A Victory to Last by bridgewater

A week later, Snape reappeared at the next Order meeting.

Moody had been about to start the discussion, but Snape stepped out of the shadows in the corner of the room, cutting him off. “I believe,” he said, “that a radical re-evaluation of our priorities is in order.”

“Not this again,” snarled Moody. “When are you going to get it into your head, Snape, that we aren’t a terrorist cell --”

“On the contrary,” said Snape. “I understand that very well now. In fact, I would propose that we take our passivity one step further and begin making overtures of peace to the Dark Lord.”

“What the bloody hell,” exploded Ron, jerking forward from Harry’s side. He was joined by a similar chorus of disbelief.

“Cut it, Snape,” snapped Moody, speaking over the voices. “Having a bit of trouble figuring out which side you’re on, eh? I guess this wouldn’t be your first time.”

“I am merely pointing out the futility --”

“But last week,” growled Moody, “you were all for doing anything -- absolutely anything -- to kill him...”

“And so I was,” said Snape, his lip curling. “Yet I have realized the merit of several arguments I’d previously dismissed. Moody, even you must acknowledge that the Dark Lord is one of the greatest wizards history has ever known. It would be a shame to kill him and erase the decades of unique knowledge he has accumulated. We should instead attempt to find common ground. You only need get past your Gryffindor pride to see that...” Snape’s voice was lost in the sudden din.

“I told you!” cried Ron, looking wildly at Harry. “There’s something wrong with him -- did you hear that!”

“Severus,” said Lupin, his calm voice somehow cutting over the shouts of outrage. “I think you have a rather inaccurate idea of the purpose of our organization.”

“And you know what I think?” said Moody. “I think maybe you ought not to spy in on our meetings, Snape, now that Dumbledore’s not here to keep you on a leash.”

Snape’s eyes bored into Moody, but finally he turned away, as if he had always expected defeat. He strode to the door, turning on the threshold one last time. “Fight the Dark Lord all you like, then,” he said coolly. “Brag to each other about your courage in battle. Proclaim yourselves the defenders of freedom. ... And all the while, remember that you are fifty and they are thousands.” He surveyed the scene coldly and then said, without breaking stride, “Harry, I need a word.” Then he vanished, the door shutting behind him.

“He’s a maniac,” snarled Moody. “Whatever he wants, Potter, don’t bother.”

But Harry was driven by a nearly morbid curiosity. Whatever the issue was, perhaps it would shed some light on Snape’s inexplicable behavior the week prior. Ron and Hermione were attending this meeting; whatever Harry missed Ron would tell him later. Harry shrugged off their concerns and followed after Snape.

Snape was waiting for him just outside in the hallway. The minute the door closed behind him, Snape said without preamble, “You are a Horcrux.”

“I -- what?” He was bewildered. The broken chalice came to mind, but Harry was not a cup.

“When I said that the Dark Lord is now mortal,” said Snape, “I lied. You yet tie him to this earth; while you are alive, he cannot be killed. Albus was quite sure of that, as am I.”

Harry blinked. Comprehension seemed to elude him. “You’re saying I have to die to rid the world of Voldemort?”

“The Dark Lord,” Snape corrected sharply. “Yes. That is precisely my meaning. Therefore, you more than anyone else must come to terms with the Dark Lord’s existence. He will be a fixture in your life for the rest of your years, and it would be fruitless to spend your energy hating what you cannot change.” Snape’s voice became flat and emotionless. “He is a skillful and charismatic leader, and his only fault is an over-preference for purebloods. I am sure that in time, you will come to tolerate his rule -- in time, you will --”

The meaning of Snape’s words seemed to catch up to him in a rush. “I’ll die if I need to!” he cried. “I’ve been willing to do that all along --”

His breath caught, his mind still having trouble grasping this. What -- he had to die?

“You’re lying,” spat Harry. “You hated my father and this is the perfect revenge, isn’t it --”

Snape’s eyes glittered intently in the gloom. “Would you like to see the very memory in which Dumbledore told me that you must die?”

“You can fake memories,” spat Harry. “If anyone could, it would be you. You were spying on Voldemort. He’d have asked for all your memories of your conversations with Dumbledore -- he’d be stupid not to -- and how would you keep your cover, except by faking them?” Harry rode on a wave of bitter triumph, certain of Snape’s deceit. “Nice try --”

A bitter smile curled Snape’s lip. “Very well,” he said silkily. “Here’s your proof...”

And there was too much of it for Harry to bear: Harry’s Parseltongue, his visions, the pain in his scar.

Against his will, Snape’s argument was starting to make sense. Harry’s mind raced desperately, grasping at alternate explanations -- anything, anything that didn’t involve killing himself -- but they were just out of reach.

Once Snape saw the slow horror of Harry’s increasing conviction, his voice became impassive. “You would be best served creating a new identity. Put that vast fortune of your father’s to use. Forge transcripts from Ilvermony and pass as an American pureblood; keep your head down, stay out of the Ministry’s sight, and if all goes well you may even live to old age.”

Harry wasn’t listening. He was working with the idea of his death, turning it around in his head, and at last he found a way to think about it. It was all a hypothetical -- If Snape was right, if he had to die, then...

Answers were suddenly rushing at him. He saw a way forward. “If I have to die,” said Harry, “I can launch a suicide mission against Voldemort.”

Snape’s expression grew suddenly harsh. “Have you been listening to what I’ve said? Your death is not necessary!”

“Right,” said Harry, his voice dripping with irony. “All I have to do is live with Voldemort’s rule.”

“Yes, that’s precisely --” Snape cut himself off sharply, realizing Harry’s sarcasm. Snape’s usual control seemed to be slipping away: He was sickly pale now, and his lips were trembling slightly. He seemed to make a great effort to pull himself together, staring at Harry, his eyes glittering in the dark, dingy hall.

“Perhaps the reason the Dark Lord’s reign is successful,” Snape said softly, “the reason there is none but this band of fifty to oppose him, is because the world is rotten to the core. Let the masses suffer under the Dark Lord’s rule; it’s no more than they deserve. And with your money, his Ministry need never affect you. You can find everything you need in Knockturn Alley. It is a world in itself, and in its depths, even the Dark Lord holds little power.” Snape paused. “I can show you how to live there...”

Harry didn’t know why Snape suddenly wanted to save him, but he didn’t care. Snape -- everything about him -- was twisted and wrong, and Harry wanted nothing to do with him. If Harry went along with Snape’s suggestion, abandoning the Wizarding World out of cowardice, he would be tacitly agreeing that the Wizarding World was rotten, that it was not worth saving.

Harry thought of Hogwarts and felt a rush of warmth. He would fight to protect it; he would die to protect it...

And, once Harry had accepted that he would die, it suddenly seemed fitting: a neat little bow on his life, as payment for his failures. Cedric’s and Sirius’s deaths still loomed in his mind; it was not as if he was any stranger to death, in all its horrific suddenness.

And so that was it, then, thought Harry uncomfortably. That was the decision made... He was going to die, and do his absolute best to take Voldemort with him...

He shivered.

Harry had the sudden feeling that he was standing before a slaughterhouse, about to be euthanized and then pushed through a meat grinder, tendons and flesh ground into strings and pushed out the end of a machine. It was horrible. It was necessary.

~~~

It was a year later that Harry appeared at Grimmauld Place again. His scar, which had once shone bright-red, was now only a faint white line. He’d just escaped from Malfoy Manor with his second life, and now stood awkwardly on the street, just outside the door. He supposed he’d Apparated here instinctually, but he hadn’t spoken to any member of the Order -- nor anyone he’d ever seen in Grimmauld Place, for that matter -- for the entirety of the year.

Harry hadn’t meant to Apparate here, but he Harry forgave himself the little lapse in judgment. He still felt shaky. He’d gone into Malfoy Manor that morning with wand blazing, a year’s worth of learning at his fingertips, and it had been terribly disorienting to find himself fighting his way back out after his death. Harry had been so certain it would be a one-way trip, and to find himself back here was utterly confusing, as though he’d Apparated somewhere only to get turned around in the ether and reappear right where he started.

He shifted uncomfortably on his feet. He should be dead right now, by all rights, and he found himself suddenly looking at the world as if it were the afterlife. He gazed at the grimy bricks of Grimmauld Place, amazed at their solidness... Then he shook himself out of his reverie, somehow fixed his mind on more mundane necessities, and Apparated to his little London apartment.

Poor choice.

He appeared in the middle of the tiny studio apartment, surrounded by the Aurors of Voldemort’s Ministry. There were eight of them at the least, crowded around the walls of the cramped room, seemingly in pairs. One of them rummaged through his bookshelf, pulling out book after book on Dark Magic, while his partner took copious notes on a clipboard. Another pair had violently upended his chest, and they were standing far back from the spiky pile of objects -- admittedly, most of them Dark -- and levitating them out of the pile with wary jerks of the wand. Behind the Aurors, sequestered into a corner, stood his landlord and several journalists.

There was one still moment in which he registered the Aurors’ presence and they registered his. And oh, he realized, I didn’t pay last month’s rent. I was going to die, I thought; there was no reason for me to care what happened after that. But the landlord must have called the Ministry here to evict him, and the bureaucrats had walked in to find all this.

And then, in the next moment, his apartment was a frenzy. Some object was hurled at him from the side; a dozen spells were shouted, the incantations mingling in the air, bolts of light flying at him from every direction. He had never defended himself before, but some sudden intuition seized him; he snapped his wand back and levitated the bed before him as a shield, giving him just enough time to spin and Apparate out.

He appeared once again on the threshold of Grimmauld Place, this time gasping for breath, his eyes wild. The sidewalk before the house was protected by the Fidelius Charm as well. Hunched over, panting in the muggy drizzle, Harry took one long minute to regain his senses.

It didn’t help. He still felt like he was living in an afterlife or a dream world, waves of disorientation and confusion washing over him. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and forced himself to consider the problem that now presented itself: Harry had no place to go. Everything he owned had been in that little apartment: Sirius’s Firebolt, his dad’s Invisibility Cloak, and the last sack of gold that remained of the once-significant Potter fortune.

It struck him that he should have kept the Firebolt and the Cloak in his Gringotts vault. But how was he to know that he would go on to live? He should have left the broom to Ron and the Cloak to Hermione, at least! But in the past year, focused on nothing but perfecting his desperate suicide attack, he had fallen out of the habit of thinking into the future. Now he was reaping what he’d sowed.

There was nothing to be done about it now but to move forward. He set his shoulders and walked into Grimmauld Place.

~~~

Some semblance of normal thought seemed to be returning to Harry as he walked through the house. He was standing now outside the kitchen of Grimmauld Place. Angry voices could be heard through the door, and Harry assumed an Order meeting was in progress. His mind raced through what he would say when he stepped through that door. Hello, he might say nonchalantly. Sorry I’ve been missing. I went to a mystical spa in the mountains, and look, it’s cured my scar! So, how’s the war going?

He hadn’t been following the papers the last year. He was clueless about what was going on.

But the Order should be equally clueless as to what he’d really been doing while he’d been gone. They knew he’d disappeared, of course, but they would not know of his attack at Malfoy Manor. The Order had never had a spy in the Death Eaters’ ranks, and as for Voldemort and the Death Eaters, the incident -- a vicious attack on their own headquarters, and Harry’s subsequent escape -- was embarrassing enough that they’d keep their mouths shut. Harry suspected that, momentous battle though it had been, it would be forever lost to history.

Lingering outside the kitchen door, Harry strained to make out the argument within, but the wood muffled the words too badly. So he focused on crafting his story carefully. He would put them on the defensive. When they questioned him about where he’d been, he’d shout indignantly, I had Voldemort in my mind for a year! Poisoning my thoughts! I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began! And through all that, none of you helped me, not one! And now you’re saying I was wrong to take a year off to get my scar cured and get the voice out of my head? Now you’re saying I should’ve just sat here and borne it? You don’t know what it was like!

He thought through the possible twists and turns of the conversation, how he’d respond to their most likely questions. He’d gotten scammed of half his fortune in Knockturn Alley in the process of learning what he needed to know, but at least it had taught him the cunning that he’d never learned at Hogwarts.

And so Harry strode into the room, head held high, casual expression fixed firmly on his face.

The Order was indeed at a meeting; it seemed like a full thirty of them were crammed in the room. He glanced at Moody, Lupin, a host of Aurors, and then Ron and Hermione at the other side of the room.

Silence had fallen as soon as he’d entered the room, and they were looking at him with hatred. He waited for it to fade into welcome, or shock at least, but it never did. And then his eyes slid to the newspaper on the table before Tonks. It was The Quibbler, a special urgent edition, and splayed across the front page was a moving picture of his London apartment being ransacked by Aurors. At the top hovered the text, Potter Gone Dark: Incontrovertible Evidence.

A chill went through his blood.

It would have been one thing, he thought, if the Daily Prophet had run the story. He could dismiss that as propaganda, and the Order would side with him. But The Quibbler had been invited to his apartment. The Ministry had brought in an enemy newspaper, with what must have been elaborate promises of safe conduct, so that they could turn own Harry’s side against him.

And it had worked. The Quibbler reporter had seen the truth of the evidence, and Harry realized that thousands of his former supporters must be reading that newspaper right now.

Harry’s prepared speech collapsed completely and his instinct told him to just leave. He wasn’t welcome here, and it was time to disappear to some hiding place. Without a word spoken by anyone, the room still heavy in silence, Harry turned to go.

“Harry!” shrieked Hermione.

He turned around. His gaze upon the other Order members had been cold, but looking at her and Ron, his two best friends, he felt a sudden affection and guilt rise up.

“Yeah?”

“You can’t just leave! I’ve been telling all of them --” she flung a hand out to the Order -- “this whole year, that there must be some explanation for all this, that you had to be coming back. And you just show up and -- leave?” Her voice rose to a hysterical pitch.

Harry glanced at all of them again, but directed his apology only at his friends. “Sorry,” he said quietly. “I never thought it would turn out this way. I mean, once I knew I’d have to die, there was no use in you two spending any more time with me. It would have been a dead-end --”

“You what?” said Ron. “You thought you’d be dead?”

“Cut the crap,” snarled Moody. His face was twisted in menace, and he moved forward quickly to thrust the newspaper in Harry’s face. “I don’t care about your death-wish or whatever it is. What is this, Potter, hm?” He shook the newspaper. “What is this?”

He would already have left, but he supposed his friends deserved to know what had happened, now that he was actually alive. So he stood his ground and told his story, explaining his status as the last Horcrux and briefly summarizing what he’d done in the year he’d been gone. “I’m no match for Voldemort,” said Harry, “but I had several key advantages here. For one, I wasn’t afraid to die. So I focused on offense, wild destructive tactics that no one in their sane mind ever uses, in order to throw them off guard. Because I wanted to die anyway, I could go utterly berserk against Voldemort in a way that no one else really could. I didn’t succeed.” He looked to Ron and Hermione, meaning this warning for them. “He has a new wand or something, and he’s more powerful than I’d imagined...”

And Moody cut in at this point, questioning him aggressively, cross-examining him. During the entire exchange, he felt that they were on the edge of deciding that he was an enemy. With a sense of idle calculation, Harry hoped that wouldn’t be so. He would have enough on his plate without having fifty new foes.

But he wasn’t surprised at their attitude, not in the least. Dark Magic was a heated subject. It created horror and contempt even in Hogwarts students, and the Order had spent their lifetimes fighting Dark Magic and watching their friends die to it. He didn’t expect his own short story to inspire any change in their attitudes.

But Ron and Hermione had taken his side. Bless their hearts, he didn’t deserve such kindness; he’d abandoned them for a year without explanation, and then showed up mired in the Dark Arts, and still they supported him.

For a short while, Harry remained in the kitchen, trying to fight off the Order with his words. But it was becoming clear that the longer they were at odds -- the longer he refused to cave in and beg forgiveness -- the more and more suspicious they became. Harry was beginning to give it up as a lost cause and leave before wands were drawn. When he saw Hermione approaching him, a thousand questions burning in her eyes, Harry panicked suddenly and nearly tripped over himself in his haste to leave.

He got out into the stairwell, slamming the door behind him and rushing down the stairs. He nearly collided with Lupin around the bend.

Lupin had slipped out of the room right after Harry’s tale. Harry frowned at him, wondering what he was doing.

“Ah, Harry,” he said kindly. “There you are. I was just about to come looking for you.”

Suddenly wary, Harry backed away, afraid Lupin would try to detain him out of some misguided desire to protect him.

But Lupin seemed to read his thoughts, and he stepped to the very side of the stairwell, as if to illustrate that Harry was free to leave. “It’s done now,” he said quietly, his eyes flicking up to Harry’s scar. “You have no more reason to kill yourself, and I don’t suspect you would try again -- would you, Harry?”

“Of course not.” But Lupin’s words stuck in his mind: He had no more reason to kill himself. How bizarre that felt.

Lupin hesitated. “And what will you do now?” he said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

Lupin spoke carefully. “Your situation is far different than it was last year.”

Lupin could say that. He was penniless and his reputation had been ruined so badly that even the Order couldn’t trust him. But that wasn’t all. Beneath his rather routine disillusionment, something more intangible had shifted, and Harry found himself looking at the world with a curious confusion that he couldn’t quite place.

And that might be why cared so little about this bad position. He shrugged. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

Lupin grew sad at that. When Harry did not elaborate, Lupin said, “In any case, that wasn’t what I came to speak to you about. I think you should talk to Severus.”

Harry felt the hint of a scowl forming on his face. “Why? Hadn’t you heard what I did after he told me I was a Horcrux?”

Lupin seemed resigned. “It was the talk of the Order --”

“But if you still think I should speak to him,” interjected Harry, “maybe something got lost in translation. Here’s what happened: the minute he realized I was going to launch a suicide attack, he tried to Obliviate me. He missed and I backed into the kitchen as he tried again -- everyone heard his second attempt at Obliviate -- surely you heard about that. And when Snape tried to tell the Order that I was suicidal, I shouted over him, accusing him of trying to Obliviate me to cover up a crime. I didn’t even have to go into details; the Order all believed me immediately! And so they kicked him out, barred him from this place.” Harry shrugged. “My bridge with Snape is well and truly burned.”

Lupin met Harry’s challenging gaze with calmness. “That’s all past, Harry.”

“Somehow I don’t think Snape is quite as forgiving as you are.”

“For the past year he’s been trying to find you to undo his mistake. He enlisted my help, as you must have guessed --” (Lupin had sent him letters during that year) -- “and I did all that I could. But between Tonks, my monthly cycles, and my duties to the Order, I wasn’t able to do as much as I hoped, nor as much as I should have.” Lupin averted his eyes briefly. “But Severus had no such restrictions. I believe he searched Knockturn Alley high and low for you, and when he found nothing, several foreign black markets as well.”

Harry’s brow creased. “Why?”

“Well, I imagine it’s...” Lupin cut himself off, almost guiltily. He glanced down the dark stairs towards the Floo hearth in the sitting room. “Perhaps he will tell you himself. Regardless, he wishes quite strongly to speak of you.” And after all he’s done for you, you owe it to him. The words were unsaid, but Harry heard them.

Harry considered refusing but found himself once again driven by a morbid curiosity. After the utter disaster of their last meeting, what would Snape want this time?

As for the potential danger, Harry could not find it within himself to be particularly concerned. Just this morning, he’d charged into Malfoy Manor.

“Alright,” said Harry. “How do I meet him?”

Lupin looked faintly relieved. “Call for Spinner’s End,” he said. “Severus’s is the only house on the block connected to the Floo Network; that’ll take you right over.”