Disclosure

Disclosure
Harry raced along the corridor outside the Room of Requirement. I need the place where everything is hidden. Ron and Hermione were close on his heels, their faces, too, tense with concentration. The wall remained obstinately smooth, unbroken. Harry clenched his fists. It was vital they get in, VITAL! He MUST find that diadem, the last Horcrux of all...

They turned and ran back. I need the place where everything is hidden. Still nothing. Surely the room must be there, waiting for him, as it had that day he'd been desperate to hide his potions textbook... Property of the Half-Blood Prince... that bastard, Snape... Just now, Professor McGonagall had called Snape a coward as he'd flown out of the window and he was, he WAS – coward and murderer... Harry blinked. He was losing focus. Concentrate, you fool, forget Snape, concentrate...

The trio ran past the Room of Requirement for the third time – I need the place where everything is hidden – and THIS time, thank Merlin, the door was there.

Harry, Ron and Hermione went in and closed the door behind them. They were in the cathedral-sized room familiar to Harry from last year: full of contraband and evidence of spells gone wrong; threaded by narrow aisles lined with piled-up furniture, bottles, forbidden books, cloaks, weapons, whips and chains.

"Coo," Ron said, staring around in wonder. "Look at this stuff!" His eye was caught by a pile of catapults and peashooters. A Fanged Frizbee hovered over the top. "I reckon there's just about everything on old Filch's banned list in here."

"You can come back and gawp at it later," Harry said impatiently. "We've a diadem to find, remember? We'd better split up." He pointed down a nearby aisle. "You try down there, Ron, and Hermione try the next one. I'll look over here. You're looking for a tiara sort of thing on a statue's head." He started hurrying down his chosen aisle, turning to add "Oh, and I put a wig on the statue first; and the whole thing's on an old cupboard." He broke into a run, glancing at the piles of junk as he passed. Did he recognise any of it? Surely those huge eggshells looked familiar... and that rusty sword...

Harry turned a corner and his heart gave a lurch. There it was – the blistered cupboard, topped with the statue wearing a dusty wig and... YES!... the tarnished tiara... Ravenclaw's diadem. But before Harry could reach it, a cold voice said, "Just one moment, Mr Potter."

Harry tried to raise his wand but found himself frozen in place, staring in helpless horror as Severus Snape stepped out from behind the cupboard. Snape walked forward and looked him up and down. Harry strained to speak, to break free from the spell holding him, but without success. All he could do was stare straight ahead at Dumbledore's murderer and hear that hated voice.

"I don't want any interruptions while I do what has to be done," Snape was saying. His look at Harry was impossible to interpret. He raised his wand and began to pace a slow circle; Harry was reminded of Hermione, protecting their tent. As Snape passed behind Harry, the teenager strained his eyes to keep him in sight, but in vain. He felt Snape touch him and realised helplessly that he was removing the wand from his hand.

"Well, well," Snape said, examining it closely. "How did you come by Draco Malfoy's wand, I wonder." He made an abrupt gesture with his own wand, and Harry found that he could move again. He took a step back and stared at Snape with loathing.

"How did YOU get in here?" he demanded.

"You may think yourself unique, Potter," Snape sneered, "but you aren't the only schoolboy who needed a hiding place in a hurry... where is my old Potions book, by the way?"

Harry glared at him. "You mean you hid something in here when you were a kid, too? What? 101 Ways To Murder Your Headmaster?"

Patches of red stained Snape's sallow cheeks. "None of your business, Potter," he spat. "You are wasting time. I have some information for you – but first –" He stowed both wands away inside his robes, reached up to a rickety set of shelves and extracted a pair of handcuffs attached to a heavy iron chain. Harry hesitated. Should he try and tackle Snape? Run? Snape stalked towards him, holding out the handcuffs, a horrible smile twisting his thin lips.

Harry grabbed an empty bottle from the nearest pile of junk. First he'd smash it over Snape's head. Then he'd –

"No, Potter."

Snape swung the heavy iron manacles by their chain and hit Harry's fist, clenched around the neck of the bottle. The bottle slipped from Harry's numbed fingers. Snape snatched it up and hurled it away with great force; narrowly missing the tiara-clad statue, it shattered against the cupboard. Furious, Harry tried to knee Snape in the balls, but was seized by the collar and shoved violently against a heavy round oak table.

Harry hit out at Snape, disregarding the pain in his bruised fist, and had the satisfaction of seeing Snape wince as the blow landed. For a few minutes they swayed backwards and forwards in desperate, panting struggle. Harry was fuelled by rage and a thirst for revenge, but whatever was driving Snape was stronger still. He managed to force the handcuffs closed over Harry's wrists, tethering him to the single, central leg of the table. Gasping for breath, Harry leaned heavily against the table, staring down at its round top. It was dark with age, covered in stains, and scarred by rude graffiti. He strained at the cuffs, but it was useless; they and their chain were unbreakable.

Snape stepped back. He too was breathing heavily, and an ugly bruise was beginning to form around one eye, but he had a sour look of triumph which infuriated Harry.

"Murderer! Coward!" Harry shouted. He knew how much Snape hated being called a coward; for a moment he remembered lying sprawled at Snape's feet after chasing after him through Hogwarts grounds on the night of Dumbledore's death. Snape had said then that Harry's father would only attack him when it was four to one, which made him, not Snape, the coward – but that was a foul lie. At that moment, Harry hated Snape more than anybody in the world, more even than Voldemort.

"Dumbledore trusted you, and you killed him!" Harry ranted.

"Dumbledore trusted me to kill him," Snape said icily. "And more besides, which is why I am here. I have a message for you, Mr Potter, and I intend you shall hear me out. Hence this –" he gestured towards the handcuffs and chain "– rather melodramatic means of restraint."

"Dumbledore trusted you to kill him?" Harry said blankly. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"He knew he would die within the year," Snape said. "The death curse in his hand –"

"Don't try and pass it off as a mercy killing!" Harry stormed. "I KNOW you used Avada Kedavra – and Bellatrix told me – you need to really mean it, to make an Unforgivable Curse work!"

Snape's face was pale and glistening with sweat. "Oh, I meant it," he said bitterly. "But it was on his orders, none the less. I've been following his orders for years. I follow them still."

"Oh yeah?" Harry jeered. "He ordered you to become Headmaster, did he – to bring in those bloody Carrows –"

"He ordered me to remain in the Dark Lord's good books as long as possible, to save Hogwarts from the worst excesses of the Carrows," snapped Snape. He paused, eyeing Harry intently. "He also –" he added slowly, running his forefinger around his lips, "– he also ordered me to make sure you received the sword of Gryffindor."

Harry stared at him. "I don't believe you."

"And very... brave... you looked, too, diving into that icy pool," Snape sneered.

"You were spying on me? I KNEW someone was there! But how – why – did the silver doe stop you killing me, then?"

Snape's face contorted with rage. "You fool! I sent the doe, I hid the sword in the pool –" He drew his wand. Harry flinched, then stared in wonder as the silver doe erupted from the wand's tip and bounded towards him. It stopped beside him and gazed up at him with its wide, long-lashed eyes. Harry had the same feeling of instinctive recognition and trust he'd felt in the Forest of Dean, unbroken even when the doe spoke with Snape's voice, saying "Do you believe me now?"

"Yes," Harry whispered. "But why –?"

"Dumbledore would not tell me why you need Gryffindor's sword," Snape said.

"Then I can't tell you either," Harry replied. "But why did you –?"

"The only thing I am prepared to tell you," interrupted Snape, "is the message which Dumbledore left for you."

Harry lifted his hands; the handcuff chain rattled against the table leg. "So, tell me."

A look of pain crossed Snape's face, then his dark eyes grew cold and empty. "I was to tell you that, on the night the Dark Lord tried to kill you, when... your mother..." He stopped for a moment. Harry held his breath. "When Lily gave her life to protect you, Voldemort's Killing Curse rebounded on himself, and a piece of his soul was torn loose."

Harry started. This sounded horribly like the making of a Horcrux. His voice sounded strange to his own ears as he asked, "What happened to it?" But he knew, even before Snape went on:

"That fragment of Voldemort's soul latched on to the only living person left in your parents' house – you, Harry Potter."

Harry looked down. Was that why Snape had handcuffed him? Not because he feared a puny schoolboy he'd always despised, but because of what was inside him? Part of Voldemort's soul? So, like Nagini, Harry too was a living Horcrux... It explained so much... his increasing sense of Voldemort's presence, his flashes of what the other was doing, his insights into Voldemort's mind... the behaviour of his old wand as he fled through the sky with Hagrid... He looked at Snape, standing in front of him as though waiting for something.

"I have to die too, don't I," Harry said. It wasn't a question.

Snape hesitated. "Dumbledore certainly thought so," he said at last. "And that Voldemort must be the one to kill you. After you had done – whatever it was Dumbledore told you to do."

Harry thought of the other Horcruxes. Only the diadem, just out of reach on the statue's head, and the snake Nagini, stood between him and that final confrontation. Between him and his death.

"I don't want to die," he said, before he could stop himself, then winced. It sounded so childish: Snape would sneer at him in his old, sarcastic way. But Snape was still looking at him with that odd air of expectancy. Harry braced himself against the table and stared down at his cuffed hands. "I've got to, though, haven't I," he went on, in a flat tone of resignation. "Voldemort's killed enough people already. If I don't turn myself in by midnight, he's going to kill a whole load more. People I love –"

Snape's face twisted. "Yes, Dumbledore was right about you – right to count on your... nobility..." he sneered bitterly.

Harry's head jerked up. "Leave Dumbledore out of this!"

"He never loved you, you know that, don't you? All that concern, all that my boy, all those evenings alone with him in his office – he was raising you for this all along, don't you realise that? Like a pig for slaughter –"

"SHUT UP!" Harry shouted. His frozen inertia of a moment before had given way to a hot rage. "He had to! He may have used me, but he –"

Snape thrust his face into Harry's. "Used you? Used you?! Of course he used you! He used everybody he could – he used ME... for the past sixteen years he's been using me – he and the Dark Lord between them, I don't know which was worse..."

Fury boiled up inside Harry; he pushed his face forward and gave in to a childish impulse to bite Snape's over-large nose. Snape yelped with pain, grabbed Harry's hair, and forced his head aside. Breathing heavily, Harry raised his cuffed wrists and hammered his hands against Snape's shoulders, lunging forward to the full extent of the chain. But it was hopeless, all Snape had to do was step back out of range... but he wasn't stepping back, he was pressing against Harry; his breath too was coming in ragged gasps, his hips were thrusting into Harry's, pinning him to the table...

Harry was shaken by a sudden surge of arousal; he realised that his erection was matched by Snape's, and that he felt hornier than he'd ever felt in his life. He was sure that the savage expression of lust on Snape's face must be mirrored on his own. Now they were grabbing and pawing at each other, they were rubbing their cocks together in desperate, angry need...

Snape seized Harry round the waist, hauled him round and bent him over the table; hunched over the youth, he tore down Harry's jeans and roughly caressed his buttocks. "No underpants?" he murmured hoarsely. "What a whore... always ready for it with Dumbledore, too, were you?"

"Fuck you!" Harry screamed. "He wasn't like that!"

Snape's laughter sounded horribly in his ears as he was bent forcefully further over the table; his hard cock rubbed against its scarred surface as Snape brought his hand down stingingly across Harry's buttocks. Harry squirmed and gasped; Snape drew his wand and stroked it lingeringly along Harry's cock, then around to caress his balls before plunging it deep into Harry's arse. Harry saw drops of precome well up from his swollen cock head and join the glistening trail of lubrication left by Snape's wand. His buttocks felt the wand's balm on the smart left by Snape's hand, and his passage relaxed and moistened at its magical intrusion.

Then the wand was removed and Harry felt Snape's thick cock breaching his entrance. He squealed as he was filled without ceremony, pressed harder against the table; his cock pulsed, adding its own stains to the blotched and graffiti-ed surface – Fuck he read beneath him, crudely carved by some long-gone hand; Bollocks and Ride My Cock and Whore.

Harry sprawled helplessly across the table in utter humiliation, watching his semen pool in the deeply-gouged graffiti, feeling Snape pressing down on top of him, breathing harshly in his ear. It seemed like his arse was being split apart by Snape's increasingly frenzied lunges. Harry felt pain and fury building inside him. He wanted to kill Snape.

His scar suddenly seared.

He was standing in the middle of an empty room, paper peeling off the walls, rolling his wand between his long, white fingers, and looking at it thoughtfully. He glanced up at Nagini, hanging suspended in mid-air beside him, twisting gracefully in the transparent protective sphere he had conjured around her. Then he looked back at the wand, and frowned. The Deathstick, the Elder wand – his at last – or was it? If all the tales about it were true, it should perform extraordinary wonders for him: but it had not. It felt no different to his old wand, his yew wand. And he needed it to perform wonders, to be sure of defeating the boy...

Why did it not work for him as it should? Ollivander had told him – all the old tales had told him – this wand usually passed from hand to hand by conquest. But he had not conquered Dumbledore. He had taken the Elder wand from his dead, cold hand in that pretentious tomb of his, yes. But he had not conquered him. Snape had conquered him...

Harry shuddered, feeling Voldemort's fury, which outmatched his own.

Snape! That was the answer... Snape had killed Dumbledore... therefore the wand had transferred its allegiance to him... yes, that must be it... he must kill...

"Snape!" Harry shouted. "Be careful!"

"Stop - whining - and - take it - boy," Snape growled, absorbed in the hot sweet tightness of Harry's arse.

Okay, Harry thought savagely, BE like that. I won't tell you. Your loss, Snape... you're doomed, just like me... only you don't know it yet...

From Snape's high-pitched, anguished cries as he came inside Harry, he could almost be dying there and then. At last he shuddered to a halt and leaned heavily against Harry's back, gasping for breath and sliding his hands up and down Harry's arms. The impulse to warn him flickered to life again. Then Harry smelt Snape's sweat, felt Snape's seed slipping thickly from his sore, ravished arse. The impulse died.

Snape wrenched himself away. "And now... you have tasks to perform, I believe," he said coldly, unlocking the handcuffs and dropping the hawthorn wand at Harry's feet. His dark eyes lost their emptiness for a fraction of a second; he gave Harry's cock a fleeting, feather-light stroke, and murmured, "Good luck, Mr Potter. I must return to my... duties. For the moment."

Harry smiled mirthlessly. Snape didn't realise that he, too, was going to his death. Harry wrenched his hands free from the handcuffs, silently cursing his treacherous cock, stirring into life once more at Snape's touch.

Snape stood for a moment, his dark eyes fixed on Harry. Then he lifted his protective spells with an abrupt sweep of his wand and stalked away. He was soon out of sight behind a tottering pile of contraband.

Harry hastily hauled up his jeans and picked up the hawthorn wand. He stared after Snape, his head spinning. Was it fair to let Snape go without warning him? But Snape had been so... brutal... and hot a tiny corner of his mind whispered. He didn't know whether to rush after him or go for the diadem, still ten feet away.

"Snape!" he called. "Don't go to Voldemort. He means to kill you!" Had Snape heard him? "WAIT!" he shouted, more urgently, and began to run.

"Hold it, Potter."

Harry skidded to a halt, feeling like a dog hauled back on a choke chain. He turned slowly. Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle were standing right behind him.

The End