FIC (HP): "Do Not Taunt the Happy Fun Horcrux!" (SS/HP, crack, PG-13)
Hello! Still not dead. :D
Title: Do Not Taunt the Happy Fun Horcrux!
Author: pen_and_umbra
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Snape/Harry
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2,922 words (complete)
Warnings: Crackfic.
Disclaimer: I pour beetles down the waistcoat of the suggestion that I own these characters.
Summary: The Final Battle To Decide The Fate Of the World And All Wizardingfolk is approaching and only one of Voldemort's Horcruxes remain. But what could it be, and what does Snape's Beefy McManstick have to do with it?
Notes: In an effort not to get Jossed and because I'm on vacation and my knee hurts so I can't play golf, I finally finished this bit of insanity. It's quite silly and ridiculous, I agree. No HP & DH spoilers.
Do Not Taunt the Happy Fun Horcrux!
* * *
Harry Potter said a very impolite word.
One cannot really blame him. Once more, the war was going to rot, or at least to places that smelled vaguely like the insides of an old man's underwear -- not that H. Potter stuck his nose into such places, but he could imagine. At the moment of his v. i. w., however, he was very busy trying to imagine ways with which he could survive long enough to have his underwear smell like those of an old man. The prospects, however, they were gloomy.
"Positively doomy," muttered Potter, and gazed at the Ministry of Magic in a positively loony manner.
You see, it had been a long war of many losses and some rather curious victories, but now it seemed he had hit a dead end. He had destroyed all of Voldemort's Horcruxes except the last one, and that last one was proving to be a quandary worthy of many impolite words of the very impolite variety.
The other Horcruxes had disappeared in big bangs and little poofs -- the locket, the saxophone, a phone booth just off Aldgate, that large man from Kent, the tureen decorated with swans, and so on. All of it had been enabled by Dumbledore's Watching Watch of Watching that he had given to Harry in his will. (Harry had also received a beard comb, a singing pumpkin, and a lifetime's supply of socks that sang and smelled of lemon sherberts.)
Presently, he took out the Watching Watch and looked at it. Yes, the little arrow was still pointing at the Ministry of Magic and the larger arrows were quivering over symbols (pointy hat - mouldy spinach - smiling aardvark - green sunshine) he knew to mean that it was definitely a Horcrux. But the other indicators, they clearly dallied about numbers and symbols that told Harry the Horcrux was big. Humongous. Gigantic on a scale where Hogwarts castle was "a bit on the hefty side". Bigger than the Ministry of Magic, half of Hogsmeade, and England's entire annual crop of sugar beets put together, in fact.
"Bugger," said Harry and decided to jump to it anyway. Perhaps there was an error or he didn't know his decimals. "It's the decimals," he decided.
After a moment spent on procrastinating over the spelling of 'decimals', Potter went in. A rotund witch with no neck searched him until he became ticklish, and then let him loose. Watching the Watching Watch, he made his way down into the bowels of the Ministry until somewhere around the sphincter, the little arrow began to quiver like a lapdog after eight espressos. When Harry looked up, he sighed.
The Department of Mysteries. But of course.
He had hoped and feared and made many a macrame flowerpot holder in an effort not to think of the moment when he would come face-to-drapery with the Veil again. But now, in the general direction of its room was where the little, excited arrow was pointing, and that's where he went.
It was as he remembered: a dreary old amphitheatre, with the Veil standing on a raised dais, appearing as if it were about to launch into a tragic soliloquy about the evils of dry cleaning. The closer Harry got, the louder the tempting voices whispering from behind the Veil grew in his ears, until he was standing cheek to fabric fold, and still the little arrow pointed at it. There was no mistaking: Voldemort's last Horcrux was behind the Veil.
"Buggeralltohelldammitbloodycockery," Harry muttered and put the Watch away. "Sirius?"
The voices answered him, tempting as only syrup and waffles and entire rashers of bacon can tempt at 6 am. For a moment, Harry stood there, thinking of how much he wanted breakfast, and then he stepped through.
* * *
He landed with a jolt, and cracked his head on something smooth and hard. The darkness in front of his eyes was filled with blinking stars and little flashing birds that persisted even when he opened his eyes.
He was evidently in a men's toilet and it swam in his eyes, cistern and smudgy tile and little, iffy heaps of toilet paper circling around as if he were on a merry-go-round of lavatorial glory. In a distant part of his mind, he also observed a very familiar-looking pair of dusty black shoes, right below the hem of similarly black robes. All he could think of was, Snape! --
-- and then he felt like he was being squeezed through a thin tube, a sensation unique and familiar to Apparition-capable wizards and toothpaste only.
"Auyiufgiuiuuuu," Harry said, but could hear none of it. Neither could he hear his attempt at a stunning spell that came out inside his head as "Ptrfffffggg ttttluuuuuuusss."
At last, the squeezing ceased and Harry found himself supine on a floor, again -- though this floor was wood and not iffy white tile, of which he was grateful. Harry's head still rang like a full peal and a half, so Snape's voice sounded about as clear as a sextuplet of oboes underwater when he spoke.
"Potter?"
Snape's form swam into focus in Harry's eyes and it was as if nothing had changed. The Man of Monochrome had stayed true to his style, and both his dental work and hair care regime still left much to be desired. Sneery, ugly bastard he was, and Harry determinedly shooed away his stray thoughts about those wet dreams he had had during his fourth year, when even the smell of a hot cauldron meant he had been nursing a semi. Nonsensical teenager fantasies, he said firmly to himself.
"Bindus Gropius Absolutus," said Snape's submerged oboes and Harry's arms, legs, head, pinky fingers, ears and tallywhacker were suddenly bound by invisible ropes. His mouth, however, was not bound.
"What the hell are you doing here? Where is here? Where is Sirius? What are you? Who am I? How many Galleons is a silver cow creamer these days? Should I kill you now? What about Dumbledore?"
"Good afternoon to you, too, Potter," said Snape, who no longer sounded like underwater woodwind but a drawly drawling thing of Much Sneer and Drawl. "To start off, the Veil is a magical doorway: every time one passes through it, it leads to a different place. My house this time. Hence, no Black."
"What?"
"What what, Potter?"
"What... what in the what what, now?"
Snape made an impatient sound, like a tea kettle farting, and launched into a monologue. It was a very convoluted explanation involving multiple repetitions of words like 'undercover' and 'stratagem', "my magical woolly underpants" and 'dunderhead'. Harry followed most of it. Towards the end, though, his brain felt like large parts of it had been replaced by insufficient amounts of cotton waste dipped in inexpensive whisky.
"Questions, Potter?"
Harry snapped out of his uneasy thoughts that had revolved around possible uses of Hippogriff feathers in foreplay, Snape and the lubricating properties of vichyssoise. "Uh, what?"
"Do you wish me to repeat all of what I have just said?" Snape said in a tone that somehow managed to suggest disembowelment as a proper cure for Harry's confusion.
Harry thought of the odd sensation of pleasant numbness in his boy bits and hastened to say, "No! I mean, I got you. Dumbledore, deal, something-something...Dumbledore." Harry frowned. "Wait, do you mean Dumbledore is alive somewhere?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes."
"In a manner of speaking, how?" Harry countered, feeling very clever and adult about his turn of phrase.
By way of reply, Snape wheeled out a little cart. Harry craned his neck and looked in.
"Albus Dumbledore," Snape drawled, "meet Harry bloody Potter."
The little baby in the cart giggled and groped with its pudgy mini-pasty of a hand towards Harry. Harry, quite unable to grope at anything but his sanity, merely stared at the baby and then at Snape. Snape must have been joking.
"You must be joking," Harry opined.
Snape rolled his eyes so hard they squeaked in alarm. "I wish I were." He waved his hand carelessly and continued, "The extend of Fawkes's power, alas. A resurrected Albus Dumbledore, yes, but not quite."
"Buggerfuck." Harry said.
"He prefers 'Brian', actually."
Baby Dumbledore giggled again, his clear, blue eyes twinkling at Harry.
* * *
"Tea, Potter?"
Harry considered the teapot and the Snape attached to it, refusing to find the offer odd. Snape was, after all, English, and thus prone to relying on the healing powers of tea and crumpets at times of great distress.
"Yes, please," Harry said numbly.
It took Harry eight cups of tea and one crumpet with entirely too much clotted cream to sort his mind out to an order that, while not organised in a manner Hermione would approve, resembled something of an orderly clump.
"So, yes. Right. You," Harry said and pointed accusingly at Snape, who looked about as perturbed as a lobotomised sphinx. "You... you. The thing. What is it?"
"Have more tea, Potter," Snape replied, eyeing Harry as if he wanted to administer the tea himself to Harry -- rectally. "Or else, start making sense."
Harry took out the Watching Watch and rapped it with his fingers. The little hands spun around, pointed briefly at a nonsensical combination (asparagus - flute-playing hippopotamus - tea cozy with a pasty in it - spotted dick) and then settled on the arrangement Harry had come to recognise as the Bloody Big Damn Huge Ginormous Horcrux. The smallest arrow pointed directly at Snape.
"Voldemort's last Horcrux is large, and it's right here. What do you have that's very big?" Harry asked, frowning first at the Watch and then at Snape.
Snape flushed to a darkish shade of pink, reminiscent of a bashful gardenia, and said nothing.
"What?" said Harry again, then felt himself flush as he realised what he had said. "I didn't... it wasn't what I meant!" he stuttered, his cheeks sizzling with heat he associated with cracked eggs on hot pavement.
"I have absolutely no idea what you mean."
Harry watched Snape's flush deepen to an alarming, imminent-heart-attack fuchsia and eyed him, feeling suddenly curious in a horrified, agh-please-no-visuals sort of a way. "Do you really? I mean, could the last Horcrux be... you know?"
"Don't be silly, Potter. Horcruxes are complete objects or ideas, not... appendices of larger structures. Also, I would know."
Snape's expression was a metric tonne of verboten, so Harry decided not to pursue the line of questioning further. Attempting not to imagine the apparently gargantuan proportions of Snape's wrinklebeast or compare it favourably to the zucchinis Mrs Weasley grew in the garden of the Burrow, Harry shook the Watch. "Well, it says the last Horcrux is big and it's got something to do with you. So what could it be?"
They went through an exhaustive list of things that: a) Snape owned, b) could not fit into a thimble, c) could not possibly act as an euphemism for Snape's joyprong or its many theoretical uses. Harry kept up the crossword of guesses ("This cauldron? That cauldron? That other cauldron? This jar of...whatever it is, yecch? That tin of beets?"), while Snape either snorted, huffed or tsked by way of reply, for hours and hours.
In the end, they could think of nothing that would fit and though Harry walked around with the Watching Watch, it kept pointing at Snape instead of any of his meagre if curious and vaguely nauseating possessions. (Harry kept a private tally of all the glass jars of pickled whatnots he saw and wondered, quite morbidly, what Snape made of them. Viscera jelly? Octopus eye pasty filling? Entrails preserves?)
"Is this your backup cache of souvenirs suspended in phlegm?" said Harry, gesturing at the glass jars.
"Focus, Potter!" Snape snapped and slammed his hand on the table.
"You focus, you...you..." Harry searched for a suitably loquacious insult, but it came out as, "You git." He rallied with, "The Watch keeps pointing at you, so, hey, maybe you're the Horcrux!"
Snape's wand was out before Harry could say Tempus Rectum. "As I said, I would know if it were me. Subject closed."
"Maybe I should try you out, just in case," Harry snapped and took out his own wand. He steadfastly refused to contemplate the phallic suggestiveness of their stance and the air that sang tension and evergreen Muggle hits and various arpeggios between them.
"You just try, Potter," Snape hissed and made a sound that really should have come out of the rear end of a lactose-intolerant race horse after two pints of buttermilk. "You don't stand a chance. You're as pathetic as your father was."
"My dad was not pathetic! If anything, it's you who's pathetic, holding a grudge for decades!"
Snape hissed again. "You know what the biggest thing in me is, Potter? My contempt for your entire sorry family line."
Harry opened his mouth to say another very impolite word but paused because his brain had just made a ding sound, like an oven announcing the readiness of a pot roast. "That's it!" he said, waving his wand excitedly until slugs wearing sequined bikinis started pouring out of its tip. "Oops, sorry. I mean, that's it! The humongous big thing, the last Horcrux -- it's your grudge against my father and me!"
Snape looked at him as if he had just lost the last vestiges of his brain. "Have you lost the last vestiges of your brain, Potter?"
"No, no, look," Harry said and thrust the Watching Watch in Snape's face. "Smiling aardvark, see? It means it's something insubstantial and, let's face it, you hold a grudge the size of... well, one of those small moons around Jupiter, whatever they are called."
Snape frowned so hard his eyebrows retracted together into a shape reminiscent of Crookshanks's tail, though black. "Assuming your ridiculous theory is valid -- and I'm withholding judgement for the foreseeable future -- how do you suggest we proceed in destroying the Horcrux?"
Harry scratched his head with his wand but ceased immediately when more slugs in sequins shot into his hair. He shook the slugs off his head and said, "Can you just forgive my dad?"
Snape's gaze was the eye equivalent of Flesh-Eating Slug Repellent.
"Okay, bad idea," Harry said and looked around for ideas. A number of eyes --
socketed and loose, whole and julienned and diced -- stared back at him from the numerous glass jars. They offered no help whatsoever, only sympathetic looks (unless diced).
How did one get rid of a grudge?
"Well, Potter?"
Harry sighed, sat down and put his wand away. Unbuttoning the collar of his robes, he said, "First, we're going to have a nice conversation on various light topics. Then, if that goes well, I'm going to give you the blow job of your life."
Looking at Snape, Harry quite liked the way his hand grasped his wand, and how said wand was no longer pointing at him. The incredulous look in Snape's eyes, well, Harry decided he'd work on that a bit with stage one before proceeding to stage two of his two-step plan.
* * *
The final battle (or The Final Battle To Decide The Fate Of the World And All Wizardingfolk, as the official nomenclature had it, to the detriment of all dyslexics for years to come) was swift yet brutal.
Harry and Voldemort fought amidst ruins, hexed each other in Birmingham, traded insults in Cardiff, ran around Stonehenge three times while attempting to jinx each other, with the final showdown taking place at the village fair in the little hamlet of Great Fryupdale. It was a fierce showdown but in the end, Voldemort administered the coup de grace on himself. His final mistake was to throw a careless Killing Curse at Harry, only to have it rebound right back from a convex mirror at the Fun House. Voldemort died with a little 'eep' and vanished in a puff of puce smoke.
"Tea, Potter?"
Harry glanced up at Snape and, quite without thinking, smiled.
All in all, it had taken Harry eight days filled with several conversations, generous amounts of Firewhisky and tea, entire tubs of clotted cream and reams of crumpets before he had proceeded to stage two with Snape. The final Horcrux had taken rather more than a blow job to destroy, but Harry thought that minor anal discomfort and learning more than he could ever have wanted about the uses of homemade lubricants was a small price.
And, of course, Harry had found out that Mrs Weasley's zucchinis could hold no candle to Snape's Buster McThunderstick. Hence, the smile.
"I asked you a question, you insolent bugger."
Harry looked up at the glowering, craggy visage of his lover. "Yes, more tea please. Severus."
Little Albus giggled. Snape glowered at him, which only made him giggle more. Harry soon joined in on the laughter, despite the look of bemusement and murder in Snape's glower.
It took three more months until Snape stopped hexing antlers onto Harry's head when called by his given name, though the grinding of teeth took longer to subside, subconscious as it was. The one time Harry attempted to wheedle a fudge-related favour from Snape by calling him 'Sev', however, resulted in such a spectacular conjunction of hexes (little tentacles and orange rabbits attached to his bits) that Harry thereafter and until he died at the ripe old age of 133 years called Snape only, and always affectionately, Severus.
* * *
End.
Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! *runs away*
ETA: Attempted to buy the GOF movie on DVD. Went to three (three!) different shops, all were sold out. Wtfucketh?
Title: Do Not Taunt the Happy Fun Horcrux!
Author: pen_and_umbra
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Snape/Harry
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2,922 words (complete)
Warnings: Crackfic.
Disclaimer: I pour beetles down the waistcoat of the suggestion that I own these characters.
Summary: The Final Battle To Decide The Fate Of the World And All Wizardingfolk is approaching and only one of Voldemort's Horcruxes remain. But what could it be, and what does Snape's Beefy McManstick have to do with it?
Notes: In an effort not to get Jossed and because I'm on vacation and my knee hurts so I can't play golf, I finally finished this bit of insanity. It's quite silly and ridiculous, I agree. No HP & DH spoilers.
Do Not Taunt the Happy Fun Horcrux!
* * *
Harry Potter said a very impolite word.
One cannot really blame him. Once more, the war was going to rot, or at least to places that smelled vaguely like the insides of an old man's underwear -- not that H. Potter stuck his nose into such places, but he could imagine. At the moment of his v. i. w., however, he was very busy trying to imagine ways with which he could survive long enough to have his underwear smell like those of an old man. The prospects, however, they were gloomy.
"Positively doomy," muttered Potter, and gazed at the Ministry of Magic in a positively loony manner.
You see, it had been a long war of many losses and some rather curious victories, but now it seemed he had hit a dead end. He had destroyed all of Voldemort's Horcruxes except the last one, and that last one was proving to be a quandary worthy of many impolite words of the very impolite variety.
The other Horcruxes had disappeared in big bangs and little poofs -- the locket, the saxophone, a phone booth just off Aldgate, that large man from Kent, the tureen decorated with swans, and so on. All of it had been enabled by Dumbledore's Watching Watch of Watching that he had given to Harry in his will. (Harry had also received a beard comb, a singing pumpkin, and a lifetime's supply of socks that sang and smelled of lemon sherberts.)
Presently, he took out the Watching Watch and looked at it. Yes, the little arrow was still pointing at the Ministry of Magic and the larger arrows were quivering over symbols (pointy hat - mouldy spinach - smiling aardvark - green sunshine) he knew to mean that it was definitely a Horcrux. But the other indicators, they clearly dallied about numbers and symbols that told Harry the Horcrux was big. Humongous. Gigantic on a scale where Hogwarts castle was "a bit on the hefty side". Bigger than the Ministry of Magic, half of Hogsmeade, and England's entire annual crop of sugar beets put together, in fact.
"Bugger," said Harry and decided to jump to it anyway. Perhaps there was an error or he didn't know his decimals. "It's the decimals," he decided.
After a moment spent on procrastinating over the spelling of 'decimals', Potter went in. A rotund witch with no neck searched him until he became ticklish, and then let him loose. Watching the Watching Watch, he made his way down into the bowels of the Ministry until somewhere around the sphincter, the little arrow began to quiver like a lapdog after eight espressos. When Harry looked up, he sighed.
The Department of Mysteries. But of course.
He had hoped and feared and made many a macrame flowerpot holder in an effort not to think of the moment when he would come face-to-drapery with the Veil again. But now, in the general direction of its room was where the little, excited arrow was pointing, and that's where he went.
It was as he remembered: a dreary old amphitheatre, with the Veil standing on a raised dais, appearing as if it were about to launch into a tragic soliloquy about the evils of dry cleaning. The closer Harry got, the louder the tempting voices whispering from behind the Veil grew in his ears, until he was standing cheek to fabric fold, and still the little arrow pointed at it. There was no mistaking: Voldemort's last Horcrux was behind the Veil.
"Buggeralltohelldammitbloodycockery," Harry muttered and put the Watch away. "Sirius?"
The voices answered him, tempting as only syrup and waffles and entire rashers of bacon can tempt at 6 am. For a moment, Harry stood there, thinking of how much he wanted breakfast, and then he stepped through.
* * *
He landed with a jolt, and cracked his head on something smooth and hard. The darkness in front of his eyes was filled with blinking stars and little flashing birds that persisted even when he opened his eyes.
He was evidently in a men's toilet and it swam in his eyes, cistern and smudgy tile and little, iffy heaps of toilet paper circling around as if he were on a merry-go-round of lavatorial glory. In a distant part of his mind, he also observed a very familiar-looking pair of dusty black shoes, right below the hem of similarly black robes. All he could think of was, Snape! --
-- and then he felt like he was being squeezed through a thin tube, a sensation unique and familiar to Apparition-capable wizards and toothpaste only.
"Auyiufgiuiuuuu," Harry said, but could hear none of it. Neither could he hear his attempt at a stunning spell that came out inside his head as "Ptrfffffggg ttttluuuuuuusss."
At last, the squeezing ceased and Harry found himself supine on a floor, again -- though this floor was wood and not iffy white tile, of which he was grateful. Harry's head still rang like a full peal and a half, so Snape's voice sounded about as clear as a sextuplet of oboes underwater when he spoke.
"Potter?"
Snape's form swam into focus in Harry's eyes and it was as if nothing had changed. The Man of Monochrome had stayed true to his style, and both his dental work and hair care regime still left much to be desired. Sneery, ugly bastard he was, and Harry determinedly shooed away his stray thoughts about those wet dreams he had had during his fourth year, when even the smell of a hot cauldron meant he had been nursing a semi. Nonsensical teenager fantasies, he said firmly to himself.
"Bindus Gropius Absolutus," said Snape's submerged oboes and Harry's arms, legs, head, pinky fingers, ears and tallywhacker were suddenly bound by invisible ropes. His mouth, however, was not bound.
"What the hell are you doing here? Where is here? Where is Sirius? What are you? Who am I? How many Galleons is a silver cow creamer these days? Should I kill you now? What about Dumbledore?"
"Good afternoon to you, too, Potter," said Snape, who no longer sounded like underwater woodwind but a drawly drawling thing of Much Sneer and Drawl. "To start off, the Veil is a magical doorway: every time one passes through it, it leads to a different place. My house this time. Hence, no Black."
"What?"
"What what, Potter?"
"What... what in the what what, now?"
Snape made an impatient sound, like a tea kettle farting, and launched into a monologue. It was a very convoluted explanation involving multiple repetitions of words like 'undercover' and 'stratagem', "my magical woolly underpants" and 'dunderhead'. Harry followed most of it. Towards the end, though, his brain felt like large parts of it had been replaced by insufficient amounts of cotton waste dipped in inexpensive whisky.
"Questions, Potter?"
Harry snapped out of his uneasy thoughts that had revolved around possible uses of Hippogriff feathers in foreplay, Snape and the lubricating properties of vichyssoise. "Uh, what?"
"Do you wish me to repeat all of what I have just said?" Snape said in a tone that somehow managed to suggest disembowelment as a proper cure for Harry's confusion.
Harry thought of the odd sensation of pleasant numbness in his boy bits and hastened to say, "No! I mean, I got you. Dumbledore, deal, something-something...Dumbledore." Harry frowned. "Wait, do you mean Dumbledore is alive somewhere?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes."
"In a manner of speaking, how?" Harry countered, feeling very clever and adult about his turn of phrase.
By way of reply, Snape wheeled out a little cart. Harry craned his neck and looked in.
"Albus Dumbledore," Snape drawled, "meet Harry bloody Potter."
The little baby in the cart giggled and groped with its pudgy mini-pasty of a hand towards Harry. Harry, quite unable to grope at anything but his sanity, merely stared at the baby and then at Snape. Snape must have been joking.
"You must be joking," Harry opined.
Snape rolled his eyes so hard they squeaked in alarm. "I wish I were." He waved his hand carelessly and continued, "The extend of Fawkes's power, alas. A resurrected Albus Dumbledore, yes, but not quite."
"Buggerfuck." Harry said.
"He prefers 'Brian', actually."
Baby Dumbledore giggled again, his clear, blue eyes twinkling at Harry.
* * *
"Tea, Potter?"
Harry considered the teapot and the Snape attached to it, refusing to find the offer odd. Snape was, after all, English, and thus prone to relying on the healing powers of tea and crumpets at times of great distress.
"Yes, please," Harry said numbly.
It took Harry eight cups of tea and one crumpet with entirely too much clotted cream to sort his mind out to an order that, while not organised in a manner Hermione would approve, resembled something of an orderly clump.
"So, yes. Right. You," Harry said and pointed accusingly at Snape, who looked about as perturbed as a lobotomised sphinx. "You... you. The thing. What is it?"
"Have more tea, Potter," Snape replied, eyeing Harry as if he wanted to administer the tea himself to Harry -- rectally. "Or else, start making sense."
Harry took out the Watching Watch and rapped it with his fingers. The little hands spun around, pointed briefly at a nonsensical combination (asparagus - flute-playing hippopotamus - tea cozy with a pasty in it - spotted dick) and then settled on the arrangement Harry had come to recognise as the Bloody Big Damn Huge Ginormous Horcrux. The smallest arrow pointed directly at Snape.
"Voldemort's last Horcrux is large, and it's right here. What do you have that's very big?" Harry asked, frowning first at the Watch and then at Snape.
Snape flushed to a darkish shade of pink, reminiscent of a bashful gardenia, and said nothing.
"What?" said Harry again, then felt himself flush as he realised what he had said. "I didn't... it wasn't what I meant!" he stuttered, his cheeks sizzling with heat he associated with cracked eggs on hot pavement.
"I have absolutely no idea what you mean."
Harry watched Snape's flush deepen to an alarming, imminent-heart-attack fuchsia and eyed him, feeling suddenly curious in a horrified, agh-please-no-visuals sort of a way. "Do you really? I mean, could the last Horcrux be... you know?"
"Don't be silly, Potter. Horcruxes are complete objects or ideas, not... appendices of larger structures. Also, I would know."
Snape's expression was a metric tonne of verboten, so Harry decided not to pursue the line of questioning further. Attempting not to imagine the apparently gargantuan proportions of Snape's wrinklebeast or compare it favourably to the zucchinis Mrs Weasley grew in the garden of the Burrow, Harry shook the Watch. "Well, it says the last Horcrux is big and it's got something to do with you. So what could it be?"
They went through an exhaustive list of things that: a) Snape owned, b) could not fit into a thimble, c) could not possibly act as an euphemism for Snape's joyprong or its many theoretical uses. Harry kept up the crossword of guesses ("This cauldron? That cauldron? That other cauldron? This jar of...whatever it is, yecch? That tin of beets?"), while Snape either snorted, huffed or tsked by way of reply, for hours and hours.
In the end, they could think of nothing that would fit and though Harry walked around with the Watching Watch, it kept pointing at Snape instead of any of his meagre if curious and vaguely nauseating possessions. (Harry kept a private tally of all the glass jars of pickled whatnots he saw and wondered, quite morbidly, what Snape made of them. Viscera jelly? Octopus eye pasty filling? Entrails preserves?)
"Is this your backup cache of souvenirs suspended in phlegm?" said Harry, gesturing at the glass jars.
"Focus, Potter!" Snape snapped and slammed his hand on the table.
"You focus, you...you..." Harry searched for a suitably loquacious insult, but it came out as, "You git." He rallied with, "The Watch keeps pointing at you, so, hey, maybe you're the Horcrux!"
Snape's wand was out before Harry could say Tempus Rectum. "As I said, I would know if it were me. Subject closed."
"Maybe I should try you out, just in case," Harry snapped and took out his own wand. He steadfastly refused to contemplate the phallic suggestiveness of their stance and the air that sang tension and evergreen Muggle hits and various arpeggios between them.
"You just try, Potter," Snape hissed and made a sound that really should have come out of the rear end of a lactose-intolerant race horse after two pints of buttermilk. "You don't stand a chance. You're as pathetic as your father was."
"My dad was not pathetic! If anything, it's you who's pathetic, holding a grudge for decades!"
Snape hissed again. "You know what the biggest thing in me is, Potter? My contempt for your entire sorry family line."
Harry opened his mouth to say another very impolite word but paused because his brain had just made a ding sound, like an oven announcing the readiness of a pot roast. "That's it!" he said, waving his wand excitedly until slugs wearing sequined bikinis started pouring out of its tip. "Oops, sorry. I mean, that's it! The humongous big thing, the last Horcrux -- it's your grudge against my father and me!"
Snape looked at him as if he had just lost the last vestiges of his brain. "Have you lost the last vestiges of your brain, Potter?"
"No, no, look," Harry said and thrust the Watching Watch in Snape's face. "Smiling aardvark, see? It means it's something insubstantial and, let's face it, you hold a grudge the size of... well, one of those small moons around Jupiter, whatever they are called."
Snape frowned so hard his eyebrows retracted together into a shape reminiscent of Crookshanks's tail, though black. "Assuming your ridiculous theory is valid -- and I'm withholding judgement for the foreseeable future -- how do you suggest we proceed in destroying the Horcrux?"
Harry scratched his head with his wand but ceased immediately when more slugs in sequins shot into his hair. He shook the slugs off his head and said, "Can you just forgive my dad?"
Snape's gaze was the eye equivalent of Flesh-Eating Slug Repellent.
"Okay, bad idea," Harry said and looked around for ideas. A number of eyes --
socketed and loose, whole and julienned and diced -- stared back at him from the numerous glass jars. They offered no help whatsoever, only sympathetic looks (unless diced).
How did one get rid of a grudge?
"Well, Potter?"
Harry sighed, sat down and put his wand away. Unbuttoning the collar of his robes, he said, "First, we're going to have a nice conversation on various light topics. Then, if that goes well, I'm going to give you the blow job of your life."
Looking at Snape, Harry quite liked the way his hand grasped his wand, and how said wand was no longer pointing at him. The incredulous look in Snape's eyes, well, Harry decided he'd work on that a bit with stage one before proceeding to stage two of his two-step plan.
* * *
The final battle (or The Final Battle To Decide The Fate Of the World And All Wizardingfolk, as the official nomenclature had it, to the detriment of all dyslexics for years to come) was swift yet brutal.
Harry and Voldemort fought amidst ruins, hexed each other in Birmingham, traded insults in Cardiff, ran around Stonehenge three times while attempting to jinx each other, with the final showdown taking place at the village fair in the little hamlet of Great Fryupdale. It was a fierce showdown but in the end, Voldemort administered the coup de grace on himself. His final mistake was to throw a careless Killing Curse at Harry, only to have it rebound right back from a convex mirror at the Fun House. Voldemort died with a little 'eep' and vanished in a puff of puce smoke.
"Tea, Potter?"
Harry glanced up at Snape and, quite without thinking, smiled.
All in all, it had taken Harry eight days filled with several conversations, generous amounts of Firewhisky and tea, entire tubs of clotted cream and reams of crumpets before he had proceeded to stage two with Snape. The final Horcrux had taken rather more than a blow job to destroy, but Harry thought that minor anal discomfort and learning more than he could ever have wanted about the uses of homemade lubricants was a small price.
And, of course, Harry had found out that Mrs Weasley's zucchinis could hold no candle to Snape's Buster McThunderstick. Hence, the smile.
"I asked you a question, you insolent bugger."
Harry looked up at the glowering, craggy visage of his lover. "Yes, more tea please. Severus."
Little Albus giggled. Snape glowered at him, which only made him giggle more. Harry soon joined in on the laughter, despite the look of bemusement and murder in Snape's glower.
It took three more months until Snape stopped hexing antlers onto Harry's head when called by his given name, though the grinding of teeth took longer to subside, subconscious as it was. The one time Harry attempted to wheedle a fudge-related favour from Snape by calling him 'Sev', however, resulted in such a spectacular conjunction of hexes (little tentacles and orange rabbits attached to his bits) that Harry thereafter and until he died at the ripe old age of 133 years called Snape only, and always affectionately, Severus.
* * *
End.
Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! *runs away*
ETA: Attempted to buy the GOF movie on DVD. Went to three (three!) different shops, all were sold out. Wtfucketh?