Chapter Three of 'Anularius'- Research At Its Finest

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Two.

Title: Anularius (3/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Snape
Warnings: Angst, time travel
Rating: R
Summary: Traveling back in time is safe. All you have to do is keep away from people who affect time, who are pretty rare. It's just Horcrux-collecting Harry Potter's luck that Severus Snape is one of them.
Author's Notes: A late Advent fic for thebookivore, who gave me this prompt: Harry/Snape. Time travelling Harry. As an unspeakable explains to Harry, time travel is actually very safe, because most people cannot affect the time stream except a rare few. You can tell who can affect time because they can see time travelers, otherwise "it's similar to how most Muggles cannot see magic, their minds naturally shy away from it and come up with the most incredible explanations for what they have seen". Harry knows to hide out from himself but doesn't realize that Snape can see him ...

I meant to complete this fic on time for Advent, but it got too long for me to finish on time, so I’m posting it as a chaptered story. The title is Latin for “maker of rings.”

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews! Extra note for this chapter: I know that, in canon, Walburga was still alive during the time this story takes place, but I’ve adjusted the timeline so she’s already in portrait form.

Chapter Three-Research At Its Finest

Harry had to close his eyes to disguise the relief he felt when he tentatively stepped up to the door of Grimmauld Place and extended his hand, and the wards snapped into being, then faded instead of stinging him. It was the first thing that had gone right since he came back in time, he thought, and touched his wand to the lock. It creaked and moved back, and Harry stepped carefully through the slowly opening door.

“If no one else is here, why are you being so careful?” Snape asked from behind him.

Harry nodded in acknowledgment, but he said, “The Blacks were rather paranoid. It would be just like them to leave a trap or something that could take some intruders out.”

“I thought you said you knew Black.” Snape’s sneer was muffled. Harry looked back at him once, turning from his careful study of the entrance hall once he’d determined there were no traps right here, and found Snape standing with his hand on his wand, his eyes darting in several different directions.

Wise of him, Harry acknowledged, and faced forwards again. He knew what would happen the moment he raised a lot of light, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. “I do-did. In my own time. But the house was rather different then. I didn’t come here for the first time until long after Sirius had disarmed whatever traps were waiting.”

Snape drew in a sharp breath, and Harry was sure he wanted to ask all sorts of questions. He didn’t, though, because Harry didn’t give him the chance. Instead, he sharply called up the light from a Lumos Charm and moved away from the door.

Two things happened at once. The less alarming one was the springing-up of a huge cloud of dust in front of him, thick and grey enough to make both Harry and Snape cough.

The second was a shriek so loud and long that it made Harry snap his head backwards. “DEFILERS OF MY HOME!”

“What the fuck is that?” Snape asked, as the shriek died down and the second one began. Harry didn’t listen to it. Something about blood traitors and Mudbloods. He knew all the words by heart already.

“That’s Sirius’s mother,” Harry told him. For a moment, he felt a sharp flash of amusement that Snape had sworn. Then he swore at himself. He had entirely neglected the possibility that Walburga or someone else might still be alive and watching over the house.

On the other hand, the wards probably wouldn’t have let him in if she was alive, and so it proved when they came around the corner. The familiar portrait was hanging, uncovered, in the middle of the entrance hall, and it began shrieking again on seeing them.

“STRANGERS! TRAITORS! FILTH!”

“Almost I don’t blame Black for running away from home,” Snape muttered behind Harry.

Harry muffled a hasty laugh in his sleeve, because really, that would be all they needed, Snape bristling at him and having another argument about Sirius. “She’s something, all right,” he said, and he waved his wand. The spell he had learned only last month to disable noisy portraits formed and spread across the surface of the picture, making a nest of spider webbing. Walburga shrieked in retaliation, but the sound was only a tenth of what it had been.

“That will keep her quiet for long enough that we can get some work done,” said Harry, turning around to face Snape. “That is, if you’ll tell me exactly what you plan to do with the bowl.” He had just realized that that hadn’t been a point of discussion. Harry shook his head. Hermione should have found a Slytherin with the ability to detect Horcruxes and sent them on this mission instead.

Snape was watching him with solemn, intent eyes. “I’ve never seen that spell before,” he said.

“Surprise, new things have been invented in the future,” said Harry dryly, and gestured up the stairs. “The library is up there.” He nodded to the side. “The kitchen is over there. If there’s a functional Potions lab in the house, I don’t know about it. I don’t think one was ever set up. What kind of research do you need to do?”

“The library has a flat surface?” Snape shifted the bowl from one hand to the other.

Harry shrugged and nodded. “Or there’s a table in the attic no one is using. We can float that in.”

“Of course no one is using it,” Snape muttered, but he seemed to be trying to keep his sarcasm to himself, for which Harry was grateful. He had enough problems without that. “My research is into whether certain gifts can be passed on by lateral inheritance instead of vertical.”

“My congratulations on your fluency in Incomprehensible,” said Harry, leading the way up the stairs. “English this time?”

“I am investigating,” said Snape, his voice dipping to an arctic level, “whether I can acquire Parseltongue from an artifact of Slytherin’s, rather than by being his blood descendant.”

Harry thought for a second about telling Snape he was a Parselmouth, but he decided to reserve that for the moment. It might allow him to understand some of the research Snape was doing if he tried to keep it secret. “All right. Does the bowl contain something that’s going to help you with that?” They’d reached the library. Harry carefully cast a few spells that ought to banish most of the dust, and opened the door.

Snape didn’t get the chance to do more than sneer a word. A shrieking, arm-waving shape was suddenly in front of them, yelling in such a high-pitched way Harry couldn’t even distinguish words, the way he had with Walburga. He stumbled back in front of it, and it pursued him, now hitting him with small fists.

“No filthy Mudbloods is to be disturbing Master Regulus’s rest!”

A second later, Harry realized who it must be. He stood as tall as he could and said in a cold voice, “And what about the one appointed heir by Sirius Black, Kreacher? Stand still.”

Kreacher was frozen in a moment, his eyes so wide with surprise Harry wouldn’t have been surprised to see him faint. But maybe he got over it faster than that, or maybe house-elves didn’t faint. He stood there and stared back and forth from Harry, to Snape, to Harry, to Snape, and then suddenly collapsed on the floor and started sobbing.

Harry looked around curiously for a moment, wondering if events had gone differently than he’d thought they had in the past and Regulus had died in the house or something. But he couldn’t see any sign of a body.

“Get that ridiculous house-elf out of the way,” said Snape, gruff.

Harry’s lips twitched as he nodded to Kreacher. Snape either would have kept his thoughts to himself in the future, or he would have expressed them as scalpels designed to scrape away the skin of the people who heard them. “Get out of the way, Kreacher. We need the library to work.”

Kreacher went on staring. He lifted one hand as though he would touch Harry’s sleeve, but all Harry had to do was glare, and he shrank away again. Harry shrugged off the thought of guilt. Yes, Hermione would be aghast if she found out the way he had treated Kreacher, But Hermione wasn’t here, and he was sure she would rather he get cooperation out of Kreacher than argue with Kreacher about it.

Well, at least I’m fairly sure about it.

“Here,” said Harry, and nodded at Kreacher while he Summoned the table from the attic. “Clear up this dust.”

Kreacher bowed, still looking shocked, and snapped his fingers. The dust fled from all surfaces in a few seconds, and this time didn’t puff up and hit Harry and Snape in the face the way it had when they walked through the door. Instead, it coalesced into the middle of an enormous ball in the air, and began tumbling over very fast in a way that reminded Harry irresistibly of a Muggle dryer. In seconds, the dust began to turn into tiny flecks, and then it dissipated altogether. That left only Kreacher, who stood there and stared and stared. Harry arched one eyebrow at him. “Go clean up the kitchen. We’ll want something to eat later.”

“Master,” said Kreacher, who had apparently decided that some orders to obey were better than no orders, and he bowed and vanished. Harry snorted a little and turned to open the library door so that the table could get in.

Snape moved out of the way, but his eyes were locked on Harry, smoldering with a low light that made Harry glance at him curiously. “What?” he added, and danced the table into the middle of the room and carefully positioned it how he wanted it. “Are you going to need clean cloth, water, candles, anything like that, to study the bowl properly?”

“I have the materials I need with me,” said Snape. His eyes were still locked on Harry, and he moved off to the side-not to set the bowl down, as Harry had first thought, but as if he had to look at him, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “You are different than I expected.”

Harry shrugged. “I can’t believe you thought I would come back to this time. How many expectations could you have?”

“I did not mean different from the Harry Potter of this time,” said Snape. His flicking hand gesture dismissed the boy presumably living with his relatives at the moment irrelevant. “I meant the man I thought you were when I confronted you in my rooms.” Finally, he turned around, pulled a blue cloth patterned with golden stars from his pocket, and put it on the table, angled so the corners of the cloth faced the corners of the table.

Harry thought about asking, but managed to restrain himself, even though he wanted to. He stood there and watched calmly as Snape set the bowl in the center of the cloth, and then took out a vial of what could have been a crystal-clear potion or just water. Snape tilted the vial back and forth several times, and a thread of scarlet unfolded in the middle of the water. Harry lifted an impressed eyebrow. He had no idea what potion it could be. Maybe it was one Snape had invented himself. He was good at inventing spells, why not potions?

“Aren’t you going to ask?”

Harry folded his arms and found himself grinning as he leaned against the wall. “You’re a lot more volatile than you were when I knew you,” he said happily.

Snape glared at him. “When I dropped such obvious bait, I did it so you would ask.” He uncorked the vial and poured the now softly red liquid over the bowl. Harry almost opened his mouth to speak, but he thought it wouldn’t really harm the Horcrux nature of the bowl. And if it did, well, bully for him.

“Really? I thought you dropped it so I would ask and you could have the pleasure of telling me I can’t ask too much, because that would ruin the timeline.”

Snape’s hand flexed on the edge of the cloth, but he appeared to have decided to ignore Harry for the moment. Instead, he bent his head down near the silver bowl and said something, a soft word Harry couldn’t make out. The only reason he didn’t think it was an incantation was a lack of wand movements.

There was a bang and shudder that made Harry flinch, until he realized it had only happened in the bowl. When he could see again, he saw Salazar Slytherin’s head-it had to be, since it matched the depiction of him in the Chamber of Secrets-floating above the bowl.

The eyes of the ghost, or spirit, or reflection, or whatever it was, turned slowly back and forth around the room. Harry wondered idly if he was surprised to find himself summoned in a place that didn’t look like the Chamber of Secrets or a Slytherin house.

Then the spirit turned back to Snape. “Who are you who call me forth?” he whispered. Harry heard the sharp hisses along the side of his words, and wondered for a second if Snape could fully understand him.

Either Snape did or he was capable of guessing the general sense of the words. He gave a short bow and said, “Severus Snape, Head of Slytherin House at Hogwarts.”

Slytherin’s eyes blinked as slowly as a lizard’s. “This…is not Hogwarts.”

“No,” Snape agreed, gazing at Slytherin. His expression was strange. Harry couldn’t begin to guess what he was feeling. He tried to think about what he would feel if he met Godric Gryffindor, but he wasn’t sure it was the same. He thought Snape’s commitment to revering his particular Founder was probably a lot deeper. “I need your help in the matter of becoming a Parselmouth, however.”

Slytherin’s neck began to swell. It reminded Harry of the way a cobra’s neck would puff up when it was getting ready to attack. Harry moved his arm and dropped his wand subtly into his hand. He didn’t like the looks of this.

“You dare,” said Slytherin.

Snape looked at him blankly.

“You dare to summon me when you are not my descendant?” Slytherin’s ghost parted his lips, and there were long, slender fangs there instead of human teeth, and a forked tongue flickering between them. “You dare to summon me without proper appeasement?”

Snape’s mouth opened. Harry just knew he was going to ask about proper appeasement, instead of worrying about how the hell he would survive whatever Slytherin was getting ready to spit at him.

Then Slytherin’s mouth opened wider, and Harry was out of time to worry or be amused. He had to move, and he did, sprinting across the room and shoving Snape to the floor as he kicked the table with all his strength.

It made tingles race up his leg and hurt his hip, but it also knocked the bowl from its firm stand on the table and the cloth, which Harry knew was the important thing. The table wavered, rocked, and almost fell over; the cloth twisted, and the bowl spilled. In a second, the ghost of Slytherin’s head had vanished.

He did have time to spit one more jet of what looked like dark, gleaming oil. Harry spun to lift his arm and get the full brunt of the splash on his shoulder. He grunted, but it had all landed on his cloak and robes. He quickly whipped the cloak off, because it bubbled like it was acid and would eat through in a second, and then cast a spell which would clean the robes.

When he turned around, Snape was staring up at him from the floor with big eyes that turned to narrow ones the minute he noticed Harry looking at him.

“I suppose that happens sometimes,” said Harry, as lightly as he could, and held out his hand to help Snape up. “Are you all right?”

“I didn’t ask you to be a hero on my behalf,” said Snape stiffly as he took Harry’s arm. He seemed inclined to lie there, so Harry hauled him up. Snape gave him a faint, considering look as if he had learned something important from that, like how strong Harry was.

“You’re right,” Harry agreed. “You didn’t ask me to do that. It was my idea.”

That got him another stare. Harry shook his head and turned back to consider the mess in front of them. The table had a scorch mark in the center of it, and sparks had tattered the cloth. The bowl itself had a small dent in its side. Harry picked it up, hoping it hadn’t been too battered for Snape’s research. He doubted such minor damage could affect the nature of a Horcrux.

“I wonder what he meant about proper appeasement,” Harry muttered, and then extended the bowl to Snape, who was already reaching a hand out to take it.

Snape snatched up the bowl and cradled it close to him. Harry only raised an eyebrow at him and turned to right the table. The cloth he’d leave for Snape. He would probably contaminate it with all his Potter germs if he touched it.

“You understood him,” said Snape.

“Um,” Harry said, and glanced back at him. “Appeasement and even vengeful spirits aren’t only concepts that Slytherins understand, you know.”

Snape smiled. It was a nasty smile, one that scraped and hurt at the edges of Harry’s mind. “No. But it is interesting you understood the last words he spoke, given that I did not. They were in Parseltongue.” He shuffled the bowl from one arm to another and stepped close enough that Harry found himself trapped against the table when he would have moved. “Who are you?”

“I told you the first time,” said Harry, and glared at him. “What, are you going to disbelieve me now? What kind of other theory would fit all the facts I gave you? And these?” He tapped the skin beside his eyes.

“And the scar,” Snape agreed. His voice was low, and he was still smiling, but he hadn’t drawn his wand. He didn’t have to, Harry admitted. He was threatening enough without it. “I want you to tell me more about yourself.”

Harry laughed at him. “What? And ruin the timeline? No. You could torture me, and I wouldn’t break. And it’s not things you need to know to live your life or anything.”

“No,” said Snape, without changing the inflection or tone of his voice in the slightest. “Gryffindors don’t break under torture, do they? But I will withhold the bowl from you until you tell me.”

Harry smiled back. “And you don’t think I can take it if I want?” He’d come close to taking it the first time he saw Snape in Knockturn Alley, after all. He thought Snape was being a fool to demand this of him. He had made enough sacrifices in his life for things that were a lot less important than protecting history in a pristine state, after all.

Snape twisted his head to the side, his mouth a slash in his face, and Harry remembered abruptly, He was older when he made those sacrifices.

“I can cast a spell on it that would burn your hand off if you touched it,” said Snape quietly. “And you won’t be able to undo it.”

Harry snarled at him, and shoved him away so he could move more into the center of the room. Snape went with the shove, but his eyes were fixed and unwavering. Harry stalked towards him in a way he hoped would make Snape draw his wand. He wanted to duel, wanted to strike back and get this boiling restlessness inside out. Merlin, he tried being nice to the bastard and it still got thrown back in his face.

Snape twisted lightly to the side, and said, “I wish to know.”

“I don’t wish to tell you,” Harry said, and cast a nonverbal Summoning Charm at the bowl while staring so hard at Snape that the git ought to miss the real target of Harry’s spell.

He did, but the bowl only flew a short distance from his wrist before banging back against it. He’d conjured a leather tie that curved through one of the handles on the side of the bowl and bound it to him, Harry thought. He cursed. He should have done the same thing when he was holding the bowl a while ago. Or just taken off and started running out the front door. It would probably have exactly the same level of utility in being able to destroy the Horcrux.

“Come,” said Snape, his voice low and coaxing, and different, now, from any other time Harry had heard it. “Surely obliging me with an account of your ability to speak Parseltongue is not such a hard bargain. Information only is not such a price.”

“It is when you’ll react to the information and use it to change the timeline,” Harry said bitterly, pivoting to face Snape.

“What if I said I would not?” There was a note in Snape’s voice Harry hadn’t heard before, and he studied Snape mistrustfully. There was nothing visible on his face except a demented helpfulness, though. He stepped forwards, stretching out one hand as though he was gesturing the way to a brighter future for both of them. “If I could grant you the security of knowing the one person aware of your presence in this time would never tell?”

Harry rolled his eyes. “Short of promising to take out all your memories of this time and store them in a Pensieve, you can’t do that.”

Snape paused and stared at him. “How did you know that.” It wasn’t a question.

“Well, anyway,” said Harry, “all someone has to do is get into the Pensieve, and then they know.” He hoped the prickling heat he could feel creeping up the back of his neck wasn’t breaking out in a vivid blush all over his face, the way it probably was. “There’s no absolute safety. I only told you this much because I need the bowl.”

Snape smiled at him. “But you did. That means it’s not an absolute rule. You might as well bend the rules a little more.”

Harry groaned and rubbed his face with one hand. He wanted to, he could admit that. If only to make things easier for himself and startle the piss out of Snape with some of the things he was going to hear about his future self. He’d probably mostly want to hear about that.

But those weren’t good motivations. And what was Harry going to do when Snape asked if he survived the war? Surely he would, once he heard there had been a second war and he had served as a spy during it.

“What else can you do?” Snape asked reasonably. “One more bargain, then: I will help you destroy the bowl.”

Harry peered at him suspiciously around his fingers. “I know I’ll keep my word, but what guarantee do I have that you will?”

“A bargain step-by-step, then?” Snape offered. “I tell you one thing about the bowl and how to destroy it in exchange for one piece of information.”

Harry grunted. He supposed that was the fairest he would get, and it would at least make sure that Snape didn’t run off with the bowl the instant Harry was done talking.

“You know it’s a good trade,” said Snape, impatience snapping and sparking in his voice like a firework.

“Fine.” Harry folded his arms and gave Snape an unimpressed look. “If you violate the bargain, then you’re going to wish you hadn’t.”

Snape smiled eagerly at him.

“And you won’t tell anyone else,” said Harry. “I can wager that even if you’re fast enough to keep me from removing the information from your brain, not everyone else will be.”

Snape paused, then shrugged. “True enough. And there are few that I’d want to share this information with.”

“What about Dumbledore?” Harry asked. That was his main fear. Snape might not know many other people who could change history, but Harry was bloody sure Dumbledore could.

Snape sneered at him. “I’m truly anxious to hear what you have to say about him, if you think that I would tell him something like this.”

Harry hesitated one more time, wondering if he was the one who had caused that attitude towards Dumbledore, and then reminded himself that he’d only been back in the past for a few hours. It wasn’t even midnight yet. “All right. One piece of information for a piece.” He paused again and eyed Snape’s hold on the bowl. “I suppose I go first?”

“For a Gryffindor,” said Snape, and leaned back against the table, “you are not unintelligent.”

Chapter Four.

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