Rating:
R
House:
Schnoogle
Characters:
Harry Potter
Genres:
Drama Mystery
Era:
Multiple Eras
Spoilers:
Philosopher's Stone Chamber of Secrets Prizoner of Azkaban Goblet of Fire Quidditch Through the Ages Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Stats:
Published: 04/02/2002
Updated: 04/16/2004
Words: 305,784
Chapters: 30
Hits: 74,152

Harry Potter And The Fall Of Childhood

E. E. Beck

Story Summary:
First in a trilogy of novels about harry's last years at Hogwarts. This one takes Harry through a new world of Death Eaters, secret identities, girls, battles and more than I can list here.

Chapter 06

Chapter Summary:
Harry does some reading, gets disturbed, then Snaped, in that order.
Posted:
04/08/2002
Hits:
2,006
Author's Note:
First, know that in this story *every* detail is important. I mean that literally. Pretty much every conversation has a point, which you

Chapter 6

Potions and Masters

"It's easy to carry the past as a burden instead of a school. It's easy

to let it overwhelm you instead of educate you." - Jim Rohn

***

Harry pulled the curtains closed around his bed, creating a little kingdom all his own. Light from his wand, balanced precariously on his pillow, cast everything in the deep rich red of his bed hangings.

He scrambled into the bed, pulling the thick comforter up to his chest and trying to make himself comfortable. Taking up his wand, he muttered a simple locking spell, ensuring that he would have ample warning if anyone tried to open his curtains. He could hear the distinctly familiar sounds of his roommates sleeping, but there was no sense being caught off guard.

Only then did he turn to the box beside him and examine its contents more closely. He found as he sifted through the top layer that there were more loose sheets of paper than anything else. He began picking them out one by one, stacking them neatly after he had examined each. He left the few books for last, figuring the papers would be of a more personal nature anyway, and would probably be more useful.

Nearly two hours later, Harry had decided that the life of an imprisoned Death Eater was incredibly boring. Barty Crouch appeared to have made a habit of keeping records of anything and everything in his immediate vicinity, from how much he ate each day to the progressively shortening periods it was taking him to break his father's Imperius Curse. The mountain of papers beside Harry was growing and he had yet to find anything remotely interesting, never mind important.

He looked up at the clock and groaned. It was already quarter past one. True he could sleep in tomorrow (no, wait, today) because it was a Saturday, but it had been a long, exhausting week. But not all bad, he reminded himself with a smile.

His date with Padma had gone better than he could have hoped. Studying with her was actually quite a lot like studying with Hermione, except with less nagging. They had claimed a table to themselves beside the restricted section where few other students would venture, and where their almost constant chatting wouldn't disturb anyone. They had talked about everything from their history O.W.L. to Padma's fascination with her one glimpse of a television. It had been fun - more than fun. They'd agreed to make it a sort of regular thing, every Friday night when most of the rest of the school abandoned the library anyway. It was a pleasant prospect, knowing she would be waiting for him there in a week's time, with her long dark hair and those eyes that so confounded him.

Harry gave himself a mental wallop for letting his attention wander, and turned with relief to the last sheet of parchment. Snorting with disgust, he cast the carefully tallied number of times Crouch Jr. had gone to the loo on June 25, 1991 aside and looked back into the box.

"Batty," he muttered, "Completely off his beam."

Only the stack of books remained, most of them dusty and well worn. Harry lifted them out one by one, glancing at the covers and riffling through the pages to be sure there were no papers tucked away in them. One was about self-regulation techniques, with copious notes made in the margins. Harry could tell after only three pages that Crouch had poured over this book for years, probably using the techniques aimed at greater physical and mental control to help him break the Imperius Curse.

He cast that one aside and went to the next. He squinted at it for a moment, completely baffled. The cover said only Mein Kampf, and Harry thought maybe it was German. It sounded oddly familiar, but he couldn't place the feeling. So he simply riffled the pages, noting absently the many underlined or footnoted passages. Shrugging and resolving to point it out to Dumbledore, Harry put that one aside as well and kept going.

One book full of cleaning charms, one in another foreign language, and a third one written in such dense scientific prose that it might as well have been. Harry spent a brain-melting few minutes trying to understand even a little about that last one, but finally gave up when he swore he felt his brain leaking out of his ears. It was something about combining muggle technology and magic to do ... something with electrostatic ... things and magiphasic resonance chambers, whatever those were.

Sighing with relief, Harry reached for the last book, a thick volume with a cracked and stained leather cover. He opened it to the first page ... and froze.

"June 5, 1984.

Father has taken me from Azkaban upon Mother's insistence. She is there now, dying in my place. Father told me to be grateful for her great sacrifice and dedication to her failure of a son. I just told him that it wasn't much of a sacrifice--she was going to die anyway. He was furious, of course. Father is such a delightful plaything."

Harry sat back, stunned. Now this was interesting, and potentially quite important. Who knew what sort of Death Eater secrets Crouch had put into his own journal. Harry turned the page, continuing to read the first entry.

"Father has explained that he will imprison me in the basement of the Manor. He has assigned a house elf, Minky or Pinky or something of the sort, to see to my every wish. Except for escape, of course. She brings me whatever I like--books and writing utensils and even this journal. Father plans to renew the Imperius Curse he used on me when we left Azkaban to keep me confined.

"Father is a fool. He thinks it is over, that he has won. He thinks he can just lock us all up with no trial and it will be the end. He doesn't know what awaits the enemies of the Dark Lord.

"Even now the boy grows. He will be four years old by now, living with that horrid relation of his. She has no idea what she is raising, what is living in her home.

"I have only to wait. My lord will return, I know that. No mere brat can defeat Lord Voldemort forever, and thanks to my quick thinking, and Reynard's many talents, a fate worse than that of his parents awaits that wretched whelp who lived."

Harry set the book down, his hands shaking a little. He flipped back to the first page, checking the date. Yes, he would have been almost four years old in June 1984, living with his 'horrible relation,' Aunt Petunia.

Questions spiraled about in Harry's mind. What had Crouch thought of? Who was Reynard and what were his talents? Why was Crouch writing about Harry himself--for it was obviously him given the references to Voldemort's downfall--as if he were the threat?

"She has no idea what she is raising, what is living in her home," he read softly to himself, shivering.

He quickly continued flipping through the diary, not really reading so much as searching for mentions of Voldemort or even his own name. To his half relief, half concern, he found neither. The entries were very irregularly spaced. Harry surmised that it would have been difficult for Crouch to write his true thoughts while under the influence of the Imperius Curse. From his brief scan, Harry could tell that his earlier assumption about Crouch's efforts in the ways of self-regulation had been correct. The man seemed nearly obsessed with controlling even the minutest aspects of his body and mind.

About halfway through, however, Harry did discover something he had not in any of the other books.

The stack of folded parchments slid out of the book, a small puff of dust rising as they landed in Harry's lap. He carefully unfolded them, smoothing out the creases and adjusting his wand to squint at Crouch's slanted handwriting.

The first sheet was a potion recipe, labeled simply "Adustum." Scanning the ingredients and instructions, Harry saw that this was one of those potions he wouldn't even know how to begin. He turned the page, finding another recipe, this one including a complex charm sequence. It was labeled "Cariosus." Another was that same charm alone but described in more detail. Harry had no idea what it was supposed to do, but he suspected it wasn't pleasant. The description only said that the results would become more and more apparent over the course of about a month until the "subject" was completely consumed.

Harry turned quickly to the last sheet before his imagination could run wild with that. He frowned at the last parchment, which seemed even more cryptic than the other three. It was not in Crouch's now familiar squashed handwriting, but in a taller script, looking inexplicably older. It was labeled simply "Reynard Manifestation" and contained not instructions, but a sort of record of progress. The dates started in 1979 with a simple "My Lord's approval" and went all the way through to December of 1981 with a chilling, "Attempt successful. Subject acquired and given treatment." Between these two was a long column of dates and brief entries detailing what looked to Harry's inexperienced eyes like some sort of experiment. He really didn't want to think about what Reynard was experimenting on, especially when he spotted "May 5, 1980: Latest test subject disposed of after treatment caused irreversible brain malfunction and inability to comprehend spoken or written language."

Harry restacked and refolded the papers before carefully replacing them in the diary. He refilled the box with all the parchments and books, leaving only the two books in foreign languages and the diary. He would go to Dumbledore tomorrow, ask him what the two books were and show him the diary and parchments. He had a funny feeling about this Reynard and his 'manifestation.'

It took Harry a long time to fall asleep, as his mind was full of progressively more gruesome and horrific scenarios to further roil his now constantly unsettled stomach.

***

"Uh, Harry, what are you doing?"

"Looking at the staff table," Harry said, half standing up in his spot at the far end of the Gryffindor table. "I hate being short," he added grumpily.

"Who're you looking for?" Ron didn't bother to stand up, just lifted his head and glanced up to the table himself.

"Dumbledore. He's been scarce all weekend." Harry collapsed back into his seat, scowling at his roast beef sandwich.

"Maybe he got called away," Hermione put in, her voice a little muffled behind their Defense book. Even though Moody had yet to have them open the text, Hermione had taken it upon herself to read and practically memorize it on her own. "He is a busy man, you know," she added, peering over the top of the book.

"What you need him for anyway? Everything alright?" Ron eyed Harry's untouched sandwich with interest.

"Here." Harry pushed his plate towards his friend, relieved to be rid of it. The smell had been making him more nauseous than usual. "And I need to tell him some things I found and ask him about some other things."

"Well, that was vague." Hermione closed her book altogether and frowned at Harry. "And why aren't you eating?"

"Uh, not hungry." Harry avoided her gaze as best he could. He hadn't told anybody about his eating problems, and he didn't intend to. He knew from experience the furor it would cause, and he really didn't feel like spending a week in the hospital wing just for a little case of the flu. Long lasting flu, but still the flu.

"You haven't been hungry a lot recently." Harry shifted in his chair, crossing his arms as Hermione's eyes tracked downward to examine his stomach and protruding ribs. "Harry, maybe you should--"

"That's weird," Harry cut in quickly. "I figured you guys would be all over what I need to talk to Dumbledore about, not my eating habits."

"Or lack thereof," Hermione muttered. Harry ignored her, looking expectantly to Ron.

On cue, his friend looked up with a slight frown. "Yeah, really. What's up?"

"Just need to tell him about what I found. He gave me some papers from the Crouch estate to look over."

That did the trick. Hermione leaned forward with interest. "Well? Did you find anything?"

"Not exactly. I found a few potion recipes and Crouch's diary and lots of other completely useless stuff. Some books in Dutch or Russian or something like that, too."

"Oh," Hermione sat back, disappointed. "What potions?"

"Er," Harry frowned, thinking a moment. "There was one recipe, just called Adustum."

Hermione looked perplexed. "Adustum? Are you sure? I've never heard of that."

Ron snickered. "Uh, Hermione, just because you haven't heard about it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist."

"I know that, Ron," she snapped, ducking under the table and retrieving her bulging book bag. "But let's see." She pulled out a book and thumped it down on the table. Dishes rattled along its entire length under the massive weight.

"Good lord! You've been carrying that around with you?" Ron looked horrified. "Hermione, you're going to end up with your back all curved and bent."

"I had a shrinking charm on it," she said in a superior tone, opening the book. "Now, this is a Modern Potions Encyclopedia. It has pretty much every potion used in daily, and not so daily, life." She flipped pages, obviously searching. Then she stopped, frowned, flipped a page back and scowled. "Or not." She sounded almost insulted that the book didn't have the information she wanted.

"Maybe it's really old then," Harry suggested.

"Maybe. The name is Latin."

"Whatever." Ron waved an impatient hand. "So you just found weird potion recipes?"

"Yeah. I mean, there was other stuff, but it was all so vague. Looks like Junior wouldn't say something right out even in his diary." Harry glanced up as he heard the rustle of many people shifting and standing. "Come on, we'll be late to Potions."

As it turned out, being late was the least of their worries. Snape was in one of the foulest moods Harry had ever seen, on Snape himself or even on his Uncle Vernon. He snapped at anybody and everybody, even some of the surprised Slytherins. He was positively brutal to the trio, hovering over their work stations half the class period, punctuating their every move with a snide commentary.

"Thank Merlin," Ron sighed as they left the dungeons.

"That was horrid." Harry rubbed his stomach absently. Snape's nerve-racking presence had made it ache and churn. "I was thinking after last year that maybe he'd be a little nicer. I mean, he looked at me at the feast and he didn't glare. I thought maybe..." He trailed off, shrugging in resignation.

"Well, I think he looks exhausted," Hermione commented. "He looked like he hadn't slept in months."

"And he was certainly acting like it," Ron said.

Harry said nothing. He was thinking about the end of last year, about Snape rolling up his sleeve and that horrid snake crawling out of the mouth of the skull on his arm. It had been dark, nearly pulsing with tangible malice. And Harry had a thought, a really stupid idea that would probably net him only detention. But if Dumbledore wasn't back by dinner ... he really didn't want to wait with his concerns about this Reynard Manifestation. There was something bothering him, something tickling in his brain telling him he was missing something, that he just needed a little more information...

***

Dumbledore did not, as Harry had hoped, reappear at dinner. The Gryffindor gazed mournfully at the Headmaster's vacant seat, feeling his self-inflicted doom approaching rapidly.

He waited for at least an hour after dinner, until most of the school would have retired to their respective common rooms.

He edged away from the table where Ron and Hermione were studying--or where Hermione was studying and Ron was drawing in his Charms book--and then rose stealthily.

"Just going to the loo," he muttered, heading for the boys' staircase, fully intending to race to his dorm and don his invisibility cloak before escaping the common room.

He had made it into the boys' dorm and was armpit deep in his trunk searching about when he heard a distinctly feminine chuckle behind him. He stood up quickly, smacking his head on the lid of the trunk.

"Oww." He rubbed the tender spot and scowled over at Hermione, who was leaning casually in the doorway. "Don't scare me like that!"

"Sorry." She composed her features into an apologetic mask, ruined only by the spasmodic twitching of her lips. "You just looked rather silly with your arse stuck up in the air like that."

"Hermione!" Harry was infuriated to feel his cheeks heating.

"What?" she grinned innocently. "I do know how to swear, you know. And 'arse' isn't really swearing anyway."

"What are you doing up here?" Harry asked a bit brusquely, just wanting to get rid of her and be on his way.

She sobered immediately, and Harry was a little concerned when she wouldn't look right at him. "Er, I need some advice."

"From me? Unless it's about Quidditch, which I strongly doubt, I can't think of anything you'd need to ask me for advice about."

"No, not Quidditch. May I?" She flicked her eyes towards Harry's bed and he nodded, watching as she settled uneasily on the edge of the mattress.

"What is it, then?" he sat himself, facing her from Ron's bed.

"Er, there is something else besides Quidditch you know a lot more about than I do."

"You're really just going to have to tell me," Harry said. "Because I'm not getting it."

"Right." She took a deep breath like this was the hardest thing in the whole world. "I need your help with Ron. I kind of ... like him and I don't know--" She cut off, staring in half amazement, half hurt as Harry exploded in laughter. He flopped back onto Ron's bed, clutching his stomach and trying to muffle his louder howls. "It's not funny." She sounded agitated.

Harry sat up, still chuckling. But as soon as he caught a glimpse of Hermione's face, he stopped laughing altogether. "I'm sorry, Herm." He reached across the gap and patted her knee awkwardly. "It's just ... you said that like it was some enormous secret or something."

"Well, it is. I haven't told anybody before." She still looked a little put off.

"You don't have to tell someone something for them to know. It's quite obvious that you and Ron have feelings for each other." Harry worked hard to suppress another snort.

"You mean, you think he likes me too?" She looked hopeful, and to Harry's surprise, somewhat confused.

"I don't think. I know." He cocked his head, looking at her oddly. "Really, I'm surprised at you Hermione. You're usually much more observant than I am. And Ron is hardly the best at hiding his feelings."

"I guess." Her cheeks stained a lovely red. "Just goes to show how hard it is to clearly see things right in front of you."

"Reckon so," Harry said, feeling suddenly uncomfortable again. "Is that all you needed?"

"No." She eyed him suspiciously for a moment, as if guessing that he had somewhere to be. "I need to know what I should do."

"Do?"

"About Ron!" There, he could deal with that exasperated, slightly condescending Hermione much more easily than the confused, unsure one.

"Well, why don't you tell him?" He shrugged at her glare, honestly flummoxed. "What? It's not like I have any more experience with this sort of thing than you do."

"True. But you know him so well. The other thing is I'm sort of ... seeing ... someone else."

Harry gawked. Now that was unexpected. "I'm guessing Viktor?" he asked carefully. It was the only thing that really made sense.

She nodded, looking confused again. "And I really like Victor. He's a very nice boy."

"I wouldn't call Viktor Krum a boy," Harry interjected.

"No, you're right. He's rather a man isn't he?" She looked dreamy for a moment, and Harry coughed unobtrusively into his hand. Her eyes cleared and she blushed again. Harry resolved to keep track of the blushes, maybe she'd make a record in one night.

"So you can't decide whether to stay with Viktor or break up with him and try to get with Ron?" he summarized.

"Right. I mean, Viktor is wonderful. And you kind of put your finger right on it when you said he's not a boy. Ron is ... well Ron is still a boy, and I think he will be for a while to come." She looked as if she wasn't so much talking to him as creating her own mental balance sheet for the two. "But Viktor lives so far away. He's promised to visit for a few weeks this Christmas, but that's a long while."

"I don't know what to tell you." Harry shrugged helplessly. "I can't tell you what to do here. I mean, all I know is that if you were to drop Viktor and show interest, Ron would be thrilled. He might not know what to do anymore than I would, but he would definitely be happy."

"That does help, I suppose." She chewed her lip indecisively. "It's just ... Ron's so ... young sometimes."

"I think it's because he's the sixth out of a large family. They all treat him like a child, you know." Harry smiled to himself. Padma would be proud of his people watching skills. "Besides, he is young. So are you, for that matter."

"I suppose. But Ginny doesn't act the way he does sometimes."

"Ginny's a girl. I got the feeling she and Mrs. Weasley are pretty close, being the only girls in the house. And even she treats Ron like he's younger than she is, sometimes."

"Yeah."

There was a long, contemplative silence. Then Hermione stood quickly, a determined look on her face. "Thanks, Harry."

"I take it you've made up your mind?" Harry asked, standing as well.

"I'm going to leave things as they are for now. It's rather cold of me, but it would be awful to mess things up with Viktor and then have things with Ron not work, either. Besides, I really do like Viktor."

"Okay," Harry said, a bit awkwardly. He still didn't know why she had come to him, of all people, about this. It wasn't like he had given any constructive advice. "Keep me, er, posted, will you?"

"Definitely." Unexpectedly, Hermione crossed the room to Harry and gave him a tight hug. He returned it, inhaling the scent of apple blossoms and old books. "Thanks, Harry."

"Of course. That's what friends are for, right?" His smile was a little forced as she pecked him on the cheek and slipped out the door, no doubt to return to nagging Ron for his lack of attention to his work.

Harry stood there a moment, hand going unconsciously to his cheek where her lips had touched him. He remembered suddenly that she had done that exact same thing at the end of last year. He wondered idly why it seemed so much more important now.

***

As soon as Hermione's footsteps had completely faded, Harry dove back into his trunk. Three minutes later, covered by his invisibility cloak and carrying an armload of books, he crept out through the portrait hole. He nearly turned back when he reached the Great Hall. He'd never been down there alone at night, and it looked much more forbidding than it did in daylight.

But Harry just bolstered his vaunted Gryffindor courage and continued on down, making his way through enemy territory to Snape's office. He looked both ways, ensuring the coast was clear, then knocked.

"What!" Harry flinched. Snape sounded remarkably ill-tempered, even for him.

Harry carefully eased the office door open, slipping the cloak off and into his pocket in the process. "It's Harry Potter, sir."

"Potter?" Snape almost looked shocked as Harry closed the door behind him. But then he resumed his customary spine-melting glare. "What do you want?"

"I need to ask you about some potions."

"Go ask Granger. I'm busy."

Harry had to restrain himself from pointing out that Snape was the potions professor, and it was his job to help students. But he would already have a difficult time getting cooperation from the man, so he just continued on doggedly. "Not class potions." He paused, bracing himself. "I think they're Death Eater potions."

Snape set his quill down very slowly and very deliberately before looking back up at Harry. "You idiot child." His voice was very soft. "Do you have any idea what you could have just ruined? If anybody saw you come down here--"

"They didn't." Harry showed his professor the shimmering corner of the invisibility cloak.

"Well, at least you used your head for something other than bouncing bludgers off," Snape said, gesturing curtly at the chair before his desk. "Now, why would our Gryffindor golden child be needing to know about Death Eater potions?"

"So there are such things." Harry took the offered chair, shifting his load of books. "What about Adustum? Is that one?"

"Where did you hear about Adustum?" Snape looked completely taken aback now.

"I didn't. I read about it."

"Where?" Snape was quite audibly grinding his teeth.

"In some papers from the Crouch Estate. They were tucked away in his diary - Junior's, I mean. The Adustum Potion, and this other one with a charm."

"I don't suppose the other potion was Cariosus?" Snape sounded dazed.

"Er, yeah, I think that was it."

"Holy mother of Sirius Black." Snape sat back, looking more human than Harry had ever seen him. "There were recipes for these?"

"Yes. I have them right here." Harry shifted the books in his arms, flipping open the diary and withdrawing the three sheets of parchment. He kept the one written presumably by Reynard, wanting to ask about that one separately.

Snape practically snatched the sheets from Harry, staring at them with a mix of awe and loathing that was really quite interesting. "I thought they were destroyed," he muttered, flicking through them again.

"What are they?" Harry's natural curiosity overrode his caution for the moment, but it appeared Snape was distracted enough to answer civilly.

"Barty Crouch Jr. was a brilliant student of potions. The Dark Lord ordered him to develop new methods of torture, the most painful he could come up with. So he did." He gestured at the sheets.

"What do they do?" Harry wasn't sure he really wanted to know, but the question was out before he could stop it.

Snape rolled his eyes, and Harry was oddly relieved to see him returning to his normal biting manner. "It's a wonder any of you make it through this school without knowing Latin. Adustum means ignite. It's quite literal. This substance, when put in contact with hydrochloric acid, is instantaneously and spectacularly flammable. Not really good for torture," he added almost absently, "but it tickled Voldemort's taste for dramatic deaths."

Harry noted that Snape was one of the few people who were apparently not afraid to say the Dark Lord's name. But he had other questions to ask. "Hydrochloric acid?"

"Oh for--" Snape cut himself off, carefully laying the parchments down on his desk. "Stomach acid."

"Oh." Harry frowned, feeling stupid. "Do I want to know about the other one?"

"The name means rotten. It takes about a month to run full course. Crouch was famous in a way for inventing these two."

"So why is it such a surprise to see them?"

"Because when all was said and done after you began your career of bouncing things off your head and acquired that scar of yours, the recipes were nowhere to be found. Only Crouch, his mentor, and Voldemort himself ever saw the recipes. Everybody just assumed they'd been destroyed. We were rather relieved, actually." Snape frowned down at the parchments. "I'll have to figure out what to do with these, now," he muttered to himself. "Perhaps Albus will..."

"Was Crouch's mentor named Reynard?"

Snape's head snapped up again at the name. "Alfonse Reynard," he said, correcting Harry's pronunciation.

"So it was him?" Harry sat forward.

"Yes, I do believe so."

"How can you not know? You were there, after all."

Snape's scowl deepened to the point where Harry was afraid his face would split open. "Don't be a moron, Potter. Do you really think Voldemort told his followers what all the others were doing? No, he knew there was a spy amongst the Death Eaters. Several, he suspected. Things were kept strictly on a need-to-know basis. Besides, Reynard was not an easy man to pin down. Most of the world believed he died back in the fifties as a young man. Until he resurfaced after Voldemort's fall, that is."

"So where was he?" Harry asked.

"There were rumors among the Death Eaters that he had spent decades hidden away in Voldemort's secret laboratory, perfecting a number of nasty little projects. He was supposedly one of the very first to join Voldemort, before he had made himself known to any more than a very small circle of acquaintances. He was brilliant," Snape added, almost grudgingly. "He was arguably the most talented magiscientist to be born this century."

"But you think that Reynard and Crouch worked together?" Harry persisted.

"Yes. I only met the man once. He was older than I, maybe in his fifties then. He went to Beauxbatons. His specialties were charms and curses. He was legendary for his nearly unbreakable Imperius Curses. Although he had a marked talent for potions, as well." Snape frowned, his eyes distant. His face was much more mobile than Harry had ever seen it before, shuttling through emotions like a slide-show as Harry watched. He could see now what Hermione had been talking about. Snape looked about five years older than he had three months ago, with deep lines etched into his face and purple smears under his eyes. "Why do you keep asking about Reynard?" Snape asked suddenly, his attention returning to Harry.

"He was mentioned in Crouch's diary. And I found this." Harry extended the last sheet. Snape squinted at it, his brow furrowing.

"Hmph," he said, then after a moment more, "Interesting."

"What is it?"

"I don't know." Snape looked as if it pained him to say the words in front of Harry. "This is apparently one of those things of which I was not informed. Does the diary say anything?"

"Only that it will bring destruction to the Dark Lord's greatest enemy," Harry said quietly.

"Well, Dumbledore can take care of him--" Snape stopped, staring at Harry. "Why you egotistical little--you actually think--"

"He used my blood." Harry reminded him, his voice tight. "The blood of the mortal enemy, he said."

Snape stopped cold, his expression unreadable. "I suppose," he said finally.

"But we could find out what this is. Just send somebody to Azkaban and-"

"Reynard is not in Azkaban." Snape looked shuttered, closed up tight.

"So he's dead?" Harry slumped.

"Not quite."

"What...oh." Harry shivered. "He was ... Kissed?"

"Yes." Snape's lips were set tightly. Harry wondered suddenly, randomly, what Snape's Boggart would be.

"I don't understand." Harry knew this was the sort of question he should probably take to Dumbledore, but Snape was here and seemed in a receptive enough mood. For Snape, anyway. "Why was Reynard Kissed while so many other Death Eaters were put in Azkaban? Weren't there Lestranges or something?"

"The whole crowd of them that were locked away were rounded up right after you rid Voldemort of his body. They thought they had a clean sweep, that they'd gotten them all." Snape winced, his eyes angry and sad. "Then, it was Christmas Eve of 1981. There was going to be a celebration, practically all of wizarding Britain was going to go. And then the Longbottoms were attacked." Harry flinched, flashing on Neville's strained, grief-stricken eyes. "It was like the war had never ended. Everyone was caught out in the cold, they'd had no idea ..."

Snape sat up, his features sharpening again. "Crouch Sr. only sent his brat to Azkaban, along with the Lestranges. It was suspected at the time that the only reason he didn't have the Lestranges kissed was because then it would appear as if he had somehow favored his son. The public were howling for blood, and Crouch gave them Reynard. Several Death Eaters questioned earlier had reported that he was still alive, and enough was known of his work to make it...justified. As much as such a thing can ever be justified. The Longbottom attack was possibly the only time Reynard ever participated in the crimes the rest of the Death Eaters committed. But it was enough, and Crouch needed someone to slake the anger of the wizarding world." Snape smirked a little. "Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, he misjudged rather badly."

"How do you mean?" Harry asked.

"He waited too long," Snape said. "People had begun to talk after his son was sent to Azkaban. Some said Crouch was too lenient, should have had the boy kissed along with the rest. Others said he was too harsh, that a man who would imprison his own son after a five minute trial should not be Minister of Magic. Crouch had Reynard kissed in an attempt to win back the public's trust." A nasty smile curled Snape's lips. "It didn't work. Most people were appalled by such a measure. No one had been kissed in many, many years."

There was a short silence, then, "Was there anything else, Potter?"

"Just these books." Harry pushed the two volumes across the desk. Snape lifted the first and glanced at it.

"A Herbology text," he said, flipping the pages. "In German, interestingly enough." He set it aside and picked up the second book. "Oh my," he murmured, eying it with what could almost have been caution.

"What's that?" Harry watched in wonder as Snape's face went from its normal displeased cast to an almost sad one.

"This is not something a boy of your age should have to think about." Snape said, setting the book down decisively. "It was something the Dark Lord liked to give to his very young and impressionable recruits. He thought it was ironic ... to apply the idea of genocide put forth by muggles to muggles themselves." He looked sharply at Harry. "You should go, Mr. Potter."

"Yes, sir." Harry rose, drawing out his invisibility cloak. "Thank you, Professor."

"Hmph," Snape said, tucking the potion recipes and books into his desk. "I will relay this to the Headmaster when he returns."

"Where is he, anyway?" Harry asked.

Snape snarled. "None of your business, nosy brat."

Harry sighed. The conversation was definitely over. Whatever small advantage he'd held with Snape surprised and stuck in the past was gone now.

Harry turned and left without saying a word, making sure that no part of his body was visible as he made his way back up to Gryffindor tower. Snape hadn't helped him much, except to further his worries about Reynard and his Manifestation. As he crossed the entrance hall, Harry

wondered why that was bothering him so much.

But he was too tired to dwell on it. Tomorrow was Monday and he'd scheduled an early Quidditch practice. He was sure the mystery would work itself out. They always seemed to. Harry ignored the taunting inner voice which was telling him he was just returning to his old passive habits, and climbed the great staircase.

He made it back to the tower a little after eleven. The common room was mostly empty, only a few seventh years talking quietly around the fire. Harry went up to his dorm and fell into bed. He'd thought he'd be asleep instantly, but it seemed it was not to be. For the second night in a row, he lay awake for several hours, thinking. "Not for a boy of your age," Snape had said. Maybe not, but it wouldn't be the first time. Nor, Harry thought with a pang he didn't understand, would it be the last.