I'd Die for You

Do you still want to die?

Snape wouldn't let him stay.

Harry begged him. "I promise you won't even know I'm here. When I sleep I curl up in a ball and I take a teeny tiny corner of the bed and I don't snore-"

"No," Snape said, pulling his underwear on, the sight of his now soft penis stirring something again in Harry.

"Fine," Harry said, his ego already bruised by his desperate performance in bed, his orgasm in the sheets. "You're a dick," he threw over his shoulder, walking out with his jeans in his hand and wrapping his invisibility cloak over his shoulders. But he still smiled all the way to his room.

He knew he wouldn't be able to sleep right away so when he got into bed, he pressed the play button on the video player and lay back against his pillows to watch.

Five minutes into it, he knew he'd have to rewind it because instead of really watching, he was screening his memory from an hour before over the wall, re-living himself and Snape moving over each other like shifting plates in the earth. He felt breathless again and laughed aloud to no one in the room, dizzy with hope.

He had his head back, lulled into a daze by the projections on the wall and the ones in his mind, when Rebecca Rickton appeared.

She was walking naked through a crowd of people that were watching and making faces, turning their heads back in disbelief, all but pointing.

She looked terrified of what she was walking toward but her body moved without hesitation. She got up the first set of steps of the fountain and then the second steadily and turned around to face the crowd and rose up, like a living imitation of the statue of Eros at the top.

Harry was wide awake now, no longer sleepy, no longer happy. His skin was goosefleshed and cold. He grabbed his wand and zoomed the video into her face, trying to see the tell-tale signs of a specific spell or curse or potion. But there was nothing magical in her visage, just the raw breach of her soul in her eyes. They filled the screen and begged for life.

___

Harry had a hard time sleeping after that and spent most of the night rewatching the footage from before Rebecca came into the frame, hoping to catch something significant to no avail. He still couldn't bring himself to move forward in the footage to the most gruesome part, but he knew he would have to soon.

His work as an Auror hadn't prepared him for anything that violent. Magical deaths were usually clean ones and he hadn't dealt with as many of those as covert missions to catch hiding Death Eaters and protecting hunted people.

Rebecca's image in the video spur him on through the night and into the morning, when he wrote a letter to Ron before leaving his room.

Ron,

I know you hate me right now and you can keep sending your 'fuck yous', I certainly deserve them. But we need to focus on putting this bewitched knife murder thing to bed.

I was watching when she first gets to the fountain last night and it doesn't look like an Imperio curse because she's aware of herself. But her body's definitely been bewitched because she doesn't hesitate.

We're better when we work together. This is bigger than us. Tell me where to meet you and we can talk. Maybe Hermione can help us with the research.

Love,

Harry

Harry sent it at breakfast with Neville's owl.

Snape didn't show up that morning. Harry was disappointed but a little relieved because looking at Snape in the light of day after what they'd done was a daunting thought.