The Stolen Locket
If it hadn't been for Dumbledore, Harry would have drowned in that cave. Dragged down below the surface of the lake by an army of Inferi, he would have become another dead guardian of a fragment of Voldemort's soul for all eternity. Having quite forgotten in his panic to call upon fire to repel them, Harry had been almost gone when he'd witnessed Professor Dumbledore summon up his last morsel of strength to conjure a great eruption of flames that had chased the Inferi off so that they could grab the Horcrux and leave.
Though the effort had greatly weakened Dumbledore and it had been a tremendous feat for Harry to return them both to Hogwarts on his own. The protection around the Horcrux had been extremely well-designed by Voldemort. Nobody could have done it alone, for it required a sacrifice - a victim - to consume the Drink of Despair from the basin that had contained Slytherin's Locket at the bottom. Forcing such a poison down Dumbledore's unwilling throat had been the hardest thing that Harry had ever had to do.
The second hardest thing that Harry had ever had to do was setting Dumbledore down in the grass when he couldn't possibly support his weight any longer. Harry had left him alone inside the confines of the Hogwarts grounds and had continued the rest of the way into the castle by himself, knowing that he had just seen Dumbledore alive for the last time.
And Harry hadn't been thinking clearly at all mere seconds later when he'd raced down to the dungeons with his Invisibility Cloak not on, but then again neither had Snape. After nearly two years of being so careful and discreet, the consequences of Malfoy's suspicious face witnessing their natural interaction were too terrible to consider. So that Harry didn't know what to think or even less what to say when he'd stumbled into Snape's quarters immediately after.
"Did you and Dumbledore get it?" Ron asked, after a long awkward pause where Harry had just gaped stupidly around the living room at him, Hermione, and Sirius.
"What? Oh yeah," Harry muttered distractedly, as he thrust his hand into his jean pocket and then held out the locket for Ron to take. His two friends were staring back at him with a mixture of pity and concern on their faces and he was thankful that the Horcrux gave them something to focus on that wasn't himself.
The trauma of entering that eerie cave with human corpses beneath the surface so ready to attack while Dumbledore had cried and pleaded with him not to make him drink any more of the potion was something that Harry found he couldn't share with them just now. It was too fresh and too horrible, as Harry thought helplessly about how Snape was probably already on his way to the side of the man who had created those evil obstacles. That Harry had quite likely made that situation even more dangerous for him now - if Snape couldn't get Malfoy to forget what he saw.
"It's all going to work out," Sirius said gently, walking across the room to grip Harry by the shoulders. "Let's get you out of those wet clothes, a hot shower, and then -"
"No," Harry shook his head. He didn't think he had the patience for any of that right now. To stand under a stream of soothing water and try to relax sounded ludicrous when he was already having to resist the temptation to turn around and run back the way he had come.
Sirius sighed, making quick work of a drying spell that had Harry's clothes feeling toasty warm on him in a flash. It was the same spell that Dumbledore had used on them both on their way into the cave when he’d still been in reasonable form. On the way out he had deteriorated so significantly that Harry had been afraid that they wouldn't even manage to get him back to Snape alive; which of course had been crucial to the plan.
“He’s gone,” Harry croaked out, burying his face into Sirius’s shoulder as he felt his legs wobble threateningly underneath him.
He was so tired from the exertion of practically carrying Dumbledore out of the cave. Though the weariness in his body was no match for the devastation in his heart. He heard Hermione make a choking sound from behind whilst she and Ron continued examining the locket to afford Harry some privacy while he cried. Sirius kept murmuring into his hair that everything was going to be okay, but Harry didn't believe that either. How could anything ever be fine again when Dumbledore was dead and Snape presumed a murderer?
"Your arms are both bleeding," Sirius commented a few minutes later, pulling Harry back just enough to examine the injuries he’d sustained from trying to escape the Inferi.
"I fell trying to get away," Harry muttered vaguely, looking down at his scraped elbows and the rather deep gash that reached all the way to his wrist. He had hurt himself on the rocks when the Inferi had suddenly dropped him in their desperation to escape Dumbledore's fire.
Though Harry was grateful that Sirius didn't ask for more of an explanation than that. He allowed himself to be steered over to the sofa and sat down, refusing to look at either Ron or Hermione who kept glancing worriedly between himself and the Horcrux, which currently wasn't of the remotest interest to Harry. They seemed to want to offer words of comfort to him but were uncertain how exactly to do that.
Sirius had gone around the corner to the bathroom, but he emerged within seconds holding a cloth and the vial of Murtlap Essence, which Snape used to apply to Harry's hand after detentions with Dolores Umbridge last year.
"Did you see Severus?" Sirius asked, sitting down on top of the coffee table facing Harry and unscrewing the lid on the vial of Murtlap Essence.
Harry nodded and wiped his sleeve across his nose, watching Sirius saturate a clean strip of linen with the healing solution. "I think he's in trouble - I think I got him in trouble. I didn't know that Malfoy was watching us and now I think he knows that Professor Snape is on my side after all."
"I think Dumbledore's death will settle any doubts that anyone has," Sirius said, reaching for Harry's left arm which had received the worst of the impact.
"You didn’t see him," Harry replied, who had recognized the look on Malfoy’s face as one of someone who thought they had just made a profound discovery.
"I trust Severus to handle it," Sirius said, as the solution he was coating Harry’s arm in began to induce the state of calmness that Snape had modified it to stimulate. In spite of himself, Harry began to lean back into the sofa and relaxed his laboured breathing.
He was waiting to see if Sirius had anything more concrete and reassuring in his mind to share, but nothing came. But there was nothing that anyone could possibly say to make this better anyway. That Dumbledore was already dying - everyone in the room had known he was already dying - didn't change the profound effect of losing this greatest of wizards whom they’d all still needed so much. Nothing could prepare for such a loss.
Or for the loss of Snape either, for that matter. In his current state he couldn't help anymore or take care of Harry. The others had seen the way Professor Snape had been pacing and agonizing all that evening as he'd waited for Harry and Dumbledore to return from the cave. They'd all known what he was preparing to do and it was a burden to know, even though Harry was relieved that they did.
While it was a risk to be told - perhaps nearly as risky as Draco Malfoy witnessing Snape hug and kiss Harry goodbye was - Harry was grateful that Dumbledore had been worn down enough that time in Professor McGonagall’s office to bring them all together. They already knew Dumbledore had been dying and in the end there hadn't been much doubt left as to the role Severus Snape had been seduced into playing.
“I told Severus to just concentrate on killing the snake and then coming back to us,” Sirius told them. “Dumbledore wanted him to stay in Voldemort’s good graces for as long as possible but I just don’t see the point in that once all the Horcruxes are destroyed.”
"But this isn't a Horcrux," Hermione whispered in a trembling sort of way. It couldn't have been more clear that she'd been sitting on this news and waiting for the right moment to insert it into the conversation. "It's just an ordinary locket.”
Harry turned to stare at the gold locket that Ron was still holding in his hand. It was neither as large as the locket he remembered seeing in the Pensieve, nor were there any markings upon it, no sign of the ornate S that was supposed to be Slytherin's mark. Ron had opened it and a piece of parchment that had been folded into a tiny square to fit inside, now lay wrinkled but flat out across his lap.
Harry had not had a chance to examine the locket at all in the aftermath of the cave. He'd just stuffed it into his pocket and then had concentrated all his energy on supporting Dumbledore's weight and apparating them successfully back to the outskirts of Hogsmeade, when he'd never attempted Apparition without assistance before in his life.
"Someone must have got there first and swapped it," Ron explained, picking up the piece of parchment that had been well preserved inside its locket shell.
"They left this note," he held it out before he slowly began to read aloud the letter that he and Hermione had been studying together:
To the Dark Lord:
I know I will be dead long before you read this but I want you to know that it was I who discovered your secret.
I have stolen the real Horcrux and intend to destroy it as soon as I can. I face death in the hope that when you meet your match you will be mortal once more.
R.A.B.
Harry felt like he'd been punched in the gut, but that was nothing compared to the aghast expression on Sirius’s race.
"Read me that again," Sirius said sharply, as soon as Ron had finished.
Ron looked a bit confused but he complied and read the letter through once more for them, even more slowly this time. Harry felt fresh tears begin to burn in his eyes as he thought back to the excruciating pain that Dumbledore had endured in that cave all for nothing. How he had writhed and shook uncontrollably. Pleading with people who weren't there while he'd hallucinated something terrifying, and there was nothing that Harry could have done to console him.
"Don't hurt them, don't hurt them, please, please, it's my fault, hurt me instead…."
And then Dumbledore had begged Harry to kill him to make the torture stop and Harry had promised him it would stop, but only if he kept drinking that evil potion. Which it turned out had not concealed the Horcrux after all in the end. Someone else had already taken it. This R.A.B. person, who had discovered the Horcrux before Dumbledore and set out to destroy it.
Harry suddenly became aware that Sirius had stopped tending to his wounded arm and had reached out his hand for the letter. His brown eyes scanned over the words again and again, as if trying to take in new meaning with each re-read. His thin lips pressed together tightly, his brow etched in confusion, and his already pale skin whitened even more.
"His initials," Sirius muttered, as if to himself, pulling on his long curly hair distressingly. "The way he held his quill - his words always leaned slightly to the right - and the lettering…."
"Dad," Harry said after a few minutes of this continued muttering.
He shared a nervous glance with Ron and Hermione who both looked equally befuddled. Sirius read the letter a few more times to himself before he finally looked up at them, as if just suddenly remembering that they were still there. His face had a haunted and sickly expression about it.
"I know who R.A.B is," he said finally. "My brother wrote this letter."
"Your brother?" Harry repeated, searching for the name he had only ever heard Sirius speak once before. "R.A.B. is - was - Regulus?"
"Yes," Sirius said darkly, setting the note down on the table and hastily getting to his feet.
He walked over to the kitchen counter and poured himself a glass from the bottle of whiskey that had been left out. Hermione had silently taken the letter back to read through again and Ron shifted nervously from his side of the sofa and seemed not to know what to say.
Neither did Harry for that matter, for the only time Sirius had ever mentioned his younger brother to him before, it hadn't been favourable. Regulus had apparently been the son that their parents had been proud of. Sorted into Slytherin like the rest of the Black family, with the notable exception of Sirius, Regulus had joined the Death Eaters after graduating from Hogwarts and then was believed to have been killed on Voldemort's orders for getting cold feet and trying to back out of what he'd been asked to do. Only the letter Regulus had left behind now suggested that that had not actually been the case at all.
Perhaps it hadn't been nerves that had prompted Regulus to retreat from the Death Eaters, but instead he had genuinely deflected and went out fighting. He would have been dragged down to the bottom of the lake by the Inferi after swapping out the locket and inevitably succumbing to the desperate thirst that the Drink of Despair invoked. But if Regulus had died, who had taken the real Horcrux away?
"Regulus did not act alone," Harry told them firmly, and Sirius turned back around to face him with a redness in his eyes that hadn't been there before. "I had to force-feed Dumbledore a potion to reach the locket. There's no way that anyone could do that by themselves."
Sirius opened his mouth to respond, but before anything came out there was a sudden sound of stones being dragged and the wall rearranged itself to form the archway that connected the quarters to the main office. For one wild moment, Harry thought that Snape had come back and his heart sank when he had to face that that wasn't the case - that that could never have been the case. By now Harry wasn't the only person that Snape had granted free access to his quarters to. Coercing Dumbledore to open up had brought them all together in more ways than one.
"Do you need the hospital wing, Potter?" Professor McGonagall asked tiredly, taking in the gash on his arm through puffy eyes that made it obvious that she had been crying.
"No, it's just a scratch," Harry assured her, picking up the cloth soaked in Murtlap Essence that Sirius had abandoned and beginning to dot it across his skin. She nodded curtly, accepting this. There were much more pressing matters to attend to than a bleeding arm after all.
"I just came down to tell you all that it's been done," she hiccuped. "We've moved him….and I've informed the staff….we'll tell the students at breakfast. Albus was soaked through to the skin?"
"We were in a cave off of a lake," Harry explained. "We both got wet."
"I see," Minerva said numbly, sinking down onto the kitchen stool that Hermione had jumped up to bring over to her. “Thank you, Miss Granger,” she added absentmindedly.
“You’re welcome,” Hermione said gently.
The sudden presence of Professor McGonagall in their midst brought them all back to the world and tragedy that existed outside of these quarters. While they put their heads together and tried to figure out the Horcrux, the rest of the castle would be mourning the death of Albus Dumbledore and exchanging stories about how Snape had murdered him in cold blood. It was all just so terrible - the sacrifices of war that Dumbledore had spoken about and been willing to face to the very end. Harry wanted to both simultaneously escape from them all and never ever be left alone again.
"You and Professor Dumbledore managed to get it then?" Minerva asked Harry wearily.
"No," Harry said bluntly, as McGonagall blinked at him confusedly and then at the locket that Ron was still holding.
"This is a decoy," Ron informed her.
"Yes," Hermione chimed in. "Someone else already -” she shot an apologetic glance in Sirius’s direction. “Well, we just discovered that the person who took the real one was Sirius's brother."
"Regulus Black?" Minerva questioned, her eyes scanning across the room to Sirius who had said nothing since she’d arrived and who Harry could see was still trying to grapple with this new revelation about his younger brother.
"Do you remember him?" Sirius asked her, setting his empty glass back down on the counter next to the bottle of whiskey.
"I remember every one of my students," Minerva replied. "He wasn't a Gryffindor but yes - I remember him. An excellent seeker, top grades, a prefect, and much quieter than yourself - I don't recall ever giving him a detention. He died just after he finished school, I believe?"
"He was a Death Eater," Sirius said plainly.
Minerva's lips thinned slightly. "I didn't know that."
"But then Regulus turned on Voldemort and stole the Horcrux he somehow found out about," Hermione said fairly, holding out the letter for McGonagall to take. "He left this behind in the cave where Harry and Professor Dumbledore were tonight."
Minerva adjusted her square spectacles and then quickly read the note. While grateful that Dumbledore had conceded to allow more people into their confidence, none of them seemed to know what to say in regards to this shocking revelation about Regulus Black. As Sirius struggled to accept that he hadn't really known his brother at all. That they had had more in common than either of them perhaps had ever realized.
"The real one must be tracked down if we are to be certain that Regulus managed to do what he said he was going to do," Minerva advised, folding the piece of parchment neatly and handing it back to Hermione. “But it’s too late to do anything else tonight.”
“What’s going to happen now?” asked Ron.
"The governors will undoubtedly be here first thing in the morning," Minerva replied. "We might be sending all the students home early. I'm not sure if the school can remain open after such a stain upon Hogwarts' history."
"You can't close Hogwarts," Harry said, outraged.
But Professor McGonagall just shrugged helplessly and continued speaking as if there had been no interruption. "I know that it had been Dumbledore's wish to be laid to rest here at Hogwarts, but -"
"That’s what's going to happen then, isn't it?" Harry demanded.
"If I have anything to say about it," Minerva said grimly, removing her glasses which were blurred with moisture and wiping them on the front of her robes.
There were so many factors to consider on this most tragic of nights. Harry was desperate for rest but also consumed with a guilt that came from feeling like anything that didn't contribute to finishing Voldemort right now was a waste of time. He wanted to find the real Horcrux, see Dumbledore with his own eyes, and learn what had become of Snape once they'd parted ways. He knew the rest of them were just as lost, yet determined, as himself. As time continued its unrelenting progression, and Dumbledore could no longer help.