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"I think I've found something," Al whispered, slipping under the covers of Scorpius's bed. "Remember what you said about adapting a Horcrux to draw out the remainder of a person's soul? You were on the right track."
"He didn't make a Horcrux, though," Scorpius said, scooting over to give Al room to get comfortable. "We checked. The portrait's the real thing. He's definitely dead; his soul's gone."
"Yes and no. I told you about Dad and Voldemort's diary, right? Well, I got the whole story out of him last time, and I guess it became something like Mum's Horcrux, too, because she wrote so much of herself into it -- but of course Voldemort had a prior claim, plus he'd properly divided that piece of himself off of the rest. The division is what was key, it meant it was its own thing and not just a tool. But it got me thinking -- what if we all have pseudo-Horcruxes lying around, more and more cluttering up our lives the older we get? Things of personal importance, like diaries or old toys."
Scorpius considered the idea. "That's great," he said slowly, "only all Uncle Severus's stuff was burned after he died. We don't have anything we can use, much less the amount we'd need to get a large enough piece of his soul. And we still haven't figured out how to recreate his body."
Al grinned. "I've got a solution to both problems. What's the one thing everyone in this school uses, day in and day out?"
Scorpius frowned. "I told you, they burned everything. I really don't think we're going to find any of his old robes or quills, and he wasn't the sort to let those mean anything much to him anyway."
Al rolled his eyes. "His wand, you great lout. Or are you so used to yours that you don't even remember it exists?"
Scorpius's mind reeled. Al didn't realise it, but he'd just proven why a wand was as close to finding a person's Horcrux -- or the gateway to their entire soul -- as one could get, provided the wand didn't choose a new master. It was, he realised, probably the basis on which Horcruxes had been founded -- there was no item more personal than a wizard's wand, to the point where it became almost an extension of self. A wizard was but half a man after the loss of his wand, and it was widely accepted that losing one's wand was more debilitating the longer it had been in use, and the more powerful the wizard had been before losing it. Wasn't that the conventional wisdom, that to lose your wand was to destroy a piece of your soul?
He imagined the first true Horcrux had been created not so much to achieve immortality as to deepen the wand's power, and in so doing deepen the wizard's own ability. The connection between wand and wizard could only be strengthened through an act which required as much force of intent as did murder, even if that bond would inevitably corrupt itself in the process. It might even explain what made the Deathstick so powerful, why it only grew stronger with time, because how could a wand which siphoned enough shards of its master's souls do anything but?
Al was a genius, he decided. And an idiot. A savant, really. Pity that an innate understanding of the principles underlying Dark Magic was rubbish in terms of making a career. It was far more likely this affinity would land him in Azkaban -- or dead -- than put food on his table. But that was why he had Scorpius, wasn't it? Scorpius was his compass, not of morality (Al was always the more moral of the two of them, even if he was too idealistic to be truly ethical) but of social acceptability. Scorpius understood what could and could not be forgiven in the wizarding world, and under which circumstances, and why. That was part and parcel of growing up with a disgraced pureblood name. As Harry Potter's son, Al had no concept of what it meant to go too far, and Scorpius was determined to be there to keep Al's unswerving idealism from leading him too far astray.
Which was his duty now.
"It might work," he said carefully, his heart sinking. Damn it, they had been so close! But if Al was heading in the direction Scorpius suspected, well. Some things the wizarding world could forgive, and some things it could not. "But we don't know where his wand is. It disappeared with his body, which means it could be anywhere -- or both might have been burnt, too. We have no way to know."
"That's not true. I asked Dad about that, too, and Aunt Luna. Dad says he couldn't have moved, or been moved; there was a lot of blood, they'd have been able to tell. He died in the Shack. And Aunt Luna said there were a lot of strange happenings after the battle, things going missing, or turning up in the wrong places, or growing or shrinking. Unidentifiable plants growing in patches over the grounds. She said all that destructive magic unleashed in one place built up and went a bit wild, rewrote the rules for how the world worked for a few days. It was only at Hogwarts, and most of the plants died within hours of blooming, but she said Dad found some of those flowers growing on freshly-turned dirt at Grandmum's grave He was spooked enough that he checked Uncle Snape's mum's grave, too." Al fell silent for a minute, eyes glassing over as he remembered -- what, exactly, Scorpius had no idea. The look on Luna's face as she recounted the tale? Or maybe he was imagining what his father must have seen. Maybe Al had seen it himself -- Scorpius winced internally at the thought, but it was true that Al was a talented Legilimens, and he'd never been terribly bothered by meddling with ethical complications in the face of serving whatever cause he felt was right.
Not for the first time, Scorpius wondered if his wistful, maudlin musings of a year and a half ago had taken on too much of a life of their own. If it was already too late to save Al from himself. Before all this, Al never would have plucked any but the most frivolous outer throughts from anyone's mind, no matter what was at stake. The whole endeavour had shown a remarkable erosion of Al's principles of what constituted acceptable evil for the greater good, and every time Scorpius felt certain that it would be okay, that Al had to draw the line somewhere, he'd been proven wrong: that either the line didn't exist, or it was a lot farther back than Scorpius was comfortable with.
But Al was his best friend, maybe his only real friend except for the portrait of a certain dead man whose interests they might or might not have at heart, and Scorpius had sworn to never walk away from him.
"He found the earth distrubed there, too. And the same flowers. Dad didn't know what it meant, if he'd finally found peace or not. He wanted to believe it, because making amends with the dead is awfully one-sided. But I'm not sure he ever really convinced himself." Al took a deep breath, trying to shake off the bleakness that had descended like a shroud over their warm four-poster bed. "I think Uncle Snape ended up in one of those places, and his wand in the other."
Scorpius remained silent for a long while, unsure how to respond. "It doesn't matter," he said finally. "Even if you're right -- and I don't see how you can be -- besides which, everyone knows your aunt's completely batty -- anyway, there's no way we can go digging up someone's grave and stealing their wand. We just can't. There's no greater desecration of dignity or propriety."
"Fuck propriety," Al spat. "And fuck dignity, too! What's worth more, Snape's life or some ideals imposed on you by a world that looks down on you because of who your dad is? I know what I care about," he added viciously, when Scorpius opened his mouth to argue. "I care about giving my uncle a second, better chance. I care about allowing my dad to make amends for one of his worst regrets. And I don't really know your dad, but you do and he's important to you and I want to give him back the only lover he's ever given a damn about. I thought you wanted this, too, or you never would've mentioned it to me. But I guess I was wrong. Goodnight." The last came out petulant as Al turned away and curled up on the edge of the bed, dragging all the blankets with him.
Scorpius felt ill. You're wrong, he wanted to say. You're wrong; I want this as much as you do. But he didn't, did he? There were certain lines he wasn't willing to cross in the service of his goals. Al, on the other hand, was fully prepared to not only cross those lines, he intended to obliterate them. Al wanted to make sure there was no coming back once his plan was set -- not for himself, because Al was too stubborn to back down if his intentions were good (and they always, always were), but for everyone else. So everyone would understand just how right Al was, that he was willing to sacrifice so much.
You're wrong, Scorpius wanted to say. There are some things you just can't do, no matter the reason. But wasn't raising the dead a far greater crime than digging up a man's grave? And hadn't Scorpius been eager to accomplish the former, consequences be damned, until he realised just how much wrong he would have to commit in order to succeed? He'd known he would have to do horrible things to bring Uncle Severus back, just not the specifics, and he hadn't cared. He was a hypocrite for feeling squeamish now, and a coward to boot.
He had always been a coward. It amazed him that a single act of bravery could have earned him the friendship of someone so courageous -- frequently idiotically so -- and that he had managed to keep it for so long. Scorpius had always been grateful to have Al for a friend, even if he was certain he didn't deserve it.
In front of him, Al's back was rigid, and his breaths came too quickly for him to be truly asleep. Whether he was simply angry or plagued by the same doubts and waiting for a response, Scorpius didn't know. He wanted desperately to ask, but was terrified of the answer. He longed to grab the blankets back and snuggle up to Al's side, conveying through touch that Al's friendship meant too much to him to let any disagreement break them apart. He thought it might be best to slip out of his own bed and take refuge in the solitude of Al's empty one, to put off any important decisions until morning. He didn't know what he wanted, he didn't know what to do -- he just wished things could be easy between them again, the way they hadn't been in the year and a half since they'd begun this madness. He missed his friend. He missed trusting his friend, and knowing his friend trusted him.
In the end, he chose to do nothing, but lay unmoving and watched as Al's stiff back finally loosened and he sank into slumber. He stared for what felt like an age after, thinking too late, it's too late now and you're wrong, Al, you have to be wrong until, sometime near sunrise, his eyes slipped shut and his thoughts emptied from his head and everything was blissfully blank.