Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
~Mark Twain

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN:  To Your Health

“What’s wrong with him!” shrieked Hermione as Neville collapsed to the floor in a silently twitching heap.

An instant later Professor McGonagall was on her knees beside Neville, his head cradled on her lap as his body spasmed wildly.  She tried to prise his hands away from the cup clasped tightly in his hands, to no avail, he had the cup in a death grip.

Cup? Thought Harry turning his attention from the flailing figure between the hospital beds to the metallic object clutched in his hands.  It had been a silvery hand, or at least a silvery hand-shaped object.  After Neville had picked it up it had changed.  Now it was a delicate golden cup with silver etchings.

He blinked at the object now clutched in Neville’s hand.  “Hufflepuff’s cup!” he whispered.

Neville writhed on the floor in obvious agony, his mouth open in a silent scream.  Harry was forcibly reminded of his fourth year Defense Against the Dark Arts class when Moody had demonstrated the Cruciatus Curse on the silent spider.

“It’s the Cruciatus Curse,” murmured Harry, unable now to keep his eyes off of Neville’s agonized face.

“Don’t be ridiculous Potter,” snapped Professor McGonagall.  “The Cruciatus Curse requires a witch or wizard to perform it, you can’t store it in an object.”

“This isn’t just any old object professor,” Harry retorted.  “First off, the Cup is a powerful object in its own right — you know this as well as I do.”  Harry watched as Professor McGonagall glanced at the cup, then did a double take as the change it had undergone registered.  It would have been humorous if Neville hadn’t been thrashing about in obvious agony.

“Secondly,” continued Harry, “if it really is the fifth Horcrux — which I’d be willing to bet on heavily at this point — it contains a piece of Voldemort’s soul; surely that would be enough to perform a Cruciatus Curse.”

“I…” Professor McGonagall stopped dead, looked from the cup to Neville, then back to Harry, swallowed, then nodded.  “So, the only way to get it to stop…” Professor McGonagall’s voice trailed off, her eyes fixed now on Neville’s thrashing form.

“Is to destroy it, yes,” said Harry heavily, and raised his wand.

“No, Harry don’t!” cried Hermione, grabbing Harry’s wrist.  “You could hurt him!”

“What do you think the curse is doing to him?” said Harry shaking off Hermione’s grip.  “You really want to see him end up like his parents?”  Hermione drew back her hand, looking shocked.

“Finite!” bellowed Harry as he pointed his wand at Neville’s writhing form.

Nothing happened.

Harry knew what he had to do.  He’d known it since the moment he’d laid the gleaming hand on the bedclothes.  He also knew that if he said anything Ron and Hermione would protest and Professor McGonagall would probably try to stop him.  Before he could think too hard about it, Harry reached out and wrenched the cup out of Neville’s hand.  The last thing he saw was Ginny staring at him with that hard blazing look in her eye that he’d come to know so well.

Their eyes met and an understanding passed between them.  She knew what he had to do.

I’ll be waiting.  Her voice in his head, as always, was soothing to his frayed nerves.  Harry managed somehow to give her a small smile before everything went black and the world turned inside out.

*     *     *

He was falling; falling through darkness and the darkness had weight; a weight that pressed against his eyeballs in an attempt to drive them back into his head; a weight that wrapped itself sinuously around his chest like Devil’s Snare, constricting his breathing until he wasn’t entirely certain that he was breathing at all.  It was a  darkness so silent that his ears rang with the sheer horror of it.

And then it was gone and Harry was left lying on a hard, unforgiving surface, gasping for breath like a fish out of water.  He opened one eye, not entirely certain that he wanted to see where he was, only to find himself staring at what at first seemed to be nothing. 

He opened his other eye and blinked.  It was nothing.  Mind you, it was a very blandly neutral shade of nothing — sort of a hazy shade of beige and not the darkness one would expect from a true absence of anything in particular.

In an attempt to gain some perspective Harry glanced down at his own body, but it didn’t help.  His body was simply a hazy body shape that seemed to blend in perfectly with the general haziness around it.  It felt real enough though.  He held a hand up in front of his face and wiggled his fingers.  The hazy hand shape in front of him seemed to shimmer a bit, but he couldn’t see anything that looked remotely like fingers. He could feel the fingers though, he could even feel the calluses on his index finger from his continual note taking and the paper cut on his left pinkie finger.  Obviously he still had a body — he just couldn’t see it. 

Temporarily satisfied with the assessment, Harry levered himself into a sitting position — or what his brain told him was a sitting position since gravity didn’t seem to be arguing too strenuously with him at the moment.  It was time to take stock of the situation.  Harry stood carefully, planting his feet wide to keep his balance.  Once he was certain he wasn’t going to fall over Harry rotated slowly on the spot…nothing, just the same universally bland beige.

“Nice entrance.”  Two words; two words dripping with sarcasm were all it took to send Harry reeling across the vacantly beige space like a drunken sailor.  He stumbled over something he couldn’t see and found himself sprawled once more on the hard, unforgiving surface he had been laying on before.

“Tell me, Mr. Potter, do you always conduct your entrances with such…grace?”

Harry blinked as a pair of bare feet materialized in front of his nose; if the hot pink polish on the toenails were any clue, he’d have to guess that they belonged to a woman.  The feet were, sensibly enough, attached to a pair of legs that disappeared around mid-calf beneath a voluminous robe of some hideously flowered material. 

The flowered robes gave Harry a nasty twinge, and for a moment he didn’t dare lift his eyes any further for fear of finding that he had somehow been imprisoned in this monotonous beigness with one of his least favorite people in the world; Professor Umbridge.

“I know, they are hideous, aren’t they?” said the voice, at once waylaying Harry’s fears.  The voice had none of Umbridge’s girlish breathiness.  It was actually rather low pitched, for a woman and now, without its sarcasm, seemed to carry a rather wistful note.  “Can’t help what they buried me in now, can I? — bloody stupid get up if you ask me.”

Harry looked up finally, to find himself face to face — or rather face to knee — with a rather short, dumpy looking woman who reminded Harry forcibly of Professor Sprout, even down to her frizzy, fly-away hair.  The eyes though, unlike Sprout’s cornflower blue ones, were an intriguing olive green and the hair, frizzy as it was, was ginger, and not gray.

“Couldn’t do a thing with my hair though,” she said, grinning and extending a hand to Harry to help him up. 

Harry accepted the proffered Hand and dusted himself off, realizing with a start that he could now see his fingers, his body, even the dust being brushed from his clothes with unusual clarity.

“Not that they didn’t try,” she reached into the bodice of her dress and produced a wide pink satin bow.  “I still think that my Pamela did it to get even with me for all the times I made her wash behind her ears.”  She stuffed the hideous bow back into her dress with a grimace.  “I tried throwing it away, but every time I do it ends up right back on my head.”

 “Who’s Pamela?” asked Harry, finally finding his voice.

“My daughter,” said the witch with a sigh.  “Pamela Hufflepuff.  Isn’t that a beautiful name?”

“Er…”  Harry blinked.  Pamela Hufflepuff?  That would mean that this dumpy little witch in front of him was…”you’re Helga Hufflepuff?” blurted Harry, unable to help himself.

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” said the witch with a lopsided grin that reminded Harry strongly of Neville.  “What’s left of me, anyway.”

“The I must be…” he looked around him.  “Am I dead?  I mean, it still feels like I have a body and all, but that doesn’t mean-”

“By all rights you should be,” said the witch with a nod.  “And if you’re not-”

“I’m not?” repeated Harry, frowning slightly.

“Of course not.  You’re not really here you know, not really.”

“So this is a dream then?”

“Well, not a dream actually.”

“But you said that I’m not really here,” insisted Harry, looking around himself more interestedly now, trying to determine where ‘here’ actually was.

“I guess you could call it a dream then, if it makes you feel better,” said the witch who called herself Helga Hufflepuff.  “But in truth, it is more like your spirit is here, with me.  Your body is still wherever it was when you activated the cup.”

“The hospital wing,” said Harry slowly.  “But it wasn’t me who activated it — It was Neville, he grabbed it and it turned from that silver hand back into a cup, but then he started convulsing…”

“The Cruciatus curse,” said Helga, nodding.  “He had it tied to the activation of the cup.  But you say it changed when he touched it?”

Harry nodded.

“Then there is only one answer, he must be a direct descendent of mine, for the cup will only activate for the one who is destined to heal our land, or for someone who is of my bloodline.”

“It was hurting him!” said Harry accusingly.

“That wasn’t me, that was the part of him that that is enmeshed here,” said Helga with a frown that looked distinctly out of place on her plump, round face.

“Here?” said Harry, looking around again.  “Then…we must be inside the cup!”

“Oh, very good!” cried the witch clapping her hands and giving a small skip. 

“So you haunt your own cup?” wondered Harry, taking another look around at the non-descript nothingness around them. 

“Oh I’m not a ghost,” said the short witch, shaking her head emphatically.  “I am the part of me that was tied to this particular object of power and now, well” she shrugged and gestured around her.  “I used to be able to get out — see a bit of the world, but ever since he discovered me…” she sighed deeply.  “It does get a bit irksome, being locked up in here.”

“So you’re a prisoner -like Rowena,” murmured Harry.

“Oh!  You’ve met Rowena then?” said Helga, her face lighting up with delight.  “What did you think of her?”

“Well, she seemed nice,” said Harry, uncertain how to explain that the circumstances of finding the harp had left him very little in the way of time to assess Rowena Ravenclaw’s personality.

“Nice?” echoed Helga, her wispy red eyebrows threatening to leap off of her face altogether.  “She is the smartest witch I have ever had the pleasure of meeting — my best friend in the world.  He was looking for her you know, I would have bet everything I owned that she’d find a way to outsmart him, but you said she’s a prisoner like me?”

“Yes,” said Harry carefully.  “She is bound to her harp in the same way that you seem bound to this cup.”

“You freed her though,” said Helga matter of factly.  “When you found her bound up by that vile self-declared Dark Lord, yes?”

“Well, I would have,” said Harry defensively, “but I didn’t know how.”

“You’ve got to use it silly,” said Helga Hufflepuff with a little laugh.  “I would have thought that to you at least, that much would be obvious — oh don’t look at me like that!” she said as she saw the look on Harry’s face.  “We all make assumptions, now, don’t we?  I knew that the one destined to unite the four objects of power would show up eventually — prophecies are never wrong after all — I just thought that he’d be, well…” she gestured at Harry and gave a small shrug.

“You thought what,” said Harry tartly, “that I’d be handsomer?  Or more experienced maybe?”

“Older,” said Helga with the smallest of smiles.  “You can’t be more than seventeen, eighteen at the most.”

“I’ll be eighteen in July.”

“Exactly.”

“Er…” began Harry tentatively.  “What do you mean exactly by using it?”

“Dear me, what are they teaching you young people today?  Use it my dear boy; play the harp, look in the mirror, drink from the cup.”

“What about the locket?”

“Not the locket,” said Helga, looking grim.  “There is no way to use it — at least none that we’ve discovered.  And, to be perfectly honest, it is designed in such a way that only a Slytherin descendent — or an extremely powerful witch or wizard can handle the power that it generates.  Even Godric himself couldn’t channel the power that the locket holds.”

Harry allowed himself a small smile at the realization that Ginny had been able to accomplish something that even Godric Gryffindor himself had not been able to do.

“So I use these other three objects, is that what you’re saying?  I use them and they will, what, deactivate the Horcruxes they’ve been made into?” Harry wondered aloud.

“Good heavens, no!  Of course not!  All using the object does is activate the power of the object.  They are all really old you know.  They’ve been in our respective families for generations.  No one knows where they came from originally, but they have their own powers, ancient powers inherent to each object.”

“So I keep hearing,” muttered Harry.

“So, it is the power of the object — channeled in the way in which it was designed to be used — that will enable you to overcome the power of that soul splitting devil.”

“All right then,” said Harry, thinking hard.  “But what about when all four objects come together, what happens then?”

“You’re asking me?” said Helga, looking genuinely surprised.  “It hasn’t been done in, well, I’ve never heard of it being done.”

“But you said that it was prophesied.”

“And so it was, but that doesn’t automatically mean that I would know how they are to be used.  That is your job my boy.”

“Great.”

“Oh don’t fret, I’m sure that when the time comes you will know what needs to be done,” said Helga, placing one plump hand on Harry’s shoulder.   “If I am not mistaken, you have had moments like that already, what?”

“Look,” said Harry, who was not at the moment ready to consider what she had just said.  “If this isn’t actually real — I mean, if my body isn’t actually here, there must be a way for me to get out — to get back.”

“Of course there is,” said the witch with an amused expression.

“Well, can you tell me?”

“No,” she said flatly, then, her eyes twinkling added, “but I can show you.”  With that she reached out and covered his eyes with her hand.

Harry blinked — to find himself standing by Remus Lupin’s bedside and it appeared that he was pouring water from the cup into his old Defense teacher’s rigidly set mouth from the gold and silver cup — Hufflepuff’s cup — that he held clutched tightly in his hands.

Startled, Harry looked up to find the faces of Professor McGonagall, Madam Pomfrey, Tonks, Ron, Hermione and Ginny all looking back at him from the other side of Lupin’s bed.

“I…er…” began Harry, but was interrupted by Hermione’s squeal of surprise.

“Harry, look!”

Harry looked down and nearly dropped the cup in astonishment.  Lupin’s lips were no longer hard and marble white, but normal looking; the flesh tones and ruddy pinkness of heathy skin was spreading from his lips, across his cheeks and down his neck, but it didn’t end there.  The deep ragged scars where Peter had mauled him were disappearing, smoothing out until not a trace of them remained.

For a moment Remus Lupin lay on the hospital bed glowingly pink, but still as motionless as a statue, but then his eyelids fluttered open and, with a gasp, he sat bold upright, his hand plunging into his robes, his eyes darting wildly around the room.

“Go to stop…Harry?” he paused as his gaze fell on Harry, who was still bending over him.  Lupin gave another quick glance around him, then looked back at Harry.  “Where — where’s Peter?” he rasped.

“He’s dead Remus,” said Harry gently.

“You — you killed him then?”

“Harry didn’t kill Peter, Remus,” interjected Tonks unexpectedly.  “I did.”

A heartbeat later she was at Lupin’s side, her arms wrapped tightly around him, her head buried in his shoulder.  “We thought he’d killed you,” she said, her voice muffled.  “His hand…the silver…I thought I was going to lose you.”

Lupin raised a shaking hand to his face, then lowered it with a look of wonderment when it encountered nothing but smooth skin.

“How — how did you stop the silver poisoning?”

“Tonks petrified you,” said Hermione quietly.

“It was Neville’s idea,” said Tonks, raising her head and looking into Lupin’s face.  “And then Harry, well Harry brought you back by having you drink from that cup.”

“The cup?” said Lupin, sitting up straighter and turning to look at Harry.

“Yeah, Hufflepuff’s cup.  Turns out we were right Remus,” said Harry, grinning now.  “Wormtail had it all along, though if Neville hadn’t…” he paused, searching the faces around Lupin’s bed.  “Where is Neville?”

“Still unconscious,” said Ron, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to where Neville lay prone on a hospital bed a little ways down the ward.

“He may,” Professor McGonagall cleared her throat, then tried again.  “He may have done permanent damage,” she managed, speaking for the first time since Lupin had woken up.

“He was subjected to the imperious curse for far too long,” murmured Madam Pomfrey apologetically, but Harry didn’t hear her, he was already on the move, walking directly to Neville’s bedside where he tipped the remainder of the liquid into Neville’s slack mouth.

For a moment, nothing happened, then Neville’s eyes popped open and he levered himself shakily into a sitting position, a wary expression on his face, as if he expected the pain to return at any second.

“It’s all right Neville,” said Ginny quietly.  “It’s over.”

“Over?” said Neville in a trembling voice as he eyed the cup in Harry’s hand with trepidation.  “How come its not got you in a twitching heap then?” he asked bluntly.

“No idea,” lied Harry with a shrug.

“He took it away from you mate,” said Ron, “and then he sort of, I don’t know, went into a sort of trance.”

“Yeah, he was chanting,” said Tonks, smiling now.  “Play the hark, look in the mirror, drink from the cup.”  She ran her fingers through her hair so that it stood up on end.  “Then he just snapped out of it, walked over to Remus’s bed and started pouring water from the cup into his mouth.”

“But where did the water come from?” asked Hermione in a small voice.

“What I want to know is if its still a Horcurx,” said McGonagall, eyeing the cup warily.

Harry grasped the cup tighter, feeling the tingling in his fingers.

“Yep,” he said with an apologetic grin for McGonagall.  “Still active — but not for long.”  He closed his eyes, concentrating on the cup, on the power embedded in its deepest structure.

“Then how…” began Professor McGonagall, but she didn’t finish, for the cup in Harry’s hands had begun to bubble and froth like a cauldron out of contro.  A vile green liquid was seething over the rim of the cup, eating its way like acid into the delicate etchings on the cup’s surface.  But then, as if in answer to the acidic bubbling, another substance, this one a vivid, electric blue, had overtaken it and was absorbing it, was retreating back into the cup, leaving it scarred and pitted, bu completely empty.

“Wicked!” breathed Ron as Harry opened his eyes and carefully put the disfigured cup on Neville’s bedside table.

“What just-” began Tonks just as McGonagall said “was that what I think it was?”

Harry shrugged and sank onto the edge of Neville’s bed, suddenly feeling utterly exhausted, his legs shaking as if he’d just run a marathon.

“You — you neutralized it!” said Hermione quietly, her eyes wide.  “Harry, how-”

“Let him be,” said Neville unexpectedly.  “Explanations can wait.  Can’t you see he’s about to pass out?”

“You need rest, Potter,” said Professor McGonagall curtly.  “Mr. Weasley, would you see to it that Mr. Potter gets up to the dormitories…” but Harry didn’t hear the rest.  He felt himself inking…sinking into a blissful darkness that came bubbling up to meet him like an elixir from a cup…