What Ginny Wants - Chapter 21 (A Harry Potter Fanfiction) (Patreon)

Chapter 21: The Prince’s Wound

The idea settled between them like a stone dropped into still water, the ripples spreading outward through everything they thought they knew. Harry closed the battered potions book with deliberate care, the worn leather soft under his fingers. The cramped signature on the inside cover seemed to stare back at him. The Half-Blood Prince. A name that had felt clever and useful for months. Now it felt like a key turning in a lock neither of them had been meant to open.

Ginny watched his face in the low library light. The freckles across her nose stood out against the sudden pallor of her skin. Her red hair fell forward as she leaned closer, voice low enough that even the silenced space around their table felt too open.

“We need the others,” she said. “Hermione. Ron. If Snape is the Prince… if that book is his… then this isn’t just about a clever set of notes anymore. This is about who he really is. And what he’s been hiding.”

Harry nodded. The weight of the book against his ribs felt different now. Heavier. “Yeah. We can’t sit on this. Not after the way he looked at you in that office. Like you’d reached into something private and pulled it out into the light.”

They left the library without speaking further. The corridors of Hogwarts were mostly empty at this hour, the portraits dozing or murmuring softly to one another as the two of them passed. Harry kept the book tucked under his arm, pressed close, as if the castle itself might try to take it from him. Ginny walked at his side, her shoulder brushing his every few steps, a steady, grounding presence.

The Gryffindor common room was quieter than usual when they pushed through the portrait hole. A few younger students were still clustered near the fire, talking in low voices, but the corner where Hermione preferred to study was empty of everyone except her and Ron. Hermione sat surrounded by a small fortress of books and parchment, glasses slightly askew, quill moving in precise, determined strokes. Ron was slumped in the armchair opposite, one long leg stretched out, a Chocolate Frog wrapper crumpled in his fist. He looked half-asleep until the sound of the portrait hole swinging shut made him sit up.

Ginny didn’t waste time. She crossed the room, dropped into the seat beside Hermione, and set the book on the table with a soft, final thud.

“We need to talk. All four of us. Right now.”

Hermione’s quill stopped mid-word. She looked up, took in Ginny’s expression, then Harry’s, and closed her book without argument. “What happened?”

Harry sat down hard. The firelight caught the green of his eyes and made them look darker than usual. “The book. The one I’ve been using all year. The Half-Blood Prince. We think it’s Snape’s.”

Ron blinked. “Snape? As in… our Snape? The bat of the dungeons?”

“The same,” Ginny said. “I called Harry a half-blood prince in detention earlier. The second the words left my mouth, Snape looked like I’d cursed him. Not angry. Not annoyed. Like something had cracked open inside him. Like I’d named a wound.”

Hermione reached for the book. Harry let her take it. She opened it carefully to the inside cover, then began flipping through the annotated pages with the focused intensity she brought to every mystery. Her eyes moved faster and faster. Colour drained from her face as she read.

“Sectumsempra,” she whispered, stopping on a page near the middle. The word sat alone in the margin in that same cramped, clever hand, followed by a brief note: For enemies. “I’ve never seen this in any approved text. The structure of the spell… the way it’s written… this isn’t meant to disarm or stun. This is meant to cut. Deeply. Permanently.”

Ron leaned over her shoulder, frowning. “What does that mean in practice?”

Harry’s voice was quiet. “I almost found out. In the corridor, when Malfoy and Parkinson came after us. The word was right there. On my tongue. I felt it. I chose not to say it. Barely.”

Ginny’s hand found his under the table and held on. “We need to know exactly what it does. Not guess. Not theorise. See it.”

Hermione closed the book. Her hands were steady, but her eyes were not. “The Room of Requirement. We can ask for a space to test a dangerous spell without risking real damage. A dummy. Something that can take the hit.”

Ron rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re serious. You want to cast something that might be an assassination curse just to see what happens.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “Because if Snape wrote it, then everything we think we know about him is incomplete. And if Dumbledore already knows… then we need to understand why he’s still protecting him. And why he’s still doing nothing about Draco.”

The four of them left the common room together. The seventh-floor corridor was silent. Harry paced in front of the blank stretch of wall opposite the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, concentrating hard on the need for a private place to test a dark spell safely, somewhere no one would interrupt, somewhere the consequences could be contained. The door appeared on the third pass.

Inside, the Room had provided a long, empty training hall. Practice dummies stood in neat rows, their straw-stuffed bodies dressed in faded training robes, painted faces blank and waiting. A long table near the wall held several practice wands and a stack of protective equipment none of them touched.

Harry set the book open on the table, the page with Sectumsempra facing upward. The handwriting looked almost elegant in its cold precision. He picked up one of the practice wands the Room had supplied. Not his own. Safer that way.

Hermione stood closest to him, arms folded tightly across her chest. “Harry… if this does what the notes suggest…”

“I know.” He faced the nearest dummy. The painted eyes seemed to watch him. “But we have to see.”

Ginny stepped up on his other side, red hair bright under the soft magical light the Room had provided. “Do it. We need the truth more than we need comfort right now.”

Ron hung back a few paces, but his eyes never left the dummy. “Just… don’t point it at any of us. Please.”

Harry raised the practice wand. The word sat on his tongue like something metallic and cold.

“Sectumsempra.”

The spell left the tip of the wand in a thin, almost invisible slash of pale light. It struck the dummy across the chest with a soft, terrible sound, like fabric tearing under pressure.

The effect was immediate and absolute.

The dummy did not simply fall. It split. A deep, clean cut opened from the left shoulder all the way to the opposite hip, so precise it looked surgical. Straw and stuffing exploded outward in a violent spray of golden dust and torn cloth. The upper half of the torso peeled open as if someone had taken a razor-sharp sword to it and drawn the blade in one perfect, merciless motion. The dummy collapsed in two ragged pieces, the straw continuing to spill across the stone floor in a widening, silent pool.

For several long seconds, no one spoke.

Ron’s voice came out thin and strained. “Bloody hell. Bloody, bloody hell.”

Hermione’s hand had flown to her mouth. Behind her glasses her eyes were wide and shining. “That would kill a person. Instantly, if the cut was deep enough. Or leave them bleeding out in under a minute if it wasn’t immediately fatal. There’s no counter-curse listed. Nothing. Just the spell and the note. For enemies.”

Ginny stared at the ruined dummy, her freckled face pale, her jaw set. “That’s not a duelling spell. That’s a killing curse dressed up as something clever. Something personal.”

Harry lowered the practice wand slowly. His hand was steady, but something cold and heavy had settled low in his stomach. “I almost used that on Malfoy. In a corridor full of students. If I’d said the word… if I’d let it out…”

Ginny turned to him, eyes fierce and bright. “But you didn’t. You chose not to. That choice matters. It always will.”

Hermione closed the book with a soft, decisive snap. “We have to tell Dumbledore. Tonight. This isn’t something we can keep between us. If Snape is the Half-Blood Prince… if he invented this… then his entire history shifts. His loyalties. The way he’s been watching Draco all year. The way Dumbledore has been protecting him.”

Ron ran both hands through his hair, leaving it sticking up in every direction. “We’ve already told Dumbledore about Draco. Harry’s told him more than once that Malfoy’s a Death Eater, that he’s building something in the Room of Requirement, that he’s up to his neck in something dark. And what has Dumbledore done? Nothing. He’s still acting like it’s all under control. Like Draco is just a troubled boy who needs guidance.”

Harry’s jaw tightened until the muscle jumped. “Because he thinks he can handle it. Or because he’s keeping secrets again. The same way he always does. The same way he kept the prophecy from me until it was almost too late. The same way he kept the truth about the Horcruxes until I was already drowning in them.”

Ginny stepped closer, her voice low and urgent, the fire that always lived under her skin rising to the surface. “We know Draco is guilty. We know he’s been disappearing into that Room for months. We know he’s working for Voldemort, or at least for people who are. And if Snape is the Prince, then Snape knows dark magic on a level none of us do. He invented something that can open a person like parchment. And Dumbledore is still protecting both of them.”

Hermione’s voice was quieter, but no less firm. “We still have to tell him. About the book. About the spell. About what Ginny said in the office and how Snape reacted. If Dumbledore is keeping secrets to protect Snape, or to protect some larger plan he hasn’t shared, then he needs to know that we know. That the book is real. That the danger is real. That we are not going to sit quietly while he decides what truths we’re allowed to carry.”

Ron nodded, the earlier humour gone completely from his face. “And if he still does nothing? If he still pretends Draco’s just a lost pure-blood and Snape’s just a bitter git with a talent for potions?”

Harry closed his eyes for a second. The weight of the last year pressed down hard—the Horcruxes, the prophecy, the secrets Dumbledore still refused to share, the way the man looked at him sometimes as if measuring how much more he could carry. “Then we still tell him. Because if we don’t, and something happens… if someone dies because we stayed quiet… we’ll never forgive ourselves. Any of us.”

They left the Room of Requirement in silence. The door vanished behind them as if it had never been there. The tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy continued its endless, futile lesson to the trolls, the painted figures dancing on without any awareness of the darkness that had just been tested a few feet away.

The walk to the Headmaster’s office felt longer than it ever had. The stone corridors seemed colder. The torches burned lower. Harry carried the book under his arm like evidence in a trial none of them had asked to attend. Ginny walked on his right, her hand brushing his every few steps. Hermione stayed on his left, quiet and watchful. Ron brought up the rear, unusually silent, his freckled face set in lines of stubborn loyalty.

The gargoyle that usually guarded the entrance to the spiral staircase was already stepped aside when they arrived, as if it had been expecting company. Raised voices drifted down the stone steps before any of them had taken the first one.

Harry stopped. The others crowded close behind him, listening.

Dumbledore’s voice, calm but edged with something rare and sharp, carried clearly in the quiet. “…you gave your word, Severus. An Unbreakable Vow is not a thing one makes lightly. The consequences are absolute.”

Snape’s reply was colder, tighter, stripped of its usual drawling contempt. “I am aware of what I swore. I have not forgotten a single syllable of it. But the boy is growing more reckless by the day. He nearly killed Malfoy in that corridor with a spell he should never have known existed. And now the Weasley girl stands in my office and calls him a half-blood prince as if the words are nothing. As if the name itself is not a blade.”

The door at the top of the stairs was ajar. Light spilled out into the stairwell. Harry pushed it the rest of the way open and stepped inside.

Both men turned.

Dumbledore stood behind his desk, looking older than Harry had ever seen him. His right sleeve hung empty below the elbow. The stump was neat and long-healed — the amputation had worked. The curse was gone. They had cut the blackened hand away and it had saved him. And yet the lines on his face seemed deeper, the bright blue eyes more shadowed by something that looked like grief. Snape stood opposite him, black robes still settling as if he had been pacing, his pale face a mask of barely contained fury that cracked for a single heartbeat when his eyes landed on the book under Harry’s arm.

The moment stretched, heavy and brittle.

Dumbledore’s gaze moved slowly from Harry to Ginny to Hermione to Ron, taking in each of them, then settling on the battered textbook. Something like resignation flickered across his features, followed by a deeper weariness.

“Ah,” he said softly. “I see the conversation has found its way to you without my invitation. I had hoped for a little more time.”

Snape’s black eyes remained locked on the book. For a single heartbeat the fury in his expression cracked further, replaced by something raw and almost panicked, something that looked dangerously close to shame. Then the mask slammed back into place, colder than before.

Harry stepped forward into the centre of the office. The portraits of previous headmasters and headmistresses watched from their frames in perfect silence. “We tested Sectumsempra. On a dummy in the Room of Requirement. It split the thing open like it was made of paper. That spell is in this book. The same book that calls its author the Half-Blood Prince. The same words that made you look like you’d been stabbed when Ginny said them in your office earlier.”

Ginny’s voice was steady, fierce, the same fire she brought to every fight that mattered. “You are him. Aren’t you? The Half-Blood Prince. The notes. The spells. The handwriting. It’s all yours. You invented a curse that cuts people open, and you’ve been sitting on that knowledge while Harry has been carrying the weight of a war you helped start.”

Snape said nothing. His silence was more damning than any confession could have been.

Dumbledore exhaled slowly and sank into the high-backed chair behind the desk. He looked at the four of them for a long moment, then at Snape, then back again. The blue eyes held no anger. Only a deep, exhausted sorrow.

“Close the door, if you would, Miss Granger.”

Hermione moved without hesitation. The heavy wood settled into its frame with a soft, final sound that seemed to seal the room against the rest of the castle.

Dumbledore folded his hands on the desk. Both hands were whole. The curse that had blackened his right hand was gone — they had all seen it healed, or believed it healed. And yet he still looked like a man running out of time. “You have all been more observant than I wished. And more determined. I had hoped to keep certain truths from you a little longer. It seems that hope has run its course, as so many of my hopes have this year.”

Harry’s voice was tight, controlled only by force of will. “Then tell us. All of it. No more half-answers. No more ‘in due time.’ We’re standing in the middle of a war you have been fighting longer than any of us have been alive, and you’re still treating us like children who cannot be trusted with the shape of the battlefield.”

Dumbledore’s eyes met his. There was no defensiveness there. Only acceptance. “Very well, Harry. You have earned the right to know. Though I fear the knowing will bring you no peace, and may cost you more than I can bear to watch you pay.”

He glanced once at Snape. The Potions Master remained silent, jaw clenched so tightly a muscle jumped in his cheek, but he did not leave the room. He did not interrupt.

“Severus Snape,” Dumbledore began, his voice steady but heavy with the weight of years, “is indeed the Half-Blood Prince. The book you hold is his. Written during his years as a student at this school. The spells within it—some brilliant, some dark, some both at once—are his inventions. Sectumsempra among them. He was a half-blood, as you are. His mother was a pure-blood witch of the Prince line. His father was a Muggle. The name he chose for himself was both a claim to the better part of his blood and a shield against the worse. It was also, I believe, a private rebellion against a world that had already decided what a boy like him was allowed to become.”

You already know Severus made an Unbreakable Vow to Narcissa Malfoy. Harry told you months ago. But I do not believe any of you have fully understood what that means, or what was actually sworn.”

He looked at each of them in turn.

“An Unbreakable Vow is not a promise. It is binding magic. The two parties clasp hands. A third person acts as Bonder. As each term is spoken, a tongue of flame issues from the Bonder’s wand and winds around the hands of the two who are swearing. If the person who makes the Vow breaks any of its terms, they die. Instantly. There is no appeal. No second chance. The magic kills them.

“On the night Narcissa came to Severus, she was terrified for her son. Voldemort had given Draco a task: kill me. If Draco fails, Voldemort will murder him and Narcissa both. Severus agreed to three terms while Bellatrix acted as Bonder.

“First: that he would watch over Draco as he attempted to fulfil the Dark Lord’s wishes. “Second: that he would protect Draco from harm to the best of his ability. “Third: that if Draco should fail in his task, Severus would complete it in his place.

“That third term is the one that now condemns me. Draco’s task is to kill me. If he cannot do it — and I do not believe the boy can — then Severus is magically bound to do it himself. If he refuses, the Vow kills him. If he lets Draco fail and does nothing, the Vow still kills him. The only way for Severus to survive, and for Narcissa and Draco to survive, is for Severus to be the one who ends my life when the moment comes.”

Harry felt the floor tilt.

“It is not because the curse is still killing me,” Dumbledore continued quietly. “You cut that away. The amputation worked. The blackened hand is gone and the curse with it. I am not dying of the ring any longer. I am dying because Severus Snape made an Unbreakable Vow to save a mother and her son, and the only way for him to keep that Vow is to kill me.”

The silence that followed was absolute.

Hermione’s voice came out small. “But we saved you. We cut the hand off. The curse is gone. You’re… you’re healed.”

“Yes,” Dumbledore said. “You did save me from the ring. And I am grateful. But the Vow was made before that night, and it does not care that the curse is gone. It only cares that the task is completed.”

Ginny’s face had gone white with fury. “So we went through all of that — Harry held the blade, we risked everything — and you’re still going to die. Just not from the curse. From a magical contract Snape made with Narcissa Malfoy on a dark night because she was scared for her son.”

“Yes.”

Ron looked sick. “That’s… that’s insane. We fixed it. We actually fixed it. And it doesn’t even matter.”

Harry’s hands were shaking. He had held the silver blade. He had watched the cursed hand come away. They had all stood there afterwards believing they had beaten the thing that was killing Dumbledore. And the entire time the real death sentence had been sitting in three lines of an Unbreakable Vow none of them had fully understood.

Ginny’s voice cut through the heavy air of the office, sharp and clear. “Ginny’s voice was quiet, dangerous, the kind of quiet that came right before something broke. “So that’s it. We cut the hand off. We stopped the curse. And you’re still going to die because Snape made a vow to Narcissa Malfoy.”

Dumbledore did not look away. “Yes.”

“You kept the full weight of it from him,” she said, looking at Harry, then back at Dumbledore. “From all of us. You let us believe the amputation was the victory. That we had more time. While the real sentence was already written.”

“I have carried many sins, Miss Weasley,” Dumbledore said. “This is only one of them.”

Harry felt Ginny’s grip on his hand. Felt Hermione’s silence. Felt Ron’s stunned, furious loyalty. The book of the Half-Blood Prince still rested under his arm.

He looked at Dumbledore. At Snape. At the empty right sleeve.

“We’re done here,” Harry said. The words came out steady. Final. They left no room for argument or further explanation. “For tonight. We’re done.”

He turned. Ginny moved with him without hesitation, her hand still locked in his. Hermione followed a step behind, then Ron. No one stopped them. No one called them back. The portraits watched in silence as the four of them walked out of the office that had always felt like the heart of the castle and now felt like the place where something essential had just been broken beyond easy repair.

The door of the Headmaster’s office closed behind them with a soft, irrevocable click.

In the cold corridor outside, the four of them stood in the flickering torchlight, the weight of the truth pressing down like the stone of the castle itself. The gargoyle had already resumed its place. The spiral staircase had vanished. There was nowhere left to go but forward into a night that had suddenly become much darker.

Harry’s voice was barely more than a whisper, but every one of them heard it clearly.

“He still has to die. Because of an Unbreakable Vow.”