“Sungjong.” Woohyun caught Sungjong by the elbow as the group broke up their DADA project meeting. Their presentations were more or less done; their information had been fact-checked [by Sungjong, of course] and the rest of them were supposed to be working on their delivery of the content but Woohyun had been sullen and restless the whole afternoon. Dongwoo had sent pleading glances the others’ way every time someone looked like they were about to tell him off.

Sunggyu and Howon waved goodbye as they left together, leaving the two of them with Dongwoo in the library as Madam Pince prowled. Sungjong slowed, fixing Woohyun with an inquisitive look.

“Oh, you can speak.”

“Sungjong,” Woohyun repeated, note of urgency in his voice unmistakeable. “I need your help. Sungyeol’s been in the infirmary five days now and no one wants to tell us anything. Myungsoo’s been missing for two days – I’m going out of my mind.”

“What do you want me to do?” Sungjong asked, skeptical. “I don’t have any special bargaining power with the Professors, not when it comes to something like this.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean – just hear me out, alright? I can’t just sit by and do nothing. I need to know what’s happening with Sungyeol.”

Sungjong looked from Woohyun to Dongwoo. “I don’t see how I come in.”

“Just – hear me out.”

Dongwoo sighed as Woohyun pulled Sungjong into a chair. Woohyun had become increasingly manic, convinced of a thousand conspiracy theories to do with Sungyeol’s continued non-recovery and Myungsoo’s disappearance, all a little crazier than the next. He had tried to be understanding and set aside his own grief to try to balance Woohyun out, but Woohyun was past listening. Dongwoo wasn’t sure if he would be able to hold Woohyun back if he needed to.

“I know Sungyeol’s been cursed, but we don’t know with what. You’re the only one I trust to know what to do, Jong. If we could get into the infirmary could you find out? What hex is on him?”

“Woohyun,” Sungjong started, looking no less skeptical than when Woohyun had started talking. “If the teachers themselves don’t know what makes you think I could find out? I’m smart, yeah, but I’m not so arrogant as to believe that I’m smarter than the professors here.”

“Jongie, please,” Woohyun pleaded. “We have to at least try.”

Sungjong rolled his eyes, sending an exasperated look Dongwoo’s way. “And how do you propose we get into the infirmary long enough to cast all these spells on Sungyeol?”

“Leave that to me,” Woohyun promised eagerly. “Dongwoo will help.”

Dongwoo’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Thank you, Jong. Thank you thank you. Let’s meet on the infirmary floor at… four in the morning? I know Snape goes to the infirmary every night around three. Four should be safe enough.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Dongwoo demanded, getting annoyed. “Woohyun, you-”

“Madam Pomfrey told us Sungyeol’s wounds reopened during the night when we went to see him in the morning that day, remember? I guessed that’s why they’re still keeping him. So I just hid myself and waited a few nights outside the infirmary to see what went on.”

Dongwoo gaped at Woohyun, look of disbelief identical to the one Sungjong was wearing. “Woohyun, you need to stop this. The professors-”

“The professors,” Woohyun spun to face Dongwoo. “Have done nothing. He’s my best friend, Dongwoo. I have to try.”

Dongwoo closed his eyes, tired. “Just promise me you’re not going to do anything crazy.”

*

Tit for tat, Myungsoo thought, the notion floating dismembered and detached in his mind suddenly gapingly devoid of all other thoughts. It made sense, didn’t it? He hurt Sungyeol, and Sungyeol had nearly died. For Sungyeol to live properly again he had to right the wrong he had done. Tit for tat.

His gaze had dropped slowly to Snape’s shoulder, glassy stare fixating on the fabric of Snape’s robes as that one idea revolved in his head.

I have to die.

I have to die.

For someone I dated a month?

It doesn’t matter how long we dated. He didn’t deserve this.

Neither do I, I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t even know.

My parents –

“Of course,” Snape continued, as if Myungsoo had been waiting for him to finish his sentence all along. “You wouldn’t have to die for long. That isn’t, actually, the tricky part.”

“What?” Myungsoo could only ask stupidly, relief and confusion and shame in huge waves battling in him till he couldn’t think straight. The matter was simple, wasn’t it? He had to help Sungyeol to make up for what he had done – whether on purpose or not – so why did he feel like he wanted to turn tail and run? If dying wasn’t the tricky part what on ing Merlin’s earth could it be? Myungsoo clenched his fists, hating Snape for being so deliberately vague and focusing on that anger in his chest. It was the easiest thing to feel at the moment.

“But perhaps not,” Snape said softly. “Perhaps I’m asking the wrong person.”

“Perhaps you should stop yanking my chain and just tell me what it is I have to do,” Myungsoo snapped, lashing out. The corners of Snape’s mouth quirked as if he found Myungsoo’s impotent anger amusing.

“Made up your mind, have you?” Snape asked silkily, still not looking at him.

Myungsoo tried to breathe normally. No. “Yes.”

Snape turned to look at Myungsoo silently.

“How do I know I can trust you?” Myungsoo blurted out. “You haven’t told me anything.”

Snape smiled, but there was no humour in it.

*

They stole Sungyeol’s body from the infirmary that night after Snape had sung his wounds closed again for the sixth time. Myungsoo had waited some distance down the corridor from the infirmary and didn’t know how Snape did it – probably Confunded everyone; or a memory charm? – even though he desperately wanted to know; something, anything to make him feel less like a balloon buffeted by the wind, head and heart just as empty and helpless.

“If you just explained to them-“ Myungsoo tried, feeling a special kind of horror at the sight of Snape carrying Sungyeol’s limp body down the corridors to his own private quarters.

“If you think the Headmistress regularly approves the use of Unforgivable Curses and death magic in this school you must be a bigger fool than I took you for,” Snape sneered.

The breath hitched in Myungsoo’s chest. “Unforgivable curses?”

“How else am I going to kill you, boy?”

Myungsoo’s feet stopped of their own accord and he watched Snape’s robes billow out behind him as he carried on walking, Sungyeol’s hair outlined briefly like a halo in the light from a torch on the wall as they passed.

This was insanity! Myungsoo had let guilt and shame pressure him into agreeing to Snape’s plan, whatever it was – he didn’t even know what was going to happen! He didn’t trust Snape; nobody he knew trusted Snape, with his deliberate intimidation and lack of sympathy together with the rumours about him and the Dark Arts; and here he was, letting Snape carry out god-knows-what on him and Sungyeol. Why did Snape even want to help?

Myungsoo hurried after Snape. He was barely keeping his head above water, and the pool was getting deeper by the second.

Myungsoo went curiously deaf for a moment as Snape murmured the password to his private apartment, and stumbled into the spartan living quarters with a ball of rage compressed tight in his chest. It was too much – all this magic happening to him and because of him without his own knowledge or consent –

“Don’t ever do that again,” he demanded, trembling with an overwhelming mix of anger and fear. “Stop casting spells on me without warning like I’m some stupid child who doesn’t know anything or – or as if I’m a thing to be used-”

Snape merely looked at him as he laid Sungyeol out on a large table to one side, leaving the other half empty. For me, Myungsoo realized. The space is for me.

“You don’t know anything, Mr Kim,” Snape told him as he settled Sungyeol’s head down with surprising gentleness. “The headmistress and I visited your parents today.”

“My – and?” Myungsoo’s heart had started pounding the moment Snape had brought Sungyeol out of the infirmary wrapped in a blanket in Snape’s arms and looking like he weighed nothing, but now against all logic it sped up even more.

Snape ed his shirt sleeves and began rolling them up to the elbow. “You are cursed, Mr Kim. You are cursed with something that makes the ones you love suffer. How you came to be cursed – that is a matter for you to talk to your parents about personally. Suffice it to say that a curse like this can only be broken once you are no longer alive. Therefore, logic follows that once you are dead – even if for a few seconds – the curse should become void and you will be released from it. The other professors are bound by wizarding law; or, should I say, less willing to break it. And so they are spending their time uselessly trying to devise ways to trick the curse in your blood to break itself – but blood curses are beautifully simple. They hang on until the victim is dead. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“And Sungyeol?” Myungsoo asked, watching Snape calmly go about readying the table and Sungyeol as if he spoke about death magic every day of his life.

“Ah, yes, lover boy,” Snape said carelessly, Myungsoo hating him for it. “Once the curse in you is broken, it should release him as well. However, he has been in a magically-induced coma for five days now – but neither I nor any of the other professors nor Madam Pomfrey put him in one to help his body cope with the stress. Every time I heal his wounds he is theoretically fine, and yet? He doesn’t wake up. I have to deduce that it is the curse that keeps him unconscious, although,” Snape broke off, thoughtful. “The curse-creator may have missed something there. How much more awful for everyone involved if the person affected recovered fully for a few hours every day, awake and normal, before having to suffer all over again, every single time? Too bad.”

Myungsoo stared, sickened. “Too – too bad?”

Snape ignored him. “Come here.”

Dragging a metal basin of water towards him, he unceremoniously divided the surface of the water into two halves, exactly the same spell he had showed to Myungsoo’s parents. He named Lee Sungyeol, Gryffindor, beloved of Kim Myungsoo, Hufflepuff – Myungsoo began blushing furiously, pointlessly, sure that Snape had only added that in to humiliate him – but nothing happened.

“See? That half is Earth and the other is the Afterlife. Your boy is not in either of them. So I will kill you, and then bring you back instantly – but not all the way. You need to find him and bring him back here with you. Whatever happens on the way – whatever you do, you have to trust me and follow my voice. Remember, you have to make it back together. If you don’t, Mr Lee will be lost. This is not a spell that can be done twice.”

Snape picked up a long, fine-bladed knife with an ivory handle from the foot of the table and without preamble made a long slit across one forearm so that his blood bloomed in quick rivers down into a glass bowl. Myungsoo jumped, unconsciously reaching one hand out to stop Snape, but Snape only sent him a sneering look.

“What’s that for?” Myungsoo half-whispered, both repulsed by and unable to look away from Snape’s blood flowing into the bowl.

“Do you think bringing you back from the dead will be without price?”

“Who – who do you have to pay it to?”

Snape gave a strange mocking smile. “The first interesting question you’ve asked me, but, unfortunately, it is better that you do not know.”

“Where is Sungyeol? How will I know how to find him?”

Snape didn’t answer for a few moments while he bound up his arm with a length of clean cloth, the bowl now nearly full. Flexing his fingers and clenching his fist, he grimaced. Myungsoo wondered why he didn’t just use the same spell he used every night on Sungyeol to close the wound, but then decided he didn’t want to know.

“Your turn,” Snape said, coming over to Myungsoo with the knife and a separate, smaller bowl. He took Myungsoo’s right arm, Myungsoo powerless to resist in shock and morbid fascination; he made the same quick slit in Myungsoo’s forearm but smaller, and collected not even half as much blood as he had taken from himself.

“This is to be able to find you to bring you back,” Snape murmured, closing the cut with a flick of his wand. “As for finding Mr Lee – the most I can tell you is that he is in Limbo. Not dead, not alive, but that is no comfort. Limbo is tricky, make no mistake. Those that guard it will not want you to steal from them a potential soul.”

Snape briskly helped Myungsoo onto the table to lie down next to Sungyeol. “Think about him. Think hard, and you will find him. And once you have, you hold hands and don’t let go. Those in Limbo have no power over the living but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to confuse you, separate you. Lost living souls in Limbo are as good to them as dead ones, and Mr Lee has one foot in the grave already.”

“Why are you doing this?” Myungsoo asked, needing to know but not knowing at all if he would like the answer.

Snape looked down at Myungsoo, scared and pale on the table. His fingers were making small nervous movements that Myungsoo probably wasn’t even aware of.

“Like I said, boy,” Snape replied evenly. “If you think the Headmistress regularly approves the use of Unforgiveable curses and death magic in this school you are a fool.”

“So… for the sake of professional development?” Myungsoo’s voice cracked on the last word.

“If you like,” Snape smirked, and readied his wand. The killing curse was leaving his lips even before Myungsoo realized that ‘if you like’ wasn’t a proper answer in any sense of the word.

Myungsoo died.

*

“Madam Pomfrey! Where is he?” Woohyun asked, shock making his voice more strident than it needed to be. He was paused in the act of helping a severely sick Dongwoo limp his way into the infirmary, Dongwoo’s supposed stomachache forgotten at the sight of Sungyeol’s empty bed. The sheets on it were crisp and perfect as if they hadn’t housed a dying student for five days. Woohyun felt Dongwoo’s body tense, confused at the discovery and unsure whether to continue the charade or not.

“Where’s who?” Madam Pomfrey asked once she’d come quickly out of her private quarters, head cocked curiously on one side. “Are you alright?” Lucky she was used to students waking her up at all hours, or these two would have been kept waiting kicking up a ruckus and disturbing her other patients while she roused herself.

“Sungyeol! Lee Sungyeol? He’s been here for days – the curse?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about. Is this friend of yours ill?”

Woohyun stared in disbelief at Sungyeol’s bed as Madam Pomfrey took a look at Dongwoo.

“I’m fine, really, Madam Pomfrey, I think the pain’s gone now-”

Woohyun grabbed Dongwoo by the arm and tugged him out of the infirmary, Dongwoo sending apologetic looks Madam Pomfrey’s way.

“Well, I never! At this time of night, too!” She grumbled, wondering if she should notify the hall monitors for students out of bed.

“He’s gone, Jong,” Woohyun reported breathlessly the moment they had reached the nook in the wall where Sungjong was waiting a distance down the corridor. “His bed is empty and Madam Pomfrey is acting like she’s never heard of him before in her life.”

“What do you mean?” Sungjong asked, frowning.

“I mean that we went in there and Sungyeol is gone. And Madam Pomfrey was all ‘Sungyeol who?’”

Sungjong was still a moment, thoughts racing in his head as Woohyun shifted his weight impatiently from one foot to the other. He hated these silent thinkers.

“Let’s try and find if we can locate him,” Sungjong said finally. If he had theories as to what was going on in the infirmary, he didn’t let on. “Do you have something of his I asked you to bring me?”

Woohyun scrabbled in his robe’s pockets and produced Sungyeol’s wand. Sungjong’s eyes lit up.

“Oh, very well done,” he murmured, flourishing his wand. “This will do perfectly. Accio map.”

Woohyun and Dongwoo looked at Sungjong, nonplussed. “What map?”

“You’ll see,” Sungjong answered, and a minute later a large sheet of parchment came flying through the corridors to them like a giant manta ray swimming through air.

He got to his knees and spread it out on the ground of the corridor, intricate drawings done in black ink sprawling across the slightly yellow parchment.

“It’s amazing,” Dongwoo said in awe. “How did you get a map of Hogwarts? It’s impossible. Some places don’t even exist every single week and the staircases change from hour to hour, at the very least.”

“I got the stones of the castle to talk to me,” Sungjong explained simply. “Obviously, there’s places missing on this map – I couldn’t get into any of the professors’ private chambers, for example. Though I did convince the stones of the other three houses to give me their blueprints,” he smiled proudly.

“How on earth did you do that?” Woohyun asked, intrigued despite himself.

“Persistence?” Sungjong answered, shrugging. “It was for an extra credit Charms assignment, I couldn’t slack off.”

“Gods, I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of you,” Dongwoo muttered.

As they looked, parts of the castle on the map changed and moved or disappeared entirely – “I’m extremely proud of that, if I may say so myself. I tied the real-time stones with vector and spatial charms to the map so that when they changed in real life the map changes too,” Sungjong told them. Dongwoo and Woohyun nodded seriously, not understanding a single thing Sungjong had said – and Sungjong laid Sungyeol’s wand onto the map, right in the middle.

“Where is the owner of this wand?” Sungjong asked, and they all immediately bent close over the map. Dongwoo whispered ‘Lumos’ to help them see; the light of the torches in the wall brackets above them not strong enough. They scanned the map minutely but to no avail, Sungjong visibly disturbed that his charm had not worked.

“There should be a little star,” Sungjong said, distractedly, and decided to try again. “Where is Lee Sungyeol?”

Again, nothing.

“He’s not on the grounds?” Woohyun asked, panicked note in his voice matched by the worry in the other two’s eyes.

“You’re not asking the right question.”

The malice in the ghostly voice was so recognisable that they hardly needed time to think. The three of them immediately turned to look up at the Bloody Baron hanging above them, wands in defensive positions at the ready.

“What do you want, Baron?” Woohyun asked, taking care to keep his wand trained on the Slytherin ghost. The Bloody Baron was no-one’s friend.

“I ask you, now is this nice? A fellow only wants to help and all he gets is disrespect,” the Baron spat, the corridor becoming steadily colder by degrees.

“We mean no disrespect,” Dongwoo offered, trying to appease the Baron and hopefully send him away. “The Slytherin dungeons are without protection without you around. You’re needed there, not here.”

“Wait,” Sungjong said quickly, putting out a hand to bring down Woohyun’s wand. “What did you mean, I’m asking the wrong question?”

The Baron laughed, the harsh sound of cracking bones and metal scraping metal. “Your friend is no longer of the living. You will not find his soul here.”

“What?” Woohyun breathed.

“Better for you to ask where his body lies,” the Baron called out, fading away maddeningly. The corridor was near freezing, their breath starting to come in little puffs of steam.

“Where –“ Sungjong had whipped back to the map and tried once more, his hands starting to shake with the cold. “Where is the body of the owner of this wand?”

At once a tiny star appeared on the map, in the middle of a space devoid of Sungjong’s neat drawings and they all stared at it in varying degrees of horror.

“His – his body?” Dongwoo asked no one in particular, feeling his chest close up.

“It’s empty. What does that mean?” Woohyun demanded.

“Shh,” Sungjong pored over the map. “This area is Slytherin territory. Those are the dungeons to the right, and –“

Sungjong stopped and looked up, staring into the distance.

“What? What is it, damn it?” Woohyun grabbed Sungjong by the arm, forcing Sungjong to look at him.

“That must be Snape’s quarters. Sungyeol’s body is in Snape’s quarters.”

*