29

Severus returned to the castle well after midnight, so cold he couldn't feel his hands or feet, even with warming charms. The snow had soaked him from the knees down, and ice had settled on his shoulders, his chest. He was going to have to check himself for frostbite when he returned to his quarters.

No Black. He hadn't even found the dog, whatever it really was. He wasn't surprised, but the futility ached worse than the cold.

Spells on the dungeons doused the torches at night, so the corridors lay in pitch darkness. He'd lived in the dungeons since he was eleven years old; he didn't need light to know his way. He knew even the gouges in the floor through the soles of his boots.

But when he turned into the hall where his quarters lay, he saw a faint light emanating from some unseen source: a dim glow, shimmering on the ground, drifting up and down the hall—several feet forward, several feed back. He stood still, a good ten paces away, trying to determine what it could be. . .

Perhaps. . . a person underneath an invisibility cloak.

It had just better fucking NOT BE—

His hand shaking, he Summoned the cloak wordlessly. If he was wrong, nothing would happen. If he was right—

Nothing did happen. Nor did his suspicions vanish.

"Homenum revelio," he whispered.

At the same time the spell lit a glow in mid-air in the vague shape of a human body in front of his door, the girl pulled the cloak off herself, her face lit by the glow of her wand.

Something tenuous but intangible inside him snapped.

He stalked toward her, letting the tide of his fury flow into his voice.

"Miss Potter," he snarled, "if you do not have a VERY GOOD explanation—"

She stared up at him as he bore down on her, her face lit silver-blue by the light of her wand. But she did not seem the least bit cowed—she looked angry, in fact, and determined—and before he could do more than notice and begin to wonder what the fuck she thought she was doing, she said:

"Why didn't you tell me Sirius Black was the one who told Voldemort where to find my parents?"

Her voice wasn't petulant; it wasn't even the voice of a child. It was forceful, wounded, and so unexpected that he was wrong-footed—that naive yet not-innocent voice, the grief in her small face. Lumos bled all the color out of the world, so her eyes had no hue; they weren't the eyes of anyone he knew, anyone he'd expected.

"Nobody told me," she went on when he didn't speak. Her anger was gaining ground over other emotions. "Nobody. I had a right to know! Everyone said Voldemort killed them, but it wasn't just him, it was Sirius Black, too—"

Not just Sirius Black, his mind whispered, cruel and unfeeling. You, too, Severus Snape.

"—he's coming after me because he wants to finish me off, isn't he? I'm right, aren't I? How could no one have told me?"

The accusation in her face and voice was as palpable as a slap to the face. How could you not have told me? she was asking.

When did you become so important? asked a sly, cynical voice inside his heart.

He found his real voice. It was hoarse, and the edge was cruel. "This is your reason for traipsing around in the dark, alone—discovering a mass murderer has more reason to kill you than you'd thought?"

Her face flashed with something between fury and hurt, and she thrust something up at him. For a mad second he thought it was her wand, that she meant to hex him—

It was a photograph.

When he saw who it was and what it was of, he recoiled, actually knocking it away with his wand, an instinctual gesture to get it the fuck away—

"He was my dad's friend." Her voice was shaking—from anger? Tears? "My dad's best friend. If you were friends with my mum, you'd have known that!"

Not for the reason you think, girl.

"Everyone keeps things from me," she went on, her jaw rigid. "They keep everything from me. It's not fair!"

"That is the cry of a child," he said crushingly.

"I'm not a child!" she all but shouted. "You know what I hear when Dementors get close to me?"

No— he thought, panic stabbing through him. Don't—

"I hear Voldemort murdering my mum—because of him." She thrust the photograph forward again. Severus couldn't stand to look at it, he couldn't not look; but Lily's glowing face was too hard to see clearly in the wand-light and the dark, jerking around in her daughter's hand. "And now he's hunting me down, he slashed the Fat Lady to pieces to find me, and nobody's telling me the truth!"

She was breathing hard, like she'd run the length of the castle. The Lumos shone in her eyes, off her glasses, in multiple points of light.

The only sound in the hall was the angry rasp of her breath.

"Does it help you, then?" he asked. The cruelty in his voice felt brittle in his mouth, sounded distant in his ears. "Knowing the truth?"

She stared.

"No," she said, which wasn't the reply he'd been expecting. "But I'd rather know, all the same."

Gryffindors, he thought. But he felt only hollow, emptied out.

"You'd rather know whom to hate?" he asked. "Whom to blame for your unhappiness?"

She stared up at him. Then, with a sobering seriousness, she said, "I do hate him. He killed my parents."

"Yes," Severus said at length. "He did."

And so did I.

The girl seemed to deflate. She lowered her arm and, with it, the hand holding that loathsome photograph. In that moment, she looked both extremely young and more sorrowful than should have been possible at her age.

"How could he have done that?" she half-whispered. "If he was supposed to be their friend. . ."

And that, he thought, was the difference between childhood and adulthood: not knowing that people could betray the ones they'd loved, and knowing that they did, without knowing why.

"That is a question that nobody can answer besides Black himself."

She looked up at him. For a few moments, she was silent. And then, quite inevitably, the question came again.

"Were you friends with my mum?"

He thought about not answering. That silence would be answer enough at this point, but that wasn't the reason he said:

"I was."

The girl's eyes widened, like she'd never expected him to admit to it. Then a hungry, yearning, lonely shadow passed across her face, one that echoed inside him with a haunting familiarity. It was like the first time he'd seen her up close, and he'd thought Potter and Lily at the sight of her face and eyes and hair.

Only this time, he was seeing himself.

"Get back to your tower, Miss Potter." He grabbed the cloak in her hand and shoved it at her, too roughly; she caught it, but it knocked her glasses askew. "Put that on. Tomorrow, we'll have a discussion about the reckless idiocy of traipsing around, alone, with a mass murderer after you."

"I was under the Cloak," she said as she pulled it back on, disappearing from his sight, except for that faint glow of her wand shining on the floor.

"And as you know now that Black knew your father, you should deduce that he'd be able to find someone who was wearing it. Didn't you wonder how I knew you were there?"

She didn't reply.

"Put your wand out." He lit his own. "And don't dare to go wandering off on your own."

He climbed through the castle, hoping the girl had the sense to fucking do as he said. In the blackness and the freezing cold, he felt like he was walking into a fathoms-deep lake, upside-down. The light of his Lumos fluttered against the dark, barely touching it.

The portrait that used to be the Fat Lady was now an idiotic knight, and he his fat pony were snoring fit to wake the dead. The knight's visor kept fluttering half open when he breathed out and clanking shut when he inhaled.

"The password's 'scurvy cur,'" the girl's disembodied voice said, close by his side.

"I don't need it." He jabbed the portrait with his wand, wishing the knight weren't wearing armor so he could have struck him somewhere fleshy and tender. "Wake up, you fatuous cretin."

The knight snorted awake, his visor clanking shut. "Who goes there!" he shouted, trying to push it open but only succeeding in twisting his helmet around and trapping himself inside. The pony blinked sleepily at them.

"Scurvy cur," the girl said.

The knight's reply was muffled as he tried to pull his helmet on straight; the portrait was already swinging open.

"He's mental," the girl's voice sighed, drifting toward the portrait hole. She seemed to pause for a moment—he could have sworn he heard the faint intake of her breath, as if she was on the verge of speaking. But then the portrait swung shut, without a word.

Fucking bloody fool reckless idiot child. He ought to have wrung her neck. But his rage felt far away, for once. Exhaustion was creeping over him like a fog.

"Stand thy ground and fight!" the knight called after Severus as he stalked away, back down the stairs to the dungeons.

The moon set before dawn, taking the wolf's body with it. It tore out of Remus, snapping bones and sinews, ripping his skin and resewing it, everything changing shape, even his mind.

Once it was done, he lay on the rug beside the fire, trying to find his breath. Eyes open or shut, it didn't matter, he saw nothing. The room was cold, for no one had come to light the fire in the night. Not knowing how the sedated wolf would react to house-elves, he'd forbidden it.

The door did not open. No one came in to hand him a blanket and help him to bed. He'd forbidden that, too.

He dragged himself to the armchair and pulled down the blanket. Everything was a haze of agony. He got the blanket on the floor and rolled into it, slumping beside the unlit fire; slipping into the half-conscious fugue that permeated his mind after the change had reverted.

The Buddhists said time was a river, didn't they? Not a line . . . and other people said you couldn't cross the same river twice. . . but you could cross the bridge as many times as you wished. . .

"Get some sleep, you moony git," he could hear Sirius saying. "'Cause when you're hungry, I'm not bringing your lazy arse breakfast in bed."

It was morning, a summer morning. The smell of cooking bacon awoke him, and the bedroom was full of light. He ached everywhere, but the bacon called. . .

The kitchen was crowded with friends long-dead. He knew they were gone, just as he knew this was a memory, found again in a dream. . .

Full moons had meant loneliness, in his childhood. Then they had meant belonging.

Now, they meant loss, as vast and deep as oceans.

"Dearest Prongs, do stop being a suffocating ponce," said Sirius. "Just write Moony some love poetry if you can't keep your hands to yourself. Wormtail, stop fucking moving the bloody marmalade around, would you?"

"I'm just trying to set it where Moony can reach it. Salt, Moony? Milk, sugar?"

"No, Peter, you don't need to, really—James, you can sit down, Lily needs your help much more than I do."

"I'm fine, Remus." Lily's belly was so big she had to sit sideways at the table to reach anything on it. "You are acting like a jumping bean, James. Please sit down. The baby's turning enough somersaults for the both of you."

Sirius stole Remus's bacon and dipped it in the marmalade as Remus tried to scoop some onto his toast.

"How can you be so heartless?" Lily demanded, and pushed all her bacon onto Remus's plate.

When the memory dimmed and slipped back into the river of time, it left Remus aching at heart as much as he did in body.

He woke up fully some time later, ravenous. That was typical. Using the furniture, he dragged himself over to the table where he ate his meals (always, no matter what) and heaved himself into the chair. His bloody-minded determination to eat upright, Sirius had called it. "Even if your head was hanging by a fucking thread like Sir Nick's, you'd sit at the table."

He had to clear his throat several times and cough so hard his body shook before he could croak, "Breakfast."

After eating (several whole steaks, half a dozen fried eggs, half a ham, and a dozen slices of bacon) he felt better. Less like death warmed over. He was able to heave himself to his feet and grope across the furniture to his bedroom, where he crawled beneath the covers and gave in to his body's fervent desire for more sleep on something more comfortable than a freezing stone floor.

"You don't need to sit up waiting for me, Padfoot, I'm fine—"

"You can call it 'fine,' Moony, if you want. Maybe for werewolves, that is fine. But it makes me feel like shit. At least let me have the honor of sitting up all night, worrying my arse off."

Remus had insisted on certain things. No watching him transform. Ever. Not as a dog or as a man.

"All right, no Peeping Padfoot. Cheers."

Sirius could drop the blanket on him and help him to bed, but he wouldn't ask if Remus was all right or if there was anything he could get him. He'd help him to bed and leave him. He could prepare some food for when Remus awoke, hungry—in fact, it would be appreciated—but he was not to bring it to Remus, and he was certainly not to feed him.

"Well, obviously, Moony. We're not Lily and Prongs. The day I feed you breakfast in bed is the day I go straight and marry Lucius Malfoy."

Remus had never known whether Sirius was relieved for the ground rules or if he'd hated them. Once the rules were laid, they'd never spoken about them. Sirius had followed them more religiously than any of his professors would have imagined him capable of. As far as Remus knew, Sirius had never even discussed them with James. Lily, Prongs, and Wormtail had gone on wondering how Sirius could pick on Remus when he was clearly so ill and barely able to defend himself.

It had been a fiction, but a necessary one—for Remus, at least, to let someone in to that part of his life. Transforming into Animagi, that had been different. It was the symbol of their acceptance and determination. When he was a wolf, he was strong, if mad. As a man. . .

He'd never said I need to be able to take care of it on my own. He wouldn't admit even that much.

But in the end, he'd been righter than he ever could have guessed; for he'd lost them all, one by one.

Harriet's mind had been so full when she lay down after meeting Snape that she hadn't had any thought of sleeping. Thoughts had roiled through her head like those time-lapse videos of clouds over vast fields or mountains. Sirius Black had been her parents' friend—he'd stood with her dad, laughing, at their wedding—he'd betrayed them to Voldemort—Snape had been her mum's friend—he'd admitted it—he hadn't wanted to—he'd kept it from her, like he'd kept the secret of Sirius Black—

She was dreaming she was at her parents' wedding. Sirius Black was there, standing with her dad, who looked so happy. Her mum was talking to Snape, who was wearing black like always, hard-faced and angry. All the voices were on mute; she couldn't hear what anyone was saying, though her mum kept wringing her hands and pacing like Hermione, sunlight shining through her veil.

Then Snape looked at Harriet, straight at her, his gaze black and fierce, and she woke up with her heart beating hard.

A chink of daylight showed past a gap in her hangings. Her eyes felt heavy and tired, but it couldn't be that early if the sun was already up.

She lay for a long time without getting up. In the light of morning, it seemed mad to have confronted Snape like that last night. She couldn't believe she'd done it. The memory seemed fake, and yet, with a hollow kind of horror, she knew it wasn't. She really had marched down there, in the middle of the night, and shouted at him, thrown a picture of her parents in his face, and accused him of lying to her. She'd said—loads of other things—she wasn't sure exactly what; it was all a jumble—just a memory of his voice, low and jagged and angry, and his face white and black in the wand-light, his eyes glittering and hollow.

Mortification burned and twisted in her stomach. She was surprised she hadn't got a hundred detentions and one million points taken from Gryffindor. Maybe he'd been as insane as she was, last night.

Tomorrow, we'll have a discussion about the reckless idiocy of traipsing around, alone, with a mass murderer after you.

Shit, she thought numbly. He'd said that, hadn't he? Oh, yes, he had.

Groaning, she pulled her pillow over her face.

Last night, Severus had threatened the girl with retribution for her recklessness; but in daylight, he realized he didn't want to see her. At all. What had possessed him to admit the truth (well, a sliver of it) about her mother?

Fuck.

Maybe the full moon promulgated a degree of lunacy in anyone who was exposed to it for too long.

Could his threat of last night make her avoid him? He would certainly do his best to avoid her.

He'd been right about her. Brazen, prying little brat.

Fuck.

How had she found out about Black, anyway?

His first thought had been Lupin; but Lupin had been too ill to leave his rooms all day and a wolf all last night; he wasn't in any (snort) shape to expose tense, emotional secrets of the past. And Rita Skeeter hadn't had the meat for an article lately. Anyway, she'd moved on to profiling a successful politician and his wife who'd been caught cheating on each other with the same man.

Perhaps the girl had discovered Black through the photograph she'd brought with her last night? But she'd have had to find an old picture of Sirius Black, besides that one . . . it would have required research . . . But she had undertaken research, of her own volition, to learn about Dementors and the Patronus.

She could have simply been snooping. She was good at that.

It didn't matter, really, how she'd found out. What mattered was that she had, and he'd put himself in the mortifying position of admitting something she would surely want to know more about. She'd pop round pestering him with questions, prying into all his most precious and most hated secrets, like a Niffler in a gold mine. They even had similar hair.

Perhaps, he thought masochistically, he ought to tell her the truth about the prophecy. Then she could move straight on to loathing him and would leave him alone. The truth could stay buried.

"I hate you," she would say, that look of blazing anger and grief in her small, thin face.

His heart recoiled as if dealt a physical blow. For a moment, he sat stunned. The distress that thought caused him was. . . astonishing.

"Fuck," he said aloud.

Harriet got dressed eventually, pulling on her Weasley jumper and her Dobby socks for comfort. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and fiddled with her Hermione necklace.

Hermione wasn't in the room. She must be studying or something. Crookshanks was gone, too.

Harriet was hungry, but she didn't want to run into Snape before she'd decided how to act.

Well. . . there was always the Map. She could use it to see where he was and avoid him until she'd got a plan.

She opened the drawer of her dresser again and rooted around. Maybe she'd missed it last night, trying to be quiet in the dark.

It wasn't there.

She checked her trunk. Nothing. Her pockets—nothing. Her bedding: empty.

Starting to panic, she started pulling out her school books and flipping through them. Still nothing. Her notes—papers—all her dresser drawers, the rubbish she hadn't cleaned out—

No map.

Oh no, she thought. Fuck!

She ransacked her memories, trying to remember where she'd last had it. She knew she'd stuffed it in her pockets after Snuffles had brought it back, because she'd used it to meet Snape. Had she dropped it in his office?

The thought was so horrifying that she almost couldn't think it. But she forced herself to track back through time. The last time she'd definitely had the Map. . . she'd been. . .

"Harriet, what are you doing?" asked Hermione's voice.

At the sound of it, Harriet's heart suffered its—fourth? fifth—nasty shock of the morning. She turned around. Hermione was holding Crookshanks and staring at the books Harriet had strewn across the floor, the loose leaves of parchment, her clothes thrown everywhere.

"What's going on?" Hermione asked in surprise.

"I've lost something." Harriet dropping the sheets she'd pulled clean off her bed, cursing the fact that there was no way to do that casually. "Is there a spell to find things you've lost?"

"There's a Summoning Charm, but it's not on the curriculum until next year." Hermione stepped carefully over Harriet's mess, setting down Crookshanks when he squirmed. "What is it? I'll help you look—"

"It's—nothing," Harriet said, looking away so she wouldn't have to lie to Hermione's face.

"It's clearly not nothing if you've done all this because you lost it." Hermione swept her hand in a wide arc to encompass all of Harriet's destruction.

"I—" Harriet thought frantically. "I've lost my necklace. The one you gave me."

Hermione stared blankly at her. Then she said, "It's round your neck."

Harriet groped at her neck, finding the chain. "Shit," she said. She tried to look extremely embarrassed. It wasn't that hard, since she didn't enjoy lying to Hermione. She ought to have just handed the fucking Map in. She'd known she ought.

What if she'd left it lying around and Sirius Black found it?

Shit shit fuck—

"Are you hungry?" Hermione asked kindly. Harriet felt like a slug.

"Not really," she said. That was the truth, at least; in the last few minutes, her hunger had evaporated.

"Well. . . we should try to eat some toast or something, at least. Coming?"

They left Crookshanks sniffing over the mess Harriet had made and headed down to the Great Hall.

What did I do with it? she thought frantically. Please please please don't let Sirius Black get it. . .

It was dusk again before Remus was able to get out of bed for anything except visiting the loo. And even so, the first thing he did was take a long bath. He almost fell asleep during, as it was.

The Wolfsbane Potion kept him sane during transformations, and for that reason alone he would use it for as long as he could. Once the change took him, the experience was similar to the way James and Sirius and Peter had described their Animagus transformations: everything diluted but still there; thoughts not words but feelings, instincts, desires. But the stag, the dog, the rat had never taken over their minds. Now, Remus could finally say the same about the wolf.

But the Wolfsbane had other effects that he knew would preclude its being a permanent solution among werewolves (aside from the astronomical price and access to a competent brewer). For one thing, when the wolf didn't subsume his consciousness, he was forced to remain aware throughout the entire change, which was more painful than prolonged Cruciatus. For another, he was more exhausted the day after the full moon, and took longer to recover. He'd have to mention it to Snape.

After the bath, he was starving again, so he dragged himself to his table to order enough food for three full-grown men on a binge. In the past, eating helped him heal faster, but it didn't seem to work when he was on the Wolfsbane.

Well, Snape had said the potion was technically a poison.

After he'd banished the plates back to the kitchens, he Summoned the pile of letters and things that had heaped up while he'd been out of it. The day of the change, he was always too restless to answer mail. The day after, he was both so determined to resume a normal routine and so bored out of his mind that he'd welcome even the stupidest message, even if it was a note from Mundungus Fletcher hitting him up for some cash so he could back a Fwooper in a race against a Puffskein. It's a sure thing, mate, only cost you a galleon. . . though while you're at it, I got a prime business opportunity to run by you. . . what do you say to 'elping me and this bloke start a ferret farm?

Today his pile was full Christmas wishes from Dumbledore and Minerva and the rest of the staff, and a little pile of packages from the same. And. . . a blank piece of parchment?

He went absolutely still, his hand held over it, about to pick it up.

Most people would've laughed to suppose that a blank piece of parchment could be familiar. But this one was. He'd once known every nick in its edges, every faint stain and fingermark. It had picked up quite a few new ones, but he only whispered It can't be because how could it be?

His hand shaking—not, now, from the change—he touched his wand to the parchment and whispered hoarsely, "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

Ink blossomed from his wand tip, rushing, leaping, skipping to each corner of the parchment. Letters formed in the middle of the page, bearing their names in that ridiculous, beloved legend (Oh, we knew how you styled yourselves), and then fading away, leaving just the map itself.

He was certain he looked at it for a long time, though he couldn't have counted the minutes on any clock. He felt like he lived a thousand minutes in one. He traced his fingers over and over the inky outline of the castle, the names flitting back and forth (Harriet Potter and Hermione Granger eating in the Great Hall; Albus Dumbledore pacing in his study). It was as if he'd stumbled over some piece of someone he'd loved and lost, which he thought was long gone, too.

That's exactly what it was.

The demands of the present returned slowly, in pieces. When they did, he lowered the map to his lap and whispered the most obvious question, the one begging all the answers:

"Who?"

But . . . he knew, didn't he?