Harriet didn't want to write first to Hermione. She knew that if she wrote complaining that Snape was tallying up all the times she was smart with him so he could give her detentions and dock a million points from Gryffindor on 1st September, Hermione would just lecture her on behaving well to a teacher and keeping her temper. She'd also probably approve of the no-going-outside. So Harriet decided to let Hermione write to her. Then she'd at least have something to reply to.
She looked round her room, remembering how she'd thought, just yesterday morning, that she'd wanted a room of her own. Not one in the Slytherin dungeons, though: one in a house on a street with a mum and dad and things they'd bought her.
It was a nice room, though. It had an arched window in a deep recess, with a sort of stone bench built in and a tattered velvet cushion to soften it. The bed might once have been in the Slytherin dorms; its duvet and hangings were deep green. The hanging of the tree on the wall rustled like its leaves were touched by the wind.
She changed out of her muddy clothes and spent the time before lunch in the library looking up Dementors.
One of the library doors was locked, but the other opened at her tug. She fully expected to find Madam Pince looming where she always did, behind her circular desk just to the right of the doors, but the desk was empty and the lamps on it dark. The whole library was much dimmer than she'd ever seen it in the day, lit by no light except the mist-tinted daylight shining against the towering windows. She remembered coming here with Hermione at night last Christmas, to find the Basilisk. It was slightly less creepy today, although she didn't like the way the books rustled in the shadows and almost seemed to breathe.
"Dementors," she said under her breath as she headed for the card catalog.
Her fingerprints left tracks in the dust of the first book she pulled down from the shelves. Its pages were parchment, but cut in different sizes, so their edges were uneven, and when she unlatched the hinge on the side, the pages crackled as they unfurled. She pushed them flat and found herself staring at an inky drawing of a streaming black cloak with skeletal fingers and shoulders, its suggestion of a face hidden by a deep hood. The ink flowed across the full two pages beneath her hands.
She stared at the darkness beneath the hood, where she guessed the face would be.
Slowly she turned the page over.
The origins of the Dementor are as lost, said the parchment in a scrawling script. History has become legend, legend has become myth, and even the myths have been forgotten. Created by magic, some believe, though most wizards shall never will themselves to think of the Dementor, by magic only can they be repelled. Non-magical beings have no recourse against the Dementor, whose evil power yet affects beasts and men alike. All creatures, possessing a soul or none, can feel the taint of the Dementor's evil. . .
"Lord," Harriet muttered, trying not to feel unnerved, "just get to the point. What do they do?"
. . . Their power to drain the life from every thing that lives, and to take from every conscious creature the memory of all that is good, and to leave in its wake only those feelings of deepest despair, misery, and fear. To cross paths with a Dementor is to become reacquainted with the darkest grief in one's heart: to meet a Dementor is to revisit one's worst days: to know a Dementor is to know fear.
She stared at the blotted scrawl on the page, understanding and confusion pulling at the edges of her thoughts. Was this book saying . . . what was it saying? She read it again. To revisit one's worst days. Did that mean . . . what did it mean?
The rest of the book was annoyingly vague like that. She shut it and went to the next book she'd found, Dangerous Beasts of the Dark. It began a little more concretely:
The Dementor is one of the most dangerous creatures that haunts our world.
Well, that was nice to know.
Even a single Dementor is to be avoided with all the power one possesses. Proximity to a Dementor will result in feelings of bodily cold and a pervasive feeling of despair. The Dementors do not have the power to manufacture fear or fantasies, but the power they do possess, to recall the worst experiences of one's life to date, and to—
Harriet stopped and read that again. Don't have the power to manufacture . . . the worst experiences of one's life to date . . .
But that . . . that would mean . . . that woman screaming in her head . . . she was . . .
She was from a memory.
She'd thought before that the light in the library was dim, but now it seemed too bright. Dust motes swirled in the air, which felt suddenly thick in her lungs. Her fingertips tingled, like she was cold. For a wild moment, she thought maybe a Dementor was close by, and she jumped, upsetting the book, so that it slammed shut.
The truth didn't come to her, not really. It was rather as though it had been exactly where it was, deep inside her, for her whole life, and she had only now just seen it was there.
Because it had been there all the while.
Hadn't it?
She felt a sudden, horrible urge to cry. It was so strong she didn't know, then or later, how she held it off.
Shoving her chair back from the table, she stood, leaving the books where they were. As she left, she heard them slipping off the table and rustling back to their shelves.
Some time later she wound up back in the dungeons, with no real idea of how she'd gotten there. She must have just walked downward until she came to them. They were as dark and creepy as she'd always thought, as stained with shadows as the grounds above were with mist.
And they were perfect for Snape to move silently about in.
"Where have you been?"
She jumped—not higher than usual, but with a stronger aftereffect. Even when she recognized Snape's voice, even when she thought, Of course it's only Snape, her heart was still beating a funny pattern against her ribs.
Fucking Dementors, she thought, using Snape's word from last year.
"Miss Potter," he said in a you-had-better-answer-me voice.
"I went to the library," she retorted, "where you told me I could read about Dementors. Since you wouldn't tell me what they were and all."
Snape stared down at her for a long moment. "I am far too busy to spoon-feed you information you are perfectly capable of finding for yourself," he said at last, his tone angry. She realized she had expected him to say something quite different. She couldn't think of what it would have been, though. Even the thought—that he might've been about to say something . . . kind—seemed mad.
"It's noon," he said, as though this were somehow her fault. "You will eat something. Follow me."
He glared her back to the room she'd woken up in earlier, which she guessed was some sort of sitting room or parlor. It didn't look like the kind of cozy she associated with parlors, though. There was the leather couch where she'd lain, but now that she was off it, it had been piled with boxes of books and papers and a flannel throw. The ceiling was vaulted, hung with a couple of age-spotted brass lamps; a sideboard running along one wall was crammed with bottles and jars in all sorts of different jewel-like colors, but they were muted with dust. There were even a few paintings stacked on the floor. How did Snape live in this mess? One look would give Aunt Petunia a heart attack, Harriet thought with satisfaction.
"Sit."
Snape was pointing a table cluttered with stacks of leather-bound journals that he told her not to spill on. She wasn't hungry, but she ate the potato and leek soup and the asparagus and the rhubarb crumble that had been laid out for her, while Snape messed about in another room. She could hear him rustling through the open doorway.
By the time she'd finished chasing the last of her rhubarb crumble around its dish, Harriet was heartily sick of her own thoughts. They were pretty much all she'd had until Hogwarts. Now, they were filled with the memory . . . and it was really a memory, wasn't it? hadn't she decided it was? . . . of something she would much rather not remember.
Or would she?
She shivered. No. Not that. Not like that.
She peeked into the next room. It looked like much more of a proper sitting-room, less crammed with dusty junk, but there was still almost nothing cozy about it. She didn't see any pictures of people (and certainly none of her mum), although over the fireplace hung an art print of an old man in an alpine forest petting a deer. It wasn't the sort of thing she'd have expected to see hanging in any room of Snape's, sweet and sort of twee.
Snape sat next to a soot-stained fireplace with a completely bare mantle, reading from a magazine with an expression of concentrated disgust/annoyance/ferocity. Every so often he would slash at the pages with a quill, circling or marking or scribbling in the margin. He did it so fiercely she could see droplets of ink flying. She wondered what the magazine had done to get on his bad side.
It figured that when Snape was on his own, doing his own thing, he was still getting mad about something—and being mean and sarcastic, probably, if that wrist action was anything to go by. It made a comfortable kind of sense. It would have been too weird if Snape had a soft, warm, caring side. If anyone asked her what Snape was like during hols, she could say, "Exactly like he always is," and nobody would be at all surprised.
Watching him, though, she felt there was something different . . . but she couldn't put a finger on what it was.
"What are you doing?" he asked suddenly, like he'd just looked up (which he'd done) and found her holding her bowl of soup over his precious journals (which she most certainly wouldn't do). He was giving her a strange look, too.
"I'm . . . " she started, but then she trailed off. She didn't know what she was.
"Then find something to do," he said, dipping his quill in its ink pot, readying for another assault.
She fiddled with a loose thread on her too-big flannel shirt. "I was reading about Dementors."
"You said." The ink was running down his fingers from the quill's tip while he held it in midair. "If you're done eating, go back to your room and find a decent way to occupy yourself. I'm sure you've holiday assignments to complete."
"I've finished them all. I was with Hermione," she explained. His disbelieving stare didn't make her feel smug or anything, even though it maybe should have. It was like the feeling just disappeared inside her, as if it was too small to fill up that big empty space that was suddenly there. Had the Dementors done this to her?
"The books weren't that helpful," she said, winding the loose thread around her finger so that it whited out the tip. "The ones on Dementors, I mean."
His quill scratched across his magazine. He didn't look at her.
She knew he wanted her to go away but she had to ask, and she didn't want to go back up to that empty library, with the books that moved on their own in the silence, and read about these things that made her feel cold and uncertain and . . . scared.
She hated being scared more than anything.
"Do they really make you remember—things?" she said in a rush. Terrible things, she thought, but didn't want to say. She didn't want Snape knowing she was afraid.
Snape looked up at her then. Was it her imagination or was his face wary?
"The Dementors do not have the power to manufacture fantasies," he said at last. Just as the book had done.
"So everything you . . . hear when you get near them," she said, curling her icy fingers into her palms to warm them, "that's all—that's a memory. It's something that really happened to you."
"Yes." He watched her for a moment, his eyes slightly narrowed, like he was thinking. But he didn't elaborate.
She willed herself to ask the next question. "How far back can they make you remember?"
Snape didn't move. When he did speak, after a long, long moment, his voice was somehow distant and strained. "I imagine there is no limit."
"Why would I hear something—from a really long time ago—and not from—from more recently? If the Dementors make you relive bad memories, I've got loads of those that are just a couple months old. Why didn't I see them instead?"
Snape was staring now at the mantle. Harriet folded her arms across her stomach, trying not to fidget, to show how anxious she was, or how much she wanted to shiver. It was freezing in Snape's dungeon, and the fire was over by him.
He finally seemed to realize his hand was covered in ink that had sloped off his quill. Silently, he conjured a handkerchief and wiped his hand clean. The red ink stained the white cloth bloody.
"Stop hovering in the door," he said without looking at her, and levitated a stack of papers off the other chair and to the floor.
Harriet gratefully drew nearer the fire, though she was rather nervous about getting nearer Snape. She didn't know why. It wasn't as if she'd never been near him before.
"Not very much is known about Dementors, aside from their effects on the human body," Snape said in a cold, detached voice, staring now into the fire. It was like her first year and all last term, when he'd looked everywhere but at her. "In part because not very much is known about the human mind. The range of any one person's experience is so variegated that it would be impossible to say why certain memories arise before others in the presence of a Dementor. Very often, however, one experiences the worst of them before the more trivial, even if that worst memory might have occurred . . . very long ago. The Dementor's power works in conjunction with your mind—or so it is assumed. From what we know of the mind, it is right to assume so."
Harriet digested this. It took her a while. She wasn't quite sure what variegated meant.
"Why did I faint?" she asked at last.
Snape looked straight at her for a moment, but then quickly away again, as soon as their eyes met, as if he hadn't meant to do it.
"The state of one's mind has a great effect on the body." His voice was less distant now, but more strained. "When one experiences great emotional distress, it translates to a physical effect. Presumably the memory you—re-encountered—was so—distressing that it caused you to lose consciousness."
Harriet opened her mouth, but then shut it again. She felt cold all the way through, like she'd been emptied out and a numbing wind was blowing through all those empty spaces. She couldn't help shivering and hoped that because Snape wasn't looking at her, he didn't see.
If the memory made her feel this bad . . . then it really probably was . . .
She almost, almost asked Snape, Do you think it could have been my mum that I heard?
But she didn't. He was clever enough that she was sure he would know whether it was or it wasn't—and she didn't know if she wanted to hear yes or no. She hoped he didn't remember her mentioning it right after she'd woken up.
"Is that why I feel—" hollow "—bad right now?" she asked instead.
Snape looked at her again, a frowning crease between his eyebrows. "You still don't feel well?"
"I felt okay for a while." But she she didn't want to say anything more because she didn't want to explain. "Maybe it's just because it's cold down here," she added.
Snape was still frowning. "Do you have a fever?"
She pressed a hand to her forehead, then her neck, then shook her head.
"The chocolate should have worked," he said, almost to himself.
"The hot chocolate?" she said in surprise. "Why?"
"It has healing properties, especially against emotional distress. I'll give you some more in a couple of hours. In the meantime, you might—have a bath," he said, gritting his teeth a little, as though he didn't want to talk about baths. Harriet tried her hardest not to stare at his hair, feeling a sudden, wild urge to giggle.
"There's an en suite joined on your room," he said irritably, shuffling the magazine he'd been abusing, and Harriet knew the conversation about Dementors was over. "Be back here at three. I need to know if you're still feeling unwell."
"All right," Harriet said, feelings of embarrassment and gratitude at being fussed over (in a warped, Snapely way) warring for prominence in her chest and finally intertwining like thread. She hesitated, then said, "Thanks," with a sudden timidity.
Snape grunted, already glaring down at his paper again. Harriet left him to it.
Write to him. Just pick up the quill and write it.
Remus rubbed his hands together. Because he was a werewolf, he was always warm; he figured it was evolutionary superiority at work. So many werewolves lived so much of their lives outside that the ones incapable of producing their own warmth died off before they could pass on the curse. At any rate, every werewolf he knew was always hungry, no matter how much he or she ate, and always hot.
But right now, his hands felt cold.
Pick up the damn quill, said a curt voice in his head. It might have been the voice of his conscience. It was frequently annoyed with him, and with good reason. It was getting angrier with him the longer he didn't do what it wanted.
It wanted him to write to Albus that Sirius Black was an unregistered Animagus.
You can tell him without incriminating yourself, said the conscience, like someone who's said this a million times before and is sick of it. You don't have to tell him that Sirius did it to lark around with you as a werewolf. You can just tell him that Sirius did it for his own lark.
He stood from his desk, or the crate that passed for it, and paced away.
Maybe Sirius didn't transform to escape Azkaban, said Conscience. You don't know if he did or didn't, so let's say it doesn't matter that you never told anyone before now. But he could certainly be hiding from everyone as a dog.
Could the Dementors distinguish between a regular dog and an Animagus? he argued back. We don't know that they can.
Shouldn't you let Albus decide that? At the very least, he can keep any black dogs away from Harriet. You're endangering her by keeping this quiet. She doesn't deserve to be in danger because you're too much of a coward to do what you ought. What you know you ought.
He scrubbed his hand over his face. Conscience was right. He didn't even have to be told to know it was right.
And yet he paced, and rubbed his hands together, and argued with the silent spaces in his mind, long into the night.
The letter stayed unwritten.
Snape's rooms were located on the uppermost storey of the dungeons, though the grounds' design made his room seem higher up than it was. From his windows the earth plunged away, part of it rolling toward the forest, the other dropping off into the deep moat that separated the castle from the lake shore. Harriet had no idea how far down the dungeons went or what their layout was; paging through Hogwarts: a History (which Hermione had given her a copy of last Christmas), she learned that Salazar Slytherin had designed them not only to prevent prisoners from escaping, but also as a place of retreat if the castle was under siege. He'd built corridors that looped back into themselves and ended in blank walls, stairs that made abrupt and disorienting changes in direction, narrow windows that opened onto other corridors, sudden drops into utter blackness. Layers of spells were woven into them, thick as a tapestry and so old now that no one living had any hope of understanding them.
Harriet navigated them with a trick she remembered from Greek mythology, where someone going through a labyrinth had unrolled a spool of yarn to keep track of the way they'd come. She unraveled an old, ugly jumper she had finally outgrown, threading the mustard-yellow yarn behind her so she wouldn't get lost, shining her Lumos-lit wand in front of her. She went so far down that she heard the rushing of an underground river that she couldn't remember reading about in Hogwarts: a History. She tried to find it, but the damp stone walls turned the roar of its breath into a thousand echoes.
Eventually, hunger stirring like a sleepy dragon, she turned to follow her mustardy yarn back upstairs, but dropped it when the Bloody Baron misted out of the wall right next to her. At least her heart clogging her throat prevented her from screaming in a very un-Gryffindorian way.
"The Professor is searching for you," said the Bloody Baron in a voice quite as creepy as the rest of him. It sounded like the invisible rush of the water, hollow and echoing.
"Okay," she said cautiously, scrabbling for her yarn. He stared at her unblinking, floating in place, his robes glittering with silver bloodstains. As she looped her yarn over her wrist, taking up the slack, he stayed where he was, watching her go with his lamp-like eyes that never seemed to blink.
Yep: the dungeons were creepy.
"You were exploring the dungeons?" Snape demanded when she explained where she had been. "Why am I not surprised? Have you any idea how perilous they are?"
"I read Hogwarts: a History. And I had this." She showed him her destroyed sweater. "Like in that story about the minotaur?"
"You are not to do that again," Snape snapped. "Now sit."
He pointed at the table where she always ate but where he never ate with her.
"Fine," she said, annoyed. "Where can I go then? Have you got a list?"
"It is very shortly going to be very short," he said, his eyes flashing in a way that would probably have quailed ten minotaurs.
"But I'm bored," Harriet said, poking her spoon into the vegetable stew in front of her. "There's no one here and I've got nothing to do except explore. I can't even. . . "
She glanced at the windows, where rain sluiced down the foggy glass. She'd woken up that morning to jagged walls of mist rolling in from the lake, thunder crumbling the air and rain thrumming against her window panes. A thoughtful house-elf had lit the fire in her bedroom, some time after she'd struggled into sleep early in the morning.
"Explore something other than the dungeons," Snape said, grabbing a stack of journals off the table and dumping them in a box.
"They can't be that dangerous or all your students couldn't live in them," she pointed out, feeling pleased with this assessment.
"They know their way," Snape said, with a look that was half prideful, half disdainful.
"The dungeons aren't really that dangerous," she said again, though his expression was making doubt creep in. "It would be way too unfair to let kids hurt themselves."
"Our House is known for its resourcefulness," Snape said, baring his teeth slightly. "And you, by the way, broke your back falling off a moving staircase. Hogwarts has never been a school well-suited the fainthearted."
"I'm not fainthearted," she pointed out.
"No," he said, with a nasty look that probably meant he wished she was. "I want your promise that you will cease this foolhardy prowling round the dungeons."
Harriet thought it was pretty rich for him to accuse her of prowling, but she said, "Fine. I mean, I promise."
He stared hard at her, as if wanting to nail that promise to her tongue. Then with a final scathing look, he picked up his box of rubbishy old papers and swept out of the room.
Harriet chewed on the vegetables in her stew, fuming at first, and then feeling increasingly bewildered. She just didn't get Snape. He didn't seem to like her at all, so why he went to the trouble of fussing when she did something dangerous, she didn't get. The Dursleys had been angry with her loads of times, but if she'd wandered into a creepy dungeon and fallen into an oubliette, they probably would have thrown a dinner party and invited Aunt Marge and all ten of her bulldogs. There was that whole thing about a debt to her father, but if that was the only thing making him watch out for her, why did he get so angry when she did something dangerous (or what he saw as dangerous, at least)? She was sure that a lot of people at Hogwarts liked her loads better than Snape did, and Hermione was the only person she could imagine getting as worked up as he did. Was it something about wizarding debts she didn't understand? Or something . . . something to do with her mum?
But her mum had been dead for twelve years. Even if Snape had fancied her, which Harriet still wasn't at all sure wasn't a lie, that was ages ago. He couldn't be worrying this much about Harriet breaking her neck for no more reason than liking her mum when they were both young. Unless maybe her mum had asked him to watch out for her . . . ? But then why would Professor Dumbledore say all that stuff about a debt to her dad?
She hadn't wanted to tell Snape, but she also needed something to do that would stop her from thinking and make her so tired she would just fall asleep at night, instead of lying awake fearing her own nightmares. Ever since she'd suspected that the voice in that black, ancient memory was her mother's, she'd been having trouble sleeping. When she did, she dreamt of her mother screaming, and she was trapped in her cupboard, where it was black and blind and she and couldn't get out, no matter how hard she kicked and pounded and scratched at the door and screamed for someone to let—
"Is there something wrong with the food?" asked Snape's cold voice.
Harriet jumped because she hadn't heard him come back in. She looked reflexively at her stew, which she'd been stirring round and round while she thought.
"No, it's fine."
"Your appetite has been waning for the past few days." He didn't draw any nearer, but his gaze was narrowed on her face, making her feel like she was under a Snape microscope. "Are you sleeping properly?"
No. But she shrugged and spooned up some of the stew. "I'm fine."
"That isn't what I asked," Snape said, like she was being deliberately untruthful.
She stared back defiantly. "I am fine. I'm just bored."
Snape looked disgusted. Harriet turned back to her lunch and diligently swallowed several mouthfuls as if he wasn't there. After a few moments, he made a soft, disparaging sound and left the room again. After checking to make sure he really was gone, Harriet let her spoon clink into her bowl and pressed her fists against her forehead, closing her eyes.
Wretched girl, Severus thought.
She had been at Hogwarts for five days, under his sole jurisdiction. Albus was off trawling for Sirius Black, Minerva on the same errand; Flitwick was so deep in research to reinforce the castle's wards that Severus hadn't seen him in ten days. Sprout and Pomfrey were still on holiday—and that was the list of all the useful teachers. He didn't know or care how Burbage, Vector, or Babbling spent their holidays, and Sinistra and Trelawney seldom came down from their respective towers.
It figured that, when given the sole charge of one thirteen-year-old girl, he was helpless to see her properly fed and rested and occupied. Only five days, and she looked pale and tired and drawn and had taken to picking at her meals. Even her current sullen obstinacy seemed listless.
Something was wrong with her; he wasn't such a blockhead that he couldn't figure that out. The Dementors couldn't be affecting her from their station at the gates, but if they had stirred up old memories, memories harrowing enough to cause her to faint when she was first exposed to them, it wouldn't be unreasonable to suppose that those memories could affect her mental state long after they had been dredged up.
I heard a woman screaming. Had she figured out who it was likely to have been? Surely hearing your mother's voice for the first time in memory—as she was being—
Surely that would be enough to distress anyone. Strong enough to make her faint when a Dementor was lancing it out of the darkest places in her subconscious; disturbing enough to rob her of sleep and appetite.
He couldn't even blame her for secreting it away, as she was doing. He could be aggravated, certainly, and want to wring her neck, but could not blame. He too had grown up placing very little trust for adults. Children knew they should be protected. When they weren't, it damaged something deep inside, draining their reservoirs of implicit trust. The girl wasn't as suspicious as he himself had been, but she was still wary and secretive. When she had the slightest doubt of how her information would be received, she didn't give it. And unfortunately, his methods of dealing with her had certified, in her mind, that anything she told him would be badly received, and so she told him nothing.
He wondered bitterly if she'd have told Dumbledore, if he were here; shared the truth with that manipulative old bastard who, uncertain whether she was a Basilisk's master or its victim, had left fate to decide whether she would live or die. Because Dumbledore smiled and called her "my dear" and gave her candies, she trusted him at least a little. Because Severus got angry with her for foolishly risking her neck, she mistrusted and resented him. Mean old git bastard Professor Snape.
His Slytherins appreciated his protection. It shouldn't have bothered him so much that one little Gryffindor brat didn't. He knew that.
But it did bother him. That simple, childish trust she placed in Dumbledore in exchange for smiles and sherbets should be his and more. He was the one who had argued that she shouldn't be left with fucking Petunia. He was the one who'd taken her away from those inhuman pustules. He was the one sleeping so little during the night at the thought of Sirius Black walking the earth, coming straight for her. Not Dumbledore. She didn't know that, but that's why it fucking mattered.
The candles around him were ribbed with wax, the drippings of hours of frustrated thought. He'd lit them ages ago, and the sun hadn't set until well after nine o'clock. He didn't keep mirrors around, except in the bathroom, but he knew he'd look terrible, his face lined with exhaustion and his hair hanging in greasy rattails round it.
The charm he'd placed on the girl's room to show movement flickered, as it had been flickering all evening since she'd disappeared behind her door. As it had been flickering for the past five nights. That's how he'd known she was lying, beyond a simple look at her tired face. She tossed and turned well into the night, finally falling still, except for the occasional flickers of deep-sleep movement, close to dawn.
Some nights he sat and watched the soft charm-light shimmer while the candles dripped to darkness around him, wondering what he should do. If had been the matter of finding the right spell—especially a crippling one—or the right information from an enemy, he would have been in his element. He was good at the things other people were wretched at. But what came so easily to others—understanding, kindness, comfort—were so alien to him that, even when he knew they were necessary, he didn't know where to begin.
Tonight, he felt the breath of an idea. Perhaps it was the product of his own sleeplessness, as when half-asleep, one stumbles upon an answer or a truth to a question asked long ago.
He slipped his wand out of his sleeve, where he always kept it, even when he slept, and let himself out of his room. The girl's door was dark, so at least she was in bed, valiantly trying to sleep.
He closed his eyes, breathed out, and shut everything away. His mind slipped into its pool of memories that were set aside to sustain him in those long stretches of life when every moment seemed as cold and hopeless as Dementors could ever make it.
"Expecto Patronum," he whispered.
The doe slipped past the wood of the girl's door, spots of brightness dancing where she'd existed for a moment, reminding him of Narcissa's earrings.
He went back into his room and shut the door.