The light shimmered behind Harriet's closed eyes like stars.
She held her breath as the thought I know what that is danced through the cold spaces in her mind, because what if she was wrong?
She opened her eyes. There stood the doe, glimmering and bright, watching her placidly.
"Hi," she breathed.
She knew it wasn't a real animal—she could see patches of the dark room through its flank—but it was created out of magic and magic was real, so it was a real thing, even if she didn't know exactly what. She sat up slowly, afraid of startling it away, of making it disappear, and stretched out ever hand even more slowly.
The doe leaned up and nuzzled her hand. She felt it. It wasn't cold or warm or any temperature at all, but its nose tingled against her fingers. She felt a well of something bright and indescribable inside, something familiar and yet stronger, much more powerful, than she'd ever known it before.
When the doe faded that time, she cried, and felt like her heart was breaking.
Harriet didn't understand what Hermione saw in the library the same way she didn't understand what Pansy Parkinson saw in Draco Malfoy. As far as Harriet was concerned, they were both bloody aggravating and unlovable.
She'd been trying to read about Dementors for days. She didn't want to go outside because of them. This bloody. . . cowardice. . . had to stop. There had to be a way to fight them.
So she'd gone to the library. She knew that if she asked Snape how you fought Dementors, he'd assume that she wanted to march out and duel them, and then his eyes would flash with that dangerous black light and he'd lock her up in her room. So she'd taken a leaf from Hermione's book, which was a cliché her friend ought to approve, and gone to the library. The annoying, stupid, unhelpful library.
Maybe it was just that Harriet didn't know how to research properly. Whenever it was essay time, she would scratch her head for a few days, bumbling through enormous books with terrible spelling like "spreit" and "mair," while Hermione made exasperated noises like a pipe organ, until her noises grew so loud and frequent that Harriet knew her best friend was about to shove a stack of books at her and say, "Here. Pages two ninety one through three oh eight, I've highlighted the proper paragraphs." Left on her own, there was just more and more bumbling.
Sighing, Harriet crossed off two more books she had eliminated as being totally bloody useless. Considering how dangerous all her reading was making them out to be, she would have expected to find a boldly titled book called How to Fight for Your Life Against Dementors. But that book that had said wizards didn't want to think about Dementors at all had been right: no one ever appeared to have done any useful study of them. Most of the books were just creepy drawings of rotting corpses in cloaks who made Sirius Black look like Clark Gable.
She frowned at the table of contents in the next book the card catalog had suggested to her: A Historie of Deefinseive Chyarmes. At least it had been published since the printing press was invented, unlike that last one. She didn't recognize any of the spells listed in it, and didn't think it was just the spelling.
Flipping to the table of contents, she looked up Dementors. Page 367.
The Patronus Chyarme.
She tapped her wand against the book and said, "Praelego," a charm Hermione had written about in her last letter, which read the words out to you. It was loads more helpful than any of the books had been.
"The Patronus Charm," said the book in a Shakesperian voice, "is the only known means of defense against the powers most evil of the Dementors. Simple in concept though it is, the charm is most advanced, and troubles many wizards of quality."
(That was another thing about these books: they hardly ever mentioned witches. Sexist.)
"Its incantation, Expecto Patronum, translates from the Latin to 'I await a protector,' for exactly that is what the Patronus Charm affords. Upon fear and despair do the Dementors feed, as supplied in ample force by the human mind. The Patronus, however, being a magical manifestation of perfect joy, cannot thereby experience the negative emotions which give to the Dementors strength. A Patronus of great power shall weaken the Dementor, and act to the despair as a shield to a spear. Great wizards have been capable of producing a Patronus of such strength to repel a host of Dementors, though this feat has been attempted seldom, and would be beyond the capabilities of many. The Patronus is advised as a means of precaution, for a weapon in reserve shall it seldom be."
This sounded so exactly like what Harriet was looking for that for a moment she was afraid she must've misunderstood what the book had said. But when she re-cast the charm and listened a second time, the meaning seemed to be the same. A charm to repel Dementors—to drive them away. Perfect.
She cast another of Hermione's useful study spells, copying the writing on the page onto a separate sheet of parchment. The book said no more about the Patronus Charm than what it had read out to her, but she was starting to expect that. Magical books seemed to like to talk as airily about spells and things as possible, and leave proper instructions to other people. Still, now that she knew what the charm was called, she could go look that up.
She dragged down more and more books, casting her charms over and over. . .
Words, words, words. . . She was drifting on a sea of words. The library grew dim and soft around her.
The silver doe was there again, just like last night . . . just like last year, that night in the hospital wing . . . it shone like a galaxy stars, brilliant blue-white, the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen, making her feel fiercely, tenderly safe . . . it looked at her and she wished it could speak, that it was magic enough to have a voice. . .
"Miss Potter," it said.
Harriet blinked. Everything was gray and blurry, and her face hurt. The doe was gone.
She'd fallen asleep with her nose mashed into the open pages of that last book. She remembered taking off her glasses and laying her head down. Rubbing her cramped nose, she groped for her glasses. The library came into focus, the table spread with her books, and Snape, a pillar of black. He was looking down at her books.
"The Patronus Charm," he said flatly.
"It repels Dementors," she said, blinking her dry, gritty eyes. How did Hermione do this so often? How did she like it?
Snape touched his long fingers to the pages of parchment she'd collected. Then he withdrew his hand, tucking it into the drape of his robes.
"You missed lunch," he said. Harriet looked up at him warily, expecting a storm of sarcasm, but his tone was almost . . . neutral, and his expression was weirdly bland.
"Sorry," she said cautiously. "I fell asleep reading."
He didn't answer immediately. Then he said, still in that bland tone, "Come eat something now, then."
She boggled. Who are you and what have you done with Snape?
"Okay," she said, even more cautiously. When that didn't set him off, she reached out to close the books, keeping an eye on him, waiting for the explosion.
Except Snape swept his wand over them and they snapped themselves shut, whipping off the table and winging back to their shelves. She gathered up her notes, rolling them up and stuffing them under her arm, eying Snape all the while. He looked un-Snapely back, without any glares.
Weirder and weirder.
All the way down to the dungeons, into his rooms, and halfway through her meal, neither of them said a word. Harriet was getting unnerved by this dully silent, expressionless Snape. She didn't know why he was acting so weird or what to expect from him, and was so distracted that she ate her dessert first.
"The Patronus Charm is highly advanced magic," Snape said at last, startling her into dropping her fork on her trousers and smearing chocolate mousse on her thigh.
"The book said," she replied still warily, watching him where he stood at his sideboard.
He tapped his nails on the wooden top. "Why were you looking it up?"
She shrugged, not wanting to tell him about the dreams now any more than she had before. She didn't want him to react in some way that would make the experience more horrible than it already was.
Snape's face had finally taken on some expression: a tint of annoyance around the eyes. She felt instantly relieved.
"You are voluntarily undertaking advanced research during the summer for a reason unclear to you," Snape said, a familiar edge to his voice. Her relief multiplied.
"I don't like them," she said simply, which was true enough. "Have you ever fainted?"
"I've lost consciousness, yes," Snape said in a tone designed to quash any questions.
"Well, then," Harriet said, though part of her filed that away for obsessing over later: what could have made Snape faint? "It sucks. It makes you feel so . . . " Weak, she thought. Helpless.
"Your reaction to the Dementors is beyond your control," Snape said, in such a way that she felt he was answering a question she didn't even realize she had asked.
"I don't want it to be," she said, slightly confused. "That's why I was looking up the Patronus thing."
"I sincerely hope you aren't doing so in order to take them on single-handed."
That made her feel as if things were really getting back to normal. Wasn't it exactly what she'd pictured him saying?
"No, but if they're going to be out there, then I might have to one day. I want to be prepared."
Snape lseemed to be trying to find something in her to argue with. At last he closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose.
Encouraged by this relative lack of sniping, Harriet said, "Can you do it? The charm, I mean."
Snape opened his eyes, looking at her past his fingers. For a second she almost didn't recognize him. It was so strange; she knew who he was, and yet in that moment it was like she didn't—as if she was seeing some part of him she hadn't known existed, a part that belonged to quite a different person from her teacher whom she'd known for the last two years.
Then he lowered his hand and the Snape she knew returned, the other vanishing back into this one.
"The Patronus Charm is notoriously difficult to cast. You might have read that many full-grown wizards and witches have trouble with it, even those who have scored high on their Charms and Defense N.E.W.T.s."
That didn't answer Harriet's question—or maybe it did. He might not want to tell her if he couldn't do it. She nodded companionably along.
"Yes, they said."
"You were reading Qureshi's book on the subject."
She honestly had no idea. "Was that the one that was being very confusing?"
"You might have found it confusing, yes," he said. "He was attempting to explain the nature of joy."
"One of the books said you have to find a happy memory," Harriet said. "At least. . . I think that's what it said. And then cast the charm. But they were talking about it being so hard I'm not sure that's really what they were saying? I mean, a happy memory—that doesn't sound that hard, everyone's got those."
"Very well," Snape said. "Finish your dinner and attempt to cast it."
Harriet was taken aback. "What—now? Here?"
"It won't destroy my house," he said.
Harriet had never really done magic in front of Snape before. Potions was different—like he'd said on the first day, there were no incantations or wand-waving in Potions. Well, she'd done magic in front of him at the Dueling Club, she supposed, and successfully disarmed Hermione . . . but the thought still made her nervous. At the Dueling Club there had been hundreds of other people. Here, there was just her. And Snape.
But she didn't want Snape to know she was nervous or afraid of looking stupid, so she said, "Okay," like it was no big deal, and turned back to her dinner.
She resisted the impulse to linger over it or to chase the stems of her artichokes around her plate—for the most part. She might have eaten a little more slowly than usual, but when she finished off her last bit of fish, she steeled her courage and went to the open door of Snape's parlor. He was sitting at his usual place near the fire, reading a book with gold letters that glinted on its thick spine in the firelight.
"What are you reading?" she asked, and she honestly wasn't sure whether she really wanted to know, or was just being polite, or was only stalling. Maybe it was all three.
Snape glanced up at her, moving only his eyes, the rest of him staying in the exact same position as he'd been when she first looked at him. Once again she felt that strangeness, that she was looking at someone very different than she'd thought.
"Anna Karenina," he said after a pause, as if he'd been judging whether or not she really wanted to know.
"Oh." It sounded very vaguely familiar, but she couldn't have said more than that to save her life. "Is it good?"
"It's considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written." The way he said it, though, wasn't chiding; it was more informative, like he didn't have an opinion on it one way or the other. She couldn't imagine Snape not having an opinion. Maybe he just didn't want to tell her what he thought. But then he said, "I doubt you would enjoy it," and closed the book, setting it on the crowded table next to his chair.
"I read," Harriet said, almost defensively.
"I didn't say you couldn't read it, I said I doubt you would enjoy it. The title character goes mad with jealousy and kills herself."
"Oh." Harriet eyed the book. That certainly didn't sound like something she wanted to read.
"Well?" Snape asked. "Have you thought of a memory suitable for casting the charm?"
Harriet chewed on her lip. "I thought, maybe, the, erm, first time I rode a broom."
Snape was restraining himself from saying something Snapely, she could tell. "Very well," he said again. "Do you know the incantation?"
"Expecto patronum," she recited.
Snape just looked at her. She stared back for a moment before realizing he was waiting for her to do it.
"Er." She pulled her wand out of her pocket and nearly dropped it.
"It's hard to concentrate with you staring," she said, when he continued to do just that.
"If you encounter a Dementor—or when, as you yourself believe—you will have a great deal more to contend with than my staring."
"Well, there aren't any Dementors now," she said, nettled. "And I've never tried before."
Snape sighed, sounding faintly but clearly exasperated. "Would you prefer I shut my eyes?" he asked, his tone communicating how ridiculous he thought that would be.
Harriet flushed. "No," she muttered. That'd make me feel even more stupid. She stared resolutely at her wand instead.
She remembered Malfoy zipping off with Neville's Remembrall, and slinging her own leg over her broom. She'd kicked off the ground and flown, the broom arching swift and perfect into the air, and her stomach had flipped and soared, and her friends had cheered—
"Expecto Patronum," she said.
Nothing happened.
Dammit.
She chanced a look at Snape, whose face was completely impassive.
"Um," she said. "Didn't work," she added, unnecessarily.
"The memory was perhaps not strong enough," Snape said, his tone pitched to match his expression. It was weirdly unnerving, just like he'd been when he'd fetched her from the library. She'd suspect he was an impostor—Sirius Black Polyjuiced into him, maybe—except in that case he could have blown her up a hundred times over by now.
She frowned at her wand. "I was happy then, though."
"Happiness can take on many different forms. One of the most common mistakes made with this spell is that people attempt to cast it on feelings of pleasure, which isn't sufficient."
"What's the difference?" she asked, confused.
"You can gain pleasure from relatively insignificant events," he said. "Or even from ones that bring pain to others. The Patronus requires joy."
"What's the difference?" She was sounding like a broken record, but she didn't know what else to say.
"Joy is more powerful yet more elusive, rarer. To create a Patronus, one must not only recall a memory when it has occurred, but must recapture the exact feeling."
Harriet was silent, partly because she still didn't really understand.
"Now you know why this charm is so difficult," Snape said.
"What's it look like?" she asked. "The Patronus, when it's cast."
Snape looked away. "Its form is unique to each person who conjures it."
Harriet repressed a sigh. Magic couldn't ever have an easy answer, apparently.
Days go by
Harriet climbed to the Owlery, a pair of binoculars, borrowed from Hermione, hanging round her neck on their strap.
She'd been having an easier time of sleeping ever since the silver doe had appeared in her room, lighting up the dark. She wished she knew where it came from, so she'd know why it came and when, and could figure out how to see it again. Why had she suddenly started seeing it, but only those two times? Professor Dumbledore had said it had something to do with the force of love, but she hadn't really understood. It was all as vague as the Patronus talk.
Magic was just like that, apparently.
Snape had lent her a book that would probably make Hermione faint with envy, because Harriet didn't understand a word of it. It was about the Dementors, but intensely confusing, not simply vague like everything else was. It said things like:
"When you are joyous look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that you are weeping for that which has been your delight."
And it talked about the Patronus and Dementors being the bright mirror and the dark of the soul, one a punishment for surrendering to despair and hopelessness, and the other a means of reclaiming oneself. She had no idea what any of it meant, and Snape couldn't break it down enough for her to get it. Maybe Hermione could help.
Harriet might not understand exactly what joy was, but if the Patronus was tied to good memories, well, then she only had to find one that was good enough to cast it. Last night she'd done one of Hermione's favorite activities and made a list, this one of all the really good memories she could find.
Learning I was a witch and leaving the Dursleys was at the top of the list. Then came Becoming friends with Hermione, and Flying, and Becoming friends with Ron, and Seeing my parents in the Mirror of Erised because it was the first time she'd ever seen their faces. Also listed near the bottom, but then moved up, was Snape taking me away from the Dursleys. She was sure that other things had made her happy, but these things had made her the happiest, she thought.
But strangely, every time she tried to concentrate on them and cast the Patronus charm, she kept thinking of things that were linked to them that hadn't made her happy at all. Thinking about Hermione made her think of growing up without any friends, and especially of not having Hermione here with her now. Remembering her friends at all made her feel painfully lonely.
So she'd switched to learning she was a witch and leaving the Dursleys. But that reminded her that her parents were dead, that she'd lived with the Dursleys because they'd died, because Voldemort had murdered them, and whenever she went back to magic, she went back to people who wanted her dead. The happiness of coming into the wizarding world was tied up with so many painful things.
The Mirror of Erised was like that, too. Seeing her parents for the first time, but being unable to touch them; pressing her hands against that cold layer of glass, staring in at them, looking at their faces but knowing they weren't really there. Snape taking her from the Dursleys, that was all right, but in order to remember it, she had to remember being locked up in her room with no food, and how she'd just been left there for so long, until Snape had taken her away.
Was that what the book meant? That in order for things to make you really happy, they had to come out of things that made you so painfully lonely and sad? But then how were you supposed to cast a Patronus, if every memory with a drop of joy was washed with unhappiness, too?
The inside of the Owlery was cool and reeked of owl droppings. Hedwig fluttered down from the rafters, having forgiven her for the ride on the Knight Bus, and let Harried feed her owl treats.
"How are you doing, girl?" Harriet asked her as Hedwig nibbled her fingers affectionately. "Dementors don't bother you, huh?"
She'd brought the binoculars so she could try and see them. The thought of looking for Dementors scared her, so she'd made up her mind to do it. And she'd decided to do it from the Owlery so she'd have Hedwig there for moral support (and be very far away). Hopefully Hedwig wouldn't fly off to lunch.
Ever since Harriet had come back to Hogwarts, the sky had been gray and the air cold. Sometimes it rained, but mostly it was just the silver mist, creeping over everything, smudging the world in the distance like ink on a drawing that was hundreds of years old. She pressed the binoculars against her glasses, leaning out the window, sweeping the fog for the fluttering signs of a flying cloak.
Someone was standing at the front gates.
Sirius Black? thought her heart, bumping twice in one beat. But surely he wouldn't walk up to the castle gate and look inside.
The person was too far away for her to see much more than that, even when she twiddled the focus on Hermione's binoculars. Whoever it was, nobody seemed to be expecting him or her. At least, nobody was going to meet them. She was pretty sure that she and Snape were the only people in the whole castle.
Speaking of whom, Snape would surely want to know someone was there. More than that, he'd know what to do about them.
Dropping the binoculars to settle against her chest, she stroked Hedwig's feathers and said, "See you later, girl," and began the long descent to the dungeons.
Wolfsbane was fiddly, complex, frustrating; it required an intense understanding of its chemistry and an even intenser concentration during brewing.
If Severus ignored whom he was brewing it for, he loved it. With the constant, tedious demands of his daily schedule, there were so few potions he had opportunity to brew that provided him with any real challenge.
Since Sirius Black had escaped, Severus had reverted to his survival tactics of subsisting almost entirely on coffee and cigarettes. Coffee allowed him to stay alert after weeks of sleepless nights, and the nicotine allowed him to drink twice as much coffee without overloading his system; so he was able to drink and smoke all day, pawning from those two substances the emotional and intellectual focus he needed. The Wolfsbane, too, gave him something to focus on, so he only spent about seven-eighths of the day worrying about the girl tripping and breaking her neck, or falling into one of the dungeon's many traps in spite of his altering the wards to recognize and protect her, or being slain by an Azkaban-mad Sirius Black who'd somehow broken past Hogwarts' millennium of defenses and come straight for her.
Severus approved of the Wolfsbane, moreover. It was entirely possible that, even following the recipe to the last jot, it would poison Lupin fatally, and then he'd have one less threat to contend with. By all rights it should poison any werewolf who ingested it, but all of the research findings suggested that it worked as advertised. This was another thing about Wolfsbane that both frustrated and enthralled him: by every natural law it should kill, not aide, and yet since the formula had been perfected in its lab, every werewolf who'd ingested it had lived. It worked in defiance of all reason.
He was chopping rue when a movement flickered at the door of his lab, which he'd left open in case the girl needed to find him. When he looked up and saw her fidgeting on his threshold, he had a brief moment to enjoy the satisfaction of being right, before he started envisioning any number of dire scenarios that could have brought such a stubbornly independent child voluntarily to see him.
"What is it?" he demanded. At least all of her arms and legs seemed to be attached and she wasn't bleeding from any arteries that he could see.
"I was up in the Owlery and saw someone standing at the front gate." She fiddled with the strap of the binoculars hanging round her neck. "I thought you'd want to know."
He was rendered momentarily speechless by this evidence of sensible thought. "Yes, I would."
"D'you know who it is?" she asked. "I couldn't see even with the binoculars."
"Since I have been underground, I haven't even had the glimpse you did." He checked the room to make sure he'd started nothing burning. When he turned back around, he found the girl giving him a half-expectant, half-exasperated look.
"D'you think it's Sirius Black?" she said, in a tone that suggested he should already have answered this.
"After being so cunning as to escape an inescapable prison and elude the entire country, it would be very anticlimactic for him to walk up to the gates and stare inside."
"That's what I thought," she said, surprising him yet again, "but who else would it be?"
"It seems like it will shock you to learn that other people do visit this castle." He moved to shut the door, causing her to shuffle back into the corridor.
"Teachers, yeah," she said, "but all of you should be able to get in on your own, shouldn't you?"
"Perhaps," he said.
She scowled, possibly at his bloody-minded unhelpfulness, but then an almost comical A-ha! expression suffused her face. "It's the new Defense professor, isn't it?"
"Possibly," he said, for variety. "I'm still underground, aren't I?"
She gave him a look, one that Minerva would have been quite proud of. It said, You're being deliberately difficult but I'm going to choose to ignore this.
"And where do you suppose you're going?" he asked in a foreboding voice when she attempted to follow him up the stairs to the Entrance Hall.
"I want to see who it is."
"You certainly aren't coming along." When she opened her mouth to argue, he said, "The Dementors will be haunting the gates. Unless you've mastered a post-N.E.W.T. charm in one morning, they will most likely cause you to faint again, which is an experience I thought you wanted to dispense with? And it will be much simpler for me to deal with our visitor if I don't have to carry you."
She flushed, and he remembered how sensitive Gryffindors were to any circumstance that could be remotely linked to physical cowardice.
"You will save yourself the emotional turmoil and wait here. In your room," he added.
She sent him a look that was part defiant, part injured puppy, and then without a word turned on her heel and headed toward her room. He would almost have called it a flounce if there weren't an air of wounded dignity to it.
He waited until the door to the girl's room was shut before casting a shield across the exit to the dungeons. Then he stalked out of the castle, toward the front gate.
He was tempted to let Lupin linger out there until someone else found him. He could always claim never to have seen him. Dumbledore would know better, but what could he do?
Something or other, Severus knew. Dumbledore always found some way to redress the balance of Severus's sins against the innocent. Some little humiliation to pay back.
Well. If he had to meet the werewolf, it would give them a chance to . . . talk.
The sky trailed low, full of storm portents, as it had done since the Dementors stationed themselves outside the grounds. The grass near the gates had started to wither, the trees on the road to lose their leaves. Walking forward felt like breathing in despair.
He sank into the grips of his Occlumency, letting it deaden everything. The memory of the girl fainting, of her asking Who was screaming; of finding her lying motionless on the floor of the Chamber of Secrets, sank beneath the surface of his emotions, snapping free.
Lupin looked so much older—that was the first thing Severus thought as he drew near enough to see the werewolf's face. It was lined and tired, and his hair was paler than Severus remembered, streaked with gray. His clothes were shabby, patched, disgraceful. A sense of triumph pushed against Severus's shields: his life, at least, had turned out more comfortably than the werewolf's. Or Black's.
Or Potter's, come to that.
Lily's. He at least was permitted to see her child grow up.
Lupin's worn face rippled with surprise when he saw who was stalking down the path toward him. So Albus hadn't told him Severus worked here. Now, what did you mean by that, old man?
"Snape," Lupin said, almost like a question. But then his surprise vanished beneath a shield of politeness so flawless Severus might almost have admired the insincerity, if he wouldn't rather Lupin have dropped dead on the spot. The bastard even smiled. "I didn't expect to see you, but you seem to have been expecting me. Judging by that look of disgust on your face."
Yes, do fucking drop dead. Had they been teenagers, Severus might have said it. He was tempted to, anyway. "The Headmaster is withholding information from you already? What a slippery slope."
"Indeed," Lupin said pleasantly, not looking the least bit bothered. "Might I ask for permission to come inside, or do I need to pass an inspection first?" His tone was not offensive in the least, but his very existence offended Severus, so this effort at witty cordiality was quite wasted.
Severus drew closer to the bars, close enough to see the dark circles beneath Lupin's eyes, the lines on his face. "Did the Headmaster give you nothing to ensure your entry?"
"Let me guess," Lupin said, still smiling. "You'd leave me out here if he hadn't."
"No," Severus said softly, knowing there would be nothing soft in his own face, his eyes. "I'd hex you unconscious and leave you to the Dementors."
Lupin's expression didn't flicker, and his smile didn't waver. It should have. Instead, he reached into his pocket and produced a ruby the size of a hen's egg, which he held out in the palm of his hand. When he passed his thumb over the surface, it misted over golden, and a small cloud rose into the air, Dumbledore's voice leaking from it like a scent:
"Remus Lupin, have entry into Hogwarts."
Severus almost expected the gates to open at the command of Dumbledore's voice, which would make him look like an utter twat. But they stayed shut.
Lupin put the egg back in his pocket. "Does that satisfy you?" he asked mildly.
"Nearly." Severus watched him. "One question, and then I'll let you in."
Lupin made a go on gesture.
"Where is Sirius Black?"
And that, finally, got a reaction. A bleakness misted over Lupin's pale eyes, and his smile faded until his face was cool, remote and wary.
"I don't know," he said, his voice also cool. "Should I go down to the village and wait there until someone else is available to let me in?"
Severus looked at him. He took in the clenched hand on the handle of Lupin's battered briefcase, the tension in the narrow line of his shoulders, the hard emotion in his face, and nearly smiled. But he never smiled.
Waving his wand, he sent the unlocking spells rippling across the gates, his magic splitting the wards apart. He felt it all through his blood into his bones, the power of Hogwarts' protection. Hogwarts wasn't the safest place in Britain because it had Dumbledore; it was the strength of its magic, reinforced over a thousand years by the castle's own sanctity, the feelings of home and succor and sanctuary of all the students that had ever lived there.
And yet nothing was ever unbreachable.
Lupin walked through the gates, carrying nothing with him but that battered suitcase and a potted plant tucked into the crook of his arm. Severus wished, without much conviction, that Lupin owned just that little, but they were wizards; there was probably an Extension Charm on the luggage. Pity.
Another wave of his wand and the gates swung shut again, the wards knitting over, flaring bright white where they entwined; hundreds of them touching in syncopation, so the air shimmered from the ground to the top of the gates.
"So you're the Potions master Albus mentioned?" Lupin asked, as if Severus hadn't just threatened him with a fate worse than death.
"How am I to know?" Severus said coldly. He turned and began striding back toward the school, his pace not inviting Lupin to walk with him.
But Lupin jogged to catch up. "If you were," he continued pleasantly, "Albus mentioned something about you brewing the Wolfsbane for me."
"I am brewing the Wolfsbane, but it is certainly not for you. I am brewing it so that no one in the castle is endangered by you, as they have been before." He cut a look at Lupin, infusing it with as much cruel revulsion as he could. "At least, that is the theory. I would not allow it, but Dumbledore—"
"Is Headmaster, and what he says goes?" Lupin asked pleasantly, but Severus was good at detecting malice and knew when it was there.
"Yes," he said, curling his lip. "Unfortunately, he has been wrong before—placed his faith, and his suspicions, in the wrong people."
"Haven't we all," Lupin said quietly.
Severus had no desire to make any kind of heartfelt chat with Remus bloody Lupin; he'd only meant to snub him. So he ignored the regret he heard in Lupin's voice as he mounted the steps to the Entrance Hall, Lupin (annoyingly) just behind him.
"One more thing." Severus stopped and pivoted so suddenly that Lupin had to stumble to the side to keep from knocking into him. "You are aware, I am sure, that Harriet Potter is a student at this school."
"Yes, Severus," Lupin said, sounding almost irritated. Fucking finally. "I do know how old she is, and Albus—"
"You will want to tread very carefully there." Severus moved deftly into Lupin's personal space, a technique he'd had cause to perfect over the years, so close his robes brushed against Lupin's legs. The werewolf tensed but didn't step away, as Severus had been hoping he would.
"Very. Carefully," he said, staring into Lupin's pale eyes that gave nothing away, not even the faintest hint of emotion. "If anything should happen to Miss Potter, I will be looking to you, Lupin."
Lupin didn't say anything; he only gazed coolly at Severus. But beneath Lupin's measured reserve, Severus thought he detected anger. In his face only, though: not a single thought stirred to the surface where Severus's Leglimency could detect it. Was Lupin an Occlumens? But even so, Severus should have seen something.
Perhaps Leglimency didn't work on werewolves. It bore investigating.
"House-elf," he said curtly.
One appeared at their knees, bowing low. He snapped, "Take care of this," and left, hoping he'd managed to get Lupin to feel for him even one thousandth of the hatred Severus held for him.
"I wouldn't have thought it possible," Remus said to Ermentrude, "but Severus Snape has managed to become even more unfit for human consumption than the last time I saw him—oh, must be fifteen years ago now."
Ermentrude did not answer because he was a non-magical potted boxwood. Remus arranged him on the windowsill, where he'd be able to catch the light.
The house-elf had showed him to a handsome set of rooms that faced over the lake. The air inside was stale and unlived-in, with a quality of reminded Remus of hotel rooms. Places that passed from person to person, or rather, that person to person passed through, developed a certain haunting feel, as if by belonging to everyone they could never belong to anyone.
"The curse upon it is very real. You will only serve three terms at the most, and several of its occupants have terminated their posts and their lives simultaneously. . ."
"A hotel and a funeral home," Remus murmured. Not a cemetery. Graves were marked with some sign of the person who decayed underneath them, which these rooms, when all the possessions had been removed, were not. But funeral homes were the hotels of the dead.
Remus wondered if that made Snape the mortician. He had all the personal warmth of a corpse, certainly. Remus couldn't imagine him as a teacher. In fact, the thought of it lay somewhere in the vast stretch between hilarious and unnerving. He would've been better suited to a life as a prison warden; children could do nothing that would render them guilty enough to deserve Snape's level of menace. And even after tending bar in a place frequented by hags, vampires, banshees, and others who'd fallen off the broad spectrum of humanity, Remus still found that Snape was one of the more menacing people he could easily bring to mind.
They'd wondered about him, all those years ago. Lily had been definite that he at least wanted to be a Death Eater, and he'd certainly been thick with the Malfoys and with Regulus, who just as certainly had been part of Voldemort's inner circle. Rumors had scorched their way across the papers during the long months of the never-ending post-war trials . . . Remus had disappeared from the wizarding world for two years after that Hallowe'en, but he'd read up on them years after, grimly determined to learn all he could. Some of the trials had never been publicized, however, and if Snape had gone to trial, his was one of those closed to public record.
But Remus couldn't imagine Dumbledore letting Snape work with children if he had ever worked for Voldemort.
He clicked open his briefcase and began pulling out of it the few possessions he'd managed to hold on to through the years of evictions, repossession and poverty. His books, some so battered he'd learned book-binding to keep them readable (and thereby, through freelancing, managed to employ himself off and on over the years). His few robes, so patched they were more patch than original cloth. A hideous Ormolu clock that had once belonged to his grandmother, then his mother, and finally to himself; his bedroll, which at least he wouldn't need here; a small 17th century Potter heirloom Norwich carpet Lily had given him when during her pregnancy she had taken a sudden and complete loathing to it.
Harriet.
Remus laid out the rug on the floor in front of the hearth, which the house-elf had lit so discreetly he hadn't even seen it happen, and set his clock on the mantle. His ritual for every new place he came to.
Her name should have been Holly. Harry for a boy, Holly for a girl. Lily and James had decided it, after eight months of bickering that everyone had known was really an expression of love, elation and fear. They'd decided on the names only two days before labor had set in and terrified them all. But when the baby had been born, Lily had burst into tears and wept that she just didn't feel like a Holly. So they'd named her Harriet instead.
Remus and Sirius had said the name was too dowdy and old-fashioned. "She'll never get a date with a name like bloody Harriet," Sirius had protested, and James had lit up eagerly and agreed with Lily; she was much more a Harriet than a Holly.
Sirius had refused to call her Harriet. He'd called her "holly berry" instead, to Lily's annoyance; until one day the baby's eyes had changed from that milky, indeterminate blue of all babies to a bright, startling green, the same shade as her own, almost the same shade as holly leaves. And then Lily had stopped grinding her teeth at every "holly berry." And then she and James had gone into hiding and taken the baby with them.
And then Sirius had killed them.
Remus sat down in the armchair next to the fire. The brightness hurt his eyes, though he scarcely saw it.
It never made sense whenever he thought of it. He could still hear the way Sirius had said holly berry, so like the way Lily had hummed the baby to sleep on her chest as they'd fallen asleep together on the couch, or James used to hold her in the air and swoop her around like she was flying on a broom. They were all the same. It should have been as unthinkable for Sirius to have sent Voldemort to kill that child as it would have been for James or Lily to have done it. Remus couldn't, had never been able to, think about it without wondering why it felt so wrong.
Because he loved her. Because he loved them. Because he loved. . .
Remus rubbed his hand across his eyes. However little sense it made, it had happened.
. . . he told himself, one more time.
"Was it the Defense teacher?" the girl wanted to know that evening when he summoned her to dinner, after successfully managing to avoid her all afternoon. "What's he like? Or is it a she? We haven't had a lady teacher yet."
"You have several," he said, "or have you forgotten your Head of House?"
"I mean for Defense."
"It's a man." Arguably, he thought. But he knew enough about Gryffindors, and especially this one, to suspect that telling her Lupin was a werewolf would only triple his stock as a person of interest.
"What's he like?"
He's a two-faced animal. "I can't think why you would imagine I have any desire to discuss him. Eat your dinner," he said, and sought refuge in the other room.
He had the hope, though it was halfhearted at best, that she would simply retire to her room after she'd finished eating, but she was developing a bold and worrying habit of hanging round and trying to make conversation. If he'd had a sense of humor, her brave but awkward attempts to find something to talk about with him might have been amusing. As it was, he found the experience intensely uncomfortable, as if a joke he didn't understand was being played on him by someone he couldn't see.
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. Someone had said that, hadn't they? With the girl poking around his rooms, looking at his things, asking him what he was reading, he felt every inch that audience.
His Inner Hufflepuff reminded him that he'd wanted to earn her trust. He had wanted it, he still did, but he wasn't sure he really had it, and he didn't see what having a miniature Lily-Potter hybrid cluttering up his personal space with nosy questions signified of trust.
"I read some of that book you gave me," she said, suddenly and out of nowhere.
It was only years of habit at controlling sudden movements that kept him from starting up from his chair. He hadn't heard her come in; she moved as quiet as a cat.
"I'm not sure I got it," she went on, picking at a loose splinter on his door frame. "Although I was thinking some things."
"Congratulations." He eyed her warily, in case she should come any closer and decrease the good twelve feet of space between them.
She gave him another Minerva-like look. "I wasn't sure what it meant by all the hope versus despair stuff, but I was thinking—whenever I remembered things that made me really happy, they were all tied to stuff that had made me feel really terrible. And it was hard to think of the happy things without remembering the bad things, and I couldn't cast the Patronus while I was thinking of things that had made me unhappy."
Severus was almost stunned. He would have said Longbottom was capable of quantum physics before he'd have expected this level of introspective awareness from any spawn of Potter, especially one so stubbornly hard-headed as this child had proved to be.
"Is that why the Patronus is so hard to cast?" she asked. The intensity of her focused stare was almost unnerving. "Because when you think of happy memories, you also remember sad things? But," she went on before he could reply, though he almost wasn't sure how to, "not all happy memories come from unhappy ones."
"It is because the type of joy necessary for the Patronus is linked to despair," he said. "Simple happiness or pleasure has a less potent inverse."
She was quiet for a few moments. Then she said, "But then how are you supposed to cast it?"
"You put the despair from your mind," he said. "You simply don't think about it."
Her forehead creased. "How?"
"By training your mind not to."
She stared at him resolutely, brow furrowed, and then bit her lip. But instead of deflating, she looked determined. Weary, but determined. "No wonder hardly anyone can do it."
Hardly anyone has slain a Basilisk, either, he thought, but he didn't say it. It would be too close to praise, and he didn't do praise. It didn't suit him.
He groped for a piece of reading on the table next to his chair and, finding something that seemed plausibly legible, opened it. It was a knitting catalog. The hell? This had to be Dumbledore's, but he had no idea why it was in his room.
"Hermione bought me Travel Scrabble for my birthday," the girl said, apropos of nothing, "but I haven't got to play it yet."
"And yet you've survived admirably," Snape said, throwing the knitting catalog away.
"Have you ever played?" she asked.
That actually made him look at her, though he didn't have the slightest idea what to say. She stared expectantly back.
"Want to play Scrabble?" she asked, in a tone that suggested if he was going to be that way, she would ask outright.
When he just kept staring, at an absolute loss for words, she said, "Or hangman or something? Have you got cards? I'm rubbish at chess."
"You want to . . . play Scrabble," he said, feeling like she'd asked him something very different and he'd had to translate for the last thirty seconds.
"Yeah," she said.
He pressed his fingers over the crease between his eyebrows. This had to be a fucking joke. Not from her, but certainly from life, or the creator, or whatever force propelled the rightness and lunacy of the universe.
"If I endure one game, will you find something to do on your own?"
"Okay," she said happily. "Wait here?"
He grunted. Seemingly deciding she wouldn't get any plainer assent than that, she dashed away.
He looked at Lily's photograph. He'd been going to say, "Your child is peculiar indeed if she's voluntarily seeking my company." But the photograph was staring where the girl had stood, a look of yearning grief on its face, so powerful it transformed her into someone he didn't quite recognize, because he had never seen Lily look like that.
For the space of a heartbeat, he thought about removing the invisibility spells from the frame. The girl would see it—she always stared owlishly at Severus's things, each time she came, even though he never had anything new around—and she'd surely ask to touch it. He could almost picture her happiness, the photograph's multiplied joy.
And he could certainly hear the questions it would raise. He had no desire to answer those questions. He couldn't answer them. Not even to make these last pieces of Lily happy.
But for the first time, he almost wished he could bear it.
Harriet scrambled through her trunk and chucking socks around willy-nilly (though careful of the Sneakoscope Ginny and Ron had sent her for her birthday, along with the newspaper clipping of them on holiday), until she found the game stuffed underneath her schoolbooks. She'd not yet taken the plastic off. Then she dashed back to Snape's rooms, feeling triumphant at finding the door still unlocked.
Her triumph was slightly dented to find Snape in the exact place she'd left him, reading through his boring-looking papers and clearly intending to be as un-fun as possible. She was reminded of Ron when Hermione suggested he start his homework early, or of Hermione when Harriet tried to wheedle her into flying. It figured Snape would hate playing games.
"Okay," she said a few minutes later. "I set it up."
Acting very put upon, Snape set his reading aside and came resignedly into the room where she always ate her dinner, and where she'd laid out the game on his messy table. She'd been very careful to arrange his moldy old journals to the side so they wouldn't fall over.
"It's Muggle—" she started to explain.
"I know what Scrabble is, Miss Potter." He was eying the table as though what she'd really brought was a pile of Hedwig's owl droppings.
"You're going to make really long and hard words and win as fast as possible, I bet," Harriet said, starting to feel resigned along with him.
"Seeing as I'm allowed only seven tiles at one time and the game is only over when the tiles are all gone, I don't think that strategy would be particularly effective." He paused, then said, half under his breath, "Pity."
Harriet chose to ignore this spoil-sporty spirit. As if Snape had soured the game against her, though, she wound up with three Y's, a D, a Z, an X, and a G.
"Crap," she said.
"No better than chess, hm?" Snape said, and spelled morbid.
It was a lot like playing chess—with Ron, who repeatedly trounced her and always won in an embarrassingly few minutes. Snape got triple word scores without even trying, and Harriet was stuck with her stupid X. He came up with words too quickly, too, while Harriet was hard-pressed to think of even simple words like "chimp." And when she did think of it, she realized she didn't have a P.
"I don't know why Hermione got me this game," Harriet grumbled as she struggled to add up Snape's score. (Hers was about twenty-five, his somewhere around two hundred and thirty.)
"You forgot to carry the one," Snape said.
Harriet dejectedly scratched out 230 and wrote 240. "Unless it was because she wanted to use it to get back at Ron for always flattening her at chess. And then Seamus and Dean sit around and cheer whenever his players smash hers. Or mine."
"You're their superior at Qudditch, Miss Granger at academics," Snape said with a bored sigh in his voice. "You can't expect adolescent boys to be inferior and mature."
Harriet had no idea what to make of this. Was he being serious or mocking her? She decided she'd probably never know (though the mocking seemed more likely, since it was Snape). She looked at the new tiles she'd pulled. An A and an M. "Ooh. . . "
"Xanthum?" Snape read as she beamed at the board.
"It's a word. It's used in shampoo and salad dressing and stuff."
"Xanthum gum," he said, and she wasn't sure whether to be disappointed that she hadn't stumped him or relieved because he knew it and couldn't argue the realness of her word. "You haven't any 'gum.'"
"So?" she said defiantly, adding the slightly more impressive score—double word points!—to her pitiful twenty-five. "Xanthum gum is two words, and I got one of them. It counts."
Someone tapped on the door. Snape raised his voice: "Yes, what?"
Professor Dumbledore opened the door, wearing a long traveling cloak. It was the first time Harriet had seen him since he'd left the Grangers' house on her birthday. The electric blue suit was gone, replaced with robes that might once have been a startling purple, but they were so soaked it was hard to tell. He must have just returned from Sirius Black-hunting, and he clearly hadn't been expecting to see what he was now seeing, because his somewhat tired expression changed to one of pure surprise.
"Severus," he stated. "Harriet. A very good evening to you both." He looked curiously at the Scrabble board. "Is that a game of sorts?" he asked with even more surprise.
"It's Scrabble," Harriet said, blushing.
"Miss Potter has been experiencing persistent and incurable boredom," Snape said, folding his arms, "which she thought this might alleviate."
"Ah." Dumbledore smiled, but for some reason Harriet felt obscurely guilty, like she'd been caught doing something . . . not exactly wrong, but . . . inappropriate, maybe. She had no idea what it could be, though. "In that case, I hate to have to interrupt you both, let alone spoil your game, but I'm afraid I find myself constrained by circumstance."
"It's almost finished," Snape said, arms still folded.
"I'm afraid it cannot wait," Dumbledore said. There was apology in his voice, but something else seemed to be going on between him and Snape, some kind of silent and untranslatable communication.
"It's all right," Harriet said, scooping the tile holders and the score pad into the box and snapping the board shut. "It's for traveling, so you can put it away and . . . it's fine, I'll go."
"Thank you, my dear," Dumbledore said, smiling like she'd done him an enormous favor.
She smiled back awkwardly, strangely embarrassed, and said, even more awkwardly to Snape, "Thanks. G'nite, then," and left, wondering why she hadn't felt embarrassed or awkward for roping Snape into playing Scrabble with her until someone else saw she'd done it.
She tossed the game onto her bed and rolled down next to it. For a few moments she stared up at the ceiling. Then she sighed.
"Now I'm bloody bored again."
When the door shut behind the girl, Dumbledore did not immediately speak. He watched her go, and then he looked at Severus, who started re-positioning the rubbish on the table the girl had nudged aside to make room for the game board. She had done it very carefully, lining up his stacks of moldering old journals in straight rows.
The air was thick with surprise verging on disapproval, wafted in by Dumbledore. It made Severus's teeth ache. For once he'd been humoring the silly girl, and Dumbledore was going to act like a Sunday school preacher about it.
"Scrabble?" Dumbledore said eventually.
"It's a Muggle word came," Severus replied at his most sneering. "A birthday present from Miss Granger," he added in a tone designed to mock the way the girl had said it.
"I'm very surprised to see you playing it with her," Dumbledore said, so plainly that Severus actually stared at him. It wasn't like Dumbledore to cut this close to the chase.
"You haven't had the persistent brat on hand for the past two weeks, constantly lamenting how bored she is. It's been driving me up the wall. Short of sedating her, I had run out of ways to get rid of her."
"It isn't like you to be kind," Dumbledore pointed out, which was the exact truth and for some reason was fucking annoying. In any typical conversation, he would only be this annoyed for Dumbledore's suggesting he was being kind; but just now, he was inexplicably offended at the implication that he couldn't suppress his repulsive urges long enough to play a single bloody game of Scrabble. (Though it had taken aeons, while the girl chewed on her scoring pencil and agonized over her word choices.)
"Call it a moment of storm-sent madness," he ground out. Then he decided to cut to the chase. "Unless you're implying that I was setting up a seduction scheme to entrap a thirteen-year-old girl—in which case you had better sack me right now, if you believe I'd do any such bloody thing—and with someone who can't even spell 'chimp' correctly—I wish you'd get out what you want to say. I've plenty of things to do now that I'm not stuck playing a never-ending sodding game of Scrabble."
"Severus, I'm implying no such thing," Dumbledore said, looking truly astonished.
"No?"
"No," he said, quite firm. "But you must admit she is getting very near the age where such . . . tête-à-têtes are verging on impropriety."
"If you really thought that, you wouldn't have made me Head of Slytherin. I've had tête-à-têtes with girls that age and older for the past twelve years, and you've never breathed a word of whatever shock your sensibilities have just suffered."
"Conferencing is part of your duties as Head," Dumbledore said. "I've never heard of you . . . relaxing with any of your students before, however."
"You've absolutely no concept," he said incredulously, "if you think that was in any way relaxing. It was tedious and insipid. Miss Potter has a vocabulary and spelling that would make Rowena Ravenclaw turn in her grave, and she's entirely incapable of thinking without chewing on something."
Dumbledore looked at him with something so like exasperation that Severus almost didn't believe what his eyes were telling him. All the times spent in effort to ruffle Dumbledore, turning every trick in his considerable arsenal of personal habits that could've pissed off the Pope and never visibly succeeding, he now managed it without actively trying?
"I can't help thinking you're being deliberately obtuse, Severus," Dumbledore said. "But," he went on before Severus could vent his indignation, "I know you're intelligent enough to understand me, so we shall leave it there. How does Remus's potion come along? He thought you were both making progress, but with his lamentable Potions expertise, he said, he was wary of asserting more than that."
"Idiot," Severus said, transferring his annoyance with Dumbledore to thoughts of Lupin. "I told him we're still testing. How did he fail to understand that?"
"Forgive me," Dumbledore said. "It was two days ago now that he and I exchanged letters. I've only just returned."
"Yes, the cloak tipped me off," he said acidly, but Dumbledore's equanimity had returned and he only smiled.
"So everything is, as the Muggles say, ship-shape then?"
"As it can be. Lupin and I have . . . talked . . . " Severus didn't try to stop his lip from curling. "And he agrees he needs to transform in a safe location for this first trial."
Dumbledore regarded him over the tops of his spectacles. "Do you not trust the potion?" he asked. "Or the man?"
Anger prickled through Severus's blood and he stared back, but Dumbledore was not an easy man to intimidate with any amount of fury.
"You know my opinion on the werewolf," he said. Disapproval surfaced in Dumbledore's gaze, but he ignored it. "As to the potion, I trust nothing until I've seen its affects firsthand. Lupin has never taken it before, and abnormalities are just as likely among werewolves as among humans."
"Werewolves are humans, Severus," Dumbledore said, the disapproval strong enough to hear quite clearly.
"No," Severus said, "they aren't. Call them people if you like, but this potion proves that they are, in fact, categorically separate. This potion wouldn't work on a human nervous system except as a quick and deadly poison. Allow that I know more about this subject than you do," he said impatiently when Dumbledore only continued to stare at him with that palpable censure. "I do not dispute that you are a genius in many areas, if not most, but I do know more about this one potion, at least, than you do."
"I'm quite sure you know more about every potion than I do," Dumbledore said candidly. "It is an area in which you are, indisputably, a genius. But I do not like your letting your personal feelings about Remus transfer into prejudice toward those affected with his condition—"
"It isn't prejudice," Severus retorted with a flash of molten anger, "it is scientifically sound."
"That is what pure-bloods say about Muggle-borns," Dumbledore said, but if that reply was designed to assuage Severus's anger, it failed pathetically.
"It is entirely possible there is a genetic difference between pure-bloods and Muggles," Severus said sharply, "the same way it's entirely possible there's a genetic difference between a concert pianist and someone who's as tone deaf as a rock—the same way the Wolfsbane's effect on werewolves suggests there's a material difference between a person affected with lycanthropy and you."
"Of course there's a difference, Severus, but a difference doesn't spell a lack of humanity—"
"I am not saying werewolves are subhuman, I'm saying they're—forget it," he snarled, "I'm not remotely in the mood to debate this. I am brewing Lupin's prophylactic, which by all rights should poison him to death, not simply sedate him, and he's agreed to my conditions for the students' safety. That is all. If you've nothing further to accuse me of, you might get on and leave me to finish up my work."
But Dumbledore didn't move. "I know it's difficult for you," he said at last, sounding, contrary to Severus's every expectation, understanding. "Having Remus here, and Sirius Black out there. But if you—"
Severus didn't wait for him to finish. He strode into the next room and slammed the door.
He stood there, breathing harshly, the oppressive force of his anger pressing obliterating silence on his ears. If Dumbledore moved in the next room, Severus didn't hear.
It wasn't until almost a full minute had gone by that he at last heard Dumbledore's rustling step, and the outer door swinging softly shut behind him.