Remus had wiped the Map clean and stuffed it in his pocket to hurtle mindlessly through the castle, which, as things turned out, was not the best of approaches. In that state of incriminating disarray, he almost plowed straight into Snape.
Even at the time, his heart jolted with the near-miss.
Making his quick way downward, he was so distracted that he passed over the proper moving staircase; he had to step off on the first floor and rush down an alternate stair pretending to be an empty drop into nothing. Just before he skidded around the corner into the main foyer, he heard the rustle of a cloak on stone.
Snape, the functioning part of his brain supplied, recognizing the complete absence of footfalls. Remus had noticed before that Snape must wear soft-soled shoes, because you never heard him stepping.
Slowing, Remus drew himself back against the wall and peered round the corner.
It was Snape, looking as menacing as ever in the torchlight. He had on a thick traveling cloak and was pulling on a pair of gloves.
Where was he going, so late in the evening?
There was no telling, but it seemed to be for a prolonged walk. A moment later he'd swung open one of the main doors and slipped out, pulling it shut behind him. A moment after that, Remus saw the wood shimmer silver with the application of a spell.
Of course Snape would want to know who went outside after him.
Well. . . Remus didn't have to take that door. There was more than one way onto the grounds.
The world outside was all silver and black; the endless night sky, tangling with the trees, and the fields of snow, the moon reflecting of the towers that rose behind Remus. The paths down to the forest were frozen over. The entire world was silent.
The Whomping Willow stirred as he drew near. He raised his wand to levitate a stick into the knothole—but the tree suddenly froze, arrested without his help.
Sirius
All the thoughts wiped blank from his mind, except for those three syllables, that name, isolated, he lit his wand.
A pair of golden eyes flashed in the darkness, and he almost ceased to breathe.
But it was a cat. An enormous, squat-faced, ginger cat. It gave him a look of unmistakable feline superiority and vanished into the darkness beneath the roots.
And once the cat had gone, the tree's upper branches began to shiver. Remus quickly levitated the branch, paralyzed the tree, and slipped beneath the roots, sliding down through muddy snow.
The smell of earth and ice was almost overpowering. He didn't see the cat.
He put his wand out. He couldn't crawl with it in his hand, and sticking the light between his teeth would only serve to blind him.
He knew this tunnel the way he knew the Map, besides.
For ages he crawled, until he saw the vague lightening patch at the end that would bring him above ground. Hoisting himself out of the hole, into the dusty, broken, derelict house, he might have passed fifteen years through time.
There were paw prints in the dust. Small ones, presumably belonging to a cat, and larger ones.
Belonging to a dog.
The imprints padded across the floor, up the stairs to the second storey, then down the hall to a room where Remus knew a shredded, decaying bed lay.
The house was almost silent but not quite. It was filled with the creak of the walls, shifted by the wind. The groan of the floorboards where he stepped. The pulse of his heartbeat in his ears. The rasp of his breath.
Did he feel calm? Did he feel nothing? Or was this an emotion so new and foreign that he couldn't even name it?
When he pushed open the door at the end of the hall, he saw a patch of ginger in the gloom: the cat, sitting on the bed next to the black dog he thought he'd prepared for, but now found he hadn't prepared anywhere near enough.
Padfoot.
Sirius
The dog looked up at him. The cat stood, arching its back and flexing its claws out. Then it sat, curling its tail about its feet, and began washing itself.
The dog didn't move. It just looked at Remus, while the cat tried to wash the back of its own neck. The house groaned and his heart beat, hard.
This was. . .
. . . not how Remus had imagined this going.
A thousand possible openings flashed through his mind, quick as a lightning storm; some inappropriately humorous (when did you get a cat), some questions he'd been keeping for twelve years (how could you have done it how could you have left), even some spells that would (avada). . .
But when he heard his own voice, all it said, all it half-whispered, was, "Padfoot."
And as if that word had been the spell he'd uttered, the dog changed into a man.
Remus' first thought was He doesn't look at all like Sirius. This man standing in front of him looked like the man in the WANTED posters, not like Sirius. Remus had seen that picture plenty of times, in the newspapers and on every surface in Hogsmeade that could be given up to it; but the dead-eyed face had so little resembled the man he had known that he could easily turn his mind away from it. It was easy to think There's the man who killed Lily and James but it was never quite Sirius; that man might be a murderer, a traitor to Remus and James and Lily and Peter and Harriet, but he wasn't Sirius. . .
Remus couldn't stop thinking: Sirius' face is handsome, full of laughter, a kind of sharp laughter, sometimes, that can darken quickly to anger, but laughter nonetheless; it's not gaunt, skeletal skin stretched tight over bone, dark hollows around the eyes and mouth, haunted, grim; his hair is thick and shining, not this matted, colorless tangle; he stands casual and proud, almost arrogant, not hunched and wary and half-feral. . .
Why should he be wary of me? he wondered distantly.
Remus stared at—this stranger. The stranger stared at Remus.
Kill him, whispered a voice inside Remus, perhaps the voice of his conscience or something altogether darker. Every second you leave him alive you're betraying them, you're endangering her. . .
He couldn't even think her name, that poor, sweet child.
This isn't Sirius, it's their murderer, you've told yourself this, and here he is in front of you; you've satisfied your curiosity, you've answered the question; Sirius is gone, this is all that's left. . .
"Waiting for me to talk first?"
Remus saw the man's lips move, but that voice didn't sound like Sirius' any more than the face resembled his. It was rasping and hoarse, worse than Remus' after the full, not deep and resonant and rife with Muggle swear words.
Remus only continued staring at him. Something flickered, not in the man's eyes, because they were nearly sunken in the deep hollows in his face—but in the ravages of his face.
"Did you ever imagine what it'd be like?" said the-man-who-was-not-Sirius in the voice-that-was-not-Sirius's, and it struck Remus that this man did not sound mad at all. Azkaban was supposed to drive you out of your mind, but these were not the words of a madman. He sounded quite sane, all things considered. . .
Kill. Him, whispered that voice again. It's what you should do. Or bring him to be Kissed—
But everything inside him recoiled—
The man's face flickered again.
"You didn't see him on the Map, did you," he asked, his croaking voice carrying currents of emotion—resignation and menace. "The fucking coward got out of it."
The return to swearing was as soothing as the context was bewildering, and it was that which made Remus finally find his voice. "What?"
"Peter."
The shadow that fell across the man's face was chilling. It was closer to what Remus had expected to find, rather than this. . . understated grief, and for a moment, almost for that moment, he could have been. . .
"Crookshanks told me the bloody fucking rat got away not two hours ago."
"Crookshanks?" Remus said, revising his estimate of this man's mental state.
"The cat, Moony."
Remus looked at the cat, which had tucked itself into a meatloaf position and appeared to be napping.
"The cat. . . told you Peter. . . what?" Have you forgotten you blasted Peter into so many pieces they only ever found his finger?
Perhaps he'd gone so long without confronting anybody about anything that he couldn't do it even in these circumstances.
The man swore, a half-muttered string of creative filth that rose in volume here and there, and he stalked to the left of the bed and then back again. In this moment, at least, he looked fully Azkaban-mad. The cat—Crookshanks—slitted its yellow eyes open and watched him pace.
He fumbled at the tatters of clothing he was wearing. Remus gripped his wand, but the man didn't notice.
"There," he croaked. "Look."
It was a piece of—paper? Remus cautiously floated it over to himself and then lit his wand. Newsprint. A half-page article with a photograph of people waving against a desert backdrop.
"These are the Weasleys," he said.
"The rat, look at the rat. On the boy's shoulder. . ."
Remus passed his wand-light over the paper until he found a boy—it was Ron—with, yes, a rat on his shoulder.
"It's Peter." The man's voice was gaining an urgent, half-desperate, yet still-menacing edge. "How many times did we see him transform? He's missing the last toe on his front paw. . ."
It was true. And the rat did look like Wormtail. . . plump and squat, it had the same slightly crooked muzzle. . .
"Peter wasn't missing a toe," Remus said slowly.
"He cut it off—when I cornered him—he left it behind, turned into a rat, left everyone to believe I'd blasted him to bits—"
The only piece they could find of him, Mrs. Pettigrew had sobbed over the box containing Peter's little finger. . .
The room tilted around Remus, but he gripped his wand and pressed his heels into the floor.
"Have you got the Map?" the man said, eying him almost desperately. "I had the cat bring it to you—so you could see—if you saw Peter—"
"Peter's dead," Remus said, the room tilting more sharply now; no amount of steadying himself would right it completely. "Like James—"
"He faked it!" For a second, the other man's face was absolutely mad—with fury, and with anguish— "He faked it twelve years ago and he's fucking done it again! Both times when I almost caught the fucking traitor—last time he cut off his own finger, this time he bit himself, left blood on the sheets, the cat's just told me—"
Remus was more convinced than ever that this was raving, but—why wasn't he attacking?
"Do you have the Map?" he broke off his rant to demand.
Remus was startled at being suddenly addressed. "You can't think I'm going to give it to you."
"I gave it to you!" His eyes were wild, burning in those hollow pits. "So you could see—I can smell him out, I can find him, I know exactly where he is—or I did, until the cowardly shit ran for it—the Map, Moony, we can find him on the Map, he's still got to be in the castle—"
"Sirius. . ." Remus wanted to pull at his own hair, or bury his face in his hands, or something; he hadn't meant to say the name, to validate—
But it was only more self-denial. He knew this was Sirius, the way he'd always known he'd never turn him in.
"It wasn't me," Sirius said hoarsely, his face becoming even more haunted than before. "I wasn't their Secret Keeper. I changed with Peter—at the last minute—he was the double-agent—"
"What?"
"I. . ." Sirius' expression flickered again, with something that on a face less hollow might have been shame. "I thought. . . it was you. So I convinced. . . James was going to use me. . . but I told him to. . . I. . ."
The room remained tilted, and now Remus' head was spinning in the opposite direction. And then, with a wrenching jolt, they both stilled, at such an angle that he was utterly disorientated, though he could see everything clearly.
"You thought I was the spy."
Sirius' face flickered again, and he nodded, the movement almost imperceptible.
"And that I'd tell Voldemort you would be the key to finding Lily and James."
Sirius dropped his eyes and nodded again. His hands were clenched into fists, his tendons standing out as harsh as bone.
"So you convinced them to make Peter their Secret Keeper. . . and it turned out Peter was the spy all along."
Sirius lowered his head. If it was a performance, it was a good one.
A very, very good one.
"That's what you're saying, at least," Remus said calmly.
"It's what happened, Moony," he rasped. When Remus didn't reply, Sirius raised his head, his eyes burning in the hollows of his face. "Look at the Map," he urged. "It never lies, you know it doesn't. . ."
"You helped make it," Remus said. "You could have enchanted it."
"No I couldn't have," Sirius asked, sounding normal again, looking almost exasperated. "You know it needs all—all four of us to change anything."
That was the truth. Remus hadn't forgotten, but to hear him say it, to hear his voice breaking on the words all four of us. . .
"You want me to believe you're here to kill Peter," he said, still calmly, "and not. . ." But he still couldn't say her name—
Every second you leave him alive, you're betraying her, whispered that voice again; and once again, everything inside him recoiled.
Sirius' gaunt, not-himself face was grief-stricken. "I'm not here to kill Holly-berry," he said, his voice so hoarse Remus' own throat ached in sympathy. "I've seen her. . . she's grown up so much. . . she's. . . she thinks I'm a dog. She calls me Snuffles. . . brings me food."
Remus was stunned. Then, with sudden and almost paralyzing force, rage boiled up inside him. Sirius must have seen it, because his face flashed with alarm and he threw his hands out, palms facing Remus, and dropped to his knees. It was an ancient pose of surrender, something pure-blood children of his class learned along with their genealogy charts and table manners (Sirius had had told them years ago, sneering). Remus had never even imagined him doing that, supplicating—
"Get up," Remus said, breathing harshly. "Get UP."
"I've got proof," Sirius croaked. "Proof she really—don't hex, all right?—Dobby."
If Sirius hadn't said don't hex, Remus surely would have let something fly at the startling CRACK! that followed. A house-elf, dressed in an odd assortment of clothes, appeared on the dusty floor between them.
"What is Harriet Potter's Snuffles needing of Dobby?" the elf squeaked. Then he saw Remus, and his tennis-ball-sized eyes widened liked he'd received an electric shock. He jumped between Remus and Sirius, almost like he was trying to act as a shield. "Professor Lupin is being here! Harriet Potter's Snuffles must hide!"
"Don't worry, mate, I saw him," Sirius said.
Remus eyed Dobby with suspicion. Under very different circumstances, he would have been amused to note the elf was doing the same to him.
"How do I know that's not really Kreacher?" he asked, while the name Dobby kicked at him in its familiarity.
"You know, Moony, it'd really be a help if you were a stuffy old inbred pure-blood," Sirius said, his croaky voice rather unsteady, "not a genetically sound half-blood. Then you'd know this is Narcissa and Lucius' old elf. Holly-berry freed him last year, he works in the Hogwarts kitchens now. Just ask her, she'll tell you," and if there was a pulse of urgency in his voice, Remus couldn't be surprised.
"Harriet Potter is the greatest, kindest, noblest witch ever to live!" Dobby asserted, his little face shining with rapt devotion. "She is freeing Dobby and saving Hogwarts from the evil monster of Salazar Slytherin, that Master Malfoy is releasing—"
He broke off, his eyes going even wider than before, and with an ear-wrangling cry of "Bad Dobby!" he hurled himself at the bed's foot-board.
Remus was too startled to react, but Sirius grabbed him before he could make contact, with the air of someone who had done this before. Crookshanks, disturbed from his perch, leapt to the floor, hissing.
"Thank you, Harriet Potter's Snuffles, sir," said Dobby weakly.
"I need you to tell Moony what Holly—Harriet told you to do," Sirius said, his eyes flicking between the elf and Remus. "About Snuffles."
"What is Moony, Harriet Potter's Snuffles, sir?"
"He means me," Remus said gently.
Dobby stood to attention, facing Remus. "Harriet Potter is saying to Dobby that she is needing him to look after someone-who-is-really-a-dog for her. She is asking Dobby to be bringing food to Snuffles and to see that he is being well, for it is being very cold outside. She says Snuffles is being her dog for many months now." He beamed.
Sirius was giving Remus a pleading look. Remus scrubbed his hand over his eyes, in part to avoid having to endure that expression.
"Did you find Wormtail?" Sirius asked Dobby, whose ears wilted.
"Dobby is trying, Harriet Potter's Snuffles, sir, but the Youngest Boy-Weasley is keeping his rat close because of the Hermy-own's cat." He nodded at Crookshanks; Remus blinked.
"Do you mean Hermione?" he asked.
Dobby nodded so vigorously his ears flapped. "That is the name, Professor Lupin, sir!"
"He got away," Sirius was snarling to himself, sounding quite mad again. "He got—little shit—not you, Dobby. Remus, please. The Map."
Sirius hadn't called him Remus until now. He'd always been "Moony" except for very private moments. Was it manipulation or a slip of the tongue?
But Sirius had never been manipulative. . . he hadn't had the subtlety or the patience. . . of them all, that had been. . .
Remus pulled the Map slowly from his pocket. He saw the yearning and the grief that suffused Sirius' skeletal face at the sight of it.
Looking away again, he said clearly, "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."
Sirius passed a shaking hand over his face, pausing for a long moment with it held over his eyes, while the inky trails of the Map bloomed in Remus' hands.
"Find him," Sirius croaked.
Dobby was watching them anxiously, even a bit awkwardly. Remus wanted to ask him to leave, but at the same time he felt a strange comfort in his presence.
Looking down at the Map, he saw Harriet's dot high in the Gryffindor girls' tower. His heart clenched at the sight of her name.
This might be your only chance, whispered that voice again.
If he's telling the truth, then Harriet has been alone with him many times and come to no harm. . .
IF he's telling the truth. Have you any solid evidence?
The house-elf—
He could have told it to lie. House-elves are madly devoted to their masters, and you never met Kreacher.
Kreacher was old. He's probably dead by now.
Any house-elf might have greater loyalty to a scion of the House of Black than to a half-blood girl.
He forced his attention back to the Map.
The longer he searched through the little black dots and along the inky stretches of the corridors without seeing what he sought, the further his heart sank. It had almost begun to make sense. . . more sense than what he'd always been told. . . and yet. . .
It was like a second loss, almost as cruel as the first.
"I don't see him." And his voice was hard.
Sirius' face flickered with disbelief and something that was nearly fear.
"Let me see it," he said urgently, his claw-like hand shaking as he held it out. "Let me see—"
"Absolutely not."
"Christ on a fucking bike, Moony, I know where Holly-berry sleeps, in the bleeding Gryffindor girls' tower on the highest floor. I'd never—" He looked at Remus, hard, an aching, burning look. "If you think I'd hurt that baby, you ought to kill me right now."
Dobby trembled but made no noise. The Malfoys had trained him well, Remus thought with acidic bitterness.
Remus stared down at the still-kneeling Sirius, who gazed unflinchingly back.
"Is that what you want?" Remus asked coldly.
"Christ fucking no," said Sirius. "But it's what you should do."
It was such a Sirius-answer, it almost broke Remus' heart. "You know I don't have the courage to do that."
Sirius looked startled, and then half-ashamed. Of Remus?
"Merlin, Sirius," Remus whispered, as pieces of his heart broke inside him, one by one, like the full moon snapping his bones in slow-motion. "What am I supposed to do with this? If you're telling the truth and I—" no, no, no "—but if you're lying. . ."
"I don't know." Sirius shook his head, looking so helpless Remus could almost convince himself that this really was someone else entirely. "I. . . I couldn't figure out a way even to try convincing you, until I found the Map—"
"How did you?"
"Holly-berry had it. I've no idea where she bloody got it, but I saw she had it and I had Crookshanks steal it—I had him bring it to you, because the Map doesn't lie, it can't be enchanted without. . . I didn't realize the boy was leaving for Christmas and taking Peter with him. . . so I stayed out of sight while he was gone, so you wouldn't see me without seeing him. . .
"I thought. . . I thought, sometimes, you might think to come to the Shack, so I stayed in the Forest for a while, until it got too bloody fucking cold. . . and after Hallowe'en. . . and none of the secret entrances or anything got boarded up, I figured you were keeping quiet about me, though I couldn't bloody guess why. . ."
"Couldn't you?" Remus asked bitterly, and then wished he hadn't.
Sirius actually looked away. "I thought you'd want me dead," he said quietly, after a long pause, so quietly Remus almost missed it over the creak and groan of the house.
Remus considered and discarded a thousand replies. "That would make more sense," he said at last.
Sirius looked back at him. The desperate, yearning hope in his face threatened to break Remus' heart all over again.
"Do you believe me?" he asked.
It was Remus' turn to look away from him. He looked at Dobby (good Merlin, was he still there?), at the cat, at the Map, and finally back at Sirius.
He took a steadying breath. "I. . ."
The streets were dark and cold, as inhospitable as the bright lights in the windows. Unseen and uninteresting out in the dirty snow, he passed by many faces laughing and talking and drinking, until he reached the plain, unmarked door that was even less interesting than himself.
Narcissa and her posh restaurants, Severus thought. He instinctively reviled any place where the waiters were better-dressed than himself.
At least Hogwarts' professors were accorded decent treatment everywhere in Hogsmeade; even ones as sour as Severus, who came in with muddy shoes and robes powdered with snow.
The restaurant was private, open only to invitation, and blessedly quiet inside. He was early. The waiter brought him a glass of cognac, and he accepted it without the smallest intention of drinking.
He pretended to relax next to the fire, though he certainly didn't really. Taking out a book—people only sat staring into the fire when they had something on their mind—he settled into a pretense of turning the pages at even intervals; the pace at which he really did read. He'd long since timed himself and made a habit of counting down in his head for situations like these, when he wanted to seem preoccupied with a book while he thought about something else entirely. He even moved his eyes from side to side and down the page.
He always used a book he'd read before so that he could answer questions if asked. The need had never come up, but for all his mental discipline, Severus had never mastered the art of being less than totally paranoid. If anything, he was disgusted that everyone was so uncritical that they believed he was reading just because his eyes were moving and his hands were turning pages.
He was trying to quell a persistent feeling that he'd been. . . followed. No, not followed, but—something. Something had been amiss. He'd felt it around the time he'd entered or left the entrance hall and not been able to shake it off. Even now it niggled at him, preventing him from absorbing a word of his book, though he knew exactly what page 157 was about.
Narcissa turned up seventeen minutes past the time she'd appointed, by which time Severus had been fake-reading for forty-three minutes and flipped through fifty pages without taking in a word. Although the lane outside was slushy and dirty, Narcissa looked as impeccable as ever. She shrugged off a spotless, ermine-lined cloak, matching gloves and hat, and joined Severus beside the fire. Like all pure-bloods of her class, Narcissa believed that dinners were meant to last for three hours at the least.
But Severus liked the little parlor. The head of a stag hung over the mantle—the form of James Potter's Patronus.
"Severus," Narcissa greeted. She never said "good evening" or anything similarly inane. It was one of the reasons the two of them got on. Lupin's and Dumbledore's little pleasantries grated on his nerves almost as much as Harriet Potter's snarky little comebacks.
"Haven't I seen you reading that before?" Narcissa twitted him as she took the armchair across from his.
"Some things may be enjoyed repeatedly," Severus said smoothly. "You notice something a little different with each new pass."
Narcissa accepted a blanc-cassis from the waiter. "Even in Muggle novels?"
She had certainly not requested he come down from Hogwarts to chat about Muggle novels, which she had not the slightest interest in; but any truly good Slytherin was patient, and although Severus despised having to be patient, he'd had cause to learn how. (If only he could pound it into Draco's head to do the same.) Narcissa was patient by nature as well as by design, and so Severus let her carry the conversation through her aperitifs beside the fire, down the carpeted halls to the private supper-room where hors d'oeuvres were served on a white-clothed table next to another fire, and throughout the multiple-course dinner. They had come there to talk about something very specific and dangerous, and they both knew that the more dangerous the idea, the greater vigilance one must observe at the safest moment to voice it. Pretty good safety would not do; it must be absolute. Each knew how unlikely it was that the waiters should be interested in their chat, or political enough to pose any probable threat; but when the price for laxity was high, it did not do to be lax at all.
It wasn't until the digestifs were served and the waiters sent off that Narcissa finally referred to the letter she'd sent him by owl at dusk.
"Have you—felt anything?"
"No." But you must know that. Lucius and I will have the same reaction. His mark was still as dark as it had been when Dumbledore asked two summers ago.
She tapped one fingernail on the table, and then stopped herself. "It is overanxious of me, I know. If. . . He. . . were to return, more than my cousin would have been freed. And yet. . ."
Draco, Severus supplied.
Her clear, light eyes searched his face. He'd known her long enough to detect the almost invisible traces of a plea. "You truly have heard nothing?"
"You would have heard more than I," he said, forbearing yet again to tell her about Quirrell.
"You are stuck minding the children," she said, "and I with the women. Drawing-room gossip and trousseaux—"
"Assignments and staff-room gossip are equally fatuous, I assure you."
"But your theory about that half-blood wastrel at Hogwarts, that he and my cousin were. . .?" Narcissa let the implication trail off delicately in her distaste.
"Black got out of Azkaban and into Hogwarts once already. How did he manage either, without help? Lupin was a free man when Black escaped, and a professor here when Black broke in—"
"Severus," Narcissa said in a soft, sharp voice as their cups began to rattle, independently of the table—which had also begun to shake.
He breathed evenly out, trying to banish the ways he'd like to rid the school of Lupin. But his usual breathing exercises didn't work; he was too angry; he'd been too angry for too long. He stood and paced, wishing the room were larger or his own, so that he could break things.
"The Headmaster doesn't believe you?" Narcissa pressed. "Don't you have his trust?"
"The Headmaster believes that people deserve second chances." He only treats them well if the transgressors hail from Gryffindor. "It feeds his assertions of his own goodness."
This conversation was getting him too bloody worked up. Measures more drastic than pacing were called for.
He regarded a rather twee porcelain statuette of a shepherdess stashed on the mantle. Then he picked it up and smashed it.
"Any improvement?" Narcissa asked, with a delicate disregard for this open display of emotion.
"No," he said, and broke one of the porcelain sheep.
"Dumbledore appears to be very sanguine about it all." Narcissa reached across the table and took Severus' untouched glass of limoncello for herself. "What does he do, with my cousin escaped and seeking his precious savior child? I've not seen that he has done anything, except for posting those monstrous creatures within arm's reach of our children."
"He doesn't tell me everything," Severus said, wishing he didn't feel so damned bitter about it.
In fact, Dumbledore had told him very little about anything this year. Ever since their quarrel in the summer, when Dumbledore had wanted to send the girl back to her Muggle relatives without telling her the truth and Severus had shouted and smashed things in his office, the old man had been oddly. . . distant. It was a cordial distance, half-abstracted, but Severus had felt it.
He didn't repent his temper—it had gained him his point, and the girl hadn't been left with those Dursleys—but it grated to be put aside for venting his spleen while Lupin, who concealed everything, was welcomed with complaisance. It appalled him to be snubbed, however gently, for caring whether Harriet Potter lived or died, while Lupin would sit back and let Black have her because he'd loved him, once.
Dumbledore wouldn't even hear the theory, but Severus was convinced that Lupin still loved Black. Perhaps Black was free only now because it had taken the werewolf twelve years to break Black out of Azkaban, and then Black was so fixated on killing Harriet Potter that Lupin permitted him the attempt.
Every time Severus thought it, the theory made him want to laugh; a bitter laugh, half mad, because it did seem like raving—and he never laughed, besides—but if it had been him. . . if that had been Lily in Azkaban—no matter what she'd done, he'd have found some way to free her, even if it had meant taking her place. If her first thought upon walking free had been to kill someone, he'd have helped.
And she hadn't even loved him back. If she had, the limits to what he'd have done. . .
He couldn't imagine any.
If Black had loved Lupin in return. . .
How was Harriet Potter still alive?
It frightened him, not knowing.
He reached out and smashed the porcelain lamb, leaving the mantle empty.
Harriet felt well enough in the morning that she decided to save Snape's black-bottle potion for another day (or month, even). Hermione, the masochist, refused to skive off Divinations to take an extra hour's sleep, but at least in the watery morning light she didn't look like she was on the verge of bursting into tears.
Still, Harriet had a decision to make.
"What do you think?" she heard Lavender ask Parvati while she considered. "The pink today, or the lavender?"
Harriet held up a hank of her hair, measuring the length in the mirror. No, that was a bit too short. . .
"The lavender won't go with the shade of pink I'm wearing," Parvati said. "We don't want to clash. . ."
That looked about right. She liked it when it was just a bit below her chin. Not so short it looked anything like a boy's hair, but not too long.
"Should I take Rudimentary Runology to breakfast or come back and get it at lunch?" Hermione muttered to herself. "And swap it out for Arthimantic Arithmatic. . ."
Harriet rooted in her dresser drawer and found her scissors. She squeezed them open and shut a couple of times to make sure they wouldn't stick, then raised them to her hair and cut off a large chunk of it. It dropped to the floor. She grabbed another hank, measured and cut that off, too.
She'd worked most of the way around her head before anybody noticed. When Parvati shrieked, she almost chopped her own ear off.
"HARRIET! What are you doing?!"
"Your hair!" Lavender cried. "Oh, Morgana!"
"It was driving me mad." Harriet brushed some tufts off her shoulder and snipped off the final bit of hair. Now at least she'd be able to get a brush through it. She fluffed it out a few times. "That's better."
When she turned around, Parvati and Lavender were wearing appalled looks, their hands over their mouths, and Hermione was holding Rudimentary Runology in one hand and Arithmantic Arithmatic in the other, and looking thoughtful.
"You can't really tell if it's uneven or not," she said. "With all the cowlicks."
"It looks awful!" Parvati said, shuddering.
"It always looks awful, though," said Lavender, almost like she was trying to be helpful.
"Thanks very much," Harriet said.
It turned out Hermione was right: Harriet's hair was always so messy that you couldn't tell she'd cut it herself with a pair of cheap Muggle scissors. No one commented on it all day—though Snape did glance at her and Hermione's table in Potions several times. It was noticeable because he normally ignored them completely, unless Hermione was getting on his nerves.
Professor Lupin was acting odd, too. He passed out group assignments (four to a group, and one of the four had a secret assignment to be the vampire, while the others' task was to figure them out and accurately defeat them), and while they worked on detecting each other and attacking with strategic cloves of fake garlic, he stared off into space. He would respond normally to questions, smiling and speaking calmly, but when no one needed him, he'd lapse into. . . abstraction? Was that the word?
As they were packing up, he asked Harriet if she might stay behind.
"Are you feeling better?" he asked once everyone had charged away to dinner. "Professor McGonagall told me you'd been ill over the weekend."
At least she didn't seem to have told him in what way. "I'm fine, thanks."
"I hope it wasn't from getting out in the snow to take care of your dog," he said lightly.
Harriet twitched. But he was smiling, his eyebrows raised.
"No," she said carefully. "Wasn't that."
"But you do have a dog," he said, like he was half-asking. "Don't worry—it's not an interrogation. My lips are sealed. I only wanted to make sure you were minding what you were doing. Even the fringes of the Forest are a dangerous place."
Harriet nodded along. She wasn't going to tell him about Dobby.
"It seems a rough week for pets," Professor Lupin went on. "I heard Ron lost his rat."
"Scabbers." She nodded again. Her newly short hair tickled her neck. "He's. . . erm, upset. He'd had him for twelve years or something. I'd be upset losing Hedwig and I've only had her for three. . ."
"Yes," Professor Lupin said after a strange pause, smiling oddly. "We all get attached." Another pause, and then he said, in a strange voice, "Losing someone is always sudden, whether they're quite old and declining, or it's entirely unexpected."
"Scabbers wasn't that old, really. Well, for a rat, maybe—but he always looked really healthy. Fat—he slept a lot, except for one time when he bit Goyle for us. But then he fell right back asleep."
Professor Lupin got a very odd look on his face, but his voice sounded quite normal now. "Then how did he—?"
"Crookshanks—that's Hermione's cat—ate him. Well, that's what Ron said. We didn't actually see it. . . but Crookshanks has been after him for months, and Ron found blood and cat hairs on his sheets. It's odd," she went on, "because other students have cats and you never hear of them eating other people's familiars, but Crookshanks has been after Scabbers since they first met."
Professor Lupin seemed to be thinking about something else. Harriet would have been put out—weren't they having a conversation? a conversation he'd started?—except then he looked at her almost like he'd seen a ghost.
He said, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. About your parents. Knowing them, that is."
Harriet was startled, but only for a moment; then she felt an anxious, desperate hope. Was he going to say something now? She held absolutely still, not daring even to nod, in case it should put him off what was on the tip of his tongue.
"It's difficult," he said, his eyes flicking here and there, leaving her face and then returning. It was like he wanted to keep eye contact but couldn't help looking away, and kept forcing himself to look back. "To talk about. . . what happened. Even the fact that I knew them. I. . . never was able to do it. Even with people who knew them, too."
He smiled again, but it seemed to battle with the rest of his face.
"The safe deposit box has your mother's jewelry in it. And some that belonged to your grandmother. Not really pieces appropriate for a thirteen-year-old girl to wear to school—I can't imagine Professor McGonagall letting them pass dress code inspection—but there might be something in there for you. . . or you just might like to have them. I thought."
Harriet's throat felt very tight.
"Thanks," she said hoarsely. "I'll send off for it."
He nodded, smiling rather oddly, and clicked his briefcase shut. Taking that as a signal, she left, but slowly. She didn't feel very hungry, all of a sudden.
Though she'd go down to dinner anyway. She wondered if Hermione would know how to write a letter to Gringott's.
Remus had thought he'd go mad, waiting the whole day to talk to Harriet, but after she was gone he was grateful that her class was his last of the afternoon. Whether she'd confirmed Sirius' assertions (and good God, she had) or debunked them, his head would have been too full to concentrate properly on his lessons. He'd barely managed it while wondering what she would say.
She had a dog (he hadn't been able to figure out a way to ask her subtly or reasonably about the house-elf), and Ron had lost his rat, who had been in his family much longer than rats should even live. . . twelve years. . . the exact span of time that. . .
What Sirius had claimed, Harriet had just innocently corroborated.
Remus' head ached. He dropped it in his hands.
It wasn't proof. The only complete truth would be Peter, and all those years ago they had deliberately enchanted the Map not to show a person's location on command. They'd had ideas of Snape stealing it in particular, and hadn't wanted him to be able to find them so easily. And without James and Peter, Remus and Sirius couldn't alter the Map in any way. Even a new map of a similar kind was likely beyond the two of them; the enchantments woven into Hogwarts' foundations had been so powerful that it had taken all their ingenuity and combined power to coax their way around them (and even so, they'd never been able to penetrate to the dungeons). Remus' powers had increased since he was fifteen, but Sirius said Azkaban had rendered his abilities so erratic that with a wand he might blow himself up trying to light a fire.
Remus would look into Locating Charms, but he had a feeling most of them wouldn't work at Hogwarts.
So you've decided you believe him, then.
Was it Conscience or that dark voice?
He couldn't even tell them apart.
"Doubt," he muttered to his silent, empty classroom, "is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother."
He didn't know which of the brothers was uppermost in his heart. He hoped to be right and feared being wrong; he wanted to trust Sirius; but either Sirius was a traitor or he hadn't trusted Remus all those years ago. . . and the truth was that Remus did not blame Sirius for not trusting him, when Remus had never trusted himself.