Old School Ties

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Disclaimer: I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us

#15: Old School Ties
[In which, among many other things, a very Auld Acquaintance is renewed.]

"You look tired," he said softly, coming into the flat on a breath of cold air and crossing to stand behind her chair, where he peered over her shoulder with what was, by now, reasonable understanding at the Style Sheet she was working on.

"Mm," she agreed, rotating her neck in an effort to loosen it, and rubbing absently at her own collar-bone. "I want to get this finished by tomorrow night, which isn't going to be easy with Beltane tonight and three hours' sleep, so I've been doing as much as I could today: but I don't want to give myself a Repetitive Strain Injury."

"Stop that," he said sternly, and she felt his deft fingers brush hers aside and begin to work their way firmly into the cramped muscle, rubbing and kneading. She relaxed back into the chair and let him, impressed at how well he had absorbed the technique just from being worked on himself... or had he already known how to do it? In the day he was for the most part this competent, even commanding creature; but the night brought desperate conversations in the dark while he raved and shook his way through some surrealist horror or other, made all the worse by knowing that the gist of it was miserable truth, even when dreaming blurred the details into hallucination. Sometimes, when the memory was especially traumatic, small objects around the room would explode and she had learned not to leave drinking-glasses or bottles in the bedroom or, gods forbid, the laptop.

Sometimes he took the Dreamless Sleep potion which Poppy had left for him, and then Lynsey got some sleep, too, instead of sitting up with him while he ranted himself sane again, and then lying awake for an hour afterwards fretting about him. But to go without dreaming every night would drive him mad in the long term. And it was a good thing that years of listening to the cats' stereo snuffling had left her fairly hardened to night-time noises, since the man snored like a tractor. Nevertheless, as deeply asleep as she might be, his shuddering distress was still enough to wake her.

She had expected that resuming teaching would leave him exhausted, as weakened as he still was: but so far he seemed to find the return to familiar rhythms invigorating and Minerva's support, her willingness to back him against a world which still largely reviled him, had eased something in him, Lynsey thought. As he was doing to her. She moved her neck again, more freely this time. "Much better. You're good at this, you know that?"

"I hope to be good at many things." He flexed his long fingers, grimacing. "You didn't tell me it hurt," he said plaintively.

"Does your thumbs in, doesn't it?" she replied sympathetically. "There's a way round that if you're doing a large area."

"What?" he said, sucking at the base of his thumb and looking consciously martyred.

"You take a hardish ball about an inch and a half across - that's what that rose-quartz ball in the knife-drawer is for, if you were wondering - and roll it up and down the affected area, using the palm of your hand. Much less trouble on the joints. But it doesn't work for bony, fiddly things like shoulders."

"Bony and fiddly describes me to a T, doesn't it?" he said lightly, stooping to give her a brief, rather tentative peck on the lips, and she tipped her head back for him to make it easier, and drew him down into a proper kiss. As far as their putative love-life went, they hadn't actually got as far as anybody actually achieving actual climax: but after several failed attempts Severus had at least stopped either shaking like a leaf or snarling at himself for his own weakness, and accepted that slow progress was better than no progress. Lynsey privately suspected that stopping worrying about it would prove to be half the battle.

"The Ministry have given us clearance to Floo from the day-school to Hogwarts on Saturday. You're sure you want to come? I can assure you it's not going to be nearly as interesting as you probably think."

"I wouldn't miss it. And I am the only expert on Klingon hunts you've got."

But first, before that, she had to show him something more of her own world. Before the May Bank Holiday Weekend came May Day itself, and before that Beltane, and the dancing on the heights. They drove down to Edinburgh in gathering dusk and he came with her up the steep-sided hill, his hand clasping hers rather nervously, to be pushed and jostled by the crowds swinging across the hillside below the fake Acropolis in the dark, stumbling as the weight of the congregation pushed them over the edge of a drop and bumped them down three feet onto the path below. The fire burned and the procession of the dancers swept through the darkness as the men dressed as red demons capered and gibbered and were driven back....

It was beautiful, as ever, but as unsatisfactory as it had been since the first few years of the festival, when the people on the hill were all believers and the army came to drum the darkness out. Then it had been real, or as real as a festival whose own organizers viewed it as Performance Art could ever be; but in later years it had for the most part been ravers and sightseers who came; the fire was choking with plastic rubbish and the midnight ceremony was not at true midnight, only at 12 p.m. by British Summertime which meant an hour earlier, and nobody thought that this mattered because nobody really meant it or really cared at what point the sun was truly underfoot and she resolved, as she resolved every year, not to come again. But it was one of the few occasions in the year when she could wear robes in public and not feel like a fool. The chance to go out dressed as herself was too good to miss, especially this year with Severus at her arm like a mantling eagle, striding out in his billow of black.

"I thought there would be power there," Severus said to her quietly, long after midnight as they made their way back down the steep, nerve-rackingly worn and irregular steps of wood and earth which would bring them out in Waterloo Place. "I thought it would be like it was in the caves, that I would feel the living earth again, but there was almost nothing...."

"There used to be, there was once, before the ravers took over. I don't know if the ravers drove the power away or if the festival died because the power is dying everywhere, but if you want to feel true power...."

The broad streets were almost deserted, just a few revellers trailing home from the Beltane Fire and the odd drunk or two, and it felt odd to be driving through such emptiness, even knowing that Kingsley Shacklebolt was wheeling somewhere overhead under the protection of Mad Eye's second-best Invisibility Cloak; but she took the car over the great cold span of North Bridge and down the tooth-rattling cobbles of the Royal Mile, around the side of the palace and into the vast darkness of Holyrood Park.

The land-locked cliffs of Salisbury Crags towered over them, as if they had stood at the bottom of an ancient sea, with the looming black outline of the lion slicing across the stars. "What is this place?" Severus asked quietly as they clambered out of the car, an edge of tension in his voice.

"Extinct volcano" Lynsey replied succinctly and he gave her a wall-eyed look, evidently not much reassured. "That - that hill there that looks like a lion - that's Arthur's Seat."

"Huh!" he said under his breath. "I spent most of my life on the boar's back, and now I shall be under the lion's paw." Lynsey remembered him telling her, in that other darkness deep under the chalk, that "Hogwarts" was probably a corruption of "hog, Art's" - the boar of Arthur.

She looked up at the crown of the lion's head where it reared above them; so unmistakable from this angle that it could be nothing else. She had always imagined the lion suddenly rising up, shaking the earth from its great mane and standing over the city, poised to kill or to protect. "A party from the Church of Scotland used to climb Arthur's Seat at dawn on May Day to bathe their faces in the dew - I dunno if they still do, but I always thought it was ironic that that was probably more authentically pagan of them than my lot leaping about on Calton Hill in tights and greasepaint. And they don't expect a bloody Arts Council grant."

She led him to the wide, sloping green skirt at the foot of the cliffs, all silver now and shadows, and urged him to lie down with her, flat on his back on the grass alongside her, his long fingers twined with hers. Moonlight silvered the edge of his sharp profile and glinted in one black eye as he turned his face towards her in the darkness.

As they lay there side by side, spread out flat against the skirt of the grass, she could feel her perception sinking into the ground around her, growing like roots, until she was aware of absolute position, of how the world stretched out around and away from her, everything in its place everywhere. "Can you feel it?" she said, as the sense of the power under the earth struck up through her spine, buoying her up as if over shifting, uncertain depths.

"Yes," he replied softly. "The heartbeat of the world."

Saturday morning dawned bright and cold. In view of the present troubles Diagon Alley and even (at least in theory) its dark twin had been warded against direct Apparition, so they were going to have to come in via the entrance from the Muggle world, and Severus was duly dressed in a cream shirt and black slacks, his robes slung over his shoulder in a bag. Lynsey too had her duffle - the same one which had been with them all the way through Chislehurst Caves - stuffed with robes and clean undies, although she had been assured that the Hogwarts house elves would take care of the laundry.

They Apparated from the area under cover of Muffliato, while the Order's agents kept watch, and landed in Trafalgar Square right next to a fountain. Nobody except the pigeons noticed their sudden arrival. Some quality in the magic seemed to prevent them from actually materialising in a space which already had a body in it - and given that fact, arriving in the middle of a crowd actually worked quite well, since anybody who saw them appear assumed they had just stepped out around somebody else.

Tonks met them by one of Nelson's lions, the very image in bronze of that greater lion which watched over Edinburgh. Today, her hair was a natural-looking golden-red, styled into a smooth shiny bob like a Twenties flapper's, and she was dressed in an amethyst-coloured jump-suit. "Still in black and white, I see," she said to Snape chirpily. "Even your mufti is sub fusc."

He frowned at her for a moment and then relaxed, evidently deciding she wasn't really mocking him, as such. "It's the price I pay for being pale," he said wryly. "My skin takes colour from anything I wear. If I wear blue, I look cyanosed; yellow and I look bilious.... I tried wearing green to inter-house Quidditch matches, to show willing, but it made me look as if I was going mouldy."

"Yeah, I see what you mean," Tonks replied, absent-mindedly developing a leaf-green streak through her gleaming hair. "'s a good thing sub fusc suits you, isn't it?"

Severus made a harrumphing noise and turned away to stalk through the crowds of tourists, irritably brushing off the inevitable pigeons as they plucked at his sleeves, hoping for grain. Lynsey would have liked to linger and buy a poke of corn for them from one of the vendors, but they were working to a deadline. The professor led her across the traffic to a tiny, shabby-looking pub at the start of Charing Cross Road, where the three of them retreated briefly to the lavatories to change into their robes. Lynsey felt indescribably freer, more centred and more engaged with the world around her once she could feel the flutter and weight of loose cloth settling across her shoulders, with the belt and the brass buckles and the feeling that now, at last, she was dressed up as herself.

The clientele at the bar were odd-looking, even by the standards of a university town like St Andrew's, but she didn't get much chance to stare before she was ushered through into a scrubby bit of courtyard at the back. A few authoritative taps on the back wall with the sycamore wand which she had made for him, and the bricks twitched aside and re-sorted themselves into an archway which let onto a winding, cobbled street.

Apart from the curves it looked, Lynsey thought, like a cross between the little complex of streets at the back of St Martin's Lane which occupied this same space in the Muggle world, and Rose Street in Edinburgh - except that at first sight the merchandise on offer did not look as esoteric as that sold in St Martin's Lane, or as eccentric as what was on display in Rose Street. But the closer she looked, the odder it got. Those weren't video displays flickering in the window of Game for Anything, but animated chess pieces, busily bashing each other with tiny swords. The petshop sold what looked like real live Tribbles, although Severus assured her they were called Puffskeins, and to her regret he steered her firmly past Don Juan's Dungeon before she could get a closer look at what appeared to be a wizarding sex-shop. There was an entire specialist emporium devoted to what at first glance appeared to be falconry equipment, but which proved to be intended for the care and upkeep of carrier-owls.

And the customers were odder than the goods. After meeting so many members of the Order of the Phoenix she had grown accustomed to the wizarding world's luridly ill-assorted fashion sense, but many of these were simply not human. She should have been used to that too, after knowing Remus and Hagrid, but it was different seeing a crowded street in which goblins made up a substantial minority, at least as common in this inner world as Japanese tourists were in the outer one. Severus quietly pointed out the goblin-run bank to her: a large white building somewhat in the Georgian mode, with a flight of steps leading up to the burnished bronze doors. Fiercely independent, the goblins had protected his assets, such as they were, from the Ministry, although he was only now being allowed access to them again.

At least the goblins treated him with the same blank disregard with which they appeared to view all humans. Far too many witches and wizards, seeing the professor approaching, drew aside from his path in a way which was just a little too pointed to be polite. After the third person had deliberately turned their back on him Lynsey threaded her fingers anxiously through his: he gave her an irritated sidelong glance, his brows flaring like a crow's wing, but the desperate tightness of his grip belied his apparent unconcern.

At his right hand, Tonks sauntered along beside him, looking surprisingly like trouble, and turned her nose up at the ill-wishers. Literally: Lynsey actually saw the end of the girl's nose change shape in order to dismiss them more effectively. But it was an unpleasant thought that he had to run this gauntlet of scorn every working day, even if he did have another Order member with him to watch his back at all times. She thought she would have been less worried about him if he had seemed to mind it more: there was something horrible about his patient acceptance of public obloquy.

That the wizarding world was deeply troubled could be seen just from looking; about every sixth shop, on average, was boarded up, and many of the shoppers had a harried, frightened air. Only the goblins appeared unconcerned.

Two large, adjacent premises, one of them apparently a former ice-cream parlour, had been converted into a small day-school. Crossing the threshold, Lynsey had a surreal moment where she thought she had somehow stepped into some sort of Welsh theme-park, so crowded was the room with high black hats. The Hogwarts school uniform seemed designed, as Pratchett had once said about the traditional jester's costume, to make the wearer look like a pillock. She tried to imagine Severus as he must have looked as a schoolboy, a scrawny little moulting crow of a child with his stringy hair and his boot-button eyes and his long nose fighting for pre-eminence with the ridiculous pointed hat, and was stranded somewhere between amusement and wincing pity. He had always been odd; isolated within a culture which might seem to an outsider to value oddness, but did so only within its own regimented rules.

But at least when these youths stepped back out of the professor's way there was wary respect on their faces rather than scorn, and Minerva, Filius and Poppy, who were to go with them to Hogwarts, greeted them both with a warmth which did not seem to be in any way false. Pomona Sprout was to meet them at the school: along with Hagrid, she had had to be given permission to continue to come and go freely in order to attend to her collection of exotic plants, many of them things which no self-respecting Ministry employee was willing to go within fifteen feet of.

A large fireplace at the far end of the room was flaring green. As Lynsey watched, at once intrigued and appalled, pairs of eagerly chattering children were stepping into the flames, quite casually, and apparently being whirled away. "If your curiosity is quite satisfied...." she heard the professor say in a disagreeable tone and she turned to him in surprise, thinking it was her he was addressing - but no. His sourness was reserved for Neville Longbottom, who was gazing at him anxiously, his bun-like face crumpled with concern and some hurt.

"I just wanted to see... to check that you, you know, that you were all right," the boy mumbled, and Severus sighed, the tense muscles of his arm relaxing under Lynsey's hand.

"I am, as you can see, functioning adequately."

"Yes, well, that's - great sir, I mean... I didn't just mean if you were in working order, tha knows, but whether you were - well, feeling OK. 'nd, mm, Hermione and Harry were worried too...."

Severus quirked an eyebrow at him in sudden amusement. "And you drew the short straw?"

The boy visibly relaxed and gave the older man a shy grin. "We all reckoned, I'm already so scared of you it kind-of can't get any worse...." Lynsey was impressed: evidently he'd remembered what she'd said about accepting a joke against himself and taking ownership of it.

"Yes, well, Longbottom - I couldn't seem to make you scared enough of the consequences of careless brewing to be careful, and if I'd left you to find out the hard way you might not have lived to profit by it: to say nothing of blowing the rest of us to kingdom come alongside you. So I had to make you as bloody terrified of me as I was of you."

"I didn't, uh, mean to blow things up...."

"But that's the bloody point, isn't it? Doing things you don't mean to do when you're handling poisons and explosives is a short cut to an early grave, and if you're going to blow yourself up I'd rather you not do it while I'm stuck in the same room." He grimaced, rubbing absently at his temples as if he were tired, which would not be surprising after the disturbed night he had passed. "I do however appreciate your... concern. Both now and - when I was in Azkaban."

"That's all right, sir." Neville smiled again, ducking his head as he did so, made a vague automatic grab to recapture the toad which was halfway out of his breast pocket, and went to join the crowd filing through the fire.

When it came to their turn Lynsey linked her arm firmly through the professor's, shut her eyes tightly and stepped forwards, trusting to him to see her safely through.

"Oh, gods, that's worse than Apparition!" The world was still spinning, and she clung tightly to the table in the little pub.

"You would prefer balancing on a broom in a freezing storm?" Severus said interestedly.

"I'd prefer the car - honestly. Or a horse."

"I could introduce you to a Thestral... but you probably wouldn't be able to see her."

The pub looked like an ordinary pub, although the labels on the bottles had an odd look, and the end of the building up by the fireplace was clearly extremely old. Severus promised to bring her back to sample the eccentric bottles before the end of the weekend.

The village, when she had wobbled unsteadily out into the sunlight, looked like an ordinary southern Scottish village, almost, or a young town; although the fancy Victorian iron lamp-stands were authentic rather than repro, the street was cobbled and the wares in the shop windows were subtly strange. The post office, which Severus pointed out to her as a curiosity although it was several doors down in the wrong direction, had apertures below the eaves for owls to come and go. The greengrocer's had some very strange-looking vegetables in among the usual baskets of broad-beans and okra and leeks, and the pet-shop sold hippogriff-chow in jute sacks. The sample images in the window of the photographer's shop pointed at her and whispered to each other as she walked past.

At least, she hoped it was her they were pointing and whispering about, the Muggle come among them like a fish out of water, and not the professor. As they walked up the canted street he indicated an earth-floored track which wove away between the buildings to the right, on and up to a low hill on the top of which was a ramshackle small house, and in the distance behind it ruins which her eye refused to focus on - "The Shrieking Shack," he said grimly, gesturing with his white hand, and she knew that that was where Remus had once, so many years ago, very nearly eaten him.

On and up they all marched, towards the mountain that reared against the sky, with the children chattering around them like a crowd of excited crows; past a clothes-shop with a display of eye-tormenting special-effects underpants, until the road divided and bore away to the right into a winding lane, a double line of hedgerow bending round the base of the hill on which the Shack stood and then snaking away across bleak-looking fields, up to -

Every time she tried to look at it it slid away from her: she knew her point of attention was being diverted, and yet she could not overcome it. There was a stone wall - she could see that, although she could hardly look straight at it for a second. To the left, dark trees loomed above the stone and there were mountains behind them and further left, to the west. To the right, bright morning seen through clouds, and other mountains in the distance, the wall snaking away to the north, ruins catching at the corner of her eye - Severus took her hand as they walked, his fingers digging into the pressure points of her wrist, and he muttered something under his breath, the wand gripped in his other hand - and suddenly she could look straight ahead.

There across the fields, approaching as they walked, was a great gate, flanked by pillars topped with winged boars. Behind it, half hidden by the wall as it grew nearer, the half-seen ruin resolved itself into a fantastically turreted and crenellated castle, springing from the top of a great grassy mound which was indeed, as she could see through the approaching gates, shaped somewhat like a sleeping pig.

The giant, Hagrid, was there to let them in, he nodded to the professor amicably as they went through amongst the flock, but Lynsey could feel the shiver travelling through her friend's arm. Harry's friend Hermione was regarding him with clear-eyed concern, and Lynsey remembered that the last time he had been here, he had been fleeing disaster and ruin for the murder he had refused to commit. Minerva said something quietly to him which she failed to catch, and he nodded abruptly.

The green rolling grounds stretched away ahead of them. There was some sort of stadium to the right, and on the left the dark bulk of the forest. As they walked up the sweeping slope of the carriage track she could see a wooden house at the edge of the trees at her left, something like a Swiss chalet but rather oversized and obviously scaled for Hagrid, and the silver expanse of a loch glittered in the sunlight to their right, stretching away from them to curve round behind the castle.

The castle itself was breathtakingly bizarre. At some point, probably, there had been a proper defensive fortress, a great multi-storeyed brick of a building perched high on a cliff above the water, but the seventeenth century fad for cod castellations and decorative turrets had been allowed to run riot here, enhanced as it was by magic. She had often thought that Rosslyn Chapel, beautiful though it was, conveyed a slight hint of somebody having run amok with an icing bag. This place had the same sort of manic elaboration, turrets sprouting from spires sprouting from towers like some sort of insane Mandelbrot set, set in stone. It reminded her rather unfortunately of her favourite quote from Blake's Seven: the architectural style, she thought, was Early Maniac.

As the long drive swept up towards the castle they passed close by the side of the loch. There were trees and bushes at the water's edge, including a great beech with a skirt of grass at its foot which looked an ideal, inviting place to sit in the sun, and she wondered why Severus's face darkened as they passed it, and he turned his face aside from it as if he could not bear to look. Nor would he look at the tall, wide-topped tower beside the front door, instead turning the bleak ivory mask of his face the other way to stare resolutely leftwards towards the projecting mass of the West Wing, and Minerva on his far side shot him a glance of anxious pity.

A Ministry official met them at the door, unctuously wary, and ushered them in. Most of the ground and first floors was off limits but they were allowed to cross the vast, chequered floor of the entrance hall to reach a long high-roofed dining-room. The ceiling of the long hall, arching two tall storeys above them, was some sort of screen, set up to play a live image of the high and windy sky outside - Lynsey thought that it must be quite unnerving when it rained. There were four long tables, she supposed for the four student houses, and a shorter table crossing at the top for the staff. Some of the older students started to drift towards what would have been their house-tables and then turned back in confusion, seeing that places had been set at only one table, and that for not much more than half of it. The hundred or so of them that were all that there were wound up huddled together, under the naked eye of the sky.

The food - which appeared on the table "as if by magic" - was excellent, but Lynsey could scarcely enjoy it for watching Severus, who ate steadily in a tense, nervous, mechanical way, eyes downcast and shoulders hunched. From what little she knew of the circumstances under which he had departed from the school the previous summer, it was perhaps not surprising that he saw this return as an ordeal rather than a homecoming. The fact that Minerva, Filius, Poppy, Hagrid, Neville and Hermione and, yes, she had to admit it, Lynsey herself were all watching him covertly as if they thought he might explode at any moment probably did nothing to soothe his raw nerves, either.

After lunch they split the children up into teams, chattering and anxious, and sent them off at five-minute intervals to stalk each other through the bowels of the castle. Severus had dug out a spell - one of his own devising, from boyhood - which could be cast quickly and silently and which turned the subject bright yellow with magenta stripes. Affected students were required to report to Madam Pomfrey, who would detain them from the game for twenty minutes before applying the counter-curse and sending them back into the fray.

Harry and several members of his Dumbledore's Army magical self-defence club were acting as officers and impromptu tutors. A DA member accompanied each team to monitor and improve its performance, and if they were hit they were trusted to stay around, observing, and not take part in the battle until their twenty minutes were up.

Lynsey drifted after Severus like the tail on a kite, feeling ridiculous: but he had warned her not to wander off and explore on her own, because the castle was full of hidden pitfalls - some of them literal. He for his turn swirled and strode down the interlacing corridors, intersecting roving bands of students, alternately coaching and hectoring them (there seemed to be little difference) on stealth and speed and aim, and occasionally pausing to turn himself or Lynsey the right colour again. The only time he admitted to being grudgingly impressed was when a girl called Luna Lovegood came up with a Disillusionment Charm so effective that he trod on her foot before he realized she was there. She said "Ow" in a rather vague voice which still seemed to be coming out of thin air, even after you knew where she was.

The castle was crazily complex, an incredible eight storeys high, with side-wings and add-ons and mushrooming turrets in every direction. The second floor in the main building could be the third in one of the annexes, or the first, or somewhere in the middle between two storeys. There were windowless rooms under stairs, and blind steps which used to go somewhere, and now ended in a blank wall. The West Wing stuck out at an odd angle, nearer to the brooding dark forest than the rest of the building, and there was an empty-windowed tower there which Severus said contained owls. Looking out at it from a stone-framed window, at the front of the building and several floors below, they could see the birds flitting out like ghosts, even in daylight.

A garish black and white marble stair swept up through the building from the main entrance, but there were other stairs, some of which, she was warned, had intangible treads - perfectly visible, and yet not really there - or went somewhere else on alternate Tuesdays. Even the main marble stair couldn't be trusted to always go to the same floors, and the corridors wormed their way back and forth through the building, now on the courtyard side and now facing out across the grounds, where flurries of rain chased each other across the grass and ruffled the surface of the loch.

The most disturbing thing to Lynsey was the paintings. She had got used to the moving, interactive photographs in the Prophet, but those performed only a simple range of actions, and were silent. Even the more sophisticated images in the photographer's shop had only whispered together in a tinny rustle, like an overheard Walkman, too faint to make out individual words. The first time an elderly, oil-painted wizard leaned forward with his elbows resting on the inside of his frame, as if he stood in a solid and three-dimensional world behind the surface of the canvas and looked out at them through a framed window, and greeted Severus with a hearty guffaw and an enquiry as to who the "totty" was, she nearly had heart-failure.

And when they stopped by the staff room at three o'clock for half an hour of afternoon tea and biscuits (shaped, rather disturbingly, like newts), the twin gargoyles which guarded the door grinned and mugged and whispered to each other in high, camp voices, eerily reminiscent of Frankie Howerd.

"Whose idea was the gay double-act on the door?" Lynsey asked, sipping her tea.

"I've no idea - they've been that way since I was a boy."

"Do you suppose that they... you know - when nobody's about?"

"I shudder to think," he said, shuddering.

As they rounded a corner to see the shadow of a student's heel disappear through the door onto a stairwell, a suit of armour suddenly moved and muttered, and Lynsey yelped and shot sideways, cannoning into Severus. There was a crack and a burst of colour up ahead and then he was cursing under his breath, trying to turn his shoulder back to its normal crow's-wing black. Along this corridor, there were classroom doors on either side, and the corridor windows opened onto deep bays between the classrooms, letting in the light. Stripes of light and shade lay across the floor, all the way along, and something half seen flew past them at high speed, tittering, and dumped a paper bag full of what proved to be itching powder over both of them.

When Poppy Pomfrey had de-itched them they found Ron sitting on the edge of a bed, clutching the bridge of his nose as blood dripped down his chin onto his hideously orange T-shirt, and Harry and Hermione hovered over him. "Oh, heddo, p'fessa" he said mournfully.

Severus scowled at him. "And what, may I ask, happened to you? Did somebody push you down stairs?"

"N' n' - 's Peeves - hit me inna face wi' a helmet."

"Peeves," Hermione said, "has been rather entering into the spirit of the thing - unfortunately."

"Peeves has altogether too bloody much spirit" Harry muttered, as Poppy bustled over and handed Ron a glass of something the colour of rust.

"Blood-Replenishing Potion," she said cheerfully. "Drink up. Will you do the honours, Severus, or will I?"

"I will." The professor tipped Ron's face up with his bony fingers. "Hold still, Weasley!" He pointed his wand along the boy's long nose and muttered "Episkey!" Ron yelped as the bone shifted and knit, then rubbed at it ruefully.

"Thanks."

Severus snorted. "Peeves is all bloody spirit, Potter - that's the problem. There's nothing corporeal we can use to catch the little sod."

"I've been wondering," Harry replied - "you don't think that Protego could be stabilized and shaped into a bottle...?" They went into what Lynsey, grinning, recognized as a techno-huddle, from which occasional intelligible phrases such as "dependent on the phase of the moon", "seven times clockwise" and "idiot boy" emerged.

After dinner Severus took her by the hand and led her, his boot-heels tap-tapping softly along the stone corridors, passing behind an arras and up a straight, neglected-looking stair which somehow jumped at least one floor, along and around a passageway of polished wood and up the sweeping wind of another stair and there they were almost into the sky, the lake glimpsed through the windows was terrifyingly far down, eight storeys and all the height of the cliff they stood on, and there was another gargoyle which shifted and rattled its stone wings unnervingly until Severus muttered the password which Minerva had given him - "Cullen skink" - and it sprang aside. A door opened behind it, sliding aside in two leaves like an electronic doorway to reveal a sort of revolving escalator, a spiral of shallow, moving stone steps which Lynsey stepped onto with relief, as being the most nearly familiar-looking thing she'd seen since Trafalgar Square.

When they reached the small landing at the top of the stair, she saw Severus hesitate with his hand on the brass griffin doorknocker of a heavy, old-looking door of polished oak. After a moment he sighed, let the griffin fall softly and pushed the door open without knocking.

The door let onto a sizeable circular room, with a carpeted floor and windows facing out in four directions: the curtains were open and she could tell from the light that they seemed to be entering from the east, although they were now so high above the ground that she hardly dared to look. The first thing Lynsey noticed was the framed portraits, dozens of them ascending the walls between the windows, one above the next, so that she felt as if she was trapped at the bottom of some bizarre stamp-collection - or of a viewing gallery, for several of the portraits were awake and more were stirring, staring down at them with interest. There were several small tables which had been pushed against one wall, their tops crammed with odd-looking silver instruments which looked like refugees from an especially unusual exhibition of modern art. On the other side of the room a fireplace stood dark and empty, and she wondered for how long the grate had been cold.

Facing them across the room was a very large desk with clawed feet, bearing a silver ink-pot, a scarlet quill and a luridly tartan biscuit tin, placed defiantly in the middle as if marking territory. Behind that was a high-backed chair, and behind that again were shelves which bore among other things a very patched and shabby, collapsed-looking pointed hat and a glass case containing a straight-bladed, Saxon-looking dress-sword, polished and gleaming, its metal neither steel nor silver but somewhere in between, with a crescent-shaped silver guard, a walrus-ivory grip and three great pigeon's-blood rubies set into the pommel. Years of fencing-practice at school and of occasional historical re-enactments since made Lynsey itch to break it out of its case and try it - it looked beautifully balanced, and she thought that the sword would sing for her.

Severus was standing as straight and rigid as a wax figure, staring fixedly at the tartan tin as if he hated it, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, refusing to look up as the portraits murmured and whispered together. "What? What?" demanded the fat, red-nosed man in the portrait behind the desk, rising from his faded green-velvet armchair and clapping an old-fashioned brass ear-trumpet to his ear.

"Nothing which need concern you, Fortesque," said a firm but aged voice from further up the wall, and Lynsey's professor flinched to his bones, a shudder chasing across his pale skin. "Severus, look at me please," the voice said gently.

"No," the professor said flatly, and Lynsey winced at the misery in his voice: then felt a small unworthy surge of triumph at the fact that he had chosen to bring her with him, had elected to include her in his bubble of private pain, instead of shutting her out of it.

"Since I imagine that you came here to consult me" the elderly voice said, rather less gently, "this is going to be somewhat difficult if you expect me to address the top of your head for the entire conversation."

At that Lynsey's professor jerked his chin up as harshly as if submitting to some form of punishment, his eyes blinded with tears, and faced the gold-framed portrait which hung high above the sword in its glass case.

"Good," said Albus Dumbledore, nodding to them both from behind his half-moon spectacles. "I venture to hope that I am more interesting to look at than the carpet, which has seen better days: although I suppose that the same could be said of me."

Lynsey's first coherent thought, on getting a good look at the late great Headmaster, was "Good grief - and I thought Severus's nose was weird." The former Headmaster's proboscis, if not quite as large as her friend's, was much more baroque; being liberally provided with bumps and bends and ending in a curious blob, such as might be found on the snout of a hedgehog. There would certainly have been little danger of his glasses sliding down his nose, even if he had not been converted into oil-paint.

He was dressed in violently green satin robes decorated with bumblebees and bunches of grapes, his silver beard spilling down over his chest and the ends tucked into his belt. Penetrating light-blue eyes watched her friend closely.

"Dumbledore," Severus said thickly. "Albus, it's all gone wrong, because of me. I told - "

"I know," the old man said gently.

Severus blinked. "How?" he said, brought up short in his litany of self-castigation. "Minerva said she hadn't spoken to you - "

"And she has not. I wish that she could have done, but I was unable to, ah, catch her on her own before the Ministry took over these halls. You understand that I was - well, that I hovered between life and death for some time, as far as I understand it. By the time I was - that is, that this image was - fully activated there were always people with her. Ministry officials whom I did not entirely trust."

"If you trusted them an inch you're a bigger fool than I take you for," muttered a sardonic-looking, goateed wizard dressed in green and silver, who stood in front of a serpent banner in a portrait which hung at Lynsey's left hand. "And that would be an achievement of some note."

"Yes, thank you, Phineas," Dumbledore said quellingly. "In any case, the fact of the matter is that I could not tell her the truth of your position when there were others present who might be in Tom's employ, even if I had decided that it was safe to compromise your security by doing so, and I would not pretend, to her or to anyone, that you were at fault in relation to my death: an issue which they were bound to raise with me. Therefore, I kept silent, and practised my snoring."

The very faint beginnings of a grin tugged at the corners of Severus's mouth. "That's a contradiction in terms, old man - your snoring is never silent."

The ex Headmaster snorted gently and waved his painted hand. "Sit down, Severus, do - both of you. You're making me feel guilty to have this excellent painting of an armchair available to me, while you are both standing."

Severus flourished his wand irritably and two plain but quite comfortable chairs appeared in front of the vast desk. Lynsey sat down in hers rather gingerly.

"And you would be the young lady who helped Severus to escape from Tom's tender mercies," the old man said, gazing at her with those penetrating blue eyes.

"Um - we helped each other."

"To be sure. I have always found Severus to be - most helpful, where it mattered."

"I am here, you know," Severus said, without much rancour.

"I can't tell you how glad I am for it," Dumbledore replied soberly. "Please believe that I am truly sorry that you should have suffered so much, and that I was not able to protect you from the Ministry at least. As you know, I had intended to come to your office, obviously sick, and have you perform the final service in such a way that I would have appeared to have expired naturally. That there might be witnesses to my death was a thing I had not anticipated."

"But you just assumed the world and everyone in it would conform to your personal agenda, as per bloody usual," Severus said wearily, "and then Draco's sudden access of efficiency upended your plans."

"Quite. I confess I had rather underestimated young Mr Malfoy."

"You didn't answer my question, how you knew what I - that I - "

The portrait suddenly looked ineffably smug. "Why did you think I always said I didn't care what honours they stripped me of, so long as they left me on the Chocolate Frog Cards? I may not be able to speak through them - they're only low-quality images after all - but I have eyes and ears everywhere."

Severus began to laugh, weakly. "I always knew you were a devious old sod, Dumbledore, but that really does take the biscuit."

"Language!" said a hard-eyed witch on the wall opposite Phineas, rapping the side of her chair sharply with a heavy white-wood wand which looked more like a vicious cane. Severus flinched visibly at the sound of wood hitting leather, and then hissed in irritation and cast a bubble of Muffliato which excluded all the portraits except Dumbledore and -

"If you would put away your ear-trumpet, Fortesque," Dumbledore said firmly, and then added "Thank you," although he was in no position to see whether the corpulent old wizard had complied or not (he had). He twinkled at them both. "Here, perhaps more than anywhere, it is a truism that 'the walls have ears', but there are occasions when constantly being overheard by the portraits can get a little tiresome, and I say this from a position of direct personal knowledge."

"Can I ask you something?" Lynsey said suddenly, irritatingly aware as she spoke that she ought really to have said "may I?"

"Most certainly." He turned the twinkle towards her, in a way which gave her a vague urge to slap him.

"Are you... still you, do you think?" Beside her, Severus turned and looked at her sharply.

"You mean, am I the real Albus Dumbledore," the portrait said, "or just an artificial construct which only behaves like Albus Dumbledore?"

"Mm, something like that. I'm sorry of it's a rude question."

"Not at all. I can assure you that I am fully conscious - although of course, I would say that, even if it were not true."

"I know you're conscious, old man," Severus said roughly. "I can feel you."

"I wondered if you were... a sort of thought-form," Lynsey said, "a created entity, or actually a kind of cul-de-sac incarnation of the real Dumbledore. An, um, loop off your own time-line." She hoped very much that it was the latter - Severus would feel so much better if he thought he really was talking to his dead friend. And she would see if she could have a wizarding portrait made of him, so that if he died in the war she need not lose his silky, acerbic voice. She would still be able to feel his spiritual presence, of course, even if he died - but she would miss the voice.

"I'm not sure how one could tell," Dumbledore replied, "but I certainly feel to myself as if I am the real me, except that I never need to eat unless I wish to, or require a chamber-pot. Just as this chair seems to me to be a real chair, and this room I sit in seems like a real room."

Severus looked at his old friend in sudden interest. "And when you go from portrait to portrait, how does that feel to you?"

"It varies according to my mood, and where it is I am going. Sometimes it seems as if I merely walked from room to room, although I don't always remember to imagine a door: sometimes as if the scenery around me simply changes."

"It could be - could it be a special form of the astral?" the professor said to Lynsey, his hawk face brightened and animated. "It could, couldn't it?"

"It sounds like it, doesn't it? In which case - Headmaster, you probably are you."

"I'm relieved to hear it, though even the most advanced wizards have never really been able to plumb the mysteries of death and spiritual identity."

"Muggles have... other techniques," the younger man said. "Lynsey gave me a very practical demonstration while we were fleeing from - Him."

"You actually went into this - astral? Into something like where I - where I am now? Although I'm not sure that 'where I am' is an applicable term."

"Oh, I did more than that - I turned myself into an imaginary mongoose, and chased Tom's tail for him." He scowled and rubbed tiredly at his temples. "But he got my tail, good and proper. That's why I - why I came."

"I imagined that you had not gone to all these lengths just to have a pleasant chat - as much as that would please me."

"If you're so bloody all-knowing, you know that I - that they broke me. That I... spilled my secrets like bloody water."

"I had gathered... something of the kind, yes. Filius nearly always has a Chocolate Frog or three about him. I am more sorry than I can say that you had to suffer such a shocking experience: I had hoped that your apparent involvement in my death would spare you anything of the kind."

"I should be bloody used to it, shouldn't I, after what the Aurors...." He grimaced and shut his eyes briefly. "It's not really your fault, old man. I'd have chosen to fight Him, I think, even if you hadn't bullied me into it - at least, I tell myself so. But it is your bloody fault that you told me so much - couldn't you have kept silent the way you usually bloody did, and not told me secrets when you knew it might come to this? Now Riddle knows nearly every bloody thing that I know."

"There were reasons, as you know, why I thought it would be better if you knew about Harry's mission. Had Percy Weasley not headed Voldemort's plans for a takeover of the Ministry off at the pass, if it had still seemed likely that you would be appointed as my successor and that I would be able to continue to guide you through this portrait, then I would have told you far less. But fearing that the Ministry as it stood would not - forgive me - would not be likely to appoint a former Death Eater as Headmaster, and that the curse on the Defence position meant you were unlikely to continue just as a teacher, I knew that whatever I told you before my death would have to suffice, and it needed to be enough to enable you to assist Harry."

"Yes, well, now the bloody - He knows about it."

"But you have a plan, of course. I've never known you not to have a plan, Severus."

"Yes. Now that - Riddle knows that at least some of His Horcruxes have been destroyed, it seems likely He'll try to make more. We - the Order - we are considering adapting the Ministry's surveillance spells in order to detect any attempt to make a Horcrux: but to do that we need to know what the spell is. We need those Dark grimoires, Albus."

"You don't have anything suitable in the collection of curious volumes which you think I don't know you keep behind the false panel to the left of the fireplace in your quarters?"

"Nothing in sufficient detail, no."

"Very well. But I cannot tell you where they are."

"Albus, please." His fingers were gouging into the arm of the chair. "I can't see any other way to put it right - please don't make me beg."

"You misunderstand me: I said 'cannot', not 'would not'. I am not the Secret-Keeper for that particular secret."

"Who, then?"

"Murcus."

"The Mer-chieftainess?"

"The same. Or her heir, in the event of her death."

"Then the books are...?"

"As you surmise. It was the securest protection I could think of, and they are the least likely folk to fall under Tom's influence, or to attract his attention."

"Very well. Will she trust me with the information, do you think? Many people - many people still see me as your murderer."

"Ironic, under the circumstances - not that I hold your disobedience against you. Say to her - " he pursed his lips and produced a shrill, warbling cascade of sound - "and she will listen. Had you seemed likely to succeed me as Headmaster, I would have retrieved them from her and left them where you could find them in any case."

Severus repeated the musical words back to him until he was note perfect, then looked down at his hands, flushing. "You should have let me die for you, old man," he muttered. "We wouldn't have been in this mess if you'd let me die for you."

"Come now, Severus," the older man said sternly, peering down at them over the tops of his glasses. "If you had tried to defend me we would all have been lost, including myself and Harry - as I'm quite sure you know. And although the curse was progressing more slowly than we had feared, I would still probably not have lived long, especially without your skill to maintain me. I had so little life left in me, while you potentially have so much - quite apart from the tasks which I still needed you to perform, I did not begrudge giving up my few remaining months to preserve you, perhaps, for decades."

"Foolish," Severus muttered, moving his head restlessly. Lynsey shifted to lay her hand gently on his arm, over where the mark had been, and he put his other hand up to cover hers. "I'm not worth it."

"I happen to think that you are," Dumbledore said firmly. "You know that I have always held you in high regard."

"Do I?" the other snarled, snapping abruptly from shame to bitterness. "I thought that I was - oh, what was it now? That I disgusted you."

For a moment the old man's painted features looked surprised - frightened, even. "No I - I never said that. Or if I did, I never meant it."

"Liar! I was so - fucking - frightened but I came to you and you told me I was disgusting anyway, because I had only asked Him to spare Lily and not all of them - as if I would have had any fucking chance of getting him to spare all of them. Lils was all I could save - I thought I could save - but you told me how much you despised me for it, and then asked me to pay you for saving them. As if I wouldn't have done anything - anything - to put right what I'd done, just for the asking."

"And this could not have been addressed at any point during the last sixteen years, Severus? I really don't think that this is the time or place - "

"What other fucking time or place is there? You tell me that!" He was breathing in rough gasps like an overridden horse, and Lynsey watched him anxiously and wondered about pneumonia and scarred lung tissue and relapses.

"I - " The image of Dumbledore stared down at him for a moment, frowning, and then abruptly turned his back. Lynsey saw Severus flinch at the apparent dismissal, his stark features bleak with pain, but the old man hunched his shoulders and said, without looking at them, "I think now that I was - overly harsh, especially in the light of your later services to the Order."

"My services as you call them didn't stop you from tormenting me with my own guilt after Lily died!"

"I... yes. In retrospect, I find myself somewhat in agreement. In my own defence, I reacted badly because I could see myself, my own mistakes, repeated in you, and so I perhaps blamed you unduly for faults which were more my own than yours."

"How could you - " Severus sounded honestly bewildered. "What did you ever have in common with the likes of me?"

The painted man turned his head so that he was looking back over his shoulder, visible in profile but meeting no-one's eye. "Only that I too had once let bad company, foolish political theories and the love of my own cleverness lead me into a situation which - which resulted in the death of my own sister. When I saw that you had done the same I assumed that you were - as selfish and stupidly self-absorbed as I had been; but having got to know you better I no longer believe that that was the case."

"I wish you had told me. Why now? If you had told me then it might have made me less - less destroyed by my own guilt. Why now?"

"Because now may be all the time we have left." The portrait sighed, a tiny exhalation, and turned back to face them. "Because I have reason to think that the redoubtable Ms Skeeter is hot on my trail, and I value your good opinion too highly to want you to learn first from her pen what you should have learned from me."

"Because you value it, or because you need it?" Severus muttered, almost under his breath, and Lynsey was pleased that he had realized the difference and accepted that being liked, rather than simply useful, was a thing which could potentially apply to himself. "Nobody on the staff except Horace gave me the time of day when I was a student - you were all too wrapped up in dancing around bloody Black all the time."

"Come now, Severus. If you had a student such as Sirius in your house - so very clever, but from such a Dark family, the son of an insane mother, the ringleader of a gang, always making trouble, headstrong, reckless, without empathy - would you not watch him at all times? Pay him special attention, in the hopes of steering him onto a less destructive path?"

"Well - yes, all right, I suppose so," he admitted grudgingly. "Minerva did say that you thought the reason he tried to kill me was because he had... mental health issues."

"I'm afraid that for much of the time poor Sirius was barking in more senses than one."

Severus gave a little snort of laughter. "You'll hear no arguments from me on that score. But that doesn't excuse the years of bloody persecution I endured from James - he was a spoiled little shit who kept his brains in his balls, but he was sane enough."

"If I had known how unhappy you were... but your talent for Occlumency was already apparent, and you were always a peculiarly difficult child to read. Please believe me that if I had known the extent to which he and Sirius were harassing you I would have asked Minerva to intervene, but to my sorrow I thought that you were - well - exaggerating matters, on those few occasions when you did complain. It seemed improbable that they would be able to do the things you alleged, and yet not be caught by any staff. I didn't know that James had an Invisibility Cloak, of course, let alone that he was using it to stalk you, and I most certainly did not know at the time that they had invented a surveillance device which would enable them to catch you when there were no teachers anywhere near. Although, mea culpa, I suppose I should have realized that Sirius's mania might lead James into a folie à deux.

"You, on the other hand.... I did worry about you, you seemed a neglected and a lonely child, but once Horace took you under his wing I was less concerned, and I never had any serious doubts about your character: despite your attempt to make yourself appear more sophisticated by cultivating an appearance of being involved in the Dark Arts."

"Yes, well," Severus muttered, "If you'd been a working-class half-blood stuck in Slytherin House with Rosier and Avery and that lot, you'd understand why anything which made me look 'cool' was a life-saver - possibly literally."

"Horace and I never took your pretensions to darkness very seriously: the hexes which you imagined we didn't know you'd invented suggested a humorous rather than a truly malicious disposition, and I always thought that you would someday be... an asset to those of us who opposed Tom. That was possibly why I was… perhaps harder on you than I should have been, later. Horace used to boast about you in the staff-room, you know: you and Lily Evans were the two best students he'd ever taught, as he never forbore to tell us. I don't think any of us had the slightest doubt that you were more intellectually and psychologically sound than Sirius: even Minerva was wary of him, for all that she tends to put her own house first."

"And you didn't? After that stunt you pulled in ninety-two, whipping the House Cup out from under my children's noses?"

"That was for Harry, not for the greater glory of Gryffindor."

"And of course, if it comes to a conflict of interests between me and the sainted bloody Potter, I'm always going to lose, aren't I?"

"Oh, Severus...." The old man steepled his painted fingers and sighed. "Seven Slytherin victories in succession, and I know you cheated."

"Minerva cheats too" Severus replied sulkily.

"Of course, of course, all the Heads of House do - even Filius does, on the quiet. But you were so much better at it - I thought it wouldn't hurt to, ah, level the playing field a little." He sighed again, tapping his fingers against his chin. "But I wish now that I had levelled it: I see now that it would have been far better to have taken the opportunity to engineer a draw between Gryffindor and Slytherin, and used it to promote inter-house cooperation."

The battered, fraying hat which lay slumped on the shelf several feet beneath him shifted like a wakening snake, and Lynsey levitated about three inches off the chair from a sitting start as it opened up a tear near the brim and drawled "Now he realizes...."

"Yes, thank you," Dumbledore replied rather coldly.

Severus pushed his hair back from his face with both hands, looking weary and sad. "Inter-house cooperation is one thing we have achieved: there are too few students left to maintain separate houses."

"You will achieve victory too, Severus: I'm as sure of it as I can be."

"Even despite my - betrayal?"

"That is not the word which I would use for it."

"What, then?"

"Just - humanity. A failure to be an invulnerable machine, in the face of overwhelming pain."

"But I should be a bloody machine - I have to be what's needed!"

"No!" the other man said sharply. "Lose your humanity and you've already lost the war, where it counts. And in any case, I think you may win because of what you choose to call your betrayal. It wasn't how I myself had planned matters, but it seems to me that the likelihood that Tom will now make another Horcrux will enable you to pinpoint him and carry the battle to him, and that may be no bad thing, so long as you can also destroy the others."

"Potter has managed to locate Slytherin's locket - you know that the one in the cave was false? - and I believe I may have a lead on the Hufflepuff Cup. And Potter - Potter suspects that he might be a living Horcrux himself, like Nagini."

"You know that I have long suspected that this is in fact the case."

"He asked me to kill him, Dumbledore! He asked me to kill him, if it comes to that, and I don't know if I can, but better that than leave him for Riddle to kill. If - if it has to be."

"You still hope to find a solution which will enable him to survive, as you tried to do for me?"

"You know damned-well that I do," Severus answered roughly. "If - if there's truly no other way to bring Riddle down then I suppose.... But I'm damned if I'm going to stand by and just let the bloody brat die, after all the years I've spent trying to keep him alive, without even trying to find another solution."

"I venture to doubt that you will succeed where I have failed," the older man replied somewhat frostily.

"Do you now?" the professor snarled. "And you are such an expert on the Dark Arts, of course, that no-one else could possibly know better?"

Dumbledore's portrait sighed. "If you can find a solution I have missed, so much the better - but I have reasons to believe that the boy must be killed by Voldemort himself, if he is to die. Because of the - nature of the link between them, it may be that Harry can only die if he is killed by Voldemort - and if Harry cannot die, neither can the thing which I believe has lodged inside him. The fact that the Horcrux survived Harry's encounter with basilisk venom does suggest that it cannot die unless he does."

"If it must be, it must - but I refuse to just accept it until I have explored all the other options myself." He rubbed wearily at his eyes, blinking. "That was why you always favoured the brat, wasn't it? Because you knew that you were raising him for slaughter, and you felt guilty about it."

"Severus...." The old man looked uneasy, even shifty, Lynsey thought.

"What?"

"Do not... seek to dissuade him. From being willing to die. There is a chance that - well, that if he is perfectly willing to die, the willingness itself may suffice. I do not wish to say more."

The professor gave him a long, thoughtful look, and then nodded abruptly. "Very well."

Albus Dumbledore inclined his painted head. "I hope that you are right, and that the situation can be resolved in a way which enables Harry and yourself Severus to survive. But I can hear him, and Minerva, waiting downstairs, so perhaps...."

"I always wondered how you knew," the younger man said restlessly. "That people were downstairs, I mean."

"I have an arrangement with the gargoyle. You should go now, Severus, and rest, for you would be best advised to speak to the Mer-chieftainess at dawn. The conch to summon her is in the cabinet by the door, and if I might make a suggestion, Harry has prior experience of the mer-village and would probably be the most suitable person to make the actual - retrieval."

"Very well. But I wish...."

"What do you wish?"

"I know the Frog Cards are only low-grade images, but I wish there was some way we could take your image with us, still consult you...."

"What would happen," Lynsey said suddenly, "if you took one of those magic photo' thingies of the portrait?"

"A portrait of a portrait?" Dumbledore replied. "I'm not sure."

"I'll ask Colin Creevey", Severus said with a rather shaky laugh. "If anyone knows how to do it, he will."

"Very well: it would I admit please me still to be able to speak with all of you on a regular basis, so long as you do not use me as a prop for your own lack of confidence. Even I must acknowledge that there comes a time when there must be fresh hands at the helm, that are not my hands, and you have passed well beyond the limits of the plans which I laid down for you while I was alive. And Severus - "

"Yes?"

"Ask the house-elves to box up the instruments for you: you may find them useful, and I'm damned if I'm going to let Rufus Scrimgeour have them."

On the way out, Severus opened the large black lacquer cabinet which stood near the door and took out a substantial conch-shell, strung on a strap. Next to it, between it and the door, Lynsey noticed a tall golden perch, big enough to carry an eagle, with a tray of soft ash at its foot.

As she followed Severus's stiff back out through the door, Lynsey heard the Headmaster say softly "Miss O'Connor." She looked back at him warily.

"Yes?"

"Take care of him for me. I value him more highly than he believes, even if I haven't always shown it as I should."

"I do try - to take care of him, I mean. And he takes care of me too, of course."

At the foot of the revolving stair they found Minerva, waiting patiently, and Harry, who was waiting rather less patiently and was kicking his heels against the wall.

"How is the old coot?" Minerva asked, as she turned towards the stair.

"Irritatingly all-knowing as ever. And - Potter. A word please."

He led her back down the long walk to the entrance hall, and further down: there was a door at the side of the stair which opened onto steps going down into the dark and he took her hand to guide her descent. As they went, he flicked his wand into glimmering light, and the soft ball of illumination showed a long tunnel stretching off into distance, unlit torches studding the walls at intervals all along their route.

"Gods," she said, "this takes me back."

"You can see why I felt quite at home in Chislehurst Caves, once you had - once I was no longer being - "

"Yes."

He flicked his wand again, and the torches flared in a whoosh of sudden orange flame.

He pointed out his classroom and office to her as they passed them, on the first level below ground; but his private flat lay much deeper, at the same level as the Slytherin common-room and lower dorms, so that he could be immediately on hand if there was any trouble among his Slytherins during the night.

"Along there" - he nodded towards the end of the corridor - "there's another spiral stair which goes straight up to a cubby-hole just along from my office. I used to use it as a short-cut if there was any trouble in the castle during the night, but I prefer to avoid it if I can: I don't know about you, but spiral staircases always make me dizzy."

"Ugh, yes. How did you know if there was any trouble, and you all the way down here?"

"Listening spell," he said tersely. "Set to wake me if there were any loud noises which sounded like an attack or a student in real difficulties. Potter managed to get me out of bed once - I'm sure it was him, Cloak or no Cloak - by dropping a charmed toy egg which sang in Mermish. It sounded like somebody having their throat cut." He shuddered, and Lynsey realized unhappily that he probably did know what that sounded like.

"The moon in a bucket" he said to the dark doorway, and the door sprang aside and admitted them.

It was clear at once that the house-elves had been busy. Although the place had been empty for eleven months there was a banked fire burning in the grate, and the room was free from dust. Outside, the sun was setting, and only a dull gleam reflected off the surface of the lake to show where the water covered the sill and came partway up the glass of two deepset windows.

The room had a comfortable but slightly down-at-heel look, with a rather battered couch and one armchair by the fire, and a rag-rug on the hearth. In the corner of the room there was a small potions workspace, with a stone bench, two cauldrons set over miniature braziers and a Belfast sink. There wasn't much to look at that wasn't books, and Severus crossed the room with a sigh of contentment and began to run his hands over the leather and cloth spines, rank on rank of books on shelves stacked up to well above head-height.

"Feels good to be back?" Lynsey asked, and she thought that the question was a rhetorical one. It came as a surprise when he answered her.

"I don't know," he said slowly, frowning. "When I was a child I used to feel so - sick with dread every year as we came up the drive, knowing that Potter Senior and his little gang would be hunting me as soon as the Sorting Feast was over - although of course I dreaded going home, too. It got easier after Lucius left, though - at least I didn't have that to worry about any more - and Horace's little Slug Club gave me some sort of sanctuary. As an adult... as an adult the school has been my sanctuary, my home, my career and my prison. I don't know whether I love it or hate it - just as I never knew whether to worship Dumbledore or strangle him."

"Do you think Harry really will have to sacrifice himself?" she asked sombrely. She had grown quite fond of the dark, intense young man with the roadkill haircut.

"Merlin, I hope not. Politics aside, I want to see Lily's killer destroyed, but to do so at the cost of her son's life is just - ghastly. I can understand the possible necessity, though I don't have to bloody like it: but I wish you could have heard how - cold Dumbledore was about it, the first time he told me. I used to think that he - that he loved the damned brat and that I was nothing to him in comparison: but now I wonder whether I should envy Potter his so-called love or pity him for it."

"He does seem fond of you, though, in his own peculiar way."

"He says he is - was - yet often he seemed so utterly blind to my feelings; he humiliated me in front of the whole bloody school by pulling that stunt with the House Cup at the last minute, without even warning me, and I don't know if he got some warped pleasure out of making a total bloody fool of me or whether he just - didn't understand."

"He said he couldn't read you properly because you were shielded, didn't he?"

"But any normal bloody person surely would have realized...."

"Mm, but I wonder if he isn't slightly autistic. A lot of abnormally tall, very clever people are, and it would explain some of the things you've said about him - why he never cared what people thought of him even when that seriously harmed his interests, for example."

"I always assumed that was just him being eccentric."

"Mm, but a lot of very eccentric people are a bit autistic. It would explain why he seemed sensitive at some times and emotionally blind at others - I mean, you could see that, just listening to him, the way it didn't occur to him to tell you that bit about the Secret-Keeper straight off but let you think he wouldn't tell you, which he ought to have known would stress you, but evidently he didn't.

"It would explain why he couldn't understand you in particular even though he loved you - yes he did - does, I think. He probably used Legilimency to cover up for not being able to interpret normal social clues, but when he didn't have a chance to read the person - or just couldn't do it, as the case was with you - then he was lost." Finding herself standing by his desk, she absent-mindedly picked up a metal ruler which she supposed he used for underlining, and began to tap it against the palm of her hand.

"You read me" he said tightly.

"Yes, but I cheat." When there was no answer, she looked up and saw him watching the movement of the ruler as if hypnotized, his face going decidedly green around the edges. She froze, the metal strip poised stationery in mid-air, and he stood swaying for a second or two and then made a small noise in the back of his throat, lunged for the sink and was miserably and noisily sick.

Lynsey dropped the ruler with a clatter and went to stand beside him, laying her hand lightly on his bowed back. "Pet?" she said uncertainly.

He stood with his head bowed and his hands gripping the edge of the sink, and refused to look at her. "They hit - palms my hands," he said gratingly, "with a metal edge, until the bones broke."

She took him by the wrist, raised his left hand from the edge of the sink and kissed the narrow palm gently. "I saw how they'd broken some of your fingers," she murmured.

To her surprise he shook his head. "N-no, not - then. Before. With the Aurors."

"Oh, pet."

He laughed, a horrible sound, and drew his wand to banish the mess in the sink with an irritable flick. "Safety precaution: it guaranteed that I couldn't hold a wand to defend myself, even if I'd managed to get one off them. I hadn't thought much about it for years." He gave a shrug which failed miserably to be nonchalant, and let her take him by the shoulders, turn him and draw him into her embrace. "You can see why I - why I said I was tired of being hurt," he said thickly, resting his narrow face against her shoulder.

"Shh." She stroked his hair. "No-one's going to hurt you tonight: quite the reverse, if you want it."

"Oh, damn, I didn't - didn't really want you to stop just - feeling a bit - intense...." Shivers chased across his skin as he lay sprawled crosswise across the bed, panting. "I'm still not used to being touched - like that - without it hurting."

"Would it help if you had a Safe Word, like S&M people use?"

"It might do if I knew what a Safe Word was" he replied rather haughtily, trying to hang on to an appearance of dignity which assorted oddly with his current position, splayed out on his back sweaty and aroused and tangled up in sheets.

"Well, um, people who do that sort of, of play-acting sex, they might tell their partner to stop and not really mean it, because they were only playing at wanting them to stop, or because they sort-of play-pretend really wanted them to stop but really didn't, so they set up a code-word or phrase in advance - something bizarre which they would never say by accident, that they can use if they really really want their partner to stop. And they know if they use it their partner will stop, so they feel, um, safe, even when they get a bit - overloaded."

"How about 'Potter is God'? That's something I'd certainly never say by accident...."

"This is true." She smiled at him and trailed her fingers delicately over a sensitive spot, making him gasp and jump. "I've never slept - or not slept, as the case may be - in a four-poster before. I like it. It extends that sort of, um, sense of privacy and safety that you have under the bedclothes into a larger arena, in which we can be as uninhibited as we like."

"You speak for yourself." He gazed up at her out of dark, serious eyes which glinted in the diffuse wand-light. "It's not easy to be - uninhibited when I know that you can... see me. You know. I might have been less - inhibited in darkness."

"But I want to see you." She bent her head briefly to plant a delicate kiss in a spot which made his hips jerk convulsively. "When I look at your body, I see something fine, attractive, not anything you need be embarrassed about."

"Well - the same, then," he said awkwardly, reaching up to brush her hair lightly off her face and tuck it behind her ear, then gave her a rather crooked smile. "But personally I've always found sleeping with the curtains completely closed a bit - worrying. One never knows what might be lurking on the other side."

"Don't tell me - let me guess." She moved her thumb experimentally, a slow circling stroking across velvet skin. "You watched Psycho at an impressionable age."

"Yesbutthatisn'tthepoint - ah! - no, don't stop. I grew up in the shadow of the Moors Murders so that sort of thing - people coming after you with a knife - that was real, and then, then you were sleeping in your bed in the dorm with the curtains drawn and you didn't know that the other boys - the other boys were just on the far side of the cloth, waiting to pounce on you with some stupid bloody vicious prank and then, then Ronald Weasley waking up to find Sirius bloody Black slashing the drapes with a knife was just - ah! - just reinforced it."

"Do you want me to open the curtains, then?"

"Maybe later...." He grinned at her suddenly, arching his back and pressing up against her hand. "I don't fancy an audience: let the house elves find their own bloody amusements."

She hooked her heel behind his thigh to draw him deeper in as his strong hands splayed against her back and they rocked together, gasping, his hair forming its own dark curtain around both their faces as she watched him, watched the delicate frown of concentration between his brows, felt the tremor in his breath and his surging back and forth inside her, the yielding mattress swaying under them until she felt like a boat on water, her own peak come and spent while he struggled to find the courage to let go, to yield to the moment. He made a thick indeterminate sound in his throat and stooped to kiss her, his mouth coming down over hers in what felt more like desperation than desire, and she wrapped her arms round him as they strove together and rubbed small firm circles in the small of his back, until he groaned aloud and heaved convulsively against her, inside her, finally, and the tense bitter lines of his face relaxed for a moment into unutterable peace.

Afterwards they lay quietly facing each other, her leg still hooked loosely across his and his long fingers lying gently across her breast. "Well," she said, and smiled at him.

"Yes." He gave her the flicker of a smile back. "I suppose I am - a man still, and I should be flattered that you chose to bestow your considerable charms on me, instead of laughing at my poor scar-ridden, scrawny carcass and - you know."

"You know I think you have a very nice bod and 'you know'."

He snorted at that and then rolled over onto his back with one arm behind his head, staring up at the dark ceiling. Lynsey eased over to lie close against him and kissed the point of his bony shoulder lightly. "I'm glad that you could - start to overcome the bad memories and replace them with nice ones."

Severus moved his head restlessly, so that he could look at her out of the side of his eye. "Don't get me wrong," he said with a sigh. "About - about being made to, to force myself on.... That only happened three times, although you'll understand that three times was three times far too bloody many. But I often had to use - charms, and potions - because somebody it would be unwise to offend had taken some sort of shine to me at some bloody Death Eater social, and it was the only way I could manage." He turned and propped himself up on his elbow, so that he could look down at her directly, frowning. "Believe me, even when she's being what she thinks passes for nice, sex with Bellatrix is a deeply emasculating experience."

"Poor you," Lynsey said with a sympathetic shudder. "Having to grit your teeth and have sex - even voluntary sex - with someone you don't fancy is no nicer for a bloke than it is for a woman."

"I sold my own body for political advantage," he replied bitterly. "What does that make me?"

Lynsey reached up and patted his arm sleepily. "It makes you a spy, I think. Go to sleep now - you've to be up before dawn."

It was too much to hope that he would sleep the night through when he had so much on his mind, even after a brisk bout of horizontal exercise. She gathered his sleeping form close, and he trembled violently in her arms as if he was being electrocuted which perhaps, in memory, he was. His eyes were wide open but unseeing. Stroking his hair back from his face, she began to sing to him quietly.

"On a field sable,
Semée d'argent etoilles..."

The song was about future spacefarers, setting out into the star-studded darkness - but it was the gentle tune, not the words, which would reach him now.

"Like the field of a knight's device,
Silver-scattered withal;
On the field of a knight's device
Ride our hopes,
Ride our fears,
Ride the dreams of us all."

The starlight glinted off the water, it glittered in his open eyes....

"...Calling challengers to the field:
Sword and shield,
Star and field,
Ships that sail with the night."

Slowly, awareness gathered behind his dark gaze and he relaxed peacefully into her hold, dreaming on the music.

"...Gift of arms, and the vigil ends:
On that field
Darkness yields;
Rockets flare once again."

Author's note:

Mufti is civilian, layman's or non-work clothing, especially the home-wear of somebody who wears a uniform when at work. Sub fusc, from the Latin for "beneath black", may be applied to any very sober, drab outfit but properly refers to the clothing traditionally worn by Oxford University students on formal occasions, beneath their black gowns. For men it consists of a white shirt, black shoes, dark suit and white bow-tie; for women a white blouse, black shoes, black skirt worn with tights and a black ribbon around the neck. Basically Tonks is saying that even when Snape has the opportunity to dress down, he still looks as sober and formal as if he was at work, and still dresses the way he would expect to dress under his academic robes.

There is a slightly artificial "traditional" style of Welsh women's dress, established in the 19^th Century, which involves high black hats with wide brims.

Rosslyn Chapel is a small, late-Mediaeval church just south of Edinburgh, built by the Sinclair family, made of white stone and famous for its supposed Templar connections. It was going to be one arm of a cruciform cathedral, if the family hadn't run out of cash and impetus, and hence is fantastically buttressed and elaborate for such a small rural church. It is covered all over in decorative carvings which are said to be some of the finest examples of the stone-mason's art anywhere in the world, but to me it always looks slightly manic.

Blake's Seven was a British science fiction series which was on the BBC during the 1980s.

Benoît Mandelbrot is a mathematician who is the father of modern fractal theory, which, loosely, examines shapes in which similar patterns are repeated at both small and large scales - as seen, for example, in mountains which are made up of lesser peaks which are made up of spires which are made up of rock faces which are made up of boulders and so on, each level being approximately similar in shape and texture to the level above it scaled down and the level below it scaled up. A Mandelbrot set is a particular set of mathematical equations which generate an infinitely complex pattern from simple rules; I only very vaguely understand it myself but for present purposes it's enough to know that it can be used to generate an image of a complicated shape covered in little curly, frilly bits which ascend and descend the scale in similar-looking stages.

"Totty" is a slang term for an attractive girl, probably one that one of the speakers has a relationship with, or hopes to - similar to "arm candy" or "bit of stuff".

The staff-room gargoyles, whom we meet briefly in OotP and again in DH, talk like Frankie Howerd, or like one of a number of other famously camp gay British comedy stars. This is very unlikely to be an accident.

Cullen skink is a peculiarly Scottish soup involving smoked haddock, potato and onion.

The description given in GoF says that Godric's sword is silver, but silver, even as an alloy, is too heavy and soft to make a sensible sword. I assumed originally that it was merely decorated with silver, but in Deathly Hallows we're told that it is "goblin silver". That could be some strange, lightweight, hard silver alloy, but my best guess would be that goblin silver is actually titanium.

The idea that the Chocolate Frog Cards might be used as a portable version of Albus's portrait was inspired by a story called Tormented Flesh by yncarn8. The idea that Albus's apparent omniscience might have been partly the result of using the Chocolate Frog Cards as a surveillance device is so far as I know wholly my own.

Folie à deux occurs when one of two friends is mentally ill, and the nominally saner friend becomes caught up in their delusions and starts to show similar symptoms.

The Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho famously shows a murder victim being stabbed through a shower curtain.

The Moors Murderers were paedophile serial killers who preyed on children in the early to mid 1960s, in the area just south of Manchester where Spinner's End is probably situated.

The song with which the chapter concludes is a filk (SF-based folk) song called Blazon, by Clif Flynt. The first (and last) verse describes the night sky in the antique French language used in formal heraldry, and begins "On a black background, scattered with silver stars...."

In the light of revelations in Deathly Hallows, the conversation between Severus and Albus has been substantially re-written, to show Albus as rather colder and to address both his willingness to send Harry to his death, and his cruelty towards Severus at the time of Lily's death.

The idea that Albus was concerned about Sirius's mental health and his difficult background, rather than especially fond of him, is I think supported by canon. As soon as the Potters were killed, and before there was any suspicion that Sirius was a traitor, Albus had already cut Sirius out of any part in deciding Harry's fate, by sending Hagrid to take Harry to the Dursleys without consulting Sirius. He seems to have accepted Sirius's guilt without question, until he found out that Peter was still alive, and later on he continued to give Sirius little or no say in Harry's upbringing, and could hardly find a good word to say about the man even when he was less than an hour dead.

On the other hand, he speaks of Snape with constant if slightly exasperated affection, and he twice refers to Snape's decision to quit the Death Eaters and work for the Order as his "rejoining" or "returning to" the anti-Voldemort party, suggesting that he'd had him pegged as naturally one of the Good Guys from the outset.