It wasn't quite cold enough for the snow to squeak beneath his boots, yet he seemed to hear the sound, an echo from his childhood, as he walked up the path to the front door. Someone had shoveled the walk recently, the marks from the blade of the shovel apparent against the frozen earth. He wondered if it had been Nathalie. No, not her, the shovelfulls of snow had been thrown too far from the edges of the walk. Her arms would have managed to throw the snow just clear of the walkway. His father, then, or his mother. He forced himself to look up as he approached the door.

The moisture on his gloves froze to the doorknocker for a moment, sticking his fingers there as he lifted the ring. He only had to let it fall once before the seal around the door clicked, and opened.

"Remus." His mother stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel. "Come in, you're letting the heat out."

He stepped in, wiping his feet without being told, without taking his eyes from her face. It would be soon enough that she would look away. She turned her eyes towards the ceiling, her hearing as keen as her son's.

"She knows you're here." Though she spoke to him, she did not meet his eyes again.

"Of course she does." He could hear her moving, running, across the upper floor of the house, then her feet pounding down the stairs.

He waited, conserving joy, a starving man before a feast not sure if the food is about to be revealed for a mirage.

There was nothing of the mirage about the child that skidded on wool socks across the wooden floor, nothing not entirely real about her arms around his waist and her head leaning on his side.

"Remus." There, his name, again, this time half squealed, half shouted instead of whispered. He saw his mother turning to leave then, leaving him to this warmer affection. The knot at the nape of her neck was entirely gray, the same hair he had inherited, gray before his time for reasons that had nothing to do with lycanthropy.

He pressed his hand to Nathalie's warm back, waiting patiently for her to lift her face from his coat. She was literally breathing in the scent of that wool, and he wondered, not for the first time, if some of the things he took for the werewolf in him weren't really just familial quirks, keen hearing and smell living in their genes, rather than inserted by some creature.

"Nat." He patted her head and she looked up, as she was meant to, though he noticed she was slouching, looking shorter than she really was. "Stand up and let me look at you."

She stepped back, stretching her spine, standing before the coat rack as if she was measuring herself against it.

"You're so much taller now," he said, hearing the words fall from his mouth like smooth pebbles he couldn't take back. She didn't mind, though, as she stretched herself taller against that measure.

"You should come home more often." She reached out her hand for his coat, and he handed it over, watching her struggle against its bulk as she hung it without letting it drag on the floor. "Come into the parlor."

Remus was glad that she let him follow her-- there was no way he could keep his shoulders from hunching whenever he walked into a new room, waiting for the surprise of seeing his father, but the room was empty.

“Where have you been? I want to know everything.” She was curling up in the armchair he recognized immediately as his father’s, and the image of her there was more balm to his mind than any words could have been. She was relaxed, never looking over her shoulder. If found there, there would be no unreasonable demands.

“I’ve been working for Dumbledore, you know that. I’ve been visiting Muggle families to explain what the Hogwarts letters are for.”

She rested her chin on her folded hands, her body nearly disappearing in the upholstery. The fire cast unusually deep shadows over the orbits of her eyes, making her irises gleam. It was only a trick of the light, but for a moment he caught his breath, seeing gold where there was really only a warm light brown.

“I don’t believe you.”

The stiff chair he sat in couldn’t betray his surprise through squeaking springs or shifting fabric, but she seemed to see it all the same. Her smile was satisfied, well beyond her eleven years, yet when she sat up straight in the chair, her legs dangling over the edge, she managed to look much younger.

“I wish I were going to Hogwarts.” She was crossing her feet over each other, no doubt scuffing the polish on her shoes. Remus was about to say something regarding that, sidestepping the myriad reasons that she would not be going to Hogwarts, but she looked up then, suddenly, and he knew his father had entered the room behind him.

Surprising, he thought, that he hadn’t detected the smell. Now that he knew the man was there the scent of sweet pipe tobacco, newsprint, and wood smoke were all that his nose knew. He stood.

“Happy Christmas,” he said, nodding as his father chose a seat in one of the other, less sumptuous armchairs. His father nodded as he sat, nearly grunting as he lowered his considerable frame, and Remus feared the moment when they might start speaking, or trying to speak. Nat didn’t know the depths to which his estrangement with his parents ran, and he didn’t want her to have to see, again, now, at an age where she might finally begin to understand.

“Happy Christmas, Randolph.” Remus almost shrank from that, from his father’s use of his real given name, but a sudden sharpening of Nat’s face, visible in his peripheral vision, prompted him to shoot her a warning glance instead. “Would you look at that,” he said, following Remus’ gaze to the armchair, “thinks she’s got me all wrapped up, she does. Sitting in my favorite chair.”

Nat smiled back, happy to play the game. “Course. You won’t kick me out.”

“Won’t I.” The crackling fire was almost enough to cover the fact that they weren’t speaking at all, after that.

Nat carried the conversation at the supper table.

“And maths,” she was saying, “they said I’ll learn plenty of algebra and calculus in the later years, but nothing about computers or calculators, so I’m trying to get started now, though I expect I’ll have to take courses over the summer or get a tutor. We could always say I’m going to a super traditional school, where they don’t let us have those things.”

“Take a breath, Nathalie,” her mother scolded, reaching out to adjust one of the candles in its holder. A Muggle to the core, thought Remus, deeply mistrustful of anything magic, or old enough to be touched by magic. He thought of the wax pooling at the top of the wax pillar, thought of showing Nat how to pour it, little by little, into cold water at the end of the evening. That kind of magic didn’t need a wand, after all, and no one could fault him for giving her a little advanced tutoring.

“And of course French,” she was saying, undeterred, “because all of the classes are in French, except Latin, which is in Latin, I guess.”

“They require Latin at Beauxbatons?” Remus asked, “good for them. You’ll be better off for it,” he told her when she pulled a face at him.

“Be one real subject anyway,” his father said, not quite sullenly. He was sitting too high, too strong to be sullen, but coming close. “Something to take with her into the real world, other than all that other stuff. Can’t get a job with that, now, can you?”

Nat jumped into the fray. “Remus has got a job, haven’t you Remus?”

His father interrupted. “Not much of one, by the looks of it.”

Remus sighed. His suit was shiny at the knees and shoulders, it was true, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to spend any of the money that Sirius had left him, what little Dumbledore had managed to priss from the Goblins, that was, after they had taken out fourteen years worth of fees.

“I’m doing alright, Dad,” he said, “putting some aside to buy a house, even.”

“Nothing wrong with economy,” his mother put in, and Remus resisted the urge to place his head in his hands. The age old fight was beginning. They might be at the table for months.

“I want to know about the war.” That was Nat, jumping in with the one word that would stop all the adults cold in their petty bickering. Of course, the kind of disagreements that could be opened with that word went beyond petty, but it would have to be endured. Even his father fell silent, merely waiting.

“It’s a waiting game, for now,” Remus said. “There’s no doubt that the schools are the safest places, though. You’re doing right by sending her to Beauxbatons.”

“Not sending her in to harm’s way, then,” his mother asked. “The nights I’ve been kept up with that thought.”

Remus had to bite his tongue to keep from saying the wrong words. “Nathalie will be magical no matter where she is, and there is a spark of something in her that makes her a cinch to find by her own kind, good and bad. You can’t protect her here the same way that Beauxbatons can.” Or the way Hogwarts could, he thought to himself, yet Hogwarts carried its own brand of danger in the bait and weapon both that was Harry James Potter.

“I’ve got my wand already,” she said, “but I’ve promised not to use it. Want to see?”

“Of course.”

A nod from her mother and she was excused from the table.

There was silence again, when she left. Remus' mother stood, retrieved his father's pipe from its shelf above the stove, and brought it to him just as he was taking the pouch of tobacco out of his pocket. Remus watched, half repulsed at the prospect of smoke, but also relieved that this one thing should remain unchanged from his childhood.

"Tell us more about the war," his father said, tamping the leaves into the bowl. "We've heard things from France, nothing clear."

"Voldemort is back, apparently at his old strength. It would appear that he is amassing an army similar to the one he had when I was at Hogwarts, but it remains to be seen how successful he will be in that."

From the slow nod his father gave him, Remus surmised that that was the extent of what he had already been told.

"The safest places, as always, will be the schools. Hogwarts is heavily protected, but it may well be targeted as well. Beauxbatons is on good terms with Hogwarts, but they have no formal alliance, so I have very little reason to think it will be targeted in any way. You've made a wise decision in not waiting until the fall term."

His mother looked pale at that, leaning forward. "You really think so?"

His father blew smoke across the table, across the chair Nat had left vacant. "Of course we have. Bloody mess, Nat having the same traits you did, but we have to do the best we can."

"She's safer in a magical school than she would be out of it, even if she had been born without her talents."

At that his father looked angry, and Remus knew he'd made a mistake, hinting at the fact that his very existence posed a threat to the entire family.

"You're not up to anything that would put us in the way of Voldemort, are you?" He gestured with the pipe, a move Remus had feared since his childhood, fearing the fire that lived in the little bowl, but he sat still.

"I'm nothing to him, Dad. Just a regular Hogwarts employee. Just a normal man, with a normal job. There are powerful spells protecting all the Muggle families with magical children, in any case. You've always known that."

His father looked as though the memory provoked him, but his mother relaxed into her chair somewhat.

"It'll be alright, George," she said, patting her husband's arm.

"What'll be alright?" Nat had slipped into the dining room, her wand case held shyly at her side.

"Nothing, Fairytale," Remus said, bringing out the old childhood nickname, a shortening of the Fairytale Princess she had insisted on, before either of them had known she was a witch. It had the desired effect, in that she came to stand beside him at once.

"We did it mail order," she said, "from Dubois, in Paris."

"Hmmm." Remus weighed the case in his hands. The wand chooses the wizard, so Ollivander had said. How much of that was his mystique and rhetoric, and how much was real? "Would you like to show me?"

She snapped the case open with a simple flick of her fingers, the movement so quick he imagined she'd practiced it many times already.

"Aspen wood, thirteen inches, very springy," she said, demonstrating a carefully slow swish that couldn't be misconstrued for underage magic. It did have a lot of spring to it, he noticed, a lot like Lily's first wand. "With a core of Kelpie hair. I thought that might be bad luck, but Madame Maxime seemed pleased when she heard."

"It is unusual." He was aware that their parents were watching them intently, yet he hardly had to expend any energy at all in ignoring them. "May I?"

She placed it in his hand. "Don't use it, though," she said, "I'll get in trouble."

"Come on." He smiled at her, "no one has to know."

He took his own wand out of his jumper, and held it over hers held in his other hand. "This is Remus J. Lupin," he said, tapping the one against the other. Setting his wand on the table, he transferred hers to his right hand. "Now, what do you think?"

"Something for Mum, first," she whispered.

A simple spell, a swish and flick, and they could hear the dishes in the sink began washing themselves.

"Lovely," his mother murmured. "Remember when Sirius was here? He transfigured part of the cabinets into a washing up machine. Stayed fixed like that for years." She sighed quietly. "May his soul rest in peace."

Remus started then, wondering how his mother knew, then remembered he had simply told her that Sirius was dead all those years ago.

"Dad?" He turned to his father. "Something for you, while we're trying out Nat's wand?"

"No." He looked deeply sour, more so since Sirius had been mentioned.

His parents retired early, but let Nat stay up, a Christmas time treat.

"It's Christmas Eve Eve," she noted as they settled into the living room, she curling into the corners of the old yet cushy sofa.

"Are you nervous about leaving?" he asked, not at all sure what he would do if she said yes. The halls of Beauxbatons were a mystery to him.

"Not really." She sank into the upholstery, looking at once older and younger than she really was. "I expect it will take me a while to settle into the new language, but I'm still young enough to pick it up, so Mum says. She's been tutoring me in that, too."

"Has she." Hearing his sister refer to her own youth had only made her seem older, somehow.

"Remus," she said after a moment, "what am I?"

He found himself stumped. "You’re my sister. You're Nathalie the Fairy Tale Princess. What else is there?"

She stared at him. "You know. The thing Mum and Dad won't call me."

"Oh. You're a witch."

She beamed at him then, looking happier than he had yet seen her.

"Why don't you come home more often?" She looked down into her hot chocolate when she asked, keeping her eyes from him. He waited until she was looking at him again to answer.

"You know perfectly well why not."

"Is it just because of your condition, though? Or is it something else? Is it your job?"

"It's my job, yes."

She looked like a satisfied cat. "You're not working for the school."

He sighed. "Yes, I am. I'm working for Dumbledore."

She relented for the moment. "I wish I were going to Hogwarts. I'd see you more then."

"Hardly." It was almost the truth.

"There's something I have to ask you," she said, looking at him this time.

"Go ahead." He tried to settle into the couch, wondering what git had coined the idea about wisdom from the mouths of babes.

"You're my father, aren't you?"

He laughed at that, a real laugh, both at the very idea and the fact that he hadn't guessed. Surely some of the neighbors thought so, if they even knew of his existence at all. The older son, the one who hardly ever came around.

"No, Nat, you're my sister." She pouted at him, the scorned detective. "Mum and Dad were young when I was born, old when you were born. It happens sometimes." He reached over and ruffled her hair. "Is that all you wanted to ask me?"

"No." He stopped laughing. "There's something else. You're different. There's something about you. I've noticed it before."

"Might be the fact that I'm a werewolf?" She glared at him. "The whole turning into a snarling animal every full moon, that might be it?"

"No. Not that. You know what I mean."

"Nat, I don't." She was twirling her wand in her fingers, a dangerous temptation for an underaged witch. He almost said something to her, then stopped his tongue.

"Last year you didn't come home for Christmas, and the year before you didn't come home for your summer visit."

"I'm a horrible older brother, it's true."

"That year you skipped the summer visit. You called me on the phone, and I heard someone in your cottage." She looked expectant.

"I'm not a complete loner, you know. I do have people round, every now and then."

"I don't think you have, since then."

He bit his tongue, determined not to become riled by an eleven year old, and she continued. "It was Sirius. He didn't die before I was born, but he was away somewhere, isn't that right?"

He lost his resolve then, leaning forward.

"Who told you that?" If his little sister had found out, it could be a serious security leak for the Order.

"No one." She leaned forward too, then tapped her third eye gently with the tip of the wand. "D'you think it'll get stronger when I'm allowed to use magic?"

"It might." Coldness washed over him, relief mixed with an awful urge to ask her what else she could see.

"It just comes and goes, now," she said, "I can't control it. And I don't know little things, just," she searched for a word, "like the background to things."

"Is that all you wanted to know?"

"No. But I'm guessing it's none of my business."

Remus drained his cider in one gulp. The chocolate in her cup smelled so good, coating the inside of his nose with the sweet dry scent of cocoa. Cider just never measured up.

"Probably not, but I wish you'd ask." That coldness came back, the sense that it might have something to do with the Order.

"You were in love with Sirius, wern't you?"

He sighed. Her gift didn't leave much room for lies. "I was. He really is dead now, though. He died this past spring."

"That's why you didn't come home this summer, isn't it?"

He nodded.

"I'm sorry." She looked drained, far beyond the modest hour.

"It's all right. He was a good friend, and I miss him, but I'm all right now." Was he? He wondered where the words came from.

The couch groaned as she levered herself out of the corner and came to stand by him. He rested his hand on her head when she put it on his shoulder.

"Sometimes I wish you really were my Dad," she said, "you'd have to take me with you wherever you went, and you couldn't stay away for summers and Christmases."

"You're going away to school now," he said, "and by the time you're done, you'll be a grown woman and you can live wherever you want." Wishful thinking, he thought, you'll be as constrained by money as anyone else. But it was true to a point, especially in the Wizarding World, where hospitality extended much farther than in the Muggle world.

She nodded, her hair mussing under his hand, then leaned and kissed his cheek.

"Good night," she said, "I'll see you in the morning."

"'Night."

He collected their cups, brought them to the kitchen. The washing up spell had long worn off, so he stood at the sink, rinsing them by hand.

"Randolph." He had smelled the man before he heard him, so it was with no surprise that he turned to see his father in the doorway. "I've been talking to your mother."

"What about?" He hung the mugs on their hooks, wondering how many times his mother had done that, if she had ever wished for a life outside of this house. She'd had a respite, a few years after he'd left school, and then Nat was born and her time in the house started all over again.

"I heard you talking to Nathalie."

Remus turned. His father was standing in the door, not leaning on the frame as was his normal habit.

"She's very fortunate that you're sending her to France," Remus said, carefully avoiding the magic words that might set the man off. "I'm sure she's grateful."

They looked at each other, the silence as great between them as if neither had spoken at all.

"You can't stay in this house any more."

The words washed over him without meaning.

"Stay here?" he asked, "I'm barely ever here as it is. I wasn't going to ask if I could move in."

"You need to leave. We can't have you here for the holidays."

"Why not?" For the third time that night the cold feeling washed over him. His mother was in contact with the wizarding world, far more than his father had ever been, and she might have heard something. "Is something wrong?"

"We always suspected you were strange, but Nat knows for sure. We can't have that around her. It's not natural."

Remus sighed, letting his hand drop to the edge of the sink. It was little enough to hold on to, but the shock was that great.

"And my being a werewolf isn't so much an issue, is that it?"

"Listen. You being a werewolf, it's beyond belief. It isn't quite real. Besides the obvious, you can't hurt Nat with that. But she's strange, stranger than you ever were, even after you changed."

Remus stared at him. "Changed" was a fairly neutral term for a process that started with his attack in the woods, continued with the stay in hospital, and the strangers all around his bed, the people who kept getting in despite his parents' protests that only family members be allowed to visit him on the closed ward. They were wizards, of course, and they would have come even had he been a Muggle child. It was only the strangest of-- was it luck-- that he was a wizard himself, destined to live in a world where his affliction would at least be known for what it was, not stuck in the Muggle world, crippled beyond reckoning by his monthly transformations.

"Why is Nat strange?" It seemed the only thing to ask.

"You know, now that's she's told you, and we know too. Never could keep anything secret from her, not since she was a baby. She always seemed to know. She takes things in, too-- and we can't have her picking up your habits."

"My habits?" Remus wondered if his father might be mad. "Turning into a werewolf every full moon, that bad habit? Sorry, I'll try to work on that."

"The other."

He should have known that sarcasm wouldn't carry him too far.

"Falling in love with men? Seems it would be the probable thing for her to do, in a while, that is. Where's the problem?" That wasn't sarcasm, but the truth.

"She's strange, and she's going to fall in with other strange people. No telling what she might take a turn in her mind to think is fashionable. We can't have her being strange like you, not that way."

"I'm not going to change her." He felt something ripping inside him, something being torn away, and he remembered her question. He'd not done right by her, he knew that, he didn't have the right to feel that something so precious was being taken away from him, but there it was, the feeling that this might be a pale shadow of what it felt like to be denied your child.

"Let me stay Christmas," he said, "I promised Nat that I would stay at least that long."

His father shook his head. "You need to go now. I'll tell your sister why."

"Let me be the one to tell her, at least. I owe her that much."

"You've not been around enough to owe her anything. It will be easier if you just go."

With that, Remus sensed something all to familiar-- futility. He washed the dishrag he'd used, rung it out, and hung it over the faucet, hoping all the while that something would change in the interim. When he looked back, he recognized that for a fanciful wish, and nothing else.

"I'll leave in the morning." He stepped away from the sink, longing for sleep and nothing more than that.

"You will leave now."

There it was, the voice of the father. Remus tried hard not to slouch, tried not to let the fatigue that threatened to overtake him hold him in its sway, but failed. There was nothing to say to that voice. No matter how nonsensical, that voice was the end of the matter in this house. In this house, that voice ruled even above his mother.

It was the work of a moment for him to retrieve his case and his coat from the front hallway. He tried to ignore his father's footsteps following him, retreating into an old trick of simply moving forward, simply moving, not thinking, just doing what had to be done.

When he opened the front door he knew his father was standing behind him, could smell the man and feel the heat of his breath on the back of his neck, but he didn't look.

He crunched through the coating of snow on the yard, leaving deep footprints, a childish thing to do. His parents would be horrified at the clear line of steps leading to the middle of the yard and stopping, not returning. He didn't need to walk away from the house at all, but standing on the steps he felt the pull of what was inside far too strongly to Apparate safely.

By the apple tree, then, bare now, of course. There the deep desire for the warmth and company inside the house faded a little bit.

On an impulse he looked up, to the small window marking where Nathalie's room was. She was awake, looking down at him. Of course. Her face was like the moon at three quarters, fuller on the side where she had pushed her hair behind her shoulder. She lifted her hand, held it near her shoulder in something that could have been either an oath or a wave.

Remus took out his wand, and thought for a moment. Anything he could spell in light would be too short, too banal to mean anything enough for her to keep. Instead he turned to the apple tree, and with the words of a charm taught to him by Lily so many years ago lit it with white lights.

It was harder to see her now, the white light reflecting in the panes of glass, but he could see the hand move then, a real wave this time. He looked away when he Apparated, afraid that a part of him would long to stay behind so much that his splinching would be a foregone conclusion.

The entryway at 12 Grimmauld was cold, as he had expected it to be, and quiet, which he had not expected. Where the portrait of Sirius' mother had once stood there was only a cleaner spot on the still-sirty wall, but it wasn't the absence of her screaming that jarred him. It was the lack of any kind of celebration. True enough, the Order had had little enough to celebrate lately, but with Dumbledore around Remus was surprised to find the house still so late in the season.

There was nothing to do but keep moving, he reminded himself. It was a thought he had held in his mind many times before. An animal that lies down in the cold woods dies, sooner or later, and he had taken that instinct into his human heart as well. No matter what, just keep moving.

Supper at his parents' house seemed a million years away, and he thought, then, to move into the kitchen, where at least there might be another person awake as well as food to be had. There was really no chance of sympathy, or even real companionship, but at least there would not be this oppressive silence.

When he placed his hand against the door of the kitchen he knew there were people inside-- there was a vibration of voices he could feel rather than hear through the thick wood, and a warmth to the corridor that would have long since faded from supper had the room been empty.

Yet when he opened the door, there was hardly any sound, only the sight of two rows of faces turning towards him. There was hardly a seat left at the long table, each place filled by a silent man or woman.

"Remus," Tonks said, her voice sounding oddly small in the wake of such silence, "we were just talking about you." She blushed slightly, lowering her head, yet no one moved to even wince at the faux pas.

"Yes, indeed," Snape put in. He was not sitting at the table, but rather at the hearth's edge, out of the light of the fire but quite near its warmth. "Talking about you, or, should we simply say, about werewolves in general."

"How many do you know?" He directed the question to Snape, but it could have been for anyone in the room, none of whom managed to meet his own stare, save for Molly Weasley. And even she, he knew, did not have any werewolves among her acquaintance.

“Only one who bears conversation, therefore, one could say we were talking about you.” Snape leaned forward then, sliding his chair forward with a sound that Tonks winced at. She stood, then, making a place for him and sitting herself on the bricks of the hearth.

“It is very grave.” That was Dumbledore, for once sans sparkle. “The Ministry has handed down a decree that effectually reverses all the rights werewolves have gained over the last two decades. Property is to be rescinded to the nearest relative, for example.”

Remus swallowed, trusting himself to meet only Dumbledore’s eyes. Then, it could seem more of a dream, a nightmare, than anything else. Only later, with memories of the others around the table, would it take on the patina of reality.

“Including personal affects?” he asked.

Dumbledore shook his head. “No, those, at least are to be retained by you. With one exception.”

He was suddenly aware of the other faces around him, glowing white as Geishas, round ghosts floating in dim firelight. Only Snape looked normal, his face so devoid of passion or apparent thought that he might as well have been somewhere else entirely. For some reason that steadied, rather than angered Lupin, and for that reason he directed his next question there, rather than to the old man whose own face had paled to match and then exceed his beard.

“My wand?” Still, it wasn’t real, not even with those words that had been heard so many times in his nightmares. It had only been within his own lifetime that werewolves had been allowed to carry wands, and he felt the threat of its absence almost every day. Now that threat was going to become reality.

“Yes. Your wand.” Then there was another pale shape in the room, the flat of Snape’s palm, outstretched, fingers flat. He didn’t beckon; he simply waited to be obeyed.

Lupin stood, barely hearing Dumbledore’s protest that the taking of his wand could wait a few moments, at least, that Lupin could choose by whom it would be done, and clutched his wand in his right hand for what he knew would be the last time.

It had been perfect for the practice of Defense, short enough to be tucked into a sleeve at a moment’s notice, but whippy enough to resist breaking should it be jarred in a duel. He had often thought of buying a new one, leaving his boyhood wand behind, but it had suited him all through his life, and he did not wish to leave that part of himself behind.

The white faces floated in the black air of the kitchen, seeming to get farther and farther away as the air in his lungs and in the room became colder. The knowledge that he was about to lose his wand hit him with the same force as a Dementor, and he nearly stumbled before bringing his arm up in a wide arc.

Expecto Patronum! He barely heard himself say the words, but then the far corner of the kitchen was lit with a mass of silver sparks that slowly resolved themselves into the shape of a great dog.

The dog bounded over, head held high and watchful even as the mouth showed teeth in a canine smile. A derisive snort from Snape was all that was needed for the dog to turn his head, baring gums in a silent growl that showed his lupine heritage.

“I should have known.” Snape was the only one who spoke as the dog resumed its domesticated shape, settling on its haunches next to Lupin’s seat. Lupin sank down then, his knee as near to the silver dog’s head as it could be without touching. Eventually, seeing that there was no danger, the Patronus would fade, but Remus wanted that moment to be slow in its coming.

“Yes, you should have known.” Remus was surprised by how pleasant his voice sounded. He felt bitter, sad, angry, enraged, really, but with the Patronus, the avatar of Sirius and Anamagi and his own animal nature sitting at his side he couldn’t let any of those hard feelings rise to the surface. The light from the form narrowed his pupils until the dog was all he saw. “You know, I’m never going to be able to summon you again. That doesn’t mean I might not need you sometime.” Again, that canine smile, the flash of gums and raised hackles towards Snape, and the form stood and made as if to run through the far wall, where it ended in a shower of sparks instead of flickering out as a Patronus was usually wont to do.

His vision came back slowly, the faces appearing at first in negative, as if he had been staring at them for a long while rather than looking away. “Alright,” he said, handing the wand over to Snape, effectually squashing the protest from Dumbledore, “if it were going to be done, it’s best that it be done quickly.” The quick nod he had from the other man had to be the most civil interaction they’d ever had, Lupin thought, and it was the last thought he had before a pain like the change ripped through him, starting with the deep middle of his ribcage and radiating out through his limbs, over the softness of his belly, up his throat, and even into his eyes. Then the deep centers of his brain seemed to burn, his skull ached, ears rang, and he thought he grasped the edge of the table, but then again he might have fallen too.

He didn’t know which, for when he came back to his senses he was sitting quite calmly on the bench, only the vaguest of discomforts sensible in the place he would have pointed to his heart.

“Is it done?” His voice was not raw, he noted, perhaps that meant he had not screamed as he had wished to do.

Snape held out his hand exactly as before, fingers straight, but this time with two thick sections of wand lying across them. Remus’ vision swam again as he looked at them, remembering keying Nathalie’s wand to his own, spelling the tree with fairy lights-had it gone dark, now that the wand that cast the spell was broken? Hard to believe, impossible to believe, that her sweet curiosity and the tree itself had all been a part of this same evening.

“Burn the pieces.” He was surprised to see Snape shake his head. Did the man have some hidden sentiment in him after all?

“I cannot.” His voice, not exactly flat, but the same tone and timbre as if he were reciting didactic potions to a third year class. Neither interested nor aggravated, his voice simply was, and the words hung in the air without any context Remus could pin them to.

“Professor Snape is quite right, Remus,” Dumbledore said, and Remus wondered if he had caught his own entry into the world of the worthless werewolf. “He cannot throw your wand in the fire, as the Ministry requires it as evidence that the letter of their law has been followed.”

Remus looked the old man in the eye and found neither compassion nor concern there. That was as it should be-either of those things would have sent him over the edge into tears, which he could ill afford in front of his colleagues. If he could still call them colleagues, that was. He nodded, repressing the thought of his wand, stored in pieces for all time, out of his sight and reach, as if it could do him any good at all.

Snape stood and walked along the length of the table to where Dumbledore sat, handing him the pieces quietly, folding his palm like one giving a tip at a fancy restaurant. No one saw the pieces pass from man to man, and only the tiniest of movements gave away Dumbledore’s stashing of them in one of the many pockets of his robe.

Remus suddenly felt the outcast more because of his own clothing, still the Muggle slacks and shirt he had worn to his parents’ house, while all others around the table had donned their robes for the meeting.

“We must finish with this,” Dumbledore said, “before we can move on to other business.”

Remus stared at the old man again, determined that nothing could be as bad as having had his wand broken.

“What else is there?” It would be bad, he knew that much. Happy Christmas to me, he thought.

“You must live under supervision,” Dumbledore said, “any official body may undertake to do so, and all may require you to work for the provisions you will be given therein.”

“I am to be put in a work prison.” He almost shuddered, wondering what lifetime of work he was to be put to in return for his stay, then hated himself for the revelation of his own frailty.

“Not necessarily. Hogwarts is prepared to employ you. However, there is only one position open, and the law requires that we do not create one simply for a werewolf’s benefit.” Dumbledore grimaced, the first time Lupin had ever seen that expression on his face. “Fudge was actually very clear on that point. Although Dolores is gone, we continue to be watched most closely.”

“What is it?” There was an odd sound in the room, and before Dumbledore could answer he realized that it was Tonks, whispering “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry” under her breath.

“Tonks,” Snape cut in, “please quiet your litany. Lupin could not have filled the Defense position even if it had remained available.”

“Right,” she said, quietly, just as Dumbledore began to speak again.

“You may not fill a teaching position, but you may work as an assistant to a professor. The choice is yours, I am afraid, to either be underemployed at Hogwarts, or to take your chances with whatever employment the Ministry might find for you.”

Remus chuffed, a wolf laugh escaping his human mouth. “Hardly a choice, is it?” he asked. There were usually only two professors who were ever afforded the luxury of an assistant-Herbology and Potions. “And I’m guessing it’s not Sprout I’ll be assisting.”

“Oh but it is,” Snape cut in before Dumbledore could speak. Amazingly, Remus noted, he was not in the least quelled by Dumbledore’s disapproving look. “You see, she is so taxed by her extracurricular activities that she simply must have an assistant. I, on the other hand, simply have nothing to do with my time outside the classroom, so I shall go without.”

“It is as I thought,” Lupin said, raising a hand to stop Dumbledore’s speech. “I will take my chances with the Ministry if my employment is not to Professor Snape’s liking. I will not make him my keeper against his will.”

The crash that followed his words was only later realized as Snape’s chair falling backwards as he stood too quickly.

“Do you really dare to think so meanly of me, Lupin?” Snape rested his fingertips on the table, a pale echo of leaning across the table and into Lupin’s face as he would have no doubt loved to have done. “That I would condemn you to some Ministry sponsored gulag, out of some kind of spite?” He straightened then, what color he possessed coming back to his face. “I was merely illuminating the extremely obvious point that you need not pussyfoot around the fact that I will be your employer, like it or not.”

Tonks was sitting very still, Molly and Arthur Weasley apparently holding hands under the table, solidarity in the face of infighting. Moody merely looked interested, Shacklebolt and Hestia looked bored, while Dumbledore, maddeningly enough, seemed to have recovered some of his normal color.

“It is not a foregone conclusion,” Remus pointed out. “I could choose to take my chances with the Ministry.”

“More fool you,” Snape said, his voice sounding odd when wrapped in idiom. “I suggest you accept Hogwart’s offer.”

Remus saw to the heart of that linguistic bit of gymnastics, neither calling the offer his, nor Dumbledore’s. Neither claiming nor rejecting. He struggled to respond in kind.

“I would be pleased,” he said, looking at Dumbledore (as it would be easier to lie to the old man than to Snape) “to accept this offer.” On the last bit he turned slowly towards Snape, so that only the last word was truly directed at him.

“Good.” Dumbledore nodded. “You will stay with us here for the holiday, under the auspices of Hogwarts, and when we return you may take up residence in the assistant’s apartment in the dungeon.” Remus thought fleetingly of the snug but picturesque shed-cum-cottage that served as the assistant’s quarters for the Herbology professor, and wondered briefly why Sprout couldn’t have been the reformed Death Eater among them.

“Thank you.” And with those words it was sealed. From now on he would be receiving the orders, and saying thank you to boot. Snape and Dumbledore would be giving them. He looked around the table at the witches and wizards gathered there, felt the collar of his Muggle shirt scratch against his skin, and wondered if he would ever again feel a peer to them in his lifetime.

nter>

“Shred these. Please.” Snape pushed the pile of Fennel roots towards him. “Discard the brown segments, naturally.” He sighed, an uncharacteristic sound. “I really should have the students shred their own fennel, but it is simply not worth the headache.”

Lupin smiled slightly, to think that Snape might spare a student for his own convenience. He knew well enough that they all assumed he would make their lives miserable at any cost.

“Anything else?” He looked at Snape’s chin when he spoke, hoping it came close enough to the mark that the other man would not notice his discomfort. He was owned by Snape, and he knew it, but that didn’t mean he was accustomed to it already. As odd as anything else was the fact that they routinely spoke in civil tones. Perhaps now that he was mere property, or at most a ward, Snape felt comfortable speaking with his once-enemy.

“Continue alphabetizing the spare jars in the back room. Work only until supper-I don’t expect you to finish this evening. Not with any kind of accuracy, anyway.”

“Right.” Lupin nodded, effectually taking his eyes away from Snape altogether.

He was required to walk to supper with his employer, his guardian, his owner. Technically Snape was only his employer, but as the Ministry never dinted to say, there were responsibilities inherent in ownership.

“Where will you be eating tonight, Lupin?” Remus turned his head, startled by the question. In the weeks he’d been working as Snape’s assistant, the man had hardly said two words to him.

“I thought I might sit with the lower Gryffindor students again tonight,” he said, “they seem to enjoy my company.”

Snape nodded minutely, thinking of his first days at Hogwarts. Ten years old, skinny, cold in the drafty castle that was nothing like the climate of his home, and surrounded by utter strangers. Had an adult joined the Slytherin table it would have been a relief to have someone, anyone to talk to.

“Be that as it may, you also have the choice of joining me at the head table.”

“Dumbledore said it wasn’t possible to secure me a place at the head table.” Lupin spoke evenly, yet he could not keep the incredulity from his voice. Of all the things Dumbledore could do, giving him a seat for his evening meal did not seem to be one of them. He had said it was a contingency of the Ministry’s allowing them to employ the werewolf, yet it still smarted.

“You would join me as my guest.” Snape looked away then, to preclude having to see anything like a grateful look on Lupin’s face, but he needn’t have bothered.

“That would be pleasant.” Lupin was all decorum. Perhaps, Snape thought with a pang of alarm, he was more beaten than decorous.

Lupin stood by the tall front doors, neither wanting to flee in haste, nor to look as though he was waiting around for something. It was true that he was watching Snape’s heated discussion with Dumbledore, but he was not waiting for the outcome. It was predetermined that a beast such as a werewolf should not have a place at the head table. Pity, too, he thought with that same bland lack of emotion, they were having roast beef tonight too. He licked his lips absently. He loved roast beef-the rich savoury sauce, the potatoes and carrots and onions, and the meat itself, bands of muscle held together by fat. He stopped. If that was how he saw food, simple wholesome human food, he would do well not to eat that dish altogether. It did bring out the wolf in him. It would be best not to sit among the humans at all. He thought a lump might rise in his throat, but instead that place that had emptied when his wand broke merely grew a little broader.

“Intolerable.” Snape spoke without looking up, without taking his attention off of his food. Lupin was interested to note that he cut meat with the same precision and uniformity of size and shape as he did potions ingredients. “It makes no sense at all.”

Lupin nodded, even knowing he wouldn’t be seen, as he forked up a mouthful of beef and potato, more traditionally cut.

“You’re an employee here, and if there’s room for Filch’s mangy cat, there’s room for you.”

Lupin laughed then, loudly but without mirth. “You might say I’m an amalgam of Filch and Mrs. Norris. A non-magical animal.”

Snape slammed his fork down, letting it clang against the good china that the house elves had supplied. Lupin looked up for that, wondering if he had misspoken, feeling the anger growing in him like a hot thing at the thought he might be chastised for speaking or laughing.

“You are nothing of the sort.” He reached into the inner pocket of his robes, pulled out his wand. “Nothing.” He held it out to Lupin.

Lupin had trouble swallowing around the lump of surprise that rose in his throat. It was almost unheard of for a wizard to offer another wizard his own wand in any but the most dire circumstances.

“I’d rather not.” He’d thought of saying thank-you, but it was so insufficient as to be insulting.

“Perhaps not.” Snape looked angry as he put his wand away, and they finished their meal in tense silence. After Lupin had layered his silverware atop the plate he excused himself, returning to his room.

A brown owl sat on top of his bureau, a letter tied to her leg.

“Well, hello,” Lupin said, approaching her slowly. Post Owls were known for not being skittish around witches and wizards, but it never did to startle any animal. “I’m terribly glad to see you,” he said, loosening the ties that held the little metal tube to her leg. “I’m only allowed to send mail by return post, so tell whoever sent this that they must continue to write back.” Yet when he unrolled the note there was no return address, no signature, no mark at all to say who it was from. “Alright,” he told the little animal, “stay here and eat while I read, then, and you can take my reply back directly.”

While she nibbled at a plain biscuit, Lupin settled into his one armchair to read. It was the first bit of mail he had received in a long time, so he tried to read slowly, despite the fact that he could clearly see the note was only a paragraph in length.

I’m not really supposed to be writing to you, so I’m not signing my name. Also, the matter I’m writing about is somewhat sensitive. I’ve known you for a long while, and I know you can be trusted not to reveal me in any letters we might exchange. You’re allowed to send mail by return post, I know that much, but I don’t know what they’d do if they knew your first letter was anonymous. If you feel that we may converse in this way, do send a reply with my owl. Otherwise, you must do what you feel is necessary for your own safety.

As you can see, I have not even broached the matter I feel is at hand. Please reply with an estimate as to the safety of this owl, and I will write to you of it after receiving your note by return owl. Thank you.

Lupin read the note twice, then threw his head back and laughed. Reaching over to the bureau he stroked the little owl on the back of her neck, laughing again when he realized she’d already devoured an entire biscuit. “Hungry sweetheart?” he asked. “Let me get you some water.”

I would be pleased to converse with you, he wrote on a small piece of paper. Of course, if the subject matter is too sensitive, or harmful to the Ministry, I will not be able to continue. Otherwise, please feel free to write and perhaps someday you will be able to reveal your identity to me.

He considered “signing” with a star, or a quick sketch of a fairy, but decided against it in the end. Even a cryptic mark like that would be too risky.

The short walk to the nearest window felt like a tiny bit of freedom in itself. He watched the owl fly away, until the spot she became on the horizon blurred and became a part of all the dots that danced in his vision at twilight.

"Will you dine with me in my quarters tonight?" Snape stood at his elbow, depositing more ingredients (beetles, by the sound of them) on the workbench as he spoke. "If you would prefer not to, please feel free to say so."

Lupin swallowed a laugh. Please feel free to say so indeed. Snape knew very well that he could command Lupin to do practically anything. It was a gift to be able to say no, and a gift that could be taken away at a moment's notice, or none.

"I would be pleased to." He had meant the words only as a formality, but when he spoke he was surprised to hear the ring of truth there.

The owl came at supper, flying into Snape's quarters through the window he'd cracked open over the sink.

"Must be for you," Snape said, "my own owl delivers all my mail." They were nearly the first words Snape had said to him all evening.

Lupin nodded. "I recognize her from yesterday." She daintily helped herself to a beakfull of peas from the edge of his plate, ignoring Snape's disdainful look if she saw it at all. Lupin smiled even as he itched to remove the letter from her leg.

"Feel free to read," Snape said, continuing to eat with that neat precision that invariably made Lupin feel like a slob. "I often do, at mealtimes." There was a ring of lonliness to those words, and Lupin filed that away to think on later. In the meantime, the only thing that occupied his mind was the contents of the letter.

I am concerned about the professors here, and although my French is not perfect, I believe I have overheard some things that may be of interest to you-- regarding your job, of course. I have not been evesdropping, I'll have you know. The walls here are very thin. Please reply and tell me if this is a suitable subject matter. Regards.

Again, the letter was left unsigned.

"From my sister," Lupin volunteered when he looked up. "She is having a difficult time, I'm afraid, becomming accostomed to her new home, at Beauxbatons." He nearly bit his tongue, thinking of how ridiculous it was to think that Snape would be even in the least interested. To his surprise, though, the other man's eyebrows merely raised.

"You have a sister?"

Remus nodded, turning the parchment over. Would it be better to write her a reply now, or wait until another time?

"May I ask how old she is?" Snape folded his napkin beside his plate, as if they were eating in hall.

"She is eleven. A caboose child, as the Muggles call them."

"A mistake." He took a sip of his water.

"A surprise." He thought of his mother's relief that she might at last have a child without the burden of lycanthropy. "You may well imagine that they were relieved for me to be long out of their home when she was born."

Snape pinched the bridge of his nose, and Lupin wodered if he'd gone too far. "What brought you to Grimmauld so early this holiday?"

Lupin felt as though he was standing at the edge of a cliff. Why not jump off?

"My parents overheard my sister and I speaking. She's clairvoyant. When she asked me if I was gay I couldn't lie to her, and they kicked me out of the house." It sounded so ridiculous when he put it like that.

"Why did you reveal that? You know how dangerous that is in these times." There was a strange mixture of concern and curiosity on his face.

"It's not as if I was jumping around the parlor yelling 'I'm a fairy, I'm a fairy.'" He turned back to his food, hardly daring to hope that the matter might just be dropped.

"So she's truly clairvoyant?" Snape seemed to want to be off the topic of his being a poof, and he couldn't blame him.

"It would appear so. She knows, too, the limits of her own gift, which is more than some clairvoyants will know in their entire lifetimes."

"Too true." Snape stared at his hands for a moment, not in idle contemplation, but more as if he were really considering them, as implements, as weapons, perhaps. "My parents kicked me out of their home for very similar reasons when I was seventeen."

"Very similar?" If he was going to far, surely Snape would tell him.

"It wasn't so much what but who." Snape grimmaced. "Good times." He seemed prepared neither to say more nor to offer an explaination. Lupin was relieved for that, and for the motif it was a part of. There had not been much talk in the weeks of his employ, nor any asking for explainations of past sins.

"And we pride ourselves to be so much more advanced than the Muggle world," Snape said, an odd smile pursing his lips, but only for a moment. "Good night, Lupin." It was not entirely an abrubpt dismissal-- the little owl seemed anxious to leave herself.

"Good night Snape."

The walls are very thin, are they? May I take that to mean that the traditional French architecture does not place as much emphasis on impermeability as our British architecture does? Be careful-- despite appearances, your listening may not go unnoticed. I am sorry that you feel you must suspect your own professors. Your school is a very respected organization, and I am sure that your professors only wish what is best for you.

Lupin actually laughed as he wrote that, then crumpled the parchment and started over. Had he his wand he could have simply banished the offending sentence, but it did not bear thinking on. Besides, his evening was fairly empty. He changed the second draft so that the sentence read I surely hope that each of your professors has only your best interests in mind. You may write to me with any concern you may have. Regards.

PS. Please be sure to give your owl a healthful diet-- here we are feeding her hardly anything but biscutits and peas. It is all I have available, though I will endeavor to find some owl pellets. He wrote that last as she polished off a plain biscuit he had left lying carelessly on top of the bureau.

Lupin managed to avoid Snape's little protest of the rules regarding werewolves at table-- whether the policy was truly the Ministry's, or Dumbledore's Lupin could not tell, and his audiences with the man himself had been less than illuminating. Similarly, he had not been able to gain any oppurtunities for actually contributing to the Order. It seemed that as far as Dumbledore was concerned, Lupin's contribution was to be quiet and obedient in his new life as Snape's employee. So be it, he thought, but that didn't mean he had to be always available for participation in Snape's rightousness. He would leave errands until the dinner hour, or else finish his work early and retire to his room. At least twice a week they did eat in near-silence. Lupin worked, slept, and waited for the little owl. Sometimes in the daytime he would look up from a task with a sudden bittersweet realization that Harry, James' Harry, was at that very instant somewhere in the castle, somewhere studying or gossiping or worrying, and knowing it made him happy even as his absence at so close a distance made him sad.

Then one night Harry joined them for supper.

"Professor Lupin." Harry's happiness to see him might also have been relief-- he had, after all, just been in the room alone with Snape.

"Harry," he said, "no longer a professor you know, it's Mr. Lupin now."

"Nonsense." Snape brought the water goblets to the table himself, carrying them with the stems between his fingers, tucked into the web, as if they were phials he was keeping straight in some experiment. "The honorific does not change even if you are no longer fulfilling a position. No one bothers with emeritus anymore, but that is what you would be, by rights."

"I think Fudge would disagree with you there."

"I think that my thoughts on Fudge do not bear recitation at the supper table." Harry was watching the adults, his eyes darting from one to the other as though he expected a duel to break out. Does he know they took my wand? Lupin wondered to himself. They must have told him. He must know. The boy looked worn out, and Lupin realized, abruptly, that taking supper with Snape was merely a part of the training he was receiving. Still, his presence was a side-effect Lupin appreciated.

Snape was civil, if not cordial, to them both during their meal. After the places had been cleared by the house elf Snape excused himself to the lab, leaving Harry and Remus to talk together at the table.

"I haven't been meaning to avoid you," Harry said apologetically. "Neither has Hermione. But the dorms are almost locked around the clock, and there's just no way to go anywhere but the library or class. It's like second year."

Lupin thought. Oh, yes, that year's particular manifestation of Tom Riddle.

"It's alright, Harry, I understand."

"What about Snape?”

“What about him?”

Harry looked frustrated, his distress from something Lupin could not see.

“Is he treating you well?” The boy looked positively piqued.

“Well within the labor laws of Wizarding Britain,” Lupin said wryly, then felt awkward about tacitly maligning his employer. “Better than that, really, he’s been very reasonable.”

“That surprises me.” Harry glared at the empty place then, displaying a look that put Lupin not at all in mind of James.

There was a silence that hung in the air then, more reminiscent of adult pauses in conversation. Well, Harry was almost an adult, he reasoned.

“They broke my wand, you know.” He thought about the owl then, suddenly, the one good thing his mind could cling to when that dark thought had to be spoken aloud.

“I know.” Harry held his gaze. “If Sirius were still here, he wouldn’t have let them. You could have gone into hiding with him.” Harry actually slumped in his chair then, and Lupin was robbed of the illusion that Harry might have ever cared anything for him beyond a student’s fondness for his favorite teacher. The only adult he had loved and trusted was gone, and no one would be able to make it up to him.

“That would have been a foolish notion, given how easy it would have been to track me.” Lupin shook his head, yet he could see it, just as he was sure Harry could see it. Sirius, anger and rage glinting in those not quite sane eyes, stretching out his hand in what looked like a plea but was really a command. “But I would have tried it.” Foolish, to admit that to the boy, but really what was foolish was all that he was leaving unsaid. The layers and shades of affection and love that would have driven him to such a mad act were unspoken and would remain so, but still he wondered what the boy could sense or see.

“He could have made you try anything.” The wistful tone in Harry’s voice was the only thing that tipped Lupin off to thinking perhaps the boy didn’t entirely know what he was saying, couldn’t hear the innuendo in his own words.

“I do miss him.” The room seemed empty despite Harry’s presence, and Lupin wondered why Snape had condescended to leave the two of them together in the first place. It was a kindness of the ilk he would have expected from Dumbledore, not his once and perhaps future enemy.

“I know you do.” Lupin looked at him. There it was again, the innuendo, the irony, but he couldn’t guess at whether or not it was intended.

Lupin dared to hope that perhaps the little owl would be there, waiting for him when he returned to his room late that night, but it was nowhere to be seen. Of course, she would simply have found him conversing with Harry, but he had held out hope that he might have another message anyway. He felt guilty for a moment, greedy, as if he were hoping too much. That gave way to anger quickly, as he thought of his life before, when conversation and a single letter would have been only small parts, and not the only highlights, of his days.

Saturday mornings found Lupin at work early. There was nothing taxing him of an evening to make his sleep sound, and no reason to sleep in. A prisoner, he thought to himself, as surely as he would have been in the Ministry’s employ, yet there was something comforting in the very familiarity of the castle. He worked alone in the Potions lab until Snape would come in, speaking not a greeting, but an instruction.

“These need to be pulverized under a glass,” Snape said, setting the small bag of billywig stings at Lupin’s elbow. He looked, grateful that it wasn’t another pile of something large and rough like the Acromantula exoskeletons-- his shoulders were killing him. “Of course, it goes without saying that you should avoid breathing in the powder at all costs.” He laid a folded scarf on the tabletop as well.

“Thank you.” Lupin finished stoppering the flasks before him, then began to wash down the surface with denatured alcohol. Without magic, cleaning the work area was such a ponderous project. Still, it reminded him of Potions when he had been a student, the smell of reagents in their thick green bottles and the astringent smell of the cleaning potions.

“There is nothing else for you to do today,” Snape said, “that I have for you, in any case. I am sure you will not want for things to do.”

Lupin finished wiping every inch of the table before he turned to Snape. “What makes you say that?” To avoid looking at him, Lupin began tying the scarf over his face. It felt soft, a thin weave of cotton that would be more than adequate for keeping the powdered stings out of his mouth and nose.

“Your work for the Order.”

“I have none.” Lupin finished the knot, then stood back to regard Snape. “Or hadn’t you heard?”

Snape looked as he always did, yet there was a hint of something discomforted around the corners of his mouth. “I had not heard one way or the other. I assumed that they would be resourceful enough to give you a project that could be completed here in the castle.”

“Without magic?” Lupin almost laughed, then stopped as the cloth over his mouth would surely have been sucked in if he had. “What kind of job would that be? Managing their ledgers? They have goblins for that.”

“Perhaps I could send you on an errand to Hogsmeade then.”

Lupin reached for the glass. “You can send me anywhere your whim requires, and you know it.” He was chaffing under the assumed civility, wondering what it meant. In a moment his hand had shot forward too fast, and the glass, out of his reach, was tilting on the hard surface.

He waited for the inevitable crash, then the inevitable mess, Snape’s displeasure, and the lengthening of his working day because of all of it. He just stood and waited while the glass spun on an edge. The waiting abruptly stopped when one of Snape’s hands closed on the open mouth of the glass, the other clasping around Lupin’s still out-stretched wrist.

“I am not interested in exercising my whim,” Snape said, letting go the glass so that it spun in minute ringing circles on the hard surface.” His grip remained tight on Lupin’s wrist, and Lupin wondered if he were contemplating the breakability of those bones. “I would think that you’d know that by now.” He let go Lupin’s wrist, not shaking it away or dropping it, but lowering the hand to the table as if the flesh and bone were just another expensive ingredient.

“In that case,” Lupin said, “I would prefer not to leave the castle. I have not been apprised of current events by the Order at all, and in such an environment I would prefer not to be out without my wand.”

“Lupin. You will never be out of the castle with your wand again, so you may as well get accustomed to the fact.”

Lupin shook his head. “Never? Dumbledore told me that they were already working on reversing the legislation.”

Snape eyed him critically, and he felt like a dunce before the man even spoke. “Do you really think it’s a priority for him?”

“I suppose not.” He took the glass in hand again, carefully this time. He couldn’t truly dismiss Snape from his presence, but he could try. The billywig stings crushed with a crackling sound that was extremely satisfying. He had learned to glean pleasure from small things.

“Perhaps you would accompany me, then,” Snape said as he walked to the door. “I will be leaving shortly after lunch.”

Lupin’s hand froze in place. He felt lightheaded from the dust that had managed to seep through the scarf, and he wondered if this auditory hallucination was a part of that occupational hazard.

“Since you seem disinclined to answer me, I will simply be at the front door at one. If you are not there, I shall leave without you.”

Lupin managed to unfreeze his vocal cords long enough to ask, “is it a Hogsmeade weekend?”

There was the hint of a laugh in Snape’s words. Then again, it might have been the billywigs. “Would I be asking if it was?” The door slammed shut before Lupin could answer.

Snape did not take his lunch in the great hall, at least, if he did, it was nowhere Lupin could see from his place amongst the Gryffindors at their table.

“I was thinking about the ways one my quantify intention, and I thought maybe you would have some experience on the subject.” Lupin was happy to turn his attention towards Hermione. She was so thoughtful, and kind, asking him all manner of questions that he did know the answers to and could flatter himself to think he might just know more than she did. He also noticed that she never asked anything that might require him to use his magic, or more specifically to use a wand. He spoke and spoke, never once looking to the head table, never once glancing at his watch. Snape couldn’t have been serious.

Yet when he left the hall he saw that it was not quite one. He took a roundabout path back to his rooms, a path that took him past the entrance hall. Snape was not there.

“Bit impatient, aren’t you?” The voice was quiet, yet the noise carried easily enough. “It’s just gone one, and you’re already off.”

Lupin schooled his features into a mask of indifference. “Thought maybe you’d changed your mind.”

Snape simply cocked his head to one side, so slightly Lupin would have missed it had he not already been looking.

“Let’s go. I want to be back before dark.”

It was an odd sentiment, from Snape of all people, and Lupin thought on it as they walked silently down the drive to the gate that defined the edge of Hogwarts. Past that gate the castle ghosts could not tread, and within their confines Apparition was impossible. Lupin remembered feeling the strange crackle of that magic being taken away when he walked through, and another sensation of it returning when he left. Even without the wand on his person he felt a change in the air.

“Sometimes I feel the wards on the school cloud my mind,” Snape said, breathing deeply as they picked up their pace. “It’s clarifying, to leave the grounds.”

“Yes, I agree.” Lupin did not dare to look at the other man, for fear he was being drawn into a trap, a verbal repartee that he would leave the worse for wear. “I felt it too.” He added that simply as he felt he was expected to speak.

“Of course you did.” Snape’s voice was clipped with irritation. “It was your wand they took, not your magic. That will remain in you despite anyone’s best efforts to remove it.” There was an odd twist to his words, though if it was at the thought that “they” would be unsuccessful, or at the idea that someone might have the audacity and hubris to try, Lupin couldn’t be sure. “I expect your wand will be reconstructed from the pieces.”

“My wand was not taken, it was destroyed, if you will remember,” Lupin said, “and you should remember, as you were the one who burned it.”

They topped a small hill then, and Lupin took Snape’s silence for indignation.

“Your wand is not destroyed.” He looked straight ahead. “It is merely broken.”

“As good as destroyed then.” He shook his head, marveling at his own eagerness to believe. He had felt that pain rip through him—how could that have been contrived?

“Hagrid still uses his daily,” Snape said, “encased in that ridiculous umbrella. Imagine what he could do if he would consent to have it professionally mended.”

“I see.” And he did, then. His wand was not at the ministry at all. Snape had it, perhaps had it on his person at that moment. It was not lost. He felt a small thrill at that, the idea that his past was not gone.

In the town he stifled the urge to walk behind Snape, yet he was not quite comfortable walking beside him. Finally he settled for behind behind and to the side—that way he couldn’t see the multitude of stares he got. Apparantly it was no secret that Hogwarts’ potions master had a werewolf servant.

“You don’t have to stay near me,” Snape said as they entered the apothecary. “You are free to move about the village as you see fit.” Lupin caught the glances of a shopping couple who drew their children close at the overheard—eavesdropped—words.

“That might be the law,” Lupin said, “but I think we’d both be better off for the time being if we didn’t test it.”

Snape cast a glare at the couple, who then put their selections down unpaid for, and fled the shop.

“Ignorance is always simply waiting beneath the surface,” Snape murmured, weighing out poppy seeds. “It bursts forth at the least provocation.” He tossed a knut on the counter as they left, not deigning to speak to the proprietor, who had looked most aggrieved when the couple had fled their significantly more substantial basket.

They stood on the footpath for a moment, standing nearly shoulder to shoulder, yet silent.

“Is there anything you require?” Snape tucked the small bag of seeds into an inner pocket.

“No, nothing. Thank you.”

Snape seemed exasperated suddenly.

“I hold your wages, but they are your wages, Lupin. If there is anything you require I suggest you tell me now.”

“A book,” admitted Lupin, and they began to walk towards Hogsmeade’s most comprehensive book shop. “Something I haven’t read in a long while. A Muggle, I think. Bronte, or Austin. Or Hardy.” He stopped speaking then, feeling that he had been babbling.

“Do you write in your books?”

Lupin almost stopped in the street. “What?”

“Do you write. In your books.” Snape’s voice was the false patience Lupin had only heard him trouble to take with the first years once long ago.

“No.” It was true—with the exception of marking his teaching texts, he had never written in or defaced a book in his entire life. His mother had made sure of that.

“Then you may as well borrow mine. I am ready to return.” He turned then, without waiting to see if Lupin was going to follow.

As if I have a choice, he thought, he holds the pursestrings.

Still, it was pleasant enough, that evening, to sit by his small fire and read Return of the Native again, imagining himself, for some few moments, not the indentured servant of one of his oldest enemies, but rather an unconcerned student, home for the holidays, catching up on the Muggle reading his mother had set aside for him.

Though he looked up from his book many times, the little owl did not appear.

“The full moon is in three days.” Snape dropped a bundle of sage grass on the worktable, spraying the area around it with pollen.

Lupin coughed and tried not to snap out his words. “I am well aware of that, Snape, a werewolf does not often lose track of the date.”

“By the end of the year, it is my hope that you will be able to brew your own wolfsbane, and I will be done with that task forever.” He moved to Lupin’s side, neither looming over him nor backing away, and began separating the bundles into smaller sticks. “These will have to be burned, and the ashes collected.

Remus reached for one of the smaller sticks, to begin burning it on the hearth, then stilled his hand as he heard Snape’s voice again in his mind. By the end of the year…It had been said in such a tone that it seemed to mark the end of something.

“What particularly will happen at the end of the year?” Lupin gathered several of the small bundles and walked to the hearth while he waited for his answer.

“Who can say.” When Lupin did not speak again, Snape gave in and looked up from his task. “It is my hope that by the end of the year this ridiculous arrangement will be good and done with.”

Remus set the sage to burning, the ashes collecting in plates. “Is there any real reason to think that? Any reason for the timeframe, in particular?”

Snape leaned on the worktable, only inches closer in reality, yet seeming to have crossed the room simply by looking at him. “Because there are developments afoot that you cannot be a part of, and these will hopefully bring an end to this nonsense.”

Remus felt a thrill of hope, not unlike the feeling he got when he would see the little owl in his room in the evening.

“Is there nothing I can do?” The smell of sage was beginning to fill the air.

Snape shook his head. “Nothing. I am not even supposed to discuss Ministry business with you in the slightest.” He looked away, but Remus continued to stare at him. “Or Order business. I am not to speak to you of that, either.”

Remus nodded, one movement, economical even in disappointment. “I suspected as much.”

The wolfsbane potion was ready for him to take that evening, the first course of his monthly routine.

“I’ll just take this to my room,” Remus said, lifting the goblet carefully from the surface of the workbench.

“Why not take it here?” Snape’s face was smooth, impassive, but Remus shrank from it as if it had been branded with a sneer.

“It’s fairly foul in the best of circumstances,” Lupin said, “I think it best, generally, to take it in solitude.”

Snape stood. “We have made several small but significant changes today, Lupin. I suggest that you take at least the first dose in my presence.”

Lupin started at that. “You hadn’t mentioned any changes.”

Snape moved to the other side of the counter. “Since this was your first time making it, I thought such mentions would only serve to complicate matters. But yes, we did change some aspects of it, I hope for the better.”

Lupin reached for the goblet, resigned, then stilled his hand for a moment, trying to figure out what it was in the air that seemed so odd. Hope. He had never heard Snape utter that word, and indeed it had sounded forced. He said nothing, simply smiled slightly and lifted the goblet.

Foul, as usual, absolutely retch-inducingly, stomach-churningly, taste-bud-strippingly foul. He rested a hand flat on the cool black surface, hoping that that, at least, would look less desperate than merely hanging on for dear life.

“Lupin.” How odd, he thought, he seemed to hear the voice from afar. He no longer tasted the foul stench in his nostrils and at the back of his throat. Instead he was standing in the cool winter air, nothing but the scent of snow and frozen water all around him. “Lupin, come back.” Certainly not, he thought, looking out over the frozen clean landscape, the white crust of snow glinting down to what appeared to be a frozen lake. Come back to the stifling hot air of the potions room, of the dungeon? Why?

A stinging hand against his cheek answered that question. He blinked, breathing in the hot close air of the dungeon, and found that the hand’s twin seemed to be grasping his shoulder, the heel of the hand digging into the top of his pectoral muscle.

“Snape.” He tried to inject some venom into that word, but it came out as a single statement, nothing more than a syllable. The hand relaxed, suddenly, as if in relief.

“Yes, Snape. Do you remember where you are?”

He blinked, the stinging in his eyes only second to the horrible taste in his mouth. The normal stuffy smell of the dungeon was not at all improved by the scent of Snape’s robes, wool on long-unwashed skin, and he struggled to speak, if only to get that scent away from himself.

“Dungeon,” he managed. “Just took the wolfsbane potion.”

Snape let go then, stepping back. “Yes.” He took Lupin’s elbow, and the other man found he was too lightheaded to resist. “One of the modifications seems to have temporarily loosened you from your body, but that will soon be entirely remedied.”

“By what?” He allowed himself to be guided into a chiar.

“Mere moments of time. Now sit still.”

Lupin found that he felt normal almost at once, then, beginning to see through his eyes instead of some strange vision without sight, as in the knowing that there was a field, and snow, and the lake, frozen solid.

“What is the purpose of that?” He shook his head slightly.

“Hopefully it will allow the wolf and human sides of your nature to coexist more symbiotically when you undergo the change. As it is, your human form does not take to it very readily.”

Lupin stifled a heave, thinking of what an understatement that was. “I’ll be returning to my room now,” he said, standing, “I’ll be back for another dose this evening.”

To his surprise, Snape stood and opened the door for him. To his even greater surprise, he found himself thanking him.

The knock came at his door on the evening of the full moon, the first knock he had heard there since he had returned to Hogwarts. He’d been waiting for the little owl, and when the knock came he leaped to answer, thinking, somehow, that it was the owl gaining access to his quarters through some other means. Yet when he opened the door it was only to find a man’s face on a level with his.

“Snape.” He held the door wide, waiting. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“The moon, obviously. I’ve brought the last dose of the potion.” He held out the goblet.

Lupin shook his head. Always the dramatic one, he thought. The potion could have as easily been transported in a coffee mug. “I was not in danger of forgetting.” Before the other man could speak Lupin had taken the goblet and downed the contents in one gulp.

The separation of his mind from his body was far more harsh and sudden that he was prepared for, and as he stood on the snowy plain he dimly also felt his arm being taken in a warm grasp.

“Sit on the bed.” He was standing entirely still, yet moving as well, letting himself be led. Yet the view of the lake did not change.

“Alright.” He heard his own voice then, echoing in the empty landscape and at the same time almost painfully close to his ear. The moon was coming up, though, and that was more important than anything that might be speaking to his mind, because when the full moon was up, there were no words that could exist in his head. The snow blazed white, almost too bright to look at, then became all he saw, and then was gone.

When he woke he found himself naked, covered with a blanket with a pillow propping his head up at an unusually high angle. At the corner of his memory there was something about a field, and the brightness of the snow, but he couldn’t seem to make his mouth form the words to tell the figure sitting next to him. That man seemed very important, he realized, before he fell asleep again.

“Water.” The word woke him. Snow was made from water, that was true, and the frozen lake, but that couldn’t be what he meant. And was it even his voice?

“Lupin. Water. You have to drink something, it’s been hours.” No, that voice wasn’t his, but it was familiar. He obediently turned his head and accepted the cup that was pressed to his lips. There was something in it, something that tasted vaguely of lime.

“Thank you.” He pushed the cup away, then thought of standing up. Sirius would help him. Sirius never minded helping him after the change. As a matter of fact, he seemed to rather enjoy his lover soft and pliant, worn out and grateful, tired but giddy. He smiled up at the face beside him, then barely stifled the urge to scream.

Someone had let Severus Snape into his room.

“You.” The word was rasped out, the image of the lake and the snow under the moon seeming to blur before his eyes as he tried to make sense of something that was pressing on the edge of his mind.

“Lupin.” There were hands on his shoulders, then, pressing him back as he tried to escape. “Lupin. You are in Hogwarts. It is 1996. The Ministry took your wand away. Remember?”

“No.” The moon seemed to blaze white before him. There was nothing before his eyes but that brightness, and a great rushing sound in his ears. “Snape took my wand.”

“Yes, that’s right. Remember.” This time it was a command, rather than a question.

“Snape.” The words were less slurred now, but his voice was still raspy.

“The same.” The hands left his shoulders then, letting him slump back on to the ridiculously high stack of pillows. “That was so you wouldn’t choke,” Snape said, noting his grimace. “You drooled a great deal.”

“That’s just great.” He looked around the room, surreptitiously scanning the ceiling and all the corners for any sign of the small brown owl. “Mail?”

The shape that was Snape shook its head. “No. No mail.”

Lupin pulverized beetles and looked out the window. He washed off the work surface and looked out the window. He took lunch by the window, until his eyes nearly glazed over from all the light. He saw spots before his eyes, but no owl.

“It is possible that she finds herself busy, at this time in the term.” Snape’s voice startled him from his reverie. “Your sister, I mean.” He set the goblet he was carrying on the workbench with a satisfying click. “This might rejuvenate you,” he said, gesturing to the potion. “It’s a modification on Pepperup. I suggest you take it.”

Lupin dragged himself to the table. “Goodness knows I’ll need all my energy to keep working on these beetles.” He attempted to sound sarcastic, yet the words sounded all too real as they left his mouth.

“There is no need for you to continue with those,” Snape said, stepping away from the goblet as if to give Lupin more room. “There is plenty done, both for the upcoming classes and my stores.” As he stepped back again he touched the side of his arm, squeezing the sleeve tight as if something was about to fall from his robe. Lupin narrowed his eyes, wondering. He wouldn’t be foolish enough to keep the pieces on his person, would he?

“But then what would the werewolf employee do with the rest of his afternoon?” Lupin grasped the goblet. The liquid inside had the same chalky look as did Pepperup, but the scent wafting off of it was far less sharp, almost pleasant.

Snape shrugged. “Whatever you like. I hardly concern myself with such petty questions.” He turned and left, leaving the potion behind.

Lupin cleared the beetle carcasses away, drank the potion, and cleaned the goblet. Life had assumed such a pattern of work and rest, and even work without rest that he hardly noticed anymore when one hour faded into another, when one day faded into another, but as he left the Potions lab gleaming and clean he couldn’t help but notice that the sun was still high in the sky. He returned to his room, retrieved his book, and set out to the grounds to read in the light of the sun glaring off the snow.

It wasn’t ideal for reading, but he read slowly at best when reading for pleasure, and the cold of the rock beneath him kept him from any illusions that he might be outside and still for too long. The Hogwarts lake and the stretches of moor around the school might have been mistaken for the landscape in his dream, but they were not. In the swiftly fading hours of the afternoon he labored through Jane Eyre, and stared at the horizon, indulging in idle dreams.

The light faded early. Against the backdrop of Hogwarts, painted orange in the effluent light of sunset, he thought he could make out the forms of Harry, Ron, and Hermione returning from Hagrid’s hut to the school. He closed his book and began to walk back himself. The cold air was invigorating, but there was no use in being a damn fool, staying out in the cold too long and catching his death.

Snape accosted him in the corridor.

“Lupin. I wonder if you would join me for dinner at the head table. The decision regarding your presence there has been rectified.”

Lupin nodded, surprised that such a thing should have happened so quickly. Perhaps it was possible that his situation would be entirely resolved before too long. On the other hand, it was possible that the Ministry was planning on slowly placating them with small sacrifices.

“Allow me to change into something more suitable.” He gestured at his robes, coated still in bits of snow and the dirt that had been clinging to the rock. It hadn’t seemed significant, at the time.

“There isn’t time. Why don’t you borrow something of mine.”

Lupin followed, composing himself to hide his surprise. As rare as it was for one wizard to lend his wand to another, it was almost as rare for them to share or borrow robes.

When Snape handed him the robe—plain, but sound—then looked away, something clicked inside Lupin’s mind. Snape was tacitly offering him clothing that was far better than his own, knowing they would both be the subject of scrutiny that evening.

“You’ve been very kind to me, lately,” he said, “and I thank you.” He thought of Harry’s surprise at Snape’s kindness, and wondered why he hadn’t seen it before. The shock of losing Sirius and his family, the shock of being reduced to a creature in a matter of moments, the monotony of work—all those things had blinded him to something painfully obvious.

“Don’t be foolish.” Snape shook the clothing impatiently. “I have merely respected you as a colleague, and any wizard or witch who would do otherwise is a fool."

Remus nodded his understanding then, and reached out for the clothes. Just as Snape was handing them over, Remus flattened his hand and knocked them to the floor.

“Are you quite alright?” Snape’s face was so blank as to set Remus to wondering if the man had even spoken, if he had even seen what had just transpired.

“I’ve come to realize something.” As he spoke he was still tallying up the information that had led to his outburst. It was only a matter of seconds until he declared it to be sound.

“Do tell.” There was a hardness to his mouth, now, that might have been taken for anger, but Remus pushed on. That little twitch of anger would be nothing, compared to what might erupt.

“It’s predictable, really. And sad. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.” Remus rocked to the balls of his feet, wondering if a step forward was in order.

“Explain yourself at once, or pick my clothes up immediately.”

Remus stopped thinking, then. He let his body think for him, stepping forward in a wide path that brought him just behind Severus.

“Lupin, what are you doing?” Snape had the bad judgment to allow himself the normal, human gesture of holding his hands out to his sides. Remus grasped a wrist with one hand, brought the top of Snape’s arm to his chest by folding his other arm around it, then stepped even closer, so that his left hip was pressing against Snape’s right.

“I’m not going to ask you again.” Lupin didn’t stop to wonder why the other man wasn’t resisting—he simply insinuated his foot between Snape’s, then used his calf to lever the other man to the floor. He held Snape’s right arm so firmly that it was a soft landing, but it was rendered less so when Lupin immediately followed.

Had Snape wanted to escape it would have been easy enough when they were both standing. Once he found himself unexpectedly on the floor, his face cushioned by the same clothes Lupin had refused, it was nearly impossible to consider. Lupin had managed to wrest his wand from him, plucking it from his pocket and sending it skittering across the floor before pinning Snape to the ground with the weight of his own body.

Neither man spoke, waiting for the other to do so and thereby lose the advantage.

“It’s so Muggle of you, Severus,” Lupin said, giving in. “But you wouldn’t have thought of that, now would you?”

There was another long pause, punctuated by Snape attempting to throw off his captor, but to no avail.

“Wouldn’t have thought of what, Lupin?” He sighed in exasperation. “How long is this going to go on, anyway? You’re going to have to let me go sometime. Ridiculous.” The only trace of venom was in that last word, and Lupin quelled the ice that seemed to run through his veins at the sound of it.

“The Muggle fantasy of it all. Screwing the help.” Lupin pressed down harder on that, his hips digging into the top of Snape’s arse. He was still very thin, and Snape wondered if he would be able to tell the difference between the hard thick arch of a hipbone, and whatever else Lupin was keeping in store.

“Screwing the help.” Snape snorted, then was immediately impressed by just how much dust there was on his floor. “What the hell are you on about?”

“You’ve been awfully nice, lately.” The words on his ear were hot, but they were heated with something other than mere breath. “Maybe a little too nice. Wouldn’t do, though, for you to look like a rapist.”

“Rich, considering where you’ve got me now.” Snape arched his back then, flexed his legs, twisted his shoulders, but through a combination of his own strength and his superior position, Lupin managed to keep Snape pinned.

“You live as a Muggle for a while, you learn a few things.” Lupin smiled, thinking that if they ever did come out of this both alive and both still within Hogwarts, it might be fun—no, not fun, congenial—to teach Snape a bit about martial arts. It was a crime that wizards hadn’t ever bothered developing their own. “And you learn a few things about how the Muggle mind works. They’ve all got a gigantic boner for sleeping with their help.” He dug something into Snape’s lower back again. Might have been a hip. “As do you, apparently.”

Snape had given up struggling to get free, and had instead merely shifted himself on the floor for greater comfort. “What an idiotic thing to say, Lupin,” Snape said, his voice muffled from being nearly inside the pile of clothing. “There is no way you could possibly tell from your present position.”

Lupin laughed, a low, canine sound. “Not literally, Severus.” He shifted too. Snape wondered if his adjustment would mean an easier escape, but he found he didn’t care for the time being. It sounded as though Lupin had more to say, and Snape was bound to hear it, one way or another. “But something in you changed this winter, didn’t it? Got you all noble.” Lupin blew a strand of hair from his face, and wound up ghosting his breath over Severus’ neck at the same time. There was no missing the shiver that ran through the potions master then, and Lupin suppressed a smile, though no one could see it. “You refused to destroy my wand. You practically made me come here, instead of going to the Ministry. You’ve been nothing but decent and kind to me since I arrived.”

Snape snorted himself, a sound that reverbrated through Lupin’s chest. “Don’t sound so surprised.”

“What else could I be? You were nothing but shite to me all through school—“

“Bringing up school, how pathetic—“

“And now I’m supposed to buy that you have nothing but my best interests at heart? Why would I believe that, Snape? What could possibly convince me that you have no ulterior motives?”

Snape was very still beneath his body, but not still enough to make Lupin relax his grip.

“Nothing should make you believe that,” Snape finally said, “though I fail to see why you would have to classify a certain affection for nothing more than an ‘ulterior motive.’”

“Bloody right it is.” Remus shifted a bit, holding Snape even more firmly to the floor. “The ulterior comes in when you realize that for the past month, practically the only other human being I’ve seen is you.”

“Hardly my fault,” Snape said, his head turned and lying on the clothing so that he looked almost comfortable. “That stupid law regarding werewolves at table was not my doing, and there was no reason that you couldn’t have left the dungeons when you weren’t working.” He sighed, his rising and falling body moving Lupin along.

“You didn’t go out of your way to point out that I was allowed to leave your vicinity,” Lupin snapped, “naturally I assumed the sanctions included me staying near my employer.”

Snape’s smirk looked even more unpleasant when viewed from the side and upside-down. “You know what they say about assuming things, Lupin.”

Lupin shifted. His arms were going to sleep. Carefully he shifted his hands so that his arms were spread wider, holding Snape’s wrists instead of his biceps.

“I could escape this easily enough.” Snape sounded almost sleepy, bored with the proceedings, waiting Lupin out.

“Why don’t you.” Lupin relaxed, counting on his weight to hold the other man still.

“I find it rather pleasant. Or, pleasant enough, considering that I’m lying on a stone floor.” He flexed his fingers, moving the bones of his wrists under Lupin’s palms.

“I stand vindicated.”

“If only you were dignified enough to stand.” Snape shifted again. “And you are not vindicated in the slightest. I admitted that I had a certain affection for you, but my wanting to ‘screw the help,’ as you so inelegantly put it, is hardly an accurate portrayal of my anticipations.”

“Anticipations. Are those different, somehow, from assumptions?” Remus gave up and simply rested on Snape’s back.

“Never knew you for a semantician,” Snape grumbled. “Now get off my back and let me get at my wand.”

Remus laughed. “Whatever for? So you can hex me into next week?”

Snape glared at him, another expression that turned out to be more alarming when viewed from an unusual angle.

“So I can place a cushioning charm on the floor. Forgive me for not wishing to invite you straight into my bed.” He paused. “Might seem overly presumptuous of me.”

“This was not well thought out,” Remus mused aloud.

“One would have to say not,” Snape agreed, “and now you have the choice to either let me up now, or wait to fall asleep and I will throw you off.”

Remus got to his feet, feeling that his bones were creaking. Snape sat, then stood, and accepted the wand when Remus handed it to him.

Remus’ fingers fairly tingled with desire when he touched the wand, feeling the capacity for magic in it has he had only rarely taken notice of when he had been in the habit of using his own every day.

Snape opened his mouth, presumably to cast the spell, then paused and looked up. “What is that noise?”

Remus turned towards the sink, realizing that he, too, had heard it, had been hearing it, for so long that it had become background, like the sounds of the castle pipes settling and the wind around the exposed corner of the dungeon.

“It’s outside the window.” My owl, he thought, and stepped to the sash. “It must be my sister’s owl.”

Snape nodded, but came to stand behind him, his wand at the ready. As soon as the shutter was opened, the owl flopped unceremoniously into the sink, its beak chipped from struggling with the catch for so long. Remus reached down to take the scrolls from her leg—there were far more pages of parchment than usual, and none of them looked like a letter.

“Fuck me, they’re all in French,” he said, just as Snape looked interestedly over his shoulder.

“Allow me.” He took the first sheet, carefully leaving the rest, as if Lupin was going to look at each one before handing it over.

“You’re going to translate them?” Lupin stared at the page, dense with text, as if it might reveal its secrets.

“I’m going to read them.” There was only the slightest hint of the supercilious in his voice.

“Right.” Lupin scanned the parchments, looking for at least a pattern, or anything he might recognize, but as Snape finished each one he handed it over.

“They’re playing a dangerous game,” Snape said as he took the next to last one. “And worse than that, they’ve entered a contract they will never benefit from.” The owl stood up then, lifting its head to catch the drips from the tap.

“They haven’t struck a deal with You-Know-Who, have they?” Lupin felt something cold settle in the pit of his stomach. No wonder Natalie hadn’t wanted to be more forthright in her letters. The walls are thin here. Nothing but her clairvoyance would have made it possible for her to see into those adult minds.

Snape nodded, pointing at the page with one finger. “There’s his name. They’ve opted out, as it were. He’s got Albania in the palm of his hand, and they see that already. Wizarding France is under his thumb by now, surely.” He turned to Lupin. “We must tell Dumbledore to remove your sister from Beauxbatons immediately.”

Snape turned the packet of letters over in his hands. “How will you say you came by these?”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing.” He thought of his sister, alone in an unfamiliar country. If they sent her home, that might be the best they could hope for.

“We have to get her here before we make it known that we have these.” Snape began rolling them together again.

Lupin couldn’t disguise his shock at Snape’s vehemence.

“Don’t look so shocked, Lupin. I find children irritating, I don’t wish them dead.” He turned and walked out the door, clearly expecting to be followed.

Lupin addressed his back. “We could say that you found them.”

“It would be safer. Still, we should secure her here.” In the meantime Lupin had caught up to him, and they walked through the corridor like any pair of colleagues, no more looking like master and servant than like two men who had been only recently on the floor, negotiating the terms of their odd relationship.

“What would have happened if the owl hadn’t have interrupted us?” Lupin ventured as they neared Dumbledore’s office.

“Beauxbatons would have continued its participation in the corruption of Wizarding France and we would be none the wiser.” They walked in silence. “Or perhaps you are referring to events closer to home?”

“Yes, I must admit that I was.” And it was a guilty admission, Lupin thought, considering that his only thought should have been his sister. She was in danger now, covered in it, treachery and deceit encroaching on the safety he had been foolish enough to all but promise his parents for her.

“I would dare to say nothing that can’t be postponed until after this is settled.” They paused before the stone gargoyle. “I believe it would be prudent of me to return this to you.” Snape reached into his sleeve, just where Lupin thought he was keeping the pieces of his wand, and withdrew not pieces, but the whole wand.

“My wand.” He reached out his hand, his fingertips tingling at the mere sight of it.

“Very astute.” The smile that briefly touched Snape’s lips was neither stilted nor unpleasant, though it was gone when Lupin looked again.

“Did you mend it?” Lupin swished the wood through the air twice, getting the feel of it. It had not changed one iota.

“Lupin. Please. One does not become a spy without having a better than passing knowledge of slight of hand.” He turned to the gargoyle. “Remember. We mustn’t allow Dumbledore to approach any tangents until the urgent business of your sister is settled. Minstrels.” The staircase began to turn, and they stepped on. “After that, I would venture that things are going to become very unpleasant indeed.”

Lupin nodded, though it was doubtful that Snape would be able to see him in the gloom. “Indeed.” Infidelity, treason, enemies in the place of friends—all of those things had been anticipated by the Order. The wand warmed in Lupin’s hand, the wood settling in the crook of his thumb, and the world began to feel normal, despite the past hour.