sam_storyteller (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-07 01:55 pm
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-07 01:55 pm
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Laocoon's Children, Year Two, 8 - 9
This is where they keep the magic.
There's always the chance, after all, that someone might be innocent, and plenty of people serve their time in Azkaban and survive it, even if they're never the same afterwards. They don't snap the wands of prisoners, whether or not they're serving life-sentences. They bring them here.
Only when someone dies is the wand disposed of, in a careful manner, by a trained expert. The current Ollivander, of the generations who have owned Ollivander's, has both provided and destroyed the wands for many of Azkaban's residents.
Among those he'd supplied, and those he had every expectation of destroying, was the wand of Lucius Malfoy. Ten inches, yew with a core of unicorn hair. Ollivander found this whimsical, as the boy himself looked vaguely like a unicorn: a pale-haired, inquisitive, and calm child, so very calm that Ollivander had peered into the boy's eyes to make sure he wasn't...damaged, somehow. There had been a keen intelligence there, but also an upsetting coolness of emotion. There was no hint of mercy in those eyes, even when he was eleven. That he should be a murderer had not shocked Ollivander.
This is the room where they keep the wands of the condemned, row upon row of cubicles lined in velvet, a name and the Azkaban serial number etched on the glass front of each small case. Some are empty; not nearly all are full, but enough are occupied that a wizard, on entering, would feel a chill down his spine. A wand is a part of one; seeing this room is like seeing a roomful of extracted teeth, carefully labeled and preserved. It is deep in the bowels of the Ministry of Magic, accessed by an unassuming little door labeled "storeroom."
(Real storerooms are never actually labeled that.)
And several floors up, a rat has crept into the Ministry and is beginning what he knows will be a long series of tests against the magical wards placed around the room of wands.
***
Remus finally made the appointment for his examination at St Mungo's in mid-September. It was the Ministry's not-terribly-subtle way of keeping tabs on werewolves, and though Sirius offered to come along, he didn't want Sirius there, hovering and making a fuss. He'd rather just quietly get it over with. Sirius was bound to raise hell if he had to actually see what werewolves underwent on the medical end, and he couldn't come into the private evaluation anyway. It was easiest for all concerned if he simply had the row ahead of time and convinced Sirius to meet him for lunch afterwards.
Not that he was ever very hungry after. The whole process was humiliating, and even looking forward to the friendly, scatter-brained company of his official evaluator, Rubin, didn't do much to assuage that.
The medical examination passed without incident; blood, hair, and saliva samples, a detailed history of the last three years' worth of Changes, physical appearance documentation including scars (plenty of those), and the tolerance tests. Remus hated that part more than anything, even stripping down for the physical appearance photographs. Technically the tolerance tests were supposed to measure how close he was to "feral" by exposing him to increasing doses of silver; a nasty side effect was that it also tested his tolerance for pain.
Finally, tired and nursing three bandaged burns on the back of his hand, he walked down the corridor to the evaluation office with something approaching relief. Seth Rubin was a friend of Moody's and had known Remus since he was a child; he'd treated him not only through the incident at school with Severus, but through the scheduled Ministry-required checkups and a brief but memorable flip-out when he was nineteen. He knew everything -- the lycanthropy, obviously, but also about the weird, sometimes prescient dreams, his sexuality, and his feelings for Sirius back before, long before, Sirius himself had known about them.
"Come in!" the Healer called when Remus knocked, and he let himself into the unchanging office full of files, some of them charmed to float in the air for lack of desk space. "Eleven o'clock...must be Remus Lupin."
"Hello, Seth," Remus called, pushing a floating pile of files to one side. A small, tidy-looking man beamed up at him from where he was scrawling notes on a yellow Muggle legal pad.
"Have a seat. I've been waiting rather impatiently for this meeting," the man said with a grin. "You had such exciting things to tell me, three years ago, and then you up and disappeared until last year..."
Remus nodded. "I'm sure you heard about Harry."
"One can hardly avoid it," the Healer said with a smile, passing a sheet of parchment across the desk. "That's your official certification of continuing stability. I thought we might as well get the formalities out of the way."
"Er..." Remus scanned down the questionnaire that Rubins was supposed to administer. "It's filled out."
"Stupid, pointless things," Seth said agreeably, leaning forward. "Only someone who has never had contact with a werewolf would ask if you had come to terms with the fact that you turn into a hairy slavering beast once a month."
"Oh." Remus gave him a slightly confused look. "You never did this before."
"You rarely had anything you needed to discuss, before," Seth replied. "Other than what's on that questionnaire."
"And I do now?"
The Healer leaned back in his chair. "Well, you've been raising a child, and the last time we spoke there was the issue of a relationship..."
"Oh...Sirius. Yes." Remus coughed. "Er...yes. Raising Harry. That's going well."
Seth grinned. "In your own time, Lupin. If you don't want to talk, I won't make you. Tell you what, play you two games of Exploding Snap while you tell me all about Harry, and you ought to be right on schedule for discharge."
Forty minutes later, Sirius sniffed the air as Remus emerged from the hospital, pulling on his coat.
"It smells like sulfur," he said. "What do they DO to you in there?"
"Relaxation technique," Remus answered with a grin, as Sirius straightened the collar of his coat. They were careful in public; more careful than either of them wanted to be, but there was a lot at stake. The Wizarding World took as well to two men kissing as it did to publicly-acknowledged werewolves. Sirius had begun fussing with his clothing as a sort of substitute affectionate gesture, and Remus rather enjoyed it. "Where are we going for lunch?"
"Actually, we're meeting someone," Sirius said. "My solicitor."
"Ah yes, the Payne," Remus said with a grin. "Business lunch?"
"Yeah, there are one or two things I need to talk to you about before we meet. Er, I'm making you Harry's legal guardian if I die."
Remus frowned. "Can we do that? Does Payne know about...me? I mean, if you're doing it without his knowledge, it'd never stand up in court."
Sirius gave him a guilty look. "I did sort of mention the situation. But -- " he added anxiously, " -- but he knows about me, too, about the animagery, I mean, and about us."
"Us?" Remus asked with a grin.
"He's really very confidential."
"Should be, for what you pay him," Remus sighed. "He knows a way around the laws?"
"He seems to."
"I'm not so sure I'm happy with you telling him about me, but we can have a shouting match about it later."
"I sort of had to, for the other thing."
Remus raised his eyebrows. "There's another thing?"
"Yeah. You remember the Dorian Gray portrait thing?"
"The letter you got?"
"I was thinking about doing it."
Remus grinned. "Vanity, thy name is Sirius. This year is a good look for you, I think."
"I want you to have it done with me."
At that point, Remus blinked in shock and, distracted, walked into a lamppost.
***
The first few days of school went quietly enough, and they were well into the third week by the time Snape stopped Harry as he was leaving Potions class and asked if he could have a word with him that evening. Harry, who had been expecting this, went back to his rooms after dinner and fetched the Quidditch playbook he'd been working on all summer, when he wasn't out with his friends or socialising with the snakes at the bottom of the garden. He assumed Snape had probably been giving him time to finish it at school without wanting to seem like he had. Harry was keen on Quidditch, though, and if he couldn't play it, making up new plays was the next best thing.
"You've anticipated my request, I see," Snape said, looking up from his desk as Harry entered with the playbook folder under one arm. "Settling into your second year?"
"Yes, sir."
"Gryffindor has already begun practice."
"Yes, sir, Oliver Wood has had to train some new players."
"A good excuse."
Harry smiled a little at the sour expression on Snape's face. "I thought it might be better if you told Captain Flint that he was lagging, Professor. I don't think he wants to hear it from me."
Snape gave him a sharp look. "I'd like you to present your new plays, please."
Harry opened the playbook and turned it around so that Snape could peruse them. "I didn't know what you wanted specifically, so I wrote three plays for Seekers and two formations for coordinated offence," he explained.
"Offence?" Snape asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Well, when I was playing last year, it looked like nobody changed much," Harry explained. "I mean, the Seekers fly low and high a lot, but mostly the rest of the players stay on a level with the hoops, even midfield. Nobody's really making use of the full space. If a player...here, I drew pictures, but it doesn't help much..." Harry flipped to the first play, and Snape looked down at the page, dismayed. It was covered in notes and scribbles. Harry had copied it out four times, but it was frustrating to discuss a three-dimensional game in two dimensions.
"I did the best I could," Harry said. Snape continued to examine the page, fingers drifting here and there over the notes, until finally he rose and went to the bookshelf behind his desk. He took down a thick book with "Quidditch Practical Guide" in gold on the black calfskin binding, and opened it flat on his desk.
To Harry's delight, it wasn't a book at all -- it was a platform from which six golden hoops sprung, a Quidditch pitch in miniature. Fourteen little figures rose up, half black and half white, along with four dots of light -- two blue, one green, and one gold.
"Show me," Snape said. "Use your wand to guide the players."
Harry, fascinated, prodded one of the little black figures with his wand, and it stuck to the player's robe so that he could move it about. He placed the Keepers at either end, the Seekers, Beaters, Bludgers, and Snitch out of the way, and the six Chasers closely clustered at one goal.
"If a player gets the Quaffle," he said, attaching the little green point of light to one of the black players, near the black goal, "He generally either shoots straight through the crowd, or he passes. Sometimes he'll rise up a little -- " he stuck the player to the end of his wand and drew it along, over the heads of the other figures, " -- but that's considered sort of arrogant, right?"
"Generally," Snape said, reservedly. "It looks like trick-playing. Flying circles around the other team."
"But the problem is, nine times out of ten, if you get the Quaffle, you're going to lose it within ten seconds."
"The Chaser's Median. You've been researching."
"Yes, sir." Harry leaned forward, dragging the player back where he'd been. "But if you can break away from the crowd, in any direction, you've got a good chance of keeping hold of the Quaffle long enough to get in scoring range."
Snape was silent, waiting for him to continue. Harry, carefully, tipped the player's broomstick up in a flyover feint, and then dropped player and broomstick straight down, executing a backwards move in a vertical plane.
One black eyebrow lifted.
"If I may," Snape said, and Harry sat back. Snape took out his own wand and re-set the figures, then flicked his wand over the entire arrangement. The players burst into motion, and he watched for several seconds. Finally, the tip of his wand, hovering over the playing area, dipped. The player Harry had demonstrated with executed the move flawlessly, and sped towards the goal while half the players shot upwards and the other half collided with each other in confusion.
"Seems to work," Harry said, a little proudly.
"Indeed. Did you have much assistance with it?"
"Assistance?" Harry asked, confused.
"From your godfather."
"Well...we talked about it..." Harry said. "I didn't cheat!"
"I'm not implying you did. This is...very reminiscent of his playing style, that's all," Snape said.
"Is it all right?"
Snape closed the Quidditch Practical and steepled his fingers over it, resting his hawklike nose against his knuckles.
"I'd like to examine the other plays, if I may -- I'm fairly sure I can re-create them from your notes, with the help of the Practical. If they are acceptable, I'll pass them on to Mr. Flint."
Realisation dawned on Harry. "You're not going to tell the team I wrote them, are you."
"Not unless you want to be ostracised by your team for the rest of the year. If you present them to the team, you will be ignored. If I force them upon the team in your name...I think you can see where this is going, Harry."
Harry sighed and sat back. He knew it was no good; Snape was right, of course. But he said it anyway. It had to be said. "That's not fair."
"Life rarely is, especially for those who represent the bottom of the age scale in any given group," Snape said, almost absently.
"On the other hand..." Harry said thoughtfully, "We'll still win if we use them."
Snape nodded, gravely.
"When do we start practice?" Harry asked.
"Sunday," Snape replied. "I'd be ready for an early wake-up. You're dismissed."
"Thank you, sir," Harry said, standing. "Sir..."
"Yes?"
"Could I try the Practical sometime?"
Snape frowned. "It's a complicated magical mechanism. Perhaps next year."
Harry nodded and left the office, wandering down the labyrinthine maze of corridors that led to the Slytherin common room. It was disappointing, knowing that he wouldn't get credit for plays that Sirius and Remus had both said were brilliant, but Snape was right; at least this way the plays would get used --
Come...come to me...
Harry stopped just outside the common room, startled.
Snake? he asked, reaching into his pocket. Snake, now almost too big to be carried around with him, complained sleepily.
What is it? Snake demanded. I was napping.
Harry shook his head. He must have been hearing things.
Let me...
He hadn't imagined that.
Let me...
Rip you, tear you, kill you...
In his pocket, Snake had pulled himself into a tiny ball, and was actually shaking with tension.
What is it? Harry asked. There was silence, and Harry bolted through the portrait-hole, closing it quickly behind him. Only when he was alone in the dormitory, with the door closed on the noise of the common room, did Snake stop shivering. He took Snake out of his pocket and set him on the pillow of his bed, watching as the muscular, sinuous body quivered with alertness.
What was that? Harry asked again. Snake curled in on himself and slithered under a corner of the blanket.
Big, came the muffled reply.
***
Sirius had gone to bed late, having stayed up reading, and he was barely asleep when he was bothered by the noise of the bedsprings and the shift in weight on the bed. He opened his eyes to slits, just enough to see Remus sitting on the edge of the bed, the hollows and ridges of his spine sharply outlined by the moonlight spilling in through the windows. His head was bowed, and his hands were running through his hair, smoothing and then disordering it, as though he were thinking deeply.
"Moony?" Sirius asked, propping himself up on one elbow. "All right then, mate?"
"Didn't mean to wake you," came the reply, slightly muffled. "Sorry."
"Not to worry, I can sleep through the day. Something bothering you? Dreams again?"
"No, just...uneasy sleep. It's all right, Pads, honestly, you can go back to sleep. Sometimes I think better at night, that's all."
"Care and feeding of the urban werewolf, Lupinus bibliophilim," Sirius said, placing one hand on Remus' spine. The skin was cold and taut under his fingers.
"You're warm."
"Come find out just how warm," he invited, grinning. Remus leaned back into his hand a little, but that was all.
"I keep thinking about the portrait," he said. "I'm sorry I haven't made up my mind yet. I know you're waiting."
"Hell, I don't think that much about it. Take your time. I'm still uncertain myself."
"It's not just that. It's...telling another person what I am. Explaining that I'm...sick. Knowing how people think of it."
"She said in the letter she'd be all right with it."
"They always do say."
"I was all right with it."
"Yeah, after a week or two. Don't think I didn't notice. Not that I blame you, mind." Remus was silent for a little while. "Does it strike you, Sirius, that I'm a little high-strung?"
"Not particularly. You worry too much, that's all." Sirius slid his hand down Remus' spine, inching forward to wrap one arm around his waist and pull him gently backwards. Remus shrugged and went, laughing a little.
"That," he said, "is because you don't do this often enough."
"Throw you down on the bed and ravish you? I do it all the time."
"I know," Remus said happily.
"What are you worrying about at two in the morning?"
"Stupid things people worry about at two in the morning. Harry. You. Whether or not I remembered to send off the owl-post orders at the shop yesterday. The portrait."
Sirius snuffled the small, soft hairs on his neck. "The portrait."
"We haven't talked about it in a while."
"I figured you needed to think about it."
"I did. But I haven't been, really. It's just...how do you tell someone that? Hello, I'm a werewolf. This is Sirius, he turns into a dog once in a while, and occasionally we have mindblowing sex."
"Occasionally?" Sirius asked, scornfully.
"All right, well, I'm not going to go into the details of my sex life with anyone, portraitist or not, but if your solicitor guessed, they will." Remus sighed. "It's such a huge...you hide this thing all your life, and then you're expected to just blurt it out to a stranger. You know what I mean. It's like telling people you're an Animagus. It's personal."
"But you do tell secrets sometimes. I mean, you never seemed very careful about people knowing you fancy blokes."
"Not in Muggle society. It's not really okay, there, but it's...more okay than in our world. And it's one thing to talk about that, it's another thing to...to have a bloke, and tell people about that."
Sirius was silent for a while. Finally, he took a breath.
"Want to have sex?" he asked. Remus burst out laughing. Sirius scowled. "It's not funny!"
"Sex is not the answer to every existential dilemma, Sirius."
"I don't see why not. It's a good distraction, and most existential dilemmas are caused by not having enough to do," Sirius said persuasively.
"I'm all right."
"Good, because I'm knackered." Sirius said, eyes drooping shut again. "Remind me at breakfast."
"Remind you?"
"Mmm, 'bout the portrait. We'll talk."
"All right," Remus said, softly.
"Sleep now."
"Yes, Sirius."
***
The next day was Saturday, which meant there was no reason for an early-morning breakfast; Harry and his friends could sleep late until the Great Hall was almost empty and still meet up at the Slytherin table for a breakfast together. Draco and Neville were already in the Great Hall, standing together under the Gryffindor banner and talking, when Padma met Harry as she came down the stairs and he came up.
Harry had lain awake the night before, huddled completely under his blankets with Snake wrapped tightly around his right wrist, wondering if he should share what he'd heard. None of the others knew he was a Parselmouth, although he'd once spoken to Snake in front of Neville, and he wanted to keep it that way. When he was eight or nine, he'd hated all the secrets he'd had to keep -- Remus' condition, his own identity, who his parents were...
Now though, back in this world, the Wizarding world -- back in a place where his scar marked him and everyone knew his history -- Harry clung to his secrets with a perverse determination. And perhaps it had merely been a big snake passing through the area. It could have been talking to the rats on the grounds, for all Harry knew.
Snake, having migrated upwards and wrapped around his neck like a living choker, still trembled from time to time, and he kept reaching up to adjust the little creature's chokehold on his throat. He used a quick warming charm on a plateful of bacon and scrambled eggs, sharing scraps of the egg with Snake.
"What about you, Harry?"
He glanced up from his plate, blinking. Draco was looking at him intently.
"Sorry, what?" he asked. Neville snickered.
"I have extra Transfigurations, Padma wants to re-write her Astronomy paper, and Neville needs books," Draco said. "But then we're all going on an adventure this afternoon. Game?"
Harry shrugged. "I have to be in bed early -- Quidditch practice starts tomorrow."
"It won't take long," Padma replied. "It's just up near the Ravenclaw tower."
"This isn't going to be the three-headed-dog all over again, is it?" Draco asked.
"Whose fault was that?" Padma retorted pointedly. "It's fine, it's not even dangerous. It looks like it might be a music classroom."
"They used to teach music at Hogwarts," Harry said.
"I hear they still do, at Beauxbatons," Draco put in.
"Beauxbatons?"
"It's a wizarding school on the continent. Mum almost sent me there, except they said they weren't taking any foreign students," Draco answered. "Just as well. Wretched school uniforms, all blue satin and bows."
"Aww, but wouldn't oo wook adorable in ickle bows?" Harry teased.
"Suck it, Potter."
"Don't you wish, Malfoy," Harry replied amiably. "Anyway, they used to teach all kinds of things in the olden days. Music, elocution, dancing -- "
"Ew," Padma said, wrinkling her nose.
"Girls had to take domestic arts," Harry added.
"Did boys have to take a class in being Kneazles' arses?" Padma demanded. "Wait, no, you don't need extra lessons in that..."
"You could go play with Mandy Brocklehurst and Hermione Granger if you want," Neville offered.
"I don't see what's so great about some music classroom, anyway," Draco said.
"You will when you see it," Padma promised. "But first we have to visit the library so that Harry can help you with your Transfiguration."
"Why, what're you going to do?"
"Neville and I are going to find his books," Padma said as they rose to leave. They all nodded, including Neville himself. It wasn't that he wasn't good at finding books, it was just that he was easily distracted and tended to wander off in search of interesting books as opposed to relevant ones.
"I have extra Transfiguration, you know, it's not that I haven't done any," Draco complained to Harry, shouldering his book-bag. "I can do it without your help."
"Suits me," Harry shrugged. "I can work on my Quidditch plays, and see if Goyle wants to play a few rounds of Gobstones."
"Goyle's a moron. I don't know how he got into Slytherin."
"Me either, but that's why I play with him," Harry answered. He'd learned that you could take away a lot from playing chess against someone smarter than you, but all you got from a Gobstones opponent with a high IQ was a faceful of noxious Gobstones scent.
Padma and Neville betook themselves to the Catalogue Room, a small cubicle filled with little card catalogue shelves and the only place where students were permitted to speak above a whisper. Harry could hear, distantly, Neville request "books about herbology" and Padma add "magical spices"; after a second, the sound of paper shuffling could be heard as the catalogue reorganised itself, index cards flying madly around the room until the requested information settled into a neat stack in one open drawer. After two years of the little village library, where it was easier to ask the librarian than to check the card catalogue, Harry had spent hours in the catalogue room, watching in fascination as the cards whirled and dipped around his head.
He didn't join them this time, however; instead he sat down at one of the study tables, tucked into an alcove just back from the doorway, and folded his arms on the table, resting his chin on the backs of his hands. He watched Draco unpack his bag, including an enormous book on basic transfigurative spells.
"Catching up from last year?" he asked.
Draco sighed. "Professor McGonagall says if I don't master the basics I'll never get anywhere," he said. "It's just so much easier to do it my way."
"Your way?"
"Yeah. But when she asks me to tell her how I'm doing it, I can't. I'm just as good as any of you, you know," Draco said. "It's like you and flying. You could fly even without having to do all the stupid basic stuff, but they made you do it anyway. Are you going to work on Quidditch? It makes a person nervous when you stare at him."
Harry made a face. "Can I borrow some parchment and a quill?"
Draco nodded his head at the pile of writing supplies, and Harry picked out a short sheet of parchment and one of Draco's quills.
"Where'd you get this nib?" he asked, examining the metal tip of the quill.
"Mum gave me a set," Draco replied. "They're real silver. They write awfully smooth."
Harry tested it out on the parchment. "Guess we know you're not a werewolf," he joked.
"Brrr, don't even think it." Draco shuddered expressively. "Can you imagine?"
"Imagine what, being a werewolf?"
"I think I'd rather die. Ugh."
"It's not like it matters that much," Harry protested. "When you think about it, I mean."
Draco sniffed and opened his book, beginning to copy notes from a page marked with a brass book-dart. Harry, dipping the silver-nibbed quill in the ink, felt almost like a traitor to Remus for using it.
Instead of doing the usual pitch-overview sketch that he always saw in playbooks, Harry tried drawing a picture of the Quidditch Practical that Snape had shown him, the way Sirius did when he'd doodled on the margins of Harry's drawings when Harry was younger. Harry had learned a lot from watching Sirius, and while he was better at drawing things without straight lines -- snakes and grass, the river, the trees -- he didn't do too badly imitating Sirius' style, which tended more towards odd assemblages of line and angles. He'd just finished sketching out the hoops, which were the hard part, and was beginning to draw in a new play when Padma and Neville returned triumphant from their expedition.
Padma was a discerning sort of scholar, but she was also of what Draco called the Grab and Run school of library research; she and Neville each had an armload of books, and she began sorting them as they were deposited on the table. Harry knew from experience that she would take her time helping Neville go through each book, and most of them would be left on the returns cart when they were done. He set himself to copying his original drawing, fixing the scratched-out bits in the new draft.
"Ready?" Padma asked finally, as Neville carried his final handful of selections to the desk to be stamped and signed out. Harry rolled up the parchment and stuffed it in his back pocket.
"Let's go see this sad little music room, then," Draco said with a grin, and Padma rolled her eyes. They followed her out of the library and up the stairs, pausing every so often for the stairs to readjust themselves as they sometimes did. Padma led them further down a corridor, past the portrait-entrance to the Ravenclaw dormitory and around a series of corners, until none of them knew precisely where they were. Finally she stopped in the darkest part of the castle they'd ever encountered, and stood in front of a large portrait.
"Lumos," she said, and held up her wand, illuminating the figure in the portrait.
It was a blond man, seated at a piano in what looked like a library; behind him a fire crackled soundlessly, and between shelves of books there was a second portrait-within-a-portrait of a striking woman with wildly curly hair. The man looked up at them and adjusted a monocle in one eye, thoughtfully.
"Password?" he asked, fingers picking out a complicated arpeggio of notes on the piano.
"Polyphonic," Padma replied. Harry expected the portrait to swing open, but startlingly, the woman in the portrait-within-a-portrait turned to them, too, and asked, in a deep voice, "Password?"
"JS Bach," Padma said confidently. With a creak, the portrait swung aside.
"How'd you figure out the passwords?" Harry asked, as they filed through.
Padma shrugged. "It wasn't that hard."
The portrait swung shut again behind them as she spoke, and Harry wondered suddenly who had turned off the sound.
"What happened?" Neville asked, in a strangely muted voice.
The room was almost perfectly round, and as Harry looked out the curving, thick windows set in the far wall, he realised where they were -- somewhere inside the curved facade set into the front of the school. Six or seven floors below them, steps led up to the front entrance; above them, a small spire rose out of the dome.
Padma, meanwhile, was pushing Draco to the centre of the room, where a series of triangles set in the floor all met in a sort of bizarre blue sunburst mosaic. She stepped back and said, in the same muted tones, "Say something."
Draco, as with most people when requested to speak suddenly, stared owlishly at her for a minute, speechless. Finally, he took a deep breath, and even on the breath, Harry knew something important was about to happen.
Know this, the ancient words are not forgot --
Vesuvius the phoenix bodies show,
Their bones unbleach'ed by the waning sun
Which our full faces and strong fingers know.
Draco's young voice echoed off the walls with the clear tones of a precisely tuned bell, each small breath and movement of his lips perfectly audible. Neville was staring, round-eyed, while Padma beamed approvingly.
Unblest by knowledge we these later times
Have sought and to our ruin unwise seen,
Pompeii and Herculaneum sleep fast
While wasteland where a city once had been
O'ergrows once more in tempered steel and glass --
Far better to have died these centuries past.
Draco licked his lip as he finished, blinking at Padma.
"That's a strange poem," Neville said. "Who wrote it?"
"A Wizarding writer in the forties," Draco answered, giving him a sidelong look, as if to ask whether Neville knew anything. "Ellis Graveworthy. It's amazing," he added, turning to Padma, voice still perfect and clear. "It's like I'm not even the one speaking. I can hear myself."
"It's acoustically perfect," Padma said. "And it's blocked somehow -- look."
She went to the windows and unlatched two of them with audible clicks; when she threw them wide, however, there was no change -- the room was still silent except for the sound of Draco breathing.
"You can't hear anything," Neville said. "No birds, no people talking."
"Brilliant place to drop water balloons from," Harry added, leaning out one of the windows. As soon as his head passed the barrier of the walls, he was assaulted with noise -- people splashing in the lake in the distance and gossipping on the lawns, the thump of a football being kicked around by some of the Muggleborn students, and the distant noises of animals and birds in the Forbidden Forest. He pulled his head back inside, and the noise abruptly ceased.
"How did you find it?" Neville asked, as Draco stepped off the centre sunburst.
"Dunno, I was just exploring," Padma answered. "It's brilliant, isn't it?"
"I can see why it was a music classroom," Draco replied, gazing around the room at the paintings of violins, pianos, flutes and harps, as well as chalkboards with permanent musical-notation lines ruled on them in white. Neville sang a note, uncertainly and not at all proficiently, and a small white dot appeared on one chalkboard. Harry laughed.
"Sing something!"
Neville laughed too. "What should I sing -- no, wait, I know." He took a deep breath. "Fight Gryffindor Fight, For we're glorious and might-y! Win Gryffindor Win, Cos we're House Champi-ons!"
"Merlin, what an awful fight song," Padma murmured, even as the musical notes to the old Quidditch cheering song were appearing on the blackboard, together with the lyrics.
"Do you think the professors know about it?" Harry asked, brushing the thickly-coated dust off a bookshelf.
"Wouldn't they use it? Imagine teaching a class in here," Padma said. "I mean, talk about having everyone's undivided attention."
"There must be all kinds of secret rooms and stuff at Hogwarts," Neville mused. "I bet there's loads of places the professors don't know about."
"Yeah, that's what we thought about the room with the three-headed-dog in it," Draco replied.
"Oh, stop complaining about the dog already," Harry said. "Come on, let's go talk Denbigh into giving us some sandwiches and have a picnic. It's too sunny to spend the whole day inside."
The other three agreed, and the man in the monocle gave them a friendly wave goodbye as they left to the faint strains of the portrait's piano being played softly.
***
That Sunday morning Harry woke early so as to be ready for practice. Flint, however, didn't come down to the common room until Harry was already washed, dressed in his gear, and fidgeting impatiently to be off. The rest of the team followed, yawning and complaining.
"Pipsqueak's ready to go," one of them observed, and Harry scowled. "You're making us look bad, Potter."
"You're making you look bad," Harry retorted. "Let's go, I want to play already."
Disagreeably, they made their way down to the pitch, where Professor Snape stood waiting for them, wind whipping his loose robes around his ankles and ruffling his short hair. Flint, the trunk following behind him with a floating charm, gave him barely a nod; Snape ascended to one of the spectator towers as the others crowded around their Captain.
One of the few things Harry liked about his captain -- who was a proud, lazy, cheating hack for the most part -- was that he never gave them diagrams. Flint didn't like charts and maps, so he didn't use them. They ran new plays as they learned them, then adjusted for problems mid-flight. It meant they drilled over and over again, while they were learning, but they were more adaptable once they did, and Harry could always plead lack of memory when he refused to cheat the way Flint wanted him to. Cheating, as he'd once told Snape, was a mug's game; you couldn't cheat in real life because the basic rules weren't breakable, so you might as well learn to play within them and use them to your advantage.
While Flint was dividing them up for a scrimmage, in which Harry had little interest since Flint was drilling the team on plays Harry had invented, he noticed a second figure in the spectators' tower. Dora -- Professor Tonks -- had climbed the ladder and was now making her way down the aisle, occasionally tripping on her robe and grabbing onto the benches for support. She was graceful, Harry decided, when she wasn't falling down.
The Snitch whizzed past his ear and he went after it, chasing it down until he had to duck through a mess around the Quaffle to get to it, and it vanished. When he looked back, she was leaning on the rails, watching through a pair of shiny brass omnioculars. Snape did not look happy about it.
"Hey Potter, stop ogling the Dark Arts professor!" Flint shouted, and Harry returned to the game, chastised. The feint maneuver he'd worked out and demonstrated for Snape seemed to be effective, but the players weren't making the most of the idea of level-change; all it had done was brought them much closer to the ground as they battled for the Quaffle.
When Ravenclaw sees this, he thought to himself, they're going to catch on and they're going to do it right, and then all of us are going to be --
"Watch where you're flying!" shouted Bole, one of the Beaters. Montague, a Chaser in his final year and clearly still bitter about not being Captain, had nipped between Flint and Pucey to steal the Quaffle, and in so doing had narrowly missed colliding with Bole, who was riding wing on Flint and keeping a determined Bludger away from him. Montague skimmed past Bole barely an inch from his elbow, and the Beater spun wildly away, clinging for dear life to his broom and trying to bat away a Bludger at the same time. He finally lost control of his broom and fell in seeming slow-motion to the pitch, where he landed in undignified fashion on his tailbone, while Flint went after his flyaway broom.
"Learn to keep on your broomstick and you can yell at me all you like!" Montague called, sneering. The others laughed.
"I should have figured you wouldn't give a damn for proper play, you filthy mudblood!" Bole screamed.
The laughter stopped abruptly. Harry had only heard the word once or twice before, but it sent a chill down his spine; Bole continued to swear, and Montague had gone white-faced.
"You take that back," he said, dropping altitude abruptly and hovering nose to nose with Bole. "I'm not a mudblood."
"Your gran's a Muggle and you've three squib aunts, mudblood, and I bet your father was a Muggle too," Bole snarled back. Two of the others went for Montague to hold him back, but someone else was faster; Dora had run for the ladder when Bole first shouted, and she was between the two before either of them could make a move for the other.
"Hold him," she said over her shoulder, to the boys who were already grasping Montague's sleeves. She whipped around to face Bole furiously.
"Fifty points from Slytherin for conduct unbecoming a student and use of profanity in front of a professor," she snapped. Harry actually saw her grow a few inches, though he didn't think anyone else was in a state of mind to notice. "If I ever hear that word out of your mouth again, Bole, you will never see your NEWTs, let alone graduate."
"Did you see what he -- "
"Two weeks' detention. I don't care what he did. That word," she spat, "is unacceptable on the grounds of this school. Or anywhere."
"Professor -- "
"Would you care to make it a hundred points and three weeks, plus team suspension? That can be arranged."
Bole sensibly shut his mouth and stared at her with wide eyes. A hand touched her shoulder lightly.
"That will be sufficient, Professor Tonks," Snape said, darkly. "I believe I am best situated to handle this particular disciplinary issue from here."
Harry saw distaste and anger in Snape's face, and realised suddenly that Dora had severely overstepped her bounds. After all, Professor Snape was senior, and he was the head of their House; if anyone was going to threaten team suspension, it ought to be him.
Not to mention her getting there first made him look rather awful, really.
"If I hear that word again from any Slytherin on this team -- " she started, but he cut her off.
"That will do, Professor Tonks. Thank you," Snape said icily. She gave Bole one last furious look before turning and stalking away across the pitch, although the effect was somewhat ruined when, about halfway to the castle, she stumbled briefly on a sudden dip in the grassy landscape.
The silence on the pitch was deafening. Everyone had landed their brooms, and Harry absently caught the Snitch when it made another run past his ear, stuffing it in his pocket.
"It is unwise to use that particular word," Snape said slowly, arms crossed over his chest as he stared down at Bole. "Aside from its unpleasant connotations of intolerance, it is a word which is not found in the polite society a Slytherin aspires to belong to, and it certainly is impolitic to speak it in front of a Professor whose own father is a Muggle-born wizard. As you can see, they tend to take it rather amiss."
Bole's eyes, if it were possible, grew rounder.
"I believe, as I do not wish to take another fifty points from my own House, or suspend an adequate player from the House team, we will make it fifty points and three weeks' detention," Snape continued, "served with Filch and Hagrid. Carry on practice," he added. "Flint, my office after breakfast, please."
He turned and followed in Dora's general direction, moving more easily and confidently across the grounds towards the castle. When he was out of earshot, Pucey let out a low whistle.
"I didn't know Professor Tonks was half-Muggle," Flint said.
"She isn't," Harry said. "Her father's a wizard same as you or I."
"Yeah, but Muggleborn, right?" Pucey put in.
"What's that matter? He's brilliant at everything," Harry retorted.
"Yeah, but blood will out, and all," Pucey said vaguely.
"Don't make me punch you," Montague snarled. Pucey still had him by one arm, and he let go quickly. Bole was looking a little as if he'd been hit in the head by something heavy. "We're not done either, Bole."
"My mum was Muggleborn," Harry said to Pucey. "Going to say something about her, too?"
"Nobody's saying anything about anyone's mum or calling anyone a mudblood, all right?" Flint announced loudly. "Harry, if you try to punch someone two feet taller than you are he'll knock you flat, so you might as well not bother. We can all fly a broomstick so let's get back to doing that, all right?"
"Most of us can," Bole muttered resentfully, glaring at Montague, but fortunately the other boy didn't hear him -- or if he did, was more sensible than to make an issue out of it.
Harry reflected, as he shook the Snitch out of his pocket and let it go again, that at least they weren't at each others' throats over whether or not to use his plays. Professor Snape was smarter than most people, Sirius included, would give him credit for.
If only Dora hadn't gone quite so far...
***
Life on the upper floors of Twelve Grimmauld Place (also known as TONKS & TONKS, purveyors of fine wizarding dress) was, outwardly, much more peaceful than it appeared to be at Hogwarts that week. At the civilised hour of nine am on Tuesday, Remus was sipping tea while Sirius made french toast. Downstairs, the shop was opening and various patrons were coming and going, cheerfully met and catered to by Andromeda while Ted dug in and worked on the perpetually-behind book keeping.
Remus had the paper open and was reading the rather badly-edited Literature section of the Prophet. The pretentiousness of the reviews and occasionally the books themselves were strangely soothing to his nerves. Sirius compensated for nerves by frying things; hence the french toast, not to mention the giant heap of bacon on a heat-charmed plate, already on the table.
"We don't have to go if you really don't want to, you know," he said, as he transferred the last of the food to a plate and carried it to the table. Remus folded the newspaper and set it aside.
"That's a coward's game," he said, tweaking a single slice to his own plate and drizzling a little honey on it. "We both know it."
"If it's going to make you anxious -- "
"Not the painting," Remus sighed. "Just the meeting."
"She'll be hexed to secrecy, this Helena person. She's the great-granddaughter of the founders of the company, she seems all right," Sirius said. "I mean, well-educated and that. And she doesn't seem anti-werewolf at all."
"She's a stranger, that's all," Remus said, cutting up his toast. "You never know about strangers."
"Maybe it's more trouble than it's worth," Sirius mused.
"No, but...I want you to have this and I like the idea too," Remus protested. "Honestly, it's no good living like this anyway. If I really wasn't a coward I'd say what I was and have done with it to all and sundry, but it makes life so unnecessarily difficult, and it wouldn't be fair to you, either. And I don't want to," he added defiantly.
Sirius watched him across the table, expression unreadable, until finally he smiled reassuringly.
"If we were to say damn the world, we could say a lot of things. Any time you want to, I'm game if you are. It won't be the first time," he added. Remus smiled.
"There's no need," he replied. "This belongs to us, not to anyone else."
They finished in comfortable if slightly nervous silence and went out into the mild bustle of a mid-morning high street, hands in pockets, strolling down towards Gringotts and the turnoff for Fansif Alley, the arts-and-theatre district. Sirius gave him a sidelong look as he put his hand on the brightly painted green-and-gilt door of Broosh & Chakle Studios, but when Remus gazed back evenly, he shrugged and pushed it open.
The inside room was a cheerful pale ochre, and several portraits grinned and waved at them from the walls, interspersed with the occasional plaster or stone statue.
"Good morning, gentlemen," said a young, formally-robed man, bearing down on them and, Sirius noticed, mentally rubbing his hands. "Do you require any assistance?"
"Is this Helena Broosh's work?" Remus asked, examining a painting of a basket of puppies. One of them kept tumbling out of the basket and clambering back in. Another one yawned humourously.
"Ah yes, Miss Broosh's work is quite popular with the town and country set," the young man said, adjusting his glasses. Sirius saw him eyeing Remus, and wondered whether it was measuring him up for a purchase or measuring him up for personal pleasure.
"We're here to see her, as it happens," Sirius said abruptly.
"I see. Do we have an appointment?" the young man asked, crossing to a desk and opening a leatherbound ledger there.
"Sirius Black? I contacted the office yesterday by owl."
"Ah yes, Mr Black, here we are. This way, please."
"I liked those dogs," Remus said, as they followed him back through a curtain in the rear of the shop. "She's a decent artist."
The back of the shop was wildly different from the front gallery; most of the walls had been knocked out to create a series of open, well-lit stalls in which sculptors and painters were working on various creations, or gathering to sip tea and wait for their next sitting. Some areas were walled off by thick black curtains. In the last stall but one, a woman around their age, in paint-spattered robes, was sizing a canvas on a frame.
"Your ten-fifteen, Miss Broosh," the man said, leaving them only after he'd leered a little more at Remus.
"Mr. Black?" she asked, holding out a hand. "Don't worry, all the paint on it's dry," she added. Sirius grinned and took her hand, shaking it firmly.
"Ms. Broosh," he said. "Ah, this is my friend Remus Lupin..."
"Yes, I've seen you both in the papers. I am," she added, "very much hoping you're here to commission portraits. You have an extremely good skull for painting, Mr. Black, and Mr. Lupin's face is an interesting study in itself."
Remus touched the small scar on his jaw self-consciously, and she laughed.
"No, it's all in the nose and chin," she replied reassuringly.
"Is there somewhere we could speak in private?" Sirius asked. She grinned and pulled a pair of black velvet curtains across the open entrance to the small room, tying them together with a small silk cord.
"There's a silencing charm as well," she said. "We sometimes do nudes, and of course we respect client confidentiality."
"That's much appreciated," Sirius said frankly. "I...am not here for a nude," he added with a grin. She matched it.
"Spoil my dreams, Mr Black," she said.
"Yes, well," he said, as Remus coughed, "I understand you've been in communication with Llewllyn Payne regarding some inquiries into the painting of Animagi."
"Are you Mr. Canis, sir? The name did sound rather contrived."
Sirius glanced at Remus. "She's quick."
Remus nodded, watching her intently.
"I had hoped you would come to speak to me in person. It really is a unique challenge, and of course I would be happy to enter into any confidentiality agreement you require -- which of you gentlemen is the Animagus?" she asked eagerly.
"Ms. Broosh, we'd like to..." Sirius paused. "There are other issues at stake, as well. We'd like to ensure that the confidentiality agreement also covers things of a more personal and dangerous nature."
"Well, unless you want to pose with a freshly killed body or something, I think I can keep quiet," she said. "I can provide references from other clients I've worked with discreetly. Men and their mistresses, erotic nudes -- all tastefully done, of course -- even people who would like to be painted in the costume of a historical figure without a fuss being made over it, though that seems pretty minor, in comparison." She glanced at Remus. "Does he talk?"
"I'm sorry, I'm being rude," Remus said, giving her an apologetic smile. "This is somewhat nervewracking." He gave Sirius an anxious look. "I've never voluntarily told anyone this before."
"Perhaps if you would feel more comfortable after any paperwork had been signed -- "
"No, it's all right -- I like you," Remus said. "I...that is, Mr. Black and I were hoping to commission a portrait together..."
She nodded, looking not at all surprised and picking up a rag, twining it between her fingers. "I have also protected the confidentiality of men and women like yourselves, whose personal relationships are not the business of the public -- "
"Well, there is that," Sirius said hastily.
"He's the Animagus, you see," Remus said. "And I'm a werewolf."
She dropped the rag in surprise. After a moment of speechless staring, she spoke.
"Oh -- I did hope that you would -- that is to say, of course, I'm sure you'd rather not be treated any differently," she said eagerly, "but it would be such an interesting challenge. And an Animagus -- those are very rare. I hope I'm not overstepping myself," she added, checking herself suddenly. "Am I right in assuming, sir, that you are an unregistered Animagus?"
"You may be," Sirius said with a smile. Remus was looking less nervous, now that the first reaction was over with and her mind seemed wholly concerned with the challenge of painting a werewolf rather than the minimal danger of sharing breathing space with one.
"Of course if you'd prefer to consider it a little more, Mr. Black, Mr. Lupin, I'd be happy to wait, but I have all the papers drawn up and the charms in place in case you want to sign them -- I have had for a few weeks, only I hadn't heard anything more and I thought you must have decided against it."
Sirius glanced at Remus, who looked back expectantly.
"There are some rather invasive techniques used," she said hesitantly, into the silence. "Nothing physical, but we do like to talk to the sitters while we're painting, and we ask questions that some might consider rather impertinent, especially if the sitters are romantically involved."
"We're getting obvious in our old age," Sirius said quietly. "I suppose that might show in the portrait, too?"
"It might," she said thoughtfully, "but I've been doing lots of animal studies lately -- "
"Yes, we saw the puppies," Remus said.
"Oh, do you like them? Troublesome little curs," she said affectionately. "I think I could actually paint a portrait that made use of both the human and animal form of the Animagus -- in public, that is to say to a stranger's eye, the painting would appear to be of you, Mr. Lupin, posing with Mr. Black's animal form. It would be a really very interesting experiment," she said persuasively. "With the names changed I could even write it up for a few journals if you were agreeable."
"Up to you, Pads," Remus said gently. "I'm game if you are."
Sirius grinned back at him. "Was that a dare?"
Remus gave him his best poker face. Sirius turned to Broosh, who was smiling slightly. "You'd better get out those papers so that we can look them over," he said. "If you do all right, I might have my godson come sit for a normal portrait sometime."
"I'm sure it would be my pleasure to paint Mr. Potter," she said, and left to get the papers. When she was gone, Remus exhaled slowly and leaned back against the wall.
"All right, Moony?" Sirius asked.
"Yes -- that went well," Remus replied, smiling at him. "It did. I thought she'd -- I didn't think she'd react like that. I like her," he added.
"Me too. She's a little nuts," Sirius said. "Like us, really."
"I suppose she's paid to be open-minded, but..." Remus grinned at him. "Well, treating a pureblood Animagus and his werewolf boyfriend like a new painting technique is above and beyond the call of lucre, I think."
***
While all seemed more or less peaceful on Fansif Alley that Tuesday morning, at Hogwarts the tempest in the Slytherin teapot had grown entirely out of control.
It might have died down if Montague and Bole weren't Transfiguration partners. If they'd been able to avoid each other, the bickering could have come to a slow and tedious halt, but it just kept up in a steady stream every time they encountered each other. Finally it broke out in violence in the hallway outside the Transfigurations classroom on Monday afternoon. A couple of Gryffindors charged in to pull them apart, but before they were both settled down by the arrival of Percy Weasley with Professor McGonagall, Oliver Wood had a really fantastic black eye and Bole had shouted that Montague couldn't always be running to that halfbreed Tonks for help, even if like did attract like.
None of the professors or prefects heard the halfbreed remark, but plenty of the students did, and by lights-out half the school knew that Professor Tonks' father was a Muggleborn, while the other half had been treated to various mutations of the story including, but not limited to, Professor Tonks being a Muggleborn, Professor Tonks' father eating Muggleborns, and Professor Tonks having some form of illicit relations with Montague, which was quashed by a horrified Montague himself.
Harry and his friends were eating their usual early breakfast on Tuesday, discussing the fight and weighing the advantages of having an honourably received black-eye versus not having a painful and ugly swollen face, when it happened. It was perhaps fortunate that it happened so early, considering everything, but unfortunate that they should be inadvertent witnesses to it. They were seated at one end of the Slytherin table, blocked from view by one of the hangings, just able to see Professor Snape eating a solitary bowl of oatmeal, when Dora -- Professor Tonks, Neville still had to be reminded -- entered from one of the side-hallways.
"Can I have a word with you, Professor Snape?" she asked. The sound echoed in the empty hall, fully loud enough for them to hear, whether they wanted to or not, and all four fell silent immediately.
"Professor Tonks," Snape said, impassively. He set his spoon down and turned slightly in his seat.
"Whether or not I chose to discipline your students, which I was within my rights to do as a professor at this school, you had no business discussing my parentage or my personal life with a pair of Quidditch hooligans who don't know better than to get into fistfights in public hallways," she said. There was an odd formal tone to her voice, as if she'd been rehearsing the speech. Neville glanced at Harry, who was watching in wide-eyed awe.
"I'm sure I'm unaware of what you mean," he replied blandly. A hint of smirk played around his lips.
"Bole called me a halfbreed in front of a hallway full of students. Since then he's been telling vicious stories about my father's parentage. I know where he got that information from."
"I merely explained that it was unwise, given your father's status, for them to use certain expressions to which you overreacted on the Quidditch pitch on Sunday morning."
"Bastard," Padma breathed.
"Shut up," Harry hissed.
"Well, he is."
"Over-reacted? Did you hear the filth coming out of Bole's mouth?" Tonks demanded.
"He's a child, he hardly knows what the word means."
"He's fifteen, he knows exactly what it means and how to use it. That's not the point. No matter how well or badly I handled the situation, there was no call to bring my father into it. And you have the audacity to lecture me on leaving your friendship with my parents out of our professional relationship!"
"I don't see how -- "
"You don't see how?" she asked, and to his credit, Snape didn't flinch. "You don't think your personal knowledge of my father's ancestry is inappropriately applied in disciplining children? Do you think he wants the whole school talking about his parentage? My mother and father are the best friends you have in this world, if they're not the only ones you have, and -- "
"That will be quite enough," he said suddenly, standing so quickly his chair fell over. "May I remind you I am a senior professor -- "
"Then act like one!" she snarled. Neville was so startled by the vicious tone of voice coming from his normally placid foster-sister that he dropped his fork.
The clatter of metal on stone was like the roar of a train passing through the hall. Both professors turned to see four students, clustered around one end of one table, looking sheepish and frightened.
"Ah, Severus, Tonks, good morning," said a voice from the doorway. Their savior had appeared; Albus Dumbledore was entering, and immediately both professors moved away from each other, Snape righting his chair, Tonks taking the furthest possible seat from him. Dumbledore sat between them beatifically and requested an enormous breakfast from Denbigh when the head of the Kitchen Elves appeared.
Students and other professors began to trickle into the Great Hall, and the four went their separate ways. The walking wounded put in the briefest, most sullen appearances -- all but Oliver, who was enjoying talking with Lee Jordan while pretending not to notice that he was the centre of attention at the Gryffindor table.
To the Next Part
There's always the chance, after all, that someone might be innocent, and plenty of people serve their time in Azkaban and survive it, even if they're never the same afterwards. They don't snap the wands of prisoners, whether or not they're serving life-sentences. They bring them here.
Only when someone dies is the wand disposed of, in a careful manner, by a trained expert. The current Ollivander, of the generations who have owned Ollivander's, has both provided and destroyed the wands for many of Azkaban's residents.
Among those he'd supplied, and those he had every expectation of destroying, was the wand of Lucius Malfoy. Ten inches, yew with a core of unicorn hair. Ollivander found this whimsical, as the boy himself looked vaguely like a unicorn: a pale-haired, inquisitive, and calm child, so very calm that Ollivander had peered into the boy's eyes to make sure he wasn't...damaged, somehow. There had been a keen intelligence there, but also an upsetting coolness of emotion. There was no hint of mercy in those eyes, even when he was eleven. That he should be a murderer had not shocked Ollivander.
This is the room where they keep the wands of the condemned, row upon row of cubicles lined in velvet, a name and the Azkaban serial number etched on the glass front of each small case. Some are empty; not nearly all are full, but enough are occupied that a wizard, on entering, would feel a chill down his spine. A wand is a part of one; seeing this room is like seeing a roomful of extracted teeth, carefully labeled and preserved. It is deep in the bowels of the Ministry of Magic, accessed by an unassuming little door labeled "storeroom."
(Real storerooms are never actually labeled that.)
And several floors up, a rat has crept into the Ministry and is beginning what he knows will be a long series of tests against the magical wards placed around the room of wands.
***
Remus finally made the appointment for his examination at St Mungo's in mid-September. It was the Ministry's not-terribly-subtle way of keeping tabs on werewolves, and though Sirius offered to come along, he didn't want Sirius there, hovering and making a fuss. He'd rather just quietly get it over with. Sirius was bound to raise hell if he had to actually see what werewolves underwent on the medical end, and he couldn't come into the private evaluation anyway. It was easiest for all concerned if he simply had the row ahead of time and convinced Sirius to meet him for lunch afterwards.
Not that he was ever very hungry after. The whole process was humiliating, and even looking forward to the friendly, scatter-brained company of his official evaluator, Rubin, didn't do much to assuage that.
The medical examination passed without incident; blood, hair, and saliva samples, a detailed history of the last three years' worth of Changes, physical appearance documentation including scars (plenty of those), and the tolerance tests. Remus hated that part more than anything, even stripping down for the physical appearance photographs. Technically the tolerance tests were supposed to measure how close he was to "feral" by exposing him to increasing doses of silver; a nasty side effect was that it also tested his tolerance for pain.
Finally, tired and nursing three bandaged burns on the back of his hand, he walked down the corridor to the evaluation office with something approaching relief. Seth Rubin was a friend of Moody's and had known Remus since he was a child; he'd treated him not only through the incident at school with Severus, but through the scheduled Ministry-required checkups and a brief but memorable flip-out when he was nineteen. He knew everything -- the lycanthropy, obviously, but also about the weird, sometimes prescient dreams, his sexuality, and his feelings for Sirius back before, long before, Sirius himself had known about them.
"Come in!" the Healer called when Remus knocked, and he let himself into the unchanging office full of files, some of them charmed to float in the air for lack of desk space. "Eleven o'clock...must be Remus Lupin."
"Hello, Seth," Remus called, pushing a floating pile of files to one side. A small, tidy-looking man beamed up at him from where he was scrawling notes on a yellow Muggle legal pad.
"Have a seat. I've been waiting rather impatiently for this meeting," the man said with a grin. "You had such exciting things to tell me, three years ago, and then you up and disappeared until last year..."
Remus nodded. "I'm sure you heard about Harry."
"One can hardly avoid it," the Healer said with a smile, passing a sheet of parchment across the desk. "That's your official certification of continuing stability. I thought we might as well get the formalities out of the way."
"Er..." Remus scanned down the questionnaire that Rubins was supposed to administer. "It's filled out."
"Stupid, pointless things," Seth said agreeably, leaning forward. "Only someone who has never had contact with a werewolf would ask if you had come to terms with the fact that you turn into a hairy slavering beast once a month."
"Oh." Remus gave him a slightly confused look. "You never did this before."
"You rarely had anything you needed to discuss, before," Seth replied. "Other than what's on that questionnaire."
"And I do now?"
The Healer leaned back in his chair. "Well, you've been raising a child, and the last time we spoke there was the issue of a relationship..."
"Oh...Sirius. Yes." Remus coughed. "Er...yes. Raising Harry. That's going well."
Seth grinned. "In your own time, Lupin. If you don't want to talk, I won't make you. Tell you what, play you two games of Exploding Snap while you tell me all about Harry, and you ought to be right on schedule for discharge."
Forty minutes later, Sirius sniffed the air as Remus emerged from the hospital, pulling on his coat.
"It smells like sulfur," he said. "What do they DO to you in there?"
"Relaxation technique," Remus answered with a grin, as Sirius straightened the collar of his coat. They were careful in public; more careful than either of them wanted to be, but there was a lot at stake. The Wizarding World took as well to two men kissing as it did to publicly-acknowledged werewolves. Sirius had begun fussing with his clothing as a sort of substitute affectionate gesture, and Remus rather enjoyed it. "Where are we going for lunch?"
"Actually, we're meeting someone," Sirius said. "My solicitor."
"Ah yes, the Payne," Remus said with a grin. "Business lunch?"
"Yeah, there are one or two things I need to talk to you about before we meet. Er, I'm making you Harry's legal guardian if I die."
Remus frowned. "Can we do that? Does Payne know about...me? I mean, if you're doing it without his knowledge, it'd never stand up in court."
Sirius gave him a guilty look. "I did sort of mention the situation. But -- " he added anxiously, " -- but he knows about me, too, about the animagery, I mean, and about us."
"Us?" Remus asked with a grin.
"He's really very confidential."
"Should be, for what you pay him," Remus sighed. "He knows a way around the laws?"
"He seems to."
"I'm not so sure I'm happy with you telling him about me, but we can have a shouting match about it later."
"I sort of had to, for the other thing."
Remus raised his eyebrows. "There's another thing?"
"Yeah. You remember the Dorian Gray portrait thing?"
"The letter you got?"
"I was thinking about doing it."
Remus grinned. "Vanity, thy name is Sirius. This year is a good look for you, I think."
"I want you to have it done with me."
At that point, Remus blinked in shock and, distracted, walked into a lamppost.
***
The first few days of school went quietly enough, and they were well into the third week by the time Snape stopped Harry as he was leaving Potions class and asked if he could have a word with him that evening. Harry, who had been expecting this, went back to his rooms after dinner and fetched the Quidditch playbook he'd been working on all summer, when he wasn't out with his friends or socialising with the snakes at the bottom of the garden. He assumed Snape had probably been giving him time to finish it at school without wanting to seem like he had. Harry was keen on Quidditch, though, and if he couldn't play it, making up new plays was the next best thing.
"You've anticipated my request, I see," Snape said, looking up from his desk as Harry entered with the playbook folder under one arm. "Settling into your second year?"
"Yes, sir."
"Gryffindor has already begun practice."
"Yes, sir, Oliver Wood has had to train some new players."
"A good excuse."
Harry smiled a little at the sour expression on Snape's face. "I thought it might be better if you told Captain Flint that he was lagging, Professor. I don't think he wants to hear it from me."
Snape gave him a sharp look. "I'd like you to present your new plays, please."
Harry opened the playbook and turned it around so that Snape could peruse them. "I didn't know what you wanted specifically, so I wrote three plays for Seekers and two formations for coordinated offence," he explained.
"Offence?" Snape asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Well, when I was playing last year, it looked like nobody changed much," Harry explained. "I mean, the Seekers fly low and high a lot, but mostly the rest of the players stay on a level with the hoops, even midfield. Nobody's really making use of the full space. If a player...here, I drew pictures, but it doesn't help much..." Harry flipped to the first play, and Snape looked down at the page, dismayed. It was covered in notes and scribbles. Harry had copied it out four times, but it was frustrating to discuss a three-dimensional game in two dimensions.
"I did the best I could," Harry said. Snape continued to examine the page, fingers drifting here and there over the notes, until finally he rose and went to the bookshelf behind his desk. He took down a thick book with "Quidditch Practical Guide" in gold on the black calfskin binding, and opened it flat on his desk.
To Harry's delight, it wasn't a book at all -- it was a platform from which six golden hoops sprung, a Quidditch pitch in miniature. Fourteen little figures rose up, half black and half white, along with four dots of light -- two blue, one green, and one gold.
"Show me," Snape said. "Use your wand to guide the players."
Harry, fascinated, prodded one of the little black figures with his wand, and it stuck to the player's robe so that he could move it about. He placed the Keepers at either end, the Seekers, Beaters, Bludgers, and Snitch out of the way, and the six Chasers closely clustered at one goal.
"If a player gets the Quaffle," he said, attaching the little green point of light to one of the black players, near the black goal, "He generally either shoots straight through the crowd, or he passes. Sometimes he'll rise up a little -- " he stuck the player to the end of his wand and drew it along, over the heads of the other figures, " -- but that's considered sort of arrogant, right?"
"Generally," Snape said, reservedly. "It looks like trick-playing. Flying circles around the other team."
"But the problem is, nine times out of ten, if you get the Quaffle, you're going to lose it within ten seconds."
"The Chaser's Median. You've been researching."
"Yes, sir." Harry leaned forward, dragging the player back where he'd been. "But if you can break away from the crowd, in any direction, you've got a good chance of keeping hold of the Quaffle long enough to get in scoring range."
Snape was silent, waiting for him to continue. Harry, carefully, tipped the player's broomstick up in a flyover feint, and then dropped player and broomstick straight down, executing a backwards move in a vertical plane.
One black eyebrow lifted.
"If I may," Snape said, and Harry sat back. Snape took out his own wand and re-set the figures, then flicked his wand over the entire arrangement. The players burst into motion, and he watched for several seconds. Finally, the tip of his wand, hovering over the playing area, dipped. The player Harry had demonstrated with executed the move flawlessly, and sped towards the goal while half the players shot upwards and the other half collided with each other in confusion.
"Seems to work," Harry said, a little proudly.
"Indeed. Did you have much assistance with it?"
"Assistance?" Harry asked, confused.
"From your godfather."
"Well...we talked about it..." Harry said. "I didn't cheat!"
"I'm not implying you did. This is...very reminiscent of his playing style, that's all," Snape said.
"Is it all right?"
Snape closed the Quidditch Practical and steepled his fingers over it, resting his hawklike nose against his knuckles.
"I'd like to examine the other plays, if I may -- I'm fairly sure I can re-create them from your notes, with the help of the Practical. If they are acceptable, I'll pass them on to Mr. Flint."
Realisation dawned on Harry. "You're not going to tell the team I wrote them, are you."
"Not unless you want to be ostracised by your team for the rest of the year. If you present them to the team, you will be ignored. If I force them upon the team in your name...I think you can see where this is going, Harry."
Harry sighed and sat back. He knew it was no good; Snape was right, of course. But he said it anyway. It had to be said. "That's not fair."
"Life rarely is, especially for those who represent the bottom of the age scale in any given group," Snape said, almost absently.
"On the other hand..." Harry said thoughtfully, "We'll still win if we use them."
Snape nodded, gravely.
"When do we start practice?" Harry asked.
"Sunday," Snape replied. "I'd be ready for an early wake-up. You're dismissed."
"Thank you, sir," Harry said, standing. "Sir..."
"Yes?"
"Could I try the Practical sometime?"
Snape frowned. "It's a complicated magical mechanism. Perhaps next year."
Harry nodded and left the office, wandering down the labyrinthine maze of corridors that led to the Slytherin common room. It was disappointing, knowing that he wouldn't get credit for plays that Sirius and Remus had both said were brilliant, but Snape was right; at least this way the plays would get used --
Come...come to me...
Harry stopped just outside the common room, startled.
Snake? he asked, reaching into his pocket. Snake, now almost too big to be carried around with him, complained sleepily.
What is it? Snake demanded. I was napping.
Harry shook his head. He must have been hearing things.
Let me...
He hadn't imagined that.
Let me...
Rip you, tear you, kill you...
In his pocket, Snake had pulled himself into a tiny ball, and was actually shaking with tension.
What is it? Harry asked. There was silence, and Harry bolted through the portrait-hole, closing it quickly behind him. Only when he was alone in the dormitory, with the door closed on the noise of the common room, did Snake stop shivering. He took Snake out of his pocket and set him on the pillow of his bed, watching as the muscular, sinuous body quivered with alertness.
What was that? Harry asked again. Snake curled in on himself and slithered under a corner of the blanket.
Big, came the muffled reply.
***
Sirius had gone to bed late, having stayed up reading, and he was barely asleep when he was bothered by the noise of the bedsprings and the shift in weight on the bed. He opened his eyes to slits, just enough to see Remus sitting on the edge of the bed, the hollows and ridges of his spine sharply outlined by the moonlight spilling in through the windows. His head was bowed, and his hands were running through his hair, smoothing and then disordering it, as though he were thinking deeply.
"Moony?" Sirius asked, propping himself up on one elbow. "All right then, mate?"
"Didn't mean to wake you," came the reply, slightly muffled. "Sorry."
"Not to worry, I can sleep through the day. Something bothering you? Dreams again?"
"No, just...uneasy sleep. It's all right, Pads, honestly, you can go back to sleep. Sometimes I think better at night, that's all."
"Care and feeding of the urban werewolf, Lupinus bibliophilim," Sirius said, placing one hand on Remus' spine. The skin was cold and taut under his fingers.
"You're warm."
"Come find out just how warm," he invited, grinning. Remus leaned back into his hand a little, but that was all.
"I keep thinking about the portrait," he said. "I'm sorry I haven't made up my mind yet. I know you're waiting."
"Hell, I don't think that much about it. Take your time. I'm still uncertain myself."
"It's not just that. It's...telling another person what I am. Explaining that I'm...sick. Knowing how people think of it."
"She said in the letter she'd be all right with it."
"They always do say."
"I was all right with it."
"Yeah, after a week or two. Don't think I didn't notice. Not that I blame you, mind." Remus was silent for a little while. "Does it strike you, Sirius, that I'm a little high-strung?"
"Not particularly. You worry too much, that's all." Sirius slid his hand down Remus' spine, inching forward to wrap one arm around his waist and pull him gently backwards. Remus shrugged and went, laughing a little.
"That," he said, "is because you don't do this often enough."
"Throw you down on the bed and ravish you? I do it all the time."
"I know," Remus said happily.
"What are you worrying about at two in the morning?"
"Stupid things people worry about at two in the morning. Harry. You. Whether or not I remembered to send off the owl-post orders at the shop yesterday. The portrait."
Sirius snuffled the small, soft hairs on his neck. "The portrait."
"We haven't talked about it in a while."
"I figured you needed to think about it."
"I did. But I haven't been, really. It's just...how do you tell someone that? Hello, I'm a werewolf. This is Sirius, he turns into a dog once in a while, and occasionally we have mindblowing sex."
"Occasionally?" Sirius asked, scornfully.
"All right, well, I'm not going to go into the details of my sex life with anyone, portraitist or not, but if your solicitor guessed, they will." Remus sighed. "It's such a huge...you hide this thing all your life, and then you're expected to just blurt it out to a stranger. You know what I mean. It's like telling people you're an Animagus. It's personal."
"But you do tell secrets sometimes. I mean, you never seemed very careful about people knowing you fancy blokes."
"Not in Muggle society. It's not really okay, there, but it's...more okay than in our world. And it's one thing to talk about that, it's another thing to...to have a bloke, and tell people about that."
Sirius was silent for a while. Finally, he took a breath.
"Want to have sex?" he asked. Remus burst out laughing. Sirius scowled. "It's not funny!"
"Sex is not the answer to every existential dilemma, Sirius."
"I don't see why not. It's a good distraction, and most existential dilemmas are caused by not having enough to do," Sirius said persuasively.
"I'm all right."
"Good, because I'm knackered." Sirius said, eyes drooping shut again. "Remind me at breakfast."
"Remind you?"
"Mmm, 'bout the portrait. We'll talk."
"All right," Remus said, softly.
"Sleep now."
"Yes, Sirius."
***
The next day was Saturday, which meant there was no reason for an early-morning breakfast; Harry and his friends could sleep late until the Great Hall was almost empty and still meet up at the Slytherin table for a breakfast together. Draco and Neville were already in the Great Hall, standing together under the Gryffindor banner and talking, when Padma met Harry as she came down the stairs and he came up.
Harry had lain awake the night before, huddled completely under his blankets with Snake wrapped tightly around his right wrist, wondering if he should share what he'd heard. None of the others knew he was a Parselmouth, although he'd once spoken to Snake in front of Neville, and he wanted to keep it that way. When he was eight or nine, he'd hated all the secrets he'd had to keep -- Remus' condition, his own identity, who his parents were...
Now though, back in this world, the Wizarding world -- back in a place where his scar marked him and everyone knew his history -- Harry clung to his secrets with a perverse determination. And perhaps it had merely been a big snake passing through the area. It could have been talking to the rats on the grounds, for all Harry knew.
Snake, having migrated upwards and wrapped around his neck like a living choker, still trembled from time to time, and he kept reaching up to adjust the little creature's chokehold on his throat. He used a quick warming charm on a plateful of bacon and scrambled eggs, sharing scraps of the egg with Snake.
"What about you, Harry?"
He glanced up from his plate, blinking. Draco was looking at him intently.
"Sorry, what?" he asked. Neville snickered.
"I have extra Transfigurations, Padma wants to re-write her Astronomy paper, and Neville needs books," Draco said. "But then we're all going on an adventure this afternoon. Game?"
Harry shrugged. "I have to be in bed early -- Quidditch practice starts tomorrow."
"It won't take long," Padma replied. "It's just up near the Ravenclaw tower."
"This isn't going to be the three-headed-dog all over again, is it?" Draco asked.
"Whose fault was that?" Padma retorted pointedly. "It's fine, it's not even dangerous. It looks like it might be a music classroom."
"They used to teach music at Hogwarts," Harry said.
"I hear they still do, at Beauxbatons," Draco put in.
"Beauxbatons?"
"It's a wizarding school on the continent. Mum almost sent me there, except they said they weren't taking any foreign students," Draco answered. "Just as well. Wretched school uniforms, all blue satin and bows."
"Aww, but wouldn't oo wook adorable in ickle bows?" Harry teased.
"Suck it, Potter."
"Don't you wish, Malfoy," Harry replied amiably. "Anyway, they used to teach all kinds of things in the olden days. Music, elocution, dancing -- "
"Ew," Padma said, wrinkling her nose.
"Girls had to take domestic arts," Harry added.
"Did boys have to take a class in being Kneazles' arses?" Padma demanded. "Wait, no, you don't need extra lessons in that..."
"You could go play with Mandy Brocklehurst and Hermione Granger if you want," Neville offered.
"I don't see what's so great about some music classroom, anyway," Draco said.
"You will when you see it," Padma promised. "But first we have to visit the library so that Harry can help you with your Transfiguration."
"Why, what're you going to do?"
"Neville and I are going to find his books," Padma said as they rose to leave. They all nodded, including Neville himself. It wasn't that he wasn't good at finding books, it was just that he was easily distracted and tended to wander off in search of interesting books as opposed to relevant ones.
"I have extra Transfiguration, you know, it's not that I haven't done any," Draco complained to Harry, shouldering his book-bag. "I can do it without your help."
"Suits me," Harry shrugged. "I can work on my Quidditch plays, and see if Goyle wants to play a few rounds of Gobstones."
"Goyle's a moron. I don't know how he got into Slytherin."
"Me either, but that's why I play with him," Harry answered. He'd learned that you could take away a lot from playing chess against someone smarter than you, but all you got from a Gobstones opponent with a high IQ was a faceful of noxious Gobstones scent.
Padma and Neville betook themselves to the Catalogue Room, a small cubicle filled with little card catalogue shelves and the only place where students were permitted to speak above a whisper. Harry could hear, distantly, Neville request "books about herbology" and Padma add "magical spices"; after a second, the sound of paper shuffling could be heard as the catalogue reorganised itself, index cards flying madly around the room until the requested information settled into a neat stack in one open drawer. After two years of the little village library, where it was easier to ask the librarian than to check the card catalogue, Harry had spent hours in the catalogue room, watching in fascination as the cards whirled and dipped around his head.
He didn't join them this time, however; instead he sat down at one of the study tables, tucked into an alcove just back from the doorway, and folded his arms on the table, resting his chin on the backs of his hands. He watched Draco unpack his bag, including an enormous book on basic transfigurative spells.
"Catching up from last year?" he asked.
Draco sighed. "Professor McGonagall says if I don't master the basics I'll never get anywhere," he said. "It's just so much easier to do it my way."
"Your way?"
"Yeah. But when she asks me to tell her how I'm doing it, I can't. I'm just as good as any of you, you know," Draco said. "It's like you and flying. You could fly even without having to do all the stupid basic stuff, but they made you do it anyway. Are you going to work on Quidditch? It makes a person nervous when you stare at him."
Harry made a face. "Can I borrow some parchment and a quill?"
Draco nodded his head at the pile of writing supplies, and Harry picked out a short sheet of parchment and one of Draco's quills.
"Where'd you get this nib?" he asked, examining the metal tip of the quill.
"Mum gave me a set," Draco replied. "They're real silver. They write awfully smooth."
Harry tested it out on the parchment. "Guess we know you're not a werewolf," he joked.
"Brrr, don't even think it." Draco shuddered expressively. "Can you imagine?"
"Imagine what, being a werewolf?"
"I think I'd rather die. Ugh."
"It's not like it matters that much," Harry protested. "When you think about it, I mean."
Draco sniffed and opened his book, beginning to copy notes from a page marked with a brass book-dart. Harry, dipping the silver-nibbed quill in the ink, felt almost like a traitor to Remus for using it.
Instead of doing the usual pitch-overview sketch that he always saw in playbooks, Harry tried drawing a picture of the Quidditch Practical that Snape had shown him, the way Sirius did when he'd doodled on the margins of Harry's drawings when Harry was younger. Harry had learned a lot from watching Sirius, and while he was better at drawing things without straight lines -- snakes and grass, the river, the trees -- he didn't do too badly imitating Sirius' style, which tended more towards odd assemblages of line and angles. He'd just finished sketching out the hoops, which were the hard part, and was beginning to draw in a new play when Padma and Neville returned triumphant from their expedition.
Padma was a discerning sort of scholar, but she was also of what Draco called the Grab and Run school of library research; she and Neville each had an armload of books, and she began sorting them as they were deposited on the table. Harry knew from experience that she would take her time helping Neville go through each book, and most of them would be left on the returns cart when they were done. He set himself to copying his original drawing, fixing the scratched-out bits in the new draft.
"Ready?" Padma asked finally, as Neville carried his final handful of selections to the desk to be stamped and signed out. Harry rolled up the parchment and stuffed it in his back pocket.
"Let's go see this sad little music room, then," Draco said with a grin, and Padma rolled her eyes. They followed her out of the library and up the stairs, pausing every so often for the stairs to readjust themselves as they sometimes did. Padma led them further down a corridor, past the portrait-entrance to the Ravenclaw dormitory and around a series of corners, until none of them knew precisely where they were. Finally she stopped in the darkest part of the castle they'd ever encountered, and stood in front of a large portrait.
"Lumos," she said, and held up her wand, illuminating the figure in the portrait.
It was a blond man, seated at a piano in what looked like a library; behind him a fire crackled soundlessly, and between shelves of books there was a second portrait-within-a-portrait of a striking woman with wildly curly hair. The man looked up at them and adjusted a monocle in one eye, thoughtfully.
"Password?" he asked, fingers picking out a complicated arpeggio of notes on the piano.
"Polyphonic," Padma replied. Harry expected the portrait to swing open, but startlingly, the woman in the portrait-within-a-portrait turned to them, too, and asked, in a deep voice, "Password?"
"JS Bach," Padma said confidently. With a creak, the portrait swung aside.
"How'd you figure out the passwords?" Harry asked, as they filed through.
Padma shrugged. "It wasn't that hard."
The portrait swung shut again behind them as she spoke, and Harry wondered suddenly who had turned off the sound.
"What happened?" Neville asked, in a strangely muted voice.
The room was almost perfectly round, and as Harry looked out the curving, thick windows set in the far wall, he realised where they were -- somewhere inside the curved facade set into the front of the school. Six or seven floors below them, steps led up to the front entrance; above them, a small spire rose out of the dome.
Padma, meanwhile, was pushing Draco to the centre of the room, where a series of triangles set in the floor all met in a sort of bizarre blue sunburst mosaic. She stepped back and said, in the same muted tones, "Say something."
Draco, as with most people when requested to speak suddenly, stared owlishly at her for a minute, speechless. Finally, he took a deep breath, and even on the breath, Harry knew something important was about to happen.
Know this, the ancient words are not forgot --
Vesuvius the phoenix bodies show,
Their bones unbleach'ed by the waning sun
Which our full faces and strong fingers know.
Draco's young voice echoed off the walls with the clear tones of a precisely tuned bell, each small breath and movement of his lips perfectly audible. Neville was staring, round-eyed, while Padma beamed approvingly.
Unblest by knowledge we these later times
Have sought and to our ruin unwise seen,
Pompeii and Herculaneum sleep fast
While wasteland where a city once had been
O'ergrows once more in tempered steel and glass --
Far better to have died these centuries past.
Draco licked his lip as he finished, blinking at Padma.
"That's a strange poem," Neville said. "Who wrote it?"
"A Wizarding writer in the forties," Draco answered, giving him a sidelong look, as if to ask whether Neville knew anything. "Ellis Graveworthy. It's amazing," he added, turning to Padma, voice still perfect and clear. "It's like I'm not even the one speaking. I can hear myself."
"It's acoustically perfect," Padma said. "And it's blocked somehow -- look."
She went to the windows and unlatched two of them with audible clicks; when she threw them wide, however, there was no change -- the room was still silent except for the sound of Draco breathing.
"You can't hear anything," Neville said. "No birds, no people talking."
"Brilliant place to drop water balloons from," Harry added, leaning out one of the windows. As soon as his head passed the barrier of the walls, he was assaulted with noise -- people splashing in the lake in the distance and gossipping on the lawns, the thump of a football being kicked around by some of the Muggleborn students, and the distant noises of animals and birds in the Forbidden Forest. He pulled his head back inside, and the noise abruptly ceased.
"How did you find it?" Neville asked, as Draco stepped off the centre sunburst.
"Dunno, I was just exploring," Padma answered. "It's brilliant, isn't it?"
"I can see why it was a music classroom," Draco replied, gazing around the room at the paintings of violins, pianos, flutes and harps, as well as chalkboards with permanent musical-notation lines ruled on them in white. Neville sang a note, uncertainly and not at all proficiently, and a small white dot appeared on one chalkboard. Harry laughed.
"Sing something!"
Neville laughed too. "What should I sing -- no, wait, I know." He took a deep breath. "Fight Gryffindor Fight, For we're glorious and might-y! Win Gryffindor Win, Cos we're House Champi-ons!"
"Merlin, what an awful fight song," Padma murmured, even as the musical notes to the old Quidditch cheering song were appearing on the blackboard, together with the lyrics.
"Do you think the professors know about it?" Harry asked, brushing the thickly-coated dust off a bookshelf.
"Wouldn't they use it? Imagine teaching a class in here," Padma said. "I mean, talk about having everyone's undivided attention."
"There must be all kinds of secret rooms and stuff at Hogwarts," Neville mused. "I bet there's loads of places the professors don't know about."
"Yeah, that's what we thought about the room with the three-headed-dog in it," Draco replied.
"Oh, stop complaining about the dog already," Harry said. "Come on, let's go talk Denbigh into giving us some sandwiches and have a picnic. It's too sunny to spend the whole day inside."
The other three agreed, and the man in the monocle gave them a friendly wave goodbye as they left to the faint strains of the portrait's piano being played softly.
***
That Sunday morning Harry woke early so as to be ready for practice. Flint, however, didn't come down to the common room until Harry was already washed, dressed in his gear, and fidgeting impatiently to be off. The rest of the team followed, yawning and complaining.
"Pipsqueak's ready to go," one of them observed, and Harry scowled. "You're making us look bad, Potter."
"You're making you look bad," Harry retorted. "Let's go, I want to play already."
Disagreeably, they made their way down to the pitch, where Professor Snape stood waiting for them, wind whipping his loose robes around his ankles and ruffling his short hair. Flint, the trunk following behind him with a floating charm, gave him barely a nod; Snape ascended to one of the spectator towers as the others crowded around their Captain.
One of the few things Harry liked about his captain -- who was a proud, lazy, cheating hack for the most part -- was that he never gave them diagrams. Flint didn't like charts and maps, so he didn't use them. They ran new plays as they learned them, then adjusted for problems mid-flight. It meant they drilled over and over again, while they were learning, but they were more adaptable once they did, and Harry could always plead lack of memory when he refused to cheat the way Flint wanted him to. Cheating, as he'd once told Snape, was a mug's game; you couldn't cheat in real life because the basic rules weren't breakable, so you might as well learn to play within them and use them to your advantage.
While Flint was dividing them up for a scrimmage, in which Harry had little interest since Flint was drilling the team on plays Harry had invented, he noticed a second figure in the spectators' tower. Dora -- Professor Tonks -- had climbed the ladder and was now making her way down the aisle, occasionally tripping on her robe and grabbing onto the benches for support. She was graceful, Harry decided, when she wasn't falling down.
The Snitch whizzed past his ear and he went after it, chasing it down until he had to duck through a mess around the Quaffle to get to it, and it vanished. When he looked back, she was leaning on the rails, watching through a pair of shiny brass omnioculars. Snape did not look happy about it.
"Hey Potter, stop ogling the Dark Arts professor!" Flint shouted, and Harry returned to the game, chastised. The feint maneuver he'd worked out and demonstrated for Snape seemed to be effective, but the players weren't making the most of the idea of level-change; all it had done was brought them much closer to the ground as they battled for the Quaffle.
When Ravenclaw sees this, he thought to himself, they're going to catch on and they're going to do it right, and then all of us are going to be --
"Watch where you're flying!" shouted Bole, one of the Beaters. Montague, a Chaser in his final year and clearly still bitter about not being Captain, had nipped between Flint and Pucey to steal the Quaffle, and in so doing had narrowly missed colliding with Bole, who was riding wing on Flint and keeping a determined Bludger away from him. Montague skimmed past Bole barely an inch from his elbow, and the Beater spun wildly away, clinging for dear life to his broom and trying to bat away a Bludger at the same time. He finally lost control of his broom and fell in seeming slow-motion to the pitch, where he landed in undignified fashion on his tailbone, while Flint went after his flyaway broom.
"Learn to keep on your broomstick and you can yell at me all you like!" Montague called, sneering. The others laughed.
"I should have figured you wouldn't give a damn for proper play, you filthy mudblood!" Bole screamed.
The laughter stopped abruptly. Harry had only heard the word once or twice before, but it sent a chill down his spine; Bole continued to swear, and Montague had gone white-faced.
"You take that back," he said, dropping altitude abruptly and hovering nose to nose with Bole. "I'm not a mudblood."
"Your gran's a Muggle and you've three squib aunts, mudblood, and I bet your father was a Muggle too," Bole snarled back. Two of the others went for Montague to hold him back, but someone else was faster; Dora had run for the ladder when Bole first shouted, and she was between the two before either of them could make a move for the other.
"Hold him," she said over her shoulder, to the boys who were already grasping Montague's sleeves. She whipped around to face Bole furiously.
"Fifty points from Slytherin for conduct unbecoming a student and use of profanity in front of a professor," she snapped. Harry actually saw her grow a few inches, though he didn't think anyone else was in a state of mind to notice. "If I ever hear that word out of your mouth again, Bole, you will never see your NEWTs, let alone graduate."
"Did you see what he -- "
"Two weeks' detention. I don't care what he did. That word," she spat, "is unacceptable on the grounds of this school. Or anywhere."
"Professor -- "
"Would you care to make it a hundred points and three weeks, plus team suspension? That can be arranged."
Bole sensibly shut his mouth and stared at her with wide eyes. A hand touched her shoulder lightly.
"That will be sufficient, Professor Tonks," Snape said, darkly. "I believe I am best situated to handle this particular disciplinary issue from here."
Harry saw distaste and anger in Snape's face, and realised suddenly that Dora had severely overstepped her bounds. After all, Professor Snape was senior, and he was the head of their House; if anyone was going to threaten team suspension, it ought to be him.
Not to mention her getting there first made him look rather awful, really.
"If I hear that word again from any Slytherin on this team -- " she started, but he cut her off.
"That will do, Professor Tonks. Thank you," Snape said icily. She gave Bole one last furious look before turning and stalking away across the pitch, although the effect was somewhat ruined when, about halfway to the castle, she stumbled briefly on a sudden dip in the grassy landscape.
The silence on the pitch was deafening. Everyone had landed their brooms, and Harry absently caught the Snitch when it made another run past his ear, stuffing it in his pocket.
"It is unwise to use that particular word," Snape said slowly, arms crossed over his chest as he stared down at Bole. "Aside from its unpleasant connotations of intolerance, it is a word which is not found in the polite society a Slytherin aspires to belong to, and it certainly is impolitic to speak it in front of a Professor whose own father is a Muggle-born wizard. As you can see, they tend to take it rather amiss."
Bole's eyes, if it were possible, grew rounder.
"I believe, as I do not wish to take another fifty points from my own House, or suspend an adequate player from the House team, we will make it fifty points and three weeks' detention," Snape continued, "served with Filch and Hagrid. Carry on practice," he added. "Flint, my office after breakfast, please."
He turned and followed in Dora's general direction, moving more easily and confidently across the grounds towards the castle. When he was out of earshot, Pucey let out a low whistle.
"I didn't know Professor Tonks was half-Muggle," Flint said.
"She isn't," Harry said. "Her father's a wizard same as you or I."
"Yeah, but Muggleborn, right?" Pucey put in.
"What's that matter? He's brilliant at everything," Harry retorted.
"Yeah, but blood will out, and all," Pucey said vaguely.
"Don't make me punch you," Montague snarled. Pucey still had him by one arm, and he let go quickly. Bole was looking a little as if he'd been hit in the head by something heavy. "We're not done either, Bole."
"My mum was Muggleborn," Harry said to Pucey. "Going to say something about her, too?"
"Nobody's saying anything about anyone's mum or calling anyone a mudblood, all right?" Flint announced loudly. "Harry, if you try to punch someone two feet taller than you are he'll knock you flat, so you might as well not bother. We can all fly a broomstick so let's get back to doing that, all right?"
"Most of us can," Bole muttered resentfully, glaring at Montague, but fortunately the other boy didn't hear him -- or if he did, was more sensible than to make an issue out of it.
Harry reflected, as he shook the Snitch out of his pocket and let it go again, that at least they weren't at each others' throats over whether or not to use his plays. Professor Snape was smarter than most people, Sirius included, would give him credit for.
If only Dora hadn't gone quite so far...
***
Life on the upper floors of Twelve Grimmauld Place (also known as TONKS & TONKS, purveyors of fine wizarding dress) was, outwardly, much more peaceful than it appeared to be at Hogwarts that week. At the civilised hour of nine am on Tuesday, Remus was sipping tea while Sirius made french toast. Downstairs, the shop was opening and various patrons were coming and going, cheerfully met and catered to by Andromeda while Ted dug in and worked on the perpetually-behind book keeping.
Remus had the paper open and was reading the rather badly-edited Literature section of the Prophet. The pretentiousness of the reviews and occasionally the books themselves were strangely soothing to his nerves. Sirius compensated for nerves by frying things; hence the french toast, not to mention the giant heap of bacon on a heat-charmed plate, already on the table.
"We don't have to go if you really don't want to, you know," he said, as he transferred the last of the food to a plate and carried it to the table. Remus folded the newspaper and set it aside.
"That's a coward's game," he said, tweaking a single slice to his own plate and drizzling a little honey on it. "We both know it."
"If it's going to make you anxious -- "
"Not the painting," Remus sighed. "Just the meeting."
"She'll be hexed to secrecy, this Helena person. She's the great-granddaughter of the founders of the company, she seems all right," Sirius said. "I mean, well-educated and that. And she doesn't seem anti-werewolf at all."
"She's a stranger, that's all," Remus said, cutting up his toast. "You never know about strangers."
"Maybe it's more trouble than it's worth," Sirius mused.
"No, but...I want you to have this and I like the idea too," Remus protested. "Honestly, it's no good living like this anyway. If I really wasn't a coward I'd say what I was and have done with it to all and sundry, but it makes life so unnecessarily difficult, and it wouldn't be fair to you, either. And I don't want to," he added defiantly.
Sirius watched him across the table, expression unreadable, until finally he smiled reassuringly.
"If we were to say damn the world, we could say a lot of things. Any time you want to, I'm game if you are. It won't be the first time," he added. Remus smiled.
"There's no need," he replied. "This belongs to us, not to anyone else."
They finished in comfortable if slightly nervous silence and went out into the mild bustle of a mid-morning high street, hands in pockets, strolling down towards Gringotts and the turnoff for Fansif Alley, the arts-and-theatre district. Sirius gave him a sidelong look as he put his hand on the brightly painted green-and-gilt door of Broosh & Chakle Studios, but when Remus gazed back evenly, he shrugged and pushed it open.
The inside room was a cheerful pale ochre, and several portraits grinned and waved at them from the walls, interspersed with the occasional plaster or stone statue.
"Good morning, gentlemen," said a young, formally-robed man, bearing down on them and, Sirius noticed, mentally rubbing his hands. "Do you require any assistance?"
"Is this Helena Broosh's work?" Remus asked, examining a painting of a basket of puppies. One of them kept tumbling out of the basket and clambering back in. Another one yawned humourously.
"Ah yes, Miss Broosh's work is quite popular with the town and country set," the young man said, adjusting his glasses. Sirius saw him eyeing Remus, and wondered whether it was measuring him up for a purchase or measuring him up for personal pleasure.
"We're here to see her, as it happens," Sirius said abruptly.
"I see. Do we have an appointment?" the young man asked, crossing to a desk and opening a leatherbound ledger there.
"Sirius Black? I contacted the office yesterday by owl."
"Ah yes, Mr Black, here we are. This way, please."
"I liked those dogs," Remus said, as they followed him back through a curtain in the rear of the shop. "She's a decent artist."
The back of the shop was wildly different from the front gallery; most of the walls had been knocked out to create a series of open, well-lit stalls in which sculptors and painters were working on various creations, or gathering to sip tea and wait for their next sitting. Some areas were walled off by thick black curtains. In the last stall but one, a woman around their age, in paint-spattered robes, was sizing a canvas on a frame.
"Your ten-fifteen, Miss Broosh," the man said, leaving them only after he'd leered a little more at Remus.
"Mr. Black?" she asked, holding out a hand. "Don't worry, all the paint on it's dry," she added. Sirius grinned and took her hand, shaking it firmly.
"Ms. Broosh," he said. "Ah, this is my friend Remus Lupin..."
"Yes, I've seen you both in the papers. I am," she added, "very much hoping you're here to commission portraits. You have an extremely good skull for painting, Mr. Black, and Mr. Lupin's face is an interesting study in itself."
Remus touched the small scar on his jaw self-consciously, and she laughed.
"No, it's all in the nose and chin," she replied reassuringly.
"Is there somewhere we could speak in private?" Sirius asked. She grinned and pulled a pair of black velvet curtains across the open entrance to the small room, tying them together with a small silk cord.
"There's a silencing charm as well," she said. "We sometimes do nudes, and of course we respect client confidentiality."
"That's much appreciated," Sirius said frankly. "I...am not here for a nude," he added with a grin. She matched it.
"Spoil my dreams, Mr Black," she said.
"Yes, well," he said, as Remus coughed, "I understand you've been in communication with Llewllyn Payne regarding some inquiries into the painting of Animagi."
"Are you Mr. Canis, sir? The name did sound rather contrived."
Sirius glanced at Remus. "She's quick."
Remus nodded, watching her intently.
"I had hoped you would come to speak to me in person. It really is a unique challenge, and of course I would be happy to enter into any confidentiality agreement you require -- which of you gentlemen is the Animagus?" she asked eagerly.
"Ms. Broosh, we'd like to..." Sirius paused. "There are other issues at stake, as well. We'd like to ensure that the confidentiality agreement also covers things of a more personal and dangerous nature."
"Well, unless you want to pose with a freshly killed body or something, I think I can keep quiet," she said. "I can provide references from other clients I've worked with discreetly. Men and their mistresses, erotic nudes -- all tastefully done, of course -- even people who would like to be painted in the costume of a historical figure without a fuss being made over it, though that seems pretty minor, in comparison." She glanced at Remus. "Does he talk?"
"I'm sorry, I'm being rude," Remus said, giving her an apologetic smile. "This is somewhat nervewracking." He gave Sirius an anxious look. "I've never voluntarily told anyone this before."
"Perhaps if you would feel more comfortable after any paperwork had been signed -- "
"No, it's all right -- I like you," Remus said. "I...that is, Mr. Black and I were hoping to commission a portrait together..."
She nodded, looking not at all surprised and picking up a rag, twining it between her fingers. "I have also protected the confidentiality of men and women like yourselves, whose personal relationships are not the business of the public -- "
"Well, there is that," Sirius said hastily.
"He's the Animagus, you see," Remus said. "And I'm a werewolf."
She dropped the rag in surprise. After a moment of speechless staring, she spoke.
"Oh -- I did hope that you would -- that is to say, of course, I'm sure you'd rather not be treated any differently," she said eagerly, "but it would be such an interesting challenge. And an Animagus -- those are very rare. I hope I'm not overstepping myself," she added, checking herself suddenly. "Am I right in assuming, sir, that you are an unregistered Animagus?"
"You may be," Sirius said with a smile. Remus was looking less nervous, now that the first reaction was over with and her mind seemed wholly concerned with the challenge of painting a werewolf rather than the minimal danger of sharing breathing space with one.
"Of course if you'd prefer to consider it a little more, Mr. Black, Mr. Lupin, I'd be happy to wait, but I have all the papers drawn up and the charms in place in case you want to sign them -- I have had for a few weeks, only I hadn't heard anything more and I thought you must have decided against it."
Sirius glanced at Remus, who looked back expectantly.
"There are some rather invasive techniques used," she said hesitantly, into the silence. "Nothing physical, but we do like to talk to the sitters while we're painting, and we ask questions that some might consider rather impertinent, especially if the sitters are romantically involved."
"We're getting obvious in our old age," Sirius said quietly. "I suppose that might show in the portrait, too?"
"It might," she said thoughtfully, "but I've been doing lots of animal studies lately -- "
"Yes, we saw the puppies," Remus said.
"Oh, do you like them? Troublesome little curs," she said affectionately. "I think I could actually paint a portrait that made use of both the human and animal form of the Animagus -- in public, that is to say to a stranger's eye, the painting would appear to be of you, Mr. Lupin, posing with Mr. Black's animal form. It would be a really very interesting experiment," she said persuasively. "With the names changed I could even write it up for a few journals if you were agreeable."
"Up to you, Pads," Remus said gently. "I'm game if you are."
Sirius grinned back at him. "Was that a dare?"
Remus gave him his best poker face. Sirius turned to Broosh, who was smiling slightly. "You'd better get out those papers so that we can look them over," he said. "If you do all right, I might have my godson come sit for a normal portrait sometime."
"I'm sure it would be my pleasure to paint Mr. Potter," she said, and left to get the papers. When she was gone, Remus exhaled slowly and leaned back against the wall.
"All right, Moony?" Sirius asked.
"Yes -- that went well," Remus replied, smiling at him. "It did. I thought she'd -- I didn't think she'd react like that. I like her," he added.
"Me too. She's a little nuts," Sirius said. "Like us, really."
"I suppose she's paid to be open-minded, but..." Remus grinned at him. "Well, treating a pureblood Animagus and his werewolf boyfriend like a new painting technique is above and beyond the call of lucre, I think."
***
While all seemed more or less peaceful on Fansif Alley that Tuesday morning, at Hogwarts the tempest in the Slytherin teapot had grown entirely out of control.
It might have died down if Montague and Bole weren't Transfiguration partners. If they'd been able to avoid each other, the bickering could have come to a slow and tedious halt, but it just kept up in a steady stream every time they encountered each other. Finally it broke out in violence in the hallway outside the Transfigurations classroom on Monday afternoon. A couple of Gryffindors charged in to pull them apart, but before they were both settled down by the arrival of Percy Weasley with Professor McGonagall, Oliver Wood had a really fantastic black eye and Bole had shouted that Montague couldn't always be running to that halfbreed Tonks for help, even if like did attract like.
None of the professors or prefects heard the halfbreed remark, but plenty of the students did, and by lights-out half the school knew that Professor Tonks' father was a Muggleborn, while the other half had been treated to various mutations of the story including, but not limited to, Professor Tonks being a Muggleborn, Professor Tonks' father eating Muggleborns, and Professor Tonks having some form of illicit relations with Montague, which was quashed by a horrified Montague himself.
Harry and his friends were eating their usual early breakfast on Tuesday, discussing the fight and weighing the advantages of having an honourably received black-eye versus not having a painful and ugly swollen face, when it happened. It was perhaps fortunate that it happened so early, considering everything, but unfortunate that they should be inadvertent witnesses to it. They were seated at one end of the Slytherin table, blocked from view by one of the hangings, just able to see Professor Snape eating a solitary bowl of oatmeal, when Dora -- Professor Tonks, Neville still had to be reminded -- entered from one of the side-hallways.
"Can I have a word with you, Professor Snape?" she asked. The sound echoed in the empty hall, fully loud enough for them to hear, whether they wanted to or not, and all four fell silent immediately.
"Professor Tonks," Snape said, impassively. He set his spoon down and turned slightly in his seat.
"Whether or not I chose to discipline your students, which I was within my rights to do as a professor at this school, you had no business discussing my parentage or my personal life with a pair of Quidditch hooligans who don't know better than to get into fistfights in public hallways," she said. There was an odd formal tone to her voice, as if she'd been rehearsing the speech. Neville glanced at Harry, who was watching in wide-eyed awe.
"I'm sure I'm unaware of what you mean," he replied blandly. A hint of smirk played around his lips.
"Bole called me a halfbreed in front of a hallway full of students. Since then he's been telling vicious stories about my father's parentage. I know where he got that information from."
"I merely explained that it was unwise, given your father's status, for them to use certain expressions to which you overreacted on the Quidditch pitch on Sunday morning."
"Bastard," Padma breathed.
"Shut up," Harry hissed.
"Well, he is."
"Over-reacted? Did you hear the filth coming out of Bole's mouth?" Tonks demanded.
"He's a child, he hardly knows what the word means."
"He's fifteen, he knows exactly what it means and how to use it. That's not the point. No matter how well or badly I handled the situation, there was no call to bring my father into it. And you have the audacity to lecture me on leaving your friendship with my parents out of our professional relationship!"
"I don't see how -- "
"You don't see how?" she asked, and to his credit, Snape didn't flinch. "You don't think your personal knowledge of my father's ancestry is inappropriately applied in disciplining children? Do you think he wants the whole school talking about his parentage? My mother and father are the best friends you have in this world, if they're not the only ones you have, and -- "
"That will be quite enough," he said suddenly, standing so quickly his chair fell over. "May I remind you I am a senior professor -- "
"Then act like one!" she snarled. Neville was so startled by the vicious tone of voice coming from his normally placid foster-sister that he dropped his fork.
The clatter of metal on stone was like the roar of a train passing through the hall. Both professors turned to see four students, clustered around one end of one table, looking sheepish and frightened.
"Ah, Severus, Tonks, good morning," said a voice from the doorway. Their savior had appeared; Albus Dumbledore was entering, and immediately both professors moved away from each other, Snape righting his chair, Tonks taking the furthest possible seat from him. Dumbledore sat between them beatifically and requested an enormous breakfast from Denbigh when the head of the Kitchen Elves appeared.
Students and other professors began to trickle into the Great Hall, and the four went their separate ways. The walking wounded put in the briefest, most sullen appearances -- all but Oliver, who was enjoying talking with Lee Jordan while pretending not to notice that he was the centre of attention at the Gryffindor table.
To the Next Part
omigod!
Argh!!! Its 4 am in the morning and there's no way I'm stopping reading now!
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I like the portrait thread and Helena seems like a nice woman.
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("This is where the dragons went.")
but yeah. *grins*
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Aigh! It's the tooth room from "Hogfather"! Where's Mr. Teatime, he must be here somewhere...
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Another wonderful chapter
So many things worry me about this AU-Harry. Namely, the feeling that he needs to separate himself by his very nature(s) to his peers and, even, superiors. Isn't that how JKR's Tom Riddle handled his life once he got into Hogwarts? Guarded? Liked and charming, but not at all terribly friendly? Hadn't JKR's D.D told that continuity's Harry that people flocked to Tom Riddle, sometimes for glory? Isn't that what Crabbe did? Wanted to be next to Snape's favourite???
and plus, this Harry's a dick!!!!
And Draco.... making up transfiguration stuff like Snape did potions in JKR's HBP... that's interesting, too. I could only wonder where that's going!!
How you're playing this AU-Harry is distrurbing. And that's what is making this series of yours so tantilizingly brilliant!
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This killed me dead, and then this:
brought me back to life and killed me again.
Laocoon's Children, Year Two, 8 - 9
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("Ah, Severus, Tonks, good morning," said a voice from the doorway. Their savior had appeared; Albus Dumbledore was entering, and immediately both professors moved away from each other, Snape righting his chair, Tonks taking the furthest possible seat from him. Dumbledore sat between them beatifically, and requested an enormous breakfast from Denbigh when the head of the Kitchen Elves appeared, eager to serve.)
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I like the names of all of the other streets. (It makes sense that Wizarding London would be bigger than just "the main street that has pretty much everything" and "the wretched hive of scum and villany".)
I'm enjoying this whole Stealing Harry thing. I noticed that year 3 seems to stop at chapter 26. Are you not planning on finishing it ever, or is it more of a temporary thing that you intend to come back to eventually?
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I hope things get less rough for you. :)
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brilliant job.
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(Anonymous) 2009-10-21 02:03 am (UTC)(link)Sorry, but since Harry is in fact a Slytherin, he should be entering his own common room through a stretch of blank wall in the dungeons (wasn't this in the second book, when they tail Malfoy with the Polyjuice potion? I could be wrong...), rather than a portrait, which is Gryffindor's common room door. An easy mistake to make, right? Oh well.
On the other hand, I absolutely love this story. I think this is probably the most amazing, amusing, and utterly individual piece I've come across in the Harry Potter setting (Or, you know. Anywhere in fanfiction). If the books had gone like this, I would have died from joy. You have a wonderful way with words and a rare talent for stringing them together into downright beautiful stories.
Seriously, I hate having to put this story away to do other things (school, sleeping, eating, how important are they anyway when Harry could be facing Quirrell and the mirror of Ynitsed?), and come back to it often. This is one of those stories you CAN'T PUT DOWN.
Really, good job. People have such wonderfully individual writing styles, like fingerprints, but you're one of a small group of people that makes me sad that it has to be so. If more people could write like this...
Pretty high praise for a work of fanfiction, right? But it's well deserved. Very well written.
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(Anonymous) 2012-12-31 12:00 pm (UTC)(link)