Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Rebecca was propped upon pillows in her infirmary bed, a quill and parchment on the tray in front of her. She, the lifeless figure of Harry, and the unsmiling trio of Aurors assigned to hold vigil over him were the only occupants of the room, and save for the impatient shuffle of feet and the absent clearing of throats, it was absolutely still. Madam Pomfrey made the rounds once every half an hour to be certain that neither of her charges was frothing and convulsing in their beds and then promptly sequestered herself in her cramped side office once more, no doubt hunched over the latest batch of life-saving nutritive potions to be massaged down the comatose Christ-child's slack throat.

She wasn't sure how long she had been there, though Winky had brought her a bowl of tepid broth four rounds ago. In truth, the entire episode was a surreal blur. The last thing she remembered before the blackness swallowed the world was the coppery taste of blood and the saline tang of tears on her lips. The next recollection after that was the burnt-leaf scent of sweaty blue wool and a glimpse of fine-boned, ebony hands. Then the pinched, baleful, harridan face of Madam Pomfrey had spread over her field of vision like a diseased lunar eclipse, and awareness had fled in the face of imminent medical histrionics.

She had awakened for the final time with the arrival of the broth and a weeping, frantic Winky, who had clambered up the bedclothes to enfold her in a breathless, goggle-eyed embrace and chattered all the while that Miss must never, ever frighten her so again. Any retort she might have made had been cut short by a wad of yeasty bread, and the little elf had stayed by her bedside in a pique of hand-wringing, tearful worry until a grim-faced Pomfrey had ordered her away for disturbing the somnolent quiet of the Hospital Wing.

She stifled a yawn and cast an appraising sidelong glance at the Aurors clustered around the door. They stood at attention, eyes riveted on the far wall and their hands clasped loosely behind their backs. Polished wands glimmered in the wan, early winter light, clutched in loose-fisted hands. The only movement was the slow blink of eyes and the hypnotic rise and fall of their blue-robed chests.

One of them brought me here, she thought, and a shiver of revulsion winnowed from the base of her spine to the nape of her neck. Then, No, it couldn't have been. They're all white. She snorted, and the one on the far left, a gangly youth no more than twenty-four, spared her a reproachful, narrow-eyed glance before returning his full attention to the scintillating vista of grey, stone wall on the opposite side of the room.

I assure you, the feeling is entirely mutual, you glue-sniffing twat, she thought venomously, and curled her fingers into a petulant fist beneath the bedsheets.

Pain flared in the beds of her nails, and she withdrew her hand from beneath the blanket and uncurled her fingers to investigate. The tips were raw, and when she prodded one with an exploratory jab, she was rewarded with a sizzle of discomfort from the offended digit. She stared at the raw, scoured flesh in mystified silence for a moment, and then memories began to coalesce in her muddled mind, recollections of wood she could not feel, of splinters driven into anesthetized flesh, and of an unpardonable sin averted. She swallowed around a lump of sudden shame and closed her eyes against a roiling heave of nausea. A miserable mewl escaped her constricted throat.

Another beady glare from the gangly Auror. He shifted from one foot to the other. "Are you all right, miss?" he queried impatiently.

"I think so, sir. Just a mite queasy." I'd feel a lot better if I could jab my wand into your eye and watch you scream and convulse.

The Auror gave a noncommittal grunt, and she fought the childish impulse to get into her chair, roll to where he stood, and tread upon his toes. Instead, she said, "Excuse me, sir, but how long have I been here, and who brought me?" She slurred her words to little more than a groggy mumble.

The Auror squinted and stepped forward a pace. "I'm afraid I didn't hear you, miss," he said in a tone of dim accusation.

She screwed up her face and formed each word with ponderous deliberation, as though she had not grasped the peculiar mechanics of her mouth. "How long have I been here, and who brought me?" She flashed him a syrupy, patronizing grin.

He stiffened and cleared his throat, and his hand came up to tug compulsively at the collar of his robes. "Ah, yes, well, you've been here three hours or thereabouts," he said diffidently, and his eyes shifted to his colleagues for tacit affirmation.

"Thereabouts?" She raised an eyebrow in sardonic amusement.

He flushed. "As to who brought you here, that would be Mr. Shacklebolt, an Auror. Your friend, Mr. Longbottle, nearly collided with him in the corridor."

Longbottom, you stupid prick, she thought, but her face remained fixed in a saccharine, loopy grin. "Oh. Would you please thank him for me? I really appreciate his help."

"Of course," he replied, but she knew that her gratitude would never reach the ears for which it was intended. He was already stepping away from her, dismissing her, and it was clear from the stiffness of his shoulders and the frozen set of his freckle-dusted jaw that he would not lower himself to being an invalid's errand boy.

Not that she cared. Shacklebolt could boil in Hell's foundry. So could the rest of them. They were only useful insofar as what she could gain from them, whether by coy manipulation or outright deceit. As soon as it was no longer expedient to show them courtesy, she would waste no time in spitting in their bland, bureaucratic faces, and when Shacklebolt's burnt porcelain face passed before her, she would not hesitate, not spare him for his act of mercy. Any errant kernels of compassion that might blossom within her breast at the sight of limpid brown eyes would be crushed by the damning blue of his robes. Blue. The color of serenity. She snorted. The color of authoritarian cowardice, and she would not be grateful to it.

You're being overly judgmental, chided her grandfather, but she pushed his voice aside. She was in no mood to be pragmatic and logical. It was her sickbed and she'd cry if she wanted to, dammit, and besides, it felt good to be angry, to despise with neither justification nor reason, a delicious kiln heat in the pit of her stomach and the palms of her hands. It was sweet on her tongue, clover honey, and she savored it, rolled it over her palate like a finicky sommelier. It needed no sustenance save what it could provide, and she was content to let her head loll against the pillows and lose herself to it.

Her grandfather was unimpressed. Stop wallowing. You're being just as ugly and unfair as the slack-jawed lackwits who parade past D.A.I.M.S like it was a damn zoo or exotic freakshow, as the fanatical cretins who think that just because your professor is a first-class tyrant and terminal misanthrope, it means he must be a murderer as well, and a stupid one, at that. Judge a man by his merits, girl, not by the clothes on his back. That's what I taught you, not this unfounded, flailing hatred.

She snorted and fisted her hands beneath the bedclothes again. Lot of good that would do. While she was busy evaluating them on their individual merits and applying lofty, idealistic standards of judgment, they would go right on ransacking Professor Snape's quarters, tearing his robes, and trampling his will into the dust. No, she would fight like with like, unthinking hatred with more of the same. Sin upon sin and indictment upon indictment until the air was black with them and the line between right and wrong had been obliterated in a miasmic cloud of means to end. If innocents fell by the wayside in this squalid little war of attrition, then so be it. Shacklebolt had chosen his robes, and now he could live with them. Such were the rules of war.

She was keenly aware of the inveterate hypocrisy of the philosophy; she didn't care. Her time in the Story, in the place where there were no sinners had recalibrated her wildly oscillating moral compass, disentangled it from the cumbersome threads of fairness and selective consequence. She would protect Professor Snape because she chose it, because somewhere along the torturous path from the sterile, linoleum floors of D.A.I.M.S. to the grimy, sole-worn stone of Hogwarts, they had become unwilling traveling companions, a tribe of two, and she protected her own. Notions of fairness and hypocrisy and the legendary fork that separated the road to perdition and the path to righteousness meant nothing. What mattered was bringing him out alive.

I would stand on the backs of a thousand house elves if it meant that I could stay here. She had said that to Hermione once, and as she looked at the Aurors from behind isinglass eyes, she found that it was true, and what was more, she would not hesitate do step on the necks of human foes, either. House elves and people and friendships were all fodder to the clanking, grinding machinery of expediency. The thought brought a vulpine smile to her bruised lips. What would Granger say if she knew that her twisted Gryffindor-by-proxy Housemate had graduated from the unrepentant oppression of an adoring magical creature to the willful, pitiless exploitation of her fellows in the name of a cause? The sanctimonious prig would swallow her tongue along with her righteous recrimination.

She flexed her fingers and reached for her quill. Enough pontificating. It was time to write the letter she had intended to pen in the owlery. The skulking presence of the Aurors precluded the use of her Dicta-Quill, and she would have be careful that none of them looked over her shoulder while she made her laborious scrawls upon the blank parchment. Not that they would be able to decipher the snarl of loops and wobbles that passed as her alphabet; even after months of practice beneath the unrelenting lash of Professor Snape, the strokes of her hand were palsied, wavering arcs. Better to be safe than sorry, however.

She pressed her quill tip to the paper and watched the ink spread over the parchment like a pooling bloodstain, black as unspoken guilt. She bit her lip, and images filled her mind, images of inexorably moving feet and greedy, outstretched fingers. The torpid, pulsating lifeline that stretched across the floor, silent and deadly as the deceiving serpent that tempted man from paradise, offering her that which was not hers to take. Mouth full of talc and anticipation. A bladder sloshing with the wet, jungle reek of terror, and underneath it all in a rancid undercurrent, the surge of triumphant entitlement. I claim this as my payment in blood. My love comes not without price.

She slammed the quill onto the tray and clapped a hand over her mouth. Those memories were obscene, and she did not wish to relive them, not here, under the prying eyes of the enemy and the dehumanizing watch of a white-smocked Mediwitch on the lookout for every aberrant twitch of her eyelid. She hoped they would remain hidden for the rest of her days, uncounted even by the omniscient gaze of God when she stood before the Throne.

Never that lucky. You know as well as I do that they will follow into your dreams and grow fertile there, lush and vibrant as sweet Georgia kudzu, and once they take root, they will never leave. They will haunt your every thought, just like Judith and Brad and those obsidian eyes that linger over the crown of your head like exploring, surreptitious fingers and comfort you even as they terrify. They will taint your last breath, and when you are nothing but bones and fading memory in some forgotten crypt, they will mingle with the fetid rot and infuse themselves into the fabric of your shroud. They're yours now, now and forever.

She scrabbled for her wand with a sweaty, trembling hand and snatched it from the bedside table with a desperate moan. It was slippery and elusive in her feverish grip, and she nearly dropped it twice before she managed to point it at the copper chamberpot tucked beneath the foot of the bed.

"Accio chamberpot!" she croaked through the choking lump of bitter, thick bile in her throat, and it zoomed toward her with absurdly merry alacrity, as though it could not wait to be pressed into its unenviable service. It skidded to a halt against her knees.

Her jittering wand fell from her fingers and landed on the coverlet with a muffled whump, but her only thought was to grab the tarnished, rough rim of the chamberpot and pull it beneath her mouth before vomit splattered down the front of her robes and pooled in the shivering hollow of her thighs. It was a very near thing. Her stomach spasmed, her mouth flew open in a silent, anguished scream and filled with the taste of rotten cabbage. Another racheting burp, and her meager breakfast broth came up in a rancid, curdled stream.

She closed her eyes to block out the sight of regurgitated broth, but there was no defense against the acrid, gassy smell wafting from the mess, and her tortured stomach revolted again with a violent heave. Her tender fingers pressed into the icy lip of the chamberpot, and she moaned through the nausea. Blood oozed down the sides of the pot in sacrificial offering and stippled the sheets.

The retching never seemed to end. On and on it went, until her throat was raw and her back felt sprung, as if muscle had torn from bone. Her stomach convulsed, and her fingertips sizzled, and her head throbbed, and still it continued. The blood pounded in her ears, and behind her closed lids, Rohrshach blots of color swirled in a dreamy, kaleidoscopic rhythm.

I'm going to vomit myself to death. I wonder if this is how Potter felt in those interminable seconds before unconsciousness descended. Then, treacherous as morning fog, Maybe Professor Snape is punishing me for my liberties.

She screamed then, a gurgling, shrill wail of self-loathing. How dare she think such faithless, unjust thoughts after what she had nearly done. If not for Neville Longbottom's temporary loss of nerve, she would have done, and yet she had the nerve to sit in mocking, high-handed judgment. It mattered not that it had been intended as black gallows mirth; every thought was the stuff of wish or suspicion, and she had told everyone who asked, including the Professor, that she thought him innocent, and she could not afford to harbor doubts now, not even to alleviate her suffering.

"Merlin's beard! What's going on in here?" Madam Pomfrey bustled from her office and strode to Rebecca's bedside.

"She suddenly became violently ill," offered the gangly Auror imperiously.

"Yes, so I see," snapped Madam Pomfrey, and Rebecca, who had been gulping the medicinal air in a brief moment of respite, heard the unspoken corollary of you ineffectual twit. It was almost enough to make her smirk, but another bout of dry heaving seized her, and she doubled over the chamberpot again. "How long has she been like this?" demanded the Mediwitch.

The Auror shrugged. "Five minutes."

"Five minutes?" spluttered Pomfrey, and a hectic flush suffused her cheeks. "Why didn't one of you alert me at once?"

The Auror drew himself up. "My dear woman, that's hardly my job. In point of fact, isn't it your job to oversee the health of the students in your charge? I cannot be held responsible for your careless inattention," he sniffed.

Pomfrey turned an alarming puce, and her lips pursed in a contemplative moue. "My incompetence, did you say?" It was a silky murmur, the antithesis of her crisp, businesslike clip, and the gangly Auror's companions took a step back in perfect unison. Pomfrey, in turn, took a step forward. My incompetence?"

"P-perhaps I should not have spoken so-," he began, but he got no further.

"You wish to speak of my incompetence, do you? I should say you have a keen eye for it, given your less than stellar performance here at the school," she hissed, advancing all the while on the Auror, who shrank back in the face of her thunderous countenance. "You've done nothing but incite panic and terror among the students, disrupt their healthy routines, and trample their rights beneath your feet. You do more harm than my 'careless inattention' ever could," she spat.

"I'm just doing-,"

"What? Standing about the castle, not lifting a single finger to ease the chaos you have created? Chatting up your fairer colleagues when no one is looking? All the time you've been here, I've not seen you contribute a whit to this investigation. Meanwhile, I'm doing my level best to care for Potter and any other child who passes through these doors. Not only that, you expect me to brew these nutritive draughts and replenish the rapidly dwindling potions stocks." She was scant inches from the Auror, her hands fisted at her sides.

"We have volunteers from St. Mungo's to assist you," he retorted indignantly, and backed up several paces.

Pomfrey snorted and rolled her eyes. "Volunteers," she sneered, contempt dripping from every syllable. "You mean that pair of shambling dunderheads who have botched every potion to which they put their hands and who need three times the ingredients to produce something one-third the quality to which I am accustomed?"

"They're doing as best they can."

"They can't hold a candle to the school Potions Master," she said baldly. "And I can't keep the infirmary running without him."

The Auror uttered a short, deprecating bark of laughter. "In case you haven't noticed, Madam, he is currently being held on murder."

"Attempted murder, you twit. And unless I've grown addled since my school days, it is still innocent until proven guilty." She folded her arms across her chest and glared at him.

"As if he could be anything but, being what he is." The Auror had regained his faltering aplomb and was staring at the Mediwitch in smug satisfaction.

Rebecca was tempted to hurl the chamberpot at his smirking visage like a sanctimony-seeking missile, but she was too drained from her bout of vomiting, and her stomach was still slaloming uneasily in its moorings, so she settled for imagining him writhing beneath the acid, serrating torment of Cruciatus.

"A fine Potions Master and an excellent professor is what he is, and so he'll remain until you've more than your festering prejudice and suspicions to show for it." Pomfrey jutted her chin at him in defiance. Rebecca fought to stifle a cheer.

The Auror favored Pomfrey with a patronizing smile. "It isn't your concern, any road," he purred, as though he were addressing a feckless, imprudently curious child and not an adult Mediwitch in her own domain. "Leave the pursuit of justice to the better qualified and concentrate on your pressing duties here."

"You've already made up your mind, haven't you?" she said in incredulous disgust.

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Mayhap you are a co-conspirator in this plot? It seems you and Snape got on rather well." Now it was his turn to advance, a greedy glimmer in his eyes. To her credit, Pomfrey moved not an inch.

Rebecca bit the inside of her cheek to quash peals of mad, nauseated laughter. It was a joke. Pomfrey and Professor Snape had most certainly not "gotten on". To be fair, nor were they mortal enemies. As far as she could ascertain from her single observation of their interaction on the day she had scalded his legs, their relationship was the same as any other that the aloof Professor maintained-one of grudging tolerance, wary respect, and occasional frosty civility. The notion of the two of them hunched over bubbling cauldrons and hatching nefarious plots against the crown jewel of the wizarding world was mind-boggling, and she crammed the purple knuckles of one hand into her mouth to stay a suicidal quip.

All amusement fled, however, when Madam Pomfrey drew her wand with terrifying speed and pointed it the young Auror's throat.

"I think I have had enough of you," she murmured, and her eyes were hard and bright with loathing. "How dare you come into my infirmary and make baseless accusations against me. The only collaborating I have ever done with Professor Snape has been a good, blazing row. A good teacher he may be, but he's also a right miserable bastard. I am doing my utmost to see that Harry gets the proper care, and I'd sooner swing than see him come to harm, and until you've evidence to the contrary, I want you out, or Circe help me, I will Curse you into unconsciousness and go to Azkaban with a song on my lips."

There was an ugly, flabbergasted silence, and then one of the other Aurors stepped forward, hands held up in a placatory gesture. "Now, please, there is no need for anger and dangerous threats."

The hell there isn't, Rebecca thought, but wisely held her tongue.

The interceding Auror doffed his pointed hat and ran a liver-spotted hand through wild tufts of white hair. "My colleague is young and rash and often speaks before he thinks." He replaced his hat and tugged the brim until it was snug against his scalp.

The gangly Auror opened his mouth to protest, but the older Auror shot him a gelid I-will-deal-with-you-later look, and he closed it, Adam's apple bobbing like a turkey wattle.

Pomfrey was unimpressed, and her wand grazed her adversary's throat. "I don't care. I want him out. Appoint a replacement if you like, but he doesn't stay here."

The Auror nodded. "All right, then. Just lower your wand. I'm sure that none of this hostility is good for your patients," he said, and his gaze drifted to Rebecca.

Oh, that's right. Use the cripple as an excuse. Any port in the storm. She shifted beneath the coverlet and stared at him with well-schooled disinterest.

"As if you give a damn about that," she snarled, but her wand dropped to her side, and she exhaled slowly. "Out. I think it would be best if you lot gave me a minute to collect myself.

"Of course." The older Auror gave a curt, awkward bow and motioned for his companions to follow him.

The gangly Auror bristled immediately. "With respect, sir, I think it most unwise to leave the Potter boy unsupervised in her care." He spared Pomfrey a gimlet stare.

His compatriot rounded on him. "You have made your opinion quite clear," he said coldly, "and quite frankly, I've had my fill of it. Enough, boy. It's one thing to accuse the likes of Snape, but to cast unfounded aspersions on an upstanding citizen will not be tolerated. Maybe Minister Fudge will listen to your harebrained palaver, but I'm not. Do you hear?"

The young Auror looked mutinous, but he shuffled his feet and gave a desultory nod. "Yes, sir."

"Right, then. Let's clear off and see about that replacement." The old Auror turned to go, and after a moment, the others glided out.

When they were gone, and the infirmary doors had swung shut behind them, Madam Pomfrey wilted onto the nearest bed, her shoulders hunched and her face buried in her hands. "Sodding bastards," she said shrilly from behind them, and she sounded perilously close to tears.

Propped in her bed with her unexpiated sin clutched in her lap, Rebecca was at a loss for words. She could only stare at the Mediwitch who had so suddenly been shown in an entirely new light. Gone was the brusque, detached phantom in the starched white smock, the stone-faced, busybodying entity known as Nurse, and in its place was a bewildered, exhausted, frustrated woman just trying to make sense of the madness. The same hands that had reduced her affliction to bloodless squiggles on carefully maintained parchment now shielded shocked eyes from unspeakable private anguish, frail and brittle as papier-mache.

She wanted to say something, but nothing seemed adequate. It will be all right, the reliable standby in awkward silences and times of crisis had proven to be false comfort, and its incestuous and addled cousin, Are you all right? was a pronouncement of bovine stupidity, so she stared at the huffing, rocking woman on the bed and tried to tell herself that she was looking at the curtains on the window behind her. An inexplicable lump formed in her own throat, and she swiped irritably at her prickling eyes.

First puking, now a bonding snivel with the school Mediwitch. Just a grand day for me, she thought morosely, and wild laughter bubbled in her aching throat. She quelled it by pressing her fingers into the notched, unkind rim of the chamberpot.

"I don't like them, either," she croaked. Her throat was still inflamed from the churning bile.

Understatement, that. Next you'll tell her that you find her dithering ignorance about your affliction off-putting.

Now that the words were out of her mouth, she felt stupid for saying them. They were hardly consoling, and in all likelihood, Madam Pomfrey gave not a fig for her opinion. If the mood took her, she could probably point out-not without strong justification-that she couldn't be said to like anyone but Professor Snape, and her affinity for him was not to be interpreted as a hallmark of good judgment. She masked her discomfiture by dropping her gaze to the congealing brown mass sloshing in the chamber pot and bunching the coverlet between her fingers in a pained, peristaltic motion.

Funny how pithy wit never seems handy when you actually need it, she mused.

Madam Pomfrey straightened with a watery sigh and scrubbed her blotched, wet face with one palm. She tugged on the hem of her smock and smoothed stray locks of graying hair from her forehead. She started when she saw Rebecca, as though she had quite forgotten she was there. She sniffed and rose abruptly from the bed.

"Miss Stanhope," she said briskly, though her stuffy nose caused it to emerge as Miz Stanhob, "what is the matter?"

I was purging my sin, and here it is in the bottom of this battered, tarnished chamberpot. Would you like to see, Sister Pomfrey, see and prescribe my penance? High colonic? More broth? Complete bedrest? Comprehensive blood screening? Laproscopy? Endoscopy? How about a spoonful of castor oil? My grandfather swore by it. Which of the Seven Sacraments will it be? One? All? Shall I have two bowls of broth and six enemas and declare my conscience clean? Rebecca shrugged. "I've felt sick since I woke up."

Pomfrey held out her hand, and Rebecca thrust the pot into it, relieved that she didn't have to look at it anymore. It was as corrupted and ugly as she felt, and she wanted it to disappear.

Pomfrey peered analytically at the contents. "Does your stomach still hurt?"

"No, ma'am." My stomach's not the problem. It's my horrified conscience, the unblinking, unclosing eye that won't look away from what I almost did.

Images of sinuous green threads with bleeding tips surfaced in her mind, and she shoved them away with a grimace. The very thought of those gently undulating tendrils of time made her gorge clench, and yet there was a seething, nascent lust, too, climax not quite reached. She tightened her grip on the bed sheets and gritted her teeth against a sour belch.

Pomfrey placed a cool, damp hand against her forehead. "No fever, I see." She removed her hand.

Rebecca grunted. "I don't suppose I'll be going back to the Gryffindor Common Room." It was not a question.

The Mediwitch's lips thinned. "Certainly not, Miss Stanhope. I'll be keeping you here for the rest of the night for observation." The bewildered woman was gone, supplanted by the familiar veneer of medical authority. "No, indeed. Quite a nasty turn you took. Must have been, for Longbottom to react the way he did. Shouting at the top of his voice, he was, and scissoring, as if he'd forgotten how to bend his knees. Nearly sent Shacklebolt arse over teakettle."

She set the chamberpot on the bedside table with a thump and busied herself with adjusting Harry's coverlet, smoothing it and tucking in the edges. "Little wonder, either," she continued. "You looked wretched when they brought you in-face slathered in tacky blood and drying mucus. You tore the finger pads of one hand to bits. What in blazes were you doing in there, child?" She turned to Rebecca again, her gaze sharp and searching.

Rebecca stiffened. "I fainted, ma'am. I was posting a letter and came over funny."

"Bollocks," came the unflinching reply.

She choked on a squawk of surprise at such coarse language from an adult. Even Professor Snape at his most poisonous never resorted to such bald crudity. Serrated satin riposte was his knout of choice. Nevertheless, she betrayed nothing. No one would ever know what happened in there, least of all a meddlesome Mediwitch. Her lips whitened in unconscious determination.

"I fainted," she repeated in a voice hard and cold as December graveyard earth.

Pomfrey said nothing, merely folded her arms across her chest and cupped her elbows in her hands. You'll not be rid of me so easily, girl, her eyes said, and Rebecca would have appreciated the white-knuckled temerity of it had she not been hellbent on guarding her secret.

Rebecca squared her shoulders and gripped her knees. You can try and strongarm me all you like, but I'll never tell. I can tell you the same lie until we both turn to pillars of salt and Potter has turned to sacred dust in his robes. What's mine is mine, and if you think that you're going to pry it from me by virtue of medical might, you've got another thing coming. You tipped your hand, and I smell the weakness in you, the clean copper of blood. Redemption and damnation at a single stroke.

The silence spun out between them, the irresistible force and the immovable object locked in silent combat, and then Pomfrey sighed. Game, set, match. Rebecca let her shoulders relax, but did not drop her gaze. She would leave no opening for a blitzkrieg last assault. She blinked lazily and watched the crow's feet nestled in the corners of the Mediwitch's eyes.

Pomfrey's shoulder's slumped. "Suit yourself, then," she muttered, and picked up the chamberpot. "I've got better things to do than stand here and play puerile mind games with you." She spun on her heel and carried the chamberpot into her office.

Probably going prospecting for evidence of my impending demise. Wonder if she'll weigh it and keep it in a little tin like some arcane specimen of mutant effluvium?

She scowled at the Mediwitch's retreating back. Wouldn't surprise her in the least if she did. Doctors and nurses always seemed to have a fanatical and mordant fascination with the voidings of the infirm. They pored over each dribble and dollop as though it held the secret panacea to the world's ills, the key that would solve the enigmatic cipher of human frailty. They weighed it, inspected it, catalogued it, and, if the illness was terminal, hoarded it for future study.

The Scatological Knights Templar, Guardians of the Secret Offal, she thought, and snorted. Well, the woman could have at it for all she cared. She had a letter to write. She picked up her quill, pressed the tip to parchment, and willed her stiff, blue fingers to form the tortured letters of confession.

Dear Jackson,

I'm sorry it has taken so long to write the letter I promised to send, but being here has been a huge adjustment for me. God, this place is nothing like D.A,I.M.S. I wish you could see it, be here with me to experience it for yourself. It's not just a school; it's a citadel of magic. Power bleeds from every stone, thrums in the mossy lichen that festoons the dungeons, even. There's so much of it that my teeth throb, a constant, niggling itch that makes me want to scrub them with my tongue. It's an incessant pressure in my eardrums and the small of my back. I've gotten used to it, but I can never quite forget it's there. Sometimes I wonder what they would uncover if they dug beneath the ancient foundations, unseated the stone from earth to which it has lain claim for a thousand years, and then, in my darker, more lucid moments, I decide that I don't want to know. I learned that lesson once, and I don't need to relearn it.

Anyway, enough of my philosophizing. How are you? Has D.A.I.M.S. grown drearier for lack of my shining, ebullient presence? Actually, don't answer that. You're liable to give me an honest answer. Is Professor Trask still bellowing at the top of his voice, and does the Dragon still breathe fire? I swear I'll dance a damn jig the day you tell me that old bitch has either done us all a favor and died, or that the buffoons at the Department of Health and Human Services have wised up and fired her. Wishful thinking on both counts, I know, and I'm not holding my breath, but everyone needs a dream.

I don't suppose she's relented and agreed to sell Dinks to Hogwarts? I feel sullied for even writing that sentence-Dinks isn't a thing to be traded like furniture-but you know what I mean. The elf that they have for me here is as sweet and attentive as can be, and I love her dearly, but it isn't the same. She doesn't sing the way Dinks does when I'm scared or sick or just plain crampy, and she doesn't whisper stories into the darkness to lull me to sleep. I know I should be too old for things like that, but I'm not, and I miss them. Especially now. As wonderful as Winky is, Dinks was home, and right now, I'm homesick to the bone.

You'd like the teachers here, I think. They're a trifle on the stuffy side, and I wouldn't want to break wind in front of them, but they're brilliant in the classroom. They use magic here, really use it. They don't just dangle it over our reaching fingers like a tantalizing artefact of Someday. It's not a dirty word or a shameful secret. You can work it, get your hands in it, and the school has its own thriving, independent ecosystem. The plants we plant, raise, and harvest in Herbology are used in the Potions lessons whenever possible, and although I'm not entirely certain of this, I suspect that the Care of Magical Creatures professor uses the excrement from the animals he tends as fertilizer for the Herbology plants. Beat that with a stick.

The teachers, for the most part, have adjusted well to having a cripple as a pupil, though my Head of House-that's what they call Student Resource Coordinators here-is a histrionic, interfering old prude with a monolithic do-gooder complex. Each sneeze and scratch on my part is grounds for immediate inquiry by the school Mediwitch, a dour, gimlet-eyed harridan who, unfortunately, shares her propensity for gross overreaction. My joy knows no bounds.

As a matter of fact, I am writing you from the Hospital Wing. It's nothing serious, so, for God's sake, don't get your pneumatic legs in a knot. I was in the owlery and went over a little funny, that's all. Must've given myself a hell of a knock, too, because according to Lady Pomfrey of the Chamberpot, my face was covered in blood. I don't remember, truthfully.

Oh, what an ironic word that was. There was no truth in that, none at all. The quill jittered in her hand, and she let it fall from her fingers and clatter against the parchment with the soft rustle of dried leaves. She furrowed aching fingers through her hair.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. Old Wills had that one dead-bang.

The door to Pomfrey's office opened, and she emerged carrying a chair in one hand and trailing her desk behind her like an obedient dog, the yellow glimmer of the Summoning Charm an ephemeral leash. Jars and phials nestled in the half-open drawers. She set the chair between two adjoining beds, facing Potter's inert form, and then set down the desk with a gentle, grating thump. She sat down with a graceless lurch, steepled her elbows on the barren desktop, and propped her chin on the backs of her folded hands.

Of course. The vigil must be maintained at all costs. Leave Potter alone, and someone could creep in here and finish the job, and we wouldn't want that now, would we? Even if it might exonerate Professor Snape. You've left me with him for an unprecedented five minutes. Will I be getting my cavity search now, or as an after dinner delight?

Her capricious mind conjured the ludicrous scenario with terrible clarity. An Auror, dressed not in the authoritarian blue robes of his office, but in elegant, fitted black robes and a cravat would sweep to her bedside, and over the crook of one arm would be a towel. The maitre d' from Hell. He would look officiously down his long, aquiline nose at her, and then he would say in a voice dripping with crisp, cultured hauteur, "Drop your knickers, if you please, madam."

She clapped a hand over her mouth and huffed manic laughter into the palm of her hand in hot, breathy puffs. It was such an absurd, stupid image, and yet it felt right. As far as she had seen thusfar, the Aurors were bureaucratic and uncreative enough to do just that, and she could very well find herself bent over the hard, cold metal frame of her bed while a grim-faced Auror went prospecting in her upturned posterior like a deranged Roto Rooter man.

That was not an image suited to quelling the giggles. It only made them worse, and she let out a low, vibrato honk as she rocked back and forth in an unconscious effort to ease the ache in her belly and sides. The ancient bedsprings gave a mournful creak, and it was all she could do not to fall from the bed in a gibbering heap. The eternally rational spark of her subconscious realized that her hysterical amusement was wholly disproportionate to the thought that had triggered it, bizarre as it had been, but she could care less. It felt good to laugh at anything, and at fifteen, she was still permitted the comfort of crude bodily humor.

Pomfrey raised her chin from the sagging cradle of her hands. "Are you all right, Miss Stanhope?" Her voice was brittle, devoid of its customary authoritarian ring.

Oh, everything is copacetic over here, ma'am. Just imagining an earnest Auror rummaging around in my hindquarters with a genteel, latexed finger.

Her chest cramped with the urge to yodel mindless laughter, and she sank her teeth into the sensitive flesh of her palm, tongue recoiling from the briny taste of old sweat. When some semblance of control had reasserted itself, she removed her hand, took a fortifying breath, and forced herself to relax.

"Yes, ma'am," she murmured. "It's been a tense day, and I'm a bit loopy."

Pomfrey sighed and muttered something too low for her to hear, though it sounded like, "Aren't we all?" Her chin drooped onto her hands again.

Dreaded medical nemesis or not, Rebecca couldn't suppress a surge of empathy. Pomfrey looked ravaged. Her hair, usually perfectly coiffed, hung in dispirited, flyaway strings around her wan, pinched face, and puffy, bruised circles of exhaustion ringed her eyes. The immaculate uniform which had once greeted Rebecca in the Headmaster's office was a faded, tattered memory, lost beneath limp, rumpled fabric, as if she had slept in it more than once, sprawled in the infirmary chairs. The stress of Potter's collapse and the subsequent infestation of Aurors had drained her, leached her of her stolid vitality. She was old and bowed, withered by time and toil, and all the medical knowledge she had amassed had failed her.

The old gods have been swept away, and there is no help for the lost. She thought of Professor Snape then, and the memory of his bleak, misery-shrouded face did what conventions of infirmary etiquette could not; the vulgar desire to giggle died in her throat.

Professor Snape. The letter. No, the confession. That was what was important now, not a disheveled, exhausted Mediwitch and her own guilty conscience. She picked up her quill in clammy fingers and tried to ignore the fact that the delicate black shaft felt like bone in her hand. She bit her lip and focused her eyes on her lilting, meandering script.

Can he even read this? Then, It doesn't matter. Just get it done. You can fix it with a Clarifying Charm if need be. Not like Professor Snape's here to stop you.

A low, pained growl escaped her at that, but she pushed down the pang of guilt that bloomed in her chest and resolutely put quill tip to parchment again.

What I do know is that I'll be here the rest of the night while they poke and prod and dance their voodoo rituals around a pot full of my puke. You know how it goes. They're all the same, whether armed with wand or syringe, and only after I jump through a thousand hurdles will they let me go back to my House. Wouldn't want to spread the crippled pox, you see.

Now that I reread what I just wrote, I realize that it sounds incredibly whiny, and if I'm being perfectly honest-she paused with a wry smirk; there was that insidious word again, oozing hypocrisy and etched into the page with mocking clarity-I'd have to say that it is. It's stupid, but I can't seem to stop myself. Every time I see those white or green smocks or those dainty, tri-cornered nurse's hats that for some reason remind me of slumming nuns or Purgatory's beauty queens, objectivity flies out the window, and all I want to do is hurt them as much as they're going to hurt me with their needles and tubes and lancets dripping legal poison. A last-ditch effort to preserve my imaginary dignity.

They're doing the best they can with what they've got, and the nurse, pain in the ass that she may be, runs a tight ship. But nothing she can do will ever eradicate the festering stink of this place. She and the house elves scour this place every day from floor to ceiling, and I can still smell it underneath the piquant perfume of solvent and eau d' lavender, the stale signature of urine and blood and centuries-old sweat, the sweet, rotten pork stench of forgotten suffering. It's ingrained in the stone now, and the industrious little elves can scrub the skin from their hands and knees, but it will always be here for anyone who knows where to look for it.

The gist of all this rambling is that I'd rather be anywhere but here, even back in the Common Room with my Housemates. I never thought I'd say this, and if by some miraculous chance, you get to merry olde Scotland and let this slip, I'll deny it to the death, but I like them. Well, most of them. There are some I wouldn't mind seeing the split end of, like those bubble-headed fools Parvati and Lavender, for two. Spend their time in a fugue of masturbatory self-importance, twittering euphemistically about their Inner Eye. Bullshit. Between the two of them, they've got twenty/four hundred vision, and I'd bet my Saturday drawers they'll never see it coming when I finally work up the courage to heave them out the window. Still, it's my House, and I've carved a place for myself in it, even if it's one most wouldn't have chosen. It's not always a comfortable place or a kind place or even a right place, but it's mine, and I'll defend my patch of dirt until I die.

It's funny how quickly I've reverted to the vernacular of home. I hadn't realized until now how much British English was creeping into my dialect; I've started calling cookies biscuits. A cookie is a cookie, dammit and a biscuit is light and fluffy and best with sawmill gravy, and I would give my right arm and some of my left to hear that surly, dry-boxed old lunch lady on the weekend shift holler, "Git yer sorry asses into the damned line 'afore I tan yer hides!" More colorful than, say, "Miss Stanhope, please queue for lunch, or ten points will be deducted from Gryffindor," don't you think? Ten bucks on which would get faster results, particularly if Lunch Lady were wielding her cast-iron ladle at the time.

There is a point to this letter, and I'm getting there, I promise, but some things you just have to work up to. I've got guts for a lot of things, but this isn't one of them, and I'm not ashamed to say so. Besides, it's nice knowing that I'm talking to someone who's been down the same road, even if we took different detours to get there. It's like sending a piece of me back home, and I think I'll savor that for a while.

The subdued click of a tumbler retreating from the snug socket of a doorjamb echoed in the reverent hush of the infirmary, and she looked up to see that the Aurors had returned. The elderly Auror was in the lead, flanked by a sullen subordinate who had been with him on the original watch and a spry, exuberant young woman who trod upon the hem of his robes and stumbled into his scrawny back with a winded grunt.

"Blast it girl, not in here," snapped the old Auror as he put out his gnarled hands to steady himself on the nearest bed.

"Sorry, Mr. Dagleby," muttered the young woman, and her cheeks flushed rose.

Mr. Dagleby straightened his robes with a phlegmatic harrumph. "This," he told Pomfrey, who had risen at the sound of the turning doorknob, "is Nymphadora Tonks; she'll be the replacement Auror on this rotation."

"Just Tonks, if you please," she said, and smiled broadly.

"Pleasure," came the reply, though Rebecca saw Pomfrey's eyes widen imperceptibly, as if she thought the Auror was going to set upon her in a sudden fit of blind fury, and crepe-soled feet retreated toward the desk and its twinkling contents in a protective hunch.

Curiouser and curiouser, she mused, and pretended to be looking over her letter.

If Tonks took notice of this strange behavior, she gave no sign. She sauntered to Harry's bedside and gazed at him, hands stuffed into the pockets of her robes. Her face was somber and shadowed, and the effervescent, toothy smile faded from her lips. She pursed them and rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet, and after a moment of quiet contemplation, she withdrew her hand from her pocket and smoothed an untidy forelock of black hair from his sallow forehead.

"Wotcher, Harry," she whispered, and there was such pained tenderness in it that Rebecca looked away.

Good Christ, she wanted to shout, he's just a boy! A boy with brass balls and more luck than brains. Life will go on if he falls. The sun will hold its place in the heavens, and the stars will twinkle in the firmament. Professor Snape will be dead, but that's no skin off your noses. Why all this weeping and gnashing of teeth?

You know why. Because he is hope and righteous might made flesh, and to lose him would be to lose their totem against the dark and the monsters it hides. They need him, or the fairy tale crumbles, and that would be more than they could stand. Besides, that's not what's really bothering you, is it?

Shut up, she hissed, but there was no rancor in it. Her grandfather's voice was right.

Seeing Tonks' hand caress Harry's cool, waxy faces evoked a wrenching déjà vu, stirred the dust from memories best left undisturbed. Her fingers tingled with the fleeting remembered sensation of fevered skin and brittle hair, and she scrubbed her hand against the cool linen bedsheet to quell it. Not so long ago, she had been on the other side of the looking glass, and it had been her hand that had offered meager solace to the dying as the ravenous cancer consumed the body and mind beneath her trembling palm. She had been the one breathing useless terms of endearment over an unresponsive face, and she had been the one who had tried to pretend that hope still had a place in those charnel house halls, just as Tonks would when duty and Mr. Dagleby called her away.

Go away, she thought fiercely. Old wounds were being scraped raw afresh, and she had spent the last four years trying to bury them, blot them from the record of her consciousness. Tonks and her mournful hands had undone it all, and resentment festered in her chest like long-dormant infection.

But Tonks didn't go away. She looked up at Rebecca and smiled ruefully, and then she came around the end of Harry's bed to stand at the foot of hers. She craned her neck at the parchment on the tray. "Writing a letter?" she asked.

Rebecca's first instinct was to cover the untidy scrawl with one hand, block it from prying eyes, but common sense told her that doing so would only draw more attention to it, and so she pressed her hand into the linens and smiled. "Yes, ma'am. Go away, you nosy bitch.

Tonks came around the side of the bed and peered more closely at the letter. "To a friend, is it?"

"Yes, ma'am. A friend in the States." It was a valiant struggle to keep an antagonistic snarl from her voice.

Tonks raised a slender eyebrow. "To the States? Mind if I look it over?"

"Not at all."

Oh, yes, yes I do. I mind it more than you could possibly imagine because I know what you're looking for with those inquisitive blue eyes and eyebrows so pink they make my eyes water, but I can't say a word. After all, I'm gormless and docile, the complacent little spastic. One wrong move ruins everything. But you can bet I mind, and there will be a reckoning for every liberty you take here, to borrow a phrase from one of the most concisely eloquent men I have ever known.

Tonks plucked the letter from atop the table and scanned it. Her lips pursed, and her eyes narrowed, and after a moment, she drew it closer to her face. She shifted from one foot to the other, and Rebecca swallowed a gleeful snigger. Her atrocious penmanship had its uses, apparently.

Tonks turned the parchment onto one side. "Not very legible, is it?" she said prosaically. She rotated it the other way.

Rebecca did snigger then, a sardonic, admiring chuff. "I guess not. I usually use a Dicta-Quill, but I don't want to disturb him." She jerked her head in the direction of Harry's supine form. "One of the professors was teaching me write, but-," she paused for a single heartbeat. I'm on the deathwatch for him now, just as you are for him. "-he is busy at the moment," she finished softly.

Tonks lowered the parchment, and her eyes were twin searchlights in her face, sweeping over her sharp, angular face with scouring, groping light. The gaze was so sharp, so knowing, that the spittle soured on Rebecca's tongue, and the thin flesh of her stomach rippled with cold tendrils of dread. She wanted to sink into the pillows and pull the coverlet over her head, hide from that probing stare, but she held her ground. She would not give a single inch.

Her heart thundered in her ears, and the dusky tang of greenstick woodsmoke filled her mouth, but she only blinked and scratched the side of her nose with a numb finger. It was too late to cover her mistake now; anything she said would only arouse more suspicion.

Quiet and vacant wins the race.

Neither did Tonks speak. They simply stared at one another in silent appraisal. Then Tonks replaced the parchment on the tray with the briefest flicker of a smile at the corners of her impish mouth.

"Well, it's not bad for a novice attempt," was all she said. "Keep at it; it'll turn out right in the end." She retreated from the bedside. "Wotcher," she said solemnly, and turned away.

"Tonks, stop wittering with the invalids and get to your post," barked Dagleby disagreeably. Then his eyes settled on Rebecca's hunched form, and his gaze softened. "Begging your pardon, miss. Poor figure of speech." He touched two fingers to the brim of his hat.

There was something so old-fashioned and endearingly Victorian in the gesture that a smile escaped her before bitterness could crush it. "None taken, sir," she said.

"Sorry, Mr. Dagleby, sir," Tonks muttered, and hurried to her post with a last surreptitious glance at Rebecca. Dagleby followed with a derisive sniff.

She had expected that Pomfrey would return her desk to its customary place in her office once the cadre of Aurors resumed their posts, but she did no such thing. Instead, she sank into the chair behind it with heavy sigh and buried her head in her hands. She moved with ponderous care, as though all the years of her age had settled over her bones at once and seeded her joints with ground glass. Her shoulders drooped with exhaustion.

All of her life, Rebecca had dreamed of seeing the shoe of infirmity and crushing fatigue on the other foot, fantasized about it the way other children fantasized about meeting princes from forgotten lands or stumbling upon the untold riches of El Dorado. She had imagined sneering at her tormentors as they crumbled beneath the burden of the sentences they so casually passed on their charges, and the thought had filled her with malignant hope. She had vowed, lying on their papered examination tables and flinching from the acid prick of their merciless needles, to live long enough to see her dark fancy come to fruition.

The fruit was bitterer than she had ever imagined, and there was no joy in it, only a heaviness in her roiling gut and a diffuse sense of dread. Physicians and their helpmates were immune to the ravages of time and toil. No disease could touch them, no malaise bring them low. It was a gift from the oath they had sworn when they had taken up the healing sword and garbed themselves in white wool strong as armor. They were untouchable, standing in open defiance of God's rapacious, wrathful hand. She had seen it a thousand times-doctors hale and whole while everyone around them fell to Death's scythe, their only defense their arrogance and a strip of sterile cotton over their mouths. To see Madam Pomfrey so exposed, so shorn of her usual confidence was yet more proof that the scales of blissful innocence had fallen from her eyes.

Don't think about it, she chided herself. Just finish the damn letter so you can bring the emotional dampers down for the night. She put quill to parchment for the third time; her hand was mutinous now, unnerved, and it took several false starts before she formed a legible stroke.

While I was in the owlery, I got to thinking about the game we used to play. You know, the one where we all sneaked down to the basement and pretended to be knights, warriors, mages, healers, and princesses. You were a mighty broadswordsman, if memory serves, and I was pretty mean with a bow, if I do say so myself. God, our imaginations were so vivid that it was almost real. I still remember cool, damp earth between my toes from the last time we played.

Do you still think about it? I know we stopped playing because somewhere along the line, it stopped being fun, but it's never been far from my mind. I think hard on it now and then, lying in my bed with my fingers laced behind my head and staring into the blackness of the canopy. I ponder and wonder if my memories of it are true, if it really was as intoxicating as memory allows, or if nostalgia is filtering the colors until only the dulcet hues remain. You were always the more grounded one, you and your stump-legged pragmatism. Was it as exhilarating as I remember?

I'm asking because I hoped you might be willing to play again. It'd be a taste of home, a way of keeping in contact with all of you while I am here. The friends I have made here are lovely, but I've yet to feel that universal kinship that I had with you. Their road ain't my road just yet, I guess you could say, and Lord, I can't believe I just wrote "ain't." Every English teacher I have ever had is wearing ashes and sackcloth as we speak. See what a ruinous influence you are?

You don't have to play, and you certainly won't wound my feelings if you don't, but I sure would appreciate it, and it might help to set my mind in order about some things that have been niggling at the back of my mind. The bones are harder to read when the earth they're buried it won't settle. I'll leave the riddle to start the game after my signature, and if you want to play, you can, and if you don't, you don't.

I hope this letter finds you well. Give my love to Dinks, and if it's not too much trouble, put some red North Florida clay in the return post. In all likelihood, the drooling fools currently conducting health inspections at the school will confiscate it as contraband, but it won't hurt to try, and if even a fingernail full makes it through, I consider it a success. You never know where home is until you leave it, and you spend every minute away trying to find the road back again. I miss and love you all.

Love,

Rebecca

P.S. Here is the riddle. Use it well, and good luck.

Here be the black-eyed, ivory serpent, poisoned by his own fangs

There sits the mongoose, holding vigil o'er former foe

Both watch the slumbering princeling, key to all life.

The dark dauphin holds court, while the warclouds gather.

Blue wolves with dripping muzzles circle on greedy paws,

And over all the pall settles, harbinger of disaster and woe.

All the pieces I have named; where lies the truth?

Name it and fear no sin.

Her quill paused in mid-stroke, and her gaze wandered to Madam Pomfrey, silent and hunched over her desk, a feeble maunt who had discovered too late the wages of hubris and now sought absolution in the final hopeless hours. Her throbbing hand found the strength for one more postscript.

P.P.S. Some dreams are better left unfulfilled, and some truths better left unknown. Ignorance is often the safer road, for all the enticements of lurid curiosity. I only hope I retain a shred of mine when the last mile of my race has been run. Pray for me, that the Lord has the wisdom, decency, and mercy not to grant my every wish.

She dropped her quill and massaged her aching wrist with the ball of her thumb. This was the longest she had ever written in a single sitting, and she was going to pay for her industry in the morning. Even so, she was certain that she hadn't written enough, that without proper points of reference, her oblique allusions to serpents and mongooses and dark dauphins would leave him stymied and certain that her trip across the pond had robbed her of her faculties.

Ordinarily, she would have included runes and general information about the symbolism in each name, but the moment she scrawled Professor Snape's name alongside that of Saint Potter's, the alarm bells would sound, and her letter would be pored over and dissected with ruthless fervor, never to reach its destination, and when they had wrung every secret from the ink and parchment, they would come for her and strip-mine her soul until all that remained was a tattered husk that rocked and crooned and marinated in its own urine. Madam Toad would be only too happy to oblige them.

Yes, well, you'll be seeing her anyway after Longbottom's indiscreet caterwauling. One can hardly overlook the fact that a student bowled over an Auror, bellowing at the top of his lungs. Especially not when the same Auror carries Hogwarts' only crippled student to the infirmary like a swooning virgin rescued from heathen sacrifice.

I've always wondered about your fascination with sexualized metaphors, Grandpa, but now isn't the time.

Her gaze fell upon the letter, and she shuddered. The ink was still wet, and in the dim, dozy light, it seemed to her that the parchment was bleeding, oozing sin and blood from its pores. She reached out and turned it facedown upon the tray, then scrubbed her much-abused fingers on the coverlet. She didn't mind the pain that lanced from fingertip to wrist in sharp, darning-needle arcs, nor did she lament the faint, rusty crescents left on the sheets. They were part of her penance.

My scarlet letter, she thought, and a wry snort escaped her.

She wanted to burn it, burn it in a flash of purifying fire and spread the ashes to the wind. Every line was fraught was deceit and calculated manipulation. It wasn't fair. It was using the cruelest of leverage against someone whom she cared for very much, luring him into a terrible snare by calling upon old loyalties that were already fading.

That was the worst of it; the bond was fading, and there was nothing she could do about it. His face, once so clear in her mind, was slipping away. She could no longer remember the slope of his nose or the jut of his chin. Sometimes, just before sleep whisked her to tumultuous dreams, she would catch a fleeting glimpse of him, of smooth, dark flesh and deep brown eyes, but more often these days, she saw only polished titanium pistons. Her friend had been reduced to the sum of his inhuman parts, and now she was knowingly(and with malice aforethought, her mind supplied judiciously)leading him down the road to perdition on behalf of a man who would crush her beneath his heel if given the chance.

Except he wouldn't. Not anymore. You've reached a détente. He doesn't like you, but he doesn't want to hurt you, either. You wouldn't agree to be alone with him in his private quarters if you even suspected malicious intent. Your sense of self-preservation wouldn't allow it.

And yet, I would sacrifice someone who would die for me for someone who gives less than a damn if I live or die. Not just offer him up, mind, but do it with no hesitation, no second-guessing. I'd do it with a smile, and I don't know why. Jackson told me more than once that I was sunshine on a cloudy day. He even sang that sappy Temptations tune to make me feel better during a stint in the infirmary. He doesn't deserve this, but I can't stop. I can't remember enough of him to keep myself from making him an unwitting martyr to a doomed cause. There aren't enough condemnations in all the tongues of Man to describe what I have done and what my choice will ask of me. What does it say about me?

But that question was too terrible, too enormous, so she closed her eyes and rolled onto her side. She needed to sleep, sleep and rid herself of her throbbing hand and the guilty nausea in her stomach.

In the soothing darkness behind her closed lids, the last words she had written etched themselves in fire. Pray for me, that the Lord has the wisdom, decency, and mercy not to grant my every wish.

She would not be so lucky.

She had retreated so deeply into the temporary sanctuary of sleep that she did not stir when, thirty minutes later, Nymphadora Tonks scooped up the letter as she excused herself from her post for a trip to the lavatory and slipped it, unnoticed, into the pocket of her Auror's robes.