Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Forty-Eight

The first time Alastor Moody had walked these halls, both his legs had been his own, and he had not counted off the paces by the solid thunk of mahogany on stone. To skip and to run were as effortless as the drawing of breath, and the brilliant, high-summer plumage of youth had not dulled to the weary dun of hard-bought pragmatism. Anything had still been possible then, within his eleven-year-old grasp, and he could vividly recall kicking Darius Stebbett in the shins with the heel of his right foot.

A wry smile twisted his scarred, leathery face as he laboriously dragged himself up the second-floor staircase, planting his walking stick on the riser in front of him before each ponderous step. It wouldn't do for him to go arse over battered teakettle down the stairs, even if no one was there to see it except Kingsley Shacklebolt. He could be called a crackpot and a barmy old codger until the world stopped spinning, but he'd be damned if he'd add cack-handed fool to his list of shortcomings. It was already plenty long enough, and besides, he wouldn't want to infringe upon Nymphadora Tonks' purview. Whatever else he was, he was a gentleman.

He laughed, a rusty, guttural caw, and Kingsley quirked an eyebrow, an uncertain smile dancing on his lips.

"Something funny?" he asked.

"Just thinking," Moody answered gruffly, and pulled his wooden peg up another step.

Funny that he should remember that after all these years. At well past eighty and after nearly forty years as an Auror, he had thought he was well past maudlin indulgence in old memories.

Ex-Auror, an officious little voice inside his head reminded him, and he snorted.

There was no such thing as an ex-Auror. Oh, they could strip you of your credentials, force you into early retirement, and insult you with a disingenuous farewell party full of false, strained smiles and stale cake, but they could not confiscate your memories or your training; once you became an Auror, an Auror you remained until they lowered you into the ground or consigned your earthly remains to the indifferent maw of the belching crematorium. It wasn't so much a job as an occupational transubstantiation.

Nor could they erase the fact that, on a torpid July night twenty years ago, he'd sacrificed his right leg-the very leg that had once kicked Darius Stebbett in one lean shin-to job and Ministry. He had bid a screaming adieu to his shin, foot, and five little piggies in a nauseating flash of bilious orange, and the next morning, he had awakened to the dismal realization that phantom pains and a thick length of mahogany were to be his companions forevermore.

As if they had followed the thread of his thoughts, the stiff leather bindings that bound flesh to insensate wood creaked and chafed the callused, puckered skin of his stump. He grimaced and stopped to adjust the cumbersome harness.

Kingsley, too, stopped. "All right, Alastor?" He reached out a steadying hand.

Moody shook him off with an irritable snarl. He didn't need to be mollycoddled like some doddering invalid. "I'm fine," he snapped, and dug one horny finger between stump and offending strap.

Kingsley stepped back and raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "Fair enough," he said amiably, and dipped his chin in acquiescence.

A disgruntled harrumph was Moody's only reply. You didn't need to be an Auror to know that was Civiltongue for, All right, you crotchety old bastard. I'll be damned if I'll give you a reason to send me tumbling down these stairs. Like his contemporaries and the young berks now entering the ranks of the Aurors, Kingsley had no doubt heard the legendary tales of Mad Eye Moody that still circulated around the office water carafe, and he, for all his politeness, clearly thought him mad as a March hare.

Course he does. He hasn't seen. Not but in his fifties, and full of the arrogant complacency of the perennially unchallenged. He hasn't forgotten the lessons of the first War against Voldemort-you can never forget-, but the screams of the dying do not ring so loudly in his ears now, and the putrescent stench of loose bowels and sizzling blood and rotten flesh no longer clings to his nostrils in perverse parody of a lover's perfume. Years and foolhardy optimism have blunted his sense of danger, and even as the storm clouds gather round him, he still hopes that it will not come to that.

He wasn't around for Grindewald, either, and some of the things I've seen there would have sent him screaming into the land of gibbering insanity. If Voldemort is a menacing shadow, then Grindewald was the solar eclipse, only he didn't just blot out the sun; he strangled it. Half the Auror patrols sent out against Grindewald's army never came back, and those that did carried the more fortunate half home again in pieces. His arrogance stems from his blessed ignorance, and I only rue that it cannot last.

The recalcitrant strap finally slipped into place with a petulant rasp against irritated flesh, and he stumped up the next step with an indignant huff. Damn leg was as much hindrance as help. The hand not fisted around his walking stick in a tenacious, white-fingered grip came up to scratch the bridge of his nose.

Ah, another trophy from bygone days, crowed the cynical voice inside his head. Most men commemorate their heroism with metals and plaques, but you, you carry the proof of your deeds on your very face. Never one for pretension.

He grimaced as he moved inexorably upward. He'd lost that chunk of nose in a frantic duel with fleeing Death Eaters a little over a year after Lily and James Potter, darlings of the resistance movement, had been reduced to charred skeletons in the rubble of their home. In truth, the loss of the bridge of his nose and the acquisition of the patchwork of scars that adorned his narrow, watchful hatchet face had angered him more than the loss of his leg. The leg, at least, could be hidden under voluminous folds of robes. There was no hiding his ravaged face.

But that's not really why you're angry, is it? With whom can you be truthful if not yourself? Your leg was an honest casualty, lost because someone was quicker on the draw than you. But your nose...ah, your nose was an eternal reminder of your carelessness. You got cocky. You were an Auror, and your quarry were young boys fresh out of these very halls. You underestimated them, and the price for your blithe insouciance was the flesh from your nose. You never repeated that mistake, but you never forgave it, either, and every morning, you gaze into and through the mirror and remember that once, just once, constant vigilance wasn't enough.

He swore under his breath and quickened his pace, robes clutched in one gnarled hand. Now was not the time to be thinking of things long dead, reopening old wounds to fester. His leg and the flesh from his nose had returned to the dust from whence they had come, and no amount of taciturn eulogizing would bring them back. Nor would it change the fact that his glory days as an Auror were behind him.

I made my peace with that long ago, he assured himself as the round, wooden butt of his leg crested the third-floor landing.

Bollocks you have, sneered the voice of unvarnished truth. Delusion does not become you, Alastor, and yet you persist in this one. The loss of your job was a far deeper blow than the loss of your flesh. Your nose and your leg were just mortal trappings, frescoes and bas relief on Temple Moody, but being an Auror, well, that defined who you were. Auror wasn't just your job title; it was your true surname, and you cherished it more than the life you were gifted. You loved it so much that you plucked out thine eye in its name. You never forgave them for tossing you out like garbage when they were through with you, an old warhorse sent, not to stud in some bucolic, green pasture, but to the proverbial glue factory, tarred forever with the whispered insinuation of madness. The very histrionic prudence they taught you became your fatal flaw.

A gargling snort and the ponderous thump of his wooden leg as he ascended another step. There was a sizzling, darning-needle stitch in his side, and his hand was numb from clutching his walking stick so tightly, but he was damned if he would take a break, much as he might need one. While Kingsley was no smirking, snot-nosed berk fresh from Auror training and still convinced that winning or losing was determined by the size and turgidity of one's pecker, he was still young enough to pity the creeping infirmities of the aged with the well-intended insouciance of youth. His mouth was sandpaper dry, and he longed for a generous pull from his silver hip flask, but it was tucked carefully inside the voluminous folds of his robes and therefore beyond his reach. When he got to the landing, then.

He spared Kingsley a sidelong glance as the walked. Not much had change since he'd first lain eyes on him as an optimistic recruit thirty years ago, when he-Alastor-had still been a respected leader of men and the fight against Voldemort had still been an escalating skirmish. His skin was as smooth as ever, devoid of wrinkles or even the minute crows' feet that laid claim to the corners of the mouth after forty. His pate was smooth beneath his wizard's hat, and he walked with the same thoughtful tread that had so attracted his notice all those years before.

And yet, there were subtle changes, minute details that the unaware would never have noted. It was in the eyes, mostly, a dull weariness and inveterate wariness that he was sure had not been there before, the burden of unwanted knowledge. They all came by it sooner or later, to the last man. It was an unspoken consequence of the job, one carefully omitted from the glossy pamphlets distributed to starry-eyed students in their fifth and seventh years. For some, the change came slowly, like tarnish on silver or the formation of cataracts, bought hard by seeing more than you wanted to and doing not nearly enough. For others, it came in a single, calamitous moment. However it came, once they earned it, it was theirs forever.

Yours came quickly, in a single roundhouse slap that extinguished your already guttering optimism like a candle flame pinched between callused fingers. The little girl at the Shaughnessy house your fourth year on the job. Little more than a baby, really. The sight of her lying in the soggy rubble of her house while the rain fell into her glazed, opaque, blue eyes and the flies crawled inside her nostrils disabused you forever and always of the notion that man was inherently good. You never trusted anyone again. Not even yourself.

He swore under his breath and hobbled toward the right side of the stairs and the solidity of the damp castle wall with grim resolve. Shacklebolt or not, it was time for a damn drink.

"Knut for your thoughts?" Kingsley asked companionably, and stepped aside to let him pass.

"I'll give you two Knuts to mind your own," he muttered gruffly, and collapsed against the cool stone with the blunted, echoing crack of wood on stone. Panting, he groped for his flask, which was lodged against the leathery, wattled crag of his hip.

Kingsley merely inclined his head and offered him a polite, enigmatic smile.

Moody snorted and curled his fingers around the smooth silver of the flask. It was cold and reassuring in his hand, and after a bit of ill-tempered fumbling and muttered imprecations, he pulled it from his robes, unscrewed the cap with impatient fingers, and took a deep, grateful pull. The familiar warmth of Ogden's Firewhiskey bloomed inside his chest and burned away the image of a little, blonde girl with frosted china eyes whose charred, ruined face sloughed off in the cold January drizzle.

"You don't smile much anymore, Kingsley, not the way you used to," he said as he replaced the cap on his hip flask and wiped his chin on the sleeve of his robes.

That enigmatic smile again, and Kingsley leaned against the wall, one hand stuffed into the pocket of his robes and his ankles crossed. It was a relaxed, aloof posture, but Moody knew his fingers were curled around the shaft of his wand. It was the stance of a well-trained Auror.

"Don't I?" Kingsley replied softly. A gentle shrug and a wry laugh. He said nothing else.

Moody replaced his hip flask and pushed away from the wall, leaning heavily against his walking stick. "So, I'm to see Miss Stanhope, am I?" he said after an awkward pause. There was no point in pursuing the previous avenue of thought any further. A man was entitled to keep his secrets, after all, and Merlin knew he had enough of his own to tend without dredging up another's.

Funny, sneered a contemptuous voice inside his head, you were never possessed of such circumspection before. Oh, my, no! As a matter of fact, you took a perverse-some would say unhealthy-delight in breaking men's minds and riffling through their closely guarded secrets like a ham-fisted thief. It was your sordid entertainment, and you were hardly particular in your methods. Behind the locked doors and Silencing wards of the Ministry interrogation rooms, there was no one to hear the screams and raise the cry. Rules of decency need not apply. No Curse was too vile, no physical torture too heinous. You snapped bones and sanity with equal facility, and you gloated over every confession you tore from bloody, shock-numbed lips like priceless treasure. You still think about it now and then, when the shadows grow long and the walls close in.

Everything I did was done in the name of protecting my world, he snarled at the implacable voice, and his arthritic hip creaked and throbbed with exertion as he quickened his pace. The fourth-floor landing was close at hand.

You didn't enjoy it, then?

Of course I did. It was my chance to avenge the helpless. Tit for tat. Those bastards deserved everything they got, and I'll not apologize for a whit of it.

A sardonic, rasping chuckle, rusty hinges in November wind. Methinks thou dost protest too much. And even if you speak the truth, there is someone here who would disagree. Two, actually, if you count Dumbledore. Determined as he is to stop Voldemort, I think he would turn away and shudder at the deeds done in the name of balancing the scales, and so do you, else you would have boasted freely of them. Ah, but the one, as to him there can be no doubt. He was younger and weaker then, and he never forgave you for the trespasses committed in that bare room.

I don't need forgiveness from his kind. Reformed or not, what he was taints what he is, and if he or Dumbledore expects me to don the ashes and sackcloth and grovel for absolution on bended knee, they'll be waiting a long time. He was dimly aware of Kingsley speaking to him, probably answering his question, but it was little more than a distant hum.

No, perhaps not, conceded the voice with a disingenuous purr. But you've never forgiven him for refusing to break. Oh, he screamed and arched and pissed his robes and trousers like all the rest, but you could never stamp out the defiance in his eyes, erase the subtle hauteur from that gaunt, pale face. Even wallowing in his own cooling piss, he knew he was better than you, and he yielded absolutely nothing beneath your lash, not even when you took the lowest road of all and tortured his exposed genitalia. To this day, he still has that same unspoken surety, that slinking smugness, and it galls you to no end. It always will.

"Professor Moody?" A hand grazed his forearm.

He started and wheeled to face Kingsley with an ungainly lurch. "What is it?" he snapped, and his magical eye fixed on him with undisguised irritation.

Kingsley was singularly unfazed by this display of pique. "I said," he answered mildly, "that Miss Stanhope asked for you specifically as I was carrying her to the infirmary."

"Did she, now?" he grunted noncommittally.

Kingsley nodded. "I'm not certain why."

Moody thought for a moment. "What happened during that search?"

Kingsley sighed. "Merlin only knows." He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. "Everything was going well, and then Umbridge, for reasons known only to herself, grabbed the girl by the shoulders and started frothing about respect for the office of the Ministry."

Something that might have been amusement escaped Moody's lips. "Bunch of rot, that."

"After that, she started shaking her. Dawlish and I prised her off, but just as we were leaving, Umbridge turned and asked Stanhope what she'd meant by an earlier comment."

"Shaking her?" Moody said sharply. "And she still has a job? I believe I was dismissed for less."

"Yes, sir, shaking her," Kingsley answered, tactfully sidestepping the issue of Moody's dismissal. "Then Dolores asked the question, and the girl just...," he trailed off as he searched for the mot juste, "...pitched a fit," he said finally, though it was clear from both his expression and the tone of his voice that the phrase was hardly apt for what had happened.

Moody filed that away for future reference. "Did she ever answer the question?" His beady magical eye leered knowingly at his companion.

"No, as a matter of fact, she didn't."

"Mmm."

He had expected as much. Interesting as the altercation in the Gryffindor girls' dormitory between Umbridge and Dumbledore's latest pubescent crusader was, his mind returned inexorably to the interrogation rooms of yore and the stiff-necked boy he could not break.

To this day, he was unsure how much his old friend Albus Dumbledore knew or suspected about what had transpired within those walls between his old and trusted ally and his newest trophy in the fight against the Dark Lord, and it was very likely he never would. By the time Albus returned for his charge two days later, the visible bruises and all the breaks had been mended, and if he noticed that the hook-nosed, greasy-haired, skinny young man could barely stand for his weariness and walked with an uncharacteristic shambling, hunched gait, he made no sign.

Not quite true, that. There was that one piercing look as he turned to leave, hard as frost and scathing as Arctic wind. He knew you too well, and you did not have to name your sins for him to know them. The illicit stink of your exhilaration was still on your skin, just as the stink of old urine and sweat clung to a twenty-year-old Severus Snape. Even if it hadn't, he would have known anyway; he was Albus. Rebuke in a single glance, and then he was gone with a majestic sweep of his robes. He never said a word. He didn't have to. And because it was easier to believe that he knew nothing rather than acknowledge that you had disappointed him, you buried your head in the sand and told yourself that your secret was safe, but you knew better, and you're too old for denial and games now.

It was my job, he protested furiously, and I intended to do it, Albus Dumbledore's approval be damned. The fourth-floor landing was so near now, and he cursed his lumbering gait and contrary joints. If he could just gain the landing, he could banish this unpleasant train of thought and focus on the business of Rebecca Stanhope, but thirty feet seemed three hundred, and his steps drew him no closer.

He was there of his own volition to confess, lay bare his every atrocity, and he did, in unflinching detail. He told you everything without so much as a flinch or a pause in that flawless diction. For three hours, that soft, smooth baritone enumerated the pleasures of the damned, and you listened, spellbound and appalled. And when he was done and that mesmerizing voice had fallen silent, you tortured him to within an inch of his life.

I had to be sure there wasn't more. For every crime the likes of him confessed, there were at least a dozen more to which they never spoke. A Death Eater gives nothing freely, and he never truly repents. That was one of the first things we learned in Auror training, and one of the truest.

You could have used Veritaserum, the voice persisted, and there was malicious glee in it now. It would have been more humane, at least, if just as unethical. There was no need to break his fingers one by one or apply a Stinging Hex to his genitals.

He said nothing. There was nothing to say. What was done was done, and he had lost sleep over none of it. Four steps to go before he reached the fourth-floor landing and the invisible line of demarcation between past and present. He planted his walking stick with a defiant grunt. From the corner of his non-magical eye, he saw Kingsley's lips purse in contemplation, but the younger Auror made no comment.

You could have been merciful, the voice continued as though there had been no interruption. But you didn't want to be. You wanted him to suffer. Every dry-kindling snap of his phalanges, every scream you tore from his throat while he writhed on the floor and clawed at the cold stone floor with nails scraped to the bleeding, ragged quick was a measure of justice meted out by your hand, and after eighteen unyielding hours beneath your wand, he still had not begun to pay a tenth of what he owed. You had been to some of the places he had mentioned, you see. You had seen the carnage he left in his wake, carried out the bodies and consoled the grieving families. And now, here it was, a chance to even the scales. And you took it.

Three steps. A grim smile spread over his mutilated face. Of course he had, and he had enjoyed every second of it, even if the arrogant prick had never broken. It had given him an almost erotic pleasure to watch him contort and flail, shrieking while spittle flecked his cheeks and glistened on his chin, and sometimes, he still dreamt of it and woke to find a leaden heat in his balls. At least one of the murderous sons of bitches had been made to taste a bit of his own gall.

Two steps.

And yet the Fates have not lost their enduring love of irony. Seventeen years later, Dumbledore, the congenial benefactor of wayward souls, has called upon you to help clear a name sullied beyond redemption. The boy you could not break has become a bitter, tortured man who would kill you if he could. He has not forgotten the old hurts, and he has nursed them on his festering hatred like misbegotten children. Sometimes when you're eating at the High Table, the weight of his gaze settles on the back of your head, and it occurs to you that the only obstacle between you and his furious vengeance is human flesh, and you know all too well what a pitiful barrier it makes. The food turns to ash in your mouth, and you are not so smug then, are you? Because you know that he would have no compunction whatsoever about smothering you in your bed. You had your retribution in that squalid little room, and one day, he will have his, and bastard though he is, he was never one to leave a job unfinished.

One step.

The voice, cruel as it was, spoke the undeniable truth. He had no doubt that there would be a reckoning between himself and Severus one day, a settling of old scores and the opening of old wounds. Too much had passed between them for any hope of a mutual détente. He was too paranoid, and Severus was too bitter to let bygones be bygones, and so they waited and circled one another with wary, interminable patience, praying for the day the stability of their world no longer depended upon their cooperation.

He gained the fourth floor at last, and a sigh of relief escaped him. The old memories could not reach him here, supplanted as they were by new concerns and the promise of a meeting with Hogwarts' shriveled little sibyl. His tread lightened, and the breath did not sit so heavily in his lungs. The infirmary came into view, gleaming mahogany doors that separated the living from the dying, and there she waited, a denizen of both lands but a citizen of neither. Cobalt blue eyes and sunfire hair danced behind his eyes, and he blinked them away.

"What do you know of her?" he asked gruffly.

Kingsley cocked his head. "Sir?"

"What's she like, boy?" he demanded impatiently. "Is she mad, like that Ravenclaw misfit?" His gnarled thumb and forefinger came together in a futile snapping motion. "Luna Lovegood, that one is."

"Oh. Having never met Miss Lovegood, I can't say for certain, but if you're asking if Miss Stanhope is crazy, I'd have to say no. Bitter and defensive and more than a little paranoid, but perfectly sane."

"That Lovegood is absolutely crackers," Moody assured him. "Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, my arse. Wastes half my lessons with her incoherent piffle. I'd wager someone's been slipping something into her food. Feckless, foolhardy little twits never think twice about sharing food, despite the fact that not even Merlin knows where it's been. Think they're invincible, they do."

"I'll trust your assessment," Kingsley answered drily.

Moody spared him a baleful glance. "Are you being smart?"

"Not at all, sir. Isn't Stanhope in your lessons?"

She was. And she had never missed a lesson. Her homework was neat and concise, and she had never been disrespectful or spoken out of turn. She kept her eyes to the front and her mouth shut, and on the rare occasion she had a question, she raised her spindly hand and waited to be called upon. He had even grown accustomed to her Dicta-Quill as it scratched its way across her parchment. In short, she was a model student.

And yet...

There was something about her that unnerved him, made the spittle sour in his mouth and his scrotum shrivel beneath his robes whenever she looked at him. It wasn't her disability-he had seen manglings and mutations uncounted during his stint as an Auror, and he was hardly a statuesque tribute to beauty. It was a deeper malaise, a taint that winnowed beneath her too-pale flesh and seethed through her very marrow. She was not so much a young girl as a changeling trying desperately to mimic that which it did not comprehend. Sometimes she looked at him while he lectured, and it was all he could do not to cram his fist into his mouth and scream or bellow at her not to look at him, damn it all. Neither was a sensible course of action for a man trying to prove his sanity to a disbelieving world, and so he held his tongue and pretended not to notice that avid gaze, and the end of the lesson could never come soon enough.

It's the eyes. The voice was back, but there was no cynicism in it now, only uneasy honesty. They're pretty, as pretty as she is ugly, but they're also as pitiless and dead as the eyes of a Greek bust. You can stare at her for ten minutes, and that blankness never changes. Her mouth moves, and she follows your movement around the room, but those china-doll eyes are a thousand miles away, in a place and time you can neither comprehend nor touch, looking for something only she can see. She can see out, but you can't see inside, and that scares you.

It's not just the eyes, he amended. It's the way she smiles. That sly, Mona Lisa smirk that never reaches her eyes. It's there and gone in a single breath, but it lingers in memory long after it has faded from that skeletal face. It is the mischievous smile of a child who knows the secrets kept behind closed doors and understands the muffled Morse code of bedsprings after dark. She knows more than she ought, and you have this terrible, swooning suspicion that she knows it about you.

All of which was preposterous rot. She was a fifteen-year-old girl, not a mysterious cipher who saw the darkest sins of man and numbered them from greatest to least. Her eyes and her smirk were nothing more than the artifice of the young, designed to project confidence where none existed and unbalance him, and he was furious at himself for letting it succeed so completely. He was so disgusted with his uncharacteristic fit of the screaming meemies that he threw the infirmary doors open with far more force than he had intended, and the resultant reverberating crash echoed through the cavernous room, the distant rumble of thunder.

Madam Pomfrey looked up with a scowl. "I'll thank you to remember that this is an infirmary, Alastor," she said tartly, and resumed her turning of the mattresses with an irritated harrumph.

His tongue burned with an acid retort, but he quelled it with a Herculean effort. One look at her pinched face and bruised eyes was enough to tell him that Poppy Pomfrey was ten thousand leagues from all right, and the last thing she needed was a blazing row over Hospital Wing etiquette. Instead, he squared his shoulders, touched his fingers to the brim of his wizard's hat and said. "Right, Madam Pomfrey. Where is she?"

Pomfrey gave a brusque nod to the corner where Harry Potter lay covered to the chin by starched hospital linens. "Over there." Her expert hands plumped a pillow that had little need of it and tugged a stubborn crease from fresh bed linens. "She seems all right now, though she was dodgy for a while." Hands tucked corners and smoothed sheets

He saw with no surprise whatsoever that she was propped in the bed beside Potter's, and he was equally unsurprised to note that she was watching him with those lightless blue eyes, her mouth set in a thin, expressionless line. He stumped grimly forward, pulled up a chair, and sat with a graceless flop.

"Miss Stanhope," he growled, and reached for his hip flask.

She gave an almost imperceptible nod, and her hands twitched on the coverlet like stunned, albino spiders. "Professor Moody." Slow and slurred.

His brow furrowed. That was odd. She spoke little in lessons, but when she did, it was concise and perfectly intelligible. "Suffer a blow to the head, did you?"

"Sir?" She gazed at him in serene befuddlement, as if he were quite mad, and all the while, her fretful hands fluttered over the coverlet.

Being coy, are you? he thought furiously, and took a defiant swig from his flask.

"There is no alcohol in the infirmary, Professor," Pomfrey chided from behind him.

"Bollocks there isn't," he snorted. "You've a whole supply chest full of it."

"Of a different sort altogether, and well you know it," she huffed.

He nodded. "Aye, and I'll wager my magical eye you've got a bottle of Ogden's in your desk drawer."

There was a considering pause. "Spill one drop, and, professor or not, you'll be on your knees with a bucket and a scrub brush. I'll not have this infirmary reeking like a grubby tavern."

"On my knee, Pomfrey," he corrected gruffly, but there was a glint of wry mirth in his non-magical eye. "I seem to be missing one."

Pomfrey muttered something that bore an uncanny resemblance to, and most of your mind, and retreated to her office, leaving the door ajar, lest one of her patients or the trio of Aurors clustered in the corner opposite Potter's bed like overeager carrion crows summoned her, and he returned his attention to Stanhope, who had observed the riposte without a word.

"Well, what did you need, Stanhope?"

She ran her fingers through her hair and dropped her hand to the coverlet once more. "Headmaster Dumbledore told me to contact you if I ever needed help putting things in order," she said quietly.

The subtle emphasis she placed on the word order was not lost on him. His left eye narrowed, and his magical eye spun lazily in its socket. "Ah. Did he now?" Another thoughtful pull from his flask. "What did you need?" He leaned forward, and the chair gave a somnolent creak.

"I was wondering if you had a chance to come up with those extra-credit spells we had discussed. You know, for theoretical purposes." Her gaze drifted to the Aurors shuffling from foot to foot at the edge of Harry's bed.

"I'm afraid you'll have to refresh my memory, Miss Stanhope. It's been rather busy of late, and I can be distracted easily."

There was a surreptitious snigger from the youngest Auror, who was unsuccessfully trying to hide his amusement behind a fisted hand.

Arrogant little shit. I was fighting Dark wizards long before you were a tightness in your father's bollocks, he thought venomously, and resisted the urge to fork his fingers at his smug face.

"Of course, sir," she said, and her hands ceased their constant flutter. "It concerns the Charms commonly employed by the assassins' guilds in the Middle Ages. I'm told stealth was a requisite."

"If you didn't want to get your arse blown up, it was," he muttered absently.

He had never discussed the medieval assassins' guilds with any of his pupils. That was N.E.W.T.-level material, if it were covered at all, but he knew what she was asking of him well enough. Concealment. The right to move about as she would, unfettered by watching eyes. If he acquiesced, she would become one with the creeping shadows, undetectable save by a few. She would glide on silent wheels, collector of bones and midnight sins, and the thought made him acutely uncomfortable. He shifted in his chair and sought the reassuring heft of his walking stick.

"You don't plan on using any of them do you?" he asked in what he hoped was a tone of sardonic humor.

A strangled chuff. "No, sir. That magic is a bit beyond me." She held up her frail hands by way of explanation.

Bollocks. "Just so we're clear."

He sat back. So there it was. All these years and all of Dumbledore's clever machinations, and from the mouths of babes was his transformation from righteous persecutor to abettor wrought. He stared at her.

You could refuse. It is your right.

He could, but he wouldn't. He knew that much even as the mutinous thought took shape in his mind. Not because he feared Dumbledore's wrath or because he was an old man growing older by the day, but because to refuse would be to admit that he was ruled by his hatreds and his paranoid suppositions. It would mean he was like Severus, and that he could not abide. As vicious and loathsome as Snape was, he was still integral to the Order, and he would not endanger all that so many better men had died for in the name of personal vendetta.

But when this War is over...

He looked at them both, Dumbledore's child-champions. Harry, sweet and eager to please, a child born and likely to die in the name of the Light, crumbling beneath the weight of the interminable weight he carried. His cheeks were sunken and grey, and he could see the emaciated jut of collarbone even through the starched linens that covered him like a shroud. The boy had been vital once, strong and full of hope, and now he was wasting away beneath the dispassionate gaze of government officials that viewed him as little more than a living weapon.

And then there was Stanhope, a child of the netherworld between darkness and light, not yet bound by Dumbledore's golden tether. She gazed at him with dull equanimity, and her hands danced upon the bed linens with oddly compelling grace.

He leaned forward in his chair and laced his fingers together between his legs. These words were hers and hers alone.

"Do you know what he is, child?"

Her brow creased, and he could see the wheels turning in her head. Finally, she shook her head. "No," she admitted, "I don't. But neither do you."

He scoffed. "Smug chit, aren't you?" He pressed his palms against his knee, his leathery face stern and forbidding. "It's always the same with you kids. Get twelve years or so under your belt and think you've solved the mysteries of the universe. I've known him since he was a skinny whelp. I assure you I know him a sight better than you, girl."

"Maybe, but everybody has many faces, and only God sees them all." She cocked her head, and a mischievous smirk played at the corners of her mouth. "Which one did you see, Professor?"

The darkest one. "Never you mind," he said gruffly, and rose with a grunt. Then, voice raised so his next words carried to the ears of curious Aurors. "If you'd like to discuss the medieval assassins' guilds, I'll be in my office at seven o'clock tomorrow."

She opened her mouth to protest.

"I've no patience for layabouts, Stanhope. Your beauty sleep is not my concern. If it's important to you, you'll be there. If not, don't waste my time."

"Yes, sir."

The words emerged with a trace of teenage petulance, and she eyed him with sullen impatience. It made him inexpressibly glad to see her subtle pique. It meant that she was indeed flesh and bone and adolescent entitlement beneath her pasty skin and gargoyle's face, not an unflappable dybbuk in human form.

"Good day, Stanhope," he growled as he stumped toward the door, and the smile that crossed his craggy face was genuine.

At the door, he turned for one last look. Stanhope had turned in her bed, and she was gazing at Potter with the pragmatic earnestness of a scientist observing a disappointing and wholly befuddling specimen. Her hand reached out to cover his, and though it was likely intended as a gesture of comfort from one long-suffering soul to another, it struck him as predatory. There was neither warmth nor sympathy in her eyes, only a grim resignation.

No stranger to death, that girl. They're on more than nodding acquaintance. Do they tip their hats to one another when they pass?

The thought was nonsensical, yet it chilled him utterly, and he hurried out and closed the door behind him before she could see him shudder.