The Harpsichordist

The concert was beautiful. Not only was the playing spectacular, but Severus had been called away to a Death Eater meeting and wasn't gazing at Wendy as though she were a particularly large piece of chocolate. In addition, the fireworks were unlike any Luke had yet seen.

When Wendy had started her piece, her cello had begun to glow, a faint bluish pulse that danced in time to the music. Luke had previously seen glowing patterns, watching students practice, prowling the school in his semi-ghosthood. But none yet as brilliant as this.

The Bach Effect didn't come into play this time around, which surprised him, so there were no extra voices during the fugue.

He had become accustomed to them over the past few weeks. They hung around -- haunted seemed the wrong word -- the instrument room and often flitted around the students as they practiced, echoing the music, sometimes making the instruments glow when a chord or passage was perfectly in tune or well played.

They had now come to settle in the Great Hall, peering over Luke's shoulder as they tended to. He wanted to bat them away, but they weren't really there, so he couldn't.

As Wendy played her final chord, there came an explosion from the cello: the pulsing light suddenly released a bluish shimmer that puffed into the air. It twinkled brightly, then dispersed.

The next group had the same thing happen, and the next. Each performance was accompanied by a dancing glow that turned into a shimmer. By intermission, looking at the stage was like looking through a cloud of blue glitter. Pretty, but a little annoying.

In the second half, the glowing puffs had become so prevalent that the audience was actually covered in shimmery musicomagical glitter. When Harry and Ginny walked on stage to conclude the program with her aria, Luke became aware of a disturbance in his plane of existence.

The castle was sighing, and it was becoming naked, as if its layers of clothing, or brick, or stone, were being stripped away one by one. Something was happening outside on the grounds.

The sighing was nothing new; he'd first noticed it just a few days ago. Fleeing Albus' office from the sight of Wendy and Snape happily throwing snowballs at each other, Luke had come across Rigel Lestrange practicing recorder in the instrument room. Rigel had been looking very tired, as though his resources were stretched thin, and kept playing the same passage over and over, missing the same note each time. It was a vicious cycle, practicing when tired -- you merely rehearsed the mistakes.

Rigel was completely covered in the magical sheen typical of students who'd been practicing for a while. But it was darker, somehow, and gave Luke the creeps. As he stared at the boy, he had to blink, because it seemed that the castle walls were bending ever so slightly inwards towards Rigel, as though trying to crush him.

When Rigel did the run incorrectly for the seventh time, a fine trickle of dust fell down on him from the ceiling, as though the castle was indeed shifting and moving.

Rigel dropped the recorder and let out a sharp breath.

Another trickle of dust spattered onto the floor a few feet away.

Rigel looked positively petrified and cast a quick glance upward just as Luke heard an immense, inaudible sigh from the stones on the walls.

Rigel's head jerked back and forth; he glanced behind him quickly, then to his left and right, and then looked up again. "I hate that," he muttered. Then, moving very deliberately, like a child who is putting his feet over the edge of the bed with full expectations that a hairy arm will shoot out from underneath to clutch his ankle, pull him under and eat him alive, he bent over, picked up the recorder, and walked over to a table to put it back in its case.

As Rigel was cleaning the inside of the wooden pieces with a fine cloth, the castle gave another sigh. Rigel twitched, but did not look up. He kept his eyes very firmly forward when leaving the room.

Luke had left, too -- he didn't like the feeling of the place anymore.

And now here in the Great Hall was that same sigh, combined with an extra knowledge that something was happening outside. It was the same kind of feeling one had when running for a bus and knowing that the driver's just going to pull away without letting you on.

Luke flew towards one of the outer walls of the Great Hall, meaning to go outside to see what was happening, but he crashed into a barrier just inches from the stones. His consciousness quivered for a moment, as though he were a clanging bell; the world around him blurred.

When things had settled down, Luke pushed against the barrier, but it felt like cement. He was trapped. Damn.

The aria went on and on, but Luke paid it no mind; he flitted back and forth along the walls, trying to find a way out. The glitter now made it hard to even move; rather than just a shimmer, it was a viscous fluid in the air through which he had to swim. It spun off Harry and Ginny onstage in clumps and clouds.

The something came closer and closer; Luke shuddered, helpless. Why couldn't he get out? Something was keeping him in -- was it the evil outside? Or was it the magic of the hall? Increasingly flustered, Luke tried to think of a way to let someone -- anyone -- know what was approaching.

Harry and Ginny finished their piece, and the hall rang with stunned silence for precisely ten seconds. Luke held his breath waiting for whatever was going to happen to happen.

And then the something sinister from outside burst into the Great Hall like a spear penetrating a plate of armor. The doors flew open, making a great pressure wave pulse through the blue clouds, knocking Luke out of position and throwing him violently against the barrier that surrounded the Great Hall.

Wendy watched as several dozen Death Eaters, fully decked out in black robes and masks, stepped into the hall, kicking aside pieces of door as they went. Wendy felt an involuntary shudder pass through her. The students who had been gathered in the antechamber, waiting for the concert to finish so they could go and greet their parents, came spilling out into the Great Hall.

The figure in the lead looked around and crowed, "The Dark Lord has risen again!"

Wendy's stomach went cold. She knew that voice -- it was Lucius Malfoy. The last time she'd heard it, he had been telling Severus to hurry up and kill her.

There was complete and utter silence, except for the sound of footsteps as the Death Eaters fanned out along the side wall where the door was.

"Those of you with wands," Lucius continued, "snap them in half."

There was a rustle; Wendy saw a few of the witches and wizards nearby reach for their pockets. Why on earth would they willingly snap their only weapons? Why weren't they charging, fighting?

"No." Albus spoke.

"No?" Lucius replied incredulously. "Albus, you cannot possibly hope to protect all these people --" he gestured to the crowd, which must have numbered at least a thousand, "-- by yourself."

"I don't need to," Albus said calmly. "They are protected by the school."

A sigh of relief ran through the hall, though Wendy wasn't sure if she believed him. She, for one, felt extremely exposed.

Lucius made an angry noise in the back of his throat. His head wobbled about slightly for a moment, and then he called, "Draco!"

Draco separated himself from the crowd, smirking, pushing some of the smaller students aside roughly. "Yes, Father?" he said, and Wendy wanted to slap him for his arrogance.

"Bring me the boy," Lucius ordered.

Draco nodded, turned smartly, and pushed his way through the crowd of students.

Wendy tried to follow him with her eyes to see who he was looking for, but he'd vanished into the mass of black. Then there was a scuffle, a loud "Hey!", the sound of a slap, and then Draco emerged, pulling with him Rigel Lestrange.

Rigel had been standing in the antechamber door, watching Harry and Ginny finish their song, when he heard a horrible crunching noise -- the doors to the Great Hall had burst open, allowing several dozen Death Eaters to march in.

The students milling about behind him in the antechamber surged forward, and Rigel could no longer see anyone. He heard Lucius Malfoy cry, "The Dark Lord has risen again!", heard Dumbledore say something in return, and then heard Mr. Malfoy call for Draco.

A moment later, Draco pushed his way through the students and grabbed hold of Rigel's arm.

"Hey!" said Rigel, trying to pull free. They tussled for a moment, but Rigel was outmatched; Draco was much bigger than he, as well as a house more ruthless.

Then Draco slapped Rigel; Rigel was startled and went slightly limp. Draco grabbed him by the arm and deposited Rigel at the front of the Great Hall, just underneath the stage. Rigel felt as though he had just been thrust naked into a spotlight without knowing his lines or his part or even what play it was.

"Rigel," said Mr. Malfoy, with a veneer of warmness that chilled Rigel more than any of his nightmares ever had. "Rigel Lestrange. So lovely to see my godson again. It's been a few years, has it not?"

It had been a few years, yes: on his ninth birthday, a cream-and-green invitation had arrived by owl, inviting "Young Master Lestrange" to "retain contact with his origins," meaning, in his opinion, to mingle with ex-Death Eaters. He'd been escorted by his foster parents to the bone-white Malfoy mansion and left for an interminable three hours, during which Mr. Malfoy had been excrutiatingly polite and distant, the perfect image of the upper-class godfather. Rigel had been very glad to leave. Even so, every detail of the visit had been chiseled into his memory.

Standing in front of the whole school, everyone's parents, and most of the local wizarding community, Rigel said nothing. He flushed -- the crowd was staring at him. His family name and connections were something he tried to keep secret, and now everything was suddenly out in the open. Rigel found himself looking straight into the grey eyes behind the white mask.

"I must thank you for your help," Mr. Malfoy continued, "in letting us in."

Whispers.

"I didn't -- I don't know -- What do you mean?" He wouldn't cry. He wouldn't cry.

"Come now, my dear boy," said Mr. Malfoy patronizingly, "surely you've been dreaming of it lately? The darkness, the red-clouded bodies? The breathing castle walls?"

Rigel became lightheaded. How could he know?

"Haven't you had those visions lately?" The voice was almost gentle. "Haven't you felt like the castle was speaking to you, was crumbling away under your touch?"

Rigel was silent. He had felt it. He had lain awake hours, every night, wondering if he was going mad because of the way the castle pressed in on him. The nightmares were no longer screaming nightmares, but sweating, moaning nightmares that left him dehydrated and clammy, nightmares he could never pull free from. It was as though there was a set task for him to do in his head each night, which was why he would lay awake for so long, hoping not to sleep, hoping to lie awake until dawn. But he always slipped away eventually.

"Haven't you? Go on, tell me. They started when your parents arrived, didn't they? After you saw them and rebuked their offers of affection?"

"No," he croaked, but knew his stricken expression would give him away.

"Rigel, my child," said Mr. Malfoy, "you can tell me, go ahead. There's nothing to fear."

The voice was so silky, so enticing... It had always been so, always pressing him to tell his deepest secrets...

Rigel closed his eyes, swallowed, and nodded. He heard more whispers and mutters, and when he opened his eyes, he saw that Mr. Malfoy's wand was trained on him.

"You let us in, didn't you? You know that, don't you?"

Rigel nodded again. He knew. He saw, now.

"You're a creature of the dark, Rigel," said Mr. Malfoy, and the warmth in his voice had become cajoling, playful. "You have no place here. Come with us, Rigel." Every repetition of Rigel's name was another thread that wound itself around his brain, befuddling and confusing him.

Mr. Malfoy had his hand out, palm up, in a welcoming gesture.

"You want me --" Rigel's voice cracked, "-- to join you?"

Mr. Malfoy's voice was cold; his eyes, the only part visible through the mask, intense. "Yes," he said, and then raised his voice. "If you join us, Rigel," he said, turning his head this way and that at the crowd, "we will leave, killing none. If you refuse," said Mr. Malfoy, and Rigel's brain screamed with fury, "the cleansing begins here."

Rigel swallowed -- his mind was full of horrific visions of screaming people, blackness and redness and falling brick, hundreds of dead bodies all piled on top of each other. He didn't know what was going on -- suddenly everything appeared to hinge upon him, upon some stupid decision --

"No."

Professor Dumbledore had spoken, moving a step closer to Rigel.

"Professor --" began Rigel, turning a stricken look on the Headmaster. "If -- if he's right -- then -- then I should -- I ought to --"

But Dumbledore was shaking his head. "No, Rigel," he said. "You do not have to make this decision. The school --"

"Stay out of this, Dumbledore!" snarled Mr. Malfoy.

Dumbledore took another step towards Rigel -- they were now only about ten feet apart. The space between them hung in front of Rigel like a huge gulf, a huge canyon. If he could only step across it, he would be safe, he wouldn't have to worry.

"Choose," commanded Mr. Malfoy.

Rigel looked at Mr. Malfoy, and at the wand pointed at his heart; then he looked at Dumbledore, whose hands were loose at his sides, whose eyes were kind and gentle and understanding. Dumbledore slowly moved his head imperceptibly from left to right, once.

And then Rigel knew what he had to do, remembered Professor Flitwick's words: Just because they were dark wizards doesn't mean you have to be one. And then he remembered Professor Dumbledore's oft-repeated phrase, passed from student to student: When the time comes to choose between what is right and what is easy...

Rigel knew what would be easy: to step forward, to accept the role of Death Eater, to join his parents and kill like they wanted him to. To continue to live, that would be the easy thing.

He spoke one word: "No."

He wouldn't cower. He stood straight-backed, chin set, arms at his sides, head up.

"Avada Kedavra!"

The last thing Rigel saw as he crumpled to the ground through a haze of green light was Dumbledore, almost glowing golden with rage, rushing at Mr. Malfoy with his wand drawn.

Lucius watched Rigel Lestrange's body crumple, and felt the heady rush of power that killing always brought. Muggles had drugs that could do this, he'd heard: heroin, cocaine, harsh words on his tongue. The Muggles had to suffer through needles and infections to get their highs; his was natural. The natural mastery of man over beast, of betters over lessers.

While the boy finished falling, Lucius became aware of movement to the side. Dumbledore had charged him, looking like an enraged bull, wand drawn, power emanating from every hair of that ridiculous white beard.

Lucius wasn't afraid of him any longer. Dumbledore had made his last mistake, letting Rigel into the school. The fool, believing that anyone with magic was worthy of entrance to the school -- giving second chances, letting the dark in.

Rigel had been born in Azkaban, carried in the womb of a Dark Witch, and suckled for three months in the presence of dementors. He was darkness in and out, and as soon as he had seen his parents, that power had surfaced.

Rodolphus and Bellatrix ought to be getting free any moment now; the Dark Lord knew the way into the Chamber of Secrets. And then they would join the rest in the hall, and then the dementors would come and feast...

This would be a night to remember, a night to celebrate for years to come -- The Downfall of Dumbledore. It would go well in his memoirs, Lucius decided, envisioning engraved intertwined D's as a chapter heading. Green ink, of course.

Lucius neatly sidestepped the charging old fool, leaving Avery and Goyle to deal with him. Where was that Muggle woman? He had a score to settle with her. It was her fault he'd been thrown into the middle of the merciless circle, cursed and hexed into a whimpering, blithering heap. If she hadn't escaped from them, they wouldn't be in this mess at all.

Lucius glanced around the hall and spotted the woman looking panicked, standing a few feet in front of the stage. He grinned and strode off through the crowd. There would be time enough tonight for sport -- the Mudbloods weren't going anywhere.

As soon as Rigel Lestrange's body crumpled to the ground, Harry's fighting insticts took over. He grabbed Ginny by the arm and pulled her off the stage and down the steps towards the antechamber where the frightened students milled. "Get the D.A.," he ordered, "and do whatever you can."

Ginny nodded and plunged into the students.

Hermione and Ron hurried up to him, Ron's satchel with his recorder swinging wildly off his shoulder, Hermione shedding pages of sheet music. "What are we going to do?" Hermione's voice was very high-pitched. "I can't believe he killed him, I just can't believe it --"

"Shut up," said Harry urgently, and Hermione closed her mouth abruptly. "If we're going to get everyone out of here alive, we need to disarm the Death Eaters."

Ron was very pale, but he gripped his wand and nodded. Hermione opened her mouth, saw the look on Harry's face, and shut it again. She, too, nodded.

"Either that, or we need to find a way to get out of the hall -- aren't there any other doors? Damn it, we need the Map. We're wasting time," he added impatiently, as he heard a harsh voice shout, "Avada Kedavra!"

Harry tried to think quickly and clearly, but his mind was buzzing with a surge of anger towards Dumbledore. Another bad decision, he thought sourly. There was no way the D.A. could take on so many Death Eaters. They needed Aurors -- wouldn't Fudge have brought a few with him?

Harry turned away from Ron and Hermione and looked at the crowd. All he could see were heaving bodies, dodging this way and that, trying to find others, trying to stay out of the way. It was a horrible travesty of a dodgeball game, except that instead of a harmless rubber ball, it was the Killing Curse being thrown. No sign of Fudge, no hint of any Aurors apart from Tonks, and Tonks was a blur of pink.

Harry turned back to Ron and Hermione. "Try to get all the Muggles in one spot," he said to Ron, "and get the wizards to protect them. Hermione... go with Ron. Be careful," he added, and Hermione shot a look full of meaning over her shoulder as Ron took her by the hand and pulled her away through the crowd.

Harry's scar, which had been quiescent all evening, suddenly erupted with pain.

The Occlumency lessons had stopped the prickling and the dreaming, so this could only mean that Voldemort was nearby. All Harry had to do to find him was to go in the direction that made the pain increase.

Towards the doors was a good place to start. Harry set off, head throbbing.

Wendy watched Lucius draw closer and closer through the seething, frightened crowd. Out! her brain screamed, get out of here! but there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee. Away!

Lucius ripped off his mask and threw it away; Wendy finally saw the face to which those nightmare eyes belonged. Cold hatred, repulsion, fury, and disgust, all chiseled elegantly into an older Draco Malfoy.

The crowd jostled him, bringing him in and out of view as bodies hurled past, screaming, shouting, crying, pleading, begging, dying. Wendy backed up and bumped into something hard and wooden, which fell over. A chair. She pushed it aside and continued to back up, hands groping, scrabbling for salvation.

Lucius was thirty feet from her, wand raised, eyes fixed -- Wendy bumped into the steps leading up to the makeshift stage and fell over -- He was twenty feet away -- She scrambled backwards up them, crablike --

Lucius climbed the steps, each footfall knocking into her brain like blocks of ice. "Filthy Muggle," he growled.

She was backed up as far as she could get, her sweaty palms clutching at the stone floor.

Lucius stopped, his knees three feet from her eyes.

Wendy stared at the scene behind him, at the carnage in the hall, the students firing spells, Dumbledore rushing to and fro. She was surrounded by people, but she was alone. She was going to die, she knew it. Again. Would Davitt Moroney come to her rescue again? She doubted it.

"You and Severus deserve each other, Muggle," he spat. "Worse than animals. Cross-species mating."

"Where is he?" Wendy's voice came from a distant place outside of her body -- or was it the other way around?

"We tortured him," Lucius said, and as Wendy looked up at his face, she saw the blatant hunger and love of pain in his eyes, and in the way he licked his lips. "We called him a traitor and tortured him. He screamed. He bled. He soiled himself." Lucius paused, his eyes roaming over Wendy's body. "What is it about you, Wendy?" he asked, saying the name the way one would normally say whore. "What is it? The sex? The Muggleness? Or is Severus just not man enough to find anything better to bed?"

"Where is he?" Wendy repeated.

Lucius ignored the question. "It's a pity he's not here to watch me kill you." He brought the hand not holding his wand up to his chin and rubbed it thoughtfully. "Pity. But he's not here, and I'm going to kill you anyway. You got away, back in September, and you shouldn't have. We -- I -- had you cornered, and then the traitor pretended to torture you, only to save time..."

Wendy pressed urgently against the stone wall behind her, then looked left and right. There was no way out, and she didn't think she could move -- he had his wand trained on her.

"Oh, yes, we know all about that. The Dark Lord knows all about your rescue, and he punished me for it. All your fault." His face twisted briefly, then cleared, with effort. "All your fault." He said this last lightly, as though he were offering to take her coat at the door.

Lucius raised his wand, and Wendy flung herself to the left, hearing a whooshing sound and those horrible, harsh words: "Avada Kedavra!"

The spell missed her -- how, she didn't know -- but she was showered with fragments from Colin's cello, which had been lying on its side not two feet away.

Wendy gave herself a precious second to be outraged at the blatant destruction of a priceless, rare Stradivarius cello, then spotted something gleaming on the floor next to her hand. It was Colin's endpin. She snatched it up and raised herself to her feet.

Lucius was already bringing his wand up for a second attempt.

She looked at the endpin in her hand. It was a foot and a half of shiny metal, about a quarter inch in diameter, with a tip sharp enough to gouge concrete. She looked at Lucius' wand moving as if in slow motion, and did the only thing she could think of.

Wendy charged. The endpin, clutched in both hands, first knocked the wand out of Lucius' hand, then grazed the fabric of his sleeve. She tried to fend him off, but he was stronger and clamped both hands around her neck.

Air stopped coming into Wendy's lungs. She felt the cold, hard metal in her sweaty hands, saw Lucius' contorted, palce face above her, hissing, spitting hatred. They fell to the ground, rolled once -- Wendy still clutching her weapon -- and landed with Lucius on top, his ribcage and knees pinning her.

Her vision began to go dark for lack of breath, and with her right hand she pushed the sharp end of the endpin up towards him.

It snagged on the heavy fabric of his cloak and was pushed almost out of her hand, but the jab startled him enough to allow Wendy a half-second to slap his hands away from her throat and let air back into her lungs. She gulped in the air, almost lightheaded with relief.

Lucius sat up momentarily to check for damage, a moment which meant Wendy was able to start struggling, rolling and twisting, her knees clamped in a lover's parody around his waist. She managed to roll on top of him, trying to pin his hands with her arms but keep hold of her precious endpin. Teeth -- now there was a weapon! She bit him. He tasted much saltier than Severus, and entirely wrong.

"Bitch!" he spat, slapping her across the face, dislodging her teeth from his neck. He gained control of the rolling tumble, but Wendy was ready as she landed on her back, all her attention on the endpin in her right hand.

Before Lucius' weight settled on top of her, pinning her immovably to the floor, Wendy shifted her hips to the left, sliding her buttocks so that she could feel the fabric of her pants snag on the stage floorboards; she moved her left hand so that both hands were gripping the endpin. She braced it against the floor, the sharp end pointing to the ceiling.

Lucius tumbled over and landed squarely on top of it instead of her.

There was a sharp intake of breath, then Lucius rolled off of the endpin, face twisted with pain. Wendy stared, transfixed, as he reached one arm up and pulled the endpin out of his chest.

Wendy gagged at the blood that came spilling out of the wound. She retched, swallowed, and then closed her eyes and turned away.

"You filthy Muggle," he said in a hoarse voice. "Unworthy..."

Wendy found her eyes open again: he was crawling towards her, wiedling the endpin as she had done, moments earlier.

"I'm going to kill you," Lucius gurgled.

He was two feet from her, the endpin in one outstretched hand. There was no way he could kill her, with so much blood leaking out of him. But he was still trying. He lurched to his knees and, in a graceless movement, fell towards her. The endpin came flying out of his hand at her.

Wendy jerked backwards; she batted at the endping and somehow managed to catch it. She stared, horrified.

"Filthy..." he breathed.

And then he fell sideways and was still.

There were four very fast heartbeats during which Wendy could hear nothing but her own breathing. Then --

OhmygodIvekilled

She scrambled up, away from the body, and ran pell-mell into the fray. Curses, jinxes, and hexes shot past, but they all seemed to sizzle around her, never touching, the beams appearing to bend around her. She reached the entrance hall and set off up the marble staircase, the corridors flashing past her, mile after mile of torchlit stone, and stopped only when she saw a hooded figure emerge from behind a statue halfway along what she thought was the third floor.

Half-crazed, Wendy charged at the figure, waving the endpin wildly.

The hooded figure let out a frightened yell that ended in a gargle, and then two strong hands curled around Wendy's arms, knocked the endpin to the floor, and she found herself being hugged tightly.

"Thank Merlin," said Severus.

He had Wendy back in his arms. He held her close, ignoring the stab from his ribs. "Thank Merlin," he said, over and over again.

She was crying as he had never seen before, not even when she'd first heard of Luke's death.

"Shhh," he said, patting her head, trying to be comforting. "It's all right. It's all right."

"I -- oh, God -- he's -- I didn't have any choice -- Malfoy -- kill me -- I didn't know what -- oh, God --" she choked. She pulled herself free from him, swallowed, and breathed hard several times. "I k-k-killed Lucius," she said, with extreme difficulty.

"What?" Had he really just heard that?

"I k-killed him."

"You... killed? Lucius Malfoy?"

"Y-yes."

"Are you sure?" He didn't mean to sound so patronizing, but it was bloody difficult for a Muggle to kill a wizard. And it did snap Wendy out of her shock.

"Yes, I'm sure!" she snapped, color flushing her cheeks. She bent and picked up the strange metal thing she'd wielded at him moments earlier. It was covered with blood. "Look!" she demanded, holding it out to him.

Severus took it gingerly, avoiding the blood."You killed him with this?"

"Yes!"

"You're sure he's dead?"

"Well, if bleeding like a stuck pig and collapsing to the floor means you're dead, then yes, I'm sure." Wendy waved a hand in front of his face. It was crimson, completely covered with blood.

Severus blanched, grabbed her by the elbow, and dragged her down the hall to the nearby washroom. "Wash it off!" he ordered, pushing her to the sink. "Quickly! Before it stains!"

"Blood doesn't stain," she retorted, but opened the taps nonetheless. "Doctors wash it off all the time." She squeezed some soap from the dispenser onto her hands.

"This blood might," he said darkly. "Who knows what kind of spells Lucius left in it?"

Wendy's hands paused in their scrubbing; the bubbles continued to froth up pinkly. "Spells?"

"Spells," he confirmed. "Anything from a simple Staining Jinx to slow-acting nerve toxins."

Wendy scrubbed harder than ever, the water from her hands running pinkish-black. She added another dollop of soap.

Severus placed the bloody metal rod on one of the vanity mirrors and muttered a Banishing Charm. He'd have to retrieve it from his sludge bin, but it ought to be safe enough for the time being. He looked at Wendy, face intent, tear streaks down her cheeks again, her hair, which earlier had pulled away from her face so elegantly, now coming out of its knot. He reached over and tucked a strand behind her ears.

Her hands paused, but only for a second, and then she muttered, "Thanks," turned off the taps, and dried her hands on the hanging towels. She turned them up to him for inspection. "They okay?"

Severus took them by the wrists and examined them. He couldn't see any stains, but only Madame Pomfrey would really be able to tell if any damage had been done.

He hadn't ever looked at a woman's palm so clearly before: her hands were small. Not delicate, just small. Her fingers were bare, with hundreds of tiny lines running from tip to palm, and very short nails -- for cello playing, he realized absently. Before he could stop himself, his thumbs traced the bump of muscle and sinew at the base of her thumbs. Wendy breathed in sharply, but made no other movement.

Then he moved his thumbs to rub her palms. She must think this is part of the inspection, he realized with something akin to glee, however inappropriate it might have been. He turned her hands back over so that the palms were vertical, and ran one finger down each of her ten in turn, noticing the calluses on the fingertips of her left hand and the almost bony bump on the left thumb. Then he pressed his palms to hers, entwined their fingers, and squeezed her hands.

"They look fine to me," he said, and had to clear his throat and say it again, because it had come out rather hoarsely the first time -- Wendy was looking into his eyes.

How could she do that? How could she make eye contact with him, open up her soul so freely? How could she trust him?

"I lov --" he began, but was stopped as Wendy pulled one of her hands free and clapped it over his mouth. It smelled of soap.

"Don't. Please. Not now," she said. She wasn't begging, but there was a note of desperation and panic to her tone.

And, almost as though it was a deliberate emphasis of the world outside, Severus felt a freezing cold that could only mean one thing -- dementors. Lots of them.