Vita Labyrinthae Similis In Quo Umbrae Vagamus

CHAPTER 2

I remember searching for the perfect words

--System of a Down--

The pain is getting worse, in great sweeping heaves. I am losing the light again.

Harry was the last one in the Gryffindor common room that night; he sat staring into the dying fire, thoughtfully running over the events of the last few days. Malfoy was behaving strangely. Normally not a day went by without some sort of run-in with Malfoy and his goons, but he'd been remarkably reclusive for several days straight. He must be sick or something, thought Harry. Crabbe and Goyle had been absent for a while, too. Perhaps Malfoy wasn't so sure of himself without his lackeys around.

But he couldn't shake the feeling that something odd was going on. Snape had cancelled class, for crying out loud. That was tantamount to the sky falling.

He is human, he reminded himself. More or less. I'm sure there's some rational explanation for it.

He sighed, cancelled the fire with a wave of his wand, and went up the spiral staircase to the dormitory above. As he slid away into sleep, he found himself wondering about Snape, as he sometimes did. What was Snape's problem, anyway? Malfoy he could explain away by dismissing him as an inbred bigoted scumbag, but Snape didn't harp on familial pride. Nor did he believe Snape's hatred of him was entirely the fault of his father's schoolboy pranks. There was something deeper there.

Harry wasn't sure he wanted to know exactly what that was.

Nastasya had the Slytherin and Hufflepuff sixth-years first thing in the morning. Despite the fact that she'd fallen asleep almost immediately after climbing into bed—the concentration required for the Revelation Charm took a lot out of you—she didn't feel rested. She knew she had purple shadows under her eyes, and her hair refused to stay in its bun for some reason, wispy tendrils escaping even from the Hold-Fast Hex she'd put on it. None of the students looked much better, though. She saw a lot of pale faces, and there was a general undercurrent of coughing in the room.

"I won't say good morning," she told them, sitting down at the desk, "because so far it hasn't been. Let's just get right into it. We'll be doing theory for the next few classes, so you can put your wands away and take out parchment and quills. Am I interrupting you, Miss Parkinson?"

Pansy jumped and stopped whispering to her friends. "Uh, no, sorry, Professor." Nastasya waited a few moments—this was normally where Malfoy drawled something to Pansy which would make her snicker, but no such comment was forthcoming—before continuing. Malfoy coughed.

"As I was saying, this is going to be theory. Today we'll address the structure of some of the damaging curses; not the Unforgivables, that's next week, but more minor curses like Asphyxiate and Emesius. Open your texts to page three-forty-two, please." A Hufflepuff girl raised her hand tentatively.

"Yes, Lina?"

"Are you really going to teach us about the Unforgivable Curses?"

"Yes," said Nastasya bleakly. "Professor Moody demonstrated Imperius and Crucio, didn't he? Demonstration and experimentation are one thing, and very important, but it's also important to understand why these curses are so powerful. I'll be teaching you about the structure of the curses themselves and the way the activating words and the stored magic of them interact with the focus of the wand."

Pansy yawned loudly. Nastasya debated screaming at her, but decided against it. She was no Snape, after all, and if Pansy Parkinson found her lessons boring, that was just too bad for Pansy Parkinson. She began the lecture, most of her mind on the subject at hand, but some of it still dwelling on the black and red swirl of the Revelation Charm of the previous night.

The period was almost half over when Draco Malfoy raised his hand. He had been coughing throughout the lesson, but so had more than half the class. "Yes?"

"I...don't feel very well," he muttered. "Can I go to the hospital wing?"

Nastasya raised an eyebrow. Malfoy's habit of malingering was legendary at Hogwarts. He did look ill, though; his face and throat were sheened with sweat, and the circles under his eyes rivaled her own. "All right," she said. "Get the rest of the notes from someone."

"Thank you, Professor," he said, coughing, and now she was staring in earnest. Malfoy never thanked anyone. Not in public.

He thanked you yesterday for talking to him, she reminded herself, but in another moment she was distracted. Malfoy had risen unsteadily, books clasped to his chest, and made it most of the way to the door before swaying and crumpling to the floor in a dead faint.

Pansy Parkinson squealed. The rest of the class turned to stare, all talking at once. "Be quiet," Nastasya snapped, hurrying to kneel beside Malfoy, turning him over. He was burning up, shivering violently despite the heat that radiated from him. She checked his pulse, which was high and thready. "I'm taking him to the hospital wing. You're all dismissed. Study the rest of the chapter and take notes on your reading." She conjured a stretcher with a wave of her wand and levitated Malfoy onto it, as gently as she could. He moaned, coughing weakly.

"Can't I come?" Pansy demanded, hurrying to keep up as Nastasya floated the stretcher towards the door.

"No, you cannot, Miss Parkinson. I am quite capable of dealing with this situation without your help. Kindly return to your common room and do as I have asked."

She was aware of Pansy's glare boring into her back as she hurried Malfoy towards the hospital wing.

"He collapsed in the middle of class," she told Madame Pomfrey tiredly. "Actually, he'd just asked if he could go to the hospital wing when it happened. What is it?"

"What everyone else has," said the nurse, settling Malfoy in bed and propping pillows up behind him. "He'll do, Nastasya. Although he should have come to me before. Boys are all the same, you know. Stubborn."

"This one's remarkably so," she said. "I've got to talk to the Headmaster. Will you excuse me?"

"Of course," said Pomfrey, busy. "You don't look well yourself, Nastasya."

"I'm just tired."

"Enter," said Dumbledore, before she'd even had a chance to knock. She knew the password was required to open the passage to his office, but she hadn't known that it alerted him to the presence of visitors. She did as he asked.

"Ah, Nastasya," he said, twinkling at her. "I'm so glad you came to see me. I've got a favor to ask of you."

"Headmaster, I'm afraid I have some disturbing news," she said, sitting down in the chair he indicated. "What's the favor?"

"What's the news?" he countered. She sighed, pressing the heels of her palms against her aching eyes, and told him the whole story. How Malfoy had been acting differently, how Snape was inexplicably nowhere to be found, how the Sneakoscope had been acting up, and finally how both her Revelations had shown nothing but swirling reddish darkness. He listened seriously, his magnificent head tipped to one side, considering. When she had finished, he handed her a mug of tea and regarded his clasped hands for a long moment.

"The Revelation Charm is a very powerful spell," he said mildly. "You must have been very worried, to choose that particular incantation."

"Very confused, at least," she said. "Headmaster, do you know what's going on?"

"Not exactly," he told her. She sighed. There was no point hiding anything from Dumbledore. He made her head feel as transparent as the crystal bowl she had used.

"Where's Snape?" she asked him, bluntly. "It isn't like him to miss classes. He wasn't at breakfast, lunch or dinner yesterday, and I didn't see him this morning either. Is he ill?"

"Not exactly," repeated Dumbledore. "He is....indisposed, shall we say? The favor I have to ask of you is that you take over the Potions lessons for a few days. In Severus's absence, you're the most skilled Potions expert we've got, as indicated by your mastery of the Revelation Charm. Your masters at Durmstrang spoke very highly of your Potions abilities."

"Yes, of course I'll do it, but...is he going to be all right?" Listen to yourself, she thought acidly. You sound like one of Lockhart's idiot fan-girls.

"Severus will be just fine," said Dumbledore, but the twinkle was gone. "He has....something he needs to deal with."

Nastasya looked at him over the mug. "Is this anything to do with the flu epidemic?"

The Headmaster gave her a smile for her very own. "You always were too bright for your own good, Nastasya," he said. "I've had my suspicions for a while, and your Revelation results have confirmed them. I don't know exactly what's going on, but it isn't Voldemort."

She was surprised at just how relieved she was to hear that. "Why can't I see anything in the bowl?"

"That I don't know," said Dumbledore. "I'm hoping to find out."

She finished her tea. "It's not flu, is it."

"No. It's not."

As she rose to leave, she gave Dumbledore a last long, considering look. "I hope you know what you're doing," she said, aware of how rude it sounded. He didn't take it wrong, though.

"So do I, my dear," he said, his eyes very far away. "So do I."

What do you want? What do you want of me?

"Did you hear? Malfoy fainted in the middle of Defense against the Dark Arts!" Ron threw himself happily into the depths of an armchair, grinning. "I heard one of the Hufflepuff girls talking about it in the hall. He's really sick."

Hermione's face lit up briefly as she looked up from her Arithmancy homework. "Really?" She'd never quite forgiven Malfoy for what he'd done to her teeth in their fourth year, even though it had sort of been an accident, and his continued reference to her as Mudblood scum had not exactly endeared him to her. "Good." She blushed, quickly, and added, "I mean, it serves him right."

"It certainly does," said Harry. "Maybe we can have a few days' peace." He didn't say that Malfoy had been acting oddly for some time now, and that they had actually been left in peace for almost a week. Ron bounced up and down with poisonous glee.

"Come on, Harry, Hermione, this calls for a celebration. Let's go down to Hogsmeade and have some Butterbeer."

"Oh, Ron, not now. I've got three more rolls of parchment to write for Professor Vector, and Magical Lit in an hour."

"So? How often do we get a break from Malfoy?"

Harry stretched, yawning. "He's right, Hermione. Seize the moment."

She sighed, put down her quill, and he could see her consciously fighting against a grin. "All right," she said. "But I'm blaming you if I do badly on this assignment."

"Of course," said Ron expansively. "Come on, let's go." Harry retrieved his Invisibility Cloak from his locker, and they set off for the secret passage that led to the Honeydukes cellar. Ron wouldn't shut up, whispering happily in Harry's ear the whole way down through the school corridors. "When I think of all the shit he gave you about you fainting when the Dementors showed up," he hissed, "I could strangle him. Heh. He'd better not bring that up again, Harry. He won't have a leg to stand on."

"Shhh," Harry muttered, but he did feel a small tingle of nasty satisfaction when he thought of Malfoy's spirited imitation of his faint on the train. He'd have some things to say to Malfoy if that was ever mentioned again in his hearing. He grinned, invisibly, as they climbed into the hollow statue and set off down the passage to Hogsmeade.

Nastasya paced irritably before the fire in her chambers. She had nothing to do for two hours or so....of course, there were always assignments to grade, lectures to prepare, devices to monitor, but nothing pressingly urgent....and she was trying to think of an excuse to go and find Snape and discover what he had to "deal with." The most simple and transparent was that she was curious; that was part of it, but there was a great deal more. Radu's apple-green eyes had been throbbing in the back of her skull for a while now, for no apparent reason, and with the instinct that would have made her an Auror she believed that whatever Snape was suffering from had some connection to those green eyes. What that connection could be was utterly beyond her, however.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the fireplace. She was far too pale, the circles under her eyes still very evident, and her hair (one of them said it was the color of autumn, and the other that it was the color of dried blood, and you know damn well which of those you preferred) had almost entirely escaped the hex and the pins. She sighed and yanked the rest of the pins out. "Accio hairbrush," she muttered, waving her wand at the room in general, and her hairbrush zoomed out of where it had been hiding for the past two days and smacked into her palm. Running the brush through her tangles of dark-red hair calmed her, as it always had.

Just because I happen to like accuracy, she told herself firmly, rather than poetic sentiment, does not mean I prefer the one statement to the other.

Oh, Nadezhda, you really are appalling at dissemination, said that mocking, hated, not-hated voice as clearly as if he had been standing beside her.

"Shut up," she told the past, and twisted up her blood-colored hair again into a tight knot. "There. I look like McGonagall. Not trying to make any kind of impression on anyone at all. So shut up."

She grinned suddenly at herself, standing in front of the mirror and talking out loud. Definitely cracking up. It's having to deal with Malfoy that does it. This is why they haven't kept a DaDA teacher much longer than a year. Except Quirrell, and he was evil anyway. And Moody wasn't even Moody.

She straightened her black teacher's robes and swept out of her quarters. She didn't need to have an excuse. He was her colleague and she was concerned. End of story.

Severus Snape, quite appropriately, lived and taught in a dungeon. Nastasya raised an eyebrow at the atmospheric gloom, and wondered as she often had why he'd never just given in and written gothic novels. He had the persona and the setting down perfectly.

She tapped at his door, after checking the presence of wards on it with a revealing spell. No answer. She paused, and tapped again, harder.

Narrowing her eyes, she bent and peered through the keyhole, which was rather large and probably corresponded to a gigantic black iron key with runes carved into it, knowing Snape. It took her a moment to realize what she was seeing, and when she did, she went cold all over. She drew out her wand again, pointed it at the door, and muttered something nice girls weren't supposed to know; a moment later she heard the muffled clunk of tumblers sliding home, and the door creaked open at her touch.

Snape lay crumpled on the cold flagstone floor, his black hair splashed over the stones and tangled over his face. He was grey-white, barely breathing. Nastasya fell on her knees beside him and reached with a shaking hand for the lifebeat in his throat; his skin was sheened with fever-sweat, but he was icy cold. There was no telling how long he'd lain here unconscious in this freezing room.

She felt all her training and all her senses come back to her, with the urgency of the situation. The panic that had threatened to choke her when she had first seen him was gone now, replaced by frozen calm. She closed the door of the chamber, lit a fire in the cold hearth by glaring at it, and pointed her wand at the supine form of Snape. She lifted him with a spell—thin as he was, he was at least a foot taller than her, and heavy with the helpless weight of unconsciousness—and floated him through the connecting doorway to his bedchamber.

Nastasya lit that fire too with a gesture, hardly aware that she didn't use her wand to do so, and gently lowered Snape onto his narrow bed. He lived ascetically, she noticed, without paying attention. The room was furnished as sparsely as a first-year dorm at Durmstrang, which was one step up from a prison. She covered Snape with quilts, aware that the fire would take a while to heat up the room to a normal human level.

She listened to his chest. The faint rattling and rasping as he breathed told her all she needed to know, and she gathered the ingredients she required from his own stock of potions. Part of her was back in Durmstrang, taking notes with a self-propelling quill while carefully brewing a test-batch of feverfew-and-valerian extract, listening with half an ear to the Potions mistress. "You may find this branch of the science boring," she had droned, "but medicinal potions are by far the most important brews you will ever make. Pay very close attention. You may need to remember this someday."

Snape had the mysterious illness that was spreading throughout the school. That much was obvious. What Nastasya didn't understand was Dumbledore's rather inscrutable and delphic implications that it wasn't just the illness. "Something he has to deal with." She wondered how long Snape had been ill; she rather thought that this was secondary, that the thing Dumbledore had alluded to had begun beforehand.

The cauldron she had hastily set over a ball of mage-fire was coming to the boil. She added the extract of wormwood, stirred counter-clockwise three times, and murmured some words in a branch of Gaelic not even bane-sidhes remembered, before cancelling the mage-fire with a wave of her wand and turning back to Snape.

He was beginning to stir, tossing his head from side to side on the pillows, breathing raggedly. She felt his forehead; he was beginning to warm up, finally. Moron, she thought wryly. Serves him right for living in a walk-in freezer.

His eyelids fluttered, parted. She was suddenly transfixed by that black gaze, as she had been by Malfoy's silver eyes the day before. What is it about Slytherin men and their ability to do that with their eyes? It isn't fair.

"...Nadezhda," he murmured, and she realized that he was delirious. Sod it. "Nadezhda....losing the light...."

"Hush," she said, managing with Herculean effort to control her voice. "Hush, Severus. It's all right." His given name tasted strange in her mouth; she was so used to calling him Snape.

"...green eyes," he muttered, and broke off in a fit of coughing. She frowned. Her eyes were grey. Unless....

No. That's just ridiculous. You may be a closet romantic but you've better sense than that.

She sighed, slipped an arm around his quaking shoulders, helping him to sit up until the spasm eased. I am NOT going to think about this. I am just going to do what must be done, and then I am going to leave and teach his sodding class, and then I am going down to Hogsmeade and getting very, very drunk.

The thought grounded her again. She let...Severus...lie back, and poured the cooling potion into a glass. The sweet scent of verbena and bergamot almost overpowered the bitter wormwood. She knew it tasted of lemon and smoke; she had drunk it herself enough to remember. "Severus," she murmured, licking her lips as if to fix the taste of that name in her mind. "Can you drink this?"

His eyes fluttered open again, fever-bright. She helped him sit up again, held the glass while he drank. Twice he was interrupted by fits of coughing, but at length she'd poured most of it down his throat, and she was happier with the sound of his breathing than she had been.

"Nadezhda....he's in my mind...." he murmured.

"Who's in your mind?" she asked him gently.

"Don't know," he coughed. "Green eyes. Knows your name....won't give it up...."

"It's all right," she said quietly, although she now knew it wasn't, not at all. "It's all right, Severus, you're safe. Sleep."

"...losing the light, Nadezhda.....I'm falling...."

"I'll catch you," she heard herself say. "I won't let you fall."

Harry Potter looked stunned as he walked into the Potions classroom, flanked by his friends Weasley and Granger. "Professor Serenskaya?" he asked, incredulous.

Nastasya could just about trust her voice by now. "Yes, it's me," she said, as evenly as possible. "Professor Snape isn't well enough to teach today. I've been enlisted to take over."

Weasley and Longbottom gave little cheers at this, but Pansy Parkinson, who was forced in Malfoy's absence to sit alone, scowled fiercely. The rest of the Slytherins didn't seem to mind; she rather thought they'd admired the way she dealt with Malfoy's collapse. She didn't honestly care.

"Where had Professor Snape left off?" she asked, and began the lesson, and was intensely proud of herself as she managed to remain calm and collected all the way through. Potter came up to her after the bell had rung.

"So he is ill," he said conversationally.

Give me patience to deal with this, Merlin. I honestly like this kid but I cannot, I CANNOT listen to him trash Snape right now.

"I'm afraid he's got a touch of the flu that's going around." Potter nodded, and she was surprised to see no exultation in the famous green eyes. She had considered those green eyes when Snape had first mentioned them, but he had said the green-eyed man knew Nastasya's name as Nadezhda, and only one man with eyes the color of witch-apples knew that name.

"I can't believe I'm saying this," said Potter, weakly, "but I, uh, hope he's okay."

She felt such a rush of warm affection for Harry Potter that it was only with the utmost difficulty that she refrained from hugging him. She settled for a smile, a true smile, feeling it light her eyes. "Thank you, Harry," she said, aware of how odd that sounded. "So do I."

He grinned back, infectiously. "But don't tell him I said so."

"I wouldn't dream of it," she said truthfully. "Go on, you'll miss dinner."

"Aren't you coming?"

"No," she said. "I've got something I need to do."

Two things she needed to do. Fly, and get smashed out of her mind. She almost ran out of the main entrance, and transformed before she finished descending the steps. With the simplification of the world into a hawk's world, some of the roiling mass of emotional upheaval that threatened to drown her receded, and she was free to simply enjoy the sweet night wind between the primary feathers of her outstretched wings. Hawkflight was like a drug to her, always had been, since she first mastered the Animagus transformation at age thirteen (and wasn't that just amazing, since no one is supposed to be able to do it until after they've passed the NEWTs?). She had dealt with some of the most difficult times in her life by spending some time on the wing. It cleared her head and allowed her to see past her pain.

She flew for almost an hour before returning over the woods towards Hogsmeade, and landed in the courtyard of the Three Broomsticks to transform back. Her hair....her blood-colored hair...had come loose again, and was flowing down her back almost to her knees. She didn't care. She walked into the empty pub and sat down at the bar.

Madam Rosmerta came over to her. "Miss Serenskaya," she said, warmly. "Nice to see you again. How are you?"

Nastasya gave her a wry look. "I've been better," she said. "You got any Laphroaig?"

Rosmerta raised an eyebrow. "My," she said. "We don't get much call for that here. I must say, you've got taste, though." She produced a rather dusty bottle of what Nastasya considered the best single-malt whiskey in the known universe, and poured her a drink.

"Who else around here drinks this?" Nastasya asked, knocking it back. A pity to waste the taste, but she needed the effects more. Rosmerta refilled the glass without batting an eyelid.

"Severus Snape."

Silence stretched for a long moment. "Holy Merlin's bones," said Nastasya, and began to laugh. The laughter was close to tears when it began, and it became tears completely of a sudden, and Nastasya was horribly glad the Three Broomsticks was empty except for her and Rosmerta. The proprietress came around the bar and put her arms around Nastasya, and let her cling and howl for a while.

Eventually she regained some control, sniffing. "Sorry," she said thickly.

Madam Rosmerta handed her a handkerchief. "No need. Are you going to tell me what's wrong, or am I going to have to buy you another drink?"

"Both, I think," Nastasya gasped. "This is fucking typical. I try and drink to forget, and I'm not doing a very good job of it, am I?"

"Sweetie, have you got yourself in trouble?"

"No," she said, seriously. "Not yet." She looked into the amber depths of the glass, and took a deep breath, and began.

"I went to Hogwarts for four years," she told Rosmerta. "Snape was in his second year when I entered the school. I was sorted into Slytherin....with my parentage, there was little question about that.....and I suppose I sort of saw him as the embodiment of Slytherin House. I mean, here you have this scared little foreign girl who's just begun an entirely new life, very impressionable, very vulnerable, exposed to the society of someone like Severus." She hardly realized she'd used his first name. "He was so....I don't know. Proud, and haughty, and too good at what he did, and charismatic in a nasty sort of way. Not like the Malfoys. He was never prejudiced like the Malfoys; he hated not because someone's blood was impure, but because they were incompetent, or stupid, or just not as good at something as he thought they ought to be. He had little mercy, and no patience." She paused, sipped her drink, and remembered her cigarettes. Rosmerta lit one for her with a flick of her wand. "Thanks. But I remember him as just being Slytherin, and young fool that I was, I thought that was magnificent, and I wanted to be just like him. Even then, though, I could see that there was something dark in him; I think, now, he did what he did because at the time the Dark seemed so much more competent and powerful than the Light, and he was too good a strategist to ally himself with the losing side. He must have realized his mistake quite soon afterward, but it wasn't so easy to back out of. In any case, I was infatuated." She drew deeply on her cigarette, regarding the burning tip of it absently, seeing instead a classroom many years ago, and a pair of shadows merging into one. "I don't think either of us realized how deeply infatuated I was. He became my...friend, I suppose you would say, although friendship is not his thing. He would tease me mercilessly. My other friends kept telling me he was nothing more than an unpleasant slimeball with the manners of a dyspeptic adder—in those very words—but I thought, and I still think, that he was hurting me to make me stronger. It worked." The cigarette was down to the filter; she chained a second one. "I eventually admitted to him that I would happily die for him if the occasion arose. He sneered, which he's very good at doing, and proceeded to tell me that I was being ridiculous, and that he didn't care, and so on. I could tell that most of it was true; the he-didn't-care part I wasn't sure about. He's the reason I left Hogwarts." She swallowed the rest of her drink. Rosmerta refilled the glass, silently, her eyes never leaving Nastasya's face. "I transferred to Durmstrang. My parents were happy; they'd wanted me to go there in the first place. I was happy; I was far away from Severus and all the shit he, and I, had put me through. I met a boy called Radu Niakov, and fell in love with him. I convinced myself to fall in love with him, and it worked fairly well. He was going to marry me. Then, just before we graduated, I was told I had the opportunity to become an Auror."

She paused, crushed out the cigarette half-smoked. "I'd always wanted that, ever since I was a child. I think that might have been one of the things that made me so susceptible to Severus's charms, such as they were. He would have made an incredible Auror. He had everything it took: brains in abundance, ambition, drive, and an unswerving devotion to carrying out his duty, whether that duty was turning the Gryffindors' beds into giant slugs or saving the world from Voldemort." Rosmerta flinched at the name. "Sorry. I tend to think of him simply as the Great Arsehole, it makes things easier. Anyway, I was offered the chance to fulfill my dream, and I took it. But Radu never liked Aurors; his mother had been one, and it had ruined his parents' marriage and eventually killed her, painfully. He didn't want me to train as one. I was seventeen going on eighteen, and no one could tell me not to do what I had always wanted to, and I told him I was going ahead. He broke off the engagement and disappeared back into Moldavia. I know....now, at least....that he was hurt far worse than I was by that, but at the time it seemed grossly unfair and appallingly painful." She sipped at the whiskey again. "Am I boring you?"

"No," said Rosmerta quietly. "Go on."

"I began the training. It was fantastic. I worked with Alastor Moody himself, and Frank Longbottom, before....well, I worked with them, and they both told me I was really rather good. I had been in training for almost a year when a Death Eater caught me alone and unprotected, and did this." She rolled up her right sleeve, showing Rosmerta the long, twisted, rippled scar that stretched from her wrist to her collarbone. "I was lucky; he would have taken off my hand, but I rolled in time, and he only managed to sever most of the tendons in this arm. I killed him."

Rosmerta swallowed. "Go on."

"They fixed my arm, but they couldn't fix my head. I was ill for months, raving about red eyes in the darkness and the green light that would take the sun's place in the sky. Eventually I got over it, but I knew...and so did they....that I would never be an Auror." Nastasya rolled down the sleeve again, hiding the ugly scar. "I joined the Ministry as a Potions and Charms R&D researcher, and spent my spare time assisting in the early-stage training of young Auror candidates. I figured that if I couldn't do it I might as well help someone else to." Her voice dripped bitterness. "Life went on, and Harry Potter began to defeat Vol...sorry, The Arsehole, on a regular basis, and eventually Dumbledore needed a Defense against the Dark Arts teacher. After Moody....or Crouch pretending to be Moody....Dumbledore still liked the idea of someone with Auror training taking the position. He looked around, and there I was twiddling my thumbs, and he offered me the job. But the point is, something very strange has been happening, Rosmerta. There's some sort of flu that's taken the castle by storm....don't worry, I did an antimicrobe charm on myself before leaving the grounds....and I tried to do a Revelation Charm to see what the hell was going on, and if it was evil or not, and I saw nothing. Just blackness. Swirling blackness."

Rosmerta frowned. "Blackness? I thought..."

"So did I," said Nastasya. "I have no explanation for it at all, and neither does the Headmaster."

"Dumbledore doesn't know?"

"No," she said sadly. "He doesn't. And, Rosmerta.....Snape's ill. Very ill. I found him collapsed on his floor, unconscious. He was raving when he came to, about green eyes and falling. And he used my secret-name, the one I only tell my closest friends. Only two people know that name now that my parents are dead. Radu, and Snape. And Radu's got eyes so green they glow." She finished her whiskey again. "Snape said something in his delirium, something like....'he's in my head, and he knows your name,' and Merlin help me, I don't know how Radu could be in Snape's head, or even know who Snape is. I never spoke of him. Not once."

Rosmerta blinked, as if suddenly struck by a thought. "What did you say Radu's last name was?"

"Niakov. Or Niakoff. Depends where he's living."

Rosmerta pulled out a Daily Prophet from a stack under the bar. The date was two days ago. She riffled through until she found what she was looking for, but realization hit Nastasya like a Bludger, and she knew what Rosmerta was going to show her even before she read the word Obituaries at the top of the page.

Radu Niakoff, Ministry attache to Moldavia, after a short illness. Mr. Niakoff is survived by his wife, Lucire de Merisi Niakova, and his sister Carmilla Niakova.

"Merlin's blood," said Nastasya very calmly. "Well, that just explains everything, doesn't it?"

Harry wasn't feeling particularly well at dinner, and it got worse quickly. Ron found him shivering in the bathroom that evening, and scowled fiercely at him. "You look horrible," he said. "Are you okay?"

He shrugged. "I think it's the flu, or something. I'll be fine."

"You should go to Madame Pomfrey, Harry." Ron folded his arms and stared at him as he leaned on the washbasin and coughed so hard he was almost sick. "You sound really bad."

"I'm fine," he repeated. "Just tired." He didn't want to succumb to what Malfoy had clearly come down with. It was a matter of pride.

Ron dragged him out of the bathroom and made him sit down in front of the fire. "Hermione? Come tell Harry he's got to go to the nurse."

Hermione looked up, frowned. She set aside the Transfiguration take-home exam she was working on and joined them by the fire. "What's wrong?"

Harry looked up at her. He felt pretty dreadful, but he wasn't going to admit that without a fight. "Nothing," he said. "Got a touch of the flu. Ron's being all motherly," he added, and had to duck as Ron took a swing at him. Hermione put her hand on his forehead.

"Harry, you're burning up." She looked at Ron, worry making her eyes huge. "Ron, help me get him to the hospital wing."

Ron grinned at him. "See? Majority rule. Come on, Harry." He pulled him to his feet, held on to him as he swayed briefly. He gave up the unequal fight, and let them drag him along the corridors to the hospital wing. It was still brightly lit and busy, despite the lateness of the hour, and Harry had never seen so many kids there at one time. It looked like more than half the school was sick. Hermione and Ron took him into Madame Pomfrey's office.

"Um," said Ron. "Harry's not feeling too well." The nurse looked up, gave Harry a wry smile.

"You too?" she asked. "You've held out longer than most. Come on, let's get you settled." She led Harry to one of the empty beds and helped him undress. "How are you feeling really? Is it just the headache, or have you got the sore throat and the cough as well?"

"All of it," he admitted. The sheets did feel awfully good against his hot skin, and the dizziness was better when he was lying down. Hermione and Ron had followed them, and were regarding the nurse with a mixture of concern and relief.

"Is he going to be all right?" asked Hermione.

"Oh, yes," said Madame Pomfrey. "He'll be fine. You two run along now. You don't want to catch this too."

The last thing Harry remembered was drinking the potion Madame Pomfrey gave him; after that the world receded for a while, and he didn't dream.