*** Bonus chapter today! ***
He does not see the boy. But he hears of him occasionally. How he has entered Auror training, how the Ministry has waived the usual N.E.W.T. requirements. How he has made a home in London, in that house that once belonged to Black, the house where he himself had once intruded, found the letter from Lily and stolen her signature along with a photograph of her, laughing as she always had in life.
Two years pass. A new century begins. The boy must be twenty, a fledgling Auror who makes occasional appearances in the Daily Prophet for tracking down remaining Death Eaters and Snatchers. The photographs in the paper show a boy less slight than before, growing into his frame. He looks handsome, even dashing, carrying himself with confidence. The cloak of adulthood becomes him. His eyes remain the same.
Always an aloof man, students do not throng around him. But neither do they look away, fearing what will happen if they meet his eyes, as they had during that last terrible year with him as headmaster, overseeing a reign of terror – in reality, his attempt to prevent it becoming worse, his promise to Dumbledore.
He guides students through their exams, to pass out of Hogwarts and into the wider world, starting lives, careers. The burden of cruelty has lifted. He no longer needs to play the role the Dark Lord cast him in, enemy of certain students. But, he finds, he has no skills to be affable, to be nice, exactly, that he is still most students' least favourite professor. At least he is not as hated as before.
He can play out the rest of his life here, avoiding unpleasantness, measuring his days like his potions, scanning the newspaper avidly for a glimpse of the boy. The articles about him become less frequent than before. Most of the Dark Lord's followers have been rounded up. He supposes the boy must have a near ordinary life now. Perhaps even a girlfriend, he thinks with distaste. He will not attempt to intrude upon it again.
They meet in his dreams, of course. He cannot help intruding there. His dreams leave him suffocated with longing, tangled in his sheets on hands and knees, sweaty, sticky, ashamed of the desires of his greedy heart.
Then there are the other dreams, the ones where the boy did not find him, where he did not staunch the bleeding. In these, his life spills on the splintered floor of the shack, blood and tears and regret, leaving him a dried-out carapace, a shrivelled corpse no one needs. When he wakes from these dreams he passes the days after in despair. He was saved, the boy saved him, but he cannot imagine what the point was, if he is never to see him.
*** To be continued. ***