Kyra

Once she had got over her surprise that he had returned for their second appointment at all, Kyra almost got used to her brother's visits to her house.

As a student, he was downright uncomplicated – not hugely talented, as he himself would have been the first to admit, but punctual to the minute, content with everything she suggested, and more diligent than all her other students taken together.

He was also a very unassuming guest. It was clear that he deliberately avoided running across her family, because he never lingered beyond the agreed time, and never expressed any curiosity about them. But she certainly wasn't ready for that encounter yet, either, so she didn't mind at all.

Gravity hung around him like a cloak, accentuated by the unchanging black of his attire. Sometimes Kyra thought she could see a deep sadness in his dark eyes. More often they looked shuttered, as if to repulse any attempt to find out what went on in the mind behind them. But in a strange way, reticence suited him. Maybe the most remarkable thing about him was that he had a very rare gift of keeping silences that felt natural rather than awkward. Kyra would never have thought that she could feel so comfortable talking to a person who barely talked back.

It was easy to forget that in terms of everything other than their music, they were both still walking a tightrope. There was a morass of resentment, hurt and reproach underneath it, waiting for either of them to waver and fall, and Kyra had no idea how she, for one, would extricate herself from it if it happened.

Then again, it was absurd to be sitting here in her own living room with her brother next to her week after week, and not try to iron some of that out. How would she ever get answers, if she didn't ask?

They were packing up their instruments at the end of their third lesson when she plucked up her courage and did.

"By the way…" She fiddled with the tension on her bow to avoid his eyes. "Did you ever get my letter?"

He was silent for so long that she had to look up eventually. His face was a mask. "Yes," he replied then, and clicked his cello case shut as if that was all there was to be said.

"I hoped you'd come," Kyra said quietly, "but -"

"- but you got a pair of Aurors instead."

She thought of the mysterious cloaked figures on the fringes of their mother's funeral. "If we're talking about the same people, four."

Severus raised his eyebrows. "I'm flattered."

"Who exactly are they, again?" The term wasn't familiar at all.

"People you don't want to cross."

"What happens if you do?"

"They'll stand on your hand, so you can't run away."

Both their eyes automatically went to look at the result. A number of pieces fell into place. "Good grief," Kyra said. "You were on the run from the law?"

"And the owl nearly gave me away."

Was there a note of reproach in his voice? He must know that she couldn't possibly have wanted to cause him harm by sending him the message about their mother's death, but it seemed that she had.

"But they're not – I mean, no one's after you now, are they?"

"If you mean the Ministry of Magic – no. I've been meek as a lamb recently."

Kyra's head was spinning. It seemed that Albus Dumbledore had been guilty of a gross understatement in his letter to her. 'Find his feet', indeed. Try as she might, Kyra could not bring herself to think of her little brother as a wanted criminal, nor even as a reformed criminal. What on earth had happened to make him first the one and then the other?

For a moment, he seemed undecided whether to acknowledge or ignore her unspoken question. "In your orchestra -" he began then.

"Yes?" She wondered at the sudden change of subject but went with it, mostly because she didn't know what else to say.

"- one man waves a wooden stick, and fifty people instantly jump to do his bidding. Correct?"

She would have laughed at his choice of words, but that didn't seem right, so she merely nodded.

"And you're one of those who do."

She nodded again.

"Why?"

"Because – " It was harder than she had expected to answer that in one concise sentence. "Because that's how it works," she tried. "Someone's got to call the tune, literally in this case. You can't play symphonic music if you let fifty people do what they each think is best."

"And what is it that makes you so ready give up your autonomy to the man with the stick?"

Kyra thought of Simon, his inexhaustible energy, his unorthodox ideas, his unrelenting precision, and his broad, highly contagious smile. "Quite frankly, because he's a great artist. He turns us into a force that's so much stronger than the sum of our parts, if you know what I mean. I'd be a fool not to want to be part of that."

"And do you find it easy?"

"Not always," Kyra replied truthfully, still wondering where this was going. "But if it's the right person in charge, it pays off every time. It's liberating as well, to be honest," she added in an afterthought. "It gives you a place and a purpose. It's nice not to have to constantly question where you belong."

"In short, 'I'd much rather be part of something that's greater than myself than be great on my own account'?"

She smiled. "Yes, quite." She was surprised to learn that this had resonated so much with him that he still remembered her exact words, weeks later.

"Then what would you do if you found out that the man with the stick, the great artist, the leader whom you look up to as a demigod, does not deserve a shred of your loyalty?"

"I'd get out of there as fast as I could."

"There you are."

In the silence that followed, he picked up the cello case with one hand and the score from the music stand with the other. "And now I'd better get going, it's late."

He saw himself out. He had to, because Kyra had sunk back down onto her chair with her head in her hand, thunderstruck.

Kyra's thoughts revolved around little else in the days that followed. She had never before regretted dropping out of the wizarding world, but now she wished she had access to that newspaper of theirs with the funny moving photographs, or to the Wizarding Wireless Network that her mother had sometimes tuned in to during housework. Maybe they could have told her something about the demigod with the wooden stick, who had commanded the loyalty of many and yet deserved none of it.

She supposed that she could write to Albus Dumbledore and demand that he enlighten her about the specifics of why her brother always wore black and never laughed. But she suspected that he would at best speak in riddles, and at worst point out that truth was sometimes painful and often hard to come by, which would not even be news to her.

It was difficult to gauge what exactly amounted to trouble with the law in the wizarding world, too. Witches and wizards, Kyra remembered, had somewhat flexible moral standards. The way they messed with people's memories alone had always creeped her out. She knew that they did it regularly to protect their world from discovery by non-magical people, and she had spent the first days and weeks at her aunt Theresa's in constant terror that agents from the Ministry of Magic would turn up and wipe the entire memory of the first eleven years of her life from her mind. She had always hated having a wand pointed at her, even for such harmless things as fixing a torn sleeve or drying off rain-soaked clothes. So if it was all right to steal people's memories from them, how did witches and wizards even define right and wrong?

But there was a prison in the magical world, too, guarded by horrific, faceless creatures that destroyed people's souls. And if breaking that iron rule of silence and secrecy could land you there, it was unlikely that the Ministry of Magic would treat other offences with laxity.

Just how far had the mysterious man with the stick and his followers gone?

TBC