10

April, 2031.

Harry Potter came face to face with his wife's problems for the first time on the second day of April. He was no longer allowed the somewhat dubious pleasure of self-denial or hiding from things.

It was his lunch break, and he was eating in the Ministry cafeteria with Lisa, Susan Bones, and a couple other assistant prosecutors called Jack Sloper and Andrew Kirke. They were discussing the likelihood of the Ministry offering departmental pay raises, when his Muggle mobile phone vibrated in his pocket. Harry had always kept in touch with his Muggle-raised roots and had a Samsung Universe that he had purchased last week. It was charmed to work in magical areas by having the battery pack shielded; something very technical the spell creation division tried to explain to him, but which went right over his head.

He excused himself to the table and stepped out into the hallway.

"Is this Mister Harry James Potter?" a crisp official-sounding voiced snapped in his ear.

"Yes," Harry answered, now on guard.

"This is Dr Joseph Mengler at St Mary's Hospital in Glasgow. I'm sorry to say that your wife Ginevra has been admitted here."

"Ginny? What for?"

"It would really be better if you came here, Mr Potter," Mengler said, still sounding as though he was discussing nothing more important than picking up a pair of shoes. "Ask for me at the front desk when you arrive."

"Yes, okay," Harry said, feeling dazed. What the hell was Ginny doing way up in Glasgow, anyway?

He hung up the phone without saying good bye and walked slowly back into the cafeteria. Everything seemed off, somehow—the white walls of the cafeteria too bright, the clank of silverware too loud, the smell of the curry someone was eating in a corner too sharp.

James was sticking close to home, at least for the time being. Having been kicked out of Hogwarts had made him surlier than ever, and Harry's punishment—no spending money at all—had seriously curtailed any recreational activities he might have engaged in. Harry had also taken away the invisibility cloak that James, as eldest son, had taken to Hogwarts. After learning from girls' testimony what the boy had been up to … well, who was to say James might not take the cloak and do something like spy on girls in changing rooms or other such dubious activities along those lines? At least none of the girls he had engaged in his extracurricular fun with had been forced. Small blessing, but one took one's comforts were one could.

Then, last night, James had left again. This time he had just Apparated away without telling anyone where he was going. He was still gone when Harry had left for work this morning, and Harry had put a discrete word in with Neville Longbottom, head of the Aurors, to be on the lookout for him. He had also kept his mobile on, in case James called home. Harry really hadn't wanted to go to work, but he didn't want to sit around at home doing nothing, either, so here he was.

Now, instead of James, it was Ginny who was in trouble this time. What had happened? And again, what was she doing way the hell up in Glasgow?

Deciding the only way he was going to find out was by going there Harry went back over to the table and explained the situation to Lisa. She gave him the rest of the day off and told him to get out of there.

When Harry got to the hospital he asked to see Dr Mengler (very unfortunate name for a doctor, Harry thought), and was shown down a white corridor into a small white room. In Harry's experience, being shown into a small white room was never a good thing. He wished again and not for the first time of late for a cigarette. Even a god damn Carlton would've sufficed, for Merlin's sweet sake.

Five minutes later an angular man with a crew cut bounced into the room. He was wearing crisp white scrubs and a Caduceus pin on his lapel. Horn-rimmed glasses rested on the end of his slightly bulbous nose, and he seemed to always be in some kind of motion.

"Mr Potter?" the man asked, holding out his hand. "I'm Dr Mengler. Thank you for coming so promptly."

"Yes, that's me. What happened to my wife?"

Mengler took the chair across from Harry, his hands drumming a restless rhythm on the table. "I'm afraid the news isn't very good at all," he said, his voice sombre. "Your wife was found this morning by a hotel housekeeper. She was on the bathroom floor. She had intercourse with almost twenty different men, judging by the sperm types we obtained. She had been sodomized repeatedly, causing tearing. Her face had suffered a number of contusions, leading us to think that her participation in this … act was not entirely voluntary. And her blood alcohol level was very high, as well.."

"Oh God," Harry whispered. He had seen such things before in his work as an Auror, but it was entirely different when it was a member of your family. Things like this weren't supposed to happen to you, because you were inside a magic circle of protection. Policemen on both sides and doctors cheerfully and blindly compartmentalised as much as anyone else.

"What's the prognosis?" Harry asked, forcing himself to come back to the present. The doctor was eyeing him with a blank face— the face of one who must distance himself from the very human tragedies he faced every day, or else go insane. Harry wondered how compartmentalised his own life was.

"Physically, she will be fine. I suspect you will want to remove her to St Mungo's Hospital down in London, whose staff can deal with such injuries better than we are able. Emotionally and psychologically, her state is unknown, as she is still unconscious. But, Mr Potter, my recommendation is to seek help for her. An ordeal such as the one she has gone through often leaves scars, not all of them visible, and often might have root causes not apparent.."

"Yes, I know," Harry said, repressing with difficulty the urge to lay his head on the table and give up. Mengler bounced his foot on the floor in an irritating rhythm. A cart with a rattling wheel rolled by outside the door of the small white room. "May I go see her now?"

"Yes, you may. There is also a constable named McCloud who will wish to speak with you, once you are ready."

Harry nodded. It was SOP in sexual assault cases. "Where is she?"

"Right this way, Mr Potter," Mengler said, and led him out the door.

# # #

After his discussion with the constable, which really accomplished nothing since Harry had no clue where she had been the night before, Ginny was remanded into the care of St Mungo's. They fed her potions and cast some healing spells, and within about three hours all her soft tissue damage had been repaired.

Harry, meanwhile, had sat, blank faced, at her bedside, waiting until they were alone. He was not happy with her. He didn't blame her for what the men had done to her, but still. She was out fucking around instead of trying to heal their family. What are you doing to try and heal your family, then? A snide voice asked inside his head. You're just burying your head in the sand hoping it'll all go away, just like a damned Dursley. Way to go, Potter.

Harry gave an internal snort. Seemed he hadn't escaped his upbringing nearly as well as he thought he had, after all.

Ginny declined talking to a psychiatrist and demanded to be taken home. Harry tried pressing the point, but she wouldn't hear of it. So, very much against his will, Harry was forced to accede to his wife's wishes and side-along Apparated her home. It was, after all, her choice, and Harry couldn't force her.

When they got there, Ginny immediately went off to see Lily, who was back to using colouring books. She did not talk about what had happened the night before, and would not allow Harry to speak of it. She changed the subject, and if Harry persisted, she got up and left the room. Frustrated, Harry went to his home office and drank two shots of firewhisky. He was at his wits end and had no clue what to do.

Normally he would call Hermione for advice, but he did not want to bring outsiders into his family troubles if he could help it. More of the goddamn Dursleys' influence, he guessed. Hermione was also quite busy these days, and had drifted apart from him in recent years. Ron had, also, begun drifting away. After the war, he was the one who had changed most. He was now timid and all his Gryffindor courage seemed to have deserted him. He was content to live life as a small town shopkeeper with his teacher wife. It was almost a shame.

Harry Potter sighed to himself, poured another shot of firewhisky, and contemplated the destruction of his family. And in the silence of his office, listening to the artificially gay sounds of cartoons filtering in through the wall, he began to wonder, for the first time, if it was worth saving.

# # #

The old man stood halfway down the aisle of the dog pound as Roger MacBride came up to meet him. He seemed utterly unaffected by the smells of fur and urine, the loud barking and the hundred different strays throwing themselves against the mesh of their cages, howling and yapping. Roger pegged the fellow as a dog lover right off. His smile was sweet and pleasant. He carefully offered Roger a hand which was bunched and swollen with arthritis, and Roger shook it in the same spirit.

"Hello, sir," Roger said, raising his voice over the din. "Noisy as hell, isn't it?"

"I don't mind," the old man said. "My name is Archibald Craven."

"MacBride. Roger MacBride. Come on in the office here. It's a little quieter and smells better too."

In the office, Roger heard a story which was predictable but nevertheless affecting. Archibald Craven was in his seventies. He had come to Greaves when his wife died. He was lonely, his only friend being the boy who came to his house and read to him. Back in Essex, he had owned a beautiful golden retriever. Now, he had a house with a good-sized and fenced back garden. And he had read in the paper … was it possible that he could…

"Well, we don't have any retrievers. They go fast because they're so good with kids—"

"Of course, I understand."

"But I do have a half-grown German Shepherd pup. How would that be?"

Craven's eyes grew moist. "That would be perfect," he said, sniffing.

"The dog itself is free, but there is a fee for distemper and rabies shots. Nothing too drastic, though—only fifteen pounds."

"That seems reasonable."

"Sure. We think so. Same dog would cost you about two hundred pounds in a pet shop. People go there instead of here, though. They're paying for a set of papers, of course." Roger shook his head. "If they only knew how many fine dogs are destroyed each year…"

"You shoot them?"

"No. We give them gas. We can't keep them longer than sixty days. They don't feel a thing."

Craven offered a peculiar smile, and for a moment—it was rather silly—Roger felt a chill. "No," he said. "I'm sure they don't."

# # #

Al's seat in Mathematics and Arithmancy was the third desk in the second row. He sat there, trying to keep his face expressionless, as Professor Powers passed back their exam sheets. But his ragged fingernails were trying to bite into his palms again, and his entire body seemed to be running with a slow, acidic sweat.

Don't be an idiot. There's no way you could've passed, he thought, watching with increasing doom as the professor advanced up the aisles, passing sheets left and right.

Nevertheless, he could not squash the foolish hope. It had been the first M&A exam in weeks which looked like it had been written in something other than Sanskrit. He was sure that in his nervousness (nervousness? Call it what it had really been: outright terror) that he hadn't really done that well, but maybe… well, if it had been anyone but Powers, who had a calculator for a heart…

STOP IT! He screamed at himself. For a moment, a cold, horrible moment, he was sure he had screamed it aloud into the nearly silent classroom. You flunked, nothing is going to change that, you'd better accept it! You flunked!

Al had done as Snape (ordered) suggested, and gone to all his teachers. Each of them had peered sternly at him and outlined nightmarish scenarios—being held back a year; having to take make up exams at the beginning of the next year, and worst of all, summer school—if he didn't get his marks back up. He didn't tell them that grades were the least of his worries; if he got found out, he was probably going to jail. But he had smiled and looked humble and told them he would do his best. And behind his eyes he felt that hot, impotent anger, pulsing like a tumour.

Finally the professor was at Al's row. He handed over the sheet without expression and moved on.

Al stared down at the parchment on his desk. He couldn't muster up the courage to flip it over and come face to face with his failure. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His heart seemed to come to a standstill.

At last, with a convulsive jerk, he flipped the sheet over so aggressively that it tore.

In the upper right corner was a number in a circle: 83. Below that was a letter: E. Below that was a brief notation:

Good improvement! Check errors carefully. At least three were arithmetical rather than conceptual.

His heartbeat began again, at triple time. Relief washed over him, but it was not good relief—it was hot and complicated and strange. He closed his eyes, ignoring the buzz over the exam as students fought and dickered over an extra point—the usual post-exam dance of schools everywhere. Al saw redness behind his eyes, pulsing with his heartbeat. In that moment he hated Snape more than ever before. He snapped his hands into cold fists and he wished, wished, wished that Snape's scrawny chicken neck had been between them.

# # #

Harry and Ginny Potter had twin beds separated by a nightstand on which stood a lamp in the shape of a Crumple-horned Snorkack, with the two light bulbs being its eyes. Luna had given it to them as a wedding present, with a completely straight face, although Harry swore there was laughter behind her usually serene expression. It was hard to tell with that girl though. Harry had known her since 1995, when she had organized the West Country Resistance Movement, and he still couldn't get a read on her half the time.

Harry was sitting against the pillows, a wireless set of ear buds in his ears as he watched the television, which was about as thick as a bathroom mirror and mounted on the wall across the room. Ginny was in the next bed, curled up and reading an old book with a gothic castle on the cover.

James had finally come home that evening. He refused to answer questions about where he'd been, responding only: "Out," when pressed about it. Another shouting match had ensued, this time led by Harry, who was amazed to find himself shouting at his sons, when he had made a smug vow to himself that he never would. Not after life with the Dursleys. His shouting had been met with impenetrable teenage blankness, and when, after repeated questions had failed to gain him an answer, Harry had given up and told James to go to bed, the boy had turned without a word and banged up the stairs.

There had been a glassy-eyed quality to his stare that Harry hadn't liked, and he thought with a sinking feeling that it wouldn't be long before James got himself arrested on a serious drug bust; Just what he needed.

Al was still cheerful, though subdued, choosing to spend most of his time in his room, or out in the park, or reading to Mr Craven. When asked what he thought about his older brother's behaviour, he had exhibited wisdom beyond his years when he said: "Dad, you can't make other people's mistakes for them. James will either pull out of it or not. I know that sucks to hear, but it's true." And Harry, who felt a little choked up, could only nod and pat his son on the shoulder.

"I know, son. I just wish there was something more I could do. Our family is falling apart and I seem helpless to stop it."

Ginny's drinking had also continued, from a cocktail after dinner, to almost a full bottle before bed. She had not been found sprawled out in the kitchen table again, at least. Harry suspected his son's intervention there; perhaps watering down the bottles of liquor with water. All it would take would be a simple switching spell.

Lily was now almost totally uncommunicative, living in a childlike haze that even Luna could not penetrate. It was with a heavy heart that Harry had to withdraw her from Hogwarts School. If things continued, his poor baby girl might have to be enrolled in one of those schools for autistic children with her magic bound. There had been, thankfully, no outbursts of accidental magic. Luna theorized that it was because she had regressed to an age where she wasn't aware of magic any more.

"Harry?" Ginny's voice said quietly.

On the screen of the television, a new sitcom family was engaged in comic adventures. Harry smiled, wistful. His own family couldn't be like that anymore.

"Harry."

"Yeah?" He removed the ear buds and looked over at his wife. She looked back, and Harry realized that she was here, suddenly all here, looking back at him clearly for what seemed the first time in years. She's going to finally talk to me, he thought, and his heart felt much lighter.

Only for it to sink back down again when she spoke.

"Do you think Al's all right?" she asked.

Never mind Al, Harry wanted to shout. What about you? What about us? What about this whole family?

"I think he's remarkably well, given the circumstances," Harry intoned, a slight cold edge to his voice that Ginny seemed to ignore.

"Well, he's lost weight. And sometimes I hear him groaning in the night."

"Well, he does look a little scrawny. Remember what I was like at his age?"

"You think he's just growing?"

"And without all the starvation I went through, he'll probably end up taller than me. As for the groaning in the night, do you think he might be having nightmares?"

"Yeah." She smiled weakly. "I hear him when I go down the use the downstairs john. I know it's silly, but my grandmother always said you could drive someone insane if you woke them up in the middle of a bad dream."

"Why don't you just use the bathroom up here?" He had put it in himself, when he had expanded the house.

"You know the flush always wakes you up."

"So don't flush it."

"Harry! That's nasty."

He sighed.

"Sometimes, when I go in, he's tossing and turning. And his sheets are damp."

He grinned in the dark, his first real grin for a while. "I bet."

"What … Oi. That's nasty, too. Besides, he's only thirteen."

"Fourteen next month. He's a little precocious but not too young."

"How old were you?"

"I don't remember exactly; fourteen or fifteen. But I remember thinking I'd died and went to heaven. Luckily I was at school; I didn't really fancy finding out how the Dursleys would've felt had I left stains on their sheets."

"You were older than Al is now."

"All that stuff has been happening younger for a while. I heard from Hermione that they had started putting sanitary napkin dispensers in primary schools when she was Lily's age. It must be the fluoride or something. How old were you when you started?"

"I don't remember. Al's dreams don't sound like he died and went to heaven, though."

"Did you ask him about them?"

"Once … a couple of weeks ago… He said he didn't remember, but he had the oddest expression. I think he did."

"Ginny, I did my best to put most of my dear dead youth behind me, but one thing I know is that wet dreams aren't always pleasant."

"How's that?"

"Guilt. All kind of guilt. Possibly all the way back from when he was a baby and we made it clear that wetting the bed was wrong. Then there's the sex thing. Who knows what brings a wet dream on? Looking up a girl's dress in Hogsmeade? Brushing up against a girl on the bus? Who knows? The one I most clearly remember was me doing a Wronski Feint and then losing my robes and pants on the way down."

"You got off on that?" she asked, giggling a little, her first laugh in what felt like forever.

"Yeah. So if the kid doesn't want to talk to you about his John Thomas problems, don't force him. We've done our best to try and raise our kids without all that crazy guilt. But wizarding society, even with all the changes since it came out of the closet, is still pretty conservative. We Brits don't like giving up our traditions. And even though we've done our best, they still pick guilt up, like the germs they brought home in primary school. The way their teachers mince around certain subjects, or even your mum and dad. 'Don't touch it in the night, Al, or you'll start growing hair on your palms and you'll start to go blind, and eventually your thing will just rot off. So be careful, Al.'"

"Hey! He wouldn't do that!"

"Like hell," Harry said, grinning a little. "I heard him at it. Just like your grandmother telling you that you might drive somebody round the twist if you woke them up in the middle of a bad dream. Even my aunt, who never had any good advice to give anyone, told me to always wipe off the rim of a public toilet before using it so I wouldn't catch other people's germs. I bet your grandmother laid that one on you, too."

"No, my mother," Ginny said absently. "And she told me to always flush, which is why I go downstairs."

"It still wakes me up," Harry mumbled.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Harry was almost across the threshold of sleep when Ginny called his name again.

"What?" he asked, slightly irritated.

"Could you … could you please hold me?

Harry came fully awake and sat up on one elbow. There was a neediness and vulnerability in his wife's voice that he'd never heard; it reminded him of himself in those horrible days after she had dragged him out of his pity party.

Silently, he pulled her into his bed and she burrowed against him. He felt dampness as she began to cry into his chest.

"Ginny?"

"I'm sorry, Harry. I'm sorry for being such a shitty wife to you for all these years and making you have to look elsewhere, for you having to find out about my little trips and … oh I'm just so sorry for everything." She cried some more—a deep, bawling, bewildered sound.

"And now our family is coming to pieces and I think a lot of it is partially my fault and I don't know what to do and … oh Harry…"

Harry continued to hold her, stroking her beautiful hair, which was still fiery red with only a few grey strands. He wasn't overly surprised to hear that she had known about Lisa; he had, after all, not gone to a great amount of trouble to hide the affair. He was more interested in why she had finally at least partially acknowledged the problems they were going through and finally noticed the elephant in the middle of the lounge.

Harry continued to stroke her hair, murmuring nonsense soothing words, until she finally quieted. She raised her head off his now very damp pyjama shirt and looked at him. Her face was even blotchier and puffier than Lisa's was when she cried.

"What brought that on?" Harry wondered, reaching into the nightstand drawer and handing her a tissue.

Ginny blew her nose, a surprisingly loud foghorn sound from such a little woman. "I don't know," she said. "I guess … talking about Al and how basically normal he is compared to the rest of us … I guess I just got tired of pretending."

"We should have done that years ago," Harry couldn't help but add.

"I know," Ginny said. She looked sad. "And I wonder how much of Lily's … problem is our fault, too."

"She saw you last year. In Cardiff … Dancing in a pub."

Her wide eyes came up to his. "No. How did you find out?"

"Luna told me last week. I asked her if there was anything-anything at all she could tell me. She said Lily told her at school that she was worried we thought of her and her brothers as mistakes."

"Oh…" Ginny sniffled again. "We've made a right proper mess of things, haven't we?"

Harry couldn't argue. They certainly had.

They were silent for a while, just regarding each other in the dark room.

"I found out about you and Lisa three years ago. You said her name in your sleep. I lay awake all night thinking about that. I couldn't very well throw any stones, could I? Not without being the world's grandest hypocrite."

Harry wisely didn't comment.

"Have you any ideas on how we can fix this mess?"

"Just bringing it out into the open is a start," Harry said. "We can discuss it more later, after we each have some sleep. Nobody ever makes rational decisions at three in the morning."

She smiled wanly. "I suppose not. Can I sleep here with you?"

"Of course you can," Harry said, raising the covers.

Ginny crawled in and spooned against his front. And, after a long while, they slept.

# # #

"Stop staring out the window. There is nothing out there to interest you," Snape said.

Al stared at him, once more sullen. On the table in front of him, his history text lay open, displaying a colour plate of British soldiers in pie plate World War I helmets. Many of them were grinning proud, patriotic grins, off to do their part in fighting back the Huns. Alvin Potter was not grinning, however.

"You like being a slave driver, don't you?"

"I like being a free man," Snape replied. "Study."

"Suck my cock."

"As a boy," Snape said, "I would've had my mouth washed with lye soap for saying such a thing."

"Times change."

"Do they?" Snape sipped his whisky. Study."

"Shut up!" Al snapped his book shut. It made a harsh snapping sound in Snape's kitchen. "I can't ever catch up in time, anyway, not before the test. There's fifty pages of this shit left, all the way up to 1930. I'll make a cheat sheet at lunch tomorrow or something."

"You will do no such thing!" Snape barked.

"Who's going to stop me, you?"

"Boy, you still don't comprehend the stakes we play for. Do you think I enjoy keeping your snotty, whiny nose in your books? I hated it back when I was a teacher, and I hate it now." His voice rose, whipsawing, demanding, and commanding. "Do you think I enjoy listening to your tantrums, your kindergarten swears? 'Suck my cock,'" Snape mimicked savagely in a high, falsetto voice that made Al flush with anger. "'Who cares, I'll do it tomorrow, suck my cock!'"

"You like it!" Al shouted back. "The only time you don't feel like a zombie is when you're on my back! So give me a fucking break, okay?"

"If you are caught with one of those cheat sheets, who do you think will be told first? What do you think will happen?

Al stared at his hands, with their chewed fingernails, and didn't reply.

"Who?"

"You know. Duckie Howie, I guess. Then my parents."

Snape nodded. "And then what do you think will happen? Put that cheat sheet in your head, where it belongs."

"I hate you," Al muttered, but he opened up his book again, the old English tommies grinning out from under their helmets, ready to show everybody that while the British Empire might be going down and out, it was far from dead.

"That's a good boy," Snape said, his voice almost tender as he rocked with his cupful of whisky in his lap.

# # #

Al Potter had his first wet dream on the last night of April, and he emerged from it, clawing and gasping, to the sound of the last cold rain of the month sloshing down the gutters he and his father had repaired last fall.

In the dream, he had been at Brecon, standing in one of the underground laboratories. He was naked, standing by a cold steel autopsy table. On the table, a young girl of exquisite, almost ethereal form was strapped. Her head was covered in an oxygen tent.

Standing across from him and wearing nothing but a butcher's apron stained with unidentifiable gunk was Snape. When he turned to check the monitoring equipment, Al saw his scrawny, hair-covered old man's buttocks grinding at each other like misshapen white stones. When he turned back, he handed something to Al. Although he had never seen it, Al recognized it immediately.

It was a dildo. It was made of metal, and it glittered coldly in the torchlight like some obscure implement of torture. The dildo was hollow, and snaking out the base was a long cord ending in a squeeze bulb.

"It's all right," Snape said in the dream. "Go ahead. The dark Lord says it's your reward for studying."

Al looked down at himself. His small penis was standing up at an angle from the thin down of his pubic hair. He slipped the dildo on, and it shrank to fit snugly. It was tight, but there was some kind of lubricant in there. It felt warm and slick and delightful. Just the thing.

He looked down at the masked girl and suddenly felt as though his thoughts had slipped into a perfect groove. All things seemed right. The doors of perception had been opened. He would go through them.

He got his knees on the table and paused, gauging the angle. His ridiculous engorgement jutted out from his slight, winter-pale boy's body.

Dimly, as though in another world, he heard Snape reciting: "Test run, sixty-eight. Sexual stimulus, metabolism, magical capacity, mental ability. Based on the Rookwood theory of negative reinforcement. Subject is a young half-blood girl, thirteen years of age, clinically autistic, no scars, no other identifying marks—"

The girl cried out when the end of the dildo touched her. She struggled to free herself, or lacking that, to try and bring her legs together. The cry was pleasant. Her struggles were pleasant.

This is the kind of thing they couldn't show in the magazines, Al thought, but it's there anyway.

Al thrust into her with an abrupt movement. She screeched like a siren. After her initial efforts to free herself, the girl lay rigid, enduring, silent. The lubricated interior of the dildo rubbed with almost painful pleasure against his arousal. His fingers toyed with the rubber bulb in his left hand.

In the distance, Al could hear Snape reciting pulse, respiration, brain waves, magical build-up, and stroke count.

As the climax began to build with delirious suddenness inside him, Al became perfectly still and squeezed the bulb. The girl arched off the table, as a crackling discharge of magical energy blasted out of the end of the dildo with a snap, like the sound of a foot breaking a thin rime of ice on a pond. Her arms and legs thrummed, her belly vibrated and her small breasts heaved.

And as the climax roared over him with cataclysmic suddenness the mask shifted and he saw that the girl was his sister, and the horror of that realization only added to the intensity and it was the end of the world, thundering apocalypse…

He woke to the distant sound of an early spring thunderstorm and the rain still rushing down the gutters. He was huddled in a hot, dark ball on his side and there was a feeling of wetness both on his cheeks and on his lower belly and he became coldly sure that he was bleeding to death.

Then with cringing disgust, he realized what that wetness lower down actually was. Jizz … Cum … Jungle juice … Words from overheard conversations and bathroom stalls.

His hands balled helplessly into fists. His dream climax recurred to him, strength less and pallid, frightening. Was he really that sick? That final scene was both compelling and horrifying, like a bite into a fruit which you realize (a second too late) is only so amazingly sweet because it is rotten. He couldn't ever do something like that, could he?

Yet nerves still sang, retreating from their spike point.

It came to him then. What he would have to do. What he would have to do to get himself back. He would have to kill Snape. That was the only answer.

"Kill him and it's all over," he whispered into the rainy dark. Games were done, story time over. This was all about survival now.

"Yes sir," he whispered again, semen drying on his belly and his eyes open wide, staring at the ceiling as he listened to the rain.

Snape always kept three or four bottles of Highland Black on a shelf over the cellar stairs. He would open the door (usually two sheets to the wind, more often than not), and lean out over those stairs to grab a bottle, keeping one hand on the shelf for support and using the other to grab the neck. The cellar was hard-packed dirt which Snape oiled every couple of months to keep the bugs from breeding down there. But, dirt or cement, old men's bones break easily. And old men are prone to accidents. The post-mortem would show that Mr "Craven" had had a skinful of booze when he fell.

"What happened, Al?"

"I went over to visit him. He gave me a key 'cause sometimes he falls asleep in the afternoon. I called his name, and he didn't answer, so I went into the kitchen and … and—" Then tears.

They would believe it. Sure they would. What was not to believe? He would have himself back again; it would all be over.

Al lay in the dark and kept listening to the ceaseless sound of the rain. He expected to lay wakeful for the rest of the night, going over it and over it. But barely half an hour after his terrible dream and it's even more terrible climax, he fell asleep with one fist curled under his chin. His sleep was dreamless, and he awoke on the first of May feeling fully rested, for the first time in months.