Severus

He had started the week by nearly getting blown up in a Muggle car bombing. It had ended with a Christmas invitation. For someone who had felt permanently disconnected from life ever since Halloween, these were certainly interesting times.

As far as the invitation was concerned, Severus decided to take Kyra at her word and assume there would be no necessity to put on a false air of festive cheer. As for peace on earth and goodwill to men, that was preposterous to ask for at any time of the year.

All the same, he was relieved when he entered her house on the day itself. Kyra had indeed dispensed with almost all the usual trappings of the season. The kitchen door stood open, but there was no whiff of a lavish feast on the air. The decorations were few, simple and probably mostly there for the sake of the child, who would expect some. No tree.

Kyra had also been serious about making music as usual. She set a less punishing pace this time, but other than that, they stuck to their routine. When they had played for their appointed hour, however, Kyra made no move to pack up.

"Would you have done it?" she asked without preamble as soon as the last note had faded away.

Severus leant back in his chair. "Done what?" He honestly didn't know what she meant.

"Back at our dinner. If they'd started suspecting anything – would you have gone and just –"

"- modified their memories?" he guessed.

She nodded, looking apprehensive.

The correct answer to that was yes. The Statute of Secrecy required it, and the circumstances – a limited number of witnesses in a limited space – would have made it a very simple exercise. But the correct answer was obviously not what Kyra wanted to hear.

"Only as a last resort," he said evasively. Even so, disappointment was written all over her face. "Oh, come on. You know that I'd be lying if I said no."

"Well, you said you were good at lying," she retorted, sounding hurt.

"Doesn't mean I enjoy it."

There was a pause. "I – " Kyra began, and then broke off again.

"Are you the one who wants to be lied to now?" If she insisted on harping on about this, they might as well get it over with for the day. "I know that magic scares you to death. But what do you expect me to do about that? I'm the villain of your story, aren't I? So why are you looking to me for reassurance now?" He hadn't meant to sound quite so disdainful, but he'd rather see her angry than in tears again. It worked.

"My story, is it?" Kyra flared up instantly. "So you're saying it's not true?"

"What, that it was us who drove you away, our mother and I? That we frightened you off, because you were different? Because you weren't one of us?"

"Severus, when I turned eleven, and that letter never came -"

"She did care about you," he objected at once, surprising himself by how much it mattered to put this right.

"Not that I noticed."

"She cried, Kyra. Night after night."

Even among his extensive collection of unhappy childhood memories, this one was especially unpleasant to recall. He could almost feel his small, cold bare feet against the floorboards again, and his ear pressed to the door of their parents' bedroom, as unable to ignore their mother's distress as he had been to ease it.

Brother and sister looked at each other for a moment.

"Yes, that's all she ever did, wasn't it?" Kyra snapped then, as implacable as before. "Sit around and bewail her lot. To you, at any rate, to her little prince. Not to me. I was never good enough for her. I was just a liability. An accident. You do know that they only got married because they'd had me, don't you? How do you think that makes me feel?"

"How is that your fault? You know how it was back then. What choice did they have?"

"And what choice did I have, except to get the hell out? I knew that no saviour would ever come and rescue me if I just sat hiding in the coal shed waiting for a miracle. Not to mention that yes, I was frightened of what witches and wizards are capable of doing, too. And I was right, wasn't I?"

"What do you mean?"

"Look in the mirror."

"Not something I'm fond of doing."

"Maybe you should. Shall I tell you what you'd see?"

Severus shrugged.

"You'd see," Kyra said bluntly, "my little brother grown into an old man in the course of little more than fourteen years, a shadow of his former self, skin and bone and nervous eyes darting all over the place like everyone's out to get you. You look like a ghost, Severus, you look ill and haunted and yes, I have no idea how that happened. All I know is that I left and you stayed, and this is the result. But how am I supposed to ever understand this if you don't tell me?"

There was a long silence. Then Severus carefully lowered his cello to the floor, placed the bow on top of it, and got up from his chair. He walked past the sofa to the window and looked out into the wintry garden. The gathering dusk was turning the trees and shrubs into shadowy outlines. Nothing moved.

"The music from your concert -" he said at length.

"What about it?"

"Can you play that?"

"Now?"

"Yes."

If Kyra was surprised at the request, she didn't let it show. She gave him a searching look, but then she raised her bow, closed her eyes for a moment to concentrate, and began to play. Her fingers picked their way along the board as if of their own accord, while the bow in her right hand plucked note after resounding note of the cello concerto from the vibrating strings.

Severus retraced his steps and sat down on the floor with his back against the sofa, silently, careful not to disturb her. He could feel the floorboards under the carpet reverberate with Kyra's playing.

It was startlingly different from what he had seen in their lessons so far. It was bursting with energy, fierce enough to edge every single note into the very walls of the room they were in. There was something almost selfish about it, too, that made the music deeply about herself and nothing and no one else. And it made her radiate a power that, even knowing that her world recognised her as a gifted artist, he would never have guessed she possessed.

He was back in their old bedroom in Spinner's End, watching and listening from his corner while she lost herself in her music, and yet he was not. The two children from back then may have carried the seeds inside them already, but it had taken all the years in between for the pain to come into full bloom. And Kyra had found a language to tell that story in. Maybe it was time he did, too.

Memory supplied the absent orchestra as Kyra travelled from the lowest to the highest regions of the instrument's voice, carried along as if by an invisible wave, higher and higher, climbing towards that one piercing note that marked the summit, quivered for a moment, and then died away.

And into the silence, Severus began to speak.

Kyra

Night had fallen, but neither of them thought of turning on the lights. Kyra had put her cello down, but she had not left her chair nor said a single word for hours. As the light had faded and the trees outside the window had merged with the night sky, her brother's deep and even voice had taken her on a journey that began on the day she had left Spinner's End. Like the night outside the window, his tale had grown steadily darker, and by the time they had reached Halloween of this year, it had become a nightmare worse than any Kyra had ever had while asleep. He had spared neither her nor himself a single detail, but his voice had never wavered except once.

And then Severus had ceased speaking altogether, and there was silence between them for a long time.

The chasm that separated them, that had always separated them, was still there. But it was as if his words had built a bridge across it, bringing them close enough, for the first time, to touch. It was a fragile structure, since it existed only in the mind, but Kyra felt sure that this was the time to test if it would carry both their weight.

"So you were the one who found a saviour," she said quietly. She could barely make out his face in the dark. "But then you lost her again."

"Yes," he said. "Twice."

The bridge held; it had not crumbled under the weight of what her brother had told her he had done, nor under the burden he carried now.

"I -" she said, then cleared her throat, tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, and tried again. "I don't know what to say. It's Christmas, and I'm sitting here with a self-confessed… terrorist, I suppose? Who also happens to be my brother. I'm having a bit of a hard time reconciling all that."

"I'm not asking you to."

"But I'd like to," she insisted. "Because he's also some sort of guardian angel, and that makes him about as strange as they come."

"You sound like an expert," he said sardonically. "How many guardian angels have you met in your life?"

"Oh, several," Kyra replied truthfully. "Theresa, who took me in and paid for my first proper music lessons… Simon, who gives us all wings... David, of course… Looking back, I found the right one at every turn, or they found me, I don't know."

"Lucky you. Imagine you'd have got a lousy one like me."

Kyra did not have an answer to that.

"What will you do now?" she asked after a moment.

"Now?" he said, and she could tell that he was misunderstanding her deliberately. "Now I'd better be off. It's late."

"No, wait. Don't go. Please." A chill had passed over her, and Kyra was sure that it had little to do with the late hour or the dinner they hadn't had. "I don't want to be alone in the house tonight."

TBC

Author's Note: If you want to listen to the music Kyra plays in this chapter, search for Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto on YouTube. Jacqueline du Pré's version is a total classic. I'm very fond of Sol Gabetta's, too.