Been a while longer than I planned, but I wasn't sure how to go about this chapter… and I might have gotten a little distracted by the Final Fantasy 12 remaster. Whoops. Anyway, it's up now, obviously, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this note in the first place, and let's just get to the chapter so I can stop rambling, shall we?

Chapter 14
Propositions

Jen tied the bag the house-elf handed her to her belt, and giving him a nod of thanks she left the kitchens and made her way to the main doors. She did not expect her task to take her through lunch, but there was no way to know for sure. Searching for paths neglected for a thousand years would not be a simple or easy task, but it would give her something to do besides think.

And time away was exactly what she needed after yesterday's conversation with Luna. Without the calming charm suppressing her emotions, her thoughts had run rampant all night. Luna both loved and hated her? Adored her yet feared her? What was she supposed to say to something like that? Intellectually she supposed she understood the broad strokes, but she had a hard time wrapping her brain around the details of the younger girl's thought process.

"Jen!"

She turned on her heel and stared up at the second story landing. Sirius and Cissy? What were they doing here? "Order meeting?" she guessed once she climbed up to their level.

"That's the official excuse. Really we're just here for the free breakfast," Sirius added in a stage whisper. Beside him, her favorite aunt scoffed and rolled her eyes. "Want to join us afterwards?"

"I'd love to, but I ate early. I have something I want to check out sooner than later. Unless you want to come with me instead?" Not her original plan, but considering she had no clue the Death Eaters had set themselves up in Hogsmeade until Portia told her, she clearly needed more information on how the war was progressing. Who better to pump for details than a wizard who involved with both the Ministry and the Order?

"Now's not the best time—"

"Sirius, don't be an idiot." They both turned to look at Cissy, who stared back at their Head of House with her arms crossed. "The chances of Dumbledore having any useful information you have not already heard from the Aurors directly is slim to none. I'll represent you at the meeting, you go with Jen."

Sirius frowned lightly, but it was a frown of contemplation rather than disagreement. "Are you sure? We both know how much you dislike dealing with most – well, all, really – of the people there."

"I most certainly do dislike it, so don't waste my generosity. Go have fun with Jen. I'll deal with the real work."

"Far be it from me to pass up an opportunity to skive off. So," he asked while he looped an arm around her shoulders and guided her towards the front door, "what are we doing?"

The opportunity was too good to pass up, and she fought to keep the smile off her face.

"Hiking."

Sirius's spluttering and protests made for an amusing backdrop while they walked towards and around the Black Lake, which sadly was not named after them. If she was right, the stream that fed the lake cut through the nearby mountain ranges, which would make finding the old paths that much simpler. Maybe. Assuming they had not completely fallen apart in the intervening centuries.

"All right. You had your fun. Ha, ha. You weren't really planning to go hiking, were you?" She did not answer, and he glanced from her to the nearby stream and mountain in front of them. "Right?"

"A little exercise never killed anyone. You can always turn into Padfoot if you get too tired. A dog would probably be quieter, too."

"Don't bet on it."

There was plenty of scrub brush and undergrowth cluttering the water's path, though nothing she could not clear out with a few waves of her hands. "I thought it might offer a solution to the problem with the Floos. If the Death Eaters have started guessing where the fireplaces are, it's only a matter of time before they figure out what Hogwarts's new address out and come pouring out in force." She shrugged. "It would be nice to have somewhere else the Ministry forces could use as a staging point before that happens."

Sirius stared at her for several long moments before he asked, "How do you even know about that?"

"A little birdie told me," she answered with a small smirk. Now that the bushes and weeds were mostly out of the way, she stared up the slope along the riverbank. Sure enough, in thee distance there looked to be a natural pathway up the side of the mountain. "That isn't to say the birdie knew everything. Why there are Death Eaters waiting in Hogsmeade, for instance. I would have thought that would be the Ministry's first target."

"They are a concern, but not as much as you might think. They've been there for a couple of weeks, but from what our observers have noticed, they are nowhere close to breaking through the wards. The final decision was that so long as there are enough people here to fight them off should they somehow breach the gates, they could be left where they are. Any Death Eater stationed there is one that isn't off making trouble in the rest of the country." He shook his head. "Not a plan I agree with, but there you have it.

"My turn to ask a question. How did you even know this place existed? You're acting much too determined for this to be a random walk."

A thrust of her hand shattered the large chunks of boulder that had fallen to block the path just around the first bend, and a few waves turned the stone to liquid that resolidified once plastered against the walls. "A couple of years back, the Grey Lady gave me and Luna a brief history lesson about the Founders and the first days of Hogwarts. She mentioned that Hufflepuff, Slytherin, and Gryffindor all found their way to the valley through a mountain path, and I was curious if it still existed. Following the river seemed like the logical place to start."

"It's been a while since I was in school, but it hasn't been that long," Sirius said in a doubtful voice. "The Grey Lady doesn't talk. Nearly Headless Nick talks, the Fat Friar talks, but the Bloody Baron and the Grey Lady? Never."

She turned around to glance at him curiously. The Bloody Baron never talked? Ever? He sure was chatty with her, albeit only on the two occasions she had ever dealt with him. "It probably helps if they owe you a favor," she finally allowed.

"A favor? Jennifer Black, what did you do that made the Hogwarts ghosts owe you a favor?"

Jen had to think for a moment about how to answer. Did killing someone who was already dead count as murder? And where had she gone wrong in life that that question actually made sense? Even by her standards, that night had been a strange one. "They hired me to send Binns to the afterlife when Umbridge took over that class. They said it was the only way to save his soul from total oblivion, though I don't know how much I believe that."

"That was back in your fifth year." She nodded. What did that matter? "Why would the House ghosts go to a fifth-year and ask her to send another ghost on? Shouldn't they have asked, I don't know, a professor or Dumbledore or something?"

"Maybe they had and were refused. Maybe they weren't sure anyone else in the castle would know how. Maybe it can only be done by someone with a deep connection to Death. I have no idea, but it earned me a few favors, so I'm not complaining."

He was silent for several long moments while she cleared the next blockage. "A deep connection to Death, huh?" Sirius finally muttered. "You really believe in all this worshipping the old gods stuff, don't you?"

"As a priestess, I think I'm obligated to say yes," she replied in a dry voice.

"No, you're not. You could be a priestess because you felt you owed Elsie, or because it made you feel special, or—" He shook his head. "No, that's not what I meant. What I meant was, you really, truly believe that the Powers exist, that they're fighting that never-ending war of theirs. You believe it so much that you dedicated years to learning a bunch of prayers or scriptures or whatever else priests do that you could have been doing something else more enjoyable. And…"

A long sigh preceded him sitting down on a rocky outcropping. "And out of any Power you could choose to worship, you think it's a good idea to worship Death. That's beyond just creepy, you know. It's the start of a horror novel. I just… I want to understand. Why? While you were staying with Elsie, okay, I can kind of see it, but why would you keep believing in all that once you were out?"

Jen looked him up and down for a short time before finding her own stone upon which to sit. She did not have to reach into his mind to see his honest earnestness. He did want to understand, though she knew he wanted to understand mostly so he could talk her out of it. As if service to the Dark Powers was something that could just be walked away from! Even were she not a black witch and really was just the priestess she claimed to be, she could not leave. Service to Death was service till death, and sometimes beyond even that.

What was it he had said that summer? That in his life he had seen nothing that needed a divine explanation? That was probably the best place to start, and fortunately she had plenty of stories on that score.

"You don't believe in the Powers because you've never seen evidence of their existence, isn't that what you said?" He nodded slowly. "It's just the opposite for me. When Elsie died, I heard the Baron's voice, felt his presence when he ushered her into the Labyrinth." Entirely true, though that he had manifested in the living world that day purely to kill the older witch was information Sirius really did not need to need. "He's called me to his realm in my dreams several times since. I've seen him, spoken to him face-to-face. To reject his existence is to doubt my own ears and eyes."

"But it was only in dreams. That could be all they were, you know. And with Elsie's death, well." He gave her a weak shrug. "You were young. You just lost the only person who ever took care of you. You were grieving. People see and hear odd things sometimes when they lose someone they care about."

"You're grasping at straws, Sirius. Not to mention, those were not the only times he has made his presence known. When Voldemort kidnapped me during the Triwizard Tournament, a cold wind that smelled of cigars shoved me out of the way of a Killing Curse. Another took away the pain of the Cruciatus Curse when I finally escaped, though it made me cry tears of blood. What would you call that but divine intervention?" That latter example stretched the truth a little bit as she remembered no such wind, but the Baron had told her he took away her pain, and she had cried blood shortly before the Ministry staff carried her from the final Task back to Hogwarts.

"I call it coincidence, maybe accidental magic."

"And I call your stubbornness excessive," she shot back. "Look, I understand. You consider yourself a Light wizard. You took up the Potters' and Dumbledore's opinions that witches and wizards are the pinnacle of existence and that beliefs in any higher powers are the delusional ravings of evil minds." Sirius grimaced at that description. "Fine, whatever. That's your choice. But I'm not you, and what I've seen in my life says that the Powers are real, that they're active, and that Death has gone out of his way to protect me because I dedicated my life to him."

"I never said that."

"No, but your actions and your arguments say it for you. I love you dearly, Sirius; were it not for the difficulty in perpetuating the ruse," she admitted, "I would wish that we had used your blood in the adoption ritual rather than Bellatrix's. But I have my own history and my own beliefs. There is nothing you can say more persuasive than what I have experienced first-hand."

Her godfather said nothing in response to that, likely because he saw there was little chance for either of them to persuade each other from their respective beliefs, and soon they continued on their way. Perhaps half an hour passed before they reached a small, flat shelf of stone, at which point Sirius's stomach made its displeasure with all their activity known. "Fine, we can take a break," she said, rolling her eyes when the nearly-forty-year-old danced a happy jig.

Settling the bag between them, she looked down in surprise as she pulled out a half-dozen sandwiches, four bottles of Butterbeer, a flagon filled with ice-cold water, and a few pastries wrapped up in cheesecloth. "I could have sworn I asked for something light as a noon snack."

"You asked the elves, didn't you? Don't do that," Sirius said with a laugh. "Give them the chance to make something, and you'll wind up with enough food to feed five people before you realize it. Back when we were in school, we threw a few parties in the tower for no other reason than we asked the elves for food for the four of us and they gave us more than we knew what to do with."

While Sirius gorged himself on the food, Jen grabbed a sandwich and a bottle and walked around the clearing a few times, flicks of her fingers reshaping it and smoothing out the sharp edges. "What do you think?" she finally asked. "If the Floo system goes down, this isn't a bad place for people to Apparate in and out from, right?"

"It's a bit of a walk from here to the castle, thought I suppose that isn't a bad thing," he mumbled. "The issue is if we start using it and the Death Eaters find out, they could come here and have an easy way in."

"Just means we need to add a wall and gate at the edge of the ward line." So long as it was within the wards, Portia should be able to hold it shut just as she did the main gates between the school grounds and Hogsmeade.

"Moody will probably want to boobytrap it until nobody can step foot in it without getting blown up to kingdom come." Sirius's expression fell shortly after that, and he patted the stone next to him. "Jen, come sit down. We need to have a little talk."

"Whatever it was, I didn't do it."

"I'll ignore your guilty conscience this time," was his dry reply. "But no, this isn't anything you did. Talking about Moody reminded me about a conversation we had this summer. It was pretty early in the summer, too. First part of July, maybe. He told me he was planning on taking control of the Order away from Dumbledore and then putting all the pieces back together before we imploded. Voldemort taking over the Ministry shook things up, but I don't think it was enough to make him drop his plans, just postpone them for a while."

She gave him a bland smile. "That's nice." Why did he think she cared?

"It gets worse. He needed someone to rally the Order behind. There was a prophecy about Danny that he found out the wording of, and it talks about a child of people who 'thrice defied' Voldemort. Danny was the one everyone thought it was about, but with him gone, Moody thought he could convince you to fill the spot."

"One problem with that: the whole thrice defied thing. He'd have to explain how I fit that criteria—" Sirius's wince told her everything she needed to know, and she ground her teeth at the sudden fury that filled her. "Or does he know?"

"Dumbledore told him."

"That bloody— And he would have to reveal the truth about my parentage to the Order to convince them to follow him, wouldn't he?" Sirius opened his mouth, but she cut him off. "No. Won't happen. I will strangle him with his own intestines before I let him tell the whole world that secret."

"I know you don't like it, and I told him that." Holding his hands up, he continued, "But. Don't you think it's more important that they keep fighting against Voldemort? Whether you're seen as Bellatrix's daughter or Lily's doesn't matter if Voldemort hunts us all down."

She scoffed at that foolish question. "Or they could volunteer to help the Ministry. They already have an alternative."

"You know they won't do that. By and large, most of the people in the Order don't expect the Ministry to succeed, or they remember the more contentious decisions Bartemius Crouch made at the end of the last war and refuse to be party to them."

Ah, yes, Crouch's solution to the Death Eaters. Using lethal force, interrogating captured Death Eaters with Veritaserum, fighting as if the country were actually in the middle of a civil war. How awful. Her smile lit up with cruel humor. "If they won't side with the Ministry against Voldemort, then they don't really stand against the Dark, do they?"

"I could ask you the same thing," he pointed out. "If you stand against Voldemort, aren't you just as obligated to help the Order?"

She buffed her fingernails on her blouse. "Not really. Aside from you, Aunt Cissy, and Snape, I despise every member of the Order I've had the misfortune to meet. I wouldn't mind them imploding or being brutally slaughtered in the field. Either one's a net gain for the world as far as I'm concerned."

"And here I was telling Moody you hated Voldemort more than us."

Not really. She pursed her lips and spent a moment considering how to phrase that just a little more diplomatically. "I stand against Voldemort because he kidnapped me, tortured me, and tried to kill me." And also because the Baron wanted his head on a platter. "I stand against Dumbledore because he bound my magic, set up the circumstances that led to basically everything bad that happened to me in my childhood, and is overall a pompous, self-righteous son of a bitch. To my eyes, the Death Eaters and the Order are both groups of sycophants who do whatever they are told to do by old men whom I dearly wish dead. They're identical in all the ways that matter."

"The Death Eaters torture and murder entire families! Anyone who isn't a Pureblood they want to see slaughtered!"

"And if the Order weren't so squeamish about getting their hands dirty, I expect they would do much the same to any dark witch they came across. Fanatics are fanatics, and they all view their own side as right and good." The Turk was certainly proof of how the Light wizards in Britain would behave if they were sufficiently pragmatic. "It might have escaped your notice, but while I'm not a Muggleborn or Halfblood, I am a dark witch. Who do you think I see as the greater danger?"

Speaking of which, she made a mental note to send a letter to the ICW's examination department about scheduling her Dark Arts Proficiency exams for sometime in the winter rather than the summer. She just knew the longer things went on, the busier she would be and the less chance she would have to get away to become an internationally licensed dark witch.

"The Order wouldn't—!" Sirius took a deep breath. "And what about Ted and Dora? Or Tracey, your best friend? She's a Halfblood. What do you think would happen to them?"

"Are we speaking hypothetically?" He nodded, and she leaned back and hummed. "Simple answer: Ted and Dora are members of the House of Black, and Tracey and Justin, who's a Muggleborn, I would put formally under our protection. If this faceless group of Dark-aligned fanatics wanted to start a war with us, then we would do everything we could to crush them, including looking for allies of convenience we ordinarily would not affiliate with. I would not, however, join a group that wanted me dead or disenfranchised just as much as their enemies. All that would accomplish is escaping the noose by kneeling at the headsman's feet.

"But we do not live in a world of hypotheticals," she continued with a sigh. "I will still fight the Death Eaters because Voldemort needs to die. I will not help the Order because Dumbledore needs to die. It isn't a question of which will survive this war, but which will fall first."

Sirius scrubbed his face with his hands, a low groan coming from deep in his chest. "So that's your final answer?" he asked once he finally looked at her.

"That's my final answer. I don't help my mortal enemies."

Why was she cold?

That was the first hint Jen had that something was wrong. The second was that her sonar was missing. That generally meant one thing: she was in the Labyrinth. Cracking one eye open, she frowned at the sight of hard-packed earth laying under her head. Normally when she was pulled to the Baron's realm, she awoke on her feet, yet she was currently lying on her side and curled up in a ball. The third she noticed only when she pushed herself upright: rather than appearing without clothing as usual, she wore a simple white slip. "Okay, what's going on?"

"Variety is the spice of life, is it not?" asked a nasal voice. She turned her head to see a dark-skinned individual in an old-fashioned suit sitting behind her, his unnaturally long limbs folded close to his torso and reminding her faintly of a dead spider. He waved one arm, the end of the cigar glowing faintly. "If every chat was the same, I would get bored. Even little things can make existence more entertaining."

To think, just a couple of years ago, the idea that the Baron Samedi was entertaining himself with her would have terrified her, but now it was almost old hat. She rolled onto her other side. What could he want to discuss this time?

"We could always talk about how long it is taking you to deal with the Abomination. Less than ten months left to complete your task, else I will be displeased with your slothfulness."

"I'm working on it. He has an army I need to either distract or go through to get to him."

"Then you might want to work faster."

She sighed and dropped her head back onto the dirt. Was that the entire reason Death had pulled her to his realm, just to chastise her about how long killing Voldemort was taking? She doubted it. That just wasn't his habit. There was something else.

"At least your perceptiveness has not suffered like your work ethic." The Baron pulled his top hat lower. "Unfortunately, yesterday I escorted my Bridge through this place to the Gates."

She blinked. Those words all made sense individually, but she had no clue what he meant by stringing them together like that.

"Little Elspeth might have called her Maman Brigitte."

"Only a couple of times," Jen muttered. "She said Brigitte was a myth the Muggles believed in, just like the rest of the Ghede. There is only one Death, not a family of death gods."

"True, and yet the story of Maman Brigitte has basis in fact. There are ways for us to gain additional power in the land of the living, methods by which we can increase our influence. One of them is by creating a Bridge through whom our power leaks unseen into your world." A low chuckle came from him. "The best and strongest way to create a Bridge? Take one of our servants as a consort."

Oh. That raised all sorts of questions she was not sure she wanted the answers to. "How does the Bridge benefit from all this?"

Death took another deep puff of his cigar before blowing out a smoke ring. "That depends on the Bridge in question. There must be an even trade as per the rules of our Pact. The Bridge makes a request, and so long as it is within our power, we are obligated to grant it with no restrictions and no attempts to circumvent it or punish that servant afterwards for it. Some ask for rewards for themselves while others ask for a gift to be bound to their bloodline. Any number of things."

A gift bound to the bloodline. Pieces starting fitting together, slowly at first but faster and faster as the truth became astonishingly clear. Of all the Powers, the Baron had the greatest talent as a shapeshifter. The Blacks were well known to have an inherent talent for self-transfiguration. Sirius and James Potter had become Animagi before they sat their OWLs, even though it was a topic that was not seriously approached until the seventh year at Hogwarts, and that was not even getting into the topic of Metamorphmagi like Dora, nearly all of whom born in Britain had some degree of relationship to the Blacks. "How long ago…?"

"A good time ago, even by our standards. It was before I created the so-called Hallows; the brothers' great-grandparents had yet to be imagined, let alone conceived. That wizard of yours was not the first of your line to serve me. His father and grandmother had both done great works in my honor, and I chose to reward their faithfulness."

Try as she might, she could not help herself from wondering. A wizard, and a native Englishman. There was no reason that this wizard would agree to be the Baron's consort, nor would he even recognize this guise. So how had Death appeared to him?

Jen jerked back in surprise when without warning a woman's face was right in front of her. Hawk-yellow eyes sparkled with wicked laughter before the stranger sat back down. Tight leather hunting garb and tangled brown hair gave her a wild look, not helped by the shark's grin filled with filed teeth. "Does this answer your question?" she asked in a smoky voice.

"…Yes."

"Good. If you wondered, he was most appreciative of the opportunity, as he should be. Few men can boast that they have made love to the Morríghan." A smoldering gaze searched her face, and the wide grin softened into a smirk before Death purred, "And even fewer women."

Jen hastily averted her eyes. She was not going down that road. That road led to bad things.

That ancestor of hers had nice tastes, though.

Thankfully, there was a convenient distraction tied along with the idea of Death fiddling with her family's genetics. "There are rumors that there is a curse on our family line. We have a hard time bearing children, and some of our members die of natural causes at unusually early ages. Does that also have to do with what you did to empower us when my ancestor became your Bridge?"

"No change is without consequence," the Morríghan said with a shrug.

That was a yes if she ever heard one. She was still thinking on what to say in response when Death, suddenly once more in his Baron form, pulled his cigar out of his mouth and reached out towards her. "You know why I have told you this."

Oh, she knew, all right. It was terrifyingly obvious. "You want me to be your new Bridge."

"Despite your recent laziness, you have served me well in the last few years. You may consider it a reward for all your hard work."

"I see." A reward for service, and also because she was young with many, many years ahead of her. So long as nothing unfortunate happened, the Baron would not need to find a new Bridge for the next century at least. Jen eyed the cigar warily. She enjoyed the magics the Baron gave her, but this had all sorts of implications she was not comfortable with. As the Black Curse proved, this could all too easily cause more problems than the extra power solved. "May your servant have time to consider your offer in greater depth, Baron?"

The death-head frowned, and he retracted his arm. "You may, ti kras jennès mwen. We will speak again."

Jen opened her eyes to find herself staring at the ceiling of her dorm. Luna and Tracey were still sound asleep, no great surprise considering it was only two in the morning. Lucky them.

After that conversation, she doubted she would find sleep again tonight.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I absolutely love writing Death.

Silently Watches out.