Chapter 45

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all

And sweetest in the Gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm

I've heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest Sea
Yet never in Extremity,
It asked a crumb of me."

- Emily Dickinson [Hope is the Thing With Feathers]

Rose watched while Snape drifted lazily down the secret passage, his head occasionally scraping against the low ceiling. Though she winced every time his face collided with a protruding stalactite, she kept her mouth shut and didn't object to Black's blatant disregard for what was happening. She was still quite angry at the man for how he'd acted earlier. Hadn't he been the one telling her not to be ruled by emotions or to behave recklessly? The hypocrite. As Lupin and Ron had chained themselves to Peter and could barely fit through the passage all strung together, Rose found herself walking beside Hermione and just ahead of Harry and Sirius. She was close enough to easily overhear their conversation.

"You know what this means," Sirius was saying to Harry. "Turning Pettigrew in?"

"You're free."

"Yes… well, I don't know if anyone ever told you, but I'm your godfather."

"Yeah, I knew that."

"Well, your parents appointed me your guardian… if anything happened to them," Sirius continued, sounding nervous. "I'll understand of course if you want to stay with your aunt and uncle, but… think about it."

"What? Live with you? Leave the Dursleys?" Harry asked incredulously.

"I thought you wouldn't want to. I understand, I just thought—"

"Of course I want to leave the Dursleys! When can I move in?"

"You want to? You mean it?"

"Yeah, I mean it!"

The excitement in Harry's voice came as a bit of a surprise to Rose. She'd always imagined Harry being dropped on the doorstep of loving relatives while she'd been sentenced to two years of neglect and abuse. Were her aunt and uncle really so terrible that Harry would want to leave them to live with a man he barely knew and had believed was trying to murder him until a mere hour ago? Perhaps their situations had not been as different as she'd assumed. Rose did not think this excused Dumbledore for sending her to that orphanage—if anything she thought it more condemning that he'd failed not one but both of the Potter children.

She glanced back and saw the two grinning at each other. The smile on Black's face had completely transformed him from filthy half-starved madman into a semblance of the person she saw in her memories. Black saw her looking and grinned at her, and Rose felt dread as she anticipated his question.

"What about you, Rosie?" He asked, slinging an arm around Harry's shoulder. "We can be a family—just like we were always supposed to be."

"You can't just—" Rose pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers. "I wasn't dropped on the doorstep of some begrudging relatives. Lucius and Narcissa adopted me. I'm legally their daughter—they're my family."

"If you'd known them during the war—if you'd seen the things they're capable of… you wouldn't be so quick to call them family," Sirius told her with a dark look in his eyes. Rose felt anger bubbling up in her stomach at this statement and glared at him.

"Oh, so it's fine if Harry wants to stay with his family but not if I want to stay with mine? You don't get to tell me what I should and shouldn't think about my own mother and father just because you knew me when I was a child—I am not a child anymore." Rose told him heatedly, her Malfoy sneer fixed to her face. "You left me buried under a mountain of rubble while you went chasing after Pettigrew. Don't act like you suddenly have some claim on my life after abandoning me for petty revenge."

Sirius opened and closed his mouth. She saw a myriad of emotions cross his face, the most prominent of which were anger and shame.

"You're right," he said after a long moment.

"I'm… what?" She asked in surprise.

"I'm not going to tell you what to choose. Just know, you always have a home with me… with us," he said, smiling at Harry who nodded back.

"…Thank you," she said curtly, and turned back around. His response was wholly unexpected, and it left her feeling shaken.

She'd always been told what the right choice was and had always been expected to then choose it. She stared at Lupin's back in the dimness of their wandlight. For a wild moment she imagined refusing to marry Stefan and, if Lucius and Narcissa disowned her for it, living with Sirius and Harry. She wouldn't be alone or abandoned… she could pursue her relationship with Remus… but she'd lose three people who were closest to her heart: her mother, her father, and her brother. The three people who had loved her unceasingly for the past twelve years. Shaking her head, Rose reminded herself that it was likely Sirius Black would be just as opposed to her loving Remus Lupin as her parents would be—he was one of his oldest friends after all.

'Don't hope for things that won't happen,' she cautioned her heart. But despite this thought, the hope remained. Remus glanced back at her and gave her a tired smile, and her heart sped up rapidly in her ribcage. She smiled back, feeling almost shy, and he turned back and continued up the tunnel passage. Rose felt eyes on her face, and she glanced to her left to see Hermione Granger staring at her with a curious expression.

"What?" Rose asked defensively, grateful that the cold light from the wands would help to hide the blush she felt rising to her cheeks.

"Nothing," Hermione said quickly, and Rose didn't believe her for a second.

As the odd procession clambered out of the passage beneath the frozen Whomping Willow, Rose couldn't help staring at Lupin. Had there suddenly become a world in which a future for them was possible? Would he even want that if there was? He'd made it clear he had nothing more to offer her than what they had now—what even did they have now? Was mutual lust the only reason he'd acquiesced to her advances? But if that was true then why had he been so jealous over Stefan? Rose was so lost in thought that she didn't notice the full moon creeping over the mountains until Remus froze and began to tremble. For a second, she didn't understand what was wrong and then, as he hunched over and hair began sprouting from his skin, she realized what was happening with deadly clarity.

"He didn't take his potion tonight! He's not safe," Hermione said with a gasp.

"Run! Run now!" Sirius shouted at them, shoving Harry back and running towards the transforming man who was still shackled to Ron. Rose grabbed the back of Harry's robes and dragged him towards her, her other arm already held out protectively in front of Hermione.

"Ron—" Harry shouted in protest, but Rose did not release her grip on him.

"Trust Sirius," she said, watching as the man transformed into the bear sized dog. He ran at the werewolf just as it broke free of the manacle and turned bloodthirsty eyes on Ron. Its eyes were nothing as she remembered from the fall. Though they were still blue with human sized pupils, there was no sign of intelligence or empathy in them—only rage and animalistic hatred at seeing the humans.

Sirius slammed into the werewolf, grabbing it by the neck with his jowls and dragged it away from them. Rose was distracted from the fight when she heard Harry shout "Expelliarmus!" and turned to see Lupin's wand flying out of Pettigrew's hand. She watched in horror as the man began to shrink down to the size of a rat.

"No you don't," she muttered, pointing her own wand at herself and transforming. It took a moment for her vulpine eyes to pick out the scurrying movement in the dark. She dashed after him, chasing the rat into the Forbidden Forest. Pettigrew had a good start on her and a great deal more experience in his Animagus form. Though she had mastered walking and could handle short sprint, she found herself misjudging distances and tripping over tree roots. For a while, even though he was out of sight, she was able to follow him by scent alone. She was slowly becoming better at using her body as she went and was sure she could catch back up.

She was completely confident about this until she crossed a small stream about half an hour into the chase. Rose stopped, sniffing the air, and looked wildly around the dark woods. She could no longer smell him and didn't see signs that he had emerged on the other side of the stream. Had he been washed away? But the stream didn't seem deep enough to do that. More likely he'd realized she'd lose the scent if he stayed in the water. So the question was: which direction had he gone? Rose wasn't sure where this stream led to, but she guessed that it came down from the mountains and would empty into larger rivers or possibly even into the Black Lake. Though the stream wasn't deep, she still thought it would be arduous for something as small as a rat to make its way upstream. Going with the current would be both easier and faster for him. Turning her nose downstream, Rose began to run.

Another quarter of an hour later, she began to suspect that she'd chosen the wrong direction. Hesitating for a moment she tried to decide whether or not to turn around. Would it even be worth going back the other direction? He'd have more than a half hour's lead on her. A bright white flash lit up what she could see of the sky through the foliage, and she began to run again. What had that been? It took almost another twenty minutes for her to emerge from the trees to see that she'd come out at the far side of the Black Lake—the stream trickling into the dark water. Whatever had made the light was by now long gone, and Rose was left alone with no sign of Peter Pettigrew anywhere.

'No, no, no,' she thought to herself angrily. She sniffed around the bank of the stream hoping against hope to pick up his scent once again, but it was useless. Rose knew that if she were human, angry tears would be falling from her eyes. Without Pettigrew, Sirius would not have his name cleared, and her dreams of having both a family and Remus were falling to ashes in her hands. She had told herself not to hope, and she's been right—look what it had gotten her. Rose sat in the mud and stared out at the dark empty lake feeling completely alone. She was so focused on what was in front of her that she didn't notice the dark silhouette of a large bird fly away from the castle and out of sight.

'I should go back up to the castle,' she thought at last. 'They must be worried about me.'

Slowly standing on four shaky legs, Rose began to walk back up the path, freezing when she heard the crack of a branch and saw movement a few meters ahead of her. Her heart sped up in fear as a familiar brown and gray wolf slunk out of the tree line and down to the lake and began lapping at the cold water. She began to slowly slink past it, but the werewolf must have caught her scent because it turned and growled at her. Rose froze once again, her body trembling as it approached. Her animagus form was not large enough that she could fight off the werewolf, nor did she think she was fast enough to outrun it. 'Don't wolves eat foxes?' she thought nauseously. Maybe she could climb a tree and get out of its reach, but she'd never tried to climb a tree as a fox before—what if she fell?

All of the swirling thoughts were deadened by shear terror when the werewolf bent its head to look at her. His dark cold nose sniffed at her face, and Rose could feel her ears lay flat back against her head and her tail tuck between her legs. He circled her, continuing to sniff at her body curiously. He nudged her belly with his nose, and Rose stumbled, nearly falling to the ground. She looked at the wolf in surprise—the action had seemed playful rather than hostile as if he were asking 'what are you standing so still for?' She watched him sink to the ground, laying on his belly so he could stare at her from her own height, his head tilted curiously at her.

Rose glanced at the woods, thinking for a moment that now was her chance to escape up a tree, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. Taking cautious steps towards the werewolf, Rose sniffed at his own snout just as he had done. She was surprised to find that the werewolf smelled like Remus—he had the same earthy scents of sandalwood and sawdust and her vulpine senses could also discern the sharper spicier tones of cracked pepper and ginger that her human nose had only ever hinted might be there. She could feel her whole body relax at the familiar scent.

'This is Remus,' she reminded herself. 'This is the man I love.'

Leaning forward, she cautiously nuzzled her snout against his.


AN: Thanks so much for your recent reviews, follows, and favorites. This Part 1 of the Rose Potter Malfoy series is going to wrap up at the end of Prisoner of Azkaban so the chapter count doesn't get obnoxious, but I will be continuing it into Goblet and beyond. I will leave info as an epilogue or preview of the next part as a final chapter once I have that up so those who follow this story will get notified when I start the next part. Make sure to follow either this story or favorite me as an author so you don't miss it!