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Chapter Seventy-Six—Speech at St. Mungo's

"How is he?"

"Much the same as he was the last time you asked, Mr. Lupin."

Remus winced as he glided through the door into the inner part of the Janus Thickey Ward. The welcome witch had been cordial enough at first, but then she'd found out he was a werewolf. She didn't quite gather her robes close to her when he passed as if to avoid touching him, but it was a near thing.

Could he even blame her for that, though? Remus had wrestled for years, and not managed to overcome his own self-hatred and self-aversion.

On the other hand, he thought, as doors opened in front of him at the presence of a wand in his hands, that's exactly what will make this idea so tempting to Albus, if I manage to break through his madness while he still has it and interest him in it.

The last door opened to the ward's common room, where colorful couches and individual chairs faced a fireplace closed off from the residents by an invisible but stern grate. Remus smiled uncomfortably at the women who caught his eye and laughed. He was never sure what they were seeing when they looked at him, but it probably wasn't a werewolf.

He walked past a few people who were holding conversations with themselves, a man staring into space with the blissful smile of someone who had overdosed on Dreamless Sleep, and one of the women whose magic had shut her mind into a continuous nightmare, who flinched at certain specific sounds. Albus was sitting on an overstuffed green chair at the far end of the room, with no one close on either side of him.

He looked up when Remus came near, and Remus caught his breath in surprise. Albus was looking at him, and his eyes glinted with something that could only be recognition.

"Remus," he said, and beckoned. "I want to share some good news with you."

Remus took the chair next to him and spun it to face Albus, his hope and heart rising. Ha Albus come out of the spell on his own? He had never remembered who Remus was so quickly before this.

Albus held out his hand. Remus blinked at his fingernails, and then blinked up at Albus, not sure what he was supposed to be seeing.

"The spell influences the growth of my nails," Albus hissed at him. "When they twist like this, on the full moon, then we should be able to capture him!"

Remus sighed. No, things hadn't changed. But he did need to check and see if some of the subtleties of the spell had. "Who are we talking about, Albus?" he asked, catching Albus's wrist and gently forcing his hand back onto his lap.

"Harry Potter, of course!" Albus stared at Remus as if he couldn't believe that Remus would ever think he'd talk about anything else. "Harry Potter and his malicious plans to ruin me. We have to stop him before he takes over the magical world, Remus. Now that he's convinced people Voldemort isn't a threat, it'll be easy for him."

Remus experienced a flicker of doubt that his plan would work after all. Albus seemed so fixated on Harry that even something else challenging might not make a dent in his obsession.

But Remus had to try. And, if necessary, he would play up to Albus's delusions. It was something he didn't want to do, but—needs must.

Remus straightened his shoulders and put on a stern expression. "Albus, we have something else to worry about than Harry pursuing the war."

"What?" Albus frowned at him, but at least didn't turn away from him to stare into corners as he often did, maybe because Remus had mentioned Harry's name. "What has he done now?"

Yes, this had been the right choice, the only choice. Remus leaned towards Albus and lowered his voice, unlikely as it was that any of the inhabitants of the ward would be able to repeat what he'd said. "Harry is looking into recruiting an army of werewolves."

"What!" Albus shouted it. He sat up in his chair, his expression thunderous. "Remus, we must stop him from unleashing those creatures on the innocent, You, of everyone, know how important it is."

Remus swallowed down the pain that came with being called a creature. He had invited this himself, he thought. He nodded. "The thing is, there may be a way to stop him, but I'd need your help."

"Whatever help I can give you while being locked up in this hellish place is yours, Remus." Albus was paying complete attention to him.

Remus took a book that he'd found in the Potters' house from his robe pocket. James had been more than happy enough to lend it to him, although confused about what he wanted it for. But Remus didn't want to confess his plan until and unless he was certain that it hadn't worked. Harry and James, at least, would get upset about how much it involved putting himself down and playing into prejudices against werewolves. "Did you know that an ancestor of the Potters researched a cure for lycanthropy a while ago?"

"How long ago?" Albus's eyes widened with astonishment. Remus spared a moment to marvel at how much easier it was to read him when he was insane.

Feeling disloyal for the thought, he rushed on, turning the book around so that Albus could see it. "Sixty years back. She never got very far, and I think she gave up in disgust because she couldn't even get funding for her experiments. She couldn't get other people to care enough."

"But if we could get the cure started…" Albus thumbed through the book gently. He seemed to be making more sense of the runes and Arithmantic equations and potions recipes on the pages than Remus had, anyway. The only one of those disciplines he'd been good at was Potions, and it was obvious, after the very small headway he'd made with the book, that you truly needed all three disciplines for the cure.

"Yes. It would tempt the werewolves away from Harry. There aren't that many out there who would rather serve him than be cured."

Even that might not be true. Remus truly had to flinch at all the lies he was telling. But the thing was, he wasn't a typical werewolf, and he hadn't spent that much time around those who were. Maybe there were more packs who would grab on to the cure, and maybe there were more who would refuse and continue to live "free," outside the bounds of wizarding society.

But from the light filling Albus's face, at least part of Remus's plan had been accomplished, and Albus chuckled and nodded. "This is important, Remus. Thank you for bringing it to me. I shall give it my full attention. Harry Potter allied with werewolves would be too dangerous to contemplate." He sat back against the chair and gave Remus a cunning smile. "I may keep the book?"

"Of course." James had agreed to that, too, although not before making a copy of it. Remus wasn't too worried about it being stolen, given the general state of the people around them, but it might be accidentally harmed. He stood. "I should go. Harry worries about me if I'm gone too long." That was another part of the charade that he was spinning, that he was spying on Harry for Albus and bringing Albus news from the "enemy camp."

"Then go, go, my boy. It's kind of you to visit me at all, and we mustn't rouse the Master of Death's suspicions." Albus made little shoving and shooing motions at Remus, and Remus gave him a thin smile and let himself out of the ward, ignoring the way the welcome witch flinched when she caught his eye.

On his way out of hospital, though, Remus pulled his head up and tried to walk as straight as possible as he made his way into Diagon Alley. He had done as he had promised.

Some of his other ideas to distract Albus hadn't worked out the way he wanted, he reminded himself. Maybe this wouldn't, either. But he had acted in a good cause, and he had higher hopes of this particular distraction than any of the previous ones.

Albus working on a cure for lycanthropy would be good for everyone. It would keep him busy, it would be a contribution to the welfare of the wizarding world in the way that he always wanted, and it would persuade Harry to free him from the spell-induced madness so that he could work on it more effectively. And there was always the chance, with Albus bringing all his intelligence to bear on it, that it would actually succeed.

And then…

And then…

Remus let his eyes close a little and huffed a soft breath when he was out of the entrance to the hospital.

Then I won't have to despise myself anymore.

"Is it true that you're offering tutoring to some of the second-years?"

Jonathan blinked and looked up from his Runes book. It was unexpectedly fascinating, and he had concentrated on his homework more than he ever had in the past when he had Harry to worry about or when more interesting things were going on outside the walls of Hogwarts. Professor Babbling was delighted with his progress, too. It seemed Salazar Slytherin had been right when he thought Jonathan had a natural gift for Runes.

But that didn't explain the red-haired girl taking a seat on the chair next to him like she had a right to be there. After a minute, Jonathan recognized her as Hannah Abbott, the girl who had comforted him when he was worried about Harry being taken away to the Headmistress's office.

That made him smile at her, but he said, "Second-years aren't taking Runes."

"No, but I want to get a head start," Hannah said. "And everyone's talking about how much of a genius you are, so I thought you might not mind tutoring a second-year." She spread out parchment and ink and a set of wooden blocks carved with the runes in black ink on the table between them, while around them the Hufflepuff common room buzzed with contented noise the way it always did. "Can you tell me what some of the most common combinations are? The books in the library just skip over those. I reckon they think everybody knows them already."

Jonathan blinked and picked up one of her rune blocks. "Did you inherit these?" They certainly looked too old and carefully-handled to have been bought in the same shop that he'd got his from.

Hannah blushed a little. "No. I found them in a secondhand shop. Mum said that the others were…" She trailed off, staring down at her fingers while twirling a pigtail through her fingers.

"What were they?" Jonathan asked quietly. He sometimes thought he might like to be a teacher, because he was good at being patient with the younger students.

Or, well, the ones who took their studies seriously. He didn't know yet if Hannah would be one of them.

Hannah gulped and looked up at him. "My family had a set of Runes that my grandmother used. My mother took them when she died, and I thought she was going to let me have them when I came to Hogwarts. But my mother said that my grandmother had tainted them because she cast curses and did Dark Arts."

Jonathan blinked. That startled him, but then again, his perspective was pretty different when he had a brother who could tell him the magical theories from twenty-eight different universes.

"That's not true, you know. The idea that someone could cast Dark Arts and have it taint random objects around them. They'd have to actually use that object in the spell to taint it. So maybe your grandmother's wand would be, but not her runes."

Hannah stared at him. "How do you know that?"

Jonathan laughed. "Harry. He doesn't know everything," he added fondly, recalling Harry's expression when he tried to deal with Voldemort sometimes. "But he knows an awful lot, and he isn't shy about sharing it."

Hannah sighed longingly. "I wish I had siblings like that."

"You don't have any?"

"One brother who's ten years older than I am. He already left Hogwarts, you know." Hannah bit her lip. "And he's training to become an Auror, and my mum always compares us, and I know that she thinks I'm not going to be as good as he is, especially because I—I don't think using Dark Arts is such a terrible thing."

Jonathan studied her for a second. Then he said, "I don't think it is either. Or I'd have to reject my brother, and I never will. I'm sorry about your mum." He picked up the wooden rune blocks she'd held out. "These will work fine."

"Really?"

Jonathan wished there was some kind of career he could get that would result in him delivering good news to people as the job. He always liked the way they perked up, and Hannah's smile was especially bright as he started explaining to her how to use the runes.

And if he taught her an advanced unlocking spell later so she could sneak into her mother's cupboards the next time she was home and retrieve her grandmother's runes, it wasn't like she would go around telling on him.

"I don't think that dissolving the House rivalry is going to be as simple as you think, Headmistress," Harry said. He thought he said it in a diplomatic tone, but Minerva still sighed and flopped back a little in her chair as if he hadn't.

"Call me Minerva, please." The woman stared up at the ceiling for a long moment, and then released a rattling sigh. "Tell me what you know about it in other worlds."

"It wasn't something that often got tried. Then again, it wasn't always as bad as it is here." Harry shook his head a little. He had heard so many claims from the other Slytherins that Hufflepuffs were no-good, lazy wastes of space, and he had no idea why (even taking out of the equation that they knew his brother was in Hufflepuff and still said that in front of him). Ravenclaws got somewhat valued for their intelligence, but also mocked for it. And the stereotypes of Slytherin and Gryffindor were as entrenched in people's minds as they had been in his first world.

"I see." Minerva took off her hat and fanned her face. Harry reached out to the air and set a silver trinket that was evidently harmless spinning so that it focused a small breeze on her. Minerva smiled faintly at him. "Well. We'll work on it."

"Yes." Harry started to say something else, but blinked as a flicker of fire took form in front of him. It wasn't unfamiliar, but he hadn't thought it would be able to get through the protective spells surrounding the school.

"What is that, Mr. Potter?"

Harry glanced up and smiled a little as he saw the wand in Minerva's hand aimed at the fire. "If I call you Minerva, then you have to call me Harry."

Minerva did not look amused. "What is it? It doesn't look or feel like any other spell that I've ever seen before."

"No. It's based on magic from another world that I taught to a friend." Harry extended his hand, and the flicker of fire landed on his fingers, taking the form of a phoenix. It gazed at him with eyes that were small flames and opened and closed its golden beak, emitting a stream of twittering notes.

The music formed into words in his head, a security measure that meant no one else would be able to read the message without his permission. I need to talk to you. It is about Severus Snape.

Voldemort's voice, but Harry's amusement fled when he heard the name. He sighed. He had wondered when they would deal with that issue, and honestly, only a patience that had been honed to inhuman over his lives in different worlds had allowed him to keep quiet about it for this long. He glanced at Minerva. "Can you spare me for the evening? My friend needs help with something."

"If we're keeping up the pretense that you're an ordinary student, then I'll ask you to leave through my Floo, Mr. Pot—Harry," Minerva corrected herself, at the mild glare Harry gave her. "Someone will notice a second-year student going through the corridors at this time of night, or at least they could."

"I can slip through the wards with Apparition, but thank you," Harry murmured, standing. The phoenix had already turned into nothing more than fire and music in his hands. "I should hopefully be back before morning."

He Apparated, thankful that Minerva hadn't asked who his friend was. Tolerant of him or not, accepting his help because he wasn't an ordinary student or not, she probably wouldn't want to hear that he was going to help a former Dark Lord with a man he had tortured.

Harry felt he knew fairly well what the limits of the humans around him were, after centuries of living within them, and he didn't want to cause anyone unnecessary stress.