[A/N- be afraid. Be terrified.]

"You!" the syllable spat itself out of her mouth before she even had the chance to form a half- coherent thought. He raised his ugly black head from his desk to look in her eyes, and smirked.

"Last time I checked, I was myself…"

"Keayalnea."

"Keayalnea?" the last time he had seen her was twelve years ago, and she had been a bundle of rebellious niavete. Time had filled her figure, sharpened her tongue, and froze the fire in her eyes. She was still beautiful. He still couldn't tolerate her.

"Yes, Keayalnea. Keayalnea Nikonde? The one you kept making obscene red- head jokes about? The one you said woul never last as the Zenith? The one you tried to save? Yeah, Keayalnea." She had come closer during her tirade. He could see the faint scar running from her jawline to her collarbone. He thought it would have been gone by now. She snorted. "Albus has to be going senile. He told me his potions master would be the perfect man for what I needed. I never thopught it'd be you. Screw it. Screw it." She flung up her hands and spun, the palm of her right hand smacking the surface of a desk, causing a loud bang. Quite to his surprise, she buckled to her knees at the impact, letting out a strangled yelp. He rushed towards her, without completely thinking, grabbing her wrist and pulling the offending fist open, staring at the mauling he faced. It looked as though she'd been sliced with a burning, poisoned blade that hadn't been treated for a week. He was about to reprimand her for it when he noticed a small shard of black stone lodged in the decaying flesh and oozing blood and puss. With the utmost care, he nimbly picked the shard out, and letting go of her hand, held it up to his face to study it.

"You've suffered worse at the edge of onyx."

"That blade was purified. Voldemort was running off a hunch."

"By all means, continue to believe that. How did you find yourself on the sharp side of it? Which leads me to my next question- why are you here?"

"You ask that as though I have the option of leaving. Sinia was attacked and I managed to intervene. I'm here for the duration of her recovery. Or lack thereof."
"I would like more specific information, such as why you are here, in my presence."

"The only person with the skills to heal Sinia- whom will look like this, given a few days, cannot make it here for nine. Any one of the gouges she has can kill her, untreated, in that span of time. So Albus sent me to offer you a challenge.

"That being?"

"To reinvent a cure or forestallment for onyx on sorcery blood."

He took her hand again, pointedly ignoring her glare as he pried the fingers open, and forced her to follow him as he sat at his desk, she leaning over the paperwork- strewn wood. He held her palm with both hands, gently forcing the sore flesh apart for his inspection. She gawked at his profile, stunned at the kindness in his touch and curious to its source. He did not notice, and liften his head to face her, their noses almost brushing backwards in the process. She jerked backward, startled, only to have him grip her hand harder, his nails digging into the sore flesh, and she gasped in pain, biting back tears.

He automatically shifted his grip from her hand to encircle her wrist, pulling her along with him toward his office.

"I cannot concoct any potion from plant, animal, or extract that will heal this. Are you aware that I know little, if anything, about chakra and gemstone healing?"

"Healing is an art you were never gifted in to begin with."

"Why did Albus send you here? Why not Poppy?"

"Tiyrn began your training in sorcery medicine twelve years ago. You have a fundamental understanding of it- Poppy is trying to convince me to let her loose on Sinia with Pepper- Up."

Severus let out a vindictive snort.

"She also couldn't learn within the time frame we have set. And I doubt that she'd make it through the testing."

He dropped her hand and turned, glaring down at her. "Tell me now, exactly what I'm getting into."

"The cure Tiyrn found for onyx varies according to the age and depth of the wounds inflicted. You have four days and a test subject before we have to start over."

"How bad is she?"

She took a step back and sighed, closing her eyes as a delicate blue light covered her like a curtain, blazing near- white along her cheek, parts of her wings, sides, and back, and her hand.

"They're less than yours."

"Bad enough," she replied, the spell fading away.

"You realize there is no way I can relieve any of the pain you will feel?"

"Quite."

"And you trust me to do this?"

"Not in the least. It's not my decision."

"Obviously, as you'd rather be anywhere else this moment."

"I could kill you right now, and some would claim I was justified in doing so."

"I apologize," with their height difference, her stp- high leverage made them nearly equal. "For what happened to you. Had I any ideawhat he was doing, I would have stopped it."

"No, you wouldn't," she smirked. "Are you proud to be one of the few who knows what I actually look like?"

"I never thought he'd go after your face. I didn't dream he'd get that far." His eyes, as black as the stone that brought them here, betrayed nothing.

"Well," her voice was clipped, her jaw tensed with barely controlled anger and hurt. "You're not very good at your job, are you?"

***

It hurt. But her eyes were closed, and floating in and out of consciousness, it was somewhat lessened. It was the smell that kept her awake- it was faint, but she got these consistant wiffs of it, and it scared her. The smell of feces, decay, the smell of death. The smell of Azkaban. Trapped in the black walls of her own consciousness, not seeing the limits of her prison. Suddenly a pair of eyes, a thousand times larger than life, appeared in front of her. Inverted, the whites prich black and the pupils a shade of blue she would never define, bored into her. Through her. And deep within the recesses of Sinia's own consciousness, she screamed.

***

Before Severus could even open his mouth to reply, Keayalnea's eyes widened, and with a strangled obscenity, she raced back up the stairwell. He followed, infuriated by her sudden dismissal.

Keayalnea had never run so fast in her life. Out of the dungeons, through the hallways, out the door, to the gate of the school grounds, which had starved dementors swarming around it in hopes of getting at the confusion and fear inside.

"No!" she roared, flinging herself at the iron bars, wings at full spread, every ounce of concentration forcing them back. But it was worthless. They were too starved.

It happened so quickly that she barely registered it, as little control as she had over her distant cousins. But the gate broke, throwing her backwards while the dementors poured in, , at least a hundred of them.

Severus understood the fundamental difference between Sinia and Keayalnea in that moment, Whereas Sinia would cower under the weight of the dementors' power, Keayalnea rose up in defiance of it.

She didn't really think about it. There wasn't time. The first one's throat was in her hands, and she slung him out the gate, forcing it shut and holding it with a cheap spell- however long that would last. She hissed as her sword materialized in her hand and slung it into the gut of the next one, flinging it over the wall. She continued in this fashion, gutting, decapitating, and tripping dementors left and right, heaving them over the stone wall until there was only one left. She slung the sword away, the spell vaporizing as quickly as it had come, and walked toward the dementor with a determination reserved for the damned. Without thought, she reached up and kissed it hard on the mouth. Severus's eyes widened in shock at the suicidal gesture, and he half stepped forward, when two figures burst from the pair, two birds, one black, one white, then the two melded together to form one red outline, bright as blood, that faded into the night sky. When he looked down, he saw a cloaked figure, kneeling, flaming red hair brushing the ground, white wings trembling visibly even at that distance. Her face was mauled past anything he could have imagined, the cartilage of her nose chopped off, part of one nostril clinging defiantly to the empty air, a deathly grey scar slicing over her eye socket, the eye glazed eerily white, the cheekbone crushed into a shapeless mass. The opposite eyebrow was missing, as well as a huge chunk of her lower lip and much of her jawbone. Her ears were mangled, ripped into shreds half their original size, with jagged, poorly healed red scars running in random patterns across her face. He had a flashback to that moment where the bonfire blazed and dozens of death eaters crowded together, earpiercing screams ringing through the darkness and laughter.

His eyes locked with hers as her face slowly transformed to the one he knew her better by. "How I have failed you," he whispered, but the words were lost with the wind.