In this chapter Lierin and Remus finally get the feeling that something is way of. Something more than just the fact that Voldemort is after the Goblet of Might. But what exactly is going on and how much time do they have left to figure things out? You know the drill, please r & r.

Chapter 10

Earlier that Saturday, Madam Pomfrey looked around the corner and found Professor Heartilly sound asleep. She sighed with relief and entered the large hospital room with a bucket of hot, fresh smelling water and a mop. After casting a spell on both items, the mop started to clean the floor and the bucket followed the mop around. Madam Pomfrey had never allowed Mr. Filch, the caretaker of Hogwarts, to clean the hospital room for in her opinion he lacked a certain awareness of hygiene. And then that awful cat of his, called Mrs. Norris, a horrible creature and most likely carrier of all sorts off parasites which would only spread nasty diseases in her strictly run hospital wing. Madam Pomfrey kept a close eye on the mop and bucket for even enchanted items might miss a spot. She inspected the room and once and a while she ordered the mop to clean a certain part of the floor again. Suddenly Madam Pomfrey spotted a crumpled piece of paper in a far corner of the room. Curious about what it could be, Madam Pomfrey rushed over the piece of paper, expecting it to be something important one of the students might have lost. However, to her great disappointment, it appeared to be a poem. Or half a poem to be exact, and a poor one for that matter.

It said:

When the beast is ....................

When the grim is ....................

When sun and moon are ....................

When she and the severe one .....................

This shall be your ....................

The power of the other shall be ....................

Failing to see the sense in such a useless poem, Madam Pomfrey crumpled the piece together again and threw it in one of the trashcans near one of the hospital beds where it lay waiting for one of the house elves to collect it for the trash. Now, house elves did most of the work in the enormous gothic castle. It really was too much work for Mr. Filch to do it on his own. They did the laundry, they did the cooking, they cleaned the dorms and everything else that they didn't have time to do, Filch did. House elves only worked at nighttime when everybody else was fast asleep. This was because they weren't allowed to bother students or teachers. This they didn't mind, they found it rather pleasant and made a sport of cleaning the rooms without getting noticed. It might be clear, whenever a student thought he or she had 'misplaced' something, most of the time this was the work of a not so careful and probably a young house elf. So, on that particular night, the night from Saturday to Sunday, one house elf came out of the large hospital wing after having collected the trash, and one house elf came from the dungeons after having cleaned up quite a gooey looking substance from the floor. A small twist of faith caused the two youthful house elves to collide with each other and the trash got scattered all over the hallway. Proper house elves would at least bang their heads against the walls, but as young as the house elves were (only one hundred and fifty years old) they only started to giggle. And as quickly as they could, they started to clean up the mess without paying too much attention to a few small remains. One of those remains was a poor little crumpled piece of parchment with half a poem written on it.

The morning came swiftly and to the likes of some students it came way too soon. The earliest students groggily walked to the Great Hall for breakfast, not paying attention to the small piece of parchment dancing between their feet as they stumbled on their way. The small piece of paper got kicked around in different directions and was only left alone for a short time during breakfast. After breakfast, students scattered from the Great Hall to spend time with friends, hang out and do all sorts of things as long as it wasn't related to homework. There was plenty of time to think about homework in the evening. So, the small piece of paper was lost in the crowd. Once going this way, then going the other way. It really was a great journey for such a small piece of paper.

Soon, most students had found their destination, where they wanted to spend the rest of their day off and the hallways were desolate once more and the only sounds that could be heard were the distant footsteps of two people walking through the hallways. The small piece of paper just happened to lie near the office of Professor Heartilly and one of the two people approaching was she, the other person was Professor Lupin. Lierin opened the door and let Remus enter her office before she did and unknowingly she kicked the small piece of paper in as well. Lierin had managed to create quite a mystical atmosphere in her office. All of the bookshelves were crammed with ancient looking books, parchment rolls and a various selection of magical artefacts. There were no paintings on the walls, instead, Lierin had put two ancient Gaelic looking swords on the wall casting a mysterious white-bluish light on her desk beneath them. On the far north wall she had put a glass closet with all sorts of magical bracelets, and the same glass closet on the eastern wall stuffed with all sorts of magical rings. Against the western wall, was a wrought-iron spiral and in the middle of that spiral floated a large silver knife. There was no visible force holding up the knife, definitely magic. The knife was really a beautiful piece of work with a large golden snake engraved in the blade. The same snake was crawling around the haft and had sparkling ruby eyes. It was one of Lierin's most treasured artefacts and she was proud to have it in her possession for it was the legendary knife of Bia, a knife which was believed to protect the person who sheathed it into the ground and touched the haft. There was also a darker side to it, if you carried a certain disease or if you hadn't able to use the knife to protect yourself in time, you could use it to heal yourself. That given fact was a good one, of course, but not the way to achieve that goal. You'd have to wound yourself with the knife as well as your victim and you had to mingle your blood with that of your victim. That way, the person carrying the disease would bring it over to the other person and the other person would transfer his health to the first. Still, the knife had saved Lierin's life countless times so it still held a special place in her heart.

Lierin walked over to her desk and gave an aggravated sigh when she threw a stack over papers on it. Of course the entire stack of papers slid of the desk causing the papers to fly all over the room. Lierin sighed again and started to collect the papers. Remus had already made himself comfortable and was sitting in a very comfortable armchair but his animal agility enabled him to snatch quite a few papers out of the air and he handed them to Lierin with an air of pretended aloof. He looked at Lierin with a bemused look in his eyes. She was clearly upset. Little did Lierin know that by collecting the papers, the small crumpled parchment with half the poem also managed to find it's way between the rest of the papers. Lierin put the stack on her desk again and this time she did so a little more carefully.

"I still can't believe he actually went through with it! Can you believe it? He actually went to see Dumbledore to complain about something as stupid as a poem. I simply have no words for it!"

"Indeed, It was quite astonishing to see him get so angry about something as insignificant as that. But, I can't get rid of the feeling that, as a matter of fact, he was indeed jealous. At least I can't imagine why else something as innocent as a little poem would set him off so much. And why didn't you correct him anyway? It was very clear what assumptions he made after hearing that poem."

"Oh for crying out loud Remus! That ugly, slimy, old git had it coming! He was really overreacting and I got angry. I didn't want to tell him. Not while it seemed to bother him so much!"

"Yes, he really was overreacting. But then again, so are you."

Lierin's mouth dropped wide open.

"I beg your pardon?"

Remus got very serious all of a sudden. Something had been bothering him for quite a while now and it was time he got it in the open.

"You heard me all right. You're overreacting, just like Severus did. But then again, you two have always overreacted when it concerned one another."

Lierin's pursed her lips together. She was already angry as she was, Remus needn't to make things worse. She'd never hit him before but by Merlin, if he continued this way, she'd not be sorry to make an exception. There was a first time for everything, right?

"And what might you be implying with that?"

"Nothing, at least not what you think. It's just that... You two have always lived on the brink of eruption. In your school years, now when you're a teacher. In case you haven't noticed, it's not normal! No one has reacted on a teacher slash student before as you two have. No student ever nearly boiled a teacher before and no teacher ever cursed a student before. But the two of you have! With the two of you, there were always too many colliding emotions involved."

"That's not true! You would have done the same as me, I know it! It - it was a freak accident. He was being his nasty old self as usual and I just couldn't take it anymore. At the moment it felt like it was the right thing to do, I couldn't help myself! For crying out loud, he was the one who cursed me! He didn't have to do that you know!"

Remus ferociously grabbed Lierin by her arms and she let out a little yelp of pain. His eyes were flickering with an emotion never seen before.

"Lierin, don't you get it! That's just it! That's what I'm trying to tell you! At the moment it felt like the right thing to do! Don't you ever feel like your life is being controlled by some unseen force? As if a little voice bids you to do something you know is wrong but you do it anyway because you know it was meant to be that way?"

"Remus, you're scaring me let me go!" cried Lierin.

Confused, Remus obeyed.

"Lierin, I'm so sorry. I don't know what got into me. But do you understand what I'm trying to say?"

"Of course I do, it's called your conscious!"

"Argh! That's not what I mean! I mean...something that started a long time ago. Something that started the moment you laid eyes on Snape and something that started when Snape almost got killed. Something...evil. And I don't mean Voldemort. I mean destiny or fate or whatever you want to call it. I feel it sometimes. Like that night when Sirius lured Snape to the whomping willow and on other occasions as well. I feel like I don't have any control in anything I do or decide to do, as if I'm nothing but a pawn in a morbid game of wizard's chess. And sometimes I say things or do things and I feel like I have said or done it before and I don't mean just déjà vu. It's something else."

This time Lierin knew what he was talking about and she also knew he was right. She had felt it too.

"I know." said Lierin simply, "I know. I've felt it too I just...never thought about it. Never wanted to think about it really."

"You felt it too? When?"

"Is it important when I felt it? I think I felt it on a few occasions, at least the day I threw the Mana Spirit over Professor Snape. I mean Severus."

"Something strange is going on. I don't know what, I can't explain why, but something is very wrong."

"You know what I felt the other day when Professor Dumbledore paid me a visit? It was right after Severus ...after Severus saved me from the Dementors... I really was being an insufferable bitch wasn't I? " sighed Lierin. Remus smiled. Lierin had a habit of saying exactly what was on her mind, without thinking about the consequences. Often people didn't have a clue what the hell she was talking about but Remus had got used to it.

"Just a bit I'm afraid. Why don't you just go to him and explain things?"

"He probably wouldn't listen to me anyway. Besides, even if I was being a bitch, I don't see why I should go to him while he was the one insulting us in the first place."

"Fine, fine." said Remus a little annoyed when they were diverging from their first topic, "What did you feel when Dumbledore was with you?"

"Oh, right. Well, he was with me for a while and I explained him about the goblet"

"I was wondering when you'd come around to tell him."

"Will you let me finish? As I was saying, I told him about the goblet and why I wanted to find it's counterpart. If there's any information about it, it should be here somewhere."

"But so far you came up with nothing and reading questionable books doesn't help either."

"Okay, next time YOU hand me the books I should read."

"You should have read Rowena's dairy. It's old as hell and something useful might have been in it."

"Pah, there's was nothing in it but utter nonsense. I can't even remember what it was about. Suns and moons and creatures and what-not. It was full of crap I'll tell you that."

"Okay, so it was full of crap, we'll find another book later. Now can you please go on with your story?"

"Hey! You were the one who brought up that book, not me!"

"Continue?"

"Fine, as I was trying to tell you before you so rudely interrupted me, I was explaining to Dumbledore about the goblet and he asked me a few questions...."

Lierin stopped and eyed Remus conspicuously.

"Yes, and ...?"

"He already knew the answers Remus!"

"That's ludicrous! Why would Dumbledore ask questions he already knows the answers to?"

"Because he was supposed to ask me those questions! Don't you get it? What were we talking about all along?"

"How did you know he knew?"

"For one, he wasn't shocked about it what I told him. A normal person would be. It was as if he was expecting this to happen."

"Why didn't you ask him then? Whether he knew about it or not."

"At the time I just thought he had done a fair deal of research about it. But when you just told me about your suspicions the entire ordeal just struck to me as odd. Dumbledore knew much more about the goblet than plausible. I was specific enough in my book yes, but not that specific. It was sheer dumb luck when I stumbled upon information about the goblet and after that it took me years to find enough information about it to be able to dedicate an entire chapter on it in one of my books. It's not very likely Dumbledore found out about the goblet and then spent years studying it."

"It does seem very unlikely. You think they're all connected with each other?"

"I don't know Remus. It is possible. Or maybe we are just being paranoid and nothing is going on at all. I mean, it is a little farfetched don't you think?"

"You mean as farfetched as magic is to muggles?"

"Right. Well, just to make sure, I'll try and find out exactly how much Dumbledore knows about all this. If your suspicions are true we need to determine when this all started. We need to go to the very beginning, maybe we'll come up with something from there."

"And how do you suggest we do that?"

"'Well, try to determine when you first had that feeling of déjà vu and I'll do the same."

"That's easier said than done Lierin. You see, I have experienced it my entire life."

Lierin let herself fall onto her chair and she let out a weary sigh.

"Oh Remus, what are we going to do? I feel as if we're fighting a losing battle and that nothing we do matters. How can we stop what's going on? What IS going on?"

"I don't know. But from now on, when I feel I must do something, I'll do the opposite."

"I think that won't do much good. Whatever it is that's toying with us, it's a lot stronger, a lot smarter than to be fooled by such tricks."

"What do you suggest we do then?"

"We wait," said Lierin, "We wait and see what happens. And when we are better prepared, when we know what to do, we fight back. The answer is here somewhere. I know it, and I'm going to find out even if it's the last thing I do."