"So, what has Remus already told you?" It was nine that evening before Severus Flooed into the kitchen at Number Twelve Grimmauld Place. All the detentions he had initially scheduled for Wednesday evening had been moved to Thursday evening, and he was in nearly as miserable a spirit as was humanly possible. And he had more scrolls to mark now. What had ever possessed him to make those students write essays? He was tempted to skim them and give them either pass or fail grades, but he knew he wouldn't. He also knew he was going to have to set aside time this weekend, without interruption, to mark those things. If he could keep his mind on the task for more than an hour at a time. Today he had realized with a jolt that the new moon was on Saturday, and he'd wasted far too much time. He was going to have to make his excuses to Autumn, and hopefully find the chance to explain more things later.

"A lot of things," she replied, grimacing slightly. "But I think I've already forgotten most of it."

He snorted softly.

"It's a lot to absorb at once!" she protested, and he leaned forward, kissing her pouting lips.

"Don't worry about it, then," he whispered, brushing his thumb against her lower lip. "There will be plenty of time later for explanations."

"I do remember he told me that you're a potions master. Is that as impressive as it sounds?" She looked up at him, her eyes shining like sherry in the sunlight, and at that moment, Severus didn't know whether to kiss her or to find Remus and kiss him for planting the idea in her head that he was impressive.

"It's a fair accomplishment," he replied softly, gesturing for her to join him on the sofa, which she did. It was more than a fair accomplishment, in all actuality. It was the cumulation of many years of work and research, and for him to have attained the coveted title at such a young age was just short of remarkable. At thirty-seven, he was a young potions master. When he'd earned the title ten years ago, he'd been astonishingly young.

She smiled at him as she settled against his shoulder. "Will you show me something?" she asked.

"What do you want me to show you? I haven't the materials to brew a potion if that's what you're asking, and it isn't particularly interesting to watch, anyway, unless you have a special interest in it." Some part of him wished that he could share that particular fascination with her, but he didn't think she would be enraptured by the way a vapor curled from the depths of a cauldron.

She shrugged slightly and he moved his arm to cradle her against him. "I don't know. I'm sure I'd find it scintillating if it were you making it. But let's see... Remus turned a teacup into a snail. Can you do anything like that?"

He shook his head slightly and kissed the top of her head, having just been proven right. Of course, of all the things she would be interested in, it would be the ostentatious forms of magic. Be fair, Severus. As a Muggle, she is most interested in those things she can easily see and comprehend. "Hrm," he murmured, absently stroking her hair, "let's see." He considered her request carefully. Transifguration was decidedly not his strongest point, and he didn't want to make a fool of himself. It had been years since he'd even tried to turn a teacup into a snail, or anything similar. A difficult branch of magic, and an utterly useless one, in Severus' estimation. He found it easier to conjure something from mid-air than to change one thing into another. Hrm. That idea had some merit. He straightened, moving away from Autumn and removing his wand from his pocket. He pointed his wand towards the middle of the room and spoke in a soft, but commanding tone. "Orchideous."

A bright bouquet of white lillies appeared at the end of his wand, and he plucked them from the tip, offering them to Autumn, who looked simply delighted. As she held them to her face, a mischievous impulse made Severus point his wand at her and murmur a softly-spoken incantation, and the lillies erupted into a swarm of butterflies, which turned Autumn's smile into a delighted laugh.

"Will that do?" Severus asked, leaning back against the sofa again. Autumn resumed her position in his arms, watching the butterflies.

"What else can you do?" she asked, and he chuckled. This could literally stretch on for days. Not, of couse, that he was complaining if it meant sitting here, ignoring the world, and conjuring flowers and butterflies for a charming young woman who made him forget, if only momentarily, that he led anything but a happy life.

Frowning, he looked around the room for a moment, then pointed his wand at a lamp on the table. With a little coaxing (charms were not his strongest point, either, and the lamp seemed particularly stubborn), Severus managed to convince the tall light to dance around the sofa, eliciting a stream of giggles from his charming companion. The giggles drew Lupin into the room, and he chuckled as the lamp bowed to Autumn, taking her hand and 'kissing' it with a light dusting of fringe across her knuckles.

Severus glanced up at the sound of Lupin's laughter, and shrugged somewhat apologetically.

Willow was there too, and she laughed as well, seating herself beside Autumn. "Can you turn a pumpkin into a coach?" she asked, as though this were a perfectly normal and expected request. Autumn snorted.

"A pumpkin?" Severus asked, at the same time that Lupin repeated, "A coach?"

"Yeah," Willow tucked her feet under her. "So that the vines become the wheels and a leaf becomes the driver's seat."

Lupin had folded his arms and was leaning against the doorjam, apparently in deep thought, contemplating this unlikely request. Autumn was snickering into her hand, and Willow was sitting there as though she'd asked something no more unusual than if she could have a cup of tea. Severus was still trying to get past the pumpkin.

"Well?" Autumn asked, obviously fighting more laughter. "Can it be done?"

Severus shrugged. "I'm sure it can be," he replied, frowning at Lupin, "but I don't know why anyone would want to." His frown deepened. "I don't know that I could do it."

"I don't know if I could, either," Remus said, shaking his head.

"Would it hurt to try?" Willow asked.

"We don't have a pumpkin," Remus pointed out, and Willow deflated slightly.

"Can't you just make one?" Autumn asked, looking at Severus now. "Like you made the flowers?"

Severus considered that for a moment, and then pointed his wand at the floor in the middle of the room, then lowered his wand, frowning. "Why a pumpkin?" he asked, staring at the two women. "Where did you come up with a pumpkin?"

Willow shrugged gracefully, and there was nothing graceful about Autumn's laughter. "Just humor me, or tell me you can't," Willow replied. "Or you won't. I'll accept any of that."

"Please?" Autumn asked, her eyes sparkling.

Severus glanced at Lupin again, who shrugged. "I don't suppose it would hurt to try..." he said, sounding a bit doubtful. "At least, won't hurt anything except our pride if we can't manage it."

After a moment's consideration, Severus pointed his wand at the middle of the room again, and a pumpkin appeared, bright orange, twirling vines, looking entirely out of place in the middle of May. "The vines are the wheels, hrm?" he walked around the pumpkin slowly, considering it, tracing his lips with a fingertip.

After a moment of studying it, he pointed his wand at it and made the first effort. He was rewarded with a pumpkin with a door, and Remus snorted. Scowling, Severus waved at the pumpkin. "Fine. You do it." He stalked out of the way, and leaned against the wall, letting Lupin have a crack at the pumpkin.

Crack was an understatement as it happened; the thing split in half as a seat appeared inside without the shell expanding to accommodate it. With a chuckle, Remus conjured another pumpkin and tried again. This time the result was a pumpkin with a door and one lopsided wheel, and, despite his determination to be more polite than Lupin had been, Severus couldn't quite hide his snigger. The pumpkin toppled over and busted open again.

"Evanesco," he intoned, and the pumpkin disappeared, and, with another wave of his wand, he brought forth another, and then set to studying it again.

Lupin stood beside him, looking at it as contemplatively as Severus was. "What do you think?" the werewolf asked softly.

Severus shook his head. "I don't know," he admitted. "I think it can be done. There's no reason it shouldn't be possible."

Lupin nodded. "Maybe..." he looked over at Autumn and Willow, who had stopped laughing and were watching, fascinated. "What should this coach look like?" he asked.

"It's white," Willow replied. "And it looks like a really big pumpkin. With gold and silver trim around the doors and windows. The wheels are silver."

"White," Severus repeated.

Autumn nodded. "Shiny white. Kind of like a pearl, only... like a pumpkin."

Lupin scrubbed a hand over his face, and Severus suspected it was to hide a laugh. Like a pearl like a pumpkin. He pointed his wand and tried again, and this time the pumpkin grew several feet tall before it exploded, coating the room with pumpkin seed and sticky juice, which was still yellow-ish orange, incidentally. Lupin stopped trying to not laugh.

"Scourgify!" Severus hissed, cleaning up the mess and then vanishing it.

Lupin conjured another pumpkin, and he made it swell to what had to be eight feet tall, and then turned it a pearly white. After a moment of a large white pumpkin sitting in the drawing room, Severus had to admit that Lupin was making progress. He had one wheel formed, and another one forming, though the second was turning out to be more squared than rounded. "Severus, can you lift it?" he asked, frowning as he tried yet again to make the wheel more circular.

"Right," Severus muttered. "Make me responsible for dropping it. Leviosa!" He lifted it a few inches off the floor, concentrating carefully on holding it up. After several minutes of trying, Lupin coaxed another round wheel ou of the vines, and then a third. The one that had begun squarishly, though, remained squarish, despite his efforts.

"Any ideas?" Lupin asked Severus as Severus eased the pumpkin-carriage back down. Severus frowned at it for a moment, then looked at the two women.

"Silver wheels?" he verified, and they both nodded, watching wide-eyed and with enchanted grins on their faces. Severus turned back to Lupin. "Maybe," he murmured. "Can you lift it?"

Lupin elevated it by a few inches, and, when he was sure the werewolf could keep it there, Severus murmured an incantation that changed the vines into silver, and then another that heated the offending wheel until the silver was more pliable. He coaxed it into a rounded shape, and then cast a cooling spell, which hardened the wheel. When Lupin let it down again, the coach sat lightly on its four wheels, which were probably too off-balance for use.

Use? Severus rolled his eyes at his train of thought. There was no use to this. It was a challenge, now, and that was the only reason he was still at it, and he suspected that was the reason Lupin was still at it. Too stubborn, either of them, to admit defeat.

"Now what?" Severus asked, taking a step back again.

"It needs a door," Lupin responded doubtfully. "But every time we've tried to carve the door, it collapses because..."

"Because the rind is too weak to support it," Severus finished, nodding. "But if we turn it to..." he paused, trying to think of what, precisely, they would be turning it to.

"Enamel, maybe?" Lupin suggested, apparently considering the same thing.

"Still too week, I think," Severus murmured. "It would almost have to be a metal of some sort, I'd think."

"We can always charm it to maintain the color," Remus pointed out, and Severus nodded.

"Aluminum?" he asked speculatively. "I'm afraid anything too heavy would damage the wheels—they aren't very sturdy-looking."

"I think you're right." After a moment of speculation, Lupin murmured the spell to turn the pumpkin aluminum, and then began the task of coaxing a door to emerge from the side of it.

Unfortunately, the pumpkin/coach suddenly began to shrink again, and despite their best attempts, Severus and Lupin found themselves staring at a slightly-larger-than normal pumpkin suspended between four wheels, a door carved into the aluminum shell, and seeds and juice spilling out of it. Both men were staring at it when an all-too-familiar voice behind them made them whirl.

"Just what is going on in here?"

"Professor McGonagall!"

"Minerva!"

Severus had the most ridiculous urge to shove his wand into his pocket and pretend he had nothing to do with the mess, and Lupin apparently had the same urge, but was less successful at suppressing it.

"What is that?" Minerva asked, stepping gingerly into the room, staring at the mess. And it was a mess. One of the wheels had begun to tilt inward, and the pumpkin was on the verge of splitting in two again.

"Erm..."

"Uhh..."

"It was my fault," Willow piped up. "They were giving us a demonstration of magic and I asked them to turn a pumpkin into a coach."

"A pumpkin into a coach," Minerva repeated, and then looked at the two men. "Honestly, I would have expected more sense from either of you. Especially you, Severus. And what would you have done if you had managed to transfigure a pumpkin into a coach? In the middle of the drawing room! It would have filled the entire room, and then what would you have done with it?"

Severus and Remus exchanged guilty glances, and came to an unspoken agreement not to tell Minerva that there had been a full-sized coach in the drawing room. And, from the looks of the still-growing mess on the floor, the shrinking of the pumpkin shell had not reduced the amount of seed and juice inside it.

Luckily, though, Minerva was studying the pumpkin now, sidestepping a stream of juice oozing out of it. "And why on earth didn't you at least carve the seeds out of it before you started?" she asked, shaking her head. "Really."

Severus grimaced. That would have been a painfully obvious solution to their persistent problem with it bursting open, wouldn't it? "Ah," he murmured. "Transfiguration was never my strongest..."

"All the more reason for you not to be trying it! Honestly! If you two were students I'd have your heads for attempting such a thing!"

Remus cleared his throat. "Umm, why don't we... ah..." he waved his wand in the general direction of the mess, and Severus nodded.

"Right."

Severus studiously avoided looking at either Autumn or Willow, but he knew when Minerva ushered the two of them out of the room, leaving Severus and Remus to clean up their mess in peace.

Half an hour later, Severus and Remus had managed to vanish all of the remnants of their experimentation with the pumpkin. The entire room had been scourgified from floor to ceiling, and neither had dared look at the other when they found pumpkin juice behind the sideboard. It had been a largely silent endeavour, and for his part, Severus was repeating Minerva's admonitions—he really should have known better. This is what you get for trying to show off.

They emerged into the kitchen just in time to for Severus to witness Autumn popping something into her mouth and then swallowing it. As he seated himself beside her, she capped the bottle of whatever it was she'd just consumed and was reaching for her handbag. He stopped her, placing a hand over her wrist. "What is that?" he asked quietly.

"This?" she held up the bottle. "Paramol."

He lifted an eyebrow. "And that is...?"

"Erm," she looked at the bottle, and then opened it again, shaking a few small, white, oval-shaped beads into her hand. "It's a pain killer?" She didn't sound too sure of herself. "Really good for headaches and muscle aches and... general aches."

He plucked one of the pills from her hand and held it up, studying it for a minute. "It's a potion?" he asked, frowning at it.

"I think it's a compressed powder or... something. I don't really know. It's medicine. Don't you have medicines? Or does no one ever get a headache?"

Severus turned the pill over in his hand. "Of course we get headaches. And there are a number of effective potions for it that you can buy at any apothecary. These... Paramol?" He glanced at her and she nodded. "They're very... smooth. They don't feel powdery." He flicked his thumbnail against the shiny surface, and frowned when nothing happened. "Are you sure it's medicine?"

Autumn sighed. "Of course I'm sure!" she replied. "It has a coating on it to make it easier to swallow. Taste's really awful if you let it dissolve in your mouth, you know. But if you cut it open, you'll see it's more powdery."

He continued to study it, his mind working at full tilt with the possibilities. "Pity you couldn't put liquid in something like that. Most medicinal potions have an abysmal taste."

"You could probably fill a gel capsule with liquid," Autumn offered, and he looked at her.

"A gel capsule?"

"Mm. We're getting into things I don't know anything about, but there are pills that have liquids inside, and they're usually in a gel capsule."

"What is that?"

She shook her head. "I really don't know. It's a little container that you swallow and it dissolves once it's in your stomach and releases the medicine. And really, Severus, that's the best explanation I can offer."

"Where do you get such things?" he asked, and she shrugged.

"A pharmacy, usually."

"Do you have any?"

"I don't think I have any with me, but I could probably get some. Why are you so interested in them?"

He had his reasons, and few that he was particularly eager to discuss with Autumn. His mind was still spinning around this revelation, though. "Just something I've never seen before," he replied, turning the pill over in his hand once more. "May I keep this?"

She laughed softly, and plucked the pill from his hand, dropping it back into the bottle. "You can have them all if you want them," she told him, placing the bottle in his palm. "I wouldn't have dreamed it would be quite that easy to make you happy."

As he considered the bottle of pills, his thoughts were all but screaming. You've no idea.

A/N: Sorry for the delay in updating! I had to take some time out and make a few decisions about what scenes to include in the rest of the fic. It was shaping up for another 100K words (yikes!)

hecate: I said it before and I'll say it again-- Aislinn simply had to die. I think she was almost a plot mechanism so I could get Severus with Autumn. Autumn is really more how I envisioned Aislinn originally, but Aislinn took on a life of her own without consulting me. And, as it happens, I think that there might be yet another addition to this story, though I'm still debating whether it's going to be a Lupin fic or a Snape fic. Or both. And I don't think I'm done with Willow, but I'm not sure how she's going to factor into anything...

west dean-- regarding the PG13... I've been thinking about that since you posted. Really I have. My gut instinct is that if this were a movie with similar language, themes and plot, it would be rated R for excessive use of a four-letter word if nothing else. But there's nothing particularly violent or raunchy in it... So I don't know. Not that I guess it really matters, anyway, though, does it? I think too much, I know.

And...Thank you all for the reviews :)