Chapter Six: Toast and Confessions

It was hard to keep watch though. I had finished my chorale and, as I directed my students through their first dry run at it, I hid the map behind the score on my stand and snuck peeks at it when I could. Unfortunately, my peripheral vision kept confusing the moving dots for musical notes, and consequently it was my own fault that three of the tenors had to be sent to the hospital wing with tongues so swollen and hairy they looked as if a baboon was trying to back out of their mouths. The other tenors were quite safe as they'd managed to cock up my misdirections.

Trying not to show how glad I was of an excuse, I let the class out early and almost skipped back to my rooms. I would get all my work done and then turn in for an early night because tomorrow was Saturday again, and Remus had got tickets to the live broadcast of the Witching Hour with Celestina Warbeck.

Up early, we traveled by floo network to London so we would be at the Wizarding Wireless Network studio by 7 a.m. The show was wonderful, though I discovered to my chagrin that Celestina actually used an enchanted microphone to hit some of her high notes and didn't even bother to lip synch since most of her audience was hearing her over the WWN. Her guests included a shabby little wizard from Lancashire, who played out a tune by squeezing a row of knarls set up on the table in front of him, and an impressionist whose version of the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, sounded rather like he might have been expelling a baboon as well.

After the show we had lunch and spent the day haunting Diagon Alley where I found an electric blue mini-robe on clearance in a second hand shop. In a fit of daring, I bought it though I had no use for the thing. I was almost too old for it for one thing and my family was never given to long slender legs. But at least I could find use for the free frog skin belt that came with it. We made it back to Hogwarts in time to get in on the dregs of dinner, and after a walk on the castle parapets, my feet were definitely telling me it was time to call it a day.

I didn't want to. With sore feet as an excuse, I dawdled on the way as Remus escorted me to my room.

"I can't thank you enough for today. I feel like I've been on holiday for a month," I said in front of my door, holding the bag from Gladrags with the ridiculous robe in it and another with a boxed set of nice stiff quills and parchment I was sending to my Dad to encourage more letters back.

"It has been fun," he replied reservedly, watching as two Hufflepuff girls came down the hall and took the staircase down. He looked like he was going to say more, but a gaggle of young spit-covered Gryffindors came out of a room across the way with gobstone pouches in their hands and stood there arguing about who had possibly cheated who during their club meeting. "Well, back to work then." He tried to hand me my third bag which held copies of i Musical Misadventures Among Muggles /i and i Chanting for Change: Strategies for Social Action /i that I'd picked up in a used book shop. The bag slipped from my hand, I caught it by clamping my elbow to my middle, and promptly dropped the Gladrags one to the floor.

He scooped it up with nothing less than a grin. "Looks like you need help with all that." And both of us, relieved of the requirement for excuses or invitations, shoved into my room and closed the door to the prying eyes of students behind us.

I let the bags fall to the floor at my feet, hearing a simultaneous third clunk as he did likewise, just before gathering me into an embrace. His mouth was tender, desperate, his arms the same. A delicious tingle rose in my belly, a hunger that had nothing to do with the slim pickings left for dinner. I held his head as his lips explored my throat, his hand closed gently around my breast, a whimper escaping me when he grazed me with his teeth.

"Wait, Nerissa," he said suddenly, pushing me away to arm's length. I gasped with a mixture of surprise and frustration. "Before we…before we go any further. There's something very important you must know." He ran a hand through his hair, seeming at a loss for words, and looked at me with apprehension as if fearful to say another word.

My heart pounded in my ears. It was the moment I'd been dreading. I didn't want truth right then, or secrets, I just wanted him. "Please, Remus, it doesn't have to be forever. It doesn't even have to be for tomorrow." I picked up his hand, kissed his knuckles, and set it on my breast again. "Make love to me tonight. No honesty, no fears, just this." I squeezed the hand cupping me. "Just a gift and that's all."

Desire and reluctance warred in his face. Almost despondently, he kissed me again. I could hear his breath quicken as his hands explored me, found their way under my robe to brush the skin across my ribs. Breathing deeper myself, I met his tongue with my own while I fumbled with the worn buttons at the neck of his robe.

"No." He withdrew, grabbed my hands, and held them between us. "I'm sorry. I can't. Not unless you know. It wouldn't be fair."

"What?" I squealed, angry now. "Are you married?"

"Heavens no!" His brows shot up at the thought. "No woman in her right mind would marry me."

I caressed his face. "How can you say that?"

He pulled my hand down again, to hold it firmly with the other one. "Nerissa, don't. Listen." He looked around the room and lacking anywhere else, dragged us over to the bed to sit down together. "Nerissa, I'm a werewolf."

He said it so fast I almost missed it. "You're what?"

"A werewolf," he repeated, gently. "That wolf you found in my office, that was no classroom specimen that was me. It was the night of the full moon."

"But you're the kindest man I've ever met," I said in disbelief, a part of me still wondering if I had misheard him somehow. I laughed, at a distance hearing the slightly hysterical tinge to it. "You're not dangerous."

"I can be. If I'm not careful I could even kill."

"You're joking. I can't believe it."

"You have to," he said sadly. "Though looking at you, I would give anything to make it not true. I am a werewolf. At the full moon I transform into a beast with no desire except to feed on human flesh."

I stared at him, mouth hanging open, trying to comprehend. Terrifying rumors and legends swamped my brain, threatening to overwhelm my reason but I knew from my own experience that the stories told of half-humans often had little to do with reality. I challenged him. "If you were dangerous how could you live at a school? Wouldn't you be picking off students every month? You'd be more of a threat than Sirius Black!"

"You asked if anyone had ever tried to tame the Whomping Willow. No one ever has because it was planted for a reason. It guards a tunnel that leads from Hogwarts to the Shrieking Shack. When I was a boy, every month I was smuggled out of the castle to spend my transformations there. The shack isn't haunted; it never was. It was me, raging that I couldn't escape, tearing at my own skin because there wasn't any other."

"But the wolf I saw--"

He gave me a teacher's look at a student speaking out of turn. "Recently a wolfsbane potion has been developed. It's very complicated, very expensive, but Snape has the necessary ability to prepare it for me. Dumbledore assured me I would have access to it. When I take it every day preceding the full moon, I still transform but I am able to maintain some of my own identity; I'm calmer, groggy in fact. I have spent every full moon curled up asleep in my office." Letting go of my hands at last, he focused on his knees. "I should have told you a long time ago, but like a school boy, I was afraid you wouldn't like me anymore. I'm sorry."

I shoved myself back on the bed and drew up my legs, so my back was against the wall and I could see the sad way he was sitting, slumped, head down. My robe sagged open where he'd unbuttoned it. I picked up a pillow and hugged it. "Who else knows?"

"Some of the other teachers; those like McGonagall that were at Hogwarts when I was a student. And Snape."

"Because he has to make the potion."

"No, because I almost killed him. When we were young, he saw me going into the tunnel under the Whomping Willow, you see, and he followed." The room was growing dark. He got up and wandered from candlestick to candlestick, igniting them while I worried my lower lip.

When he came back to stand at the bedside, I asked, "How long have you been a werewolf then?"

"I was very small when I was bitten. Fortunately there were many people along the way--my parents to start with, and Dumbledore--who helped me to have a normal life. Well, as normal as one could hope for."

"You mean as normal as possible with everyone hating half-humans and trying to pass discriminatory laws. Not being able to find work and being evicted as soon as someone finds out what you are," I said, bitterness in my throat. "Always being suspect. Being hated."

He raised his eyebrows and sat down warily, as if afraid to break a fragile hope.

I took a deep breath and shoved myself off of the bed. I knelt down and thrust my arm deep under the mattress to feel around. Puzzled, Remus scooted out of the way. My fingers touched silver and I slid the flat ornate case out. "Well, in the interest of being fair, I have something to tell you too." I said it lightly but my stomach lurched upward and my throat constricted. "You may fear the moon once a month, when you are no longer human, but I'm not human at all, not entirely."

It was hard to sing the three notes that sprang the catch on the silver box. My voice quivered, but the lid popped open with a musical chime revealing a light gray pelt with black speckles, like a sleek furred tube that shone in the candlelight as I stood up and drew it out across the bed. "This is my skin. My mother was a selkie and I'm one too, what her people call a 'land child' because my father is a wizard and I wasn't born on the shore. It doesn't have the best of connotations. Have you ever watched a seal on land?"

He stared at me, swallowed, and asked, "May I…?" extending his hand toward the pelt.

"Yes. It's as much me as this skin is," I replied, pinching my arm.

Fingers spread, he touched it delicately and lowered his palm to sweep across it. "It's like silk." He shook his head and when he looked up at me he wore a wry smile. "I never suspected."

I propped a hand on my hip. "That's the idea, isn't it?" A chuckle bubbled up out of him to dissolve my fear, like a flame doused by seawater. "What are you laughing at?"

That only induced more laughter. He flung his arms around my hips, almost knocking me off balance, and with his face pressed against my belly, he said deliberately, "I think I'm ready to get on with making love to you."

"If you don't, I'm going to bite you. Seals are carnivores too, you know."

---------------------------------------------------

If I'd been wise, I'd have skipped breakfast. But I was so famished and fluttery I needed something to bring me back to earth. With a last kiss, Remus slipped out the door to go wash up and change, promising to meet me at the staff table, and leaving me to make myself presentable again. Fortunately, I caught sight in the mirror of the red marks on my throat and healed them before they provided fodder for comment. For a moment, fingertips playing on my skin, my mind drifted back to the previous night, to the feel of his lips on me, the weight of his scarred body. I giggled and spun around, caught my feet on a robe on the floor, and ended up falling on my rear into a chair. Laughing, I pulled my shoes on and hurried from the room so Remus wouldn't be at the table before me.

I stopped at the doorway to the Great Hall, straightened myself up, and strode to the table trying to look friendly but not meet anybody's eyes. When I pulled out my chair and sat down next to her, Minerva was tapping the top of an egg with a spoon. She turned from a conversation with Dumbledore about a proposed change in the regulation of portkeys to wish me good morning.

"Good morning!" I replied a little too brightly. She paused and looked over her glasses at me. My cheeks ached with the effort of not grinning as I surveyed the offerings on the table, selected a dish of scrambled eggs, and shoveled almost a third of them out onto the plate in front of me.

Remus entered the hall, not through the side door behind the staff table that the teachers usually used, but through the main doors so that he passed down between the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff tables, greeting students as he went. "Hallo, Hannah. How are you, Neville? 'Morning, Harry!" He touched me on the shoulder briefly, and sat down, then clapped his hands together and rubbed them heartily, "Good morning, everyone!" He scootched his chair closer to the table and reached over to pick up a rack of toast. "I'm ravenous."

Both Minerva and Dumbledore paused again to look at him. Dumbledore raised his eyebrows. "Good morning, Remus."

Severus joined the table next, sitting down beside me with a scowl on his face that only deepened when Remus chirped, "Good morning, Severus! Toast?"

He glared as if offered poison and poured himself a cup of coffee.

Remus offered the rack to me. "Toast?"

"Thank you." I took a slice and laid it on my plate.

"Butter?"

"Thank you."

"Currant jelly?"

"Umm." I nodded fervently. "Please."

"Bacon?"

"Three rashers, please," I coughed out through lips clamped around a laugh. Minerva was staring at us, egg yolk dripping from her teaspoon onto the tablecloth. "Yes, that's lovely."

"Is there anything else you'd like?"

I snorted and covered my face with my napkin, not able to meet his eyes.

Dumbledore beamed benevolently. "How nice to see everyone in such a happy mood this morning."

Minerva's thin lips twitched; she focused on her egg with sudden interest.

Severus growled, threw his napkin down in disgust, and stalked away from the table.

"Ah, well, nose to the grindstone, eh?" said Remus.

-----------------------------------

A leisurely breakfast over with, I walked to my office, humming, intending to write a letter to my Dad. I had a lot to tell him, leaving out certain specifics, of course. I shoved the door open and stopped dead. Severus was sitting at my desk, idly reading an essay off the pile I'd finished correcting, feet up and crossed at the ankles.

"Severus," I said, nonplussed. "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you." He let the parchment roll up and set it aside.

"What do you want?"

"What makes you think I want anything? I couldn't possibly want anything from you." His eyes glittered dangerously.

"That's funny. I thought we were friends."

He shot upright, fury in his sharp features, fists white at his sides. Mastering himself, he slowly uncurled his fingers and sat down again in my chair. "Perhaps so. That is why I tried my best to warn you about Lupin. Advice you deliberately ignored too, so don't give me all that 'friend' rubbish. And just when it seemed you were coming to your senses, I saw the pair of you coming out of my office, cooing like pigeons." He spat the words.

My heart pounded in my chest, neck rigid, I strained to hear Remus, students, anyone, coming down the corridor so that I would not be alone with him, but there was no one.

He was still controlled, but the effort turned his face an ugly shade of red. "I was concerned; I thought you might even be under an imperious curse. Then, seeing your behavior at breakfast, I was sure of it. I went to your room."

Anger started to nudge my dread aside. I strode to the table and planted my hands on it, glaring at him. He didn't budge, looking up at me as if my response was quite insignificant. "Did you break in again? I know you've done it before!"

"I went there," he said, raising his voice louder than my own but still speaking slowly and deliberately, "to see if i he'd /i been there."

"That's none of your business!"

"I am a professor at this school; the safety of all within its walls are very much my business."

"Safety? This isn't about safety! You don't like Remus. You never have!"

"No. I don't like Remus." He enunciated every word and then breathed, "But I did like you."

My mouth opened, stunned for a moment, I stared at him. "You're jealous!" I said, realization dawning.

His nostrils flared. "I'm not."

I longed to slap him. "That's why you've been breaking in, isn't it? What have you been doing? Fondling my socks?"

He face deepened to purple, a vein throbbing in his forehead. He stood up so that he was taller than me and leaned across, bringing his face near mine. Next to my ear, he said quiet and hard, "I couldn't understand why you would prefer something like him over me. But it all makes sense now, doesn't it?" He twitched his robes aside to free his arm and I feared he was about to strike me, but he reached under his side of my desk. To my horror he pulled out my skin and placed it on the desk between us.

In our passion of the night before, I had forgot to put it away. I'd left it lying on the floor like an old blanket. I choked on my fear. "Give it back."

He snatched it away as I made a grab, holding it high above me. "Surely this doesn't belong to you."

"Give it back, Severus!"

He moved out from behind my desk, still holding my skin in the air, backing around toward the door. "I don't think so."

I spread out my hands, not taking my eyes off it. A dozen stories of selkies stranded on the shore forever, or forced into marriage with a human who held their skin hostage, darted through my head.. The thought of him stroking it sent a wave a nausea coursing up my throat. There was no pride left in my panic. "Please, I'll do anything you want. Please...just give me back my skin."

"Anything?" he sneered.

"You loathsome--!" I tried to leap up and snatch it from him but he shoved me back, wand drawn out with his other hand to hold me at bay.

"You're suddenly very particular." His eyes narrowed. "If you do that again, or even try to open your mouth to Chant something, I'll seal it forever." He paused and savored his own accidental pun.

I snapped my mouth shut.

"That's better. Don't worry, I won't keep this rag. Actually, I was planning on giving it to Dumbledore. He'll be so very interested to know what he's actually hired." He stepped backwards, wand aimed at my face, and glanced at the hallway. "You and Lupin, two little animals having a thing," he spat. "Tell me, do you do it doggy-style?"

I took my chance to make another grab, but he whirled, leaping into the hall, and slammed the door shut. I smashed into it with a cry. Grabbing the doorknob, I tried to turn it, but it was sealed. I shook it in frustration, pulled out my wand, and jabbed it at the door. i "Alohamora!" /i

It wouldn't budge.

I kicked it hard, the thump echoing in the vaulted ceiling, and hopped back from it in pain. My mind was racing, it could not stop on a single thought but getting my skin back. I ran to the fireplace and snatched down the covered candy dish where I kept my floo powder. It had been emptied.

I charged the door again in hopes that brute force might accomplish what magic could not. I slammed into it and sank down, tears starting to roll down my cheeks. "Chant something. Anything! Think, Nerissa!" I fumed at myself. The only thing that sprang to mind would have been more likely to take out the entire wall as the door. Destroying the castle didn't seem like the way to persuade Dumbledore that my deception was benign. I hit the door with my fist in frustration.

"Professor? Professor Muir?" From the other side of the door came a small hesitant voice. "Are you all right?"

I knelt and put my mouth to the whisper-thin crack where the door met its frame. "Who's there?"

"It's Ginny Weasley."

I closed my eyes in thanks and wiped my face. "Listen, Ginny. I'm all right, but I've got myself into a bit of an embarrassment here. Do you think you could find Professor Lupin and bring him here? Only Professor Lupin. And don't spread it about if you don't mind." I tried a carefree laugh that sounded more like a cackle.

"Sure, I'll get him. Don't worry." Footsteps scurried away.

I slumped down to wait, wishing I'd brought the map with me so I could see where Remus was, where Severus was. My head drooped. I didn't even know where I was.