January was cold and snowy, and the students, after their initial escapades with snowballs, grew sick of the weather and stayed inside. Cabin fever followed, and tempers often flared. One evening, Remus descended to the common room to the sound of raised voices.

"My book was right here. Where did you put it?.!" Violet, a second-year, was waxing shrill.

"I didn't do anything with your stupid book!" Brian shouted back, going red in the face.

A silence had fallen around them as everyone looked up to see what was going on.

"I saw you flipping through it," Violet said, marching up to him. "Tell me where it is!"

Remus looked at Gwen. Having seen as much as she wanted to see of the conflict, she turned back to her book, but her eyes weren't following the words. At Violet's bellow, she winced.

"I didn't do a damn thing with your book!" Brian yelled.

The tension in the air suddenly changed, diminished somehow. Violet and Brian both visibly relaxed. Violet's shoulders went down from their defensive position and Brian's complexion began to go back to normal.

"Is this it?" Peter asked tentatively, pulling it out from under the papers someone had strewn across the table.

Violet took the book. "Oh." She paused. "Sorry, Brian."

Brian shrugged, still annoyed, but not angry. People began to talk again in low voices.

During the change, Gwen had sat very still, her brow furrowed in concentration as she stared at the middle of the page. Now she felt Remus's eyes on her and glanced up and smiled at him. His gaze didn't soften at her smile, which soon faded. Uncomfortably, she turned back to her book, but her eyes still weren't moving over the page, and she seemed to have gone a little white.

"I thought we were going to get to see a fight," James said lightly, breaking Remus's concentration as he flopped down on the armchair next to him. "I would've liked to have seen that. Violet knows some good hexes!"

Sirius perched on the arm of the chair and folded his arms. "Weird how they both just kinda… relaxed, wasn't it?"

James shrugged. "Not surprising for Violet. She's usually pretty laid back."

"Brian isn't," Peter spoke up. "He's got a short fuse. Jinxed Ned Phillips last week—it was pretty nasty."

"Why couldn't he have jinxed one of the Slytherins instead?" James inquired. "That's what I'd like to know. Like that greasy-haired git, Snivellus."

Remus tuned them out, as he always did when the conversation turned to this subject. Somehow, he could not shake the idea that Gwen had something to do with the strange twist that conflict had taken. It was a ridiculous and illogical idea, but it bothered him. The fact that she had stopped reading was not surprising; the entire common room had been listening in to the conflict. It was the expression of concentration on her face.

Furthermore, he realized, this was not the first incident of this sort to have happened when Gwen was around. James and Sirius had started teasing Snape two days before, and Remus and Gwen had both been there. Gwen—and all of Lily's friends, really, except for Eunice, who was too busy crushing on Sirius to notice his faults—hated when they did this. Remus hated it too, but he never wanted to stand up to James or Sirius.

But just as the teasing was going a bit too far, his friends had uncharacteristically lost interest in 'Snivellus' and gone on to something else. Equally surprising, Severus had not retaliated, only given them a dark look and slunk away. The similarities in the two situations struck Remus forcefully.

"Isn't he, Remus?" Peter said, applying to his friend for backup.

"Excuse me a second," Remus answered, and walked over to Gwen. She glanced up from her book.

"Hey." She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes.

"I want to talk to you. When the common room empties."

Gwen suddenly looked very nervous. "Er, sure," she said, nodding.

Remus nodded affirmation and went back over to his friends.

000

When they were finally alone, Remus didn't waste time. "What is going on?" he asked her.

"What do you mean?"

"When Violet and Brian were fighting, and then they just stopped. You had something to do with that."

Remus expected her to deny it, but instead she blanched and rested her forehead in her hand with a very worried expression. "I haven't been completely honest with you," she said, not looking at him. She took a deep breath. "I'm an affectamagus," she confessed in a rush.

There was a pause. "What does that mean?"

"I can feel other people's emotions. And to some extent, I can manipulate those feelings."

Remus sat down. "Have you always been able to do this?"

"No." Gwen looked up. "It only started last winter. And I didn't figure it out until this summer."

"The party," Remus said, the light dawning. "When you passed out?"

"Yes. Too many highly excited people around me for too long. I kind of overloaded. I'm not much good at controlling it yet."

"Why didn't you tell me?" He remembered how she had bothered him until he told her about his lycanthropy, how she had said, Don't you trust me? "Why?" he asked again, his voice hard. What right had she had to put him through the agony of confessing his secret to her when she had kept secrets from him? What right had she had to make him feel guilty about it?

Gwen looked away again, almost cringing. Remus felt anger well up in him: anger and suspicion.

"Have you ever manipulated me? Is that it?" He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth, but the damage was done.

Gwen went very still. She turned back to him, her eyes shining with tears and smoldering with wrath. She held his eye for a moment, then she stood up, turned, and walked out of the room without a backward glance.

The portrait hole creaking shut behind her.

TBC