The Good War

by inwardtransience

Despite her best efforts, Elizabeth Potter is repeatedly drawn into situations she wants absolutely nothing to do with. People just refuse to leave her the hell alone. (fem!Harry, dark!independent!Harry, mentor!Snape, F/F, playing with tropes for fun and profit)

25. Third Year — IX

Liz still didn't really know how owl post worked. It wasn't any old owl who could do it, but only certain magical owls, which had been purposefully bred ages ago. (Originally in Greece, though the practice had spread over time.) They used some kind of instinctive divination to find the person they were being sent to, supposedly — owls could find someone they'd never met before, no matter where they were, with no address and not even a real name, just the sender's impression of the person was enough to go off of...despite the sender themselves not necessarily knowing where the recipient was either. It was sort of like how a pensieve could fill in information the person it was from didn't remember, or had never even noticed at the time, the sender's impression provided the owl with far more information than the sender had, because divination was cool like that.

Owls weren't the only birds mages did this with — they were the most common in Europe and the northern half of Asia, but other regions of the world tended to use whatever local bird was fast enough and large enough to be convenient. Tamsyn's use of a bloody post duck wasn't actually that weird, since ducks were quite common — muggles used to raise them for food instead of chickens, and mages still did, so they just happened to be around — though using blood magic to alter her duck through an artificial familiar bond was, obviously, not the way it was usually done.

(Liz still thought it was kind of silly that Tamsyn had named her post duck Apollo. Though, honestly, she really didn't get people naming animals in the first place? She'd never bothered giving her own owl a name, she wasn't certain what the point would be.)

For whatever reason, the post at Hogwarts came at breakfast, and sometimes dinner, but no other time. She didn't know why this was, and nobody she'd asked knew either. Apparently there were wards that could filter or redirect owl post somehow — the post coming into the estates of noble families, or even magical flat blocks, didn't come directly to the person, instead dropped at a particular spot in the building, and sometimes even sorted according to recipient, sender, subject, all kinds of things; also, it was possible to intercept letters with curses or poisons in them, which actually sounded less complicated than that redirection and sorting stuff. She assumed there must be something on the Hogwarts wards that instead of sorting the content stopped the owls from delivering at any time but over breakfast, and only in the Great Hall itself. (If people arrived late for breakfast, the owls wouldn't track them down, just wait for them to show up.) The only major exception was evening editions of newspapers and stuff, which came during dinner, occasionally some more post coming along with.

Tamsyn's post duck also always showed up over breakfast. Liz had come up with an excuse about someone she'd met over the summer, she went to Beauxbatons (a magical school in France somewhere), thankfully everyone had accepted that explanation. Some of them thought it was bloody weird her mystery pen-pal sent post with a duck, but other than that.

So Liz thought she could be forgiven for, when an owl swooped down at her out of nowhere during dinner, being so surprised she spilled her water everywhere.

Wiping off her hand with a napkin, Liz glared at the little black owl — the thing completely ignored her, of course, plucked up a slice of ham in its beak before winging off, a roll of parchment left behind on the table. In the puddle of water, shite. Dorea snatched it up without a word, and Liz cast drying charms on the table, the parchment itself, took the letter back from Dorea.

"Who's it from?" Tracey asked from across the table. "I mean, we don't usually get post during dinner."

"I don't know." At first, she'd thought that was a fucking stupid question — she hadn't even opened the letter yet — but obviously if it was someone she got post from regularly she'd recognise the owl, right. She yanked off the twine holding the roll of parchment closed, unrolled it. It was tiny, only a few inches long, and— "Oh, it's from Severus." It wasn't actually signed, but it was the same handwriting as the marking on their Potions essays. "I'm supposed to meet him down in the potions lab after dinner."

She'd 'slipped' and used Severus's first name around her friends enough times by now that there weren't the slightest flickers of surprise anymore. Still a note of suspicion from a few of them — they had asked why she kept using his first name, but she'd never given an answer and they didn't expect to get one if they tried again. Even wondering what the hell that was about, Daphne asked, "What for?"

Liz shrugged. "No idea." She would think it was news related to the guardianship stuff, but Severus wouldn't want to talk about that in public, he'd call her into his office for that. And it definitely couldn't be a remedial lesson or something, Potions continued to be one of her best classes. "I won't be able to walk down with you," she told Dorea. There hadn't been another of those awful seizure things yet, but Dorea had had another migraine a couple days ago, she still wasn't supposed to be alone, just in case.

Dorea was a little embarrassed about the whole needing an escort everywhere she went for medical reasons thing, so she didn't respond right away. And she also didn't really have to. "It's okay," Daphne said, "we'll be around."

Liz nodded, turning back to her dinner without another word.

Once she was done, she glanced up at the staff table quick — Severus hadn't been there earlier, but he could have shown up since — but no, he must already be downstairs waiting for her, so she started heading down. Severus had his private lab down here, yes, but the letter had actually been referring to the one the students used. As much as Severus severely disapproved of kids messing around in class, he was actually fine with them brewing in their free time. If only while under proper supervision — one of the unused classrooms in the Potions department was made available for a few hours every day, and ingredients wouldn't be handed over without approval of the formula.

Though Severus didn't always do the "proper supervision" himself. As Liz had noted over the summer, Severus was very busy, and it wasn't really better during the school year — he didn't have time to supervise the lab all the time. But he thought it was important for people to practise to improve their skills, so the opportunity must be there for those who chose to take it — according to the prefects showing them around back in her first year, anyway, she hadn't heard that from Severus himself — and there were long-term projects OWL and especially NEWT students had to work on, apparently. Instead, lab hours were mostly supervised by a rotation of Severus-approved NEWT students (almost all Slytherins and Hufflepuffs, for some reason), occasionally Smethwyck or Sinistra, who rumour had it had both considered going for Potions Masteries once upon a time. Supposedly even Dumbledore took a shift on the very rare occasion.

Liz had brewed down here several times. (She'd prefer to do it alone in her room, but in the lab they were allowed to use the school's potions supplies, she didn't have to worry about keeping herself stocked this way.) She did have that small stash of potions she kept on hand, and while she didn't use most of those very often they didn't keep forever either. But, far more frequently of late, she'd found a topical healing/pain potion that worked really well at reducing muscle aches and bruises and such — now she used it after every single quidditch practice. (In the shower, because she needed it places she wasn't comfortable leaving uncovered where people could see, and also it was convenient being able to wash off the extra stuff right away.) The difference it made for how stiff and sore she was the next day after a rough practice was incredible, she'd actually ended up copying the formula for a couple people on the team when they'd noticed and asked about it. Even normal bruise balm usually didn't help with stiffness and stuff, so it was noticeable she'd done something special if she wasn't limping the day after a nasty bludger hit, and Slytherins were irritatingly observant sometimes.

When she got down to the lab — pretty much exactly like their classroom, with all the little tables with burners in them, cabinets with various cauldrons and stirrers and knives and ladles and glassware, though without the teacher's desk and blackboard at the front or the creepy shite preserved in jars (Severus definitely did that sort of thing to mess with people, because he was just weird like that) — it was almost entirely empty, which wasn't a surprise, with dinner still going on. There were only two upperclassmen in here, both boys, a Ravenclaw and a Hufflepuff.

And, as expected, Severus was already here. He'd been sitting at one of the tables — not brewing, by the look of it marking essays — but when she walked in he glanced up and stood, waving her over. "This way, Miss Potter."

He led her over to one of the tables, in one of the back corners. There was already brewing stuff set up here — a single bronze cauldron, various glassware (some little phials, others for mixing things in), and several jars and bundles of ingredients, filling half the table. There was a single sheet of parchment sitting there, a lengthy formula hand-written on it. "What's this for?" Despite being in public she didn't bother being properly polite. There'd been a tingle on the air as they'd approach the desk, Severus must have put privacy spells here already.

"The presence of dementors surrounding the castle in such large numbers is already having a detrimental effect on the health of the students. The volume of brewing I must do simply to keep Pomfrey supplied has increased significantly — particularly, she's been giving out potions to treat depression, anxiety, and epilepsy far more frequently than is typical. These potions in particular happen to be delicate to brew and demand extended undivided attention, often even the smallest mistake producing deleterious effects, so I cannot delegate a portion of the work to my NEWT students for the risk of potentially fatal poisonings.

"I simply haven't the time to brew your nutrient potions anymore, Elizabeth." Right, definitely under privacy spells. "As the elves have informed me that your diet hasn't improved at all, you must learn to brew them yourself."

"Oh." She glanced down at the formula, though there wasn't a name at the top or an introduction explaining what it did or anything, just a list of ingredients and the instructions — both were pretty long, several lines longer than her special healing/pain potion, meaning it was almost certainly longer than any she'd ever brewed before. "Is it difficult?"

"Not particularly. However, it is delicately balanced, and the procedure is quite

lengthy — small mistakes early in the process will be compounded with each additional step, at the worst reducing the end result to deadly poison. Given your performance in my class, I don't imagine you'll have trouble once you've familiarised yourself with it." Liz was pretty sure that was supposed to be a compliment. "Regardless, you will only brew it here, under observation — our student volunteers will be shown what the end product should look like, though I will not be informing them why you need it.

"Tonight, you will work until you've brewed it correctly twice, to be certain you've picked it up. If you haven't managed it by midnight — which is possible, as lengthy as the process is — you will return over the weekend and try again. Do you have any questions for me before you begin?"

Liz kept staring at the formula on the table, mostly so she wouldn't risk scowling at him. It was a little irritating that she was apparently going to be stuck here all evening, she had had things she wanted to do tonight, homework and stuff. (There'd been a noticeable uptick relative to last year, and they weren't even a month into the term yet.) But, well, none of that was urgent — once she'd actually started trying, she'd gotten into the habit of working on stuff right away, so she didn't end up being rushed later — and it wasn't like Liz wanted to make herself ill from not eating properly, which she didn't know how to do and would probably be terrible at anyway.

So this was probably something she should learn how to do at some point, and now was as good a time as any. She guessed. "No, I'm good," she said, already working at tying her hair back with the scrunchie she kept around her wrist just in case. "Everything I'll need is here?"

One of Severus's eyebrows ticked up, a slight flicker of something on the air, too quick and faint for her to read — she guessed that had been a question, hadn't it. "Yes. Call me if any problems arise." And then he turned and swept off, quick enough his robes did their usual over-dramatic billowing thing, pausing on the way back to his table to loom over the shoulder of the Hufflepuff boy. Shaking her head to herself — honestly, she realised this was hypocritical of her, but Severus was just so weird sometimes — she got started.

This potion was, as Severus had said, not particularly complicated. It did require the casting of a couple charms a few times, which was sometimes necessary in potions that didn't have enough magic in them to draw all the materials into the ritual — without the charms such a potion would often still work, if not as well, it'd just need to be strained before use, since some of the stuff wouldn't be properly dissolved — which was something they'd done in class plenty of times. Probably the weirdest were the steps where she had to crush these little pebbles of minerals and dissolve them into liquid in a separate container, which must be what the mixing bottles were for. That was a new one on her, but it didn't seem too complicated, it should be fine.

What it was was long. There were an absurd number of ingredients, certainly the most she'd ever seen in a potion before, which all needed to be sliced or peeled or grated or juiced a certain way before using them, multiple stewing periods strewn throughout. Going down the list, adding up the stewing periods and guessing how long it would take her to prepare everything, she thought it might take upwards of an hour to finish it, maybe even longer. Since it wasn't complicated, once she had it down she'd probably be able to do something else during the stewing periods, read or poke at homework or whatever, but still, she could kind of see why Severus no longer had the time to do this on top of everything else he had to do around here.

She might as well get started, then.

It was a bit less than a half hour later when Severus came sweeping up to her table again. While she'd been working a few more people had showed up, maybe half the tables occupied now — mostly older students, but that was normal. "Does this seem right to you?"

Liz blinked up at Severus before turning back down to the half-completed potion. How the hell should she know? She'd never brewed this thing before, she had no idea how it should look at this point. "I don't know. Is this not right?"

"I could hear that from halfway across the room."

"Hear what?"

With an odd, disorienting lurch in his head, Severus went still, blankly staring down at her for a long moment. "You must have some sensitivity to external magic. How does it present for you?"

"Oh, um..." She didn't know how to put that into words, really, it was always kind of weird. "Kind of hot and cold...like, sometimes really sharp, or tingly, or, I don't know, different things..."

Severus nodded. Then, out of nowhere, he grabbed her wrist and pulled it over — Liz's heart jumped into her throat, ants crawling over her skin, but she forced it down as hard as she could, it was only Severus, she was fine — until the palm of her hand was hanging just a few inches over the surface of the potion. "Do you feel that?"

Well of course she did, she could feel whatever she was brewing most of the time. It was a lot more obvious now, and it wasn't particularly pleasant, cold and rough, like icy sandpaper, but the roughness wasn't really even, growing sharper and smoother in little waves. "Yes?"

"I imagine it feels unpleasant."

It wasn't the only thing about this that felt unpleasant... "Yeah."

He let go of her hand, she snatched it back. While she took a few long breaths, trying to suffocate her entirely pointless uneasiness, Severus poked at the potion for a little bit, dropping in bits of this or that, stirring it around a little. After a minute or two, he leaned back again. "Feel it now."

Shooting him a narrow-eyed look — she thought he seemed vaguely uncomfortable now, probably realised he shouldn't have grabbed at her like that — Liz put her hand back over the potion. It definitely felt different than before, maybe a little warm (though so subtle it was barely noticeable, could just be normal heat), and sort of... She didn't know what to call that. Sort of like swishing her fingers through water, she guessed, smooth and kind of clingy, though not in a gross way. "Er, it's smooth now, it was really rough before."

He gave her another sharp little nod. "The magical properties of the potion were unbalanced, I've adjusted them to where they should be." A pen was pulled out from somewhere, Severus leaned over the formula, drawing little red lines between some of the steps — one, two, three, four, five. Straightening again, he said, "The conflicting elements used should be in balance at each of these points in the process. If you arrive at any of these and realise the potion feels 'rough', you've made a critical mistake and will need to start over."

"That's cool, thanks." Liz had noticed the feel of a potion change over the process, obviously, but it really wasn't any help, since she didn't know what it was supposed to feel like. It wasn't that much of a help now, since she didn't know enough about this stuff to fix it if it wasn't properly 'balanced', but at least she wouldn't waste time continuing on with a potion she'd already ruined.

Another nod, and Severus vanished the potion with a flick of his wand — dammit, she'd thought he'd fixed it... "Rinse out everything you used, leave them in the drying rack, and take clean replacements. Try again." He swept away again without another word.

Grumbling to herself a little, she did as she was told. It would have been nice to not have to start over from scratch, but she guessed the whole point was for her to learn to do it properly — Severus swooping in to fix her mistakes wasn't really accomplishing that, was it?

Her next three attempts, together taking maybe an hour and a half (she wasn't really keeping track), Liz gave up partway through all three times. It was rather frustrating, but there wasn't anything she could do about it but keep trying. She was getting further along each time, more precise with her slicing and her measurements, timing stewing periods to the second. She would get it eventually, it was just taking fucking forever.

She was going to be here all night, wasn't she? She realised this wasn't an easy potion to make, definitely not third-year material, but ugh...

Until, finally, she finished the entire potion. Liz flicked off the burner and took the cauldron off with a clamp — gripping the thing with both hands, the little bronze cauldron filled with potion was heavy — setting it down on the table but not letting go right away, tilting the thing back and forth a little, watching the thick, vaguely syrupy potion slosh against the sides. It looked mostly right to her? It was the same purplish-green colour as Severus's...or pretty close, anyway, without an example on hand to compare against she couldn't be sure. It didn't feel balanced, more like soft, cool tingles, very subtle. But Severus hadn't put a red line at the end, so Liz assumed it wasn't supposed to finish quite balanced anyway.

Actually, come to think of it, the potions she'd been taking every morning for months now did feel kind of like this? It wasn't quite the same, she didn't think, and of course the volume of magic in a tiny little single-dose phial was much smaller than in the whole cauldron, so she'd hardly noticed. She could feel the magic in potions as she took them, which yes, felt very weird sometimes. The nutrient potions had the slightest tingly chill to them, but she'd kind of assumed they were just like that? That it wasn't the magic she was feeling but something in the potion, the slightest bit of carbonation or something, the coolness could maybe be mint?

If it were the magic, though, that meant she'd probably gotten it right. So. Good.

Before she could figure out how to call Severus she felt his mind already approaching, glanced up to find him swooping into place to loom over her again. There were fewer people around than there'd been last time she'd paid attention, a total of...six students, probably all sixth- and seventh-years. Which did make sense it was— Quarter after ten?! Fuck, she really was going to be here all night...

Severus didn't speak right away, instead poking at the completed potion, stirring it around with a ladle and frowning down at it, his head thoughtfully tilted. There were little crackles of magic in the air, but Liz couldn't guess what he was doing. It took conscious effort to not hold her breath with anticipation, this one had to be good enough, it seemed right to her, and if not she'd probably be right back here in a couple days — she'd rather not lose a second night on this, thanks.

After what felt like several minutes, Severus straightened again, turned to nod at Liz. "This is acceptable. Bottle it in quarter-ounce phials — this formula should produce somewhere between three and five ounces total, so you will need twelve to twenty phials. Then wash and replace everything you used, and try again."

Liz couldn't help smiling a little — she did have to do it all over again, yes, but still, she'd finally gotten it right! "Okay. Um, I am going to run out of a few things this time," she said, waving at the bundles and jars of potions ingredients on her table, much smaller and emptier than they'd been before.

"The door to the storeroom is unlocked. I believe you can be trusted to not make a mess." Severus hesitated for just a couple seconds, in case she thought of another question, before sharply turning on his heel and swooping off again. Because he hadn't gotten any better at that ending a conversation thing in the few weeks since he'd dropped her off on the train platform. Not that Liz had any right to judge, of course, she was probably even worse at talking like a normal person...

Anyway, bottling the stuff was tedious. Ladling a potion into such a small bottle was always a pain, and she had to do it over a dozen times. She'd gotten stalled right at the beginning, poking through the racks of glassware, looking for the quarter-ounce phials, but there actually weren't any labeled with fractional ounces — the smaller ones were marked in drachms instead. Liz was almost positive that an ounce was eight drachms — they'd talked about measurements and stuff back in first year but they never really did multiple or partial batches, so she never actually needed to know how many scruples were in a drachm or drachms in an ounce — which meant a quarter-ounce was two drachms, and these two drachm phials did look right. And they were tiny, getting the potion in was delicate work. Delicate enough she spilled a bit, but she did get thirteen phials out of it, which would tide her over for nearly two weeks, at least.

A quick charm one at a time to get the stoppers on, and that was it, she just had to clean up...and then start over again from the beginning. Yay.

It was maybe a third of the way through when something bloody weird happened. Liz had already added the minerals and greens between stewing periods, separated out from her array of prepared ingredients the lotus root — which she hadn't realised was a thing, didn't lotuses kind of just float in water? Whatever. Anyway, she'd picked up the board, and was just about to scrape the five thin slices into the cauldron when she felt...

She wasn't sure what to call it, exactly. It was an odd, frigid tension, pressing in from outside, like the icy wind through Hogwarts's corridors in the winter, Liz stiffening against it instinctively. But not a physical thing, a magical...mental thing, like a feeling coming from someone else — she even glanced around the room to try to pinpoint it, but no, it wasn't coming from a person. It didn't seem to be coming from anywhere in particular at all, seemingly just there.

It felt, she realised, a hell of a lot like scrying, the moment the magic made contact with her mind. But quieter, less insistent on drawing her attention, and much more unpleasant.

Frowning to herself, Liz pushed one of the lotus root slices off the board into the potion, and then the second and the third, and when the fourth plopped in that weird chill faded — not all the way, it was still there, but noticeably weaker. Hmm. Liz touched her knife to the last slice of lotus root, as though about to push it into the cauldron with the rest, and the feeling flared into life again, sudden and sharp enough she blinked. Instead, she set the board down, and the feeling went away entirely.

...Huh. Was this...some kind of divination...thing? She was paying more attention than she usually did to the feel of the potion, since Severus had kind of told her to. Technically, she was only supposed to at the points when the potion should be balanced, but she'd just been listening all the time anyway, in case she could figure out the trick to fixing mistakes somehow. And, supposedly, to divine properly the person had to open themselves up to magic, let the echoes from stuff happening elsewhere or elsewhen or whatever carry on into them — just like how Liz picked up people's feelings all the time, just with magic instead of the mind. It was a very similar process, she thought, she'd just come to that conclusion in the last couple weeks after actually pulling off basic scrying.

So. Was that what this was? Was she doing Seer shite right now? She couldn't come up with a better explanation...

Liz went through the rest of the brewing process much more slowly and cautiously than usual, consciously trying to keep herself as open as possible — which, since that wasn't something she was so aware of most of the time, was more difficult than it sounded. Occasionally, she would get more little nudges. A cold warning, that she was about to do something wrong, or a sense of urgency, that she was supposed to do something she wasn't. Whenever one came up, she just obeyed, assuming there must be something the bloody universe knew that she didn't.

She ended up getting one of those you're not doing something you should be warnings at a point it didn't make any sense, there wasn't anything she'd forgotten, but the feeling wouldn't leave her alone. Out of lack of any better ideas of what to do, she just started slowly waving her hand over the spread of ingredients, waiting for a nudge in the right direction. And she did actually get one, weirdly, a warm glow of approval as her fingers closed around the bottle of wolf's blood. Which was doubly weird, because she wasn't anywhere near that step in the formula. A few drops out of the stopper was all it took, the magic of the potion shifting a little bit in response, and that was it, the feeling went away and she continued on.

This was...really fucking weird. Kind of cool, but weird, she didn't know what was happening.

Trying to keep herself open to the nudges she was getting, focused on the texture of the magic around her more than anything, Liz seemed to fall into a trance. Just working on auto-pilot, hardly even conscious of what she was doing. She was so deep into it that when she got to the end of the formula, the familiar purple-ish green goop sitting in the cauldron in front of her, she was almost surprised — like she'd been climbing the stairs thoughtlessly and thought there was one more than there was, awkwardly stumbling, but in her head. Blinking down at the cauldron for a second, Liz scrambled for the clamps, took the potion off the heat before it could be ruined.

Turning it over a little, watching the potion slosh around, Liz thought it looked practically the same as the previous batch — and she actually did still have her filled phials here, so she could compare them against each other. This second batch had maybe slightly more purple to it? And, it might just be because the bottled ones were behind glass, so it was harder to tell, but she thought there was a slight sheen on the fresh stuff, like a thin layer of oil on the surface...sort of, anyway, that was the best comparison she could think of. The magic even felt mostly the same, the tingles maybe only slightly smoother? kind of? It was hard to say.

She was going to be irritated if she'd accidentally cheated with inexplicable divination stuff and the potion still turned out practically the same.

Once again, Severus appeared while she was still pondering her results. She glanced up to find they were alone in the room, all the other students had left. Which made perfect sense, because apparently it was after midnight already — this time it'd actually taken her longer to complete the potion than before, that weird trance-like thing must have slowed her down a bit.

Severus wordlessly examined her potion again, gently stirring the thing and staring blankly down at it, for long seconds. Then Liz felt a spark of surprise from his head, his eyebrows twitching. He pulled out his wand, cast a couple spells at the cauldron — to no obvious effect, she assumed they were analysis charms — then, careful not to spill any or contaminate the rest of it, let a single drop fall from the ladle onto his finger, and stuck it in his mouth. (That seemed unsanitary, but Liz wasn't the Potions Master in the room.) There was another odd feeling in Severus's head, something she couldn't quite read properly — sort of lowly simmering, like the gentle bubble of a pan of sauce on the hob.

Finally, his voice low and weirdly softer than normal, Severus said, "This one is perfect."

Liz blinked — perfect? She'd literally never heard Severus say that about a student's potion before. Of course, he didn't directly comment so much in class, positive comments even more rarely, but still. "Really?" She heard the doubt on her own voice, it was just strange, okay.

"Yes, perfect. This potion is of a higher quality than you are likely to find in any apothecary in the country. I could hardly improve upon it myself."

For long seconds, Liz had absolutely no idea what the fuck to say in response to that. When she finally did get her voice to work, all she could manage was, "Oh."

Severus's lips twitched, a flicker of amusement dancing out of sight. "Return the supplies you haven't used to the storeroom, and wash up here. I will bottle the potion."

...He'd probably seen her spilling some earlier — the two-drachm phials were tiny, okay, it was hard to get it all in there. "Um. Okay." Before Severus could say anything more, Liz grabbed a couple jars and fled.

By the time Liz was finished, finally returning to her table, Severus had collapsed into a chair. She was pretty sure that chair hadn't been there before — there were stools in the potions labs but not really proper chairs — he must have conjured it. He was slumped back, leaning on one elbow on her table, head supported by his hand against his temple, the way he was leaning making his hair cover much of his face. Besides where the bottom pooled gracefully on the floor, sitting like this his robes seemed almost deflated, gravity pulling them at a different angle changing the way they sat on him. He seemed weirdly small, like this.

Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise — it was far more obvious Severus was really bloody scrawny and lanky when he was in muggle clothes (because he was a fucking hypocrite about not eating properly). It still seemed...just weird, Liz couldn't even say why.

After lingering a moment (he looked tired), Liz said, "I'm finished."

Severus's hair shifted in a wave, nodding. "You should call that elf girl. The preservation spells used by house-elves are more stable than you're likely to manage. And she can simply send one to you at the breakfast table every morning — she will need to arrange that with our resident elves, but such is not unusual for students who have particular health or dietary concerns."

...That was a good idea, actually. Liz was used to her nutrient potion just being there when she needed it, if she had to manage it on her own she'd probably forget. "Right. Nilanse?"

With a sharp pop and a crackle of magic, the tiny elf appeared a couple short steps away. "Hello, Liz!" she chirped, practically bouncing on her toes. Then she glanced at Severus, over-large red eyes blinking. "Oh, and hello, Mister Severus."

There was another flicker of exasperated amusement from Severus, but he didn't respond.

"What are you doing still being up?" she asked, sounding more confused than chastising. "It is being very late, you know!"

"It's fine, I don't have class tomorrow." They did have quidditch practice before lunch, but she was sure she'd be awake by then. "I didn't wake you up, did I?" She didn't call Nilanse very often to begin with, but she tried to avoid doing it too late at night or early in the morning, just in case.

Nilanse's head tilted to the side, sharply enough her ears flopped a little. "No? We elves don't sleep like humans."

"What, elves don't need to sleep at all? That's weird..."

"No, elves sleep, but we sleep different from humans, is what I mean to say."

...Okay. She wasn't sure what the fuck that was supposed to mean, but she apparently hadn't gotten Nilanse out of bed, so, good. Come to think of it, did elves even use beds? She hadn't known before, and now who the fuck could say, since they apparently don't even sleep normal...

Anyway, it only took a minute to explain about the potions, that she needed Nilanse to send her one every day. According to Nilanse, she didn't have to do that in person, could just pop one over to her at any time, no matter where she was — because of the weird magic bond thing Cediny had done, maybe? Who knew, apparently elf magic was actually very weird. But it'd probably be better for Nilanse to give the potion to the Hogwarts elves to send up during breakfast instead, since it wouldn't do Liz very much good if Nilanse popped it to her while she was, she didn't know, on the stairs, or in the shower or something. Nilanse sheepishly agreed that made way more sense, popped the array of potions bottles away with a snap of her fingers — Liz assumed she'd sent them somewhere in Clyde Rock, there must be storerooms and shite there — and then disappeared herself, presumably to go arrange things with the Hogwarts elves.

Hopefully that would turn out okay? Liz had no idea whether Nilanse had had much contact with elves she wasn't related to, and she was really young and kind of...naïve, at times. It was probably fine? Liz guessed if the Hogwarts elves weren't taking her seriously she could always go get Cediny or her mother, so.

Once Nilanse was gone, it was quiet in the room for a brief moment. Then, his usually smooth voice sounding a little strained and grating, Severus said, "I expected it would take more than one evening for you to complete the potion twice. You did well tonight, Elizabeth."

Oh. Um. "I kind of cheated." There was a glimmer of confusion from Severus, his head turned a bit, staring at her from under his hair. "After I started paying enough attention to the magic in the potion, I started getting these little nudges, I guess? Telling me I was doing something wrong. I think it was divination, though I'm not sure what I was divining, exactly. I was practically half awake for the second half of that last potion, I hardly even realised what I was doing."

Not sure how to read that feeling at all, kind of shifty and grumbling, but also weirdly soft? Severus was so damn hard to read... He huffed a little, lifted his head from his hand and leaned back in his chair, his hair pulling back from his face, long and pale. And exhausted, Liz knew his face well enough by now to notice the strain around his eyes. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. It appears you are fortunate enough to have inherited all of your mother's talents — Lily had the Sight as well."

"Wait, really? Was she a mind mage too?" At Severus's ticked-up eyebrow, Liz added, "I was kind of under the impression the divination stuff was related to mind magic, that it works by a similar process."

"That presumption is not entirely incorrect — mind mages are, technically, a class of Seers. However, only a portion of us are capable of anything recognisable as divination, and few Seers are also mind mages. No, Lily was not a mind mage." Severus shifted in his chair for a second, eyes drooping closed before being forced open again. "Truly, she had no idea she was a Seer for most of her life. She always had intuitive talent for certain subjects, particularly charms and potions, but we assumed that was all it was — some mages simply have natural talent for certain forms of magic. She would also get a feeling for people and events, a sense of whether people were untrustworthy or an action advantageous, but that we wrote off as her simply being observant. After all, it is not as though every socially-adept person in existence manages such through instinctive divination. No, she didn't discover she was a Seer until after we graduated from Hogwarts, during the war."

...There was no delicate way to ask this, was there? "I thought you two weren't speaking by then, being on opposite sides of a war and all."

There was an uncomfortable glimmer on his head, Severus frowning slightly, just for a second before it was gone. "I presume you've heard of the Order of the Phoenix by now."

"Was that what Dumbledore's vigilante group was called?"

Severus sniffed. "Yes, though they would hardly describe themselves so — they were heroes and freedom-fighters, not vigilantes." There was a bit of a sharp bite on Severus's voice, a hint of bitterness on the air. It felt too personal to be on principle, Liz assumed he must have gotten into arguments with Dumbledore's people about that sort of thing. "After I defected, my identity was to remain secret, though my presence was demanded at a few meetings with the core of the group, those Dumbledore most trusted. Your parents were among them."

The implication being that Severus and Lily had made up a little bit in the last...however long before she died? Right, Liz guessed that kind of made sense.

There was a brief silence, Liz wondering if she should make to leave — she hadn't been dismissed, but she thought they were done here, and Severus looked and sounded like he could really use a good night's sleep — before Severus added, "She was a Parselmouth as well."

And, of course, he had to keep throwing out shite like that, distracting her. "...I find it kind of hard to believe no one would ever mention it if Lily Potter could talk to snakes. Have you hard some of the shite people say about her? They've practically sainted her or something, it's ridiculous." The non-racist people, she meant, obviously Liz had heard some stupid racist shite about her too — she was practically the most famous muggleborn in recent history, and also dead and thus incapable of responding to defend herself, so, easy target. "People freaked the fuck out about me, they definitely wouldn't hold back on her."

It wasn't showing on his face, but Severus was amused, a cold, derisive sort of amusement — Liz imagined he must think those idiots were as stupid and annoying as she did. "Nobody ever speaks of it because nobody knew. We were unaware of the reputation of Parselmouths in this country until a couple months after we arrived at Hogwarts, and we decided she should keep it to herself. Luckily, she hadn't yet been exposed then. I don't imagine many of the pureblood supremacists in that day would have reacted positively to a muggleborn Parselmouth. The self-righteous, snivelly little Light children would have been equally annoying, though perhaps less of a potential danger.

"Also, you likely wouldn't exist. I doubt James Potter would have lowered himself so as to marry an evil, unnatural dark witch. In fact, I suspect Lily took this particular secret to her grave."

...That was completely fucking idiotic. That people cared so much about the whole Parselmouth thing, she meant. Okay, there was scary magic out there, Liz didn't deny that — after she'd started reading Dark Arts books out of Severus's library, she was much more aware of the seriously messed up shite magic could be used to pull off — but making such a big deal out of talking to snakes? Who did that hurt, exactly? It was just so stupid, she didn't get it.

Liz had already suspected she wouldn't have liked James much. She didn't know that much about him, just comments random people dropped now and then — from some of the 'pranks' he and his friends did all the time a couple professors had mentioned, she'd gotten the vague feeling he'd been unpleasantly Dudley-ish. And, Severus hadn't come out and said this, apparently trying to be diplomatic about her father, but reading between the lines it was pretty obvious James had been an arse to him, probably one of the targets for his 'pranks'. It wasn't a surprise that he might have been so bloody stupid about just talking to snakes, given how ridiculous the Light kids in her generation could be about it, but... Yeah.

But anyway, she had something she was curious about that wouldn't be incredibly awkward to ask. "Is that normal? For someone to inherit all their magic stuff from their mother, I mean. Charms and Potions are my best subjects too, and there's the Seer thing, and the talking to snakes..."

Severus let out a long, tired hum. "It is and it isn't. There are magical traits that are encoded in a person's genes, which can be passed down equally by the mother and the father — Parseltongue is one of these. There are other magical traits that are dependent on the nature of a person's magic, separate from their physical body. The character of their soul, one might say. It is believed these traits are acquired through influence on a person's mind and magic in utero — the child is surrounded by the mother's magic for their entire development, and often in close contact in the months immediately afterward, leaving a sort of echo of the mother's mind and magic on the child's. These traits — including the Sight, and most likely your talent for charms — are passed through the mother almost exclusively. There are exceptions, but they are extremely rare."

Right, that made sense. It kind of sounded a lot like what Tamsyn had said about muggleborns and squibs — that a child is more likely to be born a mage if the mother is around a lot of magic during the pregnancy, for both mages and muggles. It made sense that the kind of magic should also have an effect too. "So, mages tend to just be more like their mothers, magically, that's just normal."

"In some ways, yes. Lily wasn't a mind mage, if you recall. Also, you're far more powerful than she was at your age — I suspect that is likely a contribution from your father." Severus paused for a second, giving her a peculiar look, Liz tensing slightly at her sense of his attention on her, sharp and shifting. (Sometimes being a mind mage was really annoying.) "You are not your mother."

Liz blinked. "What?"

"Children are not clones of their parents. Regardless of what talents you may share with your mother, you are not the same person, and nobody should expect you to be. I do not see you as Lily resurrected, and that is as it should be."

For long dragging seconds, Liz could only stare blankly back at him. She had absolutely no idea where the fuck this had come from.

...Except, people kind of did expect her to be like her parents, didn't they? Or at least they had, before actually meeting her. She wasn't sure, since their minds were usually pretty self-contained, but she thought that was a part of why some of her professors...didn't really like her much. Well, okay, it'd never been very many of them, really just McGonagall and Flitwick, and also now Lupin, she guessed. And also not Flitwick anymore.

With the comments people had dropped now and then, even shite that'd turned up in books a few times (which was absurd), Liz had gotten the impression her parents had been...nice? Like, warm and friendly and stuff — sort of like Hannah, was the way Liz thought of it — though she'd long had the feeling that impression was maybe horseshite. People like McGonagall seemed to think James had been great and whatever, but she'd started hearing about the 'pranks' almost right away, so she wasn't so sure about that. In fact, she had the feeling two of her professors were pleased she wasn't much like James — Sinistra had never come out and said it directly, just observed that Liz was paying attention and following directions (which was a low fucking bar, but okay), and neither had Sprout, but Liz had picked up the thought that, as quiet and disconcerting as she might be sometimes, at least Sprout didn't have to worry about Liz bullying the other kids in the greenhouse with potentially dangerous plants, which was also a low fucking bar, what the fuck, James...

(That thought she'd caught from Sprout had been what had originally tipped her off that the 'pranks' James and his friends had gotten up to might not have been so innocent. From the way McGonagall and Flitwick and even Dumbledore talked about it, she might not have put it together otherwise. Which wasn't actually so surprising, most of the teachers in primary had had unreasonably positive opinions about Dudley too.)

And, of course, she thought Lupin just found her off-putting — he'd given no sign it had anything to do with comparing her to her parents and finding her wanting, but he had known her parents, so that seemed a reasonable guess. At least he was polite about it. Flitwick had kind of switched though. Given Severus had said Charms had been Lily's best class, and Flitwick had taught back then, Liz wouldn't be surprised if Lily had been one of his favourite students, and Liz was very much, well, un-Lily-like, being a creepy devil-child and all. And while it'd been obvious (to her, anyway) that Flitwick hadn't liked her at first, he'd quickly done a one-eighty when it'd become obvious she was great at charms — he'd even been relatively willing to brush off her terrible written work before Severus had bribed her into doing better, babbling something about how some people were just bad at essays, she clearly understood the material, it was alright. So. Flitwick had been kind of McGonagall-ish, at first, unsettled and disappointed by Liz not being just like her parents, but unlike McGonagall had decided he didn't care at all.

But he had still expected she'd be like them at first, though, which was the point. Severus's claim that children weren't copies of their parents, and everybody should know this, was kind of ridiculous just on the face of it, because clearly everybody didn't know this. Even the Dursleys had constantly talked about how Liz would turn out just like them! Of course, when the Dursleys had said it they meant she'd end up in a ditch somewhere, unemployed and addicted to drugs and probably whoring herself out to survive — she hadn't even known what that last one meant until the mind magic had kicked in, so, kind of a silly thing to keep saying — which she knew was total shite now. Er, mostly — she was pretty sure neither of her parents had bothered getting a job after school, but that wasn't the point.

...She wasn't sure what the point was, exactly. Just, that, what Severus had just said struck her as obviously false, everyone compared her to her parents, all the time, and also, wasn't Lily the only reason Severus had done half the shite he'd done for her? Sure, that wasn't the same thing, but it was still...something, she didn't know what she was saying.

And she continued to have no fucking clue what to say. Severus was still sitting there watching her, and she just kept staring back like an idiot. The longer the silence stretched on, the more uncomfortable it got, until she felt the tension in her chest, her breath a little too hot in her throat, unpleasant electric tingles wandering across her skin, running down her spine — not quite like eyes on her skin like ants, but something very similar she knew could turn into it with the slightest nudge. Which was fucking ridiculous, it was just Severus, he was being kind of weird and confusing but Severus was weird and confusing a lot, there was nothing to be feeling inexplicably unpleasant about, this was fine, she was fine!

Ugh, she hated her brain sometimes...

"Okay. Er..." Liz broke off to clear her throat. "Are we done here, then? You look like you need to get to bed."

Severus let out a little surprised scoff, amusement flickering in his head. "I suppose we are. Good night, Elizabeth."

Liz mumbled out, "Um, night," and she fled. She didn't slow down until she was well down the hall, shaking her head to herself. That had been bloody weird. Severus had been acting a little strange to begin with — normally, he didn't sit around and answer her random questions for no good reason like that — but that last bit had been especially bloody strange. Seriously, where the fuck had that come from? And... Well, she didn't get it.

He must be tired. Granted, Liz did know he was seriously busy seemingly all the time, but Jesus, he must be practically dead on his feet if he was collapsing in chairs and babbling off about weird shite like that. Did they have potions to help people with sleep? She imagined there must be, and Severus was the one with the Mastery in Potions, if there were such thing Liz was certain he was already taking it.

...So it was probably a good thing she could do her own nutrient potions now. Seemed like Severus really didn't need more shite to do.

Anyway, bed, yes, bed was a good idea...

---

The Ministry worker person — Hefina Sykes, according to the placard on her desk — fiddled with a binder of papers, which Liz assumed must be her file here or something. Waiting, Liz tried not to fidget in her chair, and probably didn't do a very good job of it. As much as she did actually like the robe thing Tracey had talked her into trying out over the summer, most of the time, she still felt slightly weird going around in public with one shoulder uncovered.

Of course, talking to these Child Welfare people was uncomfortable to begin with, so maybe it actually had very little to do with her jacket being taken at the door. It was just a little distracting, was all.

Sykes finally looked up from her papers, giving Liz what was probably supposed to be a friendly smile. A woman looking maybe about forty-five (which meant she was closer to ninety, since mages aged bloody weird), voice warm and smooth, blonde-haired and conservatively dressed in light-coloured robes, when they'd first met in the summer Sykes had immediately reminded her of... Shite, what was her name? One of the actually nice teachers in primary, who hadn't bought into the rumours about Liz floating around (which she suspected Vernon and Petunia had started), hadn't always assumed Liz was responsible for whatever was going on. Liz had had her in...year one, she thought? Maybe year two.

She hardly remembered being that little, it was forever ago. The only thing she really remembered was the write-up she'd done at the end of the year for each of them, and Liz had noticed hers was much nicer than Dudley's, so had pinned hers on the refrigerator next to his out of some silly childish notion that if she had proof that she wasn't a worthless— Oh, Ms Derby, that was it! Honestly, Liz's impression of Ms Derby was kind of mixed — she'd probably been the teacher at that school who'd treated Liz the least bad, not just when Liz had been in her class but randomly over the next few years too, but also pinning up that write-up had been the start of things getting worse with the Dursleys, so — which made Sykes reminding Liz of her vaguely unsettling.

They didn't even look that similar, it was just... Liz didn't know, exactly. This whole thing was uncomfortable to begin with, randomly reminding her of primary school wasn't making it any better.

(She didn't like thinking about those years at all if she could help it.)

Anyway, Sykes was talking to her now, all soft and warm and smiling. "This meeting, I think, will be rather shorter than our last." Oh, good... "We've finished our investigation to our satisfaction. I'll be going over our findings with you here, and ask for your opinion before taking any action."

"Already? I mean, I was told there might be a bunch of different interviews and stuff, that you might not finish up until next year..."

Sykes's smile flickered a little, a shade of annoyance slipping through. "For a case like yours, it depends on how complicated it is, and how many people are involved. Yours is a very straightforward case, by our standards."

...Liz couldn't imagine kids ran away from home to move in with their school teachers very often — given the story she and Severus were keeping to, that's basically what happened here. How fucking absurd were the cases they usually dealt with that this was a straightforward one?

"But before we get on with that," Sykes said, all warm and friendly again, "how have things been since we've last seen each other?"

How were things with Severus, Liz was pretty sure she meant. Which was slightly weird, because, "You know I'm back at school, right?" Also, she was planning on living on her own again as soon as Sirius was caught anyway...

"Yes, I know. There were still a few weeks left before the start of term last you were here, I think, but what's happened since matters too. Now, I didn't attend Hogwarts myself, but I'm given to understand Severus is rather involved as head of Slytherin — I imagine you still see a fair amount of him."

"Well, I guess." When had her first meeting with Sykes landed again? After going to Clyde Rock, and... Well, not a lot happened after that, she'd mostly just stayed at home reading and practising magic. "Oh, um, back in the summer Dumbledore wanted to talk about guardianship stuff. I'm not sure how he even found out, did you talk to him?" He might have found out when she'd fired Doge — Dumbledore had mentioned rehiring him — but she wasn't actually sure.

"Not me personally, but somebody in our office did, yes. Mister Dumbledore was interviewed on the..." Sykes flipped through her papers for a moment. "...Sixteenth of August. Our investigator noted that Mister Dumbledore was completely unaware you wished to challenge his guarantorship — did you never talk to him about it?"

Liz scoffed. "If your investigator actually talked to him," and Dumbledore didn't lie his arse off, "you should know how ridiculous that idea is. I had no idea Dumbledore was even my legal guardian until someone at Gringotts told me two years ago. I've talked to him a total of...three times?" Once in Charing before starting Hogwarts, once at school after the Quirrell thing in first year, and back in August they'd sent a few letters back and forth, and that was it, she thought. "Yeah, three times. He never told me he was supposedly responsible for me in the first place, so I didn't see why I should tell him I don't want him to be."

There was a flare of something sharp and cold in Sykes's mind — Liz was careful not to get to close, she had no idea whether Sykes would notice her there, but it was intense enough it was obvious even from a distance. Frowning, Sykes shuffled the papers around a little, dabbed a fountain pen in an inkwell, and started scribbling something on one of the pages. She was done after a few seconds, turning back to Liz with a slightly forced-looking smile. "And what did you and Dumbledore talk about?"

For a moment there, Liz had been trying not to be nervous about what that sharp and cold stuff was about, the note Sykes had made, but she was pretty sure she didn't have to be — she hadn't missed Sykes abruptly dropping the Mister. Which was slightly ridiculous, Liz had mentioned how completely useless Dumbledore was at their first meeting, but maybe Sykes had just forgotten that detail over the last month and a half. "He tried to talk me into going back to the Dursleys. I told him to go to hell."

Sykes blinked. "Have you told him anything of what happened with them?"

"I hinted at it," Liz admitted, lifting her bare shoulder in a shrug. She didn't like talking about that stuff to begin with, she wasn't about to start blabbing about it to Dumbledore. "He did read my mind the first time we met, and Severus probably told him a little bit by now — I know Severus told him I'm taking calming potions and stuff, but I have no idea how many details Dumbledore knows about why. So."

"...And he still wants to send you back."

"Yep."

Scowling a little, Sykes started making another note.

Liz was going to guess whatever Sykes was writing wasn't exactly good for Dumbledore. "Oh, also he wanted me to rehire Doge, his friend he had voting for me in the Wizengamot, which I also refused to do. At least Diggle wrote to me about what's going on and apologised to me for his part in all of this stuff being kept from me — I'm actually considering rehiring Diggle, he seems nice enough. I still haven't heard from Doge though, so." To be fair, Diggle had mentioned Dumbledore had told him all his communication with Liz must go through himself, so Doge was probably just doing what he'd been told. But, on the other hand, that was a stupid fucking rule, especially since Liz was legally old enough to handle this sort of thing on her own now, so Doge could go fuck himself. "That's really all that happened with that, I haven't talked to him since I didn't respond to his last letter back in August."

"Alright," Sykes said, a little distracted, still writing, "what else is new?"

What else? Not much, really... "Um, Severus saved my life again, I guess."

Sykes twitched, glanced up from her writing. "Oh?"

"Yeah, I had a bad reaction to the dementors — it's complicated, but Pomfrey wouldn't have been able to handle it without him, she would have ended up sending me to Saint Mungo's. I missed the first few days of class because I was in hospital."

Her forehead wrinkling in a frown, Sykes's mind sparked a little with irritation. "Ah yes, I saw the letter in the Herald."

Back in the second week of school, an open letter had been printed in the Northern Herald, composed mostly by Susan and Cameron Peakes (an upper-year Ravenclaw) but signed by several other students, including Liz. (It'd also been sent to the Prophet, but they hadn't printed it.) Apparently, Liz and Dorea hadn't been the only ones to have bad reactions to the dementors on the train, there'd actually been a few seizures like the one Dorea had had last week — Lupin hadn't been there to stop the rest from happening like he had for Dorea — and a few other more minor things that were the same weird brain thing but with different effects? Liz didn't know, apparently it was complicated. Even most of the bad ones hadn't had more than a couple bruises, but two of them (including Peakes himself) had had serious episodes bad enough Lupin had apparated them up to the school after Liz. The letter had insisted that the protection the dementors provided against Sirius wasn't worth the health risk to the students, and they were demanding they be removed.

Nothing had come of it, of course. Liz didn't read the papers herself, but she was told by people who did that there'd been a bit of a controversy about it for a few days, but the Ministry had stood their ground and refused to remove the dementors. There were talks of starting proceedings in the Wizengamot to sue the Ministry for damages on behalf of the students affected — Liz was even on the list, she might end up getting upwards of another hundred galleons she didn't need out of it, depending on how things go — but other than that, nothing.

Liz was seriously considering writing a letter to Lucius Malfoy. Everybody said he had influence over the Minister, maybe with the added weight of Liz's stupid fame (and also bribe money) Malfoy might actually be able to convince him — from the way Draco talked it sounded like Malfoy gave a damn about the little shite, she couldn't imagine he really wanted the dementors anywhere near his kid. But she kind of didn't want to write to Lucius bloody Malfoy, for various reasons, so she hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Maybe Draco's mum would be better? Hmm...

Anyway, talking to Sykes, yes. "So, there was that. I haven't really seen that much of Severus — outside of class, I mean, obviously. Slytherin is mostly managed by the prefects, you know, he just made the rules and watches to make sure they're being followed. I think I've only talked to him like three times this month? One, um, I'm a Seer, apparently — like really, I just figured that out a few days ago — but I was already teaching myself scrying, and I realised by complete accident that there aren't anti-scrying wards on the Gryffindor dorms. There are on the whole castle, you can't scry anything under the wards from outside, but from inside the wards Gryffindor isn't protected. Slytherin is, and Hufflepuff actually, but not Gryffindor and I never checked Ravenclaw.

"So, one day I went to his office hours to tell him about that — he said he'd talk to McGonagall about it, but I don't know if anything came of it or not, I never asked." She assumed it'd been taken care of? She didn't really know McGonagall well enough to guess whether she'd take it seriously, but Severus certainly had, so. "The second was the beginning of the year meeting...thing, he does that with everyone, nothing special came out of that." Well, something special had, but Liz wasn't about to tell Sykes about Severus accommodating her performing illegal blood magic rituals. "And a few nights ago I learned how to brew my nutrient potion, because he's too busy to do it himself this year. That's really it."

Sykes was quiet a moment, blinking back at Liz. She guessed there kind of had been a lot of information in that rambling, not really surprised Sykes needed a moment to process it. "Nutrient potion?"

"Yeah. Oh, did I not mention that? Severus made me start taking a nutrient potion, because apparently I eat like crap." Her lips twitching a little with a smile, Sykes made another note somewhere. "We did talk a little bit after that, which, weird, that was weird, but that's really it."

"Weird? Why was it weird?"

That was a silly question. "I don't know if you noticed this, but Severus is really bloody weird."

There was a little flicker of a smile on Sykes's face, her amusement far more obvious in the warm twittering of her mind. "He doesn't exactly hide it, does he?" Well, he did, kind of — very few people seemed to be aware of how much of an awkward dork he was — but she guessed that wasn't the weirdness Sykes was referring to. "I meant to ask, what about that conversation made you uncomfortable?"

"Nothing. Well, no, something, obviously, but I don't... It's not important. It's not anything really bad, I mean, I'm just...awkward with people, is all." It certainly wasn't anything she wanted to talk to Sykes about, so there was really no point in explaining.

Though, she'd figured out in the few days since what Severus had been trying to say, even if he was nearly as awkward with people as she was so hadn't done a very good job of it. She'd considered asking Tamsyn about it — she was the only person who knew what was going on with Severus, and also kind of good at explaining normal people things — but she hadn't actually needed to, just thinking about writing to Tamsyn about it she'd suddenly put it together. Because of Tamsyn, indirectly.

Tamsyn had written a couple letters ago that, while his history with her mother might have been why Severus had given a damn to begin with, it probably wasn't the whole story — making sure she wasn't literally homeless, sure, that was a reasonable thing to do because of Lily, but doing all this, becoming her guardian and everything (which was kind of sort of the same thing as adopting her, she thought?) was too much. The suggestion being that, to do that much, he must actually give a damn for reasons other than just Lily. Liz was guessing that Severus had been trying to say, indirectly, that what was going on with them wasn't just an extension of his relationship with Lily, that it was its own thing.

Which itself made Liz kind of uncomfortable, if she was being honest with herself. When it'd just been, sure, Severus was doing all this shite for her, but just because he owed Lily, so that made sense, that had been...easier. The suggestion that Severus wasn't doing it because Lily, or because Slytherin, that there other reasons independent of any of that was... Liz didn't know. It wasn't bad, exactly...she didn't think...she just felt vaguely uneasy about it.

But she wasn't about to tell Sykes any of that either, so.

After that, they talked in circles for a little bit, Sykes trying to get more out of her, but...there just wasn't that much to say? Honestly Liz didn't even know what Sykes was looking for. Trying to confirm things with Severus were okay, she guessed, that was Sykes's job, to make sure adults weren't...well, doing Vernon stuff. But there just wasn't that much to talk about. She got the vague feeling Sykes thought Liz might be hiding something, for some reason, but Liz had no idea how to convince her that she wasn't. So, kind of tedious.

Eventually Sykes made a final note on one of her papers, shuffling that one further into the folder. "All right. Unless you have anything else you want to talk to me about, we've come to the end of our investigation."

As though Liz had ever wanted to talk to Sykes in the first place. "Okay. What happens now?"

"First, I take you through the report our office is going to make to the Council on Family Law." Sykes pulled a couple pages out of the folder and set them down on the table, turned around to face Liz. The now-familiar logo of the Department of Health, Family, and Children was at the top, under that the letterhead for the Child Welfare Office, then a couple names and a sequence of letters and numbers that looked like complete nonsense — a case number, she assumed. Under all that was a big, bold title — Findings Concerning Intervention in the House of Potter (HLCN, HMe, MPKESI) by Invitation of Elizabeth Augusta (HLCCP, LTCN, OM.I) — which seemed unnecessarily long and complicated, but what did she know. (Also, she had no clue what all those acronyms after her name were — did she have a fucking knighthood or something she didn't know about?)

Under that were rows of boxes, text handwritten in them. The first was called interview with subject (E.A. Potter), and then there was Sykes's name, a couple dates (one of them today's), and a summary next to that, not actually saying much, just referring to attached documents. The next box said interview with present guarantor (A.P. Dumbledore), challenged, the name of another person in the office with the date, another summary; just under that was interview with proposed guarantor, active guardian (S.R. Snape), blah blah, same things. Apparently, Severus had actually had three interviews with two different Child Welfare people — one of them was the same day as Liz's first interview, had probably been at the same time, but there was another later in August and another early in September. Liz had had no idea, Severus hadn't mentioned it...

And then, of course, there were more boxes under that. One was for the visit to Severus's house back in August — the summary was literally three words (no concerns noted), but also referring to an attached report like everything else — a statement from Gringotts on her finances, for some reason; and then there was a medical report, signed by Pomfrey, Liz hadn't heard about that. She hadn't been brought in for an exam or anything, Pomfrey must have written it based on Liz's records she must already have — it was dated to about a week into September, so Pomfrey would have seen her not long before that. That summary also referred to an attached report, but was rather longer than the others, and—

...historic severe malnutrition (est. 6 - 9 y.a.); historic moderate malnutrition (est. 2 - 6 , 9 - 12 y.a.); evidence of physical abuse, permanent scarring (est. 7 - 9 y.a.); examiner notes suspected sexual abuse (unconfirmed)...

That box hit like a bludger to the chest, for long seconds Liz could only stare down at the page, hardly able to breathe, a select few of the words seeming to burn into her eyes — permanent scarring...suspected sexual abuse...

Liz had to take a moment to breathe, the air hot and sharp in her throat, fight off the ants threatening to crawl across her skin, the echo of it seeping into the air like a bad smell. (Which was silly, she was fine, ugh, she hated her brain.) Sykes had started saying something at some point, her finger slowly inching down the boxes, but Liz wasn't listening.

Pomfrey thought...

Why hadn't she said anything?! If she'd just asked, Liz could have told her, what, that Vernon hadn't...whatever, whatever it was Pomfrey thought had happened, she didn't...

And now it was going to be in this report thing, and people were probably going to see it, and— Was it too late to get that part taken out? Liz would have to ask about that at some—

Oh, Sykes's finger was moving down to that row, she should just ask right now. "Take that out."

Sykes blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"That," Liz said, pointing at the summary box. "The bit about the— Vernon didn't touch me or anything, okay, that didn't happen." Not really, unless they were counting—

Nope, thinking about that right now was a bad idea — Liz was already feeling tense and unsettled and unpleasantly prickly, she shouldn't risk getting drawn into bad thoughts right now. Freaking out in public would probably be really, really awkward.

Also, if she ended up needing to take a calming potion trying to explain that she hadn't been, Sykes would assume that meant Liz had been and was just hiding things again, which would be worse than useless. "That shouldn't be there," Liz insisted, trying not to let on how extremely uncomfortable she was right now — and probably failing miserably.

Sykes watched her for a few seconds, her face pulled into a pinched look Liz couldn't quite read, something warm and squirmy shifting in her head. Finally, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Liz. We're not allowed to alter reports given to us by healers. I'm sure you can imagine how that power could be misused by people with bad intentions."

...Well, yes, she guessed that made sense. Annoyingly. "Can't you just..." Except editing it out of this page wouldn't do any good, because apparently Pomfrey had said so in her thing, so it would be in here anyway, so...

"Liz, our case files here are strictly confidential. Nobody besides our people involved in your case and the members of the Council will ever be able to see this. The sensitive things won't be forwarded along to the Wizengamot, only our recommendation. Anyone who breaks this rule, whether they be one of our people who gives it to someone who shouldn't have it or if someone steals it out of Records, will face serious criminal penalties — at the least a steep fine, hundreds of galleons, at the worst seven years in Azkaban. It's not going to get out, Liz, these papers won't leave the Department."

Seven years? From what she understood, prisoners rarely lived longer than five — Sykes was saying that if someone leaked this they might get a death sentence?

...Huh.

Funny enough, that did make her feel better about it. A little. After all, it didn't really matter what was written on there if nobody was going to see it anyway. And if the punishment for leaking it was really death by dementor, she kind of doubted people would risk that. So.

Right, okay. Liz needed another moment, consciously breathing slow and deep, but she managed to calm down again.

There were more boxes after that. Just under the medical one were interviews with associates (A.P. Dumbledore) — apparently they hadn't just talked to Liz and Severus and Dumbledore. She vaguely remembered she'd been told that they'd be talking to other people, she'd kind of just...forgotten about that. It wasn't like there'd been anyone else around over the summer, so who would they talk to about it anyway? She wasn't entirely sure what the point was...

Anyway, for Dumbledore they'd interviewed "E.E. Doge" and "M.S. McGonagall" — so apparently McGonagall knew about this now too. Come to think of it, she had been acting slightly strange around Liz at the beginning of the year, but she'd quickly gone back to normal, Liz hadn't really thought much about it. Honestly, she'd kind of thought that had just been McGonagall being reminded she was terrible at transfiguration and not being happy about that, so.

And then there were more boxes for interviews with associates (S.R. Snape), and there were multiple people, which was weird, Liz hadn't really thought Severus had friends. One was "B. Babbling (Hogwarts)" — so, her Runes Professor knew about this, but she hadn't talked to Liz any different than anyone else, she probably just didn't care that much — and then there was "N.Z Malfoy", which had to be Draco's mum — Liz didn't think there were that many Malfoys around, and hadn't Severus said her name was Narcissa? like the flower? That was...maybe not good. Lucius Malfoy had been big in the Death Eaters, so was likely to be one of those people who hated her for no good reason, if he wanted to mess with her spreading this around would be a pretty good way to do it.

But...he hadn't — and Narcissa's interview was dated to late August, so there'd been opportunity to. Which meant either that Lucius Malfoy had consciously decided not to make her life miserable...or Narcissa hadn't told him. Which did seem possible, now that Liz thought about it? She meant, Dorea and Hermione had kept Liz's secrets so far, and Severus was a paranoid bastard, it was maybe safe to assume that he wouldn't be friends with people if he thought they couldn't be trusted to not go babbling about his personal stuff. That followed, right? And this was the same woman who'd asked Severus to look up childcare spells for her, and he'd actually done it, so she assumed they had to be friends...

She didn't know. Things with Severus hadn't gotten out yet — Severus seemed very certain that it'd be in the papers when it did, which was ridiculous, but people were stupid about this Girl Who Lived shite — so it was safe to assume people in the know (far more than Liz had realised) hadn't talked. So, this was...probably fine. She thought.

Anyway, there were two more "associates" of Severus's who'd been interviewed, though Liz didn't know either of them — "E.D. Vance" and "M.C. Eirsley". She vaguely recognised Eirsley as one of the noble families (she thought in Ars Publica, maybe), but the other one was— Oh, was that that Auror, from back in second year? They had said they were friends, but Liz didn't remember her name, it might have been Vance...

But that wasn't all the "associates" interviews. They'd apparently done some for Liz too, which, nobody had told her about that. They'd interviewed two people, "A.E. Walker" and "E.M. Granger" — it took a few seconds staring at the names, nerves prickling at the back of her neck, for Liz to put together those must be Dorea and Hermione's parents. She'd never met Hermione's parents — well, briefly on the train platform once, but not really — so she wasn't certain which "E.M." would be, but Dorea's mum and stepfather were Abigail and Richard, so, they must have talked to Gail.

Liz...didn't know how she felt about that. She'd seemed nice enough, when Liz had stayed over at their place for a few days last year, but she didn't really know Gail at all. And she hadn't even met Hermione's parents, how could they possibly be considered her "associates"? That didn't make any sense...

The real concerning thing there was, well, Dorea and Hermione didn't know about this stuff with Severus. Hermione didn't even know she'd never gone back to the Dursleys, as far as she knew. Liz was mostly certain they hadn't gone blabbing to other students about her, but she had no idea how much they might have told their parents, but if the Child Welfare people had talked to their parents Liz couldn't guess what they might have told Dorea and Hermione. She kind of didn't want them to know about it for as long as possible. Not for any real reason, she just...

They would want to talk about it, and Liz didn't want to, really? Not because it was bad, living with Severus was definitely an improvement over the Dursleys (or even alone in muggle hotel rooms, if she was being honest), it would just be awkward and tedious, was all. She expected they would have, like, feelings questions about it, and Liz was terrible with that stuff even in ordinary day-to-day situations, and with the reputation Severus had they'd be...well, worried about her, probably, so they'd want to make sure she was okay, and Liz would be forced to try to convince them she was fine, but she was terrible at feelings conversations, so she probably wouldn't be able to communicate that very well, so they might not be convinced right away, and...

It'd be a pain, that's all, she just didn't want to deal with it. Dorea and Hermione hadn't tried to talk about it so far this year, so they must not know...yet. Who knew what their parents might decide to tell them, they did write letters back and forth regularly.

Liz asked Sykes about that, why they'd been contacted at all. Part of their normal procedure, she claimed, talking to people who might have more perspective on the kid they were dealing with — which was slightly ridiculous in this case, since Liz had never even met either of Hermione's parents and barely knew Dorea's, but whatever. Technically, they weren't supposed to contact children directly without the permission of their parents — also they were aware Liz would be at Hogwarts with them, they didn't want to accidentally start rumours that might make trouble for her — so they'd written their parents and in the end set up interviews with Abigail and Emma (Hermione's mother, then). The things parents know about their kids and their kids' friends is never perfectly accurate, but it is more information to go on, sometimes they find it very useful.

Sykes said she could go over their interviews if she wanted, but that wouldn't solve Liz's problem. She didn't really care that much what Gail and Emma said to the Child Welfare people, but what Dorea and Hermione had told them, and what Gail and Emma might have told them — reading over their interviews wasn't going to help Liz with that. She really wished the Child Welfare people would have asked Liz before talking to them, she hadn't wanted to— She didn't like not knowing what they knew, it made her uncomfortable.

She still didn't know how Daphne had found out about the scars on her back. Once things got out they drifted around, she didn't like it.

After they got through the whole, uncomfortable thing, Sykes talked about what happened next. The Child Welfare Office had finished their investigation, so once she signed off on it they'd be making their recommendation to the Council on Family Law. Since some of the details involved were very sensitive, and also because Liz was famous and people were stupid about it — Sykes didn't explicitly spell it out, but that's what she meant — they'd already decided the Council would meet in conclave. Normally, the people involved in the case would be called to testify to the various councils in the Ministry and people were allowed to observe and all, but when meeting in conclave meant it was just the council themselves, deliberating what should be done in a case. They might call in people to testify like normal, but in this case they shouldn't need to, since everything relevant would already be in the report — they might call a couple people from the Child Welfare Office to talk through it with them, but Liz wouldn't need to show up.

Sykes said their recommendation was going to be that Dumbledore immediately be removed from the trusteeship over Liz's family, to be replaced with Severus; she was certain the Council would agree. Now, in ordinary circumstances, that would be that — the whole point of the Ministry's councils was to resolve disputes like these — but since the Wizengamot had created the trusteeship only they could alter it. So, once the Council made their determination, their recommendation would be passed along to relevant people in Wizengamot Administration Services, who would put a hearing about it on the calendar somewhere. And they couldn't just bury it to make it go away, apparently there was a rule that things like this must be heard by the Wizengamot within a certain period of time — of course, that period of time was six months, so it might be a little while before they actually got to it.

The particulars of the situation didn't help. Sykes warned her that, because of the fame of the people involved (Dumbledore in addition to Liz herself), the process would get...more politically complicated than these things normally were. She thought it was very likely that they'd actually schedule multiple hearings on the subject, just to get to the bottom of what was going on — and publicly humiliate the people responsible for political points, though she didn't explicitly spell that out — and the process would almost certainly be interrupted with calls to investigate Dumbledore, and... Well, the whole thing could pretty easily snowball out of control. That's just what happened when the person they were accusing of neglect of a child they were responsible for also happened to be the headmaster of a school and the Chief Warlock.

And that was just bloody stupid. She realised it would make problems for who knew how many other people, and be extremely tedious to deal with, but she didn't care. Well, she did care, but not enough to not do it. It was frustrating that to get her full legal rights back — ever, because the trusteeship would only end on its own when Dumbledore ended it, and she had no guarantees when or if he was going to do that (he hadn't said when she'd asked in their letters over the summer) — she was going to have to deal with everyone freaking the fuck out about the Girl Who Lived again, and probably asking her questions she really didn't want to answer, but if that was what she had to do she guessed it what she was going to do.

And, yes, she realised this meant people were going to know about things she'd been trying to keep a secret. Not everything, Sykes had assured her the Council's recommendation to the Wizengamot wouldn't include certain private details (like the medical report), but some things, yes. But one of the more unsettling things about people maybe knowing things was the uncertainty — Liz thought, if she knew exactly what everyone knew about her, even if it were things she'd rather they didn't know at all, that would be better than not know who knew what. Especially since, with how the Child Welfare people would still be keeping some things secret no matter what happened, what information did get out would be under her control, at least partially. She wouldn't be happy about it, she was certain of that, but it could be worse.

So, when they got to the end of it, Liz signed her name without a second of hesitation — she'd already decided, there was no point in lingering over it any longer.

When they got back to the lounge area at the front of the Office, Severus was still there, reading out of a healing journal. (Severus tended to bring reading material with him to stave off boredom, which always reminded Liz absurdly of Hermione, who did the same thing at quidditch matches.) Severus stood to meet them, the journal rolled up and slipped into his silly overdramatic robes somewhere, talked with Sykes for a little bit — about what they'd decided, what happened next, blah blah. There was something Severus had to sign too, and once that was done they left, slipping silently through the halls of the Ministry.

Liz tried not to notice the glances she was getting. It was just the normal thing, people being ridiculous about the Girl Who Lived, as uncomfortable as it was it wasn't anything to be worried about. Due to the Prophet mentioning it it was common knowledge she was in Slytherin, it was perfectly proper for a student to be escorted to the Ministry by their head of house. Granted, it didn't happen very often, since muggleborns were unlikely to have business at the Ministry and magic-raised kids would be taken by their families instead, but it wasn't a weird, suspicious thing, nothing that deserved particular attention.

Of course, Liz didn't think her just being in public deserved particular attention but, well, people were ridiculous about the Girl Who Lived. That couldn't really be helped. She missed the anonymity of that first summer in Charing, or really the last couple years up to that picture from her first visit to the Ministry got in the papers, people actually knew what she looked like now...

(She used to be watched in Little Whinging all the time, but her mind-control superpowers had put an end to that. She still hadn't gotten used to it again, despite a couple years at Hogwarts. And trying to fuck with everyone's minds at the Ministry of Magic to make them ignore her probably wouldn't end well.)

By some miracle, they ended up alone in one of the elevators — it was in the middle of working hours, Liz guessed people were at their desks and not moving around much at the moment. The lift car was filled with metallic clanking and rattling, neither of them speaking a word, silently waiting for the noisy ride to finish. Liz shot Severus an occasional glance, but he was completely passive, staring unblinking at the doors, his mind almost unnaturally placid. She wondered how he did that, she'd seen her own mind in her pensieve and hers was far more active, roiling like the surface of a pot of boiling water and crackling and flickering like fire.

A question itched at her throat, but she swallowed it down, at least for now. The doors could open at any time, that wasn't something she wanted to talk about in public.

They quickly cut straight through the atrium — somewhat less crowded than it got at peak hours or around lunch (when they'd been here last time), but still packed with more people than she was comfortable with — toward the long rows of floo grates. Taking a pinch from the little stand next to the first outgoing fire, Liz grimaced — she hated flooing.

Thankfully, she managed not to tumble onto the floor in Severus's office, though it was a near thing, her boots catching on the carpet yanking her off balance. Severus came out immediately after her (smooth and casual as ever, of course), shrunk his fireplace back to its ordinary shape with a tap of his wand.

Twisting to reveal his wrist, Severus glanced at his watch. Most mages didn't bother with the things, since checking the time with a wand was trivial, Liz guessed he had one to help time potion stages to the second. "You've missed Charms, but if you change immediately you can still make it to Herbology on time."

Liz grimaced — she hated Herbology. "Well, that's a relief."

There was a flicker of amusement in Severus's head, but he didn't say anything. He swept across the room, his overdramatic robes whipping behind him overdramatically, making straight for the door out into the common room. That did make sense, Severus had missed a class too. (He hadn't actually canceled it, gotten one of his NEWT students to keep an eye on the second-years for him instead.) She still started, though, uncertain, anxious tingles breaking out — if they were leaving right away, it was now or never.

"Um. Severus?"

He froze only a couple steps from the door, turned to look over his shoulder at her, still standing in the middle of the room where her momentum from the floo had sent her stumbling. "Yes?"

"I was thinking..." The tingles flaring as she reached for the words she wanted and found nothing, Liz glanced away, staring at the wall rather than meet Severus's eyes. She cleared her throat, tried not to fidget. "It occurred to me, I never asked. If you're okay with...this."

Liz tried not to flinch at the flash of cold exasperation from Severus. "That occurred to you, did it. You realise it's already too late for me to object."

"It's not. You could still go down to the Child Welfare people and tell them to stop it, or petition the Council. Or any number of things, probably, I don't know much about the Ministry. I know it's late, that's why it occurred to me, actually, and I didn't know if—" Liz was babbling, she forcefully cut herself off. "I know I should have asked sooner."

"Perhaps, though you needn't have." Liz blinked, turned back to face him; little shivers of exasperation were still slipping off him, but the corner of his lips was curled up, the tiniest hint of a smile. (Or a smirk, probably, this was Severus.) "You find the thought of being indefinitely trapped under the Headmaster's authority intolerable — when a means of escape presented itself to you you reflexively grasped it with both hands, without considering the implications beforehand. As impulsive and foolhardy as your behaviour in this matter might have been, I understand it perfectly. There is no need to apologise for it now."

...Oh. Liz...wasn't sure how she felt about that.

"In any case, you might recall that, while you never did ask my opinion on the matter, I broached the subject myself over the summer. If I truly objected to this course of action, I would have told you as much, or simply refused to co-operate."

Right. Yes, that made sense, Severus didn't really seem likely to go along with things he didn't want to do, did he. "Okay." Glancing over at the wall, biting her lip. "Why?"

Severus didn't say anything, but Liz could feel the flicker of confused surprise, in her peripheral vision one eyebrow ticking up his forehead.

She took a long deep breath, clenching her fists so her fingers wouldn't shake, trying to ignore his eyes crawling on her skin like ants. (These kinds of conversations would be so much easier if people didn't insist on watching her while having them.) Part of her was cringing away from what she was doing, she wasn't supposed to ask questions — which was ridiculous, the Dursleys hadn't been able to do anything to her for years, she'd thought she was over this shite.

(Once, she remembered, she'd been maybe three or four, she'd gotten frustrated with how differently Petunia treated her and Dudley, she'd burst out asking what she'd done wrong, why Petunia and Vernon hated her. In punishment for her lip she hadn't gotten supper for days — she'd never asked again.)

(They didn't like it when she asked questions at all, but certain kinds of questions were worse than others.)

Liz swallowed, trying to work out some of the tension in her throat. "There's no reason you have to do this. I mean, just because I'm in Slytherin or because of Lily isn't...enough, for something this big. People don't... I've never..." She didn't know how to say this part, just gave up. Well, no, she did know exactly what she was thinking, she just couldn't get the words out. (You're literally the only grown-up who's ever gone out of your way to help me, and I don't know why.) Trying (and failing) to shove her discomfort aside, she muttered, "I don't understand."

As the silence stretched on for a few seconds, and then a few more, Severus staring at her, face expressionless and mind smooth and cool — his eyes crawling on her skin like ants, Liz grit her teeth, tried not to react — she belatedly realised she'd managed to ask what she wanted without phrasing it as a question. Her throat clenched, holding back a hiss of hot fury, at herself more than anything — she didn't have to keep doing things like that, she hated her brain, fuck...

Finally, after what felt like fucking forever, Severus spoke — slow and cautious, but flat and without inflection. "I know what it is like to live at the whim of more powerful men, for one's movements, freedom, even one's very life to be held in the hands of a seemingly apathetic stranger. Perhaps, I simply wished to spare you that.

"I also know what it is like to be a child without a single adult whom it is safe to turn to. Perhaps, I realised it was within my power to do for you what none would do for me, and I simply couldn't tolerate the thought of being the sort of man who would not do so.

"Perhaps, Elizabeth, I simply want to. Perhaps it is no more complicated than that."

Silence fell again, neither of them moving, the air so thick Liz felt she could hardly breathe.

Liz noticed, like she'd asked her question without actually asking, Severus had answered it without actually answering. Or at least not in a way she found at all satisfying.

That was all well and good, what he'd said — or unsettling and...something, anyway — but it didn't actually tell her why.

But she knew, without even glancing deeper into his mind, that that was as much of an answer as she was going to get. Maybe there was something he didn't want to admit, for whatever reason, maybe he didn't even know why he was doing it himself — Liz hardly knew why she did half the things she did, after all. Lingering on it and trying to force the issue would be incredibly uncomfortable, and wouldn't accomplish anything besides.

Liz forced a hot, slow breath, nodded. "Okay."

There was a brief twitter of something in Severus's head, to quiet and too short for Liz to tell what it was before it was gone. "Okay." Severus took the last couple steps to the door and pulled it open, the privacy spells breaking intense enough Liz could feel it from here, stepped back to hold it open. Waiting for her to leave ahead of him.

As uncomfortable as she already was, Liz felt her skin crawl and her stomach squirm stepping by so close to him, but she managed it without making it obvious how much of a ridiculous, neurotic mess she was. Honestly, it was just Severus, she was fine...

Actually, come to think of it, since Severus was a mind mage too, and Liz's head was so unreasonably loud, it probably was obvious to him. That was embarrassing.

Liz wandered down toward her room, feeling strangely numb — hardly feeling each step as it landed, legs seemingly moving with no input from her — and somehow...fragile, sharp shards held in place but not properly repaired, rubbing against each other with a feeling like nails against a chalkboard. Which was an odd feeling, she didn't know what to call that, didn't understand what was going on in her own head right now.

In time she arrived in her room, closed her door and leaned her back against it, blinking sightlessly into the darkness. She didn't want to go to Herbology. She never wanted to go Herbology, but this wasn't a normal day, she felt too... Right now, she didn't want to do much of anything. Just crawl through the darkness over to her bed and lay there, wait for whatever the hell was going on with her to wind itself down, and—

(—curled up in the darkness of her cupboard and wait for—)

Liz shivered. "Igniat." The enchantment sprung to life with a warm flare of magic, filling her room with gentle yellow-orange light. There, that was better.

She should go to Herbology. She didn't want to, today especially so, but her friends would wonder if something was wrong if she didn't show up — Severus had said they should be back in time for fifth period, and Liz had told them the same — which she didn't really want to deal with. Also, Severus did expect her to. Normally she didn't give a damn what people expected her to do most of the time, but...

If he was helping her because he simply wanted to, he could stop wanting to. Liz didn't want to— Going to Herbology like she was supposed to was a small price to pay, really.

She stalled an extra moment, leaning against the door drawing slow, cautious breaths. With each forcing further down the unwelcome tension threatening to crawl up her throat, hot and jagged and painful.

(Uncle Vernon hated it when she cried.)

---

Dear Liz,

It's good to hear from you, lovey. Dorea mentioned you had a nasty turn with the dementors and were hospitalised for a few days, are you doing alright?
I didn't know you weren't aware the Office of Child Welfare talked to me. They didn't tell me much (which is understandable, privacy concerns and all that) but I assumed you'd given them a list of people to talk to in the first place. If I knew you weren't being kept informed I might have told you earlier.
You've put me in a bit of an awkward position with your letter. You're one of Dorea's friends, and I don't know if what she told me she'd only been told in confidence. If I downplay what she told me, in an attempt to offend her, you might find out later from the records with the Ministry that I'm lying, which would only make it worse. So the only true option I have is to be honest, and hope you won't take it out on Dorea.
She worries about you, Liz, and she was only trying to help. Even if you're not happy about that, I hope you can at least understand that.
Now, what did Dorea tell me? Not as much as I would like, honestly, I always suspected she was holding things back. I know you ran away from your relatives in the summer of 91, and that Dumbledore forced you back to them. I assume you're still living with them, given how much Dorea worried about you the last two summers, but I don't know for sure, maybe something was done about it. That the Child Welfare Office is only talking to me now, I'm guessing you were still living with them, but that's just a guess.
Dorea hasn't come out and said so, but from things she's said I assumed a long time ago your relatives hurt you. I even looked into whether there was anything we could do about that. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do on the muggle end without knowing your relatives' names and where they live (and I thought you'd be suspicious and wouldn't answer if I asked), and family law on the magical side is almost literally medieval, so there was nothing that could be done there. If you are doing something about it now, through the Child Welfare Office, that's a load off my mind.
Dorea has also mentioned that you have anxiety issues. She brought it up when you were staying over at ours the summer before last, so I wouldn't wonder what your potion was for if you needed it and bother you with questions.
When the people from Child Welfare spoke to me, I didn't have answers for many of their questions, I'm afraid. I just don't know you well enough. Besides the things I mentioned earlier in this letter, I mentioned a few suspicions I have, but don't know for sure one way or the other. None of those are major things. For example, I found that I didn't even hear from your relatives despite staying at ours for several days, that I wasn't even expected to call them so they'd know you arrived safely, very peculiar. Little things like that, that while I'm not sure what they hint at, I thought were important for the Child Welfare people to be aware of.
They asked me about your relationship with Dumbledore, but I know nothing about that, aside from Dorea's claim that you definitely don't live with him, so I had little to say. They also asked about Severus Snape, who I believe is your potions professor? I know more about him from things Dora Tonks has said than Dorea, I didn't have much to say about him either.
Just that they asked about Snape in the first place does make me curious, though. I assumed you're challenging Dumbledore's guardianship of you, which seems like the right thing to do, but I'm not sure why they'd be asking about Snape. The only way that would make any sense is if you're living with him instead, or will once this goes through. I haven't heard anything about that from anyone, and it's just a guess, not something the Child Welfare people outright told me. (Again, they didn't say much, privacy concerns and all.)
Since the Child Welfare Office arranged the interview ahead of time, Dorea doesn't know I've spoken to them at all. I also haven't told her my guess concerning Snape. I would ask you to tell her yourself, so she can stop worrying so much, but that's your decision to make.
On a less serious note, do you have any plans for winter break? I know Dorea has invited you to stay over before, and you've always refused. Maybe you have a good reason you don't want to come, and that's fine if you do, but consider this me extending the invitation again. We'll be celebrating Christmas with the Tonkses this year (I believe you've met Dora, your first year at Hogwarts was her seventh), and my parents might make the trip down at some point over the holidays, I don't know yet. If you don't want to share Dorea's bedroom for that long, the Tonkses have a spare, and there are plenty more at Ancient House. Maybe hundreds, that place is enormous...

Sincerely,
Abigail

፠

Elizabeth,

Now, this is quite a surprise. I've heard about you from Hermione, of course, but I'm certain we've never truly spoken before. I hardly expected to get a letter from you out of nowhere, and certainly not concerning such a complicated subject.
So hello, Elizabeth. Hermione has told me so much about you, and it's nice to finally hear from you. You needn't bother with that "Mrs Granger" nonsense — besides, it's Dr Mrs Granger, thank you very much — just call me Emma.
Hermione told me rather less about your personal difficulties than you might expect. She is concerned for you, clearly, but is also all too aware that your secrets are not hers to give away. I'm uncertain how aware you are of this, but before you and Dorea my daughter never truly had friends her own age before — it would take something quite significant for her loyalty to the two of you, and some of your other school friends, to be shaken, even so much as to act in your interests without your permission.
However, that doesn't mean I haven't put things together reading between the lines. I know you have some kind of feud with Dumbledore, who is supposedly responsible for you. Hermione did tell me about an incident where you ran away from your relatives', though she reassured me Dumbledore returned you home. It perhaps didn't occur to her that this incident happened shortly after the Hogwarts letters went out, and the Potters are nobility — my assumption is that you were unaware of the magical world before this, and once you learned of it you never went back to your relatives. I'm reasonably certain you spend the summers alone in some property you inherited from your parents, and have since the summer of '91. I haven't mentioned this to my daughter.
Hermione has also said that you're rather quiet and unexpressive, and generally don't like to be touched. She's also communicated some concern that you might not be eating properly at "home". From this, I've guessed that your relatives were physically abusive, or at the very least seriously neglectful. I haven't shared this with Hermione either.
I confess I wasn't entirely surprised when the magical equivalent of child protective services came to talk to me about you. I was unaware whether such a thing even existed on the magical side — honestly, I'm not particularly familiar with how such things are managed in the UK either, I didn't grow up here and never had any reason to look into it — but I hadn't considered such a thing happening to be outside the realm of possibility. In speaking with them, I shared what I knew and what I'd guessed, tailored so as to direct them toward the desired conclusion as much as was possible.
This also took some guesswork, but my assumption was that this investigation was being done because you'd sued to have your guardianship passed from Dumbledore to Snape. (Your potions professor? Peculiar choice, but it's not my business, I suppose.) Given that context, I decided to tell the Ministry people whatever I felt would point them in the right direction, as much as was possible without blatantly lying — after all, it wouldn't do your case any good if I were caught in a lie. If I assumed incorrectly, I do apologise, and would be willing to recant my testimony at your request.
I've told Hermione nothing about any of this. My interview with those Ministry officials did take place after the beginning of term, but we have traded a few letters back and forth since then, and I haven't seen the need to inform her. Until and unless you choose to tell her yourself, I feel it simply isn't Hermione's business.
Speaking of Hermione's letters, I am aware of the incident that occurred in her dorm room a few weeks ago. She never liked to speak of it — concerned we might decide to pull her out of Hogwarts, I suspect — but Hermione was treated terribly by her roommates. While I perhaps shouldn't approve of the particular means by which you did so, I admit I'm pleased my daughter has someone looking after her. Doing what I can to contribute to your case against Dumbledore seems like the least I can do in exchange.
If there's anything else you wish of me, do feel free to write another letter. Or if you wish to speak of anything at all — I'll always be available for Hermione's friends.

Regards,
Emma

---

October 1993

---

When it happened, it was abrupt, intense and unexpected.

The Slytherin and Gryffindor portions of their study group were meeting up in the library again, with no particular plans on what they'd be going over, everyone just picking away at their homework on their own, occasionally mumbling to each other about one thing or another. The Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs had class at the moment, and they were actually the majority of the group Dorea and Hermione had put together, leaving just Liz, Hermione, Daphne, Tracey, Lily, and Neville. Which was still more people than Liz was entirely comfortable dealing with all at once, especially since she still didn't know Lily or Neville that well, but they were mostly all focused on their homework.

Liz was strangely conscious of Dorea's absence — she'd had another migraine shortly into Defence earlier this afternoon. Once she was sure it was a migraine and not a seizure, Liz had volunteered to help her down to her room (partially just as an excuse to miss half of Defence), where she would probably be shut up for the next couple hours, curled up in her bed with the lights out. Liz knew she'd be fine — this was the second migraine she'd had since that seizure in the library, they were obviously unpleasant but she was back to normal once they were over — but it still made her...vaguely nervous.

It'd only been a couple weeks, but worrying about Dorea was already getting exhausting. It turned out actually giving a damn about other people could suck sometimes. Dorea had promised back a year ago now that she'd do her best to stay out of it if someone tried to hurt Liz again, and not run into the middle of it like an idiot as she had with Quirrell, but that didn't do Liz any fucking good if Dorea's own brain was hurting her...

Anyway, Liz was kind of grateful the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs weren't here at the moment — their full meetings had gotten sort of tense lately, and that wasn't just her being uncomfortable with too many people being around at once. At their last meeting, it'd been irritating her, so she'd started skimming over people's minds to figure out what the hell was going on. It ended up being something really petty and confusing: Michael had asked out Sophie, she'd said no, one or both of them had been kind of rude about it, friends had taken sides and it'd quickly become a mess. Liz had just let out a sigh and resolved to ignore it.

There had been a...bit of interpersonal drama among Dorea and Hermione's other friends, but Liz always avoided involving herself if at all possible. People took the silliest things personally — even when she did know what the cause of a disagreement was she was mostly just confused the people involved were taking it so seriously. On a couple rare occasions she'd been directly involved with one — usually someone in the group taking offence at something Liz had said or done, which always seemed perfectly innocuous to her, it wasn't like she'd been trying to hurt them (she honestly just didn't care about any of them enough to be cruel) — and when that happened Liz just pretended it wasn't happening until they got over it. They all realised by now she was a total social incompetent, to paraphrase Dorea, so if she gave them a little bit to cool down and realise whatever implied insult they'd read into whatever it was was just in their heads, these incidents tended to resolve themselves.

Last month, Dorea had observed, sounding rather exasperated, that Liz had precisely two conflict resolution strategies: she either ignored it, hoping it would go away on its own; or she took the nuclear option, slapping someone down hard to dissuade them from bothering her ever again. In response, Liz had just shrugged helplessly — she was aware of that, Severus had pointed out the same thing back in first year, but that didn't mean she knew what to do about it. Or even if she wanted to do anything about it, seemed to be working out for her so far.

The point being, she found these disputes between Dorea and Hermione's friends to be baffling and kind of irritating, so she was relieved none of the people involved in the most recent one were around at the moment.

Since there were far fewer people around, and they weren't really coordinating their work at the moment, it was much quieter in here than usual. The crackle of parchment shuffling now and again, the turning of pages, the scritching of quills — Daphne, Tracey, and Neville were the only ones using quills, biros and pencils were quieter — now and then a mutter as someone asked a question and got a response. Liz was working on another damn essay for Transfiguration, because McGonagall was clearly sadistic and assigned far too many of these things. She still found transfiguration frustratingly difficult, especially when compared against charms, which made it even harder to focus on the written work.

There was movement from nearby on her right, Liz glanced that way — Daphne, in the chair next to her, was standing up, swishing off into the stands. Must need a reference for something, nothing for Liz to concern herself with.

She didn't really, because being able to borrow books out of Severus's library was totally worth it, but sometimes she almost regretted making their deal a year ago now. Learning how to write an essay properly had been tedious (and she still wasn't certain she was any good at it), and the written work had been much easier back when she hadn't really been worrying about it that much. It didn't matter if the essay wasn't structured the way it was "supposed" to be, or if she got little details wrong here and there, or even forgot something important, because it didn't matter what marks she got. It wasn't like anyone cared how she did in school anyway.

Except Severus, apparently. She wasn't sure why he cared, but it was clear enough that he did. Especially since she'd gotten the feeling he didn't really want to give her access to his library — especially now that she was actually using some of the dark magic she'd found— he'd just been aware bribing her was the best way to get her to do what he wanted, and that was a relatively easy offer to make. And, this hadn't been stated explicitly, but it seemed reasonable to assume her borrowing privileges would be revoked if her marks fell too far. So she had to put the effort in.

And sometimes, that honestly sucked.

It might be easier if she thought the written work for Transfiguration would actually help her do it, but she didn't think it did. This year, they were working mostly on animate transfigurations, and most of the written work involved the theory behind how long transfigurations lasted, and making calculations for examples. The maths weren't even as complicated as what they were doing in Arithmancy only a month in, but it was rather tedious.

Transfiguration was kind of complicated, theoretically. See, what the spell did was transform the target object into whatever the caster imagined — actually transforming, all the little molecules and atoms or whatever really did become the new thing, it didn't just look like it. But these new molecules and atoms or whatever weren't real, only forced into that shape by magic. The transfigured object did act like the real thing, even in all kinds of chemical reactions and stuff, but it was temporary: as soon as the spell forcing the stuff into its new form ended, the power fueling it depleted, the stuff reverted to its original form.

Which was why a person could eat transfigured food, but they really, really shouldn't. If the spell lasted long enough for the stuff to be digested, for the body to pull out the nutrients and make stuff with them, those bits suddenly changing back to what they were before — or just vanishing entirely, if it were conjured — could have very strange effects on people, depending on what those nutrients were, where the body put them, and what they were before. Normally, the effects were rather small, but they could make someone very ill or even kill them if they're unlucky. It was best just not to do it, ever.

But, while the object's physical properties were changed, their magical ones weren't. They could be, that's what alchemy was, and doing that often made the transfiguration permanent as well, but that wasn't included in Hogwarts's Transfiguration course. (Supposedly it was part of the curriculum in certain other magical schools.) Which made calculating how long a transfiguration would last kind of complicated. See, holding a transfiguration together depended on what it'd been changed into and what it'd been before — it took more energy to change between some materials than others, something called the object's formal inertia, it was complicated — but the spell itself was also weakened (or rarely strengthened) depending on the original object's magical properties. And, if the original object's magical properties were in conflict with the new object's physical properties, that could also cause interference that would make the spell fall apart faster.

And that was without bringing living things into it. Generally, when a mage transfigured one thing into another, they had to visualise exactly what they were doing, but animals were really, really complicated. If you cut up a transfigured animal — which they didn't have to do in class, though Liz thought it might be kind of neat — it most likely wouldn't have all the organs and bones and stuff inside like it was supposed to, but just a...formless meaty goo. Kind of like raw black pudding, she guessed. In addition to turning the object into this goo, the spell also held the thing in the shape it was supposed to be, simulating all the stuff that went into that. Which, obviously, was extra work the spell had to do, so the magic ran out faster.

And then there was the animation charm on top of it — the transfiguration itself just turned the thing into animal-shaped goo, it didn't make them alive, there were charms that were designed to fake that. They were the first proper charms they'd learned in Transfiguration, actually. They'd only done a couple of them so far, but there were dozens and dozens, probably hundreds of them. Obviously, different animals had different body shapes and also behaved differently, so they all needed different animation charms. But, multiple spells acting on the same object caused interference, which made the magic run out faster, but how much faster depended on which animation charm was being used, because they were all different.

It was extremely complicated, was the point. There were so many factors that went into it it was honestly difficult keeping track of it all. Thankfully, the maths part wasn't complicated — they'd been given the equations and stuff, all they had to do was plop in the numbers for the right things. It was still tedious, though.

Their assignment this time was to demonstrate which transfiguration would last longer, a mouse of a certain size made out of so much dead pine or the same sized mouse made out of the same amount of a certain kind of sand, and give a theory about why that was — they didn't have to be correct, just explain their thinking on it. Liz was pretty sure it would be the one from sand, but she couldn't really say why? Just, living things sometimes interacted with magic weirdly, even if it wasn't alive anymore. People sometimes assumed wood was a magical conductor, but it was actually an insulator — the point of their use in wands was to cut off all the bits going in directions they weren't supposed to, and filter interference by sort of compressing the spell — so it made sense that transfigurations of wood would be more inefficient than a rock, which was basically what sand was. She didn't know why living things had a higher magical resistance, though, just that they did. So, writing that part was probably going to be annoying.

Also, flipping through the tables she'd written up for use in these things, she had the numbers she needed for making a goo-animal out of dead pine and sand, and the one she needed for the conflict between dead pine and the animation charm, but not between the animation charm and the sand. She would need to go find a reference book that would have it in it somewhere.

Grumbling to herself, Liz pushed up to her feet, sidled out from behind her chair. She'd only gone a couple steps when her foot caught on something, yanking her off balance, she stumbled and—

"Ó nú..." Someone snagged her around the waist before she could fall — Daphne, her mind was familiar enough to recognise instantly. Liz was bent double over her arm for a moment, her breath knocked out of her, flailing a little she forced herself back upright. Daphne's other hand landed gently on her shoulder, close to the join with her neck, and her face was right there, only inches away. "You alright?"

Daphne sounded rather sheepish, for some reas— Oh, nope, since Daphne was so close to her right now Liz knew exactly what she was thinking without having to try. That hadn't been English a second ago, she'd unthinkingly said the same thing her father did when one of them slipped or whatever — her father wasn't British, his first language was eyjamál, the Norse language mages spoke in, like, Orkney and stuff. (Liz was pretty sure Daphne's father was from Norway, but way up there, and apparently that far north they spoke eyjamál instead of Norwegian...except the mages called it Danish, but Liz thought it was really Norwegian.) When in public Daphne tried to be a normal good little British noble girl, and definitely not a quirky strange Mistwalker, accidentally saying anything in eyjamál was breaking character. And it was a character — she slipped now and again, but Liz had peeked in her head enough to still know even if she did it perfect all the time.

Liz was uncomfortably conscious of the arm around her waist and the hand below her neck, standing close enough one of Daphne's tits was pressing into her upper arm, heat radiating out into her from every point they touched, an odd surge of tingles sprouting from low in her stomach and crawling up her spine, and did Daphne use cosmetic charms? She knew a lot of girls their age did — practically all of the magical-raised ones, even Hermione had picked up a couple, but Liz hadn't even bothered looking any up (well, a couple for her hair, but none of them had worked) — so it seemed very likely that Daphne did too. Just wondering, because she didn't think it was natural to be quite that pretty, people's skin tended to have imperfections, and were normal people's eyes that vibrant of a blue? She didn't think so, that must be magic too.

Also, apparently Daphne wore perfume, Liz had never noticed that before. That seemed kind of weird — was that a normal thing for kids their age to do at school? Liz honestly didn't know. It was nice, obviously, vaguely sweet and citrusy, she was just saying, seemed weird.

Feeling Tracey and Lily's attention on them, Liz twitched, belatedly realising she was standing here just staring back at Daphne. Crawling heat flared along her neck, quickly spreading, Liz groped for her voice. "Yeah, I'm fine." She waited a second. "You can let go of me now."

"Oh!" Daphne chirped, mind clanging with surprise, her hands springing away from Liz as though burned, backing off a couple steps. "Sorry, I noticed you trip and just caught you, I wasn't thinking."

...Because Liz didn't like to be touched, she meant. "It's fine." Liz floundered for words for a moment — it felt like she should have something else to say right now, but she couldn't really think of anything. So instead she just turned around and walked off into the stacks.

The weird tingles and the feeling inexplicably warm didn't die down until after Liz had found her book. And that even took longer than it should have, Liz had forgotten what she was looking for at first...

Liz returned to the table, slipping gingerly in her seat. Opening the borrowed book to the section with the lists she was looking for, her pen tapping at her notes in badly-suppressed irritation, Liz tried to focus on her work, to not glance over at Daphne in the chair next to her. Frustratingly, she didn't think she was doing a very good job at that, it was terribly difficult to focus at the moment, the shadow of those not-unpleasant tingles still lingering.

She wasn't an idiot, she knew what that'd been — she was a bloody mindreader, it'd definitely come up at some point. Repeatedly. She didn't think she'd ever felt it herself before. And, honestly, she was not happy about it.

That had been attraction, she was pretty sure. That is, physical attraction, the whole...sex thing. She wasn't an expert, she'd only seen it from the outside before, but she thought so. It'd come out of fucking nowhere — there hadn't even been hints of this sort of thing before, and then all of a sudden, wham, smacking her over the head with no warning at all. And even though that first burst had worn off while she was in the stacks, she still had to resist the urge to keep glancing at Daphne, so. Seemed like a reasonable guess.

And this was, just, entirely unwanted. In fact, she was a little angry about it.

She'd noticed some of the other kids in her year were starting to get stupid about this stuff — some of the girls had actually started last year, but Liz was the youngest — and she'd been content with just...not. She'd known it was possible, likely, almost guaranteed that it'd come for her eventually too, she just...hadn't been looking forward to it.

She had enough trouble with her brain fucking with her already, she didn't need more confusing, intrusive feelings shite to deal with.

At some level, she was almost kind of amused? She meant, of course she was bent, she wasn't surprised about that — she was a freak in pretty much every other way it was possible to be freakish, so why not this too? It wasn't really a pleasant kind of amusement, dark and cold and sharp, but still, yeah, in retrospect she'd honestly kind of expected she might be.

(Petunia and Vernon wouldn't be surprised at all, she was sure.)

She'd known this was going to happen eventually, but she'd kind of been hoping it wouldn't. Because she was shite with dealing with feelings to begin with, yes, because her brain was fucked up enough already without adding more stuff to the pile, yes. But also, she expected this to be extremely frustrating, because there wasn't really anything she could do about it. It didn't matter how much stupid hormones gave her sexy feelings, actually doing what they made her want to do was just not on the table — she could barely tolerate touching other people as it was, and that was just hugs from her friends, or even something as small as Severus holding her hand so he could apparate her. She'd gotten enough glimpses in people's heads over the years to have a much clearer picture of what people did than was probably normal for a kid her age, but she didn't...

It did still seem kind of gross to her, she wasn't saying she wanted to — but she'd just gotten her first smack in the face with stupid hormones, maybe that would change later if it kept happening. (She assumed, anyway, she hadn't paid that much attention to how people started to care about that stuff.) But she was pretty sure that just wasn't happening. It would require taking her clothes off with another person around, and that wasn't happening, and there was the touching itself, and yeah, that wasn't happening either. Which, if feelings like that just a few minutes ago — and also right now, Daphne was still annoyingly distracting — kept happening, but Liz couldn't actually do anything about it, yeah, she imagined that would get extremely frustrating very quickly.

And even if she did decide she wanted to do something about it — and somehow managed to get over her fucked-up brain problems, which didn't seem likely — it wouldn't fucking matter anyway. Liz was aware she was hardly a nice person, difficult to deal with even on her good days. (She really didn't know why Dorea and Hermione tolerated her, she wouldn't in their place.) The chances that someone would actually want to put up with her one-on-one for significant periods of time didn't seem very high.

Also, she was aware she was not exactly the prettiest girl around. She realised some of that could be fixed, theoretically, dressing better and using cosmetic charms and shite. Except for her hair, that was hopeless — apparently, her hair was literally magic, to the point it resisted and threw off charms on it, Christ. Anyway, she knew that was an option...or it would be if she knew how to actually do any of that stuff, and she didn't, really. She assumed, and had also picked up memories from people's heads suggesting as much, that that was the sort of thing girls were taught by, whatever, mothers or aunts or sisters, and Liz didn't have any of those. At this point, she was probably set enough in the way she preferred to do things that she couldn't learn to do all that properly. And also she didn't really want to, sounded like a lot of effort for no real benefit, so there was that.

And she was a freak, obviously, that would be a problem. She didn't know how long she'd be able to be in private with someone without revealing she was a mind mage — especially if touching was involved, since that made people's minds so loud they were completely impossible to ignore — and that tended to make people uncomfortable and paranoid, worse than talking to snakes, she was still trying to keep that secret. And she was becoming increasingly certain she just wasn't going to grow tits properly. She thought they were trying to, that was probably the dull ache she got sometimes, but it didn't seem to be doing much, so, that seemed like that was a thing.

As much as Tamsyn had said none of that really mattered, she wasn't convinced. Tamsyn had apparently forgotten, giving her that whole rant, that Liz was a mind mage — she'd seen the sexy thoughts people had, and she was very much aware about how incredibly shallow they could be about it. The wealthy and famous part, sure, but she hated Girl Who Lived shite, so, she'd rather not leverage that like that? Seemed counter-productive.

So, there was a whole long list of reasons this development, no matter how inevitable it might have been, was completely unwanted. It was making her more and more angry the more she thought about it.

And Daphne still being distractingly pretty was not helping matters. It was irritating, and confusing, really, Daphne didn't look any differently than she had yesterday, why was Liz just noticing now? Well, that wasn't quite right, she'd been aware Daphne was pretty before, it was just...different now, and she couldn't even say exactly why. Now that she thought about it, the few occasions she'd been alone with Daphne recently tended to make her feel weirdly self-conscious, so maybe this had been sneaking up on her for a while and she'd just never noticed. Either way, it was irritating.

Irritating enough it was making it completely fucking impossible to actually work on her stupid Transfiguration essay. Liz made sure she'd copied all the numbers she needed and slammed the borrowed reference book closed. Gathering up her papers, Liz muttered, "I'm going to finish up downstairs. Dorea's going to need someone to walk her to Cambrian if she's better by then." There were a significant number of stairs between Slytherin and the classroom — that was apparently a big part of why Dorea was supposed to have an escort places, in case she had a sudden seizure on the stairs and got badly hurt. The migraines only lasted a few hours, Dorea might or might not be better in time to make it to Cambrian class, but she would need someone to go with her.

Of course, Liz did have History in less than half an hour, but she wasn't going. Hardly anybody did.

"Oh, good," Hermione said, blinking at her from across the table. "Did you want to meet at the kitchens around five, to pick up a snack on the way up?" The kitchens weren't really on the way for anybody here — especially if Hermione planned on going all the way back up to Gryffindor, which she probably didn't — but whatever.

Lifting one shoulder in a shrug, Liz muttered, "Sure." It didn't really make much of a difference to her, she hardly noticed when she was hungry anyway, but she expected Dorea would probably want to. She slung her bag over her shoulder, paused to shift the strap onto her scarf. "See you later."

She walked off, a few distracted goodbyes following her out, head still simmering with fruitless frustration. Here's hoping she actually would be able to concentrate on her work even alone in her room, she always had trouble with that when she was angry...

---

Poor Liz. Feelings are hard...

Anyway, I've been feeling inexplicably exhausted lately, the next chapter is a doozy, and I've been trying to write for the Plan. There might be lapses in updates in this and other things going forward, I really can't guess these things.

—Lysandra