A/N: Now's the time to jump into the unknown... Thank you for reading. Please take the time to review whether you liked it, hated it or you're just plain confused.

PART IV

London, 1985-

Remus was left sitting at the table at "Chen's". He looked around, bewildered, though he couldn't tell whether he was more shocked by Snape's sudden disappearance or the fact that he seemed to the be only person aware of it. He beckoned to the waiter who came over, smiling graciously.

"Excuse me, this will sound odd, but how many people did you see at this table just a minute ago?" Remus asked, his voice faint.

"Before or after you sat down, Sir?" the waiter asked back, seeming to take the question very seriously.

"Thanks. Forget it." Remus mumbled, feeling idiotic. The man clearly hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary if he could ask him that with such a composed expression. The again, his very distinct Hong-Kong English seemed very prim and proper to Remus, who wondered to what extent this composure might be a cultural illusion.

"Perhaps you would like some refreshments, Sir?" the waiter offered.

"No... thank you. I er, I should head off." Remus said. And then, seeing the corner of the waiter's mouth give the slightest twitch of irritation he added "I... I don't think she'll be coming actually..." he offered, trying to come up with a plausible explanation for the fact that he had, as far as the waiter was concerned, apparently come in to the restaurant, sat down, stared at the empty seat across from him, mouthed a few words and decided to leave within ten minutes or so.

'He must think I'm mad' Remus thought to himself.

"She?" The waiter said, amused. "I understand, Sir. Come again soon." he added with a shallow tilt of his head, motioning towards the door.

On the way out, Remus noticed a couple sitting by the window, which was framed by heavy and dark silk brocade curtains. The man's attention was completely focused on trying to hold onto a saucily-slick piece of meat between his two chopsticks. The woman, however, who was more or less his mother's age, looked him straight in the eye and brought her finger to the side of her nose. Remus, nodded to her, not having the faintest idea of what she meant by the gesture, opened the door and went out, but he could still see her gaze through the front window and caught her winking at him. It struck him that her appearance was rather strange. She had been wearing an odd combination of patterns, and the mound of brown curls piled onto her hear resembled an 18th century powdered wig, except for the colour... Then again, he was in Soho... She might just have been an opera singer or performer of some sort out for a meal before a late performance.

Pushing his thoughts about the woman's strange behaviour aside, Remus felt memories flooding in.

'Severus Snape.' he mouthed to himself as he walked back to his flat. As he repeated the name over and over he felt a fogginess unfold in his mind. Through a haze he saw the missing teeth and the... miracle... the illusion... he didn't know what to call it, that Snape had performed when they were in school. For the life of him he couldn't fathom why he hadn't been traumatised by it, not to mention how on earth he could possibly have forgotten it. And for that matter, how he could have spent two more years at school without ever seeing hair nor hide of the other boy? He was starting to feel a migraine building up in this already overworked head. There was nothing to do but to go home. Come to think of it though, hadn't he felt and done exactly the same all those years ago after witnessing Snape's magical dental work? Yes... maybe that was why he had forgotten... though unconvinced, Remus suddenly felt slightly less unsettled.

'There must surely be a rational explanation for all of this...' he thought.

The next day Remus decided to pay a visit to his parents after work. His job at the news stand was originally meant to be a temporary source of income, but Remus had found over time that as a bachelor with inexpensive taste, he could afford to work there. The main attraction of the job was that he could constantly be around people without having to get too involved or even get too near them physically. People would tell him all the neighbourhood gossip, complain about the weather, their spouses, children, relatives, and whatever else they could think of and Remus would listen, ask questions and make mental bets with himself that he could guess exactly what Mrs. So-and-so would think about Miss Such-and-such's new haircut and M. What's-his-name's secretary's visibly growing baby bump. His friends, James, Peter and Sirius - whose parents clearly had meant for him to suffer all manner of puns when choosing such an outlandish name for their son - would drop by occasionally during a lunch hour for a newspaper and a chat. He was rather hoping that one of them would choose this day to visit in hopes of asking them about Severus Snape. As chance would have it, it wasn't one of his friends, but a former teacher who dropped by.

"Gooday Remus, a copy of the Guardian please." said Miss McGonagall, his English teacher. He couldn't believe his luck.

"There you are." Remus answered, handing her the newspaper. "Miss?" he sarted.

"Miss McGonagall." she corrected "Honestly, you aren't in class any more. You sound just like my current students. Now, what is it you would like to know?" she added with a forced smile. Remus thought that perhaps she felt a little sheepish for berating him for behaving as if he were still at school when she herself had just corrected him in a tone that suggested that she did in fact still think of him as her pupil.

"I was wondering... do you by any chance remember a boy from my year? Severus Snape. Black hair, sallow skin..." Remus asked, trying to make his question sound as casual as possible. Remus noted that as she made to answer, Miss McGonagall's features seemed to tense ever so slightly.

"I do." She said, pausing as if unsure of how to continue. "He was in the classroom two doors down from yours, wasn't he?" she said.

"Right." Remus answered. After a slightly awkward pause. "Actually, I was asking because I met him by chance the other day and it took me a while to place him." he said, knowing that now, just like back in school, Miss McGonagall was famous for being able to detect lies. She eyed him with... was it worry fleeting across her gaze... said "I'm surprised Remus. I would have thought that given your friendship with Sirius and James you would have remembered Severus Snape better. After all, they did get into fights regularly..." she glanced at the small watch-pendant hanging on a chain around he neck "Good heavens! I must be off. Pleasure speaking with you Remus."

"Goodbye Miss." he said.

"Miss McGonagall!" she shouted over her shoulder with a small wave.

'Well, maybe I'll just have to pay James a call...' Remus thought.

After closing up Remus made his way to his parents' house on foot. The air was still very warm at this hour. When he arrived, his mother insisted on giving him a peck on the cheek and his father clapped him on the shoulder as they made their way to the table for a light supper. After the meal, Remus went to his old bedroom while his mother and father did the washing up, a task that had been his during his teenage years, and which he was now exempted from, being an occasional visitor.

The carpet on the stairs up to the top floor still had the same smell as it did when he had live in this house and the door to his bedroom still had a tendency to jamb when the weather was warm and the wood expanded due to the heat that would build up under the roof. Remus remembered suffocating summer nights lying awake, his window wide open, the moon shining in, waiting for the temperature to become bearable enough to finally find sleep. It wasn't quite that time of year at present, but the warm stuffiness that met him when he entered reminded him of summer days past.

He made his way to the bookshelf and pulled out a photo album which documented much of his childhood. His mother had religiously filled it with pictures of her only son on various occasions. He leafed through it, pausing from time to time to smile at the rather unfortunate knitwear his mother had so lovingly made for him, remembering the year she had finally decided that she had no talent as a knitter and resorted to buying all of his clothes. He looked on, searching for a specific picture. He found it wedged in between two pages where he had put it for lack of a better place. It was a photograph of the students in his year. His old school being relatively small, all eighty or so pupils in his year had been asked to pose together on the steps to the main entrance a week before the end of term. He looked and picked out himself, James, Peter, Sirius and a few others standing in the second row from the bottom easily enough. The faces being quite small, he had to search through a drawer in his old desk for a magnifying glass. He then decided that if he was to find Severus Snape, he would have to look methodically. Starting in the top right hand corner he inspected each face carefully. After a few minutes, impatient at not having found Severus Snape yet he rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, he noticed something that made him shiver. There Snape was, on the photo, one row up from him, just to his right. Close enough to be touching him. Remus let out his breath.

'Well, this is what I came here to find...' he mused.

He put the picture back and took another look around his former room. It was cosy with its slanted ceiling on both sides and it's creaky floorboards. He had liked living here, but he was glad to be out now. His parents were lovely people, but he couldn't help thinking that they must have been the most ordinary family on earth and he felt a little irritated by it. Unlike James, Sirius and Peter whose remarkable and sometimes slightly mad families had shaped them each in their own way, he had always felt that his parents trusted him to be sensible, to make sensible decisions and therefore hadn't for a minute doubted that he would end up making them proud of him. The fact that he was an underpaid bachelor with a dead-end job was already a small revolution on his part. Closing the door he wondered how much of his time at school he had spent daydreaming of being someone special and if this had made him partially blind to others, though he had always thought himself perceptive and a connoisseur of the human mind and heart at the time. How could he possibly have overlooked someone like Severus Snape?

"Did you find it dear?" his mother asked him.

"Yes Mum." he answered.

"Those were the days, weren't they" she said, smiling at Remus' father. "It was lovely for you to have such good friends back then. Mrs. Kitchener told be that James and his wife Lydia-"

"Lily, Mum." Remus corrected.

"Of course, silly me. Well, according to her, their son is doing exceedingly well in preschool and is quite the little charmer. Have you seen them lately at all?" She asked. Remus inwardly rolled his eyes. Ever since James and Lily's rather sudden wedding five years ago, his mother had been hinting that he should find himself a nice young woman to start a family with too.

Though she had always been quite taken with Sirius' natural charm, she rather less approved of his career as a pilot. "Airplanes do crash every now and then you know... I can't think how his mother can stand it..." she would say. She approved of Peter's career as an insurance salesman even less.

"That boy was always too ingratiating. Still, I suppose if he's good at it he's done well to earn money with it... and he does earn well, doesn't he?" Favourite jibe number two.

As the conversation covered all of the usual topics, his mother drilling holes in him with her questions and his father nodding approvingly, Remus remembered why, though he loved them dearly, it was in his best interest to spend limited amounts of time with his parents. As he was leaving, his father accompanied him to the door. That days' letters were still lying face down on the ground in the hallway where they had been swept aside earlier that day to clear the path for an especially large houseplant that the Lupins had brought outside to re-pot. Remus' father picked up the letters and glanced at the return addresses of each one. Frowning at the sight of one and turned it over.

"Well how about that! Look son, this one's addressed to you. We haven't had mail for you here in years. Funny that it should have arrived today, with you visiting us and all." He clapped his hand on his son's shoulder and sent him off, giving a short wave and greeting, before closing the door.

On the front step, Remus was struggling between excitement and a growing sense of apprehension. Because, of course, the letter was from a certain Severus Snape in Hackney.