"W.D.," said Remus, concentrating carefully.

"Good."

"C.W.M," he continued.

"Yes."

"S.W.Y.C."

"Yep."

"S.O.A.I.S."

"Mm-hm."

"C.I.T.N.T. and…," he frowned and squinted, leaning forward slightly. "Omega?"

"Well done!"

"Greek letters? That's cheating!" he accused the tester good-naturedly.

"Have you ever known a potioner who played fair, Mr Lupin?" She asked airily and noted down the results on her chart. "Congratulations, Remus. Your eyes are perfect, as usual."

"Well, I'm glad part of me is," he sighed, stretching out his aching muscles.

Remus always dreaded the annual medical check-up for long-term Wolfsbane users. Ten years previously, the health checks had been stipulated by international law for anyone who had been taking the medication regularly for more than three years – partly to monitor the widespread use of what was essentially a poison, but mostly to ensure that the lycanthropy virus was not developing immunity to it, the consequences of which could be deadly for innocent humans. The Institute of Master Potioners' 'Team Wolf' eagerly devoured the results every year in the hope of finding something of use towards their development of a cure for the condition. To no avail, so far, but it kept their hungry minds occupied for a while.

The Medi-witch summoned Remus' file and ticked one of the last empty boxes on this year's test sheet.

"So, you've completed the eye test, the hearing, smell and taste tests, cardio-vascular, muscular, skeletal, skin, lung, liver, kidney and brain functions, power and control of magic, and all your allergy tests."

Remus slumped in his chair. No wonder he felt so tired. When it was all read out in a long list, his day's examinations sounded like a thorough method of torture. "And you've given us all of your fluid and tissue samples…ah, except one!"

Every year, he swore he would not be embarrassed. Every year, he promised himself he would get that particular one over and done with first thing. Yet every year he found himself queuing for all the other tests and carefully ignoring the fact that he could not escape the indignity of shuffling off into the little store-room and filling the small glass vial with his own semen. At his age, he really ought to be more grown-up about it.

He cleared his throat and reached for his cloak, hanging on the peg on the back of the door.

"You can leave that here," smiled the Medi-witch, pleasantly.

"No, er," there was no excuse for blushing like a schoolboy, but it always happened regardless. He reached into the pocket for a brown paper parcel. "I, um, brought my own magazine. Last year they were all…"

"Oh yes. They were all full of naked females, I remember!" Her grin widened. "I must apologise once again for that dreadful oversight on our part, but we've learned from our mistake. I have personally ensured that is something more suited to your tastes in there, this time."

The uncooperative ground refused to oblige Remus by opening up and swallowing him. Dreading what he was going to find as the investigation team's interpretation of his 'taste', he made his way slowly down the corridor to the stuffy, windowless room. Slipping inside, he closed the door quickly behind him and looked around.

And burst out laughing.

"Something amuses you, Lupin?" Snape whispered seductively, draped elegantly in the tatty armchair, his long fingers steepled together in front of his face.

…….

"Did you plan this all along?" asked Remus incredulously, after handing the sample to a smug-looking Medi-witch. "I thought you were beta-reading Edith's conference speech notes all day. Or was that a cunning ruse to surprise me with medicinal fellatio?"

"Hush!" hissed Snape, glancing around him in case anyone else was in earshot as they walked slowly across the quadrangle towards the Singed Eyebrow. Never one for spontaneous outbursts of sociability, Snape forced himself to take a butterbeer in the Institute's pub once every few weeks, grimly aware that it was the best way to keep abreast of the latest potions developments. Not the edited versions published in the journals or newspapers, but the real, warts-, ulcers-, apocalypses-and-all stories. "I was summoned here to assist a colleague with a serious problem. As I knew you were undergoing your tests, I offered to stay on afterwards."

Unsurprisingly, given that it was Happy Hour with all drinks half-price, the Eyebrow was packed with students and staff, spilling out onto the terrace and into the street. Snape had only to take two limping steps into the saloon before the occupants of at least four tables had shot to their feet to offer him a seat. After all this time, it still warmed Remus' heart to see Severus getting the respect he deserved. Such small, everyday acts of recognition were more important in his book than the grandiose honours conferred by the Ministry or the IMP, though the metalware did look good, twinkling complacently in its cabinet. Severus had not been permitted to stand up or to buy his own drink anywhere within the Institute since the end of the war. Remus beamed as he watched his lover nod courteously at everyone in turn and ease himself into a chair in the centre of the room.

Seconds later, a young man with gladioli growing out of his nostrils deposited two beers in front of them. No one else in the room seemed to regard the floral accoutrement as being worthy of so much as a second glance.

"Thank you, Mr Dogflud, most kind of you," murmured Snape.

"Anytime, Professor," he replied, somewhat nasally.

"Have they made any progress on your affliction?" Severus waved a hand towards the flowers.

"We thought we had the right consistency for the celeriac suspension last weekend, but it just turned them purple," Dogflud grimaced.

"How unfortunate," commented Remus sympathetically. The young man looked at him with resignation.

"I'll say. I hate purple," he sighed and sniffled away.

They sipped their drinks silently, eavesdropping on the outrageous conversations going on around them. Remus estimated that he understood roughly a quarter of what was being said, but Snape, of course, appeared to be memorising every snippet and filing it away for future reference, including the more salacious bits from the students' halls of residence.

"You can tell it's that time of the year again. Bloody werewolves everywhere," sneered a loud, female voice behind them. Snape spun round so fast his neck cracked like a botched apparition, only to find Team Wolf member Luna Flintoff grinning at them over a worryingly elaborate cocktail. She shook their hands and Snape rolled his eyes as she conjured a chair next to them and plonked herself heavily into it. "Bloody awful creatures, werewolves!"

"They're a bloody menace," agreed Remus cheerfully.

"Do not encourage her," warned Snape, who never seemed to find jokes about prejudice amusing, possible because he had regretted having held so many of his own in his youth. Luna cackled and blinked innocently back at him.

"I hear you were able to, ah, lend a hand for the testing today, Professor," she trilled.

The glare which answered her could have frozen Hades, but seemed to have no effect on the self-titled werebitch, who began visibly preparing another dig.

"How were your tests, Luna?" Remus interjected quickly. "Everything all right?"

"Oh, you know. Exhausting, humiliating, but over for another year, thank Merlin!" she drained her glass and leaned across the table conspiratorially. "I actually popped in to see if anyone knew why the Pigs were here earlier. Anything on the grapevine?"

"Aurors? Here?" asked Remus in surprise. Ministry personnel were pathologically reticent to set foot onto IMP property, finding the random explosions and the high concentration of Healing students too much for their sensitive reflexes. The Institute traditionally meted out its own discipline, usually twice as stringent as anyone else's, much to the Ministry's relief.

"None of it concerns you," stated Snape with finality, but no unkindness, staring into his pint. Remus found himself feeling faintly dizzy. The last thing Severus needed was another brush with witless ministry operatives with no idea how to let sleeping dragons lie, after his last awful run-in with the misguided young cretin, Phelps.

"Is everything all right?" he asked.

"For me, yes," he whispered.

Luna cleared her throat and looked at both of them in turn, registering the subtle tension which had gripped the atmosphere.

"Shall I push off?" she asked intuitively.

"Please," they replied in unison.

"Cool. I've got to check on Asif anyway. He inhaled some powdered horehound on Tuesday and has been acting a bit funny ever since," she left.

"Well?" asked Remus tentatively. "What happened?"

…….

Remus' beloved garden was not very peaceful that afternoon. The octurvice bush was squealing at a tatty-looking black crow which was apparently trying to eat its new buds, a muggle in some kind of motorised hang-glider was buzzing around overhead and a pair of gnomes were having a fist-fight in the far corner of the lawn, enthusiastically cheered on by a handful of their friends. He lay down on the stone bench and closed his eyes, trying to tune out the general antagonism while he digested Severus' earlier explanation.

One of St Mungo's research Healers, Wendy Suhthe, had been arrested by aurors while fine-tuning her Silver-Standard thesis on Incantation-Activated Antidotes. The premise of the paper was that those at risk of poisoning, for example, snake-handlers or certain types of potion brewer, could take a general antidote in advance, which would then lie dormant in their system until they uttered a charm to activate it. It was a very delicate cross-discipline study, researched jointly with the IMP and the Charm School in Galway, but one she considered hugely important as tests had shown that an antidote which had already been absorbed into the body was up to seven times more effective than one administered post-contamination.

The problem was that someone at the Ministry had read her article on the subject in Alchemical Almanac and decided that Incantation-Activated Potions fell into the category of Dark Magic.

"What?" Remus had gaped across the pub table. "How can it be illegal to try and prevent the accidental death of at-risk groups?"

"Lupin, I am by turns enchanted and irritated by your unfailing naïveté," Snape had strengthened the muffling charm around their table and explained as patiently as possible. "While Suhthe is publishing research into ways to activate dormant substances in the body for laudable ends, her methodology may also be used for more sinister purposes." He looked truly uncomfortable now, and Remus heartily wished that he could spare his lover the annoyance of having to explain further.

"Sorry, Severus, but I still don't understand," he had been forced to confess.

Snape took off his glasses and rubbed his fists into his eyes – such an oddly informal gesture for the habitually stiff man to make in public that it turned Remus light-headed with concern again. Sitting up straight, Snape replaced the spectacles and closed off all facial expression, falling naturally into lecture mode.

"I am referring to poison, Lupin," he had stated crisply. "Imagine how easy it would be to make a victim ingest a noxious substance which had no effect on the system until a certain word was spoken. One could wait days, months, years even, before the keyword was uttered. It would be virtually impossible to discover when the toxin had been administered, therefore impossible to narrow down a workable list of suspects."

"That's terrible!" Remus exclaimed. "Why do people always manage to use good ideas to do bad things?"

"Human nature," Snape had replied, almost inaudibly.

And it was human nature, Remus reflected later, in the warm sunshine of his little garden, which meant that Healer Suhthe was not the first to come up with the idea. According to Snape, a substantial body of work on the subject had been discovered in Hungary in the mid eighteenth century and carefully destroyed. Obliterating the written word was a simple enough process for governments, but controlling the thought processes of intelligent witches and wizards was quite another matter. The idea would surely surface again, perhaps in another place, another age. Knowledge will out.

"What will happen to Wendy?" Remus had asked at last.

"Obliviation, I expect," he had snarled. "Years of research wasted. She will not gain Silver Standard for a decade, if she has to begin again from scratch on another branch of antidotology."

"Isn't there any other way?" The werewolf had always loathed the idea of Obliviation. Stealing a person's private thoughts seemed a complete violation of human rights, he hated the idea of the Ministry poking around inside heads as a method of control.

"Yes," Snape had given his most chilling smirk. "The Hungarian authorities did not simply obliviate their clever potions master."

"They killed him," Remus had guessed. Severus leaned over the table, so that his lover could see the sparks of anger and disgust seething in the black depths of his eyes. His damaged voice had faded to an echo of a rasp.

"Something like that," he had intoned.

Remus had found that breathing was suddenly not as easy as it should be. He loved Severus dearly, truly, madly, deeply; yet very occasionally he found that the darker wizard still had the power to frighten him. No, not frighten, he corrected himself, merely disconcert. Severus Snape was a good man, who had performed brave and selfless acts for the Light - but one could not discount the catalogue of evil which the sweet werewolf knew his lover must have perpetrated, without being aware of the exact details. The knowledge that he shared a bed with a man who had probably committed more than one murder lay against his skin like the faint scars remaining on his neck from his silver-burn, a fact whose significance had decreased over time, yet could never be completely erased.

He suspected that Snape's tremendous act of willpower in bringing himself back from the Dark was one of the aspects of the enigmatic man he most admired.

The octurvice gave a shriek of such misery that Remus was jolted back to reality. A short burst of sparks from his wand sent the hungry crow flapping up into the air with an indignant squawk, leaving the magical bush alone to make sneering sound of triumph. Remus sighed and turned his attention to the gnomes, who fled through his begonia patch back to their burrows, trampling as many blooms as they could manage on the way. He was almost relieved to head back indoors when he heard the floo flaring.

Severus' bad leg folded as he stepped out into the room, leaving him sitting disdainfully on the hearthrug in a controlled heap.

"Whoops-a-daisy," said Remus cheerfully, loving the man even more for his ability to fall over with style.

"Bollocks," croaked Snape, with venom.

They manoeuvred carefully over to a chair with the help of the stick and a little magic. Remus was straightening up to go and organise some tea when Snape grabbed hold of his hand and kissed it.

"I apologise for my sharpness earlier," the potions master whispered.

"No need," Remus smiled, squeezing his hand in reassurance. "You know I understand the feeling of being frustrated with the Ministry."

"For once, I actually agree with their decision," the admission seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth.

"You do?" Remus was incredulous. It was second-nature for him to automatically assume the bureaucrats were up to no good and he felt slightly ruffled to have Severus sticking up for them now.

"They are correct in their decision to suppress this information," he insisted. "How am I to explain? Suppose an academic had invented the Cruciatus curse for theoretical purposes only - let us say he wanted to prove that it could be done. Would you consider that single innocent person's death worthwhile, to spare of the rest of wizardkind the misery which would ensue, once unscrupulous people realised the potential of a one-word torture curse?"

Feeling like a NEWT level student again, Remus wondered how it would have felt to be one of Severus' pupils, with those intelligent eyes scrutinising your face for signs of comprehension. Pretty damned scary, Harry and his contemporaries had claimed. He focussed on the question, unable to stop visualising it as an essay title at the top of a very long piece of blank parchment.

"The intentions of the inventor would make no difference," Remus spoke slowly, mindful of the earlier barb about his naïveté. "Once the spell had been published, there would be no way of controlling its use. He would have to be silenced and his work confiscated before he managed to share the knowledge with anyone else."

"Precisely," Snape smirked, "Personally, I would kill him, vanish all his papers and burn the workshop to the ground."

A shocked bark of laughter escaped Remus's throat before he could stop it.

"It would be the most thorough option," his lover scowled coldly, his expression distant as he pondered the hypothetical scenario. "Naturally, the idea would surface again, but it could take centuries, during which time the populace would be safe from the horror of the curse."

"But you wouldn't kill Wendy Suhthe, surely?" Remus wondered why he wasn't feeling some kind of revulsion for this wizard, who calmly discussed homicide as a justifiable method of censorship. Quite the opposite, in fact. Suddenly needing to be closer to his lover, he sat on the arm of the chair and carded his dry, gardener's fingers through the black and white strands of hair, almost compulsively.

"I have no personal quarrel with the woman," Snape whispered, too deep in theory to acknowledge the caress. "But her study must be stopped. No one should know how to..."

He made a nasal sound of surprise as Remus kissed him, unable to restrain himself any longer. In the werewolf's opinion, Severus was at his sexiest when radiating with fierce intelligence and the dangerously calm ruthlessness which Remus was certain would have been enough to raise him as a dark lord in his own right. Remembering the respectful faces in the Singed Eyebrow, falling over themselves to offer him small, commonplace honours, Remus had a vision of a world ruled by Severus Snape, sultry and just on a gilded throne.

As things stood, however, Snape had only one subject in his thrall, but one who was ready to follow him to the death if need be.

Ignoring the familiar ache he referred to as growing-old-pains beginning to throb in his upper arm, Remus allowed his hand to burrow through the many layers of his lover's black robes.

"What is this in aid of, Lupin?" purred Severus, finally reengaging with the common plane of existence.

"You lent me a hand earlier," he chuckled. "It's only right that I return the favour."

"I see," he hummed approvingly. "You must be relieved to have all that business over for another year."

"Oh, Merlin, yes!" said Remus. "I think buying that porn magazine was even more embarrassing than the thought of, er, using it! I never, ever want to see the dreadful thing again."

"Ah yes, where did you put that, incidentally," asked Snape, glancing around the room as though expecting it to be proudly displayed on the coffee table.

"It's still in my cloak pocket, I think," he replied, halting his ministrations for a moment. "Why?"

"Did you look at it?"

The glint in the black eyes was unmistakable, even when filtered through the glass of his heavy-rimmed spectacles.

"No," said Remus slowly, feeling the colour rise to his face. "Do you think we should?"

"I am a scientist, Lupin. My mind is of an inquisitive bent." There was something so filthy about his breathy pronunciation of the word 'bent' that the other wizard gave an involuntary whimper.

"Ought I to go and fetch it?"

"Purely in the interests of acquiring new knowledge," drawled the scholar, smirking.

Remus made it to the cloak-stand and back in less than ten seconds. Perhaps it was worth a glance, after all.

…….

AN: Thank you for reading another silly chapter of fluff! Just a reminder, Luna Flintoff is nothing to do with Luna Lovegood (the HP character with the James Bond name), it's just a perfect name for a female werewolf.

Thanks to Excessivelyperky for inspiring the bit about the clinic! Everyone should read 'The Birthday Present', by the way – you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll put a pitchfork through the picture of Dumbledore on the cover of HBP.

Love SN x