Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: So, for those of you still following along(all zero of you, I suspect), we've got seven or eight sections to go before we return to the post-Junior timeline. Enjoy.

Seamus Finnegan watched his old friend drink for the second time in a week. It was funny how life worked. After the war, he'd tried to contact her numerous times, but the owls had gone unanswered, and he'd eventually decided to stop wasting the ink and parchment and the effort it took to think of her. There had been too many other things that had needed his attention, like the burial of the dead and the dressing of wounds. He hadn't consciously thought of her in years, and then six nights ago, he'd come into a pub he'd frequented for years and found her slouched at this same table. All these years, and she was still a creature of habit.

She'd looked the same as he remembered her, hunched and wan and angular as a changeling in her chair. Her hair was still sunfire, and her face was still inscrutable as black ice. The same quiet voice and the same stiff-necked resolve. The chair was different, though, a lighter, manual model instead of the hulking, mechanical jalopy that had once terrorized the corridors and toes of Hogwarts. He wondered now what had happened to the growling tank that had roared over the muddy castle greensward and splashed mud and blood onto the hems of his robes,

There were other changes, too. Her robes were red, not the scarlet of Gryffindor, but the ominous promise of spilled blood. She looked, the more he considered it, like Little Red Riding Hood from the Muggle fairy tale, small and frail inside her too-big balaclava.

My, Grandmother, what big teeth you have, he thought for no reason, and laughed uneasily.

She offered him a humorless, lupine smile over the rim of her goblet, and saliva and wine glistened on her teeth. Her canine was queerly elongated by the wavering torchlight, and in the gloom, wine became blood. The laughter died abruptly.

There were lines etched into the corners of her eyes and mouth, the marks of age and too few smiles. Her palsied fingers bore two rings, one on each hand. One might have been an engagement ring, but the other was unmistakably a wedding ring, and the diamonds set into its golden circumference winked. When he'd asked about the man who had given it to her, she'd smiled and said only that he was a Muggle. Polite enough, but that had been serrated glass beneath her silk tongue, and he had known better than to pursue the topic.

The lines might be new to her face, but you sensed them beneath her skin long before they made their appearance on her face, pointed out a jolly, practical voice that bore a disconcerting resemblance to Neville Longbottom. We all did. She was a spirit born into darkness and wary of the light. Even before the War jaded the rest of us, cured our hearts to old leather inside our chests, she was hard as obsidian and just as black beneath her pale skin. I used to joke that she was a golem made of stone, but you told me she was a changeling. I used to think you were having a go at me, thick, fat, slow Neville Longbottom, whose parents' brains had gone to pudding in St. Mungo's, and you let me believe it because it was saner than the creeping suspicion that it was the truth.

She was hard and sharp, a miracle of will and ossified bile, all jagged edges, warped angles, and gnashing teeth. It's a wonder she's not cut herself to ribbons from the inside out. Strictly speaking if I may, it's a bloody wonder there aren't more grooves around her mouth and deeper crows' feet sunk into the corners of her eyes. Nothing so hard and sharp should've survived as long or fared as well. She should be dead or wizened beyond her age, corroded by the rage and bitterness that radiates from her like heat.

Then again, how many times could've we said that about her over the years? A pair of right Trelawneys we'd've turned out to be if we'd predicted her death aloud. She's damned charmed. She should've died in infancy, but tenacity was her birthright, and she held on long enough to dance with that old toad, Dolores Umbridge. Not just dance, but sodding win. She should never have made it that far because before Harry went down for his long winter's nap, she plunged off a landing of the Hogwarts staircase into the fickle embrace of thin air. She ought to have shattered her ceramic skull on the unyielding stone, but Severus Snape, a git who would've gladly tapdanced on our bones while sipping tea, saved her life. It was an odd serendipity that she did the same for him later in the term.

In sixth year, she danced with Lucius Malfoy and came away with a draw, which is more than most wizards three times her age ever got. She received tutelage from Snape in defensive spell-casting and dueling and endured Curses and hexes that most of us wouldn't taste for another year. The lessons were as brutal as the mind that had planned them, and on those nights, she lurched into the Common Room, face white with pain and tears damp on her bony cheeks. Often, there was blood, sticky and coppery and sweet, on the sleeves and hem of her robes where the miserable serpent had struck too deeply.

We pleaded with her to stop. Even Ron, who normally paid her as much mind as a talking Common Room armchair, tried to talk sense into her. But she wouldn't have it. She'd just shake her head and smile, and her exhausted eyes would glitter with a remote madness.

Can't, she'd say implacably, and pull the blood-dampened robes from her skin. It's a matter of survival. They won't have mercy on my weakness. I have to be ready. If you pressed the matter, she'd just gaze at you with pitying eyes and murmur, I have to, Seamus. The outside to match the inside.

You thought it was the babble of lunacy, but you learned what she meant later, and she was right. The outside to match the inside. Equilibrium. Everyone was looking for it, and they took it wherever they could. Fucking and doping and drinking. Before the War, you wondered why so many wizards lost themselves in ale and mead and Firewhiskey and were disgusted by the tottering derelicts who lurched from one pub to another when the brewmaster cut them off, but not anymore. You understand now what they were looking for in the bottoms of their mugs and steins. Equilibrium and all those cherished things life had torn from them-friends, lovers, and kin. They were searching for them, and if they couldn't be found, then at least the liquor would fill the empty spaces. For a little while, anyway.

You had your share of empty spaces after the war. Lee Jordan was dead, turned into a living candlewick by Bellatrix Lestrange. Your girlfriend lost her mind and joined the Longbottoms in St. Mungo's, and your mum disappeared a year before the final battle. Her shoes, handbag, and wedding band were all she left behind and all that were ever found. She had vanished from the face of the earth, and with so many lost, dispossessed souls, no one looked very hard. Her missing person's report joined thousands of others at the Aurory and gathered dust, and if you mention her name to the other Aurors, none recognizes it.

You joined the Aurors after the War. A lot of us did in the mistaken belief that we would find answers and solace there, or at least a measure of vengeance. But all you found were more ghosts, disillusioned people sifting through the ashes and finding only dust. Most of them drank too much, either to forget who they had been or to deny who they had become. Tonks stayed on after the War, but in truth, she had gone on the day Remus Lupin died. After Voldemort, the fear and loathing of werewolves had redoubled in intensity, and the prevailing public sentiment had been that the only good werewolf was a dead one, and never mind which side they'd stood on when the battle lines had been drawn.

So, they came for him one drunken night, an angry mob fueled by Firewhiskey. It was savage, more savage than anything gentle Remus had ever done in his life. He was almost unrecognizable when you arrived on the moor where they'd left him. It was the first time since the war that you cried, hard and ugly and furious, tears of rage and disgust with the whole human race. Remus Lupin was dead, and truly miserable bastards like Fenrir Greyback went on living and pleading ignorance of their crimes by dint of the Imperius Curse.

Despite the fact that Remus had been a loyal member of the Order or maybe because of it, the Ministry swept his murder under the rug after a perfunctory investigation in which no one was ever charged. You and a few other Aurors spent your free time running down scant leads as a favor to Tonks, but memories had been clouded by drink and guilt, and nothing ever came of it. Lupin was buried in a simple grave, and the only reason he avoided consignment to a potter's field was because Harry paid for the funeral. Tonks, Harry, and a handful of former DA members were the only attendees. A week after he died, it was as if he had never been.

You thought of something Rebecca had told you once, on one of the rare occasions she let the death mask slip. You were side by side in the trench, smelling each other's stale sweat and trying to distinguish enemies from allies and swirling shadows from a clandestine flap of robe. There was mud in your mouth that tasted faintly of blood, or maybe it was blood. One tasted like the other by then. You were staring at the lifeless, clouded eyes of a nameless fourth-year in Ravenclaw robes.

Bloody butchers, you said, and spat into the dirt. You meant the Death Eaters, of course, the masked horde that had swarmed out of the Forbidden Forest one September dawn and made children and pupils into soldiers.

Rebecca lay awkwardly in the trench, a cobra with a broken back, and when she turned her head to look at you, a trick of the moonlight made it seem as if she had no eyes, just black, bottomless pits.

Which ones? she asked laconically. We'd all be butchers if we could. We're all werewolves underneath the skin.

Not me, you swore, and she only laughed and watched the rats scurry over the corpses and search for the choicest bits with their gleaming red and silver eyes. The Devil's fireflies, your nana had called them.

You thought she was full of shite back then, but just like you had with equilibrium, you realized that she was right again. Necessary brutality and unpardonable atrocity were separated by the thinnest of lines, and the slightest breeze could carry you from one side to the other. Sometimes, the only difference is a game of semantics, but mostly, there isn't a difference at all.

The Aurory is rife with corruption, and each squad is only as clean as its most black-handed member. You've seen those sworn to uphold the law pervert it to their own ends-bribery, theft, graft, and blackmail-and what's worse, you've never spoken a word against it for fear that the man who calls you mate today will snap your neck tomorrow. It's easier to feign blindness, and besides, you're tired of fighting everyone else's battles. Sometimes you wonder how Harry Potter never went barking mad under the stress of being the whole world's fucking savior when all he had to show for it was a cheap medal and a solitary existence lived beneath the scryglass of public scrutiny.

We're all werewolves underneath the skin, she said, and truer words were never spoken. You suspect that the people who smashed Remus Lupin's bones thought they were smashing a mirror, a secret, shameful part of themselves they didn't want to see reflected in the glass. Maybe by killing him, they silenced the wolf that crouched within their hearts.

She was right about so many things she oughtn't to have known so early and so well. She was older than her years, ancient as the stooped and shuffling crones that peddled their wares in Knockturn Alley or rested their aching feet in The Hog's Head. Changeling, you thought, and were ashamed of yourself, but then the light would catch her eyes, and you'd swear they danced with fairy fire.

And there was the death mask. It wasn't a literal mask of wood, bone, or ivory, but it was as real as the skin on her face. It was the face beneath, her true face. She could hide it from most of the pupils and teachers, but not from us, and not from Snape, who did his best to hone and sculpt it, make it the face she wore all the time. We spent too much time with her, too many hours in both darkness and light, and once you knew what to look for, you could never unsee it.

She didn't like the death mask. She was ashamed of it. She wanted to be as ignorantly happy as we were, and she tried. You still remember how happy she was that day in Care of Magical Creatures, when the Borgergups slipped the paddock and led you on a merry steeplechase across the grounds. She was laughing, and the laughter brightened her face and showed you the fifteen-year-old girl she could have been in kinder circumstances. Her hair was the sunburst tail of a falling star, and as she jounced and flew over the uneven ground, shrieking her mindless joy to the skies, she was the child of Helios. She was at your heels throughout the chase, and in that moment, you knew that she would've called you brother if you'd asked her to. She would have died for you, for any of the giggling, bounding students wheeling over the castle green, because she felt like one of you.

She still would've died for either of us, even at the end, when the pitiless, fleshless death mask had become permanently affixed to her face, but the others chipped away at that sense of solidarity until it sundered. Malfoy was the worst, the berk, but the Children of Light were hardly blameless. Something happened in the summer before sixth year, and it soured the last of the hopeful sweetness in her bones. When she came back, the mask had overwhelmed her completely, and the twins, with whom she'd once been close, grew distant. You never knew what they had done, but the furtive, insolent guilt in their eyes whenever they looked at her told you they'd done something. You knew asking them would be a waste of time, and so you asked her.

Their masks slipped, was all she said, and she went back to her Arithmancy homework with grim determination.

She might've hated the mask, and you might've feared it, but there was no denying that it allowed her to thrive during the hell that was seventh year. She'd been cut off from the light so completely by the time the darkness fell in earnest that there was no need for adjustment, no moment of stuporous incomprehension. She carried on as she always had because for her, nothing had changed. It was life as usual magnified a thousand-fold. While everyone about her was losing their heads and parroting the latest dire rumors and Ministry propaganda with shrill, useless hysteria, she was simply waiting, protected by the impenetrable shell she'd spent a lifetime building from the hard scar tissue of disappointment.

The War was her debutante ball, and everything that you hated about her death mask was what kept you sane when the hexes started flying and the bodies started falling. She was as afraid as anyone else, and she screamed to raise the dead when the explosions were too close, but she never gave in to the panic, not like Colin Creevey, who scrambled blindly from the trench and got his arm blown off before you or Rebecca could pull him back. He bled to death before the Healer arrived with the tourniquet and the Blood-Replenishing Draught.

You couldn't stop staring; Colin's wide, glassy eyes were your first intimate acquaintance with death, and you felt sick and guilty for being alive when he wasn't, as if you'd somehow stolen his life by mere proximity. You turned away and sicked into the mud, but Rebecca never did. She stared at him, spastic fingers still clamped around his leg where'd she'd tried to reel him in, and on her face wasn't horror or queasy shock, but sad resignation. She cried but didn't bawl, and the next morning when you were still wrangling with the reality of loss, she was sympathetic but dry-eyed. Colin was beyond her help then, and she had already begun to forget him.

She was always like that, no matter who fell. Out of life, out of mind. All that counted was survival, that next breath of dirty, seared air. Her stoicism disgusted you in the beginning. She was your friend, and you would've died for her without hesitation, but you couldn't be assured of the same if the roles were reversed. She might very well have crawled over your cooling corpse and never looked back, never stopped to mourn your passing. It was callous and hateful and inhuman, and you were more convinced than ever that she was a changeling.

By the end of the War, you understood. You didn't like it, mind, but you understood. Because you had become just as hardened. Sights that had torn your heart out and etched themselves into your memory with clawing fingers when the blood was fresh upon the ground registered but dimly or not at all. It wasn't because you no longer cared, but because you had neither horror nor tears to spare, and the only thing worth saving was your life. The lofty ideals for which you had been fighting had long since been trampled into the blood and dust, and no one could find them anymore.

It's been nine years since you've seen the death mask or Rebecca Stanhope, but both were unforgettable and returned now and then to your dreams. You called for her in the night sometimes, and more than one girlfriend left your bed and flat in strop because they thought she was a remembered lover. She wasn't; she was the unapologetic specter of uncomfortable truth, and sometimes, you wished she was there to force the world to grudging honesty and order again.

The death mask was still on her face, as prominent as ever, and yet, her other face, the face of the girl she might have been, was there, too, peeking out from the sharp lines and sunken hollows. Married life with her Yank Muggle had clearly taught her something of kindness and joy. There were laugh lines and smiles creases to go with the frown lines and crows' feet, and her lips were fuller and pinker than before, tinged with the memory of kisses.

Tonight, though, the death mask held sway. She was more hunched than usual, and her eyes were bruised and puffy from lack of sleep. She looked worse than she had earlier in the week, and he wondered if his changeling was hounded by fetches in the night.

"You look like shite," he commented brightly.

Gravelly laughter that spoke of a throat raw from screaming or too little talking. "Rough night. You remember those fits I used to have?"

He did, indeed. She had tried to keep them secret, but privacy was a scarce commodity in boarding schools, even one so large as Hogwarts, and screams had a perverse way of carrying in the Common Room and dormitories. He had witnessed two of the monstrous episodes, frozen in the doorway of the girls' dormitory in his nightshirt while she had writhed and contorted in the grip of unseen demons, and as ridiculous and superstitious as it was, he had crossed himself to ward off the restless bogeys that had plagued her there on the thick, red carpet. The episodes had been more than sufficient to satisfy any morbid curiosity he might have entertained about the inner workings of her life, and his revulsion and horror at the unsanitized truth of it had shamed him. It had been neither fair nor kind, and he'd slunk back to the boys' dormitory and his curtained bed and feigned interest in a footie magazine his mum had owled from home until he was too tired to think. He had fallen asleep and dreamed of seizing footie players, and when Lee Jordan had shaken him awake, he had suffered a moment of blind panic, sure that the demons that had tortured her had found their way into his limbs.

He pushed the thought away. "The doctors can't do anything?"

She flapped her hand in dismissal and took a sip of wine. "Besides take my money? They've suggested anti-spasmodics and muscle relaxants, but they don't do anything but make me dribble on myself and sleep. It's bad form for a professor to be drooling atop their Powerpoint presentation, and my husband likes it when I use my mouth for more than chewing and sucking." She stopped, abashed. "Sorry. I forget that bluntness isn't always a virtue."

"No harm done," he said, and hid his discomfiture in a prolonged sip of mead.

"Anyway," she went on, "they're rare. One or two a year, maybe fewer. Triggered by stress, usually."

"Having a bad time of it, then?"

He had meant it as an innocent query, but her expression hardened, and her reply was a guarded, "You could say that."

He struggled for something to say and couldn't find it. He was bewildered. The ground had suddenly shifted beneath his feet. It was as though he had stepped from solid earth onto the boggy, sucking soil of a dead marsh. It was, to be fair, hardly a new sensation. Everyone had pockets of unhallowed ground in the hard, flinty soil of their heart, soft, spongy places where secrets were buried and wounds had been hastily papered over. He had apparently found hers, and he was old enough to know there was no graceful exit.

You've got one, too, a sucking hole in your heart that drags down unsuspecting travelers and ensures that their acquaintance with you is short and bitter. You've guarded it for years, and one strike from you is enough to dissuade the hardiest souls from poking around on that patch of earth. Even Rebecca and Dean Thomas learned to tread carefully on it, and they were granted more leeway than anyone else.

It's your mother, who disappeared one day in sixth year and left behind only her shoes, purse, and wedding band, that last a tantalizing promise, like a twopence from a leprechaun's pot of gold. Fool's gold. You knew it for what it was the instant that you fished it from the kitchen rubbish pile where your Dad had dropped it in a fit of despair. It was too light in your palm to be true gold, tin or copper beaten into shape and painted the proper color.

Your da had thrown it on the rubbish pile in a drunken rage a few weeks after she disappeared, sure that she had simply got tired of his Muggle affections and fled back to her own kind. Why not? She had hidden her bedeviled witchery from him until after the wedding, and by then, of course, it had been too late. Good Catholics did not get divorced, and there was nothing for it but to yoke himself to her damnation.

He asked you to come with him, back to the simplicity of the Muggle world, but you wouldn't. Your mum was in the magical world, and besides, your addiction to magic was too strong.

The Devil take you, then. You always were more of your mother than me, he said, but his eyes were lost and dying. He returned to the Muggle world and his milk delivery route, and the last you heard, he was tearing down the pubs in Cork and pickling his liver with cheap lager. You're no son of his.

You put your mum's ring in your pocket and carried it with you for all these years, hoping to return it someday. Your da thinks she ran away, but not you. She would never have left the flat without her handbag and shoes, and if she were leaving forever, she never would have gone without her little shadow. That's what she called you. It started when you were a wee bloke toddling after her hems, and it stuck, even into the years when you wished it would disappear. You were still her little shadow at fifteen, and you hated it. Now at twenty-six, you'd gladly die to hear her call you that just one more time.

For a while, you were optimistic. You thought that she had just got lost in the blind, flailing terror of A Death Eater raid and suffered a blow to the head or caught the bad end of a Memory Charm. You put notices in The Daily Prophet and scoured the wards of St. Mungo's for amnesiacs pulled from the streets by Aurors or well-meaning passersby. You even asked me if I had seen her, as though she and my parents were having a mad hatters' tea party on the Closed Ward. But she was there, and she wasn't at any of the international hospitals you checked, either, and not even Irish optimism lasts forever. Two years after she went missing, you stopped searching for her among the living and turned instead to the legions of the dead.

You visited crypts and Ministry ossuaries and inspected the bones of the dead in search of familiar traits, like her crooked tooth or the pinkie finger that was permanently kinked by a botched self-healing when she was thirteen. She was never there, thank God and curse the saints, and the ring stayed in your pocket. Still, every time you're called to a body, you brace yourself for the possibility that it might be her, that she had wandered from your life and created a new one in which her little shadow played no part.

You thought she was an Inferi once. An informant had tipped the Aurory to an enclave of hardcore Death Eaters holed up in Derbyshire, and when your squad got to the rundown cottage that looked like Hagrid's hut gone to seed, you found half a dozen Death Eaters and ten Inferi, including Rabastan Lestrange, and my, wasn't he a find? The rest were women, and it didn't take a genius to know what they were being used for. The realization was repulsive, and your younger members sicked into the hedgerows outside when the handbills and Body Binds were secured. Your own gut was a tight, cramping knot of loathing.

One of the women looked so much like your mum that all the air went out of you when you saw her huddled in the corner on a nest of filthy blankets. You floundered to her on boneless legs, the word mam on your lips in a pitiful bleat. You dropped to your knees and lifted her lips to see her teeth and tugged her cold, dirty-clawed hand to the light, your heart lodged in your throat. hard and cutting as ice.

No kink.

You stumbled outside and vomited into the hedgerow, but not for the same reason as the pimple-faced bloke next to you. That was the day you swore to give up the search and get on with your life. There was no point in chasing ghosts. But you have never given it up, not really. There is still that surreptitious tug at the base of your brain, that foolish grain of Gryffindor hope that refuses to die. You feel it every time you're called to a murder. The ring is still in your pocket, a perfect, golden circle that mirrors the hole in your heart.

After a long silence broken only by the indelicate slurp of morose drinking, Rebecca said, "How's the case going?"

"The case" in question was the ongoing investigation into the odd doings at the Shrieking Shack. The ruin had been silent for years, but last week, villagers had come to the Aurory with claims that the ghosts who had once lived there had returned. Shrieks and moans and wailing words had been reported, and the more fanciful duffers swore with their hats over their hearts that they had seen eerie, green light pouring from the numberless cracks and crevices. And everyone knew that green was the color of death.

The problem was that none of these witness statements could be corroborated because no one wanted to go near the rattling old pile. Common sense said that the noises that had once emanated from the Shack were the product of the wind in the eaves and the loose boards that comprised the walls and floors, but common sense held no sway in the face of deeply-rooted superstitions, and no one wanted to risk stumbling onto an improbable truth in the dark and must of those forgotten rooms.

The Ministry, taxed to the breaking point with the task of ferreting out rogue Death Eaters and their sympathizers, was reluctant to waste the time and manpower on what was likely a wild goose chase. They had told him so when he had petitioned to open a formal enquiry into the matter, and though they had graciously invited him to pursue the incidents on his own time, there would be no help from them, and their purse strings were most firmly and decidedly shut. More precious than ruddy goblins, the Ministry.

"A bloody lot of nothing," he answered bitterly. "Don't suppose you know anything about it?"

She laughed, a harsh fractured bark. "Should I? Asking after cases has become a habit of mine, I'm afraid. Comes with my love's territory."

"What about you? What brings you here again after all these years?"

Her smile faded, and there was a quicksilver glimmer in her eyes that made his mouth go dry. She turned her goblet between her flattened palms. "Exorcising ghosts and washing away sins, I suppose."

"Which ones?" He had meant it to be glib, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized how very serious they were.

When she looked at him, he saw the death mask just beneath her smudged, translucent skin, so clearly delineated that his skin crawled.

We'd all be butchers if we could. We're all werewolves underneath the skin, he thought.

"Do you really want to know?" she asked quietly. "Because I think I might tell you if you asked."

"No," he said finally. "Not tonight." He drained his mug in a single convulsive gulp.