A/N: This is extremely embarrassing. I haven't updated this in a year and a half, and I'm very sorry. Writing fanfic just wasn't a big part of my life during that time - there were more important RL issues. Anyway, I'm back. Hope someone still remembers this...

Chapter 03

Slowly, the coach carried Severus away from his house at Chester Square and toward the unpleasantness that would be the Dursleys' dinner party. They were in no hurry, since Mayfair, their destination, was not far from Belgravia, and he had no intention to arrive earlier than necessary.

As he stared out of the window into the lantern-lit streets, listening to the monotonous clatter of hoofs on cobblestone, his thoughts were not directed toward the upcoming event, but rather his butler and his latest injury. The man had acted pleasantly as always, smiling and ordering him about in that mild and yet firm manner of his that Severus had grown so accustomed to that he would have felt something missing if Lupin had ever refrained from doing it. He had not been able to fool his employer, though. Severus had not missed that the man had been paler than usual, or the pained lines around his mouth, or how he had flinched only minimally when handling Severus's clothes.

After the accident, Lupin must have sent Dora to get Dr. Dumbledore, Severus' family doctor since he had been small, just like the previous times when Severus had not been present to take care of matters personally. He knew that Dumbledore must have done his best – which was better than most of his colleagues could have done, despite his old age – splinted the arm neatly and prescribed Lupin a dose of laudanum for the pain, telling him to rest. And he knew just as certainly that Lupin must have taken some laudanum, but not enough – not enough to make him incapable of carrying out his duties, even though he had a freshly broken arm that would not be easy to heal by any means.

Severus wished he could shake some sense into the man, but he had no illusions about that. Preventing Lupin from working while he was still able to walk was about as easy as making the sun run the opposite course. It was, as Severus suspected, because Lupin was perfectly aware that under normal circumstances, it was far more likely that he would have starved to death on the streets of Paris by now rather than working for an English aristocrat. It seemed that he still believed himself to be indebted to Severus – who, on the other hand, thought that it was he who was in Lupin's debt. Without Lupin, he might very well have lost his life in Paris ten years ago.

Paris, 1819

In the late afternoon of a busy August day, Severus was on his way back to the apothecary from visiting several customers at home. The weather was hot and sticky – an entirely unpleasant experience to him, as he had moved from London to Paris two years ago and still found it difficult to adjust to the different climate. He was tired and moody and not paying much attention to his surroundings, only looking forward to the cool darkness of the apothecary's cellar, where he prepared his various medicines. It had been a dangerous mistake, as he had realised only moments later.

He looked neither to the left nor to the right as he crossed a large, bustling street, too absorbed in his thoughts to see or hear the quickly approaching coach. Only too late did he hear the collective outcry of the surrounding crowd, which had already seen him trampled down by iron-shod hoofs – then he felt a violent push, and only seconds later, he found himself on the ground, shocked, but unharmed.

When he had regained his senses enough to sit up and realise what had happened, he noticed that the attention of the crowd that had amassed was no longer focussed on him, but on a man lying only a few steps away from him on his back. He appeared to be unconscious, blood trickling from a laceration on his temple onto the street and into his brown hair, both legs and one arm twisted in unnatural angles. It was he who had pushed him out of the coach's way, Severus realised, and as a result, he had ended up being run over by the horses, which the driver was still trying to calm down a short distance down the road.

It soon turned out, upon inquiry, that nobody present knew him, which was not astonishing in the slightest. Judging by the dirty rags he was wearing, he seemed to be one of the countless beggars swarming the streets of Paris - a grey, faceless mass to the ones for whose charity they hoped daily.

It was obvious to Severus that the man's legs and arm were broken – and probably also some ribs, although that would only be possible to tell after a more thorough examination. Equally obvious was the fact that, beside Severus himself and the driver of the coach, who had finally managed to soothe his horses and was now standing beside Severus with a partly angry and partly helpless expression, nobody would move a finger to help the injured man. Severus knew that in the end, there was only one thing he could possibly do, loathe as he might be to admit it. It was his fault that any of this had happened; therefore, it was his responsibility to make sure that his saviour would be given adequate medical treatment.

Had he or anyone else known how to contact the man's family, if he had one, he could have brought him home and called a doctor to take care of him. He could have paid for his treatment as long as necessary, thanked him appropriately when he was up to having visitors, and would never have had to worry about the whole incident again. Considering the circumstances, however, this was not an option.

For some moments, Severus pondered bringing him to a hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu maybe, since it was the nearest, but he quickly discarded the idea again. Public hospitals were not a good place for a sick person to be, at least in his opinion. If he brought the man to such a place, it was more than likely that corrupt doctors would simply take Severus's money and then let the man entrusted to their care die. He was only a beggar whom nobody would miss. And even if Severus threatened to come back and look after him, they could still claim that there had been nothing they could do, and that he had died despite their best efforts. No, he realised, there was only one safe option left.

And so it came that he and the driver of the coach, who was more than relieved that the only consequence for him would result in a short drive across the city, picked up the unconscious man and brought him to the coach, which then took Severus and him to the former's home. They carried him upstairs, to the flat right above the apothecary, and laid him down in Severus's own bed – a place that the stranger would not leave during the next three months.

Usually, healthy bones took no longer than six weeks to heal, provided they were splinted properly and the patient resting enough to not overstrain himself. However, after three days, Remus Lupin – Severus had found out his name on the second day, when the other one had been awake and able to speak for a short while – developed a traumatic fever the likes of which Severus had not seen before. For almost three weeks, all he could do was give Lupin laudanum for the pain, make leg compresses, change the sweat-soaked bed sheets daily, and force him to drink as much as possible. When the fever was finally gone, leaving Lupin skeletal and weak like a newborn, his bones had barely begun to heal.

Severus's guest was amazingly compliant and patient. He never complained, barely showed that he was in pain even when Severus examined him, obediently took what medicine he was given, and, once his appetite returned, let Severus feed him regular meals with an expression of quiet and incredulous bliss that made Severus loathe himself for every time that he had complained about the cook back at his father's house in England.

Being extremely peevish and politic in character, Severus was surprised at how little Lupin's presence irritated him. In the beginning, all he had wanted was to heal him as quickly as possible, preferably without having to talk to him too much, if at all. But after some time, he found himself more and more often sitting at Lupin's bedside, asking questions, or, on Lupin's request and despite his taciturn nature, telling about life in England – something the sick man seemed to absorb like a sponge, never getting tired of hearing about the foreign customs and ideas. He seemed intelligent and sensible, and after eight weeks, Severus thought for the first time that it would be a shame if the other one were to return to his old life once he was recovered.

After losing an initial embarrassed shyness when discovering that the man whose bed he was occupying and who would feed him and change his nappies like he had never done anything else was in fact an aristocrat who had grown up in a house full of servants, Lupin had willingly disclosed the facts of his life to his host – not that there was much to tell. He was twenty, four years younger than Severus, the youngest of four surviving children, born in one of the poorest quartiers of the city to a family of beggars, and begging – and, as Severus suspected without mentioning it aloud, stealing - was all that he had ever learnt.

He would have liked to work, he said, do anything else but begging, but since of course, he could neither read nor write, all that was left would have been hard physical work, something that was practically impossible. It was at this point of their conversations that also the mystery of Lupin's incredibly slowly healing bones seemed to get solved.

As a little child, he had had broken bones constantly. He had simply needed to trip and fall, be slapped and stumble against the wall, or be grabbed by the arm and dragged along too roughly to make his bones break like brittle pottery. And while they had been healing quickly, as they usually did when you were a child, he had been frequently breaking others, so that it had been normal for anyone who knew him to see him with a splinted arm, or limping along on badly carved crutches, or not turning up for some time outside the filthy little room that his family inhabited, because some broken bone barred him from getting up. It was, as Severus thought, a miracle that he had survived even infancy, considering that his injuries had probably never received any proper care by a professional.

Their son's disability had not, however, prevented Lupin's parents from taking him out to beg when he was small, and sending him out on his own when he was a little older. It was a common strategy to pretend illness and injury in order to appear pathetic, and thus squeeze a drop of pity out of the hardened Parisian hearts - and a coin out of their purses. If the injuries were real, all the better. At least this would ensure that his performance was perfect.

"And I was good," Lupin said with a weary smile, obviously aware of how strange it must be for the other man to hear someone pride himself on being a good beggar.

As he grew older, his bones broke less easily, much to his relief, but hard work was still out of the question. Begging, however, had become increasingly difficult, since people gave to children more readily than to adults, and even then, women were better off than men. And stealing – Lupin had looked Severus firmly in the eyes while talking, but his flushed cheeks had betrayed his shame nevertheless – stealing was more dangerous for him than for others. And something else had changed as well: when he now broke a bone, it took much longer to heal than before; longer, in fact, than a normal adult's would.

After the initial surprise, it had made sense to Severus. He had heard about this at university from an old professor of his. The professor was married to a Swedish woman from a city called Uppsala, and one of their acquaintances, as Severus now remembered, had been a physician named Ekman, who had written about a disease with just the symptoms Lupin seemed to display. Additionally to breaking bones easily, patients with osteomalacia congenital, as Ekman had called it, were often smaller than average and had an odd blue or purplish colouring of the whites of the eyes – something he had been wondering about from the beginning when he had seen it in Lupin.

After three months, Lupin was restored enough to get up and limp around on crutches, his right leg having healed much faster than the left. That was the first time that he talked about leaving, but Severus would hear nothing of it. Lupin could barely stay on his feet for ten minutes, and it would be irresponsible to just send him out in the streets, he argued. So Lupin stayed. And during the next month, whenever the topic would arise, Severus would find a reason to convince both of them that it was too early by far for him to leave.

When, after four months, Severus resumed his work at least enough to make two or three short visits with patients every day, he would more and more frequently come home to find his rooms cleaned and meals cooked, and he had to admit that, even though he had easily adjusted to not having servants after leaving home, he liked it, had even missed it. He had never been able to keep a housemaid longer than just a few weeks, for they all were driven away by his moody temper and cynical remarks, being either scared or annoyed by them. Lupin, it seemed, was completely immune against this, replying with noncommittal smiles at the most – if he did not outright ignore it.

Severus soon realised that he would be insane if he let the man go. Lupin was learning to adjust his deficient manners accordingly to his host's at a surprising rate. He was silent when Severus wanted to be left alone, a pleasant listener when he wanted to talk, and seemed to have the eerie ability to know when which was the case. Additionally, he proved to be a quick learner when Severus began teaching him how to read and write.

One evening after six months, when there was no excuse left why Lupin should have stayed any longer, Severus finally asked him to work for him as a servant. Lupin accepted immediately, then excused himself and disappeared in the spare room where they had set up a bed for him. Severus could hear him cry through the thin, wooden door, and, even though embarrassed, felt pleased with himself for the first time in years.

Severus was awoken from his reminiscences when the carriage stopped, the voice of the coachman telling him that they had arrived at their destination. He nestled his watch out of the fob pocket and saw that it was five minutes after eight. Well, then, he would wait another ten minutes before entering the Dursleys' house. He would be one of the last, meaning that he would not have to go through numerous introduction ceremonies, but simply meet the host and hostess and be generally introduced to the assembled party. He certainly could do without subjecting himself to countless flowery phrases along the lines of "I am so pleased to finally meet you in person!" or "I have heard so much of you already!" In the course of the evening, he would have to listen to enough mindless chitchat anyway.

Waiting in the carriage, his thoughts returned once more to Lupin. The man had turned into a perfect butler over the years, and Severus would not know what to do without him any more. His calm seemed almost unshakable, no matter Severus's mood, and over time, he had developed the ability of ordering Severus about when it was necessary without annoying him too much - like today, when his employer would much rather have stayed at home. They both knew that they were friends rather than master and servant, but they had never felt it necessary to mention that particular fact. When Severus had returned to England more than eight years after meeting him, the question whether or not Lupin should accompany him had never arisen. He would have been a fool to leave him behind - and he would be a fool as well if he let the nonsense currently happening in his house go on much longer. As he had told Lupin before, he would have a serious conversation with Dora tomorrow.

Over these musings, time went by quickly, and finally, he could not put off any longer what was awaiting him. When he entered the house, he was met by two footmen at the door, one of which immediately took off to announce his presence to the host, the other one taking care of Severus's hat, coat, and gloves, before leading him to the parlour on the first floor, where everyone had gathered.

Vernon Dursley was already awaiting him at the doorway, apparently bursting with enthusiasm at his distinguished guest's sight.

"Aaahh, Lord Snape, what a pleasure to welcome you at my home at last!"

He had roared loud enough to draw the attention of a whole marketplace, and consequently, every conversation that had been going on before Severus's arrival came to an abrupt halt, and all eyes settled on him.

Severus had been expecting this. It was downright ridiculous how eager people without a title, yet in the possession of an abundance of money, were to know a member of the aristocracy, so that they could claim connections and boast about it in front of their family, friends, and acquaintances. That Severus was a mere baronet and thus bore the lowest title in existence, and that he was moreover working to earn a living – something that was considered as almost unspeakable shame among most of the other members of the nobility – did not seem to matter. What was important was the "Lord" in front of his name, much like an adequately sightly mongrel dog would be considered worthy to be shown off, as long as he had a shiny enough collar.

He, himself, hated the ado that was made about his birth, and class conceit was the last thing anyone could have accused him of. Had his father not be well-known in London, he would have been tempted to pretend to be no more than a common chemist, just as he had done in Paris.

"Come, Mylord, you have to meet my wife," Dursley announced, and Severus complied, letting the man lead him away to a group of women, who were apparently in the middle of an animated conversation.

"Petunia, my dear, may I have your attention for a moment? I want you to meet Lord Snape."

With these words, Dursley took the arm of a tall, blond woman in a midnight-blue silk dress, who had been standing with her back to them until now. When she turned around, Severus experienced a surprise. He would have trusted Dursley, who was ten years his senior, to have a very young, beautiful, and rather unintelligent wife. It would have fitted perfectly in the picture that he had formed of the man in his mind. This woman, however, did not fit in either of the first two categories. She was at least thirty, and looked nothing like the plump, rosy girls that were considered of the utmost beauty these days. Instead, she was thin and pale, and neither the complicated hairstyle, nor the expensive-looking jewellery, or the unobtrusive rouge on her cheeks could completely hide an impression of being tired and careworn.

Her behaviour, however, betrayed nothing of this sort, for she smiled at Severus pleasantly, extending her hand to him.

"Mylord, my husband has told me so much about you already! I have been looking forward to meeting you for such a long time now! It is an honour for us to be able to welcome you here."

Hearing her voice caught Severus completely off-guard. It was as though he had heard it before, as though he knew her, had met her someplace else in the past, but he could not remember this ever being the case. It was a strange feeling of déjà-vu – something that had never happened to him before. He managed, however, not to let his confusion show, greeting her with a polite kiss on the hand.

"On the contrary, I am honoured by your hospitality, madam."

Having exchanged some more pleasantries with the hostess – and having failed to recall where he had heard a voice like hers before – Severus was soon occupied by her husband again, who insisted he meet some of his business acquaintances before dinner began. Ere long, he was standing with a group of spice merchants like Dursley, who were having a rather lively discussion about prices and the dangers of shipwreck and pirates, arguing which was the safest route to take home to England from India.

While he listened half-heartedly and sipped at a glass of sherry that he had been handed by one of the footmen, Severus had a look around the room. He knew almost none of the other guests, the exception being the young owner of a shipping company, Zacharias Smith, who had been introduced to him by tonight's host several months ago, when a ship of his had arrived that had been bearing several expensive foreign herbs which Severus had ordered from Dursley.

His gaze was soon drawn back to Mrs. Dursley, however, since his mind was still occupied with what had happened some minutes earlier. The more he watched her, the more confused he was getting. There was something indefinable about her, something about the way she moved and carried herself, that was familiar to him. And yet, he was unaware of ever having seen her before. If so, it must have happened before his departure to Paris twelve years ago – but this was, as he thought, highly unlikely. He knew that the Dursleys had moved to London only six years ago.

Finally, after uselessly wrecking his mind for some time, Severus decided that he must be wrong about it. Maybe she was simply reminding him of another woman he had met, a patient for example. With this thought, he managed to tear his eyes away from her and engage in the conversation at hand, having been asked about the kind of herbs that he was in need of from Dursley by one of the other spice merchants, who was apparently thinking of supplying for chemists as a new business idea for himself.

It was about ten minutes later that dinner was announced to be ready, and men and women began building pairs that would sit together during the evening.

"Mylord, may I introduce you to Mrs. Murray – her late husband was a friend of mine and a partner in various business dealings."

"It is a pleasure, Madam," Severus said stiffly as he indicated a bow to the woman Dursley had chosen to be his dinner partner for tonight.

After assuring how wonderful it was to meet him, Mrs. Murray, a stout, grey-haired widow in a bright red dress, and with just as red cheeks, immediately began chattering, obviously intending to make known to him each and every advantage that her three beautiful, young granddaughters possessed.

Severus suppressed a sigh as he took her arm and followed the others to the dining room. It was going to be a very long night.

Glossary

Chester Square -- Chester Square is a small, residential garden square located in London's exclusive Belgravia district. Along with its sister squares Belgrave Square and Eaton Square, Chester Square is one of the most desirable addresses in London.

Belgravia ---- Belgravia is a district of central London in the City of Westminster, situated to the south-west of Buckingham Palace. Belgravia is characterised by grand terraces of white stucco houses, and is focused on the Belgrave Square and Eaton Square. It was one of London's most fashionable residential districts from the beginning, and remains so to this day.

Mayfair --- Mayfair is an area of central London in the City of Westminster, named after the annual fortnight-long May Fair that took place there from 1686 until it was banned in that location in 1764. Most of the area was first developed between the mid 17th century and the mid 18th century as a fashionable residential district, by a number of landlords. Mayfair is the most expensive property on a British Monopoly set.

Hôtel-Dieu --- Hôtel-Dieu ("hostel of God") is the old name given to the principal hospital in French towns. Hôtel-Dieu de Paris is regarded as the oldest hospital in the city of Paris, being founded in the year AD 660.

politic --- careful in the sense of human relations.

quartier --- district/quarter in French.

Olof Jakob Ekman --- He described osteogenesis imperfecta in 1788, in a doctoral thesis for the University of Uppsala. He described a family in which persons in three generations had a condition that he termed "osteomalacia congenita". (Dissertatio medica descriptionem et casus aliquot osteomalaciæ sistens. Uppsala, 1788.)