Chapter Three

Long, supple fingers stroked his chest and slid enticingly down his body while Remus moaned in delight. A warm body cuddled against his back and soft kisses were pressed to his neck and his shoulders. Then the fingers suddenly slipped away, just as they were about to go where he most wanted them to touch.

"No," he whispered to his lover. "Don't stop. Don't go. Don't leave me…"

He froze as the response came back in Severus' low tones instead of Dora's brighter ones. "I told you I no longer want you, Lupin. Don't be a sentimental fool…"

Remus gasped and sat bolt upright. The grey light of dawn was just beginning to creep into the room, and he was alone in his bed. Quite alone.

Throwing back the covers, he got to his feet and padded over to the window. Pushing the curtains aside, he laid his forehead against the cool glass. The small square outside was deserted this early in the morning and the heavy, cloud-laden sky promised yet another grey and gloomy day. Dropping the curtains back into place with an impatient sigh, he stalked back to the bed and threw himself on top of it to stare blindly up at the ceiling.

Why was he continuing to dream about Severus after all this time? The dreams had abated for awhile. When he was with Dora, he almost never saw Severus in his dreams, but since she died, they'd returned, stronger and more vivid than ever. He'd lost them all. Dora, Teddy…and Severus. Dwelling on any of them was not only painful but pointless. The past was done and gone. He needed to look ahead. The problem was…what was there ahead to look for?

He sat up and stared around the dim room. Harry was being kind to let him stay at Grimmauld Place again since he could no longer afford the flat he'd shared with Dora, but he knew he couldn't stay forever, nor did he want to. On a sunny day, Sirius' family home was a gloomy and depressing place, but when the weather was dreary outside, it was even worse, and that wasn't helping his outlook at all.

Somehow he needed to get his mind off Severus. The man had made it perfectly clear that he no longer wanted anything to do with him. Not ever. Despite what Remus had once believed, he'd been little more than an opportunistic conquest, desired only for sex, nothing more. The harsh reality of their relationship was that Severus Snape had never cared for him at all.

Remus frowned. Yet if that was true, why had Severus been there when he'd come back from the beyond, or the netherworld, or wherever the heck he'd been after that Death Eater hexed him? What reason would Severus have had to seek out a dead man and endanger himself in the process? Why take such a risk just to stare once more at someone you didn't care about?

That was another unanswered question. What did that Death Eater do to him? There was no doubt he wasn't hit with the killing curse. No one could come back from that. Yet he'd certainly thought he was dead and so did everyone else. He even saw and talked to friends whom he knew darned well actually were dead. So what really happened to him? Why was he alive? And what did Severus have to do with it?

With a sigh Remus got up and began to pull on his clothes. He wasn't going to be able to sleep anymore even if he wanted to, so he might as well give up trying and go have something to eat.

Once he was dressed, he left his room and headed downstairs. On the first floor landing, he glanced down into the gloom of the front hall and suddenly had a piercingly sharp vision of Severus standing at the bottom of the steps staring up at him. Severus' black eyes glittered in the candlelight and a faint smirk sensuously quirked the corner of his lips. Remus couldn't count the number of times he'd seen Severus standing there exactly like that, impatiently waiting for him to come down. The Potions master often came a bit early to meetings if he thought they could snatch a few minutes alone together before the house filled up with Order members.

Remus shook himself firmly, banishing the memory, and the hall stood empty again. As he stared down into the dimness, the same unanswered questions came bubbling up to fill the silence with whispers. Why was Severus there when he awoke? Did he do something that brought him back? What that something could possibly be Remus couldn't imagine, yet the thought continued to nag at him.

Remus knew there was something he was forgetting, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't dredge it from the depths of his mind. Everything he remembered from the moment he fell on the battlefield until he woke up to see Severus looking anxiously down at him was a jumbled mess. Trying to make sense of it was like looking through a collection of painted puzzle pieces. He knew that somehow they made a whole picture, but he could neither figure out how they fit together nor what that whole should look like if he somehow managed to put them in the right places.

Remus stopped halfway down the next flight of stairs and frowned; unbidden, a vivid image of Severus' face bending over him came rushing back. Severus had looked anxious! As if he was concerned about something but concerned about what? Concerned about him?

Concentrating his focus on that single moment in time, he struggled to piece his fractured memories together. When he first opened his eyes, didn't Severus smile at him, just for an instant? As if the man was relieved to see him alive.

Suddenly certain he was right, Remus felt a weight lift inside him and a relieved smile crossed his own face as he continued down the stairs to the front hall and then down into the kitchen, lighting candles automatically as he went.

Severus sought him out in a sea of dead bodies when what he really should have been doing was getting as far away from Hogwarts as he could. There had to be a reason for that. Did he simply want to look at him one last time, or did the man somehow know that he wasn't really dead? Remus hadn't paid that much attention to Severus' expression at the time because he'd been so shocked to find himself alive and been so devastated to discover that Tonks wasn't.

Fixing himself a bowl of porridge and a cup of coffee, Remus settled down at the scrubbed table to eat and think some more.

He'd been the only one to see Severus after the battle was over. Everyone else assumed the man was dead. Harry swore he watched him die, and until they went to retrieve his body, and it wasn't there, no one thought to doubt that assumption. Why should they? Harry was quite certain about what he witnessed; yet, isn't it possible that he made a mistake? He was under tremendous pressure himself at that point, and he didn't linger in the Shrieking Shack to be certain that Severus was dead. He had other things to worry about.

Severus was there when he awoke, and he was alive, not some sort of ghost. Remus touched him, held his arm, felt his solidity. There wasn't a doubt in his mind that Severus had been real, and that he'd begged him not to tell anyone that he'd seen him.

What happened to Severus remained one of the enduring mysteries of the war. The accepted public version of events said he was dead, and that's what most people believed. Some, mostly those close to Harry, who helped to clean up after the battle, thought that it was at least possible that Severus was still alive since his body vanished from the Shrieking Shack before they could retrieve it, and no one was able to account for what happened to it. Did he leave under his own power? Did one of the few Death Eaters who escaped in the confusion remove his body? No one really knew.

After Harry cleared Severus of all wrongdoing and publicly admitted that he'd been mistaken about his former professor, no one thought there was much reason to go looking for him. If he was alive, letting him go seemed the best solution. Wherever Severus had gone, he'd more than earned the right to live his remaining years on his own terms.

But suddenly, Remus wasn't sure that he could let Severus go that easily.

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Beneath gently swaying branches, Severus stalked along the shaded pathway that led from his secluded cottage to the main thoroughfare of Owl's Hill, the second largest village on the island where he'd settled. Normally he'd simply Apparate from outside his home to the alley beside his shop, but he had a lot of work to do once he reached his establishment, and he hoped the walk would help calm his mind enough to let him do it.

Upon reaching the village street, he paused and looked down the long hill into the town. Mosaica, the place where he hoped to escape from his past, was an island in the Mediterranean entirely populated by wizarding folk who'd settled there for any number of reasons from the temperate climate, to fleeing from scourges like Voldemort, to simply wanting to start over someplace different. The fact that its population was made up almost entirely of people from other places, made it the ideal spot for him to choose as a refuge. The island's populace was used to newcomers, so most folk neither looked too closely nor asked too many questions.

Going into business as an apothecary and slipping into a new identity had been trivially easy, particularly since he'd been planning such a move for years on the off chance that he'd somehow find a way to survive the nightmare his life had become back in Britain. So far, everything had gone according to plan, with the annoying exception of his failure to banish thoughts of Remus Lupin from his mind. He'd manage that, too, eventually. There was nothing he couldn't do if he really set his mind to it. The fact that he was here, whole and safe, proved that beyond a doubt.

Running a hand through his closely cropped hair, he set off down the street toward his workplace, his forest green robes flapping in the brisk ocean breeze. As it was still fairly early, most of the shops he passed weren't open for business and very few people were out and about just yet.

Those who were around were quite happy to exchange a brief greeting as they meandered slowly into their day. In general, the village had been very happy to see him arrive and had embraced his work much more quickly than he'd expected. The only apothecary in town had wanted to retire and spend his days fishing and gossiping at the local pub, so for once, his timing had been excellent and instead of having to build a clientele from the ground up, he'd settled immediately into a booming business. Though a small part of him would have welcomed a bit of a respite, the greater part was quite happy to throw himself straight into hard work and put the recent past behind him.

Halfway down the main street, he turned off into a narrow, shady lane and made for a small shop with a square sign hanging above a freshly painted black door. Prince's Apothecary, Marcus Prince, proprietor, the sign proclaimed in Slytherin silver and green. Severus smiled to himself. It would perhaps be more satisfying to see his own name emblazoned up there for all to read, but it would also be more foolhardy. He wanted a fresh start, and he could really only get that by leaving the name of Severus Snape behind him for good.

Not that he was so attached to the name that he mourned its loss overly much, but like it or not, it was his and, over time, he'd come to terms with that. Still the name of Prince was his by right as well, and he thought that his grandfather Marcus wouldn't mind too much if he made use of it. Looking back on his less than stellar excuse for a family, he thought that his grandfather had actually been the only one of them worth commemorating. So Marcus Prince he would become while Severus Snape slipped forever into the mists of time, a casualty of distant war.

Slipping a key from his pocket, he unlocked the shop door and stepped inside. Time to get the day started, he had lots of orders to put together and a werewolf to forget about.