A/N: Thanks to those of you who have kept reviewing. I can't tell you how happy it makes me :)

~oOo~

In the week between the demise of the basilisk and the beginning of the new term, 'Zorion' did not reappear. Whether or not he had originally intended her to see his true appearance, he seemed to now recognise that their charade had come to an end – she overheard part of a heated argument with his younger self, who objected to the disclosure, but in the end they both gave up on their disguises. The fact that the two of them avoided her whenever possible meant that a week was not really long enough to get used to the change; she still had a tendency to jump in surprise whenever one of them appeared, as if a stranger had invited himself into the house.

She had been sitting in the courtyard for some time when he entered. It was the last night of the holidays and a cool breeze heralded the approaching autumn though she was too deep in thought to pay the temperature any mind. She glanced up as he took the seat across from her, and then he feigned interest in the fountain to allow her thinly-veiled study of him to continue.

In many ways, he had picked a disguise not too dissimilar to his actual appearance: both Zorion and Salazar were almost a head taller than her, dark-haired and dark-eyed, but where Zorion had the kind of features you could lose in a crowd, the same could not be said for Salazar. She could tell that, in time gone by, he would have cut the kind of dominant figure that commanded instant attention. He was not the sort of person who could enter a room and stand in a corner, unnoticed, even now. Even when his eyes were distant and his shoulders slumped. She wondered what was on his mind, but assumed as always that she could not possibly know. Whatever he had told her, however sincere, had never been the whole truth, and he was privy to so many of the secrets of the universe… of course she was only a pawn to him. It had been naïve to think otherwise, but it was no good dwelling on that now. The whole situation was unchangeable.

She had liked him, a lot, and still did, though she had tried to fight it off. She respected him, even, in many ways, and could forgive much of what he had told her, now that she had had time to get over the shock of it. Because of the liking and the respecting, though, she had made the mistake of trusting him – even though he had always told her that he was hiding something, so it was her fault, quite honestly – but at any rate she had trusted him, and it wasn't a mistake she would be making again. In this world, in this time, it was no use trusting anyone. She had to grow up and rely on her own strength.

He was gazing back at her, now, and she felt as though she were being assessed, too. Perhaps he was going to read her thoughts. Would she be able to feel that? She looked away just in case, and vowed to work harder on Occlumency. It startled her slightly when he began speaking, as it had done all week, because his voice was the same as it always had been. The sound made her shiver, bringing back echoes of yes, yes and please, darling and fuck, yes, like that. She willed herself to forget it and to listen.

"The day I became Death, I stopped ageing, if you were wondering," he said. "That's how it works." Of all the things she had been wondering recently, that wasn't particularly one of them, but she didn't say so.

"It never really occurred to me to appear in private as anything other than how I looked that day, and in public… well… you could say that this job has developed something of a uniform… anyway. I thought that you might recognise me – or Dippet might, even. I thought I should find a new appearance. It never occurred to me that…" he gestured between them uneasily, and she felt the weight settle in her chest. He had not wanted her – apparently could not even have conceived of wanting her, in the beginning. It hurt more than she wanted to admit, and she fought hard to stop her face from falling, because feeling hurt was one thing, but showing it was quite another.

"I understand your disappointment," he continued, stiffly. "It was not my intention to pick a disguise so as to be… appealing to you. My younger self has accused me of such a thing even now." She frowned, utterly confused, but he was still speaking. "You must have been wondering why he appears older than I." This time, he was correct – she had been wondering that, and so her previous confusion was put out of mind.

"He looks as he has done all along. The way he – the way I – looked that day in 999. I was, I think, fifty-eight. But when I went to see –" there was a brief pause, here, and she imagined him thinking the name, but opting not to voice it – "the basilisk… I knew she would struggle to believe that it was me. I decided to change into the version of myself that she would best recognise. She hatched when I was perhaps… thirty years old. I left when I was approaching fifty – I suppose this –" he indicated vaguely to himself – "is somewhere between the two. I could… change… but the potential for mistaken identity might be… unfortunate." She nodded offhandedly. Their interaction was stilted and awkward; she still could not describe the overriding emotion she felt for him, and wondered what he felt in return. In terms of the conversation at hand, it was hardly an issue whether he looked forty or sixty, was it? Not when he was actually over a thousand. It made total sense for the two of them to look different, as he had pointed out. Still she said nothing.

Time wore on, and the shadows lengthened, and the silence was introverted rather than companionable. When he spoke again she had to strain to hear.

"I'm lost," he said, and there was no doubt as to the sincerity of it – he looked it – had looked it for days and weeks, now she came to think about it. "You've changed everything. You've changed me."

She hadn't a clue how to respond; merely fell even deeper into thought. The reverse was certainly true, she mused, in almost every conceivable way, but that, too, was something she had no desire to bring up.

"It's been so long," he continued, absently, staring out into nothingness. "So long, doing the same old thing, I stopped even thinking about it. At first I was drunk on the power of it all… it was such an honour, you know, to be immortal… to speak to the dead, to move freely among the living. It was decades before I got tired of it." She wondered if his reflections were coming, in a round-about sort of way, to a point, or whether she should finally break her silence. He kept speaking before she could reach a decision.

"Merlin was the last to die of anyone I truly cared for. After that, I slid into depression; there was no way out. Endless deaths, and increasingly nobody knew me. I withdrew. I stopped following the affairs of the living, because I could no longer stand to spare the time… A day's soul collection, then back here to eat and sleep – that was the fastest way to advance through the years, hoping for the time to arrive when I could finally be free…

"I lost track of the Hallows – well, of the stone and the cloak – you could say that the wand has a habit of crossing my path. I hadn't been paying attention in those early decades… I wanted them lost and separated!" He drifted off into agitated memory for some while. When he continued, it was in a tone of resignation. "I didn't know what to do. There's a contract – things I'm not allowed to do. It's a game to them. On the other side. I'm a joke. Did you know that?" He gave a humourless chuckle. "Quite a respected joke, you could say, having done the job so long… But still a joke. Almost all the past Deaths are. We all go through the same stages, you see, at one speed or another."

For the first time since he had sat down beside her, she spoke, almost without thinking.

"Stages?" He looked bitter, and sighed heavily.

"There's the smug stage. You think you're better than everyone else: you've been let in on some big secret, because you were cleverer than the rest. Then there's the sad stage. You realise that everyone you've ever known is dead, and that dying is… well, it's good, quite frankly, but you can't do it. That leads you into the angry phase. You call on all of the Elders and scream at them to change the system, to eliminate the Task and pick a new Death by some other method because you've served long enough. Then, when that doesn't work, you finally reach resignation. We've all spent quite different lengths of time in that stage… I lasted about nine hundred years, before I resorted to more underhand tactics. Morgana lasted about six months."

"You're telling me that, despite this… contract thing, you've cheated?" He looked directly at her, steadily, with one eyebrow raised. It was an expression he had often used in his disguise as Zorion, but the effect was much more imposing – and more eerily natural – on his own face.

"You didn't really think that the Elders would consider that changing sixty years of history was fine, did you?" She hadn't thought about it. She thought about it now. She supposed not, though she had very little idea who he was talking about.

"So – basically – not only did you ruin my life, but you did it against the wishes of everybody who has ever died." He flinched, and she felt a certain amount of regret, but didn't know how to express it. He, too, was quiet for some time.

"You think you're the only one that was happier before?" The words were surprisingly sharp against the still of the evening and the melancholy tone that had prevailed thus far. She blinked in surprise.

"What?"

"I was happier before! I was happier when I didn't realise what a terrible person I've been! I was happier when I had a purpose, and a goal, and I knew I wanted to die. Now I just sit here all day being useless!"

"W-what?" she said, again, dumbly, and then, "Pardon?" as if to prove she knew more than one word. He frowned.

"I said, I just sit here all day being –"

"No," she interrupted, "no, I meant… you knew you wanted to die. What do you mean?" She could see his eyes widen slightly – it was an uncharacteristic tell – a look of realisation that he had given away too much.

"Nothing," he said, flatly, as if there were any chance that she might drop it.

"You're… you're not sure anymore? This whole thing – this whole ridiculous situation – my life, my future… and you're not even sure anymore?"

There was an odd sound; if his face had displayed any emotion, she might have called it a sob.

"Y-yes."

She didn't know what to feel. It was simply one more bizarre turn in a whole line of extraordinary events – it didn't make any sense.

"Why?" He looked small, suddenly, and somehow anxious.

"Please don't ask me that question," he said, and she lowered her head, after a while, in frustrated acquiescence.

"Why are you telling me all this?"

"I…" He seemed to falter. Paused. Began again, and the words provoked a huge tangle of emotion to well up inside, impossible to separate and analyse in the moment.

"Because you're my friend." It was so simple and yet so complicated; it said nothing and yet everything. It was a statement, and yet a question.

"Yes… yes, alright," she said, eventually. And then, when the darkness had become almost absolute and there was no sign of a continuation of the conversation, "Goodnight, then. Salazar."

For a while she thought there would be no reply – she had reached the door and turned the handle. The sound, when it came, was hesitant; muffled.

"G-goodnight."

~oOo~

Slughorn turned up – late – to escort him to King's Cross. As if he was going to go missing again, as if he was going to wander off at the point of being taken back to Hogwarts! Ridiculous. But still, there he found himself, being rushed through the barrier at one minute to the hour. If it had been left to him, he would have been in perfectly good time; he didn't rush. He wasn't late for things.

The Professor didn't have to take the train, of course – oh no – he got to apparate to Hogwarts. Tom's best entreaties to be taken with him, however, fell for once on deaf ears. The idiot had evidently been expressly instructed to convey him to his destination specifically by means of the train.

Hermione was settled in the final carriage when he arrived, feet uncharacteristically resting on the seat opposite. It wasn't that he chose to sit with her, naturally, but the train hardly had an abundance of free space and he certainly wasn't going to sit with anyone else. If he had arrived early enough, he might have been able to get a compartment to himself – nobody ever voluntarily came near him, after all – but Slughorn had put paid to that idea.

"When I'm a Prefect, I'll be deducting points for that," he said, by way of a greeting. She jumped, evidently having only just noticed him, and he smirked, looking from her legs to her face and back again. Her skirt had ridden up higher than he was accustomed to seeing; the view commanded his attention longer than he had intended it to. Her cheeks began to flush slightly red – which he also found surprisingly appealing – and she moved hastily.

"Oh! Hello, Tom…." She smoothed her hair down in what he had noticed was a common response to being caught off-guard, and promptly recovered her regular demeanour. "You? A Prefect?" He allowed himself a smile and sat down fluidly next to her.

"Don't you think I'd be a good Prefect?" She chuckled.

"Perhaps. I'd like to see you take points from Malfoy." He felt his lip curl in imagined satisfaction, and they shared a sort of conspiratorial look. Was that something that they did, now?

"One day I'm going to do more than take points from him," he said, confidently, and he couldn't quite explain the expression that this produced on her face; it was a sort of conflicted resignation. Interesting. When she spoke, she had obviously opted for changing the subject.

"What did you do over the summer?" He was surprised at her choice of topic, as obvious as it was. Last year, he wouldn't have answered. Was this something that they did, now? How much should he give away? Knowledge was a powerful thing; he appreciated that better than anyone.

"Nothing," he said, casually. "I got grounded."

"Whatever for?" Her surprise seemed slightly forced, but he attributed it to his previous history of reckless behaviour.

"It was boring. Almost everyone had been evacuated. So I thought I'd go to the countryside, too."

"You just… went?" He shrugged offhandedly.

"I got a train. But Professor Dumbledore found me."

"What happened then?" There was a fraction of a second when he considered telling her the truth, for some unfathomable reason, but then sanity prevailed. No sense in giving away anything until there was good reason.

"He took me back," he said, and then flashed her a grin perfected by winning over years' worth of teachers. She knew his acts, of course, but played along anyway and smiled back.

"Bad luck," she said, lightly, and then, "I didn't really do anything either. Nothing happens in Norfolk." Tom was good at spotting lies, and something about her statement seemed off – perhaps it was the way she had volunteered the information so quickly. But since he had no real interest in discovering the truth, he let it go, and she immediately launched into an enumeration of the deficiencies of the new Charms textbook. The summer's events had faded from mind before the train had even carried them out of London.

At some point he must have drifted off, as unusual as that was, because dusk was falling outside when he next became aware of his surroundings.

"Tom? Tom." She was nudging his shoulder. She didn't normally touch him – nobody did. He thought it ought to be strange, but it wasn't particularly, so he resisted the instinct to brush her hand away.

"Tom? Do you want anything?"

He opened one eye, then the other. The tea trolley swam blurrily into view.

"No," he said, scowling – because she knew he never had any money, so why was she humiliating him by asking?

"I'm paying." She held up several knuts, as if by way of proof. His eyebrows climbed towards his hairline before he could stop them.

"I'll have a chocolate frog," he said, before he had even meant to. What was he thinking? He'd as good as admitted out loud that he didn't have any money. Thankfully there was nobody else to witness it. Well, there was no way to save face now. "Please," he added, quickly, for there was no need to add bad manners on top of stupidity. Hermione nodded to the trolley witch, and coins were exchanged for a frog and a cauldron cake. The compartment door slid closed and silence returned to the carriage. Tom rotated the pentagonal box in his hands thoughtfully.

"Why did you do it?" he asked, after a while. She swallowed a bite of cauldron cake delicately and then put the rest down, frowning.

"I just thought you might be hungry." He blinked several times. Her face was sincere; she was a terrible liar anyway. There didn't seem to be any kind of ulterior motive, which was very nearly unthinkable to him.

"But why would you care?" She appeared to consider this for some time. He wasn't sure why the answer mattered to him – put it down to curiosity.

"People like us should look out for each other," she said, finally. "Nobody else is going to."

He wanted to point out that there was nobody like him, but it was true that he had more in common with her than with anyone else he had ever met. So instead he smiled, and opened up the box – the frog was summarily consumed, and then he turned his attention to the card. The woman in the picture, who had been writing, put her paper away hastily and glared at him suspiciously.

Bridget Wenlock (1202-1285) was a gifted Arithmancer best remembered for proving the magical properties of the number seven. Notoriously paranoid, but often absent-minded, she was known to frequently lose calculations written in invisible ink.

"Thanks," he said, eventually, and wondered if that was something they did now. She looked almost comically surprised, as if she were thinking the same thing. It was… nice. Yes, it was nice. He chose not to dwell on it.

~oOo~