Though once Selena Selwyn had dreamed of a bright future in the Lower Alleys, seeing herself as the rightful heir to the Old Master of the Alleys and thinking one day to have the honor and power that he had wielded for her own, her return to her birthplace was far from a victory march. When the Old Master had been alive, when she had been his acknowledged apprentice, she had held respect by association, but little had carried over after his death. After the raids that had seen Selena and a number of important Alley denizens arrested, any favor she had managed to salvage had been lost. Her time with the Death Eaters had allowed her to forge the occasional new connection, and she found her share of work at brewing and spellcasting for the myriad establishments of questionable legality and notoriety that filled the Lower Alleys.
In time Selena would gain a certain reputation for the work, a grudging admiration for the breadth of her knowledge of obscure magics and variety of talents, hardly the fame that she had once expected to achieve. For the girl who had once expected to become the next Master of the Alleys, it was something of a letdown to discover that the title she had acquired among the people of the Alleys was instead "Master of None," from the old saying about the jack of all trades. She told herself that it was meant as compliment rather than criticism, and indeed it was not in jest that the name was given, but more often the accolade rang hollow in her ears.
In time Selena reached a point of grudging acceptance of her circumstances, though she never forgave the string of empty promises, the series of wizards who had manipulated her and thrown aside her dreams in favor of their own goals. But soon enough it became increasingly clear that there were much greater problems afoot, larger issues than how the people of the Alleys referred to their local magic experts or what positions a woman might have achieved had she been helped rather than continuously cast aside and crushed in her youth. Since the year that Harry Potter had begun his schooling at Hogwarts, Selena had been forced to deal with Severus's increasingly frustrated rants about the idiotic and dangerous situations that the boy continuously got himself into at the school, most of which seemed related to the Dark Lord, vanished already for ten long years.
The wraith possessing a professor at the school was an unpleasant confirmation for the two former Death Eaters that Dumbledore had been correct years before when he had informed them that Voldemort would return in time. At the time the unlikely friends had assumed, or rather hoped, that any such return would be long years in the future, perhaps long enough that responsibility to take action against their former master would not fall on them. But the death of Quirrell made it suddenly clear that the Dark Lord's return would be coming much sooner rather than later. The following year brought issues to Hogwarts, petrifications of students and terror filling the hallowed halls of learning, but nothing that Severus could directly tie to Voldemort, and Selena was barely aware of it.
When Sirius Black escaped from Azkaban, though, things became very real and very personal once more. For Severus, of course, it would always be personal with Sirius Black, not only for what he assumed the former Gryffindor had done to the Potters, to Lily Evans, but for everything he had done to Severus himself as a young man. But for Selena, the hunt for Black was not simply something happening far away at Hogwarts that she would hear about briefly through her occasional letter from Severus, or at one of their even rarer in-person meetings to socialize. She had nothing against Sirius Black in particular; Selena had only overlapped at school with Severus and Black's cohort for two years before her sudden departure from Hogwarts, and there had been little reason for her to interact with a Gryffindor first or second year (or, frankly, with the young Slytherin that Severus had been at the time).
She had heard after the fact about the fiasco with Pettigrew and the thirteen dead muggles, and from Severus about Black's betrayal of the Potter family, but she had spent the time just after Voldemort's fall attempting to settle her own issues and stay out of prison, and had given little attention to which Death Eaters were captured, or even which other people had been discovered to be Death Eaters, for she had certainly not known every member of the organization. No, Selena cared very little about Black breaking out of Azkaban as a concept, and what little concern she gave was for Severus's sake alone. She noted the possibility that it was another indication of Voldemort's impending return, but her primary concern was far more personal.
For the bureaucrats and politicians of the Ministry of Magic in their infinite wisdom had apparently decided to set loose Dementors to search the country, including sending them into the Wizarding Alleys. Admittedly, searching for an escaped criminal in the Lower Alleys was far from an unreasonable decision, for its winding streets and twisting passageways had played host to more than its share of petty criminals who had gone to hide there over the years. That did not, however, make it any less of a bloody nuisance to have Dementors periodically patrolling the Alleys without warning and terrorizing the citizenry, Selena Selwyn chief among them.
It was only at this time that Selena first attempted to learn to produce a Patronus charm. She had never learned the spell before. It had not been taught in the few years that she had spent at Hogwarts, the Old Master had never felt it a necessary form of magic to teach her while she served as his apprentice, and, naturally, there was no opportunity to learn such a charm in her time among the Death Eaters. Selena had heard of the spell, had come across references to it in books, but it had never seemed a terribly useful kind of magic. Against Dementors it had its rightful place, but it was rare, practically unheard of, to encounter the soul-sucking creatures in any place other than in Azkaban Prison itself. And as Selena knew quite well from personal experience, such an encounter would take place with her as a wandless prisoner, a situation where knowing how to cast a Patronus charm would be absolutely no help or consolation.
But after her first time collapsing in the street when a Dementor patrol passed too close by, bringing back haunting memories of her months spent behind bars at the desolate island prison, not to mention all the darkest thoughts and hopeless moments that had made up the worst days of her life, she thought it time to remedy this gap in her education. By the time the creatures were recalled to Azkaban after months of futile searching for the escaped Sirius Black, Selena had eventually taught herself to produce a silvery mist, only ever in the safety of her home and with great effort. She never managed to produce a corporeal Patronus under any circumstances, and when brought face to face with a Dementor she was unable to achieve even the lesser form of the spell.
Author's Note: Thank you for reading! We are rapidly approaching the end of this story, with only one more full length chapter and an epilogue to get us to the end of the war. As always, please feel free to let me know what you think of the chapter (or the story as a whole) by leaving a comment.