Severus put the empty mug down on the kitchen table, and opened the front door in time to catch the words, 'If I choose what to think about, I can choose what he sees.'
Knowing how hypervigilant Konstantine usually was, he had to have been very absorbed in his conversation with Cheiron not to have reacted as soon as he heard the door easing open. Even so, before Severus had time to walk around the corner and join his friends – before even his shadow had been visible – the Barrayaran had approached, not with the air of someone seeking trouble, but as a patrolling guard who will be serious trouble to anyone who shouldn't be there. He relaxed as he checked that it really was Severus (it's just as well I haven't told him about Polyjuice potion – if Darth up there knew how to brew that, he could grow himself a new set of limbs and pass for me any time he felt like it), and almost came to attention, as though caught between the instinct to salute and the remembrance that Severus was not his commanding officer, or any sort of officer, and it wouldn't be appropriate. He's more on edge than I thought – regressing more to the way he was when he first came here.
Because I was making him anxious.
'Hello, Severus,' called Cheiron. 'How did it go?'
'Darth Bader' (nobody reacted, and Severus realised that the reference would be completely lost on anyone who wasn't an expert on mid-twentieth century Earth history) 'is being as insufferable as you would expect. He is capable of resisting the temptation to use Legilimency, but he threatened that he can, and I quote, probe our minds in a way which is immensely painful, and can leave subjects permanently brain-damaged, and even comatose.'
'Have you threatened him?' Cheiron asked.
'Oh, it's always the Slytherin's fault for starting it! It can't be Anakin, he's a Gryffindor which makes him the hero, never mind that he's a Sith Lord!' Severus realised, much to his embarrassment, that he was struggling not to cry.
'I'm sorry,' said Cheiron gently. 'I didn't mean it to sound like an accusation. It's just that, when people are uneasy, they have a tendency to square up to each other and show how dangerous they are, to try to make each other back off. Centaurs generally rear up on their hind legs – at least, they mostly did in my day. Did they in yours?'
'Perhaps.' Severus hadn't spent much time with any of the centaurs from the Forbidden Forest apart from Firenze, and he had been as much of a misfit centaur as Cheiron.
'You have reason to be wary of Anakin, because you know enough about him to know how dangerous he is, and not enough to think of him as a person rather than as a villain,' Cheiron went on. 'And Anakin has reason to be wary of all of us, because we all know who he is and he knows nothing about any of us, or this place, other than what we tell him, or what he can find out by reading minds. Konstantine, was that why you chose to show him some of your memories?'
'Yes,' said Konstantine. 'It's not right if we've watched vids of his life, and he hasn't seen anything of ours.'
'There's a difference between being forcibly mind-read, and giving carefully selected memories to someone,' said Cheiron. 'Severus, haven't you ever shown memories to someone in order to demonstrate that they can trust you?'
'That's hardly the same thing!' snapped Severus. 'Harry Potter was an insolent, ungrateful brat with no respect for privacy, but he…' he didn't deserve to die. He didn't deserve to be groomed to be a human sacrifice, like Rowan's sister. No, not the same. Potter wasn't being reared as a spare body for someone else, he wanted to defeat Voldemort because the world needed ridding of Voldemort, and he needed information on how to do that… 'he was on the right side. It's not the same as Konstantine transferring his conscience to a Sith Lord!'
'I'm not,' said Konstantine.
Severus regarded him sharply. 'Are you sure?'
'He's weirder than me. As bad as I was after the Escobar War. That's why – he needs me to be his conscience. But I still need you to be my conscience.'
'I think Anakin needs both of you,' said Cheiron. 'Konstantine is absolutely right. The two of you know what it feels like to rebel against an evil master in order to protect an innocent person, and to have to go on with life after that, knowing that most people will distrust you because of your past, and to live with the consequences of the past – both your own actions, and the things that weren't your fault – and to face up to your responsibilities to the next generation of children. Anakin has only just started along that path, and he has no idea what it looks like – especially considering that no-one in his world believed that redemption was even possible, other than Luke. Perhaps part of the reason he died was that the journey back would have been too difficult, with no-one who had both the wisdom to be the mentor he needed and the political power to protect him from being put to death.'
'I didn't have anyone,' growled Severus. 'No-one who believed there was still good in me. Dumbledore said I was contemptible.'
'And we all know he was being utterly unfair,' said Cheiron. 'Do you think maybe he was projecting his own sense of guilt onto you?'
'What sense of guilt? Even if everything in Rita Skeeter's book was true – that he was a friend of Gellert Grindelwald and a former would-be Dark Lord himself, and that he murdered his Squib sister – I don't believe he was any more capable of feeling remorse than Voldemort was!' He glared at Cheiron. 'You don't believe me, do you? You think I'm exaggerating.'
'I think you're describing your experience of him,' said Cheiron. 'I think that people are complicated, and that more people have the capacity for redemption than you would think. But mainly, I think that Albus Dumbledore wasn't the mentor you needed, and that you had enough conscience and enough strength of will to grow from a troubled teenager into a good man anyway. I think that it has been an extremely difficult journey, and that this is part of why Anakin needs you – if you can manage to be the sort of mentor you wish you had had when you were twenty.'
At this point they were interrupted by a shout from the orc footballers nearby. 'Ball gone dead!'
'Indeed, Mr Shanzok the Delirious,' replied a more educated-sounding orc voice. 'Can anyone tell me what two mistakes Miss Bumieng the Enraged made? Yes, Miss Bhaotouk Throat Slayer?'
'Claws in when we play,' rumbled a (presumably) girl orc.
'Well remembered, and why is that?'
'Claws make hole in pig-piss-bag ball.'
'Well done! And what was the other mistake? Mr Gogzal Ghost Clobberer?'
'No touch ball with hand. Just foot, or head.'
'Exactly. There are, in fact, other variants of football in which players throw or carry the ball, but we will come to these in due course. For now, we'll play with the foam ball for the rest of today's session, and have a go at mending the inflatable ball this evening.'
Orcs were larger than humans, and they were bred to reach physical maturity sooner, even if it took their mental development some time to catch up. This particular group were around Severus's height, and looked to be at the developmental stage of human fourteen-year-olds, if humans had protruding jaws, flattened noses, pointy ears, tusks, only a tuft of hair sprouting from the top of the head, and a rather different range of skin tones. When a human was described as having olive skin, it meant someone with light brown skin, like Konstantine. In an orc, it meant green. The few who weren't green were mostly grey, or a dull yellow.
Since they looked like six-foot-high fourteen-year-olds, they were in fact, chronologically and mentally, around eleven or twelve. Half of them were clad in white shorts and red T-shirts with white sleeves, and the other half in navy blue shorts and marbled light blue T-shirts that, if you looked closely, showed a portrait of a grinning goblin. Almost certainly, these orcs had died in battle. Even though the wounds which killed you did not normally show up on your body in the afterlife, battle scars were status symbols among orcs, and several of these bore the scars of sword-strokes which must have chopped off their heads or cleft their skulls in two.
Probably they had been used as target practice for some band of trainee heroes from the more respectable species, and they might not even have been given names in their mortal lives. The mook rehabilitation programme generally encouraged people who arrived without a name to choose something they liked the sound of. Thanks to the grey-skinned orc who now strolled over to join Severus, Konstantine and Cheiron, it also taught a range of subjects from philosophy to fine arts to sport.
'Good afternoon,' he called cheerfully.
'Good afternoon, Mr Nutt,' replied Cheiron. 'You're looking tall today.'
This was generally an encouraging sign. Severus could never be certain whether Mr Nutt physically changed in size or just influenced people's perceptions, but when he was shy or trying not to be intimidating, he could be as little as three feet high, and looked more goblin-like than orc-like. Today, he was slightly taller than Konstantine, probably around 6ft 8, which was enough to emphasise his authority over the children without browbeating them, suggesting that he felt relaxed and confident. When he was angry, he had been known to reach 8ft.
'How are the psychodynamics of your altered domestic arrangements progressing?' the orc asked.
'Badly,' said Severus. 'Not badly enough for any of us to need hypnotherapy,' he added hastily. Apart from anything else, therapy from an orc affecting his planet's equivalent of a Viennese accent was disconcerting enough that you didn't submit to it except as a last resort. 'How's your football class?'
'I would be grateful for some assistance,' said the sports master. 'Sergeant Bothari, are you currently at leisure?'
Konstantine glanced to Cheiron. 'Am I?' he asked.
'I think we can spare you for an hour or so,' Cheiron said. 'I know you want to keep an eye on Anakin, but you need to take some breaks, and it's not a good idea to let friendships slide.'
Konstantine, looking relieved, headed off with Nutt to join the other orcs. He generally despised soccer as a sissy game compared to wrestling and boot polo, but he liked Nutt, and got on well with the rabble of orc urchins whom Nutt had become de facto housemaster of. In some ways, he was far more orc-like than Nutt was. Mainly, though, he was clearly relieved to get out of the emotionally fraught conversation.
Severus felt relieved himself. It was awkward enough talking about his feelings to one person at a time, let alone more than one. And Nutt had evidently seen this and come over to offer a distraction. More manipulation. But frankly, at this stage Severus was too tired and fed up to care.
'Shall we go back into the house?' Cheiron suggested.
Author's note: I am indebted to excessivelyperky for her reviews, which have given me a lot of insight into the way that Severus thinks about things.
Also, I keep mistyping 'Darth Bader' for 'Darth Vader', so it was bound to get into one of my stories sooner or later.
I'm not planning on making this a crossover with Discworld, Order Of The Stick and lots of other things - not as such. But practically everyone comes to the Rock sooner or later, either because they've died, because they need a refuge, or, like Mr Nutt, just to help out. (So, no, Mr Nutt isn't dead yet, he's just visiting.)
