Severus dug his claws into the branch of the tree he crouched in. It was winter, and the rain drummed through the tree's bare branches, soaking his fur.
He was terrified of falling, but couldn't find a way to climb down. He vaguely remembered, in the Infants' class of the Muggle primary school he had once attended, the teacher reading a story about a young tiger who insisted that everything is 'what tigers do best', climbing to the top of a tree to show off to his friend, and then remembering that he didn't know how to climb down. Stupid kid. Just like Severus's students. But it seemed as though Severus himself had done the same, though he didn't know how or why.
But it was a dream, after all. Plots in dreams didn't have to make sense. He wasn't really in the Forbidden Forest. He couldn't really die if he fell from the branch. He wasn't really a cat. If he turned back into a human – well, he would be too heavy and the branch would break, but he was a wizard, after all, and he was perfectly capable of flying down. In real life (if an afterlife where you share a house with Darth Vader and have sentient robots in the house to help look after him counts as 'real life') he didn't know how he had turned into a cat or what could turn him back, but this was his dream, and he should be able to make it do anything he wanted.
He couldn't.
Maybe he could edge back along the branch, if he turned around? Cats could move gracefully, after all. He ordered his paws to get a move on. All four of them mutinied, digging their claws deeper into the bark.
Maybe if he died in a dream from the Rock, he could die for real, and face – what? Purgatory, or Hell? No, he had killed someone with an Unforgiveable curse, so it had to be Hell. At least he still had a soul to be tortured in Hell. If Dumbledore had had his way, Severus would probably have survived long enough to be put on trial and sentenced to have his soul sucked out by a Dementor. All that time they'd spent supposedly planning how Severus was going to kill him discreetly in private so that it looked like a natural death and succeed him as Head with the trust of both the Hogwarts teachers and the Death Eaters, when all the time the old Headmaster must have been planning on enabling a student to succeed in smuggling Death Eaters into the school who would bring the situation to a climax and force Severus to murder him publicly, at the top of a tower, in front of numerous witnesses, just so that he could be sure that Severus would be rewarded for his loyal service by being subjected to the Dementor's Kiss.
Well, possibly he was being paranoid. He couldn't actually prove that Dumbledore had planned it in that much detail, or that Dumbledore had anything to gain by doing this to him. But Gryffindors were the enemies of Slytherins, and Dumbledore had said to him nearly two decades before, 'You disgust me,' so it was only to be expected that he would take posthumous revenge on Severus after having got a lifetime's worth of use out of him.
When Severus had come to the Rock, Cheiron had pretended to be nice at first, even pretended to treat him as a person. He'd invited Severus to stay with him in his own house. By breakfast time the morning after he'd arrived, Severus had been so exasperated at having a centaur, of all creatures, waiting on him and cooking breakfast for him like a house-elf, that he had demanded to know how soon he could leave. Cheiron had invited him for a walk after breakfast and shown him a vacant house, well ventilated, with no basement, but bedrooms and bathroom upstairs and an open-plan ground floor that would do well as a potions lab. There were a number of books on the shelves, from bestiaries and herbals to books on music, etymology, and mediaeval Muggle technological developments. Cheiron had explained where the island's library was, if Severus wanted a change of reading.
There had also been, curiously, a lyre leaning against one wall. It reminded him of Lily, long ago, having had a guitar as a thirteenth birthday present from her parents, with weekly tuition all through the summer holidays. By the next summer, when she was fourteen, she was getting quite good, and had offered to teach Severus. He'd wanted to learn, but it was frustrating being a beginner at something Lily was already good at, making a fool of himself in front of her. She'd let him take the guitar home once, so that he could practise at home on his own. He'd thought he'd cast a silencing spell on his room so that his father wouldn't hear, but his father had come in anyway, accused him of wanting to be a rock star – which apparently was even worse than being a wizard – and had smashed the guitar.
Here, in the afterlife, Cheiron had offered to teach Severus to play the lyre, or to leave a book on how to play so that he could teach himself if he preferred. He had tried teaching himself, for a few days, but it seemed self-indulgent, when he didn't have any useful work to do. He had asked Cheiron what he could get on with to make himself useful, to pay for the house and the regular deliveries of food that got dropped off on the doorstep. Cheiron had said that he was here for a holiday, to relax and learn to enjoy life while he thought about what he wanted to do next, but if he was really bored and at a loose end, there were some healing potions that it would be very helpful if he could brew a few batches of.
At that point, it had all made sense. Cheiron just wanted him here as a slave to brew potions. It would have been helpful if the centaur could just have said that at the outset, but very few people were able to be that emotionally honest. They didn't realise that Severus was perfectly used to knowing that nobody could love him for himself and that people would only ever want him for the use they could make of him. He'd put the lyre away at the back of the cupboard in his room that would have been a wardrobe if he cared to have more than one change of clothing, and never touched it again. What right had a slave to a hobby?
Cheiron had come to visit from time to time, but Severus had learned to plead pressure of work to keep the visits as short as possible. He had had enough of being manipulated, and he wasn't going to let that happen again.
A little later, Nutt had turned up, explaining that he used to work as a servant at another magical school, and that he had read about potions theory and was interested in learning brewing skills if Severus would take him on as an assistant, since there was so much to be done. Severus had accepted this at first. After all, the diffident, soft-spoken orc, who looked about as large and threatening as a house-elf (if you didn't know that he could change size at will, and that he had ferociously long and sharp retractable claws and the ability to recover from apparently fatal injuries) was pleasant company. They had discussed poetry, philosophy, strategy in team sports, and their different worlds' approaches to magic, magic/Muggle relations, and interspecies relations.
But then, one day, Nutt had started talking about his childhood: how he had been a slave chained to an anvil in a blacksmith's workshop until he was rescued at the age of seven, and how he had been adopted by a reformed vampire who had encouraged him to read widely and educate himself, and how one day, leafing through a book on fantastic beasts, he had found the entry on orcs, and had been so horrified at realising that this was what he was that his mind had buried the memory, until, years later as an adult, he had needed to perform hypnotherapy on himself, role-playing the patient and therapist alternately, to rediscover the truth.
At that point, Severus had realised that they were in danger of becoming friends. If Nutt stayed any longer, Severus might be tempted to trust him, and talk about his own childhood, and believe that they had something in common and that they could genuinely be friends. Losing Nutt's friendship would be even more devastating than losing Lily. He couldn't let it happen. So he had put distance between them: not exactly banned Nutt from visiting, but made it clear that he didn't need an assistant.
Sometime after that, Cheiron had come to discuss medication for the man who would be arriving on the Rock soon. He had shown Severus some of the memories regarding Konstantine Bothari that he had stored in phials. From the first scene of the tall, unsmiling bodyguard trying to warn his teenage charge off hurling himself off a wall, but, when the kid insisted on breaking his bones, just resignedly getting him to a hospital without wasting time on recriminations, Severus had felt his heart go out to the older man. This was someone like him, an ugly, grumpy, battle-scarred man with dark secrets in his past, trying to atone for his guilt by being a faithful protector to the next generation. Before he had even known the words were out of his mouth, he had offered to invite Konstantine to share his house.
Some people, including Miles Vorkosigan in the memories Severus had viewed, described Konstantine as paranoid, but he was a lot more willing to trust Cheiron than Severus could be. After all, he had first found his way to the Rock as a child, so, for the whole of his life, Cheiron and the Rock had represented safety and respite from the cruelty of his own world. So he was willing to trust Severus because Cheiron did, and he had settled in without too much difficulty. He desperately missed his friends from his old life – because, unlike Severus, he actually had friends – but he had always had to be adaptable to survive, and he had known at least some people in his life whom he could trust, so it wasn't impossible for him to believe that there could be some in the afterlife, too.
Konstantine had even become friends with Nutt, which Severus had found hard to understand at first, but he supposed it made sense. Nutt, after all, knew what it was like to have been born into a world that treated him as worthless vermin, to have transcended his miserable origins, but to be haunted by the fear that he was still, fundamentally, a monster. He had talked Konstantine into teaching him Barrayaran judo (wrestling was an important part of the culture of most orcs, but Nutt, brought up by a vampire and her human librarian, had never had the chance to learn). The tribe of orphaned orc children whom Nutt and his human wife Glenda had adopted regarded Konstantine as a beloved honorary uncle. After all, he was much more orc-like than Nutt was.
So, Konstantine had managed to make a life for himself here. Anakin seemed to be doing the same – Severus was startled to find himself thinking of the man as 'Anakin' at last, but it didn't seem strange any more. Darth Vader had been simply one stage of his life, one role he played, just as being a Jedi knight had been before. Now he was a mechanic in a repair shop. Settling in, healing, making friends. Now he and Konstantine and Erik were forming into this Reformed Villains' Support Group, and Severus wasn't allowed in. Not villainous enough, and not insane enough, to torture or commit mass murder. Only insane enough to turn himself into a cat and find himself trapped in his own dream with no way to get out. Nobody would ever come to search for him, because nobody cared.
The scaly black snout of a vast dragon touched itself to the branch he was standing on. Severus dimly remembered seeing the dragon before in – not the actual experiences he'd had of Death Eater meetings, but the dreams in which he had revisited these meetings. Anyway, there was no mistaking who it was. He had always known what Anakin's Animagus form would be if he had one.
'What are you doing here?' Severus yowled. 'Can't I have just a moment's privacy once in a while?'