Severus crouched outside, wondering what to do next. They probably knew he was just outside, listening, and Vader at least could sense his mind and know that he was lucid enough to understand speech. Not that the Sith had actually revealed that there was a spy outside. Saving the information for blackmail later?
It felt as though it was likely to start raining soon. He hadn't liked rain much as a human, and liked it far less as a cat.
Was it even safe to be outside at night? Was anywhere safe? As a child, he had known that being outside wasn't safe, because any passing Muggle might get suspicious if magical things happened around him, and in those days he'd been too young to keep himself from using magic without meaning to. But at home, even if he stayed in his room and curled up in his bed under the blankets, he could still hear Dad shouting. People said children always assumed family trouble was about them because children were self-centred, but in his family he knew it was, because he kept hearing himself mentioned – not exactly by name, but 'That brat of yours'. There hadn't been a lock on his door, though occasionally he had managed to make it stick shut, and luckily Dad had blamed it on the damp. He never knew when Dad would storm in, shout at him and hit him, or Mum would come and hold him and sob into him as if he was a teddy bear.
As for school, in the Hogwarts grounds, or anywhere in the corridors where there weren't teachers to supervise, someone – usually James Potter – could jump out and attack him. It wasn't safe to be alone, but the other Slytherins didn't always want to go around with him. He was a nerd who always got top marks, not to mention being ugly and scruffy and a half-blood, and someone whose closest friend was a girl, a Gryffindor, and a Muggleborn. For the first couple of years, people in Slytherin knew that Lucius Malfoy had decided to extend his patronage to the scruffy half-blood whose name didn't appear anywhere in Nature's Nobility: a Wizarding Genealogy, therefore they mustn't do anything to him that the Malfoys might find out about. By the time Lucius left, Severus had been in his third year and was just about accepted as a sort-of friend by Mulciber and Avery, as long as he managed to fit in by sneering at Muggleborns and calling them 'Mudbloods' the way everyone else in Slytherin did. And besides, Lily had plenty of new friends, and as time went on she'd had less and less time for him.
Had he and Lily ever really been friends? He might have believed it, once. He could hear his not-quite-broken voice pleading with her, 'But I thought we were supposed to be friends? Best friends?' She'd never been his friend, she'd just used him for information when he was the only wizard she knew, until they were eleven and at Hogwarts and she could make some actual friends. Probably she'd have laughed happily if James Potter and Sirius Black had murdered him before they ever made it to the Sorting Feast.
No, that wasn't strictly true, was it? In the first few years at Hogwarts, he and Lily had still hung out together when they had time, laughing about how clueless pure-bloods were about the Muggle world…
He swiped at his ears, trying to block out the memory. Lily must have hated and rejected him as soon as she was sorted into Gryffindor, because that was how life worked, wasn't it? All Gryffindors hated Slytherins and regarded them as evil. Everyone in the multiverse hated him, either because he was a Slytherin or because he was a half-blood or because he was a wizard at all.
Well, he didn't care if Cheiron and the others were discussing how to manipulate him by tricking him into believing they cared about him. He didn't need them to love him. He'd wanted Lily to – well, not love him, he wasn't psychotic enough to convince himself that anyone as ugly as him could find love, he wasn't like Konstantine and Erik at their very worst – but he'd wanted to be friends, when he was a little boy and didn't know any better. He'd grown out of hoping to have real friends whom he could trust, now.
Anyway, Cheiron thought he was horrible. Cheiron had known Harry Potter first, had seen Severus through Potter's memories, so he'd be on Potter's side, just like everyone else.
Severus remembered seeing into fifteen-year-old Potter's memories – especially of his relatives laughing at him as they watched a ferocious-looking dog chase him up a tree. After he had seen that, he had talked to Dumbledore in front of the rest of the Order of the Phoenix and got them to agree that Potter didn't have to spend more than two weeks of each summer with his Muggle relatives. But it hadn't occurred to him to think about what he had seen – that Potter wasn't just refusing to make progress because he was lazy and arrogant, but that he didn't trust Severus to teach him Occlumency, or to rescue Sirius Black, because he didn't know how to trust an adult, because in his experience most adults didn't care about him, so he believed he had to do everything himself. Severus at fifteen wouldn't have trusted an adult, either.
Maybe Cheiron was right. Maybe there was something missing in his brain, if he couldn't work out something as obvious as that. Maybe it was true that he didn't deserve love.
He stalked inside, pointedly ignoring the food placed inside the drawer, and went up to his own room, instead of the one that he had been sharing with Anakin recently. He groomed himself again from nose to tail-tip, curled up and fell asleep.
This time, he was human in his dream, and, as far as he could tell, adult. He was standing in a forest that didn't seem to be either the Forbidden Forest by Hogwarts, or the dreamy forest of pools on the mainland that the Rock stood out from.
At any rate, the Anakin who came wobbling towards him on new prosthetic legs was Anakin approximately as he was now – a man who might chronologically be in his forties but looked thirty years older. He was about six foot two – a few inches taller than Severus, a few inches shorter than Konstantine – and looked marginally healthier than he did in life, with even a hint of his hair growing back.
'Now what do you want?' Severus growled.
'An answer to my question. What do you want? If you had been still alive when your enemy was defeated, what would you have done?'
'Apparated away as fast as possible,' retorted Severus. 'As far as anyone on the winning side was concerned, I was a traitor and murderer. The only people who knew anything to the contrary were both dead, but in any case, as they were Gryffindors, they would have been glad to see me sent to prison as soon as I had served my purpose, and preferably have my soul sucked out by a Dementor before I could be an embarrassment to them. If I was to survive, I would have needed to change my appearance and keep well away from British wizarding society, either by living among Muggles or emigrating. Think about it – would you have expected a warm welcome from the Rebellion if you had survived? Especially if Luke was dead, or if he hated you?'
'No,' admitted Anakin. He considered. 'If you returned to human form here, what would you want?'
'At least one day off per week where I don't have any responsibilities and can't be contacted in an emergency.' Severus wasn't sure how he could actually ensure this. He could go out to the forest on the mainland with a book and a packed lunch, and stay out until he got hungry for supper or ran out of things to read. But there might always be people emerging out of pools, perhaps injured or confused.
'What would you do with your holiday?' demanded Anakin. Cheiron would have prefaced the question with some bland comment like, 'Yes, that's a good idea,' but Anakin was out of practice with social niceties, if he had ever bothered with them.
Severus tried to think of some random ideas other than obvious answers like reading. 'Decorate my room the way I want it,' he said. It was something he had never even considered, until, after Sirius Black's death, he had been to tidy up at Black's old house, and found the bedroom that had been Sirius's until he had run away from home at the age of sixteen and moved in with his best friend and fellow sociopath James Potter. Seeing the room defiantly covered in Muggle posters and Gryffindor red-and-gold banners, Severus had for the first time felt a stab of fellow-feeling for the dead man. If he had been born into a family with a centuries-old tradition of all being in Gryffindor, he would have wanted to defy them by decorating his room in green and silver Slytherin insignia.
But as it was, he had never dared stick so much as a poster of a Quidditch team on the wall at home, for fear of how Dad might react. He had just told himself that at least he didn't have to be there for more than a couple of months each summer. There hadn't been any money for fresh paint even if he'd been allowed to redecorate. And when his parents were dead and the house was his, he still hadn't done anything with it except building an extension for a bathroom, but hadn't sold it either. It had never felt like home. And at Hogwarts – well, as a boy he'd slept in the Slytherin dormitory, and as a teacher he'd occupied the bedroom that had been Horace Slughorn's before him, and then the Headmaster's room that had been Albus Dumbledore's, but neither had been exactly his room. They were simply part of Hogwarts Castle. He had never thought to ask whether he was allowed to repaint the walls in a more tasteful colour than maroon (Horace's choice) or magenta (Dumbledore's), or to ask Horace to retake possession of some of his profusion of fluffy cushions and footstools that littered his former quarters and seemed to breed like feral cats when no-one was looking. And his room here, on the Rock, had the same plain 'magnolia' cream paint on the walls (why did people call it that, when real magnolia flowers could be any colour from white to purple?) that it had had when he arrived. Bedrooms were for sleeping in, not expressing personality.
The scene had shifted, and now Severus and Anakin were standing in Anakin's room here on the Rock, which in real life was also beige and boring, but now in the dream was decorated with a starry sky – no, not the night sky, Severus realised, but space, with not even sky to blur your vision of the stars – and cut-away diagrams of spaceships.
Severus would have enjoyed painting his own bedroom black – with or without stars – as a teenager. But now – maybe it was time to try something different? Painting the walls green unevenly with a rag-roller could make it look dappled, like a forest in summer with the sun filtering through the leaves.
They walked into Severus's room – no, there was nothing as simple as rag-roller painting here. This had an actual mural of a forest around the walls. It wasn't the Forbidden Forest, roamed by giant spiders, werewolves and a feral Ford Anglia car, but as Severus looked closely, he noticed a big green eye wink at him. A green dragon crouched, almost hidden by the foliage. As he looked around, he could see more creatures – centaurs, a phoenix, and – no, surely he would never have chosen to paint werewolves in his own bedroom?
Admittedly, none of these three looked like Remus Lupin or any of the werewolves Severus had known in his time as a Death Eater. All three were female, and were people he knew, if only slightly, from seeing them greeting each other on the Rock. The strikingly beautiful wolf with the long blonde fur, wearing a collar displaying the phases of the moon, was called Angua von Überwald, he knew, and was a policewoman except when she was a police dog. The bipedal wolf with almost human-looking hands instead of front paws and a mane of long brown fur hanging down from her head, wearing yellow overalls and carrying a toolbox, was Florence Ambrose, and she was an engineer and robot rights activist. The eight-foot-tall woman with braided chestnut hair and ferocious fangs and claws, wearing a bright pink dress, was Sergeant Taura, one of the soldiers from the mercenary army that Miles Vorkosigan had founded, though she must date from after the time in Vorkosigan's memories that Severus had watched.
It hadn't even occurred to Severus to put 'overcome my fear of werewolves' on his list of things to achieve, but his future dream-self who had painted this scene apparently wasn't bothered by them. After all, there were many different kinds of werewolves on different worlds, and apparently not all of them turned into berserk monsters every full moon.
Learning to paint could be something to add to the list, though. Hogwarts had offered magical painting, but at thirteen he hadn't thought it was important enough to include as one of his OWL subjects. Creating sentient portraits wasn't usually tackled before NEWT level, but making pictures that moved around was apparently not too difficult.
He wondered whether there was anyone on this island who could teach him the techniques of magical painting, or whether he would need to work it out for himself. How common was it across different magical worlds? 'You were right,' he said aloud to Anakin. 'With so many wizards coming here from across the multiverse, we should set up – some way to learn about how magic works on different worlds, and to share ideas and skills. Not a magical school,' – whatever else he did here, he wasn't going back to being a schoolteacher – 'but maybe a magical conference.' Maybe he could go back to doing research, inventing new spells or improving existing ones, the way he had as a teenager.
Taura, who was painted on the section of wall next to the window, gestured to the men to look out.