"You went over my word again. We had agreed…"

"Agreed what? I am tired of agreeing and being put on the spot. Ever since-"

"Lucius Malfoy is a friend, Dida."

"What kind of friend, Igor? Because I know him well from Hogwarts. Hell, I've shaken the man's hand myself. With these two hands. These same very two hands you know very well…" She paused poignantly, to put her hands against his, and continued in a hushed tone. "Perhaps I may be very interested in Lucius Malfoy, your friend, as interested as he was in Durmstrang and my office."

"That's what's gotten you antsy?" Igor Karkaroff laughed in her face, and moved his hands from hers to her cheeks, pressing her face tightly against his palms, as if she were an idiotic child caught in the middle of mischief. "I thought it was something more… substantial." he added with disappointment in his voice, however Rada remained stone-faced, careful to not let any hint of an emotion pass through, as she knew exactly what he was referring to.

Igor dropped one hand to her chin, and lifted it so he could examine her face closely in the moonlight. Yet there was nothing he could get out of her expression, and no changes were visible on her face. He decided to drop the matter momentarily, knowing all too well how she reacted the last time he verbalised it, and instead focus on admonishing her recent irrational behaviour.

"Lucius Malfoy has no interest in your office or in Durmstrang, I can assure you of that." Igor stated coldly, a mocking grin appearing at the edge of his lips as he continued. "But perhaps if your office and position are causing you such stress that you keep acting against my interests, love, which I shall remind you, are Durmstrang's best interests, perhaps I should relieve you of them. We don't want undue stress, do we?"

Rada shook her head, and Igor's grin widened.

If Igor Karkaroff had been any better at Legilimency, or if Rada Pann had been any worse at Occlumency, they would not have gotten along as well as they did. But Igor Karkaroff enjoyed a challenge, and Rada Pann enjoyed each decision he would cede to her.

All in Durmstrang's best interests.

"So basically, there's this dog at Durmstrang. Big whoop."

"No, Ron, you don't understand!"

"Come on Harry, you said it yourself. Ate like a dog, barked like a dog. It was a dog."

"You have to admit, Harry, he's kind of right…" commented Hermione. "Come on, what else did you see?"

Harry pursed his lips. They were not listening to him - he knew that it was the same beast of an animal. That was no dog. It was almost as big as Pann when it got onto its hind legs, and she was not a tiny woman by a margin. It would have towered over him, if it had the chance and if Harry hadn't been covered by his Invisibility Cloak.

After Percy refused to tell them a single thing about his trip at Durmstrang, Harry decided, on his next trip, to follow him and Pann under his cloak - and while Percy was doing his class, he decided to continue following Pann around.

"At some point another Durmstrang professor came into her office - I think it was her office." Harry continued, taking a bite of butterscotch fudge from Honeydukes. "They talked about someone from Hogwarts seeing his classes, and Pann kept asking the professor to change the lesson plan. Said she did not want them to make a wrong impression. She kept saying 'theory is fine, theory is fine'. You should have heard how it went. He was dead set in his ways, and even mentioned Karkaroff. Said something about Karkaroff insisting on practicals when Hogwarts staff would arrive, he even said to put on a spectacle. He said something like-... ah, I can't remember."

"Oh, come on, Harry! You can't not-"

"I can't! That beast was there too, kept sniffing around the room! I couldn't concentrate, alright? I'd love to see either of you try with that creature in your face." Harry snapped. "It kept barking every time someone went past her office, you should have heard it when Karkaroff entered. And it smelt-"

"Karkaroff?" Ron interrupted. "What did he say?"

"I couldn't hear anything over the dog barking." Harry sighed, defeated.

Ron and Hermione looked at each other questioningly, trying their best to withhold their frustration with Harry. But all he could think about was that wretched, damning harbinger of doom. What Professor Trelawney called 'The Grim', the omen of death, crawling into her office as he pressed himself against the wall, making himself as small as possible.

Yet soon enough, the Grim had been forgotten as their lessons took their full swing, to the point Harry found himself with no time to follow Percy back into Durmstrang, not with Quidditch practice.

Karkaroff had even promised Hogwarts students on a sunny morning that the winning House would be able, at the end of the year, to play Durmstrang's team, which they all knew had two rising stars in the world of Quidditch - Viktor Krum, who had recently, upon his seventeenth birthday, become officially part of the Bulgarian National Quidditch team as a Seeker, and Petrov Khachaturian, who was in talks of becoming a Chaser for the Armenian National Quidditch team. Or at least, they all found out when Oliver Wood had started naming all the Quidditch players he knew that were still in education right after Karkaroff's announcement, earning a deduction of twenty points from Snape for talking over the Durmstrang Headmaster.

The only person not excited about the announcement was Percy, who found himself flanked by questions later that day, as he had his Model of the ICW. During the class, the delegates could not speak to each other freely, as Professor Pann was strict and would jinx whoever she would catch whispering or idly chatting. They were allowed, however, to write down anything - any stupid thing, as Percy would soon find out - that they wanted onto scraps of parchment, which then folded themselves magically into birds and flew onto the desks of the intended recipients.

He was excited at first to send and receive these - other delegates wanted to form alliances with him, would send him pointers or ask him questions that would test his own knowledge of Hogwarts or laws regarding Muggles and magic, and never had he been so happy that his father was working where he was working. However, soon enough he found himself caught in questions about Quidditch that he had quickly gotten tired of answering, especially as they would disrupt him enough that he made basic mistakes, such as ending his discourse by stating he would be yielding the Chair back to the floor, instead of the floor back to the Chair, which earned a wink and a lewd comment of 'easy there, delegate, buy me dinner first' from the moderator, a broad-shouldered Hungarian student who revelled in mocking mistakes the delegates would make.

His face turned several shades of red as the entire class laughed in response, and he found that it lasted quite a long time as well, as Professor Lupin asked him if he wished to leave the class and wash his face with some cold water. Percy refused the offer, however, and refused to discuss it even after the class ended, prompting his professor to decide on talking to Pann directly.

Remus Lupin had other things he meant to bring up with Pann, and figured that with this incident, he could no longer avoid it.

For one, when Hogwarts staff received the list of Durmstrang subjects to shadow, he put his name down for the Ethics class, which he later found out she was teaching. It piqued his interest that a school such as Durmstrang, renown for its dark magic, had such a class, and wondered what exactly it was teaching the students. He seemed to be the only interested party in the class, and was quite surprised when he found out later on that he was allocated another class to shadow, and the professor slotted for the Ethics class was none other than Severus Snape.

"Heard Pann specifically requested you not attend her class. One has to wonder why…" Snape smirked, poignantly tapping the parchment with a finger in the staff room.

Remus had heard him deride the sheer idea of teaching Ethics to students from the beginning, and figured Snape must not have been too happy himself with the allocation. Since then, however, he had noticed, while going to the dungeons to pick up his Wolfsbane potion, that he was not the only one who was accessing such potion-making services. As he passed Pann hurriedly walking with her head held down, he had asked Snape about it, worried about why exactly she was acting so unnerved, and if she would have made a connection between him and the Wolfsbane potion.

Remus had to expect, however, for Snape to be less than helpful, as his words only managed to sow seeds of distress - after all, if one of the staff members of Hogwarts were aware, that was one thing, as Dumbledore could talk to them. But if the news of him being a werewolf reached the ears of Pann or Karkaroff… Thankfully, as he watched Karkaroff bask in the applause of his declaration of the inter-school Quidditch match, as they locked eyes and he forced a smile and a weak round of applause, he could tell the Headmaster knew nothing. From the other side of the table, he could only see Pann looking left to right as if she were searching for something - her skin had an unhealthy tinge to it, and she kept furtively wiping sweat off her forehead and nose, and when their eyes accidentally met, she appeared to force the same smile he had on for a brief moment, before she turned her face away, leaving him unsure of her knowledge.

But he had to know. And during dinner, he indeed managed to catch her early on, guessing correctly that she would be sitting to McGonagall's right. He thus sat himself to the right of her, and during a lull in conversation between the two Deputy Headmasters, as McGonagall focused her attention on Fred and George Weasley, who seemed to be huddling above Harry like two vultures, he turned to her, and asked her how she found Percy Weasley. He had weighed his line of questioning, and decided that he would use this occasion to figure if she knew anything - after all, rare were the wizards who could accept a werewolf as their equal, and he was used to the disdainful looks so well…

"Very knowledgeable - of course, I expected no less, considering he's Head Boy and all… I would have preferred a Hufflepuff, but none matched the criteria we had laid out when proposing it to the House Heads."

"Why a Hufflepuff?"

"House pride, perhaps." she laughed, and Remus found himself scrutinising her as she looked towards the Hufflepuff table, surprised. It may have been more than ten years, but he could not think of a single student named 'Pann', and with her imposing height and lanky features, as if her bones were waiting to cut through and escape her skin, surely he would have remembered, even if she belonged in a different House… "You're trying to figure me out, aren't you, Professor Lupin?"

"Sorry, I didn't mean to-" He pushed himself back against his chair, not realising he may have gotten a bit too close while trying, indeed, to figure out if he knew her. "Remus is fine, please."

"It's fine, it's fine." she waved him off amused, before finally turning to face him. Remus studied her position, how she talked - she did not seem to know anything. Either that, or she was hiding it very well. "Likewise, please do call me Rada. I don't think you knew me, and it was all those years ago. I was two years below you, and in a different House… And I had a different name. After I graduated, I took my mother's maiden name, Pann. Had a better ring to it than Sturdza - which, imagine, if there would be people able to say my name, it would be the folks at Durmstrang."

He remembered now - 'Rada Pann', with a strong 'r', as in 'string', with 'a's like posh people would say 'and' was a stranger to him, but a student he'd heard others refer to mockingly as 'Rada Stuzzi', or 'Radish Stuzzi' - which he would certainly not bring up to her - brought a vague idea of who she may have been.

"There was a small influx of non-British students back then… I remember there was a group, you called yourselves the Continentals, didn't you?" he found himself saying amused, and Rada agreed. He remembered now - most of them were in Hufflepuffs, and stuck together. Well, considering what the British students called her, there was no wonder why.

"Wonder how many are still in Britain…" she mused, tapping her chin.

"When did you leave?"

"As soon as I graduated… the war kicked me out, so to speak, with You-Know-Who and everything happening… I travelled around, then landed my job at Durmstrang. I still kept in touch with what was happening here, though. Which you probably know already, since I asked Severus to-...ach. No?" She watched the confused expression on his face, and made a grimace.

"You asked Professor Snape to tell me something, and he didn't." Remus concluded, not surprised in the slightest. He sighed wearily, rubbing briefly at his eyes as he tried to make it seem like there was no animosity between them, and created a weak excuse for him. "Must have forgotten?"

"A forgetful Potion Master?" she raised a brow, and Remus chuckled bitterly, despite not knowing if it was a joke or not. Rada leaned in, her head resembling that of a vulture as she continued in a whisper. "Between us, Remus, I would have rather had someone else than him in my class, if it were after me… but Igor refused me. The reason I did not want you there was because in the class you would have been monitoring, students requested we do a mock trial of Sirius Black, which the Headmaster approved. I remembered you were good friends, back in school, and even if the students did not know any of your past, I did not want you to be in any way uncomfortable. I had asked Severus to-... well, you and me, we've barely talked, so I was unsure about springing it up on you myself, so I asked him to pass the information on."

Remus furrowed his brows - that was it? She had thought he would have taken offence or be affected by seeing a group of students doing a trial in their class? For the first in a long, long time, he laughed, laughed heartily, surprising not only her, but himself. All of that worry was gone, and he found himself at ease in the presence of a Durmstrang professor, something he had not thought before as even a remote possibility, especially not after having visited the School himself when he shadowed their Duelling class, led by a short, grey-haired Armenian witch with a predisposition not unlike Mad-Eye's.

He continued on chuckling as she described the fiasco the class had been, as students apparently always take it upon themselves to dress up for their depositions, as well as take their roles quite serious, and altogether, this time they have earned themselves weeks upon weeks of detention for a garden variety of mockeries, ranging from a student who cut eyes in a copy of the Daily Prophet and put it over his head, attempting to be 'the personification of the evil media', to a student attempting to dress themselves as what they thought He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named looked like. Because none of them or their parents had any connection with Britain, none of them figured why what they were doing were affecting her, and they simply had a disconnect when it came to empathising with the war - after all, for them it was no different than wars that happened hundred of years ago.

As she finished describing her class, he found that this time, the line of questioning was addressed to him, rather than the other way around.

"I thought you were friendly, you and Severus, since I was sure it was you who was visiting him… no? I came by a few times and if I'm not mistaken, you were going towards the dungeons…"

"More for business, rather than pleasure."

Oh, if only he could cut the displeasure of visiting the dungeons each time - however, there was not a single middleman, save for Dumbledore, that he could trust, and he could not bother the Headmaster with such trivial things.

"You, me… if there's others, he must find himself in high demand. No wonder he was so snappy when I asked him to make me-... well, something." she interrupted herself quickly, however Remus did not pry, out of politeness, and the fact that she did not ask about his own business either. However, a question found itself escaping his mouth before he realised what he had asked.

"You have your own Potion Master at Durmstrang, don't you?"

"We do." Rada sighed wearily. "The Durmstrang of today is different to the one I first taught at, Remus, very different. I would love nothing more than to be able to trust him enough to not have to go across my entire school and this one, but alas…"

And Severus Snape, ex-Death Eater, who Igor Karkaroff seems to rely on, is the one you think you can trust? The question pounded in Remus's head, and he wondered just how much she knew about Snape. However, in the middle of so many staff members, he decided not to vocalise any of his thoughts, and their conversation came to a halt.

But the next time he would see her alone, he promised himself that he would warn her. It was the least he could do, to repay that little sympathy she had when she figured he may not want to be present in a mock trial of the friend he thought he once had.

Now, however, he left the table as soon as they stopped talking, and pondered on Sirius, on James, on Peter, on the group they once had - them against Voldemort, them against the world, them, and Lily, and the Order, and the happiness they all shared in as they graduated and had a purpose. How it all devolved into accusations of espionage, and devolved into… well, a life of painful solitude, that he was reminded of each and every time he had to look at students or staff picking up that damned prophet, with Sirius's face always slapped onto the first pages. At least, outside of Hogwarts, he could avoid people, and apart from the pains of his lycanthropy, was able to find respite in his loneliness by reading, hiking, fishing, travelling into wilderness, doing all kinds of things that would take his mind off everything.

Back here, however, in the middle of all these other bodies and souls, he felt lonelier than ever.