Jennie stayed for the showing of Miles Vorkosigan's memory of the Winterfair party the winter after he returned from Jackson's Whole. From time to time she wandered over to the Pensieve to amuse herself by batting at the figures in it, but mostly she stayed close to Severus. She didn't jump up into his lap, and he wasn't surprised. He didn't deserve that, after he had broken her trust by returning to being a human.

After a while, she butted her head against his shin. Was this an invitation to stroke her? Cautiously, he did, and she purred and rubbed her head against his shins again.

'You don't have to pretend to like me just to take shelter here,' he said. 'If you hate me for being a human, that's your right.'

'She does like you,' said Anakin, with the air of pointing out something obvious to someone terminally stupid. 'That is why she is afraid of having her heart broken again.'

Jennie gave Severus one last head-bump before slipping out through the cat-flap, into the night.

She hadn't been on heat or seeking refuge at all, Severus realised. She hadn't behaved the way Mehitabel did when she was on heat, and she hadn't looked the way he had done as a cat when he was frightened. And it wasn't cold or wet outside. She had come to visit because – maybe she did really like him as a friend. But it was too early in the relationship for her to want to sit on his lap, let alone stay the night. Definitely too early to spend the night sleeping on his bed.

Severus's first full day of classes began with Dragonese. To his surprise, the teacher wasn't a dragon, but a thin, spindly homunculus with a long pointed nose and spiky red hair.

'Why can't we have a dragon as teacher?' asked an orc.

'You will, later in the course,' said the homunculus. 'However, some of the sounds in Berk Archipelago Dragonese are difficult for a humanoid to produce, and it can be easier for one humanoid to teach them to another than for a dragon to explain it.

'There are many different dragon languages around the multiverse, such as Draconic and Dragontongue. In my home world, many fantastic beings, such as dragons and pegasi, can make themselves understood to anyone, and can even enable a human to understand the language of animals while in the presence of a fantastic being. However, as an artificially created being, I do not have that power, so I have specialised in learning the languages of many different creatures, including those of dragons from other worlds.

'To those who are new to the class, my name is Fliegenbein, but most people in English-speaking cultures call me Twigleg. I was created as one of a group of twelve homunculi to be servant and spy for a cyborg monster who had been created to hunt dragons. The monster, when he couldn't find any dragons and grew bored, ate our creator, and also ate my brothers, but he left me alive because he wanted someone to polish his scales.

'After several hundred years of loneliness, grief and terror, I learned to travel to the Rock in dreams, and I started to attend classes at the Mook Rehabilitation Centre. I made friends with one of the teachers here, the man who teaches Judo and First Aid.

'Shortly after that, my master sent me on a mission. A dragon and a kobold had been seen, and my job was to track them and locate both the dragon colony they were on a quest to find, and the colony that they had come from in the first place.

'When I attached myself to this group, it turned out that there was another member – a human orphan boy who had decided to join the dragon on his quest. And this boy – Ben – and another human, an archaeologist who offered them help and advice, were the first people I had met in my own world who had been kind to me since my brothers were killed. So when I realised that my master planned to kill Ben as well as any dragons and kobolds he could find, I realised I couldn't let that happen. I remembered how my human friend here had rebelled against his evil master in order to protect a prisoner, and had taken the prisoner whom he rescued as his new master and mentor instead, and I knew that I needed to do the same. Even if I couldn't fight back physically and cut a metallic cyborg's throat, I could become a double agent and work to find a way to defeat my former master.

'When that struggle was over, Ben was adopted by the archaeologist and his family, and I went to live with them as well. I thought my problems would be over, now that I was loved and had a good master and didn't need to fear the cyborg monster ever again.

'But of course, in practice it wasn't that easy. I was still grieving for my brothers, and depressed about being probably the only homunculus left in the world. And while Ben was – is – a wonderful friend, I could see that it made him uncomfortable the way I insisted on calling him "Master", and, when speaking German, addressing him as Ihr, rather than du or even Sie. For those of you who don't speak German, ihr is usually the plural form of "you", but when used to a single person, it isn't the usual form like "you" in English – we would usually use du when talking to an equal – or even the polite form like vous in French – humans would use Sie for that, though fantastic beings generally use du to almost everyone. Ihr is a form for addressing a king – rather like the way that an English king or queen would refer to themself as 'We' – and my old master had always demanded that I call him Ihr, and I couldn't break the habit. I didn't know how to interact with Ben other than as slave to master – especially as my one human friend here was also someone who came from a deeply feudal culture and was used to being deferential.

'I realised that I needed to have a life that didn't revolve around Ben, and so I joined a support group for artificially created beings here – which includes robots, genetically engineered life-forms, and clones. And, after a while, I offered to teach a few classes. I was already working as tutor to Ben and his sister back in my own world, and I'd discovered that I enjoyed teaching, so I wanted to see whether I could handle teaching whole classes.

'So, that's my story. Would anyone else like to tell theirs?'

A few people did. A creature which hid in the shade of an umbrella decorated with cartoon ducks explained in a childlike voice how it had been kept as the hidden weapon of an undead sorcerer and his goblin assistant, until a paladin whom its masters had captured had befriended it, taught it to play Go, been willing to listen to it, and encouraged it to think about who is truly a friend. A hulking demon-hybrid-thing named Gargon explained inarticulately how, after his Dark Lord had been sent to another world where he was magically transformed into a human child and forced to go to school, one of the Dark Lord's human schoolfriends had been transported to Gargon's world, and how, while initially Gargon had revered Sooz as his Master's fiancée because she was wearing his Ring of Power, he had come to love her as a person because she was nice to him.

Why had everyone except Severus been befriended by someone good and kind, usually an innocent child or a wise and noble-hearted paladin? He stood up. 'My name is Severus. No-one was interested in redeeming me. The wizard I switched allegiance to after rejecting my Dark Lord regarded me as evil and contemptible, but he was willing to keep me on, and even protect me from prison, as long as I was useful to him. The only friend I ever had rejected me while we were still at school – which, admittedly, was partly because I had fallen in with a bad crowd who were planning to become minions of the Dark Lord when we grew up, but she hadn't had much time for me anyway once we started school and she could make other friends. But when I knew that the Dark Lord I served was planning to kill her, I knew I had to change sides to protect her, not because she would ever be nice to me, but because she did not deserve to die. When the wizard whose help I had sought did not protect her and she was killed anyway, I knew that I needed to continue to work to overthrow the Dark Lord, because no-one – adult or child, wizard or Muggle, human or elf or goblin – would be safe as long as he was in power. I don't know whether the world I've left will get better once the Dark Lord is gone or not – that depends on those who survived, and the decisions they make. But I know that it wouldn't have got better while the Dark Lord was still in power, so it was worth giving my life to defeat him.'

He sat down. There was silence for a moment, and then someone said, 'You redeemed yourself? Without a mentor?' and someone else said, 'Wow!' and everyone was clapping and cheering. Severus bristled with fury at their taunting. It wasn't okay to cut them if they hadn't physically attacked him yet, he reminded himself. Then he realised that they were actually sincere, and that was even more embarrassing. He pulled the brim of his hat further down over his eyes – and as he was still wearing an adult-sized hat until his new outfit was ready, it had already been overshadowing most of his face.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a scurry of movement. Fliegenbein had shinned up the leg of his desk and was now standing on the desk to pat him reassuringly on the elbow. 'You are like my Master, Ben,' he said. 'Someone who refuses to be corrupted, however hard your life is.'

'I'm not,' growled Severus. 'From what you've told me, this Ben was always kind and friendly and trusting and forgiving. I'm not like that.'

'No,' agreed Fliegenbein. 'But you are honourable enough to be good even without being a nice person. And perhaps that is even harder.'

'For the record,' Severus asked, 'was the human who befriended you here a tall, ugly man with a nose like mine, yellow eyes and a crew-cut?'

Fliegenbein beamed. 'Are you the wizard Konstantine lives with? The one who welcomed him as a housemate when he died and came here, who looked after him when he was ill, and healed his memory?' Severus nodded. 'He thinks the galaxy of you.'

'Really?' Severus reminded himself that the homunculus was a born sycophant, someone who had always needed to flatter a tyrannical master in order to survive.

'Really. You were the first friend he had here, apart from Cheiron. When he died, he missed his friends in his own world desperately, especially his young master. But you were someone who could be a friend on something more like an equal basis, who knew how it felt to be him, and yet at the same time you were someone he could trust to be a good mentor. Also, if it's nerve-racking enough for Konstantine or me to be oath-sworn to just one teenage boy with a craving for adventure, we can't imagine what it was like for you having to deal with an entire school!'

'Exhausting. Why do you think I've reverted to childhood? I don't have to become a teacher here, do I?' Severus added warily.

'Definitely not. You don't have to do anything you don't want to. For now, do you want to chat, or study Dragonese?'

'I'm here to learn.'

Author's note: Fliegenbein is from the Dragon Rider series by Cornelia Funke. The Creature in the Darkness (the mysterious figure under the umbrella) is from Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew. Gargon is from the Dark Lord series by Jamie Thomson.