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Chapter Text

Severus scrawled a large D atop the very last of the first-year essays with a flourish and dropped the quill into the well with a deep sigh.  He flexed both shoulders and stood, walking to the small bookshelf-cum-liquor cabinet.  He had just withdrawn a half-full flagon of brandy when a knock sounded on the door to his quarters.

Severus set the bottle down with a clunk and a sigh, resigning himself to postponing his post-marking reward.  Perhaps it was Albus or Minerva, coming to ask about some issue with curriculum or House politics, not that he was in the mood.  The first-year essays had been particularly execrable.  The Muggle ones barely knew one end of their wands from the other, and most of the pureblooded pupils weren’t much better.

Instead of Albus or Minerva, the Potter boy stood outside his door, a handful of brightly coloured packages in his arms.  For a moment, Severus stared down at Potter in shock— he hadn’t had any idea Potter knew where his personal quarters were— and Potter looked up at him with an odd mixture of wariness and expectation, a bit like he expected Severus to perform a trick.

“Mister Potter,” he began.  “What on earth—?”

“Sir,” Potter interrupted, like the horrifying brat he was, “er, I… I have something of yours.”

The Potter boy’s features twisted, as though he realized exactly how foolish that sounded.  Severus could almost hear the thoughts clanking and clattering through the boy’s mind, like a box of rusty gears:  I should’ve planned out what I was going to say.

Too little, too late, Mister Potter, Severus thought and did not say.  Instead, “…Do you?” he replied, arching a brow.

Potter took a deep breath and seemed to gather his resolve.

Very well, you’ll need it, Severus thought.

“I didn’t know it when I was eleven,” Potter began, then swallowed visibly, stopped, and began again.  “I knew nothing about the Wizarding world when I first entered it, sir.  When I came into your classroom you said I was a celebrity, but I didn’t know it, then.  Not really.”

“What does this have to do with an object you wish to place into my possession?” Snape pressed.  “Hurry it along, Potter; I have better things to do with my time.”  His eyes trailed back to the brandy, and the empty snifter waiting to be filled.  His fireplace crackled behind him, the armchair seated before it calling a siren song.

“Getting there,” Potter said, then swallowed again.  “Erm, so Hagrid was my first introduction to the Wizarding world.  He gave me this key.”  The boy lifted a chain from around his neck, briefly revealing a Gringotts key which, to the educated eye, spoke of great wealth and importance— not that the boy would know any better than to go flashing it around.  “But he didn’t explain how I didn’t have access to everything.”

Severus leaned against the doorframe.  “Potter, your rambling dialogues are much like your essays.  I have yet to see the point, and my patience is wearing thin.”

Potter blinked a few times.  “Yes, sir,” he said, and Severus wanted to strangle him.  Potter would say ‘yes, sir’, sometimes, with the utmost gravity; and then he would do exactly the opposite of whatever he had promised.  Sometimes, Severus wondered if the addlepated fool even realized how insouciant and arrogant he could be.  He thought the answer was no.  He thought the answer was no, because no one could fake shocked ill-treatment so well as Potter seemed to.

“I, er, I’ve had my birthday this past July— please, Professor, that bit’s important, I swear— and came into… um…”  Then, Potter’s entire face changed.  Gone was the entitlement and arrogance Severus had come to loathe, and a deep, rather grown-up regret and sorrow stood in its place.

“There were all these… things,” Potter said, slowly, still feeling his way, “that were left in the house after the attack.  I guess Dumbledore took everything and put it in their vault.  And, I didn’t know this until, well, until the end of October or so, when I went to get some pocket money, but I guess the Wizarding World thinks that fifteen is old enough to lay claim to what my account statement calls, er, a variety of personal items.” 

For the first time, Severus’s attention was drawn back to the packages in Potter’s arms.  “…And you have found… something of mine?” Severus said through numb lips.

“Madder,” Potter breathed, then caught that breath as though the moment of shared bewilderment was too much, as though he could be caught at that nascent moment of connection and punished for it.  Potter pressed one of the packages into Severus’s waiting palm, but then didn’t seem to be able to let go of it.  “It’s a Christmas present,” Potter choked, “from my mum… to you.”

He felt the blood drain from his face, felt his fingers and toes tingle.  “Who.  Told.  You,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

Potter stumbled back, bright boy.  “T-told me w-what?”

“Someone told you.  Was it the werewolf?” Severus growled.  “Did he put you up to this?  What did he say, that I would beg for a token of Lily’s?  She quit herself of me long before we graduated Hogwarts!”

Potter’s mouth was opening and closing like a fish’s, and it occurred to Severus that Potter might not be trying to trick him, even that (perhaps, perhaps) Potter was someone else’s instrument and had no idea what even the mention of Lily could do to him.

No.  No, it was too much.

“Get out, Potter.  Get out!”

Potter stared at him, briefly, the bright flare of hurt subsumed by rage.  “Fine, then!” he shouted, and the sound was so full of that hurt that it shocked Severus to stillness.

Potter dropped the boxes at his feet and ran.

He had a brief vision of chasing after the boy, of deducting five thousand points from Gryffindor, but Severus turned his attention to the boxes instead.  He picked them up— three in all— and turned them over and over again in his hands.

The paper around them was green and red and gold— typical Lily, all garish and bright and lacking in common sense – Severus snorted quietly to himself before the omnipresent stab of pain reminded him never again, never again, and also not to get his hopes up because, well, it was just wrapping paper, never mind how old it felt under his fingers, how worn, the way that the folds in the paper were thin at the edges, the way it…

No, no, he chided himself immediately.  Don’t imagine for a moment, not for a blasted moment, that it’s real.  Imagine instead the boy’s face when you send him to the Headmaster for such a cruel prank.  The old man would understand my need for punishment in this case, at the very least.  And to exercise his right to punish Potter, he would need evidence that a prank had been committed; otherwise, Dumbledore would never raise a hand against his Golden Boy.

And to get that evidence… he’d need to open the packages.  Prove they weren’t really… from Lily.

Severus retreated to his fireplace, to his warm, inviting armchair, and poured himself that brandy, finally.  He swirled it around more out of habit than appreciation, and took a deep, fortifying gulp.

He cast a few charms to make sure the box itself was not enchanted, then turned it over in his hands. 

To Severus / Love, Lily

was written directly on the paper, in what looked like Lily’s hand.  Feeling foolish, he raised his wand and carefully clipped that Love, Lily away from the rest.

Beneath the paper was a small, black velvet box.  With trembling fingers, Severus lifted the hinge.

There was a note over the item within; Severus lifted the note and stared at the object inside.  It was a stamp, an old-fashioned one, with a marble head curled with gold filigree and a copper plate…

Severus’s lips parted at the sight of the stormcrow emblazoned in the copper.  It was his Family Seal, for Merlin’s sake, the Prince Seal, his old grandmother’s.

Severus’s heart swelled to bursting, and for a moment he tried to be angry to cease the burning in his chest: did she still have to be so good, all this time later?  So genuine in her attempts to please him, while long since wed to another man, while long since dead?  But his heart wasn’t in it.  He opened the note with a sigh.

His, was she?  Merlin, she was a torture, even fourteen years dead and gone.  Severus took another mouthful of the brandy, savouring it a moment before swallowing, this time.  Lily had done him a good turn.  Potter had done him a good turn.  Perhaps he ought to apologize.  Not directly, of course.  That would never do; but he could take fewer points from Gryffindor over the next week or so.

Severus reverently set the Seal on the mantel and turned his attention to the second box.  To Severus was written in an unfamiliar hand.  Certainly not Lily’s, he would know it in his sleep.  There was only one other hand in that household, and that was… queer, and disturbing.  Severus checked this second package for hexes over and over again, thinking that Potter might have been displeased that his wife still thought of Severus at Christmas, or at all.  That perhaps he’d sent this gift along with the other in hopes of showing his disapproval— but there were no hexes on the package.

He was all set to tear through the package when he found himself lifting his wand and cutting free this second message, placing it on his mantel with Lily’s.

Within the other package was a second seal.  Severus lifted it up to his eye with a frown.  It was seldom that two Family Seals were produced; there was, by definition, one per household.  But it couldn’t be a Prince Seal, he could tell that already by how shiny and new this one looked.  The marble was a soft gold colour, filigreed perhaps more than was entirely tasteful, and the copper plate was… a griffin.

Severus dropped the Seal to the floor as though it were a live viper, turned the little box inside out, but there was no note, not a hint of explanation.  The Potters must have thought there would be ample time to explain why they were handing their own Family Seal to someone who was as good as a stranger to them.  Severus reached for his glass to find it empty.  He rose to pour another, and took Wizarding Culture: a series of family histories down from its shelf. 

Family Seals were passed from father to son, or, in the cases of the Greengrasses and the Tallins, from mother to daughter.  The owner of the Seal was considered the Head of Household, entrusted with finances, contracts, and holdings.  The passing of the Seal was ceremonial, and other objects or contracts could be used to represent the same conference of power.  It was a symbol, albeit a powerful one.

And James Potter had given his to Severus.

He recovered the Seal at his feet and turned it over and over again in his hands, trying to find the joke; but the Seal appeared genuine.  It was newer, shinier, because the Potters were new money, and probably didn’t have a Seal until Potter’s grandfather commissioned one. 

He placed the second Seal on the mantel beside the first and stared at the third package.  He’d recognized the subtle charm on all three packages to entice the holder to open them in a specific order, and he had neither resisted nor dismantled it.  But if the second package was shocking, he had trouble imagining what might be in the third.

He was moved, though, by the fact that the first package had contained a note from Lily.  Perhaps this third package would as well.  The lure of explanation and Lily’s hand clawed past his reservations, and he reached for the third package.

This one said only Sev, in a shaky hand.  Lily must have been apprehensive when she wrapped this one, Severus thought, which only added to his own mounting anxiety.  Trembling, he tore the paper away from the package.  Within was a white box taped shut.  Severus struggled with the Spell-O-Tape so that, when the box finally opened, a folded bit of parchment fell to the floor, revealing the object underneath.

It was a tiny sculpture, very badly done, of a cauldron with a dark-haired baby poking its head out over the cauldron’s lip.  Painted around the outside was the legend, Baby’s First Christmas, 1980. 

Severus’s mind tried to slide over to anger, but he was too baffled.  This could be seen as another of Potter’s pranks, in a certain light: look here, Snivellus, I got the girl, I got her knocked up, but it’s both far crueller and far more straightforward than any of Potter’s larks as a fifteen-year-old.  It broke his heart, and he thought he didn’t have one to break: at least, not one that could be reached so easily, anymore.

The note was in Severus’s hands, although he didn’t remember scooping it up from the faded carpet at his feet.  He pressed his fingers into its folds, breath held, and unfurled it.  A whiff of a familiar scent caught at his memory: he heard a man’s laugh and smelled something like baking pastry before the wisp of remembrance was gone.

Shaking his head to right himself, Severus turned his attention to the contents of the missive.

Severus, it said— in narrow, masculine letters, it said!—

Severus slumped in his chair.  What on earth could the madman have been thinking?  His mind went back to the possibility of a practical joke, but this was verging on embarrassing for Potter as well as for Severus himself.  Perhaps it was in some kind of code, he thought.  The note referenced chess and logic.  In that case, what was home?  Hogwarts was the only place that meant ‘home’ for both he and Potter… those three items had to be a clue of some kind, perhaps he had to use the family seals in some chess-related puzzle at Hogwarts.

Severus knew he needed an outside perspective; he knew he needed someone more knowledgeable about the castle than himself.  He knew that the Headmaster was away on some secret Order business in the South of France.  That left one obvious choice, though it wasn’t one he would relish making.

Minerva McGonagall’s face went white behind her spectacles as she turned the Potter Seal over in her hands.  She set it down on her desk and regarded Severus with a look in her eye that could only be called weighing, as though she were slicing up everything she knew of him to tiny bits and judging each component part.

“What do you suppose it means?” he said eventually, made just uncomfortable enough to need to fill the silence.  “I admit, I cannot make heads or tails of the message.”

McGonagall eyed him again, and began pouring tea from the steaming ceramic kettle on a tiny plate at her desk.  She handed him a thin, finely-made teacup and a biscuit before she replied.

“It can only mean one thing,” she said, the rasp of her brogue showing her discomfiture better than her expression.  “James and Lily Potter were handing you their financial affairs, their holdings, their very name by giving you this Seal.  What do you make of such trust in a former enemy?”

Severus snorted around the word former, but when the Deputy Headmistress continued to glare, he felt moved to continue.  “That they had no other choice,” he growled. 

“Perhaps one of them suspected a friend should betray them, and could not be certain who it was,” McGonagall allowed.

“Lily might have suspected all the Marauders of wrongdoing,” Severus agreed, “or at least all of them equally.  She never seemed entirely comfortable around Pettigrew or Black.  But why me?”

“They chose someone who was not a friend and yet not an enemy?  Perhaps Lily knew you would take care of her things as she would have seen fit.” 

Severus took in an uneven breath.  The thought of Lily trusting him with her family’s accounts and holdings, even after all the years they’d fought, was like a stab to the heart.  “But then why were they wrapped as presents, Minerva?” he said, leaning forward.  “Surely you do not believe that Lily knew she was to die?  Surely you do not believe these gifts were intended for me all this time later.  No, this was a gift meant to be given in the winter of Harry’s first year— does it not seem so?”

“Likewise, that does not make a great deal of sense,” Minerva said.  “Harry was born in 1980, and his parents left us just over a year later.  Lily would have had ample opportunity to give you these gifts at Harry’s first Christmas.  That is a mystery indeed,” the Deputy Headmistress agreed, shifting her tartan robes with an anxious twitch of her fingers.  “However, their intended purpose is not so dark to me as it appears to be to you.”

Severus swallowed a gulp of too-hot tea, and winced.  “It is a code, as I had thought,” he said.

Her features twisted to sympathy.  “Dear Severus,” she said.  “It is not a code, save in the most rudimentary sense.  Your Seal— respect for your family.  The Potter Seal— control over their property and holdings.  And the ornament, to signal a more personal connection.  It says, Severus, we trust only you to care for our son’s future in our absence.”

Severus felt the hairs on the back of his neck, his arms, stand at attention.  “No,” he said.

“Certainly Lily and James had no concrete proof that things were to go so badly as they did… but they must have had some kind of warning that things were not right with the Marauders, as early as the winter of 1980.  They must have made plans, together.  Lily would have convinced James, although it appears she may not have had to push but so hard, the letter seems quite convinced on James’s part.  Why they delayed in sending their message, only they know… and now, shall never tell.”  Minerva dabbed at her eyes with a felted tartan handkerchief. 

“If they had wanted the Potter boy to go to me, they would have put it in writing,” Severus said.  He did not know what to feel at this turn; he felt nothing.

“For all we know, they did,” Minerva said.  “I am certain many documents went up in flames that night.  And all those ‘personal items’ Potter told you about… who knows what documentation is there, now, in the Potter vault?”

Severus stared.  “I would have known.  Something magical would have told me if I had… a ward…”

“Severus,” she said with a sad smile, “you did not grow up with our ways.”

Severus felt himself bristle, a little, underneath the layers of nothing.

“To say it plainly is not to cast aspersions on you,” she said, reading his face as well as she’d done when he was just another of her students.  “It’s only that you wouldn’t know of such things.  A child’s caregiver can indeed have a magical connection to that child; but for that to happen, a bond must be established.  Harry never even met you until he was eleven.  In short, the fact that you weren’t magically informed that Potter was your ward tells us nothing, proves nothing.”

“And the Potters giving me their House Seal, and some foolish baby ornament likewise proves nothing,” Severus barked.

“Come now, Severus,” Minerva said.  “Can you imagine any other reason for Potter to hand you power over his lands, titles, and Gringotts accounts?”

Severus stared.  “What did you say?”

“I said that it seems incredible that James Potter would hand you anything of his, I admit that this is so.  But can you imagine any reason besides the one we have discussed?”

“No,” Severus said.  “No, you said power over his Gringotts accounts…”

“So I did,” she replied with a slow curl of her lip. 

Severus slipped out of Hogwarts at the next available opportunity: that Saturday, which was a Hogsmeade weekend.  With the castle empty of the older (troublemaking) students, he could have indulged in some much-needed rest and relaxation.  However, he found himself so preoccupied with the Potter mystery that that there was nothing for it but to travel to Diagon Alley to examine the account in greater detail.

As he walked through the double doors of Gringots, Severus fingered the Potter Seal in his pocket, twisting it round and round like the knob of a door.  He had never enjoyed waiting for the goblins to notice him, to accept his key, to sneer at the paltry number of Galleons it represented.  What if the Seal hadn’t been willingly given?  What if it labeled him thief? 

What if that was just what Potter had wanted all along, to set him up to take the fall for some fabricated crime?  Imagine penniless Snivellus, thinking of all those Galleons, and then…

He was feeling exposed and foolish and was about to depart when a goblin finally gestured him forward.  “Your business?” it demanded in a hard voice.

Severus presented the Seal.  “I wish to examine the contents of the Potter vault.”

“Which one?” the goblin asked.  “Three, last I checked, eh, Grimley?”

An older goblin with flyaway hair and a tiny pair of spectacles on its huge, hook-nose looked up in surprise.  “The Potter vaults?” the goblin Grimley said.  “Why, bless!  I’d begun to think that gold was getting awfully lonely with no one to look after it!”  Grimley chuckled to himself.

“You do not have the key?” the first goblin inquired suspiciously.

“My ward has the key,” Severus said.  He only said so because he thought it was the most plausible answer.  Still, hearing it aloud, even as a falsehood, was strangely disconcerting.

The goblins exchanged a goblin-look which, due to Severus’s lack of goblin heritage, was impossible to interpret.  “The Seal gives you the right,” the first goblin said; then, voice lowered, “…best all-around Mr. Potter keep it on his person, eh, Grimley?  With what scrapes he gets into.”

“Yes,” Severus said.  “Mister Potter and his… scrapes.”

Grimley took the lead, guiding Severus to a rickety cart.  Luckily, Severus was used to the ride, although he found himself becoming more and more put off by how deep the Potter vaults were: the deeper the vault, the more protected the vault, the more prestigious the name.  For a moment, all the old resentments rose, clawing their way up his throat: Potter, new money, never respected the old ways… but the words evaporated on exposure to the air.  It was not as though he were really a devotee of the ‘old ways’ he’d so automatically invoked.  But growing up, the Prince name had felt special, like it set him apart. 

Severus was jolted from his thoughts by their arrival at a series of double doors marked Seven-hundred-ten… Seven-hundred-nine… Severus assumed that there was also a Seven-hundred-eight beyond the sphere of Grimley’s lantern.

“I shall be here for some time,” Severus said to the goblin.

Grimley passed the lantern on to Severus with one, knarled claw.  “Very well, young man.  I shall return for you in an hour’s time… if I remember.  Getting on, you know, mind not what it used to be.”  Grimley tapped the side of his head meaningfully.

Severus accepted this as goblin humour, and turned back to Seven-hundred-ten. He had never opened a Gringotts vault using a Seal before, and wasn’t entirely certain how to go about it.  He removed the Seal from his pocket and held it aloft in the light of the lantern.  It sparkled as he turned it, but gave him no guidance whatever. 

Severus turned to find that Grimley was still watching him with a glint in his black eyes.  “Press the Seal into the vault door,” he advised as he climbed back into the cart.  “It will give way… so long as the Seal was freely given.”  In a moment, he was whirring away.  In another second, Severus couldn’t even hear the cart’s progress or feel the thrum of the vibrating tracks, even as his hair stirred in the direction Grimley had gone.

Severus paused on the threshold, then sternly chided himself.  He was in no way Potter’s guardian because a decision such as that, made by both Potters made no sense.  He would find the Potters’ important documents within the vault, he would verify that they listed the mongrel mutt as Potter’s godfather, and then he could believe this was one last, terribly cruel joke of James’s, and relegate it to the same corner of his mind as being hoisted up by his feet and having his knickers displayed to all of Hogwarts.

Fortified by the promise of compartmentalization, Severus pressed the Seal to the door, gryphon-side down.  The Seal took to the door as though it were wax or clay, leaving an imprint that glowed red-gold— of course.  It was as though even the vault door knew that all of the Potters had always been Gryffindors… 

All of Severus’s sour distaste evaporated at the sight of so much gold.  It was dizzying, the piles and piles of it, and the table that seemed to exclusively hold goblets and, when Severus opened the chest beneath it, held stacks of gold-leaf china stamped with a German maker’s-mark Severus dimly recognized.  There was an entire cabinet filled with charmed objects: a self-inking pen (Muggle-style, Arthur would have a fit); an ivory bell to chime at mealtimes; a Foe-glass; and a few rarities Severus didn’t recognize but had the urge to show to Filius, just to watch him squirm with envy.  Severus wrestled the brief desire to pocket some of the gold, too, but he was above stealing from an orphaned child, even if that orphaned child was Potter.

Perhaps a hair’s breadth above it, but above it nonetheless.

It did not look as though the Potters kept important documents there, so Severus took one last breath of gold-infused air before abandoning the Galleons to accrue massive interest in solitude.  He headed next for Seven-hundred-nine. 

This door appeared to be made of some dark wood rather than metal; it was paneled, each frame holding its own scene, though the weak light of the lantern did not allow Severus to make out the detail.  Severus had long since learned that looks were deceiving in the Wizarding world.  He suspected the door could hold up to a Sectumsempra, despite its appearance.

Severus pressed the Potter Seal to the door, and it gave way before him.

The door creaked open to reveal an office, complete with wall sconces, thick, Persian rugs, a roaring fireplace, and an old mahogany secretary, desk, and swivel chair.  Severus entered and the door swung shut behind him, gryphon-shaped sconces and fireplace coming to flaring life.

The lack of any dust in the rugs or clinging to the mahogany meant a very powerful preservation spell had likely been cast on the room and its contents.  Severus pulled the swivel chair out and sat at the desk, only to be confronted with another note in Potter’s spikey handwriting.

Severus reached to take up the note then paused, holding his hand back at the last moment.  Such personal notes could be Charmed to disappear if a foreign hand touched them.

Severus read and re-read the note three times.  Nothing about Harry— other than hints of the creeping horror Potter must have felt at leaving him behind.  Even he had to admit that Potter seemed to have truly loved Lily, and his son.  Nothing about why he would push the brat onto someone who loathed the very name of Potter.

Severus read the letter a fourth time, searching for clues, searing the words into his mind with increasing desperation.  The desk felt Charmed, weighted down with the phantom pull of obscured mass, and could contain thousands of documents.  Unless he pulled some sort of guidance from Potter’s last letter to his wife, there was nothing to say he couldn’t be here for months searching for documentation of Potter’s guardianship. 

Severus re-discovered the secretary, sitting in the corner.  It might even be that there were thousands of documents within it, as well… As Severus turned, the side of his hand caught the missive. 

It exploded into ash.

Severus turned back to the desk with a cold, leaden lump in his gut.  He was not a sentimental man, but destroying the very last words of the dead did not sit well with him.  A small voice in the back of his mind pointed out that he might have extinguished the last part of James Potter that wasn’t linked to his Quidditch scores or heroic doom, or Severus’s vitriol. 

Experiencing remorse in regards to James Potter was a new, and extremely uncomfortable sensation. 

Severus stood, lurched to the secretary, opened it, and pulled out a sheet of fresh paper.  Quickly, he began scribbling down every word he remembered.  Something about wailing, and tangled, and not being the best man Lily knew…

That they’d loved one another.

Severus seated himself again at the desk to continue scribbling, when he saw the ashes creeping toward one another.

Swallowing, he moved both hands out of the way.  The ashes melted together, began to change colour: some to off-white, some to darkest black.  The letter was re-forming, reconstituting before his eyes.

But it no longer read the same.

Lily’s nickname for him in Potter’s hand choked Severus, threw him.  He swallowed, re-read the first part of the missive again.  There it was, Sev, like Potter was fond of him.  Like Potter had the right.

Severus put the note down.  He smoothed it with both hands.  He stood, explosively, the chair spinning away from him… strode to the door… he needed air.  He pushed against the mahogany and stood outside on the walkway that led from vault to vault.  He took a few, deep breaths.

Guardian of the Savior, he thought, trying to inject his usual degree of scorn, and failing to feel anything at all, mind a ringing blank.  The stone walkway, with its heavy blackness and its faint stir of wind from the tracks felt as though it were a different world to the study where Severus had received his shock, and that helped.

A stirring of wind?  Sure enough, the clack of a magical cart sounded, whirring past Severus and stopping very shortly after.  He could hear the voices of a goblin and a man, a gravelly growl and a tenor with the clear enunciation of good education.  Severus had left his lantern within Seven-hundred-nine, so he advanced, sticking to the shadows.

“…maintain the vault,” the goblin was growling to a cowled figure in threadbare brown robes.

“Oh, I know; thank you,” said Remus Lupin’s unmistakable educated, courteous voice.

The goblin growled something inarticulate in return, tossed the lantern Lupin’s way, vaulted himself into the cart, and disappeared.

Severus was retreating, cursing his luck, when the cowled face lifted, clearly sniffing the air.

“…Severus?”

Severus sighed, moving forward out of the shadows.  You would be able to sniff me out, wouldn’t you?  “Lupin.  What are you doing here?” Severus demanded.  It was too much coincidence for his liking.  “Did you follow me?”

“Follow you?” Lupin returned.  “I should be inquiring the same of you.  This is my vault.”  He gestured towards the closed door of Seven-hundred-twelve with the arm carrying the lantern; the light spun wildly across the rocks.

Severus sneered.  Of course; the elder Potters were renowned for taking on pet projects.  They had probably provided Lupin with the vault when they gave James his, as Lupin’s family was so poor.  They had likely given him an allowance while they were still alive.

“What’s that in your hand?  What are you holding?” Lupin said, voice suddenly gone sharp.

Severus retreated a step.  “Nothing,” he said, refusing to move the Seal behind his back, or pocket it.  If he held it at his side, loosely, maybe—

“Severus,” Lupin growled, his eyes flashing gold in the black. 

His hindbrain unhelpfully told him to freeze.

“That is the Potter Seal,” Lupin said.

Severus hadn’t ever seen Lupin so angry (save on one, memorable occasion); he was one of the most contained people Severus knew.  Seeing him raging was fascinating, after the first wash of fear.  “If you were thinking, you’d realize the Potter Seal is not something that would serve me if I took it; it must be freely given,” Severus reminded him.

“That’s worse,” Lupin said, still advancing.  “You’ve tricked a Muggle-raised child into handing you everything he owns.”

Lupin advanced until Severus was pressed against the door to Seven-hundred-twelve, dropping the lantern at their feet.  “James Potter gave it to me,” Severus blurted, then winced.  Of all the idiotic things to say!

“James did?” Lupin hissed.  His eyes were still a deep golden colour, with flecks of blood-red.  “I would have thought someone who’d been a spy as long as you could do better than that.”

Severus hissed a breath out from between his teeth, scanning the blackness that surrounded them, little good might it do.  “You are a fool to say such things aloud!  We may only appear to be alone.”

“And do you think I care if you’re discovered?  You torment the only living connection I have to my friends, and now you’ve stolen from him…”

Severus’s eyes narrowed.  “Did you take your medicine today, Lupin?  I brought it to you this morning and left it on your kitchen table.  Did you remember to take it?”

Lupin blinked rapidly, then shook his head.  He closed his eyes, perhaps to regain mastery of himself.

“What happened?” Severus asked.

Lupin sighed, eyes still pressed shut.  “The cat knocked it over,” he said.

Severus felt the mad urge to laugh.  “The full moon is tonight, Lupin.”  Not that he believed the man capable of forgetting a second time.

“I was going to come to see you after I’d been to the bank,” Lupin said, forehead tipping forward onto the rock just over Severus’s right shoulder.  “I was going to remove some Galleons to replace the ingredients you’d lost and come straight to you.”

Severus breathed through Lupin’s unexpected proximity, reminding himself that the werewolf’s emotions were closer to the surface on the three days of the full moon.  “That was good of you, Lupin,” he said in his most encouraging voice, “but obviously the Wolfsbane is of greater priority than the Galleons.”

Lupin straightened.  “You’re doing enough for me by brewing it,” he said.  “I don’t also need you to pay for the ingredients.  I wouldn’t want you to.”  One of the buttons on Severus’s coat appeared to have transfixed him: he stared at it, tilting its metallic face this way and that in the light of the lantern at their feet.  “It takes me this way, sometimes,” he said, looking up into Severus’s eyes.  Lupin’s own eyes were still warm and golden, but their fire had been banked back down to a lazy heat.  “Especially with you.  Is it because you make the Wolfsbane, do you imagine?”

Lupin’s voice was still as polite, still as urbane as ever, but there was a hint of a growl behind it that raised all the hairs on the back of Severus’s neck.

“Perhaps,” Severus agreed.  He knew better than to do anything but agree.

“You smell like Wolfsbane,” Lupin commented, without withdrawing in the slightest.  “That’s how I knew it was you.”

Alarm bells were ringing throughout Severus’s entire being.  Lupin was… not himself… and they were all alone in a dark corridor.  Lupin could physically overcome him on a new moon, much less a full one.  And he was leaning in close, and telling Severus how he smelled.

“Potter gave me his Seal wrapped in Christmas paper,” Severus said, showing Lupin the Seal close-up, “with this note.  And so I came here, and there was another in the vault, proclaiming me Potter’s— Harry Potter’s— guardian.”

Lupin stared into his eyes, then pressed his forehead into Severus’s shoulder and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Severus paused long enough to claim James’s letter from the second vault before bundling Lupin back to Hogwarts and his couch, where he could re-brew the Wolfsbane in peace.

“Your hair is very black,” Lupin commented as he strode just behind Severus, through the door and into the Potions Master’s quarters.  “It’s blacker than most people’s black hair.”

“The grease, I’m sure.”

Lupin laughed, low and gravelly.  “That’s funny.  I didn’t know you were funny.”

“Sit, Lupin,” Severus said, shoving the other man down to perch on his couch.

“Thank you for doing this, Severus,” Lupin said in a contrite voice.

“It’s fine.  Now shut up.”

Severus looked up less than a minute later to discover that Lupin had fallen asleep sitting almost straight up, just with his head tipped the slightest bit back onto the couch.  His chapped lips were parted, and in stillness it was clearer than ever that Lupin’s face was a sickly, yellow colour.  The transformation took a lot out of him, Severus knew; he’d seen the aftereffects.  Severus was doing his best to improve the Wolfsbane formula from its original, three-quarters-poisonous incarnation… not for Lupin’s sake, but for the accolades, the grant funding, and the sales, of course.  But incidentally, if he perfected it, it would eliminate the transformation altogether, making it possible for Lupin to work once more at Hogwarts.

He had been the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher to occupy Hogwarts’s hallowed halls for the better part of twenty years.  Not as though that meant much, of course, with the sorry lot they’d had lately, but still… it wouldn’t be too disagreeable to work with him once more.

If he could perfect the Potion.

When Severus reached a stage of the brewing where he needed to leave the potion alone for a bit, he retreated to his favourite armchair by the fire and withdrew Potter’s missive.