There was an almost insulting period of time that passed before Lupin’s head appeared in the flames.

“And a good afternoon to you, too, Severus,” was the werewolf’s slightly tetchy response. “Nice to see that Christmas has imparted its usual festive influence on your manners.”

“It has been my experience, Lupin, that manners are wasted on certain people, therefore I choose to employ them only where I deem they will be of some use,” Snape replied rather snidely, tapping the arm of his chair with one finger impatiently. “Any particular reason why you’re festering under sheets at three o’clock in the afternoon like the useless flaneur you are?”

“Some of us are not blessed with regular paid work set to a pre-arranged schedule and our day-to-day needs catered to, Severus,” Lupin responded with the kind of brightness that reeked of falsity. “The great unwashed must muddle along as best we can.”

Snape sneered down his nose at him. “So, you’ve been drinking again.”

“Look, is there a valid reason why you’re demanding my attention with all the social grace of mountain troll?” Lupin snapped back at him. “I do have other things to do other than stand here listening to you carp on at me and, believe it or not, they don’t involve imbibing alcohol.”

“What a topsy-turvy world we live in,” Snape mentioned, tilting his head to one side as if bemused by Lupin’s statement. “Put your clothes on. I’ve found where the lyc-females are being held.”

Lupin’s expression switched rapidly from one of peevish irritation to keen attention. “Really? Are you certain?”

Snape leant forward in the chair facing the fireplace in his private quarters. “No, you terminal idiot, I just decided to contact you because I had a vague notion about where they could be! Of course I’m certain! You think I was up all night skulking about London because I enjoy the night life?”

“Then where are they?” Lupin’s head was bobbing from side to side amongst the flames, an extension of the fidgeting he was undoubtedly doing hundreds of miles away.

Snape narrowed his eyes at him and sat back slowly in the armchair, carefully considering the question.

“Severus!” Lupin barked at him. “Don’t start with that shit now. This is important!”

“I’m well aware of that, Lupin,” Snape replied, nonchalantly checking his fingernails. “I want something in return, though.”

The werewolf hissed in frustration at him. “It was my understanding that your help was going to provided without conditions.”

He got a snort in response. “Then you’re a greater fool than I thought you were. Nothing comes for free.”

“Something I am acutely aware of, Severus, thank you very much, so please spare me the platitudes and get to the point,” said Lupin, glaring at him. “What do you want?”

Snape let the silence drag on for a few painful seconds before picking the knife up off his lap and holding it up so the werewolf could see it.

“How the fuck did you get a hold of that!” Lupin bellowed, eyes bulging in outrage. His head disappeared from the fire and a heartbeat later the flames turned green. Snape only just had enough time to slide out of the armchair and twist out of the way to narrowly avoid Lupin’s clutching hands. Soot and slivers of charcoal belched out onto the hearth as the werewolf Flooed in like a charging bull. He clambered over the armchair in pursuit, eyes fixed resolutely on the knife in Snape’s hand, held up and out of his immediate reach.

“Give it to me!” Lupin demanded harshly, stretching up to take a swipe at Snape’s wrist. The point of Snape’s wand in the depression between his collarbones stopped him short. He hissed and tried to dodge to one side, but Snape drove the wand deeper, forcing Lupin back a couple of steps.

“Must I constantly remind you of common etiquette, Lupin? I don’t appreciate having you barging in on me uninvited…” His eyes traveled down Lupin’s torso. “… much less half-dressed. Thank Merlin you at least have your trousers on.”

“Is she dead?” Lupin ground out hoarsely, his chin raised high and to the right, the cords in his neck standing out in the effort to hold still despite the painful jab of the wand in his throat. “Is that how you took it from her?”

“Parr? No.” Snape pushed the encroacher on his territory back another pace towards the fireplace. He noticed the way Lupin relaxed slightly at his response.

“Did you steal it from her?” There was a nasty, steely flash of outrage in the man’s brown eyes.

“What a disgraceful accusation,” Snape pointed out silkily, pushing Lupin back another step. “Unlike some, penury doesn’t reduce me to theft.”

“Then how did you get it?” said Lupin through clenched teeth, his hands bunched into fists at his sides and his toes gripping the frigid stone beneath his feet. The wand left his throat.

“She gave it to me,” Snape replied, his lip curled into a sneer that showed his teeth. The flash of surprise on Lupin’s face gave him an unexpected flush of amusement and triumph. He dangled the knife between thumb and middle finger at the man opposite him, waving it from side to side in a childish display of ownership. The outrage was back in Lupin’s eyes, framed by a scowl.

“I’d like to see you try that in front of Chara,” the bare-torsoed man told him in a low voice. “She’d have your ear off for being so disrespectful.”

Snape wrapped the other fingers of his left hand around the hilt of the knife possessively and slowly ran his thumb up and down along the cloth bindings. “Is that so?” He turned his back on Lupin in order to return to his armchair. “And what other interesting little tidbits of information can you provide?’ he asked, looking up at the tense silhouette in front of the fireplace, one eyebrow raised in expectation.

“You’re an amoral, blackmailing, dirty piece of work, Severus,” Lupin told him with a degree of wonder and contrasting disgust in his voice.

Snape gave him a tight smile. “Thank you, Lupin. That means a lot to me coming from an impecunious, half-dressed tatterdemalion who reeks of wet dog hair.”

“And you’re an arsehole!” Lupin added sullenly.

“Ah, but now you’re making me blush.” He tipped his head to one side so he could gaze up at the man steadily in a manner he knew full well would unsettle him. Right on cue, Lupin’s arms wrapped around his own ribs and he edged closer to the fire, shivering slightly. “But time’s wasting, so much as I always revel in your flattery, I would really appreciate you providing the information I want.” Lupin’s lips pressed together tightly and defiantly. “It’ll be the only way you’ll get the information you desire so much. Therefore, coquettishness isn’t very conducive to satisfying your… needs.” He let his eyes travel down Lupin’s half-naked body blatantly, trailing the middle finger of his left hand back and forth along the flat of the blade resting on his leg.

Lupin closed his eyes and bared his teeth slightly, exhaling heavily. “What do you want to know?”

Snape ran his tongue along the ridges of his molars and squinted. “Why would Parr jam a bloodied blade into my desk without a word of explanation?”

“I don’t know.”

Snape’s face went stony. “Liar! I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything else out of you.” He stood up. “Get out of my quarters before I kick you back the way you came, Floo powder or not.”

“But what about the lyc-females?” Lupin reminded him, slipping to one side and away from the fireplace, his hands held out slightly as if to ward Snape away lest he did actually try to kick him into the flames. “You said—”

“Nothing for nothing, Lupin,” Snape answered, still advancing on him, Parr’s knife clutched tightly in his hand. “I thought I made that clear to you.” He pursued the werewolf around his armchair and back towards the fireplace.

“No! Wait!” Lupin lifted his open hands higher. His pursuer stopped in his tracks. “All right, I’ll tell you!” He pressed the fleshy pad of his thumb to his forehead and swore quietly. There was a long pause before he spoke again, this time so quietly that Snape could barely hear him. “Blood debt. It means blood debt.”

“Louder, Lupin. And look me in the eye so I can be certain you aren’t lying again.

Lupin sighed and reluctantly raised his eyes from the floor to Snape’s face.

“And specifics, if you would be so kind. I haven’t the inclination to coax details out from you.”

“Chara is either admitting to or declaring a blood debt to you,” Lupin elaborated. He frowned. “Were you there when she left the blade?”

“Yes.”

“What colours was she wearing down her back?”

“Orange and white.”

Lupin nodded as if he had expected this. “Then the blood debt covers both Striker and Handler. Had there only been white, the debt would have been hers alone.”

“Then this is different to that mutual punishment we went through two weeks ago?”

Lupin laughed bitterly. “Markedly so.”

“How?”

The man’s agitation was apparent in the way he shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I don’t feel comfortable with this, Severus. It’s a betrayal of Chara’s trust.”

“Why should I care about that, Lupin? I’ll ask you again: how is this different?”

“I don’t know the intricacies of it.” He widened his eyes at Snape’s look of disbelief. “I swear it! Chara doesn’t tell me as much as you seem to think she does.”

“Then she is judicious in considering your relationship with the MLE as untrustworthy,” Snape hissed at him.

Lupin wrapped his arms around his ribs again and started to quiver as his muscles attempted to generate some heat in defiance of the cold his body was steeped in.

“You have no understanding of what the situation is,” the shivering man told him truculently. “Now, I believe I have answered your question so—”

“Poorly, Lupin. Poorly. What does the blood debt mean to me?”

“Both Striker and Handler are bound to you in debt unless you wish to refuse them.”

Snape studied Lupin for some time, watching his eyes carefully. “For how long?”

A faint shrug. “I don’t know.” There was no falsity in his words.

“And if I wanted to refuse them?

Lupin blinked rapidly. “That would be… rather rude, but permissible under seevy etiquette as long as you refused correctly.”

“Then you had best instruct me in the appropriate manners, hadn’t you?” Snape warned him, advancing on him once more in a sinuous flow.

Lupin edged backwards, his eyes flicking from Snape’s face to the knife in his hand and back again. “Chara has asked you a question. You must answer it.”

“How?” The flat of the blade was teased with the slightly calloused pad of Snape’s finger as he shepherded Lupin back up against the fireplace.

“You must return the knife to her. If you wish to accept the blood debt, you leave the blade bloodied. If you wish to refuse, you clean the blade.” Lupin’s shoulder blades pressed against the mantle, the fire making the fabric of his trousers almost painfully hot as the stone sucked the warmth of his body from him.

Snape stopped a pace short of physically touching Lupin. “If I learn that your instruction has been false or lacking in any way, I shall make my displeasure keenly felt in that tick-infested hide of yours.” The minatory threat was delivered with a dangerous, almost liquid gentleness that made Lupin’s nostrils flare. The werewolf opened his mouth to protest, but Snape forestalled him. “Just remember that, Lupin. I’ll bite you before you even realise I’m there.” He stepped out of the threatening proximity and gave the werewolf the warehouse location of lyc-females.

Lupin turned quickly, grabbed a handful of Floo powder from the earthenware pot next to the fireplace and vanished into the flames the very instant they had flared green, the heavy fog of soot from his swift exit curling around Snape’s boots in the eddies of the disturbed air.

---

It was as if the colour had been sucked out of the world: the sky shrouded in the steely grey clouds that hung overhead, the air peppered with the falling snow that drifted down to smother everything it touched in a suffocating, icy blanket. All was a mélange of empty, wintry shades that sighed of the bleakness of the year’s end. The slash of orange stood out starkly in the pallid environs, like a warning in the approaching dusk. Or a beacon.

It had taken him hours to find her. According to Pomfrey, she had not been in the infirmary for some time, seemingly ever since she had driven her knife into his desk. The mediwitch was in turns angry, worried and exhausted. The conversation between them had been decidedly awkward but, at least in Pomfrey’s eyes, necessary, though Snape doubted the veracity of that. Just as he had placed her in an unjust situation two days ago, so she had done the same to him, and no amount of verbal wriggling had allowed him to escape the iron grip of her decision. Her threat to go to Dumbledore was the final nail in his coffin.

Snape watched Parr’s still, black-encased figure standing in the swale below him, her face turned toward where the sun was setting behind the clouds, but she had made no move at all—a statue that seemed scarcely alive. Waiting.

He sighed and made his way carefully down the slope of the hill, the snow crunching underfoot; a sound she could not possibly fail to hear, but still she made no move as he approached. Her overcoat was dusted with snow and even the ends of her hair seemed frosted by its frozen caress. She must have been standing here for hours.

He stopped behind her, unsure of how to proceed. Lupin’s information had been a lot less substantial than he had hoped, but he had sensed no further occlusion from the man once his lie had been called out.

What Parr had done was not only a test of him, but of Lupin also. She could not possibly expect Snape to know the intricacies of seevy etiquette, yet she had spoken to him in its convoluted, mysterious symbols and clearly expected an answer. Not only was she acknowledging debt to what he had done for her and her Handler in pulling them both back from death, but she was probing Lupin’s trustworthiness, seeing if he would volunteer up what she had told him under whatever strange arrangement bound them both to the MLE.

He stared at the white and orange panels down her back that shimmered with melted snow. Did she realise how much he knew now, what she had let him see when she had been at her weakest, at her most desperate time? Would she be angry or ashamed that he had seen her at her most wretched, unable even to hold herself upright, so mired in agony that her muscles had utterly surrendered to gravity as they flinched in knotted sensory chaos? He’d been able to feel their shuddering as he held her around her ribs to stop her falling forward as she waited in a sempiternal purgatory as Pomfrey fetched the morphine that in the end had proven so ineffectual.

He’d harboured a suspicion Parr was a Death Eater. Numerous times she had displayed discomfort in her left arm at the same times that he had, but when he had learned that she was able to palm her hunger off onto him, he’d wondered if perhaps the door swung both ways: that she could take as well as give. Shouldering her Handler’s illness was the evidence that made that postulation a truth. Her unmarked forearm confirmed it. For whatever reason, she was able to share the pain the Dark Mark had been giving him. Of course, it was still possible she was a Death Eater. The absence of the Dark Mark didn’t conclusively exonerate her. Snape shuddered to think what the Dark Lord could do with a seevy. What he’d done with lycanthropes had been terrifying enough. Perhaps she was hiding from more than he had first realised.

What Dumbledore’s interest in her was hard to determine. The Headmaster had intimated that Parr was at Hogwarts under protection, though he had been vague about what, or whom, that protection was against. He wasn’t about to take Dumbledore’s apparent philanthropy toward seevy at face value. Snape had learned the hard way that old wizard’s methods were far slyer than they first appeared to be. Dumbledore was a master at hooking someone into his schemes without them even catching a whiff of his intentions. By the time they realised the extent of their involvement in the man’s plans, it was too late.

Did Parr know what she had gotten herself into? She had more than enough to deal with already. The machinations of one of the magical world’s most accomplished, powerful and devious wizards was probably of far lesser concern to her than it should have been. Just withstanding the chronic pain that ravaged her into a hollow shell was a feat that stunned him.

As she had sagged in his grip, mucous and tears and bile leaking from her like a battered animal that waited for the blessed, merciful relief of death, he had wondered what kept her from giving up, from succumbing to the blank finality of mortality that he himself had stared at enviously more times than he cared to remember.

That was before she had screamed and the back-blast of her pain into him erased all ordered thought from his head. Everything that she had taken on from her Handler spilled out from her in a tearing torrent he couldn’t stop, a Cruciatus of terrifying magnitude that locked his body into a rigour that almost bonded him physically to her.

Pomfrey had found them on her return from her supply cupboard, he with his arms locked around Parr’s body, his nose bleeding profusely as she shrieked in agony with every shred of breath she could hold. How Pomfrey had separated them, he had no idea, but by the time he came to, he found himself on his knees, the back of his hand pressed under his bloody nose, every nerve in his body shredded and on fire. Pomfrey was fighting with Parr to try and get the morphine into her, her unfamiliarity with the syringe a serious disadvantage in such a dire situation.

It shamed Snape as much now as it had then that he had scrambled off the floor and fled the infirmary, leaving Pomfrey alone in her struggle, the only intelligible thought in his head telling him to get as far away as possible lest Parr drag him down again, drowning in that sea of constricting suffering. Perhaps it had been his shame that had led him to give Pomfrey the anodyne. Perhaps it had been his early medical training, now lost in the past under the shroud of his mistakes. Perhaps.

Regardless, it had led him here, the snow kissing his face and resting on his hair and clothing in a gentle, whispering determination to turn the darkness white. He sighed in tiredness and dissolution and uncertainty, his breath a pearly mist in the bitterly cold air, but he gave his answer nonetheless.

He walked around Parr to face her. Eyes closed, her face was pale but for the shadows under her eyes and the bluish tinge to her lips and eyelids. She had stood too long out here. Even her eyelashes were touched with snow.

Was he supposed to say something? This was a ritual he had no guidance in. Lupin’s rather pathetic information left him on a knife’s edge where not doing something could be as disastrous as doing something; a situation he should be used to after all these years, but he had never grown tolerant of it. Just more resentful.

Parr’s eyes opened, as colourless as sky above, her face inscrutable, not giving the barest hint as to what he was meant to do. He stared right into the dark centre of those pupils, hoping to find some clue to lead him, but her mind was closed to him, the steel door as impenetrable as a Gringotts vault.

So he held out the bundle in his hand, and spoke not a word. Parr’s eyes dropped from his face to his offering, the bulky shape of her knife swaddled in white cloth bound with a black cord. Unhurriedly, she raised her arm from her side and took the bundle from him with gloved fingers. Her eyes met his again, and for a moment, he thought she was going to speak, but time stretched out like an arctic plane in front of them, soundless and desolate.

He backed away a few paces and then turned to follow his footprints back up the hill and towards the castle, leaving Parr alone in the approaching evening.