Headmaster's Office, Hogwarts (August 1)
Headmaster’s Office, Hogwarts (August 1)
“They dosed us!” James shouted, his face hot and red with fury.
“Well, my boy,” Dumbledore said mildly, “It does seem that you were given a potion under false pretenses, but Lily certainly knew she was taking one.”
“But she didn’t know what she was taking! I’ve never seen that white stuff before, even if she did take the same as I did. It could be anything! It could have, it could do things that won’t show up for years!”
Dumbledore sighed. “Madam Pomfrey has identified it, based on your descriptions, as a potion of Mr. Snape’s invention—”
“AH-HA!”
“Which she recognized because Mr. Rosier nearly managed to invalidate one of Mr. Snape’s OWL scores by giving it to him against her advice when Mr. Snape was himself in a somewhat distracted state of mind.”
Dumbledore’s voice was still mild, but it had those undertones that somehow made a fellow feel he ought, just maybe, to stop talking.
This being, however, important, James persisted. “If it was against her advice—”
Dumbledore sighed again. “At that point, the potion was unknown to her, and hadn’t been thoroughly tested.”
“And I suppose it has now? If it’s so ruddy safe, why isn’t he selling it? You don’t know what Snape was like at school, sir,” James told him. “I mean, he wasn’t the only way to get alcohol or potions outside of Hogsmeade weekends, but he was the only one who always had some. And he charged little kids money for tutoring them, Sirius said his brother said. Even in Slytherin they don’t usually stoop to that. Sorry, Professor, but if Snape had something he could get away with selling, he’d be selling it.”
“According to Professor Slughorn,” Dumbledore said thoughtfully, “the hold-up lies (as, sadly, these things so often do) in an argument between the creator and his backers in the matter of marketing.”
James was almost sure he didn’t want to know, but he was absolutely sure Dumbledore was going to tell him and there was nothing he could do about it. The best he could do was sneer, “That’ll be the Malfoys, I suppose.”
“Oh, I’m sure that if the Malfoys were his backers in this instance, Horace wouldn’t have heard about the difference of opinion,” Dumbledore smiled. “No, you see, this was the potion that Mr. Snape submitted to the Most Excellent Society of Potioneers last year as his application to join their number. This does give them some rights in the matter, of course, and Horace says Mr. Snape was initially perfectly happy to leave it to them. It should have been on the shelves eight months ago, but then they showed him the proposed labels. As I understand it, that is when he brought the Malfoys in.”
“He’s just stalling because it’s got some horrible side effect and he knows everyone will find out once a lot of people start taking it,” James said firmly. “He wouldn’t give up eight months’ profit over the label; he never cares what his things look like.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure, my boy,” Dumbledore twinkled. “You see, he patented it under the name of ‘The Draught of Peace—’”
“Pretentious tosser,” James muttered.
“But the Society likes to promote their members. They would prefer to market it as ‘Severus Snape’s Sweetly Soothing Serenity Solution.’”
“…I want that label framed on my wall. Does it have fluffy white clouds and rainbows? Tell me there are daisies. And kittens. Kittens in windowsills.”
“This, I imagine, is why he’s willing to give up eight months’ profit,” underlined Dumbledore drolly.
“Yeah, all right,” James admitted. “Who’s winning?” He didn’t actually care. Well, not as such. You couldn’t help wanting to know who was going to win. And while he absolutely wanted that label on his wall, and while he would never say it out loud, he was on Snape’s side on this one. On his wall, he could take it down when it stopped being funny and he was tired of seeing Snivellus’s name in his toilet. In the shops it would get out of control, if it was actually any good.
“I can’t say I’m following the matter carefully, but Professor Slughorn assures me that Mrs. Malfoy will win in the end.”
“I’d believe that,” he said sourly. “But back to the important point, they dosed us!”
“Mr. Rosier did, perhaps, err in favor of expediency over good manners,” Dumbledore allowed, “but I must say that any hospital orderly would do the same, if an expectant father intended to make an interference between his wife and her chosen birthing assistant. Of course, an orderly would have used a more forceful spell to remove such a man from the room entirely.” He lifted his cotton-puff eyebrows meaningfully.
James’s shoulders tightened. About the first thing Snape had done had been to try to get him out. If he’d been that set on exiling James and been able to convince the midwives he had a right to, what might he have done if Rosier hadn’t gotten in there?
Was that what Rosier had been thinking? He’d been the one to point out he and James were cousins, after all. Maybe that meant something to him. Maybe he’d thought Snape would take it as enough of a win to leave off if James was incapacitated. If that was it, he’d still deserve a hex or a punch in the face for sneaking high-handedness and crippling James while his wife was screaming. You couldn’t blame a vacuous nitwittoo much for being a complete idiot who didn’t understand what it meant to really care about a person. Not if he’d been trying to do something like the right thing.
Especially not one who was obviously failing at doing the right thing because the reason he didn’t know what it meant to really care about someone was that he’d never gotten closer to a real relationship than being the school broom before he’d gone out of fashion. He couldn’t hold that against Sirius’s cousin, when Sirius’s trail of exes tended to dislike all four of them and Rosier’s one-afternoon-stands had only ever seemed to greet him more cheerfully for a few days or go a little… sort of disturbed and motherly at the same time.
Whatever that was about, clearly Rosier had been nice to them, and had been a lot more careful than Sirius had about making sure they didn’t pin their hearts on him. So James thought he did try to do the right thing. It wasn’t Rosier’s fault if he had to suddenly imagine what the right thing would be between people who actually loved each other, and had no experience. He thought he remembered Padfoot mentioning that Rosier’s parents had left him alone a lot, too, so he wouldn’t even have had them to look at for an example.
Which didn’t mean he didn’t need to be forcefully educated about his error, but probably explaining it would do. Assuming he could get the nitwit to pay attention long enough. Maybe if James got him in a completely empty with painted walls instead of wallpaper and no windows, and kept it short.
“…Okay, but how sure is Madam Pomfrey she knows exactly what that potion really does?”
“My dear boy, you may owl the Society for a description of its effects yourself, if you wish. They’ll gladly send you those, although the recipe is still proprietary.”
He eyed Dumbledore’s robe buttons suspiciously, since it wasn’t actually Dumbledore he was suspicious of and he didn’t want to insult the old man by scowling at his face. “Well, what does he say it does.”
Dumbledore smiled drily. “The Society’s description is rather floral, and Madam Pomfrey reports that Mr. Rosier initially told her it calms people. During the investigation, Mr. Snape’s description… let me see.” He beckoned at one of the glass cabinets full of books with his wand.
Instead of opening to deliver a book to him, as James had expected, it moved forward entirely, and to the side, and a scroll floated up from a hole in the floor. Not a ragged hole or anything. It was rimmed with a sort of feathery carving in some dark blue stone, a square gap about large enough to safely levitate a very large kneazle through, even if the kneazle was fighting madly. He stared at Dumbledore.
The old wizard twinkled at him as he opened his hand to receive it. “Mustn’t keep the confidential records on display, James. Now, let me see… ER declares… Expert witness GM asserts… ER intended, ER, ER, SS has no recollection, SS has no recollection, SS has no recollection, Expert witness PP testifies it both credible and likely that SS should have no recollection… ah. ‘The following is the testament of SS in his own words regarding exhibit A, an experimental potion of his own devising, which presents as a white nonviscous liquid, very slightly pearlescent, with silver vapour at room temperature: For a few hours, the drinker is inhibited from feeling disturbing emotions they otherwise would be—just the disturbing ones, the upsetting ones. It doesn’t seem to completely blot out sadness, and it doesn’t touch pleasant feelings, but it’s useful for when you’re too fussed to get anything done. Or when you need to think something through but it’s too raw.’”
“Well, that explains why they both had it on them,” he said darkly. “They’re probably both addicts. Rosier’s off on a cloud all the time.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think so,” Dumbledore said lightly, sending the scroll back into the floor and the cabinet back into place. His funny silver instruments chimed as their cabinet rolled.
“That sounds like you think you should know,” James said, maybe a bit more belligerently than he’d originally planned to. “And he was talking like… he said he knew you’d be awake, and he said he’d been taking private lessons with you.”
Dumbledore looked at him enquiringly.
James flushed. “Well, I’m sorry, sir, but it sounds a bit dodgy!”
“My dear James,” Dumbledore asked gently, “what on earth can be ‘dodgy’ about a talented young research brewer taking magical theory lessons with an alchemist old enough to be his great-grandfather, with whom he has a school connection?”
James flushed harder, but he bulled on. “What’s dodgy about it, Professor, is he started yelling about something else about half a second after he admitted it, like he knew I’d keep at him till he answered the question but he wanted to change the subject really quickly, before I had a chance to think about it. And if all you two were meeting about is brewing theory, why would he know you were waiting up to hear about Lily? And why does everybody care when Harry was…”
He had to pause and shake off the goofy smile that was inappropriately creeping up his face because this was a bad time for that even if it was completely impossible to help it. “When Harry was born? Because Lily’s been mental over it all week, and she won’t tell me why, and then Snape was pretending he was just humoring her but then, no, he was actually upset about it, too, and Rosier didn’t look all that surprised Snape was upset, either, and they both were really concerned no one should find out he was born last night except you, and this morning the midwives don’t even remember the two of them were here, and what is going on?!”
Dumbledore sifted about in his sweets jar. He came up with a roundish sort of green thing with a rim on it, held it up to the light, and popped it into his mouth. He found another one, orange, and offered it to James. “Flying Saucer? They’re a muggle sweet; they’re rather good.”
James heroically didn’t tell him that everyone over the age of twelve, including the Puffies, knew he was stalling when he did that. He took the sweet. It was rather good.
“I’m afraid I can’t answer your question, James,” Dumbledore said slowly. “For one thing, I haven’t spoken to all the people I’d need to, to fully understand what is, as you say, going on.”
“All right, then, what’s been going on,” James allowed, trying not to be exasperated at this obvious dodge.
“For another,” Dumbledore continued sadly, “it would be too great a security risk.”
“I—what?!”
“James,” Dumbledore said, all sympathy, “I don’t question your courage, or your loyalty, or those of your friends, and the tools you make for the Order are enormously useful. I thought you understood why making them has been the limit of your involvement.”
James stared. “I… We thought we were just making a stockpile,” he said blankly. “For the Aurors, and in case they were needed.”
“I do believe in being prepared,” Dumbledore said. He dipped his head as if it were an agreement, a concession, but his tone was too bland.
Then he smiled, though, a little sympathetic again, and explained, “My dear James, those of us who lived through the recent European war have learned our lesson. The wizard calling himself Lord Voldemort has not yet made any bold moves in his own name, but he has followers who have already proven themselves willing if not eager to do abominable things quietly and in the dark, and I do not believe him ignorant of their proclivities, and he has not checked them. The Order of the Phoenix must, perforce, operate on a need-to-know basis. No one may know enough to unwillingly betray all. If I must someday lose any of you in the worst of ways, the one thing above all that the enemy will learn is that their worst will gain them little.”
James said something like, “Erg.” Then he cleared his throat and tried again, and managed, “Oh.” And, “Er… are we doing anything about the in-the-dark things? I mean, we are, right? I’m not asking what, but we are, right?”
Dumbledore’s brow darkened, but it wasn’t because James had questioned him or anything, he just looked frustrated and sad. “We’ve been trying. There isn’t enough of a pattern.”
He wanted, really badly, to ask more, but obviously he’d have to convince Dumbledore he and the lads should be let in on that part of things first. “I don’t see why you’re not letting us help more,” he said. “Me and Sirius and Remus and Pete and Gid and Fab, I mean, not Lily right now, obviously. Sirius and Remus and me especially; we don’t have the kind of jobs where we’d have to answer to anyone for our time all the time.”
“Leaving the Prewett twins out of it, for the moment,” Dumbledore said, with a slightly pained, scolding look that said he’d really expected James to be able to think of all this for himself, “as good-hearted as they all are, I’m afraid your three good friends are exactly the sort of people about whom the Americans used to say ‘loose lips sink ships.’”
That was so blatantly wrong that James had to laugh. “If you think so, Professor,” he grinned, “it only proves how true it’s not.”
Dumbledore put his eyebrows up, interested and willing to listen.
James looked at him like he was crazy. “I’m not going to spill any secrets just to prove I can keep a secret,” he pointed out.
“Ah, stalemate,” Dumbledore sighed lightly.
“Look, if this is about that time Sirius and Sni—Snape got their potions mixed about who was in the Shrieking Shack, Sirius honestly didn’t mean to tell him how to open the door to a werewolf, Professor. They’d been tasting about fifty different flavors of vodka and we’ve got no idea what percent alcohol it was and he wasn’t keeping track of how many he’d had. He really knows better than to do that now.”
“Sometimes I really do wonder what Horace is thinking,” Dumbledore murmured, grimacing very slightly under his beard. “The incident certainly didn’t fill me with confidence, but I’m afraid it’s more than that. You’ll admit, I hope, that your friend has a bit of a temper?”
“…Well, yeah.”
“And that his connections with some of those we suspect of being involved with the so-called Lord Voldemort are very personal indeed, however much both sides might wish and claim otherwise?”
“He’s not connected with them,” James said hotly.
“My dear boy,” Dumbledore said, sitting back and steepling his hands fondly at James. “Tell me, what was your favorite thing to do with your father, as a child?”
James blinked. “Well,” he said slowly, “he said he was too old to go flying with me, but we used to on walks all over the place. And.” His gaze dropped. It felt almost too private to share with someone he wasn’t doing it with. “We’d, er, we’d make maps. Of where we went.”
Dumbledore sat up a bit. “Maps?” he asked sharply.
“Yes?” James’s foot dug at the rug in front of him a bit. Had Filch finally realized what he’d confiscated, given it up? He felt hot and skittish—but it wasn’t as if he could be given detention for it now, and it was hardly illegal, was it? It wasn’t Dark, it was brilliant, a masterpiece. Besides, he hadn’t had his answers yet. He set his jaw.
“A child’s maps, James? Or did you become good at it, as a grown wizard is good at his trade?”
“I’m good at it,” James said, shrugging. “I mean, don’t ask me to draw you a fjord freehand from memory without magic, but I’m good at it.”
“I’ll think about that,” Dumbledore told him, and it was, to James’s surprise, a promise. “And I’d like you to bring me an example.”
“Sure,” he shrugged again. He couldn’t do anything like the Marauder’s Map on his own, of course—that had been a joint project, it had needed all of them. But something ordinary and accurate, he could manage that. Barring hidden caves and so on.
“But to return to the matter. Suppose you had a falling-out with your father this minute, such that you both came to hate each other and want nothing to do with each other. Suppose that, a year from now, or ten years, you met at some gathering. Suppose he spoke wistfully to you of those days of walking together, do you imagine you would be entirely unaffected? Suppose he turned to your friends or his and spoke in spite of those maps you had made together, mocked your pleasure in them, mocked the skill you had taken pride in, told you he had burned those he had kept. It wouldn’t touch you at all?”
“My dad wouldn’t do that!” James cried, stung.
“No, no, of course he wouldn’t,” said Dumbledore soothingly. He leveled a penetrating look at James. “Can you say the same for all of Sirius Black’s relations?”
“His dad probably wouldn’t,” James said, trying to be fair even though he could already see where Dumbledore was going with this. “Or his cousin Andi and her family. And his brother probably wouldn’t mean to. The rest of them, in a heartbeat.”
“And can you guarantee that Sirius would keep his temper? That none of them would be able to provoke him into saying things he shouldn’t?”
“Okay,” he surrendered, sighing. “Remus and Pete aren’t like that, though!”
“They don’t lose their tempers, no,” Dumbledore agreed, “but Mr. Pettigrew can be flustered, and he works in the Ministry, which is in it’s very nature a hotbed of gossip and maneuverings.”
“Not his office,” James pointed out.
“Well, perhaps not. Should he once draw attention to himself, though, the position would make him vulnerable.”
“Pete’s really good at keeping his head down, though, Professor,” James said, smiling a little. He thought about explaining how often Pete had been treated as the next best thing to an innocent bystander for something he’d gotten Sirius plotting in the first place. He hadn’t come to spill Marauder secrets just because the statute of limitations had run out, though. “He roomed with Sirius and me with about a tenth the detentions, didn’t he?”
“True, true,” Dumbledore twinkled. “Quite sensible of Mr. Pettigrew, managing to stay out of trouble like that. Such good sense should be encouraged when possible, don’t you think?”
“…I guess,” James muttered guiltily. Pete, he knew, wouldn’t have wanted to be left out if the rest of them were doing it, but he wasn’t actually so sure Pete would have wanted James to get them all more involved in the first place. He didn’t hang back (much. Well. Anymore. Not far), but he was never the one to dive in whooping, either.
He didn’t push about Remus. He could guess what Dumbledore would say, anyway. Almost no one knew what Remus was, except the bloody Werewolf Registry. They might be legally required to keep that information confidential, but accidents could happen. Especially where almost-certainly-Death-Eaters who’d somehow never figured out that splashing gold around was tacky were involved.
James wasn’t sure Remus would have wanted him to try to get them more involved either, actually, at least not right now. Remus had been a bit occupied with trying to raise support for the wolfsbane potion project. He’d spent most of last week alternately trying to get his fellow werewolves to write letters (some dictated, all signed with their registry numbers, since absolutely no one wanted to use their names) and owling a brochure-thingy to, as far as James could tell, every wizarding door in Britain.
Including James and Lily’s. He’d asked Moony why one had been wasted on him, since he and Dad and Lily had all obviously already written the DRCMC separately to support more funding for the project (even though Snape was working there, which was very high-minded of James, he felt). Moony had looked at James with very bleary eyes and explained that The Valley was in the Godric’s Hollow listing under P. James had suggested it might be time Remus switched to coffee, at least at lunch.
In fairness to Moony, the house did turn out to be in the listing under both V for Valley and P for Potter. Still, unless Moony had wanted someone to tame his semicolons, there was really no reason to have sent James even one. He might have reached two more people whose mind actually could have done with changing with those copies. James had tried to get Zonko’s to put one in their window, but all he’d got out of it was a fatherly lecture on the separation of business and politics and the uneasy suspicion that the joke shop stocking Marauders Moon goods might just possibly be run by Slytherins.
“I guess,” he repeated now, more strongly, “but look, Professor. Okay, I can see about need-to-know and everything, but last night was my wife. And my baby! I need to know!”
Dumbledore gave him what James could only think of as an Ah You’re So Young look. It was a bit more sympathetic than indulgent, but it still made James bristle. “I’m afraid you don’t understand the term, James,” he said gently. “It refers only to what an operative needs to know to accomplish his part of a mission.”
James put on his most mulish face. “How about what an operative needs to know so he won’t start investigating on his own and maybe accidentally step all over things he doesn’t know about because you didn’t tell him about them?” he asked. “Because Snape was acting like he’s got secrets with Lily and secrets with you, and you keep blowing me off about this, sir, but I’m about a hundred and fifty percent sure he’s a Death Eater.”
Dumbledore sighed, looking stressed, and started hunting around in his sweets dish again.
“Look, would you for once hear me out, sir?” James pleaded.
For a moment, he thought Dumbledore was going to fob him off with a trust-me, again, but then he got a sort of calculating look instead. “James,” Dumbledore said slowly, “I have ‘heard you out’ on the subject of Mr. Snape many, many times before. Very nearly all of what the two of you have had to say about each other has troubled me. Shall I tell you why?”
“You’re going to,” he predicted gloomily.
Dumbledore smiled. “Yes,” he agreed, twinkling a bit, “I am. Now, as for Mr. Snape, I believe that what disturbed me is the same thing that made you so contemptuous of him from the very beginning: that when he was asked what circumstances brought him to the attention of his professors he never hesitated to detail them.”
“Grasser,” James agreed, lip curling.
“It isn’t quite the done thing, is it,” Dumbledore agreed ruefully. “I’m afraid that those of the faculty who didn’t sort Ravenclaw were generally rather inclined to think he was exaggerating. After all, a boy who’d be so dishonorable as to break that code would surely think nothing of being dishonest.”
James nodded firmly.
“He wasn’t, though,” Dumbledore continued, quite casually, “was he?”
James put on his don’t-know-what-you-mean-sir face.
Dumbledore nodded sadly, as if James had answered. “I should have remembered,” he said. “Boys who don’t grow up with friends—or, at least, with friends who are other boys—don’t learn those rules. They very often believe they should follow the rules adults give them.”
James shot him a confused look, because he was confused.
“Adults,” Dumbledore explained, “tell children to be sensible, yes? To tell an adult when they’re in difficulty. To spend their time on schoolwork more than play, to turn down ridiculous, dangerous dares like diving on one’s broom to within a foot of the ground or touching the Whomping Willow or giving Hagrid corkscrew curls in his sleep.”
“Never have any fun,” James translated.
“Precisely,” Dumbledore twinkled conspiratorially, and James grinned. “All boys know to ignore those rules, would you say?”
“Well, yeah!”
Dumbledore nodded. “Except for the ones that don’t.”
“You have to be pretty dim not to know school rules are just for when the teachers are watching, Professor,” James said skeptically. “No offense.”
“Oh, none taken, my boy, none taken. But perhaps you noticed that the girls only seem to follow adult rules? That not only do they exclusively follow those rules, but they recognize no others, and behave as though doing perfectly sensible things which must be done, such as accepting a dare which is certain to land one in the Hospital Wing, are incomprehensible and foolish?”
“Well, they’re girls,” James said, shrugging.
“As a matter of fact,” Dumbledore said, “it has nothing to do with being girls, and everything to do with not growing up playing with boys. The ones who did, they understand perfectly well.”
“Okaaaay,” James tried, in a what’s-your-point tone.
“Tell me, James,” Dumbledore asked, reflective. “Have you ever noticed what happens when two boys try to be friends, and one is markedly cleverer than the other?”
“No,” James said, firmly and loyally.
Dumbledore’s beard twitched, and his blue eyes were warm, as well as amused. “How fortunate. Well, it can turn out well, it certainly can, if the more intelligent of the two is very patient, and the slower… let us say, respects him very much. It can be almost the relationship of an older and a younger brother. Wouldn’t you say?”
James’s foot dug into the ground, and he almost felt the skin on his neck twitching, but otherwise he kept himself from squirming. “I guess that could happen,” he muttered. “I don’t know if I’d say patient, but if someone looks up to you, you’ve got to look out for them.”
“Indeed you do,” Dumbledore agreed warmly, and sighed. “Alas, it didn’t happen that way in my own family.”
James blinked. “Your family, sir?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, quite untroubled about it. “My own brother was—and it’s no slight on him to say so, for in the absence of modesty I must confess to being a very capable scholar indeed—nowhere near my level academically. Don’t think he’s a stupid man, James! Aberforth is a very sensible fellow, and probably wiser than I.”
“I’m sure he’s not, sir,” James said loyally.
“Well, we all have our areas, of course,” Dumbledore said cheerfully. “But the eternal war between town and gown played itself out in miniature in our home. I’ve learned to appreciate him since, and he, more or less, to tolerate me, I think—”
James peered at Dumbledore to see if he was kidding, but he didn’t really look like it. Not sad either, but not like a bloke making a joke because it was embarrassing to talk plainly about how much you and other fellows cared about each other even if you were related. A bit philosophical, maybe. Mildly regretful, if anything.
“—But when we were children he scorned my every study hour, sneered at my achievements, scoffed at my plans, called my ambitions worthless—the term ‘airy-fairy’ was a favorite, as I recall—and harped incessantly about the way my time with my books kept me away from my responsibilities to our family, saying that even if my mother permitted it, it was selfish of me to indulge myself.”
James’s shoulders jerked back indignantly, his head rising. “I hope you hexed him!”
“Oh, my, no,” said Dumbledore placidly. “I told him that he was small-minded and grubby and would never amount to anything, and he would know when he had said something worth listening to because I would listen to it, and that the neighbors were beginning to comment on the amount of time he was spending with the goats.”
“…Er.”
“Quite. So you see, James, I know what I’m talking about when I tell you that a young boy who’s rather cleverer than the other children around him may well find it not only easier but more worthwhile to drive them off and spend all his time with ink and paper friends than loud, slow, irritating real ones who insist on games that aren’t interesting or edifying in the least. It leaves one at a distinct disadvantage, once one can’t avoid other boys anymore.”
“You seem to have done all right, sir, in the end.”
“What I mean,” Dumbledore said patiently, “is that you were angry with Mr. Snape from the beginning of your acquaintance for breaking rules he’d never learned were there. What continues to disturb me,” he added reflectively, while James tried to figure out why he was supposed to care about that, “is that he never did seem to learn they were there. In Slytherin, where he should have been learning to navigate all manner of social codes. Of course, Mr. Snape is nothing if not obstinate, even at his own expense.”
“I’ll give him that,” James agreed sourly. He didn’t know whether Snape hadn’t understood or hadn’t cared that as long as he kept spitting in their faces they had to keep after him, and he didn’t care. The amount of trouble it had gotten him in with Lily was phenomenal. He might have gotten her to go out with him a year earlier, maybe even two, if the greasy moron hadn’t kept on challenging them.
“So much for the thing he did, over and over, to disturb me,” Dumbledore said. “But you did something, too, James, you and Sirius Black, over and over.” He smiled a little sadly. “In fact, it was just the opposite. It isn’t against the code to turn in one’s enemies for crimes—not to bring in adults if it’s the only way stop an enemy from hurting one’s fellows, doing harm above the usual rough-and-tumble that’s in the category of ‘acceptable and to be accepted manfully.’ But when you had accusations to lay against Mr. Snape that weren’t mere ad hominum attacks, it was for reading the wrong books, brewing potions you thought suspicious, being with the wrong people, using unknown spells.”
“They were bloody creepy books and really horrible people,” James maintained.
“That may be, that may be,” Dumbledore nodded agreeably. “I should not like to know that any grand-niece of mine had crossed paths with Meredith Mulciber on a lonely night, or any of the young Lestranges. Still, I feel sure that, had you ever found the least proof that Mr. Snape had engaged in any real wickedness at Hogwarts, you would have let myself or Professor McGonagall know at once.”
“Well, he knew we were watching him,” said James sensibly. “He wouldn’t have risked doing anything himself. He just found out how to do things and told his mates.”
“I wonder, James,” Dumbledore mused, taking off his half-moon spectacles to rub, with a pained little sigh, at one eye. “Are you familiar with the term ‘confirmation bias’?”
“Never heard of it,” James said. “Professor, why do you want me to be all chummy with Snape?”
“Never that,” Dumbledore assured him drolly. “What I want to tell you is that while of course I will hear you out, I wish to remind you that I’ve heard all I need or care to of your and Mr. Black’s opinion of Severus Snape’s character. I know what you think him capable of, and what you think his opinions and ambitions are and what sorts of things he’s likely to do. You need not repeat yourself on those counts. If there is something of which you would like to convince me, my dear boy, you must hang your case on facts.”
“Oh.” James was relieved. For a minute he’d really thought Dumbledore was trying to talk him around to something, but no, he just wanted to make sure James wasn’t treating this like a schoolboy matter. “If you want me to put it all together like a case, I should put it all together, though,” he suggested. Maybe his mistake up till now had been to just to say what creepy things Snape was doing as they came up, without putting them all together in context.
He thought Dumbledore’s eyes flickered briefly towards the clock, thought he heard the smallest of sighs, but the old wizard agreed, “Yes, I suppose you had better.”
So he started back at school. He couldn’t remember all the details now, of course, but Filch would have plenty of records. There had been loads of times Snape had been seen reading books he had no business with, and sometimes he’d been caught using passes to the Restricted section that had been issued to other Slytherins. He’d spent a lot of time brewing totally unsupervised down in the dungeons, and not always using Slughorn’s stores because he was being bribed to stay away from Slug Club meetings, either.
None of the potions had turned out to be really nasty, James had to admit, except in that they were the kind of thing you only tried if you were breathtakingly arrogant because of what could happen if something went wrong, but some of them had used ingredients Snape absolutely should not have been able to get his hands on. And he had been matey with Mulciber and Avery, and if he hadn’t bullied the girls and the muggleborns himself, he’d done his own sneering and never stopped them.
“You told me in May you’d been following Mr. Snape,” Dumbledore said mildly. “Does he see them still?”
“Not that I’ve noticed. So what?”
“Well, my boy, a half-blood living and sleeping in the same room with pureblood extremists would be foolhardy indeed to show enmity.”
James was unimpressed, and didn’t mind showing it. “There’s not telling them where to stick it and then there’s palling around with them,” he pointed out.
“Yes,” Dumbledore mused, “that did rather attract your attention to them, didn’t it? His making sure to be seen with them, I mean.”
“I—what?”
Dumbledore smiled harmlessly and picked another caramel cobweb out of the box. He offered James one.
“You’re saying he… wait, what? No.”
“Well, I haven’t any proof,” Dumbledore admitted, crunching, “but it is exactly the sort of thing Slytherins do. When he was trapped with the Slytherins of his year and with you, he was seen in public only with Mr. Mulciber, Mr. Avery, and Miss Wilkes.”
“She was a bit of all right,” James allowed, grinning a bit. “Mouthy piece of work, for a midget.” And she wasn’t a midget like Flitwick was, just short enough that they would have encouraged Pete to go after her if she wasn’t a Slytherin. And if she hadn’t been enough of a corker to eat him alive and leave him dazed in a puddle on the stairs. Fit, too, and pretty eyes. Not the same hazel as James’s, where there were different colors in them, but an almost uniform golden-brown—not like a bird or a cat, either, but like toffee, or butterbeer.
“Just so. But now that he has freedom of movement and can avoid who he likes on most occasions, rather than being forced into proximity by halls and classrooms and so on, he chooses to distribute his leisure time very nearly exclusively between Mrs. Malfoy and her husband, Mr. Rosier, and Regulus Black. All of whom he scrupulously avoided at school, outside of their mutual common room. Exactly, as I say, the sort of thing that Slytherins do, except in that it rather lacks subtlety.”
“Well, Narcissa Black’s not exactly your blooming English Rose either, and dodgy is not the word for her husband,” James said, unimpressed. “And Reggie Black might be an okay kid at heart, but everybody knows his cousin Bellatrix has had her hooks in him for years.”
“Ah, if only we all knew what Everybody knows, and how he knows it,” Dumbledore philosophized. James had always half-suspected he was being a bit sarcastic when he did that. “Do go on.”
“Okay, well, after he either got bored with small-time bullies or was done with manipulating his sworn enemies into attacking his secret enemies for him—”
“Would you blame him for that?” Dumbledore asked curiously.
“Er, why wouldn’t I?”
“You do seem to feel rather strongly that Messieurs Mulciber and Avery deserved your attentions on their own merits,” Dumbledore pointed out.
“Well, yeah,” he agreed, “but I don’t like being used, and pretending to be friends with someone and siccing a mutual enemy on them is not on.”
“It does make an interesting moral question,” Dumbledore reflected. “I’ve often wished we could keep a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher long enough to put a stable curriculum in place. I don’t like to interfere with my teachers, but we do suffer, rather, from each professor trying to stuff each year’s minds full of what practical defenses they feel are most important before they go, and almost no one giving a thought to ethics.”
“…Right,” James said warily. “Anyway, like you said, I have been keeping an eye on him.”
“And have you evaded his notice, while keeping your eye on him?”
He shifted. “Er… Rosier says not… but he could have been bluffing!”
Dumbledore took off his wire-rims and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What did Mr. Rosier say?” he asked wearily.
“He said they’ve got wards on their street that make a record somewhere when I’m on it.” Dumbledore kept looking at him, and he squirmed and broke. “And that Snape takes a memory for their pensieve when, er, we see each other.”
“Oh, James.” Dumbledore sighed, and asked, “And have you gone on ‘keeping an eye on him’ since Mr. Rosier told you this?”
“Well, that was just a couple of weeks ago,” James explained. “They were away, and then Lily was here. Otherwise I would have. I mean, Rosier could have been bluffing, and either way, if I stop, there wouldn’t be anyone keeping an eye on Snape. Because Sirius wouldn’t be able to just watch, and Pete’s busy and Remus wouldn’t do it and besides, if there are wards like that they’re probably set for the lads, too, anyway.”
“May I ask a question?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Why Mr. Snape?”
“Sir?”
“You know that Mr. Mulciber and Mr. Avery incline towards active malice, and you say that ‘dodgy is not the word’ to describe Mr. Malfoy. I can understand your not wishing to pursue Sirius Black’s family, but why not them?”
“Well, the security at Malfoy Manor’s too good,” James said regretfully. “We might be able to get in once, maybe, but a stakeout’s not an option. And those two are just small beer, Professor. No one’s ever going to tell them anything important, or rely on them for anything complicated. Snape’s ambitious and he’s a plotter and he’s all the Dark kinds of creative. Following him could get someone somewhere.”
Dumbledore nodded judiciously. “Well-reasoned,” he agreed, “if prejudicial. Well, go on, then.”
James went over Snape’s movements again, as best he could remember, in more detail over the last month or so. “I’ve got a log at home,” he finished, “but you see what I mean, Professor? He just keeps disappearing and not showing up any of the places where he knows people!”
“I see that you’ve handed him every legal right to duel you,” Dumbledore sighed.
“Fine by me,” James declared.
“James, has it occurred to you that when he hasn’t been visiting Mrs. Malfoy or young Mr. Black or in Diagon Alley he might have been shopping elsewhere, or gathering ingredients for personal brewing, or visiting his parents, or going to the cinema, or the theatre, or to concerts?”
James gave Dumbledore a dubious look. “I suppose he might be getting ingredients sometimes,” he conceded. “Those other things don’t sound like things he’d do. Too muggle for a Slytherin.”
“Not encouraged among Slytherins, indeed,” Dumbledore said patiently. “A half-blood’s lingering taste for activities not encouraged by other Slytherins might explain why he chooses to slip away to do them privately.”
“Oh, come on, sir, you don’t think that,” James said skeptically.
“Whether I think it or I’m playing Devil’s Advocate, it’s a counterpoint that you would do well find an answer to before you put this case of yours to anyone but myself,” Dumbledore said, opening his hands in a there-you-have-it gesture.
“Well, Sirius and I wanted to start us working on trying to follow him when he apparated,” James said defensively, “all the way back in May. But then we all reckoned it might make a fuss if it went wrong, and you didn’t seem to want the Order to be the ones to start anything.”
Dumbledore looked a little faint, as if a curse had just passed over his head and singed his hair. “Which of you realized this?” he asked. He sounded a little faint, too.
James tried to remember. “Er… Remus said we’d promised you could rely on us and it wouldn’t be reliable to follow him without checking with you even if we could figure out how. And Pete said what if it went wrong, something like that, and then Sirius said you were, what did he say, he said we could handle it if things went wrong but you wouldn’t want any messy incidents, he didn’t think. And it’s my strict policy to encourage Sirius when he’s being, you know, not-insane, even when I sort of hate it, so that was when we came to talk to you and Moody instead.”
Looking pleased, now, Dumbledore said, “You were all quite right. It would be disastrous to give the Death Eaters any way to paint themselves as victims, any way at all, even the narrowest of footholds, if your assumption had proved correct. I’m glad that the four of you can work together responsibly, and not merely brilliantly.”
“Do you need some water, sir?” James asked, pleased himself but a little uncomfortable. “Or a cup of tea? It looked like you took a bit of a turn there, for a second.”
“Tea wasn’t quite what I was thinking of,” Dumbledore said placidly, “but never mind, never mind. Well, thank you for putting it to me so clearly, James.”
“You see what I mean, then?”
Dumbledore pursed his lips a little, meditatively. “You mean several things at once, I think. Whether I agree, which I think is what you’re asking, depends upon which of them you’re referring to.”
James paused. He supposed that was sort of true, that he meant a few things. He meant that Snape couldn’t be trusted, and that Snape was definitely a Death Eater and it was obvious even if wasn’t 100% proven, and that therefore James absolutely did need to know why the vampire bat had been acting like he had secrets with Lily and with Dumbledore. It was all the same thing, though. He said so.
Dumbledore chuckled. “Not quite, my boy, not quite. I do see that I can’t let you leave with unsatisfied questions.”
“Well. Good.” James sat back, mollified.
He had a weird sense of being almost-threatened, though. Or an almost-sense of being threatened. Or maybe the phoenix was staring between his shoulder-blades again. Sirius said that when James got jumpy in Dumbledore’s office for no reason, Fawkes was usually looking at him. There weren’t a lot of birds that ate deer, and James had never heard that phoenixes did, but the big guy might have the right kind of beak. He’d never checked.
Or maybe Prongs just felt Fawkes was a forest fire waiting to happen. Kettleburn usually managed to haul all his classes up to see Fawkes on a burning day at least once before they graduated, and it had been fast. No warning at all, except that he’d looked ill all day before it.
“So,” Dumbledore said, sort of cheerfully, as if it were an exam question he expected James to do well on, “now that we both understand that other has a point—I, that you must know what has been hinted at or you will look for answers on your own, and you, that I have been right in thinking that you lads, for all your enthusiasm, present me with something of a security problem, what are we to do?”
“You didn’t say I’m a security problem,” James pointed out, not completely impressed by this.
“But of course you are, my boy,” Dumbledore said, blinking at him in perplexity. “Or are you telling me that you don’t tell your friends everything, and wouldn’t?”
James hesitated. Of course, they mostly did tell each other everything—or at least, they mostly knew everything about each other; they didn’t have to tell each other everything because you only had to tell people about things they weren’t there for. Come to think of it, they didn’t actually tell each other all that much, except for what they’d been working on separately for Marauders’ Moon.
Nobody was particularly interested in Pete’s job, even if he lamely insisted it was interesting sometimes. Nobody was really interested in Moony’s jobs, either, except for whether they were volunteer or paying because that mattered to him. They were sort of interested in when he was talking to other werewolves, but they understood that he wasn’t comfortable sharing a lot of that.
James and Pete actively did not want to know whether Sirius and Remus were pretending they were just friends or pretending they were too lazy to go try and find anyone outside their flat to pull this week (it usually amounted to squabbles over how long tea was to be brewed and what was to be done with wet towels and Remus whacking Sirius over the head with a rolled-up newspaper either way), and Pete was completely (and smugly) mysterious about his alleged girlfriend. As for James’s, everyone kept talking over him very loudly when he tried to explain how amazing Lily was, especially since she’d made them all understand where they’d have to start looking for their peckers if they succeeded in coaxing actual details out of him.
“I don’t tell them things that are, you know, just about me and Lily,” he said uncomfortably.
“James,” Dumbledore said kindly, giving him that I-see-right-through-you look, “I don’t wish to put you in a position you can’t live with. We’re not discussing domestic matters. You appear to feel, although I confess I’m still not entirely certain why, that Severus Snape is, in some way, your job. You want to know why he behaved as you say he did last night. If I tell you what I can on that matter can you, in conscience, keep it from your friends? Since their circumstances make them more vulnerable than yourself to being forced or tricked by clever and subtle dark wizards?”
He thought about it. It felt like letting the lads down, but was it really? Padfoot would be upset at first, of course, but James was sure he’d say that if that was what James had to do to find out what Snivvy was up to, James should do it. Pete would be hurt at being left out, but probably not much if he wasn’t the only one. And Remus simply wasn’t going to care what Snape was up to until James got proof it was heinous, which, after two years of trailing the wily slime on his own, James was starting to think he wasn’t going to get without a new lead.
“Yeah,” he said firmly, eventually. “Yeah, they’d trust me for that.”
He thought he caught a flash of what looked almost like pity in the clear blue eyes, but that didn’t make any sense. He must have imagined it.
“Then you know what I must ask of you,” Dumbledore said, and looked at him expectantly.
“…I do?”
“James, four years ago, I asked a boy who believed he’d had the whole of his future clawed away from him, for a joke, to let me seal his lips to silence, to protect the safety of the boy he thought had been the weapon in his attempted murder.”
James started to protest that that wasn’t what had happened at all, but Dumbledore raised his hand.
“That was what he believed,” he said. “He could think nothing else. I fear there was yet nothing before his eyes but claws and teeth and eyes in the dark.” Dumbledore pointed up at the ceiling. “Do you see that scorch mark on the marble? Filch hasn’t been able to get it out, nor have the elves. Some things, the castle chooses to remember.”
“But that wasn’t what happened,” James said stubbornly.
“Oh, my dear boy,” Dumbledore said, smiling at him without any doubt in it. “Had I believed it was, I assure you, the matter would have been handled rather differently. But in that moment, what did it matter what I thought?”
“But you did make him!” protested James. “You said he promised not to tell about Remus.”
“So he did, my boy, but I didn’t make him. I asked him.” Dumbledore meditatively crooked a finger and rubbed at his ear. “There was, as I intimated, a good deal of shouting first, I won’t deny that, but, do you know, it was all directed at you and young Sirius? The professors didn’t start complaining about him glaring at our good friend Remus during lessons until after Minerva had told me how glad she was that the four of you seemed to be friends again. And even between you and Sirius, the lion’s share—if you will forgive the term—of his animus was yours.”
“Mine?” James spluttered. “I saved his life.”
“Yes,” Dumbledore mused, gazing out the window. “He was sure you’d see it that way. In fact, he was, as I say, rather more upset about that than about his life being endangered in the first place, which I must say I found rather disturbing.”
“He’s always been a very weird piece of work, sir. But I can’t say I’m surprised he didn’t want to acknowledge a life debt to me.”
“Oh, no, that wasn’t it,” Dumbledore corrected him. “You see, he half-suspected you’d arranged for the encounter precisely so he would be in your debt.”
James’s jaw dropped. He tried to think of something to say to that, and all he could come up with was, “Slytherins!”
“Well, yes,” the old man acceded, nodding philosophically. “Later, when he was able to be more measured on the subject, he explained to me that he cannot, in his view, be indebted to you because the saving of his life was an unasked byproduct of your rescue of the futures of your good friends Sirius and Remus.” He popped another sweet into his mouth and sucked on it for a moment. “I’m almost certain that was what he meant,” he added cheerfully. “Deciphering the remark required a pensieve and diagrams.”
James frowned. “Is he right?” he asked. He didn’t exactly want to be connected to Snivellus, in any way, but it was reassuring to think he had a piece of invisible armor against the sneakiest sneak he was enemies with.
“I confess, I’ve no idea,” Dumbledore said, not sounding very sorry about it. Or interested. “Magics such as life debts are ancient and primitive—or, let us say, primal. If they aren’t entirely psychothamatic.”
“What?”
“A magical effect we unknowingly impose upon ourselves because we believe it to be already in effect, or for other reasons we aren’t aware of.”
“Like what?” James asked dubiously.
Dumbledore gave the sort of head-shake that meant the answer would have taken too long. “I don’t know of anyone who’s been able to make any conclusive study of life debts, and they certainly aren’t my area of expertise.”
“Maybe I’d better do some research,” James said slowly, still frowning.
“Then I wish you the best of luck. As I was saying, however, very little of his animus was for young Mr. Lupin. Once he’d stopped shouting at me for inadequate safety measures, I had, in fact, very little difficulty in securing his agreement to a geas of silence.”
Skeptical, James asked, “What exactly does ‘very little difficulty’ mean?”
“He appeared to believe,” Dumbledore said regretfully, “that I meant to use as leverage for his agreement the fact that he had been outside the Hogwarts grounds on a school night. I’m sure I suggested no such thing, but he found the notion most offensive.”
James paused. “He was pissed off because he assumed you were going to blackmail him?” he summarized tentatively.
“I’m still not entirely certain,” Dumbledore said cheerfully, “whether he considered his intelligence had been insulted because he thought I would threaten him with something so insignificant as a detention over a commitment he rightly understood to be of great weight, or felt his honor had been outraged because he never had any intention of endangering Mr. Lupin in the first place, or both. I do rather suspect it to be both.”
“But you didn’t threaten him,” James said slowly, his eyebrows crawling up, “he just assumed you were going to.”
“You have it exactly,” Dumbledore beamed, and offered him the sweets bowl.
“But would he?” he asked helplessly. He didn’t take a sweet, because Dumbledore was acting like it was a reward for understanding and he didn’t. At all. If it was even possible to understand Snape.
“Because, my boy,” Dumbledore said gently, leaving the bowl at the edge of his desk where James could reach it easily, “he was angry and frightened and upset. When faced with those from whom other children would expect protection when frightened, he could only assume he would be threatened and forced.”
His eyes drifted meaningfully to the scorch mark in the ceiling.
“I get it, I get it,” James said irritably, “he was scared and he still yelled at you, you want me to say it was brave.”
“No, James,” the old wizard said, smiling a little sadly. “He was frightened and angry and he still agreed to be sealed to a silence that would protect someone for whom he had no love. What I hope for you is nothing less.”