Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Edinburgh is a mad god's dream.

Hugh MacDiarmid

Eve's feet hit the cobblestones and already she started feeling colder.

The compression had been the worst part of it. The airless second where her ribs pushed inward and the world folded, all before it let go. Now she was standing on slippery, uneven stone with Moira's hand still on her arm and her lungs punched, refusing to believe the air was back at all.

Moira released her. She looked fine. Someone with Moira's constitution would look fine after Apparition. Alex was also there, a few feet to the left, straightening his silk scarf. He looked like he had arrived by appointment. He had landed with his shoes dry and not a button out of place.

The cobblestones were wet and wide, running in both directions along a ridge. Buildings pressed in on either side. They were all stone, tall, dark- and tiny- windowed. A spire rose somewhere above and behind them, its outline blurred in the fog, lit up to a certain point by the light off the surrounding buildings. Eve looked up at it and then down the sloping street. It was empty of people. She assumed everyone was inside, hidden behind those tiny windows.

Alex had called this The Royal Mile. She supposed that fit because it was, as she looked again left and right, about a mile long and it was royal looking: old, built right on a ridge, with a church at one end and a palace at the other and a castle on a rock above the lot.

The wind fluttered in through the narrow gaps between the tall stone buildings. She realised at once that her coat was not enough to bear against this cold. Moira's coat was not enough either, though Moira's posture was not admitting it.

Alex checked his watch. "Quarter past nine. She said nine."

"She said roughly nine," Eve said. Her ears were still ringing from the compression. The nausea sat low in her stomach like a drink too many. She should have known this would be the outcome. Her family floated into electrical wiring and charmed Cadillacs.

"We should move," Moira said.

"And go where?" Alex returned.

The three of them shared glances. They stayed standing on the Royal Mile in the fog, three Hogwarts students in good coats with nowhere immediate to go.

Then, Aisling came out of a close. Eve saw her before the others did. Her cousin moved straight at them with a smile lining her lips and her eyes fixed on them. Her liner was heavy as usual. The skirt was long and dark, while the leather jacket was too big for her. It had been too big for her since she was sixteen and would probably be too big for her until it fell apart, at which point she would find another one that was also too big.

"Eve," she said. Then she finally broke her stare to look at the street, then back at the three of them standing on it, and the smile that had been on the her lips tightened the smallest inch. "I was just on my way to-- did you come from the South Bridge Vaults?"

"The what?" Eve asked.

"We came from right there," Moira said, and pointed at the cobblestones behind them.

Aisling blinked. She looked at the Mile, then at St Giles, whose spire was doing its best to be visible through the fog and managing about half of itself. She refocused on Eve. "Right," she said with a deep breath and her smile coming back. "If anyone asks, you came through the South Bridge Vaults." She did not explain further. She turned and started walking toward the close she had come out of, and the close swallowed her up to the shoulders before any of them had moved.

Alex rushed to her side and put his hand out. "Aisling O'Toole, it's a genuine pleasure to--"

"When we get to the house," Aisling said, without turning. "Come."

Alex's hand stayed out for another second. Then he folded it back into his pocket and followed. Moira was already moving. Eve went last.

The close was narrow. The walls were stone and close enough that Eve could have touched both sides without fully extending her arms. The steps were worn smooth, concave in the centres, from centuries of the same descent. A lamp was fixed to the wall above them. The air was different down here-- coming off the walls, meaning nothing here had been in direct sun for a very long time.

Aisling walked without looking at the walls. She had made this descent enough times that she did not see the walls anymore. But the walls were far from invisible to the other three. Eve could tell they had been built before the building above them, which had been built before the one above that, and somewhere in the stacking was something no one was going to dig up. Ahead, through a gap where the close opened between two buildings, the Castle sat on its rock against the low sky. Eve saw it and kept walking. The close turned. The steps continued down. Alex was breathing harder than the descent should have required. Moira was ahead, close to Aisling, matching her stride without difficulty. Chaser's instinct.

"I'll be leaving with you tonight," Aisling said, over her shoulder, "so I'll show you the vaults on the way back. You'll want to know the way."

"Is it far?" Alex asked.

"No."

She did not say how far no was. They kept descending. The close narrowed once more and then opened onto a wider street that ran below the ridge, where it was darker, the buildings taller relative to the width of the road, the sky technically visible, and yet, there was that feeling of being underneath. A church bell struck the half hour from somewhere Eve could not place. It arrived flat, absorbed by the stone, and stopped.

Aisling turned left. They followed. Eve's nausea from the Apparition had settled. In its place came the sudden vertigo of being in a city she did not know, at night, in March, following a cousin down a street she could not have found again if she'd been asked.

The rest of the route was short. Two more turns, a stretch of street where the buildings on both sides were still dark-windowed and shut, and then Aisling stopped at a door. Stone frame. Heavy wood. Iron handle that had been polished by hands rather than by intention, the bright spots where fingers had gripped for long enough to wear through the black.

"Here," Aisling said. She pushed the door open. The stairwell inside was stone and rose upward in a tight spiral. Somewhere above them, through several layers of floor, there was warmth and the sound of people. "Shut it well," she told Eve, who entered last.

Eve pulled the door shut behind her and the street sounds cut off, what replaced it was the rustling of their shoes and the clicks of Moira's pointed boots. A handrail bolted into the wall at hip height, cold under Eve's hand when she touched it. Aisling was already a full turn ahead on the steps. Moira followed close behind her. Alex's breathing remained audible from the step above Eve.

The music grew, although muffled, the bass reaching them before the melody. By the second landing the temperature had shifted from stone-cold to something approaching habitable, and by the time Aisling reached a door on the third floor the warmth was visible through the wood.

She pushed it open without knocking.

The room was full. Twenty people, perhaps more - Eve counted by clusters, the groups they'd formed and the spaces between the groups. A record player in the far corner was singing about a hotel in California, and someone had turned it up past the point the speakers could bear, so the guitar had a rattle underneath that nobody seemed to mind.

Eve stepped in.

The walls were stone, again, then plaster, then a high ceiling with exposed beams that had been painted white, once, and had since returned, through age and smoke, to a more sallow hue. A tartan hung on the wall to her left - hunting tartan, dark greens and blues, framed but not behind glass, the fabric slightly faded at the folds. Next to it, unframed, tacked directly into the plaster: a poster of the Union Jack with the Queen's face and a safety pin. The two objects existed side by side, in a room that did not seem to find this remarkable.

A velvet couch in a purple so dark it was nearly black sat against the far wall, deep-seated. Above it, a mirror - old, Gothic-framed, looking like it had been removed from a church and never returned. It reflected the flat back at itself and, through the window behind whoever was sitting on the couch, the Crown Steeple of St Giles, lit dully against the sky.

The rug that covered most of the open floor was dark blue and shaggy. An iron-legged desk sat on top of it by the far wall. Such a desk could not have been moved since the building was built, Eve decided, because the iron legs had left permanent impressions in the floorboards visible at the rug's edge and the desk itself had the weight of a handcrafted object that had been carried up these stairs once, two hundred years ago, by persons who had no intention of ever carrying it down again.

Photographs on a shelf by the window. Analogue. Not moving. A Montrose Magpies jersey draped over the back of a chair, navy blue with a magpie on the chest, the fabric creased. A bottle of Highland whisky on the desk, half gone, next to a glass with a finger of water still in it. Another bottle - vodka, the label in a Cyrillic language Eve couldn't read - beside it.

The people in the flat sorted themselves into groups that Eve could outline without much effort. By the bookshelves and the desk: three people in conversation, older than the rest by a few years, one with a leather satchel still over his shoulder. They had come from an academic setting of some sort and had not yet shed the serious institutional bearing. On the couch: a louder group, drinks in hand, physical ease. Quidditch players, probably, or close to it. There was also a solitary man by the window, nursing his glass without ever looking out at the Castle above.

Aisling had been absorbed in seconds. She already had a hand on someone's arm, saying a word Eve didn't catch. Then Lorna Mackay, who was the host of their night out, came through from what must have been a kitchen, because she was carrying a bottle in one hand and wiping the other on her jeans.

She was tall. Moira's height or near it, with red hair past her shoulders and a leather jacket over a dark red shirt and black jeans and wool socks on the stone floor. Layered necklaces that clinked when she moved. Bracelets on one wrist. She had the build of someone who hit things for a living. She saw Aisling first. Went to her. A hand on her shoulder, a grin, something said close that made Aisling shake her head and smile. Five seconds. Done.

Then she saw Eve. "The baby Kavanagh," Lorna said with an even larger grin and arms spread out that assumed a great deal of familiarity that had not been earned in person, only inherited through Aisling's years of talking. Eve stood in the doorway of a house she had never been in and was greeted as family by a woman she had never met. She decided this would have to be fine.

"Mackay," she returned.

"Aisling's talked about ye." Lorna grabbed both her hands to look at her properly - the dress, the coat, the garnet beadwork, the pinned-back hair - and gave her a pat on the cheek, which from a Mackay was probably some form of high praise. "Ye look like yer maw."

Eve actually looked more like her father, as she had been told, but she smiled and nodded.

Alex stepped forward. His hand was already out. "Alexander Sykes," he said. "It's a genuine--"

Lorna took his hand and shook it firmly. "Aye, I know who ye are," she said. She looked at his outfit next, the same appraisal she had given Eve. Her mouth bent in the same way as it had after Eve. "All black- ye've done yer homework."

"I do things properly," Alex said, recovering his hand and the fingers that had been inside it. Eve could see him curling them in and out to regain feeling.

"So I see."

Then Moira, who had been standing slightly behind Eve with her coat still on and her sightlines already mapped, stepped forward into Lorna's field of vision. Lorna did not break into a smile as she had for the other two, nor did she put out a hand. Her chin rose. Her weight shifted onto her back foot.

"Palancher," she said.

"Mackay," Moira said.

They regarded each other for a second. Lorna nodded. "Come in," she said, to all of them but meaning Moira. "I'll get ye a drink." She went back toward the kitchen. The record player reached the end of the song with 'but you can never leave' and the hairs on Eve's arms stood up. The needle sat in the run-out groove, clicking, clicking, clicking, until someone across the room lifted the arm to set it back at the beginning.

The three by the bookshelves were talking about records.

Eve had not intended to end up near them. She had been looking at the books and their shelves that ran the length of the wall next to the iron-legged desk. She had been reading the titles from left to right, assessing what the collection told her about the people in this building. The books were historical. Legal. Trial transcripts, parish records, kirk session minutes. Some of them had dates on the spines that predated the house.

The man nearest the desk was explaining something to the other two. He was a tall lean man with green trousers and a green shirt and a beige sweater vest. He had spectacles the size of oranges, with an amber-coloured frame to match. The second was shorter, older, peppered hair slicked back, holding a glass of whisky with both hands while his eyes were attached to the wall across from him.

The woman was different.

She was standing somewhat apart from the two men, leaning against the bookshelf with one arm folded and the other hanging down, and in the one hanging down there was a glass she was not drinking from. Sharp face in every sense of the word, dark hair cut short, and she had been watching Eve read the spines for some time now.

Eve met her eye. Neither of them smiled

"You're the Kavanagh," the woman said.

"Eve," Eve said.

"Mairie," the woman said. "Mackay. I work between the Court and the university."

Mairie Mackay, the between-woman, Eve noted inwardly. A Mackay in the academic world who also worked for the Court. Between worlds by training, inside the third one by name. Comfortable in both.

The tall man had noticed Eve and was already turning. "Ah -" he lifted his chin to the book Eve had paused on, "The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie- we were just discussing the Survey. A, hm, cataloguing project at the university. Every witchcraft accusation in Scotland between 1510 and 1736. Names, dates, parishes, charges, outcomes." He blinked at Eve, waiting for her to start clapping. "Remarkable piece of work. Cross-referenced against kirk session records, Sheriff Court proceedings, Privy Council minutes-"

"Recording," Eve said. Her head tilted to the side. "On paper."

"Well," the shorter man said patiently, "it's rather the point. If you don't record it, you can't study it. If you can't study it, you can't understand the patterns. And if you can't understand the patterns-"

"You write all of that down," Eve said, frowning. She turned back to the books in front of her. "The names. The lineages. The accusations. The outcomes."

"That's what a survey is," the tall man said.

In Wexford, in the houses she had grown up in, information moved through speech and memory and song. It was not written on paper because paper could be taken Paper could be read by people who had not been told. Paper could be filed, and once filed it belonged to whoever held the file.

"To what end," she asked.

The tall man blinked twice. "I'm sorry?"

"The survey. You finish it. You have every name. Cross-referenced it all-- then what?"

The shorter man and the tall man exchanged a glance. Eve guessed that was just how people responded when they had been asked a question they considered somewhat naive. The shorter man opened his mouth.

Mairie spoke first. "Then nobody gets to say it didn't happen."

Eve looked at her.

"That's the purpose," Mairie said. She had not unfolded her arm. Her glass was still by her side, and she was still not drinking from it. "The records exist. The names are in them. When someone says it was exaggerated, or political, or a long time ago, or not as bad as people claim, the record is there. They can look at it. Every accusation. Every name."

"And if the wrong person looks at it," Eve asked.

"Then the wrong person sees what happened," Mairie said. "And the right person can hold them to it."

The two men had gone quiet. The tall one was looking between Eve and Mairie as if he had been conducting a seminar and discovered that two of the participants had started a different, better seminar without him.

Eve knew the safest name was the one nobody had written down, but she could not dismiss Mairie's position either, because Mairie Mackay was standing in a house in a city that had burned its witches. It had tortured them and drowned them facedown in mudflats, and Mairie Mackay was still here, saying: this happened. We wrote it down.

"Thank you," Eve said.

Mairie looked at her for another moment. Then she picked up her glass, drank from it for the first time, and turned back to the two men, who had been waiting to resume the seminar they were no longer in charge of.

Eve left the academics discussing something about parish boundaries and crossed to the couch. She sat at the far end, farthest from the window, and the velvet took her weight with the give of a couch that had suffered many people before her. She could feel the cold off the glass behind her, and in the mirror above her head, the flat and its people were reflected back at itself, and the window behind her showed the outline of a rectangular box high up somewhere that she did not turn to look at.

Alex was standing with Lorna and Tessa near the tartan on the wall. He had a glass in one hand and the other was building a thesis in the air between the three of them. "That is extraordinarily specific," Alex was saying. He was looking at the tartan. "That is a very deliberate textile decision. Not generic plaid from some grim little furnishings shop. That's tartan. That means something."

Lorna had one arm folded, bottle swinging in the other hand. "Aye."

"Right, yes, it means something materially. Obviously. But emotionally? Spiritually?" His hand expanded outward. "Who put that up and thought, this is the fabric that shall set the tone of the room?"

Tessa was leaning against the wall beside the tartan with a drink of her own. She had decided this conversation was not for her and was waiting to be released from it. "I really dinna think anyone's thought about it that much," she said.

"Surely someone thought about it," Alex said.

"It's been there since Lorna's gran," Tessa said. "Maybe her gran's gran. Naebody remembers."

Alex looked at the tartan with renewed interest, as though the fact that nobody remembered had made it more important rather than less. "Well, that's rather the point, isn't it. Inherited significance. The textile equivalent of an accent - you don't choose it, it just-"

"Are ye gonnae talk about the curtains next?" Lorna said.

"I hadn't planned to, but now that you mention it, the curtains are doing decent work for a fabric that-"

"Sykes."

"Yes?"

"Drink yer drink."

He drank his drink. Tessa's mouth moved into a smile and she wiped it away with a sip from her own glass. Lorna uncrossed her arms and looked over at Eve on the couch.

Eve stretched her neck to look at the tartan. Alex was still holding his arm up at an angle that suggested he had more to say about the tartan and was merely waiting for a suitable pause in which to resume. Eve pursed her lips. She looked at Lorna. She did not seem to mind.

Alex set his glass down on the nearest surface, which happened to be the iron-legged desk, and turned back to the tartan. "Right. Of course. And-"

BANG!

The room froze.

The conversation and the laughter stopped together. The bottle someone had been setting down was held instead, and the record player kept going because the record player did not know to stop, and the guitar filled the space where twenty voices had just been.

Alex's mouth was hanging open. His hand was still in the air where the thesis had been. The word "and" was somewhere between his teeth and the room and it stayed there.

Lorna had turned toward the door. Tessa had not moved, but her chin was up, and her eyes were wide. Mairie, by the bookshelves, had straightened her back and kept her glass in her hand. The two men beside her were still.

Eve, on the couch, watched the room hold its breath. Twenty people. Every one of them in the same posture: frozen and held, as if a single rope ran through all of them and someone had pulled it taut.

She had never seen this before. In Wexford, in Dublin, in the corridors of Hogwarts, people reacted to sounds individually or not at all. Someone flinched, someone turned, someone laughed it off, someone checked. Here, the room had become one body, and the body had gone still, and the stillness was so total that Eve understood it had happened before. Many times. Enough times that nobody needed to coordinate it.

Moira, beside the three-bar gas fire, had not gone still. Alex, by the tartan, had not gone still. Eve, on the couch, had not gone still. The three of them had not flinched.

Lorna approached the door and looked through the peephole onto the landing. Then she opened the door and poked her head out.

"Car," the man by the window said.

"Thanks, Alfie," Lorna said, and came back in.

The room returned to its former self. The man by the window finished off his beer. Mairie resumed her sentence. The debate over music selection that had been happening near the record player resumed. Someone laughed just to put sound back into the space. Alex turned to pass a glance over his shoulder at Eve.

Eight seconds. Eve counted afterward and arrived at eight. Nobody mentioned it. The party continued on top of the place where the silence had been. The silence was still underneath, the way the stone was underneath the rug. Moira looked at Eve. And Eve looked at Moira. Moira gave a nod and then looked at Alex, and Alex was still standing there with his mouth slightly open. He lifted his glass to his lips.

The record player had moved on to the devil and a game of cards, or perhaps the devil and a war. Eve could not tell from the lyrics whether the devil was meant to be sympathised with or feared and suspected this might be the song's purpose.

She was on the couch with her drink and Alex had come to sit beside her sometime during the last ten minutes, though he had not stopped talking. Alex had simply relocated the conversation from vertical to horizontal, and Tessa had followed, leaning against the arm of the couch with her glass, listening to Alex explain the difference between Highland and Speyside whisky. Eve assumed he had studied it extensively or was inventing with enough confidence that nothing he said ever came into question.

"The peat content alone," Alex was saying. "The peat content tells you everything about the water table, which tells you everything about the region, which tells you-"

"Dae ye actually drink whisky?" Tessa said.

"I appreciate whisky."

"That's no what I asked."

Eve was listening to this with one ear and watching the room with both eyes when Lorna's face snapped up from where it was bent over the record player. Lorna had seen someone arrive and had decided that this specific arrival required management. The door had opened - Eve had not heard it over the music - and a man came in, stocky, older than the rest of the Quidditch crowd by five years. He had a coat on and was pulling it off with one arm.

Lorna crossed the room. She took him by the elbow before he had finished with the coat and steered him, as if redirecting a Bludger, toward the three-bar gas fire where Moira was standing.

Moira was positioned with her back to the wall and sightlines to most of the room, while the gas burner burned. Most likely it was the warmest spot in the whole flat. She had been talking to someone from the Quidditch crowd for as long as Alex had been talking to Tessa and enjoying herself in a somewhat contained way, nodding more than speaking.

Lorna arrived with the man in tow. "Hamish," she said, "this is Moira Palancher. The Slytherin Chaser everyone's been talking about."

She smiled, all teeth, between the two of them and let go of his elbow.

Hamish looked at Moira. Moira focused on Hamish. A moment passed between them. Eve saw the effects before she could read the content. Hamish's posture changed. Not much. A degree or two of adjustment, the spine lifting, the coat held closer to the torso. Moira's posture did not change. She had been ready for this conversation since she first picked up a broom.

Eve smiled.

Fought for ten decades (whoo-hoo)

For the gods they made (whoo-hoo)

Her head bopped a bit with each whoo-hoo.

I shouted out (whoo-hoo)

Who killed the Kennedys? (whoo-hoo)

Eve's brows went up.

When after all (whoo-hoo)

It was you and me (whoo-hoo)

Her eyes narrowed to think about that for a second. Then she turned back to Alex, who was telling Tessa about the chemical properties of vodka and why Eastern European distillation methods were, in his opinion, underappreciated by the British drinking public. Tessa was holding her empty glass. She had stopped listening some time ago but was still watching the performance.

Aisling was at the door when Eve got there. She had not taken off her jacket all night. She was leaning against the frame with her arms folded, watching the room thin out. The academics had left ten minutes ago- Mairie lived downstairs, and the two men went home, the leather satchel last through the door. Several of the Quidditch crowd had gone home or wherever Magpies went before training. The record had run out and no one had replaced it.

Eve stood beside her. They did not look at each other.

"Lorna's getting her jacket," Aisling said.

"Mm," Eve said.

Aisling adjusted one of the rings on her left hand, turning it with her thumb. "Cold out," she said.

"It was cold when we got here."

"It'll be colder now."

Alex appeared with his scarf retied and his jacket buttoned. Moira came behind him, coat already on, Hamish's handshake apparently concluded. Tessa was pulling on a jumper in the hallway. Alfie, as Eve had learned during the BANG! incident, materialised from somewhere near the window - he had been so still for the last half hour that Eve had forgotten he was a person who could move - and collected a coat from the back of a chair.

Lorna came out of the kitchen with her fur-lined jacket and her keys and looked at everyone. "Right." She turned the record player off. "We're going."

One by one, they came out of the flat and down the stone stairs. Lorna locked the door behind them and went down first to lead the way. Aisling followed, then Tessa, then Alfie, his coat buttoned to the throat. Alex and Moira and Eve settled back into formation the way they always did with Alex in the middle, Moira to his left, Eve to his right.

The close was darker than it had been on the way up. Someone on an upper landing had turned the lamp off, or it had dimmed because it was old. The walls pressed even closer in the half-light. Eve put her right hand on the iron rail going down. Above them, through a gap in the rooftops where the close opened to the sky, the Castle sat on its rock in the cold. She caught it once, between two chimneys, and then the angle closed and it was gone.

Ahead of them, the four others moved through the close without touching the rail. Their feet found the steps anyway. Then the Cowgate opened below. The buildings here stood taller than anything Eve had seen on the Royal Mile, and South Bridge crossed overhead on its stone arches, carrying a street on its back. The sky was a strip. Streetlamps were fewer and the light they gave did not even reach the upper floors.

Alex was still talking. He had started in the flat when Tessa had pulled an issue of Jabberwock off Lorna's shelf about ten minutes before they'd had to leave. Alfie had written a piece for it that Alex had now read as well. The conversation had not finished before they were in their coats, so Alex was finishing it in the street.

"-and what I'm saying is he goes back to 1890 and handles Osric without ever having to spell out why he's writing it now," Alex said to Moira, who was listening with her eyes on the street and her attention divided evenly between the content and the surroundings. "Which is the whole trick. The piece is about the Ministry being slow on Ranrok. That's all it is. It's a review of that new biography. He's not writing about anything else. And then-"

He stopped talking.

Two men were coming toward them from the far end of the Cowgate. Strolling. Plain coats. One had his hands in his pockets. The other was carrying something flat against his side, a folded paper or a notebook.

Alex kept walking, but his hands went into his coat pockets like he was about to reach for a cigarette, and Eve saw how the hand was still inside the pocket without producing anything. Moira did not slow down either. Nor did her face change. Only the diamond at her left breast sparkled with every step she took.

Eve slowed by a quarter-step but otherwise did not stop.

The two men passed the others in front without incident. Lorna did not angle to look at them. Aisling kept her pace up. Tessa was saying something to Alfie and she kept saying it. Alfie, behind her, moved to the edge of the pavement and continued. The four of them considered them two men on a street, because two plain coats on a street were two plain coats on a street, and the night patrol was the night patrol, and a system worked because someone believed in it.

The two men reached the three of them.

One of them had looked at Aisling first. Then at Moira, and more specifically, at the glittering diamond brooch that was in the right position to catch the eye. Then at Alex, who was dressed entirely in black. Then past Alex at Eve, who the man reached last, and what his glance concentrated on was the chain of the locket at her throat, which - like Moira's sea creature of diamonds brooch - had not been made in Britain.

Then the group was behind them and the entrance to the bar visible down a short flight of steps, red light leaking up from below, a compressed thud of music coming through the exterior walls.

"Were those Aurors?" Alex asked, after half a block. Quietly, to Eve and Moira, without turning his head in either direction.

"Probably."

Alex pursed his lips. "Right."

"No need to panic," Moira said.

They reached the stairs down to the bar. The music was deafening here, coming up through the ground. Lorna was already going down, Aisling behind her, Tessa and Alfie following. Eve went down after them, with Alex and Moira behind her. Somewhere behind them on the Cowgate, the two men continued their patrol, and the night's report would include, among other things, a list of names.

The bar was underground.

Vault-underground. The light was also red here, coming from somewhere Eve could not identify. Four people on a platform at the front, playing: a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, and a woman with short hair and a voice that came out of her like she was trying to return it to someone who had given it to her against her will. Locals. A group of friends who had booked a gig.

The sound travelled through the floor and up into Eve's chest. The guitar was arguing with itself and winning.

Eve stood at the edge of the room with her back to the wall. Her coat was over her left arm. In her right hand she held a gin Alex had put into it before disappearing - gin with the same lemonade Moira was drinking at the bar, because Eve would not have ordered gin and Alex knew this. She kept the glass close to her mouth without drinking from it. Her left arm was across her stomach, holding the coat in place.

The mosh pit was not what she had expected. The bodies were colliding for the purpose of collision. But the collisions had a structure she could read. Someone fell, someone picked them up. Someone pushed, someone absorbed. Lorna was in it. Eve watched her move, take up space, absorb impact, redirect force. Except here the force was not a Bludger but the crowd, and the crowd was not trying to hurt her and she was not trying to hurt the crowd. The whole thing ran on rules that nobody had written down, yet everybody knew.

Alfie appeared beside Eve with a beer. He had his glasses pushed up on his forehead and he was wearing a polo shirt. "All right there?" he said.

He was gone before she could answer. She watched the polo shirt disappear into the crowd, and then there was a disruption in the pattern of the pit, and then Alfie was in it, and the quiet windowsill boy was gone.

Moira was at the bar with her elbows on the bartop and a glass of lemonade. She was facing the crowd, exactly where she wanted to be, and was not going to be moved from it. A man beside her said something and she turned her head and said something back and he laughed. Another woman leaned over and complimented the brooch. Moira touched it once, said thank you, and went back to her lemonade and the crowd.

Alex was outside. Eve had seen him going up the stairs with a cigarette between his fingers, talking to someone she didn't recognise - a man in a donkey jacket, mid-laugh. He would be up there now at the top of the steps, or back at the bar, or up there again; he would surface eventually. At Slughorn's Christmas party he had vanished for an hour and come back and nothing had needed saying. This was the same.

She tracked the stairs up in her head. Alex at the top, on the pavement, smoking. Above the pavement the Cowgate, the tenements on either side. Above the tenements, South Bridge and the street it carried. Above the bridge, the spine of the Old Town running up the Royal Mile. Above the Royal Mile, on its rock, the Castle. All of it stacked on top of her, and Alex somewhere halfway up it with a cigarette.

The woman at the front of the band was singing something. Eve could not make out most of the words. She caught fragments - a city, a promise, something broken, something held - and the fragments were enough. The woman had decided to make this sound, and she would make it, stop when the song ended, go home, sleep, and wake up tomorrow with a sore throat.

The sound in Eve's throat would not end with a sore throat. It would end with a body count.

She stayed at the wall. The band played. The pit moved. Moira drank her lemonade. Somewhere on the street above them the Aurors were filing their reports, and somewhere in a castle in the Highlands a boy she had not thought about all evening was sitting in a corridor waiting for her to come home, and Eve did not know any of this. The band started another song.

Sirius popped out around Remus's elbow with a large, toothy grin that sat somewhat lopsided.

"Come here," he said. "I've got something to show you."

He'd had a few drinks. This was clear from the brightness alone. The faster version, where noise and company had sharpened him into a flow-state equivalent to some drug that would not let him sleep all night. There were no drugs involved. Sirius always improved in crowds once they became ungovernable.

Remus followed him.

They crossed the common room with some difficulty. A girl with glitter on one cheek was standing on a chair in defiance of balance and probably school rules, though these had by now lost whatever force they'd possessed earlier in the evening. Somebody near the fire was attempting to sing over the record player. Peter, red-faced, was arguing with James over a game of chess that hadn't moved once the whole night. Remus caught only pieces as Sirius pulled him through: a shriek, a burst of clapping, somebody saying for God's sake, Potter, and then the draft from the stairwell hit them.

Noise dropped with each landing. Sirius took the steps two at a time, one hand skimming the banister at a speed he had no business maintaining, given the drink he'd had. Remus went after him at a more ordinary pace. He had drunk enough to feel companionable and not enough to enjoy his nose hitting the stairs. Halfway up the second flight he became aware that Sirius had not once looked back to see whether he was coming.

At the next landing Sirius turned his head just long enough to say, "Wait here." Then he kept going, faster than before.

Remus stopped. There seemed no point in improving upon instructions so concise. He leaned back against the wall and listened to Sirius continue upwards, then further off, then above that again. A door opened somewhere high up, banged once against something, then shut.

Remus put his hands in his pockets. The stone at his back was warmer than he expected. Every so often a laugh rose clear of the rest and reached him intact. He turned so that one shoulder was against the stone and found the bottle cap in his pocket. Chastity's. He touched it with one finger, feeling the bent metal edge against his knuckle. He left it where it was in his pocket.

Above, something fell with a clatter. Sirius said, "Oh, brilliant."

Remus looked down through the banister well at the blur below, then up again toward the dormitories.

Sirius came down at speed. He was grinning before he reached the turn in the stairs. One hand was shut around something small. He had tucked the other under his elbow to keep himself from spilling over the banister.

"Right," he said, landing in front of Remus with a little skid of shoe on stone. "Look."

Remus looked.

Sirius opened his hand.

For a moment the thing merely hung there, a gold sphere no bigger than a walnut, wings beating in tiny flashes. Remus had just enough time to register Snitch before the Snitch launched itself straight at Sirius's chest.

It hit him with a small thump. Sirius caught it at once, laughing already. "Did you see?" He opened his hand again. Up it went, wings out, hovering for one second in what might have been ordinary behaviour if one were feeling charitable. Remus was not. The thing swerved and flew into Sirius's shoulder, then his arm, then his shoulder again. Sirius burst out laughing. "Watch this. Watch this." He spread his arms, presenting himself to the apparatus. The Snitch circled once, chose his ear, and struck it. Sirius swore, because, apparently, the thing had fulfilled its brief so well.

Remus stared.

It was idiotic. That was the first and largest fact. A Snitch existed to avoid hands, brooms, eyesight, intention, and all ordinary forms of human hope. This one had been charmed to seek. Not seek a goal, nor a player in the proper sporting sense, but seek Sirius Black. It was a perfect inversion of purpose, and therefore exactly the sort of invention James would admire beyond reason.

The Snitch flew at Sirius's forehead.

He reeled back a pace with both hands to his brow. Remus heard himself laugh. The sound came out at once and much too honestly. Sirius, hearing that, brightened further and released the thing again.

"There, you see? It's trained."

"It's possessed."

"It loves me."

"It's trying to kill you."

Sirius shrugged at this, then had to duck because the Snitch had taken that as an invitation and came in for his mouth. He caught it against his collarbone, fumbled it, released it again, then stood waiting with his chin up in the air.

Remus laughed harder. Because that was what did it: Sirius giving himself to the bit with complete seriousness. He had always done this. He never simply showed someone a joke, he entered into a compact with it, lent it his body, his voice, his whole idiot conviction. Half the success came from that. The rest came from the fact that he had come straight down from seven flights up and brought it back here to show Remus first.

The charm had James written all over it, with its useless brilliance, labour expended on the wrong thing, immense confidence that the wrong thing was far better than the right one. And yet James was downstairs somewhere. Sirius had come up seven flights and come back down with this.

The Snitch struck him square between the eyes. This time Sirius gave a theatrical stagger and clutched at the wall, one hand over his heart. The Snitch had already wheeled round for another attempt. Remus put his palm against the stone beside him because his lungs had ceased to cooperate properly. He bent forward, then straightened, then bent again, making those short, useless efforts at composure that only made matters worse. He laughed into his shoulder with no success at all.

Sirius, encouraged by this, held his arms wide once more. "Come on, then," he told the Snitch. "Show some character."

It flew at him, and Sirius, still laughing, prepared to receive it.

The Snitch came in once more at ear height and Sirius, more from experience than skill by this stage, shut his hand around it and stayed like that. His shoulders still shook from laughter.

That seemed to finish the performance. No fresh challenge was issued. He stood catching his breath, one shoulder against the wall next to Remus, hair in his eyes, one fist holding the little brass menace. The stairwell had grown warmer because two people had been laughing harder than they meant to.

Below them, somebody shouted. A cheer went up at something that would almost certainly prove worthless if explained. Up above, the dormitory floors kept quiet. This left the landing to them. Remus wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand and found he was still smiling like an idiot. His ribs hurt. His face felt hot. Sirius, looking over at him, had the pleased, winded lopsided smirk of a person whose absurdity had received exactly the right audience.

At moments like this he lost several of his more elaborate qualities. The family style dropped away. So did the pose, the sarcasm, the cultivated contempt, the whole attractive rubbish-heap of Black mannerisms he usually carried about with him. What remained was a boy on a staircase with his own stupid invention in his hand and a sheen on his face so elated that it rendered commentary useless.

"We should see James with it," he said, and laughed again before the sentence was properly finished.

Remus nodded, still short of breath. "He'll lose an eye."

"One would think he would catch it before it got there."

"He's a Chaser, not a Seeker. Sirius, you might have to examine your expectations."

Sirius snorted at this and looked down at the Snitch in his fist. He turned it over once in his palm, letting one wing twitch free between his fingers, then closed his hand again before it could resume hostilities. He was nearer than before. Somewhere in the last minute he had come right down on to the landing and stayed there. Remus had not moved back because there had been no reason to move back. The wall was already at his shoulders. Sirius was in front of him, still breathing fast, flushed from the stairs and the fooling.

It would have been possible, at another time, to step aside. The width of the landing allowed it. So did the habits of ordinary self-preservation. 

Sirius looked at him with the smile no longer there. Then his free hand came up to Remus's jaw and stayed there. Just the whole hand, settling along the side of his face with the thumb near his chin and two fingers at his ear. Sirius's skin was warm. Remus felt that first, before he could have any views on what else was happening.

He did not move because he was still laughing and leaning back against the wall with his breathing not quite managed and his nerves occupied elsewhere. Sirius's hand arrived inside that condition and was accepted by the body before any other part of the brain could have been consulted.

Sirius leaned in.

The laughter was still about him. It had not gone from his eyes. That was the worst part for later accounting, or the most confusing. Remus could not have said where the fooling ended, because it did not appear to end at all. It altered its shape and continued. One instant Sirius was holding a homicidal Snitch, the next his mouth was on Remus's.

It was brief.

But briefness only spared it from having to declare itself. The Snitch remained trapped in Sirius's right hand. The wall held firm at Remus's back. Somewhere below, people were still drinking to James Potter. Somewhere above, seven floors of boys' dormitories carried on not knowing anything. Between those two places, on one mean length of staircase, Sirius kissed him with the remains of laughter still on his face.

And Remus kissed back.

Only for that fraction. Half a second, perhaps a little more. Long enough for the fact to exist and become impossible to deny later, however one might busy oneself trying. His mouth answered because Sirius's had arrived and because his body was already in a posture of permission it had not known enough to revoke. The response came from the same place the laughter had come from: straight out, without supervision.

Then his eyes blinked wide.

"What are you doing."

It was phrased quite levelly. A genuine question, which helped. If he had employed a different tone, it would have made the moment seem larger, and Remus had no wish to enlarge anything.

Sirius's hand came away.

The change in his face was not quick enough to work. What had been there a second before shut up at once. The grin returned, but in its public form now, the one built for McGonagall's detentions and the aftermath of saying something indefensible at dinner. It sat in the right place and did the right job and was false on arrival. He moved back.

"It was a joke. Relax."

Remus looked at him.

The trouble with any repair done in a hurry was that the original damage remained visible to the person who had watched it happen. Sirius had put the joke over the moment with admirable speed, but the line still showed through it, because the line often arrived very pleased with itself. Sirius's face had the same defect.

"What - no." Remus shook his head once. "No, you're using me again."

Sirius's gaze shifted from Remus's face to the light grey collar of his jumper, then lower, to some point around where the design turned into snowflake motifs probably, as though the answer might be waiting there in the pointed ends. His mouth altered, slightly tighter. Then he said, "Yeah. People do that."

He said it with a careless bitterness that might have been meant for wit and had missed it by a substantial margin. The grin stayed on, but the rest of him had gone still under it.

Remus felt his own laughter leave him completely, which was a disagreeable sensation. The landing and the stairwell looked different already. Too narrow for comfort and too public for what had just been allowed to happen in it.

Below them the party was still in business. The record player was enduring further assault, with two people stopping every five seconds to fight over the tune. Life, on the whole, had displayed a good deal of tact by carrying on somewhere else.

"Don't," Remus said.

He had wanted something clearer, harder, less likely to sound like a prefect speaking through a headache. But it was what came. Sirius heard the poverty of it and, being Sirius, could hardly fail to. That was another difficulty with him: he was generous in some directions and merciless in all the useful ones.

His gaze came up again, though not all the way. "I said relax."

"Yes, I heard you."

"Good."

Sirius still had the Snitch in his fist. Remus had forgotten about it until one wing beat frantically between Sirius's fingers with a tiny metallic tremor. The thing wanted to get out and resume its appointed idiocy. At another moment this might have been enough to save them. At this one it just made the scene look cheaper.

Remus turned and went down the stairs.

There was no point in hurrying-- that would have given the event consequence it had not earned.

The party came back first through the record player, labouring away like a machine built for punishment. Then the voices, blurred at first, then separating into laughter and the ordinary rubbish people were pleased to be saying at one another. Then the heat. By the time he reached the last turn the common room had begun pushing warm air up the stairwell again, smelling of weed, a burnt sock, spilt drink, and too many bodies in one place.

He stepped out on to the edge of it.

Nothing had altered. Of course it had not. July still performed itself at the windows with that thin northern light which suggested a benign season while offering none of its benefits. Somebody was coughing hard enough out the window to fold in half, and somebody else was using the back of an armchair in a way that made collapse likely within minutes. A banner over the mantel still had James's name wrong by one letter. Peter was visible for a moment near the table with a spoon balancing on his nose. Sawbridge stood by the drinks with Chastity and her Ravenclaw lot.

The room was full of people succeeding very tolerably at having a good time.

Remus walked through them.

He did not make much of this. He had no wish to announce himself by silence or by the sort of grim-faced exit some people managed in hopes of being followed. He simply moved between chairs and shoulders and half-finished conversations, keeping his eyes ahead. Several people glanced at him and then away again, seeing only another body in transit. This suited him.

James was in the middle of the room with a slice of cake on a plate in each hand.

It was a ridiculous object. Coconut cream with passionfruit curd, slightly listing to one side, too elaborate for a school party and too homemade to be proud of its own ambition. The layers had settled unevenly. The icing looked as though it had been applied under emotional strain. It should have failed outright. Instead it held together through some mixture of luck and stubbornness.

James saw him and perked up.

"There's cake," he said. "Have a slice."

Remus kept walking.

He did not look properly at James. He saw the cake, the hands under it, the flushed expectation arranged on his face, and left the rest alone. The portrait hole was opening in front of two departing Hufflepuffs. He aimed straight for it. Someone behind him said something loud and appreciative about the icing. Somebody else asked where Sirius had got to. Remus put a hand to the frame, ducked through, and went out into the corridor.

The Fat Lady swung shut behind him with a little offended firmness, as if his leaving reflected badly on the entertainment.

He did not go up. He did not go back in. He did not make for any of the places he generally used when he wanted to be sensible, alone, or both. His feet took him down past the turning staircases, past portraits sunk in the heavy deadness of painted slumber, past landings he knew as well as parts of his own body. After seven years in the castle he could have walked half of it blind. This, he found, was not a dignified form of knowledge.

Only on the third flight did it occur to him where he was going.

He kept going.

He found a corridor on the ground floor with no traffic in it and sat down against the wall. The stone came through his trousers at once. He put a hand in his pocket and found the bottle cap. Chastity's. He took it out, turned it once between finger and thumb and kept it there.

After that there was nothing to do except wait, so he did.