Summer, for Harry, was coming to an end, and as he sat on a boulder near the cliff’s edge, he wondered if he would ever come back here again. He hoped he would. His forced seclusion hadn’t been so bad, and he’d gotten used to the majestic sights. Here, the landscape was rugged and worn; it had character. The Cornwall shoreline was a sight to behold, regardless of the weather—dramatic under a force eight gale and serene on cloudless summer days. A permanent haunting air hung around the towering, rugged, granite cliffs and pounding Atlantic waves.

Harry wished, more than anything, for the freedom to follow the path north and south to his heart’s content one day. He wanted to discover every crooked-shaped rock formation and every natural cove hidden in the cliffs’ flanks—to find all the steep paths that led down to small sandy beaches that only existed at low tide.

As it were, he’d settle himself for one more sunset. These were his favourite; there wasn’t much west of here for a long, long way, and nature was free to display the full palette of day turning into night. The sky was ablaze with vibrant hues of blue, red, pink, and yellow to the point where Harry didn’t know where to look anymore for there was so much to see.

“A sight to behold,” came Saturnine’s voice, easily drifting to him over the light wind blowing in from the oceanfront.

Harry’s eyes left the scenery for an instant to flicker over his shoulder. His friend wore her usual garb: dark-blue jeans and a navy hoodie. Her long raven hair had been braided in a plait all day, but a few strands had come loose by that point. They blew in the wind by the side of her face.

“I’m going to miss this,” Harry said truthfully.

Saturnine mm-hmmed in agreement as she sat down next to him on his dramatic promontory of weathered granite. “When I look at those cliffs, I can’t help but wonder if they’ve been carved by some giants throwing a tantrum—or by lightning itself. It also reminds me of my time in Normandie. The coast there is a bit similar, though the cliffs aren’t as tall, and their stone is whiter.”

Neither Saturnine nor Remus had mentioned the time they’d spent living together in the north of France since Harry first found out about it, and he was curious to learn more. “You lived near the coast there, too?”

“Not really—the village was inland,” she said easily. “But Remus and I liked to go on walks when the weather permitted. I’d make sandwiches that we’d take with us, and we’d go down to the shore and have lunch atop the cliffs, gazing across the horizon—the homes we had left behind.”

“Do you miss it?” Harry asked. “Those days?”

Saturnine took a long time to answer, and her voice had a wistful quality to it when she did. “They weren’t easy, but they were simpler. But that time only exists in the past now, Harry. We could go back to that ramshackle apartment and do everything the way we used to back then, and it still wouldn’t be the same. Remus and I aren’t the people we used to be. We’ve changed as we’ve grown older.

“Life is like that, Harry. You’ll understand this yourself soon enough. Nothing’s ever set in stone—it keeps on changing, evolving. You meet new people, and others fall out of sight. You think that some people will never leave your side, but then life happens, and they drift apart. And others remain by your side, the same but different altogether.”

Her words made him think of Sirius, and Harry realised he hadn’t thought of his godfather in days. Now that he did, he found that it didn’t hurt as much as it used to. The pain of his absence was still there, but the agony of the circumstances of his death had lessened to the point where it became all but imperceptible.

Digging deep within himself to find the courage to ask, he enquired, “What if you don’t want them to?”

Saturnine sighed, gaze lost on the horizon. “You can’t force them to stay, Harry. The best you can do is ask, but—you have to be prepared to let them go.”

“Why?” he asked, sticking himself to a monosyllabic question; his voice couldn’t be trusted with more at the moment. Deep down, what he really wanted to say was, Please don’t leave me, too.

Turning to face him with a soft smile, Saturnine asked, “Would you like it if someone forced you to be somewhere you didn’t want to be?”

“No,” he admitted.

“Then you have your answer, lad. Some people will want the same thing you want at the same time, and others won’t. Or maybe they’ll change their mind down the line. It’s like that, Harry. You can’t fight it, and mostly, you can’t force people into situations they don’t want to be in. That only ever leads to misery.” She paused, then looked away. “But you can always ask, there’s no harm in that—so long as you’re prepared for any possible answer.”

Harry took a long time to ponder her words. He could ask, but was he prepared for a negative answer? It was one thing to go on as they had, to delude himself into thinking that Saturnine felt the least bit like he did, that she, too, wanted him to stick around. But could his heart—broken as it was—take it if she were to dash his hopes with a resounding no?

“I wish we could both stay here,” he decided to say at last; it was close enough. “Where things are simple, and I don’t need to ask anyone for anything.”

Because I already have everything I want, his heart added.

***

Saturnine could sympathise with that feeling. And at the back of her mind, she could see Dumbledore smirking that knowing smile of his. Damn, even in her imagination that man was annoying. She couldn’t for the life of her begin to guess at how he’d known. How in the world could he have figured out that she was right for Harry or that Harry would be right for her? She’d never even once in her life entertained the idea of having children one day. And there she was, saddled with not only a child but a teenager to boot—and wasn’t that said to be ten times more difficult to handle? But she had fallen into it effortlessly. And she’d done a great job at it, too, hadn’t she?

Harry had survived the summer. He’d put on a little weight and wasn’t as skinny as when he’d got here. She had gotten him into new clothes that actually fit him—although she had lost the battle when she mentioned getting a haircut. She had seen to it that he did his homework and taught him a few things to get him there. And aside from those dreadful two days when he went missing to help the Lovegoods—an event she refused to spend too much time reminiscing because the what-ifs were just too awful to contemplate—she had played the parent card wonderfully.

But where had that come from? She hadn’t known what to do, hadn’t had any role model to follow, and had never once before in her life thought to inquire in on the subject. And yet, she’d done a great job at it—out of sheer instinct. And what did that say about her?

And how, in the name of everything that was magic, could Albus Dumbledore have known what she didn’t even know?

“Mingling, scheming old sod,” she muttered through clenched teeth before catching herself, remembering that she wasn’t alone.

“Who?” asked Harry from where he still sat, next to her.

“Dumbledore,” she admitted, seeing no point in lying about it now that the words were out. “But best pretend you didn’t hear me say that.”

“You worry about the Defence classes?” he asked.

“I worry about a lot of things, Harry,” she admitted. “Teaching included.”

“I’ll help you out if I can,” he said. It was sweet of him to offer. “I mean, I can’t do the teaching for you. But if you’re having difficulties, maybe you can tell me about it, and we can try to find a solution together or something. I mean, we did work on the syllabus together, sort of. And well—I don’t know, but maybe—well. Just, if you think that I—ah... oh, forget it,” he rambled on, and she couldn’t help herself from tousling his hair with her hand. Harry didn’t seem to mind the gesture—if the smile on his lips was any indication.

“Thanks for the offer, Harry,” she said, feeling emotions welling up within herself, too. “I’ll take you up on that.”

Then, because she had to, and because she had postponed it long enough as it was, she said, “We need to discuss what things will be like at Hogwarts, Harry. Between you and me.” Her hand kept stroking through his mop of hair, and she felt him shudder at her words.

“I know I’m to call you Leen at all times,” Harry said, the words almost guarded. “Or rather, Professor Nine, I guess.”

“Yes, that’s one thing. But you’ll have to act as if you don’t know me, Harry. It’s best if no one realises we’re friends.” At that, Harry physically pulled away, recoiling as if he’d been punched in the stomach by the strength of her words—soft-spoken as they were.

“You can’t mean that?” Harry said, looking up at her with imploring eyes. “You can’t want that? No!”

She’d known this would hurt, and she’d put it off as long as she could to give herself more time to find another way. But she hadn’t. “Harry, I—”

“No!” he all but shouted. “Please, Saturnine. I—” he gasped, closing his mouth quickly as if to stop himself from saying something, then his resolve seemed to strengthen, and he said, “Please don’t. You said it was okay to ask. So, I’m asking you not to.”

Oh, and wasn’t it a bitter feeling to have your own words thrown back in your face? But how could she make him understand that this wasn’t her decision at all? This choice—arduous as it was—was made for his safety and in no way reflected her feelings.

“If something happens, you can always come find me,” she said. “But in class and in the hallways, you will have to act as if I’m just a teacher. And I will behave as if you’re just another student.”

She knew the words were all wrong the moment she said them, and now, there were tears in Harry’s eyes as he started to fold in on himself.

“It’s just an act, Harry. And it’s for your safety,” she hurried to add as she reached forward with both hands to grip his shoulders. “It doesn’t mean that I will stop caring about you. I’ll try to find a way for us to talk, but we’ll have to be careful about it. And when other people are present, we’ll have to act as if we don’t know each other.”

“It’s not fair,” Harry said in a strangled voice, and she could tell he was fighting off tears and losing the battle.

“Life rarely is, lad,” she admitted with the honesty she was accustomed to showing the boy. Letting all her defences down, she willed him to read in her own moist eyes and the tensed lines of her face how much that decision ate at her. “But there’s no other way.”

Displaying the heart of a true Gryffindor, Harry nodded. And the motion was enough to send twin tears cascading down his cheeks. She dabbed at them with the pads of her fingers and wished, not for the first time that summer, that she wasn’t so much of a prisoner of her bad choices’ consequences.