“Tell me again how this is a good idea,” Remus murmured sotto vocce.

The two of them were packed together in a tight recess in the wall between two statues in the corridor leading to the Great Hall. Hidden beneath a strong Disillusionment Charm, they stood as immobile as they could while students hurried out of the castle. Buzzing with anticipation, they were headed for the Quidditch pitch for the first match of the season between Gryffindor House and Slytherin House.

It was an opportunity Saturnine and Remus couldn’t pass up, and they had agreed to meet at the gates earlier that day so that she could let him in discreetly. Now, they only had to wait for the old castle to be empty of both staff and students. Then the two of them could put their plan into motion.

Saturnine felt a pang of regret when she saw Harry, dressed in full seeker regalia, walking out of the castle surrounded by his friends. She would have loved to be there to watch the game, but this was one more sacrifice she was willing to make to protect him. She silently wished him luck and dearly hoped he wouldn’t break any bones today.

Another figure caught her attention minutes later—a taller, more imposing silhouette dressed in black from head to toe. Severus didn’t look too happy to go outside as he hurriedly stepped down the corridor, black robes swirling around him like angry wings. Given the pressure his House was under, it was understandable. The animosity towards Slytherin House had reached unprecedented levels when the other three Houses banded against the snakes, and she didn’t envy his position. And if she was absolutely honest with herself, as a former Ravenclaw, she was slightly ashamed of the ravens’ recent behaviour.

Once her brother was out of sight, Saturnine relaxed slightly and eased out of the recess and into the corridor. She felt Remus following her an instant later, and the two wasted no time heading for the dungeons and entering the empty Potions classroom.

“Seriously,” Remus said, lifting his Invisibility Charm. “Remind me again why we’re doing this?”

“I want to see if Severus kept any of Horace Slughorn’s old journals. And he might also have one or two left by Salazar Slytherin himself.”

“I know that,” Remus chided. “I meant why are we doing this,” he waved his hand about, encompassing the empty classroom, “when we could just as well ask Severus for those?”

Reaching the back of the classroom, Saturnine crouched down next to the door leading to the Potions Master’s office. Pulling out her wand, she started disassembling the warding charms.

“If you want to go ask Severus Snape for personal favours, be my guest,” she said, focusing an instant on a clever repelling charm. It took an effort of will to turn it off without damaging it. “I’m sure he’ll be absolutely delighted to help you out.”

Remus grumbled his discontent but said nothing as he kept his gaze steadfastly on the entrance door. Saturnine continued to work on disassembling her brother’s safety measures. Finally, the latch clicked open, and they slipped inside his office.

The dark-haired witch was surprised by what she discovered in the dimly lit room. Her brother’s office was much larger than hers. It had a huge fireplace, a large desk, and more space than she would know what to do with. And all around the room, the shadowy walls were lined with shelves of large glass jars filled with rare species of animals and plants, floating in preserving potions of varying colours.

Moving closer, Saturnine realised what an amazing assortment this truly was. At a glance, she found two medicinal plants she thought were extinct and an unspoiled type of Grindylow said to be impossible to capture. Saturnine would have loved to inspect some of the specimens of her brother’s collection more closely, but it wasn’t that kind of visit. Still, it was as impressive as it was priceless. Clearly, Severus must have spent years assembling everything, and she did not doubt that he still added to the collection often.

Glancing around, she saw that all the jars were carefully labelled with lines of black ink. The tiny, spidery script assuredly looked familiar to her. And a smirk graced her lips when she realised that, after all these years, Severus Snape still wrote like he was afraid he was about to run out of paper. She felt a surge of affection well-up in her as she remembered an eight-year-old Severus teaching her to form letters in the margins of their father’s old newspapers.

Returning to the moment and task at hand, she pointed to a row of dusty old books and journals. “We’ll look around here first. I’ll take the left side; you take the right.”

“Severus will have me hanging by the balls if he catches us,” Remus muttered, but he got to work, anyway.

Crouching in front of the shelves, Saturnine perused the lowest levels first before working her way up. “Oh, tell me part of you isn’t enjoying this—pulling one over him, for old time’s sake?” she asked as her eyes narrowed on a copy of a potions treatise that had to be at least three hundred years old. Damn, but she would have loved to read that one.

“A tiny part of me, yes,” Remus assured her. “But a much, much larger part—let’s call it survival instinct—is screaming at me to run for the hills while I still can.”

Saturnine chuckled at his words. She wasn’t sure how much time they had. Twenty—maybe thirty minutes, at least.

It would take time for all the students to make it to the Quidditch pitch and sit down along the benches. Then the players would gather around and get ready to kick off the ground. They’d fly around a little to greet the crowd, and finally, the balls would be released into the air. She figured they had at least twenty minutes until the game began. After that, it was anyone’s guess.

Saturnine had a feeling today’s game would be over quickly. There was no way the lions and the snakes could play ball for hours without tearing each other apart limb by limb. Either the Seekers would have to be quick about it, or Madam Hooch would put an end to the all-out war and send everyone packing with their ears ringing.

It took Saturnine and Remus less than ten minutes to decide that there was nothing interesting in Severus’ office. She had feared it would be so and had come prepared for the next step. Moving to the door that led to her brother’s private quarters, she knelt down before placing her palm against the wooden surface. She could feel magical energies pulsing through the old oak.

Breaking into Severus Snape’s office had been no simple task. There had been charms all over the place. And the entrance had been warded enough to withstand a small tornado. But something in her brother’s magic had recognised her as family, and that had cut the task’s difficulty in half.

She was counting on her luck holding through for this next part. If not, she had a trick or two up her sleeve. Working for the Ministry had given her extensive experience breaking into other people’s homes. The Auror Corps had a small booklet full of spells designed specifically for that. The existence of that documentation was a well-kept secret, but she’d walked away with a copy nonetheless.

“Paranoid much,” she muttered as her Analysis Charm picked up over a dozen different safety measures entwined on the other side. They were so tightly bunched up together that it was near impossible to tell them apart, and even more difficult to isolate them.

Grunting in defeat, she pulled back before standing up. “Can you hand me a piece of wood to transfigure?” she asked Remus as she switched to her backup plan.

The werewolf handed her a small stool, and she tore it to pieces with a few flicks of her wand. Taking one leg, she transfigured it into a large frame that she stuck to the wall with a charm.

“Do you really think it’s time to decorate?” Remus demanded nervously.

Standing closer, the witch started reciting the charms to turn the frame into a portal that would allow her to cross through. The walls had only half of the protection that had been placed on the door, and that, she could disassemble.

“Be careful to leave everything just as it was,” Saturnine cautioned before stepping through the shimmying portal less than two minutes later.

They arrived in Severus’ living room, and Remus cast a portable Lumos to light up the place. He sent it hovering above the coffee table so that it would illuminate the entire space.

What an enormous space, Saturnine noted, with a touch of jealousy. And is that a kitchenette? Her private quarters didn’t have a kitchenette; aside from her bedroom and shower room, she only had a cramped space with two armchairs and a tiny coffee table barely large enough to qualify as a living room. Damn, but she had been cheated.

Remus didn’t seem as interested in the size of the accommodation as she was, and he’d already started scanning one bookshelf. She moved to another, allowing a small smile to grace her lips. Some things never changed. Severus still loved to read.

***

“It will take time to go through all this,” Saturnine said as they deposited their spoils of war on the coffee table of the Black’s library. The two had duplicated about ten books and journals before the spell she had placed on the Quidditch pitch let her know the game was over. Just as she’d imagined, it had been a quick affair.

They wasted no time leaving and were careful to set everything as it had been before. The frame was disassembled, and the stool returned to its original shape and place. The protective wards were reactivated, and two disillusioned silhouettes ghosted out of the Potions classroom and into the dungeons corridor just in time to see a fuming, brooding Head of Slytherin House barrelling down the stairs. It took no guesswork to know which team had won today.

“If you ever tell your brother about what happened tonight, can you tell him you were alone?” Remus asked, with a remorseful look on his tired face. “I already have so much to apologise for; I don’t want to add to the pile.”

Focusing on the books and journals they had brought back from Hogwarts, Saturnine nodded in understanding. “Of course, Remus.”

She fully expected her friend to leave it at that and was surprised when he kept talking.

“So much I regret already,” he admitted, his voice barely more than a whisper.

Glancing up, she saw that Remus wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was leaning against the unlit fireplace, his gaze lost on the row of shelves that supported the Black’s vast book collection. Saturnine didn’t need to see his face to know what she would find there. She was well acquainted with Remus’ regrets and guilt. The latter stole over her friend’s features every time he spoke to her about Severus.

“When I look back at it with an adult’s eyes, I can’t believe how stupid we were,” Remus added. “Four against one—and we thought we were the good guys.” He let out a harsh, bitter chuckle. “Knowing what I know now, knowing what he’d already been through—that makes me sick.”

Saturnine had half a mind to stop him, but she stayed where she was—kneeling by the coffee table, a pile of hastily duplicated books forgotten in her hand. Even if it hurt to hear it, she knew Remus needed to get the words out sometimes. She wasn’t the Snape he ought to be telling this to, but she listened anyway.

“I don’t know why,” Remus continued, leaning more heavily against the mantelpiece. “Honestly, I have no idea. It was James and Sirius—well, Sirius, mostly—but I don’t know why he singled Severus out like that. It just happened.

“And all the things they did to him—I let it happen; I even helped sometimes. All because I thought it was funny. Dear Merlin, but I thought it was funny.”

The words brought tears to Saturnine’s eyes. No matter how many years had passed, the memories were still fresh in her mind. And she could easily recall that Remus wasn’t the only one who had thought it was funny to hex Severus, to vanish his school books and charm his clothes in Gryffindor red, or whatever else the Marauder had thought of that day. Half the school had thought it was funny, too. Worse still, all the teachers had looked the other way—even when her brother almost lost his life over a prank gone wrong.

It had been hard to live through those years and see the pain and misery this brought to Severus. She had idolised him so much when they were younger, and to see him constantly on the losing side had cut her deep within.

She had tried to help at first; she came up with clever ways to level the playing field and offered her assistance to make the Marauders pay. But Severus flat out refused every single one of her ideas and ordered her, in no uncertain terms, to stay out of it.

His refusal of assistance had both surprised and pained her. But looking at it now, with an adult’s perspective, she understood that Severus had pushed her away to protect her because he didn’t want his little sister to become the Marauders’ next target.

“I’m so sorry,” Remus continued in a guilt-ridden voice. “I meant what I said the other day. I truly regret my part in all this, and I hope Severus will let me apologise sometime.”

The werewolf turned to face her then, and Saturnine saw her friend force a smile on his tired face. It never reached his eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry, ’Nine,” he said. “I bet you have better things to do than listen to me ramble on about past mistakes.”

Despite the pain she felt, Saturnine stood up. She took a step closer to the sandy-haired wizard and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “It’s fine, Remus. I’m your friend, and I’ll always be there when you want to talk—even if the subject hits close to home.”

The werewolf nodded his appreciation, his face displaying all the regret of an adult who knew he could never fix the mistakes he’d made in his youth. She enveloped him in a hug and felt some measure of relief wash over her when she felt him tighten his arms around her back.

The two of them had decided long ago that what had happened at Hogwarts would have no bearing on their friendship. Their time in Normandie had been a parenthesis in their lives: a self-contained event that existed outside of the rest. In that ramshackle of a flat, she wasn’t Severus Snape’s younger sister, and he wasn’t James Potter and Sirius Black’s best friend. They were simply Saturnine and Remus—kindred spirits who needed time to heal their wounds. The two of them had always known their time in France wouldn’t last forever and that, ultimately, they would return home one day.

Foolishly, they never imagined their paths would cross again so many years later. But now they had. And Saturnine realised that telling Severus the truth about Harry was one thing, but telling him the truth about Remus would be a whole different can of worms.