"Very good, Mr. Longbottom -- very good, indeed!", said Professor Snape, thinly smiling for once as he inspected Neville's Mithiridate Potion, which he had made Neville create, without help from Hermione, in a cauldron in front of the class. "That is precisely how it should look, taste, smell -- and behave."

"Thank you, sir," replied Neville, whose calm demeanor made him almost unrecognizable as the famously clumsy Longbottom of yore.

No one had ever expected to hear Professor Snape praising Neville Longbottom, least of all the professor himself. But things had changed since the previous school year.

It was now common knowledge that Severus Snape had spent several years playing a very dangerous role: that of the double agent. In order to seem the perfect servant of Voldemort, it had been necessary for him to be publicly cruel towards nearly all non-Slytherins, but especially to all Gryffindors -- and particularly to Harry Potter and his circle of friends.

Tormenting young Potter and his associates came easily to Snape -- partly out of Snape's hatred for the long-dead James Potter, the man who a younger Severus Snape alternately admired and envied, and partly out of Snape's own jealous realization that Harry would, in terms of popularity, eclipse even the well-beloved James and Lily Potter. But something had happened to Professor Snape over the summer. He wasn't exactly friendly to Harry, Ron, Hermione and Neville, but neither did he go out of his way to harrass them. This was enough to make Potions classes a good deal more bearable for all concerned.

But as much as Snape had changed, Harry and Neville had changed even more.

They were both calm, competent and eager to learn, especially Neville. No more did Neville stammer and stutter his way through class; he could now hold beakers with a hand as steady as a rock. Even on those increasingly rare occasions when Professor Snape would deliberately try to unnerve him in front of the class, Neville would proceed, unfazed, and provide concise and correct answers to the toughest questions Snape could throw at him. He and Hermione were now Snape's best students, with Harry close behind.

And all, Professor Snape realized, because of one Marcus Reader, M.D.

It was a realization that wasn’t entirely comfortable.

Clarice Starling lay in the large bed, her arm thrown protectively over her lover's chest. Hannibal Lecter was fast asleep -- the morphine derivatives he used as painkillers saw to that -- but she could not sleep, not yet.

With her free hand, and with the utter quiet she knew how to keep, Clarice slowly, carefully, pulled the coverlet up over Dr. Lecter's chest. Then she withdrew her arms from him and, pausing to kiss him gently on the cheek, slipped out of bed and out of their bedroom, closing the door behind her as she left.

So much had happened in the past few months, so many events and experiences, good, bad and unclassifiable, that even the comforting structure of her own memory palace was not sufficient to shield her from the occasional feeling of being totally overwhelmed. It wasn’t bad in the daytime, when she had her work and her classes to keep her busy; she was grateful to Hannibal that he had insisted she continue her Auror training. But, in the dark of night, when all was quiet, it all would hit her in a rush and she would find herself fleeing their bedroom for a quiet spot in the mansion, as far away from Hannibal’s preternatural hearing as she could get, so she could cry until the tears would no longer come.

Clarice always knew that, actuarially, he was supposed to die first. He was a good three decades older than she was, after all. But knowing something on an abstract level and being confronted with its cold stark reality are two different things. Her emotional self expected him to be immortal, impervious to all harm, as physically untouchable as he was inhumanly strong and intelligent.

It was a shock finding out that he was mortal after all.

Tonight, the shock was worse than usual. She had barely made it down the stairs to the ground floor when she found herself so racked with sobs that she could barely stand. She staggered into Hannibal's study and threw herself down onto the leather couch therein, her hair plastered to her face and head by tears and sweat, to cry in peace.

But, even in the depths of her grief, the discipline of the memory palace was not totally overthrown; a part of her mind kept watch for disturbances in her immediate area. Thus it was that she heard the faint sounds of an intruder. She had her hands on his throat before she realized it was Sirius Black, who was staying overnight before heading off on yet another mission for Dumbledore.

"Remind me never to sneak up on you," said Sirius wheezingly as a chagrined Clarice found some soothing blackberry cordial in Dr. Lecter’s minibar. "I was just about to drop into the kitchen for a midnight snack when I heard this rustling in the study." He took the glass from her hand and downed it in one gulp. "Aaaahhhhh! Much better, thank you!"

"Watch it, Sirius," Clarice said, the ghost of a smile on her tear-bloated face. "Keep that up and you’ll become an alcoholic."

"Me, alcoholic? Never!" he replied, handing her the empty glass. "So," he said, turning to look her in the eye, "I hope I wasn’t intruding."

"Well, you were, but that’s all right – it’s just my nightly ritual nowadays." Clarice looked away for a moment.

Sirius said nothing in response; he merely waited for her to continue. Eventually, she did.

"I never thought I’d lose him, Sirius," she said, her voice trembling. "Never in my wildest, worst dreams did I ever think I’d lose him. Somehow I always thought that I would be the one to go first, that I’d be the one to slip up and get myself killed --" She froze, realizing she had said too much.

"Get yourself killed? In what way, Lucy?"

She forced herself to remain quiet until her heart rate had dropped out of stroke range.

"Sirius," she said at last, "there’s something I have to tell you."

He took both her hands in his. "No, you don’t," he said, gently and quietly. "Harry’s already told me, Clarice."

Her eyes went wide. "He has." It was a statement, not a question.

"He told me a month ago."

"And… how do you feel about it?"

Sirius laughed, a short, self-depreciating bark. "Well, at first I wasn’t too crazy about the notion of a cannibal, even a reformed one, as Harry’s legal guardian. But I’d seen too much of you, both you and of Dr. Lecter, not to know that you are both dedicated to doing whatever you can for Harry."

"The Cannibal and the Death Angel," Clarice muttered. "We make a fine set of foster parents, don’t we?"

"You certainly do," said Sirius, and hugged her to him, just as a fresh round of sobs started to burst forth from her body.

He held her close, rocking her back and forth in his arms, until she was too exhausted to cry any more; then, taking her by the hand as if she were a toddler, he led her back up the stairs to her bedroom.

She paused just before opening the door to the bedroom. "Thank you, Sirius," she whispered. Then she slipped inside and closed the door.

Neither of them had any idea that Dr. Lecter had, some time before, himself slipped quietly out of bed to observe the goings-on in his study, and had only been back in bed a few moments before Clarice herself had returned.

Roger and Roselyn Granger were closing up shop for the day. There had been one badly abcessed tooth, the owner of which had stubbornly refused to seek care for until his wife had literally dragged him to the clinic, one routine wisdom tooth extraction, and a slew of fittings for braces. All in all, a fairly typical day at the Granger Clinic.

"Wonder how Hermione’s getting on over at Hogwarts?" said Roselyn as her husband set the alarm for the night.

"She’s probably just fine, Rose," a long-suffering Roger replied. "We just got an owl from her this morning, remember?"

"Well, I think that she’s not telling us all she knows," retorted Roselyn as they walked to the car park behind the clinic.

Before they got that far, two cloaked, silver-masked figures stepped out from the night-time shadows, both of them making gestures towards the Grangers. Two bright flashes of light later, the Grangers slumped to the ground, unconscious.

"Where shall we put these, Wormtail?" asked the taller of the two, who was picking up Roger Granger in his arms. "The cavern is fast filling up with Muggle captives."

"Oh, I’m sure the Dark Lord will have a place for them," snickered Wormtail, who had a firm grip on Roselyn. "Come along. We can’t afford to be seen here."

They then Disapparated, taking the Grangers with them.