Note: This fic is canon based. It takes place in the Harry Potter universe with all noticeable characters present, but events, characters attributes such as ages, and backstories are liable to change. This fic is also heavily inspired by the show, Hannibal, though no characters from this fandom will make an appearance (hence why it's not a crossover). So, think of this as a Harry Potter Hannibal AU, and buckle up for all the mind twisting, gory fun!

Full Summary: Auror Hemlock Potter sees things other's can't. Perhaps it was her Peverell blood. Perhaps it was because she witnessed the death of her mother. Perhaps she was simply as insane as the killers she tracked. Or, quite possibly, it was all of the above. When eight young girls go missing from Hogwarts, it's up to Hemlock to find the killer hacking his way through gifted muggleborns. Yet, the closer she gets to unmasking the killer, the more she loses herself to the game of cat and mouse. When the lines begin to blur between hunter and prey, Hemlock will need all the help she can get, even if that help comes from the enigmatic psychiatrist Tom Riddle.

Prologue: Way Down We Go.

Hemlock Potter's P.O.V

The troubled woman sat in the chair, stiff backed, fingers biting into leather, gaze far-flung and taut. A light from outside the window opposite her pilfered into the room, slinking, skulking, sloping over skin, lighting up eyes the colour of snake scales and the highlands of Scotland in spring.

She couldn't hear much. Noise was dulled here, as if she was sinking underwater. Down, down, down, down, until, right there, a raw hum, a throbbing, the beat of her heart echoing in her ear. And she stared, and she sank, and she sank, and she stared.

Sprays and splashes of blood drenched a wall near the blood-soaked carpet of the living room. Through the window, lit with Lumos, she watched a dozen Aurors section off the house like ants protecting the hill. One scanned the very room she sat in, the flash of his enchanted camera, much like her schoolmate had once used, matching the thumping in her ear. Another two levitated the mutilated carcasses, swathed in stasis charms, out into the hallway, through the front door, off to be poked and prodded and pricked in the mortuary of Saint Mungo's.

Anise and Alder Mulciber.

Forty-eight and fifty-one respectively.

Husband and wife.

Cousins too.

This was a tableau of horrific violence. Gruesome carnage. Terrible brutality. And it was here Hemlock Potter, barely nineteen, rigid with fingers ripping into leather, sat amongst ghosts. The last flash of the enchanted camera, the hasty steps of a swift retreat, and finally she was alone.

Alone and sinking.

Hemlock seized a protracted breath. Her chest rising and falling with the soporific virtues of a lullaby. The home was quiet now. Calm apart from the grind of her heart and the rhythmic breath catching in frail rib cage. In, out, batter, beat, and sluggishly, her eyes slid shut.

A burst of green, rancid and fetid, on the back of eyelid. The wail of a woman's dying scream. Hollow.

Hemlock's eyes opened.

She was no longer in the house, the house now clean and lively, speckled with light that late November night. The street was empty too, most at home, gobbling up tea and warmth alike after busy days at the Ministry. Hemlock is across this meandering street, standing next to a blackberry bush, huddled in leaf and twig. The tart scent tickled her noise, hid the stench of herself, masking, cloaking.

She stayed there, shielded by shadow and gloom, and watched. Night was falling. The perfect time. She glanced up through the thicket. The sky was clear, dappled with starlight, a fat, pregnant moon. Her gaze slipped back to the house of Anise and Alder across from her. They haven't shut their curtains, don't even order their countless house elves to do so.

It's almost arrogant. The confidence it won't be them. But it is, it is, and Hemlock watches, waits, slobbering. The moon is out, and night was falling, and Anise and Alder will die by dawn. She could see Anise now, by the window, in her merry pink robes, hair prim and coiled, oiled with… A sniff, lavender.

Angry.

It makes her angry. It shouldn't be lavender. Anise never uses lavender. She always uses rose water tinted with lemon citrus. Anise has ruined everything and-

It doesn't matter. The hunt was on. The teeth are sharp. The moon was full. Hemlock watched as she was joined by her portly husband, two silhouettes back-dropped by candlelight, round and juicy like a veined gooseberry. They've just finished having their tea, Hemlock thinks. Alder kissed his cousinly wife, and there, right there, it was time.

It's that domesticity she hates.

Despises with everything she has.

Sheep.

Sheep in a pen playing house.

The wolf was calling, knocking, blowing down the door-

She doesn't run to the front door. Nothing so enraged or impulsive, though, what was to come would be-

Hemlock her time. Step by step, inch by inch, she slunk across the road, and the couple in the window know and see nothing. They deserve it. Hemlock knows that now. Sheep need to be culled to keep the herd healthy. It will be quiet, it will be quick, and soon, it will all be over.

It's when she gets to the door that it all goes tits up.

Laughter. She heard laughter from Anise, followed by the husky chuckle of Alder, and suddenly, so suddenly, she's livid. The door crumbles under the force of her Bombarda, a castle of cards in a hurricane. The Mulciber wards ring like a siren, informing the inhabitants of an intruder. That's their only protection, that lone ward. They have no others up and armed about their humble abode, they never thought they would need a blood splicing ward, or a stasis ward, or a-

The noise only makes her angrier.

Alder's the first to come running, skidding on the polished floor. He manages to disarm her left hand, swift with his spells from his time spent as head duellist in the defence club at Hogwarts. Rapid but rusty. He misses the signs, the wrong bracing off her feet. She was not left-handed, neither was she right.

She's ambidextrous, rare in a duellist, and with the long cloak, he couldn't see the spare wand rigid in her right hand. She raises it, and-

Alder has time to see it. He knew what was coming next. He has to. It only makes all this better. There's no fancy wand work, she doesn't give him the time to retaliate or protect himself, this isn't a duelling club anymore, this is life and death and-

The slicing hexes don't need it either. They hit their mark. Two through the neck. Powerful. Her favourite curse. She has been practicing it on rats since she was a little child, alone, isolated and-

The first severed the carotid artery. The blood sprayed up the wall in a bowing arch. She could hear it hit the plaster like rain on a tin roof. It's better for it. Bright in the pale moonlight, warm in the flickering candles. The second hits as Alder falls, precise, exact, snapping the neck vertebrae.

He's dead before he thuds to the floor.

Anise comes next. She's running, slipping and flailing in the puddle of her husband, rushing.

Screaming too.

Anise wasn't not a duellist. She only knew minimal spells. She never thought she would need to learn. Her parents, purebloods, never thought their little daughter would be-

She's a pureblood socialite, better with a glass of champagne in her hand at a ball rather than a wand in a dog fight. Hemlock took her time with this one. Let's the rabbit run. It gets the blood thumping, the meat tender, the-

The screaming annoys her eventually.

Anise was running for the floo in the dining room.

Hemlock caught up.

She always catches up.

There's only one slicing hex this time. To the back of the neck, between the C4 and C5 vertebrae. Strong, but not too strong. It breaks her neck, but misses the jugular, peppering the stone hearth of her floo in blood. She too falls, as the screaming twists to a gurgle.

Anise wasn't dead.

This wasn't a fatal wound.

It was never meant to be a fatal wound, unlike her husband.

Hemlock is a surgeon with a wand in her hand. She knows exactly where to cut. Or, she thinks she's a surgeon, but she's not. Not really. She's a butcher slashing chops and flanks.

Anise was paralysed. Still and motionless on the hardwood floor. It didn't mean she felt no pain. It just meant Anise couldn't do anything to stop what was coming next.

Exactly how Hemlock liked it.

A swift weave of her wand, and the ward falls to silence. Hemlock knows the spells for their wards. Of course she does. She's been watching them, waiting for months, taking her time in the blackberry bush in their garden. The fruit was sweet, but these piggy's would be sweeter…

The floo flared to life, a voice, cultured, cold, echoes into the home.

A curse breaker from the warding division of the Ministry.

"This is Dawlish, is everything alright there Mr and Mrs Mulciber? We received a report a few moments ago in the directory that your ward has been breached."

Hemlock came crashing back to herself. Sweaty, breathless, trembling like a new-born fawn. She stood from her seat; the leather clung to her clammy skin, pealing like shedding skin. She stumbled to the front door, drunken almost on her legs, lurching. She threw the front door open, keeping the handle in her hand, cool brass brushing scorching palm, grounding. The Auror on guard blinked owlishly at her.

"I need the incident report from the warding division of the Ministry."

The Auror stuttered, file already in hand, waiting, should she ask for it.

"Oh, yes. Quite right, Sir. Here is-"

As soon as the crisp folder, thin, too thin, was held out, Hemlock snatched it and slammed the door in the Auror's face. She could hear him curse her from the other side.

She didn't care.

She flicked the folder open.

There it was.

Seventeenth of November, nine thirty-six pm, a false alarm.

A false alarm…

The flash of rotten green on the back of her eyelids. The wail of a woman's dying scream. Hollow.

Anise was still alive, bleeding out on the floor, unable to say a single word. Hemlock had to be quick, quick and clever and-

She'd planned for this. She'd learned all the spells for their ward, knew it better than they did, certainly she would know the warding division would get in touch, the new protocol after the calamitous case of Lily and Jam-

She made her way to the floo, one long stride over Anise, sticking close to the masonry, blending with shade. The tip of her wand is cold at her neck, digging into voice box and-

"This is Anise Mulciber."

Hemlock sounded just like her, even haughty, irritated at being interrupted so late at night. The spell worked fantastically. A creation of hers. Snatching voices as she snatches steaks and-

"Hello Mrs Mulciber. Can you confirm your security word for us, please?"

Anise, the real Anise, so silent on the floor, blinks and Hemlock stares at her with a dead gaze, watched as a tear dips from lash to skip down pallid cheekbone, plunging into ear. No help is coming this night. Anise knew that now. She knew, and she could do nothing.

Hemlock likes that.

She likes that a whole fuckin' lot.

It get's her sweaty in another way. Frenzied. The hairs on her arm standing on end, a squirming ball of tension in the bottom of her belly, wiggling.

As with all purebloods, the password's painless to find. So proud of their ancestry, their house, everything Hemlock never had and-

"Highest amongst all."

The motto of house Mulciber.

"Thank you, Mrs Mulciber. We detected a break in your ward?"

Hemlock is getting angry again, she's always getting angry, they're wasting her precious time with Anise.

"Yes, that was me. I accidentally used the wrong spell to close up for the night and, well, I've given Alder a good ol' laugh, haven't I? He always tells me I should leave it to him."

Silence…

"Is there anyone in the house with you at this time, Mrs Mulciber?"

Hemlock's teeth clenched so hard she chipped enamel. However, when she speaks, voice warped by magic, it's easy breezy and full of sunshine. The perfect, docile voice of a housewife.

"I'm just here with my husband. Everything is fine, sir."

The voice on the other side of the floo was quicker to answer and, just like that, Anise's fate was sealed.

"Do you require any further assistance?"

Hemlock grinned, and it was mean, and cruel, and sharp.

Fangs.

She had fangs; she could feel them nip her lip.

"No. Thank you so much for calling. Sorry about the false alarm."

The floo spluttered to an end.

Hemlock stood, one step, two steps, three steps, she was looming over Anise who, still alive, stared back, pupils blown, watery, scared. She's so scared, Hemlock's little lamb, but it will all be over soon.

"And this is where it get's real ugly for you, Mrs Mulciber."

Hemlock snapped back in her own body with a shudder, in the empty dining room, unsure how she got there, when she had moved, face hot, so hot, burning and-

Wet.

Wet. She was crying. Sobbing. She couldn't catch her breath and-

Air.

She needed air.

Hemlock didn't know how she made it outside, or how she shouldered passed the Auror on guard duty, or when exactly the sour taste in her mouth and the spasms in her stomach came from the vomit she threw up on the lawn, but she does, and there was yelling, and she was still sobbing, breathless and burning and-

"Auror Potter! Where are you going! We need the-"

"A vampire! It was a vampire! He's done it before, recently free from Azkaban for good behaviour. This was just a practice run. He should be on file somewhere. Look for an ambidextrous duellist. That's him. You have until tomorrow night to catch him before he strikes again."

"But what about the-"

Hemlock only glanced back once.

"I fuckin' quit."

"You-… You can't just… You have to… But the-"

Hemlock didn't listen. She couldn't. Noise is dulled here, and she could still feel the tear of sinew and muscle between her teeth, hear the vampire's voice in her head, whispering, taunting, taking. She's not sinking underwater, she never was.

She was drowning in blood and ghosts and-

Hemlock Potter walked away, into the night, ambling, leaving.

She didn't look back again.

No one ran after her.

This wasn't a bloody movie.

Five Years Later…

Hemlock stood at the head of the hall in the Auror Training Department of the Ministry of Magic. Behind her, the images of Anise and Alder Mulciber flashed and flickered with each sweep of her wand, flipping through pain, skimming through memory, tapping through death. She was calm when she spoke, calm and collected and a little bit cold. So far removed from the nineteen-year-old girl who had fled a crime scene in tears.

"Murder is as old as our civilization. It's a brutal touchstone of humanity. The three F's and the big K. Food, fucking, fluids and killing. We've all thought about it, one time or another. In defence, for greed, in the heat of the moment. It will be your job as Aurors to understand those many faces, to know them as intimately as you do your own. So, look. Look closely. Look and think about killing Mrs Mulciber. Come to know the predator's face as you know your own. See what drove him to such lengths."

The hall was silent, rapt with attention. Another flick, another image. Anise smiling with her husband.

"Why did this woman here, so full of smiles and laughter and lavender, deserve it? What caught Fowley's eye?"

The sound of quills scribbling on parchment, a few in the front row, fresh faced, bushy tailed, naive, tried bravely to snare her gaze. One even tried to wink, poor bastard. Hemlock didn't meet their offer. She stared ahead, straight and true as an arrow. Most of these wouldn't cut the upcoming exam.

Even less would make it past the first-year mark.

A few, too brash and ballsy, would die in the line of duty.

Even here, she was sitting with ghosts.

Teenage, brand-new from Hogwarts, ghosts who were too innocent to really know what they were getting into. Just like she had been. Poor bastards indeed. Or perhaps she was the poor bastard. It was, after all, her job to get them ready.

The auditorium door creaked open. A man, austere, robustly built and towering, slipped through the crack and gently shut the door behind him, leaning back against the wall. His face was like marble, clean cut and keen, the surplus of gnarly knotted scars like gold veins through white snow. With one last flick of her wand, the images disappeared.

"Alright. Times up. I want a twelve-inch essay on my desk by Monday morning detailing why you think Fowley targeted the Mulcibers. And I better not see any of my own report lifted and repeated back to me. Ask Diggory why that is a bad idea."

A mousy, timid little girl upfront stuttered, waving her hand in the air as if they were all still in the potions classroom of Hogwarts. Six months. She would last six months as an Auror, Hemlock knew.

She'd either quit, or she was going to get killed, not the type to be brave enough to fire a spell first. They'd catch her unaware, as she asked them nicely to put the galleons back and-

"Diggory was kicked off the program last year."

For the first, and only time, Hemlock met her hazel eye, brow cocked.

"Exactly. Now, get out."

A flood of movement took place as the pupils scurried to put away parchment and textbooks in satchels, swamping from the room in a river of chittering chatter. Hemlock Potter didn't notice the few smitten glances thrown her way, but the man at the door did, smirking. Only when they were completely alone in the dimly lit lecture hall did the sombre scarred man leave his perch by the door, sauntering closer, sandy, unkempt hair glittering.

"Miss Potter."

It wasn't a question. He knew who she was. Most in the Auror department, especially those in the EVU: extreme violence unit, did. She blindly turned to pluck up her glasses from her desk, thin metal, rounded frames familiar in her hand. Welcome. Distracting. She balanced them on her nose, halfway down, just so, so the frames blocked his eyes from sight as he came to a stop before her.

She couldn't stand eye contact.

"I'm head Auror Remus Lupin. I lead the behavioural division in the EVU."

Hemlock crossed her arms over her chest.

"We've met."

She can see the slight curl of his lip, a loop, a snarl on any other man, a malformed smile on this one. Idly, she wondered if he saw a ghost in her too, as she saw ghosts everywhere.

"Yes. We had the disagreement over the age of hire in the Auror department."

Disagreement was putting it lightly. Lupin had wanted to keep it the same, sixteen for training, eighteen for fieldwork. Too young. Too innocent. They didn't understand-

She'd threatened to burn his office down in a fit of rage after his file to keep the age of hire won out in the Wizengamot ballot, Hemlock's request to rise being thrown out without a glimpse.

Yet…

Neither she nor he broach the other time. The time of newly formed families, happy and cheery, with a new-born daughter, Lupin the school friend of her proud Auror father. A time so long ago, forgotten, buried when they lowered Lily and James Potter into their graves.

They had so many friends, her parents. Friends just like the man before them. Friends who, once they left that rainy funeral, never came back to see the little orphan girl ditched on the doorstep of her aunt and uncle. She wasn't bitter. Sour, yes, sour in a way one never forgot, and not really forgave, but never begrudge.

Sometimes, she wished she had the chance to walk away and never look back too.

Perhaps he had focused, as any Auror would, on tracking down their killer, ignoring the orphan left behind, blinded by vengeance, thirsting for justice. It had all been hopeless. Her parents murderer was never found, and by the time anybody thought to look back for her, she was already gone, taken in by her aunt and uncle. Perhaps the killer was dead now too. Dead and forgotten.

"I see you've hitched your Griffin to a teaching post. I can't say I'm not surprised. From what I understand, you've been known to be… Antisocial."

Hemlock did chuckle at that, dry and wry like the crunch of autumn leaves under boot. She had been called worse.

"If you think teaching is about being social, you're deeply mistaken. I talk. They listen. Or don't and fail."

And get fuckin' killed.

She didn't say that. She didn't have to. Just as she didn't have to see Lupin's eye to know it was amber, clever and biting, a man who already knows that all too well.

"Where do you fall on the spectrum?"

His voice is soothing, Hemlock thinks. Gentle in a bestial way, with the rhythm and syntax of a rolling purr.

"My Griffin, as you politely put it, is tethered closer to Autism than sociopathy. So says the preliminary psychiatric report the Ministry made me sit."

Lupin knows this. As the department knows this. As every fucker knows this. Lupin wasn't the type of man to come strolling into her lecture hall without reading every scrap of information recorded in her file. Forearmed is forewarned, they say, and, funnily, when handling an open flame like Hemlock, people needed all the protection they could get their grabby hands on. His worn shoe scuffled on the floor, a breeze of rubber on granite. He was uncomfortable. Whatever came next wasn't going to be pretty.

"But you can empathize with sociopaths, narcissists and psychopaths."

Hemlock shrugged.

"I can empathize with anybody. Less to do with personality disorders than an… enthusiastic imagination and a thorough read of the evidence at hand. Everybody can, if they bothered to see."

Lupin did smile then, full of sharp teeth and intense lines.

"Can I burrow that enthusiastic imagination?"

Lupin talked lowly on their way up the Ministry, floor by floor, to the highest offices up top, where the heads of departments sat on thrones, glowering over the masses of faithful workers.

"Over the last eight months eight girls have been abducted from their House dormitories at Hogwarts, one for each month."

Hemlock waited until their company filed out the lift to answer, hordes tapering the higher they got.

"At last count it was seven. When did you mark the eighth?"

A cutting glance, fast, fleeting.

"About three minutes before I walked into your lecture hall."

Hemlock skimmed her teeth with her tongue, a hammering beginning to strike at her temple. Merlin, not another headache.

"Abductions? By your selective word choice, I'm guessing you've discovered no bodies."

From the corner of her eye, as they hit the final floor before their stop, she saw Lupin shake his head, sandy curls whipping tired skin.

"Absolutely nothing. No signs of a struggle. No broken wards. No bodies. No body parts. Nothing that can come out of a body. Not even a trace of magic. They go to bed, their housemates see them, say goodnight, and by morning they're gone. Nothing but crumpled sheets left behind."

Lupin dipped out the lift as it chimed for the final time. Hemlock stalled.

"Then those girls weren't taken from where you think they were."

Lupin frowned at her as she rolled past.

"Then where were they taken from?"

His office wasn't hard to find. The last in a long line of perfunctory, uniform doors. He even had a little placard, shiny and bronze. Her hand dithered on the door handle. Where? Not in their own bed. Not Hogsmeade either… Close, but not too close. Somewhere dark, where secret things bloomed and-

Hemlock shook her head. A prickle of heat flushed her cheeks. If the circumstances weren't so dire, Hogwarts had, after all, been violated by some unknown assailant, eight girls were missing, Hemlock with her headaches would turn around and march away.

She'd promised herself she would never do… this again.

Never lose so much of herself and-

The fact of the matter was eight girls had gone missing in as many months. One or two could be brushed off as teenage runaways. As they had been. Number four began the investigation. By the sixth, Hogwarts was threatening closure, only saved by the fact it was only muggleborns going missing, but now, at number eight, even the bigoted Governors who couldn't give two shits about muggleborns would start to lose face.

Nonchalantly, as if she could remotely be anything nonchalant, Hemlock shrugged.

She almost felt normal.

Almost.

"I don't know yet."

She didn't wait to be invited in, as she turned the handle and entered the office. It was roomy and airy, nothing like her cramped teaching quarters, and a complete mess. Littered with papers, files, one wall holding an inflated map of Hogwarts, seven dots for seven missing girls, charmed photo's staring back, smiling, waving, merry and alive.

Hemlock froze in the middle of the chamber, observing. The tickle at her temple bowed to a beating drum. Lupin spoke up from her back, he too looking at the mass of faces who, unlike these moving images, were likely dead and brutalized in a ditch somewhere.

"They were all abducted on a Hogsmeade Friday, so they weren't reported missing by their housemates until classes on a Monday. However the killer's getting in and out of Hogwarts wards, and moving unseen, he needs the weekend to do so, and the bustle of a Hogsmeade trip to cover his tracks."

Lupin slunk passed her, prowling, straight to his desk to pick up a sheet of parchment. He tacked it onto the wall with a sticking charm, right by Gryffindor tower. The eighth girl smiled back, twirling in her Yule ball dress.

She twirled through Hemlock's mind too. Dancing. Spinning. Sinking.

"Number eight?"

Lupin nodded as he took a step back to regard the wall.

"Emily Corringham. Muggleborn. Top of her class in Divination and Astrology. A bright young girl who had a brighter future. She vanished Friday, after she complained of a headache and retired from Gryffindor's common room to get an early night sleep. She was typically an early bird, her housemates said, so when they awoke and saw her bed empty, they thought she was already in the library studying. More Ravenclaw than Gryffindor, they joked. They only began to worry on the Sunday, when they noticed she had missed dinner two days in a row. When she failed to meet her boyfriend that night for their scheduled date at the Black Lake, he came to McGonagall and informed the head of house about her disappearance. He thought she might have been called home to visit her parents and forgot to tell him…"

The clock on the wall ticked.

"The first seven are dead."

It was a cold thing to say, taciturn and detached and, maybe, slightly cruel. Yet, it was the truth. Seven girls dead. The killer wouldn't take an eighth if he had seven at home to play with. The first had been dead for as long as the second was taken. The third the same, and so on. One after the other after the other. Falling like dominoes.

But why?

What was it the killer wanted?

What was he seeing when he tagged these girls for hunting?

Lupin concurred, tight lipped, polite enough not to, unlike Hemlock, verbally denounce any hope to this sea of grinning muggleborns.

"We've turned our focus on Emily."

Hemlock crept closer to the map, searching, one by aching one, each photo.

"Without my glasses, I might mistake these for the same person. Muggleborn. Intelligent. Medium height, five-five to five-nine. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Pale, wind chaffed skin. Athletic build."

Anew, Lupin hummed his agreement.

"Roughly the same age, years five and six. Same height, same weight, same cookie cutter home. Two parents, both working, middle class. What is it about all these girls that's enticing the killer?"

Hemlock tutted, head tilting, thumbing the edge of a photo, a girl in a quidditch robe, seeker for Hufflepuff.

"Not all. One. He's a dragon stockpiling his gold. No matter how shiny the next gem is, how glittering silver can capture moonlight, he doesn't care. He only wants gold… His golden egg. Hidden here, in this stash, is his one true victim. The golden egg."

Lupin sidled up to her.

Hemlock immediately pulled away.

"So, this is the aftermath? Or is he building up to the grand finale?"

She shook her head.

"These girls aren't bookends, Lupin. Each one means… Something. My guess? She won't be the first and she won't be the last. He'll want to hide his golden egg in the waters of the banal, to bury how… Special she is. Because if he sees it, everyone else must do too. That's what I would do. Wouldn't you?"

Another shuffle of shoe sole. He was uncomfortable again. For a sick moment, that was exactly what Hemlock wanted him to be. Uneasy and achy, just as she was. She bloody needed a pain potion for the migraine flowering at the side of her skull. And, while she was at it, a bottle of Ogden's for her foul temper.

"I'd like you to get closer to this. I think-"

She didn't let him finish.

"You have Malfoy in Wiltshire and Longbottom down a floor. They do the same thing I do."

He chuckled at her.

"That's not really true, now, is it? You have a specific way of thinking."

No.

No.

"Nothing specific or special about it. I see, I connect, and I conclude. A pixie can do the same, given the training. Get Malfoy or Longbottom."

Lupin was quick to retort, sending his riposte soaring at her as speedy as a snitch.

"You make jumps you don't explain. You see things no evidence could match. You-"

"The evidence explains all."

Silence. Lengthy. Tight. When Lupin eventually countered her, it was through gritted teeth. Grieved.

"Then, Miss Potter, help me find some evidence."

She didn't need as much time to deliberate her next words as he had.

"No."

And that was that. No more, nothing left, riverbanks dry and cracked. Scorched earth beneath bleeding feet. She turned to leave. She made it to the door, partway to freedom.

"Your father wouldn't have turned his back on innocent people who needed his help. You can't either. You don't have it in you."

Her wand was out and aimed at his throat before he could blink.

His eyes flashed amber.

"Don't you dare talk to me about my father, Lupin. Not after all this time. Not you. Not you."

He had no right. Never. Maybe if he would have bothered to visit once, just fuckin' once. Maybe if she had grown up with tales of her father, given by one of his dearest friends, she might be more like him. But Remus Lupin never came, especially after the arrest of her father's other friend, Sirius Black, and here she was, a resounding disappointment on all fronts.

Ah, well, would you look at that. Perhaps she was bitter. Bitter and black and burning like good coffee.

Morgana, she was barely stable enough to-

Remus Lupin didn't have the right.

By the way he cowed, head and gaze dropping, he knew it too.

She held her wand straight, still, sincere. She held it for a long time. Then he looked up, met her eye again, and he-

He smiled.

Her wand dropped and she fled.

Hemlock left work early that day. She went back to her apartment on the outskirts of Diagon Alley, alone. She downed a bottle of pain relief potion followed by sleeping draught and she, as always, had nightmares till daybreak.

Maybe Remus was right.

Perhaps she was like her father.

Soured and shrivelled, but still a stag.

For, the next morning, despite it being the last thing she should do, she found herself, again, outside his office. Or, reasonably probable, she was trapped in a self-destructive cycle, only happy when she was breaking.

He smiled at her as if he knew she would be back all along.

Hemlock hated him for it.

But never as much as she hated herself.

Thoughts?