She does not have permission to be here, but for some reason this does not anger him, though it would have done a week ago, and would still do, if she were anyone else.

He remains where he is, out of sight, watching her without allowing himself to realize that it pleases him to do so. She works with a notable economy of movement, as though trying to minimize her presence in a place she cannot help but know is forbidden. It draws his attention rather than deflecting it, no doubt because it is so distinct from the careless way she has always seemed to throw her words about.

Her hair is swept back into a knot at the base of her neck, so that her profile is sharp against the mid-afternoon light glowing behind the laboratory windows. There are new hollows beneath her eyes and her cheekbones, and her hands seem longer and thinner than he remembers them (though he cannot remember when he last spent time observing her hands.) After another moment it becomes clear to him in why he has fallen to studying her: she looks like a woman, a witch in the first flush of her real power, and though this shouldn't disturb him, it does. Because if she is an adult, then so is Potter and all her other unspeakable little friends. And it is no longer sufficient to revile them because they are children, and because the fate of the world should not rest in the hands of children. If they are adults, then they have changed, and he no longer knows them. No longer has any concrete reason to revile them at all.

A quiet, inappropriately amused voice at the back of his brain reminds him that Hermione Granger had pointed all this out to him less than a week earlier. He ignores it.

Luna turns from the table where she has been working to remove a cauldron from where it hangs suspended over the box of Portable Flame. Something in her stance, the quiet competence of her gestures, reminds him of other moments that passed in this classroom a lifetime ago, noted only by him. The serious, smooth planes of a face, the changeable glints of light against hair and skin. Another body, tall and lean, the deftness of other hands, another lyrical name whose syllables he guards unspoken in the recesses of his mind, to prove to himself that once it was in him to be moved simply, innocently, by virtue, and intelligence, and unassuming compassion.

He moves silently from his hiding place and stops just inside the doorway, not speaking until he has managed to discard as useless the reprimands that rise instinctively to his lips. "Miss Lovegood. I didn't expect to find you here."

She jumps, scattering a few drops of incandescent yellow liquid from the vial she is emptying into her cauldron. She winces, then glances up at him briefly, and looks away again to search the work table for a cloth. She finds a clean one near the sink and presses it to her wrist, drawing it away again a few seconds later to reveal a large, angry patch of macerated-looking flesh below the jut of her prominent wrist bone.

He strides forward, more quickly than he means to, and opens the carved doors of a tall cabinet sitting opposite the fireplace. He retrieves a wide-bottomed flask and a roll of white gauze from the store of emergency supplies he keeps there, then turns to the table where Luna stands watching him.

He approaches, placing potion and bandage on the table where she can see them.

Then, wordlessly, he extends his hand.

He has not touched her since the day he threw her bodily from this room. He had hurt her deliberately then, because his anger had demanded it. In the macabre storehouses of his memory there lays a precise knowledge of how fragile a young girl's flesh can be, with how little effort a strong man can leave the impression of his fingers on a thin arm. He knows that if he were to push the sleeve of her robe up far enough he would see the narrow black lines there still. She would not have let Madam Pomfrey heal them. She had promised him that she would keep his secrets.

When she places the hand of her injured arm in his, he uncorks the flask with two fingers and pours the salve over the burn without allowing himself to register relief, or any other less comfortable emotion.

"I didn't mean to startle you," he says, meaning it. "You will need to see a qualified healer. This medicine will briefly arrest the corrosive effects of the potion, but it cannot neutralize them."

"The potion shouldn't be corrosive," she mutters.

He looks over her shoulder into the simmering cauldron. "Dragon's blood, yes? From a Welsh Green. The Dumbledore classification clearly denotes the venomous properties."

"The hummingbird nectar should have stabilized it."

He looks up from the bandage he was pressing to her wrist. "The—what the devil do you think you're brewing?"

She keeps her gaze fixed in the direction of the north window. "I'll tell you if it works."

He stares at her, curiosity and the old, welcome irritation warring for the upper hand in his mind. In the end he abandons both emotions and exhales, looking back down at the wound and making a conscious effort to uncurl his fingers from her wrist.

"Hold out your arm," he says, and takes the gauze in both hands, mummifying Luna's arm nearly to the elbow and sealing the bandages with a sticking charm.

He releases her, and she immediately turns back to the cauldron where she was working when he first entered the room and peers down at the potion inside. The luminous concoction had been aquamarine a mere five minutes earlier, but in the amount of time it has taken to tend Luna's arm the potion has yellowed into a sickly light green.

She stares at it for so long that Snape nearly speaks to her. Then she picks up her wand, as though emerging suddenly from sleep, or enchantment, and vanishes the potion with an unnecessarily extravagant gesture. Assured that she will not see, Snape indulges in a brief, sympathetic grimace. He understands, from extensive personal experience, the frustration she has both concealed and betrayed.

When she turns from the ruin of her potion to the pile of fresh daisy roots near the sink, however, his empathy begins to give way to impatience. He watches in growing irritation as she gathers the roots up in her right hand and reaches for a long silver knife with the left, unaware that he is drawing nearer and nearer to where she stands until he finds himself gazing at the nape of her slender neck.

When next he speaks, she does not jump, though his voice is low and very near to her ear. "Miss Lovegood, perhaps did I not make myself plain enough. You must see Madam Pomfrey immediately, or you will lose the use of that hand."

"That might be true," she says, keeping the back of her head to him with an air of deliberation. "And then again, you might just be telling me that because it suits your purposes. It is difficult to know what to believe, you see."

A thrill of warning raises the small hairs on the back of his neck, and he answers her with the caution of a swimmer, guided by unseen currents into unexpectedly deep water. "I have only lied to you once, to save your life."

"Yes, it's easy to confess to something everyone already knows about," she replies, her voice even, but her knife slicing with excessive force through a daisy root and meeting the table with a solid thunk.

"I am sure that I do not know what you mean." His voice does not tremble, precisely, but it trails to a lower place than usual. He clears his throat. "Miss Lovegood—"

"Fangorn weed," she continues, as though unaware she is interrupting him, "finely shredded, is the final ingredient added to the memory-restorative draught called Tears of Lethe. Once it has been added, the potion is mere minutes from completion."

Snape grows still, distantly aware that he has stopped breathing. Luna continues in a curious, sing-song recitative, reminiscent of her long ago days as a student in his class.

"You were brewing Tears of Lethe the day the school was attacked. When I first saw you, an hour before the Death Eaters came, you were slicing fangorn weed, and if I remember correctly, you added it to the cauldron just before throwing me out of your classroom. So there was time for the potion to finish brewing, and for you to bottle it, before we escaped the castle. My only question is whether you remembered to bring a flask of it with you, or whether you had to leave it behind."

The daisy roots she has been slicing are now the size and consistency of confetti, useless as a base ingredient, but she continues to sift through the pile, selecting the larger bits and shredding them into still smaller pieces. Her face is turned so that Snape cannot read her expression, but she does not appear to see what she is doing with the knife. Her back and shoulders are trembling.

Snape leans forward, just far enough to put himself at risk of being jabbed in the stomach by the vigorous action of her elbow. Then he reaches out and touches the back of her left hand with the tips of his fingers, the voluminous sleeve of his outer robe stretching like a wing to enfold her arm and shoulder. She becomes instantly still, and though he withdraws his hand, he maintains his proximity, aware that it unnerves him as much as it seems to be affecting her.

They together in silence for a moment, Snape opening his mouth and closing it again several times without saying anything. She has demanded an explanation for a crime to which he does not dare confess. He cannot offer atonement, and he cannot bring himself to deceive her further.

A few seconds later Luna lets the silver knife fall to the table with a clatter.

He takes a step back, to conceal his relief. Then he speaks, casting back to the solid ground of their earlier conversation.

"You should see the healers. If you don't, you will ruin that batch of potion as well. If you have no objection to wasting your time, I would prefer you not waste my potions stores."

He is amazed to see her blush slightly. Snape suspects that he has succeeded in his argument simply by reminding her that the materials with which she works do not belong to her. It is a constant surprise to him, how susceptible the innocent are to the mere suggestion of guilt.

He takes his moment of victory to study the other ingredients she has arrayed on the table within reach of her work area, but they make even less sense upon close perusal than they did at first glance.

His next words are carefully chosen, though whether to win some further measure of trust, or to finally drive her from the room, he is unsure. "I...knew, Polyhymnia, your mother. Not well, but well enough. She was...a brilliant witch. But she lacked a grasp of her own limitations."

Luna's back becomes rigid for a moment. Then she spins sharply on her heel and faces him, with a look of such ferocity on her face that Snape takes an automatic step away from her.

It is bewildering—frightening, he does not let himself think—to see her normally serene features so alive and utterly focused on him. "I only mention it," he adds, in a voice so calm and reasonable as to be almost soothing, "because I grow weary of watching this generation repeat the blunders of my own."

She stands staring at him for so long that he wonders whether, at last, he has gone too far. Then she lifts her chin, and when she speaks it is with the evenness and composure he has come to expect from her in the face of every disaster.

"If that's all you think we're doing," she says, "then I'm surprised you didn't drink your poison before I stopped you."

She holds his gaze a second longer, then turns and walks unhurriedly from the room.

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