Past midnight. Stairwell, second and third floors.


Felix jumped off the stairwell just as it shifted off, dropping barefoot on the upper landing and quickly dashing into the closest unlit corridor. He waited there and pressed himself against the cool stone wall. How many more floors? Four? The Room of Requirement was so high up and it was difficult enough sneaking all the way up here from the dungeons.

He had woken from a strange dream. The kind that mixed together all the forests in which he ever wandered - Siberia, Edinburgh, the Forbidden Forest - in a great, shifting one. And he had been running, running away from the howling of wolves.

But in his dream, Feliks stopped running. He stopped and thought to himself that he would rather run towards the howling, that he didn't want to be afraid. And this is what had torn him from sleep, the panic of running into danger despite his fear.

The windows in the Slytherin dorms only let on to the lake, which was beautiful but also a little stifling sometimes. So he had thrown on his jeans and an oversized jumper, and borrowed some of Bobbie's pudgy features to confuse any non-Slytherin prefects who might glimpse him tonight.

Feliks wanted to see the view of the grounds from high up. It made him feel safe. He had heard about the Room of Requirement and wondered if it would have the exact room for him: a room with the perfect view.

For some reason, his dream had made him want to get out of the dungeons and do something. Usually he would sneak away into the kitchens for a hot cocoa instead.

Footsteps. He glanced in a panic down the passage and quickly made his way to the closest door, trying the handle. Locked. Feliks slipped over to the next one, which gave, and he found himself in a dark and empty classroom. His heart was thumping hard.

He strained his ears for the footsteps outside, hoping the prefect or caretaker hadn't spotted him going in.

It had been a week since she’d interrupted[1] his late evening work. His cousin had remained uncharacteristically frosty towards him since the unscheduled meeting. Ordinarily this would not bother the stoic, resilient wizard, but in all the years he had known his cousin by marriage, she had never exhibited this behaviour. It had been an edge her late husband readily wore instead.

And it wasn’t as if Ignan thought the conversation was pointless. It was genuinely necessary, but he loathed such tasks. His style to address problems with students was to issue them a detention hanging upside-down from the classroom rafters, or conducting manual labour without a wand, or if it wasn’t to address misbehaviour, to take out adolescent frustration with curses and duels. Conversation, reasoning and concern was Greyfriar’s job, as far as his Deputy was concerned. Ignan’s strengths lay in discipline, organisation and order. Emotions were the opposite, especially when it came to teenagers.

So when Ignan had a task to do, which he was loathe to do, he kept himself busy with everything else he might have put off. For despite being a bit of a grumpy arsehole, he was still human, and he too could procrastinate, albeit productively.

Miranda had been most concerned for his health after the duel[2], but had too voiced her disgust that someone would adopt the face of a first year to terrorise werewolves. She had the objective view, of a healer, that every life had value, even werewolves. Before he had resorted to teaching for income, he had been far more preoccupied with what value a werewolf’s death had from the buyer. He had used the sort of twines he’d encased from the scene, albeit cruder version, and knew its potential strength.

Fate, as ever, had a way of delivering him to situations he was doing his best to ignore.

Ordinarily a late Tuesday evening would not have him prowling the corridors, but he knew his wife was working overnight at the hospital on a particularly difficult case. He would likely wake alone in the cottage, even at dawn. So he had busied himself with marking, but found himself oddly restless. Peeves, the school’s resident poltergeist, had been particularly active of late. While the spirit had given him an escape from the intense conversation with Camille, he had decided to compose some new ditties, including one about Professor Honeysuckle being left at the altar at her wedding to a muggle. Every teacher knew never to mention weddings in front of Lillian, to prevent her blubbering, but Peeves had taken great delight in her tears. She’d fled the castle that afternoon, citing she would not be coming back to teach Muggle Studies until the tirade stopped.

Walking the corridors this late would increase the chance he’d encounter either the poltergeist or the Slytherin ghost, who was the only other one Peeves would heed. However, ghosts didn’t have footsteps, and here, ascending the stairs, were a pair. They rounded the corner into a passage, and quickened. A student was out of bed!

There was a muffled, but telling, sigh of a door hinge, and the movement of air only a seasoned Hogwarts patroller might perceive. Three, almost four years of these night patrols, paid off. The scurry appealed to his old joy of hunting prey. Only not werewolves, but restless students. He’d find this one and send them packing to bed with a sore foot, so they were disinclined to walk further than necessary.

The tall Professor walked slowly but surely, not seeking to muffle his boots, wand in hand, ears keenly listening. He paused by the first door, leaned his left ear towards it, and held his breath. He could charm to reveal their presence, but where was the fun in that?

It was all quiet, so he focused his senses ahead to the empty passageway. No, his quarry was most certainly in one of these rooms, laying low. There were few routes away, so he took his time, boots stepping slowly, slowly, closer to the next door, where he lit his wand with pale blue light, sweeping it across the floor, as if to look for footprints, but instead delighting in the potential dread induced in whoever might be hiding behind the wood…

1.	20th March, 2012 While I Wond’ring Pause - Camille interrupts Ignan over worries about someone attacking the two Gryffindor werewolves, using the first year’s face
2.	17th March, 2012 - I Mark, in Vision of Delight, the Sage

Barefoot and silent, he slowly backed away from the classroom door. Feliks held his hands out behind him so that he wouldn't walk into a chair or desk and give himself away to the person in the passageway.

If they knew he was in here then they would already have burst in, right? But he was sure he could still hear footsteps out there. He glanced over his shoulder at the window - it let in the only light he could see by, from the sliver of moon in the night sky. Feliks made his way to it and looked out from the third floor at the grounds outside. It was a cold, pretty night.

He should have brought his broom with him! Then he would have gotten his view and stayed out of trouble.

Click opened the door and he turned around, already drawing breath to make excuses.

"I was ju--" Feliks stopped when he saw the unmistakeable outline of their deputy headmaster. Oh. This was so much more bad than he thought it was. His face shifted, dropping all pretence of Bobbie's identity. Storm would be able to tell, especially because Feliks hadn't taken on the whole of his housemate's looks - only enough to confuse prefects from other houses.

His stomach boiled over with a mix of frustration and guilt, and he wondered maybe if it was better to just jump out the window without a broom even.

"Um," the boy wizard stood straighter like he would in Defences class, and avoided looking his teacher in the eye. "Good evening, professor."

The student’s silhouette was apparent before the silver light of the moon falling through the window. They were younger, foolish, and protested rather than hid. Arrogant. Yes, of course it was…

“Spectre.”

The greeting was chilly, and lacked any greeting, despite the boy’s attempt to greet him politely. He was stood ramrod straight under his gaze. Like a soldier on duty, caught by his commanding officer. Just like the Durmstrang boys would do if caught, frozen to the spot, staring straight ahead. Interesting. His ebony wand twitched in his hand, keen to issue a hex, drag the boy back to his dormitory by the ear, or send him literally hot-footing there. Instead he took two slow paces into the room, looking the first year up and down. No, he’d hear this excuse for sport.

“Explain.”

He held his breath and braced himself, expecting either a cutting comment or a hex to be the next thing out of Storm's mouth. But no - he was being asked instead to explain. How was he going to explain? It meant having to think about why he left the dorm at all.

"Um," he looked down at his bare feet for a second, toes wiggling. "I had a nightmare. I wanted to think about but I... I don't know."

It was hard to explain. He had found the dungeons stifling and contained; if it were up to him, if there were no rules and no dangers, he would have gone walking on the grounds. Out in the open, walking and walking, thoughts rolling and rolling.

Feliks lifted his shoulders into a shrug. "I felt like I could not think, downstairs. I wanted to come upstairs and look out a window," he could hear how silly that sounded even as he said it. "I was going to go straight back to my common room afterwards."

The young wizard stopped himself, on the verge of over-explaining. Storm didn't need to know anything else. Feliks' feet were cold and his pensive mood lost to the frustration of being caught.

There was nothing he could do about it now and he wanted to get it over with.

“… and look out a window.”

The Professor’s wand twitched impatiently. Holding himself back from the thought of dangling Feliks Spectre out of said window to ask him if he appreciated the view. He’d do it to family, like his father had, but Greyfriar might have something lengthy to say to him, and that would be tedious. This wasn’t Durmstrang.

Instead he closed in slowly, eyes not leaving the boy’s pale moon face, giving all the impression he was searching the young man’s mind for confirmation of this, as he had on their first meeting at the Spectre manor.

“You cannot outrun thoughts,” he advised, “as much as you cannot outrun me.” Yet. He was certain the wand in the clearing was not this slip of a boy.

He had closed in now five feet of the boy, maintaining his intense stare. He twitched his head in reference of the window. At once the air around them moved, the glass of the window had vanished, leaving the classroom suddenly open to the elements and the night’s sky unbroken by the criss cross of the lead.

He almost took a step back, catching the movement of Professor Storm's wand. Feliks stood his ground though. It had been drilled into him over the years not to flinch or express fear of punishment - if anything he was more likely to protest in anger. It wasn't like he had disrupted a class or hurt someone! Nobody would even know if he hadn't been caught.

But again, the old wizard surprised him. His eyes remained on Storm warily, and he set his jaw at the statement: the accusation of running, rife with the implications of cowardice. He wasn't running from his thoughts!

The dark gaze followed to the window and Feliks' stoic pretension broke into a genuine expression of puzzlement. He unstuck himself from the floor and moved cautiously to the opening free of barriers. In the cold air, his breath left him as a fog and his toes tingled. It didn't matter. Feliks stared out at the unobstructed view for a second.

A crescent moon. Not a full one, like in the dream. And beneath it was the world, which held as much promise and adventure as ever.

"Professor..." he was staring out so hard, trying not to blink, his eyes stung. "Are you afraid of werewolves?"

Strange boy, Feliks Spectre. They both gazed out upon the dark Hogwarts landscape. Pensive, the boy asked a question. The man paused, considering his answer.

“We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.” An educator’s response, perhaps set against ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ which was often rang true when experimenting with magic.

The breeze ruffled sheets of parchment tacked to the classroom noticeboard.

“Are you afraid?”

He wrinkled his nose a little at the answer - because it sounded more like a lesson than an answer. But Professor Storm was old and he knew a lot of things. Maybe he was not afraid of werewolves. Feliks realised he couldn't imagine the old wizard being afraid of anything, not even werewolves.

             “Are you afraid?”

Was he? The boy looked down at his hands, frowning. Fur grew suddenly all across the back of his hands, and his nails grew long and sharp and claw-like. Feliks remembered the gloves[1] that were sent to him.

"I don't know," his hands returned to normal and he looked up through the open window again. "I don't want to be scared."

And then, more emphatically, he added: "I'm not afraid of Lucinda or Greer," as if the very idea offended his young sensibilities, "or the Headmaster."

1.	19th Feb - O Mother Tell Your Children

“I don’t want to be scared… I’m not afraid…” Ignan’s pale gaze observed the boy’s metamorphmagus skill, illustrating as he spoke.

“Why would you be?” This could turn into a philosophical discussion. The Professor had not anticipated nor intended that pursuing a student out of bed would lead to discussions of fear and control. Nor was it the time to suggest Feliks should be scared of Lucinda and Greer because they were witches, and wizards should never underestimate witches. As for the Headmaster, he was a bear of a man but not anything sinister. That was half the reason they continued his appointment as Deputy, to provide that balance.

He almost unnoticeably slipped his wand away into his long black robes, which came to the ankles of his boots and fell just short of the end of his white shirt cuffs. The heavy folds were unbothered by the draught from the missing window. Meanwhile the boy was barefoot. The cold would curtail this conversation or pin it keenly in his memory if prolonged.

“What do you know of werewolves, Spectre?”

He looked away from the view, blinking several times as his gaze adjusted from afar to the much closer sight of the professor. Why would he be afraid? Feliks shrugged - it was a given, that werewolves were scary. They were the monsters who grabbed children[1] from their sleep on cold, dark nights.

But he was not a little child. So he should not be afraid.

           “What do you know of werewolves, Spectre?”

"I know they are strong and fast and dangerous but only on a full moon," he answered, thinking of all he had learned in the copy of The Lycan that he'd duplicated. "They cannot control themselves. They will kill you because they will not even know who you are. And if they bite you then you become like them."

The boy wizard paused, wiggling his toes as they'd gone slightly numb in the cold. "Where I am from, they hunted them. For fun," he watched Storm's face with his usual brand of frankness. "But papa says werewolves are sick people."

It was hard to put those two ideas together. His father's words rang more true but he believed, for so long, that it was a great thing to be able to hunt and kill a werewolf.

1.	August 2007 - The Old Grey Wolf

“Where I am from, they hunted them. For fun. But papa says werewolves are sick people.”

“They are,” the Professor agreed, “with an affliction that is incurable. But woe betide you pity them.” He shook his head ever so slightly. If anything, those he had encountered, from the two Gryffindor witches to grown wizards, were fierce and stubborn to a fault. They held onto their pride at any opportunity. He folded his arms across his chest, the cold air now chilling the backs of his worn hands.

“But would you not agree that someone who cannot control themselves, and will kill you without question or infect you to the same fate, should be kept restrained at the full moon?” A rhetorical question, undoubtedly, but he gave the boy a moment to ponder it. “And what would be an apt consequence of those who would prefer to be free, and risk others?”

He felt something he couldn't name - maybe respect - when Professor Storm warned him against pitying werewolves. Feliks did feel bad for them but he could not picture saying that at one of Zeta Pepper's meetings. It did not feel right. If someone had said that about him, he would hate it too, so that was probably why.

            "But would you not agree that someone who cannot control themselves..."

The questions were so serious that Feliks forgot, for a moment, how cold he was and that he was in trouble for sneaking out. His brow lowered into a confused scowl. Like he was angry at this imaginary werewolf who didn't want to be locked up on a full moon.

"They should be made to be locked up!" he blurted out, upset by the scenario building in his mind. "They can't be free! They do not even remember what happens, why do they want that? It isn't fair to everyone else!"