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Severus stares at his broken and ugly face in his broken and ugly mirror for a moment, then turns away, disgusted. He brushes his crooked teeth, stomps out of the bathroom, and down the narrow stairs.

The house on Spinner’s Lane is tiny and ugly and cramped, just like his life, brewing potions in the tiny study, eating meals of tinned beans and tinned soup cooked on the tiny hob. Months pass and his wounds heal and he makes enough money through his mail-order potions business to get by and everything is grey and old and ugly and nothing ever changes.

He limps to the market on the corner and scowls at the ‘sold’ sign on the house next to his when he passes it. More and more of the houses are being sold, the old biddies who he’s lived near all his life finally dying or getting shipped off to care homes or going to live with their daughters and their daughters’ families.

“Hey there!” a man calls and Severus turns to stare at him. He’s a young friendly-looking bloke dressed in a neat button down and small wire frame glasses. “You must be my new neighbour,” the man says. His teeth are neat and white. He laughs nervously. “Or, I’m your new neighbour,” the man corrects himself. He’s much too well-off looking for this neighbourhood. “I’m Tim. The wifey and I just bought the place.”

The man gestures to the house. “Of course it’s going to take a lot of work,” he says. “We’re tearing out all the interior walls on the ground floor. Modernising. It’s a tiny little place, but so much cheaper than what’s going in Cokeworth proper.” Severus wonders if the man is still talking to him. He hasn’t yet said a word. “And this neighbourhood is so charming,” he adds.

Spinner’s Lane is decidedly not charming. Severus nods tightly at the man and moves on. There are more ‘for sale’ and ‘sold’ signs on the houses he passes, panel trucks parked in front of many of them with construction company logos painted on the sides. When did this happen?

He notices more and more changes over the next few weeks as he’s woken at dawn by the construction being done on Tim’s place. There are bright flowers planted in front of some of the houses, new paint in colours Spinner’s Lane has never seen before- sage green and light yellow and one in a shockingly bright blue. The run-down playground he and Lily used to play in has a new playset, a bright structure of painted metal and varnished wood. Even the stream looks cleaner, so clear he can see fish swimming about in it.

When he returns home with his shopping it’s sometimes a shock to see that his house is the only thing that hasn’t changed, to glance in the mirror and there, as always, is the face he hates.

Tim and his wife bring over a cake after they’ve moved in, their house newly painted grey with a red door and black shutters, a dormer window put into the upstairs, no sign of old Mrs Clark who used to live there. Severus doesn’t have any defences against Muggles bringing him cake, doesn’t know how to respond to their smiles, so he invites them in and offers them tea and tries not to notice the way their eyes flicker over the ancient linoleum, his mother’s chipped tea cups. Tim chats about his new job in Cokeworth, about the up and coming tech industry there and his wife Molly talks about her own work as a computer programer– she works remote, which is convenient with Tim’s new job, Molly’s company still being in London, and Spinner’s End is apparently well connected to the internet, whatever that means.

Severus tells them he’s a retired war veteran, which is more or less true, and Molly’s face crinkles with concern and Tim thanks him earnestly for his service, and they leave the rest of the cake behind and Severus eats it like a rat nibbling on something not belonging to him.

There are more and more flowers in Spinner’s End now. Red and purple and blue and yellow, none of the severely pruned bushes the ladies who had lived there had so harshly tended before. The air has grown clearer since the factories shut down, the ever-present dust that used to turn everything grey is gone. Now Severus is the only hold-over. Estate agents knock on his door and offer him three times what the house is worth to sell it and he considers it but he doesn’t know where else he would go.

The grocery sells organic vegetables now and the pub where Severus’ father drank himself to death now has a chef from London and children ride bikes up and down the re-paved road and everyone knows Severus’ name now, greeting him respectfully as ‘Mr Snape’.

“The poor dear is a war veteran, you know,” he hears one mother whisper to another as he walks past the park where children are scrambling over the brightly painted playground equipment. “Oh, I wondered about the scars.” The other mother whispers back. “The poor man.”

The house on Severus’ other side, where Mrs Poole had lived Severus’ whole life, is sold a few weeks later to a lesbian couple who are passionate gardeners. They confide in him that they were disappointed about the size of the garden when they bought the place but they couldn’t complain about the price. Somehow they talk him into letting them do his front garden as well as their own and a few weeks later he steps out the door to find the tiny patch of ground is a riot of colour. He looks back at the house, the grey-painted brick, the sagging shutters, the dirty windows and thinks that you can put a bright dress on an old hag but you can’t make her pretty.

His house is the only one in the row that hasn’t been repainted, he realises. It looks like the missing tooth in a bright smile.

And he himself, walking stiffly through the neighbourhood in his worn black clothing; he dreads to think what he looks like among all these happy, contented people.

He thought it would stop at friendly greetings, then at cake, then at the garden, but the next thing he knows Molly is offering to wash his windows. She’s gotten a tall ladder from somewhere and she and Tim have been making a day of it, it seems, dressed in old t-shirts and joggers, Molly climbing up the ladder as agile as a monkey, a bucket of soapy water hanging from one hand, while Tim stands below and stabilises the ladder and yells at her to be careful and sprays the hose at it when Molly tells him too, accidentally-on-purpose spraying her as well.

He also accidentally splashes water on Severus as he emerges from the door, ostensibly to do the shopping, but really to see what all the fuss is about. It’s a lovely day, the sun shining for once, the children drawing on the pavement with coloured chalk and playing jumping games Severus remembers from his own youth.

“Sorry, Mr Snape!” Molly calls as he blinks away the water and forces himself not to pull out his wand. “Let us make it up to you,” she says. “We’ll tackle your windows as well. Won’t be a spot of bother.”

They’re already moving their ladder over the short hedge between their gardens and Severus still doesn’t know how to say ‘no’ to their smiles and their friendliness.

With the windows clean the filth of the interior becomes more obvious, but here and there he can see the remnants of how hard his mother had tried. The bright yellow she’d painted the kitchen walls, the curtains she had sewn herself. He frowns and then goes up into the attic, digging into the old boxes until he finds the one of her books, the ancient ‘100 Charms Every Witch Needs to Know’ that her grandmother had given her on her seventeenth birthday.

Severus opens it and peers over the pages of housekeeping charms then blasts the dust off the walls and shelves, out of the carpets and rugs. He repairs the curtains, restores the faded upholstery, makes the wooden cabinets gleam. It’s still a drab little house when all’s said and done, dark and close, hopelessly outdated, but when he goes to bed in his narrow, ancient cot, he feels like he has done something for the first time in a long time.

On the third day of cleaning he finds his mother’s broach, tarnished silver and green stones, a curled snake in the shape of an ‘S’. He’d coveted it as a child, had snuck into her room and pinned it to his shirt and then wrapped her scarves around himself and pretended he was pretty. His mother had caught him at it once and scolded him with more fear than anger, so much fear he’d promised her to never do it again.

He holds the broach in his hand so tightly the stones leave impressions and then, mouth dry, goes to his room and places it gently on his dresser. She never wore it, never let his father see it. He would have sold it if he had known, Severus knows. Would have pawned it at a quarter of its worth and drunk the profits in one night.

He drinks firewhisky by the fire that night, seeing things in the flickering flames, until he builds up the courage to go up to the attic, all the way to the back where the boxes of his mother’s things are, until he finds the ones with the dresses in them. Dresses she’d made out of fabric she’d transfigured, turning torn sheets and stained tablecloths into sprigged calico. For all that she’d been a Slytherin she’d liked red. Red dresses, red lipstick, red shoes- flats because she was so tall.

(When he was in a mood Severus’ father had yelled at her that it made her look like a whore.)

Severus pulls the red dresses out of their box, holding them up to himself. He’s not much taller than his mother had been, and just as thin. The dresses would fit, he thinks and then pushes the thought away in confusion. At the bottom of the box he finds her cosmetics. He’d packed them away with trembling fingers after she’d died, he remembers. Tubes of cheap, crumbling lipstick, now all dried up. Powder that’s caked and crumbled in turn. She deserved better, he thinks, the old plastic cases in his hands. She deserved so much more.

He doesn’t really think about it when he goes down to his laboratory, when he takes out the books on cosmetics potions. He brews whatever potions people order and cosmetics are popular ones. Potions to smooth out wrinkles and to clear away spots. Tonics to make hair shinier, fuller, to chase away grey. Little pots of lipstick that will stay on all day, of eyeliner that will make eyes look bigger, of shadows that will make the colours pop.

He brews them for her, even though she can’t use them now. Vivid reds and golds and browns. Creams to soothe the most abused skin. Masks to make hair ripple and shine. And when he’s done, when the palette is assembled, the creams and paints and powders in their small pots, he uses them on himself. First the hair potions and masks, the application distasteful because a shower means he must touch his naked skin. Then a dress, his favourite, a deep blood red sprigged with white flowers. The skin lotion smoothed gently over his face as if by hands that love him. Lip paint applied carefully, then eyeliner, then eyeshadow, magically smoothing it out, moving to where it is supposed to be. Everything his mother should have had.

He looks in the mirror, cracked and old. He sees himself.

It is knowledge he does not know what to do with. Knowledge that is not new. Something he had known in his bones but had never been allowed to think through. He fights it at first. He fights it for a long while. It is not allowed, not accepted, not deserved. He does not deserve to be beautiful, not after the ugly things he has done. Does not deserve the relief of knowing who he is. Does not deserve the feeling of rightness, like a chord being struck right at the heart of him, a true chord, a note he has longed for.

Does not deserve this, nor the flowers in his garden, nor the neighbours who smile at him in greeting, nor the way his neighbourhood has somehow transformed into a joyful place, the cleanliness of the river and the clearness of the air and the happiness of the children that ride their bikes up and down the lane.

He does not belong in a place with flowers, in a place where people have everything they need, in a place where the sky is blue (sometimes- it is still England), does not belong in a red dress.

But it is still there, hung up lovingly in his closet, and there are still the jars of paints and flasks of potions because he made them for his mother, in a way, and he cannot bear to destroy them.

He meets the first person like him at his neighbours’ house. The lesbian neighbours, the gardeners. They have taken over his back garden as well as his front, taken down the splintered wall that used to separate them (what was he to do with a garden, after all, his knee so poorly he can barely bend down to tie his shoes?). So they invite him to their party, say ‘really, you must come, we can’t very well have a party in your back garden without you!’

Because he is grateful to them (even though he does not deserve it), he comes. He dresses in black, of course, and brings a bottle of cheap wine he has enchanted to taste like an expensive wine. His neighbours insist he sit down among their friends, mostly other older women, and bring him plates of artfully arranged finger-food and a glass of something cool and sweet.

The woman next to him tries to engage him, but he’s never been very good at small talk and the conversation dies out after a minute or two and she turns to talk to someone on her other side. He is just contemplating leaving when something about the appearance of the woman across the way catches his attention. He’s not sure what it is– her bone structure or the way she’s seated, but he suddenly thinks ‘she’s like me’, and for a moment he doesn’t even know what that means, and then his eyes catch on her wrists– her wrists of all things– and he suddenly understands, and he looked away, horribly mortified, though he cannot say why. He is not like her. He is not like her and yet he is.

He’s suddenly aware he has been acting strange. He glances around to see if anyone has noticed, then sips at the sweet wine his neighbours gave him. He listens in on a conversation some of the women are having about one of their daughters who is overseas, doing a year abroad in Peru. Another group is speaking about organic foods and if there is really a benefit to them.

“Mr Snape, how are you doing?” one of his neighbours asks, dropping into the chair beside him. Her name might be Melanie. It might not.

“Thank you for the food,” he says, nodding at the plate he had been given, then notices he has hardly touched it.

“Oh, didn’t you like it?” she asks. She’s got a thick Manchester accent unlike so many of his new neighbours.

“I am not terribly hungry,” he says.

“Oh, well, don’t feel obliged,” she says.

“Mr Snape,” another woman says. There are only seven or eight of them but they seem like so many. “Melanie tells us you’re a vet. My brother served in the Gulf War.”

Severus clears his throat. “I am not at liberty to speak of it,” he says. It isn’t a lie.

Melanie fills his wine glass. He hadn’t known he had emptied it. He tries not to glance at the woman who is like him. He agrees when the other woman compliments the garden and tries not to notice how shabby his house is beside his neighbours’.

There are other people like him, he thinks when he’s alone again. Just walking around like it’s normal. Like it’s something they’re allowed to do. He could wear the red dress. He could go out. Maybe if the makeup was enough he could fool people into thinking he was a woman. The thought makes something twist and writhe inside of him. The thought makes him ashamed.

He goes down to his potions lab and brews his potions. He goes to the corner shop and inspects the artisanal breads they now carry. The weather grows colder, then children begin wearing coats.

Severus opens his closet and looks at the red dress. If he wore the dress he would need a new name. A girl’s name. He imagines something ridiculous. Daisy. Poppy. He shuts the door.

He finds himself still thinking about it when he goes to the shops, when he walks past the playground. “Sophia!” the mothers cry to their children. “Emily! Anna!”

His grandmother was named Dolores, his other grandmother Patricia. His cousins were Beth and Patty and Bea. He thinks of the students he’d taught, the people who had died in the war. Amanda and Nymphadora, Livia and Qing and Rachel and Margaret. Lily. He goes into the library and the librarian looks up at him and smiles. “Good morning, Mr Snape.”

He hates being called ‘Mr Snape’.

He flips through books, looking for names. Catherine and Erica and Andrea and Genevieve. Mary and Jane and Kathy and Annie. Gabrielle, Monique, Padme, Ariana. None of them feel like his. How do you choose a name for yourself when you hate your name? How do you choose a name for yourself when you hate yourself?

He does not know what he is doing. He puts all the books away and goes home.

The name comes to him when he is reading one of his mother’s old books, one of her favourites. Lily had loved it too, had gushed about it and some Muggle program that had been made of it. Elizabeth, he reads and he knows it’s the right name. Without thinking it through he takes out the lotions and the paints, puts on the red dress. Hair made lustrous through magic, skin made smooth. Thin lips painted red, black eyes widened with kohl. Elizabeth.

It should change everything but it changes nothing. To change you have to be bold and Severus– Elizabeth– is a coward. She looks at the dress– at the dresses, recovered from her mother’s box and mended– and then puts on black trousers, a black coat, nods at the people who pass her and call her Mr Snape and makes idle conversation with the people who speak to her in the line at the grocer. She wants to tell them they are wrong– they are speaking to someone who doesn’t exist. But she is a coward– she doesn't know how to say anything.

An order for wolfsbane comes in. This is an oddity. The Ministry provides wolfsbane potion free of cost and anonymously. The potion is expensive to order from other sources and not entirely legal. But when Elizabeth scans the order form she understands. The recipient is allergic to charmed garlic, a foundational ingredient in the potion, and the ministry brewers didn’t know how to replace it.

For some reason the customer believes that Elizabeth does. Only a few people knew it had been her who had modified the potion. The old guard at Hogwarts, Draco, Harry Potter and his friends. Elizabeth scans the order form again. The potion is for a child of ten who has had lycanthropy from birth. The allergy, she thinks, is probably from the continuous exposure. She hadn’t designed the potion to be used by children. She hadn’t had the forethought. Or, to be fair, the time.

It is obviously Potter who had written, though if it is, his handwriting has gotten significantly better over the years. Perhaps he has a secretary, managing what Elizabeth can only imagine is his busy heroic life. She doesn’t know– hasn’t wanted to know. The only news she keeps up on is potions related, and that mainly through her supplier, Ms Jenkins of Jenkins and Jenkins Wholesale Potions Supply, who is kind enough to include a gossipy letter of the goings-on in the potions world with her monthly orders.

She writes back that she will see what she can do, but that it would be better to test any experimental potion under medical supervision. Have they gone to St Mungo’s with their problem?

Elizabeth’s correspondent has a poor opinion of St Mungo’s that reflects Elizabeth’s own. They add that they have never encountered potions of as high quality as Elizabeth’s (to paraphrase, obviously) and that they only wish the best for their godson.

Clearly Potter, then. Elizabeth would have tried anyway, but she cannot say ‘no’ to Potter. Not after everything.

After a day or two the flurry of owls dries up. Elizabeth has all the answers she needs for the moment. Potter seems satisfied. It is still an inadvisable thing to treat a child with an experimental potion, but Potter assures her he has a healer who will attend and that said healer agrees that the risk is worth it.

Elizabeth writes to Ms Jenkins for the necessary ingredients and gets to work. She has not done research like this in years, not since the war started picking back up. For a while it’s easy to forget everything– or perhaps ‘forget’ is the wrong word; more like ‘to not think about so constantly’. Even so, she cannot let the whole thing go. She gets into the habit of putting on a dress and doing her makeup lightly before she goes to spend long hours over the cauldrons. It makes her feel more like herself, more relaxed, more self-assured.

And that’s how she comes to answer the door dressed as a woman– as herself– rather than in what she is beginning to think of more and more as a hated disguise. Elizabeth has a lot of experiences with hated disguises.

She doesn’t even remember she’s wearing a dress, her lipstick carefully picked to match, her hair bundled up in a bun, still wiping her hands on her apron, when she opens the door. It’s only when she sees Harry Potter’s shocked face that she looks down and sees, suddenly, that she’s given everything away.

“Er…” Harry Potter says, mouth gaping. He looks so much older now, so grown, his shoulders filled out, a dark line of stubble on his jaw. He’s an adult but still entirely recognizable.

Elizabeth slams the door shut and then sinks to the floor, her back to it, her heart pounding in her chest.

“Snape?” Harry Potter calls and maybe he’s just used to talking to himself or maybe he knows Elizabeth can still hear him because he keeps going. “Look, Snape, I just came to talk about the wolfsbane potion. For Teddy? I don’t care what you wear, honestly.” Elizabeth braces to stand up, always a tricky manoeuvre with her bum knee, but Potter is still going. “I’m sorry I reacted like that,” he says. “I’m not good with surprises. It’s… I should have made an appointment, I know. I’m sorry. Look, I’m not sure you care about my opinion, but I think you looked nice,” he adds, possibly because he doesn’t know how to stop babbling.

For a moment there’s silence and Elizabeth thinks he’s gone away, but then: “If you need someone to talk to, I’m here, I’d love to talk to you. I’m sorry I haven’t been here all this time. You… you saved my life so many times, I should have checked in on you at least, but things were really bad after the war and after I managed to deal with it, there were a lot of pieces to pick up. But I’m going to make more of an effort.” Another silence. “And I won’t judge you for whatever you wear or who you are. Raising Teddy– I had to change a lot of my ideas about gender, because Teddy is whatever they want to be on any given day, so you don’t have to worry, okay? I’ll accept you however you are.”

Elizabeth hears a rustle that she thinks must be Potter moving away, hears his steps down the rough concrete stairs, but keeps sitting against the door for a long time after.

Potter’s owl the next day is an apology for barging in on her and a request for a meeting to discuss the potion (‘and only the potion, I promise, if you don’t want to discuss anything else, which I would be happy to, but no pressure.’)

She doesn’t answer it for three days. On the first day she puts on her disguise and goes to the shops and tries not to glower every time someone misgenders her. On the second day she creates a few more experimental variations and tests them. On the third she sits in the back garden and lets the sun warm her face and tries not to think for a while.

On the fourth she replies and on the fifth Potter comes over.

She’s gotten a cake from the shops and she bustles around making tea because her mother taught her that, at least. Potter sits bemused as she makes the tea and brings the tea tray around to the coffee table. She’s dressed as herself because he’s already seen it and because she wants to test him. Potter moves and speaks carefully as if he thinks he might trigger a trap.

“It’s nice to see you,” Potter says, when Elizabeth puts the tea tray on the table. She pours the tea and hands his to him and he quickly doctors it with milk and sugar.

“Would that I could say the same,” Elizabeth says, more nastily than she means to, but Potter only smiles.

“I’m sorry again for surprising you the other day,” he says, stirring his tea with a little too much vigour. “You looked a little dazed– I take it you’d been absorbed in your research.”

“The research I am doing for you,” Elizabeth says. She wonders if it’s possible for her to say anything to Potter that doesn’t come out sounding cruel.

“Yes,” Potter says. He sips at his tea. “I really appreciate it. I just wanted to check and see if you have everything you need? I have connections– that makes me sound like a twat, doesn’t it? But it’s true. Through Charlie and Blaise and Neville I can really get my hands on almost anything.”

“You don’t think I have my own connections?” Elizabeth demands.

Potter raises his eyebrows. “I can’t see how,” he says. “No one I’ve talked to has heard from you in ten years.”

“You were asking around about me?” Elizabeth narrows her eyes at him.

Potter nods. “I was trying to figure out where you were, so I could send the request to you,” he says. “I even went to my cousin to see if he knew anything about where Aunt Petunia came from. He had some old records, so I just came here and wandered around for a while. It’s changed a lot hasn’t it? I remember some of it from your memories…”

He takes another sip of tea. Elizabeth just waits. “So then I figured out that this house might be yours. Well, I actually asked your neighbour. He asked me if I’d served with you during the war, which I guess is actually true. Anyway, so it’s not like I was stalking you, I was just trying to find you. For Teddy.”

He gulps down his tea and winces. “I guess that does sound like I was stalking you,” he says.

Elizabeth waits for him to stop babbling. “I made myself difficult to find for a reason,” she says, eventually. “But I am not…” she stops to consider. “I am not upset that you sought me out for such a reason. To help a child,” she clarifies after a moment.

“I do not remember you being very fond of children,” Potter says. He toys with a slice of the cake.

This sends a pulse of anger through Elizabeth.

“You do not know me,” she says, stiffly.

Potter looks at her the first time that afternoon, perhaps, takes in what she’s wearing. Her favourite red dress, lipstick and eyeliner. She’s even done her hair up in a bit of a style, though she doesn’t exactly know what she’s doing.

“No,” Potter says. He pauses. “I don’t think you know me either, but…” he hesitates. “What should I call you? You’re not a professor any longer. And I don’t want to… I don’t want to misgender you.”

“You don’t have to call me anything,” she says stiffly. “You don’t have to talk about me to anyone.”

Potter cuts off a corner of the cake. “No,” he agrees. “I haven’t,” he adds. “I haven’t mentioned anything to anyone, except that you’re helping me with the potion, and only because Draco kept fretting about it.”

“Draco?” Elizabeth asks sharply.

Potter nods. “He’s the healer who’ll be overseeing it.”

“And he knows where I am?” she demands.

Potter shakes his head. “I didn’t tell anyone where you were, just that I’d gotten into contact with you. Look, I swear, I won’t tell anyone anything you don’t want me to.”

She feels herself relax a little. “I will hold you to that,” she says.

“You might consider telling him, though,” he says. “He’s really upset that you just up and vanished.”

Elizabeth narrows her eyes at him.

“He is, I swear,” Potter says. “I don’t know why you disappeared on everyone– I’m sure you had a good reason– but there are a lot of people who were sad you lost touch with them.”

Elizabeth snorts without meaning to. “I’m sure,” she says.

Potter reaches out his hand like he’s going to touch her, then pulls it back quickly when she flinches. “I’m not lying,” he says. “Or exaggerating. More people care about you than you think.”

“Why?” Elizabeth hears herself blurting out and has to restrain herself from clapping her hands over her mouth in mortification.

Potter looks at her. “Because you risked everything to bring down Voldemort, you sacrificed your life for it, and that means a lot to a lot of people. Because some of them actually cared about you, you berk. Draco and the older teachers at Hogwarts, once they realised what had been truly going on. Me. And I told everyone what you did, how you sacrificed years of your life, I spoke for you and I browbeat the ministry into giving you an Order of Merlin because you were a hero, Snape, you were a bloody hero and I won’t let anyone forget it.”

“I didn’t ask you to,” Elizabeth says, and her voice sounds small even to her ears.

“I know,” Potter says. “But it was what you deserved.”

“People do not get what they deserve,” Elizabeth says.

“Not without someone to fight for them, no,” Potter says.

“I don’t understand you,” Elizabeth says.

“You don’t know me,” Potter reminds her.

She’s feeling a bit stunned after Potter’s visit, enough so that when she encounters Melanie and her wife at the corner shop and they invite her for tea she finds herself saying ‘yes’ without meaning to.

Melanie’s wife, Andrea, is a talker, chattering the whole time Melanie is setting the table. They’re vegetarians, Melanie and Andrea, and the meal is some kind of curry with tofu and brown rice. Elizabeth eats it without complaint– it's better than most of the things she cooks for herself– and tries her best to engage with the conversation. She feels oddly indebted to them although she cannot say why. Perhaps only because they want to be her friends and it has been a long time since anyone wanted to be her friend. She wonders what it is they see in her, and panics for a moment thinking they know, but then, no, they only think she is a lonely man, someone to take pity on. Only nothing they say sounds like pity.

Potter comes again a few days later and this time he brings Teddy. The young Lupin is ten and reminds Elizabeth so much of Potter at that age her heart twists, all leggy with a shock of black hair. “Hi,” Teddy says brightly to her. “I’m Teddy. I’m a girl today.”

Elizabeth blinks at her. “Hi,” she says, tentatively.

“What should Teddy call you?” Potter prompts gently.

“Ms Snape,” Elizabeth says, after a moment.

Teddy nods, uninterested and wanders into the house. Potter gives her a bright smile. “Ms Snape,” he says, and it’s the first time anyone’s called her by the right name.

“Elizabeth,” she adds, after a moment.

Potter’s smile brightens. “It’s nice to meet you, Elizabeth,” he says and he holds out his hand. Elizabeth takes it but they don’t shake, only hold each other’s hands for a few beats.

She pulls her hand away and goes to make up the tea tray.

Teddy is more interested in the cake than anything and then when the cake is gone they get up to wander over and look at Elizabeth’s bookshelves, hands clenched performatively behind their back.

Potter sips at his tea. “Your name suits you,” he says.

Elizabeth scowls at him, flicks her eyes up to his hair. “Yours suits you,” she says.

He laughs, runs a hand through his wild hair. “I wonder how they knew,” he says.

“Lily’s hair was wild too,” Elizabeth says. “Her mum did everything she could to try to deal with it, but it was always escaping every ponytail and braid she tried to put it in.”

“Oh,” Potter says. He stirs his tea. “No one ever told me much about my mom. Sirius and Remus said some things about my dad but… Your memories were the most I ever had.”

Elizabeth feels her eyes prick at that. Stupid.

“I’m sorry,” she hears herself saying. Potter’s head jerks up. “She was a wonderful person. I’m sorry you didn’t have a chance to get to know her.”

Potter smiles weakly. “Thank you,” he says. “Maybe you could tell me about her some time. Right now though we should get going before Teddy starts touching things.”

“I wasn’t!” Teddy cries immediately, snatching a hand back from where it had been drifting over to the shelf.

“Come along then,” Elizabeth says and gets to her feet, wobbling a little from where she’d forgotten about her bad knee. Potter catches her elbow.

“Okay?” he asks and she pulls away and huffs. “I am perfectly fine,” she snips. He gives her a slow smile. “Okay, then,” he says.

The lab is too small for the three of them, so Potter stands in the doorway while Elizabeth takes Teddy’s measurements, carefully testing a few potions on their arm, cutting away a lock of their hair.

“I’ll have the first test potion done in a week,” she says, when they’re done.

Potter is leaning on the door frame, looking all too comfortable. “That’s before the moon,” he says.

Elizabeth bites her tongue on something snide and nods.

“I’ll let Draco know,” he says. “It would be better if you were there– if the potion still needs to be adjusted…”

Elizabeth sighs.

“He’d really like to see you,” Potter says. “I haven’t told him anything, but every time I see him he asks…”

“Fine,” Elizabeth says, maybe just to shut him up.

Potter looks chuffed as anything. “Should I tell him about your name?” he asks.

“Warn him ahead of time?” Elizabeth drawls.

“No,” Potter says, easily. “Get him used to the idea. So he doesn’t misgender you or anything. Some things I read said some people find it easier…”

Elizabeth can’t decide if it does make it easier, thinking she won’t be called upon to explain herself, or if she can’t stand the idea of Potter telling Draco things about her. What will he say?

Her indecision must show on her face because he takes a step forward into the cramped room. “Hey,” he says. “I’ll do whatever you want. Or he doesn’t have to know– you can wear robes; they’re pretty gender-neutral, and say nothing.”

She hates the thought of it, hates the idea of going into hiding again.

“I’ll go along with whatever you decide,” he says, gently, touching her sleeve lightly.

She nods, swallows.

“Hey bud,” Potter says to Teddy. “It’s time to go. Say goodbye to Ms Snape.”

“Bye Ms Snape,” Teddy says. “Thank you for making a potion for me.”

Elizabeth is touched despite herself.

Elizabeth stares at her face in the mirror she’s mended, her skin smooth from the potions she’s been rubbing into it. Her nose is still too large and her jaw is still too wide and despite the lipstick and eyeshadow she can’t imagine anyone will look at her and see a woman. But she girds her loins and she wraps her robes around her and floos over to Malfoy Manor with all the dignity she possesses.

“Ms Snape,” a fashionably-dressed house elf greets her. “If you will come this way, Mr Malfoy and Harry Potter are waiting for you.”

Elizabeth nods and tries to ignore the sensation of her Adam’s apple bobbing.

Malfoy manor has changed considerably since the last time she was here. The close dark panelled hallways have been lightened and widened; the stuffy velvet curtains have been replaced by lace and silk. All of the portraits are gone and in their place are landscapes with blue skies and mountains or fields of flowers. It feels airy and open.

Draco and Potter are standing in the middle of the library bickering laughingly about something when the elf throws the door open in the dramatic way of elves.

“Ms Snape is here!” the elf announces.

“Very well, Dotty, thank you,” Draco says, and then strides up to Elizabeth, his hands outstretched, his face split into a wide grin. “Elizabeth,” he says, warmly. “I am quite incensed at you, you know.”

She lets him take his hands and make faux kisses at her cheeks.

Draco, like Potter, is now an adult, taller and so much more sure of himself than the last time she’d seen him. He smiles at her like he knows exactly who he is. Like he knows exactly who she is.

“You seem very upset,” she says dryly.

“Ten years!” he exclaims, with what seems like mock anger. “Ten years– can I call you Liz?”

“No,” Elizabeth says.

“Ten years, Liz! Without a word! And then to find out you’re talking to Potter of all people. Potter! What has he ever done to deserve it?”

“I did save the world,” Potter drawls from where he’s leaning back on the mantle.

“Are you ever going to stop crowing about that?” Draco asks. “Honestly, how far do you really think it’s going to take you?”

Potter had told her about his friendship with Draco, how Draco had gone to Granger, of all people, and asked her how he could make reparations, how they’d worked together and then Potter had joined them, how Andromeda had gotten sick and Draco and Potter had split responsibility for Teddy. But it had been hard to believe in the abstract, when Elizabeth had remembered how clearly the boys had hated each other, once.

They’re not boys any longer, she realises.

“Well, Liz,” Draco says, turning away from Potter with a grin. “I suppose I’ll have to forgive you, even if you’re wearing Gryffindor red now.”

“The colour looks very well on you,” Potter cuts in, smiling.

“It does,” Draco says. “Black was never your colour– I’ve always said so. And green washes you right out, you were clearly mis-sorted.”

Potter laughs. “I hardly think the sorting hat was taking aesthetics into account,” he says.

“Clearly not,” Draco says, “because green is your colour, even though you refuse to wear it. Your eyes, Potter! And blue is mine,” he adds with a sniff.

“Blue is your colour, you swot,” Potter agrees.

“Did I come here just to listen to you two insult each other?” Elizabeth asks with raised eyebrows.

“Right,” Potter says. “Right. Teddy’s already in the den.”

“The den?” Elizabeth repeats, expecting some horrid muggle sitting room, but the den is, in fact, a wolf’s den; a cosy cave lined with old quilts surrounded by a little patch of forest hemmed in by the strongest wards Elizabeth has encountered, outside of Azkaban. They reek of Potter’s impossible magic with just a hint of Draco’s careful control. They make Elizabeth’s skin tingle when she passes through them.

Teddy is sitting curled up at the mouth of the cave, still human.

“Hey buddy,” Potter says, sitting down beside them.

Teddy flops over and puts their head in Potter’s lap.

“They’re really nervous about the change,” Draco tells Elizabeth. “The last few moons were really hard on them.”

Potter is stroking the child’s hair and murmuring.

Draco looks at Elizabeth. “I have the highest confidence in you,” he tells her. “You’re the best brewer I know. If anyone can make a brew for them...”

“They shouldn’t have been given the full strength brew all this time,” Elizabeth says.

“I know,” Draco says. “But it seemed better than experimenting. Without you around to advise us… Elizabeth, I was joking around before, but I… honestly…” he appears to be tearing up a little. Immediately Potter is on his feet, and he’s pulling Draco away, the child in his arms, and whispering to him fiercely.

Elizabeth folds her hands into her sleeves and tries not to wonder about them, about the black and blonde hair pressed so close together, the child’s head resting on Potter’s shoulder. Finally he pulls away, then wipes gently at Draco’s face with one hand, with a gentle smile. Draco looks at him and swallows and nods, then turns back to Elizabeth. He sniffs then straightens up.

“As I was saying,” he says. “I trust you to make a brew that will help.”

Elizabeth nods. “I’ve done my best,” she says. “And adjustments can be made, of course. We will supervise the shift?”

“It is not safe for us to be in the den when it happens,” Potter says, sounding very unhappy about this. “But we’ll be right outside the wards.” He smooths the child’s hair back. “Won’t we, little one?”

“I know, Harry,” Teddy says, their voice muffled in Potter’s shoulder.

They feed the child the potion shortly before the sun sets and then tuck them into their little den and go to a sitting room outfitted with a large mirror that shows the child. Draco sits down on a sofa, Potter close enough beside him that their thighs are touching, and Draco drops a kiss to the top of Potter’s head as if not even thinking about it. Elizabeth feels like a third wheel.

“Are you hungry?” Potter asks. “I can never eat on these nights, but Dotty can bring you something.

Dotty pops in, a hopeful look on her face. “It would be Dotty’s pleasure to bring Ms Snape some food,” she says. “Ms Snape has been very kind in making Mx Teddy their medicine.”

“Ah, yes,” Elizabeth says, though her stomach is roiling a little, the anxiety of the two men rubbing off on her, though she is confident in her potion. “Something light? Whatever you have available.”

“Some of that peas porridge you made yesterday, perhaps?” Draco asks. “If there’s some left. Sev… Liz, you were always particularly fond of that.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth says, ignoring the slip.

The elf nods and pops out, coming back a few seconds later with a steaming bowl and a crust of bread on a tray.

Elizabeth is scraping the bottom of the bowl when Draco murmurs that the moon is about to come out, and the knuckles on Potter’s hand, clenched firmly with Draco’s, begin to grow white. The child shivers and moans a little, in their tangle of blankets and then they’re shifting, slipping smoothly not into the hulking form of a werewolf but into the sleek body of a wolf pup.

“It worked,” Draco exclaims, sitting forward to get a better look at the child.

“It was so easy,” Potter says. “It didn’t look painful at all.” He looks at Elizabeth. “Was it painful?”

“It should not have been,” Elizabeth says.

“And they can take this potion again?” Draco asks. “No side effects for long term use?”

“There should not be,” Elizabeth says. “I will have to modify it as they grow older, but it should work consistently.”

In the mirror the wolf pup rolls onto their back, scratching against the blankets for a moment, then noses around at the blankets to fashion them into a little nest and yawns and curls up.

Draco wraps his arm around Potter. “Look at them,” he whispers.

“Can we go to them?” Potter asks Elizabeth. “There isn’t any danger, right? They can’t turn anyone?”

Elizabeth hesitates. “The probability is very low,” she says. “Less than one percent. But it is not zero.”

Draco and Potter look at each other for a long moment, engaging in some silent communication, and then Draco nods.

“Do you need anything else, Liz?” he asks. “We shouldn’t keep you from your bed.”

“I will come in the morning to do an examination?” she suggests.

“Perfect,” Draco says. “I’ll walk you to the floo.”

He and Potter stand and they both seem to hesitate for a moment, then Potter hugs Draco, tucking his head under Draco’s chin for a moment, then smiles at him and tells him he’ll see him in a bit.

Draco squeezes back and then lets him go and watches him walk from the room with a faint smile and a light blush.

“You two…” Elizabeth begins, as they walk back to the floo.

Draco’s smile grows a tiny bit. “It’s new,” he says. “We’ve been tiptoeing around it for years, and finally something just broke. We’re still not sure how to be around other people, you know?”

Elizabeth does not know, but she nods anyway.

In the floo room, Draco hesitates. “Elizabeth,” he says. “I don’t understand why you had to disappear, but I trust you had a good reason. But please, please don’t do it again.”

She stares at him for a long moment, not knowing what to say, until finally she swallows. “I didn’t think anyone would miss me,” she says, trying not to choke on the words.

He nods. “Okay,” he says. “Now you know. Please.”

She looks down. She doesn’t know how to do this. “I will try,” she says, softly.

“Can I hug you?” he asks.

She hesitates and nods and a moment later his arms are tight around her. He’s almost her height, she discovers, surprised. He’s so strong and solid under her hands. He hugs her like he’s afraid she’s going to vanish right there and then.

She tries not to get too comfortable in the solid weight of him, finally stepping back and pulling away. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” she promises.

He smiles weakly.

“Go to your child,” she says.

He nods. “Okay,” he says. “Sleep well.”

She stumbles out of the floo and finds herself back in her wretched little house alone. “Fuck,” she says to the ancient wallpaper. “Fuck.”

Malfoy manor is even more charming in the clear light of the morning. Dotty brings her to a breakfast parlour that opens onto the veranda with a series of French doors and a table laden with breakfast foods, Teddy steadily working their way through them while Draco blinks over a cup of espresso and Potter picks at a plate of cut fruit.

“Liz!” Draco cries when he sees her and jumps to his feet. Potter looks up at his lover fondly.

“I said I would come back,” Elizabeth finds herself saying snappishly.

Draco takes her arm and leads her over to the table. “Sit down,” he says. “Have you eaten? You should try Dotty’s rolls– they’re superb.”

He pulls a chair out for Elizabeth, which is strange– no one has ever done it for her before– and starts loading up a plate for her.

Potter leans forward so he can meet her eyes around Draco. “Feel free to eat as little or as much as you want. You don’t have to give in to Draco’s enthusiasm.”

“She’s too thin!” Draco protests. “Look at her, look at how thin she is.”

“She’s a grown woman,” Potter says, his voice gentle. “She is quite capable of making those choices for herself. Sit down, love.” He pats Draco’s seat, across from Elizabeth’s and reluctantly Draco goes to it and sits down. “I’m sorry if Draco’s enthusiasm is a little overwhelming,” he says.

“No,” Elizabeth says, looking at her loaded plate, still feeling a little stunned. “I do not generally have much of an appetite in the morning.” She tentatively eats a strawberry.

“You never had much of an appetite,” Draco mutters.

Potter puts a hand on his arm. “She was under a lot of stress back then,” he says. His hand squeezes Draco’s shoulder and Draco relaxes a little.

“You don’t look like you got any sleep,” Elizabeth observes, sipping at her tea.

Potter smiles. “We didn’t,” he says. “Too busy worrying over this one.” He ruffles Teddy’s hair. Teddy swats at him in annoyance and goes back to wolfing down their food.

“How did it go?” Elizabeth asks, cutting off a corner of a roll. It is very good.

“Brilliantly,” Draco says. “They took a little nap and then they were running around all night, happy as a clam. They said the transformation didn’t hurt at all. It’s even better than the potion even before they developed an allergy to it.”

Elizabeth nods. “Having the potion personally tailored makes it a great deal easier to tolerate.”

“It’s such a blessing,” Potter says. “You don’t know how much. We really owe you so much…”

“You are paying me quite a bit,” Elizabeth reminds him.

He shakes his head. “I don’t… that doesn’t even matter. You can have twice that much. You can have… anything you want. Knowing he’s going to be safe…”

Draco’s hand touches his– their fingers twine together. Anything you want, Elizabeth hears again. She tries not to think about how Draco’s arms had felt around her, about the beauty of their heads pressed together. She is just a foolish, ugly, bitter, old not-quite-a-woman. Her eyes prick. She looks away.

“They can go to Hogwarts!” Potter is saying, not noticing the cloud that has formed around Elizabeth. “We were so worried…”

Elizabeth stares down at her plate, spears and carefully eats a blueberry.

“Are you okay?” Draco’s voice asks, heavy with concern. He loves her, inexplicably, and here she is witless and greedy for something more. His hand touches hers where it rests on the table. It’s strong and warm. She pulls her own away.

“Draco,” Potter murmurs. “Give her space.”

She doesn’t want space. She wants… She swallows. “I should go,” she says.

“I thought you had to do tests on Teddy,” Draco says.

Oh. Right. She nods. “Yes.” The child is still eating like they’ve been starving for weeks.

“Have some more tea,” Potter suggests. She hates his kind voice and his worried eyes, but she takes the tea.

She drinks the tea and something loosens. She eats a little more of the bun. It is very good. She lifts her head up and butts into Potter and Draco’s conversation, acerbic comments that make Draco smirk and Potter smile, a smile like he’s found something he thought he lost. Elizabeth doesn’t want to think about that.

The child finally finishes eating and Elizabeth does her tests, Potter and Draco there for reassurance while she takes a few hairs, a few drops of blood, a few swabs of sweat. All three of them are yawning by the time she’s done, so she packs away her samples and her tubes and tells them she has to go back to her lab.

Draco trails after her to the floo room. “When will we see you again?” he asks.

She looks at him.

“You promised you wouldn’t disappear,” he says.

“That doesn’t mean…” she begins tartly, but his voice rolls over hers.

“Please,” he says. He gives her a look she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to say ‘no’ to. All the calluses she once had against it have worn away.

“When then?” she asks.

“Saturday,” he says, perking up. “We’re going to be busy catching up after all this, but we can make time on Saturday. Afternoon? No, lunch. Noon. You’ll come here?”

She takes a deep breath. There’s no question she’ll say ‘yes’.

“Yes,” she says.

He looks so much like a puppy getting a treat she’s surprised when he doesn’t bowl her over.

“Perfect,” he says. “Brilliant. Here, noon, Saturday. If you don’t come,” he adds, “Harry will just have to hunt you down again. He’ll go to the ends of the earth looking for you. You’ll never be free.”

It’s a promise more than a threat, she thinks. She conceals her shiver with the ease at which she has concealed everything, these last thirty years and more.

She tries not to think of them and tries and tries. It’s easiest when she’s doing her work, brewing with a careful focus, researching some obscure ingredient, carefully taking in the latest literature. Hard when her mind is idle, cooking and cleaning and walking to the corner shops. Hardest when she is in the bed or the shower, when water or bedclothes touch her naked body and she can imagine it is hands instead. Of course then she ping-pongs between desire and revulsion; her prick grows hard even when she wishes she didn’t have one, she has to consider the ugliness of the body that would be touched and from there make the easy conclusion that it would never happen.

No one would touch her willingly, of course. Her stupid daydreams are just setting herself up for a world of heartbreak.

She stumbles out of the shower, eyes averted so she won’t see any of her reviled flesh as she dries herself off and dresses quickly. She climbs out of bed and goes to find something to occupy her mind that isn’t pale skin sliding across brown skin, fingers sliding against each other, the tender looks, the way one boy held the other, Potter’s head pressed into Draco’s neck, that isn’t imagining Potter turning his head and beginning to suck red marks into that soft flesh, Draco tightening his grip on Potter and pressing him against the wall, that isn’t thinking about what those beautiful bodies would look like disrobed, rutting up against each other, Potter stocky and strong, the long line of Draco’s limbs.

And Elizabeth, perhaps, turning herself so she can rub that hated prick against the rough sheets of her small bed, rutting like an animal at the thought of those two boys who are so precious and beloved and, worse, who she has known since they were so young, and it’s vile and horrid and wrong and coming on the lumpy mattress with a groan and then lying there, hating herself.

Well, that isn’t unfamiliar, at least.

On Saturday she can barely show her face in Spinner’s End, much less to Malfoy Manor, but even worse than masturbating to them would be disappearing on them (again), so she dresses in brown robes that bring out the gold in her skin, does a not-half bad job of pinning her hair up in a chignon, puts on her makeup with a light hand.

Potter and Teddy are waiting for her in the floo room, playing exploding snap on the antique rug, and they smile when they see her, Teddy young enough to run over to her and hug her, Potter’s lip twisting up in a grin.

She looks at him carefully. His gaze is steady and sure. She breathes an (internal) sigh of relief that her transgressions are not visible.

“Draco’s planning something,” Potter says. “In the garden. It will no doubt be needlessly extravagant and surpass all bounds of reason. As usual.” He says this with fondness and affection. Elizabeth thinks that perhaps he needs some extravagance in his life. From what she can determine he’d been living in the miserable rotting hell of Grimmauld Place before being coerced into moving into Malfoy Manor.

How good it is, she thinks, that they balance each other out. Another reason for her to stay away.

They make their way to the ground floor and out into the garden, which has been given over into an easy wild style so different from the regimented gardens that were here before. Dog roses bloom in wild splendour and there are clumps of wildflowers here and there and dandelions and buttercups springing up in the middle of the lawn.

Draco has, indeed, been extravagant, his picnic blanket the size of Elizabeth’s entire ground floor, enough food piled upon it to feed a class of first years.

He smiles up at them as they cross the lawn, springs up and bounds over to Elizabeth, striding, his arms outstretched.

“I was almost certain you wouldn’t come,” he says, grabbing her hands and pressing a kiss to her cheek. It burns after he pulls away. “I thought I was going to have to send Harry to track you down again.”

“Moving is so much hassle,” Elizabeth says, forcing her voice to sound dry and bored. “And I was promised free food.”

Potter laughs. “Seeing the way you eat I can’t imagine food is much of a motivation for you,” he says, smiling so deeply his cheeks dimple. Draco is still holding Elizabeth’s hand. Potter smiles like he’s thinking of taking the other. Elizabeth forces herself not to blush and looks around.

“Where do I sit?” she asks.

Potter laughs. “It’s a picnic,” he says. “There’s no seating chart,” but Draco is plopping down again and he pats the cushion beside himself.

“Sit by me,” he orders, and so Elizabeth sits. Potter sits down on the other side of her, and between them they begin making a concerted effort to make her comfortable, Draco offering her her favourite cake, vanilla angel food topped with strawberries, Potter offering a glass of lemonade, Draco conjuring a small table for her to put the plate and glass down upon, Potter asking if she is too cold– does she need a blanket?– Draco bringing up the latest in potions research, Potter asking about the goings on in her life.

If there had not been a small child there, stuffing their face and getting more and more sticky, and if she had been a fool, she would have thought they were trying to seduce her.

But there is a small child there and after half an hour Potter gets up to play with them, throwing a ball around in a very Muggle fashion, then Draco pulls out a kit for blowing charmed bubbles.

She is also a fool. She finds herself relaxing in their company like she promised herself she wouldn’t, staying hours longer than she promised herself she would.

She’s a little tipsy (the lemonade had been spiked) and drowsy with sunlight and rich food when she realises Potter is sitting beside her so close that their shoulders rub together. He’s telling her about his and Draco’s work on the Wizengamot, to which they both have inherited seats. She turns to look at him and his face is too close. She looks away again, quickly.

She hears Potter inhale sharply and shift restlessly, then place a hand just behind her so he can lean back.

He tips his head up to look at the sky, which is an improbable blue. She watches the curve of his jaw out of the corner of her eye and then she pulls her robes closer around herself as if she’s cold.

Potter is quickly at attention, fussing and draping her lap with the blanket she’d rejected earlier. “I told Draco September was too late for a picnic,” he says, and then she feels a warming charm, a giddy rush of magic, filling her and leaving her so tingling and aroused with the overwhelming presence of his magic that she has to shut her eyes to handle the sensation. She’s glad for the blanket and the way it covers her embarrassingly hardening prick.

“Are you okay?” Potter asks after a minute of her sitting in silence trying to will herself to chill the fuck out.

“I think you broke her,” Draco says from in front of her. Elizabeth opens her eyes and glares at him. “No,” he says. “There you are.” He smiles. Elizabeth wants to punch him. She wants to kiss him so much she wants to punch him. She can’t deal with this, she thinks. If it weren’t for her stupid prick she’d pull herself to her feet and go.

Potter is still so close she can smell him. Draco’s babbling at her about the garden or something. Elizabeth wildly wonders what she did to deserve this, which is a stupid thought because she has done so many things that deserve so much worse than this.

She shivers again and Potter wraps his arm around her and because she has so few defences left she allows it, allows him to pull her against his warm side and cuddle her there, as if she is small and sweet and delicate, not tall and rough and cruel.

She looks at Draco, but he’s not jealous. He sits on her other side, close enough she can feel his heat as well, and together they watch Teddy running up and down the lawn chasing the bubbles.

It’s late by the time she comes to her senses, late enough that Teddy has collapsed on the blanket and Dotty has begun to clean the mountains of food away.

She pulls herself out of Potter’s grip, pushes the blanket off her lap. “I must be going,” she says.

Draco looks like he might protest and then Potter gives him a look and she doesn’t. Instead he pops himself to his feet, then reaches down to help her up (which she, embarrassingly, needs, what with her knee and all).

“Thank you for spending the afternoon with us,” Draco says, in the tone of a gallant gentleman. Elizabeth pulls her hand away to keep him from trying to kiss it.

“Yeah,” Potter says. “It was nice.” He grins at her a little sheepishly.

Draco offers her his arm, which she pointedly does not take, and then she sniffs. “I know the way to the floo room,” she says, coldly.

“Of course,” Draco says. “I thought you might want company?”

“Your house is not large enough that I’ll get bored walking across it.”

“It is a large house, though,” Draco says, still walking beside her despite her words. “Harry and Teddy and Dotty and I rattle around in here. I was thinking I might need to acquire some ghosts to fill up the place a bit more.”

She stops and looks at him. “What happened to the ghosts you used to have?” she asks.

“Ah, the whole house had to be exorcised after Riddle,” he says. “Sadly the ghosts had to go as well.”

She nods. “I’m surprised you kept it,” she says. “There were a lot of bad memories here.”

He pauses and strokes the wall of the hallway affectionately. “That’s not the house’s fault,” he says. “I had to rebuild after the war. Otherwise everything would fester. Inside of me, you know?”

She nods. She knows exactly what letting something fester inside of you feels like. It is festering inside her still, perhaps.

“Anyway,” he says. “It’s probably too soon…”

She looks at him sharply.

“It’s only,” he says. “If you were becoming bored of your house– Harry says it’s very small. You could come and stay here sometimes, if you wished. We could give you an entire wing. The Northeast wing is the best, in my opinion, though Harry thinks you’d prefer the South-southwest wing better. You’d have to look over both and see, I guess. We’ve got a full potions lab, as you know, though it’s been completely retrofitted– Harry insisted on windows.”

“You wish me to move in?” Elizabeth asks, her voice low.

Draco makes a non-committal motion. “Not necessarily move in. Is that too much? Harry says it’s too much. You could just stay whenever you like. We’re gone most of the day, you know– we both have offices in the Ministry, and I still do a few shifts at St Mungos. And Teddy is off at their day school, and Dotty does, well, whatever it is she does. Cleaning and cooking and such. I think she’s taken up quilting… So you’d have plenty of space.”

“Why?” Elizabeth asks.

Draco’s lip quirks up just on one side. “Because we want you around,” he says. “Why else would we offer? We want you to be safe and happy. We want to see you as much as we can. We want to know you’re not going to slip away again.”

Elizabeth looks down. The rug they’re walking on is intricately woven, a twisting pattern of barely discernible greens and blues.

“It’s too soon, isn’t it?” Draco asks. “Harry said it was too soon.”

Elizabeth wants to say that she doesn’t understand; she doesn’t understand why they want her. She doesn’t understand what they want from her. Her hands clench and unclench against the transfigured cotton of her robes.

“He says I’m too clingy,” Draco is saying. “Because I’ve lost so much, whenever I see something I don’t want to lose I just go for it. Which is stupid because I didn’t go for him, did I? For years I didn’t go for him even though he wanted me to… Anyway, he likes me clingy, so I don’t know…”

Elizabeth closes her eyes. She doesn’t understand. “I’ll think about it,” she grits out finally. Her voice is too deep and too rough.

Draco’s hand catches on her elbow for a moment. They go to the floo room in silence.

He makes her promise she’ll come back on Saturday and then she’s flooing home. It’s small and drab and empty. A perfect fit for her ugliness. She clenches her jaw and takes a few deep breaths and then goes and finds something to take her mind off of all of it.

At night all she can think of is Potter’s arm around her and his strong body holding her close. The heat of him. The heat of them both. In her imagination Draco presses closer and closer on the other side until she’s sandwiched between them, Draco’s hands slipping up her thighs, Potter kissing down her neck.

It’s there that her imagination stutters, because she wants she wants to have something else between her legs than what she has. Something the Potter in her imagination can sink his fingers into. She wants to be small and delicate and to fit into their arms, wants her skin to be smooth and supple and free of scars. The heaviness that grows between her legs breaks her out of her fantasy, wakes her up. There’s no way they want her like this, like whatever she is, a pig wearing lipstick, a scarecrow in a dress.

She has to stop wanting them, somehow. Has to accept just their friendship. Even that seems like an impossible gift. She should just cut it off, be so cruel even they won’t try to keep her, but she can’t bear the idea of hurting either of them.

She goes to the Manor every Saturday and then every Tuesday and Saturday and then every Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday. Draco offers a few more times for her to stay but he does not push. Harry touches her on the shoulder, on the cheek. His hips brush against her hips. In the evenings sometimes they watch Muggle movies and she finds herself cuddled up against one or the other or both of them. It is a bit of agony. It is wonderful. It is a delight to be around them. It is slashing open a wound again and again.

They’re so happy and free now. So beautiful and so generous. So accepting. They do not question her dresses and women’s robes, not her jewellery, not her makeup. Except for a few times Draco says ‘Sev’ and then quickly corrects himself, they never misgender her. When she says something cold and cutting Draco smirks and Harry smiles. Nothing she does pushes them away, not her ugliness, not her bitterness. She does not understand how they can love her so much when she does not even love herself. And yet.

Winter comes and she finds herself spending more and more time at the Manor, where somehow it’s always warm. It’s Harry’s magic, Draco tells her, as usual impossibly strong. Sometimes they have to open the windows it is so much. Harry laughs and swears he’s trying to turn it down.

The house in Spinner’s End is so cold by comparison, Elizabeth finds herself bundling up in old sweaters, trying to brew potions with fingerless gloves. She stumbles through the floo one Tuesday evening late because of a potion that kept going wrong, and Harry looks at her layered sweaters and laughs.

“Elizabeth, this is ridiculous,” he says.

Elizabeth’s spine straightens in indignation.

Harry crosses the room to her and takes her hands in his, chafing them until they begin to grow warm.

“Just come and stay here,” he says. “I know Draco offered. You’ll get frostbite.”

She glares down her nose at him and he grins up at her.

“Why not?” he asks.

She’s written herself several speeches about privacy and personal space and independence and can’t think of any of them when her fingers are caught in Harry’s warm grip, the warmth creeping up her arms and all through her.

She closes her eyes, tries to regain her will somehow.

“Elizabeth,” he says. “Why not?” He’s so gentle with her she might break open. She pulls her hands away.

“You’ll grow tired of me,” she says. She does not mean to. “You’ll realise that I’m…”

“You’re what?” he asks. She hates how kind he is. Hates hates hates.

Loves.

“I’m ugly and old and mean and…”

“You’re not,” he says.

“I am,” she snaps and turns away. There’s a mirror there and she glares at it. “You need to get new glasses, clearly.”

“We don’t want you for how you look,” he says, “although you’re not ugly. Or how old you are, although you’re not old. And I like your sharp tongue, I really do.”

“Why do you want me then?” she hears herself ask and she closes her eyes against how pathetic it sounds.

“We want you because we love you,” Draco says.

She didn’t even hear him come in. That’s how wrapped up she is in this… foolishness.

He’s standing beside Harry and their hands are clenched together. Anxious.

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, after a moment. “I didn’t mean to push you. You… of course you can do what you want. What you’re comfortable with. I just want you to know that we won’t grow tired of you, we won’t suddenly wake up one day and realise all the terrible things you think about yourself. You’re precious, Elizabeth. Important to both of us, for so many reasons.”

“What do you want from me?” she demands and she doesn’t mean it to come out as pathetic and desperate as it does.

They look at each other, do that silent communication thing they do.

“Whatever you’re comfortable with,” Draco says, and his voice is low pitched, rough. “Everything or nothing or something in between.”

“You can say ‘no’,” Harry cuts in and now he sounds a little panicked. “We won’t… we’ll still love you. We will, always. Unconditionally.”

Unconditional love is not something Elizabeth has ever had the luxury of believing in. She finds herself clenching her wand, as if there’s any magic that can protect her from this.

“You want me in your bed?” she asks, and it comes out sharp and mocking, but neither of them flinch.

“Yes,” Draco says. “If you want to be there.”

“Why?’ Elizabeth demands. “You like freaks?”

Harry’s brow wrinkles, as if he’s puzzled by this.

“You’re not a freak,” Draco says.

“I’m a man who dresses like a woman!” she exclaims.

“There is nothing wrong with that,” Harry says evenly, “Men can do whatever they like with their bodies, wear whatever they like. Being different doesn’t make a person a freak. But… I thought you were a woman?”

“I have a prick!” Elizabeth almost shouts.

“Having a prick doesn’t determine your gender,” Harry says, resolutely.

“Then what does?” she asks.

“How you feel inside,” Harry says. “That’s all. That’s it. It doesn’t matter what you look like or what your genitals are or what you like to do or any of it. You’re a woman if you’re a woman. And we don’t… I don’t want to say that we don’t care, because it’s clearly very important to you. What I mean is…”

“We want you regardless. For who you are, not for your, you know, junk,” Draco cuts in.

“Junk?” Harry repeats and gives him a sideways glance.

Draco’s lips quirk a tiny bit.

“But if you don’t want to,” Harry says, “of course it’s fine.”

“You keep saying that,” Elizabeth says.

“Because I don’t want you to think you have to trade sex for affection!” Harry exclaims. “Or food or anything. Everything we have, it’s all yours. Regardless.”

“I don’t understand,” Elizabeth says.

“I know,” Harry says. “But that doesn’t make it not true. Don’t you… don’t you ever love something because it’s beautiful?”

“I’m not beautiful,” she says.

“I didn’t mean physically,” Harry says.

“You think I have some kind of pure soul?” she demands.

He laughs. “No,” he says.

“Or is it because I’m broken? You like broken things? Or– no– you want to save me?”

Harry flinches a little.

“We didn’t mean to tell you like this,” Draco says. “But it’s true. We do, we do want you.” He steps forward tentatively, takes her large rough hands in his slender white ones. “Please believe us,” he murmurs. He lifts her hands up, kisses one and then the other, the backs and then the palms. The stained fingertips.

She sucks in a breath, pulls her hands away. “I can’t,” she whispers.

“Okay,” Draco says, reassuringly. “That’s okay.” He glances at Harry. “Please, still come and have dinner with us. Like Harry said, you’re always welcome. Teddy is excited to see you.”

She shouldn’t. She should go home. (And what? Moulder?) But she can’t tear herself away from the warmth of them. Instead she nods and stays.

It’s awkward now. More awkward. The boys sit close together, keep looking at each other and doing that silent communication thing. Harry looks a little frayed around the edges, keeps peeking at Elizabeth like he thinks she might be volatile. Teddy bounds in and starts shoving food into their mouth, talking through it, despite Draco’s gentle chiding about them speaking with their mouth full. They finish two helpings of the baked chicken and one very small one of vegetables and then jump out of their chair, calling that they have to go do their homework and disappearing.

“I do not think they were, in fact, excited to see me,” Elizabeth observes.

Harry looks after them. “Should I go see what they’re up to? They’ve been very mysterious lately.”

“They’re making Christmas presents,” Draco says.

“Out of what?” Harry asks.

“That air dry clay you got them,” Draco says. “Or that’s what it was initially. They keep asking for more and more crafting things. I’m a little afraid of what you’ve created.”

“Me?” Harry demands. “You’re the one who started this whole crafting thing when you got them that night light kit.”

“That wasn’t me,” Draco defends. “It was Hermione!”

“Is it a problem?” Elizabeth cuts in.

Harry laughs. “No. It’s nice that they have a hobby, even if they do keep ending up making huge messes.”

“Then why are you arguing?” she asks.

“Well,” Harry says. “We also have to have a hobby.”

Draco knocks their shoulders together a little hard.

“Hey!” Harry protests when it makes him drop a string bean on his lap.

“I can’t believe you tried to seduce me and now here you are acting like children,” Elizabeth says. It just slips out.

“If we were trying to seduce you we'd have done a much better job,” Draco says, but Potter is giving Elizabeth puppy dog eyes.

“Professor?” he says in a soft little voice. “I think Draco and I need someone to teach us manners.” He looks up at her through her lashes.

Fuck, it goes straight to her cock.

“Ignore him,” Draco says. “He’s a kinky bastard.”

Elizabeth closes her eyes. Bloody fuck.

“Look at what you did,” she hears Draco hissing.

“Sorry,” Harry says. “I was just joking around.”

Elizabeth opens her eyes again. “I think it’s time for me to go.”

Glad for her voluminous robes, she stands.

“No, please,” Harry says. “Don’t. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t…”

“Harry,” Draco says.

“You shouldn’t what?” Elizabeth snaps, too viciously, but she’s all wound up.

Harry flinches back. “I don’t know,” he says in a small voice.

Immediately Elizabeth is filled with regret. They’re trying too hard and all she’s doing is attacking them. She sits down. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“We’re not doing such a bang-up job ourselves,” Draco points out.

They look at each other for a moment.

Elizabeth stands up again. “I do need to go,” she says, trying to sound gentle.

“You’ll come for dinner Thursday?” Draco asks.

“Wait, Elizabeth,” Harry says, standing up quickly. “Let me come with you, for just a minute. I’ll cast a heating charm– don’t tell me you don’t need it.”

“I can cast my own charms,” she says.

“Like mine?” he asks, cheekily.

She sighs and nods. “Fine.”

Draco accompanies them to the floo room, watching her anxiously.

She turns and says goodbye to him before she steps through the floo and he steps forward and kisses her on the cheek. “Goodbye,” he says softly.

Harry is clumsy as ever in the floo, tracking soot onto Elizabeth’s carpet before turning and scourgifying it. “Sorry,” he says when the charm is too strong and leaves a bleached spot behind.

“You really have too much power,” Elizabeth says.

“Yeah,” Harry says, shyly. “It keeps getting stronger and stronger too.”

Elizabeth’s mind starts spinning for ways it can be alleviated.

“Well?” she says.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, and casts a warming charm that feels like a warm current washing over her. “That should last until Thursday.”

“Thank you,” she says, her voice lower than she means it to be.

Harry turns and looks up at her. He tentatively reaches up a hand and brushes the backs of his fingers down her cheek. “We meant everything we said, you know,” he says.

“I know you did,” Elizabeth says.

Harry smiles and then bounces up on his tiptoes and kisses her, just a press of their lips together, just long enough to leave her wanting and empty when he leaves.

She stares at the floo for a long time, resisting the urge to touch her lips.

That evening she casts a charm on the mirror to extend it, then steps in front of it naked. It’s not any worse than she’d expected, the sight of her body. Scarred and too thin, but somehow still with a pot belly, her thin chicken legs, her ribs visible beneath her scarred skin. Worse are all the ways she isn’t a woman, the flat chest, the narrow hips, the prick that hangs like a dead worm between her legs. She has the mad thought, suddenly, to cut it off, and then that thought transforms to something else. Muggles have treatment for this; hormones, surgeries. They can stick wads of plastic into her chest to give her breasts, they can pump silicone into her hips to give her shape, they can shave down her jaw and raise her cheekbones, they can invert that sad worm into something else.

Incredibly expensive, she’s sure, and dangerous as all Muggle surgeries are. There would be more scars. She could look like she’s meant to look.

And then, of course, another thought; if Muggles can do it, why can’t magic? You can transform yourself into a beetle, surely there must be a way to turn a human into a different human.

She summons her robe and dresses quickly, tries to think. She’s never heard of a spell like that, but that means nothing. There are millions of spells out there and that’s only accounting for Western ones. In other cultures, where perhaps this sort of thing is more common. In India, for example, she’s heard that there is a cultural tradition of transgendered people. She knows nothing about Indian magic– could they have some kind of spell?

She doesn’t know why it took her so long to get on this train of thought– shouldn’t it have been obvious?

And then she realises: she doesn’t want to do it for herself, she wants to do it for Harry and Draco. So when she falls into bed with them– and she will, she can’t fool herself on that account– she won’t be as disgusting, as wrong as she is now.

The thought stops her in her tracks. She’s contemplating having expensive, extensive surgery, or the magical equivalent, to please people who told her repeatedly that they liked her for who she is?

She hisses out a curse and rummages around until she finds the whiskey, pouring herself a finger of it and then staring it, golden and undrunk, for a long time. What they said can’t be true, and yet they clearly believed it to be. It doesn’t make any sense for them to love her, but when she thinks about what they’ve been doing all this time, she can’t explain it any other way. It must be true. Everything they say. They must, at least, believe it’s true.

She puts the glass down without drinking it. It would be… good… if she looked more female, but she has to do it for herself, she thinks, not for them. Do it because she wants to stand before them and feel whole, not because she thinks it will make them love her more than they do.

By Thursday evening she’s gotten a lot of thinking done. She’s stared at herself in the mirror and made a list of things she’d like to change if she could. Not the thinness and the potbelly and the scars, but the things that make her look male, the things that make it hurt for her to look at herself.

She takes the list (and drinks a shot of whiskey for courage) and steps through the floo. Draco is waiting there as usual, greeting her with the happy smile he always gives her. As if he is overjoyed to see her, and perhaps he is. Maybe she’s starting to believe it too.

“Draco,” she says, and he looks at her curiously. “Perhaps I could speak to you privately about a medical matter?”

He inclines his head and brings her to his study, overlooking the yard where the rose bushes are now filled with the red berries of the rosehips and glittering with frost.

There’s a small sitting area at one end of the study and Draco gestures for Elizabeth to take a seat, then sits down across from her and taps the coffee table for a tea tray to appear.

She waits while he pours and doctors the tea and then takes up the tea cup, but her hands are shaking too much and the cup rattles in the saucer.

“Elizabeth,” Draco says, and his voice is low and comforting. “You know you can tell me anything.”

She nods, then takes a deep breath. “I want to be more like a woman,” she says. “My body, I mean. Since you’re a doctor I thought you might know…”

But Draco is already nodding. “Gender affirmation treatments,” he says. “I’m not a specialist, and I’m not sure it would be ethical for me to treat you, considering our relationship, but I have a colleague who I’ve found very trustworthy I can refer you to.”

She almost refuses. “There’s not a… potion…?” she asks before becoming aware of how stupid that must sound, considering she’s a potioneer. Her hands tangle in her skirts.

“I think it would be best if you met with my colleague, Healer Kim,” Draco says. “She can review all of the options with you, but from what I understand there are a number of things that are possible.”

Elizabeth nods. “Thank you,” she says.

“Of course,” Draco says, sounding a little puzzled. Then he adds: “I have to apologise for Harry and myself for Tuesday. I know we were pushing you too much.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not…” she begins and then swallows. “You must know… I also want…” She forces her hands to unclench and smooth out the wrinkles they’ve made in her skirts. She swallows. “I just, it doesn’t make sense.”

Draco leans forward and reaches out a hand, an offer. She places her hand in his and he just holds it for a minute. “I think I understand,” he says finally. “And that’s why we’ve been holding back. We want to give you a chance to learn that it’s real.” He smiles. “And we really do enjoy your company. Even if everything remains platonic, we’ll still be happy to have you.”

She nods. “I feel like I should be angry that you’re treating me like some wild creature you’re hoping to tame,” she says. “But thank you.”

“We’re not,” Draco says. “We don’t want you tame. We want you exactly how you are.” He squeezes her hand. Somehow she feels like she might be beginning to believe it.

The consultation happens early next week. Healer Kim is a tall, thin, no-nonsense woman who greets Elizabeth with no indication that she finds anything about the situation strange– reassuring considering Draco said this was her specialty.

Instead she asks Elizabeth a series of questions about her history and her experiences, then what she wants. Finally she recommends a treatment regimen and a magical surgery. Elizabeth comes out of the appointment feeling something akin to shock.

Harry and Draco meet her at the floo, sit her down and pour tea into her.

“One month,” she says. “I’ll have a surgery and then take potions for a month and that will be it. It’s so easy.”

Harry smiles and sits a little closer to her, so his shoulder and thigh are pressed against her. “Is it really easy?” he asks. “I think it must have been very difficult up until this point.”

She nods. She allows herself to lean against him.

“You can stay here,” Draco offers. “After the surgery. So we can keep an eye on you. I know the recovery is much easier than Muggle surgeries are, but there’s still a period of recovery.”

Elizabeth nods. “Okay,” she says.

“That’s great,” Harry says and wraps an arm around her. “We’ll take such good care of you, you’ll never want to go home.”

Elizabeth already doesn’t want to go home. She thinks that if they are wrong, if they do grow tired of her, if they do find her too ugly, it will destroy her completely. She should be more careful with herself, probably, but there’s no question in her mind that it’s too late.

She moves into the South-southwest wing of Malfoy manor the day before the surgery. Not all of her things, just the things she thinks she’ll need during her recovery; baggy robes and things to read. Before she left she went to Melinda and her wife, told them she’d be away for a month, asked them to look after things. It wasn’t necessary, of course; her wards would do a well enough job, but she didn’t want them to worry if they didn’t see her for a while.

How odd to have people worry about you.

“Of course, Mr Snape,” Melinda had said with a smile, and Elizabeth had promised herself that that would be the last time someone would call her that and not be corrected.

Harry and Draco take her to the surgical wards of St Mungos and sit with her, Harry chattering away about something– Elizabeth can’t pay attention– and Draco holding her hand, rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand. When she’s called, she turns and looks at them and Harry kisses her cheek and Draco kisses her hand and they say they’ll be waiting for her when she gets out.

She doesn’t remember waking up in the hospital, or the trip to Malfoy Manor. The next thing she knows she feels like she’s burning up and aching, and someone is pressing cold cloths to her face.

She opens her eyes and turns her head, stiffly.

Harry smiles at her.

“Did it work?” she asks, her voice is weak and her throat aches.

“Yeah,” Harry says. “There’s just a bit of swelling. It should go down in a few days.”

“How do I look?” she asks.

Harry grins. “Honestly?” he says. “Like you have the mumps. Here, let me give you another potion– Draco said to give it to you when you woke up.”

The next time she wakes up, Draco is there, his head in a book, and she feels a lot better. She sits up in bed, swings her legs over the side.

“Whoa,” he says. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I want to look at myself,” Elizabeth says.

“Stay there,” Draco says and casts a mirror spell.

She stares. Her face is puffy, but it's clearly different, her jaw narrower, her cheekbones higher. She reaches a hand up but doesn’t touch. She shifts until she can get the robe she’s wearing out from under her and then she pulls it over her head.

“Elizabeth!” Draco exclaims.

She throws the robe to the side. Her abdomen looks much the same, except for the tiny round swell of her breasts. The potion she’ll be taking the next month will move her body fat around, form hips and breasts the healer had said. She looks between her legs, where there are still bandages.

“Can I see?” she asks.

Draco frowns, then nods. “Here, lie down again,” he says, and carefully removes them. He recasts the mirror spell so she can see it lying down. Her pubic hair had been removed for the surgery, so she can see everything clearly, red and swollen, but still so different. No prick, no balls, only a little mound and red lips. Without thinking she moves her hand to touch it, but Draco catches her wrist gently. “Not yet,” he says, and lets go of her wrist. “You still have some healing to do. May I put the bandages on again?”

She nods and lets him help her lay back on the pillows again.

He sits down beside her and helps her swallow some potions and a small bit of flavoured ice.

“What do you think?” he asks, when she’s settled again.

“It’s me,” she says.

He brushes her hair off of her forehead, puts the cold compress there again. “Yeah,” he says. “It is.”

The swelling only lasts a few days, though the ache between her legs lasts a while longer. Soon she’s able to get up and move about the house, although every time she tries Dotty appears and hovers worriedly beside her. She eats breakfast and dinner with Harry and Draco and Teddy and spends the rest of her time reacquainting herself with the library or walking about the garden.

When Healer Kim comes to visit her and inspects her and pronounces her fully healed, she casts the mirror charm again and spends a long time staring at herself naked. She’s still not pretty, still scarred and battered, still too bony, still with that little potbelly. But she looks like herself in a way she never had before.

She doesn’t really mean to find herself with her hand between her legs, but it's the most fascinating part. First it’s an exploration, looking closely at the folds of her new genitals, the soft moist flesh of them. Feeling how they fit together, the bit at the top that makes her feel tingly, the double folds around the vaginal entrance. She’d studied the diagrams, knows the names, the labia majora and labia minora, the clitoral hood. She feels the opening with a finger, slips it inside, surprised at the curve of it, the way the muscle walls press against it. She had thought it would feel more hollow, more like an emptiness.

She means just to feel it, but then it begins to grow slick, and the way her fingers press against her flesh make her want more; she slides them up and down, down between her labia to collect more slick, up around to her clit and then back down again. She hears herself make small noises, feels her hips jitter upwards. She opens her legs wider and throws back her head and clenches her eyes closed and touches and touches until she feels like she’s flying, waves of sensation lapping at her whole body, until it crests in a great wave and then she sinks down, content.

Later, when Harry asks her what she did that afternoon she feels herself blush and makes up some nonsense and she can’t quite shake the conviction that they know exactly what she did.

Days are slow at Malfoy Manor, slow in the warmth of the airy house. She’s never allowed herself the luxury of slow before, always felt pressure to be doing. But now she lounges around the sitting room reading literature and goes on long walks, all wrapped up against the chill. Often she finds herself touching herself again, in the mornings after breakfast, in the afternoons before tea, in the evenings when everyone has gone to bed.

First she thinks of nothing, only the delight of her new, pink flesh, but soon thoughts intrude. Harry’s arm tight and strong around her when they’d watched a movie that evening. Draco licking icing sugar off his fingers and smirking at her. The glimpses she gets of the two of them, Draco pressing Harry against a door frame kissing him hard, Harry sitting in Draco’s lap before they’d heard her coming and Harry had slid off, a red mark on Draco’s collarbone when his robe had slipped, Harry tickling Draco as punishment for some teasing remark until Draco’s giggle had turned into a moan.

She imagines she’s between the two of them, that her hand is Draco’s hand or, oh Merlin, Harry’s mouth. She slides her fingers into her vagina, imagines it’s them, making her ready. Harry making her ready for Draco, maybe, with his fingers and then his tongue, making her all slippery and wet. Maybe he’d coat his fingers in her slick, like this, then slide them back and finger her arse while he ate her out…

She comes, panting, seeing stars, the bed beneath her soaked. Oh Merlin, she thinks, wiping her hand on the bed beside her. Oh Merlin’s saggy tits.

When the month is over she goes back to Spinner’s End and stays for a few hours in the freezing house, going into her potions lab and just sitting there for a while. It feels like returning to the site of a dream, perhaps a nightmare. Feels like returning to who she used to be, small and bitter on the inside. Drab, colourless. She packs some things, some clothes, some books, a crate of potions ingredients, and returns to the Manor. She’s not moving there. She’s just going to see if the Malfoy Manor potions lab has really been improved as much as the boys had said.

Harry comes in while she’s in the middle of setting up the lab for brewing.

He watches her in silence while she fiddles with the fires and sets out the althames, scourgifying the beakers and measuring tools.

“I’m glad to see you’re making use of it,” he says when she turns to him. He’s perched on a stool, sitting in one of the patches of sunlight that streams through the large windows.

Elizabeth nods and fiddles with the scale. “It seems a shame not to,” she says.

Harry nods. “Draco had grand ideas for brewing, but of course he’s too busy,” he says. “Mostly, I think he wanted it for you. He’s talked about spending time in here with you, during the war. You were the only thing that made him feel safe.”

Elizabeth takes in a deep breath, then lets it out slowly. “You were the only things I lived for,” she says, adjusting the alignment of the stirring rods on the bench. “The two of you. I knew I couldn’t save you by that point, so I thought if I could just save him then it would all be worth it.”

Harry slips off his stool and comes over to her, close enough that she can feel his warmth. “We weren’t supposed to survive,” he says. He puts his hand gently on her neck, traces the ridges of her scars. “I think sometimes,” he says, his voice dropping down into a whisper. “I think of this as a reward, this life, us getting what we want. I got everything I wanted.” His hand stills, cupping the side of Elizabeth’s neck. He’s behind where she’s sitting on her stool, her head leaning against his chest. “And I still don’t believe it sometimes. Maybe this is heaven.”

“You would want me in your heaven?” Elizabeth doesn’t mean to ask.

“I would want you anywhere,” Harry says, and he leans down and kisses her, awkwardly, from above.

It was inevitable that she would end up in their bed from the moment she knew they wanted her. How could she say ‘no’ when they were so beautiful, when they loved her so very much? Even though she’s the ugly one, too tall and bony and old, they touch her as if she is precious, stripping her between them and kissing every inch of her skin, her now-sensitive nipples, her widened hips. She tugs at their clothes and demands that they get naked as well, so they do, Harry exposing his dark skin first, the darker scars that mar it, then stripping Draco who is flushed pink. They are so beautiful she cannot breathe, or she cannot breathe because they are kissing her, touching her everywhere she hadn’t known she longed to be touched. When they stop she barks at them to continue, and Harry laughs and sucks on her nipples and Draco kisses his way down her belly until he’s between her legs, until she’s coming and coming and demanding something more and then Draco is offering to hold Harry down so Elizabeth can ride him and they’re so beautiful she can’t breathe.

She goes back to Spinner’s End to clean it out, to throw away her father’s old things, to sort through her mother’s. She goes to Melinda and her wife’s house to thank them and let them know she’s leaving, goes to Tim’s and his wife’s to say the same thing. Both times she wears a dress and makeup, both times they smile at her and say they’re sorry she’ll be gone. She wants to say that she wouldn’t have made it without them, without any of them, without the town growing bright and beautiful, without them giving her tiny glimpses of what it was to be cared for. But of course that’s not something you can say to a neighbour who just washed your windows once. That’s not something Elizabeth will maybe ever be able to say.

She’s working on it though, on saying things that are true, working up to telling Harry and Draco that she loves them. Tells them in kisses, in letting herself be soft sometimes. Someday maybe she’ll be able to find the words. Someday, maybe, she’ll be able to use them on herself.