But Dead Girls Can't Curse

by Lapsed Pacifist

Auror Harry Potter is looking into a new dark wizard, one rising worryingly fast. On the other side of the planet, Severus Snape blinks open somebody else's eyes and a strange man calls him 'Carmilla'. [Genderbent Snape. Canon pairings, some blink-and-you'll-miss-it Harry/Draco implications. Some completely non-canon-compliant magic. ABANDONED.]

This is an abandoned story. There's about fifteen thousand words of it and that's all. There are some notes at the bottom if you wish to find out more about the circumstances of its posting!

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Prologue: In Which a Dark Wizard is Noticed by the Ministry

Harry was only five minutes late to the meeting, which he - and most of his co-workers - considered a great improvement.

"Sorry," he said automatically when he stumbled into the meeting room with his glasses slightly askew, arms full of paperwork and his wand jammed down the back of his pants. Mornings weren't his most shining moments, but on the school holidays they were even worse. Somehow, having the kids home was more exhausting than actually working as an auror.

It was only Hermione and Draco in the room anyway, but they both hated it when he was late, which was ...well, pretty much always.

Hermione, face set in an expression torn between exasperation and silent judgement, got up to help him with the papers. She, in contrast to him, cut a very professional figure in her sober, modest robes with her hair clean and only slightly frizzy around the edges.

"Kind of you to deign to join us," drawled Malfoy, without ever looking up from the - fascinating, no doubt - inspection of his cuticles. He was settled at the other side of the polished table, hair slicked back and robes expensive enough to feed a family of four for a month.

Harry rolled his eyes. Sometimes it was still weird that they'd gotten through their eighth year at Hogwarts without murdering each other, but it was true that by the time they'd all ended up working together they... well, Draco didn't like Harry and Ron didn't like Draco and Hermione sometimes seemed like she wanted to smack all of their heads together, but they'd grown up. A little.

Grown up enough to have their own children, anyway.

Harry rather suspected that he was not now, nor would he ever be, prepared for adulthood, but it didn't change the fact that time was flying. It twisted and darted from just within grasping range like a particularly determined Snitch.

"Yeah, well, had to get the kids up. Ginny needs the lie-in," he shrugged, yawning.

"Finished cleaning up after the birthday party, then?" Hermione asked, her smile resurfacing.

Harry made a face. "Maybe," he said evasively, which they all took to mean no. He retrieved his hovering coffee cup. "Okay." He dropped into his seat and looked between the pair of them. "So what's the emergency meeting for, and where's Ron?"

"Unavailable," said Draco, sounding bored but also colossally unimpressed with Ron's time management skills.

"Busy taking a witness interview," Hermione corrected, slicing a look in his direction.

"As I said," drawled Draco. "Unavailable."

"There's reports of a Dark Wizard," Hermione said with a sigh, fishing through the papers Harry had brought but not yet actually examined to produce the relevant ones.

"Dark wizard?" Harry repeated. He closed his eyes against the daylight, groped for his cup and took a bracing gulp of hot sludge. It seemed that wizards everywhere were desperately trying to surpass Voldemort. They generally failed, but they were occasionally vicious enough and powerful enough to pose quite a few problems to the Ministry.

This was where Harry's branch came in: The Abuse of Dark Artifacts and Magic Office. It was something the Ministry had needed for some time, but only in the wake of Harry's successful defeat of Voldemort had they had the political clout and attention to make it actually happen.

It was technically headed by Draco Malfoy, which was... among the most grating ironies of existence, really.

('Well,' Hermione had said at the time they were all coming together and had realised that this was, in fact, going to be the case, 'you can't say he doesn't know his dark magic.'

'That's the bloody point,' Ron had growled. Harry, meanwhile, had put his face on the sticky pub table and made a noise of groaning distress. Somebody, either Ginny or Hermione, had patted his head consolingly.)

It turned out, though, that while Harry preferred fieldwork to politics - and so did Ron, and, frankly, so did Hermione, because she preferred research but she hated politics - Draco liked it. It was full of manipulative and underhanded people executing amazing feats of ambitious backstabbing and Draco was, predictably, rather good at it.

His virtually unlimited funding helped, too.

In actuality, his money made the most consistent contribution to success, and his pretty manners - when he wanted to use them - and big grey eyes came in next. But it wasn't without help from a genuinely engaged mind. Despite being one of the very smallest, run by two people and staffed by no more than five at a time, they were now one of the elite slices of the Auror Division, the kind that rookies fresh out of training dreamed of getting into.

"Why does that shock you?" Malfoy wondered aloud. "Yes, Potter, we occasionally have more than requisition forms and incident reports to come to work for."

"Another Dark Wizard. Why don't you elaborate?" Hermione prompted, cutting off the argument before it began. True, they weren't usually hostile arguments, but - well. Draco and Harry didn't get on.

That was all.

Harry closed his mouth and subsided, his chewed fingernails tapping along the desk. "Well, where is he, for a start?"

Draco smoothed back his thick, straight hair. It was a familiar gesture now, the one he made when he wasn't thinking about his body language and he could feel a tension headache coming on. Harry's gut clenched. Bad news.

"Somewhere in Australia, currently," he said.

"Australia?" The feeling subsided, but it didn't go away. Harry raised an eyebrow. "You don't think we should be worried about something a little closer to home?" he suggested.

"Perhaps, but their Defense Office is under-funded, understaffed and... well, the wizarding society in Australia is very poorly defined, and they have an anemic approach to security - mostly they're self-regulating," Draco said, sounding like he thought the idea of allowing large groups of people to self-regulate was a terrible one. "A request was put in to our Ministry, and the Minister has been… encouraging international cooperation," he sounded annoyed with Shacklebolt, which was not an unusual state of affairs.

Harry sighed. "So, what? We should track down this someone-or-other in Australia and hand him over to their Ministry?"

"Well, that's just it. He's actually Romanian," Draco passed down three thin sheaves of paper.

"Of course he is," said Harry, leaning forward to accept his. "If it's not Romania, it's Moldova or - bloody Latvia or-"

"Ehem," said Hermione, "Not everybody who attends Durmstrang turns out to be a Dark Wizard," she said pointedly, even as she left a thin pile of notes at the conspicuously empty space where Ron usually sat.

"No, just seems that every one who is did," Harry muttered.

"I think you'll find Durmstrang is somewhat outside our jurisdiction," said Draco.

"But Australia's not?"

"If you'd let me finish, Potter -"

Hermione took the opportunity to interrupt, reading loudly from the one of the reports. " 'A timely request for assistance, because the Australian division has received notification that he may have some business in the United Kingdom in the near future, and we will have to answer awkward questions at the next meeting of the International Cauldron Standardisation Council if-' "

"Did Weasley write that?"

"He is the head of the Department of International Magical Co-operation."

Draco muttered something unflattering. Harry didn't have the heart to argue because, well, cauldron bottoms. It had proven to be an awkwardly lasting obsession.

Hermione stopped reading aloud and buried her nose in the papers. Harry regarded the picture slapped across the front piece of paper for a long moment. The wizard had thick, dark hair and yellow eyes – hardly unheard of, but still one of the more colourful shades a wizard could have – and a very masculine face.

Somehow, Harry always expected people touted as the Next Great Dark Lord to share some superficial resemblance to Voldemort. He knew that was stupid, because Voldemort himself had run through many appearances, from fair to foul to inhabiting other people's bodies. Darkness rarely showed on the skin.

This one was much more attractive than Voldemort, at least (although to be absolutely fair, Harry had met amphibians more attractive than Voldemort), and shared no real superficial resemblance. But the picture was a slice of this man, and there was something about the set of his jaw, the angle of his shoulders that suggested nothing so much as iron determination.

"He's going to be a problem," Harry said, without ever having flipped a page. His instincts screamed. He met Draco's grey eyes. They were a mirror.

Harry and Draco might have come from very different backgrounds, but some of their scars were the same. Harry might ignore his own instincts occasionally, but when he and Draco actually agreed with each other? Never.

"I'll say," Hermione muttered, shaking her head. She hadn't looked up and she'd missed the interaction between Harry and Draco. "A master necromancer?" She asked incredulously. "I didn't even know that was a title in use anymore!"

"His family is old aristocracy. They have certain privileges due to them, and training their heirs in necromantic magic is one of them." Draco's voice was just a little bit resentful.

"Are - are you jealous? Do you know what's involved in necromancy?" Hermione demanded, scowling at him.

"Yes."

"You -" Hermione opened her mouth but paused. "You do?" She set down the papers. She'd read them already, but she would probably do it again and again before the end of the day.

Harry looked between them. Draco's grey eyes were glittering just a little, the same look he got when he'd found uncomfortable information about his superiors. There was evidently something he was missing here.

"How did you get your hands on that information?" Hermione asked, licking her lips.

"Oh, I read it in a book somewhere," Draco said lightly, glancing at her from under his eyelashes.

"Yes?" she prompted, leaning forward.

Malfoy tapped his lower lip. "Hmm, I forget where." He smiled, then paused. "Besides, Granger, you know that's illegal. You'd never do something like that, would you? Dark, dark magic, that."

Hermione recovered herself, settling back and sniffing. "There's nothing wrong with knowledge for its own sake. Nobody would use it, I just..."

Draco was definitely smiling now, but it wasn't a very nice smile. (Few of Draco's smiles were nice.)

Hermione's expression shuttered, and she looked like she would dearly like to jog his memory with a creative hex or two.

"What's the big deal?" Harry asked, bewildered.

The tension fled as the pair of them sighed in unison, eyes cut towards him as though he was a complete cretin. Really, this was why he liked having Ron in meetings – Hermione and Draco made him feel something between stupid, ignorant and uneducated, and Ron certainly provided a helpful counterbalance. Just because he wasn't an incurable bookworm didn't make him stupid.

"Don't you read?" Hermione asked, just as Draco rolled his eyes and said, "Only you, Potter, could work for years in this job and not even know that."

"Why don't you just tell me, then?"

"Necromancy," Hermione began, sounding as usual much like she'd digested an encyclopedia, "is the magic used to animate, communicate with, and, if you believe old fairytales, resurrect the dead." She paused. "Although, in modern use, it's pretty much any magic used with the dead. Funeral rites and things can be considered necromancy now," she said it as though she disapproved of this definition.

"A lot of people consider it the Darkest form of Dark magic possible," Draco took up the thread cheerfully. "But a lot of people read The Quibbler, so you never really know."

Hermione made a noise of grudging agreement.

"And it's illegal?"

"It falls under the Unforgivable category of criminal sanction in most places, although it's a difficult branch of magic and the charge is rarely laid," Draco corrected delicately. "There are some exceptions: if your family can be grandfathered in as practising necromancers, or if you're the State Necromancer, but we don't have one of those. Haven't for ...centuries, surely."

"Two centuries," Hermione supplied. "I take it your family'd not been practising it long enough to be grandfathered in?"

"By about ten years." Draco said glumly. "Pity." He paused. "Do you think I could persuade Shacklebolt to bring that clause ten years forward?"

Hermione gave him a very dark look. Harry didn't understand the exact subtleties, but he was pretty sure Malfoy was just baiting her and he was keen to direct the conversation back to business. "So this guy can talk to dead people. Big deal. Why's that such a problem?"

"Because it's an amazingly complicated branch of magic," Hermione supplied immediately. "Even Voldemort could only animate dead bodies," she pointed out. "If this, this Valdisius has the title of master necromancer, it means that he has a lot more than a passing familiarity with the most difficult of the Dark Arts. In other words, it means –"

"He's really dangerous. Yes, I got that, thanks," Harry rolled his eyes and returned to scanning the document.

"I'm serious, Harry," she chided. "Don't go getting involved in this thinking he's just another Voldemort wannabe. He's going to be seriously dangerous."

He tuned her out. They were all seriously dangerous, in their own special way. Most of them were just dangerous because they had no regard for their own or bystanders' safety; lunatics to the end, and completely unpredictable. The occasional difficult case was also a genius. He kept reading. "Suspected killings?" Harry's eyebrows rose. "What, so they haven't even confirmed it?"

"Well, it's not an easy thing to confirm," Hermione pointed out. "But he's hit triple-digits in suspected deaths. Don't you think that's worth some investigation?"

Harry nodded grimly. "Yeah."

"Wonderful," Draco said, a little too enthusiastically. "You and Weasley can take it, then."

"Do you ever do any real work?" Harry asked acidly.

He knew that Malfoy did work, and even though most of it was tedious paperwork and boring networking with people nobody wanted to talk to, he knew from the occasional office row that his spellwork hadn't suffered much from this inactivity. There was no reason why he couldn't do fieldwork with as high a success rate as anybody else – higher, in all likelihood, than most – but for some reason, he chose not to.

"Delegation," Malfoy's lips twisted into a smirk. "Hop to, Potter. Try not to leave too many bodies on the ground this time."

As though he cared. Harry was pretty sure he the only one who lost sleep over accidental casualties. Draco Malfoy had never had that kind of conscience and the Ministry loved having the irreproachable Harry Potter stuck in those messes, because he was so obviously innocent of any evil intent.

(Well. To be fair - the media was fickle, but Hermione kept threatening to bring charges against Rita Skeeter with regard to her animagus form, so the most scathing editorials had emotive, sympathetic counterbalances.)

Harry took his paperwork, his newest file and his coffee and left the way he'd come: dishevelled and annoyed.

---

Chapter One: In Which Snape Contemplates The Shortcomings of the Afterlife and a Dark Wizard Performs a Resurrection

Severus Snape had always felt that being dead would be more restful.

He had never been the type to sit for hours on end contemplating the nature of death, not even during those rocky years of adolescence when he'd taken pains to distance himself from the remnants of his family. He had been far too busy studying for his OWLs, and then his NEWTs, and then…

Well, everybody knew how the story went after that. Mostly downhill.

But being dead was not at all as he might have assumed it to be. He was just as conscious as he had been when alive. Now he was stuck in an ageless eternity of white noise, no daytime, no night, nothing to separate one moment from the next. Time was irrelevant: he would not age, he would not die.

Death, as it turned out, was simply the place where he replayed, scene after scene, decision after decision, his life, and slowly tried to puzzle out the what ifs. In short, his life hadn't changed much. It just wasn't, well. Life.

It also wasn't interrupted by trying to teach eleven year old monsters potions for curing boils.

(If this was hell, it was remarkably like his adult life at Hogwarts. If this was heaven, he wanted a refund.)

There wasn't really anything here, except for a magnified sense of self. He was aware, in an abstract sort of way, that he no longer had a body, although his mind arranged a construct for him to believe in when it was convenient.

Occasionally, other people – dead people, the kind that liked to obsess over details or simply could not let go – would flit past, washing around him like a stream around a boulder. Some of them were muggles of surprising willpower, but most were witches and wizards. A few he even recognised. Those were the ones that gave him a wide berth.

Nobody had ever tried to visit him, except Albus. Even in the afterlife, the man was a law unto himself; he went where he would, spoke to whom he wished, and generally made a nuisance of himself. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

He had produced a bowl out of nowhere. "Sherbet lemon?"

Severus had rearranged his face into one of his practised glares. "No, thank you."

He had crossed his arms over his chest and waited as Albus fixed him with a twinkling gaze. How he made his eyes give that telling glimmer when he technically had no form at all, Snape could not work out. He certainly couldn't seem to give his sneer the same effect that it had had in life.

It did not occur to him that his name had been cleared, that the witches and wizards who passed through were awed and anxious. He might have thrown his weight around more, if he'd realised; he wasn't interested in fame, but it did come with power. Power, he liked.

Still, the important things remained. He had finally done something to atone: he had given everything for the cause and played a pivotal role in the defeat of Voldemort.

It was Dumbledore who pointed out, eyes glittering in the cold not-light, that perhaps he should have felt a little more at peace, if that was really the case.

"Have I not done enough?" Snape demanded, his high, aggrieved tone startling even him.

Dumbledore, in his usual infuriating fashion, didn't really give a satisfactory answer. He didn't seem surprised with Snape's attitude, but once he'd started in on how one ought to look deep within oneself, Snape tuned him out.

How could life be so very complicated, when one was dead?

Severus contemplated. Moments passed in little snapshots of forever. Time passed.

Well. Probably.

He knew that some time, at least, had passed, when a spirit bumped into him. It was an unusual moment; Severus Snape was unused to contact. The witch had no physical form, weak willed and not particularly tied to the mortal realm.

But there was something different, something strange, about the feel of her spirit as she rushed blindly past him. His mind grasped the edges of it, but not before he felt the wrenching twist in his gut, and he was ripped through the veil.

---

Severus Snape opened his eyes. This in and of itself was a very strange thing, since he was quite sure he had not had eyes to open in quite some time. Indeed, as far as he was aware, he hadn't had the need for eyes in quite some time, so even if he'd had them he probably would not have bothered opening them.

But as he swam up toward consciousness, he felt very human fingers against his cheek. The back of someone's hand, trembling against his skin. He stared directly forward.

It had been a long, long time since he'd been touched. Even before he died and time had lost all meaning except as something else to obsess over, he had not been touched, skin-to-skin since…

…Well, not since Lord Voldemort, but perhaps that did not count.

If that did not count, then he could not remember exactly when.

"Carmilla?" A rough, masculine voice murmured somewhere over his ear. He shifted his eyes to the man who had spoken. His shaking fingers did not stop their movements against Snape's neck, against his cheek.

That was... bizarre. Uncomfortable.

"Are you talking to me?" he wanted to ask, but he only got to "are you" before he realized that something was very, very wrong. His voice was a husky contralto thrum, and very definitely feminine.

He blinked at the man. His eyes were a pale shade grey, not really unpleasant, and filled with… something. He was shaking – blood loss, exhaustion, emotion. Snape licked his lips and swallowed. His lips were soft, plush, not chapped or bitten. That was wrong, too.

Having been dead, and now being alive, suggested that he was talking to a necromancer.

This, in turn, suggested a very powerful Dark wizard. That was all right, Snape was used to them. But... everybody who knew anything about Dark magic knew that people who spent too much time listening to the voices of the dead, who Snape now knew had a singularly unique perspective on things – one that wasn't terribly suitable for the living – didn't reason like rational human beings.

There were no bad necromancers; the art form had a way of, ah, weeding them out. But good necromancers had a way of becoming bad at being people.

"Carmilla," he repeated. "It sounds very …familiar. Is that my name?" he temporized. Perhaps he could get his hands on a wand? It would depend what this woman had been called back for. He hoped it wasn't something disgusting. So much energy and effort just to hurt someone from beyond the grave.

He hesitated, deep inside his skull. He really hoped she hadn't been recalled for some disturbing sexual purpose.

Snape swallowed. What flavour of crazy person was he dealing with today?

(Snape was used to dealing with crazy: crazy-murderous, crazy-entitled, crazy-narcissistic, crazy-eccentric... Between Dumbledore and the Death Eaters, there was a lot of crazy to choose from. He felt like he should have been able to slip back into Dealing With Crazy People mode without much difficulty, and he resented his own hesitance and nervousness.)

"Yes, yes. Carmilla," the man rumbled. "The haze should wear off in a matter of days," he continued.

Days. Snape nodded mutely. He had days. He reached for the man's hand to struggle into a sitting position. He did not hurt, but his body was not ...obeying properly? It felt as though the nerves weren't connected to the right places anymore. He would try to move his right arm, and end up moving his left foot. He swallowed down bile as he sat up and his body – previously dead, he thought with a sickening lurch – rebelled.

Stiff. So stiff. His joints... creaked.

Hair fell into his eyes as he was helped into a sitting position. Blond. She had been Lucius-bloody-Malfoy blond, with thick tresses that hung woolen over her shoulders and kept going. It wasn't until he felt the tug on his scalp that he realized he was sitting on it.

He flailed for a second, vainly trying to get this body to respond correctly. The man figured out the problem quickly and lifted him so that the hair could be moved.

Severus stopped moving entirely. Not only was he blond and female, but he was apparently extremely small.

Petite.

Dainty, even.

Light enough to be moved bodily with one arm.

He swallowed. Okay.

He finally manoeuvred the uncooperative body into a proper sitting position with assistance. Then it was time to start asking questions.

"What's going on?" he sounded breathy and uncertain. He was used to opening his mouth and hearing his own voice some out: sometimes a whisper, sometimes a roar, but always safely under his control. He supposed that this woman's voice could also be used as a tool, but he was hoping he wouldn't inhabit her body for long enough to have to learn.

"Vladisius killed you."

Was that actually somebody's name? It probably was, considering Wizarding filed the name away for later attention. "I… died?" he asked. "How?"

"Avada kedavera, but not before…" the man trailed off into an incoherent noise of rage. His grip tightened until it hurt. It was an interesting feeling. Severus revelled in it. Feeling. Sensation. "You were hurt in... various ways. We have …purified your body, of – of diseases and other things, Carmilla. You will be avenged."

Severus licked his lips and glanced down at the white shift that hinted at a tightly curved, very feminine body.

What a thought.

Lovely. Really.

Physical sensation was almost as intense as he remembered it, but his emotions felt muffled. That was probably a good thing.

"Thank you," he said, feeling very distant indeed. "How did you do this?"

"Resurrection," the man shook his head. "It was a gruesome ritual. I do not want to frighten you with the details." His expression went distant. "And, although I did it out of love, I fear what you would think of me."

Blood magic, Severus concluded. Some of the uglier necromantic rituals he'd read about in Lucius's special library involved demonic presences and sacrificial virgins, rape and torture and human sacrifice, the ripping of souls to repair one's own, the destruction of self-will… it went on and on and on, the endless parade of awful things that people could think up to do to each other. Severus rather prided himself on having a bit more imagination than most of Lucius's library. But there was something he would need to know.

"Demonic magic?" the woman's voice didn't seem to do the same harsh growl his did. The closest he could manage was sort of... purring. That was not what he wanted at all.

"I… your body was much damaged. It had to have an extra – boost, to heal before your spirit could leave again. It was a near thing." He looked and sounded guilty, shamed. The bruising self-loathing in his voice spoke to something inside Severus.

Snape closed his eyes and did not say anything damning. He knew the feeling of having done something he would regret forevermore in a moment of weakness. Demonic magic, though. That was... new. "What will the magic do to me?

"I'm not sure I understand your meaning." The man frowned, but the bleakness in his eyes disappeared slowly; smoke in a soft breeze. "It was for healing, nothing more."

Snape nodded. "Alright," he said, although he doubted that was true. He would burn that bridge later. "Do you have my wand?" It wouldn't be his, but any wand was better than no wand – as long as it wasn't made out of something stupidly exotic.

The man cringed. "I… well, no. It was – burned."

"Burned?" Severus repeated.

"You don't remember… well, of course you don't. It must have been," he shook his head as he struggled to find a word. "Traumatic."

"Yes," Severus agreed. "I have brief sort of memories, but… virtually everything is… unclear."

"Your wand was burned by Vladisius. If you can walk, I will accompany you to get a new one tonight. Now, if you want. I know how you hate to be without it," he added with a smile. He touched her cheek. "Paranoid."

Paranoid. Snape nodded. Excellent. This Carmilla had been a woman after his own heart, clearly.

He glanced back to the man, who was smiling so gently. It was such a genuine smile that Severus had the faintest snag of conscience, the tiniest hesitation about the ends justifying the means, something he had not felt since he was about, oh, fourteen. Perhaps even earlier. Before he'd met Lord Voldemort. He shook it off. No matter how gentle the man seemed with his girlfriend – perhaps his sister, if Snape was very lucky – he was not going to be happy with a stranger inhabiting her body.

No. He wouldn't mention it until he had a wand, at least. And then, well, then he'd have the element of surprise. He nodded to himself. "I can walk," he said firmly.

Carmilla's body disagreed with that statement for a few moments, but he did manage to persuade it into standing, and upon doing so he realized that what he'd thought was a bed was an altar padded out with blankets and a cushion. Furthermore, he could see the runes around the edges of the massive, bloody circle.

Definitely one of those rituals. His eyes lingered on the thurisaz rune in the inner circle. Outside, there seemed to be a very strong repetition of algiz. Somebody had been very, very nervous about this going awry – probably because of the demon. Well, caution wasn't a bad thing.

He trailed his hands down Carmilla's body, the firm curves of her breasts, and the harmonious swell of her hips. He could feel the stickiness of blood under the white shift she'd been changed into after the spell. Charming.

He stared up at the man as he rose from his sitting position by the makeshift bed. He was tall. Even from Snape's current, very short, vantage point, he would have said six and a half feet. And... broad, too. Muscled, powerful.

Snape wanted his wand and he wanted it now.

"You look so much shorter without your shoes," the man commented, smiling down at him.

Snape nodded. "Do you have them?" He didn't have any particular desire to wear women's heels, but he also did not want to be straining to look this man in the shoulder for the rest of the night. Judging from the starry array outside the window, there was not that much left of it.

"Of course. This is your room," the man pointed out.

"Well, yes, but I have been dead," Severus pointed out smoothly. "And I'm not sure how long for, either. When you die, time is…" he trailed off and shook his head. "It doesn't rush like it used to." He did not want to begin describing death in too much detail. A necromancer was often all too interested.

The body was becoming rapidly more responsive, settling beautifully around his soul. He glanced sideways at the man, wondering precisely how powerful he had to be. Snape had to adjust the way he walked to account for having hips and a different centre of balance, but otherwise it went smoothly from the altar to the edge of the circle. He toed the line, expecting pain or at least something very uncomfortable, but felt nothing. He stepped over, and magic shivered up his skin, but nothing else happened.

The room was decorated in a feminine style, in its own way: pale pinks, browns, muted reds. Oh, there were no frills or bows, but he noticed a valance, flowers in a vase, a tablecloth and curtains tied with thick ribbon - things that, really, tended to be of more interest to a woman's sensibilities, in his experience.

It did in fact have a wardrobe, and inside were numerous pairs of painful-looking shoes with long, spiky heels.

Snape hesitated.

At least they were kept in pairs, neatly in rows. He was learning more and more about Carmilla as he went. Her clothing was... girlish. He'd never seen so much silk charmeuse and handmade lace in the same place before, all in sage greens and soft blues and chocolate browns with soft pink accents.

One of Carmilla's delicate eyebrows twitched.

Snape declined to think about trying to get dressed in any of those clothes, just as he'd declined to think about having a vagina. He retrieved the most sensible looking pair of shoes – brown, and only about three inches from the ground, with a slightly chunkier heel. Her feet slid into them easily.

"Not your usual choice," the man commented.

"I am still having some difficulty." He wobbled slightly on Carmilla's ankles, but began to understand the mechanics of walking with the ball of his foot three inches below the heel after the first few steps. Analyse. Adjust. (Just like his life, but surreal.)

The man, this overfamiliar stranger, escorted Snape outside the room he'd been inside. It was an apartment that seemed to be a part of a larger compound - a lot of grey stone and hardy plants, somewhere that clearly got cold in the winter. The people coming and going all had similar features, but perhaps it was racial, rather than familial. He did not ask.

He got a few startled glances, but people seemed inclined to stay out of his way, possibly because of the behemoth who was steadying his steps. The streets felt European, but not at all English, even though the people seemed to have a good grasp of the language.

(The muggles were like muggles the world over: oblivious.)

Carmilla had been more or less in proportion, but the shoes turned what might have been a brisk, fleet-footed stride into something he had to throw her strange body into, a low, hip-slinging roll.

It was... humiliating.

And, perhaps more relevantly, he would not be able to break and run, should he have to.

The festive balls of light and glittering charms hanging from windows and doors suggested Christmas, but Severus didn't ask. He wasn't certain he wanted to know how long he'd been dead for, although he'd have to find out eventually. They passed through a wall that was apparently solid to those without a wizard's sight (or, as the case may have been, a witch's), and into a hidden pocket of magic, a street of shops and inns and delights for those with magic in their blood, human or otherwise. He looked around, noting the occasional hovering carpet. He was a long way from home.

The season meant that there were a lot of people in attendance, haggling, shifting bags from hand to hand as they grew too heavy, calling to friends across the way. A paper plane message zoomed overhead. A wolf in the window of one of the stores watched him and yawned, running its tongue over long, sharp teeth.

"I see you're still not a fan of crowds," the man said softly, as Severus stopped moving to look around and try to steady his heart rate. Heart rate. It had been so long.

"No." It did not help that he was suddenly hovering at about five and a half feet, with the shoes on. He was used to being tall enough to straighten his spine and glare out over a crowd. Merlin. What was he doing?

He took another deep, steadying breath. Now was not the time to reflect, not the time to panic. Breathe. In. Out.

He blinked his eyes. "Where are we going? I can't remember the way." He'd never seen the way.

The man nodded, took Carmilla's arm, and began walking purposefully along the street. A redheaded witch brushed past, her gaggle of children trailing after with a mixture of petulance and merriment. She shouldered Severus out of the way, and the combination of his lack of height and the ridiculous shoes almost landed him on his backside. He stumbled and clung to the massive man's forearm.

The man turned to the woman. "Watch your path," he growled. The tone was familiar. Severus felt his stomach plunge.

"Lysenska," the woman noticed him. Her eyes narrowed on Severus. "And Zimbrean." Her eyes flickered between them. "I suppose congratulations are in order. It was no small piece of spell craft." She did not sound as though she was congratulating them.

Severus could feel the man – Lysenska, which was, Merlin, Russian? Ukrainian? Where was he? – shifting, coiling like a spring, tension singing along his broad shoulders, the energy curling up along his spine, and assumed a polite, blank expression. He didn't even have a bloody wand, he couldn't get into a fight!

"Thank you," he said in Carmilla's husky purr. "I hope your Christmas shopping goes well," he added blithely, while the tension levels plummeted.

There was a startled pause. "Sure," the woman said finally, and turned, children trailing after her.

"You don't remember her," Lysenska said flatly.

"I'm sure it will come to me," Carmilla's blond hair fanned out around her shoulders as Severus shook his head. "She does seem a little bit familiar...?"

He frowned. "She's a friend of Vladisius. You have never liked her, never - I. How do you feel, Carmilla? I am not sure I asked earlier. It should have been the first –"

"I will be fine," Severus said firmly.

Lysenska looked at him. He nodded. "This way," he straightened his spine and the crowd parted for his massive bulk. He reminded Severus of a more dangerous Hagrid, an image which brought a faint, deeply cynical smile to Carmilla's generous lips.

The wandcrafter's shop was not like Olivander's, which was a haphazard but organised storehouse for row after row of wands. This was... absolute chaos.

Bats twittered at their entrance, flapping and scooting further along the rafters. An owl screeched and a cat leapt from the hearth to knock over a wand, which sent purple sparks bouncing off the walls, leaving one of the books on the mismatched, beat-up collection of shelving glowing. There was a smoking dragon-skull cauldron, which Severus itched to inspect, because he was certain he smelt too much sulfur.

"That smells interesting," was all he said, trying to restrain himself.

Lysenska blinked and raised his eyebrows. He took a deep breath. "I don't know, I'm not much of a potions brewer, myself. I didn't know you were."

"I'm not sure," Severus back-peddled awkwardly. "I'm fairly certain I did it at some point. I certainly remember it."

Lysenska nodded slowly. "Volchek!" He called after another few moments. "Honestly," he grumbled at the sounds of chaos approaching. A shelf clattered to the ground, spilling pieces of wood and a roll of dragon heartstrings. He looked at Severus. "He's always been crazy, but he's been worse and worse lately."

Severus nodded absently, his eye fixed on the cauldron. He stepped backwards at the increase in its bubbling. Fairy wings, fairy wings. He glanced along the shelves, noticing – well, nothing much. Where did this Volchek keep his ingredients?

"Ah, here we are." Volchek was a satyr, which was completely bizarre, because as far as he knew, they did not use wands. After that shock, Severus noted that his upper body looked like an imaginative sculpture of Dionysus, slowly melting into a pair of strong, cloven-hoofed goat's legs. "Ah, I've made a mistake," he sighed, looking down into his cauldron. "I'm following the instructions," he said, waving one hand at an open, dog-eared book, "but it keeps going strange on me." His fingers were long, tanned, an extra joint in the middle.

"Too much sulfur," said Severus because he couldn't help himself. It was like habit had hijacked his mouth. He snapped his teeth shut when both of them looked at him - down at him, ugh - with surprise.

"Aha! Miss Zimbrean. Good to see you alive and well," the satyr winked.

Was everybody in this bloody country either practicing or encouraging Dark magic? Severus smiled politely and inclined his head, thick hair spilling forth in a fall of shining blond.

"Too much sulfur, you say? Well, you always were an intuitive little witch," he said, which was a diminutive Severus had never paid much attention to before but now he felt it tremendously grating. He wanted his wand back so he could hex somebody.

"I'll try it." And he waved his long fingers at the cauldron, which stopped smoking abruptly as it was emptied. "Now, what can I do for you?"

"My wand has met with an unfortunate fate," Severus said, lowering his eyes to his feet. Ah yes. These stupid shoes.

"Ah, yes, I'd heard. Great pity, that. Well, here we go, try this one," he snatched a wand out of what seemed to be thin air, his long fingers wrapping around it. "Dragon heartstring, springy. Excellent for your sweet little charms."

Sweet little charms, right.

Severus took it tentatively, unsure of what a satyr-made wand would be like in temperament. It felt wrong the second he touched it, hot and angry in his hand. "No," he said immediately, dropping it to the desk before he could blow something up by accident. "Definitely not."

Volchek raised his bushy eyebrows. "No? So certain?"

"Positive."

He nodded. "It would not be much of a surprise if the magic of your body had changed," he mused. "After all, successful resurrections are so rare, we don't really have much documentation…"

"When was the last one?" Severus asked as the satyr perused the haphazard array of wands, some boxed, some left in the open, stacked upon each other in piles.

"Oh, two or three centuries, I think," he mumbled back. "Yes, it would have been Stefan. Dead for good now, of course. Not much can heal a decapitation, you understand. Here, now. Try this one. Almost complete opposite, but perhaps it will work for you. Hawthorn, unicorn hair."

Severus picked it up. The cat caught fire. He dropped it.

"Hmm, not that one," Volchek waved his hand at the yowling animal, and it settled into a smoking ball of charred fur.

He drummed his fingertips along the shelf. It creaked alarmingly. "Ahh," he turned around, "I didn't want to let this one go, as it's something of a curiosity, but with your peculiar circumstances…" he trailed off. "I suspect it might be more than commonly useful."

The wand was almost fifteen inches long, which made it the second-longest he'd ever seen, but other than that, it smelled like rowan, and had the same elaborate carvings that were seen a lot on eastern European wands all over. He accepted it, and felt the chill resonance of its magic vibrate through his bones. "Yes," he breathed. "This one."

"Show me." The satyr did seem reluctant to let him take it.

Severus shrugged and turned one of the bats into a very confused fox. It stared down at them from the rafters, its white fur almost incandescent in the dim lighting. The other bats shifted away from it.

Volchek sighed. "That," he said, "is made out of rowan and skin taken from a dementor. It's one of a kind. It will be temperamental – at best. We can look for another one."

Severus looked down at the wand. "No," he said in Carmilla's throaty purr. "This one is mine."

The satyr nodded, flipping open a book and looking up the price. "It won't do those wonderful charms of yours much good, but it will be adequate. Powerful. Good for curses," he added in a lower voice.

"I know," Snape said, drawing the wood close and pressing it to his cheek, humming along with the magic's resonance, a low, throaty rumble in Carmilla's chest.

Lysenska, indulgently silent through the proceedings, paid for the wand, and they left. Severus knew it was just a tool, but he didn't want to let it go.

They made it out of the wizarding section of the city, and he turned to Lysenska. "Thank you for that."

"I know you wouldn't want to be caught in a sticky situation without your wand," he shrugged. "It was a bit of a surprise that you chose one made out of a dementor, but…" he shrugged it off. "As Volchek said, it's likely your magic has changed. And you're safer this way," he added earnestly.

"Yes. I am," Severus agreed. "Stupefy."

Lysenska crumpled. Severus crouched beside him and quickly palmed half of the money on him – eight galleons, fifteen sickles; the man was not poor – and then he used all of the leverage he could muster to prop him against the wall. "Obliviate."

The muggles hadn't noticed a thing. They never did. Snape moved Lysenska to a completely different location - one under cover, sheltered from the weather and any prying eyes, he could do that much - and left him to wake up on his own, then hurried back to Volchek's store, executing the same spell on the satyr.

He had a moment to wonder whether or not the memory charm would work on a nonhuman, but he didn't have the time or inclination to do anything more permanent as he had to race around and edit the books to show that it had been sold to someone outside the country, for a much lower price. He then pocketed the difference and left.

Clearly, people would remember that Carmilla had been resurrected. There was no need to go back and try to erase all recollection of his passing, because it would be impossible to catch everybody. But by removing the knowledge of the wand – it was only a pity that he'd not chosen a less conspicuous one. Dragon heartstring or some other, more common, material might have been considered a loss due to shrinkage, but Snape had never even heard of a dementor-core wand before – and erasing Lysenska's memory far enough that he wasn't sure where he'd lost Carmilla, he could be out of the country before anybody really realised what had happened.

He came to a halt on the corner of a mostly deserted muggle road and stuck his wand out. The Knight Bus took almost fifteen minutes to arrive, but arrive it did. There was a new pimply kid on the door. He recalled vaguely that Shunpike had been a Death Eater? Maybe? Killed, probably.

"What you doin' all the way out here?" the kid asked suspiciously, although his eyes were not really fixed on his face.

"Leaving," he responded. He handed over a couple of sickles and curled up on one of the beds. The man's eyes followed him, lingering on his shape. It took Severus a moment to realise why he was being stared at. Then he levelled his frostiest glare on the young man.

"Yes?" he snarled. Carmilla's voice was so ill-suited to snarling. He would have to work on that.

"Where you going?"

Was it beyond his capacity to form complete sentences? But the question gave Snape a moment of difficulty. For so long his home had been Hogwarts or nowhere, he had to wonder where he really was going. But, then, there was always Prince Manor, he supposed. If it even recognised him. "Hogsmeade," he said. He would be able to Apparate from there, and then he'd know.

The boy – man, boy, it was hard to tell – nodded and went to tell the driver. It wasn't Ernie. Dead, perhaps.

Severus wondered how many years had passed, but it would look even stranger than he already did, a slip of a girl alone in the middle of the night, leaving the country with apparent haste. He would be okay. Even if he was supposed to be dead, even if he was resurrected using demon magic, even if this body was the wrong height, the wrong colouring, the wrong sex, even if he wasn't technically Severus Snape right at the moment, he would be okay. He'd been in worse circumstances.

If he gave himself a moment he might even be able to remember them.

No. He settled and breathed deeply. He had a little money, he had magic, he had time. It would all be fine.

The blood under the white shift was absolutely dry by the time he stepped off the bus, vaguely daunted by the amount of space his legs now had to cross. It was peeling, leaving tiny brown flakes on the dress and the cobblestones.

The Knight Bus disappeared in a rush of air and with a bang, leaving him clutching at the dress, precariously balanced on the heels, alone in the pre-dawn chill. The sky lightened slowly to cast its silver-grey glow across the world.

---

Chapter Two: In Which Snape Arrives Home and Harry Identifies a Body

Hogsmeade had changed. It tried to trick him, he felt, by looking familiar and comfortable, but suddenly it would leap out of the pre-dawn shadows with a glaring difference: a ruin where once a house had been, the lack of Zonko's and the addition of a new, more garish (if that was possible) joke shop. Another house here, an extra bend to this street to accommodate that alley. New roofs. Different displays.

Severus walked slowly, still not quite used to the swish and sling of his hips in such shoes. He would have to see if the Manor would let him in. It had been slightly mad - abandoned after the last of the main Prince line had died - before his death, so it may not have let him inside its doors even if he hadn't been in a foreign woman's body. The magic had gone wild with the death of the last of his mother's family, and stayed that way. It was heritage listed, but there had been persistent lobbying to have it destroyed.

Actually, he hoped it was still standing.

With that alarming thought in mind, he Apparated to its gates.

Immediately he kicked off the stupid bloody heels, feeling instantly less like a newborn faun on unsteady legs. He walked barefoot and barely wincing at the sharp rocks under his feet. His soles weren't rough. He could feel the cold ground and balance properly and his spine straightened automatically.

The gates were still there, fallen into disrepair and slathered with cautioning signs from the Ministry, but still standing.

The signs told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was in danger if he tried to open these gates, that even the Aurors had not had much success at getting past without blasting in, that the gates seemed, impossibly, to heal themselves… they rambled on and on as he approached, voices becoming increasingly shrill when he paid them no mind.

He disregarded the signs and wrapped his dainty hands around the cast iron. He couldn't bring himself to let go of the wand, so he tucked it into the crook of one arm. "I am Severus Snape, son of Eileen Prince, master of this house, and I demand entry."

There was a long, silent pause. Nothing moved.

He snarled angrily. He was sore and confused and tired and he clutched his wand, white-knuckled with temper. "I demand entry!" he shrieked at the gates.

"Good for you. You're not the first," one of the signs on the gate told him. "Didn't help them much, either, did it?"

Snape yanked the sign off, ignoring its shrill complaints, and hurled it to the side. Then, annoyed, he set it on fire. Sweet little charms, he thought acidly.

He could blast his way in, but he wasn't sure he was up to the challenge that the house presented. Perhaps he would take a room at the Hog's Head until he could figure out what to do next.

Then, unexpectedly, the cautioning signs fell from the gates, clattering to the gravel in a mumble of annoyed voices. The gates shook off decades of rust, dust, grime and ageing, and swung open with nary a creak or groan to welcome him home.

Apparently he was actually Severus Snape, son of Eileen Prince and master of this house.

Well.

...Good.

Furthermore, it seemed that the wild magic was not as wild as the stories had suggested. Merely… protective. It was an old house, and they could be temperamental like that. It was no surprise the Ministry representatives hadn't had much luck.

As he padded down the narrow, stone pathway that curved through the vibrant flora, the gates clanged shut behind him, their chains winding securely around and locking up after him. The massive vines slithered out of the pathway. Stones shifted out of the way of his feet. Everything slunk back into its correct place. It was still overgrown and unmitigated, all sorts of plants and beasts roaming the gardens, but the magic was certainly not mad.

The double doors of carved wood flung themselves wide for him, and a very old house elf appeared in the doorway. "Mister Snape, son of Eileen Prince, sir?" she asked with wide eyes.

"...Yes," he said, realising that he very definitely did not look like he was 'Mister Snape, son of Eileen Prince'.

"What is happening to you?" she asked, rushing forward to heave the doors closed behind him. "We were thinking you was dead," she added, perhaps a bit boldly.

"Yes," he said again. "I was. Prepare a room for me, ah…" he looked at her.

"Dory, sir," she curtseyed.

"Dory. A room. And I should run a bath," he added, looking down at his bare feet, now delicate and feminine, which were trailing brown flakes. "Definitely a bath."

The elf rushed off with these directions. Severus looked around at the house. There were cracks here and there, but the elves had kept the insects and mould out. He wasn't at all sure that he had any other relatives - not even distant ones - so it seemed strange that they had remained, but perhaps they were tied to his house until somebody freed them.

What a thought.

The paintings woke up as he passed them and watched him in shocked silence. "Well, now, that's an improvement," one great uncle said, leering from inside a golden frame. "Worth waking up for," another agreed, staring down a hooked nose.

Because that was what he needed: eighty year old family members leering at him. "I am terribly glad you're all dead," Severus said loudly, and continued down the hall to the sounds of shocked offence.

His room, when he was younger, had been in the highest part of the house at Spinner's End, three floors up and cramped and freezing in winter and boiling in summer. It was the reason he'd chosen to live in the dungeons when he'd taken the job at Hogwarts. Now, he traipsed barefoot in this strange body into the dungeons of the Manor. All of the old wizarding families, any of them with any money, certainly - all had dungeons. The one in the Prince house had not been used for at least a few decades. The doors screamed as he shoved at them, straining against the metal.

The battle was short, and inertia won. He growled. He had been stronger than this when he was twelve! Imagine having to use magic to open the doors. He gripped his wand, but they seemed to decide to comply on their own, and ponderously swung inwards. Huffing, Severus padded over the threshold and looked around. "Oh, yes," he breathed. "This will do very nicely. Dory?"

There was a crack. "You is wanting me, sir?"

"In here."

"Sir?" she sounded startled.

"In this room. Is the plumbing still intact?"

"Yes, sir, but -"

He turned on her. "In here. I'll fix it up," he waved one pale, delicate hand. "Also, fetch my old things - clothing and the like - from," he paused. From where? "- from wherever they were sent after Hogwarts. I don't know."

"Yes, sir." With another smoking crack, she was gone. Elf magic at its best. Severus turned to regard the room. Yes, it did have a faint rusty smell from old blood, and yes, there were still manacles hanging from the brown-stained wall. He could convert that into the bathroom, he thought. With a rung between the fixtures for them, they could become a rack for towels. A little grim, but practical.

He hummed to himself, and stopped, startled again by his voice.

By the time Dory had returned with his old things, looking a little flustered, he had found the hidden compartments and, after evicting an impressive (and used, from the smell) collection of beautifully decorative Spanish boots, decided that they would make excellent cupboards.

By piling a number of the boots up, he transfigured a wall that cut the bathroom area off from the rest of the room. His transfiguration skills were a little rusty, though, and his wall had taken on the pattern of twisting vines that was on one of the boots, and executed it in thin lines of red, which he assumed had been the garnets in another. Hmm.

Oh, well. It was usually hard to transfigure metal, particularly cold iron. And it wasn't an unattractive pattern, exactly. He frowned at that, the thought was not at all like him.

He wondered if there were thoughts left in Carmilla's dead brain.

He ran his hands through her shining blond hair.

The wall could be attempted again later, he decided. He'd fix it. Plain would be better. Plain would make him feel better.

"And the books in the library," he added to the elf as she levitated a series of boxes and chests into the corner of the room.

"The books were donated to -"

"Not those. The other ones," Severus said. She bowed, and cracked out of existence to retrieve the books.

He turned to the boxes. Three boxes, two chests and a cauldron. Was this what his life amounted to? He laughed and Carmilla's thick throaty voice echoed in the dungeons.

The books appeared on their own, neatly piling up against each other. There were only fifteen of the thick tomes, but each was a much-thumbed and annotated text. A number of them were a little bit illegal. He waved them into the top two shelves of one of the compartments that had previously been hidden, and then aimed his wand at the clothes chests to send their contents floating, neatly-folded into the other shelves.

Severus turned one of the chests into a bathtub, although the transmution of wood into ceramic was annoyingly reluctant, and spent almost an hour coaxing the house into accepting the tub as a part of its makeup so that he could connect it to the plumbing. He was grateful that these dungeons had been alternatively used as cells; there were other bathroom facilities already built in.

The boxes he emptied, glowering as he discovered more and more ingredients that had gone bad with time or poor preservation. He managed to salvage about a third of what was in the boxes. The ingredients in the other bottles, jars and vials couldn't even be transfigured because of the potent magic they contained. He emptied the ones that were not dangerous out onto the floor and destroyed them, the smell of burning flesh, hair and plant matter overriding the deeper scent of blood and death in the room briefly.

The glass of the containers was absolutely free from impurities, because that was how he stored his ingredients (none of this hybrid rubbish), and he transfigured it into a mirror with a very simple glass frame, which he affixed to the wall of the bathroom. He would need it, he reasoned, at least when it came time to cut all this hair off.

After storing the salvagable ingredients and calling on Dory to dispose of the now-useless volatiles, he squared his shoulders and examined the remaining three boxes and single chest. His wand had proven to be a near-perfect match for his magic so far, but transfiguring a bed meant taking the wood and metal of the boxes and chests and stretching it into the correct shape, twisting the materials into iron - perhaps copper, if he couldn't swing iron - and making separate pieces of fabric, stuffing - he licked his lips.

"Alright," he pressed the wand flat against his cheek again, eyelids fanning closed. It still hummed with magical resonance, but not in the same way. That first head-spinning thrum seemed to have been from build up. It still sent a pleasant shiver of cold down his bones. He aimed it at the boxes and chests, mentally focusing on all of the elements and variables, shutting them down into the shape of his will. Releasing the spell felt good, almost the same way the Dark Arts felt good: he was a sucker for a challenge.

He sank onto the green and black covers, summoned one of his few books on the topic of necromancy and settled down to read under a floating ball of light. He flicked through the extreme basics and began flipping until he found a section on resurrection. The author appeared to be of the opinion that there was no such thing as a "true resurrection", but continued to outline the possible rituals for such. It seemed as though the author thought it would be improper to believe that the laws of nature could be violated in such an extreme way.

Severus frowned. Practitioners of the Dark Arts were rarely so ...squeamish. He switched books. As he went, he found that all of the authors had similar doubts. He closed the last of his books on that topic and scowled at the far wall with its brownish stains. They did outline the rituals, but they did not treat them scientifically.

He had very few options. He could try to find the original ritual used to resurrect him, which would mean heading back to - he frowned again.

Had he really neglected to find out which country he was in? And why he'd been brought back? He brought his fingers, long, delicate and definitely female, to his temples and wondered what had been wrong with him.

Then he remembered. "The haze should wear off in a matter of days."

Fine. Fine. He could try to track down the place. It shouldn't be too hard to find the satyr wandmaker, at least. It was not a particularly common profession, and satyrs were rare; the Goblin Wars had almost wiped them out as a species. His next option was getting into Lucius Malfoy's underground library, not a hard feat usually, but considering his present appearance -

- he was just lucky that the house elves were so disinclined to question anybody that the house would respond to. He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. Her hair. It was silky and shiny, and not with grease and potion fumes, either. He was almost jealous.

He could try to piece together the spell on his own. He was good at Dark magic. Not necromancy, though.

Of course, there were as many different resurrection spells as there were stars. He could narrow it down with the demon summoning, but since he wasn't certain that he wanted to have anything to do with any kind of demon, he was reluctant to start down that path.

Perhaps it was a bit late to prevent the involvement of demons. He only hoped that it was Lysenska who was in debt, and not himself.

The thought led to a frantic search of Carmilla's body for telltale scars, but aside from a few nasty curse marks, he couldn't find any strangely-shaped ones. The curse scars all felt standard, if there was such a thing. Small magic, no summoning, no unforgivable curses. The woman had been lucky, aside from being dead. That thought made him laugh.

---

Harry pushed his glasses up on his nose and sighed heavily.

He didn't like dead bodies.

Okay, well, nobody really liked dead bodies, unless you counted a half-kilogram steak (and he didn't, generally speaking). But Harry wasn't usually hesitant about his dealings with them anymore. He was part of the Auror Division and he'd seen a regrettably high number of them.

But they were not usually former school mates. He avoided Oliver Wood's staring eyes and tried not to think of a lively, demanding Quidditch captain. Harry turned to Percy Weasley, the newest Minister for International Magical Cooperation.

He was chewing on his bottom lip, staring at the body.

Percy was not an Auror and his life had included markedly fewer. He probably hadn't seen a body since the war - since Fred. Harry rubbed his cheek and wondered.

"All right?" he asked quietly.

"I - Oh, yes, I - Fine," Percy scrambled out. "Did you say there was a witness?" He looked at Harry, very focused, as though he was grateful to have anything except Oliver's empty body to look at.

Harry nodded and rose from his crouch by the body. There was Ministry tape around the area, but the remoteness of the region meant that nobody had turned up to gawk at the body yet. He glanced around. Trees, trees and more trees. The occasional large rock. The Carpathians, huh? A popular tourist destination, if you wanted to see some half-civilised vampires, but otherwise remote and unforgiving.

"She's apparently quite good at glamour," Harry said, giving Oliver one last glance before he guided Percy away from the corpse. "So she was able to camoflauge with a tree when she realised what was going on. Her description of his attacker matches a man on our books, so you can tell the Prophet that we have a witness account that suggests it's a notorious Dark wizard, and that our office is working on it."

Percy nodded. "Easy job for me, then," he said, cutting his eyes towards Harry. "I'll tell them that Harry Potter's on the case, and there'll be no more criticism. Well, none in my direction. Perhaps Intel and the Unmentionables will feel some heat, but -" he spread his hands.

"Not your problem, mate," Ron joined in cheerfully, falling into step. Harry was pensive and sad after a murder, but Ron always tried to bolster the mood. It was one of the good things about working with him. One of many. "Leave them to it!"

"There's always us," Harry reminded him. "If we don't get on this fast, we'll have a hell of a time convincing the media that we're not just sitting back drinking expensive champagne instead of hunting down major Dark forces."

"Finally read the Prophet, did you?" Ron raised his eyebrows. He knew Harry had cancelled his subscription years ago. "See our great leader on the second page?"

He was in the papers enough that he just didn't allow them inside his house during the holidays. While Lily and Albus didn't seem to mind, James seemed a trifle more sensitive to every scathing letter to the editor about his father. Ginny had agreed, and got her allotment of news when she visited George at the joke shop and her mother at the Burrow.

"I saw it," Harry rolled his eyes.

"Merlin, he's such a prat," the redhead shook his head. Years ago, that assertion might have had some venom attached, but now it was a mixture of exasperated and amused.

He was talking about Malfoy, of course. Draco had been livid that he'd only rated the second page - but apparently the devastation of the six-point-one earthquake that had resulted in the death of the Japanese Minister for Magic was slightly more important than Draco's winning smile and big grey eyes at a charity ball.

Hermione, in her typically dry fashion, had commented that it had probably been decided by coin toss, considering his popularity and the distance of Japan.

"Not as though he needed his head to get any fatter," Harry agreed. He glanced over his shoulder to where the Ministry wizards were covering the body with a sheet. White. He often wondered why it was always white. In the greyish dawn light, the world was almost colourless, but the whiteness of that covering seemed incandescent, like it was trying to make up for the ugliness beneath.

Harry shook his head and looked back at Ron, whose eyes rapidly lost the false spark of levity. Death made him morbid, and there was nothing to be done about it. Well, there was one thing. "We're going to catch him."

Ron grinned fiercely.

By the time they got back to the office, it was midmorning, and Draco was leaning against Harry's desk.

Because of the small number of personnel and the combination of Malfoy gold and Harry Potter, the Abuse of Dark Artifacts and Magic Office boasted four offices. Malfoy's was, of course, the biggest - he'd ignored the way Ron had coughed, "compensating" when the topic had come up, because Malfoy was very good at ignoring comments that didn't suit him these days - but the other three, belonging to the three most senior members of the Office, were large enough to be comfortable.

Harry's desk was stacked high with paperwork that he kept fooling himself into thinking he'd get around to actually doing. (He would not. He knew it. Draco knew it. The paperwork knew it.) A few used mugs were scattered between the piles at random. His favourite was a birthday present from Albus, and was red with a cartoon lion on it. At the moment, the lion was scowling at him, because the cup hadn't been washed in about a week. He had intended to, but real life kept getting in the way, and he had found that he could always steal one from Hermione, because she collected hers after a day or two, complaining about how unhygenic it was to leave all those dirty mugs lying around. Usually, his desk also boasted a moving image of Ginny and the children, but its frame was currently resting in Malfoy's pale hands.

Harry didn't mind Malfoy as much these days, but there were just some things -

He rested his fingertips over the image in the frame, not taking it from him, but blocking his view. Without the photo, it would almost look like they were holding hands. "Yes?"

Draco blinked up and let him take the picture frame. Picture-Ginny's ferocious snarl subsided when she saw Harry, and she let the children come out from behind her skirt with a cheerful wave. He grinned at her and set the picture back on his desk.

Malfoy's eyes were narrowed. "Potter. You look horrible."

Harry blinked, unsure of whether this was the usual comment on his messy hair, poor fashion sense and disinclination to spend hundreds of galleons every time he bought a cloak, or if Malfoy had developed some empathic sense during the last few hours. Perversely, he decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Although he wasn't usually correct in doing so, it hadn't killed him yet. "It was Oliver Wood. The body, I mean."

The hard look in Malfoy's eyes softened for a split second, and then intensified until their deep grey looked like solid steel.

"Perhaps you'll find that motivating," he said, and pressed a sheaf of papers directly into Harry's chest. "I was going to leave these on your desk, but I doubted you'd find them amidst all of this junk - oh, would you look at this? Your report. From two months ago. In dot points. I'll just take this, then, shall I?"

Harry felt anger, molten and desperate, roil in his gut like a firestorm. Words bubbled up, scrambling like some many-legged beast up his throat, gleefully dancing along his tongue. He swallowed it all down.

Draco dealt with things his way. Harry was different. They were - different. It meant nothing. Merlin, but adulthood was hard.

"Take it, then," Harry snapped. "And get out."

Draco did, moving quickly almost as though he was grateful for escape. The door made a loud clunk as he shut it.

Harry sank into his chair and stared at his picture. Draco had had a similar photograph once, but it had disappeared, and nobody had the nerve or the energy to ask where it had gone.

Malfoy's office was directly across the floor from Harry's. This was an interminable distance filled with a coffee machine that spat a combination of cheery, coffee-related puns and hair-raising insults, a photocopier that liked to snuggle up to the unwary and the five desks of junior staff, which were almost never all filled.

It made Harry uncomfortable to linger inside Draco's office. The carpet was an irreproachable, unstained white, as were the walls, the chair and the filing cabinet. The table was one long, spotless sheet of glass.

Aside from the polished, blank-faced presence of one Draco Malfoy, the place was absolutely barren. If Harry came into work too early, he would have a clear view through the half-open door.

Inexplicably, it bothered him. Ron, who liked to linger in Harry's office, partially because he liked places that were at least not toxic more than he would admit (which meant his own office was out of the question), but mostly because Hermione kicked him out if he wasn't doing anything useful, thought it was weird.

"Yeah, I know you don't like him," he'd said early in their employment there together, "but if you close your door, you can pretend you're not even on the same floor," and he'd made to close the door.

Harry had stopped him. "No, I want it open. Fresh air and - and whatever." Ron blinked at him. "It's not that I don't like him - well, I don't, but it's not just that I don't like him. It's. You know. Kind of creepy. He just sits there."

Ron stared. "He's working."

He had been, too, penning his ridiculously decorative calligraphy onto files that would be read once and never see the light of day again.

"I don't know."

Ron leaned over and scrutinised the Malfoy, who continued working without a pause, although Harry doubted he was unaware of their attention even if he couldn't hear them. "'Mione says he has "perfect posture"," he suggested, scrunching his nose at the term. "Maybe you've never seen that before. Gryffidor common room and all," he added with a smile.

Harry snorted but shook his head. "Nah. He... looks like someone strapped a plank to his back."

Like he'd been told, sit here, like this. And he would sit there, like that, until he was allowed to do otherwise. Which was never.

"Or, maybe shoved a stick up his arse."

Harry had laughed. But he'd been late every day since.

---

Severus, upon opening Carmilla's eyes and realising that not only had he fallen asleep on one of his books, but that he was still covered in peeling blood and mighty hungry, had to admit that perhaps Lysenska had been correct about resurrection affecting one's mental state. Perhaps it was because he was used to being dead? And a spell that went wrong always had strange side effects when it affected a person. Furthermore, necromancy was one of the more potent forms of magic, and add that together with the Dark magic used...

... it was no wonder that all necromancers were nuts.

He rolled from the bed and scooped up his wand before testing out the bathtub. He let the water pour, then touched it and flinched. It was precisely as freezing as he'd expected. He levelled a warming charm at it - too strong.

It went from icy to bubbling. Steam billowed, warm and humid, and wafted toward the ceiling.

He spun the wand between his fingers, frowning. One more thing to adapt to. He felt exhausted already.

When the water had cooled somewhat, he scrubbed the pale skin of the woman's body until it turned pinkish.

It was really very hard to ignore the wrongness of breasts and curved hips and vulva when he was naked and trying to make sure the body was clean. He... didn't like it. He wasn't sure what difference it made, specifically - physicality had never been a thing he'd thought about much.

But it was important, somehow, and it made him feel wrong and restless, itchy with something he couldn't describe.

He focused instead on the clean, unblemished skin of Carmilla's left arm. That was wrong, too - but good wrong. Comforting. He ran his - her, he supposed - fingertips over it and shivered.

Eventually Snape shook himself out of that reverie. Dory had supplied soap that smelled like cocoa butter. He would find something unscented soon. He thought about the day's possibilities. The estate had enough money to live comfortably on for as long as he wanted, within reason. Since nobody except for the house elf knew that he was actually alive, he could essentially do as he wished without causing any kind of splash. It was a heady feeling.

He would begin his research on how to retrieve his own body, and hope that it did not require actually physically retrieving his own body, as it was likely to be a gross dessicated husk. And wouldn't that be disturbing?

But first, he had to collect ingredients - he didn't feel right, not having a fully stocked store of potion ingredients. He had a decent supply of expensive or rare ingredients from what Dory had collected, but he was missing things like bezoars, lacewing flies and wormwood: some absolutely basic things. Some of those could probably be found in his garden, if he asked it nicely, he supposed... but he did have a distinct shortage of goats, for one, and it seemed that he would require a trip into Diagon Alley sooner or later.

The thought made him cringe a little.

All those people in such a little space.

It was fairly well known among those familiar with him that Severus Snape did not like people very much.

He really didn't like crowds.

Breathing, thinking, moving, existing all around him, encroaching on his space. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine it like a swarm of insects crawling over his skin with white-hot feet, in his mouth, down his throat, suffocating. He dunked his head underwater to soak all of that blond hair, and then set about scrubbing it. The shampoo hit the air with the sharp, sterile scent of tea-tree.

He would have to go shopping. And this woman was tiny, a slip of a thing, soft and curved and - dammit, she was the least intimidating person he could imagine. Her elbows weren't even pointy enough to really hurt if he jammed them into someone.

He staggered out of the tub, almost knocked over by the sheer weight of his hair when wet. He wrung it out, and then stared at the mess of tangles. Well. It was too long to be practical, anyway, and he would not spend an hour untangling and brushing it. He snatched up his wand from where it was balanced on the sink, and concentrated very carefully on his severing charm; he did not need to lose part of his face to his wand's whimsy, even if it wasn't really, you know, his face.

The wand fought. It really did not like these basic charms. A glance in the mirror told him that it wasn't too bad anyway, even if it was longer at the front, and just a bit asymmetrical. It hung somewhere around her breasts. If he tied it back, it would not look like he'd hacked it off with a severing charm - at least, not at first glance. But looking at the hair led to staring at his face. Her face.

Just out of bed and freshly scrubbed, and she looked like the cover of Witch Weekly. No glamour, no camera tricks, no makeup. She was pretty. She had green eyes. Witch-green, a startling emerald like a cat's.

Lily.

His knees unhinged. He caught himself on the basin and looked more closely. Not like Lily's. Lily's had been warmer, more expressive. They'd shone with amusement, glittered with rage. Looking himself in the eye was like looking through brightly coloured glass.

He was so very grateful.

(Then again, Severus Snape had never looked out of Lily Evans' eyes. Perhaps it would have changed them. Perhaps they, too, would have been cold.)

He straightened up and steadied the tremor in his hands, then removed the mirror from the wall and carried it out into the bedroom, where he tucked it beneath the bed and left it there to gather dust.

His clothing swam on Carmilla, and he tried one more time to persuade his wand to charm them smaller. It worked smoothly, although he could feel its reluctance. He felt a little bit more like himself when he was dressed in his customary black, although he knew that was a ludicrous thought, because he was someone else. The rows of hooks and eyes that he clasped by hand gave him the illusion of familiarity. He sank his feet into boots and shrunk an outer robe to go over it all.

Then he collected the money he'd sent Dory off to retrieve earlier, as well as what he'd stolen from Lysenska, and Flooed into the Leaky Cauldron.

It had been a while, and the Floo powder was old. He came up coughing ash and stumbled out of the fireplace.

Someone grabbed his arm. "There you are now, lass," a thick northern accent rumbled somewhere above him. "Bad powder, nasty stuff. You'll hurt yourself buying that!"

Severus blinked up at the man, who gave him a smile through brownish teeth, his watery blue eyes bright with humour. He looked around. At least the Cauldron hadn't changed much, but he wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. It was still smoky, dark, dingy and crowded, filled with harrassed mothers collecting supplies for the start of the new school term, shopkeepers on a break and drunks. At least he'd gotten the right fireplace. Floo powder, he added to his list. "Not bad," he corrected, drawing away, pointedly peeling the man's fingers from his arm. "Just old."

The man refused to let go, tugging him towards a seat. "Old powder, lass? It would have to be older than you are! Come on, have something to steady your nerves. On me," he swiped an arm around Snape's shoulders.

People didn't usually touch him. People usually walked in wide circles so that they didn't accidentally touch him. He pulled harder. He could start firing hexes, or he could follow. What was the middle ground there?

"No," he said flatly.

Still, he did not let go. "Come now, where's the harm in one drink? One free drink!"

"Let me go!" Severus roared, and smacked his hand sharply. Well, he intended to roar, but it came out in a high, breathy sound that was - Merlin he'd kill for his real body. Nobody tried to touch his real body.

The man let go mechanically, staring at him like he was crazy. He felt the room staring at him. He squared his shoulders, lifted his chin and resolutely ignored their rudeness.

"No," he ground out from between his teeth. Scathing comments came to mind, but he just wanted to get out of there.

The courtyard was refreshingly uncrowded, and did not smell like tobacco and cheap wine. He breathed and closed his eyes. He didn't remember being quite this socially inept when he was alive. Then again, it had been rare that he'd needed to step outside of Hogwarts, and when he had, it had been into a very specific role: Order member, Death Eater, sacrifice.

Perhaps having no responsibility and no real goal was going to be harder than he had initially calculated.

"Are you okay?"

He leaped and whirled, gripping his wand tightly at the new voice. He registered the brilliant magenta of the man's robes first, and the horrifically clashing red of his hair second. He must have been disoriented indeed not to have noticed that retina-bruising ensemble in the pub. While he was staring in a mixture of fascination and horror at the man's clothing, the redhead tapped out the pattern on the stone wall, and the noise and colour of Diagon Alley flooded the courtyard.

"Hey? Hey, are you okay?" He had turned back to Severus, and was now frowning down at him in concern.

"Fine," he said, and started walking.

The wizard caught up. "I haven't seen you around. Do you know where you're going?"

Not really. The Alley had changed. It did that, historically speaking, to accommodate new business in its small space. He had a general sort of idea where he needed to be, however. "I am sure I will be able to find my way without further assistance," he said.

Ah, the voice didn't roar or growl, but it did do clear and sharp and severe quite neatly. Wonderful. Not all was lost.

"Well, if you need a hand, I work here, so -"

"You do?" he did not remember any shops with such garish uniforms. How many years had it been?

The redhead grinned, and he had a moment where he thought he knew him. "Sure. Own my own shop." He tilted his head and pointed. "That one."

Severus turned, and then wished he hadn't. "Are you telling me that someone is actually responsible for that hideous thing?" he asked incredulously. At first glance, it looked as though it had to be some sort of ...of psychedellic accident, the sort you got when you mixed the Draught of Living Death with a Cheering Charm and an overdorse of Pepper Up. But he slowly realised that the dizzying colours, flashing lights and loud noises could not have been anything but intentional. Nothing could go that wrong by accident.

(At this thought, he glanced down at his own narrow waist and long legs.

Well, it could, but it was very unlikely.)

"Of course," the wizard said, beckoning him towards it, and, like a moth to a brilliantly multicoloured flame, he went, compelled by its garish spectacle. "Honestly, you mustn't have been here for, what, fifteen years?"

"I'm not exactly sure," he said absently. "What is this place?" If there'd been a sign amidst the dazzling exterior, he'd missed it.

"Weasley's Wizard Wheezes," the redhead grinned at him. "I'm George Weasley."

"You -" Severus began to back out. Hastily. Trust those bloody twins to open a joke shop that made people's eyes bleed, just so further generations of students could make their professors' lives difficult.

He stumbled over something that trundled across the floor; some kind of animated something. With a very unladylike curse, he reached out and snatched the nearest object to prevent himself from tumbling arse over head onto the floor in an ungainly heap. At least he'd severed the hair. Merlin knew what kind of horror all that might have caused here.

"Steady there," George said, larger hands wrapped around his bicep. "Don't trip over our trick wands now," he cautioned.

Severus snarled and let go of his arm. "Idiot," he said in a very calm voice, "Why won't you people unhand me?"

George let go very quickly. "Hey, sorry. You just seemed so disoriented out there, I -"

He had been, but he didn't need to have it pointed out! "And you what? You thought you'd drag me into your little shop and try to sell me something asinine? Oh, bravo," despite the sarcasm, his voice was high and distressed. He tried harder. "My hero," he drawled.

George looked taken aback. "Look, I wasn't trying to upset you. I was just -"

Severus opened his mouth to say something pithy and scathing - he didn't know what, but it would come to him by the time the he needed it, it always did - when they were interrupted.

"Oh, George, there you are," a short, cheerful, redheaded woman came bustling around one of the display racks. There were a few streaks of grey filtering through her vibrant hair, and she was slightly more lined, but Molly Weasley was holding up well. "The shopgirl said you'd gone out for lunch. I thought - Oh, well, now, who is this?" she asked, eyeing him as a peregrine falcon might eye a sparrow.

"She was lost," George said, grinning at Severus, daring him to say something so impolite in front of the woman who was so clearly his mother.

(His mother, who was taller than Snape. Merlin.)

He bared his teeth in response. "I was not lost. I was disoriented from bad Floo powder," he did not need to go into the details of how old that powder was, "and you dragged me in here for no earthly reason, except, perhaps, separating me from my gold!"

Molly blinked and looked between them.

"And now," having thoroughly humiliated himself, "I am leaving. Thank you for your help, Mister Weasley," he finished, loaded down with sarcasm.

"Well, I thought you were lost," George said with a shrug. "You certainly looked it. And then that guy grabbed you, and you were having some kind of panic attack out the back of the Cauldron -"

He whirled. "I do not have panic attacks!" Carmilla's voice soared effortlessly into the upper registers.

Molly was inching away. George, with the precise lack of self-preservation that made him and his brother so damned reckless and unpredictable, was inching closer, one arm outstretched, as though Snape was the one with the problem.

He had no problem.

He was fine.

He swallowed. He was not helping himself by staying here. He had to get out. He turned. The throng outside the door pulsed and oozed in a wave of brightly-coloured people. He felt sick to his stomach. Oh, gods, why couldn't he have just mail ordered? He stepped forward with false confidence, over the threshold, and into the people.

They didn't just wash around him. They swallowed him. He went very still, blinked rapidly, and swallowed a number of times. Someone cursed and shouldered him out of the way. He was so small.

Molly touched his arm. She had to follow him out, didn't she? "Dear, it's okay," she tugged gently, led him back into the comforting riot of the store during a lull, slid the door closed and flipped the sign behind his back. "Come out back, have some tea."

---

Notes:

Okay, so this story has ended up being posted because I was talking to some people online about Snape genderswitch fanfic and mentioned it, they asked to see it and read it, and I was going to say: "Lost between one hard drive and the next, and it's really old so it's probably a steaming pile of shit," but the question prompted me to go dig through my old emails to see if I'd sent drafts to anybody to check over, ever - and I had. I had sent this third of the story to somebody in 2008.

So please be aware that unless I find the other part of it (which was probably another third or so) somewhere, this is all there will be of this story. It is abandoned. I have posted it here (and on ao3) for the interest of others, and I will be marking it complete. It's from 2007, anyway, so even if I had any inclination to write more of it I wouldn't know where I was going with it.