Since the birth of time, billions of people have died. Leaving behind billions of last words. Some quite memorable, like "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-" (1), "Acta est fabula, plaudite!" (2) and "Whadya mean, those were toadstools?" (3)

Severus Snape's choked utterance of "Lily!" was quite memorable to the five people who heard it.

Three of them had been landing kicks on him in the abandoned classroom.

The fourth, standing further off and pleading for them to stop, heard it because he was a werewolf.

The fifth, who was disillusioned in the corner, rolled her eyes. Of all the little brothers she could have had, she had to get the one hung up on a Mudblood. Well, you couldn't choose your relatives. (She conveniently ignored the fact that she had, since she was allergic to inconvenience.) Well, everyone was due their little eccentricities, eh? Even little brothers with an unnatural fondness for Mudbloods.

She wondered why her little brother was taking so long to die. She was almost tempted to call out "Get on with it!" but that would be Gryffindor and therefore ill-mannered.

"Prongs! Padfoot! Stop it! He's dead!"

Bellatrix wondered what those nicknames meant. She looked at her nails and wondered if she should start painting them. She waggled them in front of her face. Nope, they were fine as they were. Besides, they might affect the offensive charms she had on her right hand fingers and the defensive charms she had on her left hand fingers. Offence and Defence. So much easier to remember than Right and Left. Offence was always Right, exceptions excepted.

James Potter was in a state of high dudgeon and medium-rare panic. Remus couldn't find a pulse on Snivellus! What had happened?

Sirius Black looked mildly worried. Maybe the greasy git really was a vampire. Vampires didn't have pulses, did they? It would explain his general battitude.

Peter Pettigrew was seriously pissed. How come Remus hadn't yelled at him to Stop It? He was tired of being treated as irrelevant.

"We've killed him!" yelled Remus. "By Toutatis, we've fucking killed him!" (4)

Sirius' jaw dropped. He was absolutely shocked at this turn of events. Did Moony - Moony! just curse? He never thought he'd see the day.

James wondered at Remus use of the first person plural. Remus hadn't laid a single punch or Hex and he thought it was his fault? Oh well. The ramifications of their actions were rapidly settling in on him. They had killed a man. True, it was only Snivellus, but they were murderers now.

Lily would never speak to him again.

Clearly, a cover-up was in order.

Unfortunately for him, that was the Headmaster entered the room.

It was said that the Marauders could get away with murder. But it was one of those sayings, like 'If you don't eat your peas, the world will explode' or 'If you have unprotected sex with a duck, you will lay eggs'. Not something that was actually - true.

Except, mused Lily Evans, that it had become true.

The official story was that Severus and the Marauders had met each other in the corridors, and exchanged words. Unsurprisingly, Severus' words had been the far more cutting ones - he had apparently accused their mothers of having threesomes with camel riders and camels for galleons, their fathers of Hexing away all neighborhood storks after their births, and Gryffindors of being narrow-minded judgemental cowards. In response, the Marauders had Hexed him, forcing the Slytherin to duck into an abandoned classroom for cover.

And then, the coverup. By Dumbledore of all people. He announced it first to the prefects (Lupin excepted) at a special and somber meeting.

The Headmaster claimed that this classroom had an Aggression Ward on it. Anyone who entered it would have any aggressive tendencies enhanced past the point of control. In other words, the Marauders weren't the perpetrators in the murder of Severus - but fellow victims.

She had never heard such a pot of heronistic crock in her life.

She was Furious.

And when he went on to explain that the Marauders would only be getting punished with a minor points loss and a month of detentions, she was not the only prefect who was shocked.

"Headmaster!" she cried, "this is madness! They should be expelled!"

There were nods of assent, particularly among the Slytherin prefects. But Dumbledore seemed unperturbed.

"I have identified the Class Gamma Aggression Wards in the room where Mr Snape died. The wards are still present, and any of you may analyze them. Whoever placed them there was trying to frame the quartet of students in question."

Boudicca Smythe, the Ravenclaw Headgirl, pointed out the obvious. "Headmaster, such a ward does not create aggression. It amplifies it. The so-called Marauders entered the room with intent to harm him. An Aggression Ward is not an Imperius. They would have hurt him very badly without a ward. They should be suspended, preferably expelled."

"For one offence, Miss Smythe?"

There was an uproar. The Headmaster's blinkers on the Marauders' antics, which often crossed the boundaries from Pranking to Bullying (and not just on Snape), were not universally worn.

Dumbledore had the audacity to look surprised.

The uproar continued. Lily was on the verge of ripping her badge off and throwing it at the senile old man.

Somebody coughed.

The prefects recognized the cough, and the uproar died.

Smythe might have been Headgirl, but Bellatrix Black was the most influential student in the room. (Much to Dumbledore's chagrin.) Lily didn't think much of her - she was an out-and-out blood purist whose anti-Mudblood vocabulary had caused Lily - and several younger Muggleborn students - much emotional grief.

"Requesting permission to speak, Lord Dumbledore."

It was moments like this that made Lily feel like a commoner in Buckingham Palace.

"Granted, Miss Black."

"Thank you for the honour, Lord Dumbledore. I wish to point out that it would set a ridiculous precedent to suspend or expel two members of prominent Pureblood families for a tragic prank on a half-blood that nobody particularly cares about. The Marauders targeted Mr Snape for years with no punishment, as was their right as Purebloods. Now that they've finished the job - admittedly with the help of an as-yet-unknown ward-caster - they will calm down. They are hardly likely to redirect their attentions to anyone of consequence, after all."

You could have heard a pin drop in the room, and it had thick carpeting.

Two days later, Lily was still stunned at the final outcome. She didn't get the whole Blood Purist thing, she really didn't. When she got back to the Real World, she was going to hunt down some of her former Muggle classmates. Three blacks, two Pakis. Their social circles - and yes, nine year olds did have social circles - hadn't overlapped, and now she wondered if she'd been guilty of passive racism. She wanted to talk to them about it, ask them how often they felt like outsiders, ask them how they dealt with it.

She was standing on the balcony of her dorm. It faced the lake, and she imagined that she could see the giant squid playing solitaire. She imagined running away, leaving this hell hole behind, and going to Beauxbatons. She imagined shaving the Marauder's heads with a Hex. She imagined apologizing to Severus for abandoning him. So what if he was friends with a bunch of allegedly Dark wizards who hated what she represented? She imagined going back in time, accepting Sev's apology, and being friends with him again. They'd sworn be Friends Forever when they were ten, hadn't they?

She currently felt that Pondus Scummius was higher up on the evolutionary ladder than Lilius Evansus.

She would allow Sev to call her all manner of names if she could just one more minute with him so she could say sorry. He could call her a Mudblood, coward, guttersnipe, blemnite, louse, goatfucker, slimebag, troglodyte, porridge eater, ectoplasm, hypocrite (more a fact than an insult, really), coelecanth, Lily-livered landlubber, ignoramus, potions brewer (as opposed to potions inventor), tramp, harlot, Labour voter, Tory voter (5), kleptomaniac, mountebank, jackanape, flobberworm, hippo, hippogriff, hippodrome, haddock (6). But not something really insulting like Marauder or Potter. She had standards.

She sighed, and reflected on recent events.

Lupin had been stripped of his prefectship, to no-one's surprise. He looked the guiltiest of the lot. Lily was now the only sixth year Gryffindor prefect, and still considering throwing in her badge.

Black had been strutting around, and had even been heard remarking how much cleaner the school now was. Thing was, he really believed it. It was then that Lily had realized that if Potter hadn't had such a fixation on her, she would have likely been a target of Black's venom.

Potter had had the sense to realize that this was not the best time to ask her out on a date. He even seemed guilty, but that wasn't surprising. She knew he had his good points, such as not being a committed psychopath like his best friend. Still, she was looking forward to the moment that he got over his temporary sanity and asked her out on a date. She already had her Hexes planned, and she fully intended to cast them.

She didn't think about Pettigrew, seeing as she wasn't his mother.

The reaction of the school to the Marauders getting away with murder had been vocal. The prefects had, against the orders of the Headmaster, leaked the details of the meeting to the school.

The four Marauders had lost a hundred points each (leaving Hufflepuff firmly in the lead for the Cup) and had detentions till the end of the year. This was a lot heavier than what the Headmaster had initially announced to the prefects. Apparently the Headmaster didn't like being in Bellatrix Black's good books.

Lily was still confused by Bella's statement. She sounded like she believed what she said, that it was acceptable for Purebloods to bully half-bloods. But she surely knew that making such a provocative statement in front of Dumbledore would force him to punish the Marauders more. Maybe she'd found a way to have her own cake and eat it - insult the halfie and punish the Gryffies.

But they were still in school, the cocky cockhead cockroaches. Once seventh year started, they'd be all la-di-dah and Sev would still be la-di-dead.

A week after he was buried, the body of Severus Snape appeared in a Muggle apartment in Liverpool. He'd been buried with three Portkeys on him, after all.

"There you are!" exclaimed Bellatrix happily. She looked at her brother-whether-he-wanted-it-or-not-and-he-probably-didnt. He looked pale and dead, which was rather the point.

She frowned. She'd always felt that he didn't spend enough time on his appearance. Being dead was no excuse. Especially when he wasn't really dead.

A minute later, the corpse was wearing lipstick. On his lips, eyelids, nose, and cheeks.

Bellatrix considered her work. She really needed a camera. From what she had seen in other families, brothers considered blackmail endearing. She wanted to be endearing to her proboscisian new sibling. She wanted to be Endearingness Personified. She shrugged. She could always retrieve a photograph from a Pensieve later.

Now, where was that antidote Sev had brewed earlier?

A/N: Yeah, yeah, Sevvikins and Bella faked his death. He cast the Aggression wards, too. Part One (of Eighty Six And Two-Thirds) of Bella's Plan is done!

References:

(1) "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-" is the modified (but immensely more popular) version of the last words of General John Sedgwick in the American Civil War. (He served on either Side A or Side B, it's not important.) His soldiers were performing appropriate acts of self-preservation under major enemy fire, so he yelled at them, "I'm ashamed of you, dodging that way. They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." Moments later, it was discovered that he wasn't, in fact, a pachyderm. He was shot, through his left eye, fell forward, and did the whole dying thing.

(2) "Acta est fabula, plaudite!" - "The play is over, applaud!" These are sometimes said to be the last words of Augustus Caesar, but he really said "Did you like the performance?" Presumably he felt the need for a job evaluation while on his death bed. Or that a good performer wouldn't feel the need to demand applause.

(3) I made this up. But somebody, somewhere, sometime, probably said it, so it counts.

(4) Toutatis is a Celtic god worshipped ages ago by shopkeepers and frogs i.e. Britons and Gauls. (Ok, ok, Gaul is the old name of France.) In the Asterix books, the gratuitously violent protagonists are forever saying "By Toutatis!" in the same manner in which we might say "Jesus Christ!" or "Holy Pope Droppings!"

(5) For the purpose of this chapter, Lily votes Lib Dem because she is a kind and sensitive soul who will never get anywhere in life. (Fine, fine, I have too many LD friends - erase the last seven words.)

(6) Captain Haddock of the Tintin series is a master of the art of using sequences of unrelated and irrelevant words to cuss. I used some of them.