Snape supposed, in hindsight, that he could be forgiven for forgetting that Lily's last proper memory was being on the receiving end of the Killing Curse sixteen years ago. After all, she looked virtually unchanged from that time, and Merlin only knew what Andromeda had done to bring her back. When he looked over, he saw that she was white-faced, with the sort of expression that indicated that she's received an extended glimpse into the bowels of Hell - long enough to give the abyss an opportunity to stare back.

He could only think of one way to remedy this, kneeling beside her and gathering her into his arms. She clung to him, shaking with sobs, for several minutes, as he stroked her hair and made vaguely comforting noises. Once he finally settled, he pulled back slightly and tipped her chin up so he could look her in the eye. He face was still pale, and now streaked with tearstains, but at least now she wasn't locked into an expression of jaw-aching happiness.

"Where am I?" she asked, glancing around at his office. "How did I get here?"

"You're in my office in the Dungeon of Hogwarts Castle," he replied. "What's the last thing you remember?"

Her expression grew distant. "Godric's Hollow, with James and little Harry…" She trailed off, and her expression sharpened with renewed fear. "A flash of green light - the Killing Curse - Harry-?"

"Is alive," Snape replied. "He's… seventeen years old now." He hesitated, considering how best to put it, and ultimately deciding on the direct approach. "You and James Potter have been dead for sixteen years."

"I… I never saw James die," she said quietly. "Our only thought was protecting Harry from V… from him."

"You succeeded," Snape said unnecessarily, "Your love protected him, and the curse rebounded back on its caster. Your sister Petunia raised him."

"How do you know all this?" Lily asked, and when she looked up at Snape there was a flicker in her expression. "I… I feel like I should know you."

So, Snape thought, She didn't really recognize me after all. He swallowed hard.

"It's me," he said, "Severus Snape. We were friends at school." Briefly, he added in his mind.

"You… I don't remember you being so handsome. Did you start studying Transfigurations after we graduated?"

"No. I went into Potions," he summarized briefly, glossing over everything that had happened in between. "Look-things are going awry here. Someone brought you back from the dead."

"But… can the Killing Curse be reversed?"

"Not that I know of, and almost certainly not after so long. Someone is mucking about with the known laws of magic for her own purposes."

"How?" Lily asked, "And why?"

"I don't know how yet, but as for why, she appears to want to make everyone happy."

"That doesn't sound so bad…"

"How did you feel before I got the wards around us?"

Lily frowned. "Trapped," she said, "Like I was a passenger in my own body, forced to watch myself doing and saying things… I kissed you."

Snape had the good grace to look embarassed, pulling away from her and standing up to regard his bookshelves. "I won't say I didn't enjoy that part, but I would never magically compel you to do something like that. Ever. This witch - whoever and whatever she is - seems to think this is just fine."

"How were you able to resist?" Lily asked, getting to her feet as well and watching him.

"My studies in Occlumency must have played a role in it," Snape replied, pushing his hair out of his eyes, and addressed his shelves. "Dark Arts. Books on reality warpers and Legilmency experts." One by one, books dropped down from the upper shelves. Snape caught them tidily and made a small stack. "There are many paths of the Dark Arts, just as there are many paths for legal magic," he said to Lily, "We're going to need all the information we can gather if we're to fix this."

"What about recruiting other witches and wizards for help? I mean, there has to be something we can do about this, right?" Lily asked, tilting her head to look at some of the titles Snape had harvested from his library. Compulsion Spells, Enchantments, and Bindings. Make Reality Your Plaything. Beings From Beyond Reality and How to Counter Them. 2001 Arcanovores. 2001 Dangerous Creatures. Worse Than Death: Necromantic Counterspells.

"So far, you and I are the only ones free of her influence," Snape said, "We will have to work carefully if we are to defeat her."

Her expression flickered as he uttered the feminine pronoun, and he nodded, assured that Lily knew exactly to whom he referred.

A groan from the wall behind his desk made him turn, flipping his hair back from his face with a toss of his head, and he saw the portrait of Salazar Slytherin that had always hung there. Its occupant was now leaning heavily against the frame, cradling his brow in his hand, and his upper lip was streaked with red from what appeared to have been a nosebleed.

"What happened to you?" Snape asked, and Slytherin looked up, his normally sharp features now drawn and pale.

"I might ask you the same thing," Slytherin replied, wiping the blood from his nose and straightening up. His gaze shifted past Snape, and his lip curled slightly. "And what's she doing here?"

Snape turned, and was unsurprised to find Lily paging through Beings From Beyond Reality and How to Counter Them. Of course Slytherin would object to her presence - she was a Muggle-born, after all. Old prejudices die hard, even for portraits.

Especially for portraits.

"She's with me," Snape said shortly, "And to answer your first question, the Brighteyes girl brought me back to life." He watched this sink in.

"I'm sorry," Slytherin said genuinely. He wiped his bloody hand on his robes.

"What happened to you?"

Slytherin grimaced. "She's been here for ten days. I've had… J-Pop in my head that entire time."

Snape frowned. "Under most circumstances I might say that didn't seem to bad."

Slytherin shook his head. "It was a fate I wouldn't wish of my worst enemies." He shuddered. "Ten straight days of Nyan Cat."

"What's Nyan Cat?" Lily asked.

Slytherin told them.

"Merlin's left testicle," Snape breathed in horror, "What's wrong with her?"

Slytherin shook his head. "This is beyond even my knowledge of the Dark Arts. All I can tell you is that she's not human. I've seen others like her in the past, but she's one of the strongest I've seen."

"You know what she is, then?" Snape asked, his hand straying towards 2001 Dangerous Creatures. He had his suspicions, from the others he'd encountered, but he was willing to accept all the help that he could get.

Slytherin shook his head. "You won't find her kind in there," he said. "In fact, I don't know if there's even a comprehensive writeup of them anywhere. All I know is that there's been a rash of them since 1992. And they've been getting worse of late."

Snape frowned in thought, rubbing his chin. "We need to get some sort of handle on what she is and what she can do," he said. "Only then will we be able to stop her." He looked back at Slytherin's portrait. "Any advice?"

"The two of you won't put a dent in her by yourselves," Slytherin replied bluntly. "If you try, she'll just snag you again. Albus Dumbledore seems to have made it through okay, though."

Lily glanced up hopefully. "Dumbledore? He's still around? Let's go see him!"

Snape put up a hand to silence her. "He's not around any longer," he said, measuring his words carefully. "He… died during the War." He was not about to tell her how Dumbledore died, and especially not that he had killed the beloved headmaster. "I didn't see him in the Great Hall, though, so it appears the Brighteyes girl didn't, or couldn't, bring him back."

"So, if it turns out she couldn't," Lily reasoned, "maybe that means that her powers have limits."

"It's quite possible," Snape agreed. "He should be in his portrait in the Headmaster's office."

"I must caution you to be alert," Slytherin said, "Her influence is everywhere here, and if you slip even once, you might never recover. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go see if Flamel's portrait can brew up an amnesia-inducing potion."

He turned and left, vanishing off the edge of his frame.

Snape sighed. If one of the founders of Hogwarts didn't know what the hell Andromeda (he refused to even mentally list all the names in between) Brighteyes really was, what chance was there that Dumbledore would know?

"We have to try," he said, mainly to himself, and glanced over at Lily. "The problem is that right now only this one room is free of her influence. Once we're outside the wards…" He didn't need to finish, because she was already nodding. "The first person we'll need to find is Minerva McGonagall so she can let us into the Headmaster's office."

"So we take the ward with us," she concluded, with the surety of a true Gryffindor.

"It doesn't work that way," he replied, crossing to one of his chests full of supplies. He pulled the lid open and started rummaging. "Wards are stationary protective boundaries-they're not portable. My office will make a serviceable sanctuary, but if we're going to recruit help within the school, we're going to need items that we can give to our allies. Items that will protect them from her influence."

"So… amulets or rings?"

"If we had more time, perhaps. Both of those take time to craft-it will have to be something similar, though… something small enough to be easily hidden."

"What about these?" Lily asked. Snape looked up to see what she meant, and found her near his desk, holding a thick bundle of parchment slips. She offered them over, and he studied them. What could he have enough of, to give to the entire…?

"Detention slips?" he asked as his eye fell on the header of the topmost sheet.

"You certainly had a lot of them on your desk," Lily pointed out.

"Yes. Well. I needed them. Never mind." He shook his head. "What's your idea?"

"Put a protective charm on them and hand them out to people we want to recruit."

Snape frowned. "That's quite possibly the…" He paused, mulling it over properly. Of course he would be handing out detention slips. He'd earned the reputation for being the meanest teacher in Hogwarts, and he was proud of it, dammit. Of course he would be handing out detention slips to, oh, say, Harry Potter and his friends. And whatever his opinion was of Potter, the boy had developed a certain talent for fighting the forces of evil, as well as being a trouble magnet. The concession was like nails down the chalkboard of his soul, but there you had it. "That's a brilliant idea," he said finally, "And one that she won't ever see coming."

Lily smirked. "I doubt she'd see a meteor coming, if it messed with her 'happy ending'."

It was good to see her smile, not the blank, mindless smile that Andromeda had forced her into, but a real, genuine smile.

"Let us get started, then," Snape said, "I'll show you how to cast the protective charm on the slips, and we'll be done in half the time." His hair fell into his face again, gleefully thumbing its nose at the laws of physics. He shoved it back irritably. "But first, I need to do something about all this damnable hair."

"Here, let me," Lily said, "Turn around."

He frowned at her. "What are you going to do?"

Lily sighed. "Go on, turn around. Get started on the first few warding slips, and I'll take care of your hair."

Snape shrugged and turned around, using his wand to trace protective sigils on the topmost detention slip. As he did so, he felt Lily's fingers combing through his new mane of silky black hair and gathering it into a ponytail. Then:

"Hirsutius Plaitium," she said. His hair promptly whipped together into a tidy braid. After a pause, she offered this assessment: "Um…"

Snape reached back and touched the braid, but as he felt something stirring at about ankle level, he quickly drew up the entire length to survey how long the braid actually was. This turned out to be about five feet long. He covered his eyes with his hand. He wanted to scream that hair didn't work that way, but instead decided that this was just further evidence of Andromeda's fundamental failure at common sense and at understanding how the world worked. Ranting about it would do nothing but spike his blood pressure, and he honestly wasn't sure what would happen if he died of a heart attack while he was already technically supposed to be dead. The possibilities ranged from nothing at all to the Western Hemisphere being swallowed up in a black hole.

Well. If nothing else he could ward off a wine cellar in the basement and become apocalyptically drunk later. For now, though…

"Right," he said, "Now that that's out of the way, let's get the rest of these slips charmed."

Lily watched by his side as he traced the protective sigils, and then took a portion of the remainder. Side by side, the two set to work crafting Andromeda repellant.

End of Chapter 2.