In which Severus Snape has the worst day ever, Wizard Lenin manages to find some decent entertainment in life, and Lily goes on her first official shopping trip as Eleanor Potter rather than Lily Riddle and finds the whole experience to be much less fun.
The second time she met Severus Snape was not in her bedroom as he tried to wipe her memories but was with him standing at the front door to Number 4 Privet Drive and her on the roof.
The fact of the matter was that the now eleven-year-old Lily was slightly late in returning her reply to Hogwarts.
Sure, she had meant to, but then she'd never gotten around to reading the thing and she didn't have an owl to reply, so she'd just thrown it away somewhere and lost it between Riddle Incorporated, Number 4 Privet Drive, and Doctor Mitchell's office. It just hadn't seemed all that important. School had never seemed important, and she didn't know why a magical school would be any different.
She'd been unconvinced if she even wanted to go. It had taken talks from both Wizard Lenin and Death to convince her it'd be a good use of time. The turning point had been only a little while after summoning Rabbit from the universe beyond in rabbit form. She'd taken him to see Uncle Death, who had been impressed if somewhat horrified by the implications of his existence and had relayed her doubts about the educational system.
The conversation had taken place to the quiet sounds of the snuffling Rabbit as well as Wizard Lenin's usual irritation at visiting Death.
"No offense, but it seems like I have the glitch manipulation thing kind of covered. I get a lot of experience at Riddle Incorporated and from what I've seen, most wizards can't do half of what glitch manipulation is capable of. Besides, if it's anything like normal school then it's probably a complete waste of time."
With a sigh, she'd sipped at her tea, that wonderful tea flavor you could only find in purgatory, and thought about the merits of just stealing Lily Riddle's job full time.
"They're going to make you go to school somewhere, would you rather it be the magic school or the muggle school?" Wizard Lenin asked. She didn't really know why he was so annoyed about it. Technically, if she didn't go to magic school, she'd have more time to look into his little body problem, but he seemed personally offended that she didn't want to go to Hogwarts.
"Well, the glitch school I guess, if I have to go to one or the other." Lily said watching as Rabbit hopped over the glass remains of Wizard Lenin's wrath from years before and remained miraculously uncut. "But do I really have to go to school?"
Death for his own part looked at his hands with a serious expression as if attempting to solve a very difficult problem. He was often very serious about topics that he really didn't need to be serious about, such as her schooling, the existence of Rabbit, Wizard Lenin's influence on her decisions, and her part time job as Lily Riddle. "How can you be so certain you won't enjoy it? I realize you don't care for children your age, but perhaps you'll find friends there. Until I attended Hogwarts, I had no friends to speak of."
Wizard Lenin spared Death a glance conveying all his doubts about that statement without even having to open his mouth. "I can't speak of your ability to make friends, but your ability to meddle in the affairs of great wizards will be highly increased should you choose to attend Hogwarts."
In later years, Wizard Lenin had come to know Lily slightly better than Death. He was around her more often, and he lived inside her head, so she tended to follow his line of thinking more than she did Death's. Death would always be kinder, and in some ways Lily did appreciate that, but she felt for the most part that Wizard Lenin was the one who truly understood. For whatever reason, this sparked some resentment in Death that always made him glare at Wizard Lenin as if he was the incarnation of freaky business that so plagued Uncle Vernon.
So while she, like Wizard Lenin, highly doubted her ability to communicate effectively with her peers, she didn't doubt her ability to meddle.
"I'm a drug lord, I think that's a lot of meddling already." Lily noted to both of them with a shrug.
"Perhaps. But then again, there are many opportunities at Hogwarts that will not present themselves anywhere else and if you never go, you will miss them completely. Have you thought, Lily, that maybe this is simply another one of the numerous inexplicable things that Eleanor Potter must do?"
And that had been the clincher, because at the end of the day, there were many inexplicable tasks that Eleanor Lily Potter had to accomplish that seemed to serve no greater purpose to Lily. Hogwarts would simply be one of them.
Three years later, that would bring her to the roof at Wizard Lenin's prompting to send a response to the school's letter before she was denied admittance simply for not responding, attempting to make use of one of Mrs. Figg's many cats in place of an owl.
She'd initially tried with Rabbit, but apparently beings from beyond the bounds of the comprehensible universe didn't know what to do with mail. He'd just stared at the letter with that blank look in his black little eyes and then proceeded to hop slowly away from her. After that, she thought she'd try her luck with one of Mrs. Figg's many cats.
"Lily, you can't just pick an animal and have it send your response to Hogwarts." Wizard Lenin said as Lily slowly approached the cat after having cornered it on the roof with her letter in hand.
"I don't see why it has to be an owl. Besides, we've known there's something off about Mrs. Figg's cats for years. They have to be glitchy, their herd behavior cannot be explained otherwise."
In her head, Wizard Lenin sighed. She caught the image of him mentally rubbing his temples, as if he knew she was doing something profoundly stupid but had no means to stop her. Like watching a train wreck, he'd often say.
"Even if I did agree with you on the cats, that doesn't mean they have the ability or the inclination to deliver your mail to Scotland."
She caught mutterings then of something along the lines on how she never listened to him, how she was going to fall off the roof and break her neck, and how that wasn't even going to make a bit of difference because she'd just rise from the dead like she always did and pretend it never happened in the first place.
"Well, where am I going to find an owl, Lenin? At least I know where the cats are." she responded, not quite irritated but getting there, as the Wizard Lenin Frustration headache built up in her scar. The cat, for it's own part, stared at her unblinkingly, large yellow eyes taking in her very determined expression. She had the feeling, in spite of all signs to the contrary, that this was one of those moments that would change her life forever. It had that heaviness to it that could only be associated with destiny.
"Somehow, I doubt that." Wizard Lenin couldn't help but cut in.
Just before reaching the cat, it scampered off with a hiss disappearing off the roof and making its way across the street to it's safe den where it would relay all her secret secrets into the spy network and then onto Big Brother.
"You know none of that is accurate." Wizard Lenin commented drily before letting out another frustrated sigh that came with living as a brain tumor for the past ten years. "I was going to say that you could just use one from the owlery in Diagon Alley for relatively no money. However, you didn't seem inclined to listen."
She got the feeling that he expected there to be some sort of a lesson from the experience of not managing to corner Mrs. Figg's cat, but for the life of her she couldn't figure out what it was supposed to be.
It was at that point that they caught sight of the awkward greasy looking man standing at the door to Number 4, Privet Drive looking as if he desperately wished to be elsewhere. He had abandoned his wizard bathrobe for a cheap, ill-fitting, dark suit that looked very uncomfortable in the heat.
He was a very thin man, more so than the tall thin men she was normally surrounded by like Wizard Lenin, Death, and the vampires working for Lily Riddle. Where they were elegantly slim, containing a hint of danger as well as ethereality in their forms, this man was bony and seemed too tall for his frame. His features seemed slapped on, crudely fashioned, so that he resembled more of a scarecrow than a man.
She crouched down on the roof and surveyed him in silence, just taking him in, and seeing what Wizard Lenin might make of him.
"Is that who I think it is?"
She could feel Wizard Lenin's attention burning inside him, a pounding of adrenaline, hate, and the desire to hurt.
"Oh yes, I do believe Mr. Snape has decided to pay us a visit once again."
In her head, there was an image of a smaller, younger, version of Severus Snape bleeding on the floor with a look of terror on his features. Insult to Wizard Lenin, even when by proxy of Lily, would be repaid in kind. She wondered if the man had any idea that his life was in mortal danger because he'd once snuck into Lily's room with the guise of a pedophile in order to erase her memories.
"Do you think he's here for memories?" she asked as they watched the man's shuffling irritated movements on the doormat as he finally brought himself to ring the doorbell.
"Dressed like that?" Wizard Lenin said bringing up the suit with disdain, as if the man shouldn't have even tried. "I highly doubt it. No, my guess is he's here for Hogwarts. Although why they would send a man like Severus Snape is truly beyond me."
She considered him. He did seem like he wasn't thrilled to be there, and Wizard Lenin did have a relatively good fashion sense, so while she saw the outfit as just not fitting, he saw it as an abomination to humanity. Wizard Lenin responded with something akin to her not having any fashion sense at all since she'd been raised wearing her obese cousin's oversized and brightly colored sweaters, but he obviously didn't feel strong enough to say it directly to her.
As they observed him, the door opened. Lily couldn't see who it was in the doorway, but judging by the hand that rapidly slapped the man across the face, she would guess it was Aunt Petunia. Before the man got a word in edgewise, the door was slammed in his face.
"That went extraordinarily well. I suppose Severus Snape must have known Petunia Evans; he certainly knew Lily." Wizard Lenin commentated, feeling amused by the whole situation. Not enough to allow Severus Snape to live, but enough to watch him suffer from a distance. It seemed they were in soap opera mode again with the new character Severus Snape, who had a mysterious past of greasiness, and his introduction into the show.
The man simply stared at the door, seeming to be in shock, and then began pounding on it again, receiving no response from Aunt Petunia who was probably at that moment calling the police. His frustration apparently mounting to a point where he could no longer contain it, he brought out his wand.
"I do believe he means to break down your door." Wizard Lenin observed.
"Uncle Vernon won't like that. He'll probably blame it on me."
Normally, incidents like doors disappearing, mysterious rabbits appearing, or therapists calling the house were by-products of Lily's actions, but it seemed as if even if the mysterious events weren't her fault, if they were in any way mysterious, they'd be pinned on her.
"Most definitely." Wizard Lenin concurred as they watched the man's hand begin to swish this way and that, with the increase of swishes signifying the increase in power level. It seemed the man was not going so much for unlocking the door as for obliterating it entirely.
"I should probably stop him." Lily said. She could probably fix the damage, she'd been able to fix all of the other damage she'd caused over the years, but that didn't mean she was inclined to.
"No, no, Lily, let's leave him alone for a moment. This is getting fairly interesting."
Drawing on Wizard Lenin's soap opera thinking, it seemed that after blowing the door into tiny pieces, Aunt Petunia would probably start screaming, there'd be some sort of catfight between her and Mr. Snape, and then Mr. Snape would probably end up accidentally killing her and then there'd be one less Dursley in the house for Lily to deal with and the greasy agent would be able to be convicted of murder and would have to cover the whole thing up.
Lily didn't necessarily like her aunt, but having her murdered by the greasy agent of Big Brother seemed like a harsh way to do it. If Lily really wanted her aunt dead she'd do it herself.
"Yeah, I'm stopping him."
By that point though, it was too late for the door. It was a pretty destructive piece of magic. There really was nothing left of that door by the end of it and just as Wizard Lenin had predicted, Aunt Petunia had started screaming.
"Too late." Wizard Lenin sounded awfully smug about that statement.
"Yo, guy at my door, hey!" Lily called out to the man. His head swiveled up to meet hers. "Can you not blow up my house for two seconds? I assume you want to talk about the letter."
Squinting in the sunlight, he caught sight of her on the roof and staggered back into the front yard accompanied by the crescendo of Aunt Petunia's panicking shrieks which were growing less intelligble by the minute.
"Eleanor Potter?" he asked, sounding almost incredulous.
"And how my I help you today, kind sir?"
She gave him a slight bow, the hand with the letter sweeping across the shingles of the roof, and offered him a bright grin.
"What are you doing up there?!" he asked sounding panicked, not even paying attention to Aunt Petunia who had come running out of the house with a frying pan aimed at his head.
Lily, for her own part, was walking towards the edge of the roof, preparing to jump down with the aid of a glitch in the form of lessened gravity, a trick that had turned out to be very useful when needing to get down from high places as well as look flashy. So it was only as she floated down from the roof that she offered a warning to the man. "Watch your head."
He didn't, so by the time Lily's bare feet touched ground, he was out cold, and Aunt Petunia was hysterically attempting to grab her and drag her inside.
"Still going well?" Lily asked Wizard Lenin, almost feeling him smile in response.
"I'm entertained."
With a raised hand a bit of concentratio,n the door remembered its prior, not destroyed, state and Aunt Petunia found herself back in the kitchen where she had been previously with only vague recollections that something unpleasant had occurred. The man remained unconscious on the ground.
Lily nudged him with a bare foot, causing him to twitch slightly and then groan. "Come on, it was Aunt Petunia. I'm sure she didn't hit you that hard."
At that, the man attempted to roll over but became nauseous from it, turning from the sickly white color to a curious green. At Wizard Lenin's suggestion, she backed up a safe distance so that when he vomited, it wasn't on her feet.
"Did… You were on the roof." he groaned out, rubbing his head and looking altogether miserable.
"Yes, and you were at the door. But that's irrelevant now. I'm afraid I wasn't quite sure how this owl to mail business thing worked and did not send in my letter on time. That's why you're here, isn't it?"
He nodded slowly, closing his eyes and taking deep breaths, probably still feeling somewhat dizzy. He seemed incapable of too much talking.
"Oh goody. My answer is yes. I would love to attend your glitch academy."
He nodded again, eyes still closed. "Good… that's good."
He attempted to get himself in a sitting position then, which again turned him slightly green. But he persevered and did not vomit twice.
"…The roof… You were on the roof… How did… How did you get down?"
Lily sighed. "I walked."
He didn't nod at that, in fact, he looked somewhat puzzled, but clearly his addled brains weren't helping him to come up with an answer that he liked. Lily was just wondering how much longer she'd have to babysit him in her yard for.
"Ask him to take you to Diagon Alley." Wizard Lenin suddenly cut in with a forcefulness that only could mean he was scheming something.
"But I go to Diagon Alley all the time." Lily pointed out. Besides, the man could barely move, she doubted he was in any condition to teleport to London.
"Lily Riddle visits Diagon Alley all the time, not Eleanor Potter. Now that you're attending Hogwarts, people will expect to see you. Dumbledore, specifically, will expect to see you out and about, but not without the guidance of one of his pawns."
It was heavily implied there that Severus Snape was a pawn.
The man had, apparently, at one point worked for Wizard Lenin as a young revolutionary but Wizard Lenin had never really liked him. Wizard Lenin would never go into the why, but in spite of the young man's talent at potions as well as dueling, there was some major point of contention that Wizard Lenin had never forgiven.
Now that the war had been over for ten years and the dark lord Hindenburg was assumed dead, Wizard Lenin would not have been in the least bit shocked if Severus Snape jumped ship with everyone else. He was just a little miffed that the man had somehow avoided jail, and for that he blamed his go-to resource of irritation, Albus Dumbledore.
"Don't refer to me as Lord Hindenburg. Ever."
For a man who called himself lord of the airplane disasters, he sure was picky about which disaster he referred to.
Wizard Lenin had a point. She also got the feeling that he was looking forward to making the man spend the whole day with them and thereby make him suffer, which if it made Wizard Lenin happy, it made her life easier.
"I'd be happy to leave you here, but unfortunately I don't know where this glitch shopping district is, so you'll have to take me. You cool with that?" she asked, to which he didn't quite shake or nod his head, appearing to be in the process of understanding her words and trying not to feel sick. Lily decided that his opinion really didn't matter.
"Great. That's super, let's get going."
With that, she hauled the man up and began to steer him towards the public transportation.
One of the first glitches she'd started to actively manipulate, besides memories and repairing collateral damage, was teleportation. Wizard Lenin referred to it as apparition but whatever it was called, it cut her travel time to London's glitch underbelly by a ridiculous amount and therefore she loved it. Unfortunately, it was also apparently illegal for underage wizards, which normally wouldn't concern her as laws for the peons, but with Severus Snape dragged along behind her, she doubted casually breaking the laws would get her through the day any faster.
On the train ride over, he seemed to pull himself together, mustering himself enough so that he glared at her even as he was leaning against the window. "I am not going to Diagon Alley with you."
He said it as if it was the last thing he could possibly think of doing, as if she was an abomination of nature that must be thrown into the deepest pits of Hell. It was an impressive amount of hate that no one had actually directed at her before, even as Lily Riddle.
Lily's eyebrows raised, a mannerism she had picked up from Wizard Lenin. "Well, you're already on the train there, so you might as well."
"Ask your relatives to take you; I have much better things to do with my time."
He seemed to be conveniently forgetting that he had just been hit over the head with a frying pan for the casual destruction that came with the territory of manipulating glitches by those same caring relatives.
Well, she supposed if he didn't want to go that was his decision, but if Wizard Lenin's line of thinking was correct, that might cause some problems later on.
"Bring up the fact that he would be leaving an eleven-year-old girl alone on public transportation to downtown London where she'd be trying to find a magical shopping district."
"If you leave now, I'll probably just start wandering around the east end looking for a magic shopping district." Lily commented gravely, causing the man's eyes to snap back towards hers faster than lightning.
He seemed to evaluate her then, but it seemed looking at her too long was painful, because then he turned his head away and looked out the window.
"…We will make this quick."
"You remind him of your mother." Wizard Lenin commented quietly, almost tenderly, and she wondered what had prompted that kind of emotion from him.
What an odd thing to think of, Lily thought to herself, when looking at her face.
On exiting the train, Severus Snape seemed to have regained himself enough to take charge and drag her behind him and teleport them as soon as they were out of sight of muggles to the entrance behind the Leaky Beaker.
"If you ever need to come here, just look for the pub. Got that?"
"Yes sir." she said giving him a slight salute as it sounded more like an order rather than actual advice. He glared at that a little and then seemed to decide to pretend she didn't exist. He tapped the bricks quickly in the order that Wizard Lenin had originally taught her, and then dragged her through.
Without any explanation that one could expect from a tour guide, he brusquely brought them to Gringotts, approaching the nearest available teller whose expression, almost as if on clockwork, widened at the sight of Lily, probably mistaking her as Lily Riddle in disguise.
"Nope, it's Ellie Potter today." Lily said before he could run off to find the manager. He looked possibly more alarmed at that.
"It's… Eleanor Potter, today?" he parroted, his eyes shifting to Severus Snape who had turned to look at her with raised eyebrows, as if trying to figure out what that meant.
"Miss Potter would like to make a withdrawal from her vaults." Severus Snape said slowly and reached in his pockets presenting a key to the goblin.
"…He had your key? Severus Snape has your key?"
Judging by the use of rhetorical questions and the force of the oncoming migraine, Lily felt that Wizard Lenin was feeling very insulted for her at the present moment.
"Why do you have my vault key?" Lily asked, voicing Wizard Lenin's concerns. But apparently this was one of those questions you didn't ask, because the only response she got from Mr. Snape was a menacing looking glare.
One awkward cart ride through the vaults, piles of galleons that were much smaller than Lily Riddle's piles of galleons, and an awkward ride back, Lily waved goodbye to the goblins, who seemed to grow more alarmed as the rumor that Eleanor Potter was really Lily Riddle spread through the bank. She had the strangest feeling that she'd just caused there to be some sort of emergency meeting among the management, as goblins could be seen glancing at her and Severus Snape and then rushing to the back room as if their lives depended on it.
"I trust you can collect the rest of your supplies on your own. I'll meet you here in a few hours."
With that, Severus Snape abandoned her in front of the bank with a pile of money and very few instructions.
"Goodbye?"
But by that point he was already gone, his clothes transfigured into black wizard robes, and lost somewhere in the crowd.
"Well, he's just as distasteful as always." Wizard Lenin commented. "I suppose it's time to get your wand and school robes."
So Lily and Wizard Lenin went about the rest of the day, getting all the supplies on the list. Wizard Lenin suggesting various things that might be more useful than the generic supplies suggested in the letter, all of which Lily wasn't sure why she needed.
They ended the round of errands with the purchase of her wand, a ceremony that Wizard Lenin took far more seriously than her. There was a sense of nostalgia in him as they entered Ollivanders and something religious.
"Ah, Miss Potter, I was wondering when I might see you." the man, Ollivander she assumed, greeted her with the tinkling of a bell above the door. He looked old but still very with it, a wise sort of old that Lily respected.
"Well, it's what all the cool kids are doing. Getting their wands, I mean." she said as she walked in surveying the boxes and boxes of wands in the back of the store.
"Yes," he said with a slight chuckle, "I suppose it is. I remember your parents coming in here, getting their first wands, and now you're here as well."
"Funny that way, isn't it?" she said with a slightly strained grin.
"I suppose we'd best get to it then." He then brought out a tape measure and began measuring her arm and peering at her curiously.
After that, he disappeared into the back and brought several boxes with him. The glitch sticks that wizards were so fond of, wands, turned out to be rather volatile. After the fifth one, the store had almost burnt down a number of times.
"You sure you want to keep doing this?" she asked him, wondering if it just wasn't better to go without one altogether.
"Not to worry Miss Potter," he said, looking rather worried himself. "The wand picks the wizard just as much as the wizard picks the wand. Sometimes it takes… patience."
"Well, it's not really the patience thing, it's more that your store might actually explode next time." Lily pointed out, but he appeared to ignore that comment, instead choosing to shuffle through wands in the back looking for one in particular.
Finally, he returned with one, looking to Lily's eyes fairly similar to all the others, but it appeared to agree with her because instead of flames bursting out of the end as it had in the prior cases, golden sparks showered out instead.
"Interesting, that's very interesting." he said as a relieved smile made its way onto his face at not having his shop burnt down.
"I know. You know, compared to the flames that was pretty tame." Lily commented wondering if she should have gone with one of the more flame-inducing sticks instead.
"No, no, believe me Miss Potter, that is the wand for you. No, that wand's core was donated by a phoenix who only gave out one other feather. The wand whose core that was in, your wand's twin, gave you that." He pointed to her forehead and the scar. "Great and terrible things, so many great and terrible things it accomplished."
Inside her head Wizard Lenin grew uncharacteristically quiet and somber, as if he was thinking deeply on some unknown topic.
"Oh, well, that's great. Bye." Lily said and promptly left the store, letting out a breath of exhaustion now that all her supplies seemed to be in working order, the giant pile of them she had been carting around Diagon Alley.
She'd spend the next several hours glumly waiting in front of the bank waiting for Snape to reemerge from wherever he had slunk off to. If he hadn't left with the vague promise of returning, she would have just teleported back with the stuff, but as it was, he might be expecting her to be lost and helpless in Diagon Alley, so lost and helpless she had to remain.
By the time, he finally seemed to remember her, the sun was close to setting and she had gotten several offers to help look for her parents by kindly looking strangers.
Lily and Wizard Lenin had both decided that one day they were going to kill Severus Snape slowly and painfully.
"You took your sweet time." Lily commented as the man approached, still staring glumly out into the crowd.
"What I do with my time is none of your business, Miss Potter." the man responded. "I take it you are ready to return to your muggle home?"
The way he said muggle there, as if it was an insult... well, it didn't endear him to Lily any.
"I've been ready for a while, not that you seem bothered by that. Nope, you just disappear without even mentioning your name and say 'I'll be back.' Only without the sunglasses or the gun or just the general robotness of the Terminator, so it just sounds lame. So yeah, it's been fun." she said with a slightly strained smile. She wondered if people thought they could get away with treating Eleanor Potter this way, because no one would have said that to Lily Riddle.
"Professor Snape to you, Miss Potter." And with that, he grabbed both her and the purchases she had made and teleported them back to the front of her house.
"I trust you will safely find your way to King's Cross for the start of term."
And with that, he was gone, leaving Lily, the piles of ridiculous materials, and Wizard Lenin seething in her head standing outside Number 4, Privet Drive as if nothing had happened in the first
Author's Note: Or when Dumbledore's attempts to snoop via Snape fail terribly because Snape is an asshole. Also I promised Hogwarts and Hogwarts has been delivered, almost, we're close. Thanks to readers, reviewers, and to Kurama's Foxy Rose for the beta job. Reviews are much appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter