Disclaimer: Not JKR, not making any money.

Chapter Warnings: Snape is mean to a student; possible slut-shaming


Down in his rooms, Severus wanted to sleep. But not yet, not yet.

He used blood to send the message to the Dark Lord, a few drops eked from his palm. A tiny, insignificant sacrifice, but one that would protect his message as it fluttered out of Hogwarts and toward the Ministry of Magic, a pale streak in the sky like a shooting star.

To get to the Longbottoms, he wrote on a scrap of parchment, you have to go through a wizard named Jason Hanley. He knows their location. He is the only one. Severus thought for a moment, then scribbled out a few lines about how the Concealment Charm worked - just enough for the Dark Lord to know he couldn't torture the location out of Hanley, but not enough that his Death Eaters could develop a counter-spell. Severus doubted that he could develop a counter-spell, and he was a much stronger wizard than the ones the Dark Lord had working for him now.

Severus rolled up the parchment and sealed it with wax. He dropped his blood on the paper. Then he lifted the message up with his wand, chanted a few words in a Dark language, and the message disappeared. He hoped it would be enough.

His body shuddered with the sense memory of the Cruciatus Curse.

For the next few days, Severus waited. The students grated on his nerves, as usual. One of the seventh-year Slytherin girls came to his office and tried to wheedle him into raising the grade on her essay in exchange for certain sexual favors; Severus stared at her pale, lovely face, the hint of a smile curving at the corners of her lips. For a moment he thought about the way Lily would look before she did those things, her eyes bright and mischievous with arousal. He immediately shut the memory out.

"I'm not sure why you believe infecting me with a score of Muggle and magical diseases would incline me toward raising your grade," Severus said.

The girl's mouth dropped a little. Her eyes went wide.

"Was this, as the Muggles say, a cry for help?" Severus sneered. "Shall I send you up to Madame Pomfrey? I don't want to find out that half our Quidditch team is sick when it comes time to play against Gryffindor."

"Professor Snape," the girl said. "I don't - I just thought -" Her eyes shimmered a little with tears.

"Don't ever ask me to do that again," Severus told her, and he slammed the door open with his wand and glared at her until she gathered up her books, her movements clumsy, all that adolescent grace dissolved away. Severus felt rather pleased with himself, at least until his thoughts began to wander, and some voice inside his head asked, What would Lily say?

The rest of the week finished out. The fifth-years turned in essays that Severus stacked on his desk and forgot about. Severus was able to assign detention to four obnoxious Gryffindors who reminded him more than a little of Black and his lackeys; it was immensely satisfying to watch them chop up spider corpses and clean out cauldrons by hand as he sat behind his desk reading that month's Potion's Monthly.

Wednesday afternoon - Halloween, although Severus didn't much care - Severus was sitting in his office, glowering at the pile of ungraded essays. The students had been asking after them; Severus gave some Hufflepuff detention after she gave a rather unHufflepuffian sigh of vexation upon hearing the essays weren't ready. He dug through the stack until he found hers, skimmed it, then scrawled, Pitiful research. Perhaps you should try the library, not the notes of first-years. It made him feel a little better.

This was his life now. Essays and lesson plans and students, always the fucking students, swarming around him like sloppily uniformed bees. It was not like Hogwarts before; in many ways it worse, not only because there was no Lily but because of the constant responsibility. Severus had worked hard as a student, particularly in Potions and Arithmancy, subjects he enjoyed, but the work had never been as constant as it was now. He was always working, always a teacher. But at least as a teacher he had control over the students; he could bully them into submission before they tried anything on him. He had been here for over a year and not once had he been pranked. Not once. They were all too scared to try.

That, Severus had to admit, was a pleasant change of events.

He selected another essay at random and read the first paragraph and the last. Pathetic reasoning, he wrote across the bottom. The next essay in the stack belonged to a Slytherin; he scrawled Acceptable across the top without bothering to read it. Dumbledore wanted him showing favor to the Slytherin students. He didn't care one way or another, but anything that meant less work for him was always welcome.

His arm began to burn.

"Fuck!" Ink blotted across the essay he'd been reading, the work of an admittedly talented Ravenclaw. Smoke curled up through the fabric of his robe. He shoved the essay and the quill away, knocking the rest of the essays off the desk. They fluttered out over the floor like birds. "Fuck," Severus said again, as he pushed up his sleeve to look at the Dark Mark.

The pain faded.

It didn't return they way it had before. Severus leaned back in his chair, taking deep, calming breaths. He didn't think about what the Dark Lord could want; such thoughts only manufactured anxiety that would creep along the walls of his Occlumency.

He blanked out his mind. Then pushed away from his desk, tossed a handful of Floo powder into the fireplace, and stepped through to the Ministry of Magic.