Author's Notes: This is a fanfic - Standard disclaimers apply. I own nothing.
Thank you again to those who favorited/followed. Please do review; any feedback is appreciated.
A/N: 12.19.20 -
Thank you so, so, so much to those who left reviews. My apologies for the delay in updating. I've decided to split the final chapter into two - here is the first part.
Part 1
Amy crept into bed in the wee hours of Sunday morning and slept soundly until noon. When she woke, she discovered two things. First, her Malaclaw bite had turned a nasty green overnight, and, second, that she'd missed Myron. He'd finished up his last early exam and left the Castle for a week to go on a tour with his band. This was the culmination of his senior project – he'd be back just in time to attend graduation.
Amy wondered if it wasn't too early to start packing.
On Monday, the Malaclaw struck again: Fiona and Alex had an accident during their Charms NEWT and had to be shipped off to St. Mungo's for a few days. This meant that Amy had no friends left at Hogwarts to keep her apprised of current events.
Amy spent most of the day making friends with Fiona's cat.
On Tuesday, the cat – Whose name, by the way, was Mr. Cuddle-Whiskers – ate Amy's parents' owl en route to the Great Hall to deliver the post. This meant that Amy never got the news about what was going to be in the news.
Wednesday began an almost comical desynchronization with the rest of the world. Amy slept through the Alarm Spell on her watch, so she missed the Daily Prophet delivery on which this headline was front-page news:
RAPE AT HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY
Each time the paper might have entered her view, she was remarkably (one might say, magically) distracted. Her shoes would come untied and need tending, or a seam on her bag would fail and need mending, or else she had the sudden urge to sneeze.
On Thursday, the last day of exams and the same day that every Tom, Dick, and Harry at Hogwarts somehow managed to get a copy of the Memoriball containing the worst day of Amy's life, she came down with a head cold. She spent the entire day in bed and didn't even feel like reading, or else she might have appreciated the masterful way Lucius Malfoy dog-whistled his way through an impassioned open letter to the Headmaster.
The letter railed against "The unacceptable lack of transparency at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry." It exposed "The Dumbledore Administration's incestuous relationship with the Bones Court." It bemoaned the lack of deference given to "The most established members of the Wizarding Community."
"I have always wanted a daughter," the letter concluded, "But I now find myself in the curious position of being relieved not to have one. After all, how could I send her to a school where her safety is far from guaranteed?"
The voters – these same people who had lived through a war predicated on the unacceptability of miscegenation – asked themselves the very same question.
Somebody at the Prophet had been paid handsomely to make sure the open letter appeared next to yet another article about the rape, and yet another picture of the victim. Myron had been cropped out of the photo, but the "Malfoy for Governor!" pin on the girl's lapel was still very much in frame.
On Friday, Lucius Malfoy won his campaign for the vacant Governor's seat by a comfortable margin.
Amy, meanwhile, found an abandoned romance novel in the Common Room about a sensitive, tortured-soul American vampire who falls in love with a teenaged pop star. She thought it was hilarious, and was so busy reading that she missed the furtive, horrified looks coming from every corner.
She even had a coughing fit while walking past the teacher's lounge, which meant that she didn't hear this exchange:
"This was you!" accused Minerva McGonagall, her lips white with rage as she shoved a copy of the Prophet under Severus Snape's nose. "This entire week was you! You have damaged the reputation of this school – and for what? To satisfy some petty personal vendetta?!"
"I haven't the slightest idea what you're referring to, Professor McGonagall," Snape replied smootly, and turned back to his copy of The Practical Potioneer with a self-satisfied smirk.
Dumbledore would later fix him with a look of fatherly disappointment and say, "It's nice to see you finally taking an interest in your students, Severus."
By Saturday the effects of the Malaclaw had nearly worn off. The bad luck lingered just a little in the morning, when Amy got roped into spending time with the only person at Hogwarts more oblivious than herself – Professor Noun.
The older witch was determined that none of her 6th or 7th year students should leave without having cast a fully-formed Patronus charm at least once.
"Wonderful!" cried Professor Noun from the top of the D.A.D.A. classroom. "Really great job, Charlie! I knew you could do it!"
Amy looked up from her vampire book and saw Charlie—some round-faced Hufflepuff—grinning from ear to ear as he and his D.A.D.A. professor admired his Patronus.
It was a very bright, very white, and very friendly-looking bunny-rabbit.
All the Patronuses – pardon her, spirit animals – were like that, rodent-y little woodland creatures of the sort you'd see anthropomorphized in a children's novel. In fact, Charlie's must have been the third bunny-rabbit Amy's seen in the hour she'd been sitting at the back of the classroom, waiting for her turn to benefit from a last-ditch remedial D.A.D.A. lesson.
Pardon her, a 'special skills session.'
"Now, go show all your friends, Charlie! We'll see you next year!" said Professor Noun, looking exhilarated and very much like a woman on a roll.
Charlie and his bunny-rabbit left.
Professor Noun turned to Amy with a winning smile. "Well, dear, let's try again! I've got a good feeling about this time!"
Amy didn't know why. It's not as though she'd shown any aptitude for this spell all year, and, anyway, it wasn't like a dementor was just going to pop out at her one day while she's out buying lemons. There was probably a reason you couldn't just Avada the bastards, but she had no idea what it was. Maybe she'd ask Sna—
Snape.
Amy set down her book and slouched to the front of the classroom to join Professor Noun. She was just raising her wand to attempt, one more time, to cast the charm, when a silver-green blur burst through the classroom door and skidded to a halt next to her. It had the acrid, manly smell like a sweaty goat that always seemed to hang around Quidditch robes, regardless of how many times they were washed.
It was Myron.
"There you are," he said to Amy.
Professor Noun positively beamed. "How nice, Amy! One of your friends has come to watch!"
Amy lowered her wand and scowled at Myron. The last thing she needed was an audience.
But Myron barely spared Professor Noun a glance before babbling something about needing to "borrow" his friend. He steered Amy away, to the back of the classroom, speaking in low tones. "Amy, I this is important. I need to talk to you."
"Myron, why are you wearing Quidditch robes?"
"What?" he said distractedly. "Oh, they were the only school clothes that were clean. I just got back."
Amy puzzled over the surprising fact that Myron considered these "clean" as she watched him open and close his mouth several times, apparently at a loss for where to begin.
"Well?" she prompted. "What is it?"
"I…I need to talk to you," he said, after several false starts.
She was beginning to get irritated now. "Yes, you said that. About what?"
He made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan. "Jesus, Amy, do you really not know? How can you not know?"
"Know what, Myron?"
He had a great deal of trouble getting to the point and seemed unable to meet her eye. "Do you remember when Tremlett and I got into a fight in the Common Room?" he finally asked.
"Um…sure?"
"Tremlett had this Memoriball. It was…God, it was disgusting, Amy. Horrible. There's this girl in it, and she's…she's being…but I didn't stick around long enough to see her face."
A curiously cold sensation came over her, like a cube of ice slipping down her spine.
"It was – it was you, Amy. The girl was you. It's all over the school – all over everywhere. That fucking reporter wrote an article about it. I mean, she doesn't really name you – your face is sort of blurry in the picture – but everybody knows it's you, Amy. Everybody knows."
Professor Noun chose just this moment to bustle to the back of the classroom and join them.
"Well, Amy dear, time to give it a go! You know the incantation," she bade warmly and cluelessly as Myron looked anywhere but at Amy.
Amy stood there in stunned, speechless horror. Everything faded except for the distant mental click as one piece of information fitted to the next.
Snape's joke, from the beginning of the year, about the flourishing black market in illicit memories.
Click.
Snape's being on a rampage about Tremlett's Memoriball, having the boys' dorms searched for more.
Click.
His contriving to spend two hours with her in Diagon Alley, where she had a dream about a crow giving a Memoriball to a ferret.
Click.
Just days ago, when he'd let her go to Myron's Prophet interview in Hogsmeade.
Click. Click. Click.
"Go on, dear! Give it a shot!" cheered Professor Noun, cutting though the clicking.
Mechanically, Amy raised her wand and said, "expecto patronum." Something that looked like a wisp of cloud came out of her wand for exactly a twelfth of a second before dissipating and disappearing entirely.
Professor Noun shook her head. "Amy, dear! You're not even trying!" She smiled warmly and placed her chubby hand—quite without permission—on Amy's shoulder. Amy stared at it.
"I want you to look deep inside yourself," the older witch said, suddenly thrusting her free hand out to some Mystical Beyond that definitely was not inside Amy's self. Having gestured to that place, she looked back at Amy and continued, "And ask yourself, what animal says 'Amy'?"
No animal says 'Amy.' Animals don't talk.
She removed her hand, leaving Amy's skin crawling, and bade her try again. Amy did. Nothing happened.
the older woman again placed her hand—and again without permission—on Amy's shoulder. Then she placed her other hand on Amy's other shoulder. Then she leaned in far, far too close. It was an obvious attempt to reach her student, to change her life, to win a teaching award. She smelled like pumpkin juice and some eucalyptus throat lozenge that a koala probably would have enjoyed. It mingled, nauseatingly, with the masculine stench still issuing from Myron's Quidditch robes.
That's exactly what he'd smelled like, her rapist. Like sweat and mint.
"Come, now, Amy, dear. What's your happiest memory?" the professor asked, her sick-room sweet breath sliding over Amy's cheeks like a lecher's touch. "Think about something that really matters."
Something that matters. Was what this woman wanted, a fact that mattered?
The fact of the matter is this: the very idea of mattering is a delusion of such magnitude it's practically a joke.
It's a practical fucking joke.
Just like Melville said.
Think the Dark Lord will come save you? Just kidding! He was killed by a baby. The most powerful wizard ever to walk the face of the earth fell at the feet of a nappy-wearing, long "ee" ending baby. Woo! Isn't that a whopper?
Think your blood is pure? Yeah, sure it is. Until one day you're coming back from a Quidditch match, drunk, and some idiot makes sure you'll never feel pure or clean ever again. Some fool does that to you right outside your professor's empty office, and somebody makes a fortune selling the memory, and nobody has anything to say. What a doozy that one is. A real bloody laugh, isn't it?
Want to know something even funnier? It's a secret, so don't tell, but the funniest thing is that the only person who makes her feel anything but completely fucking numb is an angry, sarcastic drunk who fluffed her with his lies and fucked her on his bed and he knew. He knew and he lied to her and he set her up. He's a liar and a cheat and a monster and she is so damaged, so ruined, that she fucked him anyway.
How's that for looking inside herself?
So you want to know about something that matters? You want to know the truth of the universe? You want to know what animal embodies—not says, but embodies—Amy?
Okay. Fine. She can do that.
The truth is that there is no truth, and the fact of the matter is that she's a cockroach, okay?
She's a scurrying bit of self-deluded human waste. The star of her very own rape fantasy. A prop in a porno for perverts to beat off too before they kiss their wives good night. She's a freak; a roadside attraction.
Come one!—Come all!—Come see AMY THE AMAZING HUMAN COCKROACH!
For a knut she'll give you one of her cadaver kisses, and if you want to know what it's like to fuck a corpse, you don't even have to get consent!
That's the state of things, and there isn't a God-damned thing anybody can do about it, so maybe it's time to just grow the fuck up and accept that already. Just accept that not everybody's soul looks like Peter Cottontail and only Hufflepuffs get their happily ever afters.
That's the truth of the matter.
So unless you, Professor Stupid Fucking Name, can be the first person to actually explain why absolutely everything in my life has gone to shit, you can take your positive thinking and your story-book spirit animals and your delusions of mattering and just shove them up your—
"Amy!"
Oh.
Oh, Shit.
Had she said that aloud?
The door to Snape's office—once overwhelming in its weight and scale—flew open under the force of Amy's magic like a leaf blowing in the wind. As she stormed inside, her rage storming with her, several specimen jars broke, showering the room with broken glass and bits of frog guts. Snape rose from his desk, looking angry but not particularly surprised to see her there.
"You!" she said, an accusing finger thrust in his face. She was too angry to speak coherently, too rageful to keep her finger from trembling. "You did this!"
His black eyes glittered malevolently. "I did what, Bartleby?"
But the scale of what he did to her was too large for words to contain. It was beyond articulation, and, struggling to find a starting point, she began at the beginning. "If Slughorn were here—"
"Slughorn isn't here," Snape interrupted tersely. "Slughorn could no longer stomach the task of civilizing you arrogant, self-absorbed little pissants. Slughorn cannot help you."
"And you can?!" she burst out suddenly. "Brilliant job you've done of it so far, just brilliant. You know what? I think the big secret about you is that there is no secret. I don't think you're a noble or tortured soul underneath a bristly exterior. I think you're exactly as mean and resentful and petty as you seem, and what you did for me you did out of spite. Just a great big 'fuck-you' to the Headmaster and McGonogall and the Ministry. Because you really are their hostage, and you wanted to prove to them all that you still have a todger. So don't give me this bullshit about you 'helping' me! Were you 'helping' me when you had your tongue halfway up my—"
"Keep your voice down!" he hissed.
"Do you think I'm stupid?!" she shouted. "I fucking must be, thinking that I could trust you! All this time you knew! I fucking trusted you—I let you do those things to me—and you knew!"
"I knew what, girl?"
"About the memory! You knew, God damn it, you've known since the beginning of the year, when you made that stupid joke – 'you might have made a fortune for your trouble' – You knew!"
"No, I suspected. I suspected it would find its way here and I waited for it."
"And when it came? What did you do, then? You made sure it got to the right people, that ferret fuck Malfoy, and then you made sure I was in the same room with that fucking reporter! That's me in that memory, God damn it, me! I had a right to know!"
"And what would you have done with that information?" he asked, looking down at her with utmost contempt. "Tell me, how would your life have been so vastly improved by that knowledge? Forgive me if I thought to spare you some humiliation."
"Spare me…?!" she repeated in disbelief. "Spare me…?! You have ruined my life! And why? To embarrass the Headmaster? To get your friend elected in some stupid election?"
"You have no idea the weight of the things you're discussing."
"The weight!" she practically screeched.
"Yes, the weight!" he repeated, spittle flying from his mouth. He looked quite deranged suddenly—rageful and self-righteous, his eyes bulging, hair falling all around his face. "Look past that medieval sense of shame or whatever it is addling your brain and think a minute. Did you truly imagine you and that idiot boy were the first vicious children to act out your parents' war? Do you think you'll be the last? You weren't. You won't. But by Merlin, you will be the last one to haunt me! You will be my last ghost!"
These last words, shouted, echoed around the chamber.
My last ghost.
Amy stared at him in disbelief as he paused and took a deep breath to compose himself. When he spoke again, his tone was calmer.
"I cannot change what happened to you," he said. "But I will make the Headmaster understand that the authority I hold over my own House is total. That there are consequences to his favoritism. And the next time this happens, I will have a powerful ally on the Board and the Headmaster will think twice before overruling me. This was a worthwhile attainment requiring no small effort on my part. And if your wretched little feelings were hurt in the process, that is a decision I can live with."
"But it wasn't your decision. You don't get to make decisions like that for me!"
"And who else would? You? The idea of you making intelligent decisions for yourself is so laughable—"
"But it was mine!" she cried, her face wet. She was crying; she was weeping through eyes swollen and screwed up with frustration; bordering on incoherence and enraged by her inability to innumerate all the ways he had wronged her. "It was my memory, my decision; this is my life! And after everything that's been taken away from me, you would take this too? What more do you want?! I am empty, Snape, I have nothing left to give you!"
"We both know that you didn't come to me for my compassion, Bartleby. So what is it? What is it that you think I am?!"
"I thought you were a hero, God damn it!"
And, just like that, his anger seemed to vanish with the echo of this awful, embarrassing last confession that she just wanted to shove back in her mouth. He pinched the bridge of his nose as though a gale-forced migraine were bashing at the jagged edges of his skull and said, "Oh, stop. Just stop, before you fall into that navel you're constantly gazing at."
"So now I navel-gaze?!" she demanded, trying desperately to hold on to her self-righteous indignation.
"Yes, you navel-gaze," he confirmed, looking up. "It is the reason you are failing, it is the reason you are unhappy, and it is the reason you are standing there dreaming up new neuroses and calling me the cause. Yes, I lied to you. Yes, I took action – because somebody had to and I think it's painfully obvious that that person was never going to be you. I gave you plenty of opportunities to see what I was doing, but you weren't paying attention.
Where you might have noticed something of concern to yourself —where you might have applied yourself, you wandered about morosely, waiting for the world to grace you with reasons and reassurances. They are not coming." He raised his hand as if to highlight the futility of it all. "You may as well wait for Godot!"
His words shouldn't have even meant anything. It was merely a string of insults and an allusion to an absurdist play about two fools who wait for a god that never comes, but he'd pegged her to a tee with those words, and they both knew it.
"It has been over a year," he continued, and Merlin, did that hurt to hear, "which should be time enough for you to realize that the world does not owe you anything, least of all a hero. It does not have reasons. It does not have reassurances. And it is. Never. Going. To apologize," he said, these last words punctuated with a finality that was impossible to argue with.
"Accept that fact, or you may well wake up one day to find yourself transformed into something as vile as a human cockroach. I say this for your benefit only, because, let me assure you, I will not lose any sleep over it. What I will not abide, however, is your building an effigy in my place just for the pleasure of feeling betrayed when it burns."
"You used me," she whispered, throat burning. "You — you're a — a —"
"A what? A monster?" his lip curled. "Did you forget just who and what I am, Bartleby? Allow me to remind you —"
And, without warning, he suddenly lunged toward her, fisted his hand in her shirt, and pulled her within inches of his face. "Legilimens!"
But instead of rifling through her mind, Snape was pouring his memory into her.
Snape's memory wasn't anything like the Memoriball. She wasn't standing outside someone's recollection, a passive observer, as had been the case when she, Myron, and the reporter watched Myron's concert in London. No, this memory was in first person. She knew the date, somehow — March 21st, 1982, just hours before her 17th birthday a year ago — and she was sitting at Snape's desk.
No — she was Snape, sitting at his own desk. She became him, in the memory — felt his pounding headache, his nausea, his hangover.
Outside the office door, she could hear Memory-Amy and that boy arguing, every syllable scratching at the nerves of her skull like fingernails against a chalkboard.
"So who will you fuck, now that your cousins are in Azkaban, Scrivener?" the boy said. "That's what you Pureblood fanatics do, right? Fuck your own cousins?"
"Since you brought up fucking, why don't you clear something up for me?" Memory-Amy slurred back. "Does it even...you know...work the same way, with you Muggles? Do you even have a todger down there? Or is it just—"
Amy felt Snape's exasperation as though it were her own. Merlin, what would it take for these fucking children to just shut up? He was too exhausted to attend to this; too hungover to care. Let them work it out on their own, the miserable little fools. Snape did the only thing that made sense; he cast a Silencing Spell on the door. She felt his relief as the idiotic argument faded from his hearing and he raised his fingers to his temples to rub the tension away.
Just as suddenly as the connection began, it ended. Amy found herself mentally flung from Snape's head and physically flung from his body. She skidded several feet back, struggling to balance, and gasped.
So.
He had been in his office.
He had been in his office the entire time.
And, if only—if only—
Across from her, Snape ran his fingers through his greasy hair in an agitated gesture. As if reading her thoughts, he answered them, his every syllable dripping in defensiveness. "How could I have known? I couldn't possibly have known. And I have made my amends the only way I could."
That's when Amy started to bolt.
He caught her painfully by the wrist. "I did not dismiss you."
"Let me go!"
There was a crackling spark of magic between them, and—miraculously—he did. He let go very suddenly, as though burned. She caught a brief vision of him cradling a very bloody hand before she left. His enraged voice chased her down the corridor:
"Don't you dare walk away from me—Bartleby! BARTLEBY!"
When she gets back to the common room, she will look at the notice board. Snape hasn't updated it all year, of course, but it has been plastered all over with pictures of dead people. Some were family photos, like the picture of the Lestrange's wedding she herself posted there only a few weeks ago. Others were candid shots, and a few were from newspaper clippings, including a truly chilling image from the Lestrange trial. It was the last known photo of the nineteen-year-old Bartemus Crouch Jr. In it, he is doomed to shout the word 'Father!' over and over again in black-and-white futility.
Amy seized it by the frame, this massive collage of a monument to the dead, and pulled as hard as she could. It came tumbling down with an almighty crash, and people in the common room stared at her.
"Bloody hell," one of them said.
The truth?
She said earlier that the truth is that there is no truth, but that was a lie. A 'metaphysical dodge' as one of Myron's philosophy books might say.
The truth is that she is absolutely terrified.
It has been over a year, and she is still as frightened of the world as she was on the day it betrayed her. She is still as angry with it, and, if she could, she would force it to invert itself, and she would pick through the devastation for a reason. She would dig through the mantle for reassurance and beat on molten lava for an apology until there was nothing left of her but ashes scattering through the wind and sea. Every particle of her former self would settle in the depths and wait through the eons for a better race of people to evolve.
The truth is that her sanity is a string of glass beads under Snape's heel, and the only thing that frightens her more than the thought of him stepping down is the thought of him walking away.