Author's Notes: This is a fanfic - Standard disclaimers apply. I own nothing.
Thank you again to those who favorited/followed/reviewed. Please do review; any feedback is appreciated.
*Caution* - This chapter contains graphic depictions of violence.
A/N: 12.23.20 -
Thank you, readers. You made this possible. More author's notes at the end.
Part 2
Amy spent most of Sunday morning sitting in the corridor of her rapist's memory.
The Memoriballs containing the worst day of her life were banned under threat of expulsion. So, naturally, everyone had a copy. It hadn't been difficult to find one. She couldn't quite bring herself to go into the empty classroom where it was actually happening, so she waited in the corridor and merely listened as he raped her.
God, she hated even thinking it.
She literally hated having to think the sentence "He raped her."
"He" is a subject-pronoun in the nominative case and that would make "her" the direct object. A thing objectified.
So she tried at first to think in passive voice that "She was raped by him." That helped a little bit because "she" was now in the nominative case and "him" in the objective.
But it was merely a cheap syntactic move. "He" was still the logical subject who performed the action, while "she" was only the grammatical subject and therefore still the recipient.
Besides, she hated passive voice. Her English was made awkward by it.
This is what she was thinking about when Snape – real Snape, not memory-Snape – showed up. She hadn't been waiting for him, but she was neither particularly surprised nor particularly happy to hear the click-click staccato of his boots against the stone.
The sound got louder as he approached.
click-click.
click-click
It came to an abrupt halt just in front of her.
She heard, but didn't see, because she had her face pressed into her knees. Not to hide her tears – though there were plenty – but to hide her nose from the slaughterhouse stench she knew was coming.
Snape nudged her with the toe of his boot.
"Get up, girl."
Something tense and thin colored his voice. And isn't it ironic that Snape, the big bad Death Eater who could make his own curses and spells and had done things she couldn't even imagine, was the one who didn't want to be within ten miles of this place when it started?
She didn't care; she was going to make him listen.
No, not to the rape.
That started about three minutes ago. If you listened hard enough, you could hear these whimpering, panicked little mouse noises under throaty grunts. The point-counterpoint as he…as she was raped by him.
Snape's boot nudged her again.
"Have you any idea what sitting in a memory for any length of time can do to a person? Particularly one as woefully inept as yourself? Seizures are possible. Heart attacks. You might slip into a coma and die."
He might be right about that, because she didn't feel well at all.
"Get up. Now," he said, and there was an angry urgency to it, this time, as though dragging her—Present Amy—out would do a damned bit of good for the girl in the other room.
Then, somewhere off-stage, Memory-Amy began to beg.
It was like working a verbal combination lock with the words "please," "no" and "I'm sorry" in the place of numbers. She remembered trying every combination possible, certain that if she just found the right sequence of words, it would stop.
"Please – No! – I'm sorry!"
"I'm sorry – Please – No –"
And so on.
But every word fell from her mouth as useless as a baby bird. And there was this complete disbelief that this was really happening, and that, for the first time in her life, her words held no meaning. They didn't matter to him.
"Bartleby, if you do not get up and leave this memory of your own accord, I will physically drag you out," Snape snapped, and you would've had to have been deaf not to hear the panic in his voice.
That's when Memory-Amy began to drown.
At least, that's what it sounded like. It's what it had felt like, too.
She remembered how the first wave engulfed her and knocked her off her feet. It receded and, struggling up, she saw the stars glittering overhead, stretched out across the vast universe. She wailed at them and, staggering, reached out, but the sand gave out beneath her feet and she fell. She was aware of the sting of the pebbles rasping against her cheek, the taste of saltwater down her throat, an undulating whine in her ears. Her hands scrambled at the coast, trying to gain hold, but another wave engulfed her, and she felt her body dragged back into deeper water. Half-insane, she tried to raise her head, tried to breathe, raging against the terror and the blackness of the sea. And then the third wave came, which lifted her and slammed her against the stone of the beach. She gasped, and her lungs filled with water, and where once there were stars, there was nothing.
Nothing.
It hit her like a bludger to the chest. There was this knowledge, this dread realization that, yes, this really was happening, and no, there was nobody coming to save her. The godless sky dawned a turgid red, and suddenly she was absolutely filled with rage.
She wanted to tell her rapist – to scream at him – to somehow make him understand that her body was a place built to have orgasms and babies, and that his violence and terror had no place there.
That was me.
The author.
That's what I wanted to say.
Amy Scrivener did not need to say those words because she was the heroine of a feminine revenge fantasy, and in her world, curse words were literal. And so, when the final wave struck, Amy used her words to push it back into him. She pushed the entire ocean into him, and he'd staggered.
It had begun.
"God damn you," Snape hissed at her, and here he reached out as if to seize her by the arm. Her magic lashed out before he even touched her. There was the skittering of lightning, and he withdrew as if burned.
"Fine. Stay here. Die here, for all I care!" She heard his boots storming away.
Click-click.
Click-click.
They say that murder is an act against nature. A violation that rips the soul to pieces. Maybe they were right about that; maybe her soul was damaged and damned and that's why she's grown so used to the gnawing emptiness at the pit of her stomach. It made sense, but she couldn't help feeling skeptical about the whole idea of a soul in the first place.
You see, Amy's seen every part of a human being.
Every.
Single.
Part.
And she doesn't remember seeing anything that looked like a soul.
There was a long, low moan coming from the other room, a hacking cough, and all at once the wet, sickening slop like meat hitting the stone floor of a butcher's shop.
Those were his intestines.
She remembered how they came up first, like slimy pink-and-grey sausages filled with shit and shot through with pulsating blood vessels. If she walked in there right now, she'd see him choking on the endless deluge of gore, sputtering, and trying to bite down—bite through his own entrails—as if that could stop it.
The moaning continued. It was a horrible noise, one of unspeakable agony, and it was punctuated here and there with more fleshy slops as his organs unfurled, blossoming bright bloody red, into the world. She remembered seeing something dark and kind of lop-sided. A kidney, maybe. Or perhaps it was his liver. She was never very good at anatomy.
As impossible as it seems, the skin and muscles and very bones shifted and changed, and it was incredible that something in that contorted bag of red and wet could still scream, but it did. It screamed and screamed a veritable opera of agony with high notes and low; a loud, shrieking melody trailing slowly into a quiet, echoing groan.
The slaughterhouse stench of mingling blood and shit and burning hair hit her nose at precisely the same moment she heard Snape swear. He hadn't left, after all, but was pulling her to her feet, ignoring the way her magic burned him, physically dragging her from the memory just like he'd promised he would do.
She caught just the smallest glimpse of herself, of Memory-Amy, as Snape steered her past the open door of the classroom.
The girl was backed up against the wall, standing with bloody knickers twisted around her ankles, blood spatter in her hair, blood soaking through the fabric of her skirt where the words DEATH EATER WHORE were carved into her thigh.
Her hand was over her mouth in a parody of polite surprise, like a girl frozen in social faux pas. Then she closed her eyes and began to scream. To scream and scream until there were no more sounds left under her skin.
There was silence. And darkness. And pain.
Then, slowly, gentle academic noises filtered through the vast soundscape of nothingness: The soft susurration of cloth teaching robes, the light bubbling of a school-issued cauldron, the dull sound of a knife against a cutting board.
The pain began to localize: a tension in the temples and muscles at the back of her neck; a multi-colored migraine tugging on her optic nerves.
Amy – Present Amy – opened her eyes to a painful squint and found herself in 1983 again, slumped in a chair in Snape's office. His desk had been cleared of undone grading and stupid ministry pamphlets and even specimens. A clean slate.
She moved to sit up and immediately abandoned the gesture with a groan. Her head, like concrete on her shoulders, sunk back to rest on the chair.
"Back among the conscious, I see?" observed a sour voice to her left.
Amy turned her head gingerly in the direction of the sound and found Snape fussing over a cauldron, his mouth pressed into a thin line of irritation. His familiar, infinitely-harassed look was marred by fatigue, complete with dark circles polluting the whiteness under his eyes.
"How did I get here?"
"With a great deal of effort on my part," he answered tersely, and slid whatever he'd been chopping into the cauldron with a gentle hiss. Then he wiped his hands on a damp rag and moved toward her. His hand approached her forehead, as if to feel for a fever.
She had every intention of slapping it away, but found that her muscles wouldn't obey. Sick with her own powerlessness, she managed only a hateful, "Don't."
"Don't be difficult," he countered irritably, and pressed the backs of his long, white fingers against her forehead. She was appalled that his touch should still feel so familiar; so pleasantly cool.
"I'm still angry with you," she said. But even as she said it, she realized how pointless her anger was. How futile. She may as well have been angry with the night for being dark.
"Of course you are," he replied indifferently as he withdrew his hand. Then the lighted tip of his wand was shining in her eyes, and he was muttering something to himself about "anisocoria."
A distant sound of clapping interrupted the intimacy of the moment.
"The leaving feast," he explained. "We're directly beneath the Great Hall. You are free to leave when it is over, provided you can move." He sounded almost…envious. Like a prisoner whose cellmate is getting paroled.
"But not you," she said, with no small amount of petty satisfaction.
"Not me," he agreed.
Dumbledore's magically amplified voice trickled down from the ceiling, the words of his end-of-term speech indistinct, as Snape moved away from her and fussed with the potion some more. He ladled some into a vial to cool, then stood with his arms crossed. The Headmaster summarized the year up above.
They existed like that, on the awkward, ragged edges of somebody else's celebration, for a while.
"He's dead, isn't he?" Amy finally asked. She meant him, her rapist.
"Yes," said Snape smoothly. "In St. Mungo's, around Halloween of last year. Some four months after your trial. But you knew that."
She did, sort of. Even though no-one but the Thestrals told her.
"I should be in Azkaban."
His eyes narrowed contemptuously. "Why? Because you panicked and performed a spell you learned fishing?"
"He's dead," she said, and repeating it made it feel a little more weighty, a little more real.
Snape merely made an impatient noise that suggested he thought little of the sanctity of human life. "Charming though your self-blame is, it was an open-and-shut case of self-defense. There was no need to involve the ministry, or to drag you through the mud, or to waste my time with ridiculous questions concerning my opinion on the length of your skirt."
"They really asked that?"
"Yes, they really asked that. And you very nearly did go to Azkaban."
He picked up the vial and tipped some of its contents, which had cooled into a thick, jelly-like substance, onto the fingers of one hand. He then moved toward her once more and rubbed the potion into her temples. The relief was instant and profound – her headache eased wherever the potion touched, and her muscles unlocked under his ministrations.
When her angry tears began spilling over onto her cheek, he moved behind her and began massaging the potion into the muscles at the back of her neck, moving her hair gently out of the way as he did so.
Up above, there was another barely-audible round of applause as the Headmaster concluded his speech.
"So…why am I not in Azkaban, then?" Amy asked quietly.
"Many reasons," Snape responded behind her. "The foremost being that Abraxas Malfoy resigned his Governorship and vowed to ignite a culture war of such magnitude it would make us all look forward to the rise of a new dark lord. Five years ago he would have succeeded, too. As it was, he agreed to stay quiet in exchange for your liberty, and you thanked him for it by laughing at his funeral."
She didn't need to ask how Abraxas even found out. Snape told him.
"And the memory?"
"I have no idea how it circulated. Some underpaid worker at the Ministry's evidence office looking to make a fast galleon, no doubt."
"And you think things will be somehow different, with Lucius on the Board of Governors?"
"I know they will be," he said, the conviction in his voice mirrored in the sudden force with which he massaged the potion into her neck.
"And will you do something about it, the next time you hear an argument? Or will you cast another Silencing Spell?" Her voice was bitter; all he'd needed to do was poke his head out the door, take points, and tell them to get back to their dorms.
It was his job.
His one job.
The hand at her neck stilled, then withdrew. "It was a mistake. I have apologized. I will not spend the rest of my life drowning in guilt, or begging your forgiveness," Snape responded, his voice hard.
And, for all the conviction in those clipped little sentences, she wondered if this was a lie, too. She suspected there was some part of Severus Snape that hated himself unyieldingly. Always. For reasons she could never begin to understand.
She realized that Snape had long since stopped applying the potion and was now settling himself behind his desk, rifling through one of the drawers. She sat up gingerly, finding that, while she still felt weary and weak, the pain and the stiffness were gone, and her muscles obeyed her again.
Snape located an envelope of creamy yellow paper in his drawer and slid it across the desk to her. He tapped on it once with his index finger. "This may be of interest to you."
"What is it?" she asked.
He sighed one of his eon-containing sighs. A sigh of utter defeat. "Just open it."
The first thing she noticed was the date. "This is backdated a week."
"Yes, because you refused to answer my summons."
Oh. He'd just wanted to give her something. She opened the parchment and peeked inside, reading the top line of the message without removing it from the envelope.
We take great pleasure in awarding this…
"It's a certificate," she said, surprised.
"Congratulations, Bartleby. As part of your senior exit project, you are now a board-certified editor for the Society of Magical Language Scholars."
She licked her lips, thinking. "You…you did this. This is why you made me copy that style guide. This is why you made me log all those hours I graded. This is -" she paused, remembering that sunny Easter afternoon a lifetime ago "- this is why we stopped in that publisher's office. You weren't submitting a paper."
His hands folded together on the desk before him. "No. That was the necessary paperwork for your certification. The senior editor is quite happy to offer you a position, by the way."
"So," Amy said quietly, "this is you 'helping' me."
She probably should have been more grateful.
Snape leaned back in his seat and leveled an unfathomable gaze at her. So many times in the last year she'd seen something strange in that look – something tender, something remorseful. Now everything felt turned on its head and she realized how foolish, how naïve, she must have been to ever think she could interpret what he felt about her, or about them.
"You told me you weren't safe," she found herself saying aloud. "But I still don't understand how sleeping with me fit into all your plans. When we were together, I thought…"
She trailed off. She didn't know what she thought.
Snape seemed to teeter on the edge of speech for a moment. She'd never seen him hesitate like that before, as if poised for confession.
"If it was just about sex, then -"
He held up a hand to stop her, then paused for what seemed like an age. When he finally did speak, it was as though it physically pained him to do so. Like he was dredging up the words from the very bottom of his soul:
"No, Bartleby. I only wanted, for once, to own something clean."
It was, in its own appalling way, the nicest thing he'd ever said to her.
The 7th-year girls dormitories were almost bare.
Everyone was supposed to be at the leaving feast, or at the graduation ceremony. Amy had rather lost track of time and wasn't sure which was supposed to be happening at just that moment. It didn't matter; she wouldn't be going to either. The house-elves had taken the opportunity to strip everything. They'd already sent the luggage to the train, taken the sheets and hangings from the beds for laundering. Bits of parchment and broken quills and the occasional abandoned sock littered the floor, and lake-filtered sunlight streamed through the window, pallid and green.
Amy sat on one of the naked beds and tried to feel something about the last seven years - something reflective or nostalgic.
"Oh."
Her neck creaked at she looked up for the owner of the voice. It was Alex, standing hesitantly in the doorway, her graduate's hat askew on her head.
"Sorry," Alex said. "I didn't know you were in here." She seemed unable to fully meet Amy's eyes.
"Do you still want to see it?" Amy asked suddenly.
"See...what?" Alex asked, her brow furrowing in confusion.
"Azkaban," said Amy. "Do you still want to see it?"
Alex's mouth curved into a smile, a shyer version of the one she used to wear just before hurling a beater at the opposing team. "Yeah, yeah, I do."
"Let's go, then," said Amy, standing up. What gave her such certainty that Alex would agree, she had no idea - but she was right. The two girls simply walked out of the castle without a word of explanation - such was their prerogative as former students. They then walked to the apparation point in Hogsmeade, gripped one another by the forearm, and, closing their eyes, spun together into nonexistance.
When they opened their eyes again, they found themselves on the edge of the world where sea met deserted moor. Several miles out, a stone monolith thrust out of the ocean, defying the waves and the wind.
It was a desolate-looking place. Lonely and cold and somehow not quite real.
"He's in there?" asked Amy, nodding to the prison. She meant Alex's uncle.
"Yeah," Alex breathed. "Your cousins, too, right?"
"Right," said Amy. She supposed she had Snape to thank that she stood on the right side of the ocean, free amongst the rocks and heather.
She felt Alex's eyes on her, saw her open her mouth via peripheral vision.
"Why didn't you say anything, Amy?" Alex asked. "You could have told me."
"Could I have?" Amy wondered aloud, eyes on Azkaban. "You, who wouldn't touch a mudblood's sloppy seconds even with Myron's dick?"
Alex's mouth set in a grim line. "I never should have said that. All those stupid jokes I made...I don't know why I said it."
Amy thought that there was an easy answer to that - She'd said it because, at the time, she'd believed it. Simple as that.
"Did you see the memory?" Amy asked by way of response, but of course she knew the answer to that, too.
"Enough of it," Alex replied. Something in her voice changed, became more like her old self. "And you know what, Amy? Fuck that guy. Fuck him. Say it with me - fuck him."
"No, that's dumb, Alex. I'm not saying that."
"Just do it, you stupid bint – fuck him!"
"Fuck him," Amy said quietly.
"Louder!" Alex urged. "FUCK HIM!"
"Fuck him. Fuck him. FUCK HIM!" Amy screamed at the prison. Then she let the sob in her throat bubble out. It felt good, for once, to cry.
She carried on a bit like this, the tears blurring her eyes and burning her throat, and didn't pull away when she felt Alex's fingers intertwine with her own. She held fast to Alex's hand and let the mourning she'd denied for so long wash over her.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Alex asked when she'd quieted.
Amy did talk. She told Alex everything – but not about him. She told her about Snape, about the good things he'd done for her, and the bad. She left nothing out, not even the stupid jokes or the cruel commentary. Not the efforts he'd gone through to keep her from Azkaban nor the way he'd so coldly used her story for his own ends. She didn't leave out the editor's certificate and she didn't leave out the sex. Alex listened intently and patiently as the story unfolded, never interrupting.
"I'm not sure how I feel about all that," Alex finally said when the tale was done.
Amy sniffed and wiped her cheek dry, the wind whipping her hair around her face. "I know what you mean."
They called him a prince, but that wasn't quite right. Princes were charming and handsome and if you kissed one you'd get to live happily ever after. She had kissed Snape, but she wouldn't live happily ever after.
She's thought him a god, but that wasn't right, either. Gods were benevolent and forgiving and they didn't need to own little girls to feel better about themselves.
He wasn't a god, or even a god dethroned. He was only a man. A man as weak, as prone to folly, as human as anyone else.
Severus Snape, the Human.
And it was funny that this should come as a revelation.
Epilogue - One Year Later
On June 1st, 1984, Amy sat at her desk in the Diagon Alley Publishing House and stared dubiously into the envelope of free samples from Bertie Botts Every Flavor Bean Company. She jiggled the envelope a little to get a better look, causing Jupiter to look up from his spot under the desk, lick his chops noisily, and stare.
"And why is it necessary to come out with new flavors every year, I wonder?" she asked the dog,
His tail thumped once on the carpet in answer.
"Brown," she said, retrieving the coffee-colored bean in question from the envelope and giving it an appraising look. "It's hardly got the jaw structure for brown, has it?" She chuckled at her own joke.
Jupiter cocked his head minutely.
"Could be fudge, could be shit - but that's life I suppose….Be my guest." Amy said, and let Jupiter take the mystery bean from her fingers. He chewed methodically and mysteriously, giving no hint that he either liked or disliked the flavor.
"That good, huh?" she said.
His tail thumped on the floor again.
Amy shrugged, set the envelope aside, and began sorting the rest of the mail.
Mrs. Flora Bunda of Strausberry Lane sent in some gold to renew her subscription to Herbology Harvest. The landlord wanted his rent. A letter from Myron informed her the Weird Sisters would be playing in Kent next month. This reminded her that she really ought to write Alex back, too.
Then, at the bottom of the pile, a paper submitted for publication.
She opened the thick yellow envelope, pulled a stack of parchment out, and began to read:
Innovations in the Collection and Long-Term Preservation of Amphibius Morphology: A Review
Professor Severus Snape, Potions Master Class III
Despite what a certain past TA may believe, there are, in fact, many conceivable reasons for maintaining an orderly and comprehensive collection of Potions' specimens beyond terrifying first-years…
"Ha!" she told Jupiter.
Then she looked in the envelope again and found a card. It had Snape's name and a summer address in Spinner's End on one side, and on the other a short missive in that familiar spidery script:
Should you prefer to.
A/N – 12.23.2020
Bartleby wouldn't exist without the work and help of more people than I can name. Many of them are the authors of some of my favorite books: JKR, Melville, Alice Sebold, Laurie Halse Anderson, Kafka, Anthony Burgess…I could go on.
Others are people I know personally, or at least internet-personally: the lovely Scumblackentropy, who Beta'd for me early on. My wonderful partner, who patiently listened when I got drunk enough and therefore brave enough to talk about my dirty little fanfic.
Bartleby also wouldn't exist without you, the reader. And so I'd like to thank you, thank you, thank you, for participating in the storytelling. Those who left (and are going to leave) reviews – they mean more to me than I can say. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Finally – and I'm sure this is evident by now from my not-so-subtle self-insertion – Bartleby wouldn't exist without the reality of people who are shitty and selfish, and the violence they inflict on others. On me.
I know (because you've told me) that some of you readers have had experiences like Amy's, and like mine. To you, I say this:
Maybe the world doesn't have reasons or reassurances. Maybe it will never apologise. But I will.
I'm sorry that happened to you. It wasn't your fault. Things do get better.
-QB