Couple of notes here ('cause this chapter is only eleven pages long without 'em). When I post the next chapter the title of this fic will have been changed from Advanced to So Help Him. There's a great fanon idea for Snape's sixth year, probably not canonical but at least fitting canon, which I'm itching to try out: That all the 'sneaking around' Snape was doing sixth year was due to Death Eater orders. Advanced suits that fic better – because I could then write a companion fic Remedial if I ever have time to explore Malfoy's nightmare of a sixth year.

Between reviews and private messaging, I've gotten the impression that practically no one credits any insights Snape had on that conversation between Lupin and Wormtail last chapter. Why? Yes, I know we have to take almost anything Snape thinks with a grain of salt. But it's a grain, mind you, not the whole twenty pound bag. Sometimes Snape is just clueless, yet sometimes he knows better than he knows. (Of course, since he's an 'insufferable know-it-all' himself, he can never distinguish between the two or imagine even that there's anything to distinguish between!)

Next chapter is mostly written already and will be much faster. Sorry for the delay on this one. I promise I at least spent it constructively. For proof, check out my "Jobey" fictionpress . com account.

And now back to your regularly scheduled program, with apologies from the corporate office. Thanks very much to A.C. Mathur, auroraziazan, Blackpenny, hulahula, indianpipe, Possum 132, PsychoHaired, Random-Musings, and SupportSeverusSnape. Trolling for birthday reviews really does work. Shame I can only try it once a year.

III – Advanced Defence Against the Dark Arts

Snape could hardly tell what the best part about the Hallowe'en Hogsmeade trip was: waiting in line for the privilege of being patted down by Filch, hearing Professor Williamson's nasal apologies for another of her 'episodes' where she had spent five minutes in a corner hopping on one foot and pounding the side of her head so that the sand fell out, or having Avery inform him warningly, "Bella's going to be there, you know."

"That's even more exciting than the fact that I'm passing up a chance to have our dormitory to myself," said Snape waspishly.

Avery tried to return the irritableness: "Oh, and I'll not pass up the chance to lock you inside the Shrieking Shack if I get it, you miserable prig."

"I, a prig? We're about to go see Roland Wilkes and I am the prig?"

Considering the nature of those they were going to meet, Snape and Avery were alone and together for once, without Avery's friendlier friends, while the two allied friends increasingly got on each other nerves. There was a somewhat serious tiff when Snape lectured Avery on treating Filch with some respect, only diffused when Avery threw back his head and laughed.

"Yeah, right. Nothing doing, my Prince. Onward!" And he pointed village-wards.

"Which are we meeting at?"

"Three Broomsticks. We have a lady with us, you know." Avery rolled his eyes and groaned. "Not to remind us again. Though, come to think of it, she sort of liked you."

Once they got to the Three Broomsticks, they found all the old crew dominating the corner table. Roland Wilkes was just re-emerging from the loo; Bellatrix Black was leaning back attractively and looking killingly bored; Evan Rosier and the Lestrange brothers were at the bar, loudly jostling other customers out of the way and trying to chat up the barmaid. Rosier, of course, with his almost sinister warmth and charisma, was getting by far the most approval from their buxom quarry. But he dropped it all to warmly hale the two youngest members of the crew.

"Why, it's the schoolboys!" he announced, signaling to Bellatrix and Roland, who had noticed but not given any signal of recognition. Rosier easily gave them the welcome the others neglected. "I think they might have grown a smidgen, too! Av'ry – Severus – how are you, mates?"

Snape, very uncomfortably, found Rosier's arm around his shoulders. He hesitantly tried to shrug it off and then gave up. Rosier's other was around Avery's, and he steered them both one hundred and eighty degrees to face the bar. "Order up, first ones on me, all the rest are on you two kidlets."

It was all noise and joviality; Avery was shrilly protesting that 'kidlet' was the kind of stupid word only he could use, and Rodolphus and Rabastan were both adding some sort of jokes or greeting to the mix, and Snape, for once at the center of all this, found he didn't resent all public noise and joviality.

Still, there was such a thing as too much of it, and Snape was glad when they were all seated around the table nursing their drinks, the talk growing more serious, even more depressed.

"Haven't you been able to smoke Slughorn out yet?" asked Wilkes irritably. "Never could stand the man, no proper Slytherin feeling at all."

Snape prayed for Avery not to bring it up, but he did, "No, no. And Sev's still his favourite, you know."

Making a mental note to curse Avery in his sleep (he had done it before), Snape protested, "I'm not and I'm glad I'm not."

"What d'you mean – oh, right, Evans." Avery explained to the rest: "His real favourite is this Mudblood girl, you know he likes them prettier-looking than Severus here."

(Very well; curse him twice.)

"The Mudbloods," Rodolphus said dolefully, right on cue (for this conversation had been had so often that Snape could have transcribed it in his sleep). "That's the thing that really sticks about Slughorn."

"I've heard he's even taken up talking in class about some sort of Muggle learning, something called Silliness or whatever, is that right?" asked Evan.

"Besides that," said Avery earnestly, "not only is he nattering on about Muggle Science, but usually his information is wrong."

Everyone looked at Avery oddly.

Snape pointedly spoke up. "Slughorn invited me to this Society of Potioneering function," he said. "I'm going to refuse him."

"Why?" asked Rabastan idly.

"Sounds like a good thing for you," said Rosier. "You were always quick with a stirrer and some frog guts."

"The other student he invited was the Mudblood girl," he said darkly. "I shouldn't countenance that."

The subject changed again and Snape never really got an answer to his implicit feeling-of-the-waters.

In fact, it was all too shortly when he realised he was speaking to nobody at all. The Lestranges had their heads bent together and every once in a while there was a dark hint of laughter. Snape strained listening to them for a while, and at one point he caught, "… we'll just have to hope it doesn't…. Right, we're hardly up for that sort of weather spell…" Then they excused themselves and started chatting up a Ravenclaw girl. Pureblood, Snape noticed idly.

He felt entirely shut out of Rosier and Avery's conversation too. After listening to it, he doubted he wanted to be involved.

"I hear there's lots of purebloods dating Mudbloods 'round Hogwarts lately," said Evan casually. "Is that so?"

Snape looked edgily over at Bellatrix. This was a highly sore subject with her; one of her sisters had eloped with a Mudblood, and, more worrisomely, Bellatrix had nearly once hexed him to pieces on the suspicion that her other sister was interested in him – him, Severus Snape! (And he sometimes couldn't help but wonder if that was true.) But Bellatrix seemed unusually mellow that day. Snape had once or twice caught her smiling lazily, which was too odd a sight to think on for long without getting dizzy.

Avery considered. "I don't know," he said doubtfully. "Um… well, is Shortreed a pureblood?"

"Oh yes," said Evan. "An idiot, I'll grant you, but a pureblood idiot. He's a year above you, right?"

"Yeah… he's dating a Mudblood. A loud one. Our year. Hufflepuff."

"Hmm. I've heard of her. Samantha Orr, isn't it?"

"That's the one."

"And I heard Thalia Higgs, too…"

"Right, come to think of it she is, someone named Kincaid… "

Snape, decidedly uninterested, would still rather face feeling bored than feeling out-of-place. Roland Wilkes was not, as Snape thought at first, talking to himself; he was talking to Bellatrix, who didn't appear to be listening to him. Snape noticed she was wearing an engagement ring.

Then he noticed that she was looking intently at him, with uncharacteristically mild half-lidded eyes.

"Let's go for a walk, Snape," she said, cutting Wilkes off mid-sentence. "There's something I need to talk to you about."

"Well… of course…" Snape muttered rather randomly and pointlessly. Rodolphus stopped her on their way out to ask where they were off to. His fiancée appeared to barely even notice that she was laughing lightly at him and saying, "Have a little faith." Rodolphus continued to look suspiciously after Snape as she pushed him out into the cold. Snape concentrated on trying not to look too pleased with himself. Hell, she very well might only want to hex the living daylights out of him, for old times' sake.

But that didn't seem about to happen. They were walking in the residential areas, and anyone looking out their window might see them. Besides, she didn't seem in the mood.

She was much different, Snape noted as they walked in silence. She seemed quieter and less lively – more soft, really, and ten times more thoughtful.

"So how have you been getting along, Snape?" she asked at last, trying for her old harsh tone, and not quite reaching it. "Not that I haven't heard. You keep getting into run-ins with everybody – and you always manage to make sure you're outnumbered too, and then fight back against the wall giving as good as you get." Realising that she was sounding complimentary, she added, "Foolish of you. It sounds almost Gryffindor."

Since she had given both question and answer, Snape figured he was quite justified in saying nothing. They walked on some more until impatience got the better of him, when he asked, "So have you made good use of the past five years?"

Bellatrix actually smiled. It was really getting quite annoying. "What exactly are you trying to ask about, Snape?"

"What am I?" he asked blankly.

"You want to know about him. You always did."

He blinked. "I wouldn't've asked you! You always wanted nothing to do with him!"

Her smile widened; she stretched her arms lazily. "Oh, don't cast my childhood follies and poses back in my face. I'll start making fun of that accent you used to have. It was so cute when you kept trying to talk right at first."

Snape was too interested in him to protest that no he didn't ever have an accent.

"Well, what of him?" he asked, trying to sound casual and bored. "You've met him, I suppose?"

"More than once," she said significantly. Her faraway smile remained.

"You're a witch. You can't be in the Knights of Walpurgis."

"If you will cut out that insolent tone, I'll let you in on a little something," she said, pleasantly, dangling the tidbit of knowledge. "We're not really the Knights of Walpurgis. He's formed something completely different from us. We're called Death Eaters."

Death Eaters. He rolled the meme around in his mind, and decided that he liked it reasonably well. Bellatrix watched him musing as though mildly entertained by it.

"Yes, Snape, you'll be introduced to him, as soon as you finish school. He insists upon that for you – all seven years. We've already spoken to him of you. As someone with potential, you understand."

Snape felt tickles of pleasure and prickles of dismay. Yes, yes, yes! It had been ages since he had ever envisioned his life not being in on this, but, though sometimes he had been certain that his talent and sincerity would merit a spot, in less daydreamy moments he realised that he had no idea of what sort of hope he had – and now at last he was really and assuredly in! But he had two years yet before finishing Hogwarts, and would gladly have left now to join him. Still, if that was the word… oh, it wasn't fair, though, all his other friends who were older had already been in the action for years, and he was worth all of them put together, yet had to wait two years before he even got a shot! The war might be over by then! Irritably he asked, "So when did you first meet the nobody upstart pawn?"

Bellatrix laughed lightly to hear her own words. Really she sounded most uncharacteristic. "Oh, don't cast my old attitudes up to me, boy. I was very ignorant when I said those words. Was it only a year or two ago?" she asked dreamily. "Has it really only been two years? I've learned so much of the world since then."

It certainly hadn't made her cynical.

"So what, precisely, have you learned since then?"

"Nothing I can tell you," she said, sounding a bit more herself, but still unnaturally quiet. "Still, I'll tell you this much – he's no pawn. If anything we're the pawns."

"Including you?" Snape asked, digging carefully as a paleontologist suspecting he is on the verge of ancient dragon remains. "Miss Black herself?"

"Even Miss Black," she said quietly. "Soon to be Mrs Lestrange, you know."

"Oh, really. From the way you were talking I could have imagined you had given yourself heart and body to him."

"Tred lightly. No, I don't care. I used to hate the thought of being Mrs Lestrange – but now I have a purpose. My marriage and all the rest of my life is just a thin veneer for the real core."

"And what's the – ah – 'real core'?" Snape asked grumpily.

"You'll understand one day."

Snape glared at the singing bird in the tree above them. He wanted to practice a wandless curse on it, but settled for saying, "And until that day?"

"Oh, carry on, Snape. Patience, you know. Keep on with your studies and hone your talents – he'll find you useful."

Now Snape wanted to practice that same curse on her. He hated that tone – suggesting that he would merely be a useful servant, while she was in the leisurely inner circle. He was never going to be a good kept plebeian. All the sudden he remembered with clarity his first year, which had been Bella's last, she queening it up over the entire school. He began to chew over all the times she had sent him to the Owlery with one of her letters to post or to swipe something from the kitchens for her when she knew perfectly well that it was past first-years' curfew. Also, she had dragged him on this aimless walk damn well able to see that he had no cloak. It occurred to him just then how much he really hated Bellatrix Black. Another addition to the ever-lengthening list. In his pockets, he balled his fists.

"We should meet the others again," Bellatrix was saying lazily. It sounded to Snape like her voice was coming from terribly far off.

---

Professor Williamson returned from St Mungo's within a month, and Snape wished ardently she had stayed for two. But that Monday it turned out that even Snape did not dislike her so much as Sirius Black. For that day's class she had decided to sponsor "dialogues" between "those dissimilar in blood and background" meant to "promote understanding." She paired Black with Evans.

"Excuse me," he told her flatly, tonelessly. "I'm a Gryffindor." It was clear that ever afterwards he intended to treat her with a careless insolence. But all this did was to provide a bit of a laugh for his classmates, however, because no one else could take her very seriously.

It was a shame, too. She was so very self-consciously brave about the need to halt class every ten minutes or so, go to a corner, and hop for a while on each foot with head tilted to clear sand out of her ears. She always apologised afterwards and it was very awkward until James Potter found his stride.

"Don't mention it, Professor," he would say gallantly, interrupting her feeble, embarrassed witticisms about these episodes. "That Peeves is a real joker, eh?" And, when even this wore thin, he would proceed to scheming: "You know, if you let us look at that mirror, I'm sure we could find a way to reverse it. Practical applications and all…"

There was a certain dearth of that in her classes. Williamson was a painfully political animal. She was quite qualified in actual practice and theory, and indeed spent more time on hard training than most of her critics were prepared to admit. Her specialty, however, was a curious theory (vaguely shared by Professor Slughorn) that "current events" were caused by a mutual breach between the Houses, which was nobody's fault and everybody's – though simultaneously it was also caused by "purism," which was the fault of every pureblood, whether or not they were visibly purist or not. She gave no quarter to the standard interpretation in Hogwarts, which Black was now articulating, that Slytherin was the bastion of purebloods and Gryffindor the refuge of blood traitors and Mudbloods. Such a simple-minded belief, she informed them, also contributed to the war. Basically they all bore the blood and magic shed in the recent attacks, just as much as if they all had actually performed the Dark spells. The way to overcome this sorry state of affaires, was, evidently, to talk about it for hours upon hours. Snape longed for the idea of a class where he would simply be free to pursue her personal library, which was quite impressive although pockmarked by like-minded 'social consciousness' writers.

There were more purebloods than Mudbloods, evidently, and Williamson had Snape and his Housemate Zinnia Hawkins share their Mudblood partner. It was the loud Hufflepuff, Samantha Orr.

Snape noticed early on that Orr was determinedly working with Hawkins and not talking to him, and he didn't mind a bit. He looked witheringly down at their list of discussion questions.

Tell me/us about your most significant childhood memory.

Tell me/us about some of the differences in everyday life between wizards and Muggles.

Tell me/us about a time you have been made to feel unworthy to partake in the Wizarding community due to your magical heritage.

Was he allowed to say "Merlin's beard"?

"Well, these questions are all you-know-what," snorted Orr, fiddling with her hair. It had been very badly and obviously dyed black at the tips. "You're a pureblood," she said to Hawkins, "and I'm sure you're just fine. The only pureblood in this room I have a problem with is sitting right before me." And she leaned back and glared at Snape.

Zinnia Hawkins looked nervous. Snape's Housemates were in the habit of offending him as little as possible, but you couldn't expect some clueless Hufflepuff to understand what Snape was capable of.

"And why's that?" asked Snape indifferently.

"Because you called Lily Evans a you-know-what last year. I was there, I heard."

"Well, she speaks to me now. I'm sure you can, at least long enough to finish this stupid assignment."

"Oh, of course she would. Lily's too forgiving for her own good. But she deserves a proper apology and by all accounts you're too much of a you-know-what to ever give it."

"I have so. I have apologised."

Orr looked at him in disbelief and then stomped all the way across the room to Evans and a cross-armed Black, whom she evidently ordered to go away and not listen. The girls had a whispered confrontation while most of the classroom stared, including Professor Williamson, who appeared to be thinking about directly supervising Snape's group if it couldn't get along. But Orr flounced back over and nodded to Snape.

"She says you're okay."

Snape was far too annoyed with the girl to feel fluttery and pleased about Evans's seal of approval, but later that night the flutters would kick in.

"Okay," said Hawkins cautiously, looking from one to the other, "so are you two willing to exchange this information for the stuff at the top now?"

"I'm up for it," said Orr, smiling at Snape. "I know you've also hexed my boyfriend last year but I'm willing to overlook it, Gunther usually deserves it. What Zinnia and I just did was duplicate our papers and exchange a copy so we can fill in all the 'partner's information' faster… yeah, like that…" They bent busily for a moment, Snape trying to think if he could design a more pointless class if he tried and not much paying attention to Orr's name or address or wand type. But she interrupted his reverie by querying, "What does the O stand for?"

He wanted to snap back none of your business but, remembering that Evans had just vouched for his fitness in decent female society, settled for merely asking with an incredulous note, "Do you really care?"

"I love wizard names. They're a scream. It's probably Ossiferius or something. But anyway… that means your initials are S. O. S., doesn't it?" Orr began to giggle.

Hawkins was the one who asked, "So?" Snape certainly didn't care enough to enquire.

"Oh… probably a Muggle thing… it's a call for help on a radio… you know," she said, miming talking into a wireless (which made her look very much as though she was attacking her own face with her hand, in Snape's opinion). "Sort of like 'Mayday!' or 'Need rescuing!'… and now you two have learned a Muggle thing for when Williamson asks, so we're pretty much done." She smirked and tittered. "I don't really give a you-know-what about your childhood memories, to tell you the truth."

Which was the first and last glimmer of sense Snape ever got out of the girl.

---

Came a brilliantly warm 1 December. Snape noted with pleasure that his usual seatmate seemed to have simply not bothered coming into class that day. That pleasure lasted until the quartet of hell arrived, last of everybody, but with a disgusting impression of boundless energy. Their usual seats had been taken.

Snape noted in horror the empty spot next to him. He listened mightily to their whispered conference.

There was a smirk in Black's voice as he said, "I'll volunteer to pair up with dear Snivellus."

Potter was in the midst of a protest about Black getting all the fun and Pettigrew was in the midst of saying that worked just fine for him when Lupin broke in, sounding harassed: "You will not."

"Oh, won't I?" Black challenged.

"No, you won't."

"I suppose you will?"

"Better me than you," said Lupin, tired and irritable.

"Yeah?" said Potter, with an elaborate air of deference. "What about me, Moony?"

"You least of all – hey!" Black had snatched his textbook right out of his hands.

"Well, as usual, you're the only one who brought a book," said Black idly, pretending to flip through it.

"Yeah, the rest of us will need it," said Potter. He smiled beatifically as Black said, with a dangerous sweetness,

"You can share Snape's."

Horrified, Lupin moved to try getting his book, and in the failed attempt Potter disburdened him of his schoolbag. Black promptly plunged a hand into it and came up with a crumpled bit of parchment.

"We'll need entertainment, you understand," Potter explained most solicitously.

Black was laughing as he held the jottings up to the light to read. "Really, Moony, this is classic! What say I read it aloud to everyone?"

"Sirius…" Lupin sighed and scratched behind his neck hopelessly. Snape noticed that Pettigrew couldn't quite ingratiate himself into this scene and was looking at Lupin with positive jealousy.

"High literature, this is!" Black insisted.

"Come on," Lupin hissed, "class is going to start in about thirty seconds."

"So?" said Black.

"Everybody's staring."

"So?" said Potter, whom Snape had always known liked nothing better than attention. Lupin made a desperate lunge for his schoolbag; Potter snatched it out of reach at the last possible second, throwing off Lupin's balance badly and causing him to stumble headlong into the wall. There was now some tittering as well as staring from those who had nothing better to do than to watch the quartet of hell. Laughing themselves, Potter rather patronisingly returned Lupin his schoolbag, and Black patted him on the head. "Run along now, you'll want to be in that coveted seat before the bell rings. Say hello to Snivellus for me."

"I wish you would stop calling him that," said Lupin, quite ineffectually. "And I saw that."

Black rolled his eyes even as he retracted his fingers. "I wasn't trying to hide it, Remus, I'm hardly quaking in fear of your payback."

"Have a good class," said Potter, sweetly.

"Hey!" said Black, staring after Pettigrew. "That little rat already grabbed the seat next to Mercy Mullen! I can't believe it! Why didn't she slap him across the face?"

"Forget it, Padfoot, she's pureblood anyway," laughed Potter. "Against your policy, isn't it?..."

Rather disheveled from his treatment at Potter and Black's hands, Lupin gave such a quick and nervous nod to Snape as to be positively rude, sat down next to him, and almost promptly eased the mutual awkwardness by putting his head down on the desk and not opening his eyes until Williamson called them to order. Harmless as he seemed, Snape continued to keep a wary lookout from the corner of his eye. For the first time it was occurring to him to wonder if Lupin – always known to be sickly – had any particular malady.

"Four absent in this class as well," Williamson noted. "We have something of an endemic today. What's the occasion?"

There was some uncomfortable shuffling from the preached-at choir. Finally James Potter spoke up: "Well, Professor, some people just need the occasional mental-health holiday." Williamson looked at him and his boldness doubtfully. "Not us, though," said Potter, piously. "We here can all handle it. We're made of sterner stuff. Dedicated scholars, us." And Williamson did smile. (Snape rolled his eyes. Lupin, to whom this all must have been so much familiar background noise, didn't bat an eye at all. Though sitting up, he was distinctly bleary-eyed.)

Williamson directed the dedicated scholars' attention to the model resting on two desks clothed with black velvet. There was a series of runes around the edge of a small silver platform; above it splinters of multicoloured light shifted around aimlessly. Could anyone tell her what it was?

Snape's hand was in the air almost before the question was out. To his delight nobody else looked to have a clue. He loved when that happened.

"Mr Snape?"

"The Model Forsythe," he replied, trying to convey the all of his unimpressed complacency in his voice. "You can create models of wards by using a full range of carminulla, or 'spells in diminutive,' and simulate tests. Such simulations have long been known to prove fairly sloppy, however," he said, not trying to hide the disdain in his voice. "There's a large gap between the model and the actual situation. Look to the recent Harpies-Kestrel match. The stadium's Forsythe had 'proved' security was unbreechable, yet we now have close to seventy wizards, now shorn of their magic, as evidence otherwise."

There was total silence and plenty of attentive stares his way by the time he finished. Snape didn't have long to preen, though; Williamson was frowning at him.

"Such models are not foolproof," she said, with dignity. "But the dedication of accomplished wizards has brought them a long way and continued refinement could one day come close to perfecting them. It is still better to have an idea of whether or not a novel combination of spells – for wards by nature involve intricate combinations – will at least be workable."

Snape kept his expression bland as she resumed her lecture, though inwardly scoffing. Anyone who knew anything about wards could tell a 'workable' combination from an unworkable one without having to set up an expensive and erratic little device like that. Also, she hadn't given him House points for his answer. Idiot bint.

Idiot bint or not, he was alarmed when she looked over in his direction some ten minutes later and demanded, "Are you paying attention, young man?" Snape twitched, but, thankfully, she was talking to Lupin, who shifted hurriedly to sit up straight again.

"Yes ma'am."

"Really?" She motioned to her model; the splinters of light were now stiller and those that moved were not so aimless. "So, using Mr Snape's example, do you suppose this set of wards would have offered sufficient protection for the Harpies-Kestrel attack?"

There was a prevalent sense around the room of whew, thank goodness she didn't call on me, but Lupin considered it. "Well," he said, after a moment, and Snape realised in wonder that he knew what he was about to speak of, "it has the merit of keeping unapproved wizards out – you can tell by the purple – and Muggles, of course, as a corollary. That's an improvement on original security, because at the match they were mainly focused on outlawing magical creatures and artifacts. But it has the drawback, also common to the original security, of keeping those inside in, with no provision for the emergencies. You can tell that by the thick white outline around the stadium. That's excellent if the wards are meant to enclose something. But, except by air – by broom – nobody at the match could escape."

Snape blinked. And how did he know all that?

"That's all correct, and very good," said Williamson, reluctantly. "But it only proves that you have previous knowledge of wards. Please do pay attention. Where's your book, Mr Lupin? We're on page eighty-eight."

"We have it, Professor," offered Potter, laughter in his voice. "It's not his fault."

"Where's yours, Mr Potter?"

He looked steadily at her. "Delivery owl was feeling peckish this morning," he said, seriously.

---

The absentees didn't return for any classes that day. They didn't return for dinner. They didn't return by nightfall, and by nightfall everyone knew that they weren't returning anytime soon. Rumours had already either reached Hogwarts or originated there: kidnapped! That was an absurd thought at first; it was the threat their mothers were using all the time lately on their younger brothers and sisters to keep them close by and inside at night, now that attacks were on the rise. But the kidnapping seemed more and more probable as the hours passed without any definite news at all.

A small group of friends, seventh- and sixth-years, and mainly Hufflepuffs, had managed to sneak out of school. Some of their friends that hadn't participated provided details: an ex-classmate who had dropped out of school now drove the Knight Bus and would not refuse them passage to London. Surely they weren't stupid enough to go down Knockturn Alley? – no, they hadn't planned on it, so far as anyone knew. How had they gotten out? it was asked, and others whispered to the few who were ignorant about a well-known passageway that took you out of Hogwarts and into Hogsmeade, the one behind Gregory the Smarmy's old statue.

"I can't believe I hadn't known about that," said Snape, aggrieved. Such a passageway seemed a great beacon of freedom. Even to have known a way out of the school except through the front doors would have made being there more tolerable.

"You do realise it was an attack, don't you?" replied Avery, white-faced. They were sitting off together in the common room around a small table where many a time Snape had either wiped Avery off the board in chess or done his homework for him at exorbitant prices.

"They were Hufflepuffs. Kincaid, Marius Flambard, Shortreed's idiot girlfriend… I wouldn't be at all surprised if that lot got lost in a bad Muggle neighbourhood and turned up tomorrow some twelve hours off-schedule."

"Severus!" Avery's hair was plastered to his forehead. Very nervous bastard, Avery was. "Don't be ridiculous – this was us!"

"What do you mean, us?"

Avery at last had his long-cherished wish to for once, just once, grasp something Severus Snape didn't. But he was in no mood to crow. "In the Three Broomsticks Evan was asking me all about which purebloods were dating which Mudbloods," he hissed. "All about people who went missing today."

Snape looked at him quizzically.

"And how did they know that exactly those people would be fool enough to sneak out of Hogwarts and go off in the open?"

Avery threw up his hands. "I don't know. I'm not the slick one. But… Evan could charm that information off of anyone, you know how he is. Maybe he got it off Shortreed. Shortreed's been skulking in his dormitory with a hangover all day. Maybe Evan talked to him last night – probably Shortreed was supposed to go as well!"

Snape tried to take this seriously, but the horrified look on Avery's face was priceless. He looked like an overdone actor, for all he was sincere. Indeed the sincerity made it more ridiculous yet.

"Probably they were stupid enough to run into some sort of Muggle gang – "

"Muggles have gangs?" Avery chewed on this. It was a new idea.

" – and that Orr girl ran off at the mouth and called them a bunch of you-know-whats." Snape snorted. "Whatever it was, I really doubt it was us…why we would bother when there's so many other Ramora to fry…"

"Muggle gangs," muttered Avery, distractedly, leaning back again as though his seat were made of fire. "Yes… that could be it, couldn't it…"

Avery was tossing and turning all that night. Snape's bed was next to his, and it was really very annoying.