MARKED

1 May 1998; 22:51

If asked, she couldn't have said exactly why she had brought Potter and Lovegood this way. The quickest route to the Great Hall would have been to take the stairs directly down from Ravenclaw Tower, but some providence had whispered to her that the passageway past the suits of armour would be a better way to go.

She felt him before she heard him.

Her wand raised almost of its own accord.

"Who's there?" she said.

"It is I."

He stepped out from behind a suit of armour, and for a moment, Minerva saw not the haunted, haughty headmaster of Hogwarts but the scrawny, hopeful boy Severus had once been.

When he spoke, he wore a crooked smile that was at odds with his raised wand.

"Where are the Carrows?"

Giving her answer, she slipped and called him by his Christian name rather than the honorific he had insisted upon on the day he swept back to Hogwarts as its head.

"Wherever you told them to be, I expect, Severus."

His gaze roamed over her, face to feet, his eyes greedy and desperate, as if attempting to memorise her form, before darting past her to where Harry and Luna hid beneath Harry's cloak.

"I was under the impression that Alecto had apprehended an intruder," he said.

"Really? And what gave you that impression?"

The movement of his left arm seemed almost involuntary, and she wondered if the Mark pained him. Part of her hoped it did.

25 December 1976; 03:05

"Who's there?"

The shadow near the staircase became a dark-haired boy when she raised her wand to illuminate his face with its glowing tip.

"It's me," he said.

"It is I," she corrected, coming down the stairs and stopping on the bottom step so she remained a head taller than her student.

"It is I," he repeated."

He spoke tonelessly, with no trace of the thinly veiled resentment she'd come to expect from the Snape boy whenever she spoke to him outside her classroom.

She lowered her wand but kept it lit so she could see him. "What are you doing out of bed, Mr Snape?"

"I had permission." He dug in his cloak pocket, fished out a slip of paper, and held it out it to her.

She took it. Without her spectacles, she couldn't read it, but the expensive parchment and florid handwriting were familiar enough for her to guess at the note's contents.

"And why did Professor Slughorn give you permission to be out of bed at this hour? Was it another of his little soirées?"

The after-hours gatherings were hardly the chief reason she didn't approve of the "Slug Club", but it irked her that Horace never saw fit to warn the deputy headmistress that a select group of students would likely be roaming the castle's halls long after curfew.

"No, Professor," Snape said. "I was invited to the Malfoys' Christmas party. I … I had to wait for Lucius to Apparate me back."

Snape's worn cloak and his magically but obviously patched trousers reminded Minerva that he hadn't been among the students who'd signed up for last spring's round of Apparition lessons. At seven Galleons, the course was likely beyond his means. Minerva had paid for Lupin's herself, but he was in her House, and she couldn't be expected to subsidise every needy student who crossed her path, could she?

"I wasn't aware you knew the Malfoy family," she said.

Snape's lips curved into what would have been an insolent smile had it reached his eyes, and he said, some of the familiar defiance returning to his voice, "We're friends. Lucius and me."

"Lucius and I."

Lucius and I," Snape repeated, the smirk melting into a fleeting grimace. He'd been working on ridding himself of his Brummie speech patterns and his accent. Minerva had never tried to shed her own accent, which she would have regarded as a vain attempt to deny her origins, but she did pride herself on speaking proper English rather than the Caithness dialect her father and brothers clung to.

"That's as may be," Minerva said, "but it is after three in the morning. I hardly think Professor Slughorn expected you to be out nearly all night."

"No, Professor. It was … the party went longer than I anticipated."

She sighed. "Very well. In deference to the day, I shan't take any points, but go straight to your dormitory, and I expect to see you at breakfast."

"Yes, Professor."

She held out the permission slip, and when he reached for it, he sucked in an audible breath and clutched at his left forearm. At her frown, he quickly recovered himself. His eyes dropped to his shoes, and Minerva realised with horror what had happened at that supposed Christmas party.

Gooseflesh prickled her arms and legs, and she tugged her dressing gown closer around her body.

I should have known.

He snatched the note from her and stuffed it into his pocket.

When he raised his head, his eyes met hers, and they were full of regret and … was it hope?

"Was there anything else, Professor?"

The moment seemed to extend beyond time, waiting on a breath for something to break, and in that eternity, she longed to reach out to him, to say something that might turn him from this dreadful course.

But it was too late. Once a Death Eater was Marked, he was Marked for life, and nothing Minerva could say or do would release Snape from the bond he'd chosen to live under. He was the Dark Lord's now, and would always be.

Severus Snape had been destined for this moment as surely as she'd been fated to be a teacher and a spinster. The similarities between them had occurred to her — they had both first come to school as brilliant but lonely and serious children, Muggle-raised and unsure if they really belonged at Hogwarts — but their paths had diverged early on, as they were surely meant to: one to the Light, the other to the Dark.

"No. Nothing else. Happy Christmas, Mr Snape."

"Happy Christmas, Professor."

She put out her wand light and watched his dark form disappear down the stairs to the dungeons.