Author's Notes: This has been a long time coming. Bartleby - alternately titled "My Last Ghost" - was supposed to be a sordid little story intended to address a tired and ugly topic: rape. Specifically, let's invent an OFC, abuse her a little, throw her in with a young Severus Snape, and see what happens.

A lot ended up happening in the several years since I began writing this. My sordid little story grew a life of its own. In many ways it's an ugly tale, but in other ways it's a surprising one - to me, anyway. Maybe it will surprise you, too.

I will be updating regularly. Please feel free to review.

This is a fanfic, obviously, and was written only to quiet my internal thoughts and questions. I claim no ownership or rights. Much is borrowed from other sources.

A/N 10.06.2020 - I'd like to thank those who favorited/followed the story. I'd told myself it didn't matter to me if anyone read, but in truth I was pleased to see those traffic stats. Thank you again.

Learn with Me

One of the things that most people do not know about Professor Silvanus Kettleburn is that he's a complete jackass.

Seriously.

Just listen:

"You have already completed your first unit of NEWT-level coursework in the Care of Magical Creatures," he told his class as they shivered by the groundskeeper's hut on a drizzly day in late October." Unless, of course, you haven't, in which case you have denied yourself a wonderful experience which you shall never, ever have the opportunity to repeat. But you will have the rest of your lives for regret! Our next unit—"

Here he waved his wand, and the neon-green word 'Naturalism' appeared in the air.

"—is pedagogical rather than practical in nature. During it, you will gain an everlasting appreciation for the natural world and a basic understanding of biology, ecology, and the related 'ologies' which your well-meaning but ignorant parents failed to teach you! We will learn, among other things, the principles of fieldwork and the academic standards of this subject. After all, we cannot forget the unfortunate case of Barry Bottlebrow, who embarrassed himself before the International Conference of Wizards as he described the Frog-Rabbit as a distinct new species, when in fact that unlucky specimen is an example of…? Yes, Mister Wagtail."

"A frog-rabbit is happens when you muck up a Conjuring Spell, Sir."

Kettleburn nodded. "And thus cannot be considered a distinct species because…Anyone? No? Because natural creatures, even fantastic ones, arise through a process of natural selection—"

Here he waved his wand again, and the neon-green words 'natural selection,' appeared under the title of the unit.

A very prissy-looking Ravenclaw girl dared to contradict him: "But, sir, it clearly says in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that— "

Kettleburn interrupted the girl. "Yes, Newt Scamander has included Ashwinders and Lethifolds as creatures rather than magical phenomena, but he would be wrong. In fact, if it weren't for certain lucrative kickbacks and publishing contracts, you would not be holding that book before you at all. But we must make do!" he boomed, clapping his hands together. "Your first assignment: tear out those offensive pages, using what you have just learned about the good practices of taxonomy."

"Tear out…?" somebody, another Ravenclaw, sputtered. "But…I paid nine galleons for this!"

"Nine?! Well, my dear boy, it seems you've been robbed of your gold as well as your education!" Kettleburn shouted, every word becoming progressively louder. "I suggest you write the Board of Governors, Mr. Fawcett, just as soon as they elect a new Head. But what's this…? Mr. Wagtail, it seems you have no problem carrying out the assignment. Are you not offended on behalf of books everywhere?"

"Language is living, sir, and books the artefacts of changing culture!" Myron shouted back, tearing several pages from his book at random.

"Such eloquent nonsense! Now who said that, Mr. Wagtail?"

"Herman Melville!"

"He did no such thing! Have you any idea who Melville is, Mr. Wagtail?"

"None whatsoever, Sir!"

"See, Mr. Fawcett, how easy it is to admit your ignorance? And now I must award ten points to Slytherin for Mr. Wagtail's sporting attitude; it may be the first time in the history of his House!"

"Thank you, Sir!"

"And who is this, next to you, Mister Wagtail, and why isn't she ripping pages from her book?"

"Amy Scrivener, Sir, and she left it in the dorms!"

"Scrivener, eh? Well, make like a scrivener and copy! The phrase, 'I shan't ever forget to bring Newt Scamander's terrible book to class ever again,' 100 times, on my desk tomorrow morning."

See? Complete jackass.

Of course, he had his positive qualities. Kettleburn was an entertaining lecturer, generous with House points, and seemed to have a genuine and enduring fondness for all living things, even snotty Ravenclaws and brown-nosing Slytherins.

After they were all done defacing their books and Amy had copied the line about Newt Scamander's terrible text thirty-two times, Kettleburn told the class to break up into two groups and 'go identify something.'

"Go identify what?" asked the prissy Ravenclaw.

"Something living, my dear," he answered. "Identify it, sketch it, and report back here at the end of the hour. Whichever group has managed to make the greatest number of positive identifications shall win—nothing! You shall win nothing. This is a class, not a charity auction. Well, off you go!" he said, and promptly conjured a lawn chair out of thin air.

"And don't litter," he added as he sat and pulled out a birding book and a pair of omnoculars. "Leave the marvelous outdoors just the way you found it!"

Amy and her Housemates went one way; the prissy Ravenclaws, another.

"You ever get the sense Kettleburn's just sort of phoning it in until retirement?" Myron asked as they approached the edge of the Black Lake, out of earshot of anybody but the squid.

"Well, that's why we took this class, isn't it?" Alex said. "Easy 'O.'" She sat on a rock and pulled a small leather pouch and what looked like rolling papers out of her pocket. "Want to hear a joke?" she asked without prelude.

Fiona wrinkled her nose. "Alex, your jokes are terrible," she said.

"So a vampire walks into a bar," Alex began anyway, now rolling what looked suspiciously like a joint.

Settling in for the long hall, Amy flipped over a rock with her shoe and started sketching the roly-poly that wasn't under it.

"And the barkeep asks, 'What'll it be, mate?'" Alex licked the edge of the cigarette-possibly-joint and closed it up. "And the vampire asks for some hot water, right?"

"Right," said Myron.

"And the barkeep says, 'what, you don't want a teabag or nuffin?'"

"I hope this isn't a bollocks joke," Amy said, which caused Myron to laugh and, for some unfathomable reason, touch her arm lightly.

"Then the vampire shakes his head and says, 'Nah, mate. I brought my own,'" Alex continued, undeterred. She paused to pack the maybe-cigarette with the end of her wand, milking the joke for all it was worth, and delivered the punchline: "And he pulls out a tampon."

"That is disgusting," Fiona said. Because it was. But Myron just laughed and Alex smirked before finally lighting up. A smell that was definitely not tobacco wafted Amy's way.

Fiona wrinkled her nose again. "If Snape catches you smoking one of those—"

"He'll what?" Alex snapped with sudden ferocity. "Lock himself in his office again? Please. Snape doesn't give a shit about us. I could set us on fire with this thing and he wouldn't piss to put us out."

"Oh, pretty imagery there," said Myron. "I did not want to think about Snape's todger."

Alex scoffed. "I don't think he's even got a todger. Dumbledore's probably got it in a box. Everyone knows he's that old fool's stooge."

Alex had a fondness for saying that 'everybody' knew things, and one of the things 'everybody' was supposed to know was that Snape was a Death Eater turncoat who'd betrayed the Dark Lord and came to work for the Headmaster. Amy, who now had ownership of the joint and paused her roly-poly sketch to puff it contemplatively, thought privately that Alex was full of shit. If Snape was supposed to be some kind of…of murderer masquerading as a mild academic, he wasn't doing a very good job of it.

Myron humored Alex. "So you think that's why he's been in such a pissy mood lately? Because Dumbledore's got his todger in a box?"

Alex shot him a filthy look. "No, you ass. Because it's almost bleeding Halloween. The one-year anniversary of the day He fell? Of the day—"

"—Snape lost his Mark," Fiona finished.

Myron made an exaggerated 'Ooh' sound of understanding as Amy continued to puff.

Alex looked at all three of her companions in disgust. "They don't lose them, you idiots, they just fade."

"Uh-huh," said Myron, who clearly didn't believe that Alex knew what she was talking about. "You think they're really going to cancel the Hogsmeade visit on Halloween, like everybody keeps saying? And don't hog that, Amy" he, said, reaching for the joint.

Amy coughed, passed it, and looked down at her roly-poly picture. It looked like a lima bean with five legs sticking arthritically from either side.

Meanwhile, Alex was still talking about Halloween. "They're not cancelling it, though there's hardly a point in going, what with all the shops closed and half the Castle off at the Potter Memorial unveiling," she said, and began counting off half the Castle on her fingers. "All the Bones girls are going, that Weasley kid, the metamorphogus from Hufflepuff…"

"Why? What's she got to do with it? Her family name—Tonks, right?—I don't even recognize it," said Fiona.

"Oh, you didn't know?" said Alex, looking suddenly very smug to know a secret.

"Know what?" interjected Amy.

"That she's Andromeda Black's half-blood bastard. 'Tonks' is the Muggle's name."

Fiona put her hand over her mouth. "That's horrible. I heard my Mum talking about that ages ago. She thinks the Muggle bewitched Black, or gave her a love potion or something. Can you imagine?"

"I can't imagine letting a filthy Mudblood get close enough to me to slip me a love potion in the first place, no," said Alex scornfully. "She should've known better. She deserves whatever she got for being so stupid."

"I think I'd just kill myself," said Fiona, her hands flailing dramatically before her. "I mean, who would want you, after that?

"Right? I wouldn't fuck a Mudblood's sloppy seconds with Myron's dick," said Alex.

"Eww," said Fiona.

Myron was the only person in the group who didn't look completely disgusted. "Alex is obsessed with my todger," he told Amy conversationally. "Has been for years."

"Yeah, you wish," said Alex.

"I told her I'm saving myself for marriage," Myron continued, unperturbed.

"Ha!"

He turned to Alex and said, innocently, "Maybe Dumbledore will let you borrow Snape's. I hear he keeps it in a box."

Even Amy managed to laugh at that one. They're clever, her Housemates. Slytherin chose his students for the seeds of greatness in them, after all.

Then she gave her roly-poly little x's for eyes and drew a cemetery around it. She scribbled a cheap headstone with a cautionary tale for the epitaph, something the little roly-poly mummies could point out to their little roly-poly babies and warn, in grave whispers, against short skirts and underage drinking and walking alone after dark:

Here Lies Amelia T. Scrivener.

A Mudblood's Sloppy Seconds.

Eww.

Then she crumpled up the page and shoved it in her pocket because it's not as though she's all fucked up about the whole thing or anything like that. She was too high to remember what was on the parchment when she discovered it in her pocket on the way back to the Castle after class, and too high to care that it bounced off the rim of the waste bin when she tried to throw it away.

Very unfortunately for her, Professor Kettleburn discovered it on the ground during his lunch hour. Extremely irritated and determined to identify the litterbug, he picked it up, unfurled it, and began to read.

The crumpled-up bit of parchment lay in the center of Professor Snape's overburdened desk, Exhibit A in the Case of the Fucked-Up Teenage Girl. The words leapt out starkly, crass and too-visible from where Amy stood three feet away:

Here Lies Amelia T. Scrivener.

A Mudblood's Sloppy Seconds.

Eww.

It might have been funny if it hadn't been so fucking horrible. Amy wished she were back in the dorms again, re-reading Bartleby and letting Alex practice stupid glamours on her hair. Even being Alex's guinea pig for new beauty charms was preferable to this.

Snape considered her drawing for a moment in exaggerated silence, looked up at Amy, and frowned. "Do you know what I spent my weekend doing, Miss Scrivener?" he asked.

Judging by the amount of paperwork on Snape's desk, she guessed he hadn't spent it marking essays. Either that or he simply hadn't been given a T.A. to help with the grading. Amy wondered if this was supposed to be academia's version of a freshman hazing, because, come on, even Binns had a T.A.

Jesus, how humiliating.

Between Amy's drawing and the endless piles of grading sat several unnaturally tidy stacks of those Ministry pamphlets people are always trying to distribute to teenagers. They were still bound with twine, as though they'd just been dropped off and Snape hadn't had a chance to throw them away, yet. Don't Drink and Dissapparate! one of them warned. A vapid-looking witch on another winked at Amy and pointed to her title: Sex Can Wait, Set a Date!

At the very corner of the desk, as though placed there in some fit of irony just to make the fact that Severus Snape was supposed to be a teacher look even more ridiculous, was an apple. It was difficult to imagine Snape eating something as normal as an apple, let alone receiving one from an adoring first-year. When he showed up at meals at all, he never ate. He just sort of sat there, looking dyspeptic.

He looked fairly dyspeptic, now, as he sat behind his desk with all this unwanted responsibility before him. His thin lips clasped together unpleasantly, as though the very sight of his student standing in front of him like a criminal, like an idiot, turned his stomach. The lines of his sallow face seemed to deepen as he stared. Sometimes it was hard to believe he was only twenty-three.

Or was it twenty-two?

"That wasn't a rhetorical question, Miss Scrivener. Do you know what I spent my weekend doing?" he repeated.

"No, Sir. I don't."

"I," Snape began, crumpling up her drawing and tossing it in the rubbish bin, "spent what little leisure time is afforded to me at a staff meeting, during which we discussed the importance of learning with the student." He fixed her with a dangerous, penetrating glare. "Learn with me, Scrivener."

The vapid-looking witch on the abstinence pamphlet smiled broadly up at Amy. She pointed to her title again, which now read, True Love Waits!

"First," Snape spat, "One is to lead the student. That is where I ask a question and pray that your perilously short attention span allows you, eventually, to make the relevant inferences." He began tracing his lips with one long, pale finger. Then, abruptly, he said, "What are you?"

It was a trap. A trick question. She had absolutely no idea how to even begin to answer. "Er..."

"Your House, girl. It's hardly Arithmancy."

"Slytherin, she said, "I'm a Slytherin."

"Wrong already, Scrivener," he answered drily. "You are not a Slytherin. You are my Slytherin."

His Slytherin. He should shrink her down and stick her in a jar full of Preserving Solution.

"Which means," he continued, "that when you refuse to attend class, generally neglect to do anything that is expected of you, and leave neurotic little drawings out for anyone to see, it reflects badly on me. Worse, my colleagues—" he spat the word as if it were the crassest oath "—who, for some unfathomable reason, seem to be under the impression that I care about such things, harass me about it when I have far more important things to attend."

She wondered, vaguely, what those "more important things" were that he would rather be attending.

"Step two: observe the student. This is where I attempt to ascertain whether or not anything I've said has penetrated that fog of malaise or whatever it is addling your brain. Well, Miss Scrivener, has it?" he continued.

"Yes," she lied.

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Another educational success," he spat sarcastically. "Step three: validate the student. This is where I find that I have absolutely nothing positive to say about you except that I'm sure you'll make a fine professional mourner when you are forced to take up work following your failure to graduate, and we move on to that happy final step: evaluate the student."

Wait.

Lead the student... Observe the student... Validate...

"L.O.V.E.? Love the student?" she blurted out. "Jesus, is that intentional?"

"Is the room not positively caked with appropriately professional teacherly affection?" he asked, making a grand gesture at the dungeon walls and, failing to find the evidence 'caked' there, sighed. "Ah. What a failure I am."

Look at them, Miss Scrivener, look at all the fucks I don't give.

"But we're not done here," Snape continued. "So, for evaluation's sake, I ask again: What are you?"

He didn't mean...He couldn't possibly mean...

Snape cleared his throat expectantly.

Oh. Oh, he did.

The pride she used to have tingled, like a phantom limb, as she said the words, "I am your Slytherin."

Snape nodded in agreement. "And as my Slytherin, it should be clear that your obligations are not optional. I do not wait around for your amusement or your fancy. The Ministry did not politely request you attend classes at your leisure, and I have no idea what infantile delusion led you to believe that you may simply opt out of your detentions, your classes, and your various responsibilities, but it will never happen again, will it?"

"No, Sir."

"You will begin regularly attending every class on your singularly useless schedule. You will submit your senior exit strategy for review. You will be present at each and every one of your scheduled detentions. And, finally, you will generally behave in a way that is fitting for a member of my House—is that clear?"

"Yes, Sir."

Amy teetered awkwardly on her heels and stared at the Ministry abstinence advocate on the pamphlet again while Snape continued to talk. The words, Take The Purity Pledge! flashed at her in neon purple. She wondered who thought of these stupid slogans, and how much that person got paid.

Amy was still thinking about this when Snape stopped suddenly, mid-sentence, his eyes trained on her head as though she wore a massive pile of dragon shit for a hat and he'd somehow not noticed until that very moment.

"What—what the devil is that in your hair, girl?!" he suddenly demanded.

Her...Hair?

Amy reached back, arm bent at an awkward angle, and touched the delicate architecture of Alex's latest experiment in charm work. Something that was definitely not a braid crinkled under her fingers.

"Is that a bit of refuse fashioned into some sort of...ornament?" His lip curled when he said it.

Knowing Alex, it was probably an empty bag of crisps folded to look like a bow. Couldn't he say anything that sounded straight-forward? She tugged at the bag-bow, but it did not budge.

"Yeah, I guess so," she agreed unhappily. And then, after a second ticked by, added, "Sir."

And the look on his face. Like he thought she was completely insane. Like her very existence was not only ridiculous, but somehow outrageous. Snape then pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes tightly shut against what must have been a gale-forced migraine bashing at the insides of his skull. Because Amy is a positive harbinger of headaches, and if she had any decency at all she'd jump off the astronomy tower and save him the trouble of dealing with her.

It took a minute, but Snape did, eventually, move his hand from his face and look back at her with a scowl. "I'm dropping you from Potions," he declared.

Amy could think of nothing more profound to say than, "Oh."

His response was to point dramatically at a vile-smelling barrel in the back of the classroom. "Sort. Now. No magic."

So Amy shuffled slowly toward the back of the classroom, noting with no small measure of relief that Snape had been generous enough to leave a pair of tongs on the table next to the barrel, and there they were.

An entire bucket of horned toads massacred in formaldehyde. Mortified in red Preserving Solution, their normally resilient skin soft and slimy; their fish-white bellies exposed for all the world to scrutinize. The corpse nearest to her was dappled gently with mold; unfit, even, for some first-year's use in a sub-par potion. Amy picked up the tongs and reached for it, this thing that had once been alive.

The tongs hesitated in the air.

How was that even possible? How was it even conceivable, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, that this had once been a living, breathing thing with a heart and a soul? With a scurrying little desert life that was, to it, at least, precious? Now it just lay there, its little eyes all slack with death, half-open and staring at through graveyard cataracts at nothing. It was cold and humiliated, reduced to some disgusting—

The tongs recoiled as if suddenly nauseated with a mad idea.

It wasn't just disgusting, it was... it was profane. Somehow horrific beyond comprehension that this bucket even existed; a breach of some nameless principle of decency older than language itself that this wretched necropolis sat before her. How pitiful they were, just floating there like weird, bloated little organs in a bloody soup. Like coils of intestine and bits of liver and it reminded her of…

It reminded her of…

The tongs lowered to her side.

Somebody, somewhere a million miles away, spoke: "Is there a problem, Miss Scrivener?"

"I'm not doing this," Amy said, and, Jesus, did those words really just come out of her mouth?

Snape was still seated at his desk across the room. She refused to look back.

"Excuse me?" It was laced with warning. Danger, Will Robinson, there's an evil, greasy bat behind you and he wants nothing more than to watch you fall apart by the seams of your own neurotic aversion.

"I…can't," she said. Because she couldn't. She really just couldn't. Finally, she turned around.

Slowly, with anal-retentive deliberation, Snape set down his quill. "I think," he began quietly, every syllable wrapped in its own special threat, "you'll find that you can, that you will, and that, in fact, you must. Now, would you like to reframe your thinking on this?"

Amy looked at the bucket again. Then at Snape. Then at her shoe. "I…ah— " she cast wildly around for the right words; something polite; something demure; something that would just make this all go away. The only thing that came to mind was the line from that book she'd been re-reading, the one Slughorn had given her: "—I'd prefer not to, no."

For a moment there was only the sound of water dripping somewhere; of civilizations of mold rising and falling in the dampest, darkest, most disgusting corner of the dungeons.

Drip.

Drip.

"You'd…prefer not to," Snape finally repeated slowly. His hands were steepled before him, folded as if in prayer.

What else could she do? She said, "Right. I'd prefer not to."

Snape simply sat there silently for a moment, looking as though someone had tried to force-feed him poison.

Drip.

Drip.

He seemed to be swelling imperceptibly, the way Pandora's Box must have before that curious idiot came by and opened it up.

Drip.

Drip.

Oh. Oh, that had been a mistake.

"And just who the fuck—" here, he punctuated the expletive by bringing his hand down on the desk with a bang, causing several unmarked essays to flutter to the floor "—who in the ever-loving fuck do you think you are, Scrivener, that you'd 'prefer not to'? Shall I christen you 'Bartleby'?!"

Bartleby?

As in Bartleby the Scrivener?

Something popped in the place where Amy's brain was supposed to be. She had to smack her hand over her mouth to kill the hysterical giggle. Because how utterly, completely ridiculous had her life become that there she was, standing with a bow made out of a bag of crisps and a pair of tongs, and she and her childhood god are arguing about the stupidest task in the world—something that could be achieved in half a second by magic—and it turns out that Snape does read.

Not only did he read, he was apparently capable of making a heat-of-the-moment literary reference.

To Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, the book she'd read over the summer, the one she was re-reading now. The one about the law clerk who "preferred not to" do anything at all. That Severus Snape of all people had also read it, that he'd made the connection to her surname, attitude, and words, was shocking to the point of absurdity.

Snape was out of his chair now, giving her that look again, like she was completely insane. He was saying something, his mouth opening and closing and making noises and doing whatever else it is that mouths do when people try to communicate, but the meaning was lost.

"Please," she said. God, look at her, reduced to begging. "What if I grade papers or something, instead? Slughorn used to let me do that, when I was his T.A."

"Scriv—"

"They're going to be terrible," she insisted over him, her voice rising in pitch. "It's the Spellchecking Quills. They're single-handedly responsible for the decline of the English language. People-"

"Sto—"

"Nay, decline of Western civilization itself!" she said, suddenly eloquent in her hysteria. An English teacher's staffroom breakdown, right out of her mouth.

He began walking toward her. Stalking toward her, really. Storming toward her. And—Merlin—If she thought he was angry before, this was something much, much worse.

"Nobody will have bothered to proofread!" Amy could see herself acting like a complete fool, like somebody's disturbed teenage daughter, standing there babbling about Spellchecking Quills with trash in her hair, the tongs flailing ridiculously in her hand, but there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. It was like an out-of-body experience.

"Silen—"

"They don't catch homophones," she practically screeched. "Next thing you know, you'll be reading about 'strait' stirring rods instead of 'straight' ones. You know, S-T-R-A-I-T? Like the Bering Strai—"

"Stop!" Snape was in front of her now, and not only was he actually shouting, he seemed poised to cross that mandatory three-foot chasm of personal space as easily as he might side-step a puddle.

Amy backed into a table adjacent to the bucket of blood. Somehow, absurdly, the tongs were brandished before her like a ludicrous sword, as though she could use them to fend him off. The look on his face, she knew better than to say anything. She pressed her lips together, lest any stray bit of nonsense come tumbling out.

Snape stepped into her space, his hand—what the hell is he doing?!—reaching out. But all he did was clamp those unnaturally long, pale fingers of his around her wrist. Hard. The other hand snatched the tongs from her grasp before letting her go.

"I can only come to two conclusions regarding your behavior." He practically whispered it.

"First," he began, placing the hand with the tongs on the edge of the desk some four inches left of her hip. "First, you have either finally lost your already tenuous grasp on reality."

"Exactly," she agreed breathlessly. It just fell unbidden from her mouth. "I'm mad. You can't make a madwoman—"

"Or," he interrupted, now placing the other hand some four inches right of her hip, effectively caging her with his arms, "you believe that your...ordeal somehow makes you above other, lesser mortals and their rules."

She could feel the heat bleeding off of his thin frame and opened her mouth to say...something. Anything.

He leaned in, so, so, so, unbelievably close. Menacingly close. Close enough for her to feel his breath on her face. "The next words out of your mouth had better be a request for last rites. Tell me now to which god you pray, because, Bartleby, if you do not calm yourself immediately and find that you do, in fact, prefer to proceed with your detention, I may not be responsible for my actions," he hissed. He was trying to physically frighten her into submission. And it had been working, too.

Until she smelled the alcohol on his breath.

Snape's mouth positively reeked of that same juniper-y, antiseptic scent she'd caught the last time she'd been in his office, when he'd spiked his tea with that potion from the battered flask. Except it wasn't potion at all, she realized now. It was gin.

Just gin.

It should have frightened her. Hell, it should have terrified her, because here was this angry young man violating her personal space, his mouth a snarl of crooked teeth, his eyes positively soulless in their depth. This rumored Death Eater. This probable murderer. Her professor. Her Head of House.

But Amy wasn't terrified. She was eleven years old again, staring reverently at Snape from across the common room as he and the other gods drank firewhiskey and laughed and told jokes that would make you go redder than the Hogwarts Express. She was giddy for the day that the Dark Lord would give them more power than you'd ever dreamed of having. He would fight for them, they said, fight to get rid of all the Mudbloods and Muggle-lovers and trash that threatened their way of life. Only eleven, and the one thing in the world better than Glamouring your hair green was knowing, with all a child's conviction, that everything was going to be okay.

And then she was seventeen again. Only seventeen and standing there with all the hopelessness of the damned because the revolutionaries were all charlatans and the professors were drunks and nothing had turned out okay, after all.

"Well?!" Snape demanded, his breath mingling horrifically with the formaldehyde stench of the toads.

It hit her out of nowhere, like a sharp blow to the back of the head. There was this emptiness ballooning in her throat, a sickening lurch in her gut as her organs churned and the contents of her stomach struggled to defy gravity. Her hand slapped to her mouth in an effort to keep the broken pieces of herself inside where they belonged.

Snape jerked backward, retreating to his side of that three-foot chasm, just in time. She doubled over with an audible retch, one hand wrapped around her stomach and the other catching the half-masticated pieces of dinner that blossomed, as unwanted and unloved as the bloody chunks of an abortion, into the world.

"Oh, for God's sake—Scorgify!"

Some neuron misfired in her brain, then, and she inexplicably remembered that thing Myron had once told her.

"He's dead," she gasped, gagging on her own vile effluence, "God is dead."

There was a single moment of intense regret and abject fear in the space where her heart skipped a beat. Because Snape really did look like he was about to murder her. His lip curled back as he drew away and he even raised the tongs.

They made a sickly splash as they hit the surface layer of horned toads still sitting in the bucket.

Snape whirled away in a dramatic flurry of robes. Undoubtedly to stop himself from committing grievous bodily harm. He threw himself behind his desk, pulled out the familiar flask of alcohol, and she saw something strange written in the lines of his face. He looked exactly as she felt. Like he'd rather be anywhere else in the world than sitting right there in that subterranean prison with these piles of unwanted responsibility and fucked-up teenage girls stacked all around him.

Like he'd rather be dead.

She imagined only the thought of coming back as a ghost and having to repeat this charade without the benefit of alcohol kept him from killing himself.

When he noticed that she was still there, he called her 'Bartleby' again and told her to get the fuck out of his sight.

She did.

Later, when she has calmed down a bit, she will climb into her too-small bed and think about it for a while. She'll rub her wrist where the tingling ghost of Snape's hand still haunts her and just mull the whole thing over. She'll listen to the lake undulate beyond the window and decide that she'd been wrong.

Some Mad Man said that God was dead, but that wasn't quite right.

He was merely dethroned, the broken remnants of His kingdom strewn about Him like so many frog guts.