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 - any feedback is appreciated.
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 10.10.2020 - Thanks to MagicBrownie, hilet, laced-with-arsenic, reighnstorm90, jem2cute, and vani12 for favoriting/following. Thanks also to vani for adding me to the collection, Awesome Severus Snape Stories. Between the collection and the stories all of you have written, I won't be hurting for reading material any time soon.
Welcome to Hell
"Bartleby, go away."
It was always strange to hear Professor Snape use her nickname. Chiefly, of course, because he just didn't seem like a nickname kind of person. But it was also the name itself—there is something babyish and undignified about most English words that end with a long 'ee' sound. Baby. Crazy. Lazy. Snape almost never used such diction. He spoke in vaguely sepulchral tones and chose words that seemed ripped from a thesaurus. Infant. Insane. Indolent.
Anyway, the nickname was odd.
"I am neither your savior nor your guardian. I haven't the slightest inclination to act out whatever role your adolescent fantasies have assigned for me. Kindly remove me from the white horse and go away."
And so damn verbose, too. Amy could swear Snape must have a secret fetish for hearing himself talk. Which was also strange, because people who love to hear themselves talk are usually too self-absorbed to be very perceptive. And he was. Perceptive, that is. How else could he manage to insult so thoroughly, if not by reading your insecurities as if they were written right there on your face?
"Ten points from Slytherin."
That snapped her out of her dumbness. "From your own House?"
"Twenty points. Go. Away."
She didn't really know what she was doing here lingering gloomily outside Snape's private quarters on Halloween, the one-year anniversary of the day he lost his Mark and she her certainty. Maybe she really was just a lost little girl whose adolescent fantasies had unfairly made him into a savior. Maybe it was just that she saw something in him—something desolate and bankrupt that called to her own emptiness.
In her defense, though, she wasn't going to knock. Really, she wasn't, because that would be tantamount to a death wish. It was Snape who came out with his eerie perception and told her to go away.
It was also he who pulled her inside a moment later.
Because Peeves was coming, his usual childish mudslinging preceding him. Already he was singing;
Wee Potty's won!
Voldy's done!
Now it's time to
Have some fun!
The last thing either of them needed, she supposed, was to give Peeves something else to sing about. The whole school would be awash in sordid speculation had he seen them standing there on the threshold of Snape's private quarters.
Her professor asked what she wanted from him, but she didn't know. It wasn't his touch, not yet, anyway. The way his hand had curled around her upper arm to drag her inside wasn't exactly violent, but it wasn't wholly welcome, either. Much like his presence at the school. She didn't think he belonged there. He was too young and too angry and he was an awful gin-guzzling excuse for a teacher. It made her miss Slughorn.
Snape asked her again what the fuck she was doing there, and his use of the expletive only confirmed her suspicions that he didn't belong. Teachers don't curse, after all.
Perhaps that's what made her bold, the idea that he wasn't welcome and didn't belong. Maybe it was that she felt she didn't belong. But she wasn't about to analyze the thing to a bloody pulp, so she just shoved her hands in her pockets, relatively unruffled in the face of his ire, looked around his sitting room, and said, "You have a lot of books."
The stupid statement of fact literally took him back (he'd again been standing too close again in an attempt to intimidate).
"Indeed. How perceptive," he sneered.
"Are they all about Potions?"
Snape didn't answer because he wasn't so easily distracted, but he did give up. He looked at her very strangely, like she was something supremely disgusting but also vaguely puzzling picked in a jar, sat down in an armchair, and Summoned a glass of firewhiskey without using his wand. She wondered how he did that.
"What are you even still doing here? At Hogwarts?" he said. "Shouldn't you be in Hogsmeade with your pissant little Housemates, enjoying this day of celebration in its totality?"
'In its totality.' Who says that?
"It's a condition of my probation," she said. "I can't leave without a chaperone. I thought you knew." She thought all the professors knew that. Apparently not.
"I sincerely hope you're not expecting some sort of life advice."
"I'm not."
A particularly interesting-looking red book on his bookshelf attracted her. She walked over and admired it with her eyes and not her hands. The title was in Latin. She wondered when Snape the Death Eater had found the time to get so intensely educated.
Snape the Professor sipped at his drink and ignored her.
"I'm sure Peeves is gone, now. Sorry for bothering you, Professor," she said, and saw herself out.
The second time she lingered, he let her in without saying anything.
When she thought about it years later, she liked to think that Severus Snape had suffered her presence not because he pitied her, but because he'd been lonely. Not forlorn, wounded Byronic antihero lonely, more like 'no man is an island' lonely. He didn't seem to be on speaking terms with any of the staff and obviously hated his job.
It was one of those ridiculously picturesque afternoons in mid-November, with the dying sun casting a pink light over a Forbidden Forest so saturated with orange and red foliage that it seemed to be on fire. Not that you could see that down here in the dungeons. Still, she noticed that his sitting room did have a somewhat nice lake-window, like the ones in her own dormitory. It threw a murky green light into the room that did absolutely nothing for Snape's pallor, but it was rather interesting to watch tentacle-shaped shadows float by.
It was the only nice feature of his quarters, that window. The whole place struck her as far too modest for the likes of Salazar Slytherin, and it seemed ridiculous that the man, a legend even when he was alive, would have lived here. Could his greatness—or his ego, if you prefer—have even fit in this tiny sitting room? Where was the enchanted ceiling? The towering stone pillars? The serpentine woodwork? So much of the Castle was decorative to the point of ostentatiousness, but this place just looked like a cell for a poverty-stricken academic.
There were four walls, two doors, and the window. One door led out to the corridor and the other, she supposed, to his—her stomach gave a funny lurch at the thought—bedroom. There was a bookshelf, a hearth, a utilitarian table and chair. Clustered in the middle of the room, a battered sofa and armchair faced each other as if in confidence. It was surprisingly untidy, with broken quills and crumpled-up bits of parchment and overdue grading strewn about.
Somehow, Amy couldn't quite muster the energy to really disapprove. She also didn't refuse when Snape placed a tumbler in her hand. She wondered why he would do this.
"Because my drinking isn't making you any less depressing, so I've a mind to try and medicate the thing at its source" he replied rather nastily.
She hadn't realized she'd said it aloud.
"Sorry," she said. She downed the alcohol in one shot, having no idea how he managed to sip at the nasty stuff, and almost immediately felt a little better. "What would you be if you could be anything in the world?" she asked suddenly, still staring into the depths of the lake.
"What a ridiculous question," Snape observed from somewhere behind her.
She ignored this. "I wouldn't mind being a fish." The fish in the lake reminded her of the things preserved in Snape's office, of the toads dead in the bucket, only that the fish could swim away if they didn't want to be looked at.
He scoffed. "And here I was under the impression that all little girls aspired to be princesses."
"Didn't you want to be a prince? Isn't that what they used to call you?" she said, suddenly recalling that Snape once had a nickname, too. She turned around to face him and found him standing closer than she'd expected, an odd and stiff look on his face.
A bitter kind of expression possessed his features as he scowled past her and said, almost as if to himself, "I never should have accepted this position."
"Why did you?"
"You might say it's a condition of my probation, Bartleby." The corner of his lip twitched and curled up into a wry kind of smile that didn't really improve his features at all, as if he enjoyed throwing her own words back at her.
"Maybe it'll get better once my class graduates in the spring. Then there'll be no-one left who remembers you as a student." She realized as she said it that it wasn't true, that all of the other professors would still remember teaching him. The thought was disheartening.
Apparently lacking any witty comeback, he sighed. It seemed to her that there were eons in that sigh—years of suffering and disappointment and failure all wrapped up in one barely-audible exhalation. It must have been true, then, what they said about him being a Death Eater and a traitor. Maybe it was also true what they said about Dumbledore keeping his todger in a box.
That's when she kissed him. It was an experiment, really, a light drag of dry lip against dry lip, just to see if it did anything for her. It didn't. She didn't feel her stomach swoop or her heart flutter. The world didn't stand still or narrow until nothing else mattered. She wasn't even mildly turned-on. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing but dry lip stuttering against dry lip.
Jesus Christ, she was even depressing herself.
Probably the worst part was that she couldn't even manage to make him angry. She'd have bet all the gold in Gringotts such an action would result in either an apoplectic fit of rage or, less likely, some seriously passionate shagging. He, however, just walked away from her with a moderately revolted expression and poured himself more alcohol. No suicide by Snape for her.
"Congratulations, Bartleby. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but you've just brought about the death of every lascivious teacher-student fantasy in the wizarding world. How the collective male libido mourns."
That bad, huh? How embarrassing.
"I should go," she said.
Snape threw himself onto a sofa, somehow managing not to spill his drink in the process, and pinched the bridge of his nose as if fighting off a headache. Probably from all the whiskey. Bloody alcoholic.
"Come here, Bartleby," he growled, sounding rather exasperated and put-upon.
Well, that was unexpected. Amy hesitated.
"It would involve a great deal of tedious paperwork if this were the last place you were seen before throwing yourself off the astronomy tower. Come." He moved his hand away from his face and scowled at her in a way that reminded her of the warning look he gave students in class.
She complied rather cautiously, looked at the spot next to him on the couch, and decided to sit on the floor at his feet instead.
The young professor handed his drink down to her and, in a gesture that seemed disturbingly out of character, reached a pale hand down to absently stroke her hair once or twice. His touch was pleasantly warm, which surprised her for some reason, and just barely this side of intimate, which didn't. The action gave her the rather ridiculous impression of being some kind of lap dog. Demoralizing, but also maybe vaguely comforting.
"Welcome," he said, all silk and sarcasm, "To hell."
Is that what this was? Was this hell? She wondered how he knew that and why he seemed to be right there with her.
This was around the time she noticed the empty bottles of whiskey shoved under his armchair and pondered what sort of girl would put herself in this position.
"Myron, is Amy copying pages from the Magical Language Association Handbook for Editors?"
"Yes, Alex, she is."
"Did she lose a bet?"
"No."
"Has she been cursed?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Then why, Myron, why is Amy copying pages from the Magical Language Association Handbook for Editors?"
"Snape," Myron said simply.
"He's making her do that?"
"Yes."
"How many pages has she done?"
"Looks like she's almost a third of the way through the book."
"What's that even like?"
"I don't know. Amy, what's it like, copying pages from the Magical Language Association Handbook for Editors?"
Amy looked up from her section on semi-autonomous quills, then looked down again because Alex was sprawled across the couch with her legs over Myron's lap. Her skirt had ridden up immodestly where she had a bottle of firewhiskey shoved between her thighs like a giant glass erection, and Myron seemed to be idly pushing his index finger in and out of the bottle's opening. Neither one of them had the decency to look the least bit embarrassed by this, but were absolutely comfortable fawning all over each other like normal people apparently do all the time.
"Well?" Myron prompted.
Amy considered, her face buried in the editing book. "Have you ever read the back of a shampoo bottle?" she finally asked.
"Um…sure?" said Myron.
"It's like doing that over, and over, and over again."
Alex dislodged the bottle from her thighs and took a swig. "That's, ah, that's pretty fucked-up, Amy."
Let her tell you about the time she read the back of the shampoo bottle.
She was in France at the time—remember, her parents took her on vacation there, after it happened—thinking about killing herself. She was standing in the shower, letting the hot spray of water that beat against her shoulders go cold because the very idea of actually using soap seemed somehow exhausting beyond reason, when her mother knocked on the door to check on her.
Amy assured her mother she wasn't dead, forced herself to pick up the shampoo bottle, and, putting off the monumental task of lathering soap through her hair, read the back.
She doesn't remember what it said. It said the sorts of things shampoo bottles say. Just one long advertisement that became irrelevant the moment her mum bought the product. Promises of sleeker tips, healthier roots, a better life. Sentences without subjects. Not tested on animals. May cause eye irritation.
Single-word commands: Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
But for fifteen glorious seconds, Amy wasn't present in the life she hated. Neither was she living someone else's fiction. She was just…nowhere. Suspended. A sentence without a subject.
Not tested on animals.
May cause eye irritation.
She read it again. And again. And again.
Lather.
Rinse.
Repeat.
That's exactly what copying pages from the book was like. A sort of soap for the brain. She doubted that Snape knew this. It was much more likely he'd simply dreamed up the horribly tedious task as poetic retribution for her little grammatical breakdown. She was still being punished; it's just that this way he didn't have to subject himself to the possibility of her vomiting all over the place again.
"You know, Amy, you get detention so much, one would almost think you enjoyed it," Alex teased.
Ridiculous. What kind of sick, fucked-up person would actually want to spend time with Snape?
What kind of person would kiss him?
"Have you started on that Charms essay?" Myron asked, interrupting Amy's train of thought. "It's due on Monday."
"I'm working on it," Amy lied.
"I'm writing mine on Secrecy Magic—you know, like the Fidelius Charm, Anonymity Curse, and Non-Disclosure Enchantment. Only got three inches left, too."
Amy looked up. "Non-Disclosure Enchantment? That sounds familiar."
Both he and Alex tittered drunkenly at her.
"Well it would, wouldn't it? Flitwick's been talking about them all week, or do you just think about the shampoo bottle when he lectures?" Myron teased.
Ridiculous. Of course not. Just like she certainly didn't read the back of her ink bottle instead of listening, either. Did it say that ingestion of this product may result in spontaneous combustion, and that Scrivenshaft & Sons Ink Company cannot be held liable? How would she know? She's never read the fine print.
"I'm arguing that Non-Disclosure Enchantments differ from other forms of Secrecy Spells because they don't cover intent, and can be gotten around by—" Myron began.
"Merlin, shut up, you swot. Nobody cares," Alex interrupted.
He scoffed. "Philistines, the both of you. You never know when something like that could be important—I need a drink just to sit here," Myron said, reaching for the bottle.
Alex made a show of holding it just out of his reach. "Oh, this? You want this?" she asked innocently.
"I'll just—go ahead—and—take that." Myron bent to reach for the bottle, and Alex kept teasing it just out of his reach, giggling the whole while, until he was practically laying on top of her on the couch.
"Why don't you tell us a joke, Alex?" Amy said loudly.
Alex let Myron pluck the bottle from her hand and sat up a bit while they dislodged their limbs from one another.
"I know a great one—A vampire walks into a bar."
"Heard it," said Myron and Amy together.
Alex pouted for a minute, screwed up her face in intoxicated consideration, then smiled deviously. "So a bloke says to me he had his first sexual experience at Hogwarts," she began.
"Did he?" asked Myron.
She nodded. "Sure did. Fucked little Mary Barton behind the greenhouses, and do you know what she said to him?"
"What did she say to him?"
"She said: 'Well, you're better at shagging than teaching Herbology.'"
Myron laughed a full-throated, rich series of ha's! He had a nice voice.
Alex held up her hand to stop him. "How is spinach like a Mudblood's dick?"
"I don't know Alex, how is spinach like a Mudblood's dick?" Myron asked.
"If you're forced to eat it as a kid, you'll never enjoy it as an adult."
"Merlin, where do you even pick this stuff up?" Myron asked after he'd finished laughing.
"My uncle Augie," Alex replied fondly.
"You should ask him for new material over the holidays," Amy teased. The holidays were still two weeks away, but they couldn't come fast enough for her. Amy looked up and was surprised to find that Alex's expression instantly soured, all traces of amusement gone from her face. Myron wasn't smiling either, but looking pointedly—and angrily—at Amy.
"I'd love to, but they don't allow Christmas visits to Azkaban last time I checked," Alex snarled.
Of course. Uncle Augie as in Uncle Augustus. As in Augustus Rookwood, who was currently serving a life sentence in Azkaban for crimes committed in the service of the Dark Lord. It was hard to keep track of whose family members were dead, or in Azkaban, or simply missing and presumed to be rotting in an unmarked grave.
"I'm so sorry…I…I forgot," Amy said lamely.
"Must be nice," Alex sneered back. It was almost Snape-worthy in its scorn.
Amy closed her mouth, then opened it again to apologize more.
But Alex just waved her off irritably. "Whatever. It doesn't matter."
Myron, ever the peacemaker, offered Alex the bottle again, but she waved that off, too.
"Nah, I'll have all the firewhiskey I can drink soon enough," she said.
"Planning on robbing a pub, are you?" Myron teased.
Alex merely smiled enigmatically.
Amy dreamt.
She dreamt of that first Potions class with Snape, the one from over a year ago, now, when she learned that her childhood god couldn't lecture worth a damn, never remembered anyone's name, and certainly would not start a Snape Club where you got to eat lovely stuffed pheasant and meet famous people. Only, what she dreamed wasn't at all what happened.
Snape's classroom was in disarray.
Several 4th-year boys were chasing a 4th-year girl around with Memoriballs in their hands, giggling and imploring her to watch it. The girl bumped into a table as she ran from them, knocking somebody's potion to the floor, where it hissed and began eating away the soles of the other students' shoes.
"Professor!" cried a swotty Ravenclaw from the back, his hand thrust high in the air. "Professor! It clearly says in Advanced Charms that the Non-Disclosur—"
But whatever it was the book said, she never did learn. Amy was too distracted by Myron and Alex, who were noisily sucking each other's faces close to the front of the classroom.
"You've got to see this!" the boys were yelling at the giggling girl again. "It's disgusting!"
Snape wasn't even trying to control his classroom. He leaned against his desk, arms crossed over his wiry torso, apparently blind to everything but Amy, whom he stared at. As their eyes met, his jaw did this thing where it clenched and he looked just livid as hell. From her spot in the front row, she could see a muscle twitching painfully in his temple, partially visible through a curtain of greasy black hair.
"Professor! Professor!" cried the Ravenclaw, now desperately waving his hand in the air.
"Oh, Myron!" moaned Alex in rapture.
The 4th-year girl knocked another cauldron to the floor with a bang, and the students in the back began standing on their chairs to save their feet.
"Well?" Snape asked as the chaos swirled all around them, his lip curling with contempt.
"I—Sir?" Amy responded.
"Well, are you going to sit there for another seven years like a feckless idiot, or do you plan on doing something about it?"
"About...what?"
"Get up here," he commanded.
Amy got out of her chair, stepped over a puddle of noxious-smelling liquid that represented the mingled product of the two spilled cauldrons, and crossed over to him.
Snape caught her chin between thumb and forefinger, his touch raising goosebumps all over her skin, and this time, when they kissed, she did feel something.
The world did come to a standstill—Myron and Alex ceased fumbling with one another, the 4th-years fell silent, the Ravenclaw quit trying to get Snape's attention. Even the ruined potion coating the dungeon floor stopped its corrosive hissing.
There was nothing. Absolutely nothing but the feeling of Snape's lips gliding smoothly across her own; the taste of his mouth, hot and juniper-y with gin; the sound of her own moan vibrating against his lips and shooting straight to the space between her trembling thighs.
She felt his one of his hands tighten its grip on her chin suddenly, while the other caressed her thigh and then insinuated itself between her legs. She gasped, weak-kneed, as he slid his fingers under her knickers like a thief in the night and pressed them there. His thumb swirled around her clit as two fingers played at her entrance and slicked so easily—so very easily—inside her, and—no, no, no—this was suddenly happening too fast, and the classroom around them erupted in chaos again as Snape abruptly and violently shoved her to the floor.
"On your knees," he snarled as he began unfastening his belt.
"Professor!" screeched the Ravenclaw from the back of the room as the 4th-year girl collided with yet another cauldron and sent its red-hot contents splashing onto Myron and Alex, who lay on the ground in a tangle of naked limbs and groans of ecstasy.
At precisely the moment Snape grabbed a fistful of Amy's hair, her wand exploded of its own accord and sent him hurling toward the opposite end of the room. He shattered against the wall and became a bloody mass of dead toads massacred in formaldehyde—mortified in red Preserving Solution—and it reminded her of—it reminded her of—
"Really, Severus," interrupted Slughorn from the door, where he suddenly appeared wearing a salmon-colored fez hat and a look of gentle fatherly disapproval. "You ought to exercise better control of your classroom."
Slughorn then turned to Amy and pulled a bag of sweets out of thin air. He gave it a jaunty little shake in her general direction and asked, "pineapple?"
She woke in her own bed in the Slytherin dorms on the last day before Christmas holidays. She felt sick and dirty; covered in sweat, her heart pounding against her ribcage like a wounded animal, her belly on fire and knickers sodden, and found that Alex was talking to her.
"Amy? Are you awake?"
"Um, yeah," was Amy's groggy, breathless reply.
"I'd like to see it," Alex whispered into the night. It sounded like a confession.
"See...what?" Amy breathed.
"Azkaban," Alex said softly. "I'd like to see it."
"Well, it's not like it's going anywhere."