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: 10.15.20 - Thank you again to those who favorited/followed. Please do review; any feedback is appreciated.

The Dog

"Your parents," Snape intoned slowly, his teeth barred unpleasantly against the cold, "are truly terrible people. Did you know that, Bartleby?"

"They're all right," she said.

"They're a fucking quarter hour late, is what they are."

"Maybe they thought you meant seven P.M., not seven A.M. They're not really morning people."

Snape merely swore against something that sounded an awful lot like 'the blasted cold,' visibly shivering as they stood waiting for her parents by the front of the Castle. It was bitterly cold this close to the solstice, of course, and she was fairly certain her own lips were turning blue, but it still surprised her to hear Snape be such a whinging little bitch about the temperature. She'd always taken him for the sort who would bear it stoically, even secretly enjoy it as a sort of passive form of self-flagellation.

On her right side, a thestral Amy shouldn't have been able to see stood yoked to one of Hogwarts' carriages. It pawed the ground as if it, too, had something better to be doing that morning. The illustrations really don't do them justice, you know. You couldn't possibly appreciate how surreal they are until you can actually see them.

On her left side, Snape drew out his pocket-watch. "I believe we've established a pattern. One would be tempted to think they didn't love you."

"You really shouldn't say things like that to people," Amy said, reaching her own—unfortunately un-gloved—hand toward the thestral. Interesting as it was to finally be able to see them, she found it disconcerting. They'd told her the boy survived—and it must be true, because why would they lie about that? She wondered just how exactly that rule about seeing death and thestrals worked. Did it count if someone technically—but temporarily—died in front of you? Yes, that must have been it.

She told Snape, "You probably shouldn't have asked them to come this far, either. Diagon Alley would have been closer."

"May I remind you that remanding juvenile delinquents back to the custody of their parents is a courtesy done at my convenience? I will make the appointment for whatever time and place I damn well please," he snapped.

The thestral's nose was velvety and warm under her touch, not at all cold or reptilian like she thought it would be. It's funny, they're supposed to be creatures synonymous with death and decay, but right now it seemed very, very much alive. Would Snape's thin frame be radiating heat and life, too, if she were the kind of person who dared get closer to him?

Dared to kiss him?

She licked her lips, where the memory of Snape's lingered like a ghost's caress. She'd worried over that memory so many times in the weeks since it happened that she was no longer even sure it had happened. Snape certainly gave no intimation that he remembered.

This was probably for the best.

"Fucking twenty minutes late, now," Snape was saying under his breath. He closed the watch and shoved it into his pocket, then shot her a look of pure loathing, as if she were directly responsible for her parents' pathological tardiness.

The thestral nuzzled her hand. Amy felt an inexplicable surge of fondness for it.

"Damn it, Bartleby, stop playing with that wretched thing before it bites you and I have that to contend with, as well," he snapped.

Amy turned to him, surprised. "You can see them, too?"

"Of course I can fucking see them."

Of course he fucking could.

Amy shoved her hand back in her pocket and scanned the skies for the owl that would tell her that her parents had died, or disowned her, or otherwise left her alone with no friends in the world but the murdering angry alcoholic at one side and the harbinger of death at the other.

She didn't see one.

Snape went for his pocket watch a third time, as if that would somehow speed up the process, muttering darkly to himself about the situation being 'ridiculous' and her parents being 'ungrateful lay-abouts.' You had to admire any man who could stand there and abuse the people who'd given him the cloak on his back.

Yeah, that's right. He was wearing the new cloak. It smelled like winter, cold and dry and stiff, like his lips brushing up against hers.

"What an atrocious waste of my time," he spat.

She wondered what Snape would be doing that she was interrupting. You tended to forget professors existed when they weren't giving you detention or demonstrating the proper way to prune a Venomous Tentacula. Would he be going to his own home for the holidays? It was such a funny thought, Snape having a 'home' somewhere, but surely he didn't live at Hogwarts all 365 days of the year. He'd go mad. There must have been an address somewhere connected to his name. A kitchen with dusty glasses. A severely neglected cat.

She was about to suggest that he simply leave her to wait on her own, or, if he couldn't bring himself to abandon his duty as guardian in loco parentis, Apparate her home, but a paper airplane appeared with a pop, literally out of nowhere, and began nudging Snape.

He snatched the note out of the air and positively threw it at her as if to say that they were her terrible fucking parents, so she could read whatever terrible fucking excuse they had for being late.

"I'm sure they have a good reason…" she began, unfurling the airplane.

"Then by all means, enlighten us both as to what that good reason might be," Snape snarled back, his arms folded in front of him.

She bent her head and read, but it didn't take her very long to realize the note had nothing at all to do with her or her terrible parents. The broken seal didn't even have her family emblem on it.

Severus,

I regret to inform you that...

Jesus Christ. That was gruesome. How awful.

"Do you…Did you know Abraxas Malfoy?" she asked, looking up at Snape.

"I swear to Merlin if this is one of your asinine non-sequiturs…" he began. And the look on his face, all twisted with cold derision…

Well, it's why she didn't feel the least bit bad about breaking the news the way she did.

"He's dead," Amy said simply, handing over the note. "He slit his wrists in the bathtub last night."

At least she took a grim sort of satisfaction at the look of shock on his face.

Amy woke on Boxing Day to find the greying muzzle of a German shepherd three inches from her face.

She'd fallen asleep on the couch again.

The dog was a battle-scarred old thing with a notch missing from one ear, a slight limp, and the most disconcerting habit of staring at you while you slept. Some dogs licked, others barked, but this one just woke you by sheer force of will.

Amy rubbed her eyes, wincing at the sharp feeling of crystalized eye goo digging into her tear ducts, and turned over so her back was to the dog. She stared at the dusty upholstery of the couch cushion, so superior to the leather of the Slytherin common room because your skin didn't get stuck to it, and thought that she liked this place.

Her childhood home had the air of a once-dignified country house that had fallen into the hands of people who liked to read but didn't much care for cleaning. There were old newspapers and books stacked on nearly every surface—including, here and there, the floor. Half-drunk cups of tea left half-moon stains on half-read novels, which didn't bother Amy on principle so much as she couldn't shake the paranoid thought that Madam Pince would suddenly materialize just to have a fit about it.

But, no, Madam Pince never showed up. The air wasn't charged with the magic and drama of a thousand teenagers each convinced that they were the center of their own universe. The only voices she heard belonged to her parents. Amy could sleep where and when she wanted to, get up only when she felt like it, and have a pee without listening to the girl in the next stall have one, too.

It was all very pleasant, those two weeks in the winter and two months in the summer that she stayed here. Rather like being a houseguest at a low-key bed and breakfast that changed minutely every time she visited. New towels in the downstairs bathroom, one year. A missing painting in the sitting room, the next. It was a little alienating after seven years, the cumulative effect of all these changes.

When, for instance, had they gotten a dog?

Amy closed her eyes and tried not to worry about it, but the dog was still staring at the back of her head—had been, for God knows how long—so she got up.

The dog led her past the missing painting, past the bathroom with the new towels, past the kitchen entrance where her parents' voices floated lazily out, and stopped at the front door. Amy opened it for him, but, like the thousand other times they'd done this in three days, all he did was stare doubtfully out at nothing.

Nothing out there at all except a statue of St. Francis and some dying hydrangeas.

She let him look for a while, wondering if it was possible for dogs to go senile, before closing the door and wandering into the kitchen. He stayed behind, unmoving, and stared at the door.

Amy's parents were absorbed in a late breakfast—a favorite daily ritual that might last as many as two hours, three if it was Sunday, and usually involved cold service and gossip. She could see that they hadn't bothered to cook anything, but were eating toast and picking on the remnants of a large gift basket that had been unwrapped last night.

"Unbelievable," Amy's father grunted from behind the Daily Prophet's obituary pages. "They're saying it was Dragon Pox."

Across the kitchen table, Amy's mother stopped fussing with her toast just long enough to make a disapproving, skeptical noise. "Dragon Pox? At his age? How naïve do they think we are?"

"Dragon pox," Amy's father muttered again.

The scrape-scrape-scrape of a butter knife against dry bread resumed.

The news that Abraxas Malfoy offed himself one week before Christmas spread at about the rate you'd expect these things to spread—quickly, and devastatingly. It had been less than a week since it happened, and Wizarding Britain was already abuzz with rumor and speculation; hungry for sordid details.

Amy's parents were no exception.

She understood why they were making all the fuss; she really did. You don't hear that the patriarch of Britain's oldest, Purest Wizarding family has slit his wrists in the bathtub and feel confident about the future of your race, after all. Still, Amy wished they would talk about something else. It was already hard enough to keep her mind off the thing. It wasn't like she was upset about it or anything—she'd never even met the man. Neither did it needle at her philosophical side. She wasn't working through the nuances of some grand epiphany about life or death or choice.

It's just she couldn't help thinking that he must have been naked.

There she'd be in her childhood home with its inexplicable dog and quaint domestic debris all decked out in tinsel, and—bam!—all of the sudden there's this dead old man bobbing up between her and her soft cheese sampler. He would pop up at the most inopportune times, just floating there all naked and bloodless and waterlogged, pink-soapy bathwater staining the crevices between his wrinkles.

Her father's voice cut through that unpleasant image.

"It's Lucius' neo-fascist politics that killed him, if you ask me," he said suddenly, his face surfacing from behind The Prophet. "Lucius and his—oh, good morning, Amy."

Henry Scrivener was a self-described 'gentleman farmer' remembered in Amy's childhood merely as an agreeable fellow who had red whiskers and liked boring things. He enjoyed words like 'neo-fascist,' reading dirty French novels in his study, and once got an entire day's worth of entertainment out of watching his six-year-old daughter scour the property for Gentleman Trees, and then another when he gave her a spade and told her that gentlemen grew underground.

Amy's mother looked from her toast to her daughter. "Done with your lie-in, I see? Have a biscuit. I think your father is about to saint Mr. Malfoy just because he's gone and died," she said cheerfully, and gave her husband a playfully challenging look from behind wire-rimmed spectacles.

The only thing in the world Selina Scrivener loved more than her pet jarvey was being right, and she had a thousand little tricks to make sure she always was. Amy had to learn from her mother that a 'gentlemen farmer' had nothing to do with farming gentleman and was actually just another word for being idle in the country. People who were idle in the city were called 'politicians.' And, if you did everything for everybody without any thanks whatsoever, people called you 'Mum.'

Amy sat and suffered the gift basket to tip a few slices of smoked gouda and some crackers onto her plate, then noticed that the inexplicable dog had appeared at her elbow, and was staring.

"Saint the man?" Henry repeated, appearing to quite enjoy the prospect of a noon debate. "I never even liked him. My only contention is that Lucius's radical beliefs—"

"—Killed him," Amy's mum interrupted, setting her toast down. "As if Abraxas didn't have his own share of radical beliefs."

"What Abraxas believed and what Abraxas did were always two very different things, Selina," Amy's father said, folding the obituaries back into neatness. "We knew the man, for Merlin's sake. Forward policies and radical acts never suited him, not even when he forced that Mudlood Minister out of office in '68. Lucius is a positive zealot, comparatively." He set the paper in the middle of the table, right between a book about topiary and a jar of cocktail olives.

Amy surreptitiously tipped a slice of cheese onto the floor for the dog, but he merely sniffed at it unenthusiastically before staring up at her again.

"Well, I might have died of shame, too, seeing my own child like that," Selina conceded, which is what she did when it turned out the conversation simply wasn't as lively as she'd hoped. She picked up her toast and began scraping again. "He made quite the picture at the Wizengamot, waltzing in like the prodigal son returned, Bella's sister on his arm and that newborn son in tow, pleading some ridiculous story about Imperius."

Sounded more to Amy like the prodigal zealot Lucius was pleading imperious.

Haha, get it? Imperious?

No?

That's okay. Amy's parents didn't get it, either. It wasn't really very funny, anyway.

Amy's parents gave each other The Look, the one that said they half-expected to come home one day and find their adult daughter trying to dig gentlemen out of the garden. Then they gave her The Look. Feeling left out, Amy gave the dog The Look.

Henry Scrivener cleared his throat unnecessarily. "Well, anyway…that's exactly my point. Abraxas always went out of his way to work in the background. While Lucius was running around playing Death Eater dress-up—a foot soldier, for Merlin's sake—Abraxas was losing everything. He lost Minister Bagnold. He lost Barty Crouch—."

"—I wouldn't go so far as to say he had Crouch," Mum interrupted. "That relationship was never good."

"It was better than his relationship with Madam Bones."

Scrape-scrape-scrape said the toast. Madam Bones was a bit of a sore subject.

"Where was I?" Amy's father asked, also unnecessarily. "Right. He lost Bagnold in the Ministry, Crouch in Law Enforcement, and god knows what back-room deal forced him out of Hogwarts last term."

"Hogwarts?" Amy interrupted without thinking. "What did he have to do with the school?"

"He was on the Board of Governors, Amy. Everybody knows that," Mum said.

'Everybody knows.' It was like some damned conspiracy whereby 'everybody' got together at the monthly 'know' meeting and never failed to lose Amy's invitation.

"What, like 'everybody knows' that Professor Snape was a Death Eater?" Amy said, because she's an idiot. A little voice in her head told her that she'd just brought about the death of conversational subtlety everywhere. How the collective sense of decency mourns.

Her parents exchanged The Look again.

"Do not even mention that horrible man to me, Amelia," Mum said.

Amy's pick-up, shockingly, had not gone very well. Snape had been absolutely livid by the time her parents finally did show up, while they insisted that getting worked-up over a measly little half hour was 'a sign of a diseased mind.' On the plus side, though, it worked out rather well for Amy. Her parents were too busy being angry at their daughter's terrible teacher to be angry about their daughter's terrible grades. Snape, meanwhile, was too angry about his student's terrible parents to be much bothered by his student's terrible…everything. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be a child of divorce.

Amy's parents changed the subject after that.

They abused Lucius Malfoy a little more—hypocritically, in Amy's opinion. These were the people who'd been so friendly with the Lestrange cousins, after all—then discussed their plans for the upcoming year. Something about a wine festival in the Champaign region of France or an opera in Vienna. Whatever. It sounded boring and pretentious and full of people who used words like 'neo-fascist' while they drank. The white wine would look like watered-down piss and the red would be the exact same color as bloody bathwater.

Bam!—dead old man.

Can you imagine finding someone like that, so utterly stripped of dignity and decency? Who discovered Abraxas' body, she wondered, and was the water cold, when they did? She tried to envision it as dramatically as she could in an effort to feel something appropriate about the whole thing, something other than nausea. The scene developed slowly, with Lucius himself seeing his father's body for the first time, and attempting a desperate revival effort, and invariably failing. He collapsed into a sobbing, hysterical heap on a floor slippery with the diluted lifeblood of his heritage.

She tried, anyway.

But then Abraxas Malfoy was naked again, his wizened old man penis flopping and flaccid in her head.

Jesus.

Somewhere, a million miles away, somebody spoke.

"…Amy, so you'll have to use a Sticking Charm."

"Huh?" she said eloquently. "I'll have to use a sticking charm for what?"

Her mother tutted impatiently. "For your new gown, Amy. The zipper's a bit funny."

"Why am I wearing a new gown with a funny zipper?" Amy asked, trying her best to act like a normal person who could keep up with a conversation and definitely didn't have tiny professors and naked Malfoys living in her head.

"Because it was the only one they had in your size."

"No, no, I mean, why am I wearing a new gown in the first place?" she asked.

"For Merlin's sake, Amy," her mother said irritably, "Haven't you been listening? It's for the funeral. We're going to Mr. Malfoy's funeral." She punctuated the word 'funeral' both times by pointing at Amy with her butter knife.

"Wait, what!?" Amy said, alarmed. "I'm going? But why do I have to go?" And, Jesus, did that come out whinging and petulant.

"Because I won't have you sitting here feeling sorry for yourself all holiday!" Mum snapped.

Even she could hear how bitchy that sounded.

Amy looked imploringly at her father. He picked up the cocktail olives and suddenly became very interested in fishing one from the bottom of the jar, the traitor.

"We should pay our respects," Amy's mother continued more gently. "And, anyway, we haven't seen any of those people since Evan's wedding, and—"

But Amy's mother was interrupted by a squeaky, weasel-y voice just outside the kitchen window.

"Bloody—'come 'ere, you bugger!"

It was, unmistakably, the aforementioned jarvey that Amy's mum loved so well. There was a hurried scurrying sound, like the jarvey was trying to dig something out of a burrow.

Sure enough, the next thing they heard was a different, equally small voice panting, "'Gerroff me! Gerroff me!'"

More scuffling, struggling—and then the horrible sound of ripping flesh and crunching bone to indicate that the jarvey had just murdered another garden gnome. Amy could see it now, the glistening viscera exposed to all the world, a bloody mess of intestines strewn across the snow like slimy pink-and-grey sausages filled with shit and shot through with pulsating blood vessels. She could practically smell it, too, the slaughterhouse stench of mingling blood and—

"Don't make that face, Amy, you know what they do to the tulips," Amy's mother said matter-of-factly. She paused to listen, then remarked, "About time, too. I swear those gnomes are getting smarter."

"Well, the jarvey keeps killing the dull ones, doesn't it?" Amy said, thinking about Kettleburn's lecture on natural selection as she willed the sick feeling out of her throat. "In a couple generations, they'll be marching on the Ministry, demanding the right to use a wand."

Her father took the bait. "You know, she's got a point about that. They'll probably be followed by a pack of jarvey barristers—Oh, God, just picture them in little hats," he said, and chortled over the sound of sharp teeth breaking fragile bone.

"I don't think the jarvey's getting smarter," Amy said, disgusted. "More vicious, maybe."

"Excellent!" her mother exclaimed, exasperated. "The genius gnomes and vicious jarveys will fight it out on the steps of the Wizangamot, and we'll finally know whether the quill is mightier than the sword!"

Amy's father spilled olive brine on the table cloth laughing at that one.

Mum followed up by pointing at Amy with her butter knife again. "In the meantime, Amy, I need you to try on that gown."

So Amy tried on the gown.

It was a stiff, cheerless blue conservatively cut in wool or some equally itchy material that reminded her a little bit of Snape's teaching robes, except that Snape's clothes conferred authority. Reflection-Amy merely looked like someone's sullen teenage daughter with her dead hair and round shoulders and fundamental lack of grace. Either her mother's taste had suffered a nervous breakdown, or she'd scoured the globe for the single ugliest dress in all existence and not stopped to rest until she found it. Perhaps the intention was to shame the wandering male gaze.

Even the inexplicable dog hated it.

Her father barely glanced up from his olives, disinterested, but her mother got such a smugly satisfied look, Amy was certain she knew just how ugly the thing was, the bitch.

"It's itchy," Amy protested.

"So cast a Softening Spell," her mother said airily, as though she were the one being ridiculous.

"Why are these pockets here?" Amy asked.

"They're practical, dear."

"Practical," Dad echoed vaguely.

"I look like a walking obituary," Amy said.

"Well, thank God we're not going to the theatre," Mum retorted.

"I don't like it," Amy said, as though that settled the matter.

"Fine. Go naked, then," her mother snapped, and took a vicious bite of the toast she'd babied all morning.

Her father began to laugh. And then he kept laughing. Loudly. Heartily. With tears appearing at the corners of his eyes. The jar in his hand threatened to spill olive brine all over the table again.

"For Merlin's sake, it wasn't that funny," her mother groused.

"No, no, I've just gotten it! Imperious! Lucius pled imperious. It was a pun, Selina."

"Was it?" her mother said. "Imperius. Imperious. Oh, Imperious."

"Imperious!"

"Well, that was fairly clever, Amy."

Her parents were okay people, actually. They didn't much like to clean and frequently forgot to cook, but they were smart and funny and they taught her how to read when she was little. That's why she doesn't harbor any resentment about it. About the fact that they left her at Hogwarts for three whole hours after it happened. They're entitled to go out to a party. In France. Three hours away from even the fastest emergency owl post.

Honestly, nobody just sits at the Floo all day, waiting to hear that their daughter's been raped.

Amy had seen Lucius' photo before, in the paper—his wedding announcement or something—but, like an illustration of a thestral, it didn't do the real thing justice. He was an absurdly good-looking man in an antiquated kind of way, like he'd walked straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting for the sole purpose of restoring old-world splendor to his surroundings. Pale, with platinum blonde hair that Amy would have killed for, he couldn't have been older than thirty. His dress robes looked incredibly expensive. He smelled good.

Snape looked strange sitting next to him.

They were a study in contrast, sitting there in the opulence of Malfoy Manor waiting for the eulogy to begin. If Malfoy was the prodigal son, then Snape was the bastard: corrupted, somehow, but burning with a fierce, hardened independence.

This was December 28th, 1982. Abraxas Malfoy's funeral was held at his ancestral home, Malfoy Manor. It was a snowy day, and so dark and overcast that one was hard-pressed to guess where in the sky the sun was hiding. It wasn't particularly cold, however. Had Abraxas not been dead, it would have been a good day to have cousins over for a Christmas party, and watch as their children played with enchanted snowballs on the grounds. At least, that's what Amy would have liked to be doing, had things been different.

As the officiant droned on about Abraxas' life, Amy wondered if Snape had ever played in the snow. Surely that was a universal childhood experience in Britain. Yet it was difficult to imagine Snape had ever been any younger than the 17-year-old god she'd stared at across the Common Room. And, anyway, he was probably the kind of kid who didn't so much have a childhood as just sort of waited awkwardly for adulthood to start.

Outside, the snow continued to fall.

When the formal eulogy was over, it was time for friends and family to speak. Walburga Black was the first to totter to the pulpit and scandalize them all by reading an absolutely hopeless bit of prose:

"There are certain queer times and o-o-occasions in this strange mixed affair we c-call l-life" Madam Black began, her jowls quivering just as tremulously as the hands which clutched a bit of parchment between them.

"She's gone batty, I tell you," somebody whispered.

"For God's sake, Amycus, the witch lost both sons barely over a year ago..." somebody else hissed back.

"So did Lestrange. You don't see her whinging."

"Well, Lestrange wasn't sleeping with him, now was she? Now be quiet."

Madam Black dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief and started over: "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life, when a man takes this whole universe for a vast p-p-practical j-joke."

Madam black paused to sob for another moment or two while the audience shifted restlessly. Amy watched Lucius Malfoy's knuckles whiten as he gripped the snake-headed cane he'd inherited from his father. Though whether in stoic grief or downright rage that this elderly woman was ruining a perfectly good funeral, she couldn't say.

"I'll thank sweet sufferin' Christ when tha's over," somebody sitting next to Amy's mum whispered. "Sooner we get 'im in the ground, sooner we can give 'im a real send-off."

"Oh, got some unsuspecting Muggle to torture in his honor, Walden?" returned Amy's mum with a smile.

"Nah, 's not like the old days, is it? Me and the boys are goin' round the pub. By t'eh way, How's things workin' ou' with the dog—"

"Shh!"

The batty old woman tilted her head back and closed her eyes in one final attempt to grasp after her dignity through the misery. "A vast practical joke," she repeated, "though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own." She paused to let the words take effect. Then, finally: "That was from Abraxas' f-favorite author," she sobbed. "H-Herman Melville."

That's when Amy laughed.

Actually laughed.

She laughed loudly. Inappropriately. Right there in the middle of the pretentious hall with its pretentious people.

Because isn't it funny.

Isn't it just laugh-out-loud ironic that she's sitting in the middle of this Death Eater reunion pretending to be a funeral, and all anybody can do is snipe and gossip, and it just so happens that Melville was the departed's favorite author. It could have been literally anyone else, but it wasn't. It was Melville. Melville, who also wrote Bartleby the Scrivener.

She thought she understood exactly what Melville meant, about life being a vast practical joke. And she laughed.

"The nerve," someone spat lowly.

Her mother, the filthy hypocrite, smacked her upside the head. Hard. Her scalp stung while she watched Snape watch the body be interred in the frozen earth. It still stung a little bit while she tried not to stare at him by drowning her social ineptitude with some expensive champagne that she was undoubtedly too base to appreciate. It stopped stinging when she finally fled, fuzzy-brained, to the front steps of the Manor so she wouldn't have to try not to stare at him anymore.

Sunset had slipped into frigid night by the time Amy found a place to be alone. The front steps were cold and hard, but the air outside was abundant. New. Clean. As though the evergreens on the property had just finished making it, and it hadn't yet had a chance to pass through the gasping mouths of strangers.

It was still outside, and silent. There was something a little beautiful in the winter, though, that she'd never noticed before. Something about the way that the moon illuminated snowdrifts and icicles. The entire Manor property seemed spun from the vapors of an opium dream.

And then Amy decided that describing anything as 'spun from the vapors of an opium dream,' even in internal monologue, was a very bad sign indeed, and so she sat down. The stone bannister seemed like the perfect place to cool her fevered forehead, and it was. She watched snow move in the distance for a while before realizing that it wasn't snow at all, but an albino peacock lost in the contrast of white on white.

It really was quite nice.

And then somebody had to go and ruin it all by coming outside, too. She looked back.

Of course.

It was Snape.

She thought, for one insane moment, that he'd actually followed her outside until she saw the unlit cigarette in his hand, and the expression on his face. There he was in his forbidding black, looking ridiculously incongruent without his dungeon backdrop, scowling down that great ugly nose at her as if to say, You? Again?

She opened her mouth to say—what, exactly? 'Good evening, Professor. Having a nice funeral?'—and closed it again at the futility of the project. He had turned his attention to something in the distance, anyway, trying his best to ignore her, and didn't seem to notice.

They existed like that, on the awkward, ragged edges of someone else's tragedy, for a while. It's not like she was expecting him to say something. Definitely she couldn't feel the heat bleeding off of him, or smell that strangely familiar, homey scent of smoke and damp wool that seemed to cling about him. Certainly she didn't half-hope he would drape his cloak around her because it was cold.

Amy almost jumped out of her own skin when one of the peacocks made a long, echoing noise that didn't belong in this English winter.

"How do they survive?" she asked, unable to help herself. "Isn't it too cold?"

"Abraxas bewitched them with a warming charm every season," Snape answered smoothly, his words a coiling issue of smoke and steam.

She looked up at his profile. "Really?"

He scoffed, which she took to be an answer in the negative. "Someday, long after my own funeral, perhaps you will learn to see the difference between fantasy and reality," he said with a bitterness that she doubted had anything to do with her. Was it possible that a man like Severus Snape could be troubled by thoughts of his own mortality?

"Did you know him? The departed?" she asked.

"Not well," he answered shortly. "Not that I find it particularly funny."

She ignored the jab. "But you must know the others, then?"

"Shocking though you may find it, I do have some miserable excuse for a private life, Bartleby."

Did he? She wondered if he had a girlfriend, and then frowned. 'Girlfriend' and 'Snape' were two more words that didn't belong in the same library, let alone the same sentence. If he had anything, it would be a…

…A 'lover,' perhaps?

"You don't seem to get along with the other professors," she observed.

He sighed. "Go inside, Bartleby, before you freeze to death and deprive us all of that keen talent for stating the obvious."

Amy stood up, smoothed the wrinkles on her hideous dress, and ascending the steps to join him on the landing. "This isn't Hogwarts," she reminded him. "I can freeze to death out here if I want to."

He responded to that by irritably flinging his cigarette butt into the night. "Turn around, then," he said.

"What—why?" she said, surprised.

"Because I asked you to," he answered shortly.

Slowly, reluctantly, she did. Amy heard him take a step toward her, felt his sudden looming presence at her back, and almost cringed away.

"Relax," he said quietly. "This will only take a moment."

'This' was him placing his hand on her shoulder, the calloused pad of his thumb against the skin of her neck, and the tips of his fingers over her collarbone. It was his free hand traveling down nodes of vertebra with a strange, jerky hesitance, and coming to a rest between her shoulder blades.

'This' was, finally, the sharp susurration of a zipper.

All of the blood in her brain seemed to drain instantly to her cheeks, because 'this' was Severus Snape, and he simply didn't touch people. He didn't stand behind you with his cloak just brushing the backs of your thighs and his breath sliding over the top of your head. He didn't hold anyone's shoulder, or initiate physical contact that came very, very close to making a mockery of teacher-student boundaries.

It took her a few seconds to realize that the sound was him zipping up her gown where it had, apparently, fallen a few inches because she'd failed to cast that Sticking Charm. He was covering her; fixing something that was out of order in his universe, and, no, that did not make it any less bizarre.

"Thank you," she eventually managed. She started to turn to face him, but he held her still. The heat from his hand sank heavily into her skin.

"He financed my apprenticeship," Snape said suddenly. Not really to her, but just out loud. "Two miserable years pulverizing moonstone and chopping wolfsbane for the great Damocles Belby, and Abraxas financed everything, right down to a stipend for living expenses."

"That was…Generous," she said cautiously.

"Generous," he sneered at the back of her head. "They'll probably have a bloody portrait commissioned. 'Abraxas The Beneficent.'"

"So what did he want? From you, I mean, in return?" Amy asked.

Snape didn't answer, at least not immediately. His thumb played absently on the skin of her neck again, stroking back and forth. She felt the hairs at the back of her neck prick in a not-entirely-unpleasant fashion. When he did finally speak, there was something strange in his tone. Reflective, maybe. "And what is it that you want from me, Bartleby?"

He released her shoulder then, and she turned to face him. Backlit by the glow of the Manor, Snape was a dark silhouette.

"Is it pity?" asked the silhouette. "Do you linger at my door because you have some neurotic need for my sympathy? My approval? Merlin forbid, my touch?"

Later, she will be angry about this. She will be absolutely furious. Because it isn't okay for him to do that to her. He is not allowed to touch her like she is something that is about to break, or which has already broken. Later, when she is back in her childhood home, tossing and turning in her too-small bed, she will decide that he has no bloody right. No right to offer his understanding and then insult her for taking it.

Later.

"Well?" he prompted. "What say you? Or are you such a passive observer in your own life that you don't even know?"

She looked him square in the eye and held his gaze for a moment. "I say it's nice to be in the company of another monster."

That's when he laughed.

Actually laughed.

It was a single, half-amused bark of a laugh that, like his smile, didn't really improve him at all. He laughed as though there were something desperately, tragically ironic in what she'd just said, but she had no idea what it could be.

"There may be a spark of life in you yet!" Snape said, shaking his head in amusement. "A spark that wants kindling, to be sure, but a spark nevertheless!" He then brushed swiftly past her down the steps and began walking into the night like a dream. He'd almost reached the apparition point by the time she regained her ability to speak.

"Did it ever go away, your Mark?" Amy called across the snowscape. She had no idea why.

She didn't expect him to answer, either, but he did, after a moment. He stopped dead in the snow-covered path and said, without turning to face her, "Did yours?"

And then he left her there alone on the front steps, cold and vulnerable and stunned. A naked corpse with her dick swinging in the wind.

On the last night before she had to return to Hogwarts, the inexplicable dog found its way into Amy's bedroom and woke her up by staring.

"What?" she asked him.

He stared.

"Do you need to pee?"

He stared.

"There's nothing out there, you know. I'm not getting up just so you can look."

He didn't even blink.

"Here. Come to bed," she said, and patted the spot next to her on the bed in the hopes that he'd jump up and forget about the whole thing.

He didn't.

"You suck," she told the dog, and pulled the covers over her head.

He stared.

Amy managed to ignore him for about twelve solid minutes, but that was all. She got up and let him lead her down the stairs, past the bathroom, past the kitchen, and to the front door. She opened it for him. Snow was falling outside, and she could see, in the narrow column of illumination cast by the light of the house, that St. Francis had the bloody remains of that unfortunate garden gnome strewn at his feet like a sacrifice. The jarvey was probably cuddled up in a warm burrow somewhere, or else buried in her mother's sheets. Amy wouldn't put it past her to sleep with the awful thing.

But the dog?

He just stared into the void.

"See? There's nothing there," she said, and closed the door.

He remained at the door even as Amy turned to go back upstairs. Bloody demented animal. Probably had brain damage or something.

She was surprised to find her father in the sitting room, a dirty French novel in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.

"Couldn't sleep?" she asked.

Dad set his book face-down on his knee and fixed his daughter with a mournful smile. "We've been waiting for you to say something about him," he said.

"About who?" Amy asked, thinking, inexplicably, of Snape.

"Jupiter," her father replied, tipping his cup of tea toward the dog. "It's 'Jupiter.'"

Amy looked back at her parent's insane dog. "Jupiter? Looks more like a German Shepard to me," she joked.

Her father didn't laugh.

She cleared her throat and tried again. "Gee, Dad….I, ah, don't know what to say. You and Mum can get a dog if you want to. I don't mind, either way."

"We got him for you. He's your Christmas present."

"Oh," she said, taken aback. "Thanks. That's, umm…." She looked doubtfully back at the dog, who was staring at the door where she'd left him. Somehow, she couldn't even pretend to feel enthusiastic about it, no matter how ungrateful it made her feel. "…That's swell."

"You don't recognize him, do you?" Amy's father said.

"Should I?" asked Amy.

"Do you remember the day you got lost in the Floo? You were nine."

"I still don't see what's so funny about that," she said, irritated that they kept bringing that up and failing to see what it had to do with her crappy present. "I could have ended up anywhere, couldn't I? Some Knockturn Alley cathouse, or a pedophile's living room."

"But you didn't. You—"

"Yeah, I've heard the story," Amy interrupted. "I ended up in Mr. Lestrange's flat, and they brought me home, and you thought they were the most charming young revolutionaries. They ended up staying for dinner and you all discovered you were cousins and had a good laugh about the thing and—"

"And you were terrified."

She blinked at her father, surprised. The graveness of the admission was jarring. Her father was the agreeable fellow who had red whiskers and liked boring things. He read dirty novels and made dry puns for jokes. He didn't say anything that seriously unless it was about politics.

"I was," she agreed carefully.

"And you told us the only thing that made you feel safe was that dog. You were so frightened, you wouldn't even tell them your Floo address. Not Rudolphus, not Rabastan, not even Bella. You would only tell Rabastan's dog, Jupiter."

Memories are tricky things. Highly suggestible. We can forget, we can remember, we can utterly fabricate them. It's why, even though Aurors do take and store memory evidence, that evidence isn't fully admissible in the Wizengamot. There's no way to ever truly be sure of a memory's veracity.

It may have been that Amy completely fabricated the memory that suddenly came to her under her father's suggestion. She might have pulled the terror and the hopelessness from another experience, glued it onto the recollection of petting a different dog, and pasted that onto a photograph of Rabastan Lestrange she'd seen in the paper. It could have been that the memory of sitting in a foreign parlor, covered in soot and trembling and crying with her eyes screwed shut and snot flowing freely from her nose, was completely fabricated. It could have been that the recollection of a cold, wet nose and a friendly lick on the face, of putting her arms around something furry and warm and wet-smelling, was wrong. She didn't think so, though.

"How…?" Amy asked, pushing past the lump in her throat.

"Everything the Lestrange's owned was confiscated after the trial, including Jupiter. Everything was supposed to be destroyed, but your mother knows someone over at the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures, and, well…"

He broke off tremulously and looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time since he'd been three hours late to pick her up from school last year. He looked at her like she was a stranger. Like she was the resurrected ghost of a child he'd once had, a child he'd failed.

"I am so sorry, Amy. For everything."

And Amy began to cry. She cried for herself, nine years old and lost, and for how different her life might have been had fate thrown her out anywhere but the living room of those three charming young revolutionaries. She cried for her father, this imperfect man she only saw for two weeks in the winter and two weeks in the summer; this man who was as flawed, as capable of error, as human as anybody else.

She cried because she finally realized why Jupiter kept leading her to the door.

He was waiting for Rabastan to come home.