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: 11.1.20 - Thank you again to those who favorited/followed. Please do review; any feedback is appreciated. My apologies for the delay in updating; I am struggling without a Beta.

Happy Birthday

"Myron…what the…what the fuck are you wearing?"

"I'm off to do field research, Alex. I need to fit in with my subjects—you know, camouflage myself."

"As a gigolo?"

He did, in truth, look a little like a whore standing there in the Great Hall with skin-tight dragonhide pants, a close-fitting jacket that seemed to be made entirely out of raven feathers, and nothing else. He was hairier than Amy might have guessed. She could clearly see a smattering of chest hair on well-defined pecs; a little trail starting at his belly button and disappearing under the waistband of his ridiculous pants. If she wasn't much mistaken, he was even wearing a little eyeliner. The one saving grace was the cello strapped to his back. At least he was a musical whore.

Or a rock star.

Myron smirked. "You know, if you'd put any thought into your senior project, you might be doing something interesting, too, instead of writing a term paper on Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration."

"You know what, Myron? Fuck you and your field research," Alex said acidly. The term paper was a bit of a sore subject. "I hope you catch syphilis and grown cauliflowers on your cock."

"It's genital warts gives you cauliflower cock—but that's abstinence-only education for you!" Myron said brightly. He turned to leave with an arrogant little swagger, but stopped as though he'd just remembered something. He pulled a bit of parchment from—somewhere, Amy wasn't sure where he'd pulled it from and she was afraid to even contemplate it—and brandished it at Alex.

"This pass says I can take a guest, but seeing as you're so busy writ—whoops!" He had to duck the apple Alex threw. It landed in a golden platter on Ravenclaw's table, spraying everybody in the immediate vicinity with hot scrambled eggs.

"Hey!" a prissy Ravenclaw girl squealed.

"Very nice, throwing food!" Myron yelled loudly, pointing beyond Ravenclaw to the Hufflepuff table. "I saw that, Tonks!"

And then Myron strutted away amid a minor scuffle that ended in a massive deduction of House points from both Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff.

"I wonder what he is doing, going out dressed like that every hour of the day," Alex asked after a while. She meant Myron.

"Umm…something about 'ethnomusicology?" Amy said, fiddling with a bit of egg on her plate. The details of Myron's senior project remained a mystery to everyone, and anybody who had the misfortune of being on the other end of an explanation got barraged with the sort of meaningless, made-up words that academics like to use. Words like 'ethnomusicology.'

"What the fuck does that—" Alex stopped herself. "It doesn't matter. He can do whatever he wants wearing whatever he wants. I'm getting married."

Oh, haven't you heard?

Alex is engaged to be married. In six months' time, she'll be walking down the aisle in a white gown to join in the holy bond of matrimony with none other than Theodore Nott.

Yes, that Nott.

Recently-widowed Theodore Nott who everybody knows was one of the Dark Lord's very first followers. He was about a hundred years old and had a face the color of a veal cutlet. The idea was enough to turn Amy's stomach.

"We've already set a date, did I tell you?" Alex asked, staring lovingly down at her engagement ring. She kept angling her hand—just so—so that it caught the light and glittered with the light of a thousand dying suns or whatever.

"So, I guess you really—er—like him, then?" Amy asked doubtfully.

"Of course I do," Alex said sharply, frowning at Amy from across the table. "What do you think this is, an arranged marriage? Even my parents aren't that conservative."

"I kind of thought you and Myron—"

"Myron was fun," Alex interrupted, a little too off-handedly, "but he isn't the sort of bloke you marry."

Amy shrugged, but if Alex noticed, she chose to ignore it.

"He's not that much older than me," Alex insisted to no one, staring at her ring. She was talking about her husband-to-be. "He's only fifty-six. That's nothing. And you should meet Little Teddy. He's the sweetest baby. You have to come to my hen party. It'll be just divine."

The transformation was remarkable. One second, Alex was a foul-mouthed beater; the next, she's starting to sound like Narcissa Malfoy, talking about babies and using adjectives like 'divine.' The worst part was, she seemed aware of how forced her pre-nuptial cheer was, but didn't seem able to turn it into anything but faux self-importance.

Maybe Amy should have seen this coming. There were no more Dark Lords to follow; no grand battles for the future of Wizarding society to be fought. The patriarch of Britain's oldest, purest wizarding family had slit his wrists in the bathtub, and Severus Snape was a teacher, for God's sake. Wasn't it inevitable that they'd all have to adapt to this mundane new world with its field research and marriages of convenience?

She looked up at Professor Snape's empty seat at the head table.

Maybe fifteen years from now Snape will finally have drunk himself to death, and they will all convene at Malfoy Manor for his funeral, just for the hell of it. Maybe Myron will have a suit and a Ministry job and a balding head and wasn't it funny that he used to think he'd be a rock star? And Alex will be showing off jewelry but hiding wrinkles and she'll introduce Little Teddy, who will be a surly teenager.

Maybe he'll say to Amy, 'did you know him, the departed?'

And maybe Amy will light up a cigarette with the tip of her wand, and say, shortly, 'Not well.'

Jesus.

"The Notts are a really good family," Alex continued. "Theo can trace his family all the way back to the Statute of Secrecy. That's almost twenty generations. And they're one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, of course—and, oh, look, the post!"

A parliament of owls—seriously, that's the collective noun. Amy discovered it in the book Snape was making her copy—flew into the Great Hall in a fluttery rush of feathers.

She looked up hopefully—it was stupid, and childish, because it's not like Slughorn was ever going to write her back, and she hadn't sent any applications anywhere, but there was still this insane hope that somehow an owl would land and give her the news that she wasn't, after all, a total failure.

Maybe this was a part of the whole 'passive observer in your own life' thing.

Amy licked her lips involuntarily, the hairs rising on her neck as she remembered Snape's hand on her shoulder.

Whatever. It's not like Snape had anywhere to criticize. He wasn't even at breakfast. In fact, she'd hardly seen him at all since that day at Malfoy Manor. She started to look up at his empty seat again, then stopped herself, because it's not as though she's getting obsessed with him or anything like that.

To Amy's left, Alex squealed in delight as a large barn owl from her intended landed on her plate.

To her right, some burly fellow whose name she never bothered to learn was already talking about playing on the reserve team for Puddlemere United as he relieved an eagle owl of its burden.

Down the table, Fiona got a little scops owl. And then—

"Oh. My. God!"

And that's exactly how Fiona screamed it, too. With this obnoxious little pause between every overemphasized word.

"I've. Been. ACCEPTED!" Fiona screeched.

It's not that Amy's bitter. Really. She's happy for Fiona.

Happy as a bloody clam.

Honestly, what kind of jerk wouldn't be happy to just whittle away the hours in hell while her stupidest roommate goes off to study at one of the finest post-secondary institutions in the wizarding world?

It's just that they'd talked about going to Salem Witch's Institute together last year. They were going to share a really sophisticated flat, and drink wine from California, and fuck rugged men with strong, American jaws and names like "Trent" and "Clint."

Alex read a letter from her betrothed. Mr. Burly Fellow was accepted to Puddlemere, after all.

It's been like this since they all got back from Christmas holidays. Every morning somebody gets an owl. Hello, it's your future calling, and we're pleased to inform you that you've been accepted into the next stage of your life. Please find your scholarship award enclosed. It's the one with the really expensive parchment, right there next to your apprenticeship offer.

Amy watched as the last owl left the Great Hall in a fluttery rush of wings. No post for her, not today.

"I need to study," she said suddenly, standing and abandoning her plate.

Only Burly Fellow heard her. He looked over at her, surprised. "For…what?"

The N.E.W.T.s, of course. They're in, like, a couple months. What the hell else would Amy be studying for?

Burly Fellow blinked. "Oh…I, er…I didn't know you were taking them," he said.

What? Of course Amy was taking them. Why the hell wouldn't she be?

"Oh."

'Oh'? What does he mean, 'Oh'?

"Well, it's just…" Burly Fellow paused to suck in a breath, apparently considering. "It's just…Well, you haven't been going to class much. I mean, I can't even remember the last time I saw you in Charms…"

Ok, so she's missed some classes. So what? It doesn't mean she can't take the N.E.W.T.s.

"Actually…Well, you weren't in class, see…And so you, er…you missed the registration last term."

What?!

"Well, I think you can take them again in the summer. They do another round. You know, for people who fail the first time. Maybe if you go talk to Snape, he'll let you sign up for those," Burly Fellow said, grimacing.

Alex beat Amy to a response. "Oh, don't look as though he's just told you you're pregnant with a Squib," she said, rolling up her letter and smiling sweetly—too sweetly—at Amy. "After all, Fortescue's is always hiring—Oh, come on! Don't run off! Can't you take a joke?"

Hello? Is anybody there? It's your future calling.

What did you say your name was? Bartleby?

Sorry, wrong number.

It was done.

Amy had copied all 300 pages of the Medieval Language Association Handbook for Editors.

Okay, Amy had copied about 50 pages, then spelled a quill to do the rest for her. Still, it was a lot of work. The quill kept getting lazy and copying things in shorthand, or else the charm would begin to wear off and the next thing you knew, you were reading about strait stirring rods instead of straight ones.

She also had to teach it to mimic her handwriting exactly – but not too exactly, mind. It wouldn't do to have the text be too uniform, too artificial-looking.

The spellwork was tricky, and had required multiple references to library books with titles like Enchantments for Editors and Quick Quillwork.

Amy hadn't worked so hard on anything in months.

After copying everything, she'd taken the lengthy and boring exam in the back of the handbook, slid the whole mess in an envelope, and began the long journey from the library to Professor Snape's office.

It was a thin excuse to see him.

She knew it was a thin excuse to see him.

But he was the one who'd assigned her the horribly tedious task, so he could damn well deal with the results. This was why she was seeing him, to call him on his dare. No other reason.

Certainly not.

Amy was so busy internally berating herself for being so fucking pathetic that she took a wrong turn at the bottom of a staircase.

Then she stopped.

Somewhere in the background, the sound of one of those ever-present subterranean leaks echoed ominously.

Drip.

Drip.

A profound sense of disorientation coiled around her. She was going in the wrong direction. Snape's office wasn't to the west, it was to the east. Which meant…

Her stomach twisted into knots.

Which meant that, for the first time in nearly a year, she found herself standing in the corridor where she'd traded insults with with…

With him.

And right before Amy was the empty classroom where…

Where it had happened.

The door to the disused classroom was unlocked and open just three inches. She stared through the slender gap for a few moments, struggling to overcome a sudden sense of unreality. Her legs tingled, poised and ready for fight or flight, and the overwhelming compulsion to look inside infected every pore.

The last time she'd been here, there was screaming, and blood, and pain. What would there be, this time?

Taking a shaky breath, then letting it out slowly, she reached forward and gave the door a gentle push. It opened surprisingly easily and almost soundlessly, as though the hinges had been recently oiled.

Well.

She didn't know what she expected. It's not as though the room would have been roped off like a crime scene or left sacred and untouched like a dead person's bedroom. The walls wouldn't still be coated in blood and shit. The furniture wouldn't still be upended. The screams wouldn't still be echoing across the stone walls, or the that particular slaughterhouse stench of rusty iron still permeating the air. Someone would have seen to that.

Still, she wasn't prepared for this overwhelming mundanity. The disused classroom was quiet now, and there was nothing at all inside but a few broken chairs and dusty boxes. It smelled like book dust.

On the wall opposite the door, someone—Peeves, maybe, or a disgruntled first-year—had scrawled the words "Snape Sux!" on the blackboard.

Everything was cleaned up and hushed up.

Like it had never even happened.

The silence buzzed oppressively in her ears.

"It wasn't that big a deal," she told the empty classroom.

Then she frowned as some disused neuron in a forgotten corner or her brain flared to life.

Had Snape been the one to find her here? Her and...and the boy? She remembered so little of that day, and had so steadfastly avoided thinking about what she could remember, that what she recalled now felt dreamlike and distant, like it had happened to another girl in a different life.

She remembered casting the curse, and she remembered scrambling to her feet as it took effect. She remembered backing into a wall, covering her face with bloody hands, and screaming and screaming and screaming until there were no more sounds left under her skin.

But did she also now remember someone pulling her hands away from her face? Someone hissing at her to be silent? To calm down? Had that someone been Severus Snape?

No.

That couldn't have been right.

Because how could he have gotten there so quickly, since he hadn't been in his office? Hadn't he been at the Quidditch game, with everyone else?

"What are you doing, Bartleby?"

The words, spoken from down the corridor, had the effect of a loud noise on a gun-shy dog. Amy started, let out a highly undignified yelp, and, as though the corridor itself slid sideways, lost her footing and fell flat on her bottom. Her elbow exploded in pain as it collided with the doorjamb on the way down.

Amy was painfully slow to process the deluge of sensory data that assaulted her after that. The pieces swam before her like a puzzle: Here, the click-click staccato of boots against a stone floor. There, an utterly exasperated click of the tongue. Finally, the image of thin, pale lips, pressed together in a grim line. Only with a puzzle, you look forward to seeing the final result. It was with a feeling of doomed inevitability that the picture came together and she realized it was her Potions Professor looming above her, and that her wand was pointed directly at the hollow under his chin.

He had something to say to that, probably something like, "Put that thing away, before you injure someone, girl!" but the words slid over her brain without leaving an impression.

Amy lowered and stowed away her wand, breathing as if she'd just run circles around the Quidditch Pitch. She squeezed her eyes shut, cradled her injured elbow to her chest, and told him, "Jesus! Do you just stand in dark corners, waiting for someone to walk by so you can scare the piss out of them?"

At least, she meant to. What actually came out was more along the lines of, "Gaaarrrggh!"

He had something to say to that, too, but whether it was, "I apologize for startling you," or something more like, "pay attention to your surroundings!" she had no idea.

"Wha—what?" She asked, opening her eyes and looking up at him.

The corner of his mouth twitched restlessly before he spoke. "I merely asked if you were all right, but based on your response to this extremely simple inquiry, I believe we have our answer," he quipped quickly, and then thrust his hand before her face.

Amy's response was to cringe slightly and stare at his hand—long, pale, spidery, with closely cropped and surprisingly clean fingernails, given how much time he spent working with disgusting Potions' ingredients. This was the same hand that had zipped up her dress outside Malfoy Manor and absently stoked her head once or twice as he welcomed her to hell. The same hand, possibly, that had pried her own from her face less than a year ago.

No, no. That couldn't have been right.

Amy's gaze moved slowly past his hand, up a his lean, black-clad arm, and eventually rested on his face, prematurely lined, curtained by that greasy black hair, and currently wearing a queer expression.

Then the look was gone as he waved his hand impatiently in front of her face. "Sometime before we die of old age, girl," he snapped abrasively.

Oh.

He was only offering to help her up.

Well.

There was no need to be so rude about it.

Somewhat calmer, Amy put the hand of her uninjured arm to his. His palm slid past hers, the skin dry and surprisingly warm, and his fingers closed around her wrist before he pulled her up. As soon as she was standing, she cradled her elbow again and was surprised to find it wet. Peering down, she was even more surprised to find it bloody.

Snape's inscrutable black gaze followed hers. "I may have something for that. Come."

Click-Click went the staccato of his boots on the stone floor.

Click-Click.

Feeling immensely miserable and dazed and stupid for ever coming here in the first place, Amy followed him to his office just a few metres down the corridor.

"Sit there and place your arm on the desk," he said as soon as they entered, indicating that familiar austere chair.

Amy did as he asked and looked again at her toad—the same one flayed and mortified on his desk that had been here earlier in the year. It was currently serving as a paperweight for more ungraded papers. His collection of those seemed to have grown exponentially over the holidays, as though, left alone for two weeks, they had bred like rabbits.

She sniffed and then wiped her nose as he rifled about in the ingredients cupboard. Small domestic noises followed in his wake; the soft susurration of his robes as he moved; the wooden creak of the cabinet; the crystal tinkling of the glass vial.

The half-remembered, can't-be-true image came to her again, the one of Snape pulling her bloodied hands away from her face as she screamed.

Amy pursed her lips together, willing the memory away. "I can just go to the Hospital Wi—" she began.

"Don't be ridiculous," her professor interrupted. It was his no-nonsense voice, the one he used in class.

Merlin, but he had a gift for that.

Whereas before it would have seemed ridiculous that Snape would personally patch up a student—why, after all, would he suffer one more unnecessary second with a pubescent irritant such as herself, when Madam Pomfrey was perfectly capable?—now it seemed ridiculous that he would do anything else.

Snape located what he was looking for and pulled it from the cabinet—a simple Healing Solution, she recognized, not anything furtive like a confiscated Memoriball or flask of gin.

She squirmed a little at the contact when he rolled her sleeve gently up past her elbow, suddenly flushed and hot in a way that had nothing to do with the external temperature. He said nothing as he cleared away the blood with his wand and then began applying the Solution. His was a physician's touch, gentle and clinical, with a certain graceful economy of movement.

It was completely anal-retentive, of course, but she still sort of admired it, his deliberation of movement. It was funny, because despite so many less-than-orderly facets of his life, despite the lousy lecturing and the sloppy drinking and the undone grading, she couldn't help but think that here was a man who would be able to pull himself together, after all.

Maybe he would still be together two thousand years from now, like one of those alabaster statues in Pompeii that survived the day the sky fell.

Or maybe he would die just like the Romans' precious tongue did, only to be remembered in borrowed conjugation and obscure academic nomenclature.

Amy pondered this until the silence became so oppressive that she found herself blurting out a question, something she'd desperately wanted to know but had barely allowed herself to think about, even in the privacy and silence of her own mind.

"What happened to him?" she asked.

"What happened to whom?" Snape responded absently, shifting her arm as he continued to apply the Healing Solution.

Amy breathed out slowly. "You know—him."

She meant her rapist.

Snape paused in his ministrations and looked up at her with an odd expression, as though, for once, he was actually interested to hear what she had to say. "Did nobody tell you?"

"They said—they said he survived," she responded, her tongue tied into awkwardness by taboo, or by Secrecy Magic. "That he lived."

Snape opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again and pinched the bridge of his nose as if fighting off a migraine—which must, she was convinced, be some kind of neurotic tic, because nobody could possibly have that many headaches.

The spell of familiarity, or whatever it was, that had settled over them, clearly, had broken. Amy pulled her arm—the elbow stiff but no longer painful—out of his grasp, then stood up to leave.

"Why are you here, Bartleby?" he asked. "Other than to make my life exceedingly difficult? If this is about Flitwick, there's nothing I can do."

"Flitwick?" Amy asked. He may as well have said 'Kangaroo' for all the word made sense.

"Flitwick," Snape repeated, moving his hand away from his face to pin her with that black gaze. "He's dropping you from Charms. Surely you knew that."

Amy tried to care about this and failed. Wordlessly, she pulled the fully-copied MLA handbook from her bag—all 300 pages of it, painstakingly written in her own hand and bound stuffed in an envelope. Professor Snape took it from her with a look which suggested he'd forgotten he assigned that particular task, considered it for a few seconds, then threw it into the fire.

Amy watched as several months worth of her leisure time burned and thought this was what he must have meant, about Hogwarts being hell.

Hell felt like burning alive from the inside out.

Hell felt like losing your mind.

Seafood.

Amy has never liked it.

The word, that is, not the food.

'Seafood' was so…vague. As though there's this thing called the 'sea' and human beings just drudge up all this crap, throw everything that doesn't taste good back overboard, and call whatever's left in the boat 'food.' From the 'sea.'

Apples and pork weren't called 'landfood,' but nobody has any problem with a culinary category that encompasses anything and everything that might be found in the two thirds of the Earth that is water. Lobsters to cod; squid to salmon; all of it is 'seafood.'

Salmon aren't even born in the sea. They don't even die there, for God's sake.

The only thing Amy despised more than 'seafood' was grading. And grading regurgitated essay after regurgitated essay about ingredient substation for individuals with 'seafood' allergies? Well, it was a pretty shitty way to spend her 18th birthday.

Whatever. 18th birthdays aren't anything to have kittens about. Especially when, per the conditions of your probation, you have fewer privileges than a 1st-year. Eighteen, and you can't visit Hogsmeade any time you want or keep your own broomstick. Eighteen, and you still get lost in the Castle sometimes.

At least her friends had thrown her a party in the Common Room. They served their favorite food and played their favorite music and put up their favorite decorations. Alex talked about her wedding and Myron sulked.

Meanwhile, Amy graded.

For Snape.

The lazy twat hadn't bothered to grade a single midterm; they had apparently sat, collecting dust, for weeks while he waited for his Fairy Godmother to do it for him. For weeks, he had neglected to grade, and, gee, wasn't it convenient that Amy had no NEWTS to study for and therefore nothing better to do than fix comma splices and subject-verb disagreement all day? All month? She'd logged nearly 40 hours of grading already—he'd been making her keep count.

Snape had even included her peers' essays in the pile, and she, who wasn't even in the N.E.W.T.-level class, was supposed to grade them based solely on grammar, mechanics, and style. It was completely unprofessional, unethical, and she kind of thought they were past this point in their relationship. When Snape had her in his office, she thought...

Well, she didn't know what she thought. It just didn't seem fair that he could give her a drink in his rooms, stand with her outside a funeral, zip up her dress, and then go right back to pretending to be a teacher—even a lousy one.

She slashed through a sickeningly composed sentence on the use of Unicorn "hare" as a substitute for seal whiskers—because apparently semi-aquatic mammals count as "seafood" now, too— and took a vindictive pleasure in watching the red ink hemorrhage across the page.

Myron, sitting next to her and throwing dirty looks at Alex's prenuptial cheer from across the room, spoke: "So are you, like, Snape's TA now?" he asked.

"Uh-huh," she said. This was easier than explaining the truth: That in fact, she had no idea what she was to Snape. And, anyway, it's not like this was any of Myron's business.

"You do know there's a party going on, right? Your party?" Myron pointed out.

"Uh-huh," Amy repeated, scrawling a "T" on the corner of the paper.

Myron looked over. "A 'T'? It can't be that bad," he said.

"It is," she assured him.

"Why? There's nothing even wrong with this sentence," he said, taking the paper and pointing to the offending sentence.

"Dangling participle," Amy said.

"And here?"

"Improper use of the subjunctive."

"Well, what about this one?"

"Plagiarized."

Myron blinked at her as if he wasn't sure whether to be impressed by her newly-bolstered editorial knowledge or mock it. "How can you even tell?" he asked.

Wordlessly, Amy took the paper back from him. She picked up the topic sentence—literally picked it up so that the words hung in mid air before her hand—and then threw it at one of the bookshelves in the common room. A book, Intermediate Potions, glowed red, then zoomed over to Amy's table and magically opened itself to the plagiarized page. The sentence from the essay hovered over its printed twin.

Myron looked mildly impressed. "Where did you learn that?"

"It's just some stupid little spell," Amy said, putting the essay-sentence back on the page and sending the Potions book back to its shelf with a wordless flick of her wand. She'd learned it—along with dozens of other equally useless spells—in the MLA handbook Snape had made her copy. It was a welcome change to finally be good at something, even something as pointless as grading.

Alex's loud, false laugh issued from across the Common Room. She and Fiona were giggling over Mr. Veal Cutlet's most recent romantic missive. Myron pouted again.

"You guys weren't even dating," Amy pointed out.

"Yeah...well…" Myron trailed off, his dashed hopes fading into nothing along with the word 'well.' He wasn't as accustomed to disappointment as Amy was, and didn't take it very well.

"Why is she even marrying Veal Cut—Nott?" Amy asked.

"It makes sense for her," Myron conceded gloomily.

"It does?" asked Amy, who, Slytherin or not, couldn't think of a single reason she'd voluntarily fuck Mr. Veal Cutlet.

"Alex is broke," he said simply. "Her parents' assets—savings, her university gold, all of it—were frozen after her uncle was arrested. Knott has money. And a new baby that needs a mother."

Amy said nothing. 'Alex' and 'baby' and 'mother' were just more words that didn't belong in the same library. She picked up another of Snape's essays and started grading.

The Slytherins got extremely drunk that night and eventually turned to parlour games to entertain themselves. Someone conjured up a little play theater and, laughing, Amy's Housemates played out a humorous little scene. It was the sort of thing they might have done at a Slug Club Meeting.

The scene starred Alex as Trigger-Finger Tiffany, fastest shot in all of London. Admittedly, she did some pretty flashy wandwork, first conjuring magic birds with the Avis charm and then shooting them out of the air one by one with her wand. Trigger-Finger Tiffany continued this for a while, performing ever more impressive feats of accuracy, until the Dastardly Mudblood appeared to steal her magic and her virtue. The crowd hissed and booed as Burly Fellow appeared on the stage wearing Muggle clothes and an exaggerated expression of stupidity.

"Alas!" cried Alex, now wearing a scarf over her eyes, "I've been rendered blind by stolen magic! Where is the scoundrel? Help me find him before I'm ravish'd!"

The audience began shouting directions, telling her which way to aim her curses.

"Left!"

"Right!"

"Further!"

"No, too far!"

"Curse his prick right off!"

Amy repeated the plagiarism checking spell on several more essays while the scene ended and the party disbursed. She sent books and words zooming through the air and covered essays with red ink before she caught the eye of a wide-eyed 1st-year from across the Common Room. The boy had been staring—Marvelling, perhaps, at Amy's nonverbal magic, at her best spot in the Common Room, at the way she and her friends drank whiskey and told jokes that would make you go redder than the Hogwarts Express. Maybe the boy was giddy for the day he'd be someone's TA, and would have the power to pass or fail his peers with a simple flourish of the quill—more power than perhaps he'd ever dreamed of having.

Amy began to laugh. She kept laughing, tears streaming hysterically down her face, until her stomach ached and Myron felt the need to slap her several times on the back.

When Amy found herself, once again, standing outside the private entrance to Snape's quarters the night before yet another Hogsmeade weekend she wouldn't be attending, she decided that his was a story about failure.

It surprised her a little, the certainty of this judgement. She would know, though.

She's something of an expert on failure.

Because, let's face it, successful people simply don't find themselves on Ministry-ordered probation or fail every one of their classes or miss the registration for the NEWTS. They don't leave neurotic little drawings out for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to see or get dropped from their Charms class or find themselves drawn, again and again, to others whose lives are clearly going down in flames.

Successful people don't kiss their professors.

If Amy was a failure, she was at least in good company. Whatever it was Severus Snape had wanted to do, wanted to be, it had not happened for him. He had not rid the world of Mudbloods and Muggle-Lovers and Trash that threatened their way of life. He was not awash in glory, but in ungraded papers. Whatever power the Dark Lord had given him, it was not enough to save him from rotting in this place. He was stuck at Hogwarts.

Just like she was.

Before she knew it, Amy had kicked his door as hard as she could.

Thud.

No answer.

It felt good, siphoning all her anger and frustration into that kick.

She thought about every fucked-up thing that had happened over the last year, raised her leg, and kicked again.

Thud.

Still, no answer.

Her foot was poised for a third kick, an angrier one, when Snape finally did open the door.

He was, to her surprise, fully dressed, boots and all. His teaching robes were slightly rumpled, as though he'd fallen asleep—or passed out, as the case may be—still wearing them. There were dark circles under his eyes, and the whites were red and irritated—but his expression? Oh, he was very much awake, and very, very livid.

"I just came to tell you that I hate your specimens," she told him.

That was the straw that broke the thestal's back. The last indignity he would suffer. Amy caught a brief glimpse of his expression, twisted with abject frustration, like she was literally driving him mad, before he slammed the door in her face. At least, he tried to, but she shoved her foot in the doorjamb at the last moment.

Merlin, did that hurt.

But the door also bounced back, and that allowed her the opportunity to squeeze inside.

Snape slammed the door behind her and then rounded on her. "What. The. Hell do you think you are doing?" he demanded. The words burst like gunfire from behind his teeth.

"They're like something out of a nightmare, or a Kafka novel," she insisted, determined to push him, to make him feel as aggrieved as she did. "They depress the hell out of me, and one of these days I might just going to burn your office to t—"

"Sto-"

"—fairly certain you keep them just to terrify first-years. There's no conceivable use—"

"Silence!"

He took a step closer to her. She retreated a step in return. Her back touched the wall. And he was there, his mouth a crooked-toothed snarl of rage, his hand—what is he doing?!—coming toward her. She braced for an impact, certain that he was actually going to physically hit her, but it never came. Instead, his hand slammed against the stone some six inches left of her head, and he leaned in so, so, so unbelievably close, as he had the first day in detention.

"Listen, girl, I may have, in some misguided attempt to keep you from slitting your wrists and thus losing me my job, have allowed you certain liberties, but no more. I am not your friend. I am not your therapist —" here he placed his other hand some six inches to the left of her head, once again caging her with his arms " — And I do. Not. Fuck. Students. All of which is to say you have no reason to be here."

Something clicked, then.

I guess you could call it an epiphany. Maybe it was just a series of electrical impulses made seemingly profound by fear-induced adrenaline. Whatever it was, she got this funny little idea in her head all of the sudden, one that made her feel at once exhilarated and afraid; light-headed and deliciously deranged.

Has that ever happened to you? The feeling of being high on the possibility of an idea?

If so, you probably understand why Amy kissed him. Again.

It wasn't a stuttering of dry lip against dry lip, this time, but a forceful slide of mouth against mouth. Her brain became a useless mass of froth dribbling slowly down her spine, so it took her a moment to realize what was happening.

What was happening—impossible as it seems—was that he was kissing her back.

There were a rush of sensations all happening simultaneously—his lips, surprisingly soft and supple, positively attacking hers—his tongue slipping like a thief past her lips, skimming her teeth—his hand on her waist, clutching, sneaking upward over her ribcage, toward her breast—her hands, fisted in his shirt as she arched into his touch—a sudden need to press her thighs together—tingling in her spine—and melting, a most terrifying, thrilling sensation of melting.

Something between a growl and a groan began deep in his thin chest, shivered its way up his throat, and vibrated against her lips. The idea that this was in response to her, and the power that implied, electrified every nerve ending and sent her head spinning in the most exhilarating, delicious way possible. She twisted the fabric covering his chest, clung tightly for support, and surrendered herself to the pure molten sensation. His lips slid from her mouth to that spot, just there, where her jaw met her neck. He captured her earlobe between his teeth and nipped. She felt like her brain was melting in her skull, like her knees were melting into the floor. Like her skin was melting to his.

And then she melted through the door

Understand this.

She literally melted through the door.

One minute, she was standing in Snape's quarters, her back against the wall, receiving the most overwhelming, almost frightening, snogging of her entire life from her Potions Professor of all people, the next, she stood in the dungeon corridor, her cheeks flushed, her lips stinging and swollen, positively burning with the most confusing mixture of agitation and frustrated sexual desire. Right there in front of her was the door she almost kicked down, and Snape was on the other side.

How…how the hell did he do that?

She heard the deadbolt click.

This manic little laugh bubbled up out of nowhere and found echoing freedom in the empty, subterranean corridor.

Do you want to know what that idea was? The one that made her kiss him?

As she'd been staring up at Snape, watching his lips move around the declaration that he did. Not. Fuck. Students, some neuron misfired in her brain, and she inexplicably remembered that thing he'd once told her. That thing about her having a spark of life in her yet.

She thought that maybe he was right.