Author's Notes: This is a fanfic - Standard disclaimers apply. I own nothing.
Thank you again to those who favorited/followed. Please do review; any feedback is appreciated.
A/N: 11.7.20 - Wow, guys! 500 hits, my very first review, and a PM about this story! You are too kind. Thank you so much to those who followed/favorited/reached out. I can't tell you how much it means.
*Warning* Please be advised that there are descriptions of sexual situations in this chapter and those beyond. To say I have mixed feelings about them would be the understatement of the century; they are the main reason I had (and still have) such misgivings about sharing this story. It's extremely important to me not to glorify non-con, but it's also important to me that I make some effort to acknowledge the terribly problematic nature of any relationship with a power differential, such as the one represented here. The result is...well, it is what it is. I tried to toe a nuance; I'm not sure I succeeded. I welcome any frank discussion of it either via review or PM
How Absurd
Glamours have never been Amy's strong suit. She'd always wanted to be good at them, but she simply wasn't
So how she found herself standing over Alex, the latter's neck resting neatly on the edge of the bathroom sink, with a bottle of Celestina Warbeck's Fabulous Follicle Relaxer in one hand and a copy of Witch Weekly in the other, she had no idea.
Maybe this was just another part of the whole 'passive observer in your own life' thing.
"Alex, maybe you should get someone else—"
"I did your hair, didn't I?" Alex interrupted. "Are you going to return the favor, or are you going to be an ungrateful twat?"
"You haven't even let me see my hair, yet. You made me put this towel on my head."
"And I'll curse the damn thing to your head if you don't hurry up," Alex replied. "You've been promising you'd help me with this for weeks. Shit or get off the pot, Amy."
The bottle warned that itching, burning, permanent hair loss, and spontaneous Splinching might result from the use of this product. Celestina Warback was not responsible for any damages resulting from adverse reaction to the potion. She unscrewed the cap and gave a tentative sniff. It reeked like acetone mixed with Bobotuber pus and made her eyes water.
"This isn't the same thing you used on my hair," she told Alex.
"That's because you're white, you stupid bi—ahh!" She broke off with a tiny yelp when Amy dumped the vile solution on her head with no warning and at least a small amount of petty satisfaction.
Amy still hadn't quite forgiven Alex for the Fortescue comment.
The product soaked in Alex's hair right up to the scalp with unnatural quickness and began to bubble as violently as a ruined potion. It looked extraordinarily painful. Amy turned her attention to the magazine while Alex grit her teeth just the way she used to when preparing a vicious hit to a Bludger.
"It says to cast the charm while the potion is still on."
"Then do that," Alex ground out.
Amy cleared her throat, raised her wand, and rapped Alex hard on the head. "Mutatio Viridem!"
There was a flash of light, a great deal of thick black smoke, and the entire bubbling mass that, presumably, held Alex's hair, turned bright bottle green.
A terrible shudder ran through Alex. "Rinse it out! Rinse it out!"
Amy turned on the faucet and began rinsing. Only a little bit of Alex's hair came out by the root. Hopefully she wouldn't notice.
Slowly, relief spread over Alex's face. "Fuck, that hurt."
"I think it's all out," Amy said.
"Good. Now dry it."
Amy cast a drying charm and, to her immense surprise, the sink suddenly overflowed with large, loose curls that were silky soft and the exact color of the emeralds in the Slytherin hourglass. The whole thing screamed 'House pride' and, while fairly silly when you considered that this was all attached to somebody's head, was nevertheless pretty in its own right. Amy was fairly pleased with herself when she remembered that she had done that.
She only hoped Alex had done as good a job on her—Amy's—hair.
"Oh, my," said the mirror.
Alex jumped up and began examining the new hair-do in the mirror. She angled her head this way and that with a critical eye, her fingers combing easily through the locks, leaving no stone—or follicle, as the case may be—unturned.
"Not bad, Amy," she said approvingly. "Might have left the potion on longer, though. I'd hoped it would be straighter."
As if Alex would have let her.
"Well? Aren't you going to look at yours?" Alex asked.
Amy closed her eyes, pulled the towel off, opened them again, and—
"Red!" said the mirror.
"Red," said Amy.
"What?" asked Alex.
"It's red. You dyed my hair red."
"It's not red," Alex insisted. "The Weasley's have red hair. That Potter woman had red hair. That—" she pointed at Amy's head through the mirror "—is strawberry blonde. I dyed your hair strawberry blonde."
"It was supposed to be brown. You were supposed to dye it brown."
"Brown is boring. Brown is the color of shit. You don't have the jaw structure for brown."
"What the hell does jaw structure have to do with—"
"'Thank you' are the words you're looking for, Amy. As in 'thank you for turning that ashy shit-stain blonde into something sexy.' Even the mirror thinks so." She rapped on the glass with her knuckles. "Right, mirror?"
"Green! Green hair! What will your husband say," it reproached.
"Oh, shut it, you," Alex snapped irritably. "It's not as though I'm wearing it to the damn wedding."
Both girls stared at their reflection-selves for a few more moments. Amy wondered if this was the same girl Snape saw when he looked at her, and she became engrossed in the same line of thought that had occupied nearly every waking moment since that day in Snape's rooms, when she'd kissed him and he'd kissed her back.
There was a promise in that day, a promise of...
Of what, exactly?
It's funny. She'd pictured what came next in a thousand different iterations every day.
Sometimes, in her imagination, it was dreamlike and gentle, like his touch outside of Malfoy Manor. In these versions, Snape wrapped himself around her, and his skin felt warm and dry against her own. His caresses were solicitous and almost clinical, projecting the calm competence of one who knew exactly how to make her body respond. His kisses lingered, stroking and soft. Words whispered into her ear were low and formless, perhaps because the whole fantasy was so out of character that she was at a loss to fill in the specifics.
Other times, it was fevered and hot, with the same blood-pumping intensity she'd felt when she'd kicked his door and he'd kissed her back. These were the daydreams that made her feel wanted and flattered and powerful. When his skin touched hers, it burned with sweat and energy. His touches were carnal, his kisses demanding something which her body was only too happy to obey.
It thrilled her, this version, and it frightened her a little, too. Because sometimes—a very few sometimes—the intensity of it tipped into terrifying, the pleasure into pain, and her own reticence and inexperience into nonconsent. Her imagination carried her off, then, into the ugly realm of memory with its too-vivid screams of terror and blood.
Alex finished preening and turned to Amy. "Want to see what I am wearing to the wedding?" she asked brightly.
It was some small consolation, Amy supposed, that Alex The Bride-To-Be was, in some respects, nicer than Alex The Roommate.
"Sure," Amy said.
They wandered back into the dormitory, which was empty except for Fiona. She looked at them over the top of another Witch Weekly. "Oh, I bet the mirror didn't like that."
"Fuck the mirror." Alex busied herself rummaging through her trunk. She pulled out barely-used books and broken quills, a rather frothy-looking pink bra with little white brooms zooming endlessly across the fabric, and, finally, what looked like the beginnings of a wedding planner.
"Come see, Fiona, I'm showing Amy my wedding dress."
Fiona shot up as though her bed had suddenly caught fire and crossed over to them.
With a flourish, Alex extracted a large, gently-used photograph from the guts of the planner and held it up for them to see.
Amy's heart nearly stopped.
There, right in the center of the photograph, were her parents' friends, the young radicals whose Floo Amy accidentally ended up in, the bride and groom now destined to spend eternity in Azkaban, the infamous torturers—
"The Lestranges!" said Fiona at once, in a kind of awe.
It was a photograph of Rodolphus and Bellatrix's wedding.
"It won't be that dress, obviously," Alex said, "but I saw this in Theo's house and fell in love. He's having a reproduction made for me."
"Ooh, it's beautiful," Fiona gushed.
And so it was.
The entire photograph was beautiful, as a matter of fact. One of those snapshots of a perfect moment in life. Who would have possibly guessed that these happy, untroubled people were the same ones rotting in Azkaban, decaying in graves, or else missing, presumed dead?
You couldn't have guessed it, unless you'd known them.
There was the bride and groom, of course. Rabastan was best man, a younger, happier version of Jupiter at his heels. Someone had affixed a bow-tie to his collar. She recognized Evan Rosier and Aaron Wilkies from their pictures in the paper and the memory of their seventh-year selves. They were impossibly young and handsome in their dress robes, blissfully ignorant of the future. They'd both be dead—hunted down by Aurors—in less than a year. The maid of honor was a smiling, hugely pregnant Narcissa Malfoy.
Amy wondered, if you asked Mrs. Malfoy about her sister's wedding, would she have some hilarious anecdote?
("We just threw it together, you know, in a park of all places. Our parents were furious. But they were in love…I remember Audrey Selwyn wanted to catch that bouquet so badly—she and Evan were engaged—but as soon as Bella threw it, Rabastan's dog went right after it, the beast. Well, Audrey ended up wrestling it out of his mouth! It was just divine…")
"Is that…Regulus?" Fiona asked, prodding a tall gentleman out of the way of a shorter one. The wedding party jostled about to make room for him. "I remember him when he was a 7th year."
It was. Standing right there, waving at them, was prissy little Regulus Black who used to put down his Prefect badge long enough to laugh and drink firewhisky and tell jokes that would make you go redder than the Hogwarts express.
Alex nodded. "Yeah, I noticed him right away. Hell of a Seeker, he was."
A quiet fell over the three of them suddenly, as though they just realized they weren't looking at a wedding at all, but a funeral waiting to happen. There was something sickening about it, something appalling beyond words.
"They never found his body, did they?" Fiona said after a while, still staring down at the picture.
"No, they didn't. He might still be alive," Amy said. It was impossibly childish, and she fully expected Alex to sneer that 'everyone knew' Regulus Black was dead and rotting in an unmarked grave, but that didn't happen.
Instead, Alex continued the fantasy: "Alive and hiding out somewhere safe."
"A desert island, maybe, or a tropical beach in Brazil," Amy said.
"No, Regulus hated mosquitos."
"The arctic circle, then. Nothing up there but snow and stars. He could look at the Northern Lights every day."
"Yeah…"
But Alex wasn't looking at Regulus at all, Amy suddenly realized. Her attention was entirely focused on the tall gentleman next to him, the one who had moved out of the way just a moment ago. He had a roguish sort of smile that Amy had seen many times before on Alex's face, always preceding an off-color joke.
Amy would have bet all the gold in Gringotts that tall man was Alex's uncle, Augustus Rookwood.
"It's not fair," Alex whispered.
Then, louder: "It's not fair."
Without warning, she grabbed the photograph and ripped it violently in half.
"It's not fair!" she screamed, throwing the pieces on the ground. "It's not fair! It's not FUCKING FAIR!"
Alex dropped to the floor and began sobbing into her hands as though she could hold the broken pieces of herself in them, if only she tried hard enough. Fiona sat next to her and began stroking her hair, which was still as green and as beautiful and as silly as ever.
And Amy?
Amy didn't know how to comfort weeping witches any better than Snape, but she was struck with a sudden idea. Maybe not an idea, but a sudden…compulsion. Without really knowing why she was doing it, Amy picked up the pieces of the photograph and wandered out to the common room.
There was a full-on argument going on amongst the leather armchairs and couches, with horrified onlookers and all. Myron seemed to be confronting another boy, some 4th-year. There was a Memoriball in Myron's hand, and an accusing finger thrust at the boy.
"Do you think this is funny?" Myron was demanding.
"No! Don't report me—I shouldn't even have that!" the boy whined.
"Nobody should have this!"
But Amy didn't have the energy to wonder, except in the most idle way, what sick fantasy could possibly be hidden in that thing to get Myron in such a mood. One friend's breakdown was enough for the day.
Allowing the argument to fade into background noise, she walked over to the message board and tacked the broken wedding party right on top of a Ministry poster that advised, True Love Waits!
The photograph still didn't look quite right, so she tapped it with a Reparo! and watched as the broken ends knitted back together.
In doing so, she jolted the entire wedding party, and a previously unseen groomsman stumbled out of hiding and into the frame.
He'd told her he had some miserable excuse for a private life—hell, she'd seen the beginning of it, when he and the other 7th-years used to sit in that very common room and laugh and drink firewhisky—so she shouldn't have been surprised when the groomsman shook a black curtain of hair out of his face and revealed himself to be Severus Snape.
He would have been just a year or two older than her. Perhaps finishing up his miserable apprenticeship, the one Abraxas Malfoy had so generously financed. The Dark Mark had already been burned on his forearm under those dress robes, probably.
It's funny, isn't it? How much can change in just a few years.
"We're going to Snape about this right now!" Myron screamed behind her, and dragged the 4th-year boy away by the wrist.
When Amy went to drop off the newest round of grading, she found Snape sitting at his desk, drunk only thirty minutes into his predictably desolate office hours.
He was slumped back in a pose of exaggerated ease, eyes closed and turned toward the ceiling; his elbow propped up on the back of his chair; his legs crossed, ankle atop knee. A nearly empty bottle of firewhisky sat before him with what seemed to be defiant purpose—as though he were just daring the Headmaster to come along and sack him on the spot. Next to the bottle, several confiscated Memoriballs teetered precariously on the edge of the desk.
Amy walked into the room and set his grading on his desk with a gentle thunk.
"I wondered when you'd come crawling back," he sneered through all the layers of misery and contempt that shrouded him, mummy-like, from the world's judgment. "Always crawling back. Just like a beaten dog."
Amy shoved her hands in her pockets and waited for him to finish.
"Well, what is it this time?" he asked the ceiling, eyes still closed. "Have you had some grand grammatical epiphany? Have you decided you despise flat adverbs and came rushing here to tell me they make you 'awful' angry?"
She didn't laugh, but it was still pretty funny.
"Save it, whatever it is," Snape continued. "We all know you're not well, Bartleby, there's no need to belabor the point with yet another asinine non-sequitur."
"I thought we should talk," she finally said.
"Talk," he mocked with a humorless little laugh. "And what, pray tell, would we talk—"
But he stopped short upon lowering his head. He stared at her for a moment, his eyes curiously trained on her hair, as if struggling to bring her into focus. When he succeeded in doing so, a guttural noise escaped from his throat—a noise of utter disgust.
"Good God, if you don't exist for the sole purpose of mocking me, I don't know why you're here," he spat. "Just wait until the Headmaster sees that fucking Glamour. You know, he actually had the audacity to suggest that I somehow felt guilty about the whole thing. 'Transference,' he called it. Ha!"
"And what did you tell him?" she asked. She didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
"That I trust my subconscious not to fixate on such a piss-poor substitute. Such a talentless little thing you are, always staring off as if at the lining of your own coffin. You know, Bartleby, when I consider what you did to that boy, I find I can hardly believe it. I wouldn't believe it, had I not witnessed the effects in all their nauseating glory."
He fixed her with a look of contempt as he finished: "You are nothing like her."
There it was again, his 'miserable excuse for a private life.' Amy quirked her head and considered him. Snape the Childhood God from nearly a decade ago, the Death Eater who'd been given more power than you'd ever dreamed of having. Snape the Groomsman, the Professor—and now, apparently, the Jilted Lover.
Fascinating.
Snape leaned forward in a more alert pose, placing his elbows on the desk as he did so. "Best not prolong the inevitable—what have you come here to talk about?" he sneered.
"I thought we should talk about us," she said.
"Us," he mocked. "There is no us, Bartleby, there is only you. You and your obscene schoolgirl infatuation, your cadaver kisses, and the fact that you still don't look a day over sixteen."
He focused on her hair again, and his expression changed, softened, like he wasn't seeing her at all, but something—or someone—else very far away. "Sixteen eternally. Somewhere, Nabokov is smiling."
"I don't think that's fair," Amy said.
His eyes slid back to hers. "To whom, Bartleby? To you? Do you not think yourself a Lolita, or are you merely attempting to make me feel better about my pederasty?"
Years later, when she has actually read Nabokov, she'll change her mind about this. It was fair.
Years later she'll learn that there is no "Lolita." The girl's name is "Dolores"—"Lo" for short—and "Lolita" is just the nickname given to her by a tyrant. He reduces her down to the smallest possible syllable, the smallest piece of herself, and builds a fantasy onto it. "Lolita" never existed.
Years later, she'll think that maybe "Bartleby" had never existed, either.
But as it was, Amy hadn't yet read Nabokov. She was only 18, and as she stood there facing down something she wanted desperately but was barely prepared for—something ruinous that drew her like a moth to a flame—she couldn't articulate what, exactly, wasn't fair, or to whom. So, she stayed quiet and watched as he began tracing his lips with one long, pale finger.
"Do you know what I am, I wonder?" he asked suddenly.
"I think you're a mean drunk," she said, shifting restlessly on her heels. "I think you're not making any sense. I think you won't remember any of this in the morning."
He continued as if she hadn't spoken. "Oh, I know what your housemates say—that I'm a traitor. A Death Eater. Do you have any idea what that means? The things I've seen? The things I've done?"
She licked her lips, suddenly dry-mouthed. This wasn't going at all like she'd imagined. "What are you trying to tell me, Snape?"
"I am attempting to make you understand that I am not safe, Bartleby. Whatever it is you think of me—however much I may have every appearance of being the Headmaster's hostage, I have not been castrated by him. He does not, as your Housemates are so fond of saying, keep my todger in a box. Neither has he removed my teeth to prevent me biting the lambs."
She began to protest. "I didn't think—"
"You did. You do. Else you would not be here. If you want someone safe to teach you, to help you rediscover your damaged sexuality—and that is what you want, make no mistake—go find some unsuspecting Hufflepuff. I've no interest in it."
His words probably would have been hurtful—or more hurtful, anyway—had he not already spent the entire year insulting her. She'd long ago decided that his anger had nothing to do with her, personally, so what was one more barb from a whiskey-drowned tongue? Especially from a fellow prisoner serving out his own probation? And then there was the fact, too, the fact that…
It occurred to her suddenly in a tiny flare of realization. He'd always made it seem like she was the one pursuing him, forever standing outside his door and haunting his corridors.
But what if he wanted it just as badly as she did?
Hadn't he admitted as much, with his Nabokov reference?
There was a potent headiness to it, the idea of being desired.
"Then why am I here?" she asked quietly.
"Don't ask me to divine motivations that you yourself—"
"I'm not asking about my motivations," she interrupted softly. "I'm asking about yours. Why am I still here, when you have always had the choice to simply ward your door and refuse to answer when I knock?"
Snape smirked at her then, rather as you might smirk at an opponent who'd seen through your latest ploy. His contempt suddenly seemed to vanish, his intoxication to sober, and he leaned back in his chair again, which slid out from behind his desk and allowed her a fuller view of him. His pose radiated wiry strength, legs parted in a masculine spread, arms folded across his chest. His eyes slid from the top of her strawberry blonde hair to the tips of her toes, then back up again in one long, lingering sweep. He looked at her like she was something displayed in a window, something he might buy.
It was an invitation.
No.
A challenge.
The fabric under her hands felt supple when she joined him behind the desk and placed her hands tentatively on his shoulders. Surprisingly supple. But the muscles underneath were hard, tense and almost quivering, when she braced herself and leaned forward.
He tasted like smoke and spice—it was the firewhisky still lingering in his mouth, and it wasn't unpleasant. Neither was it unpleasant when he placed his hands on her waist, or when he drew her lower lip between his teeth and bit it gently. A soft moan escaped her mouth, and a warm glow began somewhere lower.
She'd experienced kisses before. Good kisses, even. But never had one of them caused this kind of swooping sensation in her stomach, this kind of thrilling spark in her brain. That seemed to be a talent particular to him, Severus Snape.
Before she had a chance to analyze that too much, he'd separated his lips from hers and buried them instead in her neck with a fevered groan that tightened her nipples and sent a delicious shiver up her spine. The kisses and nips began just there, in the spot where her neck met her shoulder, and began trailing up the white column of her throat until she tipped her chin toward the ceiling, eyes closed, and arched into his touch with a whimper.
Amy's grip tightened on his shoulders as he murmured something guttural and wanton into her ear, something formless and tingling. The hands that had been clutching at her waist slid lower to cup her bum, and in one swift motion he was standing, lifting her up, and seating her on his desk, his legs nestled between her open thighs.
She gasped at the sudden movement, opened her eyes, and found his eyes locked to hers. They were glittering obsidian sparks in the dungeon gloom. She didn't make the conscious decision to beg, but she found herself doing it anyway.
"Please," she whispered, her voice strange and husky to her own ears. "I want—I want—"
"Yes?" he queried, his gaze intense, unwavering, and the word slightly breathless.
In answer, she hooked a hand behind his neck and pulled him to her as she moved to lay back on the desk. He supported her back with one arm, and with the other swept the contents of his desk impatiently to the floor so she had a clean surface on which to rest. Her painstakingly-graded essays fluttered to the floor with a feathery whisper, like a bird taking flight, and several Memoriballs shattered against the stone floor. Their ghostly contents—some memory-substance like wind made solid—swirled upward around them.
Then Amy found her back pressed against the hard surface of the desk, and Snape's face was buried in her neck again, his hands restlessly moving, exploring. One hand began at her knee and slithered forward across the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. The other hand snuck under the front of her blouse where it had become untucked, traced the lines of her ribs, and cupped her breast.
He planted kisses up the line of her jaw, then began positively attacking her mouth with an almost savage intensity, sending her head spinning, spinning, spinning.
Something hard and clothed grazed along her thigh and pressed there, against her damp knickers. His cock, she realized with a start. The spinning in her head became dizzying, intoxicating, and tinged with a strange cresting panic—a subtle buzz of energy, the warning kind that precedes accidental magic.
Amy jerked her head to the side, breaking their connection.
"Wait," she gasped softly. "Sto—"
But before she'd even finished the word—before she'd even really decided if she did want it to stop—he'd withdrawn. He took one swift step back immediately and stood there three feet away in self-contained stillness, his hair disheveled and fallen around his face, his robes rumpled where she'd crushed them under her hands. There was uncharacteristic color in his cheeks—pale pink spots on his cheekbones.
His hands raised slightly in diffidence, palms open, like a hostage negotiator showing he had no weapon.
"All right," he said smoothly. Placatingly. "All right."
Amy slid off the desk, holding the hem of her skirt down as she did so, breathing hard through her nose. Already his jibe about her 'damaged sexuality' was buzzing like a wasp across her brain, threatening to sting. And she had no idea how to explain that, really, she hadn't wanted him to stop.
She'd only wanted him to pause.
But it felt too late to say that now, even if she'd known how, so she looked away from him and began to pull her appearance together. There were words for a woman who left a man with a raging erection like this, ugly ones she'd heard in the Common Room.
Bitch.
Cocktease.
Whether he thought these things of her, she had no idea.
The need to say something—to apologize, even—tingled on her tongue.
"I just…" she began.
"You don't owe me anything, Bartleby," he interrupted quietly. And there was something so disarming in his tone that her eyes snapped to his face.
Snape then did something very strange.
He reached toward her tentatively and, in an oddly tender gesture, tucked her hair behind her ear. The calloused pad of his thumb grazed down her cheek as he withdrew. Then he opened his mouth and asked the very last question she'd been expecting.
"Wherever did you learn the spell?"
"I'm sorry?" she breathed.
"The Entrail-Expelling Curse," he said. "Surely, with your grades, you're not in the habit of spending your leisure time poring over the Restricted Section, searching for obscure Dark spells?"
No, of course not. That was something he did as a student, not her.
Amy had to think a moment about this. It was like trying to remember the exact moment you learned that two plus two equals four, or that murder was wrong, or that nice girls don't get drunk and wander about after dark, dressed like sluts. Then, slowly, the memory of a pleasant day by the lake with her cousins came to her.
"Fishing," she said finally. "It's for fishing."
A look of curious disbelief crossing his features.
"They're already dead," she clarified. "It's just to...to gut them. So you don't have to pick little bones out of your dinner later."
"Fishing," he repeated to himself. He made it sound like a nonsense word, the kind babies use before they've learned to speak.
That's when he laughed.
Actually laughed.
It was that same, desperately ironic laugh she'd first heard outside Malfoy manor. As if something about what she'd said set off an inside joke which only he was privy to.
"You!" he said, shaking his head in amusement. "You are the single most depressing person I have ever had the misfortune to meet, and yet everything you touch becomes absurd. How absurd that I should still like to fuck you! Perhaps one day I shall, and perhaps that too shall be absurd."
He then made a shooing motion at her, rather like one would dismiss an endearing but badly-behaved dog. "Now go away, Bartleby, before we both of us choke on your absurdity."
Amy's roommate, Fiona, felt that the loo was a place of sacred female companionship. It was a refuge away from the world of men—really, the world at large—where witches could get together and observe the holy rituals of gossip and sisterly commiseration. Sometimes, after a particularly large meal, Fiona even prayed to the porcelain god.
Amy, on the other hand, felt that the loo was for peeing.
Shitting, too.
If you were lucky.
Amy, presently, was not lucky. She could neither shit nor piss. She could do neither because Fiona had interrupted her, mid-stream, in order to have a little chat through the stalls about the upcoming Easter holiday.
"I'll be staying here, of course—lots of studying to do," chirped Fiona. "But you're going home, right?"
Pointedly ignoring the implication that she, Amy, was free to leave the Castle because burn-outs like her did not have studying to do, Amy stared at the spot on her thigh where the curse scar still marred her flesh and made a noncommittal noise.
"That's nice," said Fiona magnanimously. "You seem like you could do with a holiday."
Amy absently ran her palm over the scar as she listened to Fiona finish peeing, flush, leave the stall, and begin washing her hands.
"I wish I could go home. But there's just too much to do with my senior project. It's coming along nicely, you know," Fiona was saying over the sound of rushing water.
It was apparently too much to hope that Fiona might, you know, leave upon the conclusion of her business.
"I even got to sit in on the last meeting for the Hogwarts Board of Governors."
"Fiona, I'm—ah—I'm a little busy just at the moment," Amy said.
The sound of splashing water ceased as Fiona finished washing her hands. "Oh, I don't mind," she said.
Amy squeezed her hand over her curse scar, nails digging into her thigh, and suppressed a groan while Fiona prattled on.
"Of course, it wasn't a full meeting of the Governors. They can't really do anything until the vacant seat is filled, but still. You know, I was even telling Slughorn that he should run for the seat," Fiona said.
"Slughorn?" Amy blurted out. She was appalled to hear the hurt in her own voice. Slughorn had ignored Amy's letter but answered Fiona's?
Jesus. How humiliating.
"Oh yeah," Fiona responded. "We owl all the time, didn't you know? I guess you don't really keep in touch with him though, do you?"
Amy squeezed her scar harder and imagined punching Fiona in the nose.
"It must be nice to have all that free time," Fiona continued, her every syllable dripping with false envy. "I feel like I spend half my life answering Slughorn's letters. He just sends so many of them!"
Amy seethed silently.
"Of course, nobody can run for the empty Governor's seat until they get someone on the advisory board to nominate them. I told Slughorn, all he needs is one—just one—advisor to nominate him before the end of the term, then it'll go to the public for a snap election."
"Fascinating," Amy snarled by way of a response.
"Hmm. Well, I'd better go," Fiona said, apparently bored with tormenting her Housemate. And then, on apparent afterthought, "Oh, and Amy?"
"What?" Amy snapped.
"I almost forgot. Professor Snape told me to tell you something."
Amy's heart jumped in her throat and her nails dug into the flesh of her leg. "Tell me what?"
"He wants you in his office tomorrow morning, before you leave for home. He said to be there at 11:30, and not to be late, as he's very busy."
"Busy doing what?" Amy wondered aloud.
"He's probably slicing Tremlett into tiny pieces for a potion." Fiona dropped her voice to those gossipy, conspiratorial tones she was known for. "Apparently the dumb kid had something very nasty on one of those Memoriballs."
"I don't know why those bother him so much," said Amy, who absolutely refused to give Fiona the pleasure of asking what 'nasty' thing Tremlett had in his Memoriball. "They're just fantasies."
Alex's words, straight out of Amy's mouth.
"Hmm. Well, whatever it was, Snape's been on the rampage about it. He even had the Prefects search the boys' dorms for more. I wouldn't go pissing him off if I were you."
Amy thought again about the words for girls who started sexual encounters they couldn't finish. Words like "slut" and "damaged goods." She somehow doubted it was Tremlett's Memoriball that had Snape in such a foul mood. Although...
Well.
Who knew with him, anyway?
"Well?" said Fiona expectantly, jolting Amy out of her reverie. "Why are you supposed to meet Snape tomorrow? What's he want?"
"To fuck me."
It felt good to say that out loud.
Fiona laughed. "Ugh, I know, right? He's such a fucker. Gave me a 'P' on my last paper. Graded it and then fucked it right in the arse."
In reality, it was Amy who'd graded the paper and fucked in in the arse, but that hardly mattered at this point.
"Oh, Amy?"
"What, Fiona?"
"I saw a box of chocolate frogs on your bedside table earlier."
"You can have one. I don't care." Amy would have given Fiona her left tit just to make her leave.
"No, no, I don't want one...But, all the same...Maybe you should give them to someone else. It's just a lot of empty calories, you know? No offense," Fiona said.
And, with that last insult, the door swung shut behind her.
Amy finally let go of her thigh and looked down. Highlighted by her own red handprint, the faded and barely-legible word "WHORE" glared back.
She wondered what Snape would have to say about how the Dittany treatments were progressing, then punched the door of the stall so hard she split her knuckle.