A/N - A bit about the Administration Series, just in case...

The Administration - this is the government of a future dystopia based out of England. At least the part this fic is centred around. It extends at least to continental Europe and everything is called New. Example, the HQ of The Administration is located in and around New London, a city built on the old location of London. English is the ONLY language legally permitted- no Welsh, no Greek or French etc. Of course there are little pockets of resistance where the old folk secretly keep their languages alive.

Of course, whenever you try to control people to this extent, you are bound to have resisters. The department of 'Internal Security' is responsible for keeping the citizens of the Administration supplicant. They do this through the use of rules, threat of of imprisonment and a lot of regulated activities etc. Those who insist on being independent, individual and quite frankly different, may find themselves in the Investigation and Interrogation Division where you may be Mindfucked (the unofficial term for "Re-education", the chemically assisted brain washing and torture used to keep citizens in line.)

Val Toreth is a Para-Investigator (he's an investigator who can use drugs and torture devices (futuristic of course) to find things out). He is, however, also a pretty emotionally complex man with a past that makes Harry or Snape's childhoods look pleasurable. As a result, he's unwilling to admit that he's, IMHO, madly in love with Dr Keir Warrick. Every time he thinks he might be becoming tame, he sleeps around, just to prove he can *eyeroll* yet he's completely insecure about Warrick cheating. Warrick is mostly tolerant of this behaviour as long as it's just sexual and not emotional cheating.

Er, I think that's everything. If anyone's reading this, please let me know if you're confused and I'll clarify in a future A/N.

- Sorry, I didn't realize that ff. net removed my section dividers.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
- Albert Einstein

Part I

Snape covertly flew back on to Hogwarts grounds from which he had fled a short while before. He spied Draco's blond head disappearing into a room on the seventh floor he was quite certain had never been there before. The younger Crabbe and Goyle were with him which did little to console the former Slytherin Head of House. They had the muscle to protect Draco but far too little brains to evade even his weakest attempts at manipulation. First Potter and now the young Malfoy, how did he always seem to end up protecting the idiot children of his friends?

Quickly stunning then confounding an approaching Auror, he followed his young snakes into the mysterious room. It was filled with towering piles of just about everything or anything Snape could think of. It appeared to be a store room of some sort, perhaps where banished things went? Who knew Hogwarts mysteries?

A sudden crash jerked him out of his momentary distracted exploration and he realized that the Golden Trio was also here. Following the moving voices and avoiding flashes of light as stray spells created further chaos in the room, he rounded the corner just in time to see Crabbe spell Fiendfyre. That fool! They all rushed to leave, the Golden Trio's brooms lifting them to safety as they hurried from the room.

To his surprise though not shock, bloody predictable Gryffindor heroics, the Trio returned to help the Slytherins. Draco hastily joined Potter on his broom while looking back at Crabbe who for a moment seemed to have been petrified.

"Crabbe!" the young Malfoy cried in terror, his voice managing to carry over the shouts from Granger and Weasley urging Potter to leave the room.

To his horror, Snape watched as Potter seemed to be turning back to save the finally moving Crabbe. Though he desperately wanted to leave the area, Snape stopped, shouting, "Potter, go!"

Potter, that stubborn prat, glared at him in defiance and continued turning towards the room, leaning from his broom and trying to reach Crabbe.

"GO!" Snape shouted, transfiguring the piles nearest to the door into great dunes of sand in what he knew to be a futile attempt to contain the rapidly approaching fire. Turning towards Crabbe he snarled, "I'll get him, Potter, just go!"

It all happened so quickly and yet time seemed to have slowed to a crawl. In almost the same instance, Snape watched as Potter snatched a chain from young Malfoy's robes then turned just in time to see the flames swallow his former student.

"Snape, help him!" Potter shouted, throwing a braided gold chain towards Snape as though it was a lifeline. "Throw it to him and then the two of you hang on!"

In what seemed a mere millisecond later, he saw Draco's hand jerk, clumsily knocking the other end of the chain from Potter's hand. In that same instant he somehow noticed the rapidly spinning pendant on the chain. His black eyes barely managed to open in horror before the out of control time turner fell over his head.

"Potter, you pillock!" Snape snarled, his enraged glare no less fearsome in spite of the grey-green tint his sallow skin had taken on after the unexpected voyage.

His spy instincts kicked in and he paused to observe his surroundings. He suspected he was in Muggle London and yet this area was different from anywhere he'd ever been. He seemed to have landed in the courtyard of a grand white complex of glass, steel and stone. What little he could see was intimidating and awe inspiring if ugly and cold. He moved to hide behind one of the giant potted plants that seemed somewhat absurd in the midst of this concrete jungle. 'Muggles!'

A sudden movement in a window several floors above alerted him that he was being observed. Looking up he spotted a blond man staring at him, mug in hand. Shit. He only hoped the Muggle hadn't recorded it. He'd read about the difficulty the Ministry was having with CCTV technology which seemed to be popping up all over Muggle London lately, recording proof of Apparating wizards and witches. It made clean up that much harder than using a few obliviation spells and relying on the Muggle tendency to deny proof of the unexpected, even when they'd witnessed it themselves.

This was all Potter's fault, as it so often was. And now Snape was here. Wherever and whenever the hell 'here' was. At least the startled look in the witness' face was a good sign that the man would most likely doubt his own eyes.

"Don't move!" Snape quickly and carefully hid his wand up his sleeve and watched as half a dozen men uniformed in black military style Muggle clothes circled him. He was quite surprised that he hadn't heard them approaching considering that their boots were now loudly echoing in the quiet yard. "Who are you, civilian? Present your ID, now!"

Snape sneered. "My name is Severus Snape and I do not have an 'ID'," the stress of the final word giving little doubt that he neither knew nor cared about what an ID was. The men glanced quickly at each other and Snape looked around the courtyard, trying to judge whether there were more witnesses around. Six Muggles were no challenge for him. He could stun and obliviate them before they'd even realized he'd moved but he needed to know that no one else would see. He wasn't really bothered about the blond who'd already given his beverage a few suspicious glares.

"Bring him inside," a seventh man called from a doorway. "This way, and quickly!"

"Yes, sir," the first speaker nodded. Pointing his weapon at Snape he hissed, "You heard him. Go on."

Senior Para-Investigator Val Toreth stared in disbelief at what he seemed to have just witnessed. He was not prone to hallucinations but he was quite certain he'd just seen a man in a long black dress suddenly materialize in the courtyard. Sara, his admin, had been nagging him to call Warrick after their last fight. She wouldn't have drugged his coffee, would she? No, he decided, she wouldn't dare.

He watched the man look around in amazement until he caught Toreth's gaze. The strange man had been trying to hide behind one of the stupid potted plants that had been installed ahead of some foolish publicity campaign that the heads at Int-Sec seemed to think would 'improve the image of Investigation and Interrogation (I&I) Division'. He hated this crap- his job was to saving the fucking public, not befriend them!

Further movement from the hiding place refocused his attention to the present and he wondered what the best course of action should be. He could capture and confront the man himself or he could wait until security caught him. Bevan and his team would most likely have seen the intruder by now. Ever since the whole resister uprising/ attempted coup a year before, security was even more wary of people being out of place. The strange man would most likely end up at Justice- trespassing was hardly a matter for I&I. Still, he would really like to find out how the man had suddenly appeared out of nowhere like that.

Fortunately, before curiosity could get the better of him, an Int-Sec security team surrounded and took the man away. He'd have to ask Daedra for the antidote to curiosity. There was bound to be a drug for that.

Severus Snape stood in a grey cell contemplating the many ways he could and would kill Harry Potter when he saw the brat again. The twentieth person in as many minutes opened his door a crack and stared at him as though he was the star freak at a freak show. He didn't have any idea what was going on but he couldn't pretend to be in any hurry to rush back to the horrors at Hogwarts. Still, in spite of everything, he had a very important role to play in the war and he couldn't waste too much time here.

He could probably blast the door open the next time one of them came to stare but it would be foolish to show his one advantage now. They'd left him with his wand first because they thought it funny to leave him with his 'little stick' and then because he'd cast a Notice-Me-Not spell on all his possessions- potions, wand and time turner alike and so they couldn't find them.

He fingered the time turner absentmindedly. Apparently he had travelled centuries or possibly millennia into the future. He did not want to believe it but he'd known they weren't lying. He had never heard of a time turner that took people into the future far less a future this distant. For as much as the Ministry closely guarded the location of regular time travel devices, either they closely guarded the mere existence of the future travelling ones or this was the only of its kind. Once again his thoughts were interrupted by another person peeping in on him.

Stupid Muggles. They had brought him through endless winding white corridors several floors below ground. He could probably escape by transfiguring his robes to match their uniforms and try to find the way out but the risk seemed too great.

For as much as their little interrogation had annoyed him, he'd much rather be there than in this room with grey floors and grey ceilings to complement the grey walls. He wondered what about his blood seemed to have confused them. Though the physiology of wizards and witches was slightly different, he'd been to Muggle doctors as a child and they'd never mentioned any anomalies. Of course that could be because the doctors had looked down on the poor, unattractive child from Spinner's End and, he always suspected, hadn't done any real health assessments. They hadn't thought him worth their time and effort. They hadn't even wanted to touch him.

He couldn't contain the brief chuckle that escaped at the memory of the horrified looks on his captives faces as 'Para Chevril' as the others called the man, tried to torture him into submission with a metal probe that valiantly tried to mimic the Cruciatus. Snape had to admit, if only to himself, that after almost five hours, it had come close. Still, he had developed an unusually high tolerance level to neurological pain after years of working with the Dark Lord. He had not punished Snape as often as some of the others but Albus and Severus had felt it in his best interest to practice controlling his responses. It strained his Occlumency significantly but he had succeeded in not succumbing to pain in front of the Muggle.

After his father, he had vowed never to beg a Muggle for mercy. Never again.

Toreth looked around the room at his terrified peers. And they were clearly terrified. Bevan, the Head of Security, hid his fear behind a fearsome scowl. His colleague, fellow Para-Investigator Chevril's neutral expression was spoiled by his greenish complexion and their boss, Tillotson's thinned lips looked in danger of disappearing altogether. He heard what they'd said but clearly the hallucination drug had seeped into all the water at I&I, not just his coffee. Strange that Sara seemed unaffected.

"So, this stranger, who calls himself Severus Snape, just appeared out of thin air and is impervious to the interrogation drugs and tools?" he asked his boss, not bothering to hide his dubious expression.

Tillotson frowned. "Show him the security footage," he nodded at Bevan.

Even though he'd seen it for himself, with his own eyes, live and in person, the sight of the stranger materialising in the courtyard was just as astonishing and Toreth didn't have to fake the surprised look on his face.

"What do you expect me to do about it?" he asked, swallowing uncomfortably. Ever since he'd been forced to save the Investigation and Interrogation Division of the Department of Internal Security (Int-Sec), they seemed to look to him to look to him to do the impossible, or at any rate, the uncomfortable. "He probably belongs in Citizen-Surveillance, did you check them?"

"Cit-Surv-? We used the new P&P right up to upper-level four and when that failed with him, we used…" Chev looked around the room and somehow managed to pale some more. "We had no choice, Toreth. We had to use the old methods," he pleaded.

About a year ago, some resisters had invaded their division and thrown the Administration into chaos. The resisters hired a psychotic Socioanalyst by the name of Jean-Baptiste Carnac to help control I&I. When Carnac had been assigned to evaluate the division a few years earlier, Toreth had tried to intimidate the annoying prick by showing him a high level interrogation which amounted to the sort of vicious torture that the division was rumoured to perform and which had resulted in I&I cultivating a fearsome and reviled public image. Of course the bulk of what the public imagined went on was purely conjecture because, quite frankly, people who went through the upper levels of the old Procedures and Protocols (P&P) didn't survive to tell the tale.

Once he found out about Carnac's plans to portray them as Administration sanctioned torturers and murderers in order to be allowed to legitimately execute them all, Toreth's only solution had been to rewrite the P&P to a less invasive method of interrogation. Although the new manual saved their jobs and more importantly their lives, his colleagues had quickly forgotten that and instead spent a lot of time bitching that the new P&P had made their jobs more difficult. They all knew that I&I division was necessary and it was only a matter of time before they would be allowed to return to high level interrogations. Indeed the powers that be in Int-Sec were already turning a blind eye to the occasional use of the old methods when it suited them. They were Administration sanctioned torturers and murders- it was just political suicide to let that become public knowledge rather than rumour and Carnac knew it.

But Citizen Surveillance was a different thing. This secretive department of the Administration- so secret that it did not officially exist- was made up of spies who lived among citizens, working at mundane jobs and befriending resisters who they quietly exterminated or betrayed to the Administration. Merely knowing the identity of their staff was a death sentence. Their people were untouchable; torturing a Cit Surveillance spy would not be appreciated. So it was no wonder his calculated casual comment had increased the tension in the room. Chev was right to be terrified and so was Tillotson. The man who authorized the torture would not be spared anymore than the torturer and he knew Chev well enough to know that he would never have done the illegal interrogation on his own initiative.

"Excuse me, sir, priority one on the secure comm.," Jenny, Tillotson's admin, interrupted.

Tillotson disappeared to a backroom for less than five minutes before returning. "You knew," his eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened as he glared at Toreth. It was a familiar if not so recently seen look. During the coup, Tillotson had cowardly stayed away and Carnac had made Toreth division head. Although he'd been only too happy to give back the top seat to Tillotson, the Head was still wary.

"Knew…?"

"He IS Cit Surveillance," Tillotson hissed, Chevril whimpered and Bevan exhaled harshly, "and they want you to deal with the case… again."

"Look, I don't know anything. A mysterious man with no apparent identity and access to high level anti-interrogation suppressant drugs shows up, it was a logical guess." Toreth was relieved his voice remained slightly bored even though his mind was processing at a thousand gigabytes a second. It had to be Leo Warrick or John Sable or whatever the fuck his name really was. The man was Keir Warrick's (Toreth's lover) father and, unknown even to Warrick, worked in Cit Surveillance. Toreth and Warrick's father had been forced to work together once before. He had hoped they would never meet again; he'd barely escaped the association with his life.

"What do they want from me?" he knew Tillotson wouldn't know but he rather liked rubbing it in his face.

"They'll contact you directly," he quoted irritably. "Listen, about earlier, maybe you can try to talk to him, to Snape," Tillotson couldn't quite keep the plea from his voice. "You have a way with people. Maybe you could reach him. Explain to him… get him to see it our way… get him to understand, we didn't realize... "

Flattery. It shouldn't work but Toreth knew that once they'd told him everything, they'd brought him into this mess with them. Even if he refused to become further involved, Cit Surveillance wouldn't spare his life anyway. He might as well take what he could get.

"Fine, but if I do this, I do it my way." Tillotson swallowed a protest and nodded. Toreth smiled. It had been a while since he was given official Carte Blanche on his expenses and he intended to have some Administration-funded fun. The stranger was certainly not his type; he had too much nose and appeared to be much too thin. But this Snape fellow was able to resist the drugs and neural induction probes which was unheard of. Not to mention that he materialized out of thin air in the midst of one of the most secure areas in the Int-Sec complex. Severus Snape was as different as they come and Toreth was in the mood for a challenge.