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"I must ask one more time," said Dumbledore, the picture of grave concern with his fingers steepled on his desk, "If you are entirely sure about this decision."
Lily made herself smile back, although she felt like doing anything but, and she said, "I'm sure, Albus," although using his first name made her feel like she was about to be given detention for a week. "Anyway, it will be good to have something to do to keep me busy," she said, and they both looked at the two year old boy currently seated in the middle of the floor of Dumbledore's office, on a squashy rug, piling up blocks from Lily's bag.
Harry put the lie to this statement. Lily, at the age of twenty-two, was a recent widow and a single mother, had plenty to do, and didn't need the money, since she had inherited from her husband. What she needed was to see someone other than James's two surviving best friends, her own having died in the war. What she needed was to get out of the house without being convinced Death Eaters were trailing her down the street. What she needed was something to stop her from losing her mind.
The project of breaking the curse on the Hogwarts Defense Against the Dark Arts position would do nicely. "Besides," said Lily to Dumbledore, tearing her gaze from Harry, lips stuck out in concentration, trying to place a fourth block on the pile without toppling it. "You don't have time to find another Defense teacher before term begins."
"I suppose you're right about that," said Dumbledore, and offered her the tin of lemon drops a second time.
The first thing Lily had had to do, after her husband was murdered, and her ridiculous, precarious plan worked and prevented her and her baby from being murdered too, was get Sirius out of prison, and get Pettigrew arrested instead. She had been breathless with horror at what might have happened, not just to Harry as she had expected but to Sirius, too: they had been so concerned about security and not leaking the new plan that they had not thought what would have happened if it failed, and she and James died with Dumbledore still believing Sirius the Secret Keeper, apparently unharmed and free. Sirius kept insisting he wasn't angry and it was his oversight too, but he'd had to be taken to St. Mungo's after being released from twenty-four hours in Ministry custody, and Remus, with whom he lived, had been visibly furious.
Lily and Harry had stayed with them for two days, because the house had been destroyed and there was no one else who Lily might plausibly ask to lend her a spare room or a sofa on which to sleep, and then Lily had given up in the face of her guilt, and their grief for James - who had been their friend long before he was Lily's boyfriend or husband - and packed Harry up and fled to a hotel. There she had nearly gone mad enough to call Petunia and ask to stay with her before sense reasserted itself, and she took Harry to stay in James's parents' house, packed up since their own recent deaths. This had only been a marginal improvement; it had been like living in a mausoleum to the Potter family. She had felt like a caretaker to a graveyard, raising the last Potter son in a house she had only visited twice. She was hideously aware that she and James had dated for a couple of years and been married for about two, and here she was, the heir to everything his family owned except for her baby son's own inheritance.
So obviously, once the Defense position occurred to her she had applied at once. She hadn't even bothered waiting for the teacher of the academic year of 1981-1982 to snuff it or quit. This had perhaps been rude of her, but Dumbledore knew to expect it as well as she did and had only tried to dissuade her once or twice before accepting.
It wasn't really about the job. Lily didn't mind the idea of teaching, but it wasn't a dream of hers, or anything. It was about the curse - the curse which had been on the position for fifteen or twenty years now, which countless teams of Curse-Breakers had failed to handle or even so much as detect, so that it was claimed by some to be a rumor. It was about the curse which, Dumbledore had confirmed, had been set by Voldemort.
Lily had - probably temporarily - killed the man by entrapping him with his surety in his own magic, after years of foiling lesser curses for the Order. By doing this she had deprived herself of her job, and of the Order, by ending the war. The Defense curse was a reprieve from that uselessness. It was Lord Voldemort's last curse (for now). It was, in the months between her job application and the following September, the subject of her utter obsession.
She had combed newspaper archives, sent owls to all of the professors she thought would speak to her and to Dumbledore himself, made lists and charts and filled out paper spreadsheets on the grand dining room table of the Potters' house, read every grimoire and tome that might be even vaguely related, and filled an ocean of paper with notes. She had to, since she'd have only the single year to break the thing, or it might kill her.
She opened the door to her new staff quarters a few minutes after her final interview with Dumbledore on the subject, and looked at Harry on her hip with a pang of guilt for that prospect. "What do you think, Harry?" she said, waving her wand to light the sconces on the wall. "This is our new home. Do you like it?"
Harry squirmed. "Put me down," he commanded, and when she did, took off at a surprisingly quick run across the sitting room inside. Lily kept an eye on him, but he went to the window opposite and climbed, struggling but determined, up to the window seat. "Lake!" he said, pointing.
Lily smiled, painfully, and shut the door behind her. "That's right," she said. "We can see the lake from here." She went over to Harry, rested a hand on his shoulder, and looked out over the grounds for the first time since graduation, slightly over four years ago.
So much had changed in four years.
"Let's start unpacking, Harry," said Lily, moving from the window with a sigh. "Then we can go for a walk around the lake, before dinner, okay?"
It was strange to unpack her possessions into the staff quarters: she could not be sure whether it was the possessions of her student self - books and posters and a handful of nicer quills she had bought her seventh year - still, somehow, surviving four years and a lifetime later to be brought back to Hogwarts that were more alien, or those possessions she had acquired as a young married woman and then mother. Most of the latter had been destroyed, but she had put some things in storage when they went into hiding in Godric's Hollow in the cottage, and the contents of the basement had been more or less safe from the explosion. A few other things had been salvageable. Lily put up the poster Mary had bought her as a birthday present sixth year over the desk furnished by the school, helped Harry line up his toys in his new bedroom, and wondered if she would get used to being here.
She could keep the job, if she could break the curse. That was another incentive.
Lily had vanquished the Dark Lord, or she was the mother of the infant who had vanquished the Dark Lord, which might be worse. People stared on the streets and whispered. No one would let her pay for anything in magical London - even the Death Eaters, who were motivated either by the knowledge that their leader had turned out to be sadistic and dangerous or the need to appear as happy for his demise as everyone else. They bowed to her in the streets, they tried to do her favors, they came up and told her things - horribly personal things, things no one should say to anyone on the street - and they expected her to know exactly how to respond. She was perfect; she was Merlin reborn; she was a living saint, as far as magical Britain was concerned.
It made her crazy. If she had had A levels, if she had even had O levels, if she had had any friends at all in the muggle world she would have left and found a job as a single mother and raised Harry away from their joint fame. But she was a Hogwarts alumni, former Head Girl, and James Potter's widow. Her parents were dead and her school friends were dead and her sister was evil. It was here that she must stay.
In Hogwarts, as long as she could keep the Defense job, she was safe from all of that. She would only have to deal with other staff and the students.
So she had better break the curse, and keep the Defense job.
There was an outburst to pull Lily from her maudlin thoughts: Harry couldn't find his stuffed dog, and a Summoning Charm was no help, so then they had to search for it. Every minute she didn't miraculously produce the dog, Harry's cries grew louder. He threw himself on the floor and sobbed and moaned and screamed, and paid no attention to Lily's soothing noises, until finally she had to shut out his wailing, keeping up a random babbling stream of soft-toned words with no input from her brain all the while, and search herself until she finally located the stuffed dog, pushed behind and partially under the new toy trunk where it hadn't been dislodged by Lily's charm. By now producing it was little help; Harry was well and truly in the midst of a temper tantrum and would not be dissuaded by merely getting what he had actually wanted.
"Nap time, I think," said Lily, bright and brittle, and for a moment in the unfamiliar quarters she had to push down the urge to throw herself on the carpet and sob alongside her son.
Once Harry was asleep, she had more of a respite. Thank Merlin for being a witch: she could simply cast Muffliato so that he would not hear any noise she made and wake (thank you, Sev, but also fuck you, Sev, as Lily had thought every time she used one of his spells for years). Then she went back to unpacking. Without the help and hindrance of a two year old it went faster. Her quarters weren't large: there was the nursery and the bedroom and the sitting room slash office, and she had asked for and thankfully received her own small kitchen, which would do for brewing her own potions as well. It had all come furnished, and since Lily's house had recently exploded and she didn't feel right removing James's parents' things from their house, she didn't have much of her own furniture to add. She rearranged what was there, put Harry's bedroom together, and unpacked clothing, kitchenware, and, mostly, books.
The books she saved for last, as a reward. She had moved bookcases to line the sitting room, all around the walls except for the one taken up by the windows and desk, and when the quarters were otherwise together she could finally take her time filling them, examining the effect of the room, and then starting to classify them. With the door to the nursery open, she could glance in on the sleeping Harry in between trips as she sorted. There was the shelf for fiction, and next to it muggle nonfiction, and next to it she would begin with the Arithmancy books...
Harry rarely slept much more than an hour, but he must have been tired today. Lily had three hours to unpack before he began to stir, and when he was up she looked at the clock and realized in surprise it was nearly his usual dinner time. For a moment, the looming pressure of doing absolutely everything alone for herself and her son mounted, and then she remembered she was at Hogwarts. Uncertainly she said, "Kitchens? I'd like dinner for myself and a two year-old, please." She shut her mouth on the urge to remind the kitchens that Harry liked chicken, hated tomatoes, and needed vegetables. She had written up a summary of Harry's dietary requirements for them when they arrived. This was only nerves.
Five minutes later the food appeared, and Harry's eyes went wide in excitement. Lily fed him, and managed to eat something herself, although she remembered she would have to put in an appearance at dinner in an hour or two, closer to the time adult people normally had meals. This reminded her of the arrangements made to let her actually teach.
"Harry," she said, seriously, leaning down to make eye contact. "Do you remember when we talked about how we would come and live at Hogwarts, so I could teach big kids?"
Harry made an indeterminate noise. He understood a lot for his age, but this was complicated and a lot had happened. Still, Lily would have to leave him frequently, and it was best to start getting used to it now.
"And how an elf would come and help mind you sometimes?" she said. Harry would not actually remember meeting any house elves. James's parents had had an elderly house elf couple living with them by mutual agreement, but after they had died and the house had been shut up they had gone to stay with distant cousins - James and Lily had agreed that as a modern couple they didn't want servants even once they were out of hiding - and so they had been gone before Harry was even born. But Lily had shown him pictures.
"Elf," said Harry, which might have meant he understood or he was remembering the picture of the elf or he thought it was a funny word to stay.
"Right," said Lily, and nervously, "Er, Vinny?"
Harry gave a little scream when the elf appeared. Then he screamed again, just for fun, and burst out into giggles, waving at the house elf.
Vinny the house elf waved back, and smiled at Lily, and generally indicated that this was no trouble and Lily should go ahead and let them get used to each other. Lily was not the praying kind, but she had not actually let anyone else babysit Harry in his life, and she felt the urge to pray, and also vaguely offended that she was being shuffled out of her own quarters immediately, but neither was any use. She bit her lip and went.
Wandering through the halls of Hogwarts, several weeks before term began and in her grown up clothing was even stranger. She felt like she was violating curfew or something, like any minute Professor McGonagall was going to leap out and dress her down for being out of uniform. It might have been easier if she had been older, Lily mused, trying not to feel naked and alone without Harry and wearing only an open dark blue robe over her jeans and T shirt. She had only been out of school a few years and wouldn't look much older than the oldest students. There wasn't enough time to clearly separate her student self from her teacher self, except that there was the war and the marriage and the widowhood and the baby, and if that wasn't enough what would be?
Then, like the school had heard her thoughts and sought to deliver, a familiar voice exclaimed behind her, "Miss Evans!"
Lily turned, a half-formed apology on her lips, but Professor McGonagall - in her usual dark teaching robes and immaculate black bun, but minus the usual hat - was first: "I'm so sorry," she said, catching up, "I forgot myself for a moment - Mrs. Potter. Albus didn't tell me you were coming today."
"Please," said Lily, wishing heartily she had not changed her name and would not have to decide whether to change it back now that James was dead, "Call me Lily. It's no trouble, sometimes I still forget myself." And then she closed her mouth, because it was so ambiguous whether she meant she forgot the marriage, or she forgot the death.
"Lily, then, and you must call me Minerva," said Professor McGonagall, terrifyingly. "And here I am, chasing you through the corridors like a student out after dark - come sit with me and have some tea?"
"Please," said Lily, heartily relieved by the prospect of adult conversation. "Distract me, I introduced Harry to his house elf minder so they'd get to know each other and was promptly thrown out of my own quarters. I feel lost."
"I'm told it's usual with the first one," said Professor McGonagall - Minerva, Lily told herself firmly. "Come on, my quarters are much nicer than the office, no need to make them intimidating."
Lily followed Professor McGonagall-no-Minerva several corridors down, to a painting of a sphinx. Lily blinked at it, and politely turned away as Minerva gave it the password. She hadn't thought to question the Danse Macabre painting over her quarters, but...
"Albus has a sense of humor, doesn't he?" she said questioningly, gesturing at the sphinx.
Minerva chuckled. "Hogwarts has a sense of humor," she corrected, and went in. "Let me just put the kettle on."
Lily looked around, overcome by curiosity. If she had ever been asked to picture Professor McGonagall's quarters as a student, she would have said one word and one word only: "Tartan."
This turned out to be correct, but not as overwhelmingly so as it could have been. The sofa was tartan-patterned, but that was the only tartan object immediately visible. The walls were green, and there were half-height bookcases along one wall in dark wood. Minerva had her desk in another room, or kept it in her office; instead in the sitting room there was the tartan sofa, and a couple of armchairs around the coffee table, and a large, stone fireplace that dominated the room. Lily sat down in an armchair, and amused herself reading book titles and imagining what the more cryptic ones might mean until Minerva came back with a plate of biscuits and the tea.
"Now," she said, pouring Lily's for her and demonstrating that she still remembered Lily took hers with an appalling amount of milk and two sugars. "You can tell me what exactly you were thinking, Lily, taking the Defense position. You do know it's cursed."
"Well, that was sort of the attraction, to be honest," said Lily, wondering if she was going to be Spoken To by every single adult she met for the next year.
"I know that you have broken a lot of impossible curses," said Minerva, "But no one has even managed to detect this one, and you'll be under it for the whole year. Couldn't you have simply asked to stay at the castle as a Curse-Breaker?"
"The Ministry won't let Albus have a Curse-Breaker, since they've failed to detect the curse four separate times," said Lily, who had actually discussed this with him. "I've got to come as a member of staff, and really, what am I meant to say? Hire someone else and I'll watch them get killed? Shuffle someone else into the Defense position and risk them instead?"
Minerva pursed her lips. "There is," she said, "Another applicant. A recurring one."
"Who on earth is a recurring applicant Albus hasn't been desperate enough to take?" said Lily, wracking her brains. "Mundungus Fletcher? One of the Death Eaters?"
"Close," said Minerva, nostrils flared in distaste. "But he's currently another member of staff, and Albus needs him, he says, in position." Lily had a terrible premonition. "It's Severus Snape. You recall he was hired as Slughorn's replacement on account of his Potions talent."
Ah, thought Lily in a moment of crystal clear, nearly emotionless chagrin - that's what I was forgetting about Hogwarts.
"Ah," she said, and set down her tea cup.
"Yes," said Minerva, patting her shoulder stiffly. "I thought you might not have... recalled."
"I suppose I'll have to speak to him at staff meetings, then," said Lily, and narrowly did not burst into angry tears.
Lily knew it was Sev who had tipped off Dumbledore that Voldemort had decided to kill Harry over Neville Longbottom, and she knew it was Sev who had spilled the prophecy to him in the first place and made it a question of which infant would be first. This was very like Sev. He was good and he was bad; she loved him and hated him and it was simply a coin toss which would come out on top at any given occasion. He was her first best friend and the closest she had ever had, the boy she had snuck out at night to meet and whisper about her fights with Tuney and who had in turn muttered recalcitrant confessions about his parents' fights. They had made up spells together, learned about illegal magic and acquired the first gasps of the skills they would use in the war: Sev to kill and Lily to save. He was the only person she had ever let read pieces of her diary. He had spent years helping torment her muggleborn friends until finally she had refused to let him make her an exception, and then she had been included, too.
She was grateful Albus had told her about the source of his information, so that she could use it in her plans, so that she knew how it had turned out. Of course she couldn't have contacted him during the war, and she had been somewhat relieved by that excuse. After James had died... She had thought about writing to Sev, sometimes, and never quite made up her mind if she should, what she would even say. For years, she had fantasized that Sev would realize all his mistakes, renounce the Death Eaters, come back and grovel for her forgiveness - which she would eventually, mercifully grant after gloating unkindly, just a bit, and thereafter have his companionship and his ideas for magical experiments back, safely. But what had happened after the prophecy was a twisted, nightmarish version of this fantasy. She wanted to blame Sev for James alone dying, but she suspected that this was in part because if it was Sev's fault James had died, it was not Lily's fault she had saved herself and saved Harry and failed to save her husband, too.
Anyway, if he was at Hogwarts she didn't have a choice about it and that very prospect made her furiously angry again. If she was going to deal with Sev she'd do it on her own terms, thank you.
Minerva was assuring her gently that she needn't speak to him, that they all understood. Of course, Minerva, as a member of the Order in general, knew only that Sev had been her best friend and that he had publicly called her a Mudblood and become a Death Eater. She knew Albus had claimed he was a spy. She would not know about any of the further occasions on which Sev had destroyed, and then clumsily tried to repair, Lily's life. And Lily couldn't tell her.
"Thank you," Lily said, smiling weakly over the tea cup. "Now that the subject comes up, do you have any last minute advice for me, about teaching? It's going to be strange, being so close to the upper students' age."
The conversation moved on. Lily was grateful she had run into Minerva because when she went down to the Great Hall from Minerva's quarters, trying not to wonder how Harry was doing with Vinny, Sev was there.
Minerva was correct: Lily didn't have to talk to him. He didn't, thank Merlin, try to talk to her, although he turned his head when she came in and she saw his eyes go wide. Then she turned firmly herself and sat down next to the only unfamiliar member of staff, a dark-haired witch who looked not much older than her, and introduced herself. Soraya Hooshmand turned out to have been hired to teach Astronomy, a recent arrival in Britain. Lily considered how odd it was that magical Britain was a place people came to to avoid political unrest instead of a place people left again, and they skated the subject of what had happened to the previous Astronomy teacher carefully, but aside from that it was a satisfying conversation: Soraya was a new teacher like Lily and did not think of Lily as some kind of superhuman saint.
Lily did not look at Severus once during dinner, although she did accept congratulations from the other staff, most of whom remembered her. The Divination teacher, Sybill Trelawney, had been hired after Lily graduated, of course, and of course speaking to her might be even harder than Sev, because according to Dumbledore she did not know she had given the prophecy. But fortunately according to Dumbledore she rarely came down from her quarters to eat with the rest of the school.
She could not stop herself from rushing back from dinner. This was the longest she had been away from Harry since - oh, since he had been born; they had gone into hiding so soon after that Lily had not had any opportunity to need a child minder before this. She ran the last corridor to her quarters, mumbled her password breathlessly, and emerged to find Vinny entertaining a rapt Harry by dangling glowing balls of magical light around him as he giggled madly, telling him a story about a girl who had decided to become a star.
"Oh," said Lily, faintly, and sat down to listen next to Harry, stunned with relief and an odd feeling of disappointment. She hadn't been needed. Vinny winked at her. Harry didn't notice she was back for almost a minute.
The beginning of term approached. Lily did have to go to staff meetings with Sev, but she refused to look directly at him, and they did not speak to each other. Dumbledore watched them thoughtfully, but then he watched everything thoughtfully, it was his poker face and meant nothing. The other staff awkwardly avoided referring to Sev in conversation with Lily, which eventually forced her to explain some of it to Soraya. But aside from this excruciating situation it was fine, really.
She tried to focus on the Defense curse and the Defense teaching. It pained Lily, but she had agreed to stick more or less to the standard Defense curriculum while teaching this year, simply so that she would have time and energy to focus on the curse. Dumbledore had optimistically suggested that if she managed it, she would have years to revolutionize the Defense curriculum, and Lily had added that if she died she wouldn't have to worry about her teaching anymore anyway.
However, she still had to plan her actual lessons, and every time she looked at the Defense curriculum she became annoyed with a new part of it and had to forcefully reign herself in from editing anyway. She eventually hit upon the strategy of working on the Defense curse first, and switching to teaching only when she had exhausted that subject for the day, so she was obliged to prepare for teaching in a great rush after Harry had gone to bed.
Lily was primarily studying the Defense curse's effects on herself. She had set up monitoring devices and charms before signing the contract with Dumbledore, so she had been able to detect the immediate changes in the room and on herself. The problem was that it was very hard to determine what had actually changed, and none of it seemed to relate directly to known curse methodology, which was undoubtedly why the Ministry teams hadn't found anything.
Curses, anyway, were a notoriously tricky subject. There were so many ways to hurt someone with magic, and the tendency to make them illegal only encouraged creative innovation towards the goal of making new ways. A curse could attack the human body in a thousand ways, the mind, the magic, the surroundings. Malicious magic could adhere to the blood or the heart or some other organ, but it might also adhere to the house, a certain area of ground, the shared genes or even the shared name and identity of a family, with no actual importance attached to their blood relationship or lack thereof.
So Lily hadn't pinned down any specific effects on herself, yet, but she had months. She knew something about her relationship with the castle had changed when she signed the contract, but it would have anyway, since Hogwarts knew and had a particular magical relationship with the staff even when they were not cursed by their positions. She was sorting through the information from her monitoring devices and spells, tracking down individual changes and determining whether they were expected or malicious, and at the same time examining other potential avenues of query. Therefore she had a thousand things to check every day and was always looking for more, but with months until the end of term and dozens of directions to try, this project remained exciting and not terrifying.
(Anyway - as she had said to Dumbledore - since it was very clear that the curse sought to remove the professor and the effects stopped after it succeeded, she could always quit if she changed her mind, and force him to find a new teacher halfway through the year.)
Perhaps things would go all right. Perhaps she would break the curse, teach acceptably and avoid speaking directly to Sev at all.
Harry, at least, was enjoying himself: he had never before had so much space to explore, or so many people and things to see, and he was an adventurous child. He and Vinny roamed the castle once Lily gave permission, and Lily took him with her when she wasn't working, or occasionally supervised him while working on safer projects. They went on walks around the lake, and Lily pointed out potions ingredients from among the plant and animal life, and occasionally prevented him from shoving them into his mouth. The last toy broom had been destroyed in the explosion, but Sirius had sent another for Harry's last birthday, and he would sometimes fly alongside Lily, skimming the grass of the lawns with his toes.
One day, the start of term was ages off - August just beginning - and the next it loomed ominously. Lily had to force herself to keep working on collecting information from the castle and researching possibilities on the curse, not only obsessing over preparing to teach and how Harry would adjust to a castle full of students. She was scared to death and she was exasperated by it, because she had faced down Death Eaters, Aurors, the Wizengamot and Voldemort himself, and here she was, terrified of a classroom full of children?
On the other hand she'd once been a child in a classroom full of children and had enough experience to know that might be reasonable.
Anyway, term arrived whether Lily liked it or not. She watched the Sorting from the teacher's table for the first time, and mused on how small the line of children was. The classes had been getting smaller from casualties and from children pulled from Hogwarts to be kept at home or taken abroad, that had started while Lily was in school. But these children had been born in the beginning of the war years, and were even thinner in number. The classes would keep getting smaller after this. Hogwarts was already half-empty, so much bigger than the school it contained, and soon it would be more like three quarters hollow spaces. Lily wondered idly if the castle felt sad. Then she wondered if she could ask it - there were ritual spells that would let you contact the spirit of a place - and then, sitting up straight in her teacher's chair, she wondered if that could help her with the curse.
She was so excited she had a hard time sitting through the rest of the feast, and practically ran back to her quarters when they were released, finally, as though she were a first year herself. But in her quarters, she checked on the sleeping Harry and then fell back into her own bed, suddenly disappointed: she couldn't do something like that without a partner, and she couldn't ask anyone in the school - most of them wouldn't have had the skills for this sort of magic, and anyway, the spell she was thinking of involved breaking the Ministry's law half a dozen times.
She went to her classes the next day and taught, she hoped, reasonably well. She had N.E.W.T. classes first. The older students weren't quite so close to her age as she had feared, or Lily herself was older than her age with everything that had happened, or both. The ones who were old enough to follow political events were themselves in awe of her, which helped, too. Even the Death Eaters' children were as terrified as they were hostile and disgusted; Lily Potter, after all, had vanquished Voldemort.
There were, however, too many classes, even with the reduced student body - one for each house through O.W.L.s, even if there were only two Defense N.E.W.T. sessions because so many students failed the O.W.L. Of course Hogwarts couldn't exactly hire a second Defense teacher. Lily put her head down on her desk during her lunch break and wished for patience, for energy, for the school funding to hire someone to grade for her and the assurance they wouldn't also be killed by the Defense curse, and finally got up and went to her potions bookshelf. She started a cauldron full of Wide Awake Elixir, special modifications done during O.W.L.s just before she and Sev had stopped speaking, forever, and she wondered how the hell she was going to curse-break when she had to teach four or more classes a day, some doubles.
She turned to look at the next shelf, trying to decide what work she could get started on during lunch, when it came upon her that there was someone in the castle she could ask to help her with illegal magic, who even had the skill to do it well, if of course Lily trusted him not to murder her like he had nearly gotten her murdered before.
Absolutely not, Lily told herself, and grabbed the lesson plans to review for after lunch.
The thought kept coming back to her, though, as she assured nervous first years and O.W.L. students and tried to keep the more adventurous N.E.W.T. students in check. After that first week she went back through her lesson plans and slashed the assignments she would have to grade manually after class in half. If she assigned certain classes to report their research findings instead of writing essays, the students would still do the work, probably, but she could grade them while listening in class, she thought, staring at the third year class plan. More practicals...
Harry was crying in his bedroom. Lily got up automatically, went through the motions of hugging him, finding out what was wrong, getting him a snack in the kitchen. If she had someone else to help - someone she could admit to her full resources and theories to - someone she had experience working with...
Absolutely not, Lily, she told herself, in more or less the voice she used to tell Harry he was going to bed this minute or that unfortunately he would have to bathe after all, and she stared at the biscuits in the cupboard and read the packaging until the idea went away again.
She might have gone on like that indefinitely: teaching, investigating the curse and parenting in spare moments, all without ever looking directly at Sev, except that in the third week of term she ran into him, literally and directly. She had guiltily asked Vinny to watch Harry at night, and slipped out of her quarters with a bag full of spell ingredients, and walked straight into Sev on the other side of the portrait hole, patrolling, presumably, for students out after curfew.
They reared back in mutual horror. He gaped, shocked, which was a relief, all things considered - he obviously hadn't known her quarters let out here.
"Lily," said Sev.
"Snape," said Lily, as curtly and dismissively as she could manage, standing in the hallway in a threadbare plush robe open over an ancient band T shirt with a gaping hole in one armpit. "I was just - going," she said, lamely, and clutched her work bag to her.
Sev looked - good, although he needed to wash his hair, Lily thought critically. The robes were far nicer than anything he could have afforded at school, a featureless black silk blend, she thought, tailored to hang correctly and clearly made for him. His acne had cleared up, and he had grown into his features, a bit, especially the nose. She had always thought he would some day. He was taller than she remembered.
She realized she was staring and hastily jerked her gaze back to his face.
Sev's eyes traveled in his own turn over her, from her messily tied back hair to the candlesticks emerging from the bag to the battered trainers she wore when she took Harry on walks on the grounds. "What are you doing here?" he said, stilted at first but with increasing volume and force. It was the way Sev said something when he had been rehearsing it in his head for ages but the circumstances had all gone wrong, and he no longer had control over what was coming out of his mouth.
"Oh," said Lily sarcastically, "Still don't think muggleborns should teach at Hogwarts, do you?"
"That's not what I meant!" said Sev. "I just - you know the position is cursed, don't you?"
"So was the main square of Diagon Alley in '79 and I uncursed that," snapped Lily, "And so was Frank Longbottom in 1980 and I saved him, and so was my husband and nearly me and my son, too, so--"
"So doesn't that mean you should be - I don't know - off with him, doing whatever normal parents do," said Sev, with increasing indignation, "And not getting yourself killed? After I--"
"After you NEARLY KILLED US BOTH?" bellowed Lily, and found with a startled and detached view like that of a person watching TV that she was screaming at Sev with her wand drawn and pointed and about half an inch from his face. Sev was standing very, very still, like someone unexpectedly confronted with an ax murderer, which only made Lily angrier since he was the murderer. "I know what you did, Sev! Were you about to say you saved us? We were only on his list in the first place because of you! Were you pleased, when you heard James was dead? That at least he didn't have me instead? Because let me tell you exactly what I think of you--"
Exactly what she thought of Sev, she did not have a chance to tell him, which was just as well since she wasn't sure what she would have said. In the pause while Lily tried to fill that gap with words, with some approximation with the nauseating terror and breathtaking fury that had suddenly flooded her veins, there was the sound of a footstep, and both of them whirled just in time to spot a student ducking back around the bend at the end of the corridor.
"DETENTION," said Sev, loudly, making as if to chase after them.
"Oh, just leave it," said Lily. The anger had deserted her as suddenly as it had come and she was just exhausted. "Just - leave them alone. Leave me alone," she said, and strode off in the opposite direction.
She still had to complete her original plans but she was distracted and fuming. She went up to the Astronomy tower as planned, and drew her diagrams wrong twice, and her hand shook violently on her wand when she tried to light the candles by magic. Finally she had to sit cross legged with her hands in her armpits and think soothing thoughts of kittens climbing bookcases and Harry opening birthday and Christmas gifts and a recitation of the glossary of Potions ingredients she had memorized for O.W.L.s and could still call up pieces of, until her breath was even and her hands stopped shaking. Then she could proceed to light the candles, position the mirrors and dab the potion prepared earlier on her temples and pulse point, and proceed with the search for any malicious magic clinging to her.
Ideally this ritual was undertaken in a state of total serenity in order to minimize interference from the caster's emotions. That might have accounted for Lily's failure to get results; or there might not have been anything to find, not with that ritual. The inconclusive results made her angry with Sev all over again, and she fumed through breakfast all the next morning and had to go on another walk around the lake with Harry to calm down before her second period class instead of grading.
Second period on Mondays, Lily had the seventh year Defense section, which contained only eleven students total. She had been nerve wracked about this class because about half of the students were closely related to known Death Eaters, some in prison, some only known by the Order. One or two were sullen and difficult, but slowly over the past month they had opened up to her, helped, Lily suspected, by her closeness in age and her willingness to talk to this class like the adults they effectively now were. In some ways, Harry helped, because many of the girls from conservative families expected to have their own families very soon, and Lily's status as a young, widowed mother made her a sympathetic and recognizable type. And she had, she knew, a certain mystique among the supporters of Voldemort, as his killer and as a woman of great magical power. At the very least the older teenagers knew they had to have some tact in case they got themselves or their remaining family members arrested.
The first and second years who were children of Voldemort's supporters were harder. A few of them were really scared of her, believing because their parents had taught them so that muggles and muggleborns were magic-hating savages who might eat human flesh. She had once accidentally reduced first year Angela Gamp, whose father had died in Azkaban over the summer, to hysterical tears simply by asking after late homework.
The seventh years were whispering when she arrived at the classroom, all, for once, on time. (But then no student without independent interest in Defense was going to pass the O.W.L. exam with the current teaching situation.) "Miss Mulciber, please put that away, whatever it is," said Lily with resigned practice. "Mr. Abbott, kindly return to your seat... Yes, Miss Nott?" she added with dread, as the students turned their attention to her and one particular girl, seated in the front row, shot her hand up.
Clio Nott was seventeen years old, the third of four siblings, and a frustration to Lily. She was smart and hard-working and she asked interesting questions. Her parents were not Death Eaters as far as Lily or any of her friends knew; but her fiancee, just two years older, was. He had graduated Hogwarts the June before the war ended, and there was no court-admissible evidence against him but he was known by the Order to have been involved in the McKinnons' deaths. Lily genuinely wasn't sure Clio Nott knew. She wasn't sure that she could do anything about it even if Clio Nott didn't know.
"I wanted to know..." said Clio Nott, and giggled, nervously, glancing over her shoulder at her best friend, Dione Mulciber.
"Clio said--" Dione broke in, also giggling.
"Yes?" said Lily, patiently checking the clock. Their lesson wouldn't technically start for another minute, so she could spare them that much patience.
"We just wanted to know," said Dione, breathlessly, "Is it true--" She looked at Clio for support.
"Did you and Professor Snape--" Clio paused and looked down at whatever was in Dione's lap and hadn't been put away, and said, "Ever date? Before?"
A fresh wave of giggling swept the class as a whole, although Lily overheard at least one mutter "Gross!" to a neighbor. A fresh wave of exhaustion swept over Lily. So it had been Miss Nott or Miss Mulciber in the corridor last night, or else one of their friends who perhaps was not in this class but had put them up to it.
Lily wanted to pinch the bridge of her nose, and after a second of consideration, did. Giggles swept the room again. She couldn't remember exactly what she and Sev had said to each other last night, the details swallowed by the blackness of her rage, and she didn't know what information they already had. They were unlikely to tell her honestly if they wanted to fish. And she was beginning to open up some trust between herself and the older girls, especially, trust she might be able to use to help them, if they would only listen to her, and she was wary of damaging that by slamming the door back down. But she knew better than to let the students bully her; if they found they could drag her personal life into lessons and fluster her with it they'd never stop.
"My personal life is not an appropriate subject for questions during class, Miss Mulciber, and Miss Nott," she began. "You are correct, however, that Professor Snape and I were acquainted before school. We were in the same class at Hogwarts. Anything else is, I'm afraid, private. Now!" Lily said, not giving anyone time to regroup before she went to the board, "The subject of our lesson today will be dementors..."
She was not entirely surprised to see a student hang back after class. It was not Clio Nott, however, but Dione Mulciber.
"Yes, Miss Mulciber?" said Lily, summoning a smile from the depths of her patience and waving her wand to wipe the board clean.
Dione hesitated, and glanced over her shoulder to see that her classmates had gone, sharpening Lily's interest. "Er," she said, and swallowed twice. She wasn't as pretty as her friend, and the look of faint, nauseated terror on her face made her pale skin look almost literally green. "Professor Potter..."
"You had something to ask me? Or tell me?" Lily said.
Dione looked down. "About Professor Snape," she began, and Lily gritted her teeth. "I don't know what's between you," Dione said quickly. "And I don't care. It's none of my business. But--" She was breathing harder as she went on, so that each breath began to come heavy and loud in the closed room, "I heard - it's just a rumor, you know - I don't know if it's true..."
"What did you hear?" said Lily.
"That - Professor Snape - might have been - you know." Dione made an indeterminate gesture, then steeled herself visibly, extended her left arm, and touched the inside of her forearm with two fingers, pointedly, just where a Dark Mark would be. "And I knew he used to visit my Dad sometimes - you know he's in prison now - and that's strange, you see? Because he's a poor halfblood and we're - you know - purebloods. So I thought you should know, if you're seeing him, you know, in private. Just in case it's true. I'm not saying it is. I wouldn't know."
"Miss Mulciber--" Lily cut in to give the girl mercy, and paused, because she had no idea what to say. Of course, Dione Mulciber might think Snape might or even probably was a Death Eater, but Lily knew it for sure; and knew for sure he really had turned traitor. But Dione didn't know that. Dione might be risking her life, if she got someone arrested and her father's friends found out.
"Thank you very much for telling me," Lily said, seriously, meeting Dione's pale blue eyes. "I know that was very brave of you, and I won't tell anyone you mentioned it." Dione visibly relaxed. "I'm - aware of the allegations," she said, carefully, "And I believe Headmaster Dumbledore had his reasons to allow Professor Snape to teach here, but I will certainly keep it in mind."
"Right. Thanks!" said Dione with a horrible grimacing grin, and took up her bag. But she paused at the doorway to wave before she left.
Lily sank into the nearest chair and put a hand over her face. She had three more classes to teach today, and about fifty second year essays to grade.
At the end of the day, when she was finally finished with her work as professor and reading to Harry a book she had read him a dozen or more times before, she could let her mind drift back to that conversation. Most likely Dione hadn't been the eavesdropper, or if she had been she hadn't heard much; Lily was certain she'd said something about Sev trying to kill her or nearly killing her, something that would imply she knew he'd been a Death Eater, anyway. But if it was spreading far enough for her students to ask her in class, no doubt it had gone around the Slytherin dungeons like wildfire and perhaps other Houses as well.
She should probably warn Sev. She had no idea what was known about him by the sort of people who had family on the Wizengamot who would know Dumbledore had testified for him - although she was, she thought with an unpleasant sort of shock, that sort of person herself, as the last living adult Potter. The point was, if the students were gossiping about their possible school romance, he should know. For the war - well, the coming war. Lily was not confident she had permanently banished Voldemort, and regardless he had too many supporters for things to really be over.
And she wanted to talk to Sev, she admitted, turning the page of the book and mindlessly chanting dialogue for the rapt Harry. She also wanted to bash his face in with something heavy, but after she wanted to talk to him about the Defense curse and the fascinating theoretical ramifications of its methodology. She wanted someone to sit up with her while she brewed potions and be impressed by her modifications. She wanted at least one of her best friends back.
But she also did very passionately want to murder him. It was hard to make up her mind between these alternatives. Hm, Lily thought, and announced to Harry that it was bed time after finishing the last page.
Her mind was made up for her at breakfast. She received a letter from an unfamiliar owl, written on smooth cream stationary far nicer than anything Sev could have afforded in school with emerald ink. (Lily rolled her eyes.) Sev wasn't present at breakfast today, which was probably a show of some maturity and tact, unless he had simply decided he did not want to deal with people today unrelatedly. She thought about burning the letter just on principle anyway, but opened it first to make up her mind, and read:
Dear Lily,
I keep putting this off because anything I could say is woefully inadequate, but after the other night I suppose I must try, inadequate or not. I'm sorry. I was blinded by power and by our old dream of getting out, and I let myself put that ahead of everything, even you & hurting you. I know Albus told you I turned traitor because of the prophecy & the Dark Lord thinking it was you, but I know I should have cared long before that.
Several lines after this had been scribbled out so thoroughly Lily could not make out a single word. An urge to get her wand out and go about siphoning the ink out of the parchment by reverse chronology stirred - she certainly could do it - but she managed with difficulty to stifle that desire by remembering when she had pried into Petunia's letters with Sev's encouragement, before Hogwarts. Her curiosity had always been her greatest and most terrible flaw.
Anyway, I could try to explain but I suppose you already know so there's no point. I'm sorry about the other day, too. What I'd meant to do was offer to help with the curse - you don't have to see me, but I could brew anything you needed, or lend you books, or something - but it came out wrong. It usually seems to.
Sincerely,
Severus Snape
Lily sighed, staring at that hauntingly familiar handwriting on the foreign paper, and folded the letter up to put in her robe pocket before someone looked over her shoulder. It had been terribly risky putting that in print. She might have to burn the letter after all.
After that she more or less knew she would have to speak to Sev, but she still wasn't sure what to actually say. Anywhere suitably private felt risky - she might start another fight, or he might, or they might start confessing things. She decided eventually to go down before one of his classes - Minerva had kindly let her have a copy of Sev's schedule ages back - and hope that this would at least keep whatever happened short. She could tell him her seventh years had asked about their relationship anyway, that had been in public and would tell him what he needed to know. Mostly.
At the very least it would give her some idea of what to expect if she went to talk to him in private about Dione Mulciber's warning.
After another couple of days of dithering, Lily chose a day when she had her classes stacked in the late morning and afternoon, and went down a few minutes before first period. Feeling ridiculous, she hovered in the hallway next to the Potions classroom briefly before she realized if she waited for a good moment class would start and she would have to try again, and she pushed the door open.
The class inside was dead silent: Sev had already arrived at the head of the room and was holding forth. In fact they did not see her for a moment, just in time for Lily to get the gist of what he was saying, about a particular twelve year old boy's woeful intellectual capacities and the likelihood he would be best off trusted only with very simple tasks like stacking cauldrons and so on, before she banged the door violently shut behind her and made the whole class jump. Sev reached for his wand for an instant - the war wasn't far gone for any of them - before he froze, face gone white.
She had always loved his voice. When he kept control of himself, he had a beautiful voice, compelling and intense. He had obviously learned to use it now, well enough to misuse it.
"Professor Snape," said Lily icily. "A moment, please. I don't believe class has officially started yet."
He said something to his class before he came, but Lily didn't hear it. She didn't care. She led him outside and shut the door carefully and then, knowing full well she would be audible anyway through the door, said, "What the bleeding hell is wrong with you? He is twelve years old. Twelve! Is this how you usually talk to your students? You are not the O.W.L. examiner or the evaluator of their worth as people! Your job is to get them to pass basic potions! They don't have to be geniuses! For the love of God, Sev, do you remember how we used to complain about how Slughorn acted? At least he was only dismissive to people he didn't like!"
"Is that what you came to say to me?" said Sev, in his iciest voice as well, although the tips of his ears had gone red.
"I suppose it is!" said Lily furiously, unable to remember why she had bothered, and stomped off towards the stairs up from the dungeons.
That was unfortunate, and she realized it only a minute or two later, as she neared her office a few floors up. She really did need to tell him what was being said about them, and because she hadn't told him then she would have to seek him out a second time. Maybe she could also do it by letter, and not open his reply? She would have to encrypt it, of course, being less impulsively careless than Sev (well, she tried) and she didn't have anything of his to do it with. They didn't have any recent ciphers in common, not having spoken in years and years.
Lily was debating the merits of actually asking Dumbledore if he had any of Sev's hair on hand, or simply getting Dumbledore to pass the message on for her, humiliating at it would be, when Sev took things out of her hands. It was a few days later, and she had been, she knew, short-tempered and irritable with everyone. It was all over the school that she had come to find Professor Snape and reamed him out for his teaching with only a thin door between them and the second year Gryffindors, and the younger students were mostly delighted with her for it, Slytherins excepted. The older students were mixed. Clio Nott asked, hovering over her desk after class, if everything was all right, and had to be dismissed twice to actually leave.
So Lily wasn't shocked when Sev knocked on her office door before dinner on Tuesday, but she was displeased to find him rounding the door and coming to sit in front of her desk.
"Professor Snape," she said flatly.
Sev gave her an incredulous look and said, "Professor Potter. May I assume that you did not, actually, come to find me last week in order to scream at me about my teaching practices?"
"If I'd known about them in advance I would have," said Lily, flatly.
"Nevertheless." Sev gave her an inquiring look.
Lily gritted her teeth. She had been trying to figure out how to get a message to him. "My seventh year Defense class asked me if we'd been romantically involved," she said. "I think whoever saw us fighting must be a friend of Dione Mulciber and Clio Nott, or a friend of a friend."
"Mulciber and--" Snape was alarmed.
"One of the older Slytherins came to warn me later that you were rumored to have been a Death Eater and I shouldn't be in private with you just in case, so I don't think they believe you're a traitor," said Lily dryly. "They just think we were tragic, star-crossed lovers." She had the satisfaction and embarrassment of watching Sev wince. "I thought you should know what was being said."
"Right," said Sev, and picked up a pen from the edge of her desk mindlessly, turning it in his fingers. They were long and graceful, the only body part he never seemed to put wrong - on a potions knife, on a wand. Lily had always loved watching him work with his hands. "Well. I've been warned," he said, and paused, awkwardly. "I suppose that means you're unwilling to involve me with - the curse," he said, dubiously.
Lily stared down at her desk and considered this.
On the one hand, another person who actually understood the project, without too many quibbles, would help. Snape might know more about Voldemort's thought process than Lily had managed to determine; it was rumored that he had been a personal student of Voldemort's in Dark Arts, recruited for his magical abilities and not just as another thug. Involving him made sense.
"That depends," said Lily, slowly.
"On?" Sev crossed his arms defiantly, an expression that made him look like a teenager himself, still. He was only a couple of months older than her, still twenty-two this early in the year.
"Your teaching," said Lily. She might have been motivated by altruism or simply a desire to embarrass him - even she wasn't sure - but it was as good a concession to demand as any. "I want you to stop being a raving arse to your students."
"Do you have more specific demands?" said Sev, in his most insulting tones, but he didn't actually refuse.
"No personal insults," said Lily. "I'll tell them to let me know if you do. And - if you give anyone detention you're to send them to me, not another staff member." Sev smirked slightly, and Lily winced at the thought of the free time she was giving up, but she went on, "If I think it's fair I'll give them a reasonable detention. If I think it's not, I'll cancel the detention. And you'll apologize to the student," she added.
She thought he would say no. Sev hated being embarrassed in public more than almost anything, unless it was being embarrassed in front of people he thought inferior to him. But he gritted his teeth and looked her in the eyes and said, "Fine. May I deduce that if you're accepting this reluctantly, you already have an idea you need a second person for?"
"I do, as a matter of fact," said Lily. "I'm pretty sure the magic is on the castle itself and affects the events within it, instead of sticking to the Defense professor. But it's impossible to isolate, there's too much magic in a place like Hogwarts. I want to contact the castle's spirit directly and I have a ritual that will allow me to communicate with it, assuming that the original dedication of the building was typical for that time period."
Snape's eyebrows raised, slowly. He said, "If you're using a ritual to communicate with the object of dedication, that would be... spirit magic? You want to mind control a ghost?"
"Not exactly," said Lily. "The ritual requires someone to die. Temporarily!" she said hastily as Sev opened his mouth. "Temporarily! I was thinking you could be the caster so I could communicate with Hogwarts."
"You know," said Sev acidly, "When I started a fight with you over trying to get yourself killed by Hogwarts, I wasn't thinking I'd like to do it myself. That is the stupidest idea I have ever heard you come up with."
"Which one of us," said Lily, "Successfully survived the Killing Curse, again?"
Sev had no reply to that.
That night, Lily had Vinny watch Harry again. She tucked him into bed with a special guilt, kissing his forehead and hoping that she would be back in the morning to greet him and feed him breakfast.
She had laughed it off to Sev, but it was true this was a risky thing to do. But of course as long as she was in the castle, she was at risk of the curse killing her, and it was already late October. Nearly a fifth of her time was gone, and she didn't even know what the curse was. The standard routes had already been tried.
Well, getting herself killed with Dark Arts in Hogwarts was better than doing it at home. There were other people around to take care of Harry, anyway.
She went out to meet Sev in a room he used for this sort of thing in the dungeons. They set up with very few words between them. She had shared the method before, and neither of them was in the mood to talk. She could tell Sev was still hoping she would change her mind, but she ignored it. He had become a Death Eater, for the love of Merlin. He would do what she required of him now.
Finally, the diagram was arranged and the potion - really more of a simple infusion of herbs - had steeped and been distributed in the crystal vials outlining their space, and Lily was kneeling dead center, hands loosely on her knees. They had revised the plan, earlier; Lily had agreed to take Draught of Living Death first, to slow down her body and give Sev more time to deal with any mishaps, before proceeding. (She hadn't bothered asking why he had it on hand. She wouldn't be able to believe what he said. In any case with Sev, there was always the chance the answer was "I felt like making it," or "I had an idea for improving the recipe.") Then he would cast a charm to temporarily stop her from breathing, keeping her in suspension so the death remained temporary.
She downed the vial, and sank to her knees, and as she lost normal consciousness, the magic and spirit of Hogwarts castle spread out before her, waiting for her.
It wasn't exactly being awake, and it wasn't exactly being asleep, because first, she was neither - she was dead - but primarily because as a (temporary) spirit there was no Lily, no she at all. People who died in Hogwarts left a part of themselves, their spirits, in the castle, were absorbed into the centuries of magic animating the castle and grounds. For a time, Lily joined them, lost herself in awareness of the thousands of people who had lived and worked and studied at Hogwarts, the volumes of the library, the stones of the castle walls, each individual tree in the forest. She knew the curse and she knew of the curse and she was the curse, and a thousand other secrets or more besides.
She came to in a rush, what seemed like no time and a thousand years later, laughing as soon as her throat cleared. "Sev!" she said, giddy.
She couldn't remember much; not much of an experience like that could be remembered and stored in the living human mind. But she had the curse, what she had came for, at least enough to break it. She had trouble caring about this as she woke. Pieces of the castle's consciousness, its love for its students, the memories imbued in the ancient stone, flashed through her mind. She wanted to get up and dance, or hug the walls of the castle, or cry for all of the people who had been and were now gone. She was alive - her heart hurt, shuddering back to life in her chest, but even that was joyful - and she was so happy to be that way, indescribably happy. She had not been so happy to be alive in years.
"Lily," said Sev, visibly alarmed. "Lily, are you--"
"Alive?" She giggled. "Sane?"
"Are you okay?" he said, hovering over her. The diagram had been broken and the flames carefully extinguished. She could taste the Draught's antidote on her lips, and she wiped her mouth and then vanished the remainder with the wand he had set back in her hand before waking her.
"Lily?" he said again, and she realized she hadn't answered him.
Poor Sev. He'd been an idiot. Well, they'd all been children. The war was over now, thank Merlin, really over, because she had him back: the very first thing Voldemort had taken from her. Let the war stay over, Lily thought, and impulsive and giddy and still half-buried in the memories of Hogwarts, she grabbed Sev's shoulder and kissed him.