Author's note and disclaimer at the end, for those who make it that far. (Let me just say now that yes, this is silly; no, this is not what you expect; and I solemnly swear it won't be too ridiculous in its conclusion. And if it's been done before... well, at least it's not been done like this.)

when a cold wind blows it chills you
chills you to the bone
but there's nothing in nature that
freezes your heart
like years of being alone

( part the first )

Potter was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.

Not a wizarding name alive that didn't mark the day; news of the Potters' demise circulated like an ill-cast Incendio, story blazing through circles both good and bad. Never mind now that it had been twelve years ago, the fact was still as quick to anyone's tongue who had a mind to think on it.

Snape knew he was dead, of course he did. Walking in both sorts of circles, as he was wont to do, he had heard the tale twice as much as anyone. But any man might be hard pressed to say just what it mattered to him; if he had an opinion on the subject, his counsel was his own.

The man was secret, and self-contained, and solitary as a hoarding dragon. Perhaps a cold within him froze his features, nipped his crooked nose, spoke out frostily in his careful voice, and gave the aspect of winter to his sharp dark eyes. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he cared not for the chill in the dungeons where he kept his class, and frowned on any students who had the audacity to shiver.

Nobody ever stopped him in the corridors to say, with gladsome looks, "My dear Severus, how are you? When will you come to see me?" No third-years implored him to extend a deadline, none of his fellow professors asked him what he made of the season's last quidditch match, no boy or girl ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a classroom, of Snape. Even Filch's cat appeared to know him; and when she saw him coming, Mrs. Norris would move out of his way, and watch him from a shadowed doorway, lowering her eyelids as though she shared with him some feline understanding.

But what did Snape care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded, misunderstanding paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was all he looked to ask.

Once upon a time-- of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve-- this Snape sat busy in his office.

It was cold, bleak, biting weather, not unusual for the season; and he could hear few students in the hallways outside, rushing by with their robes bundled up to their ears, stamping their feet upon the dungeon stones to warm them. The school clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already; indeed, it had not been light all day. Torches were flaring to life in the corridors, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air.

The door of Snape's office was open that he might better keep his eye upon a young Mr Longbottom, who, in the dimly-lit classroom beyond, was serving detention.

It was not a very heartless detention, surely, for all that it was Christmas Eve and Neville Longbottom would most assuredly rather have been anywhere else in all of Hogwarts than the chilly hard seat in which he sat. The faculty, whose opinions were often divided at the best of times, had all agreed to one thing: the latest explosion-- in the Dining Hall, night before last; close enough to singe Professor Sinistra's astrolabe necklace-- was one calamity too many, and that said Mr Longbottom would need to learn some responsibility regarding his careless magicking. To which end, of course, it fell to the professor of potions to exact detention. If perhaps Snape had been a bit supercilious in choosing the date, what then? What else could such a professor to bring to bear on such a student, to make sure he truly paid attention?

Wherefore the hapless student sat alone, amid myriad jars of pickled squid and lacewing flies: measuring and weighing, labeling and shelving, scouring out old bottles with the last of the eau de bundimun. He looked as glum as if his Christmas dinner had all turned to shrivelfig pudding, and murmured aloud once that the job would have gone by much more expediently had he but been able to use magic.

But he couldn't do the task magically, for Snape kept the boy's wand well secured in his office; so surely as the student came in to reclaim it, the professor predicted that it would be necessary to double the workload.

"A merry Christmas, Snape!" cried a brisk voice. It was the voice of Madam Hooch, who strode into the office so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of her approach.

"Excuse me?" said Snape, blinking up from his parchment copying. He did not, as a rule, anticipate company. (And he certainly had not been pondering office visits, nor had he been having trouble putting quill to paper without a heightened awareness of himself sitting alone, wondering just who might have been doing the same).

Madam Hooch had come so rapidly through the hallways, her bootsteps sure against the flagstones, that there was still a touch of frost on her robes. Her eyes sparkled in her cold-touched face; it looked like there was a light dusting of snow silvering her gloves. "I said, a merry Christmas to you," said Hooch with a touch of impatience, as though he had been one of her backwards first-years, clumsy on a broom. At his continued inscrutable silence, her smile turned wry. "I trust you do celebrate Christmas, here in these dungeons?"

Snape, who was unaccustomed to being caught unawares, merely offered her a thin, careful smile. "And how may I help you?"

She was a woman of business, tugging off her gloves matter-of-factly. "Yes, yes. Have you any of that broom de-icer that you prepared last year? Bitter cold last night; I'm afraid it'll damage some of the younger ones if they're not thawed."

He rose quietly as she spoke, his dark robes like a shadow carefully wrapped around him. "Of course. The Thawing Philtre. Let me get that for you." Long fingers found a squat ceramic pot of what he sought, lifted it precisely from its place on the shelf, dusted it off a bit. Not that Snape's office was not meticulously kept, nor scrupulously neat and tidy. Certainly the shelf might have been called dingy, if one had been inclined to say so, but that must have been the infrequently-sought nature of its contents; for what good is a little pot of Thawing Philtre in the heat of summer?

Squinting at it, she nodded brusquely. "And that will be enough for my whole Closet-full?"

"It should be," Snape explained in his expressionless voice, judging the weight of it in his palm. "If it is used sparingly."

"Fair enough!" Her smile could not quite warm the chilly aspect of the place; her frank appreciation solicited no outward pride from the man she stood beside. And who could blame her, for perhaps hoping that the potion she sought might somehow be warmer than its maker?

"Take care not to use it between midnight and one," he intoned as a warning, pot wavering between their hands as though he were unwilling to hand it over without assuring himself she was quite worthy. "The powdered fluxweed might do something unseemly, at that hour; one can never tell."

"Oh, don't be so dismal, Snape," said Madam Hooch lightly, and she turned on her booted heel and left.

As she swept back through classroom, she paused with a greeting for the student serving detention, who-- sulking as he was-- was not ungrateful.

"And a merry Christmas to you, too, Mr Longbottom," she said, with a lift of one eyebrow. "Do take care not to--" her gaze flicked briefly to the jar in his hands-- "disappoint Professor Snape, hmm?"

"Thank you, Madam Hooch," he smiled shyly up at her; and if he could not wave at her, for having a jar full of horned slugs heavy in his hands, never let it be said that he did not at least try.

As quickly as she arrived, Madam Hooch was gone-- though perhaps she gave Mr Longbottom a bit of a wider berth as she left.

Snape, his head once again bent over the book and parchment on his desk, sighed.

Meanwhile, the snow beyond the school walls drifted deeper; the sky grew thick and wooly dark with yet-unfallen snow, in sharp contrast to the brightness of Hogwarts' windows, lit and merry with their holly sprigs and swaths of fresh-cut pine. The ancient belltower, whose robust old bell was always beaming down on the Hogwarts grounds below, became invisible through the snowy fog outside. It struck the hours in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense.

And, at length, the hour of Mr Longbottom's release arrived. With faint ill-will Snape stood from his desk, and tacitly admitted the fact to the beleaguered student in the classroom, who instantly hopped up, pickled squid and hardship and lessons forgotten, and looked expectantly up at him.

"Has it been two hours, sir?" he asked, still more meekly than he might have, two hours ago.

"You'll be wanting your wand back, I suppose?" said Snape.

"If quite convenient, sir."

"It's not convenient," said Snape, "if you see fit to continue with your previous behavior. The art of potions deserves the utmost respect. I hope you've learned that, these few hours?"

Longbottom smiled faintly, down at his shoes.

And so Snape fetched the boy's wand from its-- unusually harmless-- perch on his desk, and handed it back. "Off with you, then. Be sure to be here to class on time, in January," he called futilely after the student's retreating back. Of no use, of course, as Neville Longbottom had escaped to find merrier ways to pursue the holiday.

Snape was not unaccustomed to taking dinner alone in his own melancholy chambers, but, as the night was Christmas Eve, the Headmaster had seen to giving everyone personal summons to the Dining Hall. So it was that he found himself in the cheerily lit hall, sharing plum pudding with his fellow teachers and fending off questions with his fork as the duelist deflects blows with his épée.

Certainly not, Madam Pince: he was not responsible for the copy of Magical Drafts and Potions that had gone missing from the library of late; the mere suggestion was ridiculous. And would she be so kind as to pass the pumpkin juice?

What was that, Professor Flitwick? Of course, how odd that Professor Lupin wasn't joining them for Christmas Eve dinner. How should Snape know how the man was faring; his dinner plans were certainly his own business. Naturally. And was that the butter, by his elbow? It was? Too kind, of course, too kind.

Yes, thank you, Madam Hooch, he was quite pleased to hear the Thawing Philtre worked like the proverbial charm, and of course would be willing to make more should the need arise.

This last exchange rankled him perhaps the most, as he could never quite shake the feeling that the woman was laughing at him, though he could not for the life of him fathom why. Why shouldn't he be assured that his potions would satisfy, as they were brewed to the best of his ability? Or had she found something amusing in his words to Madam Pince, or Professor Flitwick?

Perhaps it was dwelling on these snippets of conversation that had him moving absent-mindedly through the chilly hallways towards his dungeon, for, again, it should not be said that Snape was a man easily caught off his guard. On most occasions he moved easily through the corridors, his feet silent and sure on the stones; for those labyrinthine cells were his home, and they suited him perfectly. What other people might have considered a gloomy suite of rooms, he relished for its privacy, its quiet location, and its predilection for keeping potion components without spoiling. No better location for a potions classroom; there was no denying that. It was not dreary, it merely kept its secrets well, and if nobody lived there but Snape, then all the better for it.

As he rounded the final turn this night, the hallway was so dark that even he-- who knew its every stone-- was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and frost from without seemed to hang about the shadowed corridor, as if a lonesome augurey sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.

It may have been that the wind had crept in at the windowsill and endeavored to blow the torches out. It would not have been the first time; but as he was musing, his hands were not quite steady with the keyring as he sought to unlock his door.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on his door. It is also a fact, that Snape had seen it, night and evening, during his whole career at Hogwarts. Let it also be borne in mind that Snape was not a man prone to flights of fancy; nor was he susceptible to what other men might in a moment of weakness call "imagination."

And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Snape, having his palm pressed flat against the door, to push it inwards, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change--

Not a knocker, but James Potter's face.

James Potter's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the office were, but had a dismal light about it, like the Bloody Baron on a particularly unfortunate day. No, that was not entirely right; it was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Snape as Potter used to look: with spectacles catching the light of invisible torches, and a ghostly half-smile on his lips, as if at some joke he did not expect Snape to understand. The messy hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or the memory or a breeze; and though the eyes were open, they were perfectly motionless, staring unequivocally. That, and its unexpected color, made it horrible.

As Snape stared fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger for quite some time, would be untrue. But he put his hand upon the door he had relinquished, pushed it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle with a word. And if he was grateful for the cuffs buttoned low over his wrists, the collar high up to his chin, to keep out the sudden inexplicable chill, then he never breathed a word of it, and it's not our place to speculate.

( part the second )

Naturally, a school of magic as old and distinguished as Hogwarts will have its share of ghosts. This was nothing new; the presence of a poltergeist was nothing to be startled at, and Snape, for his part, had stared down Peeves and his ilk without so much as batting an ebon eyelash.

But for it to be a face he knew-- cursedly well-- this was something Snape had not anticipated.

He found himself seated before his fire, mulling it over unconsciously; his thoughts thickened like wassail left too long on the boil, down to nothing but a spiced sludge that could hardly be considered festive. It was a very low fire indeed: hardly anything on such a bitter night, and less for the fact that he was sorely neglecting it. He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from it to chafe his chilly hands.

The fireplace in his rooms was an old one, designed by some Welsh wizard long ago, and paved all round with old-fashioned Welsh carving stones, designed to illustrate the makings of intricate potions. Customarily, he might spend his evenings sitting, a book in his lap or a cup of carefully-brewed tea at his elbow, musing and marking the details in their engravings: Draught of the Living Death and the Elixir of Life, a complex love potion and Veritaserum. Yet tonight that face of Potter, twelve years dead, came like the creeping lethifold and swallowed up the whole. If each rough tile had been a blank at first, and Snape not so careful with the potency of his thoughts, an invisible quill might have traced a copy of James Potter's smile on every stone.

With one particularly vicious thought, Snape's dying fire leaped up, as though the flame cried, 'I know him; Potter's ghost!' and fell again.

Snape considered, for a fleeting moment, returning to his manuscript-copying, as a way of steadying his mind, to regain his focus and composure. No man could stay distracted, with his nose to the desk, keeping pen and hand in a concerted line; no man could let his mind wander into idle paths while copying, letter by letter, some of the more complex spell and potion instructions from the books of Arsenius Jigger.

But even Snape could not shake his wordless unease for the rigors of strict discipline; all the while clamoring memories of his own school days leapt over the half-finished parchments of Scintillating Solution in his mind, drowning out the voice of reason.

And so there he sat in his fireside chair, fingers gripping tight the well-worn arms, as the shadows of his youth tumbled over him, crowding him, eager and insistent like a classroom full of headstrong sixth-years looking forward to their winter hols. They bustled and shoved, brimming in his mind until he could think of little else.

The more Snape thought, the more perplexed he was; and, the more he endeavoured not to think, the more he thought. Why Potter, why now? Was it not enough that Black was bedevilling Hogwarts, more dangerous alive than dead? And that Lupin-- Professor Lupin-- slept not three minutes' owlflight away, in an office of his own, when Snape had thought he was rid of the man forever?

Were the echoes of his past bent on haunting him?

All that being said, though, Snape was not the sort of man to let himself be bothered by echoes, whether they were intent on plaguing him or no. Presently, his chin fell upon his chest, and he was asleep.

Truly it must have been the unanticipated presence of James Potter's ghost that had him on so; he would not have liked to admit that he was a man of fanciful dreams. But dream he did, for all that he seemed only to be sitting once more in his chair by the fire.

It was so dark, that looking out of from his seat, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his serpentine eyes, when he heard a voice call his name.

In seeming slow motion, as if he had been sitting for a long time underwater, he turned to the sound; watched in helpless apprehension as a face emerged from the darkness.

She was much as he remembered her, but that there might have been a bit of age around her eyes, or a difference in her smile that was difficult to distinguish. Her hands: they were the same, held lightly before her as though she were keeping a precious secret. With a surge of bitterness he wondered just what he had done, to merit being tormented thus; even after all this time, her face made his stomach fall, her very presence unsettled him. She was nothing if she was not an incarnation of his unpleasant childhood-- especially here, in the wake of her husband.

Still, there stood a woman before him and he could do little else but address her, for he recognized her well.

"Lily Potter," said Snape, caustic and cold as ever. "What do you want with me?"

"A good evening to you, too." Lily's voice, no doubt about it, and he felt a sting as though layers of his hard-earned cool demeanor were being peeled away, a scab scratched off too soon, leaving him red and tender beneath.

It was not an agreeable sensation. Snape shivered, and pursed his lips tight together. "If you are determined to ruin my evening, have done with it, then."

"Ruin?" Her voice was now softer, almost gentle. Singularly low, as if instead of being so close beside him, she were at a distance. "I am only a shadow, of things that have been. There is little power in me to affect your evening."

"You already have," Snape said shortly, wishing not to meet her eyes.

She put out her hand as he spoke, and time seemed to unravel about her, spinning indistinct and tenuous around her form. When her fingers reached him, the hand that clasped him gently by the arm was the hand of a younger girl, and he guessed that, caught by surprise, she might once more have answered to her maiden name. "Come with me," she said, and bobbed her head, somehow seeming more real and more impossible at the same time.

Suddenly he found himself somewhere else, without any conscious sensation of movement; they were standing in a corridor of the school, less dusty by twenty years than the hallways Snape had walked through just that evening. For a surety, the clock in Hogwarts tower was running backward, for when he looked down at his own hands in a moment of confusion, he saw the shape of a younger man: slimmer and more uncomfortable in its adolescent awkwardness.

"And thanks for walking to class with me."

He looked at Lily in amazement-- or rather, some part of him did, while some other part of him, for whom the event was the present and not a mere memory, knew exactly what was going on. Neither part of him was particularly pleased with the situation.

The response he heard himself giving her was the one he remembered making years ago. He thought briefly that he might have said something differently, now, faced with such an offer of friendship. Or perhaps not, he thought, watching her laugh and walk away without so much as a backward glance; perhaps the frost-rimed depths of his heart had spoken aright even then.

But as she moved through the hallways of his memory she became more than herself, a young woman and a mother all at once; and the thought came to him unbidden that in a kinder world he might have grieved for her fate.

All unaware of his sentiment, though, her laugh faded in the corridors; and Snape was brought abruptly back to himself when a gaggle of youngsters bustled noisily right by him, paying him no mind.

"Lily! We've all been looking for you!"

"Where are you going?"

"What've you been up to, with this slimy character?"

"Sirius, try to behave yourself."

The last of these boys bumped shoulders with him, quite accidentally, as he passed. Snape, who had certainly not forgotten the day (though he had never anticipated seeing it again quite so clearly!), dreaded the moment he knew was coming, when the young man would turn around.

And indeed: "Oh!" he said, turning back in apology, a little out of breath. His eyes were a most noticeable shade of grey, quite unsettling; young-Snape and old-Snape both frowned uncomfortably. "I am sorry," this young man smiled mildly, paying his discomfiture no mind, if in fact he noticed it at all. "See you in double potions?"

Then he was gone with the rest of them, tumbling over one another in their haste to follow Miss Evans; all four of them in great spirits, shouting to each other, until the broad corridor was so full of merry music that the air laughed to hear it.

Snape was not laughing; truly, he could not. He felt no less tense than a tightly-stoppered phial of live billywigs, high-strung and stinging; as though he might fly off the cobbled stone floor, or simply burst.

As is often the way when dreaming, that cheery afternoon dissolved even as he was standing in its midst, and all the fading voices were carried away on the noiseless owl-wings of dreams. He turned, and the movement belled his heavy robes out around him, making him aware of a chill winter draught about his ankles. An inexplicable mist, as chill December mornings are wont to have, swirled and coagulated and then just as quickly disapparated, to disclose: a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain deal forms and desks. And (as he might have expected, had he been allowing himself to speculate) at one of these desks, a lonely boy was sitting, tending the feeble fire beneath a rusty old cauldron.

Not a latent echo in that classroom, not a squeak and scuffle emanating mysteriously from the plumbing, not a drip from the half-thawed jar of streelers on the professor's desk, not a sigh among the dusty bottles on those despondent shelves, no, not a crackle of the little fire but fell upon Snape like physical blows; the combined music working their magic to create the pain of memory, very real.

It had not been his fault-- that much he remembered, quite clearly. If justice had been served, there might have been two other boys sitting in that classroom, and himself free to enjoy the evening as he pleased. But no, there he sat, even at the instruction of the Headmaster, who of all people should surely have known the truth: the truth, Black and Potter were the ones out of bed; Black and Potter should have been the ones spending the interminable afternoon heating streeler-venom under Professor Rosier's keen, watchful eye.

Of course not, they were Gryffindor, and he alone was left to suffer; as though he had been bitten by a particularly malevolent mackled malaclaw, thus doomed to bad luck for his whole school career. Every endeavor of his own merely left him trailing in their lengthy shadows, while every escapade of theirs seemed to land him in the fire; all the more so if he attempted to right their wrongs or at least make them see the error of their ways.

And so today the school was quite deserted, but for one young, blameless Severus Snape, serving detention on a miserable Christmas Eve.

The young man performed his task with vigor: carefully stoppering up the venom one little jar at a time, measuring out precise amounts of the dangerous liquid with clinical detachment. If there was anger in his stance, it only served to make his motions that much more efficient; brushing his hair from his eyes with a deft hand, he bent his attentions on his task with renewed determination in his demeanor.

It had never occurred to Snape until that instant, looking upon the scowl of his younger self, that Headmaster Dumbledore might have had his reasons. For there, even as he watched, his childhood seemed a cauldron set on a careful boil, tempering his rage into something infinitely more potent: the training of a young unpracticed hand into one of Britain's finest potions masters.

Professor Rosier seldom smiled, and even less seldom was he lenient with his students, but come five o'clock the sentence was over and he had little choice but to release the student from his charge. Now, witnessing the event many years after the fact, an older Snape couldn't help but wonder what exactly that was, sparking in Rosier's dark eyes as he surveyed the bottles, one by meticulous one. Too well he knew the man to think that it was pride; too well he knew the man's profession to suspect that it was pleasure. But if it had been satisfaction, then perhaps the day had not been a waste, after all.

There had been a reason Snape had chosen his profession in this room.

His dreaming self seemed to yield to the justice of this situation, in spite of himself. But he thought, with a struggle: mightn't there have been better ways to spend a holiday evening?

In apparent compliance with this fleeting thought, the dream then conveyed him, winter coat and scarf and shivering and all, into the ricketiest old heights of a tower that ever was seen, where the star charts upon the wall, and the celestial and terrestrial globes set into the stonework, were all waxy with cold.

Presently, Snape's former self, now grown a young man, came briskly up the steps-- accompanied, a few steps behind, by his study partner.

Yes, they were nothing more complicated than study partners for an Astronomy project; it was well known the other young man was by far the finest student of the subject, and Snape was not the sort of student willing to settle for second-best.

Yet, at the same time, they were nothing so simple as that.

Remus Lupin, if he knew, made no sign; in fact, Snape had learned to stop thinking of it, relying instead on the other boy's cool expertise. There was a sort of comfort in the distance of the stars. And if the distance between the two of them was sometimes eclipsed, it was most often the fault of the weather, and nothing to think on.

This midwinter night found them stomping their feet in the twice-packed snow, squinting through the frosty air, as if they could make out the patterns of stars through their watery eyes. They never stood too close to one another, but the winter wind caught at the ends of their scarves, blowing them together in a tangled blur of grey and gold, green and red; the same wind that stung their cheeks into color and blustered around them, seeking to knock them off balance. Their breath smoked in the frosty air, cold in their mouths like sucking on a peppermint humbug.

Sometimes it was needful to bend their heads closer together, to hear one another speaking over the din of the wind. When Lupin lifted a hand to point out the beginnings of their looked-for meteor shower, Snape followed the line of his glove up into the sky; with little provocation they stood shoulder to shoulder, for warmth, to better share the view.

Once they had seen their fill of shooting stars-- more than sufficient to make a report for the next day's class-- they bustled back indoors, until the noise of the wind buffeting the tower died away.

It was Lupin's (very practical) suggestion that they head to the kitchens for chocolate and a bite to eat, something to warm and something to fortify; it was Snape's (also pragmatic) suggestion that they go to the Astronomy study hall, to finalize their notes.

A triumph of inter-house politics: they did both.

He had forgotten about the music; both young-Snape sitting with his head bent over his notes, and old-Snape watching the scene as in a dream, were surprised when the little study hall was suddenly filled with music. Lupin, satisfied with the workings of the little magical musical device, came at sat at the desk beside him.

"Bach?" Snape identified the tune and made a noise of distaste, busy flipping through his pages and trying to make out the notes he had written hastily outside-- in the near-dark, and with his gloves on, no less; his handwriting was less than immaculate on the best of days. "Muggle music."

Lupin shook his head, surprisingly earnest. "Oh, no," he insisted. "Well, he never went to wizarding school, if that's what you mean. But his music applies almost all of the principles of arithmancy, if you know how to listen."

Snape, despite his best efforts to maintain his sarcastic demeanor, looked curious. "You're serious."

"Ja--" and here he checked himself, before finishing the name-- "some of my friends say that they listen to his music before Arithmancy exams, so they'll get higher marks."

Snape raised an eyebrow, unable to keep the dryness from his voice. "And are your friends... successful?"

Lupin dipped his head with a faint bemused smile, as if to say, "They scored no higher than I did," though he did not give voice to this sentiment. Rather he said, "It doesn't seem to preclude studying, no," with a twinkle in his eye. "But really I find the logic and patterns of arithmancy to be soothing." As Snape seemed continually unconvinced, he simply shrugged, the spread of his hands tacitly admitting compromise. "But we're studying for Astronomy, aren't we." And he laughed a little, laying a hand on Snape's arm in order to get a better look at the papers laid out in front of him.

His sudden touch, though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still present to Snape's sense of feeling. He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, and blessedly, forgotten.

Though he knew, with sure dream-logic, what scene would naturally follow, he tried to hold the sound of Lupin's laughter in his ears; the memory of it surprisingly not painful. And as the image faded-- two students blurring, studying contentedly together by the torchlight, listening to unexpected music-- Snape kept his eye upon Lupin, until the very last.

"Your face is troubled," said Lily, inexplicably at his elbow.

Snape muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice, that it was no such thing; and stiffly insisted that she go if she was going, and come if she was coming, and otherwise leave him be.

"I'm walking to The Three Broomsticks. You recollect the way?" she inquired.

"Remember it!" cried Snape with fervour, determined not to be outdone. "I could walk it blindfold."

His words produced an immediate effect, for again he saw himself: a few years older now; a student at the height of his Hogwarts career. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and late-night potions work. There was an angry, unsettled, restless motion in his eye, which showed the knowledge that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree must fall.

It was a clear, cold, winter day, with snow upon the ground. On the road to Hogsmeade, a carriage's quick wheels dashed the hoar-frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens like spray.

And he was not alone, but stood stiffly at the side of a young man whose hair was beginning to silver with something other than age: whose eyes seemed past grief, whose smile was hollow and tired.

"It matters little," Lupin was saying to him, softly. "I had thought--"

"Of course it matters!" Snape heard himself insisting, remembered all too well the lividness he felt. Little matter that Lupin winced as though he had been struck, that each word scalded the air between them, hot and deadly as an untamed dragon's breath.

"You fear the world too much," he answered, gently. "I believed that we were friends. Were we not?"

"What then?" Snape retorted. "You lied to me. And now that I have grown wiser, you plead friendship?"

Lupin shook his head.

"How can you think that nothing has changed?"

"I never lied, Severus." He answered not the question but the accusation before, his voice quiet. "And I am not the one who has changed."

"I was an idiot for trusting you," he spun around impatiently, making to leave. He could not say why the sound of Lupin's sigh stopped him, why he continued to stand there with his feet growing colder in the snow.

"I know you blame me," Lupin returned, his tired eyes downcast. For a moment he looked unsure of what to say. "How often I imagined, and dreaded, what you might say... Are you determined, now, to hate me?"

In answer he could only glare, as though the heat of his gaze might have melted the snow or warmed the frost around them, as though his unspoken words might have found their voice in the light from the distant, warmthless sun.

Looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him, Lupin said, "I only thought you would hear me out."

"I've heard all I need to hear," Snape snapped. "Your friends tried to kill me. And you-- you are--"

"Never mind," Lupin spoke so softly his words were nearly lost in the drifting snow.

"Remus," Snape was about to speak, to explain, to make him see; but with his head turned from him, Lupin murmured a word of apology, and walked away.

Snape could not watch, not twice, and so he, too, turned away. He had quite forgotten that Lily was standing by his side; her smile was sad.

"This is your doing," muttered Snape, with more weariness than venom. "It must be. Why else would I have such dreams?"

"I told you that I am only a shadows of the things that have been," said Lily, in an echo of her previous voice. "That these things are what they are, do not blame me."

"Merlin!" pleaded Snape in a broken voice. "No more!" He turned on Lily, and seeing that she looked upon him with a face, in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces she had shown him, attempted to touch her.

With a sickening phantom pain, slithering heat and blistering slide of agony, burning on his forearm as he reached for her--

He once again, without preamble, was sitting beside his now-dead fire; dream shadows flickering out of sight around him, and quite awake.

( part the third )

His robes buttoned to the chin, all his raiment in perfect order (though his hair, truth be told, might have been in a bit of disarray), Snape found himself striding through the dungeon corridors in search of some elusive peace of mind. He had read again the day's Daily Prophet, and the last issue of Potions Quarterly, and tried his hand at Arsenius Jigger, but having attempted in vain to beguile his mind to rest, he set out for a walk.

Naturally, the dream bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was mere coincidence, his mind flew back again like a tipsy imp, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through: Why had he had such a dream?

He even thought very seriously about indulging in a bottle of Ogden's, but it seemed to his rational mind that adding firewhiskey into the preposterous mix of thoughts that was the potion of his mind was questionable at best, and liable to create even more confusion.

It was not so cold in the dimness of Hogwarts' hallways when one was dressed correctly; there was nothing, certainly, to cause the chills that coursed through him, unwarranted. Snape tugged at a sleeve irritably, willing the remnants of his dream from his mind. Perhaps for that reason, also, he turned his footsteps in the very opposite direction than that in which they were wont to move, and found himself walking into one of Hogwarts' inner courtyards.

The sky was gloomy, and the stones were choked up with a thorough snowfall, half thawed, half frozen. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the hour, and yet was there an air of expectation abroad that even his most reasonable of explanations sought in vain to dispel.

As he rounded the corner into the open court, his glance happened to rest upon the Hogwarts clocktower and its bell. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange tremor, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It sounded the hour even as he watched, as happy about its own noise as if it were the brightest hour of daylight, when in fact it only tolled two o'clock in the morning. Loudly it rang, from its tower sounding deep into the lowest dungeons of the building. He was certain that everyone would wake; that the teakettle perched over his own small fire would rattle from its place and crash onto the floor.

In the wake of this great noise, however, he distinctly heard long gravelly footsteps, as if they were the very reverberations of the great bell sounding, or an ungainly mountain troll was lumbering through. Finding that he felt uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder who else might be walking out at such an hour, he turned his head sharply, straining his eyes against the darkness, though he could see no one. His hands were clenched cold at his sides; he did not wish to be taken by surprise, yet again.

At last, however, he began to think-- as you or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too-- at last, I say, he began to think that the source and secret of this inexplicable sound might be in the adjoining courtyard, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to emanate. This idea taking full possession of his mind, he crept softly to the gate.

No sooner had he laid his hand on the gate, than a voice called him by his name, and bade him enter.

It was Hagrid, his genial smile and cheery voice in deep contradiction with his words and the gloomy aspect of the night; the pull and sweep of Hagrid's snow shovel against the cobblestones was surely the sound that had been heard. Girded round his middle was a long-outdated crossbow; but surely it had seen no bolts for many nights, for the catch was frozen with snow, and the Great Forest had been sleeping under winter's mantle for weeks.

His shovel made a rough, but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the walkway pavement in front of the windows, and from the tops of the cornices, whence it was a mad delight to him to see it come plumping down into the courtyard below, and splitting into artificial little snow-storms. And as he worked, he pulled from his copious pockets a little something to sharpen his sweet tooth, a lemon sherbet here or a few ice mice there.

Watching this panoply of confections, Snape remembered a snippet of conversation from years before, the echoes of it drifting across the years to rattle conspicuously between his ears: "I bet someday you get your picture on a chocolate frog card." There had been only a little bitterness in the boy's laughing voice; they were studying potions, and Snape was running circles round him. "You're certain to go far."

He shook off the memory uneasily, aware that Hagrid was looking at him quite strangely; realized he was in fact standing ankle-deep in snow in the middle of the night.

"...Chocolate frog, Professor?" The sweet he held out was dwarfed in his large hand.

The incongruity of the hour and the suggestion made Snape almost want to laugh, but he managed politeness as he declined the offer. "No, thank you, Hagrid."

"Just looked like you had the shakes, is all," he smiled, unperturbable, munching his own frog. "Chocolate's what's good for that, y'know."

Snape smiled dryly. Of course. Everyone in the school knew it, now; everyone with a sweet tooth was suddenly a mediwizard. Judging by the sound of it, Madam Pomfrey's remedy cupboards this term must have been filled exclusively with chocolate frogs.

It was a remarkable quality of the man's (which Snape had observed first in Dumbledore's office), that notwithstanding his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as gracefully and like a magical creature, as it was possible he could have done in the Dining Hall.

"You oughtn't to be walking around at night, Professor, what with the dementors and all."

After the words had passed, the air seemed ten times lighter than before, from the mere relief of the mention of dementors being done with. Snape found himself breathing a sigh of relief without being quite cognizant of why: he would not previously have said that he found Hagrid's company particularly inspiring, nor did he have a particular fear of dementors (all coming of not having very many happy memories to be taken away from him, he told himself).

Suffice it to say that any dementor would have been hard put to shake the well-being and calm of Hagrid, and his generous pockets' worth of sweets.

Declining again the offer of joining the Keeper of Keys in a late night snack, Snape found within himself the most curious sensation: one he certainly had not anticipated feeling again this evening, after such a strange turn of events and such a vivid and disturbing dream. He thought, oddly enough, that he was tired and just might try to return to sleep.

Thus being-- from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day and night, or his inadvertent glimpse of the past, or the surprising conversation with Hagrid, or the extreme lateness of the hour-- much in need of repose; he excused himself from Hagrid's company and went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.

He should not have been surprised; he had barely closed his eyes before he dreamed. Certainly he must have been affected by Hagrid's words, to feel such a creeping unease settling around him (though at this juncture, he would much rather have dreamed of his chocolate frogs than of the dark shadows they shunned).

Lifting up his wary eyes, he beheld a solemn phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him. Slow and grave, deliberate and deathly silent was its approach, and Snape was struck with the odd urge to bend down upon his knee before it. In order that he might catch a glimpse of the face beneath the hood, of course, not out of any old reflexive obeisance.

The very air through which this spirit moved seemed to scatter gloom and mystery. Not unlike a dementor it was, shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand-- and the familiar design upon the forearm thus exposed. But for this pale arm and that dark mark, it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.

He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread... And yet, though he yearned to know more and might have questioned it, the spirit simply walked by him as though he were not there. A terrible chill swept over him as the faceless figure moved past him, as though cold invisible terror rode on the tails of its cloak, trailing fear and confusion through the murky dust.

As though guided by that death-pale hand pointing ever onward, Snape found himself following.

There was little of his own conscious choice in the matter; indeed, he had little desire to discover the shadow walking before him. Although well used to the magical and extraordinary by this time, having kept the company of wizards both good and bad, Snape could not help but feel some apprehension at this silent shape, and its unknown destination as it moved so determinedly through the impenetrable darkness.

And yet, follow he did. It thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror to know that behind the dusky shroud, there were unseen eyes that had intently fixed upon him as he passed, that perhaps saw him keenly even now.

They scarcely seemed to enter the forest; for the forest rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its own act. But there they were, in the heart of it; surrounded by the age-old trees, the gnarled roots and moss and murky streams, and things yet older and more malignant than these. Though the hooded figure carried no torch, the way he seemed to know by heart.

Without a word of warning they stood upon a bleak and barren clearing, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed, or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass. Down in the east the rising moon was casting a hue of sickly silver, which glared upon the desolation for an instant like a sullen eye, and frowning higher, higher, higher still, was lost into the thick gloom of dark night.

They halted before a half circle of other figures, a tight knot of folk who had obviously been anticipating his arrival. Snape, as though invisible, could step close enough to hear their conversation; his footfall made no sound on the dried branches. As one who had spoken the name of He Who Must Not Be Named, Snape more than recognized His influence, the distinctive taint of His followers; in spite of himself he listened closely to their words.

"No," said one wizard, turning his face to reveal a hawk-like face and an unpleasant smile. "Sad to say I don't know much about it, either way. I only know he's dead."

"Long time coming," said another, with a sneer. "When did he die?"

"Last night, I believe." This from the first, with definite relish in his tone.

"How'd they finally get him?" asked a third with hooded eyes, seemingly disinterested, though his voice was eager. "Thought he'd never go."

"I did it," said the hooded figure whom Snape had followed, silencing them every one. His voice was fine and clear, well-bred, slicing through the mingling murmurs of the men who now gathered around him. He said again, with latent power thrumming on his words that no one failed to notice: "It was I who killed the boy who lived."

The malignant glee with which this news was received chilled Snape to his very marrow, all the more so for being a sentiment to which he was not altogether a stranger.

"And the other ones, with him?" The third wizard fingered his wand nervously, rapt with delighted terror.

"All dead." The upper portion of the mysterious figure's garment was contracted for an instant in its folds, as if he had inclined its head. And that was the only answer he deigned to give.

"Good riddance, I say," said another of them, with a sharp-toothed smile. "The sooner the world is cleansed of impure blood, the better."

"And such a monster," shuddered the second, straightening his shoulders and looking down his nose, as if he had taken it upon himself to do the deed. "We could not allow such an abomination to continue."

There was a murmur of assent, a heated ripple through the crowd like an ashwinder sliding through the embers of a failing fire.

Snape, moving around the crowd as a moth darts around a flame, was fascinated and repulsed by what he heard. So caught up in the mystery presented to him in the form of their snippets of conversation, he was not minding his step-- and he recoiled, for he had very nearly tripped over a grave. A bare, undecorated grave: in which, beneath the briefest covering of soil, there lay a something covered up, which, though it was dumb, announced itself in awful language.

The ground was very dark, too dark to be observed with any accuracy, though Snape glanced round it in a desperate impulse, anxious to learn what he might. A pale light, shed from the moon slipping full from behind the clouds, fell straight upon the grave; and in it, murdered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for, was a body.

Any number of names might have been chiselled into that pitiful cracked stone, to strike horror into Snape's heart; any number of people dead might have sickened him. But the fact that the headstone was conspicuously bare struck him as even more terrible. Who had died, his body thus barely serviced and discarded? And who was the awful hooded figure; who had killed him?

In a moment of dawning realization, it occurred to him that he did not know, for a certainty, that the victim had even been human.

Slowly he lifted his eyes to the circle of dark wizards, more slowly still-- afraid to know, afraid not to know-- he let his gaze fall on their leader, the man beneath the hood. Quiet and dark he stood before them, and a silence stretched out over the woods, pregnant and dangerous such that it might have hatched a basilisk.

Then he was drawing back his hood with his outstretched hand, the rich dark fabric falling away to reveal: the face of an uncomfortably beautiful young man, blond and pale and soulless.

That it was a young man Snape knew there could be no doubt, though the very real mark on the young man's forearm was jarringly unfamiliar, something more of the father than of the son. Snape wished fervently to find it a passing shadow, to erase the mark etched into that death-pale skin, but knew it to be futile; he was lost forever to the Dark Lord.

This realization was made all the more terrifying when Snape thought, no, he was not lost; no, indeed, the Dark Lord was winning. It mattered not, the identity of the deceased; in fact, very little mattered at all.

The Dark Lord had already won.

( part the last )

Quiet. Very quiet.

Gradually he became aware that it was morning, and a chilly light was filtering through the winter clouds, to dance as feebly as a dying faerie against the windowpanes. But surely it was very quiet!

Certainly there was sound and bustle somewhere in the castle: but the noisy little house elves were absorbed in their holiday tasks, and scarcely a peep could be heard from the kitchens. The few students who remained at Hogwarts were engaged with that happiest of Christmas morning pursuits, ripping paper and eating candy; but their common rooms were far from the dungeons and the mirth of their delighted cries did not penetrate the murky depths.

He sighed sourly, rising from bed as a man who has had very little restful sleep and wishes nothing more than to resume the comforting rituals of his waking life.

But parchment-copying was not an easy task, for the hand in which he held his pen was not a steady one; and writing requires attention, even when you don't worry and stew while you are at it. But if he had broken the end of his quill off, he might have had an excuse to stop writing, and been quite satisfied.

With his head thus bent over his busy hands, a shudder passed through his form, from the soles of his shoes to the tips of his long fingers. At the expense of any semblance of rational behavior, he resolved-- then and there!-- that he would have no peace until he spoke to the man in person, as it seemed that all his conscious and unconscious thought was bent upon him with undue fascination.

This thought, once it occurred to him, became so firmly entrenched that he could not shake it; it was a persistent riddling sphinx with its claws sunk irrevocably into his mind.

And so he could not help but pass the office of the Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts; although, conversely, some stubbornness of thought meant that he just as urgently could not bring himself to actually open the door. There he stood for a full minute, his resolve wavering, his hand upon the door as if to knock, and again withdrawing without actually doing so.

He was just eyeing the knocker on the heavy wooden door (suspicious, as though he thought it might turn into the face of someone else, and his whole day of memory and discomfort might repeat itself), when all suddenly, from inside, he could hear music. Well he could imagine the scene inside, as he was shuddering to think of the vision that he might behold were he to open that door...

But it was familiar music. Among other melodies, there danced a simple little air which had been familiar to the younger man who had heard it for the first time after an Astronomy exam. And when this strain of music sounded, all the things that he had dreamed came upon his mind; he shivered, and thought that if he could have listened to it often, years ago, he might have led a very different life.

Lupin was sitting and listening to Bach-- as if he were no different than he had been, a student unchanged as he studied arithmancy or read his Malecrit; as if he were nothing more than a man enjoying some music after his morning tea. Within, there ran a fugue, the parts chasing after one another, ever pursuing, never catching; and without, Snape's mind ran circles around itself in just that fashion.

It was remarkably like hearing a new thread of harmony in a piece of music that he'd known for a very long time... and having heard it once, he knew that he would always hear it so, from that moment onwards. Even as he stood there beside the open window, with the blustery cold stinging his cheeks into color, he felt as if his whole person had been doused in Thawing Philtre; and wondered ridiculously if Madam Hooch would indeed have enough left for her Broom Closet.

Again he entertained the momentary thought of knocking, and then there was a rustle-- of fabric or of fur, of upholstered chair or of clawed foot, he could not tell-- and he fled.

No matter that he knew the man within to be harmless; had he not brewed the wolfsbane potion himself, and did he not take the utmost pride in his work? He simply knew he could not stay; conversation was, to him, as inaccessible as the dark side of the moon.

Protective of his chilly silence and attempting to regain some measure of his former ice, he hurried to the wintry depths of the dungeons-- to the safety of his office, where he might find solace with his books and escape the merciless onslaught of his own treacherous thoughts.

It was not until the next day, passing that same door again a dozen times, prowling up and down the hallway with owlwing-silent steps, that he finally had the mind to knock. But at length, he made a dash and did it, unable or unwilling to live with himself or the consequences if he did not.

The man who opened the door looked as haggard with lack of sleep as Snape himself felt, though his mouth moved in a surprised smile. "Severus? What brings you--?"

"Don't say anything, please," retorted Snape. "Come and see me. Will you come and see me?"

"I will," said Lupin. And it was clear he meant to do it.

the end.

author's notes, disclaimer & credits:
The world of Hogwarts (et al.) belongs to J.K. Rowling; "A Christmas Carol," as I'm sure you all know, belongs to C. Dickens-- it was only my ill-begotten idea to combine the two in this fashion. There may be no excuse for this, but I maintain that two scarves (one Gryffindor, one Slytherin) and an afternoon of holiday shopping got the better of me. After seeing Chamber of Secrets and coming home and promptly watching A Muppet Christmas Carol, the idea seized hold of my brain and brought me such delight I could not help but write it. I am eternally indebted to this Dickens etext, and this Harry Potter Lexicon; they have been my constant companions, this month of December. In conclusion, I hope the reading of this has made you smile, or brought some warmth to your cold winter day, or at the very least did not scar you for life. And, because I haven't yet said it: God bless us, every one.