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Spilt Milk, Part One

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Snape spent morning break leaning against the wall in the dungeon corridor, glowering at passers-by. Avery and Lestrange were lounging around nearby, reading The Purist - a magazine devoted to the Dark Arts and the history of pure-blood families, banned at Hogwarts because of its inflammatory anti-muggle sentiment.

(If Dumbledore had troubled to read it, it would probably not have been banned, because it was the dreariest magazine Snape had ever seen - full of gushing articles about pure-blood marriages, and interviews with ‘wealthy young gad-about’ Lucius Malfoy. Still, it was forbidden, and forbidden things have an irresistible charm).    

Avery was tripping up passing first-years. As a natural bully, he had an unfailing bully’s instinct about who would fight back from this kind of attack, and who wouldn’t. Snape half-watched from over the top of his book, as Avery glanced at each student that passed, summed them up, and then stuck out his leg or drew it back in, depending on whether or not they met his eyes.

Cruelty was a very precise science, as Snape was beginning to learn, and you had to know basic rules, first principles, before you could make it work for you. The first of these was fear, because hurting someone who wasn’t afraid of being hurt by you was a terrible waste.

When he saw Lily coming, holding a stack of books clasped to her chest, he felt a lurch of pleasure, which froze quickly into apprehension when he realized that Avery had got up and moved to block her path.

“Sorry, there’s a toll for coming down here, Evans,” Avery said. “You have to name at least one magical ancestor, or we don’t let you pass.”

Snape reddened but didn’t look up from his book.

“I really feel awful that I can’t boast about my parents being cousins,” Lily said calmly. “I’ll thank you not to rub it in.”

“You know, Evans, even for a mudblood, your name sounds common. I bet -,”

Avery stopped in mid-sentence. He had an odd look on his face, as though he was about to sneeze. Suddenly, he gave a high-pitched yelp and clutched his face. Between his fingers, a large purple boil was emerging, just under his right eye.

“What did you do?” Lestrange yelled at Lily, looking desperately around for a wand that might have conjured the boil.

Lily shrugged and said, in a would-be solemn voice: “Maybe he’d better go to the Hospital Wing, if he’s - ,”

“I’ll get you for this, Mudblood!” Avery yelled, lurching towards her, but he hadn’t got two feet before his yells re-doubled, and a second boil erupted on his face, this time on his forehead.    

“Looks like some kind of Selective Verbalization Charm to me,” Lily said seriously. She gave a little shrug and added: “but then, I’m just Muggle-born.”

She paused, and tilted her head, her eyes wide with innocence. “What is it you call muggle-borns again?”

Avery snarled, and knocked the books out of her arms, so that they fell heavily to the floor, bringing up clouds of dust. Lily returned his gaze with raised eyebrows; she didn’t back away. Snape couldn’t suppress the thought that she was doing this deliberately, to see if he would interfere.

“Are you going to duel me the muggle way, Avery?” she asked. “Because you can’t beat me at magic, can you, even if your parents were cousins?”  

Avery groped in his pocket for his wand and raised it at her threateningly. “Anytime, Mudblood - .”

Lily winced sympathetically as he cried out again. Another purple boil had risen, bright and throbbing, on his face. “Dear me, you don’t learn, do you?”

Avery was on the verge of gurgling a curse when a shield charm suddenly erupted in front of Lily, knocking Avery off his feet. Her eyes darted triumphantly towards Snape, but it was clear in a moment that the Shield Charm had not been conjured by him.

Slughorn was standing behind the Slytherins, his face pink and his moustache ruffling as he spluttered: “Cowardly behaviour, Avery! Impolitic too. If there’s one thing I thought every Slytherin knew, it’s not to start fights that you can’t win.”

“She put a curse on me, Professor,” Avery protested, pointing to the three purple boils on his face: “Look!”

“It’s true, Sir!” Lestrange bellowed, “every time he said the word M - ,” he stopped himself, glancing apprehensively at Slughorn.

Snape buried his face in his hands.  

“Which word would this be, Lestrange?” Slughorn asked calmly.  

Lestrange decided, much too late, to play dumb, and shook his head rapidly.

Slughorn cleared his throat, waited a moment to see if anyone was going to say anything, and then clapped his hands breezily. “Well, if there was no provocation, Avery, I have no choice but to put you in detention.”

“It was when I said ‘mud blood’!” Avery muttered, with a surly shrug.  

“Also worthy of detention,” Slughorn replied calmly. “Actually, it should be one detention for each time you said it.” He peered at the three purple boils on Avery’s face. “Let’s call it two detentions, shall we? I’m sure the last one was an accident.”

“What about her? She jinxed me!”

“Ah, yes,” Slughorn sighed. “A Selective Verbalization Charm, eh, Miss Evans? I didn’t think Professor Flitwick taught those below seventh year?”

“He doesn’t, Sir,” she replied calmly, “so it couldn‘t have been me who jinxed Avery, could it?”

Slughorn‘s moustache twitched as the corners of his mouth turned upwards. “Well, you have a point there. Can you prove that it was Miss Evans who put this jinx on you, Avery?”

“You can!” Avery protested, sounding increasingly hysterical. “Do Priori Incantatem!”

“Ah,” Slughorn’s smile fell. “Very well, very well. Miss Evans, your wand, if you please.”

Lily handed it over.

“How far back shall I go?” Slughorn enquired politely. “When was the last time you called someone a ‘Mudblood’ without a purple boil appearing on your face?”

Lestrange, as if he hadn’t done enough damage already, reminded Avery that he had called Quentin Trimble a Mudblood at breakfast.

Slughorn sighed. “Very well then. Three detentions, and I shall go back to eight o’clock this morning.”

He muttered “Priori Incantatem,” and touched the tip of Lily’s wand with his own. The shadow of her morning’s spells rose in smoky forms from her wand-tip. Snape, who had been so starved of the sight of her, was fascinated by this demonstration of her everyday life.

There were plenty of Summoning Charms - which she had once called lazy -  then Rictusempra - which meant that she had been tickling somebody - Mary MacDonald, from the sound of the high, operatic laugh that was now issuing from her wand and echoing through the dungeon corridor. Then came the Reparo spell- which meant that she had been fixing something; then Expelliarmus and Impedimenta - Defensive spells, presumably because she had been attacked by a Slytherin in the corridors. She hadn’t retaliated. Whether this was simply her gentle nature, or her awareness that she might have Priori Incantatem performed on her wand later, Snape wasn’t sure. Lastly, and inexplicably, there was the Riddikulus Charm, which Snape had only ever seen used for defeating Boggarts. He wondered what had happened to make her use it.   

Still, there was no Selective Verbalization Charm; that much was undeniable.

Slughorn clapped his hands heartily and said. “Well, there we are. Fascinating, Miss Evans. I’m sure Avery will own that he owes you an apology.”  

Avery gave an extremely resentful shrug and mumbled something indistinguishable. Slughorn must have decided to assume that it was an apology, however, because he said cheerfully:

“Well, I’m glad we got to the bottom of that. See Madam Pomfrey about those boils, won’t you, Avery? Oh, and be sure to thank your father the next time you speak to him for the crystallised pineapple he so kindly sent me.”

Lily, who had been displaying Occlumency-worthy powers of self-control all this time, now hurried off before she was presented with any more temptation to laugh.

Snape watched her for a while, and then, with no definite plan, and thinking he was stupid for even trying, he followed.  

She opened the door to the dungeon classroom where they had Potions lessons and went inside.  

Snape stood in the doorway, feeling eager and miserable at the same time. He hadn’t spoken to her for three months, unless you counted the endless string of apologies he’d written in their ledger.            

“I was going to help you,” he said, to announce his presence.

Lily looked up and raised her eyebrows coolly. “You were leaving it kind of late, weren’t you?”

Snape didn’t know what to say to this, so he kept silent.

“Well, I don’t want your help,” she said, with a little, twisted smile. “So, next time, you can spare yourself the trouble of thinking about it.”

“Whose wand did you use for the Selective Verbalization Charm?” he asked, trying to keep his voice casual.

Lily didn’t reply, but he thought he saw a smile playing around the corners of her mouth. Taking this for encouragement, he went on:

“What are you doing?”

“If I tell you, will you go away?”

“Yeah.”

She sighed and went on, in a business-like tone, “They’ve discovered a new dragon breed in Peru - a cross between a Vipertooth, and a Hungarian Horntail that somehow got sent to the wrong Reservation. It breathes poisonous fire, and nobody has discovered the Antidote, so Slughorn suggested that I work on it for a side-project. Based on the Paracelsan principle that like treats like, I’ve decided to try and make Antidote Fire.”

Snape felt a bitter surge of longing. A few months ago, she would have asked for his help on something like this. For a moment, he was tormented with the idea of working with her after classes in the dungeons, talking about the properties of powdered bicorn horn and inventing ingenious new insults for James Potter.

“Look,” he mumbled, glaring at the floor. “We’ve been friends forever. And you know I’m sorry - you know I didn’t mean to - .”  

“Why did you have to say it?” she asked angrily.

“I don’t know!” he shouted. “I don’t know why I said it! I was angry. But you know I didn’t mean it. You know I think you’re - .” Snape dragged himself back from the brink of that sentence. He had to be careful what he said. He could feel the loneliness, the bitterness of the last few months looming above him. It was like a tidal wave, poised to break over him and drag him out to sea. He saw Roger Davies kissing her outside her front door, heard the sickening laughter of the crowd down by the lake, felt the oppressive silence of the nights he had spent reading alone in the library or in abandoned classrooms, sitting up late until he was almost asleep at his desk, so that he wouldn’t have to think about what he’d lost. Lily could draw this poison out of him. He needed her. And he had the wildest urge, right at this moment, to tell her so.

Lily’s eyebrows were raised, but her expression had softened. She seemed suspended between scepticism and sympathy.  

He had to look away from her softened expression to collect his thoughts, and it was then that he saw it. A spider was crawling across her ledger on the desk in front of her; it moved slowly and stickily, as though it was wading through jam.

“Lily, shut your eyes,” he said suddenly.

Lily raised her eyebrows still further.

“There’s a spider,” he pressed on. “Shut your eyes; I’ll get rid of it.”

And, incredibly, she shut them. Snape felt almost dizzy with relief. She still trusted him. Everything was not lost.  

But the next moment, everything was lost. He knew that instantly, even though it took him a while to work out exactly what had happened.

Something black and heavy hurtled past his ear and struck Lily on the side of the head, with a sickening, ringing sound that bounced off the dungeon walls. And then another sound echoed through the dungeon, and through every nerve and sinew in his body; a high, hysterical laugh.

Bellatrix Black was standing in the doorway, convulsed with laughter. Snape had never seen her looking so mad. “I can’t believe she fell for that,” she whispered ecstatically, and then darted from the room, as though happiness had made her weightless.

Snape looked back at Lily, his brain crawling torturously towards the realisation of what had happened. He hoped that when he understood it, he would at least be able to move.

She was stirring. There was a lot of blood and dust, but she was stirring. She wasn’t dead.   

“What in Heaven’s name is going on here?”

Snape was so relieved to see Lily move that he didn’t immediately register the terrible trouble he was in. Professor McGonagall’s voice was not exactly soothing, though, and he couldn’t help starting guiltily at the sound of it.

Without waiting for an answer, Professor McGonagall swept past him and helped Lily up from the floor. “Miss Evans?” she said loudly. “Can you hear me?”

Lily said something that sounded like ‘ess, presser’. There was blood pouring down the side of her face.

“Can you walk to the Hospital Wing?” McGonagall asked.

Lily blinked blood out of her eyes, nodded, and then half-sank to the floor. McGonagall caught her and pulled her to her feet again.  

“I’ll take her - ,” Snape began urgently, but McGonagall raised her eyebrows.

“Yes, I was not actually born yesterday, Mr. Snape,” she said irritably. “I will take her.”

“I didn’t do it,” he said. His throat felt very tight. He couldn’t take his eyes off Lily’s blood-stained face. “It was Bellatrix Black, she - ,”

“Well, it will be easy enough to find out,” McGonagall said crisply. “Give me your wand.”

Snape fumbled in his pocket for his wand. His hands were shaking.

“We will see whether the last spell you performed was a Levitation Charm,” McGonagall continued.

Snape, holding out his wand to her, suddenly drew it back.

“The last spell that I performed?” he repeated.  

Professor McGonagall raised her eyebrows. “Priori Incantatem, if you prefer the technical vocabulary, Snape.”

“I - I don’t want you to do that,” he stammered.

“And why not?”

The last spell he had performed had been an Unforgivable Curse. This meant immediate expulsion, if not arrest, but he might be able to talk his way out of being expelled if he admitted to attacking Lily. In fact, it wouldn’t have cost him a moment’s hesitation, if it hadn’t been Lily, if he hadn’t been so close to being her friend again, and if she hadn’t looked so horribly injured, white and swaying and insensible as she was at McGonagall’s side.   

“Because I did it,” Snape said quietly, looking at the floor.

McGonagall surveyed him over her spectacles with suspicious dislike. He thought the dislike must have been stronger than the suspicion, however, because she didn’t ask him any more questions.

“Meet me in my office in ten minutes, Mr. Snape. We will discuss your punishment then.” She didn’t wait for a response, but turned abruptly and said, her voice suddenly gentle, “come along, Miss Evans.”


Lily spent the rest of the afternoon in the Hospital Wing. She felt enormously cheerful, and wondered whether this was because of the concussion or the thrilling, liberating feeling of total misery. Her heart was broken, and anything that happened now was just a vaguely amusing epilogue. Whatever happened next, the characters she cared about were already dead.

She was suddenly interested in everything; she had five visitors that afternoon, and asked them questions as though she was interviewing them for Witch Weekly. She found out that Mary Macdonald wanted to be a Quidditch referee, Meg Valance had once kissed both Regulus and Sirius Black on the same night, and Margot Holloway (cold, clinical Margot Holloway!) had been entered for a beauty pageant as an eight year-old girl.

“How did it go?” Lily had asked, leaning her cheek on her hand; she was unnaturally flushed, her green eyes over-bright, but if Margot noticed anything unusual in this feverish interest, she didn’t say so.

“I came second,” Margot said pleasantly. The memory didn’t appear to cause her any discomfort. “To Narcissa Black, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Her nose was straighter, apparently.”

Lily summoned a mental image of Narcissa Black. She wouldn’t have called her nose straight exactly, because it was permanently wrinkled with disgust, but that might just have been because she was near Lily. To most pure-blood Slytherins, Lily was the visual equivalent of a slap in the face. Presumably, when it had nothing to aggravate it, Narcissa’s nose could be as straight as it pleased.

“Well,” Lily said at length, “she’s pretty in a very obvious way. I think beauty should be interesting. I mean, Narcissa Black’s hair is very boring. It’s not light and floaty like yours.”      

Margot tilted her head to one side. “That’s very nice of you,” she said, without the barest trace of a smile. “I privately didn’t agree with the judges either.”   

“Were you disappointed?” Lily asked.

“No. I think perhaps father was. But I found the whole experience - .”

“Fascinating,” Lily finished her sentence for her, with a broad smile.    

After Margot had left, James Potter trooped in to the Hospital Wing, covered with mud, and surrounded by his usual crowd of sycophantic Quidditch fans (nine this time, plus a cat, which Peter Pettigrew, in all the excitement, seemed to have forgotten he was holding. He was certainly waving his arms with the kind of reckless abandon that people who knew that they were holding cats did not generally use).

Lily watched as Madam Pomfrey began shrieking ineffectually about the mud, and Meg Valance launched into a description of the spectacular Quidditch move which had resulted in Potter’s injury.

Had either been listening to the other, the altercation would have been over in a few seconds. As it was, it took at least five minutes for each to make the other understand the importance of what they were saying. James Potter was leaning casually against the wall and making no effort to help. Lily realised after a few minutes that he was staring at her, and promptly buried her head in the latest issue of Witch Weekly. She always tried not to look at James Potter on principle, because she didn’t think he should be encouraged.

Eventually, Madam Pomfrey made everyone other than Potter leave, and promised Pettigrew that she would report his animal cruelty to Professor Dumbledore, if he didn’t start being more careful. She stormed into her office to mix up a potion which, Lily knew from the expression on her face, she would not be sweetening. After a few moments, Potter made his way over to Lily’s bedside and said, in his most casual voice, “Hi, Evans.”   

“Hello,” she said cheerfully, looking up from her magazine. “What are you in for? Quidditch again?”

“Bludger dislocated my shoulder,” he said grimly.

“Ouch,” Lily replied, because she was clearly supposed to.

James beamed at her. “Still caught the Snitch, though,” he added, quite unnecessarily, because he had been playing with it for the past five minutes.

“Of course you did,” she replied, with an indulgent smile.

Misinterpreting the smile as encouragement, James began to describe the circumstances of his injury to her. “I was diving for the Snitch – I must have been fifty feet up – and it was about two inches off the ground. It was a sheer vertical drop. Wilkes had given up completely.”

“Wilkes?”

“The Slytherin Seeker,” James explained, “but, as I was pulling out of the dive, the Bludger hit my shoulder and knocked me off course. I leapt off my broom, dived for the Snitch, grabbed it, rolled and landed on the floor, right at Madam Hooch’s feet.”

“Oh,” Lily said, politely. Then, feeling that more was required of her, and not trusting herself to add any insights on Quidditch technique, she said, “do you practise in the holidays?”

“Yeah, all the time. Why?”

“It’s just that there are no muggle-borns on the House Teams, and I was wondering whether it’s because they can’t practise outside school. Their parents’ houses don’t have muggle-repelling charms, obviously, and most of them don’t have their own brooms. I was thinking of asking Dumbledore if we could set up a Quidditch club in the summer holidays, so that muggle-born students could practise.”

Potter’s eyes were shining. “Just for muggle-borns?” he asked tentatively.

“Of course not. In fact…” Lily hesitated. “I know I could get a lot more people to come if I said that you were involved.”

Fierce joy rose in James Potter; it robbed him temporarily of the power of speech. For a while, he just grinned stupidly, until Lily’s embarrassment prompted her to add:

“And the rest of the Gryffindor Quidditch team, of course, if you think they’d be interested,” she murmured, blushing. “We could have hot chocolate when it got too dark to play. Hagrid – you know he gets lonely in the summer holidays – even said he’d do some baking.”

“Yeah…” James faltered slightly, then rushed on, seemingly determined, “maybe you could get Davies to bring the Ravenclaw team along.”

“Actually, we’ve split up.”

James dropped the Snitch. It fell a few inches, then fluttered away, looking distinctly ruffled, to hover by the window.  

“I’m sorry,” he said, unconvincingly.

“That’s OK,” she turned her eyes back to the cover of Witch Weekly. Gilderoy Lockhart, dressed in his school robes, was beaming up at her with an unwavering smile, brandishing a stunned gnome heroically above his head. Lily remembered that Potter’s ex-girlfriend, the extraordinarily dim-witted Malificent, had gone off with Gilderoy Lockhart, and she felt warmer towards Potter. Somehow, these sympathetic thoughts caused her head to hurt, so she opened the magazine, in search of further distractions.    

Perceiving that Lily didn’t want to go into details, and much too happy to require any, James said: “So, what are you in for?”

Lily blinked. She had almost succeeded in forgetting. “Concussion,” she said simply.

“Oh, I wondered why you were talking to me,” he said cheerfully.

She laughed. “I’m alright now,” she lied. “Madam Pomfrey wants to keep me in overnight.”

“How’d you get concussion?”

Lily bit her lip. “I got hit on the head with a cauldron,” she said, as though she was confessing to some very stupid mistake.  

“What?”

“It was my own stupid fault,” she went on, laughing. “I let my guard down in front of a Slytherin.” She settled back on her pillows and looked up at the ceiling, feeling as though a Dementor was sewn up inside her chest, sucking parasitically at her heart.

“Still, it would take several hundred cauldrons to the head to make me think I wanted to leave Hogwarts,” she added, without smiling.

“Who did it?” James asked casually.

Lily looked back at him, her eyes narrowed. “You’re just curious, right? Because he’s already got detention, I don’t think he needs any kind of extra-curricula punishment.”  

“Oh yeah, I’m sure he’s learned his lesson.” James said sarcastically.

“And I don’t want Gryffindor to lose any points on account of one stupid Slytherin,” she persisted.  

“Who was it?” he asked again.

Thankfully, Madam Pomfrey chose that moment to come over and fix James’ dislocated shoulder. He very bravely suppressed a moan of pain when she cracked his shoulder back into place, but he couldn’t help spitting out the foul-tasting potion he was instructed to drink. Madam Pomfrey relented, grudgingly, and went to fetch some sugar.

Lily could feel James’ eyes on her in the silence, which was very distracting, but did her best to ignore it by immersing herself in her magazine. When Madam Pomfrey had come back with the sweetened potion, ensured that he drank all of it, and promised him that if he didn’t take better care of his limbs, she would soon start refusing to treat him, James went back over to Lily’s bed.

“Hey, Evans - .”

“Lily,” she said absently.

“What?”

“Call me Lily.”

James stared at her. She wondered if she was once again revealing her ignorance of the wizarding world. Perhaps wizards showed friendliness by referring to each other by their last names.

James seemed to be trying to remember what he had been about to say. “Um… Do you want me to go to the library and get you a book? If you’re going to be here all night, I mean… I’m going anyway,” he assured her.

“Oh… OK, yeah. If you’re going anyway.”

He was grinning at her again. Lily found this very disconcerting. Mostly to avoid his gaze, she scribbled the title and shelf-mark of Sympathetic Magic on some parchment and handed it to him. She didn’t feel like reading anything unfamiliar. Her head still hurt, but even this sensation was more curious than painful. She felt as though she was turning into Margot Holloway. She even hoped that it was going to last.
A very long chapter on my favourite characters, which I've split into little bits. It's been sitting on my computer so long that I've lost the ability to judge it, so apologies if it's boring! Snape is not so much fun when he isn't being sarcastic, but he's still in the process of becoming cruel and embittered, as you'll see in the next chapter!
© 2008 - 2024 ls269
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swordhawthorn's avatar
You just kill me in this chapter! I don't actually know who to feel more sorry for, Sev, Lily...or Me! Because my heart is breaking too!

It's so difficult to watch him playing such an active part in his own downfall by being inactive (i.e. not explaining himself to Lily). It reminds me of another hesitant, tragic hero who I think you've referenced somewhere before. And now someone much cleverer than me would add a pun on the chapter heading 'A Prince's Tale' and the 'Goodnight sweet prince' quote about said tragic hero!