Ten minutes later, Hermione had gotten over her shock and was smirking triumphantly. For Harry, who was staring in horrified bewilderment at himself in the mirror Fred had been only too delighted to conjure up for his use, the shock was far from over.

“What in Merlin’s ruddy name did you do?” he demanded, jabbing a finger at the mirror and glaring at Fred and George.

Fred took one glance at him and burst into fresh rounds of snickers. George somehow wrestled his face into an expression of appropriate sobriety. “Looks like that magic wasn’t so illusory after all,” he mused, scratching his head with the tip of his wand.

“PUT THAT WAND DOWN! DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY WIZARDS HAVE BLOWN HOLES IN THEIR SKULLS DOING THAT? HOW’D YOU LIKE TO GO AROUND WITH A GAPING HOLE IN THE SIDE OF YOUR HEAD FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE? YOU’RE LIABLE TO LOSE AN EAR, GEORGE WEASLEY! AND I WON’T BE HELD RESPONSIBLE, YOU THOUGHTLESS—”

“Silencio!” Harry snarled at the bracelet. Then, “Well, how d’you reverse it?”

The twins shrugged. “No idea.”

“Not even entirely sure what it did, mate.”

Hermione was all but glowing as she sat back down to her essay. Her mouth, though firmly shut, was curved in a delighted grin that shouted “Serves you right!” loud as a Howler. Ron was trying very hard not to look as though he thought Harry’s predicament was the most hilarious thing since Malfoy the Amazing Bouncing Ferret. He was not succeeding especially well.

“Will you lot stop laughing and fix it?” Harry scowled. “I can’t very well go to class looking like this, can I?”

“At least it’s stopped growing,” Ron pointed out hopefully. “Maybe it’ll go away.”

Harry pinned him to the wall with a withering scowl.

“S’pose we’d best not count on that, though,” Ron muttered.

It was nearly another ten minutes before Harry could get Fred and George sober enough to attempt any repairs. Unfortunately, the twins’ considerable talents did not extend to the realm of restorative Transfiguration. After several unsuccessful attempts, one of which unaccountably turned Harry’s eyebrows into writhing messes of miniature snakes (“Leave it!” Ron crowed, “Snape’ll love it!”), the twins slumped in defeat.

“Sorry, Harry,” Fred said, sounding as though he might really mean it. “We’re rubbish at Transfiguration.”

Harry threw himself dejectedly onto the floor. There was hardly any point in asking Ron. He’d most likely wind up worse off. And trying it himself was definitely out of the question. “I’m just going to go find Madam Pomfrey tomorrow,” he announced.

“No!” yelped Fred.

Harry sat up with a fresh scowl. “Yes.” He threw a nearby pillow at Fred, who caught it deftly.

“You can’t do that, Harry,” George added.

“She’ll cut us off at the ankles,” Fred agreed, chucking the pillow back at Harry. He nabbed it midair.

“Have you got any idea how much trouble we’ll be in?” George said earnestly. “They might even try to charge us at the Ministry, you know.”

Harry lobbed the pillow and scored a solid hit on George’s head. “Guess you should have thought of that before,” he told him, most unsympathetically.

“Oh, come on, Harry, you volunteered.” George tossed the pillow back at him. Harry ducked; it sailed over his head and struck Ron squarely in the midriff. He snatched at it with an oof.

“…and now you’re throwing things! Just you wait till I tell Madam Pomfrey! You’ll BE IN DETENTION FOR THE REST OF YOUR SCHOOL CAREERS, YOU GREAT LOT OF RECKLESS—”

The bracelet was quickly drilled by three shafts of yellow light as Ron threw up his hands with a yelp. “Will you lot stop throwing hexes at that bracelet?” he yelled in protest, hurling the pillow back at George. “You’re going to hit me sooner or later!”

“Shut your ruddy jewelry up then,” Fred ordered him genially. He tucked his wand behind his ear at a rather rakish angle.

“Seriously, Harry, please?” George said to him.

Harry sighed. “Fine. I’ll go ask McGonagall—”

“NO!!!”

“How in the name of Merlin’s lacy knickers do you expect me to get this fixed, then?” Harry snapped.

“We’ll fix it.”

“You tried that!”

“Oh. So we did.” Four foreheads furrowed thoughtfully for several seconds before, almost in unison, they all turned expectantly towards the study table in the far corner. It was another moment before Hermione looked up.

“What?”

“Come on, Hermione, fix it, will you?” Harry pleaded.

“I told you,” she said primly, dipping her quill delicately into the ink well, “it’s on your own head.”

“Hermione, really. D’you want to listen to Malfoy mocking him all day tomorrow?” Ron chimed in.

Hermione didn’t look up.

“Look,” Harry sighed. “I’m sorry. I am. Now will you please get me back to normal?”

Hermione put down the quill deliberately and regarded him. “Are you going to help me put up posters for S.P.E.W.?”

“Yes, yes, I’ll even knit you a sweater, just fix it!”

She gave him a bright, satisfied smile, set her essay aside, pulled out her wand, and began scrutinizing the disastrous effects of the Lovability Lozenge with a more studious eye.

But the best Hermione could manage did not do much to improve Harry’s predicament. Miserably he surveyed himself in the mirror an hour later. “You really can’t do any better?” he asked mournfully.

“At least it’s not quite as lurid as before,” she said.

Even the bracelet had to admit that that was true.

Ron spoke up. “It’s really not all that bad, you know,” he said. “Say you’re doing it for the Tournament. House pride and all that.”

“Yeah, Harry, you could just say you felt like trying it out,” George chimed in.

Harry stared dubiously at his reflection. “I guess I could make it to the end of the week,” he muttered. “I can always hex Malfoy if I have to…You do know Snape’s going to kill me, though.”

“What’s this got to do with Snape? It’s none of his business.”

“Like that’s ever stopped him before,” Harry said glumly.

“Just give me a few days, Harry,” Hermione reassured him. She appeared to have mostly forgiven him for trying the lozenge in the first place. “I’ll do some research in the library, maybe ask McGonagall to give me an extra lesson. We’ll get it fixed in no time.”

“I sure hope so, because the longer this takes, the more points Snape is going to knock off.”

Off-hand, Severus Snape estimated that this day was going to find itself a place amongst his ten least favorite days ever. Given that Severus Snape was a Slytherin in love with a dead Gryffindor who had married his worst enemy, and had spent most of his life in service to the two most powerful wizards of the age (one of which was a sadistic homicidal maniac who tortured the people he liked, and one of which was nearly as incomprehensible as God), that was saying something.

And daily classes hadn’t even started yet.

He went to breakfast at the first possible second, ate quickly, and succeeded in escaping to the dungeons before Potter’s brat put in an appearance. The daily routine of finalizing lesson plans did nothing to assuage his temper, however. His hand scribbled out potion instructions for his OWL class on the chalkboard, but his mind would not be distracted from the galling, nightmare-inducing fact that, by next Wednesday, he personally had to award fifteen points to the spawn of James Potter.

After spending an entire sleepless night considering it, Snape had decided that fifteen full-strength Cruciatus Curses would have been easier to tolerate.

Snape had also spent the entire night attempting to devise ways around Dumbledore’s order. For instance, Dumbledore had never said he couldn’t also take away as many points as he awarded. Unfortunately, he doubted the headmaster would appreciate his exploitation of any loopholes. In any case, such an action would only make it obvious to Potter that Snape had been compelled to award him the points. Should Potter realize that, he would be utterly insufferable.

That was to say, more utterly insufferable than he already was.

Nor would it do to hold off on awarding the points until the last possible moment. He was due to attend the Potions Society of Europe’s conference in Paris all next week, and owing to the need to prepare for it his Friday classes were cancelled. Unless he wanted to actively seek the boy out on Friday—which would be just as obvious—he had to award those points today. In class. Fifteen points to one student in one class. And fifteen more to the same house. He’d have to dish out a further fifteen to Slytherin just to keep from looking like a complete fool. Forty-five house points in a single class! His reputation was a thing of the past.

His hands tightened as the word past flashed through his mind. It was a few moments before he became aware of a throbbing pain in his left hand. He looked down and saw the jagged shards of the glass vial he’d been holding stabbing bloody gashes into his palm. Odd that he had not heard it shatter. He calmly cleaned the sharp splinters of glass out of his hand and repaired the damage, grateful for anything that distracted him from what had truly kept him awake the previous night.

It had little to do with James Potter. It had even less to do with Harry Potter. But James had always been a handy target for Snape’s frustration when living, and now that he was dead his son provided the physical target for Snape’s hatred of him. After all, the feather certainly hadn’t fallen far from the phoenix. Besides, deciding that Harry reminded him of James meant that the boy couldn’t remind him of—

He tried to cut off the thought, and failed. Lily.

The lingering pain in his hand paled against the agony that name could inflict.

She might have been alive today. One word less, and you could have saved her life. There might never have been James-and-Lily. Might never have been a Harry Potter to torment him with their memory. Might never have been a prophecy, a Dark Mark, a massacre of a family.

Just one. Damned. Word.

It seemed impossible that life and death, love and hate, joy and misery, could be decided in a single word. Yet, as of today, he’d spent eighteen years haunted by its specter. Looking back, he could scarcely believe how oblivious his younger self had been to the dreadful mistake he was making. In an instant of adolescent foolishness he had lost everything most precious in the world.

Snape sank wearily into his chair, rubbing his temples blearily. How sweet it would be to run after her, follow her through the veil. But he was not coward enough yet to succumb to his own emptiness. Or perhaps, too much a coward.

In any case, he deserved her no more in death than in life. He had wounded her, pushed her away, and betrayed her to her death. James had healed her from the wounds he inflicted. James had pursued her without ceasing for years. Severus Snape might strive to be worthy of her with every breath he drew, but James had died for her. In giving the ultimate gift, he had claimed her irrevocably. She was his, his alone.

And that was what he hated most of all about James Potter.

Snape barely even heard his fifth year Slytherins and Ravenclaws enter for their first morning class.

Harry knew perfectly well that he was being stared at for the entire duration of his march down the Great Hall to his customary spot at the Gryffindor table. It turned out to be easier than he’d expected. After all, it was hardly the first time that he’d drawn stares everywhere he went. Rather reminded him of that first trip to Diagon Alley with Hagrid. Except, of course, that this time there really was something wrong with how he looked, but as long as he forgot that he could just pretend it was everyone else that had the problem.

“You’re in luck for the moment, anyway,” Ron informed him as he helped himself to some kippers. “Snape’s already gone.”

Harry risked a glance at the head table. The entire ensemble of professors, with the exception of Dumbledore, was attempting to stare at him without being obvious about it—McGonagall and Flitwick were looking especially flabbergasted. But Snape was nowhere to be seen.

“Thank Merlin for small favors,” he muttered, reaching for a glass of pumpkin juice. Somebody nudged his shoulder.

“Blimey, Harry,” Neville whispered in surprise, “what’d you do to your—”

“Just felt like it,” Harry cut him off tersely. “Thought I’d try it out. Something wrong?”

Neville blinked. “Er—no. I guess not…I mean, if you wanted to, then…” He trailed off into indiscernible mutters and hunched back over his breakfast and Herbology book.

Slightly beyond Neville, Parvati and Lavender were staring at him wide-eyed. Harry stared back at them pointedly. They hastily pretended to have been doing homework the whole time. Unfortunately, he could not glare down the entire Great Hall in one go, or even all of Gryffindor. Harry scowled at his eggs, barely hearing Ron and the bracelet arguing over whether or not Ron could eat breakfast with his right hand.

This was shaping up to be one of his least favorite days ever.

To Harry’s relief, his first professor of the day paid him no attention whatsoever. “Back are you, Weasley?” barked Mad-Eye as the three of them settled into their seats. “Good. Pair up with Finnigan and get back to those defensive charms. Potter, you’re with Thomas, and Granger’s with Nott.”

“Nail him for me, Hermione,” Ron muttered to her. Hermione didn’t look as though she needed much encouraging—her mouth was in a tight line and her wand twitched at her side, as though she could hardly wait to drill Nott with her best curse. Harry was willing to bet his vault at Gringotts it had something to do with the smirk Nott was wearing as he pointed out Ron’s bandaged arm to a fellow Slytherin.

Predictably, Ron’s bracelet did not take well to the practical defense lesson. It very nearly managed to deafen the entire room before Mad-Eye intervened with a silencing charm that kept it blissfully mute for the rest of the hour. Happily, the charm came too late to save Nott, who had been distracted by the bracelet’s screeching and whom Hermione had promptly bashed into the wall with a Bludgeoning Hex.

The three of them waltzed off to Transfiguration in very high spirits indeed, and not even the dozens of strange looks Harry got from McGonagall and the Ravenclaws could dampen his cheer. He even managed to turn his duck into a quite respectable frying pan, if one didn’t mind having a frying pan with a coat of paint that reminded one eerily of a common mallard.

His delight over his feat soon vanished, however. Potions class was next. Gloomily Harry restored his duck to its original state and prepared to leave.

“Mr. Potter, might I have a word?”

Harry looked up in some surprise to find Professor McGonagall standing over his work table. Sparing a glance over his shoulder, he saw Ron and Hermione vanish through the door into the hallway. “Um, I guess,” he said. “But I’ve got to get to Potions…”

“I’ll write you a note.” McGonagall’s expression was the strangest he’d ever seen on her. Harry rather thought she seemed…a bit sad, even.

“Is something wrong, Professor?” he asked. He’d known people would look sideways at him after Fred and George’s handiwork—but this expression he couldn’t fathom.

“I was just wondering,” she said slowly, “if there were any reason in particular you’ve decided to do that.” She gestured at him.

Harry swallowed secretively. “I, er, just felt like it,” he said, as nonchalantly as he could when faced with those keen eyes.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with…your parents?”

Harry looked up, startled. “What?”

“The Weasleys, then?”

“Professor, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She regarded him with a surprisingly kind expression. “Arthur and Molly have told me on more than one occasion that they regard you as a member of the family, Harry,” she told him. “You know that has nothing to do with appearances.”

Harry stared, finally realizing. “Honestly, Professor, I just wanted to—to try it out,” he said lamely. “It’s not got anything to do with the Weasleys.” Well, alright, maybe it did, but not the way McGonagall was thinking… “Or my mum.”

“Perhaps you ought to consider Transfiguring it back before you go to Potions,” McGonagall told him, looking just a little relieved.

Believe me, Professor, if I could, I would. “I’ll think about it,” Harry said evasively. “Is that all?”

He snatched up his bag and dashed out before McGonagall could do more than nod.

Snape’s second OWL class of the day—Hufflepuff and Gryffindor—had just scurried out of the dungeons, leaving their professor to sort through their abysmal efforts at brewing Color Changer Syrups, a building block for their upcoming work in Polyjuice Potions. He picked up one of the sealed vials and examined its contents with a grimace. The thick, sludge-like catastrophe contained therein could not have been farther from the thin, shining liquid he was supposed to be seeing. Indeed the stuff was showing signs of expanding—

With a dismal tinkle, the swelling glob of sludge burst free of its glassy prison. Snape quickly let go before it could do Merlin knew what to his hand and Vanished the mess before it hit the floor. He flipped open his grade book with a sneer and began scrawling a resounding zero next to Grisham, Lily.

For some reason, instead of 0, the quill put down 100. With a snarl, Snape scratched out the first two numerals, doing his best to ignore the entire row of scribbled-out notations that marked every single one of Grisham, Lily’s assignments. You’d think after teaching the girl for five years he’d have figured out that, unlike Lily Evans, Lily Grisham did not regularly rate 100s on her Potions work.

Snape sank into his chair, distantly flicking the vials away with his wand, watching the students funneling in for the next class with his mind years away. She’d been the best student in their year when it came to Potions. Better even than him. Almost every vial she turned in was perfectly brewed. She never made a mistake, hardly ever even showed up late.

It had always been funny when she did show up tardy. Snape could see her now—right over there, scurrying in through the door with her head down and bag tucked under one arm. She invariably had a note from McGonagall with her, excusing her lateness, but she’d always fretted that Slughorn would be in a poor mood and take House points anyway. She’d leave her bag at her work table—he smiled, seeing her hurriedly toss it down and burrow through it for her note—and then come quickly up to the professor’s desk and lay it down. He leaned back in his chair, looking into those beautiful green eyes, sparking defiantly behind her glasses…

Wait a moment.

Lily didn’t wear glasses.

Lily With Glasses was looking at him very strangely now. But Snape was too busy realizing that Lily’s jaw wasn’t supposed to have that firm angular line.

Lily With Glasses raised her eyebrows and said, in a voice that sounded nothing like Lily, “It’s a note from Professor McGonagall, sir.”

Potter. The realization drenched Snape like a bucket of ice water. It was Potter.

With Lily’s shoulder-length, deep red hair.

Snape’s hand closed over the note from McGonagall and crumpled it convulsively. His jaw worked furiously. His foot twitched. He wondered faintly if Potter could see the sheer liquid rage boiling out of his every orifice, or if the rest of the class could feel the way the classroom throbbed in time with his heartbeat.

“What sort of sick joke is this?” Snape finally hissed at him.

Potter backed up a step, and gestured nervously at the note. “It’s not a joke! Professor McGonagall—she just held me back a few minutes after class, it says so right there!”

“Do not patronize me, Potter!”

Potter really was an exceptional actor, more so than Snape had given him credit for. That expression of befuddlement almost looked genuine. “Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he tried.

“Get into my office,” Snape snarled. Potter stared at him, apparently rooted to the spot. Snape cast an ominous glower and found that the rest of the classroom was staring as well, equally confounded.

“But…Professor, he didn’t do anything—” Hermione Granger began.

“Spare me your babbling, Miss Granger,” Snape snapped. The determined Gryffindor drew a preparatory breath to continue arguing Potter’s case, but Snape snapped up his finger. “Another word from any of you,” he hissed, “and I will deduct fifty points from the responsible party.”

The look of amusement immediately wiped itself off of Draco Malfoy’s face. Gryffindors and Slytherins alike stood in frozen, deathly silence. Nobody so much as twitched, let alone spoke.

“Office, Potter!” Snape jabbed his wand at the boy. Potter slowly started past him towards the office door, as though he were afraid any sudden movement would result in his being cursed.

“Get your bag!” Snape shouted at him. “I assure you, you will not be coming back.” Potter hastily backtracked and scooped up his satchel without daring to glance at his friends. Snape wrenched his office door open and shoved Potter through as he came back, then leveled his wand at the rest of the class.

“Get to work on your assignment, and do not talk!”

He slammed the door behind him.