Author's Notes: This has been a long time coming. Bartleby - alternately titled "My Last Ghost" - was supposed to be a sordid little story intended to address a tired and ugly topic: rape. Specifically, let's invent an OFC, abuse her a little, throw her in with a young Severus Snape, and see what happens.

A lot ended up happening in the several years since I began writing this. My sordid little story grew a life of its own. In many ways it's an ugly tale, but in other ways it's a surprising one - to me, anyway. Maybe it will surprise you, too.

I will be updating regularly. Please feel free to review. Any feedback is appreciated.

This is a fanfic, obviously, and was written only to quiet my internal thoughts and questions. I claim no ownership or rights. Much is borrowed from other sources.

Prologue

They called him a prince, but that wasn't quite right.

Princes were charming and handsome and if you kissed one you'd get to live happily ever after.

She didn't even want to think about kissing Snape. His teeth were atrocious, of course – but more to the point, who would dare kiss a god?

That's right. Severus Snape was a god, not a prince. In one little girl's mind, anyway.

Snape and all of them – Avery and Mulciber and even prissy little Regulus – they could do anything. They could visit Hogsmeade and keep their own broomsticks and Apparate any time they wanted to. They never got lost in the Castle and always had the best spot in the common room: right there where the fire was warm and the chairs were comfortable. They drank firewhisky and laughed and told jokes that would make you go redder than the Hogwarts Express.

She wasn't even allowed to do Glamours yet because she was only 11 years old.

They said that Snape knew more about the Dark Arts than anyone you'd ever met and that he even made – made! – his own curses and spells. Can you believe it? They also said that he was going to be a Death Eater and that the Dark Lord would give him more power than you'd ever dream of having. He was going to fight for them, they said – fight to get rid of all the Mudbloods and Muggle-Lovers and Trash that threatened their way of life, and that when it was all over Wizards would be in their rightful place again.

Professor Slughorn didn't like it when they said these things, but she knew it was all true. When Snape and the others graduated a year later, she wished them a secret, sacred prayer of luck in her head and she knew, with all a child's conviction, that everything was going to be okay.

It's funny, isn't it? How the things you thought you knew turn out not to be true. She'd learn that, along with many other things, in the years that followed.

On September 1st, 1981, Amy Scrivener learned that her childhood god was her new Head of House. The youngest Head of House in all Hogwarts history, no less.

On September 3rd, she learned that her childhood god was a mean, pathetic excuse for a wizard who couldn't lecture worth a damn, never remembered anyone's name, and certainly would not start a Snape Club where you got to eat lovely stuffed pheasant and meet famous people. She felt cheated.

On October 31st, the Dark Lord fell, and she learned that the death of certainty is a very nasty thing indeed. Amy figured that was why Snape locked himself in his office and seldom came out. She felt bad for herself and a little bad for him, too. Everyone else exerted what the Minister called their "inalienable right to party."

On November 4th, one of Amy's Housemates was pulled out of Advanced Potions. The Aurors had tracked down his father on the outskirts of Surrey and murdered him.

This happened again on November 10th.

And again on January 15th, 1982.

Each time one of Amy's housemates was pulled out of class to receive the news of a loved one's death, a Gryffindor boy hissed over his potion that it was no less than they deserved. Each time, Amy hissed back that he had better watch his filthy Mudblood mouth. Each time, Snape did nothing.

On February 19th, just when things were starting to get back to normal, the news about the Longbottoms broke. That same day, the Ministry passed the Frank and Alice Securities Act. It gave the Aurors and the Wizengamot unprecedented power, and she wondered how long it would take them to haul Snape away.

On March 1st, Amy's cousins were arrested, tried, and given a life sentence in Azkaban for the kidnapping and torture of Frank and Alice Longbottom. Slughorn might have gotten her a note excusing her from classes, but Snape got her name wrong and yelled at her for adding the armadillo bile too early.

On March 2nd, Amy's parents sent her an owl with the advice to keep her head down, and she wondered if that's what Snape was doing there at Hogwarts in the first place - keeping his head down.

On March 22nd, 3 hours before Amy's 17th birthday, she ignored that advice.

She wore her shortest skirt, her tightest blouse, and got very drunk watching the final Quidditch game of the season. When she stumbled back to a mostly-empty Castle to find a place to vomit, she happened to run into that Gryffindor boy from potions class. He was doing his Prefect rounds just down the hall from Snape's office.

Amy and the Gryffindor boy exchanged minor curses and nasty, juvenile insults. He wondered aloud who she would fuck now that her cousins were in Azkaban.

"Because that's what you pureblood fanatics do, right? Fuck your own cousins?" he'd asked.

She responded that, since they were on the topic of fucking, maybe he could clear something up for her.

"I've always wondered...Does it even, you know, work the same way with Muggles?" she'd slurred. "Do people like you even have todgers? Or is it just some kind of gash down there?"

So the Gryffindor boy slapped her wand from her hand, shoved her violently to the ground, and showed her that yes, in fact, it did work the same way.

About 90 seconds prior, Severus Snape had cast a Silencing Spell on his office door because their idiotic argument was aggravating his headache.

In Amy's nightmares, everything but the thud-thud-thudding of her own heartbeat drowned under a low, ringing whine. The noise was colorless; a needling white panic pricking at the edges of vision warped and dulled by the remnants of alcohol and terror.

But in her nightmares, everything was far away and detached. Details didn't lash at her eyeballs with this kind of violent reality. Words like 'political' and 'bias' weren't spat in the Headmaster's office like poison drawn from a wound. Denials weren't flung back into the dreamscape's abyss.

Pain didn't splinter in that place between trembling thighs.

"How something like this could be allowed to happen right outside your door, I can't even fathom!"

"I see, Minerva. So it's my fault that your student—"

"—My student?! Your student is the one who..."

This was wrong.

"…Severus, the curse she used…we all agree that's taking self-defense beyond the pale. And hasn't the boy suffered enough? The Aurors think so…"

This was very wrong.

"I have no idea what prompted this insanity and he will likely die before we get his side of the story, but the boy is a model student and the girl…"

She scrubbed her face with her hands and commanded herself to wake up—wake up!—from this horrible nightmare because this couldn't possibly be her. She could not possibly be the "she" who cast the curse or "the girl" who wasn't a model student. She could not possibly exist like this and it was all so wrong, wrong, wrong.

"…cannot, at this point, rule out the possibility of entrapment."

"Are you truly suggesting…? That is the most preposterous and paranoid thing I have ever..."

"Would you truly put it past some of the students in your House, Severus?"

"Is that what this is about?! You take your House favoritism, wrap it up with a bloody bow and call it 'justice?!'"

"How dare you!"

The harder Amy tried to tune out the voices, the more she heard. Placing her hands on either side of her head, pressing them painfully flat on her ears, did nothing to help. Why wouldn't they stop screaming? Just stop screaming and leave her alone and let her curl up in her threadbare black cloak and—

Her threadbare black cloak.

She didn't own a threadbare black cloak.

And why was there a hospital gown underneath?

"You cannot expect us to be blind to the wider implications…"

"…If and when her parents do arrive..."

"…Minerva and I agree that…"

"...technically still a minor…"

Somebody, somewhere, was making these little animal noises like fingernails hyperventilating against a chalkboard, but it could not have been her, because the noises sounded like panic and death.

And her thigh—oh God, oh Mum, Mummy—what was wrong with—

"…When the Governors—"

"The Governors will not be made aware of this…this…incident."

"'Incident?' This is a farce!"

"…Severus, we've already spoken with Madam Bones and—

"Yes, your good friend Madam Bones, whom you installed not a fortnight ago—"

"That is paranoid and prepost—"

"The fact remains: attempted murder trumps attempted ra—"

"— 'Attempted'?!"

The door creaked horribly above her head as somebody flung it open. It felt like her heart had exploded somewhere in the vicinity of her throat and her vision seemed choppy and wrong as she whipped her head up to see the angriest man in the entire sodding world looming darkly above.

She saw his long, spidery hand twitch as if in slow motion, and she knew what he was going to do and she tried to cringe away and escape like she'd tried last time, but her body wouldn't move and she couldn't find her wand and she couldn't stop the hand from curling around her upper arm and pulling her roughly to her feet.

She struggled, or tried to, but he was stronger than her and spun her around to face the door and then jerked her inside in one swift movement. The world swam nauseatingly and the adults were so very angry and she felt like she was five years old again and—oh my God—Oh my God—what is he doing?!

She gasped and tried to scream, but the pieces of her heart were still blocking her throat and she was absolutely terrified because his hand was there again where it didn't belong and it was tugging at the hem of her gown.

"Severus! What are you—?"

This was not just humiliation, because you can't die from humiliation and she was sure she would die. Because by the time the hand dropped her clothes or she pushed it away—she wasn't sure which happened first—they all knew. They knew that she was a Death Eater whore because it said so on her thigh. There was a crude imitation of a Dark Mark and the word "WHORE" branded there in pimples and boils and pus and they all knew. They knew and that's why the Headmaster and Professor McGonagall were looking at her so strangely and that's why Professor Snape was shouting again, his syllables crashing to the floor with ironic gravity.

"Behold the handiwork of your 'model student.' You must be so proud."

"That was uncalled for!"

She wasn't aware, really, of swaying on her feet, because her vision was black and warped and her brain wouldn't seem to function, but somehow time was passing without her consent and she was on her hands and knees on the floor, drowning under the needling white whine.

"...Minerva, get her out of here. Severus, don't do this now."

Professor Snape was pointing at her where she had fallen into as a million sordid little pieces on the floor. She wasn't a person; she was some indecent animal or thing on display behind glass. Even her own body hated her, wanted to expel her. Why else should it be forcing her to dry retch so violently in front of these people? Her face was wet and she tried to breathe over the frenzied contractions of her stomach, but she couldn't seem to get any air.

"…didn't even bother with a Sobering Solution. She will not remember a thing, so feel free: call her the Death Eater whore you believe her to be!"

"Severus, please!"

They asked her a lot of questions after that.

They asked her if she understood—really understood—what she had done. She didn't really know how to answer that question. She'd been there, right? She'd cast the Entrail-Expelling Curse, hadn't she? She'd watched her rapist turn inside-out; vomit up all twenty feet of his own intestines along with buckets of blood and shit. Yeah, she thought she understood what she had done.

They asked her why she did it, why she hadn't cast a Disarming Spell or Petrificus Totatlus or something. She didn't know how to answer that question, either. He'd raped her, hadn't he? Beat her and raped her and forced her to bear a curse scar of a skull and snake and the word "WHORE."

There were some legal conversations that she didn't really understand. Something about the statutory definition of rape and how it required the man to…finish. How it didn't really count that he'd only put it inside her. They talked about the inadmissibility of memory evidence and something about an Non-Disclosure Enchantment. She signed some parchment that said she was guilty of grievous bodily harm and would happily follow certain terms of probation.

They called her promiscuous, and they wondered aloud why she would put herself in a situation like that - drunk and alone with the boy.

She was lucky that boy survived, they told her. And lucky that Madam Bones had given her a plea agreement, because Crouch wouldn't have even given her a trial. She was lucky that Professor Snape had told the Aurors that she was a good student.

She didn't feel very lucky and she didn't think there was anything very personal in Snape's defending her and lying for her. If she were in the mood to play her hand at amateur psychoanalysis, she'd say that Snape came to her defense because the affair probably reminded him of his own school years, when the Headmaster and that McGonagall bitch sided with their precious House against him.

Her parents took her on vacation to this beautiful beach in France and the only thing to do was sunbathe and read. The only book was something Slughorn had given her ages ago as a joke. It had her name in the title: Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville. It was about a law clerk - or scrivener - who has a mental breakdown one day. He stops working, stops eating - stops doing anything at all. Whenever anyone asks something of him, he just says "I'd prefer not to."

Amy had no idea what the point of the story was supposed to be. She sent an owl to Slughorn to ask him about it, but he never did answer. She wondered then if Snape liked literature, but decided that it seemed unlikely because there was no way that such an austere ass could enjoy great stories.

They made her go back for her seventh year because of those papers she'd signed. There was something supremely absurd about her school uniform with its skirt and blouse and tie. It seemed indecent, somehow, and she hoped other people wouldn't notice that it made her look like a whore.