There Is No Such Place

I must be as cold blooded as a reptile, Lily thought, shivering violently and pulling her cloak closer around her body. The dungeons were cool in the late November air; the stones seemed to absorb the heat generated by the cauldrons. Lily felt as though all the heat had left her body. Numb fingers became clumsy; ingredients were dropped or spilt, and two students cut themselves when their small knives slipped.

Lily pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and stared into her cauldron, counting under her breath. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven... on the twelfth beat, she added the last ingredient, watching in satisfaction as the potion bubbled and turned blue. She was vaguely aware of the other students around her, cursing and complaining as potions turned green, or bubbled over and stained robes.

Professor Crowley stalked the rows like a panther, examining mixtures and offering sharply worded criticisms. She paused as she reached Lily's workstation.

"Interesting, Evans."

"Professor?"

"Adequate," Crowley pronounced. James turned slightly to offer her a congratulatory grin, although he quickly became serious after Crowley subjected his own potion to a severe critique. The Slytherins sniggered audibly as her comments became more vicious. Not that they could really comment, Lily decided; there was only one other properly blue potion in the room.

Snape watched Crowley berate James with a small smirk on his face.

After an extended lecture on the necessity of precisely counting beats, as opposed to guessing (Crowley's voice became contemptuous), the class was dismissed. Lily was carefully draining her cauldron when Crowley added, "Snape, Evans, a moment of your time."

Lily stifled a groan as she packed the rest of her potions equipment away. She caught James and Sirius' sympathetic looks as they left the dungeons.

She was fairly sure she hadn't done anything wrong, although she wouldn't put it past Professor Crowley to punish her just for hanging around Potter and Black, the professor's least favourite Gryffindors. But Snape was Crowley's golden boy, and a Slytherin to boot. She'd hardly punish him...

"Hey, Evans."

"What do you want, Rosier?" Lily was tall, but Rosier towered over her, invading her space. If she took a step backwards, she'd be pinned against the wall, proof of a weakness she didn't want to display.

The big Slytherin leered at her. "Any time you want a better fuck than Potty or Black," he murmured in a parody of sensuality.

Lily blushed fiercely, but tried to keep her dignity in spite of her hot face. "D-dream on, Rosier." She kept her voice low, but there was no mistaking the gleam in Marguerite Da Silva's heavy-lidded eyes. Was she putting Rosier up to this? He'd hardly hit on a Muggle-born witch otherwise, not while his friends were around.

Avery and Lestrange grabbed Rosier and pulled him away, not making eye contact with Lily. The Slytherin girls, Marguerite, her sycophantic shadow Florence Wilkes and the beautiful, aloof Narcissa Whytehall, followed them out. Snape and Lily, now the only students left, made their way up to Professor Crowley's desk.

They stood in silence while Crowley finished making notes on the parchment before her. Lily fiddled with her watch, until she realised that Snape was standing absolutely still.

The boys -- whom she was coming to think of as her boys, maybe because it kept her from feeling like their mascot -- hated Snape with a passion. She'd lost count of the number of times that exchanges of insults, routine between Gryffindors and Slytherins, had escalated into hexes and duels.

Lily herself had never spoken to Snape; they occasionally made eye contact as his friends tormented her. She rather had the impression that he considered himself above that sort of bullying, although he had no such scruples when it came to dealing with the boys.

Maybe he didn't consider her worth the effort.

At last, Crowley put her quill down and fixed her cool, intelligent gaze upon both of them.

"You are both remaining at Hogwarts this Christmas, I believe," she said. They nodded. "You'll be the only members of your houses left."

Lily nodded again, and Snape said, "Yes, Ma'am."

Crowley ignored him and looked at Lily, a small smile playing around her pale lips. "Seems rather cruel, really," said Crowley. "Don't your friends want you, Evans? Very unchivalrous of Potter and Black, leaving you all alone at Christmas."

Lily blushed. "My family had -- arrangements, and they wanted me to stay at school." Crowley couldn’t know that James hadn't even invited her to his home for the holidays, although the boys were going.

"Ah," said Crowley. Then: "You are Muggle-born, yes, Evans?"

"Yes, Professor."

"Hmph." Crowley shuffled her papers. "I imagine that the novelty of empty common rooms will wear off rather quickly. I have a project -- a joint project -- which might interest the two of you."

Lily glanced at Snape, who looked perplexed but curious.

"You two are the top potions students in your year, after all," Crowley added softly, "it's a rare gift, potions. Very rare."

Lily wasn't sure what surprised her more: the revelation of her academic standing, or the unprecedented praise from the icy, brilliant Adelaide Crowley.

"I -- I guess I'm interested, Professor," she said.

Crowley gave her a small smile. "Excellent. Snape?"

Snape gave Lily a challenging small. "I'd love to, Professor."

"Good. Join me here after dinner, first evening of the break."

Crowley swept out of the dungeon. Lily turned to Snape, wanting to ask whether he knew any more about this than she did. Crowley wasn't the head of Slytherin house, but she still favoured its students. Snape, however, turned away and walked past her without making eye contact.

***

"Well?"

"Detention?"

"Can't be, she didn't do anything," Peter pointed out.

"When did that ever stop Crowley?" asked Sirius, "remember that time she gave me detention just for making eye contact with Snape?"

"Sirius, I think it's a pretty safe bet that you were planning something," said James.

"I was. But that doesn't make it okay."

Lily laughed as she walked up the stairs to the girls' dorms. The boys had, as usual, gotten so caught up in their jokes that they hadn't even noticed her departure. They were such a self-sufficient group that sometimes she wondered whether she even entered their minds when she was absent.

Maybe Marguerite was right, and she really was just another Potter-Black groupie.

No, she told herself sternly as she opened the door to her dorm. You're their friend, and they're yours, and you're one of the top two students in Potions. And they're not even in the top ten, for all that they're first in all our other classes...

Lily stashed her Potions things in her trunk, trying not to look around the too-empty dorm. The Reynolds twins, her best friends, had never come back from summer holidays. There were ugly rumours about You-Know-Who, attacks on homes and dead parents. No one seemed to know the truth. There was just an empty space in the fifth year Gryffindor girls' dorm.

It was the absence of the Reynolds that had led her to spend more time with James and the rest. Geraldine and Mary, the other girls in her dorm, could be as catty as the Slytherins, and Lily was tired of wondering whether every so-sweet comment was an insult. Geraldine and Mary were friendly with Narcissa: three perfect, beautiful pureblooded goddesses. By comparison, Lily felt like a gawky, too-tall insect, excluded from their group by her Muggle-background. Geraldine had been unbearable since Lily had been made a prefect.

Compared with the girls she knew, the boys were straightforward. She usually overlooked the fact that they frequently went off on their own, had a history of private jokes which sometimes seemed like a foreign language, and weren't above using her as a decoy when it suited them.

She liked to think of the boys as her friends. She'd thought that she belonged, after four years of being "The Muggle-Born", but now she was going to be the only Gryffindor at school over Christmas. And for reasons unknown, she'd agreed to take on extra work with Crowley, who hated Gryffindors, and Snape, who couldn't even be bothered making eye contact with her.

Good going, Liliane, said Petunia's voice in her head. Making a real success of yourself in the magical world.

Her head was sore. Lily lay back on her bed and stared at the canopy above her. She worked hard, got great marks -- and in the end, she was upstaged by her friends and left alone over Christmas.

She was interrupted by a knock at the door. James was leaning around the threshold.

"Lily? You okay?"

"Yeah. Just mopey." She sat up and self-consciously straightened her long braid. As usual, wisps of red hair were falling into her eyes.

"What did Crowley want?"

"Special assignment." She smiled wryly. "My reward for being one of the top Potions students: extra work."

"You're one of the top...? Hey, congratulations!"

In anyone else, she'd have looked for signs of envy and sarcasm, but James was completely honest. It was Sirius you had to watch out for, because while James was looking innocent and charming, Sirius would be planting dungbombs in your satchel, or attaching a Filibuster Firework to your braid, "Just to see what would happen."

"Listen," said James, "we're going down to the hospital wing to visit Remus before dinner. Want to come?"

"I'd love to. Poor Remus -- I swear, he catches everything that's going around. He'd probably catch Dutch Elm Disease if he were exposed to it."

James laughed and held the door open for her as they left the dorm.

***

"Add two measures of powdered mermaid scales. Stir them slowly and evenly through the mixture."

Snape had nice hands, Lily decided as she watched him work. He wasn't much to look at otherwise; he was thin and bony, and the Potions he worked with often left an unpleasant sheen on his skin and hair. But interest -- or obsession -- made his eyes gleam, and he did have lovely hands.

"Now read this incantation..."

Lily accepted the book from Crowley and read the Latin clearly and slowly. She wasn't certain of the translation -- yet another disadvantage of being Muggle-born, she hadn't grown up with declensions and conjugations.

It was something about children, she decided: child of light, child of darkness, child of water, child of sky, blood child, earth child.

Maybe Crowley was making a Conceptus Potion. She hadn't told them what they were brewing -- identifying it was meant to be part of the challenge.

"Very nice," said Crowley. "Now let it simmer for thirty minutes, stirring it anti-clockwise with an octarine ladle every eight minutes." She surveyed them for a moment, nodded slightly, then left the dungeons.

Snape selected a ladle and watched it shimmer in the torchlight.

"You're good at this," he said suddenly.

"I -- thanks." It was the first time he'd spoken to her, apart from requests for implements or ingredients. She had the feeling that he'd been watching her closely, though.

"I mean it. Most people are terrible at Potions. Especially the Muggle-born." This was said without rancor. "It's too subtle. Not flashy enough. But you ... you're gifted. Almost as good as me."

"Gosh, I'm honoured," she said sarcastically.

He flashed her a quick smile, and Lily suddenly wanted to ask him to smile again, it so transformed his face.

"I grew up with Potions, Evans," he said. "I was brewing almost as soon as I could hold a ladle. My mother sang us to sleep with recipes and herbal lore. But you -- you knew nothing about it until five years ago." More sourly he added, "I shall have to work harder, to keep you from taking my place at the top."

Lily stared at him in faint disbelief. "Did you know that you have a special talent for destroying compliments?"

He suddenly became serious: his face closed up and his eyes became wary. "Well, I learned from a master."

"Oh?"

Almost playful again, he said, "Rosier. He'll spend hours telling me that you're--" He mimicked Rosier's cockney accent -- "the hottest bird in school, even for a frigid Gryffindor Mudblood."

Lily hissed.

"What? You do know what that--"

"Mud," she said, grabbing the book she'd used earlier. "Not earth, mud. Child of blood, child of mud..."

Snape lifted the book out of her hands and read the incantation.

"Shit," he said.

"Snape!"

"Child of blood..."

"You -- you're a pureblood wizard, aren't you?" Lily said.

"Yes." Absently, he stirred the Potion. "And you are Muggle-born."

"A Mudblood," she said flatly.

"Well, if you embrace the title..." He read on, evidently fascinated.

"Do you know what the Potion is?" she asked.

"No. But I have an idea. Several ideas, in fact."

"Is it -- is it a Dark Potion?"

"I don't know. We don't have the full ingredients list, or the complete instructions. It's definitely on the restricted list, though." Snape's eyes gleamed. "I never imagined that we'd be allowed to make one of these."

"Are we allowed? I mean, I don't think that Dumbledore would want--"

Snape waved a hand dismissively. "He wouldn't want us to know. Because it's dangerous, and children have to be protected..."

"Well -- yeah."

"Ignorance isn't protection, Evans, it's a liability."

"But, the Dark Arts--"

Snape leaned towards her. Lily could feel his breath on her skin as he spoke.

"Knowledge is power, Evans, even Muggles know that. Once you have information about something, you can deal with it. It's not the knowledge of the Dark Arts that causes damage. Knowing how to do something doesn't mean you'll do it."

"So you say as you brew a proscribed Potion."

Snape looked down at the cauldron. Lily could see his face reflected in the potion.

"I'm not the one who gave us this assignment," he said finally. "And if this is what I think it is, then it's not a true Dark Potion."

"What do you think it is, then?"

He smiled at her, a small, secretive smile. "I'll tell you when I'm certain."

They spent the rest of the evening in silence.

to be continued...

further notes: credits

"There is no such place": from the Augie March song of the same name. Also the literal meaning of the word "Utopia"
"Those formative years": from "Pretty Good Year" by Tori Amos, on the "Under the Pink" album.
"What my books did not": from "Past the Mission" by Tori Amos, from the same album. In full: "She said she knew what my books did not".

Yes, this is a songfic. I figured that since I was breaking my WiP rule, my Snape/Lily romance rule, and my no-long-fic rule, I might as well throw the ban on songfics out the window too. And it's Tori purely to annoy Christine :P

Crowley: a good name for a woman who's possibly dabbling in the Dark Arts, yes?
Whytehall: inspired, if not identical to, the name of the school in Enid Blyton's Naughtiest Girl novels. There are serious Blyton influences in this fic; I'm not sure what came over me.
Octarine: a highly magical substance on Discworld, associated with the number 8.

First posted on ff.net: April 19. Edited April 20, due to typo gremlins. Re-edited May 27, adding more detail to the beginning, including a sadly-forgotten minor character and bringing Lily's personality into slightly better focus. And edited again for Fiction Alley on July 14.

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