A bit shorter than the last one, but today is my last test, so I might be back a lot sooner than you all imagine.

TW: CHILD ABUSE AND DOMESTIC ABUSE, MOSTLY IMPLIED

PANDORA'S PARTY FOR MARY

Mary MacDonald had few hopes about her birthday. Maybe she would slip into the kitchen, drink some butterbeer her friends would sneak into the castle and go to sleep an hour or two after the usual time she went to bed, but she did not expect a full-blown party happening in the Ravenclaw Tower's Common Room with Pandora smiling bigly at her, muttering the words 'surprise' as if it was nothing big.

It was a Friday night and there was nothing that could end up going wrong. Professor Flitwick knew about the party and was pretending not to and Pandora invited only a few of her friends besides Mary's friends.

Still, there was a part of Mary that didn't believe her eyes as she saw Regulus Black, Severus Black and Barty Crouch Junior standing in the corner of the room, talking to each other in low voices in the very same room as James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew were on, especially with Lily Evans and Marlene McKinnon. In the middle of them, however, it was not surprising to see Anne Sage.

Mary was sure that if she liked women, she would've liked Anne somewhat. Sure, she was pretty and all, but there was little one could do to not like Anne. Mary liked to believe that she was a great observer, but Anne didn't allow much to leave her mind – she knew that Anne loved James very much, that her bond with Lily was growing rapidly, Anne hated black licorice and still ate it every now and again, Anne didn't care for school; that last one was odd, she had nice grades and Mary actually found herself liking having her in class with her so she had an actual competition outside of Ravenclaw, but there was very little attention coming from her in classes. Another thing that Mary had observed was that Anne was always walking in the thin line between fraternization between houses and clearly being in the wrong house, especially when talking to Slytherin and Gryffindor.

So, to be a good host and not show any preference, Mary made her way to Anne first.

"Anne! Oh, you came, too!" Mary said. "Pandora said you weren't sure if you'd make it or not."

"Yeah, I was feeling under the weather this morning, but I got better and I couldn't miss it!" said Anne. "Happy birthday! Happy eighteenth!"

"Thanks! I don't feel any different," she admitted.

Anne laughed.

"Nobody does," she dismissed. "Pandora seemed very excited about this party, rambled about it to Regulus for almost thirty minutes. She was so excited that even managed to get Severus to come."

Mary hesitated.

"Yes," was all she managed to say.

Mary was a muggleborn and she had every reason to fear Severus Snape after his confrontation that everybody saw with Lily Evans, but especially after rumours of his loyalty of the coming war got out. She had every reason to be terrified and even more reasons to not want him there. But Mary was raised by a teacher; she was polite and educated, she would never, ever tell someone to leave her party, even if she wanted and even more, she would never forgive herself for being rude to someone, even if that person was a horrible one.

"I hope you don't blame Pandora, Severus did say he wanted to meet you," Anne added after seeing Mary's hesitance. "He was quite taken aback by the length of your last Spell's essay. He barely managed enough for the parchment and there you were with three."

"I'm good at it," she said, shrugging it off.

"Don't worry, he's not interested in your romantically or anything, he just... I suppose he wants to open his circle of friends a little bit," Anne said. "If you're not comfortable after everything that happened between him and Lily, I'll totally understand and he will too, don't worry about it. I will tell him that you're uncomfortable and he'll leave."

"No! No. I could never do that!" she said. "He hasn't done anything. He hasn't even said anything, he's just standing beside his friends."

"He's not very social," Anne said with an awkward smile. "He's trying, though. He's even being civil with the Marauders and all that; the Marauders are being civil to him as well, which is quite nice."

"Nice, indeed, after all, you're in the middle of it all," Mary laughed.

"Well, I do like the idea of not being afraid of getting hit by a spell that wasn't meant for me," she admitted.

"It must be scary," Mary said, trying to sound as understanding as she could, but Anne could see she just couldn't understand why she would put herself in that situation at all. "Pandora really likes Regulus Black's company and he's not all that bad, but Severus Snape never liked us, not even while he was friends with Lily. And the child –"

"The child deserves nothing but the best of the best after all he's been through," Anne said, cutting her off. "There's a lot you don't know about them, Mary, and I do not blame you or resent you for those things without knowing the context of everything, but I do warn you to be careful."

Mary raised a single eyebrow.

"It does feel odd when you say it like that," she said.

"It's not a threat, don't see it as one, it's just a warning... a comment, if you allow me to rephrase that," Anne said, sipping her cup gently. She smiled without showing her teeth. "Barty is sweet, he just has a lot of bitterness around him."

The way Anne's eyes moved directly to Barty as if to check if he was still there and still around to find some relief with the sight of him sitting with a smiled beside Regulus as the older boy rambled about something made Mary shift in place, moving her weight from her left leg to her right. She knew that look of protection anywhere; her older brother gave her that look whenever she was home from school and seeing the people that once had bullied her in her primary school again, trying to act as if they had never hurt her so deeply that she never allowed herself to open up enough to make a true friend – and she missed her brother dearly for a second, after all a muggle could never visit Hogwarts as the other parents could in case of emergencies.

"What happened to him?" Mary asked. "My mother works in a school and is in constant contact with NSPCC."

Anne scoffed.

"They do little, but talk a lot," Anne dismissed.

National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, what a joke. Those people came to her house once looking at the room Harry and her shared with great concern when she was fourteen, a single year before things really got bad for her. Those people dressed in green with sickly sweet smiles coaxing her to talk about the horrible things she endured and thought to be normal until not that long ago, asking her and Harry to throw their problems to them so they could solve them. The helplessness that followed was hard to describe, because Anne knew that there was no way Dumbledore would let them leave the house and there was no way that she would survive if she spoke and Vernon found out, so she chose to be absolutely quiet as Harry explained away his bruises as fights in the boarding school he and Anne went to after all the trouble they caused in the public schools of the area. Anne was almost sure Petunia blamed her own bruises on calming Harry down from a mental breakdown the week before.

The NSPCC walked away as they did to many other children before, unable to help. Aunt Petunia stopped watching anything with the NSPCC propaganda in it; films with the commercial in the middle of it, tv shows that made a news report with it.

"My mother works with the NSPCC, she might be able to just research a bit more on what to do if the child is a wizard," Mary said.

"With someone as powerful as Mister Crouch, your mother has little power," said another voice. Regulus Black now stood behind Anne, hand going to the small of her back in a small and discreet touch before he pulled it back and kept it behind his own back. "That's why I took him in as my ward. There's a lot you don't understand, MacDonald."

"Because I'm a muggleborn?" she asked, trying to get a reaction.

"Yes," Regulus said without as much as a heartbeat of space between his answer and the question. "There are unspoken rules, unspoken traditions that are seen as rude as said out loud. A father and a mother have the right to do with their child whatever they want until their children are seventeen or have a job."

"This isn't right," Mary said.

"But it's the way things are in this world that it's now your word as well," Regulus said, shrugging. "If you want to change it, then you'll have a lot of work to do."

"I can do research or maybe take him away from his father," Mary said.

"And embarrass a powerful man? You'd never get a job in this world," Regulus said.

"Then I'll go to the muggle world!"

"Mary, dear," Anne said, blinking a few times as the understanding dawned on her. "He's trying to say that you wouldn't get a job in the world of the living. Mister Crouch would have you killed without hesitation."

Mary paled for a second.

"And we just leave him there?"

"For the time being that's all I can do, to take him in and make sure Mister Crouch is proud," Regulus said. "As I said, you want to change things here and make our world a better place, you'll have a lot of work to do."

It dawned on Mary after she was already away from the two talking with Severus and Barty that the way Regulus said 'ours' didn't mean the wizarding kind, but the world of people like Barty and Severus and Anne and him, if she was right to assume that the things their parents did to Sirius are being done to him as well. Regulus had just urged her to become the protector Barty needed.

Mary, who had no idea what she wished to do once she was out of school, decided to go to the Ministry and create a new department: the Magical Child's Protective Service Department– MCPS.

Severus watched silently as he tried his best not to smile at the way his friend held Anne's hand and slipped away from the dance floor towards the stairs towards the windows where most couples went.

As soon as Barty started moving to follow them, however, his stillness had to be dropped as he almost ran to hold his shoulder and stir him away from the stairs.

"They are –" started the confused boy.

"They are going to get some alone time," Severus explained.

Barty blushed deeply. He still thought that couples hiding themselves in tight spaces, rubbing against one another in an embrace, lips devouring each other was disgusting. He couldn't understand how the wet tongue against tongue could ever be pleasurable or engaging in any sort of manner, but he wouldn't dare to say so out loud because the boys in his year were starting to experiment more and more things with any girl that was willing and it made him feel like he was being left behind somehow, so he listened with attention, pretending to enjoy and understand it so they wouldn't mock him or tease him for being childish.

Severus, however, liked the idea, but knew not in flesh the feeling. All he had to go by were the retellings of Lucius Malfoy in extreme (and a bit overdetailed) stories and Regulus tame (and too sweet) stories. He had to settles with the lies told by the other boys in the dormitory to fulfil his fantasies in the middle of the night since he had no courage or wish to go around, looking for someone to canoodle with; his youth allowed him to desire, but his heavy-mind did not allow him to experiment. He didn't see himself of deserving the liberation and freeing feeling of relaxing, not after the things he had to do.

He thought Regulus lucky to see Anne as someone he deserved. Both did terrible things to survive and both of them knew what the other did to some point because neither was ashamed to break down about it. He watched from the corner as he held himself together, hating how much he wanted to find someone as broken as he was to share his experiences – he hated how unhealthy it was and how much he yearned for someone to suffer as much as he did so they could understand him completely; in a way, he didn't want someone as innocent as a child to go through his pain, but he also didn't want to suffer alone and the confusion made him freeze in place sometimes, hating himself for being a terrible person.

Since Anne had told him the truth, he couldn't help but hate himself even more. He knew that he wasn't the same person as the adult version Anne had met, but there were glimpses of the person he was at the moment in him and he didn't like his older version – that man had jumped over the dead body of James Potter, ignored the suffering and confused children wailing to hug the body of the woman he loved; that man had looked away as he saw how skinny Harry Potter came back from home every year; that man had done nothing when he saw Anne crying in the corner of the room, but allow her to cry, no comfort was given; that man had seen sexual assault in someone other than his mother and, although he had promised that he would never enable it to happen again like he did as a child, he did and stayed quiet. He didn't fight, he didn't scream, he didn't drag those children away from the horrible people they were forced to live with – he had become just like the people he hated, the people that failed him as a child.

He had failed with Anne Potter and he didn't want to come to care to anyone else just to fail to them as well.

But he was failing at that as well, because there was Barty Crouch Junior looking at him.

"Do you want a beer?" Severus asked, not knowing what else to ask.

"I'm fourteen," was his argument back.

"And?" Severus raised his eyebrows.

Barty glanced at the stairs again before smiling.

"Yes, I want one, please," he said.

Severus led him by the shoulder to the table of drinks and opened two butterbeers with alcohol and shoved one into Barty's hand, turning him around by the shoulders.

"I'm going to the restroom," he warned. "Do you see Sirius Black over there? You go and annoy him until I'm back."

Barty nodded, taking a big sip of his beer and grimacing before walking towards Sirius. With that, Severus walked away from the corners of the dance room where he had been walking around and to the bathroom.

He almost walked right out when he saw who was inside.

James Potter was fixing his hair in the mirror, grimacing at the result before sighing, messing it up and trying to fix it again. He took a moment to notice Severus almost frozen at the door, looked at him or a second as if wondering what he was doing and went back to the impossible task of fixing his messy hair.

Slowly, Severus walked further inside.

Standing with his profile to James, he took care of his needs in the urinal in silence before walking to the sink to wash his hands.

"You know," Potter started out of nowhere, "Anne really likes you a lot."

Sirius looked at James through the mirror to see the boy tense.

"You don't need to start a conversation," he grumbled, throwing some soap in his hands.

"I do think I need," disagreed Potter. "Either we like it or not, Anne is not going away from your life any time soon and I'm not going away from her life any time soon. We should make peace with one another."

"We have peace, what we don't have is friendship," Severus said. "You don't see me attacking you in the corridors and I felt not one Sting Hex in a few months at this point. Peace, see?"

James sighed.

"You're hard to get through," he complained.

"Perhaps I don't want you to get through," he said, stepping away from the sink, drying his hands on his robes.

James locked his jaw, cracking his neck to the side in uncomfortableness. He looked like he was trying so hard that Severus almost pitied him for a second because he looked like a father trying to be cool rather than a teenage boy talking to his school-rival.

"You're trying for her... and for Black," Potter said. "I can see it. Your robes, your hair, your confidence. I can see you're trying to make yourself equal to them, but I will say what I told Moony before: your hair, your face and your clothes don't make people your equal."

"I don't need your little pep-talk," Severus said, adding a grimace.

"Not a pep-talk, an advice," corrected Potter. "See, Moony doesn't come from a very wealthy family and he didn't like walking with us in our first year – right, we were loud and a lot more obnoxious than what we are now, but all the three of us came from, I guess, wealthy households and he didn't. It took him a time for him to understand that his robes didn't make him and that his scars meant nothing to us. If there's one thing that I see myself in Anne is that she looks at you the same way I look at my boys and I don't think that will change."

"What is that supposed to mean?" he asked, narrowing his eyes. He saw the glimpse of adult Severus in the mirror, that same suspicious looks to everybody. He relaxed his face in the same second.

"I mean that your robes or whatever it is, they don't mean anything to Anne," James said. "And nor do they to Regulus. They like it because they mean something to you." And with that James Potter looked back at the mirror and was satisfied with himself, mumbling an 'excuse me' and walking away. He stopped at the door. "Did you see Anne, by the way?"

Severus hesitated between the truth and a lie.

"Yeah, snogging Regulus upstairs," he admitted.

James shuddered.

"Alright, good. Not going upstairs, then," he opened the door, letting the music in. "Last time was enough and it was a lot better than what I'll probably find this time," he said to himself, but Severus heard.

He didn't ask questions as he was left alone in the bathroom, still completely out of the fact that he had been civil to the boy he had hated with all his heart and soul before, and James bloody Potter had been friendly towards him, even more than civil.

Severus took a deep breath.

He had failed Anne back at her time, but he promised to himself in the awful lighting of the male bathroom in the Ravenclaw Tower, alone and tipsy from Merlin-knows-how many light alcoholic butterbeers, that he wouldn't dare fail her once more, even if that meant that he was going to be friendly to James Potter.