Author’s Notes: No, I haven’t died. I am dreadfully sorry about how long it’s taken me to get this out. Insert the usual excuses here. Nevertheless, this chapter is extra long, and kind of odd, even for HFA. This will be the first one to make reference to Book the Sixth, so all those who haven’t read it yet should cover your eyes and hum loudly while clicking the back button. I apologize if this isn’t as humorous as is par for HFA, but I really did need to tie some loose ends together before proceeding. In any case, I hope this is worth the wait.

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It was a quiet morning at HFA. Ally White paced the eastern corridors, feeling rather ill at ease with the utter lack of bedlam, hormones, and Draco fangirls running about the place. Slumping over to the window, she gazed longingly out over the grounds, remembering her own days at the academy fondly. Then she recalled the bruises, injuries, and general nastiness, and smirked, knowing that in her current position she was less likely to be molested by Mini-Aragogs. Miss Brin had been right. The sadism had started to rub off on her.

A strange sound roused her from her thoughts. Clack-thump, clack-thump, clack-thump. Ally straightened, drawing her wand, and turned a corner, prepared to see a bunch of Lusterbuffs with a Lucius-attracting magnet of the sort which I Forget had been selling during off hours.

She had not expected to see a roughly hewn domino, hinged at the middle with a fine sheen of glitter over its upper half, tottering down the passageway. Temporarily stunned, Ally watched the thing wobble past her, toward the forbidden corridor to Aerobics Lair.

Instructor mode kicked in. “You can’t bring that in here!” she yelled, jumping after the strange wooden block that had now gotten caught in an overhanging arch. Ally tried to cast an Impediment spell, but the thing just continued to move, turning itself sideways to fit through the door. Feeling angry and frustrated, Ally pulled out a whistle from where it was tucked into her shirt on a string, and blew two short, silent blasts.

There ensued a scurrying of little arachnid feet, as well as an accompanying “What the HELL?” from Sirius Black in the depths of Aerobics Lair as he rolled out of bed, clapping his hands over his ears.

“Ah, Voldemord,” said Ally, nodding to the leader of the herd of spiders now milling around her feet (and knees. These were Mini-Aragogs, after all). “You saw that walking sandwich board, didn’t you? Take it down, uh, please?”

“Ssssure,” hissed Voldemord, clacking pincers in a way reminiscent of his namesake’s fruitless attempts to steeple his fingers. “Attempts,” because Voldemort had been in the middle of a game of Diamond Web Round with the Minis at the time, and had been at the center of a mass of multi-color yarn. The Mini-Aragogs played the game as one might Cat’s Cradle, except that—having more appendages—the Minis tended to elaborate. A Diamond Web Round that had been going since start of term had enveloped the entire south wing of the Charms corridor, into which, most unfortunately, the Dark Lord had accidentally walked.

In any case, it was with much fervor that Voldemord and his gaggle of cronies (among them Crabb and Milfoy) chased after the strange clack-thumping device, their little feet skittering across the stone floors and leaving a trail of decaying-rat odor in their wake. Ally sprinted after them, happy in the hunt. She nearly ran into Mafoy, though, when she rounded a corner and found that the Mini-Aragogs had captured their quarry, and were circling it like bizarre, arachnid wolves.

Ally hitched up her belt, pulling out a notebook and a D.A. galleon especially modified for use by the Order of the Sphinx. “What have we here?” she asked, trying to sound casual while her other, more fangirlish half squealed about how she had the coolest job in the world.

The strange wooden domino flexed its hinge, doubling its height as it raised the front of its sandwich board into the air. Ally’s eyes widened as the air seemed to shimmer about her. She had the irrepressible urge to stroke her chin, to smooth a beard that she didn’t possess.

CLAP.

Ally sat in her living room, a plate of pancakes on her lap and the television on in front of her. The deus ex machina that doubled as her Portkey to Hogwarts weighed heavily against her chest, and she thought idly about going into the office after she finished her perusal of the Saturday morning cartoon roster. She flipped through the channels, and eventually came to rest on a news channel. People were shouting at each other, as people are wont to do on news television, but then the story ended, and another began, this one about Harry Potter. Ally turned up the volume, smearing butter over her pancakes and dousing them with syrup.

“... and with the release of the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, just two weeks ago, fans of J.K. Rowling’s series about the boy wizard are eagerly awaiting the next installment, set to come out sometime within the next few years,” said the lady on the news, as clips of chipper youngsters with new 800+ tomes played on the screen.

Something nagged in the back of Ally’s mind. The fifth book... It had been out for longer than two weeks, hadn’t it? No, no, that wasn’t right, it had just come out, she had just been at HFA, she had just received an awesomely amazing job, she was going back there this fall...

No, there’s been so much fanfiction, so many stories... Sirius died, and the fangirls all want him to come alive again... Ally shook her head, spilling syrup all over her pyjamas as she tried to clear away a very powerful sense of deja vu. This was wrong, this was very wrong...

Ally looked to her left, and there, staring at her as only an eyeless being can, was the hinged domino. Its top was raised slightly, as if unsure about what to do now that it had her in its clutches. Ally jumped to her feet, her plate of pancakes squelching as they hit the carpet.

“Y-you!” she exclaimed, edging toward it. “What is this? What happened? What are you?”

The domino jumped back, and its top flew up. The world went hazy.

CLAP.

Ally sat in the common room of Canonlaw House, her knees drawn up under her chin. Around her, fellow students were giggling and leafing through books and fanfiction manuscripts. Redfire was beside her, laughing at a joke about the Slasherings. Ally chuckled, and dug her spoon into a bowl of Tantaflaf at the center of the table. The familiar, horridly sweet-yet-surprisingly-Pepto-Bismally flavor flooded through her mouth, causing her to gag and dribble a bit from the corner of her mouth.

“Right, so then I asked Remus if he’d go out with me if I stopped them from ’shipping him with Sirius, but he just sicced Lupine on me, isn’t that horrible?” said Catherine Dark Wolf. “I mean, it’s not like I offered to make out with him like Stephanie Brown.”

“They’re so unreasonable here,” said Onyx. “What’s one hug between friends, I ask you?”

“It’s ’cause the hugging turns into groping, then where are we?” blurted Ally before she could stop herself. She clutched at her head. No, that hadn’t been what she meant... she had been about to say why she only had Harry’s best intentions at heart when she tried to glomp him. It had been a brilliant argument, too, lots of examples and logic and contrapositives and stuff. But instead... what had been wrong with her?

“One too many knocks on the head by the Mini-Aragogs, Ally?” asked Redfire, jostling her shoulder playfully.

“Something like that,” muttered Ally, pressing her knuckles to her temples. “I really need to see Harry... I’ll feel better then... tell him about the Lusterbuffs I caught tunneling up under his room in Aerobics Lair and sent them to Snape for detainment...”

The other girls had started to inch away from her. “Whoa, Ally, I knew you liked the boy; I didn’t think you were going all vigilante on his other lusters,” said Redfire.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Look, if you’re going to go all possessive on your lust-object, Ally, don’t even think about coming to me when you need Gryffindor face paints,” said Chelsea, a girl who adored Harry nearly as much as Ally did.

“I don’t know! What’s going on!” wailed Ally, jumping to her feet and stumbling away from the group. She limped down the familiar corridor to her room, and stubbed her toe on something hard. She looked up through a fringe of mousy brown hair still carrying the last vestiges of blonde at the tips.

The hinged domino stared up at her. “You!” she snarled, though most of her wondered why, as she had most certainly never seen the thing before in her life. It was not the confused part, however, which was in control, because the next thing Ally knew she had flung herself forward, grabbing onto the top block of the domino, gripping its sides with her hands.

The block panicked, hopping up and down on one foot after the other, trying to shake her off. It tried to clap itself together, but Ally’s fingers were in the way. Ally bit her lip as her fingers were slammed repeatedly by the heavy board plus her own body weight. She held on gamely as her skin ripped and knuckles bled. A part of her—the part that still lusted after Harry Potter and spent its evenings gallivanting about with Lusters United—wailed at her to stop, to let go. But the other part, the stronger part, held on.

“What are you?” demanded Ally through gritted teeth. “Why—am I—back—here?” she said as the domino bucked and further damaged her knuckles.

The world hazed, but this time the hinged board creature could not clap, and Ally felt a rush of air around her body, the opposite of apparition, a free-floating experience. Echoes of conversations and memories flowed over her.

And Snap looked out the window, wondering about how horrible his life and stuff had been forever, because no one liked him and hated him for being greasy even though it was a jean problem and he couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

He thought back of all the horrible stuff that had happened to him when he was really little, like his mother being nasty and his father hating him so much cause he didn’t have enough smarts as he was supposed to have. Snape sighed and watched the snow falling like the fragmanted peaces of his soul and all the horrible misery that tormented him all the time, forever.

Ally felt the pressure against her knuckles release, and the board to which she had affixed herself faded away from her touch. She was standing in a dingy office that seemed to be cast only in deep shades of purple. Ally, who was no stranger to the fanficto-realities, wrinkled her nose at the old-lady-perfume scent that so often accompanied purple prose. She looked around warily, ready to find the hinged domino and continue her struggle, but it seemed to have vanished.

Oh, he was such a pathetic creature of the night’s darkness, full of the sorrows of night, contained in his own prison in a wall of blackest crystal. No one could touch him, no one could save him, no one loved him, and he didn’t need them ever at all.

FLASHBACK

Ally spun around as a resounding CLAP echoed through the thick air. The world became hazier, and she felt the terrain change under her feet, becoming the soft, purply carpet of a hospital room, where a young Snape was saying goodbye to his dying mother. Ally rolled her eyes at the sight of the “moleasses tears” rolling down the boy’s face, and at once she understood.

“This is your home, isn’t it?” she called tentatively, scanning the shadows for the domino. “This is where you live, right?”

Clack-thump. Clack-thump.

Ally didn’t dare turn around, but she could tell the hinged creature had appeared behind her, and was watching her every move.

“You’re a flashback, aren’t you? You take the story back to things that have happened already, don’t you?” she said, taking a wild stab at the strange being’s identity.

Clack-thump. Clack-thump.

Ally took that as an affirmative. “Can you take me back?”

Clack-thu—

“Awful potion, really; if they want the wart of a Mary Sue, they should specify which kind; I’ve had enough guesswork on these potions to last me another four months,” said a rough, masculine voice. Ally whirled around just in time to see a large, square-jawed man burst through the hospital door in his shirtsleeves and a five o’clock shadow that appeared to be on fall daylight savings time. A bow-backed college student followed wearily after, carrying a heavy sack.

The square-jawed man looked around, appearing startled to find himself in a hospital room with a grieving young Snape. The assistant peered up at Ally, and puzzlement gave way to horror.

The man roared, and Ally turned and ran, not bothering to question or assess the situation. Every nerve in her body screamed that this was a dangerous man, as if she could feel the story bending around him as she stumbled forward, knocking into a trolley full of antiseptics and cotton. “After her, Wrenchman!” howled the man. “There is too much at stake for this to blow!”

Ally skidded as the hallway down which she had been running converged into a dead end. She was trapped. She could hear the patter of tired, quick steps, as well as the fast yet heavy gait of the square-jawed man.

Then her body came into contact with something that was not a medical trolley, or a wall, or an angry antagonist. It was heavy. It was wooden. It was hinged at the top.

CLAP.

Time rushed forward. Memories—or premonitions, perhaps, for Ally could never be sure if the remembrances she garnered that day had ever actually happened, or just been fitted into her mind by the errant Flashback—flooded past her. It was a strange feeling, as if she had just been squeezed through an hourglass. Then she landed, feet slamming down forcefully on the hard stone of the entrance hall.

And it was autumn, the castle full of vigor as students milled around. Two girls were arguing about Remus’ true love, either Sirius or Tonks. A few Wantingmors lit candles at a small shrine to Dumbledore, while the headmaster himself conversed with a man with a large mustache and fine smoking jacket.

Still getting over Half-Blood Prince, thought Ally. And she remembered reading it. She remembered the watchful vigil throughout the castle as the Order of the Sphinx and fifty reserve agents of the PPC guarded against a repeat Sue invasion of the sort which had happened after the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

“Ally, there you are,” said Miss Brin, looking as harried as ever, just as Ally remembered her from the morning she had first met the Flashback. “Did you find out where Leila Wynder has been keeping that canon-corrector ray gun? Lord Voldemorts Collectively have had words about it being used in their vicinity.”

Ally puzzled this, because it was as if nothing had happened, though everything had changed. For the staff had been working on the same problem of Leila Wynder that day that she had left. Yet now there were new characters about, and she herself seemed older... though of course she could remember her own birthday just a month ago...

“Ally? Have the fanwriters gotten you?” asked Miss Brin, gray eyes looking down into her own as if searching for mind-control influences in Ally’s face.

“No, no,” said Ally, shaking her head to clear the bizarre feeling of suddenly having more memories than one remembered starting with. And this time she hadn’t even been joining up with her concurrent self in the Real World.

“Good, then,” said Miss Brin, giving her one last critical look. “I’d like your opinion on something, or someone, I suppose.”

“Someone?”

“It’s Snape. You know he’s been a little... funny... since Book the Sixth, but he’s gone... strange. ... OOC strange.”

Just then, Snape himself walked into the entrance hall to a chorus of boos and conflicted squeals from Sevvie’s Angels, who had been thrown into a state of turmoil for his assumed evilness. Ally frowned and shook her head as the professor walked past her toward the staircase with his apron on. Surprisingly, no one tried to glomp him, though Ally personally thought that anyone trying to glomp a man with such a wide, crazy rictus would have to be mad themselves. Still, there’s always one, and thus it was against better judgement that Aurora Berry launched herself toward the former Potions master.

“Wrenchman, you idiot, don’t let him get tripped up! We don’t want anything to happen to him before he gets there,” growled a man’s heavy, commanding voice.

“Right,” said another voice, this one beaten and broken.

Ally looked around for the source of the voices just as Snape turned and deftly threw Aurora Berry over his hip, such that her momentum transferred directly from glomp to thump as she hit the ground and skidded several feet across the stone floor.

“Did you know he could do that?” asked Ally, as Snape continued on his path, the manic grin not leaving his face.

Miss Brin shook her head, pulling off her glasses and hurriedly polishing them on her shirt before replacing them and peering confusedly after Snape. “Follow him, why don’t you?” she said. “And let’s get all his fangirls quarantined for now, and an updated psychoanalysis from Lily on all the major canons to see if anyone else has been having similar... ninja dreams, I suppose.”

Ally nodded, and felt herself settle into the familiar duties of HFA. It was as if nothing unusual had happened at all that morning. Well... particularly unusual. Canon characters going funny, amorous students, strange goings-on... All perfectly normal for HFA. She had probably just imagined all that stuff about the Flashback, really, as if something like that was really running around HFA. No, life had been normal, perfectly normal. Right-o. A-okay.

“Oh, and Ally?” said Miss Brin, turning back to the head of the Order of the Sphinx. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing all morning, but please do try to see Madam Pomfrey about your knuckles; they look pretty banged up. And you’ve got Tantaflaf on your chin.”