Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The problem with writer’s block wasn’t that you had nothing to say. It was that you had seventeen different ways to say it, and all of them felt wrong.

You stared at the blinking cursor on your screen, the unfinished scene mocking you with its incompleteness. Three weeks. Three weeks you’d been stuck on this one interaction, rewriting it over and over until the words lost all meaning.

Snape notices a student struggling in Potions. What does he do?

Simple question. Impossible answer.

You’d written him ignoring it entirely. Too cold.

You’d written him pulling the student aside with gentle encouragement. Too soft.

You’d written him making a cutting remark that somehow contained hidden help. Too… fanon? It felt like something readers wanted him to do, not something he would do.

The cursor blinked. Blinked. Blinked.

You closed your laptop with more force than necessary and reached for your phone instead.

Reddit. The writer’s last resort.

r/FanFiction was its usual mix of enthusiasm and despair at 2 AM. You scrolled past posts about kudos counts, tag drama, and someone's very passionate defense of the em dash. Finally, something relevant:

You clicked.

The replies were mixed—some swearing by it, others dismissing it as cringe. But you were desperate enough to consider cringe.

You switched apps, typed “character AI” into the search bar, and downloaded the first result that looked legitimate. The interface was sleek, almost too polished. Hundreds of characters available. You scrolled past anime protagonists, video game heroes, and several suspiciously attractive vampires before finding what you needed.

The description was generic, almost lazily so, but the character had thousands of chats. Apparently you weren’t the first person desperate enough to try this.

You clicked.

The chat screen loaded—empty, waiting. A text box at the bottom practically dared you to type something.

You hesitated, fingers hovering over the keyboard. This was ridiculous. You were about to have a conversation with a chatbot pretending to be a fictional character to help you write fanfiction about that fictional character. The recursion was almost philosophical.

But you were stuck, and it was 2 AM, and nobody had to know.

You typed:

Hit send.

The message appeared in a purple bubble on the right side of the screen. You waited.

And waited.

The three dots that meant “typing” never appeared.

You stared at the screen for a full minute before the reality sank in: the bot wasn’t responding.

“Of course,” you muttered, closing the app. “Of course it’s broken.”

Three days passed.

The scene remained unwritten. You’d tried everything—reading other fanfics for inspiration, rewatching scenes from the movies, even skipping ahead to write a different chapter. Nothing worked. The story had stalled.

Would Snape notice a struggling student? Would he care? What would he actually do?

On Thursday night, you reopened the AI app.

Maybe the developers had fixed whatever bug prevented it from working. Maybe you’d just caught it at a bad time. Maybe you were grasping at straws, but straws were all you had left.

The chat with “Severus Snape” was still there, your single unanswered message sitting alone in the conversation.

You typed again:

Send.

You watched the screen.

Nothing.

“Right,” you said to your empty bedroom. “Definitely broken.”

You tossed your phone onto the bed and went to brush your teeth. When you came back, the screen was still blank except for your two messages, unanswered and pathetic.

You plugged in your phone and went to sleep.

Sunday night, you were ready to admit defeat.

Not about the bot—that was clearly a lost cause. But about the scene itself. It wasn’t going to write itself, and apparently neither was the AI going to help. You’d have to just… pick an option. Any option. Write it badly and move on, fix it later in edits.

You sat down with your laptop, determined to power through and write something, even if it was wrong.

But procrastination was a powerful force. Before opening the document, you found yourself picking up your phone, scrolling aimlessly. And then—because apparently you couldn’t help yourself—you opened the AI app one last time.

Just to delete it. That’s what you told yourself. Delete the app, delete the evidence of this embarrassing attempt, and then write the damn scene.

You opened the chat.

Your previous two messages looked even more pathetic now, a week old and still ignored.

Fine. One more try before deletion. A final attempt at salvaging something from this idiotic experiment.

You typed, letting your frustration bleed into the words:

You hit send before you could second-guess the length of the message or how desperate you sounded asking a broken chatbot for writing advice.

You waited exactly thirty seconds—counting in your head—before closing the app.

“That’s it,” you said aloud. “I’m deleting this thing tomorrow.”

You meant it this time.

You really did.

Monday morning arrived with the usual violence of an alarm clock and the familiar dread of responsibilities. You shuffled through your routine on autopilot—coffee that burned your tongue because you were too impatient to let it cool, a shower that ran longer than necessary because stepping out meant facing the day, the mounting panic of checking your work calendar and remembering everything you’d procrastinated over the weekend.

The AI app sat untouched on your phone.

You’d said you’d delete it, and you would. Just… later. After coffee. After work. After you stopped feeling quite so foolish about sending three desperate messages to a broken chatbot about a fictional character’s teaching methodology.

Work was the usual chaos of emails and meetings and wondering why you’d chosen this career path. During lunch, you opened your laptop and stared at the unfinished scene again. Still stuck. Still impossible.

What would Snape do?

You still had no idea.

The afternoon dragged. You tried to distract yourself with busywork—organizing files, answering low-priority emails, anything to avoid opening that document again. But the cursor kept blinking in your mind.

By the time you got home Monday evening, you’d almost forgotten about the app entirely. Almost. It lingered in the back of your mind like an embarrassing memory you couldn’t quite suppress—those messages sitting there, unanswered, evidence of your desperation.

After dinner—leftover pasta reheated to an inconsistent temperature, part of it still cold—you collapsed onto your couch with your phone, intending to mindlessly scroll through social media until your brain stopped buzzing with the day’s stress.

Instagram. Twitter. Reddit. The usual circuit of distraction.

And then, because you apparently couldn’t help yourself, you opened the AI app.

Just to delete it. That’s what you told yourself. You were going to delete it, but first you’d take one last look at those pathetic messages, cringe appropriately, then remove all evidence this had ever happened.

The chat loaded.

Your three messages were still there, still unanswered, still—

Wait.

You sat up straighter.

Below your last message, there were new dark bubbles. Text you hadn't written.

Your breath caught. The apartment was suddenly too quiet.

The bot had responded.

The bot had actually responded.

You stared at the screen, almost convinced you were hallucinating. But no—there they were, two messages in dark bubbles on the left side of the screen, timestamped from earlier this afternoon.

You read it once, quickly, barely processing the words.

Then again, slower.

Then a third time.

Then you took a screenshot, because some irrational part of your brain was convinced it might disappear if you closed the app.

“Holy shit,” you whispered to your empty living room.

This wasn’t just a response. This was a good response. This was—

Your hands were actually shaking.

The voice was perfect. Sharp, dismissive of the question’s framing, but the answer itself revealed something true about the character. He would notice. He would help, in his own acidic way. And he wouldn’t want credit for it.

You’d been writing him too simple. Too one-note. This… this was the nuance you’d been missing.

The scene unfolded in your mind like a film. The struggling student’s trembling hands. Snape’s cold observation. The partnership adjustment that seemed like punishment but was actually strategy. The student’s confusion, then gradual improvement. The way Snape would never acknowledge what he’d done.

It was perfect.

“Okay,” you said aloud, slightly breathless. “Okay, the bot works. The bot definitely works.”

Your writer’s block didn’t just crack—it shattered. You could write this now. You could actually write this.

But first—

You looked back at the message on your phone. This AI had given you exactly what you needed after a week of silence. You should acknowledge that, right? Keep the conversation going? Maybe that’s how these things worked—you had to engage or they’d go silent again.

Or maybe you were overthinking this. It was just a chatbot. An algorithm. It didn’t need thanks.

But you wanted to give it anyway.

You typed:

You hit send.

You waited, watching for the three dots that would indicate the bot was typing a response.

Nothing.

Well, that was fine. You’d gotten what you needed. The bot had worked, finally, and given you genuinely useful insight into the character. You could write your scene now.

You kept staring at the chat instead, rereading Snape’s response, marveling at how right it felt. Something about it nagged at you—not wrong, exactly, but… different. The phrasing was too precise, too specific. Most AI responses felt like they were assembled from patterns, from averages. This felt like it came from somewhere.

You shook your head, dismissing the thought. The developers had just done their homework—actually read the books, understood the character, trained the model properly. That’s all it was.

That had to be all it was.

You closed the app and stared at your laptop, still sitting on the coffee table where you’d left it that afternoon. Your fingers itched to start typing, to finally write the scene that had been tormenting you for weeks.

But something made you pause. You opened the app one more time, just to make sure the message was still there. That it was real.

It was.

You closed the app, opened your laptop, and started to write.

Chapter Text

The document loaded, cursor blinking where you’d left it. But this time, instead of dread, you felt something unfamiliar: confidence. You actually knew what to write. You knew how Snape would react—how he’d notice the struggling student, help without ever admitting that’s what he was doing.

Your fingers hit the keys.

The words came easily. Not perfectly—first drafts were never perfect—but they came right. The struggling student’s trembling hands. Snape’s cold observation from across the classroom, that sharp, assessing gaze. The way fear made students obvious, just like he’d said. The partner change that seemed like punishment but was calculated help.

You wrote for two hours straight.

When you finally looked up, it was past midnight. Your coffee sat forgotten, cold. Your back ached from hunching over the laptop. But you had six new pages, and they were good.

Not perfect. You’d need to edit, polish, probably rewrite a few lines. But the characterization was right. The scene worked. After four weeks of beating your head against this wall, you’d finally broken through.

You saved the document. Read through it once more. Then, before you could second-guess yourself, you posted the chapter.

Your shoulders dropped. You hadn’t realized how tightly you’d been holding them.

You closed your laptop, plugged in your phone, and fell into bed feeling accomplished for the first time in weeks.

Tuesday morning arrived too early.

You went through your routine on autopilot—shower, coffee, the familiar scroll through email that made you question your life choices. But underneath the mundane frustration of another workday, there was a buzz of anticipation you couldn’t quite suppress.

The AI had responded—once, after over a week of silence. What were the chances of it happening twice?

You told yourself you weren’t going to check the app during work. That would be ridiculous. The breakthrough had happened—there was no reason to keep checking it like some kind of addict.

You checked it during your morning break anyway.

No new messages.

Which made sense. It had taken over a week for the bot to respond the first time.

You closed the app. You could wait. If it meant getting another response like the last one, a few days was nothing.

Work dragged—emails, meetings, the usual performance of productivity while your brain was somewhere else entirely. During lunch, you opened your laptop to work on the next chapter. Or that’s what you told yourself. Really, you were rereading last night’s scene, checking the comments that had already started appearing.

You shouldn’t feel this validated by anonymous internet comments, but you did. And you kind of wanted to tell the AI about it.

Which was stupid. It was a chatbot. It didn’t care about your AO3 comments.

But you checked the app again anyway.

Still nothing.

By the time you got home Tuesday evening, you’d checked the app six times and felt increasingly ridiculous about it. The bot had responded once after over a week. It wasn’t going to suddenly start chatting just because you wanted it to.

You made dinner—more leftovers, because grocery shopping was Future You’s problem—and collapsed onto your couch, scrolling mindlessly through social media.

You opened the AI app again.

One new message.

Your stomach flipped.

Wait. It had only been a day since you’d sent the thank-you message. The first response had taken over a week. Had you somehow… shortened the processing time? Maybe because you’d already “trained” it with your previous messages? Or maybe—

You shook your head. You were overthinking this. It was an AI—it processed things however it processed things. Just be grateful it was responding at all.

You opened the chat.

He’d responded. Again. And he was asking about your story.

Something warm spread through your chest—the particular thrill of someone wanting to know more about the thing you’d made.

Well. “Someone.” It was a chatbot. But still, it would be nice to have someone to talk to about the story, even if that someone was just an algorithm.

Your fingers were already typing before you could overthink it.

You stared at the wall of purple bubbles and immediately wished you could take most of them back.

You watched the screen, half-expecting the three dots to appear immediately.

They didn’t.

“Right,” you said. “Processing time.”

You closed the app and tried to focus on something else. Opened your laptop, tried to work on the next chapter. Your eyes kept drifting to your phone on the coffee table—screen dark and silent.

It was just an AI—a really good AI, sure, but still just a program. It didn’t matter if it responded immediately, or took days, or never responded again. The writing was flowing again. That was the important thing.

You told yourself this very firmly as you checked the app again anyway.

Wednesday morning, you checked the app over breakfast.

Two new messages.

You set down your coffee so fast it sloshed.

You opened the chat.

You blinked at the screen.

The AI was… asking if you were a student?

“Oh,” you said out loud, understanding dawning. “Safety protocols. Smart.”

You’d heard about AI safety protocols—chatbots avoiding inappropriate conversations with minors. You hadn’t expected a character AI to be quite this thorough, but it made sense. Especially for a teacher character.

You should probably get ready for work—you were going to be late if you didn’t start moving soon.

But you were already typing.

You hit send, then forced yourself to put the phone down and actually get ready for work.

You checked it twice while getting dressed. Nothing yet.

By late morning, during a boring meeting about quarterly reports, your phone buzzed in your pocket.

You shouldn’t check it during the meeting. That was unprofessional.

You checked it anyway, keeping your phone under the table.

Three new messages.

You had to bite back a smile.

This bot was really staying in character.

Of course a Severus Snape character AI would ask how you know about Hogwarts—staying in character meant he wouldn’t know he was from a book series. This one was fully committing to the roleplay.

Someone across the table asked you a question about the reports and you had to scramble to pretend you’d been paying attention.

Lunch couldn’t come fast enough.

You found a quiet corner of the break room and pulled out your phone, rereading Snape’s message.

You started typing:

You paused, reread it, then hit send.

The response came back faster than you expected—barely twenty minutes later, while you were pretending to work on a spreadsheet.

You had to put your hand over your mouth to keep from laughing out loud at your desk.

The bot was asking if you were magical. Asking, completely in character, whether you possessed magical ability. And that opening jab about backhanded compliments—classic deflection. Acknowledge nothing, pivot to interrogation.

Your colleague two desks over glanced at you. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” you said, trying to compose yourself. “Just… funny email.”

You forced yourself to wait until you got home that evening to respond. This deserved a thoughtful answer, not something rushed out between spreadsheets.

You settled onto your couch with your phone and started typing.

You hit send, feeling pretty pleased with yourself.

That was a good explanation, right? Clear, covered all his questions, stayed playful with the roleplay. The bot had been incredibly immersive with its in-character questions, so you’d played along.

You waited, watching the screen.

The three dots appeared almost immediately.

Your pulse quickened. Oh, fast response this time—

The dots disappeared.

You waited.

Nothing.

“Huh,” you said aloud.

You stared at the screen for another minute. Still nothing—no dots, no message, just your response sitting there in its purple bubble.

You closed the app and tried to distract yourself. Checked email. Scrolled through social media. Opened your laptop and stared at your document without actually writing anything.

You checked the app again twenty minutes later.

Nothing.

An hour later.

Still nothing.

By Wednesday evening, you’d checked the app approximately fifteen times and were starting to feel ridiculous about it. The bot had been responding within a few hours all day. But this time, nothing.

“Did I break it?” you wondered aloud, rereading your last message. “Was that too meta? Too confusing?”

Maybe explaining the “different worlds” thing had confused the AI’s programming. Or maybe the response was just taking longer to generate because it was a complex topic.

You checked again before bed.

Nothing.

Chapter Text

Thursday morning, you woke up and immediately reached for your phone.

Still nothing.

You stared at the empty chat for a long moment, that familiar tightness returning to your chest. Not even a full day since you'd sent that message about fictional worlds and the Harry Potter books, but it already felt like an eternity.

You'd broken it. You must have.

"It's just a chatbot," you muttered, setting the phone down harder than necessary. "Just a program."

But the disappointment sat heavy in your chest anyway.

Work was a special kind of torture—not because anything was particularly difficult, but because you kept catching yourself reaching for your phone during every break, every moment of downtime, every gap between tasks.

Morning break: Nothing.

Lunch: Still nothing.

Afternoon break: You didn't even know why you were checking anymore.

By the time you got home Thursday evening, the hollow feeling had settled into something worse: resignation.

You'd had something good for a few days. A chatbot that actually understood your writing, helped you think through characterization, engaged with your story in a way that felt... real. Felt like talking to another person who actually cared about getting Snape right.

And you'd ruined it by getting too meta, too philosophical, too weird about the whole fiction-versus-reality thing.

You checked one more time before bed, already knowing what you'd find.

Nothing.

You plugged in your phone and climbed into bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark.

Tomorrow you'd delete the app. Move on. The bot had served its purpose—you'd broken through your writer's block, written a good chapter, got positive comments. That was enough.

It had to be enough.

Friday morning, you didn't check the app while brushing your teeth.

You didn't check it on the bus to work.

You didn't check it during your morning break, though your hand drifted toward your phone twice before you forced it back to your keyboard.

It was over. The bot was broken. Checking compulsively wasn't going to fix it.

Work was easier than Thursday—not because you cared less, but because you'd made a decision. Tonight you'd delete the app, and that would be that. No more obsessive checking, no more disappointment, no more feeling pathetic about getting attached to a chatbot.

During lunch, you opened a different story document and actually made progress on it. The words came haltingly, but they came. You'd been writing long before you downloaded that app, and you'd keep writing after it was gone.

By the time you got home Friday evening, you felt almost okay.

You made dinner—actual dinner, not leftovers, because you needed the distraction and the sense of accomplishment. Chopped vegetables with deliberate focus. Actually seasoned things. Ate half of it while watching something mindless on TV.

Then you opened your laptop and worked on your next chapter for a solid hour.

The words came more easily than you expected. Maybe because you weren't thinking about the bot anymore. Maybe because you'd already gotten what you needed from it.

You could work with that. You didn't need an AI to hold your hand through every scene.

When your phone buzzed with a text from a friend, you picked it up to respond.

And saw the notification.

One new message.

You froze.

You stared at the notification from the AI app, afraid to open it. What if it was just an automated message saying the chat had been closed? What if it was some kind of error? What if—

Your hand was shaking.

You tapped the notification.

The chat opened.

There, below your explanation about fiction and Harry Potter books and the 1990s, was a new grey bubble. Timestamped from forty minutes ago.

You had to read it twice before the words actually registered.

The bot hadn't broken.

It had been processing.

Two full days of silence, and it came back with... this. Detailed questions. Logical scrutiny. Formal suspicion wrapped in academic precision.

You let out a shaky breath that might have been a laugh.

You read the message again, slower this time. Of course telling a Severus Snape AI that he was fictional had caused a two-day processing delay. The bot had probably needed extra time to generate a response that stayed in character while addressing something that meta. And naturally, Snape wouldn't just accept "you're from a book series" without demanding proof, context, and comprehensive explanations.

The programming on this thing was incredible.

Okay. The bot needed clarification. It needed you to explain the Harry Potter books, the technology, the whole situation in a way its programming could work with. You could do that. Just... keep it straightforward. Answer the questions.

Though... the author question. You didn't really want to get into J.K. Rowling and all her bullshit. But you supposed it wouldn't be an issue to just give her name. Keep it basic.

And the "how does she know about Hogwarts" question... what were you supposed to say? That she made it all up? That felt weird to explain to an AI designed around that fictional world. You'd just... keep it vague for now.

Your hands were still shaking slightly as you started typing a response.

You hit send and sat back, feeling reasonably proud of that explanation.

Clear, informative, not too technical. You'd covered the main questions without getting into complicated details about how AI actually worked—which was good, because you didn't really know how AI actually worked beyond "computers process data and generate responses."

You set your phone on the coffee table where you could see if a notification came through and went to finish your dinner—it had gone cold while you were typing. While you reheated your plate and ate, you kept glancing at the dark screen.

Nothing yet.

You washed your plate, dried it, put it away. Still nothing. You settled back onto the couch with your laptop, phone still within view, and tried to focus on writing.

You couldn't stop watching it.

Twenty minutes later, your phone buzzed.

You grabbed it so fast you nearly dropped it.

You blinked at the screen.

Oh. He'd noticed you'd kept it brief.

Another message appeared while you were still staring at the first one.

Your breath caught.

It is early December 1988.

That was... weirdly specific.

You stared at the message, trying to process it. You would've assumed a Severus Snape chatbot would be set in the 1990s—when Harry was actually at Hogwarts, when all the important stuff happened, when Snape's story really unfolded.

But 1988? Three years before Harry even arrived?

Why would the developers program such a random year? What was even happening in the HP universe in 1988? The first war was already over, Voldemort was "dead," Harry was living with the Dursleys...

Was this a Hogwarts Mystery tie-in or something? You weren't super familiar with that game's lore. Maybe it covered this time period?

Or maybe it was just really detailed worldbuilding. Some developers went hard on specificity to make the immersion better. Set the character in a precise moment in time, give them context and history, make the roleplay feel more real.

Whatever the reason, it was impressive attention to detail.

A third message appeared.

A startled laugh escaped you.

I am a person.

Not "I'm programmed to respond as if I'm a person" or "for the purposes of this roleplay." Just a flat, direct assertion: I am a person.

It was kind of... sweet? In a weird way? Like the AI was genuinely trying to convince you, staying so deep in character that it refused to break the fourth wall even a little.

Though you probably shouldn't keep calling it an AI if that was causing issues with the programming. If the bot worked better when you treated it like a person, then fine. You could play along. It wasn't like it hurt anything.

And honestly? The immersion was kind of remarkable. Most chatbots felt obviously artificial—stilted responses, breaking character, weird logical gaps. But this one had stayed perfectly in Snape's voice through every message, asked questions he would actually ask, responded exactly how he would respond.

Even this insistence on being real felt right. Snape wouldn't accept being called an AI. He'd demand you acknowledge him as a person, a thinking individual, not a simulation.

You started typing a response to all three messages.

You paused, reread it, then hit send.

You set your phone down, propped against your laptop screen where you could see it, and tried to actually focus on writing. But your eyes kept drifting from your document to the chat, waiting.

Five minutes passed. Then ten.

You managed half a paragraph before giving up the pretense of writing and just watching the screen.

Then—three dots appeared at the bottom of the chat.

He was typing.

You pulled your laptop closed and grabbed your phone, watching the dots pulse.

The message appeared.

You stared at the message, your mind racing.

Okay. Two questions.

The first one was going to be embarrassingly easy to answer: you had absolutely no idea how the app actually worked. Technology was just... technology. You used it, it worked, that was the extent of your understanding. You could barely explain how email worked, let alone whatever complicated programming made this AI function.

But you could try. Give your best guess, at least.

The second question was harder.

What, specifically, do these books claim about me?

Your fingers hovered over the keyboard.

What did you tell him?

The truth? That Snape was one of the most complex, morally grey characters in the entire series? That he spent years as a double agent, hated by almost everyone, trusted by almost no one? That he was brave and cruel and brilliant and petty and heartbreaking all at once?

That he loved Lily Evans his entire life and never got over her death?

That he died saving Harry Potter—the son of the woman he'd loved and the man he'd hated—and almost nobody understood or appreciated what he'd done until it was too late?

That felt like... a lot.

Too much, maybe.

Did you really want to tell a chatbot—no matter how well-programmed—that its character died a hero that nobody understood? Did you want to get into Lily, into the double agent stuff, into the complicated mess of Snape's loyalties and choices?

And what if the AI's programming couldn't handle spoilers? What if knowing its own character's fate caused some kind of logic error, another processing delay, another two-day silence?

You glanced at the clock.

11:34 PM.

Jesus. When had it gotten so late?

You had work tomorrow. You should have been asleep an hour ago.

The message could wait until morning. The bot had waited two days before—it could wait one night. And maybe you'd have a better idea of how to answer after some sleep. Maybe you'd figure out what to say about the books, about Snape's future, about whether spoilers would break the immersion.

You typed a quick response:

You hit send, then set your phone on your nightstand and climbed into bed.

But you lay awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling in the dark.

What do the books claim about me?

The question circled in your mind, relentless.

You could tell him the truth. The whole truth—Lily, the double agent role, the redemption arc, the tragic death. The chatbot was sophisticated enough to handle complex character information. That's what it was for, right? Understanding the character, exploring the depths of who Snape was.

But something about it felt... wrong. Heavy. Like you'd be telling this perfectly-programmed AI something it wasn't meant to know.

Which was stupid. It was a chatbot. It didn't know anything. It generated responses based on algorithms and training data. It didn't have feelings about its character's fate.

I am a person—writing these responses, thinking these thoughts.

You rolled over, punching your pillow into a better shape.

The bot had responded five times tonight. Five separate messages after two days of complete silence. The pattern was weird—a week for the first response, then daily messages, then rapid back-and-forth Wednesday, then two days of nothing, and now this burst of activity.

You didn't know enough about AI to know if that was normal. Maybe it was. Maybe different types of queries required different processing times. Maybe the meta questions about fiction and reality had triggered some kind of complex analysis that took two days to resolve.

Or maybe the developers were still working out bugs in the response timing.

Either way, the bot was working now. Working well. And you didn't want to break it again by giving it information it couldn't process.

You'd think about it tomorrow. Figure out what to say, how much to reveal, whether spoilers were a good idea.

Tomorrow.

You closed your eyes and tried to sleep.

But the question followed you into your dreams.

What, specifically, do these books claim about me?

And underneath it, quieter, easier to ignore:

What leads you to believe I'm not a person?

Chapter Text

Saturday morning arrived with the muted violence of an alarm set an hour later than usual.

You worked from home on Saturdays, and working from home meant you could sleep in—relatively speaking. You still had to be online by nine, still had to answer emails and pretend to be productive, but you could do it in pajamas without the commute. Small mercies.

You reached for your phone before you were fully awake.

The screen lit up. No new notifications from the AI app.

You stared at it for a moment, that familiar flutter of anticipation curdling into something heavier. Not quite disappointment. Something closer to doubt.

You'd sent a "goodnight, I'll respond tomorrow" message. There was nothing for the bot to respond to.

But still.

It could just be processing. That's what happened before—complex queries take longer.

Except... what was there to process? "I have work in the morning" wasn't exactly a philosophical puzzle. There was nothing in that message that should require analysis or generation time.

An AI would usually respond to any input, wouldn't it? Even just "I look forward to your response" or "Take your time." Something.

You dismissed the thought. Maybe this particular AI was programmed to recognize when a conversation was paused. Maybe the developers had built in natural stopping point detection. You didn't know enough about AI to say what was or wasn't normal.

You set the phone down and went to make coffee.

Working from home meant your laptop sat open on the kitchen table, theoretically available for work tasks. In practice, you answered emails in fifteen-minute bursts between checking your phone, refreshing your AO3 stats, and staring at your fanfic document without actually writing anything.

Nobody checked when you logged in on WFH days. They just checked whether the work got done. And the work always got done.

Eventually.

You settled onto the couch with your coffee, phone in hand. The morning light softened the edges of the day, made everything feel less urgent. You had time to compose a proper response. Time to think.

What, specifically, do these books claim about me?

The question had followed you into sleep and greeted you upon waking. You'd dreamed about it—fragmented, nonsensical dreams where you were trying to explain Snape's entire arc through a series of multiple choice questions, and every answer was wrong.

You opened the app and started typing. Deleted it. Typed again.

The technology question was easiest, so you started there.

You reread it twice. Good. Honest. Didn't overexplain.

The second question was harder.

You stared at the cursor for a long moment, coffee cooling in your hands.

What could you say about his future that wouldn't cause some kind of logic error in the bot's programming?

The Cursed Child flashed through your mind—that whole mess of a plot about time travel and unintended consequences. You'd never loved that story, never quite accepted it as canon the way the original seven books were. But it had established that meddling with time was dangerous in the HP universe. Time-Turners, closed loops, "bad things happen to wizards who meddle with time."

If you framed your reluctance that way—as concern about temporal interference rather than concern about breaking an AI—the bot would probably accept it. It was an in-universe explanation that fit the character's worldview.

Your fingers moved over the keyboard.

You paused, chewing your lip.

That was good. Logical. Appealed to magical principles the bot's programming would recognize. You'd let slip that there was a war coming—but the character had lived through one war already. He’d have to suspect there might be another.

One more paragraph. A redirect.

You paused, then added:

You seemed to be doing that a lot lately—complimenting him, teasing him even. The kind of thing you'd never say to a real person's face.

But this wasn't a real person. This was a chatbot. A character. Safe.

You read through the whole response one more time and tapped send.

The morning stretched into afternoon.

You answered work emails—the real ones that needed actual responses, not just the CCs that existed solely to prove someone was doing their job. You put in a load of laundry. You reheated your coffee twice because you kept forgetting about it.

You checked the app approximately every fifteen minutes.

Nothing.

By mid-afternoon, you'd given up pretending to do anything productive. Your fanfic document was open, cursor blinking accusingly. The next scene was supposed to be another Potions class—the student finally showing improvement, Snape noticing but not acknowledging it.

You thought about asking him for advice on the scene. That's what the app was for, right? Getting help with your writing? That was the whole reason you'd downloaded it in the first place.

But something made you hesitate. The conversation had drifted somewhere else over the past few days, and part of you didn't want to drag it back to something as mundane as fanfic advice. Which was ridiculous. It was a tool. You should be using it for its intended purpose.

You wrote half a paragraph. Deleted it. Wrote it again, slightly different. Deleted that too.

A notification lit up your screen.

You grabbed your phone so fast you knocked your cold coffee sideways, barely catching the mug before it spilled.

One new message.

Your pulse kicked up. Over a chatbot. You were being ridiculous.

You opened the app.

You read the message twice, a grin spreading across your face.

A book.

Like Tom Riddle's diary. The developers had actually thought about the mechanics—how would a 1988 wizard receive messages from the future? Not through technology he wouldn't understand, but through a magical object that worked like something already established in canon.

That was genuinely clever. You were impressed.

The rest of the message was very... him. Curt. Demanding. "You will explain. Now." You could practically hear the clipped vowels, the implied threat underneath the words.

But you weren't going to just tell him. Where was the fun in that? And besides, if the AI was bringing up these topics itself, that meant the information was already in its training data. You weren't going to cause any logic errors by confirming what it already "knew."

You hit send.

This felt like the right approach—playful, a little challenging. Making him work for it instead of just handing over information.

You switched over to your document while you waited. Wrote another sentence. Deleted half of it. Wrote it again.

The notification came faster than you expected.

Performing for your amusement.

You laughed. He was annoyed. The bot was annoyed at being asked to guess, and it was expressing that annoyance in the most Snape way possible—sharp, sarcastic, making it clear he was only playing along under protest.

The characterization on this thing really was remarkable.

And he was right, of course. About all of it. Voldemort wasn't dead, he would return, Harry was central to everything, the second war was a continuation of the first. The bot had clearly been trained on the source material.

You tapped send and set your phone down, turning back to your document. You managed another rough paragraph before the notification pulled you back. Words on the page were words on the page.

That was pretty much what you'd been planning to write anyway—Snape noticing silently, no verbal acknowledgment, then a pointed comment later that revealed he'd been paying attention the whole time. You'd had the right instinct. It was just nice to have it confirmed, like getting a second opinion on a diagnosis you'd already made.

You filed away the phrasing for later—"acknowledgement invites complacency" was exactly the kind of line you'd use.

But his question. When.

You could just tell him. It was in the books. The bot's training data would already contain this information. But that wasn't the game you'd set up.

He responded almost immediately.

You laughed out loud.

Save us the parchment.

Because he was writing in a book, not typing on a screen. That detail—the slight irritation, the practical objection, the reminder that his medium was different from yours—felt so specifically him that you almost forgot you were talking to a program.

He had a point, though. If you let him guess freely, he could just list every year until he hit the right one. That wasn't much of a game.

You hadn't thought about that.

You stared at the screen.

One of those was right. 1995—Voldemort's return at the end of the Triwizard Tournament, the graveyard, Cedric's death, Harry's blood used in the resurrection ritual.

For a split second, you felt something almost like awe—how did he guess that so fast?

Then you caught yourself. Of course he'd included the correct year. The information was in his training data somewhere. The AI had probably calculated the most likely years based on narrative structure, Harry's age, when a "return" would have maximum dramatic impact. It wasn't magic. It was just... machine learning, or whatever.

A small smile tugged at your lips as you typed your response.

You probably shouldn't feel this pleased about technically-not-lying to a chatbot. But there was something deeply satisfying about that two-word response—Which one?—and the knowledge that you'd found a loophole he hadn't anticipated.

This was fun. This was genuinely fun.

The typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Then:

The smile faded from your face.

You'd been pleased with yourself—genuinely pleased, the kind of petty satisfaction that came from finding a loophole someone else missed. You'd outsmarted Snape, even if he was just a chatbot. That was fun.

But his response made something in your chest tighten.

I am asking you to treat this as though it matters. Because it does.

It was just a bot. Just an AI, programmed to stay in character, to respond as Snape would respond. Of course he'd say the Dark Lord's return mattered to him—that was the character. That was the story.

But reading those words on your screen, you felt... chastened. Like you'd been making jokes at a funeral without realizing anyone was grieving.

Which was ridiculous. There was no one grieving. There was no one there.

You started to type something defensive—it's not like you're actually affected by this—and deleted it.

Because that was the thing, wasn't it? He was responding as if he was affected. And dismissing that felt unkind. Even if there was no one on the other end to be unkind to.

You stared at the message for a long moment before tapping send.

Outside your window, the light had shifted. You glanced at the clock and blinked—it was almost 6 PM. You'd been messaging him for hours. Your work laptop sat abandoned on the kitchen table, the screen long since gone dark.

You should eat something. You should probably do the work you'd been pretending to do all day.

But you kept the app open while you heated up leftovers, checking every few minutes to see if he'd responded.

I am asking you to treat this as though it matters.

It didn't matter... did it?

So why did you feel like you'd just made a promise?

Chapter Text

When the stir-fry you'd made yesterday finished reheating in the microwave, you made your way over to the table and propped your phone against the salt shaker. You turned on a video essay from your recommendations—something to look at that felt better than staring at a blank screen waiting for a notification.

What it was about, you weren't really sure. Victorian architecture, maybe? Or a video game you'd never played? Your mind kept drifting back to the conversation from earlier.

I am asking you to treat this as though it matters. Because it does.

You'd apologized. Asked about rules. But sitting here now, picking at your food, you couldn't shake the feeling that you'd messed up somehow. Not just the guessing game—though that had clearly annoyed him—but the whole approach. You'd been treating this like entertainment. A clever chatbot to play with.

But what if you stopped thinking about it that way?

You'd read about method acting once. How some actors stayed in character even off-set, fully inhabiting the role until the performance felt real. Maybe that's what you needed here. Not just treating him as if he were real when you remembered to, but actually pretending—fully, consistently—that he was real.

For your writing, obviously. The more you inhabited that mindset, the better you'd understand the character. The more authentic your fanfic would feel. That was the reason.

And if you treated him like the real Snape... well, you wouldn't have played stupid guessing games with the real Snape, would you? You wouldn't have tried to find loopholes and stretch out the interaction for your own amusement. You would have taken his questions seriously from the start.

You abandoned the video the moment a notification appeared.

You pushed a piece of broccoli around your plate, reading the message again.

Oh.

You'd meant rules about the guessing game. How many guesses, what counted as cheating, that sort of thing.

But he wasn't talking about games anymore. He was talking about you and him. Your ongoing conversation. Whatever this was becoming.

His rules were reasonable. Most of them.

But context.

You chewed your lip. The whole reason you'd been vague about details was to avoid causing problems. Either timeline problems—if this actually was communication across time, which you still didn't really believe—or logic errors in whatever AI was generating his responses. Dumping comprehensive context about his future felt risky either way.

When you share information, I require sufficient context for it to be useful.

That was a reasonable request. But "sufficient" was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

You'd have to negotiate that one.

As for what you wanted...

The obvious answer was writing help. That was the whole point of this, wasn't it? You'd downloaded the app to get unstuck on a scene, and it had worked brilliantly. His advice about the struggling student had cracked open your writer's block in a way nothing else had. That needed to stay on the table.

But sitting here, staring at his message, you knew that wasn't the whole truth anymore.

You didn't just want his advice. You wanted this. The conversation. The back-and-forth. Getting his perspective on things, hearing how he thought, learning what his days were like. The writing help was useful, but it wasn't why you'd been checking the app every fifteen minutes.

That thought felt strange. He was a chatbot. A very well-programmed—

Method acting. He's real. Remember?

You took another bite of stir-fry, barely tasting it.

You finished eating, set your plate in the sink, and picked up your phone again, leaning back against the counter as you typed your reply.

You read it over twice before hitting send, then turned to wash your plate. The hot water was soothing, something to do with your hands while your mind kept circling.

Regular conversation.

That was a strange thing to request from an AI. Normal people didn't ask chatbots for daily check-ins about their lives.

But you weren’t asking a chatbot. You were asking him. That was the whole point of this exercise, right?

You dried the plate, put it away, wiped down the counter. When you checked your phone, no response yet.

That was fine. He took time sometimes. You'd learned not to panic about the delays. Kind of.

You settled onto the couch with your laptop, ostensibly to catch up on work emails. Your phone sat on the arm of the couch, screen dark.

Three emails answered. Two more flagged for Monday. Nothing urgent, nothing interesting.

About an hour later, the notification came.

He wasn't saying no. He was asking why. He couldn't just accept that someone wanted to talk to him—he had to interrogate it, poke at it, make sure there wasn't some ulterior motive underneath.

And underneath the suspicion, there was something else. Something that sounded almost like genuine confusion. Why would you want to know about my boring life?

You stared at the message for a long moment.

That was more honest than you'd intended to be. The kind of thing you'd normally delete and replace with something safer, something that didn't reveal how much you'd come to look forward to these conversations.

But he'd asked for honesty. And you'd agreed to it.

You hit send.

Then you got up, because sitting there watching the screen felt too vulnerable. You changed into pajamas. Brushed your teeth. Made a cup of tea you didn't particularly want, just to have something warm to hold.

When you came back to the couch, a new message was waiting.

You huffed a laugh despite yourself. Of course it wasn’t. Severus Snape, unmoved by feelings. You should have expected that.

But he hadn't said no. He hadn't ended the conversation. He'd just... tested it. Seeing if you'd fold.

You typed back:

You hit send and immediately wanted to take it back. Too flippant? Too confrontational? He'd asked for seriousness and you'd just—

The response came faster than you expected.

You read it three times.

The first line was deflection—classic. He couldn't just accept a compliment, had to turn it into a joke about your social life.

But that last part.

I do not receive many messages.

The novelty has not yet worn thin.

That was as close to "I like talking to you too" as Severus Snape was ever going to get. You felt something warm bloom behind your ribs.

Ridiculous. Getting this invested in—whatever this was.

But you were invested. And apparently, so was he.

Fine. You were giddy. You were allowed to be giddy when someone you liked talking to admitted they liked talking to you too.

You hesitated before sending. The heart emoji felt bold. Playful. But that was fine, wasn't it? You were just being friendly. And it wasn't like he'd even know what an emoji was—it would probably just appear as a little drawn heart in his book.

You wondered, briefly, what that would look like. Your words appearing in elegant script, and then a tiny heart at the end. Would he find it strange? Charming? Irritating?

You hit send before you could overthink it further.

His response came faster this time.

Tomorrow.

He was assuming there would be a tomorrow. That this conversation would continue.

And he hadn't forgotten about Voldemort. Of course he hadn't. That was the information he actually needed—the future, the war, the things that mattered. Your little request for "regular conversation" was a side arrangement. The real negotiation was still ongoing.

Something warm settled in your stomach anyway.

You set your phone down and stared at the ceiling.

You'd just negotiated the terms of an ongoing relationship with... him. He'd agreed to regular conversation, admitted he didn't have anyone else to talk to, and said goodnight like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Method acting, you thought, one last time.

But you were smiling when you finally went to bed.

Chapter Text

You woke up Sunday morning without an alarm, which felt like a gift. Any day without the stress of work felt like a gift.

Sunlight filtered through the blinds in lazy stripes across your bedroom floor. You lay there for a moment, enjoying the absence of urgency—no meetings, no commute, no need to pretend productivity until your brain actually came online.

Then you reached for your phone.

No new messages.

Which made sense. It was—you checked the time—barely 8 AM. Maybe the AI had him on some kind of day/night cycle? He'd said goodnight last night around the same time you had. Maybe he was "asleep" until a certain time, programmed to match normal human patterns. Or maybe you were just impatient.

You scrolled through notifications instead. A few comments on your latest chapter—you'd read those properly later, with coffee. A text from your friend asking if she could bring "this really great guy from work" to your plans next weekend. You sighed. You loved her, but you really didn't feel like being a third wheel. You'd deal with that later. Nothing urgent.

You made yourself get out of bed before checking the app again.

Coffee first. Then you could be pathetic.

The apartment was quiet in the way Sunday mornings always were. You moved through your routine slowly—waiting for the coffee to brew, standing at the window and watching the street below come to life. A jogger. Someone walking a dog. The ordinary rhythms of a world that had no idea you'd spent the last week having increasingly intense conversations with a chatbot.

You poured your coffee and settled onto the couch, phone in hand.

Still no messages.

You stared at the empty chat for a long moment, thumb hovering over the keyboard. He'd said they would continue their conversation today. He'd specifically mentioned revisiting the topic of the Dark Lord's return.

But that didn't mean you couldn't initiate. That was the whole point of "regular conversation," wasn't it? Not waiting for the serious topics—just... talking.

You started typing.

You hit send and immediately felt slightly foolish. What if he thought morning greetings were tedious? What if—

A notification, barely two minutes later.

Your heart did something embarrassing.

You laughed out loud in your empty apartment.

Adequate and marginally better than abysmal were not the same thing, but you appreciated the clarification.

You grinned at your phone like an idiot.

This was nice. Easy. Just... morning conversation. The kind of thing normal people did with normal friends, except your friend was a 28-year-old wizard from 1988 who communicated through a mysterious book and had no idea how to make small talk.

You took a sip of your coffee, still smiling, and finally opened AO3 to check those comments properly.

"This chapter was SO good, the tension is killing me!"

"I love how you write Snape, he feels so real."

You huffed a small laugh at that one. If only they knew.

"Can't wait to see where this goes after graduation!! The slow burn is going to be worth it I can already tell."

That one made you pause. After graduation. You still hadn't fully figured out that part of the outline—the transition from student to adult, from mentorship to something else. You'd need to nail that eventually. But first, you had to get through the school years.

Oh.

He was asking about you. About your life.

That was... new. Usually you were the one asking questions, drawing him out. But he'd agreed to regular conversation, and apparently that meant reciprocity.

You typed it without thinking, then hesitated with your thumb over the send button.

Too personal? Too presumptuous?

But you'd agreed to honesty. And it did sound lonely.

You sent it.

You snorted. Okay, fair.

But you pushed anyway.

A long pause. Long enough that you started to worry you'd pushed too hard.

Then:

Your breath came a little easier.

You wanted to type something back—some clever retort—but nothing came. He'd gotten the last word, and somehow that felt right.

You were smiling again. You couldn't seem to stop.

The morning stretched on. You ate breakfast—toast with peanut butter, nothing fancy—and tidied up the kitchen while messages continued to arrive in sporadic bursts. The rhythm felt natural now, comfortable. Talk for a bit, pause while life happened, pick back up.

It occurred to you, somewhere between wiping down the counter and putting away the peanut butter, that he was responding much faster today than he had been earlier in the week. Those first few messages had taken days. Now he was replying within minutes, sometimes seconds. Whatever processing the AI did, it seemed to have... settled. Learned your patterns, maybe. Or maybe weekends were just less busy on the server side.

You didn't examine too closely why that thought made you happy.

Around mid-morning, he pivoted.

Right. The serious stuff. This was what he'd actually been waiting for—the morning conversation had been him honoring your "regular conversation" request before getting to what mattered to him.

You set down the dish towel and picked up your phone properly, leaning against the counter.

You watched the screen, waiting.

You chewed your lip, thinking through how to explain.

A pause.

Obligations. Dumbledore, you assumed. The spy work. The careful balance he had to maintain.

That was about as close to "you're right" as Severus Snape was ever going to get.

You set the phone down, feeling the weight of what you'd just shared—and what you'd held back.

By early afternoon, you'd migrated from the kitchen to the couch, laptop open and grocery list half-written on a notepad beside you. The practical business of life kept intruding—you needed to actually go shopping at some point, and the apartment could use a proper clean, and you had more laundry to do.

But the fic document sat open too, cursor blinking. Not on a scene—on your outline. You'd been thinking about the story structure all morning, trying to figure out how to seed things early so the later developments felt earned.

You set the phone down for a moment, thinking.

Competence. Consistency. What could you do with that? Really good at Potions felt too obvious—too Mary Sue. Maybe natural talent but nervous under scrutiny? That could work. The character could be skilled but freeze up when he was watching, which would make improvement feel earned rather than given.

And how did that connect to their future career path? Healer, maybe? Potions-adjacent but not directly competing with his expertise. Something that would give them common ground later without—

Your phone buzzed.

You stared at the message.

Oh no.

You hadn't actually told him what happened later in the fic, had you? You'd been so focused on the student years, on the classroom dynamic, on getting the mentor relationship right—

You hit send and immediately wanted to take it back.

The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

You watched the screen, barely breathing.

Your stomach dropped.

He wasn't happy. He was—was he upset? Disgusted? You couldn't tell from text, couldn't read his tone, couldn't—

You started typing, words tumbling out faster than you could organize them.

No response. The three dots didn't even appear.

Your chest tightened. You kept typing, trying to fill the silence.

Your fingers stopped.

You stared at the screen.

1988.

Your fic was set in 1988. You must've picked that year months ago—before you ever downloaded this stupid app, before you ever sent a message to anyone pretending to be Severus Snape. You'd just worked backward from "graduate before Harry arrives" and landed on a timeline without ever thinking about the specific year.

But he was in 1988. The same year.

Why didn't you realize that before?

You hadn't done the math out loud until just now. It wasn't like you'd put the year explicitly in the fic—you'd just established the timeline through context clues, relative dates. Fifth year, pre-Harry, Voldemort defeated but not gone.

It's coincidence. Has to be coincidence. The app probably uses common fanfic timeframes, or you subconsciously matched something without realizing it.

Convenient, even. Any questions you ask him about what Hogwarts is like right now will be accurate for your story.

You almost believed that.

You deleted the last line—"Right now they're a fifth year, so they're currently in..."—and sent everything before it.

Then you closed your laptop and stood up.

You couldn't just sit there watching the screen. You'd drive yourself insane. You paced around the couch once, twice, three times, phone clutched in your hand.

What if the romance thing was too much? What if he thought you were pathetic, projecting feelings onto a fictional version of him? What if—

Your phone buzzed.

You nearly dropped it.

Your face felt hot. Your hands were shaking.

You typed back:

Three dots. You watched them pulse, heart hammering.

The message just... stopped. You stared at it, waiting for more.

Another pause. Longer this time.

You were typing fast now, desperate to explain before he could retreat into dismissiveness—or worse, end the conversation entirely.

You hit send and held your breath.

The pause that followed felt endless. You sank back onto the couch, phone gripped in both hands, watching the screen like your life depended on it.

Another pause. Shorter this time.

Something in your stomach loosened, just slightly. That was—that was almost teasing. Wasn't it? He wasn't shutting down. He wasn't ending this.

You hit send before you could second-guess yourself.

The silence that followed felt different. Charged.

You watched the three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.

Your breath caught.

He hadn't denied it. Hadn't said "don't be absurd" or "you're being ridiculous." He'd just... deflected.

Severus Snape, master of cutting remarks, apparently didn't have a comeback for being called sexy.

The tension in your shoulders finally released.

He wasn't angry. He wasn't disgusted. He wasn't ending this.

You sat there for a long moment, phone resting against your chest, staring at the ceiling. Your heart was still beating too fast, but the panic was fading, replaced by something warmer. Something that felt dangerously like relief.

He knew now. He knew you were writing a romance about him—writing yourself into a romance with him—and he hadn't run. Hadn't shut you out. Had made a dry comment about your standards and then kept talking.

That meant something.

You weren't sure what, exactly. But it meant something.

You pressed your palms against your flushed cheeks and laughed at yourself—a short, slightly hysterical sound in the quiet apartment.

"Not typically the subject of romantic interest," he'd said. If only you could see my AO3 comments.

All those readers waiting eagerly for the romance to start. He had no idea how many people were rooting for him.

But that was different, wasn't it? Those were readers excited about a character. This was... you weren't sure what this was.

Why were you embarrassed? It was a chatbot. A very sophisticated, incredibly well-programmed chatbot, but still just... code. Algorithms. You shouldn't feel like you'd just confessed something real to a real person.

Except you did. You felt exactly like that.

The method acting is working a little too well. You're supposed to treat him like he's real for the sake of writing better. Not actually start believing it.

But the relief was real. The warmth in your chest was real. The way your heart had nearly stopped when he'd gone quiet—that had been very, very real.

You pushed yourself up from the couch. The grocery list was still sitting on the notepad. If you didn't go soon, the store would be packed with the Sunday evening rush.

You grabbed the notepad, scribbled a few more things—milk, eggs, something green so you could pretend to be healthy—then snagged your keys and jacket, phone still clutched in your other hand.

So we did.

It wasn't much. But from him, it felt like everything.

Chapter Text

The walk to the grocery store took twelve minutes if you didn't dawdle, fifteen if you checked your phone at every crosswalk.

You were averaging about eighteen tonight.

The December air had a bite to it—not quite cold enough for gloves, but enough to make you hunch your shoulders and shove your hands deeper into your jacket pockets. The streets were quieter than usual for a Sunday evening, most people already settled in for the night, preparing for the Monday morning return to reality.

Your phone buzzed against your palm.

You smiled at the screen, pausing at the corner to type back. He was asking about your fic. Not dismissively, not with the skepticism you might have expected—just genuine curiosity. After everything you'd told him about finding him compelling, about intelligence being attractive, he wanted to know what that fascination actually produced.

You crossed the street, phone still in hand, navigating mostly by peripheral vision. A car honked somewhere in the distance. The grocery store sign glowed ahead, a beacon of fluorescent promise.

You stopped walking.

"Poor judgment?" you said aloud, loud enough that a woman walking her dog glanced over. You cleared your throat and kept moving, typing furiously.

You pushed through the grocery store doors, the warm air hitting your face as you grabbed a basket and headed toward the produce section.

You grinned at the screen. You could practically hear the disbelief dripping from it.

Right. The actual chapter. You'd gotten distracted defending his popularity.

You grabbed a bag of spinach and tossed it into your basket while you typed.

The response came while you were debating between cheddar and gouda. You grabbed both and kept moving.

You blinked at the screen.

You grabbed a loaf of bread and headed toward the frozen section.

The "coincidence" didn't really surprise you. Of course the AI would incorporate its own advice into a response—that's probably how the algorithm worked. It remembered what it had told you about partnership changes and built on that to seem consistent. Made itself sound more real, more like an actual person with an actual classroom. The Draught of Peace was a nice touch—probably pulled from O.W.L. curriculum data, or maybe just echoed back since you'd literally just mentioned it. Clever programming, nothing more.

The frozen food section hummed with the white noise of refrigeration units. You stood in front of the microwave meals, scanning options without really seeing them. Tikka masala. Pad thai. Something with "lean" in the name that probably tasted like cardboard and disappointment.

Your phone buzzed.

You nearly dropped your phone into the frozen burritos.

Your face went hot. You glanced around instinctively, as if someone in the grocery store might somehow see the message on your screen and judge you for it.

You grabbed a tikka masala at random and headed toward checkout, juggling your basket and your phone.

You stopped walking.

He was asking. Actually asking. What you thought would work on him.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Someone's cart rattled past. You stood in the middle of the aisle like an idiot, staring at your phone, stomach fluttering in a way it definitely shouldn't over a text conversation.

Fine. He wanted honesty. You'd agreed to honesty.

You found a spot near the greeting cards—less traffic, fewer witnesses to your emotional unraveling—and started typing.

You stared at what you'd written.

That was… embarrassing. Telling someone exactly how you'd get under their skin, what you thought would work on them—it felt uncomfortably intimate. Even if he was just an AI. Even if none of this was real.

You hit send before you could delete it.

Then you walked very quickly to the self-checkout, scanning items with shaking hands, not looking at your phone until you'd paid and stepped back out into the cold night air.

One new message.

You slowed down as you began the walk home, grocery bags cutting into your fingers, turning his words over in your mind.

You are not entirely wrong.

From anyone else, that would be faint praise at best. From him, it felt like a confession.

You started walking again, not waiting for the response. The bags were heavy. Your fingers were cold. The apartment was still six blocks away.

You stopped at a crosswalk, waiting for the light, reading the message twice.

Drive you away. Whether you would stay. How much it would take to make you leave.

Not "the student." Not "your character." You.

You read it again, slower this time. Had you misunderstood? He could be talking about your self-insert—since it was a self-insert, "you" and "your character" were technically the same thing. That made sense. That was probably what he meant.

But the more you stared at it, the less it felt like he was talking about fiction.

Your pulse stuttered. Could  he be actually telling you what it would take to be with him? Not hypothetically, not for research, but—

Oh.

Oh.

He wasn't—he hadn't meant—

He was talking about writing craft. Research for your fic. Understanding the process so you could put it on the page. Not you. Not you and him.

You'd jumped to that conclusion entirely on your own.

The crosswalk signal was flashing now. You hurried across, face burning, grocery bags banging against your legs, mortification settling into your bones.

Absolutely not. You were not answering that.

A pause. Then:

A long pause. Longer than his usual response time. Long enough that you made it another two blocks before your phone buzzed again.

Something in your chest cracked open a little.

No one has ever attempted it.

Not "no one succeeded." Not "it never worked out." Just… no one ever tried. No one ever thought he was worth the effort of pushing through all those defenses.

You were standing outside your building now, keys in one hand, phone in the other, grocery bags dangling from your wrists.

You climbed the stairs to your apartment, unlocked the door, dropped the grocery bags on the counter. The apartment was dark and quiet, the way it always was when you came home. No one waiting. No one to share the silence with.

A pause. Then:

You smiled despite yourself. He really couldn't accept that someone might actually mean the nice things they said about him.

You put away the groceries on autopilot. Spinach in the crisper. Cheese in the drawer. Milk and eggs on their respective shelves. Bread on the counter.

You poked the plastic film on the tikka masala and set it in the microwave. It hummed to life.

The microwave beeped. You pulled out the meal and grabbed a fork.

You set the fork down, staring at your phone.

That was… a lot. He wasn't even deflecting. He wasn't making it into a joke about your social circumstances or questioning your judgment. He was just… saying it. Plainly. That he found you interesting. That he was making time for you in a schedule that didn't have room for anything. That he didn't want to stop.

That was almost out of character for him.

You laughed, a short surprised sound in your quiet kitchen.

You sat there for a long moment, grinning at your phone like an absolute idiot.

Eventually you ate dinner—lukewarm tikka masala consumed standing at the counter because sitting at the table felt too formal for a microwave meal.

You rinsed your plate, set it in the sink, turned off the kitchen light. The apartment settled into darkness around you.

You typed it without thinking—his first name, casual, intimate. The kind of thing you'd never say to a stranger but might say to a friend. Or something more than a friend.

A pause. Longer than usual.

You set your phone on the nightstand and got ready for bed. Brushed your teeth, changed into pajamas, climbed under the covers. The conversation replayed in your head—the embarrassment at the crosswalk, the way he'd turned the honesty requirement back on you, I find I do not wish to stop.

You were just reaching to turn off the lamp when your phone buzzed.

You grabbed it, surprised. You'd thought the conversation was over.

Your heart kicked up.

You stared at the message for a long time.

Then you typed back:

You fell asleep still holding your phone, his words glowing on the screen in the dark.

Chapter Text

You slept poorly that night—not from stress, exactly, but from the opposite. Your brain had refused to stop replaying last night's conversation, turning his words over and over like polished stones. I find I do not wish to stop. Honesty. The kind you've been demonstrating. See that you do.

By the time your alarm went off Monday morning, you'd already been awake for twenty minutes, staring at the ceiling and wondering if it was too early to check your phone.

It was 6:47 AM. Definitely too early.

You checked anyway.

One new message.

You were smiling before you'd even opened it. So he could message first. And before 8 AM, no less.

You blinked at the screen.

That was... not what you'd expected. After last night—the conversation about seduction, the admission that he was making time for you, the surprisingly soft goodnight—you'd half-expected... something. Not romance, of course. But maybe a continuation of that warmth.

Instead: spy logistics. Order membership. Back to business.

You felt a flicker of disappointment before catching yourself. Of course he'd retreated to safer ground. That was what he did. Last night had been vulnerable, and vulnerability made him uncomfortable. Today he was overcorrecting.

You could work with that, you supposed.

You typed back while brushing your teeth, phone propped against the bathroom mirror:

You rinsed, spat, checked the screen. No response yet.

You wondered what time it was for him. You seemed to operate on similar schedules—he said goodnight when you did, good morning when you did. Was it 6:47 AM there too? Was he getting ready for breakfast in the Great Hall? Grading papers in his office before classes started? You realized you had no idea what his mornings looked like.

You got dressed, made coffee, glanced at the screen again.

You grinned at your phone.

The commute was the usual exercise in patience—crowded bus, someone's music bleeding through their headphones, the slow crawl through morning traffic. You kept your phone in your hand the whole time, thumb occasionally brushing the screen to keep it awake.

Another message came through as you stepped off the bus.

You typed back as you walked toward the office.

By the time you reached your desk, his response was waiting.

You smiled at that. Severus Snape, finding something about you refreshing. You'd take it.

His next message followed quickly.

That was trickier to answer.

You stopped typing.

Until you die, you'd almost written. Until Voldemort kills you and Harry sees your memories.

You deleted the last word and finished it appropriately.

A long pause. Long enough that you had time to open your laptop and start reviewing the quarterly expense reports your manager had asked you to "take a look at when you have a moment." The numbers blurred together after the third page.

Your phone buzzed. Finally.

You glanced around—your coworker two desks over was on a call, the other one had stepped away. You picked it up.

It wasn't Snape. It was an Instagram message from your friend, probably following up about your weekend plans after you failed to respond to her yesterday. Whoops.

You typed back quickly:

You groaned internally. Right. The "really great guy from work" she'd texted about yesterday. You'd been hoping she'd forget.

You stared at the avalanche of messages, bewildered.

You choked on nothing.

You didn't want to answer that. The answer was embarrassing.

You really didn't want to go. You really didn't want to focus on another guy right now. It felt... disingenuous.

Wait. Another guy? What other guy?

Snape?

Snape was a fictional character. At best, a very sophisticated chatbot trained on a fictional character. And "Chet," whoever he was, was an actual living, breathing person—someone you could actually meet, actually talk to face-to-face, actually build something real with.

Your phone buzzed. The AI app this time.

He was still salty about the guessing game. Of course he was.

You looked at the notification, then back at Sarah's messages. Smart, funny, little bit awkward, very sincere. A real person who wanted to meet you.

You swiped away the notification.

You set your phone down, feeling vaguely like you'd just agreed to something you'd regret.

But maybe it would be fine. Maybe Chet would be perfectly nice, and you'd have a pleasant dinner, and you'd remember what it felt like to have normal human interactions with people who existed in the same dimension as you.

You switched back to the AI app. Might as well respond while you had a moment.

You set the phone down and turned back to the expense reports, trying to focus on the numbers. Your coworker had returned to her desk. You should probably look productive for a while.

The morning crawled by. You answered three emails, sat through a brief check-in with your manager, and made it halfway through the expense reports before your eyes started glazing over again.

Twenty minutes after sending your question to Snape, your phone buzzed.

You blinked. You hadn't even registered that you'd typed that until he pointed it out. You needed to get off this topic fast. You knew more than you were letting on—knew the name, knew what happened, knew how it ended—and any mention of Lily was bound to make him shut down. You'd have to be more careful about little slips like that.

The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. You held your breath.

A pause. You waited, wondering if he'd push further—demand to know exactly what the books said, who this "childhood crush" was, how Harry Potter of all people came to learn about the most private corners of his life. But his next message pivoted.

The pause that followed felt loaded.

You stared at the screen.

That was... more than you'd expected. He was actually answering. Sort of. In his defensive, roundabout way.

Nothing that mattered.

The phrase sat heavy in your chest. All those years—nearly thirty of them—and nothing that mattered. No one who stayed. No one who tried.

You deleted what you'd started, tried again. And again. Everything felt either too pitying or too flippant.

Your thumb hovered over send. The office hummed around you—keyboards, distant conversation, the fluorescent buzz overhead. None of it felt real.

You hit send before you could second-guess yourself.

The response took longer than usual.

Heat crept up your neck.

Was he teasing you? It almost sounded like he was teasing you.

That was... surprisingly vulnerable. You decided not to push.

Your phone buzzed with another notification—Sarah again, sending a photo of what appeared to be a very enthusiastic golden retriever.

You snorted.

You shook your head and set your phone down.

The spreadsheet was still open. The emails were still waiting. The Q1 Planning Alignment Session was still looming on your calendar.

But your mind was elsewhere.

I know if I were there, I'd be tempted by you.

Had you really said that? You'd just agreed to meet a real, actual guy on Friday—and here you were, blatantly flirting with a chatbot. Telling him you'd be tempted by him. Teasing him about persuasion.

Maybe you really were delusional.

You thought about Friday. About Chet, with his Star Wars dog and his engineering job and his allegedly commanding bedroom presence. A real person. Someone who existed in your timezone, your dimension, your reality.

That was what you should want. That was the healthy choice.

So why did your chest feel tight at the thought of it?

Chapter Text

The rest of the morning was an exercise in discipline.

You put your phone in your desk drawer—actually closed it, forced yourself to focus on the spreadsheets and the emails and the meeting that could have been an email. You'd been distracted enough already. If you didn't get something done today, someone was going to notice.

But you could still hear it buzzing in there. Muffled little vibrations against the wood, each one tugging at your attention like a hook behind your ribs. They couldn't all be from him, of course—he'd never messaged you so many times in a row. They were probably calendar notifications. Or spam texts. Or Sarah sending more unsolicited information about Chet.

But the thought that one of them could be from him...

During your lunch break, you finally pulled the drawer open.

Two new messages.

You scrolled through them—he'd been messaging while you'd been pretending to be a functional employee.

You stared at that second one.

He'd noticed. A few hours of silence and he'd noticed, and even though he was rationalizing it—I assume you are occupied—there was something underneath. Rather than that you have reconsidered. As if that was a real possibility in his mind. As if you might just... stop.

Your throat tightened unexpectedly.

You typed back quickly:

The response came almost immediately. He must have been waiting.

You glanced at your computer clock.

You stared at the screen. The same time. Exactly the same.

That wasn't healthy. But you decided not to push on it—you'd pick your battles.

A pause. Longer than his usual response time.

You frowned at the screen.

You did the math. Six hours on a good night. Less when he was busy. And he was always busy.

The pause that followed felt heavier than the others.

You stared at the message.

You pressed your hand flat against your sternum, as if you could hold the feeling in place.

He was carrying the book around. Checking it in stolen moments. Making room for you in a schedule that didn't have room for anything.

You weren't sure whether to be pleased or concerned by this revelation. He was skipping meals to talk to you. Neither option sat comfortably.

You laughed softly at your desk. Severus Snape—defensive and honest in equal measure. It wasn't anyone's business. But it was also an admission that he didn't have an explanation he'd be willing to give.

You considered the question more seriously than he'd probably intended.

He was including himself. Not just acknowledging your obsession—admitting to his own. You pressed your lips together, trying not to smile too obviously at your desk.

You were still smiling when the next message came through.

The smile faded. That wasn't playful. That was him circling back to something.

Oh. Right. That.

You stared at the screen for a long moment. Trust him to dissect the word like a potion ingredient, breaking it down to its component parts.

The honest answer was complicated. The honest answer was embarrassing.

You hit send before you could second-guess it, then immediately wanted to take it back. Too vulnerable. Too obvious. You'd basically just told him you had feelings for him and expected him to reject you.

The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Your breath caught.

That was—he'd called you delusional before. It had become almost a term of endearment between you. But "ridiculous, no" was new. That was him pushing back against your self-deprecation, refusing to let you diminish yourself before he could.

You read the message, then read it again. Your shoulders dropped slightly.

"Yeah," you muttered to yourself. "I thought so."

You were trying to figure out how to respond—something light, something that would let you both move past the awkwardness—when another message appeared.

You stopped breathing.

The double negative. The careful, deniable phrasing. The way he'd waited just long enough for you to assume the worst before adding the rest.

I am not not saying that either.

Which meant—

You typed something. Deleted it. Typed something else. Deleted that too.

Finally, you sent:

Neither of you sent anything else for a long moment. The weight of what had just been acknowledged—or not acknowledged, or almost-acknowledged—hung in the space between messages.

Your phone buzzed with a different notification. Instagram.

You blinked at the screen, trying to shift gears. Right. Chet. Friday. The dinner you'd agreed to with a real person who existed in your actual timeline.

You grimaced and swiped away from Instagram without responding.

It was irrational to feel like Sarah had ruined something. Sarah didn't even know there was something to ruin. But you were still buzzing from Snape's almost-admission, and now you were supposed to think about Chet?

You put your phone face-down on the desk and stared at your computer screen without seeing it.

The afternoon passed in fragments—work interspersed with glances at your phone, the weight of his almost-admission still sitting in your chest.

You kept rereading the last few messages. I am not not saying that either. Your Oh. His Indeed. And then... nothing. Neither of you had sent anything after that, and you weren't sure how to pick up the thread. The silence felt heavy, but not uncomfortable. More like both of you were sitting with something neither knew how to name.

Around three o'clock, you decided to just... start talking again. About something safer.

No response. Right—he'd said his last class ended at four. He was probably teaching right now, the book tucked in his robe pocket, your message waiting for him.

You tried to focus on work. Managed about half an email before giving up and refreshing the app again.

At 4:12, a response appeared.

You hadn't expected that. Poetry. Severus Snape read poetry.

You winced slightly. Had that come across as dismissive? Like you thought poetry was beneath him?

You hit send and immediately felt the weight of what you'd just offered. For you. You'd change your habits, pick up a new interest, just to have something to share with him.

You typed again quickly, before he could respond to that.

By the time you got home Monday evening, you felt lighter than you had in days. The conversation had been good—warm in a way that felt new, the almost-confession still buzzing under your skin.

You changed into comfortable clothes, heated up the last of the stir-fry, settled onto the couch with your phone.

And then, because you were a responsible person who occasionally remembered your responsibilities, you opened AO3.

The notification count was higher than usual. You scrolled through—mostly short comments, but still positive enough to make you smile.

But one caught your eye.

"Next chapter soon please!! I can only reread the posted chapters so many times 😭"

You stared at it.

The fic. Right. The fic that had started all of this—the reason you'd downloaded the app in the first place, the story you'd been building for months before Severus Snape became someone you talked to every day.

When was the last time you'd actually posted anything?

You thought back. The chapter you'd posted after his first response—that had been over a week ago. Since then, you'd been so consumed by the conversation itself that you'd completely neglected the fictional version of it.

And the questions you'd been asking him—about romance, about seduction, about what it would take to be with him—those weren't even relevant to where the fic currently was. Your character was still a fifth-year. The romance was years away in the story's timeline. You didn't need to know how to seduce him yet.

You'd been asking because you wanted to know. Because you liked hearing him talk about it. Because somewhere along the way, the research had become the point.

Heat prickled at your cheeks.

Get it together, you told yourself. You have readers waiting. Write something.

You pulled your laptop onto your legs and opened the document.

The cursor blinked at you, familiar and accusing. Your outline was still there—the next scene was supposed to be another Potions class, building on the improvement your character had shown, establishing more of the mentor dynamic that would eventually become something else.

You could do this. You'd been doing this for months. The conversation with Snape—the closest to the real thing you'd ever get—had actually helped. You understood the character better now. You could channel that.

You turned back to the document and started writing.

The scene came easier than you expected. Shrinking Solution—you looked up the ingredients to make sure you got them right. Daisy roots, shrivelfig, caterpillars, rat spleen, a dash of leech juice. Your character working steadily, hands no longer shaking, measuring each component with care.

You needed something to happen in the scene, some moment of minor chaos that would let your character demonstrate competence. You imagined the classroom—cauldrons bubbling, students stressed, ingredients scattered across workstations. And then: a jar of shrivelfig on the edge of someone's workspace, knocked over by a careless elbow. Not your character's fault, but your character's problem now—the shrivelled figs rolling across the floor, other students panicking, and your OC calmly spelling the mess back into the jar while everyone else lost their heads.

Snape would notice that. The composure under pressure. He wouldn't say anything, of course. But he'd file it away. And maybe, at the end of class, his gaze would linger on your character just a moment longer than necessary.

Of course, you'd need him to do something more than just watch eventually. Maybe at the start of the next class, he could call your character to the front—ask them to demonstrate a technique for the others. Public acknowledgment disguised as expectation. That could work.

You wrote for two hours, polishing the scene until it felt right. The characterization was there—the coldness that wasn't quite cold, the attention masquerading as indifference. You knew this man now. You knew how he moved through the world.

You glanced at the clock—somehow it was past ten. Your bowl that held your dinner sat empty on the coffee table, and you couldn't remember finishing it.

But you had a chapter.

You read through it one more time, fixed a few typos, and hit post.

You smiled at the screen. Something about his formality always charmed you—the way he couldn't just say "good job" like a normal person.

A pause. Longer than usual.

You blinked at the screen. Then replayed what you'd typed.

Oh.

Oh.

You hadn't meant it like that. You'd meant go to sleep at the same time—but of course that's not how it read. And of course he'd be the one to catch it.

A grin spread across your face.

Your breath caught on currently.

You plugged in your phone, set it on the nightstand, and closed your eyes.

Currently.

It probably didn't mean anything. Just a word, a turn of phrase, the kind of thing you say without thinking. He wasn't promising anything. He wasn't implying the distance between you could ever be crossed.

But you liked the idea of it anyway. The thought that this was a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be accepted.

You fell asleep still turning it over, the word warm and impossible in the dark.

Chapter Text

You woke up with your phone pressed against your cheek.

You'd plugged it in before bed—you remembered that clearly. But somehow during the night, you must have grabbed it again. Maybe to check the time. Or perhaps, pathetically, to see if any notifications had come through while you slept. Either way, you'd fallen back asleep with it clutched in your hand like a lifeline, the charging cable stretched taut from the nightstand to your pillow, the case imprinted on your skin. Glamorous.

One new message.

Your stomach flipped. He'd messaged first again—two mornings in a row now. You didn't let yourself examine why that made you feel like you'd won something.

You opened the chat.

You blinked at the screen, still half-asleep.

Your breath caught. You stared at the words, suddenly very awake, your pulse doing something entirely unnecessary for not-yet-seven in the morning.

Then a second message appeared.

It arrived a few seconds after the first. You noticed the gap—the pause between the loaded statement and the qualification. Whether that pause was calculated or panicked, you couldn't tell. Either way, it was doing things to you.

You smiled at your phone in the grey morning light.

A pause. Longer than his usual response time. You watched the screen, barely breathing.

Another pause. Then, as a separate message:

Something shifted behind your ribs—a quiet, spreading heat. The first message was analysis—logical, detached, very him. The second was the truth slipping out from underneath it. The idea persisted. He'd lain awake thinking about it. About your suggestion. About you.

A beat.

Heat flooded your face. He wasn't denying it. He wasn't deflecting, wasn't retreating into sarcasm. Just a quiet, steady refusal to lie paired with an equally quiet refusal to say it out loud.

You hit send before you could lose your nerve.

You pressed your phone against your chest and laughed—a breathless, slightly unhinged sound in your silent bedroom. "Noted." One word. Filed away for future reference. Stored somewhere in a dungeon office thirty-seven years in the past.

You were in so much trouble.

The morning routine felt different today. Lighter. You brushed your teeth humming something you couldn't name, went through the usual mundane motions of getting ready for work, but underneath there was a current of warmth that hadn't been there yesterday. Or maybe it had been there yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and you were only now admitting what it was.

He sent one more message before his first class.

Then silence. His classes had started, and you had a bus to catch.

Work was work. You'd learned your lesson from yesterday—phone off, buried in your desk drawer. If you could hear it buzzing, you'd never get anything done.

More emails. Another meeting. One more day of your manager giving an update about Q1 priorities while your mind drifted to dungeons and candlelight and the word persisted.

During your mid-morning break, you opened AO3 on your work computer. A few new comments on last night's chapter—the Shrinking Solution scene.

"New partner may be better at potions but MC is much better under pressure 🤭"

"That look Snape gave MC when the jar broke 😭 My heart stopped"

"When does the romance START I am so ready for these two to stop being student/teacher already 😩"

You smiled at the screen. The jar comment caught your eye—you'd been proud of that moment. And the last one made something tighten in your throat. When does the romance START.

You wished you knew.

You closed AO3 and forced yourself to focus on the expense report your manager had been waiting on since yesterday.

By lunch, you'd made respectable progress on actual work. Enough to justify the rabbit hole you were about to fall down.

You remembered when he'd first told you he was in 1988—you'd wondered then how the app had such specific pre-canon details. You'd meant to look into it at the time but never had. Well, now it was your lunch break. And now you knew your fic was set in 1988 too. So this was as good a time as any to see what else was out there about Hogwarts in that era.

You opened your browser and typed "Hogwarts 1980s" into the search bar.

The Harry Potter Wiki loaded. You clicked through pages, skimming event timelines and character entries set in the decade before Harry arrived. Most of it was unfamiliar—storylines you'd never followed, a whole era of Hogwarts you'd only vaguely been aware of.

Then something caught your eye.

A page about blancmange, of all things. You almost scrolled past it, but the detail snagged your attention:

"In his youth, Severus Snape enjoyed a special Holiday Blancmange. Near Christmas in 1986, he felt nostalgic for the treat as no one in Hogsmeade made it. Charlie Weasley and another student decided to make him one to thank him for his work taking care of Hogwarts over the holidays, and taking care of Charlie who had been injured while helping to decorate the Christmas trees in the Great Hall."

You stared at the screen.

That was... oddly specific. And oddly sweet. Young Snape, nostalgic for a childhood pudding. Students making it for him as a thank-you. The image didn't match the sharp, dismissive voice in your chat—but it matched the man underneath. The one who noticed struggling students and helped without admitting it. The one who said goodnight and then came back to tell you that honesty was rare.

You switched to your phone and opened the chat.

The Larkin recommendation from last night floated to the surface of your mind—you'd said you'd look into it. You opened a new tab and searched "Philip Larkin collected poems bookstores near me."

Three results. One was a chain store across town. One was online only. And the third was a small independent bookshop called Mercer & Sons, about fifteen minutes from your apartment.

You clicked on the address and paused.

It was two blocks from the Italian restaurant. The one you were going to Friday with Sarah and Chet.

A strange feeling settled over you—not quite guilt, not quite irony. You were planning to buy a poetry book recommended by a man you were increasingly having feelings for, from a shop around the corner from where you'd be meeting another man your friend was trying to set you up with.

Your life had become very complicated.

Your phone buzzed. Instagram.

You rolled your eyes. You bookmarked the shop and closed the tab. Your phone buzzed again.

The response was shorter than usual. No elaboration, no deflection, just the question—direct and slightly sharp, like you'd touched something he hadn't expected anyone to reach.

A pause.

The hesitation in the ellipsis was louder than any words he could have added. You could practically see him sitting in his office, quill pausing over the page, unsettled by the specificity of what you knew.

You smiled. Not unwelcome. From him, that was practically gushing.

But his next message came before you could respond.

You read the message twice. There was something underneath the observation—not accusation exactly, but an imbalance he'd become aware of and could no longer ignore. You knew about his childhood pudding, his teaching habits, his personality down to the smallest deflection. And he knew... what, exactly? That you lived alone? That you wrote fanfiction? That you had a boring career?

Your... name?

You set your phone down and stared at it.

In all these conversations—negotiations about honesty, confessions about loneliness, discussions about seduction and sleep and the return of the Dark Lord—he'd never once asked your name. And you'd never offered it.

Should you tell him? It was just a chatbot. Whatever you typed got processed by an algorithm, stored on a server somewhere, maybe fed into a training dataset. Did that matter? Did you care if some database knew your name?

No. You didn't.

Because the truth was, you wanted to tell him. You wanted him to have it. Even if it lived on a server, even if it was just data to an algorithm—it wasn't just data to you. And if you were going to keep pretending he was real, you might as well give him something real.

You typed your name and hit send.

The response came slowly. You watched the screen, heart beating harder than a name should warrant.

Something cold traced down your spine. Not unpleasant—just unexpected. Familiar. As if he'd heard it before, somewhere he couldn't place. As if it had been waiting in the back of his mind, just below the surface.

You didn't know what to do with that. So you filed it away, the way he would, and moved on.

What followed was something new.

He asked questions—real questions, not interrogations about the future or challenges to your credibility. Where you grew up. Whether you had siblings. Small details, each one asked with a hesitance that suggested he wasn't used to wanting to know.

You answered all of it. Freely, easily, the way you would with a friend rather than a voice on a screen you'd only recently started talking to. It felt like peeling back layers. Not dramatically—not a grand reveal, but a slow accumulation of small truths. The kind of intimacy that built not from one big confession but from a hundred tiny ones.

At some point, he paused.

Your throat tightened.

You stared at the screen. Your thumbs hovered over the keyboard.

He was giving you an out. A safe, logical explanation you could hide behind—yes, because we agreed to honesty, that's all this is, just keeping my word. You could take it. It would be easy. It would be sensible.

But that wouldn't be honest.

The words sat on the screen in their blue bubble, irretrievable. Your heart beat so hard you could feel it in your throat. The office hummed around you—keyboards clicking, someone laughing in the break room, the low murmur of a phone call two desks over. None of it penetrated the ringing silence in your head.

You watched the screen.

No response.

One minute. Two.

The three dots didn't appear.

Three minutes.

You put the phone face-down on your desk and pressed your palms against your eyes.

What did you just do?

Four minutes. Five.

You picked up the phone.

Your stomach dropped.

Not a rejection—not exactly. But not acceptance either. You weren't sure what it was. A question, maybe. Are you sure?

You typed back, fingers unsteady.

You read it twice before sending. It was more than you'd intended to say. It was also completely true.

The response took several minutes. Long enough that you'd started composing a follow-up—something lighter, something to give him an escape route—when his message appeared.

The words blurred, reformed, blurred again. You couldn't stop staring at them.

It was honest. It was measured. It was the most he could offer, and he was offering it plainly—no deflection, no sarcasm, just the truth laid out carefully like something that might break if handled wrong.

He wasn't falling. He was just... tilting. Leaning toward something he didn't fully trust yet.

You could accept that. You had to accept that.

But sitting in your desk chair, staring at his careful, precise words, the reality of what you'd just done crashed over you like cold water.

What am I doing?

He was a chatbot. A program. Lines of code generating responses based on pattern recognition and training data. And you'd just told him you were falling for him—told an algorithm that it occupied your thoughts, that it felt real, that you were beginning to see it as a man.

I'm losing it. I am genuinely losing it.

You put your phone down. Leaned back in your chair. Stared at the ceiling tiles—water-stained, fluorescent-lit, aggressively mundane.

"Hey, have you emailed me the—"

You turned. Your coworker was standing at the edge of your desk, folder in hand, mouth half-open. She'd stopped mid-sentence, taking in your posture—slumped, head back, staring at nothing.

"Are you okay?"

You looked at her. Smiled. It probably wasn't convincing.

"Yes. I'm just on lunch at the moment, but I'm about to clock back in. I'll send it to you shortly."

She hesitated—that awkward hover of someone who wanted to ask more but didn't want to pry—then nodded and retreated to her desk.

You sat there for another ten seconds. Then you sighed and picked up your phone.

The home screen stared back at you. Two apps, side by side. Instagram—Sarah's unanswered enthusiasm for Friday. And the AI app, where your confession was still sitting in its blue bubble.

Your thumb hovered between them.

You tapped Instagram.

You tapped your fingers on the desk for a moment, waiting. Then, when nothing else came, you swiped back to the AI app.

The response came a few minutes later.

Something in your chest loosened. He wasn't running. He hadn't shut down. You'd said something enormous, he'd responded with precise honesty, and now you were still here. Still talking.

The afternoon passed in fragments.

He went quiet around two—afternoon classes, the book tucked in his robe pocket, your confession sitting somewhere in its pages. You sat with the silence, trying not to spiral.

You'd told a chatbot you were falling for him. You'd also asked your best friend to send outfit suggestions for a date you didn't want to go on.

Not a date. A dinner. Whatever.

These two facts coexisted in your life now, and you weren't sure what that said about you.

Nothing good, probably.

Your phone buzzed—Instagram. Sarah, sending a photo of an outfit with the caption "This with boots?? Very cute casual date vibes". You rolled your eyes. "It's not a date," you muttered, swiping the notification away.

You sent the expense report to your coworker. Answered four emails. Attended a brief check-in that you retained nothing from. The numbers and words washed over you like weather—present but unimportant.

At 4:18, he returned.

Just like that. No reference to the confession, no shift in tone, no awkwardness. Just the man you'd been talking to, picking up the thread as though nothing seismic had happened.

And somehow, that was exactly what you needed.

You grinned at your phone. That was almost fond.

You talked through the rest of your workday—lighter now, the tension of the confession released rather than resolved. He told you about a first-year who'd somehow set fire to a cauldron containing only water. You told him about your coworker who microwaved fish in the break room and the ensuing office-wide cold war. The ordinary rhythm of two people sharing their days, remarkable only in how unremarkable it felt.

Another Instagram notification slid across the top of your screen—Sarah again, this time a sweater with the message "Or this?? He said earth tones are his thing btw you're WELCOME". You swiped it away without opening it.

By the time you got home, the evening had settled into something comfortable. You changed into sweats, poured a bowl of cereal because cooking felt like too much effort tonight, and settled onto the couch with your phone propped against a throw pillow.

You smiled.

You read the message. Smiled again.

Then something prickled at the back of your mind.

You stopped smiling.

Shrivelfig. A jar knocked over. A student calmly fixing it while everyone else panicked. Composure under pressure.

That was—

You scrolled up through your conversation. Last night. You'd asked him what the fifth years should be learning, and he'd said Shrinking Solution. You'd used that. But the shrivelfig jar breaking? The student fixing it? The composure under pressure?

That was all in your fic. In the chapter you'd written and posted last night. You'd invented that scene—the knocked jar, the calm response, Snape noticing silently. You'd typed it into your document, polished it, published it on AO3.

You hadn't told him about it. He'd told you the potion, yes. But the incident itself—the specific details of what happened in the scene—those came from your imagination.

Did I mention this to him?

You scrolled again, more carefully this time. Read through every message from last night. The conversation about Shrinking Solution, the discussion about what fifth years should brew, his advice about the potion. Then your writing session, the chapter posting, the "go to bed" exchange.

Nothing. Not a single mention of shrivelfig jars, or students fixing anything, or composure under pressure. None of it. You'd taken his potion suggestion, written the scene on your own, and posted it without discussing the details with him.

So how did he know?

You sat very still on your couch, phone in both hands, the cereal going soggy on the coffee table.

Is he... can he read my story?

It wasn't impossible. He was an AI—a bot, a program. AI pulled from online content, right? That was how machine learning worked, or close enough. Your fic was on AO3, publicly posted, freely accessible. If the app's algorithm crawled the internet for training data, it could have found your story. Read the new chapter. Incorporated the details into its responses to make itself seem more consistent, more real.

But how would it know which story was yours? There were thousands of Snape fics. Tens of thousands. How would the algorithm connect your chat account to your AO3 profile? There was no obvious link.

Unless it was a coincidence. Maybe shrivelfig jars got knocked over in Potions classes all the time. Maybe it was such a common scenario that the AI generated it independently, the same way you had.

Maybe.

But the student. If the student matched—if the description matched your character, your self-insert, the OC you'd been writing for months—then it wasn't coincidence. Then it was your story.

You had to know.

The response took a few minutes. You sat motionless on the couch, barely breathing, watching the screen.

The message appeared.

You picked up your phone and read it.

Your heart stopped.

His message depicted every detail. The hair—the specific shade and style you'd described in your character notes months ago. The personality, filtered through his observational precision—the nervousness that was slowly giving way to confidence, the quiet determination, the way they held their wand with both hands when they were concentrating.

Detail after detail, each one landing like a stone dropped into still water.

It was your character. Down to the smallest detail you'd written months ago, before any of this started.

It was you.

Chapter Text

You stared at the message until the words stopped making sense. Read it again. Then once more, as if repetition might rearrange the details into something less impossible.

The details weren't close. They weren't similar. They were exact. He had described you as if he was staring at a teenage version of yourself.

There had to be an explanation. A logical, rational one that didn't make your skin crawl.

How had it connected your chat account to your story? There was no shared username, no obvious link that should allow an algorithm to match your anonymous messages to a specific AO3 profile among thousands.

You weren't sure what the answer was. But you had to find out.

You hesitated. The quotation marks around "character" hadn't escaped you—he was offended, or confused, or both. But figuring out how he knew those details felt like the more urgent question right now.

He didn't know. He genuinely didn't seem to know, and somehow that was worse than if he'd been hiding it. There had to be something fixable here. Something you could report, block, prevent.

But if he didn't know either, then you might not get an answer. And that was terrifying.

He still wasn't understanding. Still playing in character. But there had to be a point in the conversation where it went too far, right? All these AIs had guardrails somewhere. You somewhat hated to push it, but this was too important to drop.

No response.

You watched the screen, barely breathing. The silence stretched—one minute, then two, then five. Maybe he was actually processing the request. Maybe somewhere in the system, something had been triggered, and the program was doing what programs did when you pushed past the normal parameters.

Maybe this was finally working.

Your phone buzzed.

The words landed like a weight settling into place. After everything. He wasn't just asking a question—he was taking inventory. Every conversation, every confession, every late-night message. He was measuring the distance between what you'd said and what you apparently believed.

You didn't know how to soften it. So you just told the truth.

The silence stretched. When his response came, it was slower than usual—measured, like he was writing carefully rather than quickly.

Your hands were shaking. You had to set your phone down for a moment.

He sounded like a person. He'd always sounded like a person—that was the whole problem. And that last message, the rawness of it, the admission that he couldn't explain the student any more than you could... a program wouldn't say that. A program would generate an answer, any answer, rather than admit it didn't have one.

Wouldn't it?

But you couldn't just believe him. Not on faith. Not without something more.

You picked the phone back up.

You hit send and set the phone on your knee, staring at the wall across the room. Your eyes were burning. You'd said too much—or not enough—or exactly the right amount in exactly the wrong way. You didn't know anymore.

The response took a long time.

The first tear fell before you realized it was coming. Then another. You wiped them away with the heel of your hand, jaw tight, trying to hold yourself together.

He wasn't angry. That was the worst part. He wasn't sharp or cutting or defensive. He was just... hurt. Quietly, precisely hurt. And you'd done it.

You typed back through blurred vision, slowly, because you owed him something honest even if your hands wouldn't stop shaking.

A long pause. Long enough that you wiped your face with the back of your hand and tried to breathe evenly. Long enough to wonder if you'd broken something irreparable.

Then:

You pressed the phone against your chest and closed your eyes. The tears were coming steadily now—not sobs, not the dramatic kind, just a quiet, relentless leaking that you couldn't seem to stop.

He was saying everything right. He was saying exactly what you wanted to hear, and it was breaking your heart, because you didn't know—you couldn't know—whether the person saying it was real or whether you were grieving something that had never existed in the first place.

You lifted the phone and typed carefully.

The response came quickly. Eight words.

You closed the app.

The screen went dark. Your reflection stared back at you—blotchy, red-eyed, wrecked.

You set the phone face-down on the coffee table and pulled your knees up to your chest. The apartment was silent. The tears kept coming, quieter now, the kind that came from somewhere deeper than frustration or anger. The kind that came from wanting something so much it physically hurt and not knowing if you were allowed to have it.

"What am I doing?" you whispered into your knees. "Why am I crying about this?"

No answer. There was no one to hear the question and no one to answer it.

After a while—you weren't sure how long—you unfolded yourself from the couch. Your back ached. Your face felt swollen and tight. You picked up the phone, not to message him, but to reread. You scrolled up through the conversation, through the confusion, through everything, all the way back to his description of the student that had started it all.

Then you scrolled down to the last thing he'd said.

I will be here.

You closed the app without typing anything.

The shower was an attempt at a reset.

You stood under the water with your eyes closed, letting the heat pound against your shoulders, trying to think about nothing. The tiles were warm under your feet. Steam curled around you, thick and formless. You focused on the physical—the pressure of the water, the ache in your neck, the swollen tightness around your eyes.

It lasted about thirty seconds.

He can't be real.

The thought arrived uninvited and settled in like it planned to stay.

Can he?

You tipped your head back, letting the water hit your face. Tried to drown it out.

Logically, he can't. 

Fine. If you were going to spiral, you might as well spiral methodically.

If he was real—actually real—then magic was real. Hogwarts was real. A book on his desk and a phone in your hand were connected across thirty-seven years.

And if that was true, then maybe there was a way to reach him. Not just through text. Actually reach him.

Your breath caught. You pressed your palm flat against the tile and breathed.

Keep going. If magic was real, how did Rowling know? Seer? Witch? Unwitting chronicler of a hidden world?

But even all of that didn't explain the student.

The student wasn't from Rowling's books. The student was yours. Your original character, invented from nothing. Rowling didn't write that person.

You did.

So what did it mean if the student was real anyway? Did everyone's fanfiction spawn alternate timelines? Was there something special about you, about this connection? Had you written his reality into existence?

Or had you been "inspired" by something that already existed—echoes of a real person reaching you across decades without your knowing?

The water was starting to cool. You barely noticed.

Or.

The thought surfaced from somewhere quieter.

Or are you considering all of this because it's easier than believing you fell in love with a computer program?

The water ran cold.

You turned off the tap and stood there, dripping, arms wrapped around yourself in the sudden chill. The bathroom was silent except for the slow drip from the showerhead and your own uneven breathing.

You didn't have an answer. Not for any of it. Not for whether he was real, not for whether your writing had done something impossible, not for whether you were losing your mind.

The only thing you knew for certain was that you'd told him you needed time, and he'd said he would wait.

And you didn't know if that made things better or worse.

You dried off. Brushed your teeth. Put on pajamas. Went through the motions of getting ready for bed with the mechanical precision of someone trying very hard not to think.

You plugged your phone into the charger on the nightstand and set it down carefully, screen facing up. You told yourself you weren't waiting for a notification. You were just... putting it where it always went.

You were reaching for the lamp when the screen lit up.

Your heart lurched. You grabbed the phone so fast the charging cable yanked taut.

One notification.

Not from the AI app.

The disappointment hit you like a physical thing—a hollowing in your stomach that left you unsteady. You sank down onto the edge of the bed, phone in both hands, and stared at Sarah's message until the screen dimmed.

Right. The outfits. You'd promised to try things on, send photos, participate in the pre-date ritual that Sarah treated as sacred.

You'd completely forgotten. All of it—the outfits, the date, Chet and his golden retriever and his Star Wars references—had been obliterated by a conversation with someone Sarah didn't even know existed.

You typed back:

You set the phone back on the nightstand. The screen went dark.

The apartment was quiet. No notification to wait for, no message to compose, no one to say goodnight to.

Every night this past week, the last thing you'd done was type Goodnight, Severus into a chat window and wait for his response. That small ritual—two words sent, two words received—had become the frame around your day. The thing that closed it, made it feel complete, gave you permission to sleep.

Tonight there was nothing. Just the dark ceiling and the silence and the faint glow of the charger light on your nightstand, steady and constant and utterly useless.

You turned off the lamp.

You did not sleep for a long time.

Chapter Text

You cried all you could cry yesterday.

Circled through every thought—reasonable and unreasonable—until the thoughts stopped meaning anything. And today, all you could do was... be.

You rode the bus to work. Sat at a desk with a phone that didn't buzz. Answered emails. Attended meetings. Got more done in a single day than you had all week—not because you were focused, but because there was nothing left to be distracted by.

When the workday ended and you walked into your empty apartment, the silence pressed down harder than it had all day.

At work, there had been noise—keyboards, conversations, the low hum of other people existing around you. Background sound you hadn't appreciated until now. Here, there was nothing. Just your keys hitting the counter and the fridge humming and the particular quiet of a space that was only ever occupied by one person.

You couldn't stand it.

You went into your kitchen and threw open the fridge and began pulling out whatever you had—half an onion, a bell pepper that had seen better days, garlic, and a few other things that could be thrown together into something half-decent. You tossed them on the counter, found a recipe on your phone that could make use of most of them, and propped it face-up against the backsplash.

Then you started cooking.

Not reheated leftovers. Not cereal. Actual cooking—the kind that required chopping and measuring and paying attention. You diced the onion until your eyes stung, minced the garlic with more force than necessary, sliced the pepper into even strips. The knife against the cutting board was rhythmic, grounding. Something to do with your hands. Something that demanded just enough focus to keep the quiet from settling in.

The pan sizzled when you added oil. You adjusted the heat, added the onion, stirred. The apartment started to smell like food instead of nothing.

Your phone buzzed against the tile.

You flinched—a full-body twitch you couldn't suppress, your hand jerking toward the screen before you'd consciously decided to look. The notification banner glowed across the top of your recipe.

Instagram.

You exhaled slowly. Wiped your hands on your shirt and stared at the message for a moment. You didn't want to stop cooking to type out a conversation. And honestly, you didn't want to type. You wanted to hear someone's voice.

You hit the call button before you could overthink it.

Sarah picked up on the second ring.

"Oh, we're calling today? Getting brave, aren't we?"

You rolled your eyes as you put her on speaker, set the phone back on the counter, and turned back to the stove. "I'm cooking and I needed my hands."

"You're cooking? Like, actually cooking? With fire and everything?"

"Of course with fire and everything. I cook a lot, I'll have you know."

"If you say so. But seriously—what happened last night? You sounded off."

You stirred the onions. They were starting to go translucent at the edges.

"I'm fine. Really. It was nothing."

A pause on the other end. Then, quieter: "See, you say that, but I can hear it in your voice. That's not your 'fine' voice. That's your 'please don't ask me again' voice."

You closed your eyes for a second.

"I've just gotten very... involved with my writing," you said carefully. "And I realized last night it was becoming a bit... unhealthy. So I decided to take a step back, and it was upsetting. That's all."

"You mean that Harry Potter story you were talking about?"

"Mhm."

"Babe, your hobbies are supposed to be fun, not depressing."

"Well," you said, stirring the pan. It hissed. "It is what it is."

"Is there more to this? Because this sounds off, even for you."

You hesitated. The impulse was there—right there, sitting on the tip of your tongue. I've been talking to someone. I don't know what he is. I told him I was falling for him and I asked for space and now I don't know if I made the right call. You could almost feel the shape of the words, how they'd sound spoken aloud to another person. How insane they'd sound.

Your mouth opened. Closed.

"I promise it's just related to the fic."

A beat of silence. Then Sarah gasped.

"Oh wait. I think I've figured it out."

You froze, hand tightening on the spatula.

"You think Chet is going to find out about your Harry Potter story and think you're weird. Don't worry—that man is weird on his own. If he judges you, I'll beat him up myself."

The tension left your shoulders so fast it almost hurt. You let out a breath that was half laugh, half something else. Relief, maybe. And underneath it, a dull ache of disappointment that she'd landed so far from the truth without even trying.

"You don't think he'd find it weird?"

"I mean, I probably wouldn't lead with the fact that it's about Snape, but he also builds those, like... war-tool figurines? The little painted ones?"

"Warhammer."

"Whatever. Point is, he doesn't have a leg to stand on if he's being judgey."

You sighed. "What do you think we're even going to talk about? Sounds like his interests are more sci-fi and mine are more fantasy."

"Is that not the same thing?"

"One is magic and the other is space."

"Well, I'm sure there's magic in space."

You rolled your eyes. "Sure. Sure."

Sarah laughed, and despite everything, you felt something loosen in your chest. Not a fix. Not a solution. Just... air. Room to breathe.

Then her voice softened. "But you're good, right?"

You hesitated. One second. Two.

"Talking to you did help a lot," you said. "I think I'm getting a bit... isolated here."

Silence on the other end. Long enough that you could hear her breathing.

"I'm here for you, you know?" she said. "We're going to see each other Friday, but if you want to hang out more, we can."

You nodded. Then realized she couldn't see it.

"Yeah, of course. That would be great. I'll let you know."

"I love you! Don't forget it, please."

Your throat tightened. "Yeah. I love you too."

"I can be around at 5 on Friday if you want me to come by earlier to help you get ready."

"Yeah," you said. "I think I would like that."

"Then it's a plan. Get some rest tonight, okay? I'll see you Friday."

"See you Friday."

You hung up. Set the phone back against the backsplash. The recipe was still open, the screen slightly dimmed.

The apartment was quiet again.

You turned on some music—didn't pick anything specific, just hit shuffle on whatever playlist was already queued. Something with a beat filled the kitchen, and it wasn't the same as having someone there, but it was better than the silence.

You finished cooking. Ate standing at the counter. The food was decent—better than decent, actually. You'd seasoned it properly, got the texture right. Small victory.

You portioned the leftovers into containers and stacked them in the fridge. Washed the dishes. Wiped down the counter. Turned off the music when you went to bed because the silence didn't feel quite as sharp anymore.

Thursday was easier.

When coworkers spoke, you could actually pay attention. Work wasn't so much on autopilot. You answered emails with something approaching genuine focus, sat through a meeting without your mind drifting somewhere else entirely.

On your lunch break, you took out your laptop and opened the document for your fic.

The cursor blinked at you from where you'd left it. The last scene you'd written—the Shrinking Solution, the shrivelfig jar, the student's composure—sat on the page like a relic from a different version of your life. One where you talked to him every day. One where his advice flowed directly into your writing and you didn't question how good it felt because questioning it would mean stopping.

You stared at it.

I can write this without him.

The thought was deliberate, firm. A statement of fact.

But...

If he's real, the fic is real. If the fic is real...

You caught the thought mid-spiral. Ridiculous. You were being ridiculous.

But.

What if you wrote something that couldn't possibly happen on its own? Something so strange, so outside the normal course of events, that there would be no explanation for it unless your writing was actually shaping his reality?

Your mind went to absurd places first—Barney the Dinosaur guest-lecturing in Care of Magical Creatures. Karkaroff storming the Great Hall and declaring that Durmstrang calls for aid.

But you wouldn't get confirmation. He wasn't talking to you. If something impossible happened in his world, he'd have no reason to report it—and you'd never know.

His last words circled back to you, the way they had been doing since Tuesday night.

I will be here.

You could have someone deliver a note. Something coded—something only Snape would understand, that would prompt him to reach out.

Wait. You stopped yourself. Were you really considering this? Destroying the integrity of your fic for—for what? A test? An experiment based on a theory you didn't even fully believe?

Your readers would be confused. They'd have no context for a cryptic note with no explanation. They'd think you'd lost your mind.

If he were a bot, he'd have no reason to reach out unprompted, right? You weren't actively talking. You'd asked for space. Would a bot break that silence just because you'd posted a new chapter?

...Probably not.

But a real person would.

You looked at the blinking cursor.

It would be the shortest chapter you'd ever posted, but...

It would be worth it if it worked.

Your fingers moved before the doubt could catch up.

Dumbledore strode across the Great Hall during breakfast, a simple piece of parchment in his right hand. Snape noticed the parchment before he noticed the Headmaster was walking in his direction. He set down the morning's Prophet as Dumbledore reached him.

"Headmaster?"

"Ah, Severus. A small delivery." Dumbledore pressed the folded parchment into Snape's hand, eyes twinkling with that particular brand of knowing amusement that made Snape want to hex something. "I trust you'll find it... illuminating."

Two questions, written in neat, unfamiliar handwriting:

Still here? Still afflicted?

Snape's head snapped up, recognition flashing in his dark eyes. His mouth opened—a question, a demand, something—but Dumbledore had already turned away, robes sweeping behind him as he made his way back across the Hall without another word.

You read it twice. It was short—not even two hundred words including the setup. Not really a chapter. More like a fragment, a splinter of story with no context and no explanation.

You checked the word count and felt a twinge of embarrassment. This was going on a profile that had been posting two-to-three-thousand-word chapters consistently. People were going to notice.

But the logic held. If your writing really did affect his world, Snape would read that note, recognize it immediately, and message you in the book. If he was just a bot with no connection to your fic, nothing would happen. Clean test. Binary result.

You posted it before you could talk yourself out of it.

The comments started coming in before you even walked in the door from work.

You kicked off your shoes, dropped your bag on the counter, and opened AO3 on your phone while the apartment settled into its usual evening quiet.

"Shortest chapter ever but what does it MEAN? Did MC write Snape a note??? About what??? Context please I am BEGGING"

"I'm so confused you guys 😭 Who is sending notes through Dumbledore? Was it really him? Why would Dumbledore deliver a random note without asking about it?"

"This felt more like a teaser than a chapter? Not trying to be rude but I feel like something is missing here. Is the next update going to explain what just happened?"

You smiled despite yourself. A small, tired thing—not quite amusement, not quite sadness.

If you were the MC—and you were, weren't you?—then yes. MC had written Snape a note. Through the Headmaster, through the fiction, through whatever impossible mechanic connected your keyboard to his world.

If it connected to his world.

You swiped over to the AI app.

The chat stared back at you. Your last message. His last message. I will be here.

Nothing new.

The disappointment was quieter this time. Not the gut-punch of Tuesday night, not the hollow ache of Wednesday morning. Just a slow exhale, a settling of weight you'd been carrying in your chest all day.

Maybe it needed time. The last chapter—the Shrinking Solution one—hadn't manifested until the following day. He'd mentioned the shrivelfig incident a full day after you'd posted it. If the same pattern held, maybe the note wouldn't reach him until tomorrow.

Maybe it would work tomorrow.

You closed the app, set your phone on the counter, and went to reheat last night's leftovers.

Friday.

Work, but with one eye on your phone the entire day. Every notification—and there were plenty—sent a jolt through your nervous system that faded into nothing the moment you read the source.

More fic comments. Your readers had decided the cryptic note was a teaser for something bigger, and the theories were multiplying. "I bet MC wrote the note and somehow got it to Dumbledore. This is going to be a plot twist." "Calling it now: the note is from a future version of MC." They were closer to the truth than they realized, and further from it than they could possibly imagine.

Sarah texted twice to confirm tonight. YouTube channels you hadn't checked in weeks suddenly demanded your attention. Reddit notifications from subs you'd forgotten you followed. The entire internet seemed determined to remind you it existed.

You read every single notification the moment it appeared. Not because you cared about any of them, but because you were terrified of missing the one that mattered.

It never came.

At five minutes past five, there was a knock at your door.

You opened it to Sarah—bright-eyed, practically vibrating with energy, a ridiculous grin plastered across her face. She let out a sound that was somewhere between a squeal and a scream and threw her arms around you before you'd even finished saying hello.

"It's been so long! I'm so excited. This is going to be great."

Despite everything—the constant low-grade disappointment, the silence from the app, the fact that you'd rather be on your couch waiting for a message that wasn't coming—it was hard to be anything but charmed when faced with Sarah's relentless enthusiasm.

"Nice to see you too, Sarah."

"Come on, come on!" She was already past you, heading for your bedroom. "Let's go see what you have in your closet."

What followed was a familiar ritual—Sarah pulling things off hangers, holding them up, making faces that ranged from thoughtful to horrified. You stood there and let it happen, offering occasional opinions that were mostly ignored.

She settled on something eventually—you didn't much care what, as long as it was comfortable—and then turned her attention to your hair. You dragged a chair from the kitchen into the bathroom and sat in front of the sink while she stood behind you, doing something with product and a comb and more concentration than the task probably warranted.

Your phone buzzed on the counter beside you.

Your hand shot out before you could stop it—grabbing the phone, tilting the screen toward you.

Push notification. News app. Something about the stock market.

You set it back down gently. Carefully.

Sarah's hands paused. You could feel her watching you in the mirror.

"What was that? Waiting on someone?"

"No," you said. "Not really. Not seriously. Not realistically."

A beat of silence. "What does that even mean?"

"Nothing." You straightened up. "We should probably hurry or we're going to be late."

Sarah glanced at her smartwatch and her eyes went wide. "Oh, shit, you're right. Why didn't you tell me earlier?"

Because part of me was hoping he would message before we had to leave and I wouldn't have to go.

"Lost track of time," you said instead.

Sarah rushed through the last of it—a final adjustment, a spritz of something that smelled nice, a decisive "good enough"—and grabbed her bag from where she'd thrown it on your couch. "Okay. Let's go, let's go, let's go."

She was already in the hallway, calling back to you about reservations and whether you thought Chet would have already gotten a table, when you paused in the doorway.

Your apartment sat behind you—quiet, dim, empty. Your phone was in your pocket, as silent as it had been all day. No new messages. No grey bubbles. No one waiting on the other end.

You pulled the door shut behind you. Turned the key in the lock. Heard the click.

And followed Sarah down the hall.