From the first year Severus Snape taught Luna Lovegood in Potions Class, she was always getting on his nerves by being unfailingly cloudy in the head. She lived in a dream world, he decided, and he was determined to knock her out of it. In his class, he made a point to frighten everyone out of their daydreams. Because dreams, he believed, were lies spun out of thin air to comfort the gullible with the idea of a loving universe, a meaningful life. But the universe was far from loving. And life wasn’t fair. Better to give his students a taste of it, to strengthen their nerve to face worse things.

     But sometimes she was so clear, so crystalline, translucent clear, it frightened him. She said things no one would say, did things no one would do, and seemed unfazed by what the world thought of her, or more imperatively, the way he tried to scare her straight. She never seemed to scare, just kept being her innocent, imperturbable self. She smiled when he scowled at her, never complained when he gave her detention, and seemed sometimes to see a completely different person in everyone she encountered. No one could fluster her. 

     And then there were the muffins. Somehow, the obstinate little witch had dug up the date of his birthday, and every morning on that day, he found a basket of muffins on his desk. She had a habit of making them for teachers on their birthdays, but he was determined that she should write him off the list. The very idea that a student should dare presume upon him personally in such a way unnerved him, and he was determined to break her of the habit. 

      The first year she baked for him, he had simply reprimanded her sternly and shoved the basket back at her, ordering her to vanish into the mists with it. The second year, though, when she dared to come back with more muffins, he had incinerated her baked goods in front of her eyes. She had looked hurt, and he was sure that would be the end of it. But the next year she was back with another basket, and he promptly put her to work in the dark, cold dungeon for detention, hoping that scrubbing potions bottles and cleaning out erasures would cure her of the disease. She did so without protest, and it puzzled him. Surely she should whine like his other students, decry him for a bullying vampire. Surely she should bemoan the unfairness of her lot.

     But she just did as she was asked, and hummed, and smiled at him. And it frightened him. He wanted to make her hate and fear him, and to stop trying to reach for something inside him he knew was long dead. He did not need anything; he did not need anyone. Least of all that airheaded slip of a girl and her half-baked, overly sugary kindnesses. To hell, to hell with them all, as far as he was concerned. All he wanted was to be left alone, in his own interior hell, where no one else could come and no one would ever dare to stay. 

      He never found out if he had cured her. The next year the war began in force, and everything changed. He had become headmaster under a reign of terror, and then been ordered executed by the Dark Lord, only to be revived by his true masters, the Ministry officials, who found him barely alive and decided to use him for their own purposes. He was only a death-eater, after all, and had showed little promise of personal change, even if he had spent years aiding them with information against Voldemort. He had done his job, and his life was worth little beyond it. He had no family, no friends, nothing to live for, they decided. 

     So they took him, and they toyed with him. He was partially crippled from the venom and couldn’t fight back well, but in their secret chambers, they played with his mind to see what he knew, to see if he was keeping anything back from them, and they tore through his memories. At first he fought it with all his cunning and intelligence, putting up blocks to their intrusions. But they kept working him over, again and again, and they broke him down further, and he fought like a savage animal, spitting and swearing, until all the fight was out of him. And for the first time in so many years, he cried. And they watched him, like a fascinating science experiment yielding its natural results. He cried, and they watched as the painful memories wracked him, and he begged them to stop, to let him sleep, even though he knew they wouldn’t. 

     And when they were all through, all done with him, they dumped him off at his house, knowing full well he would be unable to do anything but shake and stammer in the darkness until he died. He did not know how long a time passed after they left him there. His ability to measure time and decipher reality from flashbacks had all but dissolved. He vaguely remembered trying to crawl to the sofa, and lying there for a while. He knew someone had come once. It was the landlord, who long ago had wanted to sell the land so the ugly little house could be knocked down. Snape could not remember how it unfolded, but he must have demanded rent money which was nonexistent, and the potion master’s tongue must have bit hard, as it usually did, then he had felt the pain of being struck and knocked to the floor. 

    All he knew after that was panic, trying to get up and falling down, and being unable to move as the landlord marched out with threats to throw him out in the snow by the end of the week. He remembered thinking he might have broken something in the fall, but by then there was no one there to hear him cry out. He just stayed there in his pain, and grew colder and colder. It was January, and the bare floor felt like ice. And his last bit of resistance seemed to melt, and he kept crying, unable to stop until his nose bled. And he was afraid.

     Then his next memory was of her, the muffin girl, almost like an apparition hovering over him, her fingers at his forehead, and him all trembly. But he knew, somehow, this, for once, was real. “Cold…” he rasped, not striving for logical thought, only expressing desperate need. “C-c-cold…” He reached his arm up, not knowing exactly what he was doing, but instinctively wanting her closer to him, so the body heat would take away the cold. She obliged him, and was soon holding him very tight to her.

     He remained still, soaking in the warmth for a long moment, then started to twitch, his memories flashing like nightmarish Christmas lights that kept blowing out and blazing on again, like the buttons his tormenters had pressed to see how he would react. “Please stop, please stop, please…” It was all he could say, over and over as she cradled him against her. “Please, please, please…not again, please…”

      “There there, there,” she soothed him, rubbing his shoulder. “I won’t let them do it again…won’t let them do it…shh…”

     “B-but they’ll make it…come back…and…and bite me, they will…” They had shown it to him, many times in his mind, the horrible moment, over and over, until he had screamed. “I don’t want to see it…anymore…”

     “You won’t,” she whispered. “I’ll scare it away if it comes back. Promise.” 

     He leaned his face into her shoulder a little and tried to calm down. After a long time, he managed to speak, regaining some of his mental cool. “Why…why did you come…silly girl?” 

     “Why, to bring you muffins, of course,” she explained. “I learned some things, some rumors…found out where you were…”

     “Muffins…?”

     “Mmm-hmm. It’s your birthday. I always bring all the teachers muffins for their birthdays, you know that.” 

     “But…but I’m not…teacher…anymore…”

     “But it’s still your birthday.” She smiled down at him. “Come on; let’s get you up on the sofa so we can talk, hmm?”

     “Talk…?”

     “And eat my muffins.” 

     “Muffins…”

      “That’s right.” 

     He felt numb as she helped pull him up onto the sofa, how she leaned him up against the single pillow, and tucked him in with the threadbare blanket nearby. When she set down the basket of muffins in front of him, something absolutely primal took hold of him. He had forgotten how long it had been since he had eaten, forgotten just how close to starving he was, until he saw food. Now he reached out and snatched at one of the muffins, devouring it desperately, like an animal, without constraint, just to quell the gnawing in his belly. 

     Then he saw her watching her, and the pity in her eyes, and he shuddered, trying so hard to control himself. Had he gone over a week without a crumb passing between his lips? He was beginning to think it was so. And here he was eating her muffins…her muffins…

     “It…it’s good,” he whispered, then turned away ashamed. “I…I punished you for…I don’t…deserve…”

     “Of course you do,” she assured him. “It’s your birthday. Go on, you can eat them. They’re all for you. Next year, you really must tell me what kind you want, as I usually make blueberry, but I can make anything you like, really…” 

     This made him struggle against a sob. She touched his shoulder, and he shrank back against the couch. The trauma was breaking him entirely. “D-don’t you know…this…is my last…b-birth-birthday…I’ll…die…this winter…”

      “No,” she told him. “No, you won’t.”

     He shut his eyes, and murmured quietly, “You…you can take…whatever you like, from here…or they’ll just…throw it out.” His eyes flashed around the practically bare room, and settled on the book shelf. “Books…or my equipment…in the tool shed. Could…could fetch a price…” He coughed and shivered. “For…for your trouble…” Again, he felt her body close to his, holding him, and he started to sob again. 

     “I don’t want your things,” she said simply. “I want you to get better, see? That’s why…I’m taking you home with me.”

     “What…?”

     “Can’t stay here, can you? Besides, this place has something bad about it. You need to go away from it, hmm?”

     He nodded mutely, not knowing how she could possibly know all the horrible memories tied up in this place of his parents fighting and his father beating him against the wall until he was bruised and bloodied. He felt that way inside now. He wasn’t even strong enough to snarl at anybody anymore. And she was being nice to him. He didn’t know why, but she was, and he was supposed to hate it, but he was just too tired…and he didn’t want her to go away…

     “You just get some sleep,” she told him. 

     “You’ll go away…” he said blankly. 

     “No, I won’t,” she promised. “In the morning, I’ll take you home. And you know what? I can make scrambled eggs and cinnamon toast and tea. And everything will be alright…”