The fire in the Goblet had just turned red again. Sparks were flying out of it. A long flame shot suddenly into the air, and borne upon it was another piece of parchment.

Automatically, it seemed, Dumbledore reached out a long hand and seized the parchment. He held it out and stared at the name written upon it. There was a long pause, during which Dumbledore stared at the slip in his hands, and everyone in the room stared at Dumbledore. And then Dumbledore cleared his throat, and read out...

"Severus Snape."

Pandemonium erupted in the hall.

#

"Headmaster, I assure you I had nothing to do with this travesty."

"Then who did?" Moody snarled, his good eye twitching almost as much as his artificial one. The man had been pacing back and forth unceasingly, growling and muttering under his breath about security breaches; Snape had long suspected Moody's behavior had less to do with rational paranoia than with untreated lunacy, and his suspicions were being confirmed by the minute.

McGonagall chose that moment to enter the room. "The Weasley twins have confessed," she announced to those gathered, and Dumbledore let out a great sigh.

"I should have suspected as much," he murmured. "I fear young men, left to their own devices..." After a moment of very solemn emoting, he blinked and peered closely at her. "Pardon me, Minerva, but I was under the impression the Age Line had defeated them most soundly."

"They came back later and tried again," she said dryly. "While testing their ideas of how to circumvent it, they were successfully able to levitate a piece of paper with Severus's name across the Line and into the Goblet."

Moody left off coherent muttering in favor of nonstop profanity.

"Did they indicate in any way why they chose Severus as their subject?" Dumbledore inquired.

"Apparently, between their first attempt and their later session, they bothered to read up on the Tournament's fatality rate."

#

The day of the First Task arrived without any success in wheedling Dumbledore into withdrawing him from the Tournament, any indication of why he had been listed as a fourth Champion, or any decrease in Moody's blood pressure.

From his spying on various student betting pools, Snape had been gratified to note that non-Gryffindor bookies placed his odds of a premature demise well below that of the insane former Auror's spontaneous combustion. That said, he found the sheer amount of Galleons invested in such an outcome profoundly irritating - if only because it proved once and for all that Gryffindors, as their House qualities had long implied, had no understanding of statistics.

As he entered the arena, he was greeted by loud cheers - from the Gryffindor section, which had placed into the air a hideously gaudy patchwork of red and yellow lights that spelled out TEAM DRAGON. He briefly contemplated whether it was possible to deduct a thousand points at once from a single House, then decided against it... for the moment. It would be too distracting, anyway.

He tapped his throat, muttering "Sonorus", and took a deep breath. "The Muggle-raised in the audience may be aware of the maxim 'Size matters not'," he remarked calmly.

Without further ado, ignoring the stirs and whispers in the audience, he made an upwards movement with his wand and mentally incanted Levicorpus!

The dragon abruptly found size mattered not as it was hoisted into the air by one ankle. Snape blocked out the sudden shrieking and gasping from the audience as he inspected the eggs from afar. The golden egg was clearly visible... How pleasant, and how insulting to the intellect of any competent student...

"Severus Snape seems to be making no moves toward the eggs!" Bagman announced in a grating and brainless voice. Coincidentally the thrashing dragon spun towards the judges' box. After an unmanly shriek, and the dragon slowly turning away, Bagman recovered himself and continued, "W-we are all on the edge of our seats for his next move! He will have to approach the-"

Oh, no, he wouldn't.

While Bagman had been babbling, he had attempted a nonverbal Summoning Charm and Levitation Charm, and been satisfied that the organizers had at least bothered to protect it from the most obvious methods. He mentally raised their grade from "Troll" to "Poor".

It would stay below a passing grade, however, because they had failed to proceed to the next step. With several flicks of his wand and a few moments of concentration, he detached a small chunk of earth from the ground, maneuvered it beneath the golden egg, and proceeded to draw that towards him.

There was silence, and then a great groan.

"Congratulations to Severus Snape for the quickest completion of the task," Bagman said morosely as the egg settled into Snape's hand. It was undoubtedly the most hideously gaudy thing he had ever seen, aside from Dumbledore's manifold outfits, which gave him a good idea who had proposed that part of the task. Grimacing, he lowered down the dragon back onto its nest, tucked the lump of tasteless gilt under his arm, and exited the arena to the sounds of booing and weeping.

#

The golden egg, when opened, emitted a sound not unlike Lucius Malfoy singing in the bath.

Fortunately, he was permitted to shove this object beneath the surface of the water and hold it under until the noises stopped (a notion that had often occurred to those who had lived through Lucius's tenure as Prefect). Unfortunately, the egg then compensated for the ability to carry a tune by adding horrid lyrics.

"Come seek us where our voices sound,
We cannot sing above the ground,
And while you're searching, ponder this;
We've taken what you'll sorely miss,
An hour long you'll have to look,
And recover what we took,
But past an hour — the prospect's black,
Too late, it's gone, it won't come back."

His initial terror had been that it meant "the prospect's Black," and this was some demented scheme by the Headmaster to reconcile the two of them, but he was able to dismiss that quickly: surely, even Dumbledore knew his reaction to "too late, it's gone, it won't come back" would be to calmly tread water in the lake for an hour and then "mourn", in the flattest voice possible, what a terrible tragedy it was that he hadn't been able to complete the Task in time. So, discounting that...

And that was how, one wretched winter day, he found himself soaking wet, hauling an indignant Potter back to shore, and pointedly ignoring the looks of bewilderment from his Slytherins.

One infinitely, infinitely stupid Hufflepuff chose to open her mouth. "But Cedric told us it was someone you'd miss!" she warbled, and thereby made his life a far more interesting place in a way that, hitherto, only the Dark Lord had really perfected.

A frenetic scratching sound drew his ear, and he turned to see a green-clad reporter staring at him and Potter, her eyes filled with the wonder of a child's first Christmas; the Quick-Quotes Quill at her side flew across its provided parchment with all the vigor of a thousand manic pixies. "Ah... any comment, Professor Snape?" she asked sweetly.

#

"SKEETER!"

#

He had made it.

He had survived these many months of torture. Though he'd been taxed to his very limit, and reduced to the most profound desperation and barest fact of existence, he had endured the horrors that threw themselves upon him: Longbottom, Potter, the Weasley twins, Gryffindor essays, Gryffindor witlessness, Gryffindors in general, and Dumbledore...

Oh, and that "Tournament" matter. Yes, he'd dealt with that, too.

Really, the most dangerous thing about it had been the flood of Howlers he'd received for his "torrid hidden romance" with a student, which they had "concealed for years" through "playing a dangerous game of concealing the raging flames of their forbidden passion behind burning hostility, searing looks, and red-hot banter". Some traitorous wretch, "speaking under condition of anonymity", had rhapsodized about "the sparks that flew between them in their very first meeting", "the tension between them charging the air of every Potions class", and "the intensity of their feelings for each other surging forth even their mildest interactions". The worst part was that he wasn't sure whether it was a deranged Gryffindor, an impish Slytherin, or Dumbledore.

His only consolation was that Potter appeared equally horrified by the "news". Even that was marred by reports of Potter fearfully asking about as to whether there might be any truth to it on his end.

At least the Tournament was almost over. He expected the actual Champions would be done within the hour, and then he could gleefull- gracefully accept fourth place and be done with the most wretched of the Weasley twins' pranks. Counting it as a small mercy that they had never attempted to feed him to a werewolf, and thus perhaps the crazed notion of "human progress" might have some validity after all, he set up an encampment just inside the entrance to the hedge maze and began grading exams.

Three hours later, it began to dawn on him that he had the luck of the Chudley Cannons.

###

The gathered spectators cheered at the first signs of life in three hours as a Champion ran into sight - though the Gryffindor cheering grew somewhat more muted upon the realization that it was Professor Snape. His inquiries as to the status of the other Champions, the possibility of resigning the Task early, and his ability to leave the maze were all greeted with benign bemusement from the judges, though a scream of "What sort of dunderheads made a display of strength and skill completely opaque to its audience?" received stony silence from them and scattered applause from everyone else.

At last, a furious Snape (having threatened his resignation from more than the Tournament) departed into the maze, leaving a neatly stacked pile of papers behind. Though many prayed that some Acromantula might happen along and dissolve their exams ungraded, the flimsy papers remained tragically untouched; the same could not be said for the hedge maze itself, which began to emit copious amounts of black smoke as its loudly-cursing inhabitant made his way towards the center. "He'd better not be hurtin' any o' those poor, innocent creatures," Rubeus Hagrid growled from his seat, dabbing at his eyes with an oversized handkerchief, and remained oblivious to those giving him disturbed looks: those assembled, though lacking any way to determine for themselves, had largely come to suspect that "those poor, innocent creatures" were responsible for the disturbing silence of the other three Champions.

The red sparks erupting from the maze did nothing to assuage their worries, as the predetermined signal lacked a now-obviously-necessary distinction between "wounded and alive" and "determined to be an essential part of the diet of an adult Blast-Ended Skrewt". Snape, for his part, continued to display signs of life, if the continuing damage to the hedge maze was any indication... and then there was silence.

Several tense minutes followed, with urgent debates breaking out amongst Ravenclaws as to whether a Task might be cancelled if all participants were incapacitated, Harry Potter angrily fending off reassurances that his "beloved" would be all right, and many audience members beginning to whisper of the infamous six-month Quidditch match of Bodmin Moor. Just when panic was cresting amongst the attendees, and a stampede was about to commence for the exit, the fourth Champion made his reappearance, clutching the Cup, a human figure who had seen much better days, and a strange bundle.

"Stupefy," he calmly said, pointing his wand at the judges' booth, and Moody tipped over in his seat, his face frozen in a look of surprise. "Either wretchedly guilty or miserably incompetent," he explained to the gawking judges. He flicked his wand, and the abused figure sailed at Minister Fudge, who went down with an oof. "Minister, I would like you to meet Peter Pettigrew," he said pleasantly as Fudge struggled to push the moaning weight off of him. "I apologize for his condition; he attacked me, and..." Snape coughed, a slight smile playing around his lips. "I'm afraid all his injuries were inflicted in self-defense. Of course, your concern, undoubtedly, will be the unforgivable administrative disharmony between his official absence of life and his current continued existence... Choose whichever method of eliminating the error that you most prefer. I fear I shall have to remain neutral: bureaucracy was never my specialty...

"As for this-" He tossed the bundle at Dumbledore, who caught it with surprising dexterity. Whatever the Headmaster saw within gave him a sudden start, provoking much speculation from onlookers. "You've always wanted a child of your own, haven't you, Albus? Well, have it, then. You two deserve each other."

Dumbledore stared at him, then down at the bundle; slowly, a beatific smile bloomed upon his face. "I am aware that I failed you as a boy, Tom," he said, rocking the bundle gently. "I failed, alas, to give you either proper discipline or proper love... But it is never too late to start over, should the opportunity present itself, and it shall be my solemn duty and utmost delight to fulfill the role of the loving father and mentor you so badly required-"

An ungodly wail erupted from the bundle, and continued until Dumbledore shushed it (wand in hand).

Snape nodded and turned his back on the judges. "And as for myself?" he called back to the audience, just before he departed the Quidditch Pitch. "I quit."