Thirty one plus one by Hopeless Wanderer
Summary: Harry's only rejoice in these last few months is that he has his list. He would go down for sure, but before he does, he wants to make sure he gets to do everything on the list. To die without any regret. But what does Snape have to do with this?
Categories: Healer Snape, Teacher Snape > Professor Snape, Parental Snape > Guardian Snape Main Characters: .Snape and Harry (required), Dumbledore, Hermione, Pomfrey, Remus, Ron, Tonks
Snape Flavour: Snape's a Bully, Canon Snape, Snape Comforts, Snape is Evil, Snape is Kind, Out of Character Snape, Overly-protective Snape, Snape is Secretive
Genres: Angst, Drama, Family, Fluff, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Tragedy
Media Type: None
Tags: Physical Impairment
Takes Place: 5th Year, 6th summer
Warnings: Abusive Dursleys, Alcohol Use, Bullying
Challenges: None
Series: None
Chapters: 18 Completed: No Word count: 107770 Read: 32637 Published: 29 Dec 2017 Updated: 05 Aug 2019
Number III; Visit THE zoo by Hopeless Wanderer
Author's Notes:
So, So sorry about the delay, I've been working on the fic fest stories lately and I've been neglecting this one.
For those of you who might be interested I'm uploading my fall fic fest response tomorrow or the following day after that so stay tuned!
Warnings for; explicit language, child abuse (mentioned), child neglect (mentioned)
Severus did not have an easy childhood; that was not a deceitful sob story, he had kept from his spying days. Just an underestimated statement; a hard childhood was the least of his worries as a child.

He grew up in a bad neighborhood, right at the outskirts of Cokeworth, in a nearly deserted street called spinner’s end. It was atrocious, the sort of place only drug dealers and common filth on the street hung about in. Severus remembered that even homeless people managed to avoid his house.
Debris and trash littered the deserted houses that were on the edge of collapse, dogs barked in the dead of the night and people were the most unpleasant sort that Severus could fathom at that age.

His home was even more unsafe than the street itself, his father was almost always home, when he wasn’t out to the pub a few streets over to get drunk with his so called /friends/ and gamble their money away. His mother had been miserable there, but she couldn’t leave.

She had him to think of, and she had no job and thus no source of income to sustain two people in the cold harsh world out there long enough to find one. She was an angel to him though, whenever his father slacked at being a decent human being, his mother made up by being a loving, committed mother.

Severus always wore the clothes his mother could conjure up by sewing and adjusting his father’s ancient clothes, which wasn’t many to begin with. She did all she could to salvage what she was able to, so her son wouldn’t go off in the street barefoot. But life just didn’t work like that.

He remembered the cuts on her hands as she scrambled to salvage the conserved bean can on their croaky stove without a glove late at night, or as she was ridding their cramped living room from broken beer bottles. He saw the white ruined flesh glimmer under the flickering lamp as she cowered under his father’s raised fist.

Severus remembered it all as if it happened yesterday. His watchful eyes caught every scene that played out and led to his mother’s unfortunate death from the ajar door. His tiny hands gripping the hard wood and broken bits of things digging into his abused toes.

He had felt the sheer essence of hardship ever since he realized his mother went to bed hungry at nights just so he was fed.

The effects were life altering, the trauma that it left behind wasn’t sudden, not the kind that leaves one breathless. It was the kind that ragged him out, sucked him dry at the edges as if it was suckling the life out of him. It was the kind of trauma that burned into his soul and planted the cynicism in his heart.

Things only got worse when his mother died of breast cancer (a fact he only found out much later) and he was left alone.

Lily broke things off with him; he was mocked and ridiculed for wearing overly large clothes on his very lanky frame, made fun of for his pre puberty nose and his sensitive hair. Those were only the tip of the iceberg for him, things that had made a dent that only hardened his shield, but secretly hurt.
Therefore, he guessed that he somewhat always knew about Potter.

It had taken him an absurdly long amount of time to figure out why the child’s clothes hung off him the way they had once on Snape’s own body. Dramatic, health related weight loss could have been a factor, but Potter was always a small child.

He figured-through the hedges that formed the maze in his mind- that he had purposefully lost the information as a sign of denial.

Potter was a happy boy, pompous even and there was no denying that the boy just had a knack of getting into trouble, like his father. However, the more the time passed and Severus saw the way the sick child acted around him, the more he realized that Potter was just overly joyous in nature, in a ridiculous way that only toddlers managed.

He chose to ignore the small nagging voice at the back of his mind as long as he could; the signs and the strange random confessions Potter threw here and there in unrelated conversations…but burning the boy’s clothes had been the last straw.

He thrust a bucket in the lad’s shaking hands and bid him goodnight, waited for about three hours for Potter to drift off and then sneaked in his room.
He was by no means, enthusiastic about sifting through a teenage boy’s belongings, even less so, if what he suspected turned out to be accurate, but he could not ignore the internal nagging anymore.

He opened the creaking door with a stoic face and faded in the shadows cornering Potter’s room. He barely paid any attention to the boy himself and headed to the ratty wardrobe where he knew the brat must keep all of his clothes.

Garbage. Absolute and utter garbage filled the wardrobe. The neatly folded stack of shirts or the cutely matched socks didn’t fool Severus; his trained eyes caught every hole, and frayed thread and old stains. He couldn’t believe his eyes, almost nothing was salvageable.

It seemed as if Potter had gotten these clothes from a trashcan, and the potion master almost hit himself as he realized how utterly obtuse he was this whole time for not noticing this issue earlier.

He mentally sneered at the sheer size of the waistband of potter’s pants and then berated himself again.

His family wasn’t poor. He deduced, because he knew it. He had delivered the monthly wage to the muggle bank himself a few times to cover Potter’s expenses. Even if Petunia herself was starving, Harry Potter shouldn’t have.

The clothes were hand-me-downs, handed down from the boy’s cousin, apparently, judging from the size. The question was…why?

Snape didn’t directly think of the answer, but spared a glance at a wheezing Potter over his shoulder. The boy always seemed to doze off in a fetal position, Severus mused, with his wrists protectively covering his face and blocking his mouth. If it weren’t for the quick, desperate rise and fall of the child’s chest, Severus might have thought him dead.

He returned the clothes back to their positions with a disgusted expression on his face. This wouldn’t do, he thought. This would not do at all.
He would not admit the word he had been thinking about aloud, but he couldn’t just let a dying fifteen-year-old child go around wearing those…rags. Snape turned to face Potter’s curled up body and then scanned the half-lit room for his trunk.

There, his mind supplied, by the French doors that led the moonlight in. with a swift turn on his heels. He quietly strode to the trunk, his eyes falling on Potter as he went.

At least the boy wasn’t looking as green as before, the potion master thought as he noted the healthy pale hue Potter’s face had taken under the moonlight. It must have been motion sickness, or stress then. Lily always threw up when she was stressed; in fact, Severus himself was the one holding her hair up as she turned out her guts in the girl’s lavatory before an exam many times over the years.

The trunk’s password was a wheeze, and the potion master found his spying training paying off rather generously, which was a relief. Snape crouched by Potter’s bed as he quietly opened the Gryffindor’s trunk with a slight groan.

He almost rolled his eyes at what he saw inside; this was exactly how he had imagined the inside of James or Harry Potter’s trunk would look like. He supposed, not all of his assumptions were incorrect.

Old broken quills and empty inkwells, chocolate wrappers of all kind, a stack of letters, with Black’s spidery handwriting on the top of them, shards of a broken mirror, and a pair of unpleasant mustard colored socks that he abhorred on sight.

There, at the very bottom, he found the bloody shirts.

**

During our time together, Severus and I found it difficult to /stop/ talking to each other.

It was a bit ironic; the potion master didn’t even consider me worthy enough of his presence before, refused to look at me without sneering, never talked to me without having to slander my father’s name. Then, cancer happened, and we couldn’t stop confining in each other. Me more than him, really.

Our most interesting conversations happened whilst we were in the rented car I later became to find out wasn’t rented after all. I would put my legs up the glove compartment as soon as we were in, crank up the radio and clumsily hum to the rhythm of some song I’ve never heard before. He drove, looking and acting so much at ease that it felt like the car was flying on clouds half the time and not stuck in a shitty slow going traffic.

Then we started talking. It felt as if a dam had collapsed. We couldn’t stop. His words were what I wanted to hear and get involved in, and sometimes, he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say.

Later, as we got out of the car, we either, pretended the conversation never happened or saved it up for the next car ride. We were foolishly hilarious about it.

The day we finally packed up and moved out of the shell cottage, we talked about maple trees. Yes, maple trees.

/That/ conversation happened because neither of us wanted to talk about the elephant in the car, which was where we were advancing headfirst to, London, Surrey. Well the zoo in Surrey, to be specific, but still.

He thought that it was time I confessed about my home life with my relatives, since we were heading into their domain. I disagreed, even brought Hitchhiker’s guide with me to read as a form of distraction. I had freed Hedwig from her cage earlier that day, sending her off to Hogwarts to receive new letters from my friends. I missed them more than I had realized I would.

So I got reading to distract myself from the serious case of homesickness.

He got talking to prevent me from reading in the car and getting carsick. We talked about maple trees.

“Do you see those Potter?”

“Am I supposed to be seeing something?” I lifted my head from the book, trying to shake off the blurriness. “We’re moving too fast.” I told him as I watched others cars zoomed past us.

Snape rolled his eyes. “The maple trees, can you see those? Did you know that maple trees can survive for more than four hundred years under the right circumstances?” my eyebrows shot up. Shaking my head, I closed the book and gazed out of the window.

“That’s interesting.” I replied honestly, a little confused.

Snape got his eyes back on the road. “It’s called acer campestre in Latin.” He waited for me to pick up on the word but I just stared back at him with round eyes.

He sighed in exasperation. “Acer campestre’s roots is the main catalyst used in fatiguing infusion. Does that ring any bells yet Potter?”
I hummed, pretending to ponder on it. “Judging from your tone I’m going to say it’s something we covered in class.”

Severus scowled but didn’t sneer; he turned the whizzing radio down and stared ahead. The road wasn’t necessarily busy that early in the morning and we were both glad for that.

We left the cottage early; in hopes to have, a late lunch in a town called Exeter on our way, and then get to Surrey by the evening (I insisted that we stay in that town for a night and explore the ancient architecture when I first saw it, but Snape passed, saying that we had other priorities at hand. I did get to spend three nights there two months later though. In fact, I’m writing this in a hotel room in Exeter now.)

Endless rows of maple trees expanded from both sides of us, amplifying the blue sky above and the chilly morning breeze, the rails that ran along the road was the only thing restraining them. Now that I was paying attention, I regretted not doing so sooner.

Some forms of beauty were best when caught unaware, and that road was mesmerizingly beautiful.

“Third year Potter. Fatiguing fusion was the potion you had to make for your final grading.” The man finally admitted, looking at the trees over my shoulder.

I scoffed. “The grade, which I didn’t get.”

It was hardly surprising, Snape never gave anyone a full mark on their finals, or anytime, really. Even Hermione was having a hard time passing his class with an Exceeding Expectations and she was the brightest witch of her time.

“You barely remembered it now,” Snape drawled. “How did you expect me to give you a full grade?”

I didn’t argue, mainly because I didn’t feel up to agitating the man. I could tell he was putting effort into distracting us both.

“So maple trees have catalyst properties… maple syrup makes so much sense now.”

I watched as the corner of his eyes wrinkled /only a little bit/ as he suppressed his amusement, Severus wasn’t one to smile too often. Obviously, I reformed that nasty habit, but I wasn’t a miracle worker. People could only change so much in so little time.

(I don’t think smiling is something he rather do when I’m dead. Not that he should not smile; as I have told him several times…I was that butterfly that got too close to the candle. I burned, but he didn’t have to follow me into the light. He hated that analogy.)

“It might sound ridiculous to you Potter,” the man paused for effect, his expression open and one might even dare say /bright/. “But maple syrup is also useful in certain pastes. The end results do not taste as good. But it does its job.”

Mesmerized, my eyes drifted back to the trees, watching as sunlight filtered through the pointy leaves and shined through in the moving car. “I didn’t know non-magical ingredients could be so useful in potion making.”

“Seventh year students who specialize in this field have a whole essay paper on the subject. I published mine in a potion’s journal nearly ten years ago.”
Sitting up in surprise, I held the falling book with both hands, my eyes bulging.

“You’re a published researcher?” I faintly asked the man.

Snape shrugged off his shoulders. “I had my fair share here or there.”

“Wow” I mouthed, leaning back in my seat once again. Of course the man was a published researcher, he was a Hogwarts teacher, and very good at his job. Not attitude vice, obviously, but he certainly knew what he was doing. I suppose I wasn’t that surprised.

We talked a little more about maple trees, but didn’t even breach the main issue as the sun rose higher up in the sky. I could see that he wanted to talk about it, and squirmed in my new clothes, secretly relishing in the feeling of the soft texture against my frail skin, and relieved that Snape was as hesitant as I was.

Those last remaining days spent in shell cottage weren’t as hard or pressing, we were both too hyped on, constantly out, constantly swimming and falling into a very pleasant routine.

Now the shell cottage was gone, and we were truly on the move. We were headed to Surrey, and it felt like Snape inevitably was going to find out about them sooner or later, otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten me new clothes.

We stopped in Exeter for lunch as planned, but instead of going to a restaurant like normal people, Severus had prepared us two packets of cheese sandwiches, a food that I regularly made for Dudley myself, and two bottles of icy water. When I asked him, why we couldn’t have just stopped by and eaten at a restaurant he stiffened.

“Potter, are you really that dense?” he asked me dangerously, glaring at me as if he was blaming me for being inherently stupid. I raised my eyebrows. The man sneered.

“You ate half a Sheppard’s pie in a pub and then turned out your intestines barely two hours later in the middle of the road. It’s clear that your stomach doesn’t accept that kind of junk anymore.” The potion master said as he deftly bit into his sandwich and gazed out of the window.

‘Oh shit.’ My mind drew to a blank, remembering all that blood that came up with my dinner the other night. Snape didn’t know about that, and never could. The man was not kidding around; I would be landed back in the infirmary before I could even count to ten if he knew.

I was dying anyways, what was a little more sabotaging from my body? I could take a little cramping, and some gore.

I couldn’t.

I sighed as I unwrapped the cheese sandwich, putting the icy bottle on my stomach to cool down my heated body; it was getting rather hot in the car.
“When I was seven,” Snape suddenly started, his head still turned away. “Your-I…I went to this nearby park with a /friend/ once.” His hands tightly closed around the wheel. His tone was awkward. “We were too young to understand much about anything, so we thought planting a birch leaf was the right way to plant its tree. I made her climb to the highest branch to get a good leaf for us to plant into the ground. She was better at climbing then.” I stopped eating as abruptly as a heart stops beating, my brows furrowing in confusion.

Severus, too lost in his thoughts, continued. “She fell. She twisted her ankle very badly, and scraped her elbows. I had to tell her parents and they told my father about it right away. That was the first time I was truly beaten around.”

I almost choked on the cheese; my breath was caught in my chest like a frantic bird in a cage that couldn’t get in or out. Completely locked in. What? What did he just say?

“What?” I breathed out, bodily turning to face him.

Snape didn’t flinch, his expression was carefully blank. “That was the first time I was hit Potter.” He repeated patiently. “My father was not a kind man and he wasn’t too keen on me burdening him or keeping him away from his booze. I did both of those things that day.”

“Professor…” it was positively the first time I was going to call him by his full title. Even in my head. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, the food in my stomach weighting my body down.

Had the man hit his head somewhere? Was he cursed? Or maybe poisoned? Was he willingly telling me this?

“It barely got better. Especially after my mother died. I was fortunate enough, so he died only a few years after she did but that’s not the point.”
I cleared my throat several times, my body unmoving and rigid. I wasn’t expecting this conversation to happen this way, and I most definitely wasn’t expecting him to say things like that.

I knew that he was telling the truth. Even Severus Snape wasn’t that manipulative, or rather heartless enough to make this story up.
“Sir, I…” hurry! My instincts hollered at me. Think of something!

Severus’s hands unclenched, his sandwich laid innocently on his lap as his eyes bore into mine. He was reading into my soul with his onyx black eyes, I shivered, feeling paralyzed under his gaze. Like a deer caught in headlight.

“That night, after you got sick…I came into your room and looked through your things.” He admitted slowly, his face still clear of any outward emotion.

I titled my head, I already knew that.

“Not just your wardrobe, Potter. I also got into your trunk. I found the blood stained shirts at the bottom.”

“You…You went through my…” I knew that he looked through my wardrobe before deciding that I needed new clothes, but how could he possibly have access to my trunk? It had a password, I made sure no one, and absolutely /no one/ rummaged through the stuff.

My hiding system was so flawless, that even Ron and Mrs. Weasley, whom snooped around in it regularly were none the wiser of what truly laid at the very bottom, along with the broken quills and empty inkwells. I made sure no one knew.

How did Snape just waltz in my room, found the right password combination and then looked so meticulously that he found the methodically folded clothes?

“How…?”

“You slept right through it Potter, and for future reference, refrain from using your birthday as a password from now on, if you would.” He supplied dryly, finally deciding to nibble at his lunch. We were less than two hundred miles away from London. My heart was pounding louder than his voice.

“No.” I shook my head. It couldn’t happen now, I thought. I didn’t know why, but I knew that this was too soon. Way too soon for him to be asking questions and sharing his own stories with me. Put a stop to it. My mind ordered me.

“Pardon me?”

“I don’t care that you went through my things, sir.” I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry if you didn’t have an easy childhood, but I cannot sympathize out of familiarity. It’s not like what you think.”

He snorted. “Isn’t it Potter? What about the bloodied clothes, your frail body and hand-me-down clothes?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He continued smoothly as though he hadn’t been interrupted. “I’m surprised no one knew about this. You hardly act like you’ve been mistreated. Does Albus know? He couldn’t have.”

“I don’t want you mention that word ever again. It wasn’t like that, my life there wasn’t like yours. They didn’t…They weren’t that bad alright?”

“I didn’t say my childhood was a Greek tragedy Potter.” Severus gritted out. “I said it so you would understand that it’s fine, if you ever needed to discuss your relatives. We’re both past the distrust, aren’t we? If I wanted to let this pass I wouldn’t have bought you new clothes.”

“Well, I like to let this pass.” I crossed my arms protectively over my chest. “Again, I’m sorry that you had to go through something like that sir, but my situation is entirely different. I’m dying, and I’m getting tired of explaining that fact to you. I don’t want to reminisce the bad things.”

The first time the Dursleys took me to the zoo, I got beaten within an every inch of my life for endangering Dudley’s life when I trapped him in a snake’s case. It was one of those rare times, that Vernon dared to use the buckle on anywhere but my back. It resulted in a long, throbbing gash that was drawn from my left cheek to my chin and a series of discoloration all over my torso and shins. Then, he and aunt Petunia locked me in for a week.

“That’s literally the reason why we’re making this trip to the Surrey, for me to replace that one bad memory with a good one.” I said to the quiet man.
That was my only memory when I thought about the zoo, not the Boa snake I had saved, but that one painstaking week that I spent suffering and alone in a cage of my own. If anything, I felt jealous of the snake rather than flattered then.

When I drove Hermione to secretly write me the list, re-visiting the zoo was one of the first. I needed to get that memory off my mind before I died.
Snape didn’t interrupt my rant, nor did he respond. We finished our meal in silence and he started driving without uttering a single word, all the way from there to London. I gazed out of the window, hugging my body with my knees drawn up to my chest and my chin resting on my jeans.

His confession rattled me, it was like a constant buzzing in my head. His words, played repeatedly like they were wheezing out of a broken tape. He was abused? His father beat him? How was such a thing possible? This was /Snape/. The bat of dungeons. He was the one intimidating others, not the one who cowered in response.

But I supposed it made sense, in a twisted way.

I didn’t know Snape on a personal level (and I didn’t think anyone ever did), so I always thought of him only as a teacher like everyone else. A dull, grumpy grown-up who never changed out of his teaching attire and didn’t have a personal life beyond his job.

I did not let myself think about any of my teachers’ personal lives, but maybe I should have. Snape’s bitterness and new depth in character was making him more human in my eyes with each passing say, and the idea wasn’t entirely unappealing. The fact that he was abused as a child only made my grudging respect to escalate into a new level.

London was a ball of chaos and traffic, the fact that it had started raining again did not help matters, so Severus and I spent some additional time stewing in an awkward silence and blaring horns under a gloomy grey sky.

“We need a break from this.” Snape groaned out as a car honked behind us. We were moving at a turtle’s pace.

“Ugh.” I whined. I hated staying in cramped spaces more than I had to, and I wasn’t tired in the slightest.

Suddenly his eyes darted over my shoulder. The movement so sudden that I jumped back to see what he was staring at.

“Potter, how would you like to do something while this traffic sorts itself out?” he said, still looking over my shoulder at the sidewalk.

“Um…sure. Is it another car game?”

“No. it requires us getting out of the car, depending on whether or not I have enough muggle money at hand at the,” He fished into his hand into his muggle jacket, “…moment.” He finished, his eyes narrowed as he inspected the muggle money and then nodded in satisfaction.

Somehow, he managed to maneuver the not-so-rented-car from the other side of the street with little difficulty and find an empty slot as he forcefully parked it in the blaring traffic. His expression was determined, and his actions jerky. His decisions spontaneous. I loved it. (Especially since, we cannot get up into much trouble anymore. Not with my reclining…no wait…declining. Yes, not with my deteriorating health.)

“Come on Potter, try and keep up.” He helped me out of the car, his hand on my shoulder as he guided me through the swarms of people walking past us in a hurry, each having a crappy life of their own. Small droplets of rain soaked through my thin jacket.

He led me into a crowded pub, and took me to a corner closest to the door. He grabbed me by the shoulders and leaned in to look into my eyes.
“Stay here,” he ordered me, waiting for me to nod before he turned and abruptly strode away.

Shrugging, I crammed my freezing cold palms in my pockets and nervously looked around. There were so many people in here, I realized, that pub in Lynton didn’t even get close to being this crowded, or this big.

I realized that I should have noticed the out-tuned singing voice sooner, or better yet, seen the guy clutching a microphone like his life depended on it, but my attention span was entirely overwhelmed by other people all around me. The singing sucked anyways, I idly wondered how anyone was tolerating the awful noise.

Snape appeared a few minutes later with a blank expression on his face. He raised his eyebrows.

“I suppose the traffic will subdue in an hour or so,” he looked around. “I thought we better make most of it. Potter, how much do you know about karaoke?” I returned his inquiring look with an equally baffled expression.

“What?”

He began pushing me through the crowd amusedly. “I noticed you enjoyed singing along with the radio. Karaoke is somewhat similar to that. It’s what he’s doing.” We approached the sniffling guy and the microphone, or rather; Snape was pushing me from behind as I warily eyed the due.

“Oh, Oh whoa! Ooh!” the poor lanky blonde man was singing at the top of his lungs. A nearly empty drink was nestled in his hand. He looked as if an invisible force had punched him right in the face. His hair was even messier than mine was and his clothes were all rumpled. He had a specific air of misery surrendering him. If his chosen song was anything to go by.

‘Broken hearted. He was probably dumped,’ Severus told me later.

“You brought me here to sing.” I gasped indignantly. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought he was distracting me from our most recent conversation.

“Yes,” Snape confirmed. “In front of all these people who are equally as untalented as you are.” Nodding his chin at the blonde man, Severus let go of my shoulders and stepped aside.

“Wait, is this one of those humiliating technics you Slytherins use to low-key destroy someone?” I said with dread as I caught a few people looking over at the blonde man with cringing faces, while others mostly opted for ignoring the singing altogether. I winced sympathetically.

I could easily imagine myself in his place. “I’m not gonna sing in front of all these people…or with that microphone. I’m pretty sure that guy was sniffing on that only a minute ago.”

He rolled his eyes at me. “That is the point of karaoke Potter. It’s what other mundane muggles and often wizards share in common. They all suck at singing but they do it anyways. Although, magical karaoke has limitless benefits that this muggle one lacks…” he drifted off as the blonde man stepped away with slumped shoulders and tumbled past us to the bar. “The tuning charm for one thing.”

“Josh you suck!” a humorous voice cried out in the crowd and there was a short burst of laughter following Josh.

Severus pushed me into the spot and pressed the warm microphone in my hand.

“Merlin, you’re serious.” I blurted out, my eyes widening behind my glasses.

“I just paid for it, so I would assume that yes, I was quite serious.” he gave me a nudge. “Go on.”

“But I don’t know any of these songs!”

Severus huffed. “Remember that song you chose your first time in the car? The one with the silly chorus?” I cocked my head, narrowing my eyes as I tried to recall the blurry scramble of words and string them in order.

“Uh…Yeah?” it came out more like a question, my face morphed into a cringing mess as Snape sighed exasperatedly.

“I already chose that for you. The lyrics show up on the screen here.”

“I cannot sing. I don’t wanna be like Josh.”

“You don’t have to Potter, weren’t you listening? No one cares. You just sing because you can.”

“Um…aren’t you going to sing with me?”

The man went still, rigid as a floorboard. “Sing with you?” he slowly repeated as if the mere idea was laughable to him.

“Yes, it couldn’t be that bad right? According to you, all these people suck at it anyway.” A couple standing near us raised their eyebrows at my boldness. I clamped my mouth shut.

“No harm in having a little fun.” I finished lamely, the microphone heaving my hand down. Severus looked around, his posture sagging little by little as he realized everyone surrendering us were total strangers.

“Potter listen to yourself,” he scolded me almost playfully. “You just asked a specialized potion master who is also active as your teacher and caretaker to sing along with an annoying muggle song in a pub.”

“Yeah? I’m pretty sure that was what I asked.” Despite his words, he stepped forward and took the microphone from my sweating palm; he weighted it judgmentally in his hand, and then shook his head.

“Come on Professor!” my voice was almost beseeching. A brunette young woman from our right mimicked my words at Severus.

“Yeah! Go on /Professor/!” she smiled at us and raised her beer. I stared back at Snape pleadingly.

“We had a deal!” I reminded the scowling potion master. “Either we did things together or we didn’t do it at all…right? I mean you bought me muffins so I assumed that was how that conversation was settled.”

“No Potter. Singing is your /thing/, not mine.”

“We had a water fight a few days ago; if you’re worried about your reputation sir…things cannot get worse than that.”

His demeanor changed completely, and the spontaneous side of him seemed to have sprung back into action; I noticed the change in his posture and the corner of his eyes as he finally took the microphone back and the song started.

The small crowd around us cheered the man.

“Scoot over Potter, and keep your theatrics to a minimum.” He ordered. “You do enough hand waving in the car to last us at least ten songs.”
I grinned.

"When I wake up, well I know I'm gonna be! Im gonna be the..."

Nearly an hour later, found Severus and I still leaning over the microphone, clumsily singing along the lyrics to some song we have never heard before and leading on a drunk cheering crowd. They /adored/ us; the goofy /father and son/ taking over the karaoke box as the traffic passed. Even Severus was enjoying himself. I admit Sev carried his notes somewhat more gracefully than I had but as he had already mentioned; no one cared.

We were cheered on… and much, much later, when we were exhausted to our bones, on our way out, the bartender …or was it the man on the phone or…someone…stopped us…by the coatrack. I didn’t have a coat though…Then why did I just write that?

He-she gave us a bag of… no that happened in Rome…he gave us, something. I cannot remember… but he did give us something. Yes, he just gave us something, and said this.

Probably.

“Here you go sir. Hope you and your son have a lovely evening.”

Or maybe he didn’t. I am not…sure.

Severus didn’t…He didn’t correct him. Severus…H-

**
“Harry?! Harry!” There was this voice, shouting in his ear. A warm breath brushing down on his aching neck. There were hands all over him, touching his head, cradling his shoulders, on his face, on his shoulder and chest again.

Everywhere.

They touched everywhere. Everywhere hurt. Everything hurt…/Something/ was hurting! And he couldn’t….He didn’t know how to do…/things/. It hurt. God it hurt!

He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t move. He was scared.

Help, he wanted shout, he wanted to scream. He was scared. He needed help. He needed…he needed /someone/.

“Harry?! No! shit! Call for help! Someone call for help!”

His thoughts tipped over like a glass of wine, dripping down and squirming away before he could grasp one droplet of thought for more than a tiny second. The voice kept shouting. His body was being rocked, but he couldn’t feel much beyond the pain.

Oh. He suddenly understood. The pain.

The world went silent before he could finish that thought.
To be continued...
End Notes:
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