Number 0. Last dying wish(es)

Every person on this planet has a story to tell. Every person on this planet matters. Each person has their own interests and dislikes, each have abilities that others don't. The person you pass by in the streets, the guy who shoulders you in a hurry, the nobody who is anywhere and everywhere at the same time. The nobody who is dying of cancer.

Harry James Potter is a nobody, I'm sixteen, I'm an orphan, though technically I still have living relatives. I'd rather not mention much about them other than the fact that, I used to live with them in Surrey as a child, in private drive, number four. I attended school, I had a few friends, a godfather who died when I was fifteen as he was pushed in a magical veil that traveled to the unknown....

I had likes, and dislikes. I had a snowy owl as a pet. I loved Quidditch, I was actually the youngest seeker in my team once. I liked reading books, I liked eating junk food and I loved jazz. In every definition of the word, I was boring.

I hated this one kid at my school named Draco Malfoy? I had a crush on my bushy head friend for about three years before I realized that it was just that. A teenage crush. I highly disliked my potion Professor once? (that one is a long story) for a long period of time I also hated my parents for dying and leaving me with my abusive relatives, and I hated being in pain. Maybe karma had it right spot on.

I am a nobody with brain cancer, and up until now, I had four months to live. I did a lot of things in these last four months, I made some good memories, cleared up my rivalries with a lot of people, did things here and there, even helped madam Pince (the librarian) to reorganize the whole library again all by hand and without an ounce of magic.

Tomorrow, my four months will be up, you see, I have an appointment of some kind tomorrow, with a curious thing called death. I know my time is up, you could probably see the evidence all over my sloppy handwriting, although Hermione believes there is no difference.

For those of you who cared, who saw me as Harry and nothing more or less, or even for some of you who don't know me and had just stumbled upon this note, or you're just reading it out of your sick fantasy... This is my will.

Yes. This is the last will and testament of Harry James Potter. I assure you all now, that while writing this, I had been entirely lucid, not under any pressure or influence of any kinds of substances, or drugs. This is the fantastic me.

That would be a lie though, while the reserving potion was definitely not a harmful drug, it was one of the very few potions that could keep me lucid at this stage. I only had one vial, that gave me only one day to be myself. The one that I used today, to wrap up... My life, I suppose. Don't tell Severus though, it's our secret for now.

I don't have a lot to give away, so let's get over with that and get to the important stuff ( I'm getting dizzy already) but rest assured, I wasn't an asshole. I already left the things that needed to be left, I forgave those I needed to forgive, and I have already regretted every mistake in my life long before I have written this. There is no unfinished business. There never is with dying people.

Sorry, that came out wrong. What I meant to say, was that you will never find a dying person (who knows he's dying) to be unprepared. Unless the poor sod has been told that he's dying minutes away from dying. In that case, that guy would have every right to be totally unprepared.

Sorry for the rambling, my point was that I had finished my business in this world and am probably moving on as you guys are reading this. (Not really. I'm terrified.)

Before I get to what I really wanted to say, there's one thing. I know you're curious, I know you're confused, flabbergasted, angry and probably want to bring me back to life just to kill me again. But wait! Stop doing whatever you're doing now, stop crying, stop frowning, and put the wand away.

I have told you that I had more time. That I was fine and the cancer hadn't gone that bad yet. That's the lie I told everyone except my healers and the headmaster, who were in on everything. They didn't stop me from lying, but they didn't overly encouraged it either.

I'm such a bastard. You'll probably be thinking. I did that to a lot of people. Which makes me a liar, because what I said was not true in the slightest. I was dying when I said all those crap, and if there is one, only one, regret I ever had in these sixteen years is that I lied.

I'm asking for forgiveness. If I hadn't lied, you wouldn't be there right now, reading my will or weeping over my dead fuming corpse ( sorry. That was Insensitive), if I hadn't mustered up a string of lies to keep you out of my life, I wouldn't have been prepared. I wouldn't have been satisfied.

So, yeah, I know it's selfish, and I know you're thinking I'm such an ass in my own funeral ( I really need to stop writing like this about my own death) but I had to do it. And I will do it again in another life.

I had a list. /The/ list, of things I wanted to do before I died. At first it was this measly little thing, simple mundane activities that I wanted to do before I died, you know... Like reading this book, or managing to win a food marathon, have sex (still a priority of mine) or meet a famous person. (the irony)

Everything a dying teenager would want to do before his birthday, which by chance also turned out to be the date of his untimely death.

These kind of stuff, soon escalated into a gigantic list of dying wishes. After the panic kicked in and I realized that I didn't want to die, and I had literally countless opportunities and things that I wanted to do, and I couldn't because I was dying, well... That was when things got... Out of hand.

I wanted to swim with whales, wanted to scale Everest, I wanted to make the biggest ice cream sandwich that there was in the record book of ice cream sandwiches, I even wanted to be in a threesome and have dinner with the Beatles.

Yeah, crazy stuff.

I had written down so many things that if I gathered them all together, the list alone could be turned into a book.

I calmed down eventually, the ideas died with each part of me. And I rationalized myself. I decided that, if I really wanted to do these things before I died, I had to tune it down a bit and get over the crazy ones in order to satisfy my other thirsts.

I finally settled down on a number. Thirty one. That was my birthday though, thirty first of July. I calculated, if I had four months to live, then I had four months until my birthday, and if I had that, then I could grant my own wishes just in time before I died. As a late birthday gift to myself per se.

It was a brilliant idea and I was proud of myself, so I got my long scroll of crazy ideas and thought ; why the hell not? If I was about to die a painful death I certainly did not deserve then I might as well knock myself out!

I divided my list into two parts, part one was my every wish as a child, every wistful thinking that was never granted for me as kid, who was neglected. The other half, was the crazy stuff the teenage me wanted... Yes... Like having sex.

Don't tell me you didn't think about it. I mean if you're sixteen, and you're also dying and a Virgin above everything else... You do the math.

It got thirty one in total, the perfect number for me to achieve, also a very ironic number, since it's a direct cause for my parent's death.

Moving on, there was only one problem with my fantastically designed plan. I was still in school.

I attended Hogwarts school of wizardry and witchcraft, which is also a boarding magical school, dropping out of that while I had no parent or didn't have enough strength to look after myself was a problem.

I had to drop out of school, I decided, I couldn't just lie in the infirmary and waste my remaining time sulking on why's and how's. I wanted to drain every bloody second out of that four months.

What happened after that was simply history. Something that I'd definitely would like to tell you all about. It's actually one of the reasons why, I sound so okay with dying (not really, I'm terrified.)

But that is for another time.

My hand is getting tired and I'm about to sleep for the last time. I have many things to explain, to confess, to declare, alas, I don't have the strength anymore. But that's okay, because I have foreseen this, and I have been prepared.

There are forty two envelopes under the pillow I'm putting my head upon. Thirty one of those are the recording of my wishes, of how they went and If they turned out to be as good and as satisfying as I had imagine them to be. They tell Harry nobody's story. The nobody who died of cancer.

Ten of those letters are dedicated to the ten people I held dear, and one particular letter was addressed to one Severus Snape.

Sev. If you're reading this now, or if you found my corpse in the morning lying on the bed... I'm sorry.

I know I promised that I try to hold on, to fight this so you could adopt me. So that we could be a family after this was all over... But I can't. I'm sorry, but I know death has come for me. And that is why I'm so sad. I'm sorry and I know how awful it must be, that you granted my every wish and I couldn't grant only one.
These past few months, you taught me a lot of things, things that I couldn't have otherwise learned or realized by myself. I thought I knew what a parent's love felt like. But I didn't. I'm not even sure if I do now. You tried though, and that has to count for something... Right?

I know it's stupid, and selfish. But I signed the papers anyway, the adoption papers. They're folded in your envelope, neatly stacked within the pages of our adventures together. Waiting to be signed over by you and the ministry.

You followed me through everything from day one, you made my dying days into something wonderful, and... And I would always be proud... Of calling you... My father. Maybe later. Maybe in another life. But I needed to get this off my chest before I succumbed to death's last bow. ( Pardon me. I was reading poetry earlier)
I love you Severus Snape, and you were the Dad I never had.

This is my last wish. Not the thirty second wish. This is wish number thirty one plus one.

Dad, would you still adopt me if I was dead?

Number I. Leave my name behind (p.1)

When I was well under the treatment and told that I have a very low chance at living, I knew that was it.

I sucked at the very thing, I couldn't possibly have. I couldn't live. That statement shook me to the very bones.

As a sixteen year old with brain cancer, my chances were even lower from the start, I was diagnosed when the tumor had progressed too far, too far to prevent it from getting worse, grade four patients only had up to eighteen months tops.

My godfather had only died a week prior my diagnosis. There's not much you should know about him. He was lively, the bright sun in my rainy days, and honestly, he and Remus were everything I ever expected of parents.

That was until Sirius died. His deranged cousin, and the only person I hate more than you know who, Bellatrix Lestrange, pushed Sirius into a magical veil to oblivion, and just like that, everything went out of spiral.

I started to feel sick pretty much after I had returned back to Hogwarts. The sickness wasn't sudden, the buzzing was always there, had been ever since last summer. But after getting possessed by a maniac and then reliving your worst nightmares for weeks, I think the cancer had to give in eventually.

It crept up to me gradually, with scrupulous and through steps, slow and steady. A cough here, a sneeze there, puking, feeling feverish, raw headaches with no remedy. I was too mindless and hesitate to report to the infirmary, and that was my first mistake.

I was so sick by the end of the week that I could barely move. Even though my friends were worried, they mistook my general unwell pallid demeanor with grief. Dumbledore knew something was up when I started skipping classes and thought, it was somehow a side-effect to being possessed and having my mind messed with.

I didn't take it too seriously too, I was wallowing in grief as well, and getting sick out of nowhere was not a new occurrence to me.

That was until a faithful Monday at the peak of the spring. Double potions with Snape, the one class I couldn't skip even if Death was hot on my tail that very moment. Snape had made it pretty clear that skipping would get us a straight zero for the whole semester, and that we were obligated to attend classes, 'as there is no reason for you dunderheads to skip ' in the first place.

Anyways, with Hermione's insistence, and Ron's nervous twitching I somehow found myself in the back row, head bobbing and eyes drooping, nose stuffy and feeling dizzy. I remember feeling /wrong/.

As usual, Snape strode into the class room dramatically, his black robes bellowing behind him as he went, a flick of his wand, and the door was slammed shut. I was shivering. Just noticing how cold it was down here in the dungeons.

Ten minutes into Snape's lecture and I was getting worried about myself, I couldn't digest a word out of the man's blurred voice, I was shivering like a leaf, beads of sweat coated my face, and my hands were shaking. I don't recollect the following events much after that point... There was a stab of a sudden pain into my skull and I must have cried out, because every gawking head turned to me.

Snape's infamous sneer died on his lips the moment his startled gaze caught my feverish eyes, the dreadful teacher raced and caught my deformed body as I crumbled down on my bench, whimpering pathetically from the pulsing pain in my head, like a hot knife stabbing me over, and over and over again. Fuming at the mouth and convulsing like I was under the Cruciatus.

I was put under emergency treatment.

Madam Pomfrey thought the diagnosis was wrong, even went so far and asked for medical advice from several specialists from Mungo's and a muggle friend of hers to confirm, that yes, Harry freaking Potter had a tumor the size of a melon snuggled deep in his brain. Weaved through the core of the tissue, impulsive and ready to do him in.

But it made sense now, everything did. My abrupt mood swings all year long, changes in personality, crooked judgment, and nightmares that often had nothing to do with Voldemort, headaches that passed away briefly but left a subtle sting in my forehead as reminder. It seemed that everything just clicked.

Much like every other imminent crap that usually latched on to me for kill. Every year.

I had cancer. Brain cancer. The tumor was malignant, aggressive, cancerous, and quite frankly growing everyday. As I already said, life had it right by striking me with a grade four cancer out of nowhere.

That was literally the last thing I had foreseen as possible out comes to my unpredictable future. I expected to die a hero, in a battle, brave, or at least half decent. Dying with cancer, for someone like me was like dying by slipping on a peeled off banana skin. It was pathetic, and frankly, precipitous.

I didn't see much of school after that, seeing as Sirius' death occurred a day after Christmas, I must have lost the whole spring term. But I couldn't say for sure, confusing hallucinations with reality was a basic side effect of brain cancer.

No one seemed to count depression in as well. I was already feeling crappy when I was grieving for a family member loss, now I was guilty for assuming that I would in all like hood, end up with him and my parents in a short while and saw no point in grieving anymore. That made me feel guilty for abandoning Remus.

Remus couldn't come. I don't know why, maybe he was too wallowed in his grief like he was when my parents died, maybe he had told me the reason and I had simply forgotten... I just knew that he couldn't make it.

The man was strange, very kind and endearing in his own way, but also not dependable at all. If Sirius hadn't intervened in my life, I doubted Remus would have ever pursued to keep in contact with me.

"Decathect." I tried to pronounce clearly.

It was my word of the day.

( a plan Hermione came up with to help expand my limited vocabulary recently. ). The word itself meant gradually detaching oneself emotionally from a loved one or an object because the thing was about to die... It made me think of Remus, every time that I rolled the word over my tongue.

So without Remus or Sirius by my side, I bore treatment and chemo and potions and this shit and that, I let them try new methods like I was their lab rat, let them perform several unsuccessful surgeries to get the tumor out, but it back fired, as another small tumor started springing from the back of my head.

That was when the healers slowly started to hint at the possibility of me not making it as long as they had hoped. It was subtle, Pomfrey out right refused to indicate any signs of their failure, but the other healer ( Flare... Something, I never remembered. Tall, brunette with a Stern attitude Mcgonagal would be proud of) said that she would've started getting her priorities straight if it was her in my place.

I told her. "You have really terrible bedside manner Mrs. Healer. And also, I would like to switch places with you if possible."

She looked so genuinely shocked that I figured, /I / was the one misunderstanding her statement.

"I'm really sorry, I didn't mean it like that." from her quivering voice, I figured I might have gone a little too hard on her. Or have misheard her words. It wouldn't be the first time, but that wasn't the point.

Backing up my almost fake claim, the Weasleys were livid when they found out, out raged, indignant, Ron out right gave her the finger and Mrs. Weasley didn't bat an eye in response.

I felt appreciated, but I needed the healer, and I realized that somewhere down the line, it might have been my fault as well. So I gently advised them that it was against murdering my oncologist thus the misunderstanding was solved.

But that was only the beginning.

My mood swings became legendary, throwing tantrums and working myself up over mundane stuff soon came to be my favorite hobby as I was rather lonely in the infirmary. I loved it when the others had no choice but to tolerate my general bitchiness, but then I felt guilty. I'm sorries were like candies rolling off my tongue.
I could die at any moment, any time of the day, or in my sleep, in a blink, and I would have died insulting my loved ones. Life sucked, and sometimes... I couldn't just wait to die already.

Not that I was complaining for my extra time here, though, the healers had originally speculated ten weeks for me to live, any time beyond that period was just life doing its thing.

I couldn't tell if that was a good thing or not. Don't get me wrong, cause sometimes it really did worth it,But other times...

Take today as an example, today's a bad day. I knew that the moment I woke up with an intense pain in my eyes again, the tumor must be swelling again; Generally the days I couldn't see were the worst, the blindness drove me insane.

"Decathect." I mumbled, willing to detach myself from my body today.

Groaning, I turned my head and cursed, even while being blind I could tell that my vision was titled and my head felt absurdly heavy. My hand fumbled for the pitcher set on the night stand, among many other things.

"I should get a bottle." I bit out, as some of the water sloshed down on my arm and the rest just drenched down my sheets. My hand gave a sudden rattling tremor and I cursed, the pitcher slipping from my hand altogether, shattering against the ground, splashing water and glass splinters all around the floor.

I winced at the sound and shook off my hand to shrug off the dripping water.

"Potter! What on earth are you doing?!!" the loud shrill voice of the matron basically shook the infirmary as she bustled in my ward, undoubtedly with a scowl on her face.

"Sorry." I mumbled meekly.

She clicked her tongue and there was a loud whooshing sound, I felt my hands dry immediately.

"Honestly, how many time do I have to tell you boy? My office is just at the end of the hall! Asking for help doesn't make you much of a wimp Potter!"

"I was just thirsty." I protested quietly, knowing better than to out right argue with her. She was the one with the wand after all.

"That's the point!"

"Then get me a bottle from now on."

I had cancer, and yes I was currently blind and I could probably die at any moment, but I wasn't crippled (Entirely) , and asking for help over every little thing was just... Not my thing. Not when I could do them myself.

/She/ on the other hand, babied me to the point that hiding seemed more prudent for me than telling her my symptoms.

"I can't argue with that Mr. Potter. How are you feeling this morning?" like crap. Titled vision, blindness, dizziness, slight nausea, and maybe a tinge of headache forming. This day was one of /those/ days.

I had to think for a moment. "Jolly." I nodded as I declared.

She scoffed and I instinctively knew she was shaking her head at my immaturity, or maybe in pity.

"Pain level."

"A four?" not even that high, not yet anyway. I kept the large numbers under my belt for rainy days, I never flashed out chubby numbers like eight and nine. Those were for when things went shitty bad, and there was no longer any resistance to deflate the pain. Those were my secret weapon, so to speak.

Ten was my ' I don't want to die but I'm probably am ' number.

"Not downplaying anything I should hope?" she ran a scan anyways, and I let her do her thing, knowing the exact diagnosis by heart.

"Double the pain potions, no strenuous moves, and light meals with no sugar. The swelling in your eyes would deflate by late evening if you rest /properly/... Do you hear me Mr. Potter?"

"Well, there goes my sky diving schedule this evening... Honestly, It's not like I had any other plans to spend my day. It's just me and my bed."

"Feeling cheeky this morning?" I sat up promptly.

My kneecap dipped on the soaked bedsheet and I instinctively shivered, filling my stomach curl as I suddenly had the feeling that my bladder was uncomfortably full.

"Oh no."

With a wince, I realized that I needed the bathroom. Right now. oh well...

Pomfrey was still talking. "And due on a pain killer. What... What are you doing?! Lie back down!"

I groaned and pushed her away. My hands blindly in front of me for protection. "I need to use the bathroom." the need was sudden and urgent. Not like I was dying of thirst a minute ago.

"Well if you just let me..."

Indignantly, I flipped her off. "Don't you even dare suggest that again!" I would never let /any/ living soul to put that spell on me again, it was the most traumatic thing that had happened to me /down there /. I preferred to pee on my own, thank you very much.

She tried to lower me down and I blindly pawed at her hands, weakly trying to swing my legs over the edge to hop down.

"Don't be ridiculous.." In a flash, I got up anyways and hopped off the bed, nearly knocking down the trays again. (this wasn't the first time.) my painfully obvious lack in coordination was one of the obvious symptoms. Then there was the blindness.

"Potter!" she growled, I heard her expertly whipping her wand out, before trying to immobilize me. Trying to dodge, I accidently stepped on a large splint of glass and nearly jumped out of my skin.

It took me a moment to realize that I should be feeling pain.

"Gahhhh!" I cried out, and flopped back down on the bed, clutching my injured foot to my chest. She waved her wand, wrapped my foot in something wet and I cringed.

It felt icky and gross on my foot. I hated it.

"You idiotic boy! Stay still! Honestly, you just tend to make things worse don't you? Bustling around like a child, it's not like you're half blind! Hold that to your foot, I'll be back with a blood replenishing potion and a pain killer." something cool washed over my toe again and the glass was quickly removed, I grimaced, and made a move to get comfortable before I realized I was stuck to the bed as well.

"Hey!"

Pomfrey huffed, most definitely with her hands on her hips. "I learnt my lesson Potter. Sit still!"

I sulked and crossed my arms, completely forgetting the cool rag I was supposed to press on the wound.

What a shitty morning. I thought savagely. Nothing could possibly make it worse than what It was.

Apparently it could. My head fell on my left shoulder from the imaginary weight, and my hands shook like the womping willow in a rampage. That was when Snape decided to grace me with his presence.

"Stop squirming Davies! I am quite aggravated by your appearances as it is without having to bear the insufferable expressions in the mix as well!" I could feel the reek of that sneer from where I was forced to sit down, I heard muffled protests as the student was guided to a bed behind me, Snape berating the poor sod all the while.

It was Michael. He was an average resident here. Hufflepuff's Neville, so to speak.

"Hi Michael." I greeted he thirteen year old as I grinned, my unseeing eyes crinkled. My head was still awkwardly titled to the left. Like a total creep.
A muffled response replied and I only smiled.

"Potter. Mind your own business." Snape snapped, sounding quite mad. Michael must have melted his cauldron or something. It wouldn't be the first time.

"Jolly morning Professor?" Call me whatever you want, but annoying Snape never got old. Specially now that he couldn't out right beat me into a pulp with his biting words anymore.

"Potter. Not today." the man warned, surely wagging a finger as he glanced at his other student with disgust.

"Not a Jolly morning then?" I think I would miss him the most when I died. Something in that statement sounded wrong in my mind but I shrugged it off.

The man bristled, and God... The pain and that little bit of self preservation was what held me back from laughing my ass off.

"You are insufferable." I wasn't sure if he meant me or Michael who was trying to bit down his chuckles by muffling his face with something.

"I would take that as a compliment any day Professor." I couldn't turn, and he couldn't see that I was having a bad day today, my eyes were disgustingly swelled shut and my face had kind of... Popped. Not a pretty face.

"It's not too late to deduce points Potter, if you weren't in the hospital already..."

He pitied me too. That's mainly the reason why he didn't get as mad anymore when I was my cheeky self... And not going off the handle and doing...Well what Snape usually did when I was being unruly.

I hated it.

I took another direction to our morning small talk. "If it's the usual, the soothing balm is in the last cupboard to the left Michael, fetch me a glass of water while you're at it?" maybe a neck brace too, my neck would snap if it stayed titled like this for another minute.

"Playing healer now Potter? Already strutting around infirmary aren't we?" Nope. He was back.

"Exactly the essence of your insolent father." But that was the fun.

"Well I am his son. So, is it the usual?"

He ignored me. "Where's madam Pomfrey?"

"Hopefully back soon. I really need to use the loo." I dead-panned.

The man gnarled, and Michael yelped. I could tell the man was really pissed this morning.

"I don't have the nerve for this. Davies, stay here until the matron returns, since Potter is quite adequate at story telling, I believe there wouldn't be any trouble."

"Oh, you're already leaving?" I feigned surprise, struggling to keep my head upright.

Snape, oblivious to my struggle, berated me. "I can deduce points for your cheek alone Potter. Remember that."

I grinned. "Not when I tell everyone that you left an injured student and an invalid at the infirmary all by themselves. Am I right Mike?"

"I swear to merlin..."

"Sorry sir. I'm feeling bubbly this morning." and quite nauseas. Where was Pomfrey?

"I figured, Potter. You are quite more often than not, still ten points for your cheek. And you Davies... Thirty points from hufflepuff for disobedience and wasting valuable ingredients. Also two weeks worth of detention with me, feel free to ask Potter about the cleaning solution we use for cauldrons. He's quite an expert."

"I'm always glad to be of help."

"Fifteen points from Gryffindor, and I... Ahh, Madam Pomfrey." the sharp click of her shoes indicated her return. Even while being blind I knew she had a tray in her hands. Probably my breakfast and potions.

"Good morning Severus. Oh dear, is that Davies?"

"I recommended the soothing balm." I interjected cheerily.

She clicked her tongue."You recommended wrong Mr. Potter, now wait for me to just fix this poor thing..." she flicked her wand and Mike whimpered.
The matron instructed him to drink something and the boy quieted down with a groan. I wished she would be finished with him already to take a look at me. My pain levels were rapidly increasing.

"Another melted cauldron?" I heard her asking the teacher. Snape must have nodded.

"Exploded right in his face, and before you say; yes, I did warn those dunderheads about the... Dramatic nature of acidic ingredients . Honestly..." he sounded so disappointed that I really felt bad for him. Just a little bit though.

"Told you it was the usual." I drawled out.

"Potter." Snape growled out in warning.

"Sorry."

After Mike was patched up, and I was seconds away from voicing my complaints, Pomfrey decided to speak up again.

"Now that you're here, Potter needs another batch of those special pain relievers Severus, maybe by this evening? He has chemo tomorrow."

"I didn't see him writhing in pain when he was running his mouth at me Madam." the man replied bluntly.

Poppy gasped. "Severus..."

"I will drop the batch before dinner this evening, I am occupied otherwise later in the night."

My eyes hurt.

"Very well Severus. Still feeling the urge to use the bathroom Potter?"

"Quite. I'm dizzy too." simple sentences. I thought. I should stick to simple sentences to avoid difficulty with speech for the time being.

"Oh dear, I'm so sorry Potter. hang on there. Severus? Take young Davies with you, he is mostly fine. Avoid hot or lukewarm water for a while, yes Mr. Davies? Here's the balm."

I couldn't stop myself. "I told you..."

"Yes, yes Potter. We know. On your way you idiotic boy, I don't have all day."

I swear that the sticking curse was the only thing keeping me upright by then, the headache started building up behind my temples and near my scar, I felt nauseous and needed to pee and I was thirsty all at the same time. It wasn't a good feeling.

"Madam Pomfrey, I'm starting to feel squeamish." the word ' squeamish ' turned out more like ' smoochy ' but I suppose she got the meaning.

I couldn't see her, but a moment passed and I was being gently lowered in my bed, feeling a vial press up to me lips as it urged me to drink, my foot in the air. I felt so immensely glad that I didn't have to hold my head upright anymore, I almost choked.

"Drink this right up child, I don't want to see a single drop remain. As for the bathroom, you might have to wait a little or I can just put on the spell. How are your eyes?" there was a pause, then another, and I instantly felt a little better.

"Burning. Can I have some dreamless sleep potion?" because I knew the pain was about to come, and even with the pain killers....

A hand went through my thinning hair and brushed a few strays away from my burning forehead.

Normal. I exhaled shakily. This was normal, I was having a bad day and this was only a four at its best.

Her voice was throughly laced with pity and deep regret. "I'm afraid not Potter. You had one last night, and you aren't allowed a dose before chemotherapy anyways."

"Brilliant." I whimpered and rolled over, feeling hot and cold, shivering and sweating at the same time, my eyes burning as the morning passed excruciatingly.
My thoughts weren't deep, and I floated between unconsciousness and agonizing awareness for about the whole day.

My eyes did regain their vision sometime after lunch, but even without the glasses I was advised to avoid using them to reduce pressure on my skull.

The moment that I felt my tear ducts could handle drowning me in my own tears, I started the water works. Pomfrey knew better than to interrupt me while weeping in despair like I was doing now, the first few times she tried... Well, let's just say it did not end well for neither of us.

She liked to call it emotional instability, I liked to call it ' being afraid of death'. Not much difference.

In my hands, I sloppily held on my creased parchment and smashed it to my chest as I wept, unable to stop the sobs from rattling my body, rivers of utter devastation and loneliness crashed into me in gigantic waves and I was all alone in the infirmary.

I didn't even know why I was crying, it could have been the pain, maybe even my upcoming death, which did not excite me in the slightest, or maybe it was because of those lost opportunities that I now held to my chest. Soon to be granted. Soon.

That's what they were, before they turned to wishes. Lost opportunities with no sense of redemption. Things that I never got to taste and never will.
Snape was the one who approached me whilst in my break down, carrying the batch of potions as promised. He sneered at first, vanished the batch and stiffly lowered himself on a chair next to my bed, staring at me blankly with his annoying stoic face.

"Why are you staring at me?" I asked sloppily, my voice wet with tears. He shrugged.

"Why are you crying? Are you in pain?" he knew Pomfrey wouldn't let me seat here crying from pain, so what did he mean by that sentence? I shrugged, the parchment clenched in my palm.

"Do you want me to ask for a healer?" I wiped my tears and snot with the back of my hand.

"No." I whimpered miserably. Quite disturbed that he had interrupted my tantrum.

"Then why are you bawling?" he asked dryly.

"I don't want to die." I sniffed. So that's why I was crying. A moment ago, I had no idea that was the reason.

"It's not in your hands Potter. People die, all of us, some sooner than the other." he said passively.

This was not what anyone else would have said to a guy with cancer, I had no idea how I felt about that.

"It's not fair." I pouted, like a petulant baby.

Snape raised his eyebrows. "Life isn't fair Potter. You have to learn and deal with it, if anything, you should know that better than anyone."

I'll tell Pomfrey! I thought angrily. Who this bastard thought he was? Who would say such an awful thing to someone who has cancer?! Picking on me like that? How insensitive!

I cried some more, while he sat quietly next to me, my parchment in his hands as he read over the list blankly, his expression never wavering. Betraying nothing.

"Potter..."

"I ate you." I sniffed pathetically.

"I'm quite sure, you meant 'hate' Mr. Potter." he corrected and I bristled.

"Duck off!" I wished I had another pillow to dump on him, or maybe holler for Pomfrey to throw him out of the ward. Such a git!

The teacher sighed, nodding at my parchment in his hands."What's this Potter?"

I did a double take. "My lips. Give them badge!" I cringed at my own choice of words, but Snape pretended it was completely comprehensive.

"Yes, I am aware it's a list Mr. Potter. And it's yours, what is it about?" I knew that the man wanted to humiliate me farther by making me talk, when he knew I couldn't talk when I was this upset, so instead I extended my hand and gestured for my list. He gave it back without a protest, seeming deep in his thoughts.

"You wanted to run away Potter. Weren't you?" he sneered. "Albus did not mention it to any of the staff, so obviously you were..."

"It's privacy!"

Private. I should have said private. As I scrambled to fix my mistake, Snape nodded.

"I know it's a private matter. But I think he would have at least mentioned it. Unless he doesn't know, you're such an idiot Potter." just like your father. Was left hanging in the air.

"That's none. Of. Your. Business. Stop. Harassing. Me." I bit my sentence out word by word to make sure that I get everything right. Normally I hadn't that much of an issue with speech difficultly, and could wear it off in everyone's absence.

But when I was pissed off, and this bastard just kept picking on me, my tongue twisted all on its own, and words scrambled out faster than my brain could process them.

"Thought you would pack a bag, pick up a tree branch and out right walk out of the castle? Even your father had more self preservation and wits than that."
Actually, no, I did not want to run away and grant my own dying wishes all by my own. Though, I wasn't an idiot. I never even intended to tell anyone about this parchment, as it was nothing but a glaring disappointment to me. To my life as a whole and of how little I had accomplished.

"Go. Go." I tried to be as menacing as I could manage, but I sounded more like a toddler.

He was so fun in the morning! Why was he acting so mean now?!

Madam Pomfrey chose that moment to come check on me, having returned from her office, and I couldn't be more grateful.

"What's going on here?" she saw my red, tear streaked face, and the sneser on Snape's disgusting face before she flew off the handle.

"Severus?! What are you doing to him? Honestly, he's sick!"

Snape fixed his face cooly, and stood up, his long black robe flipping over his overcoat as he did.

"Chill down Poppy. Potter was already crying when I came here. I only came to drop off the whelp's potions. I will take my leave now." in my desperation to get away from the git, I didn't even notice that he took my parchment with him as he left the infirmary, Pomfrey's scowling following him closely behind.

Number I. Leave my name behind (p.2)

Today, I woke up to raised voices in my ward. I hated shouting. Uncle Vernon shouts a lot, and nothing good ever comes off of that. So I tried really hard to tune them out. But it was hard considering the subject of their argument.

Which was as always, me.

"No! Absolutely not! Are you all out of your minds?" Pomfrey was uncharacteristically vocal this morning, and my blossoming headache was not helping in the slightest. I wondered if I could shout at them to shut up already.

The second voice surprised me, and also made my heart clench. It was Snape's rich velvety voice, as always stoic and nonchalant. "Poppy, this might be the only chance he's going to have to.."

Madam Pomfrey cut in. "No Severus. He's my patient, and I don't deem him well enough for you to drag around the world for some.... Some.... Some sort of... Atrocity! How dare you humiliate him in such a way?!" she stuttered out. I was trying really hard to keep up with their banter, even while ignoring the raised voices and complicated nature of the argument, I found it hard to follow.

What were they talking about?

The third voice I could detect, was the headmaster's. I could have been wrong, but to me, it seemed as if he was the only one who wasn't ranting and going on a manic rage, next to a (supposed) sleeping patient.

"He has been having miraculous results and his life expectancy has even bewildered the oncologist." the old man said it in a way that almost made me laugh. Huh, as if I had been declared in remission already, three months of more pain and suffering hardly deserved gloating.

"--At least consider the possibility of preparing him for his final days, we have to be realistic. He is sick, and he's only fifteen, he might be running out of time." he interjected calmly, and quietly, still assuming that I was asleep.

Pomfrey sighed, worn out and resigned ( I sympathized with her. This conversation was hard to follow.)

"Albus. Potter is under aggressive treatment. It means that he has chemotherapy three times a week. You know what that means? It means that he can't talk, can't sleep, can't do anything but to lay in pain and suffer three days in a week, sometimes in a row." she emphasized, sounding chocked and at the brink of tears.

"Other days, /if/ he has a good day somewhere in between, he only manages to walk himself to the bathroom and back. For merlin's sake! He's blind half of the time! And you want me to put his care in that /man's / hands?!" she took a deep breath.

"Don't be offended Severus, but I wouldn't even consider leaving Harry's care into /your/ hands." her voice wavered, and I couldn't be sure if it was from anger or hurt. I made a tiny sound in protest as she tatted about my condition, but made no other move to indicate my awareness.
I wanted to be asleep for a while.

"Be reasonable Poppy. I might not be fond of the boy, but I am still human.."

"You were picking on him just yesterday!" she exploded, and I winced, the pulsing picking up in my temples. "Picking on a sick delusional boy! What is your problem? wasn't tormenting him for years enough? Now you have to hunt his last... His last days too?!" her voice was getting progressively high pitched the more this went on.

Snape waved her off."I was not picking on him, he was already crying when I arrived, I thought he was in too much pain to call for a healer, but he was merely crying for other reasons. Then I found the parchment."

"That's his and private, the moment you saw Granger's handwriting, you should've known that!" as they mentioned Hermione, I found myself instantly missing her. When was the last time I saw her? Two days ago? What about Ron?

Snape seemed to be gritting his teeth. "Who do you think told Granger to write that list? Even you aren't daft enough to imagine me a fit in divination Pomfrey. I thought it to be an important note or a love letter, one that Potter had no idea about or what it consisted of, it was only later that I figured Potter had told her to write those things down for him."

Pomfrey bristled. "Yes, because he can't write for himself! That doesn't justify, you working him up into a mess. Do you have any idea how long it took to calm him down?!"

"I'm not going to murder him woman! I'm doing a good thing here!"

"Which is convenient for you! That's what It's always about! You honoring Lily, by doing /good/ to her son! Let him go Severus... Leave the poor boy alone." she pleaded. I felt sad for her.

"Poppy, please calm down. Severus broached the subject with me only out of concern. You are right and Harry might not have much time, we have all wronged him in many ways, all of us, the least we can do now, is to respect his wishes in the last remaining days he might have left."

I heard her grumbling under her breath out of indignation. "There's no way, we can find a way around his treatments." she finally ground out.

"He is not well enough to travel, he can't take care of himself. His mind is as complex as a five year old, he has no sense of judgment. None at all. I'm not putting his care in the hands of a grudge holding man who hated.."

"No one said that I should be the one to care for him, in fact, I don't even want to be involved with the brat! He's a dying boy, and I saw it fit to bring this matter into light only out of concern and Pity. So don't mistake my insistence with caring Poppy, I certainly have none for the boy. However, the least /you/ can do.."

My heart clenched. Oh no, I thought, my brain finally catching up. This was about yesterday. The list. The one Snape stole, had he told everyone about it? Where they mad at me? Were they disgusted by my lameness?

"You don't get to tell me what I can or can't do Severus Snape! You wanted my answer as his healer, and this is it... He's not going anywhere!" she screeched at him.

I decided now was a good time to wake up at any rate, I wanted to be involved in this discussion as it involved me too, I peeled my eyes open, blinking the crust away.

The trio were standing closer than I had expected them to, the blurry figures were only a feet away from my bed, and I had a feeling that Pomfrey was turned sideways to my bed in a protective hunch just because of that reason. Was she afraid they would snatch me and run away? maybe disappear with a puff and a cloud of smoke? I cracked up with the thought.

"Madam Pomfrey?" I asked faintly, craning my neck to catch their attention.

Pomfrey was by my side in a blink, handing me my glasses with a frown etched on her face.

"Are you alright Potter?" she asked, and I decided she was too upset to act like her usual professional self today and go straight for my symptoms. I nodded slowly, fixing my glasses.

The world slowly slid into focus.

"Good morning." I greeted the other men, momentarily glaring at the potion master with a vengeance. That bastard! I thought, sorely reminded of yesterday, the burn of unsatisfied vengeance seared in my veins as my glare tore into his. The git! How dare he pick on me like that? Was he here to apologize? He'd better be.

That's must have been what was the argument about then, the list and his vile behavior, I figured. Maybe Snape was too much of a jerk to apologize by himself and had to be dragged here by Dumbledore, or maybe he was planning on disturbing me again. I frowned in disapprove.

"Good morning Harry, did you rest well?" the old man asked politely and I flushed, nodding a bit sheepishly as I realized the glint in his crinkling eyes. He knew I had been eavesdropping.

Snape didn't bat an eye. "Ask him yourself Poppy, he would surely tell you his true feelings."

I gulped, my mouth suddenly dry. "What's going on?" I asked no one in particular.

No one turned back to face me, it seemed Snape and Pomfrey were adamant on winning the glaring to death contest, and I swear if looks could kill, Snape would drop dead right there.

"Harry, my dear boy. I was wondering if we could all talk?"

"Albus..." Madam Pomfrey started tersely, but the headmaster cut her off with a wave of his hand.

"This should be his decision, as this is his life Poppy. Surely you understand that."

"He doesn't understand the consequences!"

"I do understand them." I protested weakly, my insides churning as I wasn't even sure of the topic of their argument.

"No Potter, you don't. I doubt you would even know what this is all about. Do you remember what happened yesterday?" Snape asked bluntly, crossing his arms and I frowned.

"You were mean. Are you here to apologize?" I confronted him and the man looked pleasantly taken back for a moment before schooling his features.

"Yes, I am sure Severus will have to apologize at some point." Albus agreed, amusement twinkling in his pale blue eyes.

Snape rolled his eyes. "We're getting sidetracked. Potter, are you aware of the list you threw at me yesterday? Of the content of that list and their nature? Answer me honestly."

I wrung my hands in nervousness, spying on Pomfrey who looked positively murderous, her face half hidden with the intense ray of sun that shone through the archaic windows behind me, framing her face in an intense glow.

She wouldn't be able to get that angry at me. I haven't done anything wrong. I tried to comfort myself, eyes darting between the three of them.

"Why? Did I do something... Wrong?"

Dumbledore looked startled. "No of course not, my boy. We were merely curious."

The way he talked made me nervous. I felt as if he had been under the impression that I couldn't understand what he was talking about. The words rolled out of his tongue slowly and with patience.

I mimicked his tone back at him. "Then yes. I did. I writed... I mean, Wrote them. Why are you asking?"

"Would you like to experience the things you wrote down?" Snape cut in before the headmaster could reply. His eyes cold and unforgiving.

I shrugged. "I wouldn't mind?" still confuse. What was this about? Could it be what I thought it was?

My last declaration seemed to struck a nerve in Madam Pomfrey, she scowled and glared at the men. "Alright that's enough. He has chemotherapy soon and I don't need you putting ideas in his head. He needs to rest in peace."

I didn't argue with her. I knew better than that, but Dumbledore looked very regretful and upset by her meddling in my decision. I kept my calm, but in the inside, I was raging too.

I knew what were they going to ask. I had cancer, I wasn't an idiot. They wanted to take me off to grant my wishes, out of this school, or rather the cage I had been confined in for years. They wanted to help me. /Snape / wanted to help me because of some unknown reason. Were they serious or was this all just a cruel trick?
My breath caught in my throat. I had to tell them somehow, tell them that I agreed. I wanted this, to do the things I might not be able to do anymore.

I opened my mouth, to shout, or to stop them from sealing the deal. My eyes caught Snape's and he narrowed his eyes, glaring meaningfully in my emerald eyes.
' Don't ' his gaze seemed to tell. I snapped my mouth shut.

He turned to a blistering Pomfrey. "Well, I see that there is no other solution to our problem Madam Pomfrey, but I'm still waiting for you to change your mind. As you already know time is golden and it shan't be wasted by petty claims and excuses such as yours. I'm open for negotiation if your opinion changes. At least consider it." the potion master declared stiffly, holding my gaze as he did.

Slowly, deliberately, the man shifted his robes, holding my gaze as he walked to my bed in a blink.

He held out a folded piece of parchment. "It was an interesting list, Mr. Potter." was all he said as he handed me the parchment, he spun around with a rustle of his robes and left the infirmary without looking back over his shoulder once.

I was too stunned to act like I was mad, or had to respond, so I dropped my gaze at my left palm, crunching the list in my hand, my heart skipped a beat. What had he done to it? And more importantly, would I be able to detect the difference if he had?

My thoughts were too jumbled for me to keep up with the silent argument that Pomfrey had pursued with Dumbledore in the corner of the ward, scolding Snape behind his back, and scorning the headmaster for allowing such a violation of privacy. My privacy, that was, not hers.

"--I'll be sure to keep that in mind, my dear. Now if you would excuse me, there's a meeting I would have to attend in a few minutes. " he said as a bidding and turned to me.

"Harry?" my head whipped up to meet his intense gaze.

"Good luck with your chemotherapy today. Perhaps we can talk later when you are feeling better? How do you feel about a tea party?" he asked gently and I had to think.

"I like tea. Would there be scones sir?" I asked calmly and he chuckled. I grazed my lower lip. Did I say the wrong thing again?

The man stroke his beard with a jovial smile as he nodded. "I will make sure that there would be. Do you have a preference?"

Pomfrey made a sound of displeasure, clearly upset with the man for both messing with her and my strict diet.

"I like strawberry." I told him firmly and he chortled again, before finally departing, exchanging a meaningful glance with my healer as he exited the ward.
Pomfrey threw her hands in the air in frustration, her face flushed and screwed in a twisted jeer in anger and disbelief.

"Those men! Honestly! No sense of respect for the ill, no sense of reality. Not everything can be fixed by magic! What are they thinking, dragging a fifteen year old around the globe..."

"Madam Pomfrey?" my voice seemed to snap her out of her rant and she immediately calmed down, regaining her composure.

"Yes Harry dear?" she pointed her wand at the doors and muttered a spell, successfully closing and locking the doors.

I followed her gaze.

"Why did they came here now? Why didn't you let me talk?"

She tensed. "No reason to worry Mr. Potter. It's all taken care of now. How are you this morning? Any headaches?" I shook my head.

After that the argument was never once mentioned again, as usual, she ran her scan and asked about my pain levels (surprisingly a one) and then proceeded to contact my oncologist ( I just called her the Mac woman), so she could bring her floo over for my chemo.

Chemo didn't take that long, each session was over after three or four hours, during which I mostly napped or gazed at the walls, daydreaming and trying to ignore the dryness and the nasty feeling in my stomach. This went on for three days out of my week, rendering me into a brainless slug the following days that I was forced to fight down the side-effects of consuming chemical poison.

Butterflies ripped my stomach apart by the moment Mac finally decided to grace us with her presence, carrying her charmed messenger bag on one shoulder and holding her walking staff ( she limped) in her other hand , her wide fake smile was nauseating, and I deliberately made a show of turning my head away in disgust, at her cascading blonde hair and her absurd pinched smile.

It's not that I hated her, I just preferred her to get lost, or get killed in a horrible accident, or fall in a hole somewhere. I swear it wasn't personal, the sole fact that her mere presence associated with pain was what drove me to abhor her.

"Good morning." she chirped and I wanted to strangle her perfect neck, with my perfectly steady hands to wipe that perfect smile off her perfect face.

"Good morning." I replied monotonously instead, closing my eyes.

She ignored my morose tone and her grin widened. "How's my favorite patient doing?" she dislodged the messenger bag on the chair near my bed and leaned her walking staff against my rumpled mattress.

Harboring murder tendencies. I thought grimly, only realizing that I had said it out loud when I saw her taken back expression.

"Harry." Pomfrey said in warning and I grazed my lip, somewhat ashamed.

She turned to Mac, her face pinched. "One of his teachers gave him a hard time yesterday, Harold is still disgruntled by the interaction." she lied to the oncologist and I huffed.

"I see." Mac winced in sympathy and shrugged. "But it's better to let bygones be bygones. Yes Harry?"

"If you say so." I replied honestly and we left it at that.

Chemo is exhaustive. There is no other way to describe my encounter with both the healer and her bag of poison. Sure there's pain, confusion, and the nausea, but exhaustive is my favorite.

I mostly daydreamed through the treatment and the light-headedness that followed me immediately after that. I was too dazed to stir up a healthy two way conversation with any of the healers, as I tended to babble nonessential words that sounded way better in my head instead of actual English words... So I was mostly just rigid and pathetic.

Despite my claims, Mac was really a good oncologist, professional and right to the point when it came to my treatment, and I secretly admired her for that. If meeting under different circumstances, she could've been a half decent adult. But alas, fate always has other ideas.

Even someone as cynical as Snape had realized that. I mused our conversation in my head, going over the details over and over again. Mulling over his words, chewing them out, even trying to reply to some of them in my head. He told me that life wasn't fair and he was right.

Life for someone like me is never fair, never easy.

But again, being me isn't easy.

It never was, not now that I was as fragile as a pelted flower and not then, when I didn't even know I was a wizard. As a child, my life was as miserable as a tragic Greek story; my parents had (supposedly) died in a car crash while drunk, I have been left mutilated as a result and humiliated through every stage of my life up until I was eleven.

Things didn't progress when I grew older, my eye sight was an abhorrent as were the state of my life, even finding out that I was a wizard didn't improve that predicament as it soon became clear that I was the chosen one.

Sometimes in my dreams, I reach for a light. It's narrow and it hurts my eyes, and I'm basically blind without my glasses. Everything is blurry, except for that light, it's intense, white and blinding, and still, I feel as if I reach hard enough I would be able to grasp it, to hold it and then it would whisk me away to somewhere safe. Away from all the pain.

It sounded insane and overly dramatic, but I didn't care. It was the old cliche, dying people and lights, bright lights beaconing them to heaven, right before their deaths. But I didn't feel as if this was a cliche, I didn't feel like dying when I touched the light. I felt... Unburdened, relieved even. I hardly felt those emotions these days.

When I dreamed (which turned out to be quite often recently) , I was something that I could never be while being awake. Being me isn't easy when you're awake and /aware/ of all the things that's going wrong with your life, dreaming made it easy for me. Made being /me/, easy for me.

That would be one of the main reasons why, I asked to be remembered as me, as Harry, and not the person whom you would have to see the last few months, something that even I don't recognize.

I asked to leave my name behind at the top of that list, because I wanted to be remembered as the Harry before Cancer.

You might think it's stupid. But it's not. Brain cancer, is most likely the worst kind of cancer anyone has to ever deal with (and I'm not even being biased). It just doesn't affect your body or make you sick. It affects your brain, your line of thoughts, your control, your emotions, things that we are taking for granted without even knowing that we are doing it.

It messes with your head, /convinces/ you that there are things that others do not see, it'd eat you up, sets you in hysteria, paranoia, difficulty with speech, and the creeping sense of unbalance will kill you gradually from the inside before the tumor does.

And to me, that sounded way worse than hair loss or other symptoms that indicated my death.

On my good days, I mostly slept a lot, specially after chemotherapy, though, there was obviously a difference between the two slumbers, one was utterly painless and restful and the other accompanied with agony.

Unlike yesterday, today was one of those good days. After my chemotherapy (I didn't even realize when it was finished for the day), I slept right till lunch. Woke up to puke my guts out, crashed back into another nap and then woke again to puke my guts out in a neat periodical basis.

There wasn't much Madam Pomfrey could do about those, or the headaches that were formed as a result of the treatment, though, she tried her hardest to remedy me without actually influencing the potions and chemo, and I was somewhat drugged up all the time.

I was both miserable and grateful.

XxXxXxXxXx

The next time I saw Snape was approximately a week later, the same day, and roughly after my afternoon nap, I instantly knew that I wasn't alone. It was near sunset, I could tell from the Orange_ish light that filtered through the windows and the long silhouettes of the furniture blocking my vision.

The person near my bed merely shifted his other leg and crossed it over the other, it took me a moment to recognize his black dragon hide boots before jumping out of my skin in fright.

"Calm down Potter, you might give yourself a heart attack." the man held out my glasses, but I was too shocked to move. What the hell was Snape doing here?! Watching me sleep?! And more importantly, where was Pomfrey?

I didn't dare voice my question, and warily gazed at the blurry man. He sighed infuriately, obviously making an effort to contain his frustration.
"Aren't you going to take your glasses?" he barked impatiently and I flushed, hesitantly extending a hand to do so.

If Snape was reeling from my hesitation, he certainly didn't show it on his face, legs crossed and sneer in place, the man seemed more angry at himself for being here than at me for being alive.

"Sir?" I asked after a few moments, looking around the darkening ward.

"Potter, how are you feeling?" the man asked, and I shook my head.

"Um... Fine. I guess." all of the hate I had felt for this man since last week seemed distant and childish, unlike my hatred for Mac.

"Good, do you feel up to walking?" he asked abruptly.

The question hit me out of nowhere, and I feared I might have misheard the man.

"What?" I croaked out. Running a hand through my messy hair.

The man rolled his eyes in exasperation and crossed his arms. "Walking, Mr. Potter. The act of maintaining balance and taking steps after the other on your two feet. Can you manage that?"

"Why?" I warily stared at the potion master, my stomach recoiling, as I was suddenly having this urge to find Madam Pomfrey. I was ninety-nine percent sure that the man had ill intents towards me; most likely wanting me to walk to my death somehow, or maybe strangle me with a pillow.

"Madam Pomfrey is in a meeting with Professor Dumbledore and your Oncologist. Miss MacMillan." oh, so that's what her name was. The thought sprang out of nowhere and I pushed it put of my mind with a harsh curse.

"You and I Potter, are going for a walk." the man finished, and I blinked.

"Where?"

"Enough with childish questions, as I'm sure your next questions will begin with ' When and How'." the man answered dryly, standing.

"But..." suddenly the concept of ' don't walk off with strangers ' popped in my head and I couldn't help but giggle, covering my mouth in hopes to strangle down the sound.

How many times did aunt Petunia smack me around for warming up to stranger neighbors? Or teachers at my school?

'you aren't worth their time! who would want to spend time with a freak like you?! ' or something along those lines.

Snape paused, raising an eyebrow after the awkward silence dragged on. "Are you having a seizure? Popped a brain fuze? I'm still waiting for a response Potter."
I was confused, terribly so, would the others approve of me walking off with Snape? And more importantly, why should I do as he says? Would Pomfrey be mad? I didn't know the answer to any of those questions and I hated not knowing. I did the next best answer besides my obvious responsible negative response.

"I will. But where are we going?" his hand was suddenly on my arm, steadying me before my world was dramatically titled to the left.

There's this funny thing, about having your sense of balance messed with, aside from the nausea and annoyance, that is... It changes one's perspective. Not only in the literal aspect of the phrase though. Figuratively, I later found that a change in my perspective was what often saved my ass. I thought out of the box and did everything my mind told me I shouldn't. So in a way it helped me more than logic ever did.

With that being said, I didn't ponder on Pomfrey's rage more than ten seconds, and my past hatred and utter disgust for a man who was basically carrying me out had absolutely vanished in thin air. He was taking me out of my prison, and I haven't been out for months. If anything, the man was an angel in disguise for doing this for me for whatever selfish reason he might have had.

I snorted the moment we were out of the hospital wing and he paused, suddenly looking wary and concerned for me.

"What is it Potter? Do you want to go back?" he must have known that I had chemotherapy today, the look of concern on his face told it all, but I was feeling miraculously better and healthy. Symptom free even. The nausea was all but a distant memory now.

I grinned. "Are you kidding? Of course not!" I exclaimed and locked my arms in his, hanging off of him like a leech as we awkwardly made our way to the staircase and down the spiral moving set of stairs.

My legs felt wobbly, and thus I found it hard to concentrate or think about anything, rather than trying not to fall.

Snape was being extremely patient with me, his hand supporting most of my dead weight as we both sluggishly made our way step after step, I was so thrilled at the aspect of finally getting to leave that damned infirmary that all I could do was to smile like an idiot.

"Poppy doesn't let you out of the ward?" Snape asked reprehensibly, eyes not showing an ounce of impatience as he helped me skip the last few stairs.
My bright smile was stifled a bit as I shrugged, suddenly feeling cold, barefoot and clad in nothing but pajamas. Snape noticed me shivering and flicked his wand, transfiguring them into a long heavy robe. I smiled at him in appreciation and we reached the main hall.

"Where is everybody?" I mused out loud, peering over my shoulder at the Grand entrance to the Great Hall.

Snape shrugged. "Mostly in their dorms by now. Don't worry, we'll be able to sneak out unnoticed by your peers."

I didn't question him, as my mind saw no reason for it do so, and Snape helped me to the grounds, charming my slippers so they wouldn't get dirty. I rejoiced in the feeling of grass under my feet, the soft breeze musing my hair, and the canopy of clouds above my head. I felt like a freed man. The warm color of the sunset and the orange tinge to the fading sun accompanied us as we strolled, and I found myself closing my eyes to memorize the scene in my head, mesmerized and giddy for more.

He directed me down the pathway, his hand warm on my shoulder as we passed Hagrid's hut.

"Are we running away?" I asked, a shrill of excitement shooting up my spine. My eyes lit up in delight as I turned to him.

Snape shook his head. "Why are you so kin on running away?" he asked, we both ended up edging the forest, I was getting more excited with each step.

"Because running away is exciting." I answered simply, resisting the urge to skip around and bounce on my feet. "Leaving is dull. I don't want to leave. I want to escape." I said honestly, and he looked satisfied with my answer.

"Now, are we running away?"

"Only for a few hours. Until they notice us gone." the man replies, finally guiding me through the tall pine trees surrendering the edge of the forbidden forest. Where were we going?

"Why?" I prompted.

"I'm proving a point Potter. So are you for that matter." he shrugged.

We hiked to the first clearing in admirable silence. My silence was admirable and awed, not his. My breaths came out in little puffs and I was getting really tired by then, but stubborn as I was, I had no intentions of stopping our little adventure.

"Now Potter, there are a few rules we need to get down before proving our point to your healers and the headmaster. Without those ground rules I'm certain that even I won't be able to help you." he warned and I nodded breathlessly.

This was it. He was going to help me get away, maybe even help me halfway to my first destination. This was what I had been waiting for, for a whole week.
We reached the second clearing and he helped me settle on a fallen tree trunk, covered in damp moss, and adorned with wild flowers, before settling in front of me. I struggled to catch my breath, sweat coating my face.

"Number one." the man started briskly. "We do not lie to each other, if you're in pain, you will tell me, if you are in need of something you will tell me to provide it for you, and I will do the same. Was that clear?"

I nodded vigorously. "You're really doing this for me? We're going to..."

He cut me off. "Number two. We will not leave each other, I do not care under what circumstances, madam Pomfrey made it clear that you are incapable of taking care of yourself. The same goes for me too, I will not leave you alone for more than a short period of time and you will learn to respect that."

"But what if I needed to use the bathroom?"

"I'm sure we can make such exceptions Potter." the man drawled dryly and I nodded for him to continue. My palms were freezing cold as I wrung them in my black robe for warmth.

"Number three. Each wish must not endanger your condition or rather worsen your symptoms, I will help you through with some of them, but others such as ' skydiving without a helmet' will need revising. If we stay tightly on schedule and if you abide the rules, I'm positive we can get to them all before something unfortunate happens."

"Like my death?"

"Precisely." the man humored me.

I wanted to jump out of my skin with glee, I haven't been so happy in my entire life. So liberated and free.

"So we're really going?! But... But what about others? Madam Pomfrey and.."

"If we can prove them wrong today, then they will have to allow this." he assured me and the tingly feeling in my chest flared again. I have heard it quite often from Pomfrey, who declared me too emotionally unstable many times, her face marred with pity, when I responded the wrong way or showed the wrong emotion. When I trusted the wrong person, and distrusted my friends and family. I would imagine her telling that to me right now, telling me that my sense of judgment was crooked and I didn't know any better.

She was right, Snape was dangerous, Snape was the snarky old man who had tormented me for the better part of my life, and I supposedly hated him. Then why was I so okay with this?

Snape studied my face, looking a bit taken back, himself. "Last rule, but not the least Potter... We do not get attached." he warned, the sneer back on his face.
"I am your teacher, and even despite the animosity between us, I am sure you will be able to keep your... Tendency to care for others, contained. I do not care for you and I never have. I'm only helping you out of pity, and to prove a point. I will not take advantage of you, but I will not cuddle you either. You should know that by agreeing to this you would lose your only chance to prolong your life and there is no return."

"What are you helping me? I thought you hated me."

"I do, hate you. But you managed to impress me, since last week and the days before that... I have thought of you wallowing in self pity, sniffling around and seeking sympathy. But you... You managed to prove me wrong. I'm curious about you. Besides, there was nobody else who would be willing to do this." he was right, not many wanted to care for a sick boy with countless disabilities such as me. Being the boy who lived aside.

"I'm not sure if I should trust you or not. What if you're lying? Would you tell me the truth if I asked you, or are you going to humiliate me?"

"Why would I do that?"

"Well, you hate me for one. You hate what I represent and you hate my father. Why are you so eager to help me now, what do you... Get... No wait.../gain/ from this?" because nothing was for free. If living with the Dursleys had taught me one thing, it was that nothing in this world came without a price, and every action was countered by a reaction of some kind.

Snape gazed at me, thoughtfully, his hands pressed together in an effort to concentrate. I could see the remnants of his sneer left on his face, darkening with the sky as the sun was finally setting. I found the situation very surreal.

"Albus and I have talked concerning this matter and he asked me the same question Potter. He asked me what I gained from this and what would this mean for our mutual hatred." a ghost of a jeer came and passed through his expression.

"What did you answer?" I asked curiously, leaning towards him.

"Sod off old man." he said with a deadpan face and I blinked. Then I laughed in bewilderment.

"What did he...?" I cackled, not able to finish my sentence.

Snape raised his eyebrows. "He offered me lemon drops." he snapped, his eyes hardening. "The /point/ of this conversation, and I assure you that there is one, Potter... Is that I have nothing to gain from this. I don't know why am I doing this, I'm being honest with you.... The idea occurred to me last week and just wouldn't get out of my head, no matter how hard I tried."

"So you're going to be burdened with a sick boy just to silence your thoughts?" the man was obviously on to something, something bigger, more sinister, maybe even lower than I had expected of him. My insides churned and my smile fell.

"Yes."

"You're a jerk. You sodding prat!" I suddenly spat at him, rushing to my feet.

"Firstly, mind your language Potter, and don't you dare forget your place with me. I am your teacher and you will respect me as such, I am not one of your peers for you to insult and mess around with." the man hissed, getting to his feet as well.


"And secondly, why would you refer me in such a vulgar manner? You seemed rather jolly the moment before."

I spewed, my hands clenching into fists and tears of humiliation threatening to stream down my face.

"You... You're making a... A...a mockery out of me! Do.. You think it's funny?! To fool me and drag me out here, to give me hold! Fuck it! You're a jerk!"

"Potter cease your blabbering. What are you on about? You ungrateful brat, I just told you I was to take care of you and your needs for free and this is how you answer me?!"

"Oh so I'm ungrounded now aren't I? You're just messing with me like all of them!"

As I looked around, bewilderment once again took over my conscious ; the sky was completely dark now, and so was my surrendering, it wasn't too dark, but dark enough for me to get lost. In the woods, completely defenseless.

So that's what Snape had in mind. I thought with dread and disgust, he wanted to abandon me here, make me wander around the forest, lost and scared shitless out of my mind. Probably to be eaten by something or get killed by tripping on a root and bleeding out of my head.

I turned to face him again, to smack him, or to follow after him to show me the way out, but I saw something in his gaze the moment I spun to spit at him.
Understanding.

It took me by surprise and I had to remind myself of how alone and angry I should be feeling now. Instead of sympathetic.

"Potter, calm down, it's okay." he said, and I eyed his wand. Pointed at me. I didn't talk.

"Take this list." he suddenly said, as if struck with an idea. Taking out my creased parchment from his pocket as he handed it to me.

I furrowed, my eyes glistering with rage and disgust. "Why did you take it?"

I swore, if this man was going to make a fucking spectacle out of me, and Mark me as his laughing stock, I would wring his neck with my bare hands and enjoy every second of it. The bastard.

"Cross out your first wish Potter." he said, ignoring me, he gave me a quill and I narrowed my eyes, intending to stab the man with the said quill the moment I had my hands on it.

"Why?" I bit out. The quill threatened to snap two in my hand.

"Because ' Sometimes you just have to fade away, to dissipate into nothingness, to leave and take nothing with you. Leave everything behind, friends, family, leave your name behind and start anew '."

My will dissolved as he recited the exact quote for me, straight out of my favorite magical novel ' Me and the Sparkle '... How did he....?

"How...?"

"You know why you should trust me. Even though we hate each other, I understand you. I understand this, and why you should do this even if it costs you your life." he nodded at the parchment.

"Anyone could have done that." I told him, referring to the quote, breathing a little easier and gaining more confidence.

"But nobody did." he answered and I knew he was right.

Nobody got the hidden meaning behind my words as he did. But the question was, would he be the right person?

March the 31th


That was the day when my journey officially begun, at the peak of April and nearing the deadline as minutes passed by like drops of sand in an hourglass. Life had been unavoidably boring and painful for me, but the promise of a better near future kept me awake at nights.

_There are several ways for me to describe my inner turmoil when I found out, that my most hated Professor went out of his way and tried to pursue my pathetic attempts at trying to look like an absolute loser, and actually took me seriously. Crying, or thanking the man was not one of those.

In fact, my reactions ranged from incredulous silence and being stunned like a statue, to being suspicious and paranoid all over. Did Snape have something up his sleeve? Did he want to humiliate me? Maybe lead me into a desert and walk off? Knowing that I couldn't find my way back?

In any case, after my slight argument with Snape the other day, and a through scolding from Pomfrey for running away and following the man out , I couldn't help but feel the giddiness and anticipation crawling all over my body in a frenzy. The two emotions I can safely say I have encountered only occasionally.

The sheer thrill of excitement that I had felt, the chilling breeze that filled my nostrils as I stumbled across the field with Snape, escaping into the unknown... It had me addicted and I was yearning for more. If one measly trip to the forbidden forest felt like this, then how would it feel like to travel around the world with the man? Heavenly wasn’t far from the answer.

And I felt as if that was the point my professor was trying to prove; I yearned for an adventure, I didn’t belong in a hospital bed and he knew it. I felt insulted that he seemed to be the only one who had noticed that.

That's probably before I realized, what just leaving the school entailed.

I had to drop treatment as well.

You can't just go ' round the world, and be back for your treatment every other day, or simply get pumped with chemo, right after winning a hot dog eating contest. It doesn't work like that.

It wasn’t like last week, when the man had to walk me back to my ward, exactly in the same condition he took me; just to prove that he could if I was willing. If I accepted his offer, then my health, my life…my entire /being/ was in his hands and he would not be held accountable for my death in the slightest.

My heart clenched at the realization, knowing that I would be throwing all of their hard work, and treatment, pain and whatnot away, for a promise a man had made. The one man I absolutely did not trust, but possibly the only bridge and final step before happiness.

So in short, it took me about an hour to figure that I should definitely stop the treatments.

The people I had to convince in Dumbledore’s office however, needed a slightly different method to be entirely enlightened.

The headmaster never ceased to amaze me, everything about the man had been an enigma to me since the moment I had set eyes on him, from the state of his clothes, to his questionable choices in outfit and seemingly barmy front he put for other people.

His office, in my opinion, was exactly the representation of his soul; I had been there only a handful of times before, but now that I look back, nothing had seemed so fascinating about this place until now that I was surveying it again with a different mind.

“Why don’t you take a seat Harry?” the man asked casually, indicating me to a chair, I chose to ignore the man in the favor of inspecting a trinket set on one of the shelves. I was utterly consumed by the sheer magic and the comfy air that hung around the circular office.

“Harry?” I nudged a glass globe with my knuckles, marveling the swirls of purple light that shot through the clear glass. What was this thing? I thought.

“Potter.” A stern feminine voice called and I was abruptly drawn out of my musings.

Madam Pomfrey raised her eyebrow pointedly. ”The headmaster is talking to you.” She scowled and I stared back blankly. Did she think that I hadn’t heard the man? Because I had heard the man quite clearly the first time he called out. He just wasn’t as interesting as this beautiful and magical globe of awesomeness.

“Sorry.” I said even though I didn’t mean it (that’s what polite people do), and walked to my seat, we were only waiting for Snape now.

Technically I had nothing to prove to the headmaster or Pomfrey, even though I was a minor, I think I had a right in deciding my future, but the man and Snape were my only keys out of here and I really needed to play my cards carefully from then on.

“Have some sherbet lemon Harry, I’d dare say they are delightful.” The man jovially said. I shook my head politely.

This was the man’s third attempt to make small talk with me, and I was struggling to keep my mouth shut.

It would have been a little impolite to compliment the headmaster on his bright green robes with orange linings, but the man had somehow managed to pull it off without seeming tacky, and so I had nothing to talk to the man about, and seeing as I had no intentions to spew out nonsense to the man I kept my mouth shut.
Pomfrey huffed and bustled about, her hair frizzy about her face, totally different from her usual neat and fixated bun, tightened with a bobby pin.
Snape finally arrives in a flurry of frustration, black robes bellowing about, eyes narrowed and his nostrils flaring, the man stepped out of the floo.

“Albus, haven’t you already scowled me for kidnapping your precious Potter?” the man spits out as his looks skim over me and the matron.

“I’d say once isn’t enough, but one would never know with you my boy.” Amusement crinkles in the old man’s eyes.

“Albus, if you would carry on already, I have a delicate potion to finish.”

“I see. Why don’t you take a seat? Harry was just about to start on the pastries.”

“Did you finally talk some sense into her?”

“Well Severus, after much contemplation, and considering nearly everything that came to our minds, Madam Pomfrey finally decided to give you a chance.”

“Not completely.” She balked.

Albus made a face in agreement; he turned to Snape, with a disapproving but halfhearted glare. “Although your earlier actions with taking Harry out of his ward in such an ungodly hour and cold did not help your case in the slightest.”

“Well?” the potion master prodded.

“We decided that Harry should have a say in this matter as well, but you already have my blessing as his headmaster and magical guardian, and Poppy’s agreement as his healer.”

Snape nodded slowly, holding my gaze as he spoke with the headmaster. “And what of the oncologist?” judging from his tone, I couldn’t help but feel that he hated her as much as I did, though Snape normally hated everyone around him. It was a given.

“She could be reasoned with.”

I couldn’t contain myself anymore, my feet bounced up with excitement, and I grazed my lip.

“I agree too. I want to go with Snape.” I blurted out, trying to stand and fully face the man. Pomfrey’s firm hand pushed me back into my seat.

“You don’t even know the basics of this plan Potter, at least wait until you have heard everything.” Madam Pomfrey said in a biting tone, her voice internally smacked me back into reality, and I straightened up in my seat, automatically, feeling utterly chastised.

Snape’s robes flown when the man positioned himself in the comfy love seat next to the fireplace with a sneer, crossing his arms, and draping one leg over the other. “Yes Potter, one would think that I want to murder you in cold blood in the forbidden forest otherwise.” He sneered mockingly.

The matron gave him the evil eye. “One would think that isn’t far from the truth.” She jeered back.

Dumbledore made a face, beseeching the adults with a scowl of his own. “Poppy please, we’re adults; let’s discuss this matter as such.” He gestured at her to seat, the woman blistered, choosing to stand over my shoulder and glower at the potion master instead, their animosity had been hilarious when we looked back at it later on.

The sneer that was fixated on the man’s face died on is lips when his face met mine. It closed off any expression, immediately. I frowned.

“I accepted to be Potter’s guardian until his list is fulfilled, probably until the next school year, any of his needs, responsibilities, or wants will be met and he will be taken care of for the duration of that period, what else is there to discuss?” he barked, his arms clenching in their position.

“Why? Why do you want this so bad? Surely it couldn’t be out of pity.” She had asked it with confusion then, but I came to know the real reason behind Severus’s insistence not much later after that day in Dumbledore’s office, but then, Madam Pomfrey had every right to be consumed, as did I, by the man’s sudden change in heart.

“My reasons are far from your business, the headmaster has already approved of this.” That’s how the potion master had answered the question that day, safely dodging the bullet.

I only sat there with a dazed expression, not quite believing that the conversation was really taking place, small needles prickled my skin, and my breath came out short, my mind couldn’t fathom the sheer /idea/ of what was about to take place. For once the pounding in my head had nothing to do with the cancer and everything to do with the blood rushing in my ears, pounding on my ear drums with vengeance.

“So you will willingly be Potter’s caregiver? While fully aware that his needs are now quite different from a normal fifteen year old?”

Snape lowered his head in confirmation; I could only close my eyes in relief, I didn’t even care the man’s reasoning, in my mind, I was sitting at an outdoor café in Paris, enjoying the weather, I was at the top of the mountain, surveying the hills, I was Harry, a teenage boy simply enjoying a vacation with his… teacher. Heat drummed in my fingers and my head snapped back to the conversation.

“I would hardly say otherwise if I wasn’t Poppy. I do know of Potter’s needs.” Snape was saying, the permanent scowl etched on his face, while still carrying that stoic undertone.

Madam Pomfrey looked taken back, torn between her professional duty as a healer and her longtime acquaintance with the man.

She had already been angry about the man sneaking me out of the castle since last week, and to her, this just seemed like the topping to the cake, I did not blame her, but at the same time, I couldn’t stop my thoughts from getting inappropriately imaginative while insulting her in my head.

I rubbed my clammy hands against the chair’s cushioned armrest; I struggled to keep up with their heated discussion for a few moments before all three turned to me in silence and I stared back with unease, my mouth going dry.

The headmaster looked at me with a knowing small, and indulged my obliviousness with a simple question;

“What do you think Harry?” he asked not unkindly, looking years older than he should have been. I gulped, I knew the answer already, clear as the day, I was almost entirely sure that the cancer snuggled in the frontal lobe of my brain. This had nothing to do with my lack of judgment.

“I want to go with S… I mean, Professor Snape.” Even though, I still couldn’t understand the man’s reasoning that day in the forbidden forest, I was not about to let my only chance at achieving my goals to flee.

Snape cut me off with a click of his tongue. “Potter has already agreed. Weeks ago, even before I had smuggled him out of the castle.” The headmaster’s eyes darkened at the mention of last week and I couldn’t help but smirk, knowing that Snape and I were harboring familiar faces.

“Smuggled an ill boy out of his sickbed in his pajamas, yes, what a splendid example of your sensibility Severus.” Poppy snapped.

Severus waved her off with a hand, obviously resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “If I wanted to be sensible, I would have been a Hufflepuff.”

“What of his treatment?” she abruptly asked, her face was red. I couldn’t remember for what reason right now.

“Albus and I have already discussed his treatment.” The man answered coolly.

“He cannot continue them” She stated the obvious merely for my benefit, as if warning me of what lay ahead, if what stopping the treatment really entailed. Death seemed the obvious side effect.

I gulped, my heart was hammering in my chest, suddenly not so sure about this plan; this was the furthest I had come in two months, all it took was Snape being a bastard and I was sitting here in this office, contemplating to drop chemotherapy and leave the only place I had considered as my home to probably never come back.

“Yes, he cannot, but he could be kept in decent health without the help of those. I suggested the boosting potion.”

She gasped, her eyes widening in horror. “That would only shorten his life.” I made a confused face, what were they talking about?

“It would prolong the /quality/ of his remained time,” the man corrected immediately. ”Yes; I admit that each dose might frighteningly decrease his chances at a longer life, but I think the decision is up to Potter.” He looked at me expectantly and I shook my head, anxious and timidly threading the hem of my shirt.

“What is a boosting potion? “I asked in a small voice, neither adults answered and the office was reduced to a tense silence. Professor Snape finally let out an insufferable sigh.

“It’s a much more complex and far more powerful version of the pepper up potion, Potter.” I could tell the very notion of watering down that information to simple words was painful for him, but I still couldn’t understand.

Seeing my lost expression made him sigh again, standing to move closer to my chair.

“It feeds of your magic, or rather acts as a catalyst for your magic to keep you in good health for a short period of time depending on the dose.” He finished explaining by glaring at the headmaster, who had long dropped in his chair, watching the exchange with hooded eyes.

“Why is that such a bad thing then?” I asked innocently.

“With an illness like yours, it wouldn’t take long for your magic to give out or gain immunity to it. You will die instantly.” Oh. So that was the downside of the potion, it gave me enough energy to get going, but it fueled off my magic, succeeding in shortening my life.

Honestly, I couldn’t say I was surprised, because I wasn’t; I knew I had to die eventually, a few months short wouldn’t make that much of a difference. I told myself.
But I had no idea how wrong I was then. Not in the slightest.

Snape saw my horrified expression and was quick to answer my unasked question. “With the doses I have personally formulated, he would have more than four months.”

Four months, tomorrow would be April the first, four months from then would be…July? As in the month of my birthday, could things get more ironic than that? I wondered. Would four months be enough to get down thirty one things out of my list?

Of course it was enough; I replied to myself, if anything, it was even poetic in a sense. A poetic death was not my forte, but eh, the more remarkable the better.
“July.” I muttered under my breath. “It would be in July, right? Then I take it.”

“Are you absolutely sure about this? Harry, you don’t have to decide now.”

“I want to go now. Four months is more than enough for me! Maybe I could even come back here before the deadline.”

“Harry, you could /die/.”

“But I’m dying now Madam Pomfrey, if not four months from now then it would be soon anyways, I want to do something meaningful, I want to live my life.”

“What of your family and friends?”

“They will understand. Please I need to do this.” I was begging her for nothing; I could already see the acceptances nestling in her deep brown eyes.

“Stopping the treatment at this stage…” she argued halfheartedly, Snape moved back to his seat in the meantime, leaning back and watching my intently with his head propped on his hand.

“Please Madam Pomfrey. I need this.” I told her, knowing that I needed her acceptance more than anything; her consent soothed my chaotic mind and left me in peace t sort out what I really wanted out of my short life.

“I can hardly stop you, now, can I?” she sighed, her voice finally broke and I dropped my chin in shame.

Snape nodded his head. “You could wish him good luck.”

She did wish me good luck, until the very last day, although I admit, that I used to drive her up the wall with my stubbornness, but she had always meant good.
Later on, she told me that letting me go that day was one of the hardest choices in her life and an outright violation to her vow as a healer. For some reason, that got to me much more than it should have.

The rest of that meeting was merely customary; Snape and Pomfrey did banter for a few minutes, the headmaster kept glancing at me with a sad smile as he instructed Severus (Snape, for me then) where to take me for my first destination, and I was simply up in the clouds.

“Albus.” Severus had said, his tone was hard and demanding.

The headmaster nodded his head. I was too happy to properly pay attention, or to remember much of what had been discussed after that point and the potion master later confirmed my suspicions. “Then it’s settled, Severus will receive the necessary information for you journey.” The first part has been addressed to me.

“The ingredients will be provided from the school’s budget, your first destination shall be in Devon I’d reckon, maybe in Lynton? You could also use the shell cottage in…”

Remember that name, the shell cottage later became a very important place for the two of us, it was a symbol of how our relationship had eventually developed, so to speak, and it was the first time I had been away from my ward in the infirmary and next to the seaside.

Dumbledore gave the instructions and the house description to my Professor and I was taken down to the ward for a nap, Pomfrey told me that I should rest for I had a long day ahead of me the next morning and I, as happy and as content I was, obeyed her without a fuss.

…

Before I proceed to the next morning, you also need to realize that the Weasleys were a big part of my life; Molly Weasley was basically the mother I never had, and their opinions really mattered to me. Their support never wavered, and I only hope that they understood my reasoning on this one too.

It took me longer than it took with Pomfrey; it was just as hard to convince Mrs. Weasley as it was to convince Ron, which made me realize where he had gotten his bullheadedness from, no offence to Mrs.Weasley though, but when it came to holding grudges or putting up petty fights, those two made the best team out of the whole clan of red heads.

Remus’s absence was only natural now, and I have been informed that the man had been made aware of my decision, still I did not receive a late owl that night when I was put to sleep, nor did he visit to see me go the next morning.

“Oh my dear boy!” Molly Weasley finally wailed, clutching me to her chest like an overprotective mother, I was smothered in her robes, flailing my arms indignantly.

“Molly, let the poor boy go before he suffocates.” Mr. Weasley tried to assuage his wife, by prying my body away from her arms.

“This isn’t acceptable! Simply not! Harry dear, please! I know what are you thinking right now, but think of us too, don’t let anyone decide for you…”

“Mom, I think this is his decision.” Bill_ the eldest son_ said soothingly, standing next to a grimacing Charlie, who awkwardly stood amongst the family, not quite sure how to react.

That was the day I decided that I liked Charlie the best.

“Anything but this! Harry dear, we could beat this cancer, if you just held on a little longer! Stopping your treatment in favor of…”

“Mrs.Weasley, I need this.” I tried to make her understand without revealing too much, her grip on my arm was getting quite painful though.

“Oh but you don’t know any better!” this set her off again, and I was once more drawn in a crushing hug, this time accompanied by the woman’s hiccup like sobs, as she stroked my frail hair. My eyes caught Ron’s blue ones and he glared halfheartedly; I knew the hurt he was feeling was not of my decision and rather the chaperon I was choosing for this task. I also knew Hermione would knock some sense into him soon enough.

“Please, Mrs. Weasley, I need all of you to get through this. Please don’t be mad at me.” I mumbled in her robes, wincing as her grip tightened a fraction.

“Oh Harry…”

“Of course we will support your wish.” Arthur finished his wife and I smiled, nervously moisturizing my lips.

This could end badly, my mind muttered. I know. I mumbled back, that was exactly what I was hoping for, for something to go right for once, to feel the same thrill that I did the other day. To feel alive at the peak of dying.

…
The next morning, I requested to be taken early in hopes to avoid a final confrontation with my friends or other students, and Snape seemed to prefer that as well, it was too early for me to be in the right mood and for him to make conversations or scold me for my poor clothing. We both were exhausted, after a restless night and I did not fancy comforting a sobbing Hermione minutes from departure.

I did left them letters though, so didn’t think they would feel awfully missed out; I didn’t have the time to focus on their feelings anymore.

“Are you ready Potter?” he asked instead of greeting and instantly went for my trunk.

I cleared my throat, the vial of the clear blue potion clutched in my hand as if it was a weapon, I was supposed to drink it under the man’s supervision only, and before we were set to leave Hogwarts. According to Pomfrey, each dose could hold me up for three days, so I would be perfectly content to swim and lap around by the sea for the next three days.

“Remember Potter, you cannot afford to waste a drop.” The man had said, my belongings safely shrunk and resting his pocket.

I uncorked the vial with shaking hands, not expecting him to stride and help me hold it in my shaking hands, tremors momentarily running through my body.
I bottomed up the vial in one go, my eyes shooting open at the vile taste; it tasted of rotten corpses, bitterly of ginger and awfully smelled of fish, it burned the walls of my mouth and my throat as it sluggishly slid down my throat. My back immediately straightened and my head felt lighter; any remnants of pain vanishing in a matter of seconds if not less.

I smiled at the man but he had already turned away.

“Hurry along. You can walk now.”

I paused only for a moment before doing so, throwing one last glance around the infirmary, knowing that it would be the last time, my conversation last night with madam Pomfrey came to my mind.

/”Take care of yourself, alright Potter?” she told me softly, her demeanor was tense and her face screwed, pruned with effort.

I smiled. “I can send letters if you want Madam Pomfrey.” I told her sweetly.

She chocked back a laugh; unshed tears glistered in her eyes. “You do that Potter.” /

The hallways were vacant, aside from the occasional chirping (bloody birds), and the talking knights and the consistent mumbling of the portraits, the shape click of our shoes was the only other sound disrupting Hogwarts’s peace.

I lingered by the bridge, knowing that this would be the last time I would ever get to enjoy this breathtaking view ever again, I tightened my robes around my frail body, my eyes set on the large pine trees racing to the top of the sky, surrendering us like a sanctuary and that bridge was our only way to the outside world.
I shook my head as I saw Snape had also stopped to watch me with an expression, I couldn’t place.

“Potter?”

I rushed to his side, surprised that I hadn’t fallen down my on face.

“I’m sorry sir.” I apologized breathlessly, thinking the man would be mad at me for stalling him.

“For what it’s worth, I am too Potter.” The man said, and I only stared, bewildered by the man’s behavior, my hands clenched as we both stood there for a moment and enjoyed the view, I stared at the peaking sun with mesmerized eyes and a fluttering heart, feeling the changes already.

‘Sometimes you just have to fade away, to dissipate into nothingness, to leave and take nothing with you. Leave everything behind, friends, family, leave your name behind and start anew, sometimes you leave everything but your name behind, and it fades by itself over time, scabs over like an old wound…but there are times when your name would be the bleeding reminder of your presence for eternity, and wasn’t that what we wanted all?’

Number II; A trip to the seaside (p.1)

The first time I remember Dudley ever mentioning the sea, was when I was five.

Everything is always way bigger, more important and giddier when you’re five, children learn how to be dramatic at that age, they learn to take things for granted, to make such a tiny or nonexistent matter and turn it into a mountain of hay, ready to be blown away with the soft breeze of reality. Even at that age, I hated being five.

To be five and be left alone for the weekend is basically a free pass to another planet and child abuse charges for the parents involved, though the Dursleys were not my parents and I was too boring and frightened to be a normal five year old.

I was such a boring kid; now that I look back at it much later, I realize my meek behavior and the Dursleys taking advantage of me was mostly my own fault, though Severus later told me that was one of the side effects of child abuse, and I was not to blame, but what does he know about being boring?

At the age of five, Dudley was the most dramatic, obnoxious, and the brattiest child I remember interacting with. He boasted about going to the sea months before the event (it was an event, for a five year old and not a simple holiday) and /years/ after it actually took place; the more he said, and boasted and goaded me into thinking that sea, was this heaven like place with loads of water and a gigantic sandbox without limitation that was only designed for good boys, the more I was convinced that I loathed the place.

The aspect of being a freak or being left alone in the house with only the old cat lady (I cannot remember her name) was not the issue, my problem was that I was five. And I didn’t believe him.

I should have been convinced if the boy had been boasting about getting to buy a flying dog or some shit like that, but instead I didn’t even fathom that this ‘sea’ thing was that great, instead I used to imagine Dudley and his parents stranded in a scary blub of filth and water where aunt Petunia burned till she got red for months and Dudley got even fatter.

The first time I ever saw the sea, was on the television, not only two years after that, as I was dusting the mantle, staggering on the stumbling stool as I constantly shifted on my knees, my short height barely allowed me to reach the top and the fear of breaking something was worse than me falling and breaking a limb.
I vaguely remember Dudley sprawled on the floor; a big bag of chips and his homework (that I was forced to do for him later) laid around him as he was drooling all over their shiny new TV.

Every once in a while I would avert my eyes and sneak a glance, my arms shaking with the sheer effort of holding my weight on the creaky mantle, and the dirty, damp rag slipping under my palm.

“OH! OH! Mommy! Mommy come look! It’s the sea! It’s on our TV!” the chubby boy suddenly screeched and I almost did a double back on the blasted stool, nearly falling in surprise.


Aunt Petunia didn’t look as excited as Dudley, but rushed in for her son’s favor nonetheless, not even having the time to scowl at me for staring open mouthed at the screen with dazed eyes; that was the moment I /fell/ in love with the sea, the first time I had dared to feel the warmth spread over my chest, and I latched on it like a leech.

Years later, it was still me who always demanded pictures of Hermione when she went on holidays to the seaside; it was me who hung over her every word as we were sitting in the train on our way to Hogwarts as Ron tuned us out in favor of devouring sweets.

And it was still me who was sitting in a rented car, humming along with a country song I didn’t know the lyrics to, as my /potion’s/ Professor was driving the car, eyes narrowed in concentration, we were headed to the cottage by the sea.

The boosting potion and my condition prevented me from using magical means for transportation, forcing the poor man, and me to jog all the way to the main gates in that ungodly hour, walk to Hogsmeade as subtly as possible, catch the train and find an empty compartment to settle in.

Snape immediately charmed the binders close and settled as far from me as possible.

“We would be in London by eleven.” Was all he told me before flipping his journal open, not batting an eye at me as I pressed myself farther into the window, struggling to catch a peak as the train was starting to move.

“This is so cool.” I breathed against the window.

“Yeah Potter, now back down before you puke.”

“No, I wanna watch the trees.”

Severus sighed in exasperation and impatience. “There’s going to be plenty where we’re going, and even if not then you would remember to abide the rules. Remember the rules.”

“Dang it.” I said without an ounce of enthusiasm and sat back, the man hummed back in the same detached tune.

After watching the nauseating process of the train from the window for another fifteen minutes just to spite the man, I decided there would be plenty of time for me to admire the nature around us and sat back with a sigh, idly glancing at my mute teacher.

Was he bored too? I wondered while yawning.

“Can we set other rules?” I suddenly wondered out loud as Snape sluggishly raised his hand to flip another page, the sound of the train moving on the trail was the only sound settling between us by then and I was more than happy to break it.

“Why should we?” he asked.

“It just seems a bit unfair that you get to make and break the rules here, besides, isn’t this a two way relationship?”

“There is /no/ relationship between us Potter. The sooner you get that the better.” After a moment of hesitation, I heard the man sigh again. I indulged a bit in his annoyance and straightened up.

“Alright Potter, what are your rules?” it seemed as if the very question pained him.

“Well…” if Hermione was there, then perhaps those set of rules wouldn’t have been as hilarious and at the same time as sad and pathetic as they have been.

“We should get on first name basis; I might as well call you Sever…ous? By now.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Come on!”

Snape dropped “Potter, I’m a thirty seven year old man with dignity, and you’re my idiotic student, you’re barely fifteen. Professor Snape is as far as you’re going to get.”

“Then call me Harry.”

“You’re violating rule number five.”

“Am not.”

“Rule number four; you are to contain your /unfortunate/ need to get close to others or care for them, especially me. I’m doing this as a favor to myself, not you. ‘Potter’ is as far as I’m going to get.”

I didn’t keep close to him anymore, I saw a lost cause when I saw one and decided to take a nap instead, now I’m not trying to sound like an old man in his fifties, but do not underestimate the sheer pleasure of taking a nap whenever possible; nap anywhere and anytime you get the opportunity. I could tell you all with confidence that I have; I’ve napped in worse places than a train compartment with my teacher before, including in a bathroom stall in a restaurant in Italy, but that happens a few months later, so I get back to the train.

To my utter surprise, the man hadn’t murdered me when I woke up two hours later, startled by a whistling sound, and Snape’s inconsistent scratching on the paper, the man was still sitting in the same position but somehow different than I think I remembered.

“Stop gawking Potter, it’s the clothes.” The man barked out when he noticed me staring and I flushed at my own slowness.

Of course it was the clothes, or the lack of them therefore; his black robe and overcoat were gone, replaced with muggle clothing, I did not bore my mind with details then, but his attire was as usual entirely in black, he had even kept his dragon hide boots, I made a sound in confusion, titling my head, but I didn’t get the chance to question the reason for his change of clothes.

He dragged me out of the station while I was still a little dazed, whirled me out of the overwhelming crowd, that was mostly consisted of muggles.
I stared around the busy station with a heavy heart, beating so hard against my chest that I was having a hard time breathing, noises overwhelmed me, so did the strangers who unintentionally bumped into me, I let myself fully in the man’s control, oddly aware of my surrendering.

“Hold onto me Potter.” Soon, we were both stepping out of King’s cross station and under London’s cloudy sky; I drew in a shaky breath.

“I…” suddenly this didn’t seem like a good idea anymore, my throat clogged and I whimpered, subconsciously curling into myself as faceless strangers swarmed around us, in what could only be described as a chaotic flop of fish; some determined to get in, pushing past other pedestrians in a hurry, and some other desperate to get out of the station, armed with luggage and annoyance.

“Calm down.” My teacher ordered. His arm squeezing my shoulder in what I supposed was a reassuring way.

“Potter.” The man hissed. “The car’s only a block away, calm down.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, I figured that the potion master must have forgotten to inform me that we would be driving in a car rather than taking the knight bus like I had assumed.

I was still in complete panic mode when Snape proceeded to take me to the other side of the street without being hit by a car or one of those taxies, no one looked at us oddly, no one spared me or my scar a second glance, and I couldn’t describe the feeling.

I was on the verge of tears when the man finally came to a stop, his gaze intently on a silver car. My eyes darted from the car back to the man and then again to the car; he wasn’t serious, was he? It took like four hours from here to Lynton with a rented car, I was absolutely sure I would lose control of my stomach the first fifteen minutes. If uncle Vernon’s driving abilities was anything to go by.

But much to my mortification, the man let go of my arm and strode to the car, leaving me to trail behind him, my mouth opening and closing like a fish.
“No.” I shook my head in denial as Snape nudged me to get me in the car, what if he didn’t know how to drive? I was so screwed! I was running from cancer, only to die from a car crash, which was considerably more pathetic than slipping on a banana skin.

“Potter would you settle down?” the man snapped once he was sitting in the driver’s seat.

“I don’t wanna die!” I squeaked, my hands already trembling and clutching the seat.

“I haven’t even started the car yet.” Snape said incredulously. “Potter, stop being dramatic, and don’t forget your seatbelt.”

A seatbelt wouldn’t prevent a horrific crash that would be the end of me, I thought in panic.

I was comically terrified, and the image of Snape behind wheels was so beyond my imagination, that part of me still thought it was dreaming. At this stage of the cancer, hallucinations occurred often, but not /that/ often for me to believe that this was one of them.

Driving with the Dursleys always had been an unpleasant experience for me; not that they took me out often, but nevertheless, the ride was never one I tended to enjoy, Petunia always had the front seat, even when she wasn’t in the car, I was always crammed in the back, next to an overwhelming amount of body mass and my cousin’s massive backside and hips. If the weight hadn’t killed me by the time we got to the destination, Dudley’s stench would have done the job.

“Settle down.” The potion professor sneered as I eyed the car with distaste and anxiety.

“Do…Do you know how to drive?” I asked, my voice trembling. Snape rolled his eyes as he started the car, causing me to close my eyes.
“I have a driver’s license.” That was the only thing he said.

That didn’t necessarily mean that he was a good driver. I bit my lower lip but remained silent, trying to contain the whimpers that were demanding to be let out.
I didn’t want to die, most definitely not in a car crash. It was too late for me to realize that maybe Pomfrey and the Weasleys were right; I was not ready for this, at all.

Snape swiftly drew out of his parking spot and I quickly wore my seatbelt before he could crash into a lamp post or something.

Which didn’t happen, Snape for all his fuss, and grumpiness, was actually a decent driver, though then, I thought it had more to do with the jamming traffic rather than his patience for insensitive jerks.

“You can open your eyes Potter.” He commanded and I did so almost involuntary, becoming face to face with the back of the car that was in front of us, blushing I wrung my hands and leaned back in my seat.

“Are you afraid of cars?” I could have been wrong, but there was a ghostly hint of amusement in his voice, though his face remained stoic and indifferent.

I flushed even harder. “No, I just find them a bit unpleasant.”

I jolted, being amazed at my own stability and capacity in speech, I didn’t even stutter. Must have been that potion, I realized.

Snape hummed, looking out of his window, we haven’t moved an inch from the block, barely a distance away from our original parking spot, with King’s cross station to our right, still harboring the same, yet different amount of people. This was going to be a long ride.

“I didn’t know you had a driver’s license sir.” I asked the man a little bit later.

Snape’s frown deepened. “You were not supposed to know of it Potter, my private life is none of your business.” I resisted the urge to snap back and set my jaw. The man obviously wasn’t in mood for small talk.

The traffic gradually grew lighter as the silence between the two of us thickened, I was more confused than ever, I haven’t seen this side of Snape before, and the sudden change was sending me into a cluster of unsolved questions. Why did Snape know how to drive a car? Why were we even going with a car? Why hadn’t we got on another train to Devon?

I voiced my questions; my fear of the man’s driving was merely a light disturbance now. Snape didn’t take his eyes off the road, but rolled his eyes at my innocent questions.

“If you had paid attention in the headmaster’s office instead of dozing off, then you would’ve known why already.” He didn’t exactly sneer, not the way he would in a classroom anyways, but he made his displeasure evident in his expression.

“I was.” I protested weakly, Snape momentarily turned and raised an eyebrow.

I shrugged defensively in response.

“We couldn’t use magical means for travel because of the potion you took this morning, it might not cross your mind, but the traces left on magical transportation devices such as portkeys can actually interfere with your own magic, and your core is already busy maintaining you as it is.”

My face grew tense; Snape saw my skeptical expression but didn’t show any outward interest in it. “We could’ve just hopped on another train, instead of renting an actual car.” I pointed out.

Snape titled his chin, his hands swiftly moving on the stir wheel. I felt my nausea slowly dissipate along with the fear. “What is your problem with cars Potter?” the man noticed my wary look.

“Why not the train though?” I asked him, ignoring the potions professor.

“We’re going to the shell cottage, and that adored train of yours, barely makes a stop at a deserted location, the distance wasn’t worth the trouble.”

“Is there any more problems?” for once, I didn’t miss the sarcasm in his voice.

I wanted to close my mouth and let the humiliation slowly trickle past in the silence, but I also couldn’t stop myself from reopening it again.

There were so many to choose from, enough to overwhelm me, some questions weren’t even related together, but still there was a sense of forbiddance and hesitance, whenever it came to asking them.

I finally settled for one. “It’s so curious that I’m only hearing of this ‘boosting potion’ now, isn’t it?”

I wanted to bring this matter up since that very morning. It was suspicious, now that I was under the influence of the said potion, I felt…normal. Yeah, I felt like I did before the cancer, pain free, almost back in my right mind and in control of my actions, why hadn’t anyone suggested this before?

Almost as if reading my mind, the potion Professor hummed in disagreement. “The potion is highly frowned upon Potter; you would know that if you had paid any attention to…”

I interrupted him rudely. “Yeah I know, to the meeting with Dumbledore.”

“That’s Professor Dumbledore, and actually I was about to say in my classroom.”

I gave him a blank look and he sighed. “The boosting potion is only a variety of magically based potions; potions or products that are influenced by your own core and not by the ingredients in the potion you’re using.” He said, fully into his teacher-lecture mode.

“Then why didn’t I get that instead of treatment?” this potion would beat Chemo every day. I thought.

Snape was silent for a while, speeding up a little now that we were out of the town and into the main road.

“That potion is not treatment per say, and long usage is…frowned upon.” He unwillingly admitted, as if saying so was a disappointment to him. I haven’t seen the likes of Severus before; the kind that were highly recognized in their field of work, and respected among peers, but not highly ethical when important matters such as this came up. Even later Severus admitted to willingly brewing some other ‘forbidden’ potions that other potion masters rarely ever approved of.

“Why? Are the ingredients too expensive?” Snape made a sound and his face almost looked as if he was wincing, but one could never be sure with Snape.

“There is that, but it’s the potion itself that’s a bit…under criticism.” Snape turned the car with caution, and I let my gaze wander around the road to other cars, the scenery, and the beauty of a cloudy grey sky.

The man continued. “Every magical core reacts differently to different types of magic, some are even allergic to the potion, some grew immune, and some reject the effects through odd bursts of accidental magic.” He explained. “Using it on a terminal illness such as yours was highly objected to.”

My teeth grazed the inside of my cheek, I drew the red cozy sweater tighter around my body, and I was starting to feel the chills, whether from the cloudy weather or the man himself. “Then why did you?”

“The dose usage I have designed for you isn’t a form of treatment, it’s a scapegoat. Surely you knew that?”

“I do know that.” I half lied. I did know that I would die regardless, but I didn’t know that the potion was assisting my body in its mission. Suddenly the ghastly taste of death in that potion made sense to me.

Snape, oblivious to my inner conflict, continued on. “So it doesn’t matter if you’re immune or not, or even if you’re allergic to the ingredients, your magic only lasts as long as four months, more or less for you to get things in order.”

“Oh.” I said lamely. Right, my clock was ticking, i will be dead by this time next year. The thought was heart wrenching and somehow exhilirating all the same.

“Potter…I didn’t upset you. Did I?” the man asked hesitantly, staring at me. I shook my head quickly in response.

“No, I’m glad that you’re honest with me.” I said honestly, and I did mean what I said; even Pomfrey tended to sugarcoat things when it came to my illness, but I liked the potion master’s bluntness, it made me sound less rude when it came to being blunt.

“It’s just that people lie to me all the time, it’s good to know that you won’t sir.”

Our conversation trailed down slowly. Having nothing to talk about and being trapped in a car with someone like Snape who hated my guts would’ve bothered me to a great extent before, but now I couldn’t find any reason to be upset about it.

From time to time, my heart did a flip as it acknowledged the fact that I was out of Hogwarts and out of the infirmary, that there would be no treatment or Chemotherapy or Mc from now on, then it would settle down as I looked out of the window and started up again when my eyes caught the passing trees. Evidence of my awareness.

By the time we were halfway to Lynton, or shell cottage or whatever the man had planned to take me, I had worked myself up to three panic attacks and back, not in the slightest car sick. My suspicions were right; it was Vernon’s driving that gave me an upset stomach, not cars in general.

“Are you hungry Potter?” the man asked, glancing at me. I raised my head from the window pane, wincing at the cracking sound in my neck.

Was I hungry? If I was being honest with myself, hunger was one of those feelings that rarely ever occurred to me; even before being diagnosed my brain never detected a feeling called hunger, it was either out of responsibility or the sound of my growling stomach that I often gave in and ate.

When I was under treatment, and under Madam Pomfrey’s watchful eyes, my meals were always on time, in coordination with my potions and the side effects of chemo and more or less blander to me, so I never outright demanded food.

“I should be by now.” I finally said, my eyes skimming over the man’s watch, it was a little after twelve, great time for lunch.

The sky was cloudier now, and every now and then a pathetic amount of drizzle came down upon us before abruptly coming to a stop and then it would start again.

Snape let go of the stir wheel and brandished his wand, before I could cry out the man waved his wand and then reached into his pockets.

“Um sir…?” the car was driving on its own, keeping a steady speed limit as Snape patiently enlarged our previously shrunk meals.

The man scowled in distaste as he saw the sandwiches. “Potter, your stomach better handles turkey sandwiches, because it’s the only available food right now.”

“Alright.” I said distractedly.

I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road, worried that Snape’s awry spell might get us in a car accident in any moment, but the man himself was too busy unwrapping and handing me my turkey sandwich to show any concerns.

“Can’t we stop?” yes, I hadn’t gotten car sick yet, but that didn’t mean I was willing to eat in a moving car, I wasn’t stupid.

Snape, much to my disappointment, shook his head and snapped. “No, we cannot afford to get out of schedule, stop fussing Potter.”

“I might throw up.” I deadpanned, affronted at the man’s sudden behavior.

“That’s what the brown paper bag is for.” The man informed me dryly. I almost laughed in disbelief, was he serious? I thought incredulously.

“I don’t think I’m hungry.” I said slowly. I had no desire to seat in car that smelled of vomit for the next of two hours, or better yet, if the man didn’t care enough to pull over for five minutes, then I wouldn’t have to care enough to go by his rules.

Fuck him anyways.

I hid the wrapped packet in my sweater for when we reached the shell cottage and went back to watching the cars, less interested this time.
Who cared what trees looked like? My mind suddenly sprung at me. They were just wood planks with leaves, like cars, which were metal planks with wheels. There wasn’t much difference between the two.

The sound of cars honking, the grip of griminess on the weather, and the ghost silence dominating the car, made me realize just how different this day was turning out from my original fantasy. There was no excitement in getting stuck in a traffic, or in watching a bland sky with no sun, or even tolerating Snape when he switched between being an absolute arse and then to the good guy, which led me to believe the man had bipolar disorder. He should have.

My rambling came to a stop when the man’s patience finally ran out. “Stop sulking.” Snape growled in frustration, he rubbed the tip of his nose.

“I’m not sulking, sir.”

“Then why aren’t you eating your lunch? Are you unwell?” the question was out of obligation and it made me sick to the stomach. This man was my guardian now. This was also added to the ever growing list of things that sucked.

“I will be unwell if I eat it.”

“I can’t spend the next two hours in this car with a sulking angst ridden teenager Potter; we might as well do something productive.”

“Like what?” I wanted to nap; feeling a bit tired and frustrated with the man. A man that I was sure that I didn’t know. I had no idea about this side of Snape; the one that drove, had a driver’s license, ate in his moving car, and actually spoke to me without sneering or sarcasm outside of his classroom. And what? It’s only been like two days?

What would happen in four months? I feared the day that Snape actually became friendly with me. (Not anymore, turned out)

Something fishy was going on here, and I was determined to find out what after my nap, but I didn’t dare to say so to the man.

It seemed as if Snape had read my mind again, the man suddenly regained his composure, lean and stoic, and it made me wonder what had happened to change the man’s mind about me in the first place, his reason to get this comfortable with me.

This person had no reason to do the things he was now, this is the same man who hated my guts only two weeks earlier, deduced points from me while I was in the infirmary, and tortured poor Mike and Neville. Why the sudden change of heart?

Opening my mouth and moistening my lips didn’t help me to smother the question so I clamped my eyes shut, It was later that I realized my hesitance was for the best. That day wasn’t /the/ day for me to pursue the man.

Eventually, as the rain properly started platting against our window, Snape leant back in his seat; looking out of the rear way mirror “We have two hours to kill with this traffic.” He waved his wand for the last time, muttering a quick ‘Finite Incantatem’ and gripped the stir wheel once again.

I pushed myself up; pursing my lips as Snape once again took control of the car, sensing the change in the man’s demeanor, I sneaked my hand to the radio and started fiddling with the stations.

Snape gave me the sour eye, clicking his tongue and I smiled sheepishly, settling for a muggle country song.

“When I said let’s do something productive, I didn’t mean listening to muggle nonsense Potter.” Despite all his nagging, he let the song stay, though he glared at me every now, grumbling as I bobbed my head to the unfamiliar tune.

“What should we do sir? Did you have a suggestion?” I inquired, feeling the glumness fading away.

The man was silent for a moment, as if ashamed of his suggestion. “Are you familiar with road trip games?”

“Are you serious?!” he couldn’t be, I drawled out in shock. Road trip games were for typical families, on normal vacations. It wasn’t made for sworn enemies on a truce, or an abnormal due of people being stuck in a car.

Snape shrugged defensively. “We might as well; I can’t handle your aggravating gaze on me the entire time, like you haven’t ever seen a man before, it’s creepy.”
“Alright, what should we play?” I yielded.

“Let’s play Spy, Potter.”

“Alright.” I conceded with a chuckle, getting the irony in the man’s tone, suddenly the song reached its chorus and I sang along, mouthing the words with the singer.

Snape wrinkled his nose in disgust. “I spy something beige with my eyes.” The man fired off casually, and my face darted off, looking for the said thing.

My mind scrambled to find words and I pruned my mouth. “It’s the beige car two lanes away, behind the white van…right?” the man nodded.

“Correct, and turn that radio down for merlin’s sake Potter.”

“I Spy something that begins with L.” I blurted out, squinting my eye through the rain.

“The lamppost we just passed, honestly Potter, you need to try harder than that.” We proceeded to play that blasted game until I finally decided to take that promised nap, half an hour before we reached the deserted beach in Lynton.

And that, guys, was our first bonding time, spent mostly on the road, under the pouring rain, way before we even reached our first destination.

It was only a shame that Snape’s shitty behavior resurfaced after that very night, reducing him to a bastard I knew and loathed, completely the opposite of the man in the rented car, playing spy with a sick boy. That was also the first time I was left hurt and confused by the man before we had even begun our adventure yet.
The thought of him distancing himself from me hurt, even back then where there were no strings attached, when I didn’t look up to the man the same way a frightened child looks at his parent.

-Someday future Harry would come to appreciate that gesture, someday future Harry wouldn’t be yearning for man’s approval as it would only worsen the agonizing weight of leaving, it would be in those very same days and on the very same beach that they were headed to, where future Harry would collapse down, where future Severus would find him hours later, and where future Harry would really come to appreciate the man’s effort to keep his distance, despite his obvious failure, because then, Harry would be /clawing/ his way out of death’s grasp in fear and desperation, not wanting to die, not after he had /gained/ so much, not when he could have so much.

It would be then that he would see the death’s pitying gaze upon him, shaking his head as Harry clung to the sobbing potion master, wishing that things hadn’t happened the way they had.

SETBACK

-Wasted time and effort; 32 hours. (He grounded me)

- Direct/Indirect influence on death; prolonging our stay in the cottage for another week.

Conclusion: I should stop calculating and adding up my hours like this. It might seem creepy.

*

My friends and healer were rather vocal when it came to choosing Snape out of all people to be my caregiver, although it wasn’t much of a choice for me at all, they (graciously) reassured me that the man and I would be back at each other’s throats eventually if not from the start, they gave us two weeks tops.

Well, Severus and I granted their predictions two weeks and a day early.

“Magical radiation is bad for you Potter; it might react negatively with your potion, so you’re going to wait in this car, until I say otherwise. Was that clear?” I nodded in understanding.

“What are you going to do?” my knees were on the car seat, easily fit in as I looped my hands around my legs, watching as the potion master bustled around the car, opening the doors and closing them, fiddling with the boot to fetch out a small black case and finally end up leaning in the car with only one of his hands, to take the switch out as the other was firmly set on the driver’s door.

“Set up the pipes, turn off any harmful magical sources except for the wards, etc. Albus said the house had a muggle setting as well, so technically speaking; there should be electricity but I doubt if the cottage has been wired. It all needs to be done by hand, so you’re useless.” He said, taking the car keys out with a sigh. Snape drew himself out of the car but left the doors open.

“Can I walk around the beach?” I asked, enjoying the wind’s limited access from the doors musing my hair.

“No.” the man snapped. “I can’t have you foolishly killing yourself off while walking headfirst into the ocean. Stay in the car.”

I scoffed. “I think I wouldn’t be that clumsy.” I was itching to run through the field, feel the wind and dip my toes in the gleaming gold specks of sand; stumbling around like an idiot was one thing, stumbling around like an idiot for the first time in a place you’ve never been before was exciting enough for my guts to twist and turn into each other.

“I’m not taking any chances Potter, now stay here, I’ll be back.” He didn’t specify an exact time and I didn’t expect him to, Snape turned to the cottage but left all doors open, probably just so I wouldn’t roast in the heat.

After a few moments of awkward humming, and narrowing my eyes to survey the clearing and the beach, I decided this was possibly a decent time for me to finally have lunch; I was just beginning to feel a subtle pinch in my stomach that could be preceded as hunger, I dove my hands deep in my pocket in search of the said lunch.

My nose scrunched up as sea air wafted into the car with a breeze; I hadn’t been expecting the moistness of the air or the intense smell of seashore, to be this familiar, if I was being honest. It was one of those things you just knew by instinct; even though it was my first time by seaside, and I was still in a confined space, I could bet my life that I would’ve recognized the smell anyways.

I shifted a bit in my seat and got the wrapped sandwich out of my sweater with a grimace.

Food is two things to me; it’s either the liquid food I had been forced to chock up on since I found out I was sick, with a bland taste, sludgy form, and honestly more like the gooey sap we brewed in our potion’s class rather than soup.

Then there was /food/; rich, house elf made food, which made your mouth water and your stomach to protest against world hunger, the kind of food, I never saw myself indulging in as an orphaned child.

The sandwich I was munching on was an utter disgrace to both groups; oh it was made by house elves alright, but even that couldn’t salvage the poor wrapping to be squashed in a sweater in a car for the better part of the day.

After a bit of pondering, I dissected the sandwich and picked out the pickles, the soaking tomatoes and wrinkled my nose before putting the turkey back together.
The more I stayed in the car, the more I felt the profundity of the humid odor that hung in the car; it smelled a bit of damp and rain water mainly because it had rained mostly all the way, mixed with an indistinguishable scent of herbs that I couldn’t recognize.

By the time the sun was only starting to warm things up again I had already finished my lunch, so I got busy working my way through Snape’s unopened juice box (it was just lying there and I was thirsty); I sneaked a few glances at the cottage as the orange juice was drained, spying to see if Snape has come out at all; he had been gone for half an hour now.

I got out of the car with the empty juice box clenched in my sweaty palm, narrowing my eyes at the sudden change in light; I felt the comfortable caress of the sun blazing down upon me and the car. I slammed all of the doors shut and jammed my hands in my pockets, my eyes two slime slits as I ignored the beach and turned to walk to the porch.

Small rocks groveled beneath my feet, as wind blew, I caught Snape’s figure crouched somewhere behind the cottage’s lawn, muttering something.

Snape scowled as I drew nearer, his tone was snarky, but not up to his own usual standards. “I’ve been expecting you to disobey me sooner Potter. You’re getting slow.”

“I got bored sir; can I get in the house now?”

The man nodded in confirmation, getting back inside. “The wards are taken care of. The rooms are upstairs potter so you go choose if you want.”

“The bathroom is at end of the same hall, I put your trunk by its door.” The potion master continued, his face maintaining a casual expression. I looked around, noticing the shells and dried starfish embedded in the pale white walls, a wind chime made of small vulnerable looking shells and the open design of the small, but surprisingly homey cottage.

I could easily imagine myself living in this place. At peace with the world, calmed by the sound of the waves and basked in its comforting scent, I could even imagine dying in a place like this.

It brought the coziness of the burrow and the shrill of being in an unfamiliar place to me at once, and I liked it.

“Thanks sir.” I ran my hand along the sturdy handrail of the stairs, noticing small pecks of sand prettily tucked at the corner of each, coloring the dark wood with sandy speckles.

“I’ll be in the kitchen, I have a headache, so do not bother me if unnecessary. However you are to call for me if you needed anything or if there was an emergency.” Snape ordered and I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me doing so.

‘Upstairs’ was just as lovely as the main floor, the walls were as pale (with no picture or portrait hanging on them) and the floor was squeaky clean, also with polished dark floorboards. The roof hung a bit low but I couldn’t really complain as I spotted my trunk at the end of the hall and went to retrieve it.
After quickly dropping in the bathroom (I had no idea I needed to pee before, I’ve been holding in all day) and checking out all of the rooms, I went to unpack. The room I’ve chosen wasn’t the largest, as there wasn’t really such a thing in this cottage, but it wasn’t small enough to be declared as Dudley’s second bedroom junior either.

The room I chose was the only one with French doors that led to a magnificent view of the sea that I had yet to check out, it was also the only one with a walk in wardrobe, much to my surprise. I’ve never seen a walk in wardrobe before, and embarrassingly enough, it entertained me longer than I cared to admit… just long enough for me to be lose interest in unpacking in the first place.

As I inspected the desk set next to the French doors, I decided that I should at least write a letter to Hermione and the Weasleys to let them know I was alright, specially seeing as I had left rudely on such a short notice; Ron was bound to hate me now, for more reasons than one.

Just for the sake of the flickering sense of humor in me and as an apology to my friend, I decided to describe my car drive in more excruciating detail and glitter it with a bit of exaggeration (we did play a variety of games that Severus would rather die than admit), in my letter. Ron for one would have one hell of a laugh about all the things I did to Snape today.

Smiling softly, I sat on the chair and laid my hands upon the desk, already forming the words I wanted to have in my letter.

I was giddy at the prospect of writing, as I was with everything after stopping that gruesome treatment. The thing was...chemo often left me so sick that writing or walking round or sitting upright for more than a minute was not a high priority on my list, now that I could get to do them though… it felt as if it was for the first time.

My grin froze on my face as I was only posing to stand up; my body went completely rigid for a moment, the air stilled as well, and silence was startlingly prominent in my brain for a few moments. In order to send or receive a letter, I needed my owl, but…

/Where's Hedwig? /

I gasped, eyes widening as they inspected the room more thoroughly, thinking that I must have left her in the car or downstairs or… somewhere. There was no way that I had left without her, I was sure of it… was I sure of it?

I ran out of my room and down the stairs faster than I have in months and bolted to the kitchen while heaving, wildly looking for the familiar golden cage that was just /bound/ to be here somewhere.

Snape also came barreling out of the kitchen, thinking that something must have happened to me; I returned his weary glance with a tearful gaze as we almost collided into one another.

“Where’s Hedwig?” I asked him frantically, and he just blinked for a moment.

“What is wrong with you Potter?” the man gritted out maliciously, his eyes still narrowed; I thought that he probably wondered if I was playing a prank on him. But I wasn’t… I can’t even fathom what had happened to Hedwig. How had I forgotten about her?

“Where is Hedwig, did we bring her?” my face contorted, as Snape’s grew blank and sneering once more.

“You just scared the living hell out of me you idiotic boy. Running around like a racket, I thought you were dying.” As he was saying this my mind was thousands of miles away, wondering what had happened to my precious owl; I must have left her at the castle, or somewhere that clearly wasn’t here, I just didn’t know where.

“What is it?” he grudgingly snapped and I sniffed, dragging my sleeve down my face.

“Hedwig. I left her.” I didn’t even know why I was crying, bottom line would be Snape quickly going back to the school to retrieve her, or sending a letter for her to fly here to the cottage, but there was something unspeakably morbid about my forgetfulness and unbalanced emotional state that required my full indignation about this.

I was such a selfish person, Hedwig hasn’t seen me in months, and I still neglected her regardless.

The man pinched his nose. His tone was irritated. “Hedwig as in your…”

I cut him off with urgency. “My owl, where’s Hedwig?”

The man crossed his arms with a scowl. “Obviously not here.” His eyebrows were suddenly arched in surprise. “Are you crying?” he asked, looking taken back.
I shook my head in frustration. “No, we need to go get her…”

“I’m sure /Hedwig/ can fend for herself until morning. Calm down Potter.”

“No I can’t! We need to go and get Hedwig, what if she’s hurt, or if she can’t find us?” I said pathetically. What if she’s been dead all these months and I didn’t know? What if she thought that I had abandoned her?

My mind was buzzing and rationality wasn’t really a big deal then, every probable possibility was being drummed in my head and Snape was none the wiser.

“She’s been in the owlery, yes? There’s no reason for a tantrum Potter, she’s safe, now stop crying.” He was tired, I could tell, the man was exhausted from driving all day in the traffic, and his constant rubbing at the temples told me more than enough about his apparent headache, still I prodded him.

“I’m not crying, but we have to go now.”

The potion master sighed again. “We can’t. It’s already past seven, too late for me to leave you all by yourself, I’m not fit to apparate either; we’ll just have to wait until morning so I could…”

“Send them a letter; Hedwig knows how to find me.”

Severus’ face twisted in a mild sneer, similar to the ones he gave me when I was in the infirmary. “I don’t have an owl Potter, and even if I did, I wouldn’t humiliate myself over what can be fixed in less than a few hours. Now go unpack, we’ll eat dinner and then you’re sleeping.”

“But Hedwig…”

“I said no, Potter. Get the hint.”

“I can’t leave her.” I said pleadingly.

“You’ve been doing it for months, I can’t apparate or floo with you around, and so that owl will have to wait.”

“Take the car then, there should be a way to…”

The man lost his patience and flipped out. “FOR the last bloody time Potter, that blasted owl will be fine.” He gritted out. “I don’t care if it’s not; its presence doesn’t make a grand difference in our lives, so it’s not urgent enough for you to bawl over. It was your inconvenience that brought this up in the first place. That owl is safe in the owlery, and will remain so until I see fit. Was that clear?”

“I can’t just leave her; it’d be quick, if you could just…”I pleaded; my stomach churning uncomfortably.

“No, Potter. Now leave, I told you not to bother me if it’s not urgent, I don’t want to see your face until dinner.”

“Don’t be so mean Snape, Hedwig was all I had, it doesn’t even take a minute for you to go back and get her.”

“Well guess what? I’m not going, not now, not tomorrow, not ever. If you wanted to bring that blasted owl along, you should have done it yourself. Now get out of the kitchen.”

The urge to stomp my feet down and be a brat like Dudley was so strong that I actually considered it, but then I was reminded that this was /Snape/, and the man already looked pissed enough that his peace had been disrupted, he might actually do me in if I stepped an inch out of line.

“I hate you.” I spat out with as much force as possible, not even caring how childish and lame I sounded like as I turned and walked out of the small kitchen.

Fuming upstairs, my door was slammed shut with more force than usual, I flung myself on the bed and sighed, my lips pressing together as I cursed myself for my forgetfulness. The excitement engulfing me while leaving the damned infirmary was so propitious that I forgot to pack the one thing that mattered to me the most; only that bloody potion had to be what reminded me of her.

She was more than just my familiar; she was my friend, and somebody who was always there for me when others weren’t. Even if that wasn’t the case, how was I supposed to communicate with others now?

Dread filled my stomach with a cold stab, causing me to curse under my breath. Surging to my feet, I started to pace, being too angry to go to the balcony and enjoy the view and too proud to go downstairs and beg Snape some more, I was stuck in a mild panic. What was the deal with him anyways?
I paced and sulked for a while, long enough to completely miss the sunset and the breathtaking view of the sea while I was at it, not only that, but my brooding left little time for me to unpack, so without taking a shower or even a change of clothes, I dragged myself downstairs for /dinner/.

I was really starting to hate the cottage.

“Don’t play with your food Potter, it’s disgusting.” The man drawled from across the table while we were seated at the small round table, the table cloth was creamy and covered with a thin layer of clear latex, our plates snuggly dipped in when they were finally set.

I twirled the spoon in my hand again, just to irritate the man. “I just had lunch a few hours ago.” I grumbled. The awful aftertaste of the turkey was still somehow lingering in my mouth.

“That’s because you refused to eat it once the time was right Potter. Stop the excuses; I can keep this up longer than you might think is possible.” Despite his nonchalant tone, I could easily detect his frustration from the stoic look on his face.

I didn’t grace the man with a response, cramming the spoonful of stew in my mouth, and started chewing with the spoon still in.

“When will you get Hedwig sir?”

“Not tonight.” The man responded sternly.

I didn’t push him, mainly because some irrational-or rather rational, at the time- part of my brain warned me against angering the man; without Hedwig to deliver my cries for help the potion master could do anything he wanted to do with me, refraining from reminding him of that fact was overreacting at best and a real concern at its worst.

Snape made me clean up the dishes as punishment, and glared daggers at my back whenever he thought I wouldn’t notice, I had half a mind to turn back and snap at him, I had brain cancer, I wasn’t a dolt, the potion master was either mad because I told him I hated him, or was already starting to take advantage of Hedwig’s absence.

“What?” I finally snapped. Snape stared back at me, unimpressed.

“Nothing. Your curfew is at ten. You’re free until then, call only if it’s urgent Potter, not for your forgotten pajamas.” I let the jab slide on purpose and only glared back. I hated this; I hated to be proved wrong by myself, to see what a bastard Snape was turning to already, and it wasn’t even our first day here.
I decided to give it one last go from tomorrow, I wanted this, I needed to get this list done before my illness finally caught up with me, and for all that mattered then, that man was what held that key above my head, he was the one who was making my new potions, and he was my caregiver above everything else. I needed him, as much as I detested that.

“Greasy bat.” I muttered under my breath, sneaking a glance at the man before trudging my way to my new room with less enthusiasm and awe than the last time.
The cottage had no wiring, and I was dragging my feet in absolute darkness, it didn’t scare me at all and I managed to find my room without tripping even once (mind blowing as it was, I wasn’t even surprised at this point), I felt the sturdy texture of the creaky door and closed it behind my back, feeling oddly depressed and alone again.

Unpacking my belongings, I put all my clothes in the walk in closet and even filled the small bookshelf above my desk in total darkness, accompanied by the silence and the old creaking of the cottage. I figured I should ask Snape for some candles in the morning; moonlight could only illuminate things so much.
The sheets on the single bed smelled clean, but I could tell they haven’t been washed in a while; they smelled a bit of damp and salt, a scent my nose was beginning to familiarize with rather quickly. I curled up in myself and stared at the French doors with longing, I could hear the waves clashing beneath me if I really paid attention, in that darkness and the weightlessness that heaved on my chest, I could even imagine myself floating over the water, being lulled to sleep.

‘That’s how you die Potter.’ A voice whispered in my head.

‘All alone, and pathetic, with the things you love only a touch away.’ She was right, the one thing I had obsessed over with since I was a child was like ten steps away and I even didn’t have it in me to walk that much, to just get a glimpse at what Dudley had been gloating about for years… it all was starting to feel petty.
Why did I even want to do these things? To indulge in them and lose them forever? Who knew if I would live until tomorrow to finally see the ocean, or to get Hedwig back?

When they told me I had cancer, they didn’t warn me about the depression or the mental anguish that was following me now, I felt as if it came only in small bursts to irritate me; that day in the infirmary when Snape caught me crying, countless nights before that, mourning Sirius’ death and Remus’ permanent absence… this new potion was only toning it down a bit now, at least it stopped me from crying.

My eyelids grew heavier with each thought, and my breath eased out eventually, as I succumbed to an uneasy sleep.

*
I didn’t sleep for long.

My feet flew over the wooden porch in a flash, darting over the steps and rushing forward to the clashing waves ahead. My breath caught in my throat, and I involuntarily trembled as the night’s chilling breeze passed over me, tingling the air with the salt and the distinctive smell of seaweed. I needed to be quieter or Snape would come out (he was in the basement, somewhere); I quietly sneaked down the porch.

The scene could better be described as a figment of my imagination, as I tumbled towards the beach; the night’s starry sky had collided with the never-ending ripples of the water, both littered with small glittering stars, so vividly, in fact, that I could barely tell where one ended and the other begun.

My legs were dragging me forward; I helplessly tried to fixate the thin duvet on my shoulders as they constantly got caught under my feet, it tangled me like it didn’t want me to venture any further, but I was determined to finally get a taste of what sea really felt like, would it feel cold? Was the water warm? Were the waves dangerous?

As I got closer, I simultaneously heard the gurgling sound of the sea the moment my feet finally was set on the squashy sand, the feeling sent a jolt up my spine, my eyes were dragged down to my wiggling feet, the warm sand swaying between my toes, and fitting snuggly beneath me like a rug.

The feeling was foreign enough that I wanted to sink my hands in it as well, so I did. I dropped to my knees and delved my fingers in the sand, drawing parallel lines with my fingers as I grinned like an idiot. I couldn’t stop smiling though, I felt like a small child, exploring and getting to know everything around him from the start.

_It is not enough for me to read that the sand on the seashore id soft; my bare feet must feel it. I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation._

If I had read ‘Fruits of the earth’ sooner, I might have been mildly affected by that paragraph when I finally got to put a sensation behind my knowledge of sand, but I didn’t… not for another two months before it was given to me, although the thrill of pure emotion never ceased to amaze me afterwards, not for a single moment.

Playing in the sandbox as a child was never an option for a scrawny kid like me, not when Dudley and other kids dominated over the playground whenever I got the chance to sneak out as well, not only that, but I was rightfully afraid of what Petunia will say if I dragged mud, sand and filth all over her house. The house that /I/ cleaned, mind you.

I played with it for a while, I liked the soft and squashy texture, if I fisted my hands, they would gather in like prisoners, if I smoothed my palms, they would cover it like a warm secure blanket, and if I drew mindless patterns on the ground, they would turn into a masterpiece just to appease me. The feeling was nice, but it left my skin a bit itchy. Not that I minded.

The waves sounded more overwhelming and louder the closer I got to them, soon they were all I could hear above the crickets crying, and the wind shuffling through the woods, the smell was stronger as well, I swore that I could even taste it in my mouth now.
The closer I got, the more I came to the same assumed conclusion; Dudley wasn’t lying, he wasn’t even remotely exaggerating, the sea was breathtakingly beautiful.

I sank down next to the shore, close enough that the foaming water only lapped up to my sand covered toes, my hands were splayed behind me and I titled my head to the sky, feeling intensively relieved.

I knew that I hadn’t made a mistake, now that my depressive burst was over and things were a bit brighter…cutting treatment, and gradually dying was absolutely worth this, even with Snape as my chaperon, specially him, because I knew that somehow, I wouldn’t be able to express myself around the people I fully knew (even though the potion master was a git) , I could never feel comfortable enough around Mr. Weasley to sneak out in the middle of the night like this, just to spite him after an argument, nor could I enjoy the fulfillment that I was feeling now under their scrutinizing gaze.

I don’t know if I had ever felt that sense of effectuation before, but if the feeling that night was anything to go by, I’d say I never had fully lived until then.
Somewhere down the line, I decided that watching it isn’t pleasing anymore, not if I hadn’t gotten to feel it, so I got up to my feet, and cautiously neared the waves.
First the tips of my toes were run over by the assuaging current of water, which relaxed me to the point that delving into the sea without any swimming abilities seemed like no big deal. My feet indignantly splashed as I proceeded to go further, the grin on my face almost splitting it in two.

“Snape is going to kill me.” My voice didn’t carry any emotions aside from the slight quiver of relief.

“Snape is going to murder me.” I said a little louder, the smile evident in my cheeky tone.

“Snape is going to cut me up and use me in small portions to make potions.” I said the third, mainly because I was enjoying my tongue-tied free night as a semi healthy person, rather than trying to wake the man up.

My legs dragged further into the water, and the waves were shyly peaking a little above my ankles now, not exactly cold or chilling, but not overly warm either. It was surprising that I could still feel the wet sand underneath my feet, and at the same time, feel the weightlessness of my legs being dragged by the water.

Snape was going to kill me; if I didn’t go right back in and pretended I didn’t sneak out here in this cold, he would surely send me packing in the morning, and land my butt back to Hogwarts before I could say jellyfish.

“You’re right Potter, he is.” A cold voice drawled behind me, and I jolted forward into the water from fright.

“Snape.” I blurted out, I was only half turned, and the damn duvet (now slightly wet and drenched) still tangled around my frame, creating an annoying friction with the sand that was making it hard for me to turn without putting myself at a disadvantage.

“Potter.” The man growled out, closer than I actually thought he would be standing.

“What on /earth/ are you doing in there?!” to his defense, I would have taken the man considerably more seriously if he didn’t look so exhausted or sluggish, the man must have been awake all night, despite claiming to have a headache earlier. (I later found out not only the man was having a severe headache that night but was prohibited from taking any forms of potions to cease the pain)

“I… I woke up and I thought...” I stammered lamely after he repeated the question a few times. The man strode even closer and I stumbled towards him, the duvet still burdening me with its dead weight.

“What does you waking up normally entail Potter? Getting a soak in the sea in the middle of the night?” he seethed, his hand closing around my frail wrist the moment I was in his general vicinity. I shrugged him off with a scowl. So the man’s still hissy about earlier today, I thought to myself.

“I just wanted to look, Snape.” I said defensively.

With another furious rub at his temple, Snape jeered. “Look at what exactly? Because to me it seemed like you were about to foolishly drown yourself under my watch in the middle of the night.” I gaped; did the man really think I was so stupid, as to just walk in the water and drown myself?! How stupid really the man thought I was?

“The water didn’t even reach my knees, give me a break.” Just like that, my magical and surprisingly intimate moment with myself was shattered. Snape’s sneer was illuminated only by the moonlight; I felt the depth of his gaze see through my soul and shuddered.

Snape jeered, his face was somehow even more frightening then. “Do not overestimate your authority Potter.” He seethed. “You are in trouble right now, in case you haven’t noticed. Your cheekiness will not be appreciated.”

I scoffed. “Next you’re gonna say I’m in trouble for breathing. I don’t see any problem in taking a walk…”

“Do not play coy, it doesn’t become you. We had a specific set of rules and I doubt going behind my back just to spite me is one of them.”

I blinked.

“What? I wasn’t going behind your back! Stop putting words in my brain!” I retorted angrily, my hands clenched into fists, and I gritted my teeth.

Snape looked unimpressed and angry at the same time, hardly looking like he could contain himself if this argument dragged on. “I can’t have you killing yourself Potter; there are more humiliating deaths than surviving cancer and accidentally drowning.”

His last comment stung, but I didn’t let it get to me, I was too scandalized and indignant to lean my focus away from the anger to hurt.

“It didn’t even reach my knees!” I exclaimed. “ I was not doing this to get back at you, I don’t even know why you’re mad, I woke up, and this is my first time by seaside, so I decided to take a walk.” It sounded ridiculous; I thought to myself, I had no idea why the man was so mad that I had sneaked out.

Couldn’t he at least begrudge me or humor me from time to time? I was /dying/.

Instead, Snape did the last thing I could possibly think of. “You were just waiting for us to be out of Hogwarts, waiting for a chance to flaunt your arrogance around and use the illness as an excuse, well guess what Potter? That is not going to happen here.” Severus spat out venomously, causing me to flinch. I narrowed my eyes, my nails were painfully digging into the palms of my hands, as I desperately tried to think of an appropriate come back.

“Don’t be mean to me! I just needed to see the…” I stuttered. I suddenly felt vulnerable and small, exactly the way I would have felt in the man’s class as a child. I was being bullied.

“/See/ what exactly? The constant and repetitive motion of the water?” he sneered. I defiantly kept my mouth shut in response.

“Get back inside the house now.” He growled out tiredly. Probably too exhausted to continue.

I grudgingly sniffed, trying to stomp past him. The damn duvet kept getting caught under my feet every few steps, causing me to limp.

As we turned to walk to the cottage, the man’s rambling continued, though even I could tell it was halfhearted. “First with that rowdy owl, and now with sneaking out, what’s next to cursing your teacher Potter? To think that I stayed up all night to replenish the potion stock for a brat who clearly doesn’t deserve such privileges.”

I huffed, not looking back at him. “I’m not talking to you Snape; you’re just pissed off ‘because you didn’t get to nap.” My wet feet were now covered in sand, now it just made me itchy and uncomfortable, making me realize how I tried I still was.

“Get. Going. Potter.” His glare was enough to get me moving again.

“You’re being unfair and you know it.” I mumbled.

“Potter.”

“Sir.” I gritted out. “You…”

Snape interrupted me with snarl. “No Potter, I’m going to stop you right there, I’m dealing with you tomorrow, but rest assured; there wouldn’t be any midnight getaways for you anymore.” I finally stopped, about two feet away from the porch, and threw a disgusted glare at my Professor.

I opened my mouth a few times, looking for the right words. “Well, if you didn’t have to be an utter…”

“Do not finish that sentence…” he warned, but I did it anyways.

“…Dick!” I chewed out. “Then I wouldn’t have to sneak out to watch the sea in the middle of the night.”

The man charged and roughly seized me by my wrist, his fingers forcefully stopping me from storming off.

When he spoke, his tone was deadly calm, but his bloodshot eyes cut into my frightened gaze. “You do not talk back to me. You will not…” he gave me a rough shake. “Take your cheek to your authority like that Potter, I am your teacher, I deserve the outmost respect for putting up with an invalid like you. You will /not/ insult me like that again when I /order/ you to stay in your bed in the middle of the night. Where you should be.”

I opened my mouth to retort but he caught me off again. “Close. Your. Mouth. An adult is talking, you sneak out from the house again, and you will be back at Hogwarts before you could even think of a comeback.” He let go of my throbbing hand but I could already feel it bruise; that’s what chemo does to your body, it wrecks your immune system and along comes the constant scarring, unexplained bruises or questionable red rashes along with the additional crap.

He followed me like a hawk as I grudgingly made my way to the door; I knew that I had overstepped my boundaries by cursing the man and arguing with him, but I adamantly believed that he also didn’t have the right to speak to me like that.

He didn’t check to see if I have gone back to my room, but I heard him shuffling around in the living room, moving furniture or some other shit like that, I balled up the soaked duvet and chugged it at the bathroom door before retreating to my room with a pout.

I had no idea what the man had in mind for me then, but somewhere down the line, I’m glad that I didn’t, sure, Sev apologized a few months later and we laughed it off as a hilarious joke, but oh boy, was I in for a treat after pissing on the man as severely as I had on my first night.

Snape and I determined our opinions about sleeping in quite early in the relationship; we both had a particular hate towards Italian moldy cheeses (long story), we were not morning people and African jazz was not allowed after nine pm.

All of the above resulted in me somehow sleeping in during our time together; but, this was the longest I had slept in… ever.

Considering my last night’s shenanigans, I slept pretty well, with almost no headaches or other symptoms waiting to ruin my day, I was still convinced that I would wake up blind or in pain and this whole thing would have been ruined, but nope…I was absolutely fine and well rested, most people would be by sleeping in till eleven.

Turned out, I had misplaced most of my stuff when I had unpacked, so I spent a fair amount of time sorting through those before gleefully choosing my clothes for the day, I picked up Dudley’s nicest button up shirt which only had two small (barely noticeable) holes in it, and pulled up my best pair of jeans.

I padded out of the room in relative silence, and to the bathroom, surveying the hallway again in the daylight; pretty much the same since last night, which was a good sign.

There were several rolls of fluffy towels stuffed in the cupboards so I didn’t have to redress and fetch my forgotten one, the walls were the same pale clay and a small window let sunshine brighten up my morning.

When I was placed in the ward, I was only allowed showers once a week, sometimes every two weeks because I was in so much pain that I could barely form coherent sentences; poor Madam Pomfrey had to clean me with a wet cloth or charm me clean so I wouldn’t stink up the whole infirmary.

Frankly, I barely cared at the time; not only Chemo hurt like hell, but the side effects sucked, the first two weeks I was pretty much unconscious (something about the swelling of my head, before my first surgery), fifth week onward, I was still coming to the terms of my illness, to the fact that I might never get to live past tomorrow… when tomorrow came… I was blind so… I couldn’t properly take care of myself.

So if any of my ranting comes to consolation, I had not seen myself naked for a /very/ (and I stress that) /very/ long time.

Self-consciously, I reached for the hem of the shirt I had blindly wore only a few moments ago and pulled. The shirt easily rolled off my arms and over my shoulder and before I knew it I was holding the overgrown shirt in my trembling hands.

There wasn’t a mirror in the bathroom, so my bodily inspection was as through as it got; my limbs were of a bird’s, bony and thin to the point that it was disgusting, all of the body mass I had gathered piece by piece from Quidditch and hard labor at the Dursleys was gone, though I already suspected them to, although, I hadn’t visually imagined how would they look like until now.

Things were as expected, up to my elbows (where I have gotten glimpses of, anyways), so I was used to that. I drew my fingers above my elbow and went over the shoulder, prodding and pushing on the stubborn bones that stuck out of my leather like but pale skin.

I was grossed out and fascinated by my own body at the same time, I know that I had shrunken in size, but having enough comprehension to fully acknowledge that fact was completely different.

My ribs each poked out hideously, my knees were wobbly, and from what I could feel, my face was /not/ doing good.
Babies reach self-awareness when they’re thirteen months old, they see themselves in a mirror and think ‘Holy Moly, is that me in there?’ while pointing at themselves back and forth, and looking at someone to finally say; “Yes that’s you sweetie!”

When they’re at least eighteen months old-give or take- they start touching their own faces in recognition, probably still thinking ‘ Holy Moly, is that what I feel like?’ then they look for an adult again and they say ; “Get your hand out of your nose Daisy!”

“Holy Moly Potter, why are you so ugly?” I said to myself as I tiredly rubbed my face, feeling the dark bags gathered under my eyes, my lightning bolt shaped scar, and my thinned out hair, no wonder Snape acted so disgusted and irritated with me, I wouldn’t like to look at myself either.

I dropped my hands and sighed, mildly disturbed, but not as much as I thought I would be.

There was a bathtub near the window, with a curtain and everything, but honestly, after what I have seen of myself that day, I preferred the shower. My shoulders relaxed under the hot blast of the water as I let out a long sigh, closing my eyes in appreciation.

It would be the first time that I truly enjoyed a hot shower out of Hogwarts; I stood under the cascading water for quite some time, disdainfully eyeing myself. I really hoped these potions would help me gain some weight; I looked like a dead boy walking. (They didn’t help in the slightest.)

After the water started running cold, I scrambled to wash myself as conveniently as possible, rushing the last few minutes before quickly drying myself off with those fluffy white towels and redressing myself in Dudley’s clothes.

I examined the faint bruise on my wrist, noting the distinct similarity to Snape’s fingers as they were clasped around my arm. That man had a lot to apologize for today. I thought.

Snape was either still asleep, or didn’t feel like coming out of his room, as late as it was. I scavenged the first floor, not daring to go out again or explore the beach, I couldn’t even bring myself to look through the backdoor and that left a bitter taste in my mouth.

I left the kitchen, and vehemently made my way into the living room. I was bored out of my mind, frustrated because I was suddenly reminded of Hedwig, and a bit Hungry, if that was what the churning in my stomach meant.

The furniture adorning the cottage didn’t look old or shabby, but it was well worn, the coffee table was sturdy, seemed to be marked repeatedly with something akin to a knife, the loveseat I claimed, had a few stray threads hanging loose in its side, and if you really squinted, you could see a small burnt whole on the left side of the rug from where I was sitting. It made me wonder, just what kind of people had lived in this place?

I claimed every furniture in the living room as if I was spreading an infectious disease, I lounged on the couch and stared up at the ceiling for seemingly hours, laid on the loveseat upside down with skewed glasses just to see what happens, and messed a little bit with the wind chime, I felt a distinct endearment upon hearing it, one that I couldn’t quite place.

I tried my best to not think about Hedwig, I was feeling so guilty about forgetting her last night that forgetting her now was the only thing that remedied the remorse, and it wasn’t like I could do anything about it either; fussing and throwing tantrums wouldn’t magically make her appear.

“Get your feet off the table, Potter.” A grumpy voice called out instead of greeting.

“Good morning.” I greeted him solemnly.

Snape passed by my feet, glaring from the corner of his eyes as he bellowed his robes in my direction and disappeared into the kitchen.

I frowned. “Are you still mad?” I called out to the shoulder that wasn’t covered by the wall, staring at half of Snape’s back as the man bustled around the kitchen.
I got up when Snape didn’t answer, stubbornly, wanting to get a response from the potion master. I hated silence treatment, because it basically meant that the other person thought that you don’t exist, and that’s very insulting to someone who’s about stop existing in a few months anyways.

“Are you still mad sir?” when the man didn’t answer, I just went ahead. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have sneaked out of the house like that, or insulted you… so?”
“So, what Potter?” the man drawled out, unimpressed.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Wasn’t the answer obvious? “So, it’s your turn to apologize.” I told him slowly. “You bruised my wrist, you shouted at me, you refused to go after Hedwig, and now you’re giving me the silent treatment.”

Snape contemplated me for a moment and then drew forward, grasping my wrist in one hand and flicking his wand with the other.

“What are you doing?!” his wand was pointed at my wrist, as he muttered an incantation that awfully sounded like ‘Whisky’. I trashed, yanking my wrist away empathetically.

“Quit fussing boy.” The man muttered on his lips and suddenly let my wrist go, making me topple back a few steps. I stared at him in bewilderment.

“What did you just do?” I asked him in a high pitch note, inspecting the smooth, pale skin of my wrist.

Snape rolled his eyes. “I thought you said the arm was bruised. Now it isn’t.”

I sputtered with wide eyes. “But-But- didn’t you say magical radiation… take it off now! Unheal it! Oh my god!”

“Yes?”

“Take it off, you-you might kill me or something!” I flailed my hand in front of his face, incredulously gawking at the oblivious potion master.
Snape only took out a mug for himself and went to fill the small kettle, ignoring my flailing over his shoulder. “You were about to drown yourself last night, what difference does it make to you?” he commented blankly.

“You’re not serious are you? You said that-that magical radiation could cause a reaction; well my death is a reaction away! Why did you do that?!” this was turning into one disaster after the other. I fumed. Ron was absolutely right, I /was/ out of my mind for coming here with Snape.

Snape put the filled kettle back on the stove, casually leaning against the counter. “There aren’t any rules prohibiting me from not doing it Potter. If you disregard the rules so swiftly then why shouldn’t I?”

I glared at him. “I wasn’t drowning myself. “ I gritted out. “From where I was looking, my foot was barely even in the water when you started overreacting like the greasy git you are!”

Snape scowled, he narrowed his eyes at me and clenched his hands, and I could see the exhaustion reeling off of him in waves. “Oh yeah? Well let me tell you how it looked like from where /this greasy git/ was looking potter, /you/ knee dipping in volatile waves in the middle of the night. The water wasn’t up to your ankles Potter, it was well above your /knees/, and you like a stargazed idiotic Gryffindor, just /kept/ going further in the sea without supervision.” He spat out, his glare stabbing daggers into mine. Instinctively, I took a step back, dropping my head as I processed the words.

“You’re lying; I know the water was up to my ankles, I felt it.” I finally said with fake certainty and confidence.

The kettle started whistling madly, too soon in my opinion, but Snape paid it no mind. “Well apparently, your feelings aren’t to be trusted with a golf ball crammed in your brain.” He retorted viciously, making me flinch.

I stilled.

“You’re saying that I couldn’t tell the difference between my knees and my ankle? Even with that potion you gave me?” I scoffed at the man. It was obvious that he was lying, I knew what I saw last night, Snape was just a prat who wanted to make a fuss out of nothing, to ridicule me and kick me whilst I was down for the fun of it. He was probably pissed that I have gone behind his back and he had missed a few hours of his beauty sleep.

Snape grabbed the bustling kettle with a swift hold and poured the hot steaming water in his mug. “Well it’s either that, or you are naturally obtuse. Neither is unlikely, as they say, apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Savagely, he smacked down the kettle on the table.

“I don’t believe you.” I gritted out childishly.

“I don’t care if you do.” The man snapped back just as childishly. “I know what I saw Potter, and you’re still getting punished for it.”

“I don’t believe you.” I snapped again. “You lie because you like seeing me suffer.”

Severus almost tore the tea bag as he was detaching the string. “No Potter, you /think/ that I would like that, because you assume that everything in this world should be hovering around your holy presence. That is not the case.” He dumped the bouncing tea bag in his mug, as he said this, his angry obsidian eyes were on me the whole time.

“You just like to make me miserable.” I shot back stubbornly.

“As if.” The man scoffed. “/James Potter/ liked to make our lives miserable, /you/ as his son may too, but I’m not that petty, potter. As I’ve said, you’re still getting punished for your foolishness.”

“Merlin, why don’t you just apologize and get this thing over with?!”

Snape, once again, drew out his wand and vanished the soggy tea bag out of his mug, irritating me even more. “Because I’m the adult, and I do not tolerate your Gryffindorish foolishness. Unfortunately, they would come down barreling at my door if the boy who lived did himself in by drowning.” He sneered and I sneered back, feeling the realization slowly, and increasingly creep into my mind.

“I was not.” I totally was. Oh merlin, I could have been, just like all those times in the infirmary.

“Yes you were.” Snape said once more, as he saw realization dawn on my face, smug, that he was proven right. I was almost green with the need to throw up.
“I was about to drown myself.” I repeated numbly. “I didn’t know, I thought- I swear that I thought they were only up to my ankles!”

I wasn’t really thinking last night, all I could think about was how utterly beautiful the sight was and how I was about to feel it, I was drunk with devotion, too engulfed in my satisfaction so really see what I was doing. My brain must have taken advantage of that.

“I’m starting to notice that Potter.”

I shook my head, grasping my thinned hair with shaking hands. “But why? Why is this happening? Didn’t that potion help? Wasn’t it supposed to do that?”
Was it supposed to lull me into a false sense of security so I could go off and kill myself?

I could have killed myself last night. Suddenly Snape’s overreaction seemed to make a lot more sense now; he came out of the cottage, exhausted and pissed off and saw me going headfirst into the sea without realizing how far I was going… it really was as bad as it looked.

“The potion can only do so much; its main duty was to keep the physical symptoms at bay, and it’s doing a fine job, your alertness however… we need to keep an eye on that.” The potion master was a little calmer now, his tone was still mildly hostile but we weren’t at each other’s throat so that was a bonus.

“So I’m still sick?”

“Potter… you have stage four cancer, were you expecting a miracle?”

I gulped. “No, but-it took me off guard.”

I couldn’t be trusted. That was what caught me off guard, not the fact that the potion might have failed. As we’ve already established, hallucinations or lack of alertness rarely happened in my case, but they happened often enough times to be troublesome. Sometimes, when I was really in a bad place they picked up pace. It was really subtle though, things like seeing Filch’s cat, Mrs. Norris strolling around my bed, or Hermione flying on a broom outside my window… things like that.

Madam Pomfrey used to keep telling me that I should ask about the things I’m not certain of, that I should be able to distinguish the difference by getting my facts straight and my mind clear.

I was doing neither last night. I was all about feelings, sentiment, and crap. I had put too much trust in myself. Apparently, I was not to do that from then on.

“How do I know next time?” I wondered out loud. “I don’t want to die like that.” No one wants to die by drowning after surviving cancer. That’s like fate double slapping you in the face for surviving its first hit.

Snape rubbed a tired hand over his face. “That’s why we had those rules in the first place, that’s why I took you away that night potter; to prove to everyone and yourself, that you are not to be trusted right now. Stick to the rules and you shall be fine.”

“Then why didn’t you just tell me that?” I asked, accusatorily pointing at him.

“I did tell you that, repeatedly.”

“No you didn’t.” I insisted.

The potion master sighed, rubbing his temple. “I explicitly explained the importance of those rules, I made you promise that you will obey them or the deal is off.

"Can’t you add those up?”

“Now I can.” I admitted slowly, sinking in my seat.

Severus hummed. “Good, then you have two full days to think about It.” he said nonchalantly.

Frowning in confusion, I stared at the man. “What do you mean?”

“As your guardian, I’m grounding you, you aren’t allowed out of the cottage for two days.”

“That’s unfair! When am I going to learn how to swim then? I don’t have that much time you know.”

Snape threw his shoulders up. “You should have thought of that before insulting me last night Potter.” I got the feeling that he wasn’t necessarily upset that I had called him a ‘ you know what’ last night, only gleeful that he was proved right and now could punish me for my wrong doings however he wanted.
“Bollocks.” I cursed, my face screwing in a deep frown.

“Don’t make me turn it into three.” he threatened

I looked at him pleadingly, feeling the unfairness surge in my veins. He was right, I needed to be punished to some extent, but grounding me in here? That was just cruel.

“Don’t ground me, please, I’ll do anything, scrub cauldrons, or- or do the laundry… but I need to get out there.”

Severus wasn’t impressed. “Two days, Potter.”

“But-“

He cut me off, mild annoyance etched on his face. “You’ve already spent eight hours of the two days’ time. Stop pouting.”

I slumped heavily in my seat. “Two days is too much.”

“You called me names that I dare not repeat last night, you shouted at me, and if it hadn’t been for me, your disobedience would’ve cost you your life. Two days is a blessing.” He declared firmly. “Get yourself together Potter; you might not survive the following months if you don’t.”

I gasped indignantly. “You… you were out of control too! You shouted at me too, and you bruised my hand and healed it with magic. That might kill me!” I held up my unmarred wrist to prove a point, feeling a little dizzy.

Snape waved me off. “No Potter, the typical healing charm might at best give you a headache. A much deserved headache at that. Its magical radiation is hardly any more conspicuous than the wards surrendering us.” I could already feel the subtle signs of an upcoming headache, a different sort from my usual headaches and milder, but still there.

“Still.” I drew out the word desperately, watching Snape sip at his tea, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

“This matter is nonnegotiable yet expandable. I hope you know what that means?”

“Yes sir.” I replied, mopping. Seventy two hours, spent indoors, only a few short steps away from the beach, this was worse than any torture the man could have handed out in a moment like this.

The potion master smirked in triumph. “Splendid. Are you hungry?”

I was hungry, but too restless to wait for Snape to cook lunch and have breakfast and lunch in one go, he made me some scrambled eggs instead, claiming that he would wait to have his lunch in a few hours, which made my breakfast even more awkward. The journal the man had been carrying around was nowhere in sight, and all Snape had to occupy himself with was his steaming mug of tea, and his thoughts.

I gazed at him throughout breakfast, inspecting his contemplative stare with a watchful eye, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking about, and frankly I was too peaked to jeopardize the extent of my punishment and ask.

“Can we go to the porch sir, to get some air?” I asked between mouthfuls of egg.

Snape stared. “No, Potter. You may not leave the house, however, you have a balcony you can use.” I frowned in confusion, chewing slowly.
“In your room.” The potion master clarified dryly.

“What if I fall off or something?”

An amused look passed over Severus’s face. “Do you honestly expect yourself to fall off the balcony?” he asked, his tone mildly mingled with bewilderment.
I huffed, glaring at my fork. “No, but with what supposedly happened last night…” I still couldn’t believe that I had almost killed myself the night before. It was crazy; I hadn’t even noticed the shift. To me, it only seemed like an innocent stroll on the beach, I was so enamored with the sight that I have gotten ahead of myself.

Snape hummed, sipping at his steaming tea. “I’m not a bit surprised, now that I really think about it, yesterday was the first time you have been awake for more than a few hours, and you were sleep deprived and distressed in the car. Your body is still getting used to a new routine. A small slipup wasn’t too far-fetched.”
“You didn’t seem this rational last night.”

“I was under the same circumstances Potter. Living with you is hard and demanding, trust me.”

That was the official end to our first argument, Snape stayed to tidy up the kitchen to a more suitable habitat while I just haunted the cottage and basically did nothing, I was still indignant with my supposed slip up, and a bit shaken. I avoided the French doors in my room, as much as possible and mostly hung out in the living room.

It was scary enough when people told you that your view or opinion of self or a situation is wrong and not the way it really is when you’re sick in the head, however, it’s entirely different when your wrong perception nearly could have cost you your life.

It made it blaringly clear that I was solely dependent on Snape, and he was right to forbid me from running off alone by myself. It distinguished the man’s precautious presence to his necessity, and I wasn’t sure if I liked that or not.

I passed on lunch (my stomach hadn’t gotten used to regular meal patterns without puking) and just laid on the couch, one of my legs dangling and my glasses skewed by the arm thrown over my face; I was bored.

“Here Potter.” Snape suddenly appeared above me, something in his hands. I peeled one of my eyelids open, exhausted merely out of being bored.
“What?” I lowered my arm and titled my head, wincing at the cracking sound it made. The potion master dumped the content in his hands on my chest, looking unimpressed and nonchalant as always. I yelped in annoyance as the semi heavy book fell on my ribs, glaring at the man.

“What’s this?” picking up the book, I distractedly fixed my skewed glasses.

“It’s a book Potter. I didn’t get you out of the hospital to lazy around; you could’ve done it there.”

“And whose fault is that?” I grumbled under my breath, rubbing my temple; I could still feel the faint buzz of ache in my head, not as prominent as my cancer induced headaches, but annoyingly vocal. Apparently, torturing me with low buzz headaches by using magic was Snape’s new method of Potter abuse.

Snape actually rolled his eyes as if he had read my mind. The loveseat squeaked under his weight as he sat, Severus folded one leg over the other, idly staring at me.

“Entirely yours.” He drawled out. “So?” he nodded at the book. “Do you want the book, Potter?”

“Let’s see if I get this right…” I said slowly. “You want me to read this.”

The brooding man raised an eyebrow, his face contorting as if he was stifling a sigh. “No, I merely wanted you to drool over the cover until you’re ungrounded.”
I scoffed, taking the man’s sarcasm as an insult. Didn’t he know that I couldn’t read?

“I can’t read.” I told the man bluntly, my face heated up as the man’s lingering gaze momentarily widened.

“You cannot read?” a pure look of surprise flashed through Snape’s black eyes. “What does that mean?”

I crossed my arms with a grimace, the book heavily set in my lap. “Exactly what it implies. The second tumor is in my parietal lobe,” I explained, doting the same speech I have been given about the different parts of brain and their functions many times.

I tried not to react to the man’s lost expression. “It means I cannot read or write as sufficiently.” I said. “I can read, but… just not as well I guess.”
Snape nodded pensively. “So that’s why that list is written in Granger’s handwriting.”

“She was kind enough to do it for me, she was the only one who knew, and she doesn’t really count anyways.” I muttered. The book clenched in my hands.
A thoughtful expression settled on Snape’s face as he hummed. “Have you tried to do either of those things after taking the potion?”

I shrugged. “No, not really.” I did want to write a letter yesterday, I thought. Too bad Hedwig isn’t here with me.

“Well, try now, with the physical symptoms at bay, the idea isn’t that much of a stretch.” He suggested, referring to the idea of me reading normally again. I didn’t correct him, but I didn’t think it would be possible. Writing a letter was one thing, the one thing I thought I was capable of now, but reading… that was like the alertness. It would be tricky to trust myself with it.

After seeing the doubtful look on my face the man’s eyes softened. “If it bothers you in any way you may return the book back to me.”

“Alright… ‘The ultimo-mate hikers-hitchhiker’s guide to the… Galaxy’?”

“Yes.” Severus confirmed, nodding his head.

I eyed the old cover dubiously. “The title sounds kind of wrong.” I frowned. They weren’t wrong exactly, just bizarre enough to spark my interest. Why would Snape have such a book? I never took him for one to read fiction; he mostly just struck me as the kind of guy only obsessed with his own choice in career. Potions, in his case.

Snape shrugged. “Still better than wasting away on a couch Potter. Get reading. It’s quite long.” He said and I raised my brows, stifling the urge to roll my eyes at the man.

I held the width of the book between my thumb and index finger, carefully balancing its weight.

“That is an understatement if I have ever heard one.” The fingers holding the trembling book (my hand was trembling, not the book, mind you) were only a tiny bit away from straining, if I didn’t know any better I would have thought the length was chosen on purpose.

“Then your life must be terribly dull in that regard Mr. Potter.” Snape answered without missing a beat and then stood. Gracefully bellowing his robes. “Will you be able to sustain yourself for a few hours?”

Nodding, I turned my attention back to the book, narrowing my eyes at the worn hard cover. “Um yeah, sure.”

“Then I will proceed to rest in my room until dinner time, /hopefully/ undisrupted, this time.”

I flushed, my face taking a red hue as the man excused himself from the room and went for a nap. (It didn’t struck me as odd that the man had slept in that day just like I had, silly me)

“Yes sir.” I muttered long after he was gone.

Flipping through the yellowed pages at random, I caught glimpses of the long words and unfamiliar phrases here and there, my eyes straining to read the faded text all of a sudden the shuffling stopped. I looked up, momentarily startled and then went back to the book with a deep breath.

The prologue itself took me twenty minutes to go through; not only was I at a disadvantage by misspelling some words or missing a line altogether, but the text itself was too heavy for me, it was meant to be humorous, I knew that much, but somehow I had to reread some lines twice as much as I normally would have.

Words like ‘apocryphal’ or ‘repository’ were hard to pronounce on the first try, and I had to mouth those words and trail them with my fingers as I did, It would be shameful to admit that the damn thing was only like four pages.

This is Hermione material, a sly voice in my head whispered and I wholeheartedly agreed, feeling a ting of homesickness as I thought of her and eventually of everyone else. She and Ron were always so supportive of me; it made me realize how I might have taken advantage of them over the years without them ever knowing.

I continued to skim over the book until I felt my eyes droop, I had almost finished the prologue and finishing the second half of the first chapter, when words started swimming all over the pages and my head throbbed with the additional headache on top of it.

I must have been tired, for no particular reason, but inexpiably tired nonetheless, I stretched out my legs and laid down, thinking that maybe a shut eye wouldn’t be a bad idea, Snape was sleep anyway, and I would surely get up before him. With that thought in my mind, my eyes automatically closed and my shoulders slouched, relaxing my craned neck and lulling me into a quiet, floating dream.

Hours later, when it was almost dark and I had rested well enough, I felt something poke at my face, persistently trying to gauge out my eyes through my eyelids it seemed. It clamped down on the fragile skin and pulled, almost as if trying to open my eyes. I waved my hands at my face and the nudging moved to my ears, nibbling and the pulling started anew.

“Nan” I grunted out, batting my hands at whatever the hell was tormenting me.

A squawking sound screeched in my left ear and I grunted in annoyance again, my poised hand dropping down out of utter exhaustion.

I kicked my legs as the thing started to poke my cheek with a vengeance, pulling and nibbling and most definitely bruising my gaunt skin, sharp talons dug into my chest, but I was too groggy and bleary eyed to care. Finally having had enough after the poking contend for another five minutes, I peeled my eyes open and drew my hands to hit the thing.

Everything in my range of vision was white, snowy white feathers, were right near my nostrils, adorned with small black dots, her wings flapped on my face and I cringed, sputtering out as she moved around my face and head, its beak was now venturing in my messy hair, preening and poking and…
Hedwig. Only Hedwig had the courage to preen my hair.

“Hedwig!”

Number II; a trip to the seaside (p.3)

I didn’t remember much of the night I got Hedwig back, but by Severus’s account of events, it went like this; he knew that the book he gave me would have to bear me out eventually, and the piling headache he was partly responsible for would most likely knock me out before the hour was up, so he waited until I fell asleep, inconspicuously got out of the house and drove /all/ the way to the main road just so he could apparate to the gates, go to the owlery and wait until Hedwig was back from hunting.

Then he found her cage in my dorm (I didn’t even ask him how he found it), and apparated back, driving all the way back just in time for dinner.
And I had slept through that.

Part of me wanted to ask him why he did it, I was looking for the ulterior motive, there must have been one, but something about the man’s stance made me change my mind, he looked oddly good spirited at dinner and the following day. Although there weren’t any differences between a pissed off Snape and a happy one, both had the same mocking sneer and the blank stoic face.

The telltale sign of the man’s happiness was in his willingness to lift my probation and take me outside for a walk around the cottage, when I respectfully asked at breakfast.

Ecstatically enough, he agreed. /After/ I took my potion like a good lad.

“Blah!” Hedwig wildly flapped her wings on my shoulder, her claws gently digging into my shirt. I made a sour face, resisting the urge to puke.

“It didn’t taste this awful the last time!” I blurted out defensively upon Snape’s unimpressed stare. Hedwig’s hoot followed in agreement.

The man shrugged, sipping his own cup of coffee. “Must have been the jitters; is the glow of your new found freedom already fading, perhaps?” he asked with a raised brow. Scowling, I reached back to pet Hedwig; she was very /enthusiastic/ to see me again.

“Or, it could just be that potions taste horrible?”

“Or that you are overly dramatic.” Snape deadpanned. “It is not unheard of, in the Potter’s line. It has never skipped a generation.” His eyes shadowed. My hand abruptly stilled in air, leaving Hedwig to fondly nibble on a cuticle wedged on my thumb.

“Well, it’s about to be demolished in a few months sir, so I bet that’s a cause for celebration.”

“Rest assured that it’s not,” Sev huffed out. “Your little fans and the pureblood society would be very sad by your death indeed.” He continued loftily, and I ate my amused grin as I pursed my lips.

-It might have seemed weird for me to think of the potion master as ‘Sev’ at the time, but the truth was, I /can’t/ bring myself to address the man as my teacher and not something more as I’m writing this. Although the idea must have been harder to digest than it was now, a little part of me had already warmed up to the concept of being Snape’s friend even back then.-

“You are treating my death very rationally sir.” Hedwig’s beak found a soft spot in my hair. She gave a thrilled hoot that rang down my ears and grasped the thinned thread of hair in her beak, furrowing her face in it. If I wasn’t so glad to have her back again, I would have been worried about her ripping my hair out in small tuffs. My hair’s structure was unbearably fragile after ruthless treatments.

“As are you Potter,” Snape’s reply was thoroughly laced with amusement. “Ever since we arrived I haven’t heard you crying even once.” Narrowing my eyes, I gently persuaded Hedwig’s nibbles to my fingers.

“I wasn’t necessarily crying about /that/.” I said after a beat, referring to that night in the infirmary. “I was just sort of … crying.” My face heated up like Ron’s. A deep, embarrassing shade of red that immediately gave me away.

“Whatever you say Potter.” the potion master dismissed me. “Whatever you say.”

I swiftly changed the subject from there, telling the man that I had little difficulty whilst reading the ‘Hitchhiker’s guide’, not that I have read much. I had just reached the tenth page, but I felt as if I needed confirmation, just to see if our views on those first ten pages were the same or not. It wasn’t really that farfetched to double check myself after almost drowning.

The wind blew pleasantly and the sun shone dimly in the blue sky, there wasn’t a single cloud in sight, much to my delight and Snape’s indifference. We started from the porch, both sitting on the steps, me with my borrowed book and him with his mysterious journal.

The smell of sea wafted above heads, and hit me in the face; that place was being unexceptionally sunny for April, considering that we were in Lynton or somewhere near that place. I had been expecting gloomy weather and gigantic clouds, rain storms and uncontrollable waves. I was sorely disappointed though.
It felt as if we were staying in a dystopian world where everything was just /perfect/. In my experience, perfect situations didn’t usually stay as such.

I remember being so restless that day, partially giddy that Snape had forgotten all about his supposed punishment, and equally wrecked that I couldn’t venture farther without pushing my luck. I recall now (nearly two months after that day, and a month before you read this), how sick I was getting of sitting on the porch and reading a damn book while the sea was less than thirty steps away.

Not that the book itself was uninteresting, if anything, I found it profoundly funny; Ford Perfect (the alien) was the perfect depiction of an oblivious wizard amongst muggles, clueless, hilarious and somehow, against all odds… lucky and able to fit in.

“What does ‘diurnal’ mean?” I asked crossly.

“Daily.” The man answered absently.

“Invariably?” I side glanced at the nonchalant man .

“Always.”

I frowned. “How… just how did Ford Perfect, convince that bypass guy...”

“Mr. Prosser, I presume?” the man asked dryly.

I hummed, picking at the yellowed paper I was reading. “Yeah, how did he convince him to /seat/ down in mud instead of Arthur, when he was the one trying to destroy the house…I have a feeling that’s not how these things work.”

“They’re going to wreck the house anyways. Stop psychoanalyzing a fictional book.”

I latched onto the analogy in hopes to talk the man into allowing me to venture farther away from the porch. “It’s fascinating though,” I falsely claimed. “Like how /one/ person could persuade /the other/ person to do something that /the other person/ doesn’t want the /person/ to do…” I chewed my lips for a few minutes after the man made a confused face, followed by an exasperated glare directed at my face.

“Alright,” I sighed insufferably. “I’ll stop analyzing it.”

I only needed to read half a page to be struck by another creative strategy.

Slamming the book shut, I stifled a sigh. I dared a hesitant glance at the man’s focused stare before cracking my knuckles. “The world is about to end.” I quoted ‘Ford’. Snape showed no indication that he had heard me.

“On a Thursday.” I continued informatively, finally stealing his glance away from the journal.

“Potter…”the potion master growled out in warning.

“Come on Professor!” Snape’s glare deepened. “The shore is like twenty steps away… and who knows, it’s a Thursday, the world really might be coming to an end. There could always be a flood; I could save myself by swimming then.”

Pinching the tip of his nose Severus closed his eyes. “I’d assure you that it would not…”

I cut him off with a protesting whine. “But you don’t know that.” I whined accusingly. “What’s the saying? Spend the Knuts instead of dreaming for galleons? I know that I was grounded but…”

“Potter.” despite his sneers and gritting teeth I could already see defeat shadowing his eyes.

So, I continued on with my rambling. “I would drown and die and you live in guilt while knowing that it could have been prevented if only…”

“Fine,” Snape slammed his journal shut with a scowl. “Go and fetch your swim trunk, just please stop with the post-apocalyptic nonsense.” He genuinely looked like he regretted giving me that book.

I gulped.

“Err- swim trunks?”

“You do have one, don’t you Mr. Potter?”

“Yeah, of course- what is your definition of a swim trunk?”

“A piece of clothing designed for boys to use when they want to swim. You must have one in your trunk if you dug in your things.” Snape said almost threateningly.

“But I’ve never been to the…” I snapped my mouth shut at his narrowed eyes. “I think I know what you’re talking about though,” I quickly blurted out. “Alright problem solved, I’d be right back.”

I dashed back into the cottage, half hoping and half dreading that Dudley’s oversized underwear would do the job. It was one of the few I had, as the boy was overly kin on wearing baggy shorts and trunks…swim trunks shouldn’t be that different from regular ones.

I griped the rails and lunged into my bedroom, zooming to my closet, out of breath. I thought I remembered packing Dudley’s clothes there the day before, so I knew where to find the said item.

“Swim trunks, of course Potter. How else were you supposed to /swim/?” I muttered under my breath, rummaging through my neatly folded clothes. No amount of neatness would have made those hand-me-downs any less horrible or shabby though, but I was beyond caring that day.

In less than five minutes I had three of Dudley’s horrid shorts spread out on my bed. Thankfully they were elastic shorts (with horrible designs though), and could be passed off as board shorts adequately enough. One of the three was too ridiculous to wear; I could practically fit two of myself in its waistband alone. The second one had a huge tear in one of its legs, which left me with the least worst one out of three.

Grimacing, I eyed the sky blue garment with distaste.

“Snape better not make fun of me.” I grunted.

Severus, did, in fact, make fun of me.

“Potter, what is that?” the man barked. “I thought I told you to find your swim trunks, not rummage in the garbage can.”

Extending my hands down to smooth my shirt, I defensively glared. “This is my swim trunk.”

“That’s not a swim trunk Potter. Those are shorts, and apparently not yours, they’re basically falling off your knees.” I blistered, lessening our distance by walking to the potion master.

“Just humor me sir, please; this was the only thing I could find.”

“Potter, trust me when I say this, as brutally as possible without making you cry in humiliation; those horrid rags are too big for you to be yours, trust me. They would fall off your waist the moment you start swimming. You would not like to go in the water with them.”

“I think I can manage sir, now can we please…”

“Go on then.”

Flushing, I trailed after the amused man, half-heartedly glaring at him. My feet squirmed in the sand, a recoiling chill settling in my stomach as we walked away from the porch.

Away from the water, and just nearing the upper grounds of the beach, nearly next to the plucked outline of the woods, a series of smooth rocks edged around the borders, some were sheltered by a plush coating of beachgrass and some were bared under the sun’s vicious glim with bald, dull, and grey surfaces that were positively hot to touch.

I distinctly remembered them upon our arrival and my late night escapade but I didn’t particularly pay any attention to them. It struck me as odd that I hadn’t; I needed to detail my surrendering a lot better to raise my awareness.

Snape shook his robes off, neatly folding them in a small square before setting them on one of the smoother rocks edging the beach; he put his wand on his folded robes, only clad in his white button down shirt.

“Alright Potter, the first thing you need to know about swimming is, learning how to float.” The man started, pushing his sleeves up to his elbows.

“Float?” I gulped. My eyes were shrewdly on the man’s bare left forearm. The Gryffindor boys would have a heart attack if I told them about my sever case of ‘Snape exposure’ when I wrote them a letter. ‘He /is/ going to teach you how to swim though.’ I thought Hermione would say.

Snape returned my unabashed stare with a jeer, nonchalantly crossing his arms in a way that subtly hid his forearms.

“On your back or stomach.” He drawled out. “It’s not usually the method people use to learn swimming in open water, but we have limited time here Potter. As far as I’m aware, floating despite its daunting approach is the easiest.” I frowned. Learning how to swim was turning out into a bigger deal than I have thought was possible. What was the difference between a pool and the sea? Swimming in both shouldn’t be much different.

I rolled my shoulders with a deep breath. “Okay, what should I do?”

“Lie on your back.” Snape replied unhelpfully.

“On the water?”

“Yes, potter. You have to lie down on water if you want to float on it.”

“Err… how do I do that?”

Snape huffed out a breath and held my wrists. “We need to go a bit farther, I’ll help you.” Very carefully, Snape dragged me in the calm and relaxing waves and farther into the sea, by then, my heart was pretty much beating in my throat. Unlike my last experience, my /bare/ skin was in direct contact with the salty water. It felt understandably different than being wrapped in a drenched duvet.

The water lapped up to my ribs and barely brushed past the man’s lower abdomen as the potion master finally came to a stop. We were still fairly close to the land, close enough that I caught Hedwig circling the cottage, and the glow of the rental car under the sun’s annoying glaze.

“This should do.” Snape declared, not letting go of my hands. My breath hitched, water splashed up to my vulnerable pasty chest, the coolness was really distracting and overwhelming all at once. I wondered what would have happened if I dunk my head underneath the surface?

I shivered in the man’s grip, my eyes wildly roaming the water surrendering us. “Isn’t the water too deep? Is this safe?” my voice shook above the sound of waves. Snape nodded with certainty, surveying around us as well.

“You won’t drown with me here Potter, just relax.” The man tried to be reassuring while sneering, which just stressed me out even more. Merlin, I thought in wonder, was I really doing this? Before then, I didn’t even know it was possible to sweat so much while being chest down in sea water.

“Right. So I just lie on my back?” I bended backwards, awkwardly trying to lower myself on the foaming water, Snape rolled his eyes.

“Not like that.” Snape let go of my wrists in a flash, staggeringly leaving me for a moment to steady his own footing. I squeaked, grabbing his forearms when I felt the current swaying past me. I was wide eyed, not in wonder, but rather in fright.

“Potter, relax. That’s the first lesson. You cannot expect to float on something you’re scared of. Now let go of my hands.” He firmly, but gently yanked my hands off his arms and nodded his head.

“Do I just walk around like this?” I asked him, slowly turning into a full circle.

Snape nodded again, crossing his arms. “Feel the water around you, thread with your hands. Circle around for a little bit until you feel like you wouldn’t faint out of terror.”

“I’m not scared,” I protested childishly. “Just startled, I haven’t been this deep in water…”

The potion master cut me off with a scowl. “You have Potter, in your forth year, you even swam back then.” His tone was grudgingly laced with respect and a ting of pity as if he thought I have forgotten about the second task.

I blustered, my hands involuntarily splashed in the water. “No, that wasn’t me.” I admitted guiltily. “It was the…uh… the thing I ate that helped me swim. I don’t have gills now!”

“So you did steal Gillyweed from my stores.” The man realized with narrowed eyes. I gulped, inwardly cursing myself.

“Is this /really/ the time for confessions sir?”

“It would be an excellent time, If only you stopped giving yourself a heart attack, the water is only up to your chest.” The man deadpanned, refusing his hands by keeping them crossed. I pursed my lips hesitantly, and drew my hands through water, feeling the strange pull of the current ushering them the other way.

“This isn’t so bad.” I mused out loud. “Just strange.”

Swimming in the Black Lake was vastly different from swimming in here, for one, I wasn’t completely under water and under the influence of Gillyweed, for another, the water there, was murky, still, exactly as a lake should be. The water here felt /alive/. Maybe that was why I was so threatened by it.

“Flapping your arms where you stand doesn’t count as threading, walk around Potter, don’t go too far but explore.” Snape said, almost as if he couldn’t believe he was saying something like this to me, the arrogant spoiled son of James Potter.

I did as he told, hesitantly walking around in an invisible circle that expanded one arm from each direction, the fear was starting to trickle off in waves, and being replaced by a pleasant feeling I soon became to recognize as glee.

“Feeling better now?” Snape asked mockingly, although his face remained blank.

I flushed, gazing at the surface lapping to my ribs, roughly where my legs should be as well. “Would it be weird if I said something just brushed past my ankle?” I awkwardly reached down to touch the said ankle with a wrinkled nose.

The potion master shook his head, completely unfazed. “Probably a fish or algae, they’re not gonna bite.”

After a few more minutes, Snape finally sighed. “I’m gonna hold your back and legs so you wouldn’t drown, it’s easier since you’re unbelievably short and underfed. Just remember to breathe deeply Potter, and keep your body in a straight line, it all depends on two things; balance and lung capacity.” He explained.

“How do I keep my head above water?” I asked nervously.

“Relax; Keep your head straight and your shoulders in the same height as your legs and you should be fine. I’m holding you up anyways, so don’t worry about drowning.”

It was ridiculously easy for the man to maneuver me in the water, with nerve wracking procession, he hauled me up. I curled instinctively.

“Don’t fold your knees Potter, relax.” he briskly instructed. Indignantly squeaking, I closed my eyes at the brutal sunbeam that directly shone in my eyes as I was lowered on the surface, my hands were stiffly clenched by my sides, and I was as stiff as a board.

“Don’t hold your breath!” Snape gritted out. “I just told you to breathe!”

I inhaled sharply, feeling oddly squeamish as my bare back felt the jolting coolness and the rhythmic waves, it wasn’t much, most of my weight was being supported by the potion master and my kicking legs. Suddenly I realized just how awkward this was.

Sirius would have loved to be the one doing this; I thought bitterly, there wouldn’t have been so much tension with him and Remus, I wouldn’t have felt like I was on a roller coaster of coiling emotions if it was Sirius or his partner and not the greasy bat.

My cheeks heated up, and I forcefully closed my eyes again. I was freaking out, my former potion master; the one person who hated me and belittled me and my friends was basically the only thing holding me above water.

I couldn’t even begin to imagine how disgusted the man himself was by this revelation, surely, not nearly as much as I was. I cracked an eye open between sharp draws of air to see the man’s blank expression. If Snape was uncomfortable by holding his half naked student buoyant, he was certainly not showing it.

I wriggled in his hold, determined to get the hang of the thing already. I had no clue why the idea of Snape helping me learning how to swim hadn’t bothered me as much when I wasn’t actually /doing/ it. It must have been a cancer side effect, forgetfulness or indifference, or whatever the hell that made me not realize the ineptness of this situation.

Snape was losing patience quickly; he clicked his tongue, and even threateningly loosened his grip on my back a few times to make me comply. Squeaking sharply, I was either forced to really comply with the man’s barked out instructions or flail hard enough so he would let go. I had difficulty breathing, and my thoughts were muddled with flares of grief and tension.

I didn’t like Snape doing this, I realized with a pang in my chest. I didn’t want a stranger to teach me how to swim, I wanted Sirius or Remus. I wanted a father figure, not a sarcastic teacher who was only doing this as a pitiful attempt to redeem himself.

“Can you let me go now?” I yelled, feeling a weird churning in my stomach. “I don’t like this!” my shorts were getting rather heavy (damn you Dudley), not unlike the blanket I used the first time, and I felt them progressively weighting me down. Snape’s sudden bouts of encouragement were /not/ helping either.

Each passing moment blaringly reminded why Snape was never a good teacher to begin with.

“Potter quit wasting my time, and actually listen for once!” the man barked. “Straighten your chicken legs and stop fussing, or I swear I’m never teaching you again.”

“I’m not ready okay?” I pleaded tearfully, dropping all pretenses. “Just… just let me down sir, please. I’m sorry.”

Snape looked positively livid, as he lowered me in a standing position. My face heated up in utter humiliation when Snape turned and yanked me out of the water in the same fashion a parent deals with their naughty children.

Frustration rolled off him in waves, when I was safely on sand the man took off, retrieving his wand and robes whilst trying his best to ignore me. I had no idea why I felt so homesick and vulnerable all of a sudden, but the emotions hit hard and in constant waves of distress, and I was /shivering/ like a bay leaf.

Before I knew what was happening, Snape had wrapped my shivering form in a thick duvet and had dumped me on the threadbare loveseat, he then left me alone. Hedwig was out hunting which left me abandoned in the quiet living room.

The sun was at its warmest, the shell wind chime, happily rang with the gentle breeze, and the white fluttery curtains inflated and deflated like a balloon. I sat all alone on the couch, my pretend swim trunks soaked through the blanket and on the loveseat. I knew it would leave a stain but I couldn’t bring myself to move.

“We’re not going to try that again Potter.” Snape jeered, as he strode through the room some time later, a ball of clothes in his hands. I hung my head, feeling utterly humiliated and idiotic as he dropped the dry clothes in my lap and settled on the couch.

“I don’t know what happened.” My voice sounded pathetically meek even to my own ears, making me cringe. Snape’s anger poured from his eyes in dark cloud like fumes, I imagined them swirling in the living room, and tainting the furniture with its bleakness.

“I do. You thought you were ready to take this on and you weren’t. Potter, it was obvious from the start; your so called /craving/ for the ocean or open water is nothing more than a conjured fantasy you thought up in the hospital wing, when it’s so blatantly obvious that you are afraid of water.”

I whipped my head up to meet his icy gaze. “I am not, afraid. I wasn’t afraid.” I was homesick. I wasn’t even homesick. No, I missed the life I never had; I missed Sirius, my beloved Godfather, whom I hadn’t even thought about in /weeks/, and Remus, whose thoughts hunted my dreams every once in a while. I didn’t have them and never could because I was dying. The startling thought jolted me whilst being taught by Snape; it had nothing to do with the water itself.

I wanted to be Dudley so bad. There aren’t many occasions where I admit that I really did want to become my fat obese, mentally challenged cousin. He had the /one/ thing that I craved my whole life. It wasn’t that he got to go to the seaside and I didn’t, it wasn’t all that goading, or having the best of everything. It was his chance to have someone whom loved him so much that they were willing to do anything for him.

I didn’t have that. I never had that.

Snape didn’t bat an eye at my unconvincing explanation. “You were afraid Potter; I saw it in your eyes.”

“I am not afraid of the sea, I just had a situation.” I confessed slowly, watching as a large water stain dampened the dry clean shirt set on my knees.

“Well, care to elaborate?” Snape raised a sarcastic brow, and I curled further into the loveseat.

“No.” he would laugh at me. I thought savagely. He would laugh and mock my stupid thoughts, then he would ridicule Sirius for being reckless and dying, maybe he would even get a few jabs at my father for being reckless and also dying. Whatever the reason, there was no way in hell that I was telling him.

“Was it a symptom? Did you have difficulty with your vision? Maybe a hallucination?”

“I’m not crazy, alright? This potion is helping, really it is. It wasn’t related to my cancer.” I sputtered out clumsily. My fingers were clenched around the blanket and I felt a strange itchiness all over my body, oddly making me want to shower. Maybe it /was/ cancer related, I mused, people didn’t just thought of their lost loved ones while learning how to swim.

“Then what was it?” Snape growled.

I drew in a breath and held it. “I was overwhelmed. You’re right, I wasn’t ready. I’m sorry for wasting your time or acting the way I did. I’ll make it up to you sir.” I nervously refolded the clothes he had brought me.

“I can learn how to float by myself, or I don’t know…maybe we can give this one up? Not every wish is meant to be fulfilled.” I unfurled the blanket and stiffly got to my feet. Disappointment and grief were smashed in a ball of raw emotions and crammed in my chest, snuggled deeply beneath my ribs. I knew with certainty that this was a lost cause.

After all, one couldn’t be taught how to swim by a dead man, or a lost one. Some small part of me also knew that I was never going to learn the basics with Snape as the tutor. I missed Remus, and I wanted him to be here, it was crazy because I haven't thought about the man in days.

I turned to leave, with a bleak expression painted on my face and self-loathing thrumming in my veins. It was too early to go back to sleep but I felt exhausted, wishing for a dreamless sleep potion more than ever.

As I turned, the potion master also stood, I paused my stride mid-way, mainly to let him pass without shouldering past me in the doorway or the stairs, but much to my surprise Severus grasped my shoulder in a wise like grip and turned me around.

“Change your clothes.” He said, and I gaped. “We’re going to build a castle.”

April the 10th

Dear madam Pomfrey

I’m writing this letter all by myself in my room in The Shell cottage. I think that I had promised to keep in contact with you, so you’re one of the first people I’m writing to. I’m doing fairly okay now, although I really don’t feel any different or miraculously better now that I use that strange potion.

The physical symptoms have stopped, but there are some minor issues that I don’t think this new treatment can solve; I had a vivid hallucination on my first night here, and there were a few times when I felt like I wasn’t completely alert, but it’s fine. At least I’m not blind anymore.

Speaking of Snape, he hasn’t been a total jerk (sorry) these past few days; he has been treating me fair, he /can/ cook, (which completely took me by surprise), and he’s been teaching me how to swim! Isn’t that just great?

You don’t need to worry at all Madam Pomfrey, I promise to look after myself, I’m taking long walks around the beach now to build some strength in my legs, Snape makes sure I have regular meals and I’m trying my hardest to gain some weight… all in all, I think life is good now.

I’m sorry for all the trouble I have given you these past few months, and I hope I can make it up to you someday, but for now, I’m just going to keep writing these letters to cease your worries, because I know, even though you say you don’t care… you really do.

Sincerely yours

Harry.J.Potter

**

After spending a whole week with Potter, Severus was sure that he was getting fairly accustomed to his behavioral patterns. Unlike his previous beliefs, Potter was actually a neat and scheduled person, despite having nothing to do with himself; the black haired teen managed his hours equally between different tasks as if he was living a student’s life.

After the fourth day Severus noticed that Potter woke up at the exact same time every day, and figured it must have been the way his brain was wired, since the brat himself didn’t seem conscious of that fact. Potter was like a glitch filled muggle device, he looked utterly ordinary where appearances counted but from the mental aspect of things… glitches occurred on a daily basis.

The potion master had noticed Potter repeating the same phrase more than once, or accomplishing a task twice; he often caught the boy zoning out or staring at a spot for a stretched period of time. Severus saw all those but never mentioned it to Potter himself, in fears of startling him.

It didn’t disrupt the brat’s routine, and so wasn’t a major issue for the man when he had much more important things to handle.

Supplying Potter’s potions wouldn’t happen on itself, the potion master had to supply fresh batches every two days for the child to take the following mornings on the third day, and to be fair, it was an exhausting task.

All in all, in one week’s time, Potter was fairing much better than he had been doing in /months/, his health and awareness had vastly improved since his treatment had stopped, Severus caught a glint of clarity in Potter’s emerald eyes that seemed impossible to find before.

More than ever, those eyes reminded him of Lily’s eyes, specifically when the boy was particularly angry or frustrated about something, his emerald orbs would gleam and his brows would furrow in a perfect arch. It was the same exact expression Lily had pointed at him more than once when they’ve been friends.
It didn’t torment him as severely as before, but Snape still despised the uncomfortable churning in his stomach when he thought about Lily’s son and his forlorn fate.

With a dejected and heartfelt sigh, the lonely potion master flexed his fingers, his chin propped up with his other hand as he inspected the yellowed page of his journal.

Potter was sprawled on the couch, holding up his old worn cover of ‘Hitchhiker’s guide’ and idly briefing through the pages, Severus knew that the brat wasn’t reading it, his eyes were unfocused. That abominable owl of his was lightly perched on his lap.

Severus glared at the blasted owl maliciously, that damn thing had bitten him /twice/ and had scratched his hands all over when he was trying to load her in the cage, it was blatantly clear that her master’s feelings about the potion master had also been conveyed to her over the years.

“Why is your owl still here?” Snape asked, jostling the lazing boy out of his thoughts.

“Oh, I forgot to write to Madam Pomfrey last night and I was too tired to send all the letters in more than one go.” The boy replied mildly. “I’ll send her tonight.”

“Be sure to let her roam free for a while before you do, she might need to hunt.”

“She really isn’t a messy owl, she hunts and eats outside.” Potter idly answered, rolling his shoulders and reaching a hand to pet the owl’s feathers.

“Oh?” the potion master raised his brow. “Is that another one of her dazzling aptitudes?”

In addition to biting, nibbling and scattering pieces of Potter’s messy hair /everywhere/.

Potter frowned, staring at him with fleeting confusion. “No, she had to learn certain things quickly.” The boy said warily, soothing his hands to smooth the hideously large grey shirt.

Severus tore his gaze away, inwardly musing over the boy’s odd choice in words and discourteous taste in clothing; honestly, one would think a pampered prince like Harry James Potter would know better than to wear over grown rags even for house wear.

The clothes could be for the brat himself, Snape knew of the boy’s significant weight loss due to the illness (so that would solve the strange largeness), and had never seen him without his outer school robes to determine the boy’s awful taste in fashion before, but something just felt /off/ about the way those clothes hung off him.

In the past the potion master had barely seen the boy longer than his potion’s class or usual sightings allowed, to him, Harry James Potter was essentially the precise replica of his father. Be it in appearances or personality, Potter was the same, arrogant, loitering prince that his father had been as a teenager.

That small shred of pity that he had felt for the young man was solely for the fact that he wouldn’t wish that kind of misery and illness on his worst enemy. He was personally familiar with cancer’s unpleasant effects; mixed blood always had the higher chance of transmitting muggle diseases.

Potter as a Half-blood already had the potential to get muggle illnesses, unlike his mother, whom had no reason to deal with cancer as a supposed pure blood, but in the end had perished anyways.

“Can I go out sir?”

Severus raised his head, still thoughtful. “You may go, I’m watching you potter, don’t go far.”

Potter shook Hedwig off his lap, and stood on shaky legs, tucking the book to his chest. His owl let out an indignant shriek at the move. “Thank you sir, come on Hedwig!”

The boy is like a puppy, Severus’s lip turned into a disgusted grimace. No, not a puppy, he drawled as an afterthought, tapping his chin with his forefinger. More like a toddler, Poppy was absolutely right, Potter acted like a toddler, as far as Severus was aware in his fifteen year’s career as a teacher, this wasn’t the way most teenagers acted.

He returned to his journal as Potter ran out of the cottage, the potion master was adamant to spend the whole day studying his notes and indulging in his interests instead of taking care of Potter and his unbearable owl, the brat could manage himself for a day and Severus would keep an eye out anyways.

Seeing as using a wand was dangerous for Potter’s regressing health, Severus had to stifle a sigh and go to the kitchen himself to make a cup of tea himself, it was bad enough that he had to cook three meals a day every day; the man wondered why he had accepted this job in the first place.

‘You suggested it.’ His mind snarled back. True, he hadn’t known that helping James Potter’s dying son on his quest would mean living like a prisoner in magical lockdown; he didn’t let himself ponder on it. Pondering too much about Potters always gave him a headache, on top of making him feel guilty, and enraged.

He was doing the right thing; Severus tried to convince himself as he filled the small kettle. His decision to help Potter was righteous at best and selfish at its worst. The thought of helping the brat was merely a whim at first, but the idea plagued him for days after he caught Potter crying in the infirmary.

He thought about it in class while giving a lecture, he thought about it in the great Hall or at the manual teacher’s meeting, and the notion barely left his mind while he was brewing the brat’s potions. The weight of that damned crumbled roll of parchment varied in his robes, it was at its heaviest when he saw the boy, small, vulnerable and defenseless and at its best when he was harboring a full glass of Firewhisky late after his shift was done.

Snape despised Potter for it at first, the spoiled brat always managed to make trouble for everybody even vaguely involved with his life, his recklessness was what had driven his dogfather to his death and drove the other away, his little army of worshippers were more scarred than experienced Aurors and no one did anything about it, all of these factors made Severus loath Potter for being born … but then he just had to go and have cancer.

Who could hate a dying child? Even Snape wasn’t that cruel.

Words and numbers were tugged right out of Potter’s delirious mouth and etched on the parchment by Granger’s neat scrawl, listed one after the other in an organized line only Granger could muster on an empty parchment.

Severus fiddled with the list for days, brooding in his chair with only a mouthful of mead left in his glass; he inspected every word and request, dissected them as if he was trying to peak into Potter’s soul.

Some of them were rather outlandish; what kind of sixteen year old would want to ‘plan his own funeral’? And then immediately switch to ‘I wish I could talk to animals and hear them back’?

If Severus didn’t know any better, he would have thought this was an elaborate prank that Potter and his goons were pulling off merely for the laugh of it, but the more it seemed like a prank, the more Severus realized just how /sad/ Potter’s list was.

“Why are you really doing this Severus?” Albus had asked when Snape finally yielded and went to his office two weeks ago.

“If you’re asking if I have selfish ulterior motives, your answer is yes. If you’re asking if those motives involve hurting Potter...no they will not.”

Albus had sat down, in a way that it suggested his legs were too tired to bear the weight of the world.

“I never truly believed you to be capable of hurting someone Severus.” the old man had said sadly.

Severus rather doubted that but had felt the need to incline his head to appease the man. “This is only for the sake of your assessment.”

“Am I to assume that those said motives aren’t going to be discussed today?”

The potion master heaved a sigh, reaching into his robes. “Just take a look at this list Albus.”

He set the parchment on the desk; his hand firmly pushing the roll towards the headmaster’s confused face.

“What if I told you that I can get this done by the end of July?”

“That boy is under heavy treatment.” Albus replied almost challengingly, his eyes narrowly examining the list.

“What if I told you that would be the least of his problems?”

Now, the least of Severus’s own problems was finding a way to prove his own bluff. They’ve already been in the shell cottage for ten days, and they were running out of time, and despite all of the rush, Potter still had yet to swim.

Over the course of six days, Potter had learnt next to nothing about floating, he said he felt comfortable in the water, and he could maintain himself without Snape’s help for at least ten seconds, but somehow, the boy always ended up panicking and going under the surface.

Severus had tried to politely ask what the boy’s problem was; even going as far as inquiring if the problem was Potter’s horrid shorts and if he needed a new proper swim trunk, but Potter shook his head every time, looking at the brim of tears before dejectedly trudging his way out of the water and settling on the sand, staring off into space before Severus called him in.

After pouring a cup of hot steaming tea, the potion master tucked his journal under his arm and went to the porch; he felt like he should be checking on Potter by then, the sky was getting cloudy and the potion master did not want Potter even remotely close to the shore if a storm were about to occur.
“Potter.” he called out, motioning the boy out of water, as he settled on the porch’s creaking steps.

Potter’s owl circled around the boy’s head as the child was trying to skip stones in the water. Severus narrowed his eyes, the water was only up to Potter’s ankles, but he looked dry, so at least he had enough sense not to go swimming alone without supervision.

“Potter.” he called out again when the boy refused to turn and sighed irritably.

“Is that boy deaf? Honestly.” The man grumbled and got to his feet.

“I think we should get your ears checked out Potter.” he remarked sarcastically when he was in the boy’s hearing range.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

Severus pursed his lips, looking up at the sky. “It’s about to rain; we need to go back inside.”

Potter threw another stone, turning to stare at the spot Severus was staring now. Both teacher and student fell silent for a few seconds, Potter’s eyes wandered to the other side of the beach, mildly admiring their old sand castle. Neither of them saw it necessary to demolish the fragile structure and so it had stayed standing longer than it should have.

Potter occasionally tended to it by adding wet sand to keep it from collapsing or adorning it with new shells, but Severus could see the way Potter’s eyes shadowed every time it did.

The castle they had made that day was somehow turned into a symbol of reminiscence for what had upset the boy in the first place, and instead of destroying it, Potter nurtured the damned symbol. The potion master idly wondered if he should kick it down, when Potter fell asleep one night.

“Can we try something, before we go?” Potter asked, not taking his eyes off the castle.

“It depends on your suggestion.” The older man placated, crossing his arms over his chest. He felt that Potter didn’t mean to mention their retreat to the cottage by /going/. His ears perked with interest as Potter’s silence dragged on.

“I’ve been thinking for a while…I want to try this one last time,” he gestured at the tides passively. “If I could or couldn’t swim by tomorrow, I think we should move on sir.”

The statement honestly took the potion master by surprise; he didn’t know that Potter was as frustrated with himself as Snape was with him. The dubious conclusion drove him into thinking that Potter was only /suggesting/ what he did, because he’d seen how his refusal to stay in the water annoyed Severus.
Severus took in a deep breath and held it in his chest, his pupils subconsciously relaxing as the last bit of sun was hidden behind gigantic grey fluff of clouds.

“Potter,” the man paused for effect, his glare bearing into Potter’s vivid emerald eyes. “You needn’t worry about time,” he cut off the boy, his mouth was open to protest. “The sole purpose of /this/ is that you get to grant your wishes in their own respective order.”

Potter wasn’t wrong about his cautiousness, but nor was he right; the whole purpose of stopping his treatments was to improve the quality of his life, not the quantity, and that applied to their mission. If things were supposed to be muddled up with hasty, hurried skimming then it wasn’t even worth it from the start.
As much as he couldn’t bring himself to say it, but he wanted Potter to have fun while doing this, he wanted the child to truly get to experience what he possibly couldn’t have in a hospital. There was no point in hurrying this along.

The boy nodded, as if it was obvious. “Exactly, I can always come back here; I can still learn how to swim after I’ve done everything else, I’m getting bored here,” he admitted ashamedly.

“The sea is still beautiful and I had a wonderful time… but I think we should go sir.” The wind picked up as he said this and Severus suppressed a sneer.
How could he drill the concept into Potter’s head without having to admitting that they might run out of time? He didn’t want to frighten the child.

“You can swim Potter,” he snapped out instead, startling Potter. “And we’re staying here until you properly let yourself learn.”

Harry’s eyes rounded and his mouth fell open. “How did you know I was…?”

Snape rolled his eyes, uncrossing his arms with a huff. “Yes, I’ve noticed it.” He said as if it was obvious. “Something is on your mind Potter, something that only triggers when you’re about to take a step forward,” he gestured at the castle and then back at the boy, sternly staring down at him. “And trust me when I say this; I will not let you move a muscle out of water before you tell me what it is.”

“It’s nothing.” Potter wrung the hem of his ridiculous shirt with one hand.

“It’s clearly potent enough to get you riled up.” small drops of water fell down on his face, Severus scowled. “We need to go inside.”

Potter held out his free hand, looking at the small droplets of rain exasperatedly. “Yeah, we do.”

Crazy as it might have seemed, a brilliant idea passed the potions master’s mind. “Tell me Potter,” he said suddenly. “How do you feel about eating out tonight?” Potter raised his eyebrows and stared back.

“Out like here on the beach?”

“No,” Severus gritted out. “Out in a nice restaurant or pub in the nearest town, I passed one when I was getting your owl.” He explained briefly. The black haired boy looked puzzled for a moment.

“How far away am I from any sort of civilization?” he wondered out loud.

“I’d try and not get offended by that comment, Potter,” the man rebuked dryly, but he had to admit there was some form of sense in Potter’s off hand offensive comment; there was only so much one could tolerate by spending ten solid days with the same person with nothing pressing to do.

Potter’s loss of awareness might have helped him a little in the regards of growing boredom, but Severus was feeling like the frustration could drive him up the wall if it dragged on any longer.

“Sorry sir.”

Snape waved him off. “But the nearest town is about half an hour away with the car.” Potter’s eyes rounded behind his glasses at the mention of the rental car still in their possession.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you need to socialize more anyways.” Severus finished.

The boy winced. “Oh no, have I been talking to myself?” Severus contained his wariness with a stoic, deadpan expression. Could it possibly go that far? He suppressed a shudder at the thought of Potter talking to himself and expecting a reply.

“I’d rather not answer that,” he replied vaguely. “Go and get ready, it will start raining soon.”

The boy dropped the remaining stones in the water and quickly tiptoed back to where Severus was standing, his eyes narrowed. “We’re going out in the rain?”
The potion master resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the brat. “We’d be in a car, so don’t worry about the storm. And Potter?”

“Sir?”

“For Merlin’s sake, wear something a little more presentable.”

**

Potter ended up wearing the red hoodie and his jeans, and Snape was left wondering whether the brat simply didn’t care about his appearances and should be told to do so, on a regular basis, or he simply didn’t know how. The clothes he was wearing then, certainly fit him better than the ones he wore at the cottage, but they still seemed to be big on him.

The potion master was beyond caring.

“I like this place.” Potter commented under the pouring rain, wiping the rain droplets off his glasses with his hands. Needless to say, Snape knew that the glasses would stain as soon as they were dry.

He pushed the boy in the pub with a careful hand. Ignoring the loud bell chime ringing as they entered.

“If you would get moving.”

Potter grasped his hand in a death grip when Severus started to move towards the tables and pulled him the other way. “Can we seat on one of the stools? Please?!”

“Why?”

“You said I need to socialize more, we can talk to people better that way, and I think you were right sir, I’ve almost forgotten how to talk to other people.”

“Potter you don’t necessarily have to /talk/ to other people tonight.”

Severus yielded nonetheless, he ushered the boy to the stools with a firm hand clasped on his bony shoulder, if it was his choice, the potion master probably would have chosen the furthest and the most isolated seat he could find, but alas Potter and his cheeriness drove them both to seats at the middle, with two fishers (still in their gear) settled on their rights and an old man on their left.

Potter almost floated to the seats with a cheesy grin, looking as if he couldn’t believe he was being let near people to talk to.
Severus rolled his eyes at the boy’s antiques and shed his black overcoat.

“Potter.” he called the boy quietly. “Do I need remind you of what is appropriate to bring up with certain kind of people in a conversation?”

Harry’s eyes lightened with realization and he quickly shook his head, his messy hair tousling.

“No sir.” He muttered back, and went ahead, while eyeing the fisher braided hair woman with a ting of suspicion. “I understand sir.”

The pub wasn’t big or spacious, but the small place was handled neatly, the storm whizzed outside, Potter despite his previous distress seemed more than at ease to settle on his stool and look around with wide curious eyes.

There were about ten small tables overall and a long line of stools aligned the bar; the pub was lit with soft lights that Potter was definitely enjoying, and behind the bar, a creaky door led to the kitchen. Very few tables were occupied but the sound of mindless chatter filled the small room.

Severus settled on Potter’s right, next to the old man with dentures who was loudly munching on his Shepherd’s fritters.

Potter’s hands were clasped together between his jean clad knees, the boy threw a quick smile at Snape’s blank stare and surveyed the barman; a short pudgy man with hard features, and a nearly bald head, who was conversing with one of the fishers about the shortage of ‘cod’ this season.

Severus effortlessly tuned them all out.

Potter’s voice suddenly rang out in the midst of their conversation.

“I’m sorry, excuse me sir…” the boy disrupted the men confidently, his voice shrill with nerves.

Severus hid his raised eyebrow by rubbing his temple.

“Yeah? Oh so’ry! Did ya wanna orde’ something lad?”

Potter’s grin faltered for a moment. He looked unsure of what to say. “I do actually, but that’s not…” he trailed off for a moment. “What’s a cod?”

“Nasty type of fish, they are.” The fisherman cut in smoothly, staring at Potter over his nose.

“Why is there a shortage?”

The fisher went into a heated monologue about those cods, the bartender, obviously seeing that he had no place there turned to Severus with a nod.

“Ya wanna orde’ somethin’ sir?” he asked in a thick accent. Severus nodded at Potter, who was seating wide eyed at the fishermen talking.

“I’m with the boy,” he informed the bartender. “Is there a special meal on offer tonight?”

The pudgy man shrugged. “We have the usual; shepher’s pie and black puddin’… Rob can manage another plate of fritters…” he trailed off, briefly staring at the old man still munching on the same fritter.

“Shepherd’s pie is fine.” Severus settled.

“Shepher’ pie it is.”

The fisher that was occupying Potter, titled his head. “I haven’t seen you around boy? Are you new here?” he asked the teenage boy.

Potter squirmed in his seat uncomfortably “Sort of, I don’t think we’ll be staying for long though.”

The fisher rubbed a hand on his rough looking stubble.

“You staying in Marian’s motel?” the fisherwoman interjected, leaning on her elbows to listen in.

Potter lost his grip on the conversation, stuttering. “Uh, no. we have…”

“We have a private property near this village.” Severus cut in, inwardly sneering at the fishers.

The woman’s brows shot up, she looked skeptical. “A private property? I don’t know about that… the only private property I’m aware of is the shack in east coast line down, and that’s for Henry Miler.”

“We’re not staying for long.” Potter repeated with a wince.

“Well, welcome anyways.” She said to Snape. “There are lots of places to explore with your son here in Porlock.”

Potter froze, and so did Severus. “I’m not…He’s not…” Potter stuttered somewhat lamely.

“He’s not my son.” Severus snapped rudely, the side of his lip turning down in distaste. What a nosy woman, he thought, sneering inwardly.
The fishers both exchanged confused looks.

“Are you sure? You two really look alike.” The fisherman said as if Severus couldn’t be sure if Potter was his son or not.

The potion master glared at them coldly, while Potter pursed his lips to smother a smile.

“Yes, I am sure that this boy isn’t my son.”

“Oh.” The woman turned to her food with a shrug at her partner. Snape didn’t offer any further explanations, and the bartender came with their meals pretty soon after the awkward silence was dragging on. The two fishers wrapped up their meal quicker than Potter could bear his gatherings and ordered two beers. Both hunched over the table.

“Her’ ya go sir. Two Shepher’ pies.” The plates were slid across the wooden island with two napkins.

“Thanks.” Potter said quietly, still side glancing at those people.

“You just scared them away, that was very rude.” He muttered furiously.

Severus dug into his food, staring ahead, and completely content with ignoring Potter’s indignant face.

“So much for socializing.” He grumbled.

“Eat your meal Potter.”

The sound of chatter and rain pattering the windows accompanied their dinner, Potter’s eyes were roaming everywhere but his plate, there weren’t many people left but Snape cold see a swarm of young men making their way into the pub.

He finished up his pie and patiently waited for Potter to stop brooding, he could tell that the boy was overwhelmed by the very few people he encountered after being in near isolation for months, but he also couldn’t place the boy’s overreaction to Snape shooting those nosy dunderheads down.

“Are you finished?” he finally asked when he noticed potter scrapping his fork on the plate.”

“Yes, but can we stay?” his eyes remained on the busy bartender.

“Why would we stay here? Is there something you need?”

Potter screwed his face in a frown. “No,” he forcefully said. “I just wanna seat here for a while. We don’t have anywhere to be, do we?”

Snape was seriously beginning to regret bringing Potter out of the cottage in the first place, but it was either sitting in the crowded pub and ignoring him or dragging him back to the deathly silent cottage and ignoring him.

“It’s going to get crowded soon.” He warned the boy.

Potter nodded. “Yeah, it’s okay.” His tone was strangely blank.

Severus’s scowl deepened. “This is a pub, and it’s getting crowded, people start getting drunk.” As if on cue, they both watched the bartender calling the young man to retrieve the tray of brimming beers, a loud cheer went off somewhere behind them.

Potter’s eyes lingered on the ginger man who had the tray. “I wanted to get drunk; it’s on the list, isn’t it?”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, the potion master closed his eyes. He knew exactly where this was coming from; Potter being scared to run out of time. He didn’t have the time to deal with a breakdown in a crowded pub. “Potter, if you think there is even the slightest possibility that /they/ let you drink by some miracle, or that I let you drink in the first place, and then drag your drunken butt back to the cottage, you are sourly mistaken. One wish at a time, either you get the hang of swimming or we stay here until you do.”

Potter’s eyes darkened behind his stained glasses. “Shouldn’t this be my choice?”

“No one is getting drunk tonight Potter,” Snape commanded firmly. “You heard that? We’re going. Hurry along.”

He stood and took his overcoat from the stool, Potter still sat on his, his head hung down.

“If it’s on the list then I have every right to.” He stated the obvious accusingly.

Snape wore his overcoat with a grimace and nudged the boy’s shoulder, glaring at the lightning bolt shaped scar. “I don’t care if it’s written on your forehead.” Potter gave a vicious stare and jerked back with so much force that the stool nearly fell over. “Don’t cause a scene here Potter or I’d swear there would be no outing again.” he warned the brat.

Thankfully the pub was crowded enough that no one noticed Potter’s little stunt.

Harry wrenched his arm away, and took his glasses off. “We could just as easily multitask!” he yelled. “I cannot spend two weeks learning how to /float/ while I have a bloody /deadline/ hanging over my head.”

Severus glowered, lowering himself to the boy’s height. “And whose fault is that?” he scoffed. “It’s yours; you don’t / let/ yourself learn. That’s why it’s taking you two weeks.” He replied when Potter remained silent.

“It’s not my fault that I cannot learn, just as it’s not my Fault that I’m here in the first place.” He retorted.

Severus paused, he could see potter breathing heavily with rage but couldn’t quit place the reason behind it. Potter was fine just an hour ago,
“What is this really about?” he inquired from the boy softly. Potter’s eyes narrowed and his face closed off.

Turning in his seat, the raven haired boy clasped his hands together in a tight knot. “Nothing. It’s about nothing.”

Severus knew that this wasn’t the appropriate place to start a talk with Potter but the boy was obviously upset, for whatever reason, and somehow it all had to do with his inability to learn swimming. He needed to get to the bottom of this or Potter would string up another excuse if he didn’t do it right then.
Sighing, he sat back in his stool and leant closer to Potter.

“Potter, tell me now, what is this really about?” he asked patiently, the boy shook his head.

“Nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. I can help.” The potion master insisted.

“No you cannot.” Potter’s voice broke. “It’s about you. Everything’s wrong and it’s because of you!” the boy crammed the water stained glasses on his face irritatingly. “You shouldn’t be here, when Sirius isn’t, or Remus isn’t.” Harry’s voice wavered, and Severus could physically see the struggle going on in Potter’s mind. “I shouldn’t be here, why should I waste my time in the middle of nowhere trying to do the /one thing/ that could have taken me two days to learn if you were /them/ instead of being you?”

Potter rubbed his face. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does Potter.” and as crazy as it was, it really did make sense.

Potter’s thoughts and assumptions about his journey were not the ones he originally had in mind, in his head; he would get to spend his last few months and possibly moments with a loved one, and not someone as distant and as alien as him.

Potter had no one like that to relate to; Black foolishly got himself killed and Lupin was off somewhere walloping in grief. The child wanted that stable authority, he wanted mentors to guide him through trivial acts such as learning how to swim or stay with him when things went from bad to worst.

And for whatever reason, Potter seemed like he had only came to that realization just then, and hadn’t thought of it before.

“This is pointless!” tears filled his eyes, but they didn’t spill. Potter was trying hard to keep demeanor. “I could get drunk right now or I could go on for months without it. What difference does it make?!” the boy ranted in a hushed voice, as if afraid someone will over hear them with all of the noise.

“So this is about Black and Lupin.” Snape voiced his realization.

A single tear slipped from Potter’s eye and the boy hastily wiped it away, his face screwing in a self-loathing frown. Severus sort of related to the boy, and knew that his need of an outlet shouldn’t happen in a crowded muggle pub of all places.

He started quietly, putting a tentative hand on Potter’s shoulder. “If this is about Black or Lupin…”

“No!” the boy exclaimed. “This is about me. I hate myself,” he spat out. “And I hate this! All my life Dudley gloated about how /wonderful/ swimming is! And it isn’t! It isn’t fun. I thought it was, I yearend for it all my life! And it isn’t as fun!”

Another loud cheer erupted behind them, Potter looked crestfallen. Throwing a look of utter envy and jealously at the group of young people.
“Let’s go into the car Potter.” the potion master ordered quietly.

“I don’t want to.” Potter answered solemnly.

“Let’s go into the car.”

Severus helped the child stand, he put some money on the stool and made note to drop in the following morning to talk with the bartender before maneuvering the raven haired boy teen through the crowd and out in the light drizzling. The pouring had died down, and had left only a bit of rain and chilly air behind its haste, which was good enough for both teacher and student as they hurriedly made their way to the other side of the street.

“We have a lot to talk about Potter.”

-If there was anything I found more awkward than crying on Snape in a muggle car in an abandoned alley late at night while it was raining, I couldn’t remember it then.

The glory of letting my emotions taking over me only lasted about five minutes before I realized where I was and what I was exactly doing. Instead of tears, shame trickled down my face and turned it into a red hue that was eerily similar to Ron’s hair.

“Are you feeling better?” Snape asked me after my sobs died down and I sunk back in my seat.

When I didn’t answer, he cleared his throat. “I think there should be some paper tissues here somewhere…” the man twisted his waist to check the backseat as if trying to prove his point.

Sniffling, I wiped the snot and excess tears with the sleeve of my sweater. “It’s fine.” I hoarsely assured the man.

Snape wrinkled his nose. “Potter that’s disgusting.”

I glared at the man with red rimmed eyes. “This is a really hard time for me you know, please cut me some slack.”

“I don’t care if you’re dying right now; wipe your snot with a handkerchief,” the man dryly responded, reaching into his pocket. “Here, take this.”

I reached for the silky black handkerchief and pathetically blew my nose, still wiping my face with my fingers, under Snape’s disapproving glare.

“I told you to…” the man sighed irritatingly. “Forget it. You can keep that.” he nodded his chin at the snot covered silky black tissue.

We sat in a dimmed silence for what seemed like hours, the gentle sound of rain pattering against the windshield built a very vulnerable wedge between us, one that I was more than eager to sustain as long as possible.

“Have you ever talked about Black or Lupin with anyone?” Snape finally asked, his hand on the wheels, and his fingers tensed around the car keys.

I frowned. “I’m not going to talk to /you/ about it.”

Even though the awkwardness seemed bleak and unavoidable, I guess I was mostly relieved that Snape thought this was about Sirius and Remus. He wasn’t wrong though, this was partially about my godfathers; the dead and the absent, but it was also about me.

I feared that Severus was right and the glory was wearing off. I feared it from the morning I woke up and wished I could be over this already and die in peace. I felt like I was painstakingly accomplishing a chore.

I didn’t want my list to be a chore, if they made me want to die.

Death wishes were for past, suffering Harry. Not me.

Severus raised an expectant eyebrow as the silence dragged on, while I was busy maintaining my demeanor, I still felt like I needed a good cry. The sadness bulged in my throat and demanded to be let out. “Sir.” I hastily choked, baffled.

“Why is that?” Snape pushed and I sighed. “I assumed /someone/ must have talked with you regarding Black’s… demise.” He started the car.

“And Remus’s ignorance.” I murmured, putting my foot up the glove compartment. My throat bobbed repeatedly as I tried to swallow the urge to sob one time after the other. I knew that bottling my feelings couldn’t be very healthy, but I also knew that I needed some privacy to sort things out first. I needed the privacy I had in the infirmary to have a good cry over Remus.

I felt bitterness flood into my mouth, and roll under my tongue. I despised it. I despised the feeling with every fiber of my being because it proved my selfishness and insensitivity to none other than myself.

It is something many people come to realize, when there comes a point in life when the only person who knows your true personality is yourself. Bare and without a mask, without the burden of normality, or judgment. You look at yourself and you realize that you are the person you hate most, because you’re the only one who sees the darkness.

That’s how I often felt when I thought about Remus.

Severus obliviously mistook my bitterness for longing and not detestation.

“I could ask for him,” he offered tensely, clearly struggling to keep the disgust at bay. “If you feel the need to have some closure.” He mouthed the word as if it was alien to him, and I almost laughed, because in that moment, I knew, the word ‘closure’ was as alien to me as it was to him.

“I don’t want closure.” I admitted, hastily drying my damp eyes when he wasn’t looking. “I ache for craving something that I could never have. Remus hated the fact that I killed his best friend and potential lover, and I hated the fact that he was right.”

I didn’t sympathize with Remus because I was under similar prediction, because I wasn’t. Back then my attraction to Hermione was nothing more than a slight crush a fellow boy feels for their best female friend, but even back then, I didn’t need to directly sympathize with the man to know his pain.

I lost someone I held very dear in my heart too; maybe not in the same way, but losing Sirius hit me even harder than it had hit Remus. Remus knew how it felt, he had already lost my parents before, and he moved on (albeit reluctantly). However, I hadn’t, the pain was fresh for me and as much as I needed his comforting embrace, I regrettably understood his harsh words and the reasoning behind his distance.

I hated myself for it; I was the one who was dying, I was getting punished and having two tumors in my head would have been way worse than any other punishment I could imagine (aside from being tortured), and in my hazed and delirious mind that was reason enough for Remus to come back to me.

But again, I knew, deep down in my heart, that Remus deserved to have his own ‘closure’. Staying as far away from me as humanly possible.

“Did he specifically blame you?” Snape bit out form his pressed lips; his eyes were fixated on the empty road ahead us.

My body went rigid. “Just to be clear, I’m not talking to you about my feelings.” The sound of tires sloshing water poodles and the mechanical sound of windscreen wipers filled the car; the rain started pouring the moment we got into the vehicle.

“But he didn’t need to; every spiteful word was accounted for instead.” I continued apathetically, adjusting my footing above the footwell.

“Typical for Lupin.” Severus commented indifferently.

“You don’t know him,” I accused the man angrily. “Don’t pretend that you understand his pain.” My heart squeezed and my throat tightened. “/I/ understand him, and I forgive him. I just hope he realizes that one day.” I said sincerely, gazing out of the foggy window.

“He’s playing hide and seek with a ticking bomb,” he said. “I don’t need to know him to judge him.”

I turned to the man. “So what? He should let me off the hook just ‘cause fate got to bite me first? I should let him take pity on me and grab my hand when I pass, just for him to turn away in /disgust/ after I died? I don’t want to live a lie!”

That was only partially true, as was everything with me.

I didn’t want to live my life with a lie. For as long as I could remember, I had been lied to, about the most trivial things, from my parent’s deaths to why I was so hated at my relative’s household. I loathed lies and yet, the same part of me that was repulsed was almost relieved by them.

Dursleys’ lies were just as comforting, as they were dismaying. As a child, I had no worries about where I stood with them, my parents died in a car crash, and I was the unwanted result of their irresponsibility and drinking problem, and left at their porch and for the Dursleys to deal with and I was mostly fine with that.
Living with a rational lie was way better than living with the truth, so maybe living a lie with Remus wouldn’t have been that bad.

“Lupin doesn’t hate you enough to be disgusted by you.” Snape says after a long pause, we were almost halfway to the cottage.

I nodded in agreement, feeling calmer. I really agreed with him. “He’s in a state of decathect, doesn’t mean he hates me.”

Sev looked puzzled at my choice of words but didn’t press. As he drove, the rain got heavier as well, filling in the holes on the gravel road and drumming against the windows.

“What time is it?” I asked warily, watching the blurry stormy waves from afar. The volatile sea unsettled me. I had the strange urge to curl in my seat, cocoon myself in a thick blanket and wish that Snape just kept on driving. Driving until the car could not take us any further. It was a strange feeling.

“It must be a little after midnight.”

After a pause, my brain felt the need to state the obvious. “I’m really tired,”

“We shouldn’t have stayed.” I added lamely and the man nodded, noting my puffy eyes and the tired haze fogging my stare and followed my eyes back to the road ahead.

The road was a stretched one-way gravel lane that only had enough space for one car to pass at the time; it stumped me to see it so vacant. There must at least be more than one car out at night, even with the rain. I just wished to see another car, or see Snape drive past one, just so I knew that my isolation wasn’t as literal as I thought. It made everything more miserable.

I would have gone insane if I only had two bitter anglers to talk to every two weeks. Snape and fish could only entertain me so much.

As if on cue, the man promptly pressed down on the gas pedal and glanced over my head, out of the fogged window. “Do you miss Lupin, Potter?” he asked blankly. “Be honest.”

“Of course I miss him.” my throat bobbed again.

“What of Black?” I silently stared at the man with wide eyes, my heart violently jerked. My hands dropped on my chest as if trying to keep the frantic organ back in my chest.

_‘One day,’ Sirius said when we settled down on the grimy floor after my trial, in August earlier last year. ‘We’d all be a big family. You, me and the rest of us.’ Swirls of smoke danced above us, and Sirius looked almost glad that we were alone; Mrs. Weasley didn’t like it when he smoked and she wasn’t exactly a quiet woman.

‘We are already a family, Padfoot.’ I assured him, squeezing his knee; we were almost the same height when we were sitting and leaning against his family tree tapestry.

Sirius snorted, puffing out the smoke as he lowered his cigarette. ‘Oh kiddo, you have no idea.’

Snape threw me a sideway glance, his gaze flickering back to the road when a soundless lighting shortly lit up the road.

“What about him?” I asked, clearing my throat. That blasted memory was still at the forefront of my mind, so vividly, that I felt like I could smell the stale odor of cigarettes and feel Sirius’ warmth near me in the car.

Snape stayed silent for a whole minute. He looked uncomfortable with the topic and so was I. I knew that if he brought up Sirius’s death, he would expect me to cry and trash around, judging by my earlier display in that pub. To be frank, I was hanging on by a thread too; the desire to cry made my throat ache and my head to throb under the sheer pressure.

Two bright red spots crept up my cheeks. I internally apologized to Sirius and let the silence build up the tension in the air.

“How do you feel about his death?”

The spots grew bigger and expanded across my cheeks. The duel between Malfoy and Sirius, his bitter glare and that excitement gleaming in his eyes when he fought with the blonde haired death eater, it all flooded my mind.

He seemed so happy to be out of that bloody house, so glad to be helping me get out of trouble. It made his death painfully ironic.

“We just talked about Lupin.” Severus urged when I didn’t answer. I didn’t feel encouraged by the man’s openness. Still, I was shifting my focus on myself, and so didn’t think much of it.

“Potter, we need to talk about what happened.”

“I had a meltdown,” my voice shook. I stared Snape square in the eyes. “What does this have to do with Sirius or Remus?”

“I think you feel guilty.” He replied at once, his expression carefully blank.

I opened and closed my mouth, leaning back in the seat when nothing came to my mind as a defense. His opinion was odd and misplaced, but not untrue. Just because I didn’t grieve my godfather, didn’t mean that I didn’t feel guilty for killing him. I really wished Snape stopped talking about them though.
“I also think that’s why you’re not indulging yourself as you should have these past few weeks.”

He was wrong. I physically couldn’t keep myself afloat, because day after day, the sight, the feelings… everything lost its appeal. Guilt might have played a hand in it, but I was fairly sure my inabilities were mainly my own fault.

“By all means, keep ignoring me,” Snape continued. “But at least listen; Lupin’s childish gap in judgment or Black’s stupidity should not ruin your life. Your lives are separate, their death or ignorance shall not affect yours the way it is now.”

Shaking my head, I completely turned my body to face the window. I knew exactly where this conversation was going; if Snape was pitying me enough to pull out the ‘it’s not your fault card’ then I really must have looked bad when I cried. Next, the potion master was going to say ‘This is just a phase Potter’ you don’t actually have depression and this is all, the cancer messing around with your head.

Snape, adamant on getting me to talk, and assured that the road was safe enough, turned and stared at my back. “I’d rather doubt it that Black would somehow come to life to tell you this himself, so I’d just cut the chase; yes, you were guilty of rushing into a dangerous situation, and of endangering your and your friend’s lives.” He paused morosely. “But you aren’t guilty of killing Black. Don’t shoulder someone else’s sin out of misery.”

“Whose?” I crocked out, accusingly staring at him over my shoulder.

“What do you mean?” the man frowned in confusion.

“Shoulder whose sin? Bella’s? Sirius’s? Tom’s?” Yours? I thought venomously.

“Anyone’s.”

“Why do you care anyways?” I suddenly asked him, frowning. “You /hated/ him, you /hated/ me. Why do you suddenly care?”

The man scoffed as if I was telling a bad joke. “This is not about caring Potter, don’t overestimate your importance. It’s common sense.”

“If it was common sense you would have let me stay in that pub.” I retorted. “You lie constantly.” I said reproachfully.

“No I don’t.” the man denied.

“Yes you do, it’s like you have to. I hate that, I hate it when people pretend to care.”

“Do you know why I miss them?” I swallowed painfully. “Because they didn’t lie to me like you do. They never would have done any of this out of pity, they would have brought the world for me in a heartbeat, and I destroyed that.”

“And now you can’t learn to swim as a result.” Sev sneered. My eyes blazed and I pressed my lips tightly in a white line. I didn’t like the way he was talking to me about Remus and Sirius, especially after talking on their behalves.

“Wow, you really understand me.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t become a Gryffindor, Potter,” the man warned somberly. “What do you want me to do? Return you to Hogwarts?”

Frustrated with the man and myself I crossed my arms. “I-I don’t know...but, I know that things cannot go on like this. With you acting so cynical, dishonest, miserable and dutiful.” As if I’m a burden, I thought dejectedly. That gut wrenching feeling that I got when Snape entered the classroom, or whenever he loomed over my cauldron was back, crashing into my chest and into my pounding heart.

Snape looked absolutely livid, all of his careful gentle demeanor was gone and his hands clenched were clenched in anger after my accusations. I could tell that I had angered the man somehow.

“Pardon me if I’m not Lupin, or Black to satisfy your juvenile needs, Potter.” Severus growled out, his eyes fixated ahead. “If you wanted to find a mentor to look up to, you made the wrong turn. That’s what I’m trying to get you to understand; I will never be the father figure you are supposedly searching for, and you keep treating me like one.”

“You’re doing a horrible job at talking about my feelings.” I said quietly. I was determined to pointedly ignore the twinge of hurt in my chest.

The man threw me a filthy glare. I only looked ahead without catching his eye. “Well I’m sorry that this trip isn’t rainbows and sunshine Potter, and sorry for not being a cuddly canine to get you through the hardships of dying. Life isn’t fair, deal with It.” finally I couldn’t handle it anymore, I mustered up my most hateful expression and turned to the man, my chest was tight with the need to supply air for my body but my tense manner couldn’t make room for air.

“If you were going to be a douche about it,” I hissed. “Then why did you even ask me in the first place? Better yet, why did you go through all this trouble to get me to talk about my feelings and then shut me down when I actually did?” I realized that I was breathing heavily at the end of my rant, and Snape looked speechless. I had never seen that expression on his face before and that made me feel much better. To have him look as vulnerable as I was feeling.

“What? Did I just stun you into silence?”

Snape abruptly stopped the car in the middle of the road. “This discussion is over.”

I sprung to the edge of my seat. “But I just said…”

He cut me off. “You called me a liar.”

“I didn’t lie, you are a liar sir.”

“Potter.” he growled out threateningly.

I conceded, drawing my knees to my chest. “Not a liar, no, just dishonest, it’s like you’re always fighting with yourself.”

Snape tried to regain his posture. “Stop analyzing me Potter.”

“That’s exactly what you were doing now, or was that thing about not feeling guilty horse poop?”

“You were being disrespectful and dishonest.” He bit out.

“So were you.” I retaliated heatedly.

“We don’t get attached Potter. You were right; I apologize for intruding in your private life or giving you the impression that I somehow cared about Black or Lupin’s fate.” Snape huffed, drumming his fingers on the wheel. “Feel free to keep things to yourself from now on.”

Eyeing him suspiciously, I unfolded my legs and leant back. “What is this, some reverse psychology trick?”

“Are you playing games?” Snape shook his head, still looking angry at some degree.

“No, I just made a grave mistake. Your personal life is out of my business, we’re both on a mission. That’s all there is to our relationship, we can go back now, if you want to.” The moment he said this I felt everything stop; even the raindrops drumming on the windows paused, none of us breathed, the air stilled and my face contorted into an expressionless statue.

“You want to go back to the pub?” I repeated numbly, the statement coming out more like a question. “To let me get drunk?”

“I could talk with the manager,” the man said slowly. “Explain the situation. If that’s really what you need. I can rent you a room there as well and come collect you in the morning.” My face didn’t change but there was a hurricane going on inside my head. I was hyperaware of everything around us, and that only agitated me more. How dare he? I thought to myself.

“You could talk with the manager.” I repeated. There was a swirl of indignation mixed with my otherwise blank tone.

Snape carefully scrutinized my figure before nodding. “Yes, surely he understands that you are a special case.”

I snorted in disbelief, and finally let the utter /rage/ bleed into my face. “You-y-you FUCKING BASTARD!” before his hand could grasp my arm; I threw the door open and darted out of the car, bending under the heavy rush of rain. I didn’t wait for Snape to call out and immediately started walking.

“Potter!” Snape called out from the car.

I tore my blurry glasses away from my face and flipped him off.

“YOU’RE A SELFISH PIG!” I yelled over my shoulder.

“Get back in the car you idiotic boy!”

“What are you playing at?! Hmm? One minute you’re rubbing my back and telling me it’s alright and then you don’t care?!”

“Potter. Get back. In the car. That’s an order.”

“Duck your orders and Duck your rules!” I hollered heatedly.

“Oh merlin, Potter you’re going to get sick.”

I sniffled pathetically, not even attempting to stop the tears from running down my face. “You are a hypocrite, Snape.”

“I’m not sure if the roles are reversed yet.” The man dryly informed me, his figure flickering with the rain. I could barely make his body out of the car without my glasses, but he wasn’t moving towards me, so that was good.

“You-you talked about Sirius and how all our lives are separate, you told me not to feel guilty and then you straight out told me you didn’t care anyways.” My voice hitched. “You basically told me to duck myself by taking me back to that bloody pub and leaving me there! Like I’m some trash!”

“I just realized I was making a mistake by implying otherwise.” Snape snapped, his voice laced with venom.

“Yeah! You’re right. Because anyone as stone hearted as you can never understand how I’m feeling. You couldn’t possibly understand how it feels to care about someone and then kill them.” I cried, and sobbed and I wanted to run away and hide somewhere safe. I wanted to smell the stale cigarettes that hung to Sirius’s clothes. To feel Remus’s soft jumper under my hands when he hugged me and told me everything was fine. I didn’t want to stand under the rain and argue with Snape.

“You’re right Potter; I’m a monster, a liar and a cheat. Now get back inside the car before someone hits you.” I snorted, shivering like a leaf, as if anyone would be out here in the middle of nowhere!

“You’re an h-horrible person!” I yelled, turning away from the car. “You never understood!” without the glasses, and the car’s lights I could barely see a thing. The frightening image in front of me was just a the dark road ahead and I couldn’t see.

“Then make me understand Potter. In the car.” Snape’s voice seemed closer, so I assumed he must have fully gotten away from that blasted car. I hated feeling as blind as I was then, to only see nothing ahead. Feel nothing but cold. I was panicking.

“You and you rules, you and your lies. I hate you, I really do and there’s no way that I’m apologizing to you tomorrow morning.”
I had to apologize the next morning.

Almost out of nowhere my stomach clenched and I was doubling over on the road, retching.

Snape slammed the driver’s door shut and raced to my side, but I was too busy throwing up to be angry with him anymore.

Tears circled in my eyes and I tried to swallow the burning bile but Snape’s hand darted to my back, firmly rubbing circles as he crouched next to me.

“No Potter, let it come out.” I stopped listening to his voice and clenched my eyes shut, rain viciously stroke my back in accomplice with Snape’s hand. I batted at the hand, shaking my head. So much for not caring, I thought snidely.

“Just relax, it’d be over soon.” No it wasn’t. I stayed there on the ground for so long that by the time Snape could drag me up, my knees felt like jelly and I was sure I had no innards left to bring up.

My insides burned, my mouth tasted acidic and vaguely of the lousy digested meal I had, my hands shook, but only in panic. This shouldn’t be happening, I thought wildly.

“Let’s get you into the car.” Severus’ arm circled my soaked figure and he half dragged me to the car, with its engine silently buzzing, and lights flickering under the rushing water.

He buckled me in and then got in himself, almost frantically steering the wheel as he speeded down the road.

“Merlin.”

“Stay calm Potter, and tell me if you need me to pull over again.” Snape’s eyes were fixated on the road; our speed was considerably more noticeable than before. It seemed like even the windscreen wipers were lurching back and forth more urgently than before.

“It could have been the food. Maybe the meal was too heavy to digest.” Sev reasoned.

I was still too frightened of the familiar heaving in my guts and mindful of the taste in my mouth to answer him.

“Or the stress. Your mo… people, usually vomit when they’re stressed.” He said as he fiddled with the heater. My hair stood in thin strayed ropes and some were plastered to my face as I shivered in my stained seat.

“I’m fine.” My freezing cold hand darted on his and forcefully moved it away from the heater. Severus threw a filthy look at my hand and whacked it away.

“Just lean back and close your eyes Potter, we’d be there in less than five minutes.”

“I’m sorry; I got it all over your clothes.” I whizzed out, shivering.

“And yourself.” The man noted quietly. “It’s alright; I’ll take care of the laundry. You should rest as soon as we got back.”

“Was it the cancer?” I was almost afraid to hear the answer, knowing that, it would be the last straw if it were. It couldn’t possibly be that, they assured me that the potion would take care of all physical symptoms. As far as I was concerned, puking my guts out was considered a physical symptom as far as my innards were concerned...

“It shouldn’t be. Hush now Potter.” Snape relentlessly speeded down the road and I groaned, closing my eyes and wrinkling my nose. The car smelled awful.

“We cannot go on like this, this is terrible.” I complained dizzily. Snape rolled his eyes and dialed down the heater to spare us the horrible smell.

“Settle down or you’ll throw up again.”

“I’m going to die.” I whimpered.

Severus actually rolled his eyes. “Stop being so dramatic. No one is dying, you had a heavy meal and you were stressed, and clearly, your body couldn’t handle that.”

“No I am. I’m only alive for another four months, Snape, and that’s even if I’m lucky.”

“This isn’t really the time for observations Potter. Keep calm.”

I got his handkerchief out of my soiled pocket and blew my nose. “I don’t want to fight with you, if we’re going to do /this/, then we either do it together or we won’t do it at all.”

“Rest for now.”

When we got to the cottage the rain had completely evaporated, the waves were bigger and more forceful than I had ever seen them though, and that made me avoid the view when Snape helped me out of the car.

“Is Hedwig home yet?” I asked anxiously, eyeing the cloudy sky. I was feeling a bit better after Snape rolled down the windows. The fresh air wasn’t doing any good to my soaked figure, but at least it prevented any further accidents and I was unspeakably grateful for that.

Snape nudged me towards the porch. “She’s an owl Potter, she’s fine.”

He got me settled on the frayed loveseat, wrapped me up in a thick duvet and ordered me to take off my dirty clothes.

Hastily, I flushed in shame and shrugged out the vomit covered sweater, followed by my stained jeans, Dudley’s white undershirt and my dignity.

Snape never peaked at my disgustingly lanky physique, but swiftly got rid of his own shirt. He went to the kitchen with the bundle of clothes and I heard a sharp hiss, followed by the smell of burnt.

My eyes widened. Did Snape just burn those clothes?!

“Don’t come in here!” Snape yelled as if in cue. I sank back in my seat in shock.

“Did you burn them?!” I yelled indignantly. The man emerged from the hallway and strode to the living room, shrugging his wand back in his sleeve. He had a white towel draped over his arm.

“Here,” he said, ignoring my question. “Dry your hair; we don’t need you to get a cold. Then sleep.”

“You burnt my clothes.” I repeated accusingly, not reaching out to get the towel. Severus gave me an unimpressed look and dumped the dishtowel on my hair. He ruffled my hair dry with the cloth, and I did not like it. Not in the slightest.

“I needed those!” Snape tugged at my hair, thoroughly scrubbing my scalp. A chilly breeze blew through the open window and I shivered, huddling further into the duvet.

“I didn’t think it would be sanitary for you to wear them again, so I burnt them.” I gaped at the man. Those clothes were basically the best I had, the best Dudley had passed down as a hand me down, and I couldn’t just tell the man that. I couldn’t tell the potion master that I had only one decent outfit.

“You couldn’t just wash them?!” I seethed, instead. Severus paused his unsympathetic toweling and looked at me like I was insane.

“I would rather be found dead than wash your vomit covered clothes by hand, and you couldn’t wear them afterwards if they were cleansed by wand. Those rags were weeks away from being unusable anyways.” He said nonchalantly, withdrawing the towel.

“You cannot make those calls.” I muttered under my breath but didn’t protest again after Snape ushered me upstairs.

He stopped by the doorway with a bucket and another towel. “Here,” he handed me the bucket.

“Just in case.”

I was out like a light as soon as my head hit the pillow.

The next morning, I woke up with a horrible taste in my mouth, which scared me at first, because I thought I must have thrown up in my sleep or something, but then I remembered that I forgot to brush my teeth the night before and that just made me feel worse.

After lying around for an extra thirty minutes I finally heaved myself up and tottered to the bathroom. My teeth and half-assed shower took another twenty minutes before I was seated on the floor with Hitchhiker’s guide in my hands in an empty cottage.

Where was Snape? I sluggishly looked around.

I found his note on the kitchen table not long after searching around the cottage, written on a torn piece of parchment. His spidery scrawl looked barely readable, so the man must have been in a hurry.

I frowned, first inspecting the parchment and then smoothing my finger over the words.

“I will be back soon,” he said in the note. “I just needed to run some errands in Porlock. Do NOT get out of the cottage and more importantly, do NOT set foot in the water Potter. I would know if you had.” I read aloud, rolling my eyes at the man.

“So much for support.” Grumbling, I slumped down on one of the chairs.

The sound of a car approaching the cottage only came minutes after, making me surge to my feet.

Through the backdoor, I walked around the cottage and to the parked car, shielding my eyes from the brutal sunbeams only with my hand.
Snape got out of the car and opened the backseat doors without looking at me, and leant in.

“Snape?” I called. The man almost hit his head as he withdrew with a dozen of bags and a few brown paper bags snuggled in his arms.

He walked past me with a smirk. “Make yourself useful Potter, there are a few bags left in the car.”

“Did you rob a store?” I asked uncertainly, somewhat joking. Looking around the numerous bags left in the car, I turned to face the potion master in bewilderment.

“Stop the cheeky tone and hurry inside, I’m starving.”

“Why did you…?”

Snape huffed and pointedly nodded at the car.

“You either help me with those bags or there’s no muffin for you.”

“Did you say muffins?” my mouth watered at the mere mention of muffins. I hadn’t had those in ages, long before I was even diagnosed with cancer. My stomach grumbled in agreement.

Snape nodded with a straight face. “I thought so.”

I couldn’t stop myself, I laughed.

-Dear Remus, I did not address this letter to you as a way to get revenge or make you feel bad by the content. I just wanted you to know what really happened between Severus and I firsthand, and how much you matter to me, remember, you and Sirius, were once my everything.
I addressed the next letter to Ron, so if you ever needed to find out what happened next, you can ask him. He looked up to you just as I did. You were a good mentor Remus, and I bet you would have made an even greater father.

Take care of my key.

Love.

Harry.

Number II; A trip to the seaside (Fourth time’s the charm)

-Hunger is a psychological desire to consume food. To keep us on our feet and restore the energy we need in order to survive. Despite, being a psychological response to the lack of nutrients, Hunger is a meaningless concept, when there is a golf ball of cancerous cells delicately set atop your Hypothalamus.

The truth was, the tumor prevented me from feeling actual hunger, but my body was having none of that, and in a blatant act of rebellion against the brain, showed the embarrassing symptoms of the psychological effects anyways.

If I were to put it in simpler terms, it was quite similar to watching someone play chess with themselves and losing the game. And not knowing that they were losing it.

It’s an odd feeling, to hear your stomach grumble and feel your mouth water, but not actually realize why. Unfortunately for me the more the time passed, the more the lack of feelings escalated.

“Where are my muffins?” my stomach grumbled in harmony with my voice as I put all of the shopping bags on the kitchen table.

“Be a little patient, Potter.”

The man unloaded the bags on the counter and then turned to face me with a thoughtful expression on his face.

“How did you sleep? No nausea?” Severus’s eyes bore into mine like he was trying to see if I lied or not. Rolling my eyes, I shook my head.

“No. No nausea, no vomiting.” No thanks to Snape. I thought snidely. He would’ve burnt the house down if I had puked in the cottage, just to /sanitize/ the environment. Aunt Petunia would have had a heart attack if she knew about Sev’s cleaning techniques. I swear to Merlin, the man had never heard of bleach in his life.

“What are these?” I pointedly asked, gesturing at the bundle of bags and packets all around us.

Snape made an exaggerated show of taking a brown paper bag out of one of the grocery bags and tossing it on the table.

“Those are muffins.” He pointed at them over his shoulder. “Don’t touch the chocolate one.” I scowled at the back of his head, the man obliviously turned to rifle through the cabinets for tea.

He tugged the tea box out and then went to fill the kettle while I venomously continued glaring at his back.

“I didn’t mean the muffins.” Although I was pissed that he called dibs on chocolate muffins. It never occurred to me before that Snape was the kind of guy who called dibs on anything… I couldn’t have been more wrong. Severus called dibs on /everything/ regardless of my opinion or condition. So much so, that it was somewhat of an inside joke between us.

Sadly it wasn’t such a hilarious trait when you actually had to live with it for four months straight.

“I meant the clothes.” I continued when the potion master didn’t respond.

Severus hummed, leaning against the counter. “That’s easy, compacted articles of fabric we wear to sustain our modesty.” He explained. “I can name each piece of clothing in those bags…”

Another breeze went about the kitchen and ruffled my hair, causing my eyes to squint at the man and his antics. This was highly unusual of Snape, I thought in bewilderment. Acting as if he was immensely amused by messing with me.

Actually, I mused, on a second thought, that wasn’t that unusual.

His behavior was confusing, and irritating. Just the night before, the potion master was raving and rambling about how he couldn’t fit in as a mentor. This morning, he showed up with muffins and clothes.

“Stop this.” I growled. “Why did you buy all of these clothes? And please, for the love of all that is holly, stop the sarcasm.”

The kettle gave out a shrill cry on the stove, another breeze sifted the curtains and mused Snape’s hair. The man straightened his shoulders and leaned down to grab the fussing teakettle. “I bought you some clothes Potter, because you needed them.” He reasoned bemusedly. “You may try them on after having breakfast.”

The chair emitted an indignant squeak as my body lunched against the table in shock. “What? I already have…”

The kettle came down on the table with a hard yet subdued sound. Snape interrupted me with a raised eyebrow. “I’m going to stop you right there Potter,” he held his hand up as I opened my mouth. “Merlin /wept/ at the state of your attire these past two weeks, and frankly, I cannot be seen in public with a teenage boy who looks like a homeless person.”

I mulled my lips for a moment and then shook my head. “But I don’t need these. I already have clothes.” I wasn't the potion master's charity case, or whatever he thought I was to him the morning after our petty argument.

“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to take these compacted articles of fabric and return them.”

Snape's eyes narrowed. “I swear to merlin himself Potter,” he wagged his finger at me. “If I see you wearing the rags I found in your wardrobe again, I’ll ground you.”

“Then what? Do you want to burn my clothes to ashes?”

Snape returned my retort with a stoic face. “I would rather you burn them and I’d assist.” he took a delicate sip of his morning tea. "No wonder you cannot stay afloat, those atrocious shorts you wear are heavier than your head.” before I could even open my mouth Snape leaned impossibly closer.

“Which brings us to another matter, why don’t you have your own clothes?”

In a fit of panic and stubbornness I reached behind him into the bag of groceries and drew out the big round chocolate muffin. I contemplated my choices in less than a second before biting off and chewing one third of the said pastry in one go. I swallowed the lump in my throat and fearfully watched Severus's reaction.

Rolling his eyes Snape took the muffin from my hands and took a bite himself, sipping his tea.

“Two can play the game Potter.” he said, seeing the bewildered expression on my face. “Do you want to answer now?”

“I lost a lot of weight, I guess.” he gave me a pointed look. I tried the next available lie on my list.

“Dudley lent some of his clothes and I forgot to give them back.” Severus's eyes darkened.

“All of his clothes?” I cursed under my breath, and returned Snape's 'do I look stupid to you' face with a deadpanned, final repsonse.

“He’s such a generous guy.”

suffice to say...I had to take the clothes in the end.

**

The stormy clouds from the night before were replaced by an unblemished blue sky that day. Two blankets of stormy blue were extended afar, going as far as my eye could see, seemingly colliding with each other at the end of the line of my vision. Blue and flawless, the sky adorned the blazing sun above our heads as Snape dragged me to the porch to try out my new clothes.

He brought his muffins and tea with him and ordered me to bring a blanket along in case the weather got /chilly/. I could see that Severus was still worried about me getting a cold. His concern was understandable, after all, I had spent a profane amount of time puking out my innards under the English rain in a muddy road exactly the night before.

I took the shopping bags in my room and reluctantly inspected the new garments, my eyes widening and my breath catching at the overwhelming sum Snape got for me. He had gotten me a whole new wardrobe completed with winter wear, which seemed like overkill. We both knew I wouldn’t get to live past July.

I humored him and held up a red bland tee-shirt, squinting my eyes at the small size. Sev wasn’t kidding when he said he got these from the children’s section.

Snape’s eyes narrowed as I showed him the new clothes, he nodded with approval and asked me if they were all comfortable. He even made me move around and try out the winter coats (obviously unnecessary-but I didn’t say anything) his eyes gleamed in endorsement as he sipped his tea and told me to scram and pack the new clothes away.

Severus didn’t bring up the Dursleys at all when I finally settled next to him, cradling a small raspberry muffin in my hands. He handed me a lukewarm cup of tea and we gazed ahead.

“I’ll pay you back sir. Those clothes must have cost a fortune.” Mentally I added up the sum and nodded, I had more than enough in my vault, since I barely used the money, and only extracted enough to get my school supplies. The rest were left for Remus.

The man would have my head if he knew I left my vault for him, but deep down, I knew that the only person who deserved to have the key in the name of my late parents was him.

Snape threw me a filthy glare that made my spine quiver in distress. “I’m going to ignore the fact that you just said that Potter.” He drawled out, bottoming up his cup. The wind blew persistently, the smell of salt, seaweed, and water filled my nostrils. I drew in a deep breath, smoothing my hand over the new red shirt and mentally reveling in the soft texture of the cotton under my fingers.

“Sir…”

“I’m not your companion Potter. I’m your guardian and caretaker, it means you are my responsibility. I will provide food, clothes, shelter and entertainment because it’s my job.”

Again, the man neglected to mention the Dursleys and the state of my previous wardrobe. He suspected something, I could tell, but we were both wary of starting yet another fight in tow with the one we had last night.

I flushed in shame as I remembered the things I had spewed out in the heat of the moment. It was mortifying, the things I’ve said last night. I couldn’t stop myself, my brain stringed words and my exhausted mouth spoke them without thinking of the consequences. I was so depressed, utterly beat. I missed Sirius, I wanted to hug Remus, to have them both with me one last time.

I would be with Sirius soon enough, I mused in my head, biting into the muffin with a hum. Its striking taste spontaneously exploded in my mouth, I hummed louder. It tasted really good. I thought with a rush of surprise, washing it down with a big gulp of lukewarm tea.

Severus gave me an amused look, the corner of his eyes only slightly wrinkling. I flushed. I was secretly overjoyed and giddy by the fact that he wasn’t holding any grudges against me since last night.

Alas that I had no idea how many things were going to go wrong because I refused to apologize to this man over the course of our journey. That one time when I forgot to tell him about misplacing my potion after an argument (about two weeks ago as I’m writing this) it nearly cost me my life.

And that man was not impressed by not my lack of regret. Yet, the absence of apologies that day in the beach was of no matter and didn’t make a huge difference in the way he treated me. He left me to my thoughts and took out his weird leather bond journal he always carries around and got reading.

I watched Hedwig circle the cottage for a while and enjoyed the April’s cool breeze freshening my face. We stayed in silence long enough for Snape to start asking awkward questions that couldn’t be avoided longer.

We both knew that the ‘elephant in the room’- as most put it- couldn’t be avoided any longer. He cleared his throat, closed his journal and stared ahead.

“Potter, what you said last night…” he trailed off and I pursed my lips. I was adamant to stave off from giving out any apologies to the man. I was still mad at him, even though he brought me clothes and muffins the next day as a decent apology.

Maybe I /was/ a horrible person.

Severus gained back his composure. “Are you tired of staying here?”

My head whipped back to face him in surprise; I thought he was going to give me a good scolding for being obnoxiously rude to him.

“I…” I stared back at the repetitive motion of the waves and paused a minute. The sight was as breathtaking as the first night, or rather, the first time I saw it on the telly. Was I tired of this imagery already?

“I’m not sure.” I replied honestly, crunching the muffin’s (R.I.P- to that muffin by the way- one of the best I ever had-) oilpaper-y wrapper.

“The next destination on your list, it’s in the Surrey. Do you want us to leave the cottage or do you require more time? This place is a good place to stay Potter. A safe haven for many, either during the first war or… onward.”

“Order members?” I gasped, suddenly the burned rug and frayed curtains made more sense somehow. Snape nodded in confirmation.

“Not many know of this place, it was a safe house-is still a safe house- for order members. People who were endangered or in protective custody came here. Funnily enough, your wolf knows of this place too.”

“That’s interesting.” My stomach churned in itself and I turned my head away. If anything, I mused, the new information only unsettled me. I imagined Remus visiting this place after I died, sleeping in the same room as I am now, would he know?

Would he be freaked out to sleep in the same room as his dead godson, or would he even care that I was dead?

My forehead broke out in cold sweat in spite of the chilly wind, my hands tightened around the wrapper.

“If you want to leave I can arrange our trip to the Surrey in a few days.”

“We’re not coming back here.” It wasn’t a question, merely a statement. I already knew the answer.

“It’s better if we don’t Potter. It takes too much time and effort. You cannot afford to lose any more of that.”

Sighing I nodded, eyeing the small specks of sand shifting on the wooden stairs next to my sock clad feet, wishing more than ever to not be reminded of the fact that my life was on a deadline.

It was two hours later when Snape approached me in my room again and asked me to put on my new swim trunks and stop lying around, my eyebrows shot up as I got up, staring after the man with a puzzled expression my face.

Padding to my trunk, I dug in the new clothes to find my new swim trunks-the vastly improved substitute to Dudley’s ridiculous bullying shorts-. Not only did I find a simple black swim trunk in the packages I carelessly had thrown in my stuff before, I also found a red swim cap lying innocently next to a new pair of socks and frowned.

“A swim cap?” I blurted out to Snape as I raced down the stairs, clad in the black swim trunks, my new red tee (which still smelled new) and with the red cap clenched in my hand.

I only caught a glimpse of the potion master’s back before he disappeared outside but I knew he heard me.

“Is there a problem with it?” he mused, eyeing the crumpled cap in my hand.

Shaking my head, I doubled over to catch my breath, gulping the blessed cool air of the April afternoon and wiggling my toes on the scratchy yet damp sand.

“Why did you get me one though?” I asked him with bated breath.

“I’m going to teach you how to swim Potter. So you can properly tick that blasted wish off your list.”

I titled my head to the side. “But aren’t we leaving?” Severus gave me an unimpressed look he always gave me in his classes for ‘thinking I was too smart’. I stared back.

“Not for two days.” He said slowly as if talking to a small child. “Two days is a long time. Come along.”

As was routine, the man unbuttoned his outer robe and neatly rolled up his sleeves as he started walking. I bit down on my lip and followed him, I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that learning how to swim was an impossible feat for me. In fact, I had resigned myself to that fact during the first week of our stay in the Shell Cottage.

Whenever I tried, life answered back by dunking my head under water, and sending sudden jolts into my heart as if it was desperate to escape, making my lungs tear themselves apart for a single breath. It seemed like the harder I wanted to be like Dudley (by being selfish and desiring the joys of having a proper childhood) the harder that invisible force of nature pushed me down.

Snape beaconed me closer with a hand and I huffed, grasping the hem of my tee-shirt with reluctant fingers. One last time, I thought to myself, just to humor the man who was thoughtful enough to buy me clothes. Think of it as payment Potter, I tried to convince myself.

The sand wiggled under my toes and tickled my ankles as I got rid of my shirt and hesitantly followed the determined man into the serene waves. He grasped my shoulder to steady my teetering balance and together we roved to a suitable spot.

“Put the cap on Potter.” Snape ordered me as he crossed his arms.

The man picked me up with little effort as soon as the cap was clumsily on my head and lowered me on the gentle rocking motion of the water. As was habitual behavior with me these past two weeks, my legs immediately stiffened and my posture went rigid.

“Potter.” The man warned me and I squeezed my eyes shut, my breathing labored. I wasn’t afraid of drowning, or rather, Snape letting me drown. I didn’t even know what I was scared of, so the unwelcome rush of terror might have been the cancer messing with my head.

As always, I was the one who held me back.

“Open your eyes Potter. Open them.” I peeled one eye open, feeling the tip of Snape’s finger holding my light body above water. Was his hand even there anymore? I panicked, twisting my neck to look back at the man.

“Don’t let go!”

“I won’t let go, Potter.” He assured me. “Let your body relax. It’s just water, you won’t drown.”

I straightened my knees but kept my eyes fully closed once again. Instead of panicking even more, I concentrated on the odd feeling of the red swim cap that was keeping my hair dry. It was such an oddity, my mind informed me amusedly. Something about using it made me feel as if my head wasn’t a part of me anymore.

“Good.” Snape’s voice complimented as my body relaxed in his hold. “Now open your eyes Potter and stare ahead. Just look at the sky and nothing else.”

“If you let go I swear-” he abruptly cut me off.

“I won’t. Do as I say.” He adjusted my dry, unstained glasses on my face.

I did as he said, gazing ahead at the pretty blue sky, no cloud in sight, and a small subtle beam of light peaking from somewhere on my right, exactly from Snape’s back. Deliberately chosen so the sun wouldn’t disturb my eyes.

Snape, true to his word, didn’t withdraw his hands from my back even once and instead let me relax into his hold at my own pace.

“Start paddling your legs.” He instructed calmly after a while.

My eyebrows shot up but I was too scared to move. Shit, I cursed, this was new.

The potion master noted my discomfort and sighed. “Potter,” his tone was exasperated. “Kick your legs in a crisscross motion. Paddle your legs so you can move.”

“I’m barely afloat!” my shrill voice exclaimed.

“I’m keeping you up, just do as I say for once you brat.”

I kicked my feet back and forth as hard and as fast I could, splashing gallops of water all over us in small droplets that sprinkled in the air, Snape drew back with a surprised yell as his hair was viciously drenched with salt water. His feather light touch left my back and suddenly I was under water, flapping my legs uselessly.

The water wasn’t too deep at all and I soon tore my way to the surface, spluttering, wheezing and surprisingly enough, laughing. Snape threw me a filthy glare, a sneer forming on his face.

“When I said ‘Potter, paddle with your legs’” he splashed me with his hands. “I didn’t mean kick up a storm.” Another splash of water hit me in the face, the man harrumphed loudly and reached out.

“You splashed me!” I spat the salty water out with a face, eyeing the potion master’s blurry face with my stained glasses, thinking that the man was enjoying this all too much. This had barely ever happened before when he was attempting to teach me.

“I thought that was fairly ob-POTTER!” I giggled, splattering the water directly into Severus’s face again.

“You insolent imp!” the man retaliated my attack, but I was laughing too hard to hit back again. Ron wasn’t going to freaking /believe/ this! I thought with delight. No Hogwarts student would ever believe me if I told them the grumpy potion master was having a water fight with his most hated student and actually enjoying it.

-Even I wouldn’t have believed me if Severus wasn’t here now to confirm the occurrence of the event. Bless his soul, he’s been such a big help recently. (He would argue, but I’m afraid he wrote nearly half of the journals. His memory is uncanny that way.)

I did learn how to swim that day, when we were both completely soaked and in the danger of acquiring various stages of sunburn. Severus did the mature thing that day and tried to teach me how to float by floating himself, and exposing us both further to the brutal afternoon sun. I didn’t mind it, not really. The water was so blessedly cool on our skin that we didn’t even notice.

He helped me on my back again, instructing me to paddle my legs correctly, and then helped me thread the water for another fifteen minutes before shaking his head.

“Potter, forget everything I told you about swimming. Floating is just impossible for you.” I felt as if I /was/ making progress though, but didn’t argue with the Professor.

He taught me how the breaststroke technic worked as best as he could and helped me in deeper waters (not that deep, sadly, I was still short. Growth spurt never hit me.) To try it out.

His hands never left me, that reassuring touch was always there on my shoulders, or my back, assuring me that my head would always remain above water.

“I would die before letting you off the hook.” The man vowed before repeating the recurring moves.

Breaststrokes were more manually demanding, than simply being held up and staring around, and the act required my sole undivided attention. I tired quickly, but was satisfied with the lopsided results. At least I was moving around in the water by myself then, and I didn’t panic when my mouth was filled with salt water when I gulped down the precious air.

Snape also seemed surprised at my sudden progress, but didn’t mention it at loud. Finally around four in the afternoon we retired to the porch, limbs aching, bellies growling, and with our skins bearing mild unpleasant red hues.

“We never spent more than an hour in the water before Potter. Today we were swimming all day and I forgot to give you the sunscreen. The water, it prevented us from feeling the burns.” The potion master explained calmly as he applied a soothing cool balm to the back of my shoulders. It didn’t even hurt that much, not with my high pain tolerant fused body, Severus assured me that they were very mild and would heal in no time.

“Your neck sir…it’s red, on the back.”

The man sighed in irritation-that was oddly pointed at himself- and headed for the bathroom. “The one time I didn’t use sunscreen...”

That night, I sat in the kitchen and watched Severus prepare dinner for us. I watched the potion master bustle around and mutter odd, unrelated potion ingredients under his breath as he moved from one cupboard to the other, his eyes distant in concentration.

My hair was still damp and my new clothes clung to my body as I sat, Severus lightly scolded me for never drying off properly when he saw my dismal state. I promptly-and cheekily enough- suggested that if he had a problem with it, he could just do it for me himself.

He rewarded my innocent joke with a firm scuffing to the neck and an eye-roll.

I fiddled with the plastic covering on our table and counted the shells adorning the joint walls that led to the hallway, but I mostly watched the potion Professor move about, deep in thought.

He was making pasta, something fairly easy and modest enough to prepare quickly, but filling enough that kept us through the night. I eyed the fresh vegetables set on the cutting board and made a quick decision.

“Do you need any help Professor?” I asked. The man had his back on me, he paused, spared me a quick stoic glance over his shoulder and then turned.

“You can cook?” my lips pursed. Of course I knew how to cook, I’ve been doing it since I was three. In fact, I could make the same exact pasta with a badass Bolognese sauce that had the Dursleys drooling by the time I was eight.

The question wasn’t whether or not I could hold my ground in a kitchen, it was the confidentiality of that information. Did I want Snape to know that I could cook well? It wasn’t fair on the man to take care of /everything/ while we were together.

But on the other hand, he was already suspicious over the tattered clothes and my lack of tact when it came to experiencing new things. He suspected something about my home-life with my loving relatives.

He would only get more suspicious this way. I knew that he was smart enough to have figured it out by now, I knew that not only he was smart enough, but cunning enough to work his way around my tactics and draw it out of me anyways. The fact that I wasn’t ready for it didn’t matter.

It was only a matter of when, rather than ‘if’.

I ran hand through my damp hair, ignoring that few too many strands of hair that came with it and nodded.

“I used to cook a lot when I stayed at my relatives.” There, I mentally nodded with satisfaction. Not bold enough for the man to get skeptical. My pulse quickened as the man’s eyes fell on my fiddling hands.

“Why? Was your aunt incapable of cooking for the family?” another direct question. I cursed, the man was being too straightforward. He wasn’t bound to find out about them this soon. I didn’t know him enough to guess how he would react.

“No.” I answered too quickly. “I just like… I like cooking a lot.”

“And you didn’t tell me that before… because?” he inquired with a raised eyebrow and a demanding posture. I leant back in my seat, staring at the boiling water on the stove behind him.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It never occurred to me that you needed help cooking sir.”

Snape hummed skeptically. “I don’t need help now.” He countered neutrally.

“I know that,” my fingers fiddled with the hem of my shirt. “I just thought it would make things quicker.” And easier for you, I finished in my head. The man had to stay up that night in order to brew me a new batch for tomorrow.

I didn’t know why it didn’t strike me before, but all of the responsibility seemed unfair on the man.

Snape’s demeanor completely changed and his arms uncrossed. The man narrowed his eyes in mild concern and then walked up a few step to inspect my face from a closer view.

“Are you that hungry?” he asked blankly. His face though, looked as if there was hint of guilt swimming behind his eyes. I flushed in shame. “I can give you something to keep you until-"

I waved both hands in his face. “No! I just…” shrugging, I hung my head. “Wanted to help.” I finished lamely. Snape didn’t react, he just reached out and handed me the kitchen knife from the counter.

“Here.” He said, nodding his chin at the cutting board. “Take your time and don’t cut yourself.” He slid the cutting board in front of me, and caught a wandering carrot that was rolling off the table. My eyes ogled his strange reaction for a moment and then I examined the knife in my hand.

My stomach chilled with relief as if it was flooded with ice cold water when he finally turned his back on me again and went back to the pasta. My hand was steady as I drew the trimmed carrot near and absentmindedly ended its life by chopping it into small, same sized pieces.

Onions effortlessly followed after and in no time, I was done butchering a decent crop of celery.

We finished the meal in silence, Severus respectfully drew away when I was finished with the vegetables and moved to the stove to make the tomato sauce. He was impressed, I could tell that he thought I was bluffing when I said that I could cook. Tomato sauce was easy enough to still leave suspicion, but at least the man didn’t think I was a total klutz anymore.

We both filled our plates in relative silence and settled down. Snape hummed.

“This is actually not that bad Potter.” He complimented. I returned his dry compliment with a flashy smile. With a full mouth. Severus rolled his eyes.
“We could take shifts now. You could cook two days a week.”

“Alright. I can do that.” It would exactly get in line with the nights the man had to pull night overs in order to brew me those sketchy ‘boosting potions’ and for me, it was better than cooking all the meals, all the time, /and/ do the chores.

Aunt Petunia sure as hell wasn’t lenient when it came to being a proper housewife. I meant myself, by the way, not her. She never lifted a single finger around the house ever since I could properly hold a dusting rag.

(Aunt Petunia? I forgive you. If anyone ever bothers to inform you of the existence of these letters, I just wanted you to know that I do forgive you for all you’ve done to me. It doesn’t seem right to die without clearing out my conscious first. Sorry for dropping off by your doorstep so unexpectedly fourteen years ago.)

I wolfed down the pasta and then dunked it all with a long glass of icy water. I hadn’t realized just how famished I was before taking the first bite. It was understandable since I was unable to feel hungry in the first place until I actually started eating.

The meal was gone in less than five minutes.

Later after dinner, we both retreated to the cozy living room. “Can someone die from hearing a bad poem?” I wondered, clueless as I tried to comprehend the printed words on the book. I could barely make sense of the few lines of poems in the ‘Hitch hiker’s guide’ myself. Seemingly, this Vogon dude was using it as a torture device against my favorite character ‘Ford’ and ‘Arthur’ for some reason I couldn’t quite grasp.

I supposed I had to reread that part again.

Snape raised his head a fraction from his own journal, but didn’t look me in the eye. “Let me guess, you suppose that they could die of ‘internal hemorrhaging’?” he drawled out dryly.

I stared blankly at the potion master’s head and he sighed. “It means internal bleeding. And no, Potter, no one has died of hearing a particularly bad poem yet.”

Before I could open my mouth again he held up his hand. “It’s not possible to throttle your brain with your intestines, no.”

I went back and reread the sections I missed several times to get full meanings of the words, I didn’t mind asking Snape the words or phrases I didn’t know about, but sometimes the man looked at me as if I was insane.

Not stupid for not understanding the words, but /insane/ for asking questions like; ‘is there a full version of Vogon’s poem?’ or ‘How do wizards cope with the destruction of Earth? Could they survive in space?’ Which were pretty good questions in my opinion.

Somewhere around ten he told me to retreat to my room, so he could go to this mysterious basement and prepare my potion for tomorrow morning. I didn’t feel like reading the rest of the book in my own room on the bed, so I closed it with a sigh and headed for the bathroom.

With a flare of grudging respect, I also found a pair of matching plaid pajamas waiting for me in my closet as I finished brushing my teeth in near total darkness.

Snape had thought of everything. And I didn’t get to ask him why, beyond his own ridiculous reasons. I avoided it like the plague because I knew asking him about the clothes would have him asking about their need to be replaced in the first place. It would get real ugly real quick.

I knew he was going to find out about the Dursley’s ill treatment of me eventually, and he would surely tell everyone as soon as he has the chance. But for reasons I couldn’t fathom, that fact didn’t faze me in the slightest. If anything it triggered a warm rush of relief in my chest.

Not even Sirius and Remus knew about the extent of their treatment. I would have never told them willingly anyways. Both hadn’t been raised by muggles, so whenever asked, I weaved the same old tale I had been weaving for everyone else; they couldn’t fully ‘understand’ me and my needs. They tried, but we were from two different worlds. That’s that.

They understood that, I’ve mingled enough truth and the right amount of lies and details to picture myself as the typical teenager. A magical teenager struggling with muggle guardians. They understood that they were my real family and the Dursleys were only another obligation. Another thing to check off my list for the sake of my safety.

‘One day we’d all be a big family. You, me and the rest of us.’ Sirius had said. Who did he mean? Besides us? Would Remus or even Mrs. Weasley have a place in there? It never occurred to me to ask those questions when the time was right.

Sirius was never too fond of Mrs. Weasley, but it wasn’t personal. I could tell he was just jealous. He got angry, snappish, when he got jealous. Jealous that Mrs. Weasley and her husband were there sooner than him, as if it was a race. Maybe he was envious over the fact that my prominent authority figures were Ron’s parents first and then he and Remus if an emergency occurred?

The summer before he died, before the world fell apart and I was the only one left standing, I caught him lingering by the kitchen’s doorframe, only in a way that I could see his haunting silhouette on the opposite wall. Molly and I were alone in the kitchen. I knew he was eavesdropping before I could even see the shadow, but Mrs. Weasley had no idea.

It was a mere hour after the Boggart incident, she was clearly shaken up. Her hands were white knuckled around her quivering tea mug, everyone else was either gone or asleep in their respective rooms. I couldn’t sleep, and she couldn’t too.

She made us tea, although neither of us finished the sweet smelling chamomile liquid in the end.

“Mrs. Weasley…” I trailed off, having nothing else to say. Should I apologize? I wondered. Would an apology make a difference? I’m sorry your children are friends with me and I look up to you? I’m sorry that you saw me dead or that you see me as a son?

She raised her mug to take a hasty sip but seemingly changed her mind and set the tea back on the table.

She stared at me as if I was a ghost. “Oh Harry, dear.” She stroked my cheek with a warm soft hand. I smiled awkwardly, my hands tapping on my own mug.

“It was just a boggart.” I blurted out to her, then cursed myself for sounding like a jerk. As I opened my mouth to apologize, she nodded in agreement.

“I’ve heard you’ve had your fair share of those.” She patted my cheek one last time and then chuckled. I flushed at the incident. “Ron told you?” that was strange, Ron barely told his mom anything. Half of the things that we did would have gotten him grounded for the rest of his life. According to him (not that he was wrong).

She shook her head. “Remus told me all about it.”

Oh. My mind drew to a blank. So Remus and she talked? Why did I ever assume that they didn’t? “I guess.” I twiddled my hands. “It wasn’t real though, that’s the good thing about it. Right?”

Her body stiffened, her brows were drawn in an absentminded frown. “I suppose.” She finally said, raising her tea mug again.

I mimicked her movements like a toddler would, not on purpose. But I felt too little in her presence. She held herself back, I felt as if she thought I was obtuse, or couldn’t fully grasp the real terror boggarts emitted. Like a toddler couldn’t look past the lost dessert or a broken toy. She thought I couldn’t get the big picture.

“That’s not the scary part.” I continued while taking a small sip of the hot burning liquid. It burnt the inside of my mouth. It made me feel alive. Her head snapped up. I was all too aware of Sirius standing by the doorframe.

“The scary part is when you realize how easily our fears can come true.” I took another tentative sip, my throat burning pleasantly by the sweetness and the sheer hotness.

She sighed, tears circling in her eyes. She let go of her mug, lunged herself at me, and pressed me in a bone crushing embrace. She smelled like flowers, the treacle tart we just had after dinner and chamomile tea. I sank into the hug.

Her shoulders shook and I realized she was crying. Sirius and I were the only witnesses.

“I-I-I c-c-can-t-t lose them!” the woman wept in my arms. My throat clogged and I hugged her back just as fiercely as she was crushing my lungs.
“I’ll try my best.” I vowed. “I promise I’ll keep them safe at any cost Mrs. Weasley.” She drew back so violently that I almost landed atop of her on the table. Tears were still streaming down her face as her lip quivered.

“You think…you think that I…Oh Harry!” this time, she was crying for me and I felt bad again. Sirius shifted anxiously by the door and I prayed that he stayed put. This was possibly the worst time for him to be interrupting us.

“I’m sorry.” I muttered. Her arms got impossibly tighter around my shoulders.

Her breath came out in hitched hiccups, and my neck was getting progressively wetter by her tears. “You’re my son!” she exclaimed tearfully. “I-I can’t lose you too! Didn’t you know that?!”

Sirius and I blanched at the same time.

I saw the silhouette’s hands clench into fists as I went slack in shock. I have never heard her admit that outright. Surely she didn’t mean that? Surely she was just scared and emotional?

I’ve heard Arthur Weasley admit that he looked at me ‘like’ he would at his son, I’ve gotten jumpers every year and gotten scolded along with the others as well. So has Hermione (to a very a lesser extent). But I never actually thought that they thought of me as one of their /sons/.

I didn’t know what to do with the information. So I did the next best thing.

“I knew.” I lied to her, rubbing her back. Sirius left.

Their relationship was never quite the same after that incident, not until Padfoot went and died.

That night, when I slept in my new plaid pajamas, I realized how true my own words were. Fear of an occurrence, of a particular situation, like dying, was worse than fearing a living being or an inanimate object.

Not when you constantly feared and knew how easily they could happen at any time that they couldn’t vanquish. You can’t kill an idea. Death knocks at one’s door out of nowhere, no matter how much prepared you are. Abuse, injustice and war happens, people are afraid of them, but it happens as easily as falling asleep.

At midnight that night, exactly as the clock struck one minute after twelve, my twisting stomach lurched me to a sitting position. I gasped with wide eyes and grunted at the harsh cramps.

It got worse, I felt nausea crawl up my throat and dashed out of the bed, clamping a cold sweaty hand over my mouth. I don’t how I got there in time, but I’m pretty sure I stubbed my toe to the door in the darkness twice. Severus was nowhere to be seen as I heaved into the toilet, he was in the basement. Obliviously brewing me a potion.

The cramping only got worse and the pain was so unbearable, it brought tears to my eyes. I didn’t have my glasses but the tears blurred my vision anyway, my head swam and my intestines turned themselves over in the loving embrace of our toilet. Merlin it was disgusting. Painful, and disgusting.
My throat burned and my stomach tensed as another wave of nausea crashed down over my body, my guts actually /throbbed/ and my chest burned. I had no idea what was going on.

I was alone when it was finally over, hugging the white porcelain relief, my clammy forehead pressed against the tip of the seat as my stomach /burned/ and /burned/ and /burned/.

I crawled back to my room in an agonizingly slow pace. I knew where my glasses were and I had no idea what I had just thrown up. It was too red. Too red to be seasoned tomato sauce, my heart clenched in fright and I felt as if acid drops were forcibly being injected into my system.

Somehow, through the haziness and the minimal light my balcony provided I found my glasses on the night stand and quickly fumbled back to the bathroom. I staggered, felt the nauseating drops of sand and the heavy air cling to my arms as I got back.

Where was Snape? Should I call for him?

Dragging myself to the toilet, my stomach rolled at the gory sight.

“Oh Ford.”

Blood clots. No mistakes about it, there, shining almost black under the moonlight that ruefully streamed from the small window. It was blood.

In perfect ribbon like stripes along with my dinner and whatever else that was in my stomach. I flushed it all down as soon as I gathered my wits, feeling as if the memory should disappear with the blood as well. I felt sickened, I didn’t know why. Why was I sick again? I shouldn’t be sick. Not by definition. I wasn’t sick.

Throwing up blood was pretty much an emergency on the spectrum, and I never had experienced them before. Granted, I had a bad case of nausea last night but, would this be a common occurrence from now? What was even causing it?

I couldn’t tell Snape, telling Snape would equal him shipping me back to Hogwarts. To pain, and misery and poison. To my abhorring oncologist and my doomed ward. Whether my sickness was cancer related or not, I decided grimly as I settled back under the covers, whether these stomach aches meant something and whether they were going to happen again…Snape cannot know.

Because if there was one thing I learnt from Molly Weasley that night was that sharing your fears, your vulnerability, only leveraged the impending terror for so long. The emotion that replaced that original fear… that desperation people get when they realize nothing can be done even though everyone know your deepest fear…

That’s the emotion I hated the worst.

And Snape was wrong; turns out intestines could throttle the brain after all.

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.

**

“The people of this world are like the three butterflies
in front of a candle's flame.

The first one went closer and said:
I know about love.

The second one touched the flame
lightly with his wings and said:
I know how love's fire can burn.

The third one threw himself into the heart of the flame
and was consumed. He alone knows what true love is.”
-Farid al-Din Attar

**
Pain.

One pain, two pains, three pains…

“But wait Harry,” a voice interrupted him, cool as ice on a blistering wound. Comforting. “It doesn’t work like that,” the voice said. “Pain doesn’t work like that; you cannot count pain like you can count cookies.”

Harry thrashed in the invisible chains that were holding him down, arching, flailing and shrieking, feeling hot lava churning in his stomach. “How does it work then?” He wanted to screech his question at the voice.

He was in /pain/. The pain wasn’t singular; it wasn’t just spread out in one place. It was /everywhere/ and nowhere at once. There wasn’t just pain; there was the stages of pain that couldn’t be catalogued in the same group as each other. They couldn’t even fit into such a short, worthless word like pain.

If he couldn’t number them then what would value his suffering? Paper cuts caused pain. By that definition, this wasn’t pain.

One pain felt like burning while the other felt like freezing. He was being choked and stabbed at once, he was drowning and dying of thirst at once, he was falling and getting buried at once. How was that pain singular?

One died and another started in a never-ending loop, at one point through it all, he just wanted to die. Then the voice held him back again, it told him he wasn’t allowed to die.

KILL ME! He shouted with all his might. KILL ME!

HARRY YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO DIE!

Fuck the voice. Harry hated the voice.

The voice was nice at first until it wasn’t.

Harry wanted to kill the voice. He planned the brutal act through the pain. Harry wanted to close his shackled hands around the voice’s throat and throttle it to death; he wanted to dunk its head in freezing water so it would /feel/ the pain Harry was feeling.

Then it’d see about choosing death. It would wish for it like Harry. It would kill for it; it would embrace it with open arms. It would grip onto it.
He wished and wished and wished for the chance…

Until he didn’t want that anymore.

The pain just stopped.

It disappeared as if it wasn’t even there, Harry was unshackled at once, and there was nothing. No evidence of his suffering, nothing that indicated the torture he’d been through perpetually.

There was no numbers to hold accountable. There was no pain to count.

The voice went away, and Harry dreamed of colors.

**

The world looked funny upside down.

He only knew that, because when he opened his eyes, blinked a few times and closed them again he could see the picture of the ceiling printed upside down in his eyelids. Then after realizing his moment of stupidity, he chuckled. Ceilings couldn’t be upside down. They already were upside down.
His head felt funny, hilariously, he found everything to be funny, but for some unfathomable reason he wanted to cry. Cry and cry and cry and cry…
He groggily chuckled. That was funny too. It was funny when people repeated the same word again and again and again and again and again and again.
He felt the mattress with his hands; his eyes roamed the orange-lit room. His head was hurting.

He had no idea where he was, this didn’t look like his room, he didn’t have…brown mattress and warm pillows and knitted afghans. He had broken toys, big shirts, and the bars on his window.

He had a bird, or he was a bird himself…he couldn’t remember which was right.

He lifted himself up with his elbows, taking note of the empty chair set beside his bed on the -left or right side of the bed? Which was left and which was right?

There was a pitcher with glasses and a flower vase set on this table next to the chair, the floor was wooden.

He noticed the oddest things as he struggled to seat up, the way the curtains were drawn in and out the window with the wind, the specs of dust rising from the desk, the fact that he could see perfectly fine without his glasses.

Glasses…where was his glasses?

He fumbled with the blankets-they all tangled with his limbs, he realized that he hated the feeling-, and his fringe wasn’t covering his forehead anymore. Harry brought his -left…right. - hand up to caress his bald head, his eyes narrowing in confusion.

Harry had no idea where he was, he had no idea when he got here and most importantly, why he was here, in a scarce, scary room that wasn’t his, with his hair and glasses and his bird missing. He was wearing his clothes at least; the shirt hung off him so he figured that hadn’t changed. He had gray sweat pants on. It was scratchy. He didn’t like that either.

He stood on wobbly knees, staggering a bit. As the world titled sideways, he blindly started walking to the desk. He slammed into the chair. Biting down a whimper, Harry carelessly reached and took the silver letter opener for protection.

Why did he have a letter opener anyways?

The door wasn’t locked; Harry leant against the wall as he opened it, stepping into the darkened hallway with caution. None of the lights was on and the walls were bare, the hallway led to a door at one end, there was a tall mirror hung near the door. The other end led to a stairway.

Harry chose the stairs, clenching the knife tightly in his cold sweaty hand, and leaning heavily against the wall.

There was a small beacon of light coming from a room, Harry couldn’t see from the stairs but he heard the shuffling. Someone was there. His heart skipped a beat. Maybe it was his kidnapper.

He saw the man’s silhouette brush against the opposite wall, his throat tightened in anticipation and a feeling he couldn’t quite place, the one that made him want to cry. Harry ignored both feelings and made it downstairs, creeping alongside the dark shadows that engulfed the strange house.

He was right, there /was/ a man in the kitchen, with his face buried in his hands, his shoulders sagging. The man’s long black hair was tied at the nape of his neck, shifting as his shoulders moved. Harry approached the man, the knife held high in front of his face. The pain in his head was like a low stabbing behind his eyes.

The floorboard creaked under his swaying feet and the man suddenly turned, his face colored with shock. He scrambled to stand; Harry stumbled back in response, his breaths speeding up.

“Harry what are you doing out of bed?” the disheveled man gasped, reaching out to steady him. Harry flied back against the wall, swinging the knife at the man. The man froze in his tracks, his eyes widening.

“Stay away!” his voice trembled and tears of pain formed at the corner of his green emerald eyes. He was scared beyond words, he was confused, and in pain. Crying seemed to be the right response to those feelings.

The man collected himself, the hard edges of his black eyes softening as he reached out to Harry again, this time as if he was trying to calm a frantic rad animal. “Harry, put the knife down, or you’ll hurt yourself…” he stepped a little closer, but Harry felt like he was too close.

The man was too close, and he didn’t like it when people became too intimate with him. Aunt Petunia said that was bad. No one wanted to be near the freak. “Come let’s get you back to bed.” The man was saying, his voice calm and soothing.

Harry fought against the calmness; his head was too foggy to process vital information. “No! What do you want from me?”

The man, much to his credit, looked taken back at the question, his eyes suddenly narrowed as if he was contemplating something. Harry whimpered quietly, fresh hot tears streamed down his sweaty face as his guts churned in fear.

The stranger snapped out of his stupor with a jostle, his eyes widening as he saw the tears streaming down Harry’s face, his expression openly soft and caring towards the young boy.

“Shhh, it’s alright, I’m here,” he said, Harry’s chin started trembling. “…Harry, give me the knife before…”

“No!”

Harry swung the knife in front of his face, his shoulders shaking with half formed sobs. He didn’t quite know why he was crying, all he knew was that he was /scared/, and he didn’t know this man and his head hurt a lot. Uncle Vernon would be so mad if he got home late, uncle Vernon would get the belt again if he didn’t do the dishes on time, and the dinner got late.

He was in so much trouble.

The kind stranger stumbled back, almost knocking his chair over as he flinched away from the knife. “Alright! Keep the knife!”

He reached out and took Harry’s shaking shoulders, maneuvering his body to accommodate the sharp edge of the blade. “It’s okay Harry…it’s okay.”

“You’re just confused, I know.” The man continued sympathetically. His hand rubbing cautious circles on Harry’s back. “You woke up, you did not know where you are, and you were alone. It’s okay, I’m sorry for leaving you alone, alright?”

“Where am I?” Harry knew he could stab the man if he thronged the knife hard enough in his robe clad side. But the man was hugging him, and that was nice. It helped the crying.

“We’re at my house,” The man subtly moved to his right as he kept on hugging him. Out of the knife’s range. “But we weren’t before, I’m so sorry for scaring you, it’s okay.”

“Take me home please sir.” Harry pleaded with the man. He was nice, surely, he would listen to him without Harry having to beg or licking his boots. When Harry was younger, Uncle Vernon had tried that a few times. It wasn’t nice.

“You are already home. Trust me.”

The man moved Harry to one of the chairs but didn’t make him seat on it. Aunt petunia would have shoved him. She would scald him if he didn’t make dinner tonight, and then start screaming and screaming and screaming at him. Then she would lock him in the cupboard until Uncle Vernon came for his punishment.

Bad Harry. Bad freak.

He needed to go home.

“We were in Exeter, remember?” the man asked him kindly, oblivious to Harry’s inner conflict.

“We had a room there; we went to the museum and watched the buildings.”

Harry’s body shook with dread. “We’re not there…Uncle Vernon’s gonna…he’s gonna...”

The man shushed him again. “No, not anymore. He’s not going to do anything.”

“No he will. I know he will, he would-”

The man cut in. “You live with me now Harry,”

There was silence in the kitchen, with the dripping faucet and Harry’s irregular breathing the only sounds filling the room. The kind man gently lowered Harry into the chair and crouched in front of him. The man was so tall that his hands were still comfortably resting on Harry’s shoulder even in his kneeling position.

“What?” Harry breathed out.

“You live with me and there was an accident, four days ago. You had a seizure Harry. You really scared me but everything’s fine now. You needed rest so I brought you home,” he said ‘home’ as if the word held meaning behind it. Shaking, Harry shrugged the man off, his mind reeling as his mind processed the words.

Seizure. What was a seizure? It sounded dangerous. Mrs. Turner hasn’t told them about seizures yet; maybe Harry should ask her after he was out of the cupboard. From the sound of things, it was scary, because the man genuinely looked frightened.

“I don’t know you and I don’t- cannot remember any of these.” He confessed, hanging his head.

The man’s face held no shock or judgment, and he nodded, as if already aware of that fact.

“Alright, that’s okay too. You’ll remember in no time.” His hands were warm, Harry noticed, and he smelled of fresh laundry, and mixed herbs. It added to the calming affect when the man talked. “Whom do you know now? Do you want me to call your friends to keep you company?”

Harry’s brows furrowed in puzzlement. “Friends?”

He had no friends. He only had Dudley, piers, John and Holland. They were the ‘Harry Hunting’ squad, Dudley specially hit very hard. Friends didn’t hit friends, but Dudley did. Did the man meant the Harry hunting squad?

Some stray hairs fell into the guy’s eyes as he nodded. Harry had the strangest urge to reach out and push them away as they annoyingly obstructed the man’s eyes. “Ron, Hermione…maybe Molly?”

Harry’s frown deepened. The man sighed, dropping his warm, soft, hands from Harry’s shoulders. “You have no idea what I’m talking about do you?” Harry gave him a blank look, secretly mourning the loss of contact.

“It’s worse than I thought then.” The man muttered under his breath, almost as if he was talking to himself. “Are you thirsty? Hungry?”

“No.”

“Do you remember your name?”

“Aunt Petunia said…Strangers….”

He cut in. “I’m not a stranger, but that’s okay.” Harry was growing sick of the word /okay/. The man was clearly overusing it. Nothing looked even remotely ‘okay’ from where Harry was sitting. The air shifted and the man moved to sit on a chair across from him, his shoulders straightening when he looked at Harry.

“My name is Severus. Severus Tobias Snape. Do you remember that? You call me Sev sometimes.”

“No.”

“It’s alright.” Severus reassured him.

“Harry. I’m Harry but no one call-calls me that.”

“What do they call you Harry?”

“I won’t tell.”

Freak, boy, insolent wimp, whelp, brat, fucking bastard, good for nothing monster, slacker…they called him by so many names, sometimes it was difficult for Harry to remember his real name. Like the first day of school, when Mrs. Turner asked for his name and Harry stupidly forgot what he should say. There were so many to choose from, so many options. Harry didn’t want to get punished for choosing the wrong one.

Mrs. Turner didn’t know that he forgot his name; she thought he was being naughty and told on him to the principle and Aunt Petunia.

Aunt Petunia scratched his arms as she wrenched him from the car and dragged him into the kitchen, roughly shoving him into his cupboard and almost cutting off his fingers as she slammed the door shut.

Was that why he didn’t live with them anymore?

“Do you want something to eat? We have soup; Mrs. Weasley brought some over this morning.”

“I don’t want to wash the dishes.” Harry flushed as soon as the idiotic sentence left his mouth, and berated himself for his prompt and unwelcome childishness.

Who knew what this man could do to him if Harry disagreed with him? Sure, the man had nice hugs, but that didn’t mean anything.

“You won’t have to touch a dish,” the man promised him amusedly, but Harry thought he could see a speck of sadness behind Severus Snape’s eyes.

“I’m still not hungry.”

Pursing his lips, the man promptly pushed Harry to sit down on a chair and then bustled around the kitchen, murmuring to himself as he patted down his pockets and looked through the cupboards, sparing a confused Harry with short apologetic glances.

Harry twisted the lean blade in his hands as ‘Severus’ rummaged the small kitchen, his eyes blown wide as Snape finally reached over the refrigerator, /into/ a fruit bowl and pulled something out.

“Sorry,” Severus sheepishly turned. “You kept on finding the vials, so I had to find new hiding places. There are so many I lost count myself.” He shook a clear vial in his hand and placed it on the table, his eyes roaming Harry’s face for a reaction.

“I keep finding them?”

“Not that it happens often, but you keep flushing the fresh ones down the toilet and I could only brew so much before…” Severus ceased his ramblings at once, and clasped his hands. His face morphing into a perfectly crafted blank expression.

“What is that?”

Moreover, why was Harry flushing them down the toilet? It couldn’t be anything good if the man was openly hiding the stuff from him.
“It helps; it’s your medicine.” Snape shortly supplied, pushing the vial into Harry’s direction.

Harry stared.

Rolling his eyes, Snape leaned and took the vial; he uncorked it with precision and took a small sip. “It’s harmless I promise…here, see?” he took another sip and then held the vial out for Harry.

The pain was pushing his will, and Harry only lasted a minute before he snatched the vial and drank it all in one go. The taste was foul and murky, as if he was swallowing warmed expired milk, but the smell wasn’t unbearable to him.

Harry dropped the vial and leaned back in his chair, eyeing Snape warily as they both waited for the potion to take effect with bated breath. Suddenly the pain in his head dissipated and Harry gasped, feeling everything just clicking into place.

He scrambled away from Snape’s hunched figure, his face turning a deep shade of tomato red that would have had Ron proud.

“Pro-Professor Snape!” he blurted out incredulously, his eyes wide.

Snape harrumphed, his eyes narrowing as he scanned Harry’s indignant face.

“Not quite there yet, but yes Harry. Are you feeling better now?”

Mortified, embarrassed and confused, Harry wrung the hem of his large shirt. “I’m not sure.”

Snape? Professor Snape?! What was he doing here with the man? And since when did Snape refer to him by his name? Since when did the man hug him when he was crying?

Since he started living with the man, apparently.

The pain was back, this time as a dull reminder as the messy haired teen pressed his mind to gather scrapes of information, but came out mostly clean. Even his encounter with the potion master from a few moments ago was fuzzy.

Snape was suddenly in front of him, his face blank but his tone of voice determined and instructive.

“You need rest, let me help you up.” He helped harry stand. His warm hand around Harry’s frail, weak shoulder, while Potter himself was gaping at the man, the knife defensively elevated.

Professor Snape rolled his eyes. “You can keep the knife, come on.”

He easily scooped a peeved Harry in his arms and somberly strode to the stairs. Harry’s eyes widened, his mouth slack with shock as his teacher carried him up the stairs and back to the room he had woken up in. he was being carried. By Professor Snape. Carried like the man had done it a hundred times before, so much so that he didn’t even bother to ask for Harry’s permission.

What was wrong with the world?

Snape held Harry like he was a child, and Harry held on in fear of the man dropping him or suddenly letting go of him as a cruel prank. It wouldn’t have been that farfetched coming from the old Snape.

Suffice to say, this man wasn’t acting like Snape at all.

He was insanely close to Harry and the man didn’t even seemed bothered by that. One could even say they were cuddling on the bed, with Harry reluctantly leaning weakly against the potion master who was holding him upright and Snape comfortably looking through some parchments.
Parchments that had Harry’s handwriting on them.

Snape caught his wary glance and smiled. “I’m just trying to find the right one,” he answered his unasked question warmly, his eyes bearing no hostility.

“Did I write these?” he rasped out, his cold hand clenching the covers.

Severus Snape hummed under his breath as he skimmed through the pages. “Most of them, except those stack of letters, those are from your friends. They write weekly, Harry.”

Again, with the name, Harry thought warily. The man who had chewed him out in his classes more than once on a daily basis was cuddling up with him in his home and calling him by his name. He must be dreaming.

“Here it is,” the man declared smugly, holding the fresh parchment as if he was cradling a baby.

“I wrote this?” he thumbed the words, his head throbbing lightly as he frowned. Snape gently nudged him with his shoulder.

“You did, we were here when you wrote this one. It’s one of my favorites.” He smirked, looking at Harry so openly that Harry had half a mind to stab the man anyway. This cannot be real, he thought. This was wrong.

However, it didn’t feel wrong, Snape’s shoulder against his, the smell of laundry and mixed herbs, the slight lines that formed at the corner of the man’s eyes, as he looked at Harry with genuine concern and fondness…It felt safe. It felt more right than Harry could have imagined. It felt /heavenly/.

“You read them?” Snape’s smirk expanded across his tired face.

“You /demand/ I read every single one as soon as you finish them.” He said, the smile on his face never fading. Harry didn’t know it was possible for the man to smile before; it was creepy seeing him do it. Some part of Harry though, a small part of him found it endearing.

“Do you like them?”

“I love them,” the potion master emphasized, giving Harry’s shoulder a comforting squeeze. Harry flinched away, but Snape pretended that he didn’t notice. He handed some of the parchments back to Harry amusedly.

“We even spoke of publishing some of them as one of those, humor columns in the Quibbler, you-”

Harry cut in. “Did I even like you? I mean…I must have if I’m staying with you.”

Snape’s face fell, his shoulders sagging as though a heavy weigh was pressing him down. Snape thumbed the favored parchment as he thought.
“You felt purple about me.” He said eventually, his smile returning once again, his eyes glinting with nostalgia.

“I felt…Purple about you…Purple, the color.” Had he heard that right?

Snape looked as if he was just letting Harry in on an inside joke. “No, not the color.” He drawled amusedly.

“The feeling.” He unhelpfully clarified. “You never told me what it meant, even in your journals. Every time I asked you, you would just smile at me and say ‘Purple Sev, how many times do I have to say? It’s always purple for you.”

“I thought colors were feelings?”

The man shrugged, rearranging his arm further away from Harry. “You didn’t label things,” he said thoughtfully. “Labeling your thoughts and feelings bothered you; it made your depression worse, so you stopped.”

Depression. Sickness. Harry didn’t like the sound of those things.

He raised his hands, puzzled as to which was which. How could he forget which hand is his right hand and which one is left? How was that even possible?

“Because I couldn’t tell them apart.” He bitterly mumbled. His hands dropping back on his lap.

Professor Snape disagreed. “Because it didn’t matter to us. You’re very open to change, it barely made a difference.”

“That doesn’t sound like me at all Professor.”

Snorting, the potion master raised both eyebrows. “You don’t sound like you now too. Your speech pattern is flawless, almost better than when you’re high.”

Harry took a double take, choking on air.

“On your prescribed medication Potter, don’t look at me like that.”

“Will I get my memory back soon?”

“Don’t worry about a thing, Charlie said you’d get better with enough rest. The longest it had ever lasted was three days, you couldn’t even remember your name then, so this is progress.”

Harry swallowed thickly. “Charlie?”

Snape waved him off. “You call her Mc-thingy. She’s your healer. Her name is not Charlie either.” He frowned. “You just call her that for some reason. You change her name every few weeks.” He sounded exasperated, and Harry was under the impression that the man wasn’t too fond of that nasty habit. Thank merlin, Harry thought, there was one thing this man hated about him.

“That sounds complicated and a bit rude. Why am I sick?”

“You shouldn’t think of it.” Snape replied without missing a beat. “Here, give me the parchment so we can get reading.” Harry tightened his grasp on the yellowing parchment.

“How did I get sick though? Is it bad? Am I getting better, or will I lose my memory again?”

Snape gently tugged at the letter in his hands, his moves were precise, practiced, and almost indulgent to Harry’s uncooperativeness. It all made the boy’s insides churn. “All of these questions will be answered in a few hours.”

Groaning, Harry gritted his teeth. “By whom?”

Snape easily shrugged him off. “By you, if you let yourself rest properly. As I told you, a disoriented state of mind is not uncommon after a seizure.”

“Why did I have-?”

“Do you want a story or not Potter?” Snape growled. “I could just as easily give you a vial of dreamless sleep and keep you dozed until you’re less irritating.”

“Oh so now you’re acting like Snape!” Harry shouted incredulously.

“Pardon me?”

“You’re acting crazy! You’re different! You were intimidating, and cruel and insulting before, there wasn’t a time where you weren’t hating me or sneering at me! Now you’re here, in this warm cozy room, cuddled up with me, smelling like cookies and smiling like we’ve known each other our whole lives!”

“Calm down Harry. This is just the shock, trust me, you won’t feel as disoriented in a few hours.”

The boy groaned louder. “You call me by my name!”

Jeering, the professor smacked Harry upside the head with his stack of letters. “What do you want to be called Potter? Pansy Parkinson? Harry’s your name.”

Harry clutched his letter opener and brought it up to his face, feeling slightly nauseous.

“You hate me… wait scratch that, /Snape/ hated me.” He willed his legs to bend and sifted away from the man. “/This/ could just as easily be Polyjuice or-or a spell, maybe Voldemort sent some of his follower to-”

Snape cut in. “What? Offer you a nice nap and pajama parties? Potter, come on.”

The boy almost fell off the bed, gasping, Harry gawked. “Oh my god did you just make a joke? Who the hell are you?!”

“I would be one aggravated Professor if you don’t cease your ridiculousness.” Even as he said this, there was a ghost of a smile tugging at the man’s lips. “No, I’m not using Polyjuice potion or a spell. Merlin, you would be so embarrassed after you remember all of this in a few hours.”
His lips fully stretched into a smirk. “I’m recording these from now on, they’re genuinely amusing.”

“You’ve kidnapped me haven’t you?” Harry rambled. “And this is all an act, you’re gonna kill me in my sleep, or-or-or fatten me up like Hansel and that cookie witch and then cook me in your oven. Is that what this is?”

Snape seemed like he couldn’t contain his laughter anymore, the man clutched his sides, as he laughed, nearly falling on an indignant Harry as he did.
“You’re absolutely going to /hate /yourself in a few hours Harry, and I’m loving it.”

“Stop laughing, it’s creepy.”

Snape smirked amusedly, shaking his head. “Polyjuice…that’s new. I must say, I’m impressed.”

“You’re right;” Harry deadpanned. “The real Snape wouldn’t need Polyjuice to kidnap me. Let me go.”

“Where? You can’t use magical transportation and its summer.” The bed dipped as Snape stood and made his way to the desk-Harry’s desk, apparently- and returned the stack of letters from Harry’s friends he had mentioned earlier. The man turned then, crossing his arms and waiting for Harry’s next blow.

The green-eyed boy seethed, fisting his hands. “Take me to Ron’s. Right now.” Snape gave him a look, and Harry returned it as vehemently as he could.
“Or I start screaming.” He threatened.

“Several loopholes in that plan Potter, first, we live in a secluded neighborhood, the only one able to hear you throwing a tantrum would probably be that old lady that lives six houses over and she has a bad hip.” Snape strode towards the window and threw the curtains wide open.

“Secondly, I already offered to call Weasley for you.” He said as he opened the window with ease. “I wouldn’t do that if you were kidnapped and I also don’t keep your teenage friends locked up in my attic in case you asked for them.”

Harry watched as Snape took the chair that was set near the nightstand instead of joining Harry, his elbows were resting on his knees. “Those are the only loopholes left if you don’t take the fact that I’m two times your size and height into consideration.”

“Stop treating this like a bloody game Snape!” Harry glowered.

“Stop making it into a game. I told you everything you needed to know and you remember the rest in a few hours. If you still have any qualms about my sincerity then, I swear on my magic that I’ll call Albus Dumbledore myself.”

“This cannot be you. It just cannot.”

Severus’s face softened a fraction, his hand grasped Harry’s shoulder. “People change Harry.”

Harry flinched from the touch. Threateningly, he raised the blade until Snape removed his warm hand from Harry’s shoulder. “How could you have changed into /this/?”

He shrugged. “Good company and a nice vacation.”

“You’re saying that /I/ changed you?”

Snape pursed his lips, regarding Harry bemusedly. “That is debatable.”

“I’m either dreaming or you’re telling the truth.”

In response, the potion master handed a particular parchment to the wearily tensed boy. Harry snatched the parchment with some perplexity. His head throbbed.

“What’s this?”

“That time we went to the zoo and you gave balloons to everyone.” Harry’s frown deepened, his rushing blood was roaring vengeance in his ears. “This is by far, the most informative piece you have written about our relationship dynamic.” Severus explained. “I thought it would be a nice way to stop your inconsistent fretting.”

Skeptically, Harry’s eyes skimmed the blurry words. “We went to the zoo together?”

Why would he ever go to a zoo with Snape? Why would he ever go anywhere with man by his own free will? This felt like the topping to the cake for Harry. Things couldn’t possibly get any stranger than this, he thought.

Except… Snape started talking again. “Only twice, once back in April and the other time was last week, we were in Paris and you insisted.”
Harry flushed, he frantically reached for the stack of parchments set on his covers, his heart thundering in his chest as he desperately pulled a parchment form the pile.

Paris. Not only they had gone to the zoo, they took vacations to other countries, and then Harry wrote about it. He eyed the pile with distrust, feeling as if each /letter/ was a grenade. Snape watched as he rifled through the letters with labored breathing, his arms crossed across his chest and his gaze absolutely neutral.

In his futile attempts to find a non-threatening parchment, or anything, really that wasn’t written by him, Harry found a slightly different paper. He held the long piece of muggle paper with his thumb and index finger. It was a yellowed legal pad paper, a badly creased one, and Harry could barely make out any words from the large blub of smudged ink. “What is this one about?” he asked Snape immediately. “Butterfly and the candle.” Was written in his spidery scrawl.

“It’s a story I told you a long time ago. You really liked it so you wrote it down.” Snape glared at the paper like it had personally insulted the man. He gave it a glare he would often give Neville at the slightest transgression.

Harry eyed the black smudges. “Would you tell me about it again?”
Snape went rigid. “Why? You’re going to remember it again in a few hours anyway.”

“Please.”

“It’s metaphorical, are you sure certain that you have the patience for it?”

Harry contemplated the parchments with a little frown. Maybe if he got Snape annoyed enough the man would snap out of…/this/. He clearly seemed to dislike this story.

“If it makes you uncomfortable, then I want to hear it. Sir.”

“Cheeky brat.” Snape scowled, taking the creased paper from Harry’s waiting hands.

Instead of reading, the man threw it on the nightstand, his scowl deepening as Harry settled in to listen to his teacher. Harry was under the impression, that Snape had very unpleasant thoughts regarding this story, or rather, of Harry supposedly liking it.

Yet, the man begrudgingly crossed his arms and started talking, his voice steady but low.

“It was said, that butterflies have never been able to meet the allure of the flame and yet, they held it most dear. It was the most natural thing for them. To admire, and yearn for the flickering flame from afar, to wrongly hold themselves as true lovers without having to meet their beloved.

One night…three butterflies flew in through an ajar window; each of them drawn in by the flickering glow of a newly lit candle.

The first butterfly flew forward, away from the other two and admired the flames, for the other two were too afraid to get any closer. It flew back to the others and said,

“I’ve seen the candle, I’ve admired the flickering flame with my own eyes and so, I’m its true love, for I was the one to be brave enough to approach it.”

The second butterfly was envious, so he, also got closer to watch the candle, but that wasn’t enough for him, he flew closer, feeling the engulfing orange warmth the candle emitted. Excitedly, he flew back to the other two butterflies and said,

“You’re wrong.” He said to the first butterfly. “I am the candle’s true love, for I felt the warmth and the glory of my beloved. I was persuasive in my love and so I was rewarded by the flame.”

The third butterfly said none as it watched the candle from afar, without a thought it flew closer, closer than the first butterfly had gotten, and then closer…nearer than the second butterfly had flown in to feel the warmth.

He flew so close that he burned, felt his wings catch harsh laps of the fire and felt it tear through his limbs. Yet, it wasn’t enough; the butterfly flew into the flame despite knowing that he won’t last long in the candle’s cruel clutches. He didn’t get the time to goat about his achievement to the other two, and didn’t need to.

The first had only seen the beauty and the second had only felt the love from afar. /He/ had flown right into it; /he/ was the candle’s true lover, for he was the one willing to take the burn of that love. He didn’t need others to tell him about the candle, for he and the candle were one.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“You’re right, I don’t get it.” Harry promptly said as he crossed his arms.

Snape arched a graceful eyebrow down at him, his hands reaching out to straighten the blanket covering Harry’s cold, trembling legs.

“What’s not there to understand? You love this story,” the man asked amusedly. His voice tinged with mocked anger.

“I get why you hate me liking it. Butterflies are stupid, and that candle was a jerk.”

Snape snorted. “I’m glad that was your first impression from a story like that.” The man dryly drawled out.

“But it’s true! Why would the butterfly fly right into the candle when the others were smart enough to stay away? What is the point of seeing his ‘true love’ for what it really was when he was just going to die in the end?”

“It’s metaphorical, Harry.” Severus reminded him. “Butterflies aren’t in love with candles.”

Wildly shifting on the bed, in spite of his blinding headache, Harry sat four legged, facing the potion master. “Alright then…what is this really about?” he asked. “What are they supposed to be representing? Love hurts? Love kills? Everyone’s going to die when they find out the truth and thus life is pointless? Your story sucks.”

Snape gave him a pointed look.

“What does that mean?” Harry snapped. “That look?”

“Why don’t you think that the third butterfly was not burned alive by the candle, and instead, consumed by its love?” Snape said wryly, arching an eyebrow down at Harry.

Harry snorted in disbelief, turning to face the potion master with an indignant look.

“He burned.” He told Severus in a tone that suggested he was talking to a child. “The candle /burned/ him. To death.”

“The candle cannot change who it is. Burning is its purpose, but it also exudes warmth and beauty. It’s just nature; people cannot help who they are. The butterfly loved the candle despite that.”

His thumb traced the sharp edge of his silver letter opener. “So love is lethal, yeah, I get it, but…but it’s stupid…Just...”

Snape hummed in agreement. “You were the one who thought of that. You thought the candle wasn’t to be blamed.”

Harry scoffed at the idea.

What a bunch of bullshit. He was really starting to hate his new self…or old self, considering the circumstances.

“Who’s the candle in real life? Death? Love? God? Our loved ones? The truth?”

Snape thought for a moment. “Anything really.” he finally said. “Because nothing is ever flawless, and our flaws are often what hurt our loved ones.”

“I still don’t understand the moral of this story.” Harry admitted.

“That really depends on how you view life Potter.”

“How did I see it before? Tell me.”

He needed to know, he felt as if he was two different people at once. If what Snape was saying was the truth, then Harry wasn’t like /that/ Harry at all, and wouldn’t be for at least a few hours.

Harry felt as if /that/ Harry was a fool for trusting Snape.

“You saw yourself as the candle.” Snape replied bluntly, he looked as if he knew exactly what was going on in Harry’s head. “And your loved ones were the butterflies.”

“I-I-I was the candle?”

“You asked me a few minutes ago that how you could have changed a man like me into who I am now…this is how. This,” he pointed at himself. “Was me all along. Assuming you were the candle in the story.”

Harry was speechless, the low throbbing behind his eyes pushed his gaze downwards, where he could do nothing but stare at his lap in silence. The well-worn afghan smelled of him and had little beads of red wool and thread sticking out, softening the texture. Harry caressed a gentle hand over the wool.

He was having an out of body experience, as if he was living someone else’s life. This was someone else’s Snape. Someone else’s afghan and warm room and cuddles.

Snape was someone else’s butterfly, whatever that meant.

“Others often take their first perception of a person and categorize them as that person’s personality, regardless of the situation…but the truth is people don’t have just /one/ persona. They only react to other people’s behavior and stance towards them in certain ways at certain times. People, tend to emphasize that reaction and mark it as personality. That is correspondence bias.”

Harry was lost on the man, his headache leaving no room for pondering Snape’s words. “How is that related to us?”

Snape scowled, his shoulders tensed. “It goes both ways with us Potter. We both moved out of the environmental conditions that defined our characteristics to each other. We left Hogwarts and we live together, I cannot remain a bitter, intimidating figure forever just as you couldn’t remain an infuriating brat.”

“Why not?!”

“Because…” his teacher paused, “We don’t go to the zoo if we were at Hogwarts, we wouldn’t feel compelled to spend time with each other, or be pleasant, or do things that a teacher and student don’t do under normal circumstances.”

Harry rubbed his throbbing forehead, feeling faint, as the swarming wave of confusion over took his senses. Snape was telling him that they were friends, maybe even more, with the man as something akin to a-Harry shuddered at the thought- father figure. Someone Harry willingly went to the zoo with, someone who cuddled up with him and told Harry philosophical stories and ideas. Someone Harry had confined in.

“As soon as their initial perceptions change, so does that person.” He said, scrutinizing the potion master’s face.

“I altered my perception of you and you changed…so in that sense…you’re the candle. Not me.”

“We show different levels of compassion and vulnerability to others.” Snape replied mysteriously.

Harry suddenly reached forward, and grabbed Severus’s wrist in a death grip, the afghan’s warmth leaving him as he leaned closer to Snape. The air shifted as Harry looked the man dead in the eyes.

“I felt purple about you and you’re kind to me now.” He started slowly. “You’re acting like you’ve been there my whole life, like you know me. The last thing I remember of you is sneering at me and saying mean things about my father. That /man/, would never be the one you are.” His cold, nimble fingers pressed hard around Snape’s reddening wrist. Harry distractedly realized that even his fingers looked thinner, but pushed the thought away as Snape calmly unclasped his fingers from his wrist with his other hand and sat back. An odd look in his eyes.

“I did apologize for that.” The man silently revealed. Harry startlingly realized that the man was ashamed. He slumped back against the headboard, drawing his hands under his knees for warmth.

The teenager’s face grew hard. “Did I forgive you?”

“You’re a very mature young man and I was a fool, Harry.”

“You should stop asking questions, it’s making the headache worse. You wouldn’t need to ask anything anyways, I’m confident in Charlie’s ability, and she said you would be fine in a few hours after you woke up.”

“But, if you’re like this with me now…you could still turn into Professor Snape at a moment’s notice? Like… what if you ever see Neville strolling outside? Or when you teach again this year?”

Snape glared. “You do realize Professor Snape and Severus are both the same person, correct Potter? Or should I have your head examined?” the two looked away from each other in awkward silence, and Snape seemed a bit grey. Harry rubbed his aching eyes.

“This is just too odd. Creepy, almost.”

Severus stood, clasping his hands behind his back and looming over Harry with an all-knowing stare. “You’d be fine when you remember and you’re not high up on your prescription drugs.” He nodded his chin at him. “Get some rest now, and please, put that letter opener away, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

Harry quickly scrambled to put the knife on the nightstand, he pulled the comforter over his legs but also kept the afghan on him; it smelled exactly like Snape did, mixed herbs and fresh laundry, and until Harry was back to his normal self, he preferred having it with him.

“Alright, thanks Professor.” He needed the man to leave. Harry needed to think.

Snape looked like he was physically trying to resist the urge to touch Harry somehow, the boy imagined the gesture was meant to be comforting, maybe a pat on the head, an affectionate hair ruffling-he was bald though, for whatever reason-, or even another hug. As freaky as it sounded, Harry wouldn’t have minded another hug.

All in a few hours, the teenager promised himself. The exact equivalent of a nice nap would apparently get him on track, which sounded just about right with his progressively worsening headache.

As the potion master turned to leave, Harry turned his head, his eyes already drooping. “What’s really wrong with me? Am I that sick?”

Severus put a hand on the doorframe; he didn’t look at Harry over his shoulder. “You’ll remember it all in a few hours. Rest now.”

**
How do you explain death to a child? How would you tell them that when a person dies, they go away and they’re never coming back? How do you tell anyone that?

How do you tell someone they’re dying? How do you explain that concept to someone who doesn’t even remember that they’re dying? Tell them, that in less than a month they cease to exist, they will be ripped away from the land of living in a painful manner, and then whisked away to the possibility of an afterlife.

Would they want there to be an afterlife? Would Severus? For his own sake and not Harry’s?

Was it better for Harry if there was an afterlife, with his loved ones waiting for him? With Lily-his dearest Lily- and James Potter, the child’s true father or his godfather waiting for him? Or would it be better if everything just /stopped/ after his heart failed to beat again?

Severus cannot bear it; he cannot bear the weight of the truth on his shoulders. Harry’s dying. There’s nothing he could do to change that, because it /will/ happen, Severus / ensured / it would happen by dosing him up with that stupid, /stupid/ potion, just to prove a point.

In a sense, Severus is a murderer.

Harry plainly asked him if he’s sick.

“You’re not sick Harry, no.” he wanted to say. “You’re dying. You’re dying and I wished it could have been me who died instead.”
Instead, he says, “You’ll remember it all in a few hours. Rest now.”

This was his mistake; a small part of his brain tells him that getting attached to the boy was his own mistake. An error in his system, and now he was too close to the burning candle to back out.

Severus isn’t a man to be ruled by sentiments and feelings. Not after Lily, and not before her. Not after his mother’s death and not before that…what is it about this /boy/ that keeps tormenting him? What does Potter Senior’s /spawn/ have, that makes it seem like his lack of existence might just /kill/ Severus?

“Harry you’re dying, it’s going to be painstakingly gradual, you are going to beg for it through the pain, and no one can put you out of your misery and the disgrace because they’re too selfish. I cannot let you go peacefully in your sleep. Because I’m selfish. You should hate me for it.”

He could easily slip the child a mild sedative and the most ferocious poison he had in his stores. He could seat by his side and watch as Harry’s life slipped from his jelly like fingers and he died with a smile on his face…he could do it in a heartbeat.

But he never would. He never /could/ do something so horrific, even if Harry begged for it.

“KILL ME! KILL ME!”

He begged for it. He begged of Severus as Poppy and Charlie held him down so the chemo can run its course. The chemo must have felt like a shocking cold stab to his chest after so many months of warm bliss.

Harry must have seen it as a betrayal, as he thrashed and shouted vengeance. Threatening to skin /him/ if Severus didn’t kill Harry first.
That was how it normally went, after the seizures. This was the third time.

He just needed to have Paranoia added in his list, that and Harry’s rapidly failure in judgment. He had fought him tooth and nail after his second seizure and had to be sedated to be put down. This time? All it took was a few menacing words and amused glances.

Severus just hoped Harry wouldn’t remember a shred of this day when his memories came back, just like he couldn’t recall the others.

I cannot do this anymore.

I cannot leave him by himself. I cannot die.

Not yet, not when so much is left undone.

But I’m running out of time.

This is hopeless, me keeping track of things. For whom? He recalls every damn second we spent together, his memory is so vast and resourceful that even without the tumor I would have pathetically lost to him.

Suddenly, I don’t know the purpose of what we’re doing anymore, our traveling, and me spending so goddamn much to record all of it. To what end? I asked myself this morning. It’s a waste of precious time. Time that runs out.

The reason for this sudden ambiguity isn’t what most might think it is. I’m not having an existential crisis or a breakdown. This isn’t even about me. It’s about Severus. I realized it too late…I realized that I should have listened to him. Followed his own damn rule.

Never get attached.

We’re /too/ attached. It didn’t happen overnight, but the shock and realization hit me the hardest just this morning. Severus has this look about him. He is going to do something stupid. I just know it.

Now, instead of fretting over my own deteriorating health, I was fretting over the potion master’s.

What would happen to him if I died? Sure, I would die in a hideous and painful way, but then it’s over for me, what about him? I’m just leaving him here with all these other people? Alone in a world where no one really understands him?

I cannot do that.

Granted he’s a grown ass man, equipped with a dangerously wide range of skills and abilities that makes my blood run cold, and also one of the most powerful wizards that I know, but my concern isn’t for his safety.

Severus’s fondness of me is about to reach a new level. Pass a limit that it shouldn’t, under these circumstances. I’m seeing it happen, but I cannot stop it.

It seems as if he’s forgetting his own demands on purpose, he is acting odd, out of bounds, I don’t if it’s just me hallucinating, but there’s something going on with him. He didn’t use to feel this way for me before, not this intensely; he merely tolerated my presence and then later proceeded to mentor me like a teacher would an apprentice.

Sure, he was friendly and caring towards me before, right from the beginning…but he was never this BOLD about it! He wants me to say something, ask him why, I just know it.

Things are different now. I could detect the alteration immediately, much to my own surprise. Before, there was an iron wall between the man and the world, an unshakable exterior, and later on, a heavy curtain, still remained between the two of us.

As of last week, the man had dropped all pretense of stoicism or anything resembling his past personality. He was….well I don’t know the word for it.
But he’s not himself anymore, that’s for sure.

He’s open. Not exactly emotional or over the top like Sirius was, but more… more exposed somehow. Openly affectionate. Bold. Towards me.
Me.

Harry James Potter.

Me.

He just doesn’t like me. He freaking loves me.

He told me that he loves me. After that last seizure. He thought I didn’t remember since I wasn’t quite /me/, but I do. He never told me he loved me before. Not only that, but he cuddled me as well.

/cuddled/.

If there was one thing Sev didn’t normally dish out, it was cuddles. Not even to me. Now though, Severus Snape is a hugger. That is literally Neville’s nightmare fuel right there.

And that’s dangerous. Because I cannot afford him to take any, drastic measures now, not now that I cannot return those feelings, because I don’t want to break his heart.

Severus is a very private and closed off person, he’s not a toy, I cannot mess with his paternal feelings for me, and then bugger off and die and leave him behind. It would destroy him.

It was fine before, when my fondness of the man out weighted his keenness towards me. Now that it’s evened up, and he’s behaving without an ounce of subtlety anymore…well…

You all think I shouldn’t care, that he’d be fine in a couple of years and moves on while I stay permanently dead. As in not alive, to see his suffering anyways.

That’s what most people get wrong about dying; when you die, you leave a typhoon of chaos and destruction and utter /devastation/ to wreck the people you left behind and that knowledge wrecks you in return. I already had too many people around me, people who once looked up to me, loved me or even just knew me…I don’t want Severus to be a part of it. Even though I won’t be there to see it.

He knew that too. He set the conditions himself, because he knew he couldn’t afford to get close to a ticking bomb, but he did it anyway. I don’t why.
I don’t want to ask him what he’s playing at. On one hand, I want to stop writing all these entries so I could spend more time with him, drink up every second that we have together and soak up his affection like a sponge; on the other hand, I don’t want to stop writing because I’m afraid that I’ll do just that.

So there are two resolutions, really; either I don’t die, so I wouldn’t break his heart, or I keep writing this in hopes that he finds it long after I’m gone, so that he could understand.

I may as well keep writing.

Getting to know Severus was a gradual process.

Everyday had a new discovery, and with every new discovery, Severus somehow seemed more humane, realer. In a way that he hasn’t been to anyone. I can safely say, no one…not even my mother, knows Severus as I do now.

The word of the day folks, is oxymoron and Sev’s whole existence defines the word.

The man is just filled with impossibly contradicting traits. He just doesn’t act like two different people, he /is/ two different people. To me, he’s Professor Snape /and/ Severus. Differentiating them though, that took me a long time.

If at first Sev’s strange behavior used to be baffling, now it was quite understandable. Not everyone could understand and interact with the man, he was…unique. One of a kind really, and I prided myself on being one of the only ones who had the pleasure of getting to know him this way.

“What happened tonight Potter,” the potion master begun as soon as we got back in the car, our cheeks flushed from the chilly breeze and hours spent on singing crappy songs. He would lie now, but he likes karaoke just as much as I do. “Would never be repeated elsewhere. Is that clear?” he turned the ignition as he finished.

I grinned. “Why? Is the bat of dungeons afraid for his reputation?”

Snape rolled his eyes as he started driving. “Watch your mouth Potter.” He warned.

I shrugged, feeling brave and abrasive as I started picking at the thread of my jacket. “I’m just saying, things wouldn’t terribly go wrong if Neville knew about your stellar singing voice, even Professor Flitwick would like the new addition to Hogwarts’ acapella -.”

“It’s my word against yours Potter,” he cut in. “And you have a tumor in your head. Do the math.”

“You’re right Professor; it’s my word against yours.”

“Cheeky brat.” The man grumbled.

“Severus Snape,” I raised my voice teasingly. “Being cheered on by drunk people as he sang to decades old muggle songs…” I paused. “You’re right, it sounds more like a hallucination than an actual event.”

He grunted, and I leant my head against the cold window, feeling the coolness seep into my forehead. There was a pleasant warm buzz in my stomach. I /loved/ karaoke.

As we were contently making our way to Surrey, I realized I might make Severus do it again with me since the man clearly loved it too, (I did.)
“As you can surely see Potter, it’s too late to go anywhere now, we will go to the zoo tomorrow morning, I hope that’s to your liking?”

“Where are we staying now?” I was too tired to get peeved as the row of familiar houses increased. Neat, and exactly alike. I hate suburban areas for the very same reason. Everything is too similar, too boring. Too / typical /. How did actual people live here? Were they content with being one of the many? With not being exceptional enough? Do I want to live in a place like this? Just be part of the mass?

“A safe house is near, Albus already gave me the keys, although I should warn you, it’s in close vicinity to your relatives’ residence. It wouldn’t be a problem since I doubt a confrontation.”

We ran into the Dursleys pretty much the next morning.

“This /safe/ house sounds dangerously close to private drive though, is that intentional?”

Snape gave me an unimpressed look. “What do you think Potter? Of course it was meant to be intentional, you didn’t expect your guards to sleep in the streets, did you?”

I stopped breathing. “My what?”

Snape graced me with one of his lighter sneers. “The members who watched you day and night since your Godfather’s successful escape two years ago,” he explained. “Don’t tell me you had no idea they existed Potter, one of them testified in court for you.”

“Mrs. Figg?” the name sounded so strange rolling in my tongue. “She was my former babysitter, I had no idea she was a Squib and she has her own house. Are you telling me there were others?”

The potion master gave me another look. “I’m going to give you two minutes to think about what you just asked Potter, while you take your situation, and the headmaster’s questionable sense of morality into consideration.”

I didn’t need two minutes or the sincerity in Severus’s eyes. My mouth fell open, and I clenched my hands on my knees. I felt indignation roll over me in slow humiliating waves. “Oh my god!” I groaned. “I had people watch over me all summer for /two/ years?!”

“You knew that.” The potion master rebuked accusingly.

“No I didn’t! I thought they only watched over me when…When C-Cedric…uh…went away.”

(Cedric was a touchy subject, you see. Thinking about Cedric was a big no-no ever since my condition started worsening. I couldn’t deal with Sirius’s death, my own death, Remus hating me /and/ Cedric on top of it. As guilty as that fact made me.)

Severus pretended he didn’t notice the stutter. “Well, knowing your Godfather, Headmaster thought it prudent someone be stationed near the house in case the mutt was foolish enough to attempt to sneak you out. Black was not exactly known for his maturity.”

“They watched over me?”

“From afar. They were explicitly ordered not to get inside the house or even close to the lawn.”

“I don’t understand, /Sirius/ wanted to break me out of my relative’s house? Why would he ever do that?”

“By Albus’s reasoning? Probably because the man was your godfather and felt the need to quench his thirst to prove himself to his dead best friend, and the notion might have unhinged him for all the time he spent in Azkaban…by my reasoning?”

“By your reasoning what?” I asked suspiciously.

Severus hesitated for a moment before responding. “I think he knew something others didn’t Potter. Something that now I know too.”

Oh no, I internally groaned. Not this again. He really wasn’t going to let the abuse thing go, was he? (He wasn’t.)

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He must have known the Dursleys personally,” the man continued. “If I remember it right, your aunt and that Walrus were already married when your parents wedded. Black was Potter’s best man, one encounter must have been enough.”

Of course, /he/ would know all about my parents’ wedding, the man knew everything about everyone. Anything there was to know. He knew all about me too. Even before he made me admit to most of it.

I honestly never found out if Sirius knew about my home life or not. Contrary to popular belief, my godfather was not an open man, not easily coaxed into talking about personal and sensitive subjects about himself or others. Sometimes…just sometimes, I think that he was wishing that by ignoring things, they would eventually go away… or he would.

Well he did leave, and he never talked about the Dursleys with me regarding this. (I’m not sure if I was angsty about that. Was I upset that Snape was pursing this instead of Sirius? Or Remus?)

“Sirius wasn’t like that,” I said after a long pause. “And the Dursleys…granted they’re not the best people around, but they’re not…”

“What, abusive?”

“Don’t say that word.” I glared at him, not ready for another emotional car talk. Honestly, it wasn’t like it mattered, I was going to die anyways. So why did it matter if I got knocked around and belittled a bit as a child? Who would care if /I/ didn’t?

Severus though, was relentless. “I bet Black knew, at least had a hunch. He certainly would have tried something if you hadn’t been guarded as closely. He couldn’t do anything without proof.”

The thought made my throat run dry. Sirius wouldn’t do that. I knew that. Not out of his lack of care, he did care. He loved me more than he was entitled to, but he wouldn’t have done something that drastic for me. Not the same way the /old/ Sirius would have before Azkaban.

“Stop, please.”

“But then again, that mustn’t have been what stopped him. He was rather pig-headed, your godfather. Even being on the run or a few order members wouldn’t have stopped him, I wonder…”

“Please.” I bit out. Hating that I was wrong. Snape clearly didn’t know a thing about the Sirius I knew.

Severus looked almost startled, as if broken from a trance. The man awkwardly cleared his throat as he gripped the steering wheel. “Yes Potter, you were guarded. The night shift members used this house, often enough.” He eventually said.

I frowned. “But didn’t they apparate back and forth though? Fletcher’s apparition was what caused all that havoc last year, right?”

“I said night shift members Potter, Albus would rather die and trust you with that man for over than two hours’ time, we also didn’t want the ministry to detect magical radiation from your house, so apparating back and forth wasn’t the best option. Fletcher was an idiot for doing it.”
We silently waited for a few moments.

“Sirius wasn’t insane.” I started slowly.

Snape nodded his head, but didn’t look like he agreed. “I’m sorry; I believe I was out of line.”

Was he apologizing? Well, that was a rare occurrence. “Are you apologizing?”

“Don’t get used to it.”

Severus took us to the edge of Little Whinging, just shy of the playing ground and closer to the Dursley’s house than I have imagined. He parked the car in the driveway and ushered me out into the dark, leading me to the porch. The house was a spitting image of the houses around it, it lacked the slightest shred of personal touch and that sucked.

Also, the freaking bathroom was situated in the hallway leading to the living room, and not on the second floor, which was a bummer since I could feel my guts painfully cramp together as we got out of the car. I knew that throwing up was only a matter of time, and I couldn’t do that in front of Snape.
I also couldn’t hide it with the darn loo literally in the man’s line of sight at all times.

The living room was spacious, and furnished with squeaky-clean furniture, a depressing brown rug covered the floor, and there were two red love seats set right next to an uncomfortable looking couch with no pillows. The polished counter bar top separated the small kitchen from the living room; two wooden stools were placed on either side. All in all, the place looked like a dollhouse.

“Um sir, this is going to sound insane…but can I take the couch?”

“Why?”

I shrugged, trying to look casual. “I don’t know, it looks cozy, I guess. I’ve never crashed on a couch before, maybe I could bring some blankets and-.” And camp in the bathroom until I wasn’t about to turn out my entrails. I finished in my mind, cringing as Snape looked at me over his shoulder.

“And?” he prompted.

“Nothing,” I blurted out, “It’s stupid, but I’ll take the couch tonight, if that’s okay with you sir.”

“Don’t take it up with me Potter, take it up with your neck and shoulders,” he said. “There’s a reason people don’t leave the comforts of bed for a lumpy sofa.”

My stomach clenched. “I think they’re fine with it sir. So is it really okay if I brought some blankets and pillows down here?”

The man sighed. “It’s not my house. Knock yourself out,” he turned and headed for the stairs. “And please for the love of god, take a shower before you fall asleep. You’re a teenaged boy, every two days isn’t going to cut it,” he grunted over his shoulder as he went to inspect the second floor.
Well that was easy, I wryly thought.

“And dry that mop properly, or I’ll shave it off.” Snape shouted, his body disappearing from view.

I nodded my head, even though he couldn’t see me. “I try sir, thanks.”

The cramps were getting progressively more persistent as the night went on; somehow, I managed to convince Sev that I wasn’t hungry enough for dinner and went upstairs to take some blankets to build my fort, mostly as a distraction from the pain.

Dudley never had a fort, as much as aunt Petunia loved her Duddikins, splaying blankets and pillows on the ground for any particular reason was where she drew the line. Not that she was the one doing the laundry or washing the sheets in the end, but still, a woman must have boundaries (eye roll).

The second floor had three bedrooms, with the one at the very end of the hall being the master bedroom, the smallest, and the blandest one on the right, and the other room on the opposite side. As Severus had already mentioned, the bathroom was downstairs.

I left the master bedroom for Snape and ventured into the two remaining rooms in a scavenger hunt for cushions and some pillows, which I found in the room that had royal blue curtains and no wardrobe.

It had a snug window seat and a double bed that took most of the space, and much to my ongoing luck, both were littered with cushions and comforters. I stifled that pure, childish sense of joy that was bubbling in my throat and hid my grin; the fort was only a mask for the cramps so I could sneak into the bathroom undetected, I reminded myself and the sharp pain in my guts agreed.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy building and sleeping in a childhood fantasy fort.

“Potter what in merlin’s name are you doing?” Snape asked incredulously, with his arms crossed. He watched in bemusement as I stumbled downstairs. I hoisted the bundle of blankets higher up in my arms.

“Just trying to make myself comfortable down here, that’s all.”

The man pinched the tip of his nose. “You could have just…forget it,” He dramatically dropped his hands by his side. “I suppose it won’t matter as long as you return them before we leave tomorrow.”

Dumping the beddings, I stifled my pained grimace with a wide grin and plopped down on the ground in the sea of pillows and duvets all around me.
I didn’t know the first thing about building blanket tents.

Well, I supposed there was a first for everything. Reaching out, I grasped the first thing that came to my hand and determinedly covered the couch with the comfortable sheets. Unlike my Aunt’s sheets, these did not have floral patterns or nauseating auras, they sort of smelled of dust and disuse, if I was being honest with myself.

I realized with a jolt that after my death there wouldn’t be much use of this house anymore. It would either stay as it is now, in a constant state of disuse and gradual decay, or the Order would clean it out and leave it be, so a muggle couple can take residence.

I wasn’t sure which was worse.

Snape had a small sandwich for dinner, as he mulled over his stupidly expensive looking journal, and I busied myself with the blanket fort. The man looked over his shoulder to check on me several times, but neither commented, nor approached me after he was done in the kitchen.
He laid out a plate for me /just in case/ and then retreated upstairs, and I was finally able to double over and clutch my stomach in pain like I’ve wanted to since arriving at the house.

God did it hurt! It felt like a mutilated cat was throwing a hissy fit in my stomach, tearing up my insides with its sharp claws, and turning my innards into abused torn ribbons. The nausea was barely helping things.

The tent wasn’t my proudest achievements thus far, but for someone with nausea and constant cramping, I did one hell of a job, building that fort. I used one of the taller loveseats to determine the height of the roof, and threw the longest blanket I had over the love seat and then extended it to the back of the couch, creating a snug, tunnel like structure.

I tucked it all in, and threw a thick wool blanket on the floor, bundled up another blanket, and clogged one side of the fort, leaving the one closest to the bathroom open, and stuffed it over with pillows to conserve some warmth. By the time I was done, I was almost crawling with pain.
Curling up on my side, I hid my face in the safety of the pillows and drew the blanket over my face, praying to every god out there to keep me from puking my guts out through the night.

Listening to Snape’s shuffling upstairs comforted me in my haze, and I found myself groggily rolling my eyes as I realized I still needed to shower since the man clearly ordered me to.

He was going to start asking questions if I acted oddly.

Reluctant to leave the warmth and scant comfort of my first exclusive blanket fort (which I am still giddy about, to this day) I quietly made my way to the bathroom, cursing the architectures of this house for their poorly execution of the bathroom placement.

Unlike the one back in the shell cottage, this one had a light switch. I flipped the lights on, wincing as the sharp, intense light dug into my half-lidded eyes. I made quick job of the clothes and almost crumpled under the warm water beating on my back.

Seating under the hot shower helped with the cramping somewhat, but the steam covering the mirror and swirling above my head was multiplying the nausea, and I gagged several times as a result.

At last, I stumbled to my feet and washed my hair as best as I could without completely raising mu arms. As I was miserably rinsing myself and cursing Snape, my eyes caught the purple bathroom cupboard above the steamed mirror.

I don’t know why I thought of searching the cabinet, but I did. Dripping wet and shivering, I shuffled out of the shower, and rose on the tip of my slippery toes. I opened the cupboard with little hesitation and looked through the content; nothing of significance, there was a lumpy packet of cottons, and a tube of sunscreen at the very back along with other toiletries that could be found in any other bathroom.

My hands closed around the only bottle of Tylenol, my eyes narrowing at its presence. Why was there Tylenol in a wizarding safe house? Come to think of it, this place was surprisingly vacant and devoid of any magical artifacts, that couldn’t have been a coincidence.

It must have been Snape’s doing, I concluded. There was no doubt that the man had thought everything through with the potion and how magical radiation effected it (insert eye roll).

An intense wave of pain washed over me and I groaned, uncapping the bottle as I gritted my teeth against the pain.

I shook out two white pills in my hand and wondered if taking muggle drugs would mess up with my system or meddle with that poison Snape made me drink every three days, as another wave hit, I quickly found that I didn’t care, and swallowed the pills dry, gripping down and clutching the sink after I did.

I washed them down with tap water and quickly toweled myself dry, feeling the churning in my stomach flare up. Grasping the Tylenol bottle in my hand, I threw on my old clothes, stuffed it in my pockets, sneaked out of the bathroom, and got into my fort.

I didn’t expect it to work, but it actually did. The cramps stopped after I settled down and I slept like an angel that night, but woke up feeling like the devil’s spawn; Severus was right, sleeping on the floor did not do my neck and back any favors.

I woke up smelling eggs and hearing the sizzling hymn of bacon singing in my ears, Severus was by the stove, looking as if he was in a middle of an existential crisis, glaring at the bacon like it was its fault.

“Good morning.” I groaned, rubbing my aching joints as I sat up.

He didn’t look up. “1918, Roberta and Bob, two fair villagers had a rooster named sunshine. Every morning, Sunshine would crow to wake everyone at sunrise. Mr. And Mrs. Roberts would call out “Good morning, Sunshine!” And that is how that phrase was first created, bacon?”

I blinked. “What?”

Snape shrugged, pilling the sizzling goods on a porcelain plate. I cringed as my neck cracked, and hastily made my way to the counter.
“Was that true? What you just said?”

Snorting, Severus puffed. “God no, at least, I don’t think so, considering that I made it up. The phrase ‘good morning’ is actually a contraction of the phrase “I wish you a good morning” first known person who used such a phrase was penned in Layamon’s Brut.”

Frowning, I took the steaming plate he held out to me. I could safely say I understood next to nothing from what the man just said to me.

“Layamon’s what?”

“A poem, Potter, composed by Layamon in 1125 BC. It was named Layamon’s Brut, also known as the chronicle of Britain, Cannot be possibly clearer than that.”

“You alright?” I asked uncertainly.

Snape took out another plate and served himself a decent portion of scrambled eggs. “Splendid Potter,” he muttered. “Something that cannot be said about you. How’s the neck?”

Still wary, I stopped rubbing the back of my neck and shrugged. “Not bad.”

Snape rolled his eyes. “Yes, not bad, considering that you spent the night on a hand knit wool blanket /on the floor/. I would have asked if you were purposefully ignorant or just daft, but then again…it’s you.” He gestured vaguely with his hand at my direction before picking up his fork.
Scowling, I popped a crackling bacon on my tongue, grumbling with a full mouth. “I am a delight.” I paused to eat, “I even took that shower last night.”

Severus pinched the tip of his nose. “Potter, wearing the same clothes after taking a shower beats the very purpose of taking one in the first place. You could have asked for your trunk.”

I flushed. I was in too much pain last night to think of clean clothes. “I was…I didn’t think of that, and it was late anyways.”

“Absolutely no sense of self-hygiene.” The potion master muttered to himself. “I’m letting it slide this once Mr. Potter. Keep in mind to wear /clean/ clothes after taking a shower next time.”

“Someone’s in a good mood today,”

Snape ignored the sarcasm in my voice as he ate. “Thank your lucky stars for that Potter, and get ready as soon as you’re done with your breakfast. We shall leave as soon as possible.”

Someone was /indeed/ in a good mood that day. Snape exuded a feeling I couldn’t quite place at the time, a feeling that bordered smugness, but not quite… something akin to excitement. I vaguely wondered if the man was excited about going to the zoo just as I was and then quickly laughed it off.
Snape and immature excitement…or giddiness? Whatever the hell this was?

It was like paying a mime to perform opera.

I pushed my hesitance away as I got dressed. Today wasn’t for me, I thought determinedly. It was for the newly turned eleven-year-old boy, who was taken to the zoo for the first time in his life.

And this time, I was going to enjoy every-damn- second of it.

“Drink up Potter.” The potion master slid a vial into my hands, and watched with hidden amusement as I choked it down.

“Is it just me, or does this thing get worse every three days?”

“It’s just you.” He deadpanned. “Let’s take a walk Potter. We can head to the zoo after,”

I cannot walk anymore, therefore, recently I’ve became to envy the times that I could stroll around to places with Severus on my tow. Walking gave us a light-hearted lift that driving in a car or lying on a couch like a cripple didn’t.

Things have gotten very intense and gloomy between us since I’ve been confined to bed rest. It seemed that we’re both really realizing that my end date is near, thus talking, interacting, or even being in the same room has been very difficult for us (Only I seem to be aware of that,). Every time he opened his mouth, I felt like my hands were choking him, and every time his hand touched my skin I felt as if I could cry because I was scared it would be the last time.

It was partly the reason why he was acting so weirdly and my hesitance to ask him about it was only fueling his creepy way of coping. He was already preparing himself for my death, or at least, I think that’s what he’s doing.

He stopped reading these recent entries, so instead of their usual place, I’ve decided to store them in my Pillowcase. He would find them eventually.
Just last night, I caught him sneaking out a bottle of firewhisky out of the upper bookshelf that adorned the living room’s supporting wall. I didn’t tell him that I know he was slightly hung over this morning, and I didn’t tell him that I was mad that he had gotten drunk with me being this sick just downstairs.

Severus looked so guilty and ashamed of himself that right after feeding me he immediately contacted Arthur Weasley’s ‘dealer’ to get us a nice telly and a DVD player, managed to hook it up with little effort before noon, and made me a nice, cozy blanket nest on the couch. (That on itself should have raised some flags).

He let me watch crappy movies all day. Worse, he sat next to me like a statue through every single one.

We didn’t talk much (even though he was literally breathing down my neck most of the day), but I slept a lot, so I think he doesn’t know that I also caught him sneaking that half empty whisky bottle back in its place.

Severus, please be sure to get rid of any kind of liquor in the house after I’m gone.

That’s a hard rule. I cannot have you turning into an alcoholic.

Although, to be fair, even I admit having something stronger than chicken broth is nice while I’m about to describe our unfortunate (but apparently planned) run in with Aunt Petunia.

**

Once upon a time, there was a boy.

He wore clothes that didn’t fit, colorless rags, sewed window curtains and anything and everything they offered him to protect himself from the cold and nudity.

He was a small, malnourished boy living in a bad neighborhood, and even there, he was considered the worst of his kind. A vermin. A rundown kid with a drunken father and a blubbering hysterical mother living by the edge of the rubbles.

One day The Boy was sad, sadder than usual; his parents had just been arguing, it didn’t happen very often as his mother didn’t dare fight back, but it had happened that day. He needed to get out of the house.

Instead of sulking in the rubbles and listening to dogs bark at each other, he headed the other way. The other way led to the better side, the side that had nicer houses, and no rubble or rubbish and no dogs barking. A vast park divided it from The Boy’s side, and the boy was adamant to go over the fence that particular day.

The park was empty; it had a scarce playground at the other side of the hill and a tall crooked tree that had old curly branches. The boy saw The Girl hiding in the crooked tree.

The Girl was hiding from a screeching banshee, The Boy noticed, as he got closer, that he was wrong. He saw that the screaming ball of blonde hair and long useless limbs wasn’t a banshee (even though she strongly resembled one) but a taller girl calling out a name.

“LILY! LILY! COME DOWN YOU FREAK! FREAK!” the boy blanched, his eyes narrowing as he focused on the girl’s wispy red hair and floating skirt that had pretty yellow flowers. She was hiding within the upper branches, finely out of reach.

The boy climbed from the back, he was small so the banshee girl didn’t see him and he was better at climbing than The Girl so he was quieter.
“Are you Lily?” he whispered into The Girl’s small ear. The Girl didn’t shriek or pull away; she turned to face him with big owl like eyes that were green. Not just any shade of green, a deep emerald that The Boy had never seen before.

Her eyes were magic, he thought to himself.

“Who are you?” the girl asked calmly, her face round with youth and her hair red like fire.

The Boy stuttered, he couldn’t tell her his name. Everybody knew his name back over at home; they all knew he was smelly oily Severus whose clothes never fit. The Girl couldn’t know that.

“Sev.” He said.

“Lily.”

“That’s a pretty name.” both of them ignored the banshee screaming at them. They were safe here, the banshee couldn’t climb or she would have by now.

“Why is she screaming at you?” Sev grimaced.

“Tunney’s just mean because I played with the flowers and she couldn’t, she’s really noisy but it’s alright, she gets tired easily.”

He sat down on the thick branch next to the girl, his arm just shy of brushing against hers.

“I thought she was a banshee, but she doesn’t have gargoyle wings.”

Lily looked at him oddly and he flushed in shame. Instead of sneering though, Lily grinned at him.

“That’s funny,” she even laughed a little.

“GET DOWN HERE YOU FREAK! I’M TELLING MOM! SHE’D BE SO MAAAAD! DO YOU HEAR ME?! SHE’D BE LIVID!”

“Is she always like this?”

Lily shrugged elegantly. “Only when I do naughty things.”

Severus’s breath hitched, his eyes narrowing. If she did naughty things like he did, was she going to get punished like him? Was her father waiting for her to come home to take out his belt and threaten to /teach/ her a lesson?

He eyed the pretty dress Lily was wearing. It was too nice. Too nice to be for a girl who did naughty things. She had a different definition of naughty then.

“Like what?” he finally asked.

Lily flushed deep beet red in shame, her small hands wringing. The screaming went on beneath them. “Making the flowers dance, or…flying off the swings.” She whispered shamefully and Severus gaped.

“Those aren’t bad things.” He said. His expression was bewildered. “They’re normal since you’re a witch.”

Her face whipped to face him and Severus’s heart lurched. The wrong thing to say, he thought wretchedly. He said the wrong thing, somehow.

Lily brushed his arm, her eyes firm but her tone soft and caring. “That’s a horrible thing to say to someone Sev,” she reprimanded him gently.

Severus choked indignantly. He batted her arm away. “It’s not…it’s not a swear word Lily.” He tried to explain. “It’s like saying that I’m a boy and you’re a girl. You have magic so you’re a witch.”

It was a different kind of witch, not the one his father sometimes used to address his mother, the good kind his mom had told him about, the kind of witch that got to leave for Hogwarts and learn real magic and do real magic.

“That’s why she’s so jealous.” Severus pointed down at Petunia. Her face was red and glittering in perspiration, her hands fisted by her side. “I’M TELLING MOM! I’LL TELL HER AND SHE’LL BE MAD! GET DOWN!!” she actually stomped her foot as she said this.

“She’s not magic.”

Lily glared at him skeptically, then back at Petunia. Crossing her arms, the girl petulantly turned away from him.

“That’s mean Sev, really mean.” Severus felt a stab of hurt, his chest clenching. The Girl’s displeasure with him made a bile gather in his throat. He really, really yearned for someone’s approval, and this girl was special.

“But it’s true!” he argued back.

“GET DOWN! DON’T YOU HEAR ME?! COME HERE! LILY!”

“I don’t like you,” Lily sniffed. “You’re lying to me, playing me, and you called me a witch.”

Lying? No, his father was a liar, he lied to his mother and him all the time, he lied to get that little scrape of money in his gambling, he even lied to their neighbors about ruining their lawn in his drunken state and blamed it on Severus.

But Severus wasn’t like his father at all. Most certainly not a liar. Never.

He got up on shaky legs, looping one arm around a lousy branch to steady himself.

“Well maybe you really are a nasty witch.” He snarled at The Girl, mentally grimacing at the hurt flashing in those emerald green eyes. He turned away and climbed back with two large jumps,

“Wait! Sev!” her sweet voice rang behind him as he ran. Severus didn’t spare her a glance.

“Ow!”

**

The Girl who fell was my mother, and it was her rotten sister, Aunt Petunia, who ratted Severus out and earned him his first severe beating as a child.
I forgave Aunt Petunia for her wrongs to me, and I was at peace with myself, and quite content to never see the woman, ever again. However, the universe (or Severus) really doesn’t care about what I want, do they?

It happened while Severus and I were walking around the neighborhood, heading south, and potentially /away/ from Private Drive, and more towards the small mass of stores huddled in the center of the suburbs, I cannot even remember why we were strolling in the neighborhood. We just were.
“You!” a shrill voice gasped in utter outrage from behind. Severus and I turned, facing an gaping horse like woman who was shuffling with her grocery bags as she tried to get herself together.

I thought she was shocked to see me loitering around our old neighborhood, and I automatically opened my mouth to apologize. To my surprise, Severus first responded.

“Ah,” he said in greeting. “Petunia.”

Aunt Petunia jutted her jaw. “Snape,”

“Lovely morning isn’t it?” the potion master’s tone would have been pleasant if not for his infamous sneer accompanying the comment.

“What are /you/ doing here?”

“Wait you two know each other?” I gasped.

“As jarring as ever I see. I always thought there was a hidden banshee trying to claw its way out of you. Good to know it’s still there.” Snape said to Petunia calmly. I choked on air and Aunt Petunia’s eyes narrowed. She closed her agape mouth with a snap and squared her shoulders.

“If you’re here to drop off that /freak/,” she pointed at me with her long crooked finger, her hand weighted down by a bag, “Then you’re out of luck Snape! We’re not taking the whelp back!”

Snape spared me a quick glance, and I flushed. Oh great, I thought, I was just the luckiest block on earth.

“Freak?” The man scoffed. “Why Petunia, I see your range of insults hadn’t expanded one bit.”

“That’s just who you lot are!” Aunt Petunia exclaimed. “A bunch of deranged freaks! We’re not taking him back, so you better get the hell away now Snape.” In her mad ranting, several people stood to watch the confrontation with their own shopping bags and drooling toddlers.

Severus noted the small crowd with amusement and Petunia and I did as well with hidden terror.

“As dramatic as ever I see,” Snape drawled. “There’s just a certain flair to turning every place into your own theatre scene isn’t it Petunia?”

It was my turn to gawk; that was the /exact/ opposite of Aunt Petunia. She was the kind who detested any abnormalities or any gossiping surrendering her if she wasn’t the one doing it.

Clearly, Severus and I knew two different Petunias.

“Your /kind/ isn’t wanted here.” My aunt gritted out forcefully, the abused bags in her hands nearly being ripped in two as she wrung them and briskly walked closer to us.

I grabbed on Severus’s elbow on instinct, my breath catching still in my chest and my head turned away in case the woman was going for a slap.
We’ll leave Aunt Petunia I promise! That’s what I wanted to blurt out before she could struck me. We can get out of your hair Aunt Petunia, running into you was an accident. I’m sorry.

Severus saw my unwanted flinch, his eyes darkened as he turned back to face the woman who was now almost an arm’s length away from us.
“I wouldn’t know about that /Tunney/,” he snarled out the offending nickname. “In fact I’d say ma-.”

“Don’t say that word!” Aunt Petunia screamed, gathering more and more crowd around us. Mostly the people who had heard over the public argument and had stepped out to hear what was interrupting their absolutely normal and boring lives.

“Everyone is watching now,” Severus smirked as he whispered. The words only meant for her ears in a menacing taunt.

I couldn’t do anything but watch the two go back and forth. My mind disturbingly blank and slow on the uptake, as I watched two worlds, two different parts of my life clash with each other in a nasty collision.

Aunt Petunia didn’t look like she much cared for staying there with us, but I saw uncertainty clouding her eyes; she couldn’t just leave us here, in her /neighborhood/, where we would leave and she wouldn’t. If she left it like this, abrupt and defeated and more importantly, /embarrassed/, then it would be the only thing people would talk about.

This made for a special kind of gossip, one without an expiration date, just a nasty reminder every time her name was mentioned.

Severus looked like he was following the gears turn in my aunt’s head as well, and his smirk widened.

“Follow me,” she seethed and turned, craning her neck to see if we were following her or not.

“Should we tell her we’re not here for her?” Severus asked me his eyes askance but neutral.

I was still in shock. “You two know each other!?”

The man shrugged. “I take that as a no.” He started walking after the paranoid woman, forcing me to trail along.

“I sincerely hope you wouldn’t miss your most exciting trip to the zoo for now.” He drawled, he extended his arm over my shoulder and brought me to his side. Too surprised to act, I stuck by his side and we followed my deranged Aunt all the way to Number Four Private Drive.

Time for a truth reveal.

Lost Entry II

Aunt petunia ushered us straight to her kitchen, not pausing in the hallway, and not lingering by the living room to greet Dudley, the boy didn’t even acknowledge his mother, deeply engrossed by the telly.

I was so dumbstruck; I didn’t have enough strength to mourn the familiar sights and the passing glimpse of my cupboard under the stairs.

“Seat there,” she pointed at Vernon’s usual chair, and scowled at Severus.

The potion master humored her with a sneer and sank down on the chair, immediately the man leaned back and crossed his arms.

“How kind of you, to invite us to your home Petunia,” he drawled, his words drenched in sarcasm, his expression cruelly impassive. He looked at Petunia the way he looked at a worthless bug, or occasionally Neville.

I shuffled by the doorframe, I wasn’t sure how to simultaneously act around the two of them without causing some big catastrophe, or kick starting the apocalypse, so I crammed my sweaty hands deep in my pockets and just stood there.

Petunia carelessly threw her grocery bags on the kitchen table, her lips were pinched as if she had swallowed a lemon and her eyes were filled with hatred. Hatred that for once wasn’t directed at me.

It was surprising, how much my Aunt could hate another human being more than me or my mother.

“Are you satisfied now?” she spat at him. “Causing a scene and brandishing your /freakishness/ in my neighborhood?”

“Are you?” Severus asked calmly.

Aunt Petunia lurched forward, slamming her hands loudly against the table. “Don’t play games with me Snape,” she threatened. “We’re not toddlers anymore.”

Then Petunia turned to face me, her eyes narrowed and her mouth curled, she showed no outward surprise to my deteriorating body, or my whimsy, thinned hair. She didn’t even looked phased by the new, fitting clothes.

“Boy,” she seethed. “Put the kettle on,”

She sank down in her own seat. “Always you. It’s always you.” She muttered under her breath. I wasn’t sure if she meant Snape or me.

The man was now staring at me; subtly trying to gauge my reactions to the order, I was given.

My legs forced themselves to move by their own accord, walking around the chairs, I reached for the kettle. My back was turned. The other two fell silent and the only sound was the telly blaring gunshots from the living room. I mentally rolled my eyes. The gunshots just about fit the mood settling in the kitchen. There was an eerie calm before both sides started bombarding each other.

“Do you always talk to him that way when he makes tea?” Severus asked Petunia.

My back stiffened, I almost dropped the empty kettle. I held it up higher in my arms and almost jogged to the sink. Being extra careful to avoid eye contact and pretend as if I was deaf.

“The way I handle my nephew is none of your goddamn business Snape. He makes fucking tea because I asked him to.” I’ve never heard her cuss like that before.

Severus remained calm. “Do you talk to your son the same way?”

“Shut up freak, just…just shut up.”

I opened the tap, and filled the kettle; it quivered in my hands as I set it on the stove, my breath unconsciously speeding up.
I had to put a stop to this, I desperately thought and turned to face the potion master.

“Professor Snape,”

He cut me off. “Seat down Harry.”

I gaped at the man. Did he just…? Did he call me by my first name? Was it because he wanted to screw with Aunt Petunia? Did he do it by accident, or did I imagine him talking to me? (That happens sometimes)

Oh, Merlin’s soggy socks…this man was driving me insane. I thought I knew what he was doing, despite the initial shock and Petunia’s obvious misunderstanding, I thought I knew exactly how the potion master was going to play the cards in his favor.

His tragic childhood, or new clothes or responsible adult talks didn’t convince me to admit I was abused, so he was going to make me admit the abuse by witnessing it. How very Slytherin of him.

“Professor…”

“Professor?” Petunia asked in a shrill voice. “You’re his /teacher/?”

“Did you think I just found him on the street and dragged him along? Of course, he’s my student. Unlike you, Tuney, some of us did make something out of our lives.”

She actually snarled at him. “I rather die than be in your freaky shoes Snape.”

“I can safely say the sentiment goes both ways.” Snape shot back impassively. “Harry, come join us at the table now. Surely your aunt can complete the tea.” He didn’t look at me as he said this. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from Petunia’s hateful glare.
“You don’t get to boss him around,” She snapped at him.

“You don’t either;” Sev pointed out. “Since you’re not willing to take him back in. he has no reason to move about in /your/ kitchen, in /your/ house to make tea.”

“Harry, come seat. Now please,” I complied, sinking down next to the man.

“Now Petunia,” Severus interlocked his fingers on the table. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

“Do what?” my aunt spat out.

“Your confession.”

She balked, her thin face drained of all color. “M-M-My confession? What the hell are you on about?”

Snape leant back against Uncle Vernon’s chair with ease. “Look your nephew in the eyes, and apologize. Then confess to your shortcomings. Your wretched behavior towards your /sister’s/ innocent child, and then, only then I just might let you live.”

Oh shit, this was going to be awful. I shook off the initial shock that my Aunt was still experiencing and tugged at Snape’s arm, my head hung low.
“Sir there really is no need for-.”

He didn’t shake off my hand off him as he started talking. “If you forgave this blasted woman in your journal, then she gets to do the actual act of apologizing in real life.”

“You-.”

“Yes, I read your entries.” He admitted without an ounce of shame.

“You had no right to do that!”

“I have every right if it concerns child abuse,” he turned to Petunia. “I have something /special/ planned out for your dear husband too Tuney. Such lucky timing that you ran into us. Saved me a considerable amount of time and effort.”

Aunt Petunia was speechless, her mouth opened and closed as her head snapped back and forth between the two of us.

“Go on Mrs. Dursley. Do the right thing,”

“I have nothing to apologize for.” She finally blurted out, regaining some of her anger.

“Yet, your dying nephew found it in his heart to forgive you. Did you know that he’s dying Petunia? Did Albus tell you?”

“He was already living on borrowed time, the fault in his freaky genes aren’t mine.”

“You blasted wrench, how dare you, how dare you sully your sister’s name and her husband’s?” Snape’s anger surprised me. “In front of their child no less. You seem really dim on the uptake don’t you? You’ve seem to have forgotten that I’m a death eater.”

“You know what we do Petunia?” he drawled, his body unconsciously leaning over the table.

“What I still do on a daily basis? I’ve /skinned/ people alive, I’ve boiled them, I’ve starved them until they started consuming their own limbs out of hunger. I’ve burned them from the inside out with nothing but a twitch of my wand. You dare talk that way again and I’ll show you what I’m fully capable of.”

“You cannot hurt me, Dumbledore-,”

He waved her off with a hand. “I don’t care what Dumbledore promised you. I am a death eater and you are a child abuser, and trust me, even the most righteous wizard would take my word over yours. If you live to tell the tale, anyways.”

Aunt Petunia turned to me with flared nostrils and wide eyes. “Boy! Do something! Are you going to let him talk to me like that? We took you under our roof, we-.”

I cut her off as I turned to Severus. “You wanted to prove a point. You did. I admit it, fine. Please stop this now Professor. Uncle Vernon will be home any second now, today’s Sunday. Please sir, I admit it, yes they’ve abused me.”

Aunt Petunia visibly sagged against her chair.

“It’s nice to hear you saying the words Mr. Potter. But you have to mean it.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore, it doesn’t matter to me, it didn’t to Dumbledore and it shouldn’t to you.”

“Show me your room,”

“I-what?”

“I won’t harm her permanently if you show me to your bedroom.”

He intensely stared into my eyes and I just knew that he didn’t mean Dudley’s second bedroom. “You don’t mean Dudley’s second bedroom,” my eyes widened at my goof. I didn’t mean to address the room the same way I thought of it.

“No,” Severus’s tone hardened. “I mean the cupboard under the stairs. Go on.”

“How-Just how did you-?” my eyes whipped back to Aunt Petunia’s disoriented face.

I turned my accusing glare to the potion master. He shrugged. “Your aunt needed better barriers to protect her sullied mind. I’m still not done with her,” his eyes narrowed. “But I need /you/ to be done defending /them/.”

I didn’t know why, but somehow my body stood without my mind’s consent and started walking to the hallway, the blasting sounds of the telly blaring behind me, and Severus’s warm hand an instant comfort against my neck.

Petunia trailed after us on shaky legs, her hand rubbing at her throbbing temples. I stood in front of the cupboard, seeing the familiar chips and oddities against the painted wood. Severus was right behind me as I reached out and opened the cupboard.

Even though the small space was shrouded in darkness, I could see various bottles of cleaning agents and detergents with several mops stored in there. My heart clenched as I finally reached out and turned on the lights.

My broken toy soldiers were crushed under the bleach, the ones I had carefully picked up from Dudley after he threw them out hours after buying them. The ones that I slept with every night since I was five years old. My cot, my toys, my crayon drawings, all of them were crushed under the dump Petunia had put in there instead of me.

That didn’t get me nearly as much as the bloody belt did, in the literal sense. Vernon’s worn belt with my dried blood on it was just casually thrown in over the mops, right on top.

Severus was staring at it with the same horror-stricken expression that mirrored mine. I wanted to close his eyes, lunge and take the brown leather belt that I remembered all too well since early childhood, but I was frozen in place. Severus had the perfect view, watching my crestfallen face and Petunia’s indifference and the belt. What did he think of me now?

Humiliation rolled off me in waves as I just stood there and tried to swallow the urge to cry.

“There are…mops, and cleaning-” I struggled to find the right word. “/Stuff/.” I pointedly ignored the belt. He just looked at me.
Petunia sneered at me. “You have your own room upstairs boy, stop the theatrics.”

“The-uh…why did you leave the /thing/? What good does that serve? You didn’t even wash off the blood-” I said it as if I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth, which was surprising, since I knew this was exactly the kind of thing Aunt Petunia would do. The very thought of touching me and anything that belonged to me physically irked her. Vernon was too lazy to clean the belt. So they just threw it in here, out of sight.

Like I was.

I probably wouldn’t have been as disturbed by the revelation if Severus wasn’t watching everything from behind. Humiliation fueled my shock.
“It’s my house’s cupboard. I do whatever I want with it.” She spat.

“No, it’s not.”

It wasn’t. Of course, it wasn’t just a cupboard. It was where I had lived for ten years, almost eleven if you counted last year. When Uncle Vernon started locking me in the small space, again after I returned home, it was more like a sanctuary to me than a prison.

The maze and the graveyard were so spacious, vast, /outside/, but both felt like an unescapable prison. The cupboard was a comfort, I was locked in, but instead of feeling claustrophobic, the place felt cozy to me.

You don’t leave the symbol of pain and sanctuary in the same place. The bloody belt didn’t belong in my cupboard, just as the bleach and the mops didn’t.

“It’s alright,” Severus, whispered, his voice was very low and I knew that the assurance was only meant for my ears. His hand clasped around my shoulder and held on tight as if he was grounding me, sticking me to the ground.

I thought the tumor was making me over-sentimental; I didn’t get the urge to cry often.

“This is not your worth, you’re not what these terrible muggles say that you are, do you hear me? This was not what you deserved. I want you to know that, to believe in what you say to me.”

Severus was the first person ever, to tell me a thing like that. No one has ever talked to me this way. I supposed the tumor and his words had more impact on me than the abuse was supposed to have.

“I-,” a small, meek sob slipped from my lips like a tiny drop of water from a cracking dam. One part of me wanted to shut him up. The other part wanted me to record his every word and play them again for the rest of my life.

“You don’t deserve to live this way, not when people like the Dursleys get to exist and do horrible things to people.” He turned me by my shoulders, not noticing how the telly suddenly turned off and there was silence. Silence and the sound of me panting for air.

Suddenly it hit me; Snape was right. How was this fair? Why did I have to lose my parents and then live in a cupboard for ten years? Why did they get to do those awful things to me when I was a child? And above all that, why was I dying when I’ve already suffered so much?

Was this justice? To be an orphan, get beaten, emotionally abused, harmed in every way, and then set to gradually die and know that your body is betraying you? How was that fair?

“This isn’t fair.” I breathed, still scrambling for some semblance of composure.

“It’s not,” Severus agreed, but his voice was far, far away from me.

I looked at Petunia and all I saw was hate. All that hate, I wondered how someone could store so much hate and disdain in his or her heart. How could you hate another human being? How could you hurt someone so much for so long and feel no remorse?

Why did I let it happen? Only a few minutes ago I was desperate for her approval, for her silence, for her ignorance so I wouldn’t get hurt. Why did other people let this happen? Why couldn’t they /see/? Couldn’t they know?

Having an epiphany has never felt more like a literal punch to the gut than that moment.

“I want you to understand this now Harry, once and for all.” Severus drew my attention to himself. My chest heaved.

“They treated you badly, no parent nor guardian does this to the children they have under their care. It wasn’t okay- it’s still not. You should be angry, and sad, and you may want to hurt them the way they hurt you. Those feelings are normal; you should be feeling that way. It wasn’t your fault, what they did to you wasn’t your fault.”

However, I wasn’t angry, I didn’t want to hurt them the way they hurt me. I was afraid. I was terrified of the doors that have opened upon me finally admitting the abuse to myself, and I wanted Severus to hug me to his chest like a little child so I could properly start crying. I didn’t need audience; I needed the privacy to vent off.

Severus seemed to finally get that, he stared into my glazed eyes and slightly nodded to himself. He briefly let go of my shoulder but then wrapped both of his arms around me and put my face against his chest. I almost died of an instant heart attack right then. Snape-bat of the dungeons Snape- DID NOT do hugs.

“I did the best I could.” Petunia gritted. “Spoiling the freak undermines everything I’ve done for him when I easily couldn’t have done them.”

“You were keeping the thing you beat the child with in the place where he slept the majority of his childhood. That’s by far the most disgusting thing I’ve seen you do Petunia. Do shut up.”

“I will deal with you and your whale of a husband Petunia. Never underestimate my threats nor my promises.” He said over my head, shifting us so we were facing away from my aunt.

“You, boy,” the potion master called, and I realized he was addressing Dudley, who was sort of standing there in the living room and silently gawking at us while his hands covered his bottom.

“Go upstairs in your room and lock the door, let a single peep out and I will have more than a pig’s tail for you.”

“Mom-.”

“Go Dudders, go and lock the door, call your father, tell him-,”

Severus smoothly interrupted her. His chest vibrating against my head as he spoke. “Tell him he’d better hurry and not waste our time any more. We do have other plans today.”

Dudley scurried past us so fast my hair shifted by the breeze it caused, he stomped his way upstairs and soon his door slammed shut with a loud bang. Severus was rubbing circles on my back to help me breathe, but I found that I couldn’t. He was actually causing more harm than good, but I didn’t have enough air to tell him that.

“Make yourself useful while your husband gets here Tuney. Bring him a glass of water, he’s obviously distressed.”

“You won’t hear the end of this you slimy bastard! Once Dumbledore knows what you’re doing he would come for you himself.”

Severus’s hand momentarily stilled on my back. “Well, you better pray he gets here before I’m done with you.” He drawled. “Don’t make me start things early Petunia, you might just get the burn of my rage and I saved that for your husband.”

I heard my aunt stride back to the kitchen and then Severus and I were alone in the hallway. I didn’t mind our position in the least, his clothes smelled of a peculiar mixture of herbs that I found very comforting and his hand steadied me without me having to stagger for balance.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be done here soon.” I had no idea what he meant by that. I knew he wasn’t going to kill them, killing the Dursleys wasn’t even an option, but I knew whatever he had in store for them wasn’t going to be pretty.

“Don’t hurt them please,” I gasped out and he frowned.

“This was unplanned, I’m sorry Harry. I meant to come over at night when you were asleep. Our run-in with your aunt this morning was accidental.” He didn’t sound regretful for that in the least, but he sounded sorry for causing me distress.

Petunia returned with the water, and grudgingly thrust the brimming glass to the potion master who caught it with grace.

Just as he was about to draw me away from his chest to hand me the glass the front door slammed open, and a fuming Vernon stood in the doorway, looking bloated and purple in the face.

“Vernon!” his wife cried out in relief.

“You UNGRATEFUL FREAK!” Uncle Vernon growled as he pointed a meaty finger at me. He charged at us.

Severus promptly let the glass fall form his hand and drew his wand out with no hesitation, “Stupefy.” Vernon dropped head first to the floor. Petunia screeched as she saw her falling husband and ran to his aid.

I stared at Snape with wide eyes as he surveyed the muggle couple. He tugged me close to his side and calmly took me to the living room; he sat me down on Petunia’s hideous floral couch and intensely stared me in the eyes.

“This won’t take long. Do you understand?” he said softly.

“I will be upstairs with your relatives for a while, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have cast a spell with you in the room. Can you stay here for a few minutes?”
I couldn’t talk; I couldn’t even will my face muscles to move. Snape concernedly touched my forehead and narrowed his eyes. “Here,” he reached for an afghan that was draped over one of the couches and nestled it around me.

“Is it better now? I think you’re going into shock.” He said this mostly to himself.

“Just close your eyes and rest, I will be back very soon.”

I didn’t want to close my eyes or rest and I didn’t want him to leave me to go and punish my relatives, I wanted him by my side so I could cry on his shoulder as I watched my childhood crumbled under cleaning products and then get the hell out of this place and never return. However, I couldn’t say any of those things to him, so I just dazedly watched as Severus strode back into the hallway.

Petunia screamed something intelligible and suddenly there were no sounds, only the stairs creaking occasionally and then there was nothing. I was alone, shivering in silence and gazing into nothingness.

I felt ridiculous, and uncomfortable in my skin, the sound of my breathing was very, disturbingly loud in my ears in the tense silence. It wasn’t the normal kind of silence; it wasn’t a natural kind where all mouths were shut as the world went on about its business. The room was devoid of /any/ sound, which made my breathing sound like angry storms and dark clouds rumbling in the tiny living room.

Part of me was in denial, not ready to believe that any of this was happening. Severus knew Aunt Petunia, Severus knew about the cupboard under the stairs because he saw it in her mind, he knew that uncle Vernon used to beat me around because he saw that too and he knew that they weren’t sorry in the least.

Most importantly, he was doing something about it, somewhat even solving it, hopefully not by killing them, but still. He didn’t react the way other adults did; he didn’t run to the nearest authority figure in charge and then stand by the sidelines to watch them do nothing.

He took the matters in his own hands, in the literal sense.

No one screamed. There was no tortured moans or pleading going on upstairs, in fact, the lack of sound was so profound that the use of a rather potent silencing charm wasn’t even questioned. Aunt Petunia wouldn’t seat around and let Severus hurt her and her husband in silence.

Sometime later, there was a loud thud above my head and then the sound of something sliding against the floor and then dragged to the stairs. I got up on shaky legs and went to the hallway, my mouth wide open as my relatives trailed down behind Severus.

“Let’s take this to the living room,” he told me gravely. Quickly, I scrambled back into the living room, the afghan almost causing me to trip.
Petunia and Vernon were both red faced, with disheveled clothes and mused hair, their eyes were wide in a mix of fear and indignation as Snape gracelessly let them slump on the floor, in front of the couch.

He gestured me to seat down. “Your Aunt and Uncle wanted to have a few words with you before we finished up. Is that alright with you?”
I nodded. Snape gave a subtle nod to my relatives and with a jostle; I realized that they hadn’t been silenced by force or magic. What had the potion master done to them?

Vernon bristled as he turned his eyes on me. The vein on his forehead was almost on the verge popping. “Boy.” He grunted and I instinctively took a step back.

“Address him properly or I chop your bits off, Dursley,” Petunia let out a little squeak.

Vernon straightened up on the ground. “You said-.”

“I know exactly what I said. Apologize to him now.”

He seemed to struggle for a moment, looking back and forth between the potion master, and me Vernon’s face suddenly turned into a deep shade of purple.

“Don’t even think about it Dursley,” Severus sneered at him menacingly before the man could open his mouth and spew off insults. “You either stay muted or talk properly. Do try and hurry.”

“Just take him! Take that freak and leave us!” Petunia screeched.

“Ugh, Petunia, you never learn.”

This was getting me nowhere. “Um, sir. It’s okay, really. They don’t need to do this.”

Severus nodded. “You’re right, they don’t need to. They have to.”

Vernon grounded his jaw as he stared at me. “He’s right,” he pointed at Sev. “We owe you an apology.” My mouth fell open.

“For not letting you freeze to death on our doorstep the night they left you here, boy. We should have let you die so we didn’t have to go through the embarrassment of having someone like you around in our normal family.”

“Vernon-.” Petunia whimpered with fear. I was transfixed on his face, my ears hearing but my eyes not really seeing him.

Severus didn’t stop him.

“We should have fucking strangled you with the pillow Dudley passed on to you so we wouldn’t have to put up with your trail of death following us around for all these years. Look at you, boy; you think I don’t see it? You look like shit and it’s getting worse, whatever’s killing you? I’m glad it’s getting the job done-.”

Vernon shut up instantly, his face bloating and redder than before, his beady eyes violently moved to stare at the potion master. My head whipped around and I saw Severus narrowing his eyes as he intensely glared into Vernon’s eyes.

“Turn him into a slug.” I quietly said, breaking Severus’s concentrated gaze into Vernon’s mind. I was surprised at how casually he used his mind Occlumency as a torture device.

The potion master paused. “He deserves more.”

“I’m not the judge of that. Just turn him into a slug so he cannot hurt anyone else with his words.”

(Applaud my self-righteousness, I don’t think it happens as often as I like.)

He nodded at me once.

“Go wait outside.”

I never saw the Dursleys the same way again.

Number IV; We (Finally) visit THE Zoo

Life is like a Bertie Botts’ every flavor bean box, and before you go off and tell me that I’ve lost my mind, here’s two things to consider;
First, fuck you, I’m dying, I can use metaphors like that and get away with it. People can get away with practically anything when they’re dying.
Second, my metaphor is actually great and here’s why:

Life is like a Bertie Botts’ every flavor bean box, you don’t know how many flavors you’re getting, you don’t know if the brown bean is whether chocolate or poo and sometimes you’re not brave enough to find out, and like everything else worthy of being compared to life…it eventually ends.
That thought flashed before my eyes as I stood in front of the exotic reptile exhibition in Surrey’s Zoo, almost the exact same place as four years ago, and watched a new Boa snake slither under a rock.

“Hi there,” I muttered. The snake lazily blinked at me, unfazed.

“Don’t you have playing to do hatchling?” it hissed, coiling around himself as he prepared for a nap. I reached out and touched the glass. This snake had more attitude than I was used to, I liked it.

“Not really,” I leaned further against the glass. “Do you want to talk?”

“Do I look like I want to talk?” I cringed at the malicious hiss and sighed. I left the snake and moved down to where Severus was standing with a chocolate ice cream cone in front of two barred tiger salamanders that were snuggling up near a rock.

“Never understood the concept of zoos,” Snape commented, he pointed at the cuddling salamanders with his ice cream. “People just pay and watch animals in cages, when they could easily go and see them for themselves in wildlife.”

“Most people get killed if they do that,” I answered, even though I was so numb that I could barely feel my tongue moving.

Severus shrugged indifferently. “That’s nature. The inferior species dies Potter,”

“Inferior.”

“Lower, Subordinate. If you wanted your word of the day.” He rattled off.

“I cannot believe you turned my uncle into a slug.”

Snape turned to me, nonchalantly munching on his treat. “Potter, you’re hilarious.” He deadpanned. “He’s lucky he’s not an Ammonoidea.”

I turned to stare at him. “What.”

“A very rare species of Mollusca believed to be extinct by muggles-.”

“No! What-Why did you do that to them?”

He rolled his eyes at me. “Because you asked me to, remember?”

“Yeah well I-,” I trailed off. “You shouldn’t have listened to me! I’m crazy! Literally! I have a tumor in my head!”

“Are we back to this again Potter?”

Indignantly, I grabbed his arms, my eyes wild like mad man. “Why are you so calm?!”

Did he not realize how much trouble we were in?! How could he not know that at any second ministry people could swarm us? Worse, Dumbledore himself? The headmaster wouldn’t kill us or turn us into slugs but he would not hesitate to get my butt back in Hogwarts until I curl up and die.

Even after seeing my manic expression, the potion master was still irritatingly stoic. “Why aren’t you?” he shot back at me. “I thought you wanted to come to this place Potter, look at that Ball Python over there, his dried skin is used as a catalyst in Verger’s complex calming potions, did you know that?”

“Don’t distract me! If Dumbledore finds out about this or anyone, they could-they could throw you in Azkaban or something!”

Withholding a sigh, Snape calmly handed me the ice cream and turned me around so I was facing the salamanders and not attracting attention to us.
“They won’t be able to do anything,” he took his ice cream back. “Rest assured. There’s no trace left of us back in that wretched place.”

“Dumbledore-,”

He cut in. “Won’t dare do anything. In fact, I will be writing him an extensive letter tonight to inform him of what I’ve seen and heard today in great detail. It seems a bit odd to me that your mistreatment has gone as long as it has. Absolutely unacceptable.”

“You don’t understand, he would be mad, he /will/ be furious when he sees you turning muggles into creatures. That’s illegal sir, the ministry doesn’t like you all that much already. Just imagine what would happen if they get word of this.”

I shuffled to the next tank and dragged Severus along.

“Professor Dumbledore will be meeting us to discuss this matter in person. He is the one under our investigation, not the other way around. He won’t be causing us any turmoil.”

Severus leaned down and squinted at the sign next to the glass. “Huh, yellow-footed tortoise,” he hummed. “I’ve never seen that one before.”

The tortoise poked its head up and squinted at Severus with its pruned eyes, its yellow dotted foot kicking as he tried to scramble away from the glass. I guess even turtles got intimidated by the potion master.

“What about my Aunt and Uncle? They cannot just stay like that!” the tortoise ducked its head back in his shell at sharpness in my voice. Severus looked like he was stifling another sneer as he looked down at me.

“Harry, this is the last time we will have this discussion; leave the adult affairs to the adults. I am your guardian, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not by any means, an idiot. I’m aware of my actions and their consequences. I know you might still be in shock, but try and will those unworthy creatures out of your mind, and just enjoy your trip.”

“I cannot, this concerns me too, they were my-.” He gave me a look.

“They’re your nothing now, do you hear me? Do not trouble yourself in the slightest over them.” He took another bite of his treat as we moved to the next tank, that either belonged to vipers or some lizard (The details get hazier every day.)

“I decided rashly, like a Gryffindor-,”

“You reacted better than most people twice your age would have.” Sev pointed out. “Much like predators, they would have gone for the head, and you had every right to wrench that man’s neck after the nonsense he spewed.”

“But I’m not a wild animal,”

He nodded his head, “No, your whole existence defines a vastly different kind of species.”

“Human?”

“Killer Whales.” He said, not missing a beat.

We both paused.

“That’s not the comparison I was waiting for.”

“It’s not an uncommon sight to see beached killer whales lining the seashore for no apparent reason. There’s an incentive as to why they’re called suicidal whales. They’re not stranded on the beach. They commit suicide by swimming to the shore.”

He waited and scanned my expression for revelation, but I just stared at him. As you might have noticed, Severus isn’t very good with…words, metaphors, or explaining things. I’ll never tell this to his face, but I believe that was one of the reasons why he never made for a good teacher.
He knew too much, but he couldn’t relate it to his recipients without having to extensively explain himself. So he didn’t, he referred us directly to the textbooks, and the textbooks sucked.

“I feel like I’m missing something in this scenario.” I finally told him.

He rolled his eyes. “You are. They’re not self-harming Potter. They get stranded because they don’t separate themselves from their sick pilot whale that leads them to the beach for rest. Your morals are the sick whale and you’re the doomed devotee that follows.”

“What does that make me? Self-sacrificing?”

“An idiot.” He deadpanned. “You should have let me get rid of them.”

We both turned back to watching the snakes again. Enjoy myself, he said. I scoffed.

Easier said than done.

At least Severus was enjoying himself. He’s not quite the person you imagine in a zoo, and you’d be right to assume that he stood out in the crowd like a sore thumb, dressed head to toe in black muggle clothes with his hair unbound at the nape of his neck. He looked threatening enough by my side that not even the reptiles dare approach us.

The potion master was a little too unimpressed with the whole affair, to be honest. I knew that he’d much rather enjoy going back to torturing the Dursleys.

The Dursleys.

My gut coiled in shame. Merlin knew what the man had seen in their minds while having his punishment round with them. If Severus was in any way shaken or equally as horrified by what he had witnessed in their heads, he was not showing it.

Maybe he was waiting for Dumbledore to arrive and then unleash himself. I shuddered, yeah, that was much more likely.
A disturbing image consisting of Dumbledore as a slug dressed in tiny purple robes popped into my head and I almost retched. Severus took that as a sign of hunger and dragged me out to get us lunch.

There was a food truck, not far away from the ice cream parlor. There were two plastic tables with occupied chairs, so Severus got us two deli sandwiches with curly fries and we settled on a wooden chair by the zoo’s entrance. We ate as we watched adults and children swarm by us.

“This is not the first time I come here you know,” I told him, reaching for the shared fries set between us. I was feeling a bit calmer after eating. It’s true what they say about thinking better with a full stomach.

He raised an eyebrow. “The Dursleys brought me here on my cousin’s birthday. Mrs. Figg couldn’t take care of me, so they had to take me with them.”

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

I shrugged with a full mouth. “I was ecstatic.” I confessed. “It was my first outing with them…they even had to buy me ice cream…one of those cheap lemon pop sickles. Still, it tasted really good.”

Snape chewed on his sandwich thoughtfully. “Was it a happy memory?”

“Well, I ended up freeing a Boa snake and trapping my cousin inside its cage.”

“Accidental magic?”

“He was bothering the snake. Uncle Vernon saw me vanishing the glass and well…the results weren’t pretty.”

“Did he beat you?”

“Not with a belt.” I flushed as I remembered the bloody belt. “Never with a belt after a bout of accidental magic. He seemed too afraid to hit me too hard, because he thought I might end up hurting him if things went too far.”

Severus turned his head away from me, his expression unreadable. “Lily is turning in her grave right now,” he muttered it more to himself than to me.
My heart skipped a beat. “Lily…you knew my mother.”

Severus’s head snapped up, his eyes guarded once more with only a flash of contempt that wasn’t directed at me. He looked like the guiltiest looking innocent man walking on earth. “We were friends.”

His slight pause on the word ‘friends’ gave away more than he realized. He was guilty just fine. Something had happened between him and my mother, something that Petunia knew too…well not anymore now that she’s a slug, but still. Maybe Sirius and my dad knew it too.

It was odd, thinking about my parents all having separate lives before having me. It was as if realizing that the characters in your favorite book were real people. It gave them depth and not knowing their history installed an exhilarating thrill into my stomach.

Their lives were beyond me once.

“Am I anything like her? People always compare me to my dad, even Sirius-.”

“He wasn’t wrong, you’re a carbon copy of your father, but he wasn’t completely right either.” I waited for him to elaborate. “The shape of your eyes and your nose is completely your mother’s.”

“My eyes?” I rolled my eyes, unimpressed by his plagiarizing comparison.

He narrowed his eyes at me dangerously. “Both the color and the doe like shape,” he explained.

“Most people didn’t notice. Potter’s eyes were nowhere as wide as yours are. You also have a habit of vomiting when distressed. She had that too.”

“I held her hair up for almost half an hour the day of our first class. We were both late as a result. We served our first detention together.”

I munched on my fries thoughtfully. Trying to imagine Snape and my mom cleaning out cauldrons as small children was as hard as one would imagine. “I always thought she was like Hermione, you know, the best of her year, her record a clean slate.”

Severus scoffed as if the idea amused him. “She was better. She was almost too good for this world. Too good for your father and me.”

“What happened?” I felt stupid for asking that question. I already knew the answer, whatever that had happened between them couldn’t have been good.

“Determinism, Potter. The idea that we are too helpless to stop the inevitable. People drift apart, friends become estranged, and lovers fall out of love and all that is inevitable. I admit, my naïve and prideful younger self sped up our falling out considerably.”

“So in short…you screwed up.”

He scowled. “Drop it Potter,”

He scrunched up his oily wrapper and threw it in a green metal trashcan near us. He urged me to stand. “Let’s just enjoy watching animals cruelly trapped from the other side of the cage.”

I munched on our last fistful of fries. “You sound strangely disapproving for someone who uses those animals to make potions.”

“At least I respect them while doing so.”

“We chop them up.”

“Only the ugly ones. Come along.”

The ‘affection’ section was absolutely terrifying. The animals they allowed the children to pet were so small, and so fragile, that it seemed like even a five year old could snap a rabbits’ neck if she hugged it tight enough.

Severus and I didn’t even go near the pocket pet death trap, since the man clearly detected my wariness with amusement. Instead, he led me to a cute small goat called Annie; she was chewing on carrots, almost choking as a boy her height started hugging her.

The parents were busy taking pictures and cooing at the adorable sight while Severus and I nonchalantly watched the kid.

We waited almost a full ten minutes and the kid was still clinging to the goat.

“Ugh, don’t these things have timed turns?” I will never admit to having pouted like a child as I said this, but Severus never neglects to remind /everyone/ of that fact once it’s mentioned.

“He’ll tire himself soon enough Potter. Cuddling a goat isn’t that exciting.” He said amusedly.

“Do you use goats for potions?” I asked.

Snape pretended to think for a moment. “Sometimes, yes.”

“Baby goats?”

“All kinds of goats.” He replied with a straight face.

“Can you look into Annie’s eyes and tell her that?”

Snape looked down at me for a beat and then walked to the goat. He ignored the small boy who was still busy with the goat and crouched down to Annie’s level.

“Annie,” he begun, putting his hand on the goat’s neck. “I regret to inform you that I, along with an impressive community of potion makers, use your crushed eyeballs in hiccoughing potions, and sometimes your chopped ears as a catalyst for a variety of healing balms, also I like goat kebab.” Annie bleated.

The small boy slowly extracted his hand from Annie’s back and turned to him with wide glazed eyes moments before bursting into tears. As he sobbed at loud, his parents rushed over and Severus drew back to where was I standing, a subtle smirk on his face.

“There you go Potter,” Severus pleasantly said as the boy’s parents glared daggers at us. “You can have your turn with Annie now.”

I struggled to keep my chuckle under wraps. “You are a terrible person.” I said.

“I got you what you wanted. Now go over before I have to traumatize another child.”

Flushing under the parents’ death glare I knelt beside an indifferent Annie and hesitantly ran my hand over her soft back, pondering. She was almost as soft as Buckbeak was, but she didn’t have his feathers as an advantage point so I didn’t hold that against her.

“Do you think she’s happy here?” I asked Severus as I picked up a carrot and held it for Annie.

Severus crossed his arms. “Potter, if you are, even slightly suggesting that we free this goat I will use your chopped off ears for those healing balms.”
I gulped. “Alright your fascination with using my body parts for potions is getting progressively terrifying.”

“We are not freeing Annie.” He firmly stated, ignoring me.

“Look at these eyes,” I framed Annie’s face in my hands and thrust it in Severus’s direction. “Can you say no to those eyes?” Annie bleated in response, fluttering her eyes and nipping at my hands.

“We are NOT stealing Annie Potter.”

I tugged Annie closer to my side. “But look at her! She’s all tied up, eating carrots when she could be so much more.”

Severus pinched the tip of his nose and knelt next to me. “Yes, she could be my dinner.”

“Severus.”

He rolled his eyes. “NO, and stop the first name calling.”

“Please.” I hugged Annie close and made my eyes huge for him.

“We are not freeing an animal from a local zoo with dozens of people all around us. No way in hell.”

“I’m dying.” (Just for future reference, I shamelessly use that card a LOT.)

“I don’t care.” He deadpanned. “We’re not taking the goat with us.”

“She’s miserable here!”

“She’s having the time of her life eating whatever junk they give her and cuddling with dunderheads all day. That’s much more than the goat kebab in Greece got.”

“She’s so small, and vulnerable, she doesn’t deserve to be in a zoo!”

Snape actually looked like he couldn’t believe he was having this conversation with me. “We’re not taking her. We have no place for her.”

I looked at Annie and then back at Severus, there had to be a solution for her. I didn’t necessarily think she was being neglected here, Severus was right. However, something just urged me to free at least one animal from this zoo, and Annie was the perfect candidate. Tradition was tradition.

“We could leave Annie with the Weasleys, I’ll write to them tonight-.”

“No.” he shook his head.

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“NO.”

Yes.

Of course, I managed to convince Severus to help me rescue Annie from the Zoo, it’s virtually impossible to resist my charms when I really put effort into it.

Our plan (crafted in a matter of five minutes as I hogged Annie the goat) consisted of three easy parts. I’m ashamed to admit, I never expected Sev’s level of cunning strategy to reach the heights it did, but he’s even better than most would think. He’s diabolical. No wonder he had managed to fool two of the greatest wizards of his time for almost ten years.

Anyway, back to our plan. The first part was easy. I would go back to the reptile house while he stayed with Annie. It was near noon already and hot, sweaty families looking for shelter from the cruel sun swarmed the house like fish. That made my job easier.

Severus had noticed a sliding panel at the side of each tank that was mostly used to feed the animals inside, my job, was to go to the napping Boa and a couple of nonlethal reptiles, open the sliding panels and set them free, causing a huge distraction.

The reptile house mishap would get people running for their lives and panicked zoo staff to scramble to find the escaping snakes.

Then, when everything was up in shambles, Severus would go for Annie, transform her into a tiny animal that would fit in his pockets, and discreetly take off to come look for me.

We would meet up at the gates and then play our parts as indignant visitors until we could safely get out and go back to the house, where Severus would turn Annie to normal in the basement and we could keep her.

I took several minutes to admire the gorilla that I once had compared to Dudley, still scratching its head and amusing people. I almost wished Dudley to be that gorilla now. I couldn’t believe the same gorilla was still there.

Good old days,

Shaking my head, I pushed my way through packs of families pressing against each other and crowding the tanks. Thankfully, the crowd was very scarcely consisted of small children who might get under foot (with most children crowding the affection section), the tanks I needed access to, were decently close to the entrance, and my foot only got stepped on, once or twice as I made it.

“Excuse me,” I tapped against the tank. The Boa snake didn’t move. I did it again. “You’re going to be glad that you listened to me,” it lazily raised its head. I smiled.

“Do you like me to let you out of there for a while?”

If Boa snakes could sneer, the look that he gave me was it. “I thought you had ssssomewhere elssssse to be naughty hatchling. Didn’t your mother teach you not to bother your elderssss?”

“I’m sure she did,” I looked around to check if anyone was watching us, then turned back to the snake. “But I’m not joking. Do you see that slide? I’m going to open it.”

The Boa snake actually snorted. “You are such a naïve hatchling, believing that you can open a human lock.”

Human lock? I shuffled closer to the panel and noticed the small padlock installed on it. Of course, there was a lock. I rolled my eyes.

“Wait right there,” I said to the snake and took off into the crowd again, this time, hoping to find a zoo staff so I could steal the keys. The crowd was compacted enough that the guy wouldn’t probably even think of it until much later.

I knew I had seen someone with a cap and zoo issued t-shirt earlier at the entrance, so I made my way out of the house to find him and plan the rest from there. How I wished I had my invisibility cloak with me.

The entrance was roughly more crowded and hotter than inside, but the chilling excitement pooling in my stomach helped me suppress the frustration and solider on. Not only was I going to kidnap an animal from a zoo (which would have gotten me two years on probation, on top of paying a huge fine, and also doing community service…yes I looked it up) I was going to steal from another person, free a bunch of other animals and terrorize more people.

There was not a shred of me that protested my decision, not even a tinge of guilt for causing this chaos; it was just too much fun.

The man I had detected looked as bored as one would expect at his job. He looked agitated by the hot weather, constantly glancing at his wristwatch and adjusting the cap on his brown haired head.

I neared him from behind, discreetly blending into two big families gathering at the edge of the doors, standing a foot from the man. My eyes gleamed even brighter when I caught the key chain attached to his belt, reflecting the sun into my eyes.

Bingo, I thought and strode ahead. Ten steps away from me, one of the orange haired girls in the crowded family started bawling her eyes out, causing the man’s head to whip around, facing them.

He crouched by the girl, nonchalantly taking note of the ice cream now on the ground, and looked over at the oblivious parents for help. They didn’t turn as though they hadn’t heard their daughter cry, much too busy surveying the crowd for something else. I saw the zookeeper sigh.

“Is she okay sir?” I asked him innocently, kneeling slightly behind him.

He jostled in his place, looking over his shoulder. “Huh-oh! She just dropped her ice cream, I think.” The man helplessly kept glancing at the parents, as if the weight of his eyes alone could alert the two.

“Why don’t I stay with her, and you can call her parents? They won’t hear you from here.” I kindly offered him, my hand momentarily slipping to his back to /steady/ myself.

The man, whose nametag read ‘Steve’ sighed again, I wondered if he was thinking that he couldn’t wait for his lunch break to start soon enough so he could leave this place.

“Sure thing kid might as well. I don’t know how to deal with crying children.” I looped my fingers on the chain, as he was rambling and nicked it off just as he started to stand, the bawling girl stopped for a beat to look at me, but caught sight of her melting strawberry ice cream again and started anew.

“You go do that,” I crammed the keys into my pockets and watched him push his way through the crowd for the parents.

This was almost too easy, I thought with hidden delight.

With that taken care of, I scooted closer to the orange haired girl, trying to bring on my kid friendly side.

“You stay here okay?” I said slowly. She didn’t pay any attention to me, so I grabbed her shoulder. The girl stopped crying in an instant, her wide blue eyes challengingly stared into mine, as her lips wobbled.

“You can ask your Mommy and Daddy to buy you another ice cream.” I gave her a warm squeeze. “Don’t cry over things you can have back if you asked nicely for it. Also…shh!” I pressed my finger to her lip and then quickly got off the ground. I had a job to do.

I didn’t have time to check and see what became of the girl, my mind was focused on one thing only; find the right key, release as many nonpoisonous snakes as I could, and then go find Severus.

I groaned about having to go through every key to find the right ones, when I saw the faded marker on each key. Steve….thank you for labeling your keys.

When I got back to Boa’s tank, he was sleeping again.

“Ready for a stroll?” the snake raised its head, hissing as it saw the glass panel sliding open. Discreetly, I hid the lock in my pockets and looked around me. It was too crowded for anyone to notice that some maniac was releasing animals.

“Just please, don’t bite anyone?” I sincerely hoped the vipers were going to do the same.

“Why are you doing thissssss?” the snake I later came to know as ‘Sasha’ skeptically hissed.

I shrugged innocently. “You seem really bored in there, it’d be nice to stretch your…Err, what was that thing…you move with? Right, your body.”

Sasha gave me the stink eye for a split second before moving to the panel. “I won’t harm the humansss if they don’t ssstep on me,” it warned.

Speaking from experience, I knew that the chance of anyone trampling Sasha would be considerably lower than people trampling each other to get away from the snake. Of course, I didn’t tell the snake that.

No one noticed the slithering snake right away, at least not until I had released the second viper with firm instructions and some bribery (shit load of dead mice) so they wouldn’t kill anyone on accident.

A young blond woman in her twenties felt Sasha’s scaly body brush against her legs and she looked down to catch the aforementioned snake tangled on the ground. With a loud gut wrenching shriek, she set my plan into motion.

I was on the move, blending with the swarms of panicked crowd when I /accidentally/ dropped the keys and yelled a few times myself for good measure.

“Snakes!!! There are SNAKES HERE!” my ear almost went deaf as someone screamed those words. I squeezed my thin body through the last bit of struggling limbs and leant against one of the doors to catch my breath.

“Many thanksssss, hatchling. May Mother gift you greatly for this,” a dotted snake hissed, cozying up to my shoes.

“Agreed,” another one, cried in agreement, chasing a shrieking woman.

“Just please don’t harm anyone.” I wheezed.

“We won’t hatchling, you promisssed usss miccccce,” the one cuddling my shoes promised. “But thissss isss fun. Chassssing men with funny voicesss.”

I followed its gaze distractedly. “That’s a woman.” Then paused. “Oh wait no, that’s actually a guy. People sometimes scream like that when they’re scared.”

“They don’t realize thissss iss a game?”

I scoffed. “Sure they do,” I started walking along the wall to avoid getting trampled. The snake hissed in approval and took off, joining its friends.

“Oh my god THAT’S A RETICULATED PYTHON!” said some man with surprising accuracy. I hid the chuckle bubbling in my throat in the crook of my elbow as I waited for the staff to rush into the crowd. Almost immediately, as people poured out of the reptile house, more than a dozen of zookeepers with their special caps rushed to the scene, followed by a myriad of people who were either trying to leave, or come and watch the show.
I pushed through all of them with ease, thanking my thin and recently fragile figure as I slid between running bodies and toward the entrance, where Severus should be waiting for me.

He looked me over for injuries, his eyes suspiciously wider than normal. I stuck by his side, wary of the flood of people coming for the exit. “Are you alright?” I asked him cautiously, as his eyes didn’t leave mine.

Severus took a moment to nod his head; he glanced over my shoulder, pulling me aside as a new wave of people came. I turned as well, watching the zoo staff desperately chasing the escapees around with strange catcher sticks.

“Potter, you’re amazing.” The man bluntly said causing my mouth to fall open.

“Err…thanks?”

The potion master shook his head. He had an odd look in his eyes that almost bordered fascination. “Simply amazing, they didn’t hurt a single muggle.”
I shrugged, still a bit uncomfortable. “It’s just a game to them.”

“Whenever I think you cannot amaze me, you keep on surprising me, Li-” he cut himself off, his eyes narrowing and becoming more alert once again.

My shoulders tensed, and I turned around, facing away from the chaos behind us. Shakily, I exhaled. He was going to call me Lily. I just knew it.

Severus cleared his throat several times and turned as well, we patiently waited for the frightened people to clear out so we could follow them. Annie the mouse was in Severus’s pocket, and as the man awkwardly pulled me against his side to play the panicked parent, I felt Annie squirming against my waist.

Even then, a small voice inside my head warned me; this is getting serious Potter. More than you thought it would.

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”

-Victor Frankl

**

When Severus was a child, his mother told him about the butterflies and the candle. She was an avid reader, and though they didn’t have any money to spare on books she always made sure that Severus heard a different story before bedtime every night, even though he might have gone hungry to bed that night.

Sometimes, when she was telling a story and forgot the rest (as she had read them in her early teenage years) she continued with her own version. Her soft velvety voice drowning out his rampant father in his drunken state downstairs.

They would lie in bed together, her warm body that somehow always smelled of vanilla snuggled up with his under the ratty blanket, and she would run her hand through his hair, and he would lay his head on her chest, his hear on her erratic heart, as she told a different story every night.
When he fell asleep, she would lock his door, go downstairs and deal with the drunken man she had married, bearing his abuse so her sleeping son wouldn’t have to in the morning.

Every time Severus was reminded of his mother, telling him stories at night, in his little room, on his bed, just the two of them… he felt his chest tighten with a typhoon of nostalgia and the scent of vanilla while his stomach coiled with anger.

When she was sick, and his father didn’t even care enough to soften his blows, his mother still made it into his room, and they still laid in bed together, and she would wheeze and cough and her clammy hand would shake. But she would still kiss his forehead and make up a tale she might have heard in the past or just concocted in her own head.

The last time Severus heard one of his mother’s stories she was whispering sweet nothings about a boy named Sevy who was a very happy boy who lived in a big castle with his friends with new clothes and all the food in the world. It was two days before he got his letter.

She told him that unlike other stories this one would be real, because Severus was magic, and Severus was ready to accept that because he knew. He thought it was just that easy, because he could do magic and his mother said it to him with such conviction that not believing it seemed like a heinous crime. He and Lily would live in a magical castle forever when he turned eleven where no one could hurt them. And since Severus was magical, he could bring his mommy along and make her well again because he was special.

His mother told him he was special.

His mother whom never got to even see him receive his acceptance letter because she had taken a beer bottle to the head. His mother, whom couldn’t soften the blows of his father’s abuse once he found the letter, who couldn’t see him off to school or aboard the train because her body was too beaten up for her to move. His mom wasn’t there to comfort him after it turned out that no, he wasn’t special after all, and he got sorted into Slytherin.

His mother who for the first time in his life, wasn’t with him when he cried himself to sleep. Not because his mother was left behind, sick and vulnerable to his father’s fists of abomination, but because Severus had been separated from Lily and through some twisted logic, that night, Lily’s separation seemed worse than the thought of his mother being all alone. The first night Mommy hadn’t come up to lie in his bed with a new story and the first night that Severus didn’t care.

He found out years later that she had cancer, too late for it to matter, but he felt idiotic after learning of it. His mother had died of a muggle illness that seemed so insignificant, so utterly mundane. It seemed like she was being punished for marrying a muggle, still years after regretting it.

She stayed for him, for Severus. All those years, she endured the pain and humiliation because of her child. She had a very big heart, his mother, and Severus sometimes thought of how disappointed she would be in him, if she saw the way he treated Lily’s boy.

She told those stories to sooth the aching longing of a better life in his chest. She would have wanted Severus to live up to the legacy, so, albeit reluctantly, he did.

Severus was decided, he had learnt the lesson his mother had been trying to teach him for years, so when he and Potter were silently making their way back to the house, Severus told him the story of the butterflies and the candle, in hopes to distract the boy from his earlier slip up.

And Potter drank up every word that came out of his mouth and the whole time all Severus could think about was the image of Harry’s uncle beating him with a bloodied belt when the boy slipped and broke a plate in parallel to the memory of his father drunkenly beating his mom. The monster then locked the battered boy with the belt back in his cupboard, forgotten until the next punishment session, in his memory, his father slumped down that opposite wall across his mother and passed out.

It was inexplicable, how the boy not only walked away from that, mentally, somehow, he seemed /fine/ with it. The severity of their abuse was appalling and yet, the teen still acted like a healthy-if not a bit affection starved- boy with an annoyingly cheery smile.

Severus didn’t know how, and even though he thought the tumors might have been playing an altering hand in the boy’s emotional state for years, he still felt baffled.

The potion master felt ashamed of himself as he went on with his story and they finally reached the porch, by then the weather was mildly humid, and the sun was starting to set. He let a thoughtful Harry walk ahead of him as he desperately tried occluding his mind.

Annie the goat was squirming in his inner pocket, and Severus had half a mind to banish the thing when he heard Harry’s loud startled gasp from the living room.

He barely had any time to think before he dashed through the door to reach Harry’s dumbstruck figure.

“Hello boys,” Albus smiled from the couch.

“Professor Dumbledore.” Potter whispered under his breath. The child looked terrified. Instinctively, Severus gripped Potter’s shoulder, the same way a wary parent would constrict a restless child.

Albus smoothed a hand down his beard, his eyes passively lingering on the potion master’s hand. Harry was trembling under his hold. The boy was clearly frightened the old man would punish them somehow.

Oh how wrong he was.

“You must forgive me,” Albus sincerely apologized to the boy, as though surprised by Potter’s thunderstruck cageyness. “I forgot to bring you scones.”

“What?” Harry frowned in confusion. Severus rolled his eyes at Albus’s lack of subtly. Albus and his tests. Of course, Harry wouldn’t have remembered their last conversation. Albus knew that.

Severus sneered over his head. “Nothing you should be concerned about. Go wait upstairs.”

“But sir-.” Harry trailed off and then looked at Dumbledore.

“Professor Dumbledore I can explain-.” He tried to tell the headmaster but Severus was having none of it.

“Go, Potter.”

Harry stood rooted to the ground, his eyes bearing into Dumbledore’s crinkling stare. “It was nice seeing you Harry.” Albus said with a kind hand gesture. “We will talk soon.” Harry nodded miserably.

He ushered the boy without turning to face the headmaster. Harry was reluctant to leave, his feet dragging on the floor as Severus firmly guided him to the stairs.

He tightened his hold on Harry’s shoulder. Ignoring the boy’s pathetic attempts to free himself. “Just go upstairs Potter. Do not come down.”
Harry whirled to face him, his face distressed and contorted.

“Severus-” the boy faltered.

The potion master cut him off. “I won’t repeat myself again.”

Harry bit his lip and threw one last anxious glance to the living room where Albus was calmly sitting with his leg crossed over the other, his figure standing out from the bland living room with his radiant purple robes and flamboyant red boots.

Severus reached a hand into his pocket and pulled Annie out discreetly. He cupped Potter’s hand around the white squirming mouse. “Go.”
Harry held Annie close to his chest as he nodded.

He watched him leave, completely stolid. Even though he was bristling on the inside, a cold, calculated rage washed over him as he finally turned away from the stairs and fumed back into the living room.

“Things are going well, I see.” The headmaster said pleasantly. “He calls you by your name.”

“Cast a silencing charm.” He growled to the older man.

“Severus-.”

“Do it or so merlin help me Albus, I’m enraged enough that taking my wand out would not be in your best interests.”

“Is that a threat my boy?”

“Trust me, it’s a promise. Cast it.” Albus heaved a sigh as he flicked his wand and muttered under his breath. His gleaming eyes dulled a fraction.
Severus waited almost a full minute to begin. “Did you know?”

Albus cocked his head with interest. “Knew what Severus? That you turned three traumatized muggles into land creatures?”

That was quick, Severus thought dryly. It usually took Albus at least half a day to find out about anyone’s misbehaving. All things considered, the potion master was impressed by the older man’s dedication. If only that hard borne devotion extended to the physical and mental state of his underlings.

“That was quick,” he voiced his thoughts. “Even for you. I was not expecting you until later tonight.”

Albus nonchalantly crossed his legs. “The blood wards fell the moment you and Harry left Severus, you nearly gave an old man a heart attack. You’re lucky no one at the ministry intercepted your little outburst.”

“You turned them back?”

Albus titled his head to the side. “They’re in my office as we speak, I’m afraid Minerva is having some difficulty reversing their states back to its former self. As you know, curses that have intense motive behind them are the hardest to diminish.”

“Good.” Severus gritted. “That wasn’t what I asked you Albus. Did you know why I did it? You must have known.”

Albus uncrossed his legs. “I’m here to know.”

Severus felt the irritation fester under his skin like an over eager creature, ready to burst out at the man and tear his smug grinning face into ribbons. Oh how he wished he could do that.

Instead, Severus glowered at the old man. “How could you not? How could you not know the boy you were pampering and preening to your own devices was abused? How could you possibly not know about the things those pests did to Lily’s son?”

“Severus you have to understand, I am not capable of knowing every little detail in everyone’s lives, aside from the fact that I had no other choice but to leave him there.”

“There’s always a choice, always another solution. Do you know what you’ve done to that boy? Do you have any idea of the damages you’ve cost him over the years by willingly handing him to them?”

In some twisted way, he later realized, Harry’s life was running a similar line as of his own. Severus remembered when he was the boy’s age, when James Potter and his lackeys took Albus’s oversight as an exultant opportunity to torment him.

When he had no choice but to go home every summer, clean up after his drunken and (newly addicted) father whose vicious tongue often hurt more than his fists, and then constantly tolerate Potter’s relentless abuse and groom his growing jealousy over Lily’s closeness to the git.

Potter outgrew his bullying and Vernon Dursley would never compare to the animal that raised Severus, but that didn’t make him any less of a monster, and Petunia as well, to some extent.

“It was prudent that Harry didn’t die and so the only solution was leaving him with the muggles, where he was safe and he was being monitored -”
Severus cut in with a snarl. “Really? Then where were your pawns when that excuse of an uncle beat the shit out of him with a belt? When Petunia almost hacked the boy’s scalp off with a pair of garden scissors? Why didn’t they step in when he was being beaten, starved, and belittled?”

“I was never notified of such incidents Severus. I’m not a monster.”

Severus sneered. “No you’re correct. You don’t know things when they are at odds with your interests Albus.”

The headmaster shook his head with regret. It made Severus’s insides recoil. “You always thought the worst of me. When are you going to realize that I’m just a human like anybody else?”

“You needed the blood wards so badly that you turned a blind eye to those damned muggles tormenting Lily’s boy! The boy I swore to protect! You let me believe they were pampering and spoiling him like a prince all these years
just to delude me into obeying your orders out of spite.”

“You are projecting your anger at me because you are mad at yourself.”

“No, I’m mad at you!” Severus spat. “You could have prevented this, and you didn’t. Potter was a victim to your meddling,” there was a significant pause. “As was I. You could have saved me too and you didn’t.”

“Harry and you are similar in more ways than you realize Severus, but trust me, the abuse wasn’t supposed to be one of them. The boy was supposed to live.”

“Well guess what? He’s not. He’s dying Albus. He’s dying not knowing that you have wronged him. Your brilliant plan didn’t go well did it? What use is a boy whose life is on a deadline? He won’t be of use for you anymore.”

“He wasn’t just a weapon to me.”

Severus let out a humorless laugh. “If he wasn’t he wouldn’t have stayed in that wretched hole for almost fourteen years. The things I saw in their heads…which you must have too. You turned a blind eye to it,” it was a repetitive cycle. Severus knew that. “Well I’m not going to let you.”

“Severus is this really about Harry?”

“It doesn’t matter if it is,” Severus snarled. “I’m not a frightened fifteen year old anymore Albus. I’m not the boy you disregarded after he almost got mauled by a bloody werewolf, you know that.”

“That child have been sick and incapacitated for all these years. Do you understand that? A boy with stage four brain cancer couldn’t possibly react to trauma the same way as normal people,” he pointed an accusing finger toward the roof. “That boy upstairs doesn’t understand that he was being abused. Not to the full extent anyways, because he has the mental capacity of a ten-year-old child, with the emotions of a sixteen-year-old teenager who was traumatized all his life. That’s your fault.”

“The Dursleys will be questioned and punished accordingly, rest assured Severus.”

“What about you? Who punishes you Albus? You’re the reason that boy slept in a cupboard for ten years. The reason he was beaten with a bloody belt at the slightest inconvenience. The reason why he’s dying.”

“You empathize with him.”

Severus’ jaw clicked audibly at the old man’s tone. A tone that bordered blaming. “I’m human, not a pile of rock.”

“And ironically enough, some people tend to disagree.” Albus shrugged. His hand reached into his pocket and Severus saw the man popping a sherbet lemon in his mouth. “You are human Severus, one of the best there is, if I say so myself. Much better than I ever hoped to be.”

“Is that your excuse?”

“It’s not a good one.” He admitted.

“Does it bother you now, that he won’t defeat him? The Prophesy is null.”

“Not in the least, Severus,” Albus said cryptically. “But the thought of pressuring that boy any further physically pains me, even though he might have been our only shot at victory.”

“This was not his war.”

The man opened his arms in surrender. “And he shall not finish it anyway.” Albus vowed, waiting until he had received Severus’ grudging nod. “I need the memories of what you’ve seen in the muggles’ heads and what led to their brutal persecution.” The headmaster continued.

“I want them punished.”

Potter’s ridiculous sense of justice wasn’t enough for Severus. He knew what the boy thought he was doing, he knew that Potter saw his impending death as a permit to forgive any living soul he passed in hopes of atonement for the things he had never done. He knew Potter felt guilty of…something.

Severus had no tolerance for that. When it came to abuse, according to his own personal experience, the only way out was the ultimate punishment. If Potter wouldn’t ask for it then he would.

“And they will be.” Albus’ promise was bland. Severus wanted more. He needed more. Anything that could erases the things he had seen that morning from his head once and for all.

“I don’t want Potter to be involved in any of it,” he snapped without really processing the words. “Keep it undertones.”

“Harry seems better. More alert.” Albus thought it would alter the tension, changing the subject so abruptly. Severus decided to play coy.

“He takes the potions,”

“Does he know yet?” Severus raised his eyebrows at the inquiry. Was Albus hoping that Potter found out about it? It was under his own resolute orders that Severus had refrained from mentioning any details about this ‘boosting potion’ to Potter.

Boosting potion, the ridiculous name made Severus chortle every time. Potter was so naïve to believe such a name existed, but of course, they couldn’t just blurt out names like ‘Lapis Capturam’ without the boy or the Granger girl suspecting anything. The direct translation from Latin was a dead giveaway.

So Poppy and Severus just came up with a name on the spot in the headmaster’s office, with Potter being too starry eyed to notice anything amiss. Harry just went with it without batting an eyelash.

“Of course not, do you take me for a fool?” Albus nodded in satisfaction.

“How is he, really?”

“As fine as he can be. There are some…glitches.” He didn’t offer an explanation. He needed Albus intrigued enough to hold him at bay, but uninformed to minimize the chance of deceit. Potter’s odd symptoms posed no threat to anyone but himself, and Severus had it under control.

“And how far along are you? I presume things must have been going well with the list?”

“Things are well.” Severus conceded. Like hell, he was going to tell that man anything. It wasn’t a matter of trust…it was privacy. Harry needed that privacy, particularly now more than ever.

“How many items have you crossed off the list? It should be ten by now.”

Severus let the silence fall between them for a few scarce moments.

“Four.” The potion master admitted. Painstakingly.

Albus looked startled. “Only four?” he exclaimed. “Severus that is not the work ethic you promised me. We’re already halfway through April, that boy doesn’t have much time.”

“I think it’s better to leave that matter to me headmaster, seeing as I’m the boy’s guardian.”

“Temporary guardian, an arrangement that could be easily rectified.” The headmaster shot him a jovial smile. Severus saw the threat through his act, clear as a day. “You promised to finish the boy’s list before July 31, and I’m holding you to your word. After all, isn’t that why I supplied you with the necessary ingredients in the first place?”

Severus narrowed his eyes. “Be careful of what you’re suggesting Albus. I’m not robbing the boy’s precious potion ingredients. I have that much respect left.”

“The stone isn’t something you find in an apothecary.”

The accusation did not surprise him in the least, but it did sting a bit. Especially since, it was he, who was mad at the old man and not the other way around. What Albus was suggesting was outlandish, as rational as it might have seemed to the man himself, Severus had not, not even once thought about pilfering the stone for his own selfish purposes. The stone was safely in its box, where he only took it out once every two days to brew Potter a new batch.

That was it.

“The stone is safe.” He drawled with confidence.

Albus nodded. “And Harry mustn’t know about it. As far as he’s concerned the philosopher’s stone was destroyed once and for all.”
Part of it was, Severus corrected the man in his head. If the stone had retained its full shape then Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel still would have been alive. Only a small shard of the stone was salvaged, Nicolas’ last gift to his old friend. Albus passed it onto Severus with the recipe with strict instructions.

Severus just did as he was told, Potter’s survival counted on him salvaging the small shard with outmost delicacy and sparing as much as he could by making it up with other ingredients that could mimic the stone’s behavior. It wasn’t much, but the potions master tried.

His deadline was July 31. According to his meticulous calculations, that was the exact date the stone would contribute to Harry’s last dose, and that was it.

Albus thought that Potter wouldn’t find out about it, and Severus was positive that the chances were very slim, with Harry’s degenerating condition the boy would hardly care about what was in the potions as long as it kept him on his feet. Severus wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to obtain such a valuable item, but it was essential.

“I will be careful.” He promised.

As soon as the stone was out of the way, and Severus could once more focus his anger on the man, the look of utter disgust, and justified anger took over his expressions once more. He wasn’t done lecturing yet, and Albus, in his last futile attempt to redirect the conversation had failed to distract him with the stone.

Severus wasn’t jesting, and he still wasn’t done with the man.

“You’re rightly mad at me Severus.” Albus deduced the glare Severus was throwing at him.

“More than you could even imagine.” He said through his teeth.

“I don’t know how to make it up to the boy.”

Severus ignored the monotonous regret in Albus’ tone. He had to be methodical about his next move. If he missed even one little detail, his whole strategy would crumple before it could be built into anything decipherable. He paused for a certain amount of time, his arms crossed across his chest and his face stolid.

He had to play his cards just right.

“Kill them,” he told the man nonchalantly. “Punishment isn’t enough. Kill them with your own wand Albus.” he didn’t look into Albus’ face, but he could just imagine that look of mild shock coloring his features. “It shouldn’t be too hard. If Harry dies, then they do not get to live. Give them the ultimate punishment.”

The couch cringed loudly as Albus shifted in his seat. “I don’t have that judgment,” he said. “Neither do you. No matter how close you are to the boy.”
“They’re barely innocent people.” Severus fixated his famous sneer on his face. “Kill them and be done with it and someday, just someday he might forgive you for what you did.”

Albus hummed sagely, his raised eyebrows almost disappearing underneath his ridiculous hat. “I’m not capable of killing Severus. Taking a life…that’s not something you just live down. Harry would not approve at all.”

“You killed Gellert.”

Albus’s reaction was immediate, he tensed, his back straightening as his eyes darkened. “That was different.” He muttered.

Severus cruelly pressed on the open wound in the old man’s gaping chest with a pointed sneer. It was true that Albus knew things about him, things that could easily ruin his life if they came to light…but Severus too, knew enough about the headmaster.

“Was it? The only difference between killing him and them is that you were in love with him. He was a horrible person so you got rid of him. Don’t preach about your innocence Albus. You’re guiltier than you let on.”

Albus’ hand left his beard and he sat up straighter. “Gellert is not the subject at hand here. Severus,” he paused purposefully. “It’s funny how often we forget our boundaries, isn’t it?”
The potion master didn’t let himself feel intimated by the headmaster’s probing gaze, “If you killed the man you loved for causing an uproar, then killing the animals that hurt an innocent boy should be easy.”

“Gellert died in a duel.” Albus said coldly.

“You killed him in a duel.” He corrected the old man. “Those muggles don’t deserve a chance.” Severus sat down in the armchair with practiced indifference. “Get them somewhere discreet, kill them and be done with it. It’s a nice way of venting off every now and then.”

Albus’ demeanor changed in a blink, the old man inspected him with his half-moon spectacles. “What do you gain from me killing the muggles?” he wondered aloud. “Obviously, Harry gains nothing; his life is ending in only a few short months.” He narrowed his eyes. “What do you gain Severus?”

“The satisfaction of seeing you squirm, trying to fix your past mistakes. You left him there with them, now it’s your job to take them out.”

Albus chuckled, his eye closing for a beat before opening, shining with humoring amusement. “Your poetic side is showing.”

Severus got up and walked right to the man. “Call it justice served cold, and get out.” Albus peered up at him but Severus was unrelenting. This was too much exposure. He could only handle Albus’ presence so much before going mad.

“The boy is terrified.” An excuse that didn’t seem far from the truth. Potter must have been panicking the daylight out of himself upstairs.

Dumbledore nodded very slowly. “Very well, I’ll see myself out. Don’t forget to send the exact memories by midnight. I cannot keep the muggles in my office forever.”

“With outmost pleasure.” He couldn’t wait until the headmaster was out of this house. He was worried for the boy.

Albus lingered by the arch that divided the living room from the main hallway. “Here’s one last advice to bear in mind my dear boy, he is not Lily.” He said. “He won’t ever be the girl you loved, but he /will/ leave. Just like she did.”

Severus got up from his seat with thunderous speed, his shoulders broadening as he imposed his full height upon the headmaster.

“Get out Albus,” he seethed, his hands balling into fists by his side.

Albus didn’t falter. “You shall never repeat the same mistake over and over again Severus.” He turned away. “You shall learn from it so it won’t happen the next time.”

“GET OUT!”

“Good day, Severus.” And just like that, he was gone.

Severus stood in the living room for several minutes, in utter silence. He composed himself on his way upstairs, trying to calm his raging heartbeat and wipe the preeminent sneer off his face. The boy didn’t need to see that. In fact, the less Potter knew the better.

The potion master stood behind the only closed door for a beat before knocking.

“Come in,” Potter’s muffled voice called out.

Severus went in, taking in the scene with raised eyebrows. Potter was crouched over his trunk, refolding some of his clothes from the distinguishable heap of clothes that wasn’t there before. The mouse-the pesky goat- was feasting upon the boy’s swimming cap.

“What in merlin’s name are you doing?” Potter dropped the shirt in his hand as he looked up, flushing as Snape narrowed his eyes.

“Um…Packing, sir.”

“You never unpacked,” he pointed out dryly. “Why is there a heap of-” Then he caught Potter’s puffy eyes and his mind went completely blank. He cursed, oh for the love of god…

“Have you been crying?” Harry fidgeted under his gaze, wringing his hands as he avoided Severus’s gaze.

Severus heaved a sigh. He pinched the tip of his nose and closed the door behind him as he fully entered the small room. He ignored the mess Potter had made. He stepped over the clutter and knelt beside the boy.

“Were you crying Harry?"

“No,” Harry said, rather unconvincingly. The boy’s shoulders tensed as he hurriedly picked up his fallen shirt and resumed his dismal folding. Severus reached and took the shirt.

Harry tugged at the garment half-heartedly, his posture frustrated and tensed. Was the boy really that naïve to think that Severus would allow Albus to take him away? Apparently, that was exactly what Harry was thinking, if his swollen face and rigid bearing had anything to say about it.

“Please sir, I need to pack this stuff. I don’t want Professor Dumbledore to wait-.”

“Oh so, you overturned your trunk’s content all over the floor because you didn’t want to delay the headmaster?” Severus meant his voice to be teasing, but to his utter astonishment, the boy looked like he was ready to cry again.

Potter furiously rubbed at his eyes, his breath hitching. “I didn’t-I-I….”

Severus rolled his eyes and dropped Potter’s shirt haphazardly back in the blasted trunk. “Potter, breathe.” He commanded the boy. “Professor Dumbledore is gone. No one is taking you back to Hogwarts.”

Potter’s mouth formed a perfect ‘O’. “What? But…but after we did all those things…wasn’t he mad at you? Or upset with me?”

“No, he wasn’t. If anything, he was rather sorry for the inconvenience.” He lied.

They both sat in silence. Severus surveyed the strewn clothes and knickknacks that Potter had carelessly thrown around the room.

“Oh, look at the mess you made child.”

“I’m sorry. I clean these up right away.” the boy said meekly.

“It’s alright. Leave them for now, let’s go tend to your goat and make some dinner.” As an afterthought, he paused. “Bring the goat too.”

“I’m not really hungry sir.” Severus hoisted the boy up by his elbow, guiding him out of the mess he made with a firm grip. Annie was too busy madly squeaking in Potter’s cupped hands.

“Well, too bad that you’re cooking and eating anyway.” He dragged Harry along to the hallway, and let go. Potter fell a few steps behind as they descended the stairs. The child worried his lower lip, and Severus almost felt annoyed. How much reassurance did a fifteen-year-old need? It wasn’t as if he had hidden Dumbledore in a kitchen cupboard.

He knew that making Albus leave rather abruptly, had stirred the boy’s morbid curiosity but for his own peace of mind, and partially the boy’s, he decided not to hint at the severe argument he had had with the old man.

Harry couldn’t afford to live his life with petty burdens such as this one. A lie told in a good cause was not even a lie. It was a blessing.
At least, that’s what he kept telling himself as he woke up with the guilt gripping him every day. Potter’s life span was too fragile to ruin it with ugly truths. Better let the lad die in peace.

He ushered the boy into the kitchen and took Annie the goat in the bathroom to transform her back into a goat, which the blasted thing did not appreciate. Ungrateful beast, Severus glared at her, and she innocuously bleated back at him.

Severus left her to her own devices, and went to join Potter in the kitchen. The boy was already in the process of preparing the ingredients. They had turkey sandwiches, eaten in companionable silence, with sudden intervals as the goat sounded from the living room. She was invisible to them both, as they couldn’t see her by glancing over the counter.

Potter couldn’t stop grinning like a child.

Already up to no good, Severus surmised with resignation.

Annie the goat was chewing on the frayed loveseat as they finally retreated to the living room, and the boy immediately made a beeline for the thing, his eyes pruning as he crouched down to separate her from the cushions.

“I cannot believe we have a goat now.” The boy marveled, his tone sheepish in despite of his embarrassed flush. Severus looked back and forth between the goat and the child and shook his own head.

He was too old for this.

“We can keep her only for a few weeks Potter, since our next destinations pose no threat to her life.”

Potter stopped petting Annie for a beat. “And?”

“Then Molly Weasley will collect Annie and take her to wherever she wants to as you said.”

As he mentioned the woman’s name, Severus noticed an interesting, conflicted expression possess Harry’s face; one of deep fondness, and the other resembling a stab of hurt. A very remarkable mixture, the potion master thought.

“To the burrow, right? Will she come alone?” the boy inquired.

Severus shrugged as he brushed past the goat and to the kitchen. “I’m unaware of her itineraries, as I have yet to write her a letter. Hopefully she accepts to take your goat in.”

“Molly loves animals.” Harry said softly. “I’m sure Annie will have fun with the gnomes.”

Severus stared at Potter with narrowed eyes, somewhat perplexed by the boy’s causal namedropping. It was a rather irritating habit of his, giving himself the permission or rather the power to call an adult twice his size and age by name.

Himself, for instance. The brat had called him by his first name when Dumbledore was just a room away, completely integrated in their hushed conversation. Harry granted the old manipulative man with the perfect lever…the boy himself.

Not an ounce of decorum, or foresight. Yes, the boy didn’t know about Albus’s motives, but they both would have fared better without having Albus know about them being on first name basis.

That deep-rooted aversion in the corner of his mind pointed out the similarity between Harry and his father in that regard treacherously, and a grudging revelation hit Severus; no matter how much of Lily the boy had in him, a large part of James Potter still haunted him. Albus was right.
“Since when do you call Molly Weasley by her name?” he was disgusted by a trickle of scorn that snuck in his tone.

Harry startled by the reproachful tone looked up from the goat, his smile faltering.

“She and Arthur-umm-Mr. Weasley insisted…after the Quidditch World cup incident.”

Severus felt morbidly ashamed of his earlier thoughts. He felt it prudent to chastise himself for his hideous assumptions about the boy. Awkwardly, he cleared his throat. “Are you very close to the Weasley clan?”

The boy chuckled, looking at him as if he was insane. “Of course I am. What sort of question is that?”

“I’ve never seen you write a single letter addressed to them. The only people you write to are Granger and Madam Pomfrey, and Granger doesn’t even reply.”

Potter tensed up again, and dropped both hands. “Don’t talk about her or Ron.”

“Why?”

“Just don’t.”

What does he write to that girl? It couldn’t be bad enough to disuse her from replying at all. Was he missing something?

“Talking about it helps.” Although, he didn’t necessarily know what Potter needed help with regarding his little friends.

“I cannot bear to look at them or think of them,” Potter snapped. “Or hear their voices. It’s useless.”

“Where is this sudden animosity coming from?”

Harry sighed as he stood, his eyes fixated on the goat. “It’s not hate. I can never hate the two most important people in my life.” He admitted quietly. “I love them. That’s why I’m not thinking of them right now.”

“You lost me completely, Potter. You do not show your love and care for other people by locking them out.”

“Well what would you know about that? You’ve never loved anyone.”

Eyes wide as saucers, and his mouth agape, Harry looked appalled of himself. “I’m sorry.” He blurted out breathlessly, his eyes glazing. He didn’t mean it, he couldn’t have. Severus could read his entire thought process just by looking at his face.

‘You’ve never loved anyone’

It wasn’t true. Maybe it was. Severus didn’t know. It stung, that Potter thought that of him, in his subconscious, but it wasn’t untrue. As far as Harry or anyone else for that matter was aware, Severus Snape, the greasy git, the terrifying overlarge bat haunting the dungeons had no heart. He preferred it that way. Fear stimulated obedience far better than respect did.

Even so, hearing the words, hearing an abused boy, like himself, call Severus heartless, incapable of love, stirred something ugly inside him. He had loved, once.

He loved his mother dearly…he loved Lily.

They both left and it was his fault. Albus was right about that there was no denying it. Severus had made his peace with that fact long ago. This shouldn’t have hit him as hard as it did.

Severus turned on his heels. “Don’t go to bed too late.” He told the boy. “I will be in the attic.”

Potter was horror-stricken. “Sir, I-.”

“Save it.” Severus said and strode out of the room.

*

Later that night, after he had acquired Albus’s much needed memories in a vial along with the detailed explanation of what he had seen in the boy’s head etched on parchment, Severus finally dared to come out of his lab. He was exhausted, and quite hungry.

Using the stone always took a lot of energy from him.

He watched from the bottom of the stairs as the boy finished making his fort and laid down among the abundance of pillows. He hesitated but then before he could change his mind, strode into the living room.

Potter was in the process of folding his glasses when he saw the potion master approach. He bolted up in his cot. Severus waved him down.

“Lay down Potter,”

Harry stared at him with large confused eyes, but Severus paid him no mind, he had no idea if what he was about to do was a good idea or not. Unlike his other plans, he hadn’t thought this one through.

He surveyed the fort, and decided to settle down next to Potter’s feet, nearest to the kitchen. They could both hear Annie bleat in the bathroom where she had been locked in for the night.

Blasted goat, he thought distractedly.

He and Harry gazed at each other for a while, before the boy groaned. “Alright I’m sorry,” he sounded miserable and guilt stricken. Severus stared at him.

This isn’t about you. Severus chided himself. This was about the boy, his happiness, his comfort, his life. Severus Snape didn’t matter at all. He was an asset. He could get the job done and he would. After this was done…maybe later, Severus could seat in a dark corner and sulk about it.

“Forget that.” He told Harry. The boy had no filter, and unlike his father, he had a legitimate reason for it. Severus wasn’t going to take offend at every little thing the boy blurted out. “Where’s the Hitchhiker’s guide?” Harry awkwardly sat up and pointed at one of the supporting chairs that the blanket was tied to.

“With my other stuff, under the sweater.”

Severus reached for Potter’s sweater, and sure enough felt the dog-eared book underneath Potter’s clothes. Harry was still sat up, wearily watching him with wide eyes.

“Lie down Potter,” he snapped at the boy, and flipped the book open. “Which page are you at?”

“Um…I’m not sure…fifty? Sixty-five?”

Severus flipped the book accordingly, feeling Harry’s unfocused gaze burning into him, the boy was clearly having difficulty figuring out what Snape was doing here, past midnight when he was just about to sleep.

“For the record, I accept your pathetic attempt at apologizing. I understand that you were overwhelmed,” Severus started and the boy nodded vigorously, his hands fisting the duvet underneath him.

Severus ran a hand upon the printed words, “And also, what you said isn’t true. I loved my mother, very much. I loved your mother too once, when we were young. I’m not sure how I feel about her now, but to assure your doubtlessly wandering mind; no Potter, I’m not heartless.”

“Sir I never thought-.”

He cut the boy off. “As punishment for your insensitive words regarding my personal feelings, I will read a chapter of this book,” he held the book up.

“Every night until it is finished and then choose another to fill in its place. Do you have any objections?”

“Um…No?”

Nodding solemnly “Very well. Now lie back and stop fidgeting.”

Severus stared down at the page for a second, and then back at Potter again, who was watching him with rapt attention and wide eyes-hardly appropriate manner one should have for sleeping-and then back at the book again.

He could tell that Potter was getting restless by the unsettling silence but Severus was busy thinking, he needed the silence, and he was grateful that the brat was insightful enough not to interrupt him.

This book was one of the only ones he had in his possession as a young child, a latent birthday gift his mother had somehow procured for him. Later, he suspected that it was borrowed from the nearest library she could find- and he had read every single page back to back in a way that he suspected anyone else has as a child, and later again in his spare free time in adulthood.

He had the second book too, probably crammed in his library back home or on the floor somewhere. The second one didn’t have as much value as the first one, he bought the second himself a few years back. This one though…this one meant the world to him.

He knew every word. The characters…the dialogue… the story and what it really stood for. Somehow despite all these Severus’ hunger compelled him to misread a word. Then that word set in motion a chain of thoughts that somehow, that late into the night, led Severus to think of ‘The Restaurant at The End of The World’.

The sequel he had bought himself, and skimmed through in a single night. Severus was less proud to admit that the book didn’t hold the same glow as the first one did, not to him, but that still didn’t mean he would forget even a word of it.

It was not a surprise when his brain started connecting dots as soon as he caught the word ‘Oglaroonians’ drifting inside his head as an associated word that naturally came to mind when he thought of the novel. ‘Oglaroonians’ whom lived in the forest of Oglaroon in a nut tree…hmm…Severus ran his fingers along the page.

They had a whole planet to themselves and they only lived in a nut tree because they couldn’t handle the thought of all the vastness and the weirdness the universe contained. For some reason, Severus found that to be hilarious. He still did, to a lesser extent, but that was beside the point.
This book just gave him the best idea ever.

“Say…Potter,” he finally started, ten minutes, causing Harry to startle out of a light slumber.

“Yeah?” the boy fidgeted in his cot.

Severus hummed, weighting the book in his hands as he pressed his lips together. It was a two -hour drive from London to the forest of Dean, it was nearly two in the morning now…he could get Potter to the forest in less than two hours considering the lateness of the hour and the boy could sleep in the car.

“How would you feel if we started your next wish a little early?”

Harry frowned in confusion, his mind clearly muddled with exhaustion. Severus could see the gears turning in the boy’s head.

“Um…camping?”

Severus nodded once. “Yes, I believe that was the fifth? Camping?” he waited for Potter’s confirmation before letting a smirk form on his face. “Did you have a specific place in mind?”

Potter seemed lost on him for a few moments before he gathered his wits about him with a slight shake of his head. “Uh-no. No, I didn’t have any places planned.”

“Splendid, how do you feel about the forest of Dean?”

Blinking owlishly, Harry tiredly shrugged. “I don’t know, sir,”

“Why aren’t you reading me a book?”

Severus got up in one move and dropped the book down at potter. The car would jostle too much in the way and he couldn’t bear a cranky Potter, he mused, but he had just the idea how to make it into an ideal sleeping place.

“Do you mind if I borrow your-.” He gestured at the fort/cot assembly Potter had going. If Harry didn’t seem lost before he definitely was now, the poor boy seemed so baffled, that Severus almost smiled at the expression. Harry slumped down and groaned, the boy looked seconds away from drifting away.

“I want to sleep,” the boy whined, his head dropping.

Severus sighed. “You will. Can you get up on your own and put on some warm clothes?” Potter groaned, his eyes closing. “I bought you another sweater didn’t I? The thick black one?” Severus crouched down to Potter’s level and scrutinized the child.

“What are you talking about?” Potter said, his eyes closed and the potion master sighed again. The boy was too far-gone. No matter, he conceded, he would dress him on the way out.

“Never mind me Potter,” he told the boy as he began the tedious task of gathering pillows and blankets off the floor.

He snagged the car keys on his way out and headed to the yard where the car was parked. He had no experience on handling fussy children on a road-trip, but he knew how to settle Potter in the backseat without him rolling off the seats in his sleep.

He kept the front door open, to ease his commuting. He unlocked the car and opened the backseat doors, both for better access, and air circulation. He dumped the bundled up mattresses and pillows onto the seats.

The potion master surveyed the footrest separating the backseat and the driver’s seat, estimating the height to be accommodating to the bundles he had available in the house. He could fill in the gap, cushion it with the pillows and tuck in some blankets to soften the surface for Potter to sleep with ease.
With a determined nod, he set to work, and started stuffing the beddings into the footrest. He had to return to the house and refill his stock, but Potter didn’t seem to mind, the boy was too groggy to follow Severus with his eyes.

Even Annie’s renewed bleating wasn’t doing a good job of keeping him awake.

After a few trips to the scarce living room and back to the car, Severus was feeling like a fully-fledged parent, expertly fixing the bedding, and baby proofing the sharp edges with blankets and afghans. Potter would sleep like an angel in this car.

As he finished, the potion master locked the car and walked back into the house, first to deal with the blasted goat (charmed back safely to mouse in his made up potion’s lab) and right into the pocket of his trousers.

He drug Potter’s trunk without any strenuous effort, and threw it in the trunk of the car. He shifted the heavy chest until he could find a lid, and then spent five minutes digging around to find Potter’s black sweater.

He muttered under his breath…honestly, the way that boy just crammed his belongings into a heap as if it was trash was appalling. He would indeed have a conversation about the matter with the child later the next day.

With that thought firmly in mind, Severus shrank his own trunk. Again, in his makeshift labs, and then finally headed down to a dosing Potter.
Potter grumbled, and squirmed a bit, but settled as Severus quickly drew the sweater over his head. “Can you walk?”

“Whe’?” Potter mumbled with closed eyes.

Severus took that as a no.

He snaked his arms around the boy’s scrawny shoulders and knees and lifted him in his arms with a heavy sigh. He was not getting any younger, and if Potter was by any means a healthy fifteen year old, the potion master would not have been able to carry him, but alas, Harry weighted almost nothing.
He’d wager a toddler weighted more than the child in his arms and mused the thought in his head as he carried Potter to the car. He needed to keep a careful eye on the boy’s eating habits. He had been so busy these past few days that he had barely thought of it.

The camping trip would rectify that.

“Hnn-.” Potter’s head lolled on the seat.

“Shh, it’s alright. Just go to sleep.” Said Severus before he got in his own seat.

And Potter listened. The boy was out like a light before Severus had even started the car. The potion master gripped the wheel with a satisfied smirk.

“Severus,” he told himself. “You are nailing this.”

A little ways down the road things are going to be different. Very much so.

It’s difficult for me to recall the exact train of events that led us here. To a stalemate.

I forget things a lot in general. Even as a kid, I was forgetful, and it came at a great cost, which was my relative’s unearned fury, although even their firm hand and unwarranted anger couldn’t beat it out of me. Even before the cancer reared its ugly little head, I was known by this trait. Nothing outlandish, I forgot things that normal people could forget too, just more frequently than they did; the last meal I had, a homework assignment, where I had put my book, a solitary sock that never came back from the laundry… trivial things like that. Things that could have been early triggers but I laughed them off.

I had no reason to be concerned about. Being absentminded wasn’t a crime.

One time, I caught Percy looking for his glasses AS he was wearing them, which was hilarious, but relatable. People aren’t machines, we’re fragile, like little tea cups with small invisible cracks. We forget things no matter how hard we try. Memory isn’t as reliable as people like it to be. You all think they’re solid, like walls or borders that defines you as a person, but really, they’re just like clay, mess with it long enough, and it becomes pliable in your hands.

No one would bat an eye at me for forgetting my transfiguration essay, but they would certainly bulk at me now for forgetting things that are-for the lack of a better word-too extreme.

This is not an exaggeration, but it’s as if the cancer dialed every shred of what made me into me, up to eleven with a cherry on top; this morning, for ten terrifying seconds, I couldn’t tell my left hand apart from my right.

I forgot.

My mind just drew a blank and I panicked.

It’s what makes this so much harder. Writing things that aren’t reliable, I should have done them the moment they were happening. I made a mistake. I think I did write them daily for a while but life caught up with me, I suppose. That’s what happens when you’re too busy to live. Life happens.

I think John Lennon might have said something of the sort, but really, I’m too lazy to make sure.

You reassure me, you tell me that all people are forgetful. I agree with you Severus. Humans are forgetful. It’s one of our better qualities to be honest, the fact that we can forget things. It reminds us that we aren’t some invincible well-tuned engine, that the thing between our shoulders isn’t an enigma needing to be solved.

It’s corrupted, it can forget the simplest of things easily by getting distracted, or alternatively, it deliberately deletes painful or straining reminiscences. Things you wished that you’d never seen or heard and boom! Your brain gets rid of it one way or another.

It’s funny though Severus, the day you decided that you forgot all about your precious rules was the day I remembered them. Do you remember now? How you dragged me out of bed, all wrapped up in a sheet with my slippers lugging on the floor? You held my arm, took me all the way out to the field and further by the edge of the forest…or even into it, I don’t know, and you looked down at me.

You told me you were proving a point, you told me we were escaping. You told me you’d make my dreams all come true because you needed to prove something to yourself, or to the world. Or to someone that thought you couldn’t.

Do you remember your rules? You made me cross out parachuting because it was too dangerous, you made me swear I’ll never lie to you about my health. I broke that rule. I think the vomiting went on for quite some time before you noticed, or I told you, I’m not sure I recall which.

But I’m not the only one breaking that rule Severus. You broke it too. You lied to me about my health, about what you’ve been dozing me with, that potent scheme you and Dumbledore had made up just for me. You bloody lied to me about that. I remember how that one went down. I caught you red handed. Do you recall?

When I told you that you’re dishonest, you got mad at me, you made me storm out of our car in the middle of the road as it was raining, you were offended by me. It was ludicrous, assuming that even then, you were lying to me through your teeth. You felt guilty about that, I know you did.

It comes as a surprise, but you aren’t normally a liar, just dishonest.

I think there’s a difference, or maybe is it that, you make all the difference. It was difficult for me to tell at the beginning, but I can tell when you’re dishonest with me, your face might remain stoic and cynical, but you have A tell (I remember the poker game, in case you worry). Your hands are always busy when you lie, and you know it, that’s why you cross them when you’re trying to lie to me. You think I won’t notice your fingers clenching and unclenching your arms, but I do.

No one ever noticed your Tell, and you’re proud of that, but the sad truth is, I don’t think anyone ever really looked at you to notice such things. I think that’s the hugest mistake anyone has ever made.

Underestimating you.

The day you kidnapped me, you looked down at me over your nose, you meant to be intimidating, but you didn’t realize that I was too out of it to fully appreciate the effort you put into hating me. At some point, as you were reciting your conditions, you crossed your arms. I’m not sure that you did but you must have, because whenever I try to recall you telling me about our last rule, I remember you crossing your arms across your chest.

If that is true, if my memory isn’t some clay that I’m molding into hallucinatory things, then that mean you were lying when you told me that you weren’t ever going to start caring about me, and I wasn’t allowed to do the same as well. You were just doing it as a favor, you said, you were adamant about it and I was half-delusional. Who cared?

It really didn’t come as a surprise I suppose when you finally came clean this morning. You were acting strangely for so long that I was expecting something worse to happen. But I’m not sure if I’m glad.

You’re sitting in front of me, we’re in the kitchen, it’s a good day for me, I didn’t even have a headache, and I could seat upright on my own. We were shrouded in silence, and I was staring at you. You were staring at the document trembling in my hands.

The parchment wasn’t trembling though. My hands were shaking. My whole body was shaking. You didn’t say anything to me. Your black eyes just bore holes into the parchment as I quivered in my seat, staring at you.

I couldn’t understand the meaning of this. I couldn’t link the words together. It’s not the cancer’s fault, I thought to myself, my brain numb. How could you do this to me? Why would you do this to me? Did you forget? Did you forget our rules?

That morning started out so well. You woke me up, we had chocolate muffins instead of breakfast, you let me have coffee. You sat me down in the kitchen, pulled out an envelope out of the cupboard above the sink (the one that you know I cannot reach) and sat down.

“This decision wasn’t made in haste.” You told me, fiddling with the envelope. “But if I had to pinpoint the exact second that made me change my mind-,” you paused as the envelope finally gave in and opened. “I’d say it was the camping trip.” You said before sliding the document toward me, waiting for me to catch up.

The camping trip was the day you forgot, then. What exactly happened on that wretched trip for you to have a change of heart? I didn’t do anything, and neither did you.

I don’t suppose you forgot because you were distracted. No, it was on purpose.

Your brain wanted to get rid of it, because it was a mistake, in your eyes, and so it did. You put the day you banned me from caring into a small wooden box and threw it in the ocean rumbling in your head. You looked away and suddenly it wasn’t there.

“What is this?” I ask you numbly, you avoid my gaze. I think you’re ashamed.

“An official document,” your answer is dry, efficient. You’re not playing dumb; you just don’t want to get me riled up. I never thought I see the day you flush. You ARE embarrassed.

An official document, a piece of bloody paper that would give me the right to call you a father. This is how you’re doing it then?

I think I’m mad at you. No, I AM mad at you. Why did you make me go by those rules if you were going to bloody break them yourself? You gave yourself the right to do so by disparaging your own words because you found I was abused as child. Just because I’m not James Potter and we’re too much alike, you and I, actually, maybe it has more to do with the fact that I remind you of your dead best friend. Is that it? Am I Lily? Or is this worthless piece of paper your way of making it right for her?

Even so, it doesn’t give you the right to ignore your own oaths and promises to me. You do that a lot more than you realize Sev.
It doesn’t give you the right to decide something this huge, just weeks, WEEKS, before I die.

Go to hell, Severus Snape. Go. To. Fucking. Hell.

***

We went camping at four in the morning.

I’m not kidding, the potion master bundled me up in the make shift nest in the backseat and started driving like a man with a plan. Which he did have apparently two hours after midnight in the witching hour. I was too sleepy to care about his ramblings, so I tuned him out after he mentioned something about Dean.

Dean? The guy who slept in a dorm with me was coming along to camp with us, apparently. He and Annie the goat. I wish I could take Ron and ‘Mione with us too.

Like a mad man, Severus drove twenty minute to a Tesco Superstore and emptied their camping accessories section into his cart. I swear that man has no idea how to shop, he just buys everything he thinks he might need and because he has a ridiculous amount of money, nothing’s stopping him, like the clothes he bought me. He should have given all his money to me. I would have organized our whole trip with a seventy pounds budget with enough to spare.

Well in his defense, he didn’t buy EVERYTHING in the camping accessory section this time; I think he left the electric pumps and the water bottles or anything that was battery related. Good for him, that’s an improvement. I still have that winter jacket he got me from a thrift store, and I’m not even making it past July. His logic defies me.

Since I was asleep, and couldn’t contain his buying spree, instead of sleeping bags, I have an airbed…and the sleeping bags, he got ‘in case of emergencies’. I didn’t know what he meant by that, unless he was going to do me in and use it as a body bag, I didn’t see an emergency occurring any time soon.

Surprisingly enough, Severus was very moderate with the food he got, probably because of my fragile digestive system. He only got ONE bag of marshmallows. Something we’d both come to regret. Honestly, Severus thought of buying an airbed AND sleeping bags, but he didn’t think of buying more than one bag of Marshmallows. That man.

He got us some hot dogs, soft drinks, fruit yogurt for me, potatoes too with some bread, deli meat, veggies, and that was it. Severus paid in cash, carried his ginormous shopping bags all the way to the car and dumped them in the trunk, got in and started driving again in fifteen minutes.
All while I was asleep, snoring away and Annie was eating her way through the car seat.

I woke up on my airbed, in a tent, in the forest of Dean at the crack of dawn. I went to sleep in my fort in some muggle house two blokes away from my childhood home and then woke up alone in a tent.

I was sure I was either hallucinating, or I was dead.

Annie was there too, back into a goat, nibbling on my hair.

As gently as I could, I batted her face away from my head and tried to get up. Our tent was roomy, big enough to have space for the airbed that I was lying on and for Annie to roam around and scream her head off as she gnawed at this and that. I cringed as I noticed a chunk of my hair still dangling from her mouth. I knew I needed to do something about the hair soon.

Wincing, I threw an arm over my face to block that cruel stream of sunshine shining in through the small crack of the entrance. My ears sharpened, registering the sound of wildlife coming from the outside, an occasional chirping, crickets, at this ungodly hour, and something crackling.

The smell of burnt wood and sizzling kindle indicated a fire already going underway. It wasn’t cold. My feet were socked and toasty warm under a familiar black wool blanket and I had never felt more comfortable in my life, never warmer. I liked being this cozy, this change of pace, and for once, no stomach cramps.

This was nice. I allowed the thought to squirm its way into my head, my fingers fiddled with the fibers sticking out from the wool. The wool blanket was the same one from the house. My clothes were different though. I had my black sweater on, no jeans, just my pajama pants and some socks, no shoes.

My hand roamed down to the ground in search for my glasses, while Annie circled the tent with unwarranted enthusiasm one required at sunrise. Her legs slammed into my hand a couple of times, and a sinking feeling told me that my glasses had no chance of survival under Annie’s wandering hooves if she has been here as long as I had been unconscious.

The goat nudged her nose into my hand apologetically and I petted her head, deciding to give up on the glasses for now. I needed to get out of here.
I planned it out in my head for a few seconds, imagined myself peeling the wool blanket off my body inch by inch, exposing it to the morning chill, and then the absurd effort I would have to put into pushing myself to my feet and avoid crashing into an overexcited baby goat that was set on trampling something.

The urge to just roll over and drift away was strong, too strong, and I almost gave in, but the nagging voice in my head, the paranoia, wasn’t letting me seat on the idea for too long. I had just woken in a strange environment, alone (not really, Annie was there), and with Severus nowhere in sight.
I chose to use my famous strategy, and rip the band-aid off by kicking the wool away in one drastic move that excited Annie into jumping headfirst into my chest and knocking the air out of my lungs.

“Oomph!” Annie agreed and brought her hooves down on my stomach to balance herself. Suddenly shivering, gasping, and trying to push a goat off my body, I felt overwhelmed and cranky.

“I liked you better when you were a mouse,” I sulked at Annie as I push her off to alleviate the heavy weight on my stomach.

I don’t pause as I get out of the tent and Annie trails after me. The lack of shoes wasn’t even registered in my head once I saw the scene laid out before my eyes. Trees. Bloody. Everywhere.

I was in a forest. Great. I think I knew that already, normal people wouldn’t camp somewhere that didn’t have some sort of wildlife to offer in return. No one would hear me scream, or beg for my life in here. I was alone. Some little memory in the back of my mind twitched.

There was a thing that I heard Hermione say a long time ago, something about trees falling.

-We were sitting in the common room, just the three of us, it was late, and most students were knocked out already, seventh year Jude Smith, the poor sod had fallen asleep on the stairs, and no one else dared to occupy the common room. Just us, and Jude Smith who was napping off an existential crisis were there that night.

I couldn’t sleep, and instead of acting like normal, functioning people on a school night, my friends, they stayed in the common room with me. Hermione had a tome in her hands, she was cross-legged on the floor, her back was leaning against the couch, and her hair was pouring down around the pages and obscuring her face. Ron and I were just lounging on the couch, mildly arguing about…something that I cannot recall. Probably about Jude.

“If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” she suddenly said, looking over her shoulder at us.

We stared at her. “Hermione what on earth are you talking about?”

“Just some light reading,” she shrugged at Ron’s bewildered question. “Now answer the question you guys! Does it make a sound?”
‘Light reading?’ Ron mouthed incredulously, his eyes wide. I stifled a chuckle.

“The tree, does it make a sound?”

“Shouldn’t it?” Ron asked her slowly, his eyes were weary. Hermione rolled her eyes at him.

“I’m reading ‘A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge’ and it asks whether the question is valid in the first place. Interesting isn’t it?”

Ron called it stupid, and Hermione fumed at him. “If something makes a sound, then it just does. It doesn’t matter if you’re there to hear it.” Ron told her hotly.

“You don’t need people all around you gawking with their thumbs up their arses while you’re ‘falling’ ” he made air quotes with his fingers. “ It’s like when you die, that’s it. Being alone while it happens doesn’t make you undead.”

Hermione huffed at him. “It’s more than that!” she looked at me for help and I shrugged. It was too late for their shit. And I never took sides. They should have asked Jude about it, I’m sure he would have been happy to have a say.

(I’m not nearly as subtle about this as I should have been, it’s too late for Jude Smith, but anyone reading this needs to make a difference by lightening the level of pressure N.E.W.T exams put on poor students,)

I think I understood what she meant now. It didn’t matter whether I fell screaming, or mute. If I’m standing alone in the middle of a forest where no one can ever hear me, it won’t change the fact that I died. I would still be very much dead, that is true and Ron was somewhat right, but the fact is…it’s not about the tree at all.

The question didn’t ask whether the tree made a sound in the first place, though it might seem that it is at first glance. The tree makes a sound, just because.

If a tree falls it makes a sound, but the truly wretched thing about it, is that, no one is around to hear that sound and respond to it. If I started screaming at the top of my lungs, right in that second, then I haven’t made any sound at all. Because, virtually I was only real in my own eyes, and no one else’s.

The question is “If you don’t see something, was that thing ever real to YOU?”

My body involuntarily shuddered at my own thoughts. Questioning reality wasn’t bound to be pleasant in the state that I was, my brain barely needed stimulation to let my imagination run wild.

I banished the memory-and Hermione, completely from my mind, opting to observe my surrendering quietly until someone came for me.
I wasn’t completely as helpless as I thought, though, my trunk and some bags were just near the entrance, and there was a fire going, sending a thin trail of smoke up into the canopy of leaves, Annie sped past me into the woods but didn’t wander far.

She looked as baffled as I was, her body kept moving in wide circles and her head was upward, she was probably thinking the same thing that I was; “look at this green shit all around us!”

But for some reason, the only view she could really appreciate was the leaves above. What I saw, was myself at the age of eleven, paired off with an arrogant little shit with a pointy chin to wander into the woods, in the middle of the night, and almost get killed. The resemblance was startling.
I had no idea how I ended up here. Obviously, I wasn’t here against my will. I’ve been kidnapped before; they don’t usually leave you unrestrained in a tent with an airbed in a blanket burrito, with all your shit lying outside.

I was rounding the tent and squinting my eyes at a moving creature squirming on my toe when my brain caught up and things finally clicked. Two things came to me simultaneously.

First, was to shriek my head off, because THERE WAS SOMETHING ON MY FOOT! The thing was the hugest ant I have seen in my life. A flying ant, or something of the sort, it had WINGS! Hastily, I flailed my foot to get it off me, the ant was sent flying into the wilderness and I warily tip toed back into the tent, my body reeling and my foot still itching by the sensation.

The other thing was a passing memory of Severus bundling me up and shoving me into the car last night, his back illuminated by the orange tinged lights in the roads, each passing in a blur and lightening Severus, the man driving in silence.

So he had brought me here, I just had to wait for him to come back.

Gathering my knees to my chest, I rested my forehead against them and closed my eyes, listening to Annie’s mad drivel getting closer to me, as the goat herself lightly crashed into my hip in her excitement, her body titled me to one side. I winced, that was going to leave a bruise.

The grass rustled and the verdant forest floor with all its small twigs, and dried leaves and disgusting insects seemed to be breathing with me. The abundance of LIFE in capital letters was so vivid around me, the small sounds, the trees creaking like old men with noisy bones, and birds that were screaming without a care in the world.

The intensity of the sound almost made me miss the sound of approaching steps trudging on the grass. I looked up at Severus’s blurry figure closing on me, the man’s hair neatly tied at the nape of his neck, he had his robe shirt on but no robes, black attire. The green light that bounced off the foliage emphasized the obvious contrast. The man was so dark and brooding, and the forest was so light and green.

It was as if even the trees were taken a back at the potion master’s presence within them.

As Severus got closer to hearing range, I stood, jostling Annie who had also gotten sight of the man, she raced past me to welcome him. Severus deftly ignored the excited goat and raised his eyebrows at me.

I was surprised at how well I could gauge the details on his face without my glasses. Huh.

“No greetings from you?” the man asked dryly, and I just stared at him.

“Where are we?” I asked and Severus looked at the fire merrily burning away, his brows furrowed as though contemplating something and then he turned to me. He was surprised that I looked affronted, his weariness alerted me, was I supposed to know where we were? Had I forgotten something?
The potion master spread his arms, gesturing at the trees and the tent with raised eyebrows. “Camping, evidently.”

“You need to stop making me wake up in strange places you know,” I told him. “It’s getting old.”

“Noted,” he grunted, crouching to inspect the plastic bags near my trunk. He reached and pulled out a small strawberry yogurt with a plastic spoon. He offered both to me. “Breakfast?”

I took the yogurt. “Where were you?”

“If you must know,” Sev drawled as he got up. “The bathroom.”

“Oh.” That made sense.

“Which reminds me,” he paused to open his own melon yogurt. The plastic spoon in his mouth as he peeled the lid off. “If you needed to relieve yourself don’t get any further than fifty steps from the tent, the bushes will be efficient.” He immediately dug in, ignoring the sudden look of horror dawning on my face.

“Wait the bushes?” my voice was high pitched. “I need to pee in the bushes?”

“Well seeing as we’re in a forest,” the sarcasm in his voice was thicker than the yogurt. “Away from any kind of population or human contact, I’d say yes.”

This isn’t how I imagined camping, not at all. I don’t know how something as simple as a bathroom break and the amount of…creatures around us had never occurred to me before whilst writing down this wish. Dudley and Ron had made it sound so simple and pleasant. I was only left with flying ants, no bathroom, and an existential crisis. And I knew exactly who to blame.

“But when we camped with the Weasleys we had like a bathroom, and a kitchen-.” That was my initial inspiration, the first image that came to my mind when I thought of camping, not this.

“Our tent isn’t the magical kind, for obvious reasons.” Severus easily pointed out, looking very invested in his breakfast. Grudgingly, I tore the lid off my strawberry nightmare treat and crammed a mouthful in my mouth.

I winced at the taste. This was what happened when people froze cough syrup with milk and sold it off as strawberry. I was just about to exchange mine with Severus’ more delicious looking grub when the man hummed as if remembering something.

“Also stay away from the poison ivy.”

My throat tightened. “Poison ivy?”

There was POISON IVY? The cough syrup felt like starch in my throat.

The potion master nodded, mistaking my dismay with confusion. “If your hand itches, don’t touch any sensitive body parts with it Potter, that’s all I’m asking.” Well guess who was going to hold in their pee for the next three days. Me. That’s who, obviously. I had brain cancer, I wasn’t asking for any more of Mother Nature’s nastiness, thank you very much.

Only if I could have though. Holding my bladder together for three days was a deed my body wasn’t prepared for, and now that I’ve experienced peeing in nature, I have to say, as gross as it sounds, it’s not that bad, as peeing goes in general.

“I think Annie broke my glasses,” I said after a bout of silence. “She was very…enthusiastic when I woke up.”

Shaking his head, Severus reached into his pocket with one hand. “I have your glasses, here.”

Then, he threw a suspicious glance at Annie, who was amusing herself by munching on the grass. “I wouldn’t trust that goat with anything.”
He was hilarious.

Ah, my vision finally cleared as I slipped the glasses on, everything coming into perfect detail. Including the animosity in Severus’s eyes that were fixated on Annie. “Why was she in the tent with me then?”

The man shrugged. “I’m going to take a wild guess and say she chewed her way out of the rope,” he ate his last mouthful of yogurt. “I should have known better.”

“Rope?”

“Am I speaking gibberish? Stop repeating-ugh,” his eyes closed on their own accord, and Severus heaved a dramatic sigh.

“Yes.” He drawled slowly. “Rope. I thought the hiking ropes held more resistance than average ones, alas that thing can probably chew through metal.” At my continued confusion, the man heaved another sigh. “I tied her to the back of the tent.” The confession, much to my relief, was tinged with a tiny amount of guilt.

“She could have wandered off!”

“I was hoping that she would actually, but she didn’t.” Severus admitted once again with disappointment. We both watched Annie chasing a ladybug with over exaggerated moves. I wanted to feel angry, or at least some level of contempt at Severus, but honestly, all I could muster up was amusement.
Never in my life, had I seen the day, when I wouldn’t feel any revulsion or anger towards the man sitting next to me, idly gobbling on melon yogurt and hating on goats.

When I said nothing, Severus huffed. He stood and bagged his empty breakfast utensils. I looked at him fuss, feeling somewhat baffled at the scene. It was so strange, that after all this time I still wasn’t used to Severus doing normal stuff.

Every once in a while, I looked at the man, and all I saw was the cranky potion master, dressed all in black, dramatic robes, and a permanent sneer on his face, then the man would go and do something like bagging his trash and then suddenly…all I saw was SEVERUS.

Two different people. Two different life times. Maybe even two different versions of me.

When I looked up, Annie was still going after the bug, and with a loud inhumane squeal (which was rather the point in her being a goat) she face planted on the ground.

Severus and I both stared at her. “That goat is absurdly smart.”

I snickered. “Yeah,” I drawled, cocking my head back at him as Annie struggled to get upright. “Smart.”

I stood, deciding that the abomination in my hand would rather speed up my death instead of reducing hunger. I dumped the whole yogurt into Severus’s make shift bin. By then, Severus was up and about, shifting my trunk and the food bags back into the tent.

“Why didn’t you let her stay as a mouse?” I asked him.

The man sneered for the first time that day. “Because searching for a needle in a stack of hay is harder than finding a goat in that stack.”

“What-.”

His shoulders slumped just a fraction. I could tell it was from the frustration, and probably something akin to resignation. “I’m not going to ruin our whole trip trying to find that blasted thing as a mouse in a forest this vast, since you won’t let it stay lost for long. I’m not senseless. Finding her as a goat, when she wanders off-.”

“If-,”

“Yes,” he rolled his eyes. “IF she happened to wander off is easier, and more productive.”

“We could put her on a leash?”

Sev stared at me. “Did you see the rope she chewed through? That rope can hold more than you and I weight combined.”

“She didn’t want to be leashed anyways, right Annie?” the goat, once again rammed into my legs in her excitement, this time with a loud verbal response.

“BAAA!”

I suppose she really didn’t want to be leashed then. I wondered if she was the equivalent of a small child. Maybe that was why parents weren’t exactly hyped up about having kids lately. If I had a tiny, screaming, messy human glued to me twenty-four seven, I wouldn’t be too pleased either.
The thought made me pause, my hand stilled on Annie’s head, and she bleated, wondering why the stroking had stopped so abruptly. Severus was too busy to glare at Annie to notice the dark look falling over my face.

Children.

I’ll never have children.

I wouldn’t have to worry about screaming messy babies, because in four months, I wouldn’t exist, and with that sad finale, the Potter line, would cease to exist. That thought actually made me sad, the thought of not having children. Not only I would never experience the love of a parent, I wouldn’t be able give that love to another human being.

What a lonely existence. I hated being a lonely tree.

The thought passed faster than a lightning, and fortunately, I was easy to recover. My hand clutched Annie’s neck in a tight grip and Severus’s glare darkened even more. “Mark my words Potter,” he began forebodingly. “One night, she’s going to come for our blood, and it’s going to be the last thing we see, and then I would haunt your ghost for eternity because of that.”

I couldn’t resist the eye-roll. “Why do you hate the goat so much? Isn’t she adorable?”

“Her screech will haunt our nightmares,”

I started ushering Annie away, smiling in spite of myself. “I think you’re being dramatic,”

“Her eyes are like two lines straight out of the depths of Hades,”

Oh. “Oh so you’re scared of her.”

The man ignored me, carrying on. “And it would bash your head in with her hooves.”

“She’s just a goat,” I wondered what the story about that goat kebab in Greece was really about. Clearly, the potion master was leaving out more than I originally thought.

“She doesn’t scream like one,”

I knew what he was worried about, he was worried he’d wake up in the same exact fashion as I, with a goat munching on my hair, and trampling him underfoot in his sleep. I would have been fine; I was the one with the airbed. Severus however…

“She didn’t stay in the leash,” I pointed out weakly, delight coursing in my veins.

“She will not sleep in the tent with us.”

I feigned a sigh. “Alright then, sorry Annie, seems like you’re not sleeping in the tent with us,”

Annie hung her head. “Yeah I know,” I shrugged at her. “I did my best.”