Mr. Snape escorted Harry from the recovery ward the next morning.

Before they left, Mr. Snape had inspected his throat himself, and seemed satisfied with what he’d seen. He gave Harry more of the magic medicine, but told him that, so long as Harry didn’t scream himself hoarse, he should be able to speak without incident.

Mr. Snape did another of his Jedi mind tricks thingies with his stick in order to get them out of hospital with no more questions asked.

Harry was ushered into the back of the Morris Marina, and when he slid back into the torn leather seats, he laid his head back and forced his eyes closed, anticipating the jerky motions of the car with dread.

They never came, however. The car reversed out of the parking spot and then sped out of the car park in a smooth motion.

He risked opening his eyes, feeling incredulous. Both of Mr. Snape’s hands were on the wheel. At ten and two—just as Harry had always read was the prescribed procedure. When he shifted up to merge onto the faster lane, it went smoothly, and when he shifted down to slow his merge onto the round-about, the car didn’t jerk once.

Harry, feeling somewhat bold—Mr. Snape hadn’t even once tried to hit him round the head for any perceived slights—noted the change.

“So you can drive—”

Snape glanced back at him in the rear-view, bearing a tooth in an almost feral grin, before he hit the accelerator as he merged onto the M40, headed north.

“I can’t drive 55.”

Harry’s hands were clutched in the material of his shorts once more, his back pressed firmly against the bench seat. Mr. Snape was easily traveling fifteen to twenty miles per hour above the posted limit.

“Where... where are we going?” Harry asked, noting out the window that they were going far afield of Little Whinging.

The car swerved a bit as Snape, once more, fumbled with the tape deck in the passenger seat. He handed the whole thing back to Harry over the back of the seat.

“Do you know how to use that?”

“Er... sorta?”

“Press that button to the right to pop the door open. See if you can’t find the case with the animal pelts on the front.”

Harry kicked through the tapes on the floor behind the seat with one scuffed trainer, until he unearthed a glimpse of zebra. He leaned down, doubled over at the waist, to shuffle through the piles of plastic and cardboard until he unearthed what he thought was probably the correct album.

“Kiss?” Harry read out loud.

“That’s the one. The triangle button.” Snape added, distracted as he passed a Ford Anglia.

Harry removed the tape from the player and swapped it out, depressing the large play button as instructed.

It seemed that the song was midway through, though Mr. Snape didn’t seem to mind. It must have been where he’d last left off before he’d switched to a different tape.

The lyrics were almost a sort of chanting, culminating in a refrain of “Heaven’s on fire,” though it was difficult for Harry to make out the rest of what they might have been saying.

In truth, once he’d pressed play, he had ceased paying all too much attention.

Snape, while speeding, was at the very least shifting smoothly, and Harry watched outside the window as the mile markers advanced, and they passed endless exits for cities and towns further and further north.

He was made to switch the tape several more times, at Mr. Snape’s direction. Apparently, the man had all of his albums memorised and knew precisely what he wanted to hear at any given moment.

It was more rock music than Harry had ever heard in his short life, and by the time they were passing through Preston, he was kicking his legs along to an album Snape had selected where a kneeling hulk of a man was holding a giant silver orb emblazoned with the letters ‘VH’ on his shoulders.

Nearing the end of the song, Harry had learned the refrain well enough to mumble along.

“Tell me why can’t this be love?”

Mr. Snape’s eyes caught his own in the rear-view, apparently checking in on him, and the man gave him a terse nod. His thin slash of a mouth, with its petulant lower lip angled in an expression which may have spoken of amusement.

They had reached Cumbria, and the car moved down a new lane once they approached the signs that told them they were coming to Backbarrow.

They had been in the car for hours at that point.

Snape finally pulled off at a petrol station that seemed to be a lone island of development in the far north hinterlands they had entered. For being so barren and decrepit, the town of Backbarrow was surprisingly picturesque, with ancient-looking plastered houses that lined the rolling streets.

“Enjoy the view now, Potter.” Snape told him, over his shoulder. He was waiting on the attendant to fill the petrol tank.

Kicking his feet—they were too short to reach the floor—Harry frowned up at the man. He had to raise his voice slightly for it to carry. “What do you mean?”

“You’ll see.” Mr. Snape had crossed his arms and was scowling, but he was then distracted from the boy for long enough to pay for his purchase. The boy was left to ponder the meaning of his words.

Though he wasn’t left in the lurch for too long. Eventually, the man started the car again—once more being curiously gentle by his normal shifting standards—and they passed over a crumbling brick bridge that spanned an odourous river (if one could call it that. It was so polluted that the water nearly stood still, and looked to be mostly mud, besides).

Curious splashes of bright ultramarine were all over this part of town, marking buildings, and streets, old push-carts that looked as if they’d been abandoned where they’d broken on the side of the road. The houses here were uniform, cramped, and constructed of brick—so close together that the window of one house almost kissed the front door of its neighbor.

The walls had to have been paper thin.

In the back gardens, which butted up to the next row’s back gardens, laundry was out to dry, and Harry witnessed several irritable inhabitants slamming the door behind them as they ducked into tiny hut-like structures that abutted the backs of the houses. They all were throwing suspicious looks at the car, each other, and even the laundry, as if anything and everything was just a second away from declaring itself an imminent threat.

“Mr. Snape? Where are we?” Harry asked. Earlier, when he’d wondered aloud where they were going, Snape had neatly side-stepped the question.

And though the man had been nothing but kind to him, he, for the first time since the journey had begun, began to worry whether he might not turn out like that story he’d heard on the news a few summers past—of the little boy who had been abducted and found months later in the brush...

Dead.

Harry’s legs began to kick at a more furious pace, and as the car rolled around some of the curves in the road, he wondered whether it was slow enough for him to tuck and roll if need be...

“This is Cokeworth.” Snape said at last. His hand was holding so tightly onto the steering wheel that his knuckles were bloodless. “This is my home.”

The man swallowed. It was the first time Harry had ever seen him nervous, and that alone made Harry nervous. He scooted sideways on the bench until he was adjacent to the door, considering his options.

It would be difficult. The car was a two-door model, so he’d have to be quick about squeezing past the front passenger seat if he had any hope of jumping...

“This was your mother’s home.”

Harry stopped with his little hand a scant two inches short of the door latch. Mr. Snape’s eyes sought his own in the rear-view mirror. It seemed like he could nearly read his mind...

“You’re welcome to run off on your own if that’s your wish, Potter. I won’t stop you. But I will caution you that I am likely the only thing in this place that would promise not to harm you.”

The car pulled off into a side street (Heddle Place) off of a main thoroughfare—Swift Street if the sign could be believed—and Snape slowed until they were stopped before one of the boarded-up houses, somewhere near the centre of the row.

Speaking over his shoulder, Snape kept his eyes firmly trained on the façade of the building. “Hard to imagine your aunt grew up in a place like that, isn’t it?”

“Aunt Petunia? She lived there?” Harry asked, his voice faint. Though these houses looked to be a bit newer and perhaps nicer than some of the other streets and houses, it was still incredible to imagine that his judgmental, all-correct and superior aunt would have come from such humble beginnings.

“This street housed the plant managers and their families. It doesn’t look like much now, but it was once the nicest street in town.”

“What happened?” Harry asked feeling as though the words were being drug from him. He felt curiously detached. Like the house—where once his mother and aunt had played—was somehow pulling him in; such that Mr. Snape felt a world away.

“The plant closed down.” Snape answered. When Harry looked at him, his own black eyes were as focused on the run-down domicile as Harry’s own had been. The man’s jaw was clenched tight, and for all that he was a young man, in this moment he looked old. Ancient even. His long, thin face was drawn with a criss-cross of conflicting lines and angles.

“The plant closed. Families like your mother’s moved away. Got jobs elsewhere.”

“But you still live here, you said—”

The car began rolling again, and Harry wanted, with every part of his being, to pound on the car door and demand to be let out... like his mother waited for him inside. Just on the other side of that door...

Perhaps he would even get to see her face.

“Families like mine stayed.” Mr. Snape growled, sounding bitter.

“Families like yours?”

“Poor families, Harry.” If possible, Snape’s hands got even tighter on the wheel, until Harry was surprised that it didn’t break. “My father was not a manager, like your grandfather. My father never found work again when they started laying off. That was years before they finally closed the blueworks, mind you. If I’m not mistaken, your grandfather was able to find work elsewhere when rumours began to spread about the plant’s failure.”

“Where did they go?” Harry asked, his fear of abduction all but forgotten. In point of fact, he had been abducted... but could it be called that when first he had been all but abandoned? Was that abduction, or familial abdication... or could it be something better? Something which was too far-fetched to even be worth considering? Something like...

Something that surely wasn’t worth wishing for, in any case.

“Somewhere south. Some place outside Manchester, I believe.” Mr. Snape looked to be far away, and Harry felt lucky that the man was able to drive at all, given the evident state of his preoccupation. “The Evanses left in ’76. I didn’t know about it until I saw the house empty.”

Harry’s voice was nearly timid as he glanced up from beneath his fringe. “You knew my mum, then?”

The car swerved a bit, reminiscent of Snape’s earlier method for driving—that is to say: poor—before he corrected course and turned down a street that was perhaps half a mile from Heddle Place. Spinner’s End.

Many of the houses had been torn down, and empty lots remained in their place. Nothing more than a footprint of some family’s life. The rest were all boarded up.

Snape stopped before the final house on the street and indicated to Harry that he should exit the car with him.

Harry didn’t get an answer to his question, though he suspected he knew the answer anyway. They were approaching the front door, the paint of which had largely peeled away and left behind a flimsy wooden barrier that might have been rotting, it was so old and damaged, and Harry braved another question.

“Mr. Snape, what are we doing here?”

The man in question was busy unlocking the door and swinging it open. Harry followed him into a cheerless, musty-smelling sitting room that was home to a wall of poorly built wooden book-shelves, a mouldering couch, and an armchair whose cushioned seat bore a foot-long slash to the fabric upholstery.

There was a single, naked bulb that hung from the ceiling, and Snape made quick work of pulling the string to light it.

Somehow, the scant light from the bulb made the sitting room look less hospitable than it had appeared with nothing lighting it at all.

“I had need of supplies. I couldn’t very well leave you in order to come pick them up myself, and I didn’t want to leave my car.” Mr. Snape answered. He made his way toward a doorway that opened up into a tiny kitchen. On the ancient cooker (and on every other available surface) there were more of those odd pots Harry had seen in the boot of the man’s car, some of them appeared to be full of fantastically coloured substances.

It was the most magnificent thing Harry had ever seen. They appeared to be mid-bubble. Like they’d been frozen while boiling. His hand reached out to touch the cast-iron of the nearest pot.

He seized it back just as quickly with a startled yelp. It had been blazing hot! Mr. Snape spun on his heel at the noise and towed him away, towards the door.

“Can’t I trust you for even a moment, Potter!?” He shouted, spittle flying from his mouth. In spite of his anger he was jerking Harry’s arm forward by his wrist and examining the boy’s scorched finger tips. They were a brilliant scarlet and beginning to blister already.

Gasping, and doing his best not to begin sobbing, Harry felt like his knees wanted to buckle from a combination of pain and shame. “S-sorry, Mr. S-snape...”

That weird stick thing appeared once more in the man’s right hand, and he tapped it to the three affected fingers each in turn. They began to cool, and eventually, the fingers felt almost entirely numb.

“How are you doing that...?” Harry asked, dazed.

Mr. Snape didn’t answer, but pointed the stick through the doorway they had just come through, flicking the curly-Q point of it up in a sharp jerk with his bony wrist. “Accio burn paste.”

And then, an amazing thing happened. A tiny pot came sailing of its own accord from down the staircase that led upstairs, flying as quickly as a cricket ball. It smacked into Mr. Snape’s palm and he made quick work of working loose the large cork cover. Inside was an oily orange substance that looked a bit like it was composed of used cooking grease. Mr. Snape scooped up a bit of it on his index finger and daubed it onto Harry’s fingertips.

The blisters receded after only a moment and the skin underneath lost its red colour.

“Don’t wipe that off—leave it.” Snape told him, releasing his wrist.

“How did you do that?!” Harry demanded again, his eyes wide with wonder.

Snape was treating him to a look that could have either been annoyance or evidence of the man’s pity for him. Snape, himself, didn’t seem like he could settle firmly on one over the other.

“You’re telling me you really don’t know?”

“Know what?” Harry asked, somewhat testily. He was often made to feel the fool, but it had been an exhausting few days for him. An exhausting week, really. He had no clue where he was, and no clue what Mr. Snape could have been playing at. He was in enough pain—if the man decided to knock him around for his rudeness it would make little difference.

“You’ve not just been playing dumb for the sake of the muggles?”

Harry nearly squawked. “For the what?”

Mr. Snape seemed to be steeling himself. He’d drawn himself up to his full height and his brow was creased in a frightful frown.

When Harry chanced a look down at the man’s hands, that were held at his sides, it was to see that they were clenched into two fists, though one held that curious stick that seemed to be so disconcertingly troublesome.

“It’s like I said when you were in hospital, Harry. Magic.”

Feeling his gorge rise a bit—though it may easily have been a consequence of having had surgery—Harry barely restrained himself from stamping his foot with irritation. Truly, it was most unlike him. He usually had a handle on his temper. It simply wasn’t safe to let fly with any little thing he might have wanted to say to his relatives.

But Mr. Snape wasn’t his relatives.

Mr. Snape hadn’t hit him, or tossed him into his cupboard, or threatened to withhold supper.

Mr. Snape had been good to him. And for some reason, that made it easier, by far, to lash out at the man.

“I thought you were having a laugh! That’s not real! Do you think I’m stupid!? Only babies believe in stupid fairy tales—" Harry struggled near the end, feeling like he wasn’t getting enough air.

He had to say the words. Had to, because for so many years the mere mention of something like magic had produced the worst excesses under his Uncle Vernon’s tyrannical rule over the Dursley home.

“You just—" Harry gasped, “you’re trying to get me in… in trouble!”

Mr. Snape appeared entirely flummoxed for almost a full minute as he watched Harry spiral further and further from equilibrium, before he muttered something under his breath; a vicious remark about a ‘Tuney,’ and gripped Harry’s shoulders tightly.

He looked like he might have wanted to shake the boy, though he didn’t.

“How would you explain the burn salve flying then?” Mr. Snape challenged, his eyes flinty.

“Someone tossed it to you..." Harry accused, though when he tried to pivot and look back into the lounge, he saw no one.

“We’re alone in the house, Potter.” Snape told him. “What about the numbing charms?”

“You… you tricked me—"

“How? I didn’t tell you how they worked, or lead you to expect any specific outcome. I didn’t say a thing.”

“I… I just wanted it to stop hurting,”

“Didn’t it?”

“I—"

Snape tapped the capped salve with the stick where it sat on the kitchen table, and it began to rise in the air, spinning slowly of its own accord.

Harry’s eyes widened and he felt himself begin to shake slightly.

“Go on.” Mr. Snape challenged him. “Prove it to yourself.”

Harry braved a glance at the man, but Snape’s expression told him nothing. It was as placid as a still lake. After several seconds of watching the salve dip and sashay through the air, as if it was doing a strange waltz, Harry reached a hand out, feeling the air around the glass pot.

No strings. Not above, nor below. And upon swinging around the sides for good measure, he encountered no resistance of any kind.

It was well and truly levitating.

By magic.

For that was the only possible conclusion.

And when Snape directed it downward with that stick, it obeyed him.

“Need I perform anymore stunts for your disbelieving eyes?” The man asked, the question sounding snide and put-upon all at once.

Harry gulped, and it hurt his throat enough that he had to wince. “Er… no?”

“Marvelous,” but Snape’s expression and tone of voice told him that it was anything but. “Then we can move on with our task.”

He turned back to the strange assortment of pots that occupied every bit of available space in the kitchen, poking and prodding about with the branch in his right hand and causing wispy little signals to spout out of the curly-Q tip.

They must have meant something to him, as he would either nod or curse under his breath whenever one of his little motions produced results.

“Mr. Snape… why did you bring me here?” Harry asked. He was leaning against the doorway now, feeling exhausted after having gone through the rigours of surgery, and having endured a lengthy car ride with the taciturn young man.

Even though Snape’s driving had inexplicably improved, he was still a menace behind the wheel, and he had, by turns, driven too fast, passed too aggressively, and had loudly abused other drivers around him in fits of pique whenever anyone so much as slowed down to turn off onto an exit.

“None of this ought to have been left for so long.” Snape’s comment brought Harry back to the present moment. The man was surveying the assembled pots, and their contents, with a critical frown. “I didn’t think I’d be gone for more than an afternoon.”

Approaching the same pot that had burnt him, though with a touch more trepidation, Harry risked a peek over the rim. At the bottom was a fuchsia substance that seemed caught mid-whirl. 

“What are they?”

“Do you ever stop asking questions?”

Suddenly self-conscious, Harry shrugged and backed up to the doorway once more as Mr. Snape waved his stick over one of the pots—this one a medium-sized copper. It seemed to come alive and began belching aqua-coloured clouds into the air. The steam smelled a bit like roasted pork loin.

Evidently this was not the desired outcome, as Snape started cursing in a way that would have made a sailor blush, and he began sprinkling bits of crushed something-or-other from a cutting board that lay to the side.

After a fashion the clouds dissipated, and the surface of the pot fell into quiescence. Mr. Snape leaned back and let out a sigh, seemingly relaxing after his apparent panic.

“That one almost was a whole waste,” he spat.

Harry desperately wanted to ask what it was that was such a waste, but, remembering Snape’s earlier gripe about his questions, he didn’t quite dare.

“Go ahead.”

“Uh—"

“Ask.”

Harry’s mouth worked mutely for a moment, wondering how it was that Mr. Snape always seemed able to anticipate what it was he was thinking.

“What… what are they? What happened with that one? What—"

“Jesus. One at a time,” Snape snarled, appearing tired.

“You’re not…”

“I’m not what, Potter?”

Harry shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. “You’re not meant to say that, I think… the Lord’s name in vain, I mean…”

Snape looked over one of his shoulders at him, pinning Harry with a sour expression. “I’ll thank you not to go about auditing my speech in my own damn home.” However, he then turned and leaned one thin hip against the rickety table. It seemed as if his weight should have caused the table to crumple, or at least to have swayed a bit, but it didn’t budge.

Then again, it had at least five of those massive pots fitted together on the crowded surface. Perhaps it was more ‘magic.’

“These are potions. That one,” Snape sneered, imitating the juvenile way in which Harry had phrased his question, “was almost spoilt. It was nearing the end of the time where it could safely be kept under stasis.

“As for what that particular potion is... That’s none of your business.”

“Oh…” Harry murmured in a small voice. He looked down at his trainers, wiggling his toes a bit just for anything he could do to avoid the black void of Mr. Snape’s glower. When he chanced a look up, however, it was to find that the man was considering him thoughtfully, one thin finger tracing his slightly droopy, asymmetrical lower lip.

“Can you mince garlic?”

The question, unexpected as it was, caused Harry to start a bit. He was surprised enough that he forgot his reticence and answered with a firm nod of his head. In spite of himself, he felt slightly excited; Mr. Snape seemed a difficult man to impress. He was happy that he could answer in any way that might not prove to be a disappointment.

And if it came to be that the man was satisfied enough with his mincing that he didn’t toss Harry out on his ear, then all the better.

It wasn’t really a conscious idea, but the thought that maybe he could prove that he was useful enough to keep around had Harry cautiously approaching Snape and taking the large knife that the man was offering to him.

“I better not regret this. One wrong move with that and I’m banishing you from the kitchen.”

Harry met the man’s frown with a solemn nod. Aunt Petunia had trained him well on knife safety, if only to avoid having to take the boy to the A&E department herself after he’d had an accident the year before that had led to questions that the Dursleys had seemed loath to answer.

Snape assembled a line of five odd-looking ingredients in front of Harry. He pointed to one that looked like a star, but it was some sort of root.

“Mince that one.”

“Where’s the garlic?” Harry asked, frowning at the odd root.

“Garlic is too mundane to be of much use in most potions,” Mr. Snape told him. His voice was devoid of his normal acrimonious intonation. Like he was simply imparting neutral information.

Harry’s eyes traveled down the line of things, lingering over one pile that looked like a bunch of dead spiders with shriveled-in legs.

“Do I mince all of them?”

“No,” Snape returned, in the same even tone of voice. He was seemingly absorbed in his task at the copper pot, observing the thin, broth-like potion in the belly of the vessel. “Stop once you’ve finished with the orion root and ask me what to do next.”

Harry started in on the root, having to bear down with all of his weight in order to bisect through the rock-hard centre. The blade wanted to wobble to the side and Mr. Snape stilled him with an iron grip on his shoulder.

“Stop. You’ll lose a finger that way.”

Harry gave a violent wince, though whether it was because he’d disappointed the man or because he was reacting to Snape’s warning was impossible for him to say.

“Cut halfway at the centre, beginning with the point, turn it around, and complete the slice from the other end. Keep your left hand clear of the blade.”

After that, Snape had little to say to the boy, beyond cautioning him to skin the root before he began mincing.

“The skin has undesirable properties for this brew.”

When next Harry glanced up, it was to see Mr. Snape laying paper-thin slices of a membranous thing flat onto the still surface of the potion. The slices seemed to be eaten through from their centre out, turning a terrifying shade of red-black before they dissolved into the caustic mixture.

Snape would snatch his fingers back as soon as he’d settled each slice on the placid surface of the potion. He did it gently, as one might cover a child with a blanket for bed.

“What next?”

Snape risked one sideways glance to his minced root and seemed satisfied. His left hand reached out and nudged at the pile of dead spiders with one yellow-stained fingertip.

“Strip these of their legs. Put those in one pile, and the thoraxes and abdomens in the other.”

Harry must have blanched at the instructions as Snape turned his attention back to the copper pot with a mocking sneer. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of spiders.”

“I’m not!” Harry disagreed, a bit too loudly. “It’s only… I rather like them…”

Mr. Snape let out a low chuckle, “Ah, so you feel slighted on their behalf,”

Harry wasn’t entirely sure he knew what the man meant, but he didn’t appreciate the mockery. His green eyes met Snape’s black ones in defiance as he picked up the largest spider in the pile he could find and he plucked the forelegs off with a sharp motion.

“Hmph.” The man rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Mind you choose the medium sized ones. The big ones and small ones are outliers—potions rely on consistency as much as on numeracy. Far better to use eight similarly sized legs than two large and four tiny ones.”

“Why don’t you just weigh them?” Harry asked, thinking of the way in which his aunt weighted ingredients with her kitchen scale when preparing puddings for guests.

“We often weigh things, but sometimes the number is just as important as the weight. Because magic, Potter.”

“That doesn’t make any sense—"

“It does. It’s counter intuitive, and goes against arithmetic, but it is perfectly logical when considered arithmantically and alchemically.”

Harry continued to pick through the spiders, frowning with irritation. He hated not understanding things.

“I don’t get it…”

“And you won’t for many years, I’d wager.”

The rest of the piles were processed, and before long, Harry was standing around without much to do as Snape went from pot to pot—though the man had finally admonished him that the strange things were, in point of fact, cauldrons—adding in the ingredients that Harry had prepared for him.

Some of it had been tossed after Mr. Snape had evidently found Harry’s method for preparation wanting, but well over half of it was salvageable.

“Hold still, you’re distracting me.”

“I can’t help it,” to Harry’s dismay it came out as a bit of a whinge. “I haven’t had a wee in hours...”

Turning to face him, Snape looked irritated in the extreme. “Why didn’t you mention that earlier? The loo’s out back, Potter.”

“Out... out back?”

“Through the door there,” Snape pointed at the door that clearly led to the back garden. “The little building to the left.”

Harry wanted to question the man further, because really—who had ever heard of someone’s loo being in the back garden?—but he was in too desperate to do so. He darted for the door and found himself in a walled enclosure that surely hadn’t seen anything growing in it for years, if ever. There was a bit of straw on the muddy ground, and clothes lines that had a few rags hanging from them, and to the left, as Mr. Snape had promised, was a stooped out-building, the likes of which he’d seen the residents of Cokeworth ducking into when they’d arrived in town hours earlier.

Using the loo was a bit of an experience, but all in all, it wasn’t so very different. There was nowhere for him to wash his hands after, so he rushed back in to wash them in the kitchen sink.

Mr. Snape had ceased his operations in the kitchen and was watching Harry’s back as he scrubbed at his palms with the bar of soap.

“I expect you’re hungry.”

Harry merely shrugged. It was true. He was hungry. But he’d gone far longer without food before. He could manage. “I’m alright...”

Snape shook his head, looking mildly irritated. “It’s been all day. I’ve been remiss in my duties. You were ill fed enough before.”

The young man glanced around the kitchen quickly and strode forward, throwing open a cabinet here and a tiny pantry there.

There weren’t cobwebs, but there may as well have been. They were almost entirely empty except for a few tins that looked to be perhaps a decade old each based on the antiquated labels.

The doors were slammed shut again, and Harry forced himself not to jump backwards in alarm. Mr. Snape was cursing again.

“Nothing here will suit,” he grumbled, finding the keys to the Morris Marina where he’d left them beside one of the smaller cauldrons. “We’ll have to go into town.”

“I’m fine with whatever you were eating here, Mr. Snape,” Harry told him, though he followed the man through the sitting room and back out the front door.

“I finished all but the last of it for breakfast before I departed for Surrey,” the man grumbled, “and I doubt you’d care for potted meat on toast, besides.”

Harry shrugged, though Mr. Snape was facing away from him and didn’t see it. “That doesn’t sound bad...”

“I suppose it wouldn’t if one is used to eating raw courgette.”

As they climbed back into the car, Snape himself set the tape deck, which he’d placed in the passenger seat once more.

“Oh no, there goes Tokyo— go go Godzilla! History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man— Godzilla!”

Harry kicked his feet to the refrain as the car began a slow crawl down the street and pulled out onto Swift.

“What is this?”

“Blue Oyster Cult,” Mr. Snape answered, distracted as he whipped the wheel around.

After a manner of minutes, the decrepit environs of Cokeworth gave way to the more lush and picturesque Backbarrow. They soon came upon the town centre where Mr. Snape found a place to pull over in a car park that abutted a seemingly derelict building that may once have been a corner store.

When they left the car, Mr. Snape used the stick—a wand, he’d told Harry—to swoop around the vehicle, laying shimmering, iridescent wisps that sank into the car and the cracked pavement that it sat upon.

“So no one bothers the car,” he murmured, perhaps anticipating Harry’s question. “Strictly speaking, we’re not meant to park here.”

“Won’t… will we get in trouble?”

Harry received a loud scoff in response to his question as the man towed him by one arm through the streets and past the other people out for Friday supper or shopping.

Their first stop of the evening was into a tiny back alleyway. In one building—that had windows covered by thick, red, brocaded curtains, and with a door so low that Mr. Snape had to stoop to avoid hitting the top of his head—they came to a counter that was being manned by a short, aged, Asian woman who, in spite of her years, had a youthful, becoming, heart-shaped face. Behind her was a loud, busy kitchen that let off fragrant bursts of flavoursome scents.

When she saw Snape her mouth twisted into a wide grin that sent both of her cheeks curling into deep dimples.

“‘Rus? Come to see us again, twice in one week?”

“It’s that good, Mrs. Padiernos.”

“And who’s that?” Mrs. Padiernos peered closely at Harry behind her bifocals. “Your son, ‘Rus?” She clicked her tongue, “I didn’t think you married.” She threw a vaguely disapproving look at Snape who, unbelievably, seemed to be colouring with a blush up to the helix of his over-large ears under her scrutiny.

“He’s not mine. I’m watching him for a friend.”

“Mm. He looks a bit like you.”

Mr. Snape turned his eyes on Harry with an appraising look. “Perhaps the dark hair… otherwise I see no resemblance.”

Mrs. Padiernos shrugged, apparently not swayed from her opinion. “What’ll it be this evening?”

Snape made a bit of a show of looking at the laminated menu that was sellotaped to the peeling countertop and selected an assortment of dishes.

“An order of four of the siopao, a large order of rice, chicken afritada, vegetable pancit—"

“With spam?”

“With spam,” Snape agreed, one index finger prodding at his lower lip as he thought, “and… er… that is...”

Harry couldn’t help but to find it oddly uncharacteristic the way the man was stammering. He’d not seen him lost for words before.

“Champorado?” Mrs. Padiernos prompted, with a bit of a sly smile.

“Yes. That.”

“That sweet tooth, ‘Rus. It’ll rot your mouth.”

“A penny, a pound,” Snape sneered with a shrug, though not unkindly. Only so much as to bare one of his yellowed snaggle-toothed canines. “I see no difference.”

“Pah, at kung hindi, ikaw ay kaya makisig. What a waste.”

Before Snape could ask what she meant, she was calling their order out over her shoulder to an elderly man that was probably her husband.

She collected the money for the till and offered back a written ticket as she hurried off to begin assembling their order into cardboard take-away boxes.

Harry and Snape found seats by the wall of the tiny ante-chamber and didn’t speak much in the ten minutes it took for Mrs. Padiernos to return with their meal.

“Come back soon—" she admonished Snape, tapping him on the cheek with one hand across the counter.

Mr. Snape looked unaccountably flummoxed and gave the woman a smile that may also have been a grimace. Though, for all that, he endured her affections.

“Likely within the week.”

Mrs. Padiernos shook her head. “We’ll find you someone, ‘Rus. No good coming to me to feed you up all the time.”

“I’m perfectly capable of cooking—!”

“Yes, but you don’t, do you?” She asked, her tone a bit patronising.

In an undertone, Snape murmured something that he perhaps thought Harry couldn’t hear, but due to a lull in the sounds from the kitchen, it was audible.

“Mine just doesn’t taste right,”

Mrs. Padiernos nodded sympathetically. “She was extraordinary in the kitchen.”

Snape’s hand clenched on the counter into a fist. “She was.”

“If you can’t cook for her sake, then come light a candle for her,” Mrs. Padiernos challenged with a small frown.

“I can’t…”

“Pah!” Mrs. Padiernos threw her hands up, “Now I know how she meant when she’d say you were impossible!”

“I wouldn’t even remember how,” Snape argued back, throwing a suspicious glance at Harry. He made a sharp motion with his head, indicating the door. “Take the bag outside and wait for me there, Potter.”

Harry did, and as the door swung closed he could hear Mrs. Padiernos urging Mr. Snape to “Come by St. Catherine’s, ‘Rus. It’s the least you could do for your mam,”

“That’s all the way out in Penrith—!” Came Snape’s faint objection.

Clutching the warm, fragrant bag to his chest, and doing his best not to allow it to slip given its weight, Harry leaned his back against the white-washed plaster exterior of the building. He had several minutes where his—captor?—remained inside the establishment to look around.

He found that, though it was an alleyway, it was kept scrupulously clean. Swept.

On the door was a small sign that he’d not noticed before.

Rice Bowl

Cumbria’s premier Filipino restaurant

Snape ducked out after a matter of minutes, looking slightly harried, and incredibly weary to boot. He spotted Harry and made a bee-line for him, snatching the paper bag out of his hands and jerking his head in a clear indication that he wished for the boy to follow behind him.

They reemerged out onto the street, and the silence felt laden after the uncomfortable exchange.

It made Harry wonder why Mr. Snape had taken them to Rice Bowl, if he’d had any inkling that it might have lead to difficult questions...

But then again, the food did smell fantastic.

As soon as the thought occurred to him, Harry felt his stomach lurch into his throat, and his salivary glands began to over-produce. While better than the day before, his throat was still on the mend.

“Erm... Mr. Snape?”

Snape’s head swiveled to pin him with a glare. Somehow, even looking back over his shoulder, the man managed to avoid running into the foot traffic.

Perhaps it was because he was so scary looking that the foot traffic avoided him.

“I’m growing tired of hearing ‘Mr. Snape, this—’ and ‘Mr. Snape, that,’ all the time, Po—Harry. You may call me Severus.”

“Oh...” Harry said, thinking this over for a moment. “Your name’s not Russel?”

The man gave a snort, “Russel? Why’s that? Because of that ridiculous diminutive from Mrs. Padiernos?” He shook his head. “She’s known me since I was a boy. She always thought my name was too big for me. Anyway, ask your question.”

“Can you do that thing again? To my throat?”

“That thing?” Snape frowned. “Is it hurting you again?”

“A bit...”

Mr. Snape steered them over to a small alcove between two store fronts. He apparently had the wand up his sleeve as he withdrew it only enough to tap the very tip against each side of Harry’s neck, before he slipped it back up against his arm.

“Better?”

Harry sighed, “Yeah.”

“Before we eat, I’ll dab you with some Essence of Dittany. I had wished to avoid that but,” Snape gave a gallic shrug, “needs must.”

“Why would we avoid it?”

Snape began leading them back down the lane again—and, incidentally, further away from where he’d parked the car—before he spoke.

“Essence of Dittany is primarily used in a topical application. It won’t poison you, but I’d not like you to swallow much if any of it as it may make you feel... a bit woozy. And naturally, dabbing at the back of your throat will prove uncomfortable, particularly after surgery, though this should complete your healing.”

“I’ll be cured?”

“Cured. Yes.” Snape drawled. “Fresh as a newly minted crown.”

Harry frowned. “I didn’t think we used those anymore...”

“We don’t.”

“Oh.” Harry looked around and saw that they were now at least three or four blocks from the car, and down a separate street. “Aren’t we going back to your place?”

“We have one more errand to run while we’re out,” Snape told him. They’d come to a storefront that had a wide assortment of animals in the window. There were puppies, gamboling around a small enclosure, and cages of parakeets and budgies that were hanging from the front-most rafter. A kitten licked its paw, and on the other side, there was an aquarium of turtles that had banked themselves on a rock, while besides them rested a type of monitor lizard on a stick under a heat-lamp.

“The pet store?”

Severus opened the door and bade Harry pass underneath his arm. “Sometimes, the prices here are better than I can get at apothecaries.”

“Prices? Prices for?”

“Parts.”

Harry gasped in horror, but Snape was already striding forward toward the one of the tanks, where he began to look over a tarantula with a critical eye.

“Mr. Snape, Mr. Snape, please no—” Harry begged, under his breath. He came up to the man’s elbow and tried to tug him away by the hem of his shirt. “They didn’t do anything—”

“Neither did the ones that are pre-processed at the apothecary: the difference is only in window-dressing.”

“But...”

“Oi! You!” A voice interrupted Harry’s pleading and a beefy man who was entirely bald strode out from the back room. “I thought I told you not to come back in here, you creep! I warned you off years ago—this store’s for customers who want a pet, not a snack!”

Snape straightened, but he seemed almost chagrined, if his blushing ears were anything to go by. He shifted the weight of the bag of food in his arms. “I don’t eat them,” he complained.

“I heard tell from that Evans girl that you did! And I told you not to darken my doorstep ages ago—thought I wouldn’t recognise you, did you?”

Snape’s sour expression said as much.

“If you’re not here to buy a pet you can walk right on out!” The shop keep insisted.

Snape threw a considering glance at Harry, who was standing between the two men, rooted to the spot.

The large man’s yelling had brought back uncomfortable memories, and he wasn’t sure whether he felt more the urge to run, or to stand his ground and absorb the anger...

Then again, the man wasn’t angry at him. He was angry at Snape.

And as he should be! Harry frowned. Buying pets to... to kill.

“Who said I’m not here for a pet?” Snape argued, affecting a disingenuously casual posture. “I’ll have this tarantula. It’s for the boy.”

The man blustered a bit, and his eyes, a deep grey, seemed to shift between Harry and Snape for a moment. “Is it true? Is that for you?”

Harry glared up at Snape who was apparently trying to look quite innocent.

He couldn’t quite pull it off.

“It’s for me,” Harry agreed. But if Snape thought he’d be sharing his new pet ‘for parts’ he had another thing coming. Harry intended to keep it. He couldn’t wait to show his aunt—she’d scream herself silly.

What if he could set it on Dudley?

Maybe on his pillow...

He’d never been allowed a pet before, unless you counted the tiny spiders underneath the stairs. Somehow, they didn’t count like the behemoth in the tank.

The shop keep looked like he didn’t quite trust the pair of them, but he could smell a sale. The next ten minutes were spent with the man piling an assortment of odds and ends into Harry’s arms, including a small terrarium and bedding.

Snape’s expression throughout the exchange had blackened considerably.

It seemed he’d finally cottoned on to the fact that he actually was, in point of fact, buying Harry a pet. By now he’d be spending far more than he otherwise would have at whatever an apothecary was.

They left the store toting bags, and Harry carried the terrarium carefully in his hands. He blinked down at the tarantula’s eight eyes. They stared steadily back. Or at least he thought they did.

“What did he say it was again?” Harry asked. He couldn’t keep the smile out of his voice or off of his face. He was positively beaming as he stared down at the tarantula, a hulking black creature that easily would dwarf Harry’s palm.

“A Brazilian Black, I believe.”

“What are some words for eight?”

Snape helped him to load some of their purchases into the car as they reached it, and he settled the brown bag of food into the passenger seat. “Words for eight?”

“Yeah...” Harry couldn’t take his eyes off the creature. “You know... like in other languages?”

Snape slid into the driver’s seat and started the car.

“Walo. Ocho. Acht. Vosem’.”

“No… I don’t like those,” Harry told the man, as he gazed down on his new pet, utterly captivated. “What are some more?”

“What exactly is the point of this exercise in linguistics?”

“I want a name for him…”

“Given that he’s supposedly Brazilian in origin, what about Portuguese? Oito.”

Harry rolled the word over in his head and found he hadn’t a taste for it. He shook his head, sending his fringe flying back and forth.

“No… that’s not ‘fisticated,”

Snape sent him an annoyed glance by way of the rear-view mirror. They were passing back over the bridge into Cokeworth, and the car jumped as he took the bump too fast.

“Sophisticated.” He corrected him.

“Yeah,” Harry agreed, “Aunt Petunia thinks France is so-‘fisticated…”

“Then the word you’re looking for would be ‘huit.’”

“Wheat?” Harry grinned.

“Huit. Ou-eet—"

“That’s how I said it!”

The car was back on Spinner’s End now and Snape was bringing it to a stop along the kerb. “No, Potter, you’re saying ‘wheat,’ like the crop. Like what bread’s made of.”

Harry shrugged. “Well… I like it.” He climbed out of the back and helped Mr. Snape to carry things into the crumbling terraced house.

“Just like I like it better when you call me ‘Harry’…”

Snape deposited their food in front of a threadbare sofa. The telly that sat in the place of honour, centred before the sofa, appeared ancient, and when Snape made to turn it on, it clicked and buzzed frightfully before the image swam into focus; as though it had to fight its way forth from the bottom of a bog.

“Noted.” He sat and began removing the contents of the brown paper bag to the crowded surface of the coffee table. “Now set that thing down and join me for a meal or else I will make good on carving it up for parts.”

“You wouldn’t really!” But Harry did sit, just in case.

“I would. The pedipalps and eyes first, then the legs from the cephalothorax, down to the abdomen and the spinnerets. And the wheat from the chaff for good measure.”

Harry glowered at him. “Now you really are making fun—"

“I’d grind him into flour,” Snape continued, with a smirk. His hands were opening all of the boxes, and with another flick of his wand, two ancient-looking stoneware plates sailed in from the kitchen. He filled the entirety of one plate with glassy, tender noodles, a sort of braised chicken, and two enormous, steamed buns.

“Spider flour?” Harry’s face must have made an impressive grimace, for Mr. Snape actually laughed.

“Yes, and you’d best be on your best behavior or else it’ll find its way into all sorts of things that I cook for you. Now,” Snape passed him the heavily laden plate. “You’re to eat all of that.”

Harry’s eyes fairly bugged out. “I can’t—"

“You can and you will if you want pudding.”

“Pudding?”

“Chocolate rice pudding. With sweetened condensed milk.”

Harry swallowed. It did sound good. But the idea of the full plate of food was daunting. And the idea of it had his throat throbbing in sympathy.

“What about my throat?”

Snape paused from where he was fixing up his own plate. “Ah,” he sighed, and made to rise from his seat. “I’d nearly forgotten.”

Dinner commenced after Snape used a stick topped with a bit of cotton wool to dab at the back of Harry’s throat with the potion he’d promised. It should have hurt, but after another numbing charm, he hadn’t felt a thing. Mr. Snape had lit the tip of his wand up and taken a look at the place where his tonsils once had been and seemed satisfied that all was well.

The food was so good that Harry didn’t have any trouble at all clearing his plate. He’d not eaten since the previous day, and that after a week of nearly starving. Even so, Snape made him wait an hour for dinner to ‘settle’ before he served him a bowl of the rice pudding.

“I thought I was meant to eat ice cream,” Harry mentioned around a spoonful of cocoa-flavoured rice gruel. Snape had added so much sweetened condensed milk (between the two of them, he’d used almost the full tin) that each bite sang on his tongue.

“Would you rather have had ice cream?”

Harry shook his head. The ice cream had been good, but the rice pudding was more substantial.

“In any case,” Snape told him, between bites of his own, “the ice cream would be to soothe your throat. Muggles—those who can’t rely on magic to heal them, that is—would still be in a great deal of pain for another week or more.”

“Why don’t magic people just heal them too?” Harry asked, allowing the spoon to hang from his mouth as he slurped the confection from the metal.

“That would be a ridiculous waste of our powers.” Snape countered, “What, do you think we have nothing better to do than to go around playing superhero for the denizens of mundanity?”

Harry frowned, not entirely sure what that might mean. “Then why—?” He scraped his bowl clean, feeling a bit crestfallen that he’d finished his portion. “Why did you help me?”

Snape merely stared at him for the full span of at least ten seconds before he went back to eating his own champorado at a sedate pace.

“Why do you think I stepped in to watch you?” Snape asked, his black eyes trained on Harry as he answered his question with a question.

“You knew my mum… did Aunt Petunia call you to watch me?” Harry asked. “Usually, it’s Ms. Figg, only she must’ve been busy…”

Snape shook his head, the motion slow, but enough to send greasy locks of his hair swinging about like black ropes. “No one called. And no one reached out to Arabella Figg either.”

“You know her too—?”

“Your relatives told no one of their intention to leave you home unattended while they swanned off to parts unknown.” Snape had, by now, set aside his bowl and spoon. He was facing him on the sofa, one leg pulled up to rest over the other, with his ankle set upon the opposite knee.

The answer made Harry’s stomach—for the first time feeling comfortably warm and full from a good meal,  particularly one he’d enjoyed in the absence of pain—feel as though it were going to drop out from between his legs.

Suddenly, he felt quite ill. In a way that had nothing at all to do with his recent internment in hospital.

“So—"

“You were abandoned.”

“Then how… how did you know to come...?”

“While no one told Arabella that you’d been left to your lonesome, she did, by Wednesday, notice when Petunia failed to crane her over-long neck into her affairs as often as would be expected.”

“Ms. Figg watches us—?”

“Like a hawk. And what should she see but you, scurrying around like a rat trying to survive a capsized ship.”

Harry nearly choked. “A rat!? I’m not—!”

“No. You’re not, Harry. But the simile is apt. You were left to drown on your own. Eight is no age for self-sufficiency.”

“I’m seven…”

“For two more weeks,” Snape said with a shrug.

Snape seemed to know far too much as it was. Harry didn’t even consider asking how it was that the man knew his birthday on top of everything else.

“If that’s true, why didn’t Ms. Figg come get me? Why you?”

Snape adopted a faintly scandalised look. “Well. And ought I feel offended by that?”

Shaking his head violently, Harry hastened to defend his question, “No! No, not like that, Mr… Severus. I just… I don’t get it,” he murmured, glancing down at his trainers as his legs began to kick in time with his rising agitation—which was to say, at a rapidly quickening pace.

“I’m not actually upset.” Snape answered him, pulling a small grimace. He almost looked regretful, but Harry couldn’t be sure. It was a weird tightening of his mouth, such that the lines that bracketed his lips and chin pulled into near dimples, and his black eyes darted aside, as if avoiding Harry’s own gaze.

“I was sent because Arabella Figg was not considered equal to the task.” Mr. Snape shook his head, sending his unevenly chopped hair flying once more. “As for why I was chosen? Well. Take it as read that everyone else was considered unsuitable.”

Harry drew his knees up to his chest and rested his chin on them, his hands gripping his shins. “Why?”

Severus gave Harry another look that made the man look a bit like someone’s drowned hound. It was an expression that spoke to misery. A kind of misery that Harry was surprised to find that he understood.

“Finally, you’ve asked a question I can’t answer. I don’t know any better than you do.”