After the initial stumbling block of Dumbledore’s interference, the journey to becoming Snape’s custodial responsibility had been surprisingly smooth.

Though, if Dumbledore was to be taken at his word, it was likely because of his interference that by Harry’s eighth birthday, he was watching Snape sign a weighty stack of papers that had been delivered by owl, all toward the ends of him being allowed to remain with the ornery young man in perpetuity.

Somehow, it struck Harry as anticlimactic. If his aunt’s soaps were to be trusted, in cases such as these he felt quite certain that he ought to have seen some busybody social worker or two, nosing around Snape’s ramshackle home, noting all of the obvious deficiencies in the house itself and Snape’s demeanour on some self-important clip-board as she—for it was always a woman, in the soaps—tutted, rudely, over what she would invariably see as shortcomings in Snape’s suitability.

Yet no busybody social worker arrived on their doorstep.

They celebrated with a trip to Rice Bowl and a take-away container of pork mechado. When Mrs. Padiernos heard of their news—and that it was Harry’s birthday—she’d been insistent that “’Rus” and Harry wait around a little longer so that she could send them home with a polystyrene container full of tiny, purple, steamed cakes.

Harry ate at least six of them following their meal and his eighth birthday was concluded with him being sent to bed with a belly ache.

Though his stomach was roiling and protesting, his heart felt full and warm. For once, he was being sent to bed with a full stomach, and because he’d eaten too much, rather than being sent off to try and ease the cramps produced by being denied supper altogether.

As promised, Harry joined Severus in the kitchen every day. The first week was a lot of catch-up. The explosion had wiped out many of the projects that had been in progress and had gotten Snape behind on others. He was still cagey about what any of the potions were for, and he never did explain himself and his processes to Harry.

As he was told time and again, his job there was in assisting with ingredient preparation and processing. If Harry was supremely lucky, he was sometimes allowed to assist with the actual brewing.

“It’s a greater foundation in the technical skills than anyone else will be arriving at Hogwarts with. Count yourself as lucky,” Snape had snarled at him when he’d dared to ask what the murky, yellow brew they were working on was for.

Snape, for all of his demanding mannerisms in the kitchen, seemed to be keeping time internally for much of their brewing. Usually, once a day, perhaps an hour after they resumed after breaking for lunch, the man would pluck the knife from Harry’s fingers and shoo him off elsewhere.

The first time it had happened, Harry had been bewildered. Perhaps even a bit hurt.

“Did I do it wrong?”

The older wizard had trained a critical eye on Harry’s cutting board before shaking his head dismissively. “Your technique is acceptable for someone your age.”

Well. That wasn’t exactly a commendation of Harry’s skills, but it was likely as good as he’d get.

“Why should I stop then?” Harry grasped at the hem of his shirt; still the overlarge Dudley cast off, which Snape had been cleaning with charms every day or so. “There’s a whole pile of beetles still, and then the fern stems…”

Snape had returned his attention to the tiny stone cauldron he was absorbed with, using a stirring rod the size of a pencil to whip frothy peaks on the surface. “I’ve wrung enough use out of you for today,” he told Harry, apparently too focused to turn his attention away even for a moment. “Go entertain yourself elsewhere.”

Feeling his face screw up and a slight itching at his eyes, Harry drew a hand through his fringe, mussing it with a nearly violent shake.

“Don’t!”

Before he knew it, Snape’s empty hand was wrapped firmly around his wrist, and he pulled Harry’s fingers from his head of cowlicks with a sharp tug.

His hand trapped within Snape’s grasp, Harry flexed his fingers. The man had placed his arm back by his side and gave him a forbidding look. One which clearly meant that Harry ought to keep it there.

Harry’s eyes felt even itchier. “What’s that for?”

“Your…” Snape paused to take a deep, steadying breath. “I don’t need stray hairs and dander fouling up the potions. Hands off your hair, Po… Harry. Just… just don’t.”

“But my hair’s not like yours,” the boy protested, eyeing the mop of swamp muck that passed for Severus’ hair.

His attention back on the cauldron, Snape’s hiss might have been mistaken for the sound emitted by one of the potions. “And what might you mean by that?”

“Your hair is straight,” Harry complained, with a bit of a whinge, “you don’t have to do nothing to it—"

“I don’t have to do anything—"

“Yeah, that. It just lays straight on its own.”

Snape stopped whipping the frothing potion and tapped the stirring rod against the rim to dispel a drop or two back into the belly of the cauldron. “You weren’t flattening or combing, you were messing it up.”

Harry felt no desire to explain that it was a narrow choice between indulging that slight nervous tick and him descending into full-blown tears, so instead he clenched his fists at his side—a conscious attempt to rid himself of the urge to push them through his short locks once more—and adopted a mulish expression, glaring at the floor. “I wasn’t meaning to.”

Drawing a breath in through his wide nostrils, Snape surveyed him from over his shoulder before offering a small concession. “In any case, I’ll have you know: my hair doesn’t exactly lay this straight when it’s short like yours.”

In spite of himself, Harry peeked up from underneath his fringe, feeling slightly hopeful. “It doesn’t?”

“No. When my hair is short it’s… well... I suppose ‘tufty’ would be an accurate descriptor,” he admitted, turning his face back to the cauldron.

Through the curtain of his scraggly mane, only the shells of his over-large ears—poking through the sheets of black, greasy hanks—showed that he was embarrassed by imparting such information about himself. They were staining crimson, the colour blooming by the second.

“Is that why it’s so…”

“So? Finish that thought, Potter. Though I caution you to think wisely about your words.”

“Erm…” Harry scoured his brain for synonyms. He somehow sensed that the word ‘greasy’ would be ill-received. “… shiny?”

A single black eye could be seen over Snape’s shoulder, watching him with a furrowed brow. Although, after a moment, Harry thought he might have caught sight of a slight smirk playing about the edges of the man’s thin mouth. That weird quarter-quark of the lips it seemed he favoured over toothy grins and smarmy smiles.

“Not bad. We’ll see your vocabulary improved yet, if I’ve anything to do about it.” He finally set aside the rod after wiping it with a soft scrap of chamois and turned to face Harry, his thin hips leaned up against the kitchen table. His arms he’d crossed over his chest, and from how he’d rolled up the faded sleeves of his KISS army shirt, Harry could see the faint black lines that made up the man’s skull and snake tattoo. “Amongst other reasons, Potter. None of which are your business, mind you. I shall concede to your damnable sense of curiosity that it is, indeed, kept shiny because the alternative is insufferable.”

“…the alternative...?”

“Ringlets.” Snape said with a bit of a theatrical shudder. “Imagine my horror.”

At Harry’s answering giggle, Snape threw him another smirk before he shooed him from the room once more, with the added admonishment that: “I’d best not see you again until supper.”

From then on out, Harry was habitually evicted from the kitchen in the mid-afternoons. It was a rather boring affair to spend the long hours alone in the stuffy house, but beyond cleaning, which Snape seemed rather indifferent about, Harry hadn’t much to do.

He’d started off by attempting to converse with Wheat but found after his first few faltering attempts that coming up with things to say to an utterly silent conversational partner was rather difficult.

What Wheat lacked in social graces, he made up for with his company, and Harry had begun luring him out onto his hand and giving him tours around the house.

He always stopped at the kitchen, looking in on Snape’s hunched shoulders as he stood at the table, wholly occupied by whatever his strange business was.

“That’s the kitchen, Wheat. Don’t go in there unless you want to be ground up for flour,” Harry told the arachnid, each time they passed.

His next attempt to entertain himself was in watching the ancient telly, but the antennae were so bent out of shape that the picture and sound came in as though from another, distant dimension. It was nigh impossible to understand what was happening on the antique set, and so Harry had stopped bothering with it.

Unlike his relative’s house, Snape had plenty of books to read... but their subjects were, to Harry’s limited understanding, utterly esoteric and beyond comprehension. It seemed as though not one of the tomes had anything contained within that he could sink his teeth into, and as the long weeks of August passed, he’d peeked into damn near every one of them. Not one suited.

Nearing the end of the month, Harry began vociferously voicing his complaints to Snape, begging to be allowed to work in the kitchen once more.

It had become enough of an issue that nearing the first week of September, Snape had thrown his fork down as they sat down to supper.

“Not another word—not about that. I’ve allowed you to contribute enough. You’re not some shop-boy I keep around for my own purposes.” For all of the violence of having allowed his silverware to drop into his potatoes, Snape’s voice emerged sounding weary.

It was far from the first time that Harry had brought the subject up, and his strategy of wearing the man down over time—while not yet successful—was showing limited signs that it might yet prevail over Snape’s principled objections.

“I can’t help it if there’s nothing to do, Severus.” Harry said with a bit of a sulk. “I only wanna help.”

Pushing his plate away with a look of disgust—something Harry could scarcely fathom, given that the fried potatoes and corned beef hash had, in his opinion, been quite good—Snape shook his head and furrowed his brow. “This isn’t something you can help me with.”

“Why not? I can chop. You don’t have to let me do the ingredients ‘n stuff,” Harry told him, sounding hopeful.

“No. It’s one thing to allow you to assist with low level brews that require little precision. Experimental work is beyond your ken. Consistency in preparation can make or break a novel formula,” the dour man sighed, digging his long, pale fingertips into his eye sockets, “If I’m to know why something failed, it’s necessary for me to have absolute control over each variable.”

Harry shoveled a forkful of potatoes and hash into his mouth and barely remembered to chew and swallow before he started in with his questions. “You’re making something new?”

Scowling around his probing fingers Snape responded in a tone that hinted at his diminishing patience. “I’m attempting to make something new.”

“You can tell me, Severus! Maybe I can help—"

His face pulling into an aggrieved snarl, Snape’s black eyes flashed as they snapped open. “Pray tell how an untrained, untested eight-year-old is meant to help in the development of a potion the qualities of which I’ve not yet even decided upon.”

“…You don’t know what you’re making?” Harry asked, his eyes wide. He let the tines of his fork lazily pull through the golden yolk of a fried egg, trailing a sunny streak across the stoneware with an ear-splitting squeak of metal on ceramic.

Snape gave him a faintly disapproving look as he plucked up his paper serviette and wiped roughly at his mouth with it. “No. I’m low on ideas, currently.”

“Well how can you make something if you don’t know what you’re making?”

Now looking decidedly annoyed, Snape stood and snatched up his plate before he strode to the sink without another word to Harry about his project.

While that effectively ended the conversation for the evening, it didn’t last. By the next day, come the hour where Harry was generally sent out of the kitchen to his own devices, he decided that his previous tactic of making himself scarce was doing little for his aims of being included in Snape’s work.

Instead, he gathered Wheat up into his hands, allowing the fat spider to crawl from one end of his hand to the other, over and over, by alternating which fist was out front as soon as the tarantula had vacated his hand held to the back. He stood with his companion, leaned up against the doorway to the kitchen, and watched silently as Snape toiled over the collection of crocks he’d amassed at the formica kitchen table.

It didn’t take long for the twitchy young man to sense that he was being watched. With an acrid, peat-black eye peeping up over his slouched shoulders, the man’s heavy brow descended upon that eye and brought it into an obvious frown of impatience.

“What?” Snape barked, his bared canine flashing with the flickering of the various flames he kept lit under the assembled army of cauldrons.

“I just thought I’d watch,” Harry said with forced disinterest. “’Cause there’s nothing else to do really. I thought if I watched I could learn something,” he offered, thinking that with Snape’s teaching background that presenting his actions as an opportunity for imparting knowledge might have been a winning gambit.

Snape’s response was terse and was delivered with a small accompanying shudder of his shoulders. “Well, you’re putting me on edge. Stop lurking around like that.”

“I could do, if you’d give me something I could be doing instead,” the boy muttered, frowning at his well-worn trainers.

Finally, that seemed to break the man from his inaction. With a snarled oath, he stalked from the kitchen after casting a series of stasis charms over the entirety of his workspace and stomped past Harry to reach for the keys at the hook near the front door.

“Come on, Potter.”

Harry scarcely knew what to make of the abrupt about face. He stood gawping rather stupidly where he’d stood watching the man from the doorway.

“Well? Don’t dawdle. Go put that monstrosity away in his cage.”

Though Harry didn’t have the faintest idea what Snape was about, he nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to obey the man. Any opportunity to leave the confines of the house was good in his books.

On his way back down the stairwell, he scrambled, taking the flight three stairs at a time, and jumping to the bottom from five steps up.

When he met Snape’s eyes it was to find the man watching him with a faintly amused expression.

“And here you’d said there was nothing to do in the house. Clearly that wasn’t the whole truth. You could have been practicing such acrobatics all along.”

Harry passed under the man’s arm as he held the door open for him, ducking to avoid smacking his forehead into the crook of his elbow.

“I could have trained you up to trade off with the local circus,” Severus continued, as they walked toward the car. “I imagine I could have gotten a decent deal on some freak of nature. Perhaps even a contortionist.”

“Nu-uh,” Harry protested as he slid into the back seat when Snape pulled the driver side seat forward for him to shuffle behind. He fastened himself in with a click. “You wouldn’t of…”

“Sure, I would. Do you have any idea what I could do with a contortionist?” Snape paused as the key brought the motor roaring to life. “Mm. At that, perhaps you don’t know. In any case, it would be a tempting exchange.”

“No!” Harry protested, feeling tempted to kick the back of Snape’s seat. He didn’t, but it was a near thing.

For all he was certain that the man was joking, a tiny part of him wasn’t so sure.

The car crawled down the street as they bickered, Snape maintaining all the way until they found a space to park that, had he been offered a circus performer, Harry’s determinate value might have been assessed against such a person and found wanting.

Finally, when the car died, Harry caught Snape’s eye in the rear-view and saw the smirk in the slight crease near the man’s cheek.

“You were lying!” He accused, his voice rising. “See? I can tell, ‘cause you’re smiling!”

They exited the car.

“If I’m smiling it’s merely because I’m thinking of how exciting it would be to have a whole three-ring operation in the space where the sofa now sits.”

Harry didn’t have time to formulate a response, as by then he’d looked up and realised where Snape had taken them.

“There’s monkey bars!” He exclaimed, running for them before Snape had a chance to quip at him about practicing his mid-air jumps.

Harry took off in such haste for the crumbling play set that he didn’t spare much of a glance for the man he left behind.

Perhaps fifteen minutes in, having passed from one side to the other at least three times, and taken the slide an even eight, he finally looked around for his custodian, finding him on a rusting park bench that sat outside the brick ring where the play equipment was contained.

Snape had apparently busied himself with a newspaper and a plastic ball-point pen, and he appeared to be marking something in the margins of the paper, which he’d folded back on itself.

After another twenty minutes of rushing about the tiny park in some manic attempt at exhausting himself as he’d not been able to do in weeks, Harry finally trotted back over to where Snape waited on him and dropped down to sit beside the man.

“What’re you doing?” he asked, slightly out of breath. He’d taken the monkey bars another couple of times, then had attempted to swing as high as he could, in the hopes of perhaps going over the bar. It was a dream of his to realise such freedom as real flight could provide, but thus far in his life, he’d only ever managed to come to perhaps a seventy-degree angle against the uprights that held the swing-set vertical, no matter how hard he pumped his legs and wished he could go airborne.

“Shh,” Snape murmured. He was tapping the end of the pen to his lips and appeared utterly absorbed in whatever it was he was reading.

There were several moments of silence that stretched out, as Harry quashed the urge to ask yet again what the man was up to, when Snape let out a bit of a hiss between his teeth and brought the pen down, the tip scratching out a few, nearly illegible, letters in a vertical column.

When Harry’s attempts to read the indecipherable writing failed, he glanced over at the clue that the paper had furnished.

8: Don’t call him Dugald or Quintius of Drear,

but call the beast Harry and you’ll find yourself nearer

the truth, for feuds simmer with no boons conferred

The fight wages on, be it with club, foot, or word.

“Is that about me?”

Severus scoffed as his pen tip tracked to a different clue that he began to puzzle out. “Not everything’s about you.”

“You said people know me—”

“And so they do.”

“The poem says ‘Harry...’” the boy argued, wondering to himself if this was another time in which Snape was simply having him on, like with selling him to a circus.

“A convenient homonym. The word they were actually hinting at was ‘hairy,’ as in possessing a great deal of fur.”

Harry frowned, his legs kicking a bit as he leaned over to look closely at the crossword. “Why didn’t they just say so?”

“Because that would defeat the purpose of the riddle. The point is to hint at the answer with wordplay and trivia,” Snape sighed, sounding put upon at having to explain such a simple concept as word puzzles. “Dugald and Quintius were members of rival clans on the Isle of Drear. Dugald, of the McClivert clan, and Quintius of the MacBoons.

“Dugald fell victim to Quintius in a formal duel, which incited a feud that had his kin spoiling for retribution. As the story goes, they snuck upon the MacBoon family while in their cups—celebrating Quintius’ victory, no doubt—and transfigured the entire family into Quintapeds—”

“What’s that?”

“They’re like...” Snape frowned, apparently a bit bewildered when it came to actually describing the beasts, “...like your tarantula. But the size of an Irish wolfhound. And with five legs all around their body, rather than eight.”

Harry thought hard at this. “But, Wheat has four on each side—legs, that is—if there’s five all around,” Harry thought aloud, stirring one finger in a circle in the air to illustrate his point, “where’s the face?”

“On top.” Snape said, with a wry quirk of his lips. “Beastly things. They’ve teeth like sharks and eat children.”

“They do not!”

“They do so...” but then, at Harry’s plaintive look that must have spoken to his mounting fear, Snape relented. “Not just children. They’ll eat anyone.

“There’s no reason to worry anyway, they’re only found on the Isle of Drear, and the Ministry spelled it off limits. You won’t ever find yourself faced with one unless you’ve made an exceptionally stupid decision somewhere along the way.

“In any case, the clue for ‘Harry’ was because they’re sometimes called ‘Hairy MacBoons,’” Snape concluded, sketching out yet another answer, this time in an across-row. “The editors expect the person doing the puzzle to have a bit of knowledge of magizoological trivia.”

Harry watched over Snape’s shoulder as the man noodled over the utterly incomprehensible set of clues, but when he got bored, he leaned back against the park bench and looked up to the sky. It was overcast and seemed to be promising a late summer rain, any minute.

His appraisal of the heavens didn’t last longer than a few moments, however, for his attention was drawn, once more, back to Snape’s paper.

“Severus, that clue might not of been about me, but what about that?” Harry asked jabbing at the outside of the folded paper where it faced away from Snape.

Without looking at what the boy was pointing at, Snape merely scoffed, too absorbed in his puzzle to pay what he must have thought were Harry’s flights of fancy much attention. “Not likely.”

“Oh really?” Harry challenged, finding himself annoyed at the man’s refusal to take him seriously. “’Cause your name’s there too: ‘ACQUITTED DEATH EATER, SEVERUS SNAPE, APPROVED FOR CUSTODIAL GUARDIANSHIP OF BOY-WHO-LIVED, HARRY POTTER.’”

The blood seemed to drain away from Snape’s face then, and he nearly dropped the paper as he shuffled it in his hands, trying to find the headline that Harry had read aloud.

Finally finding it, he cursed, the words so vile that Harry wished he hadn’t heard. He sounded furious.

“You... you didn’t see that when you got the paper?” Harry ventured, a bit hesitant in the face of the man’s anger. “It’s on the front page.”

Snape appeared not to hear him. He was now scanning the article, his black eyes darting left to right and then back again so quickly that Harry wondered how it was possible that he was understanding anything he was reading. After half a minute, Snape’s fist clenched, and the paper was crumpled into his palm.

“What did you ask...?” the man questioned him, seeming a bit out of it.

“I asked how you didn’t see it before, when that owl brought it during breakfast.”

“The vapid creature dropped it in the beans, if you’ll recall,” Snape snarled, still staring daggers at the paper that he’d wrinkled in his clenched hands, “I went to wipe it off in the rubbish bin then flipped it to the puzzles.”

Well. That did explain the dark, red-brown blemish that stained the picture accompanying the headline (and a good portion of the headline itself).

“Can I see?” Harry asked, tugging at one corner of the rag with his index finger and thumb.

After a few gentle yanks, Snape let go of the crumpled publication with a weary sigh. “If you must...

“Just...” the man shook his head and speared fingers through his limp hair as he leaned out over his knees, appearing, for a moment, defeated. “Don’t forget our conversation in the car when we drove back to Surrey.”

From where he was smoothing out the paper, Harry looked over at the man sharing the bench with him. “Why do you think I’d forget?”

“It’s not that I think you’d forget, Harry. It’s that... well. It’ll be important to keep in mind when reading their... ah... their accounting of things.”

Nodding a bit to show he understood, Harry smoothed the paper out over his knees and shook it for good measure before he began to read.

A special report from the desk of the editor.

It’s not often that closed sessions of the Wizengamot are called into being from the desk of Chief Warlock Albus Dumbledore, but late last month, quite literally at the eleventh hour, the doors to the Wizengamot chambers in Blackhall slammed shut, and each occupant was issued a binding non-disclosure contract before the items of the session would be divulged.

It has been several years since such practises have seen much use. The last time, in this author’s memory, was with the conclusion of the Death Eater trials; the last of these having occurred in ‘83 with the capture and sentencing of Bartemius Crouch Jr.

Press were barred from the room, which, while not illegal, is lacking in precedent for all but the most delicate of hearings. As such, although Albus Dumbledore managed to cloak the meeting in secrecy and obscure his purpose, he also succeeded in stoking the flames of speculation into a conflagration of curiosity.

The meeting drew to a close after midnight, with a stream of flustered looking barristers (who, upon closer investigation, all specialise in child protection) preceding a queue of dazed members of the Wizengamot out of the hallowed doors.

At the end of the line to exit was the Chief Warlock himself, deep in a conversation with Minister for Magic Millicent Bagnold, hiding, it seemed, in plain sight, behind a charm to obscure their speech from outside observation.

Whatever it was that they were discussing, Dumbledore displayed his characteristic unflappable, affable mien, while Minister for Magic Bagnold appeared to be in some distress. In any case, whatever necessitated the meeting being called to session evidently was settled beyond challenge in that single sitting, as no mention of a second hearing materialised in the following days.

Had it not been for the superior investigative impetus of our own publication, and a team of no less than five of our most skillful journalists, the mystery may have been swept as masterfully under the rug as Chief Warlock Dumbledore no doubt intended.

Raking through dossiers and raw transcript data collected under the auspices of Subcommittee for the Official Narrative’s Decree 48.t.220, also known as the Dictaquill Decree of 1848 (read more on page 14 of Non-Current and Non-Consecutive Events), the records of the meeting, though cleverly hidden, could not be redacted from public view and were available upon inquiry.

Of course, upon receipt, our offices were overrun with approximately two thousand sheafs of parchment on all and sundry that the Wizengamot had heard since the advent of the decade—a circumstance which, ultimately, worked in our favour, (read more on page 2 of NCNCE).

Over the course of two weeks, our clerks and journalists worked diligently to uncover the buried lede, with results that will likely throw a bit of a dung-bomb into public discussion of child endangerment practise and legislation for centuries to come.

The public may recall some of the better publicised cases that were heard in the years of ‘82-‘83. Largely concerned with the judgement of You-Know-Who’s legionnaires and lieutenants, Severus Tobias Snape’s trial was neither the first, nor the last, into which Albus Dumbledore inserted himself.

His was, however, the only trial where Chief Warlock Dumbledore found himself on the side of the defence. It was also one of the few trials that ended with an acquittal (to read of others ending in acquittal, read page 16 of NCNCE).  

With CW Dumbledore standing by his side as both solicitor for the defence and as his employer, Mr. Snape’s trial was impoverished of salacious details, particularly when compared to some of his (alleged) compatriots’ charges.

While Mr. Snape undeniably possessed You-Know-Who’s brand—a fact which was proven, under orders, at trial—his involvement in the raids and attacks for which He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was famous was never conclusively proven, nor did he admit to any such actions under direct questioning. (Let it be noted that CW Dumbledore successfully petitioned against the direct administration of such tools of inquisition as Veritaserum which may have illuminated the nature of Mr. Snape’s involvement conclusively).

This was all achieved with the—possibly dubious—claims that Mr. Snape served as spy on CW Dumbledore’s behalf, and for the advancement of the (not officially sanctioned) organisation The Order of the Phoenix.

At that time, the Ministry saw fit to overlook CW Dumbledore’s clandestine counter operations, with the same war-time temporary order which granted the Department of Magical Law Enforcement permissions to utilise the Unforgivable curses, a provision which has since been repealed. (Read more on pages 20, 1, and 9 of NCNCE).

For reasons that are not readily apparent, after a minimum sentence of one month in Azkaban prison, Mr. Snape was released back to public life, under the conditional stewardship of CW Albus Dumbledore, who, serving in his capacity as Headmaster of Hogwarts, was charged with tracking Mr. Snape through his probation period of one year from the date of his release.

Given the time of the year, Mr. Snape went immediately back to Hogwarts to resume his duties as Potions Master and Head of Slytherin House the very next day after he vacated his cell in the cursed north-sea prison.

Even after the expiration of his probation, Mr. Snape has found little cause to show his face amongst the Wizarding public. Each year, the governors of Hogwarts School entertain no less than ten complaints per term about his class management and performance, but he has remained ever under Headmaster Albus Dumbledore’s protection.

Or at least that was the case until the final week of July, where our investigative journalists uncovered a monstrous, three-headed Cerberus of public interest.

Registered first was the stripping of custodial guardianship from Harry Potter’s blood relatives (a pair of muggles on his mother’s, Lily Potter née Evans’, side).

The second item brought to floor was approval for Severus Tobias Snape’s official resignation from his posts at Hogwarts.

The final item under discussion was approval for the same Severus Snape, acquitted Death Eater of no little infamy, to assume Harry Potter’s custodianship himself, effective immediately.

It’s difficult to fathom what Chief Warlock Albus Dumbledore could possibly be thinking.

As the common refrain so often goes: “Oughtn’t we think of the child?”