Acid Reigns

The first weeks were like an awkward foxtrot of missteps and stubbed toes. Life inside the stuffy house on Spinner’s End took place at an odd pace, in stops and starts.

Beginning with the ride back from Surrey, Harry and Snape, realising that the scope of their relationship had shifted, fumbled around one another with the sort of lack of finesse that would have impressed only the clumsiest of social pariahs.

***

Harry wasn’t exactly sure how he felt about Snape swiping Dudley’s tape deck. Somehow, he was certain that such a theft would only come back upon his own head ten-fold, though given the apparent abdication of the family, he couldn’t exactly articulate how such a consequence might have manifested.

His initial excitement over not having to stay at Privet Drive took a sharp swerve when he realised that there was no telling what Snape might do with him now.

Maybe he’d get back to Cumbria and would immediately summon those two terrifying men once more. He could give Harry over to them and wash his hands of the inconvenience of Harry’s wretched existence with ease.

From what Harry was given to understand, were he to be given over to Yax, he’d likely never have seen the light of day again...

His thoughts were interrupted when Snape, with a smooth skill that belied the purposefully poor technique he’d been employing in the beginning, shifted into fourth and urged the car faster onto the expressway, heading north.

His pale, thin hand was beating on the top of the steering wheel, the other tapping on the downbeat against the shifter (which he still insisted on holding with his left hand).

When the song went faster, so did Snape, his hair flying every which way; a consequence of both his own head bobbing up and down to the music and the wind from the cracked window catching it.

“She’s runnin’, I’m flyin’... right behind in the rearview mirror now... Got the fearin’, power steerin’, pistons poppin’, ain’t no stoppin’ nowwwww—”

“PANAMA! Panamaa-a-a-a-ah!”

He wasn’t whipping around the other motorists, but it was a close thing, and Harry felt the urge to lean forward with his head between his knees. The only thing that stopped him was the certainty that such a position would put him in considerably more danger should they careen into the rear end of another car.

It was strange, knowing now that his parents had not only not died in a car accident, but that they likely hadn’t even owned a car to begin with.

Strange in that it did absolutely nothing to discourage or deprogram the fear that by now felt very much a part of himself.

It was as much a preoccupation—a deep fascination—as it was a phobia. Cars were complex, and enormous, and heavy. Sometimes crass and plain and at other times elegant, or even graceful.

Snape’s car was... it was difficult to say.

Plucky. Determined. Put-upon.

Certainly long-suffering, for all of the abuses that Severus heaped upon it.

Harry patted the seat beside him with a bit of sympathy, as if to soothe the steel-framed beast beneath his bottom. As if to say ‘There, there.’

For the Marina’s part, it strained to meet demand; feeling as though it were surging forward, urged on as a thoroughbred beneath the power of a jockey wielding a crop in hand. The combination of the fast, upbeat music and the speed of the car barreling up the M6 was producing something heady. A rush—a desperate tattoo of his heart beating down his ribcage like it wanted to escape the confines of his chest entirely.

For a moment, he almost felt as though if he were to jump out of the car and run alongside it—he’d be traveling seventy miles per hour too. As though through sheer force of adrenaline he could sprint that fast, that eagerly, forward.

In spite of his nerves and his fears, Harry felt himself grinning—not in spite of his terror, but maybe even because of it—and he scooted to the side of the back bench seat to catch the wind coming through the passenger window on his face. The speed was intoxicating. It felt like life itself.

They made it through the remainder of the album like that, until the tape ran out and Snape only was content to suffer for two minutes in silence before he made up his mind that he’d like another.

“There should be one up here on the floor...” Snape peered down and to the left, his black eyes scouring the passenger-side foot space until he seemed satisfied.

“I won’t climb up there,” Harry protested. He may have been feeling gutsy, but should they come to an abrupt stop he’d fly through the windscreen. Harry had only done so earlier in the day to save them both. There was no pressing need at the current moment to stick his neck out in such a way.

Though he looked a bit put-upon, Snape did glance back at him and give a wry twist of his lips. “Calm yourself, I’d not dream of asking you to,” he drawled.

Though he was clearly being sarcastic and uncharitable, Harry didn’t really think the man would have.

From what he’d learned of the wizard in their shared week working in the kitchen, Snape was more safety conscious than he’d appeared at first blush.

“We’ll pull off for a bite and make the rest of the trip after,” the older wizard decided. They were coming up on Newcastle-under-Lyme and were about half-way, but given that they’d been in such a rush to leave, the Marina was, by now, likely low on petrol. 

Pulling off into town, Snape took a slow circuit of the winding roads, apparently scouting for a promising lunch. Once he’d earmarked a likely establishment, he doubled back to a petrol station.

“Up here,” he commanded over his shoulder, patting the seat beside him.

Harry unbuckled himself and scrambled over the seat, having to shove five plastic cases to the floor to make himself space. There, he found his feet kicking a clinking pile of glass bottles.

“It could use a bit of a clean, couldn’t it?”

Snape was peering with languid boredom out the window and watching the attendant in his side mirror with a small frown. “Is that you volunteering?”

Harry nosed at one of the Coke bottles with the worn toe of his trainer. “Coke has sugar in it, right?” He asked, thinking on the tiny slice of health-consciousness that had interrupted his nearly seven years in the Dursley household.

He remembered quite clearly his aunt carping on about how sugary pop was and why she’d not be supplying it in the fridge any longer.

It had been a lie, in any case. The beverage had reappeared by the end of the week, once Dudley had led a campaign of increasingly vitriolic tantrums with the aim of conquering his mother’s concerns over his weight.

“It may,” Snape answered, with a bit of obvious evasion.

“‘Cause sugar attracts bugs.”

“And spiders eat bugs,” Severus observed, his expression glib, “perhaps if you’d be so kind as to lend me your ‘Wheat,’ we may find a mutually beneficial solution.”

Harry’s eyes widened a fraction. “You’d let him stay in the car?”

“Of course not. You could catch the bugs and take them to him.” Snape took a moment to pay the attendant before he pulled away from the pump, whipping the wheel to bring the car into the lane.

Harry did his best not to show that he was clenching his teeth in fear. “Or…” he began, breathing deeply through his nose to quell his nausea, “you could bin the rubbish on the floor—"

“I could do,” Snape shrugged one shoulder with the arm on the wheel. “But that would deprive you of a perfectly simple chore.”

“What—me?”

“You didn’t think you’d be coming to stay without pulling your meager weight, did you?”

Truth be told, Harry hadn’t really considered what it meant to leave Surrey with Snape for the second time. He was too consumed with his relief over not seeing the combined force of his relatives’ sneers upon him as soon as they’d opened the door to number four.

“Because, if you find picking up ten glass bottles to be too great of a task then I could scrounge up a few more line items, I’m sure. I’ll not see you turn into some slothful idler—"

“You… you want me to clean the car?” Harry asked, feeling curiously distant from the conversation. “That… that’s it?”

Snape threw him an annoyed but somehow curious glance, looking a bit bemused. “Are you asking for more?”

“What about the baseboards?” The boy found himself objecting. “And… and the linens?” Harry winced, thinking of the poor state of the porcelain throne in the shack that abutted the back of Spinner’s End. “…the loo?”

The car dipped as Snape nearly seemed to convulse with what appeared to be scarcely contained rage. He corrected course with a dearth of grace, as far as automotive handling was concerned.

“You may help me with potions in the kitchen—”

Harry felt his hopes rise and soar. He enjoyed his time in the kitchen more than anything he’d done in his short life thus far—!

And then his grand aspirations and dreams were dashed with the finishing of Snape’s sentence.

“—for the remainder of the summer.”

Harry blinked at the man, hoping he didn’t appear like a dullard as he did so. “…Oh.”

This time Snape slanted a clearly annoyed glance at him, his lip twisting in a faint sneer. “Well, if my plans for you are so detestable, pray tell what you thought it was you’d be doing holed up with me. Because I’ll not be tolerating any latent slugabed loafer tendencies you may have been hoping to indulge. You may be a southerner by birth and breeding, Potter, but in the north, men are expected to work—"

“Well, what made you think I wasn’t planning to work!?” Harry objected, feeling slighted. Had he not worked? Had he not proven he would? “It’s only… why only until the end of summer? Can’t I do potions with you whenever?” To his horror, his voice had adopted a faint whinge, like he’d heard Dudley do when he was only just winding up for a strop.

The car bore left into a crowded car park for what appeared to be a tourist-trap style café.

When Harry managed to open his eyes again—he’d shut them out of terror, even though Snape had managed the turn with as much gentleness as could have been expected—it was to find himself at the end of a disconcertingly assessing look from his saviour cum captor.

The shocks did little to blunt the rattling of the frame as the tyres ate up the final few feet over rough gravel until they finally came to a full stop.

Even though they were clearly at their destination, Snape made no move to exit, nor did he turn to the door. He crossed his arms over his thin chest and pivoted to face Harry, pinning him with a heavy, expectant stare.

“And precisely what did you expect you’d be doing while school was—"

The man’s eyes lost focus as he paused, his face taking on a shocking pallor. More than looking like he’d seen a ghost, Snape was pale enough to have become one, himself.

“—in session…” he finished, appearing rather faint.

It took him only a moment to recover himself, however.

“Never mind. Don’t answer that,” he commanded, shaking his head so his hair flew in an arc about his shoulders. “Come on, if we don’t put our orders in now, we’ll get beat out by the supper crowd.”

He leapt out of the door like a tightly coiled spring and Harry was left to follow at a more sedate pace, pondering the wizard’s abrupt about face.

When he closed his own door, he realised that Snape was already the entire length of the car park ahead of him and was nearly to the door. Harry had to jog to catch up.

Little was said as they were seated by one of the white-shirted waitstaff, but Harry felt his concern and anxiety mounting with each step.

For one thing, he could read the tension in Snape’s tight shoulders. He’d seemed ill at ease since they had exited the car.

For another... this was the nicest restaurant that Harry had been to with the man. He wasn’t quite sure how he was meant to conduct himself. The first time they’d eaten out together, Snape had been upset when Harry had chosen toast for himself. And the past two times, Snape had taken the initiative in ordering when Mrs. Padiernos had asked for their choices—which was just as well, really, as Harry had never heard of any of the foods that Rice Bowl offered.

Ultimately, Snape must have anticipated the difficulty, as he dictated to Harry the terms of his lunch.

“Something with meat and veg. At the least.”

Harry’s legs kicked and he ducked his head to hide a smile. The relief he felt was almost instantaneous. “’Kay, Severus.”

His finger listed down the fussy paper menu as he tried to find something suitable.

“What’s ‘Kichee?’”

“Kitschy?” Snape asked, “Where are you seeing that on the menu?”

“What’s it mean?”

“Kitschy means something tasteless or tacky but I’ve never heard of food described that way. Show me where you’re seeing that.”

Harry turned the paper around and indicated with his finger. “A ham and cheddar kichee—”

Snape sighed, sounding annoyed as he did so. One of his hands came up to poke his thumb and index finger deeply into his eyes, massaging around the socket. “That’s quiche, Harry. ‘Keesh.’ It’s French.”

“Oh...”

“Quiche is like a savoury pie made with egg for the filling.”

Harry’s eyes widened. He quite liked egg when he was allowed it. “Can I have that?”

Snape seemed to frown for a moment before he shrugged that odd half-shrug he seemed partial to. “It says it has ham and spinach in it, I suppose that fits the rule. You’re to finish it, mind. I’ll not see you take two bites of it and stop eating—”

“I’ll finish it!”

“See that you do.” Snape barked back, having returned his attention to his own menu.

When the server came back, Snape placed their orders, and he even shelled out extra for a second bottle of Coke for Harry.

After the waitstaff left them to their lonesome, an unsettling silence fell over the two, and Harry peered out at the stoic statue that Snape presented from beneath his fringe, feeling wrong-footed.

What now?

His fingers played with the starched white fabric of the tablecloth in front of him.

How had they ended up here? In this fancy café that both of them looked so ill-suited for. Just that morning it had seemed as though they could have gone on forever making potions in Snape’s kitchen, until those two oafs had showed up and changed everything.

Would Snape have even tried to take him back to the Dursleys had they not come to call? Or was it only a matter of time—

“I can almost hear you stewing over there, Potter,” the man across from him snapped, looking ill-at-ease. “Out with it now so it doesn’t spoil this doubtlessly over-priced meal we’re to share.”

Harry winced, thinking how his kichee-thing was going to cost Snape a neat eight quid...

Uncle Vernon had probably never spent so much on Harry.  The price and peril of being an ‘ingrate.’

“What... erm... what if Yax and Wulf are still back at the house—”

“I thought I made that point plain to you—they can’t get in on their own.”

“Well, no... but they could wait for us, right?”

Snape was surveying him with an inscrutable expression. “It’s possible. Many things are possible. But I have reasons to believe it unlikely.”

“What reasons—”

“None that concern you.”

Harry felt his face heating as he tried to quash the glare he could feel himself leveling in Snape’s direction.

‘Fix your face. Fix your face before he fixes it for you, like Uncle Vernon would do—’

“Like that little book—the one with my name in it—didn’t concern me?”

Against all odds, the man actually smirked, seeming genuinely amused. “Precisely like the little book.”

Harry frowned thoughtfully. “Is that like a magic telephone?” He asked, picking up his fork where it lay beside his water glass and playing with the tines with the fingers of his opposite hand.

“Mm. After a fashion,”

There was that damn answer again. Why couldn’t Snape ever just say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ like a normal person?

“Who’s talking on the other end?”

“Never you mind that,” Severus growled. He almost appeared to be sulking, and for some unnamable reason, a blush was rising up in his ears—it was all Harry could really see of the man, as he’d ducked his head even as he evaded the question with his verbal answer.

Harry didn’t get much further with his questions on the subject, as their meals were deposited before them and they each tucked into their provisions.

As it happened, Coke was a syrupy, bubbly concoction, and Harry hated it as soon as he felt the beverage on his tongue. He spent a whole minute after trying to quaff his water to wash down the sickening sweetness that lingered on his tastebuds.

It was, perhaps, his luck that Snape seemed to have a tooth for such a thing, as the older wizard quickly surmised that the drink hadn’t suited Harry whatsoever, and he snatched the bottle back from him to settle next to his own, taking it as a backup for when he finished his first.

The quiche, on the other hand, was magnificent, and Harry had no trouble finishing it as he’d promised.

Snape, for his part, seemed less that satisfied with his fisherman’s pie, and though he finished it, he grumbled under his breath for the duration about how he had been a fool to expect he could get a decent one this far inland.

Harry was just finishing with his flaky crust when he looked across the table to where Snape was spearing peas with his fork.

“Hey—you’re a teacher...”

“I suppose I should be glad that not every fact you gleaned in the past week was lost on you.”

Harry frowned, but ignored Severus’ snide response. He got like that sometimes... it was just best to let it go. He never tried to get even the same way Dudley might have.

Then again, Dudley could never have come up with some of the things Snape would respond with when Harry said something stupid.

Dudley would just get angry, and that always preceded a sporting round of the Harry hunt, which usually ended with his cousin—sat with his fat arse upon Harry’s chest—smacking, hitting, and pinching any part of Harry he could reach.

“Does that mean I’ll be in your class, Severus?” Harry asked. The man had said something about school... and it stood to reason that Harry and Snape would both be occupied come the autumn term. That would neatly explain why he couldn’t make potions with Harry any longer after that...

Harry resolutely refused to consider that perhaps Snape would try, once again, to reunite him with his relatives in a few short weeks.

Snape gave up on his pie with a look of disgust and pushed the dish away from himself. “I... you would be. One day.”

“I will?”

“You... you would.”

Something about the phrasing was planting the seeds of misgiving in Harry’s fertile imagination, but before they could take root into anything that fruited, Harry needed more context. He cautiously ventured a grin.

“That’s good. So it won’t matter that we can’t do potions in the kitchen anymore. Not if I can see you in class... hey, what is it you teach, anyways?”

“Potions... but, Harry—you wouldn’t have had for a professor for a few years yet.”

There was that odd niggle at the back of Harry’s mind again. Something was decidedly off. Snape looked like he was almost embarrassed, and he was making an effort of hiding it, although he wasn’t quite succeeding. If anything, his closed off expression only belied the fact that he was deeply uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken.

“What school will I go to?”

“Rowky Syke Primary School, same as your mother and I attended,” Snape answered.

That response didn’t garner the same strange affectation that the previous two had. Harry almost felt his suspicions ceding ground.

“Rowky Syke teaches potions..?”

Snape hissed at him with a roll of his black eyes, “Don’t be daft!” He snarled, his words hissed under his breath. “Of course it doesn’t. Rowky Syke is a muggle school. The school I teach at requires its entrants to be at least eleven before they begin under our tutelage.”

“Ohhh,” Harry mouthed, his eyes widening. That would be like that school he’d heard of from Uncle Vernon: Smeltings Academy. Though it had been impressed upon Harry that he’d not receive such a premier education. Harry had it on good authority that he, himself, was meant for a state school: Stonewall High.

Snape paid their ticket when it came and they both rose in tandem to start back for the car.

The rest of the ride was uneventful, but for Snape demanding that Harry stay silent so that he could think properly.

Thinking properly apparently involved cranking the volume up as far as it would go on an album by some band called Poison.

Harry had been enjoying his musical education until that point, but found the ringing in his ears that this produced to be a bridge too far. He leaned against the car door, miserable, and tried to block out the sound all the way from the café until they pulled onto the streets that he recognised as belonging to Backbarrow.

He might have considered risking a request that Snape knock it off and turn the dial down a bit, but the man’s grim expression disabused him of any such notions.

With no little dread, Harry gnawed his lip as the car pulled to a stop before the kerb. He peeked out the window, his head ducked down low, to try and survey the skyline above the roof—in case Yax or Wulf were flying low as they’d done when in pursuit.

“They won’t risk coming after you again. Not now,” Snape said, apparently having anticipated Harry’s concerns, or possibly, having divined them from the boy’s cagey behaviour. He made to exit and didn’t wait for Harry to follow.

It took nearly a whole minute before the boy decided that he’d rather be with Snape in the house than alone, sitting like easy prey, in the car.

He sprinted to join the wizard on the stoop where Snape was mumbling to himself over the lock.

Harry had seen the young man work on the complicated spells that barred entry to the house before but hadn’t paid it much mind. It looked, if one wasn’t paying close attention, as though Snape was merely jiggling the key in the ancient lock. In truth, he was incanting a long, complicated-sounding litany of foreign nonsense over the keyhole with his wand.

“What’s that gobbledy-gook mean?” Harry asked, his voice hushed.

Snape paused, his wand poised over the doorknob. “With almost no exceptions that I can imagine, Latin—which I was speaking—and Gobbledy-Gook are completely different languages with no identifiable commonalities.” He finally managed the door and pulled it open, stepping across the threshold in a smooth motion.

Harry was left to noodle over the surprising revelation that such a language could be real when he ran straight into Snape’s back.

“Buggering fu—”

“Ah ah ah, Severus,” began a warm voice in admonition. Harry froze, not daring to look around Snape’s back to see who it was that could possibly have broken into the man’s sitting room. The wizard standing in front of him seemed to be faintly vibrating with anxiety.

“That’s no language to use in front of such young ears.”

“Headmaster,” Snape drawled, his voice so dry that it might have desiccated even a mummy. “I’d welcome you to my house, but it seems to me that you’ve made yourself quite at home in my absence.”

He stepped aside and, before Harry could decide to bolt, grabbed hold of one of the boy’s narrow shoulders in order to pull him forward and in front of him. Directly in the line of sight for their unanticipated interloper.

As it turned out, that unwelcome guest was a positively ancient wizard—and really, he couldn’t have been anything but a wizard, with his tangerine, polka-dotted robes, his high-heeled red leather boots, his three-foot long beard tucked neatly into the belt that cinched his thin waist—whose powder blue eyes shone out at Harry from behind a smart pair of wire-framed, half-moon spectacles.

He was sitting, apparently entirely at ease, on Snape’s dusty sofa, and he’d magicked a gleaming silver serving tray to hover before him. Upon it sat a delicate set of cabbage-rose bone china with three settings.

“I must say, I thought you might have been back much earlier,” the old warlock remarked, somewhat breezily. One spindly hand reached for a pair of minute tongs with which he dropped two sugars into one cup, three into another, and...

He paused, his blue eyes seeking out Harry’s form. Though he wasn’t smiling with his mouth, he was with his gaze.

“Harry, my boy, how is it that you take your tea?”

Harry had no answer for the man. For one, he was too terrified of any stranger at that moment—particularly one who had evidently broken past Snape’s magical locking mechanisms—to trust much in this visitor. For another... he didn’t think he’d ever had tea before.

“I...”

He felt a push between his shoulder blades. It was Snape, and he was shoving him, gentle though it was, toward the doorway to the kitchen.

“Go pour yourself a glass of milk.”

Nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste, Harry stumbled out of the sitting room and did as he was bid. He hadn’t much wanted milk at that moment, thinking that it would likely be too heavy, especially after the lunch he’d had, but with some surprise he found that the shock had made his mouth run a bit dry.

He meant to stay hiding out in the kitchen with the abandoned potions from that morning but, to his displeasure, he was hailed back into the sitting room a moment later.

“Don’t dawdle, Potter—I heard the fridge close. I know you’re done in there.”

With a parting look to the kitchen—which, amazingly, seemed to have been cleaned of the exploded potion from that morning, though whose doing that could have been was quite beyond him—Harry shuffled into the room with the two men, skirting along the wall with the sort of caution that spoke to his bone-deep weariness. He kept his narrowed gaze on the ancient wizard who was watching him as though greatly amused and entertained.

This did absolutely nothing to endear him to the boy.

“Please, child, take a seat. I dare say you’ll be more comfortable.”

“And I dare say you presume a great deal, playing host in my own house, Headmaster. Kindly make your point plain so we may conclude this great farce.”

The old wizard clucked his tongue, though he seemed greatly amused. “Goodness gracious, Severus. A bit of civility will hardly hurt our cause.”

“Our cause,” Snape sneered, crossing his arms across his chest as he fell heavily to the sofa, at the furthest point away as he could manage from the supposed headmaster. “What common cause do we supposedly have this afternoon?”

The old man threw Snape a faintly exasperated look, his lips drawing thin in an expression that bordered on long-suffering. “No one would ever take you for a fool, Severus. Consequently, ‘playing dumb’ isn’t quite in your wheelhouse, my boy.”

Rolling his eyes to the cracking ceiling, Severus responded with an utterly bored tone. “Who’s playing dumb? I fail to recognise any commonality in our goals that would necessitate this little meeting you’ve contrived.”

“No?” The old mage asked over the rim of his twee teacup. He set it back on its saucer with a small clink and waved an errant hand at the serving tray, which floated away from him and began to swivel, first clockwise, and then anticlockwise, as though it had nothing better to do. “You can’t think of anything we might have to discuss?”

Snape had, by now, adopted a slightly mulish expression. It made him look, once more, like an intractable, obstinate teenager. “No.”

“Because I remember authorising you to go and check in on young Mr. Potter here a week ago—a task which you took no few pains to inform me was most unwelcome and tiresome a chore—and now I come to find that you’ve taken the boy under your own roof.”

“It was needful. His relatives were no-where in evidence.”

“Perhaps last week that may have been true. It seems to me that you took young Harry back to Surrey today, only to abscond with him for a second time.”

Snape bore one tooth in a snarl. He’d resolutely ignored the teacup that the headmaster had prepared for him, and whenever the tray meandered over toward him in order to offer its burden up to the man, he shoved it away again until it took up its spinning once more. “Which of your little spies went bearing tales this time?”

“I don’t think that concerns you at this juncture, Severus. What’s important is why you decided to remove Harry—for a second time—from the safety of the wards on his home—”

“Bugger it all, Dumbledore! They’re selling his home!” Severus was shouting now, an ugly flush having risen to paint his cheeks and ears with an unbecoming, splotchy crimson. “What would you have me do? I brought him back to Surrey when I thought it might have been a poor decision for him to have remained here with me, only to be informed by some bloody estate agent that the owners of the house had no intentions of ever returning!

“Their plans are to sell the house in absentia.” He huffed and threw a small, apologetic look Harry’s way. “They left him.”

The old man’s eyes shone brightly and seemed to catch a bit of light. It looked like some sort of magic trick, the way they seemed to flicker as might the iridescence of an opal. “Why, don’t tell me that you actually care,” he held up one thin hand to ward off Snape’s impending rebuttal, “a welcome development, truly, Severus. But I believe you understood my provisions when I spelled this mission out for you; in the case of such a dereliction of Petunia Dursley’s duties, it was my expectation that you were to prevail upon her the importance of her responsibilities.”

Snape was shaking his head, his hair whipping from side to side from the vehemence. “You don’t know Petunia any better than you know... Helga Hufflepuff!” He declared, his face growing cross. “There is no reasoning with her! She’s not... not Lily. She is...”

“Yes?” The headmaster prompted. He took a small tin from a pocket somewhere in the monstrously hideous garment he wore and withdrew from it a hard candy that he popped into his mouth.

“She’s petty. And cruel. And unworthy—”

“My, my. I suppose I was mistaken in thinking that you’d set aside some of your worse prejudices, Severus.”

“These are not judgements borne out of mere bigotry, Dumbledore! I know Petunia! She’s no more capable of accepting good reason and offering genuine charity than the Dark Lord himself.”

“Be that as it may—”

“No! You will just have to be at the mercy of my word on the matter, Headmaster. Harry will never be safe with his relatives when at the slightest provocation—or in truth, for none at all—they would toss him before the wolves or abandon him on his own to the tender mercies of that which lurks in the wider world.

“Your plan failed. You must accept this. There can be no turning back now.” Snape finished. He finally turned and accepted the teacup from the tray which had begun butting into his shoulder once more, and he sipped at it with ill-grace.

“I really must protest! There surely is still time—"

Snape darted a look Harry’s way, but the boy could make neither heads nor tails of what it might mean.

In truth, the entire conversation had been difficult to follow.

Had this Dumbledore person been the one to send him to his relatives’ house?

He wasn’t sure he liked that. Not one bit.

“Even if I could convince Petunia and her oafish husband to reconsider, there are other things to take into consideration at this stage.”

“Those being?” The headmaster asked, his eyes peering over his half-moon glasses with the kind of intensity that even Harry understood meant that one should not try lying to the man.

“I...” Snape began, looking desperately uncomfortable, “That is to say, I had no choice in the matter...”

“Severus.”

“My cover is no longer intact,” Snape admitted, his hands tightening around his teacup. “Such as it was, in any case, after you vouched for me to keep me from Azkaban. They’ll never accept me back now, if the time ever comes. I had Harry Potter and failed to give him up when it would have been all too easy to dispose of him.”

Harry winced, hearing his own demise be discussed in such cavalier terms. He was grateful that he and Snape had had their conversation in the car earlier that morning, or else he might have run screaming from the house for a second time that day.

The open, polite demeanour that the headmaster had maintained thus far faltered at the news. Where before his eyes had glittered like two gemstones in the light, they now flashed as tempered steel might do.

“This is most unwelcome news, Severus. Your foolishness may yet cost us beyond our means to make payment—”

“My foolishness!”

“Indeed!” The older man’s voice rose by only perhaps one decibel, and it was one decibel too many. “Had you not removed Harry from his home after your trip to hospital, you’d never have been forced to expose yourself!”

“And what would you have had me do, hmm? ‘Oh—here, Potter. Groceries for the week. Do try not to kill yourself while you’re off on your lonesome at a mere seven years of age.’

“Pray tell, what would have happened to him once the sale was finalised? When the estate agent found him left to his own devices without guardianship? What if he had developed complications from his surgery?” Snape breathed deeply after apparently having talked himself blue in the face. “You did not think this through, Albus. Far be it for me to doubt your brilliance in most matters magical, or when it comes to our erstwhile Dark Lord, but you know nothing of the family to whom you left the boy. You know nothing of the muggle world.

“Had the estate agent found Harry there alone, he’d likely have been turned over to the police, and from there... who knows? He may have entered the system to never be heard from or found again—”

“We have means of finding him, as you well know,” The old man—Dumbledore—objected.

Snape shook his head and set his un-drunk tea back on the swiveling tray, much to the tray’s dismay. “You could not have obliviated yourself out of such a mess. There would have been too many actors at play. Concede defeat, old man. Your king was compromised from the start.”

“I will make no such concession.”

Snape sighed deeply and scrubbed his long face with both hands. “And I stand accused of foolishness.”

“You do not yet see your importance in the larger tapestry being woven,” Dumbledore charged, looking almost worried, and his manner urgent. “Perhaps you cannot conceive of the day where Tom will rise again—”

“I do not doubt for one second that he will,” Snape refuted. “Where that man is concerned, I cannot be said to lack for imagination.”

Seeming slightly triumphant, Dumbledore began to needle the man once more: “Then you see the folly of costing the Order its spy—"

For this, Snape sent the older wizard an acrid, black scowl. “We are more than our mere usefulness to your ends, Headmaster.” He looked over at Harry, his black eyes softening a touch.

The boy had remained mute during all of this, determined to glean as much as was possible from their unguarded discussion. He had a feeling that what he was witnessing was a rare window into things that he may never be occasioned to observe again. His intention was to understand as much as he could of the circumstances surrounding his topsy-turvy life.

Snape canted one black eyebrow in his direction and slanted his eyes toward the headmaster.

Harry got the message loud and clear—or at least he imagined he did. ‘Pay attention,’ it seemed to say.

Snape was drawing this out on purpose.

“In any case, Severus,” the headmaster began, taking his glasses from his nose in order to wipe them on a brilliant amethyst cloth he fished from a pocket, “if Harry is in need of alternative accommodations, I can’t see why you would be the first or most appropriate choice of guardian for him.

“After all,” here, Dumbledore’s eyes settled on Harry himself with an assessing gaze, “I shouldn’t imagine that he would care to spend any additional time in the company of the man who was responsible for his being orphaned.”

There was absolute silence in the wake of the pronouncement. Snape had grown deathly pale, his hands clawed in the faded material of his black jeans as he stared at the headmaster with a look that spelled betrayal.

As the silence persisted, the old warlock’s mouth began to twitch, perhaps presaging an expression of triumph. For all the pleasantness of the man’s mild features, his smile was somehow unkind. Predatory.

Harry couldn’t help the bubbling indignation that rose up to choke him.

This man—presumably Snape’s employer if his title was anything to go by—thought he’d waltz in and begin throwing his weight around; browbeating Severus for having the simple decency to not shunt Harry’s sorry bottom back to the unmerciful clutches of his relatives—for letting Harry stick around for a week when he was feeling poorly after his surgery—only to do his best to throw that kindness into the meat-grinder by trying to bring up something that Harry was quite sure he wasn’t supposed to know about Snape, if this Dumbledore person’s self-satisfied smirk was anything to go by.

That wouldn’t do. By Gor (as his uncle might have exclaimed), it wasn’t right.

“What do you mean by all of that?!” Harry’s shrill voice cut through the silence like a filet knife, and it seemed to ring through the tiny chamber.

Dumbledore met his gaze with a wry, patronising smile. “Why, only that Severus here, for all of his good intentions, has made some grievous errors of judgement.”

Snape was still frozen. He looked rooted to the spot. Incapable of defending himself. It made Harry all the angrier for his defenselessness.

“No,” Harry cut in, his voice belligerent. He was swinging his legs where he sat in his chair in time with his agitation and the toe of his right trainer caught the glass of milk he’d sat on the ground before him, sending it spilling across the floorboards. “I mean what do you mean by trying to make Severus look bad to me? That’s a nasty trick, Mister. Really nasty—do you want me to hate him or something?”

“Not at all, my boy,” Dumbledore demurred, adopting a placating mien. “I only think you have a right to know the hand that Severus had in—”

“I already know, thanks,” Harry snapped, the final ‘s’ of thanks hissing out between his teeth. “Mr. Snape told me what happened, and you know what? I still think he did his best. Don’t you?”

The old wizard’s face began to look faintly ill at ease. As though he’d finally caught wind that his gambit was failing. “Doubtless Severus was in an unenviable position, Harry, but—”

“Mr. Snape got me food. As much as I could eat,” Harry informed the man on the sofa. To his horror, he felt his eyes growing a bit teary. “I’ve never had as much as I could eat before...

“And he took me to hospital and let me listen to rock music, and he made me dinner, and bought me Wheat, and he lets me talk to Mrs. Padiernos myself—he doesn’t even tell me to go hide so she won’t see the little freak he has with him—”

“Harry, has Severus called you a little freak!?” Dumbledore gasped, looking genuinely taken aback.

“No!” Harry cried, dashing his sleeve against his eyes. “No! Aunt Petunia did! And she never let me have biscuits or ice cream! She never made me dinner, special, or took me for Flipino food!”

Snape must have been recovering himself somewhat, for his voice was soft when it interjected to correct him: “Filipino.”

“And Mr. Snape sat with me when I was in hospital, and let me watch the telly, and he let me mince roots and pluck spiders for the potions! And he saved me this morning when Yax and Wulf came—so you can... you can just shut up! Just SHUT. UP. about Mr. Snape!” Harry’s voice was hoarse by the time he finished his tirade, and he was huffing with exertion. He’d risen to his feet in some instinctive idea that he ought to try and tower over the—much taller—man who’d remained seated on the couch. He felt entirely spent, but his body was humming with far too much adrenaline for him to even consider backing down now.

Not when Snape himself had nothing to say to protect himself.

Someone had to.

Harry had lacked a great deal in his rearing to that point, but one thing the Dursleys had hammered into him from the day he’d arrived on their doorstep was the value of gratitude. Of course, they’d demanded it in every instance where they were miserly and uncharitable in their dealings with their nephew, but that didn’t mean that Harry didn’t recognise that Snape deserved every ounce of thankfulness that Harry could find it in himself to muster.

Dumbledore’s clear blue eyes surveyed Harry silently for a full minute before he turned them on his employee, looking as though he were accusing the man. “I see that you have found an admirer in young Mr. Potter, here, Severus.”

“It was never my intention to manipulate the boy into becoming my sycophant, Albus. Not like some people might do. If Harry feels any regard at all for me, it is by his own merit.”

“Ah... according to young Harry, it is actually your merits that seem to have won him over.”

Harry stamped his foot, sloshing his trainer in the spilled milk. “Severus is nice to me!”

Dumbledore nodded, his expression closed off, though no less pleasant. “As you have made quite clear to me. I only wonder what it is that he plans to do come September first.”

Snape visibly stiffened, but Harry felt his confusion mounting once more. That was only a month and a bit away...

“What’s September first?”

“That’s the day term resumes at Hogwarts, where Severus is employed. It is my expectation that he returns to his quarters in order to teach and to conduct the business for the charges in his house. We don’t accept children younger than eleven, Harry, and there would be no one available to watch over you or teach you during the day.”

Frowning, Harry looked between the two men: Dumbledore with his unflappable and utterly facile manner, and Severus who was sitting as straight and unmoving as an iron pole. “Severus told me I’d be going to Rowky Syke Primary School.”

“I fail to see how that will be possible, given Severus’ own need to remain in residence over the school year—”

“I will be resigning.” Snape declared, his voice oddly flat. “If I’m not mistaken, there is a provision within the charter allowing for a one-month notice for resignation given extenuating family circumstances.”

This, finally, had the effect of satisfactorily shutting the old man up. His mouth had dropped into a slight loll, and his eyes had lost whatever magical effect he’d been maintaining which caused them to strobe up like a disco ball.

It looked as though his jaw was working for several moments in some attempt at finding adequate words, and even when he did manage to speak, it wasn’t with the same confidence he’d maintained throughout the entirety of the meeting to that point.

“This... that’s... outrageous doesn’t begin to describe—”

“No, I suspect that it doesn’t,” the young man snapped, his voice impatient. “Outrageous doesn’t begin to describe the state of affairs that you’ve so handily manufactured for Harry’s upbringing. There are a few better words which come to mind: unacceptable, injurious, wholly insufficient, contemptible—”

“That is enough!”

“—ill-begotten, profoundly malicious—”

“You cannot accuse me of malice, Severus!”

“—borderline sadistic—”

“ENOUGH!”

Dumbledore’s voice had gone shrill as he stood, his shriek ringing out through Snape’s sitting room. The owner of the house sat, unperturbed, with his arms crossed over his chest. He affected an even more languid pose by shifting so that he could lean back against the crevice where the arm of the sofa met the back, crossing one booted foot over the opposite knee so it rested on his thigh at the ankle.

“If you think for one moment that I will stand by as you attempt to seize control over the boy—”

“Who’s seizing control!?” The younger wizard laughed, the sound of it grating. He was mocking the old man.

There had been times where Harry had heard Snape bark out a laugh, but never like this.

“I’ve done nothing but to act in Harry’s best interests as his needs have come to my attention. I’ve done no more and no less than what you charged me with last Wednesday when Figg owled you. For reasons that were beyond my comprehension you chose to send me on this errand, and now you dare to say that I am attempting to wrest control over the boy from you?

“Could it be that you sent me in the hopes that there could be no attachment possible?” Snape asked, rhetorically, adopting a disingenuously ponderous look. “Would that be why it was me who was sent rather than... say... Lupin? Or one of the Weasley’s brood? Someone more nurturing? Who surely wouldn’t have left the boy alone to his relatives after witnessing what there was to witness any sooner than I am proving to?

Snape ended his tirade with an antagonistic hiss, “Admit it, old man. You had no faith in me to do the right thing, whatsoever.”

Dumbledore’s glower only lasted a few seconds more before his face seemed to fold into a tired, lined visage which, perhaps, finally showed his age in an accurate light.

“I certainly did not, Severus. You cannot blame me for expecting—”

“The worst of me.”

“Your words, not mine,” the old mage sighed. “You have a... a certain record of behaviour. I might be forgiven for thinking that it came dyed in the wool, so to speak.”

“You haven’t the faintest idea what I’m capable of. You’ve seen what you wished to see. You expect behaviour in accordance with my worst, because you’ve conveniently ignored and brushed away my capabilities for doing my best.”

Snape stood and stomped toward the door, wrenching it open and jerking his head through to the outside world. A clear demand for the headmaster to leave. “And now the bill comes due.”

The old man shuffled toward the exit, a motion that seemingly should have been impossible given his heeled boots. Accordingly, Harry wasn’t sure whether to trust this show of defeatism whatsoever.

Nothing about the old warlock seemed genuine in the least.

At the threshold the ancient man stopped, looking down on Snape where he stood—for he was perhaps three to four inches taller than the younger man—and heaved a heavy sigh.

“Is this to be the way of it, my boy? You are intent on your course?”

Snape drew himself up as tall as he could go, which somehow only made him appear shorter in comparison to the willowy headmaster. “I am.”

“Then at least permit me to aid you in a matter to which I doubt you’ve given proper consideration,” Dumbledore urged, his voice gentle. “Custodianship of Harry Potter is not likely to be easily transferred to someone such as yourself, Severus. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you why that is.”

At this, Snape seemed to pale. He looked, for the first time since he’d declared his intention to quit, nervous.

Seeing that his former employee understood him, Dumbledore nodded with a solemn gravity. “I will be pleased to put my finger on the scale where-so-ever it might be necessary to bring about the desired outcome.”

This earned a terse nod of Snape’s head, and he visibly swallowed. “And what will you be expecting in exchange for such aid?”

Albus Dumbledore sighed, looking almost sincerely wounded. “Merely that you keep in touch. Come to me if either you, or Harry, have need of me.” His eyes seemed to bore into Snape’s own, and a moment passed between them where it seemed as though more was being said than could possibly have been expressed in those two, simple sentences.

After a full half-minute, Snape broke the shared gaze, and the tension of the exchange was seemingly ruptured. “Agreed.”

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?”

Following the revelations from the article, the ride back from the playground was, mostly, conducted in terse silence.

It had taken Harry a long time to finish reading the article, and even once he’d finished, he found a good portion of it to be beyond his ability to comprehend. He’d lowered the paper from where he held it aloft with both hands, a mimicry of how he’d seen adults hold the paper when they took their morning news, and let it fold across his lap.

Hidden beneath the stain from the beans was a picture. At first, he hadn’t realised that it was meant to accompany the article, but looking closer, the three faces in the photograph staring up at him where it rested over his knee, he finally noticed the caption underneath.

‘The Potter Family,’ it read, ‘circa July 1981.’

It could have been any baby on his first birthday, Harry thought. Any baby, and any happy family. Yet, there again was that beautiful, smiling woman—his mother—and beside her, a grinning, messy-haired man with a pair of rounded spectacles pushed up the bridge of his nose. His father.

Though he’d seen his mother before in Snape’s pictures, caught in the early bloom of youth, it was something altogether different to witness her in the full flower of motherhood. She appeared exquisitely happy. So too did his father, whom he’d never before laid eyes upon, at least as far as he could remember.

One finger, tinged red with rust from the faltering playset, traced over each face, smudging them both with an orangey-ochre colour as the dust on his hand transferred to the surface of the paper.

Snape’s hand had stilled his own with a firm grip on his wrist, and had prised the paper from his grasp.

Before he could protest too much, the man began tearing the paper.

Harry scrambled to halt his movements with a strangled cry: “Stop—!”

But Snape stood, and beyond hanging from the older wizard’s elbows in an attempt to break his grip on the newspaper (which surely would have caused worse damage), Harry was too small to fight him.

Thus, it surprised him all the more when, turning back to face him from where he’d been carefully dissecting the front page, Snape handed him a carefully excised scrap. The photograph.

Harry grabbed it up with both hands, feeling greedy beyond measure.

“Careful with that,” Snape cautioned him. “I don’t know where they got the original.”

Harry gawped at him, feeling slightly breathless. “I can keep it?”

Snape had begun stalking away, having stuffed the remainder of the paper inside a pocket of his jeans—something which should have been impossible, given its size. “Do whatever you like with it.”

Magnanimous though the gesture was, Harry couldn’t help but to feel that the photograph bothered Snape, somehow.

It probably had to do with that mess he’d described in the car, weeks back. About the longstanding feud with Harry’s father. About Snape’s destroyed friendship with Harry’s mother.

About a stop away from home, not having been able to take his eyes off the three faces for any appreciable amount of time, Harry finally ventured to ask whether he could hang it on the wall in Snape’s room.

“My room?” Snape asked, clearly distracted as he rolled to a stop before a red, octagonal sign. “Why should I have to suffer it in my room?”

“So I can see it if I want to?”

“What’s wrong with the wall in your room?”

Harry’s face scrunched up a bit. “That’s where I meant to put it. Erm... if you’d let me move a poster or something...”

“If that’s the case, why did you ask to put it in my bedroom?”

Frowning at the back of Snape’s head—really, it was strange for the man to be so dense all of the sudden—Harry found it hard to provide an response that wouldn’t mock the man, given the obvious nature of the answer. “But that is your room, isn’t it, Severus?”

As though the penny had finally dropped, Snape opened his mouth without actually saying anything. Like he was about to go ‘Ahh.’

“How can it properly be called my room when you’ve been staying there for at least a month, Harry?”

The car was pulling to Snape’s usual parking space out on the kerb in front of his house.

“Well, I thought—”

“That I’d toss you out and reclaim the smaller bedroom for myself, after having finally taken the master after so many years?”

“No, not exactly—”

“That I’d shut you away in the smallest possible hidey-hole that I have on the property—the privy, perhaps?”

Harry shrugged as he shambled out from behind Snape’s seat and followed him out the car door. “It’s bigger than I was used to.”

“What is? My old bedroom, or the privy?”

“Erm... both, I guess.”

“Even Petunia didn’t make you share space with the loo,” Snape commented, as he made to unlock the front door.

“That’s only ‘cause then she’d have to give me the boot every time one of them wanted to use it,” Harry speculated. In all likelihood the Dursleys may have found themselves thrilled had they the creativity to imagine fashioning Harry into a dedicated bathroom attendant.

“So,” Harry began again, “can I hang it in er... my room?”

With a long-suffering sigh, Snape shrugged. “I’ll find you the sellotape after we eat.”

Supper that evening was instant roast dinners and a couple of tins of Heinz spotted dick for afters.

They ate on the sofa in front of the crackling television set as reruns of Yes Minister played through heavy noise.

“Why don’t you cook much, Severus?” Harry asked, around a bite of rubbery potato.

Snape’s eyes didn’t move from the faltering screen, though he clearly wasn’t paying as close attention as he was pretending to, for after a moment, he responded. “Complaints, Potter?”

“No, it’s just, you’re real good at it. That soup you made in Surrey was some of the best I’ve had.”

“I don’t get the impression you’ve had much in the way of proper cooking to know good from bad.”

“Yeah, I have,” Harry protested, slurping gravy off his slice of roast beef.

“Really? Because I got the impression that Tuney scarcely fed you at all.”

Harry ducked his head, attempting to work through the mixture of grief and anger that threatened to well up in him at such a mention. One thing he’d learned about Snape was that the man didn’t care for displays of emotionality or tears.

“She’d give me tastes of stuff so I’d know what was right or not,” Harry explained, his voice tight. The memory of having to go back to his scraps after having sampled the food that was for the rest of the family had him savouring the instant roast dinner all the more. For all that it was a near cheap imitation of the real thing, it wasflavourful and was the sort of treat that normally would have been reserved for Dudley and his uncle when a television special was airing that they didn’t want to miss for supper.

“Mmm.”

“Anyway, this is about why you don’t cook. ‘Cause you’re an adult, and you don’t have an aunt around to say you shouldn’t.”

“No,” Snape drawled, “only a scrawny brat complaining that he’s not being fed home-cooked meals.”

“I’m not—!”

“I suppose I should be grateful,” the man continued, waving his fork through the air to punctuate his affectation of long-suffering lamentation, “after all, I could instead be left all to my lonesome, eating what I want, when I want. Preparing potions quickly instead of hobbling my production time by tutoring a boy far too young and impatient to appreciate the artful legacy into which he’s enjoying an early induction—"

Harry scowled at the man and barely avoided sticking his tongue out at him, thinking that for all that Severus had been kind to him, he may well not suffer such disrespect without striking out against the side of Harry’s head. “That’s not what I meant!”

Snape’s face revealed nothing for a moment, but the careful blankness was almost enough to tip Harry off by this point.

“And you know I didn’t mean that!” The boy accused, his voice rising a bit.

Apparently, his game having been ended prematurely, the older wizard couldn’t restrict himself from smirking down at the coffee table. He made a quick job of cutting around the tops of the tins of pudding with his wand and allowed his spoon to hang, limp, from his lips as he peeled the top back with his fingers pinched and drawn away from the sharp edges. When the top had been peeled back and he’d removed the spoon from his mouth he finally acknowledged Harry’s indignation.

“So I did,” he responded, with a glib little twist of his asymmetrical lips.

“You just didn’t want to say why you won’t cook. It’s about what Mrs. Padiernos was saying, wasn’t it?” Harry asked, his curiosity having gotten the best of him.

“I don’t have any idea what you’re blathering about.”

Harry’s voice rose with an answering accusation: “You do too!”

“If you don’t eat that pudding, I’m going to bin it, Potter.” Snape said around a bite of his own pudding, into which he’d poured a generous lake of golden syrup from another tin he had sitting along with their other rubbish on the low table before them. He mashed his own pudding apart in the tin until it became a goopy soup of sponge cake in sticky goo.

Shaking his head, Harry swiped his own tin off the table and dug in, though it did nothing to deter him from satiating his curiosity.

Pudding was all well and good, but some answers to his myriad questions about his new custodian were far more satisfying.

“You told Mrs. Padiernos that your cooking wasn’t as good. As good as whose?” He asked, staring up at the man’s face, which appeared—for all of his defensive posturing and insouciance—to be adopting a faintly stricken expression. “Why not just cook anyway? You’re really good already. It could only get better—"

“Not as good as Lo—ahem— Mrs. Padiernos’ cooking.”

“Well, duh,” Harry said with an expressive roll of his eyes to the cracked ceiling. “Hers is the best I’ve ever had. But that’s not what you meant either—"

“Oh!” Snape’s spoon fell from his grasp as he gestured violently with his right arm, causing Harry to flinch back. “And you’re an expert on what it is I mean in everything I say, is that it? You’re somehow qualified to speak on my behalf?”

“No,” Harry responded, his voice trembling a bit as he recovered himself from recoiling, “it’s only... I heard her mention your mum on my way out the door.”

The moments stretched between them, stained with silence on both sides. The only sound came from the indistinct chattering of the television set.

Finally, Severus seemed to cave, as his shoulders, which had been held rigidly, released into a rounded slump. “Clever of you, not to mention it until that late.”

Harry shrugged his shoulders and ate some of his pudding. “I dunno. I thought you’d want to say it on your own.”

“Mmm,” Snape vocalised, bringing up both thin hands to scrub at the skin of his face, around his eyes. “And here I thought perhaps you had engineered the entire conversation to catch me out.”

“I wouldn’t try to be sneaky like that," Harry protested, feeling slightly bad about the entire thing by now. Clearly Snape had been evasive because he didn’t want to talk about his mum. Harry could understand that.

“Sneaky? Perhaps. I’d sooner call it cunning.” Snape said, still rubbing at his eyes, now going so far as to dig the heels of his palms deeply into the sockets.

“Well… I’m sorry.” Harry offered, with a regretful twist of his mouth. He set his tin down, suddenly no longer having a taste for the cloying sweetness. He felt undeserving of the treat. “You don’t gotta talk about her, Severus…”

“At that, perhaps I ought to.” Snape groaned, heaving out a heavy breath through his nostrils. His head was sitting propped on his hands, folded beneath his jutting chin. He was pitched over his knees, his elbows holding him up like the famous sculpture which Harry couldn’t quite remember the name of.

“You really don’t have to—"

“Damnit! I know that, you gowk!” The man snapped, his gaze adopting the poisonous quality that often made him look so dangerous. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I would ever talk to you, or anyone else, about something I didn’t want to if it was my intention to avoid doing so!”

Harry raised two placating hands, palms up, “Okay—"

“Additionally, my reasons for not cooking are not so easily reduced down to the fact that my mother was possessed of exceptional talent in the kitchen,” he sighed, deflating once more.

“You are too young, perhaps, to understand the consequences I face from my decision to tender my resignation…”

Harry frowned, not liking that assumption whatsoever, but he was too nervous to interrupt. The subject appeared to be putting Snape in a sour mood.

“For all that your uncle appeared to be a rotten specimen of humanity, he fulfilled his duties as the man of the house, at the very least.”

“His duties…” Harry prompted, wondering what it was that Snape was getting at.

Was shoving one’s nephew into the cupboard an expected activity for most heads of household? He knew, supposedly, that discipline was, as it had been made plain to him on many occasions that his uncle was both responsible for (and entitled to) take Harry to task for his myriad failings.

Snape pinned him with an assessing glance, but still seemed intent on making Harry work for the answer himself. “You read the article. What, if anything, stuck out to you?”

“Erm…” Harry thought hard. In truth, there was a lot in the article to mull over.

For one thing, Snape was apparently well known enough in this strange world to be mentioned on the front page of the paper. Harry had been told of how his own name was household knowledge, but it was news to him that Snape should be worthy of note.

For another, he’d evidently met an incredibly important personage when he’d made Dumbledore’s acquaintance. Snape certainly hadn’t treated the man as though he were the Chief Who’s-it or whatever title to which the man apparently was entitled. (He had called the man ‘Headmaster,’ though seemingly with ill grace).

Perhaps the clue to the mystery lay with Snape’s earlier pronouncement over having quit his job…

But then wouldn’t that give the man more time to cook?

Harry voiced that last thought aloud, though he didn’t really realise it until he heard Snape scoff.

“So, with my newfound glut of free time, you suppose I have nothing better to do than to prepare an endless parade of new dishes for you to try?”

“I never said that!” Harry snarled, growing frustrated. The man always seemed determined to take whatever Harry said in bad faith; always interpreting his words in the worst light possible. “You asked me to think about it so I’m just thinking—"

The young man before him heaved a put-upon sigh. “Think harder.”

But the more Harry pushed his brain to process, the more inane his observations and memories of the article became, and he just knew that whatever it was he was thinking was likely spiraling further and further from the actual relevant point.

In the end, feeling frantic and a bit embarrassed that he couldn’t come up with an answer, and growing angry to boot, he shook his head with an aggravated frown.

“Really? You can think of nothing?”

“I’m trying!”

“You’re telling me that it didn’t stand out to you in any way that you were now sharing the same roof as a man who had spent time in prison?” Snape asked, his eyebrow canted in a way which underscored his incredulity.

Harry flushed, immediately feeling as though he were being assessed on his intelligence, and, against such a rubric, being found wanting.

“Whose acquittal was tenuous enough that he was paroled to his employer,” Snape continued, in the same snide tone, “and who, out of fear of public backlash, supposedly never showed his face in public so long as he could help it—”

“No!” Harry protested, his face starting to flame hot, “’Cause you’d explained all that to me, hadn’t you?”

Snape appeared nonplussed. “And you just took me at my word.”

“Shouldn’t I of?” Harry posed, his anger and frustration mounting. “Were you lying, then?”

Snape shook his head, slowly this time, so that his hair swung in a pendular motion. “I wasn’t, no. But perhaps I ought to be concerned that you would take someone who’d abducted you—all but a stranger to you—at his word. Particularly after what you saw in the kitchen that morning.”

“What do you want from me!?” Harry demanded, crossing his arms against his chest and surging over his knees so that he was all but doubled over. “Do you want me to not like you? To think you’re a liar? Do you want me to—”

“I don’t relish being called a liar, no,” the man answered with a small frown, “but a little wariness on your part would hardly be misplaced. While I’m not sure I’d prefer you to look at me as a likely bad actor, you’d be well served to practise a little more discernment when choosing who to trust in the future.”

Not knowing what to say to that, and hating that Snape was probably right, Harry merely glared at the man, hoping that, should he wait in silence for long enough, that Snape might finally explain what he meant by his earlier comments about the article and Harry’s uncle’s duties.

It didn’t take long. Snape must have finally decided that Harry had no additional insights into what the man was playing at.

Admitting the issue, however, appeared to be costing the older wizard, and as soon as he named the problem aloud, Harry didn’t have to wonder much at why that might be.

“I’m not employable,” Snape explained. He wasn’t looking at Harry as he said this but was instead staring daggers at the empty tin of pudding. “I thought time might have changed things. I thought that... that by being custodian over you, people may have decided to extend me a bit of... of charity. But no one wants me.”

He breathed deeply through his nose, producing a sound like the loud wooshing of air through a cracked window.

“I didn’t want to burden you with anything like this. It’s not for you to concern yourself with my finances, Harry. But our margins are thin. Razor thin. For the moment, discretionary food isn’t an option.”

Harry’s mouth was making a small ‘o’ of surprise. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t understand the concept of poverty—although by no metric could the Dursleys have ever been called destitute—but Harry had lived as though he himself were the child of a penniless family for so long that it came as a surprise that Snape should care so very much what Harry thought of the matter.

“That’s okay, Severus—”

“It very much is NOT okay!” The man spoke over him, tearing his hands away from his face to glower at the boy. “It is NOT okay that I am forced to choose between proper food for you and ingredients for experiments that I cannot afford to have fail! It’s NOT okay that I’m borrowing to get your uniform sorted so that you can start school in two weeks—”

“You are?”

“It’s bloody well NOT alright that, because of what happened with Yaxley and Mulciber, I can’t even fall back on my own bleeding skills to get by, because, in truth, it wasn’t alright for me to have been hawking illicit potions in the first place!”

“You were...?”

“What did you think they were here for, you little dunderhead?” Snape asked, his eyes flashing with annoyance, “Did you, perchance, think that I had them over for tea regularly? Or that I was in the habit of entertaining their brand of depravity without recompense of any sort?”

“I don’t know!” Harry cried, “I...” he rubbed at his face, feeling a headache coming on, “I didn’t think much about why they’d come, alright?”

“None of this is alright, Harry.” Snape sounded utterly defeated. “I shouldn’t be bothering with more ingredients... I should, by rights, spend it all to try and care for you. But I can’t afford not to, you see? Anything I have left... I have to use to try and find more.”

“I don’t understand,” Harry said, feeling his legs kicking in their familiar, nervous cadence underneath him where he was perched on the sofa.

His custodian sighed. “As with so many things, your age prevents you from understanding. I must use what I have left to try and come up with something—some venture, some product, some service... anything—that might be able to support us come winter, because I’m not entirely confident that we’ll be able to eat by Christmas at the rate things are going now.”

“How do you do a thing like that?” Harry asked, his mouth twisting in a display of his confusion. “How do you come up with something new, from nothing?”

Snape peered at him for several moments, apparently considering the question. “Usually, one identifies a need and attempts to address that need with a solution.”

“So… what do people need?” Harry asked aloud, screwing up his face as he attempted to puzzle out the question.

It was almost useless. The very act of brainstorming seemed to be getting in the way of him identifying any promising ideas.

“It’s not so simple, is it?” His custodian asked, with a sardonic grimace. “Such strokes of inspiration can’t merely be summoned when you need one. It requires being in the right place at the right time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Snape drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, “I mean, being in the middle of brewing a potion, and seeing that the method you’re using is a stupid way of doing something when you know that simply modifying the technique would produce better results.

“It’s when you wish you could just make someone shut up but there’s no good method for doing so, and then you set out to fix that problem, yourself. Perhaps by creating a new spell.

“The best ideas come from when you actually have real need and no suitable solution, not from sitting there and stewing over the world at large. Or, at least, I’ve never managed to invent anything that way.”

“So, you’ve invented things before?” Harry asked, his eyes widening.

The man before him shrugged, but didn’t seem to take any especial pride in acknowledging his own craftiness. “I’ve contrived solutions to silly little problems. Little good that did me.” He sneered at the table, the expression speaking to a deep bitterness. “No one ever paid me for any of it.”

“Then, when you’re in the kitchen, in the afternoons...?” Harry prompted him, attempting to understand. Perhaps if Snape thought him capable of comprehending the problem, Harry would be allowed to be a part of the solution.

“It’s not much more productive than hoping for a stroke of serendipity by way of dashing one’s own head against the wall,” the man quipped with a glower, “yet, for all that, fool that I am, I persist in such delusions.”

Snape dropped his head back into his hands, spearing his fingers through the greasy hanks of tangled hair. “It is trouble enough that I defied Dumbledore to take you on, Harry. To have done so and then not be capable of providing for you is unthinkable.”

“Well,” Harry offered, feeling chary at voicing anything at all, particularly a line he’d heard repeated—with nary a shred of empathy—by his uncle, “there’s always the old-fashioned way...”

Pursing his lips with obvious impatience, Snape responded with a terse bark: “You’ll have to elaborate.”

“Well, the magic people won’t take you, but you live half in the normal world, Severus,” Harry began, his voice slow, hesitant, “couldn’t you get a job at, like, a normal place?”

“What? You mean like down at the pub?”

“Well... yeah?”

Though he at first frowned, it slowly morphed into a considering look. “I suppose I could do.” Snape rubbed at the back of his neck, looking none too pleased. “If need be, I’d take one if it were offered to me.”

“You made it sound like we need it,” Harry returned, though he was still feeling as though at any moment he might wander into some trap that would close around him. “I can do stuff too, Severus. I could clean for people... or maybe Mrs. Padiernos needs another cook—”

Snape’s retort was swift and ill-tempered. “Lola—ahem—Mrs. Padiernos, would never have you. She’d be aghast if I sent you to work in my stead.

“And, incidentally, you are not to tell her that I’m having troubles. Not that you’ll likely have a chance, very soon. Restaurants are strictly off-limits for the time being.”

Harry felt a small pang at that, though it wasn’t an unexpected development. He could tighten his belt with the best of them. He’d show Snape. He wouldn’t complain about anything: not toast for every meal, or having to bathe in the tin tub leaned up against the privy out back, or his hand-me-down uniform.

It was all far nicer than living with his relatives, even so.

With Snape he had a room. He hadn’t yet had a blow aimed at his head, even though he’d never stopped ducking whenever he forgot to watch his mouth and would say something that would normally have resulted in his uncle or aunt’s palm striking out to swat him upside the skull. Snape tried to feed him enough, and even if it wasn’t always the best, it was the same as what Snape himself was eating. Harry never got the crust of the bread while Snape feasted on the meat of the boule.

Harry would be happy to scrape by with the man if it meant more afternoons talking about why Sammy Hagar was a better lead man for Van Halen than David Lee Roth, or about the difference in harvesting booins from around the local lakes at noon on any given day versus at three in the morning on Fridays.

He’d prove himself. He’d show the man. And when he went back to school, he’d be certain to score higher than a mere sixty out of one-hundred on his reading test.

That’d make Snape happy.

Rowky Syke Primary School was a dowdy institution, conducted out of a dated, steel, pre-fab building that likely had been erected in the fifties, in order to serve the families of the old Reckitt Blue Works that had closed the doors against the last of its straggling workforce in 1981. Consequently, the school—which previously had seen class sizes of thirty to fifty students per year—saw its numbers dwindle to a paltry ten to fifteen students per year (and that included the surrounding areas from all around the village of Backbarrow).

Not only had families begun moving away in the seventies when the factories in town had begun to slough off workers, but in the interceding years, family sizes had begun to shrink. No longer was it common to see families of five to seven children. It was now quite normal for families of the same means to stop at one or two.

The result was a tiny, impoverished school, operating on a shoe-string budget, and with as many unpaid volunteers teaching as there were actual, bona fide teachers.

Snape didn’t explain much of this to Harry before he was meant to start his classes, and neither did Harry ask. There was too much else to be done. Snape had to scrounge around for proper supplies for Harry’s satchel, and he spent the better part of two hours on the phone with goodness knew who, asking each person he called whether they had a boy’s uniform in Harry’s size. By the end of this exercise—or, truth be told, at the beginning of it—he looked irritated beyond measure, and shamefaced, besides.

And Snape feeling any sense of shame over his pecuniary circumstances was rather unpleasant. Harry had come to find out that the man was as proud as he was surly and ill-tempered, and having to beg for Harry’s clothes had put him in a particularly foul mood.

The night before school was to start, Snape had driven Harry and himself back into town, where they stopped off at Rice Bowl.

To Harry’s disappointment—though he knew better than to hope for Mrs. Padiernos’ cooking after Snape’s talk with him about their dwindling funds—they weren’t there for a clamshell of fragrant braised meat.

For all that, however, Harry refused to give away Snape’s apparent shame over his precarious financial position, and merely smiled his most charming smile up at Mrs. Padiernos before the woman rushed upstairs—where she and her husband evidently lived—and returned with a shapeless bundle, wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied with twine.

“I thought that Nap’s uniform would fit best, ‘Rus, but it still seemed a little big,” she chattered, handing over the package. “There’s two in there, but Nap’s been going through a spurt lately, so if Harry grows, I can see about getting you another set.

“Of course, if you’d just come on Sundays, we’ve a whole closet of uniforms for school that we save for children who need them—”

“I’m sure these will suffice, Mrs. Padiernos,” Snape interrupted her, taking the package from her and stuffing it under one arm.

There came a pregnant, and awkward pause, where the woman peered at Snape through her delicate, gold-rimmed spectacles, before she sighed and shook her head. For a moment it looked as though she wished to say something to the wizard, but evidently, she thought better of it, for she looked to Harry with a considering glance, and then pressed her lips together in a tight line.

Severus cleared his throat when it appeared that the silence was going to stretch on indefinitely. “Harry? I don’t think I have to tell you what the appropriate response is, in such situations.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Padiernos,” the boy added, as quickly as he could manage.

She shook her head at him, with another tight-lipped expression that Harry was unable to puzzle-out.

“You don’t have to go calling me that because your kuya insists on it. You will call me Lola,” she announced, sending a look Snape’s way.

Amazingly, the man ducked his head, appearing as though he wished to hide his reaction.

“As ‘Rus used to do, when he was young and innocent enough not to be embarrassed by having a Lola—”

Snape’s voice sounded strangled as he attempted to voice his objection: “That’s not—”

Mrs. Padiernos clucked her tongue over his protest. “It is.”

“I’m old enough to be his father, I can’t be a kuya—!”

“Then why are you acting at being one?” She asked, her voice tart.

“I’m not!”

Mrs. Padiernos turned back to Harry and ignored Snape’s further commentary attempting to dissuade her. And for Harry’s part, he kept his mouth shut when tempted to ask what any of this business might have meant.

But, for Severus’ sake, he didn’t tell the woman that the man often slipped and called her Lola anyway, even if he always tried to correct himself.

“Are you looking forward to starting school?” She asked him, with a slight smile, having effectively walled Snape off from their conversation. The man had retreated to lean against the far wall with ill grace and a bit of a huff.

Not knowing how to answer, Harry shifted from foot to foot, the fingers of one of his hands playing with a hole he’d found in the bottom of one of his trouser pockets where he’d shoved his hands deep into the baggy garment. “I s’pose,” he ventured.

“Rowky Syke, won’t it be?” Mrs. Padiernos prodded, though not in an interrogative way. “You know ‘Rus went there, before he went off to go to his mam’s school?”

“My mum went there too,” Harry told the woman, “and my aunt.”

“Did they now?” Mrs. Padiernos looked up to send a slightly assessing look Snape’s way. “Might I know these two young ladies, ‘Rus?”

Looking a bit trapped, Snape gave an asymmetrical shrug of one shoulder and snarled at his boots. “How should I know?”

“Backbarrow’s not very big, and I’ve been here a long time. Perhaps they came to St. Catherine’s, back when your mam would bring you by—”

“They were Protestant.” Snape corrected her, in a somewhat snide tone.

“I seem to remember one summer where you came by with a pretty girl friend—”

Severus’ hands, where they hung at his sides, balled into fists, “She was never my girlfriend!” His face was flushing a deep red, and the colour from his cheeks seemed to be diffusing out to the far extremities that were the shells of his large ears.

Were it possible, Harry thought he might expect the man to start emitting steam from his nostrils, he appeared so hot under the collar.

Clucking her tongue, Mrs. Padiernos shook her head with a roll of her dark brown eyes, “I said a friend that was a girl.”

“But what you meant was—”

“What I meant,” the woman interrupted, speaking over Snape’s wounded pride with ease (the sort of ease that spoke to years of having had to wrangle with the man’s ego), “was that I remembered you had a girl you seemed to enjoy spending time with a long while ago. Red hair, I’m thinking? Tall and thin?”

Snape swallowed, and looked as though he were about to answer, when the phone began to ring, and the woman hurried off to answer, quickly snatching up a small notepad that lay beside the telephone to begin recording the order as it was placed.

They left shortly after, and as they bid Mrs. Padiernos goodbye, Harry could tell that Snape was in a poor mood from the brief mention of Harry’s mother, as Snape’s farewell was colder than usual.

Harry attempted to make up for the man’s reticence with his own warmth, waving emphatically to the woman and testing the name she’d insisted on out.

It felt odd on his tongue. Like some part of him knew that it was more meaningful than a simple four-letter name had any business being.

“Bye, Lola.” Harry had offered his wave with a bit of a shy grin, “Thanks for the uniforms.”

“Bye Harry! And I’m not the one to be thanking: if your kuya ever brings you to Penrith—” she looked to Snape with an eagle-eyed stare, “you can thank Louis yourself. They’re his son’s old uniform. I’m just passing them along.”

When they left and Harry had asked Snape what Mrs. Padiernos had meant by all of it, he’d been reluctant to answer, instead choosing to crank up the volume on Dudley’s tape deck—which had become their car player, whereas Snape’s older model stayed in the kitchen for them to listen to while brewing—and Harry’s only answer came from Sebastian Bach’s voice rising and falling on the Skid Row album that Snape had chosen.

Between songs, Harry persisted with his interrogation.

“Is that her name? Lola Padiernos?”

“No.”

“Then why am I suppose’ta call her ‘Lola?’” Harry asked with a small frown. For that matter, why was Snape himself so resistant to calling the woman that when he frequently did so, by accident, in private?

“’Lola’ means grandmother.”

Harry’s eyes widened behind their frames. “Is she your—”

“No.” The man barked again, “She’s not my grandmother.” Snape was taking the turns more sharply than he usually did, at least since he’d calmed down his driving a few weeks before.

Harry let the man stew in silence and was rewarded when Snape heaved a great sigh through his wide nostrils. “She’s just a friend of the family. Or of my mother rather.”

“Oh,” Harry offered by way of a sympathetic little murmur at the news, “you don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to...” he reassured the man once again.

Although Snape glowered at him in the rear view, and his lips tightened into a grim line, his voice, when it answered him, was more weary than anything else.

“Thank you, Harry.”

Thinking he was perhaps changing tack—and in a very considerate way—Harry chose another question. “What’s a ‘Kuya?’”

Snape resolutely refused to answer. In fact, he acted as though he didn’t even hear Harry’s query.

Dinner that evening was on the disappointing side, although this was largely because both of them had been subjected to the comparatively mouth-watering scents issuing forth from Mrs. Padiernos’ kitchen. When held up against corned beef hash and fried potatoes with eggs—because Snape always, for some reason, insisted on adding eggs to near enough every meal—it was no wonder that the cheap fry-up fare didn’t hold up by contrast.

Even so, Harry had made a promise to Severus not to complain about the food, and truthfully, it wasn’t bad at all, even for being simple. The meat was spicy, the potatoes salty, and the egg rich in flavour.

For all that the man refused to cook—or at the present moment in time was unable to do so—Harry had never gone to bed hungry, nor had he left the coffee table (where they ate the majority of their meals) feeling unsatisfied.

Snape sent him off to bed early that evening, and Harry could scarcely sleep. The next morning, the twenty-ninth of August, was a Monday, and Severus had told him that they’d be waking earlier than usual so that the man could walk him to school and show him the route.

By the time that Snape poked his head in the door to rouse him, Harry was still only half-snoozing, and he woke easily, jumping from the old bed that used to belong to Severus and pulling on his trousers and socks with a mix of eagerness and dread.

How many times had he wished for a fresh start? For a school or a classroom where he wasn’t already known to the biggest gang of bullies? How many times had he yearned for exactly this? A bedroom of his own. A uniform that fit—even though he had to roll the trouser legs up a couple of times to accommodate the short length of his shins. An adult to walk him in to school, even if only for the first day? (Aunt Petunia had always driven Dudley to school, and left Harry to walk all by himself, which, after a fashion, became the best part of Harry’s day; Dudley-free as it was).

Snape was never talkative in the early mornings, and Harry was fine with that. The man drank a cup or two of strong NesCafé (with two, heaping spoonfuls of instant coffee granules and a generous pour of sugar), and would munch his toast in a mulish, mechanical fashion as he discarded the paper’s salient news section for the puzzles near the back.

Harry still wasn’t sure why Snape seemed allergic to reading about current events, but he took advantage of the situation by swiping the paper for his own perusal. Since that first article that had been about his custodianship and Snape’s trial, Harry had made it his business to familiarise himself with The Daily Propheteach morning, heedless of Snape’s repeated warnings about the rag’s accuracy and its lack of candor in reporting.

Though he knew he lived with a wizard, and though he got to witness small feats of magic every day, that was nothing compared to the glimpse of the enchanted world he managed to steal through reading the wizarding world’s premier paper.

Part of the wonder of it all was that it was seemingly so mundane to wizards and witches themselves. There were sports played on the back of brooms that were apparently as engaging as football was for normal people, and where the financial portion of Uncle Vernon’s Sunday Times spoke about assets such as oil or land, the magical world seemed concerned with trades in things like dragon eggs and goblin-wrought goods.

That morning, Harry didn’t make it to the pages concerned with business. His attention was caught up almost immediately by an item half-way down the front page which appeared upon unfolding the paper from its rolled presentation.

HOGWARTS IN DIRE STRAITS AS STAFFING PROBLEMS PERSIST: Departure of former Head of Slytherin and Potions Master, Severus Snape, has left storied institution in the lurch; lacking for qualified applicants.

A photograph of a splendid castle accompanied the article and Harry had to gnaw on his lower lip to stifle the gasp that wanted to escape. That was where Severus had worked?

Why come back to Spinner’s End at all?

Harry began to feel uncomfortable in his seat as he risked a look up at Severus, absorbed, as he was, sipping his coffee and noodling over an across row for his crossword.

Snape had given up what appeared to be a high-ranking position at a prestigious institution with pay that could sustain him for…

Well.

For chasing after an eight-year-old whelp, eating tinned meat on toast for every meal, and staying in a house he clearly hated to its very foundations. All so that Harry might not be alone.

It was enough to cause the boy’s stomach to churn with a sick sense of guilt.

Although at that moment Snape didn’t seem terribly bothered, Harry knew that the man wasn’t exactly happy with their current situation. He’d made that clear enough whenever he attempted to portion out food, or when he thought Harry wasn’t listening while he puttered around the cauldrons that littered the kitchen.

Ducking his head behind the paper that he’d folded backwards on itself once more, Harry began to slowly work his way through the meat of the article.

The sudden departure of preeminent Potions Master, Severus Snape (28), one month ago has sent Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry scrambling for a solution as they careen towards what may prove to be a catastrophe of pedagogy.

No matter how Harry tried to sound the last word out, he couldn’t fathom what it might mean.

“Severus,” he ventured, with a sense of prickly foreboding.

“Mmm?”

“What’s ‘peed-a-goggy’?”

Distractedly, Snape frowned as he made a mark with his pen on his portion of the paper. “Where are you reading that?”

Instead of answering directly, Harry offered the fragment of the sentence giving him trouble: “a ca-tas-trophy,” he sounded out, “of peed-a-goggy—”

“That’s ‘pedagogy,’ Snape corrected his pronunciation, “the ‘e’ is short,” then, finally seeming to snap to, Snape’s eyes sharpened in a split second. “What’s supposed to be the catastrophe?”

Harry tried to think fast to come up with a pretense, but before he could get out a single syllable, Snape had snatched the paper back from him and scanned it himself. Then, with a look of mixed disgust and, oddly,triumph, he threw the paper back down between them.

Before Harry could reach for it once more, Snape stood from his seat and knocked back the rest of his sludge-like coffee in one dreadful slug. “Let’s be off. You’ll be wanting to leave the house with at least twenty minutes to spare if you don’t want to be tardy in the mornings.”

He didn’t wait for Harry to follow but strode from the room, his boots making the aged floorboards creak beneath his weight.

Harry scrambled to catch up and found that Snape had waited outside the house for him, watching as he closed the door firmly behind him to make sure that the wards sealed their home securely.

Apparently satisfied that it was so, Snape gave a short nod of his head and turned again to lead the way down the street.

They walked the entirety of Spinner’s End without conversation, as Harry was far too absorbed in studying the derelict houses and empty lots to say much.

Somehow, it looked different walking than it did riding in the car. Through the window, one didn’t get quite such a feel for exactly how abused the old town was.

Several times, Harry stumbled, either over places where the pavement seemed to have risen at least two inches from the surrounding blocks of cracked concrete, or over assorted pieces of trash that impeded their way.

He’d been about to tread on a broken bottle while distracted by an old, boarded-up mechanic’s shop (which had apparently, at one time, been called Culpepper Motors), when Snape grabbed him by the upper arm and manoeuvered him bodily out of the way.

Glancing back, Harry could see why: the thick glass shard was big enough that it likely would have torn through the sole of his trainer and lodged in the bottom of his foot.

“Thanks, Severus,” he stammered out, feeling embarrassed that he’d nearly injured himself.

The wizard didn’t look his way, he only kept walking forward, his stride so long that Harry felt winded attempting to keep up with him.

“You’ll need to pay attention,” he lectured over his shoulder, “stray bits of glass are the least dangerous thing you’ll likely encounter in this part of town.”

Harry shuddered as he looked around their surroundings quickly, imagining what might be lurking behind some of the derelict buildings. “You mean like Yax and Wulf—”

“Not exactly, no. Though I’ll expect you to be on the lookout for the likes of them too,” Snape told him. “In fact, we likely should have discussed the particulars of how you ought to conduct yourself through town before today. We’ll be having that conversation over supper this evening in order to remedy that oversight.

“If you’re still worried about Yaxley and Mulciber, don’t be,” Snape added. “I’ve taken measures.”

“Measures?”

“Never you mind.” Snape said with a short shake of his head. He led them over the small bridge that spanned the stinking creek, and then, a short while later, over a much larger bridge that had been built to connect the two sides of town built along the River Leven.

When Harry placed both hands on the short wall that bordered the bridge and tipped forward enough to get a good look, he was yanked back by a sharp tug on his jacket.

“Don’t do that!” Snape snapped at him. “You could fall to your death!”

“I just wanted a better look,” Harry whinged, though he did start back following the older wizard when he turned back to their course.

“The river is dangerous and rather violent. You wouldn’t survive a fall.” Then, relenting ever so slightly, Snape’s shoulders drooped and he added, in an even tone: “If you’re lucky, perhaps I can find an embankment someday soon where you can see it a bit closer up.”

Nodding enthusiastically, Harry grinned and looked back out over the water. Nearby, a large, writhing shape emerged from the churning water and landed back into the depths with a loud splash.

“What was that?”

Snape gave an unconcerned half-shrug. They were coming to the end of the bridge. “Likely a salmon.”

“Severus, I read in The Pro—”

A hand came down over his mouth, Snape having spun quickly to slap it over the boy’s lower face. “Don’t mention that here. Don’t mention anything about... about our world while you’re at school, or out in town. Do you understand?”

He only released his hand when Harry nodded frantically.

Casting about for a way to phrase his question, Harry began with a bit of a stutter. “I read in the... the paper about erm...” He hit upon a brick wall. How on earth did one construct a euphemism that was appropriate for something quite so singular?

Sighing, Snape leaned forward and brushed his hair back from one enormous ear. “If you must—and only if you think you must—you might at least consider whispering, rather than shouting it to everyone on the street.”

Feeling grateful for the opportunity to voice his curiosity aloud, Harry leaned in closer. “I read there were mermaids—are there mermaids in the river here?”

Snape pulled back from him with a frown. “Why would you be interested in a thing like that?”

They resumed walking.

“Well, they’re supposed to be really pretty, aren’t they?” Harry asked, with a bit of a sheepish smile. “I thought, maybe I’d get to see one...”

“They are not as ‘pretty’ as they are purported to be, and neither are you likely to ever lay eyes on one.” Snape answered him. “As for the river? It’s likely they’d prefer a deeper, less turbulent body of water. As I understand it, the school you’ll be attending a few years hence has such creatures living in the lake—though they’re not often sighted.”

“Really?” Harry chirped, feeling a thrill of excitement at the thought.

“Really. Though I still can’t say that I understand the appeal.” Snape snorted. “Scaley beasts that will sooner spear you with a trident than grace you with a Mermish serenade. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to be under the water with them when you hear it. Out in the air, their singing is purported to sound positively ghoulish.

“However, if you find yourself so interested in creatures of the deep, I have it on good authority that the River Leven is home to a flourishing community of plimpies.”

Upon further interrogation, Harry found that there was nothing so very interesting about the rotund, magical fish. He stopped asking questions after, faced with a distraction that made it rather hard for him to voice the products of his curiosity aloud. 

After the bridge there came a steep hill that they were made to climb, and Harry found himself getting winded before they’d even made it half-way. Atop that hill was Rowky Syke Primary School, and, to his dismay, he entered the hallway for the first time sweaty, disheveled, and unkempt from the hike.

It seemed as though most of the other students weren’t in such a state, either having come from a different direction, or having been driven by their parents, but when Harry turned to ask Snape about it, he found that the older wizard was already disappearing down the hill, apparently not having wanted to walk the halls that memorialised his childhood.

Harry had to furiously fight the impulse to begin crying.

Breathing deeply through his nose, an attempt to stave off the gritty feeling in his eyes that always presaged a bout of weepiness, Harry pressed himself back against a wall and watched as the other students passed him by, headed into classrooms—apparently already familiar with the school—or talking gaily with friends they’d grown up with.

He witnessed parents pecking their children on the head as they dropped them off, and teachers hurrying about in some vain attempt at corralling the irrepressible energy evidenced by their young students returning for their first day of term.

Where was he meant to go? Who was his teacher? Snape had sent him in with a bag of essentials: a notebook and a zippered pouch of pens and pencils. Would that be enough? It was more than his aunt had usually sent him with... yet less than he’d seen from some other students, notably Dudley.

Maybe, if he crept out now, he could make it back to Spinner’s End before anyone saw him leaving, and they could forget about this whole school business. Then, Severus could teach him magic until he was old enough to start at Hogwarts himself. After all, Severus himself was a teacher—

“Excuse me! Young man!”

A shrill voice interposed on Harry’s spiraling thoughts and he glanced up to see that the hallway was now mostly empty. A large, older woman in a long skirt hurried toward him as fast as her shuffling gait would permit.

“Young man! Why aren’t you in the classroom? Who’s your teacher this year?”

“Err... I dunno,” Harry ducked his head and attempted to melt against the wall, wishing it would absorb him. He had no such luck.

“Your name, if you please?” The old woman demanded, in a tart voice.

“...Harry...”

“Your surname.”

“Potter...”

The woman frowned as she considered him. She was obviously wracking her brains for something and coming up empty-handed. “I don’t remember ever having a Potter before...”

“I’m... this is my first term here,” Harry explained. Now that it had become clear that there was no means of escaping back down the hill and over the river, he felt his sense of panic rising. “Severus... Severus dropped me off here, but he didn’t tell me where to go!” He told the woman, his anger at his situation rising.

“He didn’t... he didn’t say ‘bye’ or... or... he didn’t say anything!” Harry’s voice had grown tremulous as he reached up to dash at his eyes with one fraying sleeve. His chest was hurting, the same feeling he’d experienced when Snape had disappeared upstairs while Mr. Harrogate had gone around Privet Drive taking pictures.

The same feeling he’d felt when he’d been stuck in the privy, waiting until the coast was clear...

The crushing fear of clear and present abandonment.

The woman’s face had blackened considerably as Harry went on. She drew her arms up over her bosom and scowled. “You wouldn’t mean Severus Snape, would you?”

“Yeah,” Harry agreed, “I don’t... I don’t even know if I’m meant to be repeating a year, ‘cause... ‘cause last year when I got my final scores back, my teacher said I might not make it on to year four—”

Ignoring all of this, the woman gripped him by his shoulder and began to frog-march him down the hallway, to parts unknown.

“That little hoodlum!” She muttered to herself, “and here I thought I’d seen the last of his sorry hide when he transferred out!”

Harry couldn’t help himself, he glanced up at the woman’s cross face and nearly tripped over his laces as he was no longer paying any attention to his feet. “Who? Severus?”

“’Severus’ indeed!” She snorted, her grip on his shoulder growing painful as they approached a door with the word ‘headmaster’ emblazoned upon it in faltering, faux gold-leaf. “Little wonder he’d permit his son to call him by his Christian name—”

“I’m not his son,” Harry interjected. His earlier feelings of sorrow and fear were being routed now by frustration and, curiously, indignation on Severus’ behalf. Though he was still angry with the man, he found that he didn’t quite like hearing this sour woman speaking badly of his custodian. “He has ‘custody-ship’ of me.”

“Custodianship?” The woman scoffed, “They would trust the likes of him with a child’s welfare?” She shook her head.

“And he’s apparently doing as good a job as anyone who’s known him might expect of him— filthment that he is!”

Harry hadn’t the faintest idea what a ‘filthment’ was, but the way that the woman snarled it suggested that it wasn’t anything very nice. His gorge rising a bit in his throat, he began to dig his heels in ever so much, attempting to put a stop to her relentless procession toward the head’s office. “Severus isn’t like that! He’s not so bad.”

“You told me yourself, Mr. Potter, that he dropped you here today without the faintest instruction! Nary a word to direct your course!” It was a wonder that the woman had taken in any of that, given, as Harry suspected, that she’d been so incensed over merely hearing mention of Snape’s name that she had taken it upon herself to...

Well. He supposed what she meant to do remained to be seen.

“A l’al bairn like you... what in heaven’s name were they thinking!?” She prattled on. Harry’s attempts at forestalling her from the office were for naught. She was strong for a woman so old. “But we’ll see you sorted. That we will.”

The door thudded open as she forcefully shoved against it with an open palm, the old wood ricocheting off of the wall and causing a loud bang.

“Headmistress! Headmistress, you’ll not believe whose feckless self decided to show his face back at this school—!”

“Mrs. Murray, for goodness’ sake,” came an exasperated voice from behind the cheap metal desk. “I’ve asked you on a hundred different occasions to give me a bit of lead time before you stampede into my office!”

“Headmistress, this will not keep!” Mrs. Murray insisted, with one stocky finger waving in the air for emphasis.

“Nothing ever does,” the woman behind the desk groused with ill-grace. “Very well, take a seat.”

Harry didn’t think Mrs. Murray heard the nearly silent “if you must” that the woman—evidently the headmistress—added at the end of her sentence. Or, if she did, she resolutely ignored it.

“Now, I haven’t got much time this morning, being that it’s the first day of term,” the headmistress continued with an impatient twist of her lip, “What can I do for you, Judith? Who’s this here that you’ve brought me?”

Harry remained standing as Mrs. Murray helped herself to a seat, arranging herself in a way that she perhaps imagined made her look more presentable. Harry thought that was something of a lost cause. There was nothing about the frumpy woman that inspired much in the way of respect, nor that suggested much in the way of any real refinement.

“This here is Mr. Potter, and you won’t believe who brought him in to us this morning—”

“Mrs. Murray!” The sharp tone of the headmistress cut across Mrs. Murray’s salacious introduction. “This is precisely what I don’t have time for. If you could kindly explain to me why it is that you’ve brought Mr. Potter in to my office this morning so I can sort the issue out directly, I’d be most pleased.”

“But Aida! Aida, it was that Snape boy! It was that claggy Snape boy who brought Mr. Potter, here, in!”

The headmistress frowned and seemed to pause for a moment, giving Harry time to finally study her features. She looked to be an age with Mrs. Murray, and evidently, they’d both been at the school for some time, if they were both familiar with Severus.

She looked tired. Even though it was a fresh term, one would have been forgiven for thinking that the headmistress was nearing the end of the school year. Her iron-grey hair was frizzing out from the low-fuss pony-tail she’d pulled it back into, and although it was still warm, she wore a pilling, bordeaux-coloured, knit-lace shawl over her thin shoulders. Her blouse underneath was a hideous brown paisley which made her aged features look all the more pinched and exhausted.

For all that, Harry didn’t hate the sight of her. There was something—if not kindness then he didn’t know what to call it—in the deep tea-tone of her eyes as she looked him over.

Apparently content to ignore Mrs. Murray’s attempts to gossip, she addressed Harry directly. “I’m not even sure where to begin with you, Mr. Potter. It seems you’ve done nothing wrong, yourself—”

“He was standing out in the hall! After the bell! Couldn’t even tell me his year—”

“Judith!” The headmistress hissed between her teeth. “Enough!”

She drew another deep breath and seemed to forcibly look past the woman sat before her to survey Harry once more.

Not liking the scrutiny, Harry ducked his head to frown down at his trainers.

“As I was saying, I’m not precisely sure why it is that Mrs. Murray felt the need to bring you in here this morning, besides the obvious issue of who brought you to school today—”

Feeling his hackles raise once more, Harry lifted his head to pin the woman with a baleful glare, “Why’s that an issue? What’s Severus done?”

“Good heavens, what hasn’t the l’al gowk done?”

“Must I send you from the room, Judith!?” The headmistress’ beleaguered voice raised once more to cut across Mrs. Murray’s indignant squawking. “In point of fact... yes. Yes. Please leave us for a few moments, I’ll send Mr. Potter out shortly.”

“Headmistress Shaw, you’re not serious—”

“I am, indeed, Mrs. Murray. I’d like to talk to Mr. Potter alone for a few moments, if you please.”

What followed was a sort of stare-down between the two women, which Headmistress Shaw evidently won, given Mrs. Murray’s retreat. Although she didn’t leave without voicing her complaints in a stage-whisper beneath her breath.

When they could be sure that the door had clicked behind her, Headmistress Shaw heaved a great sigh and folded her long fingers together, flush at the knuckle, over the pile of ledgers on her desk.

“Have a seat, Mr. Potter.”

Harry sat. The seat was still warm from Mrs. Murray’s large backside, and he felt faintly bothered by that fact, though he quickly forgot his irritation when the Head Mistress leveled her gaze at him once more.

“Allow us to clear the air, young man. Is it true that Severus Snape was the one to bring you by this morning?”

Harry stared hard at the woman, feeling his expression become near enough incredulous. “Yeah... but I don’t understand... erm... Headmistress Shaw,” Harry tried the woman’s title out, feeling decidedly wrong-footed as he did so.

“Ms. Shaw is acceptable, Mr. Potter.”

“Erm... okay. Ms. Shaw, what’s wrong with Severus?” Harry asked, feeling slightly crest-fallen for reasons he couldn’t quite name.

It hurt. It hurt some part of him to hear that yet more people in the town of Backbarrow had cause to think the worst of his friend or custodian, or whatever it was that the man was to him.

Was Severus really so very bad?

It was true that he had fallen in with bad people... but for all of the wizard’s craggy, cracked edges and rough spots, Harry genuinely liked him. Even when he was spinning a yarn about grinding up Harry’s tarantula for flour or selling Harry out to a roving band of carnies. Even when he got up Harry’s nose about his method for mashing ginger root into a paste... Severus was someone he looked up to. Someone he wouldn’t mind being like one day.

Severus was cool.

Looking as though she were sucking a slice of lemon, Ms. Shaw drew her eyebrows down as she glanced about the room, apparently undecided on how to say whatever it was that she’d decided upon.

“I can’t know for certain that there’s anything wrong with Mr. Snape, Mr. Potter—and is there a first name you’d not mind me using?”

“Harry.”

“Harry,” she amended, her words coming forth in a slow, deliberate manner, “and I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive Mrs. Murray for her... for her enthusiasm, when she heard who had brought you here today. She’s not quick to forgive, nor to forget a transgression against herself, nor against any of her boys—”

Harry seized the material of his trousers up in his hands and twisted the twill between his fingers. He didn’t dare interrupt again. It had been foolish to have done so in the beginning. He hoped, if he was to be ratted out to Severus over the ordeal, that the man would be lenient, given that Harry had only wanted to defend the older wizard’s honour.

“I, on the other hand, didn’t have quite such a difficult relationship with your...?” she trailed off, clearly wishing for Harry to supply whatever Snape’s relationship to him was.

“He has custody-ship... custodialship—”

“Custodianship.” Ms. Shaw supplied with a short, jerky nod of her grey head. “Well, that’s no easy feat. I should suppose that means that he was fully evaluated for his suitability, and that such considerations into his character were not found to be antithetical to his ability to provide for your needs.”

Harry’s mouth twisted a bit as he tried to wade through the thick, soupy mess of difficult words and clauses. In the end, deciding that it probably all boded well for Snape, he merely agreed with an, “Er... yeah?

“Ms. Shaw,” Harry began, feeling desperate now to defend his... whatever. “Severus’s been really good to me. He got me a pet, and lets me help him with stuff, and he quit his job to take care of me—”

“Quit his job?”

“He did! He was a teacher at a big school,” Harry drew his hands apart, palms facing one another, to show the approximate size of the institution he’d only seen in photographs. “And he was a Head of House, and—”

“He taught?” She looked a bit dumbstruck, her mouth lolling the tiniest amount. “At an institution with houses?”

“Yeah! And he quit that, so he could stay with me while I finish school here...”

“Ah yes. His transfer.” Ms. Shaw sat back in her chair with a considering look on her face. “If I’m not in error, I believe it was himself and another student in his year that we lost at the same time.” She drew a thin finger over her lips as she appeared to think.

“I recall, at the time, that the story around Mr. Snape’s departure was centered around his behavioural difficulties and disciplinary history here at Rowky Syke. Which—you’ll have to forgive me, Harry—was a bit more colourful than we like to see in our students.

“But the other student, she was a little dear. Very personable. Pleasant. A hard worker...” Ms. Shaw smiled in remembrance.

“I remember thinking it odd that they’d both leave at the same time. Odder than the fact that they were friends in the first place,” she shook her head. “Is he still friends with her, that you know? A Ms. Lily Evans?” She gave Harry a small smile, perhaps hoping to hear how one of her favoured pupils had fared in life.

She was to be disappointed.

“That’s... that was my mum,” Harry forced himself to say, past the clogged-up feeling that had begun to manifest in his throat and chest. “She’s... she...there was a car crash...”

The lie felt so natural to say, given how many times he’d heard it. He almost had to remind himself, once more, that it was nothing but an ugly fabrication.

Unfortunately, it happened to be an ugly fabrication that was convenient enough to trot out for curious muggles. So, Harry repeated it. He hated himself for it, and he did it, even so.

“Oh dear... I am very sorry for your loss, Mr. Potter,” the headmistress murmured, grabbing for a preemptive handkerchief to pass over the desk to him. Harry didn’t use it, but he twisted it between his fingers. It had a different texture than his trousers did. That alone was enough to distract him for a moment.

“I’m sure it all must feel very fresh at the moment—”

Harry looked up, startled. “Oh... no. I don’t... I don’t even remember. That happened when I was a baby,” he told her. “Then I went to stay with my Aunt Petunia, and... and I dunno. Then Severus got me.”

Ms. Shaw peered at him with a quizzical expression. “You ‘don’t know?’”

“Er...”

“Mr. Potter, it would help me to understand the situation a great deal if you could explain to me how you went from staying with Petunia Evans to Mr. Snape.” Something seemed to occur to her then. “Please don’t tell me that Petunia passed as well—?”

“No!” Harry interposed, “No, but erm... I don’t exactly understand. She and Uncle Vernon didn’t come back from church this summer. Not for days and days, and then Severus showed up, but I got real sick, so he had to take me to hospital and they took my tonsils out. And I stayed up here in Cokeworth with him for like a week, but then he took me back to Surrey, and there was someone there in my aunt’s house saying that they were gonna move to Brighton... so Severus brought me back with him and then quit his job to be my custodian.”

Put that way, the whole sordid ordeal sounded entirely trumped up. And Ms. Shaw’s expression seemed to bear that out. She looked like she was some strange combination of horrified and confused beyond measure, and all Harry could think to do in response was to give a sheepish shrug of his thin shoulders.

To lie would have been more believable when the truth was beyond plausibility.

Following the initial unpleasantness concerning Snape's custody over Harry and his ignominious reputation at Rowky Syke, the remainder of Harry's meeting with Ms. Shaw was rather boring.

A few preliminary questions into his former schooling allowed her to place him in the proper year—without having him repeat a year, as he'd feared he might be obliged to do—with the slightly embarrassed acknowledgement that Harry's scores, while not up to snuff for his former primary school, were in excess of what many of his contemporaneous peers were achieving in Rowky Syke's own books. While he wasn't quite top of his class, he'd be in the upper end past the fiftieth percentile.

Of course, maths not being Harry's strong suit, he wasn't in any way able to make sense of that reassurance, although he did try to memorise Ms. Shaw's words so that he could tell Severus about it later over supper.

By nine in the morning, she had informed him of his new teacher's identity, and had brought Mrs. Murray back in to escort him to his classroom.

The woman hadn't been in any way reluctant to voice her dismay over having been excluded from their conversation about 'that l'al gowt' Snape, and she told Harry so in no uncertain terms as she led him through the hallways toward a classroom.

Harry was too preoccupied with watching where they were going to pay her much attention. He had a good deal of practise at ignoring hateful invectives against things and people he loved from his relatives. It was best to nod along, even as his hands clenched into fists in the pockets of his trousers.

"Got away with murder, he did—and I expect he didn't mention a thing about it to you, did he?"

"No, Mrs. Murray—"

"No indeed! Of course he didn't, the scoundrel! My Neil came back all badly, like he'd seen Old Scratch himself! Told me the Snape boy'd had himself a razzie and then Neil couldn't talk any more about it—too scared! And do you know what that little devil said when we asked him about it? Do you?"

"No, Mrs. Murray—"

"The l'al blighter—oh." She sighed and sought to cover over herself with an insincere "excuse me," before continuing, "the... the... that boy said my Neil'd probably seen himself a boggle or some nonsense—imagine it! Of all the things under the heavens!"

Harry made a mental note to ask Snape what, precisely, a 'boggle' was supposed to be. The list of things he felt the need to ask about over their evening meal was growing by the second.

After what felt like forever, Mrs. Murray knocked her creaky old knuckles against the door of one room and waited with an obvious touch of impatience for someone to come answer.

A curly head of greying blond poked out after at least a minute's wait.

"We're right in the middle of our first day assessment, Mrs. Murray, couldn't you come back a bit later?" The man's voice was pitched slightly high, and he sounded as though he was at the very end of a short tether as far as patience went.

"Who's this?" he asked, frowning down at Harry as he opened the door further. "Everyone on my list was accounted for at roll-call."

"This is Harry Potter, Mr. Fowler, he'll be joining in with your class." Mrs. Murray informed him, her voice tart.

The man looked Harry over with a furrowed brow. "And where've you come from?"

Harry hadn't the faintest clue how he was supposed to respond to such a question, and he only managed to shift from foot to foot, scrounging about for an answer before Mr. Fowler ushered him inside the classroom with a barked command that he take a seat.

All the eyes in the room were upon Harry as he made his way to a desk at the far side of the chamber, by a window. He took a seat and focused hard on the faux woodgrain of his desktop, hoping that if he ignored everyone around him that they might return the favour.

He'd evidently entered in the middle of some sort of test or quiz, and Mr. Fowler came around immediately with a piece of paper that Harry was meant to fill out for the remainder of the hour. Before he left Harry with the paper, however, he filled the boy in on all he'd missed in the hour that he'd lingered with Ms. Shaw in her office.

There had been the roll-call, and then a series of introductions for the class—which apparently had been somewhat redundant, as they'd all been in the former years together coming up through school—and that had brought them to a preliminary introduction from Mr. Fowler himself on classroom etiquette and his expectations for their performance over the course of the coming term.

By the time Mr. Fowler retreated to his own desk in front of the blackboard, Harry had a scant fifteen minutes to complete his worksheet before they were collected by a designated student—a girl with a head of frizzing rust-coloured hair tied into a pair of plaits that swung around her ears—and assembled into a neat stack on Mr. Fowler's great metal desk.

Harry had absolutely no confidence where his test-taking was concerned. There had been a couple of maths questions to start with, and he was somewhat sure that he had a shot at getting those right, but then there had been a paragraph he'd been meant to read and respond to, and he'd barely had time to finish working his way through the five-sentence reading selection before he'd had to make a hurried selection from the multiple-choice questions related to the content of the paragraph. He was almost positive that there could be no way he'd gotten those right.

The final portion had bidden him to write a small composition about his summer, and he'd only managed: "Severus played me lots of music in the car like AC/DC and KISS and he got me a Tarantoola, and I call him Weet," Before the paper was taken from him.

When he risked a glance at the paper being taken from his neighbor, he saw that the other boy had managed at least several sentences more than he had.

From that point onwards until they broke to take some exercise in the fenced yard outside the school, Harry trained his eyes forward and made his best effort at not attracting any attention from the students around him, even though he could feel many a curious glance resting on his shoulders.

A couple of kids behind and to his side even tried to poke at him when Mr. Fowler's back was turned, asking about who he was and where he'd come from, but with an unfailing ability to know when a disruption was likely occurring, Mr. Fowler would turn to face his class once more and the attempts were forestalled for another few moments.

When the bell finally rang for the break, Harry sprang up from his desk and tried to make it to the door before the rest of the class. He managed to be near the front of the queue, although he still had to depend upon the human current flowing toward the exit to know where he was meant to be going. When he finally made it into the late August sun, he chanced a quick glance around and tried to scope out the yard.

A slightly rusty playset dominated the back, left-hand quadrant, and already there were ten or more children making a beeline for the dome-shaped metal play-gym. To the right were a couple of football nets set on the crumbling asphalt, and teams had formed up without any direction needed, more evidence that these children had known each other well enough to know precisely with whom and how they ought to play.

Nearer to the school, where he'd exited, there was a long, outdoor table with attached benches where a group of girls had gathered. One girl with chin-length blonde hair was sitting patiently as another with long, thick brown tresses sectioned out her locks and began twisting them into inconceivably complex arrangements around her head. Another girl with a brilliant smile and mischievous eyes was folding a square of paper into a strange, claw-like origami shape as she chatted with the others.

Behind the football goals were a few withered-looking trees: one a sessile oak, another a yew, and a winding, twisty black mulberry that seemed wedged between the first two; its long, scoping and corkscrewing branches looking rather like a referee keeping apart two combatants in a boxing match.

It was here that Harry decided to make his base for the remainder of their break. He zigged and zagged a bit, trying to appear as though he had no ultimate aim for his hapless wanderings, before he finally headed straight for the trunk of the mulberry and settled beneath its shady branches.

They were low enough that they provided a modicum of protection against the other children, and from here he could look out at the cliques and gangs and observe the intrinsic play-ground machinations of the other children from a safe distance.

Or so he'd assumed.

He was startled when a branch—one of the many which had fallen to carpet the slight underbrush near the copse of trunks—cracked beneath the tread of someone's shoe.

Harry turned about so quickly that his spine cracked and creeping up upon him from the back he spied a mussed head of short, shaggy, brown hair belonging to a small but sturdy girl with cartoonishly proportioned cheeks—reminiscent of a chipmunk's—and a spray of abundant freckles. She had a tiny lilac and butter-yellow ribbon-bow that someone had taken pains to tie into the front-most section of her hair and when she noticed Harry there, she only stopped for a moment, before she too plonked down on her bottom a few feet from him, resting her back against the trunk of the sessile oak.

Neither child said a word to one another, and after the first few moments of staring one another down, the girl wrinkled her nose a bit at him and dropped her head to her knees, turning her face away to stare out at the girls occupying the benches.

It wasn't really what Harry had wanted, this weird not-quite company that the girl was forcing on him. He cleared his throat with a pointed raising of his eyebrows.

The other child looked at him askance for a moment, before she acted as though she'd not heard him—an impossibility—and looked back out under the cover of the branches.

"Hey," Harry tried again, injecting a little bit of force into his address, the way he'd seen Severus do when the man was talking to other adults who usually fell to doing whatever Snape wanted.

"Hey, yourself," she muttered, frowning even more now.

Harry blinked, nonplussed. Usually barking at someone like that worked, at least it seemed to for Severus... although precisely what he'd been hoping to accomplish he couldn't quite say, for that matter.

"You know, I kind of wanted to sit by myself a bit," Harry ventured again, irritation sinking into his words. "Maybe you could find a different place to watch the other girls from—"

"You're new," she spat, finally looking up at him with her eyes flashing in anger, "so I guess you'll just have to learn: this is my spot you're in. Mine. This is where I sit. So maybe you can find a different place to rest your sorry bum, 'coz this spot is taken."

Bodily recoiling from the girl's unaccountable vitriol, Harry fell back to his elbows, as though she'd somehow knocked him back with a physical blow.

Was it normal for a girl to be quite so angry?

Well… his aunt had always been angry with him. But generally, when he'd interacted with other girls his own age at school, if they wished to be nasty they'd say something that sounded nice up front then giggle behind their hands with their friends in a way that made it clear only after the fact that they'd been disingenuous.

This full-frontal assault was unexpected.

"I don't see you leaving, so if you're gonna squat here you can stuff a sock in it," she continued. "I don't wanna talk to you." She allowed her head to drop back onto her folded arms, sending poufs of her choppy haircut flying in every direction around her round face.

Harry managed the silence for perhaps another five minutes, during which time loud cries had gone up from the contingent of children who were roosting on the metal play gym and culminated with the boys playing football kicking their ball beneath the branches of the yew.

The boisterous approach of an athletic-looking boy with an unbuttoned collar and his shirtsleeves rolled up interrupted their uncomfortable detente.

"Hill! Fetch me that ball," he called, from right outside the dirt ring that seemed to have naturally formed around the peripheral reach of the trees' branches.

Without a hint of graciousness, the girl stood and furiously beat at the bottom and sides of her skirt—which had attracted its share of dirt and twigs—before she scuttled beneath the low branches over to the much-abused ball on all fours, looking a bit like a feral cat as she did so. There she crouched with her bounty, casting a look over at the boy who'd demanded the treasure from her territory.

When she stood, she lobbed it at the boy's face in an overhead motion reminiscent of a foul throw. She managed to bounce it off of the top of his skull.

"Eeee'yow! Crazy bitch—" he cursed, grabbing the ball up under one armpit and beating a hasty retreat.

"Oo-hooo, Nicky," the goalkeeper jeered at him. "Did the little kitty hiss at you?"

"Bugger off!" He yelled back, "You try talking to Hill next time. Last time I bother with that tapper."

The girl, Hill, stuck her thumbs in her ears and pulled a face at Nicky's back.

Tossing the ball away from himself, Nicky turned back to Hill with a snarl and cupped his hands around his mouth to call: "Ugly bint!"

Without warning excepting an animalistic shriek of fury, Hill lowered her shoulder parallel to the ground—her arms spread for a tackle as she bowed her head like a charging bull might—and rushed the boy, knocking him off balance and into the broken asphalt with a sickening crack of the boy's skull against the ground.

Harry was rooted to the spot for half a second before he jumped to his feet and rushed out to get closer to the fracas, not knowing what he ought to do, but knowing that 'nothing' wasn't an option.

He was beat to the pile up by the other four boys who'd been kicking around the ball and the groups from the play gym and benches began to gather 'round in an impermeable wall of jeering spectators, doing their level best to prolong the fight and prevent aid from the teachers who were proving slow to respond.

Although Hill had gotten the drop on Nicky, he'd handily turned them over so he straddled her and he was striking at her face and torso with unmeasured, unpractised blows. Hill, however, had ahold of his face and was pulling with clawed fingers at his cheeks and neck, leaving angry red gouges where her fingers ripped back.

It was impossible to tell who was doing more damage. Where Nicky was clearly taller, Hill was a slightly pudgy girl whose weight was proving to be an advantage as she managed to roll them once more, even as Nicky prevented her from pinning him for a second time.

Hill pulled her leg back, her intended target clear as she gritted her teeth.

Before she could loose her kick at Nicky's groin, Harry launched himself on her ankle and held fast, her sock preventing him from getting a tight enough grip to truly impede her movement.

"Hey! Stop!" He cried, using his leverage from her ankle to work his way up until he had her with his arms around her waist, using his legs to attempt to pull her back from her target.

"Gerroff!" She hollered, twisting in his grip. Hill's other leg kicked out and made contact with Harry's shins, landing with enough force that Harry knew he'd likely find bruises in the coming days.

Nicky had taken Harry's assistance and turned it to his advantage, climbing up to his knees, newly unencumbered, and using his clenched fists to swipe at Hill's face and cheeks. He'd caught his breath and had begun to cackle, likely from sheer adrenaline, as he enacted his revenge.

"And one of these! Have one of these, pal! How'd'ya like that!?"

Hill's wrathful cries changed rather abruptly into howls of anguish as the heel of Nicky's palm made contact with her nose and opened up a fountainhead of blood. Harry felt it spraying against his face and flung out an arm to fend off more blows from the boy who now knelt above the two of them.

He was perhaps too far gone to stop, and his swinging became more violent and less controlled as he let loose a volley of knocks at Hill while she lay trapped beneath Harry.

With the mounting—and horrifying—realisation that he was enabling the other boy to take open potshots at the prone girl beneath him when his intention had only been to get between them and bring the fighting to a stop, Harry bodily pushed himself forward with his legs until he could bring his shoulders above Hill's face. He bracketed her head with his elbows and forearms and ducked his own skull down to cover her from the hits and kicks that were still raining down upon her, so close that her blood and tears were smearing his glasses where he had his cheek pressed to her forehead.

He absorbed maybe ten hits, feeling his ears ringing and as though his brain was being shaken in its moorings inside his skull, before a shadow fell over them all and he heard a strangled yell coming from the boy attacking him. When he risked a glance up it was to see Mr. Fowler wrestling with Nicky whose face was streaked with tears, snot, and blood.

"She bloody started it! She did it, sir!" He was yelling at the top of his register, so shrill and impassioned that his juvenile voice cracked.

Only a moment later Harry felt a hand pulling roughly at the back of his collar until he was hauled off of Hill's curled up form.

The adult who came for Hill was Mrs. Murray, who stood above the girl, directing her to fix her skirt where it had ridden up before she pulled her up and fussed over her puffy, swelling face.

He had a hard time getting a look at the teacher who had him by the shoulders, as he was propelling Harry along in front of himself, although the hands that had his clavicle in a claw-like grip appeared to be inarguably those belonging to a man.

The circle of students opened to each side, parting before them like the Red Sea before Moses, and the mass of wide-eyed stares and ill-concealed whispers followed the procession of ne'er-do-wells as they made for the squat building's back entrance.

Harry attempted a brief study of the faces he saw jaw-jawing all around him as he was prodded forward. The group of girls he'd seen Hill watching with barely disguised hatred and enmity were ducking behind cupped hands as they whispered back and forth, eyes alight with a malice clearly borne of schadenfreude. The others seemed merely curious, besides the boys who'd been playing footy with Nicky. They were calling out words of reassurance to their captive comrade as he marched on to meet his fate.

"He didn't do it, sir!"

"Mr. Fowler! It was Hill, then the new boy joined in! Nicky was jes' gettin' our ball back!"

"Chin up, Henderson! D'un worry, we'll tell yer mam who did it!"

Mr. Fowler pivoted where he stood and stopped their progress, growling at the boys calling to their friend. "Enough from the lot of you or I'll make additional calls to all of your mothers! I suspect none of you wish to join Mr. Henderson, Miss Hill, and Mr. Potter in the Head's office! No? Then button it, the lot of you!"

Harry winced. It'd be his second trip to the Head's office on the very first day. These kinds of trips—those for disciplinary infractions—he was far more used to, however, having been in trouble many times while attending school in Little Whinging with Dudley.

It made him a bit heart sick. He'd quite liked Ms. Shaw, and he didn't care for the thought that now the headmistress would be seeing him in this light, particularly after he'd done his level best to defend Severus to her. She'd be under the impression that he, too, was some kind of miscreant. And now it seemed all but inevitable that Harry would be lumped into that same mould from which he'd so desperately wanted to escape.

Upon reaching Ms. Shaw's office, the three were pushed into chairs on either side of the hallway. Hill was on one side, where Mrs. Murray stood close beside her, having fetched an ice pack for her face. The small girl was putting up a fight against the woman fussing over her and was doing her level best to avoid having the cold pack pressed up against her cheek.

Harry and Nicky sat across from her. Nicky had been handed his own ice pack and was using it to daub at his cheeks and against the sore spot on his cranium that Hill had managed to hit with the ball at the beginning of the dust up.

The door to Ms. Shaw's office must have been freshly oiled at its hinges, as they were only alerted to her presence by the pointed clearing of the woman's throat. With a sense of dread only rivaled by Harry's terror at what might happen when Snape himself heard of today's events, he followed the other two students in and stood before the desk, hanging his head in what he assumed to be the appropriate demonstration of humble contrition.

"Well," Ms. Shaw began, appearing once more to be unspeakably weary, "it seems that you three have earned the dubious honour of being the first into my office for such an offense this term. What have you to say for yourselves?"

Nicky and Hill began at once, hurrying to speak over one another before Ms. Shaw butted in and decreed who should take the first turn.

"Snowdrop? How did you find yourself tangling with Mr. Henderson and Mr. Potter?" Although the question was asked in a kind way, Harry could detect the hint of steel under Ms. Shaw's words, and he felt a bit of hope. Perhaps Hill's side wouldn't be presumed to be true simply because she was smaller and a girl...

But what on earth sort of name was Snowdrop?

"Henderson called me an 'ugly bint,' and said I was crazy—" She whinged, stomping one foot as she glared with baleful intensity at Nicky's head of tousled, straw-coloured hair.

"She threw the football at my head!" Nicky interjected. "On purpose! We just wanted our ball back, and I asked nice—"

Ms. Shaw drew in a deep breath through her pointy nose. "Who struck first?"

"Hill did."

"He called me—"

"Mr. Potter?" Ms. Shaw turned to him. "You don't know either of these two from Adam, do you?"

Harry shook his head. "No, ma'am."

"What did you see happen?"

Harry swallowed and looked up from underneath his messy fringe. Both of the other two children were staring daggers at him, and it looked as though Hill was mouthing something at him with angry intensity, seemingly threatening him should he implicate her in the crime.

"Erm... the kids playing footy kicked the ball under the trees where she and I were sitting, and then he," he pointed at Nicky, "came over and asked her for their ball back, but she threw it at his head and bounced it off of it, so then he called her a... a..."

Ms. Shaw nodded her encouragement with calm, expectant eyes.

"... a crazy b-bitch..." Harry shifted with supreme discomfort at having to say such words where a teacher could hear, and worse yet, to the teacher in question, "and so she made a face at him, and then," Harry nodded in Nicky's direction, "he called her an ugly bint..."

"And so?" Ms. Shaw prompted him once more, appearing a trifle impatient.

"Then... erm... she rushed him and tackled him..." Harry finished, looking to the small girl a bit apologetically. She had murder in her eyes, and was promising it to Harry himself, that was clear enough. "His head smacked the ground pretty good too, I could hear it crack."

"Mr. Henderson, how's your head?"

Nicky rubbed at a spot on the back of his skull. "Smarts a bit."

The retelling of events was put on hold as Ms. Shaw called in Mrs. Murray to go and fetch the school nurse. While they waited for her to arrive, Harry was asked to resume his story.

"It wasn't just him that got hurt," Snowdrop nagged. "He bloodied my nose!"

"Ah, my apologies, Miss Hill. It appears that Mrs. Murray did an admirable job of cleaning your face. All three of you will be receiving a once over, in any case." Ms. Shaw sighed deeply and rubbed at her eyes before she turned her attention back to Harry.

"And how was it that you found yourself embroiled in this abominable display, Mr. Potter?" She needled him with her gaze, intent on continuing the interrogation.

"Er... well, I wanted to stop them, see? And then it looked like she might have been trying to... to..."

"To what, Mr. Potter?"

"To... erm... kick him in his... his bits." Harry ducked his head as he felt heat flood his face. He took a deep breath before he could keep on. "So, I grabbed her leg to stop her, but then he got up and kept going at her face and head, even though she was still on the ground and not fighting back, so I tried to... I dunno," he finished, lamely.

The headmistress pressed forward, "You don't know?"

"Well, I didn't want him hitting her while she was down, did I?" He asked rhetorically, feeling defensive. "I wasn't fighting—I didn't wanna be involved, Ms. Shaw! Promise I didn't! I just... he shouldn't of kept going when he was up and she was just lying there! All I did was cover her head. I wasn't a part of it! I wasn't!"

The nurse entered then and pulled Nicky away to check him out. Where before he'd appeared a mild mess, as soon as the woman was through the door, he affected a piteous expression and probed at the back of his head. A strange parody of what he perhaps imagined it would look like had he actually sustained a concussion.

The nurse seemed to know this.

"Come along, Mr. Henderson," she tutted. "I'll examine Hill next, Headmistress, and then that one." She pointed at Harry.

"I'm alright," he protested, "can't I go back to class?" All he wanted was to turn back time and not have gotten involved... stupid of him. So stupid! No one else had stuck their noses into the melee, and they were all probably back at their desks by now, or headed to lunch...

"Mr. Potter you're already developing a bruise by your right eye, and I don't think you realise that you've sustained a cut at your temple. You'll be going nowhere for the rest of the day besides home—I've already called to inform Mr. Snape of the circumstances."

Where Harry had been feeling almost fine before—likely a consequence of the glut of adrenaline which had surged through his system—he now felt the weight of the fight crashing down upon him, and a sickening tide of nausea to boot. He lifted his hand to probe at his face with a wince, almost having forgotten that Nicky had been aiming his blows at Harry's head when he couldn't reach Hill's.

And God Almighty... what must Severus think?

He barely suppressed a moan of anxiety.

Nicky returned after a few minutes, having been cleared by the nurse for a concussion, and Hill was called back to go with the woman as Ms. Shaw lectured Harry and Nicky on the impropriety of their actions.

Harry had mostly accepted it as his due by now and merely ducked his head, more concerned about what Severus would say, but Nicky was still fighting the good fight, maintaining his innocence.

"I didn't wanna tumble with, Hill, Ms. Shaw! She came at me first, what was I supposed to do?"

"Be that as it may, Mr. Henderson, this was hardly your first fight at this institution. You have a history of tangling with your peers—though this is the first I've seen of you going at it with a girl."

"She's heavier than me by two stone!"

"Which didn't help her at all when she was lying under Mr. Potter and you continued your assault on her face. I don't think I need to tell you that not only was that not sporting, it was downright immoral."

"He told you what she was gonna do!" He said, jerking his thumb at Harry. "She was gonna lamp me cleppets—"

"Mr. Henderson!"

"She was!" Nicky whinged. "She was askin' for a proper pagga!"

"I know Miss Hill well, Mr. Henderson. Well enough to know that that's likely true—but I also know you well enough to know that you're just as eager to throw fisticuffs if the opportunity presents itself. I'll be speaking to Hill momentarily about her actions and you'll both be facing punishment."

"What about him?" Came a snooty voice from the doorway. Hill had evidently rejoined them and was staring at Harry with poison in her gaze. "He held me down—!"

"As near enough as I can tell, Miss Hill, Mr. Potter was attempting to save Mr. Henderson from the assault you were planning to level against him below the belt, and thereafter was attempting to keep you from being clouted overmuch in the face. I'm not sure that warrants punishment the likes of which I'll be assigning you and your sparring partner here."

Harry heard Hill begin to argue before the nurse who'd accompanied her back into the room beckoned him to follow her back to her office. He left with some reluctance, staring out over his shoulder at the other two who were now apparently ready to be sentenced for their crimes against one another.

"I'm okay," Harry protested, "I don't need anything."

"Is that so?" The nurse, who was preceding him down the hall, asked over her shoulder. Her eye, from what Harry could see of it, was bright with a bit of private amusement. "And I suppose that you don't want a plaster for that cut down your face? Or perhaps a wet rag to clean up a bit before your mother comes to collect you?"

Harry scowled back at her even as he dogged her footsteps obediently. "I don't have a mother."

"Father then—"

"Or a father."

This brought the older woman to a halt as she pivoted to stare down at him, a bit of befuddlement—or perhaps it was raw concern—creasing her brow. "Surely whoever it is that is coming for you will prefer to see you with your best face forward?"

Harry shrugged one shoulder, unconsciously mimicking Snape's unique body language as he did so. "I don't think Severus would want blood getting on the collar," he conceded, tugging the starched, white material away from his neck and hoping that he'd not already stained it.

They couldn't afford a new shirt, he knew that much.

With a brisk nod from the nurse, he was led into her small office—which probably more appropriately could have been termed a closet—and was made to sit down on a wobbly stool as she dabbed at his face with a wet cloth.

"Hold that there, there's a lad." She nodded her approval as he wiped at his own face with the terrycloth and turned to fish in a plastic container, coming away with a wad of cotton wool and a bottle of TCP.

The wool was wet with the noxious stuff and Harry tried his best to not breathe through his nose as it was daubed onto his face, although breathing through his mouth only succeeded in making it seem as though he could taste it.

"Nurse Mayhew?" A voice from the doorway called. Harry opened his eyes to see that the same man from earlier—the one who'd grabbed him up after the fight, and whose name he didn't know—was wedged between the frame and the door, his round, bald head shining a bit with the bright fluorescent lights. "Mr. Potter's guardian is here to collect him."

The announcement was enough to see Harry heaving a deep breath in through his nose which served to launch him into a bit of a spasmodic coughing fit from the odour.

This was likely to be it... Severus would decide that Harry was too much trouble. It was only his first day of school, and already the man had had to come out to collect him before the lunch hour had even come and gone...

Had he even settled in at home, or had he needed to turn straight back around after reaching Spinner's End; the phone ringing with news of Harry's misdeeds before he even had time to sink back into his tinkering?

Severus needed all the time he could get away from Harry if he was going to come up with something to save the two of them. That meant that Harry had to make his schooling work. He had to be a model pupil. Had to try and make the man proud.

And if not proud... at least he had to ensure that Snape didn't have real cause to regret his decision to take Harry in.

His spiraling train of thought was interrupted by a clearing of someone's throat. He looked up to see that the object of his ruminations was hovering over the bald teacher's shoulder, a frown affixed firmly in place.

Snape had apparently elected to drive for his second trip to his old primary school that day. Harry followed the man out to the car with a bowed head, and his teeth on edge. Snape hadn't said so much as a word, but his eyes were alight with... something.

Harry didn't like the looks of them one bit.

It took until they were crossing back over the River Leven before Snape spoke.

"Three hours."

"Er... what?" Harry asked, feeling shaken by the sudden break in the silence. Snape must have been angry, as he'd not even hit play on his tape deck. The man hated driving—or doing much of anything, for that matter—without some sort of noise breaking the air.

"You made it three bloody hours before I had a call from the headmistress' office about you." The tight words were accompanied by a strange, squeaking sound, and Harry realised with a start that it was coming from the man's molars grinding together. There was a pronounced tick in Snape's jaw. His hands, one on the wheel and the other gripping the shifter, were two, tight claws of agitation.

"I'm really sorry, Severus..."

"Sorry." He deadpanned. "You're sorry I had to drag my arse out of the house before I'd even managed to prepare a new base for experimentation? You're sorry to have fallen into a bout of fisticuffs with a girl—"

"I was trying to stop the fight—!"

"No one asked you to do that!" The older wizard snarled, the wheel jerking under his hands and the car swerving after his spasmodic ejaculation of fury.

"Next time, Potter, you're to leave well enough alone! You put your damned head down and act like you didn't see a thing! Not a blessed thing, do you understand me?"

Sullen, Harry's mouth twisted with bitterness. "She was gonna kick him in the..." What was the word that Nicky had used? It was an interesting one. New to Harry in any case. "In the cleppets?"

The car swerved again as Snape turned partially to look over his shoulder at the boy, his expression one of dumbfounded outrage. "Not even one day! Not even one BLEEDING day and you're already picking up bad habits!"

"Bad habits? Severus—"

"You're not from here! You're an offcomer! Notwithstanding your own mother's origins, you were raised in Surrey! Born in Gloucestershire! What makes you think you can spend a mere month here and start speaking like a local?"

Harry ducked his head and felt his legs begin to start swinging, as they often did when he was being taken to task over something or whenever he felt unsure of himself. "I dunno..."

"I'm from here, Potter! Hesta ivver 'eard me yatterin'n assa marra?"

Harry's mouth dropped open as he stared, uncomprehending, through the rear-view into Snape's irate gaze. "I... what?"

"Exactly. Don't speak of that which you do not know. Do not speak in tongues in which you are unversed! A lesson as valuable in the muggle world as it is when applied to unfamiliar magicks and indecipherable spells." Snape drew in a deep breath. "Use caution. At all times."

"So..." Harry ventured, his voice emerging in a slow crawl, "'cleppets' doesn't mean bollocks...?"

With a snarl that was actually audible, Snape refused to answer. That was just as well, for they had arrived home. It was probably only lunch time. Had Harry remained at school, he'd likely be queued up with a tray, waiting on a dinner nanny. As it was, he likely could look forward to scrambled eggs on toast.

He found that that suited him just fine. Even if Snape tossed his plate in front of him with an oath, so hard that it threatened to skirt right over the smooth wood of the low table and land on the floor. It didn't, and the eggs were familiar and comforting.

Eating next to the surly man who'd been forced to abandon his mad scientist routine was, however, anything but. For all that Harry was becoming accustomed to Severus' moods and peculiarities, he still wasn't entirely sure how to handle the taciturn wizard when he was in a snit, and it was worse when Harry knew he likely deserved Snape's ire.

As soon as he finished his lunch, he scrambled up the stairs with the excuse that he had to feed Wheat, and he sequestered himself in Severus' old room with the eight-legged creature crawling from one hand to the other in an endless mobius loop which would have befuddled even a mind like M.C. Escher's.

The spider's soft pedipalps tickled at Harry's wrist as Wheat probed along.

"Bet you're glad that I was in a fight," Harry commented, allowing the tarantula to meander up his arm and onto the sleeve of his jacket, which he'd yet to take off. "'Cause now I can spend the afternoon with you."

Wheat, as might have been expected, said nothing, but Harry fancied that the spider stopped for a moment to peer at him with eight, unblinking eyes, before he continued his circuitous route and crawled back toward the familiar territory that was Harry's hands.

"I don't know why I was sent home, anyway... It was Hill and Henderson that were fighting." His soft words were tinged with a bitterness that came from being forever punished for that which had nothing to do with him. For always being held to account for someone else's failings. "Even Severus seems to think it was my fault... but I don't think he..."

Harry trailed off and scrubbed with the hand that wasn't holding an over-sized arachnid at one eye, which felt grainier than it had before he'd begun his monologue. "He'd understand if it were him. He wouldn't... he wouldn't of let Hill get away with it. It was dirty: Henderson didn't even... they just wanted their ball back, see?"

Even with his eight eyes, Wheat clearly didn't, as he inched his way forward and bristled slightly, a warning sign that Harry had learned to heed which spoke of the need to return the beast back to his terrarium and to supply a number of crickets as an offering for his pet's forbearance.

He tipped the spider back onto a false rock that was surrounded by rushes and fitted the topper back onto the cage, although he didn't feel in the least inclined to cease speaking. The just compromise was for him to flatten himself onto the floor, his chin resting on the backs of his hands as he laid belly-down against the old wood, his nose pressed to the plastic.

"Why did Henderson have to go at her like that, Wheat?" It had been bothering him. The violence that Nicky had leveled at Snowdrop's face and head. She had started it, certainly, but for the boy to do as he had done, he'd truly had to have wanted to harm Snowdrop Hill, and from the jeering and crowing of the crowd which had assembled around them, it seemed as though they were all for the blood sport to commence.

There were few lessons that Harry had learned at Vernon Dursley's knee that he thought were of any consequence, but one of them he knew must have been the truly virtuous position.

"You don't hit a girl," he murmured to himself, frowning, "don't kick her, either..."

"Additionally, might I suggest that you abstain from maligning her family, or her ancestors," added a faintly amused voice from beyond the door.

"I didn't," Harry argued, from where he lay. He could see the faint reflection in the plastic of a gangly black mass over his shoulder.

"Who said I was speaking of you?" Was the terse reply. "My advice was general and was earned for a heavy price. Take it or leave it, as you see fit."

Harry had to rein in his impulse to roll his eyes.

Touchy. The man could be so incredibly touchy, sometimes.

Harry glanced up to see that Snape was leaning against the doorframe, his lanky arms crossed over his chest as he surveyed his charge. He no longer appeared angry, and he was dressed in the stained, brown-leather apron that he normally donned while brewing. It was a thick garment, made for heavy wear and heavier work, with a yoke held up with fraying rope over his shoulders and a deep pocket welted onto the upper portion above the belt that lashed it to the man's scrawny waist.

A faintly sulpherous smell wafted from him, which usually only could mean one thing...

"Did it explode?" Harry asked, shifting so he was engaging in a slight push-up until he was resting on his elbows.

The man shook his head, sending his hair flying like vines and ropes about his thin face. "No, but it was a near thing."

"Bugger..."

The reply was instantaneous, though half-hearted. "Watch your language."

The boy rolled to his side and pushed until he was seated, cross-legged on the floorboards. "I only meant that I wish it had worked..."

"That makes two of us," Snape sneered, though his expression was a touch more defeated than irritated. He finally entered the room and sat on Harry's bed, reclining until his shoulders met the poster-covered wall. When he allowed his head to fall back it was against the body of Sammy Hagar's Les Paul, where he bent over the instrument for a poster boasting a tour which had run in the autumn of '79.

Harry didn't know quite what to say to Snape, who had closed his eyes as he seemed to sink against the wall, his shoulders falling into a miserable slump. He only knew that he had to say something. That was the right thing to do, wasn't it?

His hand reached out to pat awkwardly at Snape's shin. "You'll get it, Severus. You invented other stuff—"

"Other stuff wasn't the only thing standing between the two of us and the poor house, Harry. Other stuff happened as a matter of course, not necessity. Not because there was no other option..." He shifted his leg back away from Harry's pitying pats, his spindly fingers coming up to scrub at his haggard face. He looked far older than his twenty-eight years, yet, somehow, far too young to be shouldering the responsibilities he had undertaken.

"I didn't think there were poor houses anymore..." Harry frowned, worrying at a bit of thread on his trousers. His aunt and uncle had frequently threatened him with either the poor house or the orphanage, to the point where Harry had asked a teacher about it once while still in Surrey, only to find that both institutions were largely defunct.

"Oh for—" Snape uttered a mild oath. "That's an expression! Merely an expression. You need have no worry that you'll end up under the tender mercies of some brutish Mr. Bumble—"

"Who?"

"For Christsake!" Snape appeared agog for a moment. "Dickens, Potter! Dickens! Don't tell me you're unfamiliar with Oliver Twist!"

Harry's nonplussed expression must have set the man straight on that score, for he swore under his breath. "Well, that's settled. If there's any money come Christmas, I know what you'll be getting."

"Well, what is it, Severus?" Harry scowled, not liking being in the dark once more, particularly about something which he had the impression Snape assumed to be common knowledge.

"It's a novel about an orphan. Doubtless, you'll find a great deal of material over which to commiserate with the titular character."

"Oh..." Harry didn't like the sound of that. Was Snape mocking him? Recommending a book about some snotty orphan who lived under this Mr. Bumble person? The boy wrinkled his nose and squashed his eyes together to fend off the sense that he might just start crying.

He heard, rather than saw Snape sigh. "Don't take offense. I didn't mean anything by that," the man ventured, strangely cautious given his normal cavalier attitude towards mockery of all sorts, "it's a marvelous book. I think you'd enjoy it. It's considered one of the best in the English language."

"Oh," Harry said again, though this time it wasn't with quite so much melodrama. He sniffed once and managed to look at the man sitting on his bed without his eyes glazing over. "You don't have it downstairs?"

"I don't have much space for fiction. All of my books have earned their space on the wall by being useful to me," Snape told him, not without a disdainful little sniff.

Harry wanted to argue that if this book was supposedly so very marvelous that surely it ought to have 'earned space' on Snape's overladen shelves, but he didn't bother. He still felt a bit congested and overwrought, and he wasn't entirely of a mood to be sniping back and forth with the older wizard at that moment.

Snape seemed to like to segue into such pissing matches whenever he was avoiding speaking on something that was bothering him, so Harry wracked his brains for a few seconds to try and remember what they'd been speaking about before the aside had occurred.

"I think you'll come up with something, Severus. You're brilliant." Harry said at last, peering up from beneath his fringe at the man's slumped form.

It gave an almighty twitch upon receiving the praise, and Snape looked like he might have been speechless for a moment, though that moment was just as quickly over with.

"You wouldn't know. You haven't the faintest idea of what constitutes brilliance in potioneering and alchemy," he scathed, although even as he said this his voice was almost hoarse. A shadow, perhaps, of some unnamable emotion. "You don't know the difference between true giants of the art and the petty peddlers of no consequence—"

Not liking that Snape had thrown his sincerely meant compliment back in his face, Harry challenged him, unwise of him though it doubtlessly was. "Like?"

"Like what, Potter? Use complete sentences, if you would."

"Who's a 'giant' and who's a... a..."

"A petty peddler?"

"Yeah," Harry agreed, "that."

"An example of the former would be the great genius Nicholas Flamel; the only known alchemist to successfully create a Philosopher's Stone. An example of the latter is the inventor of Sleekeazy's Hair Potion, a cosmetic product marketed to the vain and pathetic."

"Oh..." Harry thought about this. It did sound as though one invention was better than the other, admittedly. "Who invented the hair potion?"

For some strange reason, this had Snape clamming up. He ducked his head behind the curtain formed by his hair and Harry only knew that the man was regretting his words by the blush that crept up the shells of his over-large ears.

Eventually he gave a wholly unsatisfying answer. "It doesn't matter."

"Well," Harry drawled, turning his attention back to the tarantula who was now stalking a cricket around the perimeter of his plastic prison, "you're the cleverest bloke I know, Severus."

"That's..." Snape paused and pushed his hair back from his face with both hands. He was staring down at the scuffed tips of his boots against the floorboards. "That's kind of you to say, Harry."

"And you're not tryn'ta invent something like that stone-thing, are you?"

The man sighed, a sound deep with melancholy and resignation. "No. No, I'd be blessed beyond measure to have an idea for a product as inane and superfluous as Sleekeazy's right about now."

"I'll keep thinking," Harry promised, pushing his finger against the plastic wall so that it left a long gouge-like smudge. If possible, the tarantula looked as though it might have been indignant about the interruption of his hunt. "Between the two of us we'll figure something."

Snape's reply was a non-committal "Perhaps."

Then, apparently having remembered why he'd initially come to speak to Harry in his room, Snape doubled over his knees and rested his elbows upon them, his long, pallid hands clasped together, the knuckles latticed like a trellis.

"I suppose we ought to discuss how it is that you found yourself in a bray with a girl, then."

"A bray?"

"Oh!" Snape affected a disingenuous note of surprise. "I was under the impression that you were all up on speaking like a proper Cumbrian. Don't tell me you don't know what a bray is—"

Suddenly, feeling the dunce, Harry realised from the question itself that it must have meant a fight. "I know what a bray is!"

"Oh good," Snape crossed his arms and rolled his black eyes, a clear demonstration of snide mockery for the boy before him. "I'd be doubly worried about the state of your comprehension skills if you also failed to take proper cues from the freely available context I offered—"

Harry only barely restrained himself from telling the man to shut up, and he actually had to muffle the words behind his two hands, as though he could stuff the unwise invective back into his mouth from whence it came. He sort of succeeded, for Snape gave him a cross look, and a raised eye-brow in warning, but he didn't actually take Harry to task over the muffled 'Shoooit ooopfh' that left little question of what Harry had actually said.

"Well, Potter?"

"I told you..." Harry felt himself flushing. "She was gonna kick someone in the... in the bollocks. I was trying to stop them... and then he didn't stop hitting her back, and she was on the ground, so I tried to stop it, but he kept going at my face 'til the teachers came..."

"How did it start?"

"I didn't start it at all!" Harry protested, feeling desperate for Severus to understand. "I didn't! Henderson—I think—he came and wanted his ball back, and the girl—Hill—she was sitting with me under the trees in the yard, and she threw the ball at his head and hit him with it really hard," he drew a deep breath before continuing in a rush, "then Henderson said she was an 'ugly bint' and she went at him like this." Harry hunkered down and spread his arms wide to demonstrate. "She looked like she was gearing up for a scrum!"

"And your part in all of this?" Snape asked, his head resting on one hand, the index finger of it pressing into his cheek. He looked either bored or amused, and Harry felt mildly upset that he couldn't tell which it was.

"I didn't have anything to do with it, Sev'rus! Honest! I was sitting under the trees first!" the boy cried, feeling upset all over again at Snowdrop Hill's imposition into his life and space. "I just found a spot where no one else was gonna sit, and then Hill comes up and says I took her spot, and that I should keep my mouth shut if I was gonna sit there, 'cause she didn't want to talk to me." Harry scowled, the memory of the slight rising up from where he'd stuffed it in the wake of the altercation.

For several moments, Snape merely assessed him from beneath the weight of his heavy brow, the finger bracing his cheek tapping some unknown rhythm. Finally, taking a great breath in through his mess of teeth, he straightened and deigned to address the boy before him, apparently ready to pronounce his judgement.

"Incidentally," he began, the staccato of his drawl pulling the word out far longer than it naturally ought to have lasted, "I believe you."

The relief that Harry felt was such that he might have collapsed had he not already been on the floor. "You do?"

"I'm not in the habit of repeating myself for no greater purpose than to satisfy some scrappy whelp's insecurities."

Harry's frown must have moved the man somewhat, however, for he offered up a grumbled, "I do," in spite of himself.

"That being said, what I told you earlier in the car is meant to be instructive moving forward."

"What's that mean?" Harry asked, pushing up on his palms so he was sitting up a bit like a seal might, with his back curved in the kind of convex configuration that would make any adult wince.

"It means that you keep your nose clean and out of other people's business. Don't go wading into fights that have nothing to do with you, and even if you do get caught up in a scuffle, I expect you to find your way out of it without being called into the head's office."

"But, Severus—"

"I don't care whose bollocks are in danger of being kicked!" Snape continued, leaning over Harry to pin him with the full weight of his black-eyed stare, "I don't care if Miss Hill turns yours into her personal speed bag: you disengage. And if you do engage?"

Harry hung on his words, his mouth drooping slightly as he stared up at the man with near incomprehension.

"If you do," Snape repeated, "You. Do. Not. Get. Caught. Do you hear me, Potter?" Snape's eyebrows were lifted as he imparted these instructions to the boy on the floor before him. Often, the man would smirk, or hold an utterly impassive expression if he were being in the least bit facetious. That he was devoid of such tells during this current exchange was enough to put Harry on edge and call him to attention.

Speaking slowly, yet deliberately, Harry voiced his confusion, "I don't get it..."

"Merlin preserve me."

"Am I suppose'ta not do fights, or am I suppose'ta do them but... but be sneaky about it?" the boy asked, his voice uncertain.

"You are to refrain from fighting under any circumstances, Potter," Snape leaned back with his palms against his knees and shifted his eyes cagily about the room. Harry felt this must have been some sort of strange tell, but to what end he couldn't be sure. "And should I hear about any more impromptu prizefights you've managed to embroil yourself in—well. You shan't be enjoying any knickerbocker glories anytime soon."

It was an utterly bizarre pronouncement, not least of all because Snape had, as far as Harry knew, never gotten him a knickerbocker glory—and indeed, though Harry was no afficionado of ice cream, he'd seen enough of the treats consumed by Dudley over the years to recognise the towering confections—but also because it seemed, in some strange way, as though Snape was actually encouraging him to get into play-yard brawls so long as he didn't get fingered by the attendant teachers on duty.

If it were possible to say so, Harry nearly thought that the man looked a touch... proud?

"Er... right." Harry agreed after a fashion.

Snape rolled his eyes and curled a fatuous "Splendid," around his tongue, with such redolent sarcasm that Harry could have winced. "I expect tomorrow will be an utterly dull day for you, then, and I expect you to return home at the normal time. I will not be coming to collect you once more."

"Does that mean I'll be walking myself to school, Severus?" Harry asked.

"And walking back. You remember the way, I trust."

"I remember," Harry agreed, "just... is it safe?"

Snape twisted his mouth a bit with either annoyance or concern, "I told you not to worry yourself about the likes of Yaxley and Mulciber anymore. At your age, I was all over the town on my lonesome so long as I returned home before dark. If you had a mind to take yourself off to that playground we visited a few weeks ago I'd have no objections, so long as you showed your face back here for supper."

"How can you say that?" Harry demanded, pulling himself up to kneeling. He scratched at the floorboards a bit with his short nails, feeling frantic. "How can you just act like it's all alright? You didn't do nothing to make them stay away! I didn't see you waving your wand about—"

"Didn't do anything, Potter. Not nothing. And incidentally, just because you weren't present when precautions were being taken, doesn't mean that none were. I told you that I took the appropriate measures, and I did. They will not dare to pursue you once more. I expect you to be on your lookout, in any case—muggles can be as dangerous as wizards, if you weren't aware—"

"I'm aware," Harry muttered blackly. His news obsession extended past The Daily Prophet. Whenever Snape brought the muggle papers home, Harry usually had a mind to skim through at least the front pages, and people were frequently reported missing. Around the time that Snape had picked him up from the Dursleys—or perhaps a week after—there had been a report about a young Austrian boy named Erich Aigner. He'd disappeared along with his parents while backpacking across England and Wales. Not even a week ago there had been a young girl from Bath who had disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and also an older boy from one of the small towns in the Midlands. The Lake District itself seemed notorious for losing ramblers of all ages, and Harry had seen a piece in the local Backbarrow paper only a day or so previous that had listed some of the losses they'd sustained in the past several years. There were no less than ten men and women who had vanished without a trace.

Some of them had been concerningly close to Backbarrow itself when they'd disappeared.

"But you oughtn't to have any cause to fear, Harry." Even though he'd begun the tirade sounding harangued and irritated, Snape's words ended on a gentle note, and the young wizard's eyes had seemingly softened from the hard, flinty graphite that could inspire such terror, to an indulgent, warm charcoal, that always reminded Harry of why he persisted in trusting the strange man's judgement time and again.

Because, for some incomprehensible reason, Snape seemed to care. A lot.

"It'd help if I knew what you'd done," Harry admitted. "What do I do if a... a regular person comes up and starts getting fresh with me?"

Snape wrinkled his nose, looking vaguely repulsed. "You scream and run."

"What—really?"

"Yes, really!" Snape scoffed. "Have they taught you nothing of the sort in school? I thought that given the spate of anxiety in the muggle news of late about such things that they'd be covering such angles."

"No—I mean—yeah... they have," Harry fumbled, looking at the man askance, "but I expected that there was something else you'd have me do?"

"Such as?"

"I dunno!" Harry cried, feeling frustrated with the way his concerns seemingly were being ignored. "Something magic?"

Reaching forward, Snape grasped at Harry's lapel and flipped it over, holding it out before Harry's wide green eyes. In the afternoon light the small pin embedded in the wool shone with a small flash.

"That pin lets me know where you are at all times," he ground out, his eyes back to their hard, steely glinting. "It also acts as a beacon for me to direct my apparition directly to your location. I can see about getting you a portkey, but I'll have to go about it through the proper channels, unfortunately, which may take months. Would that suffice?" He asked, his voice haughty and snide.

"I..." Harry was about to admit that it did, if only to stop the man's snit from progressing any further, but he knew better than to accept a deal without understanding the terms. "What's a portkey?"

The question prompted another oath from the wizard before him and yet another expressive and melodramatic roll of Snape's eyes as he laboured to explain the mechanics of various forms of magical travel to the boy before him. By the time he'd covered the most common methods for transportation, it was nearing time for supper, and Harry was weary of asking any more questions.

Well... except, perhaps, for one.

"If you could do that," he began, referring to the last explanation Snape had given, regarding apparition, "why did we escape from Yax and Wulf in the car?"

Snape's mouth twisted in distaste. "I had wondered when you'd ask that..."

"Well, if we could just poof away—"

"It's more of a loud crack than a poof, in actuality—" Snape informed him, his lips forming a little moue to underscore his pedantic nitpicking.

"I don't see why we would take the car, 'cause we also had to run from the police," Harry crossed his arms and gave Snape the hardest stare he could muster, noting the shifty-eyed evasiveness that Severus seemed to be engaging in.

After several moments where it seemed as though there might be a stand-off, Snape finally deflated and eyed Harry from under a furrowed brow. He looked mutinous, and curiously childish.

"I don't..." Snape stopped and raised one clawed hand to his temple, using the curled fingers to viciously scratch at his scalp, almost as a flea ridden fox might've. He appeared frustrated beyond measure. "I've never been good at side-along apparition." He scowled, as though daring Harry to poke fun at his insecurity. "I didn't want to risk splinching one or both of us when escaping the scene."

Harry didn't know quite what to say. It hadn't occurred to him that there was anything at all that Severus couldn't do. He still wasn't entirely sure that he believed that such a thing could be possible.

"I bet you wouldn't of," Harry argued, wishing he could somehow reassure his guardian. Something about the man before him feeling in any way incapable didn't square with him. Sure, he was a prickly git most of the time, and he liked to poke fun and pull Harry's leg a bit more often than the boy liked, but Snape was... he was like some enormous statue, looming over Harry's life now. Not unlike a cathedral's gargoyle. He was imposing, and often terrifying, but somehow Harry felt safer for his presence and his careful vigil.

Harry was also reasonably certain—from observing Snape's work in their makeshift potions lab and his selection of books—that the young wizard was a genius, which would explain the his constant frustration with Harry's frequent bouts of incomprehension.

There was no way that Severus would have 'splinched' them, whatever it was that that meant. And Harry repeated this to him a second time, with more feeling than he'd first done.

Snape looked as though he didn't quite know what to say in response at first. He seemed to have to swallow thickly before he managed to speak. "Touching though your faith in me is, Harry, I'm afraid you don't understand well enough about the nature of such things to appreciate the amount of risk involved in apparating without the benefit of one's full attention and focus paid to one's destination. This is doubly so when the wizard in question is intending to carry a passenger.

"Splinching is dreadful business. I don't intend to ever let you find out how bad firsthand." He told Harry with a firm shake of his head, "Suffice to say, losing your arm isn't nearly as clean as it looks in Empire Strikes Back,"

"Wait!" Harry stopped him, feeling his eyes widen in terror, "You can lose an arm?!"

"You can lose anything that the wizard conducting the apparition fails to account for in his pre-apparition checklist." Snape informed him, his voice crisp. "Including one's head. I don't think I need to tell you that, while some subtractions can be rectified, decapitation is irreparable."

Harry's swallow was audible. "Oh..."

"Quite." Snape rose to his feet and readjusted the heavy leather apron about his frame, tightening the wide belt where it'd come loose around his waist. "Though I must admit, it is... gratifying to know that you have such confidence in my abilities. Given your fervent belief that I'll be certain to find us a way out of this mess, perhaps you can lend me a hand in the kitchen from now until supper."

"What? Really? You'll let me help again?" Harry asked, incapable of hiding the thrill of excitement from his voice.

"Let you?" Snape scoffed, leading the way to the door as Harry leapt up onto his feet with a nimble little movement and made to follow him. "After the setback I suffered this morning, I'm making it a precondition of your penance. I have a bucket of rat spleens that need to be de-pulped and I have no intention of doing it myself."

Harry's grin as it stretched from ear to ear could have rivaled a shark's.

Although the start at Rowky Syke had been rocky—and not in the over-driven, turned-up-to-ten way that Harry had come to enjoy—Harry's presence in Mr. Fowler's class in the aftermath of his fight with Snowdrop Hill and Nicky Henderson was accepted, perhaps all the more, because he had proven in the yard that he wasn't the retiring sort, content to sit back while he was taken advantage of.

On the other hand, it also resulted in most of the other children avoiding him outright, which was far from ideal.

Harry did his level best to fade into the background of the class. He had a lot of experience with that from his years spent as Dudley's favoured target.

Things had only seemed to get worse for him after their first week's assignment, which was to be brought in the second Monday of term; Mr. Fowler having given his class the entirety of the weekend to get their submissions in ready order.

Harry hadn't quite known what to do with the prompt.

"Bring into class the best gift you've ever received."

In the end, after a full weekend of helping Severus to separate polyps from the intestines of nogtails, Harry had scrambled out the door on Monday morning the next week with Wheat's terrarium under one arm, for once glad to be as far away from the kitchen as he could reasonably manage.

The tarantula was beating a protest against the plastic wall with his four front legs, but Harry didn't have enough time to give much attention to the spider's prosaic concerns over being moved from the boy's bedroom. He'd barely had time to scarf down two hard boiled eggs on slightly stale bread before he was running out the door, determined not to be tardy.

He knew he'd not be able to run the entire distance, but whenever he was blessed to have the cracked pavements on his side, he kept up a brisk jog, knowing he was sweating though his uniform from the way the shorts and undershirt were beginning to cling like a second skin.

He was doing his best not to jiggle Wheat overmuch, and so far, the arachnid appeared to be bearing the ill treatment with grudging equanimity.

"I-I prom-promise you—eughh," Harry groaned to stifle his mounting queasiness, "h-half a dozen crickets, honest."

If a tarantula could sulk, undoubtedly that was what Wheat was doing. He'd covered himself in rushes at the far end of his enclosure. Perhaps to protect himself from the way that Harry was jostling him about.

The school was finally within sight, just up the cruel hill that taunted Harry with its steep pitch, when Harry's progress was halted against a solid, foul-smelling wall.

Falling backwards and rolling with his elbows caught in a cage-like formation to protect his pet, Harry managed to recover his footing with the quick agility that was the natural, God-given gift granted to so many victims of bullying.

His eyes darted all about, searching for the problem, before they landed on a pile of rags he must have missed when he'd been looking above toward the school, having anticipated his arrival to fall just within the bounds of what might reasonably be termed "on time."

The rags were stirring slightly, and Harry edged around them, realising that he'd tripped on a tramp that must have crawled from underneath one of the lean-tos that often populated the side of the River Leven.

"Sorry," he hissed, hoping he wouldn't have woken the man up, but even so feeling badly enough that he felt an apology was warranted. He made to step around the gently snorting heap.

He'd just trained his eyes back on the looming hill when he felt a hand at his ankle. Glancing down revealed a filthy, muck encrusted set of torn nails, set against skin that looked to have been rubbed with dirt. Every fold and crease in the gnarled appendage's hide was caked with grime.

When Harry yanked his leg away, his sock (though not, itself, a pristine white) came away with brown-black smudges where the fingers had gripped him.

His hand reached for the lapel pin Severus had entrusted to him in his panic, and he prepared himself to run—

A pale, bleary blue eye blinked up at him through a rheumy film of accumulated eye-gunk.

"The Dickins!? Amess, gadgey! Aa ain't no dike t'be lowpin'," the man at his feet yammered at him, his words tumbling forth from behind a mouthful of jumbled and misaligned teeth.

"Er... sorry...?" Harry murmured back, without the faintest clue what he was responding to.

"G'an then, l'al twat," the tramp grumbled, scowling at the boy with obvious annoyance.

Harry shook his head and held his hands up to signal that he hadn't the foggiest idea what the man might have been saying.

Snape had been right. Harry really didn't know the first thing about Cumbrian.

Thankfully, that was the end of it, and the man then rolled over so that the matted brown hair at the back of his head, which was plastered to his skull in some places and which stuck up on end in others, was facing Harry.

Harry waited for another ten seconds before pacing himself up the hill, arriving out of breath even as he'd attempted the slope at a more sedate speed than he'd taken on the way over from Severus' place.

When he skidded past Mrs. Murray, it was to her shrill shouts admonishing him over running in the halls, as well as a slightly contradictory proscription about how he ought not to be late.

He finally managed to place Wheat onto his desk and dropped his hind end into a seat exactly when the bell went off, and he endured a mildly exasperated look from Mr. Fowler before his teacher strode from his desk to begin the day's lessons.

"This morning we'll be working on compositions," he announced. "I had you all bring in something that you ought to be able to write about, if you followed the instructions I gave on Friday, and until the break I've set aside time for you all to journal about your choices."

Mr. Fowler turned and approached the blackboard, grabbing up a stub of chalk and drawing it squeakily across the surface. Each short mark he made produced a recognisable psst-and-click sound that carried on for several moments as he began to flesh out additional prompts.

Their teacher stood back, his torso facing the class as he looked over his shoulder at the board. He reached his hand out with the chalk and tapped several times underneath the writing.

"At least one hundred words, in a properly punctuated paragraph (or paragraphs), about why you chose the item you brought today. Include any details you think will interest the rest of the class about where the item came from, how long you've had it, and how you came to own it."

"After the break," Mr. Fowler announced, "You'll be reading your composition aloud while showing the rest of the class what you've brought in."

Worried murmurs accompanied this announcement, and Harry glanced around to see what kinds of things occupied the desks of the other children.

There were quite a few footballs. At least three by Harry's count. And some of the girls had brought in precious china dolls. One boy had a strange black contraption that was made of plastic. It reminded him a bit of Severus' tapedeck.

Then it came to him that he'd seen something of the like once in one of Dudley's magazines. It was some sort of gaming device that could be plugged into the telly.

Even Aunt Petunia had drawn the line at that.

Still more had pairs of ice-skates, sketch pads, and miniature yellow digger toys.

Not one other person had a live animal with them. And Harry's temporary desk mate was already attracting stares and grimaces from other students.

He pulled Wheat's terrarium against his chest, feeling protective of the spider.

At that moment, Wheat wasn't yet visible. All that anyone might see was but one fuzzy black leg poking out from beneath a pile of organic matter, but Harry had the distinct feeling that his pet wouldn't be well received.

In any case, the looming threat of having to present their work to the rest of the class eventually had everyone, including Harry himself, bending over their work and diligently applying themselves to the assignment at hand.

Harry really didn't think that writing one hundred words ought to have been as hard as it was proving to be. But then, as he worked through the initial stages of framing his paragraph, he encountered words he knew he wanted to use but which he couldn't spell, or he ran out of things to say that would fit the scope of the assignment.

Somehow, a piddly number like 'one hundred' required the entire hour and a half that Mr. Fowler had apportioned for the task. He then moved on to having them practise their times tables before the class was ushered out the door for their mid-morning break.

Which was, without contest, Harry's least favourite part of school.

Things had not improved since his first day at Rowky Syke, and he still didn't know exactly where he was supposed to park himself for thirty minutes before lunch.

For the other four days of the first week, he'd chosen a different spot each day. First, leaning up against the fence. That had left rust marks all over his jacket, and he'd been made to endure Severus' lecturing as the man blasted the scourges from the fabric with the tip of his wand.

On Wednesday, Harry had lingered by the door, but he was made to keep moving whenever anyone entered or left the building, barely managing to avoid being hit in the face when the door was swung too hard.

Thursday he'd tried to remain at his desk, and he'd almost made it to lunch in the empty classroom when Mr. Fowler had come back and scolded the boy over how he wasn't to sit unattended in classrooms while he was expected elsewhere.

Friday had seen Harry wandering all around the play yard, from one semi-isolated locale to another, enduring the sniggering and eye-rolling that he saw coming from both the park bench with the girls and the play gym packed with spectators.

He'd just about had it. Even in early September, it was far too hot for such nonsense, and the best place in the entire yard for him had been the spot he'd picked Monday, that first day.

As such, he returned to the relative protection of the trees, and dropped down into the underbrush, leaning his back against a trunk that wasn't the one where Snowdrop Hill sulked.

Enduring her glower, and acting as though she was beneath his notice entirely, Harry picked at the long grass that was going to seed around his legs and began to separate off the little, pellet-like seeds from the thick green stems.

He rolled them between his fingers.

Would grass seed be a good potions ingredient?

Ever since they'd spoken about the process of invention, Harry had made it his personal mission to bring any and every sundry would-be-ingredient he could to Severus' attention in the hopes that it might be Just-The-Thing that the man needed for his breakthrough.

Snape was, predictably, growing increasingly annoyed with him.

"Bloater paste is for toast, Potter—not one part of it would serve as a suitable base."

"No, I've not ever had any success at incorporating

rust into a brew. I can't imagine you would, either."

"Granted, earwigs and woodworms are 'gross,' but being gross is not the chief qualification for what makes an eligible ingredient."

"The only potion you'll ever manage to brew with petroleum jelly is a heavy-duty moisturiser."

Harry refused to give up. He'd brought other pocketful of ingredients home to the kitchen over the past week: plastic shavings he'd dug out from the crack in the pavement just before the bridge, paint chips that had sloughed off old signage that Severus had quickly disposed of, with the admonition that they probably contained lead, and dried up pots of paste he'd liberated from the art room.

Now, sitting as he was under the trees, Harry stashed the grass seeds he was collecting into his pocket, and made to gather up handfuls of immature acorns off of the sessile oak's lower branches.

From across the two meters that spanned to the yew, he saw some promising berries, ripening into an appealing red.

To gather the yew berries would mean speaking to Snowdrop Hill, however, who had commandeered the yew for herself on this day, and Harry heaved a great sigh.

It was for Severus. So that the man wouldn't have to worry anymore about supporting him when Harry'd made him give up his job.

Harry had no use at all for the likes of a snotty little girl that went around picking fights with the entire yard... but it could be that he'd have enormous use for the bounty of the tree she sat against.

For Severus? Harry felt quite certain that he'd have made every effort to lasso the moon for the dust alone if he thought for one second that the man could have made use of it somehow.

All he wanted in the entire world was for Snape to know how very grateful he was for the man saving his sorry hide, and if it was the last thing Harry got to do in his short life, he was determined to accomplish this if nothing else.

With that in mind, he pulled in a deep breath to blow up his torso and to straighten his spine, and he walked with what he hoped was a brisk and confident step over to the shadow of the yew.

Today, Snowdrop had forgone the bow, which likely had been forced on her against her will for the first day of school, and her short hair that seemed so terribly chopped was messier than Harry's own. Aside from this, however, her uniform was brand new where Harry's own was likely a few owners past second hand, and in pristine condition.

Or else... it had been when she'd arrived to break. She seemed to hate the cleanliness and order as much as Snowdrop Hill appeared to hate everyone and everything, for she was busying herself with gathering dirt into her palms and dribbling it through her fingers onto her legs and socks, allowing the filth to form mountainous ridges on her legs before it sloughed off when the pitch grew too high. Where it stained the white of her shirt and socks she seemed to take especial pains to rub it into the fibers with additional care.

Harry didn't think he'd ever seen anyone devote so much time and attention to being intentionally slovenly.

"Hill," Harry called, waiting for the girl to look up at him. When she did she wore a feral sort of snarl that stretched her rounded cheeks and exposed her gapped teeth.

Harry felt more than a little bit perturbed when the girl began to emit a low dog-like growl, which may have been purposefully animalistic. She didn't speak to him.

"You don't have to move or anything," Harry began, backing up one step in hopes of placating her, "only... I wanted some of those berries off that tree."

"Today this is my tree," she barked back, pressing herself more firmly against its base. "My tree—my berries."

"Come on, Hill. I just need like a few," Harry held out his palm to show the approximate amount he wanted.

He approached with all due caution, shuffling through the needles that carpeted the ground.

Harry's hands came up to show his lack of ill intent; he held them out in front of himself, hoping the gesture would calm her.

It wouldn't be necessary to get to the base of the tree to get to the berries. The slightly unripe clusters were all over the scoping branches. He just had to get close enough...

With each step he took, Snowdrop Hill's face fell into deeper and deeper creases, beginning to take on the appearance of a deeply offended bully breed dog.

His left hand remaining up to forestall her, Harry reached with his right hand to pluck at one of the nearest berry clusters, coming away with only perhaps three by the feel of it.

All he needed were enough to show Severus, in any case. He could always bring the man more if it turned out that they proved useful.

As it happened, Snowdrop Hill was capable of moving with all of the lithe precision of a lynx. She sprang forward, propelling herself by pushing off with her tiptoes against the gnarled trunk of the ancient yew, and toppled Harry over, prising one of the berries from his hand and gulping it down without bothering to chew.

Harry managed to retain his grasp on the other two berries and he hurriedly shoved them into his pocket along with the grass seed he'd collected earlier, shoving at Snowdrop's shoulder with his other hand to try and roll the girl off of him.

"Gerroff!"

"Gimme those! They're mine!"

"What are you?! Some kind of nutter?!" Harry managed to push the girl off and he scrambled to his feet, his hand pressing down against his pocket to protect its contents. He warded the girl's renewed attempts at attack off with one outstretched palm, managing to keep her at arm's length.

They struggled for a few moments more before the bell beckoned them back for lunch and Harry felt as though he might collapse with relief. He'd not supposed that the most difficult part of collecting likely ingredients would have been some little girl playing at being a mastiff.

Even so, Hill dogged his steps and came up behind him in the queue, butting her tray against his back and muttering invectives against him as Harry collected his food from the dinner nanny.

He was made to defend against her attempts to swipe the contents of his pocket the entire lunch period, and he only was offered a respite when they were seated away from one another in Mr. Fowler's class. She was seated on the other side of the room from him, and from the angle at which he was seated, he couldn't make out what it was that she'd brought in to fulfill the assignment.

One by one the class was called forward and Harry clapped politely after each student showed off their favourite gifts, offering short explanations of the items' origins.

Evidently, Snowdrop Hill was finding the proceedings tediously boring, as she was huffing and puffing with increasing levels of drama through each presentation. To the point where Harry caught Mr. Fowler shooting the wee girl a quelling look as she had made a particularly loud sigh during one boy's monologue on his special pair of Nike trainers.

He'd been paying such close attention to Snowdrop's escalating interruptions that when Harry himself was called up, he was surprised by it.

Wheat was still hiding when Harry toted his terrarium up to the front of the room, so when he arrived to the desk and placed the spider down, Harry was made to shuffle open his paper with one hand while he decided the best way to show off his pet.

Ultimately, after an awkward moment of indecision where he shifted from foot to foot, quite aware that he had almost nothing to show if his recalcitrant pet wasn't content to show himself, Harry pried the plastic top off and reached in to scoop Wheat into one hand, holding him in his left hand as he snapped the lined paper into a taunt smoothness with his right.

The loud noise startled the tarantula into jerking about against his fingers, and Harry winced as the short hairs of Wheat's many legs prickled at his fingers.

It was all quite overwhelming, the attention he was under, and managing a six inch spider, all while enduring the collective gasp of the students before him, mixed in with a few high-pitched squeals and exclamations of disgust.

"Erm... This is Wheat," Harry began, holding his hand aloft to try and display his small friend the best he could. "Wheat is a Brazilian Black Tarantula. I haven't had him very long, only since this summer." His pronouncements were stilted and faltering, reading as he was from the paper he'd filled with his unsteady writing.

"Severus brought me to Cokeworth this summer, and we went into town for good Flipino food," Harry explained, struggling over the word 'Filipino' as he often did, "And he needed stuff from the pet store. And the owner didn't want to sell him anything, 'cause he said he didn't want Severus to eat them, so Severus said Wheat was for me, and then he actually did it!" Harry ended with a mild exclamation and bounced once on his heels, still feeling a bit of excitement and residual happiness over the event, even though it had happened a full month and a half before.

Apparently not content to remain quiescent in his small palm, Wheat began to scale Harry's left arm, and as the spider crawled onto the back of his hand and then on to his sleeve, Harry held his hand out and open, attempting to remain still as his pet made a determined beeline for his shoulder.

Mr. Fowler was frowning and cleared his throat once behind his fist. "What was it he actually did?"

"He bought me Wheat! He was gonna go in there to... well... erm..." Harry realised with a sudden clarity that it would be a terrible decision to let the class in on what it was that Severus had initially planned upon entering the pet store.

Thankfully, it seemed as though Mr. Fowler had picked up on this from context alone, and he urged him along on his tale with a strange little uncomfortable cough.

Looking back down at his paper as the spider reached out one of his front legs to stroke against Harry's neck—to a chorus of 'Ewwww!' from the assembled students before him—Harry found his place and picked back up where he'd left off.

"And uh... Wheat likes to eat crickets, so Severus got me a bag of those too. Sometimes, he'll let me hold him, like he is now, and then sometimes he gets a bit cross and wants to be put down—"

There was a collective surge as many of the girls at the front of the room squealed and vacated their seats, backing up several paces, as though Wheat would jump from Harry's shoulder at any moment.

"Back to your seats!" Mr. Fowler ordered, "I'm sure Mr. Potter has his pet well in hand—haven't you?"

"He's ok," Harry agreed, looking down and to the left. Wheat's hairs weren't on end and he seemed content to nose under Harry's lapel for the moment.

"Just as well, perhaps it would be best if you returned your 'Wheat' back to his carrier."

Harry nodded and did as he was bid, trying to ignore the derisive noises coming from Snowdrop Hill's corner of the classroom.

She was being extraordinarily rude, even for her.

"Anything else, Mr. Potter?" His teacher asked, looking like he'd quite like to hurry the process along.

"Just one thing," Harry hastened to say, looking down at the remainder of his composition in order to remind himself, "Wheat is called wheat because I wanted to name him 'eight' but in a different language, and Severus said that in French, wheat means eight—only he says I say it wrong, and that when I say it it's like what flour's made of."

There was a beat of strained silence, which had Harry gulping a bit.

"Is that all?"

There was nothing else written on the paper, so Harry nodded and handed it over to be stacked with the other completed assignments for the day. He took his seat back and settled Wheat once more on his desk, patting the plastic terrarium in lieu of stroking the tarantula himself, as if to say that the arachnid had done a good job.

There were a couple more presentations before Snowdrop herself was called to the front of the classroom. It was well into the afternoon now, and she'd been bellyaching throughout the entire process, but it was with some annoyance that Harry wondered whether he ought not be concerned once the girl approached the front desk, looking as pale as chalk dust and with her face sweat slicked.

She teeter-tottered on her feet, swaying slightly even as she held onto the desk for balance, and it seemed she'd quite forgotten why it was she had been called to the front of the room at all.

Snowdrop didn't begin to speak when prompted by Mr. Fowler, and even when somewhere to Harry's left Nicky Henderson could be heard calling out "Hill...!" in a slightly concerned voice, she didn't do more than blink.

"I... I brought a... it's a—" She had settled the little porcelain bell on the desktop and stared at it, mouthing words that never materialised from past her lips.

Lips that were turning blue.

Harry felt a bolt of panic igniting in his breast. That couldn't possibly be normal...

The searing heat he felt in his chest as his terror crested was abruptly interrupted when Snowdrop Hill swooned and fell over, her head of mismatched-length brown locks colliding with the sharp edge of the desk. It blunted her descent, but also resulted in a small explosion of berry-red arcing out over the stacked student papers on the desktop. The bell she'd brought to show the class fell to the floor and shattered into a hundred pieces.

The class heaved, and the resulting surge would have been impossible to contain. From every corner came shrieks and yells, and while some students rose to try and approach the fallen girl, still more backed away like the tide letting out against the beach.

There was no way through that Harry could see, but there was a terrible compulsion to move toward the collapsed child he'd goaded earlier that same day. From what little he could see of her where she lay on the laminate floor, she was shuddering and convulsing as Mr. Fowler attempted to rein in the situation. Without knowing what else to do, and boxed in on all sides by other students, Harry leapt onto his neighbor's desk—knocking a Beatles memorabilia figurine to the ground as he did so—and began frog-hop from table to table, ignoring the other students clawing at his jacket to hold him back.

He was nearly to the front...

Mr. Fowler was now shouting instructions to those who were near enough to help, "Sharp! Sharp—run for the nurse! Tell her to phone 999! Ward, go for Ms. Shaw!" Their teacher was on his knees near Snowdrop's head. She'd stopped convulsing and he seemed to be attempting to find a pulse, looking more panicked by the minute.

As soon as Joshua Sharp—a quick-on-his-feet lad a few inches taller than Harry himself—made it to the door, he fell back onto his bum, having been thrown away from the entrance when the door opened inward, seemingly on its own, and with violent force.

From around the white-washed door, Harry saw the briefest flash of black, before the lanky shadow stepped into the middle of the fracas near the front of the classroom.

"Who're you!?" Mr. Fowler demanded in a shrill voice, even as he was ostensibly still concerned with managing his fallen student. "How did you get in the building?"

Harry could have cried, and he very nearly collapsed off of the desk he'd made it to in the second row. Before him was Severus, craning his neck and searching out the classroom from back to front until his eyes landed on Harry himself.

"Potter!" Snape yelled at the top of his voice, ignoring the situation at the front entirely, "You're alright?"

The boy scrambled down from the desk and ran toward his custodian, his small hands yanking the man down and over until he'd pulled him toward the girl lying prostrate on the floor.

"Severus! Severus, it's Hill! Hill's... Hill's dead!" the younger wizard blathered, feeling his breaths coming in terrified gasps as his gaze lingered longer and longer on the prone, lifeless form.

Snape fell to his knees beside Mr. Fowler and the other child and nudged the teacher away, swatting impatiently at his hands. His black eyes swept over her face and with gentle movements he made to peel back the lids of her eyes, which were half-opened already.

"Who in the devil do you think you are!?" Fowler spat, shoving at Snape and attempting to tear his hands from his charge. "I'll have the police in here quick as you can say Jack Robinson!"

Sitting back on his heels for a moment, Snape looked as though he dearly wished to grab for his wand, which Harry knew to be stashed somewhere up his unseasonably long sleeves, but instead Snape swore an oath and pushed his hair back from where it had fallen into his face.

"There's little time for this girl left, so it seems to me you have a choice," Severus ground out, sounding as though he were chewing gravel between his molars. "Continue to play act the imbecile or allow a trained professional to assess her needs before she succumbs to the poison."

"P-poison?" Harry's teacher asked, his eyes rounding in their sockets.

Harry felt the roil of nausea stirring in his belly at the pronouncement and he gripped at his shirt, twisting it between his sweating palms.

"Severus—Severus, will she be alright?"

"Shh, Harry." Snape reached back, unseeing, and pushed his charge back further with an open palm as he bent over the girl, checking inside her mouth and turning her head this way and that with a critical eye.

Not knowing how else to help, Harry hovered over the man's shoulder, watching as Snape pulled a drawstring pouch from the pocket of his jeans. From the tiny leather purse, he shook out into his hand what appeared to be a smooth, brown stone.

"Help me get her up," he commanded the man next to him, grabbing at one of Snowdrop's arms.

Even though Mr. Fowler followed the instruction, using the leverage from the girl's other arm in order to hoist her up so that she could be leaned against the side of the desk, he apparently had enough cheek to question the strange person who'd come in and assumed control of his classroom. "To what end?"

Snape ignored this query outright and instead squeezed the girl's rodent-like cheeks in order to pop her mouth open. He poked the stone into her mouth, behind her bottom teeth, and then leaned her forward enough that her head could be tilted all the way back and her throat brought into alignment with her oesophagus.

It took a whole minute to coax her to swallow, and once she had they watched her for another full minute before Snape sat back on his heels with a frown.

Hill remained unconscious, Mr. Fowler was still sputtering inquiries, the students were an ever hovering mass of whispers and squeaks, and Harry had stayed where he'd stood behind Severus, feeling quite ready to tear his hair out at the root.

"What did you do? Will it work?" He asked, knowing that the other wizard would likely snap at him for interrupting yet again.

Indeed, Severus did turn to glare at him over his shoulder. "Without knowing what she was poisoned by, it is difficult to say. What I've just given her ought to work against the broadest spectrum of possible poisons and toxins without imperiling her further. I wouldn't give her anything more specific unless I knew what it was I was attempting to counteract."

"She ate a cheese toastie today for lunch, same as me." Harry informed him.

"And you ate exactly what she ate today?"

Harry shrugged, looking closely into Snowdrop's face and watching for any change. "It was from the same serving tray—"

Snape turned to him and gripped his chin in a punishing grip, turning his head from side to side and glancing at his eyes—not for eye-contact, but as though he were searching for signs of something. "How are you feeling?"

"I feel fine, Severus, honest."

Snape released him then with a sharp nod.

"Miss Hill was exhibiting signs of what I would perhaps call laboured breathing before her collapse," Mr. Fowler added from beside them. "I had thought it was merely her attempt to be disruptive—she's a history of that, I'm sad to inform—and from experience it is often the best practise to ignore her when she is doing her best to interrupt class. With the benefit of hindsight..."

Fowler shrugged, looking desperately uncomfortable.

Snape pinned him with a dark glare. "For how long?"

"Since we got back from lunch," Harry answered for him, "and she was fine during break. She—" he broke off then, as he remembered what had led to the girl having followed him to his seat at the lunch table.

"Severus, we fought at break today—" Harry announced, feeling slightly breathless.

"Potter, I believe I made it abundantly clear that I'd not tolerate hearing of any more schoolyard fights from you—" Snape's eyes were flashing dangerously.

"No! No, see? It wasn't a proper fight! I only meant that I needed some berries from the tree where Hill was sitting, and when I went to grab some, she tried to take them back. She only managed to get the one, but she ate it—"

Snape's voice emerged deadly soft. "What. Kind. Of. Berries?"

Rather than answering, Harry shoved a hand into his pocket and emerged with two underripe specimens he'd stashed away for later, handing them over to the Potions Master with a small sense of pride and hope.

Snape's thumb rolled the ball-shaped berries around in his palm, his gaze having widened with alarm as he looked them over. He had paled immediately upon seeing them, the sallowness of his skin causing his black hair and eyes to appear all the more stark and foreboding. "Pray tell what you thought you were doing collecting toxic yew berries during your break, Potter."

"I...er... I thought you might find them useful?"

"USEFUL!" Snape thundered, the shock of loud noise enough to startle the boy into falling back a step. "The seeds in the centre of the yew's berries are used in some of the worst poti-poisons known to mankind!

"There oughtn't to even be one on the grounds!" He yelled, looking slightly crazed. Here he'd rounded on the teacher and de facto representative for the school in the absence of anyone else. "Why's it not been cut down!?"

"T-the trees have been there for... for years, man. They're older than the school building—" Fowler gulped and shook his head. "I've not known of any students who venture out to sit under them, they're technically considered out of bounds."

"Yet no one ever bothered to check?" Snape snarled. "No one ever patrolled there during the breaks to see that students didn't loiter where they oughtn't be in the first place?"

"The... the yew's not exactly visible from the yard." Fowler answered, looking nervous. "If one were to walk around the trunk of the oak, he'd be hard to catch sight of."

Whatever Snape might have hoped to reply with was interrupted when Snowdrop pitched forward and vomited with the kind of force that might have put a geyser to shame. The contents of her stomach spewed forth and splattered against Snape's shirt and jeans, and some made it to his face and into his hair.

The shock of the moment held everyone motionless for several seconds until Snowdrop broke the tension by breaking down into terrified, hoarse cries that echoed throughout the silent classroom.

As soon as chaos regained its foothold, Harry was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Snowdrop Hill would live to frustrate him another day.

Given that it was the second Monday in a row where Severus had been made to come collect Harry from school earlier than he'd anticipated—and given that Snape was covered from head to foot in the contents of Snowdrop Hill's stomach, a fact which he was unable to remedy with magic while in the company of muggles—Harry thought it was rather big of the older wizard to stick around until the emergency team arrived from the nearest hospital.

By then, whatever it was that Snape had done to Snowdrop had worked its magic, and she was lucid and able to answer questions, at least in so far as her teary-eyed state would allow.

When she first came to, her hysterics were brought on principally by the fact that she'd awoken in pain and terrified. The second round had come upon her when she'd wiped her face and her hands had come away streaked with blood. The third wind had been the strongest of all, however, and had begun in earnest as soon as her eyes had registered the shattered china bell that she'd swept to the floor.

While they waited for the emergency services to arrive—Mr. Fowler having sent the class off with Mrs. Murray who hustled them into the gymnasium for the duration—she was unable to be distracted away from the pile of shards.

She had fallen to her knees by the broken porcelain and had painstakingly picked out all of the larger pieces into her hands, then using her wetted fingertip in a vain attempt to ferry some of the smaller ones in alongside the biggest chips.

At the time Mr. Fowler had been conferring with Ms. Shaw, who had by then arrived on the scene, and the school nurse.

The only two who were paying much attention to Hill's attempts to save her tiny porcelain bell were Harry and Snape.

When the team from the hospital arrived—at about the same time as an older woman whom Harry assumed must have been some relation to Hill—the girl was forced by the old lady to drop the pieces and was bodily manoeuvered away from Harry and his guardian in order to be assessed. Even though she was capable by then of standing and walking on her own, they insisted that she lay flat on a wheeled stretcher, and she was escorted out of the building, presumably headed off on her way to a stay in hospital.

Likely, Snape's presence in the classroom was the next thing that would be addressed, and Harry worried at his lip as he considered how it was that Severus was going to worm his way out of this debacle, given that he couldn't exactly speed away in the old, beat up Morris Marina.

As it happened, the wizard had no intention of going anywhere. And though he couldn't take any measures to clean himself off beyond wiping at his face with his sleeves, Harry did watch as he stooped to gather up the pieces of the shattered bell into the same small pouch from which he'd earlier produced the strange stone.

He must have used a bit of magic, subtle though it was, for he somehow managed to collect every tiny sliver and speck of porcelain dust.

"That's the girl you were in a fight with last week."

It wasn't phrased like a question, and Harry knew better than to think it was one, but he answered as though he'd been asked anyhow.

"Yeah, she's the one that tackled Nicky Henderson."

Snape pursed his lips and nodded once, and Harry hadn't a clue what that might have meant, but he wasn't given much time to dwell over it, for not long after Ms. Shaw approached the two after seeing the medical team off.

She stopped short of them and Harry was surprised to see Snape straighten up before her, ducking his head as though he himself were the student standing before her rather than Harry.

Unaccountably, Harry felt rather proud that the headmistress didn't wrinkle her nose up at the smell coming off of him. He was rank.

Aida Shaw did, however, look Snape up and down, her mouth twisting a little bit in an expression which might have meant anything at all.

"It would seem that we're lucky to see you back at the school today, Mr. Snape," she began, clasping her hands before her. "If what the emergency team tell me is true, Miss Hill may well have passed beyond our reach had you not intervened."

Snape didn't look as though he knew what to say, but he did draw himself up to his full height, which had him looking down on the headmistress by a little bit, and he nearly pulled off a dignified figure, had it not been for the fact that he reeked of vomit and his clothes looked like they'd be better suited for the proprietor of a record store.

"I was pleased to be of service." He gave a short nod. "If you wouldn't mind, Headmistress Shaw, I do think I have some questions I'd like answered—"

"I'm sure you understand that given today's events, I'll be rather busy for the rest of the day, Mr. Snape. If you'd like to arrange for a conference with me later this week—"

Harry caught the flash of annoyance in Snape's eyes at having been put off, but he wasn't certain that Ms. Shaw had. It was a look that spelled danger, usually, and Harry grew wary as soon as he saw it. Whatever it was that Snape meant to discuss with the headmistress couldn't be good, and he found himself hoping that it didn't have much to do with him.

"First thing tomorrow would suit just fine for my schedule," the wizard's cool voice returned, sounding like a smooth wave covering for violent riptides.

The headmistress blinked twice in rapid succession, like she'd not expected to be confronted so doggedly.

"I—"

The man nodded sharply and interrupted her before she could come up with an excuse. "Expect me at eight."

Then, before Harry could say another word to him, Snape strode from the room and disappeared down the hall, apparently intent on returning to Spinner's End without Harry in tow.

Which was really quite rude of him, all things considered, as the school day was only perhaps less than an hour from being finished.

Worse yet, he'd left Harry to clean up his mess for him. Namely, the boy was forced into an impromptu inquisition, trapped between Mr. Fowler and Ms. Shaw as the two teachers needled him for information on just how it had been that Snape knew to show up, where he'd come from, and what on earth it was that he'd done to rouse Snowdrop Hill from her unconsciousness.

Harry hadn't a single answer for them, and by the time the school bell rang, he darted off to heft up his bag onto his shoulders, grabbed Wheat's terrarium off of his desk and fled from the school.

When he made it outside, Severus' Morris Marina was nowhere in sight and neither was the man himself. Evidently, he'd not waited up. Harry was forced to begin his walk home alone.

He'd made it about half-way to the bridge when he heard the pounding of heavy footsteps behind him and he whipped around; his instincts—honed from years of Dudley's Harry hunting—telling him that to ignore the approaching presence might have proven to be a deadly miscalculation.

Halting as he did nearly saw him being barreled into by the fast-approaching form of Nicky Henderson, who had been hot on his heels.

Nicky stopped short of hitting him, but only by virtue of changing course at the last second so that he veered slightly to the left of Harry, his momentum carrying him at least another meter more.

"P-Potter, wait," he panted, doubling over and clutching at a stitch in his side. Harry did so, watching with wide green eyes as the slightly larger boy recovered himself.

Harry had backed up against a nearby building which stood empty, not wishing to feel so exposed. If Nicky took it upon himself to launch an attack just now, there was no one Harry could see that might be available to help him.

Of course, it wasn't so much that Nicky Henderson was a danger unto himself. Henderson hadn't gotten vicious with Snowdrop Hill until the girl had cannoned into him and begun her own assault against his person. He had, however, carried it way too far in getting even.

At last, after moments of huffing and puffing dramatically, Nicky finally caught his breath, though he was still pitched forward, with his hands clutching his knees. "Potter, who was that?"

"Who was who?" Harry asked, frowning. He shifted Wheat's terrarium under his arm so that it rested in the crook of his elbow, the tarantula making its way with leisurely grace to the other side, where Harry's bicep cast a shadow over a soft spot in the corner.

"That bloke that knocked Sharp over! He was all set to run for the nurse and then the door opened in his face. I know you know him, he was talking to you."

"Oh him? That's Severus," Harry answered. He looked around with a sense of mounting aggravation and then decided he may as well continue his trek home. If Henderson followed him, that was his own business. Thus, he began to trot toward the bridge once more, scouting out with his eyes to make sure that he didn't manage to trip over one of the vagrants once more.

With his keen eye he spotted the man he'd earlier stumbled on squatting by the bank of the river, near a couple of other down-on-their-luck sorts. He'd apparently doffed his coat and was lounging with his long johns rolled up along his shins and to the crooks of his elbows out of deference to the early September heat. They were stained yellow all over with sweat and God knew what else. Between the four people, who seemed to be chatting, lay a dog so filthy and matted that he may well have been one large mass of wiry fur. The poor thing's tongue lolled dreadfully, but he seemed happy enough as the assembled group of tramps were taking turns throwing the beast small tidbits of bread crust.

"What sort of name is 'Severus,' anyway?"

Distracted as he'd been, the question startled Harry, and he looked up to see that Nicky had, indeed, kept pace with him. They were now starting in on the bridge, and soon the tramps and their small encampment were out of sight.

Harry shrugged when he found he couldn't come up with an answer. He felt rather annoyed with the question and with Nicky dogging him all the way home. "What sort of name is 'Nicky?'" He asked back, shoving his hand that wasn't holding Wheat deep into his trouser pocket.

"Short for Nicholas, like Father Christmas—" Nicky chirped back in a matter-of-fact tone.

Harry snarled at him, not liking that his unfriendly volley had been ignored, and feeling his face pull into the familiar expression that he'd seen Severus use so many times before. "Shut up—!"

"What kind of name is 'Severus?'" Nicky asked again, apparently unimpressed by Harry's unfriendliness. "He looked like someone from a film or something."

In truth, Harry had no idea where the name Severus had come from, so he merely shrugged. He thought he might have heard Snape mention having been named for a river somewhere far south of them once before, but it was hard to say for certain, and he was hardly going to tell Nicky that. Instead, he asked his own question to try and divert from the silly question. "What sort of film?"

"I dunno—like he was in a biker gang or something? Have you seen Escape from New York?"

"No," Harry admitted. He'd truthfully seen very few films at all, and he certainly wasn't up on anything newer that his aunt or uncle might have frowned upon. That would definitely have included any films that would include a character that might have resembled Severus.

"Or like, do you know Bon Scott? From AC/DC?"

Harry paused for a moment and gave it some thought, feeling taken aback. He'd seen Bon Scott (the deceased former frontman of the band), on some of Severus' rock magazines. And on the cover of the tape for Highway to Hell. "Yeah, I guess," he agreed, finally.

"Is he like, an undercover rock star or something?"

Harry resumed walking, growing tired of the inquisition over his guardian. "No."

"He dresses like one."

"Severus likes to wear black, is all." Harry turned to face the boy who was keeping pace with him, walking now in step with one another. "Why do you care, anyway?"

"I dunno," Nicky shrugged, although for reasons Harry couldn't quite name, the boy wizard remained convinced that there was more to it than Henderson would admit.

"They made us all get out except for you, and everyone was talking about it. No one wanted to ask you 'coz you're new and they're... well..." He fumbled a bit, his mouth twisting as he considered his words, "You're the kind of kid to bring a spider the size of your face in to class, and you hang around with the likes of Hill—"

"I do not!" Harry protested, "I only wanted to sit by the trees. I didn't know that that was Hill's spot—"

"And you got in a fight, first thing—"

"I was breaking up your fight!"

Either Nicky had forgotten this, or simply didn't care about the actual facts of the matter, for he shrugged. "No one wanted to ask you, but I don't care, Potter. I thought your tarantula was cool. Don't mind 'em at all, really, spiders. Not like a rat or something nasty like that. You're pretty much alright, far as I can tell."

"Thanks," Harry ground out, sarcasm dripping from the single word reply.

Apparently, Nicky Henderson was either unaware of what the tone meant, or otherwise didn't care about this either. He soldiered on with their conversation without marking Harry's ungracious attitude.

"What was he doing to Hill, anyway?"

Since Harry didn't have much of an answer, himself, he shrugged, hoping that at any moment Nicky might decide to veer off course and head toward his own home, wherever that might've been.

"He saved her life, isn't that enough?" Harry asked, feeling defensive.

"How'd he manage it, though?"

"I don't know," the young wizard answered, this time without a hint of malice. It was true, after all. He hadn't the faintest inkling of how it was that Snape had managed, nor what the cure he'd administered might have been.

"What was Severus doing at the school?" Nicky continued his line of questioning, and it rubbed Harry entirely the wrong way that the other boy would presume to call Severus by his first name. It had taken a while before the man had permitted Harry to in the first place!

"You should call him 'Mr. Snape.'" Harry scolded, his eyes looking anywhere but at the pest by his side. They were nearing the derelict auto shop that was a few streets down from Severus' house.

"Mr. Snape then. How did he know he ought to be there?"

Harry shook his head. "I don't know," he answered once more.

Beside him, Nicky stopped walking. He looked around a bit at the empty buildings that lined the street.

"I'm not usually supposed to come this far," the other boy commented, his eyes narrowing as he surveyed their surroundings. "Cynthia—my Mam—would have kittens if she knew I'd gone all the way to Cokeworth..."

"Probably you should go home, then." Harry told him, in a matter-of-fact tone. He desperately wanted to be home, himself—to ask Severus the very same questions that Nicky had asked of him—but the muggle boy was holding him up, and Harry didn't quite have the heart to run him off on purpose.

"Right," Nicky nodded, although he seemed curiously regretful over it. "I'll see you tomorrow, Potter."

"Yeah," Harry agreed. "Tomorrow."

As Nicky turned tail and made his way back toward the lane which would lead him away from Cokeworth, Harry felt a strange emotion that was difficult to place.

It closely resembled disappointment.

He spent the remainder of his walk home noodling over what it was that he should call it, when he realised with a start—upon opening the door to Severus' house on Spinner's End—that he, in a strange way, sort of wished that Nicky had stuck around.

It had been an odd change to have another child speaking to him with no hint of aggression or artifice, and as soon as Harry realised this, he felt a mild sense of shame suffuse him.

He'd spent the entire walk trying to put space between him and his interloper, only to miss the oblivious lad as soon as Nicky Henderson had changed course to go home.

Nicky had said he'd see him tomorrow. If Harry supposed that that was true—well?

Well, that wouldn't be so bad at all, actually.

He found Severus slumped on the sofa, having slid so that his backside barely rested against the bottom of the cushions, and his legs and knees were extended out further than they ought to have been over the dirty floor. He'd draped what looked to be a wet washcloth over the upper part of his face and had folded his hands over his belly.

From the way his thin slash of his mouth was set into a dour grimace, Harry could tell that Snape was either feeling poorly or else was in a horrendous mood.

Thinking that perhaps it would be best if he avoided the man altogether, the boy set down his bookbag near the door and took large, creeping steps forward, his eyes set on the staircase which would lead him to his own bedroom, but there was no disguising the creaking of the floor, nor the way that the hinge protested as he shut the door.

"The polite thing to do when entering the house is to announce your arrival and to issue a greeting of some sort." Snape's voice emerged in a rusty growl, and Harry winced upon hearing it.

"It looked like you were napping," the boy offered back, regretting that he'd evidently disturbed the other wizard.

Severus shook his head with a sigh, the motion dislodging the washcloth from his face so that Harry could see the man's eyes. The bags underneath them were so pronounced that, under any other circumstances, Harry might have thought that Snape had been punched in the face. "I was waiting for you to return. I've a bone to pick with you, as it were."

Harry stiffened and felt a tremour run through him at the pronouncement. He was innocent! He knew he was innocent. But he'd have to prove that to Severus, somehow...

"Can I... can I put Wheat upstairs first?"

"Hurry back." Snape instructed him, with a short roll of his eyes.

Not wishing to tempt fate—or Snape's temper—Harry did as he was bid, dashing up the narrow staircase and depositing Wheat in his customary space near the wall of Severus' childhood bedroom. Although he wished he could simply lock himself in with his pet, he knew that to keep Severus waiting would hardly improve on the situation. He forced himself to march back downstairs but held his head high to meet Snape's gaze.

He hadn't done anything wrong. Snape would have to see that...

Harry was dawdling so much that his shoes were dragging and scuffing along the stairs. There were few things he could identify which he'd rather do less than to face Severus in that moment, which was a curious thing, given his certainty that he couldn't pinpoint a way in which he'd fouled up this time around.

He'd been with Snape for a month and a half and even though the man had a dreadful temper, he'd not yet raised a hand to Harry, nor had he done much to punish him beyond enlisting the boy to help with the more disgusting aspects of ingredient preparation—which, privately, Harry very nearly enjoyed.

There was only so much he could do to waste time, however, and ultimately his feet led him back into the sitting room where he faced Snape with his head hung, staring at the rubber toebox of his trainers. What must have at one time been white was scratched, brown, and caked with dirt.

"Harry."

Swallowing, the boy looked up to see that Snape was now leaning forward where he sat on the sofa, his forearms resting on his knees. For all that Harry had feared, the man didn't appear angry, however, and that was enough to allow the boy to straighten up a bit under the scrutiny of those glinting black eyes.

"Harry, can you explain to me which part of what you did today proved most dangerous?"

Harry felt his heart sink. He had done something wrong, after all... and worse yet, Snape had an urgent, serious expression on his face. For him to have been furious and spitting venom might have been preferable to this worried look Severus was currently leveling at him.

"I... I should of picked them so no one could see—then Hill wouldn't of tried to take them off me—"

"No." Snape rebuked him, though without his habitual asperity.

"I should'a told someone when Hill ate the berries I picked—" Harry tried again, stopping when he saw Severus shake his head a bit ruefully.

"Granted, you should have told someone, and that was indeed very dangerous that you left it to chance, but you need to desist from bringing me things to use in potions, full stop, Harry. You must resist this urge of yours to pick up things with which you are unfamiliar, particularly if you don't know the first thing about their properties, either in isolation or when combined in the form of a potion." Snape sighed, rubbing at the bridge of his nose with his two index fingers.

"Yew seeds are unimaginably toxic, and they're not in the least bit magical on their own. Just because something is non-magical—or just because it grows in a place that ought to be safe, such as the school yard—does not mean that it cannot hurt you."

"Well, I wouldn't have eaten them!" Harry argued, feeling defensive. He knew better than to pop strange bits and bobs in his mouth. Even Snape hadn't had to tell him that, he thought, wishing he could roll his eyes. He wasn't a complete idiot!

"Not everything needs to be ingested to be dangerous. There are toxic and corrosive substances that can harm you when coming into contact with your skin alone.

"For instance, let us say that you found a leafy green plant, surrounded by a circle of attractive, spiky leaves. Would you have gathered such a thing for me?"

Harry shrugged, "I guess I find things that look... I dunno," he faltered, "like they might not get picked up otherwise?" He fished in his pocket coming away with the tiny grass seeds he'd collected earlier. They trickled out of his fingers onto the floor.

"Grass seed," Snape observed with wry amusement. "Not especially useful for anything, bar some antiquated and rudimentary poultices. In any case, would you have picked the plant I named."

"I dunno, maybe."

"Congratulations, Potter. You have earned yourself a particularly uncomfortable skin rash. Those were stinging nettles."

"I said I didn't know whether I'd pick them—" Harry began to argue.

"What about a tall, umbrella-like plant, bigger than you, yourself? With a coronet of beautiful, vibrant, ultraviolet flowers? Sounds like the makings of a promising ingredient for potions, no?"

This, Harry couldn't deny. He'd be hard pressed to ignore the lure of such a singular specimen. Instead of answering, he shrugged, the movement of it defensive.

"Were you so stupid as to take a harvest from such a plant, you'd have far worse than the skin rash I mentioned earlier. Though beautiful, the magical variety of hogsweed is as dangerous and toxic as its giant, Caucasian counterpart, and unlike the invasive muggle variety, it grows natively in the wilds of Cumbria." Snape sighed, resting his black eyes on Harry with a gravity that felt hard to shake. "Think giant, weeping blisters, Potter. You'd be in need of medical attention, and should it be the muggles that happened upon you, they'd be at a loss for how to properly treat the condition.

"I've seen grown witches and wizards succumb to the wounds from large-scale exposure. You're a boy—do you think you'd fare any better?"

In spite of himself, Harry felt his sinuses beginning to prickle, which always seemed to presage a few tears. He tried to flare his nostrils to ward it off, and reached up a hand to rub underneath his spectacles, but it was to no avail. Feeling like he'd let the man in front of him down was enough to make him wish he could run off and hide, and because that would only disappoint Severus further, his only recourse was to stand and endure Snape's well-placed criticisms.

"I only w-wanted to—"

"I know you only wanted to help, Harry, but I don't know how to be any more clear that I find it anything but helpful to have to rush off in the middle of my day to shove precious—and expensive—bezoars down the throats of muggle girls to save them from your regrettable tendency to stick your nose where it doesn't belong."

Not knowing what else to say to that, Harry picked on the only thing he couldn't understand. "Bezoars?"

"A broad spectrum treatment for most poisons and toxins. Had she eaten more, it may well have failed to work. I can't imagine the muggle emergency team would have managed to arrive in time—you may well have had to watch the girl die in front of your very eyes."

When Harry gasped, Snape nodded in a single, decisive jerk. "How much did she have?"

"Just one," Harry admitted.

"It takes very little to prove fatal, even to most adults. She was lucky. You were lucky. Imagine she had eaten a larger dose and that you knew she'd taken it directly from your hand—"

"Severus..." Harry moaned, ducking his head. His hands came up to rub at his eyes, finding tears there that couldn't be contained.

The silence stretched between them, punctuated only by Harry's stifled sobs. "I think you get the picture." Harry heard, rather than saw, the man rise from where he was seated, then he felt when the man brushed past him, headed into the kitchen.

"What would you like from Rice Bowl?"

It took Harry a few seconds to register the question. When he did, his hands pulled down his face, his incredulous look leaving his eyes staring with widened shock at the man who was standing by the phone.

"I didn't think we could afford take away." Harry answered, rubbing at his dripping nose with the back of one hand. "And I nearly killed Hill—"

"You didn't nearly kill her," Snape answered. "The stupid girl grabbed a strange substance out of your hand and shoved it in her own mouth, without considering the possible consequences which may result.

"In any case," the older wizard paused, rubbing a thin hand over his tired eyes, "I don't feel much like cooking tonight, and one evening ordering out won't make much of a difference."

This ought to have reassured Harry, but instead he found it frightening. Was it the case that Snape had exaggerated how dire their circumstances were, or were they in such straits that it no longer mattered whether Snape wasted a few extra quid on a pair of polystyrene boxes filled with Mrs. Padiernos' delectable cooking?

"What do you want?" Snape asked again, lifting the phone off of its base and making to dial out.

"Tocino," Harry murmured, trailing after the man and leaning against the peeling wallpaper that covered the wall by the sink.

"Is that all?"

"I can get more?"

"Well, don't order the whole restaurant," Snape snarled, rolling his eyes, "but I dare say you can order more than meat alone."

Harry came up by Snape's elbow and teeter-tottered from heel to toe and back again. "What else should I get?"

"I'll order us a couple of cartons of rice," Snape decided.

"What's that bread?" Harry asked from the man's elbow. "The one that's good with that stuff?"

Severus scoffed and threw a faintly disgusted look Harry's way. "You expect me to be able to supply the names of both this mysterious bread and unspecified 'stuff?'"

"They were like, little rolls," Harry explained, holding his hands up, cupped around an invisible object in order to show the approximate size. "And they were kind of sweet and crumbly."

"Pandesal."

"That! With that brown stuff—"

"Coconut jam."

"Can we get that?" Harry prodded, hoping he wasn't pushing his luck past the breaking point.

"You realise that eating it with coconut jam isn't exactly traditional?" Snape asked, though he did move then to begin dialing Rice Bowl's number. "You'd be better served with butter."

"You eat it with coconut jam." Harry argued. After all, he'd only followed Snape's lead and had slathered his golden bun with the thick, brown paste after he'd seen Snape do so, a greedy glint having lit up the man's eyes.

"And have a look at my teeth sometime, Potter—trust that you'd do best to avoid eating quite so much sugar."

Anything else Severus might have said on the subject was interrupted by a voice coming across the other end. Harry couldn't quite make it out, but knew it must have either been Mister or Missus Padiernos, asking for their order.

"Placing an order. Take away—" There came a garbled response, and Snape rubbed a weary finger along the bridge of his hooked nose. "Yes. One tocino pork entrée, a large carton of garlic rice, an order of chicken inasal—"

Harry watched as Snape frowned, apparently having been interrupted during his order.

"No, it's not," he began to argue. Harry watched, fascinated, as a deep burgundy began to creep up Snape's neck to gather in the shells of his ears.

"No! I'm—that is to say—no—"

Harry would have sworn he heard a strange mixture of raucous laughter and jocular chirping coming from Rice Bowl's end of the call. He tried to stifle the giggle that wanted to erupt as he watched his guardian scowl at the phone as though the device itself was the thing mocking him, but he didn't quite manage.

That earned him a furious look as Severus passed his eyes over the annoyance in front of him rather than the one who was on the other side of town, apparently mocking him over the shared line.

"Mrs. Pad—Mrs. P—Lola!" Snape snapped, looking harried and upset that he seemingly couldn't get a word in edgewise.

Harry thought he heard more subdued hooting from Mrs. Padiernos as Snape turned his back to him and hunched over the phone as if he wished to hide from Harry's eyes. "And no, that wasn't all—"

Apparently, the woman wasn't going to allow Snape to get away with conducting the order, for she sounded like she was rattling off a list of suggestions as Snape listened impatiently.

"Perhaps the pandesal, we'll not be needing any of the rest."

It seemed like Mrs. Padiernos disagreed.

"That would be superfluous to our needs."

An aggrieved snort met Snape's latest commentary, and Harry thought he might have heard the woman lecturing over vegetables.

"If that's how you'll be over it, then I'll take an order of bibingka—"

"Coconut jam," Harry prompted, in an undertone.

"The boy wants a small container of coconut jam for the bread, Lo-Mrs. Padiernos—"

It seemed now that Snape was enduring another short lecture where the woman was attempting to get the man to substitute something for a vegetable or soup side, but Snape stood firm and insisted that they'd do just as well without. At length, Mrs. Padiernos seemed to have given in, for she quoted the wizard a price and Snape agreed to it, though Harry wasn't privy to what the figure might have been.

Afterwards, Snape hung up the phone and turned to brush past Harry who was still standing near the doorway that separated the sitting room from the kitchen.

He thought he might have heard the man messing with the key ring near the door before Harry was summoned with an impatient bark.

"Coming, Potter?"

Scrambling out to the entryway, Harry peered up at the wizard who had barely paused long enough to wait on him.

"You want me to come?"

Snape shut the door behind them with a loud slam, causing Harry to jump a bit. "You have to earn your keep somehow. You think I'd prefer to play pack mule to all our boxes, myself?"

"No," Harry answered, with a small frown. He followed Severus to where the car was parked, slightly pulled up onto the kerb—which Harry had given up on lecturing the man over, given the way it tended to deflate and damage the tyres—and folded himself into the backseat, still preferring it to sitting in the passenger side.

At least in the back, there was some protection in the event that Snape's driving tipped them off the bridge into the River Leven, or collided them nose first into an oncoming lorry, or—

Well. It was best not to keep on thinking of disastrous 'might-bes.'

He was much better than he'd been that first day Harry had met him, this was true, but Severus still had very little patience for driving, and even less patience for those unfortunate enough to share the road with them, and Harry sometimes felt as though he only managed to make it through their short trips into town by squeezing his eyes shut and clenching his teeth hard enough that he worried they'd chip. (It was between that and biting down on his cheek or tongue, but then he'd considered what might happen should they wreck, and he'd had the terrifying realisation that it might well have meant biting his tongue off or chomping a hole through the meat of his cheek).

Luckily, Backbarrow was far smaller than Little Whinging, and their trips into town never required them to drive more than perhaps three miles out of their way. That such a short trip could still inspire the levels of terror it did was a testament to Harry's estimation of Snape's skills behind the wheel. That was to say: Harry had no faith in the man's abilities whatsoever.

That seemed to suit Snape just fine, however, and the man hadn't taken any pains to improve his technique since he'd mysteriously stopped his aggressive shifting after they'd left hospital in July.

When they arrived at the tiny car park that Snape appeared to favour, he shooed Harry out of the car with the imperious order that the boy come back with their bags.

Harry's hands were loaded up with a stack of bills—already counted out to the exact number Mrs. Padiernos had quoted Snape over the phone—and was told not to dawdle at Rice Bowl.

As Harry walked away, he sent a few looks back over his shoulder, finding that Snape was sitting in the driver's seat, his arms crossed over his thin chest, peering out into traffic with a mulish expression on his long face.

If the younger wizard didn't know any better, he'd have said the man was sulking, and that he was probably avoiding Rice Bowl's proprietor for all that he was worth. A supposition which seemed borne out by the man's choice of music for their ride: Youth Gone Wild, by Skid Row.

Mrs. Padiernos seemed to agree with Harry's assessment, if her annoyance at seeing the boy unaccompanied was any indication.

She'd lit up at seeing Severus' ward, and then her lips had gradually pursed as she realised that Severus wasn't trailing his own mangy hide in behind the young boy, and as she called for her husband to make haste in assembling their boxes for them, she'd leaned over the counter on one elbow, her eyes rolling to the faltering plaster of the ceiling as she settled in for a chat.

"I expect he told you not to waste any time talking?"

Uncomfortable with lying, but feeling the truth was unkind, Harry's mouth twisted in a grimace as he shrugged.

"Stupid boy—" And then, seeing that Harry's grimace had taken on a pained look, her features softened a touch. "Not you, Harry. 'Rus has a stubborn streak a mile wide, and he comes by it honestly. His mother did too."

Snape never spoke of his mother—or of his father, for that matter—and Harry was painfully curious. It was likely that he'd never be able to butter the man up enough to loosen his lips about the family who'd once lived on Spinner's End, and who knew when Harry would get another chance to talk to Mrs. Padiernos alone again?

As the woman had said: he wasn't a stupid lad. If there was a chance, and if this was to be the only one, he'd be some manner of fool not to ask...

"She did?" Harry asked, his tongue darting out to lick his lips. "Severus never says anything about her..."

Mrs. Padiernos leveled an assessing look at Harry, and then glanced around, as though she suspected Snape of lurking behind the wall that led to the kitchen—although, how he'd have made it into the back of the establishment, behind the counter, was a mystery—and she leaned down to get a little closer to Harry's level, speaking low, even though they were the only two at the front of the restaurant, and Mr. Padiernos clearly couldn't hear over the loud hiss of the wok he was stirring.

"Eileen was a dear, dear thing," she nodded, her face solemn. "I was blessed to know her when she moved to town in 1950 or thereabouts.

"There's not many of us, you know?" Mrs. Padiernos asked, without expecting an answer. "The nearest parish is up in Penrith, and we met on the bus—it didn't run on Sundays, so we often went on Wednesdays because we could still catch a bus back, and go after work."

Harry's face screwed up a bit in confusion. Severus hadn't mentioned whether or not the Padiernoses were magical or not and had only loosely mentioned in passing that they'd been long-standing family friends. On the other hand... he'd also cautioned Harry not to speak of the magical world aloud without his express say-so. "Not many of us what, Mrs. Padi—"

"You will call me 'Lola,'" the woman smirked, having interrupted him. "None of this nonsense that 'Rus has fallen back on. He forgets because he wants to. I remind him of his mother, and as much as he hates that, he can't leave it alone either. I know, because otherwise he wouldn't come in as much as he does."

"He'd come in more, only..." Harry trailed off, remembering too late that he wasn't meant to be telling the woman about Severus' money woes.

Lola's keen stare told him that she may well already be aware, and Harry felt his face flush, remembering in that moment that he was already wearing the fruits of the woman's charity in his school uniform.

"'Rus isn't nearly as secretive as he thinks he is—not to me. Not to his Lola." She shook her head and rolled her brown eyes with a tiny sneer of exasperation. "He is the same boy he was fifteen years ago—too proud by half. Again, just like Leenie."

"What are there not many of, Lola?" Harry prompted, leaning both of his palms on the counter and rocking back and forth on the soles of his feet.

Lola's eyes crinkled at the edges as she laughed. "Well, at least in this neck of the woods: Catholics. But more specifically, Filipinos."

"Severus is Filipino?" Harry asked, his eyebrows rising over his rounded eyes. "He looks—"

"He looks like his countrymen. Or, in point of fact, like his father," Lola said with a languid shrug. "Tobias had strong features, and Leenie was only half-Pinay herself, but Severus got her hair and eyes, even if he got his Da's ilong," She informed him, tapping one red-lacquered nail against her nose for emphasis.

"If you worked in Backbarrow and had to make it to the church at least once a week, it couldn't be on Sundays, so she and I met for the first time when we were headed up to Penrith for services."

"Are there more Filipinos in Penrith?" Harry asked, his fingers tapping out a tempo on the laminated counter.

"Hah! No—probably there are some in Carlisle, but ours was the only family in these parts. Granted, we have a rather large family," she chuckled. "In any case, I thought I'd known of all of us around the lakes, but Eileen proved that wrong, so it's possible there are more."

"Is that why Severus doesn't wanna call you 'Lola?' 'Cause maybe he has one already?" Harry speculated, his mouth twisting in apology.

This earned a snort from the woman. "'Rus doesn't want to call me 'Lola' because he thinks he's a man grown who doesn't need to be mothered anymore, and, more than that, he imagines it's something to be embarrassed of. According to Eileen, his own Lola wanted nothing to do with them after she'd gone off and married Toby. Didn't approve of him, she said."

"His Gran didn't like him?" Harry asked, feeling his jaw drop open. He knew he wasn't any sort of expert on family... but it seemed especially cruel to be treated as disposable by one's own grandmother.

"Doubt if she ever met 'Rus. She didn't care for 'Rus' father, Tobias. Eileen ran off from some posh plot down near Cheltenham and met Toby in Birmingham where they both found work. Then Toby was hired on at Reckitt, here in the town where he was born and raised, a few years before 'Rus came along, and instead of breaking it off, they talked some priest into marrying them. That's how she found herself all the way out here in this pile.

"Eileen wasn't the sort for making many friends, either." Lola shook her head, her aged mouth firmed up into a grim little line. "She didn't want to accept help from anyone, and charity might as well have been a dirty word.

"Even so, when 'Rus came along, and the little mite didn't have any clothes that fit, or when they'd run out of money for meat, she'd bring him to me and he'd stay with Lola for a week or so," she said, patting her own breast. "Grew up alongside my Louie like he was his own brother—called him 'Kuya' and everything."

"What's kuya mean?" Harry asked, finally seeing an opening to answer a question he'd saved up since he'd last seen Lola.

"It means 'older brother.'"

Frowning now, Harry recalled how the woman had insisted that Snape was his own 'kuya,' and felt himself more confused than ever.

"'Ney!" Mr. Padiernos barked from the back, "'Rus' order is ready!"

Lola rushed off then and returned with a greasy, brown paper bag, stapled shut at the top. She pushed it over the counter at Harry who took it, juggling it a bit as the heat from the boxes inside bit at his fingers.

"I know 'Rus said he wasn't ordering vegetables, but there's a box of steamed sprouts in there that I expect you to eat, and if you can make that stubborn ox eat a few too, you'd be Lola's little hero," she beamed down at him, a bit of a twinkle coming into her eye. "If you can, get him to have those before he starts in on the bibingka, or else there'll be no turning back for him."

"Thanks, Lola," Harry chirped back, giving a clumsy salute as he pushed the bills across the counter to her.

"And don't put too much jam on those pandesal—you'll end up with teeth as bad as your kuya's."

"That's what Severus said," Harry rolled his eyes, but also offered up a tiny grin in response as he pushed the door open with his backside and shimmied out into the alleyway. "Bye!"

"We'll see you later," the woman called back to him, with a little wave of her fingers and a grin.

When he was meant to leave the next morning for school, his stomach laden with leftovers from the night before, Harry was surprised when Severus accompanied him out the door and directed his course toward the car.

He was miserly with explanations when Harry asked the man what he was about, and rather than giving any sort of satisfactory answer, responded with impatience.

"Am I not allowed to offer you a lift into town? If you'd rather leg it yourself, I welcome you to follow behind in the exhaust cloud."

"There's no need to be mean," Harry muttered, buckling himself into the backseat beside his school bag.

"There's no need to ask about things that don't concern you. There's a saying, Potter: don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

Harry, who was kicking his legs as he often did on car rides, purposefully allowed one of his feet to bump against the back of Snape's seat.

"So, if some man comes up offering candy I should take it, no questions—"

"Don't be dim, of course you ought not ask questions! You run your scrawny arse out of there and come find me."

Dearly wishing he could make a point about how Snape had once been the same manner of stranger to him, and a housebreaking one to boot, Harry nonetheless managed to button his lip, though he did kick out at Snape's seat once more for good measure.

"Do not tempt me, Potter—" Snape growled, reaching back a hand to swat ineffectually at thin air, where he perhaps approximated Harry to have been sitting.

"I'm not—"

"We'll see if there's anything left of the bibingka by the time you make it home this afternoon."

As far as threats went, it was a relatively weak one, which Snape seemed to know from his frown. As much as Harry was hoping for another helping of rice pudding, he'd gone without food—and without sweets in particular—far too many times to be cowed by such a punishment.

When he ceased antagonising Severus it was merely because he'd decided the other wizard had likely suffered enough for one morning.

And besides, it was rather nice that he'd driven him in to school.

The ending notes for Saxon's Denim and Leather were ringing off when Snape reached over to depress the pause button, his hand on the wheel causing the tyres to swerve to the left a bit as he leaned towards the passenger seat.

When they came to a full stop, Harry had to forcibly remind himself to unclench his teeth.

He exited the car and walked towards the doors, only to hear another slam behind him as Severus left the car in the drop-off lane.

Harry felt his eyes widen as Severus approached, his face set in a forbidding, black scowl.

"Did... did I forget something?"

"No. Go ahead to class, Harry."

"Then, erm... what are you doing still here?" Harry asked, walking in step with the older wizard through the foyer. "Er... I don't think you're meant to park there..."

Snape snorted, the reaction so violent that Harry was surprised not to see two twin bursts of air issuing forth from the man's bull-like proboscis. "They won't have anything to say to me over it; don't worry your messy head. Now, don't be late," he reiterated, turning Harry around by the shoulders and giving him a gentle shove down the hall.

He didn't dare to look over his shoulder again, even though he was far earlier than he'd been the day before thanks to Severus' Morris Marina.

When Harry arrived in Mr. Fowler's room, he was one of the only students to be seated with the exception of one boy who always sat at the very front of the class.

For lack of anything better to do, Harry went about extracting his pens and pencils from his bag, taking pains to line them up in an even line of ascending size as he's often seen Severus do with his knives and potions tools.

When he was finished and still saw five minutes on the clock, he went about spacing them so each had a uniform three centimeters separating them, and then—when this too failed to take him to the bell—he began to even them up on the bottom until the erasers were all in order.

When lessons were supposed to begin, Mr. Fowler wasn't yet in evidence, and the class quickly descended into loud whispers and gossip. A couple of girls in the middle formed up a circle and traded scraps of paper, giggling behind their hands, and another girl who always sat near the back, alone, had folded up a paper aeroplane and sent it flying above the heads of the other students until it dove, nose first, onto the teacher's desk.

The footballers, who always sat in a pack near the centre of the room, were busy discussing strategy and the last World Cup, though for reasons that Harry couldn't fathom, Nicky Henderson sat a bit back from the others, his arms crossed as he leaned back on the rear legs of his chair. He appeared troubled.

Snowdrop Hill hadn't come in that day.

Another few planes joined the first before Mr. Fowler rushed into the room, his hair flying about.

Had he his wits about him he might have tried to take the students to task over the small fleet of aircraft that had made their roost on his desktop in his absence, but as it was, he merely swept them aside after a cursory look, allowing them to scatter to the far reaches of the classroom.

While he set about introducing the day's lessons to his students, Harry noticed that Mr. Fowler's eyes didn't leave him once. Their teacher was practically staring daggers at him—although he didn't necessarily appear angry, and he didn't once single Harry out.

About halfway through the morning lesson, Harry heard raised voices out in the hall—the loudest of which sounded like it likely belonged to Mrs. Murray, and he could have sworn he heard Severus' voice, though it wasn't raised. If anything, it sounded like that slick, oily tone he liked to use when he was dealing with people he found particularly lacking in wit.

There were a few other people who spoke, but it was impossible to tell who they might have been, and as soon as the argument—for it must have been an argument from Mrs. Murray's tone—started, it was over, and Mr. Fowler's own droning lecture papered over whatever may have occurred.

It was the first normal week of school after the hubbub that always came with the week term resumed, and that meant that after the break and lunch, their class had the first of their twice-weekly music lessons.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays they were meant to have an hour of musical instruction. On Wednesdays, Harry was given to understand that they would take an hour in the morning for art. And on Mondays and Fridays (which had been skipped the day previous for reasons particular to Mr. Fowler's lesson plans), they apparently were to repair to the gymnasium for physical education, which had always been Harry's least favourite, as in the past it was always the class that Dudley had had the easiest time tormenting him.

They were ferried to the music room that was on the far end of the school by Mrs. Murray—who was also throwing dire looks Harry's way, although she didn't deign to say a word to him—and they all took seats in the chairs which were arranged in a three-quarters circle that was capped off on the far end by an upright piano.

It was tall enough that it hid the presence behind the keys from them until the door shut behind the last student into the room.

That was when a teased-out mess of crimped blonde hair poked up from behind the piano and chirped a bright, bird-like hello to the circle of students.

The hair belonged to a spritely woman of perhaps twenty-five, who rose from her piano bench to write her name on the blackboard in chalk that was of an alarmingly pink shade.

Ms. Tabitha Tibbons

She took a moment to brush the chalk dust from her tiny hands and then clasped them in front of her, casting about for a moment and looking unsure of herself.

"How many of you enjoyed your classes last year with Mr. Hargrave?"

A few hands went up, and Ms. Tibbons nodded, the motion of it sending her floofy fringe flying in all directions. "He'll be dearly missed. He was my music teacher while I was here too. Did he work with you all on rhythms?"

Some of the students nodded and the same boy that had sat at the front of the class when Harry first arrived that morning raised his hand.

"We did rhythms ages ago, Ms. Tibbons. I want to learn scales—"

"I'll ask you wait to speak until you've been called on, thanks, Mr...?"

At least the boy had the good grace to dip his head as he blushed, his hand being yanked down once more to his side. "Jack. I'm called Jack."

"Jack..."

"Sandys."

"Yes, well—Mr. Sandys, I appreciate you letting me know what you've been up to. I think you'll find that a sense of rhythm is important even to the most accomplished musicians, and that practising it often is more helpful than a waste of time." She held up a box full of blue, foot-long sticks. "Everyone take a pair and pass the box along, please."

Approaching the edge of the circle, Ms. Tibbons held the box out to a boy who Harry thought might have been called Carl, although he couldn't quite remember. She stood back with her foot tapping some unknowable beat as she waited for the box to make its way around the circle.

They practised a few different beats with the sticks, and Harry had to continually suppress his urge to wave it around like Severus' magic wand.

It was incredibly boring, and he, along with several other distracted students, had to be called to order more than once.

Clearly, she was new. No one seemed to know her, and she hadn't yet figured out how to keep the attention of her students beyond the first five minutes of class.

She ended before the hour was up and collected the sticks into the box once more before the class was instructed to go by turns announcing their favourite musicians and why they liked them.

Ms. Tibbons had pulled up her piano bench so she could sit in the small hole at the edge of the circle, pointing to each of her students in turn with a spare drumstick, wielding it like a conductor's baton.

"Blondie," one girl had announced, and, fingering her own head of limp brown locks, she explained that she was envious of Debbie Harry's iconic hair.

"I like Mozart," Jack Sandys announced, turning his nose up in the air and affecting a superior tone of voice.

"I love Mozart!" Ms. Tibbons agreed, nodding her head and sending her over-processed hair bouncing. "What's your favourite piece by Mozart?"

This brought Jack up short, and he blinked rapidly, apparently having a difficult time naming anything on demand.

"Er..."

"That's alright! Why do you like Mozart, Jack?" Their teacher asked, obviously offering the boy an out.

"Well, 'cause he's a genius, isn't he?" Jack asserted, sounding almost combative.

"Erm—yes. He's broadly considered to have been a genius... very good, Jack, thank you."

Next came Nicky, who was seated beside Harry himself.

"Mr—"

"Henderson," Nicky supplied, grinning a bit. "I'm Nicholas Henderson."

"Very good," Ms. Tibbons said again. "Mr. Henderson, who's your favourite?"

"I like John Williams. He's the one that did Jaws and Star Wars."

"Oh, that's a great choice!" Ms. Tibbons began to gesticulate with her hands to illustrate the list she was continuing calling out names of films that Harry had never before heard of before she finished with: "He's responsible for so many! Probably most of our favourite films in the past ten years have had John Williams as a composer; I'm glad you've mentioned him."

Nicky looked rather pleased with himself, and Harry felt his mood tank at the sight of it, which was odd. He didn't necessarily hate Nicky, or even dislike him too much... but Harry had only heard music he liked or would have called good for the first time in his life two months ago. Nicky seemed like the type of boy who was up on everything new, if his questions about films the day earlier could provide any context. He seemed to take pride in his ability to be conversant in culture.

Harry couldn't claim to be able to do the same.

He liked, for the most part, what Severus liked. And before that, he'd been familiar with the records that his aunt had been partial to, even though he'd never developed an appreciation for her tastes himself.

For the first time in his short life, he actually felt lesser somehow—at least on his own, and without the addition of his relatives' constant criticism which he'd only taken halfway to heart—and he wasn't at all sure how he was meant to cultivate his own palate as far as popular culture was concerned.

When he'd decided on what he was going to name, he had been excited to share... now he found himself feeling sheepish as Ms. Tibbons gaze moved to rest on him, her slightly protuberant eyes blinking at him in quite the way a neotenous bunny rabbit might have.

"I... erm..."

"Start with your name, if you please."

"I'm called Harry. Potter. Harry Potter." Harry began, taking a deep breath as he saw Ms. Tibbons nod at him with encouragement. "And I think I like David Lee Roth best..."

It wasn't necessarily true. He'd meant to talk about how he'd very much begun to appreciate Van Halen, but had changed it at the last second, thinking on how Severus didn't seem to care as much for David Lee Roth as a front man as he did for Sammy Hagar... and Harry had to start forming his own opinions on things at some point, hadn't he?

David Lee Roth was the one who'd paired up with that frighting Steve Vai from the movie he'd watched in hospital, and as far as Harry could say, there couldn't possibly be anyone more talented on guitar than him, if the movie could be trusted.

There wasn't anything so very wrong with Hagar, in truth. Harry liked 5150 well enough as an album... but on the rare occasions where Severus had instead played one of Van Halen's older albums with Roth as the front man, Harry remembered thinking that the band had seemed to have a wholly different flavour to that of their current artistic direction.

It had seemed to him more brash, more bawdy, just... more. Of everything.

The guitars had been louder, and Roth's wailing had been wilder, the tempo was faster, more up-beat... it'd had Harry straining to keep himself from bouncing on his heels, which he just knew would have gotten up Severus' nose.

For some reason, his choice had Ms. Tibbons blushing, the colour of her face clashing terribly with the very pink shade of rouge she'd selected for her cheeks that morning.

"He's... oh. Yes, he's very talented," his teacher agreed, twisting her mouth in a strange half-smile, half-grimace. "I don't suppose you have a favourite song?"

Harry was just about to name the song with the most mind-blowing drum solo he thought he'd ever heard—at least to his inexperienced ears—when he remembered the name of the track and thought better of it.

No. He could not tell his pretty, blonde music teacher that his favourite Van Halen song was Hot for Teacher. That wasn't on.

If possible, the song he ultimately named may have been a worse choice.

It preceded Hot for Teacher on the track listing, being the last song on the first side of the tape where Hot for Teacher was the first song on the second side.

"Drop Dead Legs."

He felt his face light up with embarrassment as soon as the words left his mouth. Worse, Ms. Tibbon's face had gone a deep maroon and she'd ducked behind her hand to cover for a sudden fit of coughing. As soon as she was able, she pointed her drumstick at the girl next to him and demanded that she continue on in the same fashion as those who'd come before her.

"Lucy Givens... I really like David Bowie a lot,"

And so it continued until the final student had had her say, and Ms. Tibbons lined them up to exit her class and to follow the hall-minder back to Mr. Fowler's room.

Little else happened of note during the second half of the day, and near the end, Mr. Fowler handed them a stack of maths papers each that he expected to be returned the next morning, filled out with their equations, written long-hand.

It was with great relief that Harry packed up his bag to leave and fled from the classroom. He was one of the first out of the doors, pointedly ignoring the way that Nicky Henderson was waving for his attention.

He bolted down the hill, feeling as though he may well pitch forward and roll the whole way down, and was barely winded by the time he made it half-way over the bridge.

It was only then that he allowed himself to catch his breath, coming up to the concrete wall that protected motorists and pedestrians from falling over the side. He looked out on the violence of the river below, watching as a few salmon jumped up from the churning waters.

The encampment of homeless were occupied as they had been the day before, and Harry watched with mute fascination as their dog waded into the shallows and snapped ineffectually at one of the jumping fish, leaping back when the salmon fell back into the waters and splashed water on its grimy muzzle.

The beast whined loudly enough that Harry could hear it where he stood on the bridge, and the tramp stomped over to it, waving his fist at the dog and yelling in the incomprehensible dialect that was apparently the unique specialty of Backbarrowers.

Behind him, he heard a set of tyres screeching to a halt and he jumped, nearly catapulting himself over the side of the bridge in order to avoid being hit.

He needn't have bothered. The pavement was wide enough that unless a car had purposefully pulled up onto the kerb, there was no way he was in danger, but Severus' warning to him about strangers still rang loudly in his memory.

Lucky for him, it was Severus himself who leaned out of the driver's side window and was hailing him over to the door.

"I waited for a quarter of an hour for you! Why did you leave school?"

"Wasn't I meant to?" Harry asked, jogging over to the car. He had to go around and carefully check for traffic before he opened the passenger side door and squeezed behind the seat, throwing his school bag onto the bench beside him. "I thought I was supposed'ta walk home like always—"

"I wasted my whole damn day at that mouldering heap and stayed an extra fifteen minutes past when I could have left to offer you a ride back to the house. That'll be the last time I go out of my way," Snape groused, sounding rather grumpy, even by Snape's standards.

"Sorry, Severus." Harry ducked his head as Snape turned the volume knob on the tape deck up once more. It was only a five-minute drive to the house, but evidently he didn't plan to spend the time sitting in silence.

"Why were you at school all day?" Harry asked as he watched the boarded-up buildings and empty lots pass them by through the window.

In response Severus gave a mighty snort and when Harry looked up to the rearview he saw the man rolling his eyes in annoyance. "I may as well tell you, I suppose. No doubt you'll hear about it somehow."

"You don't have to..."

"Of course I don't have to! I thought I might do you a favour. Perhaps, at that, I'd be doing myself a favour by telling you."

Snape took a moment where he gnawed at the fleshy part of his lower lip, his jagged front incisors looking as though they may well rip a hole in his skin if he kept at it much longer.

Finally, his tongue darted out to lick at the spot he'd worried raw, and his upper lip lifted into his familiar sneer as his eyes swept the street in front of him.

"I was in a meeting for the better part of the day with Headmistress Shaw—"

Harry's eyes widened behind his glasses. "Am I... am I in trouble?"

"No. Don't interrupt again," his guardian snapped, glaring at him through the rear view. "It was enough of a nightmare to endure the shrieking of that demented banshee and the ineffectual bleating of your milksop teacher."

"Mr. Fowler?"

"Yes, him." Snape's hands tightened on the wheel and shifter until his knuckles were the colour of slightly spoilt milk. "He ignored Miss Hill's symptoms until it was nearly too late. A pitiable lack of classroom control from what I witnessed when I arrived—"

"How did you know to come anyway?"

Snape seemingly had forgotten his proscription against interruption, for he answered without another cross word sent Harry's way. "Credit me with a bit of sense, Harry. In addition to telling me where you are at any given time, your lapel pin also tells me when you're frightened. Miss Hill's condition caused you to panic, so naturally I came to see if you were in danger.

"This morning it was myself, your teacher, and the headmistress. That might have been OK if that interfering harridan hadn't pushed her fat nose in where it doesn't belong—"

"What's a Harry-Dan?" Or could it have been a 'Hairy Dan?' Perhaps in the same vein as those strange five-legged creatures Snape had been telling him about a few weeks earlier...

"A bitch—" Harry thought he heard Snape mutter under his breath and then more loudly the man elucidated, "An unscratchable itch. A pain in your backside. Namely, a very loud, very annoying woman."

"Ohh," Harry nodded his understanding. He knew all about that type. That was his uncle's sister—his not-Aunt Marge—to a T.

"And here I thought I'd seen the last of her when I left for Hogwarts," Snape shook his head so his hair flew about his face like vines. "You owe me, Potter. I never thought I'd have to see Mrs. Murray again, and I only have to suffer her now because of you."

Harry winced. "I'm sorry," he told the man, actually meaning it. He didn't care for that woman at all. If that's what a 'harridan' was, then Harry found he could quite sympathise with Snape's irritation.

And it was no secret at all that Judith Murray hated Severus Snape for all that she was worth, although Harry couldn't even begin to guess at her reasons for it. By his accounting, Snape was alright. And likely, Harry had more reasons he could have hated Snape than most, from what the man had confessed to on the ride back to Surrey months before.

In fact, Harry would go so far as to say he genuinely liked the prickly grump, in spite of everything he'd learned.

"She didn't even have anything to do with it," the man complained, grousing aloud and not really to Harry in particular. He punctuated his grievance with a thump of his palm against the wheel. "Just barged her way into our meeting without a by-your-leave."

"So that was you I heard in the hallway? I thought there was shouting,"

"I wasn't shouting. Judith was shouting," Snape corrected, his voice snide and pedantic all at once. It seemed he didn't quite know what to call the woman, given that she was many years his senior, and he'd known her since he himself was a boy. It was clear he didn't respect her in the least, and given that she wasn't a man, he didn't seem inclined to call her by her surname. Thus, it seemed he'd settled upon using her full Christian name, probably out of spite.

Harry had to grant that of all the possible choices, calling her 'Judith' to her face likely would have annoyed Mrs. Murray the most.

And although the man could have possibly taken it a step further if he'd chosen to call her 'Judy,' that almost seemed too playful to suit Snape's style.

"And anyway, Headmistress Shaw finally told her to take a hike, but only after Miss Hill's grandmother arrived. Until she was ousted from the room, nothing productive was accomplished, in any case."

"Why didn't Hill's parents come?" Harry asked. "Or is she still in hospital? Are they with her there?"

"Miss Hill is recovering at home, and you likely won't see her until the end of the week. As I understand it, her parents are out of the picture."

"Oh... she's like me, then?"

Harry saw Snape's shoulders rise and fall in a shrug as he pulled the car up onto the kerb outside of his house. "I couldn't say. I didn't ask. You see, Potter, generally speaking, it isn't politic to go about asking invasive questions where it's not one's business to do so."

The boy ignored the slight as he crawled out from behind the driver-side seat that Snape had pulled forward for him, reaching back to snatch up his bag before slamming the door closed.

They entered the house and Harry sat against the wall, pulling his trainers from his feet while Severus sat upon the couch and did the same with his boots. They both lined their shoes up against the wall beside the door, one large pair next to the tiny one.

"Have you any homework?" Snape asked, rising from the sofa and heading for the kitchen. Harry jogged after him and dumped the contents of his bag onto the rickety chair, given that the table was entirely occupied by cauldrons and cutting boards.

"Just some maths stuff," Harry wrinkled his nose.

"And how are you with that?" Snape asked, pulling out a mortar and sprinkling some hard, wrinkled, peppercorn-like balls into its belly. (Harry only knew they weren't peppercorns because they were a bright orange). Snape then grabbed for a stone pestle and got to work crushing them underneath its weight.

Shrugging, Harry pulled the worksheets out. "I'm ok with sums," he answered honestly, "but we're working on multiplication, and I got lost when Mr. Fowler added in the tens column."

"Sit here while you work." Snape told him, hefting one cauldron over so that there was a tiny space available. "I'll check your answers over after you've finished."

Harry pulled a pencil from his bag and sat at the table, leaning over his worksheets as Snape worked at preparing a long list of ingredients that grew more bizarre and outlandish as he went on. In the background, he'd set the tape deck to playing Dokken, although softly enough that Harry still managed to hear himself think.

He managed to get to problem number ten before he became well and truly confused.

Scratching at a cowlick, he glanced up at Severus. The man was frowning down at a scrap of parchment, one stained fingertip tracing down along a hand-written list as his other hand was popping seeds from a pod like little zits.

"I think I'm lost."

"What's the problem?" the older wizard asked without looking up.

"Erm... it seems to me that the number couldn't be this low?"

"No, Harry, what is the actual problem. Give me the numbers."

"26 multiplied by 12?"

"Show me how you've done it then," Snape demanded. He snatched the cloth from his apron pocket and used it to wipe off both of his hands, edging around the table until he was peering over Harry's shoulder.

"What—" Snape scoffed and grabbed the paper. "What are all these marks in the margins?"

"It's the first number, see? There's twenty-six—"

Harry glanced up to see that his guardian looked bewildered. "Why've you done that?"

"Well, I thought I'd get the answer if I counted the ticks twelve times..."

"Is this how you've done all of them?" Snape asked, his eyes rounding as his lip curled in a dumbfounded expression. He was now checking up the side of the paper where Harry had, indeed, been making tick marks for each number he was meant to be multiplying.

"Yeah, it's easier—"

"It isn't! And clearly you've lost count a couple of times. You're off on most of these answers... did that teacher of yours not explain how to work columns for multiplication?"

"He showed us," Harry objected, twisting his pencil between his fingers, "but I didn't understand what he meant really..."

"And you didn't think to ask?"

Harry ducked his head and didn't say anything. Didn't want to mention how it was that he'd avoided asking questions in class for years because, simply put, having better grades than Dudley came with its own share of punishments.

It had always been simpler to keep his head down and to avoid trying too hard.

If he prevailed over his cousin, it would mean Aunt Petunia barging into the head's office and fighting over how the grading was unfair, along with accusations that Harry must have been cheating. To simply allow himself to fail meant that he'd endure endless crowing over how much cleverer Dudley was—but in truth that was a small price to pay for Harry's peace of mind.

"Can you explain it?" Harry said instead and handed the pencil over.

Snape grabbed a spare bit of parchment and sketched out a few new equations with different number sets than the ones on the work sheet.

"We'll work these as practice; I'll not be doing your work for you. Then you'll need to do numbers 2, 5, 7, and 8 over again. They're all wrong."

Together they bowed their heads over the parchment as Severus explained, with surprising levels of patience and fewer insults than he'd been expecting, how Harry was meant to multiply larger numbers, using what he understood of his memorised multiplication tables. When the boy reapplied himself to the worksheet, he managed all but two of the twenty problems correctly, and when Severus pointed out to him where he'd made errors, he managed to correct them himself without Snape providing the answers for him.

"Have you any more work for the evening?" Snape asked him after as he watched the boy stuff the papers back into his bag.

Harry shook his head, no. "Can I help with ingredients now?" He asked, his voice hopeful.

"You may sit and watch, but I don't want you touching anything."

At Harry's crestfallen expression, Snape sighed and got to work, though he did explain himself. "These are highly allergenic. Nearly half of the wizarding population has a reaction to them and it can get quite nasty. I know I can touch it with my bare hands, but I'd prefer not to test your tolerance."

"Oh."

Harry watched, his legs drawn up on the seat of the chair so that he was kneeling on it with his hands braced on the tabletop as Snape continued to pop the strange pods. They wept green goo all over his fingers and Harry had to wince.

He had a high threshold for disgust, which helped him a great deal whenever Severus did permit Harry's assistance, but this was pretty gnarly. Even Snape's face was dangerously close to a grimace as he deposited the tiny pea-like contents of the pods into a red-clay dish.

"What are they?" Harry asked. The peas rolled around the dish on their own, pinging and ponging off of one another in a chaotic, unpredictable sequence.

"Pyrenean magigrano," Snape answered, managing to catch one pea in his palm as it spat out of the pod towards Harry's face. "I'd not say they're highly dangerous or anything, but under normal circumstances, most brewers would buy them already processed from an apothecary."

"You're doing it yourself to save money," Harry guessed, feeling his heart sink. He was costing Severus so much... before Harry had come along, Severus had had a good job—

"I'd be doing it myself regardless," the older wizard refuted, his mouth set in a grim line. "I don't care for shortcuts in potioneering. Anything worth doing is worth doing yourself. I saved Hogwarts thousands of galleons since I started by either doing my own processing, or by assigning the task for detentions.

"Besides saving money, it assures freshness, and also the integrity of the ingredients. When you buy magigrano from Slug and Jiggers, they've dried the peas. Who knows when they were dried? Or whether the method they used allowed for mould contamination. And while the uses for the sap and the pod itself are uncommon, I'm not one for waste."

Harry eyed the pods and the pus with a new appreciation. "What if that's what you need for your new thing?"

Snape smirked a bit as he caught another pea, allowing it to fall from his fingers into the dish. "That's rather unlikely, Potter, but you're thinking on the right track, at least."

"Can't I do anything to help?" the boy asked, frowning as it came out as a bit of a whinge.

The man paused what he was doing for a moment and then pointed his slimy finger toward a medium sized cast-iron cauldron he had sitting by the sink.

"You can dispose of that for me. It's inert, so it oughtn't harm you, but it's resisted being vanished."

Harry approached the cauldron with some trepidation and used the wooden stirring rod to lift a bit of the ruined potion out for inspection. It was black and tar-like, fighting being raised from the belly of the cauldron and dripping down in ribbons—as molassas might have—off of the stirring rod.

Upon closer inspection, Harry saw that the actual potion itself was nearly colourless, but that it contained vast amounts of isolated black particulate within its matrix, rather like used engine oil.

"If you can't vanish it, how am I meant to dispose of it? Down the drain?"

"Don't you dare!" Snape called over his shoulder, and when Harry turned at the shout he saw that the man was glaring at him with a forbidding expression. "It'll ruin the pipes."

"Then how—?"

Snape stomped over to him then—a feat impressive for the fact that the man wasn't wearing any boots—and yanked the cauldron from the counter, he beckoned to Harry that the boy ought to follow him out the back door.

It was no fun trudging out into the dirt in his socks, but Snape himself was doing it, so Harry followed suit and watched as his guardian fetched from the far end of the garden a bin that Harry had always assumed to be an extra rubbish pail.

When Snape lifted the lid and Harry was able to peer inside, he saw that it may as well have been a well: it seemed as though it could go on forever, which ought to have been impossible given that if Harry pulled away from the pail's mouth he could see the bottom of it sitting, neat as you please, on the dirt of their back garden.

"... how—?" Harry asked again, his mouth hanging open as though the hinge of his jaw had broken.

"Magic." Was Snape's terse response. "Scoop out as much as you can into here and when you're through with that I'll find you the potion degreaser and you can scrub the cauldron. Make sure you put it on the cooker to dry with the hob on low or the water will rust it."

By Friday, Snowdrop Hill had returned to classes, and although she was perhaps a little more subdued than she had been at the beginning of the year, she had taken instead to growling at Harry whenever he got close enough to speak to her, and pantomiming a wide-mouthed bite in his direction, as though she might leap out at him and maul him to the ground.

Harry wasn't at all cowed by her behaviour, but he did find it confusing and, at a certain point, rather annoying. All he'd wanted to do was to apologise to the girl over the whole fracas with the yew berry, but she wouldn't let him get close enough to utter a word.

The day after Severus had visited the school, which had been Tuesday, when Harry made his way out to his place by the trees for break, he'd found his progress halted by temporary fencing, blocking off the copse of trees from the rest of the yard.

It had been clear enough that it was because of Severus' intervention that he no longer had his hidey-hole to retreat to, so Harry let it slide and meandered around the yard until he'd found himself at the furthest corner where the chain-link fence butted up against the school building itself.

He'd slid to his bottom in the dust and watched the other children play for the entirety of break.

When on Friday Snowdrop returned to the yard and found her way blocked by the temporary measure, she broke into a wholesale fit, beating at the partition with her little fists and kicking with her feet until Mrs. Murray came out to intercept her, redirecting her into the school against Hill's vociferous protests.

Harry could sympathise but thought it foolish of the girl to try a tantrum. The trees were gone to them now, and the both of them would have to find alternate ways of spending their mid-day breaks.

As far as school went, Harry thought they might have finally settled into something approaching normal, and the remainder of the second week became predictable and comforting in its familiarity.

Which was why, ultimately, when Harry arrived home to Spinner's End at the end of the day on Friday, it was so upsetting to find that Severus was missing, and that the door was unlocked.

He let himself into the house as ever and crept about with some trepidation before he decided that his best course of action was to take his shoes off and to make himself some toast—as he usually did after school.

By the time Severus finally showed his face, Harry had managed to complete his reading selection, and to respond to the prompt with the requisite two paragraphs. He finished about half of his maths worksheet before he decided that he needed assistance, and had looked over his list of words for the spelling quiz that Mr. Fowler promised them for the upcoming week.

The door opened just as he was copying out the word "committee" out for the fifth time and Harry almost threw his pencil to the table and leapt from his chair. It was nearing seven in the evening and even though Harry had been attempting to deal with his guardian's absence by acting as though everything was normal, it was only when Severus finally made his reappearance that Harry was able to think on the fact that he'd feared himself abandoned once more.

He wasn't able to stop himself from barreling into the man's solar plexus, which had him emitting a faint "Oof!"

Harry's hands were tangled up in the fabric at the man's lower back, his face buried into the soft cotton covering Snape's stomach.

Any words that he tried to say were subsumed by sobs that were very nearly delirious, and at the very least were wholly incomprehensible as human speech.

"Harry—" Snape's hands were working at untangling the boy from around his midsection and he felt a firm grasp at his shoulders pushing him away far enough that the older wizard could wipe at his eyes and nose with a spare black handkerchief. "Come on, that'll be enough."

"W-why w-weren't you h-here!?" Harry hiccoughed, feeling snot pouring from his nose. His glasses were smeared with tears and he could scarcely see through the lenses. He felt Snape remove them from his face and lift up under his chin with his index finger, turning his face to inspect it.

The man was nothing more than a wobbly black blob with an angular splotch of white skin in his eyes, and until Severus replaced Harry's glasses on the bridge of his nose—now wiped clean—he wasn't able to make out anything more than vague shapes.

"As it happens, I was taking your advice to heart," his guardian drawled, stepping away now that Harry had regained his composure. "We've about reached the point where I've no excuse to dawdle any longer."

"W-what do you mean?" Harry asked, still gasping a bit for air, even as he'd stopped crying.

Snape sighed and stepped toward the sofa where he began to unlace his boots from around his thin ankles. It was only then that Harry realised he was wearing a smart jacket over a black poloneck shirt. He'd traded in his normal black jeans for a pair of twill trousers. "I had an interview this afternoon."

His hair was pulled back into a ponytail at the back of his head and he yanked the elastic out, glaring at it as he used his wand to banish it to wherever he'd taken it from.

Given the level of greasiness, it almost stayed put where he'd had it pulled back, and it only released from the slicked back position at the back of his skull when Severus drew his fingers through from crown to the tips that brushed the bottom of his chest.

"Oh," Harry perked up at the mention of the job. It wasn't so much that he thought Severus was some sort of lay-about, the likes of which his uncle took such exception to, it was more that he worried over the anxiety he saw manifesting day by day in the older wizard, even if he couldn't quite identify it as such.

He'd figured it was only a matter of time until Snape would decide he couldn't afford to keep Harry around, and he'd pass Harry off onto someone else who would care for him so that he could reclaim his job at that school he'd told his ward so much about.

If Snape had found a job, however, to Harry's mind it was tantamount to a stay of execution. He didn't want to go anywhere else if it could be helped.

"Did you... erm... did you get it? The job, that is?"

Snape sighed deeply and leaned back on the sofa until he was slumped over on it, staring up at the missing chunks out of the ceiling. "I'll be required to man the bar at The Jiggered Yow six nights a week, until six on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and until just after the midnight hour on Tuesdays and Fridays. Wednesday and Sunday are my own."

"But if you're that late—"

"I'm considering alternative solutions for those nights."

Harry swallowed and resolved not to ask. He didn't want to prompt solutions which might result in him being removed from Snape's custody...

"Earlier this week I was occasioned to team up with Miss Hill's grandmother. She seemed to me a sensible woman, if perhaps too old to reasonably be expected to chase after her own granddaughter, let alone another child, but it may be that I expect you to spend the evening with the Hills, until such a time as I can come fetch you."

Harry had to suppress the urge to have a dramatic, fake gagging fit in response to this news. Two nights a week in the company of Snowdrop Hill promised to be torturous, and that was even in light of having lived under the girthy tyranny of Dudley Dursley.

Apparently Snape had cottoned on to his upset, however, as his eyes sharpened and he sat upright against the formless cushions. "I take it this is unwelcome news?"

Harry knew better than to agree. Snape's tone forewarned trouble should Harry put up even a token protest.

There was a pregnant beat of silence until Harry found something that might have been safe to comment on.

"Congrats on the job, Severus..."

It was obvious that Severus knew it was a slight prevarication, but he appeared too tired to pursue it and his posture relaxed enough to sink into the crevice between the back of the couch and its arm. "Thanks."

His hands came up to cover his face and Harry decided then that the best course of action was probably to leave Snape alone for a few moments.

Severus was a solitary creature by nature, and as much as it had suited him to be without the pressures of a normal workday, he also took a pride in his ability to provide far past what Harry thought he could readily understand.

While the older wizard had thrived having time alone at the house, he'd undeniably been suffering while he was living a life of relative indolence.

When Harry returned to the room, he'd loaded up one chipped earthenware plate with a pot of bloater paste and the heel off of their loaf of bread—which was, for reasons Harry couldn't begin to understand, Snape's favourite part of the loaf—along with a bottle of Coca-Cola.

"Hey," Harry called, in an undertone, perhaps imagining he might cause the man to spook like a horse with weak nerve.

When Snape didn't stir, Harry risked prodding him in the shin with his big toe. "Hey—"

Snape's hands shifted over his face so one, baleful black eye could be seen peeking out past his fingers.

"What—" he began, and then, when he caught sight of the offering the boy had brought with him, "oh... Harry, you needn't bring me food."

Harry shrugged and set his armful down on the floor near Snape's foot.

"I already ate when I got home," he explained.

Severus looked at him for a long moment, the gaze holding meaning that the boy couldn't guess at until he reached for the heel of bread and the knife Harry had provided, slathering the stale crust with puréed fish.

"How was the remainder of your week?" Snape asked between bites, pausing only to chew. "Have you been keeping caught up in maths?"

"Erm... sorta? Mr. Fowler is hard to follow sometimes..."

"What's that imbecile done now?" Snape spat, leaning forward. Ice may as well have been forming from his mouth for how cold his voice had gone.

Harry was momentarily rendered speechless. He'd been unprepared for the level of anger Snape had generated at the mere mention of his teacher.

"It's nothing that bad... it's just that when he does equations on the blackboard he goes too fast. I copied them down just as he'd done them, here—" Harry darted off to the kitchen to grab his notebook and returned flipping through the pages until he reached that day's maths instructional.

Snape watched him from behind the rim of the glass bottle. It seemed like he'd quaffed half of the entire Coke in one go.

He reached out one pale hand to receive the book, having since doffed the jacket and rolled his poloneck's sleeves up so that his skull and snake tattoo was visible on his inner arm.

Snape's black eyes darted over Harry's scrawlings, his countenance blackening by the second as he sipped at his drink.

Harry was quite unprepared when the empty bottle flew to the other end of the room and shattered against the wall, for Snape hadn't thrown it himself: it had ripped itself out of his hand and flown to its own demise, just as tendrils of Snape's lank hair were now stirring with a phantom wind that Harry couldn't perceive.

"Incurable idiocy!" Snape hissed, standing suddenly and beginning to pace about. Harry shrunk back and crouched by the sofa, near enough that he could duck behind it should more items begin to go flying. "It's no wonder that you'd done your equations poorly—the whole lot of these are wrong!"

"They are?" Harry's eyes rounded. He'd thought he'd just been too dim to follow...

"Here," Snape said, thrusting the notebook back to him and fetching up a pencil. "Do the first example in the margin, if you would."

"I'm meant to bring the four up to the top of the column, right?" Harry asked, frowning as he tapped his pencil to count along in his head while he did his figuring. "Cause, Mr. Fowler put a five—"

"Precisely," Snape snarled. "He's made elementary errors in each of these examples. He's completely innumerate."

"Why're you so angry about it?" Harry asked, his mouth twisting a bit with irritation. Sometimes Severus could be dreadfully dramatic. "It's no good reason to go about smashing bottles against the wall."

"That was involuntary," Snape snarled, though his ears coloured a bit red at the tips where they poked through the oily fall of his hair. "The man has no business being a teacher if he's cultivating an erroneous understanding of fundamentals in his students, and likewise if he's a complete incompetent in the face of an emergency—"

"You mean the yew berries?"

"I do. I'll tell you this: Fowler was lucky it was Miss Hill who'd eaten them and not yourself, for there would have been hell to pay had he bungled your own rescue so spectacularly."

"I thought you said that yew poisoning was hard to fix, anyways..."

"It is challenging, but his handle on the situation was such that I can't imagine he would have managed to save an imperiled student in any circumstance," Snape complained, continuing his pacing. He looked a bit like a caged lynx, stalking about from one end of his enclosure to the other and back again.

Harry wasn't exactly Mr. Fowler's biggest fan, but he'd mostly found the man to be unobjectionable, if unexceptional in any way. Even if his teacher was bad at maths, it seemed to him that Snape was being rather uncharitable. "Not everyone can poof around all over the place, Severus, I don't know what Mr. Fowler was meant to do. He sent students to call the emergency number and the nurse..."

"He ought to have been trained in rudimentary triage! Were I not able to rely on magic, I could have at least known how to diagnose the issue! One of the best courses of action would have been to force Miss Hill to vomit—"

"You didn't make her throw up."

"Only because I had a better solution at hand!"

"What are you mad about, Severus?" Harry challenged, rising from his crouch and facing off against the irate young man, his hands planted on his hips as he glared up into his guardian's strained features. "Are you mad 'cause Mr. Fowler didn't manage to save Snowdrop on his own, or 'cause it's not you who's a teacher that can do anything about it, yourself?"

Snape's mouth thinned into a tight, white line, and the area above his nose and nostrils wrinkled as he seemed to fight with himself to regain composure.

"Just be very grateful that you do have a direct line to me."

"I am." Harry soothed, he reached up to tug at Snape's sleeve where it was rolled up above his tattoo. "Snowdrop's lucky too, but don't expect any thanks from her."

Snape seemed to have calmed down a bit with the acknowledgement, even if he was still frowning deeply. "You really don't care for the girl, do you?"

"She's..." Harry searched for a word and couldn't think of one, until he recalled the interesting epithet from earlier that week, "a Harry-Dan."

This earned a snort from Snape who allowed Harry to tow him back to the sofa where they sat together. He even switched on the crummy television set and the grainy image—which was more a form of interpretive art than a proper programme—popped to life on the ancient tubes.

"I admit I thought you'd exaggerated after I'd cause to meet Snowdrop Hill's grandmother." Snape told him while an ad played.

"What's she like?"

Snape only shrugged as he rose for a moment to fetch something from the kitchen. He came back with another Coke for himself and a glass of milk for Harry who took it with a nod of thanks.

"She was very concerned for her granddaughter, as you might expect—or at least as one might hope." Snape answered. He was staring at the television but didn't seem to be seeing it. "She didn't arrive until a bit later during our meeting, and I'll admit I was grateful to have her there. It was one thing for me to be angry about the school's incompetence, but it was helpful to have someone there to represent the injured party directly."

"What were you there for, anyway?" Severus had never told him directly. He'd merely nosed around the issue by distracting Harry one way or another whenever the subject was brought up.

"I'm attempting to get the school to remove the yew tree," he admitted, frowning out at nothing. "I thought it a rather simple, reasonable request."

"There's a fence up around it now. I couldn't go over there for break—"

That caught Snape's attention. He turned an acrid, black eye on him and Harry felt the heat in his gaze, hot enough that he wished he'd not spoken. "You went over there again? After all that happened? What manner of idiot are you?"

"There's nowhere else to sit, Severus..." the boy objected, "I've not got any friends. And today Hill was back, and she was madder than a box of soaked cats when she saw it was blocked off. Mrs. Murray had to come out and bring her inside, 'cause she started yelling and trying to tear the fence down."

Snape shook his head, looking nearly amazed. "I fear the girl may be..." he let out a soft sigh and brought a hand up to rub at the space between his eyes and his eyebrows, closing his lids as he did so.

"What?"

"You mustn't mention this to anyone."

"I wouldn't!" Harry objected, turning his full attention on Snape, who looked exhausted beyond measure.

"I find myself wondering if the girl is a bit... touched."

Harry drew in a breath, finding himself momentarily speechless. "Oh..."

When Snape opened his eyes to watch for Harry's reaction, Harry let his breath out in a long stream. "I mean... yeah. Yeah, she might be, I dunno.

"I don't think I ever met anyone who was angrier than her," Harry admitted. "Even Dudley almost always did whatever he did for a lark. It wasn't usually because he was mad, unless he was having a fit if he didn't get his way, you know?"

Snape nodded along, even though he'd not ever met the boy about whom Harry was speaking. His head was resting in the palm of his hand as his fingers pressed into his cheek and the side of his face. He seemed to be following Harry's words closely.

"Snowdrop just... she's so mad. I don't mean like crazy mad... but then sometimes it's like she is a bit crazy..." Harry rambled, contradicting himself, "but she's mad at everyone. I hadn't even met her—you know, on my first day? When we got in that fight?—But she was already mad at me."

"As I mentioned, her grandmother seemed to me to be an attentive caregiver," Snape added. "Not that I've never known people to lie, but I spent the better part of the past seven years as a teacher—more specifically as a Head of House—and I had plenty of cause to meet for conferences with parents. I perceived nothing off about Pamina Hill."

"She brought in that little bell to show the class, Monday. I thought that was sort of weird. It's... I dunno. Maybe a bit girly of her."

Snape snorted. "Well, despite all evidence to the contrary, she's still a girl, Harry."

"No but... it seemed like it meant a lot to her. And then when she fell, it broke."

"Ah yes, that." Snape's mouth dropped open slightly. He shifted where he sat and shoved a hand down into his pocket, emerging with the pouch he'd used days before.

Harry's eyes widened in recognition. "Oh yeah—what is that?"

"An emergency potions kit," the man murmured, pulling the string so it fell open. "I never leave the house without it."

He pointed the tip of his wand—which he'd withdrawn from somewhere up his sleeve—into the mouth of the bag.

"Reparo."

Then, reaching into the mouth of the pouch, his arm disappearing up to the elbow, he brought forth a tinkling porcelain bell. It featured a sweet little ribbon that wound in loop-de-loops around the mouth, painted in soft blues and pinks. The finial at the top was moulded in the shape of a slumbering, tow-haired baby, swaddled in a white cloth.

Severus turned the bell over in his hand so that the clapper chimed gently at the motion.

"1981, it says." He was squinting at the nearly incomprehensible script that decorated the bell's body. "I expect that this was given in commemoration of Miss Hill's birth."

"It seemed like it meant a lot to her." Harry repeated, peering closely at the delicate little thing cradled in Snape's palm. "And I don't think many things mean that much to her..."

"Or perhaps it is the case that everything means a great deal to her," Snape averred, seeming a bit far-away from the conversation. His eyes were looking to the bell in his hands, but he seemed elsewhere preoccupied...

Looking at the man with a bit of a quizzical expression, Harry merely shrugged. "Yeah, that could be."

Their weekend was spent on potions, at least the portions of it where Severus was at home. He was meant to train for a few hours both Saturday and Sunday for his new position as the barman for The Jiggered Yow, and Harry was already beginning to feel the stirrings of possessiveness over the hours he was away.

At the end of the day Sunday, with the next week of school looming, the man brought home polystyrene boxes filled with cottage pie from his work, and over their shared supper, he filled Harry in on the plans he'd made for him.

He'd evidently phoned Snowdrop Hill's grandmother from the payphone outside of The Jiggered Yow and had arranged for Harry to spend the afternoons and evenings where Severus was meant to work late at their residence, which had his young ward feeling decidedly queasy.

Why was it that Harry couldn't seem to have any sort of run in with the girl that didn't end in calamitous disaster? She acted like a magnet. Wherever she dwelt, chaos was sure to come.

Since Harry already had suppositions about his own charms where such chaos was concerned, it seemed like a bad idea indeed to concentrate the power of that under the same roof.

"I think it's a bit mad, Severus..." he offered, as a rather tepid argument. It was all already arranged, and there likely could be no going back now. Besides, they dearly needed the money, and there weren't many places in town to work to begin with. The employment situation in Cokeworth, and in Backbarrow more broadly, had operated rather like a game of musical chairs after the closing of the Reckitt plant, and that Snape had managed to find a job was near enough to a miracle...

In fact it was rather suspicious. Harry wondered then whether magic might have been involved.

'Ah well. Gift horses, and all that.'

"If you can't manage yourself around a pint-sized girl for two nights a week, then I've vastly overestimated you, Potter." Snape grunted, using the tines of his fork to fish for rounds of carrot out of his pie.

"I think you're underestimating Snowdrop Hill." Harry grumbled back, shoving a wad of mashed potato into his mouth.

It was hard to speak around such a meal, really, because they didn't often eat so very well, or else they hadn't been recently. At the very least, The Jiggered Yow served food, and Severus had promised to bring back proper meals at the ends of his shifts. It'd go a long way in covering for the fact that most of their recent repasts had consisted primarily of bread, eggs, and potted or tinned foods.

Severus' first real shift was to start the Monday of that next week, and it was awfully lonely when Harry returned home from school to an empty house.

The boy fetched Wheat from upstairs and brought him into the sitting room with him as he worked on his homework, but the spider was a poor substitute for Severus.

When the man finally did walk through the door, it was clear that he was in a towering temper and in no mood to talk, so Harry left him to it as he stormed into the kitchen and occupied himself with preparing yet another round of ingredients for his experiments.

The only way that the Potions Master could save himself from a long tenure of drudgery dealing with the drunken denizens of Backbarrow would be to make headway toward that ever elusive Big Idea that he needed.

If that couldn't be achieved, then neither could any improvement in their livelihoods, and so Harry kept his distance, wishing he could do more, especially as he heard the impassioned cursing coming from the other room.

It would do no good to mention to the man how he was dreading spending the next day at Hill's grandmother's house. Anyway, it couldn't possibly be any worse than the times where he'd been left with Mrs. Figg, and Snowdrop was too small to do as much damage as Dudley.

She was a girl, so fighting back was out of the question, but perhaps there was another way?

Harry frowned down at his book. He'd lost interest in the assigned text hours ago and trying to make it through the chapter he'd been told to read was a joyless slog. There were too many other things to think about and wonder about.

Principally: what he ought to do about Snowdrop Hill.