Thirty one plus one by Hopeless Wanderer

Number IV; We (Finally) visit THE Zoo

Life is like a Bertie Botts’ every flavor bean box, and before you go off and tell me that I’ve lost my mind, here’s two things to consider;
First, fuck you, I’m dying, I can use metaphors like that and get away with it. People can get away with practically anything when they’re dying.
Second, my metaphor is actually great and here’s why:

Life is like a Bertie Botts’ every flavor bean box, you don’t know how many flavors you’re getting, you don’t know if the brown bean is whether chocolate or poo and sometimes you’re not brave enough to find out, and like everything else worthy of being compared to life…it eventually ends.
That thought flashed before my eyes as I stood in front of the exotic reptile exhibition in Surrey’s Zoo, almost the exact same place as four years ago, and watched a new Boa snake slither under a rock.

“Hi there,” I muttered. The snake lazily blinked at me, unfazed.

“Don’t you have playing to do hatchling?” it hissed, coiling around himself as he prepared for a nap. I reached out and touched the glass. This snake had more attitude than I was used to, I liked it.

“Not really,” I leaned further against the glass. “Do you want to talk?”

“Do I look like I want to talk?” I cringed at the malicious hiss and sighed. I left the snake and moved down to where Severus was standing with a chocolate ice cream cone in front of two barred tiger salamanders that were snuggling up near a rock.

“Never understood the concept of zoos,” Snape commented, he pointed at the cuddling salamanders with his ice cream. “People just pay and watch animals in cages, when they could easily go and see them for themselves in wildlife.”

“Most people get killed if they do that,” I answered, even though I was so numb that I could barely feel my tongue moving.

Severus shrugged indifferently. “That’s nature. The inferior species dies Potter,”

“Inferior.”

“Lower, Subordinate. If you wanted your word of the day.” He rattled off.

“I cannot believe you turned my uncle into a slug.”

Snape turned to me, nonchalantly munching on his treat. “Potter, you’re hilarious.” He deadpanned. “He’s lucky he’s not an Ammonoidea.”

I turned to stare at him. “What.”

“A very rare species of Mollusca believed to be extinct by muggles-.”

“No! What-Why did you do that to them?”

He rolled his eyes at me. “Because you asked me to, remember?”

“Yeah well I-,” I trailed off. “You shouldn’t have listened to me! I’m crazy! Literally! I have a tumor in my head!”

“Are we back to this again Potter?”

Indignantly, I grabbed his arms, my eyes wild like mad man. “Why are you so calm?!”

Did he not realize how much trouble we were in?! How could he not know that at any second ministry people could swarm us? Worse, Dumbledore himself? The headmaster wouldn’t kill us or turn us into slugs but he would not hesitate to get my butt back in Hogwarts until I curl up and die.

Even after seeing my manic expression, the potion master was still irritatingly stoic. “Why aren’t you?” he shot back at me. “I thought you wanted to come to this place Potter, look at that Ball Python over there, his dried skin is used as a catalyst in Verger’s complex calming potions, did you know that?”

“Don’t distract me! If Dumbledore finds out about this or anyone, they could-they could throw you in Azkaban or something!”

Withholding a sigh, Snape calmly handed me the ice cream and turned me around so I was facing the salamanders and not attracting attention to us.
“They won’t be able to do anything,” he took his ice cream back. “Rest assured. There’s no trace left of us back in that wretched place.”

“Dumbledore-,”

He cut in. “Won’t dare do anything. In fact, I will be writing him an extensive letter tonight to inform him of what I’ve seen and heard today in great detail. It seems a bit odd to me that your mistreatment has gone as long as it has. Absolutely unacceptable.”

“You don’t understand, he would be mad, he /will/ be furious when he sees you turning muggles into creatures. That’s illegal sir, the ministry doesn’t like you all that much already. Just imagine what would happen if they get word of this.”

I shuffled to the next tank and dragged Severus along.

“Professor Dumbledore will be meeting us to discuss this matter in person. He is the one under our investigation, not the other way around. He won’t be causing us any turmoil.”

Severus leaned down and squinted at the sign next to the glass. “Huh, yellow-footed tortoise,” he hummed. “I’ve never seen that one before.”

The tortoise poked its head up and squinted at Severus with its pruned eyes, its yellow dotted foot kicking as he tried to scramble away from the glass. I guess even turtles got intimidated by the potion master.

“What about my Aunt and Uncle? They cannot just stay like that!” the tortoise ducked its head back in his shell at sharpness in my voice. Severus looked like he was stifling another sneer as he looked down at me.

“Harry, this is the last time we will have this discussion; leave the adult affairs to the adults. I am your guardian, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not by any means, an idiot. I’m aware of my actions and their consequences. I know you might still be in shock, but try and will those unworthy creatures out of your mind, and just enjoy your trip.”

“I cannot, this concerns me too, they were my-.” He gave me a look.

“They’re your nothing now, do you hear me? Do not trouble yourself in the slightest over them.” He took another bite of his treat as we moved to the next tank, that either belonged to vipers or some lizard (The details get hazier every day.)

“I decided rashly, like a Gryffindor-,”

“You reacted better than most people twice your age would have.” Sev pointed out. “Much like predators, they would have gone for the head, and you had every right to wrench that man’s neck after the nonsense he spewed.”

“But I’m not a wild animal,”

He nodded his head, “No, your whole existence defines a vastly different kind of species.”

“Human?”

“Killer Whales.” He said, not missing a beat.

We both paused.

“That’s not the comparison I was waiting for.”

“It’s not an uncommon sight to see beached killer whales lining the seashore for no apparent reason. There’s an incentive as to why they’re called suicidal whales. They’re not stranded on the beach. They commit suicide by swimming to the shore.”

He waited and scanned my expression for revelation, but I just stared at him. As you might have noticed, Severus isn’t very good with…words, metaphors, or explaining things. I’ll never tell this to his face, but I believe that was one of the reasons why he never made for a good teacher.
He knew too much, but he couldn’t relate it to his recipients without having to extensively explain himself. So he didn’t, he referred us directly to the textbooks, and the textbooks sucked.

“I feel like I’m missing something in this scenario.” I finally told him.

He rolled his eyes. “You are. They’re not self-harming Potter. They get stranded because they don’t separate themselves from their sick pilot whale that leads them to the beach for rest. Your morals are the sick whale and you’re the doomed devotee that follows.”

“What does that make me? Self-sacrificing?”

“An idiot.” He deadpanned. “You should have let me get rid of them.”

We both turned back to watching the snakes again. Enjoy myself, he said. I scoffed.

Easier said than done.

At least Severus was enjoying himself. He’s not quite the person you imagine in a zoo, and you’d be right to assume that he stood out in the crowd like a sore thumb, dressed head to toe in black muggle clothes with his hair unbound at the nape of his neck. He looked threatening enough by my side that not even the reptiles dare approach us.

The potion master was a little too unimpressed with the whole affair, to be honest. I knew that he’d much rather enjoy going back to torturing the Dursleys.

The Dursleys.

My gut coiled in shame. Merlin knew what the man had seen in their minds while having his punishment round with them. If Severus was in any way shaken or equally as horrified by what he had witnessed in their heads, he was not showing it.

Maybe he was waiting for Dumbledore to arrive and then unleash himself. I shuddered, yeah, that was much more likely.
A disturbing image consisting of Dumbledore as a slug dressed in tiny purple robes popped into my head and I almost retched. Severus took that as a sign of hunger and dragged me out to get us lunch.

There was a food truck, not far away from the ice cream parlor. There were two plastic tables with occupied chairs, so Severus got us two deli sandwiches with curly fries and we settled on a wooden chair by the zoo’s entrance. We ate as we watched adults and children swarm by us.

“This is not the first time I come here you know,” I told him, reaching for the shared fries set between us. I was feeling a bit calmer after eating. It’s true what they say about thinking better with a full stomach.

He raised an eyebrow. “The Dursleys brought me here on my cousin’s birthday. Mrs. Figg couldn’t take care of me, so they had to take me with them.”

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

I shrugged with a full mouth. “I was ecstatic.” I confessed. “It was my first outing with them…they even had to buy me ice cream…one of those cheap lemon pop sickles. Still, it tasted really good.”

Snape chewed on his sandwich thoughtfully. “Was it a happy memory?”

“Well, I ended up freeing a Boa snake and trapping my cousin inside its cage.”

“Accidental magic?”

“He was bothering the snake. Uncle Vernon saw me vanishing the glass and well…the results weren’t pretty.”

“Did he beat you?”

“Not with a belt.” I flushed as I remembered the bloody belt. “Never with a belt after a bout of accidental magic. He seemed too afraid to hit me too hard, because he thought I might end up hurting him if things went too far.”

Severus turned his head away from me, his expression unreadable. “Lily is turning in her grave right now,” he muttered it more to himself than to me.
My heart skipped a beat. “Lily…you knew my mother.”

Severus’s head snapped up, his eyes guarded once more with only a flash of contempt that wasn’t directed at me. He looked like the guiltiest looking innocent man walking on earth. “We were friends.”

His slight pause on the word ‘friends’ gave away more than he realized. He was guilty just fine. Something had happened between him and my mother, something that Petunia knew too…well not anymore now that she’s a slug, but still. Maybe Sirius and my dad knew it too.

It was odd, thinking about my parents all having separate lives before having me. It was as if realizing that the characters in your favorite book were real people. It gave them depth and not knowing their history installed an exhilarating thrill into my stomach.

Their lives were beyond me once.

“Am I anything like her? People always compare me to my dad, even Sirius-.”

“He wasn’t wrong, you’re a carbon copy of your father, but he wasn’t completely right either.” I waited for him to elaborate. “The shape of your eyes and your nose is completely your mother’s.”

“My eyes?” I rolled my eyes, unimpressed by his plagiarizing comparison.

He narrowed his eyes at me dangerously. “Both the color and the doe like shape,” he explained.

“Most people didn’t notice. Potter’s eyes were nowhere as wide as yours are. You also have a habit of vomiting when distressed. She had that too.”

“I held her hair up for almost half an hour the day of our first class. We were both late as a result. We served our first detention together.”

I munched on my fries thoughtfully. Trying to imagine Snape and my mom cleaning out cauldrons as small children was as hard as one would imagine. “I always thought she was like Hermione, you know, the best of her year, her record a clean slate.”

Severus scoffed as if the idea amused him. “She was better. She was almost too good for this world. Too good for your father and me.”

“What happened?” I felt stupid for asking that question. I already knew the answer, whatever that had happened between them couldn’t have been good.

“Determinism, Potter. The idea that we are too helpless to stop the inevitable. People drift apart, friends become estranged, and lovers fall out of love and all that is inevitable. I admit, my naïve and prideful younger self sped up our falling out considerably.”

“So in short…you screwed up.”

He scowled. “Drop it Potter,”

He scrunched up his oily wrapper and threw it in a green metal trashcan near us. He urged me to stand. “Let’s just enjoy watching animals cruelly trapped from the other side of the cage.”

I munched on our last fistful of fries. “You sound strangely disapproving for someone who uses those animals to make potions.”

“At least I respect them while doing so.”

“We chop them up.”

“Only the ugly ones. Come along.”

The ‘affection’ section was absolutely terrifying. The animals they allowed the children to pet were so small, and so fragile, that it seemed like even a five year old could snap a rabbits’ neck if she hugged it tight enough.

Severus and I didn’t even go near the pocket pet death trap, since the man clearly detected my wariness with amusement. Instead, he led me to a cute small goat called Annie; she was chewing on carrots, almost choking as a boy her height started hugging her.

The parents were busy taking pictures and cooing at the adorable sight while Severus and I nonchalantly watched the kid.

We waited almost a full ten minutes and the kid was still clinging to the goat.

“Ugh, don’t these things have timed turns?” I will never admit to having pouted like a child as I said this, but Severus never neglects to remind /everyone/ of that fact once it’s mentioned.

“He’ll tire himself soon enough Potter. Cuddling a goat isn’t that exciting.” He said amusedly.

“Do you use goats for potions?” I asked.

Snape pretended to think for a moment. “Sometimes, yes.”

“Baby goats?”

“All kinds of goats.” He replied with a straight face.

“Can you look into Annie’s eyes and tell her that?”

Snape looked down at me for a beat and then walked to the goat. He ignored the small boy who was still busy with the goat and crouched down to Annie’s level.

“Annie,” he begun, putting his hand on the goat’s neck. “I regret to inform you that I, along with an impressive community of potion makers, use your crushed eyeballs in hiccoughing potions, and sometimes your chopped ears as a catalyst for a variety of healing balms, also I like goat kebab.” Annie bleated.

The small boy slowly extracted his hand from Annie’s back and turned to him with wide glazed eyes moments before bursting into tears. As he sobbed at loud, his parents rushed over and Severus drew back to where was I standing, a subtle smirk on his face.

“There you go Potter,” Severus pleasantly said as the boy’s parents glared daggers at us. “You can have your turn with Annie now.”

I struggled to keep my chuckle under wraps. “You are a terrible person.” I said.

“I got you what you wanted. Now go over before I have to traumatize another child.”

Flushing under the parents’ death glare I knelt beside an indifferent Annie and hesitantly ran my hand over her soft back, pondering. She was almost as soft as Buckbeak was, but she didn’t have his feathers as an advantage point so I didn’t hold that against her.

“Do you think she’s happy here?” I asked Severus as I picked up a carrot and held it for Annie.

Severus crossed his arms. “Potter, if you are, even slightly suggesting that we free this goat I will use your chopped off ears for those healing balms.”
I gulped. “Alright your fascination with using my body parts for potions is getting progressively terrifying.”

“We are not freeing Annie.” He firmly stated, ignoring me.

“Look at these eyes,” I framed Annie’s face in my hands and thrust it in Severus’s direction. “Can you say no to those eyes?” Annie bleated in response, fluttering her eyes and nipping at my hands.

“We are NOT stealing Annie Potter.”

I tugged Annie closer to my side. “But look at her! She’s all tied up, eating carrots when she could be so much more.”

Severus pinched the tip of his nose and knelt next to me. “Yes, she could be my dinner.”

“Severus.”

He rolled his eyes. “NO, and stop the first name calling.”

“Please.” I hugged Annie close and made my eyes huge for him.

“We are not freeing an animal from a local zoo with dozens of people all around us. No way in hell.”

“I’m dying.” (Just for future reference, I shamelessly use that card a LOT.)

“I don’t care.” He deadpanned. “We’re not taking the goat with us.”

“She’s miserable here!”

“She’s having the time of her life eating whatever junk they give her and cuddling with dunderheads all day. That’s much more than the goat kebab in Greece got.”

“She’s so small, and vulnerable, she doesn’t deserve to be in a zoo!”

Snape actually looked like he couldn’t believe he was having this conversation with me. “We’re not taking her. We have no place for her.”

I looked at Annie and then back at Severus, there had to be a solution for her. I didn’t necessarily think she was being neglected here, Severus was right. However, something just urged me to free at least one animal from this zoo, and Annie was the perfect candidate. Tradition was tradition.

“We could leave Annie with the Weasleys, I’ll write to them tonight-.”

“No.” he shook his head.

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“NO.”

Yes.

Of course, I managed to convince Severus to help me rescue Annie from the Zoo, it’s virtually impossible to resist my charms when I really put effort into it.

Our plan (crafted in a matter of five minutes as I hogged Annie the goat) consisted of three easy parts. I’m ashamed to admit, I never expected Sev’s level of cunning strategy to reach the heights it did, but he’s even better than most would think. He’s diabolical. No wonder he had managed to fool two of the greatest wizards of his time for almost ten years.

Anyway, back to our plan. The first part was easy. I would go back to the reptile house while he stayed with Annie. It was near noon already and hot, sweaty families looking for shelter from the cruel sun swarmed the house like fish. That made my job easier.

Severus had noticed a sliding panel at the side of each tank that was mostly used to feed the animals inside, my job, was to go to the napping Boa and a couple of nonlethal reptiles, open the sliding panels and set them free, causing a huge distraction.

The reptile house mishap would get people running for their lives and panicked zoo staff to scramble to find the escaping snakes.

Then, when everything was up in shambles, Severus would go for Annie, transform her into a tiny animal that would fit in his pockets, and discreetly take off to come look for me.

We would meet up at the gates and then play our parts as indignant visitors until we could safely get out and go back to the house, where Severus would turn Annie to normal in the basement and we could keep her.

I took several minutes to admire the gorilla that I once had compared to Dudley, still scratching its head and amusing people. I almost wished Dudley to be that gorilla now. I couldn’t believe the same gorilla was still there.

Good old days,

Shaking my head, I pushed my way through packs of families pressing against each other and crowding the tanks. Thankfully, the crowd was very scarcely consisted of small children who might get under foot (with most children crowding the affection section), the tanks I needed access to, were decently close to the entrance, and my foot only got stepped on, once or twice as I made it.

“Excuse me,” I tapped against the tank. The Boa snake didn’t move. I did it again. “You’re going to be glad that you listened to me,” it lazily raised its head. I smiled.

“Do you like me to let you out of there for a while?”

If Boa snakes could sneer, the look that he gave me was it. “I thought you had ssssomewhere elssssse to be naughty hatchling. Didn’t your mother teach you not to bother your elderssss?”

“I’m sure she did,” I looked around to check if anyone was watching us, then turned back to the snake. “But I’m not joking. Do you see that slide? I’m going to open it.”

The Boa snake actually snorted. “You are such a naïve hatchling, believing that you can open a human lock.”

Human lock? I shuffled closer to the panel and noticed the small padlock installed on it. Of course, there was a lock. I rolled my eyes.

“Wait right there,” I said to the snake and took off into the crowd again, this time, hoping to find a zoo staff so I could steal the keys. The crowd was compacted enough that the guy wouldn’t probably even think of it until much later.

I knew I had seen someone with a cap and zoo issued t-shirt earlier at the entrance, so I made my way out of the house to find him and plan the rest from there. How I wished I had my invisibility cloak with me.

The entrance was roughly more crowded and hotter than inside, but the chilling excitement pooling in my stomach helped me suppress the frustration and solider on. Not only was I going to kidnap an animal from a zoo (which would have gotten me two years on probation, on top of paying a huge fine, and also doing community service…yes I looked it up) I was going to steal from another person, free a bunch of other animals and terrorize more people.

There was not a shred of me that protested my decision, not even a tinge of guilt for causing this chaos; it was just too much fun.

The man I had detected looked as bored as one would expect at his job. He looked agitated by the hot weather, constantly glancing at his wristwatch and adjusting the cap on his brown haired head.

I neared him from behind, discreetly blending into two big families gathering at the edge of the doors, standing a foot from the man. My eyes gleamed even brighter when I caught the key chain attached to his belt, reflecting the sun into my eyes.

Bingo, I thought and strode ahead. Ten steps away from me, one of the orange haired girls in the crowded family started bawling her eyes out, causing the man’s head to whip around, facing them.

He crouched by the girl, nonchalantly taking note of the ice cream now on the ground, and looked over at the oblivious parents for help. They didn’t turn as though they hadn’t heard their daughter cry, much too busy surveying the crowd for something else. I saw the zookeeper sigh.

“Is she okay sir?” I asked him innocently, kneeling slightly behind him.

He jostled in his place, looking over his shoulder. “Huh-oh! She just dropped her ice cream, I think.” The man helplessly kept glancing at the parents, as if the weight of his eyes alone could alert the two.

“Why don’t I stay with her, and you can call her parents? They won’t hear you from here.” I kindly offered him, my hand momentarily slipping to his back to /steady/ myself.

The man, whose nametag read ‘Steve’ sighed again, I wondered if he was thinking that he couldn’t wait for his lunch break to start soon enough so he could leave this place.

“Sure thing kid might as well. I don’t know how to deal with crying children.” I looped my fingers on the chain, as he was rambling and nicked it off just as he started to stand, the bawling girl stopped for a beat to look at me, but caught sight of her melting strawberry ice cream again and started anew.

“You go do that,” I crammed the keys into my pockets and watched him push his way through the crowd for the parents.

This was almost too easy, I thought with hidden delight.

With that taken care of, I scooted closer to the orange haired girl, trying to bring on my kid friendly side.

“You stay here okay?” I said slowly. She didn’t pay any attention to me, so I grabbed her shoulder. The girl stopped crying in an instant, her wide blue eyes challengingly stared into mine, as her lips wobbled.

“You can ask your Mommy and Daddy to buy you another ice cream.” I gave her a warm squeeze. “Don’t cry over things you can have back if you asked nicely for it. Also…shh!” I pressed my finger to her lip and then quickly got off the ground. I had a job to do.

I didn’t have time to check and see what became of the girl, my mind was focused on one thing only; find the right key, release as many nonpoisonous snakes as I could, and then go find Severus.

I groaned about having to go through every key to find the right ones, when I saw the faded marker on each key. Steve….thank you for labeling your keys.

When I got back to Boa’s tank, he was sleeping again.

“Ready for a stroll?” the snake raised its head, hissing as it saw the glass panel sliding open. Discreetly, I hid the lock in my pockets and looked around me. It was too crowded for anyone to notice that some maniac was releasing animals.

“Just please, don’t bite anyone?” I sincerely hoped the vipers were going to do the same.

“Why are you doing thissssss?” the snake I later came to know as ‘Sasha’ skeptically hissed.

I shrugged innocently. “You seem really bored in there, it’d be nice to stretch your…Err, what was that thing…you move with? Right, your body.”

Sasha gave me the stink eye for a split second before moving to the panel. “I won’t harm the humansss if they don’t ssstep on me,” it warned.

Speaking from experience, I knew that the chance of anyone trampling Sasha would be considerably lower than people trampling each other to get away from the snake. Of course, I didn’t tell the snake that.

No one noticed the slithering snake right away, at least not until I had released the second viper with firm instructions and some bribery (shit load of dead mice) so they wouldn’t kill anyone on accident.

A young blond woman in her twenties felt Sasha’s scaly body brush against her legs and she looked down to catch the aforementioned snake tangled on the ground. With a loud gut wrenching shriek, she set my plan into motion.

I was on the move, blending with the swarms of panicked crowd when I /accidentally/ dropped the keys and yelled a few times myself for good measure.

“Snakes!!! There are SNAKES HERE!” my ear almost went deaf as someone screamed those words. I squeezed my thin body through the last bit of struggling limbs and leant against one of the doors to catch my breath.

“Many thanksssss, hatchling. May Mother gift you greatly for this,” a dotted snake hissed, cozying up to my shoes.

“Agreed,” another one, cried in agreement, chasing a shrieking woman.

“Just please don’t harm anyone.” I wheezed.

“We won’t hatchling, you promisssed usss miccccce,” the one cuddling my shoes promised. “But thissss isss fun. Chassssing men with funny voicesss.”

I followed its gaze distractedly. “That’s a woman.” Then paused. “Oh wait no, that’s actually a guy. People sometimes scream like that when they’re scared.”

“They don’t realize thissss iss a game?”

I scoffed. “Sure they do,” I started walking along the wall to avoid getting trampled. The snake hissed in approval and took off, joining its friends.

“Oh my god THAT’S A RETICULATED PYTHON!” said some man with surprising accuracy. I hid the chuckle bubbling in my throat in the crook of my elbow as I waited for the staff to rush into the crowd. Almost immediately, as people poured out of the reptile house, more than a dozen of zookeepers with their special caps rushed to the scene, followed by a myriad of people who were either trying to leave, or come and watch the show.
I pushed through all of them with ease, thanking my thin and recently fragile figure as I slid between running bodies and toward the entrance, where Severus should be waiting for me.

He looked me over for injuries, his eyes suspiciously wider than normal. I stuck by his side, wary of the flood of people coming for the exit. “Are you alright?” I asked him cautiously, as his eyes didn’t leave mine.

Severus took a moment to nod his head; he glanced over my shoulder, pulling me aside as a new wave of people came. I turned as well, watching the zoo staff desperately chasing the escapees around with strange catcher sticks.

“Potter, you’re amazing.” The man bluntly said causing my mouth to fall open.

“Err…thanks?”

The potion master shook his head. He had an odd look in his eyes that almost bordered fascination. “Simply amazing, they didn’t hurt a single muggle.”
I shrugged, still a bit uncomfortable. “It’s just a game to them.”

“Whenever I think you cannot amaze me, you keep on surprising me, Li-” he cut himself off, his eyes narrowing and becoming more alert once again.

My shoulders tensed, and I turned around, facing away from the chaos behind us. Shakily, I exhaled. He was going to call me Lily. I just knew it.

Severus cleared his throat several times and turned as well, we patiently waited for the frightened people to clear out so we could follow them. Annie the mouse was in Severus’s pocket, and as the man awkwardly pulled me against his side to play the panicked parent, I felt Annie squirming against my waist.

Even then, a small voice inside my head warned me; this is getting serious Potter. More than you thought it would.