Grease & Lightning

The House at Number 4 Privet Drive was still in the morning sun. Beams of light played off of the gauzy white lace curtains that hung before the perfectly maintained front window, and not a single sound disturbed the peace.

There had been a glut of activity hours earlier. Enough that it should have woken just about anyone with ears, but the sole occupant of the space beneath the staircase had somehow managed to ignore the kerfuffle. He was well used to his obese cousin Dudley’s attempts at shaking the whole cupboard by jumping up and down the stairs, and Harry Potter had, accordingly, developed the ability to tune out whatever wasn’t meant for him.

It was the only way to endure the endless taunting. Taunting with food he wasn’t allowed to eat. Taunting with toys that were explicitly not for him to play with. Taunting with unkind words, with more than his fair share of work, with unequal treatment that his relatives seemed to make every effort to flaunt in his drawn face.

If the boy hadn’t learned how to let these offenses roll off his back, he’d have gone round the twist. As such, unless he was summoned, for whatever boring, never ending task that he was meant to complete on Dudley or his aunt’s behalf, he made a point of getting as much sleep as he conceivably could, and he blocked out the world around him with prejudice.

It was rather nice, he thought, waking when he wanted, and not a minute before. The boy stretched, his fingertips skimming the exposed beams as his arms scoped as far out as he could reach. It must have been Sunday, he realised. Sometimes, very rarely, the Dursleys would leave for church on Sunday morning and go out for breakfast at a restaurant after the service, and on those mornings, Harry sometimes managed to sleep in.

He dressed at a leisurely pace, drawing up a pair of too-big shorts to his navel and tightening the drawstring as snug as he could make it. When he tied it off it still left a two-inch gap around his waist.

The polo was long enough to hang down to his knees if not tucked in, and had a hole or two in the armpit, but it was clean and smelled nice. He’d laundered it only the day before. The socks were rather dirty, but what could one expect of socks, he thought as he pulled them on and laced up his trainers. Those at least fit, though only because Aunt Petunia had grown tired of him tripping over his own feet in the overlarge pair he’d inherited from Dudley.

She’d swiped these from the church’s donation drive.

Even though he suspected the Dursleys had left for the morning, Harry was hesitant as he peeked his head out the door of his cupboard. He’d been fooled before. Usually, Dudley lacked the patience to lie in wait for him, but there had been a few times where he’d been crafty enough to anticipate Harry’s head emerging from his little bolt-hole. On those occasions he’d slam the door shut on Harry’s face. Sometimes Harry managed to move his head quickly enough to avoid the door shutting on him. Other times he would stagger back, a sizable bump on the head and his ears ringing for hours.

There was no one about this morning. The house was so still that he could make out the dust motes floating about lazily. He almost hated to disturb them, but he knew that his best chance at getting a breakfast of his own was to swipe the food and prepare it while the Dursleys were away.

He’d pay for it later, but it would be worth it. He could practically taste the grease of the bangers now. His stomach rumbled in agreement.

The cooker was too tall for him to properly stand before, thus he drug one of the chairs from the dining nook over and stood upon it as he heated up the cast-iron skillet. Within minutes the sound of popping pork fat filled the house and a heavenly smell accompanied the cheerful noise.

The boy kept one ear trained to listen for the Dursley’s car returning, but he managed to get through breakfast without being interrupted.

Usually, he wouldn’t manage anything quite so filling, but after the bangers he’d tried his luck with a few slices of toast, marmalade, and a hard-boiled egg that had been in the fridge. He washed it all down with a glass of full fat milk.

The resultant milk moustache he licked from beneath his nose, wiping at it with his forearm when he couldn’t get it all. He’d not felt so full since...

Ever.

It was nearing noon now. Usually, the Dursleys would be back from breakfast. He felt gnawing anxiety forming a pit in his stomach.

Harry desperately wished he had the nerve to go and sneak into Dudley’s second bedroom to look for a toy to play with, but it was likely that he’d be caught in the middle of his theft. Having raided the fridge would come with punishment enough. It was possible that he could mitigate the impending disaster by doing his chores without being directed...

And so the small boy headed outside, finding the basket of gardening supplies in the shed. He knelt down in the mulch by one of Aunt Petunia’s courgette plants and began pruning, cutting away large leaves from the base and using the male flowers to pollinate the females as he’d been shown to do. There were a few courgettes growing already, their large bases swollen, but none were ready to be harvested yet.

After a half hour he moved on to the tomatoes. From there to tend the bed of carrots. Then he worked the perimeter, tidying up the flower beds and finishing his rounds with careful weeding.

By the end of it he was caked with dirt and soaked with sweat. The sun was no longer at its highest point overhead, and he felt as hungry as he’d felt before he’d eaten his large breakfast. He slipped back into the house.

It was five in the evening.

The house was silent except for the mantle clock, which played out every quarter hour with a Westminister chime.

Harry was beginning to grow nervous. He’d passed the day without saying a single word, and the Dursleys hadn’t returned from church.

Perhaps it was one of those special church holidays... there were times where he remembered them returning late... that must have been it.

At least the respite allowed him to get another good meal in.

He raided the fridge once more, finding a tupperware with leftover roast, potatoes and congealed gravy. It didn’t look appetizing at first glance, but it reheated well and when the Dursleys had eaten it earlier in the week, Harry’d not been allowed a bite of it. He’d instead been made to eat a thin sandwich on stale bread with luncheon loaf and no cheese, nor condiments.

The boy savoured the meal, holding the plate up to lick at the drops of gravy that had pooled in the crevice of the plate when he’d finished. The remainder of the roast he eyed, a bit greedily, but, in the end, he decided against it.

How much worse would he be punished if he didn’t leave any at all? Surely the leftovers had been earmarked for Uncle Vernon’s lunch the next day.

The dishes took no time at all to wash up and replace in the cabinets, and he was left kicking his legs as he looked around the kitchen, not sure what to do next.

The toys were still dangerous. If he got too involved in playing he might not realise when the Dursleys returned... but the television he could merely click off when he heard them pull up to the front drive.

Harry hopped down from his seat and found the clicker on the arm of the sofa, seating himself, perched at the edge, like he was waiting for someone to come and swat him around the ears for his insolence.

There was nothing much on, but the sheer novelty of being allowed to man the remote control was enough to provide him a few hours of entertainment.

In the end he settled on some strange game show where the announcer seemed more concerned with mocking the contestants than with adjudicating the actual game. The boy roared with laughter, causing himself to cough and sputter, and after the first episode, he managed three more. And then a movie that was airing.

Two-thirds of the way through the film he found himself yawning, and when he looked around he was surprised to find that the sun had long since gone down. The sitting room was dark, and the only source of light was the television itself. He swallowed, his throat feeling thick with tension.

The unease that he’d been suppressing all day began to grow in the pit of his stomach. When he drew the curtain back to peek outside he saw no one on the street. No car in the drive. No headlights approaching.

With nothing else that he felt he could do, Harry drained a full cup of water from the spigot to soothe the ache in his throat and put himself to bed, wishing with all his might that he could lock the door to the cupboard behind him.

Two more days passed in almost identical fashion, and still, Harry held off on playing in Dudley’s room. In that time, however, he had managed to eat through nearly all of the remaining food in the fridge (there hadn’t been much left to begin with, in truth), and he cleaned all of the laundry in the house, also keeping up on the dusting and scrubbing the bathrooms and kitchen.

The house was spotless. And empty.

Harry was exhausted and hungry.

On Tuesday, as he replaced folded shirts in one of the upper level closets he noticed a missing space where the suitcases usually were kept.

At one point during the day, he got the uncomfortable feeling that someone was watching him, but it only caused him to draw the curtains closer.

For lack of anything to do Wednesday, and to distract from the hole that felt like it was forming in the pit of his stomach—not to mention the searing pain that had developed in his throat— Harry let himself out of the house through the garden gate, walking himself down to the playground in the centre of the neighborhood. He watched as the younger children played with their mothers in the sandpit, and shied away from the older children who often spelled trouble for him.

It was hard to play by oneself, but he managed to keep himself busy for hours, until almost sundown. His hunger, by then, having become substantial.

When he let himself back into the garden, he broke off one of the immature courgettes from its place near the base of the plant.

Once inside he ate it raw.

By the time that the rumble of a badly maintained engine broke the silence on Thursday morning, Harry was beginning to think that me might forget how to speak altogether. He’d done his best to put himself to work, to distract himself, and though he didn’t miss the Dursleys one bit, he had developed a rather full-blown terror at night and found he could no longer sleep in their absence.

There were no additional clues to where they’d gone or when they’d be back.

As soon as he heard the roar of the motor pulling up the drive, he dove out of bed, having stayed fully dressed, and rushed for the door, fumbling at the lock. He wrenched it open and prepared to run out to greet his relatives, never mind that he was certain they’d not be happy to see him, but was brought up short.

He'd never seen that car before...

Harry nearly tripped over his feet on the front stoop, his eyes widening at the imposing figure of the young man who unfolded himself from the driver-side door of the early-seventies model, brown Morris Marina.

It wasn’t the kind of car that one normally saw on Privet Drive. The paint was shabby and rust had begun to creep beneath the edge of the fender. It was only a two-door model instead of the more ubiquitous four-door family cars that lined the street.

It certainly wasn’t Uncle Vernon’s brand-spanking-new Vauxhall Chevalier Mark III that he’d gotten with a company lease earlier in the summer.

The man who approached Harry where he was frozen outside the door was also no denizen of the neighborhood. He was the exact kind of person that Aunt Petunia would have shut the freshly-painted door against, likely drawing the curtains just enough to barely disguise the narrowed blue eye that peered through the crack in judgement.

He was tall (at least in Harry’s estimation, though in truth he was an inch shy of six foot). Tall and slim. His long-sleeve t-shirt stopped short an inch above his wrists, looking to be either too small, or to have shrunken from repeated washings. His attire was all black, which Harry imagined should have been far too hot to wear out during the scorching early July heat.

He was like one of those disreputable punk rockers that Vernon steered Dudley and himself clear of on the streets when they were in town, though his clothing wasn’t ripped or torn or adorned with sharp spikes. His jeans were black, like his shirt, and tucked into the cuffs of a pair of tall, army-issue boots.

Before the boy knew it, the stranger was looming over him, peering down at him with a pair of eyes that were black like peat-moss and just as acidic.

Harry scarcely knew what to do or say. He’d been warned against people like this before. Men with long hair. People who wore all black, or really, anything that didn’t appear on the up-and-up.

It probably occurred to him far too late to turn tail and flee through the open door behind him, turning the lock and resting his back against the paint as he tried to catch his breath.

“Don’t talk to strangers,” His aunt had warned him in no uncertain terms. He’d had his ears boxed many times when strangers (and truly odd ones at that) had made it their business to come up to him for a chat in the past.

He knew better. And he certainly hadn’t said a single word to the man on the stoop. If the Dursleys ever made it back, there could be no doubt that he’d not spoken to the stranger outside the door.

Or that might have been the case, had the lock by his elbow not mysteriously clicked back upright, and the door he was resting against pushed open, causing him to slide a foot or two down the hall before he leapt away.

Harry scarpered aside, his eyes rounding behind his glasses as the stranger stood, silhouetted, at the threshold. Looking even more terrifying with the light casting behind him against the darkness and stillness of the Dursley’s domicile.

Thinking quickly, Harry grabbed for a porcelain shepherdess that sat on a small table in the hall, he lobbed it at the man’s head.

“YOU’RE NOT WELCOME HERE! I’M WARNING YOU!” The boy shouted. He winced as the screaming pulled at his vocal chords—probably they weren’t used to being used after nearly a week of silence.

The man had the good sense to pull the door partially closed in front of him, blocking the trajectory of the knick-knack, which shattered and fell to the floor. Harry scrambled for another, this one a tacky decorative egg.

This one met the same fate as the first, and the man stepped casually within the door, looking quite bored. He’d pursed his lips at the boy and then examined the mess on the floor, now crunching beneath the tread of his boots.

“Petunia truly does have awful taste,” he sneered. Then he looked up, his terrifying eyes narrowed at the scrawny boy in front of him. “Where are your relatives?”

He had a commanding voice for such a young man. He had to have been younger than Uncle Vernon, and in truth, didn’t seem that much older than some of the teenagers that his relatives liked to complain about.

Harry gulped. Was this a stranger, if he knew his Aunt? He was in the house... perhaps he’d been given a key?

In any case, the man was big, and Harry himself was small. It was bad odds to try and fight him off physically. He’d learned that much from his scrapes with Dudley and his goons.

“They’re out,” he hedged, looking about desperately.

The stranger crossed his arms across his chest, causing the shirt to ride up his forearms another inch, exposing thin, bony wrists with a smattering of black arm hair. “Out where?” the man demanded, one black eyebrow rising with obvious impatience.

The man only gave him half a minute before his face clouded over. He kicked a booted foot against the wall, and a cloud of dust came away. He’d managed to kick through the drywall.

He pulled it away from the wall, both hands braced against the white-washed surface. He was cursing with a tongue that proved truly foul.

Harry didn’t like the looks (or the sounds) of his visitor one bit. He stared at him for a second, speechless in the face of the dark stranger’s vitriol, and turned his tail, diving for the still-open door of his cupboard.

It was a foolish gambit, particularly as there was no-where to go from underneath the stairs, but if he closed his eyes tightly enough, curled up small enough, maybe he’d be lucky and would find himself on the roof, like that one time at school he’d been chased by Dudley’s gang.

He heard and felt the man’s footfalls as he approached. His stride was heavy, fast, purposeful. For a second, the sound paused, right outside of the door, then the door was wrenched away, and he had a view of the man’s faded black jeans to the knee before he bent, his black hair and scowling face bending into view. He was stooped at a strange angle which might have been amusing had it not been for the terrifying circumstances.

Several fraught seconds passed between them before the stranger let out an aggrieved sigh and crouched on his haunches, now low enough that he could have crawled into the space himself. He didn’t.

“This is how your aunt taught you to greet a guest?” He needled the boy, his voice redolent with sardonic inflection.

Harry peeked out between splayed fingers, his glasses smudged by the assault on the lenses. “You’re… you’re a guest?”

The stranger considered him for a moment before giving a languid shrug. “As a matter of course.”

Frowning, Harry drew his hands away just enough to speak. “What’s that mean?”

The man scowled down at him, his jaw ticking a bit. “It means that I may as well be.” He ground out through gritted, yellowed snaggleteeth.

Harry was caught between glaring at the dark man and ducking his head to avoid his penetrating black-eyed stare.

In the end, he trained his eyes on the ground between his trainers but when he spoke, it bordered on insolent. “That doesn’t really answer my question…”

“As far as you’re concerned, Potter, I’m here in loco parentis.”

This time Harry’s inquiry was nearly belligerent. He was more confused than before, if possible. “Well, what does that mean!?”

“It means get your scrawny arse out of the cupboard and speak to me with the proper respect, Potter.” The man growled, his voice sounding positively dangerous.

Harry scrambled out as soon as the man stepped back and cleared the entrance, patting cobwebs and dust off of his knees and out of his hair. “So, you’re like… the babysitter? Little late, aren’t you?”

“Wise you are not, boy, or else you’d know to watch your tongue,”

Harry frowned at this instruction, but had learned well not to try and interpret things his own way, in the past. He poked his tongue out of his mouth and strained to see it with his eyes, going near cross-eyed in the attempt.

It was no use, he couldn’t see it—and it didn’t seem like this was what the dark stranger wanted anyhow, if his next words were anything to go by.

“Little idiot—is this the sort of cheek you think passes for acceptable? Your relatives allowed such disrespect from you?”

Harry withdrew his tongue into his mouth and shook his head, staring hard at his worn trainers.

He found himself stuck, not knowing at all what he ought to do. He’d only done what the man had asked, but was weary now that the frightening intruder saw it as disrespectful.

He knew what it meant when Uncle Vernon or Aunt Petunia considered something a sign of disrespect: ear-boxings. Losing his meal privileges. Hours of chores. Being shut up in his cupboard—though sometimes that was alright if it allowed him to stay away from the three Dursleys.

The man said nothing and the silence was terrible... He had to fix it somehow. Had to come up with something to paper over the unintended disrespect to his...

The man had said guest. How did Aunt Petunia treat a guest?

Harry glanced up and saw that the visitor was surveying him closely, his black eyes narrowed in a way that appeared quite dangerous. He felt himself beginning to sweat under the scrutiny and his hands, which had been growing clammy, sought purchase in the fabric of his shorts, twisting the twill material between his fingers.

“Er... follow me to the kitchen,” he announced. He practically fled down the hall, hearing even, measured footsteps follow, and he didn’t look up as he filled a glass of water from the tap to set at the table in the eating-nook.

He avoided the man’s gaze further as he slid open the door to the back garden and ducked outside, ignoring the calls he heard coming from behind him that ordered him back.

“Potter! I’m warning you—you’ll come back this instant—!”

Harry left only long enough to grab another courgette from the plant, and a couple of not-quite-ripe tomatoes to boot. He cradled them in his arms as he rushed back inside, under the arm of the stranger who was holding the door open, glowering at him.

He allowed the harvest to spill from his arms out onto the table, and then he sat, heavily, in the booth.

Trying to ignore the way that the man loomed over him as he stomped back over to the table, Harry pushed the courgette and the ripest tomato at the man—a hopeful peace offering—before grabbing up the greenest, smallest tomato for himself.

“What’s this meant to be?” The stranger had picked up the courgette and was holding it up like he’d never seen one before, examining it with a frown that could have either meant he was offended or confused.

“Food, Mister.”

“Food.” The man deadpanned. He watched, his eyes widening a bit, as Harry took a careful bite of his green tomato.

It was bitter and hard. Not at all appetising... The boy struggled to swallow, certain that the burning it produced going down was likely a byproduct of eating the unripe veg.

Aunt Petunia had always insisted he’d make himself sick if he ate from the garden.

“Nasty boys who steal food will take ill with it,”

But there was nothing else to eat... And this man was a guest.

Guests were to be served food and a drink.

The man set the courgette down in front of Harry and stalked away from the table. He opened up the door to the fridge and peered down into it, shifting through the shelves.

Harry munched at his tomato as he watched. He didn’t think it was really polite that the man should be looking through the fridge on his own... but then what did he know? He’d been told plenty of times that he was possessed of fewer social graces than the beggars they passed sometimes on the street when they had occasion to go into Kingston-upon-Thames.

He eyed the riper tomato, feeling a bit greedy. He’d almost finished his own, and his stomach was aching worse than it had when he’d eaten nothing... Perhaps the man wouldn’t want it after all...

The door to the fridge slammed shut, and Harry drew back as he read the tension in the stranger’s shoulders. He then went through the icebox, apparently finding nothing to his liking there either. Next came the pantry, and that too he slammed—with enough force that Harry was surprised the wood didn’t splinter.

When the visitor turned back around, his eyes were somehow blazing, even as they appeared flinty and cold. He leveled a nasty sneer at Harry. “How long have your relatives been ‘out?’”

Swallowing, with difficulty, around the last bit of tomato, Harry licked his palm to catch the juice as he answered. “Since Sunday,”

“And how long have you been having to eat out of the garden?”

Harry ducked his head. This was it... he’d have his ears boxed for sure. He ought to have known better than to have stolen from his aunt’s crops. “Well, see? It was the last of the bread and roast on Monday... and there were only a couple of bangers left... all the tinned food she’d taken for the donation last week—”

The man appeared murderous and Harry flinched back. “I... I didn’t want to steal it—I wouldn’t have done...”

“This is unacceptable, Potter.”

Harry’s fingers clenched on the edge of the table. “I’m sorry! I... the crackers she normally has for guests are all gone, and so are the biscuits—I’m not supposed to have those, but you’re a guest—”

“Stupid boy! I don’t want any damned biscuits!”

Harry felt like hitting himself, but at this point he could barely help it. His stomach groaned in protest and he doubled over, trying to make the cramping subside. “Do you... do you want the tomato and that?” He asked, pointing at the courgette. “’Cause if you don’t... er... I’ve already gone and picked it—”

“What’s your point?”

“I’m not supposed to waste food.” Harry shook his head, miserable. “I know I’m already a waste of food—”

The next words out of the man’s mouth were deadly soft, and Harry wasn’t sure what to make of them. He would have liked to have hid in his cupboard once more, but that had hardly worked the first time he’d tried. “Are you trying to ask me if you can eat the rest of this entirely unacceptable ‘meal?’”

“Well look, if you don’t want it—”

The stranger strode forward and grabbed Harry by the shoulder, causing the small boy to wince as he pulled him from the booth. For all he had expected it to hurt, however, the man’s hold was surprisingly gentle—at least compared to the vice grip he was often subjected to from his uncle.

“We’ll neither of us be eating this. Come on,” he directed, towing Harry behind him by the fabric of his shirt.

Harry struggled to keep up with the long strides. “Where are we going?” he gasped, as they reached the door.

“Out.”

“I’m not supposed to leave with a stranger—”

The man stopped short of the entrance and spun on his heel, the movement looking lacking somehow. As if he expected it to be more dramatic...

“And your useless guardians weren’t supposed to leave you here alone for five days, without a speck of food in the pantry, to fend for yourself.”

“Still... I don’t know you—” Harry hesitated, resisting the pull of the man’s hand on his shoulder. He grabbed at the hem of his shirt and twisted it, his anxiety manifesting in a nearly full-body fidget.

Sighing like he was being made to do something far beyond tedious, his visitor straightened and canted his head, looking rather put upon as he did so. “You may call me Mr. Snape, Potter.”

Harry blinked. “Mr. Snape?”

Except the way Harry said it distorted the name. He’d lost a couple of teeth earlier that summer—aided, no doubt, by the repeated application of Dudley’s fist to his jaw—and the slight lisp he’d developed as a result made the name come out as: Mishter Shnape.

Mr. Snape winced. “Yes?”

“Where are we going?” Harry asked again.

“For a bite to eat.” Snape stalked out the front door, and slammed it behind Harry once he’d followed.

Harry felt positively mistrustful of Mr. Snape, and his clunky car, but he gamely slid into the backseat when the man pulled his own seat forward to expose the back bench, clipping himself in with the belt and tightening it as far as it would go.

It felt decidedly less comfortable than the Vauxhall, but Harry found he sort of liked it.

Unlike the Dursley’s family car, Mr. Snape’s was cluttered with odds and ends all over. Empty glass bottles littered the back floor, some of them looked to be the normal pop bottles that Harry had watched—with enormous jealousy—Dudley consume, but some of them were tiny, with scraps of paper hosting an inscrutable scrawl affixed to their fronts.

He fished through a couple of Coke bottles to find one and examined it. It was nigh impossible to read what the tiny label said, but he gamely sounded it out.

“Pepper-up...”

“Put that down, Potter,” Mr. Snape snarled, as he climbed into the driver side and clipped his own seatbelt.

Having buckled himself in, he reached across into the passenger seat and seemed to be fumbling with a tape player. There were about fifteen to twenty rogue cassettes lying about that Harry could see, and when he looked to his side he noticed many more.

They were all over the car.

Snape seemed to be rifling through them, searching for one in particular. After a moment or two, he evidently found it, as he pressed the button to pop open the tape player and shoved in his choice.

There was a soft whirring as he rewound the tape, during which he started the car—the clutch sounding as if it were putting up a mighty protest—and popped it into reverse. He didn’t turn to press play until he’d made it to the end of Privet Drive.

Harry had never heard anything like it.

The only thing that his aunt enjoyed listening to was what Harry would have termed ‘stuffy,’ or ‘girly.’ She was a devotee of acts like Rod Stewart, David Essex, and ABBA, and that was when she wasn’t intent on making Dudley and himself listen to opera or classical in some attempt at making them ‘cultured.’ The Dursley’s car also had its tape deck in the car stereo itself, but Mr. Snape’s car didn’t seem to have a cassette player set into the dashboard. Either it had never had one or the thing had been removed at some point in time.

Harry thought that this might have been the electric guitar... but it was almost difficult to say, given the level of distortion. A lick peeled through the air and undulated like a rising and falling wave of sound as two voices sang in a chorus together:

“I knew right from the start you'd put an arrow through my heart—Round and round! With love we'll find a way, just give it time,”

Harry was enraptured, but evidently, Mr. Snape was upset for some reason. He cursed—one of the bad ones that would have had Harry’s mouth being washed out with soap had he the guts to have said it in front of his relatives—and pressed rewind again.

“Damn thing,” Mr. Snape muttered, the car swerving a bit toward the median as he fumbled with the stereo.

Harry clutched at the torn leather of the back seat in a white-knuckled grip, pushing himself firmly into the bench. He felt his stomach churn with terror as he watched the oncoming traffic grow nearer.

Snape righted course after only a second’s inattention, and began the song again, this time in the beginning (as, apparently, he’d started it somewhere in the middle on the first attempt).

The bottles clinked against one another as they rolled from one side of the cab to the other. Mr. Snape was taking the turns quickly and was practically jerking the wheel around as he navigated, his hand never leaving the gear-shifter.

Harry was trying to sink into the seat. He was paying no attention to where Mr. Snape might be taking him...

How could he when the man would aggressively downshift while the engine was still straining? The whole car bucked and jerked as the transmission attempted to comply.

When they came to a stop at a red light, Harry leaned forward and his eyes widened with alarm.

“Why’re you still in gear? You’re not supposed to stay in gear when you’re stopped—”

“Just who is driving whom, Potter? Stay out of it,” Mr. Snape growled. He went back to softly singing along with the cassette under his breath and began rolling again as the light changed.

Harry frowned at his back and reached forward to poke his shoulder. “Hey—stop riding the clutch—”

As Mr. Snape turned to snarl at him for his impertinence, the car swerved in an alarming fashion. “Imagine my surprise to learn that you—at the ripe age of seven—have a driver’s license, Potter... Oh! Wait—don’t tell me you don’t? Then leave the driving to those who do,”

Harry thought that was rather rich. Mr. Snape was liable to get them killed doing as he was. He retreated back and crossed his arms across his thin chest, closing his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see. They were going to crash... he just knew it. License (or as Mr. Snape pronounced it: loicense), or no.”

He could feel the car straining underneath his bum, the engine struggling to keep up with the ridiculous shifting that Mr. Snape seemed partial to. He would slam up and down through the gears, with seemingly no regard for the RPM, and the car would lurch, shudder, and jerk with each shift.

It wasn’t that Harry liked cars. He had no especial attachment to different makes and models like some of the boys in his year. Rather, he was terrified of the things—and accordingly, he’d done as much research as he could in his primary school’s limited library so that he could learn all about his greatest fear.

The teachers, perhaps imagining that he might go on to be a mechanic, had encouraged his interest. He was often in trouble, and presumably, anything they could do to shepherd him into making something of himself later in life was worth supporting.

It was certainly more interest than Dudley had ever showed in a subject.

As a consequence, Harry could tell anyone all about the way a transmission worked, or where the carburettor was. He had memorised the standard operating procedures and knew when someone was violating them.

Mr. Snape was a living demonstration of everything someone ought not to do when operating a car.

Harry couldn’t stand to watch. He covered his eyes and began to chant a prayer in his head that he’d learned on one of the few occasions in which he’d gone along to church with the Dursleys.

“Please God, please God, please God,”

“You’re ruining the chorus, Potter.” Mr. Snape snarled. He must have lifted his hand from the shifter for a moment then, because he turned the volume up. When Harry risked a peek through his fingers it was to see the man’s long, thin right hand drumming on the wheel.

Within minutes, however, the car finally slowed outside of a rather run-down eatery in a part of town that the Dursleys always avoided. When Harry had seen them drive through, they usually made a point of locking all of the car doors.

Mr. Snape whipped into a space in the car park and slammed on the break. He probably hadn’t even been in first gear when he slowed to a stop, and Harry’s head was jerked forward and then back against the leather seat with the inertia.

“Out, Potter, we’ve arrived.”

Harry fumbled with the seatbelt, he was so rattled, and when he exited, he had to suppress the impulse to fall to his knees and kiss the sweet, steady, unmoving asphalt.

Snape took his shoulder once more and trotted him forward in front. He directed to two of them into a dusty, slightly derelict storefront that promised on the sign that they served lunch.

They sat at a table that wobbled terribly, and Harry quickly found out that he’d have to avoid leaning on it, as when he made to plonk his elbows upon the surface it tipped precipitously to the side.

“What are we doing here?” Harry asked, his finger smudging through grease that seemed caked a centimeter thick on the tabletop.

Mr. Snape looked at him with an utterly inscrutable frown. Harry couldn’t figure out if the man was angry with him or not, but accordingly, he leaned away from the table and out of his armspan— just in case he should have a wild inclination to swat at Harry’s head.

“I should think that obvious,” Mr. Snape drawled. He plucked two menus from the caddy that was sliding from one side of the table to the other each time it tipped and handed one to Harry.

“What do I do—“

Snape glared over his own menu at him, obviously annoyed now. “You chose something to eat, Potter. I shouldn’t think it that difficult.”

Harry’s face contorted with misery as he held the menu up to obscure his expression. It shouldn’t have been difficult, no. For Dudley it wouldn’t have been…

But in truth, Harry had never been allowed to order off the menu for himself before.

His eyes frantically scanned down the items, searching out the cheapest thing he could ask for.

At fifty pence, that turned out to be a side order of toast.

When the waitress returned, Mr. Snape began by ordering himself the Welsh rarebit and a bottle of Coke. Once both of their attentions turned to Harry, he found himself dawdling, his hands worrying at the laminated menu.

“Well, boy?” The man prompted, his tone impatient.

Harry couldn’t help his flinch. ‘Boy.’ That’s what Uncle Vernon called him… well, that and ‘Potter,’ which Mr. Snape had also been calling him.

Somehow ‘boy’ was far worse.

“Er… just the toast, thanks.”

Snape’s black eyes, so terrifying even when he was maintaining an emotionless expression turned faintly murderous once more.

As the waitress went to record Harry’s answer Mr. Snape interrupted. “He’ll have the burger with a double order of chips.”

“No, no— I’m fine with toa—“

“The burger.” Snape interrupted, making a rude shooing motion to the waitress. He then pinned Harry with a venomous look. “You’ve not eaten in three days and you think you’ll make do with toast?”

He snorted then, his impressively large schnoz making it all the more dramatic.

Harry grimaced down at the table, feeling his heart rate explode in his chest.

“Please, Mr. Snape... The burger is ten pounds—“

“Did I tell you to look at the prices?” Snape interrupted again, sneering. “No? Then I when I tell you to order it is with the expectation that you choose something that suits you, not that suits my wallet— in so far as you are assuming, in any case.”

Suddenly, Harry realised that he might have inadvertently offended the man, and rushed to apologise.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to say you couldn’t afford it—" he stumbled, thinking of the reaction his Uncle doubtless would have had toward such an implication.

Snape looked at him then rather as if he was a curious and unknown substance that he might have stepped in by mere accident. “My funds are not in question here. You are hungry, are you not?”

It was the first time he’d spoken to Harry where he hadn’t sounded incensed, and the change was startling enough for Harry to agree that he was, in fact, starving.

When their food arrived, he no longer felt any compunction: he dug in, ignoring that the heavy, greasy food left him feeling faintly ill, and not giving any quarter to the scratchy feeling in his throat as he swallowed.

He didn’t even see that Mr. Snape himself wasn’t eating until he was half-way through his double order of chips. He only noticed when he went to squeeze more ketchup on his plate.

When he did notice he froze, as would a rabbit in torchlight. All wide eyes and twitching ears. Nose scenting for signs of danger.

Of course, Snape had driven them there, and he was paying for the meal, (or at least so Harry assumed. He had to quickly quash an irrational idea that the man might leave him there to wash up after other patrons in order to pay off their ticket), so there was no where he could run even if he decided to do so.

He swallowed, and nearly choked, on a half-chewed bit of potato.

Mr. Snape didn’t even take his eyes off of him when he went to take a swig of his Coke. Harry had a wild impulse to tell him that it was rude to stare for so long…

He didn’t quite dare.

Snape’s own meal had barely more than two bites taken from it, but he waved for the waitress and murmured to her something that sounded like “pudding.”

When Harry chanced a glance at his own plate he was surprised to see that there was nearly nothing left: only small, desiccated bits of bread that he’d torn off when the dry texture hadn’t quite suited him.

“Mr. Snape, thanks for the meal— but you don’t have to order me pudding—“

Snape gave him a supercilious raised eyebrow in response. “And if the pudding was meant for me?”

Harry felt himself turn crimson. “Oh…” Of course, it wouldn’t be for him… the rarebit simply must not have suited Mr. Snape…

But for all of that, when the waitress returned she set a dish in front of each of them. Some kind of spotted sponge for Snape and a bowl of vanilla ice cream for himself. It even had chocolate syrup.

Harry felt his jaw drop. He wasn’t even quite sure that he knew how ice cream with syrup might taste… in his recollection he’d never tried it before.

Mr. Snape had already taken three bites of his own before he noticed Harry’s reticence. “Well, Potter? You’re not going to let that melt, are you?” His voice was brisk, but not so very unkind.

Harry was speechless, but shook his head with near violence, digging in and sighing with pleasure as the cold soothed his aching throat.

And on such a hot day?

It might have been his closest approximation of what Heaven might have felt like.

Sweet relief. Blessed satisfaction…

But gone all too soon. As was the unfortunate nature of such earthly delights.

This time they both finished, and Snape seemed far more satisfied with his second order than the first when he rose to settle their bill.

Harry observed him as he frantically made efforts to bus their table— a service always required of him by the Dursleys when they brought him along to restaurants (which was rare, and usually even then he was only to finish whatever Aunt Petunia had decided she was done picking at).

To Harry’s great surprise, when they left, it wasn’t to immediately go back to Privet Drive. Mr. Snape instead fiddled with the tape deck once more before he demanded that Harry scour around the back-seat for one of the albums.

“A crucifix, Potter. Look for a cross, with five heads on it, and red and gold—”

“Is this it?” Harry asked, holding up a cassette in the rear-view. He examined the title: “Appetite for Destruction?”

“Yes, give it here,” Snape demanded, reaching his shifting hand back through the front seats. He popped the new cassette in one-handed, the car swerving a bit.

Harry had immediately sunk back into the seat and closed his eyes again as soon as he’d finished helping Mr. Snape find the tape. It helped when the music came on to distract him from the man’s terrible driving.

It must have been the end of one of the songs, as a man’s voice—pitched higher than Harry had ever heard a man’s voice go—wailed along with the shrieking of the guitar.

“—Won’t you please take me ho-oooooooome! Yeah—!”

Nothing followed on the tape, however, and Mr. Snape cursed again as he fumbled with the player, turning the tape over to the other side and shoving it back in again.

The lede for the next song was a sorrowful refrain of notes followed by a mournful chord, before the electric guitar roared in with a powerful, ferocious peal of sound.

“Your Daddy worked in porno, now that Mommy’s not around—She used to love her heroin but now she’s underground—”

Harry frowned. The song was captivating, but confusing.

“Mr. Snape? What’s ‘porno?’”

That produced a coughing fit and from what Harry could observe of the man—namely only his overlarge ears poking through the curtain of his hair—he had begun to blush. The red colour crept up the helix of his ear and he turned viciously to jam the pause button. “Never you mind that.”

Harry was disappointed. He’d rather liked the music. He’d only asked a question after all.

“Why did the mum’s hero go underground?”

Snape frowned into the rear-view mirror, considering Harry carefully for a moment.

But before he could answer they were pulling into the carpark for Sainsbury’s. Harry knew what that meant.

Almost as soon as the car was put in park, he rushed out the door, ignoring Snape’s calls to halt him, and grabbed a trolley.

Snape stomped up behind him then, looking furious. “Why did you dart off like that? Idiot boy—I could have lost sight of you,”

Harry ducked, hoping to avoid a swat to the head. “Wasn’t I supposed to?” He asked.

“Supposed to what?” Mr. Snape grilled him, prising his hands off of the bar and directing the trolley himself down the produce aisle.

“Supposed to grab a trolley for us before some heifer got to it first—”

A hand clapped over his mouth tightly and Snape stopped, looking around, appearing a bit frantic.

“For Christ’s sake, Potter—you can’t go saying things like that! Where did you learn to talk like that?” Mr. Snape’s expression was censorious in the extreme, and Harry felt abashed, though he didn’t quite understand why.

He’d only gone to grab the trolley.

“That’s what Aunt Pe—”

Mr. Snape shook his head violently, sending his hair—which was long enough to reach down his back— flying in all directions. “Petunia. Of course,” he sneered. “I should have expected.”

He straightened then and began browsing the veg. “Don’t let me hear you say such a thing again.”

“About the trolley?”

“Don’t be obtuse! I mean calling people ‘heifers,’ particularly where anyone might hear!”

Whether Snape was more upset about the word ‘heifer’ or that someone might have overheard, however, was impossible to ascertain.

Harry trailed the dark young man as he pushed the trolley through the aisle. He stopped to examine a tower of apples and selected a few at random that he tossed into a bag he’d seemingly produced from nowhere. Heads of cabbage and broccoli joined in short order, which Harry winced at, but who was he to critique the man’s taste in food? It wasn’t like Harry would be having any of it.

He added a two-kilo bag of potatoes and a half dozen tomatoes that were already ripe enough to be eaten. Finally, he looked satisfied, and he passed into the next aisle, surprising Harry when he asked him whether he cared at all for porridge.

“Erm… I suppose…”

Mr. Snape’s voice was dry when he next spoke. “You suppose.”

“Well,” Harry began, feeling rather sheepish, “I always sorta thought it might taste better with something in it… but I don’t mind it plain, Mister, I swear—" he hastened to assure the man.

Snape treated him to another of those looks that Harry couldn’t quite make heads or tails of before he moved along, swiping out an arm for a bottle of maple syrup without a word.

“How do you take your eggs?”

“I’ve never really had a choice…” Harry hesitated, reading Snape’s mounting fury in the tense set of his shoulders. “But I… er… I always like when Dudley has them scrambled,” he amended, deliberately avoiding mention of the fact that Dudley almost never failed to finish his eggs, which meant that there were scarcely ever any left for Harry himself to have.

After that the man stopped asking for Harry’s preferences, which was something of a relief, as the boy got the distinct impression that his answers were only making Mr. Snape angry. That, and he couldn’t fathom why he was bothering…

Maybe, for all of his surliness, Snape was just polite like that.

Harry nodded. That must have been it. He was polite enough to buy Harry a meal when his own offer to the man had so obviously been lacking.

And really— that was so good of the Mr. Snape that Harry felt sweat forming on the back of his neck from the sheer humiliation he felt. He really was a lousy host. All of the sudden he felt like crying, and he had to suppress a sniffle in his sleeve as Snape dithered over the choices of packaged meats, finally selecting two hefty packages of both bacon and bangers.

He appeared to be brought up short when he turned and saw Harry trying to dash his eyes against his short sleeve, and failing miserably to stifle his tears.

“What’s this?” He asked, his voice brusque as he set the packages in the bottom of the trolley. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s n-n-nothing—“

Stomping forward in his black boots so that he was positively looming over the boy, Mr. Snape hissed at him through his higgledy-piggledy teeth. “Do not lie. Not to me.”

Harry was losing the battle with his eyes and, at that point, decided he ought to give it up as a bad job. “It’s only… I’m s-sorry I’m s-such a b-bad host…”

When he chanced a look up into the man’s face, certain he’d find it incandescent with rage, it was to see that Snape looked, for the first time since he’d met him that morning, dumbfounded.

“I know that… that I didn’t get you anything to eat—anything proper that is—and it’s been really good of you to not…” Harry trailed off, not wanting to say anything.

Not wanting to put ideas in the man’s head if they weren’t already there.

Snape’s long pale hand came out to grip his shoulder, and Harry unwittingly made the errant observation that the man’s sleeve was fraying at the wrist.

“Good of me to not—?” He prompted. His voice was softer than Harry imagined it could have gotten.

No one spoke to him like that…

Well… one teacher had once. When he had been about four… and then after a conference with the Dursleys she had gone to being as cold toward him as everyone else.

He felt like sobbing all over again.

“To… to not box my ears or anything…” Harry offered up, ducking his face and having to repress the desire to cover his ears with his hands.

There was that look again… and Harry was beginning to think it might have bordered on sadness, perhaps… or maybe even pity.

But it was gone in a flash.

The man straightened and snatched his hand back from Harry’s shoulder, but not without—at least Harry thought—perhaps having given it the barest hint of a squeeze.

“Yes, well... done’s done. Button it up, boy.” He glanced around, checking their position in the store. “Go and choose a few boxes of biscuits; no less than three, mind.”

Eyes bugging out of his face, Harry hastened to go do as he was bid. He wasn’t a stupid child. He suspected that given Mr. Snape’s generosity thus far, if he was to follow his instructions now, the man might even be willing to share in the bounty.

He came back with his selections: McVitie’s Custard Creams, Jammie Dodgers, and Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers. Snape nodded his approval and pushed forward, selecting a few brands of tea and a package of sugar.

By the end of the trip, the old Morris Marina was overladen with bags and Harry had to sit next to several that wouldn’t fit neatly in the boot (which was no surprise, given that Mr. Snape had at least two, enormous wrought iron pots that took up most of the space. There was no telling what he used the gargantuan vessels for).

The trip back to Privet Drive was conducted in silence, at least in so far as conversation went. Snape had chosen yet another album, though there were no strange allusions to words that Harry could scarcely understand in this one.

Though every song did seem to be about girls. And he didn’t quite understand what a ‘touch too much’ might have meant.

“She had the face of an angel, the body of Venus with arms, dealin’ with danger, strokin’ my skin,”

“Er… Mr. Snape?”

Snape’s eyes met his in the rear-view, giving him a foreboding look.

His voice was gravel-like when he spoke. “Don’t. Ask.”

“Oh.” Harry kicked his legs. “Alright, then.”

Before long they were pulling into the driveway, the car jerking to a stop that had the whole contents of the backseat, Harry included, flying forward.

He pried open his eyes through sheer force of will and forced himself to acknowledge the fact that they had come to a safe stop. The bile rising in his throat he forced down by swallowing. It felt like it burned his esophagus.

Snape departed from the car after turning off his tape player and turned to him once they’d both exited the vehicle.

“Grab a bag, Potter.” He told him.

When Harry went to collect up as many as he could reasonably carry at once, he realized that there was only one remaining.

His mouth nearly dropped open.

Snape was halfway to the door with most of the bags himself, leaving only a single thing for Harry to carry.

Normally, it was Harry who was expected to play the pack mule.

Harry directed the man in the kitchen as they put the shopping away in the cabinets and then, to his bemusement, Mr. Snape shooed him out with an imperious wave of his hand.

“What am I meant to do, Mr. Snape?” Harry asked from the doorway. Mr. Snape had made it clear he wasn’t allowed even a step further into the kitchen.

Mr. Snape had busied himself at the cooker. He’d located a large stock pot and was adding in a package of butter as he began to assemble a small pile of vegetables around a cutting board he’d pulled from a hook on the wall.

“What would you normally do?” He snarked as he began scouring carrots under the tap. He was obviously absorbed in his task, and Harry resisted the impulse to ask if he could stay and watch. The man looked a bit like those contestants he saw on the Iron Chef show he’d snuck to watch from behind the sofa while his Aunt was too absorbed in the programme to notice.

“Er… normally on Thursday I do the linens—“

Snape paused where he was chopping potatoes. “Do the linens?” He repeated, sounding almost stupid. As though he’d never heard such a thing before.

“Yeah,” Harry wedged his body half between the door and half in the other room, ready to dash if necessary. He didn’t mind Mr. Snape so far, but he didn’t quite like the looks of the man with the large cleaver in his hand. “Aunt Petunia wanted me to change them every day, except when Uncle Vernon got the water bill he told her it was too much, so now I do them on Saturdays and Thursdays—"

With the cleaver hanging in the air over a particularly fat tuber, Mr. Snape stared at him for several moments, not saying a word. Then he brought it down and the potato split clean down the middle with a dull thump.

“Go… just… go find something to read, Potter.”

Harry’s eyes widened behind his glasses.

Finally, after another beat of tension between the two, Snape’s lips twisted into a snarl, baring a yellowed canine. “You can read, can’t you?”

Harry felt sweat bead at the back of his neck.

“Mrs. Hendricks gave me a score of sixty on my last test…”

Harry thought he heard Snape cursing under his breath. “Merlin preserve me—“

Huh. An odd choice of words, Harry noted, someone distantly.

“What, pray tell, is a sixty supposed to mean?” Mr. Snape bit out, looking impatient as he began to unwrap a whole chicken from butcher paper.

Harry winced as he noticed that the man put aside the giblets and organs instead of throwing them away as his aunt would have done.

A thousand to one that would be his supper, he wagered.

“Sixty out of one-hundred…”

The man’s eyes narrowed at him, and he turned to face Harry, his arms crossed against his chest, the cleaver still clutched in his right hand.

He looked like a mad butcher.

“In my classes, I consider sixty out of a possible one-hundred points to be ‘Poor.’”

Harry ducked his head, avoiding the piercing gaze directed toward him.

It was no good. He could feel the man’s eyes on him. Like a raven’s beady stare, only more foreboding.

He didn’t know what to say to that, and he felt too ashamed to explain that while he’d gotten a sixty, at least it was far better than Dudley’s score of twenty-five. Particularly since his cousin had spent much of the test period sending spit balls careening into the back of his head.

All things considered; Harry thought a sixty quite good.

So, he said the only thing that came to mind in the wake of the man’s statement.

“You’re a teacher?” He managed to keep his voice from wavering, but only just.

Mr. Snape snorted. “After a fashion.”

Blinking, Harry couldn’t help but to begin to ask: “What does—“

“Don’t ask what that means,” Snape snarled. “Yes. I am a teacher.” He turned back to chopping things to put in the pot.

“You’re kinda young, aren’t you?”

This earned another poisonous glower as Mr. Snape added carrots, celery, and onion to the butter he’d melted.

In for a penny, Harry reasoned. So far, Mr. Snape hadn’t done anything to him except for to glare. By Dursley standards, he was the absolute soul of kindness.

“I mean, I’ve never seen a teacher with long hair before,” he began to natter, “and you dress like—"

Snape spun to face him, expressionless. “I dress like—?” He prompted.

His voice sent warning claxons ringing through Harry’s brain.

Unfortunately, he was far too committed by that point. Too committed and too curious by half.

“Like… er…” Harry’s hands began to wring the fabric of his too-large shirt between his sweating palms. “Well… Uncle Vernon would probably say you were in-dole-ent.” Harry sounded out.

“Indolent.” The man repeated, his voice deadpan.

“Yeah...”

Seeming to think for a moment, Mr. Snape ultimately turned back to mind the pot, which was by now emitting an enticing fragrance as the onions sweated in butter. “My wardrobe notwithstanding, Potter, my credentials are such that I am what you would call a teacher.”

“You could’ve just said ‘yes,’” Harry found himself griping, beneath his breath.

Incredibly, the man still heard him— though with his enormous ears, roughly proportionate to a bat’s, though rounded instead of coming to points—it should have been no wonder. “And allow you to persist with your poor vocabulary and comprehension? Not a chance. If you don’t know what else to do, go find something to read that’s more challenging than what you’re used to.”

That seemed to be the end of the conversation, and Harry backed out of the kitchen with a frown.

More challenging than what he was used to?

He felt far too self-conscious to admit to the man that the only reading he ever accomplished was in the classroom proper. All the Dursleys had about were glossy magazines, the business section of the newspaper (Uncle Vernon threw out the other pages most mornings, and Harry couldn’t ever make heads or tails of the strange verbiage left behind that told of acquisitions, stocks, and something called ‘futures’), and the books that Petunia kept stowed away in her bedside drawer.

Of course, there were Dudley’s comic books, but Harry wasn’t to touch those—

Actually, he wasn’t meant to touch any of the Dursley’s reading materials.

After shifting from foot to foot and painfully clearing his throat a time or two—which Snape pointedly ignored—the boy decided his best course of action was likely Aunt Petunia’s books.

That’s what a teacher would expect, right? Books?

He certainly hadn’t read very many. In class they mostly did read-alongs with books for children his own age, or they read selections of bigger things. Of course, he’d been sent home with assignments to read things like the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe… but when Aunt Petunia had found his copy and had viciously torn it to pieces before his very eyes (and Dudley’s too), he’d been forced to guess at the plot and details when they’d discussed it as a class over the next few weeks. He’d only managed to get to the part with the Badgers, which had disappointed Harry greatly.

He’d gotten poor grades for that— and a striped bottom for his bad showing when the Dursleys had been called in to discuss his marks with the teacher.

Of course, Dudley had done worse— but he’d been comforted with an ice lolly when he’d begun to bawl about how unfair it was. After all, how could the teacher expect him to know anything about a book that was so objectionable as to have been worthy of the kind of treatment his aunt had subjected the text to?

He snuck into his uncle and aunt’s bedroom, somehow worried that they would find him there, even though he knew they’d been gone for days.

Sometimes, everything felt as if it existed to entrap him.

The Dursleys’ room held two beds, his uncle’s and his aunt’s. His uncle’s was a double wide, with a neutral, navy counterpane—undisturbed since Harry had last laundered the bed clothes. His aunt’s was nearer to the door, and featured a twee floral covering next to her side table.

Harry meandered to it, trying to stuff down his misgivings. He turned on the small, fussy lamp at her bedside and crouched down beside the side table, opening the tiny drawer like it might awaken to bite his hand.

Inside was an assortment of odds and ends: reading glasses (that Aunt Petunia would never admit to needing), what seemed to be a small bottle of prescription pills that bore the lable ‘zopliclone,’ a manicure kit, and three battered soft-cover books.

Harry drew out the pile as he settled cross-legged on the floor in front of the small lamp. The room was still dim enough that he had to squint, and the covers were so creased and faded that he had a difficult time making out the titles or cover-art.

He thought the first one might have featured a woman precariously swinging from the mast of a ship, the second—if he squinted hard—a lady of means sipping tea in a posh café, and the third, he noted with some confusion, appeared to be a couple embracing.

A very pretty couple, Harry thought, as he tried hard to figure out just what he was seeing.

Somehow, it appeared that the man’s blond hair was longer and more luxurious than the woman’s, whom he was holding tightly in his over-muscled arms.

It wasn’t long like Snape’s, however—who was the only man that Harry knew personally with long hair. His was like a stringy net of swamp gook, somehow tousled and tangled even though it was poker straight.

The man on the cover’s hair was like the hair featured on the covers of some of his aunt’s fashion magazines…

And Harry didn’t think he’d ever seen a woman so beautiful in real life. She was turned slightly to the side, her eyes cast down and aside as she reclined into the man’s chest, her own hair long enough that it cascaded down her front almost to her navel. She wore a dress that appeared to be of the softest shade of pink and laced in a way that suggested it might have been hinting at a somewhat medieval setting.

And that seemed to bear out—upon a second appraisal, the long-haired man was wearing a suit of chain mail.

He rose from the floor, and then hoisted himself up to sit on his aunt’s bed, promising himself that he’d smooth the counterpane before he left, just in case she should come back and realise that he’d had the gall to perch where she slept.

The first two books he piled on the table beside her bed, and he began to thumb through the third, finding the text to be smaller than he was used to, and more densely packed.

Well. He stared at the book like it might bite him. He supposed the title page would be the most likely place to start. There was the least amount of text there anyway.

His Earthly Rewards

By Clementina Montgomery

That wasn’t quite as interesting as a lion and a witch, though it did promise to be an improvement over the promise of a wardrobe…

He continued on to the first chapter, his feet swinging beneath him, too short to touch the floor.

He found himself frowning a short time later.

How could adults stand to read anything quite so boring?

According to the story, there was a fair maiden, the daughter of a poor farmer (of course, the book had called him destitute, but Harry couldn’t quite fathom what that meant, at least not until the narrative went on to describe the rags the family was obliged to dress in).

The maiden’s family could no longer afford to feed her, and come chapter two, a knight in service to a local lord had spied her and offered to make her his… something.

Harry had no idea what a ‘consort’ might have been.

From the way she balked at the offer, he imagined it wasn’t very nice—

“What on earth are you reading!?”

The book was snatched from his hands with such speed that the page he was on tore.

“That’s—! You can’t! That’s not my book!” He protested, grabbing for it as Mr. Snape held it out from himself as if it were utter filth.

His fingers were holding the cover in a pincer grip, seemingly trying to make as little contact with the book as possible. “When I instructed you to go and find challenging reading material what could have possibly made you think that this would be in any way appropriate?”

Harry peered at him, and his confusion must have shown on his face.

“Do you know what this is, Potter?”

Harry shook his head and ducked his head.

“So, you didn’t choose it because it was… illicit?”

“Illicit?”

Mr. Snape drew his free hand down his face, appearing exasperated, weary, and prematurely aged with the gesture.

“If you don’t know already, I suppose it will suffice to say that this is material that is… too old for you. Choose another book.”

“These are the only books in the house, Mr. Snape—" Harry protested. He clawed the counterpane in with his hands, twisting at the material as he fretted over what his punishment might be.

“The only—?” Snape began, sounding a bit gobsmacked. Then he said something quite shocking.

“Fucking Petunia,” he snarled, spitting on the floor boards.

Harry’s eyes had grown comically large behind his glasses. He eyed the glob of spit on the floor, wondering if he should run for a towel, and he couldn’t quite help himself from making an inane observation, “You swore…”

Snape sighed and tossed the book into the corner, where it smacked against the wall and fell to the floor with the pages face down and the spine cracked. He repeated his earlier motion of rubbing down his face, but this time with both hands.

“I suppose I did.” He admitted, glaring at Harry with an expression that made his irritation clear.

“In any case, I came to fetch you for dinner. I called for you at least five minutes ago. I suppose you didn’t hear me through the haze of smut,” he spat, “that you were absorbed in. We will address the lamentable lack of suitable reading material after supper.”

He began to lead Harry out of the room, and Harry didn’t even bother to spare a glance for the thoroughly confusing novel he’d been wrapped up in for the afternoon.

It had been difficult to understand what the author meant by any of it, anyway.

Snape bade him to sit and Harry was amazed to discover that the taciturn young man had evidently taken it upon himself to prepare a thick chicken dumpling soup.

Soup in the middle of a hot July wasn’t precisely his first choice, but it looked and smelled delicious, and Harry hadn’t had anything fresh and hot in… well...

Actually, months if one discounted that morning’s burger and the food he’d stolen to eat right when the Dursleys had been gone.

Usually even when his relatives were home and the house was stocked with food he was only ever fed thin sandwiches on the most squashed pieces of bread or other second-hand fare.

The soup was served with a crusty slice of bread that Harry didn’t hesitate to dip in the broth—a rich golden hue that showed glossy pools of fragrant oils on the surface.

Unlike Aunt Petunia’s cooking, the vegetables weren’t cooked within an inch of their lives— they retained a bit of firmness. And flavour.

“You can’t expect me to believe there are no other books in the house,” Mr. Snape began, his tone nearly conversational, between bites.

Harry laid his spoon down and felt himself flushing and beginning to sweat. “There aren’t!” He swallowed, the action difficult. Perhaps the soup was too hot—it felt as if it had scalded his esophagus.

“I think not, Potter! Pick that spoon back up and keep eating.” Snape barked, pointing a finger at the utensil.

Harry scrambled to do as he asked, but for all that, only played at scooping up more soup to eat. He felt as if he could barely swallow, and the bread, though delicious, scratched at him terribly.

Snape eyed him critically. “You’re not eating.”

“I’m… er… I’m full still. From earlier.”

He felt the man’s black-eyed gaze on the top of his bowed head.

“I don’t believe you.” The comment was crisp, but not cruel or unkind. “When you sat down and took the first few bites you seemed ready to tuck in.”

Harry didn’t respond except to take a bite of the soft, inner flesh of the bread and to soften it over his tongue for a full minute, hoping it would go down easier that way. He added a spoonful of broth, to no avail. He still winced as he swallowed the wad of wheaty paste.

Snape set down his own spoon and crossed his arms over his chest as he surveilled Harry from beneath a furrowed brow. “You’re in pain.”

“No!” The boy hastened to object, “I’m just… it’s hot. I need to let it cool…” he prevaricated, stirring the bowl and dipping the spoon in such a way as to draw up almost nothing in the basin of the spoon. He took a pantomimed sip for good measure.

Looking like he didn’t believe him for a second, Mr. Snape merely carried on eating. Harry couldn’t shake the feeling that he was watching him closely for the remainder of the meal.

He was forced to eat at least half the bowl… and at least it tasted good… but by the time Snape had finished and the bread was gone, eating had become an utterly torturous activity.

“Er… may I be excused?” Harry asked, not looking up from the bowl. He felt like he might lose his dinner if he looked anywhere but down.

The man appeared torn, though Harry couldn’t quite imagine why… no one ever cared how much he ate, so maybe it was because it was terribly rude of him to refuse the food that he’d prepared.

And he had been so good to him so far... he’d not even made Harry eat the chicken offal bits!

All of the sudden he felt like crying, but he didn’t want Snape to see. Whenever he’d cried in front of his family it had been met with either taunting or he’d been tossed into his cupboard and locked away until he could ‘fix his face.’

“At least as much as a foul boy like yourself can fix such a scruffy mug,” he heard his aunt’s voice echo in his memory.

“Please, mister… I need the loo—"

“You’re excused.”

Harry almost fell to the floor, he had scurried away from the table so quickly. He stumbled out of the room, hoping his wretched sobs—that he no longer could contain—wouldn’t reveal his state.

The bathroom door slammed behind him, and he began retching into the toilet, the entire meal coming up from his depths. It was even more painful going out than in.

By the end he couldn’t stop spitting any saliva that gathered in the corners of his mouth—swallowing just wasn’t an option. His face was a mess of tears, snot, and the dregs of dinner.

After a few moments that he spent heaving over the bowl, he drew himself up against the sink basin and rinsed his face. He didn’t look in the mirror. He had it on good authority that there was nothing he could do to improve on that.

He felt better, but he still couldn’t keep his saliva down. He felt it filling over his tongue and spat into the basin several more times. He had to get that under control. He couldn’t go back out there and keep spitting.

Not on the floorboards and rugs… his relatives would have his hide, and there was no telling what Mr. Snape would do in response to that kind of disrespect.

He made himself gulp down the next time. It was barely tolerable, but he managed, his throat protesting the entire time. It felt like fire.

When he went to open the door, it was to find the young teacher standing at the threshold, his peat-coloured eyes bearing down on him.

“Problems, Potter?”

“N-no,” Harry gasped, feeling a cold sweat bead out across the skin of his neck.

“Because it sounded as though you were getting violently ill in there.”

“I… I’m allergic—"

“Are you?” Mr. Snape canted one of his eyebrows above the other. “To what, pray tell?”

“Er…” Harry was so disoriented that he could scarcely remember what had been in the soup. Worse, his salivary glands were overproducing as he thought of food. After everything… he was still hungry. “Potatoes,”

“Which you ate at lunch without issue.”

“Erm, I did..?” He nearly slurred.

“A double serving of chips.” Snape frowned. “I’d prefer the truth, if you would.”

Harry nearly swooned against the door jam—bile was rising in his gorge once more and his mouth was too full of retained spit to even speak… he couldn’t bear to swallow it back, and it was threatening to spill out the corner of his mouth.

He made a quick about face and ducked over the sink, turning on the spigot to rinse down the resultant overflow as he hawked into the porcelain.

Snape stepped forward beside him and Harry couldn’t protest. He was too weak, leaning against the counter.

But the teacher didn’t grip him by the roots of his hair and send him careening into the crawl space in order to sleep and sweat it off.

One of his hands, spindly and pale, passed by the corner of Harry’s vision where he was propped, doubled over the sink, to grab one of the towels from a dowel on the wall. He wet it under the faucet, allowing the water to sluice over it until it saturated the fabric, then he pressed it, without ringing it out, to the back of Harry’s neck.

His left hand came around the other side to press against Harry’s forehead, which he almost didn’t feel, by then nearly insensate.

His eyes were half-lidded, seeing almost nothing as the edges of his visions began to tunnel.

There was one thing though… something that was surprising enough to cut through the fugginess of illness.

Harry’s gaze focused on the only thing in front of his eyes, where Mr. Snape’s worn, ratty shirt had ridden up from his forearm stretching to cradle the boy’s fevered forehead in his palm.

“Hey… you have a tattoo… Thas’ c-cool…”