They stayed at Snape’s house in Cokeworth for nearly a week. In truth, time seemed to pass differently there.

Every day in the sour little house followed a nearly identical routine, which was quite unlike Harry’s existence in Number Four Privet Drive where every day had its own chore list and a set menu that Harry was expected to follow to the letter.

Snape had sent Harry up to bed following their meal, directing him toward one of two bedrooms on the upper floor of the narrow house.

It was cramped, mouldering, dark, and—at least as far as Harry was concerned—palatial.

He could nearly spread eagle on the single-wide bed, and though the sheets looked to be older than him by several decades, and smelled slightly musty, they were clean.

Snape had assured him of that, looking rather embarrassed for reasons Harry couldn’t quite fathom.

“It’s not that I’ve not washed them,” he had hastened to assure Harry, “only... no one’s slept here for years. So, they’ve not been laundered in near as long…”

Even so, one flick of the man’s wand and the linens seemed to floof out, as though an invisible wind had disturbed them, and afterwards had smelled like they’d been freshly scrubbed in a tub of washing powder and left to dry in the purifying rays of a bright, sunny day.

That first night, Harry had been too tired to investigate the room he’d stayed in. It was so late that the whole upper floor was dark, and the single bulb that was meant to light the room had long ago burnt out.

It was only in the morning light—unconscionably early as Snape had complained a bit later—that Harry realised the room he’d been boarded in was likely Severus’ own.

Or at least it had been at one time.

The walls were almost entirely papered over with glossy posters for rock acts that Harry was only now familiar with after having spent so much time in the car with the man.

When he woke, it was to see the terrifying sight of four heavily made-up men snarling at him. All had ratty, long, black hair and faces painted white and black. He was frozen to the spot where he lay, wondering for one delirious moment whether this was more magic and whether it might have been dangerous.

But the poster didn’t move. And after the fog of sleep had slipped from Harry’s mind and he’d fumbled for his glasses, he was able to make out the text on the poster.

KISS.

It was that band from the tape with the animal pelts.

The rest of the ceiling was covered as well. Apparently, the only surface that had survived Snape’s penchant for posters was the floor.

Harry rolled out of bed and crawled over to where he’d placed Wheat the evening before; on the floor and up against one of the walls. He took his time feeding the tarantula as the store keep had instructed him to do and watched with a strange mixture of fascination and revulsion as the spider systematically hunted and devoured the live crickets Snape had purchased for him. The man had helped him settle a tiny dish with water in the corner of the terrarium before bed, and had spelled it to keep it from spilling everywhere.

Watching Wheat only provided perhaps ten minutes of entertainment, however, and after, Harry was left wondering whether he should go and find Snape, or if he should poke around the man’s childhood bedroom a bit.

He had no way of knowing how early it was... Aunt Petunia always expected him to get up at least an hour before Dudley and Uncle Vernon for the sake of cooking the family’s breakfast and then he was meant to give the baseboards a good wipe. His uncle liked everything to be spic and span, all right and correct when he descended the stairs in the morning.

Harry didn’t know where to go looking for a rag and a washbasin in Snape’s house...

Would the man expect breakfast?

‘No...’ Harry thought, mentally kicking himself. Severus had all but told him that the kitchen was basically devoid of food...

And after he’d gone through all the trouble of grocery shopping back in Surrey... Oh well. Most of it would likely keep for a few days.

In the end, Harry settled for allowing himself his poke around the man’s belongings, finding what looked to be a school scarf and tie in a deep green colour, and a stack of photographs. To his amazement, half of them moved.

He didn’t think he’d ever quite get used to magic...

It was clear who Snape was. He looked the same. And he must have grown into his nose rather recently, as it looked to be the same size in all of the pictures, even the ones from when he was around Harry’s age. Between the beak and the dumbo-esque ears, he’d not really been a very attractive child. Harry felt his heart going out to him then.

He knew a target for bullies when he saw one, being one himself. There was no way a kid like Snape would have gotten by unscathed.

There were pictures where groups of twenty or more children were assembled—likely class photos from Snape’s primary school—the boys to one side and the girls to the other. Harry was curious when he thought he spied little pencil hearts sketched around one girl who kept showing up in the stack of photos.

She was fair skinned, lightly freckled, with a becoming smile and deep, garnet-red hair. While in the pictures from Snape’s childhood they were always away from one another—probably having been positioned there by teachers as they were lined up for the shot—in the newer photos where Snape looked to be a gangly adolescent, she stood at his elbow, beaming a cheeky smile up into the lens. In one of the moving pictures, she was attempting to get Severus to uncross his arms from over his chest, but he wore a mulish expression and seemed determined not to relent from his chosen posture.

It sure seemed like Snape had had a thing for her from all the hearts circling her face in the earliest pictures. And in the most recent ones, his face seemed twisted in a way that seemed somewhat uncharacteristic for him.

Scowls, frowns, smirks, sneers, snarls, and dramatic eye-rolls: all of these Harry had seen in abundance since he’d met the man just a couple of days earlier. This ambiguous, restrained quarter-smile, however? The embarrassed—dare he say shy—look that Snape wore next to his red-headed friend? Harry’d not yet seen anything that resembled that look on the young man’s expressive face.

Having reached the end of the small pile, Harry set the stack of pictures back in the drawer he’d pulled them from, pressed into the back corner of the space, just as he found them.

The sun was still coming up, and the impetus to leave the room was soon strengthened by his awareness that he desperately needed a wee.

When he snuck out of the room, it was to find the house silent and still in the early morning hour. On the upper floor, the corridor leading to the stairs was nearly pitch-black. There were no lights and no windows, excepting those that looked into the bedrooms, so the hallway was cast into shadow. He had to feel his way down the narrow, steep stairs and he nearly fell over his own feet a couple of times.

The bathroom out back was even more strange and unwelcoming with the odd unreality that often came in with the morning dew. The air was slightly wet. The back garden was cast in shadow from the shallow position of the sun on the horizon, and Harry felt struck by the surreal nature of his morning route to the loo.

It lasted even as he snuck back into the kitchen and stood in the door, glancing around.

He was nearly afraid to touch anything... every surface was occupied by cauldrons, and Snape seemed quite particular about how they were to be handled. Even so, Harry managed to wash his hands at the sink.

All of the books in the sitting room seemed far beyond his reading level, and on topics that he hadn’t the faintest idea about besides, so after five minutes of shifting from foot to foot in indecision, Harry went back out to the garden where he’d spied an old, enameled wash-basin nested inside of a larger tin tub.

He filled the tub with water from the faucet and used his hands to produce enough lather from the block of soap on the edge of the sink that the water became sudsy. Tossing in a few rags that he found in the cavity beneath the sink-basin, Harry carefully carried the sloshing dish out into the sitting room where he settled it on the floor near the door.

The rag he wrung out into the water—which, somehow, already appeared dirty—and wrapped around his index finger, the bulk of it being held against his palm with his other three fingers and thumb. He began furiously scrubbing at the filthy baseboards.

It took several minutes before he could even tell whether he was making a difference, and a tiny, shiny spot seemed to let go of the years of dirt to which it had clung.

It was no bigger than a one-pound coin. Harry’s eyes traced the perimeter of the room, taking in the expanse of what remained to be cleaned...

He didn’t let himself wince.

Had Aunt Petunia caught him wincing she’d have swatted him and told him to fix his face.

He spent the rest of the morning thus engaged, until a bleary-eyed Snape emerged, rubbing at his blood-shot eyes, from the flight of stairs.

The man nearly lost his footing when his boot trod in a wet puddle Harry had left.

“Bloody buggering bicorns—”

Harry’s head whipped up from where he’d been crouched behind the sofa, seeing that the man had barely caught himself against the wall and was attempting to stagger to his feet. The boy snapped to attention, though he found himself wringing the soiled rag between his two hands.

“Good morning, Mr. Snape...”

“What are you playing at, Potter? Is it not enough that I put you up in my own bloody bedroom? Do you also have to go around trying to get me to break my neck—and why is the floor all wet...?”

Belatedly, Harry realised that the way he was twisting the cloth between his hands was wringing out yet another puddle of water onto the floor and he quickly moved to hide his hands behind his back, feeling his face flush.

“I’m sorry... I didn’t mean to leave puddles. Have you got a mop?”

Snape strode over to him and loomed above him, his eyes taking in all that was beneath his beak-like nose as a bird of prey might have, lingering first over the washbasin, then over the variously sized puddles that spotted the floor, and finally, on the baseboards that were so clean that they looked nearly out of place flush against a floor that was stained beyond even magic’s ability to fix.

The man’s face seemed to be flushing with anger, red suffusing his neck, then his cheeks, and finally gathering in the tips of his round ears, but when he spoke it was quiet. So quiet that Harry had to strain to hear.

“I didn’t bring you here to scrub the filth from the walls.”

Harry felt his heart sink. “I... I just thought...”

But Snape shook his head and pointed a finger at the enamel tub. “Go dump that in the garden and join me in the kitchen.”

Hastening to obey, Harry barely noticed as Snape’s wand was withdrawn and the puddles cleared from the floorboards.

When he reemerged into the kitchen moments later, it was to find that Snape had withdrawn a battered old skillet and was heating it over the cooker. Oblong slices of something pink sizzled and popped over the heat and emitted a meaty aroma. For all that the pink-whatzit looked unappetising, it smelled heavenly.

After ten minutes of fussing over the crispiness of the potted meat, Snape decanted the slices onto pieces of toast he pulled from the oven, passing Harry a plate with an equal portion to his own.

For the rest of the day, they worked at the potions Snape had on stand-by.

And then too the next day.

The whole week was spent chopping, and slicing, carefully sprinkling in herbs and parted-out monsters that Harry had never heard of into bubbling tallow or alcoholic bases.

Snape didn’t make him clean anything at all. Not for the entire rest of the time they spent at his home.

They broke to go pick up groceries on that first day, and had picked up more food from Rice Bowl a few days later—with Snape hurrying them out of the establishment after Mrs. Padiernos had begun asking him pointed questions about why she hadn’t seen them at mass on Sunday—but otherwise, every day was exactly alike.

And Harry found that he quite enjoyed his days with Snape.

For one thing, the man always had his tape deck blaring rock ballads. The only time it had failed was when the batteries had needed replacing, and rather than suffer in silence, Snape had dragged them out to the store that very instant for replacements.

By Thursday, Harry found he was getting rather good at it all. Snape scarcely needed to correct him anymore—though the man seemed to restrict Harry’s part in the preparation to simple, repetitive iterations of the same ingredients, while he handled the more exotic and disgusting samples himself—and he’d even begun to let Harry add ingredients in himself at certain stages.

“Keep your right arm moving anti-clockwise... no—” Snape shook his head and directed Harry’s arm with his own hand around Harry’s wrist. “Faster, like this. Now, while whisking, you shake in the desiccated liver. Slowly. No more than one fourth of the powder should be added in for each rotation of your arm. But not too slowly, or it won’t be integrated properly—”

The tiny house nearly shook.

Booming knocks were emitting from the front door accompanied by raucous laughter.

Snape swore. Loudly and with great feeling. He finished directing Harry’s hand to add the liver and cast a stasis over the cauldron.

Seizing Harry’s shoulders up in his large hands, he shook the boy and his eyes were urgent as they met Harry’s own.

Harry felt his blood run cold. Snape had never manhandled or shook him before... and the look in the man’s eyes was enough to make him want to turn tail and flee out the back door.

Which, incidentally, was precisely what Snape instructed him to do.

“Go—hunker down in the privy. Don’t come out until I come for you,”

Harry desperately wanted to ask questions, but the look of mingled fear and fury in Snape’s black gaze was enough to dissuade him. He merely nodded in a single, jerky motion, and scurried from the kitchen, ducking into the brick structure and pulling the door behind him.

Waiting in the loo seemed to make time stand-still, and after he’d spent as much energy as he could doing things to occupy himself—counting the tiles, rubbing at the porcelain of the toilet with a spare rag until it shone, trying to peek through the crack between the door and the frame—Harry felt as though he’d been contained in the tiny room for hours.

Had it really only been a week before that he’d done this for hours at a time in his cupboard... it shouldn’t be so difficult. The walls shouldn’t have felt as though they were going to collapse in on him. He should be able to breathe... logically there had to be enough air in there...

But logic is nothing in the face of fear, and so Harry burst out of the tiny shed gasping for breath and doubling over his knees to try and fend off the sensation that his vision was growing black at the edges.

When his sight began to creep back from the abyss he’d felt himself rapidly spiraling toward, Harry risked a glance up at the house. It was silent. He heard none of the cackling he’d heard from the front stoop which had precipitated his banishment to the privy.

Surely, it had been long enough? Time had been passing differently recently, admittedly, but his time in the cramped, stinking loo had felt like it spanned for hours.

Shuffling onward on all fours, moving rather like a chimpanzee in a crouched position, his arms scoping out to balance himself as he hopped forward, Harry crouched beneath the window that looked in on the kitchen and slowly inched his way up until he was eye level.

Inside, Snape stood with his back to a stocky, broad-nosed man who was garbed in what looked, at first glance, to be a giant black blanket.

The interloper was leaning against the doorframe to the sitting room and seemed to be conversing quite comfortably with Snape as the thinner man putzed around the assembled cutting boards with a speed and dexterity that had been lacking in his potion making instructionals with Harry. 

Snape was turned away from the big man and so Harry was able to see that his face appeared lined with strain. Impatience. The man behind him cracked a joke and lacked the good grace to not laugh uproariously at his own jocularity, such that he didn’t notice when Snape cringed rather than joining in with his own display of mirth.

The only other sign that might have shown that Severus was ill at ease was the barest tremour in his right hand, which he deftly disguised as an intentional shake and flourish as he finished pouring a phial of pre-prepared tincture into the cauldron he was attending.

“Ooo, fancy that! Snape’s got himself a lookie-loo,”

Harry spun so quickly that he fell against the ancient, cratered woodgrain and the back of his head cracked against the surface of the door.

Once he’d managed to recover enough to stop clutching the back of his head, Harry’s eyes tracked slowly upwards.

First, he saw an impeccable pair of slim boots. They appeared to be one, seamless piece of leather, with no zipper, laces or elastic panels in evidence. The fit should have been impossible…

Without magic…

And that was his first clue.

The second was that this man wore a similar blanket-like garment that seemed only loosely tailored to suggest that a man wore it and not some formless homunculus.

Beneath the elaborately draped front panels, he seemed to be wearing a rather old-fashioned set of trousers, creased at the front and waist-high, though beyond that was hidden beneath the blanket. The man’s neck and chin seemed afflicted with a bad case of razor-rash, and his blonde hair was haphazardly chopped in mismatched layers around his ears.

A pair of watery, red-rimmed eyes stared down at him, narrowed in predatory delight.

It was difficult to tell how old he might have been. Harry would have suspected he was of an age with Snape, except he had the look about him that hinted at many long nights spent staring into the fathomless bottom of a full stein.

Of course, Harry wasn’t instantaneously aware of the signs of perpetual drunkenness… all he knew was that somehow, for all the man’s evident youth, he looked hardened to a crust, and faintly dangerous for it.

A bare moment after their eyes chanced to meet, one rough hand whipped out in the periphery of Harry’s vision and seized a hank of the boy’s black cowlicks in a punishing grip. The man pulled forward, hard, and brought Harry to heel by his side before he used his other fist to pound out a tattoo against the door, so forcefully that the glass pane rattled.

The door was pulled open from the inside to show Severus at the threshold, his black eyes darting between the man who had Harry by the hair and the pitiful wretch of a boy that knelt at his doorstep.

“What’ve you found yourself there, Yax?” Snape’s gaze was faintly amused, even in spite of Harry’s pleading look—one which begged for salvation, for respite. For clemency…

Because he had left the safety of the privy.

“A chew toy, I think.” The man—Yax—choked, smothering a cruel laugh.

“Pity your mother never told you not to bring in refuse off the street,” Snape intoned, with no little irony. He drew himself up to his full height—which was perhaps an inch short of six-foot— and at least half a head short of the man that had Harry by the roots of his hair.

“Ah, but it wasn’t on the street, Snape. It was hiding out in your garden. Where, evidently, you weren’t planning on sharing with the rest of the class. So selfish… though you always were the most self-interested in our year.

“Haven’t Wulf and I been good enough sports to rate a piece of the pie when one’s on offer?”

Snape’s hand surged forth and smacked Yax’s away from Harry’s hair and then twisted in the collar of Harry’s shirt, pulling him beside his own legs as though he was taking back possession of his dog from someone who’d come across him as a lost stray.

“As it happens, a pie is not on offer. Congratulations, you’ve spotted my… assistant.”

“Your assistant? This young? My my, Snape— it seems you’re not as above the rest of us as you like to act. No wonder you became a teacher,” Yax delivered the last bit of the filthy allegation in a delighted sing-song that made Harry’s blood slow and freeze like an ice floe.

A cautious glance into Snape’s face showed undisguised disgust. “Hardly. As it happens, the disinterest I feel in joining in with your own extracurriculars is rivaled only by my disgust and incredulity that you are so eager to find others to do it with you. Nay. The boy is my assistant… and donor.”

“Donor?” Yax sounded confused, but also eager. Too eager. “You mean…?”

“He is being well trained, gentlemen. Spit. Blood. Tears, on occasion. Doubtless when he reaches a suitable size, more considerable and substantial harvests will follow.”

Harry desperately hoped he was misunderstanding the man, but somehow, he didn’t think he was.

Even Yax and the stocky man known as ‘Wulf’ appeared a bit squicked.

The latter gave a laugh that sounded more nervous than the spirited guffaws he’d loosed earlier in his visit. “You’re twisted, Snape.”

“And he likes to act all high and mighty.” Yax rolled his blue eyes.

They all piled onto the kitchen and Snape gave Harry a shove into the corner. “Stay out from underfoot, boy. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll shut your ears and your eyes and forget anything you hear and have seen here today.”

The two stranger’s voices rose in a chorus of dark laughter and Snape’s familiar face twisted into a terrifying smirk that made Harry forget every moment he’d spent in the past week where the man had helped or been kind to him.

“Who knew you were ready to travel down that storied path, Snape,” Yax was saying as he reclined with one thin hip braced against the ancient counter-top, “how long do you think you can keep harvesting for? Months? Years even?”

Snape, who had turned from the men and was back to finishing off the potion in a tiny silver cauldron answered over his shoulder. “It depends on the order of the extractions. If I time it correctly, and do my utmost to preserve the integrity of the charitable party, I daresay I can make use of him until he’s at least thirteen, at which point I’ll be forced to begin a wholesale divestment of his resources.”

“Morgana’s malignant heart—just think of what you could sell some of that for...”

“Not half as much as I can sell the potions I could personally make with my gleanings should I keep them for myself.” Snape replied, his voice crisp. “Why should I risk a short-sale? It’s far more difficult to trace the potions back to me than to sell off one of the boy’s kidneys in a jar that, under the right circumstances, could be linked to myself.”

Yax sniffed. “If you’re sure...”

“This is non-negotiable.” Snape turned the burner down under the cauldron and used a wooden stirring rod to lift up a bit of the gelatinous goop for inspection. It must have passed muster, as he removed the cauldron to a portion of the table that he reserved for cooling and set about arranging a line of glass phials to decant into.

“And this was all you came for? Why else darken my door after so much time away?” He asked, rhetorically. “After all, what good am I except as a potioneer?”

Wulf rolled his eyes at the man’s dramatics. “Don’t get uppity, Snape. Why would we bother to invite you to things you’ve made clear you have no interest in? So that you can stand around in the corner and pass judgement on us? Just give us our galleons worth and we’ll leave you to your brewing.”

“What are you planning on using it for? A numbing agent of this strength?”

Harry found he could find nothing in the universe that he thought he hated more than the terrifying smile that crept across Yax’s face. His flinch must have betrayed him, as Yax’s smile widened.

“That’s right, boy. Be glad that Snape’s spoken for you. You’re luckier than the rest. At least for a little...” But then the man’s face had frozen, the smile dissolving off of it in an instant. He strode toward Harry, clasped his jaw between his fingers and yanked up his face, peering down into it.

From behind him, Harry thought he saw Snape make a sudden, jerky motion. “What are you doing to my assistant—”

“Your assistant, Severus? No, no—you’ve not been honest, have you? Well, Wulf, we knew even ten years ago to never trust a half-blood.”

“If you’re going to stand around insulting me in my own house, you can keep your galleons,” Snape spat, striding over to Harry and Yax. It looked as if he might have planned to rescue Harry from the man’s grip once again, but the larger man forestalled him, pulling out his own wand—a pale, lifeless-looking branch—and holding it against Snape’s chest. Directly over the man’s heart.

Snape stilled instantly. Tension radiated off of him as steam did off of a boiling pot.

“You’ll stay where you are, Sev, and you’ll take any and every insult I can manage. For a start: turncoat, traitor—”

“What are you nattering on about? Have you finally lost what tenuous hold on reality you’d retained—?”

The hand on Harry’s jaw tightened, and he could feel the jagged tips of the man’s fingernails digging into the tender skin of his face. He couldn’t help it, he let out a small whimper, desperately trying to catch Snape’s eye. He was having a time of it, as Severus’ gaze was trained firmly on the man who had him at wand-point.

“Come help me out here, Wulf, I need a second pair of hands.”

The man lumbered over, seemingly servile to the whims of his compatriot, and came to stand beside where Harry knelt.

“Lift the boy’s fringe, Wulf. Tell me what you see there.”

Harry felt the beefy calloused hands parting the fine hair that covered his forehead. He closed his eyes. Something about the man’s touch made him want to be violently ill onto Snape’s peeling linoleum floor, and somehow, given the circumstances, he understood that this was possibly the worst time he could find to indulge such a weakness.

“Bit of a scar,” Wulf responded, tracing the zig-zag configuration with a fingertip.

Yax’s hand wrenched Harry’s face forward, his fingers squeezing his cheeks. “Not just any scar. The scar. Harry Potter’s scar.”

It felt impossible to breathe. The feeling that he was about to upchuck his breakfast intensified to an almost irresistible urge. Harry’s whole body felt as though it was composed of pinpricks of agitation. He was quite certain that all of the blood in his head had deserted him and headed for greener pastures. Had Yax not been holding him in such a firm grip, he surely would have crumpled over the man’s impressive leather shoes.

Why did they know him? Why did it matter that he had a scar on his face?

Why did they sound so dementedly eager about it?

Harry turned his shaky gaze upon Snape one last time, begging and pleading with the God he’d been raised to fear to please let everything be okay. Please let Snape know what to do. Please... please...

Please...

As he watched, Snape’s own eyes, which had largely been unreadable throughout the entire exchange with the two strangers, widened almost imperceptibly. For the barest half of a second. They didn’t so much as meet Harry’s own, as to dart, rather as a cornered rat’s might, from Yax’s wand, to Wulf’s stocky figure at Harry’s side, and then all around the kitchen.

In the space of time it would have taken to merely blink Snape threw himself into action.

His hand, which had been holding a cluster of leaves—presumably to add right before bottling the potion he’d been preparing—tossed the ingredients into the nearest cauldron, which began to hiss and spit as its contents roiled over the rim of the hardy pewter vessel within which it was contained.

As Yax and Wulf recoiled in fright from the cauldron that was moments away from exploding, Snape dove for Harry and bodily wrestled him from Yax’s loosening grasp.

They were in an awkward embrace on the floor together, with Harry’s face pressed into the black fabric of Snape’s shirt, and when he peered over the man’s bony shoulder, he saw a shimmering wall of iridescent purple against which the neon-orange potion was splattering.

Neither Yax, nor Wulf had managed to shield themselves, though they had turned away, and they were now on the dirty floor of the kitchen, sprawled out and wailing in agony as the potion burned wherever it touched.

There was no time for Harry to look his fill, however, as Snape struggled to his feet, still holding Harry to his front, clutched to him as a koala holds itself on a tree branch, and staggered out of the kitchen.

Harry’s weight must have been a bit difficult for the scrawny young man to manage, and yet he manoeuvred the two out into the sitting room and snatched his keyring from the hook by the door. Within seconds they were ambling out of the house, the aged wood of the door slamming behind them, and Harry was being thrown into the back of the Morris Marina.

By the time that Snape was seated behind the wheel, Harry thought he saw two figures, rising in the air from behind Snape’s house, cloaked in flowing black, bearing down on the car—

“Mr. Snape! Mr. Snape—” Harry cried, inarticulate with fear. His face was pressed against the window and he was pointing wordlessly at the spectres of rage that were now flying—yes, flying. On broomsticks!—over the roof of Snape’s house.

“SHUT UP, POTTER, I SEE THEM!”

The car jerked forward so hard that Harry’s head smacked against the headrest, and then Snape began the terrifying process of bringing it up into third gear in a narrow, winding neighborhood that was much too small and confined to be speeding in.

For the first time, Harry felt no compunction to critique the man’s driving.

The car dipped and wove through the other parked cars, and then blew past the posted signs and signals that said they should rightly have slowed down or come to a stop.

Harry felt himself sliding from one side of the back seat to the other as Snape took the turns at a break-neck speed, banking left, left again, right—

And all while overhead the two wizards on brooms gained on them and bore down, casting jets of light from their wands that narrowly missed the car.

Harry could hear, from the street, a few shrieks, and knew that people must have been witnessing what was happening, though it couldn’t have been too many. Cokeworth seemed nearly abandoned, as far as villages went. Then again, it was a surprise, with the way Snape was driving that they hadn’t attracted the—

The loud claxon rent the air, intruding upon Harry’s reflections and disproving his assumptions and hopes.

“Fucking bleeding filth!” Snape snarled. They had reached a straight-away now, and he poured on more speed. So much so that Harry thought his foot was probably to the floor.

The arrival of the police on their tail did have one salutary effect, however. As Harry watched through the back-window, the two wizards looked to one another, and turned off course, slowing their pursuit until, eventually, they looked to be retreating all together and turning tail.

“Yax and Wulf are turning off, Severus,” Harry dutifully reported.

“Marvelous!” Snape spat as he coasted right, executing a dangerous turn onto an expressway that was far more crowded than the street they’d been driving on. “Now there’s only the local fuzz to worry about—”

The sirens followed them as Snape conducted the car through traffic, the other cars scattering as they saw that a chase was in progress.

Harry gnawed his lower lip, tasting blood. Sure, it was better to have the police after them than the two wizards that were so utterly terrifying, but he didn’t really want Snape to be in trouble with the law either...

Unless what he’d been saying about carving Harry up for parts was in any way true.

“What are we gonna do?” Harry whinged, his hands working their way into his hair and pulling helplessly.

“Climb up here, Potter, into the passenger seat.”

“But that’s dangerous—”

“DO AS I FUCKING SAY!” Snape shrieked. “FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST IF YOU VALUE ANYTHING YOU WILL LISTEN TO ME THIS TIME!”

It was true... this had all started because he’d disobeyed Snape’s order to stay hidden in the privy... Harry’s guilt compelled him forward, scrambling between the two front seats and into the passenger side.

Rolling down the window with his right arm, Snape cast a glance out behind the car. The police were perhaps three car lengths back and were attempting to close the gap.

“Take the wheel,” Snape ordered him, grasping his hand at the wrist and forcing it onto the steering-wheel. “Hold it steady—”

Before Harry had time to protest, Snape was leaning out the window he’d rolled down and was firing off spells onto the street; right behind the back wheels of their car and in front of the police’s vehicle.

Whatever it was must have made the road slippery, as when he retook the wheel and Harry had a chance to look back behind them, it was to see the police car pulling off onto the shoulder in haste after violently fishtailing.

For the next several moments, Severus pushed the car to the limit of what it seemed to want to run at—the RPM needle was all the way to the right, showing that he was taxing the engine far past it’s designed load, until he abruptly began to shift down (Harry having to hold onto the seat to keep from being bucked about) and decelerate.

The car pulled off onto a country lane that seemed to be in the middle of no-where, and, after having checked that no one was in front of him or behind him, Snape banked left, into a nearby field and parked.

For several moments neither said a word to one another. Both of them were panting and white-knuckled; Snape’s hands clenching the steering wheel and Harry’s the sides of his seat, before the boy crumpled to his side and heaved several times.

It was difficult to be sure whether it was with imminent tears, or retching—either way, his body was rejecting all that had preceded their arrival in the field with a clear message that told all present that it was not okay with what had just happened.

When Snape next spoke, he was almost wheezing. “You’re alright—we’ll be fine...”

Harry looked up at the man, incredulous. But it didn’t seem as though the man was trying to tell him to stiffen up his upper lip, rather, Severus himself appeared shell-shocked and shaken. He was looking off in the distance at nothing.

Perhaps, if anything, he’d been telling himself.

“Severus... will they go back to your house? Will they wait for you there...?” Harry asked, worrying at a tear in the seat with his fingers once he’d regained his breath enough to speak. “What about Wheat? What about your potions?”

Snape shook his head, dazedly, his hair dancing around his face in long ropes. “They can’t... they can’t get in. I had to let them in... the wards reset as soon as they left the premises.”

The man swallowed and his adam’s apple bobbed in his thin throat. “God knows how much damage that potion did to my kitchen... but the rest of the house has been reinforced against potions mishaps. It shouldn’t have harmed anything else except all of my other works in progress—”

At that, Harry glowered at the man and raised his head in an open show of defiance. “And you were gonna use me for those? My... my kidneys... and... and blood—”

Snape began to violently shake his head, still looking decidedly out-of-it. “No! No—I would never... You don’t get it. You wouldn’t understand what they—what Yax...” He suddenly appeared haunted, and finally, his black eyes caught Harry’s green ones.

“I would never want to tell you what Yax and Wulf do. It is... beyond words. It is nigh unspeakable... If I wanted them to leave you well enough alone, I had to... I had to suggest I was doing something as bad, or worse.”

Harry’s face twisted with anguish. “And they’re... they’re your friends? They’re sick!”

Snape appeared pained. “You have no idea how sick, Harry.”

“They’re evil!”

“Yes.”

“And they’re your friends!”

His hand coming down to slam against the steering column, Snape finally seemed to collect himself, and he loomed over Harry with a glower. “You are too young to understand! Too young for me to explain myself to you—”

“Explain what? How you’re friends with a couple of nonces!?”

Snape’s eyes widened. “Where the hell did you learn a word like that?”

“Answer the bloody question!”

“Potter, you didn’t really ask a question. And yet I did,” Snape said with a sigh. “How familiar are you with what a nonce is?”

“Uncle Vernon told us. Me and Dudley, I mean—they’re kiddie touchers,”

“Quite.”

“And you’re friends—”

Snape motioned for them both to exit the car, which Harry did reluctantly. Over the bonnet, Snape pinned him with a glare. “They are not my friends, Harry.”

The man withdrew his wand, which had Harry flinching for a moment before he realised that Snape was running it over the paint on the car, gradually changing the hue to a deep red. He approached the boot and tapped his wand to the license plates for good measure.

“Then what are they?” Harry demanded, his arms crossed.

Snape pinned the boy with a considering look and climbed back into the driver side, leaving Harry to decide whether he’d like to join him back in the car at all.

It took several moments of stewing in his anger and fear before he decided to trust Snape—after all. He’d saved him something like three times now—and he settled into the back seat once more, feeling safer there than in the passenger side.

As Snape pulled off out of the field and onto the country lane, directing them toward the road they’d abandoned half an hour earlier, he started in on a story.

A story as improbable and ridiculous as it was likely true.

Just like the fact that magic was real, and evidently wizards rode on brooms and brewed potions.

“You might have guessed that growing up only a few streets away, that I knew your family.”

Harry frowned at the back of the man’s head. As far as opening lines went, that one was rather lame. “Well, I already knew that.”

“Your mother was my best friend.” Snape snapped, his voice sharp. “Didn’t know that did you? No? Then button your lip and pay attention.”

He was holding the steering wheel in a death grip, so tightly that his arms appeared to be shaking.

His mother’s best friend? Odd, wasn’t it? For it to have been a boy?

Harry ignored the proscription against speech and voiced his confusion. “Your best friend was a girl? What about my dad? Did you know him? Was he your friend too?”

“I knew him. Unfortunately. No one in their right mind would have called us friends, however,” the man ground out, sounding furious. “Your mother—Lily—and I met when we were eight. Or... perhaps I should say we became friends at eight. We’d been in school together for years. She never took much of a notice of me in primary school, while I—”

“You liked her...” Harry ventured, feeling himself blush.

Snape didn’t speak for several moments, and Harry felt, rather than saw, the man’s eyes resting on him in the rear-view mirror.

They were back on the M40 again, headed south.

Snape’s voice emerged sounding rather raw, and when he spoke it was with a sort of derisive self-mockery. “Picked up on that rather quickly, didn’t you? Amazing how you could know in just seconds what Lily seemingly never realised in all of my years of knowing her.”

“Maybe she did know,” Harry told him, kicking his feet. He felt bad. Bad for the man in front of him. It was too bad that Lily hadn’t liked Snape back—or at least so he could assume—because he thought, as far as people went, that Snape was pretty much alright. Or even, as he’d earlier decided, a bit cool.

“Perhaps.” Severus said, wincing. “If she did, then... when it all fell apart, perhaps it was her sparing my feelings. Not that it worked that way,” he scoffed.

Harry couldn’t really understand his meaning, given the missing details, but he understood one thing: by the time his parents had perished in that frightful accident, his mother and Snape had no longer been friends.

“That red-headed girl... in the pictures in your room. Was that my mum?” Harry asked, his voice soft. Hopeful.

Snape nearly choked. “Beautiful, wasn’t she?”

Finding himself at a loss for words, Harry could only nod. She had been pretty. Prettier than he could ever have imagined...

“I suppose I mentioned a bit about Hogwarts to you? When we were at Spinner’s End.”

“You work there—”

“I do. It is a school for magical children. I knew I was meant to go there ever since I was old enough to know what magic was. My own mother was a witch.”

“That’s lucky—”

Snape shook his head. “You misunderstand. Or rather, you have no conception of what that might mean.

“My mother was a witch, and my father, like your relatives, had no magic.”

“Like me,” Harry said, trying to follow along.

The car swerved a little when Snape violently shook his head. “No, Harry. That’s where you’re wrong. Like me, your mother was also a witch. You have magic. You are magical.”

“What... me?! My mum... mum could do what you do? With a wand?”

“Just as well, and sometimes better.” Snape laughed a laugh that lacked any true humour. It sounded nearly demented in how morose it came across. “And there was the trouble. Neither of her parents were magical. And in our world... in our world that means rather a lot.”

Harry’s head swam as he passed several hours listening to Snape speak. His heart had crawled up from his chest and seemed to have made a home for itself in his throat, and he could scarcely breathe past the obstruction as his mind tried to make sense of the varied details and new information that Snape was feeding him.

Purebloods, and half-bloods, and muggleborns. Blood prejudices, and Death Eaters, and some nutter calling himself the Dark Lord. Gryffindors, and Slytherins. Some group known as ‘The Marauders,’ and Snape himself going about as a self-styled Prince.

Pranks, and hatred, and someone trying to strip Snape naked before the school... a word. An ugly word... that Harry could tell was hateful and cruel as soon as he’d heard it—and Snape had used it against his mother.

“She never, ever forgave me.” Snape’s voice was raw. “A few years later she married your father and had you. I... I joined with the Dark Lord. With the likes of Yax and Wulf.”

Harry glowered at the man. “Wasn’t that why she couldn’t forgive you? ‘Cause you would be friends with people that were nasty—”

“That was exactly why.” Snape replied. They were past Manchester now and still traveling. “And she was right to reject me... she was. I didn’t deserve her friendship.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you said you’re ‘not friends’ with Yax and Wulf, but they still come around,” Harry complained. He still wasn’t sure he was right to have put his trust in Snape. It reminded him of a tale he’d read once—or rather, part of it. His aunt had destroyed the book as soon as she’d noticed it—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Lucy had been lured into a friendly faun’s house, only to have the faun turn her over at the last moment to the witch... even though he’d come to regret his part in the deception.

Was the whole thing about using Harry as a donor really a bluff?

He couldn’t ruminate on his terror further, however, as Snape was back to speaking. “Our days at Hogwarts were only the preface to a rather more tragic story.”

If the first part of the story had Harry’s head full to bursting, the second part made him want to sick up all over the backseat.

His parents hadn’t died in a car crash... He’d been lied to... had formed his deepest fear around a tall tale he’d been told by his uncle and aunt.

Murdered... they’d been murdered... and he had been allowed to think that his father had been drink driving. Encouraged to believe it, in fact.

When Snape began, in faltering tones that suggested he himself was on the brink of some sort of emotional meltdown, to talk about a prophesy, Harry could nearly feel his brain melting.

His parents had been murdered.

Snape had been responsible. Snape had told the murderer about the prophesy... and then had turned spy against him—against the likes of Yax and Wulf—to try and buy his mother’s life.

Silence reigned in the aftermath. Apparently, the man had nothing more to say. Given that he was heaving with heavy breaths, like he had stepped immediately from the confessional into running a marathon, it should have been unsurprising that he had no more words left.

So. Was Harry sitting with a murderer? With someone dangerous?

Undoubtably the latter, if what Snape said about his time with the Death Eaters could be believed. And to think—Harry had thought his tattoo was cool.

That same tattoo that meant Snape was an enemy to everything his mother was...

But in truth, was he?

Harry stewed over this question, feeling far too shell-shocked to say anything for several long minutes.

“Harry...?” Snape asked, over his shoulder. He appeared almost nervous when their eyes met in the mirror. “I—”

“Don’t... don’t talk.” Harry demanded; his hands clenched in the material of the back bench seat. “I’m... they’re dead ‘cause of you,”

Snape’s head bowed and his shoulders came up in a full body cringe, the car shuddering as its driver nearly seized over the wheel.

It sounded as though the man was chanting something, and for a terrifying moment, Harry thought it might have been some strange spell... and he was so angry that had he not been fearful of what the spell did, he wouldn’t have bothered listening.

But he was fearful, and so he cast his head forward, his ears perked up to hear what the words might have been.

“I’m sorry... I’m so, so sorry—” a constant refrain. “Please forgive me, God... please forgive me...”

As Harry ducked his head forward, he saw an amazing thing: Snape’s eyes, so wet with tears that driving should have been impossible, and his cheeks and chin fairly dripping with water.

He was not the sort of man that Harry thought cried. He looked like the sort of street toughs that Harry was used to seeing in some of Dudley’s favourite films, and here he was, bawling—though so quietly and with such a private sort of pain that even Harry felt a bit of pity for the man.

It was Snape’s fault. That much was true... but he didn’t know... he didn’t know that this Dark Lord person would go after Harry’s family.

“So you spy on the Dark Lord now?” Harry asked at last, feeling bad enough for the sniveling man before him that he felt he ought to extend an olive branch of some sort. “And that’s why you have... you have evil gits like Yax buying potions from you—”

Sniffing, Snape’s eyes, wide with amazement, came to rest on Harry. He had great difficulty in correcting the course of the car given his shock. “He—The Dark Lord is dead. He died that night.”

Harry blinked, nonplussed. “How?”

“You. When he got done with your father and your... your mother, the Dark Lord turned his wand on you. He didn’t survive the attempt.”

“That makes no sense!” Harry argued, feeling a sense of panic overtake him. “Why me? He could kill all the adults he liked but couldn’t kill a baby?”

Snape, in spite of his heightened emotionality, seemed to recover himself enough to snort. “Quite. It’s why you’re considered such a curiosity.”

“I am?”

“You could not have failed to notice that our unwelcome visitors recognised you. Everyone in our world knows about you. About your scar.”

“My scar?” Harry asked, bringing one hand up to rub at the rough ridge where the skin of his forehead had been split ever since he could remember.

“Your scar,” Snape agreed. “The physical evidence of your triumph over the Dark Lord. You sustained that injury—that injury, and nothing else, mind you—that night. You were otherwise completely unharmed.”

“If the Dark Lord is dead, why do you still need to be around people like... like that? Death Eaters?” Harry asked, feeling mulishly annoyed on this point. Yax and Wulf had terrified him beyond measure. To think that Snape spent any amount of time, willingly, amongst such company was a worrisome thought.

“The Dark Lord is dead, but my job is yet unfinished,” Snape intoned. “Or... I expect that was the case. Before today.”

The car pulled off onto a confusing exchange and drifted toward an exit that told Harry they were headed back to Surrey.

Back to Privet Drive.

Given all he’d learned about Snape’s past, that should have been a comfort. To leave the man... but somehow it was anything but.

“How do you mean?” Harry asked, wondering if this would be his last chance to grill the man over their shared history. He had to get all the answers he could in the time they had left... doubtless when they reached Privet Drive the Dursleys would be waiting for him, ready to thrust him back under the stairs.

Back to his daily list of chores. Back to his spiders for friends—spiders that were too small to be proper pets—back to lies about magic, and his parents, and... and...

It was too much to think about.

“After today I somehow doubt that my cover is intact. They saw you, and they saw me protecting you. I ran from them.” They were now in Little Whinging. Harry felt the moments ticking by, like he was headed for the inevitable end to something he’d only just come to decide that he liked very much, even in spite of Snape’s dubious history. “I don’t imagine I can do much good as a spy anymore, given the circumstances.”

The car pulled up into the space at the front of the Dursley’s house, and Snape exited the vehicle, Harry following only with supreme reluctance. How the hours had passed so quickly, even in the absence of music, was a testament to the nature of the story Snape had told, and to its aftermath.

Number Four looked the same as it ever had: all correct.

Perhaps the grass was a little higher, for Harry’s negligence, and it looked as though a bit of post had piled up but then—

Did that mean that the Dursleys hadn’t returned? Not even once? Not to check the mail, or to check in that Harry was taking proper care of the lawn, or... even to check that Harry was alive at all?

Given the lack of food he’d been left, Harry doubted he would have been. Not without Snape having stepped in.

And that was even before one considered the lamentable state of his health that had necessitated a trip to hospital.

They had well and truly left him to his death. Should they have been home, Uncle Vernon’s Vauxhall should have been occupying the space that Snape had pulled into, and Aunt Petunia’s blonde head should be visible over the curtains, peeking through a crack in the fabric with a beady blue eye trained on her unwelcome visitors.

Snape did something at the door, something to unlock it, and they made their way into the entryway, seeing dust motes floating lazily to and fro in the late afternoon air.

The refrigerator still had all of the provisions Snape had purchased, and the left-over chicken soup he’d prepared for them a week earlier.

Had Aunt Petunia been home, she’d surely have thrown that out.

Snape was looking murderous at this point, and clearly had reached the same conclusion Harry himself had. Yet before he could voice his ire, there came a noise from the front door. Someone was attempting to enter.

The man turned and strode down the hall, cautioning Harry with one palm raised to him to stop where he was, further up the corridor.

After the debacle with the two Death Eaters at Snape’s house, Harry was happy to obey. He paused by his cupboard and watched with trepidation as Snape cracked open the front door before whomever was on the opposite side could manage to open it themselves.

“Oh!” A voice cried from the other side, “My apologies, I was under the impression there’d be no one home!”

Snape evidently sensed no danger, as he had decided to open the door in full to reveal a smartly dressed man on the other side.

He appeared like a normal sort. Sort of dumpy, though in a freshly pressed, well-fitted suit. He had a wide, flat face, and the top of his head was shiny and nearly entirely bald, while the hair around his ears and the back of his head remained.

He was someone Harry’s aunt and uncle would have found no objection to. That is to say—not magical.

Snape appeared as though he was only barely keeping his anger at bay. “You thought no one was home, and so you’d decided to let yourself in, Mister...?”

“Mr. Harrogate, sir, pleased to meet you,” Mr. Harrogate chirped, his wide face adopting a solicitous grin. He’d extended a hand toward Snape, which the wizard blatantly ignored, and after a few moments of his hand hanging, open-palmed, in the air, Harrogate sheepishly withdrew it. “Did no one tell you I was coming? I... I wasn’t aware there were any more residents, or else I’d have knocked.”

“Perhaps it would be best if you explained your business, Mr. Harrogate.”

“Er... yes. I suppose,” Mr. Harrogate agreed, with apparent caution. “Though, I’ve already been authorised to walk and survey the property. I’m here to take some photographs,” he answered, withdrawing a camera from the bag he toted with him, “and to take some measurements.”

Apparently flummoxed, Snape frowned down at him. “Why would you need to do that? Who authorised you?”

Mr. Harrogate had apparently realised by now that, if Snape had it his way, he’d have kept him out on the stoop all day, and he had begun to edge his way past the man, manoeuvering himself into the hall and setting the aperture of his camera as he liked. He spotted Harry, but seemed utterly disinterested in the boy, instead waving him aside a bit—out of frame—and hoisting the camera in his meaty hands.

Harry ducked aside into the sitting room and watched as the man began to snap photos of the entryway from every conceivable angle, even going so far as to open up his cupboard.

“I say... it looks as though they had a dog living here! That’s a clever use for the space—I ought to consider adding that as a suggestion on the detail sheet.”

“Mr. Harrogate,” Snape growled, his voice becoming that soft, dangerous one he used when he was only a second away from blowing his top, “kindly explain what it is you’re doing here.”

“Oh! Right, apologies,” the man with the camera flushed and faced his ungracious host. “I’m here from the estate agency. Mr. Dursley called a couple of days ago and asked me to come out and to photograph the property for him... Though he didn’t mention that he had a son here to watch for me—”

Blanching with horror, Snape’s voice was incredulous, “A son?”

“You are his son, aren’t you? Or... or some relation?” Mr. Harrogate appeared nervous now. Possibly, he had reasoned that if the strangers were in the house and unknown to the Dursleys who had conscripted his service, that they were here as squatters.

In fact, the dirty pallet in the cupboard seemed to bear that out.

“You said you were an estate agent?”

“I’m with the agency,” Mr. Harrogate answered, somewhat sheepishly. “I’m just here to do the pictures and measurements.”

“So the house is to be sold.” Snape demanded, his eyes narrowing and turning flinty.

Apparently having decided his best course of action was to get through his appointment as quickly as possible, Harrogate moved on to the sitting room, shooing Harry from this place too, so that the boy retreated back into the hallway once more. “That’s the way of it,” the man agreed, “Mr. Dursley was saying that they liked it so well in Brighton this week when they took their family holiday, that they found a place they’d rather like to buy, and they’re arranging a sale on this property as quickly as our agency can find a buyer.”

Harry was speechless. They... they’d left to go on holiday. They’d abandoned him in the house for nearly a week and a half. Closer to two weeks, really.

And their plan was to sell it out from underneath him...?

“Ah. No, I was not made aware of the Dursley’s intention to sell,” Snape quipped, having recovered himself from the unexpected turn of events. “I’ll be but a moment,” he told Harry, rushing upstairs.

Harry felt for a moment as though Snape was abandoning him too. It took everything in him not to begin hyperventilating as Harrogate stalked through the house, snapping pictures of this and that corner and cranny.

But then—

“Harry?”

The boy turned to see Snape resting against the bannister, Dudley’s tape deck under one arm and an uncharacteristic grin on his face. He climbed down the final few stairs and came to stand before him, patting his purloined treasure with satisfaction.

“Let’s go home.”