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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I...”

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

“Go pour yourself a glass of milk.”

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

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

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

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

This did absolutely nothing to endear him to the boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Be that as it may—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Severus.”

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

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

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

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

“My foolishness!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I will make no such concession.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snape was drawing this out on purpose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone had to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s September first?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That is enough!”

“—ill-begotten, profoundly malicious—”

“You cannot accuse me of malice, Severus!”

“—borderline sadistic—”

“ENOUGH!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The worst of me.”

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

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

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

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

Nothing about the old warlock seemed genuine in the least.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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