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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So I can see it if I want to?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, I thought—”

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

“No, not exactly—”

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

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

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

“Erm... both, I guess.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mmm.”

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

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

“I’m not—!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You really don’t have to—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really? You can think of nothing?”

“I’m trying!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s okay, Severus—”

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

“You are?”

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

“You were...?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well... yeah?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’d make Snape happy.