Snape had apparently elected to drive for his second trip to his old primary school that day. Harry followed the man out to the car with a bowed head, and his teeth on edge. Snape hadn't said so much as a word, but his eyes were alight with... something.

Harry didn't like the looks of them one bit.

It took until they were crossing back over the River Leven before Snape spoke.

"Three hours."

"Er... what?" Harry asked, feeling shaken by the sudden break in the silence. Snape must have been angry, as he'd not even hit play on his tape deck. The man hated driving—or doing much of anything, for that matter—without some sort of noise breaking the air.

"You made it three bloody hours before I had a call from the headmistress' office about you." The tight words were accompanied by a strange, squeaking sound, and Harry realised with a start that it was coming from the man's molars grinding together. There was a pronounced tick in Snape's jaw. His hands, one on the wheel and the other gripping the shifter, were two, tight claws of agitation.

"I'm really sorry, Severus..."

"Sorry." He deadpanned. "You're sorry I had to drag my arse out of the house before I'd even managed to prepare a new base for experimentation? You're sorry to have fallen into a bout of fisticuffs with a girl—"

"I was trying to stop the fight—!"

"No one asked you to do that!" The older wizard snarled, the wheel jerking under his hands and the car swerving after his spasmodic ejaculation of fury.

"Next time, Potter, you're to leave well enough alone! You put your damned head down and act like you didn't see a thing! Not a blessed thing, do you understand me?"

Sullen, Harry's mouth twisted with bitterness. "She was gonna kick him in the..." What was the word that Nicky had used? It was an interesting one. New to Harry in any case. "In the cleppets?"

The car swerved again as Snape turned partially to look over his shoulder at the boy, his expression one of dumbfounded outrage. "Not even one day! Not even one BLEEDING day and you're already picking up bad habits!"

"Bad habits? Severus—"

"You're not from here! You're an offcomer! Notwithstanding your own mother's origins, you were raised in Surrey! Born in Gloucestershire! What makes you think you can spend a mere month here and start speaking like a local?"

Harry ducked his head and felt his legs begin to start swinging, as they often did when he was being taken to task over something or whenever he felt unsure of himself. "I dunno..."

"I'm from here, Potter! Hesta ivver 'eard me yatterin'n assa marra?"

Harry's mouth dropped open as he stared, uncomprehending, through the rear-view into Snape's irate gaze. "I... what?"

"Exactly. Don't speak of that which you do not know. Do not speak in tongues in which you are unversed! A lesson as valuable in the muggle world as it is when applied to unfamiliar magicks and indecipherable spells." Snape drew in a deep breath. "Use caution. At all times."

"So..." Harry ventured, his voice emerging in a slow crawl, "'cleppets' doesn't mean bollocks...?"

With a snarl that was actually audible, Snape refused to answer. That was just as well, for they had arrived home. It was probably only lunch time. Had Harry remained at school, he'd likely be queued up with a tray, waiting on a dinner nanny. As it was, he likely could look forward to scrambled eggs on toast.

He found that that suited him just fine. Even if Snape tossed his plate in front of him with an oath, so hard that it threatened to skirt right over the smooth wood of the low table and land on the floor. It didn't, and the eggs were familiar and comforting.

Eating next to the surly man who'd been forced to abandon his mad scientist routine was, however, anything but. For all that Harry was becoming accustomed to Severus' moods and peculiarities, he still wasn't entirely sure how to handle the taciturn wizard when he was in a snit, and it was worse when Harry knew he likely deserved Snape's ire.

As soon as he finished his lunch, he scrambled up the stairs with the excuse that he had to feed Wheat, and he sequestered himself in Severus' old room with the eight-legged creature crawling from one hand to the other in an endless mobius loop which would have befuddled even a mind like M.C. Escher's.

The spider's soft pedipalps tickled at Harry's wrist as Wheat probed along.

"Bet you're glad that I was in a fight," Harry commented, allowing the tarantula to meander up his arm and onto the sleeve of his jacket, which he'd yet to take off. "'Cause now I can spend the afternoon with you."

Wheat, as might have been expected, said nothing, but Harry fancied that the spider stopped for a moment to peer at him with eight, unblinking eyes, before he continued his circuitous route and crawled back toward the familiar territory that was Harry's hands.

"I don't know why I was sent home, anyway... It was Hill and Henderson that were fighting." His soft words were tinged with a bitterness that came from being forever punished for that which had nothing to do with him. For always being held to account for someone else's failings. "Even Severus seems to think it was my fault... but I don't think he..."

Harry trailed off and scrubbed with the hand that wasn't holding an over-sized arachnid at one eye, which felt grainier than it had before he'd begun his monologue. "He'd understand if it were him. He wouldn't... he wouldn't of let Hill get away with it. It was dirty: Henderson didn't even... they just wanted their ball back, see?"

Even with his eight eyes, Wheat clearly didn't, as he inched his way forward and bristled slightly, a warning sign that Harry had learned to heed which spoke of the need to return the beast back to his terrarium and to supply a number of crickets as an offering for his pet's forbearance.

He tipped the spider back onto a false rock that was surrounded by rushes and fitted the topper back onto the cage, although he didn't feel in the least inclined to cease speaking. The just compromise was for him to flatten himself onto the floor, his chin resting on the backs of his hands as he laid belly-down against the old wood, his nose pressed to the plastic.

"Why did Henderson have to go at her like that, Wheat?" It had been bothering him. The violence that Nicky had leveled at Snowdrop's face and head. She had started it, certainly, but for the boy to do as he had done, he'd truly had to have wanted to harm Snowdrop Hill, and from the jeering and crowing of the crowd which had assembled around them, it seemed as though they were all for the blood sport to commence.

There were few lessons that Harry had learned at Vernon Dursley's knee that he thought were of any consequence, but one of them he knew must have been the truly virtuous position.

"You don't hit a girl," he murmured to himself, frowning, "don't kick her, either..."

"Additionally, might I suggest that you abstain from maligning her family, or her ancestors," added a faintly amused voice from beyond the door.

"I didn't," Harry argued, from where he lay. He could see the faint reflection in the plastic of a gangly black mass over his shoulder.

"Who said I was speaking of you?" Was the terse reply. "My advice was general and was earned for a heavy price. Take it or leave it, as you see fit."

Harry had to rein in his impulse to roll his eyes.

Touchy. The man could be so incredibly touchy, sometimes.

Harry glanced up to see that Snape was leaning against the doorframe, his lanky arms crossed over his chest as he surveyed his charge. He no longer appeared angry, and he was dressed in the stained, brown-leather apron that he normally donned while brewing. It was a thick garment, made for heavy wear and heavier work, with a yoke held up with fraying rope over his shoulders and a deep pocket welted onto the upper portion above the belt that lashed it to the man's scrawny waist.

A faintly sulpherous smell wafted from him, which usually only could mean one thing...

"Did it explode?" Harry asked, shifting so he was engaging in a slight push-up until he was resting on his elbows.

The man shook his head, sending his hair flying like vines and ropes about his thin face. "No, but it was a near thing."

"Bugger..."

The reply was instantaneous, though half-hearted. "Watch your language."

The boy rolled to his side and pushed until he was seated, cross-legged on the floorboards. "I only meant that I wish it had worked..."

"That makes two of us," Snape sneered, though his expression was a touch more defeated than irritated. He finally entered the room and sat on Harry's bed, reclining until his shoulders met the poster-covered wall. When he allowed his head to fall back it was against the body of Sammy Hagar's Les Paul, where he bent over the instrument for a poster boasting a tour which had run in the autumn of '79.

Harry didn't know quite what to say to Snape, who had closed his eyes as he seemed to sink against the wall, his shoulders falling into a miserable slump. He only knew that he had to say something. That was the right thing to do, wasn't it?

His hand reached out to pat awkwardly at Snape's shin. "You'll get it, Severus. You invented other stuff—"

"Other stuff wasn't the only thing standing between the two of us and the poor house, Harry. Other stuff happened as a matter of course, not necessity. Not because there was no other option..." He shifted his leg back away from Harry's pitying pats, his spindly fingers coming up to scrub at his haggard face. He looked far older than his twenty-eight years, yet, somehow, far too young to be shouldering the responsibilities he had undertaken.

"I didn't think there were poor houses anymore..." Harry frowned, worrying at a bit of thread on his trousers. His aunt and uncle had frequently threatened him with either the poor house or the orphanage, to the point where Harry had asked a teacher about it once while still in Surrey, only to find that both institutions were largely defunct.

"Oh for—" Snape uttered a mild oath. "That's an expression! Merely an expression. You need have no worry that you'll end up under the tender mercies of some brutish Mr. Bumble—"

"Who?"

"For Christsake!" Snape appeared agog for a moment. "Dickens, Potter! Dickens! Don't tell me you're unfamiliar with Oliver Twist!"

Harry's nonplussed expression must have set the man straight on that score, for he swore under his breath. "Well, that's settled. If there's any money come Christmas, I know what you'll be getting."

"Well, what is it, Severus?" Harry scowled, not liking being in the dark once more, particularly about something which he had the impression Snape assumed to be common knowledge.

"It's a novel about an orphan. Doubtless, you'll find a great deal of material over which to commiserate with the titular character."

"Oh..." Harry didn't like the sound of that. Was Snape mocking him? Recommending a book about some snotty orphan who lived under this Mr. Bumble person? The boy wrinkled his nose and squashed his eyes together to fend off the sense that he might just start crying.

He heard, rather than saw Snape sigh. "Don't take offense. I didn't mean anything by that," the man ventured, strangely cautious given his normal cavalier attitude towards mockery of all sorts, "it's a marvelous book. I think you'd enjoy it. It's considered one of the best in the English language."

"Oh," Harry said again, though this time it wasn't with quite so much melodrama. He sniffed once and managed to look at the man sitting on his bed without his eyes glazing over. "You don't have it downstairs?"

"I don't have much space for fiction. All of my books have earned their space on the wall by being useful to me," Snape told him, not without a disdainful little sniff.

Harry wanted to argue that if this book was supposedly so very marvelous that surely it ought to have 'earned space' on Snape's overladen shelves, but he didn't bother. He still felt a bit congested and overwrought, and he wasn't entirely of a mood to be sniping back and forth with the older wizard at that moment.

Snape seemed to like to segue into such pissing matches whenever he was avoiding speaking on something that was bothering him, so Harry wracked his brains for a few seconds to try and remember what they'd been speaking about before the aside had occurred.

"I think you'll come up with something, Severus. You're brilliant." Harry said at last, peering up from beneath his fringe at the man's slumped form.

It gave an almighty twitch upon receiving the praise, and Snape looked like he might have been speechless for a moment, though that moment was just as quickly over with.

"You wouldn't know. You haven't the faintest idea of what constitutes brilliance in potioneering and alchemy," he scathed, although even as he said this his voice was almost hoarse. A shadow, perhaps, of some unnamable emotion. "You don't know the difference between true giants of the art and the petty peddlers of no consequence—"

Not liking that Snape had thrown his sincerely meant compliment back in his face, Harry challenged him, unwise of him though it doubtlessly was. "Like?"

"Like what, Potter? Use complete sentences, if you would."

"Who's a 'giant' and who's a... a..."

"A petty peddler?"

"Yeah," Harry agreed, "that."

"An example of the former would be the great genius Nicholas Flamel; the only known alchemist to successfully create a Philosopher's Stone. An example of the latter is the inventor of Sleekeazy's Hair Potion, a cosmetic product marketed to the vain and pathetic."

"Oh..." Harry thought about this. It did sound as though one invention was better than the other, admittedly. "Who invented the hair potion?"

For some strange reason, this had Snape clamming up. He ducked his head behind the curtain formed by his hair and Harry only knew that the man was regretting his words by the blush that crept up the shells of his over-large ears.

Eventually he gave a wholly unsatisfying answer. "It doesn't matter."

"Well," Harry drawled, turning his attention back to the tarantula who was now stalking a cricket around the perimeter of his plastic prison, "you're the cleverest bloke I know, Severus."

"That's..." Snape paused and pushed his hair back from his face with both hands. He was staring down at the scuffed tips of his boots against the floorboards. "That's kind of you to say, Harry."

"And you're not tryn'ta invent something like that stone-thing, are you?"

The man sighed, a sound deep with melancholy and resignation. "No. No, I'd be blessed beyond measure to have an idea for a product as inane and superfluous as Sleekeazy's right about now."

"I'll keep thinking," Harry promised, pushing his finger against the plastic wall so that it left a long gouge-like smudge. If possible, the tarantula looked as though it might have been indignant about the interruption of his hunt. "Between the two of us we'll figure something."

Snape's reply was a non-committal "Perhaps."

Then, apparently having remembered why he'd initially come to speak to Harry in his room, Snape doubled over his knees and rested his elbows upon them, his long, pallid hands clasped together, the knuckles latticed like a trellis.

"I suppose we ought to discuss how it is that you found yourself in a bray with a girl, then."

"A bray?"

"Oh!" Snape affected a disingenuous note of surprise. "I was under the impression that you were all up on speaking like a proper Cumbrian. Don't tell me you don't know what a bray is—"

Suddenly, feeling the dunce, Harry realised from the question itself that it must have meant a fight. "I know what a bray is!"

"Oh good," Snape crossed his arms and rolled his black eyes, a clear demonstration of snide mockery for the boy before him. "I'd be doubly worried about the state of your comprehension skills if you also failed to take proper cues from the freely available context I offered—"

Harry only barely restrained himself from telling the man to shut up, and he actually had to muffle the words behind his two hands, as though he could stuff the unwise invective back into his mouth from whence it came. He sort of succeeded, for Snape gave him a cross look, and a raised eye-brow in warning, but he didn't actually take Harry to task over the muffled 'Shoooit ooopfh' that left little question of what Harry had actually said.

"Well, Potter?"

"I told you..." Harry felt himself flushing. "She was gonna kick someone in the... in the bollocks. I was trying to stop them... and then he didn't stop hitting her back, and she was on the ground, so I tried to stop it, but he kept going at my face 'til the teachers came..."

"How did it start?"

"I didn't start it at all!" Harry protested, feeling desperate for Severus to understand. "I didn't! Henderson—I think—he came and wanted his ball back, and the girl—Hill—she was sitting with me under the trees in the yard, and she threw the ball at his head and hit him with it really hard," he drew a deep breath before continuing in a rush, "then Henderson said she was an 'ugly bint' and she went at him like this." Harry hunkered down and spread his arms wide to demonstrate. "She looked like she was gearing up for a scrum!"

"And your part in all of this?" Snape asked, his head resting on one hand, the index finger of it pressing into his cheek. He looked either bored or amused, and Harry felt mildly upset that he couldn't tell which it was.

"I didn't have anything to do with it, Sev'rus! Honest! I was sitting under the trees first!" the boy cried, feeling upset all over again at Snowdrop Hill's imposition into his life and space. "I just found a spot where no one else was gonna sit, and then Hill comes up and says I took her spot, and that I should keep my mouth shut if I was gonna sit there, 'cause she didn't want to talk to me." Harry scowled, the memory of the slight rising up from where he'd stuffed it in the wake of the altercation.

For several moments, Snape merely assessed him from beneath the weight of his heavy brow, the finger bracing his cheek tapping some unknown rhythm. Finally, taking a great breath in through his mess of teeth, he straightened and deigned to address the boy before him, apparently ready to pronounce his judgement.

"Incidentally," he began, the staccato of his drawl pulling the word out far longer than it naturally ought to have lasted, "I believe you."

The relief that Harry felt was such that he might have collapsed had he not already been on the floor. "You do?"

"I'm not in the habit of repeating myself for no greater purpose than to satisfy some scrappy whelp's insecurities."

Harry's frown must have moved the man somewhat, however, for he offered up a grumbled, "I do," in spite of himself.

"That being said, what I told you earlier in the car is meant to be instructive moving forward."

"What's that mean?" Harry asked, pushing up on his palms so he was sitting up a bit like a seal might, with his back curved in the kind of convex configuration that would make any adult wince.

"It means that you keep your nose clean and out of other people's business. Don't go wading into fights that have nothing to do with you, and even if you do get caught up in a scuffle, I expect you to find your way out of it without being called into the head's office."

"But, Severus—"

"I don't care whose bollocks are in danger of being kicked!" Snape continued, leaning over Harry to pin him with the full weight of his black-eyed stare, "I don't care if Miss Hill turns yours into her personal speed bag: you disengage. And if you do engage?"

Harry hung on his words, his mouth drooping slightly as he stared up at the man with near incomprehension.

"If you do," Snape repeated, "You. Do. Not. Get. Caught. Do you hear me, Potter?" Snape's eyebrows were lifted as he imparted these instructions to the boy on the floor before him. Often, the man would smirk, or hold an utterly impassive expression if he were being in the least bit facetious. That he was devoid of such tells during this current exchange was enough to put Harry on edge and call him to attention.

Speaking slowly, yet deliberately, Harry voiced his confusion, "I don't get it..."

"Merlin preserve me."

"Am I suppose'ta not do fights, or am I suppose'ta do them but... but be sneaky about it?" the boy asked, his voice uncertain.

"You are to refrain from fighting under any circumstances, Potter," Snape leaned back with his palms against his knees and shifted his eyes cagily about the room. Harry felt this must have been some sort of strange tell, but to what end he couldn't be sure. "And should I hear about any more impromptu prizefights you've managed to embroil yourself in—well. You shan't be enjoying any knickerbocker glories anytime soon."

It was an utterly bizarre pronouncement, not least of all because Snape had, as far as Harry knew, never gotten him a knickerbocker glory—and indeed, though Harry was no afficionado of ice cream, he'd seen enough of the treats consumed by Dudley over the years to recognise the towering confections—but also because it seemed, in some strange way, as though Snape was actually encouraging him to get into play-yard brawls so long as he didn't get fingered by the attendant teachers on duty.

If it were possible to say so, Harry nearly thought that the man looked a touch... proud?

"Er... right." Harry agreed after a fashion.

Snape rolled his eyes and curled a fatuous "Splendid," around his tongue, with such redolent sarcasm that Harry could have winced. "I expect tomorrow will be an utterly dull day for you, then, and I expect you to return home at the normal time. I will not be coming to collect you once more."

"Does that mean I'll be walking myself to school, Severus?" Harry asked.

"And walking back. You remember the way, I trust."

"I remember," Harry agreed, "just... is it safe?"

Snape twisted his mouth a bit with either annoyance or concern, "I told you not to worry yourself about the likes of Yaxley and Mulciber anymore. At your age, I was all over the town on my lonesome so long as I returned home before dark. If you had a mind to take yourself off to that playground we visited a few weeks ago I'd have no objections, so long as you showed your face back here for supper."

"How can you say that?" Harry demanded, pulling himself up to kneeling. He scratched at the floorboards a bit with his short nails, feeling frantic. "How can you just act like it's all alright? You didn't do nothing to make them stay away! I didn't see you waving your wand about—"

"Didn't do anything, Potter. Not nothing. And incidentally, just because you weren't present when precautions were being taken, doesn't mean that none were. I told you that I took the appropriate measures, and I did. They will not dare to pursue you once more. I expect you to be on your lookout, in any case—muggles can be as dangerous as wizards, if you weren't aware—"

"I'm aware," Harry muttered blackly. His news obsession extended past The Daily Prophet. Whenever Snape brought the muggle papers home, Harry usually had a mind to skim through at least the front pages, and people were frequently reported missing. Around the time that Snape had picked him up from the Dursleys—or perhaps a week after—there had been a report about a young Austrian boy named Erich Aigner. He'd disappeared along with his parents while backpacking across England and Wales. Not even a week ago there had been a young girl from Bath who had disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and also an older boy from one of the small towns in the Midlands. The Lake District itself seemed notorious for losing ramblers of all ages, and Harry had seen a piece in the local Backbarrow paper only a day or so previous that had listed some of the losses they'd sustained in the past several years. There were no less than ten men and women who had vanished without a trace.

Some of them had been concerningly close to Backbarrow itself when they'd disappeared.

"But you oughtn't to have any cause to fear, Harry." Even though he'd begun the tirade sounding harangued and irritated, Snape's words ended on a gentle note, and the young wizard's eyes had seemingly softened from the hard, flinty graphite that could inspire such terror, to an indulgent, warm charcoal, that always reminded Harry of why he persisted in trusting the strange man's judgement time and again.

Because, for some incomprehensible reason, Snape seemed to care. A lot.

"It'd help if I knew what you'd done," Harry admitted. "What do I do if a... a regular person comes up and starts getting fresh with me?"

Snape wrinkled his nose, looking vaguely repulsed. "You scream and run."

"What—really?"

"Yes, really!" Snape scoffed. "Have they taught you nothing of the sort in school? I thought that given the spate of anxiety in the muggle news of late about such things that they'd be covering such angles."

"No—I mean—yeah... they have," Harry fumbled, looking at the man askance, "but I expected that there was something else you'd have me do?"

"Such as?"

"I dunno!" Harry cried, feeling frustrated with the way his concerns seemingly were being ignored. "Something magic?"

Reaching forward, Snape grasped at Harry's lapel and flipped it over, holding it out before Harry's wide green eyes. In the afternoon light the small pin embedded in the wool shone with a small flash.

"That pin lets me know where you are at all times," he ground out, his eyes back to their hard, steely glinting. "It also acts as a beacon for me to direct my apparition directly to your location. I can see about getting you a portkey, but I'll have to go about it through the proper channels, unfortunately, which may take months. Would that suffice?" He asked, his voice haughty and snide.

"I..." Harry was about to admit that it did, if only to stop the man's snit from progressing any further, but he knew better than to accept a deal without understanding the terms. "What's a portkey?"

The question prompted another oath from the wizard before him and yet another expressive and melodramatic roll of Snape's eyes as he laboured to explain the mechanics of various forms of magical travel to the boy before him. By the time he'd covered the most common methods for transportation, it was nearing time for supper, and Harry was weary of asking any more questions.

Well... except, perhaps, for one.

"If you could do that," he began, referring to the last explanation Snape had given, regarding apparition, "why did we escape from Yax and Wulf in the car?"

Snape's mouth twisted in distaste. "I had wondered when you'd ask that..."

"Well, if we could just poof away—"

"It's more of a loud crack than a poof, in actuality—" Snape informed him, his lips forming a little moue to underscore his pedantic nitpicking.

"I don't see why we would take the car, 'cause we also had to run from the police," Harry crossed his arms and gave Snape the hardest stare he could muster, noting the shifty-eyed evasiveness that Severus seemed to be engaging in.

After several moments where it seemed as though there might be a stand-off, Snape finally deflated and eyed Harry from under a furrowed brow. He looked mutinous, and curiously childish.

"I don't..." Snape stopped and raised one clawed hand to his temple, using the curled fingers to viciously scratch at his scalp, almost as a flea ridden fox might've. He appeared frustrated beyond measure. "I've never been good at side-along apparition." He scowled, as though daring Harry to poke fun at his insecurity. "I didn't want to risk splinching one or both of us when escaping the scene."

Harry didn't know quite what to say. It hadn't occurred to him that there was anything at all that Severus couldn't do. He still wasn't entirely sure that he believed that such a thing could be possible.

"I bet you wouldn't of," Harry argued, wishing he could somehow reassure his guardian. Something about the man before him feeling in any way incapable didn't square with him. Sure, he was a prickly git most of the time, and he liked to poke fun and pull Harry's leg a bit more often than the boy liked, but Snape was... he was like some enormous statue, looming over Harry's life now. Not unlike a cathedral's gargoyle. He was imposing, and often terrifying, but somehow Harry felt safer for his presence and his careful vigil.

Harry was also reasonably certain—from observing Snape's work in their makeshift potions lab and his selection of books—that the young wizard was a genius, which would explain the his constant frustration with Harry's frequent bouts of incomprehension.

There was no way that Severus would have 'splinched' them, whatever it was that that meant. And Harry repeated this to him a second time, with more feeling than he'd first done.

Snape looked as though he didn't quite know what to say in response at first. He seemed to have to swallow thickly before he managed to speak. "Touching though your faith in me is, Harry, I'm afraid you don't understand well enough about the nature of such things to appreciate the amount of risk involved in apparating without the benefit of one's full attention and focus paid to one's destination. This is doubly so when the wizard in question is intending to carry a passenger.

"Splinching is dreadful business. I don't intend to ever let you find out how bad firsthand." He told Harry with a firm shake of his head, "Suffice to say, losing your arm isn't nearly as clean as it looks in Empire Strikes Back,"

"Wait!" Harry stopped him, feeling his eyes widen in terror, "You can lose an arm?!"

"You can lose anything that the wizard conducting the apparition fails to account for in his pre-apparition checklist." Snape informed him, his voice crisp. "Including one's head. I don't think I need to tell you that, while some subtractions can be rectified, decapitation is irreparable."

Harry's swallow was audible. "Oh..."

"Quite." Snape rose to his feet and readjusted the heavy leather apron about his frame, tightening the wide belt where it'd come loose around his waist. "Though I must admit, it is... gratifying to know that you have such confidence in my abilities. Given your fervent belief that I'll be certain to find us a way out of this mess, perhaps you can lend me a hand in the kitchen from now until supper."

"What? Really? You'll let me help again?" Harry asked, incapable of hiding the thrill of excitement from his voice.

"Let you?" Snape scoffed, leading the way to the door as Harry leapt up onto his feet with a nimble little movement and made to follow him. "After the setback I suffered this morning, I'm making it a precondition of your penance. I have a bucket of rat spleens that need to be de-pulped and I have no intention of doing it myself."

Harry's grin as it stretched from ear to ear could have rivaled a shark's.