Oh, foolish, foolish Harry :-) One thing you can say for him: he's tenacious. Once he gets an idea in his head, no matter how foolish, he will follow up on it. The sad thing about this Sirius thing is: Sirius would probably make a very bad parental figure. Let's face it, even before Azkaban he was a flighty, unreliable character with a cruel streak a mile wide. Not that he would intentionally harm Harry, but he would forget things like supper or bedtimes when tinkering with his magical motorbike or snogging his latest girlfriend. Harry suffers from something all children who lost their parents before age ten, eleven suffer from: he has never interacted with them as a hormonal, rebellious teenager. Very young children see their parents as supergood and allknowing. This changes of course when they become teenagers and again when they mature. It's all a matter of natural progress. But Harry is stuck in the 'my parents were supergood and allknowing' phase, because all he has to go on is a photo from when he's a toddler and his hopeful childhood fantasies. The same with Sirius. He hardly ever interacted with Sirius, let alone on a daily, ordinary basis. He transferred the superdad fantasy onto Sirius, but this experience as Snape's ward is closer to a real and true parent-teenager relation that anything he could have with Sirius. At least Snape is trustworthy. Sirius is too flighty by half. So even if he did manage to get his hands on that necklace (which I doubt), he would be severely disappointed. Can't wait to see him planning and plotting, though :-) "I don't plot anything", indeed!

Heh, I somehow hope that for some reason or another (can't think *how*, but I hope nonetheless) Snape will turn into a giant canary or something. Snape will think Harry has fed him a Canary Cream and Harry can't say "I never went to Fred and Georges' shop" because he will then have to 'fess up going to Borgin and Burkes. Hah! Am I really so evil I want to see Harry in trouble with Snape? YES! I am!!

I see that you havn't updated YET!:(( :((

Hi. I'm late again, but Real Life has been persisting lately that I should spend more time with it :-)

Nice to see Harry slowly growing a conscience. It helps of course that he is in a predictable, stable home: he can start using his mind instead of letting anger fill the void. It's also good for him to know that even if he does the worst that he can do to Snape (destroying Snape's potion room is pretty high on that list) he will survive it. He will be punished, but he will be predictably punished and the punishment willl be no more than he can bear.

Nice to see Harry spending some serious thought about his future; a Future After Voldemort. Thinking you won't live beyond puberty must be taking a toll. There must be a heap of repressed anger towards the Wizarding World in general and Dumbledore in particular in Harry. He just can't acknowledge it because the Wiz.world 'saved' him from the Dursleys (and condemned him to them in the first place, but Harry is no great thinker, alas) and Dumbledore plays his role of benevolent grandfather to well. No wonder Harry is so consumed with hate and rage in the books. BookHarry scares me, to be frank. How can such a conceited, hatefilled boy ever be named 'pure' and 'loving' by Dumbledore beats me. But back to your fic. Glad to see Harry 'calming' down somewhat as in being almost civil and even being worried that Snape would get hurt (although the last probably because it would leave him, Harry, all alone at the mansion.

That was clever, by the way. I was rather upset with Snape for leaving Harry in a bodybind and then leaving, although I knew that if he hadn't done that Harry would have immediately tried to follow Snape (in true Harry-fashion) believing that only he, Harry Potter, could save Snape from a fate worse than death. I loved hearing Snape say, so delightfully off hand, that if something had happened, the house-elves were under strict orders to take Harry to Hogwarts. You *can* trust Snape to think of such things; a lesson even I could learn.

One of the reasons I love bookSnape is that he is always right, did you notice that? We readers get information about the characters as Harry does; the books are written from Harry's point of view. Harry gets told for instance that his father was such a hero and Harry laps this up. Snape is the only one who will tell Harry that James was an arrogant bully. We readers are supposed to think Snape an evil git for telling such blatant and nasty lies. Lupin tells Harry that Snape was 'envious of James' prowess on the Quidditch field' and Sirius tells Harry that Snape knew 'more Dark curses as a first year than many seventh years'. And we are supposed to believe all that, because Lupin is kind and charming and Sirius turns out to be unjustly incarcerated for murder he didn't commit. But then we see Snape's memory in the pensieve (and those memories don't lie, unlike cowardly werewolves and brutal, bullying godfathers) and we see that Snape was *right* about Harry's father. That Snape didn't hate James because he was 'jealous of James prowess at Quidditch' but because James was an arrogant bullying jock. That no matter how much dark curses Snape was supposed to know as an eleven year old, he clearly didn't use them against the Marauders during that 'prank' (for 'prank' insert 'mean-spirited, cruel, traumatising behaviour and you're closer to the truth) So from this example alone we see how cleverly JKR shows the difference between what is and what is percieved. If you will find, if you then reread the books with an open mind, that Snape always tells the truth, but like Cassandra's it is never the thruth people want to hear. Like Harry, most fans tend to want to believe the charming lie in favour of the unkind but necessary truth.

For this quality of Snape alone, I fervently hope that if you do construct a plotline where Harry is unjustly punished and Snape apologises (as some reviewers have requested) that you will make it clear that the only reason that Snape punishes Harry unjustly is because Harry refuses to tell the truth or lies about what really happens (not OOC for Harry by a long shot) It would be very OOC for Snape this far in the story to suddenly go off on a unreasonable punishment spree. What I like about your Snape is that he *shown* to be logical, reasonable (although strict) and controlled (hey, even when he 'looses it' after the pensieve incident he doesn't hex Harry but throws a jar of - cheap? no dearth of cockroaches - ingredients at the wall) In the books Snape is always portrayed throud the prejudiced eyes of Harry.

Therefore I hope that Snape's remark about 'having read the manual' is a) a snapish joke or b) totally accurate but it will turn out that Snape indeed *can* learn to ride from a manual (hey, if Arthur Weasley can learn how to drive a Ford Anglia - albeit a charmed one - Snape certainly can) Harry must learn to trust and I would hate to see Snape getting ridiculed by Harry for being clueless. But I have trust in you :-)

My, this is my longest review ever. Why do I always write scrolls of reviews for this story? Probably because you are the *only* ficcer that writes a 'Snape raises/adopts Harry' story that *doesn't* get all 'Snape realises he is all wrong about Harry and asks forgiveness for 'mistreating' the poor, beleagerd Boy Who Lives so dreadfully' story but rather a 'Harry realises that he is all wrong about Snape and starts to behave as a normal human boy instead of a uptight, angsting, little bore' story. (mwahhaahh!) Can't wait for the next chapter. But don't rush - good things are worth the wait!