Title: Sugary Specimens of Horror
Summary: Severus buys candy for Harry. Of course, it's only because he's exercising his power as a muggle-knowledgeable wizard. It doesn't mean he likes Potter or anything.
Warnings: Please refrain from copying my work. It's just sad. This story is a Harry Potter fanfic, Severus Snape and Harry Potter belong to J.K. Rowling.
Rating: G
Word Count: 444
Status: Completed
A row of six golden chick-shaped marshmallows glittered, lined in a row inside a white cardboard box. Harry smiled. Memories rose in his mind of a young boy standing in a corner to the side, lonely, waiting, wanting as his piggish cousin gorged on marshmallows shaped like birds with his equally fat friends.
Long elegant fingers picked the box up. Then gently turned it over and back. "Sugary specimens of horror," a voice murmured, "to be eaten by equally disgusting predators aptly named, innocuously, children.
Harry turned away.
"We'll take them," Severus Snape said. The cavity-inducing objects were given to the clerk, bought, packaged, and paid for.
The calloused Seeker-hands held the little carton as delicately as it would a priceless antique. Snape sniffed. Or the hands would, if priceless antiques were valued with the appropriate respect and reverence they demanded.
"Why?" Green eyes welled up with emotion, something that Snape was hard pressed to admit to having.
He rolled his eyes. The sensitivity of Gryffindors amazed him. "I did nothing worth mentioning."
"You bought me candy."
"As I said, I did nothing worth mentioning. I only exercised my power as a muggle-knowledgeable wizard by purchasing an insignificant item of questionable intentions." Potter asked the most inane questions. But then, he was a strange person. A better question would be what he thought of the muggle American trifle. He would have answered in his most scornful tone that they bored him. They were even lower than the Weasley twins' products and displayed only the barest ingenuity with a little covering of dyed sugar.
"Thank you, Severus."
He allowed himself a split-second of surprise before choosing to ignore this man that he certainly did not know or in anyway associate himself with. Snape was merely taking a stroll in the snow.
Footsteps plodded behind him in a pace reminiscent of a three-legged cat with a tentacle.
"Snape!" The odd, green-eyed, black-haired creature before him resembled a human being. Of course, Snape knew it must be something quite different. He stopped. Perhaps if he let it speak, it might leave him alone.
"I'm sorry I used your first name without asking but I do appreciate your kindness.
"Mr. Potter," Harry, "you have been a professor at Hogwarts for five years, gone to school at this institution for seven. I do not do kind." He walked away in a marginally less speedy stride than before.
However, he accepted the shoved marshmallow, glared at its beady eye and bit off its head. The sugar would warm his limbs against the cold.
That was the only reason he told himself, paying no attention to the organism scampering beside him.