Eleven: Zakopane (II).

The garden swing gave a screech. The cushion on it was worn and stained beyond last repair, but somehow made more comfortable for it. Severus had spent hours here, lounged back with a view of the mountains and the overgrown garden, littered with wooden boards lacking verifiable purpose, sheets of old fabric and tractor tires, all the way to the fencing torn in half by a fallen tree.

The boy never joined him: he preferred to sit on the ground. Today, he was playing with the dog, an old mutt without an eye that looked like it belonged in a fighting ring and not anywhere near a child. But often, Potter simply lay on his back in the grass, awake but motionless, with his eyes shut loosely—he was, at those times, so scary to Severus that he could barely look at him.

Already, fear featured too heavily in his daily experience, and none of it was actionable: nowhere to put it, nothing to do. Ignorant of whether a wizarding community existed in the city, Severus had kept the boy to the house and its immediate surroundings, and gone hunting for magic on his own, desperate for news. But magical enclaves were designed to be secrets, and while he could press his hands to walls and trees, he was unlikely to chance upon a stronghold of natural magic with no clues where to even begin. He'd thought he felt some smears of untapped power in the very ground on the edges of the city, in the valleys and the crags, and even in the steep ascent to where their house rose on its hill; but it felt thin and large, like a stretch of silk, and half the time he wasn't even sure if he'd only imagined it.

There was nothing to be done. He couldn't find a magical community. Even if he had, contacting Albus through the Floo or owl post was too great a risk; and how likely was it that anyone in this corner of the world would lend him an issue of The Daily Prophet?

'Did my mum have a dog?'

The boy had left the mangy thing alone and wandered over.

'No. She owned a tortoise,' Severus said, and felt at once the weight of it in the palm of his hand. He'd not thought of the tortoise in a long time. 'He got lost on the Hogwarts grounds when we were in our final year.'

'What was his name?'

'She changed it every few months. He was called Harold the longest, I think.'

Potter grinned. 'I'm named after a tortoise?'

'Most certainly.'

'Tortoises live a long time,' he planted one knee on the swing. When it screeched under the added weight, he stood down as if burnt. 'Maybe he's still living on the grounds.'

'I find that unlikely.'

'Are you angry?'

Severus had been hearing that question daily for nearly a week now, whenever he was short with the boy or distracted or sleepy, or sometimes for no reason at all. Every time, annoyance warred with that hot pain in his chest, the one that hardly ever went away since the child had told him his aunt liked to put his face in piss from time to time.

He thought this was the sort of thing one needed to give voice to, somehow: that he needed to take a half hour for himself to cry or drink or scream about it. But they shared a room and Potter was uniquely tuned in to the slightest change in Severus's mood.

'I'm squinting in the sun, Potter,' he told him, trying and failing to keep the exasperation out of his voice. 'Why would I be angry?'

'I don't know.'

'Precisely.'

He closed his eyes. He could not do anything about this, either. Albus would need to be told, and a full investigation carried out, and the boy would go to someone else—He hated thinking about it and yet he wanted it to have happened already. But he couldn't contact Albus.

And what of Potter's future as the saviour of the wizarding world? Traumatised children did not easily grow up to be good leaders. He would need all the help he could get, and they needed an alternative plan in case he proved entirely useless—but how was Severus meant to provide that aid, when he didn't know if his position had been compromised? He couldn't do much about Lamotte right now either. He couldn't do anything at all, it seemed, except sit on the bloody garden swing.

'Now you're angry.'

'Potter, for heaven's sake—'

'Because you don't like it when I ask you if you're angry.'

'I don't like being served sauerkraut for dinner every bloody night, but I do not go yelling about that to the cook, do I?'

'Yeah, but you're still angry about it.'

'I will be ending this conversation now, before I do genuinely become angry.'

The landlady saved him: she'd come back from the market, carrying a basket of food and a selection of plastic bags on top of that. Severus was usually out of breath by the time he'd climbed up to the house, and he slipped his shopping into the pockets of his coat, spelled to weigh hardly anything at all. Her daily feats spoke to some inhuman resilience.

She beckoned Harry over, to give him a little foil bag with his braids of cheese, salty and soft. They were most of what the child ate these days. Severus had enjoyed them the first few times, but by now was well and truly fed up. Children, he supposed, appreciated familiarity.

He had convinced himself this was why they were still here: familiarity. Everything in Severus compelled him to leave so he could start doing something, but the boy was traumatised and exhausted, and needed the security of a familiar environment. This was why they stayed.

It wasn't entirely the truth, though his doubts Severus sensed merely as impressions, reluctant to put words to them. He hated to think himself a coward, revelling in the contrived passivity of a place out of time, of not being able to do anything even if he'd wanted to.

When Lily and he spoke in their final year, it hadn't been as friends. They'd argued, and they'd debated and they'd hurt, and they couldn't stop: and that day the tortoise wandered off from where they sat by the lake, Severus's friends had spotted them and yelled some things out, and he had told her to ignore it, and she'd laughed ugly.

'Oh, they don't bother me. No, I mean, Lamotte? I should be bothered by poor little Quentin? Please. That is the sad part, you know, Sev: not even that you're hanging out with all these hateful, horrible people, but that these hateful, horrible people are all so flaccid. Oh, they'll talk about how they want a revolution and how You-Know-Who's the next big thing, and maybe they'll even throw some money at it if daddy tells them it's okay. But they're never going to do anything. They're not going to dirty their hands, they're too busy wasting oxygen.'

She was, he'd thought then, probably right, at least about Lamotte and Avery and their whole gang: rich, pureblood, bored and ineffectual. But she was naïve, too, to think they were the sole faction at Hogwarts sympathetic to the Dark Lord. She wasn't thinking about the half-bloods, the children of families sent into forget by scandal or financial destitution, about those that fit in between the extremes and aspired toward something greater. She didn't think about the Ravenclaw, Valerian, and his little circle, or that kid Yaxley two years behind them, coming back after the summer to tell his fellow Slytherins stories of the vile things he'd done to the muggles from the neighbouring village.

'Are you trying to egg me on?' he'd hissed at her. 'Because I'm not sure that's such a smart idea.'

'Oh, oh, and what are you going to do?' she'd pulled her face into an exaggerated frown, giving a fake sniffle. 'Call me a bad word? Please, Severus. I know you. You're the kid hiding in the dark corner. You're the kid who'll never put his hand up in class even if you know the answer, because you know sooner or later someone else will answer for you. You'd rather stay silent and sulk than speak up, because well, it's just so tiring—get back to me once you've, I don't know, killed your first muggle or whatever it is you people like to do with your free time. Then maybe I'll start treating you and your friends like the threat that you so desperately wish you were.'

That night, instead of sitting with Lamotte, Severus had sat with Valerian and his friends.

He had never forgiven her for it.

But that was not the sort of story that Lily's son was interested in hearing, and Severus soon found himself thinking instead about where Harold the Tortoise might have gone, and if the boy might be able to find him again if he tried.

Two chapters today - make sure not to miss the other one!