"Hey, who I'm is?
Rubber band man
Wild as the Taliban
Nine in my right, forty-five in my other hand
Who I'm is?
Call me trouble man, always in trouble man
Worth a couple hundred grand, Chevys, all colors man"
"Rubber band Man" – T.I.
The last Monday in June was incredibly sunny and far too warm for anyone to be comfortable in a stuffy, upper-story level, situated atop hundreds of servers that liked to produce their own heat. The curtains were drawn, but that only boxed in the hot air, which seemed intent on strangling the sole occupant of the bed in the centre of the room.
He was suspended in a confusing knot of sheets, the counterpane having been tossed off in the night to accommodate his need for fresh air, and the stray bolts of sunshine that had made it past the window-hangings had unfailingly sought out to shine directly on his bleary, blood-shot eyes.
Severus Snape was very hungover.
He rubbed his face against the scratchy material of his pillowcase and reached for his wand, casting a quick Tempus and glaring at the late hour. He wasn't generally one to laze about for most of the morning, and he'd likely missed the meeting with his team, but he knew it mattered little.
Even so, he grabbed up his mobile phone from where it rested on the cheap plywood side-table and keyed in the digits that initiated a speed-dial to Terry, having no desire to speak to Declan first thing on a Monday. The man was a morning person, and unreasonably chipper in most cases.
The phone rang a few times before it was picked up on the other end.
"Sev! We missed you at the meeting today, didn't think we'd hear from you,"
Snape rubbed at his face as he climbed out of bed and began pulling on various pieces of clothing he'd tossed aside the night before. "I had a concert last night,"
"Lucky you!" Terry crowed, "Who'd you see?"
"Maiden," Snape murmured, his voice even more nasally than it normally was, clouded as it was with sleep and fatigue. "At Brixton, I got back late,"
"And you didn't ask me to come along? Some friend you are, Snape. I'd have liked to go to that!"
Snape chucked as he sat at the side of his bed and worked his socks over his long, pale feet. "The ticket was a gift, I only had the one, and I was fortunate enough to get that,"
"I'll say. I didn't even have the connexions to get into that show,"
"Lucky me, indeed."
"Is that why you sound like you smoked two packs of cigarettes in the space of an hour?"
The wizard scoffed lightly, but then noticed that as he did so, it did sound a bit wheezy... "I may have overdone it on the booze a bit." He acknowledged.
"Well, we're all glad for you: as a sign of our happiness with your fabulous night out we saved you a stack of paperwork,"
"Goodie,"
"Yeah, and there was a bit of a mix-up in the mail room,"
Snape paused as he laced up his boots, frowning. He'd been hoping for a letter of some kind for three or so months but had given up on it as a lost cause. He tried, with vain effort, to suppress the rising tide of hope that seemed to want to crest above the dams he'd erected against such emotional intrusions.
"A mix-up, you say?"
Terry tsked over the receiver, and he thought he heard her dragging on the butt of a cigarette as she did so. She must have stepped out onto the roof-access to talk to him if she was smoking. "You'd have known about this if you'd made it in this morning."
"So I would have," he drawled. "Do me a favour and enlighten me,"
She snorted a laugh. "You'll owe me,"
"What do you want?"
"Ohhhh, I don't know. Swords. Gems. Treasures. A £20 voucher to that new taco restaurant on Maid Marian Way,"
"By the St. James?"
"That's the one,"
"Consider it done," Snape said, his lips twisting a bit with amusement. He'd paid far more for far less important information before.
Terry coughed a bit, "Christ Snape, I wasn't really serious. You don't have to get me nothin'."
Severus only shrugged, though he knew Terry couldn't see it. "Lunch then. On me. Consider it a business meeting,"
The woman laughed, a bright cheery cackle of a sound, "On Declan, you mean! If it's a meeting I can assume you're going to swipe the company card,"
"It's my company as much as it's his," he said, unperturbed. He was now making his way out through the flat and he waved off Eileen's penetrating gaze with a small gesture at the phone against his ear.
His mother glared at him from the Ikea sofa and shook her head despairingly. Though, she did let him get on with it and turned back to take sips from her teacup. She had apparently been up for a while, given the plate, which he could assume had held her breakfast. She'd abandoned her knitting on the coffee table and sat with one of his old laptops she had evidently commandeered for herself, playing a hand of Bridge with strangers on the internet.
It hadn't taken her long to become obsessed with the online card-gaming sites, though he'd had to give her a firm limit on how much she was allowed to spend per month.
Snape made his way toward the electric kettle and filled it to capacity. "And now that that's been arranged, I believe you owe me information, Teresa," he pulled an earthenware mug off of a cast-iron mug-tree and began spooning Nescafé granules into the bottom.
"If you're going to go calling me that damn name, I won't tell you squat,"
"Apologies, my liege: the great TyrantTerry. All-powerful paladin of the outer providences—" he snarked, entirely glib. He'd mispronounced paladin as 'pa-lad-in,' as Terry herself was wont to do.
"Don't you forget it."
"Tell me about the mail-room." He demanded, his patience finally spent. The wizard brandished his wand above his too-hot mug and bore it aloft on a cushion of magic in order to direct it ahead of himself and onto a small spot of free space at his computer desk.
"It's nothing major, really. Pricilla came by and briefed us that they'd mistaken a bunch of your mail in the pre-screen and had been holding it back for a few months,"
"I thought I'd stopped receiving mail years ago, most people just complain about me on the forums now instead of writing me,"
"That's probably why they mixed it up. Prissy gave me maybe three letters for you from the past few months."
"Gave them to you? Why?" Snape asked, his voice slightly incredulous. He began pressing buttons at the desk, booting up his tower first, then his monitor, and finally, turning to check the auxiliary monitors that showed the status of the downstairs servers. He'd redirected a large portion of their power over the last few months and had gone live with his plans for the World-Wide Wizarding Web just a month earlier, in April. By his observations there were still precious few users. Possibly no more than three or four dozen, but he saw higher numbers every day.
There wasn't much for a wizard or witch to do as of yet: he'd hosted a basic search engine, anticipating the need for it down the line, though there were only five live sites, all of which he operated himself, and none of them were useful for anything more than reference excepting a page of forums for discussion.
One site provided basic information and safety guidelines for the most simple and common potions ingredients and first and second-year recipes. It was something of a pet project for himself, hoping, as he did, that so many of his students hadn't wasted his time and their own during his years of instruction. The apothecaries made a solid mint off of the populace's incompetence in basic brewing, and most adults didn't have the time, inclination, or additional funds to go buying back books they'd likely disposed of after graduation if they needed a basic remedy.
There was another site which provided a basic outline of the structure of the Ministry and tips for its navigation. Though he wasn't in-the-loop enough to provide the names of the Heads of departments, he had included a handy guide on the history of the Wizengamot and a detailed explanation of how it operated and produced new legislation. He'd also included a basic list of legal protections for those who were trying to navigate the justice-side of the Ministry, but doubted they would ever reach someone in need. After all, the Ministry seemed to imprison first and ask questions later—as for determining the truth in any given situation, that still remained to be seen.
He'd soldiered on with his project, regardless. It ought to be spelled out somewhere that wasn't some dusty tome on the shelf of a barrister whose coffers were laden with the golden spoils of Blackhall's bribery.
He'd created a reference page that detailed information on Hogwarts, its classes, its houses, its testing, and its structure. His hope for this venture rested in the possibility that some muggle parent might find the advertisements he'd posted in the Prophet, the Quibbler, and The Moon (as well as on flyers around the major wizarding shopping districts) and might find the information helpful and instructive. He'd been sent on enough errands to inform muggleborn childrens' families of their world to know that having something concrete and familiar to point them toward would be enormously helpful.
The final page was possibly the most important, with the exception of the forums, where he'd already noted a few users trading basic information and stories, in a rather ham-fisted and inept manner.
The final page included an in-depth tutorial on how to create a webpage and an invitation to send the final product to himself (still under his 'Scribe' alias) for publication and hosting. At present, his enterprise was a monopoly, and he was content with that arrangement for the foreseeable future. It would eventually come to pass that other wizards and witches might learn to host their own pages, but until then, he had no plans to prop up any newcomers or competition. His position was potentially too powerful, and the technology was only out of its infancy for muggles: what the wizarding world might do with it could prove disastrous.
He had greater plans and designs: a media enterprise to rival and compete with The Daily Prophet, for one, but it would require additional people, and he wasn't yet ready to reveal himself. He wasn't sure he ever would be. It was possible that he'd forever need to be a spectral figure, operating his holdings by proxies.
Everything he'd done thus far could remain cloaked in anonymity. The WWWW was secure, accessible only by manipulating a computer's ethernet cable with a pulse of magic from the touch of one's wand (though, not so much that it would alert the trace, which he'd mentioned in his advertisements detailing the process to the public. There had to be some way for a muggleborn with a brand-new wand to access the page on Hogwarts for their parents to view, after all).
Proofing the sites against underaged use had been considerably easier, as he understood it, than doing the same in the muggle world. In Galdrvale they had had to trust the dubious integrity of the users to accurately report on their age when signing up for access, and in truth it was only to prevent liability on the part of his company. For the WWWW, he simply blocked access to the forums for anyone whose wand still was under thrall of the trace.
His grander plans for his venture involved leasing space for specifically magical internet cafés, once he'd achieved enough growth to make it worth his while, given that most wizards wouldn't likely purchase a personal computer at any point in the near future: he was, as he understood it, going to be relying largely on muggleborns and half-bloods for the bulk of his user base in the early stages, and he had accordingly directed any who were interested in the meantime to venture, carefully and cautiously, into muggle libraries and internet cafés.
"Did you hear me, Snape?" an irritated voice sounded in his ear. He only just restrained himself from giving a small start.
"My apologies, Terry. I'm afraid you caught me wool-gathering."
She humphed over the line, "How very like you to demand an answer to something and then not even listen when I tell you,"
"If you think that's anything like me then I propose you know me very poorly, indeed," he sneered. "See if I ever lower myself to apologize to you again,"
"Don't be a prat, Sev, it doesn't suit you," Terry remarked with a laugh, "Anyway, Prissy gave them to me because you apparently scare the piss out of her, and she'd heard we were friends,"
"Define friend—"
"No—you define friend. On Wednesday. Over tacos. That you'll be paying for, and then spending the rest of the meeting kvetching to me about what the players are saying about you on the forums and how much it annoys you having your mother staying in the flat above yours—"
Snape stopped her with a small growl, "You've made your point, Teresa,"
"See, you better hope you're my friend, because I killed the last fucker that dared to call me that. You know my Daddy brought me back a German Derringer from the war—"
Snape snorted and had to wave at his mother to indicate that she should go back to her card-game, as he'd attracted her attention by nearly spilling his coffee in his lap. It was another of Terry's grand fibs, and was delivered, as she always did, in the matter-of-fact I-dare-you-to-contradict me sort of way, but it was a lie nonetheless. "Declan would have your head if you killed his cash-cow."
"You ain't the only one that can write, Snape. I've written novels. I've written six: do you know Ayn Rand?"
"I'm familiar," Snape drawled, his eyes glazing over a bit as he hunkered down for another rambling discourse that was almost certainly untrue in its entirety.
"They're sorta like that, see? And I write a chapter a night—sometimes up to three if I'm feeling strong—just like she did in the Soviet internet cafés—"
Snape closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, quite literally biting his tongue to hold back the stream of criticism over the blatant falsehoods and misattributions he was hearing: but he knew it to be a lost cause. The best course of action, as ever, was to simply nod along and make noises of mild agreement.
'Soviet internet cafés, indeed.' It was lucky that the conversation was taking place over the phone, otherwise the poor woman might have cried had she seen the look on his face. For a compulsive liar, she was extraordinarily sensitive whenever anyone took exception to any of her tall tales.
At length, he managed to redirect the woman into giving him a run-down of the morning's meeting and anything relevant to his work that she was receiving as feedback from the players before he was able to terminate the call.
It had been a rather excruciating hour and a half, particularly as the only information of substance he'd received was that the players were of two minds over whether they liked Hermia or hated her, and that apparently the occultists were being well-received. Likewise, the latest raid battle he'd scripted was apparently being fêted on the forums, and there was a write-up in some magazine coming about the new story-line.
They'd asked for an interview. Terry knew well enough to decline on his behalf.
He'd just gotten up to pour himself another mug of water out of the electric kettle when his wards began to hum in warning.
Snape's back stiffened and he nearly dropped the spoon he'd been using to ferry granules of instant coffee on the counter.
"Mam," he called, making eye-contact with her from across the open space between the kitchenette and the living room, "can you hear that?"
Eileen frowned and set the laptop on the table before her, looking as if she were concentrating quite hard. "That buzzing noise?"
"Yes."
"Well, it always sort of buzzes in here, doesn't it? From those ridiculous contraptions you keep downstairs—"
"No, Mam, this should sound different. Can't you sense the difference between magic and the mundaneanymore?" he sneered, moving back to the extra monitors he kept alongside his work computer. He tapped a sequence on the keyboard below and brought up a window showing four CCTV feeds he maintained around the premises. The benefit of hosting the servers was that the company paid for the additional security.
Three of the cameras showed no-one and nothing of interest but the fourth, directed toward a door on the street level that he scarcely used, showed an untidy head of dark hair that looked all too familiar, even after nearly ten years and the man in question gaining a neat four stone.
"Christ, just what we need," Snape murmured, drawing a hand down his long face.
Eileen drew up beside him, glancing over his shoulder at the screen with a perplexed look on her face. "You shouldn't blaspheme, Severus—"
"And since when have you ever cared—no. No, that doesn't matter right now. Do you see that disheveled-looking pain-in-the-arse standing out at the receiving-entrance?"
Eileen clucked and folded her thin arms over her chest, "I see him. He looks like just some muggle, Severus, go and see what he wants,"
Snape shook his head and turned to look at his mother dead in the eyes, trying to convey the seriousness of the situation with a grave face. "I need you to listen carefully, mother. That is Harry Potter. I don't know why he's here, I don't know how he found this place, but if he doesn't already know that I'm alive, he can't find out,"
"Oh!" Eileen peered more closely at the monitor for a moment, appearing to be straining her elderly eyes, "That is young Potter, isn't it!"
Snape's eyes hardened, and in the distance, over the hum of the servers floors beneath them, they heard the echo of a knock ringing out throughout the hollow building. From the screen he could see Potter shifting from foot to foot, but not looking so urgent or impatient that he appeared in danger of breaking and entering without permission. "You know Potter?"
Eileen huffed, but before she could answer, Snape managed to answer his own question.
"Ah, of course you do. Granger dragged him over to ward your house, didn't she,"
"The girl did bring him by, yes. A nice enough boy. Really, Severus, do you think he would have trusted me to watch the little loves of his had he not met me himself first?"
The wizard merely shrugged with one shoulder and scowled blackly. "It wouldn't have made sense, but then Potter was never all that smart." He drew a hand through his hair and made a face as it caught on a few snarls in his unkempt mop. He'd neglected to trim it for going on two years and now it reached near to his elbows. "I need you to go see what he wants."
Eileen looked as if she wanted to fight him on his lack of hospitality, but then she appeared to think better of it, perhaps remembering, for once without a reminder, that if her son wasn't presumed dead he'd have been a wanted criminal, and that Harry Potter was the Deputy Head of the Magical Law Enforcement office.
Eileen only nodded once, and took her time shuffling down the numerous expanded-metal staircases. It took her nearly five minutes to reach the bottom, Snape noticed. He'd have to apparate her back up the stairs.
Not for the first time he wished he had installed an intercom system, or at the very least a set of microphones with which to hear what was being said. After a moment, he decided it was too important to leave to mere chance, and he disillusioned himself, threw himself from the top-most landing beneath his flat, and drifted down through the open-air centre of the building, alighting at the bottom near where his mother was only now arriving at her shambling gait.
He tapped the door once with his wand to release the lock, and stood back as his mother heaved against the heavy exit, opening it only a few inches through which she could peek out and meet their visitor.
Potter appeared to be lost in thought, and had evidently drifted off into his own ruminations while waiting. His bottle-green eyes were scanning the weathered brick exterior of the building and he appeared to be making mental notes, when abruptly, he was pulled from his considerations by Eileen's arrival.
"Mrs. Snape! I'm so glad to have found you!" Potter cried, looking at Snape's mother with a smile of surprising strength.
Apparently taken aback at Potter's effusive greeting, his mother seemed at a loss for words. "I—Mr. Potter, I didn't—you are?"
"I'll say! You disappeared without a trace, I've been on the search for weeks, and Hermione... well... I didn't exactly want to ask her," he hedged, forcing his hands into the pockets of his muggle overcoat. "Mind if I come in for a chat?"
Severus sneered and tightened his grip on his wand. Just like Potter to try and invite himself in. To assume his welcome...
"We'll speak outside, Mr. Potter—I don't own the building and I don't much want to walk all the way back to my flat on the top floor,"
Thankfully, to this Potter smiled sheepishly and inclined his head with a small grin. "Understood, Madam Snape."
Eileen opened the door another foot and stepped out half-way, seemingly wedging herself between the outside world and the inner sanctum of the server-farm. To Snape's displeasure, Potter craned his neck over her head and appeared to be glancing about inside the barren industrial space, blinking owlishly when he saw the rows of neat, identical towers with their flashing lights and hundreds of cables. The brat gave a small shiver, likely from the draft of cold air that whooshed out past his elderly mother and was likely hitting the stupid prat in the face.
Snape wished he could be petty enough to complain about the cost of the air he was losing from his mother standing with the door open, but even he had to acknowledge that he benefitted greatly from the ability to enchant the space with weather charms rather than paying the thousands of pounds a month in utility costs for the large industrial HVAC units that would otherwise have been required.
"And what, precisely, did you need me for, Mr. Potter? I'm afraid I can't understand why you wouldn't have asked Ms. Granger to find me if you had need of me. Unless you were looking to bypass her for my babysitting services..." Eileen asked. Her voice was acid, but near the end she almost sounded a bit hopeful.
Snape shook his invisible head and clenched his hands near his sides. The day that the Potter spawn made themselves comfortable in his home was the day he went ahead and finished the job that damned snake had buggered up by offing himself for good.
"Ah, no, Eileen," Potter hedged, looking somewhat uncomfortable. The Potter Snape had known in school would have been shifting from foot to foot with unease, but the newer, more mature man he'd grown into had apparently cured himself of his regrettable social tics through the kind of exposure and practice that came of conducting multitudes of difficult interviews with recalcitrant suspects and witnesses alike. "Would I be wrong in thinking that you and Hermione grew quite close while she was serving you at WOE?"
It was Eileen that now shifted from foot to foot, wringing her pale, thin hands a bit. "I suppose... It may have been that she spent a bit more time with me than she would have with the average resident. She took a special interest in my case,"
Potter chuckled and ruffled his hair a bit, "That's our 'Mione." He appeared troubled. "That was our Hermione..."
"Was?" Eileen broke in, looking up sharply. "Has something happened to the girl?"
"Well... er... I—it's hard to say. I came looking for you because I thought perhaps you'd know better than me. She's—"
"Is the girl alright, Mr. Potter?" Eileen demanded, her voice strangely imperious, even at her unimposing height.
"She's healthy, if that's what you mean." Potter hastened to say, looking desperately awkward and suspiciously reticent. "She's not been herself..." he trailed off, looking away at the pavement. "After she lost her job in Waldweirness, she took another at this muggle place in Islington, and that lasted for all of a month and a half. Gin—my wife, that is—and I took her into our home so she wouldn't have to cover rent herself, but it's..." he swallowed, "she's not been acting like herself. I didn't know whether you might know anything about it,"
"Are you accusing me—!?"
Potter held both hands up in front of himself in defense, "No, not at all, Madam Snape," he hastened to say, perhaps anticipating that she had a temper as incendiary as her son's had been.
"Allow me to be direct," Potter finally squared his shoulders and looked down at the frail woman, though he didn't appear to be trying to intimidate her.
Snape stiffened, ready to defend his mother if necessary.
"As I think we previously alluded to, Hermione has a habit of making projects of things. A few months ago, right after she left Waldweirness, Gin and I noticed her stepping out to the library for something she'd told us was a project, but... the signs weren't exactly there. She never brought any books back, for one thing, and she never did have a good explanation for why it was the muggle library she needed access to. I don't regret following her, mind—"
"You followed her?" Eileen barked, sizing up the man before her with a glare, "Some friend,"
Potter gave her a disgruntled scowl, "She wouldn't have told me about it. Anyway, I don't know whether to be concerned or not. At first when I saw what she was—well, working on, seems to be too charitable, really...what she was preoccupied with, rather—I thought she might have been merely embarrassed. Which is alright really, we all have silly little interests here and there. This might have been her first, after all,"
"Mr. Potter, please do get to the point, I'm afraid my patience is wearing thin, and I have a room of people waiting for me to come back and host a table for a round of Euchre,"
Potter's eyes widened somewhat comically, "You have company?"
"Well! Should I be offended that you'd be so surprised if I did?" Snape's mother asked tetchily. "Incidentally, no—not company, per se, it's an online game parlour,"
Amazingly, this caused Potter to perk up with something akin to frenzied excitement, "An online game? So, you're familiar with those?"
Snape stiffened from where he stood a few feet back, sensing danger. 'What on earth is your angle here, Potter?'
Eileen surveyed the young man before her with a chary look, "It's become a bit of a pastime of mine," she answered, her manner evasive.
"That's exactly it, Madam Snape—Hermione is... well... I guess the word I'd use is obsessed really."
"Obsessed with what?" Eileen demanded, her patience seeming to have worn to its thinnest.
"An online game. Have you heard of a game called Galdrvale?"
'FUCK. Merlin's buggering ballsack, fucking bloody bungholes—'
Snape's panicked reaction was interrupted by his mother's response. She had stiffened and her fingers which gripped the door were lily white and bloodless.
When her voice came it sounded forced and unnatural, "I've seen advertisements,"
"Advertisements?"
"Online, yes," she hedged. "It... it seems quite popular,"
"Did you tell Hermione about the game?" Potter demanded.
"No!" Eileen protested, now comfortable again to answer with complete honesty. "She didn't hear about it from me,"
Potter drew a hand down his slightly haggard looking face. "Do you know who—there are things that I saw... things in the game that look suspiciously like..." He paused and glared at the ground beneath his shoes. "It had to have been made by a wizard. Or a witch, I suppose... but someone who knows of our world—" Potter seemed to be peering into the interior of the building once more, furrowing his brow as he trained his eyes just to the right of where Severus stood, concealed.
"I know absolutely nothing about it," Eileen protested with a haughty sniff.
The Auror's face darkened and he reached out to grip the door against which Eileen was leaning. Snape felt himself stiffen in response as he drew his wand and trained it on the younger man, preparing himself to fire at will.
"That's quite interesting to me, Eileen." Potter began, his voice deceptively calm. Severus knew better, however. He'd seen those green eyes alight with angry fire enough times to know what it looked like when the little blowhard was brewing up a shit storm.
"Quite interesting, given that I only happened upon you by chance. This building is registered to the parent company that owns Games of the Magi. I found a copy of the deed in the public records.
"Now, either you truly are unaware of that fact, and didn't know about the game, or you're lying to me."
Damn Potter! Damn him—he'd grown much more wily since Snape had last seen him... Why on earth was Hermione wasting her precious time on his stupid game in the first place—at the best of times it was nothing more than a bit of a diversion, and at the worst, a shameless cash-grab operation...
"Perhaps it's none of my business, after all," Potter continued, looking at his mother with a gimlet eye, "nothing I saw explicitly violated the circumstances surrounding the Statute of Secrecy, so by that measure I expect I would argue that whomever it is you've holed up with is safe from litigation,"
Eileen deflated at that, looking far too relieved for her to have maintained her plausible deniability.
"Then again," the Auror growled, "the Confundus used against Sandra Brock certainly fell outside the bounds of legality."
Snape read terror in the ramrod set of his mother's shoulders. Her hand, where it gripped the door, shook with tremors of fright, and the other, which clutched the seam of her skirt, was twisting the fabric so tightly that it might have torn.
"I—"
"You don't own a wand Eileen. And while you could have lied about that and perhaps kept one you used on the sly, I'm not under the impression that you would do such a thing.
"I don't know who you're wrapped up with, or what they have to do with this Gald-thing," Potter frowned, waving his hand around to emphasize how trivial he found the game itself, "but if you have Hermione's best interests at heart, you'll give me a ring and tell me what you know." The younger man finished. He fished out a small piece of paper and handed it over to Snape's mother, explaining that the number would reach him at home.
Before Snape had much time to ponder the fact that the Potters owned a telephone and had evidently gone through the trouble to have one installed that could bypass the prohibitive magic that should have made having one at Grimmauld Place an impossibility, Harry was voicing his parting words to the elderly woman before him.
"Hermione would love to see you." He murmured, his face now deadly earnest. "I know she would. She's staying with us for now," he scratched at a cow-lick sheepishly, "she can't exactly afford a flat on her own with what she makes at ASDA,"
'Hermione Granger is working at ASDA!?' Snape wondered with a jaw held slack from disbelief.
"But we have no doubt that she'll be on her feet again here soon," Potter finished, looking like he was trying to convince himself more than Snape's mother. "Anyway, think about what I've said, Madam Snape. It might help her a lot if we knew what kind of hold this game had over her, and who made it and to what end."
"Grand hustle man, mo' hustles than hustle man
But why the rubber band? It representin' the struggle man
My folk gon' trap, until they come up wit' another plan
Stack and crumble bread to get theyself off they momma land
Gangstas who been serving, since you was doin the runnin man
Went down, did 10, back 'round and rich again
That's why I'm young wit' the soul of a ole man
I'm shell shocked, get shot slow ya roll man"
"Rubber band Man" (reprise) – T.I.