Two: Paris to Brussels
Harry woke up knowing something was wrong.
To be fair, that was every morning since they'd gone after the stone. Every morning, the same thing was wrong and it wasn't a thing that could get better.
But now, he was in the wrong place, surrounded by the wrong people, their breaths deeper, their snores headier, their shuffles more careful. The sheets in Gryffindor Tower were a deep burgundy that melted against Harry's cheek, and these ones here a rough white that smelled like detergent, and not even the one Aunt Petunia used.
They were also wet.
Harry shot up, head banging against the ceiling, short of time to take stock as stock took him: right, he had killed Quirrell, Quirrell was dead, he was a murderer, they had to send him away, he was in Paris, in a hostel where the beds were perched on top of each other in threes. Harry's berth sat at the very top. The morning light fell through the crease in the ugly green curtain. Far below, people moved: a man folded his pyjamas, a woman shuffled out of her slippers to examine a reddened toe.
Harry shifted forward to hang his head down and peak into Snape's bed, but the motion made his pyjama bottoms slide from where they'd stuck to his thigh, and he at once remembered, with a full-body shiver, that his sheets were wet. He ducked back behind the curtain, his throat a burn of mortification. This hadn't happened in, well, forever, except that one time a few days ago in the hospital wing, but that had been different because he'd only just woken up from the coma and Madame Pomfrey had said it was just his body getting used to being awake again, nothing to worry about, and she'd spelled the sheets clean and brought him a new gown, and there'd been no fuss about it at all. But now she wasn't here, and even if Harry had known the right spells, Snape had his wand: it was probably in his coat, and Harry couldn't get to his coat without everyone seeing the stain on his pyjamas, and anyway he couldn't cast spells or the wizard police would come find him—
He breathed through his nose and out again to try and calm down, but that only made him smell it more, and even though his stomach caved empty, acid climbed to his mouth until tears pushed through scrunched eyelids. This was like a nightmare. He'd thought it had been awful, those times it had happened back in Privet Drive, but at least then he could hope to sneak into the stairway wardrobe where the fresh sheets were stored, and strip the bed and do laundry before anyone realised. Here, he didn't know where fresh sheets were stored, or where the washing machine was, and all those people would find out, not to mention Snape—
The door opened, and Snape was there, back from the bathroom with a towel slung over his shoulder and a freshly shaved face, already cross about life in general. He'd cut himself just below the ear, too, the blood fresh and blooming.
Harry pulled the curtain all the way closed, but there was still a gap between the edge of the fabric and the wall where the rail didn't reach. He had only just covered his legs with the quilt when the curtain was shoved back and Snape's face appeared on the other side, hovering above the topmost rung of the ladder.
'I'm not letting you sleep anymore, Potter, so don't bother trying to hide,' he said. 'Get dressed and pack your things, we're leaving right after breakfast—what's that smell?'
Harry said nothing. He was too focused on not crying to form sentences.
Snape was silent for a minute, and though Harry didn't dare look at him, he could feel his gaze sweeping up and down the bed, snagging and hanging on the quilt bunched up suspiciously around his hips.
'Well,' Snape cleared his throat. 'Get dressed. There's not much of a queue for the bathroom yet, so you can go shower if you hurry up.'
'What—what should I do with the sheets?' Harry whispered. 'Do you know if there's, like, a laundry room or—'
'Leave them. Meet me downstairs at reception when you're dressed.'
Harry did as he was told, moving entirely on autopilot. By all laws of nature, he should be dead right now, he thought, he shouldn't have lived through this. It was strange to carry on with the day; he felt a little like he had after waking up from the coma, like he had stopped spinning even as the Earth carried on. As he shoved his wet pyjama bottoms into the plastic bag he'd once used for dirty socks, he wondered if comparing the two, the day he'd killed a human being with this day now, whether it made him a horrible person. Probably it did.
Snape was speaking with the lady at reception when Harry bounded down the stairs. It was all hush-hush and he couldn't make out any of it from where he'd perched on the armrest of the sofa, but the lady threw him a look of pity at some point and he immediately guessed what they were talking about. He quickly looked down at the plexiglass table, pretending like he was super interested in the leaflets about bus tours. He would like to go on a bus tour. It sounded like fun. They must have had those in London, too, not just in Paris; he imagined telling the Dursleys about it and that made him feel worse, not because they would never say yes, but because he had no idea when he'd see them, or anyone, again.
'Have you got your things?' Snape snapped at him from across the room. 'Well?'
'Yes, sir,' Harry muttered, wishing Snape would speak a little quieter: everyone else in the lobby had turned their heads to see.
As he followed Snape through the glass door to the bar, he saw the reception lady fetch a key and hurry upstairs. Was she going to change his sheets? He hated the thought so much he had to push his fingers into his lowest rib hard enough to hurt, just to stop thinking it.
In the bar, there was a system for how you got breakfast, which everyone knew but Harry couldn't follow. He understood quickly that the long table toward the back of the room was where you had to go and serve yourself, but there was an order to it yet no queue, and people seemed to know exactly what they were and weren't allowed to take even though it didn't say anywhere. Snape soon got impatient with him and barked at Harry to get on with it, which wasn't helpful at all because then Harry stopped being able to see the food, too taken with the need to hurry, and so he ended up snatching a croissant and a napkin, and rushing to their table before anyone could tell him he'd done it wrong.
Snape brought him a plate and a butterknife, looking at Harry like he was an animal.
'Is that all you're having? If you think you'll be getting food when you start complaining you're hungry in an hour, then you have deeply misjudged your circumstances.'
Harry shrugged. He wanted to point out he hadn't wanted to choose in the first place because he knew he'd probably do it wrong, but Snape had insisted, so it was hardly Harry's fault—and he might have found the courage to do so, back at Hogwarts where Snape was just one teacher and Harry one student. Here, though, they were alone, and if Snape randomly decided he'd had enough of Harry, there was little telling what he might do. Harry didn't think Snape would just up and leave him alone in a foreign country, but once the idea had struck him, it had proven unshakeable: he could just see himself, out there on the street, lost, penniless, unable to ask for help because the people who spoke English here spoke it in a way he struggled to understand, and he didn't know a word of French.
'At least get some juice,' Snape spat. 'Or jam, you do realize this is plain? Merlin forbid you get scurvy on top of everything else I have to deal with.'
An old man that smelled funny gave Harry an odd look when he zagged past him, but he managed to fetch the juice in record time. He didn't bring back jam or any such thing: he wanted to keep some satisfaction to himself. As planned, Snape looked annoyed at Harry's steadfast glare over his plain croissant; it was playing with fire, but Harry figured he wasn't going to get abandoned over pastry, and it was tasty like this anyway, if a little dry.
They walked to a train station then. It might have been the same as the one they'd been at last night, but Harry wasn't sure: the sights and smells and sounds of the journey were all tangled up in his mind. He followed Snape in a jog, his knapsack bobbing up and down on his shoulders until it hurt, from one platform to the next, under ground and up again, onto a train and into one compartment and another, and he saw the men and women lugging suitcases and bags, and heard the sounds their mouths made and the way their laughs rang, but he didn't understand. It was an odd thing, because there was little to understand, really: these people were travelling and the two of them were travelling, and the train station was quite a bit like King's Cross and the train was just a train, only marked up in a different language. But something key was missing. Harry felt as though he was watching everything from behind a glass barrier, his body moving of its own volition. Some other Harry, maybe, had taken hold of it.
Every time Snape got up to go to the toilet or to walk up and down the corridor like a caged bear, this other Harry snuck bites of the emergency biscuits he'd packed during that last frantic morning at Hogwarts. The other Harry led his body off the train, and up streets wider than any he'd seen in his life. He didn't know where they were and he would have felt stupid to ask, so he walked after Snape in perfect silence, staring at his own feet, until the roads turned cobbled, and signs set out in the storefronts began advertising beer and waffles in English.
Unexpectedly, Snape bought them chips with mayonnaise from a little window painted yellow. He sat his own portion down on a bench, to use as a weight for keeping his map flat against the wind. Harry thought about helping him with it but realised it would only earn him a mean comment; anyway, Snape seemed to know about this travelling stuff, and Harry wasn't sure he had much to contribute. The map was a web of colourful curves and tiny abbreviations with too many vowels and strange roofs over some of them. Harry had his chips instead.
They were good, the chips, but settled heavy in his stomach, already lined with the biscuits, so the venture was slow-going. He was determined to finish, though: Snape had told him explicitly he expected Harry to eat 'whatever you are given, when you are given it, Potter,' and Harry already felt pretty bad about his life without someone yelling at him, thank you very much.
By the time Snape led him to another hostel-place, this one with a winding stairway and fans scattered around wide windowsills, Harry had indeed vanquished the chips and had begun to regret it, too, as they stirred in his stomach and stirred again.
After they got to the room, all cheap wood and fluttering ribbons tied to their fans, Harry sat, then stood, then ran to the bathroom and promptly expunged the biscuits and the chips and the mayo, all in one.
'I will return in a few hours,' Snape told him once Harry had sat back on the bed: they had bunk beds here, too, and Snape had insisted on Harry taking the top one even though gravity compelled his twisting bowels to stay near the ground. 'The man at reception speaks English, so go to him if you have to, but otherwise I expect you to stay put. Are you able to sit still for that long or will I need to tie you up?'
Harry hoped Snape wasn't serious, but he'd been ready to believe the man wanted him dead not a week ago. Clearly, he wasn't a good Snape interpreter. Anyway, he had no intention whatsoever of moving anywhere, ever again.
He suddenly didn't want Snape to go, either. It was stupid, because Snape made him nervous and self-conscious and annoyed. But it wasn't stupid, because Harry slightly preferred feeling nervous and self-conscious and annoyed to being abandoned in the middle of a city he didn't even know the name of, for reasons he didn't understand and with no way of knowing if Snape would even come back. Especially now that he was ill.
'Drink your water,' Snape told him in lieu of a goodbye, and then took himself out of the room, leaving Harry alone in the humming silence of electric fans and the distant tourist bustle outside.
After a minute, Harry slid to the floor, arms wrapped protectively around his stomach, and crawled to his knapsack: he was being a little dramatic, he knew, but sometimes he liked feeling sorrier for himself than he had any right to, when he was alone with no one there to see.
Dumbledore had told him to pack only the essentials and nothing magical. His wand and invisibility cloak were with Snape, Hedwig was at Hagrid's, even his chocolate frogs had been left in his trunk in Gryffindor Tower. But the album Hagrid had gifted him, back when Harry was still in the hospital wing and before he'd been declared a fugitive, that album Harry had wrapped in an old sweater and concealed at the bottom of the knapsack. The photographs moved, but Dumbledore had said that just having a wand or a cloak near him didn't mean he could be tracked, so surely that was okay; and Harry would just keep it away from any muggles.
He had never seen pictures of his parents before he'd got the album, but by now he'd gone through it so many times that he could imagine them in all their detail when he closed his eyes.
He brought the album back to his bed, and ran his fingers against the pages' grain, and smiled at his mum's smile, and felt even more deserted than before.
I've had a bit of time and made a good advance on editing, so I figured, why not give you an advance, too - and so, I'm posting two chapters instead of one today. Check the next one out if you wish to know where Severus has gone off to.
