Needless to say, Sirius's time at the Snape home was not anything that he expected.
It was a wet and windy day when he and Mrs. Snape arrived in Spinner's End. The narrow, cobblestoned street was unlike anything he had seen before. It was old and cranky and dusty, and in that moment he could understand why the woman next to him was also so. She dragged him along like some pitiful deranged puppy on a leash , down into the cold and suffocating air and through the front door.
As Sirius imagined, Snape's father was furious; he was a tall, buff and wore his cruelty on his muscles and his pain in his eyes. He was sitting back in his armchair, permanent scowl on his face and beer cans at his feet, but he stood when the teenager came in- the wrong teenager, one also small and dark-haired and gangly but still, not the one meant to be returning- and met the gray and distant eyes with an intensity only a true Snape could manage.
He did not address him.
"I don't know why we had to hole this one up after he's bloody done gone and killed my boy." The voice was gruff and hard as to make it obvious that Tobias was a heavy smoker. It was hard to listen to. His eyes, too, were hard to look at; it wasn't so much that they were x-raying you as that they gave you the overwhelming feeling that you were not worth x-raying. Sirius threw down his bag, and when it hit the crusty wood floors a ring of dust flew up around his head.
Sirius did not think he could face Severus's father- until he actually had to.
Eileen did not respond to her husband. She flopped down on the raggedy armchair and did not look at anything. Her eyes were dead. "You'd best be getting upstairs and outa Toby's site before he decides jail wouldn't be so horrible after all," she said after a moment. "Sev's room'll be the one at the top of the stairs. Stay put till I tell you."
The usually rebellious Gryffindor seemed in no mood any longer to question such authority. He'd never actually been in a Muggle house before, and all of it seemed both eerie and fascinating. While it true there were no pictures of wrinkled old aunts screaming incredible obscenities or house elf heads mounted on the walls- Sirius knew better than to think a house elf had ever set foot in the place- the intensely narrow, dark staircase seemed to be in the strategic position of making sure he didn't get it into his head that this "home" would be any more welcoming.
The last thing Sirius wanted to do was sleep in Snivellus's old bedroom. His stomach squirmed as he kept thinking about the reason the room's owner would never again return to it; it was a sparse room, it was true. Just a wire bed and tawdry, thin covers with holes in them. Sirius sneered. Couldn't Snivellus do better than this? Didn't the boy he'd hideously abused for years have more than this? The gnawing feeling in his stomach only intensified as he noticed the pile of abandoned school textbooks stashed under the window. He wasted no time pulling the ratty blanket from the bed and throwing it, abandoned, to the floor. He was a little disturbed to find that the sheet underneath had holes in it too. But he laid down anyway, trying desperately no to cry.
He didn't make it very long.
Mrs. Snape did not call Sirius for dinner that night. He stayed shut up in that room, curtains pulled horribly tight, and tried not to think about anything. At one point he even imagined that he fell asleep. When he woke up, it was dark outside, and he was surprised to discover that there were no streetlamps outside. Everything was pitch black. His calves itched, as if fleas had bitten them.
Still he did not remove himself from the room.
"Boy! Come! This ain't no bloody bed and breakfast, ya ungrateful swine!"
Sirius groaned and rolled over. It couldn't yet have been six 'o clock in the morning. But even he knew that voice was not to be disobeyed.
Tobias Snape towered over him as he gave him the day's instructions. Don't backtalk. No whinging. Don't be a lazy bugger. Sirius was meant, of course, to help Mrs. Snape around the house, cooking and dusting and polishing, while Tobias went off to the mill for that day's work. The teenager gulped as the frightening man left the house, hoping desperately that not all Muggles were like that.
"Is he always like that?" He found the courage to ask after a minute. Severus's mother stood next to him, arms folded over her chest like the lumpy blanket he had been eager to discard the previous day, her mouth a serious and straight line. She did not answer, but merely inclined her head, beaconing him to follow.
Housecleaning was not all it was cracked up to be, he thought. That day was a difficult. Folding sheets, pressing and ironing clothes. It was hard not being able to use magic. But the worse part, of course, was that he spent all day stuck with her. Severus's mother. God forbid he left a crease or speck of dust in the wrong place- then, then it was her eyes staring and probing and judging, squinting the way they had always squinted and looked at him-
There where several times that day where Sirius had to stop and catch his breath. At lunchtime he went back upstairs. He was trying to escape, he wanted to do anything to escape. But that bedroom was no escape. There were more tears. There were always more tears.
He would not have come back downstairs, not even for lunch, but he thought that he heard a very familiar voice coming from the kitchen. It was Professor McGonagall.
"I just came to see how it was going," she was saying.
"We don't want him here. We never asked to have him here." Sirius didn't have to see her to know that her arms were still crossed. McGonagall sighed.
"I know. I know. But Dumbledore thought it would give him time to think about what he'd-"
"Think about what he's done? By taking food from our mouths? By making Toby go crazier than normal? By sleeping in our dead son's bed? Why would that senile old man think this was a good idea?"
It was half an hour before his Transfiguration teacher found him locked in the bathroom.
"Mr. Black? Mr. Black?" She pounded on the door, and pounded, but got no answer. She heard him sobbing.
"Why am I here? Why do I have to stay here?" And the tears kept flowing.
She did not answer.
"I didn't mean it! I never meant it! I never meant him to die!" And kept flowing. It was almost as horrible and gut wrenching as listening to one of Lupin's transformations.
Mrs. Snape left. She did not come back until after supper.