It wasn't until Snape showed him the bathroom, which looked remarkably new compared to what he'd seen so far, that Harry realized that this was actually happening. He was staying with Snape. That toothbrush he could see sitting on the sink? That was Snape's. Snape's bathroom. Snape's house.

He was staying with Snape.

What the hell.

The entire situation was surreal. Was this even allowed? Surely they were breaking all sorts of teacher-student rules by setting him up inside of his professor's house. Had Dumbledore really said this was all right? "Where will I be sleeping, again?" he asked hesitantly, eyes still locked on the toothbrush. "You said—the couch, right?"

There was a long-suffering expression on Snape's face, and his voice was just as withering when he replied. "It won't eat you alive if you try to sleep on it. I'll even add a cushioning charm or two, to ensure your poor neck doesn't develop a crick. Blankets and a pillow will be supplied."

Harry had seen the sofa during their brief sweep of the prison cell living room. It was torn in a few places, sunken deep in the center where the springs had given out, and looked rather unforgiving overall. At least it was better than the floor. And, unlike with the Dursleys, he'd have a pillow and apparently more than one blanket. "Do I have a curfew?" he asked. The word curfew was better than the word bedtime.

Snape's lips curled a little, like he knew what Harry had been thinking. He'd always had the horrible suspicion that Snape could read minds…and all this talk about Occlumency confirmed it. Harry hastily attempted to think of nothing but clouds. Big, puffy ones.

"Be in bed by eleven. As I said before, you won't be lazing about all summer. Your relatives might let you sleep until early afternoon, but that won't be the case here." He paused, and then: "Again—you will not enter my bedroom, for any reason besides a grievous injury. The doors upstairs stay closed at all times. Unfortunately, threats of a painful death don't work on you, as evidenced by your first year, so you'll simply have to take my word for it and keep out. "

"What's wrong with the second bedroom, exactly?" Harry dared to ask, trying not to sound nervous. He'd said earlier that it was 'unfit for human consumption.' That could mean a lot of things. Who knew what was in there? Dead bodies, fatal poisons, evil plans…

"It's been a storage room for the past two years. Until I can find a place for it all, it stays put. I have priceless possessions stored inside, hence the keep out ."

There was no telling whether Snape was lying or not, and he wasn't about to try and find out. He wouldn't put it past the man to slip something into his pumpkin juice once they returned to Hogwarts. Here, he would be reasonably safe, because there was nobody to humiliate him in front of, but he'd rather not be surprised once school began.

Well…that depended on whether or not he'd be expelled. The familiar anxiety of the last two days crested over him; Harry swallowed hard around a dry lump in his throat.

"Potter, are you listening to me?" Snape snapped, jolting him back into awareness.

"I…yes?" he said dazedly. His heart throbbed in his chest like it was fighting to get free. They were still standing in the doorway of the tiny bathroom off the side of the kitchen, encased in the dimmest of lights. He could barely see Snape's face in the shadows, but he was sure the man was glaring at him. Taking a deep breath, Harry nodded quickly. "I'll stay out. Sir."

There was silence for a few tense seconds before Snape sighed softly and rubbed at his face. "Go to the sitting room. Do not move from that room. Wait by the sofa while I find you a pillow."

Snape didn't look back as he swept out of the kitchen and into the living room; Harry hurried to follow, passing through the doorway in time to see him pull a massive tome out of one of the shelves by the fireplace, and jumped a little as the bookshelf promptly slid to the side to reveal a dark stairwell. Never mind the rest of the house, he decided, watching as Snape disappeared into the gloom. That staircase was most definitely fitting.

There were faint footsteps up above his head, creaking against floorboards so old Harry was sure they could be pulled away without much difficulty. He held his breath for a moment and then cautiously began to explore, keeping close to the furniture where the floor had settled enough not to make a sound. He found the fabric of the sofa to be surprisingly soft when he passed a hand over the back during his slow trek over to the curtained front window. Sweat ran into his eyes from where his fringe had become plastered to his forehead. I might not need that blanket after all.

Daring a peek into the stairwell to check for signs of Snape, Harry turned back to the window and shifted the curtain to the side enough that he could see out into the empty street. The Polyjuice was due to wear off at any moment, but it couldn't hurt to take a quick look.

Which house had been his mum's, if any of them? Had this street always looked this, or had Lily Potter grown up here during a time when this place wasn't so derelict, but instead closer to the little family homes less than twenty minutes walking distance?

That awful Snape boy.

Would Snape let him out of the house anytime during his stay? Would he be able to possibly scope out the neighborhood, as well as the surrounding ones, in an attempt to find something of his mother's? Something untainted by Aunt Petunia, a small piece of his mum that he himself would see and know. Finding her childhood home would be the first step.

A door shut somewhere upstairs.

Harry's breath caught in his throat. Yanking the curtain back to where it had been, he spun around and made his way back to the sofa. He was nearly there when there came a distant shout from outside and the rattling slam of a door, and his foot caught on the leg of the sofa when he turned in alarm. He was slipping—

—

Severus wrenched his parents' door open and stole inside, closing and locking it behind him. Stepping over the old clothes on the floor and heading for the wardrobe, where he could faintly remember his mother keeping spare linens, he tugged the doors open and kicked a mothball out of his path and towards the old bedframe in the centre of the room. Surely there would be a blanket tucked away somewhere. If all else failed, he'd simply transfigure the boy a pillow out of an old magazine, but he'd rather not have to go on a scavenger hunt for useless items to transfigure into a pile of blankets.

He leaned forward to rummage through old bedsheets, coughing a little from the mustiness. A cleaning charm would be needed to be cast before he could give them to Potter. There were three blankets of varying thickness stowed underneath a layer of tattered pillowcases; he unfolded one and looked it over skeptically.

It was as he was gathering everything up and locking the door that he heard the Richardson's front door slam as one of their frequent arguments started, followed by a resounding thud that shook the floorboards underneath his shoes. Severus dropped the blankets and rushed down the stairs. "What happened?" he demanded, heart beating as fast as a bird's as he looked round to find the boy sprawled on the floor by the sofa. If he managed to kill the Boy-Who-Lived in less than a day after he arrived… "Are you injured?"

"I'm all right." Potter's voice was muffled. A hand reached up to prod at the mess he had the audacity to call hair and came away, to Severus's relief, unbloodied. The Polyjuice had worn off while he was upstairs. "Ouch."

Jesus Christ. He knew the boy was accident-prone, but- "Don't move, you blasted idiot," he snarled, sliding the rest of the way down the stairs and stalking over to him. "You could have a concussion. Did you have the common decency to wound yourself anywhere else, or are you simply destined to lose as many brain cells as possible before you finally graduate and leave me in peace?"

"I didn't mean to fall," Potter said angrily, looking up at him too fast. The resulting wince was very telling. "It was the yelling outside."

"You mean to tell me my neighbor stormed into my house and pushed you over?" he sneered, dropping down to one knee to properly inspect the idiot. "And I believe I said to stop moving . Do you want me to place a sticking charm on you?"

He had a split second's hesitation before reaching out and carefully probing the lump on the boy's head. Potter immediately stiffened and fell silent, which was a relief. James Potter had been a terrible patient while in the Hospital Wing; Severus had put him in there often enough, in their late school years, to know.

Finding the wound didn't take very long. It wasn't large, but the swelling had started up quickly enough to worry him. He knew from experience that there were rusted old nails protruding from a few of the floorboards. Had the Muggles kept the boy updated on his vaccines? "Have you had a tetanus shot recently?"

There was a graze on Potter's arm, too, that he hadn't felt the need to speak up about. "A what?"

"I'll take that as a no. Tomorrow, when I make a potion for you, you will drink it," he said. "All of it. Of course, if you'd prefer to die from a very preventable disease…"

"I thought you said your house wasn't about to be condemned," the boy mumbled, pulling away from him at last and shuffling himself into a sitting position. "Why would I get a disease from falling over?"

Severus gritted his teeth and nearly snapped at him, before managing to somehow school his temper into behaving and saying in a very tight voice, "Rust, Potter. Something I'm sure even your precious Muggle family cannot scrub away entirely. This is an old building, which means rust, which means a chance of contracting tetanus. You will drink the potion."

A grudging nod. "I'll drink it."

"Get off the floor so I can disinfect your arm," Severus said, summoning the blankets he'd abandoned at the top of the landing into his arms, where he promptly dumped them onto the sofa. Neither of them spoke as they returned to the kitchen; the boy sat back down in his chair from earlier and worried a loose thread on his shirt between his fingers.

The first aid kit under the sink was starting to run low. He was going to need to brew more antiseptic, he noticed, as the remaining bit of purple potion sloshed back and forth in its vial. The local grocery carried gauze and cotton balls, but he'd never really trusted the power of Muggle wound cleansers over the abilities of ones created by himself. "Stay still," he ordered the boy, who did exactly the opposite as he immediately began to bounce one leg. "The threat of a sticking charm still holds. Stay still. "

"I can do it myself. You don't have to—"

"I have less faith in your abilities to take care of an injury than I do your abilities to stay on a broomstick, a hundred feet off of the ground," he said, in the most condescending voice he could muster. "Stay. Still."

All things considered, the injuries Potter had sustained could have been far worse. "You'll live," Severus decided, dabbing at the cut on his arm with more gentleness than he deserved. "I can't say the same for your lost brain cells. Will you be cracking your skull open on a windowsill next?"

"I told you I hadn't done it on purpose!" Potter snapped, before he drew away sharply. "I hadn't been fancying myself a nice fall to end the day. I hadn't wanted any of this."

"Potter," he said idly, stowing the first aid kit back under the sink and beginning to wash his hands, "I know this may seem like a herculean effort to someone as keen to impress as you, but keeping your mouth shut is not as arduous a task as you seem to believe it is. Are you dizzy? Nauseated?"

He was back to picking at the stuffing in the chair. At this rate, it would be gone by the end of his stay. "Why do you even care? Just send me to bed and forget about it. Or better yet, send me to where everyone else is!" the boy raged, and suddenly the anger from earlier was back, spilling out of him like an overflowing teacup. "Why can't I be with Sirius and the others? Why am I stuck with the Dursleys, and now you , while everyone else is having a grand old time at headquarters? I'm the one that watched Voldemort return! I'm the one who watched Cedric die! Why am I being left out ofeverything? I don't want to be here! I want to be with Ron and Hermione! Why can't I go be with them instead of being trapped in your disgusting house, while Voldemort is out—"

There was a broken plate on the floor, but Severus couldn't quite remember when it got there, or how. His hands were planted on the table, nails scraping at the old wood as his fingers struggled to clench against his palms. Potter's pale face was barely an inch away from his. Almost too furious to speak, Severus ground out, " Do not say that name in my house. "

He forced himself to back off, before he could do something he'd regret. The silence from before had returned, and this time it was so thick he'd probably have been able to slice through it like butter. He drew his wand, ignoring Potter's barely-there flinch, and jerkily cast reparo on the plate, as well as another cooling charm. His hands were shaking a little. Whether it was from anger or stress, he couldn't tell, nor did he care.

"I'm going to make your bed," he said as he left the kitchen. "Do not sleep on your back tonight. There will be a headache potion waiting for you in the morning, as well as an antidote for any bacteria you might have picked up from the stairs. I will return momentarily. Stay still."

The boy's voice was soft. "Yes, sir."

All things considered, Severus thought, it hadn't been a terrible first day.