Disclaimer: none of the characters or the world belong to me, obviously.

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Severus followed Lucius around Diagon Alley for an hour, trying to ignore his shopping bag, which was slowly carving a cave into his arm, so to speak. Finally, when a witch pushing a stand brushed some pink ice cream up against his robe, he decided that enough was enough already.

"Do you mind telling me why we are not back at your place yet, Lucius?"

Lucius had stopped in the middle of Diagon Alley, almost causing Severus to run straight into his back. Severus noticed that he smelled curiously of bandaids and liquor. When Malfoy senior looked at him, Severus had to hold back a strangled hoot of laughter; Lucius looked like he was about to cry.

Lucius nodded once, which was so not a viable answer to Severus's question, and turned around again, walking faster and muttering something under his breath that sounded like he was gargling water more than actually forming words.

"Ah, here we—

"Got rid of Knockturn Alley!" Lucius bleated when they reached the Leaky Kettle, or whatever. Several people stared. Severus wondered if their respective mothers had ever told them that was not politically correct. He also wondered whether Lucius was blind as well as deaf, because Knockturn Alley was only a stone's throw away from them, distancially speaking. Was distancially a word? He'd suggested it to a student in a paper once, so he guessed that it was, or else why would it be in his tried and true vocab?

Sniffling like a wounded badger, Lucius threw himself repeatedly into the brick wall behind the Leaky Pot, or whatever. A spot of red began to show against his blond hair, and Severus began to be worried about medical papers. Stepping around Lucius in his ferocious lunging, he tapped some bricks with his wand, hoping it was the right combo. When nothing happened, Severus tried two more times before some busybody heavy-breathing witch cut them in line, tapped some odd combination and rudely pushed past them inside. Severus opened his mouth to give her a bit of his lip, then gave up the goat early in the game and followed her inside, mind hanging on the faint hope that Lucius was too incapacitated to follow immediately.

However, when Severus was almost to the door of the Leaky Frying Pan or whatever, he caught a glimpse of Lucius sitting on a stool barring his way. He was on his fifth firewhiskey and was grinning like a madman. Severus was vaguely disturbed.

"How…?"

"Come on, my man, let's drink a toast to our purchases in Knockturn Alley today!"

"We didn't go to Knockturn Alley," Severus mumbled, giving the expectant bartender a frosty glance, which he specialized in. Lucius thumped him on the back far too hard and then apologized for spilling his nonexistent drink.

By the time they left, Lucius had downed fourteen and one quarter firewhiskeys and winked suggestively at fifty women, fifty-one men, and a warlock, who grunted back. Severus sat sideways on his stool and thought about dark curses. At one point, Lucius tapped him on the shoulder, leaned over to tip a wink, then said something that sounded suspiciously like, "not drunk enough for that," and turned to a hag with a mustache on his right, who was eyeing him in a girlish way Severus felt should be illegal for hags.

Out on the street once more, Severus did all he could to make the best of this current bamboozlement, such as walking extremely fast, pretending he had to go back for something, pretending not to see a wayward Knight Bus, and finally, sprinting.

Lucius was like super glue or something equally malevolent in the end, because Malfoy Manor loomed up before them in no time. Severus thought there was something missing from the plot of this story, since how could he have walked all the way across several counties when he could apparate, but the narrator wasn't addressing it and his shopping bag was seriously killing his arm, so he figured it was a moot point. He must have caught secondhand drinking fever from Lucius, since he began to giggle at that phrase, and his companion glared over at him.

"Whhhhhatttt?"

"N-nothing," he managed. They stood in front of the gates to Lucius's disgusting ship of a house for five Mississippi's before Severus decided to address an important matter.

"Should we not…go inside, Lucius?"

He turned around to find Lucius taking a shortcut through the bushes. Approximately six billion burglar alarms went off, and Severus, in danger of having his ears fall off, sprinted for the house, grabbing Lucius, who was caught in a snare of bizarrely placed Christmas lights, as he went.

Severus just about died from exhaustion or that gross thing where your stomach sticks out the front of you because you've lifted an insane amount of weight. Both of his arms were numb when he deposited Lucius on the front staircase, and he pawed at the door weakly before Lucius solved the problem for them both by falling through the nearest window and setting off yet another burglar alarm.

Severus was about to suggest they have some recoup time, but it was no go.

"DEATH EATER ACTIVITIES!" Lucius bawled, scrambling around in the broken glass beneath them. Severus got a piece in his eye when he tried to get close enough to tell him to cut it out already. That was what you got for wandering too close to the breach, he figured.

"Father," said a voice that did not sound like Lucius, though Severus couldn't really hear over the burglar alarm, and his eye was becoming watery and bloody from the glass chip. From the way the new voice abused the short 'a' vowel sound, he guessed it must be the Pointy-Faced Brat, who didn't really add anything to any scene in most cases, but Severus guessed he was kind of glad to have a third party present, until he remembered that this particular third party was also his student, of the insufferable variety.

Were there any students that were not of the insufferable variety? He decided he would have a think on that one in exchange for not having to wear an eyepatch on the first day of school, a scenario of which he was fast becoming afraid.

"Draco!" Lucius hollered from the floor, thrashing about and spitting chunks of glass about like it was some sort of fiesta they were having here. Then Severus blacked out because Lucius's large ignoramus of a foot kicked him in the face just all out of the blue. When he woke up, he was on a couch that smelled like it had never left the furniture store. There were several broken glass chips laid out all around him.

"DON'T MOOOOOOVE," said a voice that was unmistakably Lucius. Severus opened the only eye that would open as far as it would go and found Lucius looking drunkenly agitated next to the Pointy-Faced Brat, whose face looked even more sickeningly triangle-shaped this year. The Pointy-Faced Brat was holding a camera, which Severus was pretty darn sure was a muggle invention, and snapping away with the thing with a fiendish delight. In the background, the television, which Severus knew was a muggle invention, was playing a wildly out-of-season Christmas special, which reminded Severus too keenly of the last time he was here.

"Draco has a school project," Lucius said.

Severus blinked, and then felt agonized. "Do you mind getting this shard of glass out of my eye?" he asked, not entirely successful in keeping the murderous edge out of his voice. He wondered if Lucius would ever realize that he was a professor and knew that all of Draco's school projects for the summer were fake.

"Dobby got the glass out for you," Lucius said over the sound of the Pointy-Faced Brat having a grossly delighted snickerfit.

"Dobby did, sir!" said a voice that Severus could only assume was coming from either the air conditioning ducts or under the couch.

"Dobby is in TIME OUT," Lucius said, going straight on up to max volume. The voice didn't speak again.

"It still feels like there is glass in there," Severus said, sitting up and brushing the glass from his lap. The Pointy-Faced Brat started to cry. Severus noticed that he was wearing pajamas with snowmen on them, and came to the conclusion that all of the calendars in this house must be out of whack.

"Dobby wanted to use antiseptic, sir—

"TIME OUT, DOBBY!" Lucius screamed, and the voice shut up again. Severus felt his eye. It throbbed. Feeling absurdly like a pirate, he stared around the room. Behind Lucius and Draco, who was bawling up a storm, there was a woman at the kitchen table in the next room. She looked passed out or dead, it was hard to tell which. It was then that he realized it was light outside.

"I must be going," he said, finding it hard to keep the excitement from his voice, "I need to pack for school tomorrow, and I know, er—Draco—must do the same. I would not want to inconvenience you."

Lucius waved a hand in front of his face. "Narcissa will pack you a duffel bag!" he said, gesturing to the prone form in the darkened kitchen, which neither confirmed nor denied this statement.

"Faaaaaaaather, show him my surpriiiiise," said the Pointy-Faced Brat, abusing yet another vowel in the process.

Lucius, grinning like a madman again, ran over to a hidden door marked "SECRET", and tore the thing open. Several broom-shaped packages thudded out onto the carpet.

"I decided," he began, which Severus was glad for, because he had no idea where the hell this was going. "To gift the Slytherin team with new Nimbus 2001s."

Severus only stared at him.

"Well. Ah… thank you," he said, after repressing the urge to faint from the pounding in his dead eye. It was hard to be political when you were a man down, so to speak.

"And I was thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii—

"Thinking," Severus said, rather too snappishly.

"Yes," Lucius said, pouting slightly at his ruined fun. Severus thought someone ought to stick his head in the closet and slam it a few times for good measure. The thought was juicy-good, and kept him from fainting. Instead, he leaned against a six foot painting of a person the Malfoys certainly didn't know. They bought them at tag sales whenever they could, to add the elitist touch every home needed.

"I was thiiiiiiiiinking…" Lucius began again, "That since I am rich enough to buy these brooms for you, the least you could do is make my sturdy son a seeker."

The Pointy-Faced Brat was grinning sickeningly again. He looked anything but sturdy. Severus noticed that his snowman pajamas were the footie type.

"Whatever," Severus said. He was beginning to see spots in front of his remaining eye.

"WONDERFUL!" Lucius screamed.

Severus left the house soon after. He'd had to make a getaway while Lucius was preoccupied with testing every single one of the Nimbus 2001's, to see if they "even flew". Once he got outside, he jogged in place for a second because he'd heard that helped, but whatever old wife had come up with that one was a total rip off because it only made him want to puke. Suddenly, Severus remembered that he'd left his shopping bag in the house, and he had to go back in to fetch it. He had almost made it back to the door again when Lucius stopped him with a load of laundry in his hands and whispered that he had the stomach flu. Severus chose the no comment option.

When he stood in the beaming sun again, he rifled through his bag, only to find that his yak's foot was clean gone. He suspected the woman who had awkwardly tried to flirt with him back at the Leaky Engine or whatever while crouching like she was going to take either a seat or a shit at any moment. Severus had known it was fishy from the getgo since she was clearly out of his league, despite her unibrow and double-clubfoot.

Squinting against the sun, Severus guessed it was good it wasn't his boomslang skin, but when that didn't help to get the edge off of his case of the cranks, he resorted to making a dark mark in the sky. A police car pulled up beside him, and Severus quick erased it and apparated.