By Friday, Snowdrop Hill had returned to classes, and although she was perhaps a little more subdued than she had been at the beginning of the year, she had taken instead to growling at Harry whenever he got close enough to speak to her, and pantomiming a wide-mouthed bite in his direction, as though she might leap out at him and maul him to the ground.

Harry wasn't at all cowed by her behaviour, but he did find it confusing and, at a certain point, rather annoying. All he'd wanted to do was to apologise to the girl over the whole fracas with the yew berry, but she wouldn't let him get close enough to utter a word.

The day after Severus had visited the school, which had been Tuesday, when Harry made his way out to his place by the trees for break, he'd found his progress halted by temporary fencing, blocking off the copse of trees from the rest of the yard.

It had been clear enough that it was because of Severus' intervention that he no longer had his hidey-hole to retreat to, so Harry let it slide and meandered around the yard until he'd found himself at the furthest corner where the chain-link fence butted up against the school building itself.

He'd slid to his bottom in the dust and watched the other children play for the entirety of break.

When on Friday Snowdrop returned to the yard and found her way blocked by the temporary measure, she broke into a wholesale fit, beating at the partition with her little fists and kicking with her feet until Mrs. Murray came out to intercept her, redirecting her into the school against Hill's vociferous protests.

Harry could sympathise but thought it foolish of the girl to try a tantrum. The trees were gone to them now, and the both of them would have to find alternate ways of spending their mid-day breaks.

As far as school went, Harry thought they might have finally settled into something approaching normal, and the remainder of the second week became predictable and comforting in its familiarity.

Which was why, ultimately, when Harry arrived home to Spinner's End at the end of the day on Friday, it was so upsetting to find that Severus was missing, and that the door was unlocked.

He let himself into the house as ever and crept about with some trepidation before he decided that his best course of action was to take his shoes off and to make himself some toast—as he usually did after school.

By the time Severus finally showed his face, Harry had managed to complete his reading selection, and to respond to the prompt with the requisite two paragraphs. He finished about half of his maths worksheet before he decided that he needed assistance, and had looked over his list of words for the spelling quiz that Mr. Fowler promised them for the upcoming week.

The door opened just as he was copying out the word "committee" for the fifth time and Harry almost threw his pencil to the table and leapt from his chair. It was nearing seven in the evening and even though Harry had been attempting to deal with his guardian's absence by acting as though everything was normal, it was only when Severus finally made his reappearance that Harry was able to think on the fact that he'd feared himself abandoned once more.

He wasn't able to stop himself from barreling into Snape's solar plexus, which had him emitting a faint "Oof!"

Harry's hands were tangled up in the fabric at the man's lower back, his face buried into the soft cotton covering Snape's stomach.

Any words that he tried to say were subsumed by sobs that were very nearly delirious, and at the very least were wholly incomprehensible as human speech.

"Harry—" Snape's hands were working at untangling the boy from around his midsection and he felt a firm grasp at his shoulders pushing him away far enough that the older wizard could wipe at his eyes and nose with a spare black handkerchief. "Come on, that'll be enough."

"W-why w-weren't you h-here!?" Harry hiccoughed, feeling snot pouring from his nose. His glasses were smeared with tears and he could scarcely see through the lenses. He felt Snape remove them from his face and lift up under his chin with his index finger, turning his face to inspect it.

Snape was nothing more than a wobbly black blob with an angular splotch of white skin in his eyes, and until Severus replaced Harry's glasses on the bridge of his nose—now wiped clean—he wasn't able to make out anything more than vague shapes.

"As it happens, I was taking your advice to heart," his guardian drawled, stepping away now that Harry had regained his composure. "We've about reached the point where I've no excuse to dawdle any longer."

"W-what do you mean?" Harry asked, still gasping a bit for air, even as he'd stopped crying.

Snape sighed and stepped toward the sofa where he began to unlace his boots from around his thin ankles. It was only then that Harry realised he was wearing a smart jacket over a black poloneck shirt. He'd traded in his normal black jeans for a pair of twill trousers. "I had an interview this afternoon."

His hair was pulled back into a ponytail at the back of his head and he yanked the elastic out, glaring at it as he used his wand to banish it to wherever he'd taken it from.

Given the level of greasiness, it almost stayed put where he'd had it pulled back, and it only released from the slicked back position at the back of his skull when Severus drew his fingers through from crown to the tips that brushed the bottom of his chest.

"Oh," Harry perked up at the mention of the job. It wasn't so much that he thought Severus was some sort of lay-about, the likes of which his uncle took such exception to, it was more that he worried over the anxiety he saw manifesting day by day in the older wizard, even if he couldn't quite identify it as such.

He'd figured it was only a matter of time until Snape would decide he couldn't afford to keep Harry around, and he'd pass Harry off onto someone else who would care for him so that he could reclaim his job at that school he'd told his ward so much about.

If Snape had found a job, however, to Harry's mind it was tantamount to a stay of execution. He didn't want to go anywhere else if it could be helped.

"Did you... erm... did you get it? The job, that is?"

Snape sighed deeply and leaned back on the sofa until he was slumped over on it, staring up at the missing chunks out of the ceiling. "I'll be required to man the bar at The Jiggered Yow five nights a week, until six on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and until just after the midnight hour on Tuesdays and Fridays. Wednesday and Sunday are my own."

"But if you're that late—"

"I'm considering alternative solutions for those nights."

Harry swallowed and resolved not to ask. He didn't want to prompt solutions which might result in him being removed from Snape's custody...

"Earlier this week I was occasioned to team up with Miss Hill's grandmother. She seemed to me a sensible woman, if perhaps too old to reasonably be expected to chase after her own granddaughter, let alone another child, but it may be that I expect you to spend the evening with the Hills, until such a time as I can come fetch you."

Harry had to suppress the urge to have a dramatic, fake gagging fit in response to this news. Two nights a week in the company of Snowdrop Hill promised to be torturous, and that was even in light of having lived under the girthy tyranny of Dudley Dursley.

Apparently Snape had cottoned on to his upset, however, as his eyes sharpened and he sat upright against the formless cushions. "I take it this is unwelcome news?"

Harry knew better than to agree. Snape's tone forewarned trouble should Harry put up even a token protest.

There was a pregnant beat of silence until Harry found something that might have been safe to comment on.

"Congrats on the job, Severus..."

It was obvious that Severus knew it was a slight prevarication, but he appeared too tired to pursue it and his posture relaxed enough to sink into the crevice between the back of the couch and its arm. "Thanks."

His hands came up to cover his face and Harry decided then that the best course of action was probably to leave Snape alone for a few moments.

Severus was a solitary creature by nature, and as much as it had suited him to be without the pressures of a normal workday, he also took pride in his ability to provide far past what Harry thought he could readily understand.

While the older wizard had thrived having time alone at the house, he'd undeniably been suffering while he was living a life of relative indolence.

When Harry returned to the room, he'd loaded up one chipped earthenware plate with a pot of bloater paste and the heel off of their loaf of bread—which was, for reasons Harry couldn't begin to understand, Snape's favourite part of the loaf—along with a bottle of Coca-Cola.

"Hey," Harry called, in an undertone, perhaps imagining he might cause Severus to spook like a horse with weak nerve.

When Snape didn't stir, Harry risked prodding him in the shin with his big toe. "Hey—"

Snape's hands shifted over his face so one, baleful black eye could be seen peeking out past his fingers.

"What—" he began, and then, when he caught sight of the offering the boy had brought with him, "oh... Harry, you needn't bring me food."

Harry shrugged and set his armful down on the floor near Snape's foot.

"I already ate when I got home," he explained.

Severus looked at him for a long moment, the gaze holding meaning that the boy couldn't guess at until he reached for the heel of bread and the knife Harry had provided, slathering the stale crust with puréed fish.

"How was the remainder of your week?" Snape asked between bites, pausing only to chew. "Have you been keeping caught up in maths?"

"Erm... sorta? Mr. Fowler is hard to follow sometimes..."

"What's that imbecile done now?" Snape spat, leaning forward. Ice may as well have been forming from his mouth for how cold his voice had gone.

Harry was momentarily rendered speechless. He'd been unprepared for the level of anger Snape had generated at the mere mention of his teacher.

"It's nothing that bad... it's just that when he does equations on the blackboard he goes too fast. I copied them down just as he'd done them, here—" Harry darted off to the kitchen to grab his notebook and returned flipping through the pages until he reached that day's maths instructional.

Snape watched him from behind the rim of the glass bottle. It seemed like he'd quaffed half of the entire Coke in one go.

He reached out one pale hand to receive the book, having since doffed the jacket and rolled his poloneck's sleeves up so that his skull and snake tattoo was visible on his inner arm.

Snape's black eyes darted over Harry's scrawlings, his countenance blackening by the second as he sipped at his drink.

Harry was quite unprepared when the empty bottle flew to the other end of the room and shattered against the wall, for Snape hadn't thrown it himself: it had ripped itself out of his hand and flown to its own demise, just as tendrils of Snape's lank hair were now stirring with a phantom wind that Harry couldn't perceive.

"Incurable idiocy!" Snape hissed, standing suddenly and beginning to pace about. Harry shrunk back and crouched by the sofa, near enough that he could duck behind it should more items begin to go flying. "It's no wonder that you'd done your equations poorly—the whole lot of these are wrong!"

"They are?" Harry's eyes rounded. He'd thought he'd just been too dim to follow...

"Here," Snape said, thrusting the notebook back to him and fetching up a pencil. "Do the first example in the margin, if you would."

"I'm meant to bring the four up to the top of the column, right?" Harry asked, frowning as he tapped his pencil to count along in his head while he did his figuring. "Cause, Mr. Fowler put a five—"

"Precisely," Snape snarled. "He's made elementary errors in each of these examples. He's completely innumerate."

"Why're you so angry about it?" Harry asked, his mouth twisting a bit with irritation. Sometimes Severus could be dreadfully dramatic. "It's no good reason to go about smashing bottles against the wall."

"That was involuntary," Snape snarled, though his ears coloured a bit red at the tips where they poked through the oily fall of his hair. "The man has no business being a teacher if he's cultivating an erroneous understanding of fundamentals in his students, and likewise if he's a complete incompetent in the face of an emergency—"

"You mean the yew berries?"

"I do. I'll tell you this: Fowler was lucky it was Miss Hill who'd eaten them and not yourself, for there would have been hell to pay had he bungled your own rescue so spectacularly."

"I thought you said that yew poisoning was hard to fix, anyways..."

"It is challenging, but his handle on the situation was such that I can't imagine he would have managed to save an imperiled student in any circumstance," Snape complained, continuing his pacing. He looked a bit like a caged lynx, stalking about from one end of his enclosure to the other and back again.

Harry wasn't exactly Mr. Fowler's biggest fan, but he'd mostly found his teacher to be unobjectionable, if unexceptional in any way. Even if his teacher was bad at maths, it seemed to him that Snape was being rather uncharitable. "Not everyone can poof around all over the place, Severus, I don't know what Mr. Fowler was meant to do. He sent students to call the emergency number and the nurse..."

"He ought to have been trained in rudimentary triage! Were I not able to rely on magic, I could have at least known how to diagnose the issue! One of the best courses of action would have been to force Miss Hill to vomit—"

"You didn't make her throw up."

"Only because I had a better solution at hand!"

"What are you mad about, Severus?" Harry challenged, rising from his crouch and facing off against the irate young man, his hands planted on his hips as he glared up into his guardian's strained features. "Are you mad 'cause Mr. Fowler didn't manage to save Snowdrop on his own, or 'cause it's not you who's a teacher that can do anything about it, yourself?"

Snape's mouth thinned into a tight, white line, and the area above his nose and nostrils wrinkled as he seemed to fight with himself to regain composure.

"Just be very grateful that you do have a direct line to me."

"I am." Harry soothed, he reached up to tug at Snape's sleeve where it was rolled up above his tattoo. "Snowdrop's lucky too, but don't expect any thanks from her."

Snape seemed to have calmed down a bit with the acknowledgement, even if he was still frowning deeply. "You really don't care for the girl, do you?"

"She's..." Harry searched for a word and couldn't think of one, until he recalled the interesting epithet from earlier that week, "a Harry-Dan."

This earned a snort from Snape who allowed Harry to tow him back to the sofa where they sat together. He even switched on the crummy television set and the grainy image—which was more a form of interpretive art than a proper programme—popped to life on the ancient tubes.

"I admit I thought you'd exaggerated after I'd cause to meet Snowdrop Hill's grandmother." Snape told him while an ad played.

"What's she like?"

Snape only shrugged as he rose for a moment to fetch something from the kitchen. He came back with another Coke for himself and a glass of milk for Harry who took it with a nod of thanks.

"She was very concerned for her granddaughter, as you might expect—or at least as one might hope." Snape answered. He was staring at the television but didn't seem to be seeing it. "She didn't arrive until a bit later during our meeting, and I'll admit I was grateful to have her there. It was one thing for me to be angry about the school's incompetence, but it was helpful to have someone there to represent the injured party directly."

"What were you there for, anyway?" Severus had never told him directly. He'd merely nosed around the issue by distracting Harry one way or another whenever the subject was brought up.

"I'm attempting to get the school to remove the yew tree," he admitted, frowning out at nothing. "I thought it a rather simple, reasonable request."

"There's a fence up around it now. I couldn't go over there for break—"

That caught Snape's attention. He turned an acrid, black eye on him and Harry felt the heat in his gaze, hot enough that he wished he'd not spoken. "You went over there again? After all that happened? What manner of idiot are you?"

"There's nowhere else to sit, Severus..." the boy objected, "I've not got any friends. And today Hill was back, and she was madder than a box of soaked cats when she saw it was blocked off. Mrs. Murray had to come out and bring her inside, 'cause she started yelling and trying to tear the fence down."

Snape shook his head, looking nearly amazed. "I fear the girl may be..." he let out a soft sigh and brought a hand up to rub at the space between his eyes and his eyebrows, closing his lids as he did so.

"What?"

"You mustn't mention this to anyone."

"I wouldn't!" Harry objected, turning his full attention on Snape, who looked exhausted beyond measure.

"I find myself wondering if the girl is a bit... touched."

Harry drew in a breath, finding himself momentarily speechless. "Oh..."

When Snape opened his eyes to watch for Harry's reaction, Harry let his breath out in a long stream. "I mean... yeah. Yeah, she might be, I dunno.

"I don't think I ever met anyone who was angrier than her," Harry admitted. "Even Dudley almost always did whatever he did for a lark. It wasn't usually because he was mad, unless he was having a fit if he didn't get his way, you know?"

Snape nodded along, even though he'd not ever met the boy about whom Harry was speaking. His head was resting in the palm of his hand as his fingers pressed into his cheek and the side of his face. He seemed to be following Harry's words closely.

"Snowdrop just... she's so mad. I don't mean like crazy mad... but then sometimes it's like she is a bit crazy..." Harry rambled, contradicting himself, "but she's mad at everyone. I hadn't even met her—you know, on my first day? When we got in that fight?—But she was already mad at me."

"As I mentioned, her grandmother seemed to me to be an attentive caregiver," Snape added. "Not that I've never known people to lie, but I spent the better part of the past seven years as a teacher—more specifically as a Head of House—and I had plenty of cause to meet for conferences with parents. I perceived nothing off about Pamina Hill."

"She brought in that little bell to show the class, Monday. I thought that was sort of weird. It's... I dunno. Maybe a bit girly of her."

Snape snorted. "Well, despite all evidence to the contrary, she's still a girl, Harry."

"No but... it seemed like it meant a lot to her. And then when she fell, it broke."

"Ah yes, that." Snape's mouth dropped open slightly. He shifted where he sat and shoved a hand down into his pocket, emerging with the pouch he'd used days before.

Harry's eyes widened in recognition. "Oh yeah—what is that?"

"An emergency potions kit," Severus murmured, pulling the string so it fell open. "I never leave the house without it."

He pointed the tip of his wand—which he'd withdrawn from somewhere up his sleeve—into the mouth of the bag.

"Reparo."

Then, reaching into the mouth of the pouch, his arm disappearing up to the elbow, he brought forth a tinkling porcelain bell. It featured a sweet little ribbon that wound in loop-de-loops around the mouth, painted in soft blues and pinks. The finial at the top was moulded in the shape of a slumbering, tow-haired baby, swaddled in a white cloth.

Severus turned the bell over in his hand so that the clapper chimed gently at the motion.

"1981, it says." He was squinting at the nearly incomprehensible script that decorated the bell's body. "I expect that this was given in commemoration of Miss Hill's birth."

"It seemed like it meant a lot to her." Harry repeated, peering closely at the delicate little thing cradled in Snape's palm. "And I don't think many things mean that much to her..."

"Or perhaps it is the case that everything means a great deal to her," Snape averred, seeming a bit far-away from the conversation. His eyes were looking to the bell in his hands, but he seemed elsewhere preoccupied...

Looking at the man with a bit of a quizzical expression, Harry merely shrugged. "Yeah, that could be."

Their weekend was spent on potions, at least the portions of it where Severus was at home. He was meant to train for a few hours both Saturday and Sunday for his new position as the barman for The Jiggered Yow, and Harry was already beginning to feel the stirrings of possessiveness over the hours he was away.

At the end of the day Sunday, with the next week of school looming, Snape brought home polystyrene boxes filled with cottage pie from his work, and over their shared supper, he filled Harry in on the plans he'd made for him.

He'd evidently phoned Snowdrop Hill's grandmother from the payphone outside of The Jiggered Yow and had arranged for Harry to spend the afternoons and evenings where Severus was meant to work late at their residence, which had his young ward feeling decidedly queasy.

Why was it that Harry couldn't seem to have any sort of run in with the girl that didn't end in calamitous disaster? She acted like a magnet. Wherever she dwelt, chaos was sure to come.

Since Harry already had suppositions about his own charms where such chaos was concerned, it seemed like a bad idea indeed to concentrate the power of that under the same roof.

"I think it's a bit mad, Severus..." he offered, as a rather tepid argument. It was all already arranged, and there likely could be no going back now. Besides, they dearly needed the money, and there weren't many places in town to work to begin with. The employment situation in Cokeworth, and in Backbarrow more broadly, had operated rather like a game of musical chairs after the closing of the Reckitt plant, and that Snape had managed to find a job was near enough to a miracle...

In fact it was rather suspicious. Harry wondered then whether magic might have been involved.

'Ah well. Gift horses, and all that.'

"If you can't manage yourself around a pint-sized girl for two nights a week, then I've vastly overestimated you, Potter." Snape grunted, using the tines of his fork to fish for rounds of carrot out of his pie.

"I think you're underestimating Snowdrop Hill." Harry grumbled back, shoving a wad of mashed potato into his mouth.

It was hard to speak around such a meal, really, because they didn't often eat so very well, or else they hadn't been recently. At the very least, The Jiggered Yow served food, and Severus had promised to bring back proper meals at the ends of his shifts. It'd go a long way in covering for the fact that most of their recent repasts had consisted primarily of bread, eggs, and potted or tinned foods.

Severus' first real shift was to start the Monday of that next week, and it was awfully lonely when Harry returned home from school to an empty house.

The boy fetched Wheat from upstairs and brought him into the sitting room with him as he worked on his homework, but the spider was a poor substitute for Severus.

When Snape finally did walk through the door, it was clear that he was in a towering temper and in no mood to talk, so Harry left him to it as he stormed into the kitchen and occupied himself with preparing yet another round of ingredients for his experiments.

The only way that the Potions Master could save himself from a long tenure of drudgery dealing with the drunken denizens of Backbarrow would be to make headway toward that ever elusive Big Idea that he needed.

If that couldn't be achieved, then neither could any improvement in their livelihoods, and so Harry kept his distance, wishing he could do more, especially as he heard the impassioned cursing coming from the other room.

It would do no good to mention to the older wizard how Harry was dreading spending the next day at Hill's grandmother's house. Anyway, it couldn't possibly be any worse than the times where he'd been left with Mrs. Figg, and Snowdrop was too small to do as much damage as Dudley.

She was a girl, so fighting back was out of the question, but perhaps there was another way?

Harry frowned down at his book. He'd lost interest in the assigned text hours ago and trying to make it through the chapter he'd been told to read was a joyless slog. There were too many other things to think about and wonder about.

Principally: what he ought to do about Snowdrop Hill.