A/N: I had planned to split this chapter but simply couldn't find a good place to do so, so enjoy an extra long chapter.

By the time that they'd made it home, Harry felt he might simply collapse.

Between the goofy chocolate—as he'd begun thinking of it in his head—and the dose of Skeletal Restorative that Healer Lundy had returned with soon after Dumbledore's arrival, he felt knackered. And that was without paying respect to the pain and stiffness he still felt, even after the potion eased the worst of his symptoms.

Healer Lundy had cautioned Snape that he'd need to use some sort of train spell to keep Harry still while he slept, until the boy could take the second dose, which sounded dubious to Harry's ears, but then again, Snape was the adult wizard, and he'd nodded along as though this prescription made perfect sense. For that matter, Dumbledore, while shooting him a sympathetic look, had also seemed like he agreed.

They'd spoken little about the ordeal out on the roads, but when Lundy left a second time, and Dumbledore had agreed to apparate them both home to Spinner's End, the headmaster finally broke his silence once within the confines of Snape's sitting room.

"I spent some time at the scene, observing while the muggle authorities cleaned up the... ahem... mess." Dumbledore informed his former employee. He looked tired in that moment, and rather regretful. "I'm sure I needn't tell you this myself, but there couldn't have been anything else for you to do."

Perhaps the only thing keeping Snape from glowering was the fact that he'd eaten at least half of the enormous bar of chocolate, having taken chomping bites at it whenever it looked as though his hysteria looked ready to rear its head once more. "I could have left well enough alone. I could have... I could have gotten word out to someone. Had someone call the emergency line..."

Dumbledore shook his white-maned head sadly, pulling off his tassel-topped hat—which coordinated with the colours of his robes—from the top of his head in a demonstration that might have suggested he was mourning. "It wouldn't have done any good, I'm afraid. You spared—"

"I killed."

"—you spared the poor fellow a long, painful wait for an all too certain end. Must you castigate yourself for an act of mercy?"

Snape's eyes cut to Harry who was standing at the corner, swaying on his feet as he listened. He pulled Dumbledore away, perhaps for privacy, but as he wasn't quite up to his normal standards of cognitive ability, it didn't seem that Snape knew Harry could still hear them from where he'd towed Dumbledore into the kitchen. Barring that, perhaps it was that he merely didn't care, and that the trappings of discretion meant more than attaining it in truth.

"I murdered a man tonight, Dumbledore. I took a life. That is a sin—a mortal sin," Harry heard Snape hiss.

There came a faint clicking sound, and once Dumbledore took up the thread of conversation, the boy wizard realised it must have been him clucking his tongue. "It can't have been your first."

"Not my... how can that matter!? Each—each and every one—a leaden weight on my soul, Dumbledore!"

"You've managed admirably thus far," the elder wizard dismissed in a mild voice.

"For so many of those transgressions I was deluded! I was... I was wrong but thought that I must have been right! And now? Now, I know better! To continue in that vein is... is..."

"Yes?"

Snape's words erupted from him now and it was a wonder that he'd bothered to step into the other room at all. As far as Harry was concerned, if he was planning to shout his grievances to the headmaster, they may as well have had it out in the sitting room. "It is to spit in His face! It is to mock truth itself!"

There came again the clicking sound. "Surely, it counts that you have done the highest good? That you have done your best—"

"So says you! Who is to say that what I did was borne of goodness?"

"Severus," Dumbledore's voice was infused with long-suffering patience, "you ended his suffering, which must have been great. To sit by and allow such suffering—to allow that magnitude of pain, for no other reason than to avoid taking decisive action—is to be permissive of great evil."

"No!" Snape ejaculated, the word emerging with such force that Harry winced.

"You don't think so?" The headmaster asked, sounding almost amused.

"It is a grave mistake to think that choosing the path of... of what one might wish—fervently, desperately, even—to be the highest good, cannot still be participating in evil." Snape seemed to be dragging in ragged breaths, and on the other side of the wall, from where Harry eavesdropped without needing to go about it with any finesse whatsoever, he too seemed to be struggling for breath.

It was one thing to have known what that green light must have meant. It was another to hear Snape admitting to it out loud.

"You will never, never, find me patting myself on the back because I chose to commit myself to the sin that happened to be more palatable."

"There couldn't have been another choice! Should not have been! I'm telling you it's alright, Severus! You did the right thing—" Dumbledore sounded rather put upon now, even as his voice was sympathetic, nearly repressively sympathetic.

"And I'm telling you that I don't answer to you!"

Silence reigned in the wake of Snape's words, which he'd very nearly shouted. Harry could hear the man hyperventilating in the next room and thought that it may very well have been his cue to go rescue Severus from Dumbledore's well-meaning nonsense.

The boy crept in, doing his best to remain small and unobtrusive even as he sought to break up the discord that had come to roost in the Snape family kitchen.

Grabbing at Snape's sleeve between his index finger and thumb, Harry tugged on the cotton material until his kuya chanced to look down at him.

Snape seemed to be in a sort of stupor, even though he'd been yelling at the top of his voice moments earlier. It was like making such a declaration had drained him. His black eyes were glassy, nearly sightless as he peered down at Harry's face, not quite seeing him.

As such, Harry addressed himself to Dumbledore instead. "Hey, erm... it's real late Mr. Dumbledore, 'n I've got loads to do in class tomorrow, 'n Severus has work," he wheedled, telling a bit of a fib. In point of fact, Snape was off that coming day. "Couldn't you... erm... could you come back later? Or something?"

The oldest wizard stared down at Harry, unblinking, reminding him of a giant bird of prey—though perhaps an affable one. In the space of a moment, the old man went from appearing indecisive and rather put-out to once more magnanimous and in-control. He stroked one hand down his beard, pulling the scraggly ends around the palm of his hand and tucking the length of it into the red leather sash at his waist.

"A most excellent idea, Harry. It wouldn't do for you to miss more class, especially as I am given to understand that you were absent Monday."

Snape began sputtering at the same moment that Harry piped up with: "Hey, how did you know—?"

Dumbledore turned to his guardian with a censorious expression. "Did you think for one second that I'd not be made aware that you escorted young Harry to Godric's Hollow? Did you imagine that I haven't pairs of eyes all over the village? Perhaps that you've given up your position amongst your brethren isn't such a travesty after all, Severus. You seem to have lost your edge."

"Lost my...? I am sharper than a shrake's spine!" Snape protested, sputtering a bit. He'd still seemingly not recovered himself, and the sight of the taciturn youth turning seven shades of crimson must have amused his former employer, for Dumbledore's posture softened, and he seemed to take pity on the younger man.

The old wizard smiled with benign tolerance as he nodded along, somehow looking at once condescending and generous. "Doubtless you are, my boy. I'm sure your reasons were the very best, given the occasion. Dare I say that compassion makes dullards of us all, but I'd rather be a man of strong character and smooth edges than one whose well-honed blade is made brittle with bitterness."

He bowed a bit, his eyes glinting in the scant lighting. "My best to you both. Good evening." And then he winked out of existence, as though he'd never been there.

Given the unreality of the rest of the evening, Harry nearly wondered whether he'd dreamt it all: the car crash, the Knight Bus, the queer hospital cum department store, Dumbledore. Why, perhaps he'd even dreamt up the fact that he'd been made to play act with Snowdrop earlier in the day. It had all run together like some sort of non-Newtonian sludge at the bottom of one of Snape's cauldrons.

They both stood staring at the spot of kitchen which had previously borne evidence of Dumbledore's presence, now barren of all that might suggest that anything out of the ordinary had happened.

"Right," Snape muttered, sounding inane and unlike himself. "Time for bed, I think."

Though Harry didn't say so aloud, he rather thought that Severus was at least a bit off his rocker and laid up on his arse if he imagined that either of them could hope to sleep after the night they'd had. He managed to keep this observation to himself, but only just.

"What about the Marina?" Harry asked, looking pointedly at the man's trouser pocket.

"She'll keep 'til tomorrow," Snape answered, his tone warning against further inquiry.

In truth, the Morris Marina would be kept waiting for days before Snape popped open the bonnet for a good look.

That night, Snape had urged Harry up the stairs, not leaving his side even as he changed out of his clothes—which still stank of manure—into his pajamas; though he did turn away toward the hallway to give the boy some privacy. Once Harry had settled in bed, he'd cast the prescribed spell at the boy to keep him from moving overmuch in his sleep.

That was when Harry learned that, for whatever incomprehensible reason, Locomotor mortis had nothing whatsoever to do with trains. Had he not been so tired, he might have fought back when he found his legs unexpectedly locked together and into place under the covers.

Even so, Snape didn't give him a chance to argue, sweeping out of the room and flipping the wall switch before Harry could even sputter an objection.

On Wednesday, both were too knackered to do much more than to place her out on the front kerb where Snape took his time locating a number of concrete blocks from the ruins of neighbouring properties. He set them about, erecting four pillars in a rectangle.

Snape had waited until Harry had made his way home from school, ostensibly so that the boy could help. Harry thought it more likely that Snape had been sleeping like the dead for the entire morning and most of the afternoon. Even so, he still looked like a wraith-like, spectral form of himself.

A bit of surreptitious wand work which effected no change that Harry could discern was allegedly for the purpose of redirecting any interest in their activities as Snape made short work of bringing the ruined car back to its proper size.

"Why're you removing the tyres?" Harry asked, nonplussed. Severus was knelt down by the front-right wheel well, using his wand to loosen up the bolts that held the wheel in place.

"So no one gets it in mind to steal the damn things," the older wizard grunted as he threw his weight against the corroded metal. Apparently even with his wand, it was still a labourious undertaking.

Finally, he managed to wrench it free, falling backwards onto his arse with the tyre nearly breaking free of his grasp. His face was flushed with the exertion, and his eyes still told tale of their ill-fated evening in the presence of purple-black smudges surrounding the sockets. He looked ghastly.

"Come and help me, damnit!"

Harry scrambled forward and relieved the man of his burden while Snape quickly scrambled to the rear-wheel well, starting the process anew. There wasn't much Harry could do to help besides ferrying the tyres to their front stoop, where they awaited the two wizards to take them inside where they could be locked up safe.

Once all four had been removed, Snape took a cautious look about the street, even with his assurances that his warding would suffice to keep curious muggle eyes averted, and levitated the wreckage onto the stacks of concrete blocks, affixing each pillar onto the axle with a subtle sticking charm.

He stepped back to appraise his work with his two hands fisted on his slim hips, shoulders heaving and out of breath.

Harry came up to about the man's mid chest as he walked to stand beside Severus.

"She looks bad. Real bad," he observed, wincing.

Snape turned his glower on the boy beside him.

"I'd like to see you do better under the circumstances," the man sneered, baring a butter-yellow canine with what would have been malice had he had the energy for such an emotion.

As it was, the remark was lacking Snape's usual spite. He just sounded tired.

"I didn't mean nothin'—"

Snape's hand came up from behind, cuffing Harry about the head—although with a lightness of touch which belied the fact that the man hadn't much meant it. "Anything, Potter."

"Anything?"

"You didn't mean anything."

"Oh," Harry muttered, looking up from under his fringe at Snape with a baleful stare as he rubbed at the spot on his head Snape he swatted. It was a bit of an act, as it didn't hurt and he'd barely felt it.

He'd already known that, in any case.

He wished that the man didn't have to always be such a damn stickler. Words were more fun when Harry could play with them as he liked, he considered with a frown.

Later that evening, they only really had the energy to look over Harry's homework, eat supper, and then they both found themselves tucked in at the early hour of nine.

It had been sheer dumb luck that Mr. Fowler had called on a different student for the readings that day, and that until the act had been read through, he hadn't any plans to review the vocabulary, otherwise Harry might have been in dire straits indeed.

Even knowing that Harry'd not had time to study, Snape likely would have insisted that Harry's grades were maintained. The younger wizard wouldn't have put it past Snape to decide that it was his extracurricular chores at Gammy Hill's that had resulted in the dip. After all, he was meant to be studying while he was there, and there had been plenty of time for it if he'd not instead chosen to avoid Snowdrop for all he was worth.

Things only felt like they were approaching normal by Thursday, but even so, the Marina sat, helpless and looking rather sad, until Severus' next day off, which was Sunday.

They'd made a token appearance at Mass that morning, for Severus had managed to stir himself enough to apparate them into Penrith, a chore that he seemed to be gradually warming to, even if he still only trusted himself with the finicky form of transportation if he knew his destination well and was calm enough to give the full benefit of his concentration to the task.

Whenever they did side-along, he would crouch down before Harry in the aftermath, surveying him closely and grilling the boy over whether he felt anything missing, even if it were half a toenail or a portion of the boy's eyebrows.

So far, Snape hadn't splinched either one of them, and Harry had to roll his eyes at the man's paranoia.

They'd explained the absence of the car to the Padiernoses with the excuse that they'd been made to park far away, which Lola hadn't questioned at all. She'd seemed far too grateful to have them in attendance to question anything of that nature, grabbing up Harry to her as soon as she saw them and reaching up on her tip toes to pinch one of Snape's gaunt cheeks, which saw the man sputter with exasperation and humiliation.

They returned an hour or so later and Snape bade Harry change out of his antique Sunday Best and into the clothes he'd worn when they had first met: a pair of jeans that perpetually wanted to fall to his knees, they were so large at the waist, and a t-shirt that could have fallen off his shoulder because it gaped so much at the neck.

He threw the old clothes on, not sure what Severus was about, and only paused long enough to toss a few crickets into Wheat's plastic enclosure, watching as the tarantula scoped out the new prey. Then it was down the stairs at a clip, where he jumped the final three of the flight, landing heavily enough on the floorboards that it was a wonder he didn't fall straight through into the cellar.

It took a moment to recover himself as the shock of it sent a sharp pain up his shins, but when he finally straightened and edged his way along the room with a hand supporting him against the wall, it was to see Snape's back as he bent over the kitchen table.

He'd laid out a stained, grey canvas which had been wrapped up in a long roll. His hand was pushing it along until it was fully unfurled on the empty portion of table that was devoid of brewing equipment.

"What's that?" Harry asked, approaching from the side. He looked from under Snape's arm as the man examined a line of tools.

"You can't possibly be that dim. What do you think these are? Toys?"

Harry glared up at him. "I know they're tools, Severus. But these aren't the ones we usually use for brewing—"

"Thank the Lord that at least that wasn't lost on you," Snape quipped, baring a canine in his amusement. "There's hope for you yet."

Harry bit down on his tongue to stem the flow of nasty things he desperately wanted to say in return to that. "What kind of tools are they?" He bit out instead, with exaggerated patience.

"They're for the car," Snape told him, pulling up a rachet and inspecting it. He found a spot of rust on the handle and frowned, rubbing at the reddened metal with his thumb. "Surface level," he muttered to himself, sounding a bit dubious but no less satisfied.

"How's that going to fix the frame?"

Snape picked five from the selection and rolled the canvas back, wrapping a length of rope around it to keep it from unrolling. The tools he'd selected he dropped into his belt between the belt loops and the canvas he tucked under one armpit.

"It won't," he sighed, straightening up and turning around to lean one hip against the Formica tabletop. Using the hand that wasn't holding the canvas under his arm, he rubbed the heel of his palm into his eyes so hard that he must have been seeing stars.

"We'll need magic for that. And we're lucky to have it too. In any other circumstances the car would have been a complete loss."

With that, he pushed from his reclining position and led the way outside, looking both ways up the empty street—and peering with suspicion into the barren windows of the nearby abandoned houses—before he began to toss out wards with short, discreet flicks of his wand, held at his side. He only arced it in the air for larger scale protections after the initial Notice-Me-Not charms had taken root.

He explained as he went, telling Harry between his incantations what each piece of magic in the chain was meant to be doing. To Harry it still sounded like discordant, made-up chanting, but it was admittedly fascinating to learn that magic could be so very particular. It was technical: not unlike the working of an engine. Incidentally, the thing Harry was most eager to lay his eyes upon and dive elbows-deep in.

He was gratified to learn that there was anything of the like in magic. To that point, he'd found himself rather dubious at the prospect of being a wizard at all. Sure, it could apparently make certain things in life easier, but at times it all seemed so arbitrary and ephemeral. Not like machines or the things proper, normal people did with the harder sciences.

Maybe, if he were lucky, there might be some way of using whatever strange talent was his birthright for something more substantial—something that made sense to him, anyway—out in the real world. The world of cars and cassette players, and not the world of triple-tiered, purple buses that popped all over the countryside. Not the world of tarted up mannequins that would make eyes at whomever was unlucky enough to need help at what was meant to be the wizarding world's premier hospital.

Unfortunately for him, their first order of business wasn't lifting the bonnet. Snape stood him by the kerb and instructed him to watch as he tapped out in a line along the twisted doorframe.

The window had, by some miracle, not shattered, and when Harry asked about it, Snape looked a bit sheepish as he admitted that he'd long ago painted them with a solution to prevent such damage after he'd broken the windows in a separate incident years before.

Harry's mouth worked with mute astonishment while he observed Snape's shoulders hunch up a bit from where he worked, turned away from the boy. "Wait, this wasn't your first crack up?"

Severus' reply, when it came, was terse. "No."

From the tone, Harry should have been warned off of asking more, but he couldn't help himself. "So, it's only been the two, right? 'Cause you should know to wear your seatbelt if you've been in two crashes... and... and now maybe you won't shift the way you've been—"

"I'll shift however it suits me to shift, Potter. And my use of a seatbelt is none of your concern! My driving wasn't what got us into that accident, and it may well have saved your skinny arse from ending up as roadkill."

Harry was undeterred. Snape often got into self-righteous snits like that when he was feeling defensive, which meant that Harry was onto something.

"So, how many crashes have you been in?" He persisted, crossing his arms over his chest as he hunched over a bit. The early November breeze was cold, and he'd not thought to throw a layer on over his light, summer shirt.

Snape didn't look back at him as he continued to right the wonky frame with more taps of his black, twisted wand to the metal. "That's none of your concern—"

"It is if you ever want me to sit in the car with you again!"

"Well, I suppose you'll be getting a lot of good-quality exercise, in that case," Snape tossed back, sounding unconcerned.

Harry glared at the man's back as he watched the miracle that was the crimping along the window smoothing out into the flawless lines he'd come to know and appreciate. There weren't even ripples in the paint, so good was Snape's workmanship.

"How are you doing that?" He asked the older wizard, impressed in spite of his resolution to remain contrary.

"I'm zhipp'ing it." Snape's wand continued its taps down the door, pulling the dents out and smoothing the ridges into quiescence beneath a steady flow of colourless, rippling magic, only visible by the way in which it distorted the air around it.

"No, but what's it really called?" Harry protested, growing tired of Snape's mockery of his ignorance.

"I suppose you could say it's a type of transfiguration. Though I'm not really changing any of the item's innate nature or magical structure." Snape paused, glancing up at the sky in thought for a minute. His wand he manipulated across the back of his fingertips in a neat little trick before it found its way back inside the wizard's palm. "It's more like I'm directing the flow into the physical substructure. When we heat water, the atoms move further apart to become vapour, and when water freezes into ice, the atoms become more compact in space—"

"What's an atom?"

"Don't interrupt," Snape admonished him, "I'm thinking." He cast a separate spell now, one he'd been casting at intervals the whole time, and a small portion of the twisted door near the handle briefly glowed gold.

"That's a temporal stasis—like what we use with potions to maintain a certain point in the brewing process without the potion maturing further. I'm using it here to hold the edges of the surrounding metal and paint covering so that when the piece I'm working on returns to the same state as its neighboring parts, it doesn't lose its integrity."

"Why would it?" Harry asked, once it was clear that Snape had finished speaking.

"This has the potential to make the metal very brittle and inconsistent, otherwise. And before you mouth off again, consider yourself lucky that I've done this before: it is my theory that in so doing, I've actually managed to improve on the integrity of the frame. Elsewise we may have found ourselves twisted along with the wreckage the other night."

Once again, Harry was forced to wonder exactly how many times the poor Marina had found itself warped spoke to wheel. Had that been the first time Severus had burst through a hedgerow? The first time he'd nearly flown through the windscreen? Harry had heard tell of newer cars with such things as airbags but he knew the Marina was too old to have had them fitted, and certainly none had come to their rescue when they'd careened off the road and through the field.

"The potion on the windows isn't the only thing you've done to it, is it?" He asked, looking at the humble little coupe with new eyes.

"Haven't you been listening?" Snape asked straightening on his haunches as he bent slightly left and right. His back let out a series of awful cracks, all the way up the man's spine, until he shrugged his shoulder blades and the last crack came from his neck, which was exposed as his curtain of greasy hair parted to either side around it. "I just told you I figured that the frame's been reinforced."

Harry shook his head with frustration and stalked forward, his hands still wedged under his armpits to conserve heat. He came up alongside Snape and pointed to the windscreen. "That should've broken! It should've! The front window nearly always shatters in the accidents I heard of! Even the lorry's window shattered! And you refuse to wear your seatbelt, I bet you're not worried at all! 'Cause you did something else! Something that works better," he charged, his green eyes flashing now with irritation and accusation.

Snape glowered up at him, a bit shorter than Harry while he was knelt down by the kerb. He didn't bother to get up and tower over the boy. He didn't really need to. Usually, his glare alone was enough to make the most intransigent of youths cower back and reconsider himself.

Harry didn't, however. Snape was all talk, anyways. He'd never once boxed Harry's ears, even when Harry figured he may well have deserved it. Severus had never even made him go to bed hungry.

He was like a kitten, really. A kitten with a loud yowl and a baleful stare, but no less a bit of a pussycat. A pushover.

"What else did you do, Severus?" Harry probed now, venturing to ask in a slightly plaintive tone. Perhaps, if he let up on the pressure, Snape would deign to answer instead of digging his heels in harder.

His tactic paid off when Snape snorted and turned back to his task. Harry watched with wide, fascinated eyes as the car looked as though it were being forged anew.

"Extensive cushioning charms throughout, and mild sticking charms that'll hold to the passenger's back and backside—it makes the use of seatbelts rather redundant."

"How are we able to get out then?" Harry asked, peering through the window as though he could see the charms Snape had mentioned. He couldn't. The interior remained unchanged. Nothing but brown leather seats that could use a good buffing. Cracking in some places and torn away from the upholstery piping in others. The fabric on the ceiling of the car was coming away in strips in some places and Harry turned an exasperated look to his guardian. He could have at least repaired those little, superficial details. Probably with ease. If Snape hadn't done so, it only could have been out of laziness; look at what he could do when he actually bothered to fix something broken.

"They're a bit different from a normal sticking charm—these are used for touring models of broomsticks, where the rider is going to be sat in one place for a long period of time. Sometimes, wizards have been known to snooze at the handle and they manage to slip from their perch: modified sticking charms have saved many a man from his death. Standing up on one's own isn't impeded by the charm, it's only involuntary movement that it prevents."

Harry found that explanation unsatisfactory in the extreme. How could a spell know such a thing? That, right there, was precisely why he found magic so ridiculous at times. Where and when it wanted to, it seemed that magic had a mind of its own, and those designing and using the spells were merely guessing at what the magic might have actually wanted to do and adjusting accordingly.

"How did they figure out it worked like that?" He asked. Snape had finally finished with the driver-side door and had stood, running a thin finger down over the paint as though checking it for flaws. He seemed satisfied with his work when he appraised the pad of his index finger and it came away clean. He then moved around Harry in order to approach the bonnet.

The hinge protested loudly as he lifted it with far more ease than Harry had managed a week before. "A lot of trial and error, I expect," the older wizard told Harry, while he propped the top open on a little metal arm. "Spell creation is a non-linear pursuit at the best of times, even when the sorcerer has done his due diligence in researching every last detail—"

"Have you ever made-up magic?" Harry moved now so that he was once again at Snape's side. He was attracted, rather as would have been a treasure hunter to a pile of gold doubloons, to the bounty contained within the engine chamber. Engines were a thing of beauty.

Deadly, powerful, unrelenting: but with the proper knowledge, they ought to be predictable, tamable. Not like magic at all, apparently.

Harry was reminded then of a song off of a soundtrack Severus had played once for him. When Harry had asked him over the cover art and name of the album—the same as the title of those magazines Harry had found stashed under the bed—Snape had pressed stop on the player quickly and switched to a Poison album, looking harried and, if possible, a bit sheepish.

But he'd not shut it off before Harry had heard a song by the same name as the album and magazine.

"Won't you take a ride, ride, ride

On Heavy Metal?
It's the only way that you can travel

Down that road—

"Satisfied-fied-fied

On Heavy Metal—
Baby won't you ride,

Ride it until it explodes—

"Heavy Metal!"

He still remembered the melody: a slow, slightly funky song. Echoing more than the music that Snape usually preferred. In point of fact, Harry assumed that the song Severus had actually wanted to listen to off of the album had been the one written by Severus' favourite vocalist, Sammy Hagar.

That song had also been called Heavy Metal, but it had been considerably more upbeat. The one Harry had begun to hum now as he stared down at the Marina's engine had been slightly eerie.

"I've created spells," Snape corrected, exasperation plain in his voice, "yes. Now stop humming, you're distracting me."

Harry paused for only a few seconds before he took it up again, waiting only long enough for Snape to begin checking over the gaskets as Harry had done only a week before.

In truth, it looked as though Snape had a far better idea of what he was about than Harry had.

"Good Lord—if you're going to insist on making noise, at least hum the better of the two! Don Felder is a goddamned hack."

"I don't remember the other one," Harry admitted, shifting his stance so he could see better.

Snape looked back at him, pulling a grim face, his mouth taunt in a thin line, but then a rare thing happened: the man began to hum it himself.

In the absence of music playing to obscure Snape's own voice, it was a rare thing for Severus to try his hand at producing such sounds himself. Indeed, his voice was a bit rusty with disuse, and also the clear fact that he felt embarrassed to be doing such a thing. His tone was suffering under its own weight, as it were.

In spite of himself, Harry grinned back at his kuya, who was pretending not to see him, perhaps thinking it would be easier if he ignored his audience. "Oh yeah, I think I remember that one," and then he took up the hum himself, less self-conscious than Snape was, and thus a bit louder.

Relieved of the burden of being the instrument, Snape bore the standard of frontman himself, and began to quietly sing the words, growing louder and bolder as he went on. His hands remained busy on the cast-iron engine, his lit-up wand in one hand, acting as a torch, and the other wielding a steel spanner.

"Headbangers in leather, sparks flyin' in the dead of the night! It all comes together when they shoot out the lights: 50 thousand watts of power—and it's pushin' overload—the beast is ready to devour all the metal they can hold...reachin' overload... start to explode!

Harry realised then that he remembered the words as well. Snape had played the album more times than he'd thought (or at least he'd played this particular song off of the album more than the one time), and now that he'd been prompted, the lyrics were coming to him, ready to fly loose. He joined Snape in singing the refrain.

"It's your one-way ticket to midnight! Call it Heavy Metal! Higher than high, feelin' just right! Call it Heavy Metal! Desperation on a red line! Call it Heavy Metal noiiiiise!"

They sang through the entire song, Harry only joining in on the verse he could remember that was repeated, and by the end of it, both were out of breath, but grinning widely—or at least what passed for a wide grin on Snape. More like a less-grim-than-normal smirk, although Harry did think he saw most of Severus' overcrowded teeth, and it seemed as though the smile might actually have reached his eyes.

"That was cool!" The child breathed, watching with rapt attention as Snape attempted to clean off a bit of engine oil from his spanner onto the edge of his black shirt. "We should do that all the time!"

"No." Snape spat, clamming up quickly. He was rubbing furiously with the cotton material against the oil and seemed to be growing more frustrated with each pass. Rather than removing the oil from the instrument, it seemed that his efforts were doing little more than spreading a broader layer of the stuff all over the spanner.

"Bloody stubborn—" he murmured to himself, fighting against the lubricant and failing. "Harry, go grab that degreaser we use for botched potions."

Harry turned away to do as he was bid, but not before turning back to ask, "Why don't you use magic?"

"The degreaser is magical, l'al fowt! Run and get it. And bring a rag!"

Harry darted back into the house and returned with the vessel of potion degreaser. Snape kept it stored in a ceramic jug that looked rather like the cartoon depictions of moonshine Harry had seen on the telly back when he could catch episodes behind the Dursleys' backs. It was glazed on the bottom, and unglazed up top, and a thick cork stopped the neck, which had a little loop one could carry the jug by.

He handed it over and watched as Snape uncorked the jug and dipped the spanner in by the end, withdrawing it and wiping at it with renewed vigour.

The grease did come away onto the rag... but it didn't come off of the spanner. It merely seemed to spread further and further, coating everywhere that it happened to touch. Before long, the rag was coated in the stuff and when Snape squeezed it in one frustrated fist, it shot out of his palm and flew further away than it ought to have.

"What the devil!?"

Several more minutes of effort produced only worse results, and Snape seemed to be growing both suspicious and furious by turns. Finally, he lifted the rag to his face—his fingertips now seemingly covered in the same substance he'd been attempting to remove—and sniffed delicately at the cotton.

"Merlin's great hairy—how did that get in there?"

Harry had been following the whole debacle with clear curiosity, even as Snape's face had grown more and more red. "How did what get in there, Severus?"

"It smells like that bloody bilge that blew up all over the kitchen last Monday! I've not even opened the bonnet since then," he continued on to himself, in a furious mutter. "How in the nine hells did it end up in the engine?"

Harry felt his face go bloodless. He knew it must be so, for it felt as though he may well faint dead away...

Oh no. Oh God... A disaster, this was a disaster... Severus couldn't know—

If he'd truly not wanted the man to know, however, he ought to have hidden his reaction better. As soon as Snape looked to Harry, who had fallen quiet, he must have had a rather strong intuition that the boy knew something of the ruined potion's misplacement in his oil sump.

The dark wizard stalked over, looming above Harry with his superior height, and thrust the filthy rag in Harry's face.

Harry scented what smelled suspiciously like a freshly opened jar of bloater paste.

He wrinkled his nose. It had never been his favourite thing to gnosh on—pretty rank stuff, in his opinion.

"Recognise this, Potter?" Snape breathed, his voice dangerously soft.

"Erm... I... it's familiar. Smells a bit fishy..."

Snape treated him to a pitying look which clearly obscured the simmering wrath which bubbled merrily below the surface.

"Fishy is right. I hope you won't begrudge a man a bit of help?" Severus posed, not waiting for an answer before he soldiered on. "I find myself... flummoxed," he drawled, a dangerous glint coming into his eyes as he dissembled. "How is it that a ruined potion—which only two wizards interacted with in any meaningful way—made it into the engine of our car. A car which, again, only two wizards—incidentally, the same two wizards—have had cause to mess about with?"

Harry took a deep breath, and when he tried to force words out, none came. He took another deep breath, feeling as though it wasn't filling his lungs properly.

"I..."

"Yes. You."

Harry felt himself quailing under Snape's acrid, black gaze. Each second that went by may as well have been yet another nail being driven into the lid on his coffin, slowly interring him, blow by blow.

"I..." he began again, refusing to look up at the young man who was doing his best to intimidate him. He swallowed. "When you sent me out, there wasn't much to do, was there? And I'd been meaning to pick up the stuff in the backseat for a while, it was beginning to reek—"

"And while you were at it, you thought you'd sabotage our only means of transportation—is that it, Potter?" Snape posed then, his voice deadly quiet.

Harry's head came up with a jerk, and his hands tangled themselves in the cotton of his shirt, nearly ripping it as he twisted it back and forth between his palms. "No! No, I'd never—why would I do that, Severus? Huh?"

When he dared to look up into the man's face, it was to see that Snape had pursed his lips, apparently considering the question. "I'll admit, I'm flummoxed."

"That's 'cause I didn't!" Harry cried, feeling a bit angry now. How dare Snape accuse him of such a thing! Given his well-known terror about crashes—which had now been borne out as a worthwhile phobia, given the events of a few nights ago—why would he risk doing something to endanger his own life in a car he had no choice but to sit in nearly every day?

"Harry, just because you didn't mean to compromise the engine—at least on purpose—doesn't mean that whatever it is that you did didn't, in fact, have that effect."

Harry swooned and Snape actually had to reach out a hand to steady him. In the end, he didn't actually grip him by the shoulder, however, given that his hand was slick with the slippery potion from Halloween. He ended up compromising by laying his forearm over Harry's shoulder with his hand hanging awkwardly over Harry's back, enough that it braced the boy and gave him something to lean against.

"I didn't... I didn't mean to, honestly, Severus! I only wanted... I only checked the dipstick! Then I wiped it off, just like you're meant to! I didn't do anything else!"

"Where did you wipe it?"

"On my..." Harry's eyes widened, and he felt a rush of panic and shame suffuse him. "Oh..."

"Where?" Snape demanded, his voice hard and emerging from his tightly drawn lips, stretched so wide and thin that he looked to be grimacing.

"On my trousers. I... I wiped it on my trousers..."

Snape removed his arm and looked as though he were about to push his fingers into his eye-sockets in order to massage them, but then he seemed to remember himself at the last second, yanking his hand away from his face and glaring at the potion staining his fingers with disdain.

"Did I cause the crash, Severus?"

Snape seemed too distracted to answer him directly, for he was preoccupied with using the same siphoning spell he'd employed earlier in the week to remove the oily potion from his skin. It seemed to be taking extra concentration given that he was made to cast the spell with his non-dominant hand. Instead of answering, he grunted as though he'd not heard the question.

"Eh?"

"Tuesday night? Was that... was that 'cause of me?" Harry asked, feeling as though he couldn't breathe.

A man had died that night. A man had died as a result of that crash, that may well have been Harry's doing...

Finally having cleaned his hand and seemingly cottoned on to Harry's meaning, Snape's head jerked up to look the boy in the eyes. He shook his head with firm resolution.

"No. In no way could that have been because of this."

"But—"

"We weren't at fault in that crash, Harry. The lorry flew around the bend, in the dark of the night, going well over the speed limit—"

"You're one to talk," Harry scoffed, slightly taken aback that Snape had the gall to criticise anyone for such a thing.

Snape. Snape of all people! For whom Harry had found several expired citations for speeding!

Severus, to his credit, continued on as though he'd not heard Harry, which he most certainly had, given the way his eyes had narrowed at the remark. "As a professional—and as a driver who is utilising narrow, twisting, back roads, at that—the folly was the man's own," he stated firmly, his words brooking no argument.

Then, turning to look at the engine once more, his face grew thoughtful, and he stroked his finger, now clean of the potion, on his drooping lower lip. "The Marina handled beautifully, all things considered... I'd thought she might have needed a tune-up and an oil change a bare week ago, but I hadn't the time..."

He approached the engine compartment then, looking speculatively at something which Harry couldn't identify, before he grabbed at a smaller spanner than he'd previously used, and a socket set which he deftly fitted together.

"Harry, come here." Snape's imperious voice drifted over to the boy, who had still been reeling over the thought that he might have brought about the ruin of another human. It startled him from his stupor, and he stumbled back over to Snape's side, standing before the front of the car.

"You can't use magic yet, and I'll need both of my hands for this," Snape explained, grabbing a small, aluminium torch that he'd stuffed into his belt in the kitchen. He held it out to Harry. "Direct the light under the engine block."

"Why?" Harry asked, using his thumb to slide the switch that caused the torch to flare to life. He did as he was bid, even as he waited for an explanation.

Snape had bent over at the waist, a position which looked near impossible, and had both arms extended in a strange contortion which had him looking as though he were hugging the engine. His cheek was pressed against it for a moment as he felt about underneath. "I'm going to remove the oil sump..."

"You're going to remove it!? You mean all the way?"

"Needs must," Snape grunted, cursing as his hands slipped on the handle of the socket spanner he held. "I've got to clean the potion out of the system somehow, and flushing oil's not going to get us anywhere..."

"Wouldn't it be easier to go from underneath the car?" Harry asked, knowing he'd seen men on their backs working from the bottom up before. It always seemed to be the way things were done in films, anyway.

"Of course, it would," Snape barked back at him, still feeling about blindly underneath the engine. "I'm checking to make sure it'll even be worth the effort to bother." He leaned over then, looking where the light was shining.

Seeming satisfied, he took the torch back from Harry and waved his wand over the body of the car.

Harry meant to ask what it was about, but Snape seemed to have anticipated his curiosity, for he was explaining himself even before Harry could get the question out.

"So it doesn't get any ideas about falling and pinning me until I expire on the asphalt."

Oh...

Harry winced, imagining the axles shifting on the stacked blocks and doing exactly that. The further he got into the graphic vision, the more he felt his stomach turning. By the time he saw Snape's booted feet kicking out in vain while his torso was trapped beneath the weight of the Marina, he was made to shake his head, hard, in an attempt to send the unwelcome thoughts fleeing away from his mind's eye.

When he came to, Snape was already knelt on the pavement, turning over until he was on his elbows, half reclined, and then leaning all the way down, down, down—where his back and skull finally were on the ground. He did a strange shimmy to bring his head and shoulders underneath the bumper, looking a bit like a flounder at the bottom of the ocean, shaking itself to bring sand and rocks up over its body for camouflage.

When he spoke, his voice sounded at once muffled and echo-y coming from beneath the car.

"I'm going to cast a stasis on the gaskets, so that when I remove the oil sump, the system hopefully won't leak."

"I thought you were trying to remove all the oil?" Harry asked, speaking to Snape's headless, armless body, lying prostrate on the ground. It was enough to turn his stomach, even though the man was still moving enough that it was clear he was very much alive.

"I don't want it to leak after I return the sump back to its proper place, you dunderhead! Maintaining the cork gaskets is the best hope of preserving the integrity of the seal. I'll determine how much of the oil will need to be removed after inspecting the sump—"

"Couldn't you just take out the drain plug and drip it dry?" Harry asked, thinking of the times he'd seen his uncle do that very thing. Either Snape didn't hear him, or he was ignoring him in favour of doing it his own way.

The boy let out a put-upon sigh.

It was night and day, the way Uncle Vernon and Severus worked on the car. For one thing, his uncle could never have dreamed of working his considerable girth underneath any of his Vauxhalls, even if they'd been suspended on five blocks, rather than the two-per-wheel that Snape had allotted for his purposes. He might never have been able to sit back up again, once he was down.

The other difference came in the lengths to which he was willing to go to service his own vehicle. Just about the only things that Vernon Dursley had known to do to maintain his own car was to check the oil dipstick, and to drain the oil completely whenever it was even slightly darker than cloudy. (In fact, he'd done it so often that Harry was made to wonder whether it was his constant fretting over the oil levels that hadn't actually damaged the gasket meant to keep the engine from leaking). Anything that seemed to be one step beyond these two rudimentary skills the man would farm out to a professional shop in Kingston, which he'd then spend the week following complaining about, insisting that the proprietors had robbed him blind. There had been a time or two where he'd even raised a ruckus about filing suit against the shop.

Snape, on the other hand, seemed bloody minded about doing every last thing himself if he could help it. Possibly to the point of folly.

Harry wasn't as convinced as it seemed that Severus was that the magic the older wizard had employed had actually reinforced the metal of the door frame, and he certainly felt dubious about some of the other modifications Snape had claimed to have made. Paired with Severus' callous disregard for his car while driving it, Harry had to wonder, once again, whether it wasn't the case that Snape was actually trying to punish the poor automobile for some imagined transgression.

He pondered this as he watched Snape's legs flailing a bit. The man was cursing as he struggled with the torch and the spanner at the same time.

At times, it seemed as though Snape resented the Marina as much as he was grudgingly grateful for it—but that was the case with so many things in the older wizard's life. Arguably, even Harry might have fit that description. Perhaps that was just Snape's way...

Harry could hear it as the oil sump came free, and Snape emitted a choked crow of victory, doing the same weird wiggle—although in reverse, this time—to extract himself from beneath the front. When he sat up, he reached back underneath to the shoulder and dragged forth the oil sump.

When he stood, he grasped Harry by the wrist and forced a handful of bolts into his palm, closing the boy's fingers over them. "Don't lose those, I need them."

"Er... alright."

Stooping now to grab up the sump, he lifted it until the sunlight fell upon the metal, examining it by tilting it back and forth.

It emitted that same, strange, fishy smell, but besides that—there was nothing out of the ordinary about it, from what Harry knew of such things. Admittedly, that wasn't a whole lot.

Yet, something about its presentation must have struck Snape as odd, for he began to glower down at the pan as he turned it this way and that in the light, looking into the reservoir from all angles.

"No..."

Cradling it in one arm, he took a finger and drew it through the golden oil at the bottom of the pan, scraping it along the side. He brought the finger up before his eyes and rubbed at the oil between his index finger and his thumb, his expression growing more querulous by the moment.

"It looks fine, Severus..." Harry ventured to say, not understanding Snape's clear irritation. "What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing," Severus answered, though his face looked, if anything, angry at having to admit such a thing. "Not a damn thing—it's... it's like it's brand bloody new..."

"That's great!"

"No, you half-wit! I've not changed the oil in this bucket of lugs for going on five years! The sump ought to be filthy!" He eyed it with the utmost suspicion. "There should be black gunk all over the sides—the oil ought to at least be brown by now... it looks fresh as a newly minted galleon."

Blinking, Snape strode over to the open bonnet and checked the dipstick once more, holding his finger up against the stick to compare the oil on each.

"Harry, when you looked at the dipstick earlier, what colour was the oil?"

"Er... it was pretty dark. Really grotty looking."

Snape straightened then and leaned his hip against the car's open front, holding the oil sump balanced against his stomach in the crook of his arm. He held his fingers in the light, still moving the engine oil between the pads of his fingers as he considered it. He no longer appeared angry, but intrigued.

"Either someone came and flushed the whole system for us—and cleaned the sump to boot—or that absolute disaster of a potion actually did some good," he sounded as though he were marveling to himself as he spoke, he said it in such a low, incredulous tone.

"What do you mean?" Harry asked, coming to the front of the car and mirroring Severus' stance. He crossed his arms again to protect against the breeze that was chilling him, but also because he thought it made him look a bit cool. A bit more like Severus' own disaffected posture. Harry tried to look and sound as though he didn't care much whether or not Snape answered this question, even though he was burning up with curiosity.

The fouled-up potion. Made with his ingredients...

"Only that I think that cauldron of slop might have been worth its weight in sterling."

Harry could have cheered. He kept it under wraps, but only just.

He was meant to be playing it cool, after all. Cool like Severus.

A/N: Guys, I know nothing about cars. Please forgive me lmao