A/N: I'm really happy to report that within an hour of posting the last chapter, an update from Cliff's family came through about his condition. He's out of the hospital and recovering at home now, though it was apparently pretty touch and go for a while. If anyone is interested in further updates on that score, his Facebook page (Clifford Hoad – Kings of the Sun) is the place to go.

Music class the next day was perhaps the most awkward thing Harry had ever been forced to sit through, and not just because both he and Ms. Tibbons were visibly exhausted from the late night they'd had.

It had taken the woman a shamefully long time to look down at Snape's side and to notice that the man she'd recognised from years before was supervising one of her own students.

Of course, there were many possible excuses for that, but the most proximate cause was likely that she'd been at least a little bit drunk.

Once she'd finally spotted him, her enthusiastic embrace of Snape as her saviour had seemed to dry up before their eyes, and Ms. Tibbons was now mumbling apologies, even as her glazed-over eyes still sought out Severus' form with an odd sense of urgency and something else... perhaps curiosity, if the way her eyes darted between Harry and his guardian was any indication.

Even now, she seemed to be staring at Harry far more often than was usual for the woman, between sips of her abnormally strong tea (which was festooned with the tags of three separate teabags along the rim).

Their work for that day was in building on the preceding rhythm. Three or four different drums and rattles circulated around the ring of chairs, and it was obvious that the noise being produced was agonising for her, as she winced each time the head of the drums were struck.

'Well, why put us on drums at all then,' Harry scowled as he relinquished the drum to the next girl in line, his thoughts trending in an uncharitable direction. 'Should have done scales again or something, simple as.'

His anger at seeing his teacher after the KISS concert was unaccounted for. All that he knew—and really, if he knew it at all, it was somewhere distant, in the background of his consciousness—was that his regard for the woman, both as Ms. Tibbons and as the helpless damsel he'd pitied so much the evening before, had undergone a full-scale pivot to the opposite direction.

What was most annoying was that for all that she seemed more curious about him, she didn't seem to see at all how Harry was now sulking and avoiding her.

After class she beckoned him aside, and with supreme reluctance, Harry walked with a slump until he stood before the upright piano where Ms. Tibbon's fingers—painted with that, now familiar, shade of red—ghosted the keys without depressing any of them. She looked faintly nervous, and Harry noticed with a trace of detached fascination that some of her nail varnish had chipped off during the assault.

That produced enough of a stab of pity that Harry at least bothered to heed her words, even if he only picked up the thread of conversation a sentence or two in.

"—say it was a surprise to see you there with Sevvy last night. You ought to understand, I wouldn't have gone to the concert if I'd suspected a student would be there. Given that it was late on a Wednesday night, and a two-hour drive away, I didn't expect to see anyone I knew."

Harry glared at the shiny top of the piano, obscured as it was with books of scores. "Yeah, well, I won us tickets from Key 103's sweepstakes. Don't think we'd have gone if I hadn't..."

"How is it..." she began, pausing to order her thoughts, "how is it that you know Sevvy, Harry? Is he some relation of yours?"

Harry bristled. That was the only real reason she cared! Sevvy. He snorted aloud. It was a good thing he knew full well that Snape probably hated that nickname with every ounce of antipathy he could muster.

It was little consolation, but just enough to keep the spite from Harry's voice as he answered.

"Severus was a friend of my mum's. I'm staying with him—he's got custodianship, 'cause my aunt passed up on it." It was a minor fib, but Harry still wasn't ready to talk to anyone about that week when he'd been abandoned and how he'd cleaved to Severus to save him from being lost, adrift.

"Oh," she murmured, perhaps attempting to look cool and collected and not quite pulling it off. Harry thought he may have detected a flash of something when he'd mentioned his mother, but it passed too quickly for him to be sure. "I'd wondered if maybe he was your father—or perhaps an older brother."

"Severus hasn't got any brothers or sisters," Harry informed her, shaking his head. "He's not my father, he just looks out for me now."

"Doesn't he have any children of his own? It's very kind of him to open his home up for you..."

Harry's mouth drew into a thin line, as he'd so often seen Severus' own do whenever Snape was growing irritated. "Nope," he enunciated, allowing the 'p' to pop on his lips like a bubble. "It's just the two of us. It is pretty big of him," Harry granted, feeling the wash of shame over Snape's choice to take him in once more. "He quit his job and everything so that he could stay with me while I finish school."

Ms. Tibbons chuckled a bit, no longer looking so very shifty. "It'll be years before you're out of school, Harry—I'm sure he'll have to work in the meantime."

"I mean so I can finish up here, at Rowky Syke. Severus quit his job at a secondary school because they require boarding, and I'm too young. I'm meant to go there after I'm done here. Maybe they'll give him his job back..." Harry muttered, not able to help the stirring of hopefulness he felt when he considered that perhaps Snape wasn't doomed to drudgery forever. "And he still works, Ms. Tibbons. He's a barman at The Jiggered Yow."

"Is he really? How strange, I didn't see him there over the summer..."

The boy only barely managed to avoid rolling his eyes when he detected the hint of wistfulness in Ms. Tibbons' enquiry-that-wasn't-an-enquiry. "He only just got hired on this last month. He's there five nights a week, you can't miss him, really."

His teacher released him back to Mr. Fowler's room after that, her eyes having adopted a far-away look that Harry resented deeply, even if he still couldn't understand the origins of his profound sense of irritation.

That entire aside had been about Snape.

Sevvy, Sevvy, Sevvy.

The more the saccharine name rang in his ears the more Harry hated it, and by the time that he arrived home and the man himself walked in the door, he'd worked up into a fine temper over the whole thing.

Even Snape's own even disposition and polystyrene box of roast chicken and potatoes couldn't quite pull Harry out of his snit, and half-way through dinner, evidently having had enough of Harry's one-word answers and grunts, Snape snapped.

"I see you've managed to fully advance five years in one night—I trust I'll need reminding in the future to never bring you along to a concert ever again. It apparently has the capability of turning otherwise unobjectionable eight-year-olds into rude adolescents. Perhaps the big talking heads were right about rock music, after all."

"What are you talking about?" Harry snarled as he pushed a bit of potato through a pool of gravy.

Snape's hand slapped down on the tabletop, and the dishes and pushed-aside potions equipment all jumped a bit with the force. "This attitude you seem to have developed since I sent you off for school this morning."

"It's not the concert! That's stupid—"

"Oh good," Snape intoned as he leaned back from his dinner, folding his arms over his chest, "I should hate to think that by giving into one single whim of yours that I'd have spoilt you beyond recognition."

"I'm not spoilt!" Harry objected, not able to suppress the anger creeping into his voice.

At this the older wizard leaned forward to loom over the table. "You'll mind your tone, or else you'll be treated as though you're spoilt, because you're certainly acting the part, Potter."

Harry's mouth moved, but through sheer force of will he withheld the words that wanted to spill past his lips. In the end, the effort had his lower lip drooping in a pout that spoke to his sense of bewilderment and defeat.

By now he had to think hard to remember why it was he was feeling so cross to begin with, and he didn't care for the sense that he's perhaps treated Severus unfairly, especially after going out to the concert together. It had seemed momentous, and while Harry felt it brought them closer, Snape now seemed under the impression that Harry was using the milestone in order to take liberties with how he treated the elder wizard in his own home.

"Well? Anything else to say, ye l'al fowt?" His guardian prompted, his voice so smooth that Harry heard the implicit threat that ran like a dangerous electric current under the words.

Worse, he couldn't quite divine what a 'fowt' was, from Snape's phrasing alone, and Snape seemed to know it, which left Harry to admit defeat, with halting reticence. "N-no."

"Then perhaps you will take half a moment to think over why it is that you're behaving worse than one of my third-years caught smuggling contraband through the corridors."

The prongs of Harry's fork took another long sojourn through the gravy, pulling four parallel lines of brown across the bottom of his plate. "What's contraband?" He asked, finally.

"Irrelevant, Potter. Try again."

"Why did..." the words emerged before Harry even knew what he was asking, and it was only after the initial phrasing that he realised what it was that was stuck so firmly in his craw. "How did Ms. Tibbons know you?"

Snape's mouth twisted in resentment and Harry thought he might have seen that faint, off-pink blush that Snape seemed partial to creeping up to his ears. "How is it that you know her?"

Harry's head jerked in sharp indignation, so quick that his glasses dislodged from the bridge of his nose. He hastened to fix them, but couldn't help the irritation in his voice that escaped in response to Snape's obvious defensiveness. "I asked first—"

"Yes, well, it is said that turnabout is fair play."

Something about this repartee struck Harry as both disingenuous and thoroughly wrong, but he was momentarily flustered by Snape's lightning quick response, and could find no way to argue against such a universally accepted saying.

"Ms. Tibbons is our music teacher," he answered at great length and with almost insurmountable reluctance.

He didn't like the complication that it added in knowing that Snape knew Ms. Tibbons. He felt an all-encompassing desire to keep his teacher to himself, and he felt a similar desire surrounding Snape; not liking at all that he may have to share his guardian with any prior acquaintance that might make demands of him.

It was a deep-seated impulse, and he couldn't for the life of him figure out what it was that he feared happening, nor why he had the knee-jerk intuition that suggested that Snape and Ms. Tibbons might prove to be reactionary components in some mystery potion; and a potion with such dubious qualities and potential applications, to boot.

The silence stretched between them before Snape finally seemed to remember that he ought to acknowledge the scrap of information that Harry had begrudgingly offered up to him.

His response was anything but satisfactory.

"Mmm."

His fork clattering to the plate as he gave up any pretense of caring for his food, Harry scowled at the older wizard who was feigning an appetite for the chicken he'd brought home. "That's it? 'Mmm?'"

"What would you have me say?"

"Tell me why she keeps calling you 'Sevvy!'" Harry demanded, feeling his face flushing as the words spilled, unchecked, past his lips.

They'd both given up on their dinners now, and Snape scowled at the half-eaten plates, muttering something about waste as he rose to collect one in each hand and ferried them to the sink.

"I certainly never invited anyone to call me that—"

"I didn't think you would've!" Harry crowed, feeling offense on the Severus' behalf.

"If you're quite finished being a right brattle can?" Snape snarled, his hair whipping around his shoulders as his head jerked to pin Harry with his flinty stare. "Done? Might I continue answering the questions you have so impertinently decided to demand I answer? Little Lord? My liege—"

"Severus stop—" Harry moaned, clutching at the hair on the sides of his head, along with his ears. He attempted to pull the too-short strands to cover at his face, feeling annoyed and humiliated. "I'm sorry, alright? I'm real sorry..."

"She calls me Sevvy because every kid that grew up on Spinner's End knew me as 'Sevvy.'" Snape growled. He had grabbed up his wand and was using the tip to blast bits of potato off into the rubbish bin by the bench, the shocking flashes of magic seeming to intensify with every word. He just as easily could have scourgified the plate and been done with it, but he seemed to be taking especial pleasure from sending the bits of food flying into the air.

"She's from here? Not—I mean, not Backbarrow, obviously—but from this place?"

"I barely remember her at all, Harry. I don't think I ever spoke more than two words to her, and that was when I'd be at her door calling on her brother. Probably something along the lines of, 'Where's Bertie?' Can't say she's all that recognisable compared to how she used to look." Snape seemed to be relaxing, either the details he was divulging or the exercise in magic helping to relieve some of his anger.

"Oh." Harry felt like laughing then. Snape truly seemed rather annoyed by the entire thing, and—as Harry now remembered—he'd seemed annoyed the night before, too.

"So then, why's she acting like she knows you so well?"

"Who knows?" Snape gave an expressive shrug of his shoulders as he threw a dish towel at Harry. "You dry."

Approaching the bench beside Snape, Harry received each plate and utensil that Severus washed up and replaced them on the wall-mounted rack where they belonged.

There were no more dust ups that evening, and Severus checked over Harry's homework as had become their custom.

The next day was one of Severus' late-night shifts, and Harry anticipated that he'd be going home with Gammy and Snowdrop Hill. By the time that he made it out to the pristine Ford Cortina, however, he was surprised to see that Nicky Henderson was once again lounging on the back bench, needling his younger sister over something that had happened during break that week.

When Harry managed to squeeze his way into the rear of the car, he only caught the tail end of the argument, and by then, Gammy was the one settling it.

"I don't suppose you'll be wanting to see to Babs and the chickens when we get home, Nick?"

"I don't suppose I will," Nicky turned his nose up a bit, and appeared quite sullen. From the front seat, Snowdrop leaned over and stuck her tongue out.

Although Gammy saw her do it, she merely let out a tired sigh of resignation, but seemed to accept that the bickering had come to a close for the time being.

"Hi, Mrs. Hill." Harry finally felt safe to say. He'd buckled himself into the bench seat and sat with his hands clasped between his knees, still feeling entirely uncomfortable. It was bad enough when it was just Snowdrop, but the hostility that came from both children being confined together in one car felt as thick as pea soup.

"Good afternoon, Harry," Gammy smiled through the rear-mirror at him, her relief palpable. For the rest of the drive, she quizzed Harry over his day at school rather than her own grandchildren, who seemed equally as amenable to that as Harry and Gammy were.

"And you've been keeping up on your skill-sheets, just fine?"

"I think so," Harry answered. "I still don't really understand what a prepositional phrase is. Like, I can't point it out the way Mr. Fowler wants, and Severus won't tell me the proper answers, he only tells me when I'm wrong... so this last time I only got a 7/10 because I missed those questions—"

"I'm sure with a bit more practise you'll have it down pat," Gammy assured him. "What about you two? How'd you fare on your quiz, Snowdrop? Nick?"

"Six out of ten," Nicky rattled off at the same time that Snowdrop said in a bored drone: "Full points."

Gammy seemed to hesitate a moment before she reached over to pat Snowdrop's hand (which the girl snatched away with a violent jerk), "Well done, dear. Nick, I'm sure your score could be improved with only a little bit of study. Perhaps you and Harry could work together to that end?"

Nicky cast a sidelong look at Harry that suggested he thought that the studying was beneath him and that he thought Harry ought to share that opinion. It was just as well that Harry did. Severus was enough of a taskmaster. He enjoyed his time talking music and films with Nicky much better. Besides, he wasn't sure he'd trust the other boy to know what a prepositional phrase was any better than he did himself.

And he certainly wasn't about to ask Snowdrop.

"Mrs. Hill, maybe I could help with Babs and the chickens?" Harry ventured. He wasn't much in the mood to play referee between the two estranged siblings, and it usually took the woman a solid hour to do the milking and to tend to the sundry tasks she undertook around the barn.

"You've never milked before, have you?" Gammy asked him, sounding somewhat dubious.

His tongue darted out to lick his lips. "Er... no. But I'm a fast learner—Severus said so. I wanna learn, then I can help later on, too."

This was accepted without much more fuss, and when the Ford Cortina pulled up the drive to the gate it was Nicky who darted out to open it for his grandmother's car.

"That's my job, Gammy!" Snowdrop whinged, as she made to open the door even as the car moved forward.

"Snowdrop Margot! You close that door this instant!"

"Gammy—"

"If Harry hadn't already volunteered, just for that little madam, you'd be out in your boots with a shovel—"

At this, Snowdrop seemed to gloat for a moment, throwing a superior look Harry's way. "I'm sure you'll love mucking the stalls—"

The argument carried on until Snowdrop was at the brink of losing her pudding privileges, but Harry tuned it out. The Hill family was exhausting, and when Nicky was in residence, it only made things more taunt and uncomfortable.

He thought, just maybe, he'd quite like mucking out the stalls if it meant that he could have some peace and quiet for the afternoon.

"I've some boots that Nicky usually uses when he's here, Harry. They're in the cupboard if you'd like to try them on—you look like you're likely the same size. While you're in there, fetch the pail, if you wouldn't mind?"

They'd all entered the home and Harry ducked into the cupboard to unearth the dirt-caked rubber boots—which fit him with an inch to spare at the toes—and the same pail he'd seen Snowdrop take her Gammy each time they came home after school.

He was quick to pull the boots on over his socks, and he left his own trainers by the door, rushing out as fast as he could manage so that the quarreling voices of Snowdrop and Nicky faded into the distant background.

Outside it was so much more serene.

This part of Cumbria was truly beautiful. Around him he could spot several other enclosed farms in the distance, herds of sheep and hedgerows interspersing the landscape. The cloud cover that day was low, grey. Anyone else might have thought it depressing, but the slight threat of rain had built up the billowing vapour into tall, castle-like configurations that might have gone on upwards for miles.

He could taste the moisture in the air; the slight bite of first frost. For a moment, he envisioned himself as a farmer from an earlier century, like he'd heard about from story books. He had to get his crop in. He had to prepare. Winter was on the way. With the great chill, and the fields laying fallow, he and his would have only what they could glean in these last few months...

"The coop's out this way," Gammy called to him, interrupting his daydream. She set him first to scattering feed for the flock of hens, and thus, his life as Farmer Harry was begun.

As it turned out, toiling hard at farmers' chores wasn't nearly as romantic as Harry had imagined. It was a good thing that he was well accustomed to hard work.

"Fancy that, you've not complained even once," Gammy marveled as Harry made efficient work of using his pitchfork to toss the manure out of the stalls.

Stopping momentarily to wipe at his brow with the back of one smelly hand, Harry felt himself grin. "It's a bit fun," he admitted. Not so much because he enjoyed the act of flinging faeces about, but because he'd had precious few chances to really work hard while he'd resided with Severus.

He helped in the kitchen and with potions, sure, and he didn't miss the Dursley's idea of chores even one iota... but Harry had always relished the feeling of a job well done, and he'd at least taken satisfaction in doing the work that his relatives deemed too degrading to do themselves.

Combined with the rush of adrenaline that came from the hard, physical labour, the sense of pride in his accomplishments was substantial. Far more than any good grades he took home to Severus. He'd missed it.

"Mrs. Hill?" He began again, scraping at the corner where the wood met stone. He was nothing if not thorough.

"Mm?" The woman was occupied in another stall, freshening up the tubs of water for her animals and laying out new straw.

"Can I do this every time I come?"

She paused and came over to inspect his progress, ducking to avoid a bit of poo that had flung far off target. "You're doing good work, it seems. I'd hate to take advantage though, Harry. I'm not sure why you'd want to."

"You mean I can't?" He asked, feeling a bit disappointed.

Severus wouldn't let him work on the new potion... and probably Gammy Hill wouldn't let him take out his frustrations on the mountain of chores around her farm.

At least with Severus, he understood the reasons why, even if he thought the wizard was being rather persnickety about his brewing practises...

"Now listen," she grabbed hold of the pitchfork and liberated it from Harry's grasp. "Come watch while I milk Babs, we can talk about it."

"Can I milk her?"

"After you've watched how I do it," she granted.

Her hands she washed at an old hand-pump outside the barn.

They set the sweet Friesian up in an improvised lumber stock and Gammy directed Harry to fill a pail beneath her head with alfalfa and clover.

Then, the pair sat across from one another, each perched on short little stools, as Gammy washed-up Babs' udders with a soft flannel and began to express the milk into a milk pail.

Harry watched with his eyes widened in enraptured fascination.

"Why do you want to help out with the chores, Harry?" Gammy asked, once she'd gotten started. Her old hands flexed around the teats rhythmically as she spoke.

"I dunno," he hedged, scratching at an errant cowlick with one dirty finger. "I like it. The work, that is. Severus doesn't make me work much around the house. Which is nice, you know? 'Cause he told me he didn't bring me back to Cokeworth to be a house—" he stopped himself. He'd very nearly said 'house-elf.'

"A-a servant." He finished.

"No chores at all?" Gammy asked, still engaged in her work. "From my dealings with Mr. Snape I haven't found him to be one of those namby-pamby soft-touch types—"

"He's not." Harry agreed. "But... erm... my relatives—who used to have me?—with them, I did all the chores. And I think this is kind of his way of not wanting to be like them."

Her hands stopped for a second on the udders at the admission. A moment later they resumed. The loud hiss of the stream of milk hitting the pail was soothing.

"I still do chores, just... Severus doesn't care much whether the floors are clean, or if there's cobwebs up in the corners."

Gammy trilled a small laugh. "I wouldn't imagine so. He's rather young to be watching out for a l'al bairn like yourself, and a bachelor to boot. Not many men his age care so very much about housekeeping, particularly when there's no lady of the house to keep happy."

"No kidding," Harry muttered, thinking of the state of Spinner's End. It wasn't quite to the point of being unforgivably filthy, but Snape certainly only maintained it at a bare minimum of acceptable standards, at least as far as Harry was concerned.

He still remembered the one time he'd attempted to scrub the baseboards. Severus had not only been perplexed that Harry should extend the effort, he'd seemed rather annoyed that Harry thought it was his remit at all.

Finally, Gammy pointed Harry outside to wash up himself before he was to try his hand at the udders.

"Put your hand here," Gammy directed him, showing Harry how he ought to make a ring with his index and thumb around the teat and to pull downward, using his other three fingers to squeeze the fleshy part against his palm.

"A little harder—or perhaps I should say more firmly—you'll not hurt her."

Harry tried a few experimental squeezes, attempting to use the same rhythm that Gammy herself had been using while she'd milked Babs with well-practised efficiency borne from years of experience. After a few faltering spurts from the teat, he finally managed to get a solid stream and grinned, though Gammy couldn't see it from where she sat on the other side of the cow.

"That's the ticket! Think you can do the rest?"

He'd already started in, even had she not extended the invitation to him.

With a touch of wistfulness, he caught himself wishing that he could stick around the Hill's plot of land all day doing God knew what for Gammy instead of spending his days in Mr. Fowler's class.

Harry was so absorbed in the task that he wasn't quite ready with his customary defensiveness when the woman began to grill him over Snape. "You and your Severus seem happy enough. I think it sounded as though it was probably a bit of a trial for you."

"I dunno. I didn't realise they'd left until after it was all over."

"Not only them leaving, Harry. Mr. Snape informed me you also had to go for a short stay in hospital?"

"Oh yeah," Harry paused for a moment to relieve a cramp in his palm before he took up the udder in his hands again. "That wasn't very fun, but Severus was there for it all, so it wasn't really that bad, either."

"I think if either Snowdrop or Nicky had needed emergency surgery that I'd have been facing a lot of tender feelings about it. I suppose it just surprises me to hear how you took it all in stride."

"Tender feelings?" Harry repeated, his voice slightly incredulous. "From Snowdrop?"

"Ach. Don't be letting her know I've said anything about her, mind you—but all of her feelings are rather tender, where it counts."

Harry merely shrugged, feeling rather dubious about such information. Snowdrop was about the least tenderhearted person he could imagine. Doubtless Severus could have come up with a long vocabulary list of more appropriate and impressive words to describe the girl, but Harry's picks would have been the following: mean, angry, and at least a little bit crazy.

"You seem to know a lot about what happened. Did Severus tell you everything?" Although he didn't truly resent that the woman might have known—Gammy Hill was a sweet lady, all things considered—he couldn't help but to be a bit put out that Snape might have been discussing his personal business behind his back.

"Just bits and bobs, here and there. We had a bit of time to discuss it before meeting with Ms. Shaw the other day."

Harry frowned deeply, trying to think of when that could have been where Snape would have had time to meet with both the headmistress and Mrs. Hill. "The other day? When was that?"

"Two days ago, I believe—why, yes. Yes, it was Wednesday."

That was the day of the concert... and that afternoon, when Snape had come to fetch him from school, he'd been cross about a visit from that Malfoy person... he'd not mentioned that he'd been to Rowky Syke that day.

"I didn't know anything about it," he mumbled, using one stream to squirt at a conglomeration of bubbles that were clinging to the edge of the pail. To his disappointment, it didn't disperse them. It only served to create more bubbles.

"It was all rather last minute, you understand. I spoke to him when he arrived on Tuesday to pick you up to ask when he'd be next available, and given that his day off is on Wednesday, we saw no reason to delay our meeting. Of course, midway through he hurried off—I don't suppose you know why it was that he'd run off?"

That must have been when that rich friend of his had arrived. Harry knew full well that Snape's wards likely alerted him to someone—particularly a magical someone—approaching the door. Given that he had no alibi to offer, he was made to lie.

"No..."

"Ah. Well, I suppose it'll be just a mystery then. Perhaps I'll have a chance to ask him tonight, and we can plan to see Aida again next Wednesday. Granted, she may well be busy, poor thing, but she made time for us, which was rather good of her." Gammy clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "I just thought it was so odd... it's a Morris Marina he drives, isn't it? Brown...?"

Harry confirmed this for her with a small grunt in affirmation. "That's Severus'."

"Well, he ran out, but left his car behind. I just thought that was a bit strange."

Feeling the urge to groan aloud—and stifling it by biting his tongue—Harry tried to keep the motion of his hands consistent so not to advertise the fact that he knew anything about his guardian's ability to pop from one place to another by way of magic.

Severus must have apparated home. Taking the car would have been too slow. He'd not given any indication of what Lucius Malfoy had wanted, besides his sarcastic appraisal that it meant 'the world on a silver platter' or some such nonsense, but either way, it seemed that Snape hadn't thought it wise to keep his old friend waiting for any length of time.

That probably didn't bode well. Either for what it was that had given the rich wizard a reason to call on his friend, nor for what it said about the mysterious man's character.

"He... er... he probably just forgot something at work and had to dip down the street to The Yow. I think he usually picks up his cheque on Wednesdays, so maybe he forgot? After school, he drove me home and we went to Bradford that night to see KISS, so that's probably all it was. I'm sure he needed the cheque for petrol..."

It felt as though the lie was spinning out of control, and Harry was growing sick with every false word that he spoke, but after a few moments of allowing his tale to process, Gammy chuckled and agreed.

"I'm not sure I would have taken him for the scatterbrained sort, either, but I suppose people can surprise you."

That was the second or third time she'd mentioned her assessment of Snape's character. It was enough to make Harry curious. "What do you think of Severus?"

Gammy hummed a bit and stilled Harry's hands on the udders. "That's enough there, I think she'll keep 'til her morning milking. I'll grab the pail this time; it's liable to spill if you yank it too fast. Nicky spills it every time."

She carefully worked the heavy pail back and forth against the wooden slats until it was out from underneath Babs' underbelly, and only then did she fit the cap to it and heave against it so that it could be set aside.

She directed Harry in how he ought to clean her udders and then they returned the sweet cow to her pasture.

It was as they were walking back that Gammy proved she'd actually been thinking on his question all along.

"I like your Severus. He's a bit of scruff where anyone else might want to see a bit of polish, but that didn't stop him from stepping in when Blossom might have died of poisoning. He seems like the sort to see that there's a problem, and to see that no one else plans on doing a blessed thing about it, and then he says 'well, I suppose it's to be up to me.'"

Harry felt himself smiling. He rather liked the sound of that.

"Mark me, as I said: he seems like he may be a bit on the green side for caring for a boy your age—"

"Severus is the same age my parents were," Harry argued across her. "He's twenty-eight."

"Is he now?" Gammy looked a bit perplexed. She was now crab-walking a bit to manage the weight of the pail as she hefted it up the stairs. "If I'm being honest with you, from his attire and the way he acts, I'd have put him at no more than twenty-three. That would have been the other thing, I suppose. He has a touch of innocence about him, doesn't he?"

Not entirely sure what the woman meant, Harry nodded, if only to move the conversation along. He was beginning to grow weary at speaking about Snape while he wasn't present to account for himself, even though it had been Harry who had asked the question first.

It seemed strange to him that she should think Snape was younger than he actually was. To Harry, he always seemed really grown-up, and his angular face and way of speaking did nothing to reinforce any impression of youth, but perhaps at Gammy Hill's age, anyone might seem young.

Harry had meant to ask what the meeting had been about, but by then Gammy was calling for Nicky and Snowdrop's assistance in parting out the milk.

The three children worked well together, if only for the fact that Gammy had set Snowdrop to working at the dinner table, feeding what she had mysteriously called 'the clabber' while Nicky and Harry manned the bench, skimming cream off the top of a large pitcher of milk.

Whatever it was that had brought Severus to Rowky Syke a couple of days before, it would seem that it was destined to be yet another strange question in a long line of strange questions about which he'd been forced to beg Severus for answers to. He was growing rather sick of those.