When Severus returned to Gammy's house that evening, he was in a fairly good mood, for him anyway. Harry didn't know whether that made it better or worse that he'd have to impart his tale about the radio station to the wizard.
To Harry's mind, he might take it in two different ways.
On one hand, when Harry had ruminated over the possible consequences of his and Nicky's call into the station that afternoon, the first scene he imagined was that Severus would nearly crash the car out of shock, which only would heighten the man's anger over the sheer presumption of Harry giving out his name and information to a faceless third party.
The second scenario also involved Severus nearly crashing the car, but in this fantasy, it was because he was diving over into the back seat so that he could grab Harry up into a grateful hug.
Hmm. Perhaps, at that, telling him while they drove home wasn't the best course of action.
He kept his lip buttoned, and knew that by the time they'd drawn close to Spinner's End Severus was growing irritated with Harry's monosyllabic responses to his questions and attempts to converse.
Then it was all the worse, for by then Harry realised that he'd entirely wasted Snape's rare magnanimous mood from after work.
By then it felt as though it was too late to fix, as when they'd pulled to the kerb, Snape slammed the car door behind him in a towering temper, without seeming to care that Harry would have needed to scurry out behind him through the same door.
"Sev'rus!" Harry panted after he'd struggled out of the seat and shimmied behind the driver's side, having opened the door back on his own. "Wait!"
The man had almost shut the door to the house in his face as well but caught it with his hand at the last moment, a coal black eye peering at him through the crack, so angry that Harry wanted to flinch and retreat.
"Oh? Want to talk now, Potter?" The door swung open so that Harry could duck beneath Snape's arm.
Harry glared, feeling all of the sudden angry over the young man's over-sensitivity. "I wanted to talk before! I just..."
The silence stretched between them, until Snape heaved a sigh, his anger transmuted through some kind of arcane emotional alchemy into weariness.
"Let's to bed. Go see to your teeth."
Perhaps it was an olive branch, for Snape seemed to shut down before his eyes, his face going blank and inscrutable.
Harry hated it.
"No! No, I wanna talk now!" He screwed up his eyes. The tears that were forming in response to the emptiness emitting from Snape's expression were pointless. Bereft of a proper cause or a sufficient reason for their formation.
He brought up two hands to scrub at his face beneath his glasses.
He only knew that Snape had sighed again—this time more deeply than the first—because it was so very loud and dramatic that he could hear it.
"We can always talk in the morning, Harry. I think after the night I've had, I'd rather face whatever it is in the light of day."
"No, it's..." Harry hesitated and heaved a great breath, his words fleeing from his mind before he managed to say them.
Snape's thick eyebrow quirked up, an obvious invitation—or command—that he ought to continue.
"I... didyouknowKISSiscoming?" Harry's words spilt out of his mouth so quickly that they ended up all being strung together into one, which sure enough wiped the blank look from Snape's face, for now the older wizard was staring at him as though he'd quite lost his mind.
"They're—" Harry gasped in to replenish the supply of oxygen to his lungs, "they're on tour here. They were here a few weeks ago, and they're coming back."
Snape nodded slowly, still looking at Harry like the boy might abruptly lose his head should he make one move to startle him. "The Crazy Nights Tour. They made an appearance at Monsters of Rock in Donington in late August, but I was busy."
"I'm sorry, Severus..." Harry's face screwed up a bit, the tears threatening to spill once more.
Snape didn't have to say why he'd been busy. It was because of Harry. Had he not taken Harry in, August would have been his own. He'd have gotten to go to Monsters of Rock right before he got to pack up for a magical castle in Scotland where he got free room and board and was paid a salary.
Instead, he'd had to go and rescue a helpless whelp, now languished in the house he so clearly hated in a one-horse-town he harboured nothing but bad memories of, and he'd given up his prestigious job in the process.
Suddenly, the tiny concession of a pair of tickets no longer seemed like such a daunting thing to confess. Snape deserved them. He deserved so much more than the consolation prize that Harry was prepared to present to him.
"Think nothing of it, Harry. In any case, two people died during Guns 'N Rose's set. It probably wasn't the best place for me to be, even had I not taken you on."
Snape's downturned lips told a different story, however. His lower lip, which always protruded a bit, was stuck out like a small child who was ginning up for a momentous strop.
Not that Harry suspected the man would ever throw a full-scale tantrum—especially over something like missing a concert—but it was easy enough to read the clear disappointment in his features.
"What if... what if you got to go see KISS?"
"How's that?" Snape's brow creased into a skeptical frown. "I'm not certain how I'm meant to make that happen, given that I'm to work to sustain us. I can't see how I could possibly spare the money at the moment, for the tickets or for petrol to get us there, and when I saw their tour dates, they nearly all fell on school nights."
It was rather depressing to hear that Snape had indeed been considering his options on how he could make it happen and had come to the conclusion that it wasn't possible. Perhaps, for once, it could be Harry who saved the day.
"There's a Wednesday show! You don't work Wednesdays."
"That says nothing for the other problems we'd run into—"
"And what if you did that magi-travel thing? What if you poofed us there?"
"I told you already that I don't think I'd trust myself to be able to get both of us there and back in once piece." Snape scowled, not liking to talk about ways in which he didn't measure up. His poor apparition skills were a known sore point.
"That was 'cause you were panicking, is all," Harry argued. "What if you had time to practise? What if you knew when and where and could go there once first so that you knew where we'd be going?"
"What's with all of these hypotheticals, hmm?" Snape snapped back, not answering the last question. In truth, he'd begun to look slightly wistful—and dare Harry think it, hopeful—at this last bit of prodding. That hope was being crushed before Harry's eyes, and by Severus own sense of ever-present pessimism no less.
Harry hated that more than he hated to see Severus go cold and emotionless.
"Well, if you don't have to work, and you don't have to pay for petrol—"
"We'd still have to purchase tickets. And as far as I am aware, those have been sold out for weeks. Second hand, they'll cost more than they did in the box office, and we simply don't have the money."
"What if you didn't have to buy the tickets?" Harry rushed the words out quickly, wincing a bit. Here it was. This was where the pin hit the shell and Harry would finally know whether he'd be grounded 'til kingdom come.
Snape's eyes grew dark with suspicion, and he stalked forward several steps, looming over his charge. "And why, pray tell, wouldn't I have to buy the tickets?" He hissed, his mouth firming up into an ugly gash across the lower half of his face.
"I... well... Nicky called the station, see?" Harry stammered, losing roughly half of his nerve. He stared down at his trainers which were turned in to a slightly pidgeon-toed stance.
"What station?" The threatening presence above him demanded.
"Key 103. We were listening 'cause Nicky said that sometimes they played Yankee Rose, and that Steve Vai makes his guitar laugh in that song, but they didn't play it—they were doing things like Def Leppard, and Mötley Crüe, and—"
"Harry. Get to the relevant bit, if you would." Snape's voice emerged slightly calmer, but no less imperious.
"Well, they started playing Cold Gin, which is one of your favourites—"
"I know what my favourite songs are without your telling me, thank you very much."
"Yeah, okay." Harry dared to frown up at him. He was making this extraordinarily difficult.
"Well, then the DJs got on and were asking a question about KISS, and when I said I knew the answer, Nicky said I had to call in, so he dialed the number! I just... they put me on air after these two dunderheads that thought that the answer was 'Styx' or 'KISS Army.' Neither of them got it, so then it was my turn and I knew that they'd been called 'Wicked Lester' first, 'cause you'd told me..."
Snape was drawing a pale hand down his face. The right one seemed insufficient, so he raised his other hand as well and began breathing deeply through his palms.
That was it then... Harry must have really messed up. Severus was having some sort of breakdown.
"Then—'cause I answered right—they put me on with this lady who asked me for my choice between London, Birmingham, Bradford, and Newcastle... I didn't really know why she was asking, I swear! So, I thought Bradford was closest..." Harry watched as Snape's shoulders began to shake and felt red hot alarm rising in his stomach.
"Please don't be mad, Severus!" He begged, tugging at the man's shirt sleeve to try and bring his left hand down from his face. "She told me the tickets would be at the front office for us—but I had to give her your name and address so they could verify who we are... please don't be mad!"
It was then that faint hiccoughing noises began emitting from the hands clutched over Snape's face. For the barest second, Harry thought he might have driven Severus to tears, and his remorse threatened to pull him under...
But why should he have been crying? And anyway, did sobbing usually sound so stifled, like it was a lung-deep cough one was attempting to smother under a nasally wheeze?
Finally, Harry succeeded in pulling the wizard's hands away, and when he did, Snape nearly doubled over with laughter.
For several moments, it seemed as though Snape made attempts to speak or say something, only to be incapable of getting any words out past his braying.
He'd clearly cracked up.
Backing up several paces, and feeling all of the sudden nervous that Snape might actually have lost his grip on reality, Harry tried his luck. "... Severus? You're not mad, right?"
"That—gasp—that was you!?" His laughter was so deeply affected by his nose that he seemed to be snorting every few breaths, the hilarity well beyond his control at this point.
"What was me?"
"On—oh bugger—on the radio! That was you!"
Harry felt his blood draining from his face. "You were... you were listening?"
Snape's snorts and guffaws finally reversed the course of Harry's blood. It was now flooding his face and he knew he must have been beet red with embarrassment.
"I didn't know you listened to that station..."
"It's new," Snape straightened up, gasping a bit for breath and with an uncharacteristic grin stretching his cheeks, "but so long as we don't have anyone at the bar I'm allowed to listen to whatever I like.
"You little devil! I was sure no one else would have known the answer before my turn in line—"
Harry's eyes rounded and his hands found the front of his shirt that he was tugging furiously. "You called in?"
Snape's face was rapidly returning to normal and all traces of the utterly uncharacteristic fit of mirth he'd suffered were slowly wasting away into nothingness, as if they'd never been. "I did. Only to hear some little swot 'called Harry,'" he affected a mocking, unctuous tone to mimic Harry's own, which elicited an aggravated glower from his charge, "answer the question before me. Quite completely, I might add. It would have sufficed to have merely told them the name of the band without supplying the rest of the history.
"And, you know, I did think your voice sounded familiar, and obviously the name as well—but I'd convinced myself that there was no way that Mrs. Hill would have allowed you to phone into a rock radio show while she was supervising you."
"That's 'cause she wasn't. She was watching Snowdrop do the chores. She'd said something foul to Nicky about his parents, so Gammy had her out feeding the chickens and mucking out the stalls." Harry explained.
Snape made for the kitchen, Harry following behind. "Ah, yes. You've mentioned this 'Nicky.' I take it this is the same 'Nicky' whom you fought in the yard on your first day of school."
"Yeah, that was him," Harry grumbled with bad grace.
"And how was it that you found yourself in his company this afternoon?"
Harry had deep misgivings over the way in which Severus had voiced the question. It sounded entirely too casual. He dithered over the answer, suspecting that if Snape thought for even one minute that something was amiss that he might pounce.
It was a good thing there was a completely benign answer.
"Turns out that he's Snowdrop's brother—well…half-brother." Harry was made to amend. "His parents had a trip to Bath planned for this weekend, so he's staying with Gammy 'til Monday."
Snape shook his head, the softly swinging ropes of hair about his shoulders—which he'd liberated from his work-appropriate ponytail before picking Harry up for the evening—combining with the near pained look on his face to give the impression that he felt something approaching pity for the boy.
"I imagine that means they share a mother?"
"Yeah, Hill said they're about a year apart. Nicky's older."
Snape made an odd clucking sound with his tongue as he moved around the kitchen, locating the bottle of milk and pouring Harry a glass. He stashed the milk back in the tiny fridge, hesitating a moment before he slumped a tiny fraction of an inch and reached back in to withdraw one of his prized Coca-Colas. Anymore he wouldn't drink them unless he was having a particularly good day, or else a particularly bad one.
However, perhaps that prohibition was lifted now that he'd found gainful employment.
The bottle hissed as he popped the cap off on the edge of the kitchen bench.
They both sipped at their drinks in silence for a moment, Harry considering that it would have been very nice indeed to have had that warm, fresh milk from Babs that late at night. Cold was good too, and filling, as Severus never got the skimmed variety, but to have had the frothy, full-cream stuff right from the source probably would have set him straight for bed.
As it was, he still felt a bit too excitable over having confessed to calling into Key 103. It was jolly good luck that Snape was taking it in stride. Harry didn't imagine he'd have been quite so forgiving had he not had his own eyes set on winning the sweepstakes.
Harry's own meandering thoughts were interrupted by Snape's voice, emerging from the man's intense, contemplative focus on the contents of the bottle grasped in his fist.
"I suppose it makes sense that they'd hate one another."
Licking his upper lip of the cream-stache that had formed, Harry took a seat at the table, moving a mortar away in order to rest his glass on the overladen surface. In truth, he still didn't understand the potent hostility that seemed to electrify both Snowdrop Hill and Nicholas Henderson each time they laid eyes on each other. "It does?"
"It sounds as though Miss Hill was abandoned by her mother, while she kept custody of Mr. Henderson. She was the product of an illicit tryst, no doubt—"
"No," Harry shook his head. It was strange, he thought, that Snape could get it so wrong... but he supposed he could see why it might look that way. Though why Snape would imagine that Snowdrop would be the one abandoned because of the tragedy of whomever her father might have been was beyond him.
"I mean, I don't think Hill's mum abandoned either her or Nicky, at least not at birth." Harry speculated, taking another long draught of milk. He had Snape's attention, which felt so good that he couldn't help but to draw it out.
The week had been a trial given the new arrangements with Gammy Hill and Snape's work. He hadn't realised until that moment what that really meant: that he'd not get to speak to Snape nearly as much. Sitting there, past midnight, both grousing over their days—and, well... gossiping, in truth—felt indescribably nice.
"Hill said that when Nicky was born, their mum was carrying on with a married bloke, and he managed to get custody along with his wife. So that's Nicky's 'mum' now. And Hill said that their mum barely bothers to see Nicky anymore." Harry's mouth twisted a bit.
It was an awful thing to exist without his mother. It was painful to the very marrow of his bones to know that she was far beyond his reach... but he liked to think that if there were a way for her to have come to him, she would have.
That Nicky's mother was alive but had chosen to avoid her first born out of a combination of injured pride, and spite for the boy's father seemed too cruel to contemplate.
He must have said it aloud, for Severus hummed a bit. It was his usual way of expressing that he was thinking deeply but that he wasn't yet professing agreement.
"I'm sure it hurt her very deeply to have her son taken from her arms so young." His words were slow, non-committal, but still Harry couldn't help but bristle a bit.
"Yeah," Harry's mouth twisted with no little bitterness, "but she could come see him at Gammy's. Snowdrop says she avoids going when he's there. I mean... actually..." Harry thought hard, trying to remember the details of the conversation he'd been so haplessly drawn into only days before, "she's not properly allowed to see him, I guess? But Snowdrop said that even if she could, she wouldn't wanna."
"And Miss Hill is a year younger?"
"Almost exactly a year."
"Mmm." The man murmured again, bringing up his index finger to rub at his lower lip, exposing his yellow, crowded, bottom teeth as it peeled back with the rough treatment. He was slouching against the kitchen bench, the edge of it propping up his crooked spine as he pitched slightly forward. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankle, supporting him at a rather precarious angle.
When he spoke next, his eyes were fixed on the stacked piles of unwashed dishes that filled the sink opposite him.
"It sounds as though their mother may have seen Miss Hill as the logical replacement for her first child. Replacement enough that it was little trouble to transpose her affections from firstborn to second."
"That's..." Harry was seething, quietly, into his cup of milk. It was impossible to think of a big enough, expressive enough word to use to say what he meant to say, and before he could stop himself he'd blurted out "That's shit!"
Snape had looked up from his contemplation of the jumble of slimy earthenware and was now glowering at him, though after a moment's hesitation, his eyes appeared to soften. He didn't take Harry to task.
"If that is, indeed, the case—I should say that you're right."
"And besides," Harry interposed, warming again to the topic now that he'd been granted apparent carte blanche to say all he pleased on the subject, "then she left Snowdrop to her Gammy so she could go off to parties—"
"To parties?" Snape spat, seeming to perk up a bit. His voice sounded mildly alarmed, which, for Severus, was almost panicked.
"That's what she said," Harry answered with a bit of a shrug. "She said she left for a party when Snowdrop was three and that she didn't come back to stay with them after. Apparently, she comes sometimes still, but never for long, and Hill's not seen her in more than a year, now."
"Miss Hill is doubtlessly better off without the woman," Snape snarled, draining the last of his bottle and slamming it down beside him.
Harry jumped a bit at the loud banging it produced. He couldn't put his finger on exactly what it was about what he'd said that would have upset Severus so, but the man was now fuming. It looked as though he'd prefer to be pacing back and forth but was only restraining himself because to pace around the tiny, crowded kitchen would have required an utterly ridiculous circuit to have been devised.
Harry was still doing his best to remember what else had been said before the conversation had been interrupted. He was certain that as soon as the man calmed down one iota, he'd order Harry off to bed—both of them had finished their nightcaps, by now—and the boy felt disinclined toward sleep in that moment.
"Oh... er... there was another thing."
"Perhaps I ought to rethink my decision to have you under Mrs. Hill's watch if a mere two days under her 'supervision' produces results such as these—" Snape opined, throwing his head back in a show of dramatics.
"No, it's not bad," Harry insisted. "It's not about Snowdrop, or Nicky, or their mum, or the KISS tickets..."
Severus sighed deeply, slumping once more against the bench. "What is it?"
"Where do babies come from?"
Harry's plan to avoid being sent to bed was defeated in one fell swoop by voicing this question aloud. He couldn't have imagined that he'd enact his own demise in such a way, but Severus' immediate reaction to the query was to violently double over, his arm sweeping out causing the empty glass bottle by his hip to crash to the floor where it shattered into a hundred pieces.
The dark wizard, when Harry managed to catch a glimpse of his face, looked deranged. The boy was quite sure he'd never seen quite that look on the man's face before.
Snape's mouth undulated up and down, his lips pressing so firmly together that they turned a bloodless white. His nostrils flared while the deep lines that bracketed his gaunt face from his chin, up to his nose deepened into dark trenches. Harry hadn't seen his eyes look quite so incandescent since months before, during that tumultuous week where Snape had been made to rescue Harry time and again.
He took in several deep breaths, through his nose, which made him look a bit like a bull readying itself for a charge, and when he spoke his voice emerged in a low growl. "Use the loo, and take your smart arse off to bed, Potter."
"I didn't mean... Hill said—" Harry protested, his voice emerging in a feeble pitch given that he'd not at all expected this reaction.
"Go. To. Bed." The man snarled again, through his clenched teeth.
And then, Harry did. He trudged out the kitchen door to the loo, did his business in the porcelain pot, scrubbed his hands and teeth in the kitchen sink, and stomped up the rickety stairs, throwing himself into bed after shucking off all but his pants.
Snape must have followed him only moments after, but before he heard the man's louder footfalls on the flight leading up to the upper level, he could have sworn he heard that same strange, hiccoughing, stifled wheezing sound that Snape had produced earlier that evening.
The sound of the man's unbridled laughter.
Harry slept well that night. It was easier knowing that Snape must not have been truly angry with him if he'd near enough laughed his arse off as soon as Harry had left the room.
Though why the question of where babies came from would be so funny was anyone's guess.
Their weekend felt rather short. Snape was made to leave for work at nine the next morning, which was only a short time after Harry had awakened, and he'd not returned home until after six. He'd been off on Sunday, and the two had spent the time as they'd so often done over the summer, labouring over hot cauldrons until after lunch when Severus kicked Harry out of the kitchen, as seemed to now be tradition.
It didn't seem as though Severus was making much progress at all towards his ultimate aim of creating something marketable, if his constant hair pulling and cursing under his breath was any indication, but Harry knew better than to prod the older wizard over it. Even he was wise enough to know that one shouldn't poke at an already grumpy bear with the sharp end of a stick.
Every day Harry'd come home to find the tarry remains of new concoctions, each more noxious than the next. He knew that, strictly speaking, Snape hadn't asked him to clean up after him, but Harry made it a part of his routine, whenever he arrived home before Severus, to scrape the caustic failed potions into the special pail that Severus had showed him, sprinkling a cup of lye over each addition, even though he wasn't able to see as far down as the pail went, and then washing up the heavy cauldrons with gratuitous amounts of potion degreaser.
He wasn't sure what it was that Snape could be doing that made the failed potions so resistant to attempts at vanishing, but it seemed that he was on the scent of something in particular if the general trend could be trusted. Normally, the potions master could simply scourgify his failures and they would disappear into non-being. That so many of his more recent experiments ended in the same way—greasy, tar-like slop that clung to the craggy bellies of the cauldrons—suggested that he felt as though he were on to something.
Apparently, whatever it was that the man was on to wasn't cooperating.
In addition, it had become difficult to focus on school in the week leading up to the KISS concert. Harry's excitement was catching, and Severus had taken it upon himself to prepare them by cycling through all of KISS's albums on repeat until Harry felt he could reliably remember and sing each and every song by rote memory.
In the mornings he woke with Deuce stuck in his head. He hummed the opening chords to God of Thunder to Wheat as he dropped crickets into the tarantula's enclosure in the mornings. In Mr. Fowler's classes or out in the break yard his mouth formed the words to Strutter with such faithful repetition that his instructor had more than once called on him just to interrupt the voiceless chanting that Harry had taken up.
Music classes were, in some ways, the most difficult, as tuning into anything that wasn't Paul Stanley's lyrics seemed irrelevant and irritating. Ms. Tibbons was made to call him to attention more than once, as the class was expected to chirp along after her simple Mozart compositions, which had been reworked to accommodate children.
"Harry," she'd been made to pat the top of the upright piano more than once. "Eyes up here, if you please."
Her rebukes were far worse than Mr. Fowler's and the reason was two-fold. For one, Harry had high hopes for music class, and what he could learn about the mysteries of what made a tune so catching and addictive. For another...
Well... Ms. Tibbons was the pretty sort. With her wild mop of blonde, permed corkscrews, she looked like the girls on the covers of so many albums. In particular the model that graced the album art for Ratt's Out of the Cellar album, which Harry had spent more time than he'd have readily admitted to staring at.
Not to mention those magazines that he'd found stuffed under Severus' bed, gathering dust in the far corner by the wall.
They contained mostly comics, interspersed with the odd interview, their covers showing a series of buxom ladies with teased out hair in various states of dishabille, but always modeled—without a thought spared to true utility or protection—after primitive or otherworldly war costumes or armour.
After Harry had found them and had flipped through one afternoon while Severus was still away at work, he'd found in most issues pages that had been torn from the binding.
It had launched a short scavenger hunt which ended with the conclusion that Severus had ripped them from the publication and sellotaped them to his walls, interleaved with his hoard of fliers and posters.
The one nearest the pillow, at the head of the bed, showed a woman sprawled out at the feet of some inhuman warlord, a strange brassiere made of what looked to be human skulls encasing her heaving breasts, as blood spilled over her taunt abdominals from a jewel-encrusted chalice gripped in the clawed hands of her captor.
Harry had seen it many times and wondered at it, but now he almost imagined he could see a much younger Severus tugging it carefully from the bindings and affixing it to the wall where he'd be sure to stare at it more often than the rest.
The others were variations on a theme. One girl seemed like she'd been half constructed out of robot parts, with one circular, glowing, red eye and a gun of some sort that looked rather close to the blasters from Star Wars, though with the notable addition of poison-green plasma canisters for ammunition.
Another saw a woman using some sort of lance weapon against a rat-like creature that stood on its hind legs, apparently attempting to win her way free of a cavernous prison, her loincloth holding to her shining hips and thighs by nothing more than one straining strap of raw hide.
Harry made certain to always return the magazines back to their dusty hidey-hole after each perusal. Leading up to their concert, he'd taken to appropriating the tape deck to his own room each day after school until he heard the door below his room opening and slamming shut.
KISS paired with Heavy Metal (which was the name of the presumptively forbidden publication) like wine did with cheese, and Harry would spend hours at a time exploring the pages, sometimes spending fifteen minutes at a time picking apart the images with his eyes, looking for hidden hints and clues in the recesses of the illustrations, his gaze enraptured by the scenes of violence and near nudity.
It was an odd thing to have found underneath someone's bed, but he treasured the magazines and the hours he spent with Wheat trailing over the pages. It seemed all the more cool when there was a honking big spider taking a leisurely stroll over the graven image of some piggish warlord executing a prisoner.
Before the twenty-eighth, Harry was occasioned to spend three more evenings in the company of the Hills, although Nicky didn't join them again. His family had returned from their trip to the south, and he apparently didn't tend to visit his estranged mother's mother unless there were no other options available, which struck Harry as sad. When he'd seen them together at dinner, even though Snowdrop remained as irascible as always, it was clear that Gammy Hill felt a wealth of affection for her grandson, and he for her. There was a touch of tragedy to their every shared word or glance, as though they both knew full well that they'd not be seeing each other for a while after they separated once more, and with that realisation, Snowdrop's resentful, selfish attempts at wresting back attention to herself seemed all the more horrid.
Even given the fact that Harry could understand. That perhaps made it worse.
It made a great deal of sense that the girl would feel threatened when the only adult she reliably had in her life showed any affection to another child. Worse still that it was her older sibling who had parents of his own—a whole family of his own, in fact.
It was also clear, however, that even for all of the trappings of normalcy that Nicky had and that Snowdrop felt she lacked, that he was no better adjusted for having them. He had cleaved to his grandmother as soon as the woman was done supervising his sister's punishment, and until Harry had left with Severus later that evening, the two had been engaged together in mutual pursuits such as assembling complicated jig-saw puzzles, and preparing cheese at the antiquated cooker.
Harry had largely been left to his own devices, but that suited him just fine. And it suited him just as well over his next three visits when Snowdrop took little interest in him and instead seemed determined to act for all the world as though he wasn't there invading her home at all.
He had learned early on that it was better to be ignored than reviled.
Finally, Wednesday the twenty-eighth rolled around. Sitting through school that day was nearly unbearable, but he'd promised Severus that by going to the concert that evening, he'd not be neglecting his studies.
He still had to attend school the next morning, Snape had warned him, and Severus was still expected at work. Yet for all that, Harry was hard pressed to pay attention. He knew that had Mr. Fowler called on him—which, thankfully, he hadn't—he'd have been in no state to answer correctly, and that by the time reports were sent home, Severus would have had words for him over the notes that inevitably would have appeared in the margins.
Thanks to the older wizard, the homework he turned in was of better quality than he'd ever managed with the Dursleys, who were not only indifferent to Harry's school work, but may have actually preferred him to score in the lower percentile of the class, particularly when measured up against Dudley's scores.
In any case, when the bell rang for the end of the day, Harry trooped outside and watched the road for the brown Morris Marina.
He was made to wait some ten minutes, which was a bit strange, given that Snape was almost always punctual to a fault, but eventually the car jerked and careened its way to the kerb out front of Rowky Syke, and Harry suppressed the cringe that threatened to show when he watched how Snape was mishandling the vehicle.
It was slightly worse than was his usual, which hinted toward a bad mood. Although, given what they were supposed to get up to that night, it was a mystery why Severus ought to have been in any sort of towering temper.
The car skidded to a halt, and Harry imagined he might have seen clouds of steam emitting from the tyres and brake pads as it did so. Whether that was a fanciful invention of his own mind or God's honest truth was difficult to say, and he didn't have time to figure it out before Snape's door sprang open and his lanky form unfolded from the driver's side seat, looking to be coiled up like a tightly wound spring.
His face was drawn in a mess of tense lines and planes, and he looked to be rather cross, although in a strangely introspective way.
When Harry approached the car, with all of the caution of a hesitant mouse approaching the family cat, he received a bare grunt in greeting, and Snape pulled the seat back in a perfunctory way, as though he were merely going through the motions.
He seemed distracted, and until they reached the bridge and the tyres jumped over the faults in the road, neither spoke a word—and it might have been useless to, anyhow, given how loud he'd turned up the volume on the tape deck.
For the first time in weeks it wasn't playing KISS, and Harry thought that might have been a bad sign.
"In the still of the night, in the cool moonlight! I feel my heart is aching, in the still of the night–!"
"Who's this?" Harry ventured to ask, his head bobbing a bit, even in the face of Severus' stormy disposition.
"Whitesnake."
"That's new."
"I had a yen for it." The words emerged in a short staccato that served to underline just how out of sorts the man was. He seemed distracted if his driving was any indication, phantasmal expressions of irritation and annoyance flitting across the sliver of his features that was visible to Harry from his seat at the rear of him.
In the mirror he could see the tension held in the faint lines that bracketed Snape's black eyes, painting a bleak picture of his mood.
"'S everything ok?" Harry's voice was cautious, and Snape must have heard the trepidation in it, for his eyes darted back to meet Harry's own in the mirror, and then he seemed to deflate, much of the tension seeping from his wide shoulders as the car shuddered beneath their bottoms, as though it were absorbing its master's troubles through the driver's seat.
Still, he hesitated in giving an answer, the fingers of the wizard's right hand tapping a quick tattoo against the wheel, as the fingers of his left tightened into a strangle-hold on the shifter. "All is as well as I ought to have expected."
Well, that was about as clear as the recent potions that Snape had been leaving to rot in the bottoms of his standard size 2 pewters... Harry's lower lip twisted and he sucked briefly on his top lip rather without notice.
"You know, I ought to prefer your hair mussing to that—it looks positively childish."
Feeling rather self-conscious, Harry untucked his lip and wiped at the spit that he'd inadvertently allowed to collect on his cupid's bow. He couldn't quite figure how to respond. Severus was well-aware he was eight years old, but admittedly doing as he'd done hadn't looked very grown-up, and he suspected that to argue would only lose him more ground.
The moment had passed by then in any case, and it seemed as though Severus had won, by that metric.
"What did you mean," he asked then, backtracking to the point at which the older wizard had attempted to divert the conversation, "about it being what you expected?"
"What I ought to have expected." Snape snarled, though for all the vitriol he'd directed into his voice, he grimaced and there was a hint of strain in the way his bared rows of teeth rested against one another, producing the odd clicking noise that often emitted from him when he was ill at ease.
Harry shifted in the seat, picking up an empty plastic cassette case to toy with, swinging it open and closed at the hinge. "What's that mean?"
"That things have been... deceptively easy. And I should have known better."
"Easy?" Harry blurted out, his eyes flying to Snape's defeated form, "What's been easy? You never stop working! You didn't even go to Hogwarts and now you're at The Yow so we can eat—"
"As ever, you have a rosy view of the world, Harry. And I suspect you may be overly kind in your assessment of my efforts." Somehow, Snape managed to sound at once gratified and annoyed. "Working is a minimum requirement, it is in no way something which entitles me to any accolades or special praise. In any case, I am speaking of what I left behind by vacating my post at Hogwarts. Such a hasty decision on my part has resulted in a rash of downstream consequences that I ought to have been able to foresee, had I not been lazy in my thinking."
Harry frowned, not caring for the way that the man was holding himself to the flame. "You're not a fortune teller."
"Perhaps not." Snape shrugged one shoulder in provisional agreement before continuing. "But this should have been obvious. Positively myopic..." he growled as he bore right until the wheels could be felt drifting up to the kerb where he shifted into park. "I was blind. So fucking stupid..." he muttered. Harry got the impression that Snape was beyond the point of realising or caring that Harry was a party to his cursing and self-recrimination.
"What happened?" Harry pressed. They'd both disembarked from the back of the Morris Marina and headed for the front door, Harry waiting impatiently as Severus unwarded it. He'd come up with an interim arrangement for when Harry would have to be home alone, where the house allowed Harry entrance and locked down like a fortress as soon as the boy entered, but Severus still seemed to prefer the personal touch whenever he knew that he'd be away from the house and arriving back with Harry on his own.
"We received a visitor."
"A visitor?" Harry repeated, wondering at it. What manner of visitor? Could it have been that ancient wizard with the long white beard? That meddlesome Dumbledore who seemed to have had a leash attached to Severus' neck for years...
Or was it in the vein of Severus' old associates? Someone who'd have kept the company of those like Yax and Wulf...
Perhaps even someone who got up to the same things as the pair...
Once the door swung shut and the wards were back up, Snape took a seat on the sofa and shucked his boots, glowering at them for a moment before he ultimately flung them one after another at the peeling patch of wallpaper near the door. He then pitched over his thin, bowed knees, and seemed to stare down at the holes in his black socks.
"The name won't mean anything to you," he said after some time. Harry hadn't dared to interrupt and hadn't moved from where he stood near the entrance. Only a sliver of the man's profile was visible to him from this angle, but it occurred to him that if he wished their night to go the way they'd both planned, that he may have to watch himself carefully. It was possible that Snape might decide to cancel and stay in, all things considered.
"An old friend. An old comrade." Harry winced. That told him well enough that the person who had intruded on their domicile had been an undesirable.
"Lucius Malfoy," Snape murmured to his toes. The fingers of his right hand speared through the limp strands of hair at his forehead and attempted to draw through to the crown of his head, though its progress was impeded by snarls and tangles until Snape yanked it free with a look of revulsion.
"Erm... who's that?"
"A pretentious, rich prick." He sighed then looking morose, his fingertips rubbing so hard against his eyes that Harry wondered how he wasn't being blinded. "A pretentious, rich prick who happens to have been my closest friend since... since I made a hash of it with your mother. And since I ceased my interactions with the denizens of Cokeworth at large."
Harry toed off his shoes and dropped his bag beside them, crossing the room to sit beside Snape on the couch with more caution than he normally would have exercised.
"Doesn't sound like much of a friend, if that's how you talk about him." Harry ventured, hunkering down over his legs in a pose that parodied Severus' own.
"He has proven, at times, to be useful, in his own way. Even if that use is, more often than not, plying me with alcohol worth more than this squalid house and bragging about it until he's as blue in the face as he is in blood—"
"What's that mean?"
"It means that he's an aristocrat." Snape spat. "Surely, you've heard of those? The Spencers, the Herveys, the Cavendishes? Barons, Viscounts, Earls and the like?"
Harry felt his jaw drop. He'd heard names like that from the mouth of his aunt as she parroted the salacious gossip from her treasured cache of tabloids. "He's like that?"
"Well. There are no titles which approximate those held by the muggle gentry, but he is landed, that is to say: he is titled as a Lord, and he holds claim to the whole of the Malfoy estate."
Harry looked around them then, at the stained wallpaper that was coming away from the plaster, and the floorboards whose only clean spots were where they walked most often. His eyes tracked to the corners of the ceilings where cobwebs hung like torn curtains and had never been cleared away. He felt, for a moment, the lumpy sofa cushions beneath his bottom, knowing that the lounge itself must have been older than he was... perhaps older than Severus.
"It's sorta strange, right? That he'd be friends with you? If he's pre—er—pre-ten-chus 'cause he's rich 'n all?"
"You're alluding to the fact that we are poor."
The boy swallowed for a moment, but then nodded in agreement. When Snape had said it, it had been matter of fact. Although there had been a bare hint of bitterness mixed in, it was undeniable. He didn't sound as though he resented that Harry had drawn attention to their circumstances.
"You are correct to surmise that Lucius has never let me forget that I am poor, but he has never before visited me here at this house. I believe it may have been eye-opening for him. You will notice that I do not speak as though I have come up here."
"Sometimes, I can barely understand what people here are saying," Harry mentioned. "Like Mrs. Murray? And there's a few people where they'll talk to me and I just have to guess," he explained, thinking of the garbled mess he'd heard from the tramp when he'd tripped over him weeks before.
"It took long years for me to break myself from the sludge that passes for speech in Cokeworth," Snape drawled. Harry had never given it much thought before, but now that he was listening closely, he supposed that the barest hint of a northerner's tongue still crept through in the lilting sing-song quality of Snape's diction. Every so often, a word would trail up near the end, as though the man was posing a question, when in truth he was making a statement. And that was merely his accent. Severus had never used any of the local Cumbrian dialect that could easily have been considered its own language.
"It was something which I worked on long before I left for Hogwarts, a combination of listening to my mother and attempting to copy the cadence of words I heard on the radio, rather than from the lips of my own father or the other children at Rowky Syke. Some families barely have it, and some had it worse than others. The Hills, for example, don't seem as though they're in the habit of speaking in the local dialect."
"Nicky is," Harry argued.
"Perhaps certain words and phrases," Snape granted, "but it may well be that if he were to encounter someone from an older generation, even Mr. Henderson may run into difficulties. Those ways are dying—you only ever hear true Cumbrian from the blue-hairs anymore. Sometimes, at The Yow, we'll have the odd farmer in who's still disposed to converse the old way, but radio and television have changed things.
"In any case, by the time I met Lucius in my first year, I'd managed to do away with many of my less desirable habits, and he himself taught me to disguise most of the rest."
Harry turned his head to peer at the man sat beside him with a hint of skepticism. In his worn black jeans, his beloved KISS Army shirt, and with hair that looked as though it had been dunked in a pan of used engine oil, Snape hardly looked like the sort of person that could believably pass amongst the scions of high society. His sideways glance didn't go unnoticed, for Snape snarled at him suddenly with his typical defensive viciousness.
"Don't believe me, do you?"
"I believe you, Severus! Just—"
"Don't take me for a fool, Potter. I've attended my fair share of posh events—enough that I eventually learned to grow sick of them. The robes I wore as a Professor were from the same atelier that Lucius patronises, and upon his own recommendation. As Lucius didn't know me as you see me now, you don't know me as he knows me—"
"Or as Yax and Wulf know you, I'll bet..." Harry muttered, his words hinting at mutiny. He could feel that his face had drawn into a grim expression, and he looked down at his own dirty socks to try and hide that fact.
Snape wasn't stupid, however.
"Those two know me slightly differently than Lucius himself. I never have had cause to deal with Lucius in matters of business. Ours was a camaraderie borne of grudging respect, and also—if I may admit to such a thing—mutual antagonism. Yax and Wulf are lesser. To Lucius in social stature and wealth. To me in intellect, cunning, and conscience."
Harry didn't profess to understand all of what Severus said at any given time. He often worked with only the small snippets of the man's bloviated manner of speaking that he could grasp. This instance was no different, and the image that came to mind was of the cartoon cricket he'd spied once when watching through his cracked-open cupboard door as Dudley had feasted on handfuls of candy while his small eyes had been transfixed upon the Dursleys' television set.
Pinocchio, the film had been called.
Jiminy Cricket. A conscience. Severus had one, Yax and Wulf didn't. And from the way Severus had omitted Lucius from the comparison, it sounded as though he didn't think that Lord Malfoy had much of one, either.
Snape was back on his usual quest to defeat a line of questioning by leading Harry down pointless asides, Harry realised by then, and the boy felt himself growing cross with his guardian.
Sometimes, it really seemed as though Severus might be under the impression that he was quite dim, and Harry didn't appreciate that at all.
"What did Lucius Malfoy want?"
There were a few beats of silence then, which stretched with uncomfortable longevity between the two.
"The world on a silver platter. As ever."