A/N: Apologies that this chapter was posted a couple days late. My intention was a Friday posting, but obviously with FFN being down, it wasn't possible. I did manage to get it up on AO3 and Potions & Snitches, however, so in the future, be advised that the story is not only available on FFN. I hope you all enjoy, and continue to look forward to Tuesday's posting, which, excepting another server problem on FFN's side, should commence as planned. Cheers!

Also: I accidentally posted the wrong chapter just ten minutes ago. If you accidentally got that chapter instead of this one, please forgive me lol


Last time: "Come along," the elder wizard commanded with an imperious gesture of his chin. "I've found what we've come for."


Snape started off up the path and Harry had no choice but to follow him, his eyes tracing along the names as he went.

He skidded to a stop and Snape made it several meters further before he realised that he'd lost his follower.

Side by side lay the graves of two women.

Ariana Dumbledore.

Kendra Dumbledore.

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also..." Harry read aloud. This time when his finger came up to trace the image that had been painstakingly engraved upon the tombstone, he drew a small angel—the symbol for innocence. The two had seemingly passed in the same summer of 1899.

"Dumbledore... isn't that your old boss?" Harry asked, finally catching up to where Snape stood impatiently tapping one foot. He'd moved across two rows to a large, modern, white marble plinth and now let out a disdainful little sniff.

"If you were to ask the headmaster, doubtless he'd tell you that he's still my employer."

This caused Harry to scowl with anger, the tang of rage surprising as he felt a surge of indignation on Severus' behalf. "Fat chance! He's not paid you, has he?"

Snape's mouth thinned with warning. "Harry—"

"No! He's a... a... he's an arse!"

"Harry!"

Snape hissed, looking, by turns, amused and horrified.

"He is!" Harry argued as he came to stand by Snape, now warming to the topic. "He tried to ruin our... our—" Harry couldn't quite call it a friendship, and had no other way of describing what it was that he felt for the wizard standing beside him at his parents' grave.

Luckily, he didn't have to, for as he struggled to name their strange relationship, his green eyes finally settled on the words he'd been dreading and searching for since they'd arrived in the cemetery.

In Loving Memory of James Potter & Lily Potter

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

Harry shifted from foot to foot, his anger fleeing him in that moment. Nothing came to replace it.

No tidal wave of grief, nor avalanche of bereavement. The sun flashed through the parting clouds and from far off he could hear birds calling back and forth to one another. The dry grass was loud underneath the tread of his shoes, and he felt...

Nothing at all.

From under his fringe he glanced up to look at Snape, to see if he were alone in his frightful absence of sentiment and he nearly stumbled back from the look of forlorn misery etched into the angles that made up Snape's face.

Severus swayed a bit on his feet, as though swooning, before he caught himself with a hand braced against the marble. He lunged into a kneeling position, one palm flush with the stone, and laid his forehead against Harry's mother's name.

He made no noise at all in his pain, and curiously, watching Snape suffer brought about the first emotion Harry felt upon seeing where his mother and father took their eternal sleep.

He wasn't sure what he'd call such a thing, but it hurt to watch Snape hurt. So, he dropped into a crouch next to him, rocking a bit on his heels, and placed one hand on Severus' bony shoulder, feeling it shake slightly under his touch.

Gradually, he became aware of the sound of chanting.

It was Snape, speaking softly, under his breath.

"For since by man came death, by man also came the resurrection of the dead..."

Harry frowned and pitched further forward, hoping to make out more of what Snape was muttering to the marble.

"Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom of God the Father, when He puts an end to all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet..."

Harry almost fell backwards onto his arse, and he removed his hand from Snape as though scalded, suddenly feeling like he was intruding on a moment he had no business taking part in.

Snape ended his soliloquy by repeating the words from the tomb: "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."

The man took a shuddering breath then, pulling out of his lunge only to kneel fully in the dirt beside where the bodies must have lain, many feet below.

Hovering behind Snape, his hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt, Harry reached for some manner of feeling, any feeling, that he might spare for his lost parents. For his truncated infancy and childhood.

It wasn't that Harry never cried. He'd cried plenty in his short life. Usually, he did it in private, tucked away into the recesses of his cupboard, or when feeling particularly overwrought by circumstances far beyond his control. He thought he ought to have been crying now...

No tears were forthcoming. His mouth felt dry, and his tongue snaked out in an attempt to moisten his lips.

His eyes darted around the graveyard, seeing sun-dappled spots where the beams of light stretched through the scoping boughs of the trees.

It was beautiful.

The cottages all around, and the quaint church. The white marble, and the indecipherable verbiage of the quote that was scratched out on its surface...

All of it left him with an impression of beauty and tranquility.

It was difficult to work up a head of pathos in the face of such peace.

At long last, he was here. How could he say he was alone when he was sitting in the actual company of his parents, and better still, with Severus too. All he could want in the world in that moment was within arms' reach.

He stepped forward and clapped Severus on the back, not knowing whether he meant it to be comforting, or whether he merely meant to garner the other wizard's attention.

A strangled grunt was the only reply he got.

"We can come back..."

Snape turned his head to fix an uncertain look on the boy standing behind him, his weight still propped against the heavy marble slab. He raised a quizzical black eyebrow to the boy.

"Can't we, Severus? We can come back?"

"You'd meant that as a question?" Snape breathed, his mouth tight.

Realising then that his initial phrasing had been ambiguous at best, Harry rubbed at the back of his head with his knuckles. "Er, yeah?"

Snape pushed to his feet, swaying a bit as though he were barely managing to catch his own weight. He brushed his thumb one last time over the big 'L' in Harry's mother's name, bringing the pad of his finger to his lips, as if it were possible to feel her by means of metaphysical transference.

Looking about the lichyard, his eyes clearing, it looked to Harry like Snape had awoken from some sort of trance. He became collected all at once, his memories and pain packed away for later, or perhaps forevermore.

"We can return whenever you like, Harry. Though, next time, I suggest we do so after you're home from school."

In spite of himself, Harry felt a misaligned grin coming on. He nodded enthusiastically.

"Not tomorrow then?" He prodded.

"Not unless you were planning on allowing that bovine companion of yours to languish, unattended." Snape said with a snort. His eyes softened, however, and he stepped back from the gravesite, nodding to Harry.

"We can come back, but there's no telling when we'll next have a chance. I think it would be best if you made sure to say goodbye for now."

He'd not been planning on it, as treating his parents like he was merely stopping by for a visit felt odd, somehow. Yet, as soon as Snape mentioned it, Harry realised that he would indeed have been very upset with himself later on had he not taken the time to rest, knelt overtop of their bodies, with his hands threaded through the grass which grew six or more feet above them.

He breathed in the still balmy, late autumn air. He felt the moistness of the soil beneath his fingers. He was warmed by the sun on the back of his neck, and knew that his parents were comfortable, warm, and at peace—together—here in St. Jerome's cemetery.

"I'll see you later, Mum," he promised, looking to the right. Then to the left plot, he added: "I'll be back soon, Dad." Both of his hands patted the earth in tandem before he stood, brushing grass off of the knees of his trousers.

Their walk to leave the cemetery was conducted in comfortable silence, both lost in each his own thoughts.

On the way out, Harry caught a glimpse of an older gentleman watching from an lichen-covered, arched doorway at the church, dressed in a long, black garment with a row of tiny black buttons down the front.

The stranger waved at the them and Harry gave a tiny wave back, although the silent sentinel made no effort to intercept the two wizards.

On their way out to the main thoroughfare, Snape spied a bench near an old war monument that had been erected on a plinth. It was settled into the centre of the town's square and Snape made a beeline for it.

"Why're we headed there?" Harry asked as he followed on Severus' heels.

"There's a bloody rock in my shoe," Snape groused. He perched on the edge of the bench when they reached it and loosened the laces on his boot, pulling it off and dumping the contents onto the ground before them.

As he'd said, a pebble fell from the lining and made a soft 'plink' noise where it landed.

Harry didn't have to wonder how it had got there. They'd walked more than a mile from where Snape had apparated them, and then had traipsed around the cemetery for half an hour in search of the Potters' graves.

Add to that the fact that the structural integrity of Snape's shabby boot was visibly compromised—he had a hole the size of his thumb in the rubber bottom, the tread was worn to smoothness, and the upper was coming away from the lower portion near the toebox—it would have been more surprising had he managed to avoid collecting rocks in his socks.

While he struggled back into the boot, Harry meandered towards the war memorial. It looked to be a great, limestone obelisk, the likes of which Harry had seen many times before in Kingston-upon-Thames. He knew, as he approached, to expect the placard before the obelisk to list the names of those from Godric's Hollow and Aethlingham who had presumably died in service to their country, so he was surprised when he glanced down and read something entirely different.

THE POTTER FAMILY

May we never forget the sacrifice of those brave souls whose lives were exchanged for our own security.

Harry gulped and shook his head, certain he must have been seeing things. He glanced away from the inscription, thinking it must have been a mistake and that a second look would clear things up, but that proved to be unwise.

When he lifted his eyes from the text, he was confronted with an entirely different monument than the one he'd laid eyes upon earlier.

He was standing at the feet of a larger-than-life depiction of a cozy family scene. His head just about came up to the thigh of the man who sat with his arms circled protectively around a woman and a child, and Harry knew without examining it for much longer than a split second who it was that had been rendered in stone.

They'd used the photograph that the Prophet had printed in that story about Harry's change in custody as a model. The very same photograph that Harry had sellotaped to the wall in Snape's house.

That happy, bespeckled man was his father. And that gentle-eyed, smiling woman was his mother. And the baby she was looking at with an expression of wonderment and joy was...

Him.

He choked then, feeling all of the things that he'd been certain he'd managed to escape at the cemetery now flooding him up to the eyeballs. His feet were clumsy as he stumbled back and when he looked up, he found Snape's face swimming over his where Severus stooped to examine him.

Without a word, the older wizard offered him a hand to lever Harry up off the pavement.

"I take it you weren't expecting the monument."

"You could have warned me!" Harry spat, casting a look at his own stone likeness with a mix of envy—for this Harry would forever be allowed to enjoy the tenderness that came from being held in his mother's arms—and revulsion.

"That would have been a feat on my part, given that I wasn't aware of its existence until I watched you fall flat on your arse just now," Snape replied in an even tone.

Harry suddenly wished he could smack Snape. He sounded very nearly amused at Harry's expense.

He managed to reroute the impulse by allowing himself to dip into a daydream in which he throttled Snape's pallid neck with both hands, and after a moment, felt himself in control enough to merely scowl.

Yet again, Snape was doing that queer staring thing where he seemed lost in Harry's eyes. Zoned out.

When he snapped to, he emerged with a sardonic smirk, baring a glint of canine and snorting with humour that Harry couldn't, for the life of him, understand.

"Just try it sometime, Potter, and see how you fare."

"Try what?"

One pale hand came up and Harry watched as Snape rubbed at his Adam's apple, a faint mimicry of the very idea that Harry had had moments earlier.

"How are you doing that!?"

"Doing what?"

Snape began walking and he tossed his head, sending his tangled fall of hair to whip back over his shoulder, a clear indication that Harry ought to follow.

They were headed back to Aethlingham, and beyond.

"You know! The thing! That thing with your eyes," Harry demanded, barely managing to keep up.

"You look at me, and your eyes—" Harry splayed the fingers of both hands out in a popping motion to imitate the way that Snape's eyes seemed to focus when in that state, "then you tell me what it was I was thinking! Exactly what I was thinking! You're reading my mind!"

A dramatic sigh issued forth from his companion and Snape amused himself by stuffing both hands deeply within his pockets as he rolled his gaze skyward. "Would that there were anything worth reading there," he opined.

Harry's face scrunched up. He wasn't sure what that meant, but he knew it wasn't very nice.

"A mind cannot be read, Harry," Snape relented. To Harry's growing sense of irritation, his kuya was smirking down at him, looking far too pleased with himself.

"So, you didn't know what I was thinking?"

"It would be easy enough to know what you think based on the way your mouth twitches or if I were to take note of what your eyes were focused on."

"Oh," Harry said, not without a great deal of relief.

His thoughts were often filled with all of the things he couldn't ever share beyond the confines of his own head: daydreams, nightmares, hopes, and fears. His deepest desires and his greatest irritations played out before his mind's eye in a tableau of surreal mental manifestation. Every passing fancy and irrational, intrusive anxiety. He could see it all happening in his head, just as clearly as if it were playing out before his own line of sight in real time.

On their left this time, Harry spotted the façade of Aethlingworth which had so entranced him on their way into town.

Odd, wasn't it, that Snape had known to apparate there?

Snape was, by his own admission, piss poor at the art of magical transportation-by-displacement. Had he been there before?

Harry was left to wonder once more on the owners that Snape had mentioned.

That overactive mind's eye of his quickly summoned the image of a dashing Spaniard with a thin moustache, his face twisted in a smarmy grin. On his arm, bent backwards in a precarious dip, was a lovely woman with dark hair and red lips.

His first impulse was to push the image away, not sure where it had come from.

It was that same fancy he'd had weeks earlier that Snape had dismissed for being too close to a depiction of the legend of Don Juan.

He stopped, and Snape was several meters ahead of him before he realised that Harry had ceased to keep pace with him.

"What is it? You're not looking at the bloody house again—?" Severus groused, but he stopped when he saw that Harry was, indeed, staring open mouthed at the ancient manor.

"Severus... it's your family that owns Aethlingworth, isn't it?" Harry asked, blinking slowly.

That image of the gallant Lothario and his lovely wife had been conjured from the story of Erasmus Prince and Snape's grandmother. That was where he'd heard the name before.

The place of Eileen Prince's birth, and from whence she had fled to marry her own star-crossed, muggle lover. Aethlingworth.

Snape stared first at Harry, then out at the distant manor, nestled into the valley. He shifted from foot to foot while his mouth twitched, for the moment bereft of words.

"They're no family to me," he said finally, his words hissing like vapour into the air from his snarling lips.

Harry knew it would be unwise to press that point. Snape was right after all.

When Eileen had flown the coop to follow her heart, she'd been abandoned by the Prince family, much in the same way that Harry had been abandoned by his relatives. Snape had no place at their table any more than Harry would beg to be included at the Dursley's.

Thus, Harry merely nodded. As a show of good faith, he turned his attention away from Aethlingworth—no longer a mystery worth pondering—and took a turn leading them away from that painful thing known as the past.

"What'll we have for lunch when we get back?" He asked instead, turning his head back to glance at Snape's bemused face as it bobbed behind him.

Snape pulled up even with him and took over the lead, setting a more leisurely pace than he'd used when they'd strolled into town. He looked almost lighter of spirit, if Harry was any judge. His face wasn't so pinched, and his shoulders were held more loosely than Harry had seen in weeks.

The trip seemed to have done the man some good, and Harry was grateful for it. Living with a twenty-eight-year-old curmudgeon was no fun at all. Granted, Severus was never what anyone would term a ray of sunshine, but he had an odd mischievous streak that, once engaged, saw him doing things like brewing Babbling Beverage just to spike Harry's milk and singing loudly along to W.A.S.P.'s raunchiest songs. In other words, he could, at times, be almost fun, and Harry dearly missed Fun Severus.

Of course, whenever he was fun he was also at his most acerbic, taking joy in cutting anyone unlucky enough to be around him down to size, but that was just a peril of being the curmudgeonly wizard's... companion.

Friend.

'Brother.' A hopeful, and slightly impish voice seemed to suggest into Harry's ear.

He shook his head. There was no use in that. Snape didn't see him as any such thing.

"There are stacks of potted meat in the larder, once those have been cleared out we can discuss shopping for other fare." Severus said with a bit of a mocking grin.

It wasn't that Harry hated the stuff. He'd eat just about anything, especially if it wasn't raw veg—to which he'd developed something of an aversion after having subsisted off of the stuff over the days where the Dursleys had left him to his own devices. Yet, Spam out of a tin began to lose its lustre after the fifteenth time he'd eaten it that month...

It was only then that Harry realised that Snape was joking. He was staring down at Harry's face with an expectant smirk, waiting for the penny to drop.

"Oh, shove off—!"

"Mind your manners, boy, or it really will be toast again."

"You don't mean that!" Harry huffed, crossing his arms. Snape had to have been as tired of it as he was by that point.

"I don't," Snape agreed easily, with a gusty sigh. It was odd to see him strolling with so much patience. Normally Snape was always rushing somewhere to do something. Racing against time to some unnamable, unknowable finish line. Working with feverish intensity toward anything upon which he could rest his laurels.

Perhaps visiting Lily Potter had concluded the sprint, at least for that afternoon.

"How about I pick up something from The Yow?" Snape offered. "They'll not be expecting me today as I took off, but I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to poke my head in. I'll call in our order when we make it home."

Harry winced at the reminder of the travel they were about to take. He'd be happy enough if they never apparated again, even if it meant that every trip was taken in the Morris Marina with Snape's obvious death wish manning the wheel.

Harry thought that was rather saying something.

They'd arrived back at the dusty portion of road to which they'd apparated earlier in the day, and there was no sense in walking further up the road. In fact, Harry rather suspected that the fact that they'd chosen this as the apparition point had more to do with Snape's own desire to avoid engaging in that mode of travel again. There was no reason, after all, that they shouldn't have apparated back home as soon as they'd left the view of the small town of Aethlingham. Clearly, Snape had been attempting to put off the inevitable.

The man seemed like he might have been a genius on some level, and Harry didn't get the idea that it sat well with Severus to feel as though there was anything he wasn't good at, when, of course, there were plenty of things Snape did poorly: driving and apparating chief amongst them.

Perhaps Snape was merely travel-challenged in all respects.

When Harry finally glanced up, it was to see that Severus was standing with his arm out, rolling his eyes with obvious impatience.

"It won't be made any better by dawdling. Let's end this earlier rather than later."

Humph. That was rich, coming from the very person who had avoided apparating outside of town in favour of schlepping it a mile or more back into the countryside.

Steeling himself, Harry nodded and stepped into Snape's embrace, turning his face to press his nose into Severus' armpit.

The sickening flip-flop of reality came upon him with no warning from the older wizard, and even being braced against Snape's ribs, the shockwave of his feet meeting the floorboards of Spinner's End's sitting room sent jolts of pain up Harry's bones. From his tibia to his femur, to his pelvis and ricocheting off of his sternum and spine—really until his teeth knocked together so hard that he was sure they'd chipped—the impact traveled from down low to on high, and had he not been wedged up against Severus' side, he'd surely have found himself flat on his arse.

He was peeled away from Snape's person like a fruit skin, and he felt just as floppy as he allowed himself to fall onto the sofa. Beneath him the cushions emitted a tiny burst of dust.

Barely able to see and knowing his vision was impaired from squeezing his eyes so tightly shut, he pushed his spectacles up to his forehead in his quest to rub the grit from his eyeballs.

When Snape shouted, he was still seeing spots and couldn't determine the origin or reason for the great tantrum that he heard beginning to erupt.

The yelling was coming from behind him, he knew that. Not knowing what it was about and still blinded, Harry slipped from the sofa onto his knees on the floor, worried that he might have to take cover, but as he made to kneel, his knees and shins splayed out in separate directions to his left and right, hamstringing him. The loss of balance was enough to cause him to fall the rest of the way to the floor where the breath was knocked out of him and he felt his cheek crash against the old wood.

It should have felt dry and scratchy against his cheek, but instead it felt slick and oily.

Harry blinked, the world finally coming back into focus, to see that he had face-planted into a puddle of oleaginous, black gook.

"What the—?"

"IT'S GONE AND EXPLODED! IT FUCKING EXPLODED!" Snape was screaming from somewhere behind him. "IT'S BLOODY WELL EVERYWHERE!"

The kitchen. It must have been the kitchen.

His hands came up to try and push himself back up to sitting, but every time he attempted to put weight on his arms, the hands would slide out to either side and Harry remained splayed on his stomach.

He heard crashes from the kitchen that sounded suspiciously like a full-grown man's weight hitting the floor over and over again.

It took several tries, but Harry eventually succeeded in wiggling on his belly to where the sitting room emptied out into the kitchen.

As Snape had lamented so loudly, the black sludge was indeed everywhere. Harry had tripped on it where it had blown under the sofa, having emerged on the other side, the couch's back having protected a narrow strip of the sitting room wall from being similarly covered in ruined potion.

Snape was doing everything in his power to leverage himself up off the coated linoleum using the bench, the table, and the toppled chairs and was managing very little in the way of progress, as was evidenced by the long, riotous squiggles in the oobleck that had been made courtesy of his failing and flailing.

The substance was so slippery that any attempt to gain traction proved futile and Snape eventually surrendered. He laid on his back with his hair and clothes drenched in the stuff and fished around in his pocket for his wand.

Even that slipped through his grasp more than once and when he finally found it with his hand, resting in a puddle, he only managed to channel magic through it by allowing it to rest lightly in his grasp without attempting to hold onto it—for any suggestion of force would have sent it shooting out of his palm like a greased pig.

There was no chance of lunch at The Yow. Nor a chance of dinner, either. It took a full two hours to even manage to clear a space large enough that provided any chance of fighting back against the ick that had covered their home.

The bad potion was resistant to the potion degreaser, and to mere vanishing. In the end, it seemed like it was only satisfied when Snape made to siphon it off, slowly, with his wand. Thus, his first few attempts ate up a full half hour of their day, and it took longer still to clean off their hands and feet enough that they could begin to clean in earnest.

Although, of course, given that Harry had no wand of his own, there was little he could do, and eventually he grew weary of Snape's constant litany of profanity at the same rate that Snape grew tired of Harry's abject uselessness. At that point, Severus hoovered the boy from head to toe with his wand as best he could, pulling the oily mess from his skin and Harry was banished outside, told not to return until Snape collected him and gave him the all-clear.

It had all happened so fast, and on the heels of an otherwise momentous day, that the oddity of finding himself in the mid-afternoon sunlight with nothing else to do—and effectively evicted from the house—saw Harry blinking owlishly in the surprising sunlight. It was an odd contrast to the day's events.

Harry had seen his fair share of potions gone wrong before, certainly... but this one was particularly wayward. It was as though the potion were alive and knew it was misbehaving.

An impish, sniggering miscreant of a potion. Taunting them for hours. Mocking their grief by appearing as soon as they made it home from a morning fraught with big emotions and difficult memories.

Snape had been so livid that Harry was afraid to be near him. Far better to be outside, the boy decided, taking a seat on the stoop.

He rested his head in his hands and stared at the Marina where it was pulled up to the kerb.

Hadn't he weeks ago gotten it in his head that he ought to clean out the backseat? He'd never actually gone and done it.

Harry stood then and meandered close to the car, pulling open the door, pushing the driver's seat aside, and sidling into the back.

The interior was cold, and it felt curiously lifeless knowing that no one was coming out to turn a key in the ignition.

He bent down over the floor, his hands searching out the glass bottles and cassettes from the carpet. The tapes made it to one side, his right, and the trash he set on the left. There was a paper bag from a purchase Snape had made some time ago resting under the passenger seat; that was as good a rubbish bag as any.

Harry began loading it up with pop bottles and empty potion phials.

Candy wrappers, polystyrene boxes, dead leaves, and mildewy newspapers joined the bottles in short order, and by the time the floor in the back was clear, a sizable stack of cassettes sat near his hip, some in cases and some missing their protective cardboard or plastic covers.

The front passenger floor still remained, but this was good enough for the afternoon. The bag was full and he hadn't found another amongst the mess.

Looking at his handiwork, it was like night and day.

Harry patted the worn leather seat with a touch of sympathy. Severus didn't do near enough to keep the poor girl in good order. If anything, he seemed to derive some sort of perverse joy out of subjecting the long suffering car to as much misuse as he could manage.

The boy had to wonder at that. It seemed odd to harbour the sort of acrimony that Snape did towards an inanimate object such as his car, particularly given how trusty and dependable the Marina had been under Snape's dubious leadership.

Most likely, Snape hadn't even bothered to service the engine recently...

Harry frowned at that, not liking the thought that under the bonnet lurked a problem waiting to surface during a drive at any point in the future.

He slid from behind the seat, dropping his bag of trash onto the kerb beside him, and went to stand in front of the Marina, staring it down.

It took all of his meagre strength to lift the heavy cover from the engine, and he struggled mightily with the little arm that propped it open, but after several false starts, he managed it and stood looking at the car's guts, his hands on his spare hips as he had seen so many men in Little Whinging do while inspecting under the bonnet.

Harry fancied himself something of an expert; mostly in the way that only over-confident eight-year-old boys could manage about the objects of their restricted areas of interest. He checked the radiator fluid. He examined the connections on the battery. He eyeballed the gaskets and peered with rampant curiosity at the overhead valves.

He resolutely refused to admit that he couldn't possibly have spotted any deviations from what would have been normal and expected.

The dipstick! There was something he could check. He'd seen Uncle Vernon withdraw the long stick from the tube to assess the oil pan levels many times before. The Vauxhall had had a bad engine gasket which leaked terribly, necessitating frequent checks.

Harry located the long rod and withdrew it from the tube, looking for the tell-tale line on the metal showing the level.

It looked good enough.

That was a relief at least. Everything seemed in working order, he determined, without paying heed to the fact that he truly didn't have enough knowledge to be able to say such a thing.

He was left with a dirty dipstick, however, and no rag to wipe it on, as his uncle was so careful to do. Well... his slacks were already filthy. It couldn't hurt to wipe it against his trouser leg, Harry determined.

He did so, adding the engine oil to the sheen of filth from the ruined potion and slotting the stick back into the engine oil tube.

The bonnet he allowed to close with a loud bang.