Surely, after having both reconciled with his deceased mother for the time being, and having appeased his Lola's incessant demands that he attend Mass, Severus ought to have lightened up.

There was no reason at all for the man's temper to be circling the drain in such a way.

Yet there Harry was, his nose in the corner where Snape had ordered him, straining to stifle the angry sniffles that wanted to break forth.

Snape had been asleep, after all. Harry had checked thoroughly that Severus was pretty much out cold. It was one of the rare times where Snape was home, but otherwise preoccupied such that Harry was able to do with his time as he liked.

He'd gotten rather used to having the run of the house from the time he got home from school until Snape returned in the evenings, so on this odd occasion where Snape had swapped work hours with the other bar-keep and had taken advantage of his time off to kip on the decrepit sofa, Harry had been pleased enough to sneak on past him as soon as he realised that the lights had been insistently spelled off, and that a sound-barrier had been erected.

That was nearly as good as a sign saying 'Piss off, Potter,' in his opinion. Snape wouldn't have wanted to hear from him anyway.

Thus, as soon as Harry had seen the opportunity, he'd snatched the tape deck from the kitchen chair where it was enthroned and snuck a few of his favourite tapes upstairs with him.

He'd spent the first hour and a half listening to 1984, which was an album that Snape didn't often circulate.

Then again, that wasn't quite true. He played it plenty... just... less than Harry would have liked.

If it were up to him, he'd have listened to it twice a day, minimum.

Thus, he made it through two times while he puzzled out his maths homework and copied out the vocabulary and spelling words he was meant to memorise for the quiz later that week.

The other album he'd stollen was one of Snape's favourites and was far newer.

It was certainly played often enough, but Harry had never been allowed to crank it up quite as loud as he felt it needed to go.

Other albums seemed to sound just fine when coming from the speakers built into the player, set at a reasonable level, but this one only ever sounded right when Snape had the volume turned all the way up in the car, and the older wizard was loathe to do such a thing in the house, particularly when he needed to think.

Driving with music was a wholly different kettle of fish than brewing with music, apparently.

This was a rare opportunity where Harry felt as though he could enjoy it the way he wanted to hear it, and without the ever-present terror he felt while he was made to endure Snape's behaviour behind the wheel.

For the first two songs of 5150, Harry had packed away his bag for the morning and then spent some time feeding Wheat, allowing the spider to crawl on his hands for his daily exercise.

Apparently, the overgrown arachnid wasn't feeling terribly sociable that day, or else the music bothered him greatly, for he only tolerated Harry's interference for a bare two minutes before he'd begun to bristle and the boy set him back into his plastic enclosure, free to pursue the crickets that he'd furnished for the tarantula's happy hunting.

There was no telling what came over him when the third song came on. It'd started off normal enough, and Harry hadn't even really realised that he'd been energetically ramping up at the same rate as the tempo did.

All he knew was that by the time Sammy Hagar began shrieking "GET UP! MAKE IT WORK, MAKE IT WORK! GEEEEETTTTTT UPPPPPP, 'N MAKE IT WORK!" He found that his frantic pacing from one end of the small room to the other—in time with the lyrics and guitar—was no longer satisfactory to exorcise the surge of raw adrenaline that had seemingly flooded up from within him at the sense of spiraling urgency suggested by the song.

Sammy was telling him to get up. So, Harry did.

On the bed.

Finally, in jumping up and down on the ancient, protesting springs of the mattress, Harry felt that weightless sense of freedom that seemed to satisfy the demands of the tireless song, and he wailed along with Sammy as he bounced, a grin so big that it threatened to break his face stretching to the far reaches of his cramping cheeks.

With each spinning hop around he'd watched the posters swirling into a dizzying array of colours and patterns, and he reveled in the wooziness until, on what turned out to be his final pass around, he'd seen a fuzzy, black smudge where the posters of the door had been.

A furious, fuzzy, black smudge.

Snape had nearly tackled him in trying to drag him from the bed, Harry's limbs flailing about as he lost his balance and toppled over to pin Severus beneath him on the floor.

That was when he learnt that for all of the precautions that Snape had taken not to be disturbed by Harry's return from school, none of them had prevented small chips of plaster from falling down off the ceiling as Harry was busy destroying the man's childhood mattress.

Harry didn't think he'd ever heard Snape yell quite so much, and the man's deep voice nearly went hoarse by the end of it, for then he'd fallen silent. So quiet that Harry wished at once that he'd begin yelling again.

But all that remained to be said was that Harry was to stick his nose to the corner in the kitchen until Snape released him, and that if Snape came back to find that he'd been disobeyed, that he might very well decide that a sticking charm would be necessary.

Harry had frantically shaken his head at such a suggestion, and had faced the wall with resolution and an iron spine.

His heart hurt... but his ears remained in good stead, and Snape hadn't laid into his rear with the business end of a hairbrush, as his Uncle Vernon had done on occasion.

This he could endure; although the fact that Snape was so very upset with him turned out to be bad enough.

Snape was, at times, more friend than anything approximating a parent, so to be reminded that Harry was still so very capable of disappointing his guardian and looking every inch the insufferable child was terribly demoralising.

Worse yet was the silence that plagued the kitchen as Snape worked behind his turned back.

Snape never preferred to work in silence if he could help it. In punishing Harry, the dark wizard was punishing himself.

By the time Snape finally bade him turn around, the sun had set in the single window of the cramped space, and darkness had fallen.

Snape tapped him on the shoulder to tell him he was released from his penitence at the same moment that he decided he ought to pull the chain on the naked bulb that hung from the ceiling, throwing the neglected room into stark, unforgiving light.

He still was punishing Harry by not saying anything, but he did set before the boy a cheese toastie that Harry had smelled him preparing in the past fifteen minutes.

The boy picked up the two halves and scrambled to take an enormous bite out of each side, stuffing his face so that his cheeks bulged, just on the off chance that Severus changed his mind and sent him to bed with an empty stomach.

It was what his aunt would have done.

The older wizard sighed. He'd picked up his own toastie and had started in on it with far less gusto than Harry had, but set it aside with a grim look as he watched his charge's attempts to polish the sandwich off in one go. "I see that spending some much needed time contemplating your lack of good judgement did nothing to improve upon your manners."

Unable to speak around a mouthful of melted cheddar, it took a full minute for Harry to masticate what he'd stowed away in the pocket of his cheeks before he could swallow and answer. "I'm really sorry, Severus—"

"Where've I heard that before, I wonder?" Snape interrupted with a long-suffering roll of his black eyes.

"I didn't think—"

"This is not news to me."

"Quit it!" Harry cried, allowing the remainder of the crusts to fall from his fingers. He scrubbed his greasy fingers against his jeans in order to liberate his hands from the oily feeling, not caring that Snape grimaced as he did so. "I didn't think it would make the ceiling fall down! I didn't mean to damage the house..."

"No," Snape agreed, his voice deceptively mild, "you only meant to punch a hole through the mattress with your feet."

"D-did I?"

"I've not checked, but I doubt it. You're likely not heavy enough. But if it's lumpy from here on out, it's no more than you deserve." The man grumbled, directing a baleful stare at the sorrowful eight-year-old.

"I thought you didn't even like Sammy," Severus continued to complain, now picking up his toastie and taking a vicious bite out of it. The effect was somewhat ruined when strings of melted cheese weren't so easily broken and stretched from his mouth to the wedge of bread in the man's hands. He brought up his opposite index finger to break the threads, his thunderous expression signaling annoyance.

There was no helping it, however. It was a patently ridiculous look for the surly wizard, and Harry couldn't help but to laugh, even as he tried his best to choke it back down his throat from whence it came.

This, of course, helped nothing, for Snape's gaze turned positively mutinous and he set his portion down with finality, apparently resolved not to take another bite until he was no longer at risk of embarrassing himself.

"I like Sammy," Harry granted, winding a string of cheese around his finger and tugging it off with his teeth. "I just don't like him as much as Dave."

"Don't play with your food."

It took everything in him not to stick his tongue out at this directive.

Instead, he continued to compare the albums. "You never play it loud enough. When you play VHII it sounds loud on its own. When you play 5150, everything sounds... I dunno. Not as good."

"Apparently it sounded just fine to you, if you felt the need to break through the floor, jumping about as you were."

"It's ok if it's turned up all the way, but you gotta turn it up all the way," Harry insisted, gesturing with his hands as though he were turning an invisible volume knob.

Finally flashing a bit of an indulgent grin, his snaggle teeth glinting in the low lighting, Snape shook his head with evident amusement. "We shall have to take your word for it. Though I recall on occasion having it up that loud on the road, I simply can't think straight when it's playing at top volume while I'm attempting to focus.

"In any case, you will not jump on the bed. Is that clear?"

Harry felt ornery enough that he didn't want to agree verbally, so he settled for nodding, which apparently suited Snape just fine.

His amusement over the bed debacle only lasted so long, however, and before it was time to retire for the evening, the dark wizard had lapsed once more into sullen silence. The same variety that he'd been prone to for going on a week or more.

It was a sad thing to see the older wizard so very out-of-sorts. Sad and nearly frightening.

It wasn't like Snape to sit about stroking one finger over his lips as he mulled over invisible worries in his head. No sort of idler, the young wizard usually preferred to use his scant free time to better effect.

If he wasn't inventing, he was at the very least preparing ingredients or conducting research, looking up answers to questions he'd considered during the long hours at work. For him to spend so much time staring into space and woolgathering was worrisome in the extreme, and Harry wasn't entirely sure how to bring it up in conversation.

He certainly wasn't well-known for delicacy, and it was likely that he lacked the finesse to draw it out of his guardian without Snape's knowing.

Probably better that he merely played to his strengths, Harry thought, as they wiled away yet another hour in awkward company, the only sound being the garbled mess that emitted from their television set.

Snape was making a valiant effort at attempting to look as though he were paying attention to whatever it was that was on at that hour, but there was no way he could have understood any of it. The intermittent static noise that interrupted the picture and sound both made it impossible for anyone watching to discern what the programming was meant to be about.

Really, it was a mystery why he didn't just toss the set out. Perhaps he kept it for sentimental reasons. Or perhaps he kept it around specifically for moments like these, where a pretense was preferable to conversing with Harry or facing whatever it was that Snape was worrying over without some means of distraction.

"Hey—you alright?" Harry asked, finally. He was draped over the armchair in the corner with his sock-clad feet dangling over one arm while his head rested on his hands on the other, in the sort of pose only an undersized child could accomplish with any degree of comfort.

Snape didn't deign to look up from his false interest in the television. He was slouched over on the sofa, his legs forming a deep V in front of him. His right elbow was propped against the armrest and his right hand was serving to support the weight of his head. When he spoke, his voice emerged muffled from the press of his fingers against his cheek and mouth. "Don't I look alright?"

Perhaps not sensing the man's sarcasm, Harry looked Severus up and down, from the mad tangle of the man's limp hair to the greying, holey socks he wore. That was all business as usual, however. What didn't look quite up to snuff was the way in which Snape was listlessly moving about their house whenever he was home and sleeping during his off hours rather than working on that all-important invention he was always nattering about.

"N-no, not really."

"Hmph."

"You look sad," Harry continued.

Truthfully, Snape always looked a bit sad, but more often than not, that could be hidden behind any number of other expressions: anger, business-like crispness, spells of dry humour, even brief periods of mania.

At that moment, it was plain on his face. The sadness that Harry often sensed lurking deep. The sadness that he'd seen the day when Yax and Wulf had come, and Snape was made to lay himself bare, begging Harry's forgiveness as he wept in the car.

"Of all the puerile—I am not sad," Snape sneered, having cut his black eyes up at him. "Little girls are sad when they get a rip in their dresses. Sentimental fools are sad when they hear about a death of someone they never knew, nor would they ever have known. Stupid, mewling children are sad when—"

"Stop!" Harry cried, sitting up straighter in the seat and righting himself until he was no longer draped across the chair. Glaring at Snape for all he was worth, he tried his best to show his censure with the self-indulgent and morose tangent the dark wizard's speech had taken in his denial.

"Quite," Snape snarled with a vicious glint in his eye. "It occurs to me, then, that you have no real interest in hearing about how I'm feeling. Kindly butt out."

'Of all the—' Harry set his jaw in a stubborn cant and leant forward out over his knees and crossed arms, determined not to allow Severus to get away with whatever it was he was doing.

He insisted again, not letting up with the concerned frown that he wore across his bespeckled face. "I do wanna know. I just don't wanna hear you insulting everyone. If you're not sad, what are you?"

For several tense moments, they were locked in a silent contest of wills, bottle-green eyes boring into void-black.

To Harry's limitless amazement, he won. The taciturn man across the room from him seemed to deflate at long last and broke eye-contact first, appearing deeply pained as he did so. Snape slumped further into the arm of the chair, now looking as though he was doing his level best to become one with the upholstery.

No longer so combative, Snape's deep, gravelly voice was now bordering on hopelessly glum. "It doesn't bear mentioning."

"Yeah, it does," Harry insisted, peering out with concern at the man who always seemed to have all the answers for them. Anything that could depress Snape must have been worrisome indeed...

A deep gust of air emitted from Snape's flared nostrils as he sighed, perhaps in defeat. "It is almost the thirty-first."

Harry stared at him, non-plussed, for several seconds. The words hung in the air between them and the boy was left to puzzle over them.

He knew of no especial things that happened on the thirty-first...

If he followed the meandering path of his stream-of-consciousness, he considered whatever popped first into his head: his birthday was on the thirty-first of July... but that was several months past.

He must have still looked puzzled, for Snape's hand slid down off of his face and he threw a faintly disgusted look Harry's way.

"Halloween, Potter! Halloween!"

Blinking now, Harry's face screwed up a bit. "What's so special about Halloween?"

Now it was Snape's turn to blink back. The man appeared almost speechless, which was a novel look for a bloke who was never lost for words, nor for insults.

"You don't know what... what happened on Halloween?" He asked, sounding gobsmacked.

"No...? Should I?" Harry ventured, with more caution than was usual for him.

"That was the night, Harry."

It was almost perverse that Snape was now staring at Harry with sympathy shining deep in the depths of his expression. Every line on his prematurely aged face was tight with strain, and he looked as though he'd not gotten a proper night of sleep in a week or more, but here he was studying Harry with a look of worry and sorrow, even after Harry had continued to goad him.

"The night...?" Harry repeated, feeling a sense of dread at the words.

"That was the night that the Dark Lord murdered..." Snape faltered, looking rather ill at the words escaping the confines of his mouth. "That was the night you were orphaned. Halloween of '81."

A very strange thing indeed that he could feel his lips moving, forming an 'o' in accordance with the dull pang he felt, but that no sound seemed to proceed from his mouth.

It hurt. It really did. No less, and no more than it might have to have heard that Halloween of '81 was the night where his parents' car careened off of the road and ended up wrapped around the trunk of an ancient, stout oak (incidentally, the story he had grown up with, with the notable exception of the actual date).

Even so, dead was dead. Harry's initial surge of feeling back in July had been driven by a number of factors.

It had indeed been a shock to find out that his parents had been murdered, and he had definitely felt angry at the news. Angry at the Dursleys for deceiving him, and at Snape for his complicity in the ill-fated tragedy which had produced Harry the Orphan...

So why was it that he now felt so curiously numb when it was clear that Snape was expecting some sort of grand display of emotion on his part?

The way in which the elder wizard's narrowed eyes peered at him spoke to a sense of weariness. Was he thinking that Harry would break down in tears? Mourning anew the loss of parents he'd felt he'd never really known? Or perhaps he expected Harry to yell at him and reject him once again.

That struck Harry as odd, as his ire at the man hadn't lasted so very long. Perhaps it should have... but there was nothing for it. Harry liked Severus, and that was the truth. And Snape obviously felt terribly over the whole ordeal, given his tears and the way in which he'd clearly harboured feelings for his mother—

Ah. Ah, so that was it.

This wasn't really about Harry.

This was about that little red-headed girl around whose face Snape had sketched little pencil hearts so many years before. This sorrow, this misery shrouding his guardian like an impenetrable miasma of wretchedness, was Snape's way of mourning. He must have been expecting something of the same from Harry himself.

Harry felt a small twinge at the fact that he couldn't quite call up the same level of sadness that Snape clearly felt. It was his own mother—not to mention his father—who had perished. His entire world had been upended and destroyed as surely as the Potter family's home in Godric's Hollow had been... but for all that, Harry simply couldn't summon much more than a calm acceptance.

"Oh." He said.

Snape was still studying him as though he were a potion ready to boil over and explode. When, after several moments of peace no such event took place, he seemed to relax, even if his frown deepened.

"I thought you might react... with more volatility." Severus admitted, his voice emerging with slow caution.

His tongue darting out to wet his lips—suddenly dry and painful—Harry shook his head to clear it of the fuzz that seemed to be collecting at the fringes of his awareness. "I... it doesn't matter when it happened, does it? I mean... it's awful, isn't it, but does it matter if they were... if they were—"

"Murdered," Snape supplied.

"Yeah," Harry agreed. "If they were... murdered on..." he cast about for a date. Any date. The very fact that it didn't matter made picking one at random all the more difficult.

"I dunno, Christmas? Or my birthday? Or June sixth? Or today?"

Snape frowned, but for all that, his face was tranquil as he considered this. "No. I don't suppose it would."

"It's all the same." Harry explained. "They're dead. I'm a-alone... what good is there in hating October thirty-first?"

Looking at Harry as though he were something of an oddity—perhaps some rare and ponderous ingredient—Snape only blinked. "It is a convenient reminder of a terrible day I'd just as soon forget," he murmured. It sounded rather like he was making a confession.

"Is Halloween really so bad, though?" Harry posed. It was now his turn to look to the telly in order to distract himself. "I bet you think about my mum every day. Not just the day she died. Not just the month before the day she died.

"I'm an orphan every day. Not just the day my parents were... were m-mur... the day they died."

Anything else that Snape might have said to this pronouncement withered on his lips as a loud clang rent the air.

In a flash Snape was on his feet and cautioned Harry to stay put as he stalked the perimeter of the tiny house.

The length of twisting wood was held in his right hand, ready for immediate use, and he made a full circuit of the entire ground floor before he determined that nothing inside had caused the noise.

When he exited through the kitchen door to check the back garden, Harry held his breath and tried to make himself small in the chair, fearing deeply that one of Snape's old Death Eater chums had come to call once more, but Snape's reappearance moments later dispelled such imaginings.

"A bloody cat," he snarled, resuming his seat on the sofa with ill-grace. "It toppled over the bins next to the house."

Harry peered out from behind his legs, which he'd drawn up to his chest. He'd remained in a tight little ball for the duration of Snape's hunt.

"You're sure that's all it was? It wasn't... there wasn't anyone coming to see you, or... or..."

"You thought it was one of my erstwhile associates from the blood-soaked days of my youth," Snape sneered, though for all of his vitriol he also appeared somewhat pained by the admission of his misbegotten indiscretions. "No. No one has come by the house since Lucius dropped by."

"And... er... what did he want?" Harry asked again. At the time, the answer that Snape had provided had been anything but satisfactory, but given the subject matter they'd just been discussing, Harry had what may have been, perhaps, a vain hope that Severus might be a bit more cavalier with his choice of words.

Sighing with high melodrama, the dark young man sank deeper into the back of the sofa. "You haven't much in the way of an imagination, do you?" He asked. For all that his tone was conversational, it was clearly also a tad sardonic.

Harry's lips pursed with impatience. Snape was going to make him play this little game where he took whacks at the information the man withheld until it was obvious that he hadn't a single clue.

"I really don't know," he admitted, hoping that a show of humility on his part might speed the farce along.

A joyless chuckle emitted from the man slouched against the threadbare sofa. "Lucius came bearing gifts—"

"Gifts?"

"Information. Incidentally, it was worthless information that I was already privy to, but he had it in his head that by tossing me a knut, a sickle might have sprung back into his own hand."

As far as Harry was concerned, that was nonsense. Not because it seemed an inequal exchange, but mostly because he didn't know what either a knut or a sickle were and he was too tired to ask.

"And er... what did he tell you?" Harry asked. He'd worked his hands under his thighs in order to keep them warm in the chilled house and he kicked his sock-clad feet, swinging them in rhythm with Get Up, which was still stuck in his head from earlier that afternoon.

"It seems that Lucius is under the impression that because I furnished my resignation from my post as Head of Slytherin, that I also stepped away from our world such that I haven't bothered to even skim the daily paper—"

Wisely, Harry kept his mouth shut about Snape's habit of tossing the front page—often after muttering rude oaths about the rag's reporting—in deference to the puzzle section, which he diligently completed each day. Perhaps, at that, it would be a good idea for Harry himself to rescue the discarded portions of The Prophet from their resting place in the kitchen bin each morning.

"—and to that end, his interminable yammering about the petty intrigues playing out in the Wizengamot was tiresome, his whinging about the pitiable state of Azkaban's security was irrelevant to anyone who doesn't regularly commune with convicted criminals, and his blow-by-blow on the state of his marriage and fatherhood was a blatant attempt at routing the conversation towards those prosaic and domestic concerns he truly wished to know about—"

Not a single word of that made sense to Harry, and his confusion manifested itself on his features by way of creasing his brow above his spectacles and allowing his mouth to fall open in a stupefied gape. "Er... what was it he actually wanted to know?"

Exasperated, and with a renewed sense of irritation at his uppity friend, Snape snapped at him for interrupting his tirade. "For Christsake, use your head! You! He wanted to know about you!"

"Me?" Harry choked, the single syllable emerging in an incredulous, and slightly hysterical, laugh. "What's he wanna know about me for?"

Snape peered at him with a pitying glance, his head falling against the back of the sofa as he turned it to look at his charge. "Have you so readily forgotten what you mean to our world?"

"No..."

"Then you've forgotten what I've told you about what motivates the likes of Lucius Malfoy."

"I mean, actually you didn't really tell me much at all," Harry contested with a frown. All Snape had said was that the man had wanted the world on a silver platter, whatever that meant.

"Lucius wants..." Snape trailed off, and it seemed as though he was genuinely considering what it was that his occasional friend desired, or at least how to name it.

"Influence." He finally said, swallowing so that his Adam's apple bobbed in his thin throat. "Power. He wants a finger on the scale. To throw his weight around."

"What does that have to do with me?" Harry asked feeling cross. It was an odd thing to be considered such a very important puzzle piece when he knew himself to be quite unexceptional.

Certainly Aunt Petunia would have scoffed at suggestions that there was anything worthwhile or special about her nephew, and Harry never much got the impression that Snape saw him as anything more than a rather large nuisance that the man occasionally felt a spot of grudging affection for—and, if that, likely in spite of himself.

"Lucius is too cunning by half to give away what he would do with anything he learned from me. Accordingly, I thought it important to tell him a fat lot of nothing." Snape shrugged. "When his initial inquiries failed, he started in talking about Draco, and when I still had little to say to him, he grew frustrated and left."

"Wait—who's Draco?"

"Lucius' son. Your age, or thereabouts."

"Why would he talk about him? What would that do?" Harry mused, wondering at the strange convoluted way in which adults often conducted themselves.

"Likely he wished to impress upon me that he saw our duties as equitable," Snape snorted and knuckled at one eye, pressing in so deeply that Harry wondered at whether it hurt. "I do not mistake myself for your father. I haven't any desire to be your father. Lucius was about as far off the mark as he might have been if he'd shot entirely blind."

Harry felt an unmistakable stab of hurt at that and found he had little to say in response.

When the Harry didn't fill the air with another stream of pointed questions, Snape glanced up at him and must have seen the look of desolation on the boy's face, for his own expression grew restive in response. "Harry, I didn't mean that how it sounded—"

"Yeah, you did." Harry deadpanned, glaring at his feet. "'S'okay though. You're my custodian. 'S not the same as being a father."

Another loud breath of air caused Snape's nostrils to flare as they so often did when he was feeling morose. "It's not the same, no. But I hardly... I didn't mean to sound as though I feel your presence to be unwelcome. It's merely... I don't know. I feel rather young to be your father."

"You're the same age as my parents."

Snape merely shrugged, looking melancholy at the thought. "That is true, I'll grant you. I don't know if you realise that your parents had you rather young. Even if—"

"Even if it were you who'd won her over?" Harry challenged, now feeling rather uncharitable towards the man. He'd meant it to hurt, and from Snape's flinch, his words had met their mark.

"Even had it been me... I'm not so certain that I'd have been in any rush to jump feet first into fatherhood at the unripe age of twenty," Snape admitted, looking mildly apologetic.

Looking at the older wizard, Harry thought he might understand what he meant, even if he didn't quite want to.

Harry's impression of Snape all along had been that Severus was old in speech and manners, but that this fact was often undermined by the unpolished and immature way in which Snape seemed to live his day-to-day life.

In some moments, he seemed ancient, like some sorcerer of old; for whom nothing was a mystery, for he possessed age old wisdoms the likes of which Harry could only guess at.

In his other moments... well... Snape was capable of the kind of silly pettiness that Harry was more likely to expect from the other kids in Mr. Fowler's class. Furthermore, he dressed like an overgrown teenager, and seemed utterly disinterested in the sort of activities that Harry considered to be of the adult realm: namely, cleaning, nourishing oneself with food that wasn't largely junk, and consuming media that wasn't wholly rebellious in nature.

Finally, Harry had to agree with Snape; that had he not been thrust into his care of Harry beyond what he'd wanted, he likely hadn't been ready for such a thing as fatherhood. At least not from the little Harry understood of such things.

It was a wonder they'd allowed Snape any sort of free reign over students, for that matter. Harry didn't imagine that it'd be easy to take a teacher like Severus very seriously. At times he was downright terrifying, but then these occasions were balanced out by the episodes in which Snape was vaguely pathetic, or even very, very cool.

Then again, Harry knew the man better than the average student likely would have. It was a ponderous thing to consider what it might have been like to only have known Snape in the same capacity that Harry knew Mr. Fowler.

That was to say, not very well at all.

"Lola calls you my kuya." Harry offered, his voice emerging faintly hopeful.

Severus sneered a bit, though it didn't seem to be directed at Harry, himself. "Oh. And I don't suppose that interfering old woman mentioned what that meant."

Harry didn't take the bait. "Could you be my kuya, Severus?"

For several moments there was strained, painful silence. It seemed to fill the void in room with a rank mixture of hope, disappointment, dread, and perhaps something else. Something difficult to name.

"I suppose," Snape began, perhaps after the stillness grew to be too much for him, "that that would not be an altogether incorrect assessment."