Late that evening, Snape located Harry out on the old swing set at the park, where the boy had migrated for lack of anything better to do.
Harry had taken several turns on the monkey bars and he would have attempted the slide had it not been riddled with rusty holes that promised to dump him onto the scraggly grass, arse over tit. In the end, he'd decided it wasn't worth the risk, even if he had dared to use it at the end of the summer. With his luck, the thin metal wouldn't hold this time around.
No other children had bothered to show their faces, and it was dark by the time Snape had come loping out of the shadows and sat down next to him on the other swing to the sound of jangling chains.
They creaked as the man leaned his forehead listlessly against them, the toes of his boots dragging in the dirt. He appeared not dissimilar to a puppet whose strings had been cut.
"It's as good as I could hope to do for the evening," he managed to say, the bags under his black eyes giving away how very exhausted he must have been.
Harry twisted in the rubber strap so that he was facing him, a chain crossing his vision and attempting to swivel him back to face outwards properly. He resisted it with his heels dug into the earth. "How are we going to get the rest of it? You were at it for hours..."
"Eight hours," Snape confirmed. He looked to be too tired to even be properly angry about a whole wasted day and a slew of ruined ingredients. "I don't think I've used so much magic in months."
One of his bony hands came up to push the hair away from his forehead and eyes. From the look of his skin, he had been doused in sweat from his exertions and his hair appeared nearly damp from it.
"Suppose I'll just have to remove whatever I find of it when it crops up," he finally said after what looked to be a period of deliberation.
"Let me know if you find another puddle. I tried the degreaser again and it just added to the mess. I believe this ought to be a lesson to never again trust your intuition where ingredients are concerned, Potter."
Harry winced, but for all that they stung, the words rang true. Snape seemed too withdrawn and morose to mean much by them.
Beyond them, the calls of a few late season birds could be heard, and the twilight came into the full flower of night. Snape stared out into the hedges that grew at the periphery of the playground, his vacant expression betraying how very far away his thoughts were.
In the end, it was Harry who stood, and Harry who poked the man in his skinny shoulder with his index finger, causing Snape to swing forward half a foot.
"Let's get back. I've got school, and tomorrow's your long day at work. There's still some of the back meat from that chicken you made last week; I think I can make it into a salad if we still have any mayonnaise left."
It was odd how Snape stood to follow without a word. He was a husk of his usual self.
Then again, Harry understood on some level. Hadn't there been days where he'd endured past his limits for the sake of avoiding punishment from his aunt? Weren't there times where he'd been worked to the bone, wrung out of everything he had to give? He'd been pretty reserved on those days too.
Especially considering the fact that they so often presented the same results in the end that would have come had he merely slacked off.
Thus, when he awoke Tuesday morning and found that Snape was nowhere to be found, but that his bedroom door was still closed, it was no mystery that the man had chosen to have a lay in.
Harry figured that if anyone deserved one, it was Severus.
He paid the owl that brought The Daily Prophet, and when he found a bit of black goo at the far end of the cooker he penned a tiny note on some scrap paper and left it on the table for Severus to find along with the paper.
Breakfast that morning had been some of the rustic cheese he'd made with Severus' help, topped with sugar and milk, and he was glad that Snape wasn't there to make hypocritical remarks about the amount of sugar Harry had added to his bowl.
He'd get his jollies where he could, thank you very much.
School was much as it ever was. Mr. Fowler set them to reading tiny segments of Shakespeare and kept up a running tally of all of the difficult or outrageously antiquated words on the blackboard, explaining as the class read through the short bit of the play he'd chosen for that day's lesson.
The absurdity of asking a group of seven and eight-year-olds to parse through the writings of The Bard seemed utterly lost on him, and Harry was reminded again of Severus' complete lack of faith in Mr. Fowler's aptitude for teaching and assessing the difficulty of his assigned coursework. Harry had stuck up for his teacher on more than one occasion, but he was beginning to believe that Severus might have been on to something.
Certainly they could read Shakespeare aloud, but it was entirely likely that not one person in the class was managing even basic comprehension of the material. Harry knew he certainly wasn't. Sounding out the words was one thing. Understanding it all was well beyond his ken.
Additionally, it was just Harry's luck that he'd been assigned to read the part of Richard himself, and that he was meant to go back and forth with Snowdrop who'd been assigned the part of Anne.
"Your beauty," Harry bit out, with a grimace to underscore how terribly disingenuous he felt about saying so, "was the cause of that effect—Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep to undertake the death of all the world, so I might live one hour in your sweet... bosom..." he sounded out, the words coming out at a glacial pace and with unnatural intonation as he struggled over the sentence.
Mr. Fowler held up one hand as he began to scratch out five letters onto the board.
"Bosom," he announced to sniggers from the class. "That means, a woman's... *ahem*... chest. That is to say, her breast."
Harry coloured and avoided looking at Snowdrop who was glaring daggers at him. He'd pay for that later, he knew, when he had to go back to the Hill household that very evening.
He resolved to take extra long milking Babs. Perhaps he could avoid a confrontation.
"If I thought that, I tell thee, homicide," Snowdrop snarled at him, putting undue emphasis on the most malignant word of her lines. "These nails should rend that beauty from my cheeks."
Unlike Harry, Snowdrop seemed to barely struggle with her lines, and she certainly knew what 'homicide' meant. Unfortunately, Harry did too.
"Rend," commented Mr. Fowler, adding it to his list. "In this case means to tear—write these down, mind you, they may appear on our vocabulary quiz at the end of the week."
A groan arose in a chorus from the class at large, but a shuffling could be heard as they all reached for their pencils en masse.
Harry swallowed and looked at where the words were swimming in front of his nose. He always got terrible nerves when he was meant to read aloud. He was fully aware that he was butchering the odd sentence structure and obscure words.
"These eyes could not endure that beauty's wrack. You should not blemish it, if I stood by. As all the world is cheered by the sun, So I by that. It is my day my life."
Snowdrop called out her lines with impatience before Mr. Fowler could add to his sadistic lexicon.
"Black night o..." She breathed in and tried again. "Black night o-o-er-shade thy day, and death thy life."
"Curse not thyself, fair creature," Harry continued, affecting the gallantry he supposed must have been appropriate for such a delivery. It must have seemed farcical coming from him, for he heard Nicky stifling a laugh and saw that Snowdrop looked as though she'd eaten poison... again. "Thou art both."
"I would I were, to be revenged on thee," she hissed, sounding a bit too sincere for Harry's tastes.
"It is a quarrel most unnatural to be revenged on him that loveth thee."
He nearly stuck his tongue out in an 'ick' expression. Him? Love Snowdrop? Blegh.
"It is a quarrel just and reasonable to be revenged on him that killed my husband."
"He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband did it to help thee to a better husband."
Harry had little time to think on that one, but he couldn't shake the impression that the smarmy git he was reading for reminded him a bit too much of his ku—Severus. It was the sort of self-satisfied behaviour that he'd seen the older wizard engage in when he felt assured he'd gotten the upper hand, and especially when he'd finagled the result by petty or underhanded means.
"Bereft, in this context, means to have deprived Anne of her husband...by means of murder," their teacher added, unnecessarily.
Snowdrop turned her nose into the air. "His better doth not breathe upon the earth."
"He lives that loves thee better than he could," Harry swore, lightly pounding his fist on the desk for emphasis. His eyes had finally adjusted to his reading, or else he was becoming accustomed to the awkwardness of saying the words aloud as he read them in real time. The embarrassment of having to do so for an audience had faded away.
Neither noticed the way the class was now paying rapt attention to their playacting.
"Name him!" She cried.
"Planty-genit." Harry mispronounced.
"Why, that was he."
"The selfsame name, but one of better nature."
"Where is he?"
"Here," Harry declared boastfully, daring to bang his fist down on the desk before him.
That was before Snowdrop followed the cue on the page and actually spat at him in truth. She was sat near enough to him that spittle landed on the back of his hand.
Harry shook his hand in the air, his face a picture of disgust. "Oi! What's that for!?"
"It said to do it in the script," Snowdrop said with false sweetness. "Right, Mr. Fowler?"
Their teacher merely stared at them, his mouth twisting with bemused indecision. "It... it does say that, Hill, but in future, let's ignore the directions in parentheses, shall we? Onwards now: Potter, it's 'Why dost thou spit at me,' not 'Oi!'"
Harry attempted, with little success, to hide his look of contempt for the teacher. "Why dost thou spit at me?" He gamely repeated.
"Would it were mortal poison for thy sake."
"Never came poison from so sweet a place." It may as well have been poison. Harry nearly choked on the words. Gross.
"Never hung poison on a fouler toad. Out of my sight! Thou dost infect mine eyes."
She sounded entirely too honest about having said so.
"Thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected mine."
She turned then to snarl at him with all the venom of a deadly serpent, "Would they were basilisks' to strike thee dead!"
Harry's next line was, blessedly, interrupted by an intercession from the school bell. He breathed a sigh of relief and slammed the book shut—an action which would have been more satisfying had it not been a paperback copy.
Snowdrop appeared just as relieved to be done with the forced participation, and she was the first for the door.
Allowing himself to dawdle some, Harry ensured he'd be last in line. They were meant to head to music class, then he'd have to face the girl on the ride to Gammy Hill's house.
In Ms. Tibbons' class they'd long since moved on from keeping rhythm on the clacking sticks and they now used class time for things such as learning folk dances, passing around a strange assortment of drums and rainsticks in a circle, and on occasion she would play classical selections, either off of a cassette or in short pieces on the piano, then would lecture on the composers.
Harry found much of this dull beyond words. He thoroughly enjoyed music, and he knew that Ms. Tibbons seemed to like rock music as much as he himself did if her presence at the KISS concert was anything to go off of. That nothing of the sort would be included in the curriculum was beyond disappointing.
Today as they seated themselves in their green plastic chairs, she came before them with a fat stack of folders—overflowing with loose sheafs of paper—cradled in her arms.
An intrusive thought came in like a battering ram against Harry's thoughts, likely inspired by the readthrough he'd been conscripted into against his will the hour earlier.
'Against her bosom...' it hissed in his ear.
He scowled at the floor and began kicking his legs for something to distract himself.
"I'm sure I don't have to tell you lot what's coming up in a month and a half now that it's November," she began, waggling her dark brows a bit. They clashed with her peroxide blonde hair, but in a way Harry found fascinating rather than garish.
A couple of students attempted to shout out guesses, most of which she shook her head at until Jack Sandys piped up about Christmas.
"Christmas! Yes! I'll bet you can guess what comes every year with that—"
"Santa Claus!"
"Presents!" Several students had taken up the chant in varying forms, suggesting things like toys, Christmas crackers, and candy.
Harry had deflated as soon as he'd heard the word 'Christmas.'
What was Christmas except the time of year where his lack of love from the Dursleys found full expression in the disparity between his own presents and Dudley's. Explicitly: none versus too many to count. Not to mention the foods Harry was never allowed to eat and the festivities he was barred from participating in.
There was, however, another thing which he'd come to associate with the holiday. Something which never failed to send his aunt into a tizzy (and a round of combative meetings with the school) whenever Dudley failed to be cast into a suitably important role.
"The Nativity play," he answered, not able to hide the sullen expression on his face.
"Yes!" Ms. Tibbons chirped yet again, her slightly squeaky voice filled with approval and far too chipper for Harry's sour mood.
"Yes, our class will be tasked with putting on this year's Nativity for the community members. We'll be borrowing St. Mark's hall for the performance!
"I've got the program plan here, and there are enough copies for all of you. I want you to take them home with you tonight and bring them back Thursday after reading them," she coughed, looking, for some reason, a bit awkward. "I—the school can't afford to have more printed, so I'll need these back," she patted the top of the stack, her red nail varnish shining under the overhead lights.
The stack was passed around until each student held a thick stack of paper, folded into blank, cream-coloured folders.
As one, they all flipped them open to the first page.
"I'd like you to all read one line apiece, and then allow the next person in the circle to have a go at it," Ms. Tibbons dictated, taking up her drumstick to point.
'Great,' Harry thought, 'more lines.'
Was there some imperative from on high that said they had to work exclusively on acting for the next term?
The class period dragged on, and Harry couldn't help himself when in his head he heard David Lee Roth's voice echoing amongst his thoughts.
'AW MAN. I THINK THE CLOCK IS SLOW,' Diamond Dave's lascivious drawl echoed through his thoughts.
Harry sniggered, knowing what came next.
'I DON'T FEEL DIRTY.'
Ms. Tibbons threw him a bit of a warning glare. His stifled giggles had interrupted one of the shyer students during her lines.
Then came the bell.
If it hadn't been for the fact that he was meant to go home with Snowdrop Hill that afternoon, Harry might have thanked God.
"Class dismissed," Ms. Tibbons called over the celebratory shrieks. "Line up in the hall—"
The sound of a man clearing his throat interrupted her instructions, and the students pivoted to see that Mr. Fowler had stuck his head in through the cracked door.
"Tabby, might I have a word for a moment?"
"Sure, Philbert. Students, wait for Mr. Fowler to take you back—it won't take long?" She turned, asking for confirmation from the man.
"Not but a minute."
His music teacher took a moment to coach them into a more orderly line before she gave the assembled students a once over.
Satisfied that they were properly queued, she nodded once with her tiny, pursed lips held in a tight smile. Her crimped hair, gathered up in a ponytail at the crown of her head, bounced with the movement, and she ducked back behind the door to the classroom.
The highs and lows of his teachers' voices were lost behind the moderate sound proofing provided by the door and walls, but Harry thought he might have heard Ms. Tibbons let out a surprised, "Really? Those two?"
"Trust me, I'm as surprised as you are," he heard Mr. Fowler laugh.
"I'll look into it. Thanks for the suggestion, Phil."
The man had a bit of a coughing fit in reply and stammered out "Ah, any...er...anytime," before he emerged from the music room, red in the face.
He cleared his throat and marched to the front of the line.
"Alright, fifteen minutes more to gather your things and copy down the assignments, then you're free," he smirked and snorted with good humour.
There wasn't much in the way of homework, except that they were meant to read through the remainder of the scene Harry and Snowdrop had acted out in class and to take notes on the words that stumped them.
That sounded near enough impossible to Harry. Even the words that were familiar to him were used in such odd ways that the text seemed as hopelessly dense as a fruitcake.
To his eternal gratitude, there was much to do on the farm that day. Harry never thought he'd ever have been thankful for additional excrement to muck out of the animal stalls, yet the diversion gave him enough leeway to linger that by the time he made it back to the Hill's house, Snowdrop was yawning and had already changed into her pink, ruffled night-gown.
She glowered at him as he came in, covered in unmentionable stains and smelling to high heaven, but she didn't attempt to interact much with him.
Her little, pert nose likely would have protested too much to allow her to get any closer.
Harry grinned over this as he finally retired to the kitchen table, sweaty, exhausted, but satisfied with an afternoon of hard work.
At Spinner's End they'd run low on milk, given that Snape had canceled their subscription to the local dairy service. He was happy to know that after this he'd have a full bottle or two to bring home with him. Additionally, he'd found double the normal number of eggs hidden in various hidey-holes around the property, and Gammy had winked at him and told him to take a dozen for himself.
Severus would be pleased as punch over that, Harry hoped. There was nothing the man liked better than a properly fried egg, excepting, perhaps, anything drenched in golden syrup or dipped in sugar.
Gammy stood at the bench, attending to a large bowl of dough for the next day, and beside her she had a stand mixer set on high.
The whirling sound was nice, Harry thought. Sometimes the Hill house was too quiet, especially compared to the background noise he was used to in Severus' kitchen. In the absence of AC/DC, the persistent whirring of the mixer did just fine.
"What's in the mixer, Gammy?" Harry asked while he nibbled at the eraser on his pencil.
The woman scooped up a handful of coarse salt from the stoneware cellar by her elbow and sprinkled it over the bubbling dough. "Cream now, but it'll be butter before you can say Jack Robinson."
Harry had to stifle the urge to say the name just for the sake of proving her wrong. He knew what she was getting at, and he didn't really feel the desire to prod at her the same way he enjoyed getting up Snape's nose.
"Can we make butter with some of my cream?" Harry ventured, thinking it would be a very good use of his own supply of Babs' offerings.
Gammy turned to him and grinned. "No, you keep yours. We can split this batch here," she said, patting the rim of the bowl. "Does your Severus like butter as much as he likes eggs?"
Harry shrugged. "Severus'll eat anything, 'specially if it's got butter on it. And eggs. And sugar... or with bacon—"
"Good Lord, it's a wonder he's as thin as he is!"
Harry only shrugged again, not sure what to say to that. Sure, Severus was a good eater when he set his mind to it, but Harry suspected that this was because he rarely ate between those gargantuan meals he inhaled. Quite possibly, he only fed himself once a day, at the most.
He turned his attention back to the dog-eared paperback copy of Richard III and made a face at it. Somehow it had helped to read it aloud, even though he thought he didn't really hear much of what it was he was saying while he read it to the class. Part of his brain had seemed to absorb the meaning, especially as Snowdrop acted out her part. Looking at it now, it may as well have been written in hieroglyphs.
While there was a perfectly capable adult in the kitchen with him, he thought better than to ask Gammy about it. Severus seemed more the type to be able to give a proper—and likely overly snide—explication on the meaning of the word 'prodigality.'
He'd taken down a list of twenty words by the time the Marina's horn honked outside the Hill's gate.
Harry was off like a rocket that evening, barely pausing long enough to collect his jar of milk and a half pound of butter that Gammy had rolled into wax paper. He had been so hasty that he even needed to double back for the eggs.
"What's got you in such a rush?" Snape questioned, when Harry came barreling towards the car.
The older wizard was leaned against the tan exterior, his arms crossed over his thin chest, and his head drooping on his neck with might have been fatigue. Snape appeared to be too tired to even properly glare, and his eyes looked like those of a bloodhound: drooping, with black circles underneath, and slightly red around the rims.
Harry didn't answer his question, not wanting to go into the particulars of how he so desperately wanted to put space between himself and Snowdrop. Even with the girl up in her room for the evening, any sort of proximity between them was enough to pique his anxiety. She was trouble, simple as.
"Look, Severus," Harry began instead, hoping that the man wouldn't press any harder, "this time I've got milk, eggs, and butter—"
Snape snorted and turned away, opening up the passenger side door and pulling the seat forward so that Harry could climb in. "By this time next week you'll be wanting to start your own dairy."
Now there was a thought. Harry liked what he did at Gammy's house. It gave him a sense of purpose, and unlike the chores he had done at the Dursleys, he felt he was renumerated fairly for all that he helped with. "Could we, really?"
"No." The door slammed to punctuate the word, and Snape walked around the bonnet to reach his side of the car.
They started for home against the sightless black of night. The Marina's lights the only sources of light for miles excepting the stars above.
Harry would have begun reading his vocab list from his play to Snape, knowing as he did that when they made it home they'd likely both be ready for bed, but there wasn't enough light to read by, so he merely rested the side of his head against the glass of the window, wincing as a sharp turn would jostle his glasses against the side of his face.
"How was work?"
Snape grunted.
Not good then, Harry guessed.
"I would ask how your own labours went for the day, but I don't suppose that's necessary, Potter. I can smell you from all the way up here," The older wizard said with a slight drawl.
That was surely a good sign... Snape didn't joke when he was in too foul a mood.
Harry lifted the front of his shirt to his nose and took a whiff, his head reeling back almost instantaneously afterwards. Whew. He really was pretty ripe.
"I think I need to wash these tonight..."
"You think? I have half a mind to strip you down as soon as we're in the door and hose you off in the garden. Like as not you'd freeze your bollocks off," Snape said with casual disdain, "thus I'll urge you to take your putrid self to the tub after I fill it and toss your clothes in the hall. I'll deal with them tonight after you're finished bathing. In future, I expect you to bring a spare set of clothes whenever you expect you'll be knee-deep in fecal matter."
"It's not like I knew that the stalls would need mucking today," Harry argued, even as he privately figured that a spare set of clothes wasn't a half bad idea.
"Then always take a spare set," Snape decreed, his lip curling.
The high-handedness was really getting old, Harry thought mutinously. He was trying to pull his weight. He was trying to work, just like Snape seemed to value so highly. He hadn't quite managed bacon, no, but he'd furnished the eggs, milk, and butter. Some days he also was handed a fresh loaf of bread or two. It was nothing that Snape ought to have turned his overlarge nose up at.
"I don't exactly have a spare set, Severus," Harry ground out. "I've got the ones I wore back with you to Cokeworth from July, and a couple of t-shirts of yours that you said were too short, but I've only got the one pair of jeans, a pair of shorts and trousers for school."
Snape's index finger tapped out an impatient rhythm on the steering wheel, syncopated to the beat of Mötley Crüe's Wild Side.
"Suppose we find you something suitable," he finally agreed. "Mind you, it likely wouldn't be anything nice—"
"Well it's gonna get covered in er... poo, isn't it? I don't need anything nice, Severus. I need something not nice—"
"Everything you own is not nice. I'm proposing we retire your older clothes and sacrifice them upon the altar of hard manual labour, leaving us open to find you something more serviceable for a day-to-day basis."
Harry's mouth drew into a small 'o' shape. He couldn't quite figure out how to set about responding to the unexpected offer, so after a full minute had elapsed in which all that could be heard was Vince Neil chanting about living life on the wild side.
Harry was quite certain that if the 'wild side' entailed what Mr. Neil was singing about, that he'd just as happily live clear across town.
"Er... thanks, Sev'rus," Harry mumbled, finally. He brought a hand up to rub against the bridge of his nose where the pads on his eyeglasses tended to turn his skin an angry red. "You don't gotta get me anything nice, I can probably just use the clothes from back home..."
"No, I 'don't gotta,'" Snape snarled, laying stress on Harry's poor grammar. "It is imperative that I take responsibility in seeing that you have what you need. Which is to say: 'I must.'"
Harry winced. "I'm sorry, I don't want to put you out. If I ask Gammy and let her keep all the milk and stuff for a bit, I can save up enough that—"
"Don't insult me." A flash of snaggle toothed canine showed from the headlight of a car passing in the opposite direction. It was enough to see that Snape was holding onto his temper by a mere, single-ply thread.
Harry leaned forward between the seats, his eyes resting on Snape's profile, only revealed in flashing blips and flares whenever they passed a distant source of illumination in the night. He hoped to nip this in the bud. He was deadly serious about not asking the man for any more money than it required to feed him at a base level. The idea that he'd somehow offended Snape had his heart hammering in his chest, so strong that he imagined he could feel the frightened organ attempting to climb up his throat. "I'm not!"
"Let me make this perfectly clear to you, Potter: I make money for the sole purposes of meeting my own needs, and for rising to the responsibilities I've agreed—FUCK!"
The car swerved violently to the right as what looked to be a wall of lights appeared out of the darkness from around a blind curve.
All Harry got was the bare impression of a huge looming vehicle headed their direction before the entire windscreen was eaten up with branches and shrubs. Snape veered off the road and had lost control of the wheel.