A/N: Split chapter.

Severus joined him only moments later, and Harry's question about what had happened to the poor man they'd found in the ditch died on his tongue.

Snape's face had all the answer he needed. Although Harry figured that the older wizard would likely have told him had he asked, he couldn't quite bear the thought of subjecting either of them to the terrible truth.

It was simple. They'd not be leaving the man to his death all alone. They'd not be abandoning him... unless he had already passed into the next life.

Snape must have known that the end was near when he'd seen that terrible, lifeless, blue flash at the end of his wand.

Harry had known it was over when the world had been painted Paris green.

That colour was the shade that haunted his worst nightmares. Something he might have thought was the stuff of only dreams if he hadn't seen it seconds earlier with his own two eyes.

It was the colour of loss and loneliness, the hue of hurt and hardship.

He found himself both sickened and comforted that it had been conjured by Snape this time. As they stood side-by-side near the road, both silent in the night whose only sound was the hissing of the destroyed Volvo engine behind them, it didn't seem that Snape was any more capable of speech than he was.

Snape led them for at least a mile up the road, until there were no lights from distant farms to see, and only the moon's scant illumination lighting their way.

At long last, Snape took a rest by the trunk of a tree that seemed to be growing in the dead centre of an ancient, dry stone wall. He bade Harry to stop with one raised palm.

After a few moments of listening to the sounds of the nocturnal animals singing a chorus to the evening—unaware, or perhaps indifferent to the fact that a scant ten minutes earlier a man had lost his life—Snape whipped out his wand that he'd been holding in a white knuckled grip at his side.

Harry stumbled back in a full body flinch at the unexpected movement, some irrepressible and primitive part of his brain convinced entirely that Snape had meant to aim it at Harry himself and wash him in a second wave of poisonous green light.

He felt shame when a moment later the man stowed it away, not having cast a single spell and trained a confused and perhaps even discouraged look at Harry's face. It didn't last long, however. Within a split second, Snape wrestled his countenance into that familiar, placid mask of indifference.

A loud bang rent the air and Harry fell back until he felt a shockwave from the slabs of stone that made up the top of the dry wall digging between his shoulder blades. He only managed to avoid cracking his skull by the fact that Snape's hand shot out and blocked the back of his head from colliding into the sharp coping stones.

When he managed to look up, fighting the advancing stiffness in his neck the whole way, it was to see that parked before them, towering higher than even the trees nearby, was an improbable—no, surely impossible—ultraviolet bus, standing three levels high.

The folding door squeaked open and the small scruffy head of a boy poked out, looking around on the street, all the while popping his gum and then blowing until a large, pink bubble the size of an antique globe was hanging from his lips.

"Eyyyyy, oo's there?" He called. "'Oo's there? I dun see anyone, Ern'."

"Here," Snape stepped forward into the light from the windows and door, announcing their presence. "We'll need two tickets into town."

The young man started as Snape's form materialised from the darkness, and he gave the pair a once over, looking all at once both disinterested and nosey.

"'N' where's 'town' sposta be?" The distrustful boy asked. He couldn't have been more than fifteen and Snape frowned upon seeing him as he tugged Harry behind him, still mostly hidden against his side.

"Mr. Shunpike," Snape drawled in a witheringly arid tone as he approached, "pray tell what it is that you're doing on the Knight Bus. It is my understanding that you're a full five years too young to—"

Shunpike hopped down from the first step and called out to the driver, a man who looked as though he may as well have been both blind and deaf given his thick glasses and the way he cupped a hand around his ear. He looked to be so elderly that he was decrepit.

Whatever young Shunpike said to the driver, Harry couldn't quite make out, but he closed the door behind him as he dismounted to face Snape.

"'Ere. Don't fink you could'a said that a mite quieter, Professa'?" He folded his hands together in an unctuous gesture, as though begging for coins on a street corner. "Ern' don't know I'm not of an age fer me job—"

"Mr. Shunpike, by my recollection, you would have been meant for your third year," Snape growled, advancing on the boy while he towed Harry along beside him. "What in Merlin's name are you doing riding the Knight Bus out in Cumbria when, by my recollection of the laws governing school attendance, you ought to be bundled up in your dormitory in Gryffindor tower at least until your seventeenth birthday?"

The insouciant expression Shunpike had worn melted from his features as wax does down the side of a candle. Harry imagined it may as well have been dripping from his chin as all pretense of braggadocio left him.

"Well, I didn' go, did I?" He asked, shifting from foot to foot. He was nearly as tall as Snape himself; a gangly, lanky thing. "Wha's school good fer anyway? Gettin' a job? Me mum needs money now, see? 'N I got a job jus' fine, 'Fessa Snape. 'Sa decent wage, too," he said with a scowl, as though daring Snape to disagree.

"Dropped owt fair 'n square, simple as yuh like. No one's gon' look fer me, 'n I'm not missin' or anyfink, so dun' report me," he continued, though as he went on, he seemed to be pleading with Snape, whose face was growing more disinterested by the second.

"Doubtful that your employer knows you're underage," Snape scathed under his breath, although Shunpike apparently heard him.

The boy grinned, and drew his chin up and his chest out, a proud cockerel. "I do look owder a bit, don' I?"

"You said your mother needed the money, Mr. Shunpike?" Snape asked, now sounding bored and, at least to Harry's ears, tired beyond words. "Are you as hard up as all... this?" Snape waved his arm in an arc, palm open, to indicate the idling bus behind the boy.

"Mum needs the money real bad," Shunpike nodded, looking deadly serious for the first time in the conversation. "I'm the oldest af'er Theresa, 'n mum's ga' four a' home still. Me baby sis'er's in 'n outta St. Mungo's—they can' treat it, 'n mum can' afford ta leave 'er—"

Snape's shoulders slumped now as he gave up his attempt to maintain the image that he was powerful and in control. He waved an errant hand as though Shunpike's words were not but smoke that he could dispel with a mere gesture cutting through the air.

"Say no more. It's not my business anymore, in any case. How much is it for two tickets into town?"

"Not yer bizness..." Shunpike repeated with wonderment. He stared at Snape now as though he'd never quite seen him before, perhaps taking in the man's attire by the way his eyes swept the erstwhile professor up and down. He finally spotted Harry, who stood half behind Snape's back.

"Oo's tha'?"

"Ah, but that is none of your business," Snape tilted his head, looking as though he were trying to impress upon young Shunpike something of great importance through his gaze alone. "Do we understand one another?"

"Er... ah..." Shunpike appeared to be thinking hard from the way he screwed up his rat-like face. Harry had seen the exact same expression on his cousin's fat features whenever the other boy was thoroughly stumped by something.

Severus gave a deep sigh. "I won't say a word, and neither will you, Mr. Shunpike."

"Oh!" Shunpike cried then, looking relieved and delighted. "Fanks 'Fessa—"

"Think nothing of it. The fare?" Snape demanded with mounting impatience. Harry watched as Severus crossed his arms over his chest, his ears betraying him as they flushed red with Snape's rapidly spiraling irritation.

"Oh, er..." Shunpike stood tall and cleared his throat with a cough into his fist, looking as though he were readying himself for a classroom recitation. His pronunciation improved marginally as he recited his script: "Tickets is a flat rate of 'leven sickles, anywhere the client pleases. Firteen will buy yeh a fresh cuppa' cocoa, 'n fer fifteen sickles: a hot wa'er bo'ole 'n a toofbrush in yer choice'a colour—"

"Bloody racket," Snape spat, advancing toward the boy. Harry saw Severus withdraw a beat-up leather pouch from seemingly nowhere. He spent some time counting through a handful of coins he poured into his palm and handed Shunpike one large gold coin and five, slight silver ones.

Harry didn't quite dare to ask the man whether he'd bought them hot chocolates, though he felt sorely in need of one after the day he'd had, and he couldn't imagine that a bit of the stuff wouldn't serve Snape well at that juncture, either.

Shunpike licked a finger as he sorted through the six coins—which indicated to Harry that he was either doing it for show, or that he really was that extraordinarily stupid—before he slipped them into the slots on the ticket dispenser he wore on a strap around his neck. Two crisp, white pieces of paper shot out of the mouth of the machine on the front and he seemed to take great pride and relish in handing them over to Snape, who received them with a grunt in lieu of a proper 'thank you.'

Turning now on the heel of his worn, brown leather boot, Shunpike marched to the folding door and rapped against it with his knuckles, stepping astride the bus as soon as the doors opened to him and beckoning to the two wizards on the street with a theatrical flourish.

"Welcome aboard! Find yerselves a bed anywhere," he boomed before he took the front-most seat next to the driver, who appeared entirely disinterested in his two newest passengers.

At first, before Harry had cleared the railing on the stairs, he was perplexed by the order to find a bed, until he made it to the top and found that as far back as the eyes could see, there were metal-framed four-posters lining the sides of the bus, the occupants littered throughout the passenger lounge appearing in various stages of repose. Some sat, others appeared to doze, still others seemed as though they'd turned in for the night, and had actually taken advantage of the offer of a hot-water bottle, having pulled the sheets and counterpane up over themselves.

"This seems... er... nice," Harry ventured, finding a bed nearest the front. Snape sat down beside him with a glower, his hand gripping tight to the bed post.

"Hold on tight." He cautioned, seeming unsatisfied with the mere fact that his fingers were clutching the frame in a death grip. He hooked the toes of his boots underneath a bar that separated the beds and which seemed attached to the side of the bus.

"Why?"

Snape wasn't given a chance to answer. Without warning, the bus lurched forward and the beds slid back, all except their bed, anchored only with Snape's feet holding it to the bar.

Harry couldn't help his loud, terrified yelp and the way in which he hastily scrambled over to throw his arms around Snape's torso, looking much like a baby chimpanzee clinging tight to its mother's fur.

Words were an impossibility at that point, and he could do no more and no less than to bury his face against Snape's shoulder, hoping against hope that the terrible bus would simply stop.

Things only seemed to get worse, however.

"Yeh nivver did say, 'Fessa Snape: where's town?" Shunpike asked from the seat he'd taken nearby.

"Backbarrow," Snape bit out. From what Harry could hear, although his eyes were screwed shut, it sounded as though he were saying it through clenched teeth. "Or Cokeworth, if you can get near enough—"

"Blimey, tha'll be a few hours, won' it Ern'?"

Harry peeked one eye out just enough to see that the elderly driver was peering with a slack-jawed expression at Shunpike and that the man gave a rather distant nod in answer.

"Hours?" Snape spat, sounding disgusted. "We're only a few miles out of the way—"

The bus lurched violently, cutting off the rest of what Severus would have said, and Harry cried out again, fairly biting the man's bicep between his teeth as he mashed his face into Snape's arm.

When he dared to look up once more, it was to see that they had inexplicably appeared on a residential street—impossible given how far into the countryside they had been, to have gotten there in such a short span of time—and that the bus was headed straight for a telephone pole. They were a scant half a meter from hitting the pole when it skirted out of their way, sliding to the right like water over the back of a fish.

Harry could feel that his slack-jawed state was persisting. With renewed confidence, even in spite of the way he felt as though he were going to be thrown through the windscreen, he peered out into the darkness, illuminated by the lights.

Ernie was an abominable driver, and the bus kept hopping the kerb and then toppling back down into the street. Several times, he should have rear-ended the parked cars, but they too slid out of the way just in the nick of time.

Boy, magic was something else.

After the evening he'd had, there couldn't possibly have been a worse irony in the transportation that Snape had chosen for them, but Harry supposed he couldn't fault Severus for being too shaken to have safely apparated them. He did find himself wishing that the Marina could be enchanted in the same way that the bus they were traveling in was, however. Perhaps, had it been, the accident might not have happened at all.

Then again, for once, it hadn't been Snape's poor driving that had caused the problem. The lorry had careened around a blind curve in the road, and Snape had luckily been paying attention well enough to avoid a collision.

He finally managed to extract himself from Severus, who had looked to have been pointedly ignoring the way in which Harry was clinging to him, and found himself embroiled immediately in the argument that Snape was having with his former pupil over the bus route.

"We could have been there already! Where are we now?"

Shunpike checked a strange mechanism that seemed attached to the ticket dispenser. A sort of lit-up meter with words printed on the face that were too small for Harry to read from this distance away.

"Plymuf—"

"Merlin's knotty beard! Why in God's name are we in Plymouth?!"

Harry blinked, nonplussed. That couldn't possibly be the case... Plymouth was clear on the other end of the country—nearly as far south as it was possible to be while remaining in Britain...

"Well, it's where we was at 'fore we 'ad to come pickin' up you lot, weren't it?" Shunpike grinned as he rolled his eyes, seeming giddy at having something to rile Severus over. "We're on the soufern route—'fore long, we'll make our way norf. Dun' yeh worry, 'Fessa Snape, we'll be up to Carlisle 'n thereabouts 'fore sun-up."

Snape's next words were a stream of curses and oaths so dirty that even Shunpike looked faintly shocked. Although Harry had heard it all before from the older wizard, he knew that the circumstances necessary for Snape to begin losing his head—particularly in front of a former student—must have been dire.

If he wasn't very much mistaken, he gathered that Snape was likely on the very last fraying ply of an unraveling thread; under so much strain that it might snap at any moment.

The next time the bus lurched and Shunpike loudly announced through a trumpet-like cone that they'd made it into Torquay, Harry yelped loudly.

Only this time, it wasn't at all from fright—even though he was terrified beyond his ability to speak—but because the motion sent a sharp, knife like pain down his spine, originating at the base of his skull and seeming as though it terminated in his hip. His arm felt locked, useless, and he glanced up to look at Snape who had seemingly ignored this latest cry from him, likely expecting that it was once more delivered out of fear.

"Sev'rus," Harry moaned, grasping at his useless arm with the other, and thereby giving up his death-grip on the bed post. "My arm..."

Snape looked down his nose at him, and Harry saw then, under the harsh lighting from the chandeliers—odd choice, that, on a bus—that Snape looked a full ten years older than Harry knew him to be. His eyes, sunken with weariness and the suggestion of lingering horror.

Harry felt terrible that he had to garner the man's attention at all, given what... well. Given what he knew Snape had done earlier that evening.

It hurt to even think about, in truth, and somehow, Harry knew that if the whole debacle hadn't indeed been ongoing, that he likely would have lost it himself. As it was, there was no place to rest, no familiar safety to retreat to while he nursed his wounds and came to terms with the fact that Snape was a... was a...

Was it murder to kill a dying man?

Harry winced. And not only because his arm and back's pinching tightness were advancing.

Perhaps, at that, Severus had always been a murderer... he'd been rather murky on the details when he'd told Harry about his exploits as a member of that terrible crew alongside Yaxley and Wulf...

Not for the first time, Harry was left wondering at who it was he'd taken up with.

"What's the matter with your arm, Harry?" Snape asked, his black eyes narrowed as he took in Harry's stiff posture and the way in which his right arm—the one nearest to Snape himself—was hanging awkwardly. "You were able to use it fine earlier."

"Well, not exactly fine," Harry corrected through gritted teeth. "Only, it didn't hurt so bad before... before it was only my neck that felt a bit tight..."

"Your neck," Snape murmured to himself, pulling his wand from his sleeve and turning to Harry, even as he kept his feet hooked under the bar. He was made to wait through another jump of the bus, this time into Exeter, through which Harry gritted his teeth.

The lights from the candles in the chandelier seemed to brighten when they landed with a jolt, and Harry swore he saw halos forming around the flickering flames for a moment, threatening to obscure his vision before the shocking brightness retreated into a disquieting dimness, far darker at the edges of his vision than he knew the bus to actually be.

"Don' feel too good," Harry moaned, hanging his head and then wrenching it back again when the movement put terrible strain on his aching neck. Every small movement hurt.

The wand finally pointed his way and Snape murmured something, though he seemed neither excessively alarmed, nor comforted by whatever the result was.

"The diagnostic was inconclusive—"

"I..." Harry swooned again, falling nearly into Snape's side now, until the man caught him around the shoulders.

"Oi, was' wrong wif 'im? 'S not from the bus, is it? Lotsa people don' manage 'emselves wif the jumps." He heard Shunpike ask from closer than he'd been before. When Harry looked up it was to see that the older boy was stooped over, peering intently into his face. Harry screwed his eyes shut and turned his whole torso—for his neck refused to move—until he could hide himself against Snape's shoulder.

"No, I doubt that it's from the bus, Mr. Shunpike. We've been in a spot of trouble this evening," Snape bit out with supreme impatience, the words such an understatement that they may as well have been a complete lie.

"'E need treatment? We won' change the route fer jus' anyfin, but if 'e needs St. Mungo's, we ken get yeh there on the nex' stop—"

Harry felt Snape stiffen beside him, but it was only to draw in a deep breath and then let it out again in a hearty sigh. "I think that may be for the best, Mr. Shunpike."

Harry heard as the lanky teenager sprang away, and when he opened his bleary eyes, he thought he saw the silhouette of Shunpike tapping Ern on the shoulder and mouthing into the old wizard's ear.

Ern looked up at the boy with a gaping mouth, possibly not having heard the young man properly, but that was disproven when he pulled a lever by the wheel and the destination box changed from Taunton to London.

"Was' 'n London?" Harry slurred. "Was' St. Mungo's?"

Instead of answering him directly, Snape clucked his tongue. "Don't say another word. I'll not stand to hear you speaking as unintelligibly as Stanley Shunpike—"

"Oi! I 'eard tha'!"

"And I heard tell of a grossly underaged boy working as the conductor of the Knight Bus," Snape snarled in response, his voice taking on a threatening edge. "Amazing, the things the ear can pick up in a single evening, so far away from the halls of Hogwarts."

Apparently, Shunpike actually understood the implication of these words, as he paled and looked away, his silence sullen, and his face set in a mask of petulance. He crossed his long arms over his thin chest and made a great show of looking out at the post boxes jumping out of their way.

At the end of the street, Ern yanked a chain hanging overhead and the bus seemed to compress in on itself, the street outside blinking out of existence and reforming anew. These streets were unmistakable, even though Harry had only been to the capital a scant handful of times with his relatives.

London.

The bus slammed to a stop and Harry couldn't help the tiny shriek that issued forth from his lips as the motion jarred him once more and as Snape was made to raise both arms to brace against a bar at chest level, preventing the bed from flying forward and throwing them both against the waist-height partition that separated the driver's portion from the passenger's.

A look at Severus' face showed his towering fury. He appeared ready to mutiny if the grim set of his thin lips was any indication. They were firmed up into a gash-like line, such that even his perpetually hanging lower lip was tucked in, presumably between his crowded incisors. His black eyes burned into Ern's back with a promise of murder shining forth, full force.

Harry thought he heard, or perhaps felt, the words that Snape wanted most to say gurgling deep in the man's chest and near enough to spilling past his lips, but for all that, they remained captive behind the cage created by Severus' crossbite. In the end, all the sound he made was something like a strangled growl-grunt.

Harry was sincerely glad that it wasn't him who Snape was glowering at, and for all of Stanley Shunpike's bravado, he seemed to be looking a bit nervous himself, as he eyed Snape with distrust.

When the bus finally seemed as though it wasn't in danger of throwing them as an unbroken stallion might have, Snape stood, propelling the boy before him.

At the folding door, they were made to stop while a middle-aged wretch of a witch boarded, looking very poorly with a face-full of scaring-over pox.

She coughed violently as she passed, tossing a small, velveteen, orange bag towards Shunpike, who caught it, pulling a face as he held it between his forefinger and thumb. Thus distracted, Snape hastily urged Harry down the remaining stairs and they disembarked from the Knight Bus.

The street was a sad, deserted one, littered with mouldering papers on the pavement and clogging up the sewer grates.

Harry kicked with his foot, raising one of the discarded flyers—all seemingly the same—on the toe of his trainer, in an attempt to inspect it, as stooping over was out of the question. On the front he saw a fashionably dressed woman (or what might have passed for one thirty years earlier) carrying a handbag and waving as she towed two well-turned-out children with carefully combed and pomaded hair behind her, both boys outfitted in children's breeches and high socks.

"Hey Severus, how old are these? Why've they never swept the street?"

Snape ignored him and swept the flyer off of the rubber toe of Harry's trainer, flinging it carelessly into the street. He grasped Harry by the shoulder and began frog-marching him toward an abandoned storefront with an enormous display window.

"Hey, ow—slower?" Harry begged, resisting the man's forward movement.

To this Snape screwed up his face with momentary annoyance, but he did slow down enough that Harry was no longer straining to make his pained legs keep up. The relentless pace that the older wizard had initially set had sent warning twangs whizzing down Harry's spine, causing his hips and shoulder to cramp.

At the window, Snape paused before a mannequin dressed much like the woman in the advertisement, and Harry realised then that the storefront bore faltering signage that indicated it was the same establishment that had put out the misplaced flyers.

Purge & Dowse Ltd.

Harry read it aloud, a crease forming between his brows. He took a second look at the crumbling brick exterior and turned dubious eyes to Severus, who might have looked amused had it not been for the fact that the man had obviously come to the end of his tether.

"Are we sure this is a hospital?" Harry asked doubtfully. "'Cause maybe we... maybe Mr. Shunpike was wrong. He did seem a bit—"

"Witless? Dunderheaded? Doltish? Puerile—?"

"Well..." Harry suddenly felt bad. Snape's assessment of Shunpike's intelligence was doubtlessly informed by countless interactions with the young man behind a cauldron in a classroom setting, but even so, Severus words seemed a tad... cruel. "I was going to say... er... dim."

Snape only snorted in response. "An apt judgement on your part, I would say, Harry. But Mr. Shunpike had the right of it. For one, it wasn't Mr. Shunpike driving, for another, if what he told us about his younger sister was true, he would certainly be familiar with the location of the hospital, and—"

"And?"

"I've been here before," Snape admitted finally. "This is the place."

"Well, uh... shouldn't there be a nurse?" Harry asked, looking up and down the empty street. He remembered his summer trip to the A&E. It didn't resemble this wizarding hospital in the least.

Did they do all of their medicine out in the open air? Just in any old street? He half expected a gurney to materialise in front of them, much as the Knight Bus had up in the wilds of Cumbria. Then again, that didn't seem remotely sanitary...

"Little idiot," Snape scathed, with a tiny cruel chuckle. "You ought to know by now never to trust your bare eye when it comes to our world."

Without a further word, he turned to the mannequin, who, strangely seemed to have been listening in to their conversation. Harry might have sworn that her head had tilted as though she was turning an ear to them, waiting to hear something.

"No need to be such a git," Harry muttered as softly as he could manage. Lucky for him, Snape seemed to be absorbed in communing with the mannequin: a truly odd and off-putting sight, not least of all because, if it could be said so, it seemed as if the possessed doll might have been attempting to flirt with the older wizard.

Harry blanched, watching as the human-like thing moved of its own accord, twirling her tea-length skirts around her carved, wooden calves.

"None of that," Severus growled up to the window-dressing. "Cheeky tart."

She raised a wooden hand, the four top fingers fused together, to her lips, affecting what might have been a pantomimed coquettish giggle.

Harry was more than a little bit perturbed.

After a little more encouragement—which amounted to Snape insulting the mannequin with additional epithets while she continued to play coy—the woman-like figure finally swept an elegant arm out towards a stretch of wall that looked identical to the rest of the building and Snape stalked away from the window, muttering under his breath all the while.

With a sudden movement, he pivoted, driving Harry before him, and shoved the boy up against the bricks.

Only he didn't feel himself slam into the wall as he anticipated. Naturally, he'd flinched when Severus had grabbed him and thrust him in the direction of the masonry, but when he opened his eyes, it was to see that the two had emerged into a brightly lit antechamber.

(To be continued in Part II...)