Seven Drops and Asphodel Blooms
Summary: When Harry blows up his aunt during the summer, Dumbledore is much quicker to react. Snape finds him far before the Minister does, but his plan of dropping him off with a lecture and half a dozen additional summer assignments doesn't work out.
In which Harry spends the summer at Spinner's End.
Chapter 3
Severus spent most of his time in his study. Brewing had served as an adequate distraction at first, but it became more difficult to ignore his unwelcome house guest with every day that passed without Dumbledore taking back this ridiculous assignment. Severus sent out inquiries daily, without success.
He wanted to go on with his life and forget this ordeal had ever happened. He couldn't do that as long as Dumbledore insisted on using his home as a juvenile detention center.
He wasn't going to keep being restricted to one floor of his own house, however. Potter wasn't going to dictate his daily routine, even if the duration of his stay had far surpassed all of Severus' worst presumptions.
His unwanted house guest was in the kitchen when Severus went inside in search of coffee. Potter froze, a bowl of cereal in front of him.
If Severus had any less self-respect, he would have changed his mind and turned right back around.
"Your father would be proud," he said after he'd fetched his coffee and the newest Daily Prophet.
Potter paused, his spoon halfway to his mouth. "What?"
"Terrorizing a defenseless Muggle is exactly the disregard for the wellbeing of others your father has proven on a regular basis." Severus opened the Prophet and leaned back in his chair. "He, too, found entertainment in other people's suffering."
"My father did not–" Potter cut himself off. He grit his teeth and dropped his eyes onto the table.
"Of course," Severus said, the words dripping from his tongue like honey. "You would know better than I do. Years of knowing him truly pale when compared to biased stories and wishful thinking."
Potter stood so abruptly that his chair reeled back. Severus kept his eyes fixed on the Prophet.
To his immense disappointment, Potter did not do him the favor of delivering a reason to kick him out. He stomped out of the kitchen, face red with fury and hands clenched to fists. Seconds later, the door to the bathroom opened and closed and the key turned in its lock.
Potter hadn't even slammed the door. Pity.
Harry paced up and down the bathroom, trying to work off the fire roaring in his veins. Hatred rose up from the pit of his stomach, crawled upwards and tried clawing its way out of his throat. He wanted to scream. He wanted to speak his mind and hurl insults. He wanted to give Snape back everything he'd dealt out.
He couldn't. He had to behave. He'd narrowly avoided a school expulsion once, and he couldn't hope for another free pass if he punched Snape right into his smug, insufferable face.
Harry forced his feet to a halt. He took a deep breath and tried airing out all the anger simmering beneath his skin like a kettle on the verge of boiling over.
Snape's mirror tried cheering him up by inflating Harry's head until it was too big for his body. Harry didn't manage more than a weak twitch of his lips.
"Sorry," he muttered. "Not really feeling it."
He desperately wished for a place to retreat. Snape could come into the kitchen or the living room at any time – if it wasn't for the bathroom, Harry wouldn't have privacy at all.
His letters were his only means of escape. Even with them, Harry had to be careful about what he wrote. He couldn't trust Snape not to demand reading them.
Snape quickly got bored of trying to get a rise out of him. After another few times of failing to coerce a reaction out of him, he reverted back to their earlier arrangement of ignoring that the other existed.
They quickly perfected the art of doing so while sharing the same kitchen table or sitting on opposite ends of the living room.
They'd made it halfway through breakfast the next day when something on the front page of Snape's Prophet caught Harry's eye.
"I saw that guy in a news report." Black's mugshot glowered at Harry. Unlike the one he'd seen the first time, this one was moving. "But it was a Muggle one."
Snape's lips curled while reading. He turned a page.
"If he's in a magical paper, too–"
"Brilliantly deduced," Snape drawled, rustling his newspaper much like Hedwig ruffled her feathers when Harry had done something to offend her. "Yes, Potter. Sirius Black is, indeed, a wizard."
He threw Harry a sharp glare over the paper. Harry got the message and kept his mouth shut.
Harry learned how to make his life at Spinner's End as conflict-free as possible.
Snape didn't look like he enjoyed his presence any more than he had at the beginning, but neither did his mood sour to the point that Harry felt the need to check his orange juice for poison.
The brat muttered under his breath. He frowned at his parchment, scribbled a few notes and kept sounding out words.
Severus turned a page noisily. Potter kept muttering. Severus contemplating the merits of a well-placed Silencing Charm.
"Well-shaken warm wool... No, that's wormwood... Stir vicious– vigus– vigorously..."
"For goodness sake, Potter." Severus slammed his book shut. Potter flinched. "Will you stop your inept muttering and ask?"
Potter gave him an indignant scowl. "I don't need help."
"Then what exactly is stopping you from completing your work without blabbering like a fool?"
Potter's scowl deepened. He dropped his eyes and glared at his homework instead. "I'm just not sure what this says."
Severus cast an incredulous gaze at his assignment. "Is that not your parchment?"
"I mean. Yeah, but–"
"That you have written on?"
"Yeah, but–"
Severus sneered. "You've delivered impressively shoddy work to me before. Being unable to read your own writing is truly a new low."
"It's not my fault!"
Severus scoffed. "If you mustered even the tiniest glimmer of effort–"
"I wanna see you try to write legible on parchment, in the dark."
"Don't interrupt me," Severus hissed. He belatedly registered what the brat had said. "Why, pray tell, would you complete your schoolwork in the dark?"
Potter pressed his lips together. For someone who couldn't keep his mouth shut when he was supposed to, he could be infuriatingly tongue-tied.
"You will answer me when spoken to."
"The Dursleys hate everything to do with magic," Potter all but growled. "If they'd see me doing schoolwork, they'd take away my books." Under his breath, he added, "Or burn them."
If he thought he could win sympathy points by being dramatic, he was sorely mistaken.
"So I'm doing them at night. In bed. With a flashlight."
In terms of excuses Severus had heard from students over the years, this one ranked somewhere between 'I accidentally used invisible ink' and 'my owl mistook my homework for a letter'.
"How lucky for you that there are several weeks left until the new school year begins. There is plenty of time for you to rewrite your assignments into something even remotely worth grading."
To his surprise, Potter didn't do more than grumble half-heartedly. He'd likely realized that no lie he came up with would work on Severus.
After a week with no sign that their time together would come to an end any time soon, Snape seemed concerned about Harry blowing up the house from sheer boredom.
He wasn't far off. He'd finished all the schoolwork he was able to with the books he'd saved from Privet Drive, and he'd taken to spy on the neighbors through the window or watch the painting in Snape's living room for hours on end.
It still came as a surprise to him when an irritated Snape suggested he spend his time in the garden instead of 'driving him insane pacing around the house like a caged Manticore'.
The two times he'd seen Snape's house from the outside, there hadn't been so much as a patch of grass. "What garden?"
And so he discovered another of Spinner End's secrets.
Snape pressed the doorknob of his front door and turned it a quarter clockwise. The door that had previously opened into a bleak street riddled with brick houses too narrowly built to leave room for yards, now led into a small but well-kept garden.
Harry was so eager to get out of the house, he didn't even care that Snape might lock the door behind him.
The garden was framed by a brick wall with no opening or gate. Harry could look out into the street if he craned his neck. He stretched as far as he could and waved at a broody looking elderly man. The man kept walking without blinking.
Most of the garden was taken up by a sturdy looking greenhouse. Curious, Harry went to take a closer look.
The greenhouse was unlike anything Harry had ever seen. Some sections of it were blinding like they contained a miniature sun shining from the ceiling, some were so dark he couldn't make out his hand in front of his eyes, some were hot like a desert, some so humid that Harry felt like an elephant was sitting on his chest.
Plants grew from every niche and corner – reaching to its ceiling and barely brushing past the sole of Harry's shoes, with blossoms larger than Harry's head and pollen that puffed into a cloud around them, mushroom-like plants that spun in endless circles and wiry herbs that grew in peculiar patterns.
Harry, who'd never had much interest in Herbology, felt like he could spend hours here.
He liked a tuft of flowers with deeply blue blossoms the best. The color bled into purple towards the middle, and clusters of thin tines at their center carried silvery dots that, at closer inspection, appeared to form constellations. Unlike most of the other plants in the greenhouse, the night sky flowers grew out of a brightly colored flower pot.
It read with sparkling letters, 'Good morning, sunshine! Pleasant weather, innit?'
Harry gave a startled laugh. The flowers might have been Snape's, but the pot definitely wasn't.
By the time Harry felt like he'd discovered most of the plants in the greenhouse, the sun had risen high. It was larger than it should be; it had too many rooms crammed into a structure that looked far too narrow from the outside.
To Harry's immense relief, the front door opened easily for him. The television was running when he stepped into the living room, and Snape sat in his usual armchair, scribbling on a spare piece of parchment.
Harry hovered in the doorway, contemplating to head into the kitchen until Snape left.
He decided to take a chance, sat down on the sofa and waited for Snape's reaction. Other than his brows tightening irritably, he didn't acknowledge Harry's presence.
Harry made himself comfortable and watched the rest of the Muggle news for the evening.
When Severus opened his eyes in the middle of the night, he wasn't sure what had woken him. The house was silent. The occasional car drove by on the streets, but the low traffic noise wasn't usually enough to disturb him. Something didn't feel right.
Severus grabbed his wand and slipped downstairs with the effortlessness of someone who knew every creaking floorboard in the house. Scenarios flickered over his inner eye. Had Black found out where Potter was being kept and decided to get rid of both of them at once?
He found Potter sitting upright on the sofa, soaked with sweat and blinking at Severus bleary-eyed.
Severus swept the room with a glance. No danger. Nothing other than the brat's heavy breathing. "What have you done now?" he snarled.
Potter flinched, looking instantly more awake.
Severus suddenly realized the absurdity of threatening Harry Potter in the middle of the night while both of them were clad in their pyjamas. He put his wand away reluctantly.
"I didn't do anything." Potter's eyes had been fixed on Severus' wand for as long as he'd been holding it.
"I would not be standing in my living room in the middle of the night for nothing." The words didn't sound as hostile as Severus had tried making them. He blamed it on being torn out of his sleep at this godless time of the day. "I will give you exactly ten seconds to answer, or so help me–"
"I had a nightmare," Potter snapped. He crossed his arms in front of his chest. "That's it. Happy?"
"Heed your tone," Severus warned. He tried mustering enough annoyance for either a lecture or a punishment. He mostly just wanted to head back to bed. "We shall discuss this in the morning."
If this was a regular habit of Potter's, Severus would break him out of it even if he needed to pour a sleeping aid down his throat.
Potter winced. Something like resignation flickered over his expression.
Severus would let him stew in his thoughts until the morning. No matter what he was picturing in terms of consequences, a little natural fear would do him good.
Harry felt like a criminal walking to his execution. He hadn't dared going back to sleep the night before. Waking up Snape once had been bad enough, but twice in the same night? Somehow Harry doubted even Uncle Vernon's reaction to being disturbed in his sleep could match whatever Snape would come up with.
His stomach tied itself into painful knots. Would Snape come up with a punishment himself? Or would he just decide that Harry had finally overstayed his welcome and send him back to the Dursleys, Dumbledore's wishes be damned?
Harry didn't know what he would do, then. What if he arrived at Privet Drive and found himself in front of a locked door? Would he live in the streets until they changed their minds? Almost anything would be preferable to going back to the Dursleys, but surely Dumbledore wouldn't let it come to that?
Besides... Harry paused. He almost couldn't believe he was thinking it, but his time at Spinner's End hadn't been all horrible.
Spending time with Snape was awkward at best and terrifying at worst, yes. But Snape let him have more freedom than the Dursleys ever had. Harry had never had this much spare time during the summer. He'd never been able to do his homework out in the open, without fear of being punished for it.
Harry ate three meals a day, didn't spend hours on chores, didn't feel like a glorified house elf.
Snape had even given him pointers on his assignments once and twice. (Alright, so maybe he hadn't given pointers as much as insulted every aspect of Harry's schoolwork.)
They barely tolerated each other on their best days, but it was still more than Harry had ever gotten in the twelve years he'd lived at the Dursleys'. It was a bitter realization that the person who hated him the most still treated him better than his own relatives. How pathetic.
Now Harry had ruined even that. He'd finally crossed a line. He'd given Snape a big enough reason to shatter the truce they'd tentatively formed and decide that Harry wasn't worth the trouble.
"Potter."
His brain felt like it was mush. Maybe he should have tried closing his eyes for another few hours after all. "Sorry, what?"
Snape's eyes narrowed. "I've asked you whether this incident is going to become a regular occurrence."
It took Harry a second to puzzle out what he meant. "It's not like I decide to have nightmares," he protested.
"'Nightmares'," Snape said. "Plural. I assume that this one has not been the first."
"I can't help it! They've gotten worse since I've come here."
Snape raised an eyebrow.
"It's probably the couch. Or the room, I don't know. It just... It feels kind of exposed." Harry wanted to see Snape try to sleep when he knew somebody he hated could be storming over the doorway at any time.
Harry was glad he was an early riser. He didn't want to think about Snape coming in to start his day and finding Harry still sleeping.
Severus averted his gaze and pondered. He'd never have thought that the brat would be here for more than a few days, so he hadn't bothered to make more permanent arrangements.
But Dumbledore continued to stall. The brat's relatives showed no sign of changing their minds. If it had been for Severus to decide, Potter would have left this house a week ago. He wouldn't have stepped a foot inside in the first place.
Clearly there was nothing about this summer that was under Severus' control anymore.
He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was fine. What he was about to do served himself more than it served the brat. It didn't make their arrangement any more permanent than Dumbledore had already made it.
"Pack your things," he ordered on his way to the staircase.
If it meant his nights would be undisturbed, he supposed it would be worth it to sacrifice his guest room.
A/N: Many thanks to To Mockingbird, Igornerd, JustAnotherOutcast and flyingcat!
Let me know what you think!
~Gwen