It felt as though it took forever for Severus to come pick him up after his shift. Indeed, it was a quarter past midnight, and Gammy herself had drifted off in her floral armchair as she waited up with Harry.
She'd put Snowdrop to bed hours earlier—against vociferous protests, even as the girl had been rubbing grains of the sandman's dust out of her eyes—and even Harry felt as though his eyelids had been weighted down with lead. He'd had to keep blinking furiously in order to prod himself back to wakefulness.
He was familiar enough with the sound of their car to know when it was drawing up the lane, even though he knew that Severus must have paused at the gate.
Without knowing where the energy had come from, Harry was springing to his feet and darting to the door, wrenching it open and sprinting out into the darkness.
For a moment, as he saw the looming figure, a void even against the black night, he had misgivings, but then he saw the wraith-like whiteness of Severus' face and he resumed his initial speed, careening forward until he had too much momentum to stop in time and he'd properly cannoned into the man's slight chest.
The sound Severus produced upon impact was roughly that of a punctured bellows letting out all of its air in one explosive burst.
"Harry!" He heard from behind him—doubtless the feminine tone of Gammy, at the same time that Snape was exclaiming in surprise and ire: "Potter!"
And though Severus allowed the embrace for a bare moment—likely out of sheer surprise—he just as quickly set about extracting himself. "Unhand me!"
Harry toppled backwards and withdrew his hands as quickly as he might have had he touched them to one of the man's live cauldrons. It threw his centre of gravity off so drastically that he fell back onto his buttocks in the dirt.
"S-sorry, Severus..."
"Harry!" Gammy called, shuffling up beside him. "You oughtn't run out the door like that! Particularly not at this hour," she scolded him while extending an arm to his left hand.
Severus, apparently having recovered himself, looked almost sheepish, and he held out his own arm to Harry's right.
Together the two lifted the boy to his feet where he took a moment to beat the dirt off of the seat of his trousers.
When he looked up, he was able to get a proper look at his custodian, the sight greeting his eyes leaving a pit in his stomach.
Snape looked far worse than he usually did. Or at the very least more tired. His hair was pulling loose from the ponytail he'd tied it into to hang in limp, twisty strands about his face, some of them having plastered themselves to his forehead and cheeks, likely with sweat.
His eyes peered out from sockets that may as well have belonged to a skull, they were so deep and pronounced, which threw his enormous nose into even greater relief.
Harry knew that when he'd spied the man before he'd rushed off for school that morning that Snape had been freshly shaven, and now there was a day's worth of stubble darkening his cheeks and neck. His eyes were red with fatigue, and the tip of his nose faintly pink.
In a word, he looked hideous.
Harry supposed that it ought not to have endeared the man to him to see him looking so poorly, but he felt in that moment a rush of affection that made it difficult to subdue his renewed urge to hug his guardian.
"How was your first day, Mr. Snape? Would you care to come in for a cuppa?" Gammy had approached Severus while Harry had been taking his measure and was solicitously offering up her hospitality to the beleaguered young man.
"I am grateful for the offer Mrs. Hill, but I'm afraid I'll have to pass in this instance. I'm sure we've presumed upon your generosity long enough for this evening—"
"I won't force you inside," Gammy tutted with impatience, speaking over him, "but you're speaking nonsense. I'd never think of turning either of you away. In fact, it's only out of my gratefulness to you that I'm not insisting you stop in for a moment." She quirked a smile that flashed a glimpse of her perfectly straight, and nearly too-white, teeth, which must have been dentures.
"I..." Snape stopped himself and swallowed, his Adam's apple visibly bobbing in his throat in the dim light from the house's windows. "Thank you, Madam."
Gammy nodded, looking satisfied as she pulled her terrycloth housecoat more tightly around herself. "I'll see you both again come Friday. Drive safely," she bid them as she retreated to the house. "Lots of drink driving at this hour on these back roads, stay alert."
"Good evening," Severus bid her in return as he took Harry by the shoulders and turned him toward the gate.
He practically frog-marched his charge toward the Morris Marina and opened the door for him himself, pulling the passenger seat forward to allow Harry to climb into the back.
Something was missing, however. It was easier than it normally was to pile into the backseat...
"Wait! I've forgotten my bag inside," Harry protested, making to climb back out.
Snape heaved a pained sigh and glowered down at him, pushing him back into the car. He wiped at his eyes and brow with the back of one hand.
"Stay there, I'll fetch it myself."
Snape turned on his heel and stalked off toward the house, appearing to knock even as it looked like he was swaying on his feet.
Usually, Severus went to bed at the same time Harry did, a full two to three hours earlier. The boy could only imagine that the man was as exhausted as he himself was.
He watched as the door swung open and Gammy appeared in the entrance—or at least he assumed it was the old woman, as it was difficult to say from the silhouette—and he saw Snape draw a hand through his hair until it caught at his ponytail where he seemed to grow frustrated with his inability to pass his fingers through the locks as usual and liberated the inky fall from its tie.
Just as quickly, the old woman retreated into the house, likely to look for Harry's abandoned school bag, and Snape leant against the door frame for support.
It was boring waiting for Gammy to look about the house and watching Snape's silent form, so Harry turned his attention to the inside of the car and shifted an errant hand through the contents of the back bench, not looking for anything in particular besides something that might serve to take his mind off of his sleepy stupor.
In the dim lighting—the only form of illumination was issuing forth from the house that was at least a football field's length away—Harry's eyes strained to see.
There was all of the usual detritus that Snape kept about. The wizard was a veritable pack-rat, and strangely sentimental, which was the only thing that could account for the odd collection of items he kept stowed away in his teenage desk, back at Spinner's End.
He was no different in how he kept his car.
Why the man would need empty phials of pepper-up he must have taken once upon a blue moon, Harry couldn't fathom, and Severus never had made good on his threat to make Harry clean out the Marina.
Not that it was much of a threat. The boy yearned to pull a rubbish bin up to the car door and begin tossing things indiscriminately every time his backside encountered an uncomfortable lump on the seat, or his foot kicked some piece of trash on the floor. The only thing that stopped him was his concern over Severus' ire should he actually do such a thing.
Snape had stopped him from clearing out the back seat before. Apparently he meant to re-use the bottles—including the Coke bottles—at some later date for a variety of potions, but Harry had yet to see him bring any in to scour in their kitchen sink.
Perhaps that was what he ought to do...
There were new offenders that night: a paper menu that Severus must have stolen from his new place of work, a cloth apron that smelled strongly of malty, dark beer, and the stinky poloneck that he must have changed out of after his shift had ended.
Harry's nose wrinkled. If Severus wasn't going to do anything about the state of his car, it'd be as jumbled as a junk cupboard by the end of the month.
He resolved to take it into his own hands, even if Snape fought him on it. Severus may not have understood or appreciated the value of an uncluttered environment, but Harry had the sense from having lived in a one meter by two crawlspace that when the clutter began to creep in on oneself, it usually presaged something likewise catastrophic in one's life.
Like one's Aunt Petunia screaming herself hoarse until the cupboard was cleaned to her specifications.
Given that Aunt Petunia wasn't about, and that Severus didn't have his own aunt minding him, Harry assumed that the consequences to punish Snape for his own pack-rat tendencies might come from other quarters—namely the local constabulary if they ever had cause to pull the man over for one of his numerous traffic infractions.
"Butt out of my belongings, if you would." Snape said by way of greeting as he pulled the driver-side door open and slid into his place behind the wheel.
Harry rolled his eyes, knowing Snape wouldn't be able to see it in the dark. "It'd be easier to keep out of them if they weren't in my seat."
To this the man only grunted, which told Harry all he should wish to know about how tired Severus must have been.
He was never usually at a loss for words, so if his wit was failing him, it could only be because he was too knackered to bother.
"How was work?"
"How's being a nosy little shit?"
Harry fell silent, feeling stung. Even at his most prickly, Snape usually didn't fall to being this nasty to him. He'd only meant to be nice in asking—
Before he could figure out how to express his hurt, however, Snape sighed deeply and let his forehead fall to the leather of the steering wheel. His fingers sought the ignition and the car roared to life.
"Forgive me. That was..." he shook his head. "Just... sorry, alright? I'm sorry."
"S'ok."
"No, it's not. You're not a little shit, Harry."
Severus said no more, and certainly didn't rush to affirm to Harry any good qualities he might have been possessed of, but that was alright. By then the car was pulling off onto the narrow, winding road, and Harry's hands were clutched tightly in the leather of the back bench.
He hated night driving. More than anything, he hated it.
Closing his eyes to keep from getting sick, he might have almost nodded off by the time he heard Snape finally answer his question.
"There are worse jobs."
The boy's green eyes blinked open, and one hand came up to wipe at the bleariness that had formed so quickly by leaving them shut, pushing under his spectacles until they were perched, askew, on his forehead.
"What's that mean?"
"It means that I have no rightful reason to complain." Snape sighed again. It was odd talking to him without yelling over the tapedeck, but apparently Snape was too tired even for that this late at night. "We can expect a weekly salary, and it'll mean no more toast, breakfast, lunch, and dinner."
"But how was it?"
Harry saw the wizard's shoulders rise and fall in his characteristic, lopsided shrug.
"Tedious. But what man can complain of tedium when there are jobs that are actually dangerous that I was spared?" He snorted. "Not I."
Oh yeah. That. Snape's weird preoccupation with gift horses.
It seemed odd, given Severus' perennially suspicious nature, that he wouldn't seek to interrogate every good turn he got in life.
When Harry voiced that aloud, in so many words, he earned a bark of mirthless laughter from the man behind the wheel.
"It isn't that you ought to take every gift at face value, Harry. In fact, I'd never recommend that. It's more..." he paused, seemingly searching for words. "It's more that if you know things could be far worse, you may as well enjoy the temporary reprieve for what it is.
"Nothing in life lasts forever. Nothing good, and nothing bad. A winning streak will always culminate in a loss, and even torture must eventually end in death. If things are good: enjoy them while they last. If things are bad—you only prolong the suffering by steeping in it; by allowing it to change who and what you are."
The only sounds after Snape spoke were the wind rushing past the car's frame, and the wheels on the road, creating a soft, gentle soundscape which added to the odd unreality of the conversation.
Perhaps it was the fact that it was so late at night on a school night. Perhaps it was because their circumstances had shifted—yet again—with little to no warning. Harry couldn't say... but he knew that Severus was speaking from experience in that moment, and that he'd have to be a fool not to mark his words. The strange aura of weightiness that surrounded them in the otherwise silent car added a gravity to his meaning that outstripped the words alone that Snape had spoken.
Even if he couldn't quite understand them the way that Snape obviously meant them.
They made it home and filed into the dark, silent house, and Severus only yanked the pull on the bare bulb that hung over the sofa to give them enough light to see the staircase by.
Neither of them seemed inclined to stay up, and Harry only nipped back to the privy at the back of the house long enough to use the loo and to brush his teeth in the kitchen sink before he took himself off to bed, Severus presumably following in his wake and making for the master bedroom opposite his own.
The week proceeded apace, and nothing catastrophic happened between Tuesday and the next time that Harry was meant to spend his evening at Gammy Hill's house, which was Friday.
Harry dragged his feet a bit as he tidied up his desk and collected his weekend assignment from Mr. Fowler. All in all, that third week of school hadn't been too loathsome. Although Severus routinely returned back from work in the evenings after Harry himself let himself into the house, the man made his best efforts at assisting Harry with his assignments by looking them over and criticising Harry's work relentlessly until all of the answers were correct.
He'd never before gotten such good grades, mostly because Severus was never satisfied with anything less than perfection. It could be tiresome living with a former teacher, but somewhere deep down, he couldn't help the warmth that spread knowing that not only did Severus expect a great deal from him, but that he believed Harry capable of scoring in the top of his class, as well.
If that meant having to entirely redo his writing compositions at the end of the day when he'd thought himself done... well... so be it.
Harry's performance in other arenas was apparently satisfactory. He was neither the strongest, nor the weakest boy in the gymnasium—although, because of his predilection for sprinting to keep away from Dudley's targeted bullying campaign, he may well have been the fastest—and his art skills were passable, he supposed, even if he didn't quite think he ought to bring any of his drawings and crafts home to show off to Severus. Harry didn't know if he could bear the disappointment should the man not be suitably impressed.
Music class with Ms. Tibbons had started off rather dull, as she'd insisted for their first two sessions that they continue with the rhythmic clacking of the sticks she'd first passed around, but by the fifteenth of September she'd finally moved past keeping time and was now practising chords with them, playing in a mid-range octave on the piano and asking the children to chorus back to her in approximately the same notes.
Harry looked forward to more music classes, because he had the impression that if he could just memorise all of the notes that existed, they might imprint themselves in his brain into something approaching the transcendent glory that he heard coming from Snape's tapes day in and day out.
In any case, he had a mind to be not only the passive consumer of music, but the maker of it as well.
Wouldn't Severus be impressed if he could play as well as Eddie Van Halen or Slash? Maybe, someday, Snape would be playing Harry's tapes on the Panasonic.
He could almost see it in his mind's eye—and he thought about it rather frequently while daydreaming at his desk.
Harry would grow his hair out long and shaggy—sort of like Severus' own—and he'd play a bright red guitar. He imagined he'd wear tight, ripped trousers with chains all over, and a paisley bandana around his neck. His shirt would have the sleeves torn off to show off the tattoos he imagined he'd have. Just like Severus...
Yes, Snape's own tattoo was supposedly a bad one... but Harry couldn't help but to think that there was something cool about the skull and snake motif, even knowing what he did about its origins.
He'd invite Severus to all of his shows, front row, and there'd be rows of pretty girls screaming Harry's name and trying to climb on stage with him, just like in some of the concert footage that Snape had watched with Harry on the telly.
His daydreaming that afternoon had been interrupted by Mr. Fowler calling on him to come to the front. He had been meant to copy out the sentence his teacher had written at the top part of the board, using his best handwriting, and correcting for the misspellings and improper grammar.
He'd earned half marks.
Thankfully, it was a classroom demonstration, and not the kind of thing that might get back to his perfectionistic guardian.
Harry glanced down at the papers he was shoving into his bag. An entire sheet of the corrective sentences. He winced.
It barely made sense that they had to be able to identify which part of speech each word in the sentence occupied, and Harry routinely got it wrong, which must have been why Mr. Fowler called him to the front.
Severus resolutely refused to do the work for him, and Harry already knew that the man was going to pick his efforts apart the next day when he got an opportunity to critique Harry's work.
This time, he didn't draw out the length of time it took him to depart for Gammy Hill's car. Snowdrop had apparently given up waiting for him, as she was normally one of the first out of the classroom door, and Nicky—her brother, which still struck Harry as baffling—usually made haste to get home as well.
However, when Harry made it to the car, it was to find that he'd not be alone in the backseat for the drive out to Gammy's house. Nicky was taking up most of the bench with his school bag sat beside him as he chattered to his younger sister who looked as though she sincerely wished she could murder the boy behind her.
He stopped short of the door, peering in with a dubious look on his face.
Over the past week and a half he'd forged a tenuous acquaintanceship with Nicky Henderson. They'd danced around one another in the days after the other boy had caught up with him on his walk home, and had warmed over a bit with repeated exposure both at break and in class—most notably in music class, where Harry had learnt that the other boy had an appreciation for some of the same music that he himself did, even if Harry still didn't know anything about John Williams.
During their breaks Henderson hadn't bothered Harry when he'd sat at the edge of the makeshift football field for lack of anywhere better, although he'd also never invited Harry to join the boys playing football.
That wasn't so bad, mostly because Harry would have declined anyway, but also because Nicky didn't seem to have the authority to do so. He wasn't the presumptive leader of the 'footy boys' as Harry now thought of them.
In any case, knowing as Harry did now, that Severus had saved Nicky's sister's life seemed to have given the other boy decent cause to respect him, even if it hadn't quite developed into anything approaching a sense of genuine friendly affection. That Harry had waded unawares into a longstanding dispute between the siblings no longer appeared to matter to Nicky Henderson.
Snowdrop Hill, on the other hand, was well enough able to hold a grudge for all three of them if the glower on her face was any indication.
She was sunk low in the seat—dangerously low, Harry wished he could point out, as her seatbelt was loose around her and she'd dropped under the chest strap so that it was now underneath her where she'd moved it to get it out of her face. He didn't quite dare to bring it up, however.
She was Gammy's charge, not his, he reminded himself as he opened the door.
The woman in question smiled brightly at him and greeted her third passenger with a friendly salutation as Nicky gave him a bored wave and Snowdrop stared at him longer than was polite.
The girl then twisted and flipped so that she peered through the two front seats.
"Budge up, Nitty! You're in Harry's spot."
"This's been my spot for ages, Snow," Nicky corrected her, even as he pulled his bag into his own lap and scooted over until there was enough room for Harry to share the back bench with him.
"Nuh-uh. It's not yours if you're never here to use it, and now Harry'll be around every Tuesday and Friday—not just whenever his Dad's too pussy-whipped to—"
"SNOWDROP MARGOT HILL!"
"It's true!" Snowdrop cried, sitting up and wrapping the seatbelt around herself properly as Harry made to close the car door behind him.
"There's not an ounce of truth in it! Nicholas' parents have had an outing planned for this weekend for months now and this has been arranged well ahead of time—"
"His brothers get to go," Snowdrop sneered, turning an unkind smirk at the boy who was quietly fuming behind her. "Why's that, Nitty? Why do your brothers get to go for the weekend to Bath and you're stuck with Gammy and me?"
"If you don't pipe down this instant, you'll only make it worse for yourself," Gammy threatened.
Snowdrop's full cheeks stretched into a grimace as her voice turned into a hideous whinge. "What—worse!?"
"You don't imagine you'll be getting away with the first part of that, do you? When we make it back to the house, you'll be doing all of the evening chores under my supervision, and then you'll be off to your room for the night. Keep on like you have been and your weekend will be much shorter than you'd like."
Snowdrop's mouth worked open and shut, her eyebrows drawing up and down over her eyes as she tried to work out what she might say. Ultimately, good sense prevailed, and she said nothing more, though her features ripened and then soured into a fine glower that she wore all the way back to Gammy Hill's house.
As promised, the woman shooed Harry and Nicky off to the kitchen while she took Snowdrop to the collection of boots by the front door and watched over the girl as she pulled the mud-covered rubber over her small feet.
"Chickens'll be first, Blossom. Come along."
Snowdrop trailed along in her wake, aiming a desultory kick at the door frame as she passed through.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Harry could hear Nicky's sniggering coming from the other room. The other boy's celebratory mood—for reasons that Harry couldn't quite express—had his hair standing on end and his mouth drawing into a thin line, even as he hopped up on a chair to share the table with the other boy.
"She never knows when to quit."
"Seems to me like she quit when Gammy told her to," Harry argued.
In truth, what Snowdrop had said was hurtful, rude, and in bad taste, but he felt no more inclined to crow with Nicky over her punishment than he felt inclined to throw his agreement behind the hideous things Snowdrop had been saying.
What was it with these two dunderheads that always saw Harry drawn into the middle of their fights?
And that was just the word for them too. One of Severus' favourites, which Harry had never heard before he'd stayed with the man, and had never entirely understood until he'd made the acquaintance of these two fine specimens of the exact variety Severus must have been describing.
Dunderheads. There was no other word.
Well... perhaps there were other words... but the alternatives were rude enough that not even Severus' forbearance would keep Harry's ears or rear away from retribution should he voice them aloud.
"So you'll be here all weekend then?" Harry asked, trying to remain casual.
Nicky's head dropped to the tabletop and he groaned. "Don't you start in too... here I was starting to like you, Potter."
"I didn't mean it like Snowdrop meant it," Harry explained with a roll of his eyes. "Thought you'd like to tell me yourself."
"There's nothing to tell. Da' had a business trip where they paid for room and board in Bath, so naturally Cynthia wanted to go too... and there was an extra bed in the hotel room, 'n Jerrod and Dennis are older, so they got to go. Jerry's gonna take the bed and I guess Denny said he'll kip on the floor."
"You can't sleep on the floor?" Harry asked, his eyebrow raised in challenge. Truthfully he wasn't sure why he was needling the boy over his family. Perhaps it was because the exclusion of the Henderson's youngest son simply struck him as... odd.
"It's like I said, they're older, Potter. They don't have to keep watch on them while they go out to the company events." Nicky explained it with a slow drawl, like he was spelling it out for a small, dimwitted child.
Privately, Harry thought it sounded as though Nicky himself were being a bit dim over it. It sounded awfully close to the same arrangement that had led to his own abandonment that summer. Perhaps that was being a bit cynical, however.
And, after all, hadn't it taken Harry a full four days before it'd registered to him that he was well and truly alone? Or perhaps longer? Really until he'd come back with Severus to find the estate agent in the house...
At that, maybe Harry was just about as naïve as Nicky seemed to believe.
Acknowledging this did little to alter Harry's opinion that Nicky was probably being a bit over optimistic over the whole issue.
He felt a spike of pity. It hadn't been his actual parents that had abandoned him, only his relatives. That they hated him had never once been any great secret.
"When'll they be back?" Harry asked, hoping it would sound hopeful rather than doubtful.
"Should be back Monday," Nicky answered with confidence. "It's far away."
"Yeah," Harry agreed, thinking on how Severus had driven back and forth from Backbarrow to Surrey in one day for him.
"So anyway, have you really not seen Escape from New York?"
Harry blinked, taken aback by the change in subject. They both set about pulling out their worksheets from Mr. Fowler. "No. I haven't seen many films—"
"What about First Blood?" Nicky interrogated, his eyes wide.
"Er... no..." Harry cast back for the names of the films he'd watched with Severus in hospital, hoping that they'd be sufficiently impressive to the aficionado sat in front of him. "I've seen Crossroads..."
"Oh! Excellent film! Did you see Ralph Macchio in Karate Kid?"
"I... who?"
Nicky pushed back from the table as he swooned back to make a great show of rolling his eyes to the rafters. "The main character! He plays the—" and he began to pantomime the slide guitar part that Macchio had played on the yellow telecaster.
"Oh! No, I never saw Karate Kid. I more liked the red guitarist," Harry admitted.
"Oh, I don't know his name... in the movie they don't say, I don't think..." Nicky frowned as he nodded, snapping his fingers as he tried to come up with a name.
"Steve Vai," Harry supplied, remembering from when Severus had told him that he was now the guitarist for David Lee Roth's band.
"Yeah! Yeah, isn't he the one on Yankee Rose?"
"Yankee Rose?"
"You like Drop Dead Legs and David Lee Roth but you don't know about Eat 'Em and Smile?! He makes his guitar laugh! It's the best thing I ever heard—" Nicky jumped up and ran for the bench in the kitchen, pushing things aside until he found a radio that he pulled until the cord stretched as far is it conceivably could. "Here, sometimes, they'll play it on Key 103..." he trailed off as he switched the receiver on and static filled the kitchen until he'd tuned to the correct frequency.
"How can you make a guitar laugh?" Harry asked, his frown underscoring how dubious he felt about the information he'd just been imparted.
"Just listen," Nicky insisted, but for all that, fifteen minutes on the air passed without any mention of David Lee Roth or Steve Vai's laughing guitar.
Nicky was growing visibly frustrated, but Harry was enjoying the music that was playing well enough that he couldn't work up any irritation.
"Is it any wonder? You got me comin' under fire! Comin' like thunder—you know you make me walk the wire!"
"It's alright, Nick, this is good anyway," Harry offered as his head bobbed along with Def Leppard.
"I meant to show you a thing!" Nicky whinged. "And nobody calls me 'Nick!'"
"Better than 'Nicky.'" Harry argued.
"Not really..." the other boy grumbled, crossing his arms as he pouted, "but it is better than 'Nitty.'"
"Yeah, see?" Harry grinned a bit, "and I'd rather not call you 'Henderson' all the time. That's awfully long."
"You're allowed, I suppose." Nicky granted, with bad humour. "Oh blimey, now they're off talking! It'll be ages before they start playing music again..."
It was true, the station had started in with a bit of uninteresting banter that sounded rather tedious to both boys. That was, until a small sample of music played that had Harry's ears perking up and his eyes rising toward the radio from where he'd had them trained on his grammar homework.
He'd heard that song at least four times a week in Spinner's End. It was from one of Severus' favourite albums, by one of his favourite bands.
"My heater's broke. I'm so tired, I need some fuel to build a fire. The girl next door, her lights are out, yeah—the landlord's gone, I'm down and out!"
Harry had heard Severus singing the words hundreds of times by now. It was a wonder that the tape hadn't stopped working.
Perhaps Snape had replaced it... or could it have been fixed repeatedly with magic?
It was hard to say. Severus had told him more than once that magic wasn't reliable for fixing muggle things, namely: electronics or mechanical objects.
"Off of their first album ever released, Cold Gin is widely recognised now as one of their most popular songs—but before they were ever known by their internationally famous four-letter stage name, the band was first known as—?"
Another announcer came after the first and carried on where he'd left off: "Tick tock, tick tock! Callers, ring us at the station with your answers and you might get to hear your voice on air!"
A number was rattled off then and the song Cold Gin began to play in its entirety.
"Ooo, that's a toughie," Nicky frowned.
"It isn't!" Harry argued. "I know. That's KISS."
"That wasn't the question though," the other boy argued, though he'd begun to look a bit excited that Harry might know the answer. "The question was who they were before they were KISS..."
"I know that too—"
"Bloody hell! What're you waiting for!?" Nicky leapt from his chair, toppling it over in the process, and scrambled around the kitchen bin for the telephone receiver, picking it up and dialing the number they'd been provided.
"Get over here, Potter!" He hissed, indicating that he was on hold.
At a far more sedate pace, Harry did so, his reluctance illustrating his many misgivings.
It wasn't such a big deal for his voice to be on air. He could think of better, cooler things...
On the other hand, it was sort of nice to know that he, of all people, had the answer to such a obscure trivia question.
When the song ended, he could hear the disc jockeys start up talking about the song again, and Harry held the receiver to his ear, making ready to answer.
Two people preceded him, one guessing that the answer was something rather stupid (Styx, which in Harry's mind bore no resemblance to KISS musically whatsoever, even if they did have a four letter name), and the second answer, which was close enough to make Harry sweat (KISS Army, which had never been their name, but which was a fan organisation).
"Hey, mate! Thanks for calling in. What're you called then?"
Harry stalled for second. Even though he'd known he'd be answering for everyone to hear, he still felt vaguely put on the spot when he heard the disc jockey's voice come over the receiver at the same time as he heard it from the radio across the room.
"Erm... I'm... I'm called Harry."
"'Ello, Harry. Bit young for a nip of Cold Gin, aren't you?"
Harry blinked, and he glanced over at Nicky who was making dramatic 'Go on!' motions at him, as if he could prod Harry into behaving like a normal human being rather than the robotic awkwardness he'd instead fallen into.
"I... yeah, maybe."
"I bet you're too young to know!" That was from the second disc jockey, and to Harry's embarrassment and horror, they both began to laugh at him, even though their laughter was likely exaggerated for effect. He didn't like that. He did not like to feel the butt of any jokes, and the anger was refreshing enough that it cut through any lingering reluctance on his part to participate in their little back and forth.
"I'm not!" He refuted. "I know better than those two geezers you had on before me!"
When his gaze cut sideways, he saw Nicky's eyes rounding in shock, perhaps combined with a touch of stunned amusement.
The jockeys laughed again, more uproariously than they had the first time, and perhaps with a bit more sincerity.
"Go on then, Harry! Let's have it."
"Wicked Lester," Harry rushed to say, remembering the long, rambling discourse that Severus had treated him to over the origins of his favourite band while they'd been working on a batch of Pepper-Up potion. "Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons started in a band called 'Rainbow,' and then they changed it to 'Wicked Lester' 'cause there was already a band called 'Rainbow.' Then they found Peter Criss from an ad he'd posted and Ace Frehley found them and auditioned through an ad Paul posted."
The line—and the radio in the corner—were silent for several long moments after Harry's explication on KISS's origins, before one of the jockeys coughed.
"That's... that's right!" He sounded surprised, which only made Harry scowl into the receiver. Of course he'd bloody well been right! Severus had told him, himself, and Severus was never wrong!
"Well done, Harry! Well done!"
Another voice came on the line, one which didn't show up on the radio and which must have been from a private phone.
"Please stay on the line, hon, we'll be with you in a second."
"Er... alright?"
The line fell to an annoying, tuneless muzak number that repeated several times over.
He and Nicky exchanged looks after he'd explained the phantom voice on the line, and they both huddled close to the receiver, waiting for the other side to pick up.
It took perhaps a full five minutes, at which point Nicky began to grow agitated over how much the call might have been costing his grandmother, but finally, a friendly female voice appeared.
"Where's best for you, love? London, Birmingham, Bradford, or Newcastle-upon-Tyne?"
Harry pulled a face at the odd question, not exactly sure what it was he was meant to be answering. "What's best? What do you mean 'what's best?'"
"Where's closest?"
Harry frowned. None of them were particularly close to Backbarrow. Without the intention of making a pun out of it, Backbarrow was in the extreme backwaters of Cumbria, about as far away by car from anywhere else as it was possible to be.
Bradford, in West Yorkshire was an okay bet, he supposed... as was Newcastle. Both were probably about the same distance.
"Bradford?" Harry ventured, looking at Nicky and giving a small shrug as if to say he had no clue why he might be answering such a strange question. Incidentally, that was the truth.
"Okay, love!" The woman chirped to him in a bright voice. "You've won yourself two tickets to KISS's concert in Bradford on the 28th of this month! We very much appreciate your call!"
"I... what?"
"It's been a sweepstakes! We've been running ticket promotions every day for the month of September to celebrate our station's grand opening!" The voice gushed with the appropriate level of enthusiasm. "Where can we send your tickets, sweetheart? Or... in truth it's getting rather late for that, isn't it? With the concert coming up? Let me get your name, or the name of your guardian, and we'll have your tickets set aside at the venue for you. You come by with proof of identification and we'll let you in, easy as." She neglected to say what it would be as easy as.
Harry blinked and when he next spoke it was to tell her Severus' full name, as well as their home address.
She didn't get it the first time, so he was made to spell it out for her.
The line clicked dead and he and Nicky were left staring at one another, neither quite sure how to process what had just happened.
Harry'd won tickets to the KISS concert, just a short two weeks away...
His mouth grew dry.
Severus was guaranteed to be surprised at the developments, sure... but would he be happy about it?
Harry didn't quite want to find out.
A/N: Ok guys, I don't normally do this, but I feel the need to prostrate myself before you, begging forgiveness for the cardinal sin of finding insufficient evidence to suppose that there might have been a rock-oriented station that might have been broadcast far enough to have been picked up in Backbarrow in September of 1988. I was left with two options: Red Rose Radio, which launched in '82 and which was broadcast as far as Lancashire (so that it might have reached parts of Cumbria was possible, but probably with poor reception), or Key 103 which launched on September 3 of 88', having split from Piccadilly radio in Manchester into Key 103 and Piccadilly Gold. I chose the latter, even knowing that Red Rose Radio might have been the more likely choice, simply because the ginning up of Key 103 would have made it the perfect time for them to have hosted an event giving away concert tickets.
I received reliable information from a friend, Neil James (editor of Blocked Magazine, and someone who lived in Northern England at that time and personally listened in to Key 103), that: "1988 was definitely a very eclectic time here. The charts were swamped with Stock, Aitken and Waterman trash." He also explained: "As far as I can recollect there were no specialised genre radio stations back then (except classical). Radio 1 was always the most current music regardless of genre [...] If a rock song was current and charting it would've been played alongside pop."
So elements of this situation may be fabricated to meet the needs of my plot, which I'd conceived of before engaging in research about the history of British radio, (which is far more involved and convoluted than you might imagine—though now that I think of it, the very fact that pirate radio stations were a thing and that the BBC has rather a monopoly on broadcasting by design ought to have suggested that to me from the get go lol). Reforms evidently came two years later in 1990, with the Broadcasting act of 1990 which abolished the Independent Broadcasting Authority and replaced it with the Independent Television Commission and Radio Authority (which is now governed by OFCOM). (Info pulled from Wikipedia page "Broadcasting Act of 1990).