The car remained propped on the breezeblocks for another two weeks. Snape was, simply put, too busy to do the final checks necessary to make sure it was safe to be driven. Given his normal indifference towards safety concerns, Harry thought that that must have been rather meaningful.

Thus, whenever Harry passed the ghostly silhouette of the poor Marina on his way home—tied up under a tarpaulin with ropes to keep the elements off—he would first shudder, but then feel rather badly about it, and he would come up to the passenger window and give the hulking metal carcass a small, sympathetic pat.

He figured it was his fault that the embattled car was temporarily out of commission. It was one thing for Severus to ensure the safety of the frame, and quite another to feel comfortable driving a car whose oil system had been hijacked by a strange and mischievous potion which sometimes seemed to have a mind of its own.

On Wednesdays, when Snape was off, and on Sundays after they returned home from Mass, the man would ball up rags under his head and spend hours on his back underneath the engine, checking each oil line and always emerging in the evenings looking slightly shiny and smelling like fish paste.

He was never in a good mood after, but refused to give any answers regarding his ill humour.

One night, over toast and soup from a tin, Harry caught him muttering into his spoon.

He was tilting the spoon this way and that under the scant light from the kitchen bulb, watching as the small chicken sediment seemed to gather and disperse in eddies within the broth in which it was suspended.

Harry thought this a singularly odd thing to be fascinated by. He himself wasted no time in slurping the watery soup out of the spoon's bowl.

Snape really must have been out of it, for he didn't even wince at the sloppy noises that Harry was making.

"—clean. Far too clean..."

"What's too clean?" Harry asked, thinking that if he asked it in a very casual way, that Snape might be tricked into answering for once. He dipped his bread into the bowl and brought the crust up to suck the broth from the crumb.

That settled it. Snape was completely preoccupied. Normally he'd have wrinkled his hawkish nose at such bad manners.

"All of it," Snape sighed, finally taking pity on the cooling spoonful of soup and stuffing it in his mouth. He seemed surprised when the half-hearted attempt at eating resulted in a bit of soup dribbling from the side of his mouth and down his chin, and he threw his spoon down onto the table, looking disgusted.

"There ought to be small particulate in all the lines. The oil ought to be like sludge by now..."

Harry screwed his lips up to avoid the know-it-all voice that wanted to escape, admonishing the man for neglecting his oil changes.

"I didn't clean it myself; didn't flush the lines. It can't have just gone nowhere, it can't have..."

"Maybe it's magic," Harry suggested with a roll of his eyes, only half serious. He was becoming thoroughly fed up with the illogical way in which magic seemed to behave, particularly when at other times it seemed to have rules that couldn't be circumvented.

A crock of nonsense, as far as he could figure.

Whenever he thought there was something that the mysterious power ought to be capable of, he was informed by Snape that magic simply didn't work that way. Then, whenever he was quite certain that whatever he was seeing must have been impossible, he learned that, to magic, such impossibilities were not but a mere trifle. Something to be waved away with a knowing laugh.

This must have been one of those times where something that seemingly could have been easily ascribed to the intervention of magic by any uninformed bystander, for reasons that defied credulity, simply couldn't be so. Or at least that was Harry's conclusion after watching Snape's mounting frustration over the past two weeks.

"Certainly, a banishing spell or a vanishing enchantment might be able to disperse the particles elsewhere," Snape mused, apparently giving the off-hand suggestion serious thought, "but none of the ingredients in the potion could possibly have resulted in the properties we're seeing..."

He growled and pushed the bowl away as though such a thing as bland, store-bought soup could have offended him.

Harry pursed his lips and strained to think, pushing his imagination to the far reaches to try and scrounge up something—anything—that might help Severus along.

The trouble was, the harder he worked at thinking things he'd never thought before, the bigger blank he drew.

Finally, bringing up a finger to itch at a cow lick, he was made to admit defeat, and he looked at Snape's pensive form as he stared daggers at the ugly, swirly pattern on the tabletop.

"I can't think of anything, Severus," Harry uttered, by way of apology.

Snape's head popped up, the jerking motion causing his hair to fly in every direction. "As if I'd have expected a solution from you."

Harry felt his face falling along with the terrible sensation of his heart attempting to scale from out his rib cage into his throat.

"Harry..." He heard Snape sigh.

He didn't want to look up into Snape's face to see the irritation there, but he was forced to when he felt his kuya's long fingers, curled at the knuckle, chuck him under the chin, raising his face up to eye level.

Snape's expression was uncharacteristically gentle.

"I didn't mean it like it sounded."

Harry felt the tell-tale prickle in his sinuses that told him he was about to start crying, so he tried to tuck his chin again, only Severus wasn't letting him with his fingers under his chin. "You think I'm d-dumb."

"I don't."

"You do!" Harry cried, wrenching himself backwards by pushing at the table with both of his hands. His chair scooted away, squeaking loudly as the legs met resistance on the ancient linoleum floor.

Snape's hand dropped and his open palm smacked against the tabletop. Harry heard the man's harsh sigh of frustration.

"I think you're eight, Harry. And forgive me, but eight-year-olds are hardly known for being capable of solving all the world's myriad problems."

Slightly appeased, Harry glanced up and sniffed violently, wiping at his nose on the back of his forearm when it began to drip.

"I could help if you'd let me," he argued back.

"Have I said that I would reject any help you might manage to provide? No. I'll thank you not to put words in my mouth. All I said was that I didn't expect a solution from you," Snape clarified. He looked tired, and he'd begun to massage around his closed eyelids with the tips of his fingers.

"Only..."

Snape looked up. "Yes?"

"In class Mr. Fowler's been telling us about the scientific method... couldn't you do an experiment? And then you could say for sure what it was that the potion was doing?" Harry put forth, the suggestion sounding hesitant.

Severus was, to his core, a scientist. Harry had seen him conduct dozens of experiments while he'd stayed with him in Spinner's End. All in a matter of months. Doubtless the idea must have already occurred to him.

But Snape only blinked back, looking speechless. "An experiment," he repeated after Harry, almost as though he'd never before heard the word.

"Yeah... er..." Harry held up a single finger, in a sign that Snape ought to wait for him as he darted away from his chair and seized up his school bag from its spot near the door. He lugged it over to the table where he pulled it up into his lap, seated once more in the chair. His fingers rifled through the enormous stack of loose papers he'd collected over term.

Harry pointedly ignored the snort of derision coming from Snape when Severus caught sight of the mess.

Hypocritical of him, anyways, given the state of the Marina's floor.

Barking out a triumphant "Ah-hah!" Harry liberated one sheet from the rest. His homework from the previous evening.

In the simplest terms possible, it asked the class to design a rudimentary experiment.

He handed the paper over to Snape proudly, who then eyed it with dubious interest.

Harry watched as Severus' lips tightened, looking like he couldn't decide whether or not to be amused or annoyed.

"There are better ways of testing for a football's level of inflation than by seeing how far it will bounce when thrown, Harry," Snape admonished him, hiding a smirk behind his hand which cradled his jaw and cheek.

"That's not the point, and you know it!" Harry spat back, his tone acid enough to corrode metal.

Snape straightened then and gave him what amounted to an indulgent twist of his thin lips. "Granted."

Harry stuffed down the strange feeling that was rising to the top. He felt pleased that he'd at the least cheered the man up enough that he was no longer moping... but on the other hand, the condescension in Severus' tone was so thick that it grated on his pride.

"In the spirit of giving credit where due: you're spot on the money. An experiment would certainly serve us better at this juncture than more time wasted on baseless speculation."

Harry climbed up on his chair so that he was kneeling on it and pressed both hands on the tabletop so that he was leaning over the table now, rocking back and forth with excitement. It was rare for Snape to pay him a sincere compliment or to admit that Harry was right about something. "So, what do we do for our experiment?"

He considered the video Mr. Fowler had shown in class where mazes of glass and rubber piping underneath small fires produced bubbling mixtures in blue and green.

At the time, he'd thought it looked an awful lot like potions, although perhaps with a few additional steps.

He reached in his memory to try and think of some of the equipment that had then been named on the worksheet they'd been given to fill in while watching the short film.

"Will we need an... erm... one of those Bunsen burners? Or could we use a graduated cylinder?" Harry asked, feeling very proud of the fact that he'd remembered the names of such things. The graduated cylinder, in particular, had stuck out to him because he'd thought it so odd that a piece of laboratory glassware could have been matriculated into a school to begin with.

But for all of his preening, Snape scoffed and looked faintly offended. "What do you take me for: Dr. Jekyll? All we need to do is prepare a few samples of engine oil and add in our potion. The most difficult part of the entire enterprise will likely be recreating the brew as we found it that day," he said with a tiny wince. "I'm not entirely sure what went wrong to begin with that resulted in the explosion, and I don't relish blowing up the kitchen all over again. I imagine the lion's share of the effort will be taken up with figuring out what the steps are that would facilitate such an aberration in the first place."

He scratched at the patchy stubble that was beginning to break the skin on his chin. "We're lucky that the clothes I was wearing that day were soaked with the stuff, otherwise it'd be nigh on impossible to even have a clean sample to compare the new variants to. We'll just have to hope that the potion was stable enough that having been left in the open air for so long won't have denatured its properties."

"You didn't throw them away?" Harry asked, raising a dubious eyebrow as he'd seen Snape so often do. "It's been three weeks, Severus—"

"Do you have a job? Eh? Are you responsible for buying new clothes? No? I thought not," the older wizard scathed, his shoulders rounding as he crossed his arms over his chest, clearly feeling defensive. "It's none of your business whether I tried to save my clothes! I have precious few things to wear as it is. It would be a terrible waste to throw out something because it's dirty."

"But then why haven't you washed them?" Harry pondered aloud. "I saw clothes out on the line for the past week, so you've done a basket of laundry since then—"

"The potion won't come out, Potter! It wasn't for lack of trying; it's saturated into the cloth! My shirt was so sodden with it that I was able to collect the drippings into the bottom of the pail. But then, if they at least performed as a suitable reservoir for the extra potion, they'll have served their purpose, even if I never can get the slime off of them," he opined, sounding morose at the prospect.

"It was one of my better shirts," Severus muttered to the half-eaten bowl of cold soup. The words emerged sounding faintly whingey and petulant. His mouth had flattened into a thin, grim line, and the corners of his lips bowed downward in the exact inverse to what a smile might have looked like.

Harry felt a bit sorry for Snape at this. Severus was so rarely particular about any of his earthly goods that for him to mourn the loss of property must have meant he really was quite attached to it.

"At least it wasn't your KISS Army shirt," Harry offered as consolation, knowing it was likely cold comfort.

"At least." Snape's mouth curled in a miserable sneer.

They began the task of ferrying the remainder of their dinner to the kitchen sink where Snape got a sudsy lather going in the tub with a generous portion of washing up liquid. He tossed Harry a clean rag so that the boy could dry the dishes as Snape finished scrubbing them clean.

The pair made short work of the chore, as they did every evening.

"How do you think it went wrong?" Harry asked, wondering to himself whether Snape might have had any idea as to what had caused the explosion.

Snape's answering sigh sounded exhausted. "I can't be sure. It could have been an ingredient that was prepared slightly differently from the rest, or something to do with the temperature. Maybe I left it under stasis for too long... I'm not sure how I'm going to recreate it in our kitchen, or whether it's even safe to do so. It might even be the case that the explosion is a necessary part of producing the properties we've seen, in which case, I'm loathe to replicate the conditions in the house."

They had both taken a seat on the musty sofa and were reclining against opposite arms, turned towards the centre. Harry sat cross legged with his feet tucked under his thighs and Snape's long legs were lazily stretched out before him at a negligent angle, the ankle of one leg resting over the shin of the other.

There wasn't any homework for Harry to do, as he'd completed it when he'd returned home from school, and there was no reason to bother with the old television set. So, they just sort of... sat there. In the quiet. Both were too tired to even bother finding a pretense for making some noise to break the oppressive silence. That, in itself, was telling.

Snape didn't care much for stillness. That he was tolerating it, or even seemed to crave a moment of such tranquility spoke volumes about how the man was feeling at that moment.

His eyes looked far away, and his sight seemed to rest on a cobweb strewn upper corner of the sitting room, focused like two black lasers on the point where the ceiling converged with the two walls beneath. A muscle twitched in his jaw, and a soft scraping sound was coming from him, which Harry thought might have been the sound of him grinding his molars together.

"Damn it all."

"What is it?" Harry asked, startled by the vitriol bubbling underneath the man's invective.

Snape loosed a brittle sigh that spoke to a bone deep weariness. "I'm going to be made to ask the headmaster for his assistance with this."

"Mister Dumbledore?"

"Yesss," the word hissed out through Snape's gritted teeth. "Mister Dumbledore."

Harry found himself glaring at the wizard seated opposite. When Snape had repeated his words, his voice had gone up a bit, mocking Harry's own higher-pitched tonality.

The older wizard registered the fact that Harry was clearly annoyed by it with a negligent shrug of his shoulders. "Sorry," he drawled, sounding anything but.

"What do you need his help for?"

"Like as not, I'll need access to the school's potions labs," Snape tossed his head back against the arm of the sofa so that he now cast his baleful glare at the chipped ceiling. "I forfeited any right to them by resigning my post. Who knows what the old man will ask for in exchange."

That last bit might as well have flown entirely over Harry's head, for the first part was echoing in his ears.

He twisted so he was kneeling on the sagging cushions, bouncing slightly on his knees. "You mean I get to see your old school?"

His head lifting a fraction, Snape glowered at him. "No."

Harry couldn't help the moan or disappointment that escaped him, nor could he stop the words that came after "What do you mean, 'no?'"

Regret filled him as soon as the complaint left his lips.

Snape had always been rather tolerant of him, but if ever there were a time where Harry figured he would be justified in actually punishing him for once, it would be because Harry had been directly insubordinate.

Indeed, when he dared to match gazes with the older wizard, Severus looked livid.

"Care to run that by me again, Potter?" Snape questioned him, his voice having gone deadly quiet.

Harry reeled back and curled up against his arm of the sofa. Drawing his knees up to his chest, he shook his head violently. "Erm… no, Severus. Sorry, Severus…"

"Ah. It seems you do know the meaning of the word 'no.' Fancy that."

Harry swallowed and attempted to make himself look small.

At least another minute passed with electrically charged silence passing between them, before Snape seemed to sag, letting go of the anger he'd seized upon after Harry's display of impudence.

"You won't be going," Snape reaffirmed, his eyes hard. "There's no telling how long I'll have to be up there," he murmured. "It would perhaps be best if I asked Mrs. Hill to host you on Wednesdays too.

Harry groaned and threw his head back, conking the rear of his skull against the hard portion of the sofa's arm. "Ow—"

"I thought you got on well with the woman," Snape commented, narrowing his eyes at Harry's theatrics.

Rubbing now at the back of his head, Harry shrugged, not wishing to impugn the kindly older woman he'd taken a shine to. "Gammy's just fine. She's really nice. It's Snowdrop I don't like."

He scowled, thinking of all of the instances in class and after school where the feisty girl had given him jip.

"I see enough of her as it is," he complained. "Can't I stay here? It's not like you'll be gone as long as when you work late."

"That's just it, Harry. I can't guarantee when I'll be home if I'm in the middle of a project like this. The very nature of this means that I'll need to keep a strict observation of the potion so that I can observe when the change takes place and what causes it. It's entirely possible that I'll be occupied well into the evening."

"Please let me come home, Severus," Harry begged now, a plaintive note creeping into his voice. "I don't hafta be watched all the time! This summer I was on my own for three or four days before you showed up! I won't touch anything I'm not suppose'ta."

"You can be trusted to do your homework and occupy yourself for the evening?" Snape asked, tracing the seam of his lips with his finger as he needled Harry with his intent stare. "You won't touch any of the projects under stasis in the kitchen? You won't bounce on the bed? Or the sofa? You won't—"

Harry raised up on his knees, springing slightly on the cushions in his excitement. "I won't!"

Snape glowered at him, waving a hand down at the boy's legs. "You're doing it now!"

Colouring, Harry forced himself to his bottom once more and pulled his legs out from underneath himself, sitting up straight, like he imagined adults did, and fighting to keep his legs still. "Well, I won't do it anymore."

Severus looked patently unimpressed and unconvinced.

"I'll consider it. I've yet to ask the headmaster whether I'll even be free to use the potions labs. It may prove to be the case that he declines my request, and then the point is moot."

"You don't think he'll agree?" Harry asked, turning sober. If they couldn't figure out the properties of the potion, they might not be able to use the car at all. It remained to be seen whether or not it was safe to drive with the potion running through the system.

Severus sighed, slumping into a heap in his corner of the sofa. He appeared boneless and weary beyond words. "I did rather leave them in the lurch by resigning as I did. I'd not blame him for denying our request. It's not as if this is of any importance to him. This is merely a personal crusade of ours. It has no bearing on the headmaster's greater concerns."

"What are those?"

Snape shook his head. He appeared distracted. "That doesn't matter. Not right now. All that matters is that it'll be up to me to convince him that he ought to help, and also that he's unlikely to do it for free."

"Well, we don't have much money," Harry worried aloud, losing the battle with his legs. They swung back and forth independently of one another, creating two oscillating pendulums beneath him.

"It's not money he'll be wanting."

Harry wondered at this. How could you pay someone without money?

Perhaps it was like how Gammy paid him with milk and eggs.

"I can share some of the milk I earn," Harry offered. "Does Mr. Dumbledore like cheese?"

Snape blinked at him before one of his eyebrows shot upwards in a display of his incredulity. "Hmm. Perhaps you are dumb."

His mouth falling open, Harry let out a cry of disbelief and offense. He reared back, feeling his heart crashing and his eyes beginning to sting.

But then before he could question the man over the hurtful insult, Snape began to chuckle, and that chuckle turned into the sort of uproarious laughter that Harry had never before witnessed from the Snape.

He felt himself pinking up a bit with embarrassment, but by then he couldn't quite find it in himself to begrudge Severus his assessment. It had been a bit of a daft suggestion, on his part.

Harry began to laugh too.