A/N: I am TERRIBLY sorry if you got the first version of this chapter posted an hour ago. For reasons that I suspect have to do with the italicization, the formatting went wonky and many of the paragraphs ran together. Normally fixing that would be annoying but not too bad, but I'm currently away from home and had to fix the formatting on the ffn app on my phone. Mea Culpa, dear readers.
The car rumbled down the road, all that was visible was whatever the dim headlights managed to illuminate, a bare three meters or so out to the front and sides.
It was difficult to remember where they'd come from, but perhaps it had been Gammy's house. Harry was, after all, cradling a clutch of eggs in a hammock he'd improvised by holding his shirt out before him.
They were all sorts of colours: white, and brown, as most eggs invariably were, but also shades of magenta, and green, and speckled violet. Some were striped, and others dotted, and one even looked as though it might have been a lovely paisley pattern.
"Which should we have for breakfast, Severus?"
"Soup," the man answered. "Sinigang."
"Soup?" Harry piped in, his skepticism all too evident. "For breakfast?"
"Princes sardine and tomato," Snape decreed, his black eyes staring sightlessly ahead, "on pumpernickel."
Harry wrinkled his nose at this suggestion, but before he could voice another objection Snape continued his list.
"Knickerbocker glories, topped with grated courgette—"
"Grated courgette!?" Harry blanched.
"Yes, raw. Spam toasties. Coco jam. Ice lollies."
Harry stared at the back of the man's head until it seemed as though nothing more was forthcoming. "I was thinking we'd have eggs."
Snape snorted as though this were the height of idiocy. "Eggs, Potter?"
"I thought I'd have this green and black striped one," Harry told the man, holding it up from where it had rested in his shirt. "Which do you want?"
The car lurched nearly a full lane sideways even though Snape's hand remained steady on the wheel.
Harry struggled to hold himself to the seat, feeling as though he'd be pitched forward into the front row, even without the car slamming to a stop.
After a tense moment, everything went back to the way it had been, the car barreling down a black country road. Dim shapes of nothingness falling out of view before they were ever properly illuminated to begin with.
Snape, for his part, hadn't been startled at all.
"Eggs, Potter?" He asked again, sounding like one of Dudley's much-abused vinyls when they would begin to scratch and repeat endlessly.
"There's a dozen at least," Harry told the man once he'd caught his breath. He sorted through the eggs with a gentle hand, moving the shells this way and that, and no matter how many he moved to the side, it seemed there was always one more at the bottom of the bunch, each with a more splendid pattern than the last.
Here a gold egg. There a shell looking like the scales of some reptilian beast.
"Look," Harry announced, having found one he thought would suit Severus perfectly. "Here's one like St. Catherine's big, round window. You can have this one."
Snape spat out a scandalised epithet. "A rose—a glass rose. I'd rather a black diamond."
"None of these look like diamonds, Severus."
But the man ignored him in favour of crooning in the blackness of night. "Out on the street for a livin', picture's only begun. Your day is sorrow and madness, got you under their thumb—"
The music began as if piped in from some invisible set of speakers. Paul Stanley and Ace Frehley's guitars began the sinister, minor rhythm that Harry had heard so many times, and an invisible choir of singers raised their voices together for the refrain. "Whooooooo—Black Diamond!"
Snape's hands on the wheel were unsteady, pulling so that the car listed dangerously to the right, looking as though it might pass over the centre line, while the man concerned himself chiefly with his performance.
"Darkness will fall on the cityyy—It seems to follow you too! And though you don't ask for pity, there's nothin that you can dooo, no, nooo."
Just as suddenly as the car had been filled with music, the disembodied band left again, leaving no sound at all but the noise made by the tyres on the road, the wind against the windows, and the strange, whirring tone produced by the engine.
Snape too had grown silent. He still didn't spare Harry a backwards glance.
"You really don't want this egg, Severus?" Harry asked, feeling rather disappointed. He'd chosen the prettiest one in the bunch for him.
"An egg is well and good, Harry. But after that, then what?"
Harry frowned, not able to follow the man's train of thought. "You can have a second one, if one's not enough..."
"A spread of bloaters in petroleum jelly!" Snape cried, raising his hand from the wheel to gesticulate grandly towards the roof of the car, "Grass seeds, earwigs and woodworms! To thine palate it may seem old or smelly, yet not half so bad as those things that squirm. Berries, firm berries! Picked red, picked ripe; torn asunder off petrified yew—better than rust I once scraped from a nail, when stirred into our brew."
Harry's lip curled. That all sounded...
Rank. And awful.
He suppressed a shudder.
What was worse was the sing-song way in which Snape had delivered the fatuous demand. Additionally, to what end he was making it, Harry could only guess at.
"I don't think you're meant to eat yew berries, Severus..." He worried at his lower lip with his incisors, thinking that perhaps Snape really did plan on adding the foul list of nonsense into his breakfast fry up. "Or earwigs... or woodworms."
Nor petroleum jelly and rust, but Harry would break that news to him later, after he'd talked him down off the ledge of wanting to dine on the deadlier and more disgusting portions of the proposed menu.
"No?" Snape asked, sounding crestfallen. "Well, I suppose I'll take the glass rose."
There was silence for several moments, and Harry thought he might have seen a dark shape flit across the road, too quickly for him to identify what it might have been.
"Say, there isn't an egg in there that looks like an old cup, is there?"
Surprised that the man was finally being reasonable, Harry hated to think that he'd have to burst his bubble. Thus, he gamely checked for the requested pattern, and was surprised to find that there was an egg matching that very description, near the top.
"Here," he agreed, holding the egg up so that it could be seen in the rear-view window. "You can have this one too."
Snape snorted and hooted. Although the voice was his, it sounded as unlike Snape as it was possible for anyone to be. Harry had never seen Severus act quite so silly before.
"Egg-ads," he declared, laying stress on the first part of the word. "An Eggstraordinary Eggsibition! I daresay, I hope I shan't have to pony up an Eggsorbitant fee—"
Harry nearly dropped the egg as it began to shake in his hand, something within knocking along the shell as though it desperately wanted out. "Oh!"
The shell, which before had been quite firm, seemed to be collapsing until it looked nearly liquid, and dark shapes writhed and churned underneath the thinning outer membrane.
At certain points the squirming mass seemed to approach the shell, growing darker as it did so, and then it would retreat once more, until one of the shadows finally began to push against what contained it, pressing outward until the egg's shape began distorting and bowing outward.
A tiny crack split the membrane, and out of it seeped a bit of liquid, followed by a slick, black snout.
The creature nosed its way forth, fighting valiantly to birth itself into the world, and after a moment or two of struggle, an elegant, slim snake slid into Harry's cupped palms, seeking to flail aimlessly in the new, confusing circumstance it found itself in.
"Severus," he gasped, fighting to contain the creature, "a snake—"
"Pah. Too little meat and far too many bones. Barely worth the effort. Though I do wonder whether they taste like kippers." Snape spoke blithely, unaware of what had happened in the backseat. "I imagine they taste like kippers."
"No, not to eat," Harry rolled his eyes, growing weary of Snape's outrageous commentary. "It came out of the egg—which broke, by the way. You can't have this one anymore."
"Rats," Snape banged his palm on the wheel.
The boy sighed. "No, snakes, Severus."
"Ratt…" Snape murmured, sounding defiant and bullheaded.
Again, music began to filter in from a mysterious source, and Snape patted his fingers against the shifter and wheel along with the beat. "Lay it down, lay it down—"
"Severus! No!" Harry glowered at the back of the man's greasy head, feeling as though he were attempting to discipline a toddler.
The music stopped as suddenly as it had started, so Harry spared a glance down at his hands, only to see that the snake had, indeed, begun to writhe and shift, until he held in his hands an infantile rodent, squeaking and sniveling.
He almost dropped it in surprise.
"Lay it down," Snape said again, although he didn't sing it this time.
Harry hastened to do so, having no wish to cradle the rat in his hands anymore. It grew in size as soon as it was set on the seat beside him and darted away, landing on three legs on the floor of the car before it scurried underneath the passenger seat. Its hairless tail was the last thing to disappear from view, whipping about and greatly resembling a mindless nematode.
Harry shuddered. The snake had perturbed him far less, and he'd not much minded holding the serpent between his fingers. The rat, on the other hand, had frightened him.
"It's gone now. Disappeared under the seat... but it might be up front with you." He attempted to draw his feet up, pulling his knees to his chest so they'd be off the floor. He had no wish for the creature to attempt climbing the leg of his jeans back up onto the seat.
"Pity. It's a pity. Now what will I eat for breakfast?" The older wizard's voice rang out with a plaintive note, sounding truly remorseful.
"Well, you weren't going to eat a rat, were you."
"Rats don't come from eggs," Snape argued, finally sounding a bit more like himself. "A liar. A damned liar is what you are."
"The rat didn't come out of the egg, Severus, first it was a snake—"
"You were never going to give me the egg to begin with! And after all the eggs I've shared with you!"
Harry felt himself flush with anger. He levered himself forward between the seats, daring to attempt such a thing only while emboldened by fury. "I was too!"
He craned his head to look into Snape's face, expecting the bad-tempered snarl that Snape almost perpetually wore, but the wind was taken out of his sails when he finally caught a glimpse of the man driving.
It wasn't Snape at all.
A bloodless face, lined with wrinkles that belied its age turned toward him. The mouth gaped and moved, speaking unknowable words into the aether. Words that Harry would never hear.
Where he'd been sure moments before that he'd been staring at Snape's bedraggled hair, he found that he must have been mistaken, for this man's hair was chopped unevenly about his ears, and was stuffed beneath a worn woven cap.
Something dark, nearly black in the ill-lit car, coursed down the driver's cheek from his temple, and more joined it when he coughed; issuing forth from between his soundless lips.
Two bright, terrified eyes stared, unblinking into Harry's own. Cold, blue eyes; red rimmed and bulging ever so slightly as he seemed to plead with Harry to hear him.
"I... I don't... where's Severus?"
No sooner had he spoken the words then did everything seem to freeze, on that one moment of clarity. He now had a much better look at the man in the front seat than he'd had before, as a bright, blinding light was coming from in front of them, lighting up the entire Marina as though it were the middle of the day.
It was all over in a split second, but that second felt like it had stretched on for an age. Conversely, the moment where the front of the car smashed and folded in upon itself happened all at once; the driver flying from his seat like a ragdoll, pitched through the windscreen and into the black night.
Harry was thrown into the front, feeling the pain of immense fear, but curiously, no actual pain. He hadn't time to register this, however, as he was laying on his back, his bottom half laying in the passenger seat, his back shoved up against the shifter, and his head laying where the driver should have been sitting.
Then he saw nothing, for a substantial, soft object landed on his face, obscuring his sight.
It was warm, sort of wet where Harry grasped it to remove it, and surprisingly weighty.
His shrieking finally began—and didn't show any sign of letting up—once he'd managed to remove the thing from his face and saw just what had assaulted him.
An arm. A bloody, disembodied arm.
Alone in the car now—Severus missing, the driver dead—he wailed and kicked, not sure exactly what he was fighting against or fighting for. Merely... fighting.
Beneath him, on the floor of the car, a fat, snickering rat feasted on a bounty of the broken eggs' yolks.
A/N: 100 points to the house of whoever finds the Masha and the Bear reference.