"STOP KICKING, YOU BLOODY MENACE!"

"AHHHHHH! AIEEEEEEE!"

"STOP THRASHING! Hold still!"

The noise torn from Harry's throat was shrill enough to burst eardrums, and it took him a shamefully long time to realise that it was his own voice making the sound.

The room was only dimly lit with cold, pre-dawn light, enough that he could see Snape's drawn features hovering above his own, looking as though the man couldn't decide whether to be concerned or annoyed.

"Harry—!" he barked, holding onto the boy's arms at the forearm and keeping them restrained and crossed against Harry's chest.

It was then that Harry registered that he was heaving so violently that he thought me might be ill, and that his body was soaked through with a chill sweat, making him clammy all over.

He blinked, looking around the room and surprised to see the familiar collage of rock posters and magazine clippings that papered the walls. It felt as though he'd been violently ripped from one reality and birthed unceremoniously into the next. Nothing was as it seemed, it simply couldn't be.

Could he trust that the Heavy Metal illustration by his head was the genuine article? Or the Sammy Hagar poster by the foot of the bed? Or the KISS poster that Snape had somehow contrived to place on the ceiling so that it was the first thing he woke to each morning?

There by the door were Ozzy, and Robert Plant, and Jim Morrison. By the window he found the familiar likeness of Eddie—Iron Maiden's skeletal mascot—grinning at him from a poster for The Number of the Beast.

He looked over once again, seeing Snape's face, grim in expression and the shade of clabbered milk.

"Are we quite finished?"

"Yeah," Harry panted, nodding furiously. He felt the pillow mussing the back of his head as he did. It was soaked and disgustingly cold.

"If I release you, you'll keep your hands to yourself?"

"What do you mean?" His brow creased with confusion.

Apparently satisfied, Severus let go of him, pulling his hands away with the palms open and fingers spread, as if to ward off any forthcoming blows. He looked at his ward skeptically and finally nodded, looking as though he'd made a decision for himself, before he collapsed back onto the foot of the bed, leaning back against the wall and apparently exhausted.

A red spot was blooming by Snape's closed right eye, made all the starker by the curdled quality of his complexion and the unrelenting black of his eyelashes and eyebrows against his skin.

Gasping now, Harry finally managed to sit up, and he shuffled over to Snape's side, peering up at the spot on his face.

"Did I… did I hit you?"

Snape's eye opened. It looked bleary and red from lack of sleep. His mouth twisted in a sardonic grimace. "More than once."

Harry's index extended out, prodding at the reddened portion of Snape's cheek and brow bones, but Snape swatted it away.

"It's fine," he growled, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. They seemed to rest on Paul Stanley's star-shaped eye-paint.

"I hit you!" Harry cried now, leaning forward for another look, and ignoring Severus' attempts to evade him.

"It'll hardly be the first time—"

Harry reeled back at the implication, his hand still raised with the pointer finger extended. "I've never hit you before!"

"Not you, l'al fowt. But I've been clobbered before when trying to wake the unwitting from nightmares."

"Oh…"

"Yes." Snape gave a half-hearted smirk, looking as though he were reminiscing. "Being the Head of House came with unexpected responsibilities."

Harry wasn't sure what to say to this, so he hissed out a sigh through his teeth. He felt as though much of the terror he'd felt from the hazy dream, in addition to the horror at having hit Snape, escaped him with the release of air.

"…Oh." He said again, for lack of anything more appropriate.

Snape echoed him then with his own sigh, now looking at the boy beside him with heavily lidded eyes. He brought up one hand to rub ineffectually at the lower lid of his left eye. The lid was pulled down and away so that it sagged a bit and only snapped back when he released it, afterwards staring at the fingers of his hand like he might be able to see the grit he'd attempted to scrub away.

"What was your dream about?" The older wizard asked, folding his fingers over his stomach, woven together at the knuckle.

Scratching violently at one of his tufts of unmanageable hair, Harry winced. "I can't remember," he admitted.

"Not a bit of it?"

"No," Harry frowned, closing his eyes as he fought to hold on to the terror he'd so recently felt. It was an honest to goodness lost cause. The details of the nightmare flitted away from him like a girl playing the coquette. They seemed as though they might surface with just a little bit more focus, and then when he doubled down on his attempts to recall them, they collapsed into dust and floated away on the winds of memory and slumber.

When he opened his eyes again, it was to see Snape regarding him with an unreadable expression.

Harry thought he might press harder, but apparently Severus wasn't so inclined. He pushed himself up off the bed and paused by the door, where he kicked out one leg, scooping Harry's discarded school shirt onto his foot, and used this to lift the shirt into his hands, flinging it at the boy's bed.

That seemed extraordinarily lazy for Snape, Harry distantly observed, if indeed it was all in an attempt to avoid stooping to pick it up off the floor.

"You were meant to get up in a half hour anyway. You may as well come down and help me with breakfast for once."

Slipping the shirt—which was terribly wrinkled and already unbuttoned at the neck—on over his head, Harry slid from the bed and plodded over to his trousers, which he thrust his legs into.

"What'll we be having?"

A snort issued from behind him where Severus stood by the door. "Eggs, Harry. Same as every morning."

"Oh," Harry giggled, shaking his head a bit in order to get his hair to behave better. "Right."

Following the dark-haired man down the stairs, Harry rubbed the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes, hoping that he wouldn't be hopelessly tired all day in school.

He'd gone to bed at what had seemed to be a reasonable hour, and Gammy had helped him with his homework the evening before, so that he and Snape wouldn't have to stay up late into the night going over it before bed after his kuya picked him up from the Hill's house.

Richard III was continuing apace, and Harry was thoroughly sick of it. Particularly because once he'd mentioned the assignment to Severus, he'd learnt that Snape seemed almost perversely fond of the play, and that he didn't sympathise one whit with Harry's plight. It made a difficult unit downright torturous when Harry returned home, only to hear Snape begin to lecture on his own points of interest regarding the Plantagenet King's illustrious historical rule. The only quarter he granted was in acknowledging that Harry was unequal to the task of appreciating the work, and that it was a wasted effort in trying to instruct years 3 and 4 on literature so far above their level.

It was a very good thing, he considered, that Snape was in no mood to wax philosophical in the mornings over toast.

He was far more concerned with ferrying incalculable spoonfuls of sugar into his NesCafé.

Harry sniffed, eyeing the brackish, black-brown coffee, with its frothy head of sienna, with novel interest (and maybe even a bit of greed). Coffee was meant to wake you up, wasn't it? Harry certainly needed that.

"Can I have a sip?"

Snape grunted. He clearly wasn't paying attention. After the debacle upstairs, he'd apparently abandoned words once he'd determined he shouldn't need to expend any more effort on articulating his thoughts.

His left hand flitted between the triangle of pumpernickel toast on his plate and the handle of his coffee mug, alternating, almost one for one, between the two. His right hand was taken up jotting down an answer in a column of the crossword.

Harry waited until Severus stared sightlessly up at the ceiling, muttering under his breath over a clue that stumped him, before he made his move.

His hand reached out, slow and shaking, until he looped a finger around the mug's handle, and began to draw it slowly over to himself, watching as the surface of the coffee rippled and lapped against the chipped, ceramic side, making frothy, wave-like patterns on the glaze.

Once he managed to drag it in front of himself, he lifted it to his lips. His eyes cut over to Severus to watch for his attention on him, and he took a sip as cool as you please—

Which only lasted until the too-bitter, too-sweet beverage touched his tongue, at which point he reacted by spitting it out all over the Daily Prophet.

He was still sputtering and wiping at his mouth with his sleeve when he heard Snape's harrumph from beside him.

"Serves you right, too."

Snape's hand whipped out to reclaim his coffee, which he drew to his lips in order to take a huge slug of the foul brew, swallowing it down without batting an eye.

Harry fell back against the back of his chair with a huff, glowering at his half-eaten plate of egg scramble and toast. He'd taken a few half-hearted bites of each before he'd determined that he didn't have much of a stomach for any of it and had begun to eye Snape's coffee with keen interest. Now that that avenue had proven to be a dead end, he was left without satisfaction, although what it was he desired in the first place was hardly clear to him.

"You'll be home when I get back from school today, right?" He asked, finally making to rise from his chair. He grabbed up the strap of his school bag and slung it around his shoulders, narrowly avoiding hitting a drying cauldron off the scant bench-space as he did so, which earned a glare from the wizard sitting at the table.

"As it happens, I'll likely be out."

"It's Wednesday. Aren't you off Wednesdays?"

Harry began to head for the door, seeing from the time on the kitschy kitchen clock that he couldn't afford to tarry for a moment longer. Snape followed him into the sitting room and up to the door.

"I've arranged with Dumbledore a block of time where the school potions labs will be at my disposal, and Wednesday seemed the best day. Unless you'd prefer to forfeit my company on Sundays instead—"

Harry's eyes had rounded at this information, but he hastened to make his opinion on the scheduling known, all the same. "No! We have Mass Sundays..."

And they got to see Lola, and they got to eat from Rice Bowl, and Snape would sit for an hour or two in the evenings and go over the previous week's coursework while helping Harry to anticipate and prepare for what he suspected was to come...

Sundays were something special.

Wednesdays were nice, because sometimes when the weather permitted, Snape could be cajoled into escorting Harry to the ramshackle park nearby, and on occasion that trip would end with a take-away supper from some of the chippies near the river, but that was only if Harry was exceptionally lucky. He could stand to spare a Wednesday, especially if it meant that they could figure out the nature of the potion that had infiltrated the Marina's oil-lines.

The poor girl was still sitting on blocks outside the house, looking sorrier and sorrier by the day.

Harry'd gone and taken a rag to her after some miscreant had gotten the idea to draw rude pictures and words in the accumulated dust that despoiled her boot. He was worried that someone would get it in mind to break a window next, but when he'd voiced his concern to Severus, the man had merely snorted and rolled his eyes.

"I'd like to see them try."

Shaking his head to release this clutter, Harry turned to open the door, but not before he turned back to Snape, who was leaning up with one shoulder against the wall behind him, his arms crossed as he attempted a desultory pose.

"When do you think you'll be back?"

To his great irritation, Snape shrugged, his lip curling a bit, although without malice. "Once I reach the end of today's formulation. Either it stabilises—and fails—or it reaches cataclysm, and we have the first of the answers we seek."

Harry's eyes narrowed, and he mirrored Snape's posture, although he was leaning in the door frame. "Didn't you write down what you did?"

"Didn't I write it down?" Snape muttered, with a mocking lilt to his tone. "Of course I did! What kind of slap-dash, half-rate tinkerer do you take me for!?"

Harry straightened up at this and stepped back, raising both hands to placate the man. "I was only asking!"

"The day that I take brewing advice from you—" Snape began, one yellowed fingertip pointing at Harry, hovering about an inch from the boy's chest.

But he never finished. When Severus looked down into Harry's face, he seemed to weary of his anger, and it sloughed off of him as would an old, dry skin off of a snake. His pointing hand dropped to his side and he let out a forceful exhalation of air, his shoulders collapsing as his ribs compressed beneath them.

He was looking at the wall beside them now, not at Harry. In truth, he was glaring at the flaking wallpaper as though it had personally slighted him, his mouth twisting with distaste.

"I suppose I already have taken brewing advice from you, otherwise we'd not have found ourselves in this mess to begin with."

Harry's first instinct was to say that he was sorry, but that wasn't properly true. He wasn't.

He was excited that Snape had tried out his recipe, and that it had produced something interesting enough that it was worth further study. He felt a momentary, suicidal urge to quip back 'you're welcome,' but he didn't quite dare.

In the end he blinked up at Severus, not saying anything at all.

"I expect I'll be back late." Snape told him at last, taking hold of the door and gently pushing Harry until the boy was out on the stoop. "Make sure you close the door all the way until it latches or the wards won't activate, and for Merlin's sake, don't dawdle coming home! You're to come straight back here after school—"

"Okay, okay," Harry hopped down from the crumbling block of concrete that abutted their front door and turned to wave at Severus, grinning in spite of himself. "Bye, Severus."

Snape glowered after him with sour humour.

"Brat!"

The door slammed after, and Harry chuckled as he started down Spinner's End, turning onto Swift Street and toward the bridge that would take him over the River Leven.

He made it to Rowky Syke without much of a delay, and he wasn't the last student who shuffled into Mr. Fowler's classroom. He had plenty of time to bring himself under manners, arranging the homework he'd completed with Gammy's help—and, if he were to be honest with himself, Snowdrop's help—the evening before, and withdrawing the beaten-up, dog-eared copy of Richard III that Severus had lent him.

Most of the class had copies that were on loan from the school, all in the same edition, but Severus had scoffed when he'd seen this, and had insisted that the version he owned was superior.

Harry wasn't sure how that was true, unless you counted the fact that Snape had written so heavily in the margins that one could barely make out the original text. Surely, that was some sort of improvement.

It felt like one of the shortest days at school in history, and Harry was sort of sad to have to go home, knowing that he'd be arriving back to an empty house.

He made sure to pull the door closed all the way so that the wards sang under his hand as they activated, and then he didn't lose any time at all in going up to his own room.

Homework could wait. He hadn't much of it, and if he did his maths work without Severus there to help, it was likely that he would end up having to redo it all later anyhow. Snape seemed to be under the impression that Harry was basically innumerate.

Instead, he'd swiped the tape deck from the kitchen and chose a cassette from Severus' collection, helping himself to AC/DC's Back in Black album from the huge piles that were littered around nearly every available surface in the small house.

He fast forwarded through a couple of songs until he came to one that suited his mood, and then he dipped his hand into Wheat's enclosure, lifting the silent arachnid out into the world.

They spent a few minutes thus, talking. Harry allowed the spider to work its way up his arm while the boy chattered about the rotten foul that Carl Masters had perpetuated in their pick-up game over the break. Once Wheat had inched his way from Harry's shoulder up his neck and into the young wizard's hair, he giggled as the tarantula's hairy pedipalps were tickling at a spot behind his ear.

"Quit it!" He snorted, restraining himself from swatting, which he knew his pet wouldn't appreciate. "That itches!"

Wheat didn't stop, however. Why would he have?

Harry controlled his impulse to shake him off his head by scratching at the back of his neck with one fingernail, which seemed to counteract the crawling sensation that was sending zippy tingles up his spine.

He could talk to the spider as an equal until the cows came home, but that would never change the fact that the overgrown arachnid was, at his heart, nothing more than a dumb beast.

Then again, that was probably the only reason why he felt so comfortable unloading his concerns on his pet to begin with.

He'd just begun to complain once more about Snowdrop's continued snottiness when a distant sound interrupted.

At first he thought it might have been a part of the song he was listening to, but he didn't remember the strange ringing from the previous times he'd listened to the album, and when he went to turn the volume down, the new sound persisted.

With a start, he realised that it was the noise of the phone downstairs ringing.

He'd almost forgotten what such a thing sounded like. To his knowledge, Snape had never received an in-bound call before, at least not while Harry had resided there.

There couldn't be any harm in answering the phone, he reasoned, pulling Wheat from his hair and settling the tarantula back into his plastic terrarium. He fitted the lid back and then rushed out of the room, hopping down the stairs three or four at a time and landing heavily at the bottom, ignoring the way it sent a shock from his ankle up his shin, as it always did.

Severus hated when he did that, but Severus wasn't home to scold him, was he?

Besides, maybe whatever it was couldn't wait.

He knew better than to open the door to strangers. It could be one of Severus' former associates. A wizard.

The phone, on the other hand, ought to be safe. Wizards didn't ring people up to chat, as far as Harry could tell.

He knew it to be coming from the kitchen, for that was where he'd seen Severus on occasion place calls to Rice Bowl or to The Jiggered Yow. The yellowed, cracking plastic nearly slipped out of his hand as he pulled it from its base on the wall, having to juggle the receiver a bit in order to avoid dropping it as he fought to bring it to his ear.

"…Hello? Snape residence."

"Mr. Snape?" The voice on the other end barked, sounding brusque and businesslike.

Harry merely blinked, taken aback. He coughed and tried for a deeper than average voice, wincing as it came out hoarse and unconvincing. "This is his house."

Apparently that didn't much matter, for the man speaking on the other end continued on blithely without seeming to care whether he was speaking to an adult. "I am Detective Sergeant Hollyhock, with the Cumbria Constabulary. I'm calling to inform you that we've detained a member of your household for public intoxication and disorderly conduct. We're citing him with a penalty notice, and we can either keep him here with us until he dries up a bit, or you can come and retrieve him from Carleton Hall—"

Harry blanched, his face going white and his knuckles bloodless where he gripped the phone. This meant that Snape must have lied to him… he'd not gone to Hogwarts!

Now he registered a flush of anger, bubbling hot beneath his skin and singeing him along his veins.

Snape had gone out to drink! And worse, he must have been so driven to incapacitate himself that he'd not even bothered to try and hold his liquor!

"Where…" Harry began to ask, coughing when it emerged too childlike. He tried again, once more affecting a deeper tone of voice. "Where's that?"

"Penrith." DS Hollyhock informed him, in a clipped tone. Then he heard a click on the other end, and the line went dead. Evidently the sergeant had better things to do with his time.

Harry stuck the phone back on the wall, resisting the urge he felt to yank it down and whip it across the room by the cord.

He walked the few feet that separated him from the kitchen table and sank heavily into the chair, holding his head in his hands.

Severus was stuck in Penrith, and there was nothing Harry could do for him. Worse yet, he was likely only out there drinking because watching over Harry had driven him to the bottle.

Sniffing now, Harry rubbed his fingertips into his eyes, feeling a deep hurt that he'd not remembered feeling since that summer, though whether the worse offense against him had been the Dursleys' abandonment or Severus' own complicity in his parents' deaths was negotiable.

For lack of anything better to do, and because he found the motion of it vaguely soothing, he began to rock back and forth in the chair, tipping it forward and backward on the legs and creating enough of a ruckus that he could block out the rest of the world, if only for a little while.

How was he supposed to get Severus home from Penrith? The Marina was broken—and he was eight for God's sake! He couldn't have driven it if he'd wanted to.

Lola knew Penrith reasonably well, he considered, casting about for a solution. Perhaps he could call up Rice Bowl, and maybe if he walked to the restaurant, she'd take pity on the two and drive Harry up to rescue his wayward kuya...

"What in Merlin's name are you doing to my kitchen chair?"

Harry startled so badly at this that he fell backwards while the chair was tipped onto the rear legs. His body tumbled in reverse, legs over head, until he came to a stop against a pair of skinny shins, clad in black woolen trousers and a pair of all-too-familiar black boots.

His eyes tracked upwards, disoriented by the fact that he was upside down, but also because for all that the figure was familiar in build, most of the clothes the newcomer wore were not.

"Severus!"

Snape reached down and hauled him up with two hands under each of Harry's armpits, not letting go until the boy was back on his feet before him, where he persisted in brushing dust and crumbs from the younger wizard's shirt. "Just who were you expecting? Prince bloody Charles?"

Snape's snide tone of voice and his disgusted sneer had Harry momentarily forgetting that he'd been upset with the man, and he quickly quipped back with "Nah, Brian Johnson," because he'd been listening to the man sing for the better part of half an hour before he'd gotten the call from Penrith.

This at least stopped Snape mid-snit, and his expression seemed surprised—and, if possible, impressed—before he forced his eyes closed, hard, and then opened them again, seeming to use the small tic in order to bring himself back under control.

"Granted, that surely would have been something. I can't say I don't wish I were him instead."

"And I bet Brian wishes he were a wizard," Harry offered. Even though Snape's tone when having said that he'd trade places with AC/DC's frontman had hinted at levity, something about the admission had struck Harry as sad, all the same, and he felt compelled to reassure the older wizard.

Remembering then why he had been so surprised to see Snape—and not only because he was dressed in an eccentric, woolen get-up with a smock-like shirt buttoned at the shoulder and neck and belted at the waist—Harry started and flared up at him with accusation writ large on his face.

"You weren't out drinking, were you?" He demanded, steeling himself against the anger that was sure to come with his allegation.

As he expected, Snape's face clouded over with fury. When the black-eyed man spoke, his words were deadly quiet and as sharp as a freshly honed knife. "What would make you think a thing like that?"

Harry didn't answer quickly enough.

"You think I would lie to you? You stand here and accuse me of lying to you in my own home?" Snape snarled, warming to the offense he'd taken. "Perhaps you think I have nothing better to do with my time, now that I'm employed as a barkeep, than to fritter away my precious free hours on pointless pursuits like drunkenness!"

Harry winced. It was clear to him now that not only was Snape not drunk—he neither smelled like alcohol nor did he display any of the telltale signs of inebriation—but that Harry may well have miscalculated in having asked him directly.

"No! I'm sorry, it's just that—"

"If I have it in mind to get myself fully and thoroughly pissed, what'll you have to say to that? Hmm? Nothing! Nothing, Potter! I've done no such thing, but if I were of a mind to do it, it'd be none of your goddamned business—" Snape interrupted, his voice growing louder the longer he ranted.

Harry covered his ears and winced, trying to block out the disastrous confrontation he'd found himself embroiled in. "KUYA! STOP!"

Snape did, and Harry could hear the sound of him panting, as though he'd just run a marathon instead of running at the mouth.

"There… there was a phone call, and he said that you were up in Penrith, with the p-police—"

"He. Who is he?"

"Detective Sergeant Hollysmock… he said they were gonna give you a penalty notice for being disordered and publicly intoxified—"

Snape let out a loud, impatient breath through his nostrils. "Intoxicated, Harry. The police don't charge people for 'being disordered,' and neither do they hand out penalty notices for being 'intoxified,'" he informed the boy, rolling his eyes. "Whatever that means."

"He said I should come get you…"

Snape shook his head, his expression long suffering. "I suppose we ought to go investigate if they're planning to slap my name on a penalty notice without my even being there," he sneered, his attention seemingly directed out the window. "Wait here while I change."

And the man turned so that Harry could see that he was wearing some odd, flowing, black garment that fell to his heels over the black smock. It whipped around his legs as he exited the room.

As opposed to the black jeans and faded cotton t-shirt he normally wore, it was strange how this get-up suited him. It made him look taller. Bigger. Scarier.

Harry found that he would be grateful when he saw that Snape had changed back into his normal clothes, if only so that Harry would know where he stood with him again.

Severus in jeans with the knees worn thin, in a t-shirt emblazoned with some tacky graphic design—that was his kuya. Severus in this new, strange, formal-yet-too-odd-to-be-formal get-up that he'd come home in was not his kuya. He could see it in the way Snape's eyes had glinted. He'd looked dangerous. Like he had that day when Yax and Wulf had come to call. This Severus Harry barely knew, and he didn't much want to get to know.

Only, when Snape came back down, he wasn't dressed as he normally was when around the house. It was still familiar—or more so than the smock and drapey-black-thing were, anyway— but he'd chosen to wear the polo neck and trousers that he wore when going to work, and had also pulled his hair back, having thrown on that strange black sport jacket that he'd worn when meeting Headmistress Shaw to discuss the fate of the yew.

Severus must have noticed Harry's curious gaze for he excused himself with a mild shrug, saying only that if he were to be going into the police headquarters there was no sense in looking as though he ought to be occupying one of the cells.

"It can't really matter that much," Harry began to argue, but then the other wizard snorted and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Impressions matter a great deal, Harry. More than they should, perhaps, this I'll grant you. But there are many times in life where you'll find that how you clothe yourself or the face that you wear directly impacts the way you will be treated, or the results you're hoping to achieve. Take note. It's better to learn that lesson early on."

"Is that why you were dressed… like that?"

They were headed out the door to the garden, where he assumed that Snape planned to apparate to Penrith, likely to the spot they often used near St. Catherine's.

"Like what?"

"With the—" and Harry drew his hands down his front to show he meant the long, flowing whatever that Snape had been garbed in not ten minutes earlier.

"Oh, the robe. Yes. Precisely like that. When one is in the company of wizards, one wears a robe. When you begin at Hogwarts, you too will wear robes."

Their shoes kicked up plumes of dust from the ground as they made their way behind the privy, coming to stop by the brick wall that gave them the most privacy.

"What about the—" and now Harry tugged at his collar, trying to mime the way that the collar on the tunic was buttoned; a style which stood straight up against Snape's neck, unlike most that he'd seen that turned down into neat little points.

"My lab coat?"

"It looked like in the movies, with the mad scientists, only black."

"Yes, it's a Howie coat. It buttons there to protect my neck and front."

"Oh."

Snape waited, expression souring by the second. "That's all? Nothing else to question me over? Are you quite finished?"

"Erm…" Harry gave it a quick think. "Oh! You said you'd be back late. It's only five-ish, I think."

Snape blinked. "Was there a question in there that I missed?"

"Why… why are you home so early?"

The older wizard grabbed his shoulder and pulled the boy to him against his side, preparing to depart. "The first attempt failed. Simple enough."

Harry wasn't given a chance to respond, as the moment Snape finished speaking, he felt the incomparable pressure of apparition.

Snape barely allowed him a moment to catch his breath once their feet touched the patchy grass that lined the alley he liked to apparate to, a couple of streets down from the church. He immediately began to tow Harry behind him, tugging him by the hand to pull the boy from the spot behind the bins, and then beginning a brisk walk out to the street.

Once there, they turned in the opposite direction to the one they usually took when going to Mass on Sundays, heading further away from the concentration of buildings at the city's centre. It seemed as though they were headed to the outskirts, as more and more green space began to overtake any signs of civilisation.

Penrith was bigger than Backbarrow by a great deal, and it was almost strange and otherworldly to see so much traffic and so many people about on the streets after having lived somewhere so provincial (in the case of Backbarrow) or derelict (in the case of Cokeworth and Spinner's End itself).

The gaolhouse and headquarters of the Cumbria Constabulary wasn't too much farther in the opposite direction. Merely a fifteen-minute walk, and with every step, Snape's expression grew blacker and blacker, until it seemed that there must have been a thunderhead hovering over his broad shoulders, threatening a downpour on whomever was unwise enough to invite his ire.

"Let's see them try and give me a notice in absentia…" he muttered harshly, through his yellow teeth.

They were bared in a fierce snarl.

Suddenly wary of offending the man once more, Harry offered a tentative smile which Severus didn't seem to see. "Maybe it's just a mistake?"

"Mistake my wand! More like someone using my damn name to get out of trouble—"

"Who would do that?" Harry protested, thinking it seemed a bit of a stretch.

Snape pinned him with a glare, as though he didn't at all appreciate someone questioning his theory. He turned his head away then and murmured something that sounded like "flirty ribbons."

Harry frowned, annoyed by Snape's reticence.

At last, they approached the brick facade of Carleton Hall—a grand old building on its own plot of sprawling land—where Snape lost no time at all in throwing the door wide. He led the charge into the building, besieging it with his presence alone. His, and the nervous eight-year-old he'd roped into his forward march, who brought up the rear with great reluctance and trepidation.

The entryway was practically empty except for a lone, low-level constable who sat, looking bored, behind the reception desk. It was merely five-thirty on a Wednesday. Not a particularly auspicious time for criminal mischief.

Which really made the call Harry had received all the stranger.

Snape strode straight to the desk, smacking both palms down against the wood grain so that the constable, who was ducked behind a Michael Crichton book, startled, and nearly repeated Harry's own mistake of falling backwards off of his precariously balanced chair legs.

He was only saved by the wall behind him.

Severus, the cad, looked on with a glimmer of grim satisfaction in his black eyes.

"Hollingsmock!" He announced, his voice filling the whole chamber.

The constable, who'd scrambled to his feet, blinked, appearing nonplussed.

"Who?"

"Detective Sergeant Hollingsmock!" Snape glowered, straightening to his full height. It didn't quite have the intended effect, as the man opposite the desk was a full four inches taller, and at least five stone heavier. For all that, he did still seem to be cowed by the dark wizard.

"Erm… we have a Detective Sergeant Hollyhock… is that who you'd be looking for?"

Now Snape turned his exasperated glare on Harry, from whom he apparently considered that he'd received bad information.

Shrugging, Harry raised his hands, palms up, to his sides, as if to say that it couldn't have been his fault that Snape was making such a total fool of himself.

"Yesss—" the word hissed out between Snape's unfortunate collision of teeth. "Him."

"What… er… who can I tell him is asking?"

"Snape." The wizard announced, throwing his head all the way back so that he might contrive to look down his nose at the taller man. He said it as though the poor, head-scratching copper ought to know who he was by reputation or some such thing.

The muggle man's mouth opened and closed several times, before he held up an index finger, shaking it in the air as though stalling for time. "Right… er… right. Just a moment, Mr. Snape. I'll let him know you've come by."

The constable—one Detective Constable Daniel Todd, if the name on the desk plate could be trusted—hurried away as quickly as he could manage, likely out of the sense that he ought to get away from Snape as fast as possible. He didn't look back, and when a thick-necked, red-faced Sergeant emerged from the office he'd ducked into, Todd declined to make another appearance.

Snape had seemed doubly pleased with himself as he'd watched the larger man retreat, his proverbial tail tucked betwixt his legs.

If Harry wasn't so very sure that such a thing would have him in hot water once they got home, he'd have wanted to smack the self-satisfied wizard.

As it was, he restrained himself by tucking his hands under his armpits, wishing he could be anywhere but in the Cumbria Constabulary Headquarters accompanying an arrogant twenty-something with a wounded ego.

Then again, it had been Harry's own slight against Severus' honour—or purported honour—which had precipitated the entire trip, he reminded himself, feeling glum.

Or... hang on! No, it hadn't been. It had been that stupid phone call, from the stupid Sergeant Holly-who's-it.

No sooner did he consider this than did he allow himself to grow cross once more.

Cross with Severus, and cross with the blustering windbag of a man who had strode up to Snape and was now arguing with him in earnest. He couldn't much find it in himself to care what about now that he'd decided on feeling sorry for himself.

He couldn't ignore what they were saying for long, however, as the pair were endeavouring to outmatch one another in sheer volume, and with each verbal parry exchanged, their shouting grew louder and louder.

"I want to know who you have back there, Hollyhock! Whoever it was used my name! I come home from a day's work to accusations that I've been out drinking and engaging in publicly offensive behaviour!"

"I accused you of no such thing, man! I'm not even sure who you are!" The Sergeant puffed out his chest and began to poke a meaty finger at Snape's thin shoulder, making the smaller of the two take a step back.

"I'm Severus Snape! I am! Not whomever it is that you've found making a fool of himself on the streets! I won't allow my name to be besmirched because some lowlife thought it a grand idea to pin his own failings on me!"

The Sergeant's red face shifted into a look of comical puzzlement. "Severus Snape? No... no, the files I found on a Severus Snape were from twelve years ago or more: a handful of theft and criminal damage offenses, charged alongside one Bertram Tibbons—"

This seemed to take the wind out of Severus' sails. He visibly deflated and appeared perplexed, and also a bit embarrassed. His eyes darted over in a furtive motion to meet Harry's, apparently assessing whether the boy had been paying attention as Hollyhock had mentioned his youthful indiscretions.

"Then who—?"

DS Hollyhock looked rather flustered, the red bloom having crept all the way up his neck, into his neat hairline, and onto the apples of his fleshy jowls. His face was crumpled with displeasure, looking like a carved-up beet, left to rot for several days.

"Well, I can't say I don't see the resemblance," he snarled, under his breath. "I'll go fetch him. Just do me a favour and get him out of my sight: he's been enough trouble for me, and if possible, you've managed to double that."

With that odd proclamation, he turned smartly on his heel, and walked, stiff-backed and with his hands to his sides, out of the entryway, heading down a hall that seemed to lead to the back of the building.

In the silence, Harry finally had a chance to study Snape's form, which heaved with ragged breaths as he sought to calm himself.

"Severus, you stole?"

The man's eyes cut over to him, and his mouth thinned and twisted in an annoyed grimace. "Shut up. I was sixteen—"

"I'm only eight," Harry began, wishing to say that he was half that age and knew better.

"Get back to me when you're a teenager," Snape finished, turning his nose up in the air to signal his snide dismissal of Harry's judgement.

They heard the arguing coming from the hall DS Hollyhock had disappeared to before they saw the two men emerge.

One voice was unmistakably the terse baritone belonging to the Sergeant, but the other was a colourful, lilting donkey's bray, its words obscured by a heavy local accent and the impossible-to-understand dialect that was Assa Marra.

Harry's brow wrinkled in confusion, and he glanced at Snape to see what he might have thought, only to see that all of the little colour Snape seemed to possess had drained from the wizard's face.

He looked as though he'd seen a ghost.

Ultimately, it was no spectre that emerged from the hall, propelled in front of DS Hollyhock by the Sergeant's hand on his elbow.

However, Harry did realise then—with a sense of detached fascination that seemed to contrast against Severus' expression of mute horror—that he actually did know the man standing before them.

"Now come t'see yer baggabone t'oll fella eh, Sev'rus?"

Harry heard his kuya curse loudly. One of the bad ones, which indicated how out of sorts he must have felt.

But Harry barely paid him any attention. He was too preoccupied by the fact that before them stood the tramp from the bridge encampment.

A/N:

Snape: HOLLINGSHMORPHHHargahargaharagaHhh!¡!

Constable: Sir, this is a Wendy's.