A/N: My husband and I were lucky enough to go to a Sammy Hagar concert this past Friday. (At the time I post this chapter. In truth I'm typing this FROM THE CONCERT because they had to stop the show after three songs when there was a lighting storm, which started during the song Judgement Day). I know it's not my fault, but somehow it feels like this is my fault lmao
Anyway, this lineup is doing mostly Van Halen songs, with Sammy, their original Bassist Michael Anthony (who has the craziest range of any of the singers in that band. Iykyk), and Joe Satriani on guitar. One of these gentlemen makes a surprise cameo later in the story, so it felt worth mentioning. Even if the show doesn't go on, it feels pretty major we got to see Sammy and Mike do Van Halen, because this tour might be the last go 'round for that. (Alex Van Halen doesn't play anymore, Ed is gone, Wolfgang has his own thing he does, and Diamond Dave is persona non grata).
Alright. They ended up canceling the show after they came back out. Ended the show on "I Can't Drive 55" (which is Snape's favorite Sammy song, fyi), probably as a big 'F You' to the venue for telling them they had to stop playing. Sammy was visibly enraged lmao
Snape brought both hands, clasped together as though they'd come together in prayer, up before his nose and mouth, breathing deeply between the cupped palms and evidently attempting to bring himself under control.
His eyes were hard and brittle, like two chips of obsidian set into his face.
Harry knew the expression well enough to take a cautious step backwards, away from the impending explosion, but the tramp seemed either blissfully unaware, or else he simply didn't care. He shook off the hand of DS Hollyhock from his elbow and started forward, nattering on in that indecipherable language that was all his own.
"Is aboot teym! Nowt tha' Aa think tha' his highness gan t'teutt on his sary arl man, o's cwoorse. Why'd thou keep me waiting for? We weren' aboot t'let our t'oll fella spend a night in gaol, were we?"
Snape's hands fell by his sides, clenching so tightly into fists that his knuckles lost any semblance of colour.
"Aa axe thee for help yan teym—yan teym!—'n thou takes thine sweet time, divn't thee, lad, afore thou syzel in t'help? Nowt in no tatter! 'N how many teym did we spring thou-swory-self oot th'clink? Hm? Three by our reckoning—"
A visible tic had begun to pulse where Severus' jaw met his neck, and Harry thought he could make out the sound of his molars grinding against each other.
"Eh an wot?" the tramp badgered, stalking forward until he stood a foot away from the fuming, dark wizard. He dared to wave one filthy hand about in Snape's face. "Nowt t' say, l'al gowt? Learnt thee how 'n when ter shut yer mush?"
With what appeared to be considerable restraint, Snape turned to DS Hollyhock and exhaled deeply through his nose. "How much is owed against the penalty notice?"
Hollyhock cleared his throat and straightened, folding his hands together behind his back. "One hundred and fifty pounds, Mister Snape."
Severus merely grunted, pointedly ignoring the drunken pest who continued to harass him for attention. "If I promise to bring it by within the next few hours, can he be released?"
"His release isn't contingent upon payment, but if he refuses to pay it'll go to trial."
"You'll have your money," Snape growled.
Severus waved one hand in a sharp movement to Harry, motioning that the boy should precede him out the door, which Harry scrambled to do, before Snape finally acknowledged the vagrant who seemed like at any moment he might topple over to the floor.
"Come on, Da'."
They walked together out of Carleton Hall, Harry not daring to speak, Severus not deigning to, and the tramp never once ceasing.
Of course, Harry hadn't the faintest clue of what it was the man might have been trying to say, which made it a moot point.
He was gesturing about wildly, including to Harry, and kept up a running monologue as they slowly made their way back to the apparition point in Penrith, seemingly railing against Severus the whole time, while the older wizard did no more to encourage the tirade than to acknowledge his ranting with ill-humoured grunts.
Harry kept cutting his eyes over at the tramp, trying to unravel the mystery of the man.
Why had Severus agreed so readily to allow him to accompany them? He'd even agreed to pay off the charge incurred with the penalty notice, which, as far as Harry could understand of money, seemed substantial...
Harry was so bemused by the turn of events that it took him quite a bit longer than it ought to have for Snape's final words as they'd left Carleton Hall to register.
'Come on, Da'.'
That could not have meant what it sounded like it meant.
He frowned at the loquacious drunk, sizing him up. He'd fallen back behind the other two, as Severus soldiered on, his eyes fixed on a point far ahead of them, and as the tramp followed at Severus' shoulder, chattering continually while Snape's eyes glazed over.
They were quickly approaching the spot from which they usually departed, and it was then that Harry realised there might be complications in returning home that evening. It was already rather dark out, and what remained of the sunlight was fading fast. They hadn't a car to use, nor the money to hire one to take them all the way from Penrith to Cokeworth, and they'd gained what seemed to be a muggle tag-along.
Harry sprinted a few steps to pull up close to Severus other elbow, still keeping his distance from the chatterbox by Snape's right side who smelled strongly of gin.
"Severus," He hissed, with no luck. The man must have blocked out everything around in order to think while pointedly ignoring the old muggle's braying.
"Oi, l'al chor, yon babby ower yonder's got sommat he's thinkan ower."
Harry's eyes darted over to the tramp who was now grinning nastily in his direction, showing a mouth of ash-grey teeth, one of which flashed silver as he smirked.
"Severus," Harry tried again, keeping his voice deliberately low.
Nothing. Snape's fists tightened by his sides. It was as though he simply had reached whatever level of nonsense he could tolerate for the day, and he'd entirely shut himself down from receiving anything more.
Harry shook his head and grabbed at the back of Snape's sport coat, giving it an insistent tug. "Kuya-aa!"
Finally, Snape stopped mid-stride and rounded on him, his face flushing. "WHAT!?"
This did nothing to cow Harry. Not given the circumstances. Although, he did let go of Severus' person immediately, and he took a cautious step back. "How are we gonna get home?" He dipped his head, giving it a subtle toss—or, rather, what he imagined was a subtle toss, but which, in truth, was rather obvious—in the direction of their third wheel.
His Adam's apple bobbing in his throat, Snape's mouth thinned into a grim line. "I shall have to make two trips."
"You're gonna... you're gonna go the way we came? With him?" Harry asked, trying to hint to the question he couldn't ask aloud.
Did this man that lived alongside the River Leven in Backbarrow know about magic?
"He shall have to tolerate it if he wishes for a free ride—"
"'Free ride,' says me wee'an," The vagrant huffed, rolling his eyes and patting his stomach. "Aal tak a stap out o thy bicker..."
Snape sneered at this, looking disgusted and put-out. "Or meal ticket," he amended.
"An' whaa's this supposed t' be?"
Snape continued on as though nothing more had been said. "I'll take you first, and you're to go inside and wait for my return."
"T'ain't bein our gran'babby, izz'ee, Sev'rus? Ee's gey skrunty. Divn't Aa larn thee t' put a hap ower thous cordy?"
Snape's face coloured an unsightly shade of mottled burgundy, the tips of his ears flaring redder than the rest. "He is not my son."
Harry felt the beginning pangs of hurt at this, but thanks to their conversation about it weeks earlier, he was better able to take it in the spirit that Snape undoubtably meant it, which was to say, factually.
As a matter of fact, he was not Snape's son, and that was perfectly alright. He knew Snape to be fond of him in his own way.
After all, Snape had only responded when Harry had called him 'kuya,' and although Harry wasn't dim enough to think that this meant that Snape fully embraced this change to their relationship, it clearly meant that he wasn't entirely averse to it.
"Ahreet. An' then whaa izz'ee?]
Snape seemed to hesitate a moment, casting about for something to say. "He's Harry."
"Harry whaa?"
"That doesn't matter. What matters is that he's in my old room, and I've taken yours, so we're full up." Snape snarled, unkindly. "And if you think you'll come waltzing back in and you'll be entitled to the master bedroom again, I've news for you—"
What emerged next from the tramp couldn't properly have been called language. It was more a hacking, snarling, deluge of invective that surely wasn't remotely close to English.
For all that, Snape stood facing the man, blinking up at him (for he was at least three inches taller), looking utterly bored. "You abandoned the house, and it's been under my sole possession for more than a decade. As far as I'm concerned, that makes it mine. It doesn't matter to me where you choose to rest your head, but the main bedroom's taken now."
Their interloper crossed his arms, sticking out a petulant lower lip. He gave a mighty sniff and spat at the ground, although he avoided spitting at Snape's boots. "Ladgeful."
Severus ignored this. "Harry will be the first trip. You're to stay here and wait for me. I'll be back in five minutes."
"An' whoars t' screeve we left with thee, Sev'rus? Eh? T' Marina?"
Snape tensed at this, but Harry's ears perked up. The man knew about the Marina...
If this was... if this was truly Snape's father, was it possible that once upon a time, the Marina had belonged to him?
Turning to Harry with resolution, Snape only deigned to snarl his answer back to the tramp over his thin shoulder. "She's taking a holiday. Come on, Harry."
Before Harry could blink, Snape had grasped him and pulled him along his side, where his magic whisked them away back to the dusty plot behind Spinner's End.
Harry stumbled in reverse, his back hitting the chipped bricks that made up the privy. He'd nearly gotten tangled in one of the clothes lines that crisscrossed the narrow garden, and he had to bat with his hand at a pair of Severus' hole-ridden socks which were dangling too-close to his face.
Snape looked like he might depart again without another word, but Harry had no intention of letting him get away so very easily. Instead, he snatched at the arm of Snape's coat and held him there.
"Who was that!?"
"I need to get back before he wanders off—"
"Who was he!?" Harry tried to inject more force into his voice, causing it to rise throughout, until it ended in what might have been a yell coming from an older boy or a man, but from him sounded like a shrill screech.
Snape straightened up and stepped closer until he loomed over the boy. The effect was somewhat ruined when he ended up with the pair of socks resting against his chest. "I haven't the time for this!" He hissed, glancing down at where the sock had made its home. He too was forced to swat at the offending clothing, sending one of the pair flying off into the dirt, and the pin that had held it to the clothesline careening over the brick wall that divided them from the neighboring lot.
"Was that... was that your dad, Sev'rus?" Harry rushed to say, slurring Snape's name as he did sometimes when speaking too quickly or with too little care. In truth, it still sounded more like 'Shevrush,' as his missing teeth had yet to be replaced by their adult counterparts.
Snape winced, and glanced about the garden, looking every bit the cornered animal.
"That was... that is to say, that is..." The man took a deep breath, allowing the tension to drain from his frame until it looked as though he might as well melt into a puddle of weariness at Harry's feet. "Yeah."
He exhaled violently through his comically large nostrils and scratched violently at the back of his neck while he contemplated the shiny tips of his boots. "Yeah." He said again.
Harry was very nearly struck dumb by Snape's turn towards ineloquence, unprecedented as it was.
Cursing, ranting, railing, maligning: these were all the kinds of de rigueur responses he'd learnt to expect from his taciturn kuya.
For all that, he wasn't sure he'd ever heard the man use the word 'yeah' in place of 'yes.'
"What..." Harry hesitated before he asked the question, suddenly not sure whether he actually wanted to know. Even so, he soldiered on. "What was he saying? What was that?"
Looking far sharper now, and seemingly having recovered himself as he reconciled himself to this new unsavoury development, Snape straightened and glared down at him. "That was proper Cumbrian, Potter. Real Assa Marra. Not like that lamentable pidgin you attempted after one measly day of attending Rowky Syke."
Harry frowned, and apparently Snape didn't even need the boy to voice his confusion in order to know that Harry had failed to understand one of the words he'd used. The older wizard took in a deep, long-suffering sigh before he bothered to explain. "A 'pidgin' is, in simple terms, what develops when two people who don't share a common language create a means to communicate. It has elements of both languages present. And I suppose, by that metric, what you were doing wasn't properly a pidgin, either. In any case, you weren't anywhere close to true Assa Marra."
"Oh..."
"Yes. Now you understand." Snape turned his large nose up and sniffed, seeming rather affronted. "If you can't understand a word of what Da' was saying, then you're hopelessly ignorant of the language."
Snape seemed to wait a tick, for he could have departed after saying this. Harry had cast his eyes down, feeling inexplicably ashamed of himself. Snape's next words alerted him to the fact that his kuya was still lingering in the garden, however.
"I will ask him to limit his usage. He knows how to speak in a way that's intelligible to other Englishmen, but he..." Snape hesitated, looking morose and put-upon once again. He brought up one hand to rub at the back of his neck, and then afterwards at the edges of his eyes, which had thick, dark rings under them. "He doesn't usually see why he should. Especially after Mam died, and he lost his job at Reckitt. When he drinks, it's even harder to convince him to speak English—at least the sort of plain English an offcomer would have any hope of understanding...
"Maybe he'll take pity on you," Snape continued, not looking at all hopeful at the prospect. "There's no chance of you minding him if you haven't the first idea about what he's trying to say."
"Minding him..." Harry repeated, suddenly suspicious. "How long is he gonna stay for?"
This Snape didn't bother to answer. He blinked at the boy, looking at once both fed-up, and bone weary, and with a thunderous crack, Harry was alone once more in the garden.
It took him a few moments to realise that he was freezing cold, and that there was no sense at all in waiting for Severus' return. He'd be back, and with him would be that strange man from the river encampment. Severus' dad.
Shaking his head to clear it, Harry turned and made his way to the back door, letting himself into the kitchen where he looked around the house.
He liked his life here with Severus. He liked it just the two of them. What could he expect to change with the addition of another person... at that, another person who ostensibly could pull rank on both himself and Severus.
Harry couldn't remember much of what Snape had told him about his father. He'd been remarkably stingy on the details, usually demurring when any questions about his sire had been voiced. The boy knew far more about Severus' mother, and even then, he couldn't claim to know much more than that she was a pureblooded witch who'd run from her ancestral home near Aethlingham, that she had died, and that Severus clearly still missed her a great deal.
That recalled the conversation they'd had at that very kitchen table, only a month or so earlier. Snape's father had disappeared once his mother had died...
Perhaps he missed her too.
It helped, he found, to find these scraps about the tramp that he could hope to sympathise with. Otherwise, he knew that the prospect of sharing their house with a stranger predisposed to the bottle would have been too distressing to ruminate over.
He wasn't given much time to think. The door to the back garden slammed open and their guest sauntered over the threshold as though he were the master of the house.
After a moment's thought, Harry realised that he very well may have been. After all, did he know for sure that Snape owned the house outright?
What if Snape's father were to kick them out onto the street?
Harry's hands shook where he grasped the back of his chair at the table.
Would Snape's father demand this seat? Would Harry be relegated to the one that they used exclusively for stacking errant scraps of paper and back issues of the Daily Prophet?
Or perhaps Harry wouldn't be allowed to dine at the kitchen table at all...
Maybe his kuya would lose the battle over the rooms, and Severus would be forced to retake his own room, leaving Harry to sleep elsewhere.
Snape's house didn't have a cupboard under the stairs, so where would that leave him? The privy?
Suddenly realising that Snape had entered behind his father and that he was staring Harry down with that peculiar look on his face that he sometimes got, Harry gulped. He felt a bit faint, and he wanted nothing more than to retreat to his room and to pretend as though everything was as it had been when he'd arrived home from school.
Why had he had to go and answer the damn phone?
He could have just let it ring... he should have done...
"Da'," Snape's voice cut in through Harry's spiraling thoughts, "you'll be on the sofa tonight. Tomorrow I'll figure out somewhere better to put you. Before I leave for work in the morning, you can show me where you were staying and we'll gather your things."
"Aa divn't 'ave nea girt shaks." Snape's father leaned himself against the peeling wallpaper by the kitchen wall where he'd come in. His heavily lidded eyes were surveying the lay of the kitchen, perhaps comparing it to the last time he'd been in there. "Nowt bet our cur dog."
Severus seemed to draw himself up at this. "No dogs—"
"'Ave pity on thous t'ol fella! Our arl jewkle's a barrie charva."
Harry perked up, having seen the dog in question. "I saw him, Severus, he looks alright... can't we let him have the dog?"
Snape's father grinned a terrible grin, more for the fact that it exposed a rotting mouth of teeth than for any malice it contained. He held both hands aloft, fingers toward Harry, as if to say: "See? Here's a boy who knows a good dog when he sees one."
Harry saw the muscle in Snape's jaw twitching, a sure sign that he was grinding his molars. The dark wizard's black eyes looked from his father, leaned up against the wall, to his scrappy little tag-along, who still stood behind his kitchen chair. It looked almost as though the man was doing a full sheet of Harry's maths homework in his head, as he seemed to be thinking very hard about something and adding the sum of one problem to the remainder of another.
Finally, looking mutinous and like he felt that he'd been thoroughly ill-done-by, Snape grunted and nodded at his father, who gave a sort of chortling whoop.
"A gey barrie cur dog," he slurred, looking pleased with himself.
"I don't care how good the dog is," Snape snarled, turning to ward the door. "He'll be outside. In the back."
Here, Snape's father seemed to sober—although, not in the literal sense of the word, for he actually seemed to still be quite drunk—and the edges of his thin mouth turned down with displeasure.
"Ee' garn lowp yon yonder yat!"
"I. Don't. Care." Snape snarled, one canine tooth shining in the low light. "Tie him up, if you're so concerned."
Crossing his arms over his chest, Snape's father tossed his head, which sent some of his filthy tufts of greying brown hair flying about. "Nae, cannae."
"Severus," Harry tried again, cringing as it came out in a bit of a whinge, "you can't make the dog stay outside, it's almost winter. It's cold."
Snape's face paled before it began to redden with apoplectic rage. His mouth was drawn into a razor thin line and his fingers, which rested on his upper arms where he'd crossed them against his chest, drummed out a furious tattoo. He had the exact look of a man who knew he'd been well and truly ganged up upon.
"Et tu, Brute?" he snarled, his voice deceptively soft, the approximate quality of a whisper floating through the air.
For all that, the effect was lost—or perhaps subverted—when Harry screwed his face up with confusion.
"Huh?"
Throwing his hands up now, Snape rolled his eyes with an almost theatrical flair. "For Christsake—!"
This prompted another slew of incomprehensible Cumbrian from Snape's father, whose words and newly aggressive posture may well have indicated that he took offense to Snape's plaintive expression of frustration.
For several moments, Snape said nothing, although his eyes took on the calculating gleam that told Harry that Snape was likely attempting to plan his way out of the undesirable hole he'd found himself trapped in.
Finally, after a few more seconds had elapsed, he grunted and stalked off into the sitting room.
"We'll find your damned dog tomorrow, Da'. Tonight, just…" the older wizard paused and sighed, bringing his fingers to his eyes and rubbing so hard that he must have been seeing spots. "Tonight, just eat, and then we'll all of us go to bed. I can't think any more about this."
The elder Snape had followed his son into the sitting room, where he appeared to be taking the same inventory of the surroundings that he had when he'd stepped into the kitchen. He pointed one grubby hand at the television set and stammered out something that sounded like a question before Severus glared at him, located the clicker, and very nearly lobbed it at the man's head.
"Have at it," he sneered, "it barely works, anyway."
With that, Snape's father sunk into the threadbare cushions of the sofa, and he turned on the telly, settling in to watch what Harry had thought to be unwatchable: the staticky mess of local programming that he could barely discern through the interfering noise.
"Harry."
The boy turned, finding that Snape was in the kitchen once more and seemed to be beckoning the younger wizard to join him.
Harry hastened to do so, still not sure how to behave with this wholly new dynamic establishing itself in the Spinner's End domicile.
No sooner had Harry passed the doorway than was Snape waving his twisted wand behind him, whispering that spell that Harry knew would obscure their conversation.
"Muffliato."
Harry lost no time in voicing his concerns.
"Severus, what're we gonna do? Is he... is he here to stay?"
Snape had leaned himself up against the kitchen table, his bony backside pressed so heavily up against it that had it not been magically reinforced, Harry suspected it might have been knocked over. His head was hung low before his chest, causing his limp hair to cascade down over his face, which he'd buried in both of his hands.
Harry didn't think he'd ever seen Severus look quite so lost.
Anything Snape tried to say came back muffled through his fingers, although Harry had to wonder whether Snape was actually speaking for his benefit, or merely to express his own frustrations aloud.
"Ia'nno wha'ter dehr—"
It was unusual for Harry to be cast in the role of comforter, and so he hadn't the faintest idea of how to go about offering any sort of consolation. He shifted uneasily from one foot to the next before he made a cautious approach and reached up to take one of Severus' hands in his own, endeavouring to tug it down so that a sliver of the man's familiar face was exposed to his view.
"Hey, er... we just have to make some decisions is all... right?" He couldn't help but to seek Snape's approval of his plan. In truth, it seemed that there was rather more to do than to merely express, by fiat, that such a situation ought to work out along the line they decided upon, but to consider such continuities seemed beyond either one of them in that moment.
"So... are we... do we let him stay?"
"By law, this is still his house. I'm not sure we have another choice," Snape seemed to moan, the words pulled from him in a dull, droning tone of voice.
"Oh... er... alright." Harry nodded, doing his level best to take this in stride. "And erm... what does... what does that mean for us?"
Snape stared at him with an expression devoid of any emotion. "What does that mean for us?" he then asked, the inanity of repeating the question not seeming to register with the older wizard.
"Yeah," Harry hedged, taking a step back where he began to worry at the webbing between his right thumb and index finger by pinching it with his left hand. "Will we have to leave? Go somewhere else? Could we... would Mr. Dumbledore maybe let us—"
"No." Snape shook his head repressively, closing his eyes as he did so, apparently in an attempt to clear his mind from the mess that was now crowded to the forefront of his thoughts. "No, I daresay we shan't have to leave. If we were in any danger of that, I wouldn't hesitate to send Da' away."
"Send him away?"
Snape blinked down at him, his face looking rather like a sorrowful hound's. "There are ways, Harry—magical ways—by which I could endeavour to make him forget this evening ever happened."
Harry gasped, taking another step backwards, until his back bumped against the kitchen bench on the wall that divided them from the sitting room. "You can make people forget?"
Snape nodded, looking grave. "I can, yes. It's never at the top of the list of things I'd prefer to do to handle a situation, and it's not, strictly speaking, legal—"
"Have you ever made me forget, Severus?"
His mouth having tightened into a tiny moue of displeasure, Snape rolled his eyes. For all that, he wasn't as furious as Harry feared he might have been over being accused of such an act. "No. That's never been necessary."
"Why would it be necessary?"
"That's beside the point, Harry!" Snape pushed himself from the kitchen table and began to pace the perimeter of the tiny room in three short strides from one end to the other. It was so cramped that he barely managed to avoid hitting Harry whenever he was made to turn back from the cooker on each pass. Whenever he walked past the door, he craned his neck to check in on their new lodger, who seemed to be happy where he was, watching the evening news.
"Then the point is...?"
"The point is," Snape repeated, drawing in a deep, impatient breath as he turned on his heel upon reaching the back door, "that I can't come up with a decent enough reason to turn my own father away from the home he technically still owns; but that rather leaves us in the lurch, does it not?"
"What—"
Snarling now, Snape rounded on Harry as he approached. "Do not ask what a 'lurch' is!" He menaced, underscoring the prohibition with an impatient slash of his hand.
Harry must have looked visibly crestfallen at this, for Snape seemed to look apologetic a moment later, when he deflated and actually bothered to explain himself.
"Because I can't say I rightly know..." Snape paused now, looking thoughtful. "I suspect it has something to do with the word 'lich'..."
That shed no light on the word's meaning whatsoever, but Harry figured he understood the man's meaning well enough anyways. By now, he knew better than to follow up with the fact that the word 'lich' meant no more to him than the word 'lurch' did.
What Severus had meant, after all, was that they were in a very sticky spot, weren't they? And that even the older wizard didn't have the first idea about how to go about extracting themselves.
With that revelation, Harry realised that no matter what question he asked that they might contrive to answer, that it couldn't possibly have any bearing on the situation that would meet them come the morning hours. By virtue of that fact, there was nothing that could be done that evening.
He began to see then why Snape was driven to pace. He rather wished he could take it up too, but there was barely enough room for Severus to make a full circuit of the tiny kitchen, let alone the two of them doing it in tandem.
"What will it be like? With him here?" He dared to ask, wondering over how things might change.
Snape stopped by the kitchen table, near to where Harry stood, and reached out with his right arm. It was rare for him to offer any sort of comfort physically, so Harry nearly jumped when his hand came down on his shoulder, squeezing firmly.
In the end, Harry thought that it was a damned good thing Severus had bothered with the physical gesture, because his answer wasn't encouraging in the least.
"I haven't the foggiest."