Severus managed to arrange his schedule so that he could show his face at St. Mark's on his newly freed-up Wednesdays and then again later in the evenings on Thursdays.

St. Mark's faced the River Leven on the Backbarrow side of the river, sitting high above the churning waters, nestled into the hillside. It was a few blocks away from Rowky Syke and thankfully wasn't nearly as much of a climb to reach. It also wasn't terribly far from The Yow, which meant that Severus usually made it in the door only a few moments after he got off his shift.

By then, Harry was usually bored out of his mind. It had been two weeks of this new arrangement, and was now early December with the date of the Nativity fast approaching, and the boy wizard was already sick of the bother. He'd be very glad when break came and he could laze around Spinner's End for a couple of weeks, particularly because even when he was home he wasn't usually alone anymore.

Not that Tobias proved much of a nuisance. If anything it was as though the elder Snape existed in his own pocket of reality much of the time, engaged as he was with watching television programmes that were just as incomprehensible as he so often was. No, it was in some ways much much worse.

Now, on those days when Harry wasn't obliged to spend his afternoons out in the countryside, he got to play host to Snowdrop Hill at his own domicile, and seemingly by proxy, Nicky usually appeared as well.

God knew what the boy did at any other time. He seemed to come and go as he pleased, like some house-hopping street cat. Where Snowdrop was like a feral kitten, Nicky was the village tom.

It didn't seem to matter that Nicky had barely more than two lines. He preferred to dig around in Harry (and Severus') things while Harry practised his part with the most sullen and ungracious Mary that Ms. Tibbons could have possibly chosen to play the role.

Harry had just finished warning Nicky away from Wheat's enclosure for the third time before he picked himself up off the floor and strode over to where the other boy was sitting, plucking the plastic cage out of his hands and setting it firmly on the desk.

"Please. Don't." Harry enunciated, feeling rather like one of their put-upon teachers at school.

Nicky blew upwards so that the burst of air fluffed out his fringe and he grinned widely.

"I just wanted a gander—"

"Well here," Harry offered, grabbing up the cage once more and holding it before Nicky's face. "He's big, he's got eight legs, and he doesn't much want to play right now, see? He's hiding 'cause you've gone and scared him."

Just as quickly he spirited the spider away again and settled him, where he hoped he'd stay, back on the desktop.

"A spider is a stupid pet anyway," Snowdrop groused from her place on the floor. She had her copy of her lines in her hands and was absorbed in reading them, doing her level best to ignore her brother's antics. "Why didn't he get you a proper pet?"

Snowdrop never seemed quite sure what she ought to call Severus. Nicky had taken to calling the man by his given name, likely because of his conversation with Harry in the aftermath of Snowdrop's poisoning. The wizard in question was, obviously, none too keen on this. Snowdrop on the other hand was ill-at-ease around her saviour, but she was ill-disposed toward calling him Mr. Snape—which Harry would have assumed should have been the easy choice—for reasons that Harry couldn't quite figure out.

"What's a proper pet?" Harry asked, feigning ignorance. "You don't have a proper pet, Snowdrop—all you've got are chickens, a couple of daft goats, sheep, and Babs."

"They're better pets than that," she sneered looking at the tarantula with all too evident disgust. "You can at least tell if they like you or not."

"He likes me," Harry argued back. "He lets me hold him, and when he doesn't want to be held anymore, his hair stands on end. He likes me just fine."

"What's this, Potter?"

Harry's head swiveled around quickly where he saw Nicky belly-down on his bed, inspecting one of the pieces of paper affixed to the walls.

"What's what?"

"This," Nicky let out a low appreciative whistle which sounded ridiculous coming from an eight-year-old boy. One of his fingers extended out to trace along whatever it was he was seeing.

Snowdrop was faster than Harry in approaching the bed and inspecting whatever it was that had captured her brother's interest.

"Ew! You're a pig!"

"I'm a what?" Harry asked at the same time that Nicky began to bray with laughter.

"A pig!" Snowdrop shrieked, scrambling to climb over her brother on the bed, her arms swiping out at the wall. It appeared as though she was attempting to claw something, and given another moment she'd likely have succeed. She had a weight advantage over her older brother and he had begun to struggle under her pudgy frame as she got closer and closer to whatever it was that she was attempting to destroy.

Harry made haste in advancing on the pair and used all of the strength he possessed to leverage Snowdrop off of her brother, pulling at the back of her shirt and skirt in order to drag the girl backwards.

"Take it down! Take it down now!"

He was unlucky in that as soon as her weight was liberated from the bed, she'd fallen heavily onto her backside which was sat astride Harry's stomach. Given this, all he managed to produce in response was a strangled "oof!"

"Stop looking at that!" She continued, attempting to make her way back to Nicky's prone form.

He apparently found the entire scenario entertaining in the extreme. As soon as his sister had been hefted off of his back he'd resumed his perusal of whatever it was that had captured his interest and was hooting and cackling as he attempted to crowd her out.

"What are you two on about?" Harry managed finally. He sat up slowly, rubbing his aching ribs and struggled to his feet where he finally managed to join the siblings.

When he finally caught a glimpse of what the fight had been all about he coloured beet-red up to his ears.

"That's not... I didn't put that there," he attempted to explain, stammering a bit. "That was there when I came here! This used to be Severus' room!"

"Then he's a pig!" Snowdrop snarled, finally managing to advance past Nicky's guarding of the poster and snatch it off the wall. "And you're a pig for leaving it up! Near your head! And Nicky's a pig, but I already knew that," she continued, not resisting the urge to elbow her brother between the shoulders.

"I like the art," Harry excused himself lamely, plucking the illustration from Snowdrop's grasp. Now that it was in his hands, he wasn't much sure what to do with it. He glanced down at the familiar image torn from Heavy Metal magazine. The barbarian woman and the warlord.

The right thing to do in the face of Snowdrop's anger would have been to make a big show of throwing it away... but he didn't really care to.

He did like the art. How did the artist know to put that shadow there? It fell in the middle of her leg, and the light shone from behind her figure, silhouetting her thigh from both sides with contrasting bright colours. It was so... so clever! And there had to be a hundred or more skulls that festooned the throne room. How long, he wondered, would it take to draw each individual skull?

He could have stared at the page for hours. Often, he did.

Harry wasn't possessed of a single scrap of artistic talent. His rendition of Father Christmas had pretty much borne that out. He'd not yet given up on his daily daydream of playing his guitar like Ace Frehley up on stage before a sea of shrieking fans... and given his ability to follow along with rhythms and chords in music class he wasn't entirely sure that it was a hopeless dream to have. Art on the other hand? That was beyond his ken.

He wasn't even certain how he might envision the artist creating the image. Where did one start? Was there any amount of stagecraft involved in drawing something as there was in playing an instrument? Or did one simply sit there and... get on with it?

"You can almost see her... stuff!" Snowdrop gave a dramatic shudder and looked at Harry with obvious disgust. "And you think you ought to play Joseph!"

"I didn't wanna play Joseph," Harry argued back, rolling his eyes. He'd crossed his arms over his chest, resolved not to dispose of the picture. It wasn't his anyway. It was Severus'.

"You're worse than Nicky, watching all those films he's not suppos'ta,"

Nicky sat up on the bed, a cocky grin stretching his cheeks. "I think you mean he's almost as cool as Nicky." He waggled his eyebrows for extra emphasis. Harry wasn't exactly sure that he knew what that was supposed to mean, but then Nicky often said and did things that he didn't understand. Probably things that he'd picked up on from 'those films' or his older brothers. The waggling eyebrows must have had a similar origin.

"Why did you even bother coming anyway?" The girl complained, glowering first at Nicky and then at Harry, as though he were somehow intruding upon his own bedroom. "You don't say almost anything—"

"Neither do you, little madam," her brother shot back, looking superior. "The narrator has most of the lines. What's there to memorise? 'Oh no, I think I'll have this baby tonight—'"

"That's not how it goes! Haven't you been listening?"

"It's close enough," Nicky returned, jumping down off the bed and looking unconcerned.

In truth, Nicky really wasn't all that far off. Harry and Snowdrop had perhaps three lines apiece, and Harry's favourite had to be when he was speaking to the innkeeper on his pregnant wife's behalf, as it meant he got to walk away from Snowdrop to the part of platform that Ms. Tibbons called 'stage left.'

Just when his ears felt as though they were beginning to ring from the bickering, he felt the slamming of the front door through the wall and he heaved a sigh of relief. That meant that Severus was home, and usually that spelled the end of his hosting duties for the afternoon.

"Oh," he piped up, playacting a bit of surprise for good measure. "I'll bet that's Sev'rus come back. So, you two should probably..." he trailed off, naturally feeling his own eyebrows wagging and his hands gesturing a bit in order to prompt the two numbskulls before him to take the lead in packing away their school bags.

Perhaps he did understand the eyebrow wagging, after all.

"Gammy's coming for us," Snowdrop announced, her voice prim. She turned up her tiny nose almost so far that had he wanted to, Harry could have looked straight up her nostrils. "She said at eight. She went into Penrith for supplies. We're gonna eat dinner here. She already discussed it with him."

The way she had of referring to Severus as some sort of nameless entity really got up Harry's nose. As such, he felt himself wriggling his nostrils a bit in order to keep his composure.

There was no sense in having it out in the bedroom. Severus would almost certainly blame him for not policing his guests while they were in the house. Also: Snowdrop was a girl.

He wasn't meant to hit girls.

"What sort of supplies?" Harry asked instead, figuring that changing the subject was in order.

"Stuff you can't get here," Nicky answered for his sister. "Medicine for the animals, that sort of thing. The ewes usually lamb in the winter, so she wants to be prepared."

Harry could only nod. He had noticed that some of the girls had been growing rather fat in their stalls. And, given that the snow had finally fallen—unseasonably late this year—travel had become perilous. There was good sense in Gammy being prepared.

The very thought of Gammy (and Snowdrop) perhaps being trapped up at their farm had Harry's heart beating wildly against his ribcage. He didn't care for that thought one bit...

He'd talk to Severus, he resolved. He'd talk to Severus, and they'd devise a plan where they could help the elderly woman and her frequently belligerent granddaughter if need be.

His several seconds of woolgathering didn't pass unnoticed, for once he emerged from his daydream (was it a daydream? It was more like a waking nightmare. A daymare), he noticed that the other two children were staring at him strangely.

"Come on then," Harry sighed, waving a resigned hand toward the door. "Severus usually stops by The Yow to bring home dinner after he's done volunteering."

Harry was grateful he no longer had to explain himself to the other two, with regards to how Severus would manage. The older wizard and Toby had returned the Marina to working order weeks earlier and it had been in use ever since.

It wasn't enough to say that she was faring well. She was very nearly performing miracles. According to both Snapes she handled better than ever. They'd not even been made to put chains on her tyres for the snow and ice, which made little sense to any of them. Why should the potion have helped with traction?

Nicky proceeded the other two down the hall and to the stairs. "What'll we be having then?" He asked, sounding eager.

"Er..." Harry brought up the rear, and neither of the two before him saw him scratching at the back of his neck. "I'm not sure... we just had steak and kidney pie a couple of days ago, so probably not that. The Yow only has so many options..."

"I won't eat that," Snowdrop whinged as though she'd not heard him. They filed out of the opening at the bottom of the stairs one after another.

"What won't you be eating, Miss Hill?"

She froze and Harry bumped into her back at Snape's words. Nicky had kept going and walked confidently straight into the kitchen, anticipating his meal and without the sense that his younger sister may have offended their host.

Severus was standing by the door where he braced himself against the wall, the bag of food sitting at his feet as he toed off his boots.

"Move those, or Curry will have at them," Harry reminded him, but Severus was a step ahead of him, picking the slumping leather footwear up off the floor almost as soon as they were off his feet and tucking them under one arm. With the other he scooped up the bag of food, which looked to be extra full in anticipation of the two extra mouths he was responsible for feeding.

"W'as in thine bag, Sev'rus?"

Tobias had moved from the couch and was now looking to their presumptive supper with a greedy look in his watery eyes.

"Not now, Da'. I would sincerely like to hear what it was that Miss Hill was declining to eat. Should it happen to be the same fare I brought home I shouldn't like to insult our esteemed guest by serving her something wholly unsuitable."

Harry winced and edged his way around Snowdrop who seemed to be frozen with a horrified look on her face. He didn't blame her. Whenever Severus' voice turned smooth like that and his eyes went all hard, it meant he was on the verge of an explosive fit of temper.

All things considered, Nicky had the right idea, making immediately for the kitchen like he had. Harry joined him without a backward glance at the girl. She'd dug her own grave.

Nicky had chosen one of the chairs at the kitchen table, and only then did Harry realise that they were two chairs short. With two muggle children accompanying them for supper, Severus would have no opportunity to fix the situation with magic.

He took his normal seat and winced as he did so.

"When she puts her foot in it, it's best to leave her to it," Nicky whispered to him. In the other room, Harry could hear Snowdrop hurrying to explain herself, her voice a nasally whinge, although he couldn't make out what it was she might have been saying exactly. He strained harder to hear: it sounded as though she might have been trying to pass off her faux pas as somehow being Harry's fault.

"I did not tell her that we'd just been eating fried liver!" Harry scoffed, finally making out what she was saying.

Nicky shrugged and settled back into his chair, tipping it back a bit onto its rear legs. "Does it matter?"

"I think so! That'd be... that'd be... blech!" Harry stuck his tongue out. "Steak and kidney pie's not my favourite, but you can't hardly taste the kidneys in the gravy."

As it happened, it didn't matter to Severus what it was that Snowdrop assumed they'd eaten, as he was lecturing the sulking girl on how rude it was to complain about her host's food when he led her into the kitchen.

"Take your seat," he directed her, nodding to the chair he normally sat in. Snowdrop settled in with a grimace. "I trust you'll make every effort to act as though what I've provided is up to your standards?" Severus asked, his voice a bit tart.

The girl sighed with bad grace. "Yes-sss," she hissed, crossing her arms and scowling at the table.

Harry winced. He'd have never dared to act that way in Gammy's house. How was it that the girl was so comfortable speaking rudely to a near stranger? In his own home, no less?

"I'm game for whatever's in the bag, Mr. Snape," Nicky chirped, leaning forward now. He seemed determined to be as positive and charismatic as his sister was negative and surly. So much so that he even dispensed with his normal custom of using Severus' given name.

For Snape's part, he glared down at the annoying addition to his kitchen with just as much irritation as he'd shown the ungracious little girl he'd only just finished correcting.

"Where will you and Mr. Toby eat, Severus?" Harry asked, his own voice uncharacteristically meek. Between the two warring personalities seated to either side of him, he felt unequal to the task of attempting to take control or to demonstrate the sort of ease which should have come naturally to him in his own home. On some level, he hoped to appease the man who had worked so hard to bring them home something to eat, particularly after being forced into helping to do whatever it was that the parent volunteers were responsible for doing at St. Mark's.

"Just Toby, Harry," Severus corrected with a roll of his eyes. Harry's approach didn't seem to have worked. Snape looked just as annoyed with Harry's odd turn toward timidity as he was with Nicky's brash attitude and Snowdrop's combative one. "He and I will dine in the sitting room."

"Can I sit there too?" Harry asked, suddenly wanting nothing more than to leave the Jekyll and Hyde siblings to their own devices.

"That, I think, would be rather rude." Snape was pulling clamshells from the belly of the brown paper bag, opening them up and displaying their contents before the three children's eyes with a sarcastic flourish.

"Fish and chips will suit the lot of you, I trust?" He asked sardonically, letting the container drop onto the tabletop so that chunks of potato jumped up in the air with the force of its impact.

"Thank you," Snowdrop was already ferrying a mound of fried cod onto her plate, and she didn't look at the wizard when she offered her perfunctory thanksgiving.

Nicky had a fistful of chips and one in his mouth when he asked, "Is there any tartare sauce?"

Severus turned on his heel with the second box clasped in his hands. "Not in this household," he growled as he left.

Harry sighed watching the man leave without him. The other two were threatening to eat the whole lot on their own, but he figured that was probably ok. He wasn't all too hungry for fried fish. He'd have preferred to eat with Severus—even Tobias—instead. This was... this was too much. It wasn't as though he'd invited the two ingrates over, he thought to himself, purloining one of Severus' favourite words. He'd been forced into their company, as he was always forced into their company: by circumstance and adults who made arrangements around the lives of the children as it suited them and their schedules.

In the end, he did pick up a single fillet and a handful of chips, finding a small plastic container of vinegar and dunking his chips into it.

At least it was good and still hot. Severus must have picked it up from one of the chippies on the riverside. The Yow didn't specialise in fish and chips and consequently, Severus never brought it home from work. He'd said that it was a shameful imitation of the real thing, and Harry was inclined to believe him. Severus was rather picky about what he would or wouldn't eat, particularly if he had to spend money on it.

"Do you think you'll be ready?" Nicky asked Snow, nudging her shin with the toe of his trainer under the table. She kicked back and scowled at him.

She scoffed before answering. "I'm ready now! It's not that hard."

"All those people," her brother continued, his words muffled by the bits of potato shoved into his mouth, "didn't think you'd want them staring at you like that."

"I think it'll be cool to be on stage," Harry said, knowing that Nicky'd not been asking him.

"There's only a week left," the other boy nagged again, doing the eyebrow wiggle he'd demonstrated upstairs earlier in the evening.

Harry was instantly filled with annoyance. Not necessarily on Snowdrop's behalf, but it was clear enough that Nicky was trying to get under their skin.

"Are you worried about going up there as a shepherd? We're not the only ones that have to do the play."

Nicky shrugged. "All I gotta do is say that something feels special about the night and then say we're going to Bethlehem to see this thing which is come to pass. That's it—"

"You're the first on stage. You, Matt, and the sheep." Harry reminded him. "That'd make me nervous."

"I thought you wanted to be on stage!"

"I do," Harry argued, "but I wanna..." he paused for a moment, not sure if he should share his daily daydream of fluttering his fingers along the neck of a gleaming guitar to the shrieks of a crowd of pretty girls. The pair sitting before him didn't merit an explanation.

"I wanna do something else on stage," he finished, rather lamely. Fried batter crunched between his molars as he bit down on his fillet.

"Something else," Nicky sniggered, "sure."

"What, like Shakespeare?" Snowdrop wrinkled her nose at him. "I hate Shakespeare."

For once, Harry found himself wholly in agreement with her. "No, not like Shakespeare. Like David Lee Roth."

"Ooooh," Nicky drew out, his eyes adopting a gleam that Harry didn't like. "Yankee Rose."

Harry still hadn't heard the song in question so he couldn't comment. He merely shrugged.

"You wanna be a rock star," Nicky nodded. "Like Jimmy Page."

Jimmy Page. From Led Zeppelin. He'd heard them before... not quite what he'd had in mind though.

"No," he disagreed, mostly for the sake of disagreeing with the boy who always acted as though he was so knowledgeable about everything, "I want to be a rock star like Angus Young."

"Ok, but Angus Young and David Lee Roth are nothing alike—"

"I'll be a bit like Roth, and a bit like Young."

"Roth doesn't play the guitar," Nicky rolled his eyes.

In point of fact, David Lee Roth played the guitar on a few tracks, but Harry was loathe to correct Nicky on this point.

"'Cause I'm gonna do both, see?" Harry was quickly losing patience and his voice was rising. To his mortification Snowdrop was smirking rather unpleasantly at him while her brother needled her play yard nemesis over his secret burning desire to play Rock n' Roll. He quickly paused to stick his tongue out at her, which saw the dour little girl scowling once more.

"I'm gonna play the guitar and sing. And I'm gonna play better than Eddie Van Halen, and I'm gonna sing better than Sebastian Bach—"

He was interrupted by Nicky's loud laughter which was shortly after joined by his sister's. For once, they both were of an accord. They both found Harry's grandeur-embellished visions of stardom to be a ludicrous farce.

"Harry."

He glanced up to where his name was being called, his face flaming red with a mixture of rage and embarrassment. Severus had poked his head in and was looking at him strangely, with what Harry thought might have been a mixture of pity and amusement.

"Mr. Henderson and Miss Hill's grandmother is here for them. Have you three finished eating?"

He was so humiliated that he refused to look up as the other two took their leave of him. He merely picked at the remainder of his dinner while they dumped their plates in the sink and traipsed upstairs to locate their school bags.

The door slamming shut on their way out wasn't even enough to lift the pall that had settled over him.

They'd laughed at him. They'd thought it was all some great big joke.

His hand clenched around a napkin, crinkling it in his grasp.

They'd see. He wasn't yet sure how... he had no way of getting his hands on a guitar to begin with. But he'd show them... so long as he found someone to teach him to play the guitar if he were ever lucky enough to own one...

Oh, who was he kidding?

His shoulders drooped.

They were right to laugh.