In the aftermath of Papagena Hill's scene, the spectators disbanded slowly. The Hendersons had been stifled by individual attention from the headmistress who had seemed to be doing her level best to smooth over ruffled feathers; given that the argument between Tabitha Tibbons and Papagena Hill had occurred a few steps away—where Ms. Tibbons had towed the woman, and in mostly snarled undertones—it hadn't provided nearly the entertainment that people had apparently expected. Had Harry not been standing so close, he certainly wouldn't have heard most of it.
When he had cause to glance up after Severus escorted the stumbling woman to her mother's Ford, he realised that most of the parents had packed their children away into their cars and made haste toward their homes: likely in anticipation of a hot supper and last minute Christmas preparations.
Harry only felt colder at the prospect and he stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets, drawing his head down into the collar of his coat.
Christmas was unlikely to be anywhere near as agonising as it was whenever he had been made to watch Dudley make his way through a floor full of presents—and the promise of hot, roasted goose was certainly interesting—but he didn't expect anything from Severus or Tobias.
It didn't make him sad, necessarily, but he couldn't work up any excitement, either.
Worse was watching Snowdrop climb into the back of the car that held her mother in the front passenger seat, knowing as he did that she was having to go home with the woman. Nicky's departure with his family felt bittersweet as well, but at least—even if he wasn't the favoured child—it wasn't likely that his parents actively mistreated him.
Not that Nicky had ever said as much, but it seemed he roamed the streets of Backbarrow and, to a lesser extent, Cokeworth, because he was utterly indifferent to spending time with his family, and whenever he'd spoken about them, in his customarily off-hand fashion, Harry had gotten the impression that they were just as indifferent about him.
Now, after having heard his stepmother's commentary on the subject of Nicky's birth, Harry wasn't so certain that they were merely apathetic so much as resentful, but he still didn't exactly get the feeling that Nicky was to the Hendersons as Harry had been to the Dursleys.
When Severus marched back over, hunched over to hold his coat closed more tightly, he made a quick beeline for Harry and roped him under one arm, silently directing his charge toward their waiting car. He spared a second to nod an acknowledgement to Ms. Shaw and Ms. Tibbons, both of whom looked wan in the light from the single lamppost, and then he made it his business to stuff Harry away in the car, struggling with the ice-cold keys in his uncooperative and stiff fingers for a moment before he managed to unlock the door.
The whole ride home Tobias cursed his son for not unlocking the car for him earlier, which Severus ignored. Instead, he spoke over his father's rantings to Harry and asked him to put a tape into the player and turn it up all the way.
Harry didn't need telling twice. He seldom got to choose the music. Within twenty seconds, the car was filled with the opening strains of 'Paradise City.' After Ms. Tibbons' commentary earlier in the evening, Harry wanted to listen to 'My Michelle' again, but it came later in the album. Appetite for Destruction was one album that was pretty much officially relegated to use in the Marina. As far as Severus was concerned, Guns N' Roses was 'driving music.'
Normally that meant speeding, swerving, and all-around recklessness from his kuya behind the wheel, so Harry didn't often request that they put it in rotation, but he was reasonably sure that Severus was white knuckling the steering wheel, just as everyone else on the road that evening. The conditions were abominable: the visibility poor and the roads slick. Likely Severus Snape had never in his life driven as slowly and deliberately as he was made to on the evening of December 23, 1988.
At least Axl Rose had gotten Tobias to shut up. Harry enjoyed his silence, even though they made it across the bridge and back to their own house before the song he wanted to listen to finished.
He still wasn't any surer what anyone meant speaking about this mysterious heroine.
Since they had eaten before his concert, there was no supper to wait on, and Harry was too tired and heartsore over what he'd witnessed at the conclusion of the concert to try and stay up late. He marched into the house before Severus and Tobias and called Cur Dog to his side.
Customarily, Curry accompanied him outside and while the lanky mutt did his business in the back garden, Harry took advantage of the heated privy to attend to matters that wouldn't keep until the morning. Afterwards, it was back inside to wash his hands, his face, and to brush his teeth before bed.
Not one of the men in the household spoke to one another before retiring that evening. It certainly didn't bode well for the Christmas cheer Harry knew he was supposed to feel, and consequently, it did nothing to address his cynicism.
Christmas Eve was nothing special at all. Severus still had to work. He grumbled as he left the house that it was lucky his employer had given him the evening off the night before, as normally Severus closed for them on Friday nights, and it was clear to Harry that the older wizard anticipated a grueling day ahead of him.
When Harry asked how bad it could be, so near to a holiday, Snape had explained over their shared breakfast—in rather impatient and biting tones—about how the town drunks and low lives always congregated at the public houses close to times of family togetherness.
It didn't seem as though he was able to resist throwing a nasty look at his father as he said so.
The eldest Snape didn't notice while he tucked into his eggs.
A day spent with only Tobias sounded like just about the most boring thing Harry could imagine. While the man wasn't anywhere near the kind of unpredictable tyrant that Severus had at times recalled to him before Tobias Snape had joined their household, he wasn't any sort of conversationalist.
At best, Harry could hope to sit and watch telly—interrupted by Toby's impassioned outbursts—while he desperately attempted to make sense of the distorted image flickering in and out of focus on the glass.
He spent a bare ten minutes engaged thus before he gave up with disgust. It was no way to spend a day.
Making his excuses to Severus' father—much good it did him, as the man didn't seem remotely aware of his presence—he clicked his tongue to Curry and bade the dog follow him up the stairs where he sat at Severus' old desk and settled his chin in the cradle of his hands, his face turned out the window where he watched the desolate, empty street outside the glass pane.
Snape had been right. The snow had run to mud. Granted, there was still some left, but whatever remained piled around, even in the highest banks, was a discouraging, dirty grey in colour. It capped off the piles of rubbish that never moved in the empty lot across the street. It sat heavily—so heavily that it might have caused a cave-in—on the roof of the derelict house he could see from his vantage point in his first-floor room, and even the fresh flakes falling from the overcast sky didn't seem promising in the least. They wouldn't cover the filth on the ground, they'd merely mix into the dirty snow and sully themselves.
His momentary sullenness was interrupted, however, when he realised that he could take a rather startling appreciation for the fact that he was actually pretty toasty. From the view out the window, and from the negligible thickness of the pane, he might have expected that the house would be a draughty, frigid icebox. Instead, he was safe inside Severus' home. Warm and with a stomach full of eggs and sausages—not the expensive sort, no, but a decent brand that Severus shelled out for because they were enjoyed by everyone in the house—and in his own room. His own room with his own light, his own window, his own bed, and his own desk and pet.
Glumness forgotten, Harry grinned. Presents notwithstanding, he was surrounded by gifts in every wall of the defiant little house that was Spinner's End.
He sat back in his chair, balancing it on its back two legs while he maintained its upright position by keeping his toes hooked on the bar that stabilised the front legs of the desk, near the wall.
With nothing better to do, and now in a much better mood, he lazily traced his hands down the front panel of the desk until they came to the drawer pulls, which he tugged on until the wood stopped protesting and gave way.
Harry found the pictures of his mother where they always were: stuffed to the back of the desk and into the corner.
He took several minutes to look them over, grinning to himself when he saw again the pencil hearts that Severus had drawn around her image.
Severus really was a sappy bloke where it counted.
Perhaps that was why he felt so grim at the prospect of Ms. Tibbons, he reflected, frowning now at the picture of their Year Four class.
It made a lot of sense to Harry why Severus might care to take him in when Severus had always held a flame for his mother. It was sort of sad, of course, and Harry would never admit to his kuya that he pitied him for his single-minded fixation, but a writhing uncertainty seemed to grow in intensity whenever Harry imagined Severus becoming in any way serious about anyone else...
And wasn't that sort of... bad of him?
He felt his gut twisting. The emotions were too complicated for such a young boy to name or unravel, but an adult might have correctly identified them as resentment, shame, anxiety, and grief.
If Severus went with Tabby that might mean he wouldn't want to be Harry's kuya anymore, and the thought of that was simply awful.
Harry's hand sought Curry's wiry mane of hair, and he absently stroked the beast's great head as he stared distantly at the picture, not really seeing it anymore.
Tabitha Tibbons wouldn't be in the picture because, from the sound of it, she would have been several years behind Severus and his mother in schooling.
Tabitha Tibbons wouldn't be, but likely Bertram Tibbons was.
There was no telling which frowning boy in the photograph was his music teacher's older brother and Severus' partner in crime. It could have been the boy standing next to Snape, a tow-headed child as stocky as Severus was lanky. It might have been any of them, such as the boy standing next to Harry's own mother: a handsome, dark-haired lad with a smarmy grin.
And really, knowing who Bertie was wouldn't explain one whit about what would happen between Severus and Ms. Tibbons, and it would do nothing to shed light on what might transpire should they end up an item.
Yes, Harry had had something of a crush on the young woman; he was big enough to admit it. But that's all it was. The worse sense of betrayal he was feeling was coming from his indignation over the fact that Severus was supposed to be in love with his mother. His perfect, sainted mother, whom no one could find any fault with whatsoever. Who had inspired a love in Severus so pure that he'd not forgotten it in more than twenty years...
If that wasn't a betrayal of some sort, then Harry was quite sure he didn't actually understand the word.
Yet... it stirred within him a terrible and guilty feeling to actually want to see Severus pining after a dead woman—a dead woman who had married the boy he'd always hated—after years and years. Harry felt quite certain that on some level, his enjoyment of the fact that Severus had kept their class picture, hearts and all, in his desk for so long, and his desire that the man should always return to the deceased woman's memory with something like yearning burning in his soul made him a bad person.
Severus had done everything imaginable for him in the past six months. With no basis for comparison, Harry still felt confident enough to say that there was no better big brother on the face of the earth—and he would have fought anyone who would have decided to debate him on the topic.
Shaking his head ruefully, he stuffed the picture back into the dark corner of the desk and closed the drawer.
Severus deserved to be happy... and really, Harry quite liked Ms. Tibbons. She was a bit mousy, and her voice was like that of a pet budgie, but she was... she was sweet.
Harry let out an inelegant chortle that startled Curry into giving him a long, lopsided look. Severus sure did like his sweets, whenever he could get his hands on them.
His guilt melted away without his realising it, and, along with it, his sense of betrayal.
They'd be disgustingly cute, he thought, his mind finally beginning to spin with ideas. His dour, baleful kuya and the ever chipper, stary-eyed Ms. Tibbons. For the first time, the idea of them standing together—dare he imagine it?—holding hands, didn't bother him in the slightest.
With a small quirk of his lips, he considered the gnarled wood-grain of the desktop, his fingernail tracing some of the lines hither and thither. He was only roused from his silent contemplation by the cold, wet sensation of Curry's black nose snuffling along the back of his hand.
"Do you need out?"
In response he earned a whine, and Harry slid off of his seat to go relieve the dog, patting his thigh to summon the dopey beast to his side.
After Cur Dog had done his business and they were both warm and inside once more, Harry felt little desire to hole up in his room. Certainly, on some level, he felt as though his time alone had been productive, but he also was tired of avoiding Snape's father.
It didn't seem as though Tobias was going anywhere, and, in the same spirit which allowed him to grant his blessing to a potential union of some sort between a curmudgeonly misanthrope and a bushy-tailed romantic, he felt inclined to try and get to know Mr. Toby better.
He pulled Severus' chair from where it was pushed into the far corner and curled up in the embrace of its upholstered arms.
With all the good intentions in the world, Harry wasn't in the least bit certain where he ought to start. Then again, there was no chance of starting if he refused to even entertain the thought of sitting in the same room as the old tramp.
After several moments of silence, interrupted only by the broadcast coming from some soap Harry thought felt vaguely familiar, he cleared his throat.
"Er... Mr. Toby? Are you hungry?"
The figure on the sofa grunted softly. "Whatn?"
"Hungry? For food?"
"Wasn' iver a gadgee t' turn down a bit 'o scran."
Harry blinked as he took the time to work through the words. "'Scran' is food, right?"
"Aye."
Harry stood and hesitantly edged toward the kitchen, his eyes on the back of Snape Sr's head. This was proving more difficult than he'd initially imagined. "And... and 'gadgee?'"
Tobias turned and held himself in his twisted, reclining position looking over the back of the sofa with his hand gripped tight on the back.
"Gadgee. A man."
"Oh..." Harry gave a tentative grin and nodded as he took a step back into the kitchen, looking below his legs to make sure he didn't trip over Cur Dog who tended to always be underfoot.
But before he got much further, he watched Mr. Toby's grey eyes narrow with some unnamable emotion. Abruptly the man stood, and he stalked around the couch to intercept Harry in the doorway leading to the kitchen.
"What yer djarn?" he demanded, pointing one finger down and pointing emphatically.
"I was gonna go make us some... er... some scran," Harry tested the word out. It didn't sound remotely correct coming out of his mouth, but he was proud of himself for trying, and because of that he couldn't help but to grin a nervous grin.
Mr. Toby's sock-clad foot stomping on the floor caused him to jump when the eldest Snape brought it down against the splintering floorboards.
"Sev'rus would 'ave our arl napper if we 'ad thou cookin' fer us. Gan sit down."
Shifting his weight from foot to foot, Harry looked over to the sofa with uncertainty. "R-really? I only asked 'cause I was gonna make something—"
"Nae." Mr. Toby shook his head and rolled his eyes as though he found Harry quite annoying. He dismissed the boy like he might have a bothersome gnat with a shooing motion of his hands.
"Gan then. 'Ava sit."
"Er... ok. Thanks, Mr. Toby."
"Jes' Toby."
"Right, sorry." Harry swallowed and moseyed around the edge of the sitting room until he perched his bottom on the couch cushion, feeling bad about sitting when he had been meaning to do something nice for Snape's father.
While Toby putzed around the kitchen, Harry observed him over the back of the sofa, his head peeking up only enough for his eyes to watch the man's movements. To tell the truth, he felt a bit chary about the idea of eating anything that Tobias Snape might prepare. He didn't seem the type to know his way around a cooker and any talent that Severus had in that department seemed to have come from his mum.
He watched as Tobias sliced bread off the loaf and laid two pieces each on two plates, but his view was blocked when the old tramp scuttled to the refrigerator and came to stand in front of the kitchen bench. Harry thought he might have spotted the left-over chicken they'd had earlier in the week, but he wasn't entirely sure.
What arrived at the sofa moments later was a perfectly serviceable sandwich, made with chicken sliced off the left-over thigh and a bit of stilton that Severus had been hoarding since he'd brought it home triumphantly from the cheesemonger the week before.
Tobias handed the plate over the back of the couch and then walked around to fall heavily into his preferred cushion with a grunt.
"Deek ahreet?"
Harry stared at him blankly, but then decided that the best way to show his appreciation was to take a big, confident bite. It wasn't at all bad, and he savoured it.
"Aa asked if it lewked ahreet, lad—"
His mouth full, Harry nodded and crumbs flew from between his teeth as he struggled to talk. "Ish vewy gewd! Tanks!"
"Class."
Sitting together for a few more hours proved surprisingly companionable, particularly after Harry finally worked up the nerve to ask Tobias how it was he could stand to watch through the noise.
"'S easy aneuff," he explained, taking pity on Harry enough to moderate his speech and cut out many of the Cumbrian words he was partial to. "When yer lookin, gotta jes' try 'n focus on what all they're sayin'."
"But the sound cuts in and out," Harry observed. He was now comfortably seated with his head resting on his palm, propped up against the arm of the sofa. His legs were curled up to his side.
"An' I take it yer nowt use'ta an arl telly laik this," Tobias snorted, sounding affronted. "This were a barie set back when! Paid a full week's pay—barie cailo—fer this."
"It's not so bad," Harry granted. "Before I came to stay with Severus, I wasn't allowed to watch anything at all, whenever they could help it so... I dunno. I wouldn't say I'm used to better."
Tobias looked at him closely but didn't comment on this. Instead, he sighed heavily through his enormous nose—as his son so often did—and turned his attention back to the television.
"Sev'rus divn't wan'ter take care 'o eet. Same with t' Marina. Would'a kept a treat if 'ee'd jes' taken care."
Harry wasn't entirely sure if that was true. For all the abuses that Severus seemed to heap on the Marina, it also seemed as though he'd maintained it with so much magic that the car was likely more a product of clever transfiguration and charms by now than anything that may have rolled off the factory floor. It seemed odd to him, however, that the wizard, for all he did to right whatever wrongs he managed to inflict upon the poor Morris, never did anything to suggest that he took pride in its ownership.
He left the upholstery on the ceiling hanging in strips where it had become torn. He allowed rubbish to accumulate on the floor and in the back seat. He ground the gears and overclocked the engine. He resolutely refused (or otherwise pretended to forget) about routine engine maintenance.
"'Sa miracle she's still in fine fettle 'nymore. Still wuk'n."
Feeling compelled to come to his kuya's defense, Harry shrugged. "He told me once that he had fixed the entire frame and put in extra safety stuff... and after our crash I saw him straighten out the entire door frame—"
Tobias sat up with a thunderous look on his face, his contemplation of the Christmas special airing on the television forgotten. "'Ee crashed 'er!?"
Harry swallowed and shrugged. He certainly couldn't tell Severus' father that apparently his son had crashed the Marina a great many times. Not after that reaction.
"It wasn't his fault... we were on one of those streets outside of town and a lorry wasn't paying attention. If Severus hadn't driven through the hedge then the other driver would have killed us dead!"
Remembering that night had Harry feeling rather ill, and by simply invoking mention of the crash, visions of a traumatised man laying bleeding out on the ground swam before his vision. The green flash of light. The moment of terror as all he could see was darkness and his body was thrown from one side to the other against his seatbelt. When they careened through the hedgerow and down the embankment on the other side.
Something... something that didn't belong. Something about snakes... or was it rats?
He shut his eyes as hard as he could, his face screwing up as he wracked his brain.
Eggs.
That was right, he blinked. Gammy had sent him home with a basketful that evening... it must have been that they all broke in the crash, but he had no recollection of Severus cleaning them up in the aftermath.
When a hand came down on his shoulder and startled him, Harry's eyes flew open and landed on Snape's father, who was looking at him as one might look at a worrisome infection on one's own leg.
"Ye ahreet, lad?"
"Yeah," Harry answered, his voice sounding distant and vague even to his own ears.
"Deek laik thou's seen arl Gytrash, or somethin'—"
Harry shook his head to clear it—and to negate whatever strange thing Tobias might have been suggesting, for it might as well have been spoken in French—and he was grateful to spear his fingers into Cur Dog's wiry hair when the hound sidled up to him. He sat before the boy and turned his head toward him, breathing smelly dog breath in Harry's face without a hint of remorse. He'd stirred when he'd heard his master's voice speaking so urgently.
"Nowt thee, ye feckless jewkel! Ye flatter yerself, like," Tobias snorted as he chortled, his own hand scratching almost violently at Cur Dog's shoulders. The dog, at least, seemed to enjoy it, panting as he arched his spine into the clawed fingers attacking his itches.
"I was just thinking about the crash," Harry said once he felt back in the present moment once more. "The lorry driver didn't make it."
"'Ee duddent? 'Ow did ye find tha' oot?" Tobias rolled his eyes, "Waddent be laik Sev'rus ta garn ower t' 'ospital efter 'n deekabout."
Harry swallowed thickly. "We found him when we walked back to the road... he got thrown out the windscreen. His arm was off..."
"A man ken lose 'is earm an' live t' whine aboot it," Tobias remarked dismissively, shaking his hand in the air as though to dispel a cloud of bothersome smoke.
Harry scowled. That didn't make it seem as if Snape's father cared all that much. "How would you know?"
"Kneaww many a gadgee lost 'is earm wukin' The Blue. Come back in wid-in a week."
Harry stared but then shook his head. It didn't matter if Tobias didn't take it seriously, or if he knew people who'd come back to work after having been mauled by the machinery.
"This bloke died," Harry asserted, his voice firm. "I know he died."
"Duddent catch a glem thyself, dud thee?" Tobias asked, apparently determined to be argumentative. He crossed his arms and was now attempting to ignore the conversation, his eyes resting on the picture flickering in and out on the television.
Answering that proved difficult, for while Harry hadn't properly seen the man die, he also... he also had. He knew he had.
Severus had never once explained what the green light was, or what it meant—even though from his reaction and words after the fact, it was clear he considered that he had murdered the poor lorry driver—but Harry knew.
Death wasn't black like a void, or a bright white light. Death was like a mist made of sparkling, crushed emerald dust. It was as green as fresh spring sprouts, or the label on a bottle of Dettol.
Of course, Harry could tell Tobias none of this. For one thing, he had no desire to tell Severus' father that his son had killed a man—out of mercy or otherwise—and for another... Harry still wasn't certain what magic was to Tobias.
Severus seemed to use it around the house whether his father was in residence or not, which suggested that Tobias had at the very least understood its purpose and must have, at base level, a grudging peace with it; but whether the man understood that Harry, too, was magical wasn't clear. If he didn't know, it was possible that Severus meant for them to keep that a secret, although if that were the case, it would have been helpful for the older wizard to have communicated that to his ward much earlier...
In any case, Harry worried that Tobias Snape may well decide to frog march him through the snow to the closest loony bin if he were to insist to the Snape patriarch that a luminous flash—or was it more like a cloud? It had felt as though it had been dense somehow—of green in the wake of an accident meant beyond the shadow of doubt that a man had lost his life.
It didn't seem as though it mattered, once Harry stopped ruminating on it. Tobias had apparently lost interest in the conversation soon after he'd decided that Harry must have been lying, or at the very least exaggerating, about what he'd seen.
They watched the next show, and to Harry's surprise, once he stopped focusing on how terrible the image and sound were, he actually was able to see and hear through the noise to the programming lying underneath.
By the end of yet another episode of Fawlty Towers, Harry was stuffing his mouth with his fist to keep from shaking the room with his laughter, though he might as well have let loose, for Tobias was doing just that. His head thrown back against the couch, he even saw fit to stamp his feet on the floor whenever John Cleese said something particularly witty.
It was this scene of hilarity which Severus walked in on when he arrived home hours later, his arms laden and expression curiously bland.
As soon as Harry could bring himself under control once more, he jumped up to greet his kuya by relieving him of at least half of the load.
When he went to reach for one more bag, Severus spun partially to keep the brown paper receptacle away from him, glaring down with his beady black eyes until Harry took an uncertain step back.
"I can take one more, Severus..."
"You'll not touch what's in this bag if you know what's good for you, Potter," Severus decreed, turning his nose up a bit. Lingering at the edges of his mouth was the barest hint of mirth. A tiny smirk that made Harry screw his face up a bit.
"Why not? Is it more c-costy—?"
"The word you're looking for is 'caustic.' And regardless of whether or not I've brought home a bag of corrosive ingredients, for all intents and purposes you are to consider handling this bag to be just as injurious to your health as if I had. That is to say: don't touch."
From the couch Harry heard Toby snort, and he did little more to greet his son than to wave his arm lazily through the airspace above the sofa.
"Owz't ga'an?"
In response, Severus grunted, and started for the kitchen, cradling the bag of unidentified whatzit in his right arm as one might a newborn, while holding the other parcels in his left with far less care.
"Sev'rus," Tobias stood and crossed his arms as he looked at his son's departing back, which froze up under his renewed questioning. "Aa said owz't ga'an?"
Harry looked between Snape's stiff shoulders and Toby's narrowed grey eyes with a sense of impending doom.
To that point, nothing cataclysmic had ever truly happened between the two, except for when Severus had laid into his father over his absenteeism a month or so before, thus there was little actual reason for Harry to feel so worried whenever the tension between them seemed to crackle and spit as it was doing at the present moment.
And yet... the energy between the dyad always seemed like the prickle of electricity in the air that presaged a violent lightning storm, or a deafening crack of thunder shattering the heavens. Whenever they managed to diffuse the potential for anything earth-shattering happening, it always seemed to Harry as though the pressure was merely misplaced, never truly dispelled.
As such, he expected a giant row at any moment of any day, and each time it was deferred, his anxiety over what seemed inevitable only mounted.
Cur Dog, perhaps sensing Harry's unease, shuffled forward until his head was underneath the boy's hand, insisting on a pet. Harry obliged him, because at least then he could act as though he had no interest in any possible eruption that might have been forthcoming.
"Are you actually interested to know, or are you just trying to assert your dominion over the house?" Severus asked. He walked forward without looking over his shoulder and settled the right-hand bag on a high shelf while dropping what was in the left onto the table. Once he'd deposited it, he looked over at Harry and pointed toward the plates and utensils, bidding the boy come forward and set the table for the three of them.
"Wan' t' kneaww, dun't we?" Tobias scoffed, as he sat heavily in his customary chair. His place had his back to the door leading out to the garden and he watched with appreciative eyes as Snape began to unpack take-away boxes he'd lifted from the kitchens at The Yow.
Severus, in response, let out a low snort, but even if he didn't strictly believe that Tobias meant no harm, he focused on his task and answered, apparently having decided that it was most politic to take the question at face value.
"Today was tolerable. There were fewer gattered dunderheads at the bar than I expected for Christmas Eve."
As Harry scooped spoonfuls of roasted potato onto his plate he looked askance at Severus. "Fewer means there were some, right?"
Sitting heavily into his seat, Snape sighed and rubbed at his eyes with so much pressure that his vision must have been fuzzing out. "There are always some, Harry."
"Oh," Harry uttered. He avoided looking at Severus and instead stared at his plate, hoping that the slices of roast beef in hearty gravy would somehow provide enough of a distraction to lessen his feeling of guilt. His legs kicked and swung under the table. "I'm sorry."
Snape sounded tired as he answered him. "And why should you be sorry?"
"'Cause..." For some reason Harry couldn't bring himself to say that Snape was only working the terrible job because Harry himself had cost him his position at Hogwarts. He couldn't say that it was because of him and his need for food and clothing that Severus was out dealing with drunkards every day in an effort to put something more nourishing on the table than stale toast. At the very least, he felt it important not to say such a thing in front of Snape's father.
"'Cause—" he tried again, but Severus intercepted him, using the same errant wave that Tobias had earlier to dismiss what he was trying to say.
"You've nothing to do with it."
To Harry's ears that didn't ring remotely true, but he stuffed his mouth with a bite of beef in order to repress the urge to argue.
Dinner went down well, as roast beef always tended to do, and afterwards the three repaired to the sitting room to await the time where Severus towed them off to the midnight service.
He'd claimed, rather testily, that he had no interest of any kind in it beyond the fact that their attendance promised them a Christmas goose from Mrs. Padiernos, but Harry privately suspected that Severus valued their time in St. Catherine's.
At the very least, he never failed to light a candle for his mother, and once, a few weeks earlier, Harry had caught the man staring contemplatively at a rather illustrative stained glass window that depicted Christ's crucifixion.
Tobias, on the other hand, took great pleasure in informing anyone who would listen that he had never lapsed a day in his life, and he was the most apt to badger Severus about their attendance on Sunday mornings whenever they ran even a moment or two late.
To Harry's surprise, he was rather cordial with the Padiernoses, and Harry had to assume that he'd known them well enough when Severus was coming up, even if their relationship didn't seem quite as warm as Severus and Harry's own with the proprietors of Rice Bowl.
It seemed as though they might make it to departure time without any sort of issues. Severus was bent nearly double over the large tome in his lap, scribbling away into the margins while an inkpot floated lazily within reach, and Harry and Toby had chosen to occupy themselves as they had before Severus had arrived bearing supper.
Fawlty Towers was no longer airing, which Harry thought unfortunate. He'd have liked to watch a bit more of it, and the news on Christmas Eve was mostly chock full of feel-good pieces touting the charity efforts of certain large parishes. A few stories were concerned with the Nativity plays of much larger and more important schools than Harry's own, where apparently it had been worthwhile to film the children's performances, and in spite of the cold and blustery start the weekend had gotten with the snowstorm the evening before, Christmas day promised to be clear as cut crystal, if the meteorologist could be trusted.
The anchors moved on to discussing the conditions on the road, which they promised to be an improvement over Thursday and Friday's mess of mixed precipitation and freezing temperatures.
Following the commentary about the end of week snow, the programme aired a short segment highlighting some of the worse crashes and accidents that had occurred as a result of the low visibility and slippery roads.
Shutting his eyes against it, Harry's hand gripped the armrest of the couch so tightly that his fingers turned white and bloodless.
"'Eard there were a crash, Sev'rus."
From the chair, Harry heard Snape grunt. It didn't sound as though he was mindful of what his father was saying to him. He often made that exact noise whenever he was humouring Harry while not really listening.
"'Arry tol' us ye near aneuff lowped a dike—"
"I..."
Harry opened his eyes just in time to see Severus' head jerk up to attention at last.
"We didn't jump over the hedge!" He protested, his eyes darting wildly between his father and Harry himself. When they landed on the younger wizard, the look in them was accusing.
'Sorry,' Harry tried to mouth.
"Sed ye wen' through it, like—"
"Yes, well, it was bad enough without you also exaggerating about it," Snape replied testily, the tip of his feathered writing instrument dripping blobs of ink onto the page without his notice.
"'Eard that yan gadgee—from t' lorry—were real badly," Toby needled with a smirk.
Severus' lips pressed together into a grim, white slash of a line. He held them so tightly that a tiny glint could be seen of his yellowed teeth where his uneven gash of a mouth didn't quite meet fully upper lip to lower.
"That would be an understatement," he growled, sounding pained.
"Were what t' lad sed true? Drivin' along a lonnin, an' a lorry come—SMACK!" Tobias slapped one of his hands against the other loudly to simulate the sound of a collision.
"I didn't tell him that!" Harry interjected, feeling panicked all of the sudden. "I didn't, honest! We didn't crash into the lorry, Toby. Severus—!"
"Silence, Potter!" Severus roared all of the sudden, rising so swiftly that the tome in his lap fell to the floor, the pages down on the ground and spine to the ceiling. "Bloody brattle can! Why did you tell him anything at all!?"
Harry felt his lower lip twitch as words deserted him. He looked down at his sock-clad feet to avoid meeting Snape's wrath.
"I..." he gasped, "I only meant to—"
"Make my life hell? Tattle to someone whom you imagined might take me to task?" Snape interrupted, clearly not listening to Harry at all. He was stomping around the sitting room in a circuit—the same he used for pacing.
"No!" Harry protested, beginning to feel rather angry himself. He kicked the leg of the sofa hard with his heel and gritted his teeth when having done so proved painful. At that, he leapt to his feet and intercepted Snape's latest go-round, doing as he'd seen Snape do so many times before and standing with his feet planted, his chest puffed out as big as he could make it with a full inhalation of breath.
"You need to stop!" He yelled at the top of his lungs. In defiance of his rage, he could feel his hands shaking with terror at confronting Severus to his face, and he gripped them into two tight fists in order to disguise how they were trembling. "You need to stop and listen for once, Kuya!"
Snape did, in fact, come to a halt, though his nostrils were pulsing like some absurd cartoon bull, readying himself for a full-tilt charge.
"I only said you'd fixed the car really good! That's all I meant to say! I wasn't 'telling' about the accident 'cause I wanted to get you in trouble! Why would I do that?" He posed, rhetorically, still shouting.
"Your dad was saying how you didn't take care of the car and you didn't take care of the telly, and that's why the telly wasn't working good, and I said you fixed the car after the crash so that you couldn't even tell that it had ever happened! I wouldn't try and get you in trouble! Never—never, ever!"
Harry's words were emerging broken, and he scarcely remembered to take a breath between the stuttered sentences, but by some miracle, he managed to force them out, until he stood across the short space from his kuya, his shoulders heaving.
"Harry—"
Distantly, Harry registered that someone had gasped, but he wasn't yet ready to stop. It felt unreasonably good to vent his frustrations after so many months—so many years—of keeping such thoughts to himself.
"Why do you always, always, have to get mad!? You're mad when I get up 'too early', you're mad when I open the new can of paste before using the rest of the old one, which you put somewhere different each time! You're mad when I don't understand my maths homework fast enough, and you're mad when we run out of bog roll even though you forget to buy it at the store! You're mad every day you come home from The Yow, and then you're mad when you don't have go to work 'cause you know you have to go in tomorrow! And it doesn't matter if it's stupid to be mad, 'cause you won't listen! You never, ever listen!"
Through the crimson haze of his rage, Harry thought Snape might have been holding up both hands to placate him.
Behind him, he heard Tobias Snape let out a strangled gasp and a strange oath.
"Whatn t' hangment—!?"
But Harry's attention was instead focused on Severus, who appeared to be attempting to reason with him if his cautious posture was any indication.
"I do listen, Harry... I... or I will try to listen better—that is to say more—I'll try."
"No!" He shouted, feeling as though he were looking down on Snape. The older wizard's head tilted back as he craned his neck to stare at Harry with wide, black eyes.
"No, you won't! Because you want to be mad! I think you like it," Harry argued, his fury running to desperation as his shouting turned into a sob.
"It... it is at times easier to remain irritated," Snape granted, with a slow, careful nod of his head. He still appeared to be staring at Harry like the boy may well explode, as though he was some sort of armed warhead.
But why? Yes, Harry had yelled, this was true, but Severus looked... alarmed?
Looking down from Snape's face, it was then Harry's turn to be alarmed.
His feet weren't touching the floor.
He let out a strangled shriek and kicked frantically in the air, one foot catching Severus in the solar plexus, sending the older wizard into a coughing fit as he doubled over to catch his breath.
"K-K-Kuya!? KUYA! HELP!"
Still wheezing, Snape stumbled forward and gripped the side of Harry's leg by the fabric of his trousers, tugging him sharply. The levitation broke without warning and when Harry began to fall from his height of a full meter over the floorboards Snape did his best to catch him around the middle, even as he could barely breathe.
Harry's swift decent brought both of them tumbling to the ground, arse over tit, although it seemed that Snape was worse off for having played the hero: he'd mostly broken the boy's fall.
The room was chaotic with noise and yelling, and Harry was so confused in the melee that it took him several moments to register that much of the yelling was coming from himself. And then, to his humiliation, he found he could scarcely stop.
"Quiet now," Snape told him when he finally managed to sit up. He caught Harry around the middle and turned the boy's face into his shoulder so that all Harry could see was the black, pilling cotton of the man's poloneck. "Steady."
It took far longer than Harry would have wanted to admit for his panicked screeching to subside into groaning and thereafter into deep, heaving breaths. It helped that Snape had blocked out the room for him, holding his face so tightly to his body that Harry could feel a bit of painful pressure coming from his glasses pressing too deeply into the bridge of his nose.
Nothing made sense, especially not Snape's mild reaction to being pummeled, first by Harry's foot and then by him tackling the older wizard onto the hard wooden floors.
"Y-you're m-m-mad—"
"I'm not."
"The 'angment's within! T' dickens! Christ ahmighty!" Tobias could be heard shouting in the background. In truth, he'd never shut up, but Harry hadn't managed to pay him any attention. Now, knowing the old muggle had witnessed his outburst of freakishness—something which he'd not had happen for almost a year—he felt shamed by Toby's clear fear of him.
"Da'," Snape growled over Harry's head, his voice sounding strange to Harry's ears. At first he assumed it was because his ear was pressed against the inside of Severus' upper arm where he was embracing him, but a moment later, that theory was proved incorrect.
Snape really was speaking quite differently.
"Stuff thine gob or ga'an soss yer napper, Aa divn't care which. Shut. Up."
Amazingly, Tobias did. The absence of his impassioned oaths filling the air causing the resulting quiet to ring in Harry's ears. It was unbearable. He pulled away only to wrench his glasses off his face so he could return his face to Snape's armpit. Distantly, it occurred to him to be grateful that it didn't smell terribly of body odour.
Snape permitted his clinginess for a moment or two more, which Harry appreciated, and when he finally began to peel the child away from himself, Harry only protested for a moment or two before he allowed himself to be set back on his feet, staring dolefully at the ground to hide his embarrassment.
He didn't want Snape to see how much he had enjoyed the brief moment of comfort his kuya had offered, even if it mostly was because he'd given the whole household a terrible scare.
"I-I'm s-sorry," he stuttered, breathing hard again. He was never punished worse by his relatives than in those moments where his terrible freakishness was loosed from his control and into the lives of normal, respectable people. "I won't... I won't let it happen again, promise—"
Across from him, Snape scoffed and Harry's head shot up at the sound. Surely that meant that Snape didn't believe him...
"You can't promise that!" Snape said with a rather self-indulgent roll of his eyes. He'd crossed his arms over his chest, but it more resembled the stance he took when he was settling in for a good argument, not the stance he took when he was boiling over with anger. That would have seen him curling his fists at his sides as he did all he could to make his 5'11" frame look as though he'd grown another three inches.
"I... I'll do my best, Sev'rus—"
"No," Snape interrupted him, shaking his head. Some of his hair was coming loose from the ponytail he used while at work, and those strands flew around in tangled clumps which he blew with a puff of air to get out of his line of vision. "You'll do no such thing. I don't want to see you expend a single moment's effort towards suppressing your magic."
"You... you don't?"
"No," his kuya said again, taking two steps forward so he stood before Harry. He reached out to grasp the boy's thin shoulder and squeezed it firmly enough to feel bracing but not enough to hurt. "Terrible things happen to wizards and witches that deny their birthright, Harry. I shudder to think of that happening to you. It is, in so many ways, a fate worse than death."
"Ye mean thou wanst 'im fleean 'round the house laik some l'al cleg!?"
Snape's head flew around to pin his father with an aggravated glower. "It's not entirely likely we'll see that happen again. Harry clearly wanted to assert himself over me in the argument. He couldn't exactly make himself grow taller, so he floated," Snape responded evenly, the argument sounding entirely too reasonable.
"I daresay, the yelling at the top of his lungs I'd prefer not to repeat any time soon," he cautioned, eyeing Harry now with obvious warning emanating off of him.
"I... I'm sorry for that too..."
"Forgiven," Snape replied, the single word brisk. "In any case, I too would have done better to have listened to you before assuming that you had attempted to malign me under my own roof."
For all that, Severus stopped short of offering a real apology. Harry couldn't help his wry grin in response. It was enough that Snape was acting as though it was all trivial. That him floating three to four feet in the air was no more than should have been expected from a boy his age.
"Ye nivver took fleet 'n t' house," Tobias argued, settling in for a sulk. He was sunk down onto the couch once more now that he'd allowed himself to relax, and looked as surly as Severus himself so often did. "'Ad plenny 'a paggas, we dud."
To this Snape merely shrugged. "Every child is different. Doubtless I was prone to outbursts of magic that differed entirely from what Harry's managed."
"Aye. Ye chaffed 'nythin tha' weren't nailed down. We'd arl be ga'an to t' grocer, an' before Aa could say boo, thou wouldst 'ave chored a cowie off a high shelf. Flee reet down to thee, wit jus' this," Tobias explained, crooking his finger in the air to show how Severus had managed to summon things to himself. He looked to Harry then, seeming to enjoy how he could spin a tale to paint his son as a wee petty thief. "Couldn' be arrished to stop 'im. Yer boyo were a slape-fingert potter. T' worst in Barra."
Harry blinked, non-plussed. "Severus is a Potter?"
"No," Severus interjected, coughing. "He didn't mean that."
"What did he mean?" Harry asked, feeling hurt. "I'm a Potter, and I've never stollen anything."
Snape glowered at his father but didn't answer Harry's question directly, which only confused him more. "It doesn't bear mentioning."
"But Severus—"
"Don't whinge," Snape commanded, standing up straight. "In fact, you're to go wash your face and change for the evening. We'll need to be off soon if we want to make it in time for the midnight service."
Harry sighed but started for the door that led to the garden. Severus must really have been very serious about that goose that Lola had promised them if they showed up to Mass that evening.
In truth, Harry wasn't at all sure what to expect from a Christmas service.
He was pleasantly surprised when he found that it meant additional choir pieces and the ability to join in with his own hymnal. Those were always his favourite parts of any Sunday morning spent at St. Catherine's.
Something about the hall being lit by dim candlelight as smoky tendrils of incense wafted visibly through the air seemed even more mystical and transcendent than any other ordinary liturgy. The brass ornamentation and tools carried by the altar boys and clergy looked to be sparkling in the low lighting, and his young voice felt like it melded effortlessly with those around him—even with Severus and Toby, whose registers were leaps and bounds more mature and deeper than his own. It was the exact thing he'd felt had been missing from the choral performance he'd participated in just the evening before.
And if in the waning moments of the service he drifted to off sleep in the pew and Severus had to rouse him to assist him back to the car? Well... Severus didn't once mention it or chastise him for it.