As it turned out, Harry needn't have worried overmuch about having nothing to present to his kuya on his birthday, for Tobias Snape far outstripped him in bowling his son over with the kind of surprise sure to knock anyone's socks off.

Of course, it led to one of the loudest, most terrifying rows that Harry had ever witnessed. He had never in his life been more grateful to get to sit on the sidelines as someone else was absolutely railroaded, and he couldn't help in the heat of the exchange but to scoot his kitchen chair back until he was sat up against the wall, well out of distance for any blows they might exchange to land on him, and far enough away that he felt decently certain that if items started being thrown he'd not catch an earthenware plate to the face.

He ought to have known that Severus would have more finesse than to begin hurling his own dishware in his own kitchen, but then again, the sheer shock of finding that—technically speaking—it no longer was his kitchen might have properly put him over his threshold for resorting to spurious violence.

"THE BLOODY HOUSE! YOU PUT THE BLOODY HOUSE UP AS COLLATERAL!" Severus screamed, looking as though he was barely restraining himself from upending the kitchen table. "MY HOUSE!?"

"It weren't yers! Weren't nivver yers! Tha mot fra' Barclays shownt it to us, she dud! 'S our name, Sev'rus! Tobias n' Eileen Snape! Divn't see yer name on ter morgidge—nowt anywhoar!"

Snape's nostrils were flaring open and shut as a lathered horse's would have: very quickly. He was breathing so loudly that Harry worried that his kuya might well faint from acute hypoxia. "You abandoned the house for more than ten years. You abandoned me for more than ten years! What made you think you had the right!? And for something so bloody fucking stupid!"

"S' nowt stupid, ya oaf! Will make us a awful lotta dust, Sev'rus! Give'er a lofe—"

"A chance," Severus snarled, stalking forward to his father until he was looking up into his face. The height difference didn't seem to bother the wizard when he seemed on the verge of losing control of his magic.

Harry felt certain that he could feel the product of Snape's fury roiling about the room. The constrained space felt pregnant with possibility. Deadly possibility.

"You want a chance? Your chance was moving in with us! Your chance was to get a regular, proper job like any other bloke and just to keep it for long enough that perhaps we could have had this discussion like men! Instead, you reverse mortgaged the damn house on an insane whim!"

"Whazzit matter, laddo!?" Toby matched Severus for his tone and threw his hands into the air. When they fell back down, he firmly anchored them onto his slim hips and leant forward so he was looming over his only son. "Yer kind 'ave ways'a keepin' odments fra' t' bank—"

Severus blinked several times, the whites around his irises so stark from how wide open his eyes were that he looked nearly deranged. His mouth and nostrils were screwed up as though he'd detected a whiff of something rank underneath his huge nose.

"You fool. You... you utter and complete..." Severus heaved in a great breath and turned from his father, walking a step or two away and bringing his shaking hands up to cradle his head and face, his head swaying left and right in a silent 'no,' over and over again.

He continued to mumble to himself, sounding shellshocked. Harry's concern mounted.

Severus always knew what to do. When Wulf and Yaxley had turned up? Severus had improvised a plan without batting an eyelash. When Snowdrop Hill was dying on the ground without giving any indication of what had afflicted her, Severus had remained calm. When confronted with a dying man in the dead of the night beside the road? Severus hadn't taken even an additional second to do what he knew needed done, as distasteful and disagreeable as that was.

To see him looking so lost filled the boy with a sense of panic he'd not felt since they'd been speeding away from Spinner's End in the Marina, knowing that they'd had two wizards after them, hell bent on their destruction.

Snape's breaths were coming in ragged gasps. He'd finally made his way over to the far bench and was clutching the edges of it in his hands, using it to support his staggering weight. When he spoke, it looked as though he were speaking to the assortment of knives and equipment he had lined up against the wall.

"I cannot simply keep the house through magic if the bank decides to repossess the property. To do so would not merely be wrong... but quite impossible. Were I to ward the property against muggle law enforcement, my custodianship over Harry would be called into question, and I may find myself in violation of our Statute of Secrecy. That alone could be borne, but when the contention is over a large sum of money, or, say, property, there can be no doubt that I will be prosecuted for a violation of the provisions which exist to protect muggles from magical predation—"

"Eh?"

Severus growled and slammed his hands down on the bench, magic rippling out from his palms until it crackled along the woodgrain, looking like a branching network of lightning was shining forth from the surface.

Both Harry and Tobias flinched back. Finally, the elder Snape seemed to cop to the fact that his son was in a precarious mental state.

"There are laws that protect the likes of you from the likes of me, Da'! If wizards and witches wished it so—and baring any impediment such as the pesky laws which would put us away for taking advantage—our world could steal anything we liked from you. Money, houses. We could enslave every last one of you—take away your will to live, to think, to be your own person—and force you to work for us. Violations of that set of laws come with stiff penalties, and to steal a property, which has been legally promised to the bank, away with magic could very well earn me a cell in some dank hole somewhere.

"I cannot risk protecting the house from the bank if we lose it through non-payment," Severus sighed, his shoulders slumping and his voice going hoarse. "If you fail at this, then the house will no longer be ours."

He turned then, so quickly that the sight of his burning eyes made Harry recoil, particularly as it felt as though magic lashed through the air from the swinging ends of Snape's lank locks.

"I refuse to be left without my home," he hissed, advancing on his father again, his eyes promising murder. "I refuse to give up Harry simply because I cannot afford a roof over his head. I refuse to allow your selfishness to imperil everything I've worked for eleven years to maintain!"

The tip of one of Snape's yellowed fingertips jabbed his father in the chest as he drew even with the elder man.

"You owe me for leaving. You owe me for the years and years you refused to look for work after the factory eliminated your position! You owe me for rescuing your sorry arse from Carleton Hall when it looked like the weather might get too cold! And you owe me for putting everything I have now in jeopardy," he snarled, a bit of spittle visibly flying from between his taunt lips. "You sign that lease and I will be on the papers! You answer to me! Your margins for operation are under my express control, and you work at my pleasure—or else I will bloody well replace you!"

As he spoke, the finger continued jabbing Tobias until Severus' father was forced to take a step back, his brows shooting down in a look of terrified consternation.

"Now deek here! Yer ta pee in yer oan powk neukk—"

"This is every bit my own business! I'll pee in it if I damn well please!" Severus spat, his eyes shining with malice. "You've done enough damage in going behind my damn back and I'll not leave it up to chance whether you manage to lose me my home and my..." Snape paused and swallowed, shaking his head. "If you lose me custodianship over Harry there will be hell to pay, Da'. Hell!"

"Ach, fine," Tobias conceded, shrugging as though he were being very magnanimous rather than that his hand had been forced. "Sud like to see thou wukin' wiv thine t'ol fella—"

"I'm not working with you," Severus denied. "You'll be working for me."

"'S nowt what t' papers sed."

Snape's lip quivered where it hovered over his canine. "Pray tell, what did the papers say?"

"Registered as Snape an' Son, nowt Son an' Snape—"

Severus groaned aloud and dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. His words were muffled by his wrists. "Ohhr Gord—yer d'int... nehrr..."

"Eh whatn? For suer issa better job than flizzlin' arl day at The Yow."

Snape tore his hands away from his face, his eyes red. He looked hunted, like prey that had been backed into a corner and knew he had met his end. "And what am I meant to be doing at this enterprise, hm? Passing you tools, no doubt? Cleaning up after you? I'm better served scraping vomit off the bar than playing shop boy at some imaginary business you've yet to realise!"

"Is gewd wuk, laddo," Tobias doubled down, stamping a foot. "Better'n slingin' drinks."

Snape snorted, his whole face twitching with agitation. "Surprising words offered from an old drunk."

Tobias grunted and stared with baleful intent at his son, their eyes meeting until it was unclear who might win the staring match.

"Severus, I can help out at the shop," Harry offered, startling both men into looking up at him. It seemed that they'd forgotten him in the fray. In front of Harry, Curry sat upright, his ears pricked and twitching this way and that while he followed the row as might have a spectator at a tennis match.

Actually, as soon as Tobias had introduced the idea of the mechanic's shop over dinner—and well before he'd informed Severus that he'd already found space to let and filed paperwork for incorporation, which had involved reverse mortgaging the house for capital—Harry's heart had leapt at the prospect.

Cars. He felt a frisson of excitement. Big, powerful, with intricate and fascinating inner workings, the likes of which he never saw in his dull day-to-day at school, or the more pastoral work he engaged in on Gammy's homestead.

Cars.

He'd almost forgotten how much he loved them, especially in the wake of their accident, where his fear—so often equal to his sheer appreciation—got the best of him. And, of course, he'd found himself a bit chary of ever interfering again after he'd inadvertently corrupted Severus' engine with Potion Mu...

But if he were given the chance to look under the hood again, and this time with someone like Tobias guiding him—a man who, for all his faults, was at the very least a skilled tradesman when it came to mechanics and tool-and-die casting—Harry couldn't help but to see the briefest flash of a future pass before his eyes.

Him, with a spanner in hand and in a stained boilersuit, wearing a brilliant smile that shined forth from beneath a grease-streaked face.

When he glanced up again it was to see that Tobias looked rather amused at his offer to help while Severus was starring daggers at him, likely for his betrayal. The older wizard had a hard look in his eyes as his gaze bored into Harry's own.

"You," Snape breathed, "are a slave to your infantile whims and fancies, Potter."

Harry's dream evapourated into exhaust fumes. He felt himself frowning.

"Nae, 'ee's a gewd lad," Tobias argued, grinning at Harry and showing a mouthful of greying teeth with plenty of gaps where some of them had either fallen out or been pulled. "Gan let 'im wuk fer us, Sev'rus—we'll 'ave 'im in fine fettle, suer aneuff."

"The boy is a menace beneath the bonnet, Da'," Snape warned. He finally looked to be tiring of the debate, for by that point it seemed that he had accepted his lack of control over the situation at hand. "He near enough poisoned the Marina."

"Poison't it?"

"He infected the oil sump with an unknown and untested potion."

Harry glowered at Severus and only just restrained himself from sticking his tongue out at him. "I didn't know it would wipe off onto the dipstick! You didn't know what the potion was either!"

"No, I didn't," Snape agreed, rolling his black eyes to the ceiling. "Which is why I wouldn't have used my potion-soaked shirt as an oil rag after checking the levels, you little fool—"

"Now, now," Tobias stepped in, drawing himself up and apparently attempting to look authoritative and mature, which was an odd affectation from the perennially juvenile and disorganised ex-tramp. "Wey are thee drivin' in me Marina if she's poison't?"

Severus looked mutinous but answered all the same. "Because I was able to determine that the potion posed no threat to the car's continued operation."

"Nowt a threat?" Tobias pressed, his face stern.

"It works better!" Harry argued before Severus could play down his contribution. "It flushed the oil lines and the Marina runs better than it did before," he argued, looking at his kuya and glaring back at the older wizard who looked as though he'd dearly like to shut him up.

"How ista?"

"Severus said it got rid of the... the partycule...? Par—"

"Particulate," Snape supplied, closing his eyes and pinching the crooked bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger. "For lack of a better explanation, it vanished the loose particulate from the used engine oil. It also happens to be a far superior lubricant to any I've compared it to."

"Dun' soond poison't to us, laddo," Tobias argued, crossing his long arms over his thin chest. "Soonds righ' barrie. A proper improvement. Clipt an' heelt, like."

Tobias smirked as his hand came up to rub at the rough, unshaven skin of his jaw and lower face.

"Don't get any ideas," Severus warned, sighing with resignation. "I'll not be sharing the formulation with you. If you want this venture to succeed, it will do so because you bust your arse fixing the cars your customers bring in."

"'N here Aa thowt yeh wanted us to do weel," Tobias wheedled.

Severus stomped from the kitchen, his face a mask of conflicted emotions as his father followed him, dogging his steps.

"Don't follow me upstairs," Harry heard the man warn his father. The stairwell creaked from Snape's weight and Harry realised he must have been retreating to his own room, probably to sulk.

"Aa've a righ'—"

"You didn't before and you certainly don't now," Snape snarled. When Harry poked his head around the wall it was to see Severus waving his wand over the doorway upstairs and an iridescent barrier shimmering into existence.

"Harry," he called, "if you have any desire to sleep in your room tonight you'll come up immediately after using the loo. You have ten minutes before it keeps you out too."

With that, Severus turned on his heel and stomped up the stairs, leaving his father fuming down below. A great departure from the triumphant face he'd worn when announcing his coup de grâce over supper.

Harry lost no time at all in flying to the back yard as though Old Scratch himself were on his heels. He almost shut the back door in Curry's face when the horse-like dog made to follow him as was their routine each night. He made it up the stairs with a few moments to spare, but his heart was still pounding as he laid down to sleep.

He'd not even bothered to play with Wheat or to put in his customary practise on the guitar; he merely slipped under the quilt as though Severus had warded that against his entrance too.

It took an hour or more for him to sleep that night. The events from the last two hours were too fresh in his mind.

Enormously conflicted, Harry couldn't tell whether he pitied Severus—and to some extent himself—for the perilous position that Tobias had seemingly placed them in, or whether he was bubbling over with excitement at the prospect of being allowed to work alongside the elder Snape, elbows deep under a propped open bonnet, or perhaps on one of those neat roll-y cart things he'd seen men use to get underneath their cars. Then, whenever he thought it might have been the latter, he couldn't help but to feel guilty, because Severus clearly thought the entire idea to be a great boondoggle.

That was a word he'd learnt from reading the Prophet. The writers evidently enjoyed using it quite a bit in the Business and Current Events sections of the paper (and additionally in the Non-Current and Non-Consecutive Events section, which Harry still hadn't quite managed to read without thoroughly confusing himself in the process).

Perhaps, at that, he would hear Ganymede say it, on the following morning's broadcast...

Which, of course, reminded Harry that Severus was still in possession of his radio.

He sat up in bed, a deep frown creasing his features. It had been a full hour and a half since he'd readied himself for bed, but without giving a thought to whether Snape himself was sleeping, Harry all at once felt an irrepressible impetus propelling him forward and to the door. Before he could say Jack Robinson, he found himself on the other side, his fist falling against the wood of Severus' own bedroom door and his cold, bare feet shuffling on the floorboards.

It was only after the knock rang out in the stillness of the first floor that Harry realised with subdued horror what he'd just presumed to do.

In half a year of staying with Severus he'd never once thought to knock at the man's bedroom door, and the idea that he should have done it over something so trivial—something that might very well further provoke his kuya into taking out his overwrought wrath upon Harry's messy head—saw him shaking in his proverbial boots.

No noise came from the other side of the door, but just when Harry finally turned on his heel and began to slink back across the hall, he felt a cold draught that had previously been absent wash over the exposed skin of his ankles and neck.

Rather than investigate, he merely shivered and reached for the doorknob of his own room before he was stopped by a colourless hand landing on his shoulder.

"Another nightmare, Harry?"

It was a lucky thing that he'd at least been somewhat expecting Snape, as it kept him from jumping a foot or more in the air, but he still felt misgivings about facing the man for such a stupid reason. Instead, he shook his head, still not facing Severus, and mumbled something to the effect that whatever it was he'd knocked for had been stupid.

"You've never knocked before," Snape observed, his voice holding no hint of the anger he'd displayed earlier in the evening. "Surely, it must have been something bothersome if it warranted you standing out in the hall."

"I didn't mean to wake you up, Sev'rus, I'm sorry."

"I wasn't asleep, it's no bother. Come in for a moment, at the least."

Harry sighed, but if Snape really was in as equable a mood as he seemed to be, then perhaps there was hope of him getting his magic radio back. He turned to treat his kuya to a sheepish grin and shuffled in through the cracked door, his curious eyes greedily soaking up the darkened surroundings.

He might have expected that Severus would have festooned the walls of his adult bedroom with whatever posters hadn't fit properly in his old room's meager space, but he couldn't see a single one.

On the far wall was a small photograph of what looked to be a tall man standing next to a waif-thin woman wearing an old-fashioned white dress. Beside that, curiously arranged at a diagonal—up and to the right—rather than sitting flush, was what looked to be a very simple portrait, painted by an artist that Harry couldn't help thinking wasn't any good.

Not that he was any proper judge of art—his own drawings were hardly the works of a young Picasso—but he found the monotone background and almost flattened face of the young woman staring forth to be very nearly crude. Not at all like the art that was featured on some of his aunt's BBC specials where they toured the National Gallery or the Louvre and highlighted famous paintings by the art world's giants. In spite of that, the subject was clearly pretty enough.

Harry squinted.

She had features that recalled Lola's. A broad, round nose and full cheeks that must have only ripened when she was occasioned to smile. Her eyes were black, and, despite her youth, she had deep bags underneath. The edges of her mouth were creased in a tiny Mona Lisa smile, but her full lips did little to suggest mirth or amusement, or even any sense of private satisfaction.

Severus saw him staring and stepped up alongside him, as though they were two gentlemen taking in an exhibit at a museum rather than standing in the middle of Snape's bedroom late at night.

"Do you know who she is?" His kuya asked him, having clasped his hands together behind his back.

Harry glanced up at him, and then back to the portrait, which seemed to show the same woman as was photographed in the white dress.

The man beside her was tall, handsome, young, and unmistakably it was Severus' own father.

"She's your mum."

"Yes."

Harry nodded and looked at her again, searching for similarities between her and Severus.

Snape was paler than his mother, and had features which more closely recalled his father, but some of his colouring must have come from the late Eileen Snape, for he'd inherited her deep black hair and eyes, in addition to the thick, black eyebrows that Severus so often made use of when scowling at anything that offended him. Beyond that, while she seemed thinner than she might have been if she'd been properly fed up, her face was rounder, her jaw soft and feminine. If Harry had seen her walking down the street he probably would never have thought that she could have been related to her own child.

"You look more like your dad." He observed, giving a regretful twist of his mouth at the admission, as if to say 'sorry...'

"A fact I lament every time I'm forced to look in a mirror." Snape dryly remarked.

Harry blinked. Was there a mirror in this room? He didn't see one. "I didn't know we had a mirror in the house—"

"We don't." Snape sighed then, sounding rather tired. "That's on purpose. But I am occasioned to see myself whenever I use the loo at The Yow."

"Or driving, I suppose," Harry thought aloud, "in the rear-view."

"Yes, or when driving."

"She's... erm... she's pretty." Harry complimented, scratching at the back of his neck. Truthfully, she was pretty, but not in any noticeable way. In fact, Snape's mother was rather plain. Perhaps she could have been radiant if she didn't look so very... apathetic. Or maybe if she did her hair and face like Harry had seen other women do...

Yet her thick hair wasn't arranged in any especial style, and her features lacked any indication that she took extra care to enhance what natural symmetry she was blessed with.

"Sometimes in the Prophet they interview portraits," Harry observed, hinting at something that had frequently been on his mind but which he'd never given voice to before. "How do they do that?"

"Some paintings are made with magical paints which, when activated, allow them to communicate."

"Does she—?"

"She does not. Or at least she never has."

"Oh..." Harry sighed, feeling disappointed, but mostly on Severus' behalf. "I bet it would be nice to talk to her, huh?"

"Perhaps. Usually, for the paintings to develop a decent likeness of their subject's disposition, they must spend a great deal of time with whomever they were modeled after. For example, if I were to commission a painting of her that could be awakened at this point in time, it would bear little resemblance to her in personality. This one I found in the attic after her death. I'm not certain when it was painted, or by whom, but it doesn't seem to have much of her in it. I'm afraid it's... it's just a painting."

"Oh."

"Yes, quite."

Harry finally wrested his attention away from Eileen Snape's portrait and he looked over the rest of the room. The bedframe was old and wooden, with four half posts. On top were a pile of antique quilts that might have been sewn up to fifty or more years before. To the side of the bed was a side table, atop which sat a fussy, old lamp with a dust-caked shade, a book—open to a page so covered in notes that there appeared to be no margins—and a tiny, round picture frame that was propped up with a kickstand. When Harry squinted at it, he saw a very young girl, no more than a baby, in a white dress.

"And who's she?" He asked, if only to stall for time. Severus seemed to be in a chatty mood, and he'd not yet taken Harry to task for his curiosity. "Did you—do you—have a sister?"

"A sister?" Snape asked, frowning. "I haven't got a sister."

"That little girl there," Harry specified, pointing at the tiny photograph.

Surprisingly Snape coloured up to his ears before he stalked over to the picture, slamming it down against the table so Harry could no longer look at it.

"That's not a little girl."

"She's wearing a dress—"

"A baptismal gown."

"Yeah, Severus," Harry agreed, rolling his eyes. "A gown."

"You little cretin!" Snape snarled looking offended. At this, he seemed to reverse his decision over the photo and he swiped it up, holding it a foot from Harry's face. "Both girls and boys wear baptismal gowns! That's me, you absolute jackanapes!"

Now that Harry saw it, the resemblance was uncanny. Especially the positively poisonous scowl that the baby—who could not have been older than three months of age—wore.

"O-oh... s-sorry, Severus—"

Severus grunted and settled the picture of the black-haired baby back onto the table, behind the book he'd evidently been reading before bed.

"Why are you in here, Potter?" Snape asked, his mood having soured considerably since he'd opened the door just moments earlier. Harry regretted his turn from warm magnanimity toward acrimony.

"Can I..." Harry stopped himself and took a deep breath, regretting that he'd come to Snape's door over something so clearly inconsequential. His mouth quivered with indecision. "Can I... er... have it back? Please?"

"It?"

"The... the radio."

Snape drew himself up and frowned, crossing his arms over his chest. That was the first Harry noticed that his kuya had changed at some point into a long, grey night shirt that fell to his mid-calf. It made him look rather antiquated; like Ebenezer Scrooge on his late-night excursion with the ghosts in A Christmas Carol (which Harry had seen when it had aired on Christmas a few weeks before).

"I didn't take it from you to punish you, Harry."

"You didn't?" Harry asked, feeling hopeful at hearing this. He wrung his hands together in front of him. "Then I can have it back?"

Snape grunted as he turned toward the table, pulling out the single drawer and tossing the puck over to Harry while the boy wasn't expecting it. Despite of the lack of warning, Harry still managed to catch it without any fumbling.

"I didn't," Snape affirmed. "You should have told me that you'd been sent something by owl, however, and, in the future, I expect you not to touch any packages that might come through owl post."

"Should I take them from the owl?"

"No. Fetch me and I'll untie them. Don't even lay a finger on anything I've not had a chance to check yet," Snape warned, looking quite stern.

Harry held the radio up to his eyes, marveling at how very innocuous it looked. "This was okay then?"

"It arrived unadulterated."

"Unadult—?"

"No one had messed with it, brat." Snape quirked a smile. "Now, I want you to have a think over what might have happened had someone a mind to send you something cursed. I expect we shan't be needing to have this conversation a second time, or shall we?"

Harry's face drained of colour as he imagined any number of terrible afflictions he might have sustained—many of which he'd read about through the reports of Misuse of Magic in the paper. "N-no, Severus."

"Good."

Harry traced a finger over the metal face and heard the slight buzzing noise that suggested the radio was transmitting a signal, but before he could listen in, Severus reached across and tapped his wand to the top of the disk, causing it to fall silent.

"I'll show you how it works another time. For now, it's too late for Celestina Warbeck. I'll doubtless go to bed with a splitting migraine if I have to listen to even a single second."

"Who's she?"

Snape sneered. The same look of distaste he wore whenever they were forced to listen to the music that came on the radio in the car rather than his own cassette player. "A singer, if you could call her that."

Harry nodded and smiled, knowing that Severus would understand it as a show of his gratitude. When he reached the door, however, he hesitated.

"Something else on your mind?"

Harry nodded, his head resting against the doorframe. When he turned, it was slowly, and he still couldn't take his eyes off of the tiny, silver radio. He rested his weight against the closed door and propped himself against it with his bare feet angled out in front of him.

"Do you know who sent it, Severus?"

Heaving a deep sigh, Snape brought up a hand to rub at his eyes. "I do not."

"That's not good, is it?"

"I wouldn't say so, no. It could have been anyone. People know of you, and now that you're living with a known wizard and it's been widely reported in the press, it could have been just about anyone who read the story."

"Even Dumbledore?"

"I think it unlikely that the gift came from the headmaster, but I suppose that's a possibility. I've written to the shop that sent it and received word back that the gift was paid for by a proxy from Gringott's bank who refused to disclose the buyer or the name on the account."

Harry's face screwed up as he thought back on opening it that very morning. "They know I like music..."

Snape shrugged, looking unimpressed. "Most people like music, Harry."

"To better culdicate your taste in music..." Harry quoted aloud. At that, he supposed it didn't necessarily suggest that whoever had sent the radio knew of his tastes in music, only that they assumed that by including the magical variety that the mysterious sender would be broadening Harry's horizons.

However, Snape frowned and stroked at his lower lip with his index finger, pulling it this way and that so that it exposed his jagged, lower incisors. "Cultivate," he corrected, though clearly his heart wasn't in it. He looked far too distracted.

"Yeah."

"I have changed my mind."

"I... you what?" Harry asked, taken aback. He gripped the radio to his chest, suddenly afraid that Severus had decided to take it back.

"They do know what you've been listening to," he growled. "Otherwise, they wouldn't have had cause to suspect you've never been exposed to wizarding music before."

Snape cursed under his breath and pulled a foot back, clearly about to kick the bed post before he stopped himself, likely remembering how he'd made that same mistake just that very morning. Now, he was barefoot, and didn't even have the benefit of socks to protect his long toes. Instead, he let out an aggravated snort of breath through his nose, looking rather like a bull readying himself for a charge.

"Better! Hah! I'll show them better!" Snape spat.

"What's that mean?"

"It means they're sneering at my taste in music, Potter! What else!"

Something about that didn't quite track for Harry, who merely raised a skeptical eyebrow, not realising that he'd picked the expression up from Severus in the first place. "How do you figure?"

"They're suggesting that the music I've shared with you has been of poor quality! That my musical instruction for you has been lacking!"

Harry shrugged. He didn't think that such a conclusion could be reached from the simple word choice used in the small dedication but when Snape looked so hellbent on something, he'd found it was best to let the man have his way. "Kay. Well, I rather like your music, Severus. But—"

Snape turned on his heel and surveyed him from underneath lowered brows. "But?"

"But Diamond Dave is still better than Sammy." Harry grinned.

"Brat." Snape still glowered, but he eventually surrendered to a little snort of amusement which cracked his stern façade into the smallest sliver of a smile. "He is not."

"He is, but 'cause it's your birthday... I think Sammy's pretty good too."

His kuya smirked. "How very kind of you."

"I'm sorry your dad had to go and ruin your birthday, Severus," Harry admitted. He shoved the radio in his pajama pants' pocket and wrung his hands together. "And I'm sorry I didn't get you anything..."

"You didn't know to get me anything. And there's nothing I want." Snape shook his head. "As for him? Well. He has rather a lot of work to do if he's going to try and pull this one out of his hat," he said with a roll of his eyes.

His eyes rounding behind his glasses' frames, Harry bounced on his tiptoes. "People can really do that?"

Snape's expression was eloquent in how it expressed his confusion.

"Wizards really pull things out of hats? Like in magic shows?" Harry asked, referencing the few books on the subject he'd seen at his old primary—for Aunt Petunia certainly always changed the channel whenever an illusionist or magician came on-screen at the Dursley household.

"I suppose we could," Snape answered cautiously. "I haven't any idea why we'd want to, however. In any case, I was merely using that as an expression. Da' isn't magical in the least, so if he actually manages to spin up a successful mechanics shop in this part of the town then I'll be damned."

"Would he need magic to do that?"

"No. He'd need to learn organisational skills and a proper sense of diligence. By that metric, I'd likely be less surprised if he came home casting spells and waving a wand," Harry's kuya sneered, looking disgruntled. "He's probably the laziest person I've ever met, and that is saying quite a lot: I taught eleven to seventeen-year-olds for seven years."

Harry couldn't help but to grimace at this bleak assessment. "So... I don't think I understood: if it doesn't work... we lose the house?"

Staring down at him with a faintly pitying look, Severus nodded. "You understood correctly. But I won't let that happen, Harry."

With his hands balled into fists, Harry looked away, wanting to look anywhere other than at the frank honesty he saw in Snape's sad, black eyes.

"How?" He demanded, not able to keep the worry from his trembling voice.

"I won't be trusting this venture to him. He may have signed the paperwork, and this house may have been deeded to him, but make no mistake: I will not be giving it up willingly." Snape growled.

"And my custodianship...?"

"I won't be giving you up willingly either."