Harry wasn't at all certain that Snowdrop was a chip off her father's block, as her mother had accused. Mostly because he wasn't convinced that her mother had been telling the truth.
What was certain, however, was that Snowdrop was the most bloody-minded girl he'd ever had the misfortune to meet, and that no amount of wheedling her on the walk back up the bank had convinced her that the girl's indigent mother might have been telling her bold-faced lies about her paternity.
They'd left shortly after learning of Bertie Tibbons' residence, and in the dark, he'd joined up with her while Papagena Hill hadn't deigned to leave her burrow beneath the ripped tarps. How she was staying warm was anyone's guess, but she couldn't be impressed upon to leave. Not by her own mother, and certainly not by her own daughter, who'd not even wasted the breath necessary to bother.
At least that was fine with Harry. He certainly didn't want to have to fess up to having overheard their conversation, or to explain what he'd been doing lurking beside the tent.
Furthermore, Nicky was no help; he wasn't terribly concerned over who Snowdrop's father may have been anyway and didn't seem to understand her urgency in wanting to find out.
A losing battle probably, Harry conceded. If Snowdrop wanted to cajole her grandmother into making the drive out to a men's prison in Haver-wherever, then that was her business. He'd be well enough to wash his hands of the problem. Nicky seemed to be in full agreement, at least. He'd shaken his head at him when Harry had attempted to recall what Papagena had told Ms. Tibbons the night of the Nativity play with limited success.
All Harry managed to remember was that it was something about the month of February and some epic lady hero, which, when he told it aloud, sounded beyond preposterous.
At the bridge they attempted to part ways before realising that there was no way the fact that they'd been wandering unaccompanied wouldn't be discovered. Either Severus or Gammy would go to pick the children up and find them not where they ought to have been and hours displaced from when they should have reported the problem.
In the end, they were made to skulk to Snape & Son, where at the very least Severus was preoccupied enough with a client's car that he didn't have more than five minutes to spare on taking them to task. From the shop, Snowdrop and Nicky waited out Gammy and avoided the trouble that inevitably would have fallen upon their heads had they been found anywhere except at Severus' place of work when they were meant to be picked up around seven that evening.
Upon parting, no one said much of anything. The joy of having successfully managed to see Die Hard had been thoroughly ruined by the scene that had played out alongside the river, and Harry was selfishly glad to be rid of the siblings' company.
It wasn't that he couldn't understand their morose faces, or the fact that seeing their mother living rough would have been shocking and upsetting... but all the same he was glad not to have to be... whatever it was that he was made to be while in their presence that evening.
He'd pitied them. Even as an orphan, he'd pitied two children whose parents were all three ostensibly alive. He'd felt compelled to be soft and quiet while Snowdrop and Nicky had stared off in the distance, for once not arguing with one another. He'd felt as though he were tiptoeing amongst the broken glass that he'd seen alongside the river, and it was exhausting.
As soon as they'd left he heaved a sigh of relief and welcomed the change of pace, even if it meant listening to Severus lecture at him over his shoulder while the older wizard stooped in front of the car's bonnet with a spanner in one hand and a torch in the other.
With Snape's mouth occupied holding onto a spare bolt or two, his words and admonitions were pretty garbled anyhow. Harry could withstand that.
"'N wiff eh dep'sition comin' up, ah kent 'ave you 'oo knows where—"
Harry looked up from his fretboard diagram, having been mostly distracted during Severus' monologue on his irresponsibility. "What was that?"
"Eh dep'sition—"
"Yeah," Harry nodded. "When's that suppose'ta be?"
Finally, Snape straightened and ducked from beneath the lifted bonnet to spit the bolt in his teeth into his palm. "I don't know yet. I heard they were considering a date sometime in March. That gives me precious little time."
"Time to do what? What is a deposition, Severus?"
"A deposition precedes a trial, if there is to be one. From what I have gathered, solicitors for both parties will be present and facts and evidence presented. I'll be expected to give my testimony about what I saw in July."
"You will? What about me?"
Severus paused, a frown creasing his brow. "I'm not entirely sure, to be honest with you. I'm not sure I'd think it appropriate for you to have to attend the session if your relatives are to be present for the proceedings, but doubtless they'll want to have your testimony as well."
Harry's hands tapped out a fluttering arpeggio that Joe had set him to practising in his last session. His ring finger cramped and he mistakenly tapped it twice instead of depressing his pinky, which was a constant source of frustration for him. He'd been attempting to work on the dexterity of his fingers ever since his most recent lesson, while also still doing his memorisation exercises on the notes of each string. There was no telling when Joe would begin to quiz him on them, and at the very least, he'd proven satisfactory at naming all of the notes of the first five frets in the previous session.
"What's testimony supposed to be?" he asked, giving his hand a rest. "Is it like the Old and New Testament? Like from church?"
Snape appeared mildly surprised for once. "That's a better guess than you usually make, Potter. The root of the word is the same. The Latin 'testis,' which is to bear witness, or in more simple terms: to tell someone else that you've seen something."
"So I'll be telling them what happened basically, right?"
"That would be my assumption. Given that the scope of the deposition may be broader than simply condemning your relatives for their abandonment, they may ask you a great deal more about your life with your aunt and uncle."
"Like what?"
"I can't say with any certainty, Harry," Severus answered, leaning a bony hip against a nearby tool cart that was pushed up against the wall. "When we went to the store that first day you seemed surprised that I would deign to feed you, and you considered raw courgette an appropriate meal: I'm sure they'd be interested to know your eating habits. Or perhaps why it was that you were relegated to a cupboard when there was a perfectly serviceable third bedroom on the first floor."
"That was Dudley's second bedroom. If there had been a fourth bedroom, maybe I'd have gotten one—"
Harry's words stopped when he noticed that Snape was treating him to a patently skeptical look, his eyebrow raised as though to question whether Harry himself even believed what he was saying.
"I have only two bedrooms in my home, and by rights they're both mine, but I certainly wasn't about to begrudge you the use of one."
"You do for your Dad."
Snape grunted and tossed the spanner with a clatter into a metal toolkit at his feet that was full to overflowing. The spanner bounced off of a rubber mallet and toppled to the floor with a loud, discordant clang. "That's different."
Harry actually paused to consider that for a moment before nodding slowly. "Yeah, I guess it sorta is..."
Tobias only didn't have his room because he'd given it up when he abandoned Severus to his own devices after Snape's mother had died without warning. If Snape still had a chip on his shoulder after that, Harry couldn't quite find it in himself to blame him.
"Where is Toby, anyway?"
"Making moulds, he said. A few of the pieces I needed apparently are supposed to be die-cast."
"That sounds hard," Harry noted, his voice betraying his mild disinterest.
"As I believe I mentioned before: we are fortunate to have the machinery here to address a number of such manufacturing concerns. This doesn't seem as though it was any run of the mill auto shop before it closed the first time," Snape mused aloud. "Either the owner had very niche hobbies, or they specialised in creating and manufacturing specialty parts, possibly to ship elsewhere in the country. Either way, we're certainly benefiting from their misfortune."
"Do you remember Culpepper's? From before, I mean."
"When I was a child coming up here, I didn't have a car of my own, so it wouldn't have occurred to me to wonder at what went on in an auto shop," Snape snorted, apparently amused that Harry thought he must know everything about the town. "Did you wonder about every closed store front over on Swift Street or is it easier to just assume it's always been that way? Deserted, that is."
"I guess it just seems... like it's been forever, yeah."
"It wasn't. That was the busiest street in Cokeworth until I went away to Hogwarts. As children, we don't always see how things might have been, or might one day be, but often only how they are. I never was occasioned to step foot in Culpepper Motors, and therefore it was merely a storefront like any other to me when I was a child. Besides the fact that we now lease the premises, I have no insights into how they might have been run. They certainly didn't leave any paperwork behind to suggest what it was that they specialised in."
They passed the evening in companionable silence while Harry gave cursory attention to his homework—far less so than he'd normally bothered with before he'd received his Lady Godiva and before Severus had been so wholly consumed with work—and Tobias joined them only before they were set to return home in the Marina, mentioning that he was now waiting for yet another step in the protracted process that was die-making to be completed.
Or at least that's what Harry thought he'd said. His usual Cumbrian was now rendered even more perplexing given that he'd added in a number of industry terms that Harry was altogether unfamiliar with.
They all retired upon reaching the house, not one of them bothering to wait up longer than necessary. Harry only spent a bare five minutes after reaching his room on making sure that Wheat had enough water and crickets to sustain him where usually he preferred to tell the spider all about his day. Indeed, he imagined that he could have spent at least an hour talking about Die Hard, and an hour more on what had happened by the river, but the thought of spilling his guts about any of it proved too exhausting.
Wheat would understand, he was sure.
Normalcy was a blessed relief after a tumultuous day such as he'd had, and he enjoyed perhaps a full week of his usual routine: over-complicated and age inappropriate reading assignments from Mr. Fowler, mind-numbingly infantile music classes, a gratifying guitar lesson following another strange exchange of stinky goods between Joe and Snape, and Severus cursing over yet another wrecked car chassis (he was beginning to get quite the reputation for his superior auto body work. A fact he bemoaned loudly to Harry who knew well his antipathy towards Transfiguration).
Whenever Harry had a free moment, Snape took to training him up on how to perform routine oil changes, an easy enough task that provided Harry with something he could reliably assist in whenever he was available after school. If Snape was too preoccupied to notice that Harry had begun dosing the new oil with a couple of drops of Potion Mu (from a phial which he'd spirited away from the kitchen potions cabinet, where Harry had noticed Severus stash it during the Christmas season) each time he was tasked with an oil change, well, then that was his problem.
Harry took it as a certainty that it would help their business. Snape didn't have to know about it, and if Snape didn't know, he couldn't very well get in trouble, could he? Additionally, Harry couldn't recall Severus ever expressly forbidding that they use the new potion in the oil lines, only that he had concerns.
Concerns which Harry considered to be a load of pish.
Nicky, whenever he dropped by—which was happening with increasing frequency—liked to stand over Harry's shoulder or help out with the oil sump, and since four hands were better than two, Harry'd never once complained. Especially since Severus couldn't get any of his magical work done when Nicky was around to witness him using his wand, and he was stuck doing routine muggle labour—a fact which set him back hours whenever the siblings were under his care. If Nicky was the only other child about, and he was absorbed in draining the oil lines, sometimes Severus was actually able to manage a bit of transfiguration on the side, so long as he conducted his work on the other end of the garage.
Tobias, as ever, was an elusive presence, and Harry only knew that he was about when Cur Dog was in residence. For all that he never appeared to be working that Harry could see, newly machined parts that Severus needed to complete a repair appeared with reassuring regularity whenever they were necessary, which Harry's kuya seemed duly satisfied with, all things considered.
Harry himself might have thanked the eldest Snape for a bit more hands-on support of their joint venture, but it didn't seem as though that would be likely. Tobias seemed to consider any labour that fell outside the purview of his specialised training as being beneath him. Harry wasn't so sure about how Severus felt about his father's snobbishness, but Harry certainly was rankled on the young man's behalf. From what he understood, Severus' previous position as a Potions Master had been hard earned, and hadn't been the sort of job any lay wizard could have landed himself in. Not to mention that it came with additional responsibilities in the way of student supervision and Head-of-Houseship. Yet, when Harry had suggested it months earlier, Snape hadn't for one moment turned his nose up at the idea of wiping down the bar at The Yow. In fact, Harry didn't doubt that Snape would likely have swept streets and hawked trinkets from a road-side tent had the opportunity presented itself. He simply wasn't picky about such things.
On rare occasions, Tobias would deign to help his son with the more mundane tasks necessitated by the majority of their clientele, which, to the gratification of all, comprised a growing list of locals, bringing in an assortment of vehicles from cars to delivery lorries to farming equipment.
It was on one of these days—a bleak afternoon in early March—where the bell above the door tinkled quietly and two pairs of footsteps could be heard entering the main office area.
Harry lifted himself off the empty crate he'd been perched upon and padded out of the garage to greet whomever might have been calling on such a blustery Saturday when he was surprised by the presence of Snowdrop and Gammy Hill. Gammy was unwrapping a nylon kerchief from over her grey and white hair, and Snowdrop appeared as though she'd taken no especial pains to keep the rain and wind off, and therefore could have easily passed as having been shot through a cannon; such was her appearance of general disarray.
"Good afternoon, Harry," Gammy sighed, using her folded head scarf to blot at the droplets of rain that had struck on her face, forehead, and cheeks.
"Hi Gammy, er... Snow." Harry greeted, shuffling behind the counter and pulling himself up to sit on a long-legged, chrome-plated stool.
He looked from one face to another and felt with a sinking sense of certainty that this was no friendly social call. Gammy's face, so often kind and warm, was instead taunt and grim. Her mouth which normally bore a broad, tooth-flashing smile was instead a tight line across the bottom of her aged face.
Snowdrop looked uncharacteristically subdued, and not in that sullen, petulant way she usually was prone to whenever she'd found herself in a disagreeable situation.
"I wonder if we might speak to Severus for a moment, Harry? I seem to have found myself in a bit of a bind, and I could use his assistance."
"Is the Ford alright?" Harry asked, leaning over as far as he safely could on the stool to try and catch a glimpse behind the two who stood before the front windows. From what he could see, the white Cortina was parked up on the kerb, so presumably they'd driven themselves into town...
"Our car isn't in need of servicing, no," she answered, her voice brisk with an undercurrent of terse impatience. "Is Severus very busy this afternoon?"
"He's er..." Harry glanced down at the scheduling sheet and used his index finger to scroll along the side as he read to the current date and time. "Saturday, March the fourth... he's only got this suspension he's working on..."
"So it wouldn't be an imposition for you to fetch him here," Gammy prompted, with an impatient wave of her hand.
Harry shook his head as he sucked on his lower lip, not at all liking the tenor of the conversation thus far. "No, don't think so—" He began to push off his stool when he was halted by Severus' own arrival through the swinging door that separated them from the garage.
"Don't move on my account, Harry. Pamina," Severus greeted, waving a greasy, blackened hand to the two, "what can I do for you?"
He stalked behind the counter where he swiped up a filthy hand towel and began to daub off the offending grease.
Gammy sighed deeply through her nose and pulled Snowdrop before her, her hands forming into fists in the oil-cloth material that made up her raincoat. "I'm afraid I come in need of a favour, Severus. Would you object to keeping Blossom with you this afternoon? I've some pressing business which needs immediate attention in Penrith, and Snowdrop cannot be left to her own devices."
The hard way in which she said the final eight words had Harry's ears pricking, and he glanced at the girl across the counter from him with curiosity. She was staring down at the floor between her rubber-booted feet and blinking owlishly, seeming cowed for once. He thought he might have seen a blush creeping up her neck, filling her cartoonishly large cheeks, and, in an odd ode of familiarity to Harry's kuya: pinking up her little ears, behind which her choppy brown hair was tucked.
"It shouldn't present a problem, I don't think," Snape answered. He was blinking at the two, his eyebrows drawing down into a deep frown as it appeared he was trying to figure them out. When Snowdrop glanced up at him, they locked gazes for several long seconds while Gammy spoke about the need to address a complaint to Carleton Hall.
Harry had barely noticed any of Gammy's explanation, for he had been too annoyed with the way that Snape was staring daggers at the girl opposite them while she held the gaze steady with her own blue eyes, seemingly growing more defiant with each second she remained in the stare-off.
Only after the moment had passed had Harry the presence of mind to think back on what Gammy had just told them.
"Carleton Hall? In Penrith, Gammy?"
"That's what I said," she answered, her show of impatience seeming strange to him.
"That's where the police are..." Harry mused aloud.
"Yes, it is." She answered, her lips pursing as she glared down at Snowdrop. Any show of the girl's defiance that she'd begun to manifest while in her war of wills with Severus died away as she once more appeared contrite. "There is a fair bit of ironing over that has to happen, and I've not much time to make it there before their clerk leaves for the evening. They keep shortened hours on Saturdays.
"I should return before seven, if you're amenable to watching Snowdrop for that long, Mr. Snape." Gammy's eyebrows rose intently, and Snape nodded, even as his mouth twitched, indicating that he must have felt at least a little irritated with the imposition.
"And it's only your granddaughter today, Pamina? Mr. Henderson won't be joining us?"
"Only Snow," she answered, pushing her granddaughter before her with a gentle prodding between the girl's shoulder blades. It appeared that she was already departing, without wanting much to linger. "I'm afraid this is something of an emergency and Nicky has little to do with it."
With one foot out the door and her hands making quick work off fastening her head scarf over her hair once more, she poked her head back in for a final word or two.
"Seven, or thereabouts. Thank you, young man."
With that, she left, and the tinkling of the bell over the door sounded as might have the bells of a thousand-year-old cathedral in the empty silence left by her departure.
"Well." Snape slapped a hand down onto the metal counter as he breathed an enormous sigh out through his nose. His eyes beat down on Snowdrop, who, in her grandmother's absence, seemed to have grown her spine back into place.
She was glowering back for all she was worth, her jaw canted to the side and her lower lip sticking out piteously.
"Can I trust you to stay with Harry for the remainder of the afternoon, or is leaving you with any small amount of freedom from adult supervision going to result in a relapse into delinquency?"
"You don't know what happened," she ground out, causing Harry to wince. He'd gotten away with some moments of snappish behavior when irritated with Severus before, but Snowdrop was being downright rude. More rude than Harry would ever feel comfortable being to any adult... or toward just about anybody.
"I'll be a 'good little lamb' and stay with Harry," she finally acknowledged, with a total dearth of graciousness.
"See that you do," Snape answered, lifting his prodigious nose in the air in answer. "In short order, childish acts of disobedience become teenage acts of misconduct, and not much longer thereafter one may find herself locked away."
Snowdrop let out a feral snarl cum shriek as her hands clenched into fists by her side and, with a wild look of desperation—her eyes having darted around the entire space as would have a trapped animal's—she turned around and kicked her welly-clad foot against the breezeblock wall, by some miracle avoiding injuring her toes in the process.
She did, however, hop back with a whine when her show of anger earned her commensurate amounts of pain for her troubles.
Harry stood gaping at her after her fit of pique, but when he turned to see how Severus might have reacted to the tantrum, he only saw the back of the man's head when the door swung back and forth. He'd left.
"What the bloody hell was that all about, Hill?" Harry hissed, loudly enough for Snowdrop to hear, but hopefully quiet enough that Snape's W.A.S.P. album would drown out his words.
"Gammy. Must. Have. Called. And. Told. Him." She seethed, her breath coming in heavy pants between the words. She had fallen to her bottom and was now cradling her foot in her hands, massaging the toe-box of her boot.
"Gammy didn't call today."
"Last night then!"
"No one called last night, Hill. He had appointments until the shop closed, and then we went home and no one called. If they did, I would have gotten the phone. Severus' hands are usually too dirty to mess with the receiver."
"Then how. Did. He. KNOW!?" She howled, her words growing louder as she went on until she was nearly screaming them.
"Shut up! Shut up or he'll come back in, or Toby will—"
Beside them the door began to open once more, and Harry's eyes darted over with paranoia only to see that Curry had stuck his long snout through the gap and was using his head and forequarters to insert himself into the office space.
With a strike of inspiration, Harry braced himself on the bottom rung of the stool and stood, using the added height to reach the dog biscuits on the high shelf. "Give him a few of these, he likes these."
"Why should I?"
"Just do it," Harry rolled his eyes, hopping down with a handful of bone-shaped biscuits and shoving them into Snowdrop's fist after forcefully uncurling her fingers away from her palm.
She stretched her legs out before her and leaned back against the unpainted wall, picking one treat out of her palm and lobbing it at Cur Dog's head with a glare.
To both their surprise, he caught it out of the air and began smacking on it, his tail becoming a whip as he enjoyed the treat.
With utmost relief, Harry looked over at his companion and noticed that the show of talent by the Snape family dog had at least surprised Snowdrop enough to cause the frown to drop away from her face. She tossed a second treat and this time, when Curry caught it and did a little spinning jump through the air to show his delight, she grinned a bit.
"Like I said: no one called. Okay, Hill? I don't know what you think Severus knows, but he probably doesn't—"
"He said they'd lock me away," she muttered, breathing a deep, angry snort through her nose. "He said I'd been de-de...doing bad stuff..."
Harry stared at her a moment, nonplussed. "Have you?"
The next biscuit was thrown with a bit more power, passing Curry's head as he snapped at the air. "No! I only... well. I don't know! I didn't mean it to be..."
Frowning now, Harry backed himself up to the wall and slid down, his shirt riding up against the concrete blocks and scraping a bit at his back until he fell with a small oomph to the floor beside the girl.
"How can you do bad but not mean it to be?"
"I don't know, do I!? I didn't think Gammy was gonna take me—'cause why would she?—and so I thought it'd be on me to go if I wanted any answers—"
Blinking, Harry shook his head at her. "...What?"
She made a sound of utter disgust at his incomprehension and threw up her hands. "To see him, Potter! To see my... my 'Da!'"
Beside her, Harry stiffened, his eyes going wide behind his glasses. "I... he's... he's in prison, isn't he? Bertie, I mean."
Snowdrop nodded, her feet ticking back and forth in listless agitation. Curry loped up to them and began nudging and licking at her curled fingers, which she'd allowed to drop to the floor by her side. He managed to nose out one of the biscuits before she sighed with disgust and overturned her hand, allowing the remainder to fall to the floor. "Go on, have them all."
Her palm she wiped against the weft of her jeans, dislodging crumbs and dog spit.
"I took a bus to Penrith, then I met a man who had an extra seat in his lorry who took me to Haverigg for a delivery he was making. Yesterday."
With a start, Harry realised that Snowdrop hadn't been in attendance the day before, which he'd barely noticed. Any number of things could have prevented her coming in and had plenty of times before. Why, not even a month earlier she'd missed a day helping Gammy to deliver a lamb from one of the ewes. Farm life often demanded that she stay back and help her grandmother with things, and Snowdrop was hardly the only child whose family had a farm. Frequent absences during certain seasons were a near certainty amongst many of his peers.
"I thought it might've been one of the ewes again," he murmured.
"No, they've all gone now," she sighed. "Four new lambs this winter, and only one still birth," she told him. This Harry knew from having been there, but he'd not been certain if there weren't still some of the ladies waiting to lamb yet.
"How did Gammy find out?" Harry asked.
Snowdrop eyed him without speaking for a moment.
"About Haverigg... not... not the lambs."
Snowdrop snorted and rolled her eyes. "Duh! I'm not stupid. Not like you at any rate."
However, before Harry could object to that, she'd begun to tell him what he wanted to hear so he shut up quickly.
Once, he remembered, Severus had told him that sometimes the best way to get someone to tell you something was to act as though you were quite dim. Harry found that people often confused him for being dull-witted, and therefore he saw no reason not to use that to his advantage.
"They didn't wanna let me in to talk to him." She explained, pinching at the oilcloth of her raincoat and staring down at the droplets of water that were beaded on the surface. "They said they couldn't, 'cause I was too young, and it wasn't even proper visiting hours... then they wanted to know how I'd gotten there and why no one was with me. They made me call Gammy to come pick me up, and now she's gone to Penrith to try and explain how she could have lost track of me and to ask about why..."
"Why what?"
"Well... they had to keep me there for a few hours, see? Until Gammy could make it out there. So eventually one of the guards—they were pretty nice, you know? They got me a cup of cocoa and a sandwich from the machine—asked why I was there, and I said I wanted to talk to... to Bertie Tibbons, and after an hour or so he was able to convince a few people to let me talk to him."
Harry started, his eyes widening. "They actually let you?"
"They said no one had visited him in a long time and he's s'posed'ta be allowed at least one visit every two weeks or something. I didn't tell the guard that I didn't know if... if he was my... my Da'," she explained, rubbing her hands together now. She heaved a small sigh. "I just said I wanted to see my Da' and they assumed he must have been..."
"So do you know? Is he?" Harry asked drawing his knees up to his chest. Cur Dog laid down over his feet and against his shins, sighing so deeply that Harry watched the great hound's ribcage expand and contract with his breath.
Both Harry and Snowdrop reached out to begin scratching behind the dog's ears, which twitched lazily as he enjoyed their attentions.
Snowdrop was quiet for several moments as she watched Curry's face, her small, pudgy hand working to rub at the knobby bit of the dog's skull behind his jaw and ear. Curry's back leg began a rhythmic thump against the tile floor.
"I..." She forced her breath out through her nose. "I asked him. And said who my mam is, and he... he didn't like that too much."
They both shifted in unison when Curry started at a noise, his leg ceasing to wallop the floor. There came from the garage a screech, and the tape interrupted briefly before Harry could hear Severus swearing and Tobias speaking back to him. Moments later, the sound of someone quite near the partition could be heard, scraping and banging at the cabinet that abutted the door, but the metal portal itself didn't budge and no one seemed likely to come through. After a tense moment, Harry, Snowdrop, and the hound all released a collective sigh that spoke to a shared tension and Snowdrop went back to petting behind Curry's ears as his head dropped once more to his front paws.
She resumed her story.
"He told me that Ms. Tibbons called him a few months ago to say that Mam told her that I'd been born early and that that's why I couldn't be his—babies have to go for nine months in their mummys' tummies, Potter," she explained, as though she thought she were speaking to a complete nincompoop.
Harry bore this stoically and pretended as though this was new information to him.
"I was born at like... eight months? And Bertie was in prison in February, so..."
"So...?" Harry prompted, this time not having to feign ignorance. He didn't quite understand what it was that facilitated one man and one woman turning into one man and one woman in addition to a child. It might have been a type of magic... except that muggles apparently had just as much access to it as wizards and witches did. The last time he'd brought the question to Severus he'd been brushed off, and Snape had appeared to be upset with him for asking.
Snowdrop seemed to revel in his ignorance, for she sniggered at him, and, to his dismay, even Cur Dog seemed to be giving him a sympathetic, long look.
"There's a... a erm..." she giggled, wiping one hand at her mouth to try and stifle her chortles.
"Gammy called it a dance, see? That a bloke and a lady do... to have a baby, right? The rams and ewes do it, and every so often Gammy will borrow Mr. Dunlop's bull to do with with Babs so she can calf. And every animal has their own dance. And humans gotta do the dance nine months before a baby comes—"
"But you said you were born eight months after the... er... the baby dance, was it?" Harry asked, flushing even though he didn't know why he should be embarrassed.
"Yeah. So that's..." she counted on her fingers. "That's May. And he wasn't there then. So, it couldn't be him, he said. But he told me that he already knew it couldn't be him before Ms. Tibbons called."
"He did?" Harry asked, thinking back on the way that Ms. Tibbons had been aghast at Papagena Hill's taunting. She'd seemed to think that her brother had assumed that Snowdrop might have been his.
"Yeah. He said he got a physical last year and there was a... er..." she gestured vaguely at her lower half. "A thing on his cleppets, yeah? So that he'd have never been able to have a kid."
"On his cleppets!?" Harry asked, clenching his knees together in sympathy. He couldn't help peering down, himself. "What's that got to do with it?! What do our... our bits have to do with... with dancing!?"
Snowdrop glanced at him pityingly. "Ask Sna—er—Mr. Snape, that is. Anyway, he said he'd got a tumour there—you do know what that is, don't you?" She asked in a terribly patronising way that Harry hated.
"Yeah," he huffed, hotly. "A tumour's like... it's like cancer, isn't it?"
"Usually, but the doctor told him he's always had it and it's not cancer. But that he can't have kids 'cause of it. And he already knew that when Ms. Tibbons called him after the Nativity."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"So... he's not your dad. Who do you think is?"
Snowdrop's foot gave a violent twitch, which caused Curry to look up in alarm. For all that, however, she was perfectly still elsewhere, her hands clasped so tightly in her lap that her fingers were turning chalk white.
"Dunno, Potter, do I? Mam lied to me." Her eyes were trained on her laced-together fingers, which were flexing and curling around each other like a writhing ball of tangled worms.
Harry restrained himself through Herculean efforts from saying that he'd told her so. Then again, when Snowdrop was looking so very glum it became easier to take pity on the girl.
"You don't know at all?"
Staring down at her hands, she sneered, her brows drawing heavily over her stormy-blue eyes.
"No. The only thing was that he... Gor, I dunno what to call him, do I? Bertie. Tibbons. Mr. Tibbons?" She listed off, indecisively before she went again with "Bertie thought it was funny that I'd spent time around Mr. Snape."
"Around Kuya?"
"Yeah. What's that mean anyway? Kuya? I thought his name was something weird. Sev-something. I guess Kuya is weird, isn't it—"
Harry glowered at her rudeness but refused to explain the title. It seemed too... too personal.
"His name is Severus."
How could Snowdrop be such a dunce? Her own grandmother called Severus by his given name whenever they were in the same room. In fact, it seemed that she must have known that 'kuya' wasn't Severus' given name, as she'd asked what it meant. She was merely trying to be a twit.
"That makes more sense. Bertie called him 'Rus."
Harry nodded to this. "I think a lot of people used to call him that. Lola calls him 'Rus," he said by way of example.
Ms. Tibbons liked to call Severus 'Sevvy,' but Harry definitely knew better than to tell that to Snowdrop, who couldn't be trusted with such information. Ms. Tibbons had also said something about others having called him that, which Harry remembered Severus having disputed at the time.
"How did Severus come up?"
"Well, I was there talking to him for about an hour. It only took the first five minutes for me to know he wasn't my Da'. He wanted to know a bit more about me, even if I wasn't his. He said he was just curious."
Harry's nose wrinkled. He wasn't sure he'd ever welcome a convict's curiosity about his own life and wellbeing, particularly not one whose purported relationship to him had been proven invalid.
"It wasn't like it went straight there anyway. He asked who I was there with, and I said I was alone, 'cause I didn't think Gammy would have taken me, and he asked if it was always that easy to get away from Gammy, and I said no, except for the time when she thought I was supposed to be with you and Severus at the shop and instead we went to see Die Hard and I last talked to Mam."
Oh. Harry let out a breath. He supposed that wasn't so bad then... he wasn't sure why it bothered him to think of an unrelated man showing such an interest in Snowdrop except that it set off warning claxons blaring in his brain.
"He said he only knew of one bloke called Severus in his whole life and wanted to know if it was the same one. I knew it was so I told him so."
Harry nodded along rather dully, not listening carefully until he heard Snowdrop laugh beside him.
"He didn't have much nice to say about your 'kuya,' did you know?"
"Did I know what?"
"Well... it wasn't like he didn't like him, it was more like he and Mr. Snape were pretty bad, weren't they? Did you know that? That Mr. Snape had gotten into a lot of trouble when he was at Rowky Syke?"
That was rather annoying, Harry decided. His lips twisted with impatience. Just what was Snowdrop's game in telling him so?
Sure: he knew Severus and Bertie had gotten up to no good together, he'd heard it from no less than five to ten people by now.
"He said there was the time when they lifted a case of candy bars from Woolworth's, and then he told this story about the time where he and Mr. Snape sent Mrs. Murray's sons out to a rabbit warren—"
Harry shifted suddenly on the hard floor, partially dislodging Cur Dog's head from where it rested against his legs and causing the dog to look up and around as though he'd been disturbed by something alarming.
"A rabbit warren?"
"Yeah. You know, where families of rabbits live? There was one in the field out past the yard at school. I asked if it was near the trees where I used to sit and he said it was quite a bit further. They didn't know if anyone owned the land or not, but it wasn't cultivated or nothing. Nothing grew there, and no animals were being kept there, and it wasn't in a proper enclosure."
"And what did they do to Mrs. Murray's sons?" Harry asked, trepidation tickling at the bottom of his belly. He wasn't sure why such an off-hand story should worry him so much, but he knew well that the level of antipathy that Judith Murray felt toward Severus Snape was such that whatever it was that he'd done as a young man must have been truly abominable.
And hadn't Severus himself admitted to having done many abominable things in his life? Had he not, in fact, set off the chain of events which led to Harry's own parents' deaths?
Snowdrop, unaware of Harry's discomfort, shrugged with seeming indifference and looked as though she felt her discussion of Snape and Tibbons' other exploits had been unfairly interrupted. "He only said that they made them go down there and gave them a scare. He didn't say much more about it. Then he said they'd also cheated on their spelling tests, 'cause Mr. Snape had swiped the key off the teacher's desk, and that Mr. Snape had been the donkey in the Nativity play and that he made loud donkey noises when everyone else was supposed to be talking so no one could hear the story, and that the girl who was Mary was really mad at him for it and that Mr. Snape wasn't as fun to be around anymore after 'cause apparently he went to say sorry to her and she made him stop playing with Mr..." she paused, apparently indecisive about what to call Tibbons once more, "Mr. Bertie anymore."
Harry felt a sneaking suspicion begin to churn in his gut. A malaise of hope and dread intermingling.
"Who was Mary?"
"I don't know, Potter! He didn't say, did he?" Snowdrop threw her arms up, evidently despairing of Harry's irrelevant questions. "Why would I care who Mary was?"
"I..." Harry fumbled for an answer. "Maybe it was your mum?"
"She was several classes below them. It wouldn't have been her."
"Oh. Right. But he didn't know anything else about who your dad might've been? Or... or erm... anything else?"
Snowdrop turned a shrewd glare on the boy beside her, her face tightening with displeasure and wariness. "No. But if me talking to him wasn't good enough I'm sure you could go all the way to Haverigg yourself and have a go at him. I'm sorry I didn't ask all the right questions—"
"I didn't mean—!"
"I only went there to see if he was my Da', and he's not, and then I only kept talking to him 'cause there was nothing left to do except wait for Gammy to come find me! And he didn't seem to know anything else about anything and just kept going on about what he used to do before he went to gaol the first time, which was boring.
"He got himself arrested, and then he never heard from Mam ever again, except that sometimes when he'd get out—before he got back in again—he'd go looking for her and he always heard she was off partying and that she'd lost Nicky and me for good. He said sometimes the rumour was that she was staying with Gammy—and she did come stay sometimes, years ago—and that sometimes no one could find her or knew where she was except when she'd show up at some bloke's house or something. Probably 'cause she was living rough even back then," Snowdrop explained, her voice and expression sullen.
Harry felt a stab of sympathy for the girl that he knew he'd preferred not to have felt at all, but he nodded anyway. He wasn't prepared for the fact that he also now felt a bit guilty over having needled the girl for information. Likely Mary hadn't been who he'd thought. Who he'd hoped for.
A little red-headed girl, pretending to ride, side-saddle, on Severus' back, and then his kuya braying bad-naturedly during her lines later on in the stables, only to be shamed for it by the little girl after the fact.
"You know, there used to be a lot more people that lived at that camp?" He asked, rather rhetorically. "I passed them every day on my way home, and then the fuzz came and cleared them out a few months back. I wonder why she went back."
"When I told Mr. Bertie about Mam living there he said that they cleared them out every winter before the cold sets in. If she really has been there all the time then she probably goes back later on."
"Toby was one of them," Harry nodded. "He probably would have gone back, 'cause he'd been away from Severus' house for a long time, except that he was charged for being drunk or something, so they took him to Carleton Hall in Penrith and we had to go get him out."
"Have you seen any of the others coming back yet?"
"Not yet, but maybe they find warmer places until it's not so cold by the river anymore," Harry speculated.
Snowdrop nodded. She opened her mouth as if to say something, her gaze distant, but then closed it again with a resolute snap. After a moment of chewing the inside of her over-large cheek, she finally said, "I wish she'd freeze. If she wants to be by the river so bad, she should just do us all a favour. If she doesn't even have the sense to even stay with Gammy and me, or to move away from the water for the winter, she should just curl up and... and..."
'And die,' went unsaid.
That was just as well, because moments later the door banged open and Tobias hustled out, appearing flustered.
"Hi Toby," Harry greeted. Cur Dog also rose to attention and made to get up, as though to join his master, but Tobias pushed the nosy dog's snout away from him with an impatient gesture of his dirty hands.
"Nae, l'al jewkel," he answered with impatient irreverence, having addressed himself to the dog rather than to Harry, who had greeted him. "Am gan t' skry fer anudder cowie'a wax. Fer our moulds. Liker be anudder feckless heap'a cuddy splatter; Morr'son's a clarty, awl pinchgut, like."
Harry frowned at this as he picked through the words. "You're going to Morrison's?" He asked, by way of translation.
"Aye."
"Does Severus know?"
"Psh!" was the only answer he got. Tobias waved a dismissive hand and rolled his eyes, not deigning to look down at the two children seated on the floor. He also refused to look at Curry, which was odd. Stranger still, he completely neglected to find his coat where it was hung on the tree near the reception counter and rushed headlong into the freezing wind and rain without bothering to double back in order to better attire himself for the downpour.