The occupation set by Joe quickly overtook Harry's life, so much so that such banal concerns as homework or engaging with Nicky and Snowdrop when they were occasioned to be together fell almost entirely to the wayside.

He wasn't allowed the same largesse at Snape & Son's, of course, and his hours spent under Severus' direction in the garage became the only time where he knew himself to be accountable to something besides his devotion to the carmine G&L.

He named the guitar Lady Godiva, or Lady for short; not able to help how he imagined her as one of the lithe, blonde beauties—although, naturally, his youth and innocence prevented him from imagining her as nude as the Earl of Coventry's wife of legend—that he had seen frequently in the pages of some of Severus' stashed away rock magazines. In his head, his muse wore a dress as shockingly red as the Legacy's paint job.

The sketched neck diagram he had copied out at least three times, and he took it with him everywhere, hiding it below his textbook in class, or staring at it in his lap while he milked Babs. He would force his left hand to depress along an imaginary low E in the air, his lips forming the letters for each note as he 'played' it. Whenever he was with his guitar, he made sure to use the real thing. In its absence, it frustrated him how he still couldn't imagine what the notes sounded like without hearing them played live.

Mr. Fowler had almost caught him a time or two, and Harry had been forced to fold up his paper and shove it between the back pages of Oliver Twist, acting as though he'd been fascinated by his teacher's lecture on the new vocabulary from the chapter they were currently reading when, truthfully, Harry didn't think he'd learned a single word from Dickens. Once Mr. Fowler had walked back to the front, he'd been back at it, moving on to the A string when he finished low E, and so on.

Around this time, the lines of communication between Severus Snape and Pamina Hill must have twisted terribly, for there were, at times, afternoons where one or the other assumed that the reluctant trio of children who usually were meant to spend their free time at either Pamina Hill's farm or Severus Snape's auto shop were found in neither location.

After school, upon insisting that Gammy expected them at Severus' or else that Severus was sure Harry was meant to be on the farm, they'd come to realise that they had free rein, and predictably, it was Nicky who took full advantage.

A rambler in normal circumstances—for his parents didn't often give a moment's care to wherever it was that he wound up—Nicky had rubbed his hands together gleefully when he'd realised that he could treat his younger sister and sometimes-friend to his view of the tiny town.

"We should go see Die Hard at The Bluebritches!" He announced as soon as he could see that the rare opportunity for freedom had presented itself. "In the paper I saw that there are showings at 3:45 and 5:20. If we get a start, we can get there for the first show—"

Swinging her school bag around and purposefully allowing it to hit her brother so he let out a soft 'oof!' Snowdrop's nose wrinkled, making her momentarily resemble a disgruntled bulldog. "I don't want to see that!"

"'Course you don't, you're a prissy—"

"I'm not!" Snowdrop shouted, aiming a kick at Nicky's legs which he dodged with a clever sidestep, clearly having anticipated the attack.

"You can go to the park or something, Hill. Me 'n Harry'll go see Die Hard—"

Desolately, Harry considered his Lady Godiva, sitting and waiting for him to rescue her from her velvet-lined case in the upper floor of Spinner's End. He tried to think of a way out of it, if for no other reason than that an afternoon without obligation to Gammy or Severus should have meant an afternoon without obligation to the troublesome pair he was now strolling along the pavement with, headed down the hill toward the bridge that would lead to either Cokeworth, or, if one took the street that led away from the river, the centre of Backbarrow.

"I don't have any money. No money, no ticket," he explained, grimacing to try and aid in his deception. Of course, that he had no money to his name was true enough, but even if he'd had a million pounds in his back pocket he'd not want to waste even tuppence of it on seeing a film with Nicky that afternoon.

"Da' gave me enough for a whole week," Nicky assured him, patting his school bag. This caused Snowdrop to scowl with undisguised envy as she eyed the bag, greed glittering in her eyes.

"Won't prolly have enough for snacks or anything like, but I could buy you two in. If you're man enough to watch it," he finished, his eyes gleaming in challenge.

Harry didn't much care whether he was man enough to watch some dumb film, and he wasn't about to let Nicky persuade him with such a stupid gambit, but evidently Snowdrop was ill-disposed toward being so maligned.

"We are! I'm not a prissy and I'm not chicken! It doesn't even look that scary—"

"Not suppose'ta be scary," he rolled his eyes. "It's guns." He pantomimed two handguns in his hands and brought them up to 'pew pew' at Harry and Snowdrop.

"Within this skyscraper high above the city," Nicky quoted, his voice changing to try and imitate a deep, growly American accent, "twelve terrorists have declared war!"

"That sounded terrible," his sister complained. "The man in the commercial doesn't sound like that at all."

"Now, the last thing McClain wants is to be a hero—but he doesn't have a choice," Nicky continued his act, turning around and walking backwards in front of Harry and Snowdrop as he kept up quoting from the film trailer. In his hands was what must have been an imaginary rifle that he continued to hold up to his eye, as though sighting down the barrel.

Harry had to agree that his accent sounded off, but it was much better than he could have done, so he let it go.

Admittedly, when he'd seen the trailer come on after one of the programmes he'd taken to watching weekly with Toby, he'd felt a bit excited, and had dearly wished he would have been allowed to go see it.

He'd not even bothered to ask Severus, however. Money was tight enough as it was, and it wasn't rated for children. He doubted that Snape would have allowed him to go even if he were still at The Yow.

At that, he frowned. Perhaps this really would be his chance to get to see it... even just the scenes they'd picked for showing on television had been enough to have Harry bouncing on the edge of the sofa cushions, causing Toby to laugh at him and Cur Dog to start up an excited trot where he bound around the room in circles.

With one last forlorn look over the bridge and at the poorly rooftops of Cokeworth, Harry sighed, his objections having found their defeat. He shoved his hands deep in his pockets, not able to help a bit of a sulk. "Yeah, alright. Let's go."

"You mean it? You're coming?"

"Better that than doing homework."

"My lad!" Nicky crowed, clapping him on the back. He must have borrowed that from either one of his older brothers or his father, for it seemed like the kind of gesture that didn't quite suit the scrappy nine-year-old. He was a natural mimic, and it appeared as though the more he was around a person, the more inevitable it became that he would mine them for a stray trait, saying, or mannerism.

At the fork, the three broke right down the lane into town, while Harry glanced wistfully to the left, over his shoulder, wishing he was taking his usual route over the bridge. The road that led to all he was interested in. The shop, home, and Lady. There was nothing for it now. He'd made his decision.

When would he get another chance to see Die Hard anyway? Or any new film for that matter? It wasn't exactly as though Snape were in the habit of taking him to see whatever was coming out. The last thing they'd watched together had been Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the telly, and before that, it had been the films airing while Harry was laid up in hospital in Surrey.

Things quickly became more picturesque, even in the absence of the normal scenic Cumbrian greenery that was scarce only because of the season.

The fact that people cared more for their homes—or had at least the means to do so—was broadly evidenced by freshly painted facades, flower boxes underneath windows—ready for planting in a short month or two—and lacy draperies in the windows, none of them torn or yellowed with age.

"They won't let us in," Snowdrop piped up, all of the sudden. They'd begun down the way that led into Backbarrow proper and the girl was scowling deeply at the even, unblemished cement beneath their feet. "Just wait and see, they'll tell us to leave, or worse—they'll call Gammy and tell her I was tryin'a see a movie for grown-ups."

"Nu-uh," Nicky grinned, showing self-assurance that either spoke to stupidity or that the boy knew something his companions didn't. "It's one of my brother's mates that's working today. He always lets me in."

Indeed, the spotty youth—called, if his tag could be trusted, Chucky—didn't seem to care one way or the other whether they were underage after Nicky passed the stack of fivers over to him through the box office's glass partition.

"Don't let'er get scared, Nick," Chucky told him, pointing a chubby, freckled finger toward Snowdrop. "If anyone comes in to see what the fuss is about and knows I let you lot in, it'll be my job—"

"She'll be fine," Nicky rolled his eyes. "Tickets please," he insisted, holding out both hands with his fingers wriggling.

"Yeah, alright. Tell Jerry we'll be wanting to see him this weekend, out past Grimmy's watering hole."

This time when Nicky rolled his eyes, Harry was momentarily afraid they'd become stuck in the back of his skull. "Yeah, yeah, Upchuck, yeah."

"Fowt!" Chucky spat back at him with a tiny sneer, waving them through the door with a dismissive gesture of his hand. "Tell Jerry!"

The inside of the atrium was dark, with navy blue carpets and scant lighting. A stand serving concessions was off to the side, and Harry's mouth watered at the smell of fresh popcorn that he could see being prepared in a giant machine, yet unfortunately, what Nicky had said had been true: it had used up most of his money just for the tickets alone, and they bypassed the concession stand and made for the queue that would take them into the theatre proper, passing off their tickets to an utterly disinterested usher who had to have been the same age as Chucky.

Harry couldn't help but to wince at the girl's hair: the sides and top of her head were shaved completely, only to leave a bank of lobbed-off fringe that fell plumb with her bushy eyebrows. A length of tangled, bleached hair at the back of her head had, for reasons he couldn't fathom, been left alone.

She glowered at Nicky when she saw him, but didn't say a word about admitting three under-aged children to a violent, action flick.

"Jerry stood me up," she accused in an undertone while she tore the ends off of each ticket. "Second time this month—"

"He's been grounded," Nicky whispered back. "He couldn't get out if he wanted to. Da' caught him with a magazine he wasn't suppose'ta have—"

The girl's eyes narrowed at this and she nearly tore Snowdrop's ticket clear in two before she handed the mangled remains back to the stocky girl. "What sorta magazines?" She ground out, her voice emerging as a gravelly mess.

"Er... the show is gonna start. Talk later, Em. Promise."

Harry and Snowdrop were then unceremoniously propelled forward by twin shoves against their shoulders, past the velveteen rope partitions and into the dark hall that housed the screens. It was impossible to say whether 'Em' put up any additional protest, as it seemed as though she was quickly occupied with whomever was next in line.

"What sort of magazines?" Harry asked, his curiosity getting the better of him. He only just remembered to whisper when Nicky scowled at him for the words 'what sort' being far too loudly spoken.

"You know," he hissed back, smirking over at Snowdrop as he pantomimed juggling two invisible somethings up and down over his school jacket.

Harry's head cocked to the side and he shook his head, even as Snowdrop hissed with all too evident disgust, slapping at her brother's hands.

He never did get to know what sort of magazines they had been, for shortly after they'd found their seats, the film began to roll, and Harry found himself in a state of adrenaline-fueled bliss for the next two hours. So engrossed was he that he almost forgot his hunger and thirst, and was only pulled back to attention by the lights in the theatre popping back on at the conclusion of the film.

"Woah—that was..." he searched for a word, blinking furiously and working his glasses from his face in order to refocus his vision after two hours of straining his eyes to watch the screen. "That was—"

"Yippee-Ki-Yay, MOTHERFUCKER!" Snowdrop crowed unexpectedly beside him, raising two fisted hands above her head as she shouted into the emptying theatre.

Breathless, Harry couldn't help but to laugh, his guffaws merging with Nicky's mirthful snorts, as one hand came up to scratch at the forefront of his head. He could scarcely string a sentence together, marveling, as he was, at what they'd just seen. "Yeah... yeah! Exactly!"

"Yippee-Ki-Yay—!" Nicky shouted as they queued to exit.

This phrase was repeatedly bandied about between the three, earning scandalised looks and admonitions from strangers walking the street for at least a quarter of a mile. Several women threatened to find and call their mothers, but apparently weren't interested in actually interfering with the disreputable youths shouting foul epithets into the cold, February air. Instead, those who claimed they would intercede pulled their scarves more tightly around their faces, or propelled their own wide-eyed children before them, attempting to get the poor babes a safe distance away from the corrupting influence.

The three made it through town and to the bridge, kicking rocks ahead of themselves. At some point an imaginary game of shoot-em-up had begun, and, each brandishing an imaginary rifle or pair of handguns, they pursued each other along the pavement, imitating the sound of gunfire as they ran. They tended to leapfrog past one another with each pass, sometimes it was the siblings ganging up on Harry, and sometimes it was boys on girl, or any other affiliation imaginable.

Once the three made it to the River Leven, Nicky feigned being trapped under fire against the tall railing, holding both index fingers aloft with his thumbs cocked toward Snowdrop and Harry as they attempted to gun him down against the wall.

"No wait, see? This is the part where I do a—" Nicky made an improbable whooshing noise as he attempted a clumsy spin kick, effecting to dislodge the gun from Harry's hand and kicking the barrel of Snowdrop's rifle. "Whhhhushhhh!"

"Nu-uh! You're dead meat!" Snowdrop yelled back, holding up her rifle as though it hadn't been kicked from her hands. "Ptchhh Ptchh! Two in the stomach means you're dead—"

With all due drama, Nicky allowed his legs to crumble underneath him and he slid down the wall, clutching his innards in. "Not dead!"

"Dying then," Harry insisted, pointing his own handgun at the other boy's head. "Why did you shoot him in the stomach anyway, Hill?"

She seemed momentarily bemused by the question, allowing her empty arms to drop. "I dunno? It's what they always do in the shows I watch."

"What shows are those?"

Their attention was once again garnered by the melodramatic mess of boy who was now flailing on the concrete, one hand clutching his belly and twisting his shirt around until it must have been wrinkled beyond being salvageable, and using his other hand to claw at the air while suffering his death throes.

He gurgled and stuck his tongue out of his mouth, going cross-eyed and still, his hand dropping, open and limp to his side.

They waited the appropriate ten seconds before Harry and Snowdrop went to hoist him back up again and his sister began to beat at the back of his jacket to get the dirt off of him.

"Me next," she demanded. "I wanna take over the building."

"You? What'd you do with it?"

"I'd throw you out the window on the twentieth floor," she avowed, pantomiming doing just that to some imaginary person out over the side of the bridge.

"See? And then you'd—" she stopped short and turned away from them, bracing both hands against the edge of the wall and lifting up on her tip toes.

"I'd what?" Nicky demanded, impatient. He strode up alongside his sister and reached out to wave a hand in front of her face but she shoved him away without looking at him.

"Shut up!"

"What's got into you?" He asked, curling one lip. "Other than what's normal, anyway—"

"I said shut up! Shhh!"

Now all three were standing shoulder to shoulder at the wall and Harry was squinting past the out-of-date prescription on his lenses to make out in the distance whatever it was that Snowdrop was gawking at.

Nicky and Snow's eyesight was far better than his own, and accordingly Nicky saw what Snowdrop saw before Harry himself did. "What? That lady down there? The one that went in the tent?"

Harry blew a soft raspberry and pushed away from the concrete rail. "She lives there. She's there every time I walk over the bridge."

Snowdrop hadn't said another word, her mouth was open in an unladylike 'O' and was moving in a fair approximation of a trout out of water.

Without warning, she bolted away from the two boys and sprinted toward the end of the bridge, having made it all the way to the end before either of her companions realised they should give chase.

Once they'd succeeded in reaching the Cokeworth side of the bridge, heaving and panting, she was halfway down the rocky embankment, dodging bits of litter, plastic bags, and a rusting shop trolley that had been long since abandoned on the stony terrain.

"Hill! Hill, come back!" Nicky begged her, pitching over his knees to catch his breath.

She didn't bother listening, and as soon as he was able, he tripped after her, his disorientation making his steps clumsy. He was made to catch himself against a boulder more than once, and Harry, bringing up the very rear, fared no better.

"Snow!" Her brother called, his voice edging on desperation now. "Blossom!"

The sound of Snowdrop's pet name sounded all wrong coming from Nicky's lips, but it must have been a sign of his desperation that he would fall back on using it at all, as Harry rarely heard the boy refer to his half-sister as anything besides 'Hill.'

Leaning now against an encroaching bank of trees, whose exposed roots must have served to keep the river bank from further eroding into the rapids, the two boys peered out with bewildered apprehension as Hill slowed to a creep upon approaching a fluorescent orange tent that was pitched amongst the rocks on the embankment.

In places the tough, manufactured material had torn and been replaced by heavy-duty, silver duct tape (which also seemed to be failing in its struggle against the late winter elements), and on one half of the structure, a dark, olive green oil-cloth had been suspended by virtue of a combination of poles and clotheslines to create an additional 'room' on the back of the tent.

Harry saw the sides of the oil-cloth moving as though someone was inside, shifting about. Through the sparsely covered opening, he could see that it was the woman he had grown familiar with after months of spying her in the encampment. Littered about the entrance to the oil-cloth room—or was it an exit?—were hundreds of tiny pieces of tin-foil which appeared to be blackened in their middles, and a startlingly rainbow-hued array of spent, disposable cigarette lighters.

He couldn't begin to guess what any of the tin foil was meant to be for, but there was enough of it that it was noticeable amongst the more run-of-the-mill trash such as gnawed chicken bones, white take-away boxes (the same sort they got from Rice Bowl, with the red chinoiserie designs printed upon the sides), and trampled, brown paper bags which must have been from the local shops. Bits of flattened tartan or polka-dotted material seemed as though they'd been, for months, disregarded underfoot and might have, at one time, been garments of some sort. Now, however, they looked like nothing more than scraps of multi-coloured bric-a-brac that blended in with the flattened cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting serving as ground cover.

He'd never gotten such a close look at the encampment as he was now, and his nose wrinkled once the wind began to blow down river, taking with it the smell of decay, human waste, and burnt something which was emitting from the lean-to.

At one time, he remembered, there had been several such tents, with perhaps a group of four to five inhabitants. Now, it seemed, there was only the one, as many of the temporary lodgings had been removed by the local constabulary around the time that Severus' father had come to stay with them, in a raid which must have coincided with the man's arrest. It didn't seem, however, that the police were inclined to clear out the vagrants with any sense of consistency, as this lone woman had returned not long after and had remained in almost permanent residence ever since.

Snowdrop was peering into the orange part of the tent now, lifting back the flap as she bent over to see better, and she was clutching her coat to herself against the brutal wind that was careening down along the river. It must have been well below freezing that near to the water, and not for the first time, Harry wondered how it was that anyone could survive outside throughout the winter months, especially this far north.

Beside him, Nicky was shifting from foot to foot, looking increasingly aggravated as his sister continued to investigate, but apparently disinclined to investigate himself.

"Well?" Harry prompted him, taking a cautious step, lest his foot should slide down on the small, easily dislodged rocks. "You're not gonna let her stay down there all alone—"

"I bet it's infested with rats 'n stuff," Nicky sniffed, the end of his tiny nose having pinked up in the cold air. "Look! See there? I saw a tail," he pointed.

"That was a squirrel," Harry answered. He decided the best course of action for reaching the bank was to lower himself to his bottom and slide down the loose rocks, using his feet to stop himself from sliding too quickly and shuffling like a crab with his hands behind him. His fingers were so cold he scarcely registered the bite of the sharp stones into his skin.

"Nu-uh! If Hill wants to contract... if she wants rat scratch fever, it's all hers—"

Harry frowned, his nose wrinkling as he tried to place something that seemed off about that.

"Isn't it cat scratch fever?" He asked, somewhat rhetorically. He was reasonably sure that Severus had a tape of some crazy-eyed fellow that had a track on it by that name.

Nicky scowled, but began to mimic him, apparently not to be outdone when it came to feats of daring. He emerged from behind the trunk of a ghostly birch to begin sidling down the steep rock-face, same as Harry.

"Rat scratch, cat scratch—bet rats have more diseases and you know it, Potter."

Harry shrugged, he was nearing a flat area where he'd be able to walk upright and he hardly felt any desire to argue with the boy. Likely Nicky was right, in any case.

"Yeah, probably. There's a song called 'Cat Scratch Fever' though."

"'S a whole album that's called that, Potter. By Ted Nugent."

"Oh, yeah."

"Jerrod and Dennis have it," he explained, then, more darkly, he grumbled, "won't share it with me, though."

Harry led them forward, falling silent after the exchange.

Which, incidentally, was right about when they drew near to the mouth of the tent and saw Snowdrop practically paralysed at the entrance.

"Why did you go running off," Nicky started in, crunching noisily up to where his sister was crouching. "It's gonna be hard to climb back up to the bridge—"

"Shh!" She'd spun around to face them, a thick finger held to her lips and her pale blue eyes flashing with warning.

"Well, what did you come down here for if you're just gonna sneak around?" Nicky challenged her, whispering now.

The three of them were crouched shoulder to shoulder, and from what Harry could see of the interior of the tent—which was illuminated through the orange fabric by the last vestiges of sunlight—it was empty.

"I wanted to see if she'd come back..."

"Why do you wanna talk to some lady that lives in a tent, Hill? I always thought you were a bit touched—"

"She's in the back," Harry interrupted, trying to forestall yet another argument between the two. "There's a blanket-thing over the back of the tent that makes it bigger inside. I saw it moving when we were looking down from the trees. She's probably sitting back there."

Before Snowdrop could come up with anything to say in response, a hacking cough emitted from behind a zippered wall at the far end of the orange tent, and along with it, the acrid scent of something burning. Harry couldn't place the smell, but he knew well enough that it wasn't anything that smelled as though it ought to have been burned.

In fact, it was rather reminiscent of some of Severus' more badly failed experiments after they congealed in a scorched mass on the bottom of a pewter standard size 2.

His nose wrinkled and he couldn't help the sneeze that came after, which was loud enough that it caused the coughing and movement from behind the zippered tent door to cease.

"Who's there!?" A voice demanded, strained but still pleasingly feminine.

At the inquiry, Snowdrop's breath hitched and Nicky grew wide-eyed, scurrying away from the other two until he darted behind a boulder further back where Harry and he had climbed down the steep rocks. He poked his head out to hiss at them to come back, fast, and gestured at them, but Snowdrop didn't move, and Harry was rooted to the spot with a combination of fear and indecision.

Probably it would have been best to have beat as hasty a retreat as Nicky had, but Snowdrop was still peering into the tent, and his whole point in coming down had been to see that the stupid girl didn't get herself into trouble with the questionable elements who populated the area under the bridge.

"Come on, Hill, we should go," he told her, pinching the puffy arm of her coat and trying to indicate that they should make for the far boulders, just as Nicky had.

The damn girl didn't budge, however, and Harry gave it up for a lost cause when the zipper began to undo itself from the other side.

If Snowdrop Hill wanted to get in the kind of trouble she was courting with her dogged insistence on staying put, Harry wouldn't have any part of it.

He didn't have time to get as far away as Nicky had, but he did manage to stumble away from the mouth of the tent and around the side, where anyone emerging wouldn't see him. This saw him only three meters from the water, his incautious footsteps obscured by the sound of water churning past in violent bursts over the rocks. He didn't dare lean against the tent, but instead sat with his ear a mere hair's breadth away from the material, hoping against hope he could hear what was happening to Snow in case he should need to tell someone. When he glanced back, he saw Nicky watching both of them cautiously, his head poking out from behind a dead sapling that had tried to grow between a pair of rocks.

Harry heard the hacking cough once more, and noises that indicated that the orange tent was now occupied by the lady tramp.

"What are you doing here?" The voice asked, hoarse and sounding as though it had recently emerged from a smoky pub. "Kids ain't supposed to be down here—"

"M-mama?"

All movement from inside paused suddenly, and Harry imagined that the lady on the other side must have stopped abruptly.

"M-mam, why are you living in a tent?" Snowdrop's voice was a quivering mess, far from the forceful and inelegant way she usually spoke. Gone was the little girl who pugnaciously bullied the rest of the school yard into keeping out of her way.

Harry suddenly felt terrible that he should have had to sit through this. Of course, Snowdrop had refused to explain who it was that she'd thought she'd seen, elsewise, perhaps he wouldn't have felt as though he'd needed to follow her... but he'd seen enough of Papagena Hill on that one evening in December to last him for the rest of his life, and he couldn't imagine that Snowdrop wouldn't be further embarrassed by anything that the revolting woman would have to say when cornered in her... well. Her shanty.

"The bloody hell is Pammy doing letting you come down by the river!?" Papagena's voice shook as she addressed her daughter, even as it began to rise with her anger. "Go home. Now, Snowdrop."

"Don't... don't talk about Gammy that way," Snowdrop argued, her words sounding a bit stronger now. "She doesn't know I'm here, it's not her fault..."

"You're only with her and not me 'cause she made a big huff over how you were better off on the fockin' farm, and now here you are, down where we like to party," Papagena Hill said, nastily. "Suppose it doesn't matter where you're from when you'll end up in the same place as me—"

Harry heard a violent rustle from the other side and could only assume that Snowdrop was rearing to pitch a fit. "I'd never live here!" A loud sound signaled that she'd likely stomped her snow-booted foot into the gravel and dirt.

"Gammy said at the Christmas hols you should stay and you'd have your own room from before! She said you could stay after you did all that at my concert, and Christmas morning you were gone! Why are you here?! Why would you choose to live under the bridge when Gammy loves you and wants you to come back home!?"

Snowdrop's mother snorted and began to shuffle around the tent. From the sound of things, Harry thought Snow might have joined her inside the orange edifice. He pressed further away to keep the setting sun from giving away his position outside of the tent wall.

"What's all that? What's the foil for? Food?"

"Food, yeah."

Harry was never so certain of anything in his life more than the fact that the tin foil squares he'd seen had most certainly not been used for anything so benign as food.

"There's an awful lot of them—"

"Well I ain't starving, am I?"

Snowdrop didn't answer for a minute. "You're really thin," she finally observed.

"And you're turning into a bit of a porker, but I suppose that's what happens when an old farm wife fattens you up on full cream and bread."

Harry had to suppress a gasp. He'd often thought Snowdrop Hill fell a bit on the side of heavy, but to hear such a thing from one's own mother was shocking even to him as an observer.

Inside the tent there was deathly silence. Harry could only guess at how Hill might have responded in the school yard: probably with violence, by launching herself at whichever fool dared to insult her.

Here, beside the river, it didn't sound as though she were daring to move or shift her weight. The interior of the tent had been so cluttered with rubbish that, had she gone rampaging about, she doubtless would have disturbed a great deal and made a lot of noise.

Finally, after at least a minute had passed of terrifying silence, Harry heard a cough that he thought might have been from Snowdrop's mother. Another dry, crackling sound, and he heard shifting from behind the tent wall.

"I'm glad you didn't stay," Snowdrop spoke finally, her voice clear as a bell and absent of any of the grief—anger or otherwise—that Harry had guessed she must have been suffering after having been called fat by her own mother.

Really, he felt a strange prick of pride in her for her calm.

"Gammy wanted you to come back. She talks all the time about you coming back. She thinks I want you back too because I don't say anything about how much I hate you. But I do. I do hate you. I hate you more than Nicky does 'cause I know you better.

"Before the concert Gammy told me she'd found you, and I didn't know what she meant, and then she brought you home and bought you new clothes, and cut your hair, and let you sleep all day, even though you called her stupid and complained about our food, and then you complained if she asked you for help lookin' for eggs or anything stupid like that.

"She cried all day Christmas Day, except when she went to Mr. Snape's house to take him a basket of food, but you know what, Mam? I was so sooo happy. You were gone and I didn't think I'd ever have to see you again."

"And so you came here to what? Tell me to move further down river?" Papagena Hill let loose a shrill laugh, apparently unaffected by the fact that her eight-year-old daughter had just resolutely disavowed her to her face.

"Why are you here, you little bitch? To nag me? I always thought you had a touch too much of your Da' in you for me to care much to call you mine, but it seems you're a Hill after all, even if it's Mam you take after—"

"You're really gross, do you know that? Every time you come home for a bit, Gammy gives you the best of everything she has, and you talk about her like she's the worst person you've ever met! If I'm like Gammy, I'm glad, 'cause she's a million-jillion times better than you!"

"Don't flatter yourself, Snowdrop," her mother hissed, shifting about on whatever pile of trash she lounged on so that it produced a rustling noise. "You're nowhere near being more like Mam than your father—"

"Oooo," Snowdrop mocked, sounding rather annoyed. "Maybe if I knew who he was, that might actually matterto me."

When next she spoke, Papagena Hill's voice was filled with the sort of glee that instantly put Harry's hair on edge. "Oh, but didn't your music teacher tell you? How she thinks you're her niece? How I shacked up at the Tibbons' house after Nick was born? Should be stupidly obvious, given that."

Harry's breath caught and he glowered at the spot where Papagena's lying self probably was. He'd heard her tell Ms. Tibbons explicitly that Snowdrop wasn't Bertram Tibbons' child! He'd heard it, and possibly everyone else on the street watching had too...

Except both Snowdrop and Nicky had been pressed against their Gammy at the time, her hands covering their ears to stop them from listening...

"Ms... Ms. Tibbons?"

"Tabby," Papagena mimicked their teacher's nasally voice in a sneering falsetto. "Yeah. Take it she ain't told you that yet? Only reason for her making you Mary was 'cause she probably feels sorry for you. Bertie's been a gaolbird for years now, in and out. Violent. Picks fights with just about anyone. And built like a steam engine."

Snowdrop emitted a gasping sort of sob.

"Nothing more than a chip off his block, you are."

Harry was blinking furiously behind his glasses, trying with little success to remember the fight he'd witnessed months ago. What was it that had made Papagena Hill so certain that Snowdrop wasn't Bertie's daughter? She'd gone so far as to taunt Ms. Tibbons with it... it certainly hadn't seemed then as though she'd been convinced that Snow was anything like Bertie... in fact she'd found the whole idea laughable!

"If you don't believe me, ask him."

Snowdrop coughed and choked on more tears. "Where... where is he?"

"Haverigg I'd guess, if they do things the same now as they did back then."

"H-Haverigg?"

"It's a category D. West of here by forty minutes' drive or so."

"Category D? What's that mean?" Snowdrop pressed, sounding more frantic by the minute.

"Prison, Snowdrop," her mother drawled, sounding impatient with her daughter's incomprehension. "He's in the Haverigg men's prison, or at least that's where they always sent him before."

A/N: A few Christmas notes, for fun!

1) Harry's personality is largely based upon Ralphie from A Christmas Story. Especially the daydreaming

2) I definitely didn't plan for the Die Hard chapter to fall during Christmas, and I personally am not a huge fan of the movie, nor am I convinced one way or another that it is/isn't a Christmas movie, but feel free to hash that out in the comments lmao

And tomorrow (Christmas Day) the special Christmas chapter of my special Christmas fic drops, so I invite you guys to check that out if you're at all interested.

Merry Christmas, friends!