Harriet hated Sirius Black—not because he was a follower of Voldemort, not especially, nor because he had murdered thirteen people with one curse, or even really because he was probably coming to kill her. Harriet hated Sirius Black because he'd cut short her holiday with Hermione. She would have seen him thrown back in prison for that alone.
Hermione almost made it a bit easier to leave, however, by severely annoying Harriet the night before she was to go.
"It's probably better that you go," she said briskly as she checked off the inventory she'd made of Harriet's luggage, making sure Harriet didn't leave behind any socks or homework essays. "If Sirius Black is really after you, which it makes sense that he would be, Hogwarts would definitely be the safest place for you."
"Right." Harriet shone a torch under the bed, looking for her Monster Book of Monsters, which had scuttled away yesterday after trying to chew her fingers off. "Because after Voldemort and a great dirty Basilisk lived there for ages, there's no way Sirius Black could ever sneak in."
"For God's sake, Harriet!" Hermione said, so loud and sudden that Harriet jumped and banged her head on the bed's footboard. "There's a madman out to kill you, and you're sulking!"
Harriet grabbed a spare trainer from under the bed and chucked it into her trunk, not caring if it was hers or Hermione's. "Oh right, and that's never happened before! It only seems to happen every bloody year! You're acting like you're not even going to miss me!"
"Of course I'm going to miss you!" Hermione balled up her list and threw it into her rubbish bin—or at it—or so Harriet guessed; it hit the wall about three feet to the left and landed in her open trunk. "But it's better I miss you than you die!"
Hermione's face was flushed and her lips were pressed very tight together in a way that Harriet knew meant she wanted to burst into tears. Harriet suddenly felt very horrible.
"I know," she said. "I'm sorry. I just . . . I hate these people. They don't just try to kill me, they bugger up all the times they're not around, too. I've got to live with the Dursleys because of them, and now I've got a proper holiday, they've got to ruin that, too."
"You spent last summer with the Weasleys, though," Hermione reminded Harriet as she slumped next to her onto the bed.
"I wanted to spend this one with you, though. I love the Weasleys, but you're my best friend."
Hermione blinked. Then she did burst into tears, and threw her arms around Harriet. A second later, Harriet jumped up swearing; the Monster Book of Monsters had just bitten her on the ankle.
They swore to write every day. In a moment of guilty Slytherin-like intuition, Harriet asked Hermione to send her some more romance novels. Hermione rolled her eyes but agreed.
"Really trashy ones," Harriet clarified.
"Trashy what?" asked a cold, forbodeing voice just above and slightly behind their heads. They both jumped, not having heard Snape come in to the parlor. He moved as quiet as a cat.
"Er." Harriet looked at Snape's sharp, sardonic face, his shrewd black eyes that drove into you like a drill press. She was enjoying Passion's Bride, but she would face Voldemort, a Basilisk, and Sirius Black before ever telling Snape she was reading a single romance novel, let alone asking for more. "Magazines?"
"You aren't sure?" Snape's expression was sarcastic.
"It's a private conversation," Harriet settled for saying.
"Well said, dear," Jean said—pleasantly enough, but she did not seem to like Snape. "Are you ready to go, or would you like a few more minutes?"
"Whether or not she would like a few more minutes is immaterial," Snape said to Jean. "I said I would be collecting her at 8:30. It's 8:32. Miss Potter, find your things."
"Here they are," Harriet said hollowly, kicking at her trunk. Hedwig clicked her beak inside her cage.
"Then come along," Snape said. He couldn't really swoop around wearing Muggle clothes, but he still didn't walk like a normal person. She imagined that's what Dracula would look like if he had to wear trousers and a regular coat.
Harriet shot Hermione one last, mournful look. She seemed to be trying to put on a It's for the best face, but was clearly having trouble pretending that extra Snape-time would be anything like fun.
Jean and Daniel followed Harriet, Hermione and Snape to the door. Snape stalked to the foot of the lawn while Harriet dared to linger and hug Hermione one last time.
Hermione kissed her cheek. Harriet kissed her back, and then took Hedwig from Jean, who kissed her, too, and trudged down to where Snape was standing, looking tense and suspicious, one hand clenched on his wand inside his coat while his narrow eyes glared up and down the street.
"You look like a kidnapper or a bank robber or something," Harriet said. When he turned the glare on her, she added, "Sir."
"Whereas you are all that appears respectable and well-groomed. Stand back, Miss Potter."
"Why stand back? Aren't we doing that Applerating thing again?"
"No one has never Applerated, because it does not exist. Further back. Stop."
"Then what are we—"
A deafening BANG made her jump once, then twice when, with a CLANGSCREECHCRUNCH, the Granger's mailbox was completely flattened by a triple-decker bus painted in a shade of purple that must have been magical, because it surely didn't exist in nature.
"What just happened to the post?" Harriet heard Jean say.
"Wh," Harriet said.
"Get on," Snape said, shooing her.
"Is that a bus that appears from nowhere?" Harriet asked, not budging.
"Yes. Now get on. Take this," he snapped at the attendant who had just wrenched open the doors, and rammed the poor boy in the ribs with Harriet's trunk. Snape used the trunk to shove the attendant back on board, and then grabbed Harriet and shoved her at him, too.
Harriet clambered on, staring around in awe. She'd never been on a bus that appeared from nowhere, with armchairs for seats instead of plastic benches. The passengers looked a little strange, which was fairly normal for a bus; but these had greenish-looking skin and kept handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths.
"Why are so many of these people green?" she whispered to Snape, who was paying the attendant with such a hostile glare that the poor boy seemed very reluctant to take his money. When he handed Snape the tickets, his hand shook so badly that they fluttered to the floor.
"Because they're passengers on this wretched bus," Snape said. "I hope you don't get motion sick. Sit." He jabbed his wand at an empty armchair near the back of the bus. When he did, Harriet heard four loud thunks, like nails driving into metal.
She sat.
"Hold onto that owl," Snape said tersely.
BANG went the bus. Harriet slammed back into her chair; Hedwig screeched; several passengers' chairs went toppling to the floor, and one little old woman was flung free of her seat and went rolling down the aisle. Snape hadn't bothered to sit; he braced himself against one of the golden poles, looking disgusted and put-upon.
"Wh," Harriet said, staring out the window, which showed the jewel-bright coast of Cornwall whipping past. The bus vibrated around her like a thing possessed, juddering her teeth in her head. She gripped Hedwig's cage for dear life, wincing when Hedwig pecked her displeasure on her fingers.
Snape didn't reply. He seemed to have forgotten Harriet was there. She doubted it, though.
Looking at his vulture-like profile, she remembered how he'd protected her the last two years. Was this more of that? Surely he had better things to do with his holiday than babysit her sarcastically.
He was sick as a dog for your mother. . . Did he tell you that you were precious to him?
And of course, exactly when she was remembering Aunt Petunia saying that, was the moment Snape chose to look at her.
"What is it?" he asked testily as she went so brightly red she could see her face glow in the window glass.
"What is this thing?" Harriet asked, trying to act like nothing was any big deal.
"The Knight Bus. The Headmaster wanted you to be familiar with it." Snape's expression made it clear what he thought about that.
"I think I prefer the apple thing." She winced when the bus made another sudden leap, wrenching her to the right this time as it veered around Yorkminster.
"It's called Apparating and has nothing to do with apples. The trick to the Knight Bus," his voice grew colder, "is that it's impossible to predict where it will turn up." He swung forward as the bus braked so suddenly that Harriet would have been thrown to the floor if Snape hadn't grabbed her by the shoulder and wrenched her back.
"Or what will turn up," Harriet said, as she heard someone on the deck above being sick.
"I ordered the driver to let us off at the next stop," Snape said. "Don't lose your owl."
"I wouldn't. Shhhh, it's okay," Harriet said to Hedwig, who was screeching accusations at her and battering the inside of the cage with her wings. "At least our chair isn't rolling around. Why isn't it?" she asked Snape.
"I nailed it to the floor."
Harriet had heard of people kissing the ground when they got off a boat after a storm. When she climbed down from the Knight Bus onto the mushy Hogwarts road, she finally knew how they felt.
"Can't you shut that owl up?" Snape snapped; Hedwig was jabbering loudly.
"It's not her fault," Harriet said hotly.
"I didn't say it was, Miss Potter," said Snape in a dangerous voice, "I asked you to shut her up."
"Fine." Harriet unlocked Hedwig's cage. She took off with an angry screech, knocking Harriet's glasses crooked with a swipe of her wing. "I'm sorry!" Harriet shouted after her as she wheeled off into the gray, low-hanging sky.
"She's a bird, she can't understand you," Snape said.
"Then how was I supposed to get her to be quiet?" Harriet asked indignantly.
"You figured it out well enough. Come along. Watch your footing." Even though he had said two things that could be taken nicely—one praise, the other watching out for her safety—Snape managed to make both things sound like total insults.
Grumbling, Harriet squelched after him. It had been raining, or maybe pouring was a better word; the road was mostly mud, with bleak patches of standing water reflecting the clouds. The dark gray sky melted into the horizon, blurring it, trailing around the castle's spires. Harriet's trainers caked with mud and the hems of her jeans were soaked.
"Don't dawdle," Snape said sharply, turning his head to glare over his shoulder at her.
"It's hard to walk on this stuff," Harriet said. "It's almost pulling off my shoes." And I'm a lot shorter than you.
Snape sighed a put-upon sigh and stopped walking so that she could catch up, squelching. When he started walking again, it was much more slowly, though the snail-like pace seemed to irritate him. What didn't irritate him, though?
"Why've we got to hurry?" she asked.
"Have you forgotten about the homicidal maniac already?" he asked, making her feel like Neville adding his salamander blood at the wrong time.
She sighed. "No," she muttered. Why couldn't Snape answer a question like a normal person?
Aunt Petunia really was cracked, imagining Snape liked Harriet.
A cold, inhospitable breeze moaned through the trees and across the road. She shivered, tucking her hands into the pockets of her windbreaker. The air had been cold and damp and clammy from the moment she got off the Knight Bus, but maybe she had just been out in it long enough now for the chill to catch up to her. The cold had crept beneath her clothes and the smell of the mud was filling up her mouth so that she could taste it.
She suddenly felt very strange. Like something was pressing on her chest, squeezing her heart so it beat faster. She felt . . . scared. . ?
Blinking, she stared around at the surrounding trees. The forest that grew close to the road was soaked black with rain, still and silent and deep. It had never frightened her before, even when she'd been walking at night with the cowardly duo, Fang and Draco Malfoy. Was Sirius Black in there somewhere? Was this a kind of—of lizard-brain thing?
When a hand grabbed her shoulder, she gasped, her heart cramming its way into her throat.
"Don't stray," Snape said, sharp and tense. "Walk faster."
Harriet tried taking longer strides and kicked a spray of mud on him accidentally, dirtying his coat. He didn't say anything, which rattled her even more. The road ahead of them was so thick with mist, it was like the world ended there; just dropped off into nothing.
"Is he—is Sirius Black—"
"No," Snape said, and waved his wand in a complicated motion that looked somehow random and yet not, like a conductor leading an orchestra through a slow song. Through the mist she saw the towering gate opening slowly, its dark bars smudged by the mist.
She felt so cold, unlike she'd ever felt in her entire life, so cold her body was slowing up. She struggled to keep walking but she couldn't. Something black was closing over her head, like she was sinking through water, cold cold cold . . . and someone was screaming, far away and thin, screaming so scared, scaring Harriet along with her . . . she wanted to run to help but her body wouldn't move . . . everything was so black and far away except for the cold that was all around her, right there . . .
Harriet did not realize she had passed out until she understood that she was lying on her back on a creaky leather sofa, looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling, dark and dusty. The room smelt like cold, dry stone.
How'd I get here? She reached up to rub her eyes and bumped her glasses instead. The skin of her face was damp and clammy, and she felt weak and shaky all over and through.
She pushed herself up, dislodging a blanket someone had draped over her. Something clattered in the next room. She tried to stand, but she felt too ill and slumped back down on the couch.
She opened her eyes when she heard a step in the room: Snape, still wearing his Muggle clothes, coat and all. Mud was smeared all over his front, including a streak on his cheek, and he was carrying a tray packed with bottles and jars and a teapot.
"What happened?" she asked, her tongue feeling thick.
"You fainted," Snape said curtly, rapping the tray down on a nearby table with a sharp clink that rattled everything on it.
"Why?"
"Take off your glasses," he said instead of answering.
Harriet did, even without arguing, though only because she was too unnerved by what had happened. She'd never fainted before in her life.
Snape moved closer and knelt next to the couch. He touched the skin around her eyes very delicately, like he was handling very fragile tissue paper, and had her blink into a bright, concentrated light on the tip of his wand.
"Very well," he said, drawing away quickly, seeming relieved to have that over with. "How ill do you feel?"
"Like I've had a bad flu." She fumbled her glasses back on. "Why did I faint?"
Snape was mixing powdery green stuff in a little clay cup, the sort without a handle. From the clay teapot he poured a stream of something brown into it. She hoped it didn't taste like mud. She was sick of mud.
He handed her the cup without looking at her. "Drink this."
She sniffed it cautiously. It smelled like . . . chocolate? Yes, she found, sipping it; chocolate. Really rich hot chocolate, tasting a little bit like mint and cinnamon. She felt warmer, steadier.
"Thanks," she said. Snape didn't answer.
"Why did I faint?" she asked again, pleased her voice came out so much stronger.
"Drink the whole thing," Snape said as if she had asked something completely different.
"Why did I faint?" she repeated.
"Did you remember to eat breakfast this morning?" he asked, keeping his back to her as he fussed with his tea tray.
"I've skipped meals loads of times at the Dursleys and never fainted—"
Snape knocked a jar off the table. It fell to the stone floor and shattered. He turned to glare at it, his face looking somehow hard, like all his bones had suddenly turned to stone beneath his skin.
"Perhaps your constitution is changing now that you're older," he said, his voice gone chilling cold and distant. He vanished the shards of the little jar with a wave of his wand.
"It was cold," Harriet said doggedly. She kept her hands cupped around her hot chocolate, wanting the warmth to flow through the clay into her skin and blood. "And I heard somebody screaming."
Snape breathed in sharply, once. He reached out to straighten the jars left on his tray. It almost looked like he was holding onto them.
"I heard no one screaming," he said in a voice as brittle as ice.
"A woman." When Snape's voice sounded like that, it made her own want to shake. "Sounding—like she—"
Like someone was coming to kill her, she thought, with a slice of certainty, and took a drink of chocolate against the returning cold. She pictured it black inside her, like water so deep light couldn't reach to the bottom.
Snape was looking out the window. It wasn't raining, but the sky was still gray, the daylight cold and dim. He did not turn toward her.
"Do you know what Dementors are, Miss Potter?"
"No," Harriet said with certainty.
"They . . . " Snape's voice trailed away. He kept staring out the window. Harriet thought he really did forget she was there, that time.
"They are the reason you fainted," he said, sounding like himself again. "Finish your chocolate."
Then he left the room, went into another and shut the door, leaving Harriet alone.
She stood experimentally from the couch. When she didn't fall back against it, she picked her way over to the window. From there, she could see the dark slope of the grounds and the black presence of the forest, the sky trailing down in rain-colored wisps. The world was eaten up with mist.
She drank her chocolate, watching the clouds swirl across the grounds, thinking of the woman's voice. It was a memory no amount of chocolate could warm.
There had been plenty of times when Severus wished he drank. But every single time was just a reaffirmation of why he shouldn't. The number of days when he'd thought I could really fucking use a drink would have qualified him for alcoholism alone.
"I heard someone screaming. A woman—sounding like she—"
And he knew who that was likely to be, didn't he?
He felt as cold as if he were standing in a circle of fifty Dementors. Colder than he had when the girl had fainted and he'd lost his feeble grip on his Occlumency, which deadened the Dementors' ability to feed; when he'd carried her unconscious up the track, his memories of Lily's face during those years when she'd hated him and fallen in love with Potter trickling through his empty spaces like rain down window glass. A memory of a woman screaming, the girl said—a memory terrible enough to render a child unconscious—
Push it away—lock it away—get rid of it—
He couldn't this time. It was like trying to light a cigarette the Muggle way, with matches, when your hands were shaking because you hadn't had enough to drink, because you usually had too much and now a little was too little—
"Another vice, Tobias? Will this one cost more or less than the drinking? Will it be women next? They're the most expensive of all."
Goddamn fucking Dementors.
He reached out and found a jar. It fit snugly into the palm of his hand. Somebody might have given it to him, he might have bought it. He hurled it into the fireplace, where it exploded. He ground the shards into his carpet with his boot, and then broke another by chucking it into a mirror as tall as himself. The shattering of all that glass reverberated in his bones. He felt it in his collarbone.
He wanted to Crucio someone. He wanted to feel that magic like actinic electricity coursing through him, promising strength even as it shredded him; wanted to watch their faces contort and feel the panic and exhilaration press on his chest as they screamed, to feel the answering pain in his limbs as they thrashed, beating themselves on the ground. Was Dark magic more or less expensive than alcohol, smoking, whores?
More. It was the most expensive vice of all.
Something went tap tap tap at the door to the adjacent room. He'd left the girl in there somewhere.
His eyes dropped to the pieces of the mirror scattered across the floor. He'd ground a few of them to powder.
Shit. Had he forgotten to put up a Silencing spell?
He vanished all the debris and arranged his face into a distant, foreboding expression. After so many years, it took hardly any effort. The numbing embrace of his Occlumency slipped around him like a cloak placed by a paramour on a woman's shoulders.
He pulled open the door sharply. The girl blinked but she didn't jump. She peered up at him, her eyes smaller behind the thick lenses of her glasses. When she'd taken them off, he had been unnerved by how much they were like Lily's and yet were nothing like them at all. The shape was the same, and oh, the color—but set inside her thinner face, they seemed much larger; and the expressions they helped convey were entirely different.
"I thought I heard something breaking," she said.
He had meant to freeze her in place when he opened the door, but he'd gotten sidetracked. Today he was a fucking mess. A thirteen-year-old girl, with her miserable childhood and haunting memories and bold green eyes, could wrong-foot him.
"Well?" He thought about sneering but found he wasn't in the mood.
She opened her mouth, but then shut it, shrugging. "What are Dementors?" she asked, as before.
"Go to the library and look it up." I'm sure, with Miss Granger as your friend, you're familiar with how to use a card catalog. "First, though, get to your room." He pointed.
"Where did they come from?" she persisted.
"They have been sent from Azkaban to look for Sirius Black," he told her coldly. "Since Sirius Black is searching for you, the Dementors have decided that going where you are is the easiest way to find him."
"But what are they?" she asked, looking bewildered.
Ignoring this question, he said, "Your room is this way," magicked open the door to the corridor and strode out. Behind him, she let out an irritated sigh, but a moment later she was trailing behind him.
"Are these your rooms, then?"
He didn't answer that question either, only opened the door to the room Dumbledore had allotted her for the summer. Severus had converted it years ago to a storeroom for his old odds-and-ends; it had been easy enough to banish the rubbish to his quarters and shift this to a makeshift bedroom that would satisfy a child raised on the malicious avarice of Petunia Dursley. He had thought as much as he'd scoured the dust from the corners, and yet he'd found himself repairing an old bed from the Slytherin dorms that had broken last term, smuggling an armchair out of the staffroom, filching a couple of tapestries and a magical Axminster from the corridors above. He'd felt supremely stupid all the while he was doing it—especially at the end, when it was done and he found himself wondering if she'd like it, and had spent the rest of the evening despising himself for hating the fact that he was ruining her holiday with the know-it-all Granger. Because he wasn't ruining it, goddamn it, Sirius Black was. He was just trying to save her life, for all the bloody thanks it got him. He shouldn't care if she was happy as long as she was alive.
But if that were the case, he'd have left her with Petunia last year. He wouldn't have forced Dumbledore to have agreed to board her at Hogwarts, against all school rules. He certainly wouldn't have volunteered to give his summer over to the tedious task of babysitting a resentful thirteen-year-old girl.
He still had her trunk in his pocket; he'd forgotten to take off his coat. It was filthy now, since he'd dredged her out of the mud where she'd slumped in a dead faint, and carried her up the hill.
She hadn't weighed anything at all. He could almost believe she flew the way she did because her bones were hollow, like a bird's.
"You will be sleeping in here." He pulled out her trunk. It also fit snugly in his palm. "And doing whatever else. The Headmaster is allowing you to move around the castle, but don't abuse the privilege or you'll find it revoked. If you meet a locked door, do try to quash your inherent Gryffindor impulse to cause trouble and let it be."
She had been studying a fifteenth-century hanging tapestry of Yggdrasil, its uppermost branches extending into the heavens; but at that she turned to glower at him. For such a tiny person, it wasn't a bad glower.
"Fine," she said mulishly. "Can I go outside?"
"No." Dumbledore had said she could, but Dumbledore was worried about the decency of her summer holiday. Severus had no such concerns. At least, he was good at quashing them. More or less. With the Dementors hanging above the gates, he had good reason to keep her inside, at least.
"That's so unfair!" she said, sounding every inch the child she was.
"No doubt Sirius Black is saying the same thing." He restored her trunk to size mid-air, so that it made a deafening bang as it slammed into contact with the stone floor. "He'll be at least as cross about it as you."
"I thought Hogwarts was supposed to be safe." He couldn't tell from her tone of voice whether she was honestly asking or if she was trying to smart off but failed because he had at last punctured that genetic Gryffidor arrogance.
"And Azkaban is supposed to be impregnable," he answered.
She frowned, but it looked more thoughtful than petulant. She didn't reply, however.
He watched her, trying to tell if she was worried but finding it impossible. When it came to emotions that could be exploited, he knew he was an excellent judge, so he had to assume that if she was worried, it was so inchoate a feeling that she could repress it entirely. Even her pallor could be attributed to her run-in with the Dementors. Or perhaps the oversized glasses and shaggy hair left very little face to read. Despite all the evidence, he found it difficult to believe that even James Potter's hard-headed offspring could be entirely sanguine knowing that a mass murderer had escaped prison to come after her.
"Hogwarts is safer than anywhere else," he said at last.
"Yeah," she said absently. "But it's not exactly safe, is it?"
It wasn't, and no good came of pretending. "Nothing is."
Of all things, that seemed to relax her. Her body language softened, like she'd at last heard something she wanted to hear. Severus had no idea how that could be true, but it seemed to be.
"Right," she said, sounding resolute. Like the glower, she did a fairly good job of it.
"You will inform me whenever you leave this room," he said, ignoring this pint-sized show of courage. "In person. Sending your owl with a note isn't good enough. If I am indisposed or unavailable, you will stay put until you can communicate with me. Is that clear?"
The glower was back. "Fine," she grumbled.
He paused as he turned to leave. "You may also be interested to know that I have an impeccable memory for offenses committed during the summer holiday. I also have a habit of redressing them . . . appropriately . . . when the school term resumes."
She gaped at him. The expression on her face was rather amusing, really. Or it would have been, if he'd had a sense of humor.
"I'll leave you to get settled," he said, and left her to nurse those little wounds while he curled up with his own, which ran as deep as cracks to the core of the earth.