Chapter Text
Harry gaped at the sight of Severus Snape sitting cross-legged in the rear of the Knight Bus. As it was, he wasn’t entirely sure that the man wasn’t a figment of his imagination. Maybe the events of the night had officially done him in, and he had finally gone mad like Uncle Vernon had always said he would. As the door closed with a resounding whoosh, Snape looked up disinterestedly from his copy of The Daily Prophet to send an analyzing glance at the newcomer, only to freeze upon spotting Harry standing wide-eyed at the front of the bus.
He childishly hoped that Snape would think that Harry was a figment of his imagination as he began to slowly inch back towards his only escape. He thought that he may have just enough time to slip back outside before the bus pulled away completely from the curb...
As if in slow motion, Snape blinked once. Twice. And then he began to rise as he threw his paper aside onto the bed next to him, a furious snarl beginning to form on his lips-
BANG
The Knight Bus was off and Harry was rocketed off his feet to land in an ungraceful heap against an empty bed behind him. He laid there for a moment, winded from the mattress ramming into his upper back.
“POTTER!”
Harry struggled to right himself as the vehicle continued to veer and turn in nauseating intervals, but before he could, a long-fingered hand gripped the fabric of his oversized shirt and yanked him onto his feet. His ankle throbbed ominously as he managed to find some semblance of balance. He had felt it roll sickeningly when he fell.
“What in Merlin’s name are you doing?!” Snape shouted. His face was twisted with a fiery rage, “Do you have no common sense in that thick skull of yours?! Or do you simply decide to put its use towards figuring out how to best commit blatant acts of vagrancy?! I know for a fact that you do not have a valid excuse as to why you are boarding this bus at near two o’clock in the morning!”
The volume at which these words were said was not meant for the Knight Bus’s enclosed space. A wizard grunted and curled up more firmly beneath his lumpy blankets in an attempt to block out the noise while a cranky witch vocalized her disapproval from the upper levels as Snape ranted.
Snape, of course, seemed blind to the other passengers' annoyance. The hold he had on Harry’s shirt had not lessened once during his tirade, and he punctuated each sentence with a jerk of his arm that tested Harry’s already precarious footing. Irritation quickly rose within him at the professor’s assumptions. As it did every time they crossed paths, Snape’s baseless accusations quickly stoked his temper. Now that the surprise of Snape’s appearance had worn off, the two years of animosity between them easily rushed in to replace any lingering shock. Grabbing a nearby bed frame for support, Harry used his other hand to aggressively rip his fisted top from the man’s grasp.
There was no way Harry was going to tell Snape of all people the real reason why he had decided to leave Privet Drive so late in the evening, er- so early in the morning. A premonition of a gleeful looking Draco Malfoy loudly narrating to all of Slytherin House about how Harry blew up his aunt during a tantrum flitted through his mind.
“Why are you here? I didn’t realize that bats needed to take public transportation to get around,” Harry grumbled, green eyes narrowing through his lopsided glasses as he clutched the metal frame with white-knuckled strength. Perhaps the statement was too much of a test of the man’s patience, but Harry was tired, and Snape was currently the only thing between him and a warm bed at the Leaky Cauldron.
Snape’s face instantly paled in fury.
“Why you insolent, little-”
“P-professor?”
Harry and Snape’s heads both turned owlishly towards a very anxious looking Stan Shunpike. The conductor seemed to fold in on himself at the attention as he began to twist his hat nervously in his shaking hands. Harry figured it wasn’t him that had the man so rattled. One glance from Snape could easily rival the basilisk’s stare and had a history of petrifying even the most brave seventh years.
“The young lad ‘ere has not g-given us his d-destination yet, s-sir,” Shunpike managed to stutter out. His acne riddled face faded to a porridge like hue as Snape growled in annoyance, but the professor’s dark eyes had already snapped back to Harry’s own.
“Yes, Potter,” Snape began lowly. Stan yelped, “ Potter?!” in the background, “Do tell us where your dimwitted brain determined that a newly thirteen-year-old dunderhead such as yourself should travel to alone in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business, sir ,” Harry replied as his anger steadily rose at the man’s continued insults. He had a rather fond vision of a ballooned Snape floating to the top of the Knight Bus’s ceiling like Aunt Marge.
“It is ‘my business’ as you so maturely put it, Potter, because contrary to popular belief, I apparently have nothing better to do than micro-manage impossible, head-strong Gryffindors such as yourself, due to your blatant gall and untamed assumptions that you can get away with doing whatever you please!” Snape roared while the nostrils of his large, hooked nose flared in a rather unflattering manner.
Before Harry could open his mouth to respond, the dour man got a nasty knowing look on his face, one that Harry was all too familiar with. It was the same face that the professor regularly made right before he thoroughly humiliated him during Potions, and Harry instinctually fell into silence as he watched a fire hydrant deftly avoid the Knight Bus through the window.
“Oh, I see, Potter. You thought you would go on a little glory trip to finish out your summer, hmm? Let all of Wizarding Britain know of your conquests while you bask in your so-called fame and take advantage of their attention while manipulating them into offering you free hospitality? Your arrogance truly knows no bounds,”
Bloody hell!
“No! That’s not-” Harry sputtered in his outrage as he waved his arms in vehement denial. That was just ridiculous! His hand quickly resumed its post when he was nearly catapulted straight into the potion master as the bus made an impossibly sharp left turn, “I'm staying at the Leaky Cauldron in London until the end of summer! Not running around the country! And for your information, I’m going to pay for it with my own money like any decent person would-” Harry quickly stopped and snapped his mouth shut with an audible click . An embarrassed flush charted its way up onto his cheeks.
Slimy Slytherin git.
Instead of fading after his proclamation, the nasty knowing look on Snape’s face only grew more sincere, and the man’s eyes lit up with a mocking, false understanding.
“Tired of your relatives waiting on you hand and foot? How typical of you to cast their goodwill aside, Potter. Like father like son I suppose,” Snape sneered, “Make no mistake, however, the staff of the Leaky Cauldron are not meant to be your personal servants as you laze about the premises. Not everyone is jumping at the opportunity to be a part of your little fan club despite what your inflated ego may believe,”
Harry was speechless as he stared slack-jawed at Snape.
Was the man really that thick? Did he truly know so little about Harry? How had two years of school done nothing but lower the professor’s already horrible opinion of him?
‘Harry Potter, our new celebrity-’
‘Clearly fame isn’t everything-’
‘The train isn’t good enough for the famous Harry Potter-’
‘Like father like son, I suppose-’
‘Bad blood will out-’
‘If there’s something wrong with the bitch, there’s something wrong with the pup-’
The redness of his face traveled to his ears as Harry’s temper reached its peak for the second time that night.
“FINE THEN! Believe what you want about me!” Harry practically screamed, “But answer this for me, sir, how would you know anything about what I would want?! You barely knew me for five seconds before you decided I was some spoiled, horrible, little git! I guess it takes one to know one after all! It’s not like you can see two inches beyond your own nose anyway. You don’t know me and you don’t even care, so you can just leave me alone and SHOVE IT!” The fingernails on his unoccupied hand had carved into his palm while he yelled, but he barely felt the sting over his rushing anger. He had had enough of people blindly insulting him and his parents tonight. Besides, they weren’t at Hogwarts. He wasn’t going to take it from an overgrown bully like Snape when he was supposed to finally be escaping from the worst part of his life.
There was a squeak of horror from Shunpike to Harry’s left.
Snape’s face had closed off completely as all traces of disgust and anger rippled away into nothingness. A passing lamppost illuminated the man’s eyes. They were black pits that held nothing but the deepest loathing. The motion of the bus nearly caused their chests to collide as Snape moved forward to tower over him.
Harry gulped at the dangerous glint in the professor’s eyes. The blood coloring Harry’s cheeks rapidly sank to pool somewhere by his toes, earlier courage gone in face of Snape’s calm fury.
“Listen to me very closely, Potter,” Snape said with a tone so dark that it sent a chill up Harry’s already tense spine, “Your father may have condoned this disrespectful behavior of yours with a pat on the back or an outlandish reward, but… he is not here is he? No. He is not. He is long dead and buried, and it will forever be my life’s biggest misfortune that you were not buried with him.”
Harry reeled back as if struck to sit softly on the end of the bed behind him. To his horror, his eyes began to grow misty, and he averted them to look at a battered looking travel case a few feet down the aisle. Despite the pact that he made to himself years ago to not show any emotion to Snape’s cutting remarks, the man had struck a chord hidden deep within Harry with those words. It unearthed a thought that had rebounded in his head over and over during long sleepless nights in his cupboard.
Why didn’t I die too?
The thought echoed as Harry raised his head, determined to meet Snape’s eyes. As their gazes locked, a shadow of some unknown emotion passed over Snape’s face before it was quickly replaced with one of his more classic sneers. It was tight around the edges, however, and if Harry didn’t just learn about the depths of the man’s hatred for him, he would have said it looked slightly forced. The obsidian eyes turned searching the longer their silent staring contest went on, and the Gryffindor had to stop himself from fidgeting under their intensity.
A moment of silence passed where the only noise was the muffled roar of the Knight Bus’s engine and the soft snoring of a deeply sleeping passenger.
“So, we still dropping the boy off at the ol’ Cauldron then?”
The high-pitched voice of Stan Shunpike nearly made Harry jump back to his feet in surprise. The conductor was pointedly looking away from the pair, choosing instead to admire the grand chandelier that jingled faintly at each divot in the road. It was clear that Stan had heard every word uttered between him and Snape as he rubbed uncomfortably at his red neck. Harry ducked his head in his own embarrassment, the strange spell between him and the professor now thoroughly broken. When he dared a glance up through his fringe, the potion’s master had returned to as cool and collected as ever.
“No,” Snape said pointedly, and the desire to fight him on that was on the tip of Harry’s tongue. He had no right to make decisions for him. The man was the farthest thing possible from a reliable authority figure- “we shall be dropped off.”
Harry groaned aloud and let gravity take him on the next turn. His ankle gave another throb in tune with his heart. Laying sprawled on top of the swaying bed, he wondered how this night could get any worse.