Chapter Text
Something roused Harry from the depths of his slumber, not ungently but insistently, with the accompaniment of a hushed and baritone voice.
“…Potter. It’s time.”
Through the darkness of Snape’s unlit living room, Harry could make out the Professor drawing away again, hand slipping from Harry’s shoulder to the switch of the nearby floor lamp standing sentinel beside the fireplace.
Harry shut his eyes against the light with a wince, imagining for a second how comfortable it would be to sink back into sleep, before he pulled away the blanket tucked around him and stood from the couch—Snape’s couch, he reminded himself, as he put on his shoes from where he had toed them off the night before.
He was in Snape’s living quarters, where the man had so mercifully allowed Harry to stay for the night, even after he had barged into the space uninvited and without Snape’s knowledge. A prickle of shame made a frown tug at Harry’s lips. It’s against the rules for you to be here at all, and you’re thinking of going back to sleep, like this is your dormitory in the dungeons? Ungrateful idiot.
“Last night, we were settled on your waking early to return to Gryffindor Tower unnoticed, were we not?” Snape asked, brow slightly furrowed, perhaps mistaking the reason for Harry’s frown. “You seemed adamant on it then…”
“Er—yeah, of course—Thanks for waking me up on time, sir.”
As Harry had skipped the leaving feast, no doubt leaving Ron and Hermione wondering and worrying about him, he felt that he owed them and the rest of his friends their usual last morning at school together.
“Come here. A Disillusionment charm will help you go unseen.” Beckoning Harry over, Snape took out his wand and, muttering the incantation, tapped Harry on the top of the head with it. “Finite Incantatum will cancel it.”
A cold wave rushed through Harry from that spot, like someone had cracked an egg fresh from the fridge over him, and he shivered, watching curiously as he seemed to turn see-through; by the time the spell had completely sunken in, a faint outline was all that could be seen of him.
He would have admired the effect for longer, had Snape not already moved to hold the door open for him. Together they went through the short tunnel to the portrait doorway, the edges of which Snape peered around to scan the corridor beyond, in the case that a meandering ghost or Mrs. Norris rounded the corner in the next moment.
“The caretaker should have retired to his quarters by now,” Snape said quietly, stepping aside to let Harry over the threshold of the hidden doorway, “but make sure to keep away from the light, you still cast a shadow. This would have been easier had you thought to bring that cloak of yours, when you came traipsing down here yesterday.”
Harry wanted to tell the man that, at the time, he hadn’t been thinking at all, but he was no longer drowsy enough to consider that a good idea.
“Go on—and remember the plan we discussed.”
Already forgetting that he was invisible, Harry nodded, then he paused, glancing back at Snape, who was looking into the air a few inches off Harry’s right shoulder. “Professor—thanks for letting me stay the night. You really didn’t have to…”
Snape’s expression was unreadable, but his voice was dry when he replied, “Yes, well, we have already established that I am apparently unable to turn you away,” before stepping back into the portrait tunnel and shutting it behind himself.
Harry stared at the founder of Slytherin house slumbering peacefully on the dark canvas for a second. Then the painted wizard’s brow furrowed, as though he could sense someone watching him, even in his sleep, and Harry started off down the stony corridor.
His footsteps made almost no sound as he took the stairs, smoothing his sleep-creased robes as he went, crossed the empty entrance hall, stepping far from the shafts of dust mote filled sunlight that poured in from the windows, and meeting not a soul on his way except for Trevor, Neville’s toad, in yet another one of the unfortunate beastie’s bids for escape. Harry scooped up the toad, ignoring its startled croak at being picked up by invisible hands, and took it with him as he ascended the spiral staircase of Gryffindor Tower.
The common room, pillow-strewn and red-bedecked as it had been since Harry had left it the last evening, was empty, and he was free to sneak up the stairs to the boys’ fifth-years dormitory, carefully letting himself in without so much as a creak of the door.
Harry set Trevor on Neville’s nightstand before performing the charm cancelling spell on himself; his body reappeared in a sluice of cold, and he shivered as he shook out his now visible hands, feeling as if this time someone had dumped a cup of icy water over his head.
At first, it seemed that none of the other boys had noticed his coming in, nor his magic—Ron’s soft snores continued without pause, and there was a creaking of bedsprings from Seamus’ bed as its occupant rolled over—and so Harry was quite under that impression until there came a rustling of hangings from behind him.
Biting back a curse, he whipped around with his wand held at the ready, only to see Neville blinking blearily at him, in the middle of reaching for his pet.
“…Morning, Harry.” Neville picked up Trevor, though his eyes were on Harry, no doubt taking in the fact that Harry was clad in rumpled robes instead of pyjamas. “You’re up early—We’ve got a while before the alarm goes off.”
“Did I wake you? I’m sorry,” said Harry simply, dodging Neville’s not-quite question.
“Well,” Neville glanced down at his toad, which blinked glumly at Harry, “I think your magic might’ve, and that’s alright, but, er—if you don’t mind me asking—where were you all of yesterday night?”
“In bed,” Harry replied immediately.
Neville frowned, perhaps affronted by the idea that Harry thought him so naive as to believe that. “It’s not like you have to tell me, but I won’t snitch, you know.”
Did Harry really have to lie? He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to tell Neville that he had skipped the leaving feast and fallen asleep in the library or the Owlery, or that he had gone visiting Hagrid and stayed the night there, but some part of him—the part that was all too aware that it would be two months before he would see Neville again, along with the rest of his classmates, friend or foe—felt that no harm could come of telling Neville the truth. Perhaps it would be right to, even, after he had joined Harry on his rescue mission to the Department of Mysteries not even two weeks ago, knowing not the entirety of their reason for going there, and despite the likelihood that they could all be killed or kidnapped.
“Would you believe me if I said,” Harry bit his lip and continued quietly, “that I—I went to Snape?”
He might as well have slapped Neville across the face; Neville shifted backwards on his bed a little, seemingly surprised into silence. His gaze flickered from Harry’s to Trevor and back to Harry again, before he spoke in a tone remarkably mild for what he had just been asked.
“I s’ppose I shouldn’t be shocked, after you were in such a rush to get to the Ministry to save him…and that bracelet,” Neville’s eyes darted to the charmed slip of leather hugging Harry’s wrist, “you used to find his location in the Department of Mysteries…You never did tell us all why you have it in the first place.”
“I didn’t know if I could, if I was supposed to, but it doesn’t matter as much now.” Not after he’s been found out as a double agent for our side of the war, all because of me. Because I just couldn’t go back to sleep on my own.
Distractedly, Harry went over to his open trunk and began the packing he had left off on, stuffing the last of his textbooks in amongst folded clothes and spare sheafs of parchment. He had never imagined having this conversation with Neville or anyone else for the matter, ever since he’d revealed to Ron and Hermione the change in his and Snape’s relationship almost two years ago.
“I know it’s weird.” Understatement of the century. “Have you noticed how he’s been a bit less horrible this year?”
“Yeah, a bit,” Neville said slowly. “He didn’t even yell at me when I melted my cauldron for the second time in a month, and he only took points off of you a bunch, but not as many from the rest of us, I think.”
It took Harry another few seconds to gather his thoughts and rearrange them into coherent words. He turned to face Neville again, slightly regretting his decision in telling the other boy to truth and half wishing he had just come up with some better lie that would lead to a talk infinitely less awkward than whatever this was.
“Well, I’ve gotten to know him,” hell, that’s so weird to say about a professor, “‘cause I’ve been having lessons outside of class from him since last year—those detentions and ‘Remedial Potions’, you know—and I don’t hate him anymore. He doesn’t hate me either—He doesn’t hate any of us, really, but he pretends to.”
Neville squinted at Harry, not looking angry but like he was struggling to piece Harry’s shoddily illustrated picture together in his mind.
“I don’t even know why I’m telling you this,” Harry muttered. “You asked, I guess, but forget it. Maybe I can convince him to be even less horrible over the summer, so there’s that for you.”
“I must just be in shock, but all I can think is that it’s making some sense now,” said Neville, vaguely. At Harry’s blank stare, he clarified, “You always came back from your ‘detentions’,” while doing air quotations with his fingers, “a lot less unhappy than you should’ve been.”
“Damn, and I thought my acting was alright.”
With a slight smile, Neville shook his head, seemingly in acceptance of the utter absurdity he had just been told. “And—you said something about Snape and the summer…?”
“Oh, that. I’m, uh, sort of staying with him. For the whole summer. The two months.”
“That’s—that’s nice for you, I think, or at least it sounds like it, from what you’ve said about what living with your relatives is like—”
Fortunately for Harry and perhaps Neville as well, the wake up alarm chimed in the dormitory, stirring the other boys awake and effectively ending what Harry considered possibly the most clumsy conversation he had ever held in his entire life.
Neither Seamus nor Dean questioned Harry’s last night whereabouts, though Harry did give Ron a Tell-You-Later look that he resolved to follow up on sometime when they wouldn’t be as easily overheard. Together, all five boys got dressed, abandoning their hastily folded pyjamas and school uniforms, which they packed into their trunks, for casual day robes and Muggle clothes, before shuffling down to the bathroom to wash and brush with the rest of the Gryffindor population.
They met the girls on the way down to breakfast a quarter of an hour later. Parvati and Lavender began interrogating Neville on whether or not he might be able to make it to their summer solstice party, and Dean and Seamus were too intrigued by the very idea of a summer solstice party to notice Ron and Hermione dragging Harry far ahead of them for an explanation.
“I had a feeling that’s where you’d gone,” said Hermione, after Harry had told them of his overnight stay in the dungeons (leaving out the fact that it had been an overwhelming anxiety and inability to be alone with himself that had driven him there), “but we did get worried—Ron snuck a whole meat pie up to the common room for you, just in case you turned up later, missing dinner.”
“Sorry about that, I just didn’t want to…deal with the noise in the hall, y’know. What happened to the pie after I didn’t come?”
“I ate it all.” Ron grimaced and put a hand to his stomach as they entered the already bustling Great Hall and sat down for breakfast. “Probably shouldn’t have, ‘cause I had a funny dream last night—Something about a failed experiment and some bird made of light, or was it mist?”
They tucked into marmalade toast and hash browns, savouring what would be their last meal together as fifth-years and until they could next see each other again, and of when that would be, Harry wasn’t entirely sure; Snape had allowed him to the Weasleys for Sunday suppers the last summer they had lived together, but the circumstances were different now, what with the Death Eaters now wanting the both of them dead instead of just Harry, as well as the war that loomed on the horizon, darkening even their last moments spent at Hogwarts for the term.
Snippets of unhappy whispers cut an undercurrent through the otherwise cheerful and excited babble that filled the entrance hall, as students set to finding their trunks in the lineup of luggage that had been carried down from the dormitories by the house elves during breakfast. Harry couldn’t help but feel as though the sun had gone in, upon hearing the muttering and murmuring as he carried Hedwig in her cage through the front doors, hearing people worrying over whether their families would want them to return to school the next semester, wondering about the safety of distant relatives, and debating if what was in all of the newspapers were true—if Lord Voldemort had really returned.
“They all believe it now,” Harry sighed to Hedwig, who gazed unaffectedly back at him through the bars of her cage. “A lot of them didn’t, months ago, even after I did the whole interview about it…but I guess late is better than never, right?”
He opened the cage, and Hedwig stepped out and onto his forearm. She narrowed her yellow eyes, pleased, as Harry scratched her under the beak.
“Alder Avenue, Darach Hill—that’s the address Snape said,” he whispered. “Go on, fly off, and I’ll see you there in a few hours. We’re finally leaving the Dursleys behind forever, for good. That’s what he promised, anyway.”
Hedwig clicked her beak in a way that conveyed understanding, and she gave Harry an affectionate nip on the ear before launching off his arm and into the air, to the awed oohs of a few nearby first-years waiting on the front steps. Harry waited until she was merely a speck of white against the starkly blue sky, wishing that he could be as sure of their place at Darach Hill as the snowy owl seemed to be.
———
“Promise you’ll write, or at least ask Snape if you can? I know we left you in the lurch in terms of letter writing last summer, but we’ll not do that again, we swear—”
“I’ll send Pig over every week! I’ll talk through the Floo, if owling’s not an option.”
“Why on earth wouldn’t it be an option?”
“I dunno, maybe the wards around their new super safe house vaporize everything that tries to go through it.”
“Ron’s right,” said Harry, before Hermione could get another exasperated word in. He patted the pockets of his trousers, feeling the small bumps that were his shrunken down trunk, Firebolt, and Hedwig’s cage. “I don’t know everything about the wards, but I’ll ask Snape about them, and owling too. There goes the last minute train whistle—I’ve got to go.”
He swung his Invisibility Cloak over himself, and Ron opened the door to the compartment for him, under the pretence of peering down the hall.
“If you can, if Snape lets you, then send a note if you ever need to, er, get something off your mind, yeah?” Ron asked under his breath as Harry stepped past him. “If you ever wanna talk about what happened, because it’s been two weeks—”
A sudden tightness in Harry’s chest had him swallowing down words; he could only give his friend a parting pat on the shoulder before hurrying away, past more compartments of other people chatting and laughing and looking out at the platform, as though there was nothing wrong in the world. Harry gritted his teeth, biting back the envy that prickled under his tongue, and he stumbled out the open train doors, hating himself for having been jealous at all—It was my fault, no matter what Dumbledore said, and there’s no use in wishing things were different, because they can’t be.
The gleaming red engine gushed steam, the last doors shut automatically, faces and hands were pressed against the windows, and the whistle went again, a farewell hiss as the train began to move, rods going up and down, back and forth, pulling the great wheels into motion. Hagrid, standing at the end of the platform, was waving cheerfully to the departing students leaning out of their open windows to holler goodbyes at him.
Harry clutched the folds of his cloak around himself, against the billowing of wind and steam from the locomotive’s wake, and turned away, heading to one of the benches at the back of the platform, where a lone black-clad figure sat watching the train pull out of the station, travelling trunk beside him and signature stony look on his face.
“Professor,” Harry whispered, though there was nobody else around to hear. “I’m here.”
Without any other sign that he had even heard Harry, Snape stood up, pulling his trunk with him, and held his right arm crooked at the elbow. Harry took it, and before he could brace himself, he was twisted along as Snape turned quickly on the spot.
Everything went black and staticky and horribly as though they were being squeezed through a straw for a split second.
Head reeling, stomach churning wildly inside of him, Harry staggered upon their arrival and would have collided with the low bough of a tree, had Snape not grabbed ahold of his shoulder.
The Potions master had Apparated them to the grove of trees that served as the Apparition point of Duff Avenue, Elgin, just as they had discussed, and through the slim trunks of elms and elders, the gable-roofed and white-washed train station could be seen.
“Put away your cloak, and here,” Snape pulled something from the pocket of his own cloak, “take your warding stone and your ticket. Do not lose them. Now you may unshrink your trunk.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to keep it small?” Harry asked but did as he was told. He slipped away the stone, which was really a tiny slab of some unidentifiable material hardly larger than two galleons stacked together, and felt a thin hum of magic as it settled at the bottom of his pocket.
“It would be, but we are posing as Muggle travellers, if you would recall, and must draw as little suspicion and attention as possible. Now, come. We must not be late.”
Harry had more questions pertaining to the warding stones, but a sudden wave of tiredness swamped over him, plunging any curiosity he might have felt into the far depths of his mind, and he followed at Snape’s heels, dragging his trunk behind him over roots and leaves.
Ever since—two weeks ago, it’s only been two weeks, not even that—he found himself without much energy or appetite and relapsing into periods of feeling as though his head had been swathed in cotton wool and then dunked into chloroform, a feeling he once thought that he had managed to shake off. All that was missing was the sickly, rotting voice that made him blame himself for what had happened, and it would all seem the same.
But the voice was absent. What it said, however, about guilt and shame and hate, still lingered on, at the back of Harry’s head, like the sour aftertaste of washed away blood. Like blue mist curling up from the shattered remnants of what had once contained it.
They reached the station, which was lively with other passengers to-be waiting on the benches, calling for porters and guides, and looking out at the gravel tracks going past the bricks and pavements and other signs of suburbia. Harry stuck close to Snape as they made their way over to the right platform, trying to keep from knocking his trunk into anything, and a minute later, a whistle blasted, a robotic-sounding announcer called over the loudspeaker, and they were queuing up to board a train.
Snape shut them and their trunks into an empty compartment and muttered some spell at the door of it, then he sat across from Harry and took out his ticket. Harry did the same.
“How do the warding stones work, sir?” he asked, glancing down at the lump in the pocket of his trousers that was his stone. “You didn’t say, when you told me about the whole plan last night…”
“Warding stones draw upon the holder’s natural magic to maintain the charms cast on them. Ours have anti-eavesdropping, notice-me-nots, and other charms on them, as a precaution against Muggles and other mages alike. They will be convenient, as from here on out, we must use as simple magic as possible—you, none at all, actually.”
Confused, Harry made to speak; he knew that his using of magic while being under seventeen wouldn’t be detected by the Ministry of Magic as long as he was near Snape or any other of-age mage, and Snape himself was surely aware of the fact too.
The Professor continued without pause, “There are ways to locate and track down users of magic, regardless of their age, though your still having the underage Trace on you makes those ways simpler for those who wish to find us. Think of it as though we carry with us buckets instead of wands, paint instead of magic. Each time one of us casts a spell, a little of that magic spills and stains the world, leaving behind an identifiable mark, but if we do not use magic—there is no spillage. No mark to show where we have been.”
“And the warding stones’ charms don’t count towards that, because the spells have already been cast, and they work off of our natural magic,” Harry said carefully. His inference was rewarded with an affirming nod.
“Correct. Until we reach our final destination and have entered the wards, I cannot cast anything more powerful than, say, first-year spells. Lumos and the like.”
A conductor was shouting and waving last-minute passengers onto the train, and Harry couldn’t prevent himself from flinching as heavy thumping of luggage and lumbering footfalls thudded past their compartment.
He had been reminded for a moment of how Uncle Vernon had sounded just like that one evening, lurching drunkenly towards Harry’s cupboard, through the small breathing vent on the door of which Harry had glimpsed the gleam of a belt’s buckle. But a heartbeat later, the moment had passed, Harry’s spiked pulse started to slow, and he slumped in his seat, drained.
Snape must have noticed, for he tilted his head questioningly at Harry, who was too listless to either feel shame at his own weakness or speak to answer the man’s unvoiced query.
“It is an hour and a half’s journey before our stop,” Snape said, after a brief silence. “That will be in Aberdeen, and it is another hour’s ride from there to Dundee, so I fear you haven’t much time, if you wish to sleep.”
Shrugging half-heartedly, Harry put his head against the window. The glass pane cooled his clouded head, seeming to cut away some of the swathes of wool around it. “I’ll be fine, sir.”
Somewhere at the end of their platform, a whistle blew, coupled with a few more calls from the conductors. There were more footsteps, luggage wheels squeaking, child’s laughter, voices scolding and sighing and sniffing, and the distant and muffled sounds of doors slamming and locking, before the train slowly, slowly started to move along.
Harry shut his eyes, not caring to watch the trees and buildings slide past as the train picked up speed. A now familiar tiredness was overwhelming his mind and body; there seemed to be a heaviness deep in his bones, in the marrow of every one of his ribs, or rocks sewn into the skin of his chest.
It wasn’t the achy exhaustion of physical overexertion, nor the mental throbbing brought on by stress, and there was nothing that could clear it away, save perhaps for death itself.
But that was a fate all at once too terrible and merciful for someone like him.
As the rest of the world seemed to grow distant, the thought that when he awoke, he would still feel the same tiredness—the same sense that something had been hollowed out of him and replaced with stones, cold and dead—blipped dimly in Harry’s mind, but he had already drifted off—
—into a bathtub of soapy water.
It was cheap soap, the bar fractured and cracked, bits of white unscented stuff flaking to pieces in Harry’s hands, but he knew better than to reach for the rows upon rows of colourful bottles lined along the rim of the tub. Stark sky blue, snowy white, marmalade perfume, plastic as red as a freshly painted train’s caboose. They weren’t for him, and besides, he would have to get out of the water soon.
He had school the next day, at the brick building down the road past the park. Was there homework due? Or did he have an exam waiting for him, with a big hourglass at the top of the hall, and parchments that would roll up and seal themselves once the allotted time was up?
There was a harsh knocking at the door, through which the sounds of heavy footsteps were muffled, and Harry flinched, hands slipping on wet porcelain.
He spoke, saying that he would be out in a second, Aunt Petunia, but something wasn’t right.
Aunt Petunia didn’t sound like that. She didn’t twist the knob, thumping the door when it wouldn’t give, or make the air in the bathroom so cold that it was biting. She was never the one to swing the belt.
The belt’s buckle, square, unstained brass, hard metal embedded in rough leather, knocked against the door, softly, almost.
Harry shivered and sank lower in the water—a mistake; the iciness cut into his flesh, making the old welts there scream in pain, as though also in anticipation of what was to come from the hammering at the other side of the door.
Stifling a cry of his own, Harry surged out of the tub, knocking over the countless bottles of soaps and shampoos as he went. Everywhere on his body, gooseflesh pimpled, induced by the freezing air that nipped at his wrinkled fingers, but the continuous sound of his uncle at the door made him blind, deaf, and numb to all else. If he didn’t right the bottles in time, didn’t drain the tub and scrub its sides and clear away the soap—he dreaded to think, to know of what would happen.
He turned to the back of the small room, took his towel from the rack and draped it over himself before shifting his focus to the fallen bottles, scrambling to pick them up—Elm wood, gravel grey, steam-scented—He could hardly grip the plastic; his hands were shaking from both cold and fear, fingers twitching—
As though a blanket of snow had settled over the room, everything went quiet and somehow even colder. The door stopped rattling in its hinges, and its knob stopped twisting, but it wasn’t relief that swept over Harry.
Whispers, mere breaths at first, were fluttering like moths through the air.
They were saying something tempting, something promising, promising forgiveness. They said that Harry would be able to see them all again, and everything would be right, what he had done would have been made up for, compensation, an eye for an eye, or a life—
Against his will and every reasonable fibre of his being, Harry turned around and saw the source of the whispering.
The tattered black curtain, the veil of the archway, brushed so close to his face that he could smell it, the scent of snow and dry ashes, of miasma, but he wasn’t repulsed. He wasn’t even afraid anymore.
There was nothing stopping him from taking moving closer until he reached the other side.
But before Harry could do anything, he was being stirred from his sleep for the second time that day.
“…our stop, Potter—Aberdeen,” said Snape, reaching now to open the door to the train compartment, trunk in hand. “The station is a good deal larger and more crowded than Elgin’s, so stay close.”
Harry got slowly up from his seat, half expecting to feel the sting of welts on his back or the chill of steam-slick tiles beneath his feet, and without knowing why; the details of his dream were melting from his mind like morning’s frost from an open field.
All he was sure of was that it was the reason why he startled as the train pulled into the platform, why a cold sweat dampened the palms of his hands as he took up the handle of his own luggage and followed Snape into the hall of the train. At any rate, he might as well not have slept; just as he had known would be the case, his weariness had not faded in the slightest.
The state of the station did nothing to help with this. It was a huge glass prism, criss-crossed by steel beams and supports that loomed high above the people rushing about beneath it, porters pushing trolleys of luggage with wheels that wanted oiling, babies giggling and screaming in turns, their exhausted parents sipping at strong coffees, a group of dancers carrying a jukebox cranked to an intolerable volume, confused sightseers gesturing at maps, harassed-looking clerks in suits and ties comparing tickets and timetables,…By the time they had made their way close to the ticket counter, Harry was ready to pull out his wand and Stun himself, paint bucket metaphor for magic or not.
“The next train to Dundee arrives in twenty minutes.” Snape didn’t give Harry his ticket this time, which Harry was indifferent to. “Enough time to buy a lunch from somewhere, as the train does not have a food service.”
“I’m not hungry,” Harry muttered, and he wasn’t being dishonest; the only thing he wanted was to be unconscious without the risk of having another dream. Wishing for the impossible again…
Snape glanced sharply at Harry. “Perhaps not now, but in another hour, you very well could be.” His right hand shifted at his side, as though he had been about to reach out, before he had thought better of it. “Is something wrong?”
A heavily laden trolley rattled past them with a din that made Harry clench his jaw. “I just…I don’t know, sir.”
It wasn’t simply a matter of being uncertain of himself. Snape had already taken care of everything, from their itinerary to the tickets, and for Merlin’s sake, it was his new house that Harry was oh so graciously being let into, so scratch that—the last thing Harry wanted was to complain about anything.
For another moment, the Potions master continued to look at Harry, perhaps waiting for an elaboration. When it became apparent to him that none were forthcoming, he nodded for Harry to follow him.
Through the station they went, skirting around the largest groups of excited tourists and giving a leashed though rather wild looking wolfhound a wide berth. At one point, Harry was jostled into Snape’s side as a ticket inspector rushed past them at top speed, but Snape brushed off his stammered apology before quickly moving them off again.
Harry found that they had entered a slightly quieter and less busy part of the station, the platform of the train that would carry them to Dundee, and quieter yet was the almost empty waiting room that Snape chivvied him into. In the absence of the clutter and commotion of the rest of the station, everything seemed tolerable again.
“Stay here and use your bracelet if anything happens,” Snape told Harry after having sat him and their trunks down at one of the benches. “I’ll not be long.”
“What if the train comes before you’re back?” Harry couldn’t help but ask.
Their walk to the waiting room had set a nervous fire alight in his gut, and the sparks of worry spiralling from it were far from the detached numbness that he had had earlier.
“Potter, I am not nearly so bad a manager of time as for that to happen. Even if it does, then we would simply have to wait for the next one.”
In a flap of his cloak, Snape had left the room. Harry watched his dark form through the frosted glass walls until it passed out of sight, his worry only slightly eased by the man’s cool reply.