Well, Harry was sixteen and felt like he was still every inch an idiot. Why couldn't he appreciate what Snape was willing to give him? Why did he have to keep second-guessing himself and trying to be loyal to someone he'd never really known? Why did every bit of this hurt so much when really, it was nothing but a good thing? He'd have someone, finally.
Someone who could claim him. Someone who knew what it was like to tangle with Voldemort. Someone who could understand what he'd had to deal with these past few years. Someone who looked at him and saw the boy. Not the scar, not the prophecy, him.
It was great, wasn't it? So why did he feel like crying?
Biting back a frown, Harry watched as beside him, Snape wrote out answer after long answer about what a splendid father he would make.
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Coming Soon in A Year Like None Other:
Chapter Forty-One: Sometimes It Just Takes A Wizard
Comments very welcome,
Aspen in the Sunlight
Chapter 41: Sometimes it Just Takes a Wizard
http://archive.skyehawke.com/story.php?no=5036&chapter=41
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A Year Like None Other
by Aspen in the Sunlight
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Chapter Forty-One: Sometimes It Just Takes a Wizard
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The next few days were wrenching ones for Harry.
The headmaster had said their interviews would occur just as soon as Wizard Family Services had "thoroughly reviewed" the application. Harry wanted it all to be over. He kept glancing over at the parchment by the door, wishing he could will it to announce the arrival of some Family Services staff. Every night when Snape walked in, Harry asked straight away if he'd heard anything, anything at all.
But for all his anxiousness to get it over with, Harry also began to deeply wish he'd never stuck his foot in this mire. Because he felt like he was sinking fast. He tried a couple of times to call Snape Severus, but the name stuck in his throat. Sir was just easier... and far less daunting. His nervousness around his teacher was just getting worse as he lived in this not-quite-adopted limbo. With the rational part of his mind, he knew he wasn't in any danger of being rejected at this late stage. Even if he did manage to thoroughly irritate Snape, his teacher would still go through with the adoption, for the spell if no other reason.
But Harry didn't want it to be just for the spell, and so he walked on tenterhooks around the man. He started carrying Sals around more, though he didn't flaunt the snake in front of the other boys. The presence of his little friend was comforting, though, and when Harry felt particularly frustrated, he would retreat to a corner and speak to Sals in soft Parseltongue. Funny how that made him feel so much better, now. When he'd discovered the skill in himself, it had horrified him. But now, it was just a part of himself, whether Voldemort had put it there, or not.
Sals, Harry found out, was a bit of a know-it-all when all was said and done. Of course, Parseltongue wasn't English; when Harry wanted to explain about the adoption, he ended up having to say that Snape hadn't been his father then, but was going to be soon. Even that didn't make too much sense in snake-language, but Sals seemed to get the point.
"I knew you would like a father," Sals hissed, wrapping herself around and around Harry's wrist as they sat alone in his room.
"What I'd like," Harry changed the subject, "is for you to stop sleeping in the corner of the Floo. Please, Sals, we've talked about this. You'll get sick again. Don't you remember?"
"The ssstones are warm," Sals replied. "It was sooo cold in the cccellar, Harry..."
After the third time he found Sals ignoring instructions, Harry asked Snape to bring some rocks from outside. Harry put these in the corner of the Floo, and rotated them out, one at a time, into Sals' box so the snake would have somewhere else warm and comfy to sleep. But Sals still preferred the fireplace to her little box.
Observing this, Snape said a bit sardonically that negotiation apparently didn't always work. Harry got the point--he had sort of taken on Sals' well-being the way Snape had taken on his--but he still found the comment a bit perplexing. What was he supposed to do, give his snake a detention if she wouldn't behave? Or was Snape trying to say that he found Harry just as hard to deal with as Harry found Sals?
It was all a bit much for Harry to figure out.
Living with his cousin was also getting to be a strain for Harry. Dudley thought this adoption scenario was nothing short of splendid, and that Harry ought to be a whole lot happier about it. Harry tried to explain that things were more complicated than that, but Dudley didn't get it. "Call him Dad," his cousin would whisper to him two or three times a day, usually within sight of Snape, though no doubt Dudley thought the Potions Master couldn't hear him. Fat chance of that, Harry would think. From a hundred paces, Snape can hear whether you drop two newt's eyes instead of one into your cauldron.
Thank Merlin, Snape pretended he didn't hear the way Dudley kept egging Harry on.
Strangely enough, the only person who wasn't getting on Harry's nerves these days was Draco. Of course the Slytherin boy was still resentful; Harry could see it in the twist of his lip, but Draco had apparently decided to stop putting his anger on full display. Maybe Snape had talked to him about impulse control? Harry didn't know. He just knew that while Draco tutored him in subjects, or tried to help him practice magic, he acted mostly the same as he had before. Aristocratic and smugly superior, but genuinely helpful, too. He even started reading Harry's essays before they were owled out, and suggesting improvements.
Just like Hermione, though Harry decided he'd better not point that out.
It was during a Potions lesson one afternoon that the Slytherin boy suddenly said, "Someone's here."
He did that a lot; every time Harry's friends came by, Draco knew about it, even if he couldn't possibly see the enchanted scroll. "How do you do that?" Harry finally asked.
"The spelled parchment sort of makes a... buzzing in my head," Draco explained.
It's a magic doorbell, Harry thought. Honestly, sometimes he wondered why wizards made everything so complicated. Why not make the thing just ring out loud?
Draco spelled the fire under their wart-removal Potion to a tiny flame, then performed a cleaning charm on his and Harry's hands before walking out to the door, where the parchment read Albus Dumbledore, Horace Darswaithe.
"No pets?" Draco quipped, ignoring Harry's groan. "Abrire."
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The headmaster was a bit brusque, Harry thought. Possibly he was still reacting to Harry's refusal to confide in him? Hard to be sure. Not that it mattered much to Harry if Dumbledore left directly after introducing Mr. Darswaithe as a casewizard from Wizard Family Services.
The casewizard was a tall, thin man. He looked young, but his sparse brown hair appeared to be prematurely balding, which struck Harry as pretty unusual for a wizard. He had a sudden, bizarre urge to suggest the man ask Snape for a hair tonic.