The Boy Who Lived A Bit [Snarry]

Chapter One

Cups of tea had become so much more palatable at 12 Grimmauld Place since Harry had convinced Dobby and his fellow house elves to supply teabags as well as the horrid black leafy stuff that everybody else drank, that lurked at the bottom of your cup and made you want to cough and spit if you forgot and drank too far down. The other members of the Order had given him strange looks when they first saw him dunking a paper bag on a string in and out of his mug. Honestly, sometimes it was like the Wizarding world had totally missed the last hundred years of human civilisation! Only Arthur Weasley and Hermione had been cool about the teabags becoming a staple grocery item in the Grimmauld kitchen. Hermione had hugged Harry, eyes wide in gratitude, and could be heard murmuring every time she made a cuppa how she wished she'd thought of that. Arthur grilled Harry over how the bags were manufactured and to what purpose the strings could be put afterward – he knew Muggles were big on recycling, after all.

Harry tapped his wand against the kettle, boiling the water inside it instantly, and then poured some into his waiting mug. Setting the kettle down again, he busied himself with jiggling the small bag of tea up and down in the water.

'Still trailing bags of potpourri through our beverages are we, Mister Potter?' The black velvet voice was unmistakable. Harry didn't need to turn around.

 

'You should try it sometime, Snape. Tastes good. Less fuss.'

'Any wizard who doesn't know how to reduce the "fuss" of an act as simple as making a cup of tea, without resorting to Muggle inventions, hardly deserves to bear the title.'

Harry shrugged his shoulders as he levitated the sodden teabag to the bin. He added milk to his mug and carried it over to the table, looking up for the first time. 'Oh,'he said as he looked at his ex-professor. 'Is it snowing outside?'

Severus Snape gave him a look that clearly and loudly said "Obviously" as he unwound the thick woollen scarf from around his neck, specks of frosty white shaking loose as he did so and melting in the air before they even managed to reach the kitchen floor. The thick black scarf was laid on an empty seat, as were the black finger less gloves that followed. Snape then shrugged out of his heavy winter robe, too, and added it to the growing pile of blackness.

'The kettle's freshly boiled if you want a cuppa.' Harry knew he hardly had to tell the man this information but he felt uncomfortable with too much silence around them. Elsewhere in the house, he knew that Lupin was reading or writing or sleeping or something, but apart from that it was just Harry and Snape. And as much as the relationship between the two of them no longer consisted of snarls of hatred and fits of pique, they weren't exactly bosom buddies either.

Most weekends found them thrown together though, Snape and he. Harry, since finishing school last July, now lived at Grimmauld Place, as did Remus Lupin. It was quite a nice arrangement, really, if a little claustrophobic. Harry wasn't allowed out much while the war still raged, and certainly was never allowed out on his own – the Order weren't even very keen on the idea of him being in the house on his own for any length of time,regardless of its hidden location and heavy wards. Remus didn't really have anywhere else to live either, so it had seemed a natural enough move for the two of them to set up home in the old Black family residence turned Order of the Phoenix headquarters. The Order tried not to give Lupin too many weekday errands, so that he could be home with Harry as much as possible. On weekends, when most of Lupin's errands would occur, the Order always tried to have one or two members hanging around Grimmauld Place to safeguard The Boy Who Lived. Sometimes, it would be one of the Weasleys, but more often than not these days it was Severus Snape. Many times, Snape would floo in when classes at Hogwarts finished on Friday afternoon and stay until Monday morning when he'd floo back to start teaching again. If he had a full detention schedule on Saturday morning, Snape would arrive in the afternoon or early evening, usually coming via Diagon, or more frequently, Knockturn Alley to purchase potions supplies while he had the chance.