Spinner's End
The new year bursts into a existence with a shower of bright lights from the Muggle world. Harry Potter, covered in a dark cloak, dodges around a group of teenagers who are sitting on a wall and swinging their legs while drinking from a glass bottle they are passing around. Further down the dark street a black cat streaks out from between two cars, near-invisible in the dark.
He should be at home. Everyone there is celebrating, doubly so - a new year and a new baby. As large as the Weasley family becomes, a new baby always draws them back together. His house, their house is filled with light and laughter, all shadows banished for one night. The noise, the light - it was hard to think, hard to focus on anything except the immediate.
But Harry slipped out and the small, creased slip of paper with Petunia's neat cursive leads him here.
13 Spinner's End stands empty and abandoned. The few small steps to the main door are cracked and covered with the weeds that grow inexplicably on top, beside and beneath the concrete. A broken window opens into a dark room beyond. Harry enters from the back of the house. A concrete yard houses weeds up to his knees and the back door gives with only the smallest press against it. The lock splinters. The house seems to groan and creak with the effort of entrance after so long.
The door leads immediately into a small kitchen. The lights don't work, but Harry pulls out his wand and need only whisper 'lumos' to create a small ball of white light that floats above his head. The shadows retreat, darken, gather in the corners. Harry hears them whisper and plot, licking up at the light - he strengthens his focus and stays in the circle of light created by his own magic. Snape would have put curses and spells, protection for this miserable place, but Harry will not be caught out. The 'lumos' keeps him safe.
There is nothing here, and Harry in unsurprised. The cupboards are empty. The fridge is warm and dark and hollow. The barren table creaks as Harry brushes against it and takes in the room. There are stairs in the kitchen, leading up into the dark. The weight of the rooms upstairs seem heavy. Somewhere up there is the bed where Snape slept, as a child, as a teenager, as an adult. Harry can only picture some place small and cramped and dark, the only place that would breed someone like Snape.
Somewhere like a cupboard. A remarkably familiar sneer passes through his mind. Harry pushes it away. Instead he focuses on his new house, him and Ginny and now James, a light, bright house, a happy house where there are no places for shadows and no cupboards large enough to hide a person in.
He ignores the deep darkness of the stairs and moves through the half-open door, to a room walled with books.
It seems the books themselves must hold up the house. Harry finds a small stack on the table by the soft armchair, the only thing he's seen that looks like it was once used. The top book of the pile is still spread open, it's words pushing towards the light. Harry moves closer. In the small rush of air from the movement of his cloak a scrap of parchment skitters out of the book. He leans, carefully, to rescue it from the dark floor.
Colvotus charm,
the spidery writing reads, the tangled letters familiar as an old friend.
related to the cormandos charm, an early prototype of the cruciatus? Perhaps
The end of the 's' is heavier, darker, as if the quill had rested here a moment. Had he been lost in thought? Or had he been interrupted? Perhaps, Harry thinks, perhaps this is the last thing he ever wrote.
Bent over, curled around that scrap of parchment, the ball of light has started to dim. The shadows of the books lengthen, reaching over Harry's feet, sliding up and over the edge of Harry's robe. He panics, he drops the parchment and it slides along the floor and under the armchair, into darkness, the spidery black ink lost forever in the night. Harry skitters in the other direction, tripping, falling, the shadows chasing him as the light above his head fades and fades and puffs out completely.
He can hear it louder now, the thin wail that started when James was born and is stuck, rattling around his head, desperate to escape. It echoes in the same empty part of his mind that Dumbledore's voice sometimes gets stuck in. Harry wonders if there is a crack in his mind, some place where all the darkness keeps getting in.
Harry is lost in shadow. His back is against a bookcase, the unevenly shelved books on the very bottom shelf gorging hollows in the skin of his back. The thing is screaming now, screaming inside him. Harry bites down on his lip until he can feel the blood dripping off his chin. He turns his face and rubs his chin against the rough wool of his cloak.
Harry doesn't know what to do. He wants someone to tell him, someone to rescue him. He wants to be transported back to sixth year when he just had to do as Dumbeldore told him, when he had the spidery writing in his textbook to follow, when he could play the good little solider and not have to make impossible, life-altering (life-ending) decisions.
It's been years but sometimes Harry still dreams of Snape, his blood thick and heavy across Harry's palms, coating his skin, trickling down his wrist and arms, somehow shining in that dark room, and Snape muttering seventeen drops of dew, not twenty or fourteen spoonfuls of dragon hide reduced to ash by its own breath or simmer over phoenix fire which can destroy everything, even itself.
Harry will stand up soon, his mind forced clear in exhaustion and the quiet echo of the Prince's familliar voice. He will walk quickly and quietly out the front door, leaving it swinging on its hinges, the dark shadows chasing him into the orange glow of the nearest street light. He will contact Hogwarts and arrange for the books to be moved to Hogwarts library and some years or decades later he will find out that the staff cleared the rest of the house too, stacking clothes and photos and the few remaining artifacts of Snape's childhood into boxes and storing them in one of the many empty rooms at the school.
Harry will tell himself that one day he will sit and look through those boxes, but some part of him already knows what he will find.