Ten minutes later.
Severus drew back his fist and hit Tobias with everything he had, sending him crashing into the brick wall on the left.
"Get up." Severus looked down at his stunned father without any particular feeling. "Time to work. Clean this place up first, then sit back down and wait for your next order."
"What?! How did you — what?! Why can't I move my own body?! What did you do to me?!" Tobias, sober now whether he liked it or not, screamed as he lurched toward the kitchen.
"Master. From today, that's what you call me. You're my slave now. And don't touch the collar."
"I'm your father, you little — release me right now, or I swear —"
"Hit yourself in the face. Then shut up and start cleaning."
A moment later Tobias punched himself in the jaw. He shot Severus a look of pure murderous fury, grabbed a rag, and began scrubbing the tables.
Severus didn't spare him a glance as he headed upstairs to his room.
"One more thing. When you're done, and until I come back down, you'll push a needle under one fingernail every minute. Run out of fingers, pull the nails out and start again." He glanced at the table scattered with bottles, flicked a hand, and the bottles became needles.
He left Tobias's panic behind him and went to his room.
Bare walls. A mattress, a pillow, a blanket. A small table. That was all.
He's sold the wardrobe, the bed, everything. I was too easy on him. Severus crossed to the wall and tapped three specific bricks.
A section slid back, revealing a small bag, a diary, and a case with a plain-looking wand inside.
A memory surfaced with it: a painfully thin woman, almost unrecognisable as the beauty she'd once been, looking at him with warmth, one hand stroking his hair, the other tapping certain bricks with her wand.
"If anything ever happens to me, take everything here and don't come back. And don't go to the Princes for help."
She'd understood something, or perhaps she'd simply had enough. Severus exhaled slowly, picked up the notebook, and flipped through a few pages.
Then he closed it, shrank it, and tucked it into his breast pocket.
The diary held Eileen's story from the moment she'd walked through the doors of Hogwarts as a first-year: her thoughts, her ideas, and a message to her son.
I'll read it properly later. There may be something useful in it. For now. He took out the pouch and the wand, transfigured the mattress into a chair, and pulled it up to the table.
An expansion-charmed pouch and Eileen's wand. He opened the pouch, which held only a couple of Galleons, and fed a thread of magic into it.
Right before his eyes, it began to fill with gold. At the same time, a count appeared in his head: exact and immediate.
Four hundred and forty Galleons. How did Eileen manage to put away that much when she wasn't working? Though it's entirely possible the Princes gave it to her. He reached in and drew out a golden key, turning it over with mild interest.
She never said a word to me about this. Strange. I'll ask Macmillan about it when we meet; this key reads like an artefact.
He tipped everything into the bag, dropped into the chair, and closed his eyes.
Well. at least I have money. Tomorrow, Diagon Alley. I need potion ingredients, and even if most of what's available matches what I know, it's worth checking firsthand before I brew anything. The basilisk won't wait forever, and those creatures are intelligent and resistant to most magic. I need a sword. I'm not going in with my bare hands.
While he was turning all of this over, there was a knock at the window. Then another. Then several more.
He opened his eyes. A grey owl sat on the sill with a letter in its beak.
"Took his time." Severus got up, opened the window, and smiled as he stroked the bird's head and took the letter.
He beckoned a Sickle from the pouch and placed it in the owl's beak. The owl gave a satisfied hoot, pressed its head briefly against him, and was gone.
"There's something about these owls," Severus said to nobody in particular, turning the envelope over. The Malfoy seal pressed into the wax stared back at him.
"You could have simply signed it." He opened it, sat at the table, read it quickly, and put it down with a smile.
If you want to meet, fine. I've been waiting for this.
He'd reached out to Lucius for several reasons, but two of them mattered most.
The first was information. Lucius moved in the Dark Lord's inner circle, had even reached out to Severus more than once. Every time, Severus had found a reason to be elsewhere; he hadn't wanted to slip any deeper into that world, or to put any more distance between himself and Lily.
The second was Legilimency and Occlumency. Penetrating minds, and defending your own.
His own defences were solid, but solid wasn't the same as unbreakable, and he'd never had the gift for mind magic in his old world. When the chance to actually learn it appeared, he wasn't going to walk past it.
At Hogwarts, even the Restricted Section offered nothing but theory on the subject. No practice, no method, no instruction worth the name.
His stomach growled.
I should go shopping. He glanced down at himself: a robe over a shabby jacket that was slightly too big, the kind of clothes that announced poverty before you'd opened your mouth.
He pulled the robe off, closed his eyes, and built an image in his mind: a man with medium-length black hair, wearing a plain white shirt, dark heavy trousers, and high boots.
When he opened his eyes, those were the clothes on his body. He stretched, feeling nothing catch or restrict him, then walked out of the room.
On the way downstairs, he glanced at Tobias, who was scrubbing the table with furious concentration.
Severus held out a hand. "Accio, pounds sterling."
Several notes and coins flew from Tobias's pocket and from under the sofa and landed in his palm.
"Nearly ten pounds. Not much, but enough for food."
He pocketed the money, turned his wand into a needle, and left the house.
He took his time, strolling without any particular hurry, looking at the town and the things in the shop windows. The longer he walked, the more impressed he became with what people had managed to build without magic.
Electronics especially caught his attention.
A basic iron cost a frankly absurd amount. A television or a refrigerator was out of the question entirely.
Severus's family had owned a refrigerator once, before Tobias had drunk its value away. There was nothing left in the house now, not a single piece.
He paid some attention to the clothing as well.
Bright colours dominated everything on display, and he had no patience for it. In his world, dressing like that was an open invitation: you might as well have had a target painted on you. If you needed to move quietly, dark grey was your friend. Severus had never cared much about clothing beyond what it could do for him: practical, comfortable, unremarkable.
He bought enough food for a couple of days and headed home, where he was met by sobbing and pained moaning.
Tobias stood at the bottom of the stairs, eyes red and swollen, staring at Severus's face as he pushed the tenth needle under a fingernail.
"Forgot about you, honestly." Severus walked past him without breaking stride. "Carry on."
Tobias watched his back with pure despair.
"Gas is off too, I see." Severus took an apple and a saucepan from the cupboard. "No water either. How were you even living here?"
He cast Aguamenti, nonverbal, and water began filling the pan.
He dropped three eggs in, then called up a quiet thread of pyrokinesis: a skill he'd had for so long it was as natural as breathing.
The water came to a boil in seconds under a steady tongue of flame.
He could have done far more with fire. In his old world, he'd earned the name Fire Calamity for what he could do with it, and for the black fire in particular, which had made him a target for Archmages and a handful of Great Archmages besides. But right now, with this core, that was all out of reach. He had barely enough to cook eggs.
They were done in moments.
After dinner, he took one last look at Tobias, gave him a few additional instructions, and went back upstairs.
The next morning, after breakfast, Severus locked Tobias in the basement. Tobias had been methodically breaking the fingers of his left hand through the night. He now had a new task: one finger of the right hand every hour, while staring at Eileen's portrait and asking her forgiveness.
With that settled, Severus left the house.
He reached the road, took out his wand, and waved it.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, with an enormous BANG, a three-storey purple bus materialised in front of him.
The door swung open to reveal an elderly driver in thick glasses, grinning as if he'd been waiting all day for exactly this.
"Hop in, young man! Eleven Sickles! Want a toothbrush? Some cocoa?"
"Can I actually drink it?" Severus asked, gripping the handrail rather firmly.
"Where am I taking you?"
"Leaky Cauldron."
"Right, hold on tight." The driver bared his teeth, seized the wheel with both hands, and the bus vanished.
//===================//