you raise me up || harry potter

chapter 38

»»————-　song:　————-««

big houses

★ by squalloscope ★

❝ i got a soft spot for your
ancient books of horror stories...

we follow our own steps,
while our shadows keeps watching us—
the wrong steps

would be not to start this exodus.❞

♢ ♢ ♢

So this is what it's like to be able to see, Harry thought, peering around the parlour after coming back from the oculist. Things were so... crisp. He could see the pockmarks of the yellowing pages of the books. The texture of the upholstery fabric. The individual leaves of the sparse trees outside.

He refused to get new frames—these glasses were a part of him, and he didn't want anything else. So at the end of his appointment, the oculist tapped a new set of lenses with her wand, incanted several complex-sounding spells, inserted them into the old frames and handed them back to him. It was so simple, and so very different from the one time Petunia took him and Dudley to the eye doctor because the school demanded it—the burst of air into his eyes was definitely the worst part. She didn't get him new glasses after that appointment anyway.

In the waiting room, a thought had occurred to him, so he leaned over and whispered to Snape, "Why can't magic just... fix eyesight?"

"Eyesight is a fragile thing, Potter, not to be tampered with unless there's been some severe damage—sight may be restored, but not to its full capacity. Not everything can be fixed by wands and spells," Snape had said, as though it were obvious.

"Right," Harry said. "'No foolish wand-waving', as a wise professor once said."

Snape had given him a fearsome glare at that, so Harry felt it imperative to hurriedly shut up... but not before stifling a chuckle.

Harry was still craning his neck and looking around when Snape walked past the parlour.

"Potter, you look like a discombobulated newborn deer that doesn't know what the world looks like yet," Snape said, his hands full of lemons. 

"Hey—" Harry protested, but immediately switched to, "Can I make lemonade?"

"What do you think all these lemons are for?"

And that's how they ended up drinking lemonade outside on the rickety wooden steps in front of the back door.

"Honey instead of sugar. Interesting choice," Snape commented. "Different depth of flavor. Not too sour, either."

"Yeah, but it takes a while for the honey to dissolve. Tastes good, though."

"Pleasure must know labor," Snape lectured. 

"Not if labor means Potions homework," Harry said.

"No wonder you do so abysmally in my class," Snape said. "I ask for a one-and-a-half-foot-long essay, and you give me a single foot. Homework helps you review what you learn in class."

"What's all this about using "feet" to measure essay length, anyway?" Harry asked crossly. "It's not even metric. Can't you assign a word length and we use a word-counting charm or something?"

Snape shrugged. Harry had never seen Snape shrug, and the movement was weirdly casual on him. "I had the same question as you when I went to Hogwarts. But it doesn't matter to me. Some people use big handwriting to take up as much space as possible—they're only hurting themselves. Your friend, Granger, uses small handwriting and goes over the assigned length on top of that. I'd say it's excessive, seeing as she doesn't need to write an extra foot to show me she understands the material, but it's better than neglecting her studies."