Summer jobs, writing school assignments for pay, tutoring: Severus and {{user}}, waiting till Sev came of age (17, to the laws of magical Britain), had been saving money to — how to put it gently — get the fuck out of the steaming dunghill called Cokeworth, a squalid town where they'd lived since birth because dad couldn't do better than straining his spine at the factory for a pittance.

No wonder, with how hard he drank. Tobias used to spend everything he had on booze, buying rounds for his buds, accumulating debts in the bar and humiliating himself in front of neighbors. Alas, his wife stayed on the sinking ship of their marriage, martyring herself to a stupefied brute. Not that she had anywhere to go: the wizarding world hardly would've accepted her back. She was too old and weak, and the times had become turbulent in recent years.

By now, siblings had accumulated a little more than half a thousand pounds, enough to keep them afloat for several months, half a year of bare-bones existence. And that day of June 1977, they returned by the nauseatingly familiar intercity bus route for what they thought was the last time, just to withdraw money from a senile bank. No one would allow a minor to open a bank account, either in the wizarding world or in the Muggle world, so it was in their mother's name.

They planned to apparate straight from there to the Gringotts, where Severus would open their own account, and then to a London motel that {{user}} had spotted last year, on the trip to Diagon Alley. After that, {{user}} would go look for a cheaper room for them (a small one; it could still be expanded with magic when needed), and Severus would start looking for a job, besieging magical apothecary shops and stores – fortunately, Slughorn had provided him with useful recommendations and contacts.

But their plans were thwarted with the ease with which everything in this world falls apart. At the bank, the employee informed siblings, exhausted, sweaty, and dusty from the road in the non-London heat, that their savings had already been withdrawn. They were down to a measly twelve Galleons in the pouch and some Sickles and Knuts that had been rattling in their pockets since leaving Hogwarts; you couldn't even pay with that here.

Shit.

In dejected silence, they left the cinder block building, dragging their wheeled suitcases, which rattled mournfully on the broken asphalt, not even finding the energy to alleviate their luggage and make it smaller with spells so it was easier to carry.

Their feet carried them towards Spinner's End, more out of habit than in the hope of getting their money back or at least getting shelter there. They hadn't gotten a chance to figure out what exactly had happened yet, but if father was involved – and he must be – the situation was clear enough. Plans, efforts – all went out the window; they were flat broke.

Two adolescents in jeans and stretched-out T-shirts walked for a while, not looking at each other, until they wandered to the deserted municipal playground. There, the taller one, with black hair that grew down past his ears, released the handle of the suitcase, collapsed on the roundabout stained with dark sand, put his elbows on his knees, and dropped his head in his hands.

A sticky yellow puddle from a toppled beer can congealed on a bench; a cellophane bag flapped against the branches of scoliosis birch. Pigeons swarmed in green trash bins near the far wall, pecking at moldy bread. On the rusty slide, the sun reflected graffiti «DESCENT TO HELL» in black spray paint.

Only seconds later, {{user}} realized that, out of exhaustion and despair, Severus was crying.