Disclaimer: Profitless fanwork

Notes: So I usually try not to post stories too close together, as hoping for reviews is bad for my fingernails and my energy should be going to, I dunno, writing stuff or maybe lucrative things, but the snow is going sideways and we're expecting up to two feet. So this is my summer-scented gift to everyone else in the Nemo whiteout (and the rest of you too!)

ALSO THEY FOUND RICHARD III'S BONES AND THEY SUPPORT THE SHAKESPEARE-WAS-A-POLITICO-WORKING-WITH-BAD-INFORMATION-CAMP. This is also in his honor (his Northern English contemporaries really, really liked him).

I feel obliged to apologize for the shop-talk in the first chapter, but it's a story about a teeny little swot who doesn't have much besides his brain to feel good about yet and about a Slytherin who's better with people than he'll ever be, so... yeah, was unsuccessful at taking that out. vOv
Skim over if you like, but Severus was all excited to have an adult conversation; I didn't have the heart.

Grey in the Dark
Part One: August, 1970

by nightfall

Dickon gave the glass counter an absent polish, gazing idly at the dark sheen of chocolates under it, their rich surfaces sugared, gilt with decorative contrasts, spangled with tiny pieces of fruit. Three o'clock on a Wednesday, and all his young customers out at the footie, all his older ones smiling brightly over counters of their own, or bent over ledgers, or sweating chest-deep under someone's dripping sink. Almost no point in being open now, really, but there was always the off-chance…

The bell rang. He looked up with an easy, welcoming smile, which faltered not a bit at the two storm-crows, one tall and striding with her long face and heavy brows and proud patched black, the other her scarecrow miniature, shuffling along in a man's trou, cut off at the knees for his ankles. They so bundled together by a makeshift belt as to be pleated, under a tunic of a shirt that swamped him. They were tracking mud over his shining floor, but he couldn't begrudge them, when they were covered in it to the ankles, to the knees, their faces lined and shoulders stooped with fatigue. The boy's hair damp and limp, the woman's frizzed with the late-August heat.

"I've come a long way, Richard Gowan," the woman declared, explaining. A demand, not an excuse.

"Then we must see you served," he replied amiably. "And who's this young lad, then?"

"Seth," the boy muttered to the floor from behind his hair, when it had become clear by the light of his mother's elbow that everyone was waiting for him to answer.

"No," said his mother sharply. "His name is Severus."

The boy looked up, one mouse-black eye catching the candyman's. "You're a wizard, then?"

"Ah, you'll be wanting the backroom, then," Dickon said, giving the lad a mysterious wink that mostly made him look unimpressed, but also just a little bit hungry. "This way." Putting the ring-for-service bell next to the register, he gestured them through the unprepossessing Employees Only door with its boring grey paint, and into a room of glowing amber woods full stocked full with long, thin little boxes in Lincoln green, each the length of a man's forearms. The boy caught his breath, eyes burning in a shuttered face. His mother's eyes were sad, her own face stern. All business, he asked, "Now, will you be wanting the second use bin or for me to test him?"

"I can pay," the woman snapped, chin jolting up, but then she grimaced, muttering, "We can manage a wand and cauldron from new, any road."

Dickon thought she'd be better off in the long run getting the boy clothes from new—there was nothing wrong with most pre-owned wands, and you could usually find one that would take to you, and Min, up at the school now, was usually quite happy to shift the metal of a poor tyke's cauldron about for the sake of safety and the good whiskey old Sluggy sweetened her with on gifting occasions. Whereas showing up in the middle of a bunch of eleven-year-olds, many from new money with a chip on its shoulder or old blood thick with pride and snoot, looking like a sack of old rags upended on a short gatepost was terrible, terrible strategy. Still, not his place to say.

The woman was pulling, Lord have mercy, jam jars of knuts out of an old mokeskin pouch, lining them up on the wooden counter with an air of defiance. "There," she said belligerently.

"I'm bound to say you could go to Ollivander's with that," he tells her, his wand having done the counting for him.

"London's too far to walk," the boy said quietly, back under his hair again.

"I wouldn't take him to Ollivander's anyway," the woman said, tossing her head, not ostentatiously, but enough to make a point of her scorn. "Three cores, the close-minded git, and all the priciest you can use just for posh. What's a dragon's heart to burden a child with, what good are a piece of unicorn and a growing lad going to do each other? My family always comes to Heartwood. I was fitted by your father, and my son will be fitted by his."

"Then welcome back, repeat costumer," he said agreeably. Merlin, but her gaze could strip paint off the walls. Hot as hell, beneath that muddy, threadbare black.

"And he's a Ministry toady," the woman added, scowling. "The Trace on every bleeding wand he sells."

"Southern milquetoast," Dickon agrees, making a face. "No one'd stand for that nonsense north of Kent. Now, lad, do you want your mam to stay?"

"I'll fetch his schoolbooks while you're at it," the woman said at once, giving her son what wasn't a smile but was perhaps the fiercest look of pride he'd ever seen. "Can't drag this lad out of a bookstore, let him get a foot in." The boy's head tilted to meet her gaze, and he did smile, shy and crooked and small.

She swept out, heels ringing on the boards, shabby black skirt foaming around her.

"Whew," he whistled to himself, and sagged.

"What should I do, Mr. Gowan?" the scrawny boy asked him, with a drilling, expectant look that would be more hawkish than owlish in a few years, when his young flesh clung more sharply to that nose.

"You should call me Dickon, lad—Severus, was it?" he said kindly. What a name to stick on a mite of a thing. "We don't stand on ceremony, in the Sherwood."

"We come here sometimes for herbs we can't pick in the Bowland," the boy volunteered, placing himself by his local forest, as if his accent hadn't done it more nearly already. A beauty, Bowland forest was, with its crowning glory of a bluebell wood. "Mam makes… teas and things," he finished evasively.

"Brewer, is she?"

Severus brightened, the terrible secret out safely. "She can't do much at home, she says," he confided. "There's only muggles about to sell to. But she says they don't have one of their own looking after them, and Da can't argue with the money."

Not that there's much, by the look of it. "Teas and things, then?" he explores.

"And meads," he says proudly. "Meads and herbal wines and that."

"That so?" he muses. "Maybe we can do a trade, then."

"I'll make you whatever you want," the kid said recklessly, eyes as fierce as hers. "I can do it. I'll earn it myself."

"Would your mam let you make you make alcohol?" he asked dubiously.

"I help already. I do it all when she's…" he trailed off, trying to shutter his face over a furtive wince, and finished, "when she's poorly."

"Well," he admitted, not frowning in front of a customer even if it makes him right indignant, thinking of such a sparking, fine young lass chained to an implication like that one. "It's been a long time since I had a good elderberry wine, or a heather mead."

He eyed the knut jars meditatively. His wands are three galleons (Ollivander charges a flat fee of five, the lazy old gouger,* but mayhap those Diagon wankers can afford it), stretching as far as six for the really difficult cores and woods, but this lad's wearing hand-me-down boots stuffed to fit him with rags instead of extra socks, and couldn't spare for a bus ticket. "A bottle of each should do it, and a bottle of dandelion wine if the wand as chooses you is made of one of these." He handed the boy the 'costs extra' list, lets him scan it.

The small lips pursed just like his mother's as he read, and he looked up sharply, saying, "Both meads. If it comes off this, the elderberry and a bottle of heather mead, or two bottles of dandelion wine. I have to get past dogs for the elderberry and trade for the heather," he added ominously, raising the value of his goods.

Dickon stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. "Sharp as a tack, you are," he chuckled. "Make the mead with violets if it's dear, and either way you'll make me an eight-ounce bottle of liqueur with the bluebells in that Bowdon of yours and a goodly bag of crystallized petals. We'll try them in the chocolate. Lanky Truffles, we'll call them, and Bowden Bark."

"Lanky blues. Truffles is too swank," Severus proposes, looking interested. "Put a mill design on."

"Blue-colored white chocolate on… probably dark, depending on the flavor," he promises. "And if you write a piece advertising the mill's product—what is it, cotton?"

The boy gave an affirmative grunt, nodding.

"We'll put it on a little card to put in the box. People are always glad to buy local."

"Done," Severus said, and they shook on it. He looked so proud to have made a good bargain that Dickon had to smile.

"If the sweets sell, we'll see about a yearly sale when you're home for summers. Tell your mam our bargain's conditional on her using the bronze to get you kitted up proper, though, if she don't think of it," he can't help but add, looking at the boy, still titchy even now he was standing soldier-straight with competence, swimming in his mismatched, ratty clothes.

Severus nodded in the way boys nod that means like hell I will, his eyes shifting left.

Dickon sighed, and said, "Well, sit yourself down, lad; this could take five minutes or five hours—in which case I may need to leave you for a time for customers in the front shop. I'll have some hoops for you to jump; I don't know if your mam's talked to you yet about arithmancy or astrology, but we can make guesses about what wands you'll suit that can speed the process up some."

"A bit," Severus said, clambering onto the stool across from the target. "My birthday's January 9th," he added, proving it.

"Capricorn under Janus, eh?" he asked, going behind the counter to fetch out his roll. "Doors and windows, linked to Ganesha, who overcomes obstacles." Probably not a soft wood, not a dark wood, not a prey animal or one of the vicious predators, not a dragon. Try him on a bicorn animal, one of the chimeras like griffins and hippocampi, try him on runespoor scale, on salamander scale…

"He has two faces," Severus remarked. "Looking in both directions. I'm half-blood," he added, with a touch of nerves. "Mam said you'd need to know that."

"It's worth knowing, but you never can tell," he agreed. His father had thought a lot of blood purity. He'd always said it could tell you a lot about what a customer could probably afford and thought due to them: whether they'd accept less than mythical cores or demand imported woods or decorated handles. Dickon went by clothing, mostly, and mothers' nails and hair. "Know which House you're after?"

"I think so," the boy said cautiously. "Mam says her family's always Gryffindor or Ravenclaw. My grandfather owled me his old scarf, but I want to go the other way. Not narrow-minded and pigheaded like him," he scowled. "Not like Mam, neither. They can't neither of them change their minds on anything, no matter what it costs anyone. I want a house that'll teach me to think."

"Ravenclaw will do that for you right enough," Dickon agreed. "Slytherin, too."

"Were you Slytherin?" Severus asked, catching the lingering warm embers of house pride.

He smiled. "You'll learn something worth knowing no matter where you go, not to worry."

"Mam says Gryffs are brave and Ravens are smart. But she's brilliant," he complained, evidently about the obvious oversimplification.

Dickon chuckled, and said, "I look at it this way. It's about what you want, not about what you're good at; skills fall every which way, and people, too. Ravens like to work things out and know things, preferably complicated things. The 'Puffs like to do things together, preferably hard or fun things, Slytherins like to get things done, preferably important, useful things, things that move the world along, and Gryffs like to do great things and be seen to do them."

As the boy frowningly turned this over, Dickon went behind the counter to fetch his roll and its stand, which he set up and unrolled it in front of the boy.

"Now, sometimes this helps us: these are primed as if they were wands, but they're pure wood, no core. Touch them and tell me how they feel to you—warm or cold, welcoming, tingly; it takes everyone different, and don't worry if nothing happens, we'll just skip it then."

Severus put his splayed hand down over about ten of the chopstick-sized wood sticks at once. His eyes widened. "I don't think we need to skip the test," he remarked, and began running down them. The very first one he touched trembled visibly, and Dickon was just thinking that was easy, wouldn't have thought that one, when the boy yanked his hand away with an offended look and said, "It doesn't like me."

"No worries," Dickon told him with a mental shrug. "I would have thought you too serious a lad for apple anyway." And Aphrodite wouldn't go near anyone looking like you, poor mite, not before you've grown to fit that nose, he wouldn't dream of saying even to a boy closer to puberty.

"Oh," the boy uttered, and kept going, reporting, "Shaky, stupid, heavy-"

"Stupid?" he had to ask.

"Like it's eaten too much and it's in the sun and won't wake up." The boy was impatient with him.

"Ah." And does 'nice' mean 'accurate' to you? Dickon doesn't ask, and doesn't smile, but knows his eyes have crinkled at the corners.

He went on, while Dickon nudged all the promising ones an inch higher on the roll, peppering a litany of stupids with the occasional heavy, light, friendly, nervous, doesn't-like-me, really-judgmental, butterfly—

"Butterfly?"

"I think it has a short attention span," he explained, very seriously.

Dickon checked the wood. "Spot on, lad," he said. "Pine can be like that."

Severus blinked at him, and said, "But pine's an evergreen."

"Maybe the variety keeps it young," he smiled.

Severus looked at him in suspicious incomprehension, but went on. They ended up with a choice of beech, blackthorn, cedar, fig (although the lad had looked dubious when he called it warm), fir (which Dickon thought the most likely; it had rolled after his fingers), hawthorn, hornbeam, maple, poplar, and walnut.

"You wanted to narrow it down," Severus remarked, looking discouraged.

"We have," Dickon assured him. "Truth to tell, you could still end up with one of the others; the core can be transformative. But this will probably save us time. Now, how tall are you, lad?" Severus shrugged, so Dickon had to measure him with his wand.

A further measurement of his hands and feet (this involved taking off his shoes, which was a complicated process as the obvious hand-me-downs had been tied to his ankles) had Dickon telling him, "You'll be wanting one between ten and twelve inches, then; any longer and it'll still be tripping you up when you're grown, if you use an arm or leg sheath."

Severus nodded solemnly without looking up. Girls sometimes were interested in the smallest suited to them, boys generally wanted pig-stickers. Dickon therefore had to blink when the boy said, "Wouldn't a shorter one be easier to hide?"

"It might," he conceded, surprised, his estimate of his customer's future career shading from cobalt blue to teal. "You won't want it disappearing into your hand when you're grown, though—there's a range of proportion that's best for focusing your magic tightly, if you want to know. Too short a wand might give you fuzzy results, just as a too-long one would, unless your own control is good."

"Sod that," the boy said instantly, looking up in alarm, and then there was a flicker of guilt and a wall of defiance about his language.

Dickon grinned down at him, and said, "Still, giving the ten-inchers a chance shouldn't do any harm. You're not going to be a giant, after all, young Severus, sorry to be the one to tell you."

"Me da's near six feet," Severus told him.

"Your hands and feet say you might make near that," Dickon told him, "or it could be a bit less. Make sure you eat healthy at school if you want to stretch it; the elves give you such a spread you can make your bones grow an extra inch—or your belly an extra ten," he winked.

The boy wrinkled his impressive nose, and said, "If if fits me when I'm taller, though, won't it be a problem before then?"

"Never seems to be," Dickon replied. "Couldn't tell you the reason for sure, but I think, me, it's because your magic knows your body's not in its permanent shape yet, or maybe it's as much more flexible while its young as everything else is. Or could be you're right, and that's one more reason you'll get better in magic as you get older. You won't lag behind your classmates, though. So. Just one more thing, and then we can start you swishing," he promised. "It won't hurt." He grinned as Severus sneered his contempt in the face of such reassurances. "Tell me what you like to do and eat, and what you don't. It'll narrow down the cores a bit."

He listened to the stark picture that emerged, and his face didn't wince at all at items like "I don't much like fighting to keep my lunch, but even Da's happy when I win,' and 'I like going with Da to the pub sometimes, he lets me play darts and sometimes Dai lets me have a little cider in my apple juice, and sometimes when I don't go with he comes home angry." He did smile at the proud, "Mam lets me help with the brewing all the time, I'm a real help she says,' and 'I don't like maths much but Mam says I need it cold before I get to Hogwarts because they don't teach it there but you need it for some of the classes,' and 'I like Latin better than Greek, but you need them both to make new charms, and chuckled at, "I like Lily, of course, her family comes north in the summers and she's brilliant, she can nearly fly just on her own, no broom or anything, but Petty, that's her sister, she's a sour old muggle prune."

He didn't ask about sports, even though they were usually the first words out of a lad's mouth, because when they weren't, you didn't want to rub it in. And all the time he was running down the list. Could be Jarvey tail, maybe thestral mane, not manticore claw, maybe murtlap growth or toadstone, maybe graphorn horn, definitely not griffin feather, could be occamy scale or runespoor but not ashwinder or basilisk…

"Well, young Severus," he says finally, "I think that's enough to go on." He hands the boy an unprimed, uncored wand-shaped stick, and says, "Now I'll just take your wrist a minute to show you the proper way to hold it. Fingers like this—good—keep your wrist firm but supple. Too many London lads at Hogwarts, for all it's farther north nor we are; it'll be up to you to do us proud, eh? Can't have you showing up in old Flitwick's class with bad wand form." He smiled warmly at the solemn nod, and said, enveloping the small, calloused hand in his own, "Now, easy as breathing, just swish, good, and—flick! Try it again. Now without me. You'll do, lad. Now, let's start you off with…" he thinks a moment, beckons a box off the shelf, and says, "Eleven inches, walnut and hippocampus scale. Give her a try. Nothing? No fear, how about this one: ten and a half inches, walnut and runespoor scale… Whoops! That's all right, a reparo and we're set, congratulations, you're not a squib."

"I knew that," Severus told him, glowering, embarrassed.

He patted the tight little shoulder, made another tick on his list, and said, "Here's walnut and augury feather, eleven inches, and try to keep it aimed for the target, even if it jumps on you…"