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Boy-Snape

Summary:

A duel in Hogsmeade leads to unexpected consequences and adventure for Sirius Black and Severus Snape.

Chapter 1: I

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

When Sirius opened his eyes his first sight was an assessing black gaze set in a small pallid face framed by lank black hair. "You're awake," the boy said in a surprisingly soft and girlish voice. In spite of the changes in size, voice, and age, Sirius instantly recognized Snape. Struck with a new wave of adrenaline, Sirius rocketed up and grabbed Snape by his shoulders.

"What the bloody Hell did you do!" he demanded, giving his now child-sized enemy a teeth-rattling shake.

Snape didn't answer, instead, he turned boneless in his grip and began to move in tandem with Sirius's shaking. Even more infuriated, Sirius abruptly released the child and shouted, "Fucking say something!"

The boy-Snape, now a crouched heap, met Sirius's gaze after a long moment and whispered, "I don't know who you are."

Sirius scoffed. "How convenient," he sneered. Looking away to take in their surroundings, which were trees, more trees, and, oh, more trees. It wasn't difficult for Sirius to concluded they'd ended up in a forest. Hopefully, it wasn't the Forbidden Forest. "If I were suddenly an ugly little sprog with you I'd probably not know who you are either." Getting up, he grabbed the boy-Snape by the excess fabric of his robe and hauled him into the air. "But just like you would, I'm not believing a word from your liar-mouth!"

Snape's eyes went wide and he began to struggle in earnest. He nearly escaped Sirius's hold when he started to slip out of his too-big robe, but Sirius stopped him from getting away by grabbing onto his arm. Immediately, Snape yelped and went limp. "Stop," he whimpered. "Stop, stop…"

Sirius began to feel suddenly very uncomfortable when Snape's pleas turned into outright sobs. Carefully, he lowered Snape to the ground and let go of him. Instead of running like he half-expected, Snape curled in on his arm and continued to weep. Uneasily, he began to wonder if the "I don't know you" thing was actually the truth instead of a ruse. He knew Snape was a sneaky bastard, but the tears seemed a bit low— Not to mention embarrassing. Sirius was going to remember him looking like a snot-nosed brat. Tentatively, he lowered himself to Snape's level.

"Hey, what's wrong with your arm?"

Boy-Snape lifted his gaze and looked at him. But more than that too. He didn't just stop at taking in Sirius's expression, he searched everything about him, how far away he placed himself from Snape, the position of his hands, how tense his shoulders were, and for a moment, he swore the boy wasn't just looking in his eyes, but reading his mind . Merlin, Morgana, and Mordred did boy-Snape know legilimency? His parents really did have some weird ideas about raising children, didn't they?

"Dunno," Snape finally whispered.

Sirius fought back the urge to grimace. "D'you think you fell on it earlier or something?"

A shadow darted across boy-Snape's gaze. "Or something," he agreed.

He put out his hands for the boy to see. "Can I take a look at it?" Sirius didn't know what he'd be looking for, but, if something were really wrong with it, he should be able to tell, shouldn't he?

Slowly, Snape placed his twig of an arm in Sirius's beater-roughened hands. Carefully, he pulled up his sleeves and gently turned it over for a full look. It was bruised and there was an odd sort of bump down near his wrist. Sirius pressed on it, causing boy-Snape to cry out. Immediately, he backed off and apologized, "Sorry. I think it might be broken."

Eyes glassy with new tears, Snape nodded.

Sirius began to feel himself over for his wand. When he failed to find it, he frowned. "Hey, have you seen a wand around? Or maybe even two?"

Boy-Snape gave a half-shake of his head. "Only the broken one over there," he said, using his good hand to point a little ways away. Sirius got up to investigate, he sighed in defeat when he saw it was broken clean in two. "Well, we're buggered," he muttered. Returning to the kid, he set to work tearing up Snape's robe.

"What are you doing?" Snape asked, sounding alarmed.

"Making you a sling," he said. "We need to keep you from moving your arm too much since I can't fix it without my wand."

Snape still didn't look too happy, but he didn't object and let Sirius tie it up. When done, he started looking around to see if there was an identifiable path or anything for them to get on. When he didn't see one, he sighed. What were you supposed to do if you got lost in the wilderness? Look for water? That sounded right to him. They could drink that and maybe, if it was a river or something, they could follow it to the nearest town or whatever. Sirius knew people liked to settle by rivers. He waved a hand at the boy-Snape. "Come on, we're going to go look for water."

Snape didn't move. Sirius sighed loudly and asked, "What?"

The kid was shaking a little, but he said, "When you're lost, Mum says not to move."

Sirius rolled his eyes. "I doubt anyone even knows we're missing yet."

"Why not?" Snape inquired. "Mum sent me to get Dad from the pub. She's going to notice when we don't come back soon."

Sirius winced. "Maybe if that's actually what you were doing before we ended up here that'd be true, but you weren't, so…"

The boy frowned. "I wasn't getting Dad from the pub before now?" he questioned, sounding both confused and a little scared.

"No," answered Sirius. He ran a hand through his hair and turned his eyes skyward. He could only see hints of blue through the trees' red and brown canopies. How the Hell was he going to explain the shit that had occurred just before they suddenly found themselves in a woods? In the end, he decided the most bare-bones tale he could tell would be for the best. He needed to have this boy-Snape trust him just enough to get him out of the woods and to someone who could fix him. As much as Sirius hated the bloke, he'd learned his lesson with the werewolf mess. Putting someone in a potentially deadly situation "to teach them a lesson" was not okay and was utterly inexcusable. He was pretty sure leaving a baby Snape alone in the woods would be about the same on the "not okay" scale as trying to feed him to Moony.

Sirius took a deep breath and turned back to face Snape. "Okay, so this is what happened. You know how I accused you of being a liar and stuff?"

The child stared back at him, expression blank, but dark eyes flashing with incredulity. Sirius supposed he deserved that. It had just happened after all. "Well, that's because we're not friends. I guess you could say we're sort of ah…" Sirius searched for a word that sounded nicer than enemies. In the end, he settled on rivals. "We're rivals and we don't really get on because of it. Also, you were my age not too long ago—"

"Your age?" Snape exclaimed with disbelief.

Sirius glared at him. "Yes! Why d'you think your robes and stuff are suddenly two times your size?"

He looked at his clothes and seemed to fall reluctantly silent.

"—Anyway, I don't know why you're suddenly six—"

"—I'm eight!"

Sirius stopped and stared at boy-Snape. "Really? Wow, you're tiny."

The boy's face pinkened and he scowled. "Shut up, you twat!" he snapped.

He bared his teeth at the kid and fought down the urge to throttle boy-Snape. Beating up little kids was a bad thing— Even if you knew for a fact they grew up to be greasy gits. "You shut up!" he yelled back. "Do you want to know what happened or not?"

The kid shrank back a little and fell quiet. Sirius tried to pretend there wasn't something weird about that and continued on with his tale. "Again, I don't know why you're suddenly little, but before this forest, we were in Hogsmeade. You ran into me while I was with my mates, wouldn't apologize like a polite person, so I hexed you and then you jinxed me and then— Well, it turned into a big duel. I think the Head Girl came in and tried to stop it, but you were in the middle of disapparating away – which you shouldn't have been doing since we haven't had the class for it yet – and I was trying to curse you and she threw off some spell and it combined with mine and, look, I know that's bad. You probably know that's bad when spells mix like that too and you're eight! So, I did the right thing and tried to knock you down out of its striking range by tackling your knees." Sirius scratched the back of his head. "I'm guessing that didn't quite work out as well as I wanted."

Snape started to look around the forest. "D'you know where I disapparated us to?"

Sirius shook his head. "I mean, this could be the Forbidden Forest, since it's so close to Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, but…" He couldn't say for certain, but he had a fairly good feeling that wasn't the case. "I don't think so."

Boy-Snape looked around at the trees with a new, invested interest. "This doesn't much look like the forest around the river at home either."

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "You probably messed up where you wanted to go when you got hit with the spell," Sirius told the kid. "We're lucky neither of us got splinched, honestly."

The kid frowned at him. "I don't know any other forests."

"Yeah, but older you probably did," Sirius snapped back, causing boy-Snape to flinch. He sighed and scrubbed a hand along his jaw. Sirius was getting tired of feeling like he'd done something wrong every time he raised his voice. Why the Hell was the kid so jumpy? He'd apologized for being rough, hadn't he? "Anyway," he muttered, "Since I don't know where we are and no one's going to have any idea where to start looking for us back in Hogsmeade, I say we find a river and try and follow it to a town or village. We can find somebody to help us get back to Hogwarts from there."

Boy-Snape still didn't look too sure of his plan, which annoyed Sirius, but he nodded all of the same. He probably had the sense to know if he didn't Sirius would leave him behind for whatever predators lived around here. He was going back to Hogwarts no matter what. The kid looked around then, and, after a moment, back up at Sirius with wide, questioning eyes. "Which way do we go?"

Sirius opened his mouth to answer, but snapped it shut a moment later. Fuck, which way should they go?

Notes:

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