The vault was piled high with gleaming Galleons, enough to make even a goblin briefly lose itself in the sight.
This was the kind of wealth a top alchemist ought to accumulate—though the young wizard in question clearly had no real sense of that.
Professor Snape stared heavily at Sean. He remembered all too well coming here not long ago, when this vault had been almost completely empty, holding only the few Galleons he himself had just deposited.
"Give me… a reasonable explanation."
He forced the words out one by one.
The goblin had already tactfully withdrawn to one side.
In principle, goblins never allowed a vault to stay outside their sight for long—but principles couldn't always be kept.
"I… made a few simple alchemical items…"
Sean replied honestly.
"Heh. Crude little—"
Snape's lip curled, the familiar sneer about to break loose, and then he stopped again.
"Galleons don't fly into a vault because of 'simple' alchemical trinkets. Tell me… the truth."
His voice was low and dangerous; his cold gaze swept every corner of the underground vault.
Of course, it was only a lot of money, nothing more… Even with this much, it wasn't enough for Severus Snape to care about the amount.
What he truly cared about was—
"I… opened a shop at No. 93, Diagon Alley with Fred and George."
Sean said.
Severus Snape was mildly surprised, though his expression didn't change. Something unreadable flickered behind his eyes.
"And… I sold some notebooks."
Sean said, fingers tightening around the goblin's printout of his vault statement.
He himself hadn't really expected that the income from the Green Notes would be so high as well.
Snape stared at him, his gaze growing even more complicated.
Far below London, carts clattered along the rails in the darkness, humming past the rock. Severus Snape seemed to be looking at the boy standing in front of him, and at the same time right through him, into some far-off empty space.
Green's Notes, Weasley & Green's Joke Shop…
Very interesting. They'd been all over the gossip in the wizarding world lately, and he'd known nothing… or rather, he had heard of them, and never bothered to care.
"But that's not the most important part."
Sean's next sentence snapped Snape out of his daze; a vein jumped on his forehead.
"What else have you kept from me?!"
Sean suddenly felt that Snape's presence was far more oppressive than usual. His own voice dropped:
"I… made a few simple alchemical creations."
Compared to the vast, terrifying future of magical creature transformation, Sean truly didn't feel he'd gone all that far. That was why he kept thinking of them as "simple things."
"Speak."
"Fairy-tale biscuits."
Snape went still.
His mind exploded into a jumble of headlines and phrases—
*The so-called "Thrice-Great Hermes,"
Candidate for the Greatest Wizard of the Twenty-First Century, as recognized by the Chocolate Frog Card Committee…
Winner of the Uladah International Alchemy Conference Pioneering Contribution Gold Award,
Invited (but declined) as Century Guest by Today in Transfiguration, The legendary alchemist who seized the magical prerogatives of fantastic beasts…*
He pulled an invitation out of his robes, face flickering through a series of expressions, like a volcano about to erupt.
"Take your Galleons—go."
Snape turned on his heel and strode out of the vault.
His footsteps rang sharply on stone.
All the way back along the underground corridor, only the cold draft from the vaults matched the rhythm of his heartbeat.
He was more unsettled than he'd been in a long time. He'd known nothing. So in the end, what did he know?
The agitation didn't ease even when Sean emerged from the vault clutching his pouch of Galleons.
A moment later, their figures vanished from the steps of Gringotts and appeared near King's Cross Station.
Apparition could only take you somewhere you knew well. Severus Snape did not know that little patch of the world called Croydon.
So they'd have to use a very different sort of transport to get there.
The thought that Minerva McGonagall almost certainly knew the area only worsened his mood.
Inside King's Cross, trains boomed and hissed on the platforms; crowds streamed in and out. Two cloaked figures moving through the station naturally drew a few curious looks from lightly dressed Muggles.
They'd been standing there for over ten minutes. Snape said nothing. Sean asked nothing.
It was exactly this that made Snape feel a heavy, nameless turmoil.
This idiot always had that same foolish trust in him. Just like in the vault, when he'd been questioned, he hadn't even tried to lie or hide anything.
That long-gone feeling, suddenly returning, made Snape deeply uneasy, as though his thoughts were a lake someone had begun stirring with an invisible stick.
Suddenly, from the street outside the station, a dazzling light swept toward them.
Sean's half-formed suspicion was instantly confirmed.
Once, wizards had used all kinds of ways to travel through the Muggle world. But after the Statute of Secrecy, their more outrageous methods had been heavily restricted.
When a wizard needed to go somewhere they didn't know well—or when children needed to travel—there was one special option most often used:
The Knight Bus.
A violently purple, triple-decker bus had just appeared out of nowhere. Gold letters gleamed across the windshield: THE KNIGHT BUS.
Strangely enough, aside from the two cloaked figures, no one nearby seemed to see it at all.
A man in a purple uniform hopped down from the bus and called out to them:
"Welcome to the Knight Bus—emergency transport for stranded witches and wizards! Just stick out your wand arm, hop aboard, and we'll take you anywhere you need to go. Name's Stan Shunpike, I'll be your conductor tonight—oh—Professor Snape!"
He stepped forward, suddenly respectful and a little nervous.
It was Sean's first time actually riding the Knight Bus. The only other time he'd seen it was in the diagrams at the Alchemy Conference.
"To Croydon," Snape said in his habitual low growl.
"Six Sickles each," Stan answered, his eyes drifting curiously to Sean.
"Seven gets you a toothbrush…"
Something shiny clinked into his palm. Beaming, he tossed a mint to Sean.
Sean was still looking around the inside of the bus.
The interior was a mess of mismatched chairs, none of them the same shape.
When the mint landed in his hand, he wondered why they were selling them at all. A few seconds later, he understood.
At the front, the driver, Ernie Prang—a wizened wizard in thick glasses—gave the few scattered passengers a nod, and the Knight Bus lurched into motion.
It immediately began "skimming" along the street.
Ernie didn't appear to have fully grasped how to use the steering wheel. The bus kept jumping up onto the pavement, making the young witch in the seat to Sean's left shriek nonstop.
Fortunately, it didn't smash into anything; lampposts, mailboxes and rubbish bins all leapt aside at the last moment and hopped back afterward as if nothing had happened.
The bus bounced once with a deafening BANG; the little witch practically flew out of her seat before the wizard next to her grabbed her mid-air and yanked her down.
When the bus finally stabilized for a brief moment, Sean popped the mint into his mouth, and felt, very faintly, just the tiniest bit better.
~~~
Patreon(.)com/Bleam
— Currently You can Read 120 Chapters Ahead of Others!