mr mysterio and henry (snape/potter)
words: 1800ish
rating: G
warning: OC muggle pov. unbeta'd.

note: happy birthday, fitofpique! i love you! i truly believe this will make little or no sense to anyone else. <333


Mr Mysterio and Henry

"Dad! Wand!"

I turn round from the back rows of the stalls to see Tara flapping her hand at me.

"What's that?"

"Wand! I need my wand!"

"Oh." I feign a concerned look. "I don't think we brought it, did we?"

Her panicked look doesn't even last as long as it takes me to reach between my legs for our bag of provisions. "Da-ad!" She's trying not to giggle. I smile into the bag of car toys and cereal bars. There's nothing that makes me feel more like a dad than this game. Variations on the same theme. I pull out the little black and white plastic stick, wondering if there are tricks like this for parenting an eleven-year-old, a fourteen-year-old. If I saw her more than two days in seven, perhaps I'd know.

For a second, I want to drag her onto my lap, but I know she'd fuss and jerk away. "Busy, isn't it?" I say instead.

"Busy," she repeats, too occupied swishing the wand around to pay attention to me.

I blame the sudden vogue for wizards. There are hundreds of under-tens in here. When I squint I can see them swarming all round my field of vision, swishing wands and jiggling in their seats. Tiny magical ants.

It's a beguiling idea: the millennium as the end of some sort of apocalyptic supernatural war. A ferocious backroom reorganisation of the status quo that barely even impacts on us ordinary grunts. I'm not even surprised to see the stockbrokers reading it on the Northern Line. Tara – she likes the spells. Ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she'll tell you the same as every other six-year-old in her class: a wizard.

A Magical Half-Term at the Palace Theatre. I hope to god she's not disappointed.

The lights dim and a sudden quiet comes over all the shuffling children.

Tara's toe thumps into the seatback in front. "Don't kick," I whisper, one hand spanned out over where her shins would be at full stretch, and she stops, her leg dangling idle for at least a second or two.

We wait. Nothing happens for ever – I squint at our programme, but I can't make out the name of the first act – then a light flicks on, centre stage, over a table with a cage on it. From the second row, we can hear the whack of the fuses and feel the heat on our knees. Tara's little fingers tighten like claws on the arm of the seat. Someone is coming out.

Someone is a neat young man in a pristine dinner suit and glinting glasses, a touch on the short side. His black hair is shiny and slicked, but sticking up at the crown as if he's rubbed accidentally against a wall.

The man bows with a military clip, then waves a hand towards the cage on the table.

"Look, Dad!"

There's a huge black bird in it. Somehow I hadn't noticed either. It twitches and pecks at the thin steel bars and its claws skate across the bottom of the cage. Unusual choice, I would have said, but there seems to be a bit of a vogue for sinister magic acts. The bird's wings flex as it is lifted out, but it perches for a moment or two on the heel of the man's hand. Then, as another palm is brought gingerly down, cupped, to touch at the feathers on its back, the bird croaks, angry-sounding, and snatches itself away into the air.

Something makes me blink and flinch to the side – I think there must have been a flash of the stage lights – Tara's knees have shot up to her chin. When I look back, a cloud of something glittery is dispersing; there are wings spreading much larger than should be possible, uncovering a bowed head and long black body, and a man is landing noiselessly on the stage. Long black hair, pale severe face and a nose not much less extravagant than the bird's beak. He is a good deal older and taller than the first man, and instead of a dinner suit, he wears a floor-length buttoned habit, yards and yards of material, some of which has draped over his assistant's arm, where it is held in a tight little fist. He yanks it free with a jerk and a flourish of black, eyebrows so low his eyes look almost black. I can see how a dove would hardly have been appropriate.

Behind the two men, the remains of the glitter shifts and reforms to spell the words:

MR MYSTERIO AND HENRY

A small damp hand lands in my open palm and grips at my fingers.

She loves it, Tara, the whole show. Her breathing goes shallow and fast when Henry levitates on the point of a sword; she whispers at me when boxes come up astonishingly empty; she giggles when the magician pulls a string of knotted silk handkerchieves from Henry's mouth.

A disproportionate number of tricks in their act seem to involve pulling things from Henry's mouth. Enough eggs to fill a goldfish bowl, and surely when I've seen this trick before it was just one egg palmed over and over? Henry stands there with his chin tilted up, eyes closed, fingers spread, egg after egg birthing into the other man's hand, and his look of bliss entirely out of sync with the magician's frown. I wonder who designed this act, who's actually in charge here. Maybe the taller man is Henry after all. He doesn't look like a Henry. In the instant I think it, he looks straight at me, a gloomy sort of sneer on his face, a last wet egg deposited into the bowl.

"We'll need a volunteer!" Henry's voice is young and high without the aid of a microphone. Tara pushes at me so hard that I fall onto the other arm of my seat, and both performers' eyes settle on me.

"Sir?"

I don't really want to leave my little girl on her own in the audience, but she's clearly desperate for me to go. I – she's making those eyes at me – she's only two rows back, I'll be able to see her, hear her if need be – I stand up, just to make her happy.

"Come this way," says the magician, who, by contrast, has a voice that seems to come from his toes. Henry smiles in my direction, though I don't believe he sees me.

It's hot on the stage. Together, Henry and I tie the magician to a chair with a length of rope. I haven't tied knots like this since the scouts. I tie them over and over, hoping I'm doing it right, but Henry doesn't seem to know much better, winding the soft cut end over the magician's wrists and palms slowly and clumsily. I'm nervous. I look out into the audience and it's hard to see anything past the white glare, but there's a little flurry of movement. Tara waving.

When it's done and the knots checked, I shuffle back into our row, trying not to step blindly on toes. Tara puts out a hand and pulls me into my seat. I give in to the urge to drag her across the arm that separates us and cuddle her onto my lap. She fastens my arms around her like a seatbelt.

Henry pulls a screen onto the stage, a set of hospital curtains, it looks like, and arranges them around the magician, closing off three sides. With a click of his fingers, a motor fires up and from the lighting rig a circular saw drops a foot, suspended by a wire, towards the spot where the chair sits behind the screen.

Tara gasps and leans forward for a second, until the saw drops another foot, then she cringes back into my chest. I hold her tight. The third drop comes so quickly I almost think it must be a mistake, crashing past the screen, with a short screech of friction as it slices through the chair to clatter against the stage floor. There is a communal gasp, and several small wails. "Daddy – no!" comes from the region of my chest, and I have a pang of guilt for having tied the knots. Henry hears it too, and starts forward a step on the stage, one hand up, "No –it's –" then thinks better and pulls away the screen.

Of course the chair is splintered but empty. The tense little form in my lap slumps, non-plussed.

"Where –?"

I shush her. The erratic clapping of the audience drops away, waiting. Henry peers out into the theatre. But he must know –

A rustle of paper from the seat beside, then ta-da! a light swings forward and there he is! In Tara's seat! Reading the newspaper. She shrieks with delight and cranes out of my arms to touch him, manages to scrabble at a button of his robe before I can pull her back.

Mr Mysterio looks up, bored, one eyebrow raised as if the light and clapping are some sort of intolerable interruption. He folds his newspaper and stands slowly, stretching thin black arms, to rapturous applause. It's hard to applaud with a six-year-old in your arms, her little hands tangling with yours, but I am dumbfounded. On the stage, Henry's flimsy persona has dropped once again, and he's grinning and pounding his hands together for all he's worth. We clap and clap as the magician shuffles out of our row and strides back to the stage, then clap some more, watching Henry bow and the magician stand ramrod straight, blank-faced and still, unless that tiny movement of his dark eyes could be counted as rolling.

A cab home to St Albans is the final treat. Tara lolls against my side, her wand clutched in one hand, the other twirling through a string of hair.

"I'm going to marry him," she says. I'm not even sure she's talking to me, and I have my own suspicions about Henry and that magician, but I'll humour her. I wonder how many girls have come out of the show saying the same thing.

"Henry?" I say. I suppose he was the sweet type pre-teens tend to fixate on.

She yawns. "Mister Mistrious."

When she's asleep, I pull the abandoned newspaper from my coat pocket. For a second I think my contact lenses have misted over from the stage smoke, but I blink and the writing stays the same:

Ministry denies escalation of Death Eater insurgency

Potter missing, may be in deep cover, says Prophet source

New Warbeck comeback tour set to be final

I laugh, and Tara shifts, butting her forehead into my ribs a little. She's staying at the flat tonight. I'll show her the newspaper over breakfast. I know it's merchandising – and even I'm delighted by how thorough it is – but she'll think it's magic.