Harry rubbed his face and groped for his glasses on the scratched up coffee table. For a beautiful moment, he forgot where he was, and thought he might be in the hospital wing and as soon as he untangled himself from the blanket Madam Pomfrey would start fussing over him. Then he smelled the wool, dust, and potions ingredients and remembered where he was, far from Hogwarts’ calm, sterile hospital wing, in Eileen Prince’s house on Spinner’s End in 1959.

He shoved the blankets off and jammed his glasses onto his face. Stumbling to his feet, he ambled his way into the kitchen and gazed out the grimy window at the brown grey river. Without thinking, he shuffled though the drawers looking for food. In a drawer under a cooling charm, he found milk, eggs, and shortening, and across the counter, he found bread. When Eileen came into the room, he had egg frying and bread toasting.

“What are you doing?”

“Cooking breakfast, do you want some?”

She glared at him. “Yes please.”

He squinted his eyes in surprise at her glower, but he supposed he deserved it. It took some nerve to stay in a strange woman’s house and then wake up and start cooking her food without asking her. He fetched a pair of plates and slid an egg out onto each and threw a few pieces of toast with each. Pouring them each a glass of milk, he put one next to each plate and smiled at her.

Despite herself, she smiled back. It was the sort of smile a dog gave its master when it wanted to go for a walk. She sagged down into one of the kitchen chairs and wondered if a lot of men cooked when he came from. The sleeve of her heavy wool dressing gown slid down over her hand as she reached for the fork that he was busy placing on the table. As she ate, she peered at him over the food. He couldn’t have been very old at all, younger than she was even. “How old are you?”

Harry blinked, the question startling him. “Seventeen.”

She sniffed at him. “Just out of Hogwarts then.”

He didn’t bother to correct her. “Well, you can’t be much older.”

“Nineteen,” she laughed. “Two years.”

So you’ve been out of Hogwarts two years then?”

“One and a half.” She sighed, “and I’m still stuck here.”

“You have your own house, that’s nice at least.” The house made him wonder. How did an obviously poor witch who didn’t appear to work afford even a miserable place like this?

“I hate this place. Besides, it belonged to my aunt and uncle, and they were the only good thing about it.”

“Yeah, but at least you have it.”

“That’s something I guess. I don’t have any idea why they wanted to live here though.” Her shoulders drooped. “All the houses over here used to belong to the factory for its employees back before it closed. It’s an awful place.”

From what Harry had seen, he agreed wholeheartedly. “Why don’t you sell it and move somewhere else?”

She laughed the same half exasperated laugh she had the night before. “It isn’t like I have the money to buy anything better. I make my living making dodgy potions for people who want to make their enemies impotent. Or worse, pimply.”

Harry shook his head, thinking that in some strange way, she was the forerunner to the Weasley twins, selling petty mayhem, but without the fun. “Why don’t you get a job?” From what he remembered from History of Magic classes, the Wizarding World had always been more open about women in the workplace.

Her expression turned from bitter to bleak. “I didn’t study for my N.E.W.T.s. It wasn’t like they mattered, I was just going to get married and settle down. The only things I did well in were Potions and Herbology. Flat out failed Defense Against the Dark Arts, and just squeaked by in charms.”

“Er…” He really didn’t have anything to say to that. Then he realized something. “No, you aren’t married, are you?” If this was 1959, then Snape would have to either be born this year or next.

She almost spat out a mouthful of egg. “No, of course not, I live alone!”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

She pushed her empty plate away from herself so hard he had to catch it before it sailed off the table. It occurred to him as he cast scourgify on their dishes that he might have somehow offended her. Again he didn’t know what to say. “Can I use the shower?”

“Upstairs in the middle,” she snarled. “Dry up when you’re done.”

He fled, but she followed, going back to her room. She pushed a pile of flannel shirts and jeans into his arms. “These are my uncle’s. When you’re done, put these on you look like a prat in what you’re wearing now.”

~*~

When Harry was taking his shower, Eileen had been getting dressed, so when he came down stairs, she was wearing a faded yellow dress of the sort Aunt Petunia wore when she especially wanted to appear the old fashioned mother, only Eileen’s dress was threadbare and sloppily stitched. Someone had made it, and either hadn’t spent much time on it or wasn’t very good at making dresses. She seemed ill at ease in it, picking at the lace which was coming off the short sleeves. However, from what he had seen, she probably looked ill at ease in anything except a Hogwarts uniform.

“You’re too small to wear my uncle’s clothes.”

He just grimaced at her and sank onto the couch, watching her. A piece of parchment and a thick book sat unopened on her lap. She was using it to write a letter on. “Who you writing to?”

“Gringotts, I need them to change some galleons into pounds.” A scrawny screech owl sat puffed up on her shoulder, tucked into her hair where he hadn’t seen it before. She picked him up and tied the letter and a bag of coins to his leg, and took him to a window to let him fly away.

“Aren’t you afraid your neighbors will see you using an owl to deliver mail?”

She shook her head. “They already think I’m eccentric. It won’t make any difference.”

“You are eccentric.”

She blushed as if he’d given her the sweetest of complements. “You really think so?” As he nodded, thinking she reminded him of Luna, she composed herself, pushing her shoulder length hair behind her ears. “You realize that if you stay here, you’re going to have to work? I can’t afford to feed you otherwise.”

He shifted nervously. “What do you want me to do?”

“How good are you at potions?”

It didn’t matter if he was good at potions or not. She rushed away upstairs and signaled for him to follow. They could barely stand together on the tiny upstairs landing as she opened the door on the other side of the bathroom from her bedroom. It was the only other room upstairs, and Harry figured it must have been Snape’s when he was growing up. Harry thought it was fitting that it had been his mother’s potions workroom. Repeating her question, she ushered him inside the cramped room.

Every inch of the wall held a shelf crammed full of plants, animal parts, stones, and the sort of disgusting things in glass jars that had so repulsed him as he had waited for detentions in Snape’s classroom. In sixth year, he had had to use some of those things, and they had lost a bit of their novelty.

“I was only average at potions, nothing special.”

“Did you get into N.E.W.T.s?”

“Yeah,” and he did it without her son’s book, and with him hassling Harry every step of the way, but he didn’t mention that.

“Then you can prepare the ingredients.” One finger pointed imperiously at the table. “The directions are on page forty-six in the grey book on the shelf behind the table.

While he pulled out the book and opened it, setting it down on the table, she propped up her cauldron on a table under the room’s only window, opening it. “No magical ventilation,” she explained. “I usually just keep finished potions on the other table.”

As he thumbed through the book to the right page, he asked, “Don’t you need the instructions?”

She looked insulted. “For a sterility draught?”

“I would.”

“You don’t make them almost every day. People pretty much order the same potions from me all the time. I keep boils potions on stock, and I’d keep sterility draughts too, but they only last a few days.”

He chopped, diced, pounded, and shredded in silence while she waited patiently for her ingredients. When he finished, she peered at his work. “You grated my salamander skin instead of shredding it.”

“There’s a difference?”

“It’s close enough anyway,” she winced. “Well? Pick up the second letter and start preparing the components for that one! The whole point of having you help me is to speed things up.”

As she brewed each potion, he prepared the ingredients for the next. With each potion finished, she took it off the tripod she had set up over a Bunsen burner and set it down on the other side of the table to cool. More and more cauldrons soon sat there until Harry had to ask, “How many cauldrons do you have?”

She gave him an odd look. “Three pewter, one brass, one bronze, and one copper.”

“What are you going to do when you run out of cauldrons?”

“I’m going to pour the potions into jars, and you are going to wash the cauldrons in the bathroom sink.”

“Ah, well that works then.”

~*~

By the time the sun had begun to set and Eileen told him they were done, Harry’s hands ached and he had cut himself twice. He had managed to smash his hand with her pounding stone, which had caused him to swear and ask why she didn’t have a mortar and pestle. “If you work fast, I might get enough money to buy one,” she replied sweetly.

“So do I get to eat?”

“I usually manage four or five potions Potter, and today we did twelve. I think I’ll feed you.” She grinned. “If you keep this up, I’ll put an advert in the daily prophet.”

He hoped he wouldn’t be staying at Spinner’s End that long, but he stayed silent. She nearly skipped down the stairs, and he followed. “Do you mind cooking again?” She called up to him. “I’m dreadful.”

At the bottom of the stairs, he turned to her, “but you’re a potions maker.”

“And everything I cook tastes like potions.” She smiled ruefully. “You don’t have to cook, but I think you’ll want to.”

“Fine by me, so long as I get to eat it.”

She snorted at him and he grinned disarmingly.

~*~

That night Harry didn’t even consider sleeping on the couch again. One night with popped springs poking into his back keeping him awake was more than enough. He transfigured the couch into a bed as best he could, achieving something that resembled the sort of bed he could imagine Mrs. Figg having as a little girl, piled high with pink flowered comforters and knitted afghans. What it lacked in masculinity, however, it made up for in comfort, and he was unwilling to try again and maybe get something worse.

Clambering into bed, he settled down to sleep, pulling off his glasses and dropping them onto the coffee table. He pulled the covers over his head and shut his eyes, but his throbbing hand kept him awake. As he lay there, he sucked on the cuts and stared at the underside of the quilt. When sleep did take him, it took him by surprise, so long was it in coming.

He was just beginning to dose when a horrible wailing woke him. His heart pounding, he sprang out of bed and ran up to Eileen’s room. He stopped at her bedroom door as he heard her talking to someone out her window. “Go away, Snape, and don’t you dare call that singing.”

“Aw, Eileen, won’ you come down ‘ere and kish me?”

“Tobias Snape, you’re drunk, go home to your ma!”

“Won’ you take me home?” he crooned. “Ma’s not ‘alf as pretty as you.”

“Get out of here, you idiot!” she cried, throwing an empty jam jar she used as a cup at him so that it shattered at his feet. He scrambled away and she slammed the window down so hard the glass rattled. “I know you’re out there Potter.”

“Sorry, I thought you were in trouble or something.

”No more than normal.” She sighed, “I just wish I could hex him.”

“Oh, well. Good night then.”

She looked at him like she wouldn’t mind chasing him downstairs with an empty jam jar.

Harry retreated as gracefully as he could back to the living room. So that was Snape’s father? He couldn’t wrap his mind around it. Eileen appeared to genuinely dislike him, and he thought she was far to smart to fall for him. All she had wanted to do was send him on his way as fast as possible.

It brought it home, hearing her call him by the name Tobias Snape. This was Snape’s home, this was his mother. His stomach clenched. He liked her too much for her to be Snape’s mother. He liked her too much for her to marry someone like Tobias Snape. It hurt too much to think of her with someone like that.

Sighing, he crawled back to bed.

~*~

The next morning, he awoke early and started making French toast. He whistled cheerfully as the bread fried. Eileen shambled down the stairs in her dressing gown. “If you don’t stop whistling, I’ll give you a concussion.”

“My, aren’t you in a good mood this morning.”

“You are far too chipper this early in the morning.”

He sighed and made her a cup of strong tea. She just held it in her hands and let the steam billow into her face as he served them both French toast and honey. Sipping distractedly at the tea, she shoveled breakfast into her mouth. “Where did you learn to cook so well?”

He shrugged. “I just did a lot of cooking when I was a kid,” he answered, not wanting to get into his life with his aunt and uncle with Eileen. She raised her eyebrows, but didn’t ask further.

A faint tapping at the kitchen window interrupted them, and Eileen shuffled her way over to it to open it. Fourteen owls flew in, knocking the tea cups and sugar bowl off the table. His mouth dropped open. “Don’t worry Potter, this is all perfectly normal.”

“Fourteen!”

“I usually have to refuse most commissions.” Delicately, she began untying the letters and pouches of coins. She grinned, “But not today.”

He groaned. “How do you get them the potions if the owls don’t stick around?” he asked as the owls all flew away. He stared at her screech owl sitting in his perch next to the oven. It was barely larger than Pigwidgeon.

“Nero can carry anything, can’t he? Small but mighty. He just picks up the handles on the potion jars and flies away with them. He flies in and out all day.” Deftly, she counted the coins and turned to him. “I need to do some shopping before we can start today; you can use the shower while I’m gone, and get the ingredients for the first potion ready.”

~*~

Their days began to fall into a pattern, and a month flew past before he noticed it. Every few days, she would head out to the grocery store or to Diagon Alley, and recluse that she was, couldn’t otherwise be seen outside the house. No one called on them to remark on it, so Harry assumed that this was normal for her, or that she wasn’t well liked in town.

He never left the house at all, not wanting to cause a paradox, and because Eileen didn’t want him seen coming and going from her house. “Everyone will think we’re lovers!” she explained exasperated when he asked about it.

That first week, she brought home a mortar and pestle, handing it to him proudly, and in the end of January, she carried a bag bulging with a collapsible brass cauldron four times the size of her other cauldrons. “For stock potions,” she explained.

When he told her that it wouldn’t fit over her Bunsen burner, she lit the kitchen fireplace and he didn’t mention it again.

One day, he finished the ingredients for a potion quite a bit before Eileen was ready to start on the next one. Without any comment, she signaled him over and handed him the ladle. “Stir it counterclockwise every ninety seconds until I say stop,” was all she said as she began preparing the next potion.

Eventually, she had him brewing his own potions, which she had pronounced good enough, and he soon learned why she didn’t need the book anymore. The night he brewed his first potion for her, a hair loss potion, she bought a whole chicken, and he made chicken and stuffing for dinner.

Early on, he began to complain about the dust, and she told him he could clean the house if he wanted it clean, because she wasn’t going to. As he took up the cleaning as well as the cooking at the last house on Spinner’s End, he wondered if she would ever tell the same thing to Tobias Snape and how he would reply if she did.

Harry found he didn’t mind cooking and cleaning so much if he got to enjoy the benefits of both, and if he could at least mostly magic the house clean. He supposed that Eileen’s woeful charms weren’t really up to cleaning the house by magic, and he could see why she wouldn’t want to tackle the task by hand. It reminded him of Grimmauld Place only smaller and without all the dark curses.

Twice more, Tobias Snape woke them up, trying to sing outside Eileen’s bedroom window, and twice more, she took aim and threw something cheep, heavy, and replaceable at him. Harry began to suspect that she kept a supply of such things up there for just that purpose. “He doesn’t do this to anyone else,” Eileen told him after the second time; “I just wish he’d do this to Jane Winston, two houses down. She’s prettier, and she deserves it anyway.”

While he stayed at Eileen’s house, he watched and waited for something that he might need to do to make the future the way it hat turned out, so that he could get back home. Yet nothing showed itself. He never left the house, and spent all his time with Eileen. He was sure no amount of potions brewing and housework was going to affect the future in any meaningful way.

Harry kept waiting for an opportunity to change something, but nothing ever happened, and for a month and a half, nothing changed.