Towards the end of February, Eileen came downstairs after her shower in her dressing gown, her wet hair trailing down to brush her shoulders. During the day she had it clipped back in bobby pins, or if she was brewing, tied back with a ribbon, but just then she just let it fall onto her wool dressing gown, leaving a wet spot, looking like a blotchy shadow under her hair.

Watching him clean the bookshelf, she managed to look sullen even as she smiled smugly at him. She dropped into the armchair and he wondered if it was anymore comfortable than the couch had been. She raised her eyebrows as he dusted the shelf by hand, pulling off the books one by one. He decided her face was one that looked best moving. It wasn’t that she was unattractive, she just didn’t photograph well. He smiled back at her.

She tucked her legs up under her as she watched. Harry disliked the bookcase, because he couldn’t cast a scourgify on the books, or he’d get them damp, and if he tried to cast tergeo or vanish the dust, he’d probably vanish the books, one of which was her old Advanced Potions Making book from school, a very familiar volume that he couldn’t risk being destroyed. Consequently, he had to wash the whole thing by hand.

“Do you like watching me clean your house?” She had the strangest smirk on her face, and he had to ask.

“I can’t deny I feel some satisfaction at watching anyone other than me clean this place, but there are other reasons to watch you.”

He blinked at her and almost fell off the kitchen chair he was standing on to reach the highest shelf. She winked at him.

“Are you flirting with me Eileen?” Sometime in the last month, he had begun to call her by name, and he had stopped being Potter and started being Harry.

“Why ever would you think that?” she asked, wiggling her heavy brows in a mock lascivious way.

He somehow pursed his lips and smiled. “You winked at me.”

She grinned. Of course she was flirting with him. It felt nice. She had never had the chance to do this at Hogwarts.

“I’m surprised at you.”

“Why Harry? I’m not much older than you are.” When she wanted it to be, her smile could be quite infectious. He laughed.

~*~

A week later, Harry thought that if he didn’t leave the house somehow, he wouldn’t last long enough to do what he was supposed to do in 1959, whatever it might be. He broached the question at dinner, resolved to sneak out after dark if she didn’t agree.

Surprisingly, she agreed immediately, after denying any possibility of him leaving the house and perhaps being seen. So it was that late that night, just after midnight, they pulled on their coats and slipped out of the house to walk along the river. Every light in every house along Spinner’s end was off and no one was awake to watch them. A thin film of late winter ice glazed the river, and Harry had to pull his overlarge coat around him.

Suddenly he was acutely aware how ridiculous he must look in Eileen’s uncle’s clothing, skinny and not exactly tall young man that he was, hair reaching to his shoulders. Though the air was cool, his hands sweated, and he pulled them into his sleeves. They felt clammy, and he flushed.

Eileen smiled as she grabbed his arm and pulled him along the bank of the river. A litter of fox kits hid under a bush and mewled and whimpered as they passed. He pointed them out to her, smiling, amazed. She shook her head. “Some of the people around here still keep chickens. They kill them every chance they get. The children throw rocks at them and chase them out with sticks.”

“Er…”

“Don’t worry, they almost always get away.”

Harry didn’t quite have any idea what to say to that. Every time he thought anything, it disappeared before he could grab onto it and say it. "Well that’s good at least.” She smiled in answer and he felt bolder.

“Yes.”

Harry pointed at the mill, and the smokestack that he thought he could see from every part of town. Each day, it spewed smoke and vapor up into the air, which would sink down to hang low over the village. “I thought you said they closed it down.”

“They did right after the war, sold off all the houses. They sold it a few years ago and opened it again.”

‘What does it make?”

“Steel,” she murmured, “I think. I do my best to ignore it.” Harry decided that if he had lived on Spinner’s End for any length of time, he would have done his best to ignore it too.

“There’s a bridge over this way, I used to fish underneath it.” She led him to a crumbling concrete road bridge and leaned against the columns holding it up. When he sat down with his back to the column, she slid slowly down beside him. “I stayed here a few weeks every summer until my aunt died.”

“How did she die?” he asked, and then thought better of the question. “I mean…”

“Pneumonia, before sixth year. My uncle died right before I started at Hogwarts experimenting with charms.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For their deaths, or for asking?” She picked up a flat stone and examined it. “They left it to me, had no children.” A flick of her wrist sent the stone skimming across the slow moving river. “My dad hasn’t quite forgiven them for that.”

“Not having kids?”

“For leaving me this place. Actually, I don’t think he forgave his brother for marrying a Muggle-born girl and moving here in the first place.”

Harry favored her with a sidelong glance. “Did that have anything to do with why he married her?”

She grinned at him. “It had a lot to do with it.” Her smile turned sad, “but they made up before mum and dad had me.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“And your family?” she asked tentatively. “If you can tell me.”

“I guess I can. My parents died when I was one, same person cast the killing curse on them as tried to cast it on me. My mother’s Muggle sister and her husband raised me.” He wasn’t going to say anymore.

It was her turn. “I’m sorry.”

He tried to skip a rock across the water, but it plunged beneath the surface.

“It’s okay, it’s not like you did anything.”

~*~

It wasn’t for another week that either wanted to sneak out again. The combination of their mutual prying and exhaustion from taking every commission that crossed Eileen’s breakfast table kept them at home in their beds late each night.

When they did creep out of the house, they didn’t head for the bridge, but instead kept walking past it, meandering with the river. They walked side by side, and she slipped her hand into his again. “Your hands are cold, Harry,” she muttered to him as they walked.

“So are yours.”

“Yes.” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like winter much”

Ever since he had been eleven, winter to him meant Hogwarts, and the Christmas Holidays, having the school all to himself. It was the summers he despised. “I don’t mind it.”

She ran a hand up his arm. “I’d like it better if we were sitting in front of the fireplace with hot tea.”

“I wouldn’t mind that either.”

There was a thin film of ice along the edge of the river, but the middle ran sluggishly. In spring it would swell and run faster. The ground crunched with frost as they walked.

He gripped her hand and rubbed her fingers with his thumb, “it’s not really winter anymore, it’s March.” But it felt like winter, even if she didn’t say it.

A cold breeze whipped by them, and she curled up against him for warmth. He draped his arm around her shoulders and tucked her coat tighter around her. She smiled up at him. before he could smile back, Eileen slipped up under his arm and kissed him lightly on the lips and slipped back down again.

He blinked at her, too surprised to do anything else. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, looking at him wide eyed.

“No, no, it’s okay,” it was more than okay, he just couldn’t think right then how much more. He drew her closer, and they turned for home, not sure what else to do just then.

~*~

The next evening, they didn’t go out walking. Instead, Eileen lit a fire, and they curled up on the kitchen floor, on top of pillows pilfered from Harry’s transfigured bed. Every time Eileen saw that bed, she gave it a tight smile. The first time, she snickered at it, with the pink flowered comforter, and Harry snippily asked if she could do better. She replied that it didn’t matter whether or not she could do better, only that he could not.

“It’s a fine bed!” he had exclaimed.

“It’s a fine old lady’s bed,” she had shot back.

That evening, however, it didn’t look like a bed that belonged to any particular type of person, because it had been denuded, and all of its normal attire was tucked into a nest in the kitchen, with a boy, a girl, and two chipped mugs of tea.

Harry took his turn to steal a kiss from her, as he handed her his tea. She pulled him down and off balance, kissing him back, and taking him by surprise. “Be careful, I might spill the tea,” he burst out.

“Put it down then,” she retorted unfazed.

He laughed at her and she wrinkled her nose. It was easy to forget that he had left behind a battle, with Fred dead, and Remus and Tonks dead, and their son, his godson, alive. He knew everything that had happened, but he felt as separated from Ron and Hermione as from Remus. He hadn’t been around for long enough for it to sink in. It didn’t feel like time to mourn.

It was hard to concentrate on what he left behind when he was curled up next too Eileen, so he didn’t try. It was very hard indeed to remember that this woman’s as yet nonexistent son had died in that world he had left behind was almost impossible. He had trouble even remembering that she was Snape’s mother.

He had been willing to die, had expected to die for the world he had left behind, but it felt like a dream, distant from what he was living then. That sort of peace was what he had fought for, and he enjoyed it with little more than subconscious guilt. It didn’t seem to matter as much if he never went home.

He grinned at her, and leaned in to kiss him again. The firelight flickered warmly, and he said his goodbyes to winter, waiting for spring. “What would you do if I never left?”

She tucked her elbow underneath the side of her head and lay silent for a moment. “I guess I wouldn’t mind too much. I’d have to introduce you to the town.”

He snorted. “I wonder how your town would cope.”

She gave him a somewhat nasty smile. “They would cope, is what they would.”

“You want to cause trouble here, don’t you?”

“They don’t like me here.” She grinned at him with the same almost nastiness. “They think I’m strange, and they don’t even know I’m a witch.”

His hand pressed against his heart. “Your strangeness has nothing to do with being a witch.” She pulled his hand away and held it, and he finished, “You’re strange without it.”

She laughed, but her face fell back into her customary sullen lines. She didn’t mean to appear sullen or bad tempered, that was just her normal expression. “They would call you as strange as I am.”

He kissed her neck and then her ear. “Well, at least I wouldn’t be alone.”

~*~

He tossed the comforters and pillows back onto the bed. A finger brushed the damp spot where Eileen’s hair had been. Her shampoo smelled like lilacs. He followed the bedding, and pulled the covers up around them as she tramped up the stairs.

That night, he dreamed. His breath hissed out of his lungs as his mind led him through pictures of Ginny, kissing Dean, at Bill and Fleur’s wedding, losing the ability to speak when he was in the room when they were younger, near death in the Chamber of Secrets, kissing him in sixth year, fighting with Ron.

He saw her back in her first year with smoke coming out of her ears from pepperup potion, and he smiled as he slept, thinking as he did that it suited her, his perfect Gryffindor girl, brave and loving.

Yet when he awoke, he remembered nothing of his dreams, nothing of the red hair spread across his pillow in his dream, or of the gnawing sense of longing. All that he forgot when he woke, feeling only that something was missing, and he couldn’t quite grasp it.

~*~

Some days blazed hotter than the summer he had left behind, but others blew in as cold as winter, leaving no hint that spring was at hand, and that the day before they had opened all their windows to breathe. The weather couldn’t settle on whether spring had come, or even if they would have a spring instead of just a long summer.

Eileen griped and moaned while Harry listened patiently, mostly ignoring her. As they waited for the weather to settle into its season, Harry wondered in the back of his mind when Eileen would marry and have Snape, when Tobias, a man he didn’t like much from what he’d seen, would strike her fancy.

Smiling at her over their cauldrons, he marveled at the way life had led him there, brewing potions, something he didn’t enjoy terribly, even when it didn’t involve Snape, with Snape’s mother. He suddenly missed Neville, who would certainly have made things more interesting.

As he mused, Eileen turned her eyes away from her softly simmering cauldron to gaze out the window at the April morning and made herself a resolution. She faced him again, smiled back at him, and made her plans.

~*~

After dinner, as Harry cleaned up, she covered his hand with hers. Her eyes narrowed as she smiled him. “Come up with me?”

Harry stared at her, unable to comprehend what she meant, but also knowing exactly what she meant. His hand turned clammy beneath hers as he began to sweat. His stomach twisted and then disappeared as he wondered where on earth his tongue had gotten itself to.

Eileen looked down, clutching his hand nervously. “I mean…” As she looked up at him, her eyes grew wide.

Before he knew it, the word had burst from him. “Yes!”

Her face lit up. “Oh, good.” Suddenly she looked horrified. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

He grinned at her, beginning to find his feet again. “It’s alright, I know what you meant.”

Her lips curved up again into a smile. Her hand slipped into the one she had pinioned to the kitchen counter. She held it up high like a trophy, but let him pull it down to kiss her hand. Slowly, she led him up the stares and to the door farthest from the steps. The doorknob creaked as she turned it, pulling it open.

“I hope you know I’ve never done this before Eileen,” he murmured.

“Don’t worry,” she laughed, “neither have I.” As she closed the door behind them, Harry could hear a nightingale through the open window.

~*~

A Lark sang outside the window and the sun streamed in warming the shabby bedroom, lighting the scuffs on the threadbare grey comforter. Harry awoke slowly, with Eileen stroking his cheek. “Good morning,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Morning, Harry.” Even as she spoke, he felt a sudden distance from her. The time he had left behind was suddenly present with a sharp clarity before it faded away again. He smiled at her, but she suddenly paled. Her hand scrabbled around on the bedside table before she plucked her wand up from it. “Ostendo parvulus,” she muttered nervously.

Harry felt queasy, suddenly as worried as she. A thin band of gold light connected the wand to her abdomen, or more precisely, her womb. She glowed with the same light before she yanked the wand away the light twisted up into the wand. She stared at him wide eyed.

His mind began to buzz. She was pregnant, after one night, and he... He felt sick. His head spun and he wracked his brain for everything he had heard about that spell. The light had gone back into the wand when she released it. She was pregnant with a boy.

His organs seemed to dissolve inside him. The sudden way he had remembered his own time came back to him. This child would be born in 1960, or the very end of 1959, but he suspected that he would be born on January 9th, 1960, one year after he had come.

A horrible realization struck him. “I know why I was supposed to come!”

“What are you talking about, I am pregnant and you tell me you know why you came?” Tear gathered in her eyes, and she considered throttling him.

His hand shook as he took hers with it. “I had to come to father this child.”

Her eyes widened further. “What do you know about this child?” she demanded.

“He… will be important.” He smiled at her halfheartedly, trying to compose himself. “His name’s Severus Snape.”

“Snape!” She looked at him as if he had gone insane.

“He was one of my professors at Hogwarts,” his head spun. “He went to school with my father, he’s saved my life.” It hurt to admit the last part, but it was a small pain next to the sharp, shocking pain that Snape was his son.

She glowered at him, as baleful as a dementor. “You’re going back now, aren’t you?” she snarled. When he nodded, she hissed, “Then go, get out of my house!” Her anger was spoiled with a sniffle.

He came close to her and laid a hand over the place where his son was. She didn’t move away as he closed his eyes. Focusing on Snape has he had been when he first met him, and then as he had seen him in Snape’s pensieve, he murmured, “occulto verum” He spoke it again, louder, “occulto verum.” He yelled it, “occulto verum!” Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought it fit that Snape was under a glamour with the word occulto in it.

Glamours were strange things. They couldn’t copy people like polyjuice potion, but they lasted longer. He had never seen himself casting the one he had just cast. It was used to disguise a child’s genetic heritage. What had looked like him in Severus Snape would look like Tobias. With a jolt, he realized that given how strongly both Snapes resembled each other, Severus Snape likely looked quite a bit like him under the glamour.

He toppled over as a strange unreality settled over him. Very few people used glamours; they took too much power. Potions were less trouble, even fiddly ones like polyjuice. As the magic left him, he grew weak, but he raised his head. “I hate to do this to you.”

“Oh I bet you do.” Her words left her in a low roar, and she wished she had strangled him.

“If you marry Tobias Snape-“ she cut him off with a gesture, furiously, but he drove on. “If you marry Tobias Snape and name this boy Severus, I can promise that he will die a hero.”

Her eyes looked at him as if she wanted to turn him to molten lead. “Get out of my house!” She stormed out of the bedroom, and left him alone to stagger to his feet and dress clumsily.

Dressed once more in the tee shirt and trainers he had arrived in, he Apparated away to the edge of the Hogwarts grounds.

~*~

Standing at the edge of the grounds was a familiar figure with a pointed purple hat and flowing spangled robes. Albus Dumbledore waited to meet him. “Back again, young man?”

“Dumbledore!”

“I didn’t believe we had met,” he winked at Harry, but his eyes didn’t sparkle. “Except for when I saw you in the Forest.”

Harry stretched himself as tall as he could. “You won’t meet me until 1981, Professor, but you have to trust me. I can’t tell you much, because I’m not from now.”

Dumbledore nodded, the sparkle back. “I’m sure you don’t want to cause a paradox.”

Harry nodded. Hermione told him all of the dreadful things that could happen when wizards messed with time. “In 1998, you’ll have a chance to send me back in time to January 9th of this year.” I have to tell you that I am the father of Severus Snape, and I need you to send me back in time so I can father him.” Harry gave him a sad smile. “You won’t have met him yet either.” He turned towards the Forbidden Forest. “Bye professor, I have to go back now.”

Dumbledore waved to him as he rain for the place that would take him back. Harry wished that he could stay and talk with Dumbledore just one more time, but hat would he say to him? This Dumbledore didn’t remember him.

As searched for the right place, he loped through the Forbidden Forest, trying to absorb what he had learned and prepare himself again to face Voldemort, hopefully for the last time. Lying face down in the dirt, he watched the sun rise and set thousands of times out of the corner of his eye in one moment.

~*~

The sun sat low in the sky when Eileen saw Tobias Snape returning home from the mill. Leaping up, she thundered down the stairs and out the door, past her safely de-transfigured couch. In her haste, she almost ran into him. “Snape!” she called, and he stopped. “Tobias.”

“Hello, Eileen,” he spoke like dirty oil and she tried not to shudder.

Her smile was frosty when she spoke, her voice tight and angry. “You want me Snape? You think you love me?”

He nodded, obviously trying to spot a trap. She took a deep breath. Anger had taken her this far. “Then come.” And she took his hand to lead him inside and up to her room.