Mettle

Eileen never believed she had the stuff for motherhood. Growing up, she'd been an only child with a father who encouraged reading and studiousness. While, in contrast to her father, Eileen's mother vainly attempted to implant a maternal bone in her body through visiting relatives that just had babies and children several years younger than Eileen. Whenever they'd visited an "uncle" or "cousin" or "family friend" with a baby, she was pleaded with to hold the little monsters. Sometimes, she gave in and held those soft, drooling, warm bundles of unshaped humanity. She would look into their sleeping (or, sometimes, not sleeping) faces and say:

"He looks like a right bruiser."

or

"She'll be beautiful, won't she?"

Adults around Eileen cooed at her when she said these things. The parents would take their baby back from her and agree with Eileen through proper shows of caressing the baby's cheek or fixing their bonnets. But, really, Eileen had hated them. Babies were too heavy, too awkward, too hot and they smelled.

Eileen had known she wanted no children from very early on in her life. But as it was improper to voice such an opinion, she kept it to herself. While her mother may have dismayed at her disinterest in dolls and frills, her father's guiding hand kept her on a rigorous course of intellectual pursuits that often lead them to the Prince Manor's cellar where he kept his potions lab.

She recalled fondly the hours they spent down there. Them sitting around bubbling cauldrons as he quizzed her on ingredients and let her stir the potions he made. She would always remember her father fondly. He had been a good man who hadn't minded that she was a girl instead of a boy. He had even done with her what he could without pushing the limits of society too far.

It was thanks to him her education at Hogwarts went as smoothly as it did. He'd prepared her for the courses there better than any tutor could have and when she went, she excelled and garnered the favor of many of her professors. However, all the praise from the professors did little to help her social standings among her peers. They were jealous of the attention the teachers bestowed upon her and Eileen feared she'd always be an outsider. That was, she did until her mother, of all people, told her what to do in a letter a month and a half into her first year.

Join a club, Eileen. Not just any club, though, a club you know you won't be the best at.

Taking that advice, she'd joined the Gobstone Club. At first, she was so horrible the others laughed at her constantly, but to Eileen's relief, the laughter didn't last long. A short while into her being a member, they began to show Eileen how to do things the right way and she began to make friends with her compatriots. Those friendships even started to extend outside of the club when her teammates began to ask her for help in their school troubles. She gladly gave it and soon enough, she was mildly popular among her peers.

By the end of her fifth year, Eileen was just as good at Gobstones as she was at everything else and was elected club leader. It had been one of her favorite moments at Hogwarts, she would reflect later. Knowing that she was good enough and liked enough to get such a position. Eileen had been so buoyed by this she had decided her last two years of Hogwarts would be the best of her education.

How wrong she had been.

When her father died from a heart attack in the spring of her sixteenth year, Eileen couldn't have been cast more adrift. She'd come home to a mother who tittered and fretted over her in a suffocating way that she couldn't escape. Or, more truthfully, felt too guilty to escape. This was how her mother was coping, she understood, it was through taking care of Eileen that her mother's hurt heart was comforted.

But by the end of the summer, before her last year of schooling, when she began to talk marriages and husbands and motherhood, Eileen knew she wouldn't be coming home after she finished Hogwarts. She wanted none of that proper pureblood womanhood. And so, almost a whole year later, she slipped out of King's Cross without looking back and headed for the Muggle world.

There, she found it easy enough to enroll in a couple Muggle secretary know-how classes and began to learn how to conform to this foreign world. While there, it was liberating to learn it wasn't odd for a single woman to live on her own, though, most found it worryingly dangerous when she admitted this fact.

"But, dear, what if someone breaks in?" One aged neighbor down the hall from her apartment had asked her once.

Putting on her most confident smile, Eileen had answered, "Oh, don't worry, Missis Glenn, I know how to handle myself."

That was the nice part about having a wand and magic, she realized. It was an edge against the darker elements of this strange world.

At the end of her secretary training, her class decided to celebrate by going to a pub on the hard end of town to drink and maybe flirt with some of the factory men. While there, Eileen had left her gaggle of giggling cohorts and gone to the bar herself to ask for a gin tonic.

The bartender, a nice young man that was long of face, had given the drink to her for free.

"Why…?" she'd muttered.

He gave a little laugh and tipped his head in the direction of a bloke sitting with two others on the other side of the pub.

A smile still on his face, the bartender told Eileen, "He said if you came up, to give you a drink on him."

"Ah," she'd replied. Turning, she gave that young man a once over and decided he wasn't half-bad. He had a good build and a very dashing face. His hair left something to be desired, but his boldness was quite tantalizing. So, throwing caution to the wind, Eileen had gone over.

Lifting her chin with a haughty ascension, she'd greeted him with a deep-voiced, "Good evening."

"Back at ya." He'd grinned, leaning in with black eyes all a glitter as her father's cauldrons once done in the light of a fire.

Eileen's liking became an instant infatuation.

Four and a half months later she was living with him. He worked at the factory as a welder and she found a job at a small marketing firm as their secretary. They lived quite happily that first year or so. Their lives were simple; they went to work, came home and kissed, and had dinner and sometimes went out to the pub or to dance and had fun.

Tobias was a breath of fresh air compared to all the boys she grew up with. He was candid and wasn't afraid to get dirty or cuss someone out if they were an arse. He wasn't perfect, Eileen would be the first to admit, but he had a charm, she would also tell anyone who'd listen.

When he proposed two and half years into their relationship, she agreed. On one condition, that is. "No children," she'd told him quite firmly.

He'd become more than a bit upset by that and they'd had their very first big fight. She threatened to leave him. He swore he'd tell her boss she'd been living in sin. She slapped him. He punched her in the mouth – causing a busted lip.

It was the first time she wondered if she'd chosen wrong.

But Tobias had apologized as soon as he hit her. He even looked like he might cry as he gave a garbled, "God, oh God almighty, Eileen!"

"Shh..." she'd soothed him as she folded into his open arms. "We were both mad," she murmured into his thick neck.

They began to sway together, letting their heated emotions cool away and finally, feeling just guilty enough to have driven her lovely Tobias to hit her, Eileen relented.

Pulling away, she met his dark eyes and declared, "One child. I will give you one child."

"Eileen," he said with great enthusiasm. "I couldn't have asked for a better girl!"

She smiled at him but felt like she'd betrayed some inner part of herself in the process of bringing him joy.

Only time would tell her how her disloyalty would hurt her.

By luck, or maybe because all her babies sensed her unease, she had three miscarriages by the time they found a nice little townhome on a street called Spinner's End.

Tobias was devastated by how they kept losing their children and Eileen couldn't help the moods that took her sometimes too. Was something wrong with her? Was she truly not woman enough to carry a baby? Finally, she had it and went to a potioneer in the wizarding world to get a fertility potion.

That worked like a charm. Soon after, she was pregnant again and then, miracle of all miracles, the baby made it past the first trimester of pregnancy.

Tobias had been elated by that and took to kissing her belly before he left for work every day after the accomplishment. It was sweet of him, and Eileen wondered if she truly couldn't love this little thing growing inside of her. After all, her dear Tobias did it so freely. How hard could it be?

When her baby was born, a healthy 2.7 kilos with black hair and black eyes just like Tobias, she couldn't have been more pleased. Surely a boy so much like himself would make Tobias the happiest man to ever exist.

And it did, for a time, anyway.

-v-v-v-v-v-

It was barely a week after Severus's first birthday that he proved to be a wizard.

Everything pointed toward a normal morning for the most part, except Tobias was running late. This meant Severus's bottle was in the pot bubbling over on the stovetop as she tried to get her husband's work shirt properly closed as it was missing a button and Eileen had not yet found the time to fix it with all her attention going to her son.

"UUUUHHHH!" Severus screamed from his highchair.

Struggling to close her husband's shirt with a safety pin as he stretched for his thermos of tea, Eileen could only snap, "One minute, Severus!"

However, that minute was an eternity to a one-year-old and the bottle levitated itself from the pot right to his highchair.

"By God!" Tobias shouted, causing Eileen to stab him in the stomach; which meant he sent her careening into the wall with a jerk of his welder-arm. Sinking to her bum, she looked at her husband's face and realized he was staring at their son. Looking to Severus, she saw he was sucking on his bottle. How...? And it clicked. He was magic. Severus was magic like her and every Prince before her.

Struggling to her feet, Eileen declared, "We need to talk."

Tobias's dark eyes bewildered, he stood no chance against her breaking his world.

Things never quite returned to what they were after she explained magic and wizards to him. If anything, he seemed to retreat from her and their son by drinking and spending late nights out at the pubs. They started fighting a lot too – sometimes to the point where they turned physical.

Eileen knew it couldn't be good for Severus to see his parents hurting each other, but what else could she do? If she returned home, her mother might not take her back. Not after leaving her husband.

No proper woman would do such a thing.

Thus so, she was royally trapped.

This is just the first chapter of what I feel might be a five, six chapter story - all of it centering on Eileen Snape. This is setting things up for what is to come and so don't be fooled by its ordinariness because that all changes next chapter ;)

Thank you all very much for reading and please review!

EDITED: 8/15/15