I wanna ask you:

Do you ever sit and wonder,

It's so strange

That we could be together for

So long, and never know, never care

What goes on in the other one's head?

Things I've felt but I've never said

You said things that I never said

So I'll say something that I should have said long ago:

You don't know me at all

"You Don't Know Me" – Ben Folds (feat. Regina Spektor)

It occupied the space somewhere between abjectly horrible and simply wonderful to spend time with his mother, Severus had decided.

He'd been at it for several weeks now.

Twice a week he'd log out of Galdrvale, shut down his developer's software, save any changes to the script he was writing in Microsoft Excel, and make his way into the small, attached lavatory in order to carefully craft the personage that had become Anthony Adkins.

Faintly, he could hear the swell of a guitar riff and the chiming of church bells coming from the general-purpose area of his studio flat. He must have forgotten to shut off his record player after the last song...

He always found he wrote better when he had the appropriate music setting the mood.

"I'm waiting in my cold cell when the bell begins to chime
Reflecting on my past life and it doesn't have much time
'Cause at 5 o'clock, they take me to the Gallows Pole
The sands of time for me are running lo-ow..."

He faced the mirror and the guitarist let loose—shredding out an early crescendo—as he considered his reflection with a careful eye. Becoming Anthony was precisely what made the ordeal so horrible: he'd found that it was difficult to moderate his voice to anything approaching normalcy without simply going for something near to a falsetto, and therefore had fallen back on the voice he'd often used to mock Pettigrew, either to his face or behind his back to Dumbledore, that year before he'd been obliged to kill his old mentor.

Sometimes it brought back fond memories: his simpering Wormtail impressions had often earned a chuckle out of the old man, particularly when he pantomimed the pathetic excuse for a man doing all manner of imbecilic and degrading things, but usually Albus would remember himself and scold him roundly for his fun at the ex-Marauder's expense. He never liked being made to feel all of sixteen again, when he was closer to forty. It was far more telling, he considered, that Albus always did laugh, often heartily, before he remembered that he should rebuke Severus instead.

More often, however, it made him feel somewhat pathetic. His voice was one of the precious few things he had always liked about himself, even after his vocal cords had been all but ripped out of his neck and the smooth quality had never fully rematerialized.

Even then, the muggles didn't understand how he'd managed to regain his faculty of speech at all—it was one of the few things he'd been able to remedy with a combination of his own healing spells and a regimen of carefully brewed potions. All they knew was that from week to week, as he'd attended his checkups, he'd become intelligible and had abandoned his use of his notepad for the purposes of communication.

He fervently wished he could show his mother the man he had become rather than the strange facsimile that he'd concocted, first to stalk her out and then to make her acquaintance.

"When the priest comes to read me the last rites—!
Take a look through the bars at the last sights—!
Of a world that has gone very wrong for meeeee—

Can it be that there's some sort of error?
Hard to stop the surmounting terror...
Is it really the end, not some crazy dream?

Somebody, please tell me that I'm dreaming
It's not easy to stop from screaming
The words escape me when I try to speak!

Tears flow, but why am I crying?
After all, I'm not afraid of dying
Don't I believe that there never is an end?"

'Oh, for fuck's sake,' he rushed out of the loo with a feral growl and lifted the arm of the record player so abruptly that it let loose a loud screech in protest. With a deft hand, and a scowl for the album, he stuffed it back in its sleeve and placed it back on the shelf with the others.

Not that song. Not today. He always forgot that that song was even on that album, and he only preferred to listen to it when he was feeling particularly sorry for himself, or when he was writing a bit of lore that was dark and perilous to the player.

To let himself into that headspace when visiting his mother was a dangerous way to prepare himself.

He shuffled back in front of the mirror, making quick work of glamouring his face into Tony Adkin's far less offensive visage. The tufty brown hair. The watery blue eyes. A round nose and a far weaker chin than his own. The cheekbones dropped lower—he might have looked like his father if not for the lack of beak and jaw... perhaps like a cousin then. He'd scarcely know. He'd not seen any of them in years.

It was unfortunate that he'd chosen this particular face when he'd gone to Waldweirness that first time, as he was now committed to it: and it brought him no pleasure whatsoever. In fact, it was all rather unsettling.

Thankfully his glamour had improved with each casting, and his features no longer listed behind his actual features, or gave him away the way they had with Granger.

Speaking of...

He groaned and leaned against the sink. She'd be there. His mother told him that she'd invited the blasted woman to dine with them.

Thursdays were usually his day to play at the rec centre with his mother, but their normal gobstones league had been cancelled that week—a nasty bout of dragon pox was spreading throughout some of the elderly at Waldweirness, and optional recreation had been postponed while they isolated all of the cases in St. Auberts.

Instead, his mother had invited him to share a chicken dinner that evening. He suspected she was lonely, even given the fact that she had been able to round up a respectable number of friends and acquaintances within her neighborhood.

The prospect had been bittersweet: chicken had been hard to come by for the Snapes during his childhood. It wasn't often that they'd have meat available to eat at all, but every few months the lorry would stop somewhere in the neighborhood on the way to a delivery and the driver would be distracted elsewhere, and Eileen would manage to kidnap a live one off the back of the vehicle before anyone was the wiser.

She'd feed it corn and scraps of bread in the back garden for a week or so, and Severus, too young to know any better for several years, made the blasted birds into play mates.

He'd chase them through the dirt, pet them and hold them when he felt too lonely—separated from most of the muggle boys in his neighborhood due to his propensity for magical outbursts—and would generally spend his time befriending the feathered beasts before it would all come crashing down around his ears in preparation for Sunday dinner.

For several years, it was the case that the bird would simply disappear, and he'd make no connexion to the fact that he was allowed the luxury of a drumstick and thigh for dinner that evening.

Eileen managed to protect his innocence until he was something like eight years old, and she'd not been able to catch a particularly fat hen as it attempted to evade capture.

"Severus! Come help—"

His small face peeked around the back door, his eyes large in his face as he observed his mother chasing the chicken, whom he'd named Ladyfeather, around the small fenced-in area.

"Mam?" his voice had been timid, "What do I—?"

"Grab the washbasin, quickly!"

And he'd taken off, hoisting the metal tub high above his head and waiting for a few breaths, until Ladyfeather came to a stand-still several feet in front of him, pecking at the ground for grubs or other sources of nourishment once she'd sensed that Eileen had given up her pursuit.

"Now, Severus!"

He slammed the washbasin into the ground over the startled fowl and seated himself on top of it, feeling her wings beating against the metal beneath his bum.

In the aftermath, Eileen had shooed him off the washbasin and he'd stood back and watched as his mother had first stunned the bird and then culled it with words that were too soft for him to hear.

It had been his first-time bearing witness to the killing curse. He'd not understood what he'd been watching back then, but he remembered the flash of green light and the zig-zag course the spell had taken quite clearly. In retrospect it was quite unmistakable.

That evening, she had included him in helping to prepare dinner. Before that day she'd never asked him to help. He'd watched as she performed the messy task of severing the dead bird's head and fastidiously plucking all of the feathers. He'd assisted in cutting up onions and potatoes while his mother had smeared butter over the skin and then dusted it with salt.

Tobias was late back that evening and collapsed onto the sofa in a dead stupor, otherwise it might have been the three of them eating together, but he remembered with vivid clarity that it had been a far more pleasant Sunday dinner for his absence.

Afterwards, Eileen had removed the remaining meat and had mixed it with hard boiled eggs and mayonnaise for chicken salad. They'd eaten it for the rest of the week on pieces of bread that they took care to cut the mouldy bits off of. For a family that usually ate tinned beans on toast it was a memorable week of food. Though perhaps the most important moment had come when his mother had leaned over, snapped off the bird's collar bone and had knelt before him, her black eyes shining with mischief.

"Grab hold of the other end, Severus," she directed, showing him how she'd looped three fingers around her side of the V-shaped bone. "And place your thumb at that knobby-bit there at the top, just like mine is—yes, there's a good boy." She smiled at him like she never did when his father was awake and stomping about the small house.

"Now, on the count of three, you're to press your thumb against to top and pull with the rest of your hand, and we'll break the wishbone together.

"One, two, three—!"

The bone came apart between their hands, Severus having hold of the top bit, not quite understanding why his mother was beaming at him in the way that she was.

"Marvelous!" She'd crowed, her eyes bright. She peeked over his shoulder and out the door to make sure his father was still a dead weight on the couch—Tobias let loose a rather strangled snore. "Ok," she continued, in a whisper, "you got the bigger end—now you can make a wish..."

He'd wished for a friend. He remembered as if it were yesterday, because not three weeks later he'd met a small red-headed girl on the swing-set in the park, and his life had afterwards never been the same.

He never befriended another of the chickens ever again, realizing the ultimate futility of the endeavour, but neither did he feel the need to: from that point on he'd had Lily.

He took a moment on the descent through the stairwell to shake off the past. It wasn't difficult, the freezing conditions that the servers were kept in meant that shivering was almost a pre-requisite of passing through the building. It was lucky he was so used to living in the dank Hogwarts dungeons.

He found that on the fire escape he still had to take several minutes to clear his mind—the muggle way in this instance. Not having access to his Occlumency made the entire enterprise exhausting, and far more perilous than he'd imagined it would be when he'd decided on this course of action.

Lying to the Dark Lord under torture? Doable, provided he had taken the time to cloak himself in his phalanx of mental shields.

Lying to his mother, on the other hand?

He always left the encounters feeling as if he'd only made it by the skin of his yellow, crooked teeth.

The sun had already set as he closed the gates to Waldweirness behind him. It was mid-November, and freezing cold. The air was still dry and crisp in England—and the only evidence of the temperature were the icy puffs of breath that emitted from his mouth as he tramped his way down the lamp-lit streets, that, and the enormous woolen overcoat he'd purchased years ago during his recovery from a muggle-second hand shop. He knew that up at Hogwarts it had probably snowed already.

He could hear Granger and his mother chatting as he approached the door. Someone—probably his mother—had opened the kitchen window, and the enticing smell of roasted chicken in garlic wafted down to him.

Snape shifted with ill-disguised irritation, even as his stomach growled in anticipation. He hoped the thrice-damned woman had thought to bring pudding this time.

Even as he knocked at the door his conscience nagged him for that final thought. He knew damn well that he could have brought it himself.

'Next time,' he resolved. 'Though it'll serve Granger right if she doesn't like spotted dick out of a tin.'

She'd been raised properly, after all. He sneered. Probably preferred petit fours or something else similarly fussy and pretentious—

The door swung open and enveloped him in light before he could come up with another posh dessert. He was faced with the curly-haired menace herself.

"Where's my mother?" he hissed, his annoyance as clear as day.

Granger rolled her eyes—brown, he noticed, but shining and bright somehow—and held the door open as he entered. "She's pulling the bird out of the oven."

Snape smirked at her, as unpleasant as he could make it for a face as inoffensive as Tony's. "Did you remember the pudding this time?"

The girl's face pinked as her mouth tightened into a pucker. Merlin, he enjoyed getting her angry. He almost forgot to keep the smile out of his expression. "You're in luck, Tony, as a matter of fact, Eileen requested I bring something for afters."

She turned on her heel and breezed down the hall as he removed his coat and tossed it over the back of the settee, taking care not to disturb his mother's knitting project.

"Is that Tony, girl?" He heard his mother ask. Granger must have responded in the affirmative because he was summarily summoned to the kitchen to assist. "Tell him to move his arse in here—I need him to do the carving."

Severus sighed, with both pleasure and exasperation. He knew from experience that his mother was completely capable of carving up the chicken herself, she'd done it for years. But if there was a man around—a man who wasn't drunk off his arse on gin—she preferred to delegate the task, as she would say, properly.

"There you are!" She said, her voice making it sound as if she'd been waiting hours and like he wasn't arriving exactly when he'd been asked to. She handed him the carving knife, "Remove the breasts, wings, thighs and legs to that platter, there."

She didn't say please, but then she never had. If anything, Severus preferred it that way—if she'd have fallen over herself to be polite it would feel even further from his mother as he'd remembered her, at least as it came to treating him as her son.

"And Tony? The breast should be sliced across the grain!"

He only nodded, not trusting himself to speak. It didn't matter that he'd been a Potions Master for more than twenty years or that he could slice, dice, chop, mince, and julienne better and more consistently than a high-class chef—all that mattered was not allowing his pride to reveal his identity. He gritted his teeth and got on with it while Granger tittered her amusement at his expense behind him, helping his mother to set the table with sliced bread, the vegetables served up on a platter, and settling the gravy boat between the three place settings.

There were a few moments of shuffling as they all fixed themselves whatever drink they preferred, two cups of water for the women and a can of diet pop for himself. He felt momentarily grateful that Eileen had taken to asking Hermione to provide them for her so that she'd have something for him whenever he visited.

The talk was rather small and mundane for the first part of the meal. He had to remind himself almost constantly that Tony had no reason to snark at Hermione Granger the way that Severus Snape would, and he found himself fighting to ignore the backhanded commentary that she made, her almost open mockery. Like she wanted him to reveal himself.

Well... in truth he knew that she did, she'd said as much to him on their first meeting. When she had realized that he'd secured her silence by way of an oath—and one that he had elicited through subterfuge, at that—she'd been in a righteous towering fury.

Her hair frizzed out in all directions when she got like that—he'd almost been tempted to touch it... but only to see if it would give him a bit of an electrical shock.

Perhaps she'd be an adequate back-up generator for the servers, if I manage to get her really going, he'd found himself thinking.

Tony, he'd decided, was a rather quiet fellow. It made it easier to keep his cover. And his mother preferred to do most of the talking herself, anyway, behaving in a way far more imperious and high-handed than she normally would have if she'd been privy to the fact that she was speaking to her own son.

She got this way, he remembered. It was a pureblooded woman thing—to avoid displaying one's vulnerability by falling back on being an accommodating hostess, as was normally taught from birth. He'd seen Narcissa play this game for years. Some of the women he knew came by it quite naturally: Augusta Longbottom came to mind. It was no stretch for the woman to be somewhat dictatorial and snide—it was in her own nature. Molly Weasley was another example, though she tended towards an accommodating warmth that he expected was quite genuine. His mother, he knew, only did this when she was nervous or out of her element.

It was why she'd never quite managed to find friends amongst the other women in Cokeworth: they all thought her behaviour a touch too posh for their tastes or too rich for their blood.

He managed to observe while she interacted with Granger, however, and found that her behaviour was yet different still. She clearly didn't act quite as haughty toward the Department of WOE employee—and whenever she seemed to be putting on airs, Granger would give her this look, like she'd had quite enough and was waiting for Eileen to cut it out already and come back down to earth. Then the next thing Granger would say would be prim enough to shame an errant school child.

He was quite amazed to see how well it worked. It seemed to cut through the hubris with absolute efficiency.

He didn't care for how his mother tended to sulk afterwards, though. Then again, who was he to judge his own mother on being sulky... Though, it seemed apparent that Granger also preferred his mother in a better mood, as she always followed it up with something kind and genuine enough to brighten his mother's spirits.

She had a way of bringing out Eileen's honest self, and that was what Severus was there to visit, after all. He couldn't help but to be grudgingly appreciative.

The conversation, a discussion of clients and radio shows, Mrs. Snape's gobstone league and her frustration with her bridge partner, all floated over him and around him. He'd begun to assemble a sort of open-faced sandwich on his plate, starting with a large slice of crusty bread, buttered, then layering on top spoonfuls of roast carrots and potato, and topping it all off with gravy. It wasn't until he'd carefully apportioned himself one of the thighs and drumsticks that he noticed his mother's attention on him.

"Yes?"

She eyed his plate for a moment, "Weren't you listening at all?"

Shit. Had he been listening? Sort of... barely. "You said Mrs. Douglas was sick with the pox but that she'd been making poor bids lately anyhow," he tried, his nasal Pettigrew voice nearly cracking at the end. He coughed, and it came out far deeper than he'd hoped.

Eileen nodded slowly, her eyes narrowed in a shrewd survey of his person. "Too true."

Turning and facing Granger, she pursed her lips and continued on, turning the conversation over to discussion of Potter's eldest son, James. Severus found himself scowling once more at the choice of name.

"Something the matter, Tony?" his mother piped again. He shook his head, finding himself mute for the moment.

"James was here that day Hermione took you back to your house, do you remember?"

"Vaguely."

"Yes, well, you were too busy skulking around my street looking like a vagrant, I guess I wouldn't expect you to remember the girl carrying a child." Her voice was haughty once more, and he wanted to sigh in relief, but he repressed the urge using no little amount of will-power.

"I miss the boy, Hermione—when would Potter allow you to watch him again?"

Granger smiled at his mother with genuine affection this time. "I mean, I don't know when Harry and Ginny will likely take another vacation, it'd been since their honeymoon that they did this time, but I can ask next time I see him. I'm sure they'll let me watch James again."

"Such a little gentleman—funny too. You know he can barely lie without admitting it, if you ask him outright that is? I'd gone to the loo and he climbed up on that chair you're sitting on and snuck the last biscuit. He fessed up almost immediately and offered it back to me—he'd not even eaten it yet! When my Severus was young, he could have half of the biscuit in his mouth and half of it crumbled all over his clothes and even then lie about it with a completely straight face!"

Granger gave an almighty snort and pitched over her supper in repressed giggles.

'Don't you dare look at me, girl, don't you fucking give it away.' Snape clenched his fist in a vice grip around his fork, using the side of one tine to cut with vicious intent into his tower of bread and veg. He stuffed his mouth to avoid saying anything incriminating. God, he'd give anything to have had gobstones scheduled instead. This was turning out to be both more difficult, and more embarrassing, than he had bargained for.

What followed were even more stories he'd give anything to obliviate from Granger's overcultivated, insufferable mind. How he'd run out into the street as a toddler without a nappy. The time he'd used his magic to propel the pram down the sidewalk when he'd been left to play in it, looking for all the world like he was directing his own motorcar in a race. (That had been the last time he was left to play in the pram outside, Eileen had explained). The way he took to changing the colour of the hand-me-down smocks to black... (He remembered then why he'd stopped. His father had beat him for it, and after that he was left with whatever cheery colour the owner before had left to him).

"Oh, girl—he was so full of beans, he was. A plucky little monster," his mother had enthused to his utter horror. His only recourse was to keep shoveling food in his mouth to cover for Tony's awkward and sudden turn toward absolute silence.

At this point even Granger was giving him a nervous look, her eyebrows lifting in some form of urgent communication. As if telling him to keep quiet. 'Like I need help from you...'

"There was one instance where he took off with Toby's gin while he were at work, and the little terror shared it with the other boys in the neighborhood—"

"I need the loo." He stood quickly, throwing the serviette from his lap up onto the table by his nearly cleared plate and then rushed off without bothering to look back at the reaction his hasty departure might have brought about.

Oh, he remembered that incident.

The door to the lavatory slammed shut behind him and he leaned his full weight against it, his eyes closed and his heart hammering in his chest.

Tobias had beat him black, blue, and then unconscious over it. It had been his last bottle until payday, and his mother had brought it up to company as if it were nothing more than some heartfelt story from his childhood. As if he hadn't paid for it dearly... As if that beating hadn't been one of the worst he could remember receiving from his father. He'd put money on the fact that she couldn't come up with too many stories after that... he hadn't been quite so full of beans, as she'd put it, in the aftermath.

What was more, he and the other boys had been so blisteringly drunk that he remembered vomiting in near enough every corner of the house—he'd likely given them all alcohol poisoning. Any one of them could have died.

That had also been the last time any of the other mothers had allowed their children to play with him—he'd ended up entirely alone, and injured far worse than he'd ever been at that point in his life, all from that one bad decision. It was his first true taste of soul-crushing regret.

He took the opportunity away from his mother and Granger to bathe his face and neck in cold water from the tap. Pudding. Pudding and then he'd leave—and maybe he'd beg off next time. He couldn't do this again—this was... this was a form of psychological torture that the Dark Lord never would have been creative enough to invent.

When he emerged, he found Granger at the cooker and his mother arranging for tea. The plates were scrubbing themselves in the sink, Granger's doing most likely, and the insufferable harridan was stirring a pot of what smelled like custard on the hob. She removed it from the heat before the eggs could curdle and poured it into the freshly cleaned gravy boat.

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Snape, I needed—"

His mother waved his excuse away with her hand as if it were composed of nothing more than smoke (and honestly, it sort of was). "No matter, I don't need to know." Her attitude was back to that of the imperious well-bred hostess again. "I asked Hermione to pick these up at the shops today, it's just not a dinner without it,"

He about jumped out of his seat when he observed the three, perfectly round—as if pressed from a mould, because truthfully, they had been, at least in a certain sense—spotted dick puddings that were set before each seat. They were the exact size and shape of a Heinz tin. Precisely as he remembered from nearly forty years ago.

Eileen sat as Granger set out the custard, a jar of golden syrup, and a pot of tea, playing mother for each of them and pouring out. She even remembered his three sugars. Moments later she finally seated herself and Severus felt free to doctor his pudding as he liked.

It was moments like these where he truly felt transported back in time. His favourite confection, and served just as he liked...

He found himself almost smiling to his plate as he ladled over a heaping spoonful of custard on one half and poured a generous amount of syrup on the other, then he used the back of his spoon to smash the thing to bits, creating a sort of sweet soup with fat raisin-in-sponge dumplings—

"I KNEW IT!"

Eileen had stood so suddenly that all of the plates shifted about an inch when she'd bumped the table. Her pale white finger was jabbing in his direction. Severus felt himself go cold all over... "OH, I JUST KNEW IT, you... you...!"

And the woman stalked around the table, circumnavigating a completely taken aback Granger to stand before him, seeming to tower even at her tiny height. He found himself quite incapable of speech, a spoonful of sponge cake hovering half-way to his gaping mouth.

Before he could say boo, she'd covered his face with both of her hands, the force of her fury and magic tingling against his skin. With horror, he realized that his mother was using what little magic she still felt in control of to rip his glamour apart. It tore over his face as she wrenched her hands back, disintegrating like crepe paper in water.

When he dared to open his eyes he saw her standing before him, shaking with rage, her hands clawed at her sides... and he knew that his face was utterly naked.

"Mam, I can explain—" he began, as slowly as he could, finally in his own voice.

But this only infuriated her more.

"EXPLAIN HOW YOU WOULDN'T FACE YOUR OWN MOTHER AFTER THIRTY YEARS, SEVERUS TOBIAS SNAPE? Explain how you thought I WOULDN'T NOTICE that you eat your chicken dinners like a Kraut? How you eat your damn puddings like you've always done, as if you're mixing up some potion!?"

Quite against his own will he felt his ears reddening. He tried to swallow, finding it near impossible his throat was so dry. "Mam..."

"DON'T YOU 'MAM' ME! If I hadn't ripped that damn mask off when the hell were you ready to tell your own DAMN mother that you were alive!?" she sneered, but it was belied by the tears that were coursing like quicksilver down her cheeks. "Did you just plan on playing gobstones with me forever? Did you think you'd go on acting at being an invalid—like you were a soulless puppet for the rest of my years, instead of my own child?"

Snape was shaking, and he'd almost forgotten that Hermione was there, before she stood, as quietly as she could manage and settled a hand on Eileen's quaking shoulder. "I'll give the two of you some privacy..."

"OH NO YOU WON'T," Eileen shrieked in the girl's face, spittle flying. "You will sit and stay! Don't think I didn't notice how unsurprised you are that Severus is alive! You little liar—you knew too! And don't you dare deny it!" she hissed, her voice venomous.

Granger pulled her chair next to his and sat in it heavily, seeming to be entirely cowed. For once, the silly woman couldn't seem to find anything to say. Then again, neither could he... Finally, he felt what his students must have when he'd found a cauldron erupted or an impropriety taking place in the halls. It was odd, but it seemed they were on the same level at that moment in time, he and Granger.

Both were hanging their heads in shame. Possibly, too, a bit of fear. He'd never heard his mother like this before...

"You tell me right now, Severus—what in Merlin's name were you thinking? How could you stoop so very very low as to deceive me like this?" She'd stopped shouting at least, but her voice, tremulous and hurt as it was, broke his heart clean in two.

"I don't know, Mam," his voice was like gravel, having lost entirely the silky edge he'd worked so hard to cultivate. "You'd said you never wanted to see me again—"

"So you thought you'd waltz back in as someone else, hmm? You didn't think that maybe I'd have reconsidered after thirty years? Or more than that, after learning that you weren't a Death Eater at all—"

"I was. I was a Death Eater. A real one... You were right to throw me out..."

"He changed sides, Eileen—but it wasn't until later on, as I understand it," Granger defending him. Now that was something. Pigs were probably flying over the three frozen rivers of Hell at this very moment.

"So, when you got that thing on your arm, that was real?"

"Yeah, Mam. That was real. It is real... it's still there." He murmured, shame faced.

Eileen looked up and away from them, blinking away tears that seemed to be clouding her vision. "You took that body I made you and fouled it up with dark magic—"

"I did. I'm so sorry, Mam. I'd take it all back if I could." His head was still hung, he felt he could barely raise it. Prostrating himself before his mother was far different from doing it for a Dark Lord's vanity, or begging for Lily's forgiveness, or for Dumbledore's redemption. He offered himself up in supplication, but knew that if no succor, no mercy, were granted... well then, he'd take that and feel that it was well deserved. He'd bollocksed this up. He didn't deserve forgiveness.

"But you can't."

"No." He clenched his hands into fists on his knees, his trousers caught in the grip.

"And you can't turn back time and come to me like a son, with that beautiful face I gave you, and your proper ears and eyes and nose..." Eileen let out an almighty sob as she crumpled in on herself.

He'd done this. He'd made another piss poor decision...

"Mam, please—"

But at the same time as he made his plea, Hermione had held out her hand to the woman, her gesture gentle and concerned, "Eileen..."

"Oh don't you start!" Eileen snarled, suddenly all teeth and Cokeworth viciousness. Both members of the guilty party startled in their seats. "You knew... you knew how much I missed my Severus, and you knew he was... was alive..."

"I only knew since I caught up to him that day, Eileen, not when we talked those first few times..."

Feeling suddenly wrong-footed, (well, more than he should rightly feel in this situation wrought of his own bad choices), Severus felt obliged to defend the poor witch. After all, she'd tried to do the same for him, and she'd done her level best to convince him to say his piece to his mother.

"It's not Granger's fault, Mam. I made her swear not to tell... I made her take a wand oath."

"Which she didn't have to take!" Eileen snarled back, her black eyes flashing danger.

"No, she didn't... but," he sighed in resignation. "I may or may not have made it sound as if I had every intention of going to you that very afternoon on my own. It's not entirely her fault that she thought it was my place to tell you and not hers, especially since I led her to believe that I'd be doing it sooner rather than later."

Eileen regarded the both of them in silence, her arms hugging herself as she shook and her jaw working furiously. Her lips were twisted in a piteous contortion, and her black eyes were flooded to the brim with tears. She looked a mess—and he couldn't help but to feel as if he deserved to have died in the Shrieking Shack for that alone.

When she finally spoke, it was with a voice that wavered in and out of strength, as if she were on the verge of falling into a dead faint. "I don't want to see either of your faces again."

When he went to interrupt, she held up a boney hand. "You've broken my heart twice now, Severus—and that's two too many times. And her?" she said, indicating Granger with a jerk of her head, "I'll go down to the office tomorrow and request a new Community Liaison. I don't need a lying wretch delivering my food and keeping me company..."

Beside him Granger was shaking. In a distant part of his mind he almost felt surprised—she really seemed to care that his mother was estranging herself from her. He was sure that it was partly guilt over the situation with himself as well, but... if he wasn't mistaken his mother and Granger had become friends of a sort. Inexplicably, he felt the additional burden of guilt over their severed relationship pulling at his overladen shoulders.

"Leave me." Eileen demanded. She rose from her chair and swept out of the room. Moments later they could hear the door to her bedroom slamming shut behind her.

The kitchen was completely still around them, their puddings abandoned on the small table, their tea left untouched. He rose first, and scoured the plates with his wand, sending everything back to its proper place with another few waves. He didn't want his mother to wake the next morning and to see the fallout of the evening before—a painful reminder of his second betrayal. Finally, Snape motioned to Granger to follow him from the room, and, after gathering their coats, from the house itself.

They trudged through the silent night. Under the gaslights, he could faintly make out the small flecks the told him the first snow of the year had finally arrived. It was going on 9 o'clock.

Upon reaching the gate, he felt compelled to hold it open for his unlikely companion. Together they exited the neighborhood. It felt like death followed them.

"I think I owe you an apology."

The girl looked up, obviously startled by his frank admission. "No, you don't."

"I do. I shouldn't have misled you. I shouldn't have made you take the oath. You and I both know that you would have told her."

She shrugged, her face frowning at the concrete beneath her scuffed brown boots. "Not immediately... not soon enough. I'd have wanted to give you a chance to say it yourself. And it doesn't matter now anyway—what's done is done. I think I deserved that as much as you did."
He could only nod at her, his face set in stone. She wasn't taking the out he'd offered... well bully for her. Severus really wanted to sneer at her self-effacement, but he could only feel begrudgingly satisfied with it. "To our failures, then. And to our terrible judgement."

She snorted in what might have been amusement and her brown eyes twinkled at him in the lamplight. Even so, he could tell that she'd much prefer to cry, that was probably why her eyes appeared so glossy in the first place. He knew he would. "I suppose so. Cheers."

"Cheers."

Only then did they turn from one another and apparate away to their respective flats, twin cracks of air displacing being the only thing they left behind in the quiet of the evening.

"If I'm the person that you think I am

Clueless chump you seem to think I am

So easily led astray,

An errant dog who occasionally escapes and needs a shorter leash, then

Why the fuck would you want me back?!

Maybe it's because

You don't know me,

you don't know me."

"You Don't Know Me" (reprise) – Ben Folds (feat. Regina Spektor)

A/N: The song in the beginning of the chapter is "Hallowed Be Thy Name" by Iron Maiden.

This one has several pieces of art attached, all having to do with Snape, Eileen and Ladyfeather. To make things more simple, I added all of the artwork for Assisted Living to its own gallery on my Deviant Art (again, you can find me as Mothboss).

The titles for the art are:

Temporary Friend
Early Exposure
Scenes from the Snetchbook: Snape Sketchdump 1 (only the bottom sketch)
Wishbone Traditions
He Won the Wish

Supper at Spinner's End

Enjoy! Thanks for reading, and thanks for the reviews 3