Part V

London, 1985-

After much debate with himself, Severus had resolved that it would be better to send a note to Remus' parents, seeing as he didn't want the fact that he knew exactly where Remus lived and what his habitual haunts were to scare him too much. On the day after their meeting at Chen's, the waiter and owner whose name, incidentally, wasn't Chen at all but Wesley Lai, had told Severus exactly how much he had enjoyed watching Remus squirm when he pretended that he hadn't seen Severus with him at the table. Because as a matter of fact, none of the muggles in the restaurant had. But Wesley Lai wasn't exactly a muggle.

"He actually insinuated that a lady friend had stood him up. I did my best to stop myselflaughing, imagining you as his lady friend." chuckled Lai. Then his face dropped.

"The stingy fellow could have at least ordered something. I hope you don't make a habit of bringing in poor customers Severus." he chided.

"By no means. Rest assured." Severus answered.

His connection with Lai was a complex one. After disgracing himself in Hong Kong's high society in the sixties, Lai had emigrated to England. Though he was exceedingly well educated and came from the best of families, no to mention enjoyed British citizenship, he had to face the fact that, his connections not stretching far enough to get him a job as a diplomat or government employee here in Britain, there weren't many interesting or well paid options available to him. Being the only squib in a very ancient family of potioneers in Hong Kong, he decided that what he couldn't openly sell as being magical would however be acceptable to local muggles under the label "Traditional Chinese Medicine" and only the local witches and wizards would know the real reason behind his medicine's effectiveness. So for several years, he and an older witch by the name of Prunella Bertram had set up and run a discreet yet highly lucrative business from her corner shop in the countryside outside London. Wesley would have preferred to operate by himself, but being a squib he had only his mother's collection of recipes and childhood memories of observing her at work to go on to try and reproduce his family's ancient art. Though Prunella was a competent brewer, there were a few obstacles to their unmitigated success. Certain ingredients being hard to come by in their fresh state in the United Kingdom, as well as the climate and stars being different, made the potions less effective than they were back in Hong Kong, though they still worked better that what most herbalists had on offer. As time went by, Prunella's health started to fail and it was decided that she should take up a young witch or wizard as a trainee. At the time, in the village, there weren't many youngsters, and as far as Prunella and Wesley could tell, none of them were wizards, so it was by complete chance that Severus had entered the picture.

London, 1978 -

One fine day, Prunella had been off to London to pick up a new pair of specially made support stockings when she caught Severus' attention. Back then he had been taken on as a shop assistant by an antiques' salesman. The pay was miserable, but it gave him somewhere to be during the summer holidays, and he was considering working there for a year in order to save up money to apply to the university of Southampton, something his father grudgingly approved of. He had been staring out the display window on a particularly slow morning, when something caught his eye: an older woman, no doubt thinking that the thick coat of dust and soot on the shop's front window would prevent those inside from seeing her, was facing towards it so as to shield what she was doing from the passers-by. She was trying to fit a flat, elongated parcel into her rather wide but shallow carpet bag.

'Try all you want, daft old bat.' Severus thought with a yawn, his head propped on his arm.

The woman reached into her bag and brought out something that looked somewhat like a conductor's baton made out of beautiful reddish wood.

"Cherrywood." Severus said to himself, still relatively uninterested but using the opportunity to practice recognising the type of wood.

The woman used the baton to tap the parcel, muttering something at the same time and Severus saw, his heart giving a jolt, that it shrank to a size that enabled her to fit it into her bag comfortably.

With a rush, Severus shot up from his seat and rushed out to catch up with the woman who was already heading off down the street.

"Excuse me Madam!" he said, using the polite tone he usually reserved for the shop's few regular customers.

The woman turned around and smiled kindly at him. Now that she was closer, Severus noticed that she had a lovely round face with rosy cheeks and laugh-lines around her eyes that crinkled in a wonderful way. She was also wearing a frilly dress that sported rather ugly print of what seemed to be a botanical illustration of various different types of turnip.

"Yes? What is it, Love?" she asked.

Severus was terribly excited. His cheeks flushed a strange yellowish pink and his eyes sparkled slightly feverishly. Placing his hand firmly on her shoulder he said:

"I saw you shrinking that parcel."

The woman blinked and answered:

"I haven't a clue what you are talking about. Now run along Love, I must get home in time to start cooking for supper."

With the gentlest of touches she pried off his hand and was about to leave when he, a desperate rasp in his lowered voice, said:

"Please! Could you teach me? I don't have a cherrywood stick, but I can do things like that as well!"

Turning, she eyed him up and down. Something in his animated and earnest gaze told her that this odd young wizard, for whatever reason, had apparently never heard of wands and, given his age, clearly not been educated at Hogwarts. Feeling a sudden surge of pity, she opened her bag. Pulling out a small notepad and quill, which to Severus' amazement didn't seem to need ink, she scribbled down an address in spidery cursive.

"There you are. Do come and visit me at my shop. It's not very busy and you may come any time you like during opening hours. Now, Love, if you'll excuse me, I still have that supper to attend to."

With a smile and a pat on the shoulder, she was off. But Severus, gripping the note in his hand, knew that he had just met his first witch aside from his mother. That night, he hardly slept and, feigning illness the next morning when he came in to work (which wasn't hard since he seemed to be burning, so anxious was he to learn about magic,) his employer, a notorious hypochondriac, told him to stay home for the rest of the week.

And so it was that over the next five years, Severus found out about the larger wizarding world and discovered his mother's duplicity at having received his summons to Hogwarts and informed the school that he would not be attending. As his guardian, she had every right to do so, and so it was that he had never known what he was missing because of his mother's decision to live as a muggle. Prunella, a patient and very conscientious teacher, had done her best to instruct him in basic magic and she soon found, as if he were the answer to her and Wesley's prayers, that he not only showed considerable talent at brewing potions, but also a certain flair for figuring out which local ingredients worked best as substitutes for their originals from the Far East.

But Prunella did worry about Severus. Especially about his bitterness towards his mother. No more than a week after the beginning of his lessons with her he announced that he could no longer bear to live in his home with his mother. He had no intention of telling her that he was learning magic, and therefore he had to endure his anger at finding out all she had kept from him. To do otherwise would have alerted her suspicions and by now he new that her suspicions more often that not became his father's suspicions, which tended to be resolved in a violent manner. So it came about that Prunella decided to introduce Severus to Wesley.

Over the years, Severus had taken over as main potion brewer and when Prunella unfortunately died by tripping over her cat and tumbling down the stairs, they were forced to accept that her niece was to run her small shop, depriving them of their main sales-point. It was Severus who had come up with the suggestion that Wesley open a Chinese restaurant. By day, the kitchens would be used for food preparation and by night, they would be used to prepare potions in larger amounts than ever before. The sizeable nest-egg that Wesley had saved up over years of ever improving sales would enable this easily and by renting premises in a more central location they would increase their numbers in due course.

Once Chen's did finally open, Wesley found that he rather enjoyed working in the service industry. He was an abysmal potioneer, but he did know how to cook, and his refined manners soon earned him a reputation as an agreeable businessman among gourmets and pharmacists alike. Severus, on the other hand, only had interest for potions, but he was starting to feel that he had learned as much as he could and was itching to further his magical education. At the same time, his deep-seated wish for acceptance in the muggle world put up a fight. Indeed, he knew, that however strange muggles might find him was nothing compared to the endless questions he would have to face if he entered wizarding society, starting with how he could possibly be a proper wizard without his own wand.

For learning purposes, Prunella had let him use hers, and now that she didn't need it, Merlin keep her gentle soul, he was free to use it as he wished, but it didn't feel quite right. He couldn't, never the less, face the idea of marching into a wand shop (though he had an address for a certain Ollivander's) and requesting one, though he also had inherited enough wizarding money from Prunella to be able to afford one. Wesley, no doubt bitter about never having a wand of his own, being a squib, had enhanced Severus' fear of being seen as positively abnormal and pitiful by wizarding standards.

London, 1985 -

So here Severus sat, listening to Wesley chuckle about Remus' bemused expression, wondering how to turn things to his advantage, had decided to write to him. It seemed neutral enough. Certainly more neutral than most of his recent actions. Picking up one of the restaurants' business cards, he flipped it over and wrote:

"This is where you can find me. Yours, etc., SS".

A/N: Well now, I've been writing this mainly because I want to know what happens, myself. So it's fair to say that it's writing itself, I guess... I hope you like it. I'm discovering similarities with my other story, Lovex, which puzzle me. If anyone happens to have read it, please tell me whether you see them too. I'd be curious to know... I wonder what they say about me. ^_^`` (scratches head).