It was entirely possible this would be Severus' last Christmas with his mother, so he did not stay at Hogwarts for it. Rather, he brewed a large batch of calming draft on Christmas Eve, decanted out individual portions as requisite presents for each of the staff, and on Christmas Day took the rest of it to St. Mungo's, along with two servings of Hogwarts feast foods fetched straight from the kitchens. He made a detour to Spinner's End on the way to pick up an extra set of gobstones.

He would visit Harry and Petunia on Boxing Day.

Annoyingly, there was a trainee healer he did not know minding Eileen's private ward when he arrived. He seemed dead-set on ruining Eileen's possibly last Christmas, too.

"We do not accept potions here brewed outside of the hospital's own pharmakopoiea," he said judgmentally of Severus' calming draft. "And gobstones are on the list of prohibited items for this patient." He smiled toothily.

Severus fixed him with his most vicious glare. He waited for a time until the man started to visibly sweat before answering, "If you had read her file, you would be aware this patient refuses to consume any elixirs of any kind, except those produced by my hand. Severus Snape. Potions Master of Hogwarts."

The healer quickly grabbed the chart and hid his face behind it for several minutes. His voice had risen by nearly an octave when he started speaking again. "Ah... yes Professor, I see it does say that, here. Yes, I suppose that is in order, then. I will have to send a sample down to the pharmakopoiea for verification before any can be administered."

Severus slowly leaned and twisted to look through the glass into his mother's room. She was sitting quietly, watching the muggle foot-traffic through the outside window. She was perfectly calm at the moment. Severus looked back at the healer, who now appeared to have shrunk several centimeters. The cringing and voice change allowed Severus to recognize him, finally. The healer had been a seventh-year N.E.W.T. student the year Severus had started teaching. The name escaped him; Chance something? He decided not to mention that. "Acceptable," he said softly. He set the heavy flask on the desk. "Notify me when the verification is complete. I expect it will take less than two hours."

"Right."

Severus turned.

"B-but the gobstones, er, they're still prohibited, sir. It says here she tried to shove them down someone's throat."

"Then I suggest, if you go in there, you keep your mouth shut. For safety." He ignored any further protestations and entered his mother's room.

She did not look up when he closed the door. He crossed the room and sat down next to her, setting the two plates of food on the small table between them. "Happy Christmas, Mother," he said.

She blinked and looked at him then. "Is it?" He nodded. She had been tired and frequently disoriented ever since the attack earlier this month. Partly, that was because he had continued to brew variations of the calming draft for her every weekend, to help her sleep if nothing else. Valerian had also tried some new mind treatments Albus helped design. Eileen smiled slightly. "Then Happy Christmas, Severus. I'm afraid I don't have a present for you this year. They don't let me out of here to go shopping."

"That's alright." He wasn't sure if she was trying to be funny with that statement, but she usually wasn't. He gestured to the covered plates. "Your other gift is being inspected by your nervous security guard out there, but we can start with these."

Eileen slowly reached out and lifted the lid of the plate nearest her. Her smile broadened. She actually looked somewhat happy, for the first time since Severus had forced her into the hospital. Perhaps they would have a good day today. "From Hogwarts?" she asked. He nodded. "I never stayed for Christmas when I was in school, but I was always told it was wonderful. Certainly, every other feast was."

Severus forced a grin. "It will at least be better than hospital food."

"That's for certain."

He took the box of gobstones back out of his pocket and handed them over to her. "For after dinner."

She frowned. "They'll probably just steal them from me again."

Severus shook his head. "I won't let them."

She raised her eyebrows. "They have rules here. All kinds of rules."

"I don't care."

She smiled again, ruefully. "That's my boy. Let's eat."

The food was delicious, of course. Eileen particularly loved the Brussels sprouts and parsnips, saying the hospital always reduced vegetables to mush. That was a common problem when healing magic was concentrated in one place too close to a kitchen. Curiously, Severus recalled Tobias voicing the same complaint when he was admitted to a muggle hospital once after a work accident, so maybe it had to do with concentrations of illness, both magical and mundane, rather than of cures. For himself, Severus preferred the turkey. And the Holiday blancmange, of course, which he had specifically requested of the delighted and accommodating Hogwarts house elves. The conversation was light throughout the meal, if a little one-sided. Eileen became markedly more talkative after drinking the small vial of peppermint Schnapps Severus had sneaked in for her. It had exactly three drops of Pepperup added to it, which was an elixir that fortunately maintained its nature unchanged when mixed with alcohol. He had decided the risk of giving an Obscurial a mild stimulant was worth it if it brought her some joy. As he had hoped, the peppermint liquor disguised the taste of the potion perfectly. As she slowly mellowed, Severus told her stories from this term, and his discovery on the mid term examinations that he would have to add some remedial materials into the upper class curricula. Eileen was not sympathetic, either to him or to his students.

"Not everyone's so damned logical as you, Severus, you know that. Slughorn isn't. Eleven-year-olds definitely aren't. You putting actual theory of potions in the first- and second- years might turn out some truly excellent potioneers, but I bet it's boring most of them to tears.

"Which is why Slughorn put it off until he'd already caught their interest through other means," Severus concluded, nodding thoughtfully. The observation was cynical, but surprisingly logical. He didn't think he could stomach teaching only "recipes" and proper slicing and dicing techniques for two years before introducing any of the underlying magical theory though.

"Still, that idiot boy clearly never read any of his textbooks, or he would have known not to falsify ingredients even without you telling him," Eileen mused. "How many points did you dock?"

"Fifty each." She nodded. He could not tell if she approved or not. Severus leaned back, still thinking of her earlier comment. It was the crux of his problem as a teacher. He found his subject innately fascinating; his students did not. He found their innate lack of interest incredibly frustrating, and he had no idea how to create enthusiasm out of nothing. He should probably stop focusing on work for the day, though. He was here to savor the dwindling quality time with his mother that remained.

"Round of gobstones?"

"I did bring them for a reason."

Eileen smiled, grabbed the box, and moved to the floor. She patted her pockets and frowned. "I'm out of chalk," she muttered. Rather than simply drawing the ring with his wand, since the visible magic might derail her good mood, he silently conjured some chalk inside the pocket of his robes and handed that to her. "Perfect." She crawled around on the ground to make a sizeable circle, then laid the chalk aside and started setting up the game, humming to herself.

Severus played the first round with his usual disinterest, so Eileen won easily. She did not chide him for his lack of effort. She was used to beating him. The door opened while she was resetting the game, and the healer crept inside with Severus' batch of calming potion. Severus gestured subtly to the spell-locked and shielded cabinet in the corner. He would inform his mother of the draught when he left. She didn't need it right this moment, but she needed to know it was there and from him in order to trust its origins when she next required it. When the healer was gone again, Severus asked, "Mother, how did you and my father meet? If I ever heard the story, I don't think I remember it." He was curious mostly because Albus had been hounding him about ways they could engage with Eileen's more positive emotions. Severus, unfortunately, did not have much experience with that.

She looked up at him, surprised. "We must have told you, surely?" Severus shrugged again. Eileen smiled reminiscently. "I was just recently graduated. I was looking through shops in muggle London - muggles have been coming up with so many more board games in this century alone, I had hopes of finding some candidates I could adapt and market, maybe through Diagon Alley. Anyway, Tobias happened to be in the same shop as me at the same time and approached me. We talked for a little while, and he asked if I wanted to go to a movie with him." Her smile widened. "He was tall and very... athletic-looking even then, doing manual work you know, and I had never been to a muggle theater, so I said yes. It was just a discount theater, not even a shilling to get in. I never thought anything would come of it, of course. I thought it would be a fun novelty for the afternoon, but at the end of the film, which was a romance, he kissed me, right there in the theater."

"On your very first date?" Severus asked, surprised. That seemed abrupt to him.

She nodded. "I wasn't expecting it. I thought about slapping him, but he didn't do anything more than that. And he was just so suave. He held my hand when we left the theater and asked to see me again. Well, after such an... exciting time, I couldn't really say no, could I?"

Severus could have. Easily. He did not contest her claim, though. She had been a teenager with a new infatuation. And that infatuation had lasted, and intensified over seven years to the point she willfully left her family for Tobias. What she had had with him had been real, at some point, even if Severus had never really appreciated it.

"I miss him so much. I know you and he didn't see eye-to-eye..." Severus fought to control his sneer. That was putting it mildly. "But, well, it was just very hard for him. We weren't ready for you, not really. He worked so much, never at a job that paid enough. And he was always secretly worried one of my cousins would... do what they did." Her eyes were misting. "I wanted to have more babies," she whispered.

"You did?" He had never heard her express such a thing before. The possibility of a sibling had never seemed realistic to him, even as a very young child. His parents fought too much.

"I did. But you displayed your magic so early, I think it frightened him. He wanted me to take that muggle birth control. I refused, and he went out and got some muggle operation without telling me to stop us from getting pregnant. I was so angry at him for that. I don't think I ever hexed him before, not until he came back and told me what he'd done." Severus was very much regretting this conversation, now. Surely she didn't mean Tobias had himself castrated? No... he definitely would have remembered that from when he took care of the body. He didn't know what she was talking about, and he did not want to. "It was a Transmogrifian curse. I thought he was going to leave me after that. But he didn't. No matter how difficult I was, he never left us."

"No, he never did," Severus said diplomatically, even though he might have preferred it if Tobias Snape had abandoned the family at some point, rather than taking his frustrations out with his fists. Then he realized what she had said and had to recoil as he suddenly remembered the night she was talking about. The Transmogrifian Torture was very dark magic. The incantation Transmigure parsmortus was evocative of its effects, as it caused parts of the body to putrefy. This in turn caused intense pain, not to mention terror and distress in the victim. There was no traditional counter-curse, merely healing charms and potions, which could be more or less successful depending on how long the curse was applied and the degree of damage... Severus had been three at the time and gotten a good eye- and nose-full of Tobias' red, swollen, and pus-filled hands before his father had forcefully kicked him out of the room and slammed the door behind him. That was not the only time Eileen had used that particular curse, either, just the first and most savage time, and the only time Severus had not understood what was happening. He was fluent in the incantation and wand movements long before he actually obtained a wand, which was both strange and alarming to him now he was entering his third year as a teacher. Merlin...he had rarely thought about his parents' marriage from Tobias' perspective before, but it was clear the abuse went both ways. The muggle man would have been at a distinct disadvantage against a pureblood Slytherin wife. It was a wonder their family hadn't killed eachother before the wizarding war. He could count himself extremely lucky his mother had never turned her wand on him.

Eileen smiled weakly, perhaps recognizing how uncomfortable the conversation was getting for him. Her smiled faded, her eyes darkening and lowering to the floor. Her cheek twitched, or rather it was not twitching but vibrating with the corrupted magic stirring inside her.

"Mother... don't. Please."

She blinked and looked up at him again, back to normal, thank Merlin. He breathed a sigh of relief. She turned back to the gobstones game, flicking her next stone with great deliberation. They said nothing about what had almost happened. "How about you, dear?"

"How about me what?"

"Are you stepping out with anybody? Will I ever have grandchildren?"

Oh, and this topic was so much better. "I'm not seeing anyone, no."

"Why not? Are you even trying?"

"Not particularly. The last woman who expressed interest of that kind did so in such a way I can quite do without." That woman was Marge Dursley. Regretfully, she would be present tomorrow.

Her eyes narrowed. "You're not still hung up on that Evans girl, are you?"

"No, and she was only a friend."

"Could have fooled me."

Severus rolled his eyes. "Well, pardon me for not actively hunting down a mother for your grandchildren for you."

Eileen's expression soured. "It's a bad world out there, boy. You should give me grandchildren while you still can. Give the one who came on to you a chance."

Severus sighed. "Trust me, you don't want her for a daughter-in-law. What about quasi-grand-nephews? Would that satisfy you?" She raised one questioning eyebrow. Severus grinned and started regaling her with his friend Patricia's (Petunia's) latest anecdotes of his pseudo-nephews, Daryl and Hudson. This subject proved so safe, and so pleasant for both of them, Severus even felt comfortable bringing up Marge again later: he needed advice on what to give her for Christmas that really and truly communicated, "Let's just be friends." Eileen's suggestion was the worst muggle board game she had ever encountered, called Big Funeral. It was both atrociously offensive and poorly designed as a game. They both laughed over it.

Author's note: if you're confused, the operation Tobias Snape had was just a vasectomy. But let Severus stew in his horror over barbaric muggle medical procedures, and the general discomfort with hearing about his parents' marital problems, even long after the fact. Also stew in the realization of actually, he was exposed to far more than "light hexes" as a child. The Marauders' observation that Severus was "up to his eyeballs in dark magic" the moment he arrived at Hogwarts was completely accurate, but Severus did not have that same perspective because for him, that was just normal: Dark=defensive magic.

I googled "worst board game ever," and found an actual game called Big Funeral from 1964 on the list. Too hilarious not to include.