Last time: Harry shook his head, growing tired of Snape's pessimism. He leaned his back against the tiny door to Rice Bowl and opened it with the weight of his body, standing as a human door stop so that Snape could duck beneath the lintel into the warm embrace of Lola's domain.

The counter was empty at first glance, so Harry drummed his fingers on the piece of laminated menu that was permanently sellotaped to the countertop. His fingertips smudged the surface into four dots.

"It'd be luckier if you're there all the time instead of trying to do both," Harry answered at length, not sure what else to say. Luck wasn't something he could argue against, particularly as it seemed that Snape had had his fair share of rotten luck in his twenty-nine years. Harry, too, had a bad track record of ill fortune. At best, that didn't amount to much. And at worst? It was downright foreboding.

"I fail to see how it's luckier, although I'll grant that, with more attention spared for our new enterprise, it can't hurt our chances—"

"You make your own luck," Harry parroted, using the same words he'd heard from his uncle's mouth at every dinner meeting he held with prospective buyers. "Luck is when opportunity meets preparation," he quoted again.

He'd never properly understood the second axiom, but he'd heard it enough that it had practically become a part of him. Almost as much of a universal truth as "magic isn't real."

Then, of course, with magic being real, that didn't bode well for his uncle's truisms about the nature of fortune, either.

Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw Snape gawping at him; a most unattractive look on the man's long, gaunt face. He looked a bit like a corpse whose mouth had fallen open in death, never to close again.

"I believe my ears may be deceiving me, Potter, for if they are I might be forgiven for thinking that you'd actually said something wise for once."

Colouring with indignation, Harry glared while Snape recovered himself enough to not leave his jaw where he'd dropped it on the floor moments earlier.

"I'm wise—!"

"Penny wise and pound foolish."

"What's that suppose'ta mean!?" Harry clapped his hand down on the menu, shifting it slightly on the counter. Almost apologetically, he smoothed a finger over the sellotape to try and put it to rights, though the adhesive seemed to be failing.

"It usually means that a person is judicious with small sums of money and irresponsible with access to greater funds, but in this case I only meant to say that you can be astonishingly perceptive at the most surprising of times while maintaining your proclivity for middling dunderheadedness in all other instances."

Harry tried hard to make sense of the soupy paragraph of words that Severus had served to him and only managed an ineloquent "Huh?" before Snape smirked and approached the counter himself, finally locating the service bell and ringing it.

"With you in a moment!" Came Lola's voice, from somewhere back in the kitchen. She sounded mildly strained and Harry couldn't help if his instantaneous desire was to rush to assure her that there was no need to hurry.

"Take your time, Lola!"

Quite against his wishes, that only seemed to spur her on, as she flew out of the kitchen seconds later, her salt-and-pepper hair a slight, but not alarming, mess and sticking to her face with sweat. She beamed upon seeing them and lifted the hinged counter in order to hurry into the reception area.

First, she grabbed up Harry's cheeks between her wrinkled hands and pressed four quick kisses to his brow and face, then she hopped to envelop Snape in a hug that had the man looking desperately uncomfortable and—if the blush creeping up his ears was any indication—rather pleased.

"Mrs. Pad—"

She swatted him and glowered. "No."

"Lola," he drawled, as though merely humouring the woman, "I hope the evening finds you well."

"Well, not well; the evening has found me." She replied, her response slightly terse.

Harry wasn't sure what to make of that ambiguity, but Snape apparently was capable of reading between the lines, for he shrugged sympathetically. "I am sorry to hear that."

"Do not be sorry! It is not I who am sick," she clucked, retreating behind the counter and picking up a small notepad which she studied after donning a pair of red-rimmed reading glasses.

"Who's sick, Lola?" Harry asked, lifting up on his tip toes to try and read the notepad from upside down. He would have struggled even if it were in print, but it was near impossible when half of the words were in Tagalog and it was all rendered in Lola's loopy, short-hand script. Judging by the totals to the left of the page when read upside down, it was likely an order.

"Ney is," she clucked. "Trouble with his gallbladder. We have been seeing a specialist in Carlisle to bring it back into alignment with his liver—"

Snape grunted and began drumming his fingers on the counter in a way that could only indicate his impatience. "To bring it into alignment with his liver? To what end?"

"Madame Mapua suggests that there is a misalignment in his meridian. He's seen some improvement since he began treatment a week ago."

"Has he now," Snape mused aloud, sounding skeptical.

"Yes," Lola replied, sounding impatient. "I don't want to hear it, 'Rus. Madame Mapua is an old friend to the family and wouldn't tell us wrong."

"I don't suppose you've rung your GP over it, either," Severus remarked sardonically.

"Pah! So he can be seen a month or two from now and told to merely stop eating some things? You should know better!"

"I suppose I should," Snape answered, sounding resigned. "If the longevity of your relationship with this Madame Mapua is what confers weight to her opinions, I don't expect you'd welcome a solution I might offer?"

"When your last suggestion was that we should ring the GP?" Lola retorted, looking, for the first time Harry had seen, irritated. "It would depend what solution that is!"

"A tonic. Of my own creation. One I'd be pleased to bring by as early as tomorrow."

Lola's eyes narrowed as she looked Severus up and down. "A tonic," she repeated dryly.

Snape said nothing, for there was nothing to say and Harry knew he was loathe to repeat himself. He merely raised a coal black eyebrow in challenge and waited for Lola to think his offer over.

"What kind of tonic?"

"A natural one. I can guarantee improvement within three days of consistent dosing."

"Can you now?"

Again, Snape said nothing as he exhaled an impatient breath through his nose.

"It won't hurt Ney—?"

"Why would I wish to hurt him!? I would as soon hurt him as I would hurt you! Don't insult me like that," Severus snarled. Beneath his anger, Harry thought he could detect a bit of woundedness in the way his shoulders slouched while he crossed his arms over his chest.

Her mouth twisting in indecision, Lola dithered over her answer for a moment. It spoke loudly of her distress over her husband's condition that she didn't rush to reassure Severus that she did, indeed, trust him. Instead, she looked anywhere but at the two standing in her restaurant and frowned at a spot of nothing in the corner.

"If you bring it by, I will make sure he takes it." She answered finally, sounding irresolute.

"That's all I ask."

Eyes growing misty, she looked up into Snape's face and offered a tepid grin. "Your mam had good tonics too. I remember now... before she had you, she had the most amazing medicines..."

Snape nodded slowly. "Before she had me. Yes. She... ah. She had difficulty in sourcing ingredients later on. It wouldn't have done to offer anything that wasn't, shall we say, 'complete.'"

"I'm sure if we ran out of potatoes, I could substitute something else in the afritada," Lola began to protest, but Snape held up a hand to forestall her.

"This is not like cooking, Lola. Perhaps your Madame Mapua would tell you: in medicine, each little thing matters. For the purposes of alignment." He sneered the last part with particularly venomous sarcasm but Lola didn't seem to take any notice, for she sniffed and nodded.

"You have everything you need, then?"

"I do."

Somewhere in the kitchen a timer went off and Lola cried something in Filipino before she strode purposefully to the back and attended to whatever dish was apparently ready to be attended to.

"Maybe we should leave, Severus," Harry suggested in an undertone while she was occupied. "She's really busy..."

Whatever Snape might have said in response was lost in the loud metallic clang of something heavy falling and the rushing sound that came with liquid quickly escaping whatever contained it. Harry fancied that he could feel the floor shaking under the weight, and after that, a startled shriek from Lola jolted the wizard at his side into action.

"Stay here," Snape commanded, pointing one finger down at the floor before Harry as he strode off. Of course, Harry didn't listen for even a moment and was on his heels, nearly running into Severus as they approached the kitchen and saw an overturned stock pot on the floor.

Lola was backed up against the far wall, where she'd presumably sprung away from the crash and explosion of boiling water, and her hands were buried in her chin-length hair, pulling at the roots.

"Ayyyaah!"

"Are you burned?" Snape asked, stepping forward and wading through the puddle, apparently having determined that there was nothing else in danger of falling or exploding.

"No! No, but that's just what I need! I have orders for sinigang and the last batch of it was all taken—"

"Why didn't you just tell them you were out?" Severus groused, finding a towel and ineffectually using it to try and direct the water on the floor into the pot. He then turned and dumped what he'd managed to collect in an industrial-sized sink.

"It's our most popular dish right now, it's so cold out. I didn't think it would be a problem to make another batch..."

"Mam never would have made sinigang that didn't simmer for at least two hours," Snape complained.

"Your mam didn't have customers to satisfy!" Lola sniped back. "We've simplified it enough that we can usually cook to order... usually..." She sighed.

"Go to the loo and check yourself over for burns. I'll get this cleaned up."

"You don't need—"

"It'll be faster if you let me," Severus directed again. "Go."

Finally, after more grumbling and hair pulling, Lola scampered off to the water closet and Harry heard the sound of a faucet running.

Severus took the opportunity to withdraw his wand from his sleeve and to make quick work of the puddle, which he siphoned off into nothingness. "I thought she'd never leave." A tap of his wand saw the pot scoured and a second had it filled two thirds of the way with fresh water, which fountained forth from the tip like an open spigot.

Lola took her time in coming back, and Snape put himself to work assembling an enormous, pale slab of pork belly and a large assortment of vegetables that Harry couldn't name off the top of his head. These he'd placed into a colander while he made quick work of slicing the pork into thick strips on an old, worn cutting board.

"If it was so important for you to disobey my direct request that you stay back, then you can at least make it up to me by mincing garlic," Snape commented, turning his head to look over his shoulder at Harry. He brandished the knife he was using almost like an extension of his index finger as he used it to point to the sink. "Wash your hands first."

Harry did as he was bid, washing up to the elbow as Snape had taught him for potions preparation, and he quickly found a small cutting board that seemed appropriate for such menial work. Snape handed him a knife and didn't say a word to him over his technique—although he'd said plenty on it for months when they'd first begun brewing together. Either Harry had actually improved, or it didn't matter that the pieces of garlic were uniform when they were meant to be added to soup.

Severus was as fastidious a chef as he was a brewer of potions. This didn't come as much of a surprise, as Harry had spent months in the kitchen with him, however he couldn't help feeling a bit of amazement that Snape was evidently able to produce the recipes they prepared from memory alone.

He'd checked the list that Lola had toted with her once, nodded while grumbling a bit, and then had made two trips to the refrigerator and freezer for provisions before he set to work.

By the time Lola returned, each hob was occupied and a batch of pandesal—the dough for which Lola had prepared ahead of time—was baking in the oven.

The adobo, which had been left braising in its pot by Lola so that it was ready whenever it was needed, he parted out into separate white boxes as he called behind him that Harry needed to fill three of the small boxes with garlic fried rice.

"'Rus! What do you think you're doing?"

Severus tapped the ladle he'd been using several times against the rim of the stew pot to shake loose a few droplets that clung to the utensil. "Helping."

"You didn't come here to cook for me! You came here for your own food!" She fretted, rushing over to assemble the boxes they had already prepared into a brown paper bag. She found the stapler and clipped the ticket to the top, along with the paper that specified who the take away was for.

"I know it looked bad," she sighed as she set it down on the counter, "but I wasn't that far behind. We close in half an hour, anyway. I'd have made do. When his attack lets up, Ney will be back and—"

"Lolo will be back and in fine fettle by the weekend, provided you heed my instructions," Severus promised. He was still flitting between cutting boards and the cooker, sprinkling in some bright green leaves he'd given a rough chop to into the sinigang. "Tonight, you will accept the help Harry and I offer."

She sighed but observed as her grandson-in-name conducted a masterful performance worthy of any Michelin-starred chef in her tiny kitchen. There wasn't even much space for her to work with both Severus and Harry rushing about.

"I'll pay you in food—"

"No." Severus looked over his shoulder to Harry who straightened up under his fierce appraisal. At that moment Severus was the captain and Harry felt every inch the ship's boy, awaiting orders.

"What do you want to eat tonight?"

Truth be told, Harry hadn't given it much thought. He made a bit of a face and shrugged. Although he'd arrived at Rice Bowl with a fine appetite, the glut of activity had dulled the urge to eat until it was a mere background murmur. He glanced around, looking for inspiration.

In his hand was another box filled with garlic rice. It smelt heavenly.

"Some of this would be good..."

"That's not a proper meal," Snape admonished him, sneering. "Put aside a full box of that for us. I suppose you'll just have to be at the mercy of whatever I decide upon."

Harry shrugged and did as he was told. In all truth, where Rice Bowl's menu was concerned, Snape had never once steered him wrong...

At least if he didn't count the single sickening ordeal over dinuguan. Harry had eaten most of his serving of the stew before Snape had fessed up that one of the principal ingredients was pig's blood.

That had been a memorable row.

Snape seemed to be taking a portion of the sinigang for themselves in a plastic container, and also a couple of adobo drumsticks. He added in two pandesal for each of them before he instructed Harry to carry their order over to the counter.

"I believe a double order of adobo with sinigang, rice, and buns comes out to an even twenty-five."

"It does not!" Lola protested, looking appalled. "I've never charged you that much!"

"Take my wallet, Harry," Snape instructed the boy, ignoring Lola's scandalised words. "There should be a few fivers in there. More than enough."

Harry was made to wrestle the beat-up leather bifold from Snape's jeans pocket while he tended to the items he had going on the cooker. Inside, as promised, were several five-pound notes. Harry began counting on his fingers as he attempted to figure out how many he'd need.

"What are you doing?" Snape demanded over his shoulder, sounding impatient.

"Counting."

"Counting!? We worked on this for months, Harry. Use your multiplication tables," he spat, shaking his head in annoyance.

"But I have to figure from twenty-five..."

"Then divide."

"Er..."

"For Christsake! Five! It's five! Give her five notes—"

"Sev-er-rus Snape! You will not take the Lord's name in vain in my kitchen!" Lola cried, stomping over to where they stood. She swatted lightly at the man's shoulders and buttocks, which he shrugged and shook off in turns, looking as though he were beset by a particularly bothersome fly. "Palo, palo, palo!"

He didn't apologise—in fact he did little more than to grunt with obvious irritation—but evidently Lola figured that her assault absolved him of guilt going forward.

"And I told you I'd not be taking your money! Much less, twenty-five pounds of it! Harry, put those back—"

Grinning mischievously, Harry shook his head and dashed over to the till where he pressed the button that he'd observed would release the cash drawer. Quickly, he stuffed the bank notes into one of the slots at random and shoved it closed again.

"Agh! It'll be out of balance now!" She threw her hands up but was quickly distracted from her diatribe when the door opened to admit one of the customers who had ordered from her over the phone. Immediately, her frustration gave way to a solicitous mien as she completed the transaction.

Until Rice Bowl closed for the evening, there was a steady enough flow of customers through the door that she never got around to removing the twenty-five pounds, and by the time Severus and Harry had all of the pots and pans washed up and ready for the next day, Harry figured that she must have forgotten.

Their food would probably be cold by the time they got around to eating it, but Harry didn't much care. It would taste better than anything he'd ever gotten cold from his aunt before, and he knew he wouldn't be going to bed hungry, for Severus never allowed that, if at all possible.

Besides, as his kuya so often reminded him when he wished he could go off to play instead of scrubbing gook out of the bottom of a used cauldron: 'A job half done is a job not done at all.'

From the way Severus routinely talked about 'how men in the north do things,' Harry had always assumed that Snape had gotten his work ethic from his father; or at least he had in the months before Tobias Snape had entered their lives. Now, knowing Toby as he did, he couldn't fathom where it must have come from. Severus was an absolute stickler about proper process and a tidy finish, completed in the timeliest and most expedient manner as was possible.

That was okay, Harry supposed, for he himself had never even had an opportunity to develop lazy habits. It was easier to leave everything in the Dursley household above reproach—which didn't, of course, mean that his aunt or uncle wouldn't find fault with something—and he'd long since developed a keen eye for anything left unfinished or out of place that could be returned to an orderly and tidy position.

They were alike in that way, and it was good to know that even if he wasn't always as clever as Severus seemed to want, or as quick on the uptake, he at least had something besides an innate talent for magic that he shared with the older wizard.

His kuya.

His brother.

When Lola saw them out the door, she made a valiant effort to kiss them both on the brow. Harry she managed with little difficulty, but she nearly had to climb on Severus to get him to accept her display of affection, and even then, he made a great show of rubbing it off as he scowled, which, even to Harry's mind, was rather juvenile.

They departed with a promise on Snape's part that he'd have the tonic for Mr. Padiernos ready to drop off in the morning, and slowly trudged back to the car.

It was just as dark and cold as it had been earlier, except fewer people were out, as all of the shops and restaurants were either closed or closing for the evening.

"You know, you could have asked to help out," Harry prompted again. They were settling into the Marina, and Snape had started the ignition, creeping forward to test that their wheels hadn't been trapped in the dirty snowbank he'd parked near. "She needs the help... and if Mr. Padiernos is poorly—"

"He won't be for long," Severus answered him sharply. He pulled off into the road and they began the short trek home. Harry got the curious sense that neither of them wished to return to Spinner's End, which was unfortunate, as he'd always felt very at home in the ramshackle house.

Recently, it had felt just a bit... too crowded.

"That hack she's been seeing in Carlisle is merely prolonging the inevitable," Snape murmured. "With the problems Lolo has been having, if he were to rely on muggle medicine alone, I imagine that a surgery to remove his gallbladder may well be necessary for him to see improvement."

Harry gasped and clutched at the leather seat in front of him, leveraging himself forward just a bit. "That's like when I got my tonsils out?"

Snape loosed a longsuffering sigh. "Not at all. This would be a few degrees more invasive. They merely had to go in through your open mouth to access your tonsils. Lolo would require an actual incision in his abdomen, and the recovery would leave Lola without her husband in the kitchen for, potentially, weeks."

Appropriately, Harry gasped in due dramatic fashion, not realising he was playing into Severus' bid for a receptive audience.

"She needs the help then!"

"No. She won't. Because she has a grandson with the unique distinction of being one of the youngest certified Potions Masters in the British Isles. Of course, not all potions work as well on muggles as they do on wizards, but the gallbladder tonic comes together in a relatively stable way and doesn't feed off the host's magic in order to do its job. It ought to do in a few hours what that Madame Mapua has likely been overcharging her to do for several visits and would have continued to charge her for for weeks or months to come."

"It's gonna line his liver?"

"What she promised was to 'align with his liver,' and it will do no such thing! If he's having attacks such as these, he likely has gallstones. This will dissolve them all in a single, fell swoop. It'll be like a breath of fresh air for his bile ducts."

Harry grimaced. He had an intimate familiarity with bile, as he'd been made to press many a small rodent's viscera for the precious liquid in recent months.

"What if it's not that? Lola said they didn't ask a doctor..."

"Then it certainly won't hurt him."

The car turned onto the bridge and Harry felt the change as they crossed the uneven cement blocks that then turned into a pot-hole lined street once they emerged into Cokeworth.

"If, however, it brings no improvement, I'll take him to the GP myself," Snape growled through grit teeth. "He's always been a stubborn fool, but he's met his match in me."

It seemed best not to comment on the fact that Snape had essentially just insulted himself, and Harry merely nodded, for, at the very least, taking Mr. Padiernos to the GP seemed a good course of action all around.

Supper was hastily consumed, as it was after nine at night by the time they made it through the door. It had been blessedly quiet as they'd entered the house—with the notable exception of Curry scratching and licking himself noisily at his post in front of the sofa—and Harry was left to wonder aloud where Toby might have gotten himself to on a Wednesday evening, given that his usual nights for attendance at his twelve-step programme were on Tuesdays and Fridays.

"He's decided to attend on Wednesdays for the foreseeable future," Severus had groused. "I think it's because those are my days off and he'd rather that I wasn't there looming over him while he's doing God-knows-what to try and 'prepare the shop,'" his voice pantomimed a dreadful mimicry of his father's as he drew air-quotes with his fingers. "Just as well for us, I have no desire to see what it is that he assumes is the most important item on the docket. The less involved he is, the better."

Even so, Harry couldn't help but to believe that Snape deeply resented that the sole responsibility for their future had fallen, as it seemed so often to do, onto Severus' own bony shoulders. It was enough when he had only Harry to look out for, as voluntary of a commission as that was. To be on the hook for his indigent father while the elder man played fast and loose with the family's scant holdings was an insult almost without parallel.

Whether for better or worse, their fates were held within Severus' grasp, and Harry couldn't help but to think that there ought to have been more he could do to help the young man. Snape certainly seemed to need it, even if it was likely that he'd die before admitting to it.

A/N: Just a quick note, if anyone is interested in reading my 2024 Advent/Christmas story for the year, the first chapter is out and it updates weekly on Wednesdays! It is a gen fic revolving around Severus, Aberforth Dumbledore, and Argus Filch and it explores their strange history and sort-of-friendship. :)