The kitchen table at Spinner's End was doing its best impression of a Hogwarts workbench.
Secondhand cauldron. Scales. A chipped knife. A dog-eared copy of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi. A battered Beginners' Potions propped open with a salt cellar.
Severus sat straight-backed on a rickety chair, all tense concentration and awkward elbows. His hair flopped into his eyes; he didn't seem to notice.
Eileen stood over him, arms folded, looking like every strict professor who'd ever lived, if you ignored the way her robe fit a little better these days and the slim black band at her throat.
"Again," she said. "Cut them evenly. 'Roughly similar' is how you get rough sickness."
Severus scowled at the valerian roots.
Nico sprawled inside Eileen's nervous system like a cat on a radiator.
> Domestic bliss, he said. With knives. I like this.
Eileen ignored him.
Severus lined up the roots, tongue peeking out in concentration, and started slicing.
"Your hand is too high on the handle," she said.
He adjusted, trying not to look annoyed.
"Better," she said. "Don't rush. You'll do enough rushing in that dungeon when Slughorn's breathing down your neck."
"Do you think he'll… like me?" Severus asked, not looking up. "Professor Slughorn, I mean."
"He'll like your talent," Eileen said. "He likes things he can brag about. So he'll like you if you don't blow anything up."
> He'll like you more if you stop staring at Black arses in public, Nico said helpfully.
Eileen's mouth twitched.
"Focus," she told Severus. "Not on girls. On roots."
He blinked. "I am focusing on roots."
"Good," she said. "Keep it that way."
> You saw him look, Nico sing-songed inside her skull. The boot girl. Violence eyes. Ass like a war crime. He nearly tripped.
"He did not nearly trip," Eileen muttered under her breath.
Severus looked up. "What?"
"Nothing," she said sharply. "Slice. Then nine clockwise stirs, not ten."
He went back to chopping, cheeks a bit redder.
Nico oozed smugness.
> He has taste, Nico said. I approve. She's insane, but honestly that tracks.
"You are not commenting on teenage crushes while attached to the boy's mother," Eileen thought at him, hard.
> I'm just saying, Nico said, he saw Bellatrix once and his soul left his body. It's cute.
"Say her name out loud and I will see how flammable symbiotes are," she warned.
He grinned and shut up.
For about eight seconds.
---
"Now," Eileen said, "add the roots. Then the syrup. If you do it in reverse you get something that smells like troll sweat and stains like blood."
Severus wrinkled his nose.
He tipped the sliced roots into the simmering cauldron.
Steam curled up, thick and faintly sweet.
He reached for the syrup bottle.
"Wait," she said automatically.
He froze.
"Clockwise stirs first," she reminded him. "Soft wrist. Nine. Don't scrape the bottom."
He started stirring, counting under his breath.
"Good," she said. "You have a better touch than I did at your age."
He tried not to beam.
Nico slid along her collarbone, pleased with her choice of praise.
> He is good, Nico said. Knife work's not bad either. Look at that grip. That boy's going to invent new poisons for fun if no one hugs him.
Eileen's eyes narrowed slightly.
"Do not give him ideas," she hissed under her breath.
"What?" Severus asked.
"Nothing," she said. "Seven, eight, nine. Syrup. Thin stream. Don't dump."
He poured, tongue out again, attention fully on the potion.
Behind him, Eileen's robe shifted.
Nico had been very good for nearly an hour, which for him might as well be sainthood.
His restraint snapped a little.
A seam along the inside of her robe tightened, a fold of fabric brushing more precisely over her chest as he experimented with micro-adjustments.
Eileen's breath caught.
She did not drop the spoon in her hand, but it was close.
> Testing responsiveness, he said. For armor research. Science.
"Stop touching my nipples while my son is brewing," she thought at him, venomous.
> He's not looking, Nico protested. This is stealth appreciation.
One corner of her mouth twitched with the effort of not reacting.
Severus's back remained firmly turned.
If he had looked, he would have seen nothing scandalous: just his mother, arms folded, expression firmly set to "disappointed in everything."
He did not need to know her robe was one wrong twitch away from becoming an HR complaint.
"You're distracted," Severus said suddenly, not looking up.
Eileen blinked. "No."
"You are," he insisted. "You always stare harder when you're going to criticize me."
> Child's observant, Nico said.
"Stir," she said. "Clockwise, then counterclockwise twice to bind. Then let it rest."
He obeyed.
She stepped back, trying to get Nico's nonsense under control.
He slid down her spine, sulking.
> You never let me have any fun.
"I literally let you reshape my clothes," she replied silently. "Your entire existence is 'fun.'"
> You're hotter when you admit it, he said.
Her jaw clenched.
"Now what?" Severus asked, peering into the cauldron.
The potion was a decent pale green. A bit too thick, but not a disaster. It glugged when it should've rippled smoothly, but it hadn't exploded, which put him ahead of half the students she remembered.
"Now you wait," she said. "Ten minutes. If it doesn't curdle, you've got a functioning Cure for Boils. If it does curdle, we open the windows."
He glanced at the grimy pane. "They don't open."
"Then we all suffer," she said.
> Speaking of suffering, Nico said, casually draping himself across the front of her ribcage, we should talk about your love life.
"What love life," she snapped before she could stop herself.
Severus flinched slightly.
"I— I wasn't talking," he said.
She shut her eyes briefly. "Not you."
He frowned. "Who else is here?"
Eileen swallowed.
For half a second, she considered actually telling him.
Then she remembered he was eleven, anxious, a half-blood with a temper, and that introducing "Mum has symbiotic murder slime" into his worldview right now would derail everything.
"Nothing," she said. "Go wash the knife. Don't touch your face until you've rinsed. Boil remedy in the eyes is worse than the boils."
He hesitated, clearly wanting to press, then obeyed, carrying the knife to the sink.
The second his back turned, Nico moved again.
The fabric over her hips tightened, hand-shaped for a heartbeat, then smoothed.
She bit the inside of her cheek.
> You're going to rip this robe, she thought.
> I can repair it, he said. Or replace it. With something sluttier.
"You try to put me in lace in this house and I will go stand in front of a Dementor," she warned.
> Noted, he said. Start with silk.
She couldn't help it. A tiny, traitorous part of her brain flashed the image: silk, dark, well-tailored, her body not reduced to "tired thing under shapeless wool."
It did not help.
"Ma?" Severus said. "You sure it's supposed to smoke that much?"
She snapped back to the cauldron.
A thin, greyish steam was rising—normal. Then a thicker, slightly purple swirl—less normal.
She leaned over.
"It's fine," she said. "Barely. You stirred too hard on the last pass. That's why it's thick."
"Sorry," he muttered.
"Better thick than volatile," she said. "This will still work. Just… don't sell it. It's an emergency batch."
> Look at him, Nico said, softer now. He's good. He cares. He keeps checking your face to see if he's disappointed you.
She knew.
Of course she knew.
She also knew he was a walking nerve bundle with a temper and a crush on a murder girl he'd seen for three seconds.
"Next time," she said, "you'll stir lighter. And we'll see if we can get you the good knife from the Prince trunk. If I can find where I hid it from your father."
Severus' shoulders straightened a fraction.
"You kept the trunk?" he asked. "From… before?"
"Of course I kept the trunk," she said. "I'm not insane. I just don't let Tobias know I kept anything that mattered."
> See, Nico said, that's hot.
She ignored him.
She turned away to get a ladle.
Nico, who was objectively a mistake, took advantage of her back being to Severus and shifted again: a quick pinch over one breast, just enough pressure to spike sensation, then gone.
She inhaled sharply through her nose.
"And that," she said very calmly in her head, "is your last warning."
> I'm helping, he lied. I'm keeping you from going fully dead inside.
"You're trying to turn a potion lesson into foreplay," she replied.
> Why not both, he said.
She resisted the urge to smack herself in the face with the ladle.
She managed to serve a small sample of the potion into a cracked bowl and set it down to cool without spilling.
"Tomorrow," she said out loud, "we'll try something harder. Pepperup, maybe. Or a sleeping draft."
Severus brightened.
Then his expression shuttered. "Will we have ingredients?"
"Yes," she said flatly. "I'll manage. You're going to Hogwarts with more than the bare minimum and I don't care what I have to pawn to do it."
> I can steal some, Nico offered.
"You're not shoplifting through my epidermis," she told him silently.
"Can I… help?" Severus asked.
"You already are," she said. "If you brew flawlessly, Slughorn will start throwing ingredients at you. He likes talent more than Galleons. Take advantage of it."
He looked mildly scandalized. "That's… using him."
"Yes," she said. "Good boy."
Nico purred.
> That's my girl, he said. Corrupt him just enough.
"Not too much," she reminded both of them.
Severus went to wash the cauldron, shoulders less hunched now.
Eileen watched him for a long moment.
Then she shifted her weight, letting Nico smooth and settle her robe again, the choker warm, the magic in her bones awake.
She still felt ridiculous.
She also felt… wanted.
Not by Tobias, whose idea of affection was not worth thinking about.
By the thing under her skin, stupid and loud and utterly fixated on her being more than a ghost.
And by her own magic, finally, after years of dormancy.
"Tomorrow," she told Nico silently, "you behave for the full lesson. No creeping. No groping. No comments about my son's crushes."
> That's oppression, he said.
"Tomorrow," she repeated.
He sighed like a martyr.
> Fine. Tomorrow. Today you got a free trial of Premium Horny Goo. No refunds.
Her lips twitched.
She extinguished the fire under the cauldron with a flick, the spell landing smooth, perfect.
Severus glanced over his shoulder, saw the tidy motion, and hid a small, admiring smile.
Outside, Spinner's End glowered in the fog.
Inside, Eileen Prince-Snape was, for the first time in a long time, a little dangerous again.
And Nico, because he was who he was, was already planning fifty new ways to "help" that had nothing to do with proper potion technique.