Chapter Text
Professor Snape had returned from somewhere deeper in the house with no less than six vials of potions, which he placed in front of Harry, moving three of them towards the middle of the table. "Those three are best taken with food," he said shortly at Harry's questioning look, "you will take them after you've eaten."
Harry nodded and took the potions in front of him, left to right, without question. Which seemed to fluster Professor Snape even further. What? Like he was going to barge into a man's house and not only offer, but demand they take a stroll through his brain but then act like he doesn't trust the man when asked to take potions? Besides, this Snape might not know it, but he devoted seven years to keeping Harry alive; Harry had zero doubts that every potion on the table was both beneficial and necessary.
Snape didn't say anything though. Harry supposed there was enough answer in everything they'd said so far for whatever questions Snape had at the moment. Instead, he moved to make breakfast. Harry boggled.
He was aware that the Dursleys' kitchen was not an average kitchen for a British family. Little Whinging was a relatively newly constructed town, Privet Drive especially, and had followed American trends in the kitchen, building it large with plenty of granite counters. The Dursleys had even started a trend of getting large American fridges instead of the small ones most of Europe preferred, though none was as big as the Dursley fridge, and the kitchen was partially open to the dining room. They even had a large American dishwasher, though it was never used while Harry was there as Petunia preferred to make Harry do them all by hand.
The average Brit home had the dining room entirely separate from the kitchen, which was small, with little counter space, usually laminate, a small, if any, dishwasher, and a fridge that fit under the countertop. Some even had a clothes washer/dryer under the counter.
Professor Snape's kitchen was neither of these things.
It seemed the house was too small to have a dedicated dining room, if they had put a wall in, there wouldn't have even been enough space for a two person table and still have room to move around it. Instead, they simply took an awkward corner made by the mudroom's incursion on the floorspace of the kitchen, and built two benches and a table into it, just big enough to seat four people, if they were comfortable with each other.
Even still, the far kitchen counters were only about six feet away. The counters were made of wood, the sink tiny. There was a small, relatively new fridge in an open space beneath the pantry next to the table, and a positively ancient clothes washer under the counter nearest the mudroom. The real boggler, though, was the stove. Which wasn't anything like any stove he had ever seen. At Privet Drive, stoves were a range of four hobs, with a single large oven underneath, either gas or electric powered, with various dials and knobs and buttons to adjust the temperature. At the Burrow and Grimmauld Place, stoves were the same old wood-burning stoves Benjamin Franklin invented in the 1700s, simply charmed to burn magically, with the temperature controlled by the same means. This was neither, a beast of a thing that looked straight out of a Dickens novel and had no controls whatsoever. It also seemed to always be on, doubling as the primary heat source for the house in winter.
"Professor Snape? What is that?" He asked.
Snape was opening the silver domes up top of the beast and putting pans on the two iron plates on top, he looked at Harry and back to the beast. "Ah, no, I imagine you haven't seen one before have you? I doubt Petunia would keep one even though her mother was a maestro with theirs. This is an AGA cooker. Invented in the 1920s and produced for public purchase in 1930. My grandfather spent all his savings getting this one for my grandmother in 1937. It ran on coal, but when the local mine went under and my father took to drinking enough that he wouldn't notice, my mother charmed it to run on magic."
Without Harry saying anything, what followed was a rather thorough science lecture on heat and conductivity, followed by one on the uses and functions of the AGA, drawing comparisons between learning to cook on one and learning to play an instrument. An ode to cooking not unlike the ode to potions Harry remembered from his first Potions class. It occurred to Harry that, when all his students had to do was listen, Snape wasn't a bad teacher. It was when the students had to start doing things and he had to keep an eye on twenty people and ten cauldrons or someone would get maimed that his teaching broke down.
Snape startled him out of his thoughts, "Have you ever cooked before?"
"Oh, uhm, yes. I've cooked all the Dursleys' meals since I was five and tall enough to see over the stove with only a small stool. But that was a gas powered range, nothing at all like what you said cooking with an AGA is."
Snape raised an eyebrow at him, one eye twitched slightly, like he was constraining himself from something, probably killing Petunia. "Would you like to learn?"
Harry stared at him a moment, shocked that he'd offer, shocked that he'd let Harry anywhere near a family heirloom. "Yes, I think I would." Look at him, making changes already. Maybe he could do this.
***
Breakfast passed surprisingly amicably. Snape handled the stove, talking the whole time about what he was doing and why, how you could control the temperature of the pan by moving it closer to or away from the center of the plate, how and why each of the four ovens below had a different temperature that you didn't have to do anything to control because good engineering took care of that for you, where in each oven was hottest or coldest. Harry managed the prep and handing things to Snape, mostly focusing on learning to play the mystical beast of a stove.
If he was staying here for a while as Snape had implied, he wanted to be able to repay the favour, and a house as small as this one wouldn't take much time to clean. Cooking he could do, if he knew how the stove worked.
After breakfast, small and healthy but still bigger than he could manage much of, Harry took the remaining three potions and Snape led him upstairs.
There were three doors. Snape pointed to the center one, "the bathroom, shared, so do try and keep clutter to a minimum. The door on the right is the master bed, my room, knock if you need something, but otherwise stay out of it. The door on the left was my room growing up, you may sleep there. One of the bunks is still set up for studying, so sleep on the other. It is six thirty, I will write to Madame Bones, sending the letter at seven. I suggest you take a nap until she arrives, which won't likely be before eight."
Harry nodded silently as Snape turned and went back downstairs, leaving Harry alone on the landing.
The room was also, well, not what Harry thought of as normal. He supposed it was bigger than it seemed, but couldn't be even as big as Dudley's second bedroom. Two of the walls had beds built into them, with drawers beneath and along one side, and cabinets above, removing the need for extra furniture in the form of dressers or shelves. The window wall appeared to have bookshelves facing the foot of the beds, while a nightstand was built into the head of the beds behind the drawers. Under the small window between the beds sat an old trunk, with the initials EMP on the latch, half open, with a Hogwarts robe sleeve hanging out of it with Slytherin green trim.
Both bookshelves were full of books of very different types. The right bed's bookshelf appeared to hold all seven years' books and quite a bit of supplemental reading. There was also an old wooden lap desk, the kind with drawers for paper and pens and ink, set haphazardly on the foot of the bed, a pile of notebooks on the nightstand, and a few more scattered by the lap desk. A giant pile of a motley assortment of cushions in absurdly bright colors took up at least a third of the bed. He somehow doubted that even teenaged-Snape bought himself lime green and raspberry pink pillows for his study bed. He smiled, certain they were his mother's infliction.
The left bed, which had a black and green comforter and grey sheets, only had two black and grey pillows, confirming his thoughts on the pillows of the other bed. Its bookshelf was loaded with everything from Shakespeare to Dickens to Poe to science fiction, with the last shelf appearing to be muggle text books for history and science.
He could take a nap, as instructed, or... he could learn more about the man he'd come to rely on and maybe his mother, too.
He never did sleep much, anyway.
***
Amelia Bones had just sat down at her desk, cup of strong Darjeeling tea in hand, when the Spinner's End Owl flew in and settled onto her desk. She sighed deeply. It didn't matter the year or even the decade, any day when that owl showed up was bound to be long, tedious, and overflowing with horror.
The Spinner's End Owl, called such because he once belonged to both wizarding children of Spinner's End, Severus Snape and Lily Evans, was an irascible old bugger who hated everything. It was well known that anything he carried was guaranteed to not have been tampered with as he was both capable and vicious about his duty. Most people blamed Severus for this, his surly disposition even as a child matching the owl's perfectly, but Amelia knew it was actually Lily's fault the bird knew how best to disable humans while still holding his letters in his claws. What she didn't know was how the hell the feathered bastard was still alive, having been an adult when Mrs. Evans purchased him for the children twenty years ago.
"Hello, Edgar, what trouble is Severus dropping on my desk today?" She asked the bird as she dug a treat out for him. Politeness being the only way to get his letters from him even when they were addressed to you – also Lily's fault – Amelia had long since developed the habit of speaking to him as if he were Moody, which suited the Greater Sooty Owl just fine.
Edgar inspected the treat like he was checking for poison – the only bit of the bird besides color and attitude that was all Severus – before taking it daintily and stepping off of the scroll-tube he carried.
She left Edgar to his food, as he preferred, and opened the tube, finding a scroll of some length and a smaller letter inside.
Amelia,
The letter began, which was unfortunate, if he was calling her by her first name, it was sensitive and also likely involved their yearmates. Bugger.
I strongly request you visit me at Spinner's End with one of your office pensieves in tow at your soonest convenience. While it is not an emergency, it is rather urgent. See attached diagnosis for the reason.
I cast it myself this morning at 5:00AM, when Lily's Son appeared on my doorstep demanding I "simply Legilimense" him.
Floo is open.
S.S.
Bugger it all. Severus was adamantly not a morning person, having rather more in common with Edgar The Owl than most humans had with their owls, she did not relish anything that would have him up and capable of casting complex diagnostics at five of the morning.
Then she unrolled the scroll, and was immediately fully awake herself.
Damn Dumbledore to a special level of hell reserved just for him. This was going to take weeks to sort out, she just knew it.
"Selwyn," she called out the door to her assistant, "better cancel all my appointments for the week. The Spinner's End Owl brought us Problems again."
Amelia dashed a quick reply onto a scrap parchment and slid it into Edgar's carry tube. "Straight back home, then, Sir Edgar. I'll be along as soon as I can. Look after Lily's boy, would you?"
Edgar nodded gravely as only he could, picked up his tube and was gone.
"Damn," Amelia swore again, pocketing the letter and the scroll of Gryffindorish ink. She hoped it was early enough in the day to get the best pensieve the office had, she had a feeling that anything less wouldn't be good enough.
***