Clinically speaking, an "enyouthening" potion did nothing to restore one's youth. It restored the body's own regenerative abilities, allowing the patient to recuperate from the cumulative harm of life. In many ways it was the equivalent of a year or two on a regime of physical therapy, exercise, and healthy activities. Unfortunately, enyouthening potions were complicated brews of expensive ingredients and each potion consumed would be less effective than previous ones. Between their cost, relatively minimal effect, and the greatly diminished returns per potion, they were not popular among those who pursued prolonged life.

They were however very useful for the treatment of wasting illnesses, such as that suffered by -

~O~O~O~O~

The Salomons property was nowhere near either the Salomons Estate or Salomons Road. But he supposed to an estate agent the name sounded better than The Convenient To The Pound Shop Property. At least his little Frog Lane house was actually on Frog Lane.

The upper floor of the Frog Lane house was given over entirely to the bedroom and a closet that was too large for his needs. Currently he had the bed charmed down to a sixteenth its normal size and shoved into a corner to make way for dueling practice.

The enchanted ring around him threw out sparks - Some harmless, others painful. Snape shot two out of the air and knocked a third aside with his wand. He snapped back to this style's waiting stance and scanned left and right, alert to fresh attacks.

This dueling style's only advantage was its emphasis on footwork. He stepped aside from a series of sparks that struck at his knees, then beat the sparks back with a forceful Stunning Charm. Again he brought his wand arm back to readiness, elbow tight to the side and forearm up to hold the wand near the head. The style was rigid, intended for formal duels, and left the lower body poorly defended. The ring now recognized that weakness. Snape swatted aside another cluster of sparks coming for his feet.

"Break," he said. The shimmering blue-white around him dimmed a bit. He wasn't learning anything new here. The ring's reactions to the style would be predictable because the style was predictable. "End." The light faded entirely, leaving a simple blue circle drawn on his bedroom floor. He placed the end of wand against the circle, like a pen, and drew up the ring and its energies into a flickering nimbus around the wand.

He stepped against the back wall, well away from where the bed would be. Then he focused the nimbus into a restorative charm and dumped the energy into his bed. It nearly exploded back to its regular size, suddenly expanded beyond that with a series of loud cracks, banged off the far wall, and with one last crack! shrank back down to its normal size.

"Hell," Snape muttered. Even from here he could see the scrapes in the wall under the window, and the headboard had banged up the back wall as though someone had gone at it with a hammer. He swore again. "Too much trapped energy," he shook his head. "You'll have to find a better way to earth it, unless you want to live in a disaster."

He went over the damage with his wand, blending the gouges and scrapes back together. "Dueling practice. Waste of time. Who do you think is coming after you? Lockhart?"

He went downstairs to the first floor. He'd turned half the kitchen into a simple workshop, with cabinets full of stainless steel pots and herbs hanging in the window. Rosemary, dandelion, thyme, garlic, and others made for a burst of green in this room, and the scent of soil and growing things reminded him of the greenhouses -

Memory was a waste of time. Nostalgia was a luxury he could not afford. He inspected the window and table pots for soil moisture and inspected green leaves for pests and general health. Finding nothing out of order he left the plants to their business of growing. Contemplating possible replacements for pumpkin oils and boomslang hide, he poured himself the last half-cup of tea and went down to the ground floor sitting room.

His hiding-hole for now, the little house on Frog Lane had more space than the Salomons property but divided that space between three floors. Bedroom on the second floor, kitchen and bath on the first, and sitting room on the ground. The previous tenant here had agreed to move to the suite at Salomons in exchange for a generous deal on his lease, and now that property had an offer at a very nice mark-up over what it had cost "Mr Corby". The firm had presented their client with a list of other possible investment properties, which he should look over sometime soon, and congratulated him on his foresight in selling the Salomons property at the right time. Honestly, he'd just wanted a kitchen big enough to work in.

At the door he opened the little bin and prodded the sealed bags of grit and old potions within to see if they were ready for disposal. He decided to give them another day to be certain they were inert. He'd mixed his more useless healing potions - the hair-lengthening formula, the enamel restorers, the wart removers - into blends of sand and coal. In a day or so he would mix them in with food scraps to be hauled away with the rest of the municipal waste. Plain silicon and carbon would do most of the work of making them harmless, and the sheer bulk of Tunbridge Wells's scraped food would do the rest.

He had not yet dumped the enyouthening formula. He would do that soon, he told himself.

~O~O~O~O~

Potions work occupied much of his time. He'd found a Muggle shop where he could buy minimally acceptable extracts and essential oils, and was learning how to blend them to serve as the bases for home potions. It would take some weeks of careful tending and soil preparation before his little garden produced ingredients of the right quality. For now he made notes on traditional herbal potions and the arithmagical studies he would need to make draughts without imported ingredients - ingredients he could only find in the magical shops that were now off-limits.

Defence practice ate up another chunk of his days. An hour a day at home reviewing his dueling forms, and he'd found quiet areas south of town where he could practice in more space. Two or three times a week in the woods, never on the same schedule, was his routine so far.

The rest of his time he spent in cafes, the library, pubs, hiking through Tunbridge Wells's parks, or in meetings with his financial agent. He paid attention to the places he'd visited recently and avoided becoming a regular at any of them. He never visited the library or any other establishment on a pattern. His walks through the city never followed the same path twice. Habits left you open to ambush. Snape had been in on such ambushes often enough to have learnt that lesson.

Today he tested his defences, both personal and household, and set off for the Muggle library.

~O~O~O~O~

The magazine selection wasn't vast, but it had the computer magazines and consumer reports he needed. He found three with reviews of newer laptops and went looking for a quiet spot to read.

There were library wasn't fully packed, but there were enough Muggles about today that there were no places for him to sit away from the crowd. The best place for his needs was half of a study desk across from two girls who looked to be Fourth or Fifth Years - Fourteen or fifteen, he corrected himself. He set out his magazines and notebook and began his research.

" - just mush again," one of the girls said.

"Well stop boiling it too long," said the other.

He tried to focus on an article about the IBM Thinkpad. 16MB RAM, 2.1Gb hard -

"I don't understaaand," whined the first girl. "I'm following the recipes. Nothing works."

But for just under four thousand pounds it didn't seem to offer much except -

" - burnt the sausage and undercooked the mushrooms. I don't know how I'm supposed to - "

For just under four thousand pounds it -

" - can't even follow a recipe. I'm a worse cook than mum."

He drew in a long breath through his nose and exhaled through clenched teeth. "Give me your cookbook," said Severus Snape.

One of the Muggles peeked around the edge of the study desk. "Pardon?"

"Give me. Your bloody. Cookbook."

"What for?"

"So I can teach you how to cook, obviously."

She frowned at him. "Are you a cook?"

"Obviously not. I'm an evil wizard in hiding from the secret Ministry of Magic." He sneered. "Of course I'm a cook. Who else would be offering to teach you to stop wasting food?"

"Well you don't need to be mean."

"I don't need to be nice, either. Do you want to learn something or not?"

She continued to frown, but she handed him her cookbook. Snape saw that it was a library book, so he grabbed his notebook instead of writing on the pages.

"You'll start with eggs, because they're cheap and versatile. If you can't cook an egg you can't cook. Here we are, sausage and mushroom quiche. Cooking time, fifty minutes - No time breakdown. What a useless book. Cooking time fifty minutes. What are you doing for fifty minutes?"

"Cooking," she answered. "Obviously."

"Precisely the answer I'd expect from someone with no idea what they're doing. Look here, bake in preheated oven for twenty-five to thirty minutes. What are you doing for that half an hour?"

She opened her mouth to answer. "Nothing," Snape cut her off. "Leave it alone, unless you plan on ruining it. Prep time, twenty minutes. What are you doing in that time?"

The girl crossed her arms. "I don't know."

"That's better," Snape told her. "Now, pay attention and you just might learn something here. That is, if you're not as big a dunderhead as I usually have to teach."

~O~O~O~O~

One might accuse you, Mr Snape, of having enjoyed that.

And so what if I did?

~O~O~O~O~

His meandering path took him through the Commons, where he gathered leaves from a feral growth of garden mint. The greenspace was too crowded for his comfort, so he turned homeward across London Road and up too-busy High Street. There was a restaurant off White Bear Passage he hadn't tried yet, but he decided not to turn that way. The sullenness written on the girl's face had not left him in the mood to be around people.

She'd learned, but she hadn't been grateful for it.

Grateful for what? A lecture from a middle-aged bully?

He was not in the mood to be around even himself. Too many images of ungrateful faces came up. He wondered what fools had taught those spoiled children that life was supposed to be kind. But those memories were a waste. Wallowing in them would get him killed. He pushed them down, but could not entirely crush the resentment they had stirred up.

Memory bound him like a too-small pot binding the roots of a plant.

He sniffed the leaves he'd gathered. The mint had been a healthy growth, and he'd sealed the wounds where he had taken leaves with a simple gardening charm. Now the deeply green scent of mint clung to his fingers and tugged at his memories of summers by the old rail track and a girl with shining eyes.

He abandoned those thoughts as useless. Here and now Snape was coming up narrow Frog Lane, and he scanned the rooftops and crannies of the houses along the slight rise of the street. It was a tight street, closed in and with few places to run. Nostalgia and regret were distractions that left him open to ambush and he had no intention of dying again. Snape kept his pace casual, just an ordinary man strolling along in the afternoon sun, but his gaze probed every place an attacker might hide and he kept his head up as he unlocked the door. No sign of strangers, stray animals, or odd distortions in the air that might be dismissed as a trick of the eye.

Once inside Snape locked the door and simply listened for a moment. In the quiet he felt none of that sense of a stranger in one's space, no lingering body scent or oddness in the he checked his protective enchantments. He found nothing.

The ground floor sitting room was occupied by a comfortable armchair, a low table with a record player, and bookshelves, all items from a second-hand shop. The room was not large, and those few pieces of furniture did not leave room for anything else. He had enchanted the apparently small bookshelves to hold all his collection, inconvenient though it was to remember exactly where in extended space he'd shelved everything. Beside the door he had a little bin holding his potions-waste until he was sure it was inert.

Shamed by his weakness, Snape took the vials of pond-green potion from their place on top of the bin.

~O~O~O~O~

Eileen had passed on suddenly, in her sleep next to her husband. Tobias had blamed himself, and Severus had blamed him as well. If the old man hadn't drunk himself to sleep perhaps he might have noticed something amiss.

Perhaps not. The doctor said it had been swift.

No one had thought there was any love between Eileen and Tobias at that point in their lives, but with his wife's death a terrible aging took hold of the man. Already beaten by the lack of work and the shame of the dole Tobias now seemed to waste away. The two years after the death of Eileen seemed like some foul journey to the Faerie Lands, where Tobias aged ten days for every one that passed.

The wasting of Tobias Snape had been shockingly quick and cruelly slow. Those last summers he spoke of nothing to his son but old memories. Stories of Constantine and Darius, Mary and Deborah, the grandparents and great grandparents who had died in Severus's toddler years. Westlake and Johnson and Barnes, who'd died in mines and mills. Clement and Willis who were still alive and doing their best to help their old mate but these were the tales of their school days. And Eileen, always Eileen, who had been young and fierce and yes sharp-tongued but loyal always loyal and like no one else Tobias had ever known. And he'd loved her, and he'd been a poor husband and a poor father, and he knew that son he knew that.

The death of his father hit Severus Snape far harder than the death of his mother because at least she had simply gone. She hadn't faded away, slipping away into sadness and wandering tales of better days. Eileen Snape had died, Tobias Snape had wasted away. There had been days when Severus looked at his father, looked at the way the flesh of his face had sunken in on his skull, looked at the way his father's eyes had peered out from their sockets, and seen how a life without purpose could strip a person down to nothing but old bones and stories.

And Severus had hated himself then for not loving his father even in that state, and for not loving his mother, the way he knew a son was supposed to love his parents.

And Severus hated himself now for fearing that this life without school or the Death Eaters or the Order or Lily's mad son would be the death of him the way life without work or Eileen had been the death of Tobias.

~O~O~O~O~

Severus Snape hated himself for his fears, and he hated himself for drinking the potion.