In a lonely clearing near the river, amongst a copse of alder, willow and birch, a man appeared with only a quiet displacement of air to mark his arrival. He was tall and thin in a way that spoke of ill-treatment or a recent and voracious illness not yet recovered from if the way his dark clothes hung about his emaciated figure were anything to go by. His thin, sallow face was framed by lank locks of shoulder length black hair and dominated by an aquiline nose and deep-set black eyes which were ringed in such prominent dark circles they appeared bruised.

The ever-oppressive heat of a Cokeworth summer surrounded him in its hot, muggy, misery and had him sweating through his shirt within moments. Not that his body's attempt to cool itself would do any good. The high temperature was compounded by the even higher level of humidity that prevented the evaporation of perspiration and left one feeling as though they were attempting to breathe through a soggy sponge.

The only improvement, if it could be considered such, from the summers of his childhood, was that with the closing of the mill and the apparent implementation of new regulations up river was that the water before him no longer alternated between indigo-blue and rust-red depending on who was currently dumping their refuse into the waterway – the mill or the slaughter houses in Aspen Tallow.

The man cast his dark gaze about the clearing. His eyes staring into the middle distance at visions of something only he could see. After a moment, he set aside the memories of a dark-haired boy and an emerald eyed girl who had used the clearing as a hideaway a decade before like the precious thing that it was and set off. He wound his way through the trees until he emerged onto a grassy stretch of the river's bank. It was just as rubbish strewn as it had always been with discarded fish-and-chips wrappings, empty brown bottles and the ends of cigarettes that had been smoked down to the filter.

He trudged to the top of the bank and ducked under a line of railing that separated the river from a narrow, cobbled street. Blank faced he stared across the road at the row of moldering houses, their windows dull and dirty from the grimy fog that rose from the dirty river at night.

Once he was assured he wasn't about to meet his end by being flattened by a Muggle lorry, he crossed the road, slipped into an alleyway between a pair of houses and was instantly glad he'd foregone wearing his typical attire of long, black robes, which would have swept the ground.

The alley between the houses was full of overflowing bins that were scarred with rusted fissures that seeped unnamable fluids as their contents putrefied in the heat and mixed on the cobblestones with the even more horrid stench of piss from both man and beast. It was with shallow breaths that the man passed through the alleyway and emerged out onto a second, almost identical street.

Over it all stood the enormous chimney of the disused mill. Looming even in the summer sun as it cast its shadow over those it intended to keep even after it had shuddered with its final breaths. This was Spinner's End, where thousands had come to work over the years and eke out a living only to be replaced by newer and better machinery until at last the work was taken away and sent to those would do it for even less.

The man, Severus Snape, was not entirely sure what had driven him to return to a place he'd sworn never to set foot in again once he had left Hogwarts. The dilapidated house he had once shared with his parents stood empty and abandoned before him. Its brick façade covered in a thick layer of grime, while its shutters hung half-off their hinges like broken teeth.

His father, Tobias, had run off years ago. An angry man desperate to drown himself in drink and lose women in the town's shadier array of pubs and taverns. If he hadn't already met his end at the wrong end of a broken bottle in a bar fight, then Severus was half-tempted to track the old man down himself and give him the end he deserved for taking off when his wife had actually needed him.

Severus's mother, Eileen, hadn't been perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but she had tried her best to do right by her only child. She'd shielded him from the worst of his father's wrath when she could and he'd learned his craft at her knee. As far as he was concerned the fact that he'd become the youngest Potions Master in Europe was because he'd been able to build on the firm foundation of her teachings… He was utterly loath to say that he had learned anything from the likes of Slughorn….

Not that their combined knowledge had been able to help them when the worst had happened and Eileen contracted Thaumalysis the summer before what would have been his seventh year at school…. The disease had ravaged her magical core until it had been completely depleted and her body had simply shut down.Perhaps, he thought, stepping through the cracked and peeling front door, it's a fitting penance that I should begin to make up for my most recent failure by dwelling in the place of my last….

He swung the door shut behind him and heard it seal itself with a faint click. The sitting room before him appeared gloomy and dark with only sparse patches of sunlight managing to filter in through the moth-eaten curtains and dirty window that faced the street.

Stepping into the center of the room Severus drew his wand – a slender length of ebony – and gave it a sharp flick in the direction of at the lamp hanging from the ceiling with a muttered, "Flickorum."

Tiny flames flickered to life, lighting the stubby candles in the lamp and illuminating the tiny sitting room Severus's mother hand made her own in her last year of life. The walls were completely covered in books, most of them bound in black or brown leather with their gold and silver titles pealing along creased spines. It was an eclectic collection Eileen had inherited from her parents and all that remained of the once vast Prince family library.

There was also a moth-eaten sofa and armchair with a rickety coffee table between them encapsulated in the circle of candlelight. Even as tired as he was from apparating all the way from Hogsmeade to the clearing by the river, he was reluctant to sit on either piece of furniture. Both looked to be infested with some manner of vermin. He was tempted to use the table as a seat instead but feared that the flimsy thing would be unable to hold the weight of one of his smallest first years never mind his own.

The floor about his feet was coated with a thick layer of dust. It appeared undisturbed save for his own footprints and the scampering prints of some kind of small rodent: a rat or mouse if the droppings were anything to go by.

If the bedrooms upstairs were in the same sort of state as the sitting room, then there would be enough work to keep him busy for a few days even with the use of magic to help things along.

"Pulitas," he murmured, waving his wand in a grand sweeping motion and the floor began to clean itself as though being swept by an invisible broom. Once the dust had swept itself into a pile he pointed his wand at it the mound and vanished it with a quiet, "evanesco."

Dark eyes evaluated the state of the room once again. The sofa and armchair would need to be replaced, but he could probably manage to transfigure the table into something serviceable.

Satisfied with the state of the sitting room for the moment, he headed on through to the house's small kitchen.

He was met by the sight of the same small table and quarte of chairs that he had eaten meals at with his mother and father; its scrubbed wooden surface was nicked and scarred with a dark circular burn at the center from the time a pan had been taken straight off the hob and placed upon it without so much as a trivet to insulate it.

As a whole, the room was as dirty as the previous. The only upside was that both the cooker and the sink appeared to still be in working order – if in desperate need of a good scouring. He checked the icebox next and found it to be mercifully bare. The runic array his mother had etched into the bottom of it in place of a Cooling Charm was still sound although in need of recharging. That little array was probably the only bit of magic his mother had ever performed that Tobias Snape had actually appreciated and that was because it allowed him to squander more of his meager paycheck on himself.

Severus closed the door ignoring the empty gnawing sensation in his stomach. He would recharge the runes after he visited the green grocer and butcher's shop in town.

Ignoring the little voice at the back of his head that sounded remarkably like the Hogwarts Matron, Madam Pomfrey, which was warning him that casting any more spells would be flirting with magical exhaustion. Instead, he made a broad sweeping gesture with his wand as he cast another series of Sweeping Charms and then jabbed his wand in the direction of the cooker.

"Scourgify!"

The Scouring Charm ate at the layers of dust and grime atop the hob like a bubbly pink piranha stripping flesh from a cow.

Feeling exhausted and suddenly light headed, Severus sank into one of the ladderback chairs encircling the kitchen table. His last conscious thought as his vision faded to black was that at least the ground floor of the house was now habitable even if it wasn't homey….