*coughs* Long comment is long
This is phenomenal. I am totally in awe of this fic. If I could write this brilliantly, I'd give up my day job and devote myself to storytelling.
I read this several days ago, and have been trying ever since to figure out how to describe my response. I love the voice, the language, here. It's gritty and specific, so chockful of the pinched and dreary texture of Eileen's life while at the same time being so colorful and idiomatic, that it only creeps up on the reader bit by tragic bit how subtle the story is and how sly and subterranean the doled-out truth. Your brusque, grudging, slangy words build a tangible world that's stained with feeling, like wallpaper yellowed by nicotine.
The gruff way Eileen mothers her son, every action a kind of desperate sign language for her unspoken love, is heartbreaking, quiet at first but then growing in terribleness as she reaps what she's sown and inflicts the consequences of her magical crime on the child who is the visible evidence of it. There's a horrible symmetry to it, the same kind of heartless justice that Greek tragedy's known for: the kind that can't be stopped once it's set in motion.
I love how observant your eye is, how perfectly and precisely you know what's in Eileen's kitchen, the cocoa boxes she obviously buys whenever her boy comes home, how she makes an extra effort when he's there, putting the bedclothes in order, bothering with the bathroom's chill; the way her wand and her potions paraphernalia are tucked back with the worst of the "best-before" items.
The way this fic constructs Snape as a child born of unconsensual sex, raised in a dead-end zone, his own secret-keeper – because by now he must have faced the Shrieking Shack and lost Lily's friendship and Eileen clearly hasn't a clue – is extraordinary, in a harrowing way. He's such a teenager here, decent and fairly docile, although there are signs scattered all through of the toll life's already taking on him. The slap followed by the kiss perfectly symbolize the family dynamic; it hurts to see Severus so resigned. Although, watch out, mates: he's a fan of the Stranglers! *waves Union Jack for the band beloved of brainy alienated young arseholes everywhere*
She slept uneasily, as the curl of his magic slipped through her grey dreams, and in the morning she woke to a haunting sense of weight, as though a hag had spent the night upon her breast. Tobias' side of the bed remained empty and she stretched a hand across the cool softness of the sheet, missing him.
This is like poetry, and it whispers and foreshadows so much. It also echoes later, after Severus' departure: She sat up in bed and felt the warm, wrinkled sheet he'd left behind. The comparison deserves a shiver.
Randomly, I adore this tossed-off remark: and she rather liked to see him strap on his tool-belt
He hunkered down upon his haunches and lifted the needle between his meticulous, ink-stained fingers… (she wondered) if Tobias was adopting a similarly reverent posture at that very moment. It's both touching and, in retrospect, dreadful, the way her thoughts often stray to Tobias. I like catching glimpses of his dad in Severus, contrasted with the times Eileen looks in the mirror and sees her son's face. It's as if she can't imagine him having a destiny separate from hers.
These are a selection of the various low-key descriptions of Severus that struck me because of the vivid, rather endearing and melancholy picture they conjure up: the way he fossicks about the cupboards and the image of him piping crosses on buns. The batter came off his fingers well enough but the ink stains didn't budge one bit. She thought he'd be better off using a Bic - he'd been happy enough using them in primary school - but she didn't say so. Bad enough when he caught it from his dad; he didn't need to hear it from her too.
He had started up his ritualistic teenaged rummagings once more
He was wearing a coaxing smile - it seemed hesitant and almost grotesque on his drawn face… She shook the old thoughts away and found that her son's inviting smile was starting to slip; he was always braced for a knock-back, even from her.
This is the last day of any innocence he might still possess.