Chapter Text
When Hermione tumbled through Harry’s fireplace, it was Luna she found on the sofa, sketchbook in hand. At the woosh of the flames, she looked up from her work and brightened. When she set aside the sketchbook, Hermione’s jaw dropped at the sight of her belly, which appeared to be swollen to the tune of seven months gone. As long as she’d been away.
“Hello, Hermione,” she said. “It’s so good to see you, even if you’re sad.”
“Luna! What!”
Luna, who always seemed to be floating along in a way that highlighted how graceless everyone else was, struggled to her feet. Hermione was by her side in an instant, and when they hugged around the beach ball Luna had swallowed, Hermione was mortified to find herself bursting into tears.
She was dimly aware of Luna rubbing her back and murmuring comforting nonsense in her ear. She didn’t know how long they stood there, but by the time she came back to herself, her head was pounding and her eyes felt like they were on fire. A ripple tickled across her belly.
“Oh!” Hermione pulled away. “Oh, it’s moving!”
“She does that a lot lately,” Luna said with a smile. “You can touch if you want.”
Hermione laid a hand on Luna’s belly, where the ripple blossomed into a full wave. It was as amazing as it was alien, and though she’d felt it countless times before in the wombs of various Weasley women, Hermione knew with a sudden certainty that she’d never bear children.
“She?” she said. Luna’s smile widened and she nodded.
“We’re thinking about names now,” she said.
“Harry didn’t tell me,” Hermione said, and the tears threatened to overtake her again.
“I only just got home last night,” Luna said. “We were up all night talking, and of course we had to fit in loads of sex, and then he went to St. Mungo’s this morning. I’m sure he’s bursting to tell you and Ron as soon as he has a free moment.”
A watery laugh bubbled out of Hermione, and she stepped back to wipe uselessly at her face.
“God, look at me, blubbering all over you,” she said. “You should sit. Do you want me to make you some tea? Chamomile? Peppermint?”
Luna sat dutifully, but tugged on Hermione’s hand until she slid in beside her. Her eyes were big and luminous and blue. Meeting them always felt a bit like being set adrift on some great, still sea.
“I’m quite well, Hermione,” she said. “It’s all right if you’re not.”
Hermione’s face crumpled and she turned away again. A rush of fresh tears renewed the stinging of her eyes.
“I just feel so stupid,” she cried. “To have thought it could last, to have thought it could end any other way, to be crying over a man in the first place!”
“I see,” Luna said. “It’s your first time.”
“What?” Hermione said, her breath hitching. “My first time with what?”
“Heartbreak,” Luna said. “Real love.”
“I’m thirty-eight years old!” Hermione wailed.
“My father didn’t fall properly in love until he met my mother when he was seventy-three,” Luna said. She set her hand on Hermione’s knee. “Love comes to us on its own schedule. Do you want to tell me about him?”
Hermione sat up straight and closed her eyes. She held her breath in an attempt to control its wild hitching and swiped at her eyes again.
“He was full of passion,” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought him capable of it, but he was. For his city, for the people he served, for music and books and the bloody cinema.” She gasped for breath again. “For me.”
“He sounds lovely,” Luna said. “He gave you something you were missing.”
Hermione nodded and the tears came again.
“What happened?” Luna asked.
“He’s a bloody-minded, stubborn arse who refuses to understand that sometimes you have to unclench enough to let someone else into your life!”
“Ah. That’s disappointing.”
“And…” Hermione’s breath came out stuttering again.
“And?”
“And I pushed, like I always do!” Hermione balled her hands into fists and she thumped her own thighs. Silently Luna covered one of Hermione’s hands with her own and stroked gently over her locked fingers. Hermione shuddered and she forced her hands to relax. She sagged against Luna’s side, which proved a more solid buttress than usual. “Usually I’m pushing away,” Hermione said, “but this time I wanted so much so badly. I pushed and pushed until he cracked. I can’t even blame him.”
It must have been nonsensical, but Luna hummed with agreement nonetheless. Hermione sobbed a little bit more, trying to keep it quiet, whilst Luna sat silently, running her thumb over Hermione’s knuckles.
After the crying tapered off and Hermione blew her nose, she asked Luna about her pregnancy.
“I was in Peru studying the mating habits of the Western Bramstiggle when I found out,” Luna said. “I was already five months gone; I know I should have realised earlier, but in my defence, my cycle has never been what one might call ‘predictable,’ and of course Bramstiggle dung can often give wizards and witches dizzy spells. It was easy to miss.”
“But you didn’t tell Harry until last night?” Hermione asked, and God but there it was: the snide, judgemental edge to her question. She felt the urge to break up with herself, too.
For her part, Luna answered as peaceably as ever.
“I loved him too much to put it so baldly on a bit of parchment. ‘Wish you were here, by the way you’re to become a father.’ It wouldn’t have been right. Since Apparition was out, I had to leave the village I was staying in by Muggle means, so it took me some weeks of traveling by van and bus to get to Lima, where there’s a wizarding community. I stayed there for a few more weeks to see a Healer, and take all the necessary potions, and make sure everything was all right. I sent Harry a letter telling him I wanted to see him, and that I loved him. I told him I wanted to try again. I know that was selfish, but…” She shrugged.
“It’s not,” Hermione said. “Maybe for some people it would be, but… Harry never let go of you, Luna. He always hoped you would come back to him. He—he always will, when you go.”
Luna pressed on the curve of her belly.
“Did you know there are Wickerspin colonies off the coast of Scotland, and that the Scabby Ungerwalls of Wales are endangered?” she asked.
Hermione frowned.
“No?” she said.
“Yes,” Luna said. “There’s a lot of work to be done right here in the United Kingdom. And Ireland.”
“Ah.” Hermione smiled at her and was horrified when she began to cry again. Luna arm came up around Hermione’s shoulders.
“I know it’s not the same, but you have us,” Luna said. “Me and Harry and Ron and the baby. And the Weasleys, and Ms. Hillcut, and all the children. Even Draco. You are so loved, Hermione.”
Hermione only sobbed harder. Harry took that moment to step out from the fire.
“Oi!” He rushed to her side. “What’s happened! Are the squibs all right?”
“It’s her young man, Harry,” Luna said over Hermione’s head. “They’ve broken up.”
“Ah.” Harry budged in next to her so she was squashed between him and Luna. “Well, he’s clearly a wanker of the first order,” he said. “Do you want me to put a little curse on him, Hermione? Pestilent boils, maybe, or a permalimp spell? Just say the word.”
Hermione laughed and sniffled. She met his eyes and found them full of joy.
“I’m happy for you, Harry,” she said and a huge grin stole over his face.
“Thanks,” he said. “I was going to find you as soon as I got out of my hospital robes.”
“A little girl!”
“Only a handful of weeks left,” he said. “I wondered if you wouldn’t mind if we named her Hermione.”
Hermione started crying again. She could feel the way Harry and Luna were communing over her head, probably in a series of complicated facial expressions couples of long standing tend to develop over the years of their union. Suddenly a steaming mug of tea appeared on the coffee table before her.
“We don’t have to name her Hermione…”
“You shouldn’t,” Hermione said when she came up for air. “Not that I’m not honoured, and grateful, and full of love. But there are thousands of them out there. You can’t throw a cat in the street for hitting a Hermione. She’ll be one of thirteen in her graduating class.” She took his hand and squeezed it. “Her name should be Lily,” she said. She turned to Luna. “Or Pandora.” A smile touched Luna’s lips. “Or something all her own, because she’ll be all her own. Thank you for thinking of me, and I can’t wait to meet her, but no.”
Harry bent to kiss her on the forehead. The tears threatened again, so she slid out from between the two of them and made her way to the fireplace.
“Thanks for the tea, but I think I’ll go home to have a bath and a wallow,” she said. “Congratulations again.”
“If you need anything…” Harry said.
“I know.” She threw Floo powder into the fire.
“Watch out for the scheming muldroons,” Luna called out as she stepped into the fire. “They’re lurking everywhere.”
Dear Severus, Hermione wrote, and vanished it.
Dear Stephen,
I hope this missive finds you well. I write only to tell you how sorry I am for trying to force you into something you didn’t agree to. I should have been able to accept you as you were, since I had certainly been able to love you as you were. It is the curse of the idealist, I think, to view everything in the light of what the idealist perceives as its potential instead of as it is. That doesn’t make much sense, but I hope you understand me, because you seem to have a knack for doing so, which is something that I’ve found quite lacking in my life. You’re a Scot now. I admired that about you right from the start, and I shouldn’t have been so callous as to believe casual visits to England wouldn’t be fraught for you.
I want to tell you that I cherish our time together, even now. I did not know I could feel that way, nor that being with someone the way we were could be so nourishing. It’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it? To be my age and only just now finding out about love. Though our time was brief, I can’t help but feel I know you better than anyone ever has, and you know me the same way. Being known is intoxicating, isn’t it?
I’ve listened to the Unforgettable Fire. It’s quite different from the rest, but it makes me feel hopeful, somehow. Maybe that’s what it does for you, too.
I miss you. I do. I want you to respond by saying, Come to me post-haste and forget all of this. I know my chances of such a thing are slim to none, but I wasn’t sorted into the house of lions for nothing.
Even if you can’t do that, I hope you can find it in yourself to forgive me, Stephen. Forgive a foolish Englishwoman with a broken heart.
Yours with love,
Hermione
She stamped the envelope with the return address that would reach her even through Muggle post, and then threw the whole thing promptly into the bin.
It went through countless iterations and she hemmed and hawed over it for weeks before she finally stuck it in a post box.
Weeks more went by, and she didn’t hear back.
With the expansion of S.O.P. and M.O.P. came the freedom to do more engaging trips with the children of St. Hieronymus’ Home for Wayward Squibs than, say, a visit to a chemist’s shop. Thus, Hermione, Ephigenia, and a handful of tutors chaperoned all twenty-six of the children over ten on what would be, for most of them, their first Muggle train ride and overnight stay. They were all very excited and chattering away, but Hermione and the rest of the adults made sure each one knew how the train station worked, how the automated ticketing machines as well as the queues worked, where the platforms were and how to find where they were going, who to ask if they were lost and how to listen for announcements. They were also meant to hold on to their own tickets to present the ticket collector when asked. It was going to be a fun trip, but there was no part of it that wasn’t a learning experience.
They went to Birmingham, tickets in hand for Cadbury World. Hermione had even got enough funding to pay for the older students to have a “chocolatier experience,” which was all any of them could talk about at dinner afterward. The younger students were put out that they’d missed it until they were assured this trip would be a yearly one. Harry L., Hermione F., and Ophelia were suddenly keen to become chocolatiers, and Varna had pulled out her mobile phone to Google “how to become a chocolatier.” Several of the children had gathered round her to see the answer.
Hermione was watching with fondness when a tap came at her foot. She looked at Ephigenia across the table from her, whose eyebrows were doing some heavy lifting.
“How are you holding up, love?” she asked.
Hermione flapped a hand.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“You’re a shite liar, Hermione Granger.”
Hermione sighed. She poked at the bowl of don buri before her.
“He took me to this chocolate shop,” she said. “Posh place, best chocolate I’ve ever had. I was exhausted, it was restorative, he hadn’t even had to ask if I’d needed it. And he bloody sat there looking as good as one of the hand-painted truffles. I wasn’t sure before, but I knew then that I was going to…” She forced herself to smile, but the workings of Ephigenia’s eyebrows told her she didn’t believe her for a second. She sank in on herself and shrugged. “Cadbury World was rather a hoot but it couldn’t compare.”
“We didn’t have to go to an actual emotional minefield, my girl.”
“Well we could hardly afford Disneyland Paris!”
“Lor, but can you imagine?” Ephigenia sniggered. “Us showing up with a fleet of children who didn’t know who any of the characters were.”
“Maybe we could afford to put a telly and DVD collection in the rec room now,” Hermione said. “Maybe in a few years, we really could go to Disneyland Paris.”
“I want to be quite judicious about that sort of thing,” Ephigenia said.
“Oh?”
“You know, limit their screen time. They need fluency in mobiles and computers, but they mustn’t become enslaved to them.”
“You could think of a background in popular films as a form of cultural fluency, but I do see what you mean,” Hermione said.
“It’s not a bad idea though,” Ephigenia said. “We could do something like have the telly but no cable—”
“Who could afford it?”
“—and do Sunday afternoon film screenings instead. And I could keep the DVDs in my office to be signed out on certain days.”
Hermione’s brain was firing a thousand ideas at her, and she sat up straighter to give her mouth better access to her thoughts, but suddenly Ephigenia’s face pinched into a scowl and tension squeezed her in on herself. The hair at the back of Hermione’s neck stood up and quivered.
“Madam Withersby,” Ephigenia said, cold and flat. Hermione stiffened and turned around to look up at her former boss. It was magenta ruffles today.
“Miss Hillcut,” she said. “Miss Granger. How curious to find you at a Wagamama in Birmingham with all your little charges. Surrounded by Muggles.”
Hermione pushed insistently at Ephigenia’s foot. Genius that she was, Ephigenia stood quickly and rushed to the cluster of would-be-chocolatiers to hiss, “get out now.” The rest of the tutors sprang into action and ushered the children from the restaurant as Ephigenia darted up to the counter, no doubt to have the proprietor evacuate the rest of the customers. Hermione felt the press of her wand in her sleeve.
She stood to face Phaedra Withersby, whose hair was wild and lopsided and whose lipstick had smeared across her cheek. An alarm sounded and Muggles grumbled all around them as they filed out.
“You look a fright, Phaedra,” Hermione said.
“And you look as mudblooded as ever, I’m afraid.”
“My God, spare me that old song and dance and let’s duel.”
“‘My God,’” Withersby snivelled, drawing her wand without finesse. “The Muggle in you does out, doesn’t it.”
Hermione had her wand in hand and half an Expelliarmus out when Withersby kicked her legs out from under her and wrestled her to the ground, knocking away her wand. The back of Hermione’s head smacked into the floor with a sickening crunch. Withersby pinned her there with one knee on her throat and the other on her wand arm. Hermione gasped for air as stars cascaded behind her eyes, her free arm flailing about. Gardenia perfume boggled her senses.
“It’s funny,” Withersby said in that grating sing-song voice of hers. “That your blood can be pure shit and still none of you ever expect an old-fashioned Muggle brawl.”
“—won’t—be—good—f’you,” Hermione choked out.
Withersby cackled like the proverbial witch in a Muggle fairy story. She placed the tip of her wand at Hermione’s temple.
“I’ve nothing to lose, have I?” she said. “Job’s gone. Son’s dead. If they throw me in Azkaban, at least I’ll have the comfort of having sent one of the people who stole his magic to whatever Hell mudbloods rot in.”
The knee on Hermione’s throat grew heavier. Through the stars she saw Ephigenia creep up behind Withersby, Hermione’s wand clutched in hand. Blackness threatened at the edge of her vision. Ephigenia looked like an avenging angel when she stomped on Withersby’s shoulder. Withersby screamed and whipped around to blast Ephigenia unconscious into the wall, but not before Ephigenia tossed Hermione’s wand to her. Not before Hermione dragged a breath like daggers in through her swollen throat and remembered sunlight on Severus Snape’s face long enough to croak, “Expecto Patronum!”
A wisp of blue smoke sparked into an otter that bounced around her frantically.
“Get Ron,” she rasped, “and then Harry.”
Another blow came against her head, and another, and another. The last thing she saw before consciousness left her was the flash of Ron’s Head Auror robes and Harry’s face looming wide-eyed before her.
Harry pushed the hair from Hermione’s forehead as she slept on in her hospital bed. It had been thirty hours since the attack and she hadn’t woken. Diagnostic spells indicated swelling in the brain. The Healers had been able to repair her crushed nose, zygomatic arch and oesophagus as well as the crack in her skull, but only time and potions could ease the swelling.
Harry pulled up a chair and sat at the edge of her bed. He clasped his hands together on the bed rail and laid his forehead down on the resultant knot of fingers. Please let her wake up, he thought, though despite all his travels he still did not know where such thoughts went when they were hurled out with so much desperation into the universe. I can’t do this without her.
He could hear Ron’s footsteps as he approached. When he appeared beside him, he was in civilian clothes and looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.
“Withersby’s in custody and singing like a snidget,” he said. “Changed back to her maiden name so no one would connect her to some Death Eater grunt. Stirred up the idiots in Purity First from behind the scenes just to throw us off the scent. All the pamphlets and picketing the Wizengamot vote and threats against the Shacklebolts were red herrings for her real target.”
“Hermione?” Harry asked. “But why?”
“Don’t be naive,” Ron said, sighing. “You know why.”
“Fucking Hippogriff shit,” Harry said.
“Looks like she even maneuvered her way up the Ministry ladder just to keep Hermione overworked.”
“The ultimate results of which were that the squibs and Muggleborns were kept from accessing all the resources they were entitled to.” Harry knotted his hands together until his knuckles cracked.
Ron pulled up a chair beside him and nudged a cup of tea against his hands. Harry took it without conscious thought.
“You need to go home to Luna, mate,” Ron said. “She’s about to pop and it seems like you might too.”
“She said the baby’s going to be fashionably late.”
“She can’t know that.”
“She knows a lot,” Harry said.
“I can keep vigil, Harry,” he said. “If anything changes, you’ll be the first to know. Well, after the Healer on duty.”
“Draco’ll want you home too,” Harry said.
“He’s locked away in his workshop at all hours the last few weeks,” Ron said, arranging his long legs to fit beside the bed somehow. “He’s taken some notion about thestral feather cores in his new line of wands.”
Harry hummed. “Luna might be interested in that.”
“I think they’re Firecalling about it all the time lately, actually.”
Harry hummed again. Hermione’s face had taken on the slack quality of someone with nothing left inside to animate them. His heart took up residence in his throat.
“We’re not the only people with someone, Ron,” he said.
“Eh?”
“She was seeing this bloke in Edinburgh,” he said. “I’d never seen her like that before. Radiantly happy. Relaxed.”
“Oh, the Muggle chemist?” Ron said. “I thought they broke up.”
“And if you’d broken up with Draco, but weeks later he lay in hospital half dead, wouldn’t you want to see him?”
Ron grunted and took the untouched tea from Harry’s hand. He blew on it and gulped half of it down in one go.
“We’d have to figure out the intronet to find him,” Ron said. He nodded at Hermione. “Our resident expert in all things Muggle is indisposed.”
“I’ll do it,” Harry said, and stood abruptly. Ron’s hand darted out to grab his wrist.
“Don’t hurt yourself, mate,” he said.
Harry shrugged him off.
“I can handle myself, Ron,” he said. “Look after her.”
In a blink he was in Hermione’s flat. He rifled through the papers on her desk, her kitchen table, her bedside table, searching for any clue as to which chemist’s shop in Edinburgh might employ a Stephen Savage. He found a record, though he knew she had no record player—The Unforgettable Fire, it was called.
When he’d been through what seemed like every paper in her flat to no avail, he yanked at his hair and bellowed. Then, he closed his eyes. He focused on the way his breath felt, expanding inside him cool and cleansing. He let it out slowly. He could feel the way his magic wrapped around the core of him and pulsed like a heartbeat.
His eyes snapped open.
“Find me Stephen Savage, chemist, Edinburgh,” he said.
Before him materialised a set of coordinates, a street name, and the words, “The Apothecary.”
One of the good things about running a sleepy neighbourhood chemist’s was that it afforded Severus the time to read. He had an Oxfam recliner in the break room and a stack of books beside it. The bell at the door alerted him to the rare customer, and he could get on with it in the peace and quiet. If something inside him was on high alert waiting to hear a certain voice yammer on about the rights of the marginalised or the dubious charms of Stevie Nicks, he certainly wouldn’t admit it.
Still, when the bell tinkled, he sprang to his feet and chucked Jeanette Winterson into the chair without ceremony. It was probably just Mr. Kudriti or that Biverton urchin, but he smoothed down his collar and made sure his shirt was tucked crisply into his trousers.
“Hello?” a male voice called out, and Severus suppressed his disappointment as he swept out into the shop from behind the rows of medications. A short man with broad shoulders stood before the counter, black hair licking upwards in all directions, and when he turned to meet Severus’s eyes they both screamed.
“Potter!”
“What the fuck!”
“Get out of my shop at once!”
“What are you doing here!”
“What are you doing here!”
“You’re alive!”
“That’s obvious, you Neanderthal!”
“You’ve been dating Hermione!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“What did she say? Is it all over the papers? Why have you come?”
A ripple of magic reverberated out of Potter and Severus heard the locks of the shop doors slide into place. Even the open sign flipped over to read “closed.” A spark of disquiet came to life in Severus’s mind. He wished he had his wand; he knew he couldn’t take Potter even if he’d had it. Some hateful old urge to throw himself at the feet of the most powerful man in Britain rose up, and Severus stamped it down.
“You were supposed to be some Muggle she was seeing!” Potter said, jabbing a finger at him over the counter.
“And she was supposed to keep my whereabouts a secret!” Severus drew up tall and straight and looked down his nose at one Saviour of the Wizarding World. “For the last time, what do you want, Potter?”
Potter’s cheeks were suffused with red and his chest was heaving; he truly hadn’t expected to see Severus there. Which meant he was searching for Stephen Savage, and probably didn’t mean to kill some hapless Muggle, whether he’d done injury to his friend’s heart or not. Severus watched Potter control his breathing, clenching and unclenching his hands at his sides until he was calm enough to speak.
“It’s Hermione,” he said, and Severus’s heart dropped into his stomach. His nerves lit up and without warning, he was shaking. “She was attacked by a blood supremacist. We don’t know if she’s going to make it.”
“Death Eaters?”
“Just the mum of one,” Potter said. “Some grunt with little magic who died in a scuffle during the war.”
“Who,” Severus said.
Potter’s mouth thinned. Despite his colouring, despite his awful hair—he looked like Lily in that moment. Lily disappointed in him. Lily turning her back. He was sixteen years older than Lily ever got to be.
“She’s in MLE custody, Snape,” he said. “You can’t do anything to her.” Then his face split into a savage grin, and he looked like no one so much as himself. “No matter how much we might want you to.”
Severus looked away.
“What would you have told some Muggle, had you found him here?” he asked.
“That she was in hospital. That he should come.”
“The Statute of Secrecy—”
“Fuck the statute,” Potter said. “She loved you. If you were a Muggle, if you loved her too, who gives a toss about the statute?”
“That’s easy for the Boy Who Lived to Break the Rules to say,” Severus said, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“Come see her, Snape,” he said. “If you ever cared about her at all, you’ll come before it’s too late.”
Severus imagined it: the buzz of magic, the weight of wizards’ judgement, the spit flying towards him in the street. Hermione lying pale and diminished in a hospital bed.
“I can’t,” Severus said, horrified to hear his voice crack.
Potter sneered and struck the counter with one fist.
“Then you really are a coward,” he said, and vanished.
Severus sagged against the partition. His mind raced in countless directions: whose mother had struck down his strong, wild-haired girl? What was Potter going to do now that he knew Severus was alive and how did he bypass all his anti-Apparition wards? Would wizards ever learn that blood, that people didn’t come in fractions? How many times was he going to be made to remember the worst thing he’d ever done?
He scrambled through the break room and up the stairs into his flat. He threw open his closet door and dropped to his knees to rummage in a box on the floor. In it he found a set of teaching robes, a tiny cauldron in solid gold, a book of potions by Kilpatrick Montague, the premiere potioneer of the 18th century and the father of modern potions, some photographs, both Muggle and magical, and a vial of something that would make his suffering end irrevocably. Underneath it all was his wand.
Before Hermione had summoned it into her hand without a thought the first time they had lain together, he’d not seen it in almost fifteen years. He’d put it back gingerly and closed the door, but it was like closing the door on an elephant. Now that elephant was heavy in his hands. Heavy and familiar and lighting something up inside him he’d thought he could crush. His lip twisted; how like him, to believe his will were somehow stronger than the very force of magic. The truth was, he had always been a fool.
“Lumos,” he whispered, and the light seemed to rush up from within him to illuminate the closet. He held his breath to calm his thundering heart. The light fell on the photographs and he sifted through them dispassionately.
A portrait of his mother from her Hogwarts days, looking hard-eyed and sour, as if she knew what fate had in store for her, 1953. A stiff black and white Muggle formal with his unsmiling mother and father at his baptism, 1960. A Polaroid of himself and Lily pulling faces in her family home, 1969. Lily eating Fortescue’s and sticking her tongue out at him over and over in a loop, 1973. Malfoy major and Black minor, smirking in their beautiful, superior way, 1978.
“Incendio,” he said, and the last one went up in flames. He put it out with a wave of his wand. He wished he had photos of Hermione. There had been ample opportunity, and he was like everyone else out there with a smartphone in his pocket. It had been cowardice, just like Potter said. He’d known the affair couldn’t last; his happiness had always been so fleeting as to be half-imagined. He hadn’t wanted the reminders. He hadn’t wanted to be able to look back and see what he was missing.
Her amber-lit eyes. The constellation of freckles across her cheeks, her nose. Her one crooked tooth, the dentists’ daughter.
The way she listened to him. The way she debated with him on the merits of this or that film, album, book, play. The way she spoke so enthusiastically her hands flung out and her voice rose. The way she saw suffering and sought to ease it. The way she saw him, all of him, and didn’t flinch away.
His feet knew the way to Holyrood Park.
Hermione woke to pain and her hand cradled in Ephigenia’s. Ephigenia lit up around the bruising on her face, but Hermione began to cry. Ephigenia squeezed her hand before she hopped to her feet, calling out for help, and then a swarm of Healers came in. The pain subsided, and so did Hermione.
The next time she woke, it was Ron at her bedside. He grinned at her and clasped her hand. His eyes filled with tears and his nose flared with the effort of keeping them in.
“’Bout time you woke up,” he said. “We wondered if you’d get here in time.”
“Time for what,” she said and froze, vision dappling. Someone had set her throat on fire.
Ron directed his wand to her mouth and said, “Aguamenti.”
When she finished drinking, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and raised her eyebrows to ask the question her voice wasn’t up to. Ron wiped his eyes and beamed.
“Luna’s having the baby upstairs right now,” he said. “She wanted to do it at home but it looks like she’s breech. Harry got her in the right hands and now he’s up there holding hers.”
The tears rushed out of her even as she smiled. Ron patted her hand.
“Won’t be long now,” he said.
Hermione groped for her wand. She thought hard until the word “Ephigenia” appeared from the tip like a brand.
“She’s doing great,” Ron said. “And all the children and the tutors got out unharmed, though they’re shaken up, as you can imagine. The Muggles were Obliviated. Harry treated the both of you at the scene. Ephigenia had a crack to the head just like you but it was an easy fix. Bruise salve doesn’t seem to do much for her so she looks a bit, erm, alarming right now, but she’s fine.”
Hermione sank into the bedding, her eyes falling shut.
“You and her saved everyone in that restaurant,” Ron said. “If you ask me, Kingsley should give you another Order of Merlin.”
Hermione tapped her wand again.
You, it wrote.
“And Harry,” Ron said. “The dream team.”
Hermione’s smile was tremulous, but she squeezed Ron’s hand.
The next time she woke, Severus sat beside her, his face a thunderclap. Her heart began to race.
“Severus,” she murmured. It didn’t hurt as much anymore, but her voice was muffled and broken, and it felt as though there were a manticore sitting on her larynx.
“Hush,” he said. “Your throat is still healing. You need to give it time. Believe me.”
Hermione cast about for her wand. Severus plucked it from the bedside table and handed it to her.
What? came up and dissipated like smoke. Severus sighed.
“It was brought to my attention that I was behaving like a massive knob,” he said. “Your boy wonder came to collect a Muggle to visit you but found me instead.”
Hermione gazed at him openly as if to drink him in, an oasis in the desert. His hair had grown beyond his ears, and to her surprise and delight the ends curled upward ever so subtly.
“You sent me a letter and asked me to forgive you,” Severus said. “I was boorish enough never to respond, because if there’s one thing I’ve never been able to let go of, it’s my pride. Now I find myself prostrated before you, hoping for your forgiveness.”
Hermione shook her head. What was there to forgive? That he wanted his privacy, that he wanted to live in the Muggle world on his own terms? Those were not choices that demanded forgiveness. More, she didn’t want him to come to her now out of misplaced guilt and the fear that she might not survive. She was hale. She was here. She was never going to be anything but what she was: a bulldozer of a Muggleborn witch who lived with one foot in either world.
And just like he always did, he understood her wordless rumination.
“Yes, the attack brought me here,” he said. “Of course I was worried for you, but more than that, I realised what a colossal mistake I’d made. I thought being a Muggle meant being free, but with you gone I understood that I was still hiding, that I had spent the last nineteen years waiting to be caught like a fugitive. I had become my own gaoler. When I walked away from you, I walked away from the only person in more than forty years never to ask me to choose between the disparate threads of my heritage. The only person who behaved as if those threads weren’t disparate at all.”
He pulled his wand from his sleeve and laid it carefully beside Hermione’s own.
“I Apparated here,” he said. “I greeted your slack-jawed Head Auror in the hall and fended off a Potter brandishing a baby at me. I’m here, if you’ll still have me.”
Hermione reached her hand out, and he took it. Her heart felt hot and huge. He crooked up one corner of his mouth, and her life slotted back into place.
“I brought a book,” he said. “Would you like me to read to you?”
Hermione nodded. He pulled his hand away with some reluctance and produced a book she’d been meaning to read for decades.
“The Remains of the Day,” he read. “By Kazuo Ishiguro.” With elegant fingers he flipped the pages. He cleared his throat. “‘Prologue. July 1956. Darlington Hall. It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.’”
She let his voice lull her to sleep.
Hermione thought she’d never get her fill of the sight of Severus Snape holding the rainbow rope.
He was not effusive with the children. He didn’t gush or put on a show of excitement around them, the way many adults did. He didn’t suffer fools, and he had no patience for silliness. He did, however, listen to them intently, and look them in the eye, and think about what they said as if their words had as much import as those of an adult. The children of St. Hieronymus’ had learned that they could come to him with their schoolwork, their troubles, their little hurts. He was better with them than Hermione could ever have dared to hope. She had stopped comparing him to the man who had taught her as a child—that man had died in the dirt and filth of the Shrieking Shack, loveless and alone and so relieved to have reached the end.
He still ran The Apothecary, but he’d hired help and now split his time between the shop and the Centre for the Advancement of the Admirers of Mrs. Norris, as he persisted in calling it. He had convinced her to lease a facility just outside Edinburgh, a short train ride to North Berwick. She’d moved from her drab London flat into a house they shared in Morningside. There was a Floo in this house, and if he pretended to grumble about Harry and Ron and little Aurelia showing up in their sitting room, Hermione grumbled back about his constant hosting of one Draco Malfoy. Hermione was amused to find he never grumbled about Luna.
It was a Sunday, which meant they were going to see a film. The sun peeked out from behind a cloud enough to cast harsh light across the planes and angles of Severus’s face, which made him look as if he’d been sprung from stone until he nodded thoughtfully at something Harry M. was saying. He looked up as if he could feel her scrutiny from the end of the queue of children between them. He caught her eye and his expression warmed.
“Onward, chaps,” he said as he led them to the Cameo.
Hermione trailed behind them, all the loves of her life.
End