The wind whistles the door into a slam behind him as he stomps the snow off his boots on the doormat. "I've gotten the food," he calls into the house. "So we may to continue to stave off starvation another week." The bags get stacked neatly beside each other on the countertop and the perishable items stored away in the refrigerator before he feels okay about moving into the next room, looking for her.
She's sitting on the floor with her legs tucked underneath her, methodically ripping the pages out of his first edition copy of Asiatic Anti-Venoms and scattering them onto the carpet around her. From the size of the nest she's already built, he knows there isn't much point in stopping her, but he still sweeps over and pulls the book from her unresisting fingers. "I might need that, you know," he says. "If Potter's precious posse decide that a little moonseed in our tea might be the easiest way to get us, dead or alive, you will wish you hadn't done this."
"It's not as though you haven't got the whole bloody thing memorized," Bellatrix sneers, twisting her hair around her fingers as she pulls it back from her face to glare at him better. "It's all you've done the last six months. And I doubt poison will be how either of us goes out, besides."
"Regardless," he says, putting the book down on the closest flat surface, a three-legged brown and green coffee table. "We must exercise every caution." He half leans against the side of the tattered blue sofa that sags like a bad flan in the center of the living room and watches her silently for just a few minutes. The way she gets slowly more agitated, first twisting her hair into black snakes with her fingers, then scratching vaguely at her arms, tugging on the sleeves of her dumpy borrowed black robes, finally digging her hands straight into the bare wood floor and scratching at the planks underneath her, it all gives him the reminders he needs of exactly who and what she is.
When her hands move to her stomach he stands, retrieves a book from the cinderblock shelf, and thrusts it at her. "Here," he sneers. "Do try to read it." She opens it, flips through, and begins shredding pages so quickly that he leaves the room in disgust, her laughter echoing behind him.
She seeks him out in the basement two hours later.
"The books are gone," she says. Then she stumbles on a step and he has to catch her quickly, help her down to the floor. He keeps one arm around her back, the other pressed to the center of her chest and she gives him a fake half-smile and a sly glance that lets him know his efforts are understood. She's been waddling for at least a month now, and his job is to watch her, to check on her, but he can't bear to touch it.
"You shouldn't be down here," he says. "The stairs and the fumes could be bad for… You could undermine the whole mission!"
"Mission?" she laughs cruelly, head tilted back, and looks for a moment like she did in the halls of Hogwarts. "Suicide mission, Severus, and you know it! Two make it out and only two survive."
He stands ramrod straight, stiff, and glares at her as emphatically as he can. "You impugn my talent, Lestrange. I am here to ensure your health, and if you imply that I might fail-"
"I'm dying already," she hisses. "I've been dying for the last nine bloody months and he knew it. I told him what would happen, and that's why he chose me."
"He chose you because you were loyal."
"He chose me because I was mad," she retorted, grinning widely. "And for my blood. A madwoman is no fit mother, but a Black is."
"Listen to me," he grips her arms at the elbows and sees her stare up at him in return, defiant, and wonders what she sees. "He chose me knowing I had no love left for him, because I am the best and because I had little choice but to accept. He did not think ahead. I am no nursemaid, and I'd sooner the world be rid of him for good." He shakes her slightly in his grip. "You will not die. I will save you before I save it."
Their climb back to the living room is slow as he grips her arm and helps her heave her unwieldy frame up the stairs. The floor is littered in pages piled, surrounding where she'd been kneeling in what does have a vaguely nest-like appearance, and she manages to sit quietly on the faded sofa for a few moment while he stoops and begins to clear away some of the mess.
"You're not completely disgusting for a traitorous half-blood," she says.
There's a whistle outside and they both spring up. His hand is already on their wands, concealed under his robes, but he takes the time to toss hers and that's what gives Harry the advantage when the door blows off its hinges and he busts in, flanked by Ron, Hermione, and a small squad of Aurors.
"Locomotor Mortis!" It catches him by surprise and he hits the floor hard as his legs freeze up up. He strains to see Bellatrix and finds her physically restrained from behind by a hulking blond man with a cruel mouth, wand nowhere to be seen. She twists and struggles, not to get away but to get at her captor, and her robes drape and strain with her movements.
"She's pregnant," Hermione gasps, one palm stretching automatically toward the heaving woman in the automatic gesture of anyone caught up in the miracle of life until Bellatrix snaps at her hand and the spell is broken.
"Well," Harry says, "Isn't this interesting? Ron, wasn't Lestrange killed over a year ago?"
"Yeah," Ron sneers at the woman glaring death at him, teeth bared. "Neville got him at Budleigh Babberton."
The Boy Who Lived nods and glares down at the man on the floor. "Whose would this be, then? In the habit of chasing other men's wives, Professor?"
"You know nothing, Potter," he snaps.
"I know what you did," Harry replies, cold eyes looking nothing like Lily's now. "I know what you deserve. She's nothing to you, is she?" He nods to the tall Auror holding Bellatrix captive. "Rason, take her into the back and call Remus and Neville. She has her own amends to make." Rason pulls a grin that would seem more appropriate on the face of Gregory Goyle and begins pulling the twisting Death Eater toward the rear door of the cottage.
"Wait," he says calmly, pulling his head up carefully to stare right into Potter's eyes. "Spare her. She is… She is my wife." All his ex-students are staring at him, he knows. Lestrange, she's staring too. Distantly he hears her outburst of cackling suddenly cut off, probably by a shake from the capable Rason. He is perfectly focused on Harry Potter's winter green gaze.
"The baby, then," Potter says finally. "It would be-"
"Mine, yes," he snaps. "And it's a very high risk pregnancy." He shifts his focus to Granger. "She probably won't survive the birth anyway without my assistance."
"Alright, Snape," Harry says, and he feels himself relax for a moment before the boy takes a breath and turns to Rason again. "Take her outside like I said, but," he turns to Hermione. "Get the child first."
Granger is pale, Bellatrix screaming in rage, attacking anything near her without regard to her own well-being. The door frame is imprinted forever with the grooves of her claws as she's pulled out into the yard. "You are the one who told Voldemort of the prophecy," a voice is saying icily over his head. "You are as much to blame for my parents' death as Pettigrew was. But I'm not a bad person Professor. Your child won't be abused, degraded, raised in a closet by Muggles." He finally looks up at the young man hovering over him, wand in hand. "But he will know what it's like to be always compared to parents he never knew."
"Fool," he spits, and he realizes that Harry thought he was referring to him in the split second before the fist, wand clutched firmly, meets with his infamous nose.
The baby is pale as a serpent's belly with a little thatch of jet black hair and curious blue eyes. When Harry hands him to Ginny she lights up immediately and he can see she's already in love. The baby curls her pinky finger into his mouth and tries his hardest to bite down with no teeth and Ginny just laughs. "Harry, where is he from? Where are his parents?"
"Dead," he says shortly. "Killed by Snape and Lestrange."
"Muggle?"
With his back turned to her, he smiles grimly. "I really don't think so." He spins back around and puts his arm around her, cups the back of her head and strokes her smooth red hair. "What will you name him?"
She looks down into the baby blue eyes and watches the little mouth gnawing on her finger and something sparks deep in her belly. "Tom," she says. "Thomas Arthur."
And Harry reaches down and chucks the baby's chubby chin, pinches his cheeks. "Hullo, Tom," he says.