Disclaimer: Not mine.


When Hermione returns to the Shrieking Shack, she half-expects the books she left there to be undisturbed. She half-hopes they will be undisturbed. It might mean that Professor Snape is gone, that he found a way to free himself from his ghostly existence. If anyone could do it, she thinks nonsensically, it is Professor Snape; and then she would be free as well, free of the weird sense of responsibility that has weighed her down for years, now.

But when she pushes open the shack's door, her breath catches in her throat for the books are most definitely not undisturbed, in fact they are utterly disturbed. They are lying as she left them, but each and every one is open and the pages of one are fluttering madly, directed by the muttered words of the transparent figure suspended in a crouched position inches above it.

"Professor Snape," she whispers, and he visibly startles, shoulders jerking and head whipping around to look at her. Hermione thinks of all the times he snuck up behind them when they were students, appearing silently over their shoulders while they brewed, stepping out of darkened alcoves to catch them mischief-making in the halls, and how funny it should be now that it is she who has startled him; but of course it isn't funny, not really.

"Are you enjoying the books, then?" she asks, for want of anything more intelligent to say. Her voice is a squeak.

He stares at her for a long moment, his mouth half-open, then says, "Yes," so quietly Hermione can barely hear him.

"I'm glad," she says. "I didn't really know what you'd like so I just… I bet you've read some of them before, but the Lowell was published after your…" She trails off, twisting her fingers together and feeling unbelievably stupid.

"I noticed," he says, and then, "How long… precisely... has it been?"

"Oh," Hermione says. There is a pleading edge to Snape's words that cuts into her soft tissue. "Six years… nearly seven." She feels ashamed, suddenly, and rushes to say, "I'm very sorry I didn't come back sooner, sir. I just…"

Snape blinks away a sort of winded expression. "I believe I was rather forceful in telling you not to return," he says.

"Yes, well. I had a lot of practice disobeying you when we were at Hogwarts, Professor. I should have kept up the habit a little longer."

He snorts, and she looks at him, surprised. There is something odd about the way he is holding himself, a stiff uncertainty. His eyes hold a touch of mania that makes Hermione nervous, but he is also, obviously, amused, which is shocking enough to put just about everything else out of her head.

"So, why are you here now?" he asks. "And why… this?" A vague wave of one hand in the direction of the books spread across the floor.

Why, indeed? "I… went back to Hogwarts recently," Hermione says. She isn't entirely sure where to look; it is difficult to focus on his face, when the ghastly wound on his neck is so close that her eyes are drawn to it against her will. She finds herself staring instead at his feet, shimmery in their thick-soled boots. "It was a memorial dedication. A marble wall with the names of the dead enclosing the western courtyard."

She risks a glance at Snape's face. He sees her glance and raises one brow, and Hermione nearly starts crying; she hated, hated that raised brow when she was his student, for it often preceded a particularly nasty comment and indicated quite clearly that the person on whom he gazed was an utter idiot. But seeing it now, all she feels is a profound sense of loss. She looks away.

"R-right," she says. Get to the point, Hermione. "It's just - there are a lot of ghosts at Hogwarts."

"Really?" Snape says, and Hermione doesn't have to look at him to know he is smirking. "I hadn't noticed."

"No, I mean - there are a lot of ghosts now. After the battle… Well, I suppose many were not prepared to - die." She blinks against the image of Colin Creevy's spectre waving wanly at her as he drifted past her in the entrance hall.

She looks up at Snape and forces herself to hold his gaze. "There are a lot of them," she says, "and it's awful and sad and - and everything you'd imagine. But I thought, at least - at least there are a lot of them." She lifts her hands, gesturing at the empty, desolate room around them. Snape's eyes widen, just the slightest bit.

"Ah," he says; the sound is choked, and there is something - something - in his dark eyes that makes Hermione glad she came, even if she is so late. For it is something, despite all her research, that she had not considered before - what happened to ghosts whose corporeal bodies died in remote places. At Hogwarts, at least the ghosts have each other and other living people with whom to interact. Snape has been trapped - imprisoned, essentially - alone for years, with no one to talk to and nothing to do. It is a wonder he hasn't run mad. (Can ghosts run mad? her brain insists on asking, and she tells it quite firmly to shut up).

"So you thought I must be… lonesome," Snape says now, drawing the last word out as though it is distasteful. "And you believed - what, precisely? That your company would be preferable to being alone?"

That something is still there, an uncertainty at the corners of his eyes and the twitch of his fingers. It makes Hermione feel suddenly bold. "Isn't it, sir?" she asks.

The Snape she had once known would have castigated her for the audacity of her question. But she Snape she had once known was alive, and living, however unwillingly, amongst other people; no matter how misanthropic he always appeared, no one can be entirely right without some basic human contact. Snape's ghost is, she can see all at once, truly more transparent than his former self, in every sense of the word. His emotions play across his face in a way that her professor's rarely had.

After a brief struggle, his mouth working in silent fury, Snape says, "Perhaps." The two syllables are bitten off and spat out; Hermione can practically feel his humiliation.

"Well… good. Because I think being alone forever sounds rather horrible, and if I can do anything to help, I'd like to."

She feels her own humiliation rise when he barks a bitter-sounding laugh in response. God, why does she have to sound so prissy? She blushes.

Snape gives her an absolutely withering look. "And the books?" he asks.

Hermione shrugs, feeling more awkward by the second. "I figured… well, I can't imagine being unable to…" She shakes her head. "I thought you must be terribly bored."

Snape is very still, watching her. Hermione thinks about everything she has read over the past few years. The life, if it can be called such, of a ghost is one of frustration. That line, from Sandusky's The Left Behind, has echoed in her head again and again.

"I would be," she adds.


He ought to thank her. That's what people do, isn't it, when others have done them a kindness, but Severus cannot make himself speak the words. Instead he manages, "Bored… does not begin to describe it," and wonders if this girl, this young woman, can possibly imagine the hours, the days, the bloody years, six of them, apparently, with nothing to do and no one to talk to and the impression that his mind is atrophying; no, worse - that it is crumbling to bits, all the reasonable, intelligent, relatively good parts drifting away like so much dust leaving in their wake the dark and ugly parts of him, the insane parts that he always suspected might be lurking somewhere.

And then this - this woman came and left these books behind her and he felt… it was a mad rush, a frenzy, as though he had been starving and was suddenly sat before a Hogwarts feast. It was hard - is still hard, really - to believe the evidence provided by his own eyes. She took the time not only to choose books she thought he might like, but to Charm them to open at his voice, to turn their pages at his command. She considered him; whatever else she has been doing with herself for the past six years, she considered him. It is impossible to comprehend.

He drops his eyes from her face. Takes in her sensible robes, flat shoes. Her hair is pulled away from her face, held off her neck by a clip. Severus cannot surmise anything about her life from the way she presents herself; she could be anyone. A teacher, a reporter, a small businesswoman. A potioneer, even.

"What is it you have been doing with yourself, then?" he wants to say, but doesn't, feeling wrong-footed, rather as he felt when he was a young man and still attempting to join or strike up conversations. He remembers that certain expression, the one on the faces of his fellow students or Death Eaters or colleagues. What, it talks? the expression said, and, with a raised eyebrow and a dismissive flick of the eyes, Why is it talking to us, do you suppose? His mouth turns down in a grimace; he loathes this part of himself.

Granger is gathering the books he's already finished into her arms. A strand of hair has escaped the dubious confines of the clip and drifted into her eyes; she hefts the books against her hip with her right arm and swipes impatiently at the hair with her left. A glint catches Severus' eye, but before he can ask the obvious question she has shifted the stack of books again so that it is cradled in both arms. She smiles at him, tentatively.

"I'll bring more next week, then," she says, and though her voice does not rise at the end of the sentence Severus sees the question in the uncertain set of her brows. He feels his own brows come together incredulously. She thinks he might not allow her back.

"That would be… appreciated," he says.

"Anything you'd like in particular? I don't know that I'll be able to find anything too archaic, I've got a lot of meetings and… family things, but I can do my best with anything else."

He shakes his head, watching her. She's here, she's really here. She's coming back. "No," he says slowly. "Whatever you find is fine."

She nods and smiles, the corners of her mouth turning up a bit more firmly. "Good," she says. "Well… good-bye, sir."

Severus nods. He suddenly feels incapable of speech, or rather, he feels as though what might come out of his mouth would likely be humiliating, along the lines of, Don't leave me.

He is still trying to hold back the words when she Apparates away.


"It's really quite interesting," Hermione tells Ron over breakfast the following week. "The social structure of merpeople is different from ours in so many ways. It's actually more like that of goblins, if you can believe it, with a strong matriarchal-"

Ron sets his coffee mug down on the table with a little more force than necessary. He looks irritated. "It's six-thirty in the morning," he says, and to Hermione's ears his even tone is obviously forced. "Can't you give it a rest just-just for a bit?"

Hermione feels hot from her sternum to the crown of her head. She wraps her hands around her own mug and blinks down into it. She knows Ron isn't exactly enthralled by the details of her work, and he's not really at his best in the mornings anyway, constantly griping about his captain's penchant for early practices, but… Well. It's just as well, then, that she promised Professor Snape she would not reveal his continued existence to anyone; Ron would be bored silly if she tried to talk to him about the fascinating 'lives' of ghosts.

"Sorry," she mutters.

Ron looks uncomfortable; he generally knows when he's being a bit of an arse. He shakes his head and crams a bite of toast into his mouth, then says around it, " 's okay, love."

Hermione wrinkles her nose. "That's repulsive, you know," she says, and can't decide whether she wants to chuckle or sigh when he gives an agreeable nod.


The Cannons are playing in Ireland over the weekend, so Hermione has the house to herself. She cleans on Friday night, muttering to herself as she sends Ron's socks, rancid from spending hours in his disgusting trainers during practices and matches, flying toward the hamper from all corners of the house. She is not much of a housekeeper herself (whenever Molly is coming over, she and Ron always engage in a mildly panicked flurry of cleaning, often resorting to Muggle methods as neither of their household charms are really up to snuff), but at least she doesn't leave her dirty laundry scattered everywhere, thank you very much.

She spends Saturday alternately working on yet another draft of the centaur legislation her boss has promised to take a look at, and making a list of books she thinks Professor Snape might enjoy. Her memories of his office at school are not only of gruesome, pickled things in jars, but also of the haphazard rows of dusty books those jars propped up, but she had never been in his office long enough to look closely at the titles. The books she had chosen last time were a hodge-podge from her own collection; she had simply hoped that at least some of them would truly interest Snape, and figured, rather guiltily, that he must be bored enough to read the others anyway.

So. Hermione taps the end of her quill against her chin in thought. Snape has probably read any and all relevant potions books that had already been published when he was alive, but she can check Flourish and Blotts to see what has been written since his death. And perhaps periodicals, as well; those come out far more frequently than books, and while they are not lengthy enough to last Snape very long they would probably at least be interesting. And other disciplines as well - she can bring an assortment of books that have come out in the last six years, both magical and Muggle, and then she can ask him more specifically next time which subjects interest him most. Perhaps some fiction as well… detective stories? Those would be not only entertaining, but would give Snape's great mind something to solve. Hermione's mouth curls into a faint smile as her quill scratches at the parchment, a neat bulleted list appearing in its wake.


Hermione returns to the shack during her lunch hour the following week to find Snape hovering by the window as though he has been waiting for her. She smiles uncertainly at him as she unpacks a new stack of books from her handbag and arranges them, like the others, around the room, but, unsurprisingly, he does not return the smile.

"Are you finished with the old books, or shall I leave some of them?" she asks finally, at a loss as to what else to say.

Snape shakes his head slowly. "I'm finished," he says. His voice is hoarse, as though he has scarcely used it since Hermione saw him last.

"Okay." A few waves of her wand send the old books sailing, shrunken, into her bag. She looks up at Snape, fiddles with the handbag's delicate straps. "I suppose… I'll let you get to it, then," she says.

Something twitches in Snape's expression, and then he is looking at her with a combination of defiance and desperation in his face. Hermione presses her lips together, wondering, and after a moment she dares to say, "Or - well, I've got a sandwich in my… would you… mind very much if I ate it here? Only, lunch is so dreary anyway in the Ministry cafeteria…"

The excuse sounds flimsy even to her own ears - what on earth could be drearier, after all, than eating lunch in an abandoned shack with a dead man? - and Snape gives her a long, measuring stare before saying, "As you will."

"All right then." Hermione looks around the room, grimaces at the state of it, then gingerly picks a spot on the floor, settles down with her back against the wall, and takes a sandwich out of her bag. It is only when she has partially unwrapped the wax paper that she realizes her faux pax, and looks up at Snape with a horrified expression.

"Professor, I'm so sorry! I wasn't thinking - here, I'll just - I'll put it away -"

Snape, who has drifted over to examine one of the books, head cocked to one side at an angle that fully exposed the wound on his neck, glances at her, brows raised. "Pardon me?"

"The - my sandwich," Hermione says. Stupid, how could she be so stupid? How could she have overlooked something so basic after all the research she's done -

If anything, Snape's brows climb higher into his hairline. "Your sandwich," he repeats.

"Yes," Hermione says, but she is beginning to feel uncertain. Isn't it insensitive to eat in front of ghosts? "I'm sorry, it was very rude of me…"

It takes her a moment to recognize the look on Snape's face as one of amusement. "Rude of you to eat," he says.

I will not be embarrassed for trying to be kind, Hermione thinks firmly. She says, "Sir Nicholas was always offended when we talked about food around him."

"Sir Nicholas is an idiot," Snape says.

Hermione's mouth twitches. "Oh."

Snape's thin lips stretch into the smallest smile Hermione has ever seen before he glances back down at his book again. She takes a bite of sandwich and chews slowly, watching him. He doesn't seem to really be reading, she realizes after a few minutes, his eyes skittering across a line or two before flicking around the room in an agitated fashion, resting everywhere, seemingly, except on her, so she is startled when he says, apparently speaking to a crack in the window, "So. You are employed by the Ministry then, Miss Granger?" Then, with a sudden, pointed glance at her left hand he sneers, "Or should I say, Mrs. Weasley?"

"It's Ms. Granger," Hermione says, taken aback. And then, though he certainly has not asked for an explanation, she adds, "My parents got… lost, after the war. I didn't want… I wanted them to be able to find me easily if they ever came back, so I kept my name."

Snape looks at her. "Lost…?"

Hermione shifts, glancing away from him. "I modified their memories and sent them to Australia after Sixth Year, before Harry and Ron and I went into hiding. Then, when everything was over…" She will not cry, she will not. It has been more than six years. She will not cry.

"When everything was over," she repeats after several seconds, "I went to Australia to look for them. I wasn't sure… I think I could have restored their memories, but I was afraid…" She hitches a shoulder, cutting a look at Snape from under her fringe. He looks back at her, the crease between his brows cutting deeply. "Well, it was a moot point anyway. I couldn't find them. I have… no idea where they are, or even if they're still alive."

"Ah." Snape looks uncomfortable, but he doesn't offer any false apologies, for which Hermione is absurdly grateful. That is, until he adds, "You know the chances of their memories returning properly on their own are slim to none."

Her lips tighten. "Quite aware of that," she says. "Thank you."


Severus is frantic for nearly the entirety of the following week, certain Granger will not be returning. Once again, he thinks bitterly, he has managed to drive away the only person who wants to help him. He feels despair twist at insides that are no longer there, and he clenches his eyes shut against the image of Lily, young and lovely and hurt by his angry words. Thoughts of Lily have cropped up with exhausting regularity since his death, rather as though it is she who is doing the haunting, but they are still pale things compared to the bright, hot thoughts he carried with him constantly when he was alive. They ache rather than sting.

But this, this is like reliving the worst parts of his life. Granger's kindness is as inexplicable as Lily's friendship was, and now it, too, is likely gone for good. Alone again, and again, it is all his own bloody fault.


Severus is as near a state of sleep as he seems able to achieve in his incorporeal form, a sort of don't-give-a-fuck catatonia. He has been hovering horizontally above the mattress in the upstairs bedroom, staring up at the ceiling where a long, faded watermark has begun to blur before his unfocussed eyes.

A call from downstairs startles him out of his stupor. "Professor? Professor Snape? Are you here?"

It's her. Severus blinks to clear his vision and sinks through the mattress, through the floor, before he can muster so much as a single coherent thought.

Granger looks startled by his sudden appearance, but she recovers quickly. "I brought you more books," she says, not meeting Severus' eyes. "I got some from the library… how are you enjoying the detective stories?"

Severus shakes his head. "Ah… very much," he hazards, because he assumes he will enjoy them when he finally reads them. Believing that Granger would not be coming back, he has read very little this week, trying to ration reading material that might, after all, have to last him for eternity. But he does not tell her this.

"Good," she says, "because I brought some more." She straightens and shoves her hands in her pockets, looking uncomfortable.

Severus feels a ridiculous sort of terror. "Thank you," he manages, and then, before his nerve vanishes - pathetic, pathetic! - "You never did tell me what you are doing working for the Ministry."


Snape's unexpected question is delivered in a rush that gives the impression he has run a gauntlet, and his face, full of contradictory lines that make him appear both hesitant and fearsome, makes it apparent that he has come out the other side uncertain whether or not he has triumphed. Expressing interest in others' lives is a matter of basic politeness but Snape makes it look like something frightening. He is, Hermione realizes, quite hopeless when it comes to simple human interactions.

It takes a moment for her to get her voice to work properly. "Um, well, I'm working at the bottom-of-the-bottom in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures," she says, adding, "It's a dreadful name, of course."

She pauses then for a moment to let him respond. He doesn't, and she has to take a deep breath before continuing, feeling as though she is giving an oral report to a particularly disinterested audience.

"'Regulation and Control,' for heaven's sake. It's barbaric; these are sentient beings just like we are but there's this whole 'magic is might' mentality that doesn't even make sense, you know, as they're magical, too - it says it in the bloody name! Which ought to be the first thing to go, I think. After all, if people hear I work for, say, the Department for Equality for all Magical Creatures, it sets a very different tone as far as the work the department does than -"

"All magical creatures?"

Caught off-guard by the interruption, Hermione's next words catch in her throat, resulting in an unattractive gurgle. "Pardon, sir?"

"You cannot possibly mean to say all magical creatures ought to be equal according to Wizarding society," Snape says.

Hermione eyes him. "Well… yes."

He examines the wisps of his fingernails. "Flobberworms?"

She feels a flush creep up her neck. "Self-aware magical creatures, then."

That bloody eyebrow. "Dementors?" And then, before she can even begin to formulate a response: "You're wasting your time in the Ministry, anyway. It is a bureaucracy, rife with corruption. There is no point in discussing it further."

Well, then.


Granger comes to the shack at least once a week after that, generally during her lunch hour, though once or twice she arrives in the evening or at the weekend, explaining, at Severus' inquiring look, that Ron has a late practice or is out of town for a match. It seems Mr. Weasley has not grown up since Severus saw him last, that he still thinks tossing Quaffles around is the best way he can make a contribution to society.

Then again, Severus thinks disparagingly, he is probably right, at that.

Some days they sit silently but for the occasional murmured renewal of Granger's Warming Charms - the shack is, Severus understands from the way she shivers, damp and chilly - until Granger says, exasperated, that they must have some conversation, that it is bizarre beyond reason to sit silently like this while Severus floats tight-lipped above her.

Other days, like today, she simply begins talking the moment she walks into the shack and seems incapable of stopping. Severus wonders if perhaps she is as starved for conversation as he is, and though the thought troubles him he still prefers these days, when he has only to answer her questions rather than struggle for something to say himself, to the stilted quiet of the others.

Today she asks whether ghosts feel the passage of time as humans do; and if they feel like the same people they were when they were alive; and how far from the shack itself Severus is able to roam. "I have research to do," she says when she stands, brushing dust from her trousers. She leaves wearing an air of distraction, mumbling to herself about the longevity of cleaning charms.


Hermione returns to the shack the following week, armed with Mrs. Weasley's well-worn book of household spells. It is the sort of magic that Hermione has always secretly disdained, but as she aims her wand at the bloodstained floorboards and watches the rusty color leech away, she feels ashamed of her own snobbishness. It is useful work, she supposes as she looks around her, the keeping of a tidy home. It does wonders for one's mental state.

Snape has said nothing since she arrived beyond an incredulous, "What in blazes do you think you're about?" when she breezed past him through the door, threw off her cloak, rolled up her sleeves, and began divesting the corners of their cobwebs with vicious, satisfying flicks of her wand. Now, he floats down from the corner in which he had been perching, watching her work through narrowed eyes, and looks about him at the walls, scrubbed clean of dirt, the tattered wallpaper mended; the floor, scoured and polished; the curtains, cleaned and pinned back from the windows, which are free of grime, their cracked panes repaired. There is much more light, now, streaming through the clear glass in the spaces between the boards, reflecting off the snow outside. The room is - almost - cheerful.

"Better, sir?" Hermione says. She feels unaccountably nervous, as though she has handed him a potion that she knows she brewed perfectly, but which he is sure to find lacking in some way.

There is a moment of silence, and then Snape says, "Perhaps." And then, more quietly, "A great deal better."

She cannot stop the grin that stretches her mouth, but she does manage to keep her tone relatively even when she says, "You're very welcome, sir."


Severus has given up trying to mark the passage of time. Though it would be easier these days, what with Granger's visits giving structure to his otherwise formless existence, he finds that he no longer cares about time in the long-term sense. It is enough to know, when she walks in the door again, that at least a few days have passed, and that in another few days she will walk through the door again.


And then something happens that forces him to begin counting days again: Granger doesn't come for, as best he can tell, nearly four weeks. Severus runs out of books with which to distract himself, her latest offerings lying dusty where she left them, and his thoughts dart between fear that something has happened to her and dread of the empty days and weeks and years stretching endlessly before him. His helplessness is shameful, and mortifying, though it ought not to have been unexpected. What a fool he is, not to have noticed the creeping dependency.

When she returns at last, she looks pale and too thin, with hollows below her cheekbones that shouldn't be there, and she is walking very carefully, picking her way with unusual slowness across the dewey ground. Severus watches her from the window, his non-existent heart setting up its phantom pounding in the hollow space where it once lay, and is determined that she will not know how much her absence frightened him.

"Are you quite all right?" he asks the moment she steps foot in the shack. She turns to look at him, squinting slightly, and Severus realizes it must be difficult to see him with sunlight streaming through his form. He drifts away from the window.

"I-yes," she says. "Thanks for asking." He presses the point, though self-preservation is screaming at him to shut up, shut up, man, for the love of Merlin -

"You are not injured?" Her movements up the hill were too deliberate, nothing like her usual impatient strides.

"Nooo," she says, and pauses, looking faintly embarrassed. "I've been… sick, I guess. I'm sorry I couldn't get a message to you, I thought you wouldn't want me to tell anyone else you were here and of course owls can't deliver letters to ghosts."

Severus closes his eyes, then opens them again. "I am… pleased that your illness has passed."

"For the time being, at least," she mutters, and then sighs. "I might as well tell you - you'll find out soon enough anyway, seeing as you're merely dead, not blind." She squares her narrow shoulders. "I'm - I'm pregnant. I've had horrible morning sickness - I couldn't even go in to work."

"You can't be pregnant," Severus says. "You're far too young." He wants to yank the words back the moment they escape this lips - they are irrelevant, not to mention absurd. Granger huffs a laugh.

"I'm not a student any longer, Professor," she says. "Haven't been for years, in fact."

If ghosts could blush, Severus would be covered, head to toe. "Quite," he says, voice clipped with embarrassment. He eyes her. She must be several years older than Lily… was… when she married James Potter and bore his child.

"Indeed," he says, and makes a noise as though he is clearing his throat of a non-existent blockage. "In which case, I believe congratulations are in order."

He hopes his voice does not sound as dubious to her ears as it does to his own.


Visiting Snape becomes more and more arduous as Hermione's pregnancy progresses, Apparition being unsafe for expectant women. Ron, too, becomes more attentive to her whereabouts, worrying about her in a way that is at once touching and irritating, as though pregnancy has stripped her of all capability in his eyes. She takes to seeing Snape on Sunday mornings, when Ron is generally still sleeping off the effects of too much alcohol after a Saturday night spent either celebrating or commiserating with his teammates, depending on how the afternoon's match had gone. She leaves Ron a note that is she out walking or running errands, gathers her latest offerings for Snape into her beaded handbag, and Floos to the Hog's Head, making her increasingly slow and uncomfortable way from there up to the Shrieking Shack.

Hermione is tired all the time, it seems, and it shows in her reflection, which she has taken to avoiding whenever possible. The morning sickness ended with the first trimester, thank goodness, but between work - she is determined not to give her supervisor any reason to think pregnancy, or indeed motherhood, will lessen Hermione's devotion to her job - and trying to keep the house at least somewhat livable despite Ron's best efforts, and keeping up with Harry and Ginny and the rest of the Weasleys, and the baby's rolls and jabs and her own bitter fear keeping her from sleeping… Well, she is tired. All the time.

She has considered cutting back on her visits with Snape, but finds the thought distressing. She doesn't know what he does when she isn't there, beyond reading the books she leaves for him. When he was her teacher she never considered him having feelings, really, but now his loneliness is palpable. And of course, she - along with the rest of Wizarding Britain, thanks to Harry's efforts to champion Snape's memory, not that she will ever tell Snape about that - knows about Lily Potter. Knows that he is - was - is - a person capable of friendship, and heartbreak, and love. And besides, weird as it is, Hermione would miss Snape if she didn't come see him. She knows this for certain, because she was surprised by how much she missed him for those few weeks when she was laid up in bed with a bowl strategically ready at her elbow.


On the Sunday before Christmas, Hermione hefts Snape's gift into her arms and Floos to Hogsmeade. It is snowing, but only a little, delicate flakes brushing her cheeks and mostly melting when they land on the ground, making the path to the shack slightly slick. Hermione navigates it with care, and has to shift the package so that she is supporting it against her belly while she opens the shack's front door.

Snape is waiting for her, as is usual these days, his hands clasped behind his back. He surges toward her when he sees her burden, hands held out as though he means to take it from her; then he obviously recollects himself and a look akin to self-loathing crosses his face, and Hermione finds herself wanting nothing more than to reach out and smooth it away.

"Happy Christmas!" she says, forcefully cheerful, and bends at the knees to set the package on the floor.

"Is it Christmas?" Snape says, and then, "Is that for…" He shakes his head so hard it looks like he is trying to shake some unwanted thought away.

"You," Hermione says.

Snape's expression would be funny - mouth slack, eyes bulging - were it not for his obvious stupefaction. "I," he says, and makes a choked sound. He doesn't say anything else.

"Oh," she says, and blinks for a moment, her eyes aching, before injecting cheer into her voice once more. "Well then, let me open it for you!" She wrapped the package last night in the same striped paper in which she wrapped Ron and Harry's and the rest of the Weasleys' presents, feeling a little silly as she knew Snape could not open it himself but wanting some element of surprise. She uses her wand to slit the Spell-o-tape and gently peels away the paper.


It's a phonograph, of the Wizarding variety.

"See," Granger says with her customary enthusiasm while Severus floats beside her, staring, "here, I've got records…" She pulls them from her handbag and enlarges them with a flick of her wand.

"I didn't think I ought to shrink the player, it seemed a bit too delicate," she explains as she stacks the records one above the other. There are a lot of them, both Wizarding and Muggle; Severus recognizes Mozart and The Beatles, as well as The Unforgivables, a magical band that was popular when Severus was a student. Granger does something complicated with her wand and the records levitate upwards to hover above the phonograph.

"Next record," she says, and the lowest record in the stack drops into place. She proceeds to demonstrate the commands for getting a record to play, turning it over, and returning it to the top of the stack so the next record can have its turn.

"I know Latin's traditional for incantations, but I just didn't have time to come up with the proper translations," she says, almost apologetically. She looks up at Severus from her position crouched on the floor in front of the phonograph; the pose emphasizes the bulge of her belly where it rests against her thighs, and Severus looks away, embarrassed.

"Is it all right?" she asks, and the vulnerability in her voice forces him to look back at her, bewildered and appalled. "It was rather like the books, I wasn't sure of your taste in music so I included a bit of… well, not everything, but a lot."

"I like… a lot," he says, and does not have time to begin cursing himself for how stupid he sounds before her smile, wide and brilliant, wipes all other thoughts from his head.


One day, she can't help it. The weight of the baby is pressing upward against her lungs; her back aches and it is barely eight o'clock. The night before she had been kept awake by the irritating, intermittent tightening of Braxton-Hicks contractions. Stress, the healer said when Hermione complained about them. Avoid stress, and drink plenty of water.

She is consuming water by the liter, but the other directive is harder to obey.

She says, "I'm terrified I'm going to be a bad mother."

Snape gives her a long, measuring look, and says nothing, which Hermione decides to take as an invitation to continue, even if he probably didn't mean it that way.

"I get caught up in my work. I'm selfish - Ron's always complaining about it, and I know he's right in some ways, but at least he's a grown man and can… But a baby. A baby can't understand that if I forget to make dinner, it's just because I got lost in my book and not because I don't care." She presses her palms to her belly. "And even though Ron pretends he's stupid in the kitchen, he can make himself a sandwich if he's hungry, but a baby can't." She takes one hand off her belly and holds it flat against her sternum, struggling to calm her panicked breathing.

Snape is quiet for so long that Hermione starts to wonder if perhaps he has drifted away. She can't look at him, can't bear to see the derisive expression she is certain waits for her on his face.

Then he says, "That you are aware of this… potential shortcoming bodes well for your overcoming it." He lifts a hand, lets it hang oddly in mid-air for a moment, then drops it back down to his side. "As a student, you were diligent to a fault. Apply that diligence to the task of motherhood and I've no doubt your fears will prove to be unfounded."

Hermione has heaved her bulk up off the floor and taken a step toward him before she remembers that ghosts cannot be hugged.


They have discussed the fact that Hermione will be unlikely to be able to come to the shack for a time after the baby's birth. It was a strange, surreal conversation; Snape looked unhappy, but unsurprised, and Hermione tried not to feel guilty, leaving as many books behind with him as the shack's floor would hold, lined up one directly beside another.

"Good luck," he said, awkward and strangely sweet, just before she descended the hill to the village.

She worries about him in the days leading up to labor, when she has little to do but think and time her frustratingly infrequent contractions. And then the intensity of the birth and its aftermath make her forget everything else for awhile, everything but Rose, sweet, exhausting, demanding Rose.


Severus keeps music playing almost constantly, relishing the sound in the otherwise silent shack, and sometimes when his own thoughts become too clamorous he barks the command to raise the volume until the swell of music drowns out anything else that might fill his head.

He thinks too much, these days, rationing his reading material in case Granger takes longer to return than they both expected. Severus has had little reason to think about childbirth in the past but knows, in an academic sort of way, that the process and subsequent recovery can, for some women, be arduous. He tries not to think that perhaps she might not return at all - either by choice or because, as he understands, sometimes childbirth can go dreadfully wrong.

He also tries not to think about what will become of him if - no, when, for whether she succumbs today or tomorrow or one hundred years from now, Granger is, without a doubt, going to die and leave him someday - Granger doesn't come back. Immortality is not something Severus ever aspired to - it was, in fact, one of the Dark Lord's hang-ups that he found quite ridiculous - and it is disturbing to think he may have achieved it without meaning to. His panic threatens to envelop him, and he tells the music to play even more loudly.

It is an almost welcome distraction when the first group of Hogwarts students comes upon the shack during a Hogsmeade weekend. They send snowballs thumping against the windows, slush sliding down the panes, and dare one another to get closer. Feeling reckless, he amuses himself by making ghostly noises, when one is bold enough to touch the doorknob.


She returns when the snow is just beginning to melt. Severus is vaguely aware of the pop of Apparition above the gentle undulations of Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D, a song he dismissed in life for its ubiquity but which, in death, he finds himself turning to more and more often because it reminds him, in as physical a way as he is capable of being reminded these days, of the rhythm of the human heartbeat. For a moment, he thinks the students are back; then the door opens and she is standing there in shapeless robes and her cloak around her shoulders and someone very small cradled in a sling against her chest.

"Hello," she says, and smiles a little.

"Hello," Severus says, and then, "Is that…?"

Granger's lips twitch a bit, perhaps at the obviousness of the question, but she steps forward, turning so that Severus can see a round little face below a fluff of reddish hair.

"Her name is Rose," Granger says, unasked. She is swaying gently where she stands. "Isn't she gorgeous?" Then she laughs quietly, flicking an embarrassed glance up to Severus' face and down again. "Sorry. I used to hate it when new parents asked me that because new babies usually aren't."

Severus cannot say with any honesty that the baby, who is sleeping with one miniscule fist curled alongside its - her - chin, is very attractive, but for a moment she makes him imagine he feels breathless, in the old human way he remembers.


Hermione has always been good at juggling her many projects, but finds that motherhood is something else altogether. Rose cannot be juggled; Rose refuses to be taken care of on a convenient schedule. Yet Hermione has discovered that Snape was right - her fears about motherhood have not become reality, largely because Hermione had not counted on just how consuming thoughts of Rose would be. Mrs. Weasley has assured her that the intensity will lessen as Rose grows and gains independence - "Though it will not, of course, ever be quite gone, dear, depend upon that. She'll never be too far from your mind."

It does become more difficult to visit Snape, however, once she returns to work. She spends her lunch hours at the Burrow, now, nursing Rose and letting Mrs. Weasley feed her nourishing meals because she's generally too knackered by the end of the day to manage to put together anything much for dinner, and Ron's efforts, while filling, are rarely nutritious. And then Ron is making an effort to be home more, only staying at the pub for a single pint after matches, so he is up at a decent hour the next morning. Hermione finds herself both touched by his obvious devotion to Rose - no matter how annoyed Hermione is with him, something loosens inside of her whenever she comes upon him rocking their daughter, singing the nonsensical, Wizarding lullabies that Mrs. Weasley must once have sung to him - and resentful that she has been reduced to quick Apparations to the Shrieking Shack after work once a week or so. The resentment simmers around the base of her skull, making her restless and snappish, and then she feels guilty because what sort of wife is she to wish her husband would spend more time away from his family?

She only stays at the shack for five or ten minutes at a time, time enough to give Snape some new books and music and have a brief chat that mostly consists of her prattling on in a rushed sort of way and him giving monosyllabic responses. She stopped asking how Snape's week was after he snapped at her, once, that "Nothing bloody happens to me, Granger!" in a tone that is both embarrassed and slightly self-pitying.

She is irritated with Snape, too, sometimes, irritated by his clear helplessness when, in life, that was the last word she would ever have associated with him. It is exhausting, this charade, trying to fit him into her life, which already feels full to bursting with work and Rose and Ron and, occasionally, sleep, and there are times that she wishes he wasn't so dependent on her. And then she feels, yet again, horribly guilty because - well, what else is he going to do? What else can she do? She can't leave him alone there, she can't.

Hermione's last thought most nights before she tumbles to sleep is that things will get easier, eventually. They must.


Granger comes to see him one morning, appearing unexpectedly outside the window through which Severus had been gazing blankly. She stumbles a bit on the landing of her Apparition, as if she is drunk or very tired, and shakes her head, looking frustrated, before knocking briefly and entering.

Severus watches, bemused, as she stomps into the room and settles with her back against the wall. She is clutching a thermos full of something that steams gently, and she closes her eyes when she sips from it.

"What day is today?" Severus asks at length, and Hermione looks at him.

"Saturday," Granger says. She closes her eyes and takes another sip from her thermos. "Ron's at a match near Edinburgh. I dropped Rose at Harry and Ginny's for a bit; you'd think they'd have their hands full enough as it is but they offered and…" She trails off.

Severus cocks his head. "What, pray tell, have the Potters got their hands full of?"

She sighs. "Well, James of course," she says, and Severus suppresses a disgusted noise at the mention of Potter's unimaginatively-named offspring. "And Ginny's pregnant again, and Harry's been run off his feet lately at the Auror office." She sips again. "But they don't seem overwhelmed at all. They were more than happy to take Rose." This last is said with far more bitterness than the words themselves seem to warrant, and Severus raises an eyebrow.

Granger sees the gesture and pulls a face. "All right, yes, I'm overwhelmed," she says.

"I hadn't noticed."

"Har-har." Another sip, lashes sweeping the shadows under her eyes. There is a moment of silence, not uncomfortable but unusual for her, and Severus wonders what he is meant to say. She hasn't even brought any books - she was here only two days before, after all, and it has been… a long while, it seems, since she has visited twice in one week. It seems strange to him, that she has come here, of all places, when she is in such a mood, and without the excuse of books between them.

"Why do you think you're still here?" she asks abruptly without opening her eyes. Severus freezes, stares at her.

"I… beg your pardon?" "I'm sorry," she says. "I'm sure it's a rude question, and you don't have to answer, obviously, but I've wondered since I first saw you and I can't… I can't work it out." Her eyes do open then, but she focuses them on Severus' feet rather than his face. "All the research I've done, well, it suggests unfinished business and I thought at first that maybe Harry… But you know, now, that Harry's alive, that you succeeded, and yet you're still…" She shrugs. The gesture is apologetic, but her eyes are bright and focused.

For a moment, Severus is surprised to realize that he is not offended by her words. But he senses, somehow, that she does not actually wish him gone. Hers is a curiosity of the frustrated intellectual sort, tinged, he suspects uncomfortably, with a genuine concern for him.

"I don't have an answer," he says after a pause. "It is a question that has plagued me greatly."

"Harry said… Harry said he had a choice. When he died. Whether to come back or - go on." She sounds nervous, as she often does on the rare occasions she brings up Potter's name to him.

Severus tips his head back and gazes at the ceiling. "Yes. Well. As with so many other things associated with Mr. Potter, his death was… special." He feels his mouth twist and looks back at Hermione. "I did not have a choice about dying," he says.

She looks flustered. "I'm sorry, I -"

"However," Severus interrupts her, "I believe I did have a choice to either 'go on,' as you put it, or return to this plane as I am now." His lips purse as he considers how to explain to her something that he, after years of turning it over in his mind, has only begun to comprehend, himself. "It… was not a conscious decision, you understand, and it was made in an instant. There was no time to consider all the repercussions either way."

He remembers dimly, as though recalling a long-ago dream, sensing that he was approaching something, hurtling toward it really, not the proverbial white light of Muggle lore but something he couldn't quite grasp with his senses, something vast and warm and terrifying. And he remembers recoiling from it, struggling, until he came to himself again in the shack, looking down at his empty body and feeling a phantom nausea that he did not have the physical ability to expel.

Granger is silent, watching him. Her face is still, but her fingers twist together.

"I have thought about this a great deal," Severus says. He longs to take in a deep breath, but settles instead for closing his eyes for a moment. Then he says, "I don't suppose there is any chance that Potter did not tell you about my… history with his mother?"

"Ah, no," Granger says. "No chance, that is." She looks… cagey, Severus thinks. For just a minute, but long enough to make him wonder what she isn't saying.

"Right. Well. I never thought otherwise." I never thought better of the selfish brat. "In that case, I expect you understand why I might have been… less than eager to see Lily again, thinking, as I did at the time, that I had only just sent her son to his own death." He is grateful that he did not stumble over Lily's name; it slipped out as easily as any other word.

"Okay." Granger frowns. "But… well, I mean, again - now you know Harry's alive. He's fine. Thriving, even, for goodness' sake. So…"

"I. Don't. Know, do I?" Severus says between teeth that ache to be properly gritted. He swishes around in mid-air, the closest he can come to pacing these days. "Do you really think that if I'd sussed out a way to get out of this - this - hellhole, I wouldn't have taken it?" He whirls again and looms over her, carefully avoiding the creeping realization that even knowing Potter's fate thus far, he has no desire to meet Lily again - has no desire to meet with anyone again, really, for there are none among the dead with whom he could with any honesty have claimed friendship. "Why are you asking this now, anyway? After - after all this time?"

She looks stung for a moment. "I watched you die," she says finally, and her voice is brittle as ancient parchment. Severus looks at her, at the way her hair curls madly in the humid air, at her shapeless robes and the pouches of exhaustion under her eyes, and doesn't know what to say in response. So:

"I know," he says.

Granger holds his gaze, as still as if motion might make her shatter, and when she speaks her lips hardly move at all.

"I'm so sorry," she says.

Severus shakes his head very slowly.

"Not your fault."


"Caldiff rejected my proposal for the pixie legislation again," Hermione says the moment Ron gets home from practice. She is stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce, Rose perched on her hip, the offending legislation scattered across the kitchen table. "I don't know what to do. He refused to even read it, and I spent weeks researching and tromping about in the woods trying to find some bloody pixies to interview -"

"You could let me get all the way through the door before bombarding me with this, love," Ron says. He stoops to peck Rose's cheek.

"Yeah, sorry, sorry." Hermione stirs the pot a little too hard and sauce splatters across the stovetop. "It's just so frustrating - Davies and MacDougal have their half-arsed ideas approved all the time, but anything that's thoroughly researched he doesn't have time for -" She cuts herself off, seeing the look of patiently-suppressed irritation on Ron's face. "Sorry," she says again. "Anyway, how was your day?"


She brings the proposal with her the next time she visits Snape, along with a framed print she found in a jumble shop in Diagon Alley, a torn-out page from an old text with botanical drawings of Potions ingredients native to the North of England. The frame is cheap and warped, but the print is in good condition, the drawings precise and clearly labeled. She hangs it near the staircase, where there is good light from the window.

"I thought the place could do with a bit of cheer," she says, and the corners of Snape's lips twitch as he studies the illustrations.

"Indeed. It is… an accurate depiction."

Hermione smiles. "I thought so, too." Unconsciously, she glances down at the bunch of parchment in her hands, and Snape raises one brow expectantly.

"And what is that?"

"Oh," she says, feeling all at once awkward. "It's a proposal I drafted for work. My boss won't even look at it - says it's too wordy and convoluted." Her fingers clench around the parchments. "He's a bit of an idiot. Or at least lazy."

"Most people are," Snape says mildly. "Though I do recall your essays being a bit more… involved than was actually called for. Tangential, even." The eyebrow again, accompanied by an amused tilt to one side of his mouth.

Hermione feels herself flush. She has all but forgotten Snape-the-teacher and how she despised him for his pettiness and the way he dismissed her questions and the extra effort she put into her assignments. The reminder is unwelcome.

"What's so wrong with expanding upon a topic?" she demands, her voice more shrill than she meant it to be.

Snape chuckles darkly. "Become a teacher, and you'll understand." At her irritated look, he says, "It takes a great deal of time to mark essays, even when one's students keep to the required length. That is in addition, of course, to actually teaching classes, patrolling the corridors, administering detentions, and creating lessons plans." He crosses his arms in front of his chest. "I used to dread your essays, Granger. They took at least three times longer to grade properly than any of your classmates'."

Hermione feels tears of humiliation spring to her eyes. "Fine. Well. That's… Yeah." She shakes her head. "I just - I get so interested in a topic, and then everything seems so important." She lifts her chin defiantly. "Details are important. They add nuance and - and - balance, I guess. How can the Wizengamot make an informed decision regarding the destruction of pixie habitat without understanding the reasons behind the pixies' choice to live in specific areas?"

"And no doubt the history of each race of pixies from Cornwall to the Isle of Skye," Snape says dryly. "Granger… it isn't that details are unimportant. It is that there is a time and place for them." A pause, and then he says, "If you've the time and inclination, I could give you pointers from the point of view of a burnt-out marker of papers." There is a sardonic twist to his lips, and he spreads his hands wide. "I am, I find, quite at my leisure."


When Granger bursts into the shack one afternoon with a triumphant grin stretched across her face, Severus cannot help but smile back, bewildered though he is. And when she announces that her boss has agreed to put her proposed legislation before the Wizengamot during their next session, he finds that his smile grows wider, a feeling like satisfaction settling into the empty space inside his chest.


It isn't really cheating, of course. Hermione finds this thought flitting through her mind more and more frequently of late. It crops up at the most inconvenient times: when she is meeting with a goblin liaison for work; when she and Molly are sitting in the Burrow's kitchen, drinking tea and watching Rose play on the floor with Ginny's old dolls; when Ron half-wakes in the night to her restless movements and stills her with an arm thrown heavily across her middle, his fingers stroking her side with sleepy, fumbling gentleness. The solidity of him beside her reassures Hermione. There is nothing solid - nothing physical, that is - about Snape's presence in her life, after all. So no, it isn't really cheating.

But the guilt is wearing, sometimes, nevertheless. It's stupid, really; mostly, she is able to justify her deception by reminding herself of her promise to Snape to never tell anyone about him. And Ron is not always the most discreet person, particularly after a few pints with his Quidditch mates, some of whom were Snape's students. So really, she has no choice but to keep quiet. Usually she can get away with simply not mentioning where she spends her lunch hour - why would Ron need to know that, anyway, under normal circumstances? - but once in awhile she is forced to fib a bit, make vague references to her research, and then it all feels… wrong. Odd. Necessary, but odd.


Time passes with a blurred fluidity. Granger is nearly gleeful when she informs him, one afternoon, that Potter has named his newborn son, in part, after Severus, who is vociferous in his condemnation of the "Savior's" stupidity. The unfortunate child's other namesake holds his peace, smugly, from his floorboard.

"The idiot has named his son after two madmen," Severus says, disgusted.

"You're not mad," Granger says.

"Am I not? I was certainly tending in that direction." A pause. "Until… you."

She has no reply to that bit of inarticulation, though the tip of her left ear, visible through the hair she has tucked around it, glows rather pink.

Her own second child is born several years after the first, and Severus endures, once again, her long absence after the boy's birth. She brings him with her, as she did her daughter when she was first born, and Severus sees with a jolt of something strange and possessive that the baby bears none of his sister's resemblance to the Weasley clan. His head is covered with a close cap of brown curls, and his mouth is shaped precisely like his mother's.


A/N: I was completely remiss in the last chapter in not sending out a huge thank-you to my beta, Ivy Amelia, for her help with this story. She took time out of her very busy schedule to look it over, even though this is not the story she signed on to edit!

The last part should be posted sometime next week.