A/N: The second-to-last chapter. You may understand now why I've put off posting for so long.

Chapter Twenty Six will be posted tonight, and we will be finished.

Take a deep breath...

Chapter Twenty-Five

Before I Sleep

Hermione Granger and Severus Snape never married, nor did they have any children. It was not a deliberate thing on either part — rather, the habit of either action or inaction was difficult to alter, whether it was breaking routine to arrange a license and a small town hall wedding, or finally shaking off the steady drip-drip of hormones into Hermione's fragile reproductive system. They did talk about it, and they did decide to try at some point (or rather, not not try), and attempted to reject disappointment when result after result told them what they already knew, and what they would have hated to hear from anyone else: it was not to be.

But it wasn't. Not for them. Hermione was not Lily and Severus was not just some Muggle husband. Children to be had here would be children to leave behind when, if, the world they had once known was to ever come to pass again. Perhaps their bodies were more assertive where their brains were not, Hermione often thought, but she couldn't decide whether to be resentful or grateful.

"I never wanted them anyway," Severus said to the wall the night of her thirty-eighth birthday. He was trying hard not to sulk but was no longer very good at stowing his emotions somewhere Hermione couldn't see. The streetlight outside — it had finally been fixed — still managed to leech through the bedroom curtains, glimmering off the fine strands of grey in his hair.

"I want them, someday," Hermione said, knowing it was a stupid thing for a woman near-forty to say. "Not now."

With Ron, she thought, but she wouldn't need to say it out loud. They never talked about it, the idea that she might have another life after this, another chance.

Another life that Snape had already departed.

"You're enough," she said in a rare show of affection, and pressed her lips to his shoulder.

"Mmph," he grunted, but sounded slightly more pleased as he rolled onto his back and finally went to sleep. She held the black-stone pendent, always faintly warm, clutched tight in the palm of her hand.

"Maybe today?" Snape would tease her in happier times, as he left for work each morning, tie tight around his neck, shirt starched half-way to standing up on its own.

"Maybe, Professor," Hermione teased back, and kissed the sharp edge of his cheekbone.

He hated romance, hated gushing, but he would find a way to show his gratitude each evening when he returned home. Chocolates (Hermione had a fondness for salted caramel). A book to fill the new shelves they'd installed in the sitting room. A leaflet for double-glazed windows.

"You do know that all I want to hear," Hermione had told him, "is that I am always right."

He had tried hard not to smirk then, and that was enough — she knew that even if he didn't say the words aloud, he had as good as admitted them. On multiple occasions.

Being right only seemed to grow sweeter as she grew older. The deluge of e-mails that flooded Snape's inbox until he finally gave in and applied for the full university scholarship for ex-offenders — and won it. Her pressing him to apply for a teaching position at the secondary school and college in town. He hadn't got it — "I'm afraid for child protection reasons" blah blah blah — but they'd offered him something sweeter instead. A research job, and one that didn't involve teaching idiot children.

He had his own moments, as well. The tiniest seconds that she looked at him begrudgingly, her face tight at his smug expression. Never mean, but always gloating.

He was wearing it the minute he bent down over her shoulder, looking at the computer screen at the sales figures for the third children's book she'd written. ("Plagiarised," Hermione had corrected him. "The original author just doesn't exist in this world to sue me."

"There are creative differences," he had replied. "And the original author didn't have the great illustrations of the late Dean Thomas.").

"Not bad," Snape intoned, his nail moving down the spreadsheet, as if to flick punctuation marks from lines of numbers.

"It's not enough to live on," Hermione had sighed.

"No," Snape agreed. His breath rustled her hair. "But surely enough to get us by until you change your mind."

Years passed so quickly in the Muggle world. Hermione remembered every moment seeming so much more agonisingly slow when she was at school, either St Anthony's or Hogwarts. Perhaps it seemed even longer, remembering two parallel lives, twice as much stuffed into a narrow stretch of eighteen years. But surely it wasn't meant to move as quickly as this. Surely her parents weren't meant to retire, settle up the house in London and spend the rest of their sentient years combing beaches in Dorset. Surely Crookshanks should have been immortal, not live to a rotund age of twenty-two before she, for all it looked like, actually ate herself to death. How one governmental election seemed barely over before they were already campaigning for the next, leaflet after leaflet stuffed through the postal flap and cascading onto the wooden floor, as though anyone in Spinner's End would ever vote for anyone other than Labour.

She took the necklace off every once in a while. Panicked, wondering if that was what was making time speed by unchecked, if its sole purpose was to rush her on to a quicker death. It would sit for weeks in the wooden box on the bedside table before Hermione, worried that the little rotting house would be burgled (as though it ever looked a place desirable to thieves), fastened it quickly around her neck with an apology for ever having abandoned it.

Snape tried to wear it once, in the beginning, coiled in his jacket like a pocket watch, but only shuddered and shoved it back her way, explaining, "I don't like it. It reminds me that there's nothing there. Not for me."

Always implying, never saying, You're here, with me.

He did not touch it again.

Surely it was selfish to continue. Surely it was cruel to keep going in this wrong world, this tilted world, with the people walking about as though they weren't meant to exist, for lives to carry on with purpose, only to snuff them out at the pinnacle, at the prime.

For all the joking, the jibing, Snape knew Hermione was terrified.

"What if I'm wrong?" she always said, fighting back tears.

"You'll know when you're right," he always replied.

When? Hermione thought. Every birthday, every holiday, every loss. When will it be right?

Times of illness were the hardest, especially the creeping, angry, lingering ones that plucked at bones, lungs, heart, eyes. Made breathing painful, made living worse. Most especially when they happened to Snape.

"Let me die," he said on more than one occasion, ever dramatic, as he shivered in their bed and soaked the sheets with sweat.

"Don't be an idiot," she always replied.

Except once.

It was going to happen eventually as their lives grew on, he especially being so much older than she. She had tried to ignore it, tried to push aside the fact that she was only in her forties when his bones began to creak, his lungs began to crackle, the old house finally getting to him, wanting to claim another life.

"Maybe we should move," Hermione had said on more than one occasion, but both of them knew she didn't mean it. The house was a part of them now. Moving would be another revelation entirely, another acceptance — just like the not-not trying for children — that perhaps they might stay after all.

It was too late now. The curtain was fluttering, closing. They had had a good life. A long one. They so often refused to say it but they loved each other. They both knew, even for the lack of words. It was the looks, the affection, the fact that they could live so long under the same roof, encourage each other in word and deed, cling so close to each other at night.

It was only right that on the night that Snape would die, she would feel an immense sadness, a deep regret. Relief, too, at the decision being taken out of her hands. Thankfulness that she had waited, given him — been given — the chance.

Snape's hand was in hers, growing weaker all the time.

No one else was there, no one else was needed. And yet, Hermione knew the presence at her side. They had met before — how often had she felt that presence an adversary rather than a friend?

"Will you remember me?" she asked Severus Snape as the night drew on, when his breath began to catch, his pulse fading to a distant tattoo. "After?"

Then the sinew tightened minutely, the lines of two lifetimes deepening the creases in his face. The pendent hung between them, rocking, the black stone sucking in all light.

Snape's throat was dry, his breath papery. She had to bend her head to hear him, to feel the word in her one good ear:

"Always."