Chapter Twenty-Nine
In the weeks after the preliminary hearing their lives settled into a kind of normality. The mundanity and monotony of it all was, at least as far as Severus was concerned, a beautiful and serene thing. He did not find himself to be a natural father, much as he had anticipated, and, though not to such an extent that he would appear neglectful, he left much of the babies' care to Hermione. She fed them, changed them, and bathed them, and he watched on mesmerised, handing her nappies and wipes every now and again. Though it left Severus with a profound sense of inadequacy, Hermione, apparently content to allow him to move at his own pace, did not seem dissatisfied with this arrangement. He did find he was rather adept at settling the twins, sometimes more-so than Hermione, and he enjoyed the weight of them resting against his chest as he did so, their hearts beating in tandem. It reminded him of the absolute vitality of life; for the first time all the pain and suffering he had endured until this moment seemed utterly worth while.
'And you deserve it,' Hermione had said when he tried to articulate this to her.
Hermione's friends visited, of course. Severus shared awkward nods of acknowledgement with Potter and the myriad Weasleys who passed through his front door. He certainly didn't mind them coming but tried to busy himself out of the way while they were there, though a lengthy conversation with Longbottom regarding the preservation of Snowdonia Hawkweed had been most useful. Severus had found that his house arrest did not exclude the garden, and so Longbottom, a little nervously, had instructed him for an entire afternoon on how to tend and maintain his own nursery there. It clearly made Hermione happy to have them around and to see her more spirited in their company was enough for Severus. From the garden, the cellar, the bedroom, or wherever else he had chosen to hole himself away, he would hear these friends referred to as the babies' aunts and uncles and after long deliberation with himself decided that he could not possibly mind. To have that many people doting on them could be no bad thing.
He experienced a similar sensation when Hermione's parents visited as well. Seeing them fussing and cooing over their grandchildren would, in a past life, have made him nauseous, but now filled him with a warm peacefulness; and he discovered the true source of these feelings one Saturday afternoon when the Grangers were invited over for a barbecue.
'We fished out these old photographs of when Hermione was a baby,' Georgia said, handing them over to Severus as they sat around on cheap plastic furniture in the garden, 'Erin is the spitting image of her.' Severus looked between the photograph and his daughter and saw that it was true. They shared the same round face, almond-shaped eyes, and those distinctive brown curls.
'Those are so embarrassing,' Hermione complained, stretching her arm out to snatch them from Severus, but he held them just out of her reach.
'No they're not,' he said calmly, 'you were very cute. I particularly like this one,' he added, holding out a picture of a chubby Hermione, perhaps a few months older than the twins, having a bath in the kitchen sink. Present Hermione blushed furiously in response and folded her arms in mock annoyance.
'So Isaac must look like you then, Severus,' Bertram said, holding his grandson in front of his face, squinting at him studiously. 'He certainly doesn't seem to have much Granger in him.'
'Mmm,' Severus grunted, a little less enthusiastic now. A life-long battle with his gangly limbs, sallow skin, and greasy hair made him just a little anxious at the thought of Isaac having inherited them.
'Do you have any photographs from when you were a baby?' Georgia asked.
'Yes, he does!' Hermione said gleefully, jumping to her feet, apparently relishing the opportunity for revenge. She passed Severus with a satisfied smirk before faltering by the back door and turning to him. 'You don't mind, do you?' she asked, clearly remembering his offhand reaction when he had caught her looking through the photographs all those months ago. All that seemed so insignificant now, as though the past had finally learned to stay where it belonged.
He shook his head and she disappeared into the house, returning again a moment later with three battered photographs. 'Aw, just look at him,' Hermione cooed, handing the photographs to her mother. 'Exactly like Isaac, you both have that little crease between your eyebrows.'
'Oh, you don't have those wonderful moving photographs,' Bertram commented, looking at the picture over his wife's shoulder.
'Err… no,' Severus said, 'my father didn't… approve of them.'
'Is this him?' Bertram asked, pointing to a miserable looking man begrudgingly holding an equally miserable looking baby Severus in one of the photographs.
'Mmm,' Severus grumbled affirmatively.
'And who's this?' Georgia asked, pointing to the woman in the photograph. 'Your mum?'
'Yeah.'
'Oh!' Hermione suddenly exclaimed, 'your mum. I've been so busy with everything I never even thought… won't she want to know she's a grandmother?'
'I don't know. Perhaps not,' he replied a little sadly, taking the photographs from Georgia. When he was a child his mother had always seemed very old to him, perhaps it was the way she carried herself as a result of her abuse, he wondered, but in the picture she looked awfully young, practically a child herself as she cradled her newborn son in her arms. A ghostly smile played across her lips as she looked down at the baby, but there was a depth to the subtlety of her expression which suggested wonderment and hope.
'She looks so proud of you there,' Hermione observed, smiling softly down at him as he ran his thumb over the photograph.
'She was. That's the trouble,' he murmured. 'I let her down very badly.'
'Oh, our children do all kinds of things that let us down, Severus,' Georgia said, sympathetically, pausing in the middle of fussing Erin, 'but it doesn't mean we think any less of them.'
'Oh yes, you'll learn that soon enough,' Bertram added, issuing his daughter a mildly disapproving look. Hermione looked a little put-out at this but Severus couldn't imagine that anything she had ever done quite compared to becoming a Death Eater. 'The letters we used to get from your school about you, Hermione… but of course, I'm sure you'll know all about those, Severus?'
'I imagine I probably wrote one or two of them,' he replied, grinning at Hermione and glad of the excuse to steer the subject away from his mother. '"Consummate rule breaker," that was my favourite phrase.'
'Well, our Hermione did always like to be the best at whatever she did,' Georgia said, causing everyone but Hermione, who sat with a mildly disgruntled expression as she attempted not to laugh herself.
'Yes, you're all very funny,' she said after a moment, giving in at last and laughing along with them.
~oOo~
'Today was nice,' Severus said later as he and Hermione sat down in the living room, the twins asleep, at least for the moment, in their cots upstairs. 'Do you think your parents like me?' he then asked. Hermione frowned momentarily, it wasn't like Severus to question, or even care, what others thought of him. 'It's important to me that they do,' he said, apparently reading her expression.
'I think they do, yes,' she assured him, 'they're certainly coming around to the idea of us being together.'
'Oh… so when your dad said that you'd done things that had let them down, he wasn't referring to… us?' It was a thought that had only occurred to Severus after the event, but had been niggling at him ever since.
'Definitely not,' she replied, quite forcefully.
'Good. I wouldn't want to cause any difficulties between you,' he said, shuffling uncomfortably on the settee beside her.
'Has this got to do with your mum?' she asked, intuitive as ever.
'Maybe,' he shrugged. 'It got me thinking anyway, what you said about her wanting to know about the kids. Seeing your parents with them, having them over for barbecues, even your friends visiting, things like that, it's… well, it's nice.'
'And do you think your mum might like to be a part of that?'
'I don't know, I - she - we, never had then when I was young, but when I looked at that photograph today, how hopeful she looked in it, I wondered whether that's how she expected things to be. Like I said before, he made it so she didn't have any friends and her parents died when she was still at school. I can't help but think she must have been very disappointed with her lot,' he said bitterly.
'With your father maybe, but I'm sure not you.'
'By the end she didn't think us so very different.'
'Then perhaps it's time to prove her wrong,' Hermione said, in that optimistic way she had.
'How would you feel if Isaac or Erin became Death Eaters?' Severus asked glumly.
Hermione sighed, a little defeated sounding, in response.
'Sorry. I don't mean to upset you,' Severus continued, turning to face her a little more and reaching out to brush his hand through her hair again. He had done this a lot at the start of their relationship and had found himself doing it again now he was free from Azkaban; it had become a sort of comfort to him, settling his rattled nerves. 'But that's what it equates to; Isaac or Erin running off to become Death Eaters is unthinkable to me, so it must have been equally so for my mother when I did it. I don't think I realised it until today, not properly anyway, but I was all she had, and then… and then I went and did… that.'
'She didn't buy into that ideology? I think I kind of assumed that's where you got it from…' Hermione said apologetically.
'Merlin no! I read about it in books and I hated my father so I simply… made it fit. Then when I went to school and I was surrounded by it, it got augmented. I can't pretend that the notion of being part of a group, where I might have real influence, didn't seem appealing to a kid who'd never really had any friends, and before I knew it I was in way, way too deep. But my mother, I think she was sort of fascinated by Muggles, I think. She did marry one after all and she'd never hear a bad word against them. I suppose she had more sense to see the difference between one shitty Muggle and Muggles in general.'
'And how did Lily fit into all that?'
'She didn't. She was an… anomaly. But once she started going out with Potter, I couldn't see the point in resisting any longer. I had nothing left to resist for.'
'Not your mother?'
'By my mid-teens I felt pretty bitter towards her. Don't get me wrong, she was my mother and I loved her, but I was angry at her, for staying with my father I suppose.'
'It's not always so simple as just packing a bag and leaving.'
'I know that now, but it seemed that simple back then. And I suppose I was angry at myself, for not being able to help her. I thought by joining up to the Death Eaters I might be able to get rid of him once and for all for her, but then he died in that accident at the mill and I felt I'd been robbed of my chance.'
'Severus…'
'I know, I know. All this… it's not how I feel now, as a forty-five year old, but it's how I felt when I was fifteen.'
'Alright. What happened next?'
He shrugged tiredly, 'like I said, she used the compensation money to put me through my Potions apprenticeship. I repaid her by taking The Mark and she effectively disowned me.'
Hermione studied him at length as he closed his eyes and tried to calm his agitation. She only spoke once he opened his eyes again and looked over at her expectantly; needing her to respond with something that might make him feel better. 'I'll ask you a similar question to the one you asked me now,' she said. 'If Isaac or Erin became a Death Eater, how would you feel? Would you care any less about them?'
'No!' he replied insistently.
'Then might we assume your mother feels the same about you?'
'I don't know,' he responded, hanging his head. 'It's been twenty-five years.'
'The passage of time may have worked to your advantage. Look at the way Harry and even Neville are with you now… look at the way I am with you now. Ten years ago I'm sure you wouldn't have expected that possible. And you've already told me you feel differently about your mother now than you did back then, so what's to say her opinions of you haven't changed? Time affords us perspective.'
He contemplated this for a long moment, remembering the unfiltered disgust his mother had exhibited towards him the last time they had seen one another. She had caught sight of the Dark Mark as the too-short sleeves of an old jumper had ridden up as he washed his hands in the kitchen sink for dinner one evening. Severus had seen her that angry with his father before, but never with him. He had left Spinner's End that evening, bound for Malfoy Manor, pulling his old Hogwarts trunk containing all his worldly possessions along behind him. Within the year, the Potters would be dead.
His mother had sent him one letter in the years since, telling him that she was moving to Devon, a residential home for witches, and that Spinner's End was his to do with as he pleased. He had been teaching at Hogwarts for a little over five years at the time and had considered replying to tell her as much; to tell her that he had made something of his life. He had sat in his office, the quill hovering above the parchment where he had written "Dear Mother," when it dawned on him that perhaps he had not made that much of his life after all, that he was here because of Dumbledore's generosity alone, not his own merit. At this he had dismissed the idea in an instant, screwing the letter up and throwing it into the fire.
He had kept Eileen's letter though. It had probably been lost at some point after he had fled The Final Battle, but he had kept it all those years, reading over it every now and again. It had been short and to the point, formal almost, but signed "love always," which, now he remembered that, made him realise Hermione might be right.
'I suppose a letter wouldn't hurt,' he said, still sounding unsure as he rubbed a hand through his hair, 'though I don't know where I'd start.'
'I can help you with the wording if you like.'
He nodded in agreement and watched as Hermione fetched some spare parchment and a quill from the drawer in the hallway.
