"Ssh. It's alright." It was a voice that nearly broke her. Her heart was in her throat, expecting a fight. He stepped out of the shadows as Hazel defensively drew her wand. No. You're dead. It can't be you.

"Whoever you are, this isn't funny. If I find out you've been messing with Polyjuice Potion, I'll get you expelled. Minimum. Tell me something only the real Sev would know," she commanded, tears already welling up in her eyes. He reached out for her, but she stood her ground, threatening to curse him. "Tell me."

"You have the faintest scar below your left ear. It came from our sixth year, when I accidentally cursed you. Madam Pomfrey missed it when she was healing all of the others." She lowered her wand as Snape reached out for her, his fingertips brushing over the scar she usually forgot about. "You've never much minded, since you can cover it with your hair, but I've felt awful about it ever since. You've always said my nose was unique. No matter how many times I wanted to shrink it, you would tell me not to." Smiling slightly, he thought of something that would get past her defenses and disbelief, past the hex that was hovering on her lips. "Amortentia - do you remember when we first brewed it with Professor Slughorn? Mine is linen, lavender, and Butterbeer. Yours is ink, rosemary, and formaldehyde, which I never realized why, but you spent so much time helping me bottle ingredients in Slughorn's class, what else could it have been? It only made sense."

She stared for a second, taking it all in before she wrapped her arms around him. "Sev… how? Harry said he saw you die." He felt the tension drop from her shoulders, the sadness and the anger she had been carrying for so long starting to fade away.

"Nagini is a constrictor, not a biter," he told her, holding onto her for dear life. "Her venom was only a paralytic, something the Dark Lord failed to realize. I had been taking a small dose of antivenom every day, as a precaution, ever since I watched her kill someone else at Malfoy Manor. You know I did a dozen things as precautions before every meeting. It was… not pleasant, but here I am." He let go of her only long enough to show her the two identical scars on his neck, tiny puncture marks from the snake. "I kept the scars. Why bother getting rid of them? Well, I went into hiding for a while, in case any more rogue Death Eaters emerged. I was hated by both sides in the end."

"Harry saw you die," she spoke into his shoulder, still in shock that he was back, that it was actually him after all of this time. "You gave him all of the memories you had of his mother -"

"I didn't want them anymore."

"Why?" She stepped back in surprise, still holding onto his hands. "Lily was -"

"I love you." The words had never crossed his lips before. He'd been dwelling on them since he disappeared, dwelling on the ache in his chest, the longing to be back there with her. He'd dream of her every night and wake up trying to resist the urge to camp out in the woods just to check up on her. Every glimpse he managed to catch made him want to race towards her, but he couldn't. Not yet. Not until things settled down.

"Severus," she smiled, the hope in his chest faltering for a fleeting second. It was too good, she was too good, to ever say the words back. She had said them before, a handful of times when he was in great danger. How could someone like her ever - "I love you too."

He gave her a kiss, holding her close for what seemed like an eternity. Neither of them wanted to let go. Just being there together was erasing the pain of the last few months, the pain of loss and of being forced to stay away. "Hazel, I - You ask nothing of me, only that I be there with you. And only when I can be. You understand my need to constantly work, to throw myself into everything I do -"

"Sev, what do you want? I mean it in the best way possible, but why are you back? Why now? It's still dangerous out there."

The answer was a simple one. "I want a home. I want you to come with me. Tell Minerva you're retiring at the end of the year. Come with me, and we can start the rest of our lives."

"Sev -"

"Please."


Scotland was dotted with small villages, full of wizards and Muggles alike. Plenty of them had managed to come together, the crusade against witchcraft ending early. After all, having a magical Healer in town helped everyone, and as long as Death Eaters and the like stayed out, many of the towns were fine with witches and wizards living openly among them. It was on the outskirts of one of these tiny villages that a house seemed to spring up overnight.

It wasn't far from the cliffside, a winding path bringing anyone curious enough to venture out there to a hidden rocky beach. A massive window overlooked the ocean, warmed by a fireplace that was constantly burning. Sometimes a couple of cauldrons were hung there, simmering late into the evening. The sitting room led into a kitchen that the occupants of the house got great use of. A guest bedroom sat empty off of the kitchen. They rarely had guests, and when they did, they apparated away before long. It was nothing against them, just the fact that only a few people knew that they lived there. A wooden staircase led upstairs to a bedroom, bookended by two offices. If anyone happened to go through them, they would find a veritable library of Potions books in one and every Defense Against the Dark Arts treatise in existence neatly catalogued in the other.

The occupants of the house ventured into town once a week. They would pick up groceries, but they often stopped in curious little shops that sold things marketed to witches, wizards, potioneers, people that some of the occupants of the village appreciated but didn't always understand. They would smile to their neighbors, the man who so often dressed in black stopping by a list of homes to drop off mysterious vials of liquid that often tasted awful but cured everything from the common cold to the strangest case of Dragon Pox the town had ever seen. The woman with him was always sure to stop at the post office, where owls would drop off books that she had ordered from the wizarding stores across the country.

The townspeople would smile at the sight of them, knowing they desperately loved each other. When they weren't walking hand-in-hand, they were carrying piles of books or bags of groceries, making it impossible. Though none of the onlookers would ever see how they were constantly by each other's sides at home, they knew they were inseparable. Despite the dreadful nightmares, the flashbacks to both wars, the abject terror they would find themselves in at times, they would always gravitate back to one another. They were each other's sense of stability, the thing that kept them grounded when all they could see was the battlefield that Hogwarts had turned into, the apparent hopelessness of the Shrieking Shack, or the dozens of Death Eater hideouts that spelled despair for both Auror and Death Eater alike.

Most of the time the two of them stayed close to the little house, diligently working away but spending every evening together. Every few years one of them would publish another textbook, writing under fake names that they adopted from Muggles in the town. They kept an extensive garden, filled with ordinary herbs and magical wonders that even most wizards had never heard of. It was a beautiful place to live, and they were happy there by the seaside.

As the years wore on, the man appeared in town wearing less dour colors. He still preferred black robes, though he eventually branched out into grays, dark purples, forest green, and a unique shade of blue that he wore whenever a Ravenclaw Quidditch game was coming up, though not if they were facing Slytherin. Anyone who was paying close enough attention - mainly the shopkeepers who saw her regularly - would have noticed the appearance of a wedding ring on the woman's hand, a change she didn't publicize to anyone. However it didn't take Sherlock Holmes to notice the other major change in their lives as one spring turned into summer and summer turned into fall.


Minerva had long since stopped checking the Book of Admittance, save for those who were turning eleven that year. For a while she would peer into the book, noting the new names every month or so. During the last Wizarding War, it had been too painful to see many of the names disappear, children's lives snuffed out by the Death Eaters before they truly began. So she would only check for those coming to Hogwarts within the next year, giving her hope that the next generation of witches and wizards would survive.

This year, something struck her as odd. There, written in the middle of a page, was an undeniably familiar name. Eileen Minerva Snape. Impossible. And yet a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. Impossible for anyone but him. Perhaps that was why the portrait never talked. Unlike wizarding photographs, the portraits of the Headmasters and Headmistresses were never enchanted until they had died. For years she had assumed that the magic had been faulty. The best of the artists had died in the war, and she had yet to have someone fix it. She had tried herself, but nothing was working. Even Flitwick tried the standard charm to enchant the painting, to no avail. Chalking it up to needing a more experienced artist, she had nearly forgotten until that name had appeared on her list of magical children about to turn eleven. "Albus, do you know anything about this?"

Dumbledore's portrait smiled serenely down at her, offering a cryptic answer. "Why do you think, in the nearly thirteen years we've sat here, Severus has never said a word? He hasn't as much as blinked."


Rifling through the pack of letters that the owl had brought over, Hazel set one aside. She looked up from where she had been working in the kitchen, silently observing the others. Severus sat on the hearth, a book in one hand and a stirring rod in the other. They were brewing a cure for the flu, something simple for one of their neighbors. "Is it time for the rosemary yet, Dad?" The young girl peered into the pewter cauldron, curly black hair falling into her face.

"Not quite. Be careful you don't end up in the cauldron. Not all potions are this well-behaved. Felix Felicis, for example, won't hurt you, but you wouldn't want to be splashed in the face either." After she was born, his demeanor had softened. He smiled a little more, and was a lot less annoyed at the world. All of the panic about not having a good parental role model had vanished. Eileen became the center of his world, the center of both of their lives. She loved her mom for sure, but her dad had always been her favorite.

"I hate to interrupt," Hazel smiled, joining them by the fire, "but Lee, your Hogwarts letter is here."


Years later, the two of them stood on the side of Platform 9 ¾, hugging their daughter goodbye. She had become a Potions legend at Hogwarts, and was just named as a Prefect. Hazel reached out for her husband's hand, a twinge of sadness in her smile as they waved at the train.

Elsewhere on the platform, a group of their old students was convening, trying to get their own children, first-years this term, onto the train with their trunks and their owls. As always, it was a bit of chaos, everyone saying goodbye, promising to write, and telling each other to take care and watch out for their cousins and friends.

Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione all stood together, a few of the younger children waving at their siblings. They would have to wait a few more years until it was their turn to board the train and head off to Hogwarts. Hermione happened to look down the platform, telling all of the others to look before it was too late. "Is that… it can't be. Professor Snape died years ago."

"No. There's no way." Ginny stared at the two figures dressed in Muggle clothes, people she hadn't seen in years. Professor Ashmore had retired the year she graduated, dropping off of the face of the earth. And Snape… Snape was dead.

"I watched him die," Harry mumbled, sharing an incredulous look with Ron. "I'd say he's got to have a cousin or something, but both of them? What are the odds?"

"Impossible." Ron shook his head, all four of them now staring at the couple. "That's got to be them."

Snape and Hazel were still used to scanning for threats, so they could feel when there were eyes on them. "We should probably go now that she's on the train," Snape suggested, taking his wife's hand. "I thought we'd be safe without the Polyjuice Potion this year, but it seems not. I don't feel like reappearing quite yet."

"Neither do I." The two of them turned their backs to the group, stepping back out into the rest of King's Cross Station and apparating back home before anyone could stop them.

Though their lives had finally stabilized, they still couldn't quite return to normal. Not that they wanted to. Neither of them wanted to be in the press. The Ministry of Magic was hard at work ferreting out the last of the Death Eaters and summarily shipping them off to Azkaban. Neither of them would have been in danger of a trial, but if it came out that Severus had survived, they might wake up to find a rogue Death Eater holdout on their front porch. It was simpler and safer to keep low profiles and write under fake names. Only those who needed to know knew anything - the goblins at Gringotts, the poor Muggle actor who they had to layer in protective charms because The Daily Prophet insisted that he looked like Snape in hiding, and a select couple of old friends, Minerva McGonagall now included. Everyone else at Hogwarts assumed that Eileen was some distant relative of his, something they told her to never confirm or deny.

Even in hiding, though, they were happy. Once Eileen graduated, they were planning on weaving themselves back into the wizarding world. She would be old enough to protect herself, old enough to start making a name for herself and forcing everyone to judge her based off of her own character, and not whatever misconceptions they held about her father. But for now, they were content living on the cliffside, enjoying each other's company, spending their time inventing spells, altering potions, and creating their own version of a "happily ever after".


"He might get married to somebody beautiful and live happily ever after. And stop wearing black." - Alan Rickman, when asked about what would've happened if Snape had survived (he did!)