No one questioned how the little girl could make flowers grow by talking to them, or why she and her father would check at the post office for owls instead of regular mail. There were a few families in the village like that, families that had lived there well before the rest of them had moved in. No one quite understood it, but they knew well enough not to ask questions. After all, the best doctors were a couple who could heal injuries seemingly like magic. Everyone's favorite primary school teacher was a nice woman who was a little too sprightly for being - as most people believed - well over a hundred years old, though that was highly doubted. And the oddly private couple that lived out on the shoreline could brew up a cure for anything.

The little girl had been playing with magic since before she could talk, and she practically learned to walk in the garden that was full of the strangest, most delightful plants any of the Muggle neighbors have ever seen. Her mother was constantly ordering strange books with mysterious titles, and her father - well, no one quite knew what her father did, but he could cure everything from the common cold to what some people in the town called "dragon pox", though the Muggles didn't understand how a childhood illness could make someone sneeze sparks.

The witches and wizards of the town all knew each other, of course. They weren't all friends, but they tried their best to get along. There was one summer when one of the local boys noticed the tattoo on Sev's arm, whispered about it to his mother, and suddenly half of the town was casting them suspicious looks whenever they were in any of the shops. But Hazel set everything right, taking her husband's hand and glaring at anyone who tried to say anything. Eileen, an active three year-old at the time, hadn't noticed.

Hazel had a little help. Rita Skeeter's poison-pen biography made people detest him even more in the wizarding world, but a much larger bestseller suddenly appeared on the shelves, seemingly days after an autographed copy of Rita's nasty book arrived by owl post. Sev wasn't sure how she'd done it, but Hazel had a friend in the Ministry of Magic who must have been some help. She spent a feverish few days writing, sustained by coffee and whatever she'd been brewing in the cauldron that sat in the fireplace. She didn't let him get too close to her work, but every night he would fall asleep on the sofa next to the armchair where she was furiously typing hundreds of pages. Eileen would hop up next to him, her stuffed wolf in hand, and fall asleep there too.

Eventually he would read the book, finding it to be well-balanced and carefully fact-checked, with dozens of citations to Daily Prophet articles and all sorts of other sources. It was much less of a tell-all than he'd been afraid of, and she'd left the ending open, merely saying he was attacked in the Battle of Hogwarts and presumed dead.

Once the book came out, those in the town started pointing and talking about them differently. Could it really be him? Had he actually survived? And was she the professor who dropped off the face of the earth a year after the Battle of Hogwarts? Impossible. Unless it wasn't.

"Severus, please?" They were words he'd heard a lot in his life. Severus, please be quiet, your father's already in a bad mood. Severus, please torture for me. Severus, please kill for me. Severus, please kill me. Severus, please don't let him kill me. Severus, please die for me. But this was different. "Sev, please," Hazel mumbled, reaching out for him in her sleep. "Five more minutes?"

He kissed the top of her head and obediently turned the alarm clock off. "It's the weekend, love. You can sleep in all you want."

While Hazel contentedly went back to sleep, he sat up, wide awake well before their alarm went off. He watched her doze, thinking of how everything had changed. No one was asking things of him that he could barely bring himself to do. "Severus, please risk your life, risk your soul for me" had been replaced by "Sev, please let me know when you're going into town, I've got a couple of things we need to pick up", "Sev, please keep Eileen out of here, I'm trying to wrap her birthday presents", "Sev, please don't get up, I'm nice and warm and we don't need to be up anyway"... No longer were Dumbledore and the Dark Lord reminding him that he owed them his soul, that he was forever bound to them because of the choices he'd made. There was only one set of choices he cared about anymore, the set that had landed him here. And his soul was his own. At least partially. It really belonged to his wife and his daughter, but he would want no one else.

Dumbledore and Voldemort had been instrumental in it, but he wasn't going to give them credit for any of it. The little house on the Scottish coast was untouched by either of them. They may have set things in motion, but he was no longer a chess piece in their grand match of wizard's chess, where pawns and knights and rooks and bishops and queens could all be sacrificed "for the greater good". The only choice he cared about - the only choice he wanted to care about - was that he'd chosen to share his life with someone who was critical of both Dumbledore and Voldemort and recognized that they were both using him to win their war.

He did his best not to think about the wizarding wars, about where he had come from, and instead tried to focus on this, on the two people who brought him so much joy that he often felt he didn't truly deserve. Hazel was good at spotting it, coming over to give him a kiss or ask what he was up to when she noticed he'd grown quieter than usual. And it helped to have an energetic little girl who would bound over and demand his attention, asking what he was making and if she could help. Taking care of Eileen was an excellent distraction, and by the time she'd gone to bed every night, he found himself smiling as he tucked her in, truly happy for more than a few fleeting moments. It had once been rare, but he slowly started to realize that now there were more good days than bad.

"Sev, please?"

"What? Sorry," he smiled, kissing her good morning.

"I asked if you could wake Eileen up and feed the owl. I'm going to start making pancakes as soon as I properly get up and put the coffee on." Hazel sat up and stretched. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"No reason, you just constantly remind me of how lucky I am." He kissed her again as he got up, adding, "And because I've looked at you like that since seventh - well, sixth - year, and I'm not going to stop now."

Hazel laughed, raising her voice a little as she went to brush her teeth. "I love you, Sev!"

"I love you too!"

"Sev, you lived in the Muggle world for how long?" Hazel asked, trying her best not to laugh. She and Eileen had gone into town and returned to find the kitchen half flooded with bubbles. "That's way too much soap for the dishwasher."

He frowned, trying to mop everything up with kitchen towels. "This is why we just use charms for cleaning," he grumbled as Eileen raced into the bubbles. "Lee, don't -"

"I wanna help," she said, trying to pick up the bubbles and throw them into the sink. She was way too short to reach, though, and just ended up throwing bubbles everywhere.

"Evanesco," Hazel smiled, waving her wand over the kitchen. Suddenly all of the bubbles were gone, leaving the floor, Sev, and Eileen perfectly clean. "Did you leave your wand upstairs?"

"I heard an odd noise and thought I'd set this thing wrong," he said, gesturing towards the dishwasher. "I didn't think to grab it."

"What about wandless magic?"

"I was a bit preoccupied trying to keep this from flooding the kitchen," he sighed, picking Eileen up.

"Well your box of ingredients from Potage's just got here," she told him, setting down the bags she had been carrying. "And we've had a couple of owls this morning - Lucius Malfoy was one of them, and I think Minerva wrote back too. It's been a little while since we've heard from her."

Their lives in the little coastal town were an odd mix of magic and mundane, but they loved it all the same. After years of intense work for the Death Eaters, the Ministry, the Order, all of the others who had grand plans for them, it was nice to be able to get up and work on their own time. Eventually their days were punctuated by taking Eileen to school and picking her up, the seasons marked by birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays instead of grim new assignments. They would spend Christmases with the Lovegoods or Andromeda and Teddy, and New Years' with the Malfoys. Every summer they would plan some sort of vacation, even if it was just taking Eileen to see the sights in London. Things would all be changing soon enough, though.