Disclaimer —

All things not Allosia or Gabriel belong to JKR.

I'm writing this one drunk.. so make of it what you will.

To address some questions in recent reviews:

I'm a pagan, and I try not to bring that in to the HP universe, but these characters saying God to my ear sounds wrong, so I make it plural.

I'M NOT GOING TO KILL GABRIEL, but that's all the information you get.

Yes, Allosia will eventually get to read all the letters, so, the ones that are missing in the numbering will eventually be shared with you all (yes, I am writing them as I go along the time line — it's a very insistent voice).

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Severus Severus Severus. I so love to say your name, and I suspect always will. I chant it, in lieu of actual content. I feel I know you through it, as much as I know you have often despised it. But I can mumble it to myself and summon you, feel your grip at my shoulders, an arm across my chest, you are my armour as I face the world, and my heart, as I face myself.

*

To say that the six months of preparations leading up to the WISP conference were trying would require my being very generous. It was, at times, absolutely painful. Besides submitting an advance copy of his presentation, a requirement my husband labeled absurd, there was also a ton of paperwork to be dealt with, travel arrangements to finalize and a number of publicity related requirements including the submission of his CV, biography and photograph.

As you might imagine, the CV was the only of those things that managed to be simple. The process of writing the biography was at least amusing, as we got more than a little drunk while fussing over it, and wound up writing at least half a dozen completely outrageous ones that Severus, of course, insisted I burn. While I thought he was being foolish at the time, I realized he was completely right by the time we had both sobered up. Had we accidentally given the wrong one to Sendak to deliver, we would have redefined "too much information" on a grand scale.

The photography issue was much less amusing, and to a certain extent I came to regret pushing it as much as I did, but at the time it seemed patently absurd for Severus to send in a ten year old photo of himself for the brochure. Dragging him into Hogsmeade to have him sit for a proper wizard's photograph wasn't the best idea I ever had though. He was in a foul mood that day, and considering it now, was probably telling the truth about having a migraine. The pictures were reasonably fine until they inevitably scowled and turned away from the viewer and that certainly wasn't going to make more people sign up for the conference.

I tried to be gentle and I tried to cajole in part because I would have liked to have had a good photo of my husband for myself. In the end though I merely hurt his feelings, made both of us crazy and ignored Gabriel in the studio long enough that he started crying which then led one of his damn toy dinosaurs to freak out and bite his thumb. Severus started cursing in medieval Italian, I started pacing so I wouldn't lash out at anyone and it was, in almost every way the exact day my mother must have wished for every time she said, "just you wait until you have a family" to me as a child.

Eventually, after far too much mucking around on my part with a camera, I got a few excellent pictures of Severus in his lab, working. It wasn't exactly what the WISP people wanted, but after getting a long tirade from myself posing as Mr. Snape's personal assistant, they eventually came to understand that this was as good as it gets, and surely, if they were familiar with him and his work, they already knew that. I still treasure those photos, because I so clearly remember that day, and his shy smile at me over the cauldrons, beakers and vials.

That entire episode, which managed to consume the entire second half of February, involved a great deal of sulking from Severus. In the end, I think, I hope I managed to make him see that I did in fact find him exquisite, not just because I loved him, but because I was the sort of woman whose tastes, admittedly, did not run so standard. It was never easy navigating the narrow spaces between his need to be ugly and his need to be beautiful, both of which had so little to do with who he really was.

That was a strange term, strange months, where we perhaps fought more than we ever had, but also became closer than we ever were. While sometimes, I am sure we both must have wondered if we would survive this sudden excitement in his career, it was what perhaps in the end what saved our marriage, because no one else understood. They did not choose to, and could not have if they tried. This was a man who could tremble before me, and bare his throat to me, and this was Severus. How could arguments matter?

We packed for Florence with both great care and excitement, as I prepared to show our son the world that had forgotten me.