Hello lovelies! I hope you enjoy chapter 16! You should start to see more regular updates from me. I am shooting for a chapter every weekend right now, and I'm about two chapters ahead of this as of 10/26!
Louisa's flat in London was just a short walk from the hospital.
It was furnished in shades of creams and rich, dark greens. Charlotte felt awkward sitting on the sofa in her sundress, conscious that there was a grass stain on her sandal, which sat carefully on the shag rug beneath her feet.
"So, Snape wants a baby," Louisa chortled as she returned from the kitchen with two glasses of wine.
"No," Charlotte said, aware of the strain in her voice, "I want a baby."
"But not right now."
Charlotte took a sip of the Riesling and perused the plate of cheeses Louisa's house elf had procured for them when she arrived.
It felt odd, she decided, sitting in such a formal atmosphere. It was nearly uncomfortable.
The Rosiers had left everything to their only surviving child, before retiring to France. Louisa's parents had done everything to ensure their daughter carried the status that was due to her name, and from the furnishings to the gold-rimmed marble cheese plate, it showed.
She distracted herself with a slice of cheddar, crunching the crystals between her front teeth as Louisa watched her over the wide brim of her glass.
"It'll be difficult to tell if it can be fixed."
Charlotte shrugged, running her tongue around her molars, "I know."
"I wanted to take you to a healer."
Louisa's voice had been higher than her typical musical tone, raising each time any mention was made of Charlotte's war injuries. It didn't seem to matter that Charlotte had reassured her continuously over the years that she had never blamed Louisa. It had been a different time.
She echoed the words again.
"I know you feel that way, but I'm sorry. I'm sorry I did this to you."
"You saved me," Charlotte reminded her as she plucked a grape from the marble, "You saved my life."
Louisa shifted and placed her glass on the mahogany table.
Charlotte had waited until Severus had departed for Hogwarts before seeing her schoolmate. The last few days leading to his return to Hogwarts had been comfortable ones. She was sleeping better, and some of her appetite had returned. Snape had given her a break from the pensieve, and instead had asked her to help him prepare his ingredient stores for travel.
She hadn't minded the break. It had given her time, she decided, to gather some energy to throw into her lessons with Remus. Even if Severus gave them little thought, Charlotte doubted that Dumbledore would have asked Lupin to help her if he hadn't thought something would come of it.
"Are you even having sex?"
Charlotte snorted into her wine glass.
"Lou!"
"I've never known you to be a prude."
"I am not a prude," Charlotte began defensively, "I just don't see why you're asking."
"You don't see why I'm asking if you're sexually active when we're going to be testing your fertility?"
Charlotte paused, "We aren't."
"I'm surprised you haven't jumped his bones yet. When was the last time you even had a good snog?"
Louisa was grinning, showing her teeth in a wolfish smile.
"Rabastan, probably. Or Scabior."
"I forgot you fucked Scabior."
"I wish I could," Charlotte muttered, the edges of a smile pulling at her lips.
There were few days Charlotte felt like she could peel off the skin she had developed since marrying Severus. He preferred a calmer version of herself, and while their conversations had grown over the summer, Charlotte doubted he ever wanted to discuss her sex life prior to their marriage.
With Louisa, she felt limp with relaxation. Her limbs had softened, her joints loosened. If it were the wine or the company, Charlotte could not decide. Perhaps it was a combination of the two.
"He was at least handsome, back then," Louisa mused, crunching on a cracker, "But Rabastan. How did you ever win over that sociopath?"
Charlotte couldn't recall the precise moment.
Rabastan had been popular with the witches through their time at school. He was handsome, from a wealthy pureblooded family. At Hogwarts, neither he nor his brother had struggled in the way of company. Charlotte doubted he even so much as spoke two sentences to her in school. Rabastan had been in the year ahead of her – the same as Severus – and hadn't bothered with her.
After she had taken the Mark, things had changed.
Suddenly, she was no longer Sirius's – or Regulus's – she was free game.
Charlotte would have been lying if she said she had not sought their company. She had been lonely after Regulus, and the abundance of single Death Eater wizards had been high. Scabior had been a mistake – a drunken evening at the White Wyvern – but Rabastan had been a constant. He had invited her to move into his flat, and she had. There had been a comfortable, unspoken agreement between the pair of them. Rabastan wasn't the marrying kind, and Charlotte had no desire to become someone else's wife, responsible for their circumstances. They had been relatively happy with one another, though their tempers had bested them many evenings, unless Severus had been around.
Rabastan had never liked Severus.
"But you and Snape are talking, anyway, about having a baby?"
Charlotte frowned, "Kind of. We've started to. He knows I want one, eventually."
Louisa bobbed her head in agreement, "Did you ever try again?"
Charlotte shook her head, "No, Rab didn't want to risk it again."
"What about Black?"
The air changed as his name left her schoolmate's mouth. It felt cooler, threatening a change to the conversation that would follow.
She hesitated.
"I never told him."
Her voice sounded higher, and she wondered if Lou would notice.
Louisa pursed her lips together, and Charlotte worried what words would pass through them. It was a sensitive subject, Sirius and Charlotte, with Louisa. Though Louisa had covered for Charlotte – several times – she had never approved of it.
It had been too risky.
The consequences for it had been too high.
"We'll have to run a few tests. Two I have in mind will take a few days for the results to develop. When they come back in, we'll move forward with those results in mind."
Louisa had brought home flasks and vials filled with potions and odd bits of ingredients. A particularly large jar held a thick syrupy substance that shone like pearls. Charlotte frowned at the box as Louisa picked it up and ushered her up the stairs of the flat.
They turned down the hallway, and Lou ordered her to strip from her sundress and arrange herself on the guest bed.
As she worked at the dresser, Louisa hummed softly, stirring together a few ingredients and cracking open the jar. A sour smell filled the air, and Charlotte noted that sweat had begun to bead above her lip. She wiped at it quickly.
"Nervous?"
Lou's eyes peered at her, and Charlotte chewed her lip and nodded.
It was difficult to hide anything from Louisa.
"Charlie," Louisa sat on the edge of her silk comforter, "Nothing we're doing today is going to hurt. It might feel a little gross, and I'm going to look at your lady bits. It can't be avoided, so I hope you've trimmed."
Charlotte laughed, "I had the thought."
"We're just going to see what we're looking at. We may even find out today that if you decided to take advantage of Snape tomorrow you could be knocked up by your next cycle. Okay?"
Charlotte nodded.
"Why haven't you, by the way?"
"Taken advantage of Snape?"
Louisa had perched herself on a stool at the end of the bed and was busying herself between Charlotte's legs with a few vials.
Charlotte tried not to think of it. She had always hated witch's health exams.
"We've never been like that."
"I seem to recall differently," Louisa said quietly.
Perhaps at a time, they had been.
Things had happened very quickly after that night in Godric's Hollow.
With the Dark Lord gone, the Ministry had gone hunting for his Death Eaters.
Within a week, Rabastan had been caught with his brother and sister-in-law. It seemed as though every day the Daily Prophet was publishing stories of Death Eaters being caught, and subsequently providing the Ministry with a renewed list of names.
The night Charlotte had seen her name in the Daily Prophet, she had gone to Snape.
He had been intoxicated, she recalled, when she appeared in his living room.
Charlotte had downed a few shots of liquid courage before leaving her room below the White Wyvern, which had been converted in the last months to a safe house for Death Eaters.
His fingers had been wrapped around a bottle of firewhiskey, and he had been throwing empties at the fireplace. Her feet had carefully tip-toed around glass shards as she approached him. When his eyes opened, he watched her stand in front of him for several moments before speaking.
The recollections of that evening were hazy.
She had stayed on his sofa for two nights before feeling the urge to move again, and by the time she had taken a room under a fake name and charmed to the gills at the Leaky Cauldron, Dumbledore had approached her with the proposition.
"He always had a soft spot for you," Louisa continued, "During the war. Hated Rab."
"There was one night," Charlotte found herself thinking aloud, "But it isn't possible."
Louisa popped up, peeling off a set of gloves, "What do you mean, there was one night?"
"After the Dark Lord fell. I went over there, when Igor named me to the Ministry."
Louisa's brows raised, "You went to Snape's?"
"Lou, I was drunk, and I really doubt anything happened."
"But it could have."
"No, it couldn't."
Smirking, Louisa went to the jar of syrupy liquid, "How are you so sure?"
"He would've said something."
"Maybe he doesn't remember, either."
Charlotte shifted on the bed as her friend spread the goo across her abdomen. She was creating a thick sheet of it, and it felt warm and cold simultaneously. Louisa drew her wand and began chanting softly under her breath.
"I can't picture Snape blacking out, even if he was drunk."
Louisa did not reply, she was peering at the goo on Charlotte's belly, and carefully scratching notes away with a quill, still chanting softly.
"He would have said something."
She couldn't tell if she said it aloud for Louisa's benefit, or her own.
Louisa's notes continued for several moments before she began siphoning away the goo with her wand. Charlotte tried to read her expressions, but Louisa's cocked brows and smiling smirk contradicted one another.
After Lou had closed the jar and wiped away the other vials into a bag, she turned back to Charlotte and propped her hands on her hips.
"I can see scarring. A lot of it."
"What does that mean?"
"I'll need to remove some of it. It'll be uncomfortable. Give you cramps."
Shifting, Charlotte sat up, "But then I could get pregnant, if I wanted to. It wouldn't be dangerous?"
"It's difficult to say. I mean, it could be that simple. I have to remove the scarring before I can see anything else. It's all scar tissue. I'm surprised you haven't seen a healer. Your cramps must be unbearable."
Charlotte frowned, "Not any more than usual."
Louisa pursed her lips together, "That's odd."
"A bad odd?"
Exasperation filled her when Louisa shrugged her shoulders. She bit her lip and took the sundress that Louisa had passed back to her.
"I really don't know, Charlie. I'm going to talk to the head of our witch's health department. I'll be vague, but I won't see her until the end of the week. She's been busy with winter deliveries."
By the time Charlotte left Louisa's flat, it had grown dark. She appeared in the fireplace at Spinner's End and longed to curl up on the sofa with her favorite wireless show but stared at the bare spot on the floor where their sofa had been.
The house felt oddly empty, as it had never before. During all of her previous years at the house while Severus was at Hogwarts, she had been able to fill the emptiness with books or a few projects around the house. But Charlotte could no longer muster up much magic at all and doubted she would be able to do anything around the house without a trip or two to Diagon Alley, and that in itself posed a challenge as she could no longer apparate without assistance.
She reached for a handful of catalogs Severus had brought home from his last trip to London and dumped them onto the floor. Her few glasses of wine in full effect, she found herself dropping cross-legged onto the threadbare rug and spreading out the fabric swatches she had written for and held them up in the light.
Withdrawing her wand from her pocket, she waved it quickly at the kitchen without a second thought and felt her arm freeze.
Horrified, she quickly turned to see what had exploded.
Instead, she watched a bottle of wine free itself from the cabinet and come slowly spinning through the air to land at her side, alongside her wide-brimmed goblet.
As it dropped to the floor with a loud THUMP, Charlotte stared at the bottle of chardonnay with absent-minded horror and wonder.
She hadn't wanted it to come back, she thought, as she hurried to her feet.
But her feet carried her to the kitchen, where she dug through a drawer for the corkscrew.
Charlotte peered at the bottle, sitting upright on the floor, and found a soft laugh escaping her mouth as she unscrewed the cork.
I believe that obscurials can recover from their affliction, though I am sure many would disagree with me.
She was certainly one of them.
An obscurial can possibly be healed by replacing their feelings of alienation, which ultimately lead to the creation of their obscurus, with a sense of belonging.
Perhaps it was the co-sleeping, she thought as she collapsed back to the floor where the bottle sat. She absently thought of the calm that she awoke with during the last few nights before Severus had returned to Hogwarts. It had lulled over her like a cup of hot milk, her bones felt lighter, somehow, waking alongside Severus. Perhaps it was just the physical contact.
She drummed her fingers on the goblet's neck and peered at the corkscrew.
With bated breath, she placed it on the floor.
"Wingardium leviosa."
There we have it! Let me know what you think in the review section.
I am going to update this Monday with the House Cup numbers as I am a bit sleepy, but as always - bring your House to Glory.
Drop your Hogwarts House in the review section for 5 Points!