A/N: Hey guys! Thanks for reading and reviewing! I can't believe we've made it to fifty followers of this humble tale! I hope you're enjoying the ride so far. I wanted to hop on and apologize for if the pregnancy seemed a bit like a bait and switch. It wasn't intended to be a moment of dishonesty on my part and was planned from the beginning (and yes, I know it's cliché, but it's my favorite trope, so you'll have to forgive me). The truth is, of course, that even an IUD isn't a guarantee against pregnancy and there are circumstances where they fail—so the birth control failing was very much a part of my decision making, as Hermione and Severus simply forgetting seemed beyond credulity for this particular tale. (I guess it also serves as a PSA of sorts—99% effective is ninety-nine percent effective, and it's important to remember that Hermione's is an old one, circa 2001. Improvements in the technology and placement have been made since then).
"I saw you standing there, and I knew
I'm done for, it's over, I'm through
Playing games from the start
Sinking your nails in my heart
You bring out the worst in me
You bring out the worst in me"
"Worst In Me" – Unlike Pluto
It never in a thousand years would have crossed Hermione's mind to consider that the hardest job she would ever take would be stocking shelves at a local supermarket. The boxes of new merchandise were endless, the product maps confusing, the physical nature of the labour, unrelenting.
As soon as she managed to finish one box, another appeared in its place, and if she ever chanced to finish a whole pallet, the next one would be filled with another round of boxes, with heavier or more numerous items, or the placement on the shelves would require her to either crouch down to a painful sustained squat, or dance about on her tiptoes in order to reach the upper shelves. It would have felt like back breaking work under the best of circumstances, and these were decidedly not the best of circumstances.
Each time she crouched low to maneuver the products onto the bottom-most shelves, she felt the dull ache of it in her back and hips. If she stood too quickly from her stooped position, the rush of blood to her head would bring her stumbling against the steel aisles. Whenever she was occasioned to have to balance to reach up high, she would barely manage not to topple against the cart she pulled with her filled with merchandise.
Hermione Granger was no klutz, yet her hands, even after only a few weeks, bore the obvious evidence of having lost the battle with the box-cutter a few too many times. Each week—nay, each day—brought with it new challenges even after she'd gotten the hang of reading the stock-lists and planograms that directed her activities.
It was as if the revelation of the pregnancy brought all of the true challenges of her delicate condition to bear, where before, they had been nothing but nagging, infrequent concerns. So subtle that she'd endured for the first five months with hardly any thought given to the mere possibility that she might have been with child.
Worse still, she'd not heard a word back from Severus, whom she had sent two additional letters since her first, though she'd not given any direct information about their unexpected bundle of... well... something. She certainly would have welcomed a feeling of joy about her situation, but had yet to be graced with its brightening presence. Her near constant companion was more akin to an ever-present and all-encompassing sense of impending responsibility and duty.
The second letter she had sent him had told of her dismissal from Marigold House, and the third proposed that perhaps he could meet her for her lunch sometime, and gave him the address of the ASDA where she'd been hired on. She'd kept the tone of each missive light, and hadn't alluded to anything pressing that they had to talk about, lest she scare him off... but given his lack of response, she was frighteningly sure that she was going to have to show up at his door in Nottingham, six months pregnant with her sheepish, pained grin in place.
'Er... Ta-da?' Yes. That would go over nicely.
She shuddered and heard the faint clink of glass against glass as she knocked a bottle of pre-made ragu into another behind it.
Hermione shifted on her knees and worked her feet out from underneath her, trying to encourage a bit of circulation to her ankles.
She'd always enjoyed the blessing of small feet and dainty ankles, but nowhere were these features in evidence. Her lower legs were swollen and painful, and whatever she rested against left deep welts and indentations in the flesh.
Immediately after moving, she felt the familiar swimming sensation that came from her blood being re-circulated about to areas that had been receiving too little for too long. The lights appeared brighter and sharper for a few moments, and her ever-present migraine flared from the dull but biting pressure it usually was to a sickening, sharp pulse between her eyes.
That was the final bottle of pasta sauce, she saw, rising unsteadily to her feet. She broke down the box and flattened it, pressing it down into the bottom of the cart as she wheeled it away toward the stock room at the back.
She was really quite lucky, the witch thought to herself. From what she'd heard of Ginny, Fleur, and Hannah's pregnancies, by this point they were having to run off to the loo every five to ten minutes, whereas she was still managing to go a few hours or most of her shift without having to wee.
Ginny had begged her to go see a healer, but Hermione had put her off, citing the ease of the last few months as grounds for a lack of concern. She'd scheduled a meeting with a midwife in her parent's area and was scheduled for her first round of tests and scans in just a few days. She'd been asked to appear a couple of days earlier, right after she'd called for the appointment, but had bought herself more time by fudging her date of conception, though they'd urged her to make an appearance at her earliest convenience.
That was, unfortunately, precisely the problem. The witch groaned and drew herself up against the cart, checking the stock-list in her slightly swollen fingers. It wasn't convenient in the least. Her first priority had been a way to support herself, and to find some way of telling Snape without showing up at his door, up the duff and almost destitute.
She wasn't sure what had prevented her from going to him herself. She was fairly sure it wasn't pride... though there was a deep sense of embarrassment.
It wasn't as if they'd not discussed contraception, even if it was after the fact... but she had refused him, had been certain that she'd been well covered by the muggle device she'd had implanted years before...
It was difficult to say what had caused the failure. She was coming up on five years with her IUD, but it was supposed to last at least that long. Perhaps it had fallen out of place... or maybe it simply wasn't the best device for a witch to use, and wasn't equal to the task of blocking magical sperm from its quest to access a magical egg...
An utterly improbable image of the little swimmers winking from one place to another, like apparating adult wizards might, caused her to chuckle, though it held little true mirth.
In any case, it wasn't supposed to work like a barrier method, she reasoned. Supposedly her womb shouldn't have been able to let the egg implant.
It seemed that her and Snape's offspring was already proving to be rather stubborn and hard-nosed.
'Imagine that,' she snorted, reaching for a few boxes of plastic clam-shell covered cutlery sets and a container of hooks she was meant to hang them from. The product map told her to bring them to the kitchen aisle. Quickly, Hermione memorized the layout she was meant to create, counting units and hooks, before she set out to fulfill the directive.
Emerging back into the store was like going from a dank cave into the blinding sunlight: everything had a slight halo and sunburst-like auras were twinkling about her vision. She shielded her eyes, tightened her grip on the cart's handle, and heaved the heavy load in front of her, having to put a considerable amount of weight behind it to get it going.
In this fashion she carried on for the remainder of her shift, though she frequently made stops at the water fountain in order to splash a bit on her pink face or to hydrate herself.
Sometime after her first bathroom break of the day, and some five hours into her shift, she glanced up from her position on the floor where she was pushing boxes of brightly-coloured sugar cereals into their positions to see the shift manager speaking to a customer in a cady-corner aisle at a rather uncharacteristically loud volume.
She kept her eye trained on the exchange, hoping she wouldn't have to high-tail it to the stock room in order to avoid a physical confrontation... they weren't exactly common, but neither were they unheard of. Since the migraines had set in, she'd observed a noticeable unpredictability with her magic that made engaging in a dust up a poor idea, and that wasn't even taking into account the fact that she was working in a muggle establishment.
Though it grated, she knew her best course of action would be to keep her bushy head down, and to avoid confrontation (and worse: job loss), by any means necessary. She didn't know where she could possibly go after losing a job at a supermarket, and she had no plans to find out.
Her eyes and hands turned back to the task she'd been set, arranging boxes of chocolate wheats next to the cinnamon and multi-grain varieties.
The voices continued to rise, and she tuned her ear to the argument, feeling certain that she could now hear a voice she hadn't expected to encounter when working stock in the muggle supermarket...
How had he found her? She shuffled back to peer down the aisle, watching as Severus gesticulated wildly and imperiously to her shift manager. He appeared to be growing frustrated. Oh... right, of course—she'd included the address of where she worked in her last letter.
Perhaps he'd come for lunch...
But then why was he bothering to harangue her boss?
Everything felt like it was just slightly out of reach. She knew that under nearly any other set of circumstances, she'd have jumped to her feet and would have flown over to the confrontation in order to diffuse it, but instead she was observing with a sort of curious detachment. The witch brought in a deep breath through her nose and slowly let it out of her mouth.
"She'll just have to see you after her shift ends, sir—unless you're a relation you have no right to be making demands—"
"Surely she's allowed a break? Last I understood, she was entitled to take a lunch. The laws are clear on that point,"
"Are you familiar with her schedule, sir? Did you clear her for her last break? Are you familiar with the rest of my employee's time sheets? No? Then I'll thank you not to presume to take away one of my stockists on a busy Monday morning at the start of the month! Hermione is a dedicated worker, and those are in short supply: we change all of our end-caps at the beginning of the month, it's one of our busier times,"
"And you're content to let her forgo lunch for the sake of your time crunch, is that it?" Snape demanded, his voice rising.
"I—"
"Because if I know Ms. Granger, I know she's the sort to insist on working through any and all breaks in order to complete a project. You'd barely even have to guilt her into it, would you?" Snape asked, dangerously.
"See here, man—does she even know you're coming around sniffing after her? I doubt she'd care for how your attitude is reflecting on her performance here,"
Snape snarled, a terrible, animalistic sound. "Is that a threat?"
"I can't have employees here whose personal lives infringe on their ability to do their jobs!" Her manager, Mr. Sullivan, said, though his voice trembled with his obvious fear of the other, taller man. "And I can't have her boyfriend coming in here blowing smoke in a cloud so high that all the customers can see—"
"Boyfriend?" Snape snorted loudly, "Do I look like the sort of man one could reasonably call 'a boyfriend?'"
At this Hermione saw Mr. Sullivan's shoulders straighten as he seemed to glare up at Snape with indignation, "Well if that's where you're content to leave your responsibilities, then far be it for me to be surprised you'd come in behaving so abominably—"
"My responsibilities?" Snape demanded, his voice dangerous. Silky. "And which responsibilities, pray tell, am I supposedly shirking so shamefully?"
Mr. Sullivan crossed his arms and shook his head and Hermione took the opportunity to slide down the aisle further, so that Snape's taunt visage was now, finally visible to her.
It was startling to see him after so long. More so than when she had seen him after presuming him dead. She felt a dreadful twisting in her stomach as bile rose up her throat and knew, with a terrible suddenness, why she hadn't gone to him directly.
She was petrified of telling him... Horrified that he would glare, and snarl, and gnash his snaggle-teeth at her. Scared that she'd be left alone, whereas if he simply didn't know... then at least her heart wouldn't be broken.
She only barely managed to bite down on her knuckle to prevent the low keening sound that wished to erupt from her breast to break the silence in which she'd hidden.
"That's the trouble with things now," her manager interposed, looking like he had happened upon a subject on which he held many strong opinions, "when men don't take proper responsibility for their extracurriculars and leave a woman with few options, who can question why the poor girl had to take it upon herself—"
Snape looked thunderous, his face blackening with rage and incredulity. "Mr... Max," he said in sneering tones, clearly having read the man's given name off his badge, "If you at all value the intact nature of your face, you will tell me what the hell it is you think I'm to take responsibility for,"
"Now see here, man—I'll not have you threatening violence in my store! You can speak to Hermione on her own time, I'm calling the police. I—"
But during Max's diatribe Snape had finally spotted Hermione's pink face over her manager's shoulder, and his face had clouded with what appeared to be a mixture of frustration and determination. He pushed past the blustering middle-aged muggle and made a beeline for her, striding into her aisle with his boots clicking audibly the measure of each of his steps.
"You couldn't have saved me from that fool?" he snarled, glaring down at her where she was resting on the floor.
Mr. Sullivan had hurried over and was waving his arm in Snape's peripheral vision, trying to draw his attention back to himself. "You need to leave! I'm warning you—I'll have you taken out with force if necessary,"
Snape drew himself up and glowered at the shorter man, before he partially withdrew his wand from his pocket, the tip still covered by the material of his jacket—an unseasonably warm choice for the early July weather—and cast what looked like a very mild muggle-repelling charm on their surroundings.
Max's face pinched in confusion, and he glanced at his employee and at Snape with evident befuddlement, before he ultimately scrambled away toward the main office, muttering about ledgers that needed his attention.
Hermione swallowed, nervous. "Will he still call the police?"
With a roll of his eyes, Snape shook his head, "Not likely. He'll have forgotten by now."
A fraught silence seemed to stretch between them as they sized one another up, though Snape broke it after a fashion by remembering himself and extending a hand to her. She glanced at it with obvious trepidation.
The man frowned after she failed to accept the obvious overture of good will. "Are we back to that then? Not only will you not allow me to help you off the floor, but you can barely stand to look at me—"
As he made to withdraw his hand, she grasped it and, with a bit of an effort, used it to lever herself up and to her feet. She dared not look into his face as she stood, training her eyes instead on the floor, the linoleum pattern of which was swirling in unsettling wave-like eddies to and fro.
She'd not let go of his hand, unsteady as she was, and thus she knew the exact moment that the knut finally dropped, as it tightened around her own in a vice-grip before releasing as if she were infected with leprosy.
Hermione barely managed to catch herself against the cart. He'd not pushed her, but she felt the sensation of pins and needles all throughout her legs. "I don't suppose you still wanted to go grab lunch..."
Snape hissed like he'd been scalded, "You daft woman, of course I don't want to get lunch!"
"I—"
"Did you suppose you could hide this from me if you'd had time to cast a concealing charm on your clothes?" Snape sneered at her, unkindly.
"When would you have bothered to tell me—I wonder—and what could you have been hoping would happen!? That I'd clean up the messy decisions you've continued to make well into adulthood? That you'd somehow impress upon me to take pity on you?"
Hermione gaped at him, uncomprehending of his vitriol. "What do you mean? What are you saying?" she demanded, glaring up at him through a sheen of perspiration.
"I think that should be obvious, Granger! You want me to claim another man's whelp as my own. Why else would you have tried to hide it—?!"
"I did no such thing! You never responded to my letters—"
Snape snarled and squared his shoulders, his navy-black eyes turning a flinty shade of shale, "All three of them? Tell me, Granger, if you really wanted to see me—if you cared one whit about the time we spent together over Christmas—why didn't you come to see Mother and me? Why only send half-hearted notes to my place of business that might never have been opened and that contained nothing of importance—"
"YOU TOLD ME TO SEND THEM THERE!" She screeched, feeling her face redden. The surroundings brightened and the aura that seemed to shine from everywhere all at once became overwhelming. Hermione could barely make out Snape's features amongst all of the visual white noise.
"And... and furthermore," she strained to say, reaching out to grasp the cart with one hand, "how dare youaccuse me of trying to implicate you in a pregnancy that's not yours—"
"So you admit it isn't mine!" Snape shouted, eyes alight with righteous indignation.
"No, you fucking git," Hermione panted with strain, "I wasn't trying to implicate you in a pregnancy that... that was yours. Merely... merely to inform you," she struggled to articulate.
Snape looked curiously indistinct... were there two of him...?
"Sev—Sev'rus... there wasn't... no one else, I mean..." All was silent except the progressively worsening buzzing in her ears. It seemed to be coming from the florescent lights above her. She trained her toffee-coloured eyes on them and squinted. How was it that though she was looking directly into the light, it was so dark everywhere else... all around...
"Granger?" Who was that? She'd heard that voice before... so familiar...
"Hermione?" There was more being said, but she couldn't make it out, everything was awash in a uniform unreality. She felt nothing. She heard nothing. Then she saw nothing, not even the floor coming up to meet her as she collapsed.
"Looking back in my rear view
Nothing, no nothing can change you
I decided to play when I knew you were fire
It started off warm and now I hear the choir
Who do you think you are?
Leaving your keys in my car
You bring out the worst in me
You bring out the worst in me"
"Worst In Me" (reprise) – Unlike Pluto