"Hey little sister, what have you done
Hey little sister, who's the only one
Hey little sister, who's your superman
Hey little sister, who's the one you want
Hey little sister, shotgun"
"White Wedding" – Billy Idol
"Granger?" Severus snapped, his voice impatient. The damned girl had drifted off into a string of incoherent sentence fragments. That should have been his first clue, had he had his wits about him.
Hermione didn't respond, her eyes instead floated, almost lazily, up and to the right. When he turned to see what she was staring at all he saw was the ugly muggle florescent lighting.
Snape turned back to her and was struck first by the way in which her arm, which was supporting her weight against the cart, that might have rolled out from underneath her had it not been wedged up against the sturdy steel frame of the aisle shelving, shook with a slight tremor. In the stillness that came in the seconds immediately after he'd called her name, all he could hear was the slight shaking of the cart. The sound of jangling metal. His second impression was the errant observation that her eyes, focused as they were on the bright light, should not have been dilated as they were...
He didn't even notice his anger evaporating in favour of the familiar and physically tangible emotion that was fear.
Snape drew himself up before her, a frown of concern creasing his brow. "Hermione?" He waved one palm in front of her eyes, noting that there was no change, before he heard the woman make a small grunt, and his ears detected the unmistakable hiss of someone losing control of their bladder, so familiar after observing hours of torture at the Dark Lord's side.
In the space of two seconds, the terrible silence they had both occupied since she'd lost control of her speech was replaced by a series of sounds which for years after would haunt Severus in moments of weakness.
She collapsed into the pool of urine she'd released, and unlike someone suffering under a sustained bout of Cruciatus, she didn't scream, couldn't. Her eyes, unseeing, dilated and contracted by turns, her head cracked loudly against the linoleum as it was thrown back by spasmodic undulations that carried her arms and legs in a helter skelter pattern, knocking boxes of cereal across the aisle and sending the cart careening down the narrow corridor before it ultimately toppled to the side with a deafening clatter.
There was absolutely no time to think. No time to consider how he felt about the revelation, so abruptly sprung on him. He couldn't organize his thoughts in order to decide whether he took her word at face value: and it was in that moment that he realized he truly didn't care to examine the truth.
It wouldn't have mattered if she'd lied, but with a painful, paralyzing clarity, he knew for certain that she hadn't.
Severus had collapsed to his knees beside her only a second after she herself had lost her footing, and he moved to straddle her, unsure of his actions beyond knowing that he somehow had to prevent her from injuring herself with her thrashing. His knees pinned her arms to her sides, and though he could do nothing to prevent her legs twisting viciously behind him, he drew her head up to rest on his forearm where it no longer could make violent contact with the befouled floor beneath them.
With his other hand he struggled to grasp his wand, his panicked brain registering the necessity of help—this was not something he could solve by apparating her away—and he cast a Finite Incantatem to bring the end of the muggle-repelling charms.
"SOMEBODY! HELP! OVER HERE, WE NEED HELP!" He shouted from where he kneeled, heedless of the mess beneath him and looking over his shoulder as he used his free hand to hold her head still. It strained against his palm as the slight woman beneath him rode out the waves of her seizure.
Down the aisle he could see people beginning to poke their heads around, attracted by the ruckus. "YOU! HEY! Yes, you! Call the fucking emergency line!" He struggled to restrain her through a particularly powerful convulsion, "She needs—" she thrashed again, "She needs a doctor!"
The next ten minutes were agonizing. Hermione didn't regain consciousness, and though she'd stopped seizing, her head now lolled, like a dreadful puppet, to the side. He'd moved them so that he was seated against the aisle, holding her against his chest and directing the other shoppers and store associates who had gathered around to bring a handful of cold, dampened paper napkins from the bathroom. When they were brought to him he folded one across her forehead and eyes and took a handful of the remaining napkins to sluice water down her clammy skin, any of it that he could find exposed, including her forearms and her neck to the clavicle.
An older Indian couple had stopped and stayed beside him, the wife speaking to him and giving him instructions that he heeded because of their good sense, but which he couldn't have repeated for the life of him had he been asked later on.
She knelt down by Hermione's feet and worked loose first her shoes, and then her socks, exposing ankles that were visibly swollen with mottled skin and deep recesses where her socks and plimsolls had rested.
The woman had grabbed up Hermione's wrist and checked her pulse against her watch, frowning with obvious concern.
"They'll be here soon, dear," she said, directing her soothing words to Severus who was the one awake to hear them. She squeezed his shoulder. "How far along is she?"
Snape glanced at the woman, his eyes looking only a bit less unfocused than Hermione's own had appeared before her collapse, "How far—?"
"In her pregnancy? They'll need to know in the ambulance,"
"Oh," he shook his head, trying to clear it from the fog of terror that had overtaken him, possible only because his occlumency shields had long since been felled for good. "I don't know,"
"You don't know? You are her husband, are you not?" This was asked by her own husband, a shorter man with a thick, well-groomed moustache.
"I—" he swallowed, thinking hard when he was interrupted by the sounds of claxons ringing out a shrill cry.
The ambulance had pulled up to the store-front and a team of EMTs, demanding directions from the staff that had positioned themselves at the front of the store to meet them, rushed the entrance.
"They're here... can you bring them back?"
"Of course, sir, we'll be back in only a moment," the wife reassured him, tugging her husband along with her.
When he was asked in the days and weeks to come why he had acted as he had, he never did manage to come up with a satisfactory answer. He perhaps would have defended it to himself with the excuse that he only had thirty seconds to act... nearly no time at all to think... that he was used to taking drastic measures to ameliorate the worst-case outcomes... surely, he couldn't keep an eye on her if they whisked her away from him; he wasn't entitled to stay by her side under any other circumstances, nor to talk to the doctors on her behalf...
His hands fumbled at the clips nearest to him advertising a corn-based puff cereal. He snapped the tag off and turned it over in his hands, picking up a second one as he went.
Severus had to conduct his magic out in front of him, as his arms were still wrapped around the unconscious woman leaning against his shoulder. Under his fumbling fingers, the tags warped until they connected end-to-end, bending to the steady flow of magic coming from the tip of his twisted wand. Then, concentrating on turning the plastic and paper into seamless metal, he transfigured them into a matched pair.
The resulting band he hastily shoved onto his own left-hand ring finger, the second onto Hermione's. As he heard them maneuvering the large, wheeled stretcher up the aisle, he shoved the tip of his wand into her purse and summoned her wallet into his hand, flipping it open and charming her muggle I.D.
The husband and wife drew back up to him, urging him to allow the EMTs to carefully move Hermione's prone form onto the stretcher they'd brought. He wanted to growl at them that he wasn't some lost child, but then couldn't help but to admit that given his shell-shocked reaction to Hermione's condition they perhaps had grounds for thinking him a bit feeble-minded.
A young man of probably twenty-five was doing an immediate check-over as his colleague secured the straps around her arms, legs, and torso. He turned to Snape.
"You're the husband?"
Snape finally stood from his position on the floor as they made to lift Hermione and engage the wheels beneath the portable gurney. He swallowed, his throat dry, though when he managed to speak his voice was deceptively strong and decisive. "I am."
"How many weeks pregnant is she?" the younger man demanded, businesslike.
"I'm not sure, she—we only just found out,"
The EMT glowered at him like he was a particularly thick specimen, before he nodded, his face betraying his irritation.
"We'll be taking her to The Royal London, so you can follow along after—"
"Oh no," Snape said, his voice dangerous, finally having managed to sharpen his wits equal to the task at hand, "I think not. I'll be accompanying you in the ambulance."
"That won't help her—"
Snape didn't give him time to finish, as the other emergency worker was already wheeling Hermione down the aisle. He stuck his hand in his jacket and directed the point of his wand toward the man before him. He'd hoped to avoid such contingencies through the subterfuge of the marriage-that-wasn't, yet he'd still do whatever necessary.
"Imperio."
In only seconds the young man's eyes had glazed over.
"You will be letting me into the ambulance,"
"I... yes, of course, sir."
"Good." Snape scowled. "Then let's away."
Thankfully, the man was merely the driver, and all Snape had to do was to direct him to complete his course as he normally would have. The other EMT had taken far less convincing, as his partner had already consented to allow Snape into the back of the vehicle, and he was far more concerned with checking Hermione's blood pressure and hooking her up to a fetal heart-rate monitor.
"160 over 102..." he murmured to himself, shaking his head with a frown.
Snape said nothing, as he doubted his input would have proved helpful. Beneath her eyelids, Hermione's eyes seemed to be darting back and forth in an alarming pattern.
The EMT worked at a furious pace to stabilize the woman between them before he grabbed up a receiver and made what appeared to be a quick radio call to the hospital where they would be arriving.
Snape paid this little attention. He was too captured by the pallor of Hermione's face, her ragged breathing, how her lips appeared to be chapped and peeling after she'd expelled a mouthful of frothy edema onto the supermarket floor not even ten minutes earlier. Her face was partially hidden under a plastic oxygen mask that the EMT had strapped into place, but it was still clear to him how wasted she looked lying before them.
The wizard felt a rising tide of pressure that took him a moment to identify, and only at the very last second did he manage to suppress the sob that wanted to escape by sucking in his cheeks and creasing his brow in a furious frown. Severus only barely accomplished the feat by swallowing around the balloon of anguish that was rising up out of the pit of his stomach and which clawed at him: first at his chest, then his throat, trying to squeeze its way into his eyeballs and pickle his brain in a wash of dread grief.
He would not—no. He refused to even think the word. Only if the doctors failed. Only if the ambulance didn't make it on time. Only if they lost her on this paltry little stretcher...
'Only if the baby doesn't make it,' came an insidious voice in his thoughts.
In shaking loose the poisonous image that thought produced he let out a feral growl between the gulps he was employing to keep from letting his moans of agony escape.
He wasn't allowed to cry. To cry meant to mourn, and there was nothing to mourn, was there? They'd not seen each other since January. They'd only spent the one night together. He'd never even imagined himself with a child, much less wanted one. To lose one he'd known for less than an hour wouldn't be such a terrible tragedy.
But these were all lies he was telling himself. Half-truths at best and malicious deception at worst. The only real reason he could hold onto with any sense of sincere hope was that there was nothing to mourn yet.
Where his fingers circled Hermione's limp wrist he could still feel the faint tattoo of her heart beating. On the beeping monitor across the ambulance from him the child's heartbeat was still racing, though he could make neither heads nor tails of whether it was too fast...
180... was that high?
Snape shook his head. There was no reason to mourn yet. His fingers squeezed around Hermione's hand where he'd slid them from her wrist. He had to make himself useful... How?
If she'd been telling him the truth—if it had only been him—then at the very least he could figure out how far along she was.
He looked up to see the EMT, whose attention was divided between the monitors, the oxygen gauge, and the radio receiver.
"...yes—female patient, I'd say probably twenty-five,"
"Twenty-seven," Snape corrected.
"Twenty-seven," the EMT amended, "pregnant, looks to be somewhere in her second trimester,"
"Twenty-six,"
"I thought you just said she was twenty-seven," the younger man responded, distracted.
"No," Snape sighed, "twenty-six weeks. It was Christmas. Twenty-six weeks pregnant."
Speaking to Snape and covering the receiver, the EMT turned to him, "You think you conceived on Christmas?"
"I know we did."
"And that was twenty-six weeks ago, by your count?"
Snape growled, not liking being questioned on his understanding of basic maths. "Yes."
The EMT picked the receiver back up once more and spoke into it. "That's a bit of a correction: she's early in the third trimester—yes. That's right. Twenty-nine weeks most likely,"
"I told you twenty-six! Are you incapable of even basic comprehension?" the wizard snarled, his eyes flashing with ire. "Or are you suggesting that... that my wife was with another man?"
The EMT rose to an equal height before him, giving him a level look, no small task in the stooped confines of the ambulance. "The baby's age is counted from the date of your wife's last menses, sir— I estimated an additional three weeks. Who has she been seeing for antenatal care?"
Snape's lips twisted into a grimace. "I'm not certain."
"Has she been seen at your GP's clinic? Was it a midwife? An obstetrician—"
"I told you, I don't know," the dour man snarled.
Though the EMT didn't say it, it was clear from his expression that he either didn't believe that Snape was telling the truth, or that if he was, that he was judging him harshly for it.
The younger man, 'Clint' if the name on his badge was to be trusted, gave him a look that screamed impatience. "Just tell me her name then and I'll have them look her up in the system,"
"Hermione Snape," Severus said, the lie tasting like a sip of an intoxicating, complex wine on his tongue. One replete with notes of longing, frustration, hope, and bitter disappointment.
Clint spoke the name into the radio and after a moment of listening on the headset looked at Snape with accusation. "They've not heard of her,"
"Perhaps they're spelling it incorrectly," Snape replied evasively.
"The fetal heart-rate is well into the range for sustained distress, it's not come down," Clint continued into the radio. "No. She's not regained consciousness—Blood pressure is still in a bad place...
"Yeah? Alright. Copy that." He turned to Snape and gave him a somewhat apologetic look, which was something of a turn-about from the snippy attitude he'd adopted in response to Snape's lack of information on Hermione's medical history.
"When we arrive at hospital, we're going to be taking your wife into the operating theatre, first thing—"
"The operating theatre—?!"
"Yes," Clint interrupted his outburst with practiced ease, "And I'm afraid you'll have to stay back in the waiting room. Your wife is suffering from a condition known as eclampsia. The high-blood pressure from her pregnancy is life threatening. They're going to deliver your baby today by caesarian."
"Hey little sister, what have you done
Hey little sister, who's the only one
I've been away for so long (so long)
I've been away for so long (so long)
I let you go for so long
It's a nice day to start again
Come on, it's a nice day for a white wedding
It's a nice day to start again"
"White Wedding" (reprise) – Billy Idol
A/N: I'm going to have to beg the reader's mercy on any inaccuracies. I did the best research I could, but it's difficult as an American to learn of the actual practices that would have been in place in 2007 for an ambulance ride. I'm also not a medical professional, so I relied heavily on British midwifery training videos that are publicly available on Youtube.
Thank you all for reading and reviewing!