Hermione jumped under the duvet a little at a knock on the bedroom door. Despite the fact that her life was steady now, that the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters and other such bogeymen were no longer a danger or even a nuisance in her life (well, the ones who weren't now her in-laws), she still found herself getting jumpy late at night. Hah, late, she thought to herself. It was half past nine, hardly an hour she would have considered late back when such bogeymen actually were a concern.
Her husband felt the small bounce in the bed from her shift in weight and reached over to rub her arm without looking up from his book. Being middle-aged and boring isn't so bad. He'd long since learned that she didn't want to be pitied and she didn't want him to always play therapist; she just needed him to be there for her, and he always was.
"Come in, Graham," Hermione called, and the door creaked open. Their son Graham, four and a half years old, crept into the room and shut the door gingerly behind him, chin wobbling.
"Mummy," he said, arms crossed, the pain in his voice obvious, "I had a nightmare."
A small smile tugged at Hermione's lips when Draco answered before she did. "Come up here and let's talk about it," her husband said. The gravity of whatever monster or nasty situation had disrupted his son's sleep was obviously more interesting to him than the Torts in Tottenham book in front of him (the unfortunate leading candidate for textbook for the magical civil law class he would be teaching in the fall, and utterly, utterly boring).
The moment that Graham crawled up the side of the bed and under the covers with them, though, he was pressed flush against his mother, already asleep again, a veritable bug in a rug. "See?" Hermione whispered playfully, carding her fingers through their son's thick, curly blonde hair. "No one wants you to play therapist for them, everyone just wants to sleep."
Draco returned to his torts book, miffed, and for a moment his only reply was to wrinkle his nose. Then, "Merlin, I hate this book."
Assignment #4: Travel & Tourism (Task #3 - Write a kidfic.) WC: 368
