In the final month leading up to the potion's completion they become almost single-mindedly focused on the success of their work. The conclusion of the recipe is the trickiest part, but of course between Hermione Granger and Severus Snape there is no real cause for concern. She has never felt so connected, so in sync with any other person. Severus knows what needs to be done without once entering her mind; he foresees her desire before she even has the chance to express it on her own.
They move a cot downstairs and barely leave the cool basement space at all, except to make food briefly and bring it back down, or to retrieve a new book. Images Hermione will never forget: reading Shakespeare aloud to Severus as he laughs in spite of himself and plays along, the scene from Macbeth with the three witches, leaning over the cauldron and repeating the words in the voice of an old crone. Spreading the blankets out across the cot, letting him take her far away from the bed, from the house, out of her own mind as she rides waves of pleasure to their eventual completion.
I never want to leave here, she finds herself thinking as she watches the flames burn, lying naked in his arms as he dozes. She is both hotly anticipating the potion's completion and afraid of what will happen when it's over.
What will she do? Who will she be? And will she really have to part ways with the person who brought her back to life? Who made her realize that she was destined for more than a sandwich shop, more than a lifetime mourning the precious little girl she was, briefly, in her teens?
It's now just a week to completion and their journey to the graveyard. Severus sits down with her at lunch and explains how it'll play: a small, Ministry-approved group will accompany them to camp in the graveyard overnight. Hermione can scarcely believe it: how quickly time has passed, how excited and afraid she is. How difficult it is to imagine her life in any way beyond the events of that night, regardless of whether they fail or succeed.
"Hermione." He pauses. "Are you absolutely certain that you want to attend?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean it will likely be quite a shock if Potter… rises."
They look at each other for a minute, and then she reaches for his hand across the table.
"You don't have to protect me, Severus," she says softly, after a beat.
He looks back at her with a slightly bemused expression.
"Of course not, Hermione."
They continue to sip their tea quietly, their plates now empty before them. Hermione can hear the birds chirping outside, can catch fleeting glimpses of them through the kitchen window. It'll be otherworldly to return to the outside world—to feel actual sunlight on her skin. The last time she ventured through the front door, it was snowing. It's been months now. She glances at the burns on her arms, faded but never fully gone—the curse prevents them from totally disappearing—and thinks of that night. How little they knew of each other back then.
"I had assumed…" he begins again. She puts down her mug and looks at him. He clears his throat. "I had thought… when Potter came back… that you and he would… be together."
"What?" Hermione says, flabbergasted. She laughs a little and now that she's started she finds she can't stop, accidentally knocking over her empty mug, vaguely aware, though her half-closed eyes, that Severus is staring at her in shock and confusion.
"But you always spent so much time together," he persists. "And being James' son, moving through the world as if it belonged to him… I assumed you were… drawn to him. To that. I thought…" He clears his throat again, a quick rough sound in his throat, attempting to disguise his embarrassment. Hermione hiccups, hiding her smile. "And you've said. You've said you… loved him. That you love him still."
"Well yes, but…" she stops and thinks. "Maybe it was different with you and Lily. I can see that now. But Severus, you can love someone and not be in love with them." Hermione inclines her head and for a rare moment realizes she knows more than him about something.
"I want Harry back for the good of the wizarding world. I want Harry back because he's my friend. And I've been sad all this time, for all these years, because we were quite close." She pauses. "He was possibly the best friend I ever had. But I wasn't in love with him. Not the way you're thinking."
Strange how she can still say anything to Severus about herself that surprises him, yet here they are. He's looking at her mug rather than her face now. They don't talk about their own relationship in these terms, with this kind of language. They have lived outside of such vocabulary. Neither has used the word love in reference to the other—not out loud. But as their inevitable departure approaches, she has begun to wonder about the way she feels for Severus Snape. How she might begin to define it. If love might be a word she one day fully learns how to use.
"Have you… have you been in love, Hermione?" Severus asks, seemingly almost before he can stop himself. Hermione bites her lip and stares back at him. He looks at her for a moment that lasts so long she almost forgets the question he put to her entirely. Almost.
She doesn't answer.
The Ministry group arrives in the afternoon. Hermione wakes rumpled in Severus' arms after something like three of hours sleep to polite but persistent knocking: a sound that has become so foreign to her in the last year she hardly remembers what it means. It takes her another minute to gather herself and walk across the small familiar space for what will be one of the last times.
Her bag is packed beside the door. The potion is cooling downstairs, the blue fire finally out for the first time in six months.
It's real. It's happening. They'll be in Godric's Hollow tonight.
Their company consists of two aurors and someone from the experimental potions department—a bloke by the name of Will who seems vaguely irritated that he did not invent the potion himself. He speaks of nothing else the whole way there—Severus and Hermione and him all in the backseat of a magicked sedan together, driving from Spinner's End to Godric's Hollow. Severus and Will converse haltingly about the recipe—Severus in a somewhat haughty manner, reminding Hermione how he used to act and what she used to think of him, as Will continues to ask question after question, toeing the line of what he is allowed to know. Hermione can mostly only pay attention to her heart thumping in her ears, blood rushing loud.
She's annoyed with Will's unrelenting curiosity until they start unpacking at the graveyard—the aurors first magicking the appropriate illusions and restrictions to deter Muggles—and he mentions that he's Muggle-born. Suddenly she identifies with him instead. That same familiar thirst to prove oneself—oh, she knows it well. It's borne from years of prejudice, after all. She casts Severus a small, soft smile, and maybe it's just her, but after that she notices his responses to Will are softer. Kinder.
The aurors—two very tall men in imposing dark robes—stay silent and watchful at the outskirts of their little makeshift camp. She feels protected by their presence, even while it is strange to be around other men again.
The other three have brought tents, but Severus had insisted she and him sleep out under the stars, directly beside Harry's grave. He drags out two sleeping bags he seems to have inherited from his parents: small, old, dusty.
Hermione mostly watches Severus interact with the three from the sidelines, feeling shy, having forgotten how to communicate with the others. It's odd, too, seeing Severus around other people after having spent almost a year alone with him. They are both rusty at interpersonal interaction after having attuned themselves so finely to each other. It's a mark of how far he's come with her to see him regress back to his original form now: mostly monosyllabic, irritated to be asked any questions.
Severus had wanted to be alone for this. She can see it in his face when he takes in the graveyard as the sun begins to set. The desire to fully immerse himself in the events of the evening, the distraction of the company of strangers.
"I wish it was just you and I," he whispers fiercely to her as they pull things out of Hermione's magic bottomless bag beside the grave. Vials and funnels and a tiny spoon. "I wish there was no one else here at all."
Though it's one thing to know this, it's another to hear it, and his verbalization still makes her heart flutter. And she knows what he means, of course. This is the culmination of all their work, private and important.
Harry might join us here tonight, she resists pointing out, but she keeps quiet. Harry. Harry Potter. She is excited but can't shake the feeling of strange sadness, like something is ending—a something may or may not have existed between her and the man sitting beside her, forever pushing his hair out of his eyes.
They have been bound by this task for so long.
Being in the graveyard feels strangely like a morbid summer camp, Hermione finds herself thinking, and then she stifles a laugh before it erupts from her and these three very serious men think she's mad. The air is thick, hot, and heavy around them as night falls in earnest and everyone finally settles in.
When Hermione looks up she can see a thousand tiny stars dotting the sky. It's strange to think of the last time she was here with Harry, but once she thinks it she can't unthink it: the two of them in their different, Polyjuiced bodies. The blanket of snow covering the ground all around them. Christmas ten years ago that feels like a hundred.
She and Severus roll out their sleeping bags on either side of Harry's grave. She takes in the small, simple white marble tombstone. Just to the side is Lily and James's grave; she throws a glance Severus' way, to see if he's also looking at it, but he's looking at her instead.
Mosquitos buzz in clouds around them. Will and the two aurors have long since crawled into their tents; Will a bit grumpily, but eventually giving into his own exhaustion. The protections still crackle around them occasionally; she can see through the barriers to their small-town surroundings—the quiet, closed businesses surrounding the square. She remembers thinking it was interesting, that Godric's Hollow had so centralized their graveyard. A reminder of mortality across from the church and the market and whatever else. Step out and you'd see the memorials of the dead congregated there. A reminder of what was coming.
She had assumed she and Severus would pass the time by talking, but the minutes pass and mostly he just readjusts things before them, picking the glass vial up and putting it back down, slapping dead any mosquitos that dare to land on him.
Lucky Hermione brought a book, of course. She takes it out and reads it after a few failed attempts at conversation. She knows how he feels, her stomach twisting and knotted in anticipation—the possibility that they have managed what no other witch or wizard has, that tonight they will bring the Chosen One back to life.
"It's not natural, you know," she'd heard one of the aurors mutter earlier. "What they're tryin' to do. You can't just bring a person back. Ain't right."
She'd looked up at the same time Severus did, caught him just as he was turning away from the words on Lily's tombstone. She thought of the cursed fire that had almost swallowed her, the house. Everything they'd learned against Defense Against the Dark Arts. The Tale of the Three Brothers. Her misgivings are beginning to build in earnest—but isn't it too late?
In the moments before they pour their year's work over Harry's grave, Severus looks at her.
"I have to tell you something, Hermione."
Her heart quickens.
"The potion works. I know it works. I won't tell you how I know, but I know." He clears his throat. "But there's something I need to tell you. Something I didn't put in the notebook."
She can only stare at him as he continues, feeling her eyes widen of their own accord.
"I built a loophole into the recipe. The possibility of refusal. So Harry… he can choose to stay. If that's what he wants, wherever he is. Instead of coming back. If wherever he is is… better."
She understands the gravity of what Severus is saying. If Harry chooses to stay behind, it will appear to the outside world that they failed. Especially for Severus—it will look as if he wasted ten years of his life on something that never materialized. Time wasted. When in actuality he managed the biggest success of all—he simply performed it with kindness.
Severus takes a shaky breath, his normally cool demeanor long gone.
"We won't tell them about it—the Ministry. If Harry remains in the grave tonight, this will be the end of the Resurrection Project. We'll put the work to bed and leave the experiment behind, and you won't ever breathe a word of what I've told you to anyone. Our secret, Hermione. But I want Potter—Harry—I want him to have that choice. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
She can only nod mutely, clutching her book very tightly to her chest. She knows nothing of the afterlife, has never understood its iterations in religion or conversations with others. But she finds herself hoping that wherever Harry is, he feels safe and loved.
"His whole life, everyone put so much on him," she says softly. "The weight of the world. He was supposed to save us all from the beginning. From the moment he was born."
They both turn to face the tombstone and Hermione heaves a great sigh.
"But maybe… maybe it's not his responsibility anymore," she says. "Maybe Harry Potter has done enough for us." She catches Severus' eye. "He wouldn't want to come back, would he? He wouldn't want to be an emblem, a symbol. He never did, even when he was alive."
"We'll leave the choice up to him," Severus murmurs.
Hermione nods, but in her heart she already knows.
"Wherever he is, Hermione," Severus says—and here his voice shakes a little, despite his best efforts—"I think he's with Lily. And—and with James."
She looks at him questioningly, hating that she still has the need to ask, unable to stop herself.
"So… Lily's grave—"
He holds her gaze.
"No. Just Harry's."
Together they pour the vial out over Harry Potter's grave, and as midnight strikes in Godric's Hollow, Severus weaves his trembling fingers through Hermione's one more time.