After a good night's sleep Severus had calmed down. Hermione kissed him goodbye and Flooed to work at St. Mungo's, and Severus climbed down the cellar stairs to his potion's lab. Here in his private lair he chopped ingredients, the potions bubbled in their cauldrons and when the air was filled with the familiar fumes of a lifetime he could concede that the debacle was his fault. It had been a long shot to begin with and had hinged on a factor Severus had no control over. Well, he wouldn't make the same mistake twice. The potions were all simmering at uncritical stages, so Severus wiped his hands, made a pot of tea upstairs and had a cuppa in his makeshift office in the second cellar room he had moved into so that Hermione could have his upstairs office. Theoretically the upstairs room was big enough for the two of them, but he had fled from Hermione's clutter. Her creativity thrived on chaos, on heaps of haphazardly stacked books stuffed with colour-coded bookmarks until they looked like rainbow-coloured hedgehogs while his mind needed order to unfold its potential.

He sipped the hot tea while he thought some more. So, phase two of his plan. Backup plans were for Gryffindors who rushed in without thinking; Slytherins crafted plans that covered every possible outcome. His gaze fell on the rickety bookshelf crammed with obscure potions texts and it occurred to him that he had better check something else first.

On the bottom jammed between two unwieldy tomes stood the plain slim hand-written book that Severus needed. He plucked it from the shelf and opened it. The journal had been written by a mediaeval witch with a dreadful scrawl, gathering the potions she needed for her daily work as midwife. Only his years of marking homework enabled Severus to decipher the chicken scratches.

After his coma he had to deal with the fallout of Nagini's venom. For the first weeks he suffered from dizziness, numb fingers and toes and, most annoying, temporary loss of his voice. Strangely enough the venom had also solved his oily hair problem, at least temporarily. These after-effects only lasted a month, but Healer Smethwyck had warned him that he might face more permanent long-term effects, most notably sterility and impotence. What a glorious morning it had been when, about two months after that, Severus had woken up to find his todger proudly greeting the day. He hadn't wasted a thought on sterility, as far as he had been concerned his equipment had done everything Severus needed it for. Maybe it still did, but he had to make sure of that.

He was looking for the Sterility Solution, a simple but reliable way to test if a man could sire children. Of course there were newer and more sophisticated fertility potions; Severus regularly brewed them for St. Mungo's. Their colour could tell a healer if Mr Bollywoggle's chances to spawn little Bollywoggles would improve if he stopped smoking and swore off the Ogden's, but they also took at least two days to brew. Severus didn't want to risk Hermione walking into his lab and asking which one of the hospital's patients the potion was for.

Severus thumbed through the book, stopped and turned back two pages. Well, if push came to shove he could volunteer to take that Seahorse Elixir here and carry their child himself. He read the instructions until he came to the next page that had a crude illustration drawn next to the recipe. Severus did a double take, carefully crossed his legs and decided he would rather endure hour after hour of Cruciatus before doing something that foolish.

Enough time wasted; on the next page he finally found what he had been looking for. He skimmed through the page and nodded to himself; he had just enough of the needed ingredients left for one dose. Excellent.

With all the necessary ingredients arranged in orderly rows on one side of the cauldron and the journal put on the other, Severus started brewing in his lab. It wasn't challenging work. The crucial factors were to add the sperm sample directly into the potion and not collect it first in a cup or it might get contaminated, and to do so not later than, here Severus craned his neck and squinted, not later than fifty minutes after adding the Belladonna seeds.

Severus set the Matty, the magical timer used by potioneers all around the globe named after its inventor Hatty McLeod - a genius tinkerer with no sense of time but a solid business acumen to make up for it - , stirred the rod one last time and dropped the purple seeds into the cauldron.

There was enough time to let the potion cool down, decant a tumblerful and go up into the bedroom, fetch the old edition of Playwizard hidden under his side of the mattress, settle down to some pleasurable business and collect the spoils.

"Miaow."

"Get out, you flea-ridden oversized mouser! Shoo!"

Crookshanks obviously was in no mood to listen. He jumped on the table and landed on the battered journal.

"You know you aren't allowed in here!"

"Miaow!"

Severus grabbed the protesting half-Kneazle, threw him out of the lab and closed the door behind him. The potion was undisturbed, but the book had fallen off the table. A tiny flake of dirt crumbled off the page when he picked it up and dusted off the paper with his hand. Where there had been written a comfortable fifty only seconds ago was now a challenging five.

Five minutes.

For ten precious seconds out of that five minutes Severus's mind went blank; then the adrenaline rush set in and he bustled about the lab with hectic activity. First he tapped his wand on the Matty and changed it to five minutes; it changed its colour from a friendly blue to a nice orange and hummed at a low frequency. If this batch was ruined Severus had to wait and order new ingredients before he could try again, but with the potions he had to start today because Potter's new Auror recruits had walked into a training trap and set a new record on acting stupid, his tight working schedule in the next days to catch up on his regular orders and the weekend looming he would lose a whole week. But only five minutes...

The Matty hummed louder and the dial emitted a yellow glow.

… but only four minutes and thirty seconds left. Apparition with the potion at this stage was out of the question, hurrying up to the bedroom would take too much time. He couldn't just drop his pants in his lab. It was unsanitary, and how would he be able to work here in the future? That left the office. A flick of his magic wand - the wooden one - and the door to his office flew open with a loud bang, the cauldron and the Matty floated over to his desk with Severus close behind.

Four minutes.

Severus ripped off his robe and pulled his trousers and pants down in one go. It was awfully chilly in his office, he hadn't really noticed before.

The Matty grew louder.

"Alright, alright!"

How hard could it be? Severus looked down. Not hard at all, unfortunately. He took matters into his hand. A fantasy, but which one? The one of them under a Disillusionment Charm and Hermione giving him a blowjob at Flourish and Blotts and they had to be careful not to be caught? Sex in the restricted section at Hogwarts after hours? Hermione as the librarian punishing him for stealing a book? And what the hell was wrong with him that all his fantasies contained books?

The Matty chimed once. Severus took a deep breath, closed his eyes and got to work. The time they came back from Arthur's party. Oh, that was nice. The curve of Hermione's hips under his hands. Yes, that was working. The Matty chimed again, at a higher frequency and reminded Severus that while it was nice that he had fun he better hurry up and finish sooner rather than later, how about in the next two minutes, 'kay?, and Severus dug out one of his most prized memories, so precious to him he seldom thought of it lest he tainted and distorted it somehow.

Their first time together, how Hermione had shoved him against the door, all pushy and gloriously determined and how they had ripped their robes in their haste and how his knees had gone weak when she had moaned in his ears, like they did now and he put down his free hand on the desk for support, ignoring that the chime in the background turned into an aggressive buzzing, the signal that only one minute was left, and that the edge of the desk top cut into his thighs, because that only reminded him how they had ended up on the stairs and he had ripped her stockings off and she had dug her heels into his backside to have him closer, closer and she had been so hot and he had lost it and oh Hermione she was and he was and they were and oh fuck yes now yes...

Severus bucked once, twice, in sync with the magical timer that skipped and skidded over the desk, then quickly opened his eyes and witnessed through the curtain of stringy hair that clung to his sweaty face that he was bang on target and right on time, too, because the Matty wailed one last time and tipped over. The potion in the cauldron was the same dull brown colour as before, rather anticlimactic really, but the whole process took one to two minutes before there was a reliable result. Severus hobbled over to the chair on shaky knees, made a half-hearted attempt to pull his pants up where they belonged and then just gave up and slumped down with his briefs dangling around his ankles. Short fuse, loud bang, just like their first time only less embarrassing. He had been mortified, Hermione disappointed, but she had let him make it up to her, twice, before they went at it again and it was perfect.

A tiny bubble broke the potion's surface and burst with a soft pop, then another, and another. A golden oily sheen formed before at last a sparkling mist rose in triumph from the cauldron and spread over the ceiling, a swirling and pulsing testament to Severus's fertility.

Severus leaned back his head to enjoy the view. He was feeling rather chuffed with himself. The answer to his other question suddenly seemed pretty obvious to his mellowed mind; it was swimming in that cauldron right now. Not literally, of course, but he realised he had put the cart before the horse. Instead of dangling children in front of her nose he had to circumvent her impressive higher brain functions and appeal to her animalistic side, the part of her that acted on instinct and checked men against the evolutionary blue print that said 'father material'. It was also obvious to him that he needn't bother trying to fit into the 'protector' or 'provider' blue print; Hermione was a powerful witch more than capable to protect herself, and she knew only too well how much money Severus made. No, he would go the carnal route.

Severus was a thin man, had been downright skinny even for as long as he could remember, but after Nagini's attack he had lost so much weight he couldn't spare to begin with that he had resembled a gaunt Inferius. His muscles had atrophied and while he had gained a stone again with time he hadn't regained his old strength. At Hogwarts he used to walk miles during the day, from down in the dungeons up to the Great Hall during meals and to the Astronomy Tower during his rounds and through the Forbidden Forest to collect ingredients and didn't break sweat, but lately he had become complacent and sluggish. Nevertheless, Severus was top-notch father material and before long Hermione would come to realise that, too, yes indeed. In phase two of his plan he would put an end to the deplorable state of his body and get back into shape. Although it was high time to buff himself up he could do so step by step in addition to his other undertakings.

Reproduction was essentially a matter of biology, and from now on he would remember to treat it as such. He was potent, and Hermione was young. They had plenty of time.

Severus was running out of time. Time, stamina and pain killers; why on earth had he been too chintzy to brew one last batch again? He slowly heaved his aching body into their bed without his usual grace. Luckily for him, Hermione was engrossed in perusing The Official Highway Code - this was the latest requirement in order to fulfil the ridiculous new tightened Ministry regulations for Muggle liaisons - or he would have been forced to put on the graceful potions master persona for her and risk grievous injury.

In the beginning he had started out slow with taking the stairs in the house at a run at least ten times a day and Apparating to a location a mile off his destination when going out and walking the rest of the distance. He now dropped off his potions for St. Mungo's in person instead of sending the sturdy owl all their potion suppliers were provided with. This had the advantage that he could pry Hermione out of her lab and treat her to lunch in the cafeteria.

After the first week had passed with no apparent progress, he became impatient and upped the ante. He started to clean his cauldrons by hand, scrubbing their encrusted and stained bottoms until their shiny surfaces reflected his face. While it was an oddly meditative experience and improved the dexterity of his fingers, it wasn't the full-body workout the rumblings of his pupils about their detentions had led him to believe.

Really, had he known sooner he would have found something worse for the spoiled brats to do.

After the second week with neither any muscle gain nor any leisure time to speak of due to all the extra hours he spent scrubbing and walking, Severus was ready to explore new avenues. Instead of just scrubbing his cauldrons he used them as dumb-bells. He started with the standard size two copper cauldron, just the right weight and felt good in his hand, and that went so well that he soon worked his way forward to the big knee-high kettle lovingly called the Macbeth by connoisseurs. That resulted in a pulled muscle and a dent both in his ego and the cauldron respectively and was the reason he resumed taking the pain reliever slash muscle formation potion he had to take after his coma. Luckily he had one vial left and was thus spared the humiliation of being seen buying the potion. He couldn't lift his injured arm to open the bottle, let alone brew with it. He used his teeth to uncork the vial.

Thereafter he changed back to the middle-sized weights, just in case, and brewed a month's supply of his potion.

With his arms and chest nicely taken care of in his training workload he was looking for a way besides the stairs to improve the muscles in the rest of his body. In Hermione's book case stood a book on yoga, but the Macbeth debacle was fresh in Severus's mind. He didn't want to sigh out his soul on the bedroom rug knotted up like a pretzel, so yoga was out.

He needed to go on a mushroom foray anyway, so he Apparated deep into the forest and just started to run. His lungs soon burned and his thighs protested but he ploughed on, only stopping long enough to transfigure his boots to trainers and his dress trousers into black tracksuit bottoms after an oncoming jogger had eyed him suspiciously to then give him a wide berth. His shirt he left as it was; the collar concealed the snake bite scar on his neck and the long sleeve covered the fine silvery scar where his Dark Mark had been.

He frightened an old lady with her dog when he crashed through the underbrush back onto the path only a few yards from her. The malicious part of him gleefully registered that he still had it in him to spread terror only to have the woman ask if he was alright, her poor husband had looked that red in the face before he had his heart attack, just a minor one don't worry, but wouldn't it be better to slow down and make an appointment for a check-up just in case? She droned on and on until Severus was out of earshot, but her unleashed terrier followed him.

Severus tried to outrun the nasty bugger, but the dog, tongue lolling and wagging its stubby tail, chased him happily around the lake until Severus slipped on a wet stone, lost his balance and landed in the smelly water with a loud splash. The resident swans were a bit aggressive - nothing a well-aimed hex didn't solve - and the cool water was invigorating, so no harm done. He should have felt mortified and threatened the swans to stay away or he would pluck their feathers one by one and manufacture them into quills to then Disapparate in disgust and order his mushrooms at Slug & Jiggers, but he didn't. Instead, he felt gorgeously alive with the blood rushing through his veins and a rivulet of cool water running down his back. Somewhere between running for his life and swallowing a pound of duckweed his physical awareness had come out of hibernation.

He waded back to the shore and splashed the yapping dog with the water he wrung from his hair. Too bad Hermione couldn't see him rise from the waves like a demi god, his white shirt clinging to his wet flushed body warmed by the summer sun; the whole scene could have been lifted straight out of one of her Regency romances. Severus sniffed at his shirt. Apart from the smell, of course. Oh well, he had started to take three showers a day anyway, to keep his activities secret from Hermione.

That secrecy was now about to end. Severus lifted his stiff legs one by one, and accomplishing that was no small feat, then rolled on his side and arranged his limbs in a suggestive pose. For weeks now he hadn't disrobed in front of Hermione, slept in his old nightshirt and made love to Hermione in the dark to maximise the surprise effect. He had sacrificed his leisure time to run, lift weights and cook a whole meal at noon because his appetite had gone through the roof. Every muscle in his body screamed in agony but it had been worth it.

His naked skin glistened in the candle light because of the oil he had carefully applied, in agony in some difficult to reach places. He didn't have a stitch on; he had thought about investing in new underwear and in the end decided against it. He'd seen a nice pair of briefs in Slytherin green when they'd been shopping for Scorpius's birthday present, though, that he only hadn't gone back for because he wasn't sure if the string in the back wouldn't chafe.

Severus knew the time for the grand reveal had come when the bathroom mirror whistled at him when he came out of the shower.

Hermione had yet to look up from her book. Severus coughed.

"Just this paragraph."

Severus coughed again and finally she put down her book and looked up.

"I'm all ears- oh." She poked at his pectoral muscles, pinched his upper arm and then withdrew her hand as if burnt. "So I wasn't wrong. You did feel different," she said at last.

Severus thought she appeared rather pensive than surprised; had to be the light playing tricks on his eyes. Maybe he should have waited until after her test, but there was no turning back now. "Like what you see?"

She rubbed her thumb and index finger together and sniffed at her hand. "Did you use my body oil?"

"Come closer and find out," he purred and slipped his hand under her nightgown.

She frowned. "Again?"

"I didn't know it was such a great hardship for you."

"It's just, we did it yesterday."

"So?"

"Twice. And the day before."

"I fail to see your point."

"And the day before that." She bit her lip and looked up at him. "Is this about me being so busy lately? It's not much longer, I promise." She shoved her book under the pillow as if to emphasise her point. "I know driving lessons three times a week is a bit much, but I want to get it over with. Look, now that I've passed the theoretical part it's only the practical test left."

"It's not about your driving license. I don't need a special reason to desire you. In fact, if you're that worried about your test, why don't you take lessons on the remaining week days, too?"

"Um. Really?"

"Yes, I don't mind."

"Oh. You don't. Huh."

Severus leered at her. "Now, where were we?"

Hermione picked up his hand and planted a quick kiss on his knuckles. "Sorry, I'm just tired, with work and the driving lessons. Another time okay?"

Without waiting for his response she blew out the candle on her bedside cabinet, lay down and turned her back to him. Severus blinked against the sudden darkness as he went through their conversation again. Not subtle enough or just plain bad timing? Not yet ready to admit defeat he decided to try one last time with his best move: the back rub. He felt his way across the bed under the cover until his fingertips reached Hermione and then ran his hand up her back in one long stroke. Her shoulder was tensed and hard under his fingers. He gently dug in and kneaded the stiff muscles, but unfortunately it wasn't working that night. He waited for a reaction, a sigh, a purr, but nothing. When he peeked over her shoulder at last he could see in the dim moonlight shining through a gap in the curtains that Hermione's eyes were closed. Apparently she was fast asleep.

In a way he was relieved. Disappointed as well, yes, but the physical exertion of the last few weeks had left him exhausted. A night off wouldn't hurt. On the contrary, he could use a good night's sleep, just this once, to renew the strength for when Hermione was in the mood to rip his clothes off and test his newly found agility. He yawned and pulled the blanket up to his chin. At least she hadn't been able to take her eyes off him, he thought and smirked in the darkness. Everything was still going according to plan.

He closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep blissfully unaware of his surroundings, and although he might have subconsciously registered if Hermione got up soon after, he wouldn't have been able to remember it in the morning.