Disclaimer: Not that I believe anyone would think this, but I'm not J.K. Rowling. I'm an avid fan of her books and like them so much that I just want to borrow them for a short while.

Sors Vita- Chapter 2

"Well, good morning Severus," Minerva McGonagall said.

Minerva McGonagall was enjoying her morning stroll when she saw the two young Snape boys playing on the grounds unsupervised. Feeling that her colleagues would be worried sick if they noticed their boys missing she had round them up and brought them down to the dungeons right away. Judging by her beloved colleagues annoyance at her disturbance she now wondered if she should have kept the boys at her quarters until lunch instead.

The headmistress looked past Severus to find her former student under the blankets. She noted the Potions Professors disheveled look and after putting one and two together, she felt her anger rise.

"So you let your two sons run around the grounds just because you couldn't keep your hands off each other? How old are you two? Seventeen? You know how dangerous it is to let your boys roam out there, what would you have done if Death Eaters had swooped in and kidnapped them?"

Severus was both shocked and confused about his employers outburst. Death Eaters could never enter Hogwarts and ever since the end of the Final Battle most Death Eaters had been rounded up and killed. He looked behind Minerva to find Emeterius hiding, he assumed it had to do with his outburst before he opened the door. On the other hand Celedonius had his head hung low in a signal of guilt.

Hermione had shot straight out of bed the second Minerva's rage filled the room. She slowly approached the Headmistress, "Minerva."

"I've had enough of this. I'll take the boys for the day. Severus, keep on your toes, you know that he isn't as trusting of you as he last was. I assume to see you two at dinner tonight to get the kids." With that Minerva took the two boys by the hand and approached the floo to floo back to her quarters.

The rest of the day Hermione and Severus tried to figure out how they ended up where they did and what was happening in the world they currently found themselves in. They started by evaluating their failed attempt at returning to their own world through sleep.

Hermione sketched out her two major theories for their current predicament. The first being the two were sharing simultaneous dreams after their collision at the staircases. They were most possibly in some sort of comatose state and were creating this reality by themselves. Unfortunately forcing sleep didn't seem to reverse the condition. While it could be possible that the condition will reverse itself if they fall in to subconsciousness using other methods, the most possible method of return would be to reenact the collision, but the risk of concussion was far too large to risk.

Another possibility was some magical spell being cast on them that had brought such hallucinations to the two. Severus was more inclined to this theory having recalled the peculiar magical signature that was present when they had collided on the staircases. However neither Hermione nor Severus could recognize the magical signature or know a spell that could create such a realistic vision. They decided that more research would have to be done if they find themselves still in this reality by the next morning.

The two had a more pressing task at hand of getting a hold of their current situation. Minerva's warning about Death Eaters and the mysterious 'He' had piqued the couples curiosity. Death Eaters were no longer a threat in their timelines most remaining Death Eaters having been executed within months of the fall of the Dark Lord. The only few that remained were the few redeemed Death Eaters through efforts towards the light during the fall of the Dark Lord.

"What do you think Minerva meant about the Death Eaters?" Hermione asked her colleague carefully.

"I'm thinking that this universe may not be as safe and nice as our own. We already know that it's completely separate from our universe through the existence of our marriage and children," Severus replied.

Severus considered the possibilities, he wondered if the Final Battle had not occurred in this universe or if the Final Battle did not end the war as it did in their universe. Was it possible that the Death Eaters were still at large and not persecuted in this timeline or were the few that remained suddenly turning their backs on the light. Severus shivered at the thought of something much more sinister, the revival of the Dark Lord himself after the final battle. Severus looked at his Dark Mark and found nothing out of place, which was expected considering the Dark Mark had remained even after the death of the Dark Lord.

Hermione decided some heavy research about the situation outside the walls of these chambers had to be done before they found a way to leave this retched timeline. Hermione had always wrote a weekly log and had archived it over the years she decided that would be a good place to start. On the other hand she remembered Severus also kept a report on his war efforts when he was a spy for the order, "Severus, do you think you reports for the order exist in this universe?"

Severus remembered the large pile of papers he found in his secret keep place and realized that those extra papers may have been the extra reports for the order that he would have had to write if the war was still going on in some form outside the castle. "I think they do still exist. Do you have any other form of documentation of your life? A diary or something?"

Hermione nodded and walked over to the closet to find her bag and sighed in relief when she located it. Severus also walked over to his personal keep place, he hesitated for a second before opening the safe wary of an others presence but decided to open it anyway. At the same time, Hermione reached in to her bag to pull out her log but realized there would be several log she would need to look at, with that she pulled out her wand and summoned a large pile of logbooks out of her bag.

Hermione heard a noise outside and a few seconds later the bedroom door burst open. Severus shut the secret safe shut and looked to identify the intruder. "Emeterius, have I not told you to knock before entering?" Severus raised his voice at the boy still recovering from the shock of an intruder.

Emeterius stepped back and looked at the ground ashamed, behind him was his younger brother Celedonius. Emeterius had run out of the Headmisress's quarters hoping to return home and his brother had followed despite his initial protests. Hermione felt her maternal instincts kick in seeing the upset expression on the older boys face, she pulled her arm around the two boys protectively and glared at Severus. She lead the two boys out as she picked up her pile of log books.

Severus sighed at the scene that had unraveled in front of him, it had reminded himself so much of his childhood. His father's abuse and his mother's protective stance, it always surprised him why his mother had stuck with his abusive father. He again wondered why the alternate Hermione would have chose to be with a man like his alternate self, a man so much like his father that he wouldn't be surprised if he was a wife-beater as well.

Severus returned to the task at hand and reopened his secret safe and pulled out the top layer of documents and started to read.

Outside Hermione continued to keep a firm grasp on her two sons, she didn't know what had came over her but to see the child so upset had riled up something within her. She looked at her older son, "You know your dad dn't mean to yell at you," she said as she rubbed her hands up and down the boys arms like how her own mother used to do when she was upset.

"No, he meant it. Dad always means it," Emeterius responded, trying hard to stop the tear from falling down his face.

"It was Em's fault anyway. He should have knocked and we should have stayed at Granny Minnie's," Celedonius said.

"Why did you come back anyway?" Hermione prodded her son.

"I wanted to apologize for running out like that. I know you keep on telling us not to. Even worse I took Don with me, so I wanted to say sorry for everything," Emeterius answered.

Hermione looked at the boy and became upset with herself. She had no idea how this version of herself would have reacted to these children or what kind of father Severus was. Frustrated and lacking the proper parenting skills, Hermione could only say, "Don't worry about it Em. Why don't you go play with that alchemy set over there with Don?"

With that the two boys looked confused, talking to their mother had always lead to a feeling of relief but today they felt like their issues were not resolved. However the boys didn't feel comfortable objecting their mother when she was so out of it and took her advice; they played with the alchemy set.

Hermione was slightly worried when she saw the boys initial reaction to her suggestion but was relieved when they took the suggestion. Knowing it wouldn't be a smart idea to leave the children alone again she took out the earliest log book and started to read. She found that the first log book that covered her fifth and sixth years at Hogwarts were as she had wrote them in her timeline. Noticing this she figured that by reading her own diary she would be able to find where her own timeline had diverged in to this timeline.

Severus had already found upsetting information that he was still a spy for the order in the present time. Not only were the Death Eaters at large his detailed reports about his interactions with the Dark Lord showed that he too was alive in this reality. However his position amongst the Death Eaters had fallen, the reason as to why was not made clear in his most recent reports. He had to look back to find out.

Hermione had started skimming her journal for the year where she, Ron and Harry have gone out in search of horcruxes. Everything was like her own journal and to her own memory until she reached the day where the locket was destroyed with the Sword of Gryffindor. Hermione was engrossed with her own story as she read how she had followed the patronous after seeing it from afar and had found herself face to face with Severus Snape. She read about how she was enraged and had attempted to assassinate the wizard on the spot and run back to tell Harry that the sword was laid as a trap. However she was too weak, too hesitant to kill the man she had once respected for his intelligence. The then headmaster had been curt and had left the words Dumbledore had once used, he told Hermione to trust him and in Hermione's second of hesitance Professor Snape had apparated away.

From then on Hermione found herself falling in love with the Severus Snape within her logbook. She felt herself connecting to the conflicting feelings of her younger self when faced with the possible darkness of Snape but also the small opening of salvation that Snape could bring. After the event at the forest, the alternate Hermione had started to contact the Headmaster at Hogwarts through former Headmaster Phineus Black's portrait. Through these brief contacts her alternate self had started to develop feeling for the darker man.

Severus continued to read backwards and had finally found the reason for his fall in popularity within the Dark Lords circles. The Dark Lord had identified him as a possible traitor due to his continued often suspicious behavior. Another thing that had upset the dark wizard was his marriage to a muggle-born witch and his quarter blood children. The Dark Lord was not pleased to hear the news considering his most beloved half blood, his doppelganger in so many ways had chosen to further taint his magical bloodline with the blood of a mudblood witch.

Hermione was drawn to the blossoming love story written in her journals. In this version of history she had been the one to find Severus dying from the snake's bite. She had returned to the Shrieking Shack while the rest had gone to fight to mourn for the man she had come to have feelings for. Her pitiful cries had drawn the phoenixes attention and it's tears had saved a dying Snape long enough for Hermione to escort him to the infirmary.

The feelings on Severus's side only seemed to have started from this point where his gratitude had been repaid by several brief dates with the witch much to the witches delight. However a few dates did not suffice for Hermione's greed and she in the end had approached Snape to take her in as a potions apprentice. While working as the Professors assistant her efforts had finally paid off and her relationship with Severus had begun to take off. By the winter of 1998 and 1999 the couple were relatively happy with one another and had no qualms that they would have a lasting relationship.

In early March of 1999 she had found herself pregnant and had considered the option of abortion. However Severus was ecstatic to hear they would be expecting a child and was on his knees proposing marriage on the spot. The couple was married within a month of the discovery and Emeterius was born 8 months later as part of the baby boom that occurred after the end of the war. Hermione had laughed at the part about the naming of her son where Severus had been oppposing of following family tradition of naming his children after Saints but Hermione having always been nostalgic had been able to convince him on using the name.

Severus continued to read his reports and found that on August 21, 2001 after three years of peace the Dark Lord had risen from his grave. Severus was summoned along with all the surviving Death Eaters including the large number of Death Eaters awaiting a dementors kiss within the walls of Azkaban. The report had been very professionally written but there was a small note that the summon had come while he was at a family event. That was when Severus remembered.

Hermione read about her first three years with her son and how she had gone from a Potions mistress to a full fledged Arithmetician. Her second son was conceived on her eldest son's first birthday, it was the result of their little celebration. Her son, Celedonius Wolfric Snape was born on August 21, 2001, the same day the Dark Lord had been resurrected for a second time.

A/N: That is it, I know many of you are curious as to why the couple has been sent to this strange and dangerous alternate reality but I can assure you the reason won't upset and I am going to keep it hanging for now. As for now, there are even more mysteries that need to be solved.