Hermione didn't know much about childbirth, as a seventeen-year-old, there had not been a huge amount of need to know about babies. Of course, she was well aware of where they came from, well aware of how to prevent them but for some reason way back, a lifetime ago in the summer of the previous year all caution had been thrown to the wind.
They had found a moment which had turned into something else. She had told Ron it was because she trusted him, she wanted it to be him just so the first time was safe and secure and perfect. That wasn't the reason. She loved the lanky, ginger, young man more than he knew – she had thought more than he would ever know at all. But then it had all changed, she had a baby, a real live baby which had come from her – she was bloody well aware of that part.
She hadn't remembered much of the previous evening, she remembered Ron meeting their little boy, remembered talking to Mrs. Weasley and then she began to feel very tired, so tired she couldn't force her eyes to stay open. She had heard the words 'bleeding' and 'rupture' but not much else.
Now she was in a room she knew. The hospital wing, though missing some chunks of brick and the majority of its window panes, was still familiar and the sun which shone through the open, or non-existent, windows gave Hermione a feeling like she was back in her early years of school, back when the threat of Lord Voldemort had seemed further away and unlikely to come near them in their lifetime.
She rolled on the little bed, feeling the weight of a drip in the back of her hand snaking along her arm and up to the bag of fluids above her head.
She saw her affirmation on the floor. She wasn't worried, she wasn't scared or ruminating the future. On the stone floor, a large wicker basket had been placed. In the basket, asleep and dreaming, was her baby boy.
There was nothing more perfect. He was a little wrinkly, his hands a little blue at the tips of his long fingers. He had nails which were slightly too long and tufts of hair that were vaguely red in colour. He had purple capillaries on his eyelids and plump little pink lips.
Aaron was curled on his side and swaddled loosely in an assortment of blankets, mostly ones she knew belonged to the school, one which was clearly knitted by Mrs. Weasley and had probably come from the end of Ginny's bed. At the foot of the basket – too floppy and out of shape to be called a Moses basket – sat a little envelope.
Hermione reached for the envelope, lifting it gently and breaking the Hogwarts seal on the back. In neat green ink was swirled a message.
There was once a prophecy told of a little boy born as Summer saw its end. I am sure you are acquainted with the tale, but now a new world dawns, a little boy has come to signify the end of what another started.
You were never one for Divination, never a believer in its delicate art, nether the less, I tell you that he will be named from his father, and will carry his heart, he will see an end to the world we knew and begin a world like we have not known before.
Sybil Trelawney.