Severus had considered making an entrance. Waiting for the students to find their seats in the Hall then throwing the doors open. But it just wasn't practical. There was too much to see to.

Minerva had made the beginning of term paperwork hell. He'd had to create copies and check all of her work multiple times—she'd put extensive effort into masking the student lists, keeping the blood status of incoming students from him. He knew for a fact that she'd paid special visits to the families of Muggle-borns and warned them away, suggested Beauxbaton's or the Salem Institute. He'd hoped she would do just that, but he hadn't anticipated the glee she'd taken in misplacing scrolls and changing innocuous information.

He'd spent most of the first of September trying to sort out the house elves. When he hadn't been doing that, he'd been arguing with the Carrows about where they'd be seated at the Head Table.

Fucking stupid day.

In the end, he was sitting in the overly ornate chair at the center of the staff table when the students entered. They fell silent when they saw him, as though they hadn't known about his placement for a month.

He kept his chin up and ignored the looks, which ranged from outraged glares to pure terror. He watched them enter, noted which ones looked particularly rebellious, noted that Draco Malfoy looked just as trapped at the Slytherin table between Crabbe and Zabini as he had at the Dark Lord's meeting table between his mother and father just two nights previous. The teachers on either side of him ignored him, as they had for the entirety of the summer.

The noise in the Hall had settled to a low mutter when Minerva entered with the first years. The little things looked so small. Fragile. There were fewer than he'd expected, and he hoped that was a good sign that the Muggle-borns had been spirited away. There was no song from the Sorting Hat this year; they'd discussed it. The Hat merely stated its purpose and kept quiet until Minerva got on with it.

Severus stood when the Sorting was finished, looking at each House table before he spoke. He kept his face blank, his Occlumency shields strong (more because it made it easier to think than because he was afraid one of the students was secretly a Legilimens waiting to catch him out).

"Thus begins a new school year," he said, his voice filling the Hall. It was a cold, foreign sound. "My staff and I would like to welcome our incoming first years." He paused, noting the first years bunched together at the near ends of the tables. "I expect all of you shall be a credit to this school.

"I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome our newest staff members," he said, indicating the Carrows, seated to his direct left. They'd wanted to flank him, to present a triad of Death Eaters, but he'd refused them; he wanted Minerva at his right hand. Gods, imagine being surrounded by them… "Amycus and Alecto Carrow are taking over the positions of Muggle Studies and Defense Against the Dark Arts."

There was a wave of conversation down the tables. He waited patiently, not quite glaring, for it to subside.

"Returning students have undoubtedly guessed that this will be a year of many changes, not just in staffing—" He indicated the Carrows with a tilt of his head. "—but in curriculum and discipline." He didn't weight the word discipline, but he let his eyes linger on the Gryffindor table, and the message was clear. "Any… rebellion—" He made the word a joke. "—will be harshly met. This is a school; you are here to learn."

He sat down without further ado, and the tables filled with food. The warm, welcoming smells of the feast eased some of the tension out of the Hall, but not all of it. Severus watched the students at the Gryffindor table as he ate, noting the mutinous looks as the students picked at their food.

\\

Classes began the next day, and he was inundated with disciplinary requests in earnest. Most were ridiculous—speaking out of turn, first years late to their first classes (presumably because they got lost), failure to enunciate to Filius's suddenly exacting standards. Most were for Slytherin students. There were only two serious requests, one from each of the Carrows, and both concerning Neville Longbottom.

Bloody hell.

He had hoped it would be at least a day before he was faced with it. A detention. He'd have to have a detention, possibly two—the example needed to be set. And failure on his part in this case would draw the attention of the Dark Lord.

Fuck the fucking fuckity Gryffindor fuckwit.

His lunch—he'd decided after the last staff meeting before term (a week before students arrived) that he would only eat dinner in the Great Hall—was interrupted by Phineas Black's indignant arrival.

"Your wife has stolen my portrait!"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your little Mu—"

"Do not make me ask Filch to bring up the turpentine."

"Fine." Black hissed, settling into his painted chair and fussing with his robes. He was agitated, caught up in his own indignation but also… amused? "She's stolen my portrait. Your sodding wife took it from the ancient and most noble house of Black and stuffed it in a bag. I couldn't see a thing."

"Why did she take it?" he asked, trying not to show his amusement. Phineas was touchy. He was bound by the spells of the office, he couldn't betray the headmaster's secrets and he had to help if he was able, but the painted man had a habit of wandering off when he was annoyed. Particularly if he thought he'd be required to be useful when he didn't want to be.

"Maybe she wants to look at me," the man sneered. Severus rolled his eyes, flicking his wand at the portrait. The curtains he'd conjured flicked shut over the portrait, preventing Phineas from jumping to a different frame and effectively silencing him as well.

"Let that be a lesson to you all," Severus said, glaring around the room at the others. Most of the headmasters and headmistresses on the walls liked him, or at the very least pitied him. They did as he asked and were generally helpful, but they spent most of their time feigning sleep.

Behind him, Dumbledore chuckled. Severus ignored him, as he'd taken to doing whenever he could. They'd had a few conversations about running the school and other things pertinent to the war effort, but he still hadn't forgiven the man for his reaction to Hermione. And Dumbledore kept bringing her up, kept wanting to talk about it—and "talk about it" meant continue to chastise Severus for it.

\\

The Evening Prophet arrived at the end of dinner. Severus had just stood when the owls swooped in, bringing the staff and a surprisingly large number of students their copies. Severus took the newspaper and left the room, not looking at it until he was safely in his office again.

It was a good thing he'd waited because he almost fell over.

The front page story was on a break-in at the Ministry. Harry Potter had been spotted, Undesirable Number One himself. Which meant Hermione had been there.

A whole cell of Muggle-borns due to be registered had been broken out, and he prayed to anything listening that that hadn't been the entire point of the maneuver, but it seemed to have been. The article ran a list of those who escaped and asked the Wizarding community to be on the lookout.

Hermione's wanted poster—Undesirable Number Two, demoted now that Potter had been maneuvered into persona non grata status—was the entirety of page three. He folded the paper so that he could look at her and left it on the desk; she glared out at him from underneath the bold print declaring her reward sum. He wondered where the picture had come from; it was relatively recent.

\\

"I feel I should warn you that your wife is on her way," Phineas said very late one evening toward the end of September.

"What? Why?" Severus asked, trying not to be excited at the prospect of seeing her. They had agreed they wouldn't visit each other. It was in their best interest to maintain pretenses; it could easily be disastrous if the wrong person—or even the wrong portrait—saw them together.

"I've no idea."

Severus snarled at the portrait, but Phineas merely held up his hands.

"She seems quite mad," the portrait said. "Utterly insane."

"What?"

"I've been in her bloody bag, haven't I? I don't know what they're up to. All I know is that one minute all's quiet, and the next she's yanked me and a dozen other things out, rearranging her bag, asking me to come here and make sure you're alone."

Severus blinked. At least she's not injured, he supposed. He adjusted the dial on one of Dumbledore's spindly devices, locking down the wards on his office, and looked back to Phineas. "Tell her to Apparate in, then."

Phineas did as he was told with poor grace. Seconds later, there was a crack! and Hermione stood in the center of his office.

She was radiant. He couldn't believe he'd forgotten how beautiful she was. How overwhelming it was to be in the same room as she was, the warmth of her mind against his, the utterly disarming knowledge that she knew all his flaws and loved him beyond reason.

She also looked like hell. Her hair was limp, pulled back from her face in a loose ponytail of suspiciously flat curls. She had dark circles under her eyes, and lines on her face that hadn't been there the last time he'd seen her—the faintest of lines near her eyes and mouth, but he spotted them immediately. She was pale, paler than usual; paler, in fact, than he was. She wore a plain navy robe over a loose Muggle skirt and top. She looked exhausted and a little bit sick. Worried. Run-down.

"Oh, my darling," he heard himself say. She was in his arms in a flash. He'd been waiting, leaned against the edge of his desk, and he held her to him. She was shaking. "Hermione, what's happened? What's the matter?"

He'd had a number of ridiculous things to say come to mind in those seconds he'd been waiting—jokes that wouldn't be funny—but none of them would do. For all the preparation they'd been through, all the training Dumbledore had had her literally circumvent the laws of time to acquire, it looked as though something had gone wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

Oh, hell. She was crying.

"Hermione. Tell me." He reached out with his mind, not trying to read it from her but just trying to comfort, support. He wanted to wrap her up in a blanket and hold her on his lap like he had after she'd been stabbed.

"I've been incredibly stupid," she said, pulling back from him and scrubbing her hands over her face. She seemed more annoyed at the tears than sad. He raised an eyebrow.

"I doubt that."

"No, no. I have," she insisted. She took her satchel off her shoulder and tossed it casually on the ladder-backed chair facing his desk. She beamed at him, then, but a moment later the expression was gone and she was biting her lip while she avoided eye contact.

"What in the world…?"

She cleared her throat, straightened her shoulders, and smiled at him again. "Hello, Severus."

"…Hello."

"I love you. You know that, right?"

"Of course I know that." He couldn't help it if his tone was a bit sharp; she wasn't making sense.

They looked at each other for a moment, and he noted that she was Occluding. He narrowed his eyes at her.

"Oh, hell. I'm doing this all wrong!"

"Hermione, for Merlin's sake," he said, grabbing her by the elbow and bringing her over by the fire so that he could push her down into the plush armchair there. In the warm light of the fire, she looked less tired and more worried. He reached out with his mind, caressing, and her eyes fluttered closed.

He knelt on the floor between her spread knees, hands twined with hers in her lap. On his knees as he was, his eyes were even with her chin. It was easy for her to lean forward, pressing their foreheads together.

Severus left off questioning her for a moment, just enjoying being with her in the quiet. September had been brutal; he could feel the tension building in the school, could see the lines being drawn. It was going to get worse, but for now he was here with Hermione.

"I didn't even think of it," she said. He opened his eyes, but hers were closed. He watched her, though with their foreheads together as they were it was hard to see her full expression. "I should have thought of it. Hell, even after the fact I should have put things together sooner than I did."

"What's happened?" he asked again, quietly, when she lapsed into silence.

Hermione opened her eyes and beamed at him again, sitting back and twining her fingers more tightly with his. She was positively brimming with happiness. Sudden, overwhelming joy. She'd stopped Occluding, though he couldn't see the source of her joy through all the delight beating down on him.

"It's wonderful and it's awful. It's a mistake and it shouldn't have happened, but I can't help being glad that it did." She sighed, closing her eyes again, packing away all that happy excitement. He wanted to reach out and pull it back, wanted to bask in it.

"Are you hurt? Have you been cursed?" She was babbling. She wasn't making sense. He couldn't think of a reason why she'd come to him when there was so much to do unless something had happened that she couldn't fix herself (or talk one of those boys through doing). Perhaps she was out of it from a curse and was glad she'd been cursed because it was an excuse to see him?

"I'm not hurt. I haven't been cursed."

She leaned down and kissed him. It was a bedroom kiss, deep and immediately intimate. He responded in kind without thought, dropping his hands down to hold her waist, lifting them up to tangle his fingers in her hair. She grabbed him around the shoulders and slid off the chair, pushing him back onto his heels.

She was pressed into him, almost straddling his thighs, every inch of them together from hips to chest. And there was something between them. A bump. A… not a hardness, but it wasn't a softness either.

He pulled back, eyes flying open. She met his eyes, biting her lip nervously.

"Hermione?"

"I—er." She was frozen as she was, a secret pressed into his stomach. He could feel the nerves radiating off her, the worry about his reaction foremost among many others.

"Thank you."

It was a stupid thing to say, but it made her smile. Some of the tension leaked away. She stopped biting her lip and bit at his instead until he kissed her into submission. He kissed every inch of her skin that his lips could reach across her face and neck until one of the portraits loudly cleared its throat.

"Spoilsport," one of the other portraits said, presumably to the one that had cleared its throat.

"It's been so long since we had a young headmaster," another said wistfully.

Severus couldn't even bring himself to blush, to be embarrassed. He was crying like a fool, and there were fresh tears on her cheeks, too.

"Come," he whispered to her, shooting a glare over his shoulder in the general direction of the thickest gathering of portraits. "We'll sleep, and then we'll plan."

\\

In the morning, she was still there. Naked, her back pressed to his front. She was still sound asleep; he'd woken when he'd accidentally tried to breathe some of her hair, out of practice at brushing it away in his sleep.

Severus held her until she woke, trying to wrap his mind around the situation. He couldn't even think well enough to begin planning. He couldn't seem to get past the sheer emotional wall of the little bump just there. He ran his hand along it, Hermione's skin soft under his fingertips.

His moment of joy crashed around his ears when his wards trilled, alerting him to a presence at the base of the stairs. A moment of focus and he knew it was Minerva, probably come to disturb his Saturday morning with paperwork.

For one crazy moment, he wanted to bound down the stairs and swing the Head of Gryffindor around. They'd been friends for ages; she'd been the witness at their wedding. If it was a girl, they'd probably name it Minerva.

Good Gods. I'm going to be a father.

Minerva knocked again, and Severus slid out of bed. He was in a good mood, so he'd put her in a good mood. He didn't dress, he simply tied his thick green dressing gown securely and went down to the office to let her in.

"Good morning, Minerva," he said, trying to sound tired instead of jubilant. "What do you have for me today?"

The deputy headmistress had frozen in the doorway, eyes goggling at his state of undress. He wondered belatedly if he had any love bites he should have made an effort to cover up.

"Come now. You're the one who yanked me out of bed at—" He looked dramatically over at the carriage clock on the mantle. "—seven in the morning. On a Saturday."

Shaking herself, Minerva crossed the room with a sharp click of heeled boots. She presented him with a thick dossier full of parchment slips.

"The week's disciplinary requests."

"Oh, good."

"And I wanted to speak to you about Hogsmeade visits."

They bickered about Hogsmeade for almost an hour before they both clearly heard Hermione moan happily upstairs. Severus smirked when Minerva's eyes darted down to his bare feet and ankles.

"You have a guest?"

"I'm sure she can take care of herself for the time being."

One of the portraits cackled the way only witches can, only to be shushed by one of the others.

Minerva glared at him until she remembered that he could read her mind with eye contact. Then she looked off at Dumbledore's portrait, though the headmaster was feigning sleep as usual.

She settled in for the long haul after that. After he conceded that Valentine's Day could be added as a Hosmeade day given that they had removed the day in the village for January, she started in on Hagrid's pumpkins in preparation for Halloween. Then it was the Carrows' latest shortcomings as teachers. He finally tossed her out when she started in on the Muggle Studies curriculum.

"I'm sorry," Hermione said when he joined her in the sitting room. She had a full breakfast spread on the coffee table under a Stasis Charm and was nursing a cup of tea while reading a book on gravity in relation to transfigured mass. "I didn't realize the door was open, and the house elves had all this set out for us. And, for the first time in ages, I was actually hungry."

"I thought pregnant women were supposed to be hungry all the time," he said, not bothering to hide the giddy grin that crawled across his face.

"No, that's teenaged boys," she said, sharing his grin. She resettled on the couch when he joined her, accepting a bite of his toast once he had it spread with jam. "I've been queasy most mornings for the past month, actually. It's something that should have tipped me off well before now."

"Now?"

"Yes. I only realized I was pregnant yesterday night. I was putting away the supper things and realized I hadn't had my period in ages. I hadn't thought much of it; I assumed it was stress. But then I started thinking about the nausea on and off, and especially in the mornings, and how tired I've been since before Bill and Fleur's wedding." She rolled her eyes. "I've been just exhausted, Severus. Ridiculously tired. I've been crying all the time at the slightest little thing. And my boobs have been sore."

Severus smirked, recalling. She had grabbed his hands the previous night, imploring him to be gentle with her breasts when he'd tried to touch them. He had been very gentle.

"Do you know what happened that the potion was neutralized?" He'd brewed the last batch of her contraceptive himself. He'd been with her when she'd taken the dose shortly after returning to the student body to watch Harry Potter.

"I was given Blood Replenishing Potion that night." She didn't have to specify which. "I was burned or something and didn't realize how much I'd been bleeding until I collapsed."

"You didn't tell me about that."

"I was fine." Then she looked sheepish. "And, really, we were a little busy fucking to properly exchange accounts."

"True."

They sat in silence for awhile. He finished his breakfast and she Banished her book back to the shelf.

"So," he said. "We'll use the Time Turner?"

"Yes, I think we'll have to."

They went to the Shrieking Shack to Turn back. They'd needed a place that was magically grounded (Hogwarts was the best option, but it would've been difficult to get out of the castle without being noticed), and the Shack was more-or-less guaranteed to be empty.

"Okay," Hermione said, pulling the Time Turner out from under her shirt and lengthening the chain so that it could go around Severus's neck, too. "Two years." She shifted the rings around to the appropriate positions. "We're probably both going to vomit," she warned him. He just smiled the same dreamy smile he'd had on his face since he'd realized she was carrying his child.

"We'll be fine." He pecked her on the lips and hitched his duffel bag more securely onto his shoulder.

"Alright then."

She activated the Time Turner, and watched the grime-coated window. There was a vague difference between night and day as time sped backwards, flashing faster and faster. At first, she didn't notice anything wrong. The light flickered outside the window, the dust mites inside circled hazily.

She felt it on her neck first. The chain was hot. She looked over at Severus and saw that he'd noticed it, too. Looking down, she saw that the chain was almost red with heat close to the Time Turner. The Time Turner itself was red going white, and the tips of her fingers were red and blistered, going black from the heat.

Hermione tried to scream, tried to drop the Time Turner, but she was frozen in the pull of the little super-heated device. The scream came out a whimper. Severus's eyes were huge, his movements slow, like he was moving through water.

It had never been difficult to move while she was Turning. She hadn't moved much, because that made the nausea worse, but it hadn't been a struggle.

Something's wrong. Something's wrong. Something's wrong!

It could've been her thought, or Severus's. She couldn't tell.

The world narrowed to the burning of her fingers. She hardly felt the heat on the back of her neck where the chain was beginning to burn her; it didn't compare.

Vaguely, she could feel the passage of time slow. The spinning became a whirling, and she closed her eyes against the vertigo she knew would follow. She focused on Severus's breathing, tried not to pass out.

A/N: So she finally figured it out. Yes, I know it took her forever. She's been distracted.

And I apologize (but only a little) for the cliffhanger.

Cheers!

— M