When she woke, she was lying on the floor of the Shrieking Shack. The trap door leading to the castle was just a few feet away, blocked by wooden crates. The room smelled of vomit.
Hermione opened her eyes. It was gloomy as ever. Dust mites lazily drifted through the single, tiny shaft of sunlight that filtered through a clean spot in the window where the gunk had flaked away from the glass.
Her head hurt like she had a hangover. Her guts churned, and she could taste bile at the back of her throat. When she moved her head too fast, the world swam around.
"Oh," she moaned, sitting up and squeezing her eyes closed.
Severus grunted from next to her, the way he did in his sleep sometimes when she woke in the middle of the night. She looked over, blinking slowly while she waited for her eyes to refocus. He was sprawled on his stomach, face turned away from her. One hand had flopped in her direction, and the other was trapped under his body. His opposite shoulder rested in a congealed pool of foul-smelling sick.
She flicked her wrist, clearing away the vomit, and then wished she'd left it. Lights exploded inside her skull, pain blooming at her temples, a dull throb striking up a cadence at the crown of her head. She turned away from him and threw up.
She felt marginally better when she finished vomiting. The world didn't swim when she turned her head, though everything still hurt. She noted that her right pant leg was stuck in a dried pool of sick, bits clinging to it when she pulled her leg away.
\\
She didn't remember passing out, but the next time she woke the room was dark. Severus had moved closer, and they were half holding each other. He had his head on her chest and she had one arm around his shoulders.
The room smelled terrible. The air was close and stifling, the smell of their collective sick hanging heavy over a myriad of other unpleasant smells. Unwashed bodies, urine, burnt flesh.
"Oh, God," Hermione moaned. Her head hurt. Every muscle in her body was stiff, aching. Her eyes were gritty. Her stomach churned uncomfortably. All of it paled in comparison to the burning pain of her hands. "Oh, God."
Severus grunted, and then jerked awake. He sat up so sharply he almost took her arm off. She moaned, tears springing to her eyes when the side of her thumb bumped against the smooth wool of his frock coat.
"Oh, God," she said again because she couldn't think of any other words.
"I got Essence of Murtlap on them, and Burn Paste," Severus said, sitting cross-legged next to her and holding her wrists. "I kept passing out."
Hermione sucked in air, drawing her Occlumency shields up to force herself to think, to compartmentalize, to block off the pain so that she could fix it.
Her hands were crusty with the dried remnants of the Murtlap-Burn Paste slurry he'd accidentally created treating her hands. That explained the awful flecked-orange look to them, the sickening slick coating she could feel between her fingers. The rest of her hands was red and blistered, her fingertips black with scabs. He'd probably saved her sense of touch acting as he had.
"Please tell me it wasn't like this every time you made any major Turns back," Severus said.
"It's never been this bad," she said, then turned her head away and choked back bile. She'd moved her hands and bits of flesh and dried paste had flaked off.
"Something went wrong, didn't it?"
"Yes. Where did the Time Turner go?"
"I threw it over there."
"Threw it?"
"When we stopped, I yanked it off us. It stuck to your hand; it was burning you. I flinched. I just threw it, then I threw up." He swallowed convulsively. "Then I found the Murtlap Essence and dunked your hands in it before things went black. The Time Turner was still red-hot when I woke up enough to get the Burn Paste out. We're lucky it didn't set this dry old house on fire."
"Thank you for…"
He shook his head, turning her hands over with his grip on her wrists. They didn't look good, but it was manageable. She'd seen much worse burns from cauldron explosions. It was just that these were her hands needing to be cleaned and mended.
Hermione shoved away every unnecessary thought, talking Severus through cleaning and cleansing her hands. She did her best not to react, holding as still as she could. He cleaned away the dried mess of first aid, conjured a small tub for water. She dunked her hands and he scraped away the flaking paste and bits of charred skin on the very tips of her fingers. Then came more Burn Paste.
When it was finished, she pressed her forehead to his breastbone, trying not to cry. It hurt.
"Burns are the worst."
\\
They spent another six hours sitting on the floor in the Shrieking Shack, staring numbly at the walls, reapplying Burn Paste to her hands every half hour. She diluted Essence of Dittany and soaked her hands for a bit every third application of the Burn Paste.
"They've made remarkable progress."
"You acted quickly."
"I'm just glad you had your kit."
They'd cleaned up a bit while they'd waited for the Burn Paste to do its work. Cleansing Charms on hair and teeth, a thorough Scourgify for their clothes and the room around them. Severus had even forced one of the windows open to let some air in.
"How are your hands?"
"Stiff," she said, holding them out for his inspection. He'd just spelled away the Burn Paste one last time, revealing new pink skin. Her fingertips were a bit swollen, slightly darker pink. What she'd told him was true, though; her hands were just a bit stiff.
"Thank Merlin."
"No, thank you."
He sighed, putting her hands in her lap and pecking her on the nose before he stood up. She watched him walk to the near wall and stoop, rising with the Time Turner dangling by its chain. It looked exactly as it always did, only dimmer. It wasn't reflecting light the way it normally did, though the light was murky and dim.
"It's… dead," he said, prodding it with his wand.
"Dead?"
"Dead." His wand hadn't provoked a reaction, so he put it back up his sleeve and tried to manipulate the rings. They wouldn't budge. "It's fused in place."
"When are we?" Hermione asked, dread pooling at the base of her spine.
JUNE 3, 1990
They stared at each other, the spell for the date hovering between them.
"We're lucky we didn't die," Hermione said.
"How did this happen?"
"I have no idea."
"And there's no telling how long we were just laying here, passing out and soiling ourselves," he said after a long moment. Hermione nodded.
"We're lucky we didn't end up a hundred years ago. Or that it didn't just blow up outright. Or that it didn't just send us back three days or something entirely unhelpful."
"Is the baby—?"
"Fine. It's fine; I'm fine. If something was wrong, it would've shown up when I cast the diagnostic to check my hands."
"You should probably teach me to read those."
Hermione smiled at him.
He was hovering and he knew it bothered her, but he couldn't help it. They'd come out of the Time Turner disaster with a red line across the backs of their necks where the Time Turner's chain had been and little other evidence of their trouble. Her hands were uncalloused and sore, but fine.
After spending the night at the Shrieking Shack, curled up on conjured cushions under his cloak, they'd changed into Muggle clothes and Apparated to London. They'd spent the morning shopping, and then bought tickets for the next flight to Australia.
Simon and Cora Blake had arrived in Sydney and spent a day in a hotel room falsifying Muggle documentation. Then they'd acquired a used truck and started driving.
They'd been on the road for a week. He knew she was fine. She looked a hell of a lot better than she had when she'd shown up in his office, for one thing. He'd also caught her putting her hand on her bump while she looked out the window. She looked remarkably peaceful. He couldn't help it if he wanted to do things for her, though.
"I can bus my own tray," she'd told him when he'd taken her dishes to the counter with his at lunch. He'd shrugged and opened the door on her side of the truck for her, too. She'd scowled at him, but she'd smiled too.
\\
They found the house when they were driving through Mary Valley on their way to Brisbane. There was a sign stuck out at the end of the dirt driveway. The driveway was rutted from use by big trucks, but the trucks were nowhere to be seen. There were trees on either side, suddenly opening on a clearing, the house standing in the middle of it, some of the felled trees still stacked up on one side of the driveway.
Two weeks later, they moved in.
The couple that had built the house had intended it to be a place to retire to with plenty of room for their grandchildren. The realtor hadn't shared the whole story, but Severus got the impression that one of them had died, leaving the just-completed house empty and on the market.
The house was gray with a bright blue door. The kitchen was large and had a breakfast nook. The formal dining room attached to the kitchen by way of French doors. There was a large living space with an oversized bay window at the front of the house. There were two rooms on the ground floor that didn't seem to have a purpose, though one had enough built-in shelving and had probably been intended to be an office. There was also a mud room at the back of the house, past the kitchen, that led out to a small attached deck and a large patch of the yard that had been fenced off like it was intended to be a garden.
Upstairs, there were six bedrooms. Two were smaller, three were medium-sized, and the one at the opposite end of the house from the stairs was a master suite. It had a large walk-in closet, an ensuite bathroom, and a little balcony that overlooked the side yard and garden shed.
"There's so much space," Hermione said when they'd first walked in. The house was officially theirs, and it was an overwhelming thought. Their house. "We don't even have any furniture."
He'd laughed because she was right. He had a house in Manchester, and she had several flats around Britain, and together they owned quite a bit of furniture. None of it was here and now, though.
They'd slept in the tent she'd had in her satchel that first night. It was the same tent Arthur Weasley had borrowed from somebody-or-another to house his children and their friends when they went to the Quidditch World Cup. Hermione had borrowed it as a back-up plan. They'd set the tent up between the house and the shed, and enlarged one of the camp beds to sleep together.
\\
The first month flew by.
They warded the house and property beyond necessity, layering security and alerts with a few gentle anti-Muggle charms. They unpacked what they did have into the walk-in closet, which only made the closet look bigger because there was so much empty space, and set out their toiletries in the bathroom. They drove into the nearest town—Kenilworth—and bought furniture and groceries and seeds to plant in the garden.
Hermione was almost seven months pregnant, and she finally looked it. After a month of good, hot meals and regular rest, she looked well. She'd even bought a book on pregnancy at a wizarding shop in Brisbane, and she used a charm to listen to the baby's heartbeat every night before they went to sleep.
"I want another one," she told him in the dark.
"Another what?" he asked, half-asleep.
"Another baby."
"We haven't even had the first one yet." He wished she would save these confusing conversations for daylight hours. She tended to spring them on him, usually like this when he was dead-tired from a day out in the sun gardening.
"I know. I just like it."
"Like what?" He rolled over and propped his head up on his fist so that he could see her better. Obviously, they wouldn't be sleeping yet. "Being pregnant?"
"That's not what I meant. I mean I like the idea of having children. We have the time—we have years, Severus."
"But in the end we'll have to go back to the war."
She was quiet for long enough that he thought she might've fallen asleep.
"But if we have more than one, if we die our child won't be alone."
That was the last time either of them mentioned the war for a long time. It was a quiet dread waiting for them at the end of this peaceful interlude, and they knew from the timbre of the quiet sometimes that they were both thinking about it.
The charms told her she was eight months pregnant to the day. According to them, she would go into labor in a month and two days, and there wasn't anything to worry about. She was still worried, though. They'd fitted out the bedroom nearest theirs as a nursery, and they'd had a few meetings with a local midwife, and she'd read everything she could get her hands on.
But she wanted to talk to her mother. And she wanted to talk to Mrs. Weasley, because she'd done this many times and been a witch. And she wanted to talk to Poppy, who was a mediwitch. And she wanted to talk to Minerva, because Minerva had been the one she went to when she first got her period and it just seemed like good symmetry to talk to her about childbirth, too.
Severus had a job at a book store in town. He didn't hate it, but she knew he didn't really like it either. With any luck, he'd be able to quit in a few months when the garden was properly sprouted and they could sell the plants as ingredients to the apothecary in Brisbane.
It was difficult trying to make money honestly when all their proper credentials were wizarding but they were trying to avoid the notice of wizards. They'd bought the house using fake credit and false documentation, but they didn't want to rely on it; they'd both had enough dishonesty in their lives.
"Hi."
Hermione blinked. There was a woman in jeans and a tank top standing outside the garden gate. Presumably she wasn't a Muggle because the wards would've had her wandering back in the direction of home.
"Hello."
This isn't the war, she reminded herself. She would've set the alert off if she'd snuck across the wards with any sort of secrecy charms on her. And she just walked up and said hello; that's a horrible opening if the end goal is an attack. This isn't the war.
"My name's Jane Atkins. I live in town. I would've introduced myself sooner, but I figured you all would want to settle in a bit."
"Yeah. Hi." Hermione stood up, rubbing her hands on her jeans. Her wand was in the sheath on her left arm, but her knife was in the kitchen. She did have the sharp little trowel in her hand… Not the war. "I'm Cora Blake."
She made a mental note to check the wards and add an alert for when even non-hostile witches crossed the property line.
Jane grinned. "Sorry. I just can't remember the last time I ran into another witch."
"I can imagine," Hermione said. One of the prime reasons they'd chosen Australia was its small magical population, spread wide across the large continent. They'd been hoping there wouldn't be anywhere near anybody else vaguely magical.
Jane launched into her story. She and her husband, Ed, were originally from Sydney. Jane was an editor for Sherman Press, a peer-reviewed potions journal. Ed did something with charms for a private firm. They had two girls, a five-year-old named Ursula and a two-year-old named Amelia.
"Oh, you have so much to look forward to," Jane said. They were in the house now. Hermione had pulled out the lemonade, and Jane had gone on from her basic backstory to the joys of parenthood.
They were in the middle of a very strange conversation, Jane going off about the challenges of properly raising magical plants for use in potions, when Severus arrived.
"Hey, Her-oney. Hey, Honey."
"Simon," Hermione said, smirking. She got up to pour him a lemonade and kissed him on the cheek. "This is Jane Atkins. She lives in Kenilworth and thought it was about time she came to say hello."
"Thought you'd like to know there were people around who know what's what," Jane said, grinning.
Is she from the government? Should I Stupefy her?
Actually, I'm hoping she'll put in a good word for you about a job…
"That was… utterly strange," Severus said into the dark. They were in bed—and they had a real bed now, not a conjured one—lying next to each other and staring up into the dark.
"Did we just make friends with that couple? I think we just made friends. I can't tell, though. I've always been bad at knowing when I was friends with somebody."
"I should think we did. We invited them—and their children—over for dinner Friday."
"We should probably buy a table."
"We could use the breakfast nook."
"Isn't this what dining rooms are for, though? You put a nice rug down and forbid the children from going in there unsupervised, and only use it when you invite friends over for dinner. Or you plan to use it—you set the table and make it all look nice, then spend the whole time standing in the kitchen together."
"How the hell should I know? You saw the house I grew up in. Do you think my parents had friends over for dinners?"
"My parents had people over all the time. Well. They did before I started having uncontrollable bits of magic pop up at the supper table. I was so bored, sitting there listening to them talk about molars."
"Your magic lashed out in a fit of boredom?"
"Yes. More than once."
"That must be true boredom."
"Well. I hadn't experience History of Magic with Binns yet. But by then I had better control, I suppose."
"It's all about the Goblin Wars with that man."
"I feel like that's an important class. Or would be if it was taught right."
"You're not alone in that opinion."
"It sounds like there's a story there."
"Oh, there are plenty of stories there. Mostly it's a long list of not-quite-fights between Dumbledore and McGonagall. He stood by the Hogwarts tradition of having a completely useless class, utterly boring and not particularly informative. She wanted to rewrite the syllabus, bring in a new teacher, and simply hold class in a different room; Binns would never know."
Hermione laughed quietly, shifting onto her side. Her pregnant belly pressed into his ribs. After half a moment, the baby kicked him.
"I love it here," Hermione said, almost whispering. "It's almost perfect."
"Almost?"
"There are poisonous snakes here, and that gives me the willies on principle. And none of our friends or family live here. And it's bloody hot."
Severus smiled, lifting his hand and running it along her ribs, then across her belly. He turned on his side so that he was facing her, his body arched around their child inside her.
"Our Cooling Charms are set. It's perfectly nice in the house."
"Yes, in the house," she said. He could see the gleam of her teeth in the dim light—faint moonlight streamed through their curtain-less windows, but the moon was on the other side of the house. "We've been gardening for two days."
"You don't have to. I can finish on my own."
"I want to help, Severus. I don't want to just sit inside and—I don't know—knit booties."
He smiled because she'd spent most of the morning working on just that project. They'd given in to their curiosity and used a charm to find out that it was a boy, and they'd even picked out a name (Sebastian Rubeus, after Hagrid and because they both thought Sebastian Snape had a nice ring to it); the next logical step was for her to knit little blue booties, of course.
"I can feel you laughing at me," she said.
"I'm not laughing."
"No, but you're amused by me."
"Knitting booties in Australia is amusing," he said, defensive. "As you said before, it's hot here."
"I just don't have much else to do."
And that was true enough. He knew it was driving her a bit mad, too. He'd found a part-time job fairly easily, and there were definite possibilities for more interesting work through Jane Atkins. Hermione hadn't had any luck, though; mostly because potential employers saw that she was about to have a baby and didn't want to bother training her up for their shop if she was just going to quit when the baby was born. (Since that was indeed the plan, she hadn't fought them on it.)
He went to work, he came home. They worked on the house, they worked on the garden. On his days off, they foraged for furniture and the like. While he was gone, she usually read his books or added layers to the wards to keep crocodiles away. She was very bored, and they both knew it was only a matter of time before she was very busy; but for now she was knitting booties.
\\
The best part about Australia—maybe not the actual best part, but one of the highlights—was the house. It was their house for one. It was also filled with natural light, with windows along every external wall and no curtains to speak of. So very different from his rooms in the dungeons. Even different from his rooms in the headmaster's tower, which had a few rooms with a view but otherwise the walls were covered in bookcases instead of windows.
And yet they were buying curtains. They were going to block out all that wonderful light. Because, apparently, that's what civilized people did. They put curtains in their windows even though they didn't have neighbors and the house was surrounded by trees.
"What do you think?" Hermione asked, holding up two near-identical items. They were both cream-colored gauzy things, one with more texture than the other. He didn't understand why she was choosing so many neutral colors—the house was already all beige and white, because that was the color Muggles painted houses when they were trying to sell them.
"They both look fine."
"Yes, but which one do you like better?"
"The white one."
"Severus."
"Hermione."
"These are for our bedroom. You can pretend to care."
"I like whichever one you like."
"That's what you said about the curtains for Sebastian's room."
"He's an infant. He's not going to care what the curtains look like. All that matters is that they block enough light that he naps during the daytime."
Hermione sighed, pressing the pad of her thumb against the space between her eyes. Then she turned and tossed the less-textured curtains in the cart on top of the gray-blue curtains for the baby's room, the olive green drapes for the living room, the cream and blue checked curtains for the kitchen, and the ochre-red apron she'd picked out so far.
"Let's go look at rugs."
He barely contained a groan, and she spun to glare at him. He put his hands up, mollifying, defensive.
"Don't you even care?"
"It's just stuff, Hermione. What does it matter?"
She'd been reminding him of Narcissa Malfoy in a strange way. Not a bad way—Cissy was the lesser of all evils when it came to the Death Eaters—but in an odd, always talking about "bringing a room together" and "conversation pieces" sort of way.
"Normal lives, Severus! Remember how we wanted this? Remember talking about this?" He blinked. He remembered talking about normal lives, remembered wanting it so badly that they'd cried together more than once. (Nobody had said anything about the damned curtains, though.) "Well, now we have it. And what happens? We're fighting. What if we can't do it, Sev? We came together in a war, under pressure, stressed out of our minds, lying to our friends—what if we can't do normal? What if, under normal circumstances, all of it falls apart?"
Severus laughed. He laughed so hard he had to sit down. When he recovered himself, she had her arms crossed, resting on her pregnant belly, glaring at him.
This isn't funny.
"Hermione," he said. He reached up and she, reluctantly, let him take her hands in his. "We can do normal just fine. I just really, truly, honestly don't give a flying fuck what color the curtains are. As long as you like staying there and you let me stay there with you, I have everything I need."
"Damn hormones," she muttered, turning away to hide the tear that escaped one eye. He smirked and kissed her palm and stood up, pulling her into a hug. She melted against him, tension that he hadn't even noticed was there leaking away.
"Let's go look at rugs," he said, resigned to it. She had the day planned out, shops marked out on a map in the truck. "Those I care about more than curtains. I don't want any of those damned rugs that are always flopping up. Tripping hazards. We're going to be carrying a baby around the house, you know."
"I love you, you know that?"
"Is that why you're making me search myself for feelings about home décor?"
"Yes."
"My feelings are that we should just charm the damned glass opaque whenever we're tired of looking at the trees."
"That's not the point of curtains, Severus."
"That's exactly their point. It's their purpose. It's what they do; they block the view."
"But what about the method of it? At night, when the sun sets, going around and closing the curtains for the evening, having one last look out at everything."
"The Zen of the curtains."
"Don't make fun of me."
"I'm not making fun of you."
"You are."
They arrived at the section of rugs. They were… rugs.
"What do you think of this one for the bathroom?"
Severus groaned.
Hermione frowned at the books on the table. She wasn't sure where to begin. Or rather, she knew exactly where she should begin but she just didn't feel inclined to do so. It was a strange feeling; she usually didn't have a problem throwing herself into theoretical work.
She had half a mind to put on her apron and bake a loaf of bread or something. She'd already cleaned everything in the house. She'd rearranged the nursery half a dozen times. They were as ready as they could be, but she still felt like she should be doing something. Baking bread sounded imminently more useful than reading a few books.
She stood up, and that's when her water broke.
"Severus!"
She'd had a few contractions the week before. Sebastian had dropped low two days ago, moving around, getting ready to be born. She looked at the clock as if it mattered—ten o'clock in the morning, November 2, 1990. It was a Friday.
"Severus!"
She stood in her own puddle, breathing, waiting for a contraction. That was what followed, right? She was officially in labor. Now came the contractions and the rush to the hospital and the pushing and the baby. They were avoiding the wizarding world, so it would be the Muggle hospital.
"What?" Severus called from the shed. He'd turned it into a lab, setting up his cauldrons and working out a clever shelving system for ingredients. Jane had indeed got him the right connections, and he'd been offered a job in potions in no time. (Actually, he'd been offered several jobs, but he'd just taken the one.)
"Severus!"
All the windows in the house were open, as was the door to his lab. It was a hot, beautiful morning. There was just enough breeze that, with all those windows and doors open, it was just about comfortable inside without Cooling Charms.
"Severus."
"What's the matter?" He walked into the house, wiping his hands on his jeans.
"Baby," she said stupidly, still frozen in her place.
"Is that—Did your—?"
"Oh." A contraction, stronger than any from the week before but not very long, squeezed through her. She reached for Severus, locking her fingers around his arm.
Sebastian Rubeus Snape was born fourteen hours later, just before midnight. By all counts, the labor had been as easy and uncomplicated as her pregnancy.
"Didn't feel easy," Hermione had muttered to him when the doctors had been telling her how lucky she'd been, how well everything had gone, how easy the labor had been. Severus felt it was best to agree with her since his main contribution had been to hold her hand and apologize sporadically after the big pushes.
Little Sebastian was tiny and pale, with a thick head of black hair and Severus's dark eyes. He was two days old now, noticeably larger than he had been at the very beginning.
"Good set 'a lungs on 'im!" one of the doctors had said, and that had held true. Sebastian was well able to let them know when they were failing as parents.
Currently, they seemed to be doing okay. Hermione was showering—he couldn't remember if she'd had a chance to do that since they'd returned from the hospital—and Severus was sitting with the baby. He wasn't sure what, exactly, they were supposed to be doing. Little Sebastian was fed, he had a dry diaper, and he didn't seem particularly inclined to sleep. They were just sort of staring at each other.
They'd bought a rocking chair for the nursery. It was more of a glider than a rocker, and it had wonderful cushions. The seat was wide and deep, the arm rests were soft. It was the perfect chair to sit with Sebastian, the seat deep enough so that Severus could lay the baby on his thighs and the arm rests would rise on either side like guard rails.
Sebastian lay on Severus's lap, staring up, purely innocent. He was a pale little thing—so little. Ten fingers, ten toes. He went pink when he was annoyed, red when he was angry. Right now, though, he was pale, calm. He was swaddled—one of the nurses had taught them all about swaddling—in a pale blue blanket, but one little fist stuck out by his chin, gripping the top edge of the blanket like he was going to pull it up over his shoulder and roll over. (Of course, he was just two days old and he couldn't hold his own head up, let alone roll over.) Severus nudged the fingers, and they loosed their hold on the blanket to curl around his finger instead.
So very, very small. And perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Sebastian had this way of looking at his father—"Oh, hello, Dad. Good to see you."—utterly guileless, somewhat perplexed. It wasn't an intentional expression, of course; he wasn't even a week old.
They were like reflections of each other. Whenever they had a quiet moment, they just stared at each other. Silent. It was like they were trying to figure each other out. It was lovely to see; it made her smile every time. And then Severus would catch her standing in the doorway watching them watch each other, and he would pretend to glower at her before he handed Sebastian over to be fed.
It was exhausting being a mother. She was still sore in places that best went unmentioned, despite the potions Severus had produced for her. She suspected it was mostly a mental thing, expecting sensitivity. And she was lactating; that was different.
They had no schedule to speak of. They tried to sleep when it was dark and be awake when it was light, but that didn't necessarily pan out. Sebastian was up at all hours, needing to be fed or changed or burped or soothed. Whenever he woke up, they both got up because they didn't want to miss anything.
They made it into town once that first week to pick up groceries. Hermione carried Sebastian in a sling across her body, cooing and rocking the whole time. It took nearly three times as long as it had ever taken them to shop before, and Sebastian hadn't even been fussy.
\\
By the time Sebastian was two months old, they weren't both jumping out of bed to see what he needed in the night. He was cute and they loved him, but Hermione could handle the midnight feeding by herself, and the 4 a.m. diaper change was all for Severus.
Meanwhile, the job Severus had got through their connection to Jane Atkins had flowered wonderfully. It had begun as an experimental brewer of sorts, trying out new and experimental potions in the garden shed lab and sending back reports. He still did that, but his reliability as a potioneer (they couldn't falsify the documentation for a Potions Mastery—the Australian Ministry had the means to verify it, and they still wanted to avoid notice) had led to supplemental projects brewing common potions that the company supplied for apothecary contracts.
"It's kind of like brewing for Hogwarts," Severus told her, "only I don't have to run around every night trying to keep the students from testing the contraceptive potions."
With Severus working from home, Hermione found a part-time job in town. Jane had offered to put in a good word for her, too, in the Australian magical community, but Hermione declined. She just wanted something that would bring in a little bit of extra money (because Severus was making enough to pay all their bills). She ended up working four mornings a week at a plant nursery, watering and pruning.
\\
Sebastian—they called him Bast—was a sweet little boy with an easy giggle and a penchant for getting into places he wasn't supposed to be. Whenever he was discovered, he would give Severus that same guileless look—"Oh, hello, Dad. I was just standing here; I don't know how those whatsits got broken." It was both endearing and annoying.
The boy's first word had been "no," and he'd employed it often and loudly. Second was "Mumma," quickly followed by "Da." He called himself "Bats" for a long time, often insisting "No! Bats do it, Mumma!" when Hermione tried to help him with anything. Oddly enough, he let Severus help with anything and everything. Hermione told him it made him infuriatingly smug, but Severus just shrugged.
He hadn't brewed her a dose of the usual contraceptive after Bast was born, and she hadn't asked him to. Her second pregnancy was harder than with Bast. It was twins, and she had Bast to chase around, and the part-time job. She took a lot of soothing baths, letting the water take the weight of the growing babies off her back and ease the pressure in her hips. Severus did what he could, brewing her this or that, and often resorting to foot or back rubs. Bast mostly just wanted to know what was taking so long; he wanted to meet his sisters.
Sofia Minerva and Elaine Poppy were identical down to the last freckle. Like their brother, they had Severus's coloring and Hermione's curls. Where Bast took after Severus in his long limbs, the girls looked to favor their mother.
Sofia had come into the world screaming her indignance with the lot of it. She flailed her little fists, narrowed her black eyes, and informed them in the only way she could that this cold existence was much lacking compared to the warm womb she'd just occupied. Elaine, as would come to be a trend, let her sister do the talking, but showed her support of the general position by harmonizing her screams pitched for perfect, ear-splitting cacophony.
"Too loud," Bast had said.
After the girls were born, Hermione quit her job at the nursery. Severus made more than enough brewing from his lab in the garden shed to cover their expenses, and time was crawling up on them.
When the children were napping or playing, Hermione researched. They wanted a spell to pull Voldemort's soul out of Harry's scar so that they could destroy it. The books were unpleasant, to say the least.
On Sunday afternoons, Hermione baked. She turned out loaves of crusty bread, dinner rolls, cookies. Whatever she felt like, or whatever was needed for the coming week's meal plan. During the week, she worked on the problem of Harry the Horcrux, or worked up arithmantic extrapolations trying to figure out other likely items and hiding places for Horcruxes.
Bast displayed all signs of inheriting Severus's nose. The girls went through a nasty month teething, always waking one another up with their discomfort.
\\
The Dark Mark on Severus's arm had faded to a dull gray upon their arrival in 1990. It had been slowly darkening over the last year; they'd hardly noticed.
"Whatsit?" Sofia had asked one morning over breakfast, rubbing at her father's arm like she was trying to get some dirt off.
It's back, he'd thought, and she'd heard the horror echoing in his head.
"It's…" Severus had turned his arm back and forth in the light, looking at the tattoo there.
"Put your head between your knees," Hermione told him, picking Sofia up and putting her hand on the back of Severus's neck since he didn't seem to be functioning. "Breathe, Severus."
"What's wrong?" Bast was too perceptive for his own good.
"It's bad magic from a long time ago," Hermione said, fingers still on Severus's head. Sofia squirmed to be set down; she'd been holding her too tightly. Hermione was reluctant to let go, she had the urge to pick them all up and squeeze them and never let them go. She set Sofia down, though, and watched the toddler walk across the room to look at a picture book with her twin.
"Bad magic?" Bast asked, not allowing himself to be sidetracked by his sisters being cute.
"It's hard to explain."
"I made a mistake once when I was mad," Severus said, raising his head. He was pale, but he didn't look like he was going to vomit anymore.
"Like when I popped the ball?" His first episode of uncontrolled magic, when Elaine had been playing with his green ball and he hadn't wanted to share it. The ball had popped, scaring the bejesus out of Ellie; there had been tears all around.
"Kind of."
"Oh."
And with that, Bast had gone off to find his toys, curiosity satisfied.
"What are we going to tell them? How are we going to tell them?" Hermione asked, sitting in the chair next to him. His fingers tightened around hers, though she couldn't remember when he'd taken her hand.
"I have no idea."
\\
On June 24, 1995, the Mark didn't burn like it had before. He wasn't the one being Summoned, that was the other him. The one at Hogwarts. The one who hadn't killed Dumbledore yet, hadn't met the Hermione who would be his wife.
They'd put the kids to bed early, not sure what to expect. It had only itched a bit, gone fully black, and that was it.
"I don't want to sell the house," Severus said into the dark after they'd gone to bed.
I don't want to go back.
"I like the idea that we can come back here someday. Either live here or just visit. Whatever we want. I like the option."
"Me too."
He sighed. "I don't want to go back, either."
She turned onto her side so that she could look at his profile, vague in the darkness of their bedroom.
"What are we going to tell the kids? They're too little to understand any of it. It will just scare them."
"I have no idea."
Hermione reached out to him, grabbing the hand that had been on its way to rub at his Dark Mark, and holding on.
\\
"Hermione?"
She sat back and scrubbed at her face, smiling wetly at her husband. "Sorry."
"What's wrong?"
She closed her eyes and sighed, twitching a thumb at the crumpled bits of parchment filling up her wastebasket.
"I spent the afternoon trying to draft a letter to the children. For when they're older. Just in case… in case—"
"Come here."
\\
The spell, the one to separate the Horcrux from Harry, didn't work. No matter how many variables they changed, no matter how many iterations they tried, the arithmancy wouldn't balance. The only time they came close, the spell would have simply yanked both souls out of the body and more-or-less destroyed them. (They'd burned their notes on that one.)
"I hate to say it, but I think Dumbledore was right," Hermione said.
"I hate it when he's right," Severus grumbled, laying lengthwise on the couch in the library and propping his feet up on the arm rest. He was too tall for the couch, which was why it was in the library and not the living room.
"There is a chance—a staggeringly slim chance—that if the Dark Lord is the one to do it, and he uses the Killing Curse, it will kill the Horcrux before it kills Harry."
"A Horcrux tries to preserve its vessel," Severus said, following her thought to its conclusion.
"I think so, yes."
\\
On Saturdays, they visited with the Atkinses. Sometimes they went into town, sometimes the Atkinses visited them in the woods. There was always good food and something interesting to talk about.
Jane and Ed knew something was wrong. Hermione got the impression that they thought the Blakes were having marital issues. Jane talked a lot about hardships they'd faced over the years, and Ed kept giving Severus openings to spill his guts.
\\
"Mummy, why are you sad?" Bast asked her one afternoon out of the blue. Hermione had been sorting through the books she'd accumulated in the six years they'd been in Australia, thinking back on the projects that hadn't worked. (And the ones that had—Severus had come up with a clever spell for fog that, when she introduced her bluebell flames, created a sort of controlled lightening storm to surround and disable opponents.)
"Why do you think I'm sad, Honey?"
Bast frowned at her, a perfect imitation of Severus when he knew she was evading a question. It made her smile at him.
"Things are going to change soon," she told him, wondering how much she should tell him, when she should tell him. He was extremely clever, and extremely stubborn. But he was also five years old. "I'm going to miss things the way they are."
"Then leave them the way they are." The 'duh, Mum' was implied. She smiled at him, and made a mental note to talk to Severus about it all later. The children would have to be told something, especially Bast. The girls were too little, and would be too little, to understand. Bast couldn't understand the whole of it, but he deserved information about the bits that would affect him. Deserved to know where Mum and Dad had gone off to.
\\
Hermione stood in the doorway, watching her family. It was a nightly ritual now. She was in charge of bath time—luckily not a hated activity in their house, unlike Jane had led her to expect—and Severus read them stories. Hermione cleaned things up in the bathroom and turned down their beds, and the four of them cuddled up on the overlarge couch in the toy room (originally the nursery).
Severus was in the middle, hair pulled back into a queue at the base of his neck, bare feet poking out of the cuffs of his jeans. He had Bast, his miniature doppelgänger, on one side, t-shirt and pajama shorts, hair already curling up again after his bath. The girls were on the other side, both wearing Severus's old t-shirts as nightgowns.
The stories went in cycles. Sofia picked out a book and Severus read to the twins while Bast had his bath. Then Ellie picked out a book while Sofia had her bath. Then Bast picked out a book while Ellie had her bath. Then they each picked out one more book and they read them together while Hermione got their beds ready. They mostly read the same books every night; Bast was all about Dr. Seuss, and his sisters followed his example.
"That is what's going to be the worst part," Hermione said after they'd said goodnight to all three of them and placed the usual alert charms on the bedrooms. They were downstairs, circulating the house and putting things to rights after the day. Bast had a puzzle all over the breakfast nook. Sofia's stuffed kneazle was prowling across a bookshelf.
"What is?" Severus asked, making his nightly round, checking the locks on the doors and windows, and closing the curtains.
"Not seeing them at the end of each day. Kissing them goodnight."
Hermione sighed, and Severus put his arms around her.
"We're surprisingly good at this, you know that?"
"Good at what?"
"Normal lives."
"We don't even fight about who takes the trash out."
"Nobody takes the trash out."
"Magic is a wonderful thing." Her voice cracked and she hid her tears against his collarbone. He held her tighter. "I think we made it worse."
"Made what worse?"
"Before, when it was just an idea, some hypothetical thing to want and to try to get to, it wasn't so bad. Now that we know what we're going to be missing… I don't know if I can do this."
"If that were true, you wouldn't be this sad," Severus said. "You're sad—hell, I'm sad—because we know that we can compartmentalize. We can have this and hold it close and wish for it, and still put it in a box at the back of our minds and do what needs to be done. We've been making provisions for this since the beginning, and it's a hateful thing to plan to leave our children, and it makes us sad, and it makes us angry. But we're still going to do it because that is who Dumbledore made us to be."
"And we're going to win the war and survive the world in spite of it."
"What do you mean?"
"He made us, yes, but if he had it his way we probably would both give our lives for the cause. I'm not willing to do that. Not anymore. And I know you don't plan to die, either."
"You're right." He sounded resigned, but she could feel the steel in him when he said it.
A/N: So, this is one of the chapters that was completely rewritten after my trip. Originally, Harry, Ron and Ginny came along, there were other marriages and babies… it was all incredibly convenient and completely served my desire for tying them all up in happily ever afters before the whole Battle of Hogwarts and people start dying thing. I'm still not completely happy with this chapter, and I'd especially love reviews on this one: What works, what clunks… I feel like things need to be fleshed out more, but I can't decide which bits, so it'd be lovely if you could tell me what you'd like to read more of (or less of).
Also, Google thinks I'm pregnant and moving to Australia based on my search history now. I've never had kids, and I've never been to Australia, and if you have any input about either topic feel free to share and I'll try to incorporate more real detail in a revised version of this chapter in the future…
Cheers!
—M