The Orders of Merlin arrived one morning, entirely without pomp or circumstance. Two simple packages in brown paper tied up with twine. Inside, two identical letters thanking them for "acts of valor" and their contributions to the "returning of the peace."
"Well that's fitting," Severus said, not quite sarcastically. Hermione shrugged.
"Would you really want to go to something so ridiculous as a ball? Put on dress robes, smile at all the people…" She leaned back against him, looking down at their entwined hands, tracing the curve between his index finger and thumb with her fingertip. "It would be nice to dance with you."
"We could dance anytime you like," he said, his voice a soft murmur in her ear.
"I was thinking of that last Christmas party of Slughorn's, actually," she admitted. She could practically feel him roll his eyes at the thought. She squeezed his hand. "I wanted to dance with you then. And you were angry with me—do you remember?"
"I walked in and the first thing I saw was that idiot McLaggen going at you under the mistletoe."
"I was talking to some man whose name I couldn't remember," she said, beginning to trace the curve of his hand again. "It would be nice to have a second go of it."
"I was a jealous idiot that night."
"My jealous idiot."
He chuckled into her hair, stilling her tracing finger and bringing the hand to his lips.
\\
A bit of research had revealed that the statues at Prince Manor had attacked her because she wasn't a Prince by blood nor had she been added to the wards by a Prince by blood. Severus remedied that quickly enough, suffering through endless ribbing from Minerva about him gallantly throwing himself at his wife when she was in danger. It was easier to laugh when the statues weren't shooting at anybody.
The Manor, despite being the latest property that had actually been lived in, was not an appropriate place to raise a family. The statues at the door were the gentlest of the enchanted objects, as they were meant to protect. Most of the rest were just for the amusement of those who knew what they did—the Princes seemed to be the sort of people who hexed their teacups for the entertainment of watching their guests squirm when they failed to detect the danger.
The next three properties were almost as bad, though neither of them managed to injure themselves in the exploration.
The fifth property on the list was a mess. It was a small old Georgian house plonked in the middle of a large plot in the middle of nowhere, Scotland. The nearest patch of civilization was a tiny Muggle village that consisted of a petrol station, an old ruin of a church, and a pub where the local famers spent their evenings.
It was perfect.
The front was overgrown with wisteria (or ivy or some other non-magic vine plant that had been left to its own devices too long), most of the windows were broken, and there was an oak tree growing straight through the curved iron framework that had once been a conservatory, but the bones of the house were in good condition. It was more of a cottage done in the Georgian style than a proper Georgian manor house, but that was exactly what they needed—none of the empty rooms like they'd had in Australia.
"This was probably a dining room," Severus said, standing in the room at the front of the house next to the stairs. It had a fantastic bay window overlooking the grassy terrace. "We could turn it into a library, of course. The walls over here between the kitchen and—what was this, the sitting room?—are already gone. An open floor plan. We could put a table here. We'll spend more time in the library than the sitting room anyway."
"It's falling apart, Severus."
"Four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms," Severus said, reading it off the property description that had been in the inventory of his inheritance. "It's old, so it's probably a good thing the walls are falling apart. It will be easier to fix the plumbing that way."
"You really want to undertake a project like this when there are Death Eaters after us?"
"They won't come looking at a place like this."
"Because it's a ruin, Severus," she said, but her lips had twitched into half a smile and they both knew he'd won. "It's already a death trap."
Ironically, that was the day the loose Death Eaters were finally captured. The strangest part—for the Snapes, at least—was that they read about it in the paper instead of participating.
The headline was, "It's over," Minister declares: last Death Eaters finally in custody. The story was remarkably detailed, but that was probably because the conclusive attack had taken place in Diagon Alley within easy view of the Prophet's office.
At noon, when Hermione and Severus had been picking their way through the layers of dirt and dead leaves in the master bedroom, the remaining Death Eaters had Apparated to the street outside Weasley Wizard Wheezes. The Prophet speculated as to whether that location had more to do with the twins' steadfastly upbeat and cheerful store even through the worst of the war, or if they'd somehow known that Harry and Ron had been spending their release weekends above the shop with the twins.
In any case, the Death Eaters had arrived en masse in full Death Eater regalia—dark robes, masks; there were more than a few pictures in the paper—and attacked the shop. It was their boldest attack yet. Unfortunately for them, Fred and George had long ago warded the hell out of their shop, not only because they knew they were targets but because they did a lot of research and experimentation as they developed new products, and they hadn't wanted a mistake to blow a hole in the street outside the shop.
There were two immediate casualties—Rabastan Lestrange and Luna Lovegood.
Lestrange, it would later come out, had been the leader of the remaining Death Eaters, and he'd been standing closest to the place where the spells had impacted the shop's wards. He'd been caught in the backlash, thrown across the street into a brick wall. He'd broken a dozen bones, including his skull and two vertebrae, from the physical impact alone. The spell backlash had burned away his eyebrows, fused his joints, and called up bulbous green pustules inside his lungs and on the sole of his left foot.
Luna had been exiting the shop with her father at the moment of the attack. She'd been a step ahead of her father, and thus had been just outside the wards when the Death Eaters attacked. The explosion of spells against wards blew her back into the shop, but she was lucky in that it was the Killing Curse that ended her life. She never felt the shelving unit she'd been blasted back into fall on her, didn't feel when one of its posts broke and speared through her kidney.
Mr. Lovegood was blasted back into the same shelving unit. He was rushed to St. Mungo's the moment the fighting was over.
Harry, Ron, Fred and George leapt down the stairs, throwing themselves out the shop door. By all accounts, it had been madness in the street. Shoppers Disapparated right and left, shopkeepers slammed their doors or ran out to try to help. Aurors rushed in—patrols had been tripled since the attacks had begun.
The Prophet claimed that the fight had lasted nearly an hour, but Harry said it was maybe ten minutes. He and Ron would probably receive accolades for their part in the fight.
George ended up in St. Mungo's overnight, though it was only for observation. He escaped his room and sat with Mr. Lovegood. He was there in the wee hours of the morning when the older wizard died from his injuries.
A Death Eater named Clarence Burke died overnight as well. His identity had been a surprise—everybody had assumed the pudgy younger man, a cousin of the Burke at Borgin & Burke's, had been a casualty of the war, one of many taken from his home in the night and never seen again; nobody had known he'd been a Death Eater.
The Order gathered at Grimmauld Place within an hour after the delivery of the Prophet's special evening edition. Nobody had called a meeting, but most had come anyway. Fred and Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were at St. Mungo's with George. Harry, Ron, Hill and the other Aurors were clearing up at Diagon Alley or making their reports at the Ministry.
Nobody knew quite what to say.
\\
Two days passed. It was a Saturday. There had been no attacks. The Death Eaters had been securely locked away in the bowels of the Ministry and questioned under Veritaserum—they were the last. It truly was over. Perhaps there were still sympathizers out there, but the likelihood of those old-fashioned bigots suddenly deciding to rain mayhem on the unsuspecting populace was minimal.
By luck or divine providence, Hogsmeade completed its repairs that Saturday. It was a weekend; it was the first time in too long that they weren't afraid. Much like the evening on the Quidditch pitch after Hogwarts completed repairs, they celebrated.
Music filled the streets, and dancers. Rosmerta and Aberforth and even Madam Pudifoot herself lined the walks outside their establishments with tables full of food and drinks. There were bonfires in the large open areas off the road. Zonko began setting off fireworks from his roof at dusk, quickly escalating when Fred and George set themselves up on the roof of the Shrieking Shack and began setting of their own pyrotechnics.
The only damper on the evening was that Harry had finally realized that she'd known when and how Black would die, and he wasn't speaking to her. The highlight was witnessing Rosmerta dump a pint of ale over a reporter's head when he tried to get her to talk about "that horrible Headmaster Snape character."
They left well before the village's festivities died down. The children were asleep on their feet, and the atmosphere was quickly devolving into dirty drinking songs and couples seeking out dark corners for more private celebrations.
When the children were in bed, they found a dark corner of their own.
A/N: Yes, yes. It's horribly short. I'm sorry. We're looking at one more chapter and then the epilogue (which will possibly be two chapters long; I'm still writing it so I don't know what the final product will look like...), and this was the best stopping-point. Writing the end of this thing is more than a little bit bittersweet.
—M
P.S. Mashakas is fantastic and has begun translating this monster of a story into Russian! fanfics dot me/index dot php?section=3&id=79686