Of course, no one thought to claim that after the Battle of Hogwarts, everything would go according to plan, life would get better, and everyone would find what they had been looking for for so long. Naive stupidities were inherent only to fools from the House of The Bravest Ones, whom her late husband had the misfortune to teach and humiliate in his time. To be honest, two years later and a lifetime after everything that had happened to them, Hermione agreed with him more than ever.
What would he say to her now if he happened to overhear her decadent thoughts? He would scold, as he often did in the past. He would have grimaced, would have arched an eyebrow at her, and spat out a venomous comment, something between the lines of: "And this is what you, the war heroine, the owner of the Order of Merlin, first class, and my wife are saying to me now?" He would have spoken the last addition in such a tone as if it explained everything. As if Hermione had once demanded an explanation from him.
Hermione stirred the cream into a cup of hopelessly cold black coffee, and took a sip, not tasting it or smelling it, suppressing the urge to throw the cup against the wall and send the very same Order of Merlin to the Ministry with the wish to shove it where the sun did not shine. As recently as this morning, the owl brought her a letter with Kingsley's florid speech about how Sirius and Severus had finally been pardoned and rewarded. Her accomplishments paid off. And the fact that rewards and justice overtook their heroes posthumously was nothing more than an unfortunate misunderstanding.
"After all, 'Mione, life goes on! We won!" Harry would say so. And Hermione wanted to strangle him. Forced heroes of the cruel and meaningless war could believe in happy endings as much as they wanted. She knew the true cost of their victory. Harry chased the surviving Death Eaters like crazy, trying to destroy them to the last. The fact that Severus Snape and Draco, now one of Hermione's most loyal friends, also had been the Death Eaters in the past, escaped his notice. During the day, Harry played the brave Auror, and in the evening he sat at the bedside of Ron, who had fallen into a magical coma, and promised him... Promised, promised. And failed. And he seemed to be drinking. The sobering potion, brewed from the improved recipe of Britain's most capable Potions Mistress, trained by Master Snape himself, Madame Snape, nee Granger, was bearing fruit.
Hermione glanced at her watch, grimaced at the approaching migraine, and put aside the bulky report folder she'd been working on instead of Harry. Her friend was once again swallowed up by field practice. Well... Harry could spit motivational speeches left and right as much as he wanted. He was far from the eulogies of the late Dumbledore. Hermione terribly wanted to spit out some kind of an evil remarque and she understood with growing sadness that she somehow inherited her husband's best character features.
Hermione was exceptionally lousy at playing prosperity today. Not to say that she loved her birthday so much, but she still had some warm memories of this holiday of approaching old age. The baggage from the past was not always depressing and hopeless. On her twenty-two and their first anniversary, Severus presented her with a dried heather flower pendant. The one from the Scottish Highlands, where they fled in the middle of the night, in the midst of the hunt for Horcruxes. Just to keep from going crazy.
Only Severus and McGonagall knew that Hermione's games with the Time Turner had added a couple of extra years to her. And she married Severus already being a deep adult. Not that it would change anything in her husband's iron-clad moral code. In addition, the Marriage Law, which the Minister of Magic announced just before her seventh year, at that time did not require them to acquire heirs or confirm the union with an intimate relationship. Rather, the not entirely out of their mind Ministry was trying to protect Muggle-borns in this way. Hermione had her own thoughts on the matter. And now, more clearly than ever, she would like three years ago to grab her husband in an armful and shamefully run away with him from the country.
When she shared her thoughts with the portrait of Severus, he looked at her in such a way that she wanted the ground to open up and swallow her entirely.
"I don't care what you think of me! You would have been alive, damn you, Severus! And everyone else would have been alive! My parents would have been alive, and Ron would be fine! Harry and I wouldn't be playing heroes, things would have been different."
"Don't shout, Miss Granger. It's not becoming of a Deputy Auror to act like this," Severus said unemotionally from the rural landscape on the wall where he'd been living since early morning.
"I didn't ask for your comments, Professor Snape, and stop calling me Granger. The Marriage Law still hasn't been repealed, if you want to know. In fact, I'm still your wife."
"Well, if you enjoy being my widow, I dare not interfere with your call of the heart."
"Severus," Hermione hissed menacingly, "I will ban you from my office and you will die of boredom over McGonagall's desk! If you've come to piss me off completely, then I'm not happy to see you."
Hermione continued to quarrel with the portrait of her husband, and in her throat constricted treacherously with the bundle of unshed tears. Irritation and annoyance rose like a hot wave in her soul. Let Severus sneer all he wanted now, let him call her "Granger" and keep saying that she didn't belong in DMLE, as long as he was there. Just like then, that night, that smelled of heather and was lit by the dim light of indifferent stars. Their only night. Before the Battle.
Hermione wanted to howl. It's been two years and she still hasn't learned to let him go. And she would give anything to get her hands on the Time Turner. But they were all destroyed during the Battle of the Ministry. If she had that damned philosopher's stone dust ball in her hands, Sirius would still be alive, her husband would still be alive, and her parents would write her letters and send postcards from Australia.
Life did not tolerate the subjunctive mood, but Hermione had long been not giving a damn about the rules and regulations. All to the Greater Good, which eventually destroyed them all. Who knows, if Dumbledore had not nurtured his heroes for slaughter, but at least once acted as the Greatest sorcerer that everyone considered him to be, perhaps everything would have ended differently. Or if her husband wasn't so stubborn...
"I came to wish you a happy birthday. Again, I am the only one who, in general, remembered this."
Hermione straightened up in her chair, suppressing the remark that congratulations from the dead was a special kind of perversion and she had no part in it. Severus understood perfectly well what she had failed to tell him. And he was terribly right, and that made it all even more unbearable. She drained her cup in one gulp, slammed it against the table, and frowned at the portrait.
Severus looked at her too closely. It always annoyed her when he looked at her like that, as if he knew much more than he preferred to say aloud. Snape and his eternal omissions. Merlin, how she missed him! She missed their misunderstanding, the eternal feeling of acute injustice, those rare evenings when they just drank herbal tea and did not think that war was breathing in their backs. She missed the strategies and plans. His potions, his mentoring tone. His voice, that, like melted dark chocolate, drove her crazy. His thin aristocratic fingers that touched her only once, on the border of despair and passion. His hoarse whisper. She missed him.
"Grager, instead of sitting here and having a self-indulgent feast, you'd better go in search of your illustrious intellect, it's still out there somewhere, in the depths of your unjustified despair, I'm sure."
"Severus, I swear by magic, I will drive you away."
"Oh, go ahead! And tell me who will wake you up from your nightmares? Crookshanks? Is it him who you're going to get yourself drunk tonight with when you finish this report and run home three hours early? Just think, the famous Grandeger does not take into account any authorities!"
"Severus, you're ridiculous as hell right now. I did not invite you to my office, and therefore I would ask you ..."
"…what did I tell you before I died? Tighten your brains and listen to me for once in your life."
Hermione clenched her fists.
"You know perfectly well that all the Time-Turners have been destroyed! What do you want from me? I don't raise people from the dead."
"My library at Spinner's End is still yours, as is Black's, and Draco won't refuse you if you ask him. It's much easier than you think, Maya."
Hermione narrowed her eyes in response. She had already heard herself called by that name, both times in moments of mortal danger: Sirius, before disappearing into the Veil, and her husband, back then, in the Shack, when she fed him with an antivenom that failed to work and begged him not to leave her. He then caught her hand, squeezing it in his bloodied fingers, and whispered: "You can change everything, Maya!"
Two years had passed, and every time before or on her birthday, Severus's portrait kept reminding her of it. One could imagine that he was simply mocking her, but Snape, whether alive or dead, did not throw words into the wind.
In the evening, as Hermione tossed logs on the fireplace and sipped wine melancholy with her cat, just as Severus had predicted, he reappeared, frozen in the frame of their wedding photo. Hermione shrugged her shoulder as if she were chasing away a pesky fly, and her fingers were already reaching out to touch the image. The illusion of warmth was so close and so unimaginably far away. He held out his hand to her, and a heather flower materialized on the mantelpiece. Well, her husband had always been an outstanding magician, capable of anything but resurrecting from the dead.
"I miss you too, wife."
"Severus, I..."
"And think again about those words of mine."
"Severus, don't go... Severus!"
"Think, Hermione."
And a sob echoed from the walls of the gloomy and lonely apartment.
She promised to think. To him, to herself, and all the fallen. Happy birthday to the brightest witch of her generation who lost the battle for happiness. Tomorrow would be another day.