Summary: He left her, and now she was alone.
A/N: It's cold outside. It's also raining. Together, this is hell.
Beta Love: Dragon and the Rose, Dutchgirl01
A Shift In Priorities
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
Mother Teresa
Hermione realised as she stepped out of the bedroom that she had taken too long.
He was gone.
All of his things—gone.
His books. His spare boots. His brewing supplies.
He'd ask to speak with her, and she'd just brushed it off.
He'd asked her again, but she had an important meeting at the Ministry.
He'd asked again the night before, and she'd said after a shower, and she'd fallen asleep without even coming out to share a dinner with him—something they'd always made time for before.
She had done this.
She had pushed him away, not because she'd had some reason to but because of her own pursual of her stupid job and her stupid obligations to a Ministry that didn't even give a shite about what happened to her.
Their plans to look at houses together—pushed aside.
Their plans to marry—delayed.
Even the time they had usually reserved for each other—she had allowed for exceptions. Work requests. Staying late at the office to finish one more task—
And now he was gone.
And now that she realised it, like some wound she didn't realise she had until she saw it, her heart sank into despair.
She had no friends.
Harry was off doing his best to breed himself a happy little Potter-Weasley family.
Ginny stopped talking to her after Hermione had insisted on paying the goblins restitution for having flown a dragon out of Gringotts.
As for Ron—
Ron was a walking cock for rent for any and all available witches.
Molly had banned her from the Burrow for causing "her poor Ronnie to have to seek out comfort for himself" after Hermione had told him no.
Arthur—
He was too henpecked by his wife to stand up for anyone or anything—least of all Hermione, as there was no real benefit to be had in defending her.
And now—
The one person who had given a shite about her was gone.
Failure, she realised, was the only thing she was good at.
She had failed her parents.
Failed to keep people alive during the war.
Failed at wards.
Failed to remain unseen.
Failed at not raising suspicion amongst the goblins.
Failed to free the house elves.
Failed at winning basic rights for werewolves.
Failed to give quality time to a relationship she'd truly valued but didn't bother to put it into words.
Didn't do anything significant to prove it—
Didn't—
Do anything but try to climb up the rungs of a Ministry that she hated.
For what?
To come home to an empty house?
Not even a house elf wanted to be around her.
And Crookshanks?
He was gone, lost in the war.
She didn't even have his warmth and purr to comfort herself with.
Her parents were dead.
Her cat was dead.
Her career might as well be dead.
Her friendships were dead.
Her relationship was dead.
She ate an entire quart of double chocolate ice cream, didn't brush her teeth, drank a dreamless sleep potion, and went back to bed.
"Well, what do you think?"
Hermione bolted awake and found herself sitting at the dinner table. There were flickering candles, a bottle of wine, and a plate of her favourite indulgence—beef wellington.
Beside it, however, was a housing catalogue turned to a page with what looked like a small cottage on the coast.
"It's really pricey, but I think—if you really like it, I could perhaps sell one of my patents, and we could fix it up, put in some additional hidden space," Severus said. "It would mean—" he trailed off. "I could really use your help with the potions business. We could work together instead of you slaving away at the Ministry every day at some thankless job. We'd be close to the ocean. You could go furry and bash things with rocks to your heart's content."
Hermione stared at him with wide eyes, her mouth working but no sound escaping.
Severus frowned. "I can keep looking, if you have your heart set on staying at the Min—"
"I love you!" Hermione suddenly blurted.
Severus startled. He grimaced in confusion, taking her hand. "I love you too, but—I want our first home to be something special. If you really don't—"
"It's perfect!" Hermione said, swallowing hard.
"Your heart is beating like a wild hare running across the moors," Severus said, frowning slightly. "Did I say something that upset you?"
"No, I just—" Hermione broke into a sob, and Severus promptly came unglued, standing to gather his witch up in his arms and hold her close.
"Hermione—what have I done to upset you?"
"Nothing!" Hermione sobbed. "Nothing! You're perfect. You're so wonderful. I—" She sniffled into his buttons. "I just had this horrible vision of you leaving me because I was too wrapped up in my career. My miserable, thankless, stupid Ministry job. I just pushed you away and— and—you'd finally had enough and left me alone."
Severus held her close. "Whatever brought all this on?" he asked, gently kissing her temple. "I highly doubt I'm perfect at anything. My track record is pretty much a constant downward spiral into Tartarus."
Hermione shook her head. "You're everything I want. Everything that matters to me. I just—needed to be reminded, I think. That you truly are—everything I want. Damn everything else."
"Well, that is going to make my housewarming gift to you if you said yes to it a little awkward," Severus said.
Curiosity, the bane of every single cell in Hermione's body, reared its thrice-damned head.
Severus smirked and pulled out a box from his robes and tapped it with his wand. It enlarged—and squeaked.
Hermione tapped the lid of the box with her fingertip, curious but wary. She'd been the unlucky recipient of far too many Weasley-made boxes that squeaked and then blew up in some way.
She gently lifted the lid and was immediately pounced into the floor by a warm, wriggly gryphon kit.
The kit chirrrrrrrrrred loudly and snuggled into her neck, kneading her chest and enthusiastically rubbing its beak into her chin. There was deep resonating thrum and a heated surge of magic, and the kit gained Hermione's curls in a mane around its neck only in Severus' deep black colour.
"Wherever did you get him?"
The kit was already snoring on top of her chest, oblivious to the fact she was on her back on the floor and not anywhere remotely comfortable.
"I saved Weasley's life from this angry miscreant's sharp beak—well, his bollocks, which apparently is the equivalent to the tosser's life—" Severus shook his head. "He apparently tried to capture one from a nest to give to his paramour as a token of his eternal stupidity. Or love. Seems much the same from where I'm standing. The parents came looking for their kit and tried to eat the Weasel, which I'd've normally quite enjoyed, but I didn't want the poor creatures to die of indigestion. I convinced the parents to make Weasley swear on his magic to never go near a gryphon again, and he did, and he was magically teleported to Devon Island, Canada—where as I understand it, nothing really wants to live there or at least no species of gryphon lives there, making an ideal place for him."
Hermione eyed the snoring gryphon kit and eyed Severus somewhat suspiciously. "And you ended up with Gleoite precisely how?"
She frowned slightly as she realised she had no idea how on earth she knew his name.
"He told his mum that I smelled like someone he wanted to get to know, and he wanted to find her," Severus said. "He seemed to think I smelled okay but not as good as your scent, which was still on my robes."
"His mum said she would allow it, but—if he found out you were not quite what he was expecting, I was to promise to bring him back to her unharmed or she would come visit and rip my gonads to pieces with her beak and claws."
"So—now what happens?"
"That's where the house comes in—" Severus grimaced.
"Severus?"
"If the kit decides we are acceptable, the whole family wants to move into our back garden."
Hermione thumped her head back onto the floor. "Oh. Alrighty then."
Severus flipped the page on the book he was reading in their back garden as a squeaky otter bounced by, a crab wriggling in her mouth and Gleoite bounding along behind her grasping a disgruntled black moggie in his beak.
Moggies, of course, had no sense of self-preservation around gryphons, and the cheeky little gryphon kit naturally used this to his advantage when seeking out his practice prey.
Gleoite's sire and mam built a home in their back garden, as promised, and the huge construct was easily as big as the cottage's outside. The parents flew back and forth from the nest to feed their kits, but sometimes Gleoite's mam would have to come and extricate her other kits from Hermione's resting spot.
No spot was quite as seductive to them as where Hermione was. Their brother thought so, so they thought so too.
The garden was, much to their happiness, quite expansivè, and the area around the seaside cottage in Melfort by Oban was all lush green woodland with plentiful grass, trees and flowers. The little white cottage with its drab grey roof seemed almost too ordinary when compared to the spectacular view of the picturesque loch, yet they both thought the place was utterly perfect. They decorated the main part of the house to look like a cosy setup for two, an old wood-burning stove, mud room, and typical cottage fare.
However, when one passed through the hidden bookcase passageway, they would find an expanded magical space with a vast library, a state-of-the-art potions lab, a storage and packing area for their orders, and an owlery, and the expanded living space gave them all the creature comforts they could ever ask for.
It had taken most of a year for them to complete all of the renovations and magical enchantments in between filling and shipping orders, but it had proven well worth it in the end.
The gryphons, too, seemed to pay as much attention to building themselves the perfect nest as Severus and Hermione had in expanding and decorating their cottage.
Gleoite and his siblings were finally getting old enough to fledge, but their favourite pastime was still chasing the squeaky otter around the property on all fours rather than flying.
Severus and Hermione had decided together to expand the doorways to accommodate for the larger gryphon size lest they lose a wall and have to repair it on a daily basis.
As a squeaky otter leapt up onto his lap and curled up to nap, Gleoite and his siblings decided to snuggle against his legs, and Severus had to confess that the feeling of utter contentment he had found with Hermione was a balm to his war-weary soul. It made so much of the bitterness he'd always had seemed like too much effort to hold on to, so he didn't bother anymore.
He closed his eyes, enjoying the sun as he caught a bit of a salty scent in the afternoon breeze, and he smiled. He lay his hand over Ottermione's warm body and stroked her back gently, savouring the feel of her smooth fur between his fingers.
There had been a time when he'd worried that Hermione would choose to have a home closer to the Ministry and continue to chase her aspirations in climbing the rungs of politics in search of something greater. As it turned out, his meticulous research in finding the perfect coastal cottage that would serve them well as both a place of business and a home, was more key to finding this virtual paradise than he'd originally thought.
Ottermione shoved her nose into his hand, letting him know that he'd stopped petting, and he chuckled, stroking his wife's furry backside with a smile on his face.
Life was finally something well worth living, and he intended to live it to the best of his ability as long as she was there at his side.
Squeak!