Summary: There will be 31 days of mayhem, but I'm not sure there will be 31 actual stories. That would require more brain than Corvus has.

Beta Love: Dragon and the Cold Water Bottle Torture, Dutchgirl01 the Busiest Bee that Ever Buzzed, Commander Shepard the Winter Soldier

A/N: Each story will be a separate chapter to feed my laziness and desire not to post that many new stories for the same event.

To Live

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."

Dolly Parton

Prompt: "How dangerous," he thought, "to finally have something worth losing."

Prompt 2: She crawled under my skin and carved her name into my heart with sensibly manicured nails. I am a marked man.

It came after the war.

Silent.

Insidious.

Routine even.

She came back from visiting her parents just like she always did, but she had a heaviness about her that chased the smile from her normally beaming expression.

"What's wrong?" I said, knowing that she carried something significant within her.

"It's cancer," she said. Her face was strong, but I could feel the anguish burning within her.

Her mother had had it. One of her father's relatives had it as well.

Magicals didn't believe in cancer. They firmly believed there was a potion for everything. Even when there wasn't.

Hermione was not one of those people. She knew the magical world didn't have a cure anymore than the Muggle world did. There was only surgery, treatment, and the hope that remission outlived their life.

I clasped her to my body, my arms trying to hide the tremble of my emotion.

How strange, I thought, to finally have something I never wanted to lose. To have something worth living for. Before, many had wanted me to die for a cause, but now, holding her against me, I finally had something I did not want to lose.

She had crawled under my skin and carved her name into my heart with sensibly manicured nails. I was a marked man.

I hadn't intended to fall in love with her.

I had intended to push her away. To encourage her to marry someone younger—to live a long, full life with—anyone else.

But I was as selfish as I was anything else, and I wanted her—at my side and in my life.

"They want to do a bone scan," she whispered against my chest. "To check for structural change—to see if it spread to my bones."

I rubbed her back.

"Will you—come with me?"

"Of course," I answered. I would cross fire and damnation to stay at her side but one more day.

She snuggled into my chest. "Thank you."

We knew what the scan would say. She'd been in so much pain after the war. It was easy to say it from that—echoes of the war's great destructive tortures—

I sat with her as the man injected the radioactive tracer into her vein, and she maintained that same brave expression. We waited together as the tracer fused to her bones so the nuclear imaging device could tell us what we already suspected.

She remained so still under that machine on that tiny, thin table as the imaging pads spun around her.

I held her against me that night, whispering to her that she didn't have to be so strong all the time. If she needed a safe place to lose her mind, I would hold her.

The smile she gave me was like the brightness of day. "I love you," she said. "So very much."

I cradled her head between my palms. "And I you. Always."

The bone scan surprised us. There was no sign of cancer in her bones. It was, unknownst to the Muggles, the echoes of Bella's Cruciatus.

But, she still had to have surgery.

They had to take out the mass and have it typed, cross-matched, or whatever it was that doctors did to determine the DNA of a tumour. I'll admit that as the doctor was yammering on, my brain was thinking only of Hermione and her hand so tightly squeezing my thumb like it was an anchor.

"Will you still like me if I have a flat chest?" she whispered as her hand curled against my chest. Her voice was so soft and vulnerable.

"Don't be ridiculous," I snapped. "I wouldn't care if you were flat, lopsided, oblong, triple-breasted, or secretly a werewolf."

"Then I'd have six breasts or more," Hermione said with a chuckle.

"Bring it on," I said into her hair, and she chuckled harder against my skin.

The surgery was a week later, and I swear she didn't have a lick of bacteria on her after all the Hibiclens she'd had to use for three days before it. The stuff was unnervingly orange, and it made me think WARNING and DANGER despite knowing better. It had that semi-chemical smell about it, and she joked that at least she could still smell it was horrible.

I stayed at her side until she went under and they had to roll her away. When she was out of PACU, I held her hand and waited as the medicine that had put her under worked its way out.

"I changed my mind," she said. "Just lop them both off. This hurts like hell. I never want to go through this again."

I squeezed her hand. "You'll get through this. You managed to survive a war and not kill Weasley. This is nothing by comparison."

She laughed and gave me a smile.

I'd take that small victory.

When she healed enough, they treated her with radiation. It made her nauseated and that wonderfully wild bushy hair of hers quickly disappeared. She'd cut it so she didn't have to experience the grief over a long period. She wore a dark purple silk scarf over her head that matched my cravat.

I brewed her nutrient potions for the healing and to help with the nausea, and she took them without complaint. Even though I knew they tasted like the arse end of a camel.

I vowed to make them taste better after seeing her expression. I may take them when they tasted like camel rump, but that didn't mean I wanted her to suffer it.

And then, the results came.

She was in remission.

She burst into tears and sobbed into my arms that night—finally letting go of all that strength she had soldiered with for so many months.

We were married a month later in a small ceremony with her parents in attendance. Her father said that anyone who would stay by his daughter's side during the hardest moments of her life had his blessing to marry his daughter.

She had wanted a small affair—nothing too crazy. She'd had more than enough crazy.

And the night we slept in the same bed we'd always slept in, bands on our fingers where they had once been naked—our Oaths to each other set in our magic and our soul—I felt the curse on me break at last.

I was no longer trapped in this sack of human meat and bones. I was no longer tethered to two masters and a long dead woman—

No, I was tethered to Hermione Snape—the love of my exceedingly dreary life before her.

"Stay with me," I whispered into her ear, feeling my reborn fangs extend against her warm skin. "Forever." My body was already changing. My tail burst from my suffering pants as a hand through rice paper. My wings unfolded from my back as my skin turned to what mortals might consider stone if it wasn't fluid and able to move. My ears picked up everything down to the beat of her heart against mine.

She looked at me with wonder, her hands cupping my monstrous face with a calm smile. "You're a gargoyle."

Could I even trust words?

"Yes," I managed.

Her fingertip touched my lips as she leaned in to place a kiss there. "I meant my marriage vows," she said. "I am yours. For as much time as we have, for as long as you wish it."

"Would always be okay?" I whispered. Gargoyles lived a very, very long time.

"Always would be perfect," she whispered into my mouth, and I felt that strum of the perfect chord in my soul.

My teeth sharpened—eager to do the task only the sharpest of teeth could do—as the liquid cement-like fluid dripped from each point. "I love you," I promised into her skin. "Forever."

My fangs met her neck as the special cocktail of my species flowed into her blood. Her body trembled, shook.

She clung to me—

But I knew she would survive it.

She had survived too much to let a little mutagenic catalyst ruin her now. This change would be the only one that mattered. This was my gift to her—the gift I was finally able to give her. The gift of wings and strength. The gift of equality. The gift of my heart and soul.

This mutagen would only come once in a gargoyle's life—to ensure their mate was strong and fierce—and that we could not be stolen from each other. If they were already a gargoyle, it would be a formality—but in the case the mate wasn't—it would ensure they would be. But it couldn't be forced. It could not be bartered—

She had to truly love me in return and want to be with me.

My mate.

Her body stilled, her skin turning pale like stone.

I touched her cheek, a glowing stream of tears escaping my eyes.

Please.

You can survive this.

You're a fighter.

I need you.

I love you.

It wasn't like I'd ever had to Turn a mate.

Did I do it wrong?

Was instinct—wrong?

Panic settled in my liver and it spread to my stomach.

Cracks formed in the stone—

And Hermione yawned and stretched as shards of stone flecked off her new stone skin—smooth and shiny. Her skin was the colour of hawk's eye and pietersite, stippling with golden browns and sienna and bands of shiny hematite. Her wings unfolded from her back with a flop as her tail unfurled from her rump and curled around mine.

I pressed my forehead to hers. "Hermione."

"I love you," she purred.

I gathered her into my arms and wings, crushing her to me as if to merge us into one being.

Our life together could finally begin—with no secrets. No inequality. No curses. No looming cloud of ill health.

"I love you, too," I said as I instigated one of many kisses that would consume her this day, night, and following lifetime. "Always."