Chapter Text
2052
She wasn’t sure exactly when it had started, but these days she always woke up facing outwards towards the window, almost as if there was nothing between her supine body and the bedroom door that could hold her interest any more.
And there wasn’t, was there? Not really. It had been a long time since she had been awakened by his stubbled face tracing kisses across the back of her neck. The exhalations from his large nose that sent puffs of warm air down the back of her nightie, tickling along her spine and making her shiver with desire. In the early morning light, her body would instinctually turn towards his indistinct outline like a sunflower towards the sun.
There were no more small children peeking through the gap in the door, no loud whispers from the landing or ridiculously heavy-footed tiptoeing before a small body climbed onto the bed, pressing a bony knee onto one’s full bladder or breast or belly. He’d always grumbled that hugging Heloïse was like clutching a pillowcase full of elbows to his chest. But that was just him and his habitual need to growl. With his children he’d always been all bark and no bite. Heloïse, his first and favourite, was a cookie cutter replica of her father, albeit a mite smaller. Like him, she’d been an awkwardly gawky and pointy teen, before she’d grown into the tall Picassoesque jumble of sharp angles that graced the Prince side of the family.
Their younger daughter, the more solid and rounder Aelith, always chose to crawl on top of her mother, lying on her belly like Woodstock on Snoopy, Her snarled tangles of unbrushed curls would tumble into her mother’s laughing mouth. Then after clamboring over duvet-covered limbs, their soft sweet baby, Leo, would settle himself under the covers, squeezing between his parents, head on his mother’s shoulder, little stumpy legs draped over his father’s waist. They’d lay there in a warm cosy heap until someone’s stomach growled, or Aelith would force out a fart and say, “Oh, I do beg your pardon,” in her best Lady Bracknell voice, before scurrying away to the lav.
Even the pets didn’t come upstairs much anymore. Her mother-in-law slept downstairs in what had been Severus’ study. The cats spent their time in the far cosier room where there was always a knubby crocheted throw to sit on, a crackling fire in the grate and a restless crabbed hand nearby to stroke a butting head. Even her own dog lingered treacherously at the foot of Eileen’s bed, a small furry shark, ever watchful for the plentiful crumbs from the desert-dry Garibaldi biscuits her almost toothless mother-in-law was inexplicably fond of.
She rolls over and sighs. The bedding doesn’t even smell like him any more. It hasn’t for years. Any lingering scent was washed out ages ago, replaced by the sweet almond smell of the laundry detergent. His side of the bed has become a sort of hypoallergenic no-man’s land into which she never strays. Even on the hottest of summer nights, she chooses to dangle her foot over her edge of the bed, seeking the breeze from the open window, never venturing onto the cool, devastatingly empty sheet of his side.
The wall unit chirrups its first morning alarm to remind her to let the animals out. The second alarm will sound soon for her pills, and the third, fourth and fifth to get Eileen to take her numerous vitamins and medications…. Aelith had the Home Aid system installed after Eileen’s first fall, ten years ago now. She’d been on yet another magical detox at the time and had wanted her mother to be less reliant on magic, which she believed to be both physically and emotionally draining to a person’s qi, and to trust more in Muggle technologies.
With another sigh, she waves her hand before the wall unit to dismiss the alarm, then heaves her legs over the edge of the bed, feet feeling blindly around for her slippers. Like most mornings, one slipper is exactly where she’d left it the night before, neatly facing the window on the little bedside mat. And like most mornings, she has to fumble wildly under the bed for the other, pulling it out and discarding the dust bunny sticking to it with another sigh.
“Erm… I’d like a complete vacuum upstairs this afternoon. Erm, please?” she asks the wall unit, polite to a fault, even to AI.
“Request acknowledged: Upstairs vacuum. After 12,” replies the wall unit in its disjointed singsong automated voice. Hermione hates the unit’s jarring cadence. Magic at least, she thinks sniffily, would have been able to mimic a real voice.
She stands slowly and stretches, trying to work the kinks from her shoulders and spine. Unable to go to sleep with ease these days, she keeps falling asleep while reading, propped too high on her pillows and it’s wreaking havoc on her neck. There is, after all, no one to pluck the book from her sleepy hands anymore, turn out the light and softly gather her tired body into position as the little spoon. No more whispered reprimands telling her that she really must sleep…. With a twitch of her hand, she summons her dressing gown and pulls on the old ratty robe, belting it securely around her waist as she steels herself for the day ahead. Yanking open the heavy velvet curtains, she earns herself a sharp zing of pain in her right shoulder, which she massages as she looks into the garden below.
She sees her dog Sid snuffling a path through the dew soaked grass as he closes in on the ideal spot for his morning wee, and both cats sit on the patio table licking at their damp paws. Another deep sigh escapes her, making her nostrils whistle. Despite repeatedly being asked not to, the frail 122 year-old Eileen has evidently struggled to the kitchen to open the door for the animals. Unconsciously mirroring one of her husband’s quirks, she pinches the bridge of her nose along with his patented huff of eternal suffering. Her mother-in-law is a lot. Heloïse is due for tea later, so she’ll get her to speak to her. Maybe it’s her height and physical similarity to Severus, as well as the authority given off by her swishy black barristers gown, but she is the only one Eileen ever listens to.
A wild shriek from the ground floor makes her hurry to the stairs, her right hip complaining with each step. In her discomfort she makes a mental note to try sleeping on her left side tonight, facing towards the door and Severus’ empty pillow, but she knows she won’t. Hobbling as quickly as she can to the kitchen, she finds a hysterical Eileen collapsed on a chair, clutching vaguely at her heart while flicking a tea towel ineffectually at one of the cats. The feline has a furiously chuntering gnome in his jaws.
“Biggles,” commands Hermione. “Drop!”
Severus had taken enormous pleasure in bestowing downright idiotic names on all of their pets, mainly drawing from the television shows, comics and books of his youth. It amused no end him to hear the children bellowing “Bridgadier Lethbridge-Stewart” at the top of their voices in the park, making other walkers believe they’d somehow misplaced a dotty old relative rather than simply recalling an errant mongrel, prone to eating conkers and other dogs’ shit.
Over the years, he’d gleefully given the children’s guinea pigs names such as Hawkeye or Hotlips Houlihan. One birthday he’d given Hermione a timid shivery dachshund puppy called Rowdy, and his own rather portly owl he’d dubbed Billy Bunter. Hermione had fondly indulged her husband. The silliness that had been so absent from his own miserable past he attempted to create with his own children. Leo, still young when Severus died, had devoured his father’s entire childhood library. Determined to continue his father’s frivolous legacy, Leo had named Hermione’s current dorgi, Sid after Sid James, he of the filthy laugh from the Carry On films.
Back in the kitchen, Biggles does not drop the distressed gnome. If anything, in a silent fuck you to Hermione and humans in general, Biggles clenches his jaw a little more firmly, making the gnome squeal. Ignoring Eileen’s furiously fanning hand and breathless yelps, Hermione drops to one knee and grabs the stubborn cat by its scruff. She shakes Biggles, admittedly a little harder than necessary, and tells him to drop the creature once again. Biggles opens his mouth resignedly and the small gnome drops to the floor, covered in drool and bleeding from four small puncture wounds on its sides. Recovering itself rapidly, it darts through the open kitchen door and into the garden beyond with a “skreeeep” of terror-tinged relief.
“I’ve asked you not to get out of bed without someone being there,” reprimands Hermione, struggling to her feet. “Why won’t you use your walker?”
She crosses to the Belfast sink to get her mother-in-law a glass of water. Looking upwards to implore a God she doesn’t believe in, she notices dusty cobwebs decorating the upper shelves and dark beams of the kitchen ceiling. She’d best add those to the Home Aid unit’s cleaning schedule, before the eagle-eyed Eileen spots them. Her vagueness and mild senility do not extend to subjects where she can get an edge on Hermione. The colourful vintage plates her and Severus had collected on their family holidays in France, then displayed on the sage green walls, had been bizarrely dismissed as looking “quite, erm, Dutch.” She braces herself for what she knows is coming: some pitiful passive aggressive monologue about not wanting to be a bother and not knowing when Hermione is going to emerge, as if she is a slothful teenager, rather than a woman in her seventies whose bladder rarely allows her to get up any later than 7am.
“I didn’t know when you were going to get up, did I? I’ve been awake since 5 and the cats were meowling and poor Sidney got restless… Well, I’ll know not to bother next time. I just wanted to help, but it seems I am, as ever, an encumbrance…." Eileen dashes at her eyes with the tea towel she still has clutched in her hand.
Hermione turns to flick the kettle on with unnecessary aggression and grits her teeth. Eileen always calls Sid “Sidney” despite that not being his name. It irritates Hermione beyond belief. Leo always says to not let it get to her, but it does. Eileen just rubs her the wrong way. And on mornings like this, it usually doesn’t take her long to build up a head of steam and mention Severus. Hermione feels that if she does, she might actually lose it. She slams the kitschy King William V coronation tea caddy onto the kitchen surface with a little more force than necessary, jostling the two waiting mugs loudly. Unfortunately Eileen doesn’t take the hint.
“My darling boy should have just left me where I was. He didn’t have to burden himself, or you, with his poor old mother. I’d have been fine on my own, back in…” Eileen pauses for a second to burp out a dramatic hiccough, “Glossop.” For good measure, Eileen lets out another shaky sigh and dabs at her eyes again with a loud sniff.
“Don’t be silly, Eileen. We both wanted to have you here. You were such a help with the children, too,” says Hermione, untruthfully. In reality, Eileen had always been somewhat of a spectre at the feast. A tall, dark Dementor-like figure hovering in the background, silently judging and sucking the joy from those last few years with Severus. Had Hermione known then that his time was running out, she would have selfishly left Eileen to rot in her little Glossop bedsit. But Severus had suspected, and wanting to make amends towards his mother before it was too late, had set about showing her that he had known happiness, had been loved and respected, and had known how to be an absolutely reproachless father.
And he had been an amazing father. Adamant that he would never be anything like his sperm donor, he had found something positive to say about even the crudest fingerpainting or misspelt word. “Most of the letters are there,” he’d say reassuringly, “and that’s a perfectly laudable first step,” hugging a beloved child to his side. He’d been strict but fair and endlessly encouraging. When Aelith went completely Muggle after leaving Hogwarts, Hermione had fretted about what she dubbed her “magical Rumspringa”, but Severus had just waved his hands and shushed her. He’d known from his own experiences that rash decisions made at 17 weren’t the be all and end all. And he’d been right, Aelith had found a happy medium between both worlds and became an educational therapist mainly working with children with special needs. She had also become a fierce advocate for squib children and had successfully lobbied the Ministry into outlawing the term as being inflammatory and derogatory, and to have the condition renamed as dysgoeteia.
“Porridge or eggs?” she asks Eileen, almost able to mouth word for word her mother-in-law’s following response, criticising the regularity of both eggs and porridge.
“Whichever you’d like to make dear,” says Eileen, falsely offering the decision to Hermione before whisking it away with her next words, “although we have been having a lot of eggs lately.”
“So, porridge then?” asks Hermione, reaching up to unhook a small pan from the rack dangling above the stove.
“Not sure I fancy porridge either,” says Eileen with a little put-upon sigh. “We do have that a lot too…. Is there any bacon? Tobias used to make us delicious bacon sandwiches with lashings of brown sauce….”
Eileen’s eyes flutter closed at the memory of the one time her dear departed Tobias had a one-off personality glitch and knocked up a solitary bacon sandwich, before turning into a complete arsehole who’d terrorised his wife and son. She’d completely rewritten the past and often described her dead husband as a paragon of virtue who’d tried so valiantly to keep his family afloat throughout the bad times, conveniently blocking out the cold, the fear, the hunger, the bruises and the angry beery spittle spattering her face. Severus had just allowed Eileen to get on with it, but Hermione often felt as if her barely contained rage might bubble over when listening to her mother-in-law’s fiction. The children had all learned to switch off when Eileen waxed lyrical on their father’s childhood; however, Hermione had always been too fiercely protective of her husband and couldn’t bear the idea of him not getting all of the justice he deserved, even in death.
“Righto,” replies Hermione, as she crosses to the fridge, all the while knowing that any sandwich she makes will lack the magical quality - tsk tsk, not magical, she reprimands herself - the mythical quality of Tobias’ one-time offering. Besides, Eileen’s remaining teeth aren’t up to a normal bacon sandwich, she’d have to chop the meat into little pieces and soften the bread somehow. Hermione would also be unfairly blamed for today’s low salt, low sugar version of the sauce not being “quite the same since it was being made by those Poles,” and “did Severus ever tell you that his dad worked for Daddies back in the fifties?” Yes, he had indeed. Tobias had lasted a record seven months before drunkenly punching his foreman during a staff outing to the football.
Breakfast duly eaten, criticism duly received, Hermione guides Eileen back to her room despite her weak protestations. “I’d help with the dishes but I just need a bit of a nap, dear. I have been awake since five after all.”
“That’s alright, Eileen. I’m just going to set a charm anyway.” Hermione realises that she is starting to sound a little bit like the Home Aid unit with her toneless automatic responses.
She returns to the kitchen and with a wave of her wand sets the pans and dishes to scrub. Even after all these years, especially in her long dressing gown, she still feels a bit like Merlin in The Sword in the Stone, magicking Arthur’s dishes into their washing routine. Rather than interact further with the wall unit, she waves her wand at the cobwebs and banishes them. “Rubbity scrubbity sweepity…”
She doesn’t really resent Severus’ decision to invite his mother into their life. She knows how important it was to him and respects that. She just resents Eileen’s Eileenness and wishes that she was less of a bitch. Then she wishes she were less of a bitch too for thinking that. Sure, she knows that the old woman hasn't had it easy, but above all Hermione values honesty, and Eileen persists in living in a rosy tinted altered reality.
While the older woman snoozes fitfully in her stifling room, Hermione dresses and goes into the garden with Sid. She’s been meaning to tidy the plants before winter anyway. She cuts some late blooming zephirine drouhin for the kitchen. A nice splash of colour for when Heloïse comes after work. The deep pink will look nice against the green of the walls and the flashes of colours from the ‘quite, erm, Dutch’ plates. She is looking forward to it. She enjoys seeing Severus in their elder daughter’s face. It somehow helps anchor his memory – otherwise it sometimes feels like it’s all slipping away. The ache of loneliness and duty often leaves her feeling hollow and makes her afraid of the 50-60 years she might have left. At 73, she’s known him for over half her life, but time passes by and there will come a day when he will have been gone for longer.
Tears rush suddenly to her eyes and she wipes away the snot that immediately starts leaking from her cold nose with the cuff of her glove, then rubs the smear onto the thigh of her patched gardening jeans. Even after 20 years, and despite the strength of the carefully constructed walls of self preservation she has erected around her, on occasion the sorrow of missing him smashes through her resolve like a wrecking ball. She muffles her animalistic shout of desolation with the back of her hand and backs onto the slightly damp wooden bench. Sid immediately hops up and nudges at her hand and attempts to lick her snot and tears away. Hermione clutches his silky tan body to her chest and rubs her face over his soft fur as she rocks back and forth and gulps back sobs. Silly silly woman, she chides herself, you’re too old for this.
After the war, she’d not really thought of her professor at all, apart from feeling pleased knowing that he had survived. She had taken her NEWTS by correspondence and had thrown herself back into Muggle life, mending her relationship with her parents and attending university. She’d studied History and French, writting her doctoral thesis on the history of magical persecution. During tea with Professor McGonagall one day, she had bemoaned the dearth of primary documentation on her thesis subject, despite unlimited access to the well-stocked Hogwarts library and the school’s meticulously kept archives. She had needed more details on the concept of veneficium, and given veneficium’s dual meaning of poisoning and causing harm by magic, Minerva had then suggested she write to an expert in both Dark curses and Potions, namely Severus.
After much deliberation, she had eventually penned the letter. When, unexpectedly, a reply did arrive she had unfurled the scroll gingerly, anticipating a scathing rejection. She had been surprised to read a perfectly courteous missive in which he gave her a number of avenues to research, as well as an invitation to peruse his library for any materials she might find useful. She had visited his home twice, and while he had been respectful and reserved, he had been astonishingly insightful and had loaned her a number of precious tomes, which had speeded her analysis along. Hermione had been glad to see how well he looked, now that he no longer held the weight of the wizarding world on his shoulders and was free to do as he wished. A year later, when a small academic publishing house issued a limited print run of her thesis, she had added his initials to the small dedication and had sent him a copy.
Feeling a little calmer, she presses her lips to the top of Sid’s head and lets out a long shuddering exhale. He is such a comfort to her in moments like this and Severus would have loved him. He really seems to listen when she speaks, his slightly crossed eyes boring into hers and his head tilting back and forth making his large pointed ears flap. When all the children had left for Hogwarts, she’d often come home from work to find Severus chatting to the watchful pets as he worked in his lab or preparing their evening meal in the kitchen, his expressive hands moving as he extolled the virtues of using a serrated knife on tomatoes or a copper/goblin steel alloy on wormwood. She would throw her arms around his waist and press her face to his back and implore him to carry on. She could have stayed that way forever, encircling his spare frame and breathing him in as he lectured his animal audience and meticulously zested lemons and chopped garlic.
Plopping Sid onto the mossy brick pathway, she gets to her feet and grabs the roses she’s dropped. She decides to collect some windfalls from the tiny orchard to make an apple cake for Heloïse’s tea. She finds Biggles in the orchard sitting before a small hole in the ground like a malevolent loaf of bread. She suspects the hole is where the injured gnome lives and shoos the cat away. She decides to prop some small twigs around the hole to give the poor creature some cover for the next time it dares to venture out.
She carries the apples and roses back to the kitchen in the front of her jumper and dumps them out into a bowl. The zephirine drouhin she arranges in an Art Deco Saint Clément goose vase she is sure Eileen will turn her nose up at.
After prepping the apples for the cake, squeezing a little lemon juice over the chunks and adding some brown sugar and cinnamon, she peels some potatoes and slices leeks and starts making soup for lunch. She could use magic, but the days are long enough already without cutting short her daily chores. More downtime means more time to wallow in sadness and she’s already had her cry for the day.
She still works part-time at the University of Durham. She does a little lecturing and only supervises a couple of PhD students each year that leaves her ample time to take care of Eileen. On the days she does have to go into the office, Leo comes over to watch his grandmother. Leo is an artist who makes his living painting enchanted oils of witches and wizards. His renditions of haughty sneering Purebloods grace some of the greatest private collections in the magical world. The remainder of the time he spends designing bespoke jewellery, both magical and muggle, that he sells in Diagon Alley and in a small independent jewellers in Clerkenwell. This allows him to work from home as he is essentially a stay-at-home dad. His wife Yasna, an Iranian political refugee and former colleague of Heloïse’s is a human rights lawyer who works all hours. Leo is the least Snape-looking of all the children, his hair is a curly dark blonde and he has his mother’s hazel eyes, but their children have Yasna’s colouring, and their black olive eyes remind Hermione of the grandfather they’ll never meet. When she tries to show the grandchildren photos, their lack of curiosity in Severus pains her. To the grandchildren he is an abstract, shadowy figure, much like Yasna’s abandoned family back in Mashhad.
She wonders if he’d want to come to tea this afternoon too. He could bring the grandchildren after school. Eileen has a particular fondness for children’s television and, bracketed by Esther and Farzan, can watch endless episodes of Noggin the Nog and The Clangers that she remembers from Severus’ childhood. Her great grandchildren enjoy watching the rudimentary animations with her and pester their Nana endlessly about the ‘olden times days’, squealing in disbelief when she talks about her tech-free childhood.
Hermione dictates a message to Leo and sends it via the Home Aid unit.
Checking that the chunks of potato in the soup are soft enough for Eileen, she sets spoons, bowls and a plate of buttered bread on the table, placing Eileen’s lunchtime pills beside her place setting. Sid in tow, she goes down the hall to knock softly at Eileen’s half open door. For someone who professes to never sleep, she sure snores loudly. Eileen jerks awake with a snort and protests that she was just resting her eyes. Hermione helps Eileen to her walker then walks slowly behind her to the kitchen with all the momentum of a chief mourner in a funeral procession. All the while, she silently pleads for her mother-in-law to pick up the fucking pace.
At the end of the meal, Eileen pats Hermione’s hand and thanks her.
“You’re too good to me, dear,” she says earnestly, and Hermione feels like a piece of shit.
However she feels slightly better again when Eileen leaves the room at a snail’s pace saying “such pretty flowers, Hermione, but Merlin, such an ugly jug…”
After the cake has been made and is cooling on a rack in the kitchen, Hermione grabs Sid and goes upstairs for a rest. She pulls the curtains and Sid nestles against her body in the crook of her bent knees. She starts going over one of her student’s proposals in her mind, mentally considering the plausibility of her theory. The student, Carole, a divorced empty-nester in her 50s, has returned to her studies after years of being a mother and a housewife. Despite fighting in a war and having more than likely actually killed people, Hermione finds Carole inspiring, and is impressed that the woman is brave enough to start over at her age.
About five years after Severus’ death, and the children had all moved out leaving Eileen and Hermione alone, Aelith had organised a sort of family summit, inviting Harry, Gin and their kids over for Sunday lunch. As Hermione had collected the trifle bowls at the end of the meal, Aelith had caught her siblings’ eyes then cleared her throat. Holding her mother’s hand, she told her that it was time for her to move on, that she still had time to find someone else and how it was “what dad would have wanted.”
“She’s not wrong, Auntie Hermione,” James had said slowly as if she were a 5 year old. “You might have another century in you. It’s a long time to be alone. I doubt Uncle Severus would have wanted that.”
Eileen had made everyone around the table jump out of their skin with her sudden screech of derisory laughter.
“Gods! None of you knew him at all! Aelith, you silly child, your father never would have wanted her to ‘move on’. He hoarded your mother the way a dragon hoards gold. He’d never want anyone else to have her.”
At the time Hermione had looked at their upset faces and had been surprised by Eileen’s outburst, but deep down she knew it to be the truth. He had always placed his hand on her thigh when he drove, encircled her in his long arms as she stood at the stove, reached for her in the night and pulled her against his lean body as he slept between her and the door, ever loving, ever protective. Her and the children had been his everything. From the moment they had first come together to his last breath, a slow wet rattle that had dampened the crook of her neck, he had made her the centre of his orbit. She could never want anyone else, and was sure that the synchronicity and complicity she and Severus had as a couple had been unique to them. She really wasn’t willing to settle for anything less. She’d never be brave enough to do what Carole has done and make such a drastic departure when it was all she could do to just maintain the status quo.
Her eyes start leaking again and she quickly falls asleep, sniffling pathetically and feeling rather sorry for herself.