Chapter Text
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters, just having a play.
For everyone waiting for me to update my other WIP, I'm not giving up on it! Just been busy (and stressed) so my muse hasn't been kind.
All opinions in this fic are those of the characters (Severus I'm looking at you!) and are appropriate to the context of the storyline (and Severus being Severus) rather than a reflection on my own thoughts and beliefs.
It all started not long after she realised she was pregnant. The vague sense of unease that had begun to bloom within her quickly developed into the knowledge that something was very wrong indeed.
Severus hadn’t believed her at first, not even when two light bulbs had blown within minutes. It was only when the appliances started to go haywire, and he’d run into their small utility room to find her covered in suds from the washing machine whose door had unlocked mid-cycle, that he conceded that it was unlikely to be mere coincidence.
Always the master of understatement.
Of course, the 18th century cottage in the Yorkshire Dales they’d moved into after their marriage around six months ago needed a lot of updating. They’d spent most of their savings on buying the place – she still wasn’t sure how they’d managed to buy it outright, not with the jobs they had – and they were reluctant to spend the rest when there was a baby on the way.
She couldn’t even remember what had led them to buy such a place so out of the way, a walk and then two buses away from the town where they both worked. Neither of them had ever bothered to drive, although her husband was currently in the process of learning, as Hermione hadn’t been thrilled with the idea of being stuck out in the middle of nowhere waiting for an ambulance if and when anything happened.
If only either of their parents had been alive. She was sure her parents would have paid for her to learn, had they not died in an accident when she was in her last year at school. Severus’ mother was a dab hand at DIY when she’d been alive, he’d told her, always managing to patch up their old house and making do with very little, and her father had enjoyed getting his hands dirty too, although he’d been able to afford to pay someone else to do it for him.
She tried not to think of her parents often. It hurt too much. She could remember her childhood well, up to the age of eleven. After that it got hazy, and the few memories of her parents she had as a teenager seemed to revolve around Christmas and the summer holidays. Even more bizarre was the image of owls that accompanied any thoughts of more recent birthdays, hers or theirs. She didn’t let her lack of memories bother her though. She vaguely remembered being told it was a natural effect of the overwhelming grief she’d felt at their deaths. She couldn’t even recall who’d told her that either.
The lack of clear memories wasn’t the real reason why she avoided mention or thought of them though. It was the guilt. She couldn’t even understand what she had to feel guilty about. Perhaps it was not being with them when they had died, or the fact she could barely remember half her life with them. Either way, the merest thought of them crushed her with remorse so intense she tried her best to evade them.
The most Hermione allowed herself was the vague regret that they couldn’t be here to share in the joy of their unborn grandchild. They’d tried so long and hard to conceive Hermione herself, and her mother had never been able to carry another child to term after her. Hermione’s maternal grandmother had had the same problem, and she’d been worried that she would have the same issue.
In the end it had taken less than six months to conceive. Severus had been as desperate as she was to have a child, and they’d spend those months shagging like rabbits. No wonder, really, when she considered they’d waited to have sec until the night of their wedding. She couldn’t remember who suggested holding off, neither was she sure why they’d agreed to wait, considering how desperate they both were by the time they consummated their new marriage. It wasn’t like she’d been a virgin either.
The strange thing was that she couldn’t remember ever finding him particularly attractive before they’d got married, not that the details of their relationship before their wedding were too clear. It didn’t matter to her though. They were married, in love, and about to have a baby.
Life was perfect.
Life was most definitely not perfect.
He hated his job. He hated working in the book shop, despite the 25% discount that they both took shameful advantage of. He hated that he’d pissed his education away, and that he wasn’t qualified for any of the sort of jobs he could imagine himself doing, such as a chemist, or a researcher.
The fact that Hermione had done the same only made it worse. He honestly couldn’t understand how someone so clearly as intelligent as she was hadn’t continued into higher education, but instead was working as a receptionist at one of the larger hotels in town.
When he’d asked her what she’d done before they had got married she’d just shrugged and told him, “Something similar, I guess.” Strange that she was now suddenly planning extra studies around her job and the upcoming prospect of having a baby. Where she’d suddenly got the drive from he wasn’t sure, but he’d been eyeing up some of the leaflets she’d got, and enrolled himself on an adult chemistry courses. It would hopefully give him the skills he needed to take some Open University chemistry courses as a possible means of finding himself better suited to his interests.
It wasn’t just his job that was the problem. Why they’d chosen to live so far away from their jobs when neither of them could drive was a mystery, one that they never managed to discuss. They’d moved in the same day as their wedding, and the state of the place had made him wonder what the two of them had been on when they’d signed the contracts.
The house itself was fairly sound, although extremely dated. Everything in it was horribly old fashioned and when he’d started redecorating he’d found more than one set of shelves or table that seemed to be held together with nothing but luck. They’d forgotten to contact the gas and electricity companies before they moved in too. It had taken a couple of days to get it sorted, given that they had no electricity and therefore no way to make a call without going down to the phone box in the nearest village.
There was an ancient rotary phone in the hall that had seen better days, but when they’d eventually set up a phone line they’d decided not to get internet. Not that either of them had had any real knowledge of how to use a computer. That was surely understandable in someone his age, but Hermione had had not a clue either. She’d had a bad time at work until she’d picked up the hang of the ‘flashy monster’ she had to use. She could only remember ever having used a couple of programmes for which her father had known the correct file pathways in MS-DOS. Neither of them had wanted a computer in the house, nor one of those fancy mobiles which you could apparently now send written messages in. Severus couldn’t see the point, not when they had a perfectly good telephone at home.
There had been plenty of other problems in the first few weeks, many of them silly little things that they’d forgotten to buy for the house, such as an electric kettle or a toilet plunger. Why they’d bought a whisk broom instead of a hoover, he wasn’t sure, although it had become a bit of a running joke that he would tease Hermione about using to fly to work on like a witch. For some reason the idea seemed to make her feel queasy, which only made him laugh harder.
It had taken a couple of months to get the house how he wanted it, but it had been so difficult in parts that he just hadn’t been able to get past his irritation and fall in love with it. It just didn’t feel like home. He didn’t like the harsh electric lights, and had bought candles to place around the house which he often used instead, unless they were reading, when they used the small table lamp which gave off a much more comforting glow.
He didn’t like the noise any of the appliances made. He wasn’t a fan of the TV either, although Hermione had insisted on buying one. She’d found a couple of series that seemed to remind her of something she’d watched when she was younger – The Worst Witch, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, both of which he couldn’t stand. The magic in either of them didn’t make any sense to him, and he’d told her so.
It might not yet feel like home, but he was hoping it would by the time the baby arrived. He just wished he could shake off the sense of wrongness – constantly feeling like he’d forgotten something. He even doubted their relationship some days. As much as he loved Hermione, and was sure to love their child - and hopefully the hordes of children they had planned, he sometimes looked at her and wondered what had ever possessed him to marry a girl like her, 18 years his junior, and as bright and kind as he was surly and irritable. She was far too good for him, he knew, but for some reason she seemed as enamoured of him as he was of her, so he wasn’t about to complain.
Every day, as he woke with her in his arms he would tell himself he was the luckiest guy in the world, and try to ignore the little voice that whispered that he was too lucky, that someday soon his luck would run out and she would see him for the worthless creature he was and leave him. She deserved better, both in her choice of husband and in the life they were building together. There was something about her – he somehow knew she should have been destined for greater things – to make a difference in some way, yet she was stuck with him in some run down cottage in the middle of nowhere. Still, she seemed happy to be there, with him, and they had both been over the moon when she’d found out she was pregnant, so he tried his best daily to hide his worries.
But then the strange occurrences had started. He’d tried to pass it off as faulty electrics, but as her pregnancy progressed towards the end of her first trimester, the incidents also began to increase, and he could no longer ignore what was happening.
He had called an electrician when Hermione had been at work, but he’d been unable to find anything wrong. It was Sod’s Law that of course nothing had happened when he was there, and after hours of testing every appliance and trip, the bemused man left, shaking his head at the odd man with the old fashioned house and an overactive imagination.
Twenty minutes after Hermione had returned, however, the cooker had tripped. He’d been trying to sear the pork medallions for their supper while Hermione ranted about a particularly irritating customer that day. It had occurred to him then, as he stared morosely down at the cooling fat congealing in the pan, that the electrics never seemed to blow when she wasn’t there. Neither had there been any problems before she’d become pregnant.
He’d gone to the small library in town over several lunch breaks to surreptitiously study the limited number of books on pregnancy after browsing the ones he could find at work, but had found nothing. He’d even braved the horror that was the World Wide Web. He’d had to resort to asking one of the members of staff to help him work out what to do – a young girl with pink hair and a pitying look in her eyes as she showed him how to search and move back and forward between pages. She scurried away quickly at his irritated scowl when she began to pry into what he was wanting to search for.
Growing frustrated with the slow interface (why in Merlin’s name were the letters on the keyboard laid out in such an stupid order?), the garish colours and lack of relevant results on a page with the irritating name of ‘Yahoo!, he was just about to give up moving down the list of results that had provided him with exactly nothing. Irritated with the failure of the web to provide answers, and feeling vindicated in his dislike of all things more technological than a lightbulb, he clicked on a link that seemed to promise content inane enough to harass the librarian about the ineffectual service they offered.
Dragging the side bar down to move the page in search of some choice phrase to throw at the hapless member of staff he suddenly paused.
He read the paragraph that had caught his eye twice before scoffing at the absurdity of it.
That didn’t stop him from going back to the top of the article – if you could call such badly punctuated trip an article – and, after checking round to make sure no one could see what he was looking at, read the whole thing.
“Utter nonsense,” he said to himself as he stalked towards the exit, not forgetting to gripe at the lady at the desk that they really ought to get a better copy of the web if they were going to continue charging people to access it.
“What sort of imbecile would write such drivel?” he thought as he watched the darkening landscape fly past on the bus journey towards home.
“If sure there’ll be a perfectly good explanation for all of this,” he thought nervously, watching the light above their heads flickering as Hermione flung her arms happily round him moments after he’d stepped in through the front door.
“I’m too old to believe in that sort of nonsense!” he told himself as he carefully lifted a weeping Hermione off the bathroom floor where minutes ago she’d been hovering over the toilet bowl, and carried her over the glass shards of yet another light bulb.
“I guess the warts make sense, but what sort of school is named after a pig?” he pondered as he eyed up a particularly hairy-faced crone across the bookshop till. “She would make a perfect hag,” he sneered to himself as a copy of Macbeth in the classics section caught his eye. “’Double, double toil and trouble,’” he whispered to himself as he gently ran a finger down the spine. “Double trouble sounds exactly right.”
Later that week he found himself standing outside one of those ‘new age’ type shops, peering in through the window at the displays of overpriced candles, piles of incense and joss sticks and books with titles such as ‘Wicca for Beginners’ and ‘Wiccan Book of Herbal Spells’. He snorted in disgust. “Herbal Spells? Whoever heard of such a stupid idea? Surely even the biggest dunderhead knows that spells are done with a wand and ‘herbs’ are for brewing with.”
The dumpy woman behind the counter, clad in an odd combination of loose fitting, gaudily-coloured clothes, set off with a number of strangely shaped pendants and with a shawl draped over her shoulders, was most definitely not what he thought a witch should look like. The counter was close enough to the front of the shop that he could clearly see the boxes of sparkling crystals labelled ‘protects against negativity’, ‘opens hearts to love and promotes peace’ and other preposterous claims.
“Ridiculous,” Severus muttered absently, “very few crystals have any intrinsic magical value,”
All in all, this was not what he had imagined when he’d read the article, and he wondered, not for the first time, whether his behaviour was not becoming slightly irrational. He scowled at the thought.
He had been standing there, glaring into the shop for long enough that the woman, who had been engrossed in weaving various coloured strands across a circle, had noticed someone at the window. She looked up with a smile which froze on her face as she took in his fierce glower. Growing pale, she stood and turned to one of the stands behind her, hurriedly rearranging several items.
With one final sneer, Severus turned from the window and stalked away, his long black coat whipping around his legs. Behind him in the shop, the woman peered back towards the window through a bejewelled mirror at the back of the stand. Realising the severe-looking man with the shadowy, roiling aura had left she walked cautiously to the door and pulled it open. She glanced each way down the street, she sighed in relief as she when he was nowhere to be seen. Shutting and locking the door, she flipped the sign to closed, and made her way into the back of the shop to make herself a cup of tea.