Chapter Text
She’d had it all planned out in her mind. A cake with a special message on top, vanilla with chocolate frosting, and in the neat baker’s scroll Happy Birthday Daddy. Only, instead of a post-birthday celebration with just the two of them, Ron had come home from work that evening with a grim look on his face. One she’d become all too familiar with in their three years of marriage.
“I’m sorry,” he’d said, distraught, not even having to name.
“How long?” she managed, gripping his arm though they were not yet entangled.
“A month, six weeks at most.”
And although it had pained her, although she was bursting to tell him, to share the life growing inside of her, she had closed her lips, and pressed her face to his chest and made him swear he’d come home.
The cake had been delicious even if the baby wasn’t as fond as sweets as their father (it hadn’t tasted quite as good coming up as going down) and Hermione held the secret close. For it was Ron, who had had an equal part in conception, who deserved to know first. To share the private joy with her, the thrill of a life-changing secret. She counted down the days as the first month passed then the second, holding onto every letter he penned and that was passed to her in secret. As the first trimester disappeared she held onto the secret.
A baby, their baby. Who would grow up loved and cherished. One that would feel real as soon as their father knew of the baby’s existence.
“How much longer?” she asked Harry in a moment of weakness.
He’d taken to looking in on her, stopping by to beg her round for dinner or to putter around her home as though he didn’t have a toddler and pregnant wife of his own.
“Hermione I-“ he stared, staring at her hopelessly.
She felt the tears well up in her eyes. Everything made her emotional now. Songs and sights that would only ever make her smile before was now a cue for waterworks.
“Soon,” Harry pleaded. “He’s coming as soon as he can.”
Three months. Ninety-seven days without him. The longest they’d been apart since she’d left for Hogwarts—no before that even for during her seventh year there’d been Hogsmeade weekends and quidditch matches and desperate midnight rendezvous in the room of requirement— the longest since they’d met.
Come home. She scratched into parchment a dozen times and tossed the letter into the fire. She knew he had to. Wouldn’t be gone so long if he didn’t have to. He wouldn’t leave her if he didn’t have to.
She wrote it out a dozen times. Knowing that telling him would summon him back and make this nightmare end. She missed him so fiercely that every night she fantasied about what he might have done if she’d let it slip. If her perfect plan to tell him might have not involved his birthday or a cake but instead, a blurt in the middle of the night or a handwritten card.
That night she fell asleep on the sofa, wrapped in one of his sweaters, a half-finished letter on her lap that she’d never send for she loved him too much to make him question his career. In her dream, he came to her. That crooked grin she loved, those bright blue eyes. A noise started her awake and in the confusion of waking in a place she never fell asleep, she was convinced a moment that he was indeed a fantasy.
Those same blue eyes, his cheeks covered in a beard thicker than she’d ever seen. His hair long and shaggy.
“Ron,” she whispered, holding onto the fantasy for a moment longer.
But the hands that pulled her forward so he might press his face to her abdomen felt real and she was completely stunned to realize that she wasn’t still dreaming.
“Hermione,” he whispered back, voice aching with emotion.
She kissed the top of his head, noticing a letter crumpled in his left fist.
“You read my letter?” she asked, feeling a little cheated.
“It was addressed to me,” he answered cheekily in that tone that she loved and when he peaked up at her there were tears in his eyes. “Is it true? Are you-?”
“Yes.” And at last her heart filled with glee, terror, all of those emotions she’d kept at bay unlocked with only one sight of him. “We’re having a baby.”
“Oh Hermione,” he said, kissing her cheeks, her eyelids, every place he could reach as the texture of his beard tickled her skin. “Oh, Hermione.”
“Welcome home,” she replied, capturing his lips with hers at last. “Welcome home.”