Chapter Text
Wisps of steam coil from the surface of the mug.
The tea within it is boiling hot and still steeping, the distinct aroma of the Russian Earl Grey filling the kitchen. He removes the strainer and adds a dash of milk to the brew. Carrying the mug with him into his sitting-room, he is about to settle into the armchair before his fire to read the paper when he hears a familiar scratching, followed by a whimper at the front door.
With a put-upon sigh, Severus abandons his tea and paper ritual, casting a charm to keep his beverage warm, before he drags himself out to the front entry.
The wagging tail and excited bark that follows his arrival at the door causes him to snort. How easily pleased the dog is. Reaching for the Parka hung up on the coat hooks, he pulls it on and opens the door handle, pausing as he watches the dog’s bum wiggle in anticipation.
“Ares,” he says with a warning in his tone.
The dog's ears flatten somewhat at hearing his name in that tone. Without protest, Ares sits, and Severus finally opens the door, letting in some of the chilly air outside in the process. He can tell his young Greyhound is desperate to go out, and he lets out an amused chuckle.
“Fine, you may go,” he murmurs, and in seconds the gangly grey dog is out of the house, and begins to galavant around the yard.
Severus walks out as well and stands on the little brick path that leads down to the front gate, waiting for his companion to finish emptying his bladder — likely on the rose bush as he so often does . His patience begins to wane having not yet consumed his morning tea, when Ares trots over to the front gate and starts to whine, looking up at him expectantly before turning back to scratch at the wood slats.
“What in the world,” he mutters, before walking towards the fence to investigate. It was probably a rabbit or some other small creature.
What he finds instead surprises him, and Severus’ eyes widen as he peers down over the gate to the base of his mailbox to see a small child huddling against it. She is young—possibly no older than three or four years old—and wears a little knit cap on her head over a riot of red curls.
“Hello?” he says, and she turns her face up to look at him.
The girl’s face is so familiar, that he is momentarily stunned. He recognises the stubborn chin, slightly upturned nose, and expressive brown eyes. She looks a little scared, and Ares continues to whine and paw at the gate, eager to see who was at the mailbox,
“Is there—where are your parents?” Severus prompts gently, trying not to scare her.
She continues to stare at him silently, so he begins to look around the street to see if any adults were hunting for their child. When he sees no one, his lips thin as he represses another sigh. He quickly summons a leash for Ares and locks up the house, attaching it to the dog's collar before opening the gate and exiting his property.
“Let’s go find your parents, hmm?” he tells the girl who is still crouched at the mailbox.
She stares at Ares who is barely restraining himself from slobbering all over her in his excitement at seeing another person beside him. “Pretty,” she says, standing and straightening out before reaching her hand out to pet the dog.
Severus is struck by how endearing it is, seeing this small child cheerfully patting his canine companion. For his part, Ares is loving the extra attention and leans his head into her enthusiastic embrace. He rolls his eyes at the display, but the warmth spreading through his chest at the sight doesn’t dissipate.
The more pressing question rattling around in his mind is who the child belongs to, and why she looks just like someone he knows. Pulling up on the leash, he gets Ares’ attention and the dog stops what he is doing and sits up straight. Severus smiles briefly, before returning his attention to the young girl who is now staring back at him once more.
“Where did you come from?” he asks her.
She seems confused for a moment, and then turns and points down the street. “There,” she squeaks softly.
“I will walk with you to find your parents,” he informs her, waiting for her nod to confirm.
They begin to walk cautiously in the direction she indicated, boots crunching in the orange-brown leaves that litter the footpath. Autumn is in full swing, and if he let Ares off his leash. Severus has no doubt the dog would be dancing around in the piles of leaves that gather at the base of the near-naked trees.
She walks at his side quietly, and he finds her behaviour curious, and her mannerisms to also be strangely familiar. He turns his eyes back up to stare ahead as they walk, only to feel a lead ball sink into his gut when her tiny hand wraps around one of his own. His eyes look down at her sharply, but she continues to walk at his side, grasping onto his fingers, completely unperturbed.
Who the bloody hell is she?
He cannot suppress the infernal nagging in the back of his mind that he knows her face. Not knowing is driving him to distraction. So much so that he doesn’t notice the hasty approach of another person until she is right in front of them.
“Rosie, you scared me half to death,” she says, panic evident in her tone.
Severus turns his gaze from the child still clinging to him, to the obviously worried mother, only to have the wind knocked clean from his lungs.
“Granger.” Her surname slips from his lips as his brain tries to process what he is seeing.
“Professor.” His old title leaves her mouth as she stares at him like she’s seeing a ghost.
His mind kicks into gear, reminding him that she likely did think him dead. It’s been twelve years since she saw him fall to Riddle’s bloody snake. Twelve years and somehow she is there before him in the quiet town of Windsor, Maine, where he escaped to after the war. Twelve years and she looks almost the same, save for a few smile lines, and the little red-haired child still attached to his hand.
“I assume this is your child?” he drawls, breaking the silence between them.
Granger nods, still appearing dumbstruck. “Thank you, yes,” she says, before crouching down to be at eye level with said child to address her. “Why did you run off on your own like that?”
“I followed a bird,” the child mumbles in reply. “It was pretty.”
Severus watches as relief and annoyance flicker over the woman’s face. That is why the child looks so familiar. Finally, she releases his hand and steps into her mother’s waiting arms, and Granger hoists her up as she stands, cuddling her against her body protectively.
“I’m so sorry to have troubled you, sir,” she tells him.
“It was no trouble,” he replies. “There is no reason for you to address me as sir or professor any longer. I do not teach.”
She smiles at that. “Can I offer you a cup of tea?” she asks. “I live just two doors down.”
Severus ponders for a moment how sensible a choice this is; his mug of tea at home would hold under his stasis spell. He knows that if he goes to her house, he will likely be subjected to questioning about his survival. But as he stares at the woman in front of him, something makes that prospect not seem so disagreeable.
“Tea sounds fine.”
He follows her as she leads the way to an ivy-covered brick home, Ares trotting along excitedly beside him. He resists the urge to roll his eyes at how happy the canine was to be around other people.
In no time at all, he is sitting on a plush sofa with Ares laying prone at his feet, and the child—Rose—seated beside him. His posture is stiff, and he feels entirely out of place inside Granger’s warm and tastefully decorated house. How long has she lived here? He wonders. It’s unlikely to have been long given how often he is out in the sleepy neighbourhood walking Ares.
“How do you take your tea?” Granger asks, poking her head back into the room, disrupting his train of thought.
“Splash of milk,” he replies, before adding a polite, “please.”
A couple of minutes later she reenters the room and places a tray down on the coffee table. As she takes a seat on an adjacent armchair levitating a child-proof cup to her young daughter, Severus feels as though he is in the twilight zone. Everything about this is awkward and uncomfortable.
“Your dog is lovely,” Granger says, breaking the silence. “What’s his name?”
“Ares,” he replies quietly. “He is a retired racing hound.”
The fact that he has adopted a dog that has essentially been cast aside is not lost on either of them. She looks as though she has a lot of questions, and so he waits silently for the inquisition to begin.
“So, you’re alive,” she says. It’s a statement rather than a question.
“Your powers of observation are astounding,” he drawls as he accepts the mug of tea she passes him.
“I don’t want to interrogate you as you no doubt expected I would,” Granger says, leaning back to gaze at him over the rim of her mug. “If you want to tell me, you’re welcome to, but it’s really none of my business how you came to be here.”
He is stunned into silence by her comment. Part of him wishes to take her up on the offer, while another urges him to just rip off the plaster and tell her so that he can justify asking what she is doing there.
“I had provisions in place to ensure I survived whatever horrors Riddle had conjured—I expected he would attempt to kill me. What you saw was the poison slowly shutting down my central nervous system,” he tells her, looking into the milky tea he clutches. “What you did not see was twenty minutes later when the initial paralysis wore off, and the numerous potions I preemptively swallowed kicked in. Albus also provided me with his bird—Fawkes—to cry over my wounds and carry me to safety.”
“The body we buried—”
“Was a fake,” he interrupted. “Conjured out of an old hessian sack in the corner of the room. It took months for me to fully recover—I did so in Ireland in the secret-kept safe house Albus bequeathed to me in his will.”
“You didn’t stay?” she asks.
“What for?” he challenges. “There was nothing for me on that godforsaken island anymore.”
Appearing satisfied by his answers, for the time being, she asks, “And are you happy here?”
He pauses before answering as it’s not a question he’s been asked before. No one he knows from his life here knows anything about his past. They don’t know enough to question him about his state of being.
“I am content,” Severus settles on.
Beside him, Rose squirms off the sofa and plops down onto the floor beside Ares who immediately shifts so that his head is in her lap. The young girl smiles and pats his head gently, and Severus is once more surprised that his heart clenches in his chest and a lump forms in his throat.
“Sorry about her,” Granger says sheepishly, which he immediately waves off. “She snuck out the front door while I was cleaning up after breakfast, and apparently followed a bird to your house. I swear I had locked it though—”
Severus gazes down at the child for a moment, before muttering, “Spontaneous magic can occur at a young age, as I am sure you are aware.”
The witch sighs and nods. “It’s happened a handful of times over the years, but nothing like this before,” she confides. “I suppose I’ll have to sit down with her for a talk sooner rather than later.”
“Why are you here?” he asks her, intent on satisfying his curiosity.
“I imagine you don’t really keep up with the Prophet over here, do you?” she answers, and when he shakes his head, she continues. “I am divorced, you see, and while it might have been easier to stay and try to make things work with Ron, I just couldn’t bring myself to. It was finalised over a year ago, but we only just moved here. I wanted to make sure Rose got to spend time with her father before we left.”
“You married Mister Weasley?” he asks, surprised. Throughout his time as a teacher at Hogwarts, he was somewhat aware of the teenage drama that surrounded him, he always imagined Granger would realise how incompatible she was with the youngest Weasley male.
“I was young and we survived a war together,” she says, her cheeks beginning to glow red. “In hindsight not a very good foundation for a relationship, but you live and learn.”
“And how is your daughter coping with being separated from her father?”
“To be honest, Ron didn’t waste any time getting remarried after we split up. He’s been distracted the past few months with the birth of his son to his new wife,” she says, and he can see there is a little pain in her eyes that she seems to have schooled out of her expression. “Rose and I have always been a bit of a duo anyway, so it hasn’t been too difficult.”
As if on queue, the child in question stands up and walks over to her mother, tapping on her knee before extending her arms to be picked up. He watches the woman lift the child into her arms, wrapping them around her protectively before pressing a kiss to her forehead. There is an answering tug in his chest, one he can only describe as longing. He doesn’t like children all that much—never has—but there is something about the pair that sends yearning through him. Perhaps he hungers for what he never had as a child—an affectionate and doting mother?
But it is more than that.
Granger might still look a lot like the girl he once taught, but she is very much a woman now, with a soft curve to her hip and bosom, kind eyes, and though her hair is still a chaotic nest of curls, they appear soft. Her demeanour and the way she carries herself is different—calmer. She is not a girl. She is a woman, a mother, and by all accounts, still a very powerful and talented witch.
There is something about it that draws him in despite how much he doesn’t want to have any connections to his past.
“She’s very precocious,” he says, even as the child curls into her mother with a yawn.
“I think the same word was used to describe me as a child,” she says with a soft laugh that warms him from the inside out.
He smirks. It is an accurate descriptor. “What will you do here?” he asks.
“I have a job,” she says with a smile. “I am the librarian at the Ilvermorny school in Massachusetts. I don’t have to live on campus due to the library hours, and Rose can come with me to work the two days she isn’t in daycare.”
“I see,” he murmurs with a smile, unsurprised that Granger got a job working with books. Of course she did.
“You said you don’t teach. How do you keep yourself busy?” she asks.
“I consult under a different name, and brew potions,” Severus answers. It is likely the most typical thing he could have fallen back on, but it is steady work and he has the freedom to pick and choose who he works for and when.
He finally takes a mouthful of his tea now that it is no longer likely to burn him, and is pleasantly surprised at the taste. “It’s good tea,” he tells her.
She beams at him, and he finds himself unable to think of anything but how beautiful her smile is. “I brought it over with me. I still haven’t managed to find any tea that I like over here yet.”
Before he can second-guess himself, Severus finds himself blurting out, “If you are amenable, I will direct you to my supplier.”
“That would be lovely, actually,” she says.
He realises now that he has essentially offered to contact her again, and isn’t quite sure what to do with this information. Does he want to see her again? Is this his mind's way of tricking him into being more social? At his feet, Ares yawns, momentarily grabbing his attention. The child—Rose—and Ares already appeared to be in cahoots, and despite his desire to leave the past where it is, he finds he wants to make an exception for Granger.
“I can bring you a list of places to find British staples locally,” he tells her. “Perhaps tomorrow when I take Ares for a walk I can stop by?”
She smiles and nods in agreement. “We will be home.”
Finishing his tea quickly, Severus stands and snaps his fingers, and Ares jumps to his feet in an instant. “I won’t keep you any longer,” he tells her.
Granger walks him to the door, still holding her sleeping child against her. “It’s been nice to see you, Mr Snape.”
“Call me Severus,” he offers, not fond of how formal Mr Snape sounds when she says it.
“Severus,” she repeats, gazing up at him in the doorway to her home. “Please call me Hermione, then.”
With the door now open, the light flooding the entryway catches the flecks of gold in her eyes, causing them to almost sparkle. He swallows past the lump which has returned, and he feels like every one of his limbs is buzzing. Pushing the feeling aside, he nods at her and steps down onto the path leading from her front door to the gate.
“Until next time, Hermione,” he murmurs.
“Until then,” she agrees.
Without looking back, Severus turns and walks swiftly away, Ares gambolling along beside him as they finally go home. A few minutes later, settled in front of the fire with the tea and his paper, he finds himself unable to concentrate, all of his thoughts consumed by the accidental run-in with the witch from his former life and her young daughter. A small smile creeps onto his face as acceptance washes over him.
Perhaps having them around won’t be as bad as he thinks?