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Hermione Granger stood in the centre of the apothecary, hands planted firmly on her hips, surveying her new domain with a critical eye. It smelled of damp wood, stale herbs, and long-settled dust.
Behind her, Ron gave an exaggerated shudder.
“You’re mental, you know that, right?”
Harry, more diplomatic, simply wrinkled his nose as he edged around a grimy display case. “Bit of a fixer-upper.”
Hermione ignored them both.
“How much of your Order of Merlin money went into this place, anyway?” Ron groused, peering into a jar of something that looked suspiciously like pickled rat tails.
“None of your business,” Hermione said briskly. She wasn’t about to justify herself, not when Ron was still sulking because she’d made it clear she wasn’t interested in any relationships at the moment, least of all a doomed attempt to rekindle whatever they’d had during the war.
She had bigger priorities now.
Crossing the floor, she ran a finger along one of the nearest shelves and inspected the thick smear of dust it picked up. “Well, the stock’s mostly intact, at least,” she said, brushing her hands off on her jeans.
Harry grunted in agreement, giving a wary glance at a crate labelled CAUTION: UNIDENTIFIED SPORES.
“Bit dusty,” he added helpfully.
Hermione rolled her eyes.
“The estate agent wouldn’t tell me who owned it before. Just that it was purchased a little over a year ago. The buyer insisted on anonymity in case of… premature death.”
“So the old owner’s dead,” Ron said, poking a jar of shrivelled, spiky leaves with his wand.
“Seems that way,” Hermione said softly.
The words settled strangely on her tongue.
Something about the shop demanded quiet, demanded respect.
The air was too still, the shadows a little too deep, as if the building itself were holding its breath.
She shook it off. “Anyway. I’ll get it cleaned, restock what’s missing, and then I’ll be open for business.”
Harry shot her a long, considering look.
“Just… be careful. This far down Knockturn, you never know who you’re going to attract.”
Hermione smiled, small but determined.
“I’m hoping the presence of one of the Golden Trio will be enough to discourage any lingering Death Eaters from causing trouble.”
Both Harry and Ron winced at the term, but she barrelled on.
“Especially if you two make a point of visiting often.”
She gave them each a pointed look.
They exchanged guilty glances, but nodded.
After they left, half-heartedly promising to come by next week, the shop fell into a heavy, aching silence.
Hermione exhaled slowly, letting the dust-moted air fill her lungs.
“Well,” she said aloud, squaring her shoulders. “No time like the present.”
She drew her wand and set about siphoning years of grime from the shelves.
The shop creaked around her, as if rousing from a long, uneasy slumber.
Two weeks later, the apothecary gleamed with a cleanliness that would have impressed even Madam Pomfrey.
The shelves were dust-free, the windows scrubbed until they let in slanted, golden light, and a few modest orders to help stock her shelves were already on the way.
Hermione stood in the back workroom, sleeves rolled to her elbows, a smudge of powdered dittany across her cheek, and four cauldrons bubbling industriously around her.
Contraceptive potions. Sobering potions. Calming Draughts. Minor injury solutions.
All essentials. All in high demand since the war had ended and peace had proven, for many, to be just another battlefield.
She wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, her movements sharp with fatigue.
She was trying to do too much at once, she knew that, but the thought of a full, thriving shop outweighed common sense.
Still, she could feel herself fraying at the edges.
Her Wiggenweld potion, simmering nearest the hearth, had drawn most of her attention, and she cursed under her breath as she remembered she’d left her Calming Draught unstirred for too long.
She rushed to it, wand in hand, ready to salvage what she could… only to stop short.
The potion was perfect. The colour, a soft, pearlescent blue, was exactly where it should be.
No scorching. No separation. No odd smells.
Hermione frowned.
She could have sworn it had needed another counterclockwise stir five minutes ago. Had she already stirred it and simply forgotten?
A thread of doubt wormed into her mind.
“You’re overtired,” she muttered, brushing it off. “Get a grip.”
Turning back to the workbench, she gathered her next ingredients. She needed to skin a shrivelfig. Simple enough.
She reached for the silver knife and froze.
There, laid out neatly beside her chopping board, sat a perfectly skinned shrivelfig. Pale, glistening, and unmistakably prepared.
Hermione stared at it.
She hadn’t done that yet. She was certain of it.
She remembered crushing the sopophorous beans, remembered mincing the valerian root… but she hadn’t touched the shrivelfig yet.
Had she?
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.
Sleep. She needed sleep. That was all. She was working herself into delirium, forgetting her own tasks.
Shaking herself, she scooped up the shrivelfig and dropped it carefully into the Calming Draught. The potion immediately shifted to a soft baby blue, the telltale sign of completion.
“Good,” she breathed, extinguishing the flame beneath it with a sharp flick of her wand.
Only a few more potions to finish. A couple more hours.
Then she’d go home, collapse into bed, and promise herself she wouldn’t run herself ragged like this again.
Another week later, the apothecary was nearly ready to open for business.
The floors gleamed, the windows let in just enough light to make Knockturn Alley seem almost respectable, and Hermione had a respectable stock built up.
Everything should have been perfect.
Except for one small, nagging problem.
She was fairly certain she had a poltergeist.
She hadn’t said it aloud yet for fear that speaking it would somehow make it worse. Or tip off whatever entity was quietly rearranging her life.
Poltergeists, she knew from Defence Against the Dark Arts, weren’t the same as ghosts.
A ghost was a tethered soul: a witch or wizard who, for one reason or another, had chosen not to move on.
A poltergeist, on the other hand, was pure magical spirit. Mischief incarnate.
Peeves, for instance, delighted in chaos.
Hermione’s… helper, if it could even be called that, was much more… organised.
She rubbed her temples at the memory.
The day after the Calming Draught incident, when the potion had seemingly completed itself, Hermione had wisely listened to her instincts for once.
She’d taken an entire day off: slept late, eaten three full meals, even treated herself to a leisurely stroll through Diagon Alley.
She had returned to the apothecary refreshed, determined to get back to work.
Instead, she’d found her entire shop rearranged. Every shelf. Every display. Every labelled drawer. Gone was her sensible, alphabetical system.
Instead, her mysterious assistant had sorted everything by classification first, then alphabetically within those groups.
Sleep aids on one wall. Healing draughts across from them. Mood stabilisers along the far shelf.
It was, infuriatingly, a better system than hers had been.
Even worse, each new section bore a tidy, handwritten label. Not in her handwriting.
Spidery, tight script. Sharp, economical strokes. Familiar handwriting.
Hermione had stood frozen in front of the first shelf. Hair Regrowth — Cosmetic stared back at her as her fingers trailed lightly over the tag, her brain whirring.
She’d seen this handwriting before.
Countless essays. Countless red-ink corrections bleeding into her margins over six years at Hogwarts.
No.
She shook herself sharply.
She already had one rogue spirit in her shop. She didn’t need to conjure up ghosts as well.
Ghosts, especially him, didn’t reorganise shops and finish brewing potions.
Probably.
In the week since finding her shop reorganised, Hermione had tried in vain to ignore the creeping sensation that she was being watched.
Several times, she could have sworn she heard an irritated sigh behind her, usually when she was about to make a mistake while brewing.
It was maddening.
Merlin, it was like being back in his classroom again.
She kept having the absurd urge to mutter instructions to Neville Longbottom before he blew his cauldron up, or to scold Harry for using the notes from the margins of that bloody Potions book.
His Potions book, she corrected herself grimly, even as the prickling at the back of her neck intensified.
She paused, stirring rod held tight in a tense hand, realising she was about to stir one too many times.
With a muttered curse, she set it aside before she could ruin the potion.
Well.
At least it wasn’t a destructive poltergeist.
She didn’t know what she would have done if she had ended up with a Peeves-like menace hanging about.
Her business would have shuttered before it even opened.
This one, at least, seemed content to stay hidden. Helpful, even, in a grudging sort of way.
And Hermione could not shake the feeling that the spirit was distinctly male.
It was not anything tangible, but she felt it as keenly as she felt the weight of her wand in her hand. A presence that was sharp-edged, impatient, and watching her with a critical eye.
She told herself she could manage.
As long as he stayed hidden, as long as he continued to mind his own business, she could work around him.
She hoped.
Three times now the sign she had painted for the shop had been ruined before the paint could dry.
The third time, she had been mid-stroke when the entire can tipped over, spilling thick black paint across the fresh lettering.
Hermione sat back on her heels, stared at the mess, and muttered, “What exactly is wrong with The Silver Mortar? It’s a perfectly respectable name.”
The paint on the board promptly smeared further, a gloppy, defiant protest.
She narrowed her eyes. “Well then, what would you call it, since you clearly have opinions?”
Silence.
Hermione huffed, thinking the spirit had finally given up.
Then a cauldron clanged loudly from the other side of the room.
She raised a brow. “You want me to call it The Cauldron? Bit uninspired, don’t you think?”
The cauldron rattled angrily.
A moment later, the door to the front room shook in its frame.
“Fine,” Hermione muttered, getting to her feet and following the racket.
A jar rattled somewhere down the aisle that housed the more dangerous ingredients.
Hermione followed the sound warily, glancing up and down the narrow shelves.
Another jar clinked against the wood, pulling her toward the poisonous stock.
“Nightshade?” she guessed aloud. “You want me to call it Nightshade Cauldron? That doesn’t make any sense.”
Another jar rattled. Then a third.
“Oleander? Hemlock?”
She gave the rattling jars a deeply unimpressed look.
“Are we trying to kill someone?”
All three rattled together, as if laughing at her.
Hermione sighed, crossing her arms. “Shall I call it The Dead Cauldron then?” she said sarcastically. “Because that’s exactly what you’ll be if you mess with any of these.”
Something cold touched the centre of her forehead, pressing her back a step. It had the sensation of a fingertip dipped in ice water.
She batted at the empty air, scowling. “Don’t do that. I’m not a child. If you insist on communicating this way, rattle one jar for yes, two for no. Got it?”
A pause. Then a single jar rattled.
“Good,” she said with a short nod. “Now. Am I at least on the right track?”
One jar.
“You could just tell me, you know. Poltergeists can usually talk.”
Silence answered her.
Hermione rolled her eyes. “Fine. Whatever. We’ll play it your way.”
She tapped her chin thoughtfully.
“So what, then? The Dying Cauldron? The Deceased Cauldron? The Dearly Departed Cauldron?”
At the last suggestion, the cold fingertip returned, prodding her forehead with a chastising poke.
“Quit that,” she snapped. “Just… is it even an adjective?”
Two jars rattled.
She considered, then said slowly, “Death’s Cauldron?”
There was a pause, followed by two rattles.
No.
She wrinkled her nose. “Not Death, then. What other names for Death are there? Grim Reaper?”
One jar rattled, then two in quick succession.
Close, but not quite.
She pressed her fingertips to her forehead, thinking aloud.
“The Grim Cauldron? No… that’s an adjective. Reaper’s Cauldron?”
This time, a gust of cold wind swept through the aisle.
Every jar rattled on its shelf, filling the air with soft, eerie clinking.
Hermione glared upward.
“Reaper’s Cauldron? A touch morbid, no?”
A second, sharper gust whipped around her, cold and insistent.
“Alright, alright,” she huffed, folding her arms. “We’ll call it Reaper’s Cauldron. Maybe now you’ll stop rearranging my shelves like a deranged house elf.”
There was no reply.
Only the faintest ripple of laughter, distant and low, threading through the still air.
Hermione shivered.
She had the distinct impression she had just been outmanoeuvred by a spirit.
The first few weeks after the opening of Reaper’s Cauldron were a surprising success for Hermione.
Word spread quickly that one-third of the Golden Trio had opened shop in Knockturn Alley, and business boomed.
Unfortunately, it also meant that nearly half the customers seemed more interested in asking for her autograph than purchasing potions.
Hermione bit back her snappier comments each time, forcing herself to smile and scrawl her name across scraps of parchment, receipts, and once, someone’s forehead.
Was this how Harry had felt his whole life?
It was absurd.
Still, she managed.
Until the day an older man came in. He was middle-aged, balding, with a kind face that resembled Arthur Weasley if Arthur had gone terribly to seed, and he had decided to ask for more than a signature.
“Would you let me take you out to dinner, after you close up shop?” he asked, voice smooth with self-satisfaction.
Hermione blinked.
“Oh! Erm…” she hesitated, searching for a polite escape. “I don’t really date. Sorry.”
The man arched a brow at her, unimpressed.
“Come now, little lady. I just made a fifty Galleon purchase. Surely you could show a little gratitude?”
Her temper sparked, hot and immediate, but before she could even draw breath to reply, the man was hauled backward by the hood of his robes.
He landed with a graceless sprawl on the floor, spluttering indignantly up at her.
Hermione stared for a moment, stunned, but slowly straightened, dusting an invisible speck of lint from her sleeve.
“Sorry about that,” she said mildly. “You seem to have upset my resident spirit. I’d be careful what you say next.”
The man scrambled to his feet, red-faced and muttering, casting a final glare at her before storming toward the door.
He made it only as far as the threshold before an invisible force booted him cleanly into the street, where he landed with a sickening thud and a low grunt.
The door slammed itself shut with a sharp crack of finality.
Hermione shook her head, fighting the urge to laugh.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said softly into the silence.
A chill brushed her cheek in answer, the cold, featherlight touch of a finger sliding a stray curl behind her ear.
She shivered at the sensation but did not flinch away.
This particular spirit, she had learned, seemed to favour physical touch.
He brushed past her often, a cold sweep against her arm, a nudge at her hair, a steadying hand at her back when she teetered on a ladder.
And strangest of all, she didn’t mind.
Not at all.
She felt safer with him here, ludicrous as it was.
He was a spirit. She was mortal.
And yet… she could almost feel his loneliness in the air around her, heavy and aching, like a song with no one left to hear it.
If only she could touch him back.
If only.
Six weeks after the apothecary’s opening, Hermione was deep in the storeroom, balancing a heavy box against her hip.
She stepped through into the back room where she brewed, crossing toward the door that would take her up to the front.
Her foot caught on something.
She stumbled, the box flying from her hands, but before she could fall, strong, cold hands seized her and jerked her upright.
Her face pressed into a frigid shape, just for an instant.
A faint whiff of sandalwood, clean and faintly bitter, filled her nose.
Then the presence retreated.
Heart pounding, Hermione steadied herself, staring down.
One of the floorboards sat slightly higher than the others. She was quite certain it hadn’t been like that before.
Without a word, she crouched down, pried her fingers beneath the board, and tugged. It lifted cleanly away.
Nestled in the hollow space between the joists was a cloth-wrapped bundle.
Hermione reached in carefully, drawing it out into her lap. The cloth unfurled to reveal a journal.
Her fingers trembled as she flipped it open and she gasped.
The pages were filled with his handwriting, that familiar, sharp, spidery script she had seen a thousand times at Hogwarts.
She had always suspected, deep down.
Had always feared naming it aloud would scare him away, or anger him into vanishing altogether.
She sank to the floor more steadily this time, crossing her legs, the journal heavy across her thighs.
The task of restocking was forgotten.
She began to read.
The entries were raw. Personal. Regrets from the war. Loneliness, thick and heavy. Self-recrimination that bled through every line, every sharp stroke of the quill.
He blamed himself for so much. For things he hadn’t deserved.
The struggle to remain by Voldemort’s side was the worst. He loathed the man. Endured his presence like poison under the skin.
I would rather be tied to Dumbledore for the rest of my miserable existence than be forced to bow down again to that wretched creature.
She swallowed hard and turned the page.
Near the end, the tone changed. The entries sharpened, darkened, edged with fury.
Dumbledore has so kindly informed me that the boy is to die. That he has been raised as nothing more than a sacrificial lamb. What is my existence for? My years of service? My vow to keep her son alive?
I had not planned to survive this war. The Dark Lord’s paranoia all but ensures my death. But now? Now I do not wish to go so quietly. There is a potion. Ancient. Forbidden. Perhaps I can complete it before I die. Perhaps I can bargain to stay, if only that I might thwart this final betrayal. If only that I might live the life I was denied at last.
Her hands shook as she turned to the final page.
Ambrosia — A Bargain with Death.
Below the title lay a list of ingredients.
Some were merely rare.
Others were impossible, requiring fortunes or dangers Hermione could hardly begin to imagine.
She exhaled a long, shuddering breath and closed the journal, pressing it to her chest.
Then she shifted onto her knees, feeling the solidness of the floor beneath her, grounding her.
Her voice came out as a whisper, soft and certain.
“It’s you, isn’t it?”
The room seemed to still around her, thick with silence.
“You’re not a poltergeist,” she said, her voice trembling. “You’re a ghost.”
The air in front of her rippled, as if reality itself shivered.
And then he was there, kneeling before her, silent and translucent.
Dark eyes, sad and haunted, fixed on hers.
He looked younger.
Not the bitter man she remembered from before, but something closer to what he might have been, if life had ever been kind to him.
Hermione’s heart broke at the sight. A tear slipped down her cheek.
He reached out. His hand, cold as ice and steady as iron, brushed her cheek, wiping the tear away.
He cupped her face in his palm.
It felt like plunging into an icebox. It seared against her skin. But she didn’t pull away. She leaned into it.
Because it was him. Because he was still here. And because deep down, she had known it was him all along.
Hermione closed her eyes for a moment, steadying herself.
The journal lay heavy against her heart.
When she opened them again, she found him still watching her, silent, waiting, afraid.
She reached up, placing her hand against the chill of his. It passed through, ghostly, but she held it there anyway, a touch that existed only in intention.
No words passed between them. None were needed.
She would help him. She would find a way.
She would strike a bargain with Death in exchange for the life of Severus Snape.
She had questions. So many questions.
And to her surprise, he answered them.
She was taken aback by how pleasant his voice was when it wasn’t sharpened by irritation or cruelty. A low, velvety baritone that seemed to strike some deep, resonant chord inside her.
It only deepened the feelings she had been nursing for weeks, even before she had known for certain who he was.
He had taken care of her long before he revealed himself. More than once, he had dealt with rowdy customers. Silently, ruthlessly.
The man who had grabbed her by the robes, yanking her forward across the counter, had found himself in St Mungo’s with unexplained memory loss.
Hermione hadn’t managed to feel sorry for the man.
The touches had grown more frequent too. Soft brushes of chill against her wrist, a guiding pressure at the small of her back.
Once, after a long, difficult day, she had whispered into the empty shop that she wished she could touch him, just once.
The answer had come immediately: a crushingly cold embrace, fleeting but unmistakable. For a single moment, she had been surrounded by sandalwood and soap and something achingly him.
And now… now he was real.
He had shown himself.
Confirmed what her heart had been telling her ever since she first saw his handwriting adorning the shelves of her shop.
She asked him why he had stayed.
He told her he wasn’t ready to move on. He felt cheated by the prospect of Harry’s death. He wanted to complete the potion, but had found it difficult to access his vaults from his side of the veil.
She asked how he was able to move things. To touch her, to rearrange her shelves, to throw people bodily out the door, when everything she knew said only poltergeists could do that.
He gave her a long-suffering look, the kind that made her feel sixteen and hopelessly unprepared for his class.
“Did you not submit essays to Professor Binns for six years?”
Hermione’s cheeks warmed.
Oh.
Well.
It seemed ghosts could touch things, if they really wanted to.
When she asked why he had hidden himself from her, he hesitated, then confessed.
“I was cruel to you before,” he said quietly. “I never wanted to be a cruel person, but it was convenient. The persona fit me like a second skin. I made myself believe that’s who I was. Who I was meant to be.”
Her heart twisted painfully.
“If you come back…” she asked, voice small, unable to meet his eyes. “If it works… are you going to leave?”
She hated the desperation she heard in her own voice. Hated how deeply she already knew she was falling for him.
His cold fingers touched her chin, tilting her face upward until she was forced to meet his gaze.
“I will stay,” he said, steady and low, “as long as you’ll have me.”
She swallowed against the knot rising in her throat.
“I don’t want you to stay because you feel like you owe me something,” she whispered. “You can leave. You can live whatever life you want. I won’t tell anyone you’re alive, if you don’t want me to.”
For a long time, he said nothing. His expression was distant, as if working through some impossibly complicated Arithmantic equation.
Finally, he swallowed.
“I want you.”
He said it like a confession. Like a sin.
“I shouldn’t,” he added, so quietly it was almost a breath. “But I do.”
She shook her head, a weak, embarrassed protest bubbling up.
“I’m nothing special,” she said quietly. “I’m annoying, and I—”
“You are kind,” he offered simply. “And compassionate. And fiercely loyal. You are insufferably unafraid. And you are beautiful.”
She had no answer to that. None that didn’t sound foolish.
That night, she stayed at the shop for the first time.
She transfigured empty crates into a passable bed, pulled pillows and blankets from the beaded bag she still carried everywhere.
She curled up beside him. Though the thick blanket separated them, she could still feel the icy chill of his presence beside her.
She didn’t care.
For the first time in a long time, Hermione felt completely, irrationally, at home.
It took almost a year to procure all the ingredients.
Severus had given her the key to his vault, allowing her access to the funds needed to purchase some of them.
Others, Hermione had retrieved herself, though Severus fretted terribly every time she left, worried she would die in the attempt.
Once, she had returned from a cursed forest in Bavaria, pale and shaking, with burn marks up one arm where the air itself had turned against her.
Another time, she had spent two days trapped in a crumbling tomb in Cairo, after the floor collapsed beneath her feet while she retrieved a flowering nightshade said to only bloom in Death’s shadow.
Each time, she smiled through the fear. Each time, she promised him she would return.
“I can get it myself,” she snapped once, when he begged her for the third time not to undertake her next journey, “or I can spend five hundred Galleons on it. It’ll take too long to come up with the gold. I’m going.”
“The last time you left, you were almost killed,” he hissed, his voice slicing the air between them.
“If it kills me,” she said, voice low and fierce, “then I’ll choose to stay, like you did. I’ll come back to you either way, Severus. And we’ll figure it out from there.”
She had left before he could answer.
And now, it was done.
The potion stood in a gleaming goblet of gold on the table before them, casting strange, shivering reflections across the room.
“Do I drink it?” she whispered.
“No,” came the immediate, sharp reply. “It would make you immortal, but at a terrible cost. You would still age, but never die. Eventually, you would be nothing but a pile of bones, your consciousness trapped within.”
Hermione shuddered at the thought.
“It is meant only for the gods. For those beyond our realm. It is said to be a favourite of theirs,” he said, glancing toward the goblet. “Death will come.”
No sooner had he spoken than the air shifted.
Darkness crept across the room like a rising tide, the edges of the walls dissolving into twilight. The temperature plunged, far colder than even Severus’s touch had ever been.
Hermione’s breath hitched.
Even Severus, when he had wrapped himself around her in those desperate, stolen moments, pressing icy kisses to her skin, her lips, her throat, had never chilled her so deeply as this.
What is it you wish for, my child, in exchange for the elixir of the gods?
The voice did not come to her ears but thrummed through her bones, heavy and relentless.
The figure that appeared was cloaked and hooded, almost dementor-like, but not despairing.
Quite the opposite.
She felt drawn to it. Felt that to step into its embrace would be to step safely across the Veil, whole and untarnished.
Unbidden, her foot shifted forward.
A cold, familiar grip seized her elbow, holding her fast.
It is not yet your time, child, the entity chuckled, the sound rumbling through the marrow of her bones.
Hermione shivered and stepped back, allowing Severus to pull her into his chilly embrace.
She lifted her chin and stared directly into the void of the hood, feeling as though she were falling through stars and darkness and eternity.
“I would see him returned to life,” she said, voice steady. “He, who was taken too soon. He, who sacrificed himself to bring you the soul of Tom Riddle. He, who chose to remain in this realm rather than make the final journey into yours.”
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Then, in a sudden breath of air, the entity was before her, inches away.
The pull toward it became overwhelming.
She wanted to step forward, even as Severus’s arms tightened around her.
She felt his shuddering breath at her ear, reminding her: Stay. Fight.
Death’s hand, or whatever passed for it, rose.
It touched her forehead with a pinpoint of cold so brutal it stole her breath.
But before she could even gasp, it was gone.
The goblet vanished, and Death with it. The darkness receded.
Severus’s arms no longer encircled her.
Instead, he was knelt before her.
Solid. Real.
Naked and unblemished. Reborn.
He stared down at his hands at first, as though he didn’t trust the sight before him. And then he lifted his head.
Dark eyes, no longer haunted, no longer empty and translucent, locked onto hers.
Then he whispered, voice rough and broken.
“Hermione.”
Her knees hit the floor and she was in his arms before she could think, sobbing and laughing all at once, pressing kisses to his cheeks, his forehead, his bare shoulders.
Touching him.
Feeling him.
Warm. Alive.
Severus gathered her against him, holding her tightly, as if he would never let her go.
And then, his lips found hers, greedy and needy and full of every emotion neither of them had dared to put a name to yet.
The world dissolved.
The cold, the dark, the loneliness and waiting, all vanished.
There was only Severus.
Only Hermione.
Only this.
He was back.
He was here.
He was home.