Chapter Text
Severus gasps as his body is firmly placed back on solid ground. Head still spinning, he finds himself in the Malfoy dungeons, staring at an empty crevice in the wall. It takes a few seconds before his brain catches up. The time turner. He becomes aware of its weight around his neck, and he nearly destroys the clasp getting it off. It looks the same as it did a few moments ago—twenty-nine years from now— but as he watches it, the glittering sand inside the hourglass slowly dissolves. Hermione’s words come back to him, spoken across a kitchen table. Once you’re back, there’ll be no way to travel again.
Fuck. There has to be a way. He could save her. He should save her. Can he save her?
The time turner’s cold metal digs into his palm. He’s never been under any delusion that life is fair—that much has been drilled into him for as long as he can remember—so this shouldn’t surprise him.
“Ah, there you are,” comes Lucius’ voice from behind him. “We’re late for dinner, and Narcissa is fuming. It’ll be the doghouse for both of us.”
Severus shoves the time turner into his robe pocket. “If it comes with a leather collar, I’m leaving.”
Lucius snorts.
-
The decrepit state of Spinner’s End is never more apparent than when he returns from Malfoy Manor, but Severus ignores the peeling lino and black spots on the wallpaper. The cupboard next to the sink is pathetically empty; two tins of baked beans, a few stray bags of PG Tips but most importantly, the almost empty bottle of Blishen’s firewhisky—a Christmas gift three years ago from Minerva. The glass he takes from the sink has a chip in it. Still standing, he pours a decent amount of firewhisky into the glass and knocks it back with a grimace. He scrubs his hand over his face. He feels untethered, and the burn from the firewhisky does nothing to keep him grounded. The present and future jumble together in his mind until he can’t make sense of anything. And it’s giving him a headache.
The firewhisky ripples in his glass. Its sheen reminds him of Hermione’s eyes this morning, as they dressed in a tense silence. When she looked at him after adjusting her jumper, it was with a quip about breakfast and not the wand in his face he was expecting. At the time he was too relieved to question her reasoning, but as things are settling he starts wondering why. He refills his glass for the second—or third—time and throws it back before summoning a notebook and a biro. The chair squeaks against the lino when he sits and opens the notebook to a blank page. His pensieve is still at Hogwarts, so writing his memories down is the next best thing until he returns for the school year.
-
Severus has been dreading this day for months.
He sips his water—wishing he’d had the foresight to swap it for something stronger—and glances towards the doors to the entrance hall. Any minute now Minerva will come through with this year’s first-year students. First-year students including Lily’s son and Hermione.
The double doors open, admitting Minerva and a gaggle of small, robe-clad children. Fucking hell. He spots her frizzy hair—almost as big as she is—straight away, though it’s longer than how she wore it as an adult. When the line of students stop in front of the Sorting Hat, her face catches the light, and Severus fears he might be sick all over the staff table. It really is her. Knowing she was—is—a student and seeing her as such are two very different things. He breaks out of his panic when Minerva calls her name.
Hermione—Granger, he reminds himself, Granger—practically runs towards the hat. It spends no more than ten seconds on her head before shouting out Gryffindor. Severus snorts. He knew it.
-
Her first essay is twice the required length and makes his eye twitch. She proves a gifted student but is too eager to prove herself, and part of him enjoys the slash of his red ink across the parchment. His resolve to stay clear of her proves hard when she, Weasley and Potter keep getting in trouble. Fighting trolls, getting past Hagrid’s bloody three-headed dog, brewing Polyjuice potion in the girl’s lavatory...
By the time their third year of making his life stressful rolls around, Severus has found four new grey hairs that weren’t there before the summer holiday. He delivers the first of seven doses of wolfsbane potion to Lupin—and pushes away the memories of feral yellow eyes and the smell of wet fur—and makes a round on the fifth floor. The alcove behind the statue of Aden the Amorous is usually occupied by snogging teenagers. Finding it—thankfully—empty, Severus scrubs a hand over his face. Maybe he’ll get something resembling sleep tonight. There’s only so much coffee and invigoration draughts can do. Something brushes against his leg. He looks down.
“Oh. It’s you.”
Hermione’s orange familiar blinks at him with yellow eyes. The Kneazle part of him must be dominant because he looks exactly the same as when Severus saw him in 2008. The cat bumps its head against Severus’ trousers and kneads his paws against the stone floor.
“Off with you,” he says. “Go back to your owner, and tell her she’s giving me grey hairs.”
The cat curls its tail around his calf before trotting down the corridor and disappearing behind a tapestry.
Severus spells the orange hairs from his trousers. Bloody cat.
-
“You called, Headmaster?”
Dumbledore pulls a silver memory from his temple and lets it float into the pensieve. “Arthur Weasley was attacked tonight in the Department of Mysteries.”
Severus’ jaw clenches. “Is he alive?”
“He’s at St Mungo’s. I’m told his condition is stable but serious. The effect of Nagini’s venom is proving the most challenging to remedy, and the Healers are still working on counteracting the effects.” Dumbledore looks at him, face weary. “I need you to get as much information from Tom as you can about what they’re planning.”
He bows his head. “Of course, Headmaster.”
As the door to his quarters closes behind him, Severus scrubs a hand over his face. That blasted snake. He hates it almost as much as he hates the Dark Lord. He freezes. A memory resurfaces of Hermione curled around him, thinking him asleep, fingers tracing the side of his neck. Another memory of her hugging her knees in an armchair, smiling sadly while saying he was very brave. His death.
Fucking hell.
He’s spent more time than he should over the past six years thinking about how he will die, running through the possible—sacrificing himself in a battle—to the ludicrous—tripping on his robes and breaking his neck—and has become no wiser. Until now.
Is that how he dies? Being bit by that bloody snake? His stomach turns, and he barely makes it to the loo before losing his dinner.
-
Severus gasps.
Pain, blinding pain. In his throat, his chest, his gut.
He blinks. The room becomes no less blurry.
He’s so cold.
It requires all his strength to lift his hand to his neck. When his fingers find torn flesh, the blinding pain makes him scream. Every shallow breath sends a new gush of blood coating his fingers and dripping over his wrist.
Blood replenisher. He needs blood replenisher. Black spots dot his vision. Hand still pressing against his neck, his other one fumbles for his robe pocket. Finally—finally—it makes contact with a smooth glass vial. He nearly drops the vial getting the stopper off, but manages to bring it to his mouth and swallow the contents.
Severus coughs. The hand on his neck becomes warm and slippery again. He reaches for the other vial, the one he’s been carrying on his person for two years in preparation for this moment. His hand shakes so badly he can barely lift it to his mouth. The antivenin is warm on his lips and tongue, trickling down his throat.
He blinks slowly. The black spots get smaller. Breathing gets easier.
Wetting his dry lips, he slowly removes his hand from his neck. His blood seems, for the moment at least, to remain inside his body. He blinks. He needs his wand. Blindly feeling as far as he can reach without moving, panic builds when his fingers only touch the ground. Then his fingertips brush the smooth wood and he grits his teeth reaching the final way to wrap his fingers around it.
Fuck, this is going to hurt.
Fingers gripping his wand, Severus closes his eyes and pictures Spinner’s End in his mind. He apparates with a loud crack, leaving behind only a large pool of blood and the echo of his scream.
-
Severus sips the overpriced coffee he purchased from a café on the waterfront. It’s much too humid for coffee, but he’s too jet-lagged to care. Morning commuters hurry past him, paying him no attention.
Finding the residence of the Wilkinses—formerly known as the Grangers—hadn’t been easy. The memories from 2008 proved unhelpful in that regard, so he apparated to a sleepy village in Gloucestershire. A bit of spell work and he left with an address to a town close to Perth. He arrived yesterday by an illegal Portkey, which is currently tucked into his coat pocket, and his first stop was a brightly coloured bungalow on the outskirts of town. Disillusioned, he watched as a thin man and a woman with Hermione’s hair tended to the garden.
A tremor goes through him, blinding pain accompanying it as if to remind him of the night he almost died. He clenches his jaw and waits for it to pass. They’re not as frequent as they used to be, but they always send him back to those weeks after the war when he was trying not to die. Once he can breathe easily, Severus blinks. He’s lost sight of the Grangers. Fuck. He focuses on the tracking spell he put on them yesterday, let’s it pull him along the street. He hasn’t got much of a plan other than following them all day and making sure they’re still alive at the end of it.
The sound of wailing sirens comes closer and closer until two ambulances speed past him, lights flashing. Severus’ stomach drops. He reaches out for the tracking spell, testing its strength. Hermione’s anguished face swims into his mind as she shared her failure to save her parents. The tracking spell fizzes out, leaving him standing on the pavement hoping Hermione can forgive him.
-
Being dead is easier than he thought. He leaves Spinner’s End shortly after getting back from Australia—it’s only a matter of time before someone will come to remove his possessions, and possibly burn the house to the ground—and manages to get his meagre savings from Gringotts. The goblins don’t care who makes withdrawals as long as they have the key.
It’s part chance, part nostalgia that makes him apparate to the Isle of Arran. He travels between villages for a few weeks—under a glamour, of course—and while browsing a second-hand bookshop in Irvine, he finds a tattered copy of a book taking place on the island that his mum used to read to him when he was a child. A visit to an estate agent and a carefully placed Confundus charm later, and he’s the owner of a one-bedroom cottage on the west side of the island. It’s smaller than Spinner’s End and in not much better shape, but there’s a peculiar feeling in his gut when he steps over the threshold to take in the small sitting room and even smaller kitchen. A sense of belonging that he hasn’t felt since the Sorting Hat shouted Slytherin across a crowded Great Hall.
It takes him nearly a week of apparating to and from the mainland to make the place habitable, and the number of shrunken objects in his pockets would be enough to sink him should he misjudge the apparating distance. One morning in mid-October, Severus walks down the creaky stairs and makes himself a morning coffee. The world outside his windows is ablaze with autumn, and in the distance is the glittering surface of the Kilbrannan sound. He could be at peace here, at what feels like the end of the world.
-
Rain pelts against the windowpanes, distorting the world outside his cottage. Severus looks at the clock next to the fridge. Quarter to six. He runs a hand through his hair. This is getting ridiculous. He’s been stalling for the past hour, having several cups of tea and decluttering his magazines. Fucking hell. Before he can talk himself out of it, he raises his wards and apparates.
London is sunny and loud, and as soon as he leaves the apparition spot he wants to leave. He got used to the stillness of his cottage with only the birds and sea for company, and the sounds of traffic and the people everywhere make his jaw clench. This could backfire spectacularly, and not just because he doesn’t know if Grimmauld Place will still admit him. He’s not sure if it’s relief or dread in his gut at seeing the facade of number 12.
The silver knocker seems to mock him. Behind him on the pavement, a toddler screams after being denied to jump on the bin bags. Severus rolls his neck. The screaming toddler and its companion, thankfully, leave him in his staring match with the door. For fucks sake. He is pathetic. He survived that bloody snake but is intimidated by a door.
The knock is unnecessarily loud. Then the door opens, and there she is. She looks as he remembers, all wild curls and bright eyes. Seeing her does something to his chest.
“Hello,” Severus says, like a knobhead.
Hermione’s eyes widen, mouth falling open as she stares at him. “You’re not dead,” she says, voice still stunned.
“Despite a very thorough attempt, it would appear not.”
She’s still clutching the door. A gust of wind makes him shiver. Doubt seeps through the cracks in his chest and makes his palms clammy.
Then she blinks, the stunned look leaving her face, and she steps aside. He takes the silent invitation as a sign she’s at least willing to have a conversation with him. Hermione leans against the closed door, as though the stability of the solid wood is the only thing keeping her standing.
Severus shoves his hands into his pockets. “Are you all right?”
“Am I…” She rubs her neck. “I wouldn’t say that, no. Less than twelve hours ago, I risked my career by sending you back with your memories of the future while also thinking it would be the last time I saw you. Then you show up, clearly not dead, and all you say is hello?”
“I considered a ‘long time, no see’ but it felt too casual.”
He should have known the attempt at humour would fall flat.
“I think I have a right to be a bit taken aback, Severus,” she says, voice going shrill. “You’ve had twenty years to prepare for this, I’ve had less than twenty hours!”
“Do you want me to leave?”
She huffs. “No.”
That’s something, at least. “How about a cuppa, and then we talk? And if you change your mind you can toss me out whenever you’d like.”
Hermione pushes herself off the door. “All right.”
She walks off without waiting for him, but at least she doesn’t slam the door to the kitchen in his face. Severus takes a few steadying breaths before following.