Chapter Text
“It’s time.”
The strong winds outside rustle the leaves of the tree beside the window. She stares outside resolutely, the words she spoke moments before hang in the air as the silence stretches out. The house is empty save for herself, and Crookshanks, who in his old age is often on the sofa before the fireplace, napping.
The room she is in is mostly empty, with the exception of the double bed pushed up against the far wall and the two nightstands on either side of it. It is a guest room, for all intents and purposes, although she doesn’t entertain all that much these days. Her work is far too busy and keeps her at the office late frequently. This might have been a nightmare to anyone else, but to Hermione, it is as ingrained as breathing.
Scratching her fingernails over her palm, she sighs heavily as she looks around. Originally the room’s intended purpose had been a nursery. She’d bought the house with Ron more than ten years earlier, but that had been a different time. In their divorce, she asked only to keep the house, and he had been more than happy to let her have it. Children had been important to him, but ten years earlier, she was focused on building a career.
Now things are different; she is different.
Dropping a hand to her stomach, she presses on her abdomen. It lies as barren as the room she stands in, and there is a twisting in her gut. It isn’t that she regrets divorcing Ron—their relationship had been on the rocks for some time, and her resistance to his pressure to have children early had been the last straw. No. She simply regrets that in all this time, in the nine long years since their separation, she has not managed to find another person who shares her same interests and desires.
He does, her mind supplies unhelpfully. She frowns and pushes the notion away. Her unwelcome feelings for her associate and colleague always manage to worm their way out at the most inconvenient times. She drops her hand, closing her eyes for a moment as she tries to imagine what it might be like if it was not some unrealistic dream she harbours, her most closely kept secret.
Shaking her head, Hermione leaves the room and closes the door softly behind her. She walks downstairs to the sitting room and finds Crooks exactly where she expects him to be. Instead of waking him, she putters into the kitchen to find his medicine and mixes it into some wet food for him. His joints are a little stiff now, and she knows he’s in some pain. Lucky for her, her business partner is a former potions master and keeps her stocked with a steady supply of the potion to keep Crookshanks’ pain at bay.
She makes tea and carries it, along with the food for Crookshanks, with her into the other room. Setting it down on the floor, she helps him down so he can slowly munch on it before she settles on the sofa with her tea and a book.
While she reads, her eyes glaze over as she becomes distracted by her runaway thoughts once more. Never in a million years would anyone suspect that she wished to start a family. Hell, she had been certain for years that children were not for her. And now she is thirty-five years old, all of her friends are married and have children, and she is still trying to work through the mess that is her social life. Because in the last twelve months, she has noticed a shift, and now she wishes she’d spent more time after her divorce trying to meet someone new.
You have met someone, her mind supplies. She snorts to herself, alarming her cat as he eats. The idea of him even being interested in her is laughable. Swallowing a mouthful of tea to distract herself, Hermione does the only thing she can think of and Occludes. Hard. He was the one to teach her this particular skill as well, though now she finds herself using it more in personal situations than at work.
Her eyes drift to the fire crackling away merrily in the fireplace, the red-orange flames dancing against the stone and reflecting warm light.
It occurs to her suddenly that her lack of love life does not have to be the nail in the coffin of her desire to have a child. Nor does her own foolish pining for the one man she knows will never return her affection have to stand in the way. There are options, she recalls, for people like her, and resolves herself to begin looking into them at a later junction. Smiling to herself, the knot in her stomach abates as she shifts slightly on the sofa to accommodate Crookshanks as he leaps up after finishing his dinner.
At least, she thinks to herself, not all hope is lost.
“You’re joking.”
She stares at the surprised faces of her friends, hands in her lap twisting the bottom edge of her jumper anxiously. A few weeks have passed since she made her decision to explore what avenues were available to her in the magical world for reproduction. It isn’t like the Muggle world, where there are fertility clinics all over the place. She has had to research and ask questions to the point of exhaustion.
Now that she has a more clear idea of what she is doing, she’d made the decision the evening before that she would let her friends know what she intends to do. The confused faces staring back at her make her wonder if she should have waited longer to inform them.
She glances up at Ron who is standing by the fireplace cradling his newborn son against his shoulder, bouncing lightly with the child. She feels her gut clench a little at the sight. If she’d stayed with him, that could have been her child. Hermione gives herself a mental shake; the child he holds would never have been her own, because whether she’d wanted children at the time or not, their relationship had an expiry date.
“I’m not joking,” she says finally.
Ginny is the next person to finally shake off her shock to speak. “I thought you didn’t want kids,” she says, glancing briefly over to where her brother stood.
“I just didn’t want children then,” Hermione admits quietly and casts her eyes down to stare at the fraying corner of the rug on the floor.
She feels a hand come down onto her shoulder gently and cranes her head around to look up at Harry who has stepped up closer to her. His expression is one of understanding and he offers her a small smile.
“I don’t think Ginny meant to interrogate you,” he tells her, and the red-headed witch nods vehemently.
“Of course, not!” Ginny agrees. “This is just taking us by surprise, as I’m sure you understand.”
Hermione breathes out a shaky sigh. Her friends are right, of course. Her desire for a child is something she has kept to herself for this very reason; because telling them that she wants one after years of not being interested is terrifying for her.
Ron, she realises has been strangely silent since his initial outburst. Her gaze moves back over to him, and he merely appears thoughtful as he watches the conversation unfold. His wife, Gabrielle, is sitting with their eldest daughter on her lap, a sweet child with strawberry blonde hair by the name of Rose. She does not seem to be at all concerned by this revelation either.
Ron finally speaks and despite her concerns, he sounds very calm. She attributes a lot of this personal growth to having Gabrielle in his life—she has been a good influence in a way that Hermione never was. “So, who’s the lucky bloke?” he asks her.
She swallows hard. In for a penny, she thinks. “Well, that’s the thing,” she begins nervously. “There is no bloke.”
Ron’s brows, along with everyone else’s, raise. “Explain,” he demands, nonplussed.
“It’s called Artificial Insemination,” she begins. “Muggles have been doing it for years with a lot of success. I’ll simply be choosing a donor from a list and then I’ll go to see my Healer at St Mungo's to have the insemination completed.”
“You’re going to let a stranger fill you with their sperm?” Ron says bluntly before he realises he’s spoken it aloud.
“Ron!” Gabrielle scolds gently, covering their daughter’s ears. “Pas devant les enfants, mon amour.”
He flushes and sheepishly rubs the back of his head with his free hand. “Sorry.”
Hermione watches the domestic scene with amusement. They are a much better couple than she and Ron ever were, and she likes Gabrielle. She is beautiful, kind, and Ron adores her; she makes him feel important in a way Hermione was never able to.
“To address your outburst, yes, the donor will be anonymous,” she says with a chuckle.
Just as she is about to elaborate further, a loud cry comes from upstairs and Harry dashes out of the room. One of their kids crying meant the other wasn’t too far off being awake after their midday nap as well. Harry reappears after a minute with a child in each arm, and he passes the youngest off to Ginny and continues to hold and rock their toddler James gently.
“So, what did I miss?” he asks.
“Nothing,” Hermione replies. “I just—this was a hard decision for me to make, so I really hope I have your support, is all.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to wait and meet someone?” Ginny prods.
Hermione shakes her head, her gut clenching immediately at the thought. No. All of her attempts at dating had yielded nothing. She knows a large part of the problem is that nobody quite compares to him but she doesn’t voice this. None of her friends would be able to understand her attraction to him, especially given how unkind he’d been to them when they were younger. But Hermione knows he is not that two-dimensional figure, the callous bastard, anymore. She still isn’t about to announce her unrequited feelings to the room.
“No,” she says firmly. “This is my decision, and I am at peace with it.”
“We support you,” Harry tells her.
Gabrielle nods along with him, “Yes, you will always have our support.”
“When are you going to tell mum?” Ron asks her with a smirk. He means, of course, Molly Weasley, who, despite their divorce, insists that Hermione is still one of her children.
She feels like a bucket of cold water has been poured over her. “Merlin, I hadn’t thought about that,” she says with a sense of dread creeping over her. “Perhaps I’ll wait until I’m already pregnant.”
“That is a very good idea.” Ginny grins.
Hermione slumps with relief. Telling her friends had, on a whole, gone a lot better than she had expected. Now, she realises, the only one left to tell was him.
Fuck.
After her relative success on the weekend sharing her decision with her friends, she is more nervous than ever, come Monday morning.
She heads into the office, grabbing a tea instead of her usual coffee on the way to work, nerves making it impossible for her to have anything too caffeinated. As her feet touch down inside the Ministry Atrium, she makes her way quickly to the lifts with her briefcase in one hand and her travel mug in the other. Making it just in time before the door closes, she gives the only other occupant a grateful smile for holding the doors as the lift begins its descent. Down in the lower levels, she disembarks, and her shoes click on the marble floors as she enters the Department of Mysteries offices.
Heading straight for her shared office, she nods and smiles at Agnes, the Department Junior Assistant, on the way.
She tries to nudge open the door to the office with her hip, but just as she is ready to give up and put down her briefcase, Hermione peers up to see her partner striding towards her. He is later than usual, she realises, as he is normally always at work before she is. In two more steps, he is in front of her, looking down his long, hooked nose at her with a half-smile curving his thin lips.
She feels her stomach flip at him standing so near to her and almost forgets to greet him. “Good morning, Severus,” she says, smiling at him gratefully as he reaches past her to open the door to their office.
“Hermione,” he acknowledges briefly before gesturing for her to enter.
They both walk in and settle at their desks that are in the centre of the office positioned to face one another. This makes it easier for them to work without getting in one another’s way, but also enables their workflow to be more fluid. At first she had been thrilled when he suggested it, but now she finds it hard; it is difficult to constantly be faced with the object of one’s interest for the entire workday, she realises.
“Tea?” he says, one of his dark eyebrows raising.
“It wasn’t a coffee day,” she replies.
“Every day is a coffee day,” he informs her smugly.
She rolls her eyes at him. “How was your weekend?” she prompts.
“Passable,” he replies gruffly. “Yours?”
Hermione has no idea why she suddenly has no idea what to say to him. She spent the previous evening going over every possible morning scenario in her head to prepare for this, and she is still frazzled. “Not bad,” she answers, hedging. She doesn’t need to drop that information on him first thing in the morning, after all.
They get started on reading their mail and going over any paperwork and loose ends from the week prior, and she spends the entire time chewing on her bottom lip and mulling. By the time they’ve been working there for two hours quietly, she is a veritable balloon of anxiety merely waiting for the slightest pressure before she’ll burst. Severus looks up at her curiously, as if he can sense her tension from across their desks. He probably can, she reasons. They’d been working together for long enough.
“What is it?” he asks impatiently.
“Nothing,” she lies automatically.
“Granger,” he says, a warning in his tone. “Either you tell me now, or I’ll get it out of you at some stage, and that won’t be anywhere near as pleasant.”
She sighs heavily in defeat. “I am going to have a baby,” she says quickly.
There is no disguising his shock from the way he sharply inhales. “What?” he says in disbelief.
Hermione realises how that sounds and hastily corrects herself. “Oh, I’m not pregnant.”
His shoulders visibly sag. “Then what did you mean, ludicrous woman?” he snaps.
She swallows and takes a second to calm herself. “I am planning to have a child, and in the near future, I will be attempting magical Artificial Insemination,” she tells him. “I’ve been seeing some Healers about it and done some research, and I’ve made the decision to try and have a baby.”
His face is a cold, impassive mask, making it difficult for her to tell what he’s thinking. “When did you decide this? Have you spoken to anyone else about it?”
“I told Harry and the others yesterday,” she says, shuffling the papers in front of her into a neat pile. “Other than the four of them, you’re the only other person I’ve told.”
“Why?”
“Why did I tell you, or why am I trying to have a baby?” She has a feeling she knows the answer, but she wants to hear him ask it.
“Why do you want a child?”
“I just do,” she admits quietly, looking away from him. She finds it impossible for her to continue to meet his dark, penetrating gaze.
He makes no further comment, and they both lapse into silence. Hermione feels self-conscious now about admitting this to him and wonders if she has told him too soon. She wants to know what he is thinking, but short of asking him, it doesn’t seem like he’s about to volunteer that information.
When lunchtime rolls around, she stands up from her desk to stretch and decides to go up to the Ministry cafeteria to hunt down something to eat.
“Are you coming for lunch?” she asks him, pausing at the door.
“No.”
His monosyllabic response sends a chill down her spine, and she notes he doesn’t even bother to look up at her. She tries not to read too deeply into it; he could simply be engrossed in his paperwork or research, so she simply leaves the office and goes up to eat.
When she returns to the office, he isn’t in there, and she plops down into her seat feeling a little listless. She pulls a new stack of case files towards her so she can begin to peruse them while she awaits his return and nearly jumps out of her seat when the door opens loudly. Severus strides inside looking like a storm cloud with his mouth set in a hard line and the crease between his brows looking more pronounced.
“Have you eaten?” she asks, trying to ease the tension.
“Yes.”
Another monosyllabic reply. The knot in her stomach has returned, and now there is a piercing pain in her chest that makes it feel as though there is a switchblade sliding around under her ribcage. It feels impossibly stifling, so she simply passes him one of the case files as he retakes his seat and they lapse into an uncomfortable silence.
At the end of the workday, she feels as though nothing was accomplished, and when she drags herself out of her chair to pack her things into her briefcase, Severus continues to appear engrossed in his work. Her throat feels tight, and her eyes burn, the desire to cry is so strong. At the door, she pauses to turn and look back at him to find he has not moved, nor is he in any way responsive to her. She wonders why he is suddenly acting so cold to her after so many years of them getting along well.
“Good night, Severus,” she tells him, turning to walk out.
When silence greets her in response, she finds it very difficult to keep her composure until she is able to make it home.