Author's Note: Thanks to thehalflie for fabulous beta-ness.

———

She finished smoothing his hair into place, then adjusted his collar—making sure that the scar was mostly concealed—so that he wouldn’t be able to see her shaking hands. The scent of her perfume mingled with the sharpness of his cologne, creating a unique smell that would always recreate nausea and a strange, soaring feeling in the pit in her stomach.

“I don’t know why I agreed to this.”

“Turn round,” she said. He obeyed, and she cast a spell over his dress robes to remove any lint. “You’ll be fine. Besides—an Order of Merlin, first class. It’s just what you always wanted.”

“A cottage by the sea would be preferable.”

A smile tugged at her lips as he turned back to face her. “That’s what the grant money is for; all you have to do is survive the ceremony. Are you ready to go?”

His eyes grew wider in a face still gaunt from long months of illness, and she felt the sudden urge to pull him in for a hug—he still wasn’t far enough from his deathbed for her to stop panicking every time he lost his breath.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

A flick of her wand turned off the light and she tucked her hand in his, checking the mirror once more to ensure that her dress robes fell correctly. “Good.”

*

The aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts had left them all stunned. Hermione couldn’t quite remember what she had been doing—a metallic taste in her mouth and a dulled sense of sorrow were all that came to mind—but the Auror sprinting to an overwhelmed Kingsley Shacklebolt, shouting that Severus Snape was alive remained clear in her mind. She thought that she recalled him tripping over a mangled body in his haste, but that might have been a detail added later to contextualise the incident—it was hard to tell.

After that, there were only snippets: brushing the eyes of little Dennis Creevey closed with her fingertips, watching the horrified expression on Molly Weasley’s face as Fred’s body was recovered from the wreckage, vomiting up her first meal in two days because she didn’t fully believe that the chicken breast wasn’t human…

And then, finally, the trembling, violent realisation that came with the terror that kept her from breathing—the realisation that this was what a nervous breakdown felt like.

In the end, she had offered to help with Snape’s recovery because she couldn’t take another memorial service. One look at him, with plastic tubes encasing his body and what looked like a dialysis bag, made her stomach clench.

Still, at least he was alive, and in some dark unconscious corner of her mind she had already decided that this wasn’t going to be another corpse on its way into the ground.

*

Hermione tried to let go of his hand as they appeared before the Ministry, but he had latched on, nearly crushing her bones in his damp grasp. Instead, she half led, half dragged him towards the telephone booth, trying to keep her worry from revealing itself in the tensed muscles of her back and the half-stumbling steps she took.

“Where do we need to go, again?” His voice, which had once seemed so inapproachable and large, echoed into the chamber.

“The banquet hall.”

She had only been there once—last time, for the ceremony when she, Harry, and Ron had been given their awards—but this seemed different, somehow. Then, she had been half-drunk on cheap, catered wine and staring in wide-eyed awe at the throngs of people milling around the room.

This time, it felt different. She was terrified, for one thing, no longer filled with the hesitant invincibility that came with survival. And, this time, it wasn’t about her, but Severus, who was all too aware of his mortality and, in spite of her lectures telling him otherwise, not expecting a warm reception.

As they paced through the darkened corridors of the Ministry, she felt a stab of relief that she had had the forethought to bring him through the rear entrance. He didn’t need the anxiety that came with people—their pressing, uncomfortable warmth, the shouts of greeting. Even if this crowd of upper-level ministry employees was relatively subdued, Severus, as she had learned rather quickly, was the sort of person to panic at the sight of more than three people in the house.

*

She had learned this after what must have been two months of taking care of him—he was back at Spinner’s End, albeit still mostly bedridden, and they had moved past the sneered insults stage into a sulky and resigned silence. Harry and Ron had turned up after Severus had been put to bed, takeaway extended.

It had been weeks since she had seen them properly—her days off were spent sleeping in her old bedroom at her parents’ house—and she had let them in with hugs and muted squeals, dragging them into the lounge and urging Ron to pass round the food. It had been ages since she had eaten anything that she hadn’t cooked herself, and the aromatic spices created a sudden stab of hunger. Ginny and Neville arrived a moment later with bottles of wine, and Luna followed closely with Sentient Scrabble (now includes automatic spell-check!) tucked under her arm.

Placing a quick Muffliato around the room to avoid disturbing Severus with their laughter, Hermione joined them and quickly lost herself in the copious amounts of food and the discussion of whether or not Ancient Egyptian, which Luna claimed to be fluent in, counted.

“English only,” Ron said. Hermione suspected that he was using half-masticated food as a deterrent; he’d only stop chewing with his mouth open when Luna stopped arguing.

“But, Ronald,” said Luna, “where does the line between English and other languages lie? Because if we’re only using English, then Middle and Old English ought to count as well, don’t you think? And what about words like ‘ballet’? Are they English or French?”

He scowled. “But Egyptian needs whatsits—those things—symbols?” He looked to Hermione for back up. “Don’t they?”

Luna waved her wand over the letters, replacing them with hieroglyphs with typical serenity. “Now we can.”

Hermione tuned out Ron’s protests of unfairness in favour of slipping into the kitchen to check the time. It was nearly time to inject him with his nightly dose of the numbing potion that would enable him to last the night, so she prepared the syringe, careful to let out any bubbles of air. She had been squeamish about this at first, both terrified of mixing up the dosage and of breaking the surface of his skin. It seemed invasive in a way that the tests for his blood content hadn’t—those were a quick prick, a drop of blood on a small monitor, and that was all.

The injections terrified her—the act of forcing a substance into his body with the push of his thumb, even when he was nearly screaming with pain, was repulsive. It hadn’t helped that when she had first started learning his blood vessels were constricted from dehydration and blood loss.

“Hermione?” Harry’s voice, a half-whisper, made her nearly jump out of her skin.

“Yes?”

“Do you mind if I come with you?”

She intentionally avoided his eyes, knowing that they would be wide and pleading. “You know that he hates visitors.”

The unspoken “especially you” hung between them.

“I just want to see him—make sure that he doesn’t need anything else.”

“Harry…”

But she made the mistake of looking up and seeing the desperation in his eyes, emphasised by the dark circles under them—although she was having difficulty sleeping, it was nothing compared to being hounded by the press, who wanted mourning statements about dead friends one moment and victory speeches the next.

“Fine,” she said, “but make yourself useful and bring up a glass of water, won’t you?”

The moment she pushed open the bedroom door, she realised that she had made a mistake. For one thing, Severus wasn’t asleep, which meant that he wouldn’t be too dazed to realise who had come with her when she woke him up; he was sitting up with a book. For another, the movement of expression from mild irritation at the interruption to blind fury brooked no argument.

*

When Severus rejoined her, he was looking whiter than she had seen him in weeks. She suspected that the trip to the loo had had as much to do with relieving his churning stomach as it did with bowel movements, but said nothing, only straightened his collar again and patted him on the shoulder. His eyes remained trained on the wall behind her, blank and not registering anything that met them

“Just think—within two hours it will be over,” she said, but he gave no indication that he heard. It only made the knot in her stomach tighten further.

They slid into their seats at a table with the other recipients a moment after the presentation began, which was for the best, really—Severus didn’t need to be rushed by a stampeding horde of cameras and Quik-Note Quills. Automatically she sought out Harry and Ron, who were seated across the room with their medals pinned to their chests. She waved surreptitiously, outlining the grooves on her own Order of Merlin absently with her other hand.

*

His reaction to Harry’s impromptu visit had been crisp in her mind upon receiving Kingsley Shacklebolt’s missive. It had taken over a month for her to regain any modicum of trust—he would only let her perform the injections when he was trembling too heavily to do them himself and, now that he was able to move about at will, would watch her closely as she cooked, as if he thought she would toss something potentially lethal in when he let his mind wander.

Although that had been months prior, she had run through the situation repeatedly, not wanting to make the same mistake again.

Several days passed before she worked up the nerve to broach the subject, and over the course of those days the heavily creased parchment sat heavy in her pocket, a constant reminder of the mistake she was about to make. She finally mentioned it during a particularly pleasant evening—dinner had turned out, for once, and they were eating on his sofa in comparatively companionable silence. Rather than explaining, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the letter, passing it off.

He read it once, then set it down, not seeming to react. Not wanting to be the first to speak, Hermione stoked the fire, nearly burning her hand in the process.

“You can owl Shacklebolt and tell him I’m not interested,” Severus said after a moment had passed. “If they feel so compelled to honour me, they can award it in absentia. And you can stop being so bloody diplomatic.”

“I’m not—”

“Not what?” His tone grew mocking, but she could see something akin to terror in his eyes. “You waited eight days to give me the letter, and I can tell you’ve been fretting about it this entire time.”

She met his challenge with a glare, the aftertaste from dinner going sour. “Of course I was—you’re beyond being pain in the arse when something rubs you the wrong way.”

“Why bother, then?”

It was a difficult question to answer in specific terms. He ought to be taken care of, in general, because he was a hero, really, and because she didn’t want his sacrifices to go unrecognised; she, herself, looked after him, because she liked him as a person—and perhaps pitied him a bit, although she would never tell him that.

So, she didn’t answer it. Instead, she asked, “And if you don’t keep living in Wizarding society, what are you going to do? Who do you think is paying your expenses right now? The Ministry. And they’re offering you more with the award.”

The fork that was in his hand fell to the plate with a clatter, and she could see now-familiar fury etched between his eyebrows. “What will I do with it once I have it?”

“Buy a new house. Start a business. Backpack across Australia—I don’t know. Try living.”

“And if I don’t want to?”

There was another silence, less companionable this time. The air seemed to hum as she gathered up her dishes with a steady focus that she didn’t want to break—she was afraid of what she might say if she did.

“Then,” she replied, walking stiffly into the kitchen, “I truly can’t help you.”

*

Kingsley Shacklebolt rattled his way through the ceremony with the familiar steady pace he adopted when he wasn’t in the midst of hexing someone; the soothing rise and fall of his voice only frustrated her, gently sawing at her nerves until she wanted to march up and take over. Instead, she toyed with her fork, folded her napkin in several creative ways, and tried very hard not to look at Severus.

She failed; he was poking at his food dispassionately, face tight, drawn, even wary. He seemed determined to create some sort of architectural wonder out of his mashed potatoes, although as yet she wasn’t entirely sure whether it was shaping up to be an exact replica of the Eiffel Tower or the Chrysler Building. He caught her eye once, quickly, before glancing away, but it told her everything that she needed to know.

He was terrified.

It dawned on her that all of the other recipients had been called up and that the speech Shacklebolt was giving was about him. She tried to focus on the words, but that same frustratingly patient tone made it impossible. It didn’t particularly matter; he couldn’t say anything in the speech that she didn’t already know.

When his name was called, Severus froze momentarily. Gently, Hermione pried the fork from his grasp, squeezing his hand encouragingly.

“That’s you.”

He nodded, then stood to walk mechanically to the stage, apparently deaf to the roars of the cheering crowd. Hermione joined them, clapping until her hands were numb, then fell silent as the medal was pinned on his breast and he shook hands with the Ministry representatives.

His smile as he returned breathlessly to his seat was tremulous, not quite enough alone, but when combined with the gleam in his eye, it told her that he was relieved. Relieved and happy. She stood to meet him and pecked him on the cheek before he had the chance to sit down.

“Welcome to the world,” she whispered in his ear. “I hope you enjoy living.”