Hermione glanced around at the guests until her gaze caught those eyes. Those midnight black eyes, dark and intense, that made her catch her breath a little every time they met hers.

She remembered black eyes glaring at her through years of Potions lectures. Eyes that cut her as deeply as the sharp words in her fourth year, when her already large teeth were hexed to gargantuan proportions. Dark eyes mocking her as she was labeled an insufferable know-it-all when all she wanted to do was to do things right. Those black eyes haunted her childhood with a piercing hardness that she would never forget.

Then they changed, or maybe she changed and started to see them as they really were. The hardness was not cruelty, it was pain. Mocking was self-defense and cutting glares were loneliness and solitude. As she softened her attitude towards those eyes, the looks she got were softened too. Pain turned to hope, cutting to affection. Although the mocking would always remain, it was gentler now and she knew it was not intended to hurt anymore.

Now black eyes held something different for her, as they focused on her in the midst of her birthday party in the garden of the Burrow. Their owner grinned at her, a blindingly bright smile as those dark eyes blazed with a look of love and admiration, which quickly turned to surprise as that grinning mouth suddenly spit up. She laughed, and as she did, an identical set of dark eyes turned to meet hers. A tiny giggle came from the baby on his shoulder, as Severus’s gaze moved down to the spit up running down his formerly immaculate black robes. Handing the baby to his wife, Severus scowled as he cast a quick Scourgify on himself, but couldn’t help smiling at the sight of Hermione with their son. Hermione looked up into the pair of eyes that had become her past, present, and future and was reminded of how grateful she was that their son had inherited his father’s black eyes.