Sufficient

“There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.”
-John Stuart Mill

He had lived his life in a state of certainty. When he was very young, he had been certain that he was going to become a great wizard. Then, after his seventeenth birthday, he was certain that the Dark Lord was going to make him a great wizard and promise vengeance to those who had wronged him. After the death of his first and perhaps only friend at the hands of his Master, he had transferred allegiances, and had been sure that he would not live to see the end of the war.

Certainty, Severus Snape had decided, was not necessarily the way to live.

When he had blinked into consciousness seven weeks after the Final Battle, to find that he was not dead and that he was not in Azkaban, but instead the recipient of an Order of Merlin, First Class and only mildly injured due to the bite of the damned serpent, he had been certain that he was dreaming.

Thus, when Hermione Granger had rushed to his bedside two days later, eyes bright with unshed tears, he was incredibly uncertain.

They had begun a tentative relationship, with Hermione chomping at the bit and Severus digging in his heels. She was the one to finally propose.

Three years later, the reinstated Potions master of Hogwarts married the brightest-witch-of-her-age in a hushed ceremony at the Ministry of Magic.

Still, he had made no promises beyond his vows. “I love you,” she would murmur in the quiet moments, when her stomach ached from laughing, while she paced about their quarters reading Arithmancy journals, before she went to bed. The words fell freely from her lips, but he was still hesitant. Doubtful. She was certain, but he was wary of the idea of certainty.

He did not change. He still skulked in the shadows at celebrations, wore dark clothing and groused about Harry and Ron. His teeth were still crooked, though he had begun to take more notice of his appearance. He terrorized first years and favored Slytherin above all others, and he still remained a rather despised figure.

Six months into their marriage, she crawled into their shared bed where he was already propped against the pillows, marking third-year essays on unicorn hair, and told him she loved him and that she was seven weeks pregnant.

He was not happy.

Maybe she didn’t notice, as she floated about in a haze of pleasure and contentment and absolute certainty. When her stomach began to swell, her complexion to glow and her smiles to become secretive and frequent, he began to worry.

“What is there to worry about?” she asked him, looking vaguely pleased. She and the best Healers had cast every diagnostic spell known. The baby was healthy, a boy who was quiet and typically inactive according to his mother. “Like you,” she grinned, pressing a kiss to his forehead and holding a protective hand on her stomach.

He was afraid this child would be like him. Sullen, both in personality and looks, unfavoured by most, withdrawn, easily hurt. Why, he wondered, would anyone wish a child to resemble him?

He would not discuss names. He did not attend the numerous shopping excursions his young and happy wife went on, pleading that he had too much work to do, that he was tired, that he did not have the slightest idea what color the nursery should be.

When he came back to their small home after classes, stepping out of the fireplace and looking grim, to find her in the nursery waving her wand and wearing an old jumper and trousers, he cringed to see that she had painted the walls a pale shade of mint.

“It made me think of you,” she explained, when she showed him the Wee Wizard’s Illustrated Guide to Potions Ingredients. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

He retched in the loo for an hour afterwards.

She grew, and one cold night in October she screamed his name and they took a cab to the hospital. All her screaming about potions and wands necessitated a quick Obliviate of the curious cab driver, and when Severus finished he found that his wife had disappeared into the hospital.

He didn’t follow.

Three hours later, he was leaning against the doorframe of her room, arms crossed under the billowing black cloak and his eyes fierce. Hermione, his Hermione, was lying in bed, her head turned towards the window. The baby was nowhere in sight. For one cold, dark moment he thought something terrible had gone wrong, but then there was a sound that made him remember how to breathe again.

He must have made a sound, because she turned towards him them, her face tight with worry and pain and something else he couldn’t identify.

He thought she would ask where he had been. Why he hadn’t been there. He expected tears, screaming, throwing, and her to tell him she was leaving. What he did not expect was to hear her offer him the baby.

“Come here,” she whispered, voice raw, “and meet our son.”

He didn’t move.

“I named him Silas,” she continued, as if he had been there all along, “because I didn’t know what you wanted.”

He was silent.

“Silas Severus Snape,” she said, her voice firm and quiet, “for his father.”

He almost left. The air was tight with the possibility.

But he did not. Instead, he stepped into the room and kissed her on the cheek, studiously avoiding the mewling infant in the Moses basket beside her.

She wanted to leave that very night, so in the first snow of the winter, a highly unusual weather for late October, they left London with a healthy baby boy and an exhausted but pleased mother. Severus was somber and still as ever.

He did not hold the child. The first three days were filled with visitors, her parents, her friends, vague acquaintances that cooed over the baby and brought brightly-colored gifts. Hermione presided over them all, enthroned in a chintz armchair and supplied with tea and biscuits by an attentive, if rather sullen, husband. But he didn’t look at the baby.

By the third night she was exhausted, her eyes glassy with effort and her exertions covered by beautiful glamours. He offered a cup of tea that he dosed with Dreamless Sleep, and she had to be carried to their bed.

When the baby cried, he stared at the ceiling and recited as much of a rune alphabet as he could remember. Finally, the cries became too much to ignore and he glanced helplessly at his wife, who snored under the scrutiny. He swung his long legs out of bed and walked slowly to the baby’s room, his wand drawn and his features tight.

Was it wrong to be more scared of a baby than the Dark Lord?

The door opened easily and the child stopped sobbing expectantly, but when Severus failed to continue into the room the whimpering resumed.

He considered a Silencing Spell, and winced to think of Hermione’s disappointment.

Strengthening his resolve, he stepped into the room. Moved over to the cradle, looked down in the darkness for the first time at the infant.

There was little to see in the weak moonlight. A shock of dark hair, the Gryffindor pyjamas that Minerva had seen fit to give them as a joke, tiny hands balled into fierce fists; all were vague enough to be Harry Potter’s latest brat.

Finally, hesitantly, he cast a whispered spell and nearly sobbed when he saw the child lying there.

His child. Beyond any doubt. With all the certainty the world had to offer.

Dark hair that was fine and shining in the darkness, with the slightest hint of his mother’s unruliness. He couldn’t be sure, but certainly the child was much longer than other babies, and when the baby unclenched his tiny fists his father watched the long fingers unwind and was reminded of his own. The eyes, blinking up in the sudden flare of light, the darkest shade of brown he had ever witnessed, something out of a potions textbook. Cautiously, he glanced at the child’s nose, and could have wept with exasperation and pleasure. For there, centered on his child’s face, was the Snape nose in miniature.

When Hermione woke up the next morning she was alone with a saliva-soaked pillow and the headache she had been nursing for three days gone. She propped herself up on one arm, glanced about the room hesitantly, and then, with a sudden screech of horror, she threw back the covers and ran towards the baby’s room.

And shrieked again when she noted the empty cradle.

“If you don’t stop,” came a silky voice from behind her, “you’re going to start him going again.”

When she turned to find her husband, wearing a black T-shirt she had gotten him ages ago and a pair of boxers (neither of which he had ever worn before), she nearly wept.

Because in his arms, wearing the tiniest set of billowing robes she had ever seen, lay Silas, his large dark eyes blinking curiously at her and his hand fisted in his father’s T-shirt. “I think,” Severus began, slowly, while Hermione’s expression traveled through a plethora of emotions, “that he rather likes this better than those ridiculous pyjamas of Minerva’s.”

“I like those pyjamas,” Hermione retorted, her voice soft, and with that, her son gave her the first of what was sure to be a great many scowls.

And this is how Severus Snape, the Potions master of Hogwarts, the turncoat Death Eater and the murderer of Albus Dumbledore, the cynic and the pessimist and the self-loathing greasy git, became absolutely certain that the world could be a good place, a place that he wanted to be in, and that he loved Hermione and his son beyond any shadow of a doubt. And it was sufficient.