The Yew House

More AU warning applies.

The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out

You left me in the dark

No dawn, no day, I'm always in this twilight

In the shadow of your heart

I took the stars from our eyes, and then I made a map

And knew that somehow I could find my way back

Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too

So I stayed in the darkness with you

~ Florence and the Machine, Cosmic Love

The white cottage, she learnt, was originally called the Yew House, even if the exact tree it was named after had died centuries before. When Severus' great-great-grandfather, Joachim Princewicz, had moved to England from Poland halfway the XIX century, it was nicknamed the Jew House, for a while.

The house was in a state of ruin, and Joachim was able to buy it for a few pounds. He had finally needed a safe place for his family, instead of just a shelter for the night, because he was a married man and a father to be, now, after toiling at his little trade by the sweat of his brow. He worked hard to restore the thatch and the walls, to keep the cold outside and the warmth inside, and by the time he finished the rebuilding his first child was born, a daughter, and his wife was healthy and safe, for any man should keep his vayb safe, in a house of their own. A couple of years later, his first son Ruben was born, born free and independent, though in a different country from their homeland. But, after all, where was homeland for a Jew?

Ruben, Rachel – the firstborn daughter – and the others who followed them were good children for Joachim. They were obedient and observant of the Law, and had all made good marriages, blessed be the Lord. But Ruben's own son, Elijah, was a different matter. Oh, he was a friendly fellow, knowing more Yiddish jokes than all their relatives in Poland did, but for other aspects of life, he was a disaster. He sported all kinds of modern, weird manners, since he was born exactly at the turn of the century, in 1900. He had gone to the war and survived and employed a lot of time to find a wife. And when he had, he did a terrible marriage.

For May was not only a gentile. She was also a witch. Or in reverse order.

They said they loved each other, but that ought never to justify disparaging marriages, in any case.

They had but one girl, Eileen, and Elijah imbued her with notions about England and Yorkshire, their history, and such nonsense. Joachim had come to England and had found himself in the north, because there was work there for him, but did not go to the big town, York, for it had been unkind to his kin. Better to stay outside the city walls, near the country, because he was a rich man who owned his own house, with a patch of land to cultivate just in case. Elijah, on the contrary, was enamoured of the city, he went there and ate there, in defiance of the cherem. Unconceivable. For Elijah, their ancestry was worth mentioning only for humour's sake, not for remembering where, and with how much effort, they came from. He refused to be called Princewicz and had shortened his surname to Prince, that made him sound more like an Englishman, he said. He wanted to mix in.

And what a mixture did he choose. When she was young, May was as lovely a thing as her name promised. Pureblood, but of the lowest rank of purebloods, the country folks. She prepared philtres and potions for the common people, and they would call her a witch without really believing she was one.

Their little girl had been the first in the family to go to Hogwarts. The Second World War and the Grindelwald war had just ended, then.

Eileen was a sweet, tender girl when she had left for school. By the time, she finally returned with her N.E.W.T.s, she was radically changed. She, a little half-blood of Jewish, Polish and Northern origin, had struggled her way through purebloods that lived in manors, with house-elves and silverware, who celebrated Christmas by a profusion of gifts, and who spoke with received pronunciation. She had to suffer the nastiness of other houses' teachers and students alike for being a Slytherin. She came back harsher, using sarcasm for defence, with a frown to mar her pale brow.

"To endure the patronising manners of Mrs. Foxcroft of Foxcroft Park was one thing. She and Adele's mother, Nora, would shower attentions upon her, filling her with teacakes and letting her play with the puppies. Mrs. Foxcroft would give my mother Nora's cast-off clothes, and she would like them because they were pink and flouncy, or something girls would like, anyway.

"To endure Hogwarts was a horse of a different colour. As my grandfather recommended, she had to cudgel her brains," Snape concluded. "Dark tricks came in useful to impress the purebloods and to keep the bullies at bay."

"I see."

They were standing in front of Eileen's grave, the ground around it drenched from that night's rain, in the small cemetery of Stockton-on-the-Forest. A star was engraved on the granite, and below it, simply,

EILEEN PRINCE SNAPE

Beloved Wife and Mother

Hermione had asked him to go visit Eileen's tomb while they were having breakfast, and when they had finished, he had taken her there, under a leaden sky.

"There was some boy from Hogwarts who went after her. A Hufflepuff, if I'm not mistaken. But she, as her mother, chose a Muggle. Poorer than her. A Slytherin in all but in ambition, my mother was. She was happy enough to move to Manchester and to become an anonymous housewife." Severus snorted gently. "She didn't marry a goy, at least, but the line was broken in any case. We had to put up a bit of a fight to have her buried here. Great-great-grandfather Joachim wouldn't be very pleased with us."

Curiosity about Severus' family had seized Hermione after watching the photographs on the mantelpiece. On that dull Sunday morning, he had been content just talking and she just listening. Dirty-white rags of clouds speckled the sky, now, and the grass kept leaving a wet trail on her feet, covered only by sandals. The land oozed humidity and thunder rumbled in the distance. The smell of rain spread across the field, and the green looked ecstatically brighter.

The landscape was immense, and she imagined herself as its mistress, conveying electricity from heaven to earth, able to make clouds and wind spin around her in a whirling dance. She was a powerful and benign goddess and swirled as well; at the same time, planted as she was at Severus' side, she wouldn't actually change her place for somewhere else.

Rather, she would like to grab Severus and roll with him on the grass, to sink deeper with him in that earthy scent and to knead the soil with her fingers like dough. She wouldn't care for her jeans, or her t-shirt, or even for the blue shirt, he had worn for her after she had cleaned it. She could clean them all over again, for what it mattered. But they were in a graveyard, after all. A bit of dignity was called for, darn it.

Graveyards didn't sadden her. They used to remind her that 'there's nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others die. That's the sensation of life – the sense that we remain.' For the point at issue were the both of them, the two affected survivors, not what lay behind the marble. They were the improbable mixture that resulted from improbable mixtures in the past. The dead slept peacefully in their tombs, while the living was charged with the dangerous, difficult, and inebriating half of the trade.

Hermione noticed that Severus' mother was only four year older than he was at present when she had died, and that when it had happened, he was of the same age as she was now. She gripped his arm more tightly, resting her head on his shoulder as she had already done once. She rubbed her face against his deltoid, and then pressed a kiss on it.

"She was still young," she said. It was a banal thing to say, she knew, and more reasonless her fear, since Severus' father was still alive.

"It all happened very quickly, and there wasn't much to do. We discovered her illness in September, and she died two days before Christmas. 'She is a half-blood,' the Healers told us in St. Mungo's, 'you cannot expect her to react to cures like a pureblood.' Potions, apparently, only worked as painkillers."

Her stomach squirmed.

"My father would read her newspapers about the fall of the Wall, and that kept the both of them occupied throughout the therapy. She was actually happy that my father would stay by her bedside, reading. As far as death goes, it was quite peaceful."

She only knew she couldn't ever stand watching Severus dying again.

"Some people later said that it was appropriate for my mother to die of ovarian cancer, since she was the mother of a murderer," he continued, grimacing. "One of the many tragic ironies of my life, I believe. Like that I would be wounded by a snake, of all the bloody beasts, or that Dumbledore's portrait would give evidence for me during my trial in absentia."

By then, her eyes were full of silent tears. She wouldn't say, "Oh, Severus," because she knew he wouldn't like it.

His eyes flashed and his expression somehow changed. "Or that I would waste my time with a whiner," he added. "Someone who would go into hysterics for the fear of watching me die."

Now she couldn't help. "Oh, Severus," she choked, and she flung herself into his arms.

She hugged him as if air was an enemy to be expelled from betwixt them. She hooked his shoulder blades and sobbed against his collarbone, grateful that his chest was of the right size to imagine it could actually merge with hers, like a platonic androgynous. Severus stroked her hair; or rather, he crumpled it up with one hand, wrapping her from shoulder to shoulder with his other forearm. He rocked her for a while, until her sobs subsided. Then, giving pecks on her forehead, he told her to hush.

"When we argued, all I truly wanted was to cry with you," she sobbed in reply.

"And all I wanted was to prevent it, having got the message. But obviously, once you chose a path, you had to walk insistently along it," he retorted softly.

"You listened to me rambling about another man. How blind I've been," she moaned against his neck.

Soothing strokes petted her back. "That was my biggest chance. I've read so many times of men who, consoling after consoling, win a girl to their bed."

"Severus!"

"But it's true! I immediately thought I should put it into the book."

"You became a writer because you're a liar, like all writers are," she rebuked, brushing away her tears. "Except for Brother Lucretius. I trust only him."

He freed her from the embrace and looked at her, quirking his mouth in a lopsided smile, half-amused, half-regretful. "I'm really sorry of what I heard, honestly. It was somehow comforting to listen of your humiliation. I could have never got on well with the optimistic pest you were once."

"Why, since when are you getting on well with me?" insinuated Hermione with a final sniff. "You have just said I had to suffer to gain your attention."

"Everyone has to suffer to gain something worthwhile."

"Ha!" she puffed, cleaning her glasses.

Severus' slanting smile fell as he turned to the grave. "To go on well doesn't stop men and women from suffering because of each other. My mother was not well repaid for sticking with my father." He tucked his hands into his pockets as he gazed at the stone, eyebrows knit in reminiscence.

"Harry related to us some unpleasing memories about your father," Hermione offered, sounding rude to her own ears. The 'beloved wife and mother' on the granite didn't give her the impression of a lie.

"Potter saw only what I understood about the situation as a child, that is to say, a digit close to zero," Snape said grimly. "My parents argued a lot, that's true, and I got upset by their raised voices. Whenever they became loud, a danger bell would ring in my head. But, in the end, nothing actually happened to worry about; they didn't break up, not even when my father was in prison, neither were they precisely shouting because they couldn't stand each other anymore. Mine was only a childish fear, born out of things I didn't understand at that time."

"Your father was arrested?"

"A couple of times, during strikes, manifestations, or other public gatherings like those. He was always released after a few months." At her inquiring look, he added, "Some time after the mill in which he worked closed down, and he was left unemployed, my father joined a trade union and went into militancy. He would stay away from home for weeks or even for months, following the workers' protestations all over England. However much she might share his ideas, my mother wasn't much happy for his protracted absences. Every time he came back home and announced he would be leaving again, they would became short-tempered – well, my father still is – and fight. She would implore him not to go; that sooner or later he would be arrested again, and in the end he was."

"I'm sorry."

"You shouldn't be. Prison was a budgeted possibility for his actions. Besides, at that time I wasn't much pleased, either, with him spending so much time away, caring only for the wellbeing of other Muggles. Weren't my mother and me just as important? In my tortuous reasoning, I came to the conclusion that the Death Eaters could be a kind of trade union for wizards. One of the finest manifestations of deductive skills ever sprung to my mind." He made a wry face.

"A trade union for wizards?" Hermione's eyes widened. "What else, a charity?"

"Charitable indeed. I had been in the gang for half a year when two of my comrades arrived in Spinner's End to pay homage to my mother. She was home alone – my father had been arrested for the second or third time – and they bullied her for being married to a Muggle. 'See? Muggles are good-for-nothing; they can't even keep themselves out of trouble! What did your husband do now, eh? In jail again. Right? That's what you get for marrying a Muggle!'

"When she attempted to reply, they told her, "Go back to Israel, the both of you! There's no place here for your scum!" She hexed them out of the house, but was shocked. They had been her mates at Hogwarts."

Somewhere above them, it thundered. "Who were they?"

"It doesn't matter. They're dead. Killed during the first war." Severus' mouth twitched.

"When I came back home from a meeting with Avery, I found her in tears, collapsed on the floor. The way she looked at me... it wasn't even angry, only weary. And resigned. My dear comrades had done a fine job, Confringo-ing windowpanes, blasting the sofa, mucking up the house with jinxes. They did even know I was one of them, but they didn't care about that, or they came here on purpose. Not even my own mother was shielded by my party membership. I had made a colossal blunder, shooting myself in the foot like the duped nar I was. Protecting the mice by joining the cats."

The level of humidity in the air was increasing, and the echoes of thunders were getting closer. Hermione stepped back, chewing her lip, the moist ground bending softly under her soles. She turned her gaze on the rows of tombs – a handful of rows, a small community, only the members of four or five families drawn together, somehow, in that little corner of England. Most of what was written on the marble slabs she couldn't read. For a swot, she knew so few languages.

Her curiosity broached sour memories, but Severus was recalling those to her willingly and with moderate spite. He could have said no. They could have stayed at home, playing Gobstones, or whatever other game, even if she was a terrible player. He could have read to her. Instead, he had agreed on carrying her there, and was telling her more than what she demanded, as if it was more important for him to let her have that information than spare himself the pain of remembering. For reasons that still escaped her in full, she had been honoured with his confidence along with his company. When did she earn it, exactly? Once she, too, had crossed failure?

She wondered if she, a Muggle-born, wouldn't ever fall – with the best intentions, or even with second-best ones – into the attractive cobweb of a self-proclaimed pro-Muggle-born party. It was, after all, only too easy, and too convenient to take matters about blood status to an extreme. The nasty comments of Mr. Hullarder, her employer in the Canterbury binding shop, still rang in her mind sometimes. He often indulged in sniping at her for attending a Muggle college. "The Daily Prophet may call you a heroine as much as it wants, Miss Granger, but nothing changes the fact that you know nothing about bookbinding, because you were taught it by Muggles. There's no future for you in this profession." On those occasions, she wondered if he had contributed to the typesetting of Mudbloods and the Dangers They Pose to a Peaceful Pure-Blood Society.

She imagined herself being torn between two parents, one magic-full, and the other magic-less, while her mother and father were not only both Muggles, but also practiced the same job, in the same dentist's surgery, and had come out unscathed even from their hazardous hiding in Australia. Then she figured Severus, scrawnier than today, younger yet surlier, a little punk listening to the Pistols and the Clash (he still kept LPs at home) and hanging out with Avery, Mulciber, or others of their sort, while his father led strikes during what was fittingly called the Winter of Discontent. Her brow furrowed in thought.

What would it feel like, being torn between magic and Muggleness as...as...as she was, after all. And she was not above cherishing magic like a spoiled child, as everybody educated in Hogwarts did, deep inside, no matter what legacy they have. What she had told Severus was true: she didn't know how she would have really handled the talk with a Muggle boyfriend. A Muggle-born she might be, yet she reckoned there were things a Muggle could never understand about her; issues like fighting against a monster who had split his soul into eight parts, or losing friends by the simple utterance of two words. Or grasping that spells could devastate a house – or torture you until you screamed for death – yet couldn't buy you happiness, or shelter people from cancer.

For all its flaws, though, magic could save people, as it had saved Harry, and later, Severus himself. There was a protection that could be offered without magic, as he had protected her – them – her from harm or from being caged into the obsessive images again, or even from feeling alone in that unknown, little walled city. There was a comfort that could be given, no matter how it was fuelled.

She had to distract him from his recollections, she thought, which she knew was costing him more than his casual tone implied. But Severus was going on, "I reported the attack to our squad leader, Regulus Black, telling him I wouldn't tolerate more disrespect toward my own family as long as I joined the party. He told me to run away as fast as I could, so long as I still had the chance."

Enough.

"What happened to Spinner's End?"

Severus finally looked back at her, his eyebrows smoothing as a gust of wind blew behind her and her hair sprawled everywhere. She pulled her ruffled strands away from her face, fighting in vain against the electrostatic effect.

His tone was warmly bored when he replied, "Sold when my father retired. He hadn't been living much there anyway, after my mother's death. He kept saying that he would move south, to the sea – to care after his health for once – but stopped in Wimbledon eventually. Not exactly seaside, is it?"

"No, it is not. But there are the Championships, and it's in the same line to Kew. I suppose you like Kew."

He smiled fleetingly, enough for the double wrinkle to form at the side of his mouth. Thin, graspable skin.

The first drops of rain started to splash on the ground, large and far from one another.

"Let's go back home," she said and finally admitted to herself that hers wasn't just curiosity. It was more like closing a circle sketched many years before. Justice, debt, however you would call that kind of repairing.

With a circular motion, she Conjured a single, white rose and she placed it gently on Eileen's headstone.

"Let's go home," she repeated.

By the time they reached Yew House, a true deluge had broken from the clouds, and buckets of water had sloshed over them faster than she could cry, Impervius! Once safely inside, she dried off the water blotches that had rushed with them into the house and proceeded to cast a Drought Charm upon herself and Severus, but he slunk away from her wand's range. When he appeared back, he was wearing an old black short-sleeved shirt he evidently reserved only for home usage. She glanced at him, but didn't comment.

They ended lunch with a bunch of grapes he had bought the day before. A grape in her mouth, Hermione stood up to look at the heavy rain laving against the windows. She spat the tiny seeds in her fist, clutching them with three fingers as she plucked another grape from the little branch she was holding with her other hand. When she turned, commenting innocently that there was no hope of go out again, for a few hours at least. Severus gestured for her to throw the seeds in his plate.

She took it as a proposal.

On the ground floor, the Yew House hosted only four rooms: the main room, functioning as hall, living room, and writing nook; the bedroom with its adjoining bathroom; the kitchen, plus a small storeroom. The children's room and another, larger storeroom were placed in the attic.

The storm that was raging outside had almost a tropical quality washing the land with sultriness instead of coolness, extrapolating heat from the ground and making the air almost unbreathable with humidity. With doors and windows shut against the downfall, the house had quickly turned into a little greenhouse.

As long as they weren't directed upon himself, Severus accepted tacitly her spells. She roamed through the house casting Cooling charms everywhere, pontificating that every house should have double-glazing to better ward off heat or cold and that it was a great energy waste not to have a properly insulated building. Snape watched her with his arms folded, sometimes pinching the bridge of his nose and shaking his head.

"I take back what I previously said, Granger. As expected, you are trying to change my way of living."

"Only the indispensable parts of it," she panted, fretting around. "You wouldn't have me sleeping in a baking oven, would you? Besides, a lot of mosquitoes will arrive with such a heavy rain. We have to repel them before they get inside. Why don't you grow pelargoniums in the garden?"

"Tsucheppenish."

"What?"

"Pain-in-the-arse," he spelled.

"Why, for so little." She smiled sweetly. "And you have already called me that. Whoever told you had a way with words?"

Severus closed his eyes and his mouth curled in a satisfied smirk. "Oh, she was a beautiful woman."

Lily?

"Is a beautiful woman. Raven hair, ebony eyes, dark complexion, a true championess of her country."

Where?

"She was the one who put hope in me again after my lapse in the quagmire of suicidal obsessions, and the one to urge me to become a writer."

Hermione's wand arm slid at her side, strengthless. This was to be foreseen, she thought. "Why didn't you take her as inspiration for your novel, then?" she asked sourly. "Provided that I didn't serve as a model for the madwoman, of course."

Severus' lips curled again, dangerously. "She lives too far for daily observations."

"Well, you could always use imagination."

When it came, unexpectedly, his laugh sounded genuinely amused. "Granted, I'm turning my dishonourable attentions on you now, Hermione, but I'm not such a paedophile. She was ten or eleven at that time, so how old she would be now? Seventeen? Eighteen? And I haven't even met her since."

He held out a hand for her but she scorned it, trying to keep on sulking. Nevertheless, she asked with a mollified tone, "Who was this girl?"

At a second attempt, his hand reached her and caught one of her ringlets, twirling it around his forefinger. "The daughter of a distant relative of mine, in Portugal. A hundredth-some cousin from my father's Sephardic side. I visited them at the end of my wanderings – or what turned out to be the end of them. This little girl, Teresa, barely knew a string of words in English, but was determined to learn more and resolved that I – I – would be an adequate teacher for her. She wasn't deterred by any of my attempts to drive her away – bizarre child. Eventually, I decided that the best method to get free of her would be, instead of keeping taciturn, flooding her with discourses she wouldn't understand. I started by reciting to her the conquests of Britain from the Romans, to the Saxons, to the Normans, hoping that she would be bored to death. On the contrary, she seemed to love those incomprehensible tales, and would forever ask for more. You see, Teresa could be really obnoxious sometimes, just like someone else I know."

"You could read her Hogwarts: A History."

He leant against the table's edge – he had followed her in the kitchen during her cooling fury – and smoothed the fading remainders of her pretended sulk with his thumb.

"The purpose was to repel her, not myself. Besides, she is a Muggle. Quite an insistent one. 'You should write them down,' she repeated to me, half in English, and half in Portuguese. Later, I thought it couldn't be that wrong to obey. But maybe I simply misunderstood what she was telling me."

She stepped closer, subsided, enclosing his shoulders with her arms and bending over his ear to whisper, "If things went as you say, Severus, she just liked your voice."

A/N.

I warned you about the non-canonicity of this chapter, didn't I?

"There is nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others die. That's the sensation of life...the sense that we remain" from Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, ch. LIV.

Yiddish: vayb = wife, goy = gentile, nar = fool, tsucheppenish... well, you got it.

My beta, Valady, adds: Cherem= (Old Testament) literal translation "something removed from common use and set apart for a special purpose." Also: "Nine times out of ten the use of the word 'cherem' is to mean a type of spiritual excision or excommunication. There are different levels of cherem, but a person in 'cherem' is not allowed to be part of the religious community" -- "excommunicated!" York was subject to a cherem because of the pogrom in Clifford's Tower in 1190.

The episode with Teresa was inspired by an Italian song, La canzone della bambina portoghese (The song of the Portuguese girl) by Nomadi. You can hear it here, with English subtitles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJkDFaP8-8k

Patiently alphaed by Pink Raccoon and Alfavia. Additional corrections by RobisonRocket.