Thank you for reading! I don't own any of Harry Potter! Please let me know if you enjoy! Updates every Saturday!
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Late one stormy night, Severus returned from yet another impromptu meeting with Voldemort to find Lily staring out the window at the pouring rain while she aimlessly rocked in the wooden chair.
She didn't bother to look over as Severus swept across the room, careful to make his footsteps heavy so that his presence would be known before he managed to startle his wife.
Her emerald eyes were glazed over with a poignant dismay that shattered Severus's heart to witness as he made it to her side, knelt down, and took her hand in his.
"............Lily?" He asked in his velvet voice.
Slowly, she turned her head to glance over as her features twisted in a tormented frown, "Hey, Sev.......What's the matter?"
"........I'm home, my love." Severus answered in his low drawl, as if he expected that simple phrase to give her reason enough to take comfort and drop her morose countenance.
The smile he received in return was genuine but short, too short, fleeting and flashing as it graced her lips and died like a shooting star moving overhead, "Oh........How nice.......I'm very glad, dear"
The pained look that crossed his face sent Lily spiraling through instant regret as she shook her head and nodded quickly, "I-I didn't mean to sound so flat! I'm very happy you're home, sweetheart, I am! It's just that-.......I'm afraid my mind-"
"-Is on other matters, I understand." Severus nodded sympathetically as he raised Lily's hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her knuckles.
He hoped his small act of commiseration may help her to forgive his rudeness, but his heart swelled as she slipped her fingers from his grasp and threw her arms around him.
"This is turning out far worse than I ever could have imagined." She confessed beside Severus's ear in an exasperated little sigh, "No one mentioned this child......Trelawney did not predict it, Dumbledore did not prepare for it, what are we supposed to do, Sev?! I can't confine her to the manor. She won't listen to me anyway! She'll........"Lily gasped for breath as she thought, "She'll....."
"Harriet will have to forge her own path, my love." Severus wisely determined as he moved back long enough to gaze into her emerald eyes, "Has she not done decently so far? The war and how it shall end is in her hands more than ever before."
"Aren't you frightened, Sev?" Lily asked with a disheartened chuckle that rang with bitterness, "Even if this war were not.....if the war had never happened, she's a child! What kind of mother can she be? She still needs mothering herself!"
Severus's black eyes scanned Lily's fair face as he took a long moment to think.
"She inherited your intelligence, my love." Severus reassured Lily, "She's headstrong and reckless, certainly, but she'll do her best. She's nearly seventeen.....You were only a few years older when she arrived. I'm certain that with our guidance....she and the child will be perfectly fine."
"The child......." Lily sighed.
"The father worries you more than anything else." Severus wisely concluded, "There is little we can do to change that."
"Suppose something goes awfully wrong?" Lily pressed, "How......How is this even possible, Sev?! For him to come from a horcrux, a single shred of a soul and.....and......"
Her face twisted into a scowl of disgust as she imagined what Tom Riddle had needed to do to result in Harriet's precarious condition.
"Do you think she's lying?" Lily asked with an undisguised hint of hope in her voice, "Do you think it's possible that Draco may be-"
As her voice trailed off, Severus indicated his answer as he gave his wife the slightest of nods.
"Oh......" Lily pouted, "Never mind then.....you would know, Sev....You can read thoughts almost as well as....he can."
"Lily," Severus said as she passed a hand over her face. When she sniffed and looked down, he reached out and lifted her chin until her eyes were level with his, "Have I not protected our family all these years?"
Tears welled in Lily's eyes as she listened to Severus's words.
Our family.
Suddenly, it was as if her nightmarish marriage to James had been just that, a nightmare and nothing more.
"I don't doubt you, Sev." Lily said as she placed a hand on his cheek and smiled, "...,But I'm worried about what he'll do."
"Oh my love......." Severus whispered in a desperate sigh as his brow furrowed in concern while he gazed into Lily's face, "Don't torment me so....My heart cannot bear to see yours pained.....Let me do the worrying for us both."
Lily closed her eyes as she and Severus moved closer to each other.
Their lips met in a tender kiss before Severus lifted his darling flower as easily as if she had been a doll, gathered her into his arms, and carried her over to their bed.
Their coupling would change nothing, but that mattered little to Mr. and Mrs. Snape as they clung to each other while the world around them threatened to crumble.
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Ellery sighed as he glanced out his dormitory window that evening and wondered how his sister and her friends fared.
Still ignorant of Harriet's condition and the latest turn of events, Ellery idly wished his parents would have excused him from school to help Harriet with.....whatever she had gone to do.
As he looked around his lonely room, a sigh left his lips.
He would have much preferred to spend time with his sister than to sit in the drafty castle and ponder his lack of friends.
With Harriet gone, Ellery barely ever received a passing glance of acknowledgement from his peers, let alone a kind word.
He closed his eyes as he put a hand to his face and pondered his own imprisonment.
His parents went home every night.
Harriet had left on her own terms.
Somehow, it didn't quite seem fair that he should be the only one to remain trapped within Hogwarts' walls.
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That particular night would have been arguably the worst evening for Ellery to have accompanied Harriet.
Against her parents' guidance and friends' insistence, she had undertaken the expedition to retrieve Marvolo Gaunt's ring.
Tom bravely drank the cursed water he himself had placed.
His usual, arrogant smirk crossed his handsome features as he watched everyone present marvel at the wonder that the noxious liquid had no effect on him whatsoever, being neither completely alive nor totally lifeless.
Harriet had enjoyed too much of her own bravado.
After she retrieved the ring from its vessel, she bantered back and forth with Tom while the others went to ready the boat.
There was no warning, no lead up, no outward sign.
They all seemed to come at once.
Dozens and dozens and dozens of hardened, gray bodies came rushing up from the lake's surface, intent on dragging all five present down to join them under the black water.
It took Tom by surprise when one of the Inferi his older self had made actually showed the audacity of clawing his wand from his hand with its long, sharp, talon-like nails.
Hermione, Ron, and Draco worked to blast them back from the boat but by the time Tom scrambled back over to his wand, one of his undead servants had managed to tackle Harriet to the ground.
Anger welled in his dark heart as he listened to his beloved scream while she fought against the clawing hands of Inferi, which did their best to disorientate and confuse her as the ragged edges of chipped nails clawed through the flesh of her shoulder.
"INCENDIO!" Tom finally shouted the second he managed to get his fingers on his wand and point it at the cavernous ceiling above them all.
There was no time to tend Harriet there.
Instead, Tom shuffled her into his arms and quickly scrambled over to the boat.
While Ron and Draco saw them pushed out of the cavern and back to their ill-fated dock as swiftly as possible, Tom held his bleeding darling in his arms while Hermione's trembling fingers made bold attempts at providing care for her friend's deep wounds.
Draco's heart pounded in his ears as he kept glancing over his shoulder to keep track of Harriet's condition.
"Hurry, Malfoy!.....Or we'll be too late!" Ron snapped.
Draco didn't even pause to look over at the boy who had spoken, his attention remained on Harriet's well-being.