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She sat up in bed, swung her legs to the side, twisted her body and placed her feet flat on the floor.

Well, her toes. The bed was simply too high for her to manage anything else.

Eyes closed, arms braced on the mattress, she turned her face into the light. With her eyes closed, there was a lot less pain. Perhaps because she didn’t have to look, didn’t have to see it, she didn’t feel it. It is all psychological, after all.

She’d had to throw the nightgown out; sheer white cotton and delicate lace that it was, it couldn’t take the stress of a good, hard clean. She wondered, idly, if the blood would stain the sheets forever. If she would scrub, and scrub, and scrub, and never get it out.

She wondered if she would use them again, if she could scrub it all out.

With a sigh, she shook her head, feeling the long locks of hair that had escaped her sleeping braid falling around her face and shoulders. There was nothing good in thoughts like that.

That way, madness lay.

There was nothing to be done for it, really.

Well, except for placing an ad in the paper.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.



“Come on, Athena, come to Mummy! That’s right, sweetie, and next foot. Come on, babygirl, you can do it! Walk to Mummy!”

A young girl with a mop of dark curls, nothing more than a toddler, took but one more halting step before falling flat on her bottom on the wooden planks of their verandah. There were no wails, though, only the slight fall of her mother’s face and her sudden interest in the cricket that hopped around her feet.

Hermione bent down, hooking her arms under her daughter’s arms and hefting her, settling her on her hip. Away from the cricket.

And then the wails began, the tantrum of a somewhat spoiled child losing a shiny new toy. Her exhausted mother did nothing, simply flinched her head away momentarily from the high-decibel shrieks.

“No, Athena,” she said, firmly. “We don’t play with things that are bad to eat.”

“What’s wrong?”

She looked up to the figure of her husband behind the closed screen door, smiling with a shrug. The Australian summer heat still got to him, kept him closeted within the Cooling Charmed house.

“She lost her cricket. It made her cranky with me.”

“Ah,” he said, with a nod, taking a swig from the beer bottle in his hand, condensation droplets dripping from his fingers to the polished wood of the hallway. He could feel himself sweating from the wall of heat he stood on the edges of, just inside the door.

“Aren’t you hot out there?” he asked, blinking, pushing messy, thick hair off his forehead.

“Mmm, no,” she replied, distractedly, as she bounced her daughter on her hip and walked to her husband. She pulled the door wide. “I’m bringing her inside, though. She is, I think.”



Summer was her favourite part of the year. The furthest from winter, certainly, but also the holiday season. It was days spent at the beach, and the smell of a Christmas tree standing next to the air conditioner, recycling fresh pine throughout the closed-off living room and good dining room.

It was sitting in the backyard, nursing a glass of champagne with her sisters and older nieces, watching as the younger children played silly buggers with the dog; Pippa’s long dead now, poor old girl. Now they play around with each other, water pistols and laser gun sets that shock you when you’re shot.

This year, though, summer is answering questions.

“Where’s Severus? Visiting family in England?”

“You didn’t tell us, what happened to that great news you had?”

“Did he leave any of those great tonics of his? Think he’s got some stored somewhere at home? I can drop ‘round.”

Bethen has cancer, of the breast. Advanced. Not much modern medicine can do for her. Muggle medicine, that is; her, their medicine.

His can do much more. And is, though they aren’t telling Bethen. In case it doesn’t work for Muggles. If nothing else, it relieves the pain. Eases her days, eases her family’s worries.

She hasn’t the heart to tell them that Severus has left. For now, for all time. Who knows?

He left her. She bled all over their sheets, and he left her. Although with the house fully paid and enough money to see her through, and a note promising the continuation of Bethen’s treatment.

She misses him. She hates him, and she misses him.



Supermarket shopping is another thing in Sydney, Hermione has discovered.

Here, the lines between Wizarding and Muggle are blurred. There is no distinct boundary, no train barrier or brick wall to separate the two. Instead, wizards wear Muggle clothes more often than not. Several shopping districts service both Wizarding and Muggle. Their Statute of Secrecy is looser here, and none have suffered from it.

Although, perhaps that is simply the people. The heat seems to make them more easy-going, more friendly, more inclined to simply shrug and suggest a game of backyard cricket or a beer.

She takes Athena shopping with her, both of them in shorts and a t-shirt, ‘thongs’ on their feet. Might as well be barefoot, Hermione feels, but loves how acceptable so little is in this society. Secretly loves the seeming freedom from constraints.



She goes shopping with Bethen for a new wig, something in red, she says. They laugh and joke, slide bizarre purple bobs and waif-like blonde wigs over their natural hair – long and dark brown, in her case. A goldy peach fuzz, in Bethen’s.

They ignore that great purple elephant that stands between them the entire trip.

The fact of the matter is, Bethen isn’t getting any better. She remembers him mentioning a more extreme line of potions, for the more terminal cases. Slim chances of working, but when you’re terminal, slim to none is better than the other option.

Just none.

For her sister, she’d swallow her pride. She’d send him a letter. She’d apologize for not being strong enough, not being good enough.

And so she does. She sends a letter, and she does all those things. She pleads for her sister’s life.

She expects silence, perhaps a package of potions. She doesn’t expect a raging wizard on her doorstep in the midst of a summer storm, letter crumpled in his fist as he berates her for her endless and needless apologizing, for her idiotic guilt, for not owling him sooner for Bethen.

But she gets what she gets, and she’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.



Hermione feels the crackle of magic over her skin under the stormy sky, and it’s something more. It zaps along her spine, makes the hairs on her arm stand on end.

It’s definitely something more.

It’s still there in the morning, that edgy feeling she gets when she’s too close to too much elemental magic. The type of purity of magic only achieved by strength of emotions and a very powerful being.

She keeps her eyes open as she walks down the street, but she needn’t have. The house glows brilliant in her eyes, magical aura throbbing.

New as she is, she doesn’t know whose house it is.

She knocks firmly, licking her lips, her sweating nothing to do with the heat and lingering humidity, despite last night’s storm.



A strange woman is on her doorstep, and she frowns slightly. Bethen is in the back, being sick, and she’s loath to leave her, even if Severus is there.

“Yes?” she asks, somewhat shortly.

“Uh, hullo,” the woman begins, in an accent vaguely similar to her husband’s. “My name’s Hermione Potter. I’m, uh, I’m new to the area, and I was j-just wondering...”

She feels something probing the edges of her mind, small tendrils of something slipping in around the edges. Panicking slightly, she thinks very hard on Bethen, on how sick she is and how sick she is right now.

The woman looked as if she’s been slapped in the face.

“I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, if I’ve come at a bad time, I-”

“What can I do for you?” she asks, unable to keep the slight desperation from her voice.

“I was just—might I borrow a cup of sugar?”

Unoriginal, she supposes, but at least a little more plausible than anything else.

She pulls the screen door open, opens her arms in a ‘come in’ gesture. With a nod, she directs her down the hall, the Federation floorboards creaking under her feet, bare in the heat.

“I’ll just get it for you.”



My wife’s sister is dying.

She is dying, and there’s nothing I can do for her, as there was nothing I could for my wife when she needed me most. I knew, from the very first, that I would bring this family nothing but pain. Emptiness, and unkept promises. I have done this no good.

I wonder what is keeping Isabelle, why she hasn’t hurried back to see if the potions take, just a little.

I can hear a second voice, in the kitchen. British. Familiar.

Fuck.



She watches as this new neighbour of hers stands on tiptoe, stretching for a jar kept where someone much taller could easily reach. Husband, perhaps, or son. Brother?

Her cheeks are still flaming, and she’s sure they’ll stay that way. It was unforgivably rude, to probe her mind as she did, and she deserves what she learnt. To feel so guilty.

If she strains, she thinks she can hear that woman in the bathroom, only a room or two away. As an only child, she’s not the knowledge of how it is to watch a sibling – a twin no less – die in such a manner.

Yet, she knows what it was to watch the third of their Trio die, and so perhaps she isn’t so silly.

She is so busy watching the woman take the sugar down, admiring the well-shaped form of her with an artistic eye, that she almost completely misses the flash of black in her periphery.

But she does not, because this is Australia, and this is summer, and only the insane, Gothic or magically able to cool themselves wear black in such a time and place.

She turns her head, blinking when she encounters a familiar nose and beetle black eyes, the same long lank hair, if tied back from his face. It softens his angles, makes him look younger.

Her fingers slide over the wood of her wand, tucked inside the band of her shorts, and she slides it out easily.

“You fucking traitor,” she hisses, tongue pressing against her teeth in repressed rage as her hand balls into a fist. She wishes to strike him across that beak, break it and his smirk in one fell swoop.

The man in front of her is the reason her trio is a two, a couple forced together by little more than shitty circumstance and a need to cling.



I can’t feel my legs.

I’m bent over this porcelain bowl, clinging to it like my life depends upon in – in a sickening way, it somewhat does – and I cannot feel my legs.

Severus has gone to get Isabelle, to call Mark and the kids.

I can’t quite believe it. It’s like there’s no pain, now. Even through all the throwing up blood, the muscle clenching and stomach wracking, the extra hair loss, there’s no pain.

Severus should’ve been a doctor. Something where he can impart that precious talent to others. Sure, he’s a little craggy, rough around the edges, but he’s a wonderful man if you pay that no attention.

Neither Isabelle nor I ever have.

I can hear screaming, two British voices, and then a hand is sliding into one of my own, sweaty palms. A familiar torso, exactly the size of my own, although with the natural swelling I’ve lost to my disease.

“I can’t feel my legs, ‘Belle.”

I hear her scream for Severus, and then it all goes black.