Chapter Text
Severus has been gone for four days. It’s longer than usual, and though he hasn't said as much, Hermione feels it. Through the tether. Through the quiet. Through the way her own emotions feel heavier without him nearby to balance them out. She feels flickers of his state, like sunlight through a fogged window: blurred and intermittent. A few hours ago, there was strain. Before that, annoyance. Some sharp flare of tiredness that she could taste at the back of her tongue. But it never lasts. What keeps pulsing steady beneath it all is a kind of contentment. Not quite joy, but something close. And then, unmistakably, boredom.
She snorts softly to herself as she presses the cinnamon dough into neat little discs on the tray. Boredom is a good sign. Boredom means he's finished whatever strange task he's set himself and is simply waiting to return. She doesn't ask him where he goes. He never tells her, but he always comes back, and that’s what matters.
In the quiet warmth of their kitchen, she decorates. Not the garish kind, no blinking lights or Santa-shaped candles. But greenery, simple and old-fashioned. Twined garlands. Charms that sparkle gently. She hangs dried orange slices with cinnamon sticks on twine and nests enchanted baubles between the sprigs of spruce along the mantle. The fire crackles steadily as she moves through the house, her hair pinned back, cheeks dusted with flour from her earlier baking.
It’s the first Christmas they’ve spent truly together. The first one where he kisses her with no sense of obligation, where she can curl into his side and feel that bond between them hum soft and sure, not just alive but like something they have chosen.
Around this time she misses them more, her parents. The absence aches differently now. Not as sharp, just deep and constant, like a hollow behind the ribs. They’re still alive. Still safe. Still in Australia, eating pavlova and wrapping presents in paper printed with little kangaroos no doubt. But they don’t know her. Not the war, or the spell she cast to protect them, and not the girl they once sent off to school with a brand new backpack and a glittery notebook for the first time. She has tried so many times, but the spell she used had been too good, and when she went back to them, nothing stirred. They had new jobs. New lives. No memory of the daughter with wild curls and a mouth full of questions.
She hasn’t told Severus. Not directly. He must know some of it, he’s seen her quiet sadness in the evenings, must have felt the sharp twist of longing that surfaces around the holidays. But she’s never said the words, so he might not know why, not exactly as she has never given voice to that particular kind of grief.
So instead, she tidies, she bakes and she decorates. The kitchen smells like sugar and cloves. There's flour on the floor, on the cat, said cat is currently batting around a rogue cranberry on the floor. Soft music plays from their speakers, soft crooning about sleigh rides in the snow. She hums along under her breath as she lifts a tray of shortbread from the oven, the golden biscuits crisp around the edges and will be dusted with powdered sugar after cooling off. She doesn’t feel the wards announce him, but then, a thrum. Low and familiar. Not from the tether, but from the house itself. The way the magic in the house shifts subtly. And then the soft click of the door. Her breath catches. She turns. And there he is. Standing in the threshold, travel-worn and rumpled, dressed in all black. His hair’s windblown, his boots are scuffed, and he looks tired, he looks so tired, but his eyes find her immediately. And the moment they do, something in her untwists.
She opens her mouth to speak, but stops, because he’s staring. At the house. At the lights. At the little charms that drift lazily like snowflakes above the mantle His eyes flick to the tree, small, crooked, decorated with odd little handmade bits and glass baubles that float mid-branch, and then back to her.
She’s in an oversized jumper, sleeves pushed up, hands dusted with flour, hair coming loose from its pins. For a moment, he just… looks.
“…You decorated.”
She shrugs, suddenly sheepish. “Well. You were gone.”