Can you remember, remember my name?
“I am an assassin,” he said, his head lowered in genuine pain, with a remorse so deep he couldn’t even fathom it. “Mother, I have blood on my hands. That’s not who you grew me up to be. Will you forgive me?”
The elderly woman looked at him: most days, she couldn’t remember things. She forgot her own name –the kind people who took care of her told her she was called Eileen, but she wasn’t sure about it–. Other days, she saw images flashing before her eyes: a wooden, intricate stick that made things look better when she yielded it; an image of something bubbling into a big black pot; a man cradling a bottle, a man holding a belt, a man who made her cower in fear even when she didn’t know how he was called. And a child; a beautiful little boy with black, messy hair and the saddest eyes she had ever seen in a child.
Mother–
“Mother, it’s me,” a voice not belonging to a child cut through her musings: a voice hoarse, steady, belonging to the man with the long, black hair currently knelt in front of her chair. And even when she forgot things, she knew that voices grew and changed along with the people holding them, but some emotions didn’t change.
“Sev,” Eileen whispered, not quite believing that this man was the child she once held in her arms, soothing his pains with tales from their magical world.
“My Sev,” she repeated, and a strangled cry echoed from the man, whose shoulders were now shaking.
“Forgive me, mother–” he kept on repeating, sounding as if he had carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. “It took so long, but I found you –she found you for me–, mother–”
“What’s this commotion?” a woman entered the room where this reuniting occurred; a Muggle woman, a nurse in the elderly care unit where Eileen Prince was living the rest of her days, safe and sound despite the condition that made her memory fade and her to lose sight of her only son. “Mrs Snape, when you contacted us, looking for your mother-in-law, I didn’t think you’d come here and make such a fuss, annoying the rest of our elderly–”
Hermione Snape, nee Granger, the brightest witch of her age –and the one with the greatest detective skills, if I may add–, shook her head, making the shock of short curls she sported for the last few years bounce playfully; a motion that the black-haired baby in her arms followed with great interest, for such a young child. Should this be a wonder though, when the baby girl Hermione held carefully in her arms, over her –once again– heavily pregnant belly, was a child made out of an unexpected, but intense love between Severus Snape and herself?
“My apologies, Mrs Priestley,” the witch said sweetly, her gaze never leaving the reuniting of Eileen Prince with her child. “I am certain we will keep on being loud for a bit longer, now that I’m about to introduce Eileen to Eileen.”