And now, we'll eat
“Where’s mom?” the little girl asked, all rosy cheeks framed by a shock of black curls. She was tapping her foot impatiently in the sand as her father meticulously covered every inch of her pale skin with sunscreen.
Sunburn was no game.
“She went to the sea to catch a monster,” Severus explained to the now gaping Eileen. “Your mother is very good at capturing and setting monsters on the right path, as you know.”
Including myself, he wanted to say, but he refrained. Hermione would immediately come to his defense, even if he were the one badmouthing himself: a contradiction out of the many they lived through as a family. He didn’t protest though: his wife, young as she was, proved to him every day that she was the mature one out of the couple of them. She took care of their family with such intense affection that set everything broken in him right again.
“And–will she be safe out there, catching monsters?” his daughter asked, with a sly grin that wasn’t so befitting of a four-year old kid. Maybe he had to reconsider his treatment of her: he’d stop being caught unawares of her smarts that way. “Maybe I should go help her, daddy–”
“You’re not going anywhere, young lady,” he said, chuckling as he quickly wrapped the girl in a big, fluffy towel. “You’ll turn into a mermaid if you stay in water for longer than you already did. Besides, it’s time for lunch.”
“That’s right,” Hermione’s voice echoed, and they both turned their heads –so very similar– in tandem, to watch her as she walked towards them, her three-year old son hoisted over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He was protesting meekly that his playtime in the sand was coming to an end: but his mother, smart woman, bribed him with ice-cream and so he let himself be carried around.
“She went to the sea to catch a monster and came back with a son,” Severus said, trying –and failing– to hide his pride at the sight of his little family, something he never allowed himself to dream of having. But life had its own way of giving him back his soul, in the form of those three standing in front of him, all salty from the seawater and sandy from the beachside. “Now we can eat.”