Eleven Years Later...

Beads of sweat forming from the steaming cauldron, Severus Snape pushed back his glossy black hair with the back of his hand, and then cringed. He had forgotten about the mashed frogspawn that had spattered his fingers earlier that evening, and it was now mashed right into the strands over his ear.

"What's wrong?" I asked, suppressing the urge to laugh. As loving and secretly pleasant a man as he was to me, my husband of more than ten years still occasionally lacked what one might call a sense of humour. He gave me a wry smile, adding the next ingredient to the potion without looking. It turned brilliant scarlet and gurgled.

"Is it bad?"

I picked up my wand from beside a basket of rolled up student star charts awaiting grades.

"Want me to remove it?" I brandished the wood in an annoyingly unnecessary flourish like Gilderoy Lockhart. Severus cringed again.

"Best not, this potion may explode if exposed to magical narcissism. I'll wash up when I'm done."

He turned his focus back to his potion, a common pepper up brew for Madame Pomfrey, but I sat back in my chair. This strange office was our home, here in what had been formally named the Albus Dumbledore Memorial Building, but was usually just known as the New Wing.

In the great castle rebuild, Severus and I had managed to swing an agreement from Headmistress McGonagall for a joint office and potions workspace, and shared living quarters, provided we were properly married before the students returned the September after the battle. The fact that we had needed to move a crib into our quarters before the school year was over had only shocked the most delicate sensibilities.

With my father's deposition as minister of magic, and eventual disappearance from public life, the rebuilding of Hogwarts was the last component my fresh start. Albeit at great cost, we had defeated Voldemort, and forgotten somewhere in a drawer was our Order of Merlins to officially show the parts we had played in that victory. Where we really saw our victory, though, was in the faces of the students, back in classes months later and ready to learn.

I picked up the next star chart and weighed down the curling edges. A familiar handwriting caught my eye immediately, tight and loopy.

"It's hers," I said quietly, eagerly skimming the work. Severus leaned over with a curious smile, squeezing my shoulder gently, and smelling of frogspawn.

"How is it?"

"Not perfect, but good."

There before me was the first piece of homework I had received from my own daughter.

Hogwarts was in her blood. She had been conceived in its dungeons, born in its highest tower, and raised running everywhere in between. Her childhood friends were house elves and ghosts, and she had ridden Fang across the grounds like her personal mount since she was old enough to scramble on the gentle dog's back at Hagrid's hut. She may have been the only child whose Hogwarts letter had been hand delivered by the headmistress herself on her eleventh birthday.

It was strange now, knowing she was asleep (or just as likely, awake) in the Ravenclaw dormitories on the other side of the castle, instead of in her little bed in the room next to ours, but we were proud of her.

She was a child born into a world at peace, a peace we had helped make for her.