The Mating Game

Chapter Thirteen

Results

January seemed to pass at a crawl. Hermione settled into her routine of teaching, attending meetings, and grading essays quickly. She spent her spare time doing research on a transfiguration thesis, despite her husband's admonishment not to overexert herself. "I'm not happy unless I'm busy," she'd snap whenever he told her to take it easy.

On the last Friday in January, Hermione was sitting on one end of the sofa, immersed in a book, while her husband sat at the other end grading the seventh-year students' work. Suddenly he stood up, threw his quill on the floor, and began pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace.

Hermione knew from experience that he never did this unless something was weighing heavily on his mind. "Severus, what's bothering you?"

"I'm tired of waiting," he snarled. "Don't you get tired of waiting to find out? There must be some way to tell if you're pregnant without waiting for your period to start. Or not to start. You know what I mean!"

"Some Muggle pregnancy tests claim to be able to tell a day or two before your period is due to start..."

"But surely, magic should be able to test for the presence of a successful conception earlier than that."

"I don't know. Magic is actually lagging pretty far behind Muggle technology in this area. I mean, witches can't even find out the gender of their child until it's born, can they? But Muggles have been able to do that for years. My Mum knew with me..."

Severus stopped in mid-pace. "Of course! Why didn't I think of it before?" Striding over to one of the bookshelves, he reached up and removed a thin red book from the top shelf. He flipped through the dusty pages while Hermione tried to make out the title. The characters were some sort of Oriental language--Japanese? Chinese? Cambodian?

At last he took out his wand, waved it over her abdomen, and pronounced an incantation in a language she didn't understand. Immediately a glowing red pictograph appeared over her, rotating slowly in the air. Severus looked at it carefully, consulted the book, and then looked at it once more. Then he drew himself up to his full height, and--to her utter shock, grinned. "Congratulations," he announced.

Hermione's jaw dropped. "You're kidding me. I'm not even late. How can you tell?"

He smirked at her. "The spell actually wasn't designed to indicate the presence of pregnancy; that's just a side effect. It was developed to indicate the gender of an in-utero child. It's a boy, by the way."

"Amazing. I wonder why I've never heard of it?"

"Because most British wizards don't read Chinese. And there are few surviving books that teach the spell, seeing as it's an Unforgivable in China."

She stared at him. "You're putting me on, right?"

He shook his head seriously. "For camouflage reasons, most Chinese wizards abide by the Muggle government's decision to limit families to one child. Even among Muggles, girls are considered undesirable--often they're given to orphanages or left out to die. Imagine how much worse the situation would be among wizards, who could discover the gender of their child in the first month of pregnancy."

"Oh," said Hermione dumbly. After a long silence she added, "Well, it looks like the Snape line isn't going to die out, then."

"I wish it would," said Severus quietly. "I was hoping that all the stupid traditions that were carried on in my line for generations would disappear completely. Girls often end up adopting the traditions of the men they marry, and I was hoping that by having only girls...Well, never mind. Besides," he added softly, running his fingers through his wife's curls, "I was hoping for a little girl. One who would be just like you."

"One of me isn't enough?" frowned Hermione. "I don't think I could stand to be around another of me, thank you very much. A girl would be okay...if she were more like you. Or like my mother. But just like me? Ugh."

"A man can hope, anyway," said her husband earnestly.

She looked at him and saw how seriously he'd meant what he'd said. "Maybe next time, anyway," she responded, trying to soften her tone. "We do get one more chance. In the meantime, maybe we should start thinking about boys' names."

Severus knelt down and kissed her still-flat abdomen. "Hello in there," he whispered. "This is your father speaking. You grow well, do you hear me?" Hermione giggled. "And no making your mother sick, either, you understand?"

"If you're going to talk to him, he really does need a name. Now."

"Hermione, love, we can't tell people that we know he's a boy. Let's just pick a nickname. An in-utero name."

Hermione, remembering Minerva's silliness, suggested, "Little Snake?"

They both burst out laughing. Severus calmed himself enough to say, "I think I prefer something a little more formal."

Composing herself, Hermione announced with a perfectly straight face: "His Royal Majesty, Quintus Aurelius, Emperor of the Dungeons." They laughed again--Hermione guffawed until she had to wipe tears from her cheeks.

Yet amazingly, the name stuck. The first of the new generation of Snapes was known as Quintus Aurelius (or, at times, Majesty) until the day he was born.