It was a distraction from the start, so they're pretty distracted, and for a while she doesn't think she'll be alive to have it anyways, so Hermione doesn't end the pregnancy.

Even with the war (especially with the war, with Bill and Sirius already dead, and sleeping every couple days at best) Harry arranges a chain of alternate guardians, none of whom are named Dursley. The list is fifteen people long (almost half of whom, Remus and Arthur and Arabella among them, will die before the war is over) but Harry (a bit redfaced over the whole thing, a teenaged boy trying to be a hero trying to be a teenaged boy trying to be a responsible father) talks to them all, makes sure they think they could love his son and don't hold with stair-cupboards for raising children.

The Death Eaters don't attack when Hermione goes into labor, and it turns out to be twin girls, one with red hair and one with mocha skin. Neither has astonishing green eyes. Harry and Ron and Dean shuffle their feet outside the room where Hermione is sleeping and don't look at one another until Ron makes a crack about it looking like Neville's been left out again. "Or maybe," Dean says, "He knows how to use an effing condom," and Harry might have said it as an accusation, but after all, he had thought it was his.

There is a great deal of head-shaking, though not in front of Molly, who mostly ends up taking care of them while the boys are out patrolling Hogsmeade. Hermione can't breastfeed because she's working with too many poisons in her research, and the idea kind of weirds her out anyways. Harry and Ron and Dean talk about getting a flat together when the war is over, but they will all find other things they want to do and none will be more than an occasional visitor. When Percy finally pressures Hermione into taking the girls off Molly's hands she will be alone with them in her tiny flat, charming them mute while she tries to read abstracts. But that hasn't happened yet, and now, when Ron and Harry come back scorched and tentaculous from a Death Eater run-in, they stroke the babies' cheeks with burnt fingertips before they go to Hermione.

Hermione names them Polly and Thessaly, and no one ever suggests that twins with different fathers have certain magical uses, not even to stop the war.

::End::
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