Balaur

It had taken many months to get to “better”. 

Multiple attempts ended in tears, shattered progress and depressive episodes over the fear still firmly living in her core. Post-partum illness joined the post-traumatic stress she’d delayed confronting, and set up picket lines that made long-term healing a new battleground in her life.

Three weeks after she’d gone into labor, Hermione returned to her original life’s path determined to paint over the trauma and grief of the last year: she’d returned to Hogwarts. Her war-time and post-war travails toughened her so that the stares and whispered attention no longer assaulted her sense of self. What concerned her more was her future, proving to herself every minute of every day that Voldemort had failed to defeat her in every possible context. 

That proof remained elusive for a very long time. 

In deference to her status as a war hero and a war casualty, Minerva McGonagal set her up in the staff housing, isolated from students who'd suffered less and away from those who’d risk being hexed by intruding on her solitary privacy. The space afforded Hermione the opportunity to surround herself with the things she loved and to mourn the things that had been taken. Fortunately, this no longer included her parents; they’d been found and returned to Britain for treatment by an unnamed benefactor. Both were “coming along nicely”, adjusting to the fantastical magical events that swooped them up and away. 

The same could not be said for their daughter for a very long time.

Deference had also been negotiated for her NEWTs. The Headmistress’ proposal to apply Hermione’s war activities to satisfaction of graduation requirements garnered unanimous consent from the Board and most of the former Hogwarts’ heads’ portraits (including the newly mounted Severus Snape). Those who served with her in Dumbledore’s Army lined up without hesitation to donate memories in Hermione’s behalf — 

— except for one former Gryffindor whose absence was notable and explainable; Ron Weasley’s hidden war wounds were now visible to all who watched his deterioration. Her tears had long dried over the loss of a best friend who’d tried to kill her and her unborn baby with a Disintegration curse, in the hopes of removing any evidence that they ever existed. Ron blamed her for ruining his life by tossing him into a chaotic vortex of jealousy and abandonment. 

She blamed herself for those very same mistakes for a long time.

Her studies gave no surcease to the wretched life she still lived in that perpetually active mind of hers. Hermione sat with no door to her back. She ate quickly to ensure no one escaped her scrutiny — lest they attack her during a lull in her vigilance. She barricaded the door in any room she entered, a reality that moved a concerned Minerva McGonagal to recruit a support team for her flailing favorite student. Many skills would be needed to right Hermione’s mental “rudder”, none more than the house elves who volunteered to observe and care for the S.P.E.W. founder 24 hours a day. They needn’t have worried, though; she’d never harm herself now that she had so much to do.

Her spacious (by student standards) three-bedroom flat made the ridiculous workload she shouldered comfortable. After setting security wards (that Dumbledore himself asked her to teach the school’s faculty), she’d set about moving a small amount of her furniture from Babadag into her accommodations — including Accio-ing the entire nursery into the bedroom she shared with her infant son.