Starting Over

Starting Over
Hermione can’t deal with it being over. In her head it’s never really over, no matter how many times she tells herself it is. For years you live with death looming over your head. Your death the death of those you love, sometimes you run, sometimes you fight but always it’s there. Then one day you wake up and it’s all over, and you’ve seen people you loved die, and you’ve fought a war, and lived with death for years, and now it’s over and your only seventeen. Sometimes she wants to scream, she wants to laugh and sometimes she just wants to have died, like Fred, during the finally battle. All she really knows is it’s over and her life suddenly doesn’t have meaning anymore.
Harry wants normalcy. She understands that, it’s what he’s never had, ever in his life, what he deserves after all they’ve been through, and she knows she’s expected to want that too, but she can’t. Every time she sees Harry he’s talking of his job or being engaged to Ginny and the house their buying and the kids their planning to have, and it make her sick inside, because she know she should want this too and she can’t. She should dream of a house and kids and a good job maybe at Hogwarts, but all she dreams of is blood and darkness and things that run through the forest at night.
She made a deal with herself when it ended that she’d learn to live with the pain. Someway, anyway, she just knows she can’t go mad. So most days she studies and the days when the pain gets too much she gets a tattoo. She likes them. Likes the idea of bright pictures on her skin, and the sharp pain of the needle, takes away the dull pain in her heart and insider her mind, reminds her that she’s alive. She starts out with happy things butterflies, flowers, bees, then turns to symbols of power, runes and ancient words scribed on her skin. There are marks on her back now, on her arms, and chest, feet, and hips. It’s different, it makes her feel good and she studies too. When the war ended she was already one of the most powerful witches in England. After the war she threw herself into study, the one thing she had left. Now she spends hours in libraries, pouring over books, scrolls and spells. She knows she’s one of the most powerful witches in the world now, that people speak her name with awe and at little bit of fear. She knows the Counsel of Merlin will give her a chair in a second if she asks, and she could have any position in Hogwarts she wanted, even Headmistress , but there’s no point for her anymore, no place for her in this new wizarding world.
She’s engaged to Ron. It’s easier that way. She likes Ron, he’s her best friend and it’s easier for both of them to pretend. It’s what people expect, what people want to see, what Harry wants, what Ron’s family wants. It staves off questions and keeps people at bay, keeps them from thinking she’s totally crazy. Sometimes she thinks she loved him that way once, but she can’t remember, never thought she’d live long enough for her to really find out. Ron used to try to draw her out, play it right, be the good boyfriend and pretend they’re the happy, young couple Harry and Ginny always are, but she withdrew, stopped coming home until late at night spending more and more time with her books or out at a wizards bar where no one ever wants to talk to her and leaves her alone. Eventually he stopped trying.
She knows Ron cares about her, really cares about her, more then anyone else but she also knows he doesn’t love her either not in that way, not as lover. The night she came home and found him kissing another man on the couch, she didn’t say a word, just turned and walked back out. She didn’t come back that night and the next morning Ron greeted her with a guilty expression, avoiding her eyes but she never spoke of it. It became easier after that, he left her alone and she never mentioned the men he brought home, never got in his way and played the good girlfriend for his family and friends.
When she sits alone at one of her bars she wishes there’s someone she could go to, someone who would understand, but they’re all dead. Sirius, Dumbledore, even Snape might have understood this, this emptiness. After all they had already survived one war before Hermione and the rest ever started fighting. Gone, they’re all gone, and now there’s no one she can go to. When she drinks she sees their faces, their war is over but she’s still fighting her’s in her head. She plans to leave England, to go someplace anyplace were the fights not over, where there are still apocalypses to avert and worlds to save, she thinks maybe America. She’s drinking at bar when some one talks to her for the first time in a long time.
“hey darlin’ anyone sitting here”
She looks up to see a man, youngish, middle height, dirty blond hair, trench coat, blue eyes, cigarette.
“what?” she’s surprised. No one ever talks to her, but he looks drunk
“I said you drink’n with anyone”
She looks at his eyes then at the glass in front of her not her first won’t be her last.
“no one except the dead”
He sits next to her and orders a gin and tonic looking sideways at her. For a moment she things he’s going to says something stupid, try to save her soul or ask her back to his place, but all he says is
“Yeah tell me about it”
and stares into his drink.