Prologue
"How does one return to normal, after something so great, something so beyond human comprehension happens?" Hermione Granger wondered.
It had been over a month since the end of the war, 32 days to be exact. And slowly, life and people began to move on. Harry and Ginny had, in the hype and hubris of the ending of the war, declared their love for each other and were now engaged to be married.
"It's not like we're getting married tomorrow, Hermione, he just wanted to let me know that I'm the one." Ginny had said after Hermione declared the engagement to be too premature.
" But how do you know that you're the one?" She screeched
"We just do, and if you can't accept that, I honestly don't know why we're even friends." Ginny shot back.
Ginny then turned on her heel and walked away, flinging the door behind her.
They had made up 2 days later, but Hermione sensed the shift between them.
So that had happened. And then Ron, who she had loved since she was 14 and who she thought had feelings for her as she had for him, , began seeing Lavender Brown, the harpy, screechy, bitchy Gryffindor who clung on to him and called him "Won-Won" instead of Ron or even Ronald, which were perfectly acceptable names in Hermione's opinion. Her need to change it to something so childish, so dog-like irked her, even more so than her over makeuped face and clearly anti-Hermione demeanor.
So they had all moved on.
Everyone except Hermione, she was stuck in the past.
The deaths of her friends and peers seemed to be looming wherever she went, omnipresent in her day to day activities though it had been over a month since the end of the War. She dreamed of Fred and Tonks and Lupin. She dreamed of their lives, and especially of their deaths.
She could still see the wide-eyed corpses surrounding her. She could still taste death in her mouth and feel it on her skin.
Hermione was suffocating from trauma. And suffocating alone.
She needed to leave London.
and more importantly, The Wizarding World.