Author Notes: this is a much more tragic Epilogue to the Harry Potter series. I am a bit disappointed about how it ended, mostly by how little actual growth and development the main characters had, in my opinion. Thus, I came up with this to satisfy my disappointment and that much fit how things ended. Be warned, it isn't exactly a happy ending.

A Different Epilogue

Hermione Granger hated her life. How had she come to this? How did she end up retiring on some beach house, alone? How did she reach the eighty years of her life without one child to call her own? With a friend to visit her from time to time? With some old love to abate her solitude? As she sat there, staring into the horizon, wrinkled-faced and ever-tired, clad in her usual scarlet robes, she pondered about her life.

Hermione, in hindsight, should have known. The very moment she graduated from Hogwarts, and hit the wall that was reality, she should have seen it coming… but she didn't want to see it. She failed to see. She wanted to help people, to make use of her abilities, so she dived into the Ministry, all too confident she would be Minister of Magic in no time. With her fame, her smarts and skills, who would doubt her confidence? Ronald – poor old Ronald – hadn't discouraged her. Oh, how wrong they were.

She had always wondered why Harry had never become an Auror like he – like everyone - had dreamed, why he chose a life of endless exploring. He abandoned Ginny. He abandoned everyone and… and just left. Hermione had been rather angry at him, feeling as if Harry, after everything they had been together, was simply going to walk away from the life they all fought for. For the first time since it happened, Hermione, too old and too late to change anything, finally understood what drove Harry to ignore the expectations lingering on him. The guilt, his lack of drive… Harry knew long before the end of the Second War he would never actually become an Auror. It had been a flimsy thought of a hopeless teenager who didn't know what to do with his life. And thus, instead of following what people waited for him to do, he left, in search of his own future.

Hermione would be lying if she said she wasn't envious of Harry. He travelled the world, from Haiti to Sri Lanka, correcting the world's wrong and being the hero he had always been. He fought necromancers and stopped Dark Lords. He saw magical miracles and the greatest mysteries. First, he was alone, and then, he got Luna. Through the years his returns grew fewer and shorter, unwilling to settle, only ever coming back for his godson. But when Teddy Lupin graduated, he did not return.

How did his tale end? Hermione was not sure. The lack of correspondence, of any answer from her once beloved friend, or how no one could locate him didn't bode well. If he had to guess, Harry was either somewhere isolated … or he had met a silent death in his adventures. Hermione's heart hurt thinking that, if she was truth to herself, the latter was the likeliest… Harry's luck was bound to run out at some point. One doesn't go around barely escaping by dumb luck from the most ridiculous of dangers through decades without end.

Her tale, and Ronald's, had been less exciting, more boring and much, much worse. They had gotten together, blissfully ignorant of the world's cruel workings, seeing a new brave world at an arm's reach for them to conquer… and they had wasted the opportunity. The first years after Hogwarts, they had been happy – oh, how much did Hermione long to relive those blissful days. Ron had been such a gallant man... And then they moved together. It looked like they were going in the direction of their happily ever after… only that Ron never got on his feet and Hermione never actually stopped working.

Ronald spiraled down in a life without a vocation, not knowing where he was good at – or rather realizing the world might have not have a place for him. He tried as an Auror, only meeting bitter disappointment as he failed the requirements. He moved on to a Hit-wizard, barely making it, only to discover that was not what he wanted. Without Harry, the dangerous lifestyle of hit-wizards had just not been that appealing to him. He helped his Brother George's business, only to sorrowfully be part of it to see the enterprise end – without Fred, George had never recovered his mischievous spirit and Ron, while amazing in humor, was no prankster or good at anything prank-related. Then came the Ministry, and Ron became little more than a paper pusher. It took a toll on Ron. He grew disheartened by the way his life was plummeting. With the years, his fame died with the hopes of a better future, and with it, the fires of resentment and hopelessness grew.

Where she had been all that time? Stuck, like a fool, climbing up a bureaucratic ladder that led nowhere. She had been tricked, fooled really, into thinking she was headed to somewhere of importance… but she was no politician. She was terrible at dealing with the right people, with the correct tact and the proper appeal. Angering them? Now that was something she had excelled, most of the time unknowingly. The world of governments had no place for goodie-two-shoes. How could she have hoped to be anything better than some token bureaucrat of some god-knows-what department? And yet she had stubbornly pushed on, persisted, like a child in a world of adults…

They never married. After three years under the same roof, Ron grew spiteful of his lack of success, his self-worth at a new-time low. Then his father died in a horrible accident involving a muggle device. After that, the only piece of joy and comfort he found was at the end of a bottle, and with his terrible temperament, their relationship took a dark turn for a few months. They argued. They got at each other's throats. They insulted each other. They returned to being the bickering children they had been back at Hogwarts… with no Harry between them. And finally, they split up.

It was too late, though. She was in her early thirties, childless, without any real friends, only co-workers that hated her guts and bosses that ignored her altogether. She had never been good at the looks department, but she had hoped her well-placed position at the Ministry, her smarts and so forth would have served for something. Truth of the matter was that all good men were either too shallow for women like her, or didn't want what she wanted: a family. Men like she had wanted were all married and the few that weren't just didn't see anything on Hermione. That and she had actually gotten a lot bossier and more annoying over the years, trapped in that godforsaken Ministry…

Ron ended up in a life of misery, locked up later on when he attacked some wizard who taunted him. Things had gotten nasty. A few empty bottles, a Weasley temperament, and a dangerous wand had been a dangerous combination that fateful night. He was released at some point but by then Hermione had lost all contact with the man she had once thought would be her husband at some point.

Hermione had waited patiently for that moment in life, for that new beam of daylight in those dark days. Days passed and each birthday grew harder to experience, coming to a point where she ignored them altogether. And then she searched… and searched. For the first time in her life she knew what she so desperately wanted: to find love, to find a partner, a companion. Someone. But it was too late. She had hit a big, nasty wall… when she was forty, she had had enough. It was clear she was not going to get anywhere where she was and she had lost most of her life already. So he went to Hogwarts to teach, and a teacher she became – surrounding herself with children to call her own.

And here she was, in the twilight of her life, full of regrets… this was not what she had wanted. This was not the life she had thought she was going to have. Tears rolled down her eyes. Where were the days when she would see her children – a boy called Hugo and a girl called Rose, perhaps – board the Hogwarts Express, waving at her as a mother? At what point did she take the wrong turn from that dream? What had happened to staying friends, to see her good friend Harry's own children as the famous boy calmed a son down? Would she ever know what happened to Ronald? Where were her friends? Where, oh gods, where had all the magic in her life, the wondrous essence that had made her so happy as a child gone?

Hermione started crying as the day slowly died around her. The sun neared the horizon, ignoring the wailing for an old lone witch, as night slowly crawled in. It was going to be a very long, cold and dark night…