When she is eight, Hermione's parents adopt a little grey kitten they find wandering around on the side of the street. They name him Tom, short for tom cat, and he sleeps curled up at the feet of Hermione's bed like a dog.
"He's just as loyal as any mutt," Hermione's dad jokes.
When Hermione is ten, Tom dies of a liver disease. She is heartbroken.
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Hermione is in her second year of Hogwarts when she is faced with the Chamber of Secrets. The less said about that, the better.
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"How do you feel about death, Hermione?" The lilting accent in Fleur's voice breaks her words apart into increments. One syllable, two syllables, a full word. Then repeat.
The question doesn't seem right coming out of her mouth and Hermione is caught off guard. Fleur's hair falls in soft, distracting whisps around her face. Hermione is strongly reminded of tinsel and spending cozy evenings decorating a tree for the holidays. She doesn't remember when she last saw her parents.
She knows Fleur is more than an electrifying, tempting presence and the sum of her physical features. But her forte, which lies in temptation and allure, is its own sort of power. It lights up the space around her and makes the kitchen in the dreary little cottage feel somehow lighter.
"Death is-" Hermione's mouth snaps shut. There's a commotion upstairs and she can faintly hear Ron shouting. She follows the sound.
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"How do you feel about war, Hermione?" Harry asks her once, three days after Sirius's funeral, where they put to rest his spirit and stared blankly at a grave without a body to occupy it.
He is half drunk off of a bottle of Fire Whiskey Fred and George nicked from they-won't-say-where and Hermione is wishing she'd taken a sip when Ron had offered.
"The war-" Hermione begins.
"Just war," Harry steps in.
He takes another haphazard sip from the mouth of the bottle. Ron watches with his knees tucked closely to his chest, arms wrapped around himself like a hug. Hermione takes the bottle and goes to have a sip.
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"How do you feel about life, Ms. Granger?" Dumbeldore's portrait asks her amid the wreckage of the castle. Hermione dodges an errant spell from a Death Eater and tries to forget the way Bellatrix drawled her name in twisted mockery and buried the tip of her wand deep into Hermione's skin.
It hurts.
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A year and a half later, Harry is lying face down in the dirt. His clothes are stained with a combination of soot and sweat and the Death Eaters surrounding him are cutting off the rest of her view.
Hermione can feel the tightness in her throat and her eyesight has narrowed down to the same, familiar tunnel vision she gets when reading books. Harry's corpse doesn't so much as twitch as Voldemort monologues in front of it.
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At twenty-three, Hermione gets a letter delivered to her muggle residence.
It reads:
Dear Hermione S. Granger,
We regret to inform you...
And then diverges in a tish-tosh, mish-mash of technical terms Hermione memorized October of her third year and repeated every morning while brushing her teeth.
Her next purchase is a pair of shared grave plots under the name Granger.