The second (or third) of my 'I'll ship anything you request.)
Angst, alternate post-war dystopia, the beginning will make sense by the end.
"Thank you, Miss Sawyers," Mrs Elliot smiles warmly, taking little Alexis by the hand. "Say thank you, Alexis," she adds to her daughter, and Alexis smiles up at me.
"Thank you Meh-loh-die," Alexis sounds out in a sing-song voice.
I can't help but smile as I reply. "See you next time, Alexis."
Alexis is my last patient for the evening, so I walk out with them, past that receptionist whose name I can't for the life of me ever actually remember (maybe, I think to myself, I've just got a problem with receptionists.) I could never remember the name of Mum and Dad's, either, even though I saw the woman almost every single day, till…
A laugh escapes me suddenly, shrill and piercing in the cold quiet of the hallway.
When I finally close the decaying wooden door of my tiny apartment behind me, I can't help but lean against it, eyes shut tight as my bags drop to my feet. It's been a normal day, today; light, even, and Alexis is always a nice one to finish up on.
But Mer-dear God, I can't help but feel like I've dropped in a lake and wrung out.
One more day, over.
Which would be just lovely, if I was counting down towards something changing; but I'm not.
Somehow, I manage to pick up my bags (I'd leave them by the door, but even as exhausted as I am, I can't help but be as fastidious as always) and take them to the desk in the corner of the main living room that suffices for my study.
It's not like I need a study anymore, anyway.
By now, the weariness is bone-deep; like it's been stewing in the air of my apartment all day, just waiting to settle over me when I came back…(not home, this will never be home.)
It's going to be one of those days, I can tell; so I don't look into the mirror till after I've finished showering, till I've pulled a holey sweater over threadbare shirt.
Finally, standing in front of the sink, toothbrush in hand (I'm vaguely aware that I should eat, that I haven't eaten the whole day since the apple and wholemeal crackers when I woke at 5 in the morning, but I can't do it), I force my eyes up.
Always the eyes; that's what I can't help but see first – irony, I suppose, though I can't be sure, because Hogw- school and grammar always existed on two different planes.
Sometimes, staring into startlingly vivid blue eyes, I forget what they're meant to look like.
Today's good. Today, I remember that I inherited Mum's eyes (brown is dominant, blue is recessive – I used to wish I'd gotten Dad's lovely sea-blue instead of the boring brown I spent most of my life with.)
Boring brown.
I'd rip these ones out, tear them from my eye-sockets with my bare fingers if it meant I could get those back.
The hair; it's hard to forget the hair, because one of my most treasured moments is the look on everyone's faces when I finally managed to stop it looking like an electrocuted bush. It says a lot that I almost (I'm not that far gone, yet) miss the half-hour spent every morning before class, battling it into some semblance of respectability.
Now, short, glossy black hair frames a face that's too slender to be the result of weight loss, brushing sharp cheekbones that look more like Malf- Malfoy's.
Melody Sawyers. "My name is Melody Sawyers," I whisper. Hermione Granger doesn't have blue eyes and black hair, and she's not skinny as a model and as short as a fourteen year old.
And then the doorbell rings.
With one last look in the mirror – I am Melody Sawyers – I tear my eyes away and rush from the bathroom, opening the door of my apartment a fraction.
"Who is it?" I rasp, and I can actually hear the tiredness in my tone.
"Miss Granger."
Fuck.
"Password."
There's a sigh. "Miss Granger, you know very well that if I were here to kill you, I'd-"
"Password."
"Miss Granger-"
"Say the goddamned password!" I shriek, and there's silence in the aftermath, as echoes ring around the room.
This time, the sigh is one of resigned acceptance. "It's my fault they died."
It bloody well is, you son of a bitch, I think, swallowing heavily, leaning back to open the door.
I pour boiling water into my cracked mug, trying not to wince as some of the liquid splatters (as it does, always, and I'd buy a new kettle or pour more slowly but there's something real about the pain) on my skin. "Tea?" I ask, already reaching for another mug.
"It's happening tomorrow," he says grimly, in lieu of actually responding to my question, though he does lean forwards from the old, musty couch he's seated on to take the mug I hand to him.
Not unexpected news; perhaps it's what I've been counting down to, I suppose. "Alright," I shrug.
Maybe something in my tone – the apathy, the absolute lack of I care – surprises him, because he looks up sharply with what seems uncomfortably like disappointment in his eyes.
"Alright," he echoes.
I blame the not-really-long long day for the fact that, barely ten minutes into the silence, I begin shifting uncomfortably in my seat (a wooden-backed, un-cushioned chair that is the only luxury, other than my bed, I'll afford myself when it comes to rest.)
Surprisingly though, it's he who breaks the silence first. "How are you?"
A humourless laugh escapes me before I can stop it. "I'm fine" (lie), "just fine. The business is good, patients are tolerable-"
"I didn't ask," he cuts me off quietly, "how Melody Sawyers is. How are you, Miss Granger?"
I sip my tea, though it's already cooling. "Don't call me that," I murmur.
A smile curves his lips (but doesn't reach his eyes, it never reaches his eyes) and he shakes his head. "Really, Miss Granger, it's your name." I don't respond, though the way he accentuates every syllable of my – that – name grates against my nerves like little else can, now. "You can't let that go so easily," he continues, obviously undeterred by my silence. "Just like you can't let them go."
It's entirely possible that the sound of something shattering is the mug when I place it deliberately on the table.
I can deal with that later, I promise myself vaguely as I rise to my feet, striding towards him with my fists clenched.
"What, Professor," he flinches at that, good, "you mean the way you let them go when you let them die?"
He doesn't look at me, just sets his tea down on the table softly, licking his lips slightly.
(My eye doesn't follow the movement of his tongue. It doesn't.)
"Perhaps," he allows, shoulders moving slightly. "Perhaps not."
"Fuck. You. Professor. Snape."
His reply is smothered by the crush of my lips against his.
Somehow, we find ourselves where we always have, ever since everything fell to ruination and I ran, became Melody Sawyers with a dental degree I never started and a practice I never worked in, much less cofounded.
With his head between my legs; my fingers tangled in his hair, pulling and twisting; with the same words dripping from my lips in an incoherent snarl of language and grief and oh Merlin the pain.
"It's your fault they died," I hiss. There's a muffled sound of what is probably agreement, but it's not enough; and so I wrench his head back with one hand, the other grasping at his chin and forcing his dark, unfathomable eyes to meet mine.
"Say it." The words are barely audible, a breath, and yet he hears.
(Or at least, he knows. He always knows.)
"It's my fault they died."
Staring into that gaze, black and striking and real, that's the first time I realise he believes it, really believes it.
Slowly, my fingers untangle from the back of his head as I release his chin (though the warmth of his skin lingers against mine.) Still meeting my eyes, he bends his head back down, almost tentatively.
I nod, blinking back what must be dust in my eyes, before giving up and shutting them completely under the force of bittersweet pain-pleasure that wracks my body.
"Harry, don't!" I scream, but it's too late.
I've figured it out too late and all I can do is watch the green burst of light strike him in the chest, see my best friend collapse to the ground at the feet of Ginny Weasley, the girl he's been cursed to protect since second year.
Only, she's not Ginny Weasley. She hasn't been for a long time.
One half of Tom Riddle's soul in Ginevra Weasley's body turns towards me and smiles. "I was going to let Bella have you, Hermione," she says sweetly. "But we've been such good friends for so long, I just knew I had to do you the honour of seeing this done personally."
"No!"
Too many times, I've watched this pair of boys suffer for me; and this one, most of all.
It's just…ever since the war started; I knew it'd be me dying for him.
(So why am I watching Ron Weasley dying before me and why am I holding a football in my hand…?)
Riddle figures it out just before I do, and his/her dawning look of cold fury is the last thing I look at.
Because the last thing I see is my best friend and the boy I was going to marry, dead-dying-living-laughing-loving-gone.
And with that, all I can do is hate.
Hate them for leaving me alone, hate Voldemort for everything he did to take all I had and tear it to pieces, tiny and irretrievable, unfixable.
Hate the Ministry for not doing what it should have, hate Dumbledore for dying and leaving us to destroy ourselves.
Hate Professor Severus Snape for not letting me end it all.
"It's my fault they died," I whisper, tears dripping down my face and blurring my vision as I come.
Dimly, some part of my mind alerts me to the fact that I'm crying; to the fact that I'm being carried into my bedroom, and that he's got his arms wrapped around me.
"The airports will open again, after the Dark Lord has declared himself and our world," you murmur into her ear. "Perhaps I can find some way to help you out – some way of avoiding the Ministry, the government."
You chuckle, though there's nothing funny about anything. "You came to ask me about the institutions of magical research in America once, in your fifth year. Maybe you can finally go and see them for yourself."
She twitches in her sleep, and you run fingers through her short, sleek hair. It took you a long while to develop a potion to create a transformation this thorough; you had to use Nymphadora Tonks's research into her own powers to do it, and though you haven't told the girl in your arms, you know she's probably aware; it's currently irreversible.
You wonder, sometimes, what it'd have been like to touch her real hair, see her real eyes glazed over in lust and the aftermath of orgasm.
(Not that you'll know, now, and you should be content with what you have because Ron Weasley is dead and he'll never see what you see, ever again.)
(It's your fault they died, and you know it.)
"I wonder," you murmur, "when you'll realise that you can't use magic anymore. I wonder when it stopped working, when your light died out. Was it when Weasley died? Potter? When you realised that this isn't a war anymore, it's a victory march?"
She's suffered enough, and yet she'll suffer more; from tomorrow as a Muggle, as an officially inferior human being. When she invariably tries to leave the country and he has to tell her that she can't, because they'll be able to sense that, powerless or not, she's still magic-born, and he's not letting her die.
Not the last of the Golden trio.
Not her.
"Anything, to keep you alive," and you know it's true, no matter how much she'll hate you for it.
Anything.