Chapter 1; Same Old, Same Old
"Soul Meets Body" by Death Cab For Cutie

In my head / There's a greyhound station / Where I send my thoughts / To far off destinations / So they may have a chance of finding a place / Where they're far more suited than here.

It almost seemed ironic. Like life did this on purpose. She had just complained about her job as a crime journalist, which had been quite boring the last year. Just ten minutes ago, she had expressed how she didn't have anything interesting to do, that there were only petty crimes and no interesting cases like the ones she had solved when she had first been hired by the police department. And now a colleague of hers was dead. Murdered. Brutally murdered. Lavender Brown had been shot six times with a high caliber gun, from behind.

Her body had been found by a local, who had called the police. The call was instantly put through to the head of the Murder Investigation Team, Zacharias Smith, who had brought his team together immediately. He had ordered Harry to come to the emergency meeting - Harry didn't know the subject of the meeting at the time - and call Hermione in, who was, by coincidence, already there.

Hermione huffed a little at the pure irony. Just after complaining about the boring times at work... she was called in for a emergency meeting, which she was normally never called in for. And certainly not on a day she was supposed to be free. Hermione was, technically, not a member of the police department, nor a member of the MIT. She was just a crime journalist with maybe more guts than was good for her, who had been hired by the police department to write press releases and small articles for the local news paper - but she proved herself helpful and a brilliant addition to the squad when she, after only being hired for three weeks, had successfully solved a unsolved case from years ago. Another two weeks later, she noticed a very small but important reoccurring detail in five separate unsolved drug cases and, without permission, she went undercover to collect evidence against them - which she did. After that huge success, Hermione had been asked to work along with the MIT when needed, because of her ability to spot small details and see things others overlooked. But she was never called in. Never. She never went to a murder scene, never went to an emergency meeting, but now she was.

Her mind shifted back to the meeting room when Zacharias Smith stood up. She slowly took in the faces of the other people in the room. Most of them had paled a lot. Terry Boot looked like he had to throw up. Dean Thomas rested his face in his hands, his elbows on the table. Harry looked normal - but Hermione saw a look in his eyes that expressed grief, but also anger. Neville Longbottom, a good friend of Hermione's, stared at nothing in particular with an open mouth that expressed his shock - his eyes were watery. It had started raining again - the depressing hard sound of the water on the windows matched the moods of everyone in the room. Zacharias Smith spoke, for the first time after announcing Lavender Brown's death and the cause of her death.

"Lavender Brown was a hard-working and appreciated colleague," he said. "Brought light in every room she entered. It is a shame to lose a police officer like her, but it is a bigger shame to lose a person like her. She will be missed." The MIT nodded and mumbled some words for the woman.

"Should I come to the murder scene, sir?" Hermione asked Smith quietly, not wanting to sound inhumanly fast back to business.

"Yes, Miss Granger, that is why I had Potter call you," Smith said, somehow sounding slightly annoyed by her question. "The sooner this case is closed, the better. For our colleague's sake." Smith put his hat back on his head, thereby making the difference between his personal self and his professional self. "Okay, Longbottom - go to the murder scene immediately with your team. Potter, follow them, take Granger with you. Boot and Thomas - question the man who called us to report the murder and search other witnesses. I'll stay here to control the situation here at the office."

And so it happened that a few minutes later, Hermione sat next to Harry in a police car, on their way to the murder scene.

"I can't believe it," she said to Harry. "I feel so guilty. I just complained - and now - Lavender - and - " She felt sick to her stomach, sick with guilt, like it was her fault that Lavender was murdered. She almost felt dizzy thinking about it.

"I know," Harry said with a soothing voice, smiling her a fitting smile. Normally, Harry's or Ron's voice could calm Hermione down in seconds, the three of them being friends since middle school.

"Ron..." Hermione said. "Ron doesn't know yet." Ron wasn't part of the MIT. Somehow, Smith seemed to neither like nor trust Ron Weasley, and where everybody saw he was a good strategist and could think rationally, Smith didn't see it, or refused to see it.

"Smith is probably informing everyone at the moment. Just... try to keep calm, and get your strength out of knowing that the murderer will get caught and locked up," Harry said with the same sort of smile on his face. It still couldn't comfort her. She felt like she couldn't be calmed down at all - she felt like throwing stuff through the car, and at the same time she felt like breaking down, putting on pajama's and eating chocolate ice cream in bed until she fell asleep. She wanted to say to Harry that he should know, since Ron knew her well. Better than her and Harry, anyway, but she didn't say it, and took a middle way with her feeling by lighting up a cigarette. She knew she couldn't smoke in police cars, but at the moment, she couldn't care less as she shut her eyes and lay her head against the cool window.

Four days ago, she had been buying snow globes as a souvenir for her friends. Three days ago, she had said goodbye to Chicago, a city she had come to love in the two weeks she had spent there alone, and got on the plane back home. Two days ago, she had spent her day getting comfortable with her jetlag, sleeping in as long as she wanted, watching some movies and cooking herself an unhealthy but satisfying dinner. Yesterday, she repeated that. And this morning, Monday, a day she was normally off, she went to work. People were happy to see her again, she was happy to see them again. She gave her snow globes, they ate some delicious birthday cake, she invited a small group of friends over for a late birthday dinner at her house this evening. She laughed, felt happy with her life and her friends, happy in her single life where she could do anything she wanted, happy with her job, where she worked with friends, although she had her complaints about it, and she knew that those were the moments everybody should value and appreciate the most and live fully. Because it could be over in a heartbeat. Because around the same time she had been congratulated by someone, gotten kisses on her cheeks, Lavender Brown had been brutally murdered.

Hermione angrily squeezed her cigarette filter between her fingers, and felt hot tears dripping out of her eyes, knowing that her life as she knew it had changed for good - and could not ever be changed back.

In my head / There's a greyhound station / Where I send my thoughts / To far off destinations / So they may have a chance of finding a place / Where they're far more suited than here.

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