1Disclaimer- I do not own any of these characters. I just like to write about them.
Chapter 1.
One thing Hermione loved about summer was that she could read. A lot. Whatever she wanted. Whenever she wanted. It could be for school. It could be romance. It could be mystery. It could be a magazine about hair, for all she cared. However, it wasn't about the genre of the book or the material at hand. Hermione read because it took her somewhere else. She could be in the heroin's world. Or just a person watching it first hand. Frankly, she'd needed that lately.
If nothing had happened, she would have been finished with her seventh year at Hogwarts. If life had stayed the way it always had, she would have graduated by now, and on her way as an auror. But something did happen, and life did not stay the way it always had. "The War"–as everyone had come to call it, in awe, in fear– was over. Everyone was safe. Families slept. The sun shined. Laughter could be heard in the streets. Laughter hadn't escaped Hermione's lips din three months, since "The Great Battle". All these wars, battles. She was sick of hearing it as if it belonged in history books. Hermione knew that in ten years or so, a girl just like her would read about it, drink it down, store it in her own mental records of the magical world. To Hermione, it wasn't history. It was the saddest, most frightening, nerve jarring day in she would ever suffer through. She lost loved ones, her friends, companions. Sure, the world was saved, and it was a win for all things good, the light side. But she lost. Lost almost everything important to her. She was broken in a way. She lived, but so much of her was dead.
Before it all happened, the Great Battle, she'd been preparing for any and everything that might come her way. Losing Harry. Even Ron. Classmates, teachers, idols, mentors. But they were all gone. Even the families of anyone involved had been slaughtered. Every last one died. She wasn't prepared to lose both of them. Ron died saving her. Of course he did, she thought, if he went down, he went down like a lion, a true Gryffindor As for Harry, no words could relate what he had done. In the last altercation and confrontation between Voldemort and Harry, it was discovered that Harry himself was the seventh Horcrux. And suddenly, nothing else mattered. Put simply, though, he sacrificed himself for mankind, wizardkind, and those purely innocent and oblivious to what was taking place.. His life floated away, carrying with it the constant fear of sudden death. The Boy Who Lived was dead.
The only people that she knew and could think of that had lived were Lupin, thank the lord, and Draco Malfoy. But Draco Malfoy didn't count. She couldn't yet think of him as human. She'd heard the stories of the mind control games he had been under. She didn't believe any of that crap. For six years she looked into his gray, cold, soulless eyes. As far as she was concerned, he didn't have a heart then, and he didn't now.
All of that brought her here, in London. She was taking a break from the world that broke her heart every time she thought about it. She had taken time to learn how to drive so that everyday, she took her mother's car into the city. She worked as a clerk in a small boutique, but mostly folded sweater-sets and hanging up belt. The 15 discount didn't hurt, though. In her afternoons, she would eat lunch and escape to yet another world at Stacks, the bookstore and café in one(there was one on every corner now). It was good therapy for her, to be in a routine that was safe and light. She knew, though, that she would have to return soon. Return to Diagon Alley, to the Castle, to the world that looked so dark and dismal.
She was set to return in October, just before Halloween. She had signed papers for her own apartment, on a street just off of Diagon Alley called Vane Lane. As a godsend, she was offered a job by Lupin as part of a firm that investigated magical, well, mysteries. She was so accustomed to rooting around where her nose may not have belonged, used to using her knowledge to find something that not many people knew about. And maybe, just maybe she would be helping people. She wasn't exactly sure the range of services this firm performed. She wasn't even sure of the name of the firm. She might be lonely, because the only person she knew there would be Lupin. One thing she was sure of was that she would work with Remus Lupin any day.