A/N: Alright guys, this is my response to the "Peanut Butter Sandwich" challenge over at WIKTT, hope you enjoy it!
Chapter 1:
Silver Bullets Put an End to What May Have Been Love
"What do you mean you mean exactly what you said you mean?" Hermione asked, staring at the head bobbing in the green flames of the fireplace.
She was standing in the beautiful Victorian house, the Black house, which Harry had left to the Order of the Phoenix. Of course, now that Voldemort was dead, and Harry too, for that matter, there was no need for the Order to keep the house. Dumbledore, in his ever omniscient way, had given the house to Hermione and Remus.
Hermione granted herself a watery smile. Remus had proposed to her about three seconds before plunging into the final battle, and she had said yes two seconds before she herself had gone.
The battle had been a spectacular thing, full of multi-hued spells bouncing through the air accompanied by cries of rage and pain echoing and reechoing in the vast cavern of the hollowed Alpine mountain in which they fought. Suddenly there had been one explosive flash of green light, a boom louder than a dropped atomic bomb, and darkness for every creature in a 100 mile radius.
In exactly seven days, most awoke again. Everyone was a bit disoriented, and a few ministry and Order officials who had not been present during the battle appeared to arrest the still-dazed Deatheaters. Hermione had gone searching for Remus, desperate to know if he was still alive, but what she found broke her heart three thousand times over.
Harry Potter, her best friend since she'd entered witchhood, was dead. He and Voldemort were laid across from each other, stretched to full length and with looks of such peace on both their faces you'd think both were genuinely destined for heaven. Near Harry, so near Hermione could tell he had been present in the final moments of battle, was Remus.
His hair seemed grayer than ever before, his face more wrinkled than Nicholas Flamel's, Remus Lupin seemed dead tired.
She had waited by Remus's bedside for weeks, praying and muttering and pacing, desperately hoping he would awake. It was during that time that Dumbledore had appeared next to Hermione.
"Sirius would have wanted the house left to him, you know," he gestured toward Remus's still and torn body, "but Harry, would have left it with you." Hermione nodded, uncertain as to what Dumbledore meant.
"Since the house was left in my care, I have decided to leave it to both of you," Hermione's head jerked up in time to see Dumbledore's eyes twinkling and her ex-headmaster departing. And she continued to wait.
Now what she heard could not be true. It couldn't be. After he had survived teaching at Hogwarts and being with the Order and fighting the final battle, how could it come to this?
Her husband of three glorious years was dead. Shot in a hunting accident. By a farmer. On the full moon. WHAT KIND OF FARMER TRAIPSES AROUND WITH SILVER BULLETS? She raged within herself. Yet it was true, so very true.
She did not attend the funeral, she did not put an obituary in the paper, she did not respond to the condolences cards she was sent. No, she went to Wales and got herself drunk the only way she knew how.