Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or it's characters or it's plot. Please enjoy this as a mixture of my ideas and JKR's.
AN: OOPS YOU CAN'T APPARATE WITHOUT A WAND. My bad. I'm not going to change it, though, because it would throw the story off. Besides, it's just a device to move the plot along. Also I guess I should have capitalized apparate in the story. But whatever.
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I paced. I paced and paced and paced, from one place to another and then back again. I didn't talk to anyone, I didn't find a job, I didn't cry after the first year. I just paced and paced, and wandered from one part of my life to another. For weeks, then months, then years, I waited in coffee shops and diners in dreary Muggle London for something to make sense again.
Curled in my ratty blankets and sheets, on my big queen bed in my tiny little cottage far out in the country, far away from anyone and anything who knew who I had been. The cottage was leased to my for practically nothing by the lovely old couple who owned most of this town, and lived in the huge manor at the top of the hill, looking over the village. I paid for it with the overly generous stipend the Ministry has issued me at the end of the war five years before.
I lived at the very end of the lane; nowhere anyone would accidentally wander past my house. I spent much of my time sitting on a huge old wicker armchair I had dragged outside when I first moved in. The flowers had grown around it, and when I sat there in the summers I couldn't see anything but the blooms and color. I hated them for being able to be pruned every year, and still coming back with a vengeance. I wish I remembered what a vengeance could feel like. I remember I had so much anger those years, but when I lost so many people in that battle… I couldn't snap out of it the way everyone else did.
I spent the first summer lying in Ginny's old bed, sobbing. Or staring out the window. Or making tea for Molly and Arthur, since everyone else seemed to have abandoned them. George couldn't bear to be at home. Percy wasn't ever comfortable there again, Ginny had run off with Harry, and Ron was living with Lavender. He said that he couldn't bear to be with someone as emotional as I was, someone unable to move on. It was just Molly, Arthur, and I that summer. But I finally had to leave too; Molly and Arthur began to cope, and it was obvious they needed their space to heal.
So I found a place out in the country. It could have been over in Africa, for all that mattered; I could easily apparate back to visit them. And yet, I felt I had expended so much effort trying to protect England, my England, that I needed to remain here. And I wanted to at least consider myself to be somewhat near the few people I had left in the world.
After months of solitude, with only the occasional letter from Molly or book from Arthur to appear on my windowsill, I was obviously shocked when I wandered into a small coffee shop in Diagon Alley to see none other than the back of a head of long, lank black hair that could only belong to my former professor.