Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or any of J.K's collection of ingenious characters
This is my first fanfic everyone...it's just getting started, I have some ideas of where it's going to go, but it's still evolving. This first chapter is a lot of background, groundwork kind of stuff, it will pick up soon! I promise!
Review please! Constructive criticism always appreciated.
-one-
Hermione drew one ragged breath after another, urging her feet to keep moving as the corner came into view. Just a bit farther... She consoled herself as she simultaneously dodged a cyclist to her left and a soda can underfoot. Those hurdles behind her, she looked ahead with squinted eyes to continue plotting her zigzagging route through the throng of early morning joggers, hurried executives, and children on their way to school.
It had started off a good morning. She had woken up to a ray of fiery sunlight inching its' way across her face, and the scent of dark coffee tickling at her nose. Her friend Jackson had soon sauntered into the room, a huge proud grin on his dangerously handsome face, carrying a tray with all of her morning favourites: grapefruit, danishes, strong coffee, and toasted English muffins with wild blackberry jam. After teasingly feeding each other for a good fifteen minutes, they ended the filling meal with a quick romp in the covers.
Ok...so Jackson wasn't exactly a friend, but he wasn't a boyfriend either. Her and the built, tanned, chisled, skilled...uh, fireman didn't have the kind of connection, correction, intellectual or emotional connection, for her to consider him such a large part of her life. She liked to think of him as a good distraction, as she did with all men lately. Yes, Jackson was a very good distraction...this one would be hard to cut loose.
After they had disentangled themselves from the covers and each other, Hermione had quickly realized that she had a bus to catch in 10 minutes. She dressed in a sweaty hurry, clipped back her wild hair, and sucked back a mint as she scrambled out of the door. Halfway down the elevator she realized she had forgotten her keys, and had to race back up to retrieve them.
And here she was, 5 minutes later, makeupless, and unshowered with fuzzy teeth, sprinting to catch a damn bus. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered with this, but the answer always popped achingly, agonizingly into her head, and she set her jaw and kept going, driving the image away. She had always done things the hard way. She had grown up doing it, and she could – she would - handle it.
Determined not to be late for work and have to wait another half hour for the bus, she gathered her strength and sprinted the last few feet to the bus stop, her heavy bag bouncing painfully against her hip and her heels rubbing uncomfortably against her feet. She arrived to find no bus in sight – had she missed it? – but people waiting. She was safe! She put her hands on her knees, balancing her bag of files and supplies awkwardly on her back, and inhaled the humid morning air deep into her lungs.
Standing there, panting like someone who had just run a marathon instead of just a mile, she knew she was drawing a few stares from the people around her. Men, admiring her hanging bosom and her small behind up in the air - and probably imaging ways in which they WISH they could make me pant - and women, looking at her heaving, sweaty body distastefully, silently radiating their disapproval. She threw back a few intimidating glances, straightening up.
The bus arrived momentarily as her breathing regulated. She climbed on, her legs aching, thinking about that gym membership she had purchased two months ago, and gratefully took a seat by herself. Sex was one way to burn some calories but really she should think about going...
After a few minutes she noticed in her peripheral vision a man eyeing her, and she gave him a quick smile. She considered striking up a conversation but he seemed just a little young for her 25 years. She didn't like feeling like she'd robbed a cradle...
25 years...wow sometimes that scared her. If she could have predicted where she was now, in a hot city bus surrounded by muggles, this would not have been it. The studious, innocent girl of her teens had been obliterated, by her own personal choice of course. Once she had dismissed that tame version of Hermione, she had explored a different side of herself, the one where she lived instead of lived in books. The one where she inhabited the muggle world, and abandoned the magical, well...all that she could of it...
The bus stopped on a shabby London street, marking her destination. She got off and walked a block until she faced a run down clothing store that was "closed for renovations". She stopped in front of it and sighed, piecing together her courage and composure as she did every morning before stepping into an old phone booth on the sidewalk.
She picked up the phone's receiver, jabbed a few buttons, and a cool voice echoed in reply, "Good morning, and welcome to the Ministry of Magic Headquarters. Please state your name and purpose,"
She sighed, before repeating the reply she gave every morning.
"Hermione Granger, Department of Mysteries, employee number 8713346,"
The machine answered impersonally, "Thank you. Welcome to the Ministry of Magic and have a nice day," before shooting out a tacky button with her name and title on it. She grabbed it and stuffed it in her bag along with the countless others she accumulated daily as the elevator floor began to descend into the ground.
It was hard to try and live as a muggle, but work in the magical world... but after... after what happened, they wouldn't let her leave, she'd found out too much. She was trapped under the thumb of the Ministry. She knew that she couldn't go; they would find her. They could ruin her life. It was better to get through the work as numbly as possible, and then return to her wandless, lonely existence where spells and incantations did not prevail, where a few precious syllables could not tear someone's life apart.
It's not that she didn't have friends in the muggle world though. She did, but they weren't friends like...like she'd had in the past. It was hard to talk openly to someone and have serious conversations when you couldn't tell them about a large chunk of your life, and about your past. They were living in one world, completely oblivious to another that was just under their noses, and Hermione resided in both. It was a sticky situation.
She didn't get very close to anyone, she seemed to lose that ability a while back anyways, but she had people to talk on the phone to, go shopping with, and party with. Superficial friends, she liked to think of them as...acquaintances almost...
...And of course she had men constantly ebbing and flowing into her life. She would stay with one until she got restless, or he wanted to get close. She was almost satisfied, and that was good enough...
As the elevator doors swung open and released her, she was swept out of her reverie and into the Ministry's main chamber. She glanced around, mentally calculating the path of least resistance to the elevator across the room, trying to avoid the eyes of her coworkers.
Taking one last moment before starting off, she looked down at her image, flattening her plain skirt and blouse – such a contrast from her usual eclectic ensembles, she didn't want to attract attention here – and noticed she had a run in her stockings. She uttered a groan of despair. It was going to be a long day...