A/N: Gratuitous H/C because I'm trash like that. Anyone who can figure out the narrator before the end gets a virtual high five.
House: Gryffindor
Category: Drabble
Prompt: Shaking [Action]
Word Count: 470
Beta: Theoreticaloptimist
Even now, years after it's all happened, her hands still tremble.
The Healers tell her that it's nerve damage - unfixable because it was an Unforgivable that did the damage. It doesn't hurt, but it's not pleasant either. Her more knowledgeable friends look for answers - cures - all over the world. They try books, plants, ancient potions, new potions, spells, counter-curses, runes, long-forgotten hermits in huts on the outskirts of third-world countries; they call in favor after favor after favor until she finally tells them enough is enough. She can live with some shaking in her hands. She doesn't need the guilt of them wasting years of their life on her shoulders too. Selfish, maybe, but she's isn't arsed enough to care. Besides, it's not the worst affliction. She certainly got off lightly considering the curse in question.
For now, until a viable solution presents itself, whenever she's particularly focused or motivated, she can steady her hands. Otherwise she has a permanent tremor in her hands, like those war veterans she read about when she was younger.
Oddly enough, the only times her hands consistently don't shake is when she's casting spells. Even writing is a challenge for her. Maybe she should have been an Auror.
Still, she's nothing if not intelligent enough to make up for her own deficiencies. After all, what company - magical or otherwise - would want an office worker who can't write her own name without it coming out as an illegible mess? After some time spent in despair at all of the unfulfilled promises, she gathers herself up and bullies her brain into coming up with solutions.
She charms any writing utensils into automatically compensating for her hands' unsteadiness, she transfigures a small wooden holder for her books and papers, she holds what she absolutely has to in her arms and levitates everything else, and she firmly refuses to think about what a mess she must seem like to the rest of the world. She survived a war that killed dozens if not hundreds, and yet she can't even sign a check or read a book without aid.
Her friends, once they catch on, are eager to be useful however they can be. Instead of fixing her body, they look to adjust things around it. Change the environment, not the person. It's great. It's wonderful. She couldn't ask for better people to help her, to love her.
Sometimes she just wants to scream at them all to leave her alone. But she doesn't. Because she knows better.
And even now, after so many years, she gets nightmares of excruciating pain and of the word Mudblood being screamed at her, over and over again. Because Hermione Weasley nee Granger still hasn't recovered from the effects of Bellatrix's depraved cruelty at Malfoy Manor.
And she thinks that she never will.