Dirge
Chapter 10: Hermione
She hasn't lost anybody important. She's lost people she cared about – Fred, Sirius, Professor Lupin, Professor Dumbledore – but she hasn't lost anyone she loves. Her parents, Ron, Harry, Ginny, even Lavender and Parvati, are thankfully, wonderfully alive.
The thing about war is that it would be selfish for her to mourn. There are so many people who have it worse than she does – almost everyone, it sometimes seems. She shouldn't be feeling as lost and confused and empty as she does. In this world, where Ron and Ginny have lost their brother, where Harry's saved the world but not Sirius or Remus or Dumbledore, where Lavender's had half her skin torn off by Greyback, where Parvati still doesn't know what's happened to her parents, Hermione doesn't get to mourn. Everybody she loves is alive. She has to be strong for those (for Ron) who aren't as lucky.
She almost laughs at the thought. She's supposed to be lucky? She's been captured and tortured, she's seen people die, she's killed people (not with Unforgivables, but with carefully placed jinxes and curses and charms that kill more legally and more painfully than Avada Kedevra. She's not sure if she can use Wingardium leviosa or Impedimenta ever again).
She found out yesterday, helping Hagrid repair his hut with Ron and Harry and Ginny, that she can see thestrals now. But after the battle, there's nobody at Hogwarts who can't. Ginny said only, "Oh. So that's what they look like," and that was all anyone said about it. All Hermione is allowed to say about it.
If she were still in the Muggle world – if she had never gone to Hogwarts (she allows herself that fantasy every so often – she has not stopped having it since her first day at Hogwarts, she has never stopped wondering what would have happened if) – if she had not gone to Hogwarts she would never have had to drop out of school, never have been tortured, never seen someone die, never killed someone. The events of her first year – watching Ron sacrifice himself for Harry, watching Harry sacrifice himself for the world – would be completely foreign to her. Now those horrors seem like nothing compared with what she's seen this year, and the year before, and the year before.
She's not sure if she's going to tell her parents what she's seen, what she's done. She's been through more at eighteen than either of them ever will. It's a frightening thought, almost horrifying. If she had stayed a Muggle she wouldn't have had to see, to do, any of this.
She hates what this world does to people. It's made her grow up too much and too soon.
She knows it's not fair to blame the entire wizarding world for the events of these past few years. She knows there are times in Muggle history – wars, plagues, famines, droughts – when the opposite could be said, that the Muggle world made people grow up too much, too soon.
Knowing this doesn't help. When she's with Ron in the Great Hall and there's fifty dead bodies in front of her (people she knew, Fred, Professor Lupin, Colin, Susan), when she's not allowed her own feelings because Fred belongs to Ron, she can't help but imagine leaving this world – going to Australia to find her parents and never coming back.
It's too late for that, she knows. She hasn't been to Muggle school since she was eleven. She's an expert at Transfiguration and Potions and Arithmancy but she never learned calculus and she doesn't know the difference between Helium and Hydrogen. She has no Muggle education, no skills she can use in that world. And she can't leave Ron and Harry and Ginny.
Still, she can't help but think of the Hermione-that-could-have-been. And she can't help but wonder (was it the day she got her Hogwarts letter, the day she helped Harry and Ron fight the troll, the summer after she was Petrified and she still decided to go back?) when it was she died.
She's not allowed to miss her, though, any more than she's allowed to miss Fred. Nobody she loves has died, and she's not allowed to mourn.