TITLE: You're Really Here?
CHAPTER: Chapter Two - Memories of a Lost Love
AUTHOR: Teigra
E-MAIL: teigra_kefira@yahoo.com
PAIRING: Remus/Hermione
SERIES: Yes
ARCHIVE: My web-page, my yahoo group, and any place else that it is wanted, just ask first.
CLASSIFICATION: PG-13
SUMMARY: Remus finds an old friend whom he hasn't seen in years.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own them... She does *points to JKR* and I am making no money from this, I'm just enjoying sharing some of my own crazy ideas.
AUTHORS NOTE: Remus would *NOT* leave me alone until I wrote this. This is only the first part... but this is just to please him, so I can get back to writing my other fics.

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*flashback*
"I can't do this Remus, not any more." She was pacing around his sitting room, her robes flaring out around her feet. He knew she really shouldn't be doing this, she had only been out of the Hospital wing for a couple of hours and only because Poppy couldn't keep her in bed any longer. Yet there was nothing he could do to stop her when she was in this kind of mood.

"Love," he tried speaking calmly, not wanting to upset her any further. "What can't you do any more?"

"This, all of this. I can't take it any more. The fighting is over, we've won, I'm leaving." She stopped in front of the fireplace, her back facing him. Even though it was the middle of the summer, there was a fire in the grate, so her body was cast in shadows while surrounded by a bright orangey-red light. "And don't call me that, I don't deserve love from anyone."

"Lo…" She spun around and glared at him. Oh yes, the war had changed them; in ways he couldn't even begin to imagine. "Hermione, why?" He refused to even think that she was serious. She had just spent the last seven years of her life (well, nine, if you included the extra time the time turner gave her) learning to become the powerful witch that she was. The last two years in what he hoped would be a relationship that would last forever; he sure couldn't give his heart to anyone else. And the last year in one of the most gruesome wars since the Crusades.

"Why? Do you really want to know why?" When he nodded his answer, she started in on him.

"Lets see, first reason, my parents are dead." Yes, they had died, two of the first hits on muggle born witches and wizards families. That had happened right after she returned to school this year.

"Second, my dorm mates were murdered in their sleep and I almost was too, except I was here." Lavender and Pavarti, two good witches that would have been useful in this war. A fire charm had been cast in the room and then accelerated until the flames were out of control. The rest of the tower was evacuated, but there had been no way to save the two young women. Goddess knows we both tried, she still bears the scars on her arms, refusing to let them be healed.

"Third, it was a fellow Gryffindor who did it!" She was trembling with anger. "A bloody forth year that I… *I* was tutoring in potions." Oh he remembered that, Severus (he had become Severus to him just this year, you couldn't fight a war together and not start to respect a person) and Jeffery Flitwick had sniffed out the culprit together through a combination of charms and potions. When the child had been found and asked why, she said it was because they let a Mudblood stay in the same dorm as them and that all Mudbloods should be removed from the world (the muggle born student who had been her dorm mate had transferred to Beauxbatons the summer before their second year). Hermione had blamed herself for not seeing it coming, but the kid had seemed so sweet. The girl was now currently in the Ministry's hands until her sixteenth birthday, on which she would be sent to Azkaban for murder.

"Forth, who was then kidnapped by Death Eaters, tortured to an inch of their life and then tossed out on the street to die? Me, that's who!" Oh gods, that was something he could never forget. She had been walking across the grounds, her arms still in the bandages from the fire, when she was taken. He should have never agreed to let her walk out there alone, but she insisted that she needed to think, needed to sort through what had happened. So he let her go, saying he would join her in an hour. He didn't see her again for a month. It was Oliver Wood who found her in the early morning of April, spoiling Voldemorts plans he was sure. She was almost dead when she was found, an hour more and she wouldn't have made it. Oliver had decided to take a different route for his morning jog, instead of heading towards the school he went in the direction of the Shrieking Shack, where he found her laying across the front step, bloody, naked and barely breathing. No one has told her the extent of what happened, the extent of what couldn't be healed, it had been far too long since it happened to be healed by magic. Even muggle medicine couldn't help her now. Yet he was sure she knew.

"Fifth, I have lived in fear for my life for far too long." We all have, he thought.

"Sixth, if I go to a Muggle University, I could get in on the grades I have." She did still have the best grades in the school since Dumbledore. "I could do anything I wanted to out there." That she could, he knew she was brilliant, she had known about him after all, long before anyone else had.

"Seventh, I want to forget I was ever in this ruddy war, I want to forget it ever happened." He really couldn't blame her for that, she had been a part of it almost from the moment she walked into this school. When she became friends with Harry, she became a target. Over the last seven years she has seen more and done more than any one should have to do in a lifetime. This last year being the worst.

"And finally, I killed someone Remus, I'll never, NEVER be able to wash that stain off my soul. I don't care if it was my life or his, I don't care that I was fighting a war, *I* took a life. It may have helped win this war, but I can't live with myself knowing how I felt when I did it." He had seen the cold fury in her eyes when she saw Lucius Malfoy, just a week ago, during the final battle. It was then that he knew just who had done most of the horrid things to her during her kidnapping. They had both seen other Death Eaters, Goyle, Crabbe, McNair, even Diggory and she had been almost clam around them. Lucius however sparked something I had never seen before in her. True hatred. Lucius had been the last barrier between the Dark Lord and us, several wizards had already gone against him and now lay scattered around his feet. He had done something to protect himself from magic, but had forgotten to protect himself from physical attacks. He had laughed when he saw her, taunted her, underestimated her. Ever since she returned from what she referred to as 'the month from hell' she had been carrying a dagger strapped to her right calf. Severus, Sirius and Remus had all spent several days of the week, for the last three months teaching her how to use it and she proved just how much she had learned that day. She attacked Lucius so fast the man never knew what hit him. It was wizards fighting wizards, he had never expected an attack like this. There had been a sort of gleam in her eyes when she removed the blade from the mans chest, looking him in the eye making sure he knew exactly it was who killed him. Oh yes, the war had changed all of us. Her removal of Lucius had allowed Harry into face Voldemort and shortly there after, we had won the war.

Their first day as full wizards and witches, the first day they had received their licenses, the graduating class of Hogwarts '97 had fought and won the final battle with Voldemort.

She had collapsed after attacking Lucius, crumpling in on herself. A slow acting curse, which she must have been fighting for ages before succumbing to it. A parting gift from one of the captured or dead Death Eaters. It put her back in the hospital wing until today.

"Hermione," He didn't want to ask this question, not now, he felt he already knew the answer. "What about us? You know I can't enter the muggle world."

"I'm sorry Remus, I do love you… but I… I can't… No, won't stay here, in this world, any longer."

"Then I won't stop you. I understand," and the sad thing was, he did. He did understand why she needed to leave.

He never did stop her when she walked out his door, even though it broke his heart to do so. For the next couple of years he kept an eye on her, hoping beyond hope that she would return to him, but she never did. By the end of the third year he resigned himself that she would never come back. He knew he could never love another woman, knew that he would forever be alone, yet sometimes he dreamed…
*end flashback*

This wasn't how he wanted to get the woman of his dreams back. Padfoot had teased him for ages that he was holding onto a pipe dream, that she was gone, but he had never completely given up on her, she had said she loved him, it was one of the last things she ever said to him.

The woman laying here in his arms was only a shadow of the person he once knew. He knew she had gotten into Cambridge University, yet had quit less than a year into her studies. After that he had a hard time tracking her, she was travelling all the time, not staying in one place for more than a few weeks at a time. By the time he had completely lost track of her five years ago, he knew she had to be coming to the end of the money her parents had left her. He hoped that it would bring her hope, but it didn't.

Whispering softly, "What happened 'Mione? Who did this to you?" Resting his cheek on the top of her head, he gently kissed her hair.

"I still love you."