[Do I really need to tell you that Harry Potter is not mine? Okay, then, here it is, minus the cutesy jokes that so many people put into their disclaimers: Harry Potter is not mine.]
Hermione walked briskly over the cobblestones of Diagon Alley, trying desperately to keep her grip on the parcel of books she was carrying. She let her eyes wander around the street, taking in the people and the colorful signs above the shops. It all seemed slightly unfamiliar, yet she still felt at home.
It had been a year or more since Hermione had last been here; had last seen and talked with wizards as if she was their equal. It had been a cloudy, miserable day, and her mind was even hazier than the streets. Harry had steered her by the arm from shop to shop, pretending that people were not staring and whispering behind their hands. He had walked her into Ollivander's and explained as she stood there, seeing nothing and everything, that she needed a replacement wand. Mr. Ollivander had fussed and flitted about of course, handing her wands and making her wave them absently until finally one had languidly sparked. Harry led her home, then, took her to her door, and told her that he would write. He hugged her, and she walked inside, slowly pulling the door shut behind her.
Harry did write, first long letters telling her to hang on and come back, then short, polite, inquiries as to whether she was eating. Mrs. Weasley had written at first, which was surprising, considering Ron's attitude about the whole thing, but she had stopped when the scandal of Ginny's death erupted. Hermione could not fault her for this, and when pictures of Ginny dead with her Death Eater boyfriend ran on the front page of the Prophet, Hermione knew that she would not be hearing from Molly Weasley again. She had received a few other letters. A supportive one came from Neville Longbottom came at the beginning. It was probably, as Hermione reasoned later when his name was printed in a list of casualties, one of the last letters he wrote. She also received a stiffly concerned letter from the Ministry with Percy's signature telling that they would pay for psychiatric treatment at St. Mungo's if she would come back to work. Yet despite whom the senders were, something was the same: eventually the letters stopped coming, and soon Hermione's only contact with the wizarding world was through the Daily Prophet, which had only mentioned Hermione's disgrace as an Auror for one or two weeks before something new and more scandalous came up. She used those issues to line Crookshanks's litter box.
Hermione really didn't mind not getting letters, of course. She hardly noticed that she was alone during those long, mechanical months. It seemed quite the opposite. She had constant company in her head, and her dreams had as many faces as could fit into the World Cup stadium, all leering and laughing. She hardly woke from her nightmarish stupor until another letter arrived almost ten months after the owls stopped visiting her flat.
The letter was from Dumbledore, whom, she realized as she read the letter aloud to the increasingly frail Crookshanks, she had not seen in a year and a half. Apparently the old problem with unintentionally temporary Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers had cropped up again. In Hermione's sixth year, an Auror named Hubert Higgs had taken the position. In sharp contrast to Moody, he was young and notoriously lax about security. This carelessness was endearing to the students, but became darkly painful when he was killed over the summer, supposedly by Lucius Malfoy, who, along with Draco and his wife, disappeared from the public eye shortly afterward. His absence left the school governors free to appoint Mad-Eye Moody for one more year (as he had never really carried out his contract two years before), and Fleur Delacour ("Scarcely old enough to be decent," Hermione had muttered several times over the school year) to the position in Hermione's seventh year. To everyone's surprise, Fleur proved to be the longest staying DADA professor in recent memory, teaching at the school for ten years until her mother died and Madame Maxine invited her to teach at Beauxbatons in order to be closer to her sister Gabrielle, who was now a student at the school. After her were two more professors, each Aurors, both of whom had died in service. Now Dumbledore was asking her to fill the position.
"I have full confidence in your abilities," Hermione read out loud, and paused. Was he being ironic? No, surely not about that, surely not. And if he is, another voice inside Hermione's head said defiantly, we'll show him. So with that rare burst of confidence still lingering within her, she transfigured a lampshade into an owl, and sent a reply back to Dumbledore.
Now, Hermione was walking unsteadily through Diagon Alley, balancing armloads of Defense Against the Dark Arts books in her arms, already contemplating lesson plans. It had just been yesterday that she had gotten an owl back from Dumbledore confirming her position, yet it seemed like another world entirely. It was a new life, as much as a turning point as that terrifying and impossible night over a year ago had been.
The thing was, though, Hermione didn't know whether she could really have the new life she wanted. She knew none of the current Hogwarts students besides Charlie Weasley's twin daughters, who by Hermione's reckoning, would be first years this fall. As far as she knew, none of her former classmates had children over the age of eight or brothers and sisters under the age of eighteen. She hadn't known any of her coworkers besides her old school friends well enough to know their families, but she knew that they would probably know her.
In one of his early letters, Harry had carefully warned her that she had maybe better stay out of the public eye for a while. People were talking about her, calling her mad and worse, and laughing at her. It was a sign of the dark times, Harry wrote bitterly, that a newspaper as mainstream as the Prophet would call her, in a comic parodying a famous one about a Muggle named Martin Miggs, "Madame Granger, the Mad Mudblood". She had not cared at the time— as if I'm going out otherwise, she told herself— but now that she was back to a public life, she didn't fancy the idea of being called Madame Mad Mudblood by children.
At this discouraging notion, Hermione picked up her pace and began to walk more briskly in the direction of the Apothecary. Only one more stop, she told herself as she struggled to keep hold of her books. One more, and I'm through. She became distracted, though, by the sight of a small girl, sitting only a few doors away from the apothecary. Her shoulders were heaving.
Hermione approached the girl cautiously, and kneeled beside her. She tapped the child on the shoulder gently. "Are you lost?" she asked quietly. Her voice was hoarse from disuse.
The girl looked up. She was four or five, and so precociously beautiful that Hermione nearly gasped. She was pale with white-golden hair and dark, intense eyes. She did not speak, but only continued to cry raspingly.
"What's your name?" Hermione asked, wiping a tear from the girl's cheek without thinking. At this touch, the girl's sobs subsided, and she wiped her nose on the sleeve of her robes.
"Priscilla," the girl whispered in return, looking up shyly at Hermione, who suddenly remembered the Christmas at the Weasleys' when Charlie's girls were this age. Hermione had always managed to make them stop crying, and they adored her completely. "Hermione, you're so lovely with children," Charlie's wife had marveled. She remembered this praise now, and it gave her confidence.
"Priscilla," she said again, "are you lost?"
As if in answer, a pair of black robed arms and gloved hands wrapped themselves around the girl's body, and pulled her into the air. "Priscilla, where have you been?" The man's words were muffled as he held his daughter close to him. "Daddy's been so worried over you, you silly girl."
A gloved hand reached down to help Hermione, and as he helped her to her feet, he thanked her, relief clear in his voice. "Thank you so much, I'm terribly sorry for the trouble."
Hermione brushed off her robes hastily, and looked up. "That's quite—" she began, but stopped short as she got a good look at the man in front of her. It was Draco Malfoy, looking very much the same as he had when she'd last seen him, with changes mainly in height and build, and a long scar that ran across one cheek. He immediately recognized her as well, and the warmth quickly drained from his light eyes.
With no idea what to say, Hermione said the first thing that popped into her mind.
"I didn't know you had a daughter, Draco."
"It's been thirteen years, hasn't it?" he said coldly, and continued before she could respond. "Still keeping company with Potter and Weasley?"
"No, not since—" She paused as it all came back to her for the millionth time. That night, so soggy and black, saturated with the screams of Death Eaters and Aurors. She remembered the wet ground as she threw herself down, trying to reverse the spell, hoping and praying vainly as she stared into the shallow, dead, eyes of the woman's body, that it hadn't worked. Look at you, Ron had screamed later, his face twisted like a wet rag as they lined up the bodies of the dead, you kill one Death Eater and go to pieces. You know how many of our own died because of your stupidity tonight? You let your team down. You let me and Harry down. Hermione took a deep breath. "Not since a while," she finished lamely.
At the lack of a response from Draco, she looked down at Priscilla, who was sucking her thumb happily. "Who's her mother? Do I know her?" she asked, avoiding Draco's eyes.
His response was not cold or scornful, but angry. "You should," he said, his voice quivering with hate.
Hermione looked at Priscilla again, and it hit her. Those eyes... She had seen those eyes before, from under a Death Eater cloak. They were anonymous and frightened as Hermione uttered those words that only Aurors were allowed to say. The woman had fallen, and Hermione had fallen with her, wishing that her words were reversible, probing at the woman's face until she saw those eyes, glassy and incomplete.
"Oh my God," Hermione whispered, and looked up at Draco. His eyes were red and he was shaking. They stared at each other for a few moments, and despite the hate she felt emanating from him, Hermione pitied Draco at that moment as she had rarely pitied anyone before.
"You've chosen the wrong side, you know." Hermione said quietly. "You'll lose, I know it."
Draco's eyes flashed as he pulled his daughter toward him. "I may be on the losing side," he hissed, "but at least I have something to fight for." He looked at her coldly. "What do you have? Your spell books?" He kicked at her books, which were still in a pile on the ground. "Don't pity me, Granger," he said finally. "I don't need it from you." With this, he lifted his daughter and held her tightly, her legs wrapping around his waist. He turned away so briskly that Priscilla's long hair swooped around them as he walked away.
Hermione stood there watching them, watching Priscilla's impassive face as her head bobbed over her father's shoulder, until they finally vanished into the swaying waves of the crowd. She went into the Apothecary and bought her ingredients mechanically, her mind wandering from her shopping. She left the shop, and prepared to apparate, but paused, letting Draco's words wash over her again. At least I have something to fight for. What do you have? Hermione thought of her books and papers and every useless thing she had done in her life. Rubbish, she thought bitterly. Complete and utter rubbish, all of it. I haven't got anything of worth, except for... She made herself stop, and a thought jumped into her mind, as uncalled for as if it had apparated there. She thought of a home, crooked on its foundation, with lopsided stories piled on top of each other. She thought of a clock missing one hand, now, but with many more in its place, and of a family that had treated her like their own when she had no other family to lean on. She thought of a table, uneven and long, where tonight would sit at least a dozen people with shared histories and lives and jokes, all with red hair, except for maybe one with black hair and a scar across his forehead. They would sit there, laughing and talking with their mouths full, about who had come into Fred and George's shop that day, and whatever funny thing someone at the ministry had said, and the girls' new haircuts, and oh, Ron, do you remember that time in first year, with Hagrid and Norbet? There would be an extra chair at the table, near Molly and Bill, left out for a girl who would never come back, and another one folded up at the side, propped against the wall that had been used so many times by a guest who used to come that no one could bear to put it up. And if she came, they would all smile, cautiously at first, and then big crooked smiles and laughs, and oh Hermione, they would say, there's a chair over there by the wall— the same one you used to use, we think. And she'd set it between Ron and Harry, and all would be good again.
Hermione blinked, and she was back in the hazy afternoon at Diagon Alley. Now, though, she had something to fight for, and with a smile, she held up her wand, and whispered, "The Burrow" as she apparated away.