"Would someone please call a surgeon

Who can crack my ribs and repair this broken heart

That you're deserting for better company

I can't accept that it's over

And I will block the door like a goalie tending the net

In the third quarter of a tied game rivalry"

"Nothing Better" – The Postal Service

February brought with it a cold wetness that seemed to creep into any and every exposed fissure that could let in a draft and which shellacked the streets and denizens of London in the sort of freezing, clammy damp that one couldn't simply shake off in front of a warm fire.

It also brought with it a call, from a care home in Islington, that was close enough to Hermione's flat that she wouldn't exhaust herself by apparating across the country each day for work. Incidentally, it was also her only offer, so it likely wouldn't have mattered much anyway—but she still looked at it as a good sign.

The call had come one week after the disastrous meeting with her parents, and she'd accepted an invitation to interview for a position as an assistant with the residents for the coming week. It was less than what she'd expected, both in stature and in pay: after all, she had an actual degree in gerontology. Yet, the home had declared that they didn't need anyone with that particular skillset. What they needed were trained nurses, and as she wasn't that, they could only accept her in the role of an assistant to the nurses.

When she arrived the following week to view the premises and to meet with the interviewer, she was struck by the conditions, so anemic and sterile after having worked in the wizarding world, where flourishes in decoration were both common and encouraged, but she shook off the sense of foreboding that the depressing care home instilled within her breast. It was a job. She needed one of those.

She'd walked into the interview not knowing what to expect, but having planned for something rather more high-profile than she was presented with, even having gone so far as to wear a ready-to-wear suit her mother had lent her years ago for the very purpose of attending interviews and business affairs. By the end of the meeting, she left the establishment feeling rather more demoralized than she had hoped. When they called back a day or so later in order to extend her an offer, she accepted, but with a somewhat heavy heart.

The flurry of activities which followed were something of a blur and included shopping for a new work wardrobe of non-descript navy polos with the name of the care home and khakis (from which her Gringott's account took a definitive hit), and doing a bit of a clean-up around her flat which had gone to the dogs (or rather, to the cat) since she'd lost her position at Waldweirness.

Between hawking her CV to every potential employer and spending any free time she had holed up on her sofa, nibbling the ice-cream bars that seemed to be all that could satisfy the gnawing black hole in the pit of her stomach, it looked almost like a resentful harpy had made her way through her belongings: clothes strewn about every inch of the floor, cat hair on every surface, soap scum and hard water build-up accruing on her sink and within her shower—and just about nothing in her fridge was edible anymore, either having been eaten in some sort of fugue state, or having spoilt while her attention was elsewhere.

She bore it all with ill-grace, knowing that if she didn't get her affairs in order before she started in Islington, that she'd be forever behind. She only just managed it, by the skin of her teeth and with a lot of magical intervention (including a few visits to Molly Weasley to inquire about cleaning charms). The witch made it with a day to spare, and woke up early the next morning, before the sun was up to greet her, to prepare Crookshanks' meal, and to head out to her first day on the job.

Marigold House, on Cressida Road, was only a short walk from Wittington Hospital, and Hermione managed to apparate to a small alley behind the ambulance fleet that she had cased out when returning from her initial meeting. As it was still dark, she took the opportunity to cast her own wards on the tiny walk-way, and set about establishing muggle repelling charms and notice-me-not enchantments. Once she felt that she'd secured her safe apparition point, she continued through the frigid morning to meet head-on the new challenge she'd accepted for her life.

Hermione tried to pretend that her stomach wasn't flipping unpleasantly at the prospect. Though a Gryffindor, and not averse to tackling new adversaries and trials, she had always been the nervous sort whenever a new job was concerned. At Waldweirness, she'd managed to push away the feeling by jumping in feet-first and taking the bull by the horns. She'd completed much of the department's backlogged paperwork on the first day, and spent the rest of the week acquainting herself with each of the residents. By her second week, she'd felt very much at home, and like she had found a place where she was needed.

This couldn't possibly be so different, she reasoned. She'd meet the residents, she'd learn their needs, she would meet those needs. Simple.

She had, perhaps, been a bit too optimistic.

If Hermione had thought that the process of being hired had been demoralizing, she wasn't entirely prepared for the reality of the new position she'd be occupying. Though it was important, even crucially so, to the smooth operations of Marigold House, she occupied the approximate position of a house-elf.

Sheets needed cleaning, bed pans scoured, catheters and colostomy bags gathered for disposal. Because of her background she had found herself assigned to the closed Dementia ward, which, though it was where she would liked to have been, was all the more horrifying for what she had to witness. The level of degradation that the residents both suffered and were subjected to made the state of Wizarding Luenfeldter's sufferers pale in comparison.

To her cursory glance, it seemed like the staff treated with patients with as much respect as possible, but the simple fact was that there was little to no dignity left so close to the end, and without the sort of cognition which made adult humans what they were. She'd never realized how much she and the staff at Waldweirness had relied on the fact that they could simply vanish away a mess made by incontinence, or to restrain a resident experiencing an episode with gentle magic and a quickly administered calming draught, rather than the help of burly orderlies and sedatives which turned the residents into the living dead.

When they weren't zonked out of their minds, plenty of them were happy to yell and scream abuse at her as she made her way through their rooms, tidying, or brought them their meals. This she at least had some exposure to. She'd been screamed at by the elderly enough in the past few years to not let it get to her, but the words used were different, and because of the medications and interventions being offered (and which couldn't be offered), Hermione quickly found that the strain of the everyday (every hour) interactions wore on her in a way that Mary Forsythe's epithets of professed hatred never had.

Around a week after she began at Marigold House, Hermione returned home to find an eagle owl waiting for her. He sat, cool as you please, on the other side of the windowpane, scowling at Crookshanks as the elderly cat made ineffectual swipes to the glass. She rushed over to set the tom on the floor and unlatched the slim metal clip which held the window up, allowing her visitor inside.

The owl made one low pass of the room, dropping an envelope on the kitchen table as he swerved, and flew straight past her back out the window, disappearing into the night without a backward glance.

She might have questioned it if she hadn't been so exhausted. As it was, she left the envelope where it fell with a small shrug, her bleary eyes passing over it with near indifference, as she made to strip off her polo and establish herself firmly under the warm flow coming from her shower-head. No matter how many cleansing charms she snuck when she retreated to the box room in her ward at Marigold, she never felt like she could completely get the blood, piss, and shit off of her skin, or the stench of it out of her nose.

It only occurred to her that it might have been a job offer from the magical world about five minutes into her shower, when she yelped, barely remembered to rinse the suds from her hair, and rushed, starkers, out into the main living area to snatch up the missive from where she'd left it on the table.

She felt momentary disappointment when she realized that it was a muggle envelope: plain white, and oddly, with a small cut-out window on the front patched over with a bit of cellophane through which she saw her name, written out in pen. The witch frowned. It looked like the kind of thing sent out by a muggle bank or credit company, but, having been delivered by owl, and with her name written on the paper contained inside (not typed, as she might have expected).

Hermione eased a finger underneath the sticky taped edge, barely noticing the goosepimples breaking out over her body from standing, wet and naked, in the middle of her poorly heated flat. The paper was the same kind she was tasked with refilling in the care home's copier machine, and the letter appeared to have been written in blue ink from a ball-point pen... but she'd seen the writing before.

Her lips quirked up. Oh yes.

She'd misidentified it once as a young woman's writing: the spiky script slanted, almost angrily, to the right. The full stops were nearly dashes and could have been mistaken for commas had they not indented on the paper so far that it looked like the author of the note had been in danger of ripping a hole straight through. Granted, his handwriting looked a bit cleaner coming from a muggle pen. She'd often thought, after receiving an essay back, liberally slashed with red, that his penmanship with a quill was reminiscent of something that one might find on a ransom note where the kidnapper was trying to hide his or her identity through sheer sloppiness.

Hermione, the letter began. She frowned at the opening. It looked like there had been something before that which had been hastily scratched out, though he'd scrawled over it so thoroughly that she couldn't make it out at all, not even to try and count how many letters the word might have been. Beyond that, she thought it interesting that he'd not begun with "Granger," as he did when he was being anything but extremely earnest.

She shook her head and began again after staring at the missing salutation for longer than she felt was prudent.

Hermione,

I moved mother out of her house. If you go looking for us, don't think to find her in Waldweirness. I expect that you remember where I apparated us to that first day we met again in October? In any case, an owl can find us. I won't be writing down my address. Alternatively, anything posted to my employer might also find me, given that you address it to "The Scribe."

If I don't have cause to see or speak to you again, and I wouldn't imagine that I would, I owe you my gratitude for watching out for my mother. I know she's come to view you as a friend.

Anthony

Her face, which when she'd begun reading the missive had been open and eager with anticipation, was now pinched with aggravation and disappointment.

He didn't expect to see or speak to her again.

His mother had come to view her as a friend.

She felt her hand clench, wrinkling the paper where her fingers seized.

He'd not even signed off as himself, keeping even his honest identity away from her.

The entirety of the last three months felt like a mirage... something she'd imagined, or perhaps that she'd dreamed. Hell, had she not been fired, she might have thought that nothing had happened at all to change her entire life. That she'd not met Severus Snape's mother. That the man himself hadn't taken over her life and her thoughts since November...

That they hadn't done... what they'd done... on his mother's sofa in the parlour. On Christmas of all days.

Suddenly feeling her nakedness and the cold that had begun to needle at her nerves, she went and sought out her pajamas.

Curling up on the couch, a squirming Crookshanks under one arm and a pint of rocky road in the other, she turned on the television, though she only managed to stare at the flickering pictures blankly.

The spoon made trips to her mouth without her really recognizing the journey.

An owl can find us.

He hadn't told her she couldn't write... that she couldn't visit even...

I expect that you remember where I apparated us to...

Was that an invitation? Or was he just informing her of their whereabouts so that she wouldn't worry? She frowned, glaring holes into the inoffensive face of the news anchor that was speaking.

That was the problem with Slytherins. Always circumspect. They could never just be fucking direct.

By the end of the program, her eyelids drooping from exhaustion, she clicked off the television and made for her bed, deciding that she'd send out an owl on the off chance that he hadn't meant to ward her off.

Work at Marigold House slogged on, day by day, and after more than a week where she didn't feel it possible to even eat at appropriate times, much less to find her way to a wizarding post office, she had quite forgotten about the letter from Snape.

Between carrying stacks of bedpans throughout the fluorescent-lit corridors of the care home, paying her bills for the month (an expense which brought her bank account into the negative, causing her to take gold out of her Gringotts account to bridge the gap before overage charges began to be applied), and scrounging up anything edible that she could afford, she simply didn't have the necessary attention span to worry about Slytherin sensibilities and what Snape might have meant with his reticent correspondence.

Her one method for release was the library, which she had begun visiting every few days, and more often if possible, in order to play in the magical world that Snape had created.

Galdrvale began to capture more and more of her attentions whenever she had any free time. On the weekends, having nothing else to do, and no money with which to do it, she commandeered a computer terminal from open till close, finding that it provided a convenient distraction from the hunger which gnawed at her.

What was hunger in reality when she could raid fields of cattle in the game?

She quickly advanced from a beginner to a novice, and from there through the ranks, earning better armor, superior weaponry, and a little pet tiger to follow her. (She was particularly fond of the tiger, as it reminded her of her familiar, and she had earned it from a laughably absurd side-quest wherein she had to save a priest from the Midnight Sea. Snape, whom she could only assume wrote the quest, had dubbed the questline "Holy Diver").

By the time it occurred to her that she should probably write to him, she felt too nervous and was sick with the fear of rejection. After much fretful deliberation, nearing the middle of March, she finally borrowed a paper and pen from the front desk at the library and scrawled a rather apologetic note to the man.

Dear Tony,

I can only hope that you're not too upset with me. I've been terribly busy with work—the I3W kept me from finding a position in our world, so I'm employed at a muggle establishment in Islington. I'd tell you the name, but I guess it doesn't matter: I'm nothing special here. While I wouldn't mind what I do every day—it needs to be done, after all—I can't say I find as much meaning in the work as I did at Waldweirness.

Perhaps I just miss you and your mother... I can't really discount that as a possibility. Then again, I always enjoyed my work in WOT before she came along. Anyway, don't mind me, it's not really of any concern to you, I suppose.

I wonder whether you two would like to meet for supper sometime? Like during the holidays. If you'd care to, I'd welcome another owl.

Yours,
Hermione

She had addressed it in a muggle envelope to Galdrvale's parent company, Games of the Magi Ltd., the address of which she found at the bottom of the customer support page on their website. As instructed, the letter was addressed to 'The Scribe.'

Hermione could scarcely afford the postage, but it was far less expensive for a single stamp than to pay for an owl, and though she could have borrowed the Potter's new owl, she didn't want to explain herself to Harry. As such, she sent it off through muggle means, praying all the while that it made it to its intended recipient.

By the end of March, she still hadn't heard back. Work at Marigold House was spiraling into an all too depressing scenario where she repeated the same hellish slog through unmentionable conditions and substances, and each day she noticed new disturbing behaviour from the staff and orderlies toward her residents. On the occasions where she let her parents close enough to speak to her, she received nothing but thinly veiled insults, or, worse, they pled with her to come home, or to accept their charity.

The only two things in her life that she felt remotely good about anymore were Crookshanks, whom she could no longer spoil with steak, and her parallel life in Galdrvale, where she adventured and smote the evils of the world like it was ten years earlier, when she'd been a teenager and had a concrete and all too important sense of purpose in her life.

After a shift where she'd had to watch a veteran be restrained and administered anti-psychotics, a quest through the underworld to kill the crazed demon-queen Abaddon (whom she suspected was modeled after Bellatrix Lestrange) was just the thing.

When she despaired over having witnessed the other attendants taunting poor Mrs. Gregson over her mock garden parties, saving the maiden of Marffa from violent marauders cheered her (not least because of the all too obvious resentment that was evidenced by Snape's naming of the villains in the plot).

Throughout her travails, Lady Hermia reappeared periodically to either berate or celebrate her for her deeds and achievements, at times seeming to nag her for her handling of a situation (which could indeed be frustrating, as she didn't have any choice in how the plot proceeded), or sometimes celebrating with her by providing her with ciders or 'ginger-brew,' both of which gave her a random buff.

Lady Hermia had only kissed her the one time after the tutorial quest, but it always seemed that she remained just out of reach: the lady fair who, though the knight may fight for her favour, he could never hope to wed.

She had finally, after her weeks of playing, and preparing, managed to reach level thirty, which offered a skill advancement, and a change in title from lancer to 'Captain of the Guard.' The game offered a small cutscene after her victory over a group of the occultists—she had been made to scout out one of their strongholds in order to steal back a book for the Lady—and Hermia herself had appeared to her, resplendent in all the glory evidenced by her clownish hair and pink jumper, and was preparing to reward her once again.

Hermione's breath caught, however, when she saw from where Hermia was pulling the newest armor upgrade set.

A beaded, purple evening bag. A tiny little thing. Containing a full set of adult-sized plate armor...

She glanced down at her side to where the exact same bag was hanging from her knee, where she kept it in order to discourage thieves...

When she finally managed to glance back at the screen, Hermia's face had changed slightly, though it was difficult to discern when everything was so terribly pixelated: the woman had grinned, a pair of enlarged incisors flashing playfully at Bookwyyrm.

On the other side of the computer monitor, Hermione felt herself flush, and a cold sweat begin to prickle at the back of her neck. She quickly rose from her seat, closed out of the browser, and beat a hasty retreat back into muggle London.

"I feel I must interject here

You're getting carried away, feeling sorry for yourself

With these revisions and gaps in history

So let me help you remember

I've made charts and graphs that should finally make it clear

I've prepared a lecture on why I have to leave"

"Nothing Better" (reprise) – The Postal Service