As she walks down towards the lake, she thinks back on the bright-eyed little girl who first arrived here, all those years ago. Stumbling up the cliff side from the boathouse, still dazed by the knowledge that she was a witch, blissfully unaware of the horrors and harshness of reality and of war.
"You have a gift, Hermione, my dear," is what Professor McGonagall had told her the day she got her letter. Nowadays, she isn't sure if it isn't more of a curse.
She can hear the laughter and singing and celebrations long before she can see their source. She doesn't want to see or hear them at all, and her legs are lead as she forces herself down the hill, but, as a war hero, she's obligated to attend the victory day celebrations. (She scowls to herself as she remembers the numerous arguments she's had with McGonagall on the subject.)
She does, almost, laugh when she finally reaches the rows of stalls and games raising money for… whatever the latest post-war tragedy that the papers are promoting is, as though most of the funding doesn't go straight into the pockets of whoever is in charge of the project anyway.
There's a clear divide between the attendees, though. Attendance for Hogwarts students was mandatory, as the Headmistress had announced at breakfast the week before, and she could tell just by looking that most of them would rather be anywhere else. But most of the several hundred guests are just random citizens, wanting to celebrate the end of the war.
Probably, she thinks cynically to herself, just as they would have if Voldemort and his bastard Death Eaters had won.
She makes it through the morning, barely, smiling for reporters' cameras, shaking hands with pointless ministry officials whose names she doesn't even bother to learn, pretending she wants to and is happy to be there. She doesn't want to be there. She wants to fucking scream.
She buys a box of biscuits off a third year who glares at her when she hands him a galleon and tells him to keep the change. She poses for a picture with a baby who is, rather creepily in her opinion, named after her. She wishes she'd never been brought into the magical world at all.
Harry and Ron were lucky enough not to be there, out on an auror missions or something like that. Not that they really spoke to her anymore, but it would have been nice to share the spotlight. Instead, there's a dozen journalists who follow her around all day, constantly yelling questions at her and rarely leaving to try and wheedle and interview out of some other poor soul.
Once upon a time, the other students might have rescued her. They don't. They hate her, especially the old remnants of the DA. She wasn't there, when Maisy Reynolds was tortured to the point of paralysis in the middle of class, just for daring to speak out against the new regime. She wasn't there, when a first year had his ribs broken by people who shouldn't have been allowed within a mile of a school, much less to 'teach' in one. But she was there, at the end of the final battle, and afterwards, to take all of the glory for being part of the trio to bring down the madman.
I was tortured too, you know, she had though desperately and on the verge of tears at the end of that first, awful, awful, week back at school. I was starving, and freezing, and constantly running and terrified for my life but we had to find those bloody horcruxes, else all of your suffering would have been in vain. It wasn't exactly a fucking picnic for us either.
But she couldn't tell them that. Kingsley, as the new head of the DMLE, had pulled her aside a few days after the final battle and curtly informed her that, if she were to discuss the horcruxes with anybody who wasn't already aware of them, she would face a decade in Azkaban.
She hated him for it. She hated the whole stupid Ministry for not being able to do their fucking jobs and relying on children to fight a war for them. She hated Voldemort for making her feel so alone in the only place she had left to call home. She hated her classmates for living through a war and still coming out with some of the naivety and innocence that an eighteen-year-old should have. She hated herself because she didn't.
But she couldn't explain any of this to them, and so, they hated her as well.
Hermione Granger's a girl with a lot of hate in her life.
It's a relief when two o'clock comes around and the new Minister, some useless puppet everyone pretends can actually do his job, walks up onto the stage and tells everybody to sit down for the memorial service.
Her seat is on the front row, so she can sit, staring forwards and ignoring the glares of the students and the pining of the reporters. It's nice, after all the stress of the day so far, to be able to just relax and ignore everybody else. That is, until, the Minister begins to speak.
Like Harry, she's always had a bit of a saving people thing. It's probably why they were friends for so long. (Memories of S.P.E.W are quickly banished from her mind.) So, even though her classmates hate her and she's not particularly fond of them either at the moment, she still feels protective of them. She's the oldest in their year, she's the one that's always in the know of what's happening in the war (what was happening, was, the war is over now and she needs to remember that), and she feels she has a responsibility to keep them safe, or to make sure they can keep themselves safe.
She sits through the Ministers' speech, half listening, half watching a group of pixies fighting just beyond the tree line, not bothering to pay attention because she knows he's just going to spend twenty minutes repeating the same bullshit buzzwords about togetherness and healing that they've been saying for the past year.
In fact, she's paying so little attention that she almost doesn't hear the Minister say,
"… and whilst the boy-who-lived himself was, unfortunately, unable to make it here today, his close friend and fellow hero, Hermione Granger, is here and I'm sure would love to say a few words for us!"
She doesn't.
She really, really, really fucking doesn't.
She does.
A round of polite applause follows her as she walks up onto the stage and she feels so awkward that she realises why Harry is always miraculously absent from these things.
She looks out across the audience, a few hundred expectant faces and a handful of muttering elderly witches who are eyeing her muggle shorts in disgust.
"Um, I didn't really expect to be up here today so I don't have a speech planned or anything…" She nervously tugs the cuffs of her jumper over her hands and she doesn't know why she bothers. It's not like the huge 'MUDBLOOD' scar hasn't been slapped across the front page of the Prophet on more than one occasion. Everyone here has probably already seen it. The word echoes around her head (filthy mudblood) and she can feel the curse in the knife burning through her arm and hear the sound of that crazy bitch's awful laugh right next to her ear.
Frozen to the spot, she can't move, her muscles tight and refusing to obey the desperate signals from her brain telling her to flee. She can breathe though, so that's good. Better than last time, certainly. In, one, two, three. Out, one, two, three. In, one, two, three. The memory plays itself through in her head, each detail so perfect and horrifying and excruciating that she wants to vomit but she has to let play through because she knows that it's just so much worse if she tries to fight it.
It's been at least two minutes, when she finally opens her eyes. Which doesn't really sound like a lot, but when you're in the middle of making a speech it's a long time to keep people waiting.
She wants to cry and she wants to go to bed. She doesn't understand why she has to stand here and talk at these people who won't remember a word she's said a week from now but will judge her for it anyway. She's sick of people thinking they have any idea what the war was actually like, when most of them locked their doors and pretended it wasn't happening. She's just so fucking tired of it all and she's about to walk away when she realises that actually, maybe, yeah, she does have something she wants to talk about after all.
She takes a shaky breath.
"Today has been a celebration. I'm sure that up and down the country people will be having their own parties and get-togethers to mark the ending of the war. I think what we're forgetting today is just how much it cost for us to get here."
The audience in front of her look slightly nervous and she can't help a spark of grim satisfaction that goes through her. There's a reporter, right in front of the stage, and he quickly snatches up a quill, his eyes looking her over, hungry for a good story.
"'We fought, we survived, we prospered.' That's the tagline for the rebuilding efforts, right?" she looks to the Minister for confirmation. She doesn't need to, though; she's heard it enough times.
"I noticed the main focus of your speech was the idea of togetherness, Minister, you used the word 'we' quite a lot there, too. You talked a lot about how we fought the war, we defeated Voldemort. You say 'we' as though you're included in that, when I know for a fact you spent the entirety of the active war hiding in France like a fucking coward."
She turns back to the audience, despite the Minister's spluttering protests, who're loudly muttering amongst themselves.
"How many of you were here for the final battle? Practically none. And yet, you sit here celebrating without a thought for the people, for the children, who suffered and died in this very place, on this very day, so that you could live in a world free of tyranny. Cowards. Every last one of you."
There's gasps of outrage and people yelling back at her from the crowd, and the Minister looks absolutely furious as he has a hushed conversation with a pair of aurors and she's so surprised both by what she's said and the reaction to it that she almost backs down but then a second year muggleborn she recognises from when she volunteered at the war orphanage over summer looks up at her, his eyes sparkling with fury but a grin breaking out across his face and shouts,
"You fuckin' tell 'em, Granger!"
And she remembers just why she's so angry in the first place, and turns back to the Minister.
"But you, you make me feel sick. How can you stand up here in front of the school children you made fight a war for you and claim that you're one of them? How can you so blatantly lie to their faces and claim that everyone was in it together when whilst they were suffering, and you and the whole bloody Ministry knew they were suffering, you were sipping wine in Paris without a care in the world. You disgust me."
She wants to go on because now she's so entirely consumed by all of the rage and the frustration and the hurt she's been bottling up for the past year that she needs to get it all out, but when she spots an auror out of the corner of her eye just behind her, she recognises the body language of someone gearing up for a fight and she realises just how nervous the Minister is getting.
Good, she thinks smugly to herself.
She walks off, the picture of calm, back up towards the castle. As soon as she knows she's out of sight she doubles back into the forbidden forest. She's found, over this school year, that it's the perfect place to come when you need a good cry.
So that's what she does. Slumps down at the bottom of her favourite tree, and sobs.
He must have been standing by her for a good few minutes because she doesn't hear him approach. Actually, he must have followed her all the way from the lake, which is a bit creepy but she quickly forgets that when he offers her his hand and says
"You look like you could do with a drink."
She looks up at him, wiping her eyes with the cuff of her jumper and smearing her mascara in the process, and gives him a weak and shaky smile.
"I think that's the first sensible thing anybody has said to me in a long time."
