After a long day at work filled with mindless tedium all Hermione wanted was to sit down with a lovely take-away dinner and a tall glass of red wine.
What she got was mediocre take-away as the Italian place she loved had too long of a wait for her and a small glass of red wine because she was starting to think she needed less wine due to the fact that she was down to her last two Sober Up potions.
One cauldron made about 25 vials and she had made a batch less than two weeks ago. So, yeah she considered it a good idea to skip a trip to the store tonight to restock.
She got home and eased her heels off on the edge of the couch. She was pretty sure the littlest toe on her left foot was going to need to be removed magically due to the pointy shoes she wore all day. Heels and a pencil skirt might have made her legs look great and done wonders for her ass but she wasn't really trying to impress anyone at the office anyway. All the meetings she got to sit in on now that she was Undersecretary to the Department-Head in Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures were boring and filled with people who were so busy patting themselves on the back for the tiny baby steps they managed to push forth in policy that they didn't try to do anything bigger.
Her boss had no problems with this take no charge and make no improvements kind of attitude. Hermione figured he constantly put her on the back burner because he felt threatened by her. Every single change that had been made to policy since the end of the war was written, negotiated, and passed through the Wizengamot by Hermione and her team.
Every.
Single.
One.
When they gave her the promotion to Undersecretary she figured it was just the start of her moves towards bigger better things.
Within the first month her boss called her into his office and asked her to shelf her new Werewolf Rights Bill. Expecting them to have job security because of their condition was fine to him but asking for equal pay for equal work was just far to much in his estimation for the department to ask of the Wizengamot.
When Hermione disagreed he gave a little chuckle.
He chuckled at her like she was being intentionally cute. Then he mentioned in passing that she shouldn't be too concerned about it as she would be leaving the office when she married to start having a family.
When she tried to explain that she had no intentions of marrying right now and was not in a relationship in fact he just laughed her off and told her it wouldn't be long before some wizard swept her off her feet and she found herself at home with a family and children.
She left his office that day and completely disregarded anything that ever came from that man's mouth again.
What she didn't count on was the fact that her new promotion basically excluded from the process of writing new laws. All she ever did was correct her coworkers mistakes and take meetings to get yelled at by other departments for the things that assumed that she had a hand in. Normally these problems were caused by her misogynist of a boss.
It was during a late night pub outing to complain to her best friends about her boss and her new crap promotion that she bumped into Marcus again. He recognized her from across the pub and came over to say hello. They spent an evening catching up and checking in with each other about the war and what they had done since then.
Looking back over crappy food and not enough wine she could easily see that a lot of the problems started with her. A lot of the issues that they constantly ran into were based on nothing more than her frustration with her job and her life in those moments.
Everything that happened hurt her so much. It broke her in way that she didn't realize that a person could be broken. Sitting there all alone in her flat she could acknowledge the mistakes that she made even if she hated them.
She was broken and hurting and it didn't seem as if it would ever go away or heal. She hated feeling this way. Sitting home and yearning for the person who hurt her. She needed to move on. She hadn't felt so trapped in herself and her life since right after the war as her body and mind tried to process the damaging things she had seen and done.
She needed to move on with everything that was wrong in her life. She needed drastic changes.
It was time to stop camouflaging her pain in wine and work and being alone.
It was time her for to live again.