In this story, Hermione Granger killed her parents at the age of seventeen.
She can still remember the look on her father's face as she raised the wand to his chest. Not horrified, as her mother had been—the wide-open O of her mouth, the wet red of her tongue, her face tearstained as Hermione held out her wand and whispered the fatal words through tightly clenched teeth.
No, her father's face was different. There'd been a certain calm to it. An understanding settled into his liquid brown eyes. A look that still wakes her up in the night. And after all this time, she's still unable to forget what he said.
We were always afraid this would happen, Hermione.
Ever since the day you got your letter, we were afraid.
Her parents were with her at Ollivander's the day she bought her wand, just seven years prior: ten and three-quarter inches, vine wood, a core of dragon heartstring. When her small fingers closed around it a surge of warmth spread down the length of her arm and throughout her whole body, all the way to her toes, as if magic was moving through her very veins. In all her short life Hermione had never felt she belonged anywhere as much as she did right then, in that dilapidated wand shop on a street called Diagon Alley.
But she made the mistake of looking up in the midst of that joy, saw her mother and father exchange a single, dark glance. One she'd been too young to understand back then, as she bought the weapon which would one day end their lives.
Today marks ten years since the war ended. Hermione Granger hasn't used magic since.
Hermione takes a seat in a plain wooden chair at a plain wooden table in an empty, windowless room in the heart of the Ministry of Magic. She's wearing a too-short cotton dress in lieu of the robes she threw out years ago and feels—not for the first time in her life—spectacularly out of place.
It's the first of July, a day of sweltering but expected heat, her dress sticking damply to her thighs by the time she finally found the correct room, the right floor. It's also the first day she's entered a magical building in a decade, though there were several instances while making her way through the streets of London that she found herself passing a very particular telephone box, her heart always skipping a beat when that shock of scarlet caught her eye. She'd located and entered the very same booth just a half-hour prior, stuttering that she'd come in response to a certain letter she'd received via owl post just the day before. The badge on her chest read, fittingly, Recipient of Important Letter. The letter in question, which Hermione had since memorized, bore the wax seal of the Ministry. Its message was sparse, but undeniably intriguing:
Miss Granger,
Your presence is requested for an interview at Ministry of Magic Headquarters on the first of July, this year. We cannot say much more here should this letter fall into the hands of those who wish our failure. However, it has recently come to our attention that you may be the only person who can successfully undertake the task at hand.
We very much hope you will be able to join us.
The door opens behind her and Hermione starts. A severe-looking older woman with dark, short hair paces to the opposite side of the table and sits across from her. Hermione briefly has the chance to be reminded of a former professor before the woman leans forward—too close, closer than one would ever expect a stranger.
"Might I employ Legilimency, Miss Granger?"
She nods before she can think about it and the woman promptly opens up her mind, as if it were a waiting envelope. Hermione can only sit numbly in her chair as the woman sifts through her thoughts and memories in lieu of asking questions.
There are flashes of four poster beds and writing desks and books piled high; she can smell the pages turning, briefly, a musty and familiar scent, and then they're gone.
Now flashes of Harry—sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the Great Hall, in the Three Broomsticks, on the train. Watching him eat, watching him cry out. A glimpse of his spiky handwriting, round and perpetually broken glasses, the drop of a single tear.
The witch is going through her years at Hogwarts, Hermione realizes, but to what end?
She nods and murmurs periodically, more to herself than Hermione, but does not try to communicate or ask for clarification. Hermione's memories don't lie; they can't.
More flashes of Harry. A crackling fire warming her favorite crimson armchair in Gryffindor tower. Her parents, their cold still limbs, her mother's fingers reaching—it is here Hermione finally lets a soft, wordless sound escape her.
The witch withdraws, a pressure immediately releasing in Hermione's head. She exhales a breath she didn't know she was holding. Her lungs fill anew.
"Right," the witch says, betraying nothing. "Thank you, Miss Granger. Everything seems to be in order. Of course, you were the first person we thought of. And of course—" the witch dips her head, clears her throat awkwardly—"I am deeply sorry for your loss, but I must admit it uniquely qualifies you."
Something goes off in Hermione's brain. Faint—like a bell heard from far away—but even in the dulled recesses of her grief-eaten mind she hears it.
"What do you mean?"
The witch smiles slightly, acknowledging Hermione's innate curiosity—something that, while significantly dimmed, Hermione was never quite able to shake.
"Sign this first." She slides a slip of parchment across the table along with a quill. Hermione barely skims the words—don't tell a living soul, truly and utterly confidential, etc. There's likely some curse on it that'll remove her voice or kill her if she relates the contents—it's magic, after all.
But—Hermione smiles grimly as she scrawls the familiar syllables of her Muggle-born name—who does she have to tell?
There's green ink smeared into the crease of her right pinky finger when she pulls her hand away, the same place she'd always end up with ink stains while doing her homework.
History of Magic, Ancient Runes, Charms class. It's been years.
She looks at the smudge with sudden and intense nostalgia, so momentarily distracted that she barely notices the witch roll up the parchment solemnly across the table, still without a word, and Hermione, her interest now well and truly piqued, says, "What's this all about?" and the witch finally responds.
"Miss Granger, we're trying to bring Harry Potter back to life."
There's a funny jolt in Hermione's stomach at first: a split-second reaction she can't help every time she hears Harry's name. She recovers quickly and laughs outright.
"The resurrection stone was destroyed years ago, and Harry died killing Voldemort. There's no way—"
"We have someone in our employ who thinks there might be a chance. A slim one, but it's there," the witch says carefully. "Someone you know."
In a rare burst of irritation—god, when was the last time she'd even had the energy to be annoyed?—Hermione bursts out, "Can you please just explain this nonsense; magic can't bring the dead back to—"
"It will likely surprise you to hear this, Granger, but you don't, in fact, know everything."
Hermione whips around in her seat so quickly a sharp pain in her neck throbs bright the moment she locks eyes with him.
Severus Snape.
Of course, she'd recognized his voice the second he spoke. She hadn't even heard the door reopen, yet here he is, his head almost grazing the top of the doorframe. His hair, sleek and black as coal, skims the tops of his shoulders as he studies her, shifting infinitesimally. Jaw set, dark eyes narrowed like she's already given the wrong answer. Her gaze flits across his. How is possible that he looks just the same as ever? In fact—
"We thought you were dead," Hermione breathes. She has forgotten the witch across the table. Forgotten everything else.
"Trust that I am none too thrilled to disabuse you of the notion myself," Snape responds flatly. Hermione scrambles to calculate how many years have passed since last she heard that voice—not since the Battle of Hogwarts, not since that night—as he paces the length of the claustrophobic little room and comes to a halt behind the witch, who is trying to regain Hermione's fraught attention. Hermione stares in a state of disorientation at the surface of the table before her. She thinks of the old potions classroom. That dark and smokey dungeon where her fear of failure had always pulsed a little bit stronger than anywhere else.
"The Ministry long ago decided I still have a debt to pay," Snape continues. "Most recently they've conspired to delay my progress further by forcing me to house an assistant."
"Miss Granger," the witch interrupts—this has clearly been a point of contention—"you were by far the best witch at Hogwarts in your time. Possibly all time, to be frank." Hermione blushes out of habit. "As Severus' efforts have proved fruitless over the last ten years, despite essentially unlimited resources—" and here the two cast each other looks of unbridled contempt, as if to resolve any doubts Hermione might've had about their mutual hostility—"we'd like to offer you a position on the project."
"I don't understand. Why are you trying to bring Harry—"
"Simply put, Miss Granger, the wizarding world has lost its hope." The witch clears her throat, spreads her hands. "When Harry Potter died ten years ago, even in the midst of defeating Voldemort, our kind found themselves with nothing left to believe in. A fear gripped them—fear that another tyrant would arise, except this time no one would be there to protect them. So hundreds every year choose to leave our world behind to live as Muggles, as you did yourself. But our population is dwindling. The economy, devastated by the war, never recovered. Culture, schools, government—all suffering. Not enough people to fill the many jobs that need doing. We need a boon, Miss Granger, we need… a leader." She sighs. "And—"
"And, for inscrutable reasons, the Ministry has concluded it's got to be Potter." Snape's eyes flash.
"This is ridiculous," Hermione says suddenly, her mouth moving faster than her mind. "I don't want to work with him—" She gestures at Snape, waving a hand. "I can't be expected to trust you, after—after… And—and you're meddling with dark magic anyway, trying to bring a person back to life! Look… I—I miss Harry every day, of course I do, he was my best friend, but he died ten years ago in the Hogwarts courtyard. I saw it happen. I touched his body." She lifts her chin. "And it should've been you, Severus Snape. Harry was good. He didn't deserve to die. It should've been you."
Her voice cracks on the final syllable and she hates herself for it, disgusted by the vulnerability she's displaying. The witch is staring into space, deliberately unfazed by Hermione's outburst. Snape, however, is glaring openly back.
No one speaks for a moment. The witch seems to be waiting to see if Hermione has anything else to say. After another beat she sighs and shuffles some papers on her desk.
"I had hoped we could move past the old prejudices. But I suppose there's nothing for it. You may go, Miss Granger."
Hermione pours as much venom, anger, and resentment she can muster into the final scowl she throws at Severus Snape as she gathers herself—her balled fists and too-small dress—and departs from the small room.
The man responsible for the death of her best friend and his parents, the headmaster of her school—he lived. Severus Snape had survived.
She had not realized how much she blames him for everything that had happened, nor the degree to which the loss still burns within her. And the fact that he had the gall to keep living—she thinks on the tube home, clutching the pole so hard it turns her knuckles white—when just waking up every day is an act of endurance for her to begin with. Just the bloody effort of getting out of bed.
She realizes, lost as she's been in her thoughts, that the old wrinkled Muggle standing across from her has been leering at her all this time. She glares, though she senses tears in her eyes, as if daring him to continue. He can't maintain eye contact and soon looks down, abashed. It feels like a small victory.
The fact of the matter is that Hermione Granger has carved out a little life for herself and it has nothing to do with magic.
She works in a sandwich shop just down the block from her one-room flat in London. Over time she has whittled her life down to the bare essential activities; she speaks to no one from her past, Muggle or wizard. Intellectual pursuits are frivolous and belong to another version of herself—one who'd never fought in a war, one who'd never lost anything. She replaced her books with Muggle television, traded her wand and quills for a cell phone. Hermione Granger simply exists, and perhaps if she'd never received the Ministry's letter, she would have left it at that.
But the interview has lit a fire in Hermione. She stays on the tube a few stops longer and gets off at the one nearest the library. It's a Muggle library, not magic, but she enters anyway, runs her fingers down along rows of worn spines. She breathes in the smell, which is the same everywhere, in every library, wizard and Muggle alike. It's a scent that reminds her of youth and yearning, a time when the world was full of possibility and she had everything left to learn.
She's vaguely aware of missing her evening shift, the time passing rapidly, but she finds herself walking the aisles instead. She knows what staying means: an angry slew of voicemails, no one to make the sandwiches. And yet.
Hermione sits in different sections, leans against the shelves and memorizes the spines of books she will never read, and thinks back to how she used to view the shelves of unread books as a challenge. She thinks of challenges, of Severus Snape, all the way back to the potions classroom of her youth where she was always fighting the idea that someone of her parentage could not do magic, could not be a witch. Could not exist at all.
"Miss, would you like a library card?" the young and well-meaning librarian asks her kindly an hour before closing, his green eyes sympathetic. She wonders if he thinks she's homeless, or unemployed, and then remembers she might in fact be the latter. She gazes up at him, momentarily mute. He looks a little bit like Harry.
She returns home on the tube, her mind right on the edge of made-up. Maybe this is my last challenge, she thinks. My final chance to prove that I deserve the gifts I was given, that they can be used for good. Maybe there's a way to make up for the wrong I did.
She takes the narrow, creaky stairs up to her floor and finds a dark silhouette beside her door, spine pressed to the wall, like he's been waiting a while. She spent a decade thinking he was dead; now she's seen him twice in one day.
"What are you doing here?" she says brusquely. She walks past Snape to her door, prepares to open it and abruptly remembers the key is buried somewhere in the depths of her purse. The bare bulb above them flickers.
"I'm sure you can't believe that I have any desire to be here myself," Snape says. He's so close to her, his crossed arms nearly grazing her elbow as she feels for the cold metal of the key in her purse, eyes betraying his impatience. "And believe me, I have no interest in being someone's messenger boy, so rest assured this visit will be the first and last of its kind. As it stands…"
He sighs. "They want you. They think it has to be you. Because of your… connection to Potter." He looks disdainfully at her, standing there in the Muggle hall of her Muggle building, dressed in his black robes. "Personally I never quite understood it—the three of you, always together. But it's painfully apparent he made his mark on you, Granger. Look at how you live now, having lost him." He casts another contemptuous gaze at the uneven floorboards beneath their feet, the cracked, pale walls. The light above them blinks again.
"No one will force you to do anything. Least of all me." He finally looks at her—actually at her, their eyes meeting—and it feels unfamiliar. It's a searching look, as if he's trying to understand something for the first time—like a word he's never heard before, written down on a page.
"It is indeed peculiar, though," he says in a different tone. Softer. "When they told me it had to be you. I had thought…" He shakes his head, dark hair falling into his eyes, and she marvels again how unrelentingly the same he appears, his features simply set deeper into his face, more defined, emphasized further by the minute lines now surrounding them. "I had assumed you would never turn down a chance like this… to go deeper into the study of resurrection magic than any other witch. It surprises me—you surprised me. But perhaps you were never capable of what they hoped. Perhaps the Ministry… misjudged you. I can see now that I did."
He regards her briefly, letting his last assertion hang in the air between them for a moment longer and then he turns and sweeps off into the shadows of the hallway, the bulb above her finally burning out with a metallic ping as he descends the stairs.
Hermione is left standing in the dark.