This one kind of snuck out.

I was listening to Adele's When We We're Young and it almost literally fell out of my keyboard.

It's very angst and not at all my usual HEA, so if you don't want to have your emotions trampled by a Hippogryph...let's just say you were warned?

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Hermione had always thought best in writing. She wrote lists and schedules and plans. She wrote notes in Hogwarts. She wrote letters to all the adult Order members she could find to help prepare for the war.

What no one knew was that, for a year when she was away at university, she wrote letters to one Professor Remus Lupin. Lots of letters. Reciprocated letters that turned into a passionate long-distance courtship. At least until the real world came back into view and made its opinions known about the relationship between a young witch and the former professor who was 20 years her senior.

The letters stopped. Hermione 'grew up', got married, time passed.

But Hermione still thought best in writing.

Dear Remus,

I honestly don't feel like I even have the right to be writing to you. I would say "after the way things ended", but I don't remember them ending all that badly. Well, the only bad part was that they ended at all. Bloody hell, I'm not making any sense, am I? But that's the thing, my thoughts of you never do.

In some way or another I've loved you since I was sixteen. At first you were just my professor, someone who saw past the swotty overachiever all my peers detested and thought I was special, made me feel like I was special. I always wondered if you knew how much your letters meant to me when you went away to fight. My age made the thoughts in my head and the butterflies in my stomach wildly inappropriate, but I clung to every word like a life raft. I don't know if I ever got the chance to tell you, it's been what feels like so many lifetimes ago, but I loved you unrepentantly from the first letter you sent.

I remember the one time you got leave to come visit whil I was still at Hogwarts but you had left to fight the war. I had no idea you would be there but you just walked in the door as if it was a normal day, grinning that smug smile you wore when you knew something others didn't. Flinging myself into your arms as you walked in those doors is still my patronus memory to this day, a secret which both will and most definitely should be taken with me to my grave.

We lost touch after I finished at Hogwarts. Again, I don't know why…seems to be a common trend. You continued on in your normal routine, and I got thoroughly disillusioned with basically everyone male I met. When our letters began again, it was like a cool breeze in a summer so stifling you had forgotten there was anything but heat. It took me all of two letters to remember how easy it was to be in love with you.

However , this time I was of age, in university, and fully able to hope for more than a schoolgirl's fantasy. You were so hesitant at first; even though you made no secret of your fondness for me, it seemed as if I had to drag you every inch of the way. Looking back now you seem by far the wiser of the two of us. If I had heeded your resistance I could have saved us both so much pain, but I selfishly cannot bring myself to even an ounce of regret on this front. It may be horrible to suppose the pain I caused you was worth the acquisition of some of my most cherished memories, but I selfishly hope you would feel the same way if I ever had the chance to ask you.

So, after all my pushing and prodding, the second half of our long distance love affair began, except this time it was real and it was mutual. Looking back at it now, that was the happiest time of my life. I love Ron and I wouldn't trade our children for anything in the world, but even on the best of days now I still fight the inner dementors that seem to reside in the recesses of my mind. I still feel their pull, even when all seems externally well. Ron says I've been sad since he's known me, so maybe it's just who I am now, but it wasn't who I was with you.

Maybe it was the long distance creating the imagined perfect ideal of a relationship that couldn't ever be that way in the harsh pressures of reality, but I'll be damned if our too few visits didn't feel just as perfect as the dream.

I have never felt so loved, so accepted. I never had to put up a facade or be anything other than what I truly was with you, a fact I see now I never properly thanked you for. You let me ask you silly questions and kissed me in the rain when I said I'd never tried it before. You sent me articles on things I'd mentioned in passing months prior and never scoffed at my dreams, no matter how unrealistic or ambitious. Again, after seeing more of the real world I now wish I had seen how precious of a gift this truly was.

I wonder so many things. I wonder if you still have the scarf I knitted for you. I know you wore it when we were together but that when things started to look bleak it got relegated back to the drawer of mementos from unrealized dreams. Did you burn it after things officially ended between us, or do you still take it out and bury your nose in the thick fibers when you're too sad or tired to fight it anymore, seeking a scent that has long faded? I know I threw away all our letters in a fit of attempted closure, but there is rarely a night that goes by anymore when I don't try to remember every word.

I tell myself everything is fine, and it is. It is. From the tiny pieces I can glean from mutual acquaintances you seem happy enough, though I know who you were well enough to guess no one would be able to tell if who you are now isn't happy. Ron and I are coming up on our first decade as a married couple. He tells me he loves me and I honestly think he believes it. Most days I do too, but between his work as an auror and all the chaos that comes with a house full of children nothing is the same anymore. I honestly feel so run down that I often doubt I'll be capable to return to "normal" human life after the process of raising two kids.

I seriously don't understand how the species has survived. Rose and Hugo are my life, my soul, and the reason I draw breath, but I feel as though living every moment for another for years on end has extinguished a part of my being I may never get back. I'll simply remain a functional shell, a human impersonation who makes snacks and cleans the house until they become self-sufficient, at which time I'll no doubt go mad with the grief of missing them. Either way it feels like my old self is a long-lost concept that either cannot be retrieved or has disappeared entirely.

Maybe that is why I find such solace in thoughts of you, because when I travel back to our time together I not only recall your treatment of me, but I remember the girl I was with you. The other day I found an old photo you took of me when we were together. (it was just of me, so it must have survived the great breakup purge.) I started sobbing immediately the second saw it and still can't look at it for too long. I want to be that girl again so badly it burns. The girl with her future in front of her, who doesn't believe the word 'no' applies, who fights for things and feels everything so deeply. The girl with the love of a man who stays up late just to hear more of the sound of her voice through the floo. The girl who wakes up each morning to a new letter declaring just how loved she is so she never has to doubt.

The girl who doesn't yet know that our ages, the one thing we knew of all along would be the thing to destroy everything beautiful we built. The girl who hasn't had to tell you goodbye, knowing that it was the most a right choice would ever hurt her.

I don't regret it. I can't. We would have faced unending agony, derision, and scorn. Yes, it would have started with the Drs. Granger, whose disapproval played more of a role than it probably should have in sealing our fate, but the looks and raised eyebrows would have followed us everywhere. They would have followed our kids everywhere. Is this true? Yes. Would it have been insurmountable? Possibly, but possibly not. Would our love have been strong enough to weather all of life's atrocities if I had had the courage to tell everyone else in my life to go to hell? Don't think I don't ponder this question every day.

I'll never know. And this is entirely my fault. Just as it is entirely on my head that I deeply hurt a man who treated me with more kindness, understanding, and love than anyone else in my life. I do not seek forgiveness as it is quite possible I deserve none, although I do wish you knew how often thoughts of you still haunt my mind. In the decade since we last spoke, not a month has gone by without at least one dream of you. Sometimes you're as angry as you were when we parted, sometimes you grant forgiveness I do not deserve, occasionally I get to feel your arms around me again, but most often we just stare into each other's eyes, drowning in the unspoken, gazing across a room of mutual friends who are unaware that we ever had anything past the friendship of a swotty student and her favorite professor. I do not know how you feel about me, more than a decade later, but if you are as angry as my worst nightmares paint you to be, you can take solace that your war of attrition has continued inside my head and you have emerged victorious in every battle.

Why am I writing to you? I'm not. This letter, like so many others, will see nothing but the inside of my fireplace. I have a life, a good one, and something about making your bed then lying in it comes to mind. But on nights when I lie alone and sleepless, depressed, maudlin, lonely, and nostalgic, exhausted from toddler tantrums and a never ending supply of household chores, my mind retreats into memories of you. I find it only too easy to grab a quill and write to you, as we did all those years ago. Back when I was cherished and you were only an owl away.

I'm sorry about so many things, and I'm not immoral or foolish enough to open the can of worms that would come with apologizing to you in real life, but maybe magic will allow an incoherent and tear-stained apology letter tossed into the fire to somehow make its way to your subconscious and grant both of us a more peaceful night's rest…or maybe you already sleep just fine. I guess that is why I already lit the fire….