Love, Letters, and a Lack of Galoshes

DISCLAIMER: I am not Just Kidding when I say that I am not J.K. (R.)

Thanks very much to excessivelyperky for beta-ing this work, listening to my rather crazy ideas, catching my silly mistakes, and inspiring new trains of thought. Much love to you!

Love, Letters, and a Lack of Galoshes: A Chance for Redemption in Writing.

"Why is a raven like a writing desk?" -Lewis Carroll

"Because Poe wrote on both."--Sam Lloyd

Chapter 1

What a way to start a story, Hermione thought, examining the first paragraph of her memoir. It was perfectly atrocious. Tennyson, though an excellent writer, was not at all a good guide for forming one's own prosaic voice.

Yet another wadded ball of paper was shoved to the corner of her desk, where it toppled off and rolled across the floor. It startled Crookshanks enough for him to open one eye, hiss in a demonstration of his alertness, and curl up tighter on the hooked rug.

"Perhaps I shouldn't be doing this at all," she mused, not noticing how Crooks avoided the paper ball. It was not the first time she had thought so that evening.

A nagging feeling that she was neglecting some major issues plagued her, and she felt horribly guilty and depressed. She was further aggravated by the intense pain that followed every movement she made; the concentrated pain-alleviating potions that Poppy Pomfrey had been sending her since her torture at Malfoy Manor had run out, and Hermione had to wait another day for refills. Until then, she had to suffer, and she preferred to suffer alone. She could brew her own, but it would take energy she did not have at the moment, though Molly had given her something to take the edge off.

As she was acutely aware, locking herself up in Ginny's room at the Burrow a week after the Battle of Hogwarts was not helping her solve any of the grievances that plagued her. Falling into a familiar habit, Hermione began to catalog every possible hindrance.

Thesis: I'm sitting up here 'writing my memoirs' because...

a) I feel guilty about kissing Ron when I have absolutely no interest in him

This was, by far, the clearest reason, and the one that made her cringe in embarrassment the most. She did not love Ron, though for a long time she fancied that she did, but she hated to break his heart and disappoint his family. That was one major reason that she was hiding from the problem in his sister's bedroom. Life was so much more complicated when love (or, in her case, lack thereof) entered the equation.

b) I feel guilty about my parents, especially because I'm not interested in going and fixing up their memories.

Like the first, this motive was one she had realized very quickly. She knew that she could not cope very well when had been in the wrong. However, Wendell and Monica Wilkins would be all right even if she left them for a year or longer; she had left them as a newly-wed couple just starting out with a shiny new dentistry firm in Australia. Hermione had bought the building, put up a name-plate, and paid the first month's rent, leaving them to fill out the details. Knowing her parents, it was probably a flourishing practice already. Going and interrupting them in their new life would probably be quite a disappointment to them; the thought did strike her that they might be happier without a daughter. In any case, she did not want to have to deal with the whole scenario before she completely recovered from her injuries. They were in no danger anymore. Life had to be taken one step at a time, and she no longer needed to live the life of a fugitive, putting her own needs on hold.

c) I'm dead tired, and in bloody physical pain, I don't want to start studying for N.E.W.T.s just yet. (Prof. Trelawney would prophesy that the world is ending.)

Hermione Granger, not eager to run to the library? Such an idea would have been unthinkable in the past, but this was the present. She had learned over the past year that some things mattered more than the cumulative sum of one's education. Life was meant to be lived, not spent in the dark.

d) I'm scared to go out into the world with my newfound experience.

She had to challenge the old perception of herself; everyone knew her as the annoying know-it-all. She would have to face the reputation she had, even though she had dramatically changed her own views. No longer was she the trivial, naïve, too-complex Granger waving her hand in the air. Now she had acquired purpose to her responsibility, real bitterness to her misanthropy, justification for her need to understand. Life was no longer a game to be played for the fun of it; there were real consequences to every action, and death was the inevitable Game Over.

e) I feel guilty being happy that Bellatrix Lestrange is dead.

Every time she thought of it, she felt both giddy and sick. To wish death upon another human being was immoral and therefore distasteful to Hermione, but she could not help feeling a rush of satisfaction when she thought of the gorgon-like features of the decapitated Death Eater. Hermione wished that she had killed the vile woman. The Death Eater who had so mercilessly tortured her--and liked it--could not die a death that was long or painful enough. It made her feel good to know that Molly Weasley had exacted revenge on her behalf. Life was better without Bellatrix Lestrange in the world, but Hermione knew that someone out there would think the same thing of her if she had fallen instead.

There were, however, many people for whom she felt that she had not done enough. What if she had died, and was remembered as nothing more than a shrinking violet that had spent all her available days immersed in studies? Had she ever enjoyed her life? She wondered about that more and more. Would she have been satisfied with how she had lived her life, if she had died that fateful night? The more she thought about it, the more she thought that she ought to have died; so many more worthy ones, more admired ones, more loving ones, had fallen in her stead.

This was, she thought as she scratched it onto the parchment before her, her worst sin.

f) I could have done more to save them:

She listed their names carefully.

-Fred Weasley

-Remus Lupin

-Nymphadora 'Tonks' Lupin,

-Ted Tonks

-Argus Filch

-Colin Creevy

-Grody Boot

-Busby Heron

-Laura Fielding

-Severus Snape

The Potions Master was no afterthought, despite the fact that he followed several lower-year students whose names Hermione knew only in passing. She just was not sure whether or not she ought to feel guilty about having watched him die. After all, it was not as though anyone knew he had been on the Order's side the whole time.

However, whenever she posed this argument to herself, whenever she told herself that she could not have done anything, she immediately recognized such to be self-deception.

Indeed, it was his death that she felt worst about, mostly because he was the only one she could have done something about. Since the battle, she had endured many nightmares, most of them involving herself at the end of Bellatrix's wand or Professor Snape bleeding to death on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, and many of them incorporating both memories. When she woke up--shaken to consciousness by Ginny or clawed by her own nails--she usually lay with her eyes open for hours afterwards, thinking feverishly of what she ought to have done to prevent both situations.

The first one was simple--she should not have let Harry say the name of Voldemort aloud. However, Harry was used to not listening to her. Therefore, the second occupied her mind the most. As a result of many nightmares and much resulting insomnia, she had come up with a thousand different ways to save the crotchety Potions Master. She might have called Fawkes for some Phoenix Tears, she might have attempted to stop the blood loss with standard wound-closing spells, she might have had Harry try the Sectumsempra cure. Hell, she might have tried a bezoar from her bag! Even that would have been better than standing, pathetically petrified, unable to do anything besides summon a glass for the dying man's memories.

Thinking of excuses for herself no longer placated her. So what if she never caught a single one of the hints that testified to Snape's innocence?

Namely, that Snape prevented the Carrows from doing anything to stop the new D.A.--which, being him, he must have known about--and then sending Luna, Neville, and Ginny on a merciful detention with Hagrid instead of a cruel Death-Eater-Worthy punishment. There were others: the fact that Dumbledore's will was so relevant to their search that he must have revised it very soon before his death, which indicated that he had anticipated it, the Sword of Gryffindor's appearance in the Forest of Dean, which MUST have been Snape's doing,...and oh, there were so many others.

Even if she had not been able to put it all together, she still ought to have tried to save him, even if he nothing more than a nasty Death Eater, especially after the Dark Lord had marked him as an enemy. If she were truly smart, she would have realized that Snape could have become an immediate (and powerful) ally, if she had shown him mercy when his supposed Master showed none.

Besides all of this, thinking about Snape's death brought her to recognize the value of others' lives, all too late.

Harry did not seem to understand like she did; he had almost died himself, and though he understood the blessing of his own life, he did not completely have a grasp of the fact that so many had fallen. On top of it, Harry was more than a tad egocentric; he got used to being the Boy Who Lived, thanks to Dumbledore's unfailing encouragement. Along with that, the only ones whom he had truly lost in the battle was Lupin and Tonks, though of course he mourned Fred with the entire Weasley clan. As Harry told her, there were many dead on both sides who, under different circumstances, could as easily have been their allies as their enemies. He considered himself lucky to be alive, lucky that Ginny was alive, and lucky his friends were alive. There was no room for emotion beyond these, save relief, and excitement at being Teddy Lupin's godfather. He kept bringing up Sirius--whom Hermione sensed that he grieved for more seriously than for anyone who had recently died--and said he wanted to be 'just like old Sirius for little Teddy'. Not wanting to rain on his parade, Hermione bit back the observations that Sirius was in prison half his life, gave Harry badly biased advice for the duration of their very short relationship, and then on top of all that needlessly died just before Harry needed him most.

Besides, Harry's main preoccupation, one week after the battle, was to sing Dumbledore's praises to the multitudes. This disgusted Hermione--Dumbledore was quite knowingly, as Harry quoted Snape, raising him 'like a pig to slaughter'--but the realization seemingly had no effect on the Boy-Who-No-Longer-Was-A-Horocrux. He and his hero-persona had to combat the nefarious suggestions, which were prompted by Rita Skeeter's article, about the old wizard's manipulative inter-personal relations. While Harry still lionized the late Professor Snape, the issue of re-paving the dead man's reputation had dropped off his radar, particularly after Kingsley Shacklebolt hinted that perhaps it would be better to wait to clear the name of the dead man. The new Minister of Magic's reasoning was that people would be loathe to honor the memory of any Death Eater, reformed or not. Harry, for better or worse, agreed with this assessment, and therefore the prickly hero remained unsung; the Boy-Who-Lived-Twice! could not bear more than one dead man's cross at a time.

When it came to having a sense of loss, Hermione could not compare herself to Ron, who joined the lamentations of his entire family for Fred. Since the battle, he had done his fair share of moping around, fiddling idly with knickknacks, and trying to cheer George up, but his brother's death wore heavily on him. Even Percy's return to the family, much less Hermione's half-hearted attempts at affection, could not bring him much joy. Quite the opposite reaction, actually, since George, Ginny, and Molly in particular could not understand why the prodigal son who had forfeited the nest had lived, while the loyal son had to be the one to die. Arthur, Charlie, and Bill were the few who were just grateful to have Percy back, while Ron periodically flip-flopped between their side and that of George and the females, though he inclined mostly to following his mother's example.

Conversely, when it came to Snape, Ron could not care less. He was still completely biased against the dead Potions Professor, making the valid point that even if the spy was not ever a Death Eater, he would still be a slimy, nasty git. So what if she did not even try to save Snape from a death inflicted by the Dark Lord. It was not, in Ron's opinion, her place to do so, and he suggested that she leave the subject alone. Such a declaration only validated her past observation that he did have an emotional range the size of a teaspoon.

Hermione, however, could not help but think and feel, and therefore she commonly combined the two.

While considering her own pain, she thought about the sad case of Marietta Edgecombe. The girl who had been the 'sneak' in fifth year had, in the eyes of many, made up for her transgression with her valor in the battle. Ginny told Hermione how the Ravenclaw had pleaded to let her back in the D.A. when Neville and Luna started it again, and they did so with limitations. (She was only allowed to know where meetings were, for instance; fellow D.A. members had to guide her while blindfolded.) No one was disappointed with her, and she had taken down two Death Eaters in conjunction with her boyfriend, Terry Boot. It went to show, Hermione decided, that one could change, given the chance.

Could Snape have changed, if he had lived? She supposed it was possible, which was just one more reason to berate herself. Ron would say, she knew, that Snape would never have changed, and most people would tend to agree. However, when she thought about Neville and Luna giving Marietta one chance to prove herself, it saddened her that she could not have done the same for Snape.

Hermione snorted, letting abashed tears run down her face. To hell with typecasting her scenario; survivor's guilt or not, she was responsible for withholding a life-preserver from a drowning man.

I'm a monstrous imbecile, she told herself fervently, A monstrous imbecile who could not give a dying man the benefit of a doubt.

She never would have guessed that the chance to redeem herself was on its way, in the form of a charmed letter that dangled under the nose of one very cross Hogwarts librarian.

. . . x . . . X . . . x . . .