Post-Traumatic
by Match

At the beginning of her seventh year Hermione boarded the Hogwarts Express with her old trunk, a brand-new knapsack, an umbrella, handbag, and picnic basket. She returned with a different knapsack and the handbag, her wand spelled smaller to fit inside it. She could feel it jangle against the other things on the bottom, her last few sickles and a lump of blue-fuzzed toffee. The arhythmic, soft jolts of magic were just enough to keep her awake, but not enough to hurt.

The trunk was destroyed toward the middle of the Death Eaters' bombardment, on the night most of Gryffindor Tower caught fire. During the evacuation, between this last stand and that safe house, she lost track of first the picnic basket, then the knapsack. Hermione suspected the picnic basket had joined the giant squid; she never could puzzle out what had happened to her umbrella. Probably it had burnt along with most of the rest of her things, but she wanted to believe a house elf had found it and made it into -- she didn't know. Clothes, maybe, or a lean-to shelter against the green and yellow storm of wizards' battles.

Hermione Apparated in the clump of trees next to her parents' house to find workmen tearing up the road. No one seemed to be home. Only Muggle machines, she told herself, they won't hurt you. In another time, another place, that might have been a bitter joke. Hermione felt bone-tired, incapable of irony.

One of the neighbor children was practicing the clarinet, warbling though the same arpeggioes over and over.

If Hermione were ever to cry over everything lost in the war, the blunt stupidity of all the deaths she was still ashamed she couldn't put names to, it would have been then. It should have been then.

 

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