Chapter 1
Chapter 1:
It’s been years since the war, Hermione quietly reflected as she sat in the Room of Requirement eating her sad sandwich. Hogwarts looks the same, if not better than those first years when she arrived. But still, every day when Hermione walked by this hallway and ask the castle for a quite space to eat her lunch she couldn’t help the flood of memories from the war. The memory of the first time she’d stood there training with Dumbeldore’s army and all the things that happened after. She has to shake her head to rid of those darker thoughts.
The first time she used the room of requirement to eat her lunch was her second week of teaching at Hogwarts, coming back as a potions master was a privilege of a life time. She remembers being thrilled, jumping up and down when she got the letter of acceptance to the post, thrilled packing, thrilled celebrating with Harry, Ron, and Ginny and George. But the reality of her choice hit her hard when she walked through those doors on the first day. She hadn’t been back since the war, and so much as changed. She didn’t occupy her mind with what it meant to be back here, in this magical yet terrible place. The best and worst memories of her life littering every corner of the castle ground. She was fine, she always has been fine, and she’ll continue to be fine.
Yet, it was brutal walking by the portraits of all those she lost. The first time she saw Fred’s ghost, well she nearly dropped dead from shock of seeing his face, forever frozen in time, when she had grown so familiar with George’s older features. It’s no wonder she was the only one who came back, it took Neville only 2 years of teaching here before he had to leave the place, you can’t heal where you were hurt. These grounds saw a lot of hurting from her and her friends. Now she was back, teaching in the same place Snape gave his final lectures.
Her first week was hard, and made harder by only knowing the head master, all the professors were new, all the students were strangers, Hermione was either afford professional distance by her colleagues or incredibly pandering treatment from students hailing the war hero, returned at last.
So her daily dilemma quickly revolved around where to spend her free lunch hours. At first, it was silly, the teacher’s tables were perfectly acceptable of course, but she could hear the students whisper too much. Eating lunch in Snape’s old office was a good alternative, until she had to sit in the quiet of his space and remember his loss tenfold. She’d hardly used the office choosing to do her work in the great library, the only safe place for her. But even that became too pathetic, at last, one day as she was wandering the hall picking at a protein bar she remembered the easy old solution to needing space in Hogwarts castle: the room of requirement.
And so it became her daily routine, to leave her morning classes, walk over to the blank wall, and think: I need a quite peaceful place to eat lunch, et voila: this room she now sits in daily was created. But everything has a cost. She now remembers flashbacks of training with the DD in this room, the memories come at random and without any sort of reason, but when they do she is forced to wait for the wave of nausea that passes over her.
A war is a terrible thing for a child to have lived through.