I confess I had lived

This fic is owed to geminiscorp,

Again scatteredlogic, How would I thank you?

Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chaper V

Chapter VI 

 

Chapter VII

 

They had tipped her that "Eros & Thanathos" was a unique independent Muggle bookstore at Perarchori, at Ithaki Island. It has one of the best and most extensive collections of death and erotic studies in literature known. Her grant allowed her to go overseas, but the board of trustees wanted her to visit a prestigious institute, not a private bookstore. She lobbied defending her cause, presented tons of documentation and finally almost begged them.  Hermione was finally there, at the paved small street, watching the white and blue building, with its red door. The aroma of dark coffee tempted her.

Maybe she could leave this for later and look for a new place in which to drink a sketos?

Ever since she arrived in Perarchori two months ago, she had been experiencing problems crossing that street. Not that she first noticed it, but the closer she got to the store, the more she felt this great urge to go and explore the rest of the island. So far she had made four excursions towards Homer's land, read the Iliad and the Odyssey twice, visited Kioni and Vathy more times that it was worth, before it struck her as odd behaviour. After a few more tries she contacted Bill Weasley to ask for an amulet against magical shields; the owl takes three days to find Bill and more than a week to come back.

Bill’s recommendation had been simple, for this particular ward, stating aloud a piece of the Odyssey in which Ithaki was quoted could do the trick. He didn’t say if a translation would do, neither did he mention if her lack of magic could affect the countercourse.

So there she was again, looking at this cute little bookstore, fighting the urge to go and visit again that lovely Monastery near the top of the mountain to drink coffee with the monks.

Inhaling deeply, Hermione cried to no one:

“Bright Ithaca is my home: it has a mountain,
Leaf-quivering Neriton, far visible.
Around are many islands, close to each other,
Doulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthos.
Ithaca itself lies low, furthest to sea
towards dusk; the rest, apart, face dawn and sun”.

A few people passing next to her mumbled in Greek what she guessed was a reprobatorial comment, but she didn't care.

The shield was neutralized; she could feel it. She wasn’t happy, though. She knew that the magic was made by the amulet and not cast by her; that brought to her a deep sense of loss that struck her with force. Ever since she started investigating this estrange phenomenon with Death at wizzarding culture, her well build inner wards had melted, making her crave magic; the mystery added by the bookstore dilemma, has turn her sabbatical, not in the self search travel she hoped, but into a intense mourning for what she has lost years ago.

She tried to divert her feelings and concentrate on the task at hand. Hermione consciously held her breath, and then lether breath out slowly while crossing the street. Why did the chicken cross the road? She snorted; she remembered facing torture at the Malfoys’ Manor when she was young; in the middle of that traumatic experience, her mind wouldn't shut up. Making bad jokes and seeing the irony in an unexpected turn of events was a habit that had brought her more than one problem through the years.

Hermione crossed to the little red door that welcomed Muggle buyers from all over Greece and gasped. She was facing the loveliest and cosiest bookstore she´d ever seen. Eros & Thanathos was one of those places in which books, apparently without order, crowded on small exhibition tables or on the shelves that covered the walls. The apparently small store had a first floor with the owner’s selection of books, often exeptional and rare enough to satisfy any social science lover She could well spend a week sharing a cup of coffee with that Gilgamesh  she glimpse over there. Hermione had been told that it was the bassement that gave the bookstore its fame. In apparent disarray, the buyer could spend hour after hour walking through the bookshelf labyrinth, finding more and more surprises at each step. This bookstore was designed for the pleasure of discovering books in the chaos of covers, spines and formats. How different from the cold columns of identical volumes at a neat retail bookstore, arranged as if they were a large miniature city of soon to be bestsellers; here titles were supposed to catch the reader's eye seducing, inviting, capturing them. With all her will she fought the lure; not a magical one, but her own compulsion and fetish for what was offered her here.  She approached an old lady for directions:

Do forgive me; it’s my first time in here. I don’t see any clerk or someone who could help me.  I’m researching the phenomenon of Intermittences of Death in ancient cultures; well that was stupid, she thought, this woman will have no idea what I’m looking for.

The woman assed her while thinking of an answer, her face impassive.  You know better than me that life and dead has no intermittence. Chuckling she changed her deep tone for a more pragmatic one:  “Still, you might want to check in the last corridor, at the south wing”. Something in her eyes reminds her of Dumbledore. “Good Lord, how long since I last thought of him?”.

Locating it – a grey shadowy corridor, a bit anticlimactic after the gorgeous bookshelves she has step by on her way here – Hermione caressed the side of a few books with her fingers, distracted  by the smell of humidity and her own disappointment, not really looking at the volumes. Another reader was near; diffused between the shades and shadows, bent over the pages of a book, totally engrossed and oblivious to his surroundings. She had to go back a few steps, when it struck her as someone she knew, as she had seen him so many times in her childhood. Hermione slowly approached him. Just a few steps, clasping her mouth, her eyes wide. She could see him dressed in layers of clothes: Close-cut textured jacket, a black cashmere turtleneck and a shirt with dark-based fussy patterns. It couldn’t be him, she thought, not alive, not in Muggle clothes. “Lovely logical train of thought,  Granger, she congratulated her self” but then, there were his large thin hands and his sharp  aura – for lack of a better word – that make her believe her gut instinct, so she called to him:

“Professor Snape!”

 

For geminiscorp,

Thanks scatteredlogic for battle with my grammar and spelling and general non nativeness

Please review,

Prelude
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III

Chapter IV : Extracts from the life of Hermione Granger years 2004 - 2005

 

PHD Comics bookmark by Granger:  Grad Student etiquette

TBC ...

 

Chapter II:

Extracts from the life of Hermione Granger

( Extracts from the life of Hermione Granger )

I present a great friend of knowledge and a great supporter of liberty; a heroine of our cause, Hermione Jean Granger, to be presented to the Order of Merlin First Class and Medal for Magical Merit.

Minerva Mac Gonagall, head of The Order of the Phoenix to the Wizengamot.

18 September 1999

***

Howler, from Hermione Granger to Ron Weasley. (Sometime during November 1999):

CALL ME COW AGAIN, YOU TWIT, AND I’LL HEX YOUR BALLS OFF!

PICK UP YOUR THINGS AT THE BURROW. DON’T YOU DARE GET NEAR ME.

***

Chat between dean_forest (dean_forest@hotmail.com ) and Herm19 (herm19@aol.com)

21:59 dean_forest: Hi sweetie, everything ok?

Herm19: You talk to Ron?

dean_forest: Got me!

Herm19: Don’t ever try to pair us again up. That’s over.

dean_forest: I know, I’m not THAT brave

Herm19: ha, ha funny

22:00

dean_forest: He’s making a habit of checking his crotch.

Herm19: That was the idea

dean_forest: You’re evil, Hermione, you know that?

Herm19: Muahaha: Voldemort incarnate

***

Mysterious Disappearance linked to UFO Abduction

Melbourne, December 23^rd. A British couple, Wendell (45) and Monica (43) Wilkins, mysteriously disappeared from their downtown flat. Police investigators are working under the hypothesis of kidnapping, while the neighbors point out the mysterious circumstances surrounding their departure. José Fuentes, the caretaker, commented: “It’s like they’ve vanished without a trace; the table was set for two. Everything is normal in there, as if the owners would come back at any minute”. Meanwhile, local authorities ….

***

Letter from Hermione Granger to Harry Potter:

 

… I had been dead tired for weeks, months if I come to think of it. At first I thought of it as a coming flu, which never arrived, but there it was: the sore muscles, the fatigue, the need to sleep, and the permanent migraine. I have dealt well with it. I have to work harder these days to cast charms to my usual standards, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle. Well, not until I arrived from Melbourne.

***

Chat between dean_forest (dean_forest@hotmail.com ) and Herm19 (herm19@aol.com)

12:01.

dean_forest: How are your parents adapting?

12:02 Herm19: You don’t want to know.

dean_forest: That bad?

Herm19: We’ve had a serious and honest chat

dean_forest: Eeeewww

Herm19: aha, eeew indeed.

12:03 Herm19: They want me to live with them for a while

dean_forest: Playing good muggle daughter?

Herm19: More in the line of getting to know their only daughter

***

Excerpts from the Veterans Compensations Commission:

File: Granger, Hermione Jean

The Applicant’s Medical Evidence

21. The medical evidence is not repeated here in full. However, some of the relevant medical evidence of the Applicant is as follows:

22. Mediwizard Oliver Faux, in a report dated 26 December 1999, noted that the

Applicant sustained pain and fatigue in muscles and tendons; charms stiffness; magical impairment; dysmenorrhea. On examination Med. Faux formed the impression of “well healing of the fractured tibial plateau and left radius and ulna injury consequence of multiple battlefield hexes”. Med. Faux noted associated problems of post traumatic stress disorder, sleep disorder with associated panic and vocational issues. He concluded that he expected that the Applicant would be able to return to work in nonmagical duties in six weeks’ time.

Prelude
Chapter I

For geminiscorp

For those who are oldies at fandom, there is a nod to pigwidgeon37 TSO interlude here

A BIG thanks to scatteredlogic and knight0fswords for their kindness and patience in the beta process.




Thanks for reading, I'll apretiate comments and honest feedback.

I'd been writting a fic, still a WIP, I would like to test it  - f -locked - here before daring to post it elsewhere. Please be honest.

Circe Historical Society Press brings array rare books, addressing currently relevant areas of knowledge. Is that so that the editor board has decided to print this long overdue manuscript called “Hermione & Severus. The letters and other writings”; widely known by scholars specialized in the post Voldemort era, from the XXI th century on, there are references to the couple by multiple authors With their inclusion by Rose the Vain in her Romance with Death (2081), their immortality as symbols was ensured. (Note, however, Moon Lovegood opinion that it was Clement of Faux, who owned one of nine surviving manuscripts, who first showed a "genuine interest" [Lovegood 48].) This is a collection of the surviving manuscripts and script fragments, including single-leaf documents, emotion pensieve´s transcriptions now known to have been written or cast in England and Greece, or to have been imported into the country, from the twentieth century to the end of the twentieth two, date in which “Letter to young man” was found among the Earls of Winchilsea and Nottingham’s hidden magical archives at Ewerby’s town
 

This letters and writings are common knowledge for the wide public for its romantic implications, having face multiple best sellers apocryphal mainly known as “Time – Turner Series”; “Marriage Law Challenge Collection”, “Hurt/Comfort rape fics” and the most notorious “Erotica compilation”; most of them popular during the latest XXI th century romantic period. Said textual tradition has been problematic, causing debate and confusion among scholars about the authenticy of the texts. This has lead to numerous modern theories as to whether they are genuine, edited or fictional. Following, Barbara Right article: Eros & Thanathos, a journey trough the magical implications of sexuality during post war times [Right, 2133] in which she both argues against the authenticy of the apocryphal and for the “Hermione & Severus. The Letters and others writings” genuineness, and discusses why it was called into question, the new spells cast and aritmanthy calculation to assure its originality, the current consensus (although not unanimous) seems to be that they are genuine.

 

Prelude

 

There are different time frames -- some count life in seconds, months and years; others in eons, eras and epochs. Occasionally, they get engaged in a dramatic tempo; sadly, in most cases, rocks, centaurs, Muggles and witches live at their own pace, unaware of others’ rhythms, of others’ pulses. All of them abandon themselves to the cadence of their own existence, all of them leaving marks, mute witness of their path through earth.

I invite you, dear reader, to follow one of those petit dramas; one which the stars will dismiss for their insignificance in the grand scheme of things. It is the common story of a young woman pushed by the desire to live and take the best of the fruits life could offer her, yet paralyzed into folly by her insight that, as everyone else, she inevitably will die.

To chapter I

For geminiscorp
Many thanks to scatteredlogic & knight0fswords   for encouraging me and betaing. This, with my grammar, is never easy .

(The Circe Historical Society Press text is unbetaed)