Irreparable

Fact:
When the Unites States Government sent the Native Americans to reservations, one of the most significant chiefs, Chief Joseph, was exiled from his people. Only months after having been exiled, he passed away. The physician who had done the post-mortem was unable to identify a cause of death so he wrote the one reason he could think of: a broken heart.



The cool ocean breeze flung her hair in a hundred directions, stinging her beautiful face mercilessly.

She stepped over the dead body of Voldemort, the man who had completely altered history and been the cause of more deaths that affected her personally than any plague or illness possible could. She did not care about him. She was looking for a different fallen soldier, one much kinder.

“Harry?” she whispered into the night air.

A pitiful body on the ground answered her. “Hey.”

His simple, one syllable response vocalized more pain than any long speech possibly could have. His voice was dying and so was he.

She crouched down next to him, laying her hands on his face, mopping his hair away from in front of his eyes.

“You’ll be fine,” she said after a moment. This was not so much of a statement as a pronouncement of her deepest desire. “I’ll take you home and I’ll give you-“

He smiled. “Forget it. It’s far too late now.” His smile lowered to a frown. “Is he dead?”

She nodded her head as tears began to stream down her face.

Harry studied her for a moment, struggling to keep his eyes open, “You need to learn to let go. Ron, the Weasleys, Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hagrid and the others; they are all gone. You need to learn to accept that and not keep dwelling on the preposterous idea that you can change your past.”

There was more silence.

“Please don’t leave me, Harry.”

She grabbed his wrist as his eyes slowly began close.
Her fingers found his pulse and pushed as if she could force life back into him but instead all she felt was that the constant beating had slowed to a stop. He was gone.


The entire world was slowly building itself back together. Large piles of rubble were slowly being cleared for new high-rises, bodies were being cleared from the streets to make way for larger sidewalks and the government was reinstating a politician in place of the auror that had replaced Scrimgeour much as he replaced Fudge.

The world’s rebirth was based on a quote that had flooded the front pages of newspapers for months. “War is casualties. We can only stop deaths once we learn to accept that.”
But she knew that people could never understand just how stupid that statement was.
The people who had died were a large number in the sidebar of a Daily Prophet article to most people.

But to her, they were not the elite of an underground army to fight off Voldemort without the bureaucracy of the government. They were her best friends, mentors, teachers, and the only man she had or ever would love.

She grabbed the piece of glass that hung on a chain around her neck and surveyed it.

The time-turner.

She could completely alter everything that had happened in the past few days with a few simple flips of this small vessel. She could alter her past, relive moments with her friends and complete the childhood that she was supposed to have gotten many years ago.

No.

With a stroke of resolve, she cast the hourglass into the ocean.

It was just like Harry had said: nothing could fix her. It was far too late for that.

“Maybe we’d be better off like Ron. Maybe death is a far better way out of this war than winning.”
Potter looked down at her. “No. As long as we have each other… life is still worth living.

***

The St. Mungo’s healer stepped across the white tile, leaving “Morbid Wing.”

She looked down at her silver watch. It was far too late to still be at work.
The bodies were no longer flowing in at a constant rate. Fewer people were being found dead with no explanation. She didn’t need to be here this late.

“One more piece of paperwork.” She reminded herself. “I just have to write one more report and I’m finished for the night.”

She pulled her wand from her pocket and flicked it at the door in front of her that bore her name plate.

It creaked open and she stepped in.

Sitting at her desk, she pulled a wand out of midair and stared down at the blank paper. Wiping her eyes, she tried to figure out exactly what the right thing to write would be.
With a sudden idea, penetrating her exhausted mind, she threw her quill to the paper and allowed her hand to flow across it, the words spelling themselves out faster than she could think of them.

At the bottom of the paper, she signed her name with a flourish.

Getting up and putting on her cloak to apparate home in, she couldn’t help but wonder whether she had been right to go into this field. Maybe working with dead people constantly was a bad way to spend the few years she had left before retirement.
She spun on her heel, still deciding and disappeared with a resounding pop.

The piece of paper on her desk was swept by the small breeze she had created with her spin into the short and elegant garbage bin on the side of her desk.
The paper had fallen so that it stood upright, only the bottom protruding from the surface.
The only words visible were up-side-down but very clear nonetheless.

Name: Hermione Granger
Cause of Death: Broken heart