Jabberknolls Can't Forget

The potion was foul, as was to be expected. It also made me feel positively wretched, which I had not expected. The pain that shot through my head was so incredible, I must have passed out. When I came to, I was lying on my bathroom floor, cold and cramped, with my head still throbbing, and alone.

“Snape?” I called out, not knowing if I was hoping he’d answer or not. “… Severus?”

He was most definitely gone. Dizzy, I pulled myself up to my feet and looked at myself in the mirror. I was a mess. I felt like my insides had all been unceremoniously scooped out while I’d lain there, leaving me with a core of hollowness within my empty ribcage, and I wanted to cry my eyes out, but…

I had to get to the Necroikos. Frantically, I yanked clean robes out of my closet, threw my hair up into some sort of order, and cleaned my face. I rushed out of my apartment, raced to my Apparition spot, and only took to or three calming breaths before turning into the tightness of Apparition. I raced up the front steps and hammered on the door. Gregory opened it with his usual cool grace.

“Miss Granger? I’m afraid this isn’t a good time…”

“Let me through!” I demanded, barrelling past him, racing down those muffled halls until I came to the Somatorium.

Luna was there, wringing her hands. A young man with strong facial features, thick, dark hair that just asked to be tousled, and very pleasing proportions sat on the centre table, smiling handsomely. Luna gasped when she saw me. She was all a-flutter.

“Hermione! I’m so glad you’re here! This has never happened before in my time here, but apparently we misread his diagnosis! The man wasn’t dead at all!”

I sighed hugely, relief threatening to drown me, draining the strength out of my wobbly knees.

“I’m terribly sorry,” said the young man. “I didn’t mean to cause you any inconvenience. My name’s Rolf Scamander. I was working with my father in the Amazon, when a creature we were unfamiliar with attacked. I have no idea what happened between that moment and finding myself here.” He looked at me and looked a bit confused.

“I feel as though I know you,” he said, hopping off of the table and coming towards me. Luna was standing there helplessly. “What’s your name?”

Close to, I saw something that rendered me speechless. Rolf Scamander had deep, dark, intense eyes that I had seen before.

“Please,” I said once I’d managed to regain some semblance of composure, “Call me Hermione.”

“Hermione,” he said, smiling.

Rolf Scamander adjusted well to his new life. Apparently, he’d grown up travelling all over the place, alone with his father, his mother having died when he was very young. Because of the constant uprooting, he’d never made strong friendships or come to think of any one place as home. There was little that he remembered about himself from before the accident, but we found that he was a very intelligent wizard, terrifically skilled at Potions, though somewhat shaky with Transfiguration. The accident had no lasting negative effects on his health, though his hair grew mysteriously darker, and people who had met him before said that his voice was rather deeper and somehow different in tone.

Rolf got along very well with Ron, and they often played chess very competitively against each other. His relationship with Harry, though good, was never quite so natural. With all my friends, he was courteous and humourous, but ever so formal. Only when we were alone did he seem completely at ease. I already half-knew him, of course, and he perhaps maintained some sense of connexion to me.

Sometimes, when I look into his eyes, my heart aches for the man he was, the biting, volatile man I knew before. I see his old person shining through, and I know that it’s better this way—he’s happy, he’s what Severus Snape would have been under better circumstances, he doesn’t carry the hurt anymore that he shouldered for so long—but I still ache. Sometimes, when I watch him lean over a cauldron, a look of intense concentration on his face, I smile, selfishly relieved that his interests are familiar to me. Sometimes, when I watch him talking with Mum or Dad, I wonder if an amicable relationship would have been possible between them and his old self.

And sometimes, when I’m looking through my book titles for a read, I pass over my old Care of Magical Creatures book. My fingers will pause over it, and sometimes I’ll laugh, and sometimes I’ll cry. I never thought, when I’d carefully looped Hermione Granger onto the front page, in writing almost too neat for a twelve-year-old, that one day I’d glow with pleasure and pride to tell the people I meet: I am Hermione Scamander.