A/N: This is a completed story, which will have its various parts posted daily until finished. The prompt came from a reader of 'Missed' who was looking for, I imagine, something a little different from this end result. Perhaps I'll actually follow the prompt to the letter at some point. I'll post the prompt at the end of the story.

Warnings: Slightly more mature content in later chapters; will be marked as such. AU in that folks are alive that aren't in the books.

Disclaimer: JKR owns everything.

A Filled Space

1

She takes solace in the mundanity of it, the pure simplistic emptiness of it. Day in and day out, she scrubs and waxes, polishes and dusts, cleans and shines, until the floors sparkle and the windows glisten. Her muscles ache come the evening, and when sleep finds her hours later, she dreams of nothing. The life of a maid is not what the world envisioned for Hermione Granger, but she welcomes it.

She is invisible and hidden, and no one knows of it.

Harry and Ron believe her to be thousands of miles away, holed up in a strict apprenticeship in Greece, studying arithmancy and lunar currents. She never lied, not exactly; she did receive the offer and she did write a letter of acceptance. But the parchment the owl took from her contained nothing of glad tidings and excitement. The school did not send a second letter, and Hermione was glad for it.

Her former roommates, the ones that still draw breath at least, trade rumors of an elopement with her once would-be paramour Viktor Krum. That his denials in the papers couple with dark blushes do nothing to hinder the gossip. She is sorry for the undue attention, but not for the cover it grants her.

The Weasleys senior were concerned, at first, when her name on their clock pointed to Lost. But Hermione is cleverer than most, and in her haste to disappear, she managed the sort of charm-work that first brought her the apprenticeship offer. The clock shows her at School now, and the Weasley family thinks nothing of the fact it never changes.

Her parents required no convincing or trickery. Why bother them with something they could not even remember? Her most clever of achievements, this saving of her parents: her spell was too good, too thorough. They have their roses and inverted seasons, and Hermione does not visit.

She walks, now, to the empty house her parents left her unknowingly. The yard remains neat and tidy, the only piece of upkeep she maintains. Her mother's roses died during her year on the run, but magic is kind to those needing a mere quick glamour. The only part of it she can't manage is the smell; her roses flutter in the wind, bend in the breeze, but smell of nothing but damp earth and stale stalks.

She turns on the telly and removes her shoes. The pins holding her hair up follow, along with her keys and purse. She sits in her stockings and massages her feet, nibbling on a bag of beef flavored crisps and weighing whether a proper dinner or an indulgent bath would be the better reward for the eleven hours of hard labor that filled her day. Her new assignment is the repair of a formerly vacant house, narrow and built of fading red brick. She imagines her hands were the first to grace its interior in decades, the photographs dotting the walls smudged beyond all recognition.

The couple on screen argues and then embraces, clothes lost in the dash to reconcile, and the music played during their coupling reminds her of school and her fourth year ball. She opts for the bath and is asleep an hour later.

2

The study reeks of molded pages; more than one book crumbles at her touch. She sorts and organizes, divides and conquers. Hermione loses half a day in her efforts to repair the room to some semblance of care and invitation. She replaces the drapes and admires the garnet gleam of them against the drab wallpaper. Her cheeks flush from the effort of lifting and adjusting; she welcomes the ache of her arms as she stretches dangerously from the ladder.

Her wand is at home, along with the temptation of its use. If she could magick her way through the job, what was the point? She likes to think Professor Snape would have appreciated the sentiment; she likes to think he'd have understood her choice to hide in plain sight.

She hopes, as she fights with a crack of blackened quoining, that he's happier on the other side of things. She hopes they all are, the ones who died and left her.

Hermione breaks only for her lunch and when the sun sets and her watch warns her of excess hours, she considers staying the night. The shelves require more attention, layers of books still untested and judged. Deep into the night, she turns the pages, distracted too easily by a spare passage describing faerie lights and another exploring early maritime charmwork. Sleep finds her halfway through a treatise written in early elvish, and while her dreams force frightened chatter from her lips and wrinkle her brow with long-vanished monsters, she wakes remembering none it.

A hand is on her shoulder, the palm warm and the fingers long and taut. She travels past the hand and arm to the face gazing down at her, and, for the first time in days and weeks and a millenia of minutes, a rush of nervous fear strikes her.

"Please, Professor Lupin, you can't tell them I'm here."