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It still seemed surreal, to be honest.
Three months ago, he was starving in the tent.
Two months ago, he was planning to rob an un-robbable bank.
One month ago, he’d finished up the last of a long run of heartbreaking funerals.
And now, he was staring out at the ocean, well on his way to getting pleasantly smashed with Hermione’s dad.
Life comes at you fast.
It wasn’t particularly tough to find Hermione’s parents. Tracking people down is pretty easy when money is no object and, thankfully, Harry was quite well-off. Granted, his vaults were notably sparser than they were a few months ago—Goblin Reparations and all that—but there was still plenty of money to hire private investigators to track down the Wilkinses, a/k/a Robert and Helen Granger.
They were discovered just north of Brisbane. As expected, they weren’t thrilled with their daughter’s actions, but Hermione is rather pitiful when she’s weeping uncontrollably, and the Grangers, for any faults they may or may not have, obviously love their daughter deeply. It took about an hour for them to agree to start rebuilding their relationship.
It would’ve taken less time than that—far less time—if Harry hadn’t needed to translate Hermione-sobs into coherent English.
When given the choice between dealing with a bawling woman and the Cruciatus Curse… well, Harry would have to think about it for a minute.
At any rate, the ladies were currently at the spa—something that Hermione deserved to repeat weekly for the rest of her hopefully long and relatively stress-free life—which left Harry with the solemn responsibility of day drinking with the Granger patriarch. It was something that he quite enjoyed, though he felt like it might’ve been more appropriate for Ron to be here instead; he was the presumptive boyfriend, after all. However, Molly, in her immense grief over Fred, basically had a panic attack anytime one of her children was away from the borough for more than a few hours.
Plus, the thought of ‘going Muggle,’ as Ron characterized it, clearly weirded him out a bit. The redhead would’ve (probably) gotten over it in the absence of family obligations, but he didn’t particularly hide his relief to have an excuse to miss out on the trip.
“So…,” drawled Robert slowly, taking another long pull from his drink, “what does one do after they’ve saved the world? How d’you follow that up?”
Normally Harry would’ve bristled at the characterization of him ‘saving the world.’ However, he knew Robert was, at this point, just doing it to poke at Harry, whose feckless attempts at modesty endlessly amused the older man for some reason. Also, given that the boy was currently feeling rather buzzed—still in control of his faculties, but with a far looser tongue than normal—he couldn’t find it within himself to care too much about anything.
“Not sure,” replied Harry, intently peeling the label from his current bottle, “I'm slated to become an auror, so... I suppose I'll follow it up by hunting down more dark wizards.”
“Oh—really?” replied Robert, his good humor fading a bit with surprise. “I mean, you’ve done quite a bit of that already; I wasn’t of the impression that you particularly enjoyed it.”
Harry chuckled mirthlessly. “No... can’t say I did. But, you know, it’s what I prepared for in school. And I’m good at it--dealing with dark wizards. Plus, it’s what people expect, right? Maybe it won’t be so bad when I’m not starving, living out of a tent, and filled with mortal dread?”
“Hmmmm— maybe not,” answered Robert noncommittally. “Sounds like a very responsible decision.”
“Never thought I’d hear a Granger describe something as ‘responsible’ with such an unfavorable tone,” quipped Harry with a grin.
“Pft—I’m just as surprised as you are,” laughed Robert, looking off in the middle distance as the waves gently crashed on the shore.
“And yet?” prompted Harry.
“And yet… And yet, I think, if there’s such a thing as a lifetime quota of behaving responsibly, that you may’ve already met it. And maybe, now that the requirement is satisfied, you could afford to do something not completely driven by selfless duty, or at least something without the prospect of mortal danger,” elaborated Robert seriously.
“Well,” shrugged Harry. “I really don’t know what I’d do otherwise. Hermione says I have a ‘saving-people thing,’ and she’s right about pretty much everything—”
“Runs in the family,” interjected Robert.
“—so, it’s not like I can, I don’t know, work in a broom shop or play Quidditch or something frivolous like that. It might be nice at first, but I think I’d go mad after a bit.”
The two fell into a companionable silence.
“What about medicine?” suggested Robert after a while. “That certainly counts as ‘saving people,’ doesn’t it? And I know there are some pretty incredible spells available. The number of times I’ve… well, never mind that,” he finished with a hint of bitterness in his tone.
“What?” prompted Harry, turning towards him curiously.
“Oh, nothing. You don’t want to hear an old Muggle’s rants,” replied Robert, with a forced lightness in his voice.
“I think I’d strongly prefer them to my own whinging,” replied Harry. “I feel like someone’s slipped me truth serum and I’ve just been blathering away.”
Robert snorted. “Not at all, son. Besides, my rant is— It’s just— in some ways, your world seems very quaint and even a little bit backward to me, no offense intended. But when Hermione came home after her fourth year, and we saw her teeth…”
Harry winced, remembering how Malfoy had hit her with a tooth-growing hex, rapidly enlarging the physical feature Hermione was most insecure about. Madame Pomfrey had fixed her right up, and even resized Hermione's teeth more to her liking.
“Well,” continued Robert, “she explained what’d happened and how your school nurse fixed things up in about a minute and, I’ll confess… I’ll confess that it— it bothered me a bit. I mean, here Helen and I are, dedicating our lives to fixing people’s teeth, and a general practitioner with no specialized training or equipment whatsoever waves her wand and does something in sixty seconds what it would take our medicine several months of major realignment and painstaking procedures to achieve.”
Harry just nodded intently, with an indistinct “mmm” added to show that he was listening. But…he wasn’t quite sure what Dr. Granger was driving at.
“It’s— that’s just one example. You can do so much with magic, but you keep it to yourselves. I know it’s the law—the Statue of Secrecy, God knows Hermione’s mentioned it enough—I know that. But… I can’t help but think how many lives could be saved if magical folk shared their talents with us lowly Muggles.”
“Yeah,” muttered Harry, thinking back to the maladies Madame Pomfrey had fixed over the years—all sorts of broken bones, many of which would take weeks to recover without magic, if they’d ever recover; Bludger blows to the head that probably should’ve resulted in irreparable brain damage; complicated nerve damage from the Cruciatus Curse; even re-growing Eloise Midgen’s nose.
“Yeah,” echoed Robert, taking another long swig from his bottle. “Told you it wasn’t a pretty rant. At any rate, I’m just saying there are other ways to save people if you don’t want to be an auror. But, then again, maybe all you need is a good holiday and you’ll be keen to be fighting those dark wizards again in no time.”
“Uh huh,” agreed Harry noncommittally.
Robert Granger gave Harry a worried look. He'd just meant to tease the boy, not spark an existential crises. However, Harry didn't notice; he was staring out at the ocean, worry creasing his face as he contemplated his uncertain future.
Many Years Later
This had become a ritual for him, of sorts.
There were more efficient ways to clean away the aftermath of battle—the blood and other fluids that somehow made their way past his protective gear and onto his skin. However, Harry found that washing without magic was important for him mentally, and so here he stood, slowly and methodically scrubbing away with soap and water.
The non-magical ritual allowed his body and mind to transition away from the heady, adrenaline-fueled task behind him, to compartmentalize the fear, excitement, and trauma into a neat little box, so that it’s after-effects didn’t spill out into everyday life.
Harry had people to support him if they did, of course, but he had learned that skillfully dealing with the aftermath was almost as important as a successful fight itself.
And what a battle this had been.
The enemy had been formidable this time, but Harry had grown to relish such challenges. The more dire the circumstances, the more perversely calm he became. The flicks of his wrist would grow more precise, and his hands would know just what to do in the moment, long before his mind provided the rational answer.
It was now hard for Harry to believe that he’d even considered a different path.
Truly, for Harry, the most difficult part was what came after. Harry still wasn’t comfortable with this part, but the families needed to know, and he wasn’t about to pawn that off on someone else—come good or ill.
He finished washing his hands and checked himself in the mirror to make sure he had cleaned completely—failing to remove viscera, even a little, before such a meeting was a mistake he'd never repeat—and pushed his way through the double doors.
It's a small gathering this time. Sometimes there’s an enormous group waiting to hear his report, but not today. It's just a father, mother, and an older brother, all huddled together with held hands and tense, fearful expressions, dreading the bad news to come and hoping against hope for a miracle.
Their eyes flit to the door the moment he enters, but it is the mother who leaps to her feat, her eyes burning in desperate anticipation for the news that she knows will change everything.
Harry smiles warmly at her, and she crumples back into her husband’s arms, sobbing uncontrollably in relief. He holds her, tears of his own now running freely down his cheeks, while their oldest child wraps his arms around them both, burying his head between them.
It’s uncomfortable for Harry to stand here for such an intimate moment among strangers, but he knows that his presence is important. They keep shooting him looks as if to say, “It really went well? Is it safe—finally safe—to feel light and happy and hopeful once again?”
He just nods and smiles every time, soothing with the briefest of words. “It went well, it went well.”
Finally—though in reality it only takes a few moments—the family gathers their composure enough to hear his full report.
“Surgery went as well as we could’ve possibly hoped,” he lectures in a more authoritative voice. “Now—we can’t know how truly successful we were until swelling goes down and we get the returns from imaging, but I’m cautiously optimistic that we got everything we needed.”
He hates that part—he knows he got every last bit of cancerous tumor from their daughter. Every— last— bit. But he can’t take their fear away completely, because to do so would violate the Statute. His patient and her family are not magical, and so he needs to keep up appearances as a ‘normal’ surgeon. And that means waiting for imaging to confirm the success of the surgery.
“You’re sure?” says the mother breathlessly.
“As sure as I can possibly be,” replies Harry in a kind, well-practiced answer that is reassuring and true and just nebulous enough.
“You’re sure?” presses the father urgently. The man is searching Harry's eyes for any hint that it might not be true.
He doesn’t mind that they’re questioning him, that they’re skeptical. After all, he knows the path that patients and their families take to get to this point—to when they're in his waiting room, grasping onto the faintest sliver of hope.
It’s a horribly painful journey.
At this point, many have heard the word “inoperable,” so frequently that it’s written on their hearts and echoes through their nightmares. A good number have already begun the transition away from physicians, treatments, and tests towards comfort care, funeral plans, and last wishes. To many, Harry merely represents a last gasp, a desperate Hail Mary before they're forced to accept their horrible, crushing loss.
They don’t know—can’t possibly know—who they’re dealing with.
That they’re dealing with the Master of Death.
Harry used to hate that term. Loathe it, despise it, shun it with every fiber of his being. It was a term used by magicals to describe someone with overwhelming power, the ability to summon Death at their whim.
But they were wrong. They were wrong about what it meant. They were even wrong about the very definition of power.
Any fool with hate in his heart and weapon in his grasp can summon Death.
But true power? True power is the ability to look Death in the eye and tell it, “Not today.”
Because Death is an ever-hungry wolf, willing and ready to attack anyone who nears it, dragging them away to the Next Great Adventure. Harry’s job is to command Death to sit. To stay.
But the worried father doesn’t know that. Only the smallest handful do.
So, Harry looks him in the eye, projecting complete confidence, and grins. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“When can we see her?” asks the mother, trembling with a maelstrom of emotion—hope and fear and the overwhelming feeling that if she can just see, if she can just lay eyes on her little girl, her precious, irreplaceable child, that she’ll know if it's really true. She’ll know if her daughter has been healed.
In a well-choreographed move, Eloise, one of the nurses, emerges from the shadows. “Analise is right this way, ma’am. She’s still pretty out of it, though, but she’s already asking for you.”
“She—” gasps the mother, choking back another sob. “Really?”
Asking anything is a new development. The tumor had been pressing against her brain, robbing Analise of coherent speech.
Not anymore.
Harry is fully embraced by the mother, who’s launched herself directly into his chest. He is thankful, for roughly the ten trillionth time, of the years of Hermione Hugs that have prepared him for these moments. The father hovers nearby and gives Harry a firm grasp on the shoulder, his eyes filled with tears, and words clearly failing him.
Harry both adores this part and finds it overwhelmingly uncomfortable. He’s known so much loss that he’s overjoyed to prevent someone else from suffering that pain. However, he feels almost like he’s cheating. That if they knew how easy it was for him, that he can wield honest-to-god-magic, that they might be less overwhelmed. That they’d be less awed.
But no matter, this isn’t about him. It's really, really not. It took a long time—far too long—for Harry to realize that this is an essential part of the healing process. That a family’s gratitude is a key part of their closure.
Eloise understands this too, but she also understands that Harry’s tolerance for both grieving and celebration isn't limitless. She herds the family down the hall to the recovery room, and he is finally left alone.
Well, mostly alone.
“Is that all for the day, Doctor Peverell?” asks Linda, the clinic manager, with a wry smirk. She emphasizes her words as though Harry has somehow done the bare minimum and is now going to skive-off and play golf.
Which, well... yes, that's partly true. He is going to sneak in a half-round. He was surprised as everyone else to find that he really enjoyed golf—though no one except Harry was surprised that he was damned good at it—but it’s not like fully excising an inoperable tumor is skiving by any stretch of the imagination.
Of course, Linda knows that. And Harry knows that she knows. But it still wrankles him the tiniest bit, so she keeps it up.
It should come as no surprise that Hermione was the one who recommended hiring her.
“Oh, shut up you witch,” he says maturely, rolling his eyes.
This insult internally amuses Harry a great deal because Linda is, in fact, not a witch at all and has no concept of the magical world.
It also has the added bonus of driving Hermione a bit batty when she hears him use ‘witch’ as an insult. His tiny bit of revenge.
Summer of 1998 and onward
While he is happy and secure in his work now, getting to this point was anything but easy.
Ginny had been thrilled—and Ron a bit perplexed—when Harry declared that he was returning to Hogwarts for a final year with the intention of apprenticing under Madame Pomfrey.
Both of the Weasleys were far less amused when he clarified that he’d be following his time at Hogwarts to study non-magical medicine at university.
For Ginny and Ron, their lack of amusement manifested itself as a Weasley Family Intervention wherein Harry was surreptitiously portkeyed to St. Mungo’s to be checked over.
Unfortunately for them, the tests for potions, bewitchments, and other forms of mind manipulation revealed that Harry's apparent insanity was 100% organic. Free-range, even.
Ginny never warmed to Harry’s plans. He wanted to work outside of the magical world by (very discretely) combining magic and medicine to heal Muggles. She had envisioned a very different sort of life. One in which she married Harry the wizarding hero—first, the idealized version from the books, and second, the flawed-but-somehow-all-the-grander-for-it hero from real life. But for Harry to remain a hero of the wizarding world—for him to remain the person she wanted to be married to—he needed to stay in the wizarding world. That no longer seemed to be in the cards. Not really.
Suffice it to say, their relationship ended before it truly restarted.
Hermione and Ron’s relationship didn’t survive her decision to 'go Muggle' on a long-term basis, either. The fact that Hermione seemed to be following Harry's lead was also a contributing factor.
Or, possibly, it might've been the entire reason. In Ron's eyes, Hermione had chosen Harry. Again.
What was perhaps worse: Ron hadn't been surprised in the slightest.
In the end, the fact that she'd chosen to follow Harry had been shocking to exactly one person: Harry.
During their last days in Australia, when he'd told her of his wild, daft plan to use magic in Muggle medicine, Harry had expected Hermione to smile at him sweetly. To softly grasp his hand. To sincerely compliment his kind heart and his desire to help.
Only then would she gently-but-also-quite-ruthlessly crush the idea with a hundred instantaneously-generated and logically-impeccable reasons that he’d never even begun to consider.
She was quite good at that. They probably wouldn’t be alive if she weren’t.
And it had mostly gone as expected.
Sweet smile.
Gentle grasp.
Sincere compliment.
But then…
Then she had said what he hadn’t expected, but really should’ve.
“I’m coming with you.”
Back when they'd booked their Australia trip, Harry had insisted on buying first-class plane tickets. He’d never flown in a plane before—and might never do it again—and he wanted to experience it to the fullest extent possible.
As a consequence, they were able to watch movies on the plane. Harry had never been able to watch a movie—not properly, at least. He'd just caught glimpses here and there, or overheard the tele with his ear pressed against the cupboard door. Suffice it to say, he was quite excited. In fact, his enthusiasm for cinema was so overwhelming that even Hermione put down her books and watched several movies with him. After all, it’d been quite a while since she’d been able to relax and take in a film as well.
One such film, which Hermione showed no interest in viewing, was a movie called Billy Madison. It was a rather juvenile movie, something Harry, who’d been robbed of many opportunities to act juvenile, greatly appreciated. The premise of Billy Madison is that a spoiled twenty-something-year-old man must, for some absurd reason or another, redo his entire primary and secondary education in the span of less than one year.
Harry could've never imagined how much he'd empathize with the titular character.
In an event more predictable than the rising and setting of the sun, Hermione had been using her summers to keep up with the more salient points of non-magical education. Sure, she might not’ve mastered chemical reactions or been intimately familiar with the equations describing Newtonian mechanics—yet—but she already could lecture so fluently on the Industrial Revolution that you’d be forgiving for thinking she'd literally just aced her History A-level.
Harry, on the other hand, had spent primary school mostly thinking about how hungry he was and how he’d manage to avoid Dudley and his gang on the playground. Then he’d gone to Hogwarts, taken the two electives that probably were the least helpful to his newly chosen career path, and gave approximately four-and-half seconds worth of thought to the Muggle education he was missing.
So yes, it was like Billy Madison— except it was, so, so much harder. After all, Billy just had to pass, whereas Harry had to meet Hermione Granger's exacting standards.
It wasn’t all work and no play, mind you. There was something so much lighter about studying with Hermione when it held the promise of a bright and Dark-Lord-free future. They sequestered themselves in Grimmauld place, but took breaks to renovate the house, taking great pleasure in projects big and small, like bashing down the entryway hall with sledgehammers.
Walaburga’s portrait—and surrounding walls—had been enchanted to hell and back to prevent spell damage, but the Blacks had never considered someone just going mental on it with primitive Muggle tools.
Typical purebloods.
When the appeal of wrecking and re-constructing Grimmauld Place waned, Harry and Hermione would apparate to across the country and enjoy the countryside without fear of snatchers or Death Eaters. Hermione found a list of the best beaches in the U.K. and they visited and personally ranked every single one. They had a picnic next to The Old Man of Storr and (briefly) dipped their feet in the freezing-cold Fairy Pools in the Isle of Skye. They explored the Cliffs of Dover, the Durdle Door, and the Needles in the Isle of Wight. They took in museums and castles, football games and amusement parks. To their delight, they were often joined by Ron, who’d gotten over his hurt and jealousy, as he always did eventually.
(It didn’t hurt that, as the only member of the so-called Golden Trio of Gryffindor still regularly participating in the magical world, he received a lion’s share of the attention. Telling the demonstrably true story of breaking out of Gringotts on a dragon made attracting pretty witches very, very easy. He was understandably a very big fan of that.)
In the end, they were accepted into Oxford. It had taken a lot of studying and a veritable mountain of forged paperwork, the latter of which neither Harry nor Hermione felt too bad about. After all, telling white lies on their applications is only fair considering that they weren't allowed to list ‘prevented mass genocide’ on their extracurricular activities.
Harry, truthfully, was quite surprised at his A-level results and subsequent acceptance. He'd never been a very good student before, but it turns out that escaping year-round mortal dread and existential anxiety had done wonders for his intelligence.
Who would’ve thought?
It wasn’t until Oxford that Harry and Hermione’s relationship shifted.
At Hogwarts, they’d both received comments about dating, but after years in which nothing happened between the two, everyone just decided that it never would. Sure, Harry and Hermione were close, but that was just the way things were. A fact of life, like gravity, the color of the sky, or Snape's disagreeableness.
Their new friends at Oxford critically lacked that context.
“Wait, wait, wait—you’re not a couple?” they’d ask in well-meaning incredulity.
“What’d’you mean she's like a sister?” and "Like a brother!? The hell he is!" They knew they’d never looked at their brothers and sisters like that.
“Surely you’ve at least snogged a bit, after a drunken night out or something?” they inquire, finding it incomprehensible that two ostensibly heterosexual, attractive people of the opposing sex who lived together, studied together, ate together, hung out together, and even vacationed together wouldn’t have ever at least tried something.
Harry and Hermione both brushed it off. Most of it.
However, there were was one question that plagued them both. It was so innocent, so genuine. It was asked in quiet, sincere, one-on-one conversations with their closest friends. It was simply:
“But… Why not?”
Hermione responded to the Question of Why Not by making a list of things that she wanted in a partner. It had things like:
Physical attraction (mutual)
Common goals
Different interests.
Supports me.
Pushes me to grow.
Ambitious
Not too ambitious.
Patient.
Action-oriented.
Not afraid to stand up to me.
Will listen to me.
Can be serious.
Makes me laugh.
And so on. (And so on, and so on, and...) When she’d made her list, three things struck her.
First, that she had maybe dodged a bit of a bullet with Ronald. He was a wonderful friend, she loved him dearly, and she hoped that they’d remain close for their entire lives. But… he checked a wholly insufficient number of boxes.
The second thing was that many of her criteria were almost conflicting. For instance, “can be serious” and “makes me laugh” weren’t mutually exclusive, but it was a fine needle to thread. And that was far from the only pair. It made her feel quite picky, like the set of men that would satisfy her preferences was a rather exclusive group.
The third thing was that, while Harry didn’t satisfy all of her criteria all of the time, he did satisfy all her criteria some-or-most of the time. And that made him part of that rather exclusive group.
There was a time that she might’ve been worried about ‘Physical Attraction (mutual),’ because while Harry was plenty fetching—piercing eyes, angular features, tousled hair, and, if we’re being honest, a truly magnificent arse—she hadn’t been sure if the attraction was reciprocated. However, during their post-war time together, she’d caught his eyes lingering over her—flitting down her blouse, appreciating her arse, and staring at her on sunny beach days when he thought she was napping—so she wasn't so concerned about one-sidedness anymore.
Now, with her recent list-related revelations about Harry, she needed to understand if other people could possibly compare by checking all those boxes. If Harry stood as the only one who could manage such a thing, then… well, she’d just have to make him fall in love with her, wouldn’t she?
And if there were others, then…
Well, then she’d probably still have to make Harry fall in love with her, but she’d need to do her due diligence first.
Harry response to the Question of Why Not… was to panic.
Then, to brood.
Then, to panic again.
Then, to brood again.
Then, of course, to pretend like everything was perfectly fine.
Totally, absolutely, really, just... fine. Perfectly fine.
And, because pretending like everything was perfectly fine meant continuing their day trips, he found himself enjoying a sunset with Hermione on their favorite beach. (Or, rather, her favorite beach. He liked them all about the same, but knew life would be easier if she believed they'd reached a consensus.)
The temperature was just short of hot, with a refreshing, gentle breeze forceful enough to tease her Hermione’s curls into a wild mane. The sun’s last rays illuminated her cheeks in the most perfect way, as she closed her eyes and drank the final tendrils of warmth.
He decided to kiss her about a half-second after he’d already started kissing her.
As usual, his body knew what to do in the moment, long before his brain provided the rationale.
And, for once, Hermione’s beautiful mind didn’t need to give instructions either.
Even though she never finished her due diligence, she never felt too bad about it—for some reason.
Harry and Hermione finished their medical education and began to pursue their specialties. Hermione dove into research, with the aim of adding a D.Phil. to her growing list of credentials. Harry, instead, focused on surgery.
It was a tricky business, applying magical techniques in the surgery suite. Luckily, Harry had become extremely good at wandless magic and at illusory charms, spelling his wand to look like a scalpel or other surgical instrument as the situation demanded. In the rare instances where he bollocksed things up—or had to take particularly extreme magical measures—he’d become very good at Confudus and Oblivation charms, ones that could be directed to disregard and erase only specific things.
Having a generally addled surgical nurse, for instance, is a pretty bad idea overall. Best to avoid it.
Over time, he accumulated more and more specialized staff. Not just specialized in medicine or surgery, but in their knowledge of magic. He collected whoever he could find: disenfranchised Muggle-borns, squibs, and even direct Muggle relatives of witches and wizards who were exempted from the Statute. Now, Harry could work freely in his clinic and only had to resort to his benevolent deception when he took shifts at Accident and Emergencies in the hospital.
Hermione, meanwhile, dedicated herself to figuring out the science behind why healing potions work, and how this could be replicated without magic, reverse-engineering the process. To boot, she also figured out how to translate several Muggle treatments into magical medicine—particularly much-needed fertility and prenatal treatments—earning accolades for her huge contributions in both worlds.
She now worked in her own private lab, having assembled a ‘magic-aware’ staff of her own. Harry privately speculated that, in a few decades’ time, she’d be adding another Order of Merlin to put on the shelf alongside her first one. Or maybe she'd place one on each side of the near-inevitable Nobel Prize in Medicine.
However, no award she received would be valued as much as the letters. The messages from witches with moving baby pictures telling stories of how she'd helped them conceive (sometimes, perhaps, with a bit too much detail); the testimonies from doctors and patients with rare, mysterious diseases that'd been cured using her discoveries—these were what Hermione treasured.
After all, she had a little bit of a 'saving-people thing' herself.