A/N:

This is not my first fanfiction, although it is the first I have made on this profile and the first I have written in around three or four years. I'm not going to tell you what the other one's are because they were written when I was young and had no practice and I'd like to forget about them all together if at all possible. I have only a general outline plan made up, and because of the fact that I'm almost making it up as I go along, posting will be very irregular. Shit happens. There might be two days gap between posts, there might be a months. I'm sorry about that but I felt I should definitely warn anyone who will get frustrated with that straight away.

The common plot line of fanfiction that I'm both basing this fanfiction off of and also totally ignoring is the one that goes like this: Everyone thinks Severus is dead - Hermione falls in love with the idea of him being all dark and mysterious and having saved all their lives - turns out Severus isn't dead but he's very broken and needs help - cue romance.

I'm twisting this around backwards. I thought it would be fresh for everyone to think Hermione was dead and that she would save Severus' life and that he'd (once again, unfortunately enough for him) fall in love with a dead woman who showed him kindness.

Also, just as a heads up, music is going to feature heavily in this fanfiction, and though it is set in the time frame of the year 1999+ (apart from this chapter, the prologue), I'm not going to bother limiting myself with only music that came before that year, as a decent chunk of the relevant music used in this fanfiction will probably have been made after that. So if you dare to skip past this and then try to correct me about it later I will cyber-slap you out of it. I will include a list of any and all songs (even if they are only briefly mentioned or hummed or something) in an author's note at the end of every chapter.

This fic is rated M for violence, swearing (a LOT of swearing), touchy subjects including domestic abuse, miscarriages, attempted suicide and self mutilation. You have been warned. This is not a cheery fic, and I beg you to remember that as we go on. Thank you.

I do not own any characters who's names are recognised from the Harry Potter series. I do, however, own some of my own. I do not profit from writing this fanfiction, so don't go suing me like an asshole.

Prologue

The dull roaring in her ears reminded her of taking off in a plane, and her eardrums hadn't popped yet. It felt like pressure from nothing. It made her blind, deaf and dumb.

Hermione Granger stood in the center of The Great Hall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, watching the lifeless body of the Dark Lord Voldemort keel slowly backwards. Red, evil eyes frozen in shock stared without seeing from a grey face that had long ago lost any trace of belonging to a human being.

The back of Voldemort's head connected to the stone floor of the castle with a deafening crack. His death was ironically mortal; the body crumpled on the ground, undignified and final.

All hell broke loose.

The safety of pressure left her in a sudden rush of sound and colour. There was a unified flick of turning dark robes as the remaining Death Eaters tried to escape, having easily justified their abandonment of their cause after watching their revered Master fall uncermeniously dead at the Potter boy's feet. No loyalty among cowards. Hermione thought fleetingly. She couldn't seem to make herself focus on anything except her own heartbeat, suddenly aware of how very much alive she was. The familiar 'thun-thun' of her too-quick pulse assured her that maybe she would live through the end after all. Lord Voldemort was finally dead. They could end it now. They could claim their victory.

Although could you really call it victory?

Hermione forced the bile creeping up her throat back down into the depths and forcefully held it there. She knew she should be helping and internally she kicked herself and her frantic uselessness - standing around gaping like a First Year on the lake wasn't going to help catch loose Death Eaters. It wouldn't treat the injured.

Wouldn't avenge the dead.

Her heart and soul crushed themselves into miniscule pieces of shattered dust that dissipated into the stone of the castle just as the mis-aimed spells and hexes did as they crackled past her person. She could feel the heat radiating from the more deadly ones as they whizzed and dislodged her hair.

Hermione Granger stood stock still in the middle of The Final Battle and counted the dead.

The bodies of Remus and Tonks lay on their backs, hands almost touching on the floor only a handful of feet away. Remus and Dora Lupin. She corrected herself. Married with dreams that would never be fulfilled, they had left behind a baby that would never understand why he didn't have a Mummy and Daddy to tuck him in at night and tell him "Sweetie, there's no such thing as monsters". Of course there are monsters, Hermione thought bitterly. Monsters are the reason he won't have parents.

Fred Weasley. She could spot a shock of fire-red hair in a corner by the rubble and a shattered window. Fred; one half of a duo that could not exist fractured. She wondered for a moment how George was going to cope with his death when the adrenaline of battle was missing and the chance of revenge was either seized or left hanging. Hermione knew they wouldn't get every Death Eater, that was inevitable. Someone always escaped, but their job was to minimize the importance and number of the someones. Hermione thought back to the night where George has lost his ear. Foreshadowing, she thought, one half of a pair taken away in battle. It would have been almost funny if it was something she'd have read in a work of fiction. But this had happened, and it was staring her in the face.

Poor little Colin Creevey sat propped against the wall, wide-eyed and very dead. Hermione remembered the small boy with too much enthusiasm fondly, and recognised that he had easily had the best photography skills she had ever seen. And with a Wizard's Camera, no less. Colin wasn't meant to have been able to stay behind. He was neither seventeen or in his seventh year at school. Gryffindor recklessness coupled with a desire to protect and serve the building that he and his brother had considered a home-away-from-home for years led to this unforgivable breaking of rules. This obviously had the more than unfortunate consequence of him walking into his own death. Maybe Colin had known it to be a suicide mission and felt as if he needed to help anyway. That went far beyond being a golden, noble Gryffindor. That was being both foolish and yet more selfless than probably anyone else in this room had ever been.

Hermione wondered what would happen to his photographs.

A deathly green spell buzzed passed her ear. She did not flinch.

Four. So far.

Her eyes crawled across the room methodically and found no more dead lying on the stone. She did find dying, however, but she was too numb, her vision surrounded by a haze and feeling as if there was a layer of unyeilding fuzz over her skin. Useless! she screamed to herself, and yet she still could not will her body into movement. She was using all her control to keep her stomach acid down as it was. That was all that was in her stomach too: she couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten. Hermione thought for a fleeting moment that perhaps she should be worried about that. She wasn't.

Her eyes fell to the doors of the Great Hall, where one had been broken into brittle pieces and was being used as clubs by those who had lost their wands. Out in the halllways lying with her face turned in the direction of the open doors was Lavender Brown. Pretty blue eyes, blank in a white face. Cannibalised by a werewolf Death Eater, still in human form.

Five.

Hearing noises behind her she turned her head to watch seven of Voldemort's followers scream in angony as their skin was melted from their bones by a particularly vengeful Order Member whom Hermione did not recognise. The screaming stopped soon after it started.

Twelve.

An Auror and a man who did not don the robes of the Dark were locked in a battle of vicious curses and dark hexes. Hermione recognised the Auror as Dawlish, a thin man with a balding head sparsley populated with brown locks, who had once tried to arrest the Great Albus Dumbledore (just the fact that he had tried to take on one of the greatest men in wizarding history showed his loyalty to his position in the Aurory at the Ministry). She assumed his opponent to be a Death Eater sympathiser, if not just an under-dressed Death Eater.

The both of them hit each other with the Killing Curse at the same moment, and both died successful and surprised. Out of the corner of her eye Hermione watched two more Death Eaters drop to the floor dripping blood from head wounds, Professor Trelawney having chucked heavy crystal balls at them. Divination has it's uses. Hermione conceded as she watched Trelawney howl like a mad woman. Although Hermione supposed she was a mad woman.

Glancing back into the hall again she saw a mass of Hogwarts robes and counted three differently sized hands with blue fingernails.

Nineteen.

For the first time in her life Hermione Granger truly understood that the end did absolutely fucking not justify the means. Nineteen people in her field of vision dead was nineteen too many, even including the Death Eaters. And that was one room in one massive castle in one battle at one time. She could not help the long and disgusting list of lives that the twenty-three year long war had claimed from presenting themselves as bullet-points in her vision.

Lilly and James Potter. Dead.

Professor Quirrell. Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel. Moaning Myrtle (although that had been fifty-odd years ago Hermione felt obligated to include her as a victim of Voldemort, and as she had the significance of having been used to create his first Horcrux from the Diary). All dead.

Twelve unsuspecting and oblivious Muggles at the hands of Peter Pettigrew, and one finger. Tom Riddle Sr, Thomas Riddle, Mary Riddle. Bertha Jorkins. Frank Bryce, the caretaker of the Riddle House, who had been used to create the Horcrux Nagini. Dead because of pure bad luck and a desire to keep the house he had cared for free of hooligans, squatters and children who were too curious for their own good. Dead.

Hermione began to hyperventilate as she continued her count. The bile was churning again.

Barty Crouch Sr, and his son - having been Kissed was also as good as dead. Marlene McKinnon and her whole family had been slaughtered in a Death Eater raid. Gideon and Fabian Prewett, twin brothers of Molly Weasley.

Sirius Black. Dead.

Hepzibah Smith, Amelia Bones, Florean Fortescue, Igor Karkaroff. Regulus Black, Charity Burbage, Alastor Moody, Rufus Scrimgeour.

Hedwig. Dead.

Gregorovitch the wand maker. Bathilda Bagshot. Ted Tonks. Dirk Cresswell. Gornuk the Goblin. Peter Pettigrew, who found out the consequences of trying to deny a Life Debt. Bogrod the Goblin. Vincent Crabbe. Bellatrix Lestrange no less than twenty minutes ago, maybe a little longer, at the hands of the Weasley matriarch who had definitely proved that she would do anything and everything for her babies.

Dobby. The most brave and loyal Free Elf to have ever graced the halls of Hogwarts. Hermione once again had to force herself to not be sick as she remembered that poor, sweet Dobby had died for her. If she could have moved she would've fingered the everlasting wounds of an awful word carved into her left forearm with Bellatrix Lestrange's poisoned blade. It couldn't heal, much like the wound Dolohov had left her with in the Department of Mysteries that diagonally bisected her sternum and still burned and weeped if she stretched the skin or scratched it.

Voldemort was dead.

Albus Dumbledore was also dead. The two iconic leaders, the personification of Dark and Light; Voldemort with his demonic appearance and black cloak, and Professor Dumbledore, who looked like a political cartoon of God in his brightly coloured robes. Although, just like God, Hermione knew Dumbledore could be as cruel and ruthless as any Demon, but still think he was doing right.

But someone has to make those decisions, and better it be him than her.

There still should have never been any decisions to make.

Hermione cursed and internally spat on her near-perfect memory. The battle raged on and she totalled.

At least eighty. Probably more.

Just about to finally finish and accept her numbers and finally join in with the battle that was starting to die down, she felt as if she'd forgotten something. Maybe if I move now I can still tend to the inj-

She remembered.

Severus Snape. Professor of Hogwarts, Potions Master, Head of Slytherin House, Death Eater and member of the Order of the Phoenix. Murderer of Albus Dumbledore.

Distantly she heard cheering and her subconscious recognised that the battle had been fought, and finished. But her mind was stuck on one trail of thought and would not be dislodged.

Severus Snape.

Not dead.

Hermione had never run so fast in her life. She usually avoided doing so as much as possible, on account that she had inherited her Grandad's lungs. Terrible lungs in the first place, and she'd had two extremely bad bouts of pneumonia, one when she was seven and the other during the summer between her third and fourth year, the turmoil had left her with around one lung's worth of working tissue. The rest was made up of useless scar tissue, and did not make for decent sprinting.

Medicinal potions clinked and clanked in a bag she had plucked from a pile of rubble on her way down to the Potion's classroom, begging all the way that she would find something, anything, of use. Thankfully, she had managed to procure a Skin-Knitting potion, a Blood-Replenisher and an anti-inflammatory. That was all she had managed however, as everything else in the room had either been taken or was in piles of shattered glass and black goop on the floor. Figures that something meant to heal would turn into sinister looking sludge when it went bad.

Hermione practically flew up the stairs and through the corridors to get out of the castle onto the grounds, her hair whipping against her cheeks when she turned her head every which way to look out for remaining enemies. Passing by the Great Hall she heard someone call her, but in response picked up speed.

If she had the power in her to save this one man today, she would.

Over the grounds towards the Shrieking Shack, she wondered what was provoking her to save him over the rest. A sense of loyalty to a Hogwarts professor, perhaps. Maybe it was because he had been on their side after all - if Harry's speech before he executed Voldemort was to be believed. Perhaps it was because she had been so useless earlier during the Battle and needed to do something to assuage her guilt; maybe she would have done anything.

Or maybe it's just because you feel bad for him, Hermione thought to herself. You shush.

As much as she had been damning and cursing her memory earlier when she recalled the List of the Dead, she was now thanking it profusely for remembering all those "useless facts in textbooks" that the man she was about to save had accused her of memorising. She didn't actively memorise anything, really; if she read something more than once she remembered it anyway. It was usually impossible for Hermione to forget anything. It made arguments with her boys interesting.

She hoped her boys were alright.

She could hear the relevant passage of the book European Snakes and their Characteristics by E.W. Pipes recite itself in her head as she ran. Panting and out of breath. Why are the grounds so bloody large.

"Vipera ammodytes. Colouration is grey with a black zigzag pattern. Dark stripes are usually found behind each eye. This viper is responsible for many bites. Deaths have been recorded. Its venom is hematomic, causing severe pain and tissue damage, and it jaws can come down at 14kgs. However, the viper also uses its venom as a preservative. The venom numbs the body and slows blood flow and heart rate to near death, to preserve the body in a live state for as long as possible. This enables the snake to last through long winters where mammals are in hibernation and the ammodytes finds it harder to hunt. In a human case, if found and treated medically within three hours the rate of survival is decently high; approx. 63%. Common distribution: Italy, Yugoslavia, northern Albania, Romania."

"A good rate of survival within three hours". By her own count, Hermione figured the professor had been left for around two and a half since Nagini attacked. She quietly thanked the gods that Voldemort didn't allow his pet to eat him also. Although, the fact that the bite had been centered at his throat would have to be factored in. Hermione thought she could do it. Hoped she could.

Maybe Harry isn't the only one with a "saving people thing".

She approached the huge, aggressive tree with more than a little apprehension, and began searching for a stick to poke at the immobilising-knot at the base of the tree. Bent over and scrabbling at the dirt, she did not hear or see the branch until it connected with her ribs. She was knocked onto her back in the damp grass. Hermione gasped as the wind was beaten out of her. She both heard and felt the snap of one of her ribs and couldn't help but stifle a sob. It was bad. It hurt, a lot.

Groaning and panting she pushed through the pain and rose to her hands and knees, feeling jagged bone grind off of jagged bone as the segments of her broken ribbed jabbed against each other with every movement she made. Snape better be bloody well thankful when she was finished. She reached the arm above the broken rib slowly and tentatively out to grab a nearby branch; she didn't feel that arm would be able to hold her own weight if she tried to use the other one.

That came to be a bad decision. The branch was slippy with rain but Hermione managed to grip it tightly, and she swung back her arm and threw it forward again, letting the branch loose. It hit perfectly on target.

Her broken rib slid on the inside of her muscles and she felt herself being torn up on the inside, by her bottom rib on the right side, vertically under her arm-pit. She couldn't help but cry out this time. Hermione knew that she'd definitely have internal bleeding as a result, but her number one priority was to get the professor back to the castle, and then she could have Madam Pomfrey fix it for her. Or maybe even Luna, she thought. Luna had a flair for healing spells.

Hermione pulled herself to her feet, trying not to wretch as she was blinded by pain for a few moments. After a few deep breaths she stopped seeing spots and by the time she took her steps towards the entrance in the trunk of the tree, she had steadied herself enough and the pain had reduced to a dull throb; she could now go save the cranky professor who would more than likely have no thanks for her. Typical day in the life of Hermione Granger. Saving people who forget to say thank you.

Twenty minutes later the body of a white-as-a-sheet Severus Snape emerged from under the Whomping Willow, being shakily levitated on a badly-transfigured stretcher, held up by nothing other than the sheer determination of a young witch who refused to let one more good wizard die. Okay, well maybe "good" was going a bit far, but she still wanted to save him anyway. Moon crater-sized warts and all.

In a ridiculous amount of pain but triumphant, Hermione limped and gasped her way back in the direction of Hogwarts Castle. There was a side door that came out on the inside of the castle at the portrait of Hogbod the Goblin King on the second floor, located on in the wall in the direction of the Entrance Hall, before you hit the courtyard. She wouldn't take him in the front door. Innocent or not, Hermione thought there would more than likely be a few Aurors or ex-students of his that would like to get a few digs into him before he became an official War Hero.

She hugged the stone wall of the castle as she rounded a corner, keeping Snape's body low and steady to avoid floating him in front of the stain glass windows at the back of the Great Hall. She could hear murmured conversation from inside, and felt vibrations of laughter. Maybe things could go back to normal soon.

Hermione cautiously and slowly rounded the last corner, another thirty steps and she could feel for the fake stone in the wall. When she came out in the second floor there was a portrait of Bartimus the Rowdy that would take her right outside the doors of the Hospital Wing.

Suddenly she nearly swerved into the wall at the sight that greeted her. Hermione was sure she would finally be sick. Out on the grounds of Hogwarts, laid in neat, morbid rows, were bodies. Too many to count this time. Death Eater, Order Member, Hogwarts Student alike, were placed neatly in a scene befitting a history book in a section on the Holocaust. The Deat Eaters were in their own rows, however, laid out more haphazardly and with uncoincidential disrespect. Some were just face-down in the dirt. Unlike the Death Eaters, the rows of students, Aurors and Order of the Phoenix members, were laid out perfectly neat, arms crossed (and sometimes where there were missing limbs, just arm), eyes closed, looking peaceful. As if they were only sleeping.

A moment later she really wished she'd had the forward thinking to put Snape under some sort of a Disillusionment charm. She hadn't known what kind of effect magic would have on his poison-riddled body. She didn't want to get beat up by a tree and crawl through dirt just to have him die because she doubted her own stealth. Hermione could feel the area around the broken rib swelling, the skin feeling tight and more than a little tender. Her breathing felt as if she had phlegm in her lungs too, and she categorised that information while pulling herself and Snape as close to the wall as possible, crouching low on the ground to avoid detection. There was no choice in whether to Disillusion him or not now, seeing as she would have to cancel the Levitation charm to do so, and she doubted she would have the strength to pick him back up again. Levitating a feather would have been bad enough in her current condition.

Professor Minerva McGonagall was levitating a bloodied and still Death Eater to join the mass of bodies in the grounds. Her face was pinched, her hair toussled and her robes dishevelled. Hermione's heart beat faster and stronger, drumming a violent tattoo on the inside of her rib cage as the Transfiguration teacher drew unknowingly closer and closer to her and her unconscious companion. Hermione didn't know why she felt she had to hide. It was just McGonagall, but still there was the hum of danger and Hermione had learned nothing over the last year if not to trust her instincts.

The adrenaline in her body hightened her senses as she tried to remain hidden. The stench. The copper smell of dried blood, bodies that had emptied both bladders and bowels, and the sickening smell of already-rotting flesh as wounds were left to the elements. Death was neither pretty or elegant.

Hermione couldn't repress the gag. The retching sound drew McGonagall's attention, and maybe ten meters away from the battered duo she dropped the body of the Death Eater on top of another, and swung her wand around in their direction.

"Good gods Miss Granger, are you alright? Oh!" McGonagall gasped as she took in the prone form of Snape on the battered stretcher. "Is that Severus? Potter said he'd died!"

Hermione couldn't manage a reply. She began to retch into the pile of weeds to her right, away from the two Professors. She couldn't stand the aroma of death. Tears leaked from her watery eyes as she threw up nothing but pure stomach acid into the grass on her hands and knees. Her throat began to burn and she let out a sob, which made her gag.

Rinse, repeat.

In her distress, her levitation charm failed and Snape's body dropped from its position of a foot above the ground with an almighty thud. It was fortunate he was deeply unconscious.

"Oh Merlin, Granger!" McGonagall rushed to Hermione's side, but she was waved off into the direction of the other Professor, making unintelligable noises between crying and heaving. The damn holding her together through the battle had obviously broke. She managed to hiccup out "Him - hic - I'm - hic - fine - retch - please!" and though Minerva frowned disapprovingly at her, she moved to tend to the Professor who was in a heap on the ground.

"I'm so glad you found him alive Miss Granger," she started as Hermione's stomach finally stopped seizing. "I couldn't imagine my last words to him being 'coward'. He always hated being called that. Now I suppose I know why." She huffed the last words out of her nose as she stood and re-transfigured the badly-made stretcher into something more suitable for an injured person to be carried on.

"It's not your fault Professor," Hermione reassured her, wiping the sleeve of her jumper across her mouth. "It's not as if you knew he was innocent." Hermione's throat burned, and breathing made the right side of her chest ache. She coughed into her hands and the came away speckled with red. She wiped her mouth again.

"I know that, but still-" McGonagall didn't get to finish her sentence. Hermione shot to her feet despite that burning pain in her upper body, and pointed her wand at the Death Eater, who had his wand fixed right in between her eyes. It was the one McGonagall had carried out herself. Everyone was obviously too exhausted to keep up proper safety measures.

McGonagall couldn't draw her wand to help before the Death Eater started the curse that would end Hemione's life.

"Avad-"

"-a Kadavra!"

The curse died in his throat as his face morphed into utter shock and disbelief.

McGonagall screamed.

Hermione stared, mouth open and eyes wide at her wand, as she felt her soul rip in two.

This time when she retched, it was black.

She felt the taste of something wrong on her tongue, as the dark liquid poured from her mouth over the front of her chin, and dribbled slowly onto the front of her chest, creeping down and stinging the wound residing there. It took her a moment to realise that the man who gave her that wound was lying dead at her feet. By her wand.

Murdered.

Hermione's body was wracked with tremors as every single atom in her body vibrated violently in protest. Staring down at her wand she felt disgust and anger. At herself, at her instrument, at magic. She glared, hyperventilating, at the wand like it was the root of all evil.

She supposed for the moment, it was.

She brought it down over her knee and snapped it in two.

McGonagall screamed again.

Snape lay unaware and unconscious still on the floor, probably comatose.

Hermione fell to her knees for the third time in an hour as she felt something else inside her crack. It wasn't her soul, and it wasn't her body; it felt like both and at the same time, neither. Something ethereal yet physical.

In that moment, Hermione Granger hated magic. She hated it more than anything she had ever had negative feelings towards in her life. More than Snape, more than Dolohov. More than Voldemort.

Not as much and more than herself.

The black came forth from her body again. She did not retch this time. She knelt, her legs awkwardly tucked underneath her, her hands grabbing fist-fulls of grass at her sides, knuckles tensed and pale. Her lion's mane of hair fell around her shoulder's and she stared, eyes dead, into the distance. Distantly, she thought she heard McGonagall calling her name. From her eyes, ears and the corners of her mouth came spilling forth a black, thick liquid. It was a dark parody of Professor Snape's leaking memories. There was nothing to learn from this material: nothing salvagable.

Hermione Granger's magic was leaving her body, and there would be no putting it back.

Briefly she wondered if she was dying.

For a little longer than briefly she thought maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea.

She took a shuddering breath and spoke to McGonagall. "Please."

"Please what, Miss Granger?" she near-shouted at Hermione, coming to kneel beside her student. She felt internally repulsed by her for some reason, but the girl needed help. "What have you done to yourself, girl?"

Hermione looked her in the eyes and pleaded. "I need to leave." Her face was begging.

"What do you mean 'leave'? We need to get you to Poppy, on your feet!"

Hermione allowed herself to be pulled into standing, but wouldn't move forward.

"I'm dead."

"Don't be stupid girl, I'm looking right at you."

"Tell them I died." Hermione clutched at the older woman's wrinkled wrists, becoming frantic. "Please Professor, I need to leave, tell them I died! No-one can know! Professor please!"

"Calm down Miss Granger!"

"I'll owe you Professor please you have to do this for me Professor please!" She ended on a strangled cry, her thoughts were buzzzing angrily, she needed to leave. She needed to leave NOW, and no-one could come for her.

"Okay, okay, Miss Granger, we'll get you straight up to Poppy and then we'll get you out of here-"

"No Professor you don't understand." Hermione began whispering, looking crazed and pained. "I can't go in there, Professor I'll die. I need to leave, and no-one can come after me. No more magic, no more magic. Tell them I died saving Snape, please Professor I can't do this, they can't know."

McGonagall didn't know what to do. Hermione pulled away from her mentor and teacher, and struggled to walk slowly away. McGonagall's eyes watered.

"Alright Miss Granger, alright." She started to cry in earnest. "Where will you go? You will owe me this Miss Granger! And one day this will be yours to explain!"

"Dublin, Dublin. I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Hermione herself began to cry again, limping hurriedly away from the castle. Away from McGonagall. Away from Snape. Away from friends.

Away from magic.

She heard one last cry of "Miss Granger" before she was gone.

The reference of Severus hitting the ground with "an almighty thud" is taken from the song An Almighty Thud by We Were Promised Jetpacks.

Read and Review, tell me how I did and whether I should definitely continue.