Gold Dust
Harry Potter, Hermione, PG.
summary: There's not a book for this
story notes: ficlet.
Hermione's sleeves are too long one week and too short the next. She tugs at them all through Spells, trying to hide her hands, trying to pull the hem over her fingers. She's a clever girl, but she can't figure this out. Her limbs won't conform to any kind of pattern she can catalogue and memorise.
On good days she felt like all the magic in the world was inside her skin. Breasts like rosebuds, hips beginning to sway and it felt like blooming, flowering, curling towards the sun. On bad days there was nothing left inside her that she knew, nothing but her ink-stained hands splayed across a splintered desk.
Boys start to look at her too long. She notices this. The soft scrape of lead on paper can't map the way her stomach twists, or the flush that rises in her cheeks. Hermione is waiting for hands that can take her apart and put her back together, but right this time, so her body makes sense again. Every day she hurries through the corridors with her hair in her eyes and books pressed against her chest.
There's not a book for this.