'Fit to be Seen', Gen, Hermione, G
Title: Fit to be Seen
Characters/Ships: Hermione; (some Ron/Hermione)
Summary: Hermione Granger is a sane, rational human being. Except for when she loses control.
Rating: G
Word Count: 1,145
Notes: This is a drabble that got way, way out of hand. Also, GenFic, woo! You know y'all love it ;D
Fit to be Seen
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen? - Evelyn Waugh
The first time Hermione loses her control, she is twelve and very, very alone.
After what she had thought had been a good Charms lesson, she hears those boys - Ron Weasley with all the brothers and Harry Potter who’s very famous - making fun of her.
With those comments - Ron called her “a nightmare” - she realises - completely, properly realises - that she has no one. Once again, Hermione Granger is huddled in the corner of the playground at breaktime, trying to turn the pages of her book in mittens.
There was nothing that special about those boys. But she doesn’t get on with the girls and the other boys are just as bad or worse and those two had seemed friendly. She’d thought they’d liked her on the train. A bit.
But they didn’t like her. They didn’t like her or want to talk to her and it didn’t matter for them because they had each other - they liked each other - and they could laugh about it and then get on with it.
She’d escaped to a magical school in a whole other world, but it was just like before.
She rushes to the toilets and hopes no one notices the sticky glimmers on her face, and once there she locks the cubicle door.
Something she’s always wanted to do - something she’s spent her life doing - is to grow up, but she’s always hoped it wouldn’t be the only way she’d find friends.
Before she knows it she’s crying properly. For once she doesn’t care who hears.
***
The second time Hermione loses control, she is seventeen and after the first Quidditch match of the year, she sees Ron kissing Lavender Brown.
Through the crowds of the Common Room, through the noise and through Harry, she sees Ron’s lips kissing Lavender’s, his hands moving so fast and so confusedly over her body that they seem to be a blur - and she realises that they are blurry because her vision if blurry. She takes a step back, horrified: at what, she doesn’t know.
She realises that someone might see her, standing here, in the sad attempt to catch someone in the act who isn’t hers to catch - not even close.
She pauses for a moment, understanding truly for the first time the meaning of racked with indecision, and then she turns on her heel, stumbles out of the portrait hole, and flies down the corridor.
A cold rush; deep and tremor-inducing confusion; blind anger boiling between her ears; she has been through them all by the time she is sitting neatly on a desk in a classroom.
It’s dark. She remembers the spell McGonagall told them to practise; she raises her wand and bright, yellow, perfectly-formed birds burst from the tip. Chirping loudly, they rise and fly around her head, becoming her halo. She thinks of Wingardium Leviosa.
A thought rises, unbidden, and before she can dismiss it as the ravings of the broken-hearted, she realises that it does not matter whether or not it’s cliché or typical or predictable - it is true. She clamps her quivering lips together as the forbidden thought grows into a statement that cannot be questioned.
She never wants to see him again.
The door opens, and she tenses. But oh - of course, it would be Harry, and he would want an explanation for why she looks deranged, and he would decide that now is a good time to show his non-comprehension of the fact that sometimes Being A Good Friend entails leaving someone alone. The awkwardness in the air cuts her - shouldn’t she be weeping and wailing all over him?
Then Ron comes in, dragging Lavender by the hand, come to find somewhere private, and all the feelings she has fought down for Harry’s sake are back with a roar.
She slides to her feet and every step is a problem, but she has to get to the door, as she doesn’t want to slap him, she doesn’t, she mustn’t - it would be so embarrassing, because he isn’t hers, she has no right to him, cannot continue this deluded game of Mummies and Daddies with him and Harry - no, Ron isn’t hers, never has been, and she mustn’t lose it and look like a crazy person…
But his expression - maybe I can get away with this - is the worst slap she’s ever received.
As she reaches the door and his awkward relief leaves her view, she makes her decision and spins around.
“Oppugno!”
She feels a flare of triumph at the horror on Harry’s face, the completely animal fear on Ron’s, and then she’s thrown the door open and hurled herself through it, slamming it behind her.
Another realisation: even after this, he still won’t get it. He still won’t understand why she’s hurting so much, because his feelings for her are nowhere near the depth of hers for him. She finally starts to cry.
***
The third time Hermione loses control, she is still seventeen. It is less than a year later.
The clouds are rolling in for the storm, and everything is changing.
Everything she knew has ended.
She was once an intelligent girl, but it doesn’t mean that much these days. What is intelligence at a time like this?
She was once a brave girl - she thinks she was, anyway - but she isn’t anymore. With the things she thinks about, she can’t be.
She thinks she was once a happy girl - well, there were things that made her happy, and she knew what they were. She supposes she was happy - maybe she was so happy she didn’t think about it. She’s not sure what happened to that, either.
Standing in her old bedroom, she stares out of the window, past the new curtains her Mum sewed and her Dad hung in an attempt to make her “stay a bit longer, this time,” and into her back garden.
She always thought she’d catch up on spending time with her parents.
She probably won’t ever get a chance now.
Suddenly, she grabs at a vase sitting on her much-used desk, and throws it at the window. It crashes on the double-glazing and falls to the carpet in shatters.
She tumbles to the floor, her chest heaving, but no tears coming out - she tries to catch her breath - is she having some kind of attack? She doesn’t know - she doesn’t know anything anymore.
She lies down on the floor, curled up like a cat, or an unborn baby, and stares at the still shards of vase lying at the side of the room.
She doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want to go. Harry is going and Ron is going, so she is going too, but she doesn’t want to go.
Hermione Granger has to grow up, and for the first time in her life, she would do anything to prevent it.