~~ `thirst' - hermione-centric ficlet inspired by rhoddlet.

[reenka]

rhoddlet wrote a ron/hermione drabble upon my request which made me shiver and think about hermione some.... i think i'm kind of bothered by hermione a lot of times, maybe a bit the way i am with percy and snape. there is something about this compulsive, obsessive thirst for knowledge and control and power taken together that i can both identify with and which horrifies me.

luna puts me more at ease, with her soft, imaginative relationship with words and ideas, her need to interact with them and to spin her own tales to believe in, not just -use- them to make things happen. sometimes i think controlling things like that only seems disturbing because i can't do it very well. whatever it is, hermione pushes some strange little buttons in me.
    i was supposed to write evil!hermione with draco for ethrosdemon awhile ago, but found i can't bear to look at hermione like that. i like her with ron-- seen through his eyes: bemused, affectionate, not-quite-understanding, infatuated. i like seeing her as a girl with needs for companionship and laughter, a girl who doesn't quite know her own place and buries herself in facts and figures to prop her up, give her the confidence to stand on her own like she'd always thought she had to. but i don't want her to be -evil- anymore than i want to see -myself- as being evil, and my own need for knowledge to be used against me. not to mention, i simply -can't- see her with draco. i just can't. i'm sorry, i can't, okay?

but rhoddlet's drabble made me think. or rather, write. i'm -supposed- to be writing other things right now, but whenever i think that, it means i won't do it. i -want-, i really really want to write my birthday fic and get it off my chest. but who wishes anyone a happy birthday 2 weeks late, anyway? well, i will. no, i -will-. even harry-- i have harry yet to wish a happy birthday too. poor woobie. oh well, he'll forgive me. ahahaha i give him sex, he -has- to forgive me. also, i haven't been reading my friends page (er... taking a break, or something), so if i haven't responded to your brilliant whatever-it-is, just comment with a link and i will, okay? okay.

so. here it is. expect my posts to be ficcish for the next few days or week or whatever. hopefully. then back to meta. yes, i'm sure everyone's holding their breath or whatever. i'm on a roll, though. heheheeh. and i'm a feedback slut, so.

    

Disclaimer: JK Rowling owns Hermione's books.

Author's Note: I thought I could finally write evil Hermione for Kassie, but I can't. Oh well, now I know. Draco/Hermione this isn't either, though I did manage to sneak him in. Apparently, I am doomed to write R/Hr weirdness for-evah. And, this is very much inspired by Rhoddlet, but don't blame her or anything.



- thirst -




Ron doesn't make any sense anymore.

Hermione doesn't try to make him. Some things have become luxuries, and attempting to bridge the gap between them would take more energy than Hermione has. Ron still has too much pent-up energy, too much drive and ambition and zeal, and no idea which direction to throw it. She has to find them both a direction. That is her task, and she won't be swayed from it. Ron is going to have to wait, but Hermione knows he can't. He may be telling himself he's waiting, but he's really only waiting for the right moment to turn the world over, looking for his own answers, burning his own path to hell if he had to. When the time came, Ron would stand in her way and tell her he knew what he had to do, what Harry would want him to do, Hermione was certain.

He'd burn up her words and set her books on fire if he had to. He's incendiary, loud and brash and he doesn't -understand-, doesn't see what she has to do, what she'd always had to do. Hermione's work is cut out for her; cut and dry and can't he -see-, can't he see, he's blocking her light, the candle's growing shorter and there's not much time left.

Ron sits next to her in the library after Harry disappears, watching her and not saying a word. He watches as if he were frightened of her dry strings of words, her silences and the dark between them. Ron doesn't like the dark the way he doesn't like spiders-- with an instinctive, feral terror. Hermione wonders if his fear of the darkness is related to the fear of actually -saying- anything, because everything is shrouded in the unknown. Ron thinks the unknown is something to brave, to conquer. Hermione knows the unknown dissipates easily, so easily, if you can find the right combination of words to form the basic, irreversible spell of knowledge. To banish fear, one must understand its source and its nature, one must become its weakness themselves, by knowing it.

Hermione thinks she isn't afraid as long as there are still more places to look. The library is larger than any of them fully realize. Somewhere out there, she has to find them: the words that will banish her fear. Somewhere out there, its weakness is written in a language Hermione can understand.

When Ron screams, he doesn't scream in any -words-, he doesn't make sentences Hermione could understand. He tears at her fingers, pulls at her sleeves, tugs her after him, but she can't go. Not yet. She has to find out the answer she knows is waiting for her, there in the dark. She knows he couldn't understand, and she understands that, she does.

Ron is Ron. She is Hermione. They had been Ron & Hermione, and Harry. Now it's just Hermione, and she's alone here, in the dark.

Eventually, of course, the dark would silence him completely. Hermione doesn't wait for it, but she realizes the day will come. For now, he whispers to her occasionally, complains of the drafts, the bitter cold at night, the lack of entertainment. He plays cards with himself and whistles tunelessly, trying to distract her. He wants to make her smile, and Hermione inclines her head to show she understands.

"Can't you just--"

He never finishes his sentences anymore, falling into sullen silence.

Hermione doesn't look up, wets a finger and turns a page, barely registering when Ron tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. She shakes her head, making Ron growl in frustration and threaten to leave.

"Is that what you want? Is that it?" he shouts, and she doesn't know what to tell him. "I miss him too!" he's yelling, thumping the table. "Bloody fucking -hell-, Hermione, he's my friend too!"

"I know," she says, and her voice is hoarse with disuse.

Ron shuts up, expelling a loud breath and throwing himself into his straight-backed chair, pushing it away from the table.

"You'll never help him like this, you know," he mumbles, but he doesn't expect a reply, by now. He takes out a queen, some knights and some pawns from his bag, starts moving them listlessly on the table. He doesn't bother with a chessboard, since there's no one to play with. She sighs, wishing she didn't have to sleep in about two hours. She must get at least three hours of sleep in order to be functional, she knows that.

She only wishes it went -faster-. She only wishes it wasn't -skin- that covered her fingertips but some absorbent layer that soaks things up and changes her, little by little, into a reflection of the words. Hermione knows she must be getting too sleepy now, her mind too restless, that she would entertain fantasies where she descends into words until they imprint themselves on her and she -has- no skin, no self, even. Only dry knowledge that one could drink and drink and only get more thirsty, until one is merely skin and bones and words.

Ron must wish he could burn her, wake her up and set her loose as ashes on the wind, somewhere free and impossible like the places Harry always felt so comfortable exploring. Somewhere where no rules or words or theorems apply.

He touches her tentatively, when everyone had gone from the Common Room and Hermione is mostly asleep by the fire, or when they sit together in another of their soft silences at breakfast, Hermione remembering not to nod off into her porridge. Ron finds her hand, wraps his own hand around it, sighs. He doesn't look at her, doesn't wait for her to say any of the things he knows she won't. They don't have time for this, she'd say. He just has to wait, she'd say. It's no one's fault, she'd say.

Ron just wants to forget all that and remember the way her hand feels in his, the way it feels to rub his thigh against hers when he sits next to her during Potions, content to follow her instructions and to watch her, still. Always, to watch her.

"Do you want me to leave you alone?" he says eventually, tentatively. His knight has stopped by the queen, not moving and seeming to hesitate before knocking her over, the game over without ever having begun.

"What?" she breathes, voice husky. "Can you get me some water?" She is reading long strings of words without understanding them, cursing her increasingly poor vision and the charms that seem to not be working as they should anymore. What was that about finding missing people by lighting candles for them to light their way? Seems like some kind of fairy tale, she thinks. Her head begins to ache, and she rubs dry, bony fingers against her eyes, sighing.

She'd thought she'd be living in a fairy tale, when she was eleven. She'd thought it would be such an opportunity to see what magic was really like in those stories, without the happily ever afters, because she'd just keep living past them. She'd be a part of them, could peel away the layers of words until she found the mechanisms that made them move across the pages.

Or perhaps that's just what she tells herself these days; Hermione doesn't quite -remember- being eleven. It seems to her as if she had been seventeen all her life sometimes, and Harry had always been gone, and the neverending line of books empty of the knowledge she sought had always stretched out like this, to the horizon.

"Sure, Hermione. I'll get you some water, but you should stop. We can come back tomorrow, and the day after that, for however long it takes, but you should stop now. It's late." His voice was soft, far away. She could barely hear him.

Her throat parched, she lifts a hand to cover up a yawn. "You go on. I'll be up in a bit," she says, swallowing thickly. All the moisture had apparently gone out of her, and she'd lost the desire to move to replenish it somewhere along the way. No food or drink in the library, she remembered. What was she thinking?

"All right. You promise?" he says, hand on her shoulder. It feels good, there, warm almost to the point of being burning hot. It spreads little tendrils of heat through her body, and Hermione feels herself melt deeper into her seat.

Perhaps a little nap wouldn't be so bad. "I promise," she says, eyes blurry and unseeing.

She wakes up with her mouth pressed to the thin parchment, saliva running harmlessly over the charmed ink. At first she thinks it's just a dream, yet another one where she's alone in the library and looks up to find Harry there, sitting next to her where Ron had been, smiling like he'd never left.

The light never changes in the library, and Hermione never knows if it's morning or evening in her dream, only that Harry is smiling again, and she knows they'd find Ron fast asleep when they went up to Gryffindor Tower to wake him, because Harry was here, and it was all right. Everything was all right now.

Walking to the window, she peers out. It is still dark, and when she looks closer, she realizes it's raining. She can hear the thunder, too, the hurried whispering of the rain on stone and the water droplets sliding furiously down the glass window. Hermione can't see very far beyond the window, and she supposes that's all right, too. There's really nothing to see. There's nothing out there but the wind and the rain, she knows that just as she knows she's alone here, in the flickering half-light of this large, echoing chamber.

She stands motionless by the window until morning, as if waiting for something she knows won't come. The words she hadn't quite read had seemed to seep into her during the night, and she's running them through her mind, memorizing their shapes and sounds, sifting through them patiently, her eyes wide open and staring into the night even as it shifts slowly into day.

"This is hopeless, Granger. Get this straight: Potter isn't coming back. The Dark Lord doesn't release his prizes."

There's no sneer in that voice, only certainty. Hermione's back is to him, and she's glad of it, so that he doesn't see her face twist and her composure shatter briefly into a million tiny pieces. She wants to -kill- him at that moment, strangle him with her bare hands. It is his fault, his and his father's and everyone who's like them and who ever had been. It was them who should disappear as surely as the night gives way to the feeble grey of the dawn.

Her fists are clenched by her sides, hard enough to have shattered glass if she'd swung them fast enough. She could have calculated the exact velocity and angle needed in under a minute, but she can think of nothing to say to Malfoy that would make any difference at all.

Hermione closes her eyes, visualizes the book still open on her habitual table, thinks that the answer could be hiding on just the next unturned page. And the next, and the next. Still, it is now time for breakfast, and it is important to keep to a schedule, to get to her classes on time, to keep up appearances. Shower, eat, walk, sit and try to listen in every class even when her time would be better spent in solitary study, right here, where she has everything she needs.

She turns around, looks Malfoy in the eye steadily. He looks startled. Malfoy's tired too; there are circles underneath his eyes, and his skin is almost as paper-thin as hers. He's carrying darkly-bound, heavy books under his arm and scowling, looking impatient. Hermione stares at him, and for one brief, impossible moment, she sees herself.

"Well?" she says briskly, her sudden leap of intuition leaving her feeling a bit winded. It had been a while since the last time she'd forgone common sense and just -understood- something important like this. Hermione's mind feels clearer all of a sudden, sharp as the sunlight slicing through the glass behind her. She could see through Malfoy and he couldn't. That was power. "What are you waiting for? Tell me what you know."
~~

Comments

[starlitefaerie.livejournal.com]

i love this so much that i barely have the words for it.

this is beautiful and heartbreaking and slightly ethereal. this hermione feels human, feels recognizable. i see myself in her obsessiveness, in her emptiness.

and the words you use, the combinations of emotions and senses and that first line (Ron doesn't make any sense anymore) comes together into this perfect part a story - so much has come before and so much is left hanging for after.

i love this so much, reena. one of your best.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

wheeeeee! thanks so much :D :D
am glad it worked for you ^^ (or anyone. meep.)
this kind of was me being disturbed by hermione... i didn't have a -story-, didn't know if it -worked- as a story, was mostly a character study where i tried to make hermione evil but couldn't, quite, because suddenly she seemed all too human.
i know it's kind of fragmentary, but er... it disturbs me too much to go very far with it. but suddenly i -saw- her, so i'm happy you did too, messed up as she is ^^;

[starlitefaerie.livejournal.com]

i didn't find it fragmented, not really. i was just so swept up by this hermione that you had captured, and by this ron and how they were falling apart, that a story or plot itself was utterly unimportant.

(you reminded me that i once wrote a ron/hermione drabble and so i posted it in my lj. if you'd like to read it, it's very short. *smiles*)

write more often. i miss you lovelydreamy faerie tales...

[adamo-mortalis.livejournal.com]

You don't know me at all and this is probably weird - but I saw this on Cassandra Claire's friends list and thought it sounded interesting, and I thought it was really good. I'm not usually a R/Hr fan, but I liked their interaction, and the diction here was beautiful - so many descriptive words. Just thought you should know.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

thanks!
this is one of those fics that probably only appeals to a special type of audience, and i guess i'm particularly curious how other people would see it... or not see it (well, judging from the lack of comments in general), so i really really appreciate you letting me know :D

[tieleen.livejournal.com]

I'm too much of a slash reader to know where to find the good H/R, mostly, so reading this was a lovely surprise. It's so easy to see them this way, a verion both a little distant and grown up, and a little deeper than what we see in the books -- and yes, I know, that's what most fanfic is about, but this felt like it was utterly that, the drawing of Hermione in sharper lines and softer colors.

There is so much lovely imagery here, and good lines, and the feel of it is exactly right. And all that works well to show the main thing, Hermione and Ron and all the things you never think your life would be about when you're eleven.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

meep. thank you~:)
i didn't mean to write something this soft-- or with this much ron in it. er. but i'm glad the mood kind of took care of itself. i was seeing it as rather darker and more foreboding/disturbing descent into madness... but then i realized that the line between insanity and sheer desperation isn't so thick as all that.

[tieleen.livejournal.com]

(lj claims that my comment has been added, but it isn't showing up, so I'm reposting just in case...)

I didn't mean softness as a bad thing -- it more, weaves into the whole thing. Seeing Hermione through Hermione's eyes and *understanding* her. As opposed to the books -- where, even though it's easy to understand Hermione, in places I always feel like I'm not *supposed* to.

And you're right, IMO, that it doesn't feel like madness; it feels like standing on the edge of losing yourself, in some lines, but more through -- having too much reason to be too much of who you are. Which could be madness, I suppose, but it doesn't quite have that feel. ;p

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

*grins* wah. it feels rather strange-- but entirely thrilling-- to have someone say such insightfully pretty things about anything i wrote. especially, well, hermione-- i tend to avoid her. i mean, i never really felt like i -did- understand her, really-- in the books or in general; she seems like the character with the least amount of struggle. she's all studious and well-balanced and sensible and she's like all the girls my mother had ever imagined i should or could be, but i never was, so i want to avoid her.

i like the characters with deeper flaws, horribly misguided ideas about life, fatal weaknesses that defeat them at every turn, and so on, and yet this urge to overcome that makes them hopeful, in the end. well, obviously i like harry and draco~:)
i feel like by intensifying hermione like this, isolating her from ron & harry, who balance her, i do something that frightens and disturbs me more than writing about death or mutilation, probably. maybe that's what happens to people when they grow up-- they both lose themselves and become lost in themselves, become more set in their patterns, more dry and concentrated unbalanced, at least sometimes.

i can see her being evil, like that-- anyone being evil like that-- insane and frightening, only themselves and no one else, knowing only what -they- know, trapped in their own mind. isn't that the worst curse? maybe just for me.
anyway. er. *laughs* it's weird, but i like being inspired by a comment to my own story. sort of like continuing the cycle i'd started by responding to rhoddlet in the first place~:)

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Love it! I hope Rhoddlet likes it - I remember some time ago when she asked on LJ why there didn't seem to be any Dark!Hermione fics out there, why nobody had given Hermione the "Speak, Desire" treatment. I had that post in mind, actually, when I wrote my Polyjuice!Hermione fic, and now I'm even less inclined to write its sequels, because man, making dark Hermione all about the sex is put to shame when I see a brilliant character study like this. I didn't see it as evil!Hermione, and was rather surprised to read that in the comments - do you have the idea that she teams up with Draco afterwards, rather than just getting information out of him? interesting - I just saw it as her being embittered and neurotic and scary in a doing good, but maybe making unacceptable sacrifices along the way. It was very realistic for the Hermione we know, and the Ron bits were heartbreaking. I'm glad you managed to show how they clearly didn't work out while still keeping Ron admirable and sympathetic.

The continuous metaphors of flame and heat were woven in gorgeously, even more so than the eponymous thirst. I like it that Hermione's become so divorced from nature.

Congratulations, anyway. <3