Title: Beneath the Surface
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Hermione/Harry, Hermione/Ron
Warnings: language, sex, violence Dark!Hermione(ish)
Summary: Hermione has secrets that she keeps from everyone.
A/N: written for a Harry Potter ficathon on kolms' livejournal for the following prompt:
"hermione granger, she carries unknown things inside her like old volumes"
She carries secrets she has learned beneath her skin. Sometimes she wants to tear her own skin and release them. But she doesn't because she has duties to the others; to the rest of the world. Instead she lets the secrets fester into what she imagines are cankerous growths. She lets them grow until they threaten to spill from her tongue and out into the world.
Sometimes she doesn't speak to her friends, because as they slowly begin to patch their lives together she is stuck in her own skin. She needs to be rid of the shame of her secrets. But she cannot tell it to Harry or Ron because they look at her with trusting eyes. They trust her knowledge even now, when they ask for advice on cases, and she wishes she was an Auror too. So that she can use her secrets.
She wants to confess, wants to atone her sins and wants to wash her hands clean.
Her secret isn't honourable, in fact it is deplorable, Hermione Granger (brightest witch of her age, part of the Golden Trio, Harry Potter's best friend) knows more about killing than her best friends do. Because she knows how to kill, knows how it feels to actively take a life. Has taken lives.
She has known since before the war properly started, before the year the spent searching for horcruxes.
She tells herself the reasons are honourable, that she did it so that Harry stood a chance (that is the reason she did a lot of things). So that they could fight properly. Because if there is anything that books have taught her is that one doesn't win battles by being kinder than the other side. So in the summer before they leave she readies herself. Steels herself, teaches herself.
She finds Dark spells in books that contain information about horcruxes but the problem with those is that they can become addicting. She memorises them anyway, just in case. They burn in her blood and want to trip out. So when she aims her wand she has to concentrate.
Instead she learns how stop bodies in the tracks. How to sever nerves to the brain, with a simple cutting spell, how to freeze blood in veins, (isn't that what she feels like) how to boil blood. She learns how to brew different poisons that act quicker than blinking. (She keeps a capsule in her pocket. In case she is ever taken without Harry. She would sooner die than betray him) She learns anatomy, as these methods only work if you know where to make them act. She can conjure the human body in her mind's eye and knows where she cast a spell to end a life. Sometimes she conjures up the image when Ron thrusts into her, not because she wants to kill him.
But because she can.
She practises the spells before the Order come to collect her that summer. She practises on small animals in forests. Sometimes she comes back with rabbits, her parents thinks that she has taken up hunting. They don't say anything, but she wants them to.
When she raises her wand to erase their memories half of her wants to see whether her practise has worked. Instead she does what is right (will always do that).
She doesn't use any of her knowledge until they are flying from Privet Drive. She casts the spells non-verbally and sees how Death Eater drop from their brooms. It thrills her to know her spells work. (For Harry)
She uses the spells again during the battle. She kills people during that battle. Not because she didn't manage to push them out of the way, or because they fell or were crushed by things. She kills them herself with her own wand. She looks and she understands.
She knows that Harry has never killed anyone that he meant to die, he is braver in that way, Except Voldemort, but she would have killed him too if given the chance. But that was his burden just like this is hers. When Harry kills for the first time as an Auror, he comes to talk to her first (before Ginny, before Ron), she soothes, she listens. She kisses him. He needs it as much as she does, she needs the knowledge that she isn't the only one who can kill, and he needs the reassurance that he is still good.
They hold each other as they fuck. It is a re-forging. Although the secrets are still hidden beneath her skin (and sometimes she feels she will burst heavy with them) when Harry touches her; her skin becomes a little thicker and the secrets a little deeper.