The problem with burying herself in books is that she knows what is out there, and she knows she cannot touch it.
That makes her want to put a gun to her head and pull the trigger.
She reads and reads, but she can never fully realize it -- the truth, the action itself.
It is enough to make her suicidal -- the thirst she cannot assauge.
There is shooting herself, and there is snorting up. It gets to the point where she would do either, just to get out of her head, just to get away from her thoughts, because her thoughts are all dreams of action, and action is impossible because she is in a cage, and she is not sure if she will ever get out from behind those fucking iron bars.
Sometimes she wishes that she had never turned to books, to words. Sometimes she wishes that she had been able to be happy with slow (with normal dusty roads and Quidditch games and fellow students).
She wishes that the craving would just go. The fuck. Away. And she is not sure if she is talking about the drugs or the books.
It is desperation in its purest form, and that raw LONGING is too much, too much.
It is all just words, but they are such beautiful words, words of love like she dreams impossible and lust like she has never seen it -- it never felt that good to her. There are people, such interesting, intriguing people, and it is life, life that she wants, and SHE WILL NEVER HAVE IT.
She won't live much past graduation. Harry needs her, and, as the mudblood best friend of the Boy Who Lived, she is already one of the prime targets. She cannot abandon Potter (she should, and she wants to, and she doesn't care who wins because she will not survive to enjoy it anyway), so she will never have it.
She whispers the damning phrase out loud: "I will never have it."
She is tempted to kill herself before the hypocritical half-blood bastard gets around to it.
But she wants life, and she is so restless. She is so hollow, and she thinks that every spark she uses to light her cigarette in the Astronomy Tower (she tries to avoid the library now - books started all of it, after all, because she wouldn't have become friends with Potter if she hadn't been such a know-it-all - but she doesn't manage half the time) might be the one that will set her aflame, burn her to cinders because she is brittle, too, and not really alive in any real sense of the word.
In the end, faced with her dad's stolen gun or her straw, she chooses the straw and makes herself a line, because it is experiencing life, still. At least. And maybe she isn't doing it with friends (no one else has the hunger), and maybe her barren dorm room is the only witness to her desperation, but that does not matter in the slightest.
She is still alive.
Numb as fuck (she can't feel a thing, including her face), but alive. And that is something, isn't it? That is a victory, isn't it?
(The problem with burying yourself in books is that you know what is out there, and you know you cannot touch it.)
.:let me live:.
finis
A/N: What do you think? Was I too harsh on Hermione?