Hermione lays on her back, wondering when he'll be done rutting inside her. He doesn't even notice that she's thinking of the grocery list and the specials at Tesco so she can plan the meals she'll be making.
It was between pork dumplings and chicken Primavera when she felt her husband shudder and the rhythm ended, and she turned into his face and kissed him back, hoping that this time would work so she wouldn't get that disappointed look from Molly.
"I love you, 'Mione." Ron said as he rolled over and feel asleep.
"Love you, too." she replied, getting out of bed to clean up and use the loo. After the war ended, she decided to do the safe, comfortable thing for once. She had a job, a house, and a husband. It was stable.
And for the life of her, she couldn't understand why she wasn't happy.
Her dreams were always the same; being pinned down to the floor, blue eyes looking on impassively as every synapse was on fire from the Unforgivable Curse.
The sharp pain of the knife felt clean in comparison as she dragged the razor blade across her flesh, the only times she felt real and alive anymore.
She healed herself with her wand and vanished all evidence, of course. She didn't want anyone to think she was mental.
She would go to work and be an advocate for magical creatures, while feeling dead inside. She made dinner and ate at an empty table as Ronald decided to go eat at the pub with his friends instead.
His portion would keep and he could eat it for lunch the next day. After a while, she felt like nothing more than his maid, cook, and whore at his convenience.
It finally hit a head when she had trouble getting herself to climax by her own hands. She tried all sorts of positions and toys, but nothing got her comfortable enough to let go.
That's when she realized she needed pain in her sex. To not be in control. She tried to explain to Ronald that her sexual needs were different, but all he would do was a half-hearted attempt at cunnilingus before giving up.
She didn't know how to tell him to pin her down, make her hurt and scream and fight as fingers invade her and curl her into oblivion.
Hermione couldn't tell Ron that the only times she really gets off is when she's bound and scared. She settles for charming a dildo to fuck her as she casts relashio on herself and she feels the bite of the magical ropes against her wrists and ankles.
Afterwards she uses the blade against herself and it clears her mind as she carves LIAR onto her forearm, only to heal and vanish it away before crawling back into bed, the ghost of satisfaction slipping away as sleep takes her.
This went on for weeks before Ronald asked if she were on a pill to prevent pregnancy.
"Of course not. We're just not lucky is all." She would never reveal how grateful she was that it hadn't happened. She saw the charges on their account and knew he wasn't just having a pint with the guys, and her suspicions were confirmed as he didn't want to fuck her as often as before.
She realized that it should have hurt more; instead, she only felt things when it was pain. She didn't even have to hide the "LIAR" on her arm anymore as he'd never look.
She always wore long sleeved robes to work, anyways.
The first time she met a guy through the website, she felt ashamed yet excited. It was different and rebellious, and through their correspondence he knew that she liked it rough and was willing to do things that might otherwise seem extreme.
As the muggle man choked her as she was handcuffed and getting railed by his thick erection, she whimpered in delight as the first orgasm in years crashed through her, leaving her legs feeling rubbery and useless.
She settled the feelings of guilt as she carved "WHORE" into her flesh over her pubic bone. The guys she found online never asked or cared enough as they would restrain her, beat her, and make her come screaming from whatever depraved thing they wanted to do to her.
Ronald had lipstick stains on his shirt, and Hermione didn't care anyone.
Months pressed on and her constant litany of "I'm fine, really" stopped most questions when people saw her limp or wince at work. She developed a reputation of being as clumsy as Tonks, and wondered if she were hiding a similar pattern of consensual pain.
She knew this muggle seemed dangerous. Hermione knew enough wandless magic to get her wand if the situation were dire enough.
She hadn't expected this, though.
The muggle liked to cut flesh and watch her bleed. She felt herself grow wet from the torture and could only think of Narcissa's impassive blue eyes as she was growing cold.
The man kept rutting inside her ass as Hermione's eyes focused on the gash on her bound forearms. It wasn't just bleeding, but flowing.
The usual amount of pain that made her feel alive was absent as she felt her mortality slipping away as she served as little more than a semen receptacle for the latest man in her life. It was the only thing that she seemed good for.
Maybe it was fate, or just sheer desperation as Hermione wandlessly cast the killing curse on him out of self-preservation.
Either way, she knew she'd be facing a formal inquery about this.
Narcissa Black was grateful for the divorce; she no longer had to worry that she'd end up in prison for Lucius' crimes. It even helped that Harry Potter testified that it was her betrayal of The Dark Lord that helped the side of Light win.
She hated the pretentiousness of it all, but history is written by the victors. And it was Draco's story that was being written now by the Wizengamot.
She had to call in every last favor she had left to get a solicitor to his defense; nobody wanted to speak for Lucius' son as they both wore the Dark Mark and the general consensus was that they both deserved the Dementor's Kiss.
Even though he was a man, Draco would always be her little boy. She looked at the timepiece in her pocket and wondered why her appointment with the MLE had been delayed.
When Aurors Potter and Weasley burst out of the office, she knew something was wrong. They were arguing in hushed tones about how something couldn't be regular procedure as the entryway opened, a battered and shackled Hermione Weasley wearing rune-etched manicles designed to neutralize wandless magic, flanked by Auror Proudfoot and a Hit Wizard on either side.
"This is completely uncalled for!"
"She's not a danger!"
"I'm just following orders, Auror Potter." Hit Wizard Peasegood replied, handing Harry the ancient key.
Hermione was still covered in dried blood, and there was a poorly sealed scar on her forearm that would have killed her. As the prisoner was handed over, Narcissa recognized the look on the young woman's face: shame.
Something had broken the poor girl, and it was then that she noticed the word "LIAR" carved into her flesh beneath the offensive scarring her sister had placed many months ago.
"She's still under arrest, Harry," Proudfoot cautioned, "but she's asked for you as legal counsel. An Unspeakable is on their way to collect her memory of the attack for the archives.
At that, Hermione shook her head in horror. As Ronald tried to approach her with his wand, she turned away from him as much as the Hit-Wizards would allow.
"Blimey, wife, I'm just trying to clean you up! Hold still!" Ron yelled, visibly aggravated.
She doesn't know what made her do it, but Narcissa found her hand on the ginger's shoulder, calming him down like she had so many times before with her son.
"She's obviously been through a traumatic event, Auror Weasley." She turned her concerned eyes to Hermione as Harry helped pull his friend back.
Hit Wizard Peasegood tried to stop the woman. "She's under arrest for murdering a muggle."
"Then what's one more dead Death Eater sympathizer?" She snarled back, her frustration breaking through her icy resolve.
"She did it without aid of a wand." He warned, backing away anyways.
Cissy nodded in understanding; not even The Dark Lord could pull that level of magic off. She recomposed herself as her neutral blue hit hollow chestnut brown.
"Mrs. Weasley, may I heal you and clean you up?"
Hermione barely registered that, and it was like Cissy was looking into the eyes of a victim of the Kiss. This was to be her ex-husband's punishment in a matter of months, and it seemed fundamentally wrong on the war heroine's face.
Narcissa swore to herself that this wouldn't be Draco's fate.
"I'm going to clean you up now." Narcissa said more forcefully, raising her wand to the empty girl. She cast the gentlest tergeo she could, cleaning away the blood upon her body. The cutting was mostly superficial as she automatically followed it up with a diagnostic charm. Within a split second she vanished the results, horrified at what she saw.
Anemia. Blood loss. Burst capillaries and glamour charms to hide the bruises. Large gash, poorly healed, on her right forearm. The words 'liar' and 'whore' carved into her skin, non-magically.
By all appearances, she had been tortured for months and should be in 's. Narcissa knew that these kind of wounds might get her a visit from Witch Advocacy, but she was fairly certain that her husband Ronald wasn't the perpetrator.
What had the muggle-born gotten herself into?
Hermione dumbly nodded her way through the investigation, letting the Unspeakable and the representative from the MLE believe that she has been assaulted, violated, and that she had killed him in self-defense.
It was close enough to the truth, and when Kingsley came back with a muggle report that the man had been escalating his assaults on women and been flagged by the Scotland Yard, it was a closed case.
Hermione had killed a man, and had gotten away with it. It didn't matter that he was a bad man, probably on his way to becoming a serial killer. She had willingly went to him in hopes to orgasm, to simply feel alive and get off.
And everyone looked at her with that same pitiable look. Nobody used the word rape around her. It was 'the incident', or the 'assault'.
The closest thing to normal was Narcissa's neutral, knowing stare. She had been unusually kind enough to wipe the details on the diagnostic charm, even as she knew what all had happened.
Ronald had avoided touching her altogether after that. She knew that he couldn't handle the idea that she was soiled goods now, but never said it out loud.
He continued his affairs while she was left too shaken to resume looking online for casual rough sex.
It all went back to that damned moment beneath Bellatrix, when she was tortured and carved, and when she had been forced to orgasm against her will.
And, being the head-strong Gryffindor that she was, Hermione found herself at the gates of Malfoy Manor in order to confront the demons of her past.
It was a shock to her to find Narcissa at the gates, as she had known of her divorce from Lucius from the headlines of the Daily Prophet.
"Mrs. Weasley, what a pleasant surprise." The Black said coolly, not making any signs of opening the gates to her.
"What are you doing here? I thought this was Malfoy property."
"It is; Draco has let me stay here as he's still under indictment and may have to abandon the property should he be sent to Azkaban. I'll be the steward of the estate until such time he decides to sell it."
"Is Draco here?" Hermione asked, the knowledge unsettling her.
"He's currently being deposed. Again. For the International Confederation of Wizards." She said it with a bit of impatience.
Hermione nodded in sad understanding. The international community wanted more than their pound of flesh for The Dark Lord's return. It was like they needed to prune every family tree that had any link to the last Wizarding War, and Narcissa's freedom had poisoned the general attitude of clemency towards her son.
"He did more good than harm, unlike your sister." She hoped her jab hit home, to anger the only person who knew her darkest secret.
"What do you want, Mrs. Weasley?" Narcissa's polite parry left Hermione aggravated and frustrated at the same time.
"I need closure. And access to your Great Room."
"I'll not let you kill yourself in here, Mrs. Weasley." As emotionless as the Slytherin was, Hermione was losing her own control.
"I'm not-"
"-spare me your lies. You may have the rest of the Wizarding World fooled, but not me."
"I need release." As their eyes met, Narcissa remembered what her sister had done to the girl.
"Why in Merlin's name would I violate you like that?"
"It's not violating if I ask for it." Cissy saw the pleading in her face, and want certain what to make of it.
"You killed the last muggle you asked."
It wasn't a question as much as it was a statement. Hermione didn't even bother to challenge it.
"It went too far that time."
It was left unspoken that she'd been doing this repeatedly, and that she'd been cheating on her husband. Narcissa had known about Ronald's indiscretions with Lavender for weeks now as they tried to hide it in Knockturn Alley.
"What's in it for me?"
"You can use me." As the Gryffindor said it, her voice was empty of whatever fire she once had during the war.
Narcissa understood the comment for what it was and more; she had whored herself out to find release with countless men, and it was the only currency she had.
"Get the charges against Draco dropped."
Hermione stilled at that, stuck on the other side of the gates. She wasn't on the Wizengamot, nor in the MLE, but she had sway as one of the Golden Trio.
"Be brutally unyielding." The muggle-born begged.
Narcissa nodded to the agreement, understanding exactly what the girl before her needed. "You, too."
As the gates opened, the placid, numb eyes looked to Hermione as she raised her wand to the girl's neck. Invisible ropes bound around her, jerking her forward and making Hermione stagger and forced to follow in Narcissa's swift wake.
As they entered the Manor, Hermione was lost in memory as the ropes pulled her to crash into the ground with an audible grunt.
Her limbs were left splayed outward by spell-work as Cissy used a cutting charm to shred through her robes. Occasionally her skin was cut but it barely bled.
Hermione fought the restraints as her clothing was ripped away, and she could tell that she soaked through her panties. When Narcissa tore those off, her other hand clasped tightly around Hermione's throat.
"You wrote 'whore' on yourself, I think it's time we test that theory." As Cissy looked at Hermione with neutral eyes, she saw the fire in the Gryffindor return as two fingers jabbed their way in, finding almost too much natural lubrication ready for her.
Hermione was alive again, even if it was momentary. This was her addiction, and it left Narcissa feeling needed for the first time in a long time.
As she struggled against the magical restraints, she wasn't freely bleeding. She wasn't even really all that hurt. But she found her release as she screamed, locked onto the memory of icy blue eyes.
What felt like hours later (but was probably only minutes) Hermione found herself dozing in Narcissa's arms.
"Do you wish for me to, uh, reciprocate?"
"That wasn't a part of the agreement." Cissy tried to remain stern and detached.
"Neither was us cuddling afterwards."
Narcissa pressed her lips to Hermione's temple. "Perhaps we could make this an ongoing arrangement."
"What will this cost me?"
"Divorce Ronald. I won't be known as an adulterer."
"Done."