Descend

I have known freedom and I know hope; I have known love on the darkest of days and beauty in the harshest of lights; I have known heart stopping fear and crushing jealousy that rips and tears and destroys. I have traversed happiness to its peak only to be redirected down the vast road of descending hopelessness, with only bitter memories of before. I have felt blood stain my hands – not my own, but so, so close – and the sensation never leaves me.

My blood stained hands try to grasp the concept of happiness but I am left to scrabble at a constantly disappearing lifeline with hands that are too dirty to really hold on. So I grab onto him, someone that doesn't need clean hands because his are just are filthy as mine. I have never been more vindictive – destroying him so that I may feel something other than hatehatehate and gutwretchinghorror – and I drag him down into a lone pit of bitter despair where demons come in little things that can bring the biggest memories to the surface – the little yellow napkin that would've been the colour of the nursery's paint; the wine that was the same colour as the blood on my hands; a man whose hair was the exact same colour… - and we suffer together, in not-quite silence that is still so, so - too - quiet.

There's a little photo of a little baby who should've lived. I keep it, framed, in my bedside table so I can look at it when I might be feeling happy. The little black and white sonogram stares at me, a little childish voice mocks me and I want to smash it but the little voice tells me, over and over and over until it's all I can hear, that it's already broken and it was I who destroyed it in the first place. There could be more photos, more sonograms, then pictures of a perfect little baby who would grow into a child, but baby's dead and mommy's sorry and sorry isn't quite good enough anymore.

War is no place for a child. Nor is it safe for a mother-to-be. It was a mistake, a moment of passion in the midst of the war's darkest days and I had been so young, so desperate for something other than fear that I had crumbled into strong arms and had felt what may have been love. I left his bed that morning with a blossom of hope, a smile and an unwanted baby. I never told him about his child. Why should I tell him about the baby that wasn't (but should've been)?

How could I tell him that I had killed my – his – baby?

I couldn't. So I didn't.

The baby died on April 15th, 1998. We were both eighteen, surrounded by death and fighting against oppression. It was a natural abortion. Pregnancy is natural and magic… felt wrong, somehow. Tainting a child with something that can kill and torture is wrong but…but I am contradicting myself. What would magic matter, when my purpose was to kill? I didn't want to hurt the child – if only it had come later, after the war, then we could've lived, baby – even as I mixed up the remedy to miscarry. Belladonna, nightshade, atropine… no consumption, just smell. So easy, so simple. So unnecessarily necessary.

Again, I contradict. Again and again and again until I am nothing but an opposite and an equivalent, everything and nothing. A monster and a mother; a child and a killer; innocent and tainted. I cannot decide and thus I take all and hide in the lies I have built.

There was pain. It was like salvation, escape in a way that I don't understand, but acknowledge. There was so much blood, on the floor, on my hands, in my hair. And then there was baby, a little tiny thing, covered in blood and dying. It wheezed, little not quite formed lungs struggling momentarily and I held a moment long strip hope that maybe I could make this work with my child but that little hope died along with the little baby. I cradled the foetus to my chest, sobbing and sorrysorrysorrybaby – Oh God, it was my baby – and the baby was aborted.

Baby, it was a boy, was buried next to Dobby. No maker, no stone. No one knew he was there, bar me. He was put in a little shoe box scavenged from Fleur, wrapped with tissue paper and buried at midnight. No one knew I was there to bury my child, I hope, and when I walked away, back into Shell Cottage, I slipped into my room and spent the night tossing and turning. It was somewhat anticlimactic, waiting to see if anyone knew, to see if I had been discovered.

I wasn't but there was always some misguided hope that I would be found out, that I would be yelled at and they would want to know and I wouldn't be able to answer because I was wrong. How could I kill my child? Abortion had been wrong, my parents had said and I'd vowed, so full of ignorance and childish bravado, that I'd never kill my child. But I had… Oh God.

"There are things I don't tell you," I whisper, voice hoarse, in the aftermath of the Final Battle. "Things that I have no right to keep from you, but I do anyway."

He tries to pull away from me. I hold onto him; he is my vice, to lose myself into when I don't want to feel anymore. "W-what?"

I stroke the side of his face. My fingers linger, streaks of someone's congealing blood transfer onto his freckled skin and I pretend not to notice his flinch. "I wonder what you'd say, if you knew what I've done. It haunts me… maybe you already know that bloodstained hands never feel the same again. The blood lingers, stains and the red is so vivid…"

My voice trails off into unsteady silence. It is broken by his voice, cracked and raw. "Y-you're crazy, Hermione. So, so crazy…"

I laugh. It's a horrible sound. A bitter choke of pain and regret and something that feels like hysteria. He flinches just as hard as I do.

"I know," I whisper into his neck. The words are muffled. "I know."

After the war, it was supposed to be happy. We were supposed to move on, have kids and raise little families and become great. But I couldn't.

I didn't deserve another child. I immersed myself into studies of magic and I tried to forget but there is no going back from the point of no return. Blood still lingers, sticky and slick and redder than ever and happiness is always out of reach for dirtied hands.

Maybe I could tell you it gets better. That the baby that wasn't left my mind and I had another child, one that I would spoil to make up for my past grievances and that I stopped hating myself and dragging him down my horrid path. I could tell you so much, a foundation of lies that are better than the truth.

And the truth is that I never did move on. I clung to him and he followed me, like a little lost puppy, never questioning my motives even though they were horrible things. I visit baby and I don't know what to say, so I imagine that I had kept him and we had lived to become one happy family, like the rest of the remaining Weasley's but imagination shatters and I fall into the harsh reality of pain. It won't get better and I'll accept that because war changes people, it scars and hurts and kills and it becomes the reason that babies can't live.

The war has changed us all. No mercy, though we cried to a God that didn't listen and we lost faith. We were crushed, even though we won. Poor baby.

Maybe one day I'll tell him (but I probably won't) and we'll be okay. But I'm not expecting miracles and happiness has always been so far away…

NOTE: I wrote this nearly five years ago when I was thirteen, and no longer agree with the opinion expressed. It is kept up because of the interest it received and as a reminder of how my writing has progressed. I sincerely apologise if this offends anyone as that was not my intention when writing it.