With Arms Wide Open
Prologue: Unconditional Love. Unwavering Loyalty. Unsurpassed Strength.
Betrayed.
Alone.
Hopeless.
Horrified.
Pain was all I felt. It wasn't physical in anyway but it didn't have to be, this pain hurt so much more. I couldn't breathe and I honestly didn't want to. If I didn't breathe then perhaps I would die. Such a selfish thought but it was true. I wanted to die, to no longer live in this world anymore. The Wizarding World was a corrupt place and I never truly felt like I fit in. I didn't belong here and I never would.
Perhaps in a another path, things could have been different. If I had never been sent away for such pathetically poor reasons. If only my biological parents could have found the joy in loving an imperfect daughter. I was alone in this world and in every thought I was reminded of this painful reality.
My painful reality.
I had no family. My parents were dead and my real brother had still yet to contact me. My excuse for a biological mother was somewhere off with her hundredth husband, she still wanted nothing to do with me. My biological father was a secret known only to my mother and one that she would never tell. Surely he was a pureblood but a disgrace I was sure nonetheless.
I would have no friends soon enough when they found out another surprising truth about me. Harry would understand better than Ron would but both of them would feel betrayed. However, they didn't know betrayal as I knew it. Up close and personal. I lived betrayal; I received it and dished it out. I was a horrible excuse for a friend to them.
Merlin help me.
All through school I was considered the perfect one. The one who always bailed Harry and Ron out of trouble in the last second with superior intellect and quick wit. Yet now, it wasn't Harry and Ron who would be in desperate need of help.
It was me.
Perfect Hermione Granger.
Top of her class and perhaps the most brilliant witch of her age. A sweet and shy girl with few friends. Loved by many and hated by few. But it was just a lie. A fake, that's all she was. It was fake confidence, fake courage, fake sweetness and most of all a fake person.
He had knew that and had confronted her about it. All she could do was deny and deny but he saw right through her. He always saw right through her. He saw her pain that she hid as she faked a smile for the press and pushed her problems away. He saw the fake laughs she gave to assure Harry and Ron that she doing well. But he of all the people in the world had known that she was not okay. That she hadn't been okay in a long time.
And it just got worse.
The Second War had been over for a year already and people had begun to move on and heal. But she hadn't had the time to heal. She was still being struck all over the place in the same wound.
First with finding out that her entire life had been an utter and complete lie.
Second with having to mourn the death of her parents that raised her.
Now, she had this.
She didn't have one bloody clue how she would be able to manage this. It wasn't her expertise and in the past, definitely hadn't been one of her thought driven ideas. She was as blind to this as Harry had been to dealing with crying girls. Of all the things Hermione was, she just wasn't maternal. She was loving yes, to Harry and to Ron but it was more of a loyal love. It wasn't unconditional love like she would be required to give to a child.
It was still hard for her to even admit to herself that she was, well, pregnant. Her, innocent and sweet little Hermione Granger. Still at the tender age of nineteen with a baby that was conceived out of wedlock. Not to mention the father of the baby wouldn't be around. She hadn't meant anything to him, it had been just a one night stand of a sort.
Sure she had known the guy for a good while but most of that time they had loathed one another. She had just seen him as a beacon of light in her ever darkening life but he had turned out to be another bringer of darkness. It shouldn't have surprised her but she had to admit it had. She thought that he had changed, that maybe he had liked her as she had learned to like him. But she had been wrong. So terribly wrong. And now.
Now, she was pregnant.
With Draco Malfoy's baby.