Macabre Idiosyncrasies
a k a n t h a e - h i m e
Authoress' Note and Disclaimer: Written for The Writer's Notebook guild, as well as Meii, whose profile is obvious retaliation against my much longer one. Her penname is INELEGANTpoetry and she owns the universe. She'll know what some of this stuff is about because it was supposed to help her write Psychosis (no details lest Meii kill me because I talk too much) but it didn't. I got bored so I wrote something. Macabre is also a submission to the contest at The Writer's Notebook, although it will most likely not win and doesn't really count as a story anyways. More like a one-shot or drabble that is partially AU because of the whole witchcraft reference - the Wicca bit of me seeping through my writing- that is nothing like real HP magic. Well...too bad.
The contest details are as follows; and the content of this .
"Write either a 100-300 word poem about summer or a 500-750 word story about anything! This will win you a Large Honey Lemon Smoothie. Contest ends June 1. Submit entries to email address on the webbie!"
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Maybe once upon a time she would have liked to erase what was writ on life's pages, replacing it with something she actually agreed with. Life hadn't ever really enjoyed her presence anyway. It was always moving too slowly for her taste. So slow; and then when she'd finally gotten a grasp of the world around her it had shattered into little bits of flammable disaster.
Not beautiful, like everyone had always assumed, or majestic or angelic in even the slightest sense of the word.
But not exactly what she had thought would happen, either. A prophet such as herself would always have liked to predict the coming of some sort of extreme catastrophe - to feel as important and outrageous as the potency of such horrific news that was, at the same time, extremely ersatz, a fake mediocrity. Prophets, however, are never really the source of divine belief. (She knows several examples in history of calamitty that came out of disbelief, but few mention prophets.) Not even the prophet herself wants to believe her predictions, if they mean the destruction of the people she believes in and the consequences that come as a part of that destruction...death, hatred, pain.
When something is true, it means that all that follows is true as well. And when something is true, it is as real as anything that she has ever been able to touch, feel, and immerse in all her being.
The reflection in the mirror is her scrying glass; the flickering lightbulbs on the frame of the cheap vanity table, her scented candles; the lipstick and mascara kisses on the fringe of the tablecloth, her circle of power: the pentacle drawn on her hand with a knife as its center. She is a witch, though a benign one - she remembers that much, but only by chance and the faces of familiar others carved onto her dresser. Her hair is a hue of pale white once brown like the nourishing feel of the earth beneath her bare feet; such hues of color fade from her life as the colors fade from her make-up, gaudy and unfashionable as always. Eyeshadow hides the wrinkles underneath her eyes with ebony smears.
...Insomnia and insanity are both dogged on Hermione's heels. She's almost stopped running, for fear she'll trip and end up the same way everyone else is.
But as long as she chooses to deny it, living for a dream and for all the others who died in the Rose Wars (her own little misnomer, the people who never got the chances she could conjure up at a moment's glance, and the people who did but died anyway), she is not dying.
It is all just a dream, just like the spotlight illuminating the moonbeams dancing across her face as some voice inside her head tampers with a calypso meant to downplay anything else she wants to hear.
She is not dying.
In fact, she had probably never lived at all. That's what Malfoy...Ron...Harry...God would have said.