Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
Pairings: HermionexHarry, Slight HarryxDraco
Warnings: Mostly cursing.
When she kisses the demon all she could taste was sulfur, the tears that were rolling down her cheeks, and the only thing she could think was hope that this work and save her parents.
She doesn't remember partnering up with Harry Potter. All she remembered from the first time that they met that she had saved her life from a troll. No, seriously how the hell a troll of all things got the best of her she had no idea. But it did and in the end he had saved her life.
She repaid him with drinks and the next morning they awoke naked and in bed together.
The next step was obviously partnering up together.
The only thing that Harry ever told her was that he had been in this life since he was eleven and rescued from his abusive aunt and uncle.
She didn't bother telling him about her demon deal and that her days were being counted down with each passing hour. All she told him was that she entered the life after rescuing her parents from a pairs of vampires.
He had nodded, accepted it, and never asked another question.
That was something she liked. He never asked any questions that he didn't need to.
From the moment she had kissed that damn demon there was a clock in the back of her mind that counted down the time she had left.
She knew that she should be researching, in another life she could have been a good researcher or scholar or something, for anything that would help to break her deal. Something that would help her live past her twenty seventh birthday.
The very least she should do is tell Harry so that when he found her dead body one day he wouldn't have to wonder what happened.
In the end she didn't do any of that. She drank her beer, hunted monsters with Harry, slept with him when she wanted to or got someone else into her bed if she wanted something different. In the dark of the motel room she would lie on her side with her eyes on the clock watching every last second pass before she would fall into an exhausted sleep.
Going by Harrys breathing pattern he was never asleep while she was still awake with her mind going insane from trying to figure out just what was going to fucking happen to her.
Harry never asked her about anything.
Towards the end she wasn't sure if she loved him for that or hated him for it.
This wasn't supposed to be her life. She was good girl. A straight A-Grade student who had a future. She had scholarships to her throat to wherever she wanted. She even had gotten a fucking admittance to Oxford.
She was supposed to have graduated college with honors. She was supposed to have gotten married to the perfect man, have the 2.5 children, have a house with a white picket fence and a fucking dog.
Instead she was in seedy bars throwing men twice her height and weight over her shoulder when they didn't realize that no meant fucking no. Instead she was drowning her poor liver in alcohol in an effort to numb the pain. Instead she was screwing men in dirty motel rooms with gritted teeth and nails digging into their chests, because fuck if she wasn't going to be on top of them and not the other way around.
When the both of them have to do research whatever they are hunting sometimes Harry watches her as she easily goes through books and finds answers within seconds and says that maybe this really isn't the life for her. She sometimes thinks about going back to school she wants to laugh and vomit at the same time.
She has less than eight years left and she wants to waste them in school? Typical of her.
She wasn't sure of her relationship with Harry. They were hunting partners and in truth there was no one else she would have rather had watching her back after she had seen him throw himself in front of a knife that was aimed for her back. They fucked each other, he never complained when she would top him like other men would and would always give her a lopsided smile and grip her hips tightly.
He never said a single word when she would take other men, and sometimes women because why not she was going to hell soon enough anyway. He met her drink for drink and he always seemed to know a different version of a familiar drink and she had never seen him drunk.
She knew his hands intimately, either from feeling her body or watching and learning how to properly use and assemble a gun to throwing a knife. Sometimes she spent hours watching him assemble and disassemble their weapons over and over again while the television in the motel would fade into background noise.
If there was one thing she was happy about in the last three years since she had sold her soul was that she had met him. Harry at least made some of things bearable.
On a whim one day she logged onto the computer she had taken with her from home and typed in her parents' names and Australia. They had started a new dentist office in the country and they had another child.
"Her name is Hermione, we've always partial to that name." had said in the article.
Before she even knew what she had done Hermione had punched her fist through the computer screen, she had gotten her jacket, and went out to search for the nearest bar.
She awoke in her bed the next day with Harry gone to get breakfast and a brand new computer waiting for her on the table with all of her previous information already uploaded.
She couldn't learn everything on her own and she had no desire to get herself arrested and waste her remaining life behind bars so she never attempted anything that went over the legal line.
It was Harry that taught her to fake information on credit papers in order to get credit cards which they used to pay their way through diners and motels. It was Harry that taught her to make fake ids, how to pick locks, and how to jump start a car without a key.
She was always a quick learner and this was no exception.
Sometimes she looked into a mirror and she wasn't able to recognize the woman staring back at her no matter how long she looked.
Harry Potter was a bit of enigma to her and despite being partners with him for four years she still didn't know that much about him.
Just like their weapons there was one thing that he didn't stop at spending good money on, no matter how much it cost him, to buy the best contact lenses that there were. The one time she asked he had shrugged and said that bad contact lenses would blind him and what use would he be then?
He wasn't an emotional person, preferring to hide his amusement behind a quirking of the corner of his mouth, sometimes he would tap his fingers against the table or the side of his beer bottle.
They were the same age was something that surprised her. His eyes had made him look so much older than twenty one. He drank with the air of someone who had drunk alcohol their entire lives, he smoked cigarettes as if he had been born with one in his fingers, and sometimes he would obtain a fond look in his eyes when he watched someone take drugs.
Maybe in another life she would have never spared him another glance.
But in this life he had become her everything and it gave her something to look forward to the morning, as pathetic as that sounded.
Four years and eight months into her deal she met the Weasley pack of werewolves and the ones that apparently had saved Harry from his aunt and uncle.
He did, however, keep out the fact that while they had killed his aunt, uncle, and cousin, they had also tried to forcefully turn him into a werewolf in order to bring new blood into their pack.
They had chosen interbreeding between siblings Harry had later explained to her as they drove a stolen car down the highway after escaping from the wolves. They had started three generations ago to go to incest and were just realizing just how bad an idea it was and were trying to force people into their pack.
Apparently when Harry had been eleven, skinny and abused, he had still reeked of an alpha type of wolf that the pack was eager to take for their own.
The only reason he hadn't killed them all yet, he had told her later. Was because they did save him in the end from his own blood and gave him a new freedom.
He did get his revenge though, he had added. When he had escaped from them the first time after narrowly not getting bitten he had killed one of the twins in the pack, his name had been Fred, and that was the start of his real new life.
They met a siren named Draco Malfoy in Las Vegas who had offered his help in killing his cousin named Fleur who had gone insane and had killed any man that would lay a hand on her after being driven to do so because of her allure that she couldn't control.
Hermione had been sure that it was a trap however when Draco had been the one to hold Fleur down as she had stabbed the siren with a bronze dagger. Harry had to have been tied up and left in their motel room after Fleur had placed him under her spell.
After she had gotten back from her celebratory drinking as much alcohol as she could and still be able to make as least sensible if not smart decisions she had met with Draco once more as he walked out of hers and Harrys shared motel room with his neck covered in bite marks and a smug look on his face.
She threw a smirk at Harry who simply met her gaze with a raised eyebrows before he returned her smirk with one of his own rare ones.
Five and a half years into her deal she and Harry were in a diner in New York, eating slowly and trying to will their hangovers away while scanning through her laptop trying to find a new job for them to do when she ran into a group of people she knew from high school and knew that she was planning to go to Oxford.
She never had friends as a kid, she was never able to connect with them and they often hated being with a know-it-all so no one would ever try to befriend her.
She had spent years now learning how to properly read people without them having to say a single word and she knew the moment that they recognized her that they were almost gleeful.
She had a faded bruise on her cheek and a deep bandaged cut on her other cheek. There were deep bags under her eyes from her sleepless nights and her nails were bitten down to their cuticles. She was dressed in leather and jeans and her once bushy hair had been cut short so that they were barely hanging down her ears. Her eyes were bloodshot and she was obviously hung-over and when she licked her lips she tasted blood.
The only thing that kept people from calling the police on her and making a domestic abuse report was that Harry looked just like her and at times worse.
The group eyed her almost gleefully, taking in her ragged appearance and her worn out duffel bag that was next to her to the beat up laptop that Harry was reading newspaper reports before they had started laughing behind their hands.
Taking a seat in the booth behind the two of them the group was quick to start talking about their classes and their jobs and how fucking perfect their futures were.
One person said in a loud and carrying tone on how sad she was that so many promising students had fallen to drugs and alcohol and god knows what else.
The only thing that was stopping her from taking her gun out and shooting every last one of them, she was already damned to hell why not take down as many as she could while she still had time, was the fact that there was a cop at the counter sipping from his coffee cup and already shooting her and Harry suspicious looks.
In the end Harry had placed his hand on top of hers, eventually flipping them so that she could grip him tightly to a point where her nails were driving into his skin with each new comment that the group said. He didn't even flinch or blink when her nails pierced through his skin when her parents were mentioned. All he did was sip his coffee quietly and pick at his eggs.
After they paid for their meal and they left the diner Hermione had taken her sharpest knife and slashed the group's car, carefully only doing three tires so that they would have to pay out of pocket to replace them.
Six years into her deal she woke up one day, realized it was her birthday, and refused to get out of bed.
Harry had been annoyed, even more so when she wouldn't tell him the reason she hadn't wanted to leave. He didn't know her birthday and she didn't know his, all they knew was that they were the same ages.
He left after trying to nudge her out of bed for five minutes and didn't return until it was nearly midnight smelling of burgers, beer, and lube.
Hermione spent the day in bed watching television, not even carrying what was playing she only wanted the noise to ground her slightly. She ate their saved food from last night never even tasting the food and just doing it so she wouldn't be weakened. Most of all, she simply slept.
When Harry returned he came back with half of a cake which he gave to her wordlessly and a new pair of boots because hers was starting to fall apart.
She never asked how he knew, or if he even knew, but she did thank him which he nodded to.
The cake was slightly stale and the frosting was a touch too cold. Each bite stuck in her throat which she washed down with a bottle of whiskey.
It was the best cake she ever had in her life.
They met a fairy named Luna in Mississippi of all places. She and Harry seemed to be good friends and she had looked sadly at Hermione as if she knew what was coming for her.
Hermione couldn't bring herself to care anymore.
They killed a pair of demons in Kansas, they were calling themselves the Lestrange couple.
If Harry wondered why they had taken one look at her and started laughing before they were exorcised he didn't ask a single question.
Seven years in and she could barely find a reason to get out of bed. Harry was getting more and more annoyed with her, she could tell.
She sometimes wondered what was keeping him with and dreading the day that he left her for good.
She didn't want to be alone in her last few years.
They were tracking a Wendigo in Colorado when Harry got caught and needed hospitalization.
When the doctors asked for their relationships she lied and said that she was his wife. If they needed authorization and paperwork to state that she was more than confident about her skills at forgery to make the necessary papers now.
In the end she didn't need any papers, although she did need the fake insurance cards they had made, and towards the end when Harry felt his best they sneaked out of the hospital but not before rooting their supply cabinets and stealing a number of medications.
Better safe than sorry in the end.
Eight years in Hermione felt a calm descend on her when she started to think about her end. It no longer mattered that she would be taken into hell. She wasn't afraid anymore.
The fact that she read about her parents and their new daughter named Hermione being murdered in Australia right in their own homes during a burglary gone wrong told her one thing and one thing only.
She had sold her fucking soul for nothing.
Nine years in Hermione woke one morning to find Harry in bed with her and his arms around her. He wasn't asleep.
You were crying in your sleep he had told her. He had his chest pressed against her back and the both of them were naked, neither of them liked sleeping with their clothes on. His arm was snaked in between her breasts and he pressed a tender kiss to the back of her neck.
They stayed in bed until they needed to go eat and neither of them said a thing about what had happened that morning.
They ran into the Weasleys one last time. This time Hermione had almost been bitten, intended to have become a mate to the youngest of the male wolves; his name was Ron and he looked at her like a piece of steak he couldn't wait to eat.
Harry provided the distraction they needed to lock them in the basement of an abandoned building and then set the entire campus on fire.
They took the car that the pack had used to get there and quickly drove away listening as the wolves screams. As Harry drove the car Hermione had twisted in her seat to watch the smoke rise into the air and darkened the skies.
Once after drinking more than he usually did Harry told her that he had been considered suicidal by hunters everywhere because of how when he would go with someone he would throw himself in front of others to make sure that they wouldn't get hurt.
He wasn't suicidal, he told her. He just didn't want anyone to get hurt on his watch.
He had given her one of his rare grins and said that it was a stupid saving people thing that he had and he knew for sure that it was what was going to kill him one day.
Time was running out. Her years had turned into months which turned into weeks which turned into days.
Time was running out.
It wasn't until the day before her deal came through that she looked at Harry who still had no idea and was leafing through her torn and worn copy of "Wuthering Heights" that she realized that she really didn't want to die, that she wasn't ready to go to hell.
That she was scared beyond belief at what was going to happen to her.
She just hoped that Harry would remember her sometimes.
Harry, seemingly understanding that she didn't want to be near him for the day, had left her in their motel room.
Hermione had cried and cried until she had no water left in her body. She had gathered her strength, wrote out an entire letter to Harry in which she told him what she had done ten years ago and that she was leaving all of her meager belongings to him.
That she loved him.
She had sealed the letter and placed it in his bag where she knew he would find it and sat down on her bed to wait the last three minutes of her life out.
It wasn't until midnight came and went and nothing happened that Hermione realized something was very, very wrong.
She wished she could say that she felt something when she found Harrys body hours later looking as if he had been torn apart by rabid dogs with his still open and unseeing eyes staring up at the sky in a pool of his own blood.
He was wearing his glasses at that moment, she barely remembered him leaving the motel room without putting his contact lenses on for the first time since she had met him ten years ago.
She couldn't even cry. She couldn't feel a single thing.
She wished that she wasn't alive.
In the end all she could do was burn his body until nothing remained. She gathered their belongings together and continued to travel around and kill whatever needed to be killed.
In the end she was trying to find herself a reason to live again.
She just didn't count on it being in the form of a man named Sirius Black who was looking for Harry Potter and had the news hell was trying to break free onto earth.
When Black had demanded to know who she was she looked over the rim of the glassless glasses that she had found in Harrys bag and said,
"My name is Hermione Potter."