Supernova (she will shatter a universe too)
Disclaimer: I do not own anything you might recognise, and am merely playing around with J. K. Rowling's magnificent creation.
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She dubs it a love story and calls it quits.
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She kills him, in the end. (They burn as they began - in fire and scorn and destruction.)
It's early January. Not quite bitterly cold, because bitterly cold isn't her thing - not like burning rage is - but it's cold. Cold enough to freeze her fingers when she stands outside too long, cold enough to make her wish for a book and an armrest by the fireplace.
It's early January, but there are flowers blooming in her mind. There's an ocean of colour that ripples through her, bending and twisting and warping her vision until she sees flowers and lights and even the rain seems to bow. There are soft pinks and gentle reds, pastel blues and viridian green that dance around her sight, in the night or in the morning, when there is the burning of the sun through her eyelids or the biting of the cold on her skin. There are colours inside of her, an ocean of colour that ripples and blooms when the world outside is grey; shades of black and white and dead.
She is alive.
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He's gone, in the early January. He's gone and perhaps not coming back (she doesn't know, he doesn't know, even Harry doesn't know and Hermione feels herself drown because that's almost worse than knowing he's not coming back at all) and she cannot help but wonder if she is the reason why he left. It's odd, because she thinks herself in love, thinks that the blooming colours are hers and that the alive-feeling she feels stirring in her guts is real - but she doesn't think she could forgive him if he came back.
It's early January, and the world around her is in shades of black and white. She holds onto the palette of her mind, holds onto the viridian green and azure blue and crimson red and thinks, thinks but dares not say it, that if he came back, if he came back and begged - she might not find it in herself to forgive him. The fluttering of her heart (be still, she tells it; but it's always been too stubborn to listen to her brain, to her magical, clever, logical brain. She's always felt more strongly than her friends; always felt too strongly), the curling of butterflies in her stomach, the sound of his voice on the wind - it's too much. It's pain and anger and a constant reminder that keeps the wound of his betrayal open, open and oozing with blood and pus and hatred.
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Her world gains more colours. The primroses of her mind have thorns, the grass is a lush poison green and the sky too far away for any help. She learns rust; the colour of dried blood, she learns charcoal; the despair in the night, she learns white; hope and helplessness and the blinding pain that shoots behind closed eyelids and tears at her skin. She learns the colours of hatred, grey-blue like his eyes and fire red like his hair and pale cream like his skin; and in doing so she is alive.
It's better than this cold, early January - the world dead around her - and Hermione thinks she would rather be alive and hating than dead and beautiful.
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Harry doesn't see. His green eyes are turned inwards, to the shattered pieces he is trying to stick back together - and when they are not gazing at his flaws and overlooking his qualities, they are steadfastly stuck on to the north, where the sun never goes and Ginny waits for him. There are dark clouds gathering in the North, clouds that make her wonder if he's looking for Ginny or Voldemort, if he thinks of Hogwarts as home or as a battleground where he will die.
Hermione does not have the luxury to ponder long. Early January is cold and someone needs to gather wood, stock the fire, scourgify clothes, hunt for food and keep them alive. Harry cannot do it - too cold and alone and forgetting the world for all he looks far away and shuts inside of himself.
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She is precise and meticulous, and so when she cannot sleep at night, cannot get out of the tent because Harry is having a nightmare right next to her (at least he's sleeping) and if she moves she'll wake him, Hermione catalogues her pain and dissects it. It's the only way she knows how to cope.
His eyes are grey-blue. (It means that her sky can be azure, her ocean ultramarine, her will metallic - but never grey-blue, never that shade again; because she is banishing it, taking it away and pushing the pain out as she expures her vocabulary.)
His hair is Burnt Orange, she decides. (She learned it in a book about football, something she had picked up in a waiting room to pass time and she would have never thought it might be of use, but burnt orange is not a pretty colour and she doesn't mind tossing out of her world.) Burnt Orange is rare in her sight, so it doesn't hurt quite as much not to see it anymore. (Grey-blue is everywhere in the winter. Hermione thinks she wants to wreck the world apart never to have to see it again; but if she does she'll put Harry in danger and putting Harry in danger is putting the wizarding world in danger and, for all she hates Ron and hurts, she cannot do that yet.)
His skin is - his skin is - (It's soft and she remembers it, remembers his smell and the feel of kisses on the column of her throat and how his lips were parched and gosh she hates him.)
Hermione turns in her bed, firmly closes her eyes and tells herself to go to sleep.
(His skin is peach and she cannot toss it out, because it's one of her favourite fruits and it's her own skin and she feels like she is about to burn.)
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He comes back. (January is gone. The bitter cold has vanished, leaving only the last frosts of spring and her hatred has become a part of her. Gosh she hates, but hating is being alive and Hermione has learnt to be grateful for the little things like that.)
He comes back, wet and sodden and she is angry. She is sick with worry about Harry disappearing, is sick with anger at the Boy-who-Lived for almost dying twice, is enraged at Ronald stepping back into camp with a victorious smile and dark rusty hair (not Burnt Orange anymore because they are wet and she doesn't know Burnt Orange and she'll have to expunge Rust out of her vocabulary as well, tonight, when she'll toss and turn and hate.) He comes back as if he could, as if she would let him, and the sound of her hand against his cheek is oddly hollow. This is a pale copy of her hatred, a shadow of her pain and as his head snaps and he tries to speak; she can only hear the thrumming of her blood in her ears, the thudding of her heart against her ribs, the cold of spring that is no longer early January. (She imagines it's the thrumming of her glee, the thudding of his body on the floor, the cold of his death and something in her, something dark and twisted, something turns and whispers and tells her how beautiful she is, chest heaving and eyes flashing and hair wild.)
Later, when the rage abates, Hermione is ashamed at the thought of Tom Riddle whispering so seductively in her ear and her listening, listening despite her pride and stalwart loyalty and bravery. (She's not wearing the Horcrux.) Hermione thinks she makes a poor lion. (She just hasn't realised yet that wounded lionesses wreck apart the world before their deaths.)
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She has felt it for a while now.
Anger bubbling under her skin, burning red and hollow blue and acid green and poison purple. She knows the fire in her soul is hatred, has accepted that the gaping hunger aching at her breast is chaos and agrees that there is something beautiful about how, sometimes, when she's alone and despairing and angry and hating, her gasps catch in her throat and she cannot breathe, asphyxiating on unsaid words and hidden wrath. She's bursting with emotions, too-full of poison to dare open her mouth, to dare open her heart - because surely it will all come pouring out and wreck everything she has tried so hard to create.
She has felt it for a while now. She becomes proficient at stocking a grudge, holds onto the burning fury curling in her stomach and Hermione is powerful. It's what pulls her through Bellatrix to the other end, what makes her and does not break her - nothing could now - doesn't break her but tempers her, like steel beaten until it is shaped for death. She has felt it for a while now, taking life inside of her.
Hermione is a roaring inferno. She is powerful and unforgiving and she will show the world how bright she can shine; how bright she can burn - like a supernova.
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She kills in the battle of Hogwarts. It's not her first time killing a man, but it's her first time killing someone she knows, and for all the Weasley cry and cry and bemoan his death, Hermione thinks it a shame that he almost survived the war. If he had been dead before the end, she might have not had to kill him. As it is, Ronald Weasley had too much luck, and it is ever so hard to know, in the midst of the war, who was killed by whom. Death under friendly fire is something the Wizarding World turns its eyes away from, and who could think that the Golden Trio would burn so?
She kills in the battle of Hogwarts. It's not her first kill, but it's the first time killing a friend and Hermione wonders if the thrills she felt through her body, the hunger for more - more power, more death, more hatred - if it all came from the fact that she had - once, in the past, in another life, in another universe - loved the man she killed.
It's addicting. The fire in her skin roars, the smell of blood is pungent on the old stones and she shivers, how she shivers, as a breeze comes ruffling by and sweeps all her fine nerves alive.
She's never felt more awake.
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She glows in the darkness of the war, glows brighter and brighter each day as she outshines everyone, outshines them all with magic beyond their minds and carefully hidden madness and roaring inferno illuminating her from inside. Sometimes she thinks herself about to spew forth fire. Hermione is burning, shining like a star in a dual sun system and outstripping all others of their light. She is greedy as a black hole, terrible as the storm, powerful like madness. Harry grieves his friend and twists the Stone in his fingers, but Hermione has her gaze firmly set onto the future, onto Britain, onto the World and with the Elder wand in her hand, she is shooting for the stars.
Sometimes, she convulses with hatred, alone on the wooden floorboards of her parents' house. She thinks it's Death coming to greet her, coming to save them - but perhaps Death has learnt to fear her too, perhaps Death is smarter than everyone else because they acclaim her and praise the woman she pretends to be, but Hermione is carefully hidden madness and cultivated rage and burning wrath. She is luminous, glowing with a fire within and she thinks, in the dead of the night when her bed is cold, that she might just spontaneously combust under the strength of her emotions.
Her time is coming, the time for her to erupt into a volcanic rage and wreck apart cities and take her place amongst the godly monsters of her race. Hermione can hear the call of their voices, the pull of their presence in her mind. She will be great, will be great not because it is her destiny - she does not believe in such things - but because she can, because she has the tools to be so in her reach and she has always been ambitious. (Perhaps she is a snake in a lion's pelt.) Her fangs are sharp and her bite poisonous.
Her era is coming.
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She is going supernova, bubbling with rage and feeling the burning of life coursing through her veins. She is going mad, going wild and losing sight of who she was, what she had believed in - her time has come. She is going supernova, is ripping the world to shreds and dying; taking the universe down with her.
There is a hunger in her veins, a luring calm underneath the fire that swallows it all, greedy and waiting, baiting. She has a black hole in her heart, a vacuum; a vortex that rips and hungers and craves - voracious, insatiate, rapacious. She is going places. (She is going supernova.)
Her time has come. She will not only move mountains; she will shatter a universe too.