Never Daring
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.
A/N: This is for the 2012 Mew and Mor's Weird Pairings Competition. Please enjoy my first story for M&MWP Hermione/Audrey!
Hermione was a Gryffindor. She was strong, brave, loyal, and able to do anything for what she believed was right. However, despite her crimson and gold blood she wasn't daring. She was calculated and weighed everything out first, even if it didn't seem like it at times. Which made her current situation brutal and so cruel.
Ebony hair that flew with the wind and sapphire stars that twinkled only for her, the smell of jasmine that permeated the air, the bell like laugh, rose colored blush, the pink and delectable lips all taunted her. Audrey taunted her.
She hated it. She hated being out of control, she hated being disorganized, and she was all of that around her. She sometimes stumbled on her words and her speech had a nasty little habit of losing itself to the wind, her volume decreasing every moment she spoke, and her words now seemed to have a holiday home in the sky, beyond her reach. She couldn't help feeling like the teenaged girl she was a long time ago around her. She lost all of her self-confidence and bravery. She wasn't a hero around her, she was just Hermione and that scared her.
Despite some of the rather unpleasant things about having acrobats in her stomach, she loved feeling like she was young again. She didn't want to be a seasoned veteran of war. She wanted to be a thirty-year-old woman. She felt chills down her spine with Audrey's eye contact and her cheeks were painted in light pink when their hands touched accidentally while enjoying family meals. Hermione loved the way Audrey's nose crinkled when she was thinking or how she affectionately teased the people she loved without going too far with her words.
Hermione loved Audrey. Audrey was everything Hermione wanted and really needed. She wasn't the past, an old friend whispering about adventures like they were all that they had or all that was ever exciting. Audrey was the present and future. While Hermione didn't regret much in the past it wasn't a place she wanted to revisit. She grew out of a pile of rubble and instability and now that she was in order and comfort she wanted to stay there.
But, Hermione wasn't daring and so her joy could only be in listening to Audrey's soothing voice and watching their kids grow up, not side-by-side but rather with husbands in the middle. Hermione didn't want to shake everything up. She loved her stability and maybe she was being a coward but wasn't it right to be faithful? Wasn't it right to keep harmful desires to themselves? You didn't tell a homicidal maniac like Bellatrix Lestrange to open fire on what she believed to be scum because it made her happy. No, you told her to go to Azkaban and have fun with the Dementors.
In the dictionary, as Hermione flipped through a thousand times, daring means bold and courageous but while she was both of those things, she wasn't the other adjective the massive book used: fearless. She could fear as well as any other person but most of the time she faced her fears, her nightmares, head on yet, in this situation she couldn't. She was too scared to shatter her family, could her kids look at her in the same way again? What would Hermione leaving Ron do to him?
But what would Hermione living a lie and leading him on do to him when he found out? Hermione wasn't stupid enough to think that Ron wouldn't find out that he wasn't the center of her universe. What would Audrey say or do? She was married as well and as far as Hermione knew she was as straight as an arrow.
How long could Hermione keep on hurting herself and taunting herself by being around Audrey without telling the other woman her feelings though? She hated being in love, she couldn't predict things or know what was going to happen and most importantly she didn't know everything about what was going on. It wasn't like brewing a potion in Snape's class and being a know-it-all it killed her to admit that she didn't know all the important things, only minuscule book facts.
Hermione was courageous, brilliant, bold, kind, and loyal. She was a part of the Golden Trio and a star example of a strong Gryffindor witch but she wasn't daring and so when Audrey comes over in the afternoons Hermione tries her best not to stare quite so frankly and tries her best not to kiss Audrey, the witty Ravenclaw.
After all, Hermione had a family to hold together and her fear of losing them was like a huge smoldering set of chains suffocating her. She couldn't lose her family, not like her parents. Hermione was never fearless and therefore she was never daring. Audrey deserved daring, not bookworm and pompous Percy Weasley. Hermione wants out of her situation so badly it sends shooting pains through her but those are just the cards life dealt Hermione and she wasn't going to change those things so she had to accept them.
She was never daring and now Hermione feels the price of that but she'll do anything for what she believes is right, even if it means leaving herself raw and wounded for scavengers, her own personal demons, to feast on.