Just a bit of a wee Hermione/Ron timeline type thing. Ending is pretty average haha. It has a happy ending, which was hard to write but I couldn't bear to make it sad. So…yeah.
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"Imagine you're the queen of everything. Falling in and out of love."
[I want to shape the world to fit the way you move]
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They're eleven and she sits in the shade under an oak tree reading one of her hundreds of text books. She is focus and steel and brilliance, her wild mane of curls pulled back off her face.
(This is before Trolls and he-who-must-not-be-named and discrimination and a corrupted government and a WAR. This is before parents who forget who you are and losing friends and falling in love with your best friend who breaks her heart, yet makes her feel whole at the same time. This is before Ron.
This is before Hermione forgot what she was fighting for in the first place.)
It is early summer, the heat is intense and she wishes for a cool breeze or light rain. The sun hangs low and there's a red sky that endlessly stretches.
(In the future she'll consider this symbolism for her generation at Hogwarts and the lives they lost and the blood that was shed.)
She stretches her foot out of the shade of the oak and into the sun and notices the tiny scar on her big toe. She wrinkles her nose. A scar is a flaw and she's supposed to be perfect.
She doesn't notice the lanky red-haired boy down by the lake with the urban legend that is Harry Potter. If she does she ignores it. He is rude and loud and the exact opposite of everything that is her, and therefore irrelevant in her world.
Regardless, this is how it goes.
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This is Hermione at twelve. She is determined and calm. There is intelligence there, too; the twinkle of knowledge, how to use it, who to use it against. But there is also innocence, the kind that prevents her from using her brain to its full ability.
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This is Hermione at fourteen. She is full of uncertainties and self confidence for as a cheap mask that continues slipping as she gains attention from a boy who is just not what she wants.
(She could never kiss him without his black hair fading to red or his brown eyes turning to blue.)
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This is Hermione at seventeen. No longer so innocent, reminded by the horror that surrounds her world that hatred is the one thing that maybe love just can't defeat. Beautiful, the way that makes you ache. The type of girl who is unwilling to betray her best friend, even for the boy she loves. She is loyal and strong and full of wishes and unspoken fears and feelings and about to explode.
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One from eleven to twelve. Two from twelve to fourteen. Three from fourteen to seventeen. What's next?
(She thinks more wars and hatred and a boy she will never quite get over and who will never be brave enough to love her back.)
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At thirteen years old Hermione Granger knows exactly who she is and it is not the type of girl that cries when her best friend is mean to her. She should be used to this. She is used to this.
(So why does it feel like her heart is breaking every time they fight?)
They make up. They always make up.
"I'm sorry," he says, it's all he ever says.
"You're always sorry Ron, how about you just stop bothering to apologise since you don't even care?" She wants him to stop because she's fought and fought and she's tired of fighting.
"Sometimes you have to fight for what you love," and with that he closes their friendship and instead starts something epic. Those words destroyed something that was never really there in the first place.
She pretends she doesn't hear him and they never speak of it again.
(They both think about it every night.)
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Physical violence is not in Hermione's nature. She is the type of girl that does not let her emotion get the better of her and keeps herself calm.
At sixteen she watches the boy she's always loved kiss the girl she's always hated and she thinks that physical pain would hurt less.
He breaks her heart and she sets a flock of canaries at him. It is almost enough.
Even after the whole Lavender fiasco is over with she's still violent towards him. She always has been. During the war she's seen enough violence to last her forever and she hates him because he still evokes such a primal response.
(She hates herself more for turning into a whole other person just for him.)
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The first time he tells her he loves her its an accident. One of those rare perfect days in autumn when everything is covered in mist and they're taking shelter on the swinging chair on his porch. She can only see as far as the edge of the porch then nothing. Its all white and blurry and she wonders if she stepped into it she would just fall off a cliff into nowhere.
They're not fighting.
(It's a pleasant surprise.)
"I love you," like the words weren't even meant to come out of his mouth.
(They weren't.)
She stares at him, afraid to blink. Like catching a rare moment when a butterfly lands she's scared because it's too beautiful to be real and she thinks her heart will just stop.
"You shouldn't." It's the truth after all.
"I do. Always have, always will."
"I love you to."
She kisses him and the world ends.
(It's just the right boy at the right time, but he makes meteors appear.)
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