For Sophie.
WC: 500
Ron and Lavender are standing on a table, as if on a stage. His hands are resting on Lavender's hips, and those hips are coming closer. Gryffindor's screaming so loud that Hermione can barely hear herself think, but over all this noise she can hear her blood rushing to her ears.
The lights are not all on upstairs when she stumbles away from the crowd.
She should have expected it. She should have expected that Lavender would lean into Ron's lips with a smile.
Oh, god, Hermione hates herself as she crawls outside, trying to leave her heart back in the room so it can't follow her. It's going to be difficult for her to turn off the faucet once it starts, and she can't afford for that to happen, not now.
Hermione's vision blurs as she makes it out to the steps and suddenly she's tumbling, and now her knees and elbows hurt as well.
Of course this would happen. Get a grip, Hermione, she tells herself.
She wipes her eyes and props herself up on the steps, cradling her sore limbs. And realizing how stupid the situation is, she lets escape a self-pitying sob.
Pushing her head into her hands and feeling grateful for her long, bushy hair, Hermione focuses on breathing. It is as if she has forgotten how.
"I'm a mess," she says, her voice thick.
Her chest stops contracting on its own accord, so she inhales deeply. Her breath catches itself like a car that isn't sure if it should brake or accelerate.
She wipes away her slobber and snot with her sleeve, and her shoulders stop heaving.
Quickly, she wipes her eyes. "Silly me," she mutters to herself. "Why would I get upset about such a thing?"
The answers come unbidden, opening a dam that she wasn't sure was this weak. Hermione feels her eyes filling again, so she looks towards the sky to get the tears to recede into her eyeballs. She knows that that's not how human anatomy works, but it helps anyway.
The answers scream in her head, as they usually do, but this time, she can't shoot her hand in the air to blurt them out, not when she's keeping this secret.
Hermione imagines that her palms would fit perfectly in the curves of Lavender's hips, that they would rest right above the bone and it would feel like home.
She imagines that Lavender would laugh at her jokes and would find her witty, and that they would lie on the lawn and stare at the sky, and they'd talk about how the clouds reflect where they want to go.
She imagines that Lavender's girlishness would contrast with her own sense of femininity like petals to a stem. Hermione imagines that it would feel complete, not wrong.
Of course, Lavender won't return those feelings, and now Hermione has all the proof she needs.
So, feeling a little bit more in control of the truth, she pastes her heart back together.
