A Prohibition Against Sodomy and Sapphism

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law. -Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524

We all find our own ways to cope. The most rational means by which one copes is through problem-solving thinking; unfortunately, people are not rational. (War is not rational.) According to Freud—and Hermione knows Freud, as she has conscientiously kept abreast of the coursework of her muggle peers. She was slated to take the A-levels in the spring except…she couldn't make the appointment—but according to Freud, when problem-solving strategies fail us (as they are wont to do, brutes that we are) a range of defense mechanisms are triggered. Basically, defense mechanisms serve to protect us from ourselves by distorting reality into something manageable for our fragile psyches.

One such strategy would be displacement. Because she can find no constructive outlet for her anger…she'll kick her cat. Surely, Crookshanks is not the dark lord, nor in any way responsible for his atrocities, but there's just something cathartic about kicking something. Still, when all is said and done, she's left with both unresolved anger and a disgruntled cat to contend with.

Another would be projection. She could say "Why mother, you look knackered. Your post-traumatic-stress-disorder must be acting up again" or "Oh father, your flashbacks of innocent people being eviscerated by a sadistic, reptilian mad-man are really interfering with your productivity."

Rationalization—"it's all in God's plan. God wanted unmitigated death begetting unmitigated suffering." Well, God's an unmitigated sadist.

Reaction Formation—instead of huddling under her desk in a fetal position and crying until her head aches she'll…do a merry jig.

Regression—she'll regress into her childhood. Her jubilant childhood of…almost being bludgeoned to death by a troll, eaten by a werewolf, given a myocardial infarction by a basilisk—Oh, those carefree days of simplicity and gaiety.

Repression—and not in the fun, Victorian novel way where eventually she breaks down Mr. Darcy's emotional walls, and his dour, acerbic disposition yields to soft kisses and fluffy bunny rabbits. No, this is denial's second cousin. Haven't seen each other since repression was "this big", but was invited to the wedding anyway. She'd push uncomfortable thoughts (death, anger, guilt) and images (green, distended stomach, smoking hole in a shattered skull, a cold death's head leering) down into her subconscious, so that she's surprised when she jumps at the word 'war' (common these days, what with the American incursions into the Middle East) or sweats at the sight of blood.

Sublimation—burning away her problems in a gaudy glass bowl and exhaling them with the cannabis. Or fucking until she's limp. Drugs come in innumerable colors, consistencies and ecstasies.

Denial—never happened. No war. No Voldemort. No death heads staring at her with startling vacancy, evil smoldering behind that inert metal mask. Smoke should have been wafting out of the eye holes. And no hope for pity or reprieve, just promises…

And finally, her preferred method of deferring her angst—intellectualization. Taking an objective viewpoint devoid of emotional content. How utterly…predictable. But that's who she is. The cool-headed intellectual. A bastion of sense amongst delirious emotions. Yes, there was pain and death and loss—but who is she to indulge in despair? Just the other day, she heard on the telly about a Bangladeshi orphan whose family was killed by the tsunami, whose aunt sold her to a pimp for the equivalent of two pound thirty, and whose virginity will be sold to the highest bidder when she reaches menarche. Who is Hermione to indulge in tears when she has her life, her freedom, her family, potable water, education…and a telly with 200 channels through which she can watch their suffering—or Wife Swap? No, she doesn't deserve the luxury of grief. She's actually rather proud of herself. Her eyes have been dry as the Kalahari through this whole ordeal…but isn't that just a little odd? Not to cry. Not even for her friends. To move on so quickly like their lives had been written on water in her soul. Maybe she can't feel anymore. Maybe she never could. Maybe her friends were nothing but convenient ego boosts—tools to make her feel needed. Something to stopper her own insecurities.

To cry now—it would be like trying to retch up her own stomach.

BRRRING BRRRING She nearly jumps out of her skin as the phone tremors beside her. Sudden, loud noises have always made her sympathetic nervous system twitch, but now the physical excitation is so acute that her stomach churns nauseas and her heart palpitates.

BRRRING the phone continues. No one's picked up. Mum and Dad must be out. Probably intended for them anyway, but still, she could take the message.

She plucks the phone off the receiver, a chintzy Hello Kitty number purchased before Hogwarts.

"Hello, Granger residence," she says in her painfully put-on phone voice.

"Hermione?" a young woman's voice answers with more familiarity than Hermione can claim.

"Sorry, who's speaking?" She fells a pang of guilt for not recognizing the choice that has done the courtesy of recognizing hers.

"It's Becks," she says, with a kind of finality that suggests that this hint should be enough for Hermione. She scrolls through her mental rolodex, which has become rather short and dusty from disuse, but registers no recognition of "Becks" under the B's. When Hermione remains silent, she continues, "Miss Mee's maths class. Hucknall International School."

The fragments coalesce into the time-blurred outline of a girl with straw-colored hair, (frequently unbrushed and tucked under a brash blue beret) and a blushing pink Tinkerbell jumper covered in ketchup stains and frequently reeking of Febreze, as she insisted on wearing that rag every bloody day. Yes, Becks Crossman. She and Hermione used to play role-play during lunch. When she and Becks played house, neither wanted to play the mommy, so they both played the daddy. Trangenderism and alternative families—oh, had her Hogwarts friends seen her then.

Ironically, Hermione feels that she possessed far more imagination in muggle schools than at Hogwarts. Imagination functions much more smoothly when unpressured by the possibility of realization. For example, it is much easier to fantasize about trolls and snakes and pixies—until you realize that all three have attempted to maim and/or kill you. And aside from that, systematizing magic has muted her enthusiasm for it. To an eleven-year-old, magic is a source of wonder, but squeezing it into an intellectual framework makes it…not magic. It's technology. But not. It's technology without a discernable mechanism—like giving a Playstation to a caveman. Philosophical fulminations aside, it's refreshing to hear a voice not laden with pity for the "sad state of things."

"Oh Becks!" she replies, with perhaps an inappropriate measure of enthusiasm. "Grand to hear from you!"

"Yeah, we thought you were dead or something. Your parents said something about a boarding school in Scotland, but we never saw you, even during the hols, so we just assumed that they'd cut you up into little pieces and put you in the walls."

Hermione feels somewhat abashed. She hadn't bothered to contact anyone from her former school, though she hadn't expected anyone to care. They used to call her a teacher's pet—and maybe she was. Maybe she should have remained one. Here. Then at least she'd have a future. Now she's just got the diffuse fragments of her eleven-year-old self to reconcile with the woman she's become in a parallel world. And worse—she can't be either one. It's as if she was in a car accident seven years ago, spent the intervening time in a persistent vegetative state, and has awoken to womanly expectations when all she'd like to do is dream again. Well, dreams are ephemeral. Isn't that right?

"I'm sorry. I should have said something."

"No worries, mate. Anyway, I'd've left Hucknall in a heartbeat if I had the opportunity."

"Well, I'm sure that you're going to University this fall, so that should get you out." The emphasis on "sure" sounds insufferably presumptive, and of course her regrets are immediately rewarded.

"Erm, no, actually." Hermione isn't sure whether Becks's tone is sardonic. Hermione feels she deserves derision, so she'll assume so. "UL rejected me," Becks continues with palpable irritation, as if Hermione were the personification of UL at which Becks could vent her frustrations.

"Well, you know, you're a gifted student, but UL maintains high standards—"she pauses, realizing that her words probably bear a close resemblance to Becks' rejection letter. "—too high, if you ask me." She says in words ransacked from the cinema. The tone shift is painfully artificial, but she presses on. "I'm not going to university either. I couldn't even get into Nottingham." All true, in an equivocating kind of way.

"So what are you going to do?" Becks asks, tone neutral. Hermione is crap at lying.

"I'm probably going to…work." And what the hell do people her age do for employment? From what she's seen, they either go to university or become rowdy knuckle-draggers, smoking fags, getting sloshed and sitting on the pavement making obscene comments to passers-by. At any rate, Hermione hopes that her response would be adequate.

"Oh really, where are you going to work?"

And here is the pivotal moment which will determine whether the conversation continues, or Becks suddenly remembers that she left the kettle on.—Why care? Having faced death….many times, it seems as if approval should be a triviality—should, of course, being the operative word. Hermione feels as if there's perspective to be gained from her experiences—it's just beyond her. And why should she? She's eighteen years old and terribly lonely and facing the possibility of having to seek employment in the subsequent months, because her parents are awfully understanding—fussing over her, constantly asking if she's all right—right now. But there will be a day—maybe in six weeks, maybe in six months, when they tell her that "yes, we said that everyone grieves at their own pace, but even grief has deadlines. There's a point at which we'll cease to sympathize with you, and start agitating for you to move on. Partially because we're anxious that you won't recover fully, and mostly because this traumatic experience is something we cannot share with you nor relate to, and it's exhausting to tiptoe around this pain that we cannot comprehend. So just—move on!" Fine. Just fine. She'll be well moved on before that day arrives.

"I don't know, but I'd like to work in a pub."

"A pub? Wicked. What can you make?" A quick spike of interest blips across Becks's hitherto flat interest line.

"Erm, I don't really know how to make anything." Hermione confesses, nervously, already wishing farewell to that transient sense of connection.

"Oh, that's all right. I'm useless at making drinks, too. I just turned eighteen last week, and it was wine bars and nicked vodka before that."

"Yeah, same here," Hermione returns eagerly. "Wine bars and smuggled firewhisky."

"Sorry?"

"Firew—oh, you probably don't have that here…in Nottingham. Must be a local thing…in Scotland." Hermione couldn't be more squirrelly if she tried. Well, maybe if she spelled back her buck teeth.

"Sounds great. Did you bring any back with you?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Oh…"

Oh no!—a lull. Hermione had not anticipated this. Silence transpires during which Hermione cannot form a narrower question that So…what have you been doing these past seven years? Thankfully, Becks takes the initiative.

"Are you one a facebook?"

"Pardon?"

"Not on facebook yet? They just made it public, so most people haven't switched yet. I think it's better than MySpace, though, because there's a lot more privacy and you don't have to listen to any annoying music on peoples' profiles. What's your handle?"

"I'm sorry, but I can't say that I understand what you're saying?"

"Wot, were you in another world in that boarding school?"

"You have no idea."

"Well, how about your mobile? I'll give you a ring."

"I don't have a mobile."

"No mobile!? How can you send covert messages during class? Annoy your friends with your tasteless ringtones?"

Hermione grins at the thought of texting Harry during potions. "imho snape is a h8r…gtg p0710n b0111ng 0v3r."

Her chest constricts. Like there's a hard gall at the base of her esophagus threatening to swivel up and out her mouth, her eyes. She couldn't be that innocent again. She misses a time when the prospect of a scolding was terrifying. (And, strangely, she wishes Snape were alive to scold her. Just to remind her of who she is.) But that's not what muggle Hermione is meant to understand. She'll be subject to that kind of scrutiny for the rest of her life from employers, landlords, friends—and she can't just scream, "I'm Hermione-fucking-Granger and I was homeless in the bloody, sodding woods for months. I started fighting sadistic, hardened death eaters when my peers' greatest worry was drivers examinations. All to save your sorry rectum from a muggle Auschwitz, so just SHUT UP!" No, she's liable to be thrown into a psychiatric facility if she brings that up…

It's not fair! She doesn't want medals or accolades or even recognition for what she's done—she just doesn't want to be alone with her experiences. She'd just like to tell someone, anyone—war heroes tell people like Larry King, but she's perfectly content with a psychiatrist. But babbling about a resurrected reptilian mad-man who kills people with a stick—well, now we're back to Thorazine and doors that lock from the outside. Maybe if she'd been smarter, worked faster, hadn't been so self-involved and narrow-minded, hadn't gotten distracted by Ron—maybe they would have solved the riddle before the Ministry had collapsed. Before the anarchy, the riots, the factions…

She hears a muffled sob. She wonders briefly if she's finally crying, but then she realizes that the sobs have issued from the other end of the line.

"Why are you crying?" Becks chokes on her own attempt to talk straight.

"Why are you crying?" Hermione echoes.

"I—my—" sobs swallow her words, but she holds together the shattered fragments of her voice long enough to say, "Pappelwick graveyard."

"When?"

"Now." The phone clicks on the receiver.

Hermione hangs up, suddenly overwhelmed with nausea. Her head feels heavy, and her skin prickles cold. Her blood vacates her body and she's filled with something less substantial—like polystyrene. Ready to crumble.

She throws on a jumper and shoes. Automatically, her hand slides open her left desk drawer, where her wand lies inert and diagonal to fit. She reaches for it, but her fingers curl in involuntarily. No she decides, she's rather leave the past at home, at least for a few hours.

She slams the drawer shut with a curious mixture of elation and guilt. She feels oddly like a child shutting a cat into a closet. And when the door closes behind her, she pauses and pats down her pockets. She's fully clothed, but she feels oddly exposed. Like there's a hole in the back-side of her trousers.

Shrugging it off, she sprints to graveyard.

Hermione hits the pavement at a sprint. She could have asked if Becks has a license. Though "now" seemed to imply that she had some immediate means of conveyance to the graveyard. Or maybe she lives next to it. Frightening thought—Hermione had always been afraid of living near graveyards. She was (irrationally) afraid that the dead would rise one night and her house would be the first in the zombies' path of destruction. But anyway, Hermione cannot be certain if Becks lives close to the graveyard, as she's never actually seen Becks's house. At any rate, Hermione lives nearly a kilometer away.

As her chest seizes up and her breathing wears ragged, she dearly wishes that she had just apparated. No, she couldn't apparate. At half twelve in such a public place?

…Though just the thought of it makes her dizzy. Magic, that is. Not that she'd avoid it. That's absurd. She just…needs to become reacquainted with her muggle existence. Ever since, well, Hermione has been in limbo as to her position in the wizarding world. She hasn't graduated. The infrastructure's in shambles. She just couldn't stay. Thus, while her life there remains in question, she must prepare for the possibility of re-entering the muggle world. Not that the transition would be seamless. Not at all. The adjustment she would have to make—first, she effectively dropped out of the English educational system at the age of eleven, and even though she has been playing catch-up these past few months, her A-level scores wouldn't be sufficient for the Oxbridge system. Not to mention, she has no legitimate grades to submit and she doubts that her "Excellents" from Hogwarts would transfer. It's strange that the pursuits to which she has attached her cognizant life have so abruptly dead-ended. It's disconcerting, but if there's one lesson she can take from this, it's that her avenue to success was contingent upon the survival of the institutions that supported the roles for which she was training. She feels like Okonkwo from Things Fall Apart He was so heavily invested in the old ways of his tribe, that when the colonists came, he was unable to cope with the changes they wrought. And how did he solve his problems?—beat his wives and hanged himself. Well, that lesson wasn't terribly profound.

…but we can only take away narrow lessons for ourselves. Everyone already knows the big ones. They're timeless. There's a parable for every big lesson. They're collective property—a cultural inheritance that parents, pop culture and literature passes on like an heirloom. You never learn the big lessons—it's just feeling what the morality tales have told you. So that when you feel those lessons, the feeling isn't discovery—it's more like a kind of completion. Satisfying circularity. The comfort of fitting into a world that others have comprehended. Not feeling alone…

Hermione stops at the graveyard gate, body bending in half, like a shutter clapping shut on its hinge. Her chest, her belly, her whole torso seems to expand with her panting. Leaning against the rusty wrought iron gate, she feels her muscles get heavy, as if big pockets of bloated blood were settling in her limbs.

She tests the gate, which groans like a demented old man disturbed from his nap. Despite its dilapidation, it refuses to budge.

"Hermione!" Becks voice calls from the other side of the fence. She cracks on the second syllable. Must have been crying.

Straining through the bars, Hermione locates the source of the greeting. Sitting cross-legged on a weathered, above-ground sarcophagus sits Becks. She rises, and meets Hermione at the gate.

She's grown, Becks has. Long blonde hair haphazardly tied back in a braid. Tall, for a girl. And possessing a defined, curvy figure which makes Hermione self-conscious about her own boy-straight body. Absurdly, Becks's looks cement a wall between them. Pretty people have always seemed somewhat unapproachable to Hermione.

"Grand to see you," says Hermione, with nervous enthusiasm.

"Yeah, me too."

"Erm, the gate's locked."

"Yeah." Becks says, as if the answer to Hermione's indirect question is self-evident. Hermione hates self-evident answers. They make her look like an idiot when she doesn't know them.

"Well, have you got a key or something?"

"A key? Just jump it."

Hermione glances up the rusted iron fence. It's taller than she is, and topped with edges that are blunt—unless one were to slip while climbing the fence. Then they'd do a decent job of impaling her. Now Hermione dearly wishes she had brought her wand. An alohomora and an obliviate would get her inside without a problem. She never realized how dependent she was on such a flimsy little stick. Wands: the power to kill—but liable to snap like a pencil if you sit on it.

"It's too high, I can't reach the top." She stretches her arm up and stands on her tiptoes to demonstrate her inability to scale said fence. Not that it would solve the immediate problem of getting in, but maybe Becks would decide to meet Hermione elsewhere.

"Just stand on the gravestone there and throw your leg over the crossbar." She says in a tone which is friendly, but nonetheless suggests that anyone who fails at said endeavor is grievously inept.

"Right."

The aforementioned gravestone is composed largely of weathered, crumbling sandstone, and whose extensive erosion suggests that it was erected in the eighteenth century—and probably not as a footstool.

Swallowing, Hermione puts one saddle-shoe'd foot on the headstone and grabs two parallel bars. Her soles are too smooth for this—the absence of traction is palpable in the precarious sliding of her heel as she fully mounts the gravestone.

From this height, the cross-bar is chest high, and yes, she's afraid. Spiders, giants, Cerberus—bring them on! She feels safe with a wand in her hand no matter what she's pointing it at. But heights—it's funny, she could break her neck and die and the headline in the Prophet tomorrow would be "War Hero Hermione Granger Dies Falling off Fence."

That is, if the Prophet were still printing.

Her mouth is dry and her hands are shaking. Her palms are slick on the iron bars, and she knows she can't trust them to hold her firm.

"Hurry up, then," says Becks, with an edge of impatience.

Hermione swings her foot onto the cross-bar, bears her weight down on it, and hoists herself up. The spikes are eye level, and Hermione can't shake the image of her eyeballs impaled on the heads. Like St. Lucy—except far more prosaic. At least she got to be martyred. The only cause she's being martyred for is social approval—but that makes her no different than any testosterone-laden troglodyte who's crashed his riced-out Civic in the middle of an illicit street race—except, here also, she is far more prosaic.

Mounting the bar, she suddenly realizes that the maneuvers by which she would need to scale the bar are rather perilous. She's hanging in the air, one foot planted on the cross-bar, two slippery palms gripping parallel bars, and posterior hanging in the air like a drooping cloud, afraid to commit her weight to the narrow, rusted cross-bar.

"I can't do it," she bursts.

"Yes, you can. Just—hop over!"

"Well, how did you get over?" Hermione blurts, as if Becks's claim to having scaled the fence has merely been a ruse to trick her into humiliating herself in attempting to climb it and really Becks has had a key all along. Hermione dearly wishes were the case—then at least there would be an alternate entrance into the graveyard.

"I can't," she repeats, voice tightening, and tears swelling in her eyes.

"Shh, someone will hear you."

Hermione chokes down her tears, and shakily commits her weight to the cross-bar. She's crouching now, perched like a raven on a telephone pole, hands on either side of her clutching the fence posts for dear life. She can't stand, the bars don't reach high enough to steady her.

Summoning her courage, or at least her fortitude, she learns forward to jump—and stops short, grasping the bars so tight her palms are sore from the pressure.

"Jump!" Becks shouts. It's unnecessary to shout from this distance, but of course the increase in volume is due more to irritation than concern over making herself heard.

On this prompting, Hermione closes her eyes (a foolish idea) and falls forward. At the last moment, she makes another grab for the bars, but too much of her weight has tilted forward, and only one hand in successful, while the other twists, awkwardly falling down, down and making the bar slip out of her grasp. One of the iron spikes catches her jeans, ripping through the material and tearing a jagged laceration across her calf.

She hits the ground with an audible thump which in some ways is more sickening than the physical impact of the fall. The impact knocks the wind out of her chest.

"Are you all right?"

Why do people only ask that question when you're quite obviously not all right? The question really is: are you too maimed for me to continue this social encounter without fussing over your injuries?

"F—" she coughs a shock of air into her lungs, "Fine. I'm fine."

"Nice cut there," says Becks, as if complimenting a new designer purse. (Oh thanks, it's one of a kind..)

Hermione sits up, and peeps through the gash in her ruined jeans. The cut's raw, but not deep. She can heal it (and mend her trousers) when she gets home.

"You coming?" Becks has seated herself on the same stone sarcophagus.

Hermione struggles to her feet, pain searing her calf, but she's determined not to reveal the extent to which she has damaged herself.

Seeing no convenient place adjacent to the sarcophagus, and being unwilling to plop herself down into the wet, grave-mud grass, she sits beside Becks. The stale adrenaline in her veins is making her head foggy. She can't remember why she's come here. Consequently, she can't think of anything substantive to say.

"You're not wearing your jumper," she says, straining for familiarity.

"I'm sorry?"

"The jumper you wore every day."

"I don't…Oh, wait, I remember. The Man-U one, right?"

"No, the…never mind."

Hermione feels grieved that Tinkerbell has been supplanted by Manchester United. Moreover, she feels a strange sympathetic connection to Tinkerbell as one discarded, part of a dim past that young adults so earnestly struggle to bury. But Hermione made her decision, and really she was the one who discarded this life in favor of Hogwarts. She just never believed that she would be called to reckon for it.

In the silence of the crowded graves, Hermione hears a sob. The purpose for this meeting returns to her with a shock—like waking up from pleasant dreams, and realizing that you're real and you've got a funeral to go to that day.

Becks sobs, and Hermione wonders what has addled her so. Friends talking ill of her behind her back? Parents being over-protective? Boyfriend cheated on her? Hermione dearly wishes that her experiences were narrow enough to cry over such trivialities.

Life's a cup, you know. And your experiences are water. Experiences are always the same volume, but the cup…it grows. So, things like that might make Becks's cup overflow and she cries and cries the tears of it, but Hermione's cup, well, such things are shallow, half-evaporated puddles at the base of her life.

That doesn't make Becks wrong, because no one deserves to have perspective like Hermione has at her age. She wants to cry about stupid things, sometimes. She misses Ron. Can't she cry about that? His family went into hiding and he can't contact her without potentially compromising their location. Isn't she important? Doesn't he trust her?—stupid question, really. They braved the apocalypse together, but she's eighteen, so they don't treat her like an adult. What does it take to earn approval? She knows that Harry wouldn't be bitter like this—but she and Ron have always been Harry's foils. Close, but defective. Best of intentions, but lacking a certain something that makes Harry the messiah. Peters and Thomases to Harry's Jesus.

--life isn't fair, and she's still young enough to believe it should be. Maybe that's why they still don't trust her fully. Idealism is dangerous these days.

Despite herself, she harmonizes with Becks—sobs with sobs. Hermione's real griefs are too big to cry, so she'll cry for the small things. Cry for the stupid, juvenile, petulant things.

Becks throws her arms around Hermione, and Hermione doesn't care. It feels good not to be alone with tears. That only doubles your grief. You cry for what you're crying about, then you cry because you're alone. And the warmth of someone else feels soothing, even if she smells like stale fags and cheap perfume. She returns the embrace, crying buckets on the shoulder of Becks's jumper.

There's something that bonds women crying, something where you don't need to say what's wrong—it's sufficient just to be connected in your grief. They cry like that for a long time inside that limbo where time feels like an eternity because purging your demons always feels like it takes years, when in reality, it's probably only five minutes.

It takes a moment for Hermione to notice the fingertips peeking under the hem of her t-shirt. They're cold on her back. She's ambivalent about them. She ignores them.

The fingertips slide up her back, till fingers, a palm and a narrow wrist have also wormed their way between her lower back and t-shirt. The palm and wrist are warm, and together all parts of her hand stroke Hermione's back. Every tendril of Hermione's body rears up at the touch.

By now, her tears have stopped, and by the evenness of Becks's breath, she imagines that her grief has also abated.

The hand lingers at the base of her spine, lazily stroking up and down and around and basically coaxing every jot of physical stimulation out of Hermione's lower back possible. And more. The gentle strokes have raised goose bumps on Hermione's flesh, making her even more sensitive.

She feels like she's in a trance. Like the world's narrowed to tunnel vision and there's nothing precise except for physical sensations. It's easier that way.

The fingers inch up her spine, teasing out pleasure where Hermione had never known it to exist before. Pleasure radiating out from her spine. Pleasure wrapping around her ribs. Pleasure like a fishhook grabbing directly for her nether regions. She's suddenly quite aware of her pulse down there, throbbing dully like a faint heartbeat.

[Over Becks's shoulder she spies the name on the gravestone. Jonathan Hathaway III. She doesn't imagine that Jonathan Hathaway III would be terribly pleased with the unnatural acts currently occurring two meters from his mortal remains. She stifles the thought and squeezes her eyes shut.

Warm, tapering fingers brush the curves of her ribs slowly inward, making Hermione acutely aware of her breasts, in a physical sense. As if within her dense network of nerves the dormant mesh of nerve endings in her breasts have suddenly fired-up, buzzing with activity. With want. With need. Arching up for physical stimulation to match her feverish anticipation.

The fingers trace a circular pattern, looping inward and outward in ellipses of greater and greater eccentricity—meaning, in absurdly academic terms, that the caresses sweep nearer and nearer to her multitude of fibrous axon terminals writhing in unison—but it's excruciating. To know want without a floor or ceiling. A stray digit peeps over the goosefleshed mound of her breast and she wants to scream.

Amid the silent graves, she can hear herself panting.

With agonizing lethargy, the finger slides away and the seconds dilate to staccato eternities as she waits and waits for it to arc back inwardly. Lazily, it circles back around, and her neurons stretch their limits to meet it and she swears she could hear the hyperactive thumping of her heart palpitations. But the finger falls away.

Hermione's throat clenches tight as a withered vine and she has never felt a more visceral imperative to cry and cry and cry.

"Beg me for it." A whisper harsh in Hermione's ear, sharp with gravelly shards that flay as they grind into her.

Her feelings are…conflicted. Like she's being called a mudblood, but…something else. Like that same voice is promising her anything she wants if she'll agree. And everything Hermione represents to herself is offended, but for the first time she feels that she's being forced to reckon with everything she refuses to admit to be. And she rather liked the feelings those fingers inspired, and even more so she enjoyed the moral immunity that came from closing her eyes and just feeling it without naming it. She could have gone on that way, for…who knows how long. She could have.

But the moment has far too much momentum to stop now.

"Please—please touch me." She pleads to the base of a golden ponytail. She feels threadbare—words being wrung out of her.

"Where?" And it's the most difficult question ever posed to Hermione, not for the elusiveness of the answer. Oh no, that would never be a problem for her. It's the humiliation of answering it. It's admitting that she has sexual anatomy, and yes, she's connected to it. And in this moment, controlled by it…

It's that potential that frightens her, the potential that there's a realm of her existence where her mind is obsolete. She so prides herself on her mind that maybe she's useless where she can't apply it…but she wants.

"My breasts." Hermione shuts her eyes and crushes her face into the fags and cheap perfume of the jumper—into the curiously narrow, feminine shoulder.

The moment she speaks, the hand which had been lingering, splayed across her ribs, creeps forward and cups her breast. The suddenness and fullness of the contact makes her breath catch, her exhale trills on its heels as her skin reverberates in response.

Soft fingers caress her skin, making her shiver from the core., and the warm vibrations of pleasure resonate deep inside her—in her breasts, her stomach, her…crotch. And though Hermione feels awful comparing them, the care and meticulousness of the caresses is much more pleasant than Ron kneading her breast like raw dough through her jumper. He only tried once, but it was miserable, and made her dismiss her breasts as an erogenous zone outright. She couldn't help but to feel violated—what with his clumsiness, his lecherous eagerness (something she's always despised—when a perfectly rational young man becomes a grunting Neanderthal in the presence of two lumps of fatty tissue.) And because of that, it was easier to say no. She even felt proud of herself for it. Repressing her sexual desires was nothing at all. Nothing—until she actually felt sexual desire.

Her nipples pulse like beacons on her electrified nerves, straining upward for something tactile. The warm, blood-plump pad of an errant forefinger brushes the peak and her spine shudders into a curve, arching toward that touch, but only trapping the hand between their chests. Hermione draws back, careful to leave sufficient space for the hand to maneuver, but unwilling to draw back enough to meet her face…

It total, she's bent her spine into a comical quarter-circle that hurts to maintain, but she wants—

"You didn't tell me to touch you there," is the response to her contortions. The voice is louder than a whisper, and consequently far smoother, more feminine. She knows it's a girl wielding this power over her, and it excites her. Excites her in ways she knows Ron (or any other male, for that matter) couldn't. Excites her in ways that make her feel like she's not being victimized. Excites her because her sexuality's safe, and for the first time she feels some modicum of control. And refreshingly, not as the antagonist.

And she could say it, but the word 'nipple' has always sounded ridiculous, even in her thoughts. And there's no safe euphemism for it, no medical terminology on a more comprehensible level than mammary papilla. If the word were less…strange, then maybe she would feel less self-conscious about them. Maybe by extension she believes that her nipples are ridiculous. Damned loaded words—loaded with repressive cultural inheritance.

But doesn't intellectualizing just make it so worse—yes, ridiculous as it sounds, then "Touch my nipple."

Becks takes Hermione's nipple between her thumb and forefinger, gently as if she were plucking a flower by the stem. Classical conditioning. Hermione moans now, feeling as if the wispy tendrils of her nerves were dancing like reeds caught in a strong wind, enlivening every inch of her skin all radiating from her breast—and she wants more. Much more.

She bites her lip, and minutely jerks her shoulder, so that her nipple is clenched in a momentarily tighter grip. After a moment, her stratagem is detected and Becks says, "Oh, very clever. But you've got to ask." She says it in the same volume and timbre as her speaking voice—but the tone…it's mocking. Assured. Something about it makes Hermione suddenly conscious of the clamminess between her legs.

And because of classical conditioning (asking yielding pleasure) she could ask, but something besides modesty tethers her to silence. It's shame—for wanting what she wants. For asking for it. For breaking down and being selfish for just one moment. For being weak.

…but she deserves it. She deserves a moment of weakness. There's nothing to sacrifice for right now, just the rest of her life stretching past horizons that recede further and further the closer she comes…

Yes, this is her life now. And right now—she just wants her nipples teased.

"Squeeze them," she says so low, she's almost growling. She feels possessed. She loves it. "Pinch them. Tweak them. Twist them. Hurt me. I don't care."

And Hermione can't speak so earnestly to someone's back, so she pulls back, and sees Becks's face and connects the sensations to a person. To a girl. A girl with amber-green eyes and crooked teeth. A girl whose fantasy has run away from her.

Becks must be taken aback, because there's a long pause where she doesn't move or speak. It unsettles Hermione because she felt comfortable with Becks directing this…whatever it is.

"I—I've…" Becks's hand drops out of Hermione's blouse, guiltily, like she's been caught picking forbidden fruit, and she can almost see the apple dropping, rolling through the grass between the crowded graves. "I've got to go."

Becks shoots up, hurries to the fence and jumps over.

And now Hermione's where she didn't want to be from the beginning—alone and crying.

Hermione slips inside the house as quietly as she can, gently nudging the door shut behind her. It squeaks on the hinges. Damn it. For the third time today, she wishes that she had her wand.

"Hermione," her mother calls from the kitchen.

"Yes, mum?"

Mrs. Granger emerges and upon seeing Hermione's bloodshot eyes and torn jeans, wrings her hands and begins to panic. "Hermione, what happened?"

"I…hurt my leg…so I cried."

Mrs. Granger kneels down to examine the injury. Sure, she's got "Doctor" in front of her name, but she's knows no more about wound care than a housewife.

"Are you sure? I don't see anything. Hermione, what's wrong?"

Hermione turns in her leg for a better view of her calf. Her mother was right. There is not trace of the angry laceration. Not even a red mark to betray its existence. But she hadn't healed it…

"Oh, must have just banged it, then," she says, a little too quickly.

Mrs. Granger begins to speak, but bites down on her words. Hermione carefully side-steps her mother and rushes to her room.