Soldier
Bellatrix is dueling three, and it's all they can do to keep afloat, keep alive to duck and aim and nearly buckle and somehow duck again. Like a memory, Hermione can already see how it will end, whichever side wins, if by some miracle she makes it out intact: the sick smile of weeping, trembling hands clutching at Ron's collarbone. She has kissed him, and alongside his bickering cluelessness will now be not just love but affection, physical affection, fingers tracing her war-thinned waist and lips sprinkling kisses like polka dots across the top of her head; and she will be a vortex for more, too much, too hollow to hold him in.
They are three dueling her, Hermione and Ginny and Luna, and they are soldiers taking blind orders from dead generals: Dumbledore and meaning and God and now Harry too. They are three pawns dueling a grandmaster in a game they have no place playing, and Hermione catches Bellatrix's eye and remembers writhing on the floor beneath her wand, beneath her gaze and the gazes of the Malfoys watching, intruding. She has drunk Bellatrix's hair and slipped into her skin, and it seems fantastical to Hermione now that she ever walked with the gait of the woman who now shoots to kill, cackling madly.
Like a dream, she flashes back to Viktor and to waking up the next morning with an aching between her legs and the pulsating conviction that they were too young to have done what they did. She had shared something with him that she herself hadn't fully understood, had released inhibitions she hadn't realized she'd been holding and let him see her at her most vulnerable; for three days after, her muscles screamed white-hot against every movement she made, and Hermione couldn't visit him in Bulgaria after that, couldn't continue to throw herself into the clutches of something so beyond her. It's the same now with Bellatrix, playing dress-up with Polyjuice and dodging curses meant to rip her apart, but what Bellatrix fails to realize (or perhaps realizes all too well) as that this alone is enough to rip apart Hermione's mind and cast the remains like tumbleweeds into the wind.
Because Bellatrix of all people understands how to create madness from sanity, whether in spite of herself or because of it, and she's seen inside Hermione, oh yes, has set her shrieking and sobbing with the flick of a wand, and she sometimes screamed alongside her, sometimes even louder, and other times stood back and watched Hermione devolve with a quiet upturn to her lips. Yes, Bellatrix is an expert at madness, must have known that nothing would haunt Hermione worse than to reproduce that burn between her legs, magnified a thousand times, with every Cruciatus she cast. She whimpered. Hermione whimpered between the screams, slowly losing consciousness on the Malfoys' floor before half of Voldemort's inner circle, and it was that much worse with everyone there, tearing away any semblance of privacy for this sickeningly intimate moment between herself and Bellatrix, and when it was over she collected the hair on her robes like she was assembling a rape kit and drank what she couldn't say.
She could plaster on Bellatrix's black eyes and white face, but Hermione never could replicate her essence, her torturous smile. She stripped off her pajamas in the bathroom of Shell Cottage, a pair of robes that could pass as the Death Eater's folded and resting on the edge of the sink, and she guzzled the potion and stared in fascinated horror at the changing shapes of her legs, her breasts, her hands. Then she crossed to the mirror and stood naked before it, the face of Bellatrix Lestrange staring back at her with such paralyzing terror as one would never expect Bellatrix Lestrange to wear, and at last Hermione set her jaw and threw on clean robes and dragged herself back to reality.
They are three dueling her, but to Hermione it is only Bellatrix and she, and Bellatrix is hers and Hermione knows that she will not recover from this and then the Killing Curse scrapes an inch shy of Ginny's cheek and Molly Weasley is throwing them all out of the way and Bellatrix is falling, falling, falling—
A/N: Merry Christmas, M. love E