A/N: Okay, so this one has been a long time coming. A long time. Written for ReillyJade's Unlikely Hermione Pairing Challenge, and inspired into completion by the wonderful Shira Lansys! If it weren't for Shira, I would not be able to drabble. So go say thank you, Shira! Additional prompt provided by Shira: if only.
Prompt: 42. Watch
Pairing: Rita Skeeter/Hermione Granger
She catches you.
Catches you in your own sticky web of lies, slams a glass jar down over your little insect body, and has you trapped.
You never would have thought it of her, this little girl with the bushy hair and the skin as pale as the pages she so loves. She looks young, naïve, and she's fighting on the good side, but she must be twisted in some sort of way because she throws some leaves on top of you, seals the jar, and leaves it next to her bed.
And you are stuck.
(Watching.)
She picks up the jar sometimes, peering in at you with her big, dark eyes with the spider-leg lashes and the glint of sadistic amusement. She watches you watch her.
And in those moment there is an unspoken thought that slides down the legs of her spider-lashes and curls itself around your antennae:
She could kill you.
She could hex this jar and watch the sunlight catch the specks of glass that fly like glitter when it shatters. She could laugh as you hit the ground, trying to remember how to move, how to change, how to run. She could raise her skinny leg and with a crunch! she could crush you.
But, instead, she just watches you.
And just you sit there, trying to learn more and more about the girl with the sarcastic smile and the triumph in her voice. She is nothing like you expected and the more you watch, the more you can't help but love her and hate her at the same time.
Because she's a little too bitter to be made up of those sweet smiles she flaunts, and when you spend your days trading secrets behind hands and enchanted quills, a girl who can lie to the world as readily as this one...she's something special.
It hits you one day that she keeps you here because she hates you. You are the enemy here. For a fleeting moment, you were the bane of her existence. To her, you are the woman who ruined everything.
And that's all you'll ever be.
And, maybe, if you had met a different way... If you were younger, or she older... If you were not as vindictive, as spiteful, if you were good enough...
Alone in the jar, you find yourself thinking if only, imagining the different ways you could have met her.
(And forgetting the way you did).