I wanna love you, but I better not touch (don't touch)

I wanna hold you, but my senses tell me to stop

I wanna kiss you, but I want it too much (too much)

I wanna taste you, but your lips are venomous poison

You're poison, running through my veins

You're poison, I don't want to break these chains

- Poison :: Alice Cooper -

After the war...

There were worse boys she could have lost her virginity to. Ron was kind and caring, and sweet. And as they rose from the rubble after the war, when they brushed themselves off, the new couple seemed to shine like diamonds in the eyes of the wizarding community - a testament to the perseverance of love.

Love.

What did Hermione and Ron know about love?

They were teenagers, pretending to be adults. In the wake of the Battle of Hogwarts, they merely clung to each other for dear life. Ron was mourning the death of Fred, and Lavender, and so many other friends. Hermione was mourning the loss of her parents, by her own hand, to the Obliviate spell.

Shared trauma is like a magpie, mimicking the call of something that sounds similar to love.

As Hogwarts rebuilt, Hermione sought refuge in The Burrow, keeping a room with Ginny, counting the days until she could return to school. It was a place to hide—a shelter where sorrow was accepted as the norm. During the summer, she would often walk with Ron, quietly, as if not to disturb his grief, all the while wishing she could discuss a book or a spell or a newspaper article with him, anything that would keep her brain busy to distract from her own pain. It was in these quiet moments that she fully realized that Ron was not a boy of words. The awareness that her imaginary musings of a life together with him would not contain her ideal daydream of two partners - sharing tea while discussing the latest translation of Cornelius Agrippa's masterworks from the original German - just added to her melancholy. But she carried on.

When they were far enough away from the house, Ron would often pull Hermione into his lap and kiss her with desperation so deep, she could smell it on him like a badger in heat. Sometimes his hands would wander across her skin, and she would yank them from under her jumper, telling him to mind himself, and he would pout like a child. Hermione scolded him that she wanted to wait. Wait for what, she wasn't sure, but something about it all felt wrong. And he acquiesced. What she didn't tell him was that she was so tired and hurt by the trials of war that every time his lips touched her skin, all she felt was pressure, not pleasure.

Then the letters came. They would return to Hogwarts for their last year. Headmistress McGonagall explained in Ron, Harry, and Hermione's correspondence that a team of professors would personally see that the three caught up enough on the classes they missed so they would not feel left behind as they prepared for their N.E.W.T.s at the end of the year. Apparently, the knowledge gained while helping to destroy Voldemort only got a student so far in the eyes of the Hogwarts teaching staff.

And so it came that they humbly returned to the scene of all the final crimes of Voldemort. While the stones looked new, the blood of fallen students seemed to leech into them, permeating every crack and corner. There were notable absences of both the dead and the living.

The house of Slytherin was now nearly empty, save for a few random students in each year. It was rumoured that most of the pure-blood students were finishing their studies at the Duramstag Institute, given haven by Professor Karkaroff. When she heard this, Hermione wondered aloud to her friends how Malfoy and Victor Krum would get on as dormitory mates, causing everyone to make some vulgar comments about the nocturnal habits of disgraced death eaters.

But there were more significant concerns than for their former serpentine classmates. The first night back at Hogwarts, there were screams and cries from veiled beds (Hermione's included) as those who had survived the war succumbed to the terror of being back in the place where it happened. The second night, calming potions were given for all students in need in the hope that some semblance of normality could eventually be achieved. Over the next week, slowly, the cries ceased, and the nights became slightly more bearable.

On the nineteenth of September, Hermione turned 19 years of age. While Harry and Ginny spent breakfast being overly cheerful to her, Ron became extra attentive. Poured her tea in the morning. Passed the bacon to her before taking the rest of the plate for himself. Hermione thought it was part of her birthday celebrations that day, and it helped ease the sadness that came with acknowledging there would be no present from her parents to open this year. Ron reached for her hand just before they headed to classes, presenting her with a new journal, and she thanked him a little too vigorously for his simple gift.

Later that evening, on the way back from a small party in Hagrid's hut, Ginny and Harry continued on to the dorms while Ron pulled her hand down the long corridors of the castle. Hermione was shocked when the Room of Requirement doors appeared along the stone walls, and Ron turned as red as his hair when he bashfully gave her hand a tug to lead her inside. As they entered, she found the room alight with candles, circling an enormous bed with golden posts.

Her first thought was how desperate Ron must be for a shag that he managed to conjure an entire room.

Her second thought was it was, in fact, a tad on the romantic side, and maybe it would distract them both from the pain that still lingered in their hearts.

She didn't remember much after that—the soft edges of memory broken to jagged outlines of trauma once more.

There was kissing. Hermione remembered the kissing. It was kind. Innocent. Hesitant. Unlike the rough desire of the summertime, there was a reverence in Ron's actions. There were clothes shed and words shared, and when Ron kissed her neck, it tickled, and she laughed, and it made him flush deep red again. She admitted later to the Aurors that she had her eyes closed when the sharp pinch of him entering her hit and how she held herself steady against the burning that radiated from between her legs and through her blood to cover every part of her. The only reason she opened her eyes was the pain screaming from her Mudblood scar was too much to ignore, and when she looked above her, she saw Ron's ghostly white face, locked in a state of fear and shock, as if he was making love to a Dementor.

The rest was blurry. The realization that Ron had stopped breathing. Pushing him off her. Trying to save him. Grabbing a sheet and running, screaming into the hallways for help. Staff magically appeared. Somehow there were students. Harry. Ginny. The collective gasp of relief when Ron began breathing again. The sight of him being apparated to St. Muggo's in an instant and the Aurors appearing in the next.

She floated through the rest on a comfortable cloud of Calming Draught, mercifully given to her by the Headmistress. Her sheet was transfigured into a robe as she sat with the Aurors for the next few hours, telling her story repeatedly. At some point, her blood was taken by a female Auror who disappeared in a blinding crack, and when she returned sometime later, she broke the news to Hermione.

She was a succubus.

It was nearly impossible for a muggle-born witch to be a succubus, and Hermione watched as a very heated argument broke out amongst the Aurors about how this could have happened. It was the Headmistress that hypothesized that perhaps it was a blood curse that made Hermione this way. When it was mentioned, Hermione's arm began to throb, and she pulled back her robe to find her scar raised slightly from her skin in irritation as if it had pulse and feelings about the matter discussed.

More research was needed, but all seemed to agree that when Bellatrix carved her arm, she cast a powerful blood spell on Hermione. One that meant engaging in intercourse would kill her partner. McGonagall suspected that Ron's pure-blood status may have had something to do with it, but they couldn't be sure.

It was around then that Hermione began laughing. It started out as a nervous giggle. Surrounded by these men and women, telling her that any man she engaged in intercourse with would end up dead, she actually felt her brain stretch to its final thread and snap. She never wanted to sleep with Ron in the first place, and now, she nearly killed him. A fanny to die for. The obscene words tickled her mind, and she found herself laughing at the thought. Because what else was there to do? She had lost everything. Family. Friends. Why not add lovers to that list?

The Headmistress pressed a vile to Hermione's shaking hand and helped her drink. She woke up in the infirmary a few days later, alone. When she was allowed visitors, to her relief, Ginny somehow managed to have the heart to forgive her best friend for almost accidentally killing her brother. The revelation of what Bellatrix did to Hermione just seemed to add to Harry's post-war anger and grief, and he retreated for a few days to deal with his emotions. But when Hermione walked into the Great Hall for the first time since the incident, to the gasps and whispers of the student body, Harry was the one who jumped from his seat to escort her the rest of the way to sit between himself and Ginny.

And life, for Hermione, moved on.