Summersmut Mod (summersmutmod) wrote in hp_summersmut, @ 2009-08-27 00:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | 2009, fic |
[FIC] Anyone Would Drown :: Luna/Hermione | gift for minervasrevenge
Title: Anyone Would Drown
Author:
Recipient: minervasrevenge
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Luna/Hermione, implied Ron/Hermione
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. The title comes from the song “Liar, Liar” by A Fine Frenzy. No copyright infringement is intended. Both characters are of age in Britain.
Summary: Hermione is reeling after being tortured by Bellatrix. Luna helps her come down.
Warnings: DH-fic, PWP, disturbing imagery, hurt/comfort, cunnilingus, and mutual masturbation.
Word Count: 5,500
Author's Notes: I hope you like this, minervasrevenge! I tried to include romance, drama, and I consider this to be a happy ending all things considered. ^_^ Thanks to my beta and to thescarletwoman for running this fest!
There is a kind of darkness that no nightmare can dredge from the recesses of the unwounded mind. A twisted, bleeding filth that oozes out of madness and stains the righteous. Only the insane can create it, but that’s the problem with insanity. It doesn’t stay contained. It leeches and spreads. It invades. It corrodes the sane until they go bad. If going mad could be manifested physically, perhaps eyeballs would rot and tumble out of skulls, leaving twin hollow pits where bright irises once sparkled with vitality.
Hermione Granger feels as though she has become one of the soiled.
Perhaps it was naïve of her to think that she would survive this war with all her intellect intact. Perhaps she never should have dared to hope that she would emerge as pure as when she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Harry and Ron and declared that she would never leave the so-called Chosen One to fight alone. War breeds the twisting darkness. She imagines starving white rabbits fucking in what she hopes is oil and not blood, and this is proof enough for her that she has been changed. She never used to think like that before. She thinks in words, not images.
But it seems the ministrations of Bellatrix Lestrange has changed the way she thinks. She still hears words coursing through her mind, but they are accompanied by pictures pulled out of the mind of Picasso if he’d painted with razorblades.
When she hears that Dobby is dead, for example, she thinks, “Oh, how terrible, Harry must feel awful, poor Dobby, he was the one who inspired me to found SPEW and now he’s gone, that’s so sad.” But she sees his tiny body rotting beneath the ground. She sees the worms making a feast of his flesh. She sees the clothes he once treasured turning to dust. And she sees him fifty years from now, waking up with no eyes because they were the first course for the dinner of decay. She sees him struggling against the grave Harry dug for him, crying maggots instead of tears and clawing at the dirt with metacarpals now that his skin is gone. He is asking over and over again why Harry Potter let him die, why Harry Potter left him alone, why Harry Potter let Bellatrix lay a hand on poor little Dobby.
If Hermione put any stock in psychology, she’d assume that she was indulging in a bit of transference. But she’s always thought it was a soft science. The human mind is far too complex to be filed into categories as so many doctors would have her believe. Oh, she understands the impulse. It would be so convenient to simply label Harry with a sticker that says ‘abandonment issues’ and Ron with one reading ‘inferiority complex’ and write them off. But there are too many facets, too many variables, and though she’ll admit she sympathizes with Dobby, she certainly doesn’t identify with him.
After all, Dobby died, and she lived. When you look at it that way, they have nothing in common. Nothing at all.
“What are you thinking about?”
Hermione turns, blinking, and remembers that she is not alone. Fleur and Bill have set her up with Luna, who is seated on the bed closest to the door, her legs tucked underneath her like a child awaiting a grandfather’s impossible life story. In a removed sort of way, she finds it a bit hilarious that the newest Mr. and Mrs. Weasley of all people have split them up by gender. They seem more like the type to wink and look the other way while the traumatized teenagers work through their urges and hormones. She wonders if Molly Weasley has some sort of hold over Bill from afar, and then she realizes it’s ridiculous to wonder.
(She sees Molly shoving one of her horrible sweaters down Bill’s mouth, and when it gets stuck, she uses a Sectumsempra to cut his mouth and make it wider, but she misses, and his ear falls off.)
“Hermione?”
She blinks again and forces herself to look at Luna. It turns out to be more difficult than she anticipated. Luna Lovegood has always been a slight girl with a certain fragility, but now it seems as if you could break her hand just by holding it. Not that this is any surprise of course. The Malfoys don’t seem like particularly hospitable hosts if you happen to disagree with their politics. Her grey eyes seem to have faded so that the color can almost be lost among the white, and their protuberant quality has been exaggerated by her sunken cheeks and sun-starved skin.
(She sees Luna’s skin falling off, revealing a skeleton that glows with moonlight and Bellatrix beats sticks against Luna’s ribcage, making music horrifying in its beauty.)
“I’m fine,” Hermione whispers, her voice still raw from screaming.
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“Oh. Well, what did you ask?”
“I asked what you were thinking about,” Luna repeats in her voice that sounds as if it’s been pulled from a dream, “but I think maybe you’re not sure.”
It has been ages since Hermione actually spoke with Luna, and now that she thinks of it, she remembers that she avoids speaking with the Ravenclaw as much as possible. Certainly, she’s gained a bit of respect for the girl’s insight and intuition, but her willingness to believe anything simply because it is said still makes her want to rip her hair out. This is only slightly less annoying than Luna’s brutal honesty.
(She sees herself sewing Luna’s mouth shut with thick, black thread, and throughout the whole process, Luna does not blink and she does not cry. She simply stares with light grey eyes that fade with every stitch until Hermione is staring into two tiny seas of white.)
“I think the wrackspurts have gotten you.”
“Oh, honestly, Luna,” Hermione sighs.
“Does your brain feel a bit fuzzy? Like you’re not thinking the way you ought to? Or perhaps like you can’t quite think at all?”
It isn’t a bad description, Hermione admits, but she knows that Luna’s imaginary animals have absolutely nothing to do with why her brain feels off. She says as much.
Luna tilts her head to the side, and Hermione expects her to blink. She doesn’t think Luna has shut her eyes in a while, and though Luna blinks far less than most people, surely she needs to do so soon.
(She sees Luna ripping her eyelids away so that she can’t blink anymore. Nagini comes slithering up from the shadows, and Luna tosses the oval pieces of flesh down the snake’s gaping jaws. The snake laughs at this folly, but the laugh belongs to Bellatrix.)
“The wrackspurts can get you quite easily when you’re with Bellatrix.”
Before Hermione can stop herself, her shoulders hunch like a convulsion. She feels sick, and her mouth fills with the taste of blood shed hours before and bile threatening to rise here and now, this very minute. She covers her mouth to push it back.
(She sees Bellatrix reaching down her throat and pulling out her still beating heart. Blood pours out of her mouth, creating a private red sea on a marble floor. Bellatrix rolls in it, drinking it down, and laughing, laughing, always laughing.)
An arm winds around her shoulders, pulling her close. She doesn’t know why, but she expects it to be Ron, tall and lanky, but reassuringly solid and warm. She nearly jumps away from a body so thin that it may as well be made of frozen glass.
“Shh, it’s all right,” Luna soothes, her dream-voice lilting and soft. Her palm is a light touch on her shoulder, but it never strays. She doesn’t rub vigorously as Ron or Harry would do. She is steady and unmoving, and though Hermione is unused to the action, she finds that she enjoys the difference.
“I’m sorry that she hurt you,” Luna whispers, resting her head into the crook of Hermione’s neck. “She hurt me to, you know.”
Hermione had no doubt. You can’t dangle a mouse in front of a cat and not expect it to swipe.
“Badly?” Hermione asks. She isn’t sure she really wants to know, but it has always been her curse that she always has to know.
“At first, yes,” Luna says with an ease that makes Hermione doubt this statement, although she doubts Luna really understands the concept of lying outright. “She saw me as her own personal Christmas present, since they took me on December 20th.”
(She sees Bellatrix standing over Luna curled up on the floor of the cellar, throwing up holly berries and mistletoe.)
“She’d sing ‘crucio’ over and over again to the tune of Christmas carols. She preferred religious to secular,” Luna adds. “I suppose she found it ironic.”
Hermione suddenly wishes Ron was there. He’d make a bad joke to defuse the situation, and though she’d swat at him, it would make her feel better.
(She sees Bellatrix sitting on Ron’s corpse as one would a throne. He still has a stupid grin on his face, a grin she pretends to hate but secretly loves. Meanwhile, Bellatrix smiles like a grotesque and Hermione knows without asking that Ron has died for one of those awful jokes.)
Hermione shudders and lets out a strange sound, like a kitten crying. Luna does not tighten her grip, but she continues making sounds that border on music. She doesn’t say anything more about what happened to her at Bellatrix’s hand. Only someone who went through it could understand when not to say too much. Hermione is more grateful than she can ever say for this.
But again, it is Hermione’s curse that she always has to know.
“How did you stand it?” she asks. “How did you stay sane?”
She feels Luna shrug against her. “I don’t know. I think maybe she got bored with me. I never screamed loud enough for her, and I never cried.”
Anyone who didn’t know Luna but who had been on the receiving end of Bellatrix’s tortures would have found this preposterous. But Hermione does know Luna and she accepts this as truth. Hermione has never seen Luna cry. She suspects that she saves her tears for the most important of occasions.
(She sees Bellatrix bottling baby’s tears and mixing it into her blood-red wine which may not be wine.)
“I keep seeing things,” Hermione confessed, driven to honesty by exhaustion or understanding or the taint of madness. “I don’t think in pictures, but I’m seeing things now. Horrible… awful things.” She swallows so hard it feels as if there’s steel in her throat. “I’m scared to go to sleep. If I’m seeing these things when I’m awake…”
Luna nods and brushes Hermione’s damp hair away from her forehead. “The nightmares are terrible,” she says, never pulling any punches. “Mr. Ollivander was very kind on the worst nights. He let me curl up next to him. I don’t know why, but it helped.”
And suddenly, Hermione realizes that she doesn’t want to sleep alone.
She doesn’t ask and Luna doesn’t offer. They simply sit in quiet companionship for a few minutes more before simultaneously laying back. Luna pulls the covers over them and Hermione curls into Luna’s small body. Frightfully small arms encircle her, but Hermione forces herself not to be disturbed. She buries her face into the pillow and forces herself to sleep.
(She dreams she is sleeping with Death, but when she wakes up, it’s Luna. After awhile, it becomes difficult to tell the difference. Neither Death nor Luna let her go once during the night, but only one is a comfort.)