Categories > Books > Harry Potter > Breathing Dust and Desperation
Breathing on Epiphanies
1 reviewThis is a love story. [Are you listening? I would live for you, she says. Are you listening?] Femmeslash.
3Ambiance
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This is a love story.
It is after the climax and everyone is still lying dazed in the dust, waiting for their hearing to return and give them the means to tell whether they are laughing or sobbing. This is Hermione, and her side is bleeding dangerously and heavily and so is the gash above her right eye (but it is okay because she can't feel the pain. The blood in her right eye makes it impossible to see, but this is kind of good because having only a single working eye makes it harder for her to notice that her vision is blurring and spotting and maybe she is about to die). And maybe she is about to die.
This is absolutely alright with her, though - she lies dazed in the dirt and wishes her spotty, blurry left eye could see through the dust surrounding her to the sun, or maybe the moon. The stars would be nice, and it would let her know how long this has lasted. She wants to see something beautiful. She wants to see something magnificent, something that will validate her life and her death and the pain that she can't feel and everything lovely in the world that she is giving up. See, her death is absolutely alright with her in the way that it isn't, and her brain (which isn't blacking out, she insists to herself as she searches frantically for a sight beyond gritty particles that get everywhere - eyes, mouth, teeth, nose, lungs) is declaring in a very characteristic, defining, hermionegranger way that she needs a reason to die - a very good reason, like all the dead children being resurrected in exchange. She needs for someone to be getting something out of it beyond the galleons for her burial - which they won't be getting anyway, she remembers suddenly and morbidly, because her will specifies a pyre. She needs, in a very innate, intimate way, to be a payment or a sacrifice or something fucking noble - something that does not - oh, she needs to be a fucking martyr! SHE IS WORTH MORE THAN THIS, do you hear her? Do you hear her?
Judging by the desperate hand suddenly seizing her fingers (the index finger is broken, she remembers, but she can't feel it - it hits her that this should worry her), Ginny doesn't either. Then again, Hermione thinks muzzily, Ginny probably can't hear anything over her own voice. Hermione can see her cracked, bleeding lips (so lovely, and she wants to kiss them, lick the blood away and heal the broken skin) as they form frantic words. Her freckles are invisible against the dust in the air, the dust that is sticking to Ginny's cloud-pale skin and giving her the tan she told Hermione once (in fifth year, maybe, when Hermione came back from France so bronze like happiness - or was that third year?) she wished her milk-white skin could get. She is gorgeous in a way that Hermione knows very thickly at the base of her spine - she can feel the knowledge deep inside her, somewhere in her blood and echoing through her bones, resonating from her very marrow and running under the cells that contain her and pulsing into that warm puddle she is lying in, and why has she never let herself admit this before? She knows Ginny's beauty like she knows a lot of things, like she knows Golpalott's Third Law and the twelve uses of dragon blood. She tries to blink the blood out of her right eye, and, dammit, it's getting in her left eye, too, and now she can barely make out Ginny's outline - the riotous red tangle of her hair and the smooth curve of her shoulder that Hermione realizes she has wanted to kiss and lick and bite and brand for the past nineteen vicious months.
She says, Ginny, listen to me - Ginny, you're magnificent. You're beautiful, and I would die for you, she says. Are you listening? I would live for you, she says. Are you listening?
Can't you hear her? No, neither can Ginny.
This is a love story.
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A/N: A request from my LJ comm. What do you think? Is she dead? Alive? Am I going to break all tradition and give you a follow-up chapter, possibly with a happy ending (which I have never offered to write before - feel special. This is so not my usual style)? I don't know. Am I, reviewers?
-
-
This is a love story.
It is after the climax and everyone is still lying dazed in the dust, waiting for their hearing to return and give them the means to tell whether they are laughing or sobbing. This is Hermione, and her side is bleeding dangerously and heavily and so is the gash above her right eye (but it is okay because she can't feel the pain. The blood in her right eye makes it impossible to see, but this is kind of good because having only a single working eye makes it harder for her to notice that her vision is blurring and spotting and maybe she is about to die). And maybe she is about to die.
This is absolutely alright with her, though - she lies dazed in the dirt and wishes her spotty, blurry left eye could see through the dust surrounding her to the sun, or maybe the moon. The stars would be nice, and it would let her know how long this has lasted. She wants to see something beautiful. She wants to see something magnificent, something that will validate her life and her death and the pain that she can't feel and everything lovely in the world that she is giving up. See, her death is absolutely alright with her in the way that it isn't, and her brain (which isn't blacking out, she insists to herself as she searches frantically for a sight beyond gritty particles that get everywhere - eyes, mouth, teeth, nose, lungs) is declaring in a very characteristic, defining, hermionegranger way that she needs a reason to die - a very good reason, like all the dead children being resurrected in exchange. She needs for someone to be getting something out of it beyond the galleons for her burial - which they won't be getting anyway, she remembers suddenly and morbidly, because her will specifies a pyre. She needs, in a very innate, intimate way, to be a payment or a sacrifice or something fucking noble - something that does not - oh, she needs to be a fucking martyr! SHE IS WORTH MORE THAN THIS, do you hear her? Do you hear her?
Judging by the desperate hand suddenly seizing her fingers (the index finger is broken, she remembers, but she can't feel it - it hits her that this should worry her), Ginny doesn't either. Then again, Hermione thinks muzzily, Ginny probably can't hear anything over her own voice. Hermione can see her cracked, bleeding lips (so lovely, and she wants to kiss them, lick the blood away and heal the broken skin) as they form frantic words. Her freckles are invisible against the dust in the air, the dust that is sticking to Ginny's cloud-pale skin and giving her the tan she told Hermione once (in fifth year, maybe, when Hermione came back from France so bronze like happiness - or was that third year?) she wished her milk-white skin could get. She is gorgeous in a way that Hermione knows very thickly at the base of her spine - she can feel the knowledge deep inside her, somewhere in her blood and echoing through her bones, resonating from her very marrow and running under the cells that contain her and pulsing into that warm puddle she is lying in, and why has she never let herself admit this before? She knows Ginny's beauty like she knows a lot of things, like she knows Golpalott's Third Law and the twelve uses of dragon blood. She tries to blink the blood out of her right eye, and, dammit, it's getting in her left eye, too, and now she can barely make out Ginny's outline - the riotous red tangle of her hair and the smooth curve of her shoulder that Hermione realizes she has wanted to kiss and lick and bite and brand for the past nineteen vicious months.
She says, Ginny, listen to me - Ginny, you're magnificent. You're beautiful, and I would die for you, she says. Are you listening? I would live for you, she says. Are you listening?
Can't you hear her? No, neither can Ginny.
This is a love story.
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-
-
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A/N: A request from my LJ comm. What do you think? Is she dead? Alive? Am I going to break all tradition and give you a follow-up chapter, possibly with a happy ending (which I have never offered to write before - feel special. This is so not my usual style)? I don't know. Am I, reviewers?
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