Best Kept Secrets

Hermione

When she was eight years old, she discovered magic.

It was simple enough. She stopped her cup of apple juice from spilling as it fell off the table by making it hover in the air until she could get to it.

Her parents put it off to quick reflexes.

That same year, she killed someone.

She was downstairs, watching television, when she heard someone trying to open the back door.

Thinking it was one of her parents who had forgotten their key, she walked to the back of the house and opened the door.

But the person who walked in was no one she knew.

He was a big man, wearing all black, with a smile on his face that she didn’t like at all.

He called her cutie and brought out a knife.

She panicked and tried to run, but he pushed her and she fell, stinging her knees on the hard tile floor.

Before she could recover, he flipped her over onto her back. He was kneeling, that smile growing as he looked her over.

He began unzipping his trousers, and she felt confusion and terror pressing in on her.

Before she even understood fully what was going on, he had pushed her plaid skirt up to her waist and yanked her knickers down to her ankles.

And by the time she did understand enough to scream, he was already slamming into her, his fullness stretching her with excruciating pain.

And as she sobbed, she wished that he would die. That that knife laying beside him would plunge itself into his back.

And, to her surprise, that is exactly what it did.

When her parents came home to a dead body on the floor and her crying on the couch, they all agreed not to tell anyone.

That was the only time she had ever seen her father bury a human corpse in their backyard.

~*~

When she was thirteen, she fell in love.

She wasn’t sure what attracted her to Ron, but something did. She found that she loved everything about him, from his red hair and freckles to the way he had stood up for her to Draco Malfoy in their second year, even the way they argued.

But she knew she had no chance. Not yet. He hadn’t seemed to realize that she was even a girl, let alone an attractive one. Not that she considered herself attractive, of course.

One night she saw him leading Ginny to an empty classroom. Confused and curious, she had followed.

When she looked back on it later, she would wish she had minded her own business.

She watched them disappear into the Charms classroom. Furiously trying to figure out the best way to see what they were up to, she finally settled on an x-ray spell.

But what she saw made her physically sick.

Ron was hitting Ginny. In the face, the stomach, the legs. Bruising her, surely. Hurting her, obviously. Drawing blood.

But, to her horror, it didn’t stop there.

Ron did to Ginny what that sick man had done to her at age eight.

But no knife stabbed into Ron’s back. Nothing intervened to make him stop. It was like he didn’t even hear Ginny sobbing.

But the one thing from that night that would never leave her mind was what Ron said when he was finished.

"I love you," he had said. And his voice was so bitter that it made her flinch.

~*~

When she was sixteen, she took her first hit of cocaine.

It burned her nostrils, but it made everything go away.

She forgot about Ron, about the things he must have been doing to Ginny at that moment. She forgot that she loved him. That she would never stop. She forgot about Voldemort and the war and that Harry hadn’t spoken a word to anyone in over a week.

It made her mind blissfully blank, so blank that she didn’t even care that she Slytherin who gave it to her was pushing her head down toward his groin.

Hell, it made her feel so good that she was willing to do whatever he wanted, as long as he promised her more.

That was the night that Hermione Granger gave up her virginity.

~*~

When she was nineteen years old, she committed suicide.

She shot up one last time, letting the high wash over her.

But she knew it would end, and that reality would slam down upon her once more.

Ginny Weasley was dead.

Her murderer – her brother, and the man Hermione loved – was sentenced to a lifetime in Azkaban prison.

Harry had died a few months before. Alcohol poisoning.

There was nothing left for her, and she was ready to let go.

The method was Muggle. A pistol her mother had given her ages ago, to protect herself.

The first shot she ever fired was into her own skull.