Blue

She looked at the stick again, not wanting it to be true. But there it was, an almost obscenely bright blue streak. Hermione wasn't a religious person, but she had sat there waiting for the Muggle test, praying to see the thin pink line that would mean safety, that would mean freedom from that past indiscretion, that would mean she wasn't pregnant. Pregnant. As she stared at the blue line, she decided that if this was what prayers got her, she wasn't going to raise this child in the Church. A child. She, Hermione Granger, Head Girl, was carrying a child. She wasn't quite sure that she had processed that fact yet, she didn't know if she could. She knew, logically, what she had done and the biology behind it; she just couldn't believe it. She brought her knees up to her chest and lay her head back against the bathroom wall, closing her eyes. Fuck. It was the only thing she could think. She couldn't begin to consider her options, to weigh the pros and cons, to make a rational decision on what the right thing might be. Not now. All she could do was sit on her bathroom floor and think about how royally fucked she was.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. She was supposed to help end the War and graduate Hogwarts and study in Egypt and find a job with some private research firm or university and then she would meet someone handsome and intelligent and charming who loved her and then they would get married in a small, tasteful ceremony with all of their family and friends and they would honeymoon in someplace beautiful and exotic and they would move into a new, cosy home where they would live for at least a year or two, and then, after much discussion and consideration, then they would try for a baby, and she would announce one night to her ecstatic husband that she was pregnant. She was not supposed to be sitting here in the Head Girl's private bathroom staring at a Muggle pregnancy test and trying to regret that tryst with Fred during the November Hogsmeade visit. He had come to visit and check in with everyone and somehow they had ended up tangled and sweaty in a much cleaned and restored bedroom in the Shrieking Shack. She had performed the charm, but of course she had gotten it wrong and for crying out loud of all the times for Little Miss Perfect to fuck up, why did that have to be it? Little Miss Perfect Prefect. He had called her that, once it was over. Looks like our Little Miss Perfect Prefect got a promotion he had said, grinning and running his thumb over the badge on her robes as she buttoned her blouse. Give me that, she had said, snatching her robes away and laughing as she put them on. Like you haven't teased me about it five hundred times already. And they had teased and talked and decided to put this behind them for the moment, that neither one of them could handle anything serious and that they were better off friends for the moment. All in all, she had thought that they were quite adult about the whole thing. Adult, ha, she thought. An adult would have done the bloody charm correctly. She took a deep breath, counted to five, and exhaled slowly, setting aside her memories for the moment and wondering how the hell she was going to tell Fred. She briefly considered telling her parents, but set that thought aside for a later date. Honestly, she was so far separated from her parents now, she couldn't imagine telling them about this now. Maybe once I've decided what to do about this she thought. No need to worry them about this until then. She could hear her father screaming and her mother crying and both of them telling her how disappointed they were, and she shook her head violently to rid herself of the image. No, better to not tell them until it was decided.

She did, however, have to tell Fred. As much as she wanted to deal with this on her own, as much as a part of her just wanted to abort the thing and be done with it, she knew she couldn't. It wouldn't be right. This thing growing inside of her was Fred's as well, and he deserved to have some say in what they were going to do with it. Hermione thought about how he would react. Would he yell at her, would he cry as she hadn't been able to, would he simply stare in shock. And then she tried to think about what he would want to do. She took everything she knew about Fred, and thought about different ways of telling him, and every circumstance he could possibly consider, and she kept on coming back to the same conclusion. He would probably want to keep it. He would want her to carry this thing to term and if she wouldn't raise it, then he would and he probably wouldn't try to stop her if she truly, deeply wanted to abort it, but she was afraid that he would always think a little less of her for the decision, which was painful because it was for his good opinion that she had showed off in performing the damn charm in the first place. All of a sudden Hermione felt violently ill, and she clambered to her knees so she could bend over the commode and empty her stomach of all she had eaten that day.

As she flushed the toilet and sat back down, performing a Breath-Freshening Charm and an Air-Freshening charm to rid herself of the taste and the stench of vomit, she closed her eyes and willed herself not to cry. Because it was the sudden realisation that this was real, that she would have to do something about this and that no matter what she did, it would affect her for the rest of her life. Emotional stress, physical stress, no matter what choice she made she was going to have to deal with them both. And for a moment she was tempted to just floo to the nearest witches' clinic and have the problem taken care of. But she knew that she couldn't. Because she couldn't do this on her own. Not only would it not be fair to Fred, but she knew she couldn't handle the stress of that big a secret weighing on her for the rest of her life, and if she ever told someone it would cause so much more damage than just telling someone now. And she knew who she needed to tell. Taking a few deep, calming breaths, she stood up and walked out of the bathroom and sat down at her desk. She had to stare at the parchment for a few minutes longer, composing herself, before she began the letter, asking Fred to meet her at the Shrieking Shack that weekend. They needed to talk.