Author's Note: I have distinct suspicions that the addition of this companion piece cheapens the first work, but I've written it anyway, because people asked nicely – you may disregard it as fits your fancy. The appeal in writing was largely that it allowed me to exorcise two of my peeves relating to Rowling's disregard of Actual Fucking Biology (snake fangs would break off before they slashed anyone open, and venom coagulates blood). Science! It makes fiction better! /rant

Lies and Red Ink: Part II

Zigadenus

The Defense essay is burning a hole through her satchel. It was all she could do not to unfurl it in the midst of class, but she is nothing if not circumspect. And so it is secreted here, flattened between two textbooks, but no less dangerous to her peace of mind for having lost physical volume. She forces herself to linger in the common room before bed, and make polite conversation with Ginny. No, she doesn't know where Harry is, she was in the library. Ron chimes in that Jimmy Peake brought around a note from Dumbledore, and everyone is diverted by speculations as to what the two are getting up to in this distant, nebulous 'war' with the Former Tom Riddle.

She eases out of the conversation; she'd thought to tell them what she'd discovered, about this mysterious Prince and his potions book, but on second thought, it's a delicious little secret she's just as keen on keeping to herself for now. Perhaps she can find a way to sneak into the Room of Requirement and retrieve the book without Harry knowing? She'd like to compare the writing to the red ink that's waiting for her on this latest Defense essay.

Except, well, 'Defense' is a misnomer in the grandest possible way. She'd only written one of them this year. It had been returned with an X like a gaping wound slashed across half the parchment. Since then, she's not bothered with the charade: he's clearly just as interested in reading regurgitations of textbooks as she is in producing them.

She pulls the drapes closed around her bed, and snuggles down into a den of pillows and quilts. She sighs, deep and happy, as she extracts the parchment from her bag. What will he have to say about her models?

She hasn't gotten very far when there is an outrageous din and clamour. The foolish grin falls from her face as the meaning of the shouting clarifies.

Everything is confusion, terror, chaos.

She will remember the strange look in his eyes, as he pushes past Luna and directs them in to assist Professor Flitwick. She will remember it, but she will never know what it meant.

In the aftermath of what she mistakenly believes is Everything, she looks down upon this crumpled piece of parchment. The compulsion of these crimson words has dissipated, the notes of the siren's song discordant and broken. She picks it up; there should be disgust or dismay, or something, but all she feels is empty.

She shoves it into the bottom of her trunk with the rest of them, eventually convincing herself that she has forgotten that she hasn't read to the end.

It's another night, and the light is poor; the room is dusty and rife with cobwebs. He has fallen against a heap of broken furniture, and his limbs are twitching, spastic and progressively enfeebled with every shuddering breath. The venom, injected near the carotid artery, seems to have travelled swiftly; his blood is tracing out across his paper skin. The light is poor, but she can still see the colour of it; a freshet seems to burst from a tear duct, dripping across the harsh planes of his face even as she watches. It is like so much ink. She turns away. This is beyond her capacity, she can't be witness to it any longer.

When things are quiet, she asks Harry what he meant, dangling those mocking words in front of Riddle. She discovers that she doesn't want to believe what he tells her. Why her? But there is no time to untangle this knot of anger, this petulant confusion. The world is whirling away from her, escaping the grim control she's always applied to it.

He's left her his books. She thinks she's misread the notice. The words blur together in front of her eyes, and she leans heavily against Molly's kitchen table. No one, least of all her, really believes it at first, but everyone is eager to help her transport them away from the dingy terraced house. They want a peep show, a window into his privacy. She demurs, this is something she will do alone, for more reasons than one. She is there all afternoon, surrounded by the detritus of his life. At one point, she collapses into the frayed armchair and cannot move for hours. The sun wanes, Next Door is beating his wife, a dog barks. When it is finally silent, she rouses, ready at last to conduct these rites of departure, ready to dismantle all remaining reality of him.

She's nearly finished when she turns up the daybook. It has been tucked alongside Moste Potente Potions, and falls onto the floor as she extracts this volume from its bowed shelf. She stoops to retrieve it. There is something illicit about the fine calfskin with which it's bound. And here's that so-familiar cursive again; she's unaccountably thankful that the tight, cramped lines march across the pages in lines of black.

She flips through it meticulously, twice, looking for some variant of her own name. There is nothing, and in the cold light of the clouded dawn, she can't convince herself there is meaning encoded in a lack of evidence.

And so she finally acquiesces to what seems inevitable, and that night steals into Ronald's room. The brass plate on the door reassures her that she hasn't been in error, in relentlessly identifying this fellow with his proper noun. She detests monosyllabic names; they are somehow undignified and too casual. And perhaps some parts of reality are under subjective sway: if she thinks 'Ronald' long enough, hard enough, maybe some more illustrious character will take substance and displace the boy who lights up as she enters.

She is going to show him; she will have revenge.

(It is only later that the absurdity of this spite – this illogical, burning desire for vengeance - actually occurs to her. She laughs, and it's a cracking, broken sound, echoing weirdly in the bath.)

If the absurdity takes a while to catch up, the knowledge that this is a bad idea is manifest nearly immediately.

Stop, she tells him, but he doesn't hear her over the way he's chanting an endless litany of "So good, fuck Hermione, so tight, fuck, FUCK! Hermione, this is brilliant, you're so fucking tight." The fact he can pronounce her name isn't enough intellectual compensation for this reduction to a mere orifice. Especially as she knows she isn't 'tight' – not enough that he'd be apt to notice. It's just that he'd gotten started before she's adequately aroused.

If he won't stop, at least he could have the courtesy of not speaking. She turns her face into the pillow, away from the sour reek of his armpits. Her traitorous body is finally responding to this ill-conceived invasion she's plotted against it, and his movements are slickened, faster. At least it's reduced him to wordless grunts and panting. Minor improvement; she grits her teeth and barely has time to work up a good head of self-recrimination before he's finished.

She's released from the prison of his limbs when he flops back into the bedsheets, a shit-eating grin wide across his face. "That sure was something, wasn't it?"

"I need the loo," she responds.

She leans against the closed bathroom door, surveying the hollow darkness of her eyes in the mirror. She can't shake the feeling that there's some integral part of her missing, irretrievable, lost. She's wasn't a virgin by the standard metric so it can't be that, and besides: this certainty of loss is something that's been clawing away at the quiet corners of her mind for days. And yet it slips away from her every time she tries to examine it.

Standing here fails to accomplish enlightenment, it only allows his ejaculate to exit her body. It trickles down the inside of her thigh; she swipes at it with a wad of tissue, suddenly disgusted by the biological realities of what she's done. She cracks her forehead against the tap, dry heaving into the washbasin.

She needs him off of her, in every possible way.

She huddles on the cold edge of the toilet as the tub fills, arms crossed defensively across her chest, fingernails leaving bloody crescents in the goose-prickled skin of her shoulders. It's as she's watching the water plunging down that she realizes she'll be marinating in a diluted soup of his semen. This untenable reality necessitates the soapy washcloth with which she viciously attacks her genitals, the coarse weave harsh against newly-tender tissues.

When she does lower herself into the bath, her eyes are dragged toward the incongruous yellow of a plastic razor. Harry has probably abandoned it here; she doesn't think any of the Weasley boys use these Muggle implements. It's the matter of mechanical moments to smash it against the bathroom tile with the base of a shampoo bottle. The little strands of sharpened steel glint amidst the wreckage.

She reaches out and then there are trailing crimson veils through the water and she surfaces out of darkness to find lime-robed Healers hovering over her and diagnosing her with post-traumatic stress disorder and – Here her imagination fails her; it has hiccoughed on the idea that wizards understand anything about psychology. She leans back into the tub, until the water laps along the sides of her breasts.

It is as she is carefully sweeping the broken pieces of this instrument into the trash that she finally catches hold of this enigmatic sense of loss that's been plaguing her. She'd been chastising herself: she didn't even know him. But it occurs to her now that what she has really lost is a part of her own identity, the part of her that resided in his mind, echoed back in marginalia. This realization seems so profound that she has a sense of being cheated when nothing changes. He is still dead, and she is still sitting here on the cold tiles, wrapped up in a towel, the cleanliness of which she's not entirely certain.

Things go on. They always do.

Ginny and Fleur unite in an expectation that her bridal flowers will be dominated by bright scarlet roses and carnations, gold-gilt ferns: a Gryffindor-ish panoply that they have assembled over hours of giggling consultation with The Language of Flowers. She plumps half-heartedly for roses deep as blood, but Molly won't have it. "My dear, this is really not the occasion for your gothic sensibilities." She has no idea what this means, but shrugs and goes out for a walk in the wind and the rain.

It's when she's consulting a book of her own that she finds a scrap of parchment that gives her something new to do. She's huddled into the attic of her new home. There was nowhere else to store the books, and Ronald doesn't want Snape's Things cluttering up the spare bedroom. Better that it sit empty, just a lonely white bed. She sleeps there sometimes. But now she's awake and energized, towering heaps of books on every side, a barrier behind which she is surreptitiously flipping through the object of her interest. Moste Potente Potions is one of the few books that she knows contains a section on abortifacients.

The parchment is tucked into an early chapter; anticoagulants. He must have been aiming twenty pages further on (polyjuice), because the parchment is scribbled over in derivations of equations that are perfectly familiar to her, as if she's just written them yesterday. Along one margin are the hasty words mention methylation to Granger; resolves? stability.

And of course it does, she can see again the structures, and she knows, suddenly and with certainty, that this part of her she feared lost forever has only been quietly sleeping, resting in some protected place.

She expected, perhaps, a sense of accomplishment, when her copy of the published article arrives. She has opened it while standing at the mailbox; she'd requested it delivered through the Muggle post so that Ronald won't see it. She isn't sure she is capable of explaining why she chose to author it with her maiden name. But there was something necessary in the gesture. She traces her fingertip across the byline, hesitating beneath her coauthor's name. There is a little dagger superscripted there: deceased. No, she does not feel accomplished, but there is a sense of closure in seeing their names married here in type.

She breathes in, deeply. She can smell the rain-freshened earth. It feels like it is the first breath she's ever taken.

She tucks the reprint back into its brown-paper envelope, and retrieves the rest of the post. Flyers and adverts and the Muggle newspapers she still takes. There is a plain white card that at first she assumes is a business-reply mailing, but a flash of colour discredits this notion. There, in red ink, are the simple words I have read your article with great interest.

fin.