Current mood:	indescribable
Entry tags:	fic : hp : gen

Ficlet: Rotten. Hermione gen.
Title: Rotten
Characters: Hermione
Rating: Uh, PG?
Summary: She doesn't like horror movies.
Notes: Another tangleofthorns prompt. She is to blame for this.

*
She'd always had a bad feeling about this place, even though she'd never seen it, only heard about it from Harry. It sounded like one of the houses in those awful films her mum likes. Hermione had always rolled her eyes and scoffed and complained that they don't make any sense, but the truth is she'd crept downstairs one night when she was seven just in time to see the man with the bladed fingers rip all the veins out of someone's body and use them as puppet strings.

Hermione hadn't slept for a week.

Now she doesn't like horror movies, and she doesn't like houses that belong in horror movies, and every time she thinks about the Dark Arts, she hopes no one's figured out a spell to tear the veins from someone's arms.

Regardless, Harry thinks the last Horcrux is here, so here she is. It's barely even a house anymore; it's decrepit and so overgrown with vines and weeds that Hermione can't see how anything could be here at all, let alone any kind of elaborately ridiculous magical protection device Voldemort had come up with back when he was sane. Or less insane, at any rate.

Everything about the Gaunt house smells rotten—rotten wood, rotten vegetation, and she imagines the Dark Arts once practiced here left the stench of decay lingering in the air. It's ridiculous, she knows; magic doesn't smell like anything, but there's something in the wind she can't identify, and it makes her nervous.

Maybe she shouldn't have told Harry and Ron she'd scout ahead on her own.

She creeps a little closer, trainers loud as they move over fallen leaves, over broken glass and shattered stones. What's left of the door hangs off one rusty hinge, and the inside of the house is unnaturally dark. There's barely a roof, and it's full daylight, and she really ought to be able to see inside.

She's just put one foot through the door when she hears it, when someone comes crashing through the underbrush, running, breathing heavily.

"Hermione!" Ron yells, but Hermione's already put her foot down, and something tells her it's too late. "HERMIONE, WAIT!"