toxicology
Summary: Being best friends with a horcrux for seven years changes a person.
“While the magical container is still intact, the bit of soul inside it can flit in and out of someone if they get too close to the object. I don’t mean holding it for too long–it’s nothing to do with touching it,” Hermione added before Ron could speak. “I mean close emotionally. Ginny poured her heart out into that diary. She made herself incredibly vulnerable. You’re in trouble if you get too fond of, or dependent on, the horcrux.”
- deathly hallows
Hermione’s different in the summers.
First comes the crash. She doesn’t know what it is, the exhaustion, the almost reptilian languor, but she always begins to feel it the instant she parts from Harry and Ron at King’s Cross. Those first few days of summer she’s always dangling off her bed in the midmornings and staring out the window of her parents’ house, eyes blank as rough garnet, lace coverlet thrown across her wrist, inside which her pulse is throbbing in something like a withdrawal symptom. For two days she can’t make herself touch books, or even food. Her mouth starts to taste like water.
But everything’s slow in summer, and she has time to adjust. It’s a process of kaleidoscopic reorientation, shifting the tube so that the crystals align just so, until they coalesce perfectly into a mirror and there–she can see herself again.
By end of July, she’s woken up.
(via firewhisky)
