Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You’d never find a bible in here.

Hermione brushes her fingers along the book spines, all of them old, most of them sporting a layer of dust, and many of them cracked.

A select few, if you yawn them open in your hands and flip through, you’ll find the scraggly edges of pages torn away. You’ll find chunks blacked out where someone went ham with a Sharpie. You’ll find graffiti, packaged up between the covers.

You’ll never find a book on ammunition. Or The Chronicles of Narnia.

But you’ll find an encyclopedia or twelve.

Someone grabs her by the upper arm and pulls her around.

“ID,” the guy says.

He’s the very picture of a senator’s son, or maybe some college kid who’s used to getting that C bumped up to a B when his last name comes into play.

A senator’s son with a senator’s haircut and no nametag. Not a library employee.

Hermione half-turns back to the shelf. “I’m fully aware of the age restrict—”

“ID.” He snaps his fingers at her, then opens his palm.

She sighs and digs out her ID. Doesn’t hand it to him, just holds it up to his face with her thumb pinched tight at the corner so he can’t snatch it away.

He reads the year on her birthdate. His lips go buttery as he licks them a couple times and mumbles to himself. Down at his sides, his fingers twitch as he counts the years up to today’s year. By the looks of it, he has to start over twice before he gives her a satisfied nod, glances down at her tits, then moves along.

Idiot. But she’s not interested in being paraded back to the front desk just to show them her ID all over again.

Encyclopedias, medical texts, historical accounts.

All your most indecent books, really.

Hermione wanders from one row to the next, peering around corners to make sure Mr. Senator’s Son isn’t waiting to accost her again.

You’d never find a bible in here, but Hermione pulls a self-help from the shelf titled, NOT A VICTIM: Healing Sexual Trauma.

Catch one stinking whiff of evolution, or sexual ideology, or maybe the side character’s a girl dating a girl, and whoop—! Better sweep it behind the 18+ curtain to gather dust, because everyone knows they log your name someplace if you venture back here too often.

She heaves a thicker one off the shelf, one so old the title’s been stripped off the spine. Something clatters after it, bouncing to her feet.

It’s a thumb drive, the little USB mouth rubbed raw with age. No logo on the body. It’s made of that beige plastic they used for everything back in the late 90s, except the back’s been busted open so a couple wires poke loose.

Hermione avoids those wires and picks it up. Feels heavy.

She glances around again, then slinks to the corner furthest from the curtained door where they keep three computers for anyone to use. One of them’s got a fat hairy hunk of genitalia spray-painted over the screen, and the middle one doesn’t respond when she clicks the mouse and punches the power button.

At least the third works, though it’s missing a few keys on the keyboard. Careful, so she doesn’t scratch up the metal worse than it is, she slides the USB into place.

A pop-up tells her the drive’s been detected. She navigates to the right window, but…

…there’s nothing. The USB is empty.

She slumps, then yanks out the thumb drive. Maybe she ought to stick it back between the books, but she ends up stuffing it in her pocket.

&&&

These days, the microwave heats up her food just fine.

While tonight’s takeout Italian spins around on its little stage, Hermione heaves today’s chosen books to her room, which is also sort of her office-slash-dining room-slash-living room. Emphasis on the living room, because aside from grocery trips and library trips, she lives all her life in this room, just sucking on the electricity and squinting at faded text.

Her roommates tell her she can move her desk to the living room. The typing won’t bother them, they say. They won’t look at her screen, they say.

She smiles and tells them thank you, but no. She’s fine. She likes the privacy.

She drops the books at her desk—eight, the library’s borrowing limit—and hightails it back to the microwave to hit the STOP button before it wails. Not that it’s late, but if anyone’s home, she’d rather not send the invitation to talk.

They always want to talk these days.

The plastic container burns the pads of her palms and the steam clouds up her glasses, but she makes it to her room without getting accosted.

Her room. The bulb on the overhead light went out long ago, but she’s got her trusty lamp in the corner with the purple-flowered shade, and that does just fine. She’s got her bed with its Hermione-shaped divot in the middle where she passes out at midnight, one, maybe two in the morning.

And she’s got her computer. A big hulking thing, a hand-me-down from a friend. Can’t run any games, but it’s fine for working from home, plus one specific extracurricular.

She scoops noodles into her mouth and boots the monster up, listening carefully for the awkward screech of a half-melted fan. Nothing. Healthy.

All the right programs boot up on their own, checkering her monitors. Her last project has finished compiling, and it sits there on her desktop, a proud and plain little icon. She checks the storage on her current thumb drive, takes a look at the project’s total size, and sighs.

It won’t fit. She carefully ejects that USB, shoves another bite of grainy pasta past her teeth, then crawls under her desk where she’s got two shoeboxes.

The top one is wrapped in plastic, and it rattles when she takes it. She’s saving up for one of those waterproof fireproof burglerproof security boxes, but for now, a saran-wrapped shoebox will have to do.

She unwraps and opens it up, holding it gentle as a newborn infant in her lap. Inside, dozens upon dozens of thumb drives fill the box about halfway up. Some of them plain, some of them marked up with feeble logos, companies she’s never bought from, or even heard of, in a lot of cases.

Head to a hotel. Any hotel. Maybe a golf course, if it’s warm and early. Watch for the big shiny signs. Watch for polos and khakis and a table covered with nametags and sharpies.

If you see formal suits, give up.

Wear the right outfit and sprout the right smile, and no one’s going to question you at that nametag table. Nod politely and ask good questions at the sponsor kiosks, and no one’s going to tell you ‘no’ when you eyeball the branded paraphernalia they’ve got laid out for potential customers and buyers.

Stress balls. Golf towels. Hats. Socks. Water bottles, but the cheap kind.

But Hermione ignores it all until she finds the free USBs. Hit a good conference, especially if it’s tech, and she might pick up five-plus USBs at one event.

She weighs the full USB in her palm, then tucks it carefully inside the shoebox. She’d swear they’re heavier with all that data inside. She doesn’t drag her fingers through the pile, even though she’d like to.

Instead she wraps it all up again, then turns to the other shoebox. It’s only got a couple scattered thumb drives inside. One with a logo on the side, and one she got at a yard sale for five cents. That one’s in the shape of a cartoon pig with the pink skin scuffed down to gray.

She takes the pig and sits at her computer again.

The little pig stares at her from where its eyes used to be painted on. There in the curl of its ear, that’s someone’s old booger.

She sets it down and instead goes through her bag until stiff wire pokes her thumb, right where the cuticle meets nail. Yikes.

Under her lamplight, the USB she found in the library looks older. Scragglier. Every scratch on the plastic stands out. The metal bit at the front has tiny teeth bit into it from how bad the rim’s been dented. No wonder it doesn’t work.

Even so, she bends over her computer and slides the thing inside the port.

Her file explorer window blinks, then populates with the new drive down in the corner. No name, just “//T:”. When she opens it up, it’s empty of any files.

Now she’s cooking up a real smile. Those library computers probably have gum in all the ports, so no wonder it didn’t work there.

Just to be safe, she runs her antivirus on the USB and shoves more pasta into her mouth while she waits. It comes back clean, so she drags her latest project into the window.

It sits there for a moment, just like it’s supposed to. She’s chewing away, happy as a damn clam.

Then in an instant, the file multiplies. Fills the window, the scroll bar shrinking as the file spews into the digital ether, a thousand million copies.

Hermione drops her pasta into her lap.

Then—it’s gone. All of it. Every single file, including the original.

“No.” Pasta warming her thighs, she clicks through to her recycling bin.

Empty.

She closes the file explorer and opens it up again. Runs another scan on it.

Empty. The file is gone.

She presses a fist to her forehead and groans. That was Born to Be Someone, a riveting account of New York’s first openly trans governor.

And now it’s gone. Well, it’s back at the library, technically, but who knows how long they’ll keep it? With more ‘discouraged’ books getting shunted back there every week, it’ll soon be tossed. Worse than tossed: sent for disposal. No dumpster diving allowed.

She’s tried.

One trash bag, three damp paper towels, and a new pair of pants later, Hermione’s slumping back at her computer.

Five USBs at one event may not seem like a lot, but that’s gigabytes of digital space she just picked up for free. Gigabytes of books filled with “highly controversial content” crammed as single page scans into a bit of metal the size of half a chicken nugget.

She pulls the top book from the newest pile. A Handmaid’s Tale, the thicker hardcover copy with the sequel running double feature at the bag. She fits it into her scanning setup, adjusts the camera and lighting, then turns to the first page and runs the program.

Scan.

Check for crookedness.

Save.

Turn page.

From under there, the book probably feels like it’s at the dentist. The bright LED illuminates every word right down into the crease.

Scan.

Check for crookedness.

Save.

Turn page.

About twenty pages in is when she usually gets the automatic clicker going. From then on, all she has to do is sit there and turn the page when the program alerts her.

Today she gets to page thirteen, then scowls down at the USB still plugged into her computer. Those two wires poking out would probably zap her.

You’re supposed to safely eject a USB before you go pulling it out of a computer, but Hermione doesn’t afford this little bastard the luxury. She yanks it free, careful to avoid the wires.

When she looks back, an error sits at the center of the screen.

WARNING: Data Corrupted

She rolls her eyes and hits the ‘OK’ button to dismiss it, but instead, another error box replaces it.

FRIEND OR FOE?

There’s a selection box for each option. She bites her lip and runs the antivirus program again, this time on her whole machine. Still comes back clean.

Alright, well, if some hacker did manage to sneak in here, she doesn’t want to give them any reason to fuck with her. She hits the button for ‘FRIEND’ and sighs with relief when the box closes without another taking its place.

She scans the next page and the next. Everything works like it’s supposed to.

“Idiot,” she mumbles, before tossing the USB into her garbage can. It slithers between used tissues until it hits the bottom of the can with a clink.

Whatever. She’ll pick up Born to Be Someone next time she’s at the library and do it all over again. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s screwed up a project.

Chapter Text

A few days later, and she’s back at the library, with a stomachache heavier than the pile of books in her arms. That’s what she gets for eating so much takeout.

Born to Be Someone isn’t there on the shelf. When she asks the librarian about it, he shrugs his shoulders and tells her, “Ran out of room, missy.”

She tucks her chin so he won’t see the heat sizzling her face a nice bright color and slides her returns across the desk. He gives her a grunt, then drops them straight into an old cardboard box with the Amazon-brand tape still flapping from the lip.

Not the return stack, but a cardboard box. At the end of the day, those books’ll be sent away to the government disposal site. There’s no sneaking into it. She’s checked.

Her stomachache twists into nausea and she has to practically scrape herself off the edge of the front desk.

It’s okay. It’s okay! She’s got a clear digital copy of every book in that stack, all of them tucked away on the next clear USB.

But she’s thinking about the bodies. The leather, cool with the finish worn off at the spine. The pages pressed from trees that died before she was even born, maybe even before her parents were born.

She stumbles back to the restricted section. Flashes her ID again. Rescues another batch of soon-to-be-annihilated novels and biographies and self-help digests for wannabe-divorcees.

Halfway up to the front desk, her diaphragm lurches. She runs to the bathroom and sends the books sliding across the tile floor as she drops to her knees in front of the toilet.

Her mouth opens. Her throat bobs. Nothing comes out.

She gives it until a drop of drool rolls from her tongue down into the toilet water, then stumbles from stall to stall, gathering up all the books. A few of them got wet around the edges, either from puddles of water or piss. Knowing her luck, it’s probably piss.

The whole bus ride home, her stomach’s twisting like it might be hungry, but she’s too bloated to even think about food.

One peek in the fridge tells her she’s got nothing on hand suitable for an upset stomach, so after a quick glance around, she swipes one of her roommates’ green health drinks. They won’t notice, and if they do, she’ll claim illness and grovel. They’re nice. They won’t care.

She sips her nasty drink and starts scanning the next project. Maybe she’s got food poisoning or the flu or something. That cheers her a little. She can’t be expected to work if she’s throwing up, and if she’s not working, she can get a whole lot more scanning done.

She keeps the trash can near, but though her stomach churns like the agitator in a washing machine, nothing comes up.

One minute she’s adjusting the margins on one particularly stubborn illustration page, and the next, her eyes sting. Just at the corners, outer and inner. Stinging like she’s about to cry a little cayenne.

She turns on the blue light filter for her computer, and nothing. She shuts off the lamp and stares at her dark wall, one hand on the book she’s scanning so she can turn the pages.

Her eyes still sting.

She lays in bed and closes her eyes. The sting turns into a prickly itch that spreads over the whole surface of her eyeball. Even when she sits up and returns to her computer, her eyes won’t stop prickling, like she’s got fresh bug bites lining the surfaces of them.

To keep her hands busy, she shuts off the autoscan and does it by hand. Repetitive, but at least she’s not scratching the shit out of her corneas.

The clock hits midnight and based on the acid creeping up her throat she’s for sure calling out tomorrow, so she keeps on going and going until she’s finished scanning two books and has started on a third. By the time she crawls into bed, it’s four in the morning and her eyes throb with every blink.

All through the night, she’s waking up stretched in odd poses, her stomach twisting into knots like she ate a damn gaggle of rabbits trying to burrow their way out.

When sunlight beams through her blinds, she hobbles to her computer and taps out an apology email.

I have the flu, Hermione says, but she’s never caught a flu that had her eyes itching so bad. When she drags herself to the bathroom, they blink back at her white as can be, so maybe she wasn’t scratching them in her sleep like she’d worried about.

Her pee comes out as a trickle, and when she wipes, it’s a bright, radioactive yellow verging on green.

Maybe the thievery wasn’t a good idea. The ingredients list on that health slop was about a mile long. Ugh.

She tries to throw up again, hoping it’ll help the gurgling of her stomach, but she can’t bend over for that long. Her innards pinch together and she heaves alright, but out of pain, not nausea.

In the mirror, her stomach bulges out from her pubic bone to her ribs.

She counts backwards to her last period and rifles around through the communal medicine box. Pepto, stool softener, an expired bottle of Tums—she takes it all, then slumps in front of her computer and starts up her scanning.

Turn the page.

Turn the page.

God, but her eyes itch. She tries rubbing at the outer corner where she won’t scratch anything, but it feels deeper now, like the imaginary bug bites have burrowed into that viscous fluid inside her eyeball.

She takes off her pants, then her underwear, and sits slumped with her distended belly pushed out. Gas burbles around, seemingly content to run a circuit from her lower gut up to her lungs and back again without actually emerging from either end.

When she tries to sip some water, it comes right back out. Not as vomit; her throat outright rejects it.

She googles rabies and swallows her own spit, which tastes like rust and acid.

By mid-afternoon she’s on her fourth book and her fingers start to ache with each tap at the keyboard. It’s her fingernails, or the beds of them, throbbing out of tune with her heartbeat. They look fine, but they feel as swollen as her stomach.

Someone knocks on her door. Her roommate. She tells them she’s sick with the flu, and don’t come in please, but she’s a-okay. No need for worry.

Oh, and sorry about the green drink.

The roommate says, it’s fine. Here if you need me.

Hermione doesn’t need anything but to throw up or take a dump or, ideally, both. No matter how long she spends sulking on the toilet, nothing comes out.

She rifles through the medicine box until she finds the laxatives and takes a double-dose, then lays in bed and calls her mom.

“I wouldn’t worry too much.” The TV babbles away to fill the space whenever her mom isn’t talking. “Tummy problems run in the family.”

Hermione pets her swollen belly. She imagines the laxatives sucking all the fluid from her tissues and spitting it into her colon. “First I’ve heard of it,” she says.

“Well, sure you haven’t. That doesn’t exactly make for polite dinner talk, does it? But your Aunt Rudy, back in the day…”

Her fingers throb where she’s holding the phone. She turns it on speaker and sets it on her chest.

“...and your cousin Marcelle. Oh, excuse me, Marcie. Or is it Marissa? Shoot, let me…”

Her intestines must be blown up like a balloon animal in there. If someone stuck her with a big fat needle, she’d go whizzing through the air.

“...and then me, I had all sorts of problems when I was pregnant with you.” Some studio audience squawks away in the background. “Oh, honey. You’re not…?”

Hermione groans. “No, mom. I’m not pregnant, believe me.”

“Alright, if you’re sure. Well, it’s probably that computer. I tell you, fifteen minutes in front of that thing and I’m all sorts of nauseous. They’re radioactive, you know. Just a little bit, but I think sensitivity to that sort of thing runs in our family, too. In fact…”

The laxatives don’t work. Neither does the ibuprofen she scarfs down for that stitch crawling up her spine, or the wash cloth she lays across her eyes, or the heating pad she wraps around each of her joints in turn as they all begin to ache.

With every movement, she’s creaking on the inside. Her stomach boils with whatever it won’t let go of.

Another one of her roommates raps on the door and asks if she needs to go to the hospital. Maybe they heard the groaning.

Hermione tells them, “I’m good! Fever’s about to break, I can feel it.”

There’s no fever, but sweat leaks from her forehead and her pits and the backs of her knees. When she makes her hourly trip to the bathroom, just in case those laxatives have decided to work, her sweaty feet slip around on the tile.

The fifth book lays spread-eagle on her desk, the white LED light still beaming into its spine crevice. The program needs her to turn the page, but sitting upright puts too much pressure on her stomach.

Her computer screen shifts to her screensaver, a ribbon twisting on itself and churning through the whole pinwheel of colors and back again. The light gets her eyes itching worse than ever, but she keeps staring, hoping that maybe she’ll hit the ceiling of her discomfort and break straight through into relief.

It doesn’t happen. One by one, her roommates close their doors out there and go to sleep, but Hermione doesn’t.

No matter how hard she swallows or how many times she rinses with mouthwash, the bloody taste of metal coats her tongue. The acidity of it nibbles at the tender flesh of her cheeks.

The throbbing in her fingertips kicks up a notch, faster than her heartbeat now, and spreads down to her toes. The pills and the saltines and the Italian takeout from the other night all squirm through her abdomen, running that same race track up and down her guts.

Her computer screen flickers. The ribbon goes still.

She feels it in her chest first. A vibration. Then a pressure change so sudden it gets her ears popping.

Hermione cradles her swollen stomach and starts to cry. Through her tears she stares hard at the computer monitor, but the ribbon doesn’t move.

The vibration strengthens until she’s feeling it up into her throat, behind her eyes, behind her popping ears. It wraps around her bones and shakes them hard. It slithers into her joints and gets the throbbing in her fingertips and toes going fast as a rabbit pulse.

She can hear it now. Her vision shivers with it.

She imagines enemy jets and bombs and maybe some top secret sonic weapon ready to melt her skin off her body.

The vibration separates into multiple separate tones. At first they’re nearly harmonized, but more and more threads split until it’s one fat battering ram of a chorus, like playing every piano key at once, plus a few extra.

Hermione says, “Help.” She barely hears herself.

Her roommates must be panicking out there. It’s a wonder they haven’t come rushing into her room, flu-ridden or not. Hermione reaches for the bed post to heave herself up—

—but when she tries to move her arm, something cuts into her.

She looks down. There’s nothing there, just her naked stomach and her arm wrapped around the side of it. She reaches again, and ow.

It’s on the inside. Like a row of splinters running up the length of her radius. She tries to move, but the splinters don’t move with her.

The other arm is just the same. And her legs. All she can move much is her head, and even then, she gets a sharp prickling down her spine until she shifts back to her original position.

The vibrations dig into the soft innards of her teeth. Somewhere very, very close, Hermione senses a footstep.

Her body revolts. She lifts an arm, intent on rolling herself straight off the bed if she has to.

The splinter feeling explodes into a sharp stitch that runs from her wrist up to her shoulder, and then her arm stops.

There—at the inside of her forearm, right where the sting is worst—a protuberance bulges. Like a limb under a blanket, if the blanket were the skin of her arm.

Everywhere she feels splinters, her skin bulges outward as something inside of her rejects the motion.

The air leaks out of her, and she forgets to pull it back in.

There’s something inside of me.

The chorus of vibrations scrambles her thoughts. She moves her arm back, and the splinter feeling mostly fades. Mostly.

If she jerked her arm away, right now, with all the strength left to her, what would happen? What would rip free?

Suddenly a wave rocks her entire body, as if she’s riding the ripcurrent of vibrations. Her computer screen flickers to white, just plain white, and cranks up brighter than she knew it could go. The backlight on her keyboard surges. Her phone over there on the desk beams a blank nothing at the ceiling.

The world shimmers. Her eyes swim.

Then—the door.

Her bedroom door slips open.