Foolish Hearts

One

Hermione's Pov...

The hot water runs down my face and body, but I barely feel it. Blood ran down off of my body, but I don't feel that either. The pain and soreness comes later; it always comes later. For now, I am numb from my husband's fists. I cannot even cry, I am too numb inside and out.

I finished my shower, and looked at my body in the crappy, cracked bathroom mirror. My face Ron left mercifully alone, claiming that he liked me to 'remain pretty.' But the rest of my body is a testament to his brutish fists. I felt a tightening, then a loosening in my womb with ever increasing pain. I clamped my lips tight.

No, it would not be smart to scream, it never is when Ron is asleep. A bloody fetus lay in the corner of the shower. The third one in my marriage. Shit. I was pregnant and didn't even know it. How was I to know? I have not seen my period since the second year of my marriage.

I have to clean this up...
He will know...
It will all be my fault...
It is always my fault...
I am just an ugly mudblood...
I deserve nothing better than this...

I finished bathing, and dried off. I was always a thin girl with ugly, bushy mousy brown hair, and what was worse, I had amber eyes that didn't set off my hair color in any way. I got on the scale. I weighed 95 pounds. I should weigh at least 124 to be healthy. I looked, instead, like a skeleton, or a holocaust victim.

I covered up my emaciated figure with modest suits that a child could wear for work, but because of the wizarding world's archaic view of the husband being the boss in the family, I was out of luck legally. I don't know of any other reason for staying in this horrible marriage other than I don't think I deserve any better than Ron Weasley.

I got ready for work after throwing away my baby in a plastic grocery bag, and scrubbing the blood out of the tiled floor. I had a lie planned out for if Ron found any of the blood: I would just say it was that time of the month. No sex...unless he was drunk enough, that was. Yes, that would work. It had to.

I padded to my closet quiet and stealthy, as my fat, lard ass ginger haired husband snored loud enough to resurrect Voldemort in our lumpy, cheap queen sized bed with its scratchy red wool blanket pulled up around his head. I got dressed, and picked up my vine engraved wand.

I pointed it at Ron. I knew the words: Avada Kedavra. It would be so easy to say the killing curse, but then the aurors, or likely Harry Potter himself would cast me into Azkaban, along with the other former death eater prisoners. I tucked my wand away. No, there had to be another way out of this marriage, there just had to be.

I slapped on makeup that would look clown-like on any other woman, and tried to do something with my hair. No, that was a lost cause, like always. I grabbed my purse, and was about to use the Floo network from our fireplace when Ron stumbled out into the room bleary eyed.

He wore nasty stained white underwear with no shirt to hide his fat belly. "Hey! Where th' bloody hell ya goin' dressed like that, y' dumb slag?!" He slurred.

"I'm going to work, Ron," I tried to sound polite and kind, just like a good wife should. "I should be back by five."

Ron drank right out of the firewhisky bottle, and threw the empty bottle against the wall with a loud crash. He came towards me, and I tried to fight him off, but he had me pinned against the wall. I began to cry as he tore at my panties, and forced his member inside of me.

I screamed, but that only earned me a backhanded slap across the face. He gave a few more hard thrusts, which hurt because of the pain and rawness of my miscarriage. He withdrew and spilled his seed on his leg and the floor.

"Get outta here, filthy slut," Ron growled, kicking me towards the Floo network. I put the sand in and said, "Ministry of Magic."

I arrived at work looking like a ragamuffin, and I headed right to my department. I ignored everyone's stares, and sat at my desk, and tried to concentrate on my filing of the accidental misuse of magic by young wizards and witches.

By my lunch break, I decided to leave early and go to where Professor Snape used to live before his untimely death: Spinners End. It was dark by the time I arrived via apparation, and the last thing I remembered before the cobblestones of the street connected with my face, was a light come on in the somber house....