The Confectionary Chronicles || HP/SPN

Lollies and Loki- CH1

CHAPTER ONE

Once upon a time, in one particular universe or dimension or whatever you choose to call it, Hermione Jane Granger was not born an only child, but in fact had an older sister.

Clytemnestra Jill Granger was nine years older then Hermione, but just as quiet and bookish and clever. The two girls were remarkably similar in appearance, with the same untameable hair and slightly too-long front teeth, though Ness– as Clytemnestra preferred to be called, having being saddled by an even more obscure, unpronounceable Greek name then her younger sister– had their father's darker hair, closer to mahogany then Hermione's chestnut curls.

Despite the age difference between the girls, Ness loved her baby sister (as she persistently called Hermione, despite the maturity the younger girl's extremely high IQ lent her) and Hermione practically worshipped her sister. Hermione was a lonely child; she had no friends and she was bullied almost relentlessly by her peers. Ness was everything to her– absolutely everything.

But if Hermione was bullied by her schoolmates, then Ness could be considered downright tortured by hers. She was a gentle, soft-spoken girl by nature who'd had the misfortune of developing earlier then her classmates, leaving her with the sort of eye-catching curves that most teenage girls would literally sell their souls for. And she was tormented for it by her peers, with boys constantly making lewd comments and gestures. And the girls were even worse, as hard as that could be to believe– her homework, lunch and belongings would be stolen and thrown into dumpsters or flushed in the loos, the locker-room was hellish as her bra would be ripped from her hands, and sometimes the girls would even go so far as to gang up on her and physically hit, scratch and kick her. More then once she'd had to hide in the bathrooms for hours on end.

Ness was so isolated and so tormented that when she reached her breaking point, intellectually Hermione couldn't even be surprised. A terrible 'prank' had gone horrifically wrong. Ness had been cornered by a group of bullies after school, forcibly stripped bare and tied to one of the football poles. One of the bullies had then rung Richard and Helen Granger and told them that Ness was spending the night at her place. When a hysterical Hermione had tried to convince her parents otherwise, knowing deep down that her sister wasn't safe, Richard and Helen had been too excited about their eldest finally making friends to see Hermione's desperate pleas as anything other then a little girl being afraid to lose her sister as her best friend.

Hermione didn't sleep a wink and Ness spent the entire night tied to that pole, as bare as the day she'd been born. It was a freezing London night and Ness almost died. She was unconscious when the school's groundskeeper had arrived and found her, a small mercy. The school nurse rang an ambulance and Ness was treated in hospital for severe hypothermia. She was discharged after only a few days with a clean bill of health, but something had been damaged irreparably inside her. She never named the bullies responsible for her ordeal, never fully disclosed to anyone the horrors she had suffered that night, and instead seemed to fade into herself more and more every day, until the horrific evening when Hermione was seized with the sudden, paralysing knowledge that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

Determined not to fail her beloved sister again, Hermione followed the pull in her chest to the upstairs bathroom. She banged her small fists desperately against the locked door until something inside her seemed to explode out, reducing part of the door to splinters. But even as she half-fell inside the bathroom, it was already clear that she was too late.

The water of the bath was a deep, murky red and Ness was as white as the crimson-splattered tiles on the floor, the kitchen knife she'd used to carve into her own wrists dropped on the floor beside the tub.