Her heart stopped as she was born. This stop was brief, and went almost unnoticed by everybody present, but she was still altered by it. This was hardly surprising, as young Hermione-to-be was saved by her own inchoate magic, and if she wasn't, that brief stop would have been longer—in fact, more permanent—and she would be very, very dead. But her problem was far more fundamental than that. For her experience had marked her, and this mark would follow and motivate her for a long period of her life
She screamed even more than a child could have been expected to, because she felt that mark. She could feel, even only just born, that there were things missing; she could feel a gaping void in her soul where three things should be but were not. This hunger clawed at her and demanded that she rectify it; for lack of capacity, she did nothing; for lack of satiation, she screamed.
As she got older, she grew more capable of restraining it, but not of satisfying it, since she hardly knew what she desired so ardently. Her parents found what she talked of it strange, but medical practitioners could make neither head nor tail of it, so they grinned and bore it. This deep strangeness compelled and aided the girl in beginning to wield magic before she ought to have done—not that she knew such limits in the first place—but hardly provided explanation.
This lasted until she was seven, when the dreams started. She finally understood what she hungered for: a wand as white as bone, a cloak as clear as the Lethe, and a stone as black as obsidian. Not only that, but she saw some of their past and understood their present. And all of it felt so grim and unfulfilling, potential squandered that would be so much better devouredabsorbedclaimed by her as her rightwielded by her.
The wand would be quiescent and loyal under a worthy master (her) but it currently desired to flow from hand to hand, to feel being used in combat. Alas, its current master was so great as to render flowing almost impossible and combat unsatisfying, at least with the usual calibre of opponents he fought. This would make it the most difficult to retrieve in absolute terms, claiming it would require a victory, even if a small one, against such an opponent.
The cloak was left alone, a family heirloom unused and left to rot. While there was some of the line that possessed it still in the world, would they come across it? Would they come to treasure it and use it themselves? It could be easy to obtain if all that would be necessary was to tell the right honeyed words to the right person, or difficult if it depended on stripping someone of what they see as their birthright (she would say it was far more her birthright than it was theirs; after all, can they remember the taste of deathdeathdeath on their souls as they were born?).
The stone was ruined and defiled, used and wasted as a vessel for some ignorant bastard's soul. For that matter, he left it cursed and trapped. Oh, what irony; someone so bent on escaping death crudely ignores one of the tools that might be most useful for exactly that. But perhaps this fool's folly is to my advantage, she thinks, since it is easier to disarm a few traps and curses than fight a skilled wizard or charm some mysterious person. But then again, those curses could be so fiendish to make it far more difficult than it seems.
She sneaked into what passed for magical public libraries, knowing just enough from vignettes in her dreams to not stand out. After all, if she wanted to contend with the variety of fields necessary to seize that which she desired, she'd need to study quite a lot. Perhaps it would be less relevant to convincing some stranger to hand over a family heirloom, but studying magical ways to increase one's charisma or to analyse conversations couldn't hurt.
She acquired the stone first, when she was nine. She'd studied wandmaking enough to make a barely functional imitation of the wand which drifted through her dreams; certainly made of elder and thestral hair (and it was hardly surprising she could see them, at least to her—of course she's seen death, she died when she was born), otherwise incomparably awful in every way. But it was quite enough for her purposes.
This abomination of a wand was used to bring her to the place where the precious stone was hidden. With some effort she pried it from the curses burying it, and flayed it from the soul piece embedded in its former housing alongside it. This feat would have been more impressive if she had not had visions of those curses being applied in her dreams, subtly informing her of the exact counters necessary to do this, and the soul-containment being more aimed at the ring as a whole than the stone. Perhaps in a moment of caprice, she left the greater soul attachment undisturbed—she came here for the stone, and the stone alone, after all. The stone sung in her hands when she took it, and she seemed to be able to produce it from anywhere.
But while one piece of the trio sated part of her hunger, it wasn't just enough.
The cloak came next, a reasonable amount of time later. She'd come of age for formal magical schooling by then, which had hardly came as a shock to her given she'd been having visions of suchlike for years beforehand—not that she ever made that clear to anyone. She had to get a 'proper' wand, however (This wand is not the one you seek,
said Ollivander, I can see that very well. But it will serve, 'twill serve indeed.
); it was quite different from her homemade wand, which she'd grown quite used to—but that would've attracted awkward questions.
Of course, she quickly stumbled across the heir to that unused old heirloom, a fantastic stroke of luck. And he was desperate for friendship and kindness, and willing to agree to just about anything to get it. She managed to convince him to repay her friendship with his future cloak—though she never put it in such mercenary terms to his face. She was, at least, not planning on betraying her payment for the cloak; being a loyal friend seemed fine in exchange for a cloak worth so much more to her than it could ever be to him. She soon got her hands on the cloak, when it was slowly returned to her new associates over Christmas, and far more quickly given to her that day. It whispered to her when she wore it, and it simply seemed to appear when she desired to wear it, comfortably embracing her.
But even though two pieces of the set sated most of her, she still needed the last piece to be complete.
The wand was the last part, and acquiring it require more charisma than she expected and less combat nous than she expected. If you can't fight the headmaster in open combat, and it would be unreasonable to even try, how do you get him to engage you on a more even footing? Well, the answer is obvious considering the academic context: an educational duel. Could someone who still trades on his reputation for dueling Grindelwald be lured into putting on a demonstration for the dueling club? You'd think so—but it wasn't quite so smooth sailing.
Getting him to do it required an assault on all fronts; a petition from students, pleading that you were petrified by a basilisk (no matter how irrelevant that is to dueling), and pressuring his apparent desire to have a positive reputation with your good friend; all of these strategies are needed to succeed. Getting him to duel her was slightly more work; he wasn't keen on it up front, primarily because he was hardly confident in her being the best duelist in her year. So she had to arrange for the dueling spots for the headmaster to be arranged by vote, and then a spot of light election rigging. Actually acquiring the wand was much easier—she saw his typical tactics in her dreams of the wands, and could understand them well enough to get a disarming charm to stick. The disarming charm caused mastery to transfer to her—making her and her Hallows whole and indivisible, never to be separated—and she pulled the wand to her, glad to finally have gained all she desired, and to have the wand whispered of in her dreams.
She had got the final piece. That indefatigable hole inside her had been filled at last. She no longer felt incomplete, like a broken puzzle with missing pieces.
The faces of everyone around her were shocked. Not only had she disarmed the headmaster and took his wand, but something now seemed very different about her. She just smiled, her mouth looking just a little too sharp, and gloried in her wand, her cloak, and her stone. She wasn't quite sure what she had quite done, or what she could now do, but at least she had relieved that gnawing ache. She no longer felt spiritual phantom limbs, screaming at her that there was something missing. She was finally whole. The constant, devouring feeling of death that lurked within her had been rewarded.