They call it gifted kid burnout . Hermione definitely feels like she's been set on fire and left to char.
She's been awake since five. Her shift starts at eight. She's not moved to get ready or anything. She's just staring at the curve of fat and muscle on Susan's back, and thinking about how they're too good for her.
They smell like sweet clove body spray, pumpkin spice, and after-sex sweat.
Hermione smells like a double-shift at the hospital, followed by falling into a dump and running a marathon. She feels like it too. She feels like stepping in front of a train. Like suffocating under the blankets they share. She feels like a THC approved bonfire made up of burnt-out kid.
She rolls out of bed at seven-ten and spends another two minutes staring at Susan's soft face over their shoulder before she grabs her scrubs and a scrunchie and heads to the bathroom to get ready.
When she's ready to leave, she mouths I love you into the soft skin and baby hairs by Susan's ear, and she heads out the door.
xXx
She doesn't even like pumpkin spice. She doesn't like lattes. But the sinful combination of both is in her hand on the bus, and she is downing it like shots of serotonin, wishing she was still in bed with the human personification of it. She drinks like it's life or death on the line.
Pumpkin spice latte is filling up her imaginary lungs, and she can practically see her tragic headstone. Killed by Starbucks.
She's not that lucky.
She gets off the bus, careful not to touch the rails, and walks the last bit to work. She drops her plastic cup in recycling. She inhales bleach and stares at white walls and houseplants and plastic chairs lining hallways of the sick, and she ponders why she ever wanted to be a nurse.
xXx
Hermione is seven and wants to help people.
Ten years later, she hangs out in libraries with her two gay best friends and plots D&D campaigns and how she'll make the world a better place.
Twenty years later, she's spent years in the sophomore slump and doesn't sleep enough. She's helping people but not as fast as the world can kill them.
Hermione feels betrayed.
xXx
She picks up another latte on the way home. Not for her.
It's for Susan.
xXx
They've not been on a date outside for a month, maybe. Susan looks like a masculine lesbian, not a she/they bisexual switch who doesn't want top surgery. Hermione is pulling on knee-high fishnets and a sweater that Ron's mom made for her to fight the autumn chill outside. Her ponytail looks like it’s exploding behind her head in the mirror as she fumbles for makeup. But it's the best she's going to get it.
Susan asks if she's ready, and Hermione jumps so hard to leave, she gets liquid eyeliner stuck to the bathroom door. Susan kisses her, before they go out. They smell like sugar cookies and vanilla, lipstick and latte cream.
Susan has a car, a minivan her aunt left her when she died, but they take the bus. Hermione waits at the bus stop with one of her hands claimed by Susan and the other stuck in her pocket to stay warm. Their shared breath is white in the streetlight’s moonbeams. She watches traffic go by with a sort of half-formed desire to jump in it like the girl from Fight Club and see what happens.
Susan's fingers tighten around hers like they know what she's thinking.
They probably do.
She tears her gaze away from traffic and settles it on the soft curve of Susan's jaw instead. Her mouth feels dry with the want to kiss it. Susan turns to smile at her, and she feels like giggling like a Sailor Moon anime girl.
Susan looks so pretty. Hermione went to med school and wrote essays for meaningless prizes in high school, but her advanced vocabulary is reduced to an average six-year-old's whenever she thinks of what Susan looks like.
Pretty . Just so pretty. It slides off her tongue like foamy pumpkin spice and wet kisses. It melts her insides like cookie dough.
They're the better half of her by far. Hermione is completely lost to them.
And she's so in love, she stays off the road.
xXx
Hermione is a good nurse. But she loses so many patients. Sometimes she thinks they just want to die. And she can't help them with that.
The pot can't call the kettle black.
xXx
This is not going to work, Hermione thinks, alone on the couch as Susan is at work.
The planet is dying. People are starving. The wealth will never trickle down. There are a million things she is plagued by, and she cannot fix any of them. She has too much empathy for this. She has climate grief hard and she has never been paid fairly in her life. She was seven years old and just becoming aware of the world around her and people praised her for it. Now she's aware of all the flaws, and they wonder what jaded her.
How can they live in this world and not mourn its loss? Hermione has felt burdened by the inevitable end of the universe since she was nineteen.
She is not okay, and how dare she pin Susan with a radicalised girlfriend in permanent panic attack mode on their couch? She's such a hypocrite.
She is going to break down. She'll cry. She'll paint the hospital floor red and call it colour theory. She'll start going to therapy again and it won't help.
But she is never going to leave.
Hermione crawls to her feet to go and buy her partner a pumpkin spice latte before they get home, because for staying with her, they deserve it. Susan deserves everything.
Hermione is a burnout bonfire, but Susan is a star, and their glow on the other side of the bed is bright enough illumination for the both of them.