Embedded Foreign Objects by Aeater [Rated PG-13]
Exchange Story for IceHeart161
Title: Embedded Foreign Objects
Author: aeater
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence and general grossness
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is not mine.
Author Notes/Beta Credits: Between specifying no "main character death" and then the deal breaker saying no "character death" I got sorely confused (no dying by anyone whatsoever? death so long as it's not someone important? what? huh? @ []e;; ). I think I found the not-so-happy median.
Ohgorshsomanymanythanks ballades. You saved my tail from certain painful, self-induced death. My brain still exploded but I'm told you don't need those bits of gray matter to live.
Summary: It's an uninvolved sort of love.
Embedded Foreign Objects
"Don't bring them in here, we don't have room. We can't do anything for them. There are no Healers here. We will not compromise our position, we will not take them. DO NOT BRING THEM IN HERE."
But they pooled in like flood water anyway. Through open doors they trampled over the words too weak against the tide of need to be any effective, any real barrier.
And so able bodies laid dying ones side by side in rows. The floor was cleared, and chairs were being transfigured into beds. Tables became operating stations, and more were being brought from the headquarters upstairs. All of it, popping, clanging, clattering, banging into an overwhelming cacophony.
"RONALD. RONALD WEASLEY."
It was shrill and it pierced through the commotion absolutely. From his haze Malfoy could see a chestnut blur darting through the crowd. The man carrying him grinned expectantly.
"'Lo, 'ermione." The words were awkward, spoken with a mouth full of glittering gravel. His face was slick with fresh red and his clothes were stiff and caked with dried brown blobs, but he was with his fiancé and the glass splintered in his lips was not going to keep him from beaming.
Malfoy groaned and after shifting, shuffling, cries for assistance and he was moved to a table where he could watch with clarity as deft fingers eased shrapnel from flesh, sealed a thousand paper thin cuts, lips pressed softly against newly healed freckled skin, and whisper idle, loving threats before moving on to more critical patients.
Weasel's fingers inspected her work before calling, "Oy, love, couldn't leave me a souvenir?" He stood from the spot she healed him from to trail after her spouting nonsense about war scars and bragging rights.
Across the room, a squeamish novice by the pile of rags' side held puffed cheeks for several seconds before taking in a sharp, quick snort through her nostrils. She was trying to be discreet about holding her breath and was failing. She was too new for all of this, too inexperienced to know that war didn't care about pleasantries, didn't care that it knew it reeked of sewage and death, to know a tactless nurse was better than a hyperventilating and unconscious one.
From his neck and his hand and his face, she yanked and tugged ungraciously, worrying each sliver of greasy, bloody glass with a pair of Muggle pliers, free. He started concentrating on the sudden hisses that came like clockwork, counting down the seconds until the next whistling gust. It kept him thinking on something that wasn't excruciating pain running down the length of his body. Each pinch of the metal fingers had him wanting to scream but his mouth just hung limp and useless because that and his neck had been paralyzed. She had numbed the half of his body that wasn't textured like broken bottles. The wrong half.
Salt from his eyes driveled and pooled into the open sores of his face and through the searing pain he couldn't help but know that her clumsy hands would leave a grisly scar.
__________________
Wafer thin walls.
“Malfoy?”
"...explains all the glass..."
"...the Ministry's collapsed..."
"Muggles Obliviated."
“Did…”
“Nothing, there was never…”
“…Hermione?”
“Ron trust me. Please.”
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.
__________________
Malfoy and nearly half of those he arrived with were kept overnight for fever. During the course of the week, one by one, they were permitted to leave until only a handful remained and day by day, the pain in his hand grew. Understaffed newspapers were thin and terse, "Muggle Transport Attacked" was spared only a few lines in a page full of similiar reports. Read one, read them all.
Now, though, his throat was dry and itchy and he wanted something to drink. His head hurt and the soft movements of patients, of the volunteers-turned-Healers, of the clattering life outside bumbling around with complete disregard to his condition, came in pounding like drums, like red hot needles through his skull.
"Water," he croaked.
A shadow clinking with plates passed by and set a glass by his makeshift bed. He could feel the cool vapor on his heated skin. He was broiling. His hand moved to it slowly, uncontrolled, shaking, weak. He winced at his fingertips’ first contact.
The shadow noticed.
"Here let me-" A left hand grabbed at his haphazardly, her other one somewhere in that vague distance, preoccupied with the more important task of balancing five meal plates.
Breakfast shattered into a thousand soupy, messy pieces as Malfoy lay in bed, head thrown back, shrieking.
__________________
Chunks of gnarled, dead flesh clung to crusty bandages. The dirty wraps crackled and spewed flecks of dried pus when they were stepped on by busy feet, forgotten on the floor.
"It looks like gangrene." Hermione said, palpating the bruise-colored flesh, cringing at Malfoy's guttural howls. Tiny slivers poked through hard, thick skin and glistened with green-yellow ooze as she passed over them with her thumb. "Good God, Maria, there are still shards of glass in here."
"I'll kill her, I'll kill her." He muttered hoarsely through pained gasps. He wanted the Squib's neck wrung and her body dragged through the streets, over miles and miles of rusty nails.
Hermione dutifully ignored him, turning instead to another volunteer, calling, "Grab for me an analgesic, please."
She examined his hand again, peeling away flaking layers of pus. "It's still in its early stages, it's still treatable. That's good news." She glanced up to gauge his reaction and found she was talking to an unconscious Malfoy.
__________________
"Septic shock...poultice for now..."
"...questions, has he..."
"No."
“Are you sure?”
Fading in and out.
__________________
During moments of lucidity, when he wasn't delirious from fever, Malfoy watched.
He watched for as long as he could. And when watching long fingers puncture and drain greasy discharge from thick blisters, hack and saw at black slabs of dead skin and tear amalgamated glass from his flesh became too much, he closed his eyes and just listened. The steady flow of snips from scissors floated around his ears. The familiar grinding of mortal and pestal was a lulling. A numbing sensation that was a godsend. No pain for now, not for awhile.
"We can't do anything about the fever." Her voice was soft like the rustling of new gauze. The gauze of the fresh poultice around his right hand.
The back of her hand pressed against his skin. Cool. Recollections of heat and impossible warmth and he wonders, Was she always so cool?
__________________
"Drink it."
"Did that Squib make it?"
"She's not a Squib, and it's a perfectly well made brew."
Something wriggled in the cup she was holding. A bubble surfaced and croaked as it popped.
"No."
"Drink it Malfoy."
"I refuse."
"You could die."
“That could kill me."
"Malfoy..."
"You make it."
"No." A sigh. "We don't have the ingredients to waste on you."
"You make it."
"Draco, you're being a child."
"Make it."
"Why me? What if I poison you?"
"Then I'll die because you want me to die, not because of some idiot's incompetence."
"Why won't I make a mistake?"
"I trust you." Desperate honesty.
A pause, uncomfortable rustling of blankets and sheets.
"Then trust me now."
Trapped, he had no choice but to drink down the sludge, tasting every vile drop as it passed his lips.
__________________
Liar.
She tried to kill him. He knew. Propped up against a wall, heaving into a bucket he knew that vindictive woman had induced a slow, miserable death.
"Your body is purging your blood of poison right now."
A hand on his back, rubbing soothing circles into it, but he couldn't feel it, couldn't feel anything except the nausea and lumps burning against his throat, making their way into the bucket, clumps sticking to his mouth, drying, itchy, sore, his arms too weak to do anything more than hold the tin pail between his knees.
Painful, unceasing, hunched over and retching, he glared between waves of vomit. Her doe eyes were soft, saying I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but it was all pretense. He knew. He knew with a cynicism profound how she was enjoying his misery. When she left saying something about war business and other patients his suspicions were confirmed. She was off to have a private giggle at his expense, he knew.
More retching, more dry heaving, more loathing. The time not spent willing an early death was spent sifting through his memories. Memories of pain, comparing, contrasting. Which hurts less, could this hurt more? Hangovers, headaches, pains and sores, broken bones, wiping his hands of vomit, wiping his hands of blood, wiping his hands of...
A dark room he wasn't supposed to be in. Moans from prisoners, but mostly the cells of the dungeon were quiet with despairing surrender. He heard that Dementors were sent down here for a lark, a shoddy imitation of Azkaban, enough to whet His peoples' vengeful appetites never to quench, but they weren't down here now. Now a man was tormenting someone. More larks, more quenching, voices wanting vengeance, voices seeking the sadist's bliss. Malfoy found slipped into a niche in the wall, listening.
"We're generous people, we're giving you a choice."
"No."
"You can kill the filth inside of you or we can."
"No, no."
"Does that mean you won't?"
When the screams came, he quietly turned away and walked steadily down the corridor. The hands pressed against the stone walls came away with trails of sticky goo, because they were those kinds of people. He wiped his hands quickly on the underside of his robe, stomach churning all the while.
Thick muck, the last bits of dredge in his body, made disgusting plops into the bucket. His body quivered violently. Comparing, contrasting, is this what Hermione Granger felt like when Rodo Lestrange kicked her pregnant belly until she bled?
__________________
He was left alone and the voices from upstairs ceased to be loud enough to torment him. He had stopped vomiting, his hand was beginning to lose its dying blue-black hue, the dead skin peeled away to reveal new, too new, pink flesh not quite ready for the world but not having a choice. He was alone, the others were gone or buried and it was dark now, like it was then. Alone and with ample time for wondering.
Hours and hours later she walked in, carrying books and not healing potions, smelling like ink and not decay. She didn't speak, she normally did, but it didn't bother him, not today.
"Would it have been a boy or girl?"
"Excuse me?" She asked with sincere confusion. Her steps were paused.
Malfoy wasn't facing her, couldn't, or wouldn't. He was looking far away in the other direction, through a window that existed only in his head, at a landscape of his own invention.
"Your baby."
Silence. A pregnant silence.
"Drop it, Malfoy." The footsteps resumed, a determined ring to their clamor.
"It would have had your hair…unless you carry the gene for that ghastly red somewhere in your veins." He mused, half-cooing, indifferent.
Her books dropped with an ominous clatter. "Shut up."
His eyes flitted towards her, head unmoving, lips in a thin line. She had her wand out. Quaint.
He continued, unabated. Carelessly. "Your eyes too. Weasel's freckles, though, and his shape of face…”
The sharp sting of wood on his neck. She was near enough now he imagined he could hear her pulse. "What do you want?"
"It would have been a beautiful girl. Like its mother."
A hand collided with his face. The puckered red slash reopened, he could feel wet blood trickling.
"You have no right, none, no right whatsoever-"
"They think I'm dead, you know."
"Out."
"Weasel said your people would grant me sanctuary.”
"I've heard it all and I'm saying I want you out," Her eyes were watering. There was anguish and indignation.
"You can't get rid of the Dark Mark with magic. At least, not with any spells or charms we know." He continued, methodically.
"Are you listening to me? Out of here, OUT. You odious, odious boy. I want you gone."
"Before your Weasel even touched me he gave me a knife and told me to cut it out." The wand was digging deeper, making speaking more difficult but Malfoy was obnoxiously persistent. "Said he wouldn't take me back otherwise. I did. I carved it out and he dragged me over here still bleeding. I suspect that's where the infection started, though the Squib helped it along."
"Is there a point to this?"
His voice was still steady and he marveled at his penchant for being heartless. "I was there. I could have stopped Lestrange."
Legs collapsing, shoulders shaking.
"Then why didn't you?"
"Attacking Lestrange then would have just killed me-"
"BUT IT WOULD HAVE SAVED MY BABY."
"Or all three of use would have been died." He spat. "There was no way to the surface from the dungeons that wasn't crawling with Voldemort's men. Use your head woman, we would have all been captured. We would have all been killed.”
“You’re a coward Malfoy.”
“No, I’m economical.”
She was crying harder now.
"I got you out."
"When you were good and ready-"
"At the first opportunity that wouldn't have your head on a pike-"
"Oh shut up Malfoy" Her voice was cracking, hands over her face, muffling her wailings. "…couldn’t be bothered, couldn’t be arsed…”
He waited until her coughing fit played out and her sobbing died down.
“So,” he started, “was it mine after all?”
__________________
Sometime between her leaving the room that day and her returning the next afternoon, he had gone. Quick exits and loose ends were something of his specialty.
[end]
Assignment:
BRIEFLY describe what you'd like to receive: post HBP, some angst but no "main" character death
What rating would you prefer? PG13 or up
Deal Breakers (what don't you want?): incest, rape, character death
Final Author Notes:Ah, it wasn't so romantic after all, even though it had a soap opera ending. - A-;; During the course of writing this my knee got infected with cellulitus (which can develop into gangrene), wonky, eh? It's like I willed it or something...
Thank-you for participating in the Hot Summer Nights with Draco and Hermione fic exchange.
Title: Embedded Foreign Objects
Author: aeater
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence and general grossness
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is not mine.
Author Notes/Beta Credits: Between specifying no "main character death" and then the deal breaker saying no "character death" I got sorely confused (no dying by anyone whatsoever? death so long as it's not someone important? what? huh? @ []e;; ). I think I found the not-so-happy median.
Ohgorshsomanymanythanks ballades. You saved my tail from certain painful, self-induced death. My brain still exploded but I'm told you don't need those bits of gray matter to live.
Summary: It's an uninvolved sort of love.
Embedded Foreign Objects
"Don't bring them in here, we don't have room. We can't do anything for them. There are no Healers here. We will not compromise our position, we will not take them. DO NOT BRING THEM IN HERE."
But they pooled in like flood water anyway. Through open doors they trampled over the words too weak against the tide of need to be any effective, any real barrier.
And so able bodies laid dying ones side by side in rows. The floor was cleared, and chairs were being transfigured into beds. Tables became operating stations, and more were being brought from the headquarters upstairs. All of it, popping, clanging, clattering, banging into an overwhelming cacophony.
"RONALD. RONALD WEASLEY."
It was shrill and it pierced through the commotion absolutely. From his haze Malfoy could see a chestnut blur darting through the crowd. The man carrying him grinned expectantly.
"'Lo, 'ermione." The words were awkward, spoken with a mouth full of glittering gravel. His face was slick with fresh red and his clothes were stiff and caked with dried brown blobs, but he was with his fiancé and the glass splintered in his lips was not going to keep him from beaming.
Malfoy groaned and after shifting, shuffling, cries for assistance and he was moved to a table where he could watch with clarity as deft fingers eased shrapnel from flesh, sealed a thousand paper thin cuts, lips pressed softly against newly healed freckled skin, and whisper idle, loving threats before moving on to more critical patients.
Weasel's fingers inspected her work before calling, "Oy, love, couldn't leave me a souvenir?" He stood from the spot she healed him from to trail after her spouting nonsense about war scars and bragging rights.
Across the room, a squeamish novice by the pile of rags' side held puffed cheeks for several seconds before taking in a sharp, quick snort through her nostrils. She was trying to be discreet about holding her breath and was failing. She was too new for all of this, too inexperienced to know that war didn't care about pleasantries, didn't care that it knew it reeked of sewage and death, to know a tactless nurse was better than a hyperventilating and unconscious one.
From his neck and his hand and his face, she yanked and tugged ungraciously, worrying each sliver of greasy, bloody glass with a pair of Muggle pliers, free. He started concentrating on the sudden hisses that came like clockwork, counting down the seconds until the next whistling gust. It kept him thinking on something that wasn't excruciating pain running down the length of his body. Each pinch of the metal fingers had him wanting to scream but his mouth just hung limp and useless because that and his neck had been paralyzed. She had numbed the half of his body that wasn't textured like broken bottles. The wrong half.
Salt from his eyes driveled and pooled into the open sores of his face and through the searing pain he couldn't help but know that her clumsy hands would leave a grisly scar.
__________________
Wafer thin walls.
“Malfoy?”
"...explains all the glass..."
"...the Ministry's collapsed..."
"Muggles Obliviated."
“Did…”
“Nothing, there was never…”
“…Hermione?”
“Ron trust me. Please.”
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.
__________________
Malfoy and nearly half of those he arrived with were kept overnight for fever. During the course of the week, one by one, they were permitted to leave until only a handful remained and day by day, the pain in his hand grew. Understaffed newspapers were thin and terse, "Muggle Transport Attacked" was spared only a few lines in a page full of similiar reports. Read one, read them all.
Now, though, his throat was dry and itchy and he wanted something to drink. His head hurt and the soft movements of patients, of the volunteers-turned-Healers, of the clattering life outside bumbling around with complete disregard to his condition, came in pounding like drums, like red hot needles through his skull.
"Water," he croaked.
A shadow clinking with plates passed by and set a glass by his makeshift bed. He could feel the cool vapor on his heated skin. He was broiling. His hand moved to it slowly, uncontrolled, shaking, weak. He winced at his fingertips’ first contact.
The shadow noticed.
"Here let me-" A left hand grabbed at his haphazardly, her other one somewhere in that vague distance, preoccupied with the more important task of balancing five meal plates.
Breakfast shattered into a thousand soupy, messy pieces as Malfoy lay in bed, head thrown back, shrieking.
__________________
Chunks of gnarled, dead flesh clung to crusty bandages. The dirty wraps crackled and spewed flecks of dried pus when they were stepped on by busy feet, forgotten on the floor.
"It looks like gangrene." Hermione said, palpating the bruise-colored flesh, cringing at Malfoy's guttural howls. Tiny slivers poked through hard, thick skin and glistened with green-yellow ooze as she passed over them with her thumb. "Good God, Maria, there are still shards of glass in here."
"I'll kill her, I'll kill her." He muttered hoarsely through pained gasps. He wanted the Squib's neck wrung and her body dragged through the streets, over miles and miles of rusty nails.
Hermione dutifully ignored him, turning instead to another volunteer, calling, "Grab for me an analgesic, please."
She examined his hand again, peeling away flaking layers of pus. "It's still in its early stages, it's still treatable. That's good news." She glanced up to gauge his reaction and found she was talking to an unconscious Malfoy.
__________________
"Septic shock...poultice for now..."
"...questions, has he..."
"No."
“Are you sure?”
Fading in and out.
__________________
During moments of lucidity, when he wasn't delirious from fever, Malfoy watched.
He watched for as long as he could. And when watching long fingers puncture and drain greasy discharge from thick blisters, hack and saw at black slabs of dead skin and tear amalgamated glass from his flesh became too much, he closed his eyes and just listened. The steady flow of snips from scissors floated around his ears. The familiar grinding of mortal and pestal was a lulling. A numbing sensation that was a godsend. No pain for now, not for awhile.
"We can't do anything about the fever." Her voice was soft like the rustling of new gauze. The gauze of the fresh poultice around his right hand.
The back of her hand pressed against his skin. Cool. Recollections of heat and impossible warmth and he wonders, Was she always so cool?
__________________
"Drink it."
"Did that Squib make it?"
"She's not a Squib, and it's a perfectly well made brew."
Something wriggled in the cup she was holding. A bubble surfaced and croaked as it popped.
"No."
"Drink it Malfoy."
"I refuse."
"You could die."
“That could kill me."
"Malfoy..."
"You make it."
"No." A sigh. "We don't have the ingredients to waste on you."
"You make it."
"Draco, you're being a child."
"Make it."
"Why me? What if I poison you?"
"Then I'll die because you want me to die, not because of some idiot's incompetence."
"Why won't I make a mistake?"
"I trust you." Desperate honesty.
A pause, uncomfortable rustling of blankets and sheets.
"Then trust me now."
Trapped, he had no choice but to drink down the sludge, tasting every vile drop as it passed his lips.
__________________
Liar.
She tried to kill him. He knew. Propped up against a wall, heaving into a bucket he knew that vindictive woman had induced a slow, miserable death.
"Your body is purging your blood of poison right now."
A hand on his back, rubbing soothing circles into it, but he couldn't feel it, couldn't feel anything except the nausea and lumps burning against his throat, making their way into the bucket, clumps sticking to his mouth, drying, itchy, sore, his arms too weak to do anything more than hold the tin pail between his knees.
Painful, unceasing, hunched over and retching, he glared between waves of vomit. Her doe eyes were soft, saying I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but it was all pretense. He knew. He knew with a cynicism profound how she was enjoying his misery. When she left saying something about war business and other patients his suspicions were confirmed. She was off to have a private giggle at his expense, he knew.
More retching, more dry heaving, more loathing. The time not spent willing an early death was spent sifting through his memories. Memories of pain, comparing, contrasting. Which hurts less, could this hurt more? Hangovers, headaches, pains and sores, broken bones, wiping his hands of vomit, wiping his hands of blood, wiping his hands of...
A dark room he wasn't supposed to be in. Moans from prisoners, but mostly the cells of the dungeon were quiet with despairing surrender. He heard that Dementors were sent down here for a lark, a shoddy imitation of Azkaban, enough to whet His peoples' vengeful appetites never to quench, but they weren't down here now. Now a man was tormenting someone. More larks, more quenching, voices wanting vengeance, voices seeking the sadist's bliss. Malfoy found slipped into a niche in the wall, listening.
"We're generous people, we're giving you a choice."
"No."
"You can kill the filth inside of you or we can."
"No, no."
"Does that mean you won't?"
When the screams came, he quietly turned away and walked steadily down the corridor. The hands pressed against the stone walls came away with trails of sticky goo, because they were those kinds of people. He wiped his hands quickly on the underside of his robe, stomach churning all the while.
Thick muck, the last bits of dredge in his body, made disgusting plops into the bucket. His body quivered violently. Comparing, contrasting, is this what Hermione Granger felt like when Rodo Lestrange kicked her pregnant belly until she bled?
__________________
He was left alone and the voices from upstairs ceased to be loud enough to torment him. He had stopped vomiting, his hand was beginning to lose its dying blue-black hue, the dead skin peeled away to reveal new, too new, pink flesh not quite ready for the world but not having a choice. He was alone, the others were gone or buried and it was dark now, like it was then. Alone and with ample time for wondering.
Hours and hours later she walked in, carrying books and not healing potions, smelling like ink and not decay. She didn't speak, she normally did, but it didn't bother him, not today.
"Would it have been a boy or girl?"
"Excuse me?" She asked with sincere confusion. Her steps were paused.
Malfoy wasn't facing her, couldn't, or wouldn't. He was looking far away in the other direction, through a window that existed only in his head, at a landscape of his own invention.
"Your baby."
Silence. A pregnant silence.
"Drop it, Malfoy." The footsteps resumed, a determined ring to their clamor.
"It would have had your hair…unless you carry the gene for that ghastly red somewhere in your veins." He mused, half-cooing, indifferent.
Her books dropped with an ominous clatter. "Shut up."
His eyes flitted towards her, head unmoving, lips in a thin line. She had her wand out. Quaint.
He continued, unabated. Carelessly. "Your eyes too. Weasel's freckles, though, and his shape of face…”
The sharp sting of wood on his neck. She was near enough now he imagined he could hear her pulse. "What do you want?"
"It would have been a beautiful girl. Like its mother."
A hand collided with his face. The puckered red slash reopened, he could feel wet blood trickling.
"You have no right, none, no right whatsoever-"
"They think I'm dead, you know."
"Out."
"Weasel said your people would grant me sanctuary.”
"I've heard it all and I'm saying I want you out," Her eyes were watering. There was anguish and indignation.
"You can't get rid of the Dark Mark with magic. At least, not with any spells or charms we know." He continued, methodically.
"Are you listening to me? Out of here, OUT. You odious, odious boy. I want you gone."
"Before your Weasel even touched me he gave me a knife and told me to cut it out." The wand was digging deeper, making speaking more difficult but Malfoy was obnoxiously persistent. "Said he wouldn't take me back otherwise. I did. I carved it out and he dragged me over here still bleeding. I suspect that's where the infection started, though the Squib helped it along."
"Is there a point to this?"
His voice was still steady and he marveled at his penchant for being heartless. "I was there. I could have stopped Lestrange."
Legs collapsing, shoulders shaking.
"Then why didn't you?"
"Attacking Lestrange then would have just killed me-"
"BUT IT WOULD HAVE SAVED MY BABY."
"Or all three of use would have been died." He spat. "There was no way to the surface from the dungeons that wasn't crawling with Voldemort's men. Use your head woman, we would have all been captured. We would have all been killed.”
“You’re a coward Malfoy.”
“No, I’m economical.”
She was crying harder now.
"I got you out."
"When you were good and ready-"
"At the first opportunity that wouldn't have your head on a pike-"
"Oh shut up Malfoy" Her voice was cracking, hands over her face, muffling her wailings. "…couldn’t be bothered, couldn’t be arsed…”
He waited until her coughing fit played out and her sobbing died down.
“So,” he started, “was it mine after all?”
__________________
Sometime between her leaving the room that day and her returning the next afternoon, he had gone. Quick exits and loose ends were something of his specialty.
[end]
Assignment:
BRIEFLY describe what you'd like to receive: post HBP, some angst but no "main" character death
What rating would you prefer? PG13 or up
Deal Breakers (what don't you want?): incest, rape, character death
Final Author Notes:Ah, it wasn't so romantic after all, even though it had a soap opera ending. - A-;; During the course of writing this my knee got infected with cellulitus (which can develop into gangrene), wonky, eh? It's like I willed it or something...
Thank-you for participating in the Hot Summer Nights with Draco and Hermione fic exchange.