HP -- Getting a Life II: Muggle Ingenuity
Title: Getting a Life
Chapter: 2. Muggle Ingenuity
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,355
Warnings: language, violence, drug use
Summary: Hermione Granger loves metaphors. Draco Malfoy loves Muggle cigarettes. What happens when the king of Slytherin and the queen of the library collide?
Author's Note: It just keeps getting better and better! ...well, no.
DRACO
I knew that the guys were going to be up late, as usual-as always, really. That knowledge gave me the invaluable privilege of setting up an air-cleansing spell (a nice bit of work I was somewhat proud of) and smoking to my black little heart’s content.
There were a few things I’d observed about Muggles after stepping off of the manor and into a much stranger, much odder, and much more perilous world, one that was real, undiluted, uncensored, and known as Hogwarts. There were more things I’d observed on jaunts off-campus with my dearer friends over the summer. The two worlds were melting together at the edges, and things were seeping in either way. That fuckoff Potter’s driving around in Weasley’s dad’s car made it into Muggle newspapers; their mass-market products slipped inconspicuously into our purchasing habits. The two worlds blurred a little. It was kind of disgusting, and it was also kind of thrilling.
The best thing about Muggles was that, for all their incapacity to perform or even understand magic of any sort, they had compensated as best as they could. They were persistent little bastards, and they had done their damnedest to make up for the disparity with ingenuity. Although I would have subjected myself to a thousand nameless terrors before I stooped to taking a class on it, I had to grudgingly admit that their technology, as they termed it, was interesting enough. Guns were wicked, and so were tanks. So were more innocuous things like light-switches and the like. But the best by far, although AK-47’s put up a good fight, were the drugs.
All due credit to Nicolas Flamel, and whatever, but the fogey never brewed anything that could compete for a minute with vodka and cigarettes.
It was the latter that I was particularly attracted to. Muggle movie stars loved them, or pretended to, which added a nice air of distinguished mystery to my popping one in my mouth and setting a flame on the end with a spell or with one of those flicking-things they called lighters, depending on my mood, but it wasn’t the distinguished mystery that I really liked. Who the hell was going to see me anyway? No, and it wasn’t the way that they dampened the appetite a little-though the less I had to stomach of that shit they fed us, the better. The thing I liked most about cigarettes was that they calmed me down in a way that nothing else really could.
Maybe some of it was psychosomatic, since after the first few tries, I expected them to have that effect, but a lot of it was chemicals and smoke wafting towards the ceiling and into my eyes and good, old-fashioned Muggle ingenuity. I had to hand it to them.
There was, naturally, a little bit of shame to it. Quite honestly, who the hell wants to turn to Muggle drugs to quiet that nagging inner panic and hack it down before it builds? Just how pathetic is that? I mean, they didn’t need our world. Why should we need parts of theirs? It didn’t seem right.
There was also a bit of a worry that I’d soon have little black lungs to go with my little black heart, but I tried to ignore that. Hopefully Pomfrey could clean that kind of thing up in a matter of seconds anyway.
The reason I was going through cigarettes like Vincent Crabbe went through pastries on this particular day was because of a particularly annoying Mudblood by the name of Hermione Granger.
After retrieving the damnable book I’d been stupid enough to forget in McGonagall’s class, I’d run into her, and we both knew that we could very easily have just walked on by with our heads down. But where was the fun in that?
Today, more than ever, I had wanted to get a rise out of her. I didn’t know exactly why, only that I had to do it. It was a compulsion. She’d been adjusting quickly to the child’s-play I’d been working with before, so I had to up the ante if I was going to spark a reaction. Well, that suited me just fine. There wasn’t much I wasn’t willing to say.
It was all going very much in my favor until the little barbarian tried to murder me with her bare hands. Trust a Mudblood.
Obviously, an indignity like that can’t stand. Accordingly, I shoved her off and hit her back. Chivalry is dead. As far as I was concerned, so was that remorseless bitch of a Mudblood, because I was going to kill her.
We rolled around on the floor a bit, pummeling each other ineffectively. We didn’t get too far just smacking each other before I remembered who and what I was, at which point I scrambled back a little without getting up from the floor, whipped my wand out and pointed it at her, opening my mouth for whatever hex or curse or jinx or nigh-unprintable cuss was ready to come out. Damn her to hell, Granger was faster.
“Expelliarmus!” she screamed.
God damn it, I thought.
Before my brain had even completely finished mumbling those three words to itself, my wand was in her hand. Then, like a child throwing a tantrum, she pitched it away, and the little stick of wood-for that’s all it really was, if you think about it-went flying end over end over end and came to a clattering landing near a huge stone flowerpot. The flowerpot in question stood proudly on an Oriental rug in a long hallway, the left side of which let in, through an almost unbroken mass of windows with diamond panes, a very considerable quantity of golden afternoon sunlight. On a different day, I might have paused to reflect on these windows (laugh at that pun and I swear I’ll kill you), or, more likely, the most entertaining way to break them, and the best escape route after so doing. Today, however, Hermione Granger was pointing a wand in my face.
Stupid Mudblood.
She got to her feet, panting a little, and started to back down the hallway without lowering her wand.
“I’m warning you, Malfoy,” she said slowly, probably thinking she sounded dangerous and imposing. Far from it. “One wrong move…” Good God, where was she getting the lines? Honestly, girl like that should have been able to come up with something that didn’t sound like she’d stolen it from a bad movie. “…And I’ll zap you so hard you wouldn’t feel it when I drowned you in the lake after that.”
Admittedly, that was original.
I’d glared at her, darkly, or as darkly as you can glare at people when you’ve got what my first-grade teacher called “happy eyes” (I almost died of shame), until she disappeared off into some adjoining corridor, at which point I picked myself up from the carpet, muttering more nigh-unprintable things.
A First Year, whistling insouciantly, chose that moment to start strolling down the corridor. It was inconceivable that Draco Malfoy would bend down to retrieve his wand in front of a First Year, so I deemed it better to loiter by the wall and glower until she’d passed.
Glowering did the trick. It usually does. She quit whistling faster than you could have said “Silencio” (had you had your wand), ducked her head, and started strolling a hell of a lot faster.
I couldn’t help the triumphant little smirk that alighted on my lips at that. Natural reflex.
--
Back to the dorm, and the beautiful little tube of paper and tobacco resting between my fingers. Not without some pleasure, I considered the fact that I probably looked like a billboard. Or at least until I pulled out the wand.
“Flagrate,” I muttered.
Gratefully I breathed in the wispy incense of it and felt myself relaxing despite the ringing that Granger had inflicted upon my innocent ears and the series of bruises that had begun to form on my innocent face.
Stupid Mudblood.
I’d get her. One of these days, I’d be faster.
[Chapter I] [Chapter III]
Chapter: 2. Muggle Ingenuity
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,355
Warnings: language, violence, drug use
Summary: Hermione Granger loves metaphors. Draco Malfoy loves Muggle cigarettes. What happens when the king of Slytherin and the queen of the library collide?
Author's Note: It just keeps getting better and better! ...well, no.
DRACO
I knew that the guys were going to be up late, as usual-as always, really. That knowledge gave me the invaluable privilege of setting up an air-cleansing spell (a nice bit of work I was somewhat proud of) and smoking to my black little heart’s content.
There were a few things I’d observed about Muggles after stepping off of the manor and into a much stranger, much odder, and much more perilous world, one that was real, undiluted, uncensored, and known as Hogwarts. There were more things I’d observed on jaunts off-campus with my dearer friends over the summer. The two worlds were melting together at the edges, and things were seeping in either way. That fuckoff Potter’s driving around in Weasley’s dad’s car made it into Muggle newspapers; their mass-market products slipped inconspicuously into our purchasing habits. The two worlds blurred a little. It was kind of disgusting, and it was also kind of thrilling.
The best thing about Muggles was that, for all their incapacity to perform or even understand magic of any sort, they had compensated as best as they could. They were persistent little bastards, and they had done their damnedest to make up for the disparity with ingenuity. Although I would have subjected myself to a thousand nameless terrors before I stooped to taking a class on it, I had to grudgingly admit that their technology, as they termed it, was interesting enough. Guns were wicked, and so were tanks. So were more innocuous things like light-switches and the like. But the best by far, although AK-47’s put up a good fight, were the drugs.
All due credit to Nicolas Flamel, and whatever, but the fogey never brewed anything that could compete for a minute with vodka and cigarettes.
It was the latter that I was particularly attracted to. Muggle movie stars loved them, or pretended to, which added a nice air of distinguished mystery to my popping one in my mouth and setting a flame on the end with a spell or with one of those flicking-things they called lighters, depending on my mood, but it wasn’t the distinguished mystery that I really liked. Who the hell was going to see me anyway? No, and it wasn’t the way that they dampened the appetite a little-though the less I had to stomach of that shit they fed us, the better. The thing I liked most about cigarettes was that they calmed me down in a way that nothing else really could.
Maybe some of it was psychosomatic, since after the first few tries, I expected them to have that effect, but a lot of it was chemicals and smoke wafting towards the ceiling and into my eyes and good, old-fashioned Muggle ingenuity. I had to hand it to them.
There was, naturally, a little bit of shame to it. Quite honestly, who the hell wants to turn to Muggle drugs to quiet that nagging inner panic and hack it down before it builds? Just how pathetic is that? I mean, they didn’t need our world. Why should we need parts of theirs? It didn’t seem right.
There was also a bit of a worry that I’d soon have little black lungs to go with my little black heart, but I tried to ignore that. Hopefully Pomfrey could clean that kind of thing up in a matter of seconds anyway.
The reason I was going through cigarettes like Vincent Crabbe went through pastries on this particular day was because of a particularly annoying Mudblood by the name of Hermione Granger.
After retrieving the damnable book I’d been stupid enough to forget in McGonagall’s class, I’d run into her, and we both knew that we could very easily have just walked on by with our heads down. But where was the fun in that?
Today, more than ever, I had wanted to get a rise out of her. I didn’t know exactly why, only that I had to do it. It was a compulsion. She’d been adjusting quickly to the child’s-play I’d been working with before, so I had to up the ante if I was going to spark a reaction. Well, that suited me just fine. There wasn’t much I wasn’t willing to say.
It was all going very much in my favor until the little barbarian tried to murder me with her bare hands. Trust a Mudblood.
Obviously, an indignity like that can’t stand. Accordingly, I shoved her off and hit her back. Chivalry is dead. As far as I was concerned, so was that remorseless bitch of a Mudblood, because I was going to kill her.
We rolled around on the floor a bit, pummeling each other ineffectively. We didn’t get too far just smacking each other before I remembered who and what I was, at which point I scrambled back a little without getting up from the floor, whipped my wand out and pointed it at her, opening my mouth for whatever hex or curse or jinx or nigh-unprintable cuss was ready to come out. Damn her to hell, Granger was faster.
“Expelliarmus!” she screamed.
God damn it, I thought.
Before my brain had even completely finished mumbling those three words to itself, my wand was in her hand. Then, like a child throwing a tantrum, she pitched it away, and the little stick of wood-for that’s all it really was, if you think about it-went flying end over end over end and came to a clattering landing near a huge stone flowerpot. The flowerpot in question stood proudly on an Oriental rug in a long hallway, the left side of which let in, through an almost unbroken mass of windows with diamond panes, a very considerable quantity of golden afternoon sunlight. On a different day, I might have paused to reflect on these windows (laugh at that pun and I swear I’ll kill you), or, more likely, the most entertaining way to break them, and the best escape route after so doing. Today, however, Hermione Granger was pointing a wand in my face.
Stupid Mudblood.
She got to her feet, panting a little, and started to back down the hallway without lowering her wand.
“I’m warning you, Malfoy,” she said slowly, probably thinking she sounded dangerous and imposing. Far from it. “One wrong move…” Good God, where was she getting the lines? Honestly, girl like that should have been able to come up with something that didn’t sound like she’d stolen it from a bad movie. “…And I’ll zap you so hard you wouldn’t feel it when I drowned you in the lake after that.”
Admittedly, that was original.
I’d glared at her, darkly, or as darkly as you can glare at people when you’ve got what my first-grade teacher called “happy eyes” (I almost died of shame), until she disappeared off into some adjoining corridor, at which point I picked myself up from the carpet, muttering more nigh-unprintable things.
A First Year, whistling insouciantly, chose that moment to start strolling down the corridor. It was inconceivable that Draco Malfoy would bend down to retrieve his wand in front of a First Year, so I deemed it better to loiter by the wall and glower until she’d passed.
Glowering did the trick. It usually does. She quit whistling faster than you could have said “Silencio” (had you had your wand), ducked her head, and started strolling a hell of a lot faster.
I couldn’t help the triumphant little smirk that alighted on my lips at that. Natural reflex.
--
Back to the dorm, and the beautiful little tube of paper and tobacco resting between my fingers. Not without some pleasure, I considered the fact that I probably looked like a billboard. Or at least until I pulled out the wand.
“Flagrate,” I muttered.
Gratefully I breathed in the wispy incense of it and felt myself relaxing despite the ringing that Granger had inflicted upon my innocent ears and the series of bruises that had begun to form on my innocent face.
Stupid Mudblood.
I’d get her. One of these days, I’d be faster.
[Chapter I] [Chapter III]