HP -- Getting a Life III: A Brief Waltz
Title: Getting a Life
Chapter: 2. A Brief Waltz
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,959
Warnings:
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: Isn't it fantasmical? Plz to be forgiving crappy formatting; I got lazy. You can tell how committed I am to this fic.
HERMIONE
Harry and Ron were impressed with my injuries.
They were not so impressed with my excuses.
“Oh, come on.” Ron rolled his eyes at Er… I fell. “Even you’re not that clumsy. Besides, what’d you do for a bruise that size, fall into a coat-rack?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I responded, attempting to sound mysterious.
Unfortunately, my “mysterious” tended to coincide with most people’s “stupid.” Consequently, Ron raised a coppery eyebrow.
“Wouldn’t’ve asked if I didn’t,” he replied caustically.
My turn to lift my gaze to the ceiling. “Well, get over it. I’m not telling.”
Harry, who had been considering this exchange, opened his mouth.
“Don’t even utter a syllable,” I warned him.
Compliantly, he shut his mouth again. Good thing one of them was considerate, or I would have obliterated them both with a well-timed spell by now. Ronald Weasley was lucky he was alive.
I would like to say that the next morning dawned pale and clear, the rising orb of the sun warming the fragile leaves of the greenery below, rousing bushy-tailed squirrels and talking bunny rabbits and beautiful princesses alike from their gentle slumber. But it didn’t. The next morning dawned mercilessly frigid and edged with a biting wind, and that was what this not-so-beautiful not-so-princess woke up to, earlier than usual because her blanket had slipped off of her bed and fallen to the floor.
As if mornings aren’t bad enough to start with.
Ron, Harry, and I trudged our way to Potions, me pretending not to trudge because I was supposed to be the chipper one. Today wasn’t a very chipper kind of day. Today was a sit-at-home-and-nurse-my-wounds kind of day.
But if I’d stayed home, Heaven only knows how much Malfoy would have been able to gloat. No, no gloating for the Gloat-Master on this particular morning, gelid as it was.
We took our usual seats, Ron on Harry’s left and me on his right, finding the usual safety in numbers as Malfoy and his darling (read: repulsive) cronies smirked over at us as if they had nothing better to do. As I ignored them, after noting with triumphant glee the purplish contusions highlighting Malfoy’s angular cheekbones, I couldn’t help but wonder what the three of us looked like when we wandered the halls of Hogwarts. Were Harry and Ron a frail little female’s bodyguards, or were Ron and I Harry’s insufferable sidekicks? Or were Ron and I supposed to fall in love, with Harry presiding over the proceedings and giving his blessing?
I turned my thoughts to Potions instead. It’d be my own doing if those made me throw up.
Potions went as Potions usually did: Snape asked questions at the beginning; I’d prepped and knew the answers; he grudgingly called on me because no one else had bothered, because they knew I would have; I looked like a know-it-all; I felt kind of stupid trying to look so smart; and we went to work. We sliced things, diced things, minced things, and generally performed all the functions of your average infomercial product. When we’d finished, most of the class was glaring at their partners over their hissing, spitting, intractably misbehaving concoctions, and Neville and I were shaking hands. I’d decided to take pity on the poor fellow this morning, and when I relegated his activity to cutting things into little pieces and handing them to me as I required them, it went over fairly well-provided that I reminded him every few minutes to pretend that we were in Herbology, and that his newt spleens or what have you were actually plants. The kid liked plants, and they liked him. It worked. Psychology is a beautiful thing.
Snape gave me some good marks even more reluctantly than usual, since I was partnered with poor Neville. It was unfair, but Snape was always unfair, and that was something that you just had to deal with. At least I wasn’t, you know, Harry or anything. Snape was more liable to dive headfirst into an acid bath than to give Harry a good grade.
I had to run for the next class I’d jammed into my schedule right as Potions ended, so I headed straight for the exit. To my displeasure, so did a particularly scummy daunting aristocrat with a feral glint in his eyes.
We reached the door at almost precisely the same moment, so Malfoy elbowed me.
“Out of the way, Mudblood,” he ordered.
I was so tired of that. So tired.
So I pushed him in return. “You get out of the way,” I shot back.
“Don’t touch me,” he snapped.
“What, afraid some of my intelligence will rub off?” I retorted.
“If you had any, maybe,” he rejoined. “I do know, however, that you’re shedding Mudblood skin cells all over my nice cloak.”
Creative, I had to say.
“Why are you going outside in such a hurry?” I inquired, jumping to a new subject. “Aren’t you worried that a hippogriff’s beak might graze your arm again, and you’ll be incapacitated for a week?”
He pushed; I shoved; he nudged; I jabbed back, just as hard. Then-
“What the hell are you doing to Hermione?” Ron demanded.
Ah, good old sidekick Ron, ready to get fired up over anything at all, so long as it involved swearing at Draco Malfoy.
“Fuck off, Weasley,” Malfoy responded immediately. As if motivated by the presence of an interloper, he shouldered me out of the way at last and darted up the stairs, “nice cloak” swirling around his ankles, and disappeared down the hall. Crabbe and Goyle, ever the faithful little tagalongs, lumbered after, like pull toys, trailing in the wake of the boy who had passed before, one colder and more ambitious even than the gray dawn had been. They were tributaries to that mad, rushing river, a river fraught with whitewater, carried by a roaring undercurrent even stronger than the evident flow. Their homage fed his ego, swelling the water further up the banks. What was going to happen when that river overflowed? Was the world even prepared for a flood of that caliber?
I made it to my class on time-barely-and managed to forget the river and my lack of life preservers in the midst of a pretty good lecture. But it wasn’t all fun and games. Oh, no. In fact, it wasn’t much of either.
That afternoon, Ron and Harry managed to claim the Quidditch field for Gryffindor before anyone else could beat them to it. I stayed in the common room doing homework, and, before long, my hand started cramping something awful. It was about at that time that some mischievous second year rolled a lit smoke bomb down the stairs, and the heretofore tranquil common room was summarily swathed in pungent purple smoke, thick mist that bit ravenously at the eyes and the throat and sent the majority of us diligent students directly out the portrait-hole, shouting our protests over our shoulders. For my part, I was hoping that McGonagall would catch the culprit shortly and flay him alive. Or at least stuff a lit smoke bomb down his throat.
Since I was already outside, and since my hand hurt like mad anyway, I decided to take a little walk instead of returning directly to the common room, slaughtering the first guilty-looking second year to cross my path, and clearing the air of sulfurous fumes. Jamming my hands in my pockets to warm them, my vague gladness that I’d left my books behind tempered by my vague concern that they would smell like smoke forever, I started for the lake, thinking I might find some lasting peace there.
Instead, I found Draco Malfoy.
This time, our favorite little prince-in-his-mind was unwrapping a packaged muffin, from which he then proceeded to tear small pieces to throw into the lake. I considered turning to leave, but my hesitation to go left me staying. It was, despite the aristocrat’s presence, indeed very peaceful, and that was what I had sought. The water lay flat like a mirror but for the little rippling waves raised and carried across the surface by a tugging wind, and blushing autumn leaves broke free of spindly tree limbs and went sailing away through the crisp air. Not exactly a beach in southern France in late May, but I thought it was very lovely.
Then, before I could wonder why he was throwing most of his muffin to the lake anyway, Draco Malfoy put a sizeable piece in his mouth and swallowed it. He blinked, looked down at his hands, and let the plastic flutter to the ground, its surfaces glittering in the light that penetrated the gloomy clouds. Slowly, as if trying to add drama to a scene in a movie, he sank to one knee, and then blood erupted beneath the skin of his face, flushing it immediately in a patchy, dangerous red like the mottled patterns of a moth’s wings, and he abruptly commenced rasping for breath.
In an unthinking instant, I had moved, and the plastic was in my hand, the label under my eyes; they flicked next to Draco Malfoy’s as he looked up at me with horror and a reluctant plea. There was no time to ponder the finer points of the situation, so I didn’t. I grabbed his arm, pulled him to his feet, and began dragging him towards the Hospital Wing.
I don’t really know how we got there. I don’t remember anything of the trip except for one big haze of stumbling down the corridors, ignoring the gawking onlookers, listening desperately for the next wheezing breath by my ear. Somehow, we made it; somehow, I shoved the door open; somehow, we staggered in, like the winners of some deranged three-legged-race; somehow, I managed to gasp out “Ana-(pant)-phylactic;” and then I didn’t have to be the hero anymore. Once I’d uttered the crucial syllables, Madame Pomfrey went to a drawer, retrieved a syringe, tapped it, took Malfoy’s arm, and buried the needle’s tip in a prominent vein.
Draco Malfoy, the arrogant, the vain, the egocentric, the mighty, collapsed into a chair, shaking and pale, and clung to it as the epinephrine wound its way through his bloodstream.
I found the plastic package crumpled in my hand and carefully opened my fingers, which were clenched around the little bag so hard that my knuckles had gone white. It crinkled, as if glad to be freed from my clutches. I looked at the list of ingredients again, and then I handed it to Madame Pomfrey, who glanced over it and sighed, coming to the same conclusion I had.
“No more soy for Mister Malfoy,” she concluded.
The faintest whisper of his voice was audible in reply. “Rhymes,” he managed to murmur.
“What?” I said.
“Soy; Malfoy,” he repeated, a thin and almost spectral smile twisting the corners of his lips upward. “It rhymes.”
I looked at him, but he didn’t look back. Instead, he managed to shuffle over to a vacant bed, kick off his shoes, peel back the white sheets, and bury himself between them. Hair that was almost white but for the butter yellow sheen peeked out of the small gap between the sheets and the pillow. Gradually, his breathing smoothed and slowed. Apparently spent by his brief waltz with the Grim Reaper, Malfoy had gone to sleep.
Madame Pomfrey thanked me, and I went down to the Gryffindor common room to dispel the last of the smoke with a few swishes of my wand and return to my homework, attempting to push thoughts of the Hospital Wing from my overburdened mind.
It wasn’t long later that I made the mistake of going back.
[Chatper II] [Chapter IV]
Chapter: 2. A Brief Waltz
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,959
Warnings:
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: Isn't it fantasmical? Plz to be forgiving crappy formatting; I got lazy. You can tell how committed I am to this fic.
HERMIONE
Harry and Ron were impressed with my injuries.
They were not so impressed with my excuses.
“Oh, come on.” Ron rolled his eyes at Er… I fell. “Even you’re not that clumsy. Besides, what’d you do for a bruise that size, fall into a coat-rack?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I responded, attempting to sound mysterious.
Unfortunately, my “mysterious” tended to coincide with most people’s “stupid.” Consequently, Ron raised a coppery eyebrow.
“Wouldn’t’ve asked if I didn’t,” he replied caustically.
My turn to lift my gaze to the ceiling. “Well, get over it. I’m not telling.”
Harry, who had been considering this exchange, opened his mouth.
“Don’t even utter a syllable,” I warned him.
Compliantly, he shut his mouth again. Good thing one of them was considerate, or I would have obliterated them both with a well-timed spell by now. Ronald Weasley was lucky he was alive.
I would like to say that the next morning dawned pale and clear, the rising orb of the sun warming the fragile leaves of the greenery below, rousing bushy-tailed squirrels and talking bunny rabbits and beautiful princesses alike from their gentle slumber. But it didn’t. The next morning dawned mercilessly frigid and edged with a biting wind, and that was what this not-so-beautiful not-so-princess woke up to, earlier than usual because her blanket had slipped off of her bed and fallen to the floor.
As if mornings aren’t bad enough to start with.
Ron, Harry, and I trudged our way to Potions, me pretending not to trudge because I was supposed to be the chipper one. Today wasn’t a very chipper kind of day. Today was a sit-at-home-and-nurse-my-wounds kind of day.
But if I’d stayed home, Heaven only knows how much Malfoy would have been able to gloat. No, no gloating for the Gloat-Master on this particular morning, gelid as it was.
We took our usual seats, Ron on Harry’s left and me on his right, finding the usual safety in numbers as Malfoy and his darling (read: repulsive) cronies smirked over at us as if they had nothing better to do. As I ignored them, after noting with triumphant glee the purplish contusions highlighting Malfoy’s angular cheekbones, I couldn’t help but wonder what the three of us looked like when we wandered the halls of Hogwarts. Were Harry and Ron a frail little female’s bodyguards, or were Ron and I Harry’s insufferable sidekicks? Or were Ron and I supposed to fall in love, with Harry presiding over the proceedings and giving his blessing?
I turned my thoughts to Potions instead. It’d be my own doing if those made me throw up.
Potions went as Potions usually did: Snape asked questions at the beginning; I’d prepped and knew the answers; he grudgingly called on me because no one else had bothered, because they knew I would have; I looked like a know-it-all; I felt kind of stupid trying to look so smart; and we went to work. We sliced things, diced things, minced things, and generally performed all the functions of your average infomercial product. When we’d finished, most of the class was glaring at their partners over their hissing, spitting, intractably misbehaving concoctions, and Neville and I were shaking hands. I’d decided to take pity on the poor fellow this morning, and when I relegated his activity to cutting things into little pieces and handing them to me as I required them, it went over fairly well-provided that I reminded him every few minutes to pretend that we were in Herbology, and that his newt spleens or what have you were actually plants. The kid liked plants, and they liked him. It worked. Psychology is a beautiful thing.
Snape gave me some good marks even more reluctantly than usual, since I was partnered with poor Neville. It was unfair, but Snape was always unfair, and that was something that you just had to deal with. At least I wasn’t, you know, Harry or anything. Snape was more liable to dive headfirst into an acid bath than to give Harry a good grade.
I had to run for the next class I’d jammed into my schedule right as Potions ended, so I headed straight for the exit. To my displeasure, so did a particularly scummy daunting aristocrat with a feral glint in his eyes.
We reached the door at almost precisely the same moment, so Malfoy elbowed me.
“Out of the way, Mudblood,” he ordered.
I was so tired of that. So tired.
So I pushed him in return. “You get out of the way,” I shot back.
“Don’t touch me,” he snapped.
“What, afraid some of my intelligence will rub off?” I retorted.
“If you had any, maybe,” he rejoined. “I do know, however, that you’re shedding Mudblood skin cells all over my nice cloak.”
Creative, I had to say.
“Why are you going outside in such a hurry?” I inquired, jumping to a new subject. “Aren’t you worried that a hippogriff’s beak might graze your arm again, and you’ll be incapacitated for a week?”
He pushed; I shoved; he nudged; I jabbed back, just as hard. Then-
“What the hell are you doing to Hermione?” Ron demanded.
Ah, good old sidekick Ron, ready to get fired up over anything at all, so long as it involved swearing at Draco Malfoy.
“Fuck off, Weasley,” Malfoy responded immediately. As if motivated by the presence of an interloper, he shouldered me out of the way at last and darted up the stairs, “nice cloak” swirling around his ankles, and disappeared down the hall. Crabbe and Goyle, ever the faithful little tagalongs, lumbered after, like pull toys, trailing in the wake of the boy who had passed before, one colder and more ambitious even than the gray dawn had been. They were tributaries to that mad, rushing river, a river fraught with whitewater, carried by a roaring undercurrent even stronger than the evident flow. Their homage fed his ego, swelling the water further up the banks. What was going to happen when that river overflowed? Was the world even prepared for a flood of that caliber?
I made it to my class on time-barely-and managed to forget the river and my lack of life preservers in the midst of a pretty good lecture. But it wasn’t all fun and games. Oh, no. In fact, it wasn’t much of either.
That afternoon, Ron and Harry managed to claim the Quidditch field for Gryffindor before anyone else could beat them to it. I stayed in the common room doing homework, and, before long, my hand started cramping something awful. It was about at that time that some mischievous second year rolled a lit smoke bomb down the stairs, and the heretofore tranquil common room was summarily swathed in pungent purple smoke, thick mist that bit ravenously at the eyes and the throat and sent the majority of us diligent students directly out the portrait-hole, shouting our protests over our shoulders. For my part, I was hoping that McGonagall would catch the culprit shortly and flay him alive. Or at least stuff a lit smoke bomb down his throat.
Since I was already outside, and since my hand hurt like mad anyway, I decided to take a little walk instead of returning directly to the common room, slaughtering the first guilty-looking second year to cross my path, and clearing the air of sulfurous fumes. Jamming my hands in my pockets to warm them, my vague gladness that I’d left my books behind tempered by my vague concern that they would smell like smoke forever, I started for the lake, thinking I might find some lasting peace there.
Instead, I found Draco Malfoy.
This time, our favorite little prince-in-his-mind was unwrapping a packaged muffin, from which he then proceeded to tear small pieces to throw into the lake. I considered turning to leave, but my hesitation to go left me staying. It was, despite the aristocrat’s presence, indeed very peaceful, and that was what I had sought. The water lay flat like a mirror but for the little rippling waves raised and carried across the surface by a tugging wind, and blushing autumn leaves broke free of spindly tree limbs and went sailing away through the crisp air. Not exactly a beach in southern France in late May, but I thought it was very lovely.
Then, before I could wonder why he was throwing most of his muffin to the lake anyway, Draco Malfoy put a sizeable piece in his mouth and swallowed it. He blinked, looked down at his hands, and let the plastic flutter to the ground, its surfaces glittering in the light that penetrated the gloomy clouds. Slowly, as if trying to add drama to a scene in a movie, he sank to one knee, and then blood erupted beneath the skin of his face, flushing it immediately in a patchy, dangerous red like the mottled patterns of a moth’s wings, and he abruptly commenced rasping for breath.
In an unthinking instant, I had moved, and the plastic was in my hand, the label under my eyes; they flicked next to Draco Malfoy’s as he looked up at me with horror and a reluctant plea. There was no time to ponder the finer points of the situation, so I didn’t. I grabbed his arm, pulled him to his feet, and began dragging him towards the Hospital Wing.
I don’t really know how we got there. I don’t remember anything of the trip except for one big haze of stumbling down the corridors, ignoring the gawking onlookers, listening desperately for the next wheezing breath by my ear. Somehow, we made it; somehow, I shoved the door open; somehow, we staggered in, like the winners of some deranged three-legged-race; somehow, I managed to gasp out “Ana-(pant)-phylactic;” and then I didn’t have to be the hero anymore. Once I’d uttered the crucial syllables, Madame Pomfrey went to a drawer, retrieved a syringe, tapped it, took Malfoy’s arm, and buried the needle’s tip in a prominent vein.
Draco Malfoy, the arrogant, the vain, the egocentric, the mighty, collapsed into a chair, shaking and pale, and clung to it as the epinephrine wound its way through his bloodstream.
I found the plastic package crumpled in my hand and carefully opened my fingers, which were clenched around the little bag so hard that my knuckles had gone white. It crinkled, as if glad to be freed from my clutches. I looked at the list of ingredients again, and then I handed it to Madame Pomfrey, who glanced over it and sighed, coming to the same conclusion I had.
“No more soy for Mister Malfoy,” she concluded.
The faintest whisper of his voice was audible in reply. “Rhymes,” he managed to murmur.
“What?” I said.
“Soy; Malfoy,” he repeated, a thin and almost spectral smile twisting the corners of his lips upward. “It rhymes.”
I looked at him, but he didn’t look back. Instead, he managed to shuffle over to a vacant bed, kick off his shoes, peel back the white sheets, and bury himself between them. Hair that was almost white but for the butter yellow sheen peeked out of the small gap between the sheets and the pillow. Gradually, his breathing smoothed and slowed. Apparently spent by his brief waltz with the Grim Reaper, Malfoy had gone to sleep.
Madame Pomfrey thanked me, and I went down to the Gryffindor common room to dispel the last of the smoke with a few swishes of my wand and return to my homework, attempting to push thoughts of the Hospital Wing from my overburdened mind.
It wasn’t long later that I made the mistake of going back.
[Chatper II] [Chapter IV]