HP -- Getting a Life VIII: Glass in the Sink
Title: Getting a Life
Chapter: 8. Glass in the Sink
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,920
Warnings: blood, oh, my; and Shakespeare references
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: I ♥ Shakespeare. I'm sure you can't tell.
DRACO
What a fucking disappointment.
That was what I said. What my dear father was going to say would be worse.
What a fucking disgrace.
And I was, wasn’t I? It was absolutely disgraceful to get wiped off of the field by that self-righteous, sermonizing, goody-two-shoes asshole Harry Potter. Him and his infamous flame-haired cohort. The two of them were a match made in Hell for any respectable wizard in the world-the ultimate foil for the old families, because they had as much a claim to good blood as we did, and they abused it to no end.
That pissed me off. More than anything else in the world, that in particular pissed me off, because there was nothing I could do about it-short maybe of killing them.
I knocked back a shot of vodka and forced my shaking hand to stay still enough to fill the little glass again. It was a small target.
That was an idea. Killing people. It was absurdly easy, really, if you thought about it. Human beings are fragile, fragile things. Slit a throat, smash a skull-simple stuff. And with a wand in your hand, it’s almost too easy. The act itself really ought to be more of a challenge, given the consequences.
Given that I was getting a good buzz now, I started to plan my prospective murder. Murders, really-plural. Weasley was going down with Potter. It was the way it should have been. I think it not meet Marc Antony, so well-beloved of Caesar, should outlive Caesar.
Yes, I’m that kind of drunk.
I would torture Neville for the password to the Gryffindor dormitory, and then I would either scramble his brains or outright kill him. Killing sounded preferable. No witnesses was always a good thing. I would take that password, enter the dorm-if that overweight woman in the portrait even thought to ask, someone would have borrowed a book of mine that I needed-and creep up to the appropriate bedroom. I would open the door quietly and wait for the rustling of limbs against bed-sheets to go completely silent. And then I would approach my victims and, one after the other, I would hit them with an Unforgivable and be done with it.
Or maybe I’d put a bullet in each of their respective foreheads. Seemed like a nice touch, given that the both of them were Muggle-lovers, and that using Muggle means would frame a Mudblood. I nodded to myself. Yes, that sounded good. And it would be infinitely more satisfying to pull a trigger than to wave a wand.
Maybe I’d kill Dean and Seamus, too, just to make sure that there weren’t any witnesses. It wasn’t likely they’d sleep through the shots, even if I had a silencer. They probably had to die, too. It wasn’t a great loss. More Gryffindor scum in the graveyard.
I wondered if Hogwarts had a graveyard. Surely people died here, and the administration covered it up. There had to be suicides, and homicides, and roommate-icides. I mean, honestly.
I downed another dose of vodka and admired the view from the bathroom window, a lovely panorama afforded to me by my improvised upturned-rubbish-bin chair. It was getting dark, and the stars were peeking out of a velvety sky, and the moon was full and crisp and yellow, low and fat on the horizon. It looked like cheese. I could have gone for some cheese with my vodka, but I didn’t want to leave to try to find some. Instead I just poured again, spilling a little this time despite my best efforts to steady my hands.
The door opened, and without looking I told the intruder to fuck off. I could hear a little bit of a slur in my own voice, which was a bad sign, but the statement was clear enough. The invader only really needed to hear the tone of it anyway.
“I most certainly will not fuck off,” she answered.
Red flags went up rapidly. It was like a bullfight. First of all, Plan A, or the “Mind Your Own Fucking Business” Method, was not working. Second of all, I was in the gentlemen’s lavatory, and this voice was distinctly female. Worst yet, it was familiar.
Intoxicated or not, I knew it was Granger.
“Mind your own fucking business,” I told her. Uncreative, I know. Cut me some slack. Drunk, remember?
“I’m making this my business,” Granger announced, stomping up to me and folding her arms disapprovingly. Where did the girl get these lines?
I shrugged and took my next shot. Fourth? I thought it was. Somewhere in that area. When I lowered the glass, I found that Granger had repossessed my bottle and was making for the sink, presumably to pour its contents down the drain. I managed to find my feet and scramble after her with surprising dexterity given the situation.
“That shit’s expensive!” I protested, mostly coherently, as she moved to upend it.
Granger looked at me, her eyebrows drawn together. Concerned or something.
“Draco, this isn’t the answer,” she said.
The statement gave me an opportunity to snatch the bottle back. It was an opportunity that I took gratefully.
“The whole point of life is finding your own answers,” I announced. It didn’t sound quite so clichéd at the time, if you were wondering.
She reached for the bottle, and I jerked it away from her.
“You’re being insufferably stupid,” she snapped.
“Not just stupid,” I commented calmly. “Insufferably stupid. That’s incredible.”
“That’s right,” she sniffed. Next a plaintive note came into her voice. She was playing all her cards tonight, and trying out all her voices. “You’re going to ruin your life this way. Don’t be an idiot. Please.”
“‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I,’” I began pleasantly. Told you I was that kind. “‘Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit?’”
Granger frowned. “Don’t.”
I couldn’t remember the next bit, so I skipped ahead. It worked better like that anyway. “‘What would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have? He would drown the stage in tears, cleave the general ear-’”
Granger’s face darkened. “He certainly wouldn’t hide in the bathroom and drink cheap vodka, I’ll tell you that.”
Being mildly inebriated, I couldn’t help but laugh uproariously. “Allow me to assure you,” I told her, “that this is very expensive vodka. Draco Malfoy does not drink cheap vodka. Neither does Draco Malfoy smoke cheap cigarettes. And Draco Malfoy most certainly does not explain himself to Mudbloods.”
As I reveled in my linguistic genius, tickled especially by my exquisite parallel structure, she caught me off-guard and ripped the bottle out of my fingers, at which point she clutched it close to her chest as if it were a very valuable prize. “Draco,” she said patiently, as if she were a tired mother reprimanding an obstinate child, “don’t be stupid.”
“Sorry,” I responded, reaching for the neck of the bottle again, scrabbling for it. “But I am. It’s a character trait. These things are permanent, I’m afraid.” I missed my target and instead ended up with my fingers tangled in her hair. She tried to yank herself free and in the process captured my hand even more effectively. We struggled a little, pointlessly, a bit of back-and-forth pulling that the both of us knew was entirely useless, and then I looked at her a moment, appraised her value, and made a new drunken decision-one that outdistanced all its predecessors in pure and unadulterated idiocy. “Mudblood,” I declared. “‘That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’”
Granger’s brow furrowed again, instantaneously, like the folds in a curtain. It was a talent of hers. “Romeo and Jul-”
I kissed her.
When I let go and somehow managed to extricate my fingers from their plaited prison, she staggered backwards, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. I didn’t have the presence of mind to be insulted just yet.
“Your breath is noxious,” she sputtered.
Winsomely and, I hoped, winningly, I smiled. “Give me the bottle,” I coaxed.
Even after the great sacrifice I had just made to appease her, she refused to yield. I’d thought she was smarter than that. If she’d been anywhere near as brilliant as everyone seemed to think, she would have realized that if she had pretended to be intimidated, I would have left her alone. It was about exerting power; it was about having control over the people I viewed as my inferiors; and if she submitted to my will, just once, that would have been enough, and I would have let her live in peace. How could the premier know-it-all since Rowena Ravenclaw, the greatest mind to be immured within this castle since its foundation, fail to grasp such simple pettiness in another human being?
Or perhaps she did understand it, and that was precisely the reason that she continued to defy me.
For this particular act of defiance, she held the bottle out of my reach and then proceeded to smash it on the edge of the sink. Shards of glass exploded outward like a supernova and soared like falling stars, and a glittering waterfall of vodka coursed down into the bowl of the sink and drizzled tranquilly down the drain.
I stared. Then I cried indignantly, “Hermione Granger!”
A small smile toyed with her lips, playfully, and then expanded across them, the corners rising, giving me a hint of the teeth I’d attacked with a wonderfully vindictive spell a few short years ago. “You sound like my mother,” she said. “You sound exactly like my mother.”
“What’s your middle name?” I asked.
“Jane,” she answered.
“Hermione Jane Granger!” I amended, adding a layer of matronly scolding to my voice.
She laughed. Then she noticed the bleeding cuts on her hand.
“Oh,” she said.
“Tell Pomfrey it happened in Potions,” I suggested.
“Potions was hours ago,” she reminded me.
I considered. “Tell her…he made you do detention.”
She looked at me. “Detention?”
I looked back. “Oh, right. Forgot who I was talking to. Never mind.”
She paused, contemplating, turning the idea over in her mind. “No,” she replied slowly, “that might actually work. I mean, if anyone was going to give me detention, it would be Snape, wouldn’t it?”
Had to give her that one.
“Excellent,” she decided. She righted the trashcan, placed the broken neck of the bottle in it, started for the door, and then paused, turning to look back at me. “Thank you, Draco,” she said.
“Sure,” I responded.
It was only after the door had closed behind her that I recalled the glass in the sink. I would have gladly left it there if it hadn’t been tangible evidence of my transgression. It figured she hightailed it out of there and landed me with the cleanup.
“Fuckin’ Mudblood,” I muttered as I picked the glimmering fragments gingerly from the cold gray stone of the sink basin. It was like wending my way through a minefield. Pretty symbolic.
And here’s Draco Malfoy, who doesn’t drink cheap vodka and doesn’t explain himself to Mudbloods, cleaning up the sink, I narrated in my head. Isn’t that a disgrace?
I pricked myself on a jagged edge and swore under my breath.
You’re damn right it is, I answered grimly.
[Chapter VII] [Chapter IX]
Chapter: 8. Glass in the Sink
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,920
Warnings: blood, oh, my; and Shakespeare references
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: I ♥ Shakespeare. I'm sure you can't tell.
DRACO
What a fucking disappointment.
That was what I said. What my dear father was going to say would be worse.
What a fucking disgrace.
And I was, wasn’t I? It was absolutely disgraceful to get wiped off of the field by that self-righteous, sermonizing, goody-two-shoes asshole Harry Potter. Him and his infamous flame-haired cohort. The two of them were a match made in Hell for any respectable wizard in the world-the ultimate foil for the old families, because they had as much a claim to good blood as we did, and they abused it to no end.
That pissed me off. More than anything else in the world, that in particular pissed me off, because there was nothing I could do about it-short maybe of killing them.
I knocked back a shot of vodka and forced my shaking hand to stay still enough to fill the little glass again. It was a small target.
That was an idea. Killing people. It was absurdly easy, really, if you thought about it. Human beings are fragile, fragile things. Slit a throat, smash a skull-simple stuff. And with a wand in your hand, it’s almost too easy. The act itself really ought to be more of a challenge, given the consequences.
Given that I was getting a good buzz now, I started to plan my prospective murder. Murders, really-plural. Weasley was going down with Potter. It was the way it should have been. I think it not meet Marc Antony, so well-beloved of Caesar, should outlive Caesar.
Yes, I’m that kind of drunk.
I would torture Neville for the password to the Gryffindor dormitory, and then I would either scramble his brains or outright kill him. Killing sounded preferable. No witnesses was always a good thing. I would take that password, enter the dorm-if that overweight woman in the portrait even thought to ask, someone would have borrowed a book of mine that I needed-and creep up to the appropriate bedroom. I would open the door quietly and wait for the rustling of limbs against bed-sheets to go completely silent. And then I would approach my victims and, one after the other, I would hit them with an Unforgivable and be done with it.
Or maybe I’d put a bullet in each of their respective foreheads. Seemed like a nice touch, given that the both of them were Muggle-lovers, and that using Muggle means would frame a Mudblood. I nodded to myself. Yes, that sounded good. And it would be infinitely more satisfying to pull a trigger than to wave a wand.
Maybe I’d kill Dean and Seamus, too, just to make sure that there weren’t any witnesses. It wasn’t likely they’d sleep through the shots, even if I had a silencer. They probably had to die, too. It wasn’t a great loss. More Gryffindor scum in the graveyard.
I wondered if Hogwarts had a graveyard. Surely people died here, and the administration covered it up. There had to be suicides, and homicides, and roommate-icides. I mean, honestly.
I downed another dose of vodka and admired the view from the bathroom window, a lovely panorama afforded to me by my improvised upturned-rubbish-bin chair. It was getting dark, and the stars were peeking out of a velvety sky, and the moon was full and crisp and yellow, low and fat on the horizon. It looked like cheese. I could have gone for some cheese with my vodka, but I didn’t want to leave to try to find some. Instead I just poured again, spilling a little this time despite my best efforts to steady my hands.
The door opened, and without looking I told the intruder to fuck off. I could hear a little bit of a slur in my own voice, which was a bad sign, but the statement was clear enough. The invader only really needed to hear the tone of it anyway.
“I most certainly will not fuck off,” she answered.
Red flags went up rapidly. It was like a bullfight. First of all, Plan A, or the “Mind Your Own Fucking Business” Method, was not working. Second of all, I was in the gentlemen’s lavatory, and this voice was distinctly female. Worst yet, it was familiar.
Intoxicated or not, I knew it was Granger.
“Mind your own fucking business,” I told her. Uncreative, I know. Cut me some slack. Drunk, remember?
“I’m making this my business,” Granger announced, stomping up to me and folding her arms disapprovingly. Where did the girl get these lines?
I shrugged and took my next shot. Fourth? I thought it was. Somewhere in that area. When I lowered the glass, I found that Granger had repossessed my bottle and was making for the sink, presumably to pour its contents down the drain. I managed to find my feet and scramble after her with surprising dexterity given the situation.
“That shit’s expensive!” I protested, mostly coherently, as she moved to upend it.
Granger looked at me, her eyebrows drawn together. Concerned or something.
“Draco, this isn’t the answer,” she said.
The statement gave me an opportunity to snatch the bottle back. It was an opportunity that I took gratefully.
“The whole point of life is finding your own answers,” I announced. It didn’t sound quite so clichéd at the time, if you were wondering.
She reached for the bottle, and I jerked it away from her.
“You’re being insufferably stupid,” she snapped.
“Not just stupid,” I commented calmly. “Insufferably stupid. That’s incredible.”
“That’s right,” she sniffed. Next a plaintive note came into her voice. She was playing all her cards tonight, and trying out all her voices. “You’re going to ruin your life this way. Don’t be an idiot. Please.”
“‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I,’” I began pleasantly. Told you I was that kind. “‘Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit?’”
Granger frowned. “Don’t.”
I couldn’t remember the next bit, so I skipped ahead. It worked better like that anyway. “‘What would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have? He would drown the stage in tears, cleave the general ear-’”
Granger’s face darkened. “He certainly wouldn’t hide in the bathroom and drink cheap vodka, I’ll tell you that.”
Being mildly inebriated, I couldn’t help but laugh uproariously. “Allow me to assure you,” I told her, “that this is very expensive vodka. Draco Malfoy does not drink cheap vodka. Neither does Draco Malfoy smoke cheap cigarettes. And Draco Malfoy most certainly does not explain himself to Mudbloods.”
As I reveled in my linguistic genius, tickled especially by my exquisite parallel structure, she caught me off-guard and ripped the bottle out of my fingers, at which point she clutched it close to her chest as if it were a very valuable prize. “Draco,” she said patiently, as if she were a tired mother reprimanding an obstinate child, “don’t be stupid.”
“Sorry,” I responded, reaching for the neck of the bottle again, scrabbling for it. “But I am. It’s a character trait. These things are permanent, I’m afraid.” I missed my target and instead ended up with my fingers tangled in her hair. She tried to yank herself free and in the process captured my hand even more effectively. We struggled a little, pointlessly, a bit of back-and-forth pulling that the both of us knew was entirely useless, and then I looked at her a moment, appraised her value, and made a new drunken decision-one that outdistanced all its predecessors in pure and unadulterated idiocy. “Mudblood,” I declared. “‘That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’”
Granger’s brow furrowed again, instantaneously, like the folds in a curtain. It was a talent of hers. “Romeo and Jul-”
I kissed her.
When I let go and somehow managed to extricate my fingers from their plaited prison, she staggered backwards, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. I didn’t have the presence of mind to be insulted just yet.
“Your breath is noxious,” she sputtered.
Winsomely and, I hoped, winningly, I smiled. “Give me the bottle,” I coaxed.
Even after the great sacrifice I had just made to appease her, she refused to yield. I’d thought she was smarter than that. If she’d been anywhere near as brilliant as everyone seemed to think, she would have realized that if she had pretended to be intimidated, I would have left her alone. It was about exerting power; it was about having control over the people I viewed as my inferiors; and if she submitted to my will, just once, that would have been enough, and I would have let her live in peace. How could the premier know-it-all since Rowena Ravenclaw, the greatest mind to be immured within this castle since its foundation, fail to grasp such simple pettiness in another human being?
Or perhaps she did understand it, and that was precisely the reason that she continued to defy me.
For this particular act of defiance, she held the bottle out of my reach and then proceeded to smash it on the edge of the sink. Shards of glass exploded outward like a supernova and soared like falling stars, and a glittering waterfall of vodka coursed down into the bowl of the sink and drizzled tranquilly down the drain.
I stared. Then I cried indignantly, “Hermione Granger!”
A small smile toyed with her lips, playfully, and then expanded across them, the corners rising, giving me a hint of the teeth I’d attacked with a wonderfully vindictive spell a few short years ago. “You sound like my mother,” she said. “You sound exactly like my mother.”
“What’s your middle name?” I asked.
“Jane,” she answered.
“Hermione Jane Granger!” I amended, adding a layer of matronly scolding to my voice.
She laughed. Then she noticed the bleeding cuts on her hand.
“Oh,” she said.
“Tell Pomfrey it happened in Potions,” I suggested.
“Potions was hours ago,” she reminded me.
I considered. “Tell her…he made you do detention.”
She looked at me. “Detention?”
I looked back. “Oh, right. Forgot who I was talking to. Never mind.”
She paused, contemplating, turning the idea over in her mind. “No,” she replied slowly, “that might actually work. I mean, if anyone was going to give me detention, it would be Snape, wouldn’t it?”
Had to give her that one.
“Excellent,” she decided. She righted the trashcan, placed the broken neck of the bottle in it, started for the door, and then paused, turning to look back at me. “Thank you, Draco,” she said.
“Sure,” I responded.
It was only after the door had closed behind her that I recalled the glass in the sink. I would have gladly left it there if it hadn’t been tangible evidence of my transgression. It figured she hightailed it out of there and landed me with the cleanup.
“Fuckin’ Mudblood,” I muttered as I picked the glimmering fragments gingerly from the cold gray stone of the sink basin. It was like wending my way through a minefield. Pretty symbolic.
And here’s Draco Malfoy, who doesn’t drink cheap vodka and doesn’t explain himself to Mudbloods, cleaning up the sink, I narrated in my head. Isn’t that a disgrace?
I pricked myself on a jagged edge and swore under my breath.
You’re damn right it is, I answered grimly.
[Chapter VII] [Chapter IX]