Washing Away the Pain

One-Shot, Angst. Hermione does something that she is ashamed of. She doesn't something in the heat of the moment that can never be undone.

Ignores book 4 and 5 in my little head

Washing Away the Pain

Hermione stood at the entrance to the great hall where the Yule Ball was being held. She was nervous, so nervous that she had agreed when Ginny gave her a drink to loosen her up. This would be the first time where she would be seen as a girl. She wouldn't be seen as Harry Potter's sidekick, Ron Wesley's obsession, or Draco Malfoy's enemy. A regular girl.

She didn't have a date, but she wasn't going to let that destroy her evening. She was going to have fun; she was going to dance with anyone who would dance with her. She was going to do things she never had the courage to. This was her night and she was excited to get it started.

The doors opened and many people gasped when they saw that the bushy haired girl wasn't as ugly people had expected. She also showed that her body had a form underneath the robes of hers. She was actually quite beautiful, as Pavarti had whispered while she passed.

Throughout the night, she had had the time of her life; she danced with Ron, Harry, Neville, Fred, and George.

She could have even sworn that Draco had given her a few hungry glances also. She just felt full of sunshine and light. She walked over to a corner out of view of everyone by the exit as she fixed her hair that had been falling out of the clips. Before she knew what was happening she heard yelling and screaming. It was Draco and Pansy.

"You little whore!" Draco yelled at her as she had a smug smile on her face. The teachers were about to pull Draco away. Pansy was sitting on Blaise kissing him. Pansy had just revealed that she had in fact been sleeping with Blaise for a year, just as she and Draco started to date.

Draco pissed stormed towards the exit before the teachers could get to him. They didn't bother, knowing he was leaving. Draco stopped at the wall opposite of Hermione. He didn't even see that she was there. Draco slammed his fist into the stone. Hermione heard a painful moan from Draco. His hand was now crimson from blood. Hermione gasped; he had deeply scared her.

"Granger?" Draco said looking at her, his eyes scanning her form. "Wow, who knew you were a girl?"

Hermione took the comment with great offense. "Just because your girlfriend was cheating on you doesn't mean you have to be rude, Malfoy." She brought her hands to her hips.

"I was complimenting you."

"Oh." Hermione didn't know what to say to that.

"I don't fucking care anymore that she was cheating on me. I knew from the moment I met her she was a little skank but it's just the pride thing, you know."

"Pride and reputation can be overpowering." Hermione said, leaning against the wall.

"You have no idea." Draco stated.

"I understand why you get it, but you don't get it the way I do. You don't know what it's like to not ever be with anyone. At least you know what it's liked to be with someone, even if it's only for a moment. You don't know what it's like to be unwanted." She stated, looking down.

"You're not unwanted." Draco stepped closer to her filling the space between them. Draco grabbed her hand and pulled her into the dark corridor. He pushed her up against a wall and kissed her.

"What are you doing?" She asked, her voice breathy.

"Kissing you." He said and did it again. His lips moved from her mouth to her neck and Hermione let out a gasp. That was her sensitive spot. She put his hands on the back of his head.

"Malfoy." She groaned.

"It's Draco." He said before biting her earlobe.

"Draco." She moaned.

"Come with me." He urged her.

"To?"

"My room." He said with a smirk.

"I can't Draco. It's not right."

"A lot of things aren't right. Just say no and I'll leave you be, but say yes and I will take you for the rest of the night."

She wanted to say no, she really, really did, but she didn't.

"Yes." She said and the moment the words left her mouth he grabbed her hands and pulled her to the Slytherin dungeons and he led her to his room. Hermione didn't even have time to look at where the infamous Draco Malfoy slept before he pulled her to his bed and laid her down. He started to unbutton his shirt as he kissed her.

Everything seemed to be in a haze. It was so unbelievably wrong, what they were doing. It was bitter and dangerous and so utterly perfect in every way.

Draco ripped out the pins from her hair none to gently and entwined his hands in it, pulling her closer. The kisses were feverish and rough, certainly not what the kisses in fairytales are like but then again, this was no fairytale was it? Hermione would have let out a bitter laugh if her mouth hadn't been preoccupied. He was only doing this because he didn't have Pansy to fuck anymore. He didn't want her. He didn't care about her, or what this could mean to her. He hated her and she hated him.

Draco had found heaven. This was what he'd been dreaming about for so long and now it was a reality. It was even better than he could have ever imagined. Breaking the kiss for a moment, he smirked down at her as she let out a breathy moan and rubbed herself against him. As their eyes connected, he had to do everything in his power to stop himself from spewing out some love poem. There was time for that later.

It was really all a one big blur. Their clothes were gone before their eyes and he was inside of her.

During the whole thing, there was one thought that kept running through both of their minds.

So this is what it's like to be alive.

Hermione awoke and looked around. She was confused about where she was. Then all the events from the night came flying back and it was too much to hold. She then saw in her mind's eye the looks on her friend's faces when they found out, Draco's look of disgust when he woke up and realized what he'd done with her. She couldn't do it. She couldn't let people find out.

She knew Draco; Draco would brag, and he would laugh and point. He would tell people that she was easy, that he had gotten into the pants of the most prude girl in school. Harry and Ron would find out, they would never speak to her again. The Weasley family would find out, and she would lose Ginny as a friend. She couldn't lose the only friends she had. Slytherin would laugh at her, and Gryffindor would say she betrayed them.

She didn't know what to do, but she couldn't stay here long enough for him to wake up. He would smile and kick her out. She had to think. She had to figure this out, most of all she had to get out of the room.

Hermione didn't even get dressed. She grabbed her wand out of her secret pocket on her dress and wrapped a sheet around her before she ran. She didn't care where but she ran. She couldn't believe what she had done. As she ran she was happy when she realized no one was awake. She was running with all these thoughts swirling in her head and she elbowed a figure but didn't care. She just kept running. She had to run. Her figure turned out to be Harry and Ron under the invisibility cloak.

Draco woke up and found Hermione gone. He saw her clothes, but no Hermione. He couldn't understand what would make her leave without at least putting on clothing. A better question would be-

"Where could she go without her clothes?" He dressed and left Slytherin to wander the halls and search for her.

Hermione ran and just kept running. Everything was so screwed up and she knew it. Her world was fucked because she had been weak. It was in ruins because she'd wanted to feel alive, if only for a moment. The life, the feeling she'd felt while with Draco was gone now though. She felt dirty and unclean. She felt like she wanted to scrub away every inch of her skin that he'd touched until she was raw and bleeding. And event then she wouldn't be clean.

Her friends were going to abandon her, she knew. They'd have to. She was all wrong, all messed up. If her family found out, she had no idea about what she would say to them, what she would do to convince them that she was sorry. No one would understand. No one.

She neared Moaning Myrtle's bathroom and skidded to a stop before it. She fell to her knees, panting heavily from her nonstop running, and happy that Myrtle wasn't there. She didn't need the annoying ghost when she was trying to think about what to do. The sheet was barely hanging on her body, her hair was unruly, her eyes red and puffy from tears. She had no right to cry though. This was all her fault. Her hand covered her face as she cried in despair and disappointment at herself. What had she done? She had slept with the enemy. She'd all but proven that she really wasn't anything but a dirty, mudblood whore.

She knew there was no way to fix this. There was a good chance that someone had seen them. Even if she had tried to convince Draco not to tell, she knew someone had to have seen. Someone had to see when they kissed in the great hall, or when they kissed more in the corridor, maybe when they were on their way to Slytherin, or in his room. Someone must have seen and she knew she couldn't run from this.

This was her fault. She had done something that in the matter of hours everyone within a hundred mile radius would know. She couldn't let them see her, see her with the shame on her face.

She just wanted to hide, crawl under a rock so no one would ever see her again. She wanted to disappear forever.

She knew what she had to do. She knew it was the cowardly way to get out of this situation but at the moment she would have given anything for this to end. She had to make it all go away. It was almost funny how she'd created her own little personal hell in one night.

She had to make these feelings and emotions stop. She had to make it so they'd never haunt her again. She was so ashamed. She was going to burn away the shame. She grabbed her wand, stood up and stared at her form in the mirror. What she saw disgusted her. Letting out a loud sobbing scream, she punched the mirror as hard as she could. The glass shattered and imbedded itself in her hand. She watched with morbid fascination as the blood started to seep out.

There was a tube of bright red lipstick some girl had left lying on the floor among the shards of broken mirror. She picked it up and scribbled a quick note on the wall, her blood mingling with the lipstick. Maybe she wanted to ruin Draco just as much as he'd ruined her.

She didn't consider her sanity; she didn't worry about how this could never be undone. She just had to make sure that she would never have to see the looks on all her loved ones faces when they knew what she had done.

She pointed her wand at the piece of mirror that was still intact and screamed

"Avada Kedavra!"

It seemed as if it had taken hours for the green flash of light to reflect off the glass and rebound her way, but it had only been a matter of seconds before it hit her and her breathless body fell to the ground. Moaning Myrtle flew in from wherever in the castle she'd been and screamed. The ghost's scream lead a shirtless Draco in, certainly disheveled and horrified at what he found. His body ripped with agony.

Harry and Ron were only seconds later in their arrival, the invisibility cloak hanging loosely in Harry's hand as Ron gaped in disbelief. They all looked at the broken mirror on the wall it said in crimson red. Draco was the only one that dared utter the words, though.

"Pride and reputation can be overpowering."