A/N: I figured with the amount of this stuff that I read, I ought to make some sort of contribution. I haven't read any of the books past the 5th, so forgive me if I make a few mistakes. Post-Hogwarts, DH. Three Chapters. I don't own any of the characters, obviously.
Summary: Hermione is trying to recover from her breakup with Ron; Draco is trying to piece himself together after the events of the past few years, and chance has them meeting, disguised, at a bar in muggle London.
No matter how she tried, she couldn't stop thinking about Ron. This had been the pattern for the past two weeks – Hermione would get up in the morning, get dressed, promise herself that this was the day she would begin to function normally. By noon she ended up back on her bed, obsessing over what went wrong, and cleaning her room over and over, packing everything that reminded her of Ron tightly away.
She was on summer break from her Healer training, and had too much time on her hands to think, to obsess, as was her nature, but try as she might, she couldn't figure out exactly what went wrong in her relationship.
Today, however, the pattern had broken. Hedwig had arrived at Hermione's window, tapping loud enough to completely distract Hermione with the prospect of a broken window. She roused herself out of bed with an annoyed grumble, which quickly turned into a wary stare when she saw Hedwig.
'This isn't from Ron, is it?' she asked the bird. There had been no letters from him since they had broken up, even though Hermione had written him two long letters against her better judgment, asking what had gone wrong, apologizing for every small fight that she had initiated. Hedwig glared at Hermione, appearing affronted at the very suggestion she would carry a letter from anyone other than Harry. Feeling slightly mollified by the haughty glare from the owl, Hermione opened the window and accepted the letter Hedwig carried with a sigh. She looked around her spotlessly clean room for a treat for the owl, but remembered that she had thrown them all away with the boxes of stuff of Ron's.
'Hedwig, I'm sorry, I don't have anything for you. I'll make sure to get some for next time you come,' Hermione said, feeling badly. With an indignant hoot, Hedwig flew out the still-open window.
Hermione looked down at the letter, half-hoping and half-dreading that it was actually from Ron. She was saved from having to figure out her real feelings when she unrolled it and saw Harry's writing at the top of the page.
The letter itself was long and apologetic for not having written earlier. Harry wrote all about his summer at Auror training, paragraph after paragraph of small little stories that Hermione knew he had been saving up just to make her smile, to distract her, and the knowledge of how he cared for her made her smile and laugh at the stories more than they really deserved.
Her smile disappeared at a little sentence thrown in near the end of the letter.
'I just thought you should know that Ron's started going out with Parvati. I didn't want you to find out from someone else. Keep your chin up. Love, Harry'
She crumpled up the letter and threw it across the room, then decided that wasn't nearly enough, so grabbed her wand and set it on fire, startling Crookshanks awake. While she had been sitting moping around in her room, Ron had been out getting busy with that little slut that had wanted him for as long as Hermione could remember. The knowledge infuriated Hermione, and she tore around her room in a rage.
'I can't believe this,' she spat to her cat. 'I've been sitting here for two weeks, thinking and THINKING about what I did wrong, what happened to that apparently perfect relationship I had with that red-haired GIT and he's already found an easy screw…'
Hermione's train of thought broke as she abruptly remembered a conversation she'd had with Harry a few months before she and Ron had broken up, right around the time that their relationship began to go downhill. Ron had just left for Romania to spend some time with Bill, and Hermione had stayed home so Ron could spend time with his brother. When she had asked Harry how Ron was enjoying Romania, he had looked at her quizzically and started to say something that sounded like 'Romania?' but had quickly recovered and said that he hadn't heard anything, but seemed very uncomfortable. When Hermione looked back on it, Parvati had been missing that week from Healer training. The realization that that Ron had probably been cheating on her brought her to her knees. Hermione hadn't been able to cry for the past two weeks, with her brain on overdrive, but the dam finally broke and she climbed into bed, buried her face in her pillow, and cried herself to sleep.
When Hermione woke up later that evening with decidedly red eyes and a puffy face, she was still spitting mad. She started to talk to Crookshanks again, who looked slightly terrified at the rage she was it.
'I refused to sleep with Ron for the first YEAR of our relationship, because I was SCARED that it would change something. When I had finally acquiesced, I THOUGHT that it had just brought us closer, that it was something we SHARED, that it was something SPECIAL. Apparently it wasn't been a big deal at ALL for him, he found it easy just to FORGET about our relationship and screw something else, and now start DATING her two weeks after we broke up."
Hermione's head was spinning with the lies that had held her relationship together for the last few months, how she had turned a blind eye to how little they saw of each other, dismissing it as the fact that he was finally applying himself to his Auror training, even feeling a bit proud that she had rubbed off on him when he spent Friday nights 'studying.' The fact that she had still slept with him sickened her, that he could sleep with her while having Parvati on the side. She had to do something. She had been sitting alone in her room with no one to talk to but her cat for too long, while Ron had been going out with his new girl.
Hermione made up her mind. She was going out tonight, to somewhere no one would know her, no one would judge her, where she could have some mindless fun. She grimly set to work removing all traces of her tears from her face, and putting on the muggle makeup that her mom had given her for her last birthday.
When she was done, all made up, dressed in a red shirt, black skirt and red flats, she inspected herself in the mirror. Her brown hair had been tamed into a sleek, straight ponytail, and her lips were highlighted with the bright red lipstick she liked so much.
She didn't like what she saw. She looked like she had dressed up for Ron, unconsciously made herself up into what he liked her to look like. With a frustrated groan, she kicked off the shoes and pulled the elastic out of her hair. What she really needed was a big change, something that would turn her into someone that wasn't Hermione Granger, just for the night.
Twenty minutes later, she barely recognized the girl in the mirror. She had long blonde ringlets cascading over her shoulders, eyes highlighted with carefully applied makeup, and a little green dress paired with black heels. It was exactly what she wanted to be – something that Ron didn't like. He had always hated her wearing green, 'too Slytherin' for his tastes. She performed several protection spells on herself to ensure that she couldn't be taken advantage of as a single girl going out alone, and then shrunk her wand so that it would fit in her purse. Hermione ran downstairs, explained to her parents that she was meeting friends down at the local bar, and went to go catch a bus.