Hermione opened her eyes. She was lying on a bed. It was a dream! she thought, relieved. Thank goodness. Just an odd, disturbing, nightmarish dream!
...WAIT.
Her eyes focused on the green silk hangings of the four-poster bed. Then she noticed the sheets that were embroidered with silver thread. Then she noticed Draco Malfoy standing beside her bed, looking down at her with a concerned expression.
She sat up quickly and rubbed her eyes. More hallucinations? What? Was it even possible for Malfoy to wear that kind of expression? Where was she? Why does her head still ache like a million jackhammers were trying to drill open her skull?
"You're awake!" He said, delighted.
"Alright," Hermione took a deep breath, collecting her thoughts. "I have no idea where the hell I am and why the hell you're here with me and how the hell I got here, so you better start explaining because Ron recently just showed me a book with an interesting hex and he asked me to teach him but of course I declined but I read the procedure and I know I can do it the first time I try if I have someone to do it to." she babbled threateningly.
A big shadow was passing the windows and the room went pitch black. Hermione squealed and instinctively hid under the sheets. "What is that?" She whispered.
"Well, that was the giant squid..."
The room wasn't dark anymore and Hermione slowly creeped out of the blankets.
As if noticing her for the first time, Malfoy's eyes widened. "Granger?" He yelled. "What are you doing on my bed? In my dormitory?"
"What? It's you who knows! I just woke up!" She yelled back, outraged. "As if I want to be here! It's you who's got some explaining to do! Why am I here?"
"How should I know?"
"How should I know how you should know? Like I said, I JUST WOKE UP, with no memory whatsoever letting me know how I got here!"
"Then what makes you think I know?"
Getting really annoyed, Hermione grabbed his collar and pulled him closer with a lot of force. They were nose to nose. "Just shut up and tell me what you were doing before you were standing here."
"Let go of me, you filthy mudblood-"
"DO YOU WANT ME TO TURN YOU INTO A FERRET? Shut the hell up, and answer-"
Malfoy's expression suddenly softened and he kissed her.
xxx
"Hey, where's Hermione?" Parvati asked. She was in back in her dorm with her roommates, they had already finished breakfast. "I thought she went back here."
Lavender shrugged. "Maybe in the library, doing homework..."
Julie burst in the room, bouncing up and down in excitement, with a huge grin on her face. "He spoke to me! After breakfast! When I was leaving the Gryffindor table!" She squealed.
Fay's face lit up. "The potion worked, then? What did he tell you?"
"What did the potion say again? What was supposed to happen?" Lavender asked. In the book, there were follow-up notes about how not to make the potion too strong, like substitute a potion ingredient with something weaker, and stir it counter-clockwise after every three clockwise stirs...of course they had to do those, Julie was still young. And innocent. "After substituting all those ingredients and stirring the opposite ways and things?"
"Well," Julie said, sitting down on Hermione's empty bed, trying to remember. "He's supposed to feel 'attracted' to me first, and I would be always on his mind. All throughout the week, because the potion will only work for a week because I only put a tiny bit in the pumpkin juice...because, you know, what if we did something wrong while making it, and I was afraid he'd get poisoned or something...anyway, all throughout the week he can still, sort of, well, think for himself a bit because we added some extra mistletoe berries for that, but his, um, feelings and actions would be controlled by the potion..."
"Oh, then he'll start thinking he loves you," Parvati said.
"And at the end of the week when it wears off, even if his actions and feelings aren't being controlled by the potion anymore, it's now in his mind, how he loves you?" Fay asks.
"Not really 'love', just...'like', because we added way more valerian sprigs than we should have, and it supposed to, how can I put this, kind of, 'diluted' the love. And then I can work on it from there after the week," Julie added brightly.
"Valerian sprigs?" Lavender's eyes widened. She got off her bed and went to Hermione's bed, where underneath it they stuffed all the extra potions ingredients they nicked. She pulled out a huge heap of the sprigs. "I was supposed to put all of these in?"
"Well, yeah..." Julie was confused. "Maybe I read that part of the notes wrong then, maybe it was something else that lessened the attraction factor." She shrugged. "Because if it was the valerian sprigs, he should have kissed me already or have done something more extreme."
"So we did do it right, then," Fay smiled.