Crookshanks purred loudly and wiggled his way under her covers first and then under the poor excuse of an extra-large t-shirt in which she slept. The half-kneazle continued to vibrate and her whole body swung along with it. After having finished talking to Theodore Nott, she had refreshed Nott Senior's potions, stopped by the lab to take a look at her long time project—a potion to prevent infections of the body during times of a weakened immune system—and had gone home.
Hermione curled around her cat and nibbled at her bottom lip with her teeth. Theodore Nott confused her. His confession of some sort had surprised her and she hadn't been exactly prepared for an honest conversation with him. Being a war heroine had the side-effect of many people sucking up to her and while she had never received as much praise and compliments as she did nowadays, she was indeed frequently lied to as well. Most wizards and witches obviously thought it wiser to feed her half-hearted truths and little lies rather than to stick up for their opinion in front of her.
Theodore Nott, however, even had the courage to tell her that he thought that muggles were hairless apes. The… polite way he had said it didn't make the comment to be any less insulting towards her heritage of course. Why she hadn't cursed his ass out of the ward right then and there was something that personally bothered her. It was difficult for Hermione to analyze herself and her emotions and to draw the right conclusions from them. If she had been a potion, she would have been able to break down the ingredients and work with that but… Unfortunately, it was far more complicated than that.
As Crookshanks nestled even closer against her stomach, Hermione sighed in distress. When the ex-death eater had first insulted her a few days ago, she had pointed out to him that her life wasn't as easy as he had made it out to be. The only people she had been really close to were Harry, Ginny and Ron. Harry was being thoroughly trained as an Auror and in a very time-consuming relationship, so she didn't want to bother him all that much. When Ginny wasn't having romantic dates with the boy-who-listened-to-her-every-whim, she was either training with her quidditch team or having matches, a lot of times overseas. Hermione was indeed happy for those two to be so in love and occupied and that they could fulfill their dreams and yet… she missed them.
Ron, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter and their friendship had drastically suffered since the war. It had been hard to fully trust him again after he had left them behind during the horcrux hunt but she had eventually been able to overcome that. With her job and her emotional up-and-downs though, she found that he couldn't provide her with the support that she needed. It just didn't feel right. Every time they saw each other, he commented on how she overworked herself and she thought that he maybe shouldn't be talking about work at all when he seemed to put only half his efforts into his own auror training. A lot of their meet-ups ended in tears on her and a hoarse voice on his side. Since they weren't meeting up as often as when they had been at school, she found that it was hard to wiggle back to a thing they might have had once. Hermione sometimes felt shame creeping up on her, when she knew that she was too tired to even try to get back to their former state.
This hickhack shouldn't make her tolerate insults against muggles so she wondered why she had overlooked that in the moment. It wouldn't happen again.
So after that thoughtful look on her quite lonely life, her thoughts turned back to Theodore Nott. A deep blush flared alive on Hermione's cheeks as she thought back to that stupid slip of thought of hers that she had unfortunately voiced out loud. 'We could be friends.' Really, how idiotic could you get? Theodore Nott had probably snorted in his head at that childish declaration but simply had been too desperate for a conversation with a normal witch to launch at that. What she had actually wanted to express was, that, in another world—maybe in an alternate universe—they could have been friends from the start since they were the same age, same year, etc. pp. The speech department of her brain had obviously decided to skip half of the words in that moment which had resulted into stupidly offering something she wasn't quite ready to give.
Or maybe she was that desperate to find someone for her friend department. She was severely lacking in that department after all.
As Hermione tried to roll onto her back, Crookshanks protested loudly, before crawling away from his personal heat source to go sleep in front of the fireplace, the absence of his purring a reminder that he had been deeply offended.
The witch pulled the covers up to her chin. Despite the high temperatures of August, her cottage located in the outer skirts of London was always fairly chilly, especially at night. "This is bullshit," Hermione suddenly said to the thin air, turned on her other side and closed her eyes, determined to go to sleep as fast as possible. They weren't in kindergarten anymore—something as childish as a(n accidental) offer of friendship wouldn't determine whatever was laying ahead of them. Not that Hermione even had the faintest idea what that might be.
The next morning brought three things which weren't all exactly a pleasure to deal with. First, it was unbelievably hot—the whole of Britain struggled with the sudden heat wave and Hermione had trouble to convince herself that it was indeed necessary to put on her healer robes (or any clothing at all) to floo to work. Second, when the witch arrived at her lab, she found her potion had finished sooner than expected and that she would be able to use it in the case of Nott senior. That made her quite unhappy on the one side because he had to be conscious for it and quite happy on the other side because the potion she had worked on for so long finally could be put to a real life test. The third thing was the worst though.
She had expected and readied herself for another awkward conversation with Theodore Nott but it was not a tall, strange wizard with dark hair that sat at her patient's bedside table—it was Draco Malfoy. The muggle-born witch stopped dead in her tracks, already half over the threshold before she thought about simply bolting from room 15c again.
His careful nod made her drop that plan. His pale face showed no real emotions and he stared at her with awfully clear, grey eyes. Draco Malfoy's chin was as pointy as ever and the white blonde hair was neatly parted to the right. The wizard wore something that could be loosely described as a very thin, long-sleeved robe and its black color made Hermione want to shrug off her own robe. How could he live in that during these temperatures?
A moment passed, in which they were both measuring each other up silently until Draco Malfoy quietly said, "Granger" and left it at that. "Malfoy," she replied and started to head over to Nott Senior's nightstand, putting the rather large bottle with the pale yellow potion she had brought down. Some time passed again in which they both didn't say anything until Hermione felt that wasting her work time with staring at Draco Malfoy's face was too pointless to accept. "I, uhm, would have expected Nott to be here."
Malfoy's lips twisted into the familiar, arrogant smirk that she despised but his tone was much softer than what she was used to. "Well, the thickhead needs to sleep once in a while. I told him, I'd take one shift of staring at his unconscious father." He paused for a while, his eyes quickly scanning Nott Senior's lifeless body. "There's something creepy about a friend who's spending his whole time at the hospital, who's not eating enough and drinking too much and doesn't talk at all." Obviously feeling that he had said too much, Malfoy shut his mouth and stared suspiciously at her as if thinking she might have wanted to squeeze some sort of information out of him.
"Why do you ask, Granger? Am I not reaching the high standard of a proper ex-death eater? You prefer another one?" Hermione recognized the underlying, subtle hurt of being excluded from the world that Theodore Nott had already shoved in her face and she refused to leash out like she had last time. As the brightest witch of her age, she felt that she had to learn from her mistakes. She felt her lips tighten before she pointedly looked at Nott Senior's ashy face. 'Be the better person,' she chanted in her mind and blinked a few times to get rid of the stiffness she felt inside. "No, not at all," she answered boldly and used a flick of her wand to summon a thermometer, "I don't mind that it's you." For a moment, he slipped and an openly baffled expression stole itself onto his features. And from a very lonely, very deep place within her, she found the courage to actually tease him. "My expectations for ex-death eaters aren't so high that you could disappoint."
It took him a while but then he showed her a lazy half-smirk. Malfoy still seemed too stressed and too exhausted to her but she found that she could have made a poorer choice than to be at least civil to him. "Honestly, though; do you know how to get in touch with Nott?" The blond wizard leaned back in his chair and somehow managed to make the simple metal piece look like some sort of thrown. Which was remarkable if one took into account that he was pretty much an outcast in the wizarding world, probably even less popular than flobberworms. "Maybe. Maybe not." Responsible and mature as she was, Hermione rolled his eyes at his answer. "I will be doing preparations to wake his father up," she explained and Malfoy's mood suddenly dropped to a dry sadness she couldn't quite understand. "I need to go over it with Nott so that everything runs smoothly." When there wasn't a vocal answer except for Malfoy's sudden change of demeanor and strange sigh she added, "I want Nott to be present when his father wakes up."
Malfoy slowly got up and his sadness disappeared as if he had simply wiped it away. "I'll let him know that he is expected to come in this afternoon." The lack of teasing or sneering let her regard him with something akin to respect. "Good." After a short pause she said, "Thank you." His grey eyes roamed over her once before he nodded curtly. "No problem." His black robe billowed slightly as he made a beeline for the door, suddenly seeming to want to leave quickly. It seemed like Nott wasn't the only one caught in something emotional and rather depressing. "And Granger?" Malfoy called out as she carefully started to remove Nott Senior's blanket. "Hm?" Hermione didn't even look up as she was already focused on determining the state of a poorly healed cut on her patient's chest. "You should keep screaming at Nott. Maybe he'll return from the living dead and actually starts to speak with us again."
Totally caught off guard, the muggle-born witch looked up but Malfoy was already gone.
Just a few words in regards to Draco: 1) I love him. 2) I imagine him to be rather awkward 'shortly' after the war. His father is in Azkaban, his mother probably under house arrest and I imagine him to be what he is in this story-an outcast with a limit of ~5 friends. He knows he has to drop his attitude but all the expectations and his own misery (both the one he's experiencing and the one he's feeling) makes him behave rather strangely.
As for Nott, he may seem soft, but we have six more chapters to go and the only time Hermione has spoken to him up to this point was during the time he was around his unconscious, half-dead father. People behave very out of character when they're in the presence of a loved one who's on the brink of death.
This is an explanation because I thought, someone might be interested in the reason why everything is as it is. I hope I've made Hermione's own emotional problems somehow clearer. See you soon.
xoxo