A/N: Thank you to all who reviewed or favorited or put on alert! You're the best. I hope you enjoy this next chapter.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.
On Tuesday, Ron tells me that Ginny's made Quidditch captain. When I ask him how he knows, he gives me a withering look and says, "my mum owls every day about very trivial matters, so I know all."
On Wednesday, Ron and Hermione attempt to make a steak and kidney pie from scratch. Its charred remains end up in the bin, and we end up eating takeaway curry.
On Thursday, I spend six hours sitting in a tree with a senior Auror as we stake out a suspected Death Eater. The suspect never shows up.
On Friday, I make the offer to Ron that if they both want her to, Hermione can just live here. He says he can't get too used to waking up next to her before she leaves for Hogwarts, "it'll just make it worse."
On Saturday, I allow myself to be coerced into a day trip to Diagon Alley so Hermione can buy her school supplies. After a few butterbeers and a few small tumblers of Firewhisky at the Leaky, I also allow myself to be coerced into another family dinner with the Weasleys.
I still have a black eye, though the swelling is all but gone, and I wake up on Sunday morning with a throbbing headache and a sense of existential dread. My typical method of operation in which I act first and think later really backfired on me, because there's no way that I went unnoticed in the Leaky Cauldron on a Saturday in the summer. Which, while I don't love it, is still ordinarily not a big deal. Because ordinarily, I do not get thoroughly drunk in the middle of the day.
It's all a bit of a blur. I recall stepping into the dark, dilapidated pub with my two best friends, Hermione laden down with books she refused to let Ron carry for her, and we all decided to split a basket of chips and have a few butterbeers. And I was staring out of the window while Hermione was looking through her Transfiguration book and Ron was trying to get her to stop, and I saw someone walking a big shaggy dog. The dog didn't even look like Sirius when he was transformed but it still made me think of him, and I recalled all of the hangover potion in the bathroom cupboard and how despondent he must have been. And so while Ron was saying, "you have all year to spend with your book but only six weeks left with me", I ordered a Firewhisky.
At some point, Hermione started in about Sunday dinner at the Burrow, promising me that this week it'll be so much better but if it isn't, she'll never ask me to go again. Finally I said something like "anything for you, Hermione", which made her grin with satisfaction and order another basket of chips.
I don't quite feel as though I should be made to follow through on anything I agreed to while under the influence, but I know that argument is futile with Ron and Hermione. They'll tell me that drunks are honest, so that must mean that I really do want to go to dinner. And besides, if I don't follow through on my end, then I can't enforce Hermione's promise of never making me go back again.
I drag myself down the hallway to the loo, only to find the door shut and the shower running. With a heavy sigh, I proceed down to the ground floor with the hope that some toast - no, bacon, something greasy - will get me through until I can access the potion. In the kitchen I find Hermione wearing a large maroon jumper with an R on it and standing at the stove, dancing lightly side to side as she tends to something in a skillet.
"Good morning," she smiles, never ceasing her lighthearted movements. Over her shoulder, I see several strips of bacon sizzling gloriously.
"Morning," I reply. "What're you in such a good mood for?"
"It's a nice day," she says with a little shrug.
"Be careful with that jumper," I tell her grumpily as she uses a pair of tongs to turn the bacon in the pan. "Those sleeves are going to catch fire."
"I'll be fine, but thanks." Turning from the stove, she studies my face. "Would you like some bacon?"
"Merlin, yes," I groan, making her laugh. With my bloodshot eyes and pale face, I'm not exactly the picture of good health.
I eat slice after slice of fatty, greasy, delectable bacon, which does serve to settle my stomach a bit. I don't know where Hermione even procured all of this bacon, since we're terrible about keeping the house stocked with groceries, but I won't question it. I must be on my seventh or eighth slice when Ron comes loping down the stairs, hair still wet. He lays a loud, smacking kiss on Hermione's lips and then meets my eyes, irritatingly smug.
"How you feeling this morning?" he asks me, using Hermione's shoulder as an armrest.
"Fine," I reply curtly.
"Now that he's eaten his weight in bacon," adds Hermione. Scowling at her, I shove an entire slice in my mouth and chew as they snicker at me. I suppose I could let it bother me, the pair of them teaming up against me, but it was always going to end up coming to this. We didn't know it when we were a bunch of little eleven-year-olds and our biggest concern was Hagrid harboring an illegal dragon, but it was always going to be those two, together, and then me. And for a minute there, probably around the time Lavender broke up with Ron and Gryffindor won the Quidditch cup, I expected that our little group would rework itself into two pairs of two, but I was not so lucky.
"You look cute in this," Ron says in a low voice to Hermione, tugging on the sides of her jumper.
"I look ridiculous in this."
"Yeah, same thing."
He puts a finger under her chin to tilt her face up toward his, and I realize that the loo is unoccupied. The bacon has helped, but the stairs require way too much effort, so I use my wand to summon the potion. It tastes like a combination of bananas and seaweed going down, but within minutes my headache has cleared, my stomach is soothed, and my eyes no longer burn. Actually, I feel better than I have in a long time.
As they're snogging and letting the bacon burn, a small barn owl tumbles through the fireplace with a newspaper clutched in his beak, so I retrieve the paper and place a few Knuts into the little pouch tied to his leg. As I unfold the Sunday edition of the Daily Prophet, I am greeted by a large moving photo of myself drinking morosely from a tumbler of Firewhisky. Potter Hits the Bottle, reads the headline. The article is penned by - who else? - Rita Skeeter, so Merlin only knows what her imaginative mind has dreamed up this time.
Harry Potter, begins the article, and ugh, I can just hear her voice in my head, age seventeen, was spotted late Saturday night in the Leaky Cauldron with longtime friend Ron Weasley and suspected secret lover Hermione Granger.
"Oh, for crying out loud," I exclaim, tossing the paper down onto the counter. But then curiosity gets the better of me, as it so often does, and I keep reading.
Weasley is only the latest in Granger's long list of conquests, which includes Bulgarian Quidditch star Viktor Krum and Potter himself (Granger does fancy famous men, and tellingly only displayed interest in Weasley after he earned renown as Potter's sidekick). While the two openly engaged in sickening displays of affection, Potter seemed to drink himself into an oblivion.
"It was really sad," says an eyewitness. "Harry said something like 'I'd do anything for you, Hermione' and that Ron bloke didn't even catch on. He seems kind of thick."
My fist tightens angrily around the paper - Hermione does not have a long list of conquests and Ron is not thick - but I keep reading.
Could the strain of carrying on a secret romance be wearing Potter down? Several eyewitnesses say that he drank several glasses of Firewhisky and had to be carried out on the shoulders of Weasley himself, the very friend he is betraying with his secret affair. Only time will tell if Potter, who once had such a promising future, will allow his torrid affair and new penchant for alcohol to be his downfall.
I chuck the paper down onto the counter with such force that it makes my plate of bacon rattle about, and the lovebirds finally spring apart.
"What's wrong?" asks Hermione, and all I can do is hand them the paper.
Look, I know people are going to fabricate stories about me. I know that after everything I've been through and everything I've done, I'm going to be in the public eye. But it's the things that they say about my friends that really get to me. Calling Ron thick or my sidekick when I'd be dead without him, implying Hermione is some sort of scarlet woman obsessed with famous men, it just infuriates me in a way that suggesting I have a drinking problem doesn't.
"I thought I was your one and only, Hermione," Ron says jokingly as he reads over her shoulder. "How could you do this to me?" While he pretends to choke up, however, Hermione does not see the humor.
"Where's my jam jar?" she asks sharply, eyes flashing with rage.
"Hermione-" Ron begins, trying to temper her. We both know her mind immediately went to repeating her actions from the end of our fourth year, when Hermione decided to teach unregistered Animagus Rita Skeeter a lesson by trapping her in a jar while she was in her transformed state.
"Jam jar!" she repeats. Standing on her toes, she starts searching frantically through the cabinets. Ron looks over at me - I can only shrug at him - and then back at Hermione, who is currently grumbling to herself as she shoves aside bowls and goblets. "Maybe there's one upstairs!"
"It's not worth it," Ron says as he steps in front of her and places a hand on each of her shoulders. "It's just a stupid article."
"It's not! She can call me a slag all she wants but the things she's saying about you and Harry-"
"Hermione," he says again. "Tomorrow there will be some crazy article about Voldemort having a secret love child or something and everyone will forget about this."
"He's right," I add in, even though I'm still pretty irritated about the things that were written about them.
"Is he?" asks Hermione, swiveling in Ron's embrace to face me. "About the love child thing too?"
"Oh, I don't know. If that had been in Dumbledore's lessons, I definitely would have told you."
Thanks for reading! Please review :) also, I promise that Ginny will be back in the next (and final) chapter!