Disclaimer- I do not own Harry Potter© or any of the concepts derived from the book series. The book series is the soul property of J.K. Rowling.
This and Here
Chapter Nine
Bathrooms
God forbid he ask his mother for advice while sober.
And indeed, Narcissa had never quite seen her son quite so inebriated. He had frequented Malfoy Manor drunk before, of course. Once, he had managed to convince Crabbe and Goyle that the Fountain of Youth lay somewhere on the Malfoy property and at promptly three in the morning, the Manor was woken up with whoops of success as the boys went streaking through the sprinklers. Draco included of course. Any increment beyond five glasses of wine was enough to wipe Draco of any dignity—which was saying quite little for the alcohol considering Draco fared quite poorly in the dignity department.
But considering all else, Narcissa had never seen her son so devastated. She had rushed to the main hall as soon as she had heard the 'POP' of apparation, only to hear a 'BANG' of realization as he walked into the front door. When he finally opened the door, he fell onto the granite floor and lay there for perhaps fifteen minutes before extending a greeting to his mother. It was not so much a greeting as it was a 'MERLIN'S BEARD MY LIFE IS RUINED'. Indeed, thank Merlin that his father was thoroughly passed out with the wine glass still in his hand.
Narcissa was not the type to lend anyone a helping hand, not even her own spawn, so she levitated Draco—first, into a wall as punishment for showing up this drunk, and then to the closest bathroom, where she promptly began filling the tub with cold water. As the water inched up the side of the bath, Draco explained in all his drunken glory, the banes of his existence—that "slutmongrel" Pucey and that "cantankerous jungle cat of a witch" Hermione, and he hardly noticed at all when Narcissa levitated him over the tub. He should have caught on from the way his mother picked up the hem of her robes and turned her face away, but of course, he didn't, and within seconds, he was climbing the Alps butt naked. Or at least, he thought he was.
When he burst out of the arctic cold water, gasping for air, his mother let out a cackle of delight, because what mother doesn't find pleasure in seeing her son hoover air in all his intoxicated debauchery? Draco clawed his way out of the tub like a wet cat, then proceeded to vomit all over the nice marble floor of the bathroom, and maybe even a little made it into the toilet.
"YOU ARE INSANE," he sputtered out, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
"And you missed a spot," Narcissa curtly replied, turning on her heel and walking out of the room.
Watching his mother prance around as if she hadn't almost committed manslaughter made Draco almost forget why he'd come back here, to this wretched place that had sucked the humanity out of him for a good two decades like some sort of freak hybrid graveyard-vacuum-booby trap. Then the fumes from his own bile wafted up to his nose and he remembered everything in its awesome painfulness—oh right, he didn't know where Hermione was, his life was in shambles, and he was completely and utterly sloshed.
He jumped up off the ground and chased his mother down the hall, waving his arms as if it would help and screaming profanities like a madman. He naturally assumed his father was blackout drunk, as the story of his childhood often went, because Lucius would have had his walking cane up Draco's arse before he'd even stepped foot into the Manor. And then he would have made him run naked through the sprinklers for giggles. Glegh—bad memories of Crabbe's junk flopping about like a ragdoll made him trip over his own feet.
Narcissa finally stopped at the dining room, where she took a seat at the head of the table and steepled her fingers beneath her chin with that stupid Chesire-cat grin taking up half of her face. Draco took the seat opposite her and cleared his throat.
"All right, I apologize… for my… er… current—condition?" he finally managed to spit out with a conclusive flick of his wrist, even though the room was spinning like a carousel, and the house elf in the corner was beginning to look more and more like Hermione.
He could tell his mother was upset at the way his eyes kept rolling about in his head like marbles. Wasn't there some sort of spell for this? Eradico alcoholatus or Iswearimnotico Drunkitio… GOD, just any English phrase masquerading as a Latin proverb?
"I hope… No, I pray—that you have a good reason for showing up at this god awful hour, drunk and making a fool of yourself!" she hissed as her eyes narrowed threateningly.
They eyed each other from opposite ends of the table until finally, Draco succumbed, unable to stare straight any longer, and let his head smash into the table.
"Shbeee webbttt," he moaned into the dining mat.
"What?" Narcissa replied.
He let his head roll to the side so his cheek flattened out on top of the table.
"Shhee leeffftt!" he cried out.
She scoffed and folded her arms across her chest as she leaned back in the chair. "I gathered that much from your little… diatribe in the bathroom. What exactly do you plan on doing about it?"
Draco simply let out a wail and let his arms drop like limp noodles to his side. In the first place, it was all his mother's fault. She'd invaded his man-pad and practically forced him to fall in love with Hermione, and now here he was, a grown man, slobbering all over the fine oak dining table. Secondly—secondly, he was in love with Hermione. Thirdly, Hermione love. FourthlyloveHermione.
"I LOVE HER," he shouted, his head too heavy to move, but his hands free to make all sorts of gestures. There was absolute silence as Narcissa absorbed this information.
"Then what exactly are you doing sprawled out across my dining room table?"
"I don't know where she bloody is!" he wailed again, "The Ministry won't tell me anything, they keep going on and on and on and on and on about how they've got enough press to handle as it is and now all I want to do is just tell her I love her and I'm sorry that I told her because I guess she's the groundhog type that hides when it sees its shadow and I just figured that we'd work that…"
"DRACO!" Narcissa had to yell in order to put a stop to his drunken ramblings. He lifted his head just enough to see her face, then dropped his head again.
Another silence ensued until Draco finally lifted his body all the way up until his back was against his chair. His mother breathed sharply through her nostrils, as if she was thinking about something painful, and loosened her shoulders.
"Draco—many years ago, right before your father and I were married…"
"Oh my god mother…" Draco interrupted, gesturing to the house elf for more alcohol. Narcissa sneered and motioned for the elf to stay put.
"So help me, Draco, you are going to listen to this story because if I am going to impart any bit of romantic wisdom upon my son, this is it—so shut up and sit tight or I will lock you in the bathroom with your own vomit," Narcissa hissed, completely annoyed and completely serious.
"You don't own me!" he threatened in return in some pitiful display of his manliness, but he quickly folded his hands in his lap and stayed silent.
"Before your father and I were married," she cleared her throat as she loosened her shoulders a bit, "He proposed at least three times to me. I denied him the first several times he proposed because I was already engaged to another wizard. But the last time, I said yes, broke my engagement with my ex-fiancee, and married your father."
Draco snorted. Wow. His mother told the worst stories ever. He should've assumed that it would suck, judging from the very rare bedtime stories she'd told him as a child. Ohh, how could he forget the epic sagas of Horace, the Pureblood Prince and Mortigus, the Mentally Incapacitated and Malodorous Mudblood.
"Why?" Narcissa continued, "Because even after my parents placed a cloaking charm on our house, he still managed to find me. So what I am trying to tell you is that—if you love her, then… I suppose you need to do everything in your power to find her."
The tail end of his mother's story was the only worthwhile part of her entire rant. She could've have simply said "Go get 'em tiger!" and gotten the same reaction because Draco was drunk and apt to forget everything about this night. The only thing that actually shook him to the core was the fact that she'd slumped while telling the story, and never in his entire life had he seen his mother loosen her shoulders. And that was good enough reason to take the moral of her story to heart. He just needed to find out where to start. God, he didn't want to deal with the Weasel, who would probably explode his brains through his eye sockets if Draco got within breathing distance of him. And god forbid he talk to Ginny, because she would no doubt relay any and all juicy details of their meeting to Ron, and again, Ron's brain would explode. Potter, Potter was a safer bet, and although he'd sworn from a very young, very prepubescent age to never, ever fraternize with him, his mother was right. He would need to swallow his pride and find Hermione, or live a life as a sterile fungus of a man, whittling his life away in a darkly-lit cellar some where.
"Thanks mother," he managed, "So… who was this other chap that you would've married had father not made such a chivalric move?"
"It's not important," she said with a shake of her head.
"No, come on, you can tell me, I feel like we're having a moment here, one of those fabled mother-son moments," Draco replied, though his head was beginning to spin again and all of a sudden he had three mothers.
"I suppose it wouldn't hurt… You remember your good friend Vincent? Well, his father and I met…"
Draco blocked out the rest of his mother's words as utter disgust clouded every sensory orifice of his body. He could have had Crabbe's genetics and been a whale of a man with blubber in his armpits. His head hit the table with a loud "BANG" as the alcohol overtook him. He would get to work finding Hermione, first thing in the morning.
xXx
Hermione finally made an attempt to immerse herself back into society a few months after her resignation. She'd successfully watched every season of every television series that she'd ever been the least bit curious about and felt that it was about time to return to reality. Actually, it wasn't so much a personal sentiment as it was the sentiments of Harry, Ron and Ginny, who barged into her flat one Saturday morning and pushed her off of her couch.
"You can't live like this anymore!" Ginny had pleaded. Hermione had then covered her face with a pillow and tried to suffocate herself—which, memo to self, does not work so well if the person trying to suffocate themselves is still trying to take the handle of vodka to the face.
Harry managed to convince her to try one of her childhood passions: healing. So, after much negotiating and screaming and bawling and incoherent rambling, Hermione cleaned herself up and followed Harry to St. Mungo's. And it really wasn't bad at all.
She'd always wanted to be a Healer at St. Mungo's, or at least, she'd always wanted to be a Healer up until the point when she decided she wanted to work at the Ministry. Merlin, it felt so incredibly different, making a hands-on difference by lopping off an arm here and an ear there and rebuilding people's insides, instead of making a semi-sort of-kind of-difference filling out paperwork in an office all day.
After a few weeks of working at the hospital, the stares and the whispers and the constant questions from strangers had faded into background static. It was actually just one person, one brazen little girl with a case of the Muggle measles, who broke any façade of bravery that she'd managed to create.
With her big blue eyes swimming with tears, the girl had clutched Hermione's wrist with both hands and asked, "Are you sad Miss Granger?"
And only because people had been barraging her with questions all day, after weeks of suffering the same interrogations day after day after day about the tremendous significance of her resignation and the consequential inexplicable silence of her opponent, did her face crumble at the thought that someone actually cared about how she was actually feeling.
"And just where did you get that idea?" she'd replied, biting her lip.
"You're wiping your nose with my sweater," the little girl had howled.
With those words, Hermione's last glimmer of hope of finding the meaning to life in a conversation with a booger-eating nose-picking eight year old had croaked it's final breath, and had died. She released the girl's sleeve and jabbed her with the syringe, then handed her off to an attending nurse and rushed off to the bathroom.
…Which was where she was now, her knees huddled beneath her chin, roosting on top of a porcelain bowl as if it were her own toilet—since she'd recently picked up the habit of hiding out in the bathroom after long nights of binge drinking her emotions into oblivion. Her life was in shambles and she had realized the other night that for the first time ever, she legitimately could not think of a way to make her situation any better. For once, Hermione Granger could not help herself. She hadn't even really gotten this job on her own. Of course, it was common knowledge that she was smart enough for this job, what with her finishing at the top of her class at Hogwarts and all, but she certainly hadn't had the medical resume for it coming in. Thank Merlin for Harry, working his boyish charm with the head of St. Mungo's, convincing him to let her take an accelerated training program and entrance exam. Otherwise, she would have barricaded herself away on some deserted island off of the coast of Africa. It had either been this job, this final shot at rebuilding her life—or becoming that batty senile neighbor from kid movies that deflates basketballs and carves dirty words into the backs of Frisbees.
God, and the worst part wasn't even the fact that she had given up the opportunity of a lifetime (because in the end it really hadn't been the opportunity of her lifetime), but the fact that during the entire debacle, through the press conferences and the interviews and the nights of sitting up alone in the darkness of her kitchen shoveling frozen yogurt into her mouth, he had not once broken his silence to the public. There had been the occasional commentary from his media spokesperson, but aside from that, absolutely nothing from his camp. Undoubtedly, this would have hurt his reputation in any other circumstance, but with the only other noteworthy candidate, her, Hermione Granger, out of the running—well, it was really Draco's race to win.
But in his defense, it had been his position to win from the beginning. She'd realized that she'd never even wanted it that bad. She'd gotten so caught up in thinking about what she could be doing with her life that she'd completely stopped caring about what she should be doing. Sure, she could be the new Minister of Magic, she could climb fucking Mount Everest naked with her hands tied behind her back because frankly, she could do anything she put her mind to because she was the one, the only Hermione Granger. When she was younger, she used to kill bad guys in her sleep. Somehow in between her first few years at Hogwarts and her run at the Ministry, she'd gotten so obsessed with the could-bes that she'd stopped doing what she should have done in the first place. She should have enjoyed what she had instead of pining for the next great thing for just once in her adult life. She'd been so stuck. Absolutely stuck on herself.
So while she'd been spouting accusations at Draco, left and right, calling him a selfish prat and rejecting every single earnest advance he made, she'd just been trying to protect herself. Of course, there's nothing wrong with a little self-preservation, but geez, she should've realized that she'd reached the quota for that a long time ago. It had taken truth serum (by the way, that's legitimate magic) to make her confess her true feelings, because that was how concerned she was about not getting hurt. For God's sakes, she'd punched him in the face with her purse because she had been too proud to share the lift with him!
She wrapped some toilet paper around her hand and dabbed at her cheeks as the epiphanies flooded over her, one after another. All she'd really wanted in her future was to help people, and now she was finally doing it, working at the St. Mungo's that she should have been working at years ago. And God, it killed her every time to admit it, but she should never have let Draco walk out her door so many months before. She'd just been too scared to let him stay.
Hermione nearly teetered off the toilet as she heard the bathroom door creak open.
Ohgodohgodohgodohgod please be the cleaning lady, she prayed, her fingers digging so tightly into her own arms that she swore they were sausages, what with how little she could feel them.
"Hermione?" a familiar voice chirped outside of her stall. Damnit. Hermione relented, no longer caring about what a mess she must look like, and unlocked the stall door.
"Step into my… office," she mumbled as Ginny nervously poked her head in.
"Gods Hermione—what happened?" Ginny asked, gaining more confidence as she saw the state Hermione was in.
"Oh, nothing, you know, routine check-up… normal Healer stuff. I just had to make sure the toilets weren't sick. You know how they get sometimes," she waved her hands animatedly, the wad of toilet paper still wrapped around one. Then realization dawned on her and she stumbled off the toilet, grabbing Ginny's shoulders in confusion, and a little for the sake of balance.
"Wait—how did you find me here? What are you doing at St. Mungo's? Are the boys all right?" she spewed out, shaking Ginny the entire time. All the lamentations of the past ten minutes flew out the window as images of Harry in a full body cast and Ron holding his decapitated head jumped into her head. Oh God, she'd gone and done it again—had she really been that out of it these past few weeks? Had another War started and she'd missed it because she'd been so absorbed in her little ice cream pity-parties at night?
"Jeez Hermione, calm down! So help me if you don't take a fucking breath and stop shaking me, I'm going to charm boils all over your ass and your face!" Ginny threatened, slapping Hermione's arms away and pushing her back down onto the toilet bowl. She pulled a tissue out from her purse and began rubbing away the tear tracks on Hermione's cheeks as she started explaining.
"Sorry—I didn't mean to be so harsh—but lately you've been acting completely mental. Not the bad mental, not some sadistic psycho killer mental, just… quiet mental. And everyone's noticed it—me, Harry, Ron, that little girl you just left with a needle in her arm like some sort of human pincushion…"
"In my defense, that little twat deserved it! And that needle had a vaccination in it—not some sort of flesh-eating virus—" Hermione interrupted, her nostrils flared with some mixture of confusion and anger.
"Hermione! Shut up and listen! We were waiting for you to finish up—"
"We?" Hermione interrupted again. "You weren't the only person who saw me run off bawling to the bathroom like some socially inept grade school reject?!"
"Yes, WE you idiot! Me, Harry and Ron. Well, Ron was a little… apprehensive about coming… but shut up—the point is that we're here to talk to you about… ugh, I hate to say it, but about Draco."
Hermione immediately bolted up from the toilet and shoved Ginny out of the way as she rushed towards the bathroom door. There was no way in hell she was going to talk to anybody about that… that… God, she couldn't even think of anything to call him anymore.
Why was she still running away from this?
She stopped short of pushing the door open, then turned to face Ginny whose arms were stretched out in some sort of… skeptical hug.
"Hugsies?" Ginny asked, her face crinkled half with enthusiasm and half with confusion. She wasn't exactly sure why Hermione hadn't bolted out the door—not like it would have helped because Harry and Ron were nervously waiting outside with a panacea of ice cream and Get-Well balloons (Ron's idea)—but she was glad Hermione was still in the bathroom.
"I'm fine, Ginny," Hermione moaned, dragging her hand down her face as she walked towards the sink. "I feel very gross, very grimy, and tired, but I'm fine."
She turned on the faucet and as Ginny held her hair behind her shoulders, she splashed water into her face to try to reclaim some remnant of her dignity.
"If it makes you feel better, Draco already told us everything," Ginny said, "That's why we were waiting for you."
Hermione groaned and slumped back against the wall, letting her body fall to the ground like a corpse. God, she wished she could have been there to see Draco explain this one to Ron, to see Draco smash through a window or a door, or knowing Draco, even a mirror in his haste to escape Ron wielding mobile pieces of furniture like chainsaws in all his raging glory. Ginny slumped down beside her and sighed.
"Okay, don't get mad because it's really all Ron's fault that it's taken so long—but Draco's been looking for you for months," Ginny explained, much to Hermione's dismay. "In Ron's defense, we were all feeling a little less than friendly towards Draco because all we knew was that one minute you were running against each other, then the next minute you were going on secret dates with each other, and then the next minute you were sitting in the dark in your bathroom writing poetry in your bathtub…"
Oh please, poetry? God, Hermione wasn't some sort of angst-ridden twelve-year old who sits out the middle school dance to read Conrad to her imaginary friends. She wanted to correct Ginny, but it probably would have made things worse if she tried to explain that she'd been penning her will in case she went into diabetic shock from the choclacohol. And no, that didn't come pre-made.
"You might as well know the whole story… when Draco first tried to get in contact with Harry, Ron thought he'd be clever and he sent Draco an owl from Harry telling him to go to look for you at this nunnery in the States. He didn't think Draco'd actually do it, but he did, and then when he came back, Ron sent him another owl from Harry saying you'd gone to Asia to "find yourself" in the mountains. So Draco just kept running around the world, doing Ron's bidding, thinking it was Harry, thinking that you were in some mysterious place when the entire time you were at St. Mungo's. By the time we finally caught on to what Ron was doing, Draco was already in France looking you up in all the brothels he could find…"
And even though it wasn't very funny at all in its separate parts—the irony of the situation, the hardships Draco must have gone through, the pain she'd endured these past few months, the fact that Ron had told Draco she'd started working as some sort of scarlet woman in France—put together it was the funniest thing she had heard in a long long time. Hermione couldn't stop herself from bursting out in laughter and she even let her face roll around on the floor for a bit in all her delusion. Of course, she immediately regretted it and tried to scratch off her face with her hands, but right afterwards she stood up and was really fine. No exaggerations this time.
Technically, she would be fine once she got a hold of Draco.
"What did he say?" she asked, dusting off her sleeves.
"Well, when we finally met him, he didn't have to say much," Ginny replied, "Harry was already thoroughly impressed by the fact that Draco was able to go to a slutty European brothel without coming back with some sort of hooker-bride, and even though Ron doesn't like to admit it, I think he was a bit impressed too. Maybe a little guilty, but mostly impressed. I don't think he expected Draco to last beyond that first trip to America."
She then grabbed on tightly to Hermione's arms.
"He loves you, 'Mione. He even let us yell at him for a bit, thinking that he'd broken your heart. But all he said was that you told him no, and it makes a lot more sense to hear that a woman said no to Draco, than to hear that Draco said no to a woman. So tell me—what happened?"
Hermione sighed, and though she'd heard Draco say it so many times before, she couldn't help feeling light-headed and breathless thinking about Draco loving somebody other than himself. She returned Ginny's stare and shook off her grip.
"I don't know why the idiot didn't just pick up a newspaper and figure out where I'd gone," she jibed. "Ugh… but he's right. I told him I didn't want him. And at the time, that was technically partially sort of true."
"Hermione…" Ginny pressed, brow sternly furrowed.
"Okay, okay, jeez… all right, I admit it. I hate having to say it, but I admit it. I was wrong, Ginny, so completely horribly terribly utterly wrong."
And surprisingly, it didn't hurt that bad at all, saying that out loud. Feeling a boost of confidence, she pushed onwards.
"I suppose… my first mistake was thinking that I actually wanted to be the Minister. And my second mistake—well… my second mistake was thinking that I wanted that more than I wanted… ugh… more than I wanted Draco. Merlin, all I've ever wanted to do was help people, and instead of helping people, and I mean really helping people—you know, the good stuff, like fixing their bones and their heads and their little fingers and toes—I've been all caught up in this stupid race for power. And from all the way up there, how could I have ever helped people as closely as I help them now? And I've just been so stubborn, just wanting to be better than everyone else and—God, all I cared about was my own pride and—"
"You should probably be telling this to him, not me, " Ginny interrupted, gesturing towards the door. Now, normally, this would have been the perfect moment in a film for the heroine to burst out the hospital doors and run into the arms of her lover. But Hermione still had some rationality left, as well as a line of patients to attend to, and most importantly, one entered and exited St. Mungo's through the window of Purge and Dowse Ltd., so there would be no epic flights of passion unless Hermione wanted to burst out of the window and into traffic. Instead, Hermione remained put in St. Mungo's. She hugged Ginny and together they walked towards the bathroom door.
"Thanks," she said, "I don't know what I would have done without you."
Ginny shrugged.
"What are you going to do now?"
Hermione smiled and held the door open for Ginny, catching a glimpse of a relieved-looking Harry and Ron holding a giant balloon bouquet.
"Surpriissseee!" Harry and Ron hesitantly whispered in unison.
Ginny turned to Hermione, ignoring Harry and Ron's complete failed attempt at instilling any sense of shock in Hermione.
"What am I going to do?" Hermione replied, "Owl Draco. But right now? I'm going to punch Ron straight in the face."
It was about time Hermione Granger stopped being afraid of getting hurt.
Author's Note- Contrary to popular belief, I am not a doctor, so I don't actually know if you can go into diabetic shock from eating chocolate and alcohol. Is the Fountain of Youth in the Malfoys' backyard? Is Draco part Crabbe? Does Hermione moonlight as a prostitute? All completely irrelevant because I made those all up. I don't know if any of you know math or anything, but this was first published five years ago, and now I've got like, 12 kids and a house to run and a career to tend to. JUST KIDDING. Last chapter up soon. For real this time.
