Author's Note: It is astonishing how much of this fic was written after midnight on a variety of days. Perhaps that explains the fact that portions of it exhibit what I call "Very Early Morning Humor," which is what most people call "Nonsense and Idiocy."
Sorry I've sucked so much at replying to reviews lately… I still love all of you!
And I apologize for any vocal cords strained by screams of anguish during/after this chapter.
Chapter Ten
Silver and Green
Hermione was sitting primly on the couch, Sparky at her right, with all the lights off. She had been sitting primly on the couch, Sparky at her right, with all the lights off, for four hours now.
A key turned in the lock, and Hermione clenched both fists, forgetting that she'd set one hand on Sparky's back. Accordingly, the cat fled.
Draco backed in, fighting the key out of the lock again, and stumbled a little. He was singing softly.
"Good mornin', good mor-nin'; it's great to stay up late; good mornin', good mor-nin' to you…"
"Where have you been?" Hermione inquired coldly.
Draco turned, blinked, and flicked the light-switch on. He then recoiled from the nearest lamp, which was telling to say the least. "I… have been… out," he announced at last, nodding to himself.
"You're drunk," Hermione noted icily.
Draco nodded again, helpfully. "Yeah, but you should've seen Potter—I had to carry him into his house, and I totally hit his head on the doorway, and—"
"Stop," Hermione ordered.
He did, obligingly, but only for a moment. "You're so pretty when you're irrationally angry," he told her.
"I am quite rationally angry, Draco," she spat. "You leave saying it'll be a few drinks down the street, and you come back at four in the morning unable to string a sentence together?"
Draco shrugged, smiling absently. "Din't mean to make you worry."
Hermione fought the knot in her throat—fought it tooth and nail. She wasn't going to lose it now. There was far too much at stake. "That's the problem," she snapped. "Intentions aren't everything, Draco Malfoy. You've got to think first. You've got to think about what other people want, and what other people are going to feel. You've got to consider how what you're doing will affect other people." She felt her rage ebbing, leaving her as tired and desolate as might be expected at four in the morning after a workday and a night of worrying hard.
"It's all part of my strategy," Draco said.
Her eyes narrowed. "What strategy is that?"
"My coping strategy."
"Getting sloshed is your coping strategy?" Hermione summarized incredulously.
Draco smiled a little more yet. "Yes," he said, his voice slurring only slightly.
Hermione covered her face. "I don't believe this. I don't believe it. I refuse to believe it."
Gently Draco pried her hands away. That done, he proceeded to plant a few slightly clumsy kisses on her face. "So melodramatic," he murmured.
She shoved at him. "Eugh—your breath—"
"—smells like flowers and wintergreen and happiness."
"Notquite, Draco."
"Come on, love, just cut me a little slack—"
"A little slack?" she repeated, hearing a strident note in her voice as she tore herself away from him. "Yes, of course. And then I'll cut a little more, and a little more, and pretty soon, I'll have cut you loose, and there'll be another girl, and you'll do the same damn thing Ron did, and then where'll I be, Draco Malfoy?" Tears threatened her voice, but she pushed them away, just as she pushed everything away—out of sight, into the dark little corner where she kept all the emotions and fears and doubts and hopeless prayers that she couldn't bear to examine in the light of day. "Then where'll I be, when you've gotten tired of me, too?"
Draco sighed, rubbing at an eye. "Hermione—"
She turned her back. "No," she said. "I'm not having this argument when you're drunk. I'm having this argument when you're wide awake and thinking, and then you'll have to hear me. Goodnight, Draco."
She shut her ears to the pleas that issued forth, strode down the hall, entered her bedroom, and locked the door behind her.
Only then did she fall down onto her bed and bury her face in her pillow.
Seeing Draco sprawled out on the couch wrung her heart almost dry as she slipped through the living room the next morning. Two, she had decided, could play at his game—she was going out. She didn't know where, or for how long, and she didn't care. All she knew was why: Because he ought to know how it felt for once. Because somebody besides her should have to hurt for a change.
The house coffee at the little shop two blocks down was warm and rich, and Hermione sat nursing her cup, looking out the broad window at the quiet street, for a long time. Long enough to watch the Saturday morning crowd bustle out of their homes and towards the shopping district; long enough to regret the mere four hours of sleep she'd obtained the night before; long enough for her coffee to be very cold by the time she set it down and went out into the street herself, burying her hands in the pockets of her coat like she wished she could bury the memory of the desperate plea in Draco's unfocused eyes.
She did more ogling of displays than actual shopping, and the day crawled by like a crippled snail on an uphill slope. As her stomach whined about food, drink, nourishment, and other trivialities when she glanced at all the happy people chatting over lunch at the street-side cafés, she almost ducked into a phone-booth and called Ginny. Or Ilsa. Or both. But if she called them, they would see it written on her face in silver and green, and they would get a confession out of her if they had to resort to medieval torture devices.
Hermione wasn't up for a confession. What she wanted was for the next police box to be the Doctor's TARDIS, so that she could travel back in time to a moment when she didn't feel like something inside her had rolled over and died.
It would have been much too depressing to sit at one of those cheery tables, right across from the moving Christmas displays in the big stores' windows, all by herself. She judiciously decided to skip lunch. The unadulterated patheticness of braving it alone would have made her throw her food up again anyway.
She almost cried when she realized that she had just made up a word.
The night did not sneak up on her. Rather, she watched it fall, piece by piece, second by second, one faint star blinking into existence at a time, as she learned the sidewalk with her shoes. A waxing moon rose, the silver, it seemed, of tears.
God, Hermione thought. I should never get depressed. This sad-poet persona is extremely unflattering. Come on, it can't possibly be the "silver of tears." Tears aren't even silver; they're transparent.
She peered at it a little more, squinting now. No, not tear-silver. The shadowed craters and basaltic maria were the dark gray of his pajama shirt, and the highlands were the pale gray of his eyes.
Well,that worked, Hermione thought acridly.
All of this really just made her want to throw herself off a bridge. A small bridge, though, so that either she'd live, albeit horribly maimed, to give Draco the biggest guilt trip of his young life, or the fall to her death would be short enough that she wouldn't have time to regret jumping in the first place.
The streets were almost entirely clear now, but she didn't want to go home. She didn't want to see the signs of him draped all over the life she'd tried to make for herself, the parts of him indelible and inevitable and absolutely inseparable from who and what she was now.
The moon continued to draw her gaze to it even as she continued down the street. It was very high, very distant, and very cold—everything she wanted to be right now.
She tore her eyes away with no small effort and looked at her feet for a while. Then she looked up again, and the stars mocked her, too. She imagined they had shrill, squeaky little voices, like the frighteningly-long list of children's television icons that she had always thought were on helium, crack, or possibly an elaborate cocktail of the two.
Was it really only a month ago that he'd dragged her to dinner, dragged her out past the suburbs, dragged her up a hill, and flopped down on his back and pointed? Only a month ago that he'd told her to lie down and look for Draco, only to cry "Here I am, silly!" and kiss her instead when she finally rolled her eyes and complied?
Was it really only three days ago that he'd showered her with origami cranes and grinned like an eight-year-old who'd won the class spelling bee?
The idiot. The wonderful, beautiful, lovable idiot.
When she heard the telltale whisper of wood over fabric as someone drew a wand, she spun, but it wasn't fast enough.
"Confundo!"
Hermione had time for three last coherent thoughts.
The first was, Aw, crap.
The second was, What kind of crappy last coherent thought was that?
The third was, Do I have a fixation with the word 'crap,' or what?
It was about then that everything became crappier still. Unimaginably crappy, in fact. And Hermione wasn't even conscious enough to process the crappiness as everything made one sudden, blurry rotation and then came back into focus twisted and with half the color leached out, like a photograph splattered with water.
Her thoughts came in a mutilated, truncated, nonsensical rush, and her ears rang.
silver
"—silver—"
dark green coats dark gray pants black cloaks
"—sure?"
cloaks shadowing their faces
"—do it now—"
The world spun, with her at its axis.
black alley silver sidewalk black alley silver sidewalk
"—absolutely sure?"
And then—
cold hot freeze burn silver red
"—good, now let's—"
Go.
red red red red red red RED—
The silver sidewalk rose abruptly. Hazily Hermione saw her hands splayed out on it, holding her weight. She stayed there, it seemed, for a long time. An eternity, perhaps, to gather her wits again.
There was a migration of sticky, unpleasant warmth outward from the Land of Searing Pain that had arisen in her midsection. Putting one of her shaking hands to it, she used the other to push herself up, resolved to walk to one of those not-TARDIS phone booths after all. At the first step, she staggered, her low heels like inverted pyramids balanced beneath her feet, her head whirling, her eyes watering, her heart pounding so hard she expected it to rupture—
"MyHeavens, dear," a familiar voice declared, in a hand-over-heart kind of tone. "What in the world's happened?"
Dazedly Hermione managed to find Lychorida Bolton's bony shoulder and latch onto it like a mussel onto a coastal pinnacle of granite.
You knew things were bad when Hermione Granger was making similes like that.
"Please," she panted. "Have you got a car?"
"Well, yes, dear; right over he—"
"You'vegot to take me to my friend's house." Hermione found herself seeing nothing but a haze of dark silver wet sidewalk and light silver moist sky and forced herself to focus on the face swimming in front of her.
Lychorida's eyebrows drew together, sending folds rippling across her forehead. "I should think you need a hospital, dear—"
"No," Hermione insisted. "It's got to be—got to be—" She caught her breath and coaxed the last few words out. "Harry Potter's house."
Lychorida's brittle fingers closed surprisingly gently around her wrist and began guiding her away. "Does he live nearby?"
"Yes—close enough—the address—"
It was a good thing Hermione had perfected the art of multi-tasking in school. Writing a Transfiguration essay, studying for Charms, and deflecting a bout of intended plagiarism from Ron and Harry all at once had been excellent practice for what she was doing now: walking towards Lychorida's dark green jalopy, covering the spreading bloodstain on her shirt with her hand, reciting an address, and largely holding herself together by force of will alone.
She would have been pretty impressed with herself if she'd had time.