Four hours and three bags of blood later, Hermione woke up.
By then the sun had been burning for almost half a day, streaming in through the large window on her right. Draco was beside her, helping himself to a glass of water from her bedside. His feet were propped up onto the foot of her bed, and he hadn't noticed her consciousness yet. His face was buried in a book while he waited.
Once again, it seemed, Hermione had taken up the entirety of his break.
"Malfoy, what are you doing here?" She mumbled.
Putting the book down, and pushing his glasses further up the curve of his nose, he snorted. "I work here. What are you doing here?" She saw the humorous glint in his eyes.
"Isn't that the question of the day. For all I know I should be dead. Yesterday."
Draco flipped his book onto the bed. "Don't be like that. You survived. Rejoice."
"Don't feel like it."
"Well, you should." He got up to sit in front of her on the mattress. "You just helped us figure out the seventh and eighth stages of BR Poisoning, and how to treat them."
Hermione only gave him a confused look, something she was doing very often these days. "What do you mean?"
"Well. The seventh stage was the anemia, which actually lead to the eighth, internal and external bleeding. Now, I've taken a blood sample while you were stable enough and sent it to the lab to test it out with cancer medication. Turns out, chemo helps kill BR cells. You're in luck, you may just be the first ever survivor of this poison."
Hermione started crying.
Draco sighed, then cried out in surprise as she yanked his jacket and pulled him in for a hug, wrapping her arms around his head. He only pat her on the arm and let her, saying, "Your bouts of chemotherapy start tomorrow. Make sense?"
She nodded, letting him go to wipe her tears. "Thank you so much, Draco." She said in between sniffles.
"It was my pleasure." He looked at her and smiled, but it dropped quite quickly as he saw her bandages. "Now, actually, I need to fix your stitches, I totally forgot."
"Idiot," Hermione laughed.
"I'll need you to sit still, okay, Granger?" she nodded in response.
Carefully he pulled a tweezer-like tool from a plastic shell on the countertop. With Hermione's head turned in the opposite direction and his left hand over her ear, he cut and pulled away the remnants of the thread. With every bit he pulled out from her skin, she flinched. "Don't… move…" Draco mumbled, trying his best not to lose concentration. She only made a small humming sound to show she understood, but when he pulled out another stitch she twitched. Draco passed her an annoyed look, but otherwise said nothing.
Minutes later, her neck was covered with a fresh patch of medicated cloth, and he moved on to the stitches over where her appendix used to reside. It looked only slightly infected. He sterilized it with a swab of rubbing alcohol, making his patient hiss and twitch beneath his hands. Working faster he finished with the swab, tossed it out, and recovered the site with a fresh layer of gauze.
"All set."
Hermione thanked him, and asked, "Don't you need to get back to work? Don't let me keep you too busy. You're an important person at this hospital, from what I gather."
He just waved off her concerns, assuring her that he'd taken the next few hours off. His shift would begin when the day ended.
Hermione nodded, and the room fell back into silence. The atmosphere grew almost awkward.
"So," Draco began. "Why the female doctor? Don't trust my judgement?" He tried to make a joke of the situation, hoping to make her at least smile.
Hermione avoided his eye, once again. She then said, "I'll tell you if you answer my question."
They then looked into the other's eyes. Draco shrugged, "Yeah, okay."
She examined his face, not really sure she should have been asking. "Your Dark Mark. I don't see it." Draco nodded slowly, waiting for her to continue.
"Those things don't ever come off. How'd you get rid of it?"
Draco sat silent for a few moments, pondering on the best way to answer her question. It took a minute or two, before he said, "I never really did. I tried to, for an entire year. It never came off." Saying this he got up to reach the medical tools from near his former seat. Picking out a pad soaked in rubbing alcohol, he scrubbed away at his arm. Slowly lines the colour of a regular ink tattoo began to show.
"I've burnt, scratched, and cut away at my arm. Nothing worked. By the time I'd healed, the mark healed with me. The only way I covered it up was with my wife's makeup. Her skin tone was a little too dark for me, so she got me my own set." He laughed at that.
It grew silent again after that. His glasses were beginning to slide off his nose. He pushed them back up. He didn't pry for her answer on his question, despite his burning curiosity.
Her answer, however, came a little while after his.
She looked nervous, not expecting him to have answered. But a deal was a deal, and it would be highly unfair of her to have left him hanging when she had poked at possibly one of the most horrifying things that had ever happened to him.
"Doctor-patient confidentiality?"
Draco nodded solemnly.
"I trust you. Of course I do. You're my doctor, and a very skilled one at that." She paused. "But you are a man. And to be honest I've only had one man before."
"Weasley." He said. She nodded.
"And by 'had' you mean…" Draco made exaggerated movements with his hands, getting at what they both understood as intimacy.
"Yes. Him and another man. I don't even know his name, but that wasn't my decision."
She was beginning to tear up, her voice getting hoarser as she swallowed her pain. Draco already understood. She'd been forced into activities with a man not waiting for her consent.
"Granger, you don't need to…"
She nodded, knowing he already understood. "But don't you remember? When you said I needed to talk to someone, I said I'd only talk to you? This is me doing that, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me."
Draco nodded and shut up.
"I was raped, on March 18th two years ago in the alley behind Ron's apartment. I've never trusted a man since. I've never recovered; never let a man close enough to do such a thing to me ever again."
He took her hand from under her blanket and held it in between his two. "Granger, know that I would never do such a thing to you – to anyone – so please, I don't want you afraid I will."
She nodded, and the first tear fell.
"At least tell me you informed someone." He whispered. She shook her head. "I was still with Ron at the time. I told him, and he said it was my fault. That I'd cheated on him. I tried to tell him I didn't do it purposely – I didn't do it at all, but he left me. I didn't have anyone else to turn to. My parents were dead. No one would have stood by me then." As she said this she squeezed his hand in hers once.
"Potter, then? Where was Potter?"
Again, she shook her head. "I didn't want anyone to know, really." She sniffed. "I was ashamed. I believed Ron. I told myself it was my fault. Until today I hadn't told anyone."
Draco nodded, sullen. He let her clutch his hand like it was the last thing that held her to this worlds as she cried on. He offered her his handkerchief again. She laughed only briefly.
It took her almost a half hour to calm down, Draco beside her the entire time. at one point he allowed her to rest her head on his shoulder, her body still shaking from her confession.
When she had cried her final tear she wiped it away, swiftly, with the Slytherin house hanky. They stayed in their position.
"Malfoy?" she called, her voice low and muffled.
He hummed in acknowledgement.
"I'm sorry I punched you in the nose."
They both laughed. "That's okay; I'm sorry for being such a jerk."
"I used to hope you would die."
At this Draco sighed. "Yeah, me too."
Hermione got of his shoulder and looked at him dead in the eye. "What? Why?"
Draco only shrugged. "I hated myself. I didn't let anyone else see it but I did. I listened to everything my father said, and it ended up hurting so many people. Katie Bell, for instance. Sometimes I still don't sleep thinking of what I did to her." He paused, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eye, ridding it of the tears forming.
"My father, at home, was abusive. To both me and my mother. I never wanted to leave her alone with him. I used to make myself sick. So sick that Madame Pomfrey had to call my mother to Hogwarts. My father didn't care enough to bother, so it got my mother away from him for a few days. She'd come in to see me, so worried, but then I'd see her bruises. He never stopped. And then I tried to kill myself. I'd always chicken out at the last second, always for my mother. Only for my mother.
"My hate for my father became hate for myself. I developed bulimia. Every morsel I ate came back up. I got too thin. It lead to depression, anxiety, all sorts of things. I already couldn't breathe properly, not from birth. I got dehydrated too fast, and refused to eat for days. It was terrible."
Hermione nodded. "I know the drill. Your skin gets messed up, and your cheeks swell. It takes a lot out of a person."
Draco agreed with her. By then he'd given up trying to keep his tears off his face. He let them fall. Hermione looked at him in surprise. She'd never expected to see Draco Malfoy cry in front of her eyes.
"The throwing up every meal, it isn't easy. The rehab is so much worse. You're told that it's all in your head, or stop whining and just fucking eat something, but it's so much harder than they think. A lot of my friends left me because of it."
He hadn't noticed her running her hand over the length of his arm until then. She had tears running down the side of her cheeks too. She'd related to everything he'd told her.
"I'm sorry you had to go through all that." She whispered. He pat his hand over hers when it stopped moving against his arm.
"Yeah, me too."
ALRIGHT now, I'd like to mention a few things right here.
1) Rape= not okay. If it happens to you, tell someone. It is not your fault. Don't ever think it's your fault. YOU WERE NOT asking for it.
2) Bulimia and anorexia. These are serious diseases. It is not all in your head. Same goes for depression, anxiety, and other things I'm probably forgetting. These are real medical conditions that you should never make fun of others for having, or put them down for it. It. Is. Serious.
3) Respect the people around you. No matter how horrible they are to you. I'm going to sound like your mother when I say this but just ignore them. You don't know what they'd been through.
4) Suicide. Please don't do it. I know it's hard, and even though it's impossible for me to relate to what you're feeling now, please. Please don't kill yourself today.
5) Bless you all, take care of yourselves. I love you all.
6) Also don't do drugs.