Chapter Eleven

She arrived just outside the entrance of the Three Broomsticks in Hogsmeade. Her mission was to seek out the best piece of advice she could about her Malfoy Predicament and this first person was bound to help her in some way. There was a strong possibility that she might not even want to talk to Hermione, let alone give her advice about Malfoy. But it was her best bet to start here and she'd already made her way to the door. A few reassuring breaths later and she headed inside.

She toured the area with her eyes, quickly scanning the pub for the woman she sought out. Upon finding her, she marched over to her bar and sat down next to her. Madame Rosmerta gave her water and a smile before proceeding to serve her other customers. The older woman had been eternally grateful to the Golden Trio since the war's end and she was not afraid to show it whenever the opportunity presented itself.

"What are you doing here?" Pansy Parkinson asked in the rudest way possible. "I didn't say you could sit next to me, Granger. It would have been polite to at least ask me first. Aren't you supposed to have manners or something?" she sounded bitter, resentful, and a little drunkl but that wouldn't stop Hermione. She was on a mission.

She cleared her throat. "I came here to ask you a very personal question."

"Well you came to the wrong place. Who says I'm going to answer you?"

She hadn't missed the way Pansy always felt the need to bite back after never being bit in the first place. The beat of their conversations in the past was always quick. Why should things be different now? "It's about Draco Malfoy."

At the mention of his name the dark haired witch raised her eyebrows a tad. She had obsessed over him in school after all, and her love was always unrequited. It hadn't been easy to forget about him. She was still on the road to recovery, trying to figure out if she meant anything to anyone she really cared for. "What's there to know? He's a heartless bastard who only cares about himself."

"Of that much I am aware. But you don't really think that do you? You were friends with him after all." This wasn't going well. If she didn't find a way to make peace she would never get the information she wanted. "Listen Pansy, I know things aren't going so great for you right now, what with your parents disregarding your feelings about what happened to you, but I need your help and I am asking you nicely. If it makes you feel any better, things have been complete crap for me too so you don't have to feel alone."

Pansy's ex-fiancé was now in a tropical island, enjoying the fruits of his broken engagement. They were betrothed from an arrangement of Pansy's father and her ex-fiancé's mother, but one day he decided there were better and prettier fish in the sea, took the next girl he could find to paradise and left Pansy a cruel note stating the circumstances of which he left. From then on Pansy was distraught and took to drinking to numb the bitterness she felt.

I always feel alone these days. "Fine. If you're going to insist on staying until I talk then I'll talk. What the hell do you want?"

Improvement, sort of. "You were in love with him back in school weren't you?" This was not her area of expertise and it killed her to talk about these things with the world's most emotional and egotistical female.

"What makes you think I'm not in love with him now?" she quipped back. Pansy knew the conversation was headed this way as soon as she'd brought the stupid beautiful git up. It wasn't fair for all of these residual feelings to just linger like the morning dew on the grass. She wanted to be able to walk in the yard with no shoes on, metaphorically speaking of course, and she could never do that with the heavy hold Draco had on her heart. Having an unrequited love was much better than deliberately getting your heart broken by a man you didn't even know.

"Well I assume that if you still had feelings strong enough to go after him then you would be after him now. You might not know where he lives but I'm sure you could find out. It's no secret that he works for the Ministry so you could catch him if you wanted him. Admit it; if you wanted to want him you'd be around him right now just like you always were. You simply don't want to want him, do you?"

Pansy coughed and grabbed a handkerchief from her pocket to cover her mouth. "You always were the cleverest little witch…"

It had sounded more like an insult than a compliment coming out of her mouth but Hermione had very little time to complain. Her patience with this girl was running thin. "You're being counterproductive. I need your help or else I wouldn't be here."

"All right, I'm sorry. Well I'm not sorry but you're right in that I don't want to want him. I don't want to want anybody. I want my parents off my back and the Prophet off my arse. What is it you want to know?" Pansy was really tired of having this conversation with the Golden Girl but the longer she protested, the longer the conversation went on. It was better to cooperate than whine about things senselessly.

Hermione cleared her throat again out of nervousness and drank a few gulps of water before going on. "I was wondering if you ever slept with him."

"No."

"Oh."

"And not for lack of trying either. He simply wasn't interested in me that way." Her memories sank in of all the times Draco had turned her down. She allowed herself to become a little sad at where she was now, instead of being in his arms.

"So he didn't take advantage of the fact that you had feelings for him?"

"Draco is… he's not a bad person. He might not always seem like it but he knows what's right and what's wrong. He doesn't shag every girl he sees just because he can. If he wants to sleep with someone then it's because he really likes them or liked what they could offer him. He holds beauty with high value but that's not all he cares about. I couldn't get him to even touch me after seven years which is kind of embarrassing. I'm not all that bad looking; I just don't fit his tastes." She asked for a refill of her drink and waited impatiently for its arrival while shoving peanuts into her mouth. "I'm allergic to these. In two hours I'll have hives and a swollen tongue. I don't really care; someone here will fix me up. It's usually her," she said pointing for a moment at Madame Rosmerta before drinking half of her gin and tonic. "She keeps hiding them from me but I keep finding them." Her sing-song tone was light and cheery as if this whole thing was a game but only for a millisecond, and then she was back to normal Pansy. "We dated for a little while but just to please our parents, and he left me quick enough. He told me that he was sorry because he could never return my feelings the way I wanted him to. And after that year he didn't have much time to throw himself at other girls, he had a task to do as you already know. There was a lot of pressure on him already and he was very stressed about it. He didn't exactly have the childhood he desired. No, Draco never had much time for girlfriends."

Hermione felt conflicted. She had no idea what it felt like to grow up in a household where your father decided everything for you before you were old enough to talk. Her Slytherin classmates all had socialite authoritarian parentage and their involvement in the war became necessary when their parents had decided to. It was simply unfair. She wondered for a second what Malfoy and Pansy and the others would be like if they hadn't been brainwashed into thinking that people like her were scum, if they had a choice or a say in the matter. They might have ended up friends in an alternate universe. It was hard to picture mentally, but she had seen something nice and it left her wanting more. "There's a girl our age named Ella Wainwright. Do you know of her?"

"Obviously," she said with a snort.

"And why is it so obvious that you should know her?"

"When you're in love, you make it your business to know your competition. She's the one that hold him in the palm of her hands now. Last I heard they were shacking up together at her place. I thought a lot about making him see me in a different light until she came along. He seemed okay with her, a little less angry at the world for making him the way he was: a heartless man with a hatred for something he didn't understand fully. She's muggle-born too so I thought that she was changing him and so I gave up on him to see if she did but that was weeks ago. Has she?"

"Er, I don't really know about that. He's just broken it off with her today apparently. He claims she was too clingy and in a jealous rage, she fired me because she thought I was too close to him." She left out the part about her living under his roof and deemed it something Pansy didn't need to know.

"Ha, you and Draco too close? Yes that's very funny Granger. What did she really think?" Pansy requested to Rosmerta to keep her drinks coming.

"Well," Hermione was a little uncomfortable talking about this now after seeing Pansy had become a borderline alcoholic. "I'm sorry to say that she really did think that. She heard us talking after he left her and assumed the worst." Surprisingly enough, the worst had nearly come true earlier but I'll keep that to myself as well.

"That woman's head was cracked," said Pansy after a little silence. "I wasn't so sure of it at first because they looked so good together and Draco doesn't have a habit of dating odd women. He isn't the kind of man that likes to waste time. She must have tricked him into thinking she was sane enough to bother with, or he was in it halfheartedly. Which is it?"

"Um, I suppose she was tricking him. How do you figure all this out?"

"Easily," she croaked out after a nasty belch. "Oh, excuse me I forgot where I was. I know him better than anyone else in the world. He probably got comfortable with her because she took care of him a little but she got too used to having him around. His mother... well she's been pressuring him to tie the matrimonial knot and he's been objecting. If Ella-bitch was trying to get him to do the same then yeah, he would have left her. Is he living alone now?"

"Sort of," Hermione wasn't used to being in a position where she wasn't doing most of the talking. Pansy was opening up to her and the things she was saying were actually helpful. She chalked it up to being purely sloshed in her spot and thanked Merlin that the former Slytherin had forgotten who she was talking to and their history together.

"Well he left Narcissa at home a while ago," she hiccupped. "Draco wanted to escape that place and all the bad memories associated with it. I never fully understood his reasons but I guess that doesn't matter. If he's left that Ella bitch then it's because he found someone else to take care of him. Draco doesn't know how to cook and he's too lazy to keep clean on his own. He's only ever been served and that's exactly what the little whore was giving him. She was pleasing him and feeding him and tidying up so he was comfortable enough that he would stay around for a little while. Her crazy must have come out a little bit too much this time and she couldn't make up for it."

It was all too much to handle. Hermione was shocked and only because it all made so much sense. She didn't know how much of it was true but Ella was always a little unstable. If she was under the delusion that they were a happy couple then Pansy was probably spot on. Ella played housewife to him and got too comfortable, that had to be what happened. She didn't exactly have the best personality either. "So do you think he'd treat any woman he gets with like that?"

Pansy seemed to sober up for this part of the conversation. "Are you asking me if Draco Malfoy is capable of loving another person?"

"I think so, yes."

Pansy sobered up for this answer and thought for a long moment. It was a question she didn't ever think she'd be asked. Draco was a very complicated person but he wasn't incapable of loving. He just didn't know what loving was. His parents were so distant so that didn't surprise her. "He is. Just because his track record is garbage doesn't mean he is. I was the wrong woman for the job and Ella-bitch was just the wrong bitch at the wrong place at the wrong time. She spoiled him too much and it backfired on her." Another hiccup and another swig put her back into her inebriated state.

Hermione got up, said her thanks to Pansy and gave Rosmerta a smile before leaving the establishment. Everything seemed a little clearer now because of that conversation. Draco didn't just want her to have another notch on his belt, so to speak. All the girls before her were ones that approached him first. They made him the bad guy because he left them brokenhearted. It was easier now to see that if Draco Malfoy wanted something then he wasn't going to let it out of his sight, not even for a second. He'd been with Pansy because it made her happy but he couldn't oblige. He stayed with Ella as long as he did because he was comfortable. Did he seek after Hermione because he thought she was different? Did he want her for something more than just to have her? She wasn't absolutely sure it was possible for him even after talking to someone who knew him very well. Hermione didn't find herself extremely sexually attractive but maybe he did. It was just so out of character for him to act this way with her. Perhaps if he had taken his time and actually wooed her like Viktor Krum had, she could have actually seen the good side of him. But now she had to have proof of his intentions other than a good word from a friend because that simply wouldn't be good enough.