Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
***
I shouldn't go out with Harry and Ron and Ginny and Neville to the Three Broomsticks because I always have too much to drink. No, correction, that's "always" with a sample size of one. That's the once. Tonight. Tonight I had much too much to drink, and I sat next to Neville, who put his hand on my forearm after the third round of firewhiskey, and I knew that meant, Hermione, you've had quite enough. I felt quite coherent, though, which surprised me. And what a very married gesture that was, in spite of the fact I don't dare touch him. In fact, I know I had the third firewhiskey because I was having the urge to put my hand on his thigh under the table, and I thought that I ought to slow myself down. This stuff isn't just alcohol; it has a curious numbing property that I find I really like. Numbing, with focus. What more could an emotional control-freak want?
Well, really it was the last one and a half drinks that were on account of Neville. Ordinarily, I would have left it at one, and half of the second, and then let Ron or Ginny take the remains, just as I did at our celebration back in May. Except back in May I was not being haunted by the thought (ye gods and goddesses) that Neville Longbottom is unendurably attractive. It's just wrong that my entire potential dating pool is people I went to school with. They're too much like siblings or cousins seen too often on holidays. I know that people marry their cousins, but still…
When I look at Neville I see, simultaneously, his earliest and latest selves: the chubby little boy I met on the Hogwarts Express, in tears because his new toad had escaped; and the hero of the Battle of Hogwarts, the young desperado who faced down Voldemort and then, still on fire, swung the sword through the neck of the dread Nagini. Both of those images are off-putting. In the one case, it's something like cradle-robbing or incest; that little boy is so innocent and helpless. In the other it's just intimidating: the doomed-but-defiant warrior who's stepped right out of legend. His strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure, so what am I to be lusting after him? And for Merlin's sake, he's sitting right next to me. I'm basking in the blaze of his body heat, and every time my arm brushes against his, every hair on my body stands on end.
The firewhiskey helps with that. A little.
They say alcohol inflames the desire and takes away the capability. I'm still judging the effect of firewhiskey on the libido, especially after I came out of the stall in the girls' loo and… all right, I don't know how to say this, except straight out: Ginny Weasley. I had just finished washing my hands when somebody took me by the shoulders and spun me around and pushed me up against the wall and out of nowhere she's snogging me. Ginny on firewhiskey number three or four; I lost count of hers at about the time that I decided that Neville's physical proximity was frying my rational mind and that a little local anesthesia was just what the doctor ordered.
There was a tiny voice very far back in my head that was telling me about how people commit dubious sexual acts under the influence of alcohol and drugs. I think it was transmitting from somewhere in Newfoundland—certainly nowhere close enough to make any difference in what I did. I cannot work up the courage to make even the mildest and most chaste advance to Neville, but I was wrestling tongues with Ginny without a second thought, and she was running her hands up under my shirt. It didn't feel like an assault, more like fooling around with your girl cousin on holiday. She's tough and compact and athletic and just about my height, which is unexpectedly hot. We fit together, and my hands find that they really like her new haircut. It's cut short, so it sticks up bristly and spiky. Reminds me of Tonks, as it's meant to. I remember Ginny saying something earlier about how she'd gotten it cut like that because the other girls in Auror training were doing it too, and some of them have charmed theirs pink, and, yes, some are even calling the haircut "a Tonks." She's passed into legend already.
And her hair smells like Ron's. I don't know if it's the well water at the Burrow or the soap or maybe my own crazed synesthesia but it's a grassy-spicy smell, the scent of the Amortentia fumes in Slughorn's class. Her hair feels like Tonks' and smells like Ron's. My unrequited crush and my more than requited first love, and now I'm sucking on her neck and biting her shoulder and I'm thinking, I am going to regret this in the morning. Ginny should not be drinking this much. I should not be drinking this much. My drunken brain likes Ginny because she's a bad girl, even though she broke my nose. In the middle of groping her breasts through her shirt, I'm remembering how she hexed the hell out of Draco Malfoy and I start laughing uncontrollably.
Ginny asks me what's so fucking funny.
I tell her I love the way she hexed Malfoy back in whatever year it was and how, ever after, he looked terrified every time he saw her. Because really there was a little piece of me that was scared of Malfoy, but ever since Ginny fixed his wagon, I have not been. Not in the least.
She says, if he so much as looks at you, I'll kick his arse.
She elaborates with relish: his skinny, pale, pointed, inbred Malfoy arse. And he will come back to earth somewhere in the North Sea. She giggles. Maybe we can drop-kick him straight into Azkaban fortress.
The radio station in Newfoundland is telling me: This girl is training to be an Auror, that's Magical Law Enforcement to you--Ministry cop--and she's talking much too enthusiastically about kicking arse. Even if it's Malfoy arse, we're still talking about police brutality here. The calm rational voice in eastern Canada is reminding me that my parents used to go to protests about that sort of thing--human rights violations, remember?
Except this is Ginny the Quidditch queen and she is a bad girl, which is terribly appealing. The drunken brain tells me that only bad girls are capable of acting on the kind of unseemly feelings I'm having about Neville. And she's my ex-boyfriend's sister and my best friend's girlfriend which makes what we're doing something like incest or adultery—my brain's too confused to figure out which—but anyway A Bad Thing. If I believed in divine lightning, it ought to be homing in on me about now, fixing the girls' loo at the Three Broomsticks in its crosshairs from someplace out by Alpha Centauri, and zap! There goes the brightest witch of her generation, poof! Sizzle! Reduced to a greasy black spot on the floor for snogging Ginny Weasley while thinking about Nymphadora Tonks and Ronald Weasley. Some kind of threesome. Foursome, if you include me. (And then there's the voice of reason, which is now broadcasting from Saskatchewan, but I don't think we include it in the count of participants because it's definitely not approving.) Possibly incestuous. Definitely adulterous because Tonks was married and Ginny is too, well, almost. And probably sadistic, because of Ginny's enthusiastic gloating about kicking Draco.
No, Harry's not on the roster, because that would just be weird, and Neville isn't because he's Neville. In fact, Neville would probably be scandalized if he knew what kind of thoughts I had—about him or in general.
But I'm not going to think about that.
Somebody's pounding on the door of the loo and bawling about what are we doing in there that's taking so long. I realize that the wall against which Ginny has me pinned is actually the door. The pounding is making my teeth rattle. Ginny laughs and says, "That was fun," or something to that effect, and then giggles one more time about kicking inbred arse, before we settle our clothes and walk back into the pub as if we'd been about nothing more than answering nature's call.
Neville looks at me with an expression that I realize much later is concern and alarm, and I sit down next to him, rather unsteadily. He puts an arm around me to steady me and I happily collapse into his embrace, remembering how nice it was to have my nose fixed by him at Harry's birthday and how grateful I am to Ginny for breaking it in the first place. I don't know if any of these thoughts actually escape my lips, because I am much too absorbed in how absolutely sumptuous it feels to lean back against Neville's chest. And that's with clothes on. I believe this is the first time my brain actually embarks on imagining Neville without his clothes.
But this is not the worst.
The worst is outside the pub, when we are talking about going home. Well, for Harry and Ron and Ginny, home is the Burrow. For me, it's a little ambiguous, and my firewhiskey-addled brain thinks "the Granger residence" and before you can say destination and whatever those other two things are, I've got my wand out and I'm turning in a circle to Apparate to the downstairs foyer of my parents' house. I'm lucky I didn't royally splinch myself. There would have been nobody to fix me, because nobody had the faintest idea where I was. Two o'clock in the morning (I saw the clock on the wall) and here I've gone and Apparated under the influence, and miraculously landed in one piece.
No, I lied. It gets worse.
I stumble through the defenses and go downstairs to my Potions bench and pour myself a nice tumbler of Polyjuice by way of nightcap, because I'm thinking about Tonks and how I can't bear another minute without seeing her, since I was snogging her in the girls' loo at the Three Broomsticks. And I've got my beaded bag with all of my everything (because Hermione Granger may not be a bad girl, but she is an organized girl), and I pull out the file envelopes with the hairs in them, and I drop a hair in the tumbler. And then I go upstairs where the full length mirror hangs on the wall in my parents' bedroom, so that I can get the full effect.
Of course, I didn't check which envelope I pulled, and when I'm finally standing in front of the mirror after the Polyjuice agony, it's Draco sodding Malfoy who's looking back at me. I think I wasn't finished with the process of getting drunk, because the wires got progressively more crossed. I'm staring back, and of course what's looking at me from the mirror is ice-cold grey eyes and long blond hair and aristocratic disdain, and I say, "All right, if I can't have Tonks, I'll have you."
I don't even want to remember this part, but unfortunately it's in blazing, high-noon focus. That's the godawful part: the bloody focus. The humiliation and the glory of the firewhiskey hangover is the total recall the next morning, in photographic, razor-sharp detail, of absolutely everything you did under the influence, assuming you stopped short of toxic blackout.
I said to the mirror, "Fuck you, Malfoy." In his voice. And obviously, the mirror said the same thing back to me, with the appropriate sneer and snarl, which got me very angry, and also very horny. For the record, firewhiskey definitely inflames desire. Any desire. It's actually quite fortunate that my reptile brain chose the path of sex rather than violence, because otherwise I probably would have broken the mirror with my fists in the attempt to beat him up and then I would have bled to death, right there in my parents' bedroom.
I proceeded to take his clothes off and throw them to the four corners of the room. And then I put my hands all over him and …
I learned by experiment that firewhiskey in fact does not take away the capability. At least not in my Polyjuiced male avatar, who rather enjoyed the experience up to the point where he produced a very satisfying mess, all over the mirror and the floor.
Well, it's not as if I hadn't seen that before.
Then I got horribly fascinated at the idea that I was looking at Draco Malfoy's genetic material and that if I weren't on the vile purple potion I could probably collect it and make myself pregnant with a baby Ferret. Sick, sick, sick. Made me want to scour out the inside of my own skull the next morning, just the idea that I'd had that thought.
By the time I came back to myself, which is to say that a naked and chastened Hermione was staring back at me from the mirror, I was sober enough to Vanish the mess and collect the clothes and put them back on, more or less right side out. And then I remembered that I'd Apparated here from the Three Broomsticks and my friends had no idea where I was. And it was three o'clock in the morning.
Not to worry, Hermione has the time-turner.
I checked my clothes once more, and made sure I had my beaded bag and my wand. Then I turned off the lights and went downstairs to the foyer where I could look at the clock and calibrate the time-turner against it, because I still wasn't feeling any too steady.
I Apparated out of the downstairs foyer back to the Three Broomsticks at precisely 2:02 a.m., which to my friends looked as if I had blinked out briefly and then rematerialized. Neville took my arm, not noticing that I was rather more stable on my feet than I had been, and I didn't disabuse him. We went back into the pub and stepped through the Floo to the Burrow with Harry, Ron, and Ginny. The plan was to sleep it off until we could return by daylight, because the Aurors at the gates of Hogwarts were not going to let two drunken teenagers back in after curfew, even if one of them was Professor Sprout's apprentice and the other was the junior member of the War Crimes Commission, and the both of them heroes of the Battle of Hogwarts.
***
At St. Mungo's. Just got out of the appointment. It's running together whether I'm the patient or the assistant. I'm here too much. I told Derwent about the firewhiskey but not what I did under its influence. She advises me to be very, very careful. Dosing myself with mind altering substances is the exact opposite of constant vigilance.
It's all very postwar, just not the postwar we were anticipating. Lost generation. And it's a bloody cliché. I will not take to drink, whether it's alcohol or Potions. Constant vigilance. There's too much darkness gathering in my—in our—peripheral vision. What if Dementors had shown up outside the Three Broomsticks when we were drunk? Neville was the soberest one of us, and even he wasn't any too steady.
And for threats only a little less scary than Dementors… well, I ended up at the Burrow, and it was my good fortune that it was Andromeda, and not Molly, who met us coming out of the Floo and shushed us and fed us Sobering Potion before packing us off to bed. It was Andromeda, too, who saw to it that I didn't meet Molly on my way out of there the next morning.
I don't think I want another night out like that. Firewhiskey turns loose the seriously ugly things lurking in my own head. Merlin help me, I was admiring Ginny for breaking my nose and laughing about her hexing Draco. And mistaking her for Tonks—how drunk was I?
I don't like what Ginny is becoming. I'm afraid for her, and I don't think that Harry did anything about that card I gave him when we met for lunch at the Leaky.
At least Ron didn't say anything this time. Oddly quiet the whole time, for Ron.
And what's wrong with looking at Neville? Only that you have some notion that you aren't worthy. He takes the 'Hero of the Battle of Hogwarts' title less seriously than you do. And Ron is not your boyfriend anymore.
She pauses, pen lifted above the page, alarmed by what she just wrote. Not that anybody else can see it; she's put magical encryption on the book. Anyone else reading it will see a collection of lists and schedule notes of unimaginable dullness. She scrawls:
Talk yourself out of this, my girl, before you go round the twist.
Hermione closes the book and tucks it away in her blue beaded bag as she hears footsteps in the hallway. She isn't sure what she means to talk herself out of, and it's long since time to go home.
She's mortified to see that it's Neville, whom she hasn't seen since the night out at the Three Broomsticks. Mercifully, he doesn't see her, because he's talking to someone else, giving directions, it appears. Not unusual. Neville knows the layout of the Spell Damage floor as well as anyone who works there; he knows the Healers, the custodial staff, the patients, the regular visitors like himself.
He's between her and the lift, so she'll have to walk by him. Not such a problem until she sees whom he's engaged in conversation. Marietta Edgecombe, who's no longer wearing a balaclava, but is looking off to the side in a strange way. She's talking to Neville, but avoiding his eyes, and, it seems, she's fighting the urge to look straight at the floor.
As Hermione passes, Marietta glimpses her and turns her face away, mumbles something to Neville, and flees for the door that leads to the staircase. No mistaking the look on her face, though, in the split second when their eyes met: sick terror and shame. It's the same expression that she's seen on Draco's face when he catches sight of the children who attacked him.
She remembers what she thought about Marietta three years ago: Nothing's worse than a traitor. No, she thinks, there are a few things worse than that. "If you want your major risk as the next Dark Lord, you're speaking to her." How casually those words had come out of her mouth, almost like a joke. Almost like defiance. She wonders what Derwent wrote in the file after she said that.
Neville turns to face her; in slow motion, she sees the light of recognition in his eyes, and then his glance locks on her and his whole face lights up. "Hermione! I didn't see you…" but now he's glad he did, he doesn't need to add. Everything's adrenalin-slow, and her heart's hammering because she's just seen Marietta react to her the way that victims do to perpetrators. She can't fool herself about what she did. The curse may be broken, but the damage is considerable.
"Are you feeling all right?"
She shakes her head. What lie do I tell now? "Long day." Please let him not look at me.
But he does. "You're going home, I hope."
She nods. "Pretty directly, I think." She steps into the lift, and he follows her.
On the way down, he says, "I saw someone we know from school." She closes her eyes, waiting for the inevitable. "Lavender Brown, you remember her?" Oh yes, another ghost. Ron's girlfriend of sixth year, the one he had the thing with. The habit of hatred is so ingrained that she gets a little spurt of fight-or-flight rage before she reminds herself that it's ancient history.
"She's doing much better lately," Neville says. "She had a bad time of it, most of the summer."
Yes, she'd seen Lavender's name on the casualty list in the Daily Prophet. She even remembers her feebly stirring body amid the smoke and curse-light of the battle. Greyback savaged her, about the last thing he ever did. It's amazing she's even alive.
"I'm surprised you've never crossed paths with her," Neville is saying. "She's seeing Derwent too. She's down here almost as often as you are." They're walking out the front doors of St. Mungo's now, where the hospital lobby opens onto the disused doorway of Purge & Dowse, the department store eternally closed for refurbishment. As they debouch into Muggle London, the evening is chilly and foggy. Neville puts out an experimental hand to see if it's raining. Nothing dropping, but she can feel the air thick with condensation and a peppery feeling in her nose. It's a filthy London evening in October.
"Anyway, she says hello to you, and asked how you were doing. I told her you were working for Derwent and the War Crimes Commission, and she said good for you. She said you were the smartest of our year and she wanted an invitation when they swore you in as Minister for Magic. 'Score one for the Gryffindor girls,' was what she said." Neville smiles again, and it takes her a minute for the meaning of the smile to register. He's proud to hear someone speaking well of her.
Odd that Lavender includes her as one of the Gryffindor girls. In her recollection, the Gryffindor girls never particularly cared for her nor vice versa. She remembers sneering at Lavender and Parvati for their endless preening and their chatter about Divination and their giggling about boys; equally well, she remembers them looking at her with disdain for her long hours in the library and her bossy manner and her impossible hair.
"Give her my best if you see her again," Hermione says. She steps into the shadows in the alley alongside Purge & Dowse, one of the few locations for easy Apparition in central London; she knows for a fact it has no surveillance camera. She's still thinking about walking ghosts as she squeezes out of the other end of the dreadful compression into the downstairs foyer of her parents' house, and goes upstairs to her old bedroom to finish some programming.
***
From the journal of Hermione Granger
(undated – some time in early October)
One of the things I am learning is that the things that I most want to know are not in books. My education in magic was very like the education I gave myself on the other side of the border: narrowly technical, more the training of a hacker or a guerrilla than the education of a philosopher. I know how to make things and do things, but I don't know the taboos or ethical guidelines, and I'm only now finding out why it might have helped to know some of those things.
I suspect I'm poaching on forbidden turf. Necromancy is banned, but no one taught us the rules about its imitations.
***
If I do say so myself, I am rather good at brewing Polyjuice. And a good thing too, because I have been doing a bit of that lately. I was shocked the other day to notice that I had significantly depleted the stock I made for my experiments back in July.
Well, how… that's another question. Not work-related, that's for certain.
And I've been cheating a bit on the time-turner, an hour here and an hour there, for my recreational use of Polyjuice. No other thing to call it, even given the agony. The pain of transformation is a test: how badly do you want this?
To see Tonks again, if only in the mirror: very badly. I know perfectly well I'm not resurrecting her, even if I hear her voice say, "Wotcher, Hermione." I'm inside her skin—didn't I want that?—and I can't hear her as I would when she was alive. I hear her voice as she heard it, from inside her head. It has a lovely furry resonance; the echo vaults of her sinuses deepen her contralto with overtones of smoke and whiskey. I look at those pictures Andromeda gave us, and I wonder what it was like to grow up as that little girl, with a Muggle-born father and a Pureblood aristocrat mother, knowing both worlds and perfectly at ease in both. That's what I envy her: perfect ease. I desperately want to know her, and I know that I can't; it's too late and she's gone. I want to ask Andromeda everything that she remembers, and I don't dare, because she's still grieving her daughter.
The other detail in those pictures that haunts me is the wiggly little toddler who grew up into the appalling Draco Malfoy. Well, he was already Draco, but at that point it was just a name. All I see in those pictures is a little creature who's curious about the world and who wants to hang out with his very cool older cousin. He looks no worse than any other two-year-old.
And then there's the other circumstances under which I've met Draco, or rather a simulacrum of him—and that's the other place where I know I'm crossing the line. A guidebook would be nice, to say for certain, "You have now crossed into serious obscenity," which would confirm my gut feeling about what I'm doing. Several times now, I've reproduced, deliberately and while stone cold sober, what initially I did by mistake and falling-down drunk. I've turned myself into Draco and then… well, gone exploring. Call it a practicum in adolescent male sexuality, or the safest safe sex there is. Given my schedule and my current state of overwork-induced celibacy, it's likely to be the only sex I get.
And it's probably safer, psychologically, than Polyjuicing as Ron. Yes, I did think about that, and turned away just as quickly as I could, because that's a place I don't want to go. I still get a little stab of longing when I look at that picture that Dean made. I have it up on my bedroom wall at Hogwarts, which probably isn't the safest place since I see it every day. It's a beautiful piece of work and I don't want to hide it in a drawer. That would be an insult to the effort Dean put into it.
So in the privacy of my parents' bedroom, in front of the full-length mirror, I play solo games with Polyjuice. I put on the skin of someone I never liked, and I pretend that all my base urges are actually his, and then I find out what it takes to bring him off. The mind-body problem takes on a whole new kinky twist: the mind is me, the body is him, and then there's the fuzzy boundary where the two meet. I never liked the person, but I'm becoming rather fond of the body, both for flying and for sex: it's wonderfully responsive, like driving a Jaguar when you're used to a nice sensible Volvo.
It's an interesting excursion in many ways, not least that I can escape my own skin. The fictional Draco is my shadow self: male where I am female, Pureblood against my Mudblood (let's call it the way he would), aristocrat where I am commoner. In real life, he's a prisoner while I am free. Politically, he is (or was) a Death Eater, against my Knight of the Order of Merlin. Dark to my light, which strikes me funny from the esthetic point of view because he's paler than anyone I've ever known.
Last but very definitely not least, he's the bad boy I can have any time I like. Compared, obviously, to Neville who's the good boy, no, the hero, who's pure and off-limits to the likes of me. Playing these games helps me forget what I can't have.
And then there's the intriguing experience of inhabiting a male body, whose balance feels strange, with the center of mass too high off the ground and such frighteningly vulnerable parts right there at the join of the legs. When I return to my own body, I feel much more solid and strong, for all I'm supposedly the weaker sex. I watch Harry and Ron and Neville and Dean now, and understand things about the way they move that never struck me before.
If ever again I do touch someone of the opposite sex, it's going to be a very different experience. Not that it's likely.
***