Title: Curiosity
Rating: R language and sexuality…
Spoilers: Books
Key: Hermoine/Draco mmm….
Summary: Malfoy, a bit confused about his condition, and none too happy, must deal with an irate Hermoine for putting her in the position of caring.
A/N: ARGH!! Tests just around the corner, and I'm writing this thing than studying!!! ARGH!!!!
**
before
**
Malfoy's wand held surprisingly steady, she whispered as many incantations and spells and curses and hexes that she could remember, hoping that they would trigger something (anything!) and free Malfoy's limp (hopefully alive) body.
But nothing seemed to work.
"Alohomora!" It was the lst one she had, "Alohomora!" She screamed louder, her voice cracking...nothing.
The tree, whipping, thrashing, screaming, and Hermoine watched, waiting to hear the tell-tale snap of the neck and the final, last crack of the spine.
Something to tell her that she couled give up; that there was nothing left for her to do.
"Let him go," She whispered, more to herself than to anyone else, "Please."
She closed her eyes, and felt her arms, sitll wrapped around an unmoving branch, go numb.
The thrashing stopped so suddenly that Hermoine still had her eyes closed when Malfoy's body, limp and bloody, dropped to the ground.
**
now
**
For a few seconds, everything was silent. The tree no longer writhed, there were no screams in the air, the only sound was a distant bell signaling the end of first period, and the labored breathing from deep within Hermoine.
Malfoy didn't move, didn't scream, didn't curse, didn't do much of anything. His eyes were closed, his robes torn to shreds, his arms and legs bleeding from a thousand tiny cuts, and a large number of deep gashes.
Hermoine watched; as she slipped down the tree, as she tiptoed slowly to Malfoy's prone body just lay there, bleeding.
Was he...
A flash back to the hospital, back to where her father lay on the cot, not doing much of anything.
...dead?
A hesitant hand reached out, hovering above Malfoy's nose and mouth, searching for the hot moisture of his breath.
Nothing.
Was he...
Harry and Ron, looking for all the word like the living...
...dead?
She was afraid to touch him, but she let her fingers fall onto his cheek, looking for something...anything...
Malfoy's eyes snapped open, searching into Hermoine's; unguarded, open. His breathing resumed in tortured gasps.
Hermoine fell back, scuttling on her hands and feet, until she hit a tree, and fell down.
He propped himself up on bloody arms, his eyes scanning his own body. He did not look surprised, he didn't not hitch his breath in pain, rather, it seemed (to Hermoine) that he studied his cuts, and gashes, and welts with detached familiarity.
He looked back up at her, noticing for the first time, that she was there, shivering, not from the cold, but from fear, fear that Malfoy was dead, fear that there was yet another person she knew, however insignificant, was gone.
His stomach hitched, and he stood up, unsteadily, feeling his legs protest with the movement.
Something was wrong, and he looked back down at his arms and legs and felt dizzy.
That was...a lot of blood.
And he didn't feel it. He felt fine, he was sure of it. The cuts and gashes and the way his wrist turned in the oddest way, he should feel something, anything.
But nothing.
Nothing.
Hermoine was still watching him fearfully, those brown eyes no longer blank, but a noxious combination of anger, pain, and hope.
And than it hit...
...rushing to the back of his head.
He felt his legs giving out, felt them turn to something akin to jelly. His eyes didn't seem to work. They seemed attracted to the back of his eyelids, and there was a strange smell.
Coppery...
...warm.
It was his blood, and it was rushing through his veins, pulsing into his head, behind his eyes, as all the pain he should have felt, rushed along with it. His wrist screamed in fury, the numerous cuts and gashes and everything, they just flared up, burned, stung, screamed...
And he fell.
Again.
He heard Hermoine's horrified shout he felt the dust kick up around his face as she skidded to her knees beside him, pushing his body, trying to move him.
But he could barely feel it, masked by the sheer pain that moved through his veins and slammed into his skull.
And then he didn't feel much at all.
**
One moment he looked dead, then he looked fine, and now he was back to being-looking dead.
Malfoy still breathed though, as hard as it was to find. It came out in shallow gasps, through his mouth and nose.
Hermoine screamed at him, anger laced with tears and pain. She shook his unconscious body, trying to get a rise out of him, "Stupid GIT!" She shouted, as she shook him harder, ignoring the blood that made her hands slick, "You stupid, bloody, fucking GIT!" She screamed even louder.
But no matter how many times she called him a git, or a ponce, or a bloody poofter, or just asshole and bastard, and after all that she still got...nothing.
His eyes remained rolled to the back of his head, the lids barely covering the bloodshot whites of his eyes.
So she stopped -suddenly- just stopped. She didn't scream, cry, or curse, just looked at his unmoving body, and wondered why there were tears on her face.
They were hot, and salty, and mixed with blood, leaving thin pink marks on her cheeks.
She sniffed, angry at Malfoy for getting such a reaction out of her, and swiped at them with her hand, leaving a red streak of Malfoy's blood on her cheek.
It was then, while Hermoine was crying, out of anger, out of confusion, out of just plain frustration, that Hagrid came bounding through the forest.
His voice was loud and reverberated through the forest, bouncing off of trees and stones, "Ye' stupid tree!" He shouted out, "Always makin' a fuss," His feet made the ground vibrate underneath Hermoine as he came closer, "Ach, there will come a time I'll cut ye' down, and then we'll see who's- Hermoine!?!" His voice was tinged with just a bit of hysteria.
Hermoine looked up quickly, as Hagrid ran towards her, she quickly tried to wipe away the tears, "Hagrid!" She said between gasps, "We have to get him to the hospital, we have to or," And she couldn't really finish the sentence -at all- the words just died in her throat and she looked helplessly up to Hagrid.
Hagrid wasted no time; he scooped up Hermoine in one hand, and gingerly picked up Malfoy in the other.
Soon he was trampling out through the forest, trying to ignore Hermoine who was crying softly into his hair.
**
By the time Malfoy was cleaned up and put into a hospital-wing bed, Hermoine had herself under control.
She was reasonably certain that she couldn't cry any more. She couldn't imagine that she had an tears left for that matter. Her eyes were dry, painfully so, like her lips, they felt chapped.
She didn't stay for long in the hospital wing, and to avoid the barrage of questions that Dumbledore trailed her with, she escaped into the stacks of the library.
The library hadn't changed, Hermoine was sure of that at least.
It was still a library, with long rows of dusty hardback books. They held titles such as, Milenfred's Magical Monopodium vol II, and, Porterville's Portitude of Potions. But the for the first time since forever, Hermoine didn't grab a book to read.
She found herself moving deeper into the stacks, looking for a dark corner that she could get lost in and not come out of for a while.
Between stack 243 and 244, lay one such corner, and Hermoine sat down in relief. The floor, cold stone, didn't bother her.
She sat there, her knees drawn up to just under her chin, her fingers splayed against the floor, her hair, still streaked with blood and dirt and littered with leaves, falling across her face.
Her eyes didn't close for a few moments, they stared out straight ahead into nothing, until she felt her hands (unknowingly) come up off the floor, to rest around the bottoms of her legs.
It was then that she closed her eyes.
She didn't wake up until a few hours later.
**
Malfoy woke up to the wrong end of a medi-wand. It was currently emitting a loud squeal, and the tip was sparking dangerously. Still half groggy, and not thinking clearly, Malfoy tried to back away from it, succeeding only in getting himself tangled in the sheets, and tumbling out of the bed.
"Mr. Malfoy!" Pomfry shouted angrily, pushing up her glasses with one finger, and pointing the wand at him menacingly with the other, "You must stay calm!" She yanked him up from the ground, "You mustn't move! You are in very frail condition." Pushing him roughly back into the bed, she tsked and tusked as she made a show of tucking him in, fluffing his pillows, and pulling a blanket up under his chin.
"What-what are you talking about?" Malfoy's head felt muddled, stuffed with tissue. He felt sweaty, hot, feverish, and he struggled as Pomfry attempted to stack more blankets atop of him.
Mrs. Pomfry just tsked some more, and tucked the sides of the blankets into the side of the bed.
The blankets cut into his skin, and Malfoy struggled some more. They felt binding, as if he was being tied down, and Pomfry, held him down.
Malfoy didn't like to be tied down.
He didn't like to be held down.
With screams that reminded him of back home, he pushed Pomfry off of him. He tumbled out of the bed, his bed-robes' sleeves rolled up, and he stopped moving because he was staring at-
His arms....
...Covered with little scars, little red ones that covered almost every inch of his skin.
He looked up at Pomfry, who was staring at him from her position on the floor, a guilty look on her face.
"You...you don't remember?" She asked.
Malfoy shook his head mutely, and as Mrs. Pomfry enveloped him in her arms and tucked him back in bed, Malfoy wondered why the scars reminded of home.
Scars and bindings.
**
The library was dark when Hermoine finally opened her eyes.
She had been fighting against the impulse to wake up for over a half-an- hour, unwilling to trip back into the real world just yet.
In the real world Mum was dead.
Da' was dead.
Harry and Ron were close to it, and Malfoy...
So she tried not to wake up because where she was at the moment was much nicer.
She was back at home, in her room. The covers were tucked up beside her chin, her hair splayed on the pillow. The sun, bright, blindingly so, filtered through the blinds.
It was Sunday. Mum was in the kitchen humming something, and cooking eggs. She could hear dad padding down the hall.
The light coming through the windows became brighter, and Hermoine covered her eyes with a hand, squinting.
Brighter and brighter until it became even hotter still.
And her skin felt like she was burning.
And she couldn't fight not opening her eyes any longer and she was rocketed back to the cubby between stacks 234 and 244.
It was dark, and she was cold.
And it didn't smell like eggs.
**
Malfoy couldn't go back to sleep after Pomfry had left.
He just...couldn't.
After she left, he slipped out of the blankets and rolled up his sleeves.
He tried to remember.
Flashes of green and brown and the whole world shifting, twisting, up and down and side to side.
They came to him as his fingers traced the cuts and barely healed gashes.
His skin glowed red.
Red scars...
...Redisthecolorofbloodasitflowsintohiseyesasthewholeworldmoves...
...They stung.
But they didn't hurt, they just...he passed his fingers over them again...stung.
And then he tried to remember.
**
Hermoine didn't like waking up one bit.
It was hard, painful.
Cold.
But she got up anyway, smoothed down her robes and headed back down the stacks.
**
The memories hit, and afterwards, Malfoy felt incredibly stupid.
Really, really, stupid.
What had he been thinking?
He was finished marveling at the scars. They would heal and if they wouldn't disappear, he would hex them away.
It was what he always did.
So when the memories came, he catalogued them, and pushed them out of his mind.
He wanted to get out.
Something about the hospital wing always bothered him and he didn't want to stay there long.
Pomfry, too busy bustling with medi-potions and heal-hexes to pay mind to her patients. Malfoy slipped out from between the sheets, his feet touching the stone the floor.
He had to get out of here.
Harry and Ron were in the beds next to him.
They had the same cuts.
They had the same bruises.
They had the same...everything.
He had to get out of there.
So he did.
He looked to see if Mrs. Pomfry was around, but she was too busy to notice him leave. So he left. His feet slapped against the stones that made up the hall, and his breath came out in tiny clouds.
His bedclothes billowed between his feet, and the scars began to burn.
And Malfoy wondered if Potter's scar, the little pansy one shaped like a lightening bolt, burned, or stung, or if it was just there, without pain or consequence.
But that thought left him as he rounded the corner and realized he didn't really want to go back to his bed. He didn't really feel like sneaking anywhere, suddenly too tired to be silent. His feet felt leaden, weighed down, and they slapped sickly against the stones as his steps faltered.
He didn't want to go back to his room and wake everyone up and have Crabbe and Goyle look at him in shock, at all the little cuts and scars that bore evidence to what he did.
And for who.
So he found himself turning around, slipping down the stone steps into the library.
And crashing ungainly into Hermoine.
Briefly, as Malfoy fell to the ground, he wondered exactly where chance lived, so after all of this, he could hunt down chance and kill it.
Because lately, chance was really getting on his nerves.
**
Hermoine cursed under breath when she felt her body connect with someone else's. She had been so wrapped up in herself; she didn't bother notice the other person.
Now, she thought angrily, not only was she caught out of her room past curfew, the way the guy (she was sure it was a guy) fell, she'd probably caused some damage.
She felt her legs tangle with the other persons, and she heard him curse under his breath.
And then she recognized his voice.
Oh.
**
"Bloody hell!" He finally managed to get out, despite the pressure of Hermoine against his chest, "Do you purposely do this, or are you just blind?"
Hermoine was looking at him like he was a ghost. Her eyes were wide as saucers, and her mouth was slightly open.
And then Hermoine slapped him.
Hard.
She straddled his chest, her hand raised for another slap
"What in the bloody HELL-"
And then another.
Finally, Malfoy had enough, and he wrapped an ankle around Granger's and twisted his body, until he trapped her, struggling, beneath him. His hands found Granger's wrists, and held them down.
"You bloody, stupid, idiotic-" Granger was cursing as she struggled underneath him, "How dare-"
"How dare I? YOU slapped me. For something that YOU did." His hair fell across his face, and he ducked his head a bit to move it out of his eyes.
Granger read this wrong, and struggled some more.
"What are you doing?" Malfoy whispered savagely at her, suddenly aware that it was very much nighttime, and they were both very much past curfew.
"Trying-" She muttered,"-to get away from you."
"Maybe think about that before you slap next time."
"Well...you kissed me!"
"And that has to do with slapping me?"
"Well..." And Hermoine stopped moving for a second to think about that, "...Yeah."
Malfoy opened his mouth to say something, something that would be mean, or insulting, or witty...at least something witty.
But before he could think of something, a wave of dizziness and nausea broadsided him and left him breathless.
He felt his arms go weak. They felt as if they were going to break.
And he fell.
He landed atop of the mud blood, unconscious.
**
Read, review…. You'll get an egg! They're good for you! I swear, and they crack real funny on lil' brother's heads…
-dafnap
Rating: R language and sexuality…
Spoilers: Books
Key: Hermoine/Draco mmm….
Summary: Malfoy, a bit confused about his condition, and none too happy, must deal with an irate Hermoine for putting her in the position of caring.
A/N: ARGH!! Tests just around the corner, and I'm writing this thing than studying!!! ARGH!!!!
**
before
**
Malfoy's wand held surprisingly steady, she whispered as many incantations and spells and curses and hexes that she could remember, hoping that they would trigger something (anything!) and free Malfoy's limp (hopefully alive) body.
But nothing seemed to work.
"Alohomora!" It was the lst one she had, "Alohomora!" She screamed louder, her voice cracking...nothing.
The tree, whipping, thrashing, screaming, and Hermoine watched, waiting to hear the tell-tale snap of the neck and the final, last crack of the spine.
Something to tell her that she couled give up; that there was nothing left for her to do.
"Let him go," She whispered, more to herself than to anyone else, "Please."
She closed her eyes, and felt her arms, sitll wrapped around an unmoving branch, go numb.
The thrashing stopped so suddenly that Hermoine still had her eyes closed when Malfoy's body, limp and bloody, dropped to the ground.
**
now
**
For a few seconds, everything was silent. The tree no longer writhed, there were no screams in the air, the only sound was a distant bell signaling the end of first period, and the labored breathing from deep within Hermoine.
Malfoy didn't move, didn't scream, didn't curse, didn't do much of anything. His eyes were closed, his robes torn to shreds, his arms and legs bleeding from a thousand tiny cuts, and a large number of deep gashes.
Hermoine watched; as she slipped down the tree, as she tiptoed slowly to Malfoy's prone body just lay there, bleeding.
Was he...
A flash back to the hospital, back to where her father lay on the cot, not doing much of anything.
...dead?
A hesitant hand reached out, hovering above Malfoy's nose and mouth, searching for the hot moisture of his breath.
Nothing.
Was he...
Harry and Ron, looking for all the word like the living...
...dead?
She was afraid to touch him, but she let her fingers fall onto his cheek, looking for something...anything...
Malfoy's eyes snapped open, searching into Hermoine's; unguarded, open. His breathing resumed in tortured gasps.
Hermoine fell back, scuttling on her hands and feet, until she hit a tree, and fell down.
He propped himself up on bloody arms, his eyes scanning his own body. He did not look surprised, he didn't not hitch his breath in pain, rather, it seemed (to Hermoine) that he studied his cuts, and gashes, and welts with detached familiarity.
He looked back up at her, noticing for the first time, that she was there, shivering, not from the cold, but from fear, fear that Malfoy was dead, fear that there was yet another person she knew, however insignificant, was gone.
His stomach hitched, and he stood up, unsteadily, feeling his legs protest with the movement.
Something was wrong, and he looked back down at his arms and legs and felt dizzy.
That was...a lot of blood.
And he didn't feel it. He felt fine, he was sure of it. The cuts and gashes and the way his wrist turned in the oddest way, he should feel something, anything.
But nothing.
Nothing.
Hermoine was still watching him fearfully, those brown eyes no longer blank, but a noxious combination of anger, pain, and hope.
And than it hit...
...rushing to the back of his head.
He felt his legs giving out, felt them turn to something akin to jelly. His eyes didn't seem to work. They seemed attracted to the back of his eyelids, and there was a strange smell.
Coppery...
...warm.
It was his blood, and it was rushing through his veins, pulsing into his head, behind his eyes, as all the pain he should have felt, rushed along with it. His wrist screamed in fury, the numerous cuts and gashes and everything, they just flared up, burned, stung, screamed...
And he fell.
Again.
He heard Hermoine's horrified shout he felt the dust kick up around his face as she skidded to her knees beside him, pushing his body, trying to move him.
But he could barely feel it, masked by the sheer pain that moved through his veins and slammed into his skull.
And then he didn't feel much at all.
**
One moment he looked dead, then he looked fine, and now he was back to being-looking dead.
Malfoy still breathed though, as hard as it was to find. It came out in shallow gasps, through his mouth and nose.
Hermoine screamed at him, anger laced with tears and pain. She shook his unconscious body, trying to get a rise out of him, "Stupid GIT!" She shouted, as she shook him harder, ignoring the blood that made her hands slick, "You stupid, bloody, fucking GIT!" She screamed even louder.
But no matter how many times she called him a git, or a ponce, or a bloody poofter, or just asshole and bastard, and after all that she still got...nothing.
His eyes remained rolled to the back of his head, the lids barely covering the bloodshot whites of his eyes.
So she stopped -suddenly- just stopped. She didn't scream, cry, or curse, just looked at his unmoving body, and wondered why there were tears on her face.
They were hot, and salty, and mixed with blood, leaving thin pink marks on her cheeks.
She sniffed, angry at Malfoy for getting such a reaction out of her, and swiped at them with her hand, leaving a red streak of Malfoy's blood on her cheek.
It was then, while Hermoine was crying, out of anger, out of confusion, out of just plain frustration, that Hagrid came bounding through the forest.
His voice was loud and reverberated through the forest, bouncing off of trees and stones, "Ye' stupid tree!" He shouted out, "Always makin' a fuss," His feet made the ground vibrate underneath Hermoine as he came closer, "Ach, there will come a time I'll cut ye' down, and then we'll see who's- Hermoine!?!" His voice was tinged with just a bit of hysteria.
Hermoine looked up quickly, as Hagrid ran towards her, she quickly tried to wipe away the tears, "Hagrid!" She said between gasps, "We have to get him to the hospital, we have to or," And she couldn't really finish the sentence -at all- the words just died in her throat and she looked helplessly up to Hagrid.
Hagrid wasted no time; he scooped up Hermoine in one hand, and gingerly picked up Malfoy in the other.
Soon he was trampling out through the forest, trying to ignore Hermoine who was crying softly into his hair.
**
By the time Malfoy was cleaned up and put into a hospital-wing bed, Hermoine had herself under control.
She was reasonably certain that she couldn't cry any more. She couldn't imagine that she had an tears left for that matter. Her eyes were dry, painfully so, like her lips, they felt chapped.
She didn't stay for long in the hospital wing, and to avoid the barrage of questions that Dumbledore trailed her with, she escaped into the stacks of the library.
The library hadn't changed, Hermoine was sure of that at least.
It was still a library, with long rows of dusty hardback books. They held titles such as, Milenfred's Magical Monopodium vol II, and, Porterville's Portitude of Potions. But the for the first time since forever, Hermoine didn't grab a book to read.
She found herself moving deeper into the stacks, looking for a dark corner that she could get lost in and not come out of for a while.
Between stack 243 and 244, lay one such corner, and Hermoine sat down in relief. The floor, cold stone, didn't bother her.
She sat there, her knees drawn up to just under her chin, her fingers splayed against the floor, her hair, still streaked with blood and dirt and littered with leaves, falling across her face.
Her eyes didn't close for a few moments, they stared out straight ahead into nothing, until she felt her hands (unknowingly) come up off the floor, to rest around the bottoms of her legs.
It was then that she closed her eyes.
She didn't wake up until a few hours later.
**
Malfoy woke up to the wrong end of a medi-wand. It was currently emitting a loud squeal, and the tip was sparking dangerously. Still half groggy, and not thinking clearly, Malfoy tried to back away from it, succeeding only in getting himself tangled in the sheets, and tumbling out of the bed.
"Mr. Malfoy!" Pomfry shouted angrily, pushing up her glasses with one finger, and pointing the wand at him menacingly with the other, "You must stay calm!" She yanked him up from the ground, "You mustn't move! You are in very frail condition." Pushing him roughly back into the bed, she tsked and tusked as she made a show of tucking him in, fluffing his pillows, and pulling a blanket up under his chin.
"What-what are you talking about?" Malfoy's head felt muddled, stuffed with tissue. He felt sweaty, hot, feverish, and he struggled as Pomfry attempted to stack more blankets atop of him.
Mrs. Pomfry just tsked some more, and tucked the sides of the blankets into the side of the bed.
The blankets cut into his skin, and Malfoy struggled some more. They felt binding, as if he was being tied down, and Pomfry, held him down.
Malfoy didn't like to be tied down.
He didn't like to be held down.
With screams that reminded him of back home, he pushed Pomfry off of him. He tumbled out of the bed, his bed-robes' sleeves rolled up, and he stopped moving because he was staring at-
His arms....
...Covered with little scars, little red ones that covered almost every inch of his skin.
He looked up at Pomfry, who was staring at him from her position on the floor, a guilty look on her face.
"You...you don't remember?" She asked.
Malfoy shook his head mutely, and as Mrs. Pomfry enveloped him in her arms and tucked him back in bed, Malfoy wondered why the scars reminded of home.
Scars and bindings.
**
The library was dark when Hermoine finally opened her eyes.
She had been fighting against the impulse to wake up for over a half-an- hour, unwilling to trip back into the real world just yet.
In the real world Mum was dead.
Da' was dead.
Harry and Ron were close to it, and Malfoy...
So she tried not to wake up because where she was at the moment was much nicer.
She was back at home, in her room. The covers were tucked up beside her chin, her hair splayed on the pillow. The sun, bright, blindingly so, filtered through the blinds.
It was Sunday. Mum was in the kitchen humming something, and cooking eggs. She could hear dad padding down the hall.
The light coming through the windows became brighter, and Hermoine covered her eyes with a hand, squinting.
Brighter and brighter until it became even hotter still.
And her skin felt like she was burning.
And she couldn't fight not opening her eyes any longer and she was rocketed back to the cubby between stacks 234 and 244.
It was dark, and she was cold.
And it didn't smell like eggs.
**
Malfoy couldn't go back to sleep after Pomfry had left.
He just...couldn't.
After she left, he slipped out of the blankets and rolled up his sleeves.
He tried to remember.
Flashes of green and brown and the whole world shifting, twisting, up and down and side to side.
They came to him as his fingers traced the cuts and barely healed gashes.
His skin glowed red.
Red scars...
...Redisthecolorofbloodasitflowsintohiseyesasthewholeworldmoves...
...They stung.
But they didn't hurt, they just...he passed his fingers over them again...stung.
And then he tried to remember.
**
Hermoine didn't like waking up one bit.
It was hard, painful.
Cold.
But she got up anyway, smoothed down her robes and headed back down the stacks.
**
The memories hit, and afterwards, Malfoy felt incredibly stupid.
Really, really, stupid.
What had he been thinking?
He was finished marveling at the scars. They would heal and if they wouldn't disappear, he would hex them away.
It was what he always did.
So when the memories came, he catalogued them, and pushed them out of his mind.
He wanted to get out.
Something about the hospital wing always bothered him and he didn't want to stay there long.
Pomfry, too busy bustling with medi-potions and heal-hexes to pay mind to her patients. Malfoy slipped out from between the sheets, his feet touching the stone the floor.
He had to get out of here.
Harry and Ron were in the beds next to him.
They had the same cuts.
They had the same bruises.
They had the same...everything.
He had to get out of there.
So he did.
He looked to see if Mrs. Pomfry was around, but she was too busy to notice him leave. So he left. His feet slapped against the stones that made up the hall, and his breath came out in tiny clouds.
His bedclothes billowed between his feet, and the scars began to burn.
And Malfoy wondered if Potter's scar, the little pansy one shaped like a lightening bolt, burned, or stung, or if it was just there, without pain or consequence.
But that thought left him as he rounded the corner and realized he didn't really want to go back to his bed. He didn't really feel like sneaking anywhere, suddenly too tired to be silent. His feet felt leaden, weighed down, and they slapped sickly against the stones as his steps faltered.
He didn't want to go back to his room and wake everyone up and have Crabbe and Goyle look at him in shock, at all the little cuts and scars that bore evidence to what he did.
And for who.
So he found himself turning around, slipping down the stone steps into the library.
And crashing ungainly into Hermoine.
Briefly, as Malfoy fell to the ground, he wondered exactly where chance lived, so after all of this, he could hunt down chance and kill it.
Because lately, chance was really getting on his nerves.
**
Hermoine cursed under breath when she felt her body connect with someone else's. She had been so wrapped up in herself; she didn't bother notice the other person.
Now, she thought angrily, not only was she caught out of her room past curfew, the way the guy (she was sure it was a guy) fell, she'd probably caused some damage.
She felt her legs tangle with the other persons, and she heard him curse under his breath.
And then she recognized his voice.
Oh.
**
"Bloody hell!" He finally managed to get out, despite the pressure of Hermoine against his chest, "Do you purposely do this, or are you just blind?"
Hermoine was looking at him like he was a ghost. Her eyes were wide as saucers, and her mouth was slightly open.
And then Hermoine slapped him.
Hard.
She straddled his chest, her hand raised for another slap
"What in the bloody HELL-"
And then another.
Finally, Malfoy had enough, and he wrapped an ankle around Granger's and twisted his body, until he trapped her, struggling, beneath him. His hands found Granger's wrists, and held them down.
"You bloody, stupid, idiotic-" Granger was cursing as she struggled underneath him, "How dare-"
"How dare I? YOU slapped me. For something that YOU did." His hair fell across his face, and he ducked his head a bit to move it out of his eyes.
Granger read this wrong, and struggled some more.
"What are you doing?" Malfoy whispered savagely at her, suddenly aware that it was very much nighttime, and they were both very much past curfew.
"Trying-" She muttered,"-to get away from you."
"Maybe think about that before you slap next time."
"Well...you kissed me!"
"And that has to do with slapping me?"
"Well..." And Hermoine stopped moving for a second to think about that, "...Yeah."
Malfoy opened his mouth to say something, something that would be mean, or insulting, or witty...at least something witty.
But before he could think of something, a wave of dizziness and nausea broadsided him and left him breathless.
He felt his arms go weak. They felt as if they were going to break.
And he fell.
He landed atop of the mud blood, unconscious.
**
Read, review…. You'll get an egg! They're good for you! I swear, and they crack real funny on lil' brother's heads…
-dafnap