Disclaimer - I know none of the characters are mine. Do you have to keep
rubbing it in by making me write this comment? It hurts my feelings you
know.
-=-=-=-
Hermione awoke to Lavender, Parvati, Ron, and Harry all hovering over her bed, their heads in a circle. She screamed.
"What are you all doing in here? Trying to scare the living daylights out of me? I could have hexed you!" She yelled at them and they all threw themselves backwards about ten feet.
"Hermione you don't have your wand with you." Ron pointed out; finally glad he could prove her wrong for once.
"I could have gotten it easily. It's right there." She retorted and pointed to where the stick of wood lay on her bedside table. "Why are you all in here?" She repeated.
"You were screaming. In your sleep." Lavender said quietly from her place in the doorway. She strode towards her roommate and sat at the foot of her bed. "Are you sure you're alright?" Hermione looked flummoxed. She glanced from face to face looking for answers.
"Screaming about what?" She said slowly.
"I don't know." Lavender said. "We couldn't understand you. You were speaking in some foreign language. It sounded a bit like French with some German thrown in but we couldn't decipher it."
"I went to France and Germany over the summer." She muttered. She then looked up at the slender blonde perched on her bed next to her. "I don't speak either of the languages though."
"This is really weird." Parvati said quietly and joined the other two girls on the bed. Harry and Ron began to feel quite uncomfortable in the girly bonding moment.
"We, erm, have to go. Have, er," Harry stuttered.
"Quidditch practice!" Ron shouted and finished his friend's sentence. "We have Quidditch practice. Bye!" They left the room a little more quickly than usual.
"What were you dreaming about Hermione?" Lavender finally asked after a moment of awkward silence.
"I don't really know. It was all so confusing, made no sense at all. I was standing on the Quidditch Pitch looking up at the sky and a big green bird type thing came barreling down and knocked me flat off my feet and flew away. So I just lay there on the ground and then I looked down and all these black things started to come towards me.
They were reaching out with their hands when the bird came back and saved me. But one of them grabbed on right as I flew away and cut my arm. I tried to put pressure on it so it would stop bleeding but it wouldn't. My blood was pouring all over my robes and the bird. Then you woke me up."
"You know, you might want to go to Professor Trelawney-" Hermione send her a deathly look.
"I am NOT under any circumstances going to that old bat." Lavender's eyes widened at having her favorite professor called an old bat and she had to hold Parvati back from slapping their roommate upside the head. "Sorry bout that. Forgot you loved her so dearly." She stifled a laugh.
"I was just trying to make a suggestion. But I guess if you don't want my help I'll just go. Come on Parvati." She grabbed the sleeve of her best friend's robe and dragged her from the room. Hermione kept quiet until the two girls had left before collapsing into a fit of laughter on her bed.
"Oh please," she said between gasps for air. "Like she could ever help me."
She smoothed the wrinkles in her skirt and made her way to the Great Hall to eat breakfast with her fellow Gryffindors. When she entered the room Malfoy caught her eye from the Slytherin table and smirked. Her blood boiled and she tried to kill him telepathically. It didn't work.
She quickly turned her head to the other side of the room where Harry and Ron were sitting and talking animatedly about the Quidditch game coming up next week. They were so excited an innocent bystander would have thought they were playing.
Of course the entire school, with the exception of Slytherin, would be rooting for Ravenclaw. Everyone kept giving the team reassuring smiles and pats on the back. All seven players were glowing. They Slytherin team, however, was huddled up in a little bunch at the end of their table going over ways to trick the other house and put them out of the game.
"Hey guys." She said as she plopped down next to Ginny on the bench. They acknowledged her by waving but kept on with their conversation. Ginny was the only one who really cared she was there.
"So," she said slowly, not knowing how to start off a discussion with the older girl. They had never really talked much. She was always just the only girl to talk to in the summer when Hermione came over to the Burrow. "What classes do you have today?"
"Arithmacy and Defense Against the Dark Arts." Hermione answered simply and reached for a biscuit from the basket in the middle of the long table.
"Oh. Do you like the new teacher?" Ginny had never been very good at making small talk, especially with people older than she was.
"Yes. I like her a lot. Do you?" Hermione looked at the redhead for the first time since she sat down.
"Well she's better than Beacon. I'll tell you that much. She's pretty good. At least she knows what she's talking about." The two girls laughed. Their professor last year had been completely oblivious to everything that he was teaching. They still wondered to this day why Dumbledore had hired him in the first place.
"Well I had better go. Don't want to be late you know." Hermione said. The chatter had become a bit uncomfortable.
"Right. See you later." Hermione took her bag and walked out of the room. The castle was empty and very quiet this early in the morning. Everyone was eating breakfast. She walked in peace up the three flights of moving stairs to the Arithmacy classroom.
The professor greeted her as she entered and she took her seat in the front row. In her mind she went over the morning events. She was still curious how she was speaking German and French in her sleep. She hadn't been in either country long enough to pick up even a little bit of the language.
She shook her head and started debating with herself over how it could be possible.
"The shame of your family driven you insane Granger? Or is it just that no one else was willing to talk to you?" Malfoy drawled from behind her, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
"Sod off Malfoy." She said venomously. 'Damn, I forgot he was in this class.' She thought.
"I'd rather not." He took the seat next to her and smirked at her.
"What do you want?" She asked and glowered at him.
"What do I want? Only the pleasure of your misery." He sneered at her.
"Do what you want Malfoy. Just remember, you were just the second choice." She looked down at her notes and smiled to herself. His pale face grew red and his eyes narrowed to tiny slits.
"At least I was good enough for him." He shot back. She laughed and he looked surprised. Her body began to shake from the laughter. She couldn't stop laughing and she had stopped breathing. Draco looked around for the professor but she had left.
She had now begun to turn red from lack of air but kept laughing, violently shaking now. Not knowing what else to do he slapped her across the face. After a few seconds she stopped laughing and took in deep breaths. A bright red handprint was now plastered on her right cheek.
"What was that for?" She yelled and rubbed the tender skin where his hand had made contact.
"You weren't breathing." He said simply.
"So? That gives you no right to hit me." She retorted.
"Fine." He spat out. "Next time I'll just let you die. You should learn to be more respectful of your superiors."
He stormed out of the room, leaving a very surprised Hermione sitting alone in the empty room.
'He saved my life?' She thought, not able to process the idea. 'Actually I would have just passed out from lack of air and been able to breath again but he still saved me from fainting. This year is getting too weird.'
The rest of class came in over the next half hour in groups of three or four. Draco was the last one to enter. He took the last remaining seat in the room next to Hermione but both refused to say or look at each other the entire class. If they had one thing in common it was that they each had a very strong sense of dignity.
-=-=-=-
It was finally time for the first Quidditch game of the season. The two teams had been training endlessly, whenever they had even fifteen minutes of spare time. Both felt that they were prepared to destroy their opponents.
The entire school was waiting in the stands waiting for the match to begin. Madam Hooch stepped onto the field with the Quidditch chest in hand. Soon after the players soared onto the field.
"Remember," Hooch said, her voice magnified to ten times its' normal volume, "you know the rules and I expect you to follow them." She looked at the Slytherins as she said this.
Dean Thomas sat in his chair waiting anxiously for Madam Hooch to release the balls so he could begin his commentary of the game. She looked the players over once more, set the bludgers free, and threw up the quaffle.
(A/N: I do not know the names of the players on either team, I'm also not great at describing sports so bare with me and please don't flame me about it.)
"Hernam from Ravenclaw has caught the quaffle! Look at him fly. Oh-no! Here comes Selaw. They're going to-! Ouch. That had to hurt. Slytherin has the quaffle. They've made it past the last chaser! Let's hope Kefner can block it. Yes! He's been hit with the bludger! Ravenclaw back in possession."
Thomas went on with his explanations while Draco slowly circled the field far above the players; his keen silver eyes scanning the field for the snitch.
He watched on as Ravenclaw scored twenty points quickly. The entire stadium cheered. The Slytherin's only cheered because one of the Ravenclaw chasers seemed to have crashed into the goal post while scoring and hurt his arm.
Cho Chang was keeping very close to the end of his broom. She wasn't stupid, she knew when she played Gryffindor or Slytherin if she had any chance of catching the snitch it was to follow Draco and Harry.
He decided to play a trick on her. He stopped his broom quickly and looked around frantically. Not moving forward at all he turned his broom shaft ninety degrees downward and went into a strait dive towards the ground.
As the wind rushed through his hair he saw a glint of gold to his left. In a freak accident he had actually gone the right way, and led her to the snitch as well. Being the expert flyer he was he gripped the broom tightly with his right hand and reached out with his left as far as he could. He was still a good five inches from it.
Chang was gaining on him. He glanced back and saw that she was no longer on his tail but almost directly next to him. In one last desperate move he removed both hands from the broom's handle and threw himself in the direction of the snitch.
The ground neared as he flailed around frantically for the golden ball. He finally grasped it in one of his pale hands right as the end of the broom made contact with the earth below. The force hurled him forward and slammed him headfirst into the sand underneath the hoops.
He heard a tremendous cracking noise as his right arm and several ribs shattered. Before the world went black he glanced down at his hand. There, wriggling in his grasp was the snitch. Slytherin had won, and the world faded away to nothing as the pain overtook him.
"Do you think we should move him?" Professor Snape asked once the teachers had reached the field. They had forded through a mob of angry students to reach the injured boy.
"No," McGonagall answered sternly. "We should wait for Poppy. She'll know what to do."
"Is his arm supposed to bend like that?" Snape said and motioned to his arm, which was bent behind his head at an odd angle.
"Goodness what happened here?" Madam Pomfrey hurriedly said as she summoned a stretched and levitated him onto it. "Quidditch injury no doubt. I'll never know why they still allow them to play such a dangerous game." She began to talk to herself as she took Draco back to the Hospital Wing.
-=-=-=-
"Hermione you didn't tell us he'd get that hurt." Ron said, his eyes wide in shock.
"I didn't get to see all-" Ron cut her off and went right on ranting.
"This is great! Oh! What if he's out of the game against Gryffindor? We'd be sure to win then! Harry can you imagine?" He turned to talk to Harry about Quidditch for the thousandth time that day.
Hermione nervously bit her fingernails. If he ended up dying from blood loss or something she could have prevented it. 'Madam Pomphrey is great. She won't let him die.' She reassured herself.
Nevertheless, Hermione was still a nervous wreck the entire day. She overheard Snape telling Dumbledore that Draco was recovering well in the hospital and he would be back to class in a few days so that lifted her spirits a bit. At least he didn't die. Plus he would never know that she could have prevented his injury.
-=-=-=-
Draco's eyes flickered opened and took in the stark white surrounding him on all sides. It took him a while to realize where he was. When he tried to sit up, a blinding pain shot through his right side and he collapsed onto the bed once more.
The nurse bustled about the room placing potions in their respective places. He groaned and rubbed him sore side. The nurse came at once and gave him a pain solution that would help numb him out.
The liquid burned his throat and he nearly choked. The moment he was done he fell back asleep.
-=-=-=-
Three days later he returned to class. No one gave him the evil eye for winning for they knew what lengths he went through to achieve the victory. His fellow house members congratulated him, but most people left him in peace. He liked that, being in solitude. It calmed him.
Snape gave him a very, very small, almost miniscule smile when he entered the classroom. Draco was so surprised by this that he almost forgot to do anything. He gave the Professor a small smile of his own and took his seat.
For once he was there before Hermione. She sat down a few minutes before class began but was utterly silent.
"What did you do?" He asked her after she rummaged through her bag looking for nothing for a while.
"What do you mean?" She said, never looking up.
"Look Granger, I can tell when people are guilty. What did you do?" She visibly stiffened and slowly turned to meet his gaze. She couldn't tell him about her visions. Only Harry and Ron knew of those. So she lied.
"I forgot to do my Charms essay." She admitted and tried to look ashamed. Draco just started laughing. He laughed until tears came to his eyes and he had to brace himself for support.
"Hogwarts' star student didn't do her homework. Oh this is priceless." He wiped his eyes and snickered one last time before Snape began his lesson.
-=-=-=-
See? I told you this one would be longer. I keep my promises. Hope you liked it. I had a lot of fun writing this chapter. With lots of help of course.
A big thanks to my beta readers:
Weasley Pride - Author of The Serpent Prophecy. It's good. I swear, I don't read bad stories. Check it out sometime.
And
Casper - Author of Love Me. One of the best stories I have ever read. You need to take a look at it too.
Also - Thanks to everyone who has reviewed so far. I love you all.
REVIEW!
-=-=-=-
Hermione awoke to Lavender, Parvati, Ron, and Harry all hovering over her bed, their heads in a circle. She screamed.
"What are you all doing in here? Trying to scare the living daylights out of me? I could have hexed you!" She yelled at them and they all threw themselves backwards about ten feet.
"Hermione you don't have your wand with you." Ron pointed out; finally glad he could prove her wrong for once.
"I could have gotten it easily. It's right there." She retorted and pointed to where the stick of wood lay on her bedside table. "Why are you all in here?" She repeated.
"You were screaming. In your sleep." Lavender said quietly from her place in the doorway. She strode towards her roommate and sat at the foot of her bed. "Are you sure you're alright?" Hermione looked flummoxed. She glanced from face to face looking for answers.
"Screaming about what?" She said slowly.
"I don't know." Lavender said. "We couldn't understand you. You were speaking in some foreign language. It sounded a bit like French with some German thrown in but we couldn't decipher it."
"I went to France and Germany over the summer." She muttered. She then looked up at the slender blonde perched on her bed next to her. "I don't speak either of the languages though."
"This is really weird." Parvati said quietly and joined the other two girls on the bed. Harry and Ron began to feel quite uncomfortable in the girly bonding moment.
"We, erm, have to go. Have, er," Harry stuttered.
"Quidditch practice!" Ron shouted and finished his friend's sentence. "We have Quidditch practice. Bye!" They left the room a little more quickly than usual.
"What were you dreaming about Hermione?" Lavender finally asked after a moment of awkward silence.
"I don't really know. It was all so confusing, made no sense at all. I was standing on the Quidditch Pitch looking up at the sky and a big green bird type thing came barreling down and knocked me flat off my feet and flew away. So I just lay there on the ground and then I looked down and all these black things started to come towards me.
They were reaching out with their hands when the bird came back and saved me. But one of them grabbed on right as I flew away and cut my arm. I tried to put pressure on it so it would stop bleeding but it wouldn't. My blood was pouring all over my robes and the bird. Then you woke me up."
"You know, you might want to go to Professor Trelawney-" Hermione send her a deathly look.
"I am NOT under any circumstances going to that old bat." Lavender's eyes widened at having her favorite professor called an old bat and she had to hold Parvati back from slapping their roommate upside the head. "Sorry bout that. Forgot you loved her so dearly." She stifled a laugh.
"I was just trying to make a suggestion. But I guess if you don't want my help I'll just go. Come on Parvati." She grabbed the sleeve of her best friend's robe and dragged her from the room. Hermione kept quiet until the two girls had left before collapsing into a fit of laughter on her bed.
"Oh please," she said between gasps for air. "Like she could ever help me."
She smoothed the wrinkles in her skirt and made her way to the Great Hall to eat breakfast with her fellow Gryffindors. When she entered the room Malfoy caught her eye from the Slytherin table and smirked. Her blood boiled and she tried to kill him telepathically. It didn't work.
She quickly turned her head to the other side of the room where Harry and Ron were sitting and talking animatedly about the Quidditch game coming up next week. They were so excited an innocent bystander would have thought they were playing.
Of course the entire school, with the exception of Slytherin, would be rooting for Ravenclaw. Everyone kept giving the team reassuring smiles and pats on the back. All seven players were glowing. They Slytherin team, however, was huddled up in a little bunch at the end of their table going over ways to trick the other house and put them out of the game.
"Hey guys." She said as she plopped down next to Ginny on the bench. They acknowledged her by waving but kept on with their conversation. Ginny was the only one who really cared she was there.
"So," she said slowly, not knowing how to start off a discussion with the older girl. They had never really talked much. She was always just the only girl to talk to in the summer when Hermione came over to the Burrow. "What classes do you have today?"
"Arithmacy and Defense Against the Dark Arts." Hermione answered simply and reached for a biscuit from the basket in the middle of the long table.
"Oh. Do you like the new teacher?" Ginny had never been very good at making small talk, especially with people older than she was.
"Yes. I like her a lot. Do you?" Hermione looked at the redhead for the first time since she sat down.
"Well she's better than Beacon. I'll tell you that much. She's pretty good. At least she knows what she's talking about." The two girls laughed. Their professor last year had been completely oblivious to everything that he was teaching. They still wondered to this day why Dumbledore had hired him in the first place.
"Well I had better go. Don't want to be late you know." Hermione said. The chatter had become a bit uncomfortable.
"Right. See you later." Hermione took her bag and walked out of the room. The castle was empty and very quiet this early in the morning. Everyone was eating breakfast. She walked in peace up the three flights of moving stairs to the Arithmacy classroom.
The professor greeted her as she entered and she took her seat in the front row. In her mind she went over the morning events. She was still curious how she was speaking German and French in her sleep. She hadn't been in either country long enough to pick up even a little bit of the language.
She shook her head and started debating with herself over how it could be possible.
"The shame of your family driven you insane Granger? Or is it just that no one else was willing to talk to you?" Malfoy drawled from behind her, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
"Sod off Malfoy." She said venomously. 'Damn, I forgot he was in this class.' She thought.
"I'd rather not." He took the seat next to her and smirked at her.
"What do you want?" She asked and glowered at him.
"What do I want? Only the pleasure of your misery." He sneered at her.
"Do what you want Malfoy. Just remember, you were just the second choice." She looked down at her notes and smiled to herself. His pale face grew red and his eyes narrowed to tiny slits.
"At least I was good enough for him." He shot back. She laughed and he looked surprised. Her body began to shake from the laughter. She couldn't stop laughing and she had stopped breathing. Draco looked around for the professor but she had left.
She had now begun to turn red from lack of air but kept laughing, violently shaking now. Not knowing what else to do he slapped her across the face. After a few seconds she stopped laughing and took in deep breaths. A bright red handprint was now plastered on her right cheek.
"What was that for?" She yelled and rubbed the tender skin where his hand had made contact.
"You weren't breathing." He said simply.
"So? That gives you no right to hit me." She retorted.
"Fine." He spat out. "Next time I'll just let you die. You should learn to be more respectful of your superiors."
He stormed out of the room, leaving a very surprised Hermione sitting alone in the empty room.
'He saved my life?' She thought, not able to process the idea. 'Actually I would have just passed out from lack of air and been able to breath again but he still saved me from fainting. This year is getting too weird.'
The rest of class came in over the next half hour in groups of three or four. Draco was the last one to enter. He took the last remaining seat in the room next to Hermione but both refused to say or look at each other the entire class. If they had one thing in common it was that they each had a very strong sense of dignity.
-=-=-=-
It was finally time for the first Quidditch game of the season. The two teams had been training endlessly, whenever they had even fifteen minutes of spare time. Both felt that they were prepared to destroy their opponents.
The entire school was waiting in the stands waiting for the match to begin. Madam Hooch stepped onto the field with the Quidditch chest in hand. Soon after the players soared onto the field.
"Remember," Hooch said, her voice magnified to ten times its' normal volume, "you know the rules and I expect you to follow them." She looked at the Slytherins as she said this.
Dean Thomas sat in his chair waiting anxiously for Madam Hooch to release the balls so he could begin his commentary of the game. She looked the players over once more, set the bludgers free, and threw up the quaffle.
(A/N: I do not know the names of the players on either team, I'm also not great at describing sports so bare with me and please don't flame me about it.)
"Hernam from Ravenclaw has caught the quaffle! Look at him fly. Oh-no! Here comes Selaw. They're going to-! Ouch. That had to hurt. Slytherin has the quaffle. They've made it past the last chaser! Let's hope Kefner can block it. Yes! He's been hit with the bludger! Ravenclaw back in possession."
Thomas went on with his explanations while Draco slowly circled the field far above the players; his keen silver eyes scanning the field for the snitch.
He watched on as Ravenclaw scored twenty points quickly. The entire stadium cheered. The Slytherin's only cheered because one of the Ravenclaw chasers seemed to have crashed into the goal post while scoring and hurt his arm.
Cho Chang was keeping very close to the end of his broom. She wasn't stupid, she knew when she played Gryffindor or Slytherin if she had any chance of catching the snitch it was to follow Draco and Harry.
He decided to play a trick on her. He stopped his broom quickly and looked around frantically. Not moving forward at all he turned his broom shaft ninety degrees downward and went into a strait dive towards the ground.
As the wind rushed through his hair he saw a glint of gold to his left. In a freak accident he had actually gone the right way, and led her to the snitch as well. Being the expert flyer he was he gripped the broom tightly with his right hand and reached out with his left as far as he could. He was still a good five inches from it.
Chang was gaining on him. He glanced back and saw that she was no longer on his tail but almost directly next to him. In one last desperate move he removed both hands from the broom's handle and threw himself in the direction of the snitch.
The ground neared as he flailed around frantically for the golden ball. He finally grasped it in one of his pale hands right as the end of the broom made contact with the earth below. The force hurled him forward and slammed him headfirst into the sand underneath the hoops.
He heard a tremendous cracking noise as his right arm and several ribs shattered. Before the world went black he glanced down at his hand. There, wriggling in his grasp was the snitch. Slytherin had won, and the world faded away to nothing as the pain overtook him.
"Do you think we should move him?" Professor Snape asked once the teachers had reached the field. They had forded through a mob of angry students to reach the injured boy.
"No," McGonagall answered sternly. "We should wait for Poppy. She'll know what to do."
"Is his arm supposed to bend like that?" Snape said and motioned to his arm, which was bent behind his head at an odd angle.
"Goodness what happened here?" Madam Pomfrey hurriedly said as she summoned a stretched and levitated him onto it. "Quidditch injury no doubt. I'll never know why they still allow them to play such a dangerous game." She began to talk to herself as she took Draco back to the Hospital Wing.
-=-=-=-
"Hermione you didn't tell us he'd get that hurt." Ron said, his eyes wide in shock.
"I didn't get to see all-" Ron cut her off and went right on ranting.
"This is great! Oh! What if he's out of the game against Gryffindor? We'd be sure to win then! Harry can you imagine?" He turned to talk to Harry about Quidditch for the thousandth time that day.
Hermione nervously bit her fingernails. If he ended up dying from blood loss or something she could have prevented it. 'Madam Pomphrey is great. She won't let him die.' She reassured herself.
Nevertheless, Hermione was still a nervous wreck the entire day. She overheard Snape telling Dumbledore that Draco was recovering well in the hospital and he would be back to class in a few days so that lifted her spirits a bit. At least he didn't die. Plus he would never know that she could have prevented his injury.
-=-=-=-
Draco's eyes flickered opened and took in the stark white surrounding him on all sides. It took him a while to realize where he was. When he tried to sit up, a blinding pain shot through his right side and he collapsed onto the bed once more.
The nurse bustled about the room placing potions in their respective places. He groaned and rubbed him sore side. The nurse came at once and gave him a pain solution that would help numb him out.
The liquid burned his throat and he nearly choked. The moment he was done he fell back asleep.
-=-=-=-
Three days later he returned to class. No one gave him the evil eye for winning for they knew what lengths he went through to achieve the victory. His fellow house members congratulated him, but most people left him in peace. He liked that, being in solitude. It calmed him.
Snape gave him a very, very small, almost miniscule smile when he entered the classroom. Draco was so surprised by this that he almost forgot to do anything. He gave the Professor a small smile of his own and took his seat.
For once he was there before Hermione. She sat down a few minutes before class began but was utterly silent.
"What did you do?" He asked her after she rummaged through her bag looking for nothing for a while.
"What do you mean?" She said, never looking up.
"Look Granger, I can tell when people are guilty. What did you do?" She visibly stiffened and slowly turned to meet his gaze. She couldn't tell him about her visions. Only Harry and Ron knew of those. So she lied.
"I forgot to do my Charms essay." She admitted and tried to look ashamed. Draco just started laughing. He laughed until tears came to his eyes and he had to brace himself for support.
"Hogwarts' star student didn't do her homework. Oh this is priceless." He wiped his eyes and snickered one last time before Snape began his lesson.
-=-=-=-
See? I told you this one would be longer. I keep my promises. Hope you liked it. I had a lot of fun writing this chapter. With lots of help of course.
A big thanks to my beta readers:
Weasley Pride - Author of The Serpent Prophecy. It's good. I swear, I don't read bad stories. Check it out sometime.
And
Casper - Author of Love Me. One of the best stories I have ever read. You need to take a look at it too.
Also - Thanks to everyone who has reviewed so far. I love you all.
REVIEW!