Hermione woke slowly. With huge effort she cracked her eyelids open, but after a few moments of squinting she realised she couldn't focus on anything. The room before her, even though she was pretty sure it was bathed in sunlight, was a complete blur. She closed her eyes again and tried to take a steady breath. She could already tell that her head was too heavy to lift. The throbbing at her temples was almost too much to bear.
As she lay there with her eyes closed, she tried to remember where she had fallen asleep. From the feel of it, she knew she lying in a heap on a hardwood floor. She tried opening her eyes slowly again but immediately closed them against the sunlight. It was when she tried, and failed, to bring her hands up to her head that she realised something was very, very wrong.
*~*~*~*~*
Draco muttered quietly to himself and absently chewed on a green apple as he climbed the staircase leading to the north wing of the house. "Bloody house elves," he grumbled. "Bloody great tossers." He had been perfectly content sitting in the kitchen, doing nothing but chewing on apples and watching two squirrels tear each other apart on the front lawn, but then the bloody house elves had to begin making a racket getting ready for dinner. So Draco gave them all a piece of his mind and grabbed a handful of apples and headed back to his room, where he had been hiding the majority of the time since summer holidays had started a month ago.
"Bloody great old coot," he muttered as he passed his father's doorway, which was closed, as usual. He was in a particularly bad mood with his father at the moment. Most of the time Draco loved acting like his father's perfect little henchman, but ever since Lucius had informed him that Crabbe and Goyle couldn't spend the summer with the Malfoys as usual, Draco had been decidedly nasty to him. And what infuriated Draco even more was that his father seemed to think it was extremely amusing.
Draco balanced his apples in one arm and threw open the door to his room with the other. He immediately scowled. "How many times to I have to tell those ruddy house elves not to open the curtains…" He drifted off as he looked down to the floor a few feet in front of him. He squinted as if he wasn't quite sure what he was seeing. Because what he was seeing looked an awful lot like Hermione Granger lying in a heap on his bedroom floor.
Draco's squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. She was still there. Passed out, hands tied behind her back, hair looking like she had just run through a wind tunnel.
"Father?" Draco said absently, almost in shock. He stepped back out of the room and slammed the door. Five seconds later he was pounding on his father's door, then threw it open without waiting for Lucius to answer.
"Father," he tried to say as calmly as possible. Lucius was sitting at his desk, back to the door, scribbling furiously on a piece of paper. "Father, there's a mudblood in my bedroom."
Lucius continued writing but answered vaguely, "For the fourth time, Draco, there are more apples is the cupboard."
"Father," Draco was on the verge of yelling. "You don't seem to understand. There's a mudblood in my bedroom."
Lucius turned to face his son, a small smirk coming over his face. "Good. She's arrived."