Travel Companions (7)
by pari Disclaimers: Draco and Hermione and all their lot belong to J.K. The Sunnyville crew belong to Joss. I've got nothing. This is simply for fun, not profit.
Feedback: please.
Archive: ask and you shall receive.
Thanks: to everyone who has sent me feedback for this (luckstart, foxxglove, twylyte shadow…et al. You know who you are :) and again to Stacy - I love your reviews. Even the slightly scary ones ;p And you've recced my fic! You so deserve those bunnies. But alas they aren't here yet (don't hurt me! ;) Soon. They'll be here soon. Also: thanks to Methaya for her nice review, and for letting me know I was being naughty in Chapter 6 without knowing it.
Apologies: to any German-speaking readers who read the last chapter and probably now think I am a great, big pervert :D I might sorta be one. But I like my perversion to be the result of a conscious effort, usually, so… Yeah.
And: to everyone for the extra-long wait. Irresponsible drivers, smart-mouthed paramedics, psychotic ex-boyfriends, and a new job all conspired to keep me away from my computer for longer than usual. This year I had the most memorable Summer ever. Unfortunately.
Past parts can be found here: ?storyid1710729
Hermione wasn't vain when it came to her intellectual prowess, regardless of what some of her past acquaintances might say. She did, however, maintain certain expectations where her performance as an Auror and as a researcher for the Ministry of Magic were concerned.
That is to say, when Hermione made a decision, she expected it to be the right one. Always. She never acted upon her decisions rashly, and was always careful to keep an open mind when making important choices, so this should not have been a difficult goal to achieve. And yet, every now and then, Hermione chose wrong.
"Wrong" as in 'That Gilderoy Lockhart is such a great professor!' Wrong as in 'I'm sure Ernie's much less a prat outside of school. I'll date him.'
The kind of wrong that ended with Hermione sitting atop a bound Slayer and looking like she'd just battled a Troll. Malfoy sat nearby, on the floor with his back to the motel room's door. The motel manager had been yelling from the other side of it before Malfoy had cast an obliviate at him through the room's now broken window.
Malfoy sported a nasty looking bump over one temple and a bloody nose. Hermione could hardly understand him when he spoke - the Break-Away Broken Nose Balm he'd just applied not quite having gone into effect.
"O, dob be silly, Mowfoy. Wha's se goin to do? Ruh away? We'b warded te door," Malfoy grumbled from beneath the scrap of ruined curtain he was using to staunch the bloodflow from his nose. "Se din ruh away, Grager. I gib you dat."
No, the Slayer most certainly had not run away. And, to be honest, Hermione hadn't even considered the possibility that they'd face an alternative problem with her once they'd removed her from her body bind. Hermione had only agreed to putting her in one in the first place to simplify the process of getting her back to their motel room. Hermione knew all about Slayers, of course - she realized that they could be very aggressive and didn't trust easily. But surely a woman who had been fighting demons and vampires since she was a teenager, sans magic, would have to be patient and rational, as well? Hermione hadn't thought the woman would attack the second she'd regained the power to blink, much less knock Hermione across the room and pin Malfoy to the wall.
Malfoy had insisted that she would. "It's what I would do," he'd rationalized at the time.
Hermione hadn't listened. And she got the feeling she'd be hearing about it now for the rest of her days.
"Nope, I'm still here," the Slayer said, glaring up at Hermione from the floor. Hermione had put another bind on her, this time casting just at her shoulders and below, so that they could talk with her. Granted, that might take a little work. All Hermione had heard coming out of the Slayer's mouth thus far had been a variety of colorful curses and threats so imaginative they had piqued Draco's interest. "And you're cute and all…" Faith continued. "But if I'd wanted a lap dance, I probably would have let Blond and Sniffly over there do the honors."
Hermione - already flushed from their unexpected confrontation - turned an even brighter pink at the Slayer's comment and unstraddled her slowly. She half expected the bind she'd cast to miraculously fail, and for the woman to jump up and try to thrash them again.
Malfoy had still been muttering under his breath, his words more clear now when they were loud enough to make out. Hermione made a mental note to ask what he'd added to the Balm he used to make it work so quickly.
"You know, under other circumstances I might have enjoyed that," Malfoy was saying as he stood, tossing the bloodied bit of curtain in his hand in the wastebasket by the bureau. Ironically, it was perhaps the only bit of furniture left standing as it had been before Hermione had unleashed the Slayer upon everything around them. "But now I'm thinking…"
Malfoy withdrew his wand, his eyes locked with those of the Slayer. With a swish and flick a vial had removed itself from the potions chest he'd left sitting open on the now lopsided table in the corner. The vial flew into Malfoy's hand, and he wiggled it at the Slayer.
"…let's get this over with, so we can pay a little visit to that Watcher's Council of yours and see what they have to say about the situation."
Hermione threw him a measuring look. Draco might be bluffing, but then again - despite their orders - he might not. The Slayer had broken his nose. Getting bested by a girl had never sat well with Malfoy - Hermione should know. She'd bested him in their classes at Hogwarts for years, and she'd even slapped him in the face in their fourth year. Two years later, Malfoy had still been angry enough about it to hex the joints out of Hermione fingers. Ron had retaliated by giving Malfoy a concussion, and both boys had gotten their prefects' status temporarily revoked a week later - for busting one another's kneecaps in the midst of an after-hours duel.
"The Watcher's Council, huh?" the Slayer said from her spot on the floor. She looked unperturbed by the wand in Malfoy's right hand, although she'd seen what it could do, and the Veritaserum in his left; for all she knew, they could be about to feed her poison. If anything, the Slayer just looked angrier than she had when their little skirmish had begun - a fact which made Hermione's hair stand on end. And she obviously found Malfoy's mention of the Watcher's Council darkly amusing, although Hermione wasn't to know why until she said: "Figures. If you're talking WC, the new and improved, I'm thinking the G-man'll back me up. If it's old school Watching you're looking for, you're sorta out of luck. That Watcher's Council went boom about a year ago."
Hermione blinked.
"Pardon me?" Draco asked.
"Boom," said the Slayer, patronizingly. "As in their sneaky, British asses needed kicking, and someone gave it to them good. The new crew set up shop in Cleveland after B shut down the Hellmouth."
She could very well have been speaking a different language, but Hermione and Malfoy got the gist of what she'd said.
Malfoy hesitated, and then threw up his hands.
"Well. You wouldn't happen to have a manual that tells us what to do about that, do you, Granger?"
Dazed, Hermione glanced around them at the piles of disheveled books that littered the room. Her Goblin psyche text, sadly, had not survived the Slayer's wrath so well as Malfoy and Hermione herself. It was now a smoldering stain on a patch of carpet in the corner.
"Bloody hell," Hermione whispered.
She couldn't think of anything else to say.
"Well, it isn't like we've misplaced them, Justin…"
The second time they needed to use the telephone, Hermione made the call.
Actually, she made two of them. One to the dispatch in their department, to leave a message, and one on the Emergency Communications line. The latter was going about as well as Draco might have expected.
"No, I don't see how that… Of course! But…No! I can't wa…"
Hermione was pacing about their side of the room - opposite the one that held a partially-bound Slayer sitting in the corner, glaring darkly at the wall. She was having another of those frantic moments that had led her, before, to make strange gestures out the car window, and plow their Volvo into a road-side ditch.
Hermione sighed as she was put on hold, the sound containing much less anger than something else for Draco's comfort.
Draco didn't even think as he did it - clutched Hermione's wrist on her seventh pass by him. His thumb lightly brushed over the pulse point there, bringing Hermione as effectively to a halt as if he'd grabbed her and ordered her to stop. It was just something Draco had done when he was younger, whenever Lucius was away on "business". Draco's mother would work herself into (what constituted, for her) an outright panic, waiting for news of Draco's father, and Draco would calm her down with a touch - to her shoulder, her hand. He'd never been good with the sort of words that would have served the same purpose, so he'd stopped trying to give them.
Now he wasn't sure what had sparked such a reaction from him. Draco had never felt the need to console someone outside his mother and the small circle of friends he considered family.
And Hermione was obviously as shocked by Draco's behavior as he felt. She stopped in front of him, where he sat on the corner of the motel room's dresser, eyes wide, and just blinked at him. Draco heard Finch-Fletchley talking on the other end of the telephone line before she did.
Then Hermione snapped to, with an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Draco half expected her to snatch her hand away, and wasn't sure what to do when she didn't. He waited until she was involved in conversation again to withdraw his own hand and make the issue a moot point.
"Yes? Oh, yes, I'm still here," Hermione was saying. "What?" She began to pace again. "But… Yes, yes, I do realize that…" There was a pause, and then a displeased sigh that Draco would not want to have been the recipient of. "Fine! Yes, we'll wait for the call back!"
Hermione slammed down the phone receiver with much more force than was necessary.
"They're taking the news that well, are they?" Draco innocently asked.
"You'd think we'd bloody well been trying to make the Ministry look bad. Honestly! As if they can blame us for making a Hellmouth and the Watcher's Council disappear!"
Actually, the Ministry couldn't blame the two of them for this - or, more to the point, they couldn't blame Draco. Draco seriously doubted Hermione would have found herself faced with any pointed fingers, even if the Ministry could have pointed one at her.
But, unfortunately, the Ministry could - and most likely would - try and blame the Aurory for all of this. Nevermind that the Aurors weren't responsible for keeping track of Hellmouths - nor that they'd all been a bit busy, the past nine years, battling Death Eaters and dark lords, to be taking on extracurriculars. Cornelius Fudge was no longer Minister of Magic as he had been when Draco and Hermione were children, but the Ministry hadn't changed so much since Fudge's day that they were above passing the buck and letting others pay the price. And who better to take the fall, for the sake of PR, than the one department in all of Magical Britain that openly hired former Death Eaters and ex-Slytherins as more than mail boys and secretaries?
"Hmm. Beaurocracy's a bitch all over. There's a shocker." Hermione looked almost surprised at the reminder that the Slayer was in the room with them. She and Draco looked over at the woman as she cocked an eyebrow at them. "And fun as it's been, sitting here on my ass, listening to you two get all angry and British… If you're gonna keep me here much longer, you could at least make with some of that grub you got 'round here somewhere. Girl's gotta eat."
Draco and Hermione exchanged a look. The Chinese Hermione had brought in with them earlier was not in plain sight - and was most likely unsalvageable, wherever it had ended up in the wreckage of their motel room.
"Right. I'll just grab my cloak."
Hermione grabbed her cloak and her coin purse, half-conscious of her own movements. Her mind was still obviously on her conversation with Finch-Fletchley. She cast a wary glance in the Slayer's direction, and a questioning one at Draco, but Draco waved her on with a look of his own.
When Hermione had gone, silence settled over the room anew.
"So…" Draco began, shifting into a more comfortable position on top of the dresser. He decided conversation was as good a way to pass the time til Hermione returned as any. "Inhumanly strong and charming, as well. How's that working out for you?"
The Slayer gave him a look that made the use of her fingers unnecessary.
Draco shrugged.
"Or we could just sit here and glare at each other some more. That's good, too."
The Slayer snorted and rolled her eyes.
tbc
by pari Disclaimers: Draco and Hermione and all their lot belong to J.K. The Sunnyville crew belong to Joss. I've got nothing. This is simply for fun, not profit.
Feedback: please.
Archive: ask and you shall receive.
Thanks: to everyone who has sent me feedback for this (luckstart, foxxglove, twylyte shadow…et al. You know who you are :) and again to Stacy - I love your reviews. Even the slightly scary ones ;p And you've recced my fic! You so deserve those bunnies. But alas they aren't here yet (don't hurt me! ;) Soon. They'll be here soon. Also: thanks to Methaya for her nice review, and for letting me know I was being naughty in Chapter 6 without knowing it.
Apologies: to any German-speaking readers who read the last chapter and probably now think I am a great, big pervert :D I might sorta be one. But I like my perversion to be the result of a conscious effort, usually, so… Yeah.
And: to everyone for the extra-long wait. Irresponsible drivers, smart-mouthed paramedics, psychotic ex-boyfriends, and a new job all conspired to keep me away from my computer for longer than usual. This year I had the most memorable Summer ever. Unfortunately.
Past parts can be found here: ?storyid1710729
Hermione wasn't vain when it came to her intellectual prowess, regardless of what some of her past acquaintances might say. She did, however, maintain certain expectations where her performance as an Auror and as a researcher for the Ministry of Magic were concerned.
That is to say, when Hermione made a decision, she expected it to be the right one. Always. She never acted upon her decisions rashly, and was always careful to keep an open mind when making important choices, so this should not have been a difficult goal to achieve. And yet, every now and then, Hermione chose wrong.
"Wrong" as in 'That Gilderoy Lockhart is such a great professor!' Wrong as in 'I'm sure Ernie's much less a prat outside of school. I'll date him.'
The kind of wrong that ended with Hermione sitting atop a bound Slayer and looking like she'd just battled a Troll. Malfoy sat nearby, on the floor with his back to the motel room's door. The motel manager had been yelling from the other side of it before Malfoy had cast an obliviate at him through the room's now broken window.
Malfoy sported a nasty looking bump over one temple and a bloody nose. Hermione could hardly understand him when he spoke - the Break-Away Broken Nose Balm he'd just applied not quite having gone into effect.
"O, dob be silly, Mowfoy. Wha's se goin to do? Ruh away? We'b warded te door," Malfoy grumbled from beneath the scrap of ruined curtain he was using to staunch the bloodflow from his nose. "Se din ruh away, Grager. I gib you dat."
No, the Slayer most certainly had not run away. And, to be honest, Hermione hadn't even considered the possibility that they'd face an alternative problem with her once they'd removed her from her body bind. Hermione had only agreed to putting her in one in the first place to simplify the process of getting her back to their motel room. Hermione knew all about Slayers, of course - she realized that they could be very aggressive and didn't trust easily. But surely a woman who had been fighting demons and vampires since she was a teenager, sans magic, would have to be patient and rational, as well? Hermione hadn't thought the woman would attack the second she'd regained the power to blink, much less knock Hermione across the room and pin Malfoy to the wall.
Malfoy had insisted that she would. "It's what I would do," he'd rationalized at the time.
Hermione hadn't listened. And she got the feeling she'd be hearing about it now for the rest of her days.
"Nope, I'm still here," the Slayer said, glaring up at Hermione from the floor. Hermione had put another bind on her, this time casting just at her shoulders and below, so that they could talk with her. Granted, that might take a little work. All Hermione had heard coming out of the Slayer's mouth thus far had been a variety of colorful curses and threats so imaginative they had piqued Draco's interest. "And you're cute and all…" Faith continued. "But if I'd wanted a lap dance, I probably would have let Blond and Sniffly over there do the honors."
Hermione - already flushed from their unexpected confrontation - turned an even brighter pink at the Slayer's comment and unstraddled her slowly. She half expected the bind she'd cast to miraculously fail, and for the woman to jump up and try to thrash them again.
Malfoy had still been muttering under his breath, his words more clear now when they were loud enough to make out. Hermione made a mental note to ask what he'd added to the Balm he used to make it work so quickly.
"You know, under other circumstances I might have enjoyed that," Malfoy was saying as he stood, tossing the bloodied bit of curtain in his hand in the wastebasket by the bureau. Ironically, it was perhaps the only bit of furniture left standing as it had been before Hermione had unleashed the Slayer upon everything around them. "But now I'm thinking…"
Malfoy withdrew his wand, his eyes locked with those of the Slayer. With a swish and flick a vial had removed itself from the potions chest he'd left sitting open on the now lopsided table in the corner. The vial flew into Malfoy's hand, and he wiggled it at the Slayer.
"…let's get this over with, so we can pay a little visit to that Watcher's Council of yours and see what they have to say about the situation."
Hermione threw him a measuring look. Draco might be bluffing, but then again - despite their orders - he might not. The Slayer had broken his nose. Getting bested by a girl had never sat well with Malfoy - Hermione should know. She'd bested him in their classes at Hogwarts for years, and she'd even slapped him in the face in their fourth year. Two years later, Malfoy had still been angry enough about it to hex the joints out of Hermione fingers. Ron had retaliated by giving Malfoy a concussion, and both boys had gotten their prefects' status temporarily revoked a week later - for busting one another's kneecaps in the midst of an after-hours duel.
"The Watcher's Council, huh?" the Slayer said from her spot on the floor. She looked unperturbed by the wand in Malfoy's right hand, although she'd seen what it could do, and the Veritaserum in his left; for all she knew, they could be about to feed her poison. If anything, the Slayer just looked angrier than she had when their little skirmish had begun - a fact which made Hermione's hair stand on end. And she obviously found Malfoy's mention of the Watcher's Council darkly amusing, although Hermione wasn't to know why until she said: "Figures. If you're talking WC, the new and improved, I'm thinking the G-man'll back me up. If it's old school Watching you're looking for, you're sorta out of luck. That Watcher's Council went boom about a year ago."
Hermione blinked.
"Pardon me?" Draco asked.
"Boom," said the Slayer, patronizingly. "As in their sneaky, British asses needed kicking, and someone gave it to them good. The new crew set up shop in Cleveland after B shut down the Hellmouth."
She could very well have been speaking a different language, but Hermione and Malfoy got the gist of what she'd said.
Malfoy hesitated, and then threw up his hands.
"Well. You wouldn't happen to have a manual that tells us what to do about that, do you, Granger?"
Dazed, Hermione glanced around them at the piles of disheveled books that littered the room. Her Goblin psyche text, sadly, had not survived the Slayer's wrath so well as Malfoy and Hermione herself. It was now a smoldering stain on a patch of carpet in the corner.
"Bloody hell," Hermione whispered.
She couldn't think of anything else to say.
"Well, it isn't like we've misplaced them, Justin…"
The second time they needed to use the telephone, Hermione made the call.
Actually, she made two of them. One to the dispatch in their department, to leave a message, and one on the Emergency Communications line. The latter was going about as well as Draco might have expected.
"No, I don't see how that… Of course! But…No! I can't wa…"
Hermione was pacing about their side of the room - opposite the one that held a partially-bound Slayer sitting in the corner, glaring darkly at the wall. She was having another of those frantic moments that had led her, before, to make strange gestures out the car window, and plow their Volvo into a road-side ditch.
Hermione sighed as she was put on hold, the sound containing much less anger than something else for Draco's comfort.
Draco didn't even think as he did it - clutched Hermione's wrist on her seventh pass by him. His thumb lightly brushed over the pulse point there, bringing Hermione as effectively to a halt as if he'd grabbed her and ordered her to stop. It was just something Draco had done when he was younger, whenever Lucius was away on "business". Draco's mother would work herself into (what constituted, for her) an outright panic, waiting for news of Draco's father, and Draco would calm her down with a touch - to her shoulder, her hand. He'd never been good with the sort of words that would have served the same purpose, so he'd stopped trying to give them.
Now he wasn't sure what had sparked such a reaction from him. Draco had never felt the need to console someone outside his mother and the small circle of friends he considered family.
And Hermione was obviously as shocked by Draco's behavior as he felt. She stopped in front of him, where he sat on the corner of the motel room's dresser, eyes wide, and just blinked at him. Draco heard Finch-Fletchley talking on the other end of the telephone line before she did.
Then Hermione snapped to, with an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Draco half expected her to snatch her hand away, and wasn't sure what to do when she didn't. He waited until she was involved in conversation again to withdraw his own hand and make the issue a moot point.
"Yes? Oh, yes, I'm still here," Hermione was saying. "What?" She began to pace again. "But… Yes, yes, I do realize that…" There was a pause, and then a displeased sigh that Draco would not want to have been the recipient of. "Fine! Yes, we'll wait for the call back!"
Hermione slammed down the phone receiver with much more force than was necessary.
"They're taking the news that well, are they?" Draco innocently asked.
"You'd think we'd bloody well been trying to make the Ministry look bad. Honestly! As if they can blame us for making a Hellmouth and the Watcher's Council disappear!"
Actually, the Ministry couldn't blame the two of them for this - or, more to the point, they couldn't blame Draco. Draco seriously doubted Hermione would have found herself faced with any pointed fingers, even if the Ministry could have pointed one at her.
But, unfortunately, the Ministry could - and most likely would - try and blame the Aurory for all of this. Nevermind that the Aurors weren't responsible for keeping track of Hellmouths - nor that they'd all been a bit busy, the past nine years, battling Death Eaters and dark lords, to be taking on extracurriculars. Cornelius Fudge was no longer Minister of Magic as he had been when Draco and Hermione were children, but the Ministry hadn't changed so much since Fudge's day that they were above passing the buck and letting others pay the price. And who better to take the fall, for the sake of PR, than the one department in all of Magical Britain that openly hired former Death Eaters and ex-Slytherins as more than mail boys and secretaries?
"Hmm. Beaurocracy's a bitch all over. There's a shocker." Hermione looked almost surprised at the reminder that the Slayer was in the room with them. She and Draco looked over at the woman as she cocked an eyebrow at them. "And fun as it's been, sitting here on my ass, listening to you two get all angry and British… If you're gonna keep me here much longer, you could at least make with some of that grub you got 'round here somewhere. Girl's gotta eat."
Draco and Hermione exchanged a look. The Chinese Hermione had brought in with them earlier was not in plain sight - and was most likely unsalvageable, wherever it had ended up in the wreckage of their motel room.
"Right. I'll just grab my cloak."
Hermione grabbed her cloak and her coin purse, half-conscious of her own movements. Her mind was still obviously on her conversation with Finch-Fletchley. She cast a wary glance in the Slayer's direction, and a questioning one at Draco, but Draco waved her on with a look of his own.
When Hermione had gone, silence settled over the room anew.
"So…" Draco began, shifting into a more comfortable position on top of the dresser. He decided conversation was as good a way to pass the time til Hermione returned as any. "Inhumanly strong and charming, as well. How's that working out for you?"
The Slayer gave him a look that made the use of her fingers unnecessary.
Draco shrugged.
"Or we could just sit here and glare at each other some more. That's good, too."
The Slayer snorted and rolled her eyes.
tbc