-1Chapter 8
A/N Sorry for the long update time. I wrote at least five versions of this chapter before I felt satisfied. Please review after you've finished reading and tell me what you think!
"Ron, It's not what it looked like!" Hermione's voice echoed through the dormant school grounds. She struggled to catch up to Ron who was running towards the direction of the castle and ignoring her.
"I know bloody well what it looked like! You and Malfoy snogging each other senseless!" Ron bellowed and ran back to the castle, his long legs made it impossible for Hermione to catch up to him. Hermione sat down on a nearby rock and felt tears blur her sight. What had she done? Ron was right. She wanted Draco to snog her senseless. She wanted to feel the comfort of his embrace. She wanted to be admired, to feel beautiful, for once in her life, to feel sought after. What hurt her the most was not Draco's trap tonight, but the fact that she had dug this hole for herself to fall into. She had fallen for the weakness of her emotions.
Draco's trap. She realized what this meant. Draco knew who she was the whole time. He was playing along with her little game, but he knew who she was the whole time. Venomous, she felt hatred flood her all of a sudden. She desired, she needed revenge. She had fallen for him, he was toying with her, ruining her friendships.
"Reducto!" she bellowed angrily at the nearest rock and watched it reduce to dust. She was going to find the Recondite Butterfly before Draco could. As for Voldemort killing his entire family, they could all go to hell for all she cared. She stomped angrily towards the castle, eager to plot revenge with Ron and Harry.
Nearby hidden behind a tree, Draco saw Hermione's angry outburst. He felt both happy and sad. Happy that Hermione will no longer be caught between loving him and hating him but sad because he had lost the friendship of the only person he had that bothered to care. He walked over to the dust reduced rock and picked up a handful of dust-sized fragments. They slipped through his fingers and drifted through the air. He was like those dust-sized fragments. He was destined to drift from place to place without free will, yet in essence he didn't deserve sympathy because he was still a rock. Everybody had a choice in life. He had two choices: cling on to people as dust, but be seen as pest and live constantly in the fear of being swept away. Or, he could gather with others, who are dust-sized boulders, just like him and revenge on the world and fate for it's cruelty of landing him in a life without choice and a life destined for loneliness. There was no choice, no choice at all.
Hermione walked back to the common room, her mind on nothing but anger. It was anger not for Draco, but for herself. She had turned into a mindless floozy, like Lavender and Parvati. She had sacrificed the mission, something so important, for a boy.
"…and there she was! Shoving her mouth towards him! And Malfoy! The slimy pervert! He was touching her!" Ron ranted on and pounded his fist on the coffee table to emphasize his anger. His face was as red as his hair and beside him were an array of scattered objects which he was probably throwing around to release his anger.
"It probably wasn't like that. I mean, this is Hermione and Malfoy we're talking about! Maybe he was leaning forward to tell her something and…uh in the trick of the light it looked like they were, you know-" Harry tried to explain but was cut off by a fuming Ron.
"-kissing. Are you trying to say I'm a liar! No bloody trick of the light can make two people look like they're snogging! Well there she is! Why don't we hear first hand how is it like to snog the 'Slytherin Prince!'" Ron directed his angry eyes at Hermione who was walking towards the two of them.
"Ron, you don't understand!" Hermione bellowed angrily back at Ron.
"I have eyes! I saw what you two were doing!" Ron yelled loudly back at Hermione.
"It was a stupid trap all along! He wanted to meet me by the lake, because he knew that somebody was bound to show up there!" Hermione fumed and flopped angrily down on a plushy armchair.
"Don't make yourself excuses!" Ron's voice echoed loudly over the empty common room. Harry looked uncomfortable at this point because he had a feeling that one of them was going to say something that the other wouldn't forgive.
"I'm not making any bloody excuses!" Hermione was beginning to swear now, this was the first time Harry heard her do that, he had a feeling she was going to blow up any minute now.
"So what's your reason? You want to know what he tastes like?" Ron smirked with his face red, his fists clenched together tightly.
"You want to know why! I'll tell you why! I met him by the damn lake because for once I thought somebody actually paid attention to me! You think it's easy being me? Everyone expects me to get good marks! All they see in me is a bloody textbook! Nobody's bothered to try and see if there's anything more! All the boys, all they care about are looks! It doesn't matter if the girl's mean or something, as long as she's as skinny as a stick and she has a balloon sized chest, everyone wants to date her! There, you happy!" Hermione snapped and stomped up the stairs without saying goodnight.
"What…the hell was that about?" Ron stared questioningly at the stairs to the girls' dormitories.
"You have a sister, try asking her," Harry suggested as he ascended the steps to the boys' dormitories.
Meanwhile, up in the girls' dormitory, Hermione took a deep breath and threw herself on her bed. She knew she shouldn't have blown up at Ron, it wasn't his fault. If she saw him and Pansy Parkinson kissing by the lake, she would probably do the same to him. It was just that, she felt so raw and empty inside. The excitement and prospect of an adventure left as quickly as it came. She turned her head on her pillow and saw the rose still sitting there with a few petals that she tore off earlier that day. She stomped over to her window and threw the rose and it's remains out. She yanked her bed curtains closed and climbed onto bed with her clothes still on. Ron was mad at her, Harry probably sided with Ron, she failed to hide her identity from Draco, and the mission was probably ruined, but now she needed some time to be selfish. She needed sometime for herself before she could sort things out with Ron, Harry, and Draco.
The last name lingered in her mind. Draco, Draco, Draco… he was causing a big rift in her life, but at the same time, she found that her thoughts were flooded with him as she slowly drifted off to sleep.
Underneath Hermione's window below the Gryffindor Tower, Draco Malfoy stared at the torn rose lying on the ground in front of him. He bent down to pick it up. He was busy mesmerized by the beauty of the blood red rose that he did not notice one of the thorns had cut his thumb. One drop of his blood dripped from the thumb and landed on the petal of the rose. The color blended right in, his blood mingling with her scent as he let the rose float gently to the ground and left for the Great Hall.
Breakfast was awkward silence between Harry, Ron, and Hermione that morning. Hermione propped a book up in front of the salt shakers and forked bacon and eggs into her mouth as if nothing was wrong, but kept on jiggling her foot so much that she kicked Harry's shins three times in the past half hour. Ron ate his breakfast with less enthusiasm than usual and kept turning his head in Hermione's direction. Harry sat in between them and was caught in the crossfire between the stares and the shin-kicking.
"Why don't you two just talk instead of staring at each other and accidently kicking innocent bystanders?" Harry got up and left the table, leaving Hermione and Ron sitting beside each other with three feet of space in between. Ron flickered his eyes towards Hermione, who blinked awkwardly for a few moments and closed her book to face him.
"Let's go find Harry," Hermione stood up and waited for Ron to follow her.
"Umm, okay," Ron agreed and walked behind her. The only noise that came from the two of them were the sounds of their feet trudging on the dirt and grass. Hermione stopped when she reached the tree by the lake where she and Draco were kissing last night. Ron probably remembered as well, because he looked at Hermione with curious eyes.
"Do you want to know why I met him by the lake last night?" Hermione asked him. She didn't want to argue anymore. All she wanted was a civilized conversation to repair their friendship.
"I think I might know, lets not talk about it," Ron moved closer to her, indicating that they're finished with their row.
"You asked Ginny for help didn't you?" Hermione asked in a joking voice.
"Shut up," Ron replied. Hermione froze, not from Ron's reply but from the person that was staring at her directly at ten feet away, it was Draco Malfoy.
It was as if time itself and everything around them had been frozen. Hermione couldn't hear what Ron was saying. She couldn't feel the fresh breezed against her skin. She couldn't smell the sweet scent of grass. She couldn't see the sun streaming from the skies. She sensed him, only him. He walked closer and closer. She could feel hatred mixed with longing. The desire to feel her lips against his mixed with the desire to hex him. As he approached closer, she saw that he too stared at her with intensity. His blonde hair was even messier than Harry's and his robes looked as if he picked them up from the floor and stuffed himself in them, but she still saw a flicker of sapphire among the sea of gray in his eyes as he walked closer and closer. She didn't know what she expected him to do. Should she back off and run? Insult him and curse him? She never knew what the answers to those questions might be. Draco walked almost right up to her, he stared at her with those blue-gray eyes. Then the blue disappeared and he merely left without a word.
"What was that about?" Ron asked. He, too was curious. He had been tempted to reach for his wand, but Malfoy didn't seem to be doing anything. He didn't try to provoke or insult the two of them, he simply stared at Hermione and walked away. He didn't even have his two bodyguards who made up for their lack of brains with mountains of flesh.
"Harry's over there. We might as well tell him that we're not fighting anymore and he doesn't have to avoid us," Hermione said in an oddly distracted voice. She wasn't really paying attention to the situation. All she could remember was Draco's intense look. It was as if he was trying to see through her, trying to sense her confusion of anger mixed with longing and passion.
"So I see you two haven't bitten each other's heads off," Harry noted when he saw the two of them approaching.
"Even if I wanted to, I would wait until we've found the Recondite Butterfly first," Hermione replied to his comment.
"We still need to figure out the poem," Ron pointed out instead of replying to Harry's snide comment.
"I think I might have figured it out," Hermione thought back to the rose and it's petals last night. If they solved the riddle and found the Butterfly, she could disconnect her life from Draco forever. She wouldn't have to deal with her conflicting emotions, but on the other hand part of her wanted to have him in her life. Part of her wanted to feel the desire and passion she had for him, but the safety of the wizarding world depended on whether or not she could find the Recondite Butterfly. She felt sick of this heroine business of making sacrifices to save others. If she was in a world where there was no Slytherin and Gryffindor, if there was no Voldemort, if there was no Recondite Butterfly, there would be know differences between her and Draco. But if those things did not exist, their paths may have never crossed, fate sometimes has an interesting yet cruel way of weaving the pattern of life.
"Really?" Harry asked eagerly, hoping that Hermione was right and they could find the Butterfly and be a step closer to destroying Voldemort.
"You guys remember the Fibonacci numbers and the poem, right?" Hermione stopped to recollect her thoughts and tried to block out the rose that Draco sent her.
"Loves me, loves me not/I seek a flower/to give me the answer/I desperately sought/Fly," Harry quoted from memory. He read through the poem so many times the past few weeks that he could probably quote it backwards in his sleep.
"See, the last word drew my attention. Each line of the poem is at least a fragment of a sentence, but the last word just stood there alone. So, I counted the words in the poem. There are twenty-one," Hermione stopped to see if Harry or Ron could see the connection she was trying to make.
"Okay, I still don't get it, but go on," Ron stared at her with a blank face as he listened to her explain the information the poem was giving.
"Twenty-one is a Fibonacci number. You know that thing that girls like to do? They pick a flower and rip the petals off one by one while saying 'loves me, loves me not?'" Hermione stopped and asked just to make sure the boys weren't too lost in her explanation.
"I've seen Ginny do that loads of times," Ron remarked thinking about how his sister was obsessed with his best friend back when she was little. Beside him, Harry's cheeks turned pink.
"If you pick any flower with a number of petals that is a Fibonaaci number, you will always end up with 'loves me,'" Hermione explained.
"So that explains the 'I seek a flower/to give me the answer?'" Harry asked.
"Yes, I'm guessing since there's twenty-one words in the poem, we need to find a flower with twenty-one petals," Hermione concluded her explanation.
"Oh, no, and I thought looking through all those books was bad enough. Now we have to prowl around Hogwarts counting petals on flowers!" Ron groaned and said in an exasperated tone.