Chapter 14: Resisted Arrest
He pounded on her apartment door with his throbbing hand and instantly regretted it, "Please let me in, Granger."
"Just go away!" She yelled from behind the thick oak.
"I shan't." He retorted. Everything had been going so well 20 minutes before. The world had seemed sunnier and faces friendlier, and he'd been heading to take Granger on a perfect date.
"Turkish Delight." She sobbed through the letterbox. Her voice was awash with angst and despair.
"You cannot Turkish Delight a person who is merely trying to ascertain your current wellbeing, Hermione." He spoke gently as he crouched at the slat on her door. "Let me in. Please." the adrenaline, born of the confrontation minutes earlier, was dissipating, and his voice shook. "Please," he repeated.
Click.
The entrance swung out toward him, he stood, and his heart broke. There she was, Hermione, blood on her cheek, her hair plastered to her head with some foul, wet substance and her face red with tears. It was her rattling sobs, her inability to catch a breath that had him scooping her up.
"Leave me." she sobbed as she struggled against the arm he'd slipped under her. He pulled her front door closed and locked it as he strode through her abode for the first time.
"Let me look after you," he commanded sternly, as his eyes scoured the doors of her apartment, looking for tell-tale signs of a bathroom. A crack of tile at an ajar portal informed his decision, and he marched with purpose toward it.
He placed her carefully on the closed lavatory seat and turned to the sizeable claw-footed bath. She had a very nice apartment indeed. With a grunt, he bent into the depths of the tub and stoppered the plug, then flipped the taps on. Eyeballing her shelf of soaks, he grabbed something which said 'SOOTHING!' in capital letters and glugged it into the filling tub.
Hermione trembled as she sat and sobbed on the toilet seat.
"Granger," he intoned softly as he crouched on the tile beside her to better look in her downcast eyes.
"Do you know what happened?" she asked, her voice trembling as he inspected the minor cut on her cheek. He decided to heal it once she was clean, lest an infection takes hold.
"I arrived a few seconds after you left," he mumbled as he loosened her white knuckle grip on the small bag she held.
"I can look after myself." she tried to snap, but her voice wobbled, and more tears sprung to her eyes.
"Is it not possible, Granger, that the man who can take care of you in one aspect of your life might be capable of doing it in others? Perhaps my skills are transferable." he prattled, wondering if he could quiet her storm with words.
"It's been a really long time since someone called me that." she finally spoke after a long moment of charged silence. Her chin shook, and she drew in a ragged breath.
"I know." He soothed, grabbing her hands with his own bruised ones. "I'm so sorry, my darling." he'd called her that name in the past. He would nurse her spirit back to health as penance for all of those times.
"What happened to your knuckles." his bloodied and bruised hand was clutched in her fingers, he tried to pull away, but she clamped down, finally distracted from her despair.
Just about 20 minutes earlier
"What on earth is going on out here?" Hermione barrelled from her office with her wand drawn. She struggled to hold her balance as she teetered on her nicest and most agonising heels. She'd not made a total effort, just a small one, a smack of lipstick, shoes that made her arse pop out and a blouse that zipped, so he didn't struggle with the buttons. It was an effort, certainly, but not the whole hog. Keep telling yourself that. She thought as she fought against the fabric of her skirt, nipping in at her knees.
"Please, Marcus, no!" Celia was begging, holding the brute of a man back from Hermione. His new falcon squawked angrily and spread its wings.
"You swan in here, acting the Billy Bigshot, putting ideas in my fiancés head…." The man snapped as the bird, known as Prince, flapped threateningly.
"I've done nothing of the sort. I've answered her questions where I can and have told her, repeatedly, that queries about her private life are not my business." Hermione put calming hands out in placation as Prince the not yet trained falcon's eyes settled on her.
"Mr Pitt, please get a hold of your bird!" Hermione commanded sternly.
"She's my fiancé!" Marcus retorted angrily, pointing at the wailing Celia.
"I mean the one perched on your shoulder Marcus, the one with wings and talons, the one that's just about ready to rip my eyes out!" Hermione shouted, raising her arms to her face as the bird once again flapped menacingly.
"Don't tell me how to do my job. I know you think because you're fucking the minister, you can get away with murder…." Marcus exploded, spit flying his lips.
"Excuse me!" Hermione squeaked. "How dare you, how dare you assume my position here is anything more than meritorious." She hissed, her eyes not leaving the pterodactyl on his shoulder.
"Yea, then what's this note? You whore." He waved a small piece of paper she was sure had come from Draco with the flowers.
"I have no idea Mr Pitt, but know this, if you've been tampering with my mail, you will feel the full consequence of that action." Hermione was done with this. She folded her arms across her and stared at the prick and his parrot down.
"You didn't deny it." he sneered.
"That's because who I'm fucking is none of your business, just like it was none of my business when your 'fiance' fucked Jim." Hermione spat with venom.
"You Mudblood bitch." Marcus roared before punching a wall and sending his bird flying at Hermione.
For her part, Hermione's world had gone silent. That word flung at her again set her ears to ringing. She didn't hear the falcon as it screeched in her face, his talon catching her below the eye before gripping in her hair. As if an attempted scalping by a winged demon wasn't traumatising enough, the feathered monstrosity then decided to add insult to injury by unloading the contents of its bowels on her head. She swung her purse at it, managing to extract herself. As she fled, she got a snapshot of James trying to choke Marcus and being thrown off, Celia sobbing against a wall and the bird flying haphazardly around the corridor. What she missed was a flash of blonde hair at the other end of it.
"What the hell is happening here?" Malfoy demanded. The gravitas of his presence was enough to halt the tussle. Hermione was nowhere in view.
"He Called Miss Granger a Mudblood." James, who was of mixed parentage, tried to launch himself at Marcus again but was swung back and thrown against the wall next to Celia.
"you did what?" Malfoy's voice became tiny, a poison-tipped needle.
"she's an interfering mud…." Marcus didn't get to finish his sentiment as his nose bone came dangerously close to piercing his brain with some helping along from Draco's fist.
"It's been a really long time since I've done anything like this, so you'll have to bear with me." Draco Malfoy pulled his wand from his sleeve and pointed it at Marcus' leg. "I always get the spell for breaking legs and amputating legs mixed up," he muttered as he glanced at the ceiling, pretending to try and remember.
Marcus whimpered and endeavoured to scuttle backwards down the hall, but Draco caught his collar and dragged him back. "You so much as look at Hermione funny again, and I'll skin you alive, you think that's a turn of phrase, don't you?" he laughed "not in my family, bird boy."
The falcon swooped for Malfoy, but the coursing adrenaline and desperate need to defend Hermione resulted in him throwing a second punch, effectively knocking the bird out.
"You punched him?" Hermione breathed as she ran her fingers over his knuckles, her eyes fixed to her lap.
"And his stupid bird." Draco nodded, having recounted his part of the story. "Potter ran in wand ablaze, I explained what happened, the Pox twins backed my side of the story. Then Potter punched Marcus, and we all agreed he'd resisted arrest." He told her in a soothing voice as he pulled off the painfully high heels she'd spent so long picking out. He tossed them to the side, catching how full the bath was out of the corner of his eye. He turned the tap off with a flick of his hand.
"thank you," she muttered, watching intently as he pulled the zip at the side of her skirt down.
"lift your bum a second." he directed as he tugged the fabric down and over her legs.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked, her voice still trembling.
"Because I want to look after you, Hermione," he stated plainly, pushing her blazer off her shoulders, utterly unphased by the splodge of bird poop that landed on the back of his hand. He moved to her blouse "A zip?" he commented as he slid the metal fastener down. "Very modern." she looked unconvinced by his answer, staring at him with furrowed brows, letting the silence push him for more "I used to call you that word, I knew it hurt you, and for years I've ripped my gut up wishing I could take it back. I can't take it back, darling, but I can make it better this time. He pointed his wand at the bath, a thick layer of suds appeared. "I'll shut my eyes, and you can pop off your underthings and get in the tub, but don't let your hair touch the water" he moved to the sink to wash his hands before throwing them over his eyes. A slight grin played on his lips.
"I can wash myself," she commented, and he heard her shuffle past him.
"Or, you can accept the help of someone who cares about you and avoid rinsing all that bird shit into your lovely bath." he reasoned with a smirk.
Hermione wasn't sure if it was his declaration of 'care' or perhaps his solid logic regarding her mane, but she threw off her underthings and sunk slowly into the bath. The movement of the water alerting Draco to her assent.
"now prop your head against the side of the bath with a towel, and I shall wash your hair into a basin" he removed his hands from his eyes and rolled his sleeves up, trying very hard not to look too pleased with her blushing cheeks and lip caught between her teeth as she complied.
Hermione's mind was whirring. Is this a sex thing? She'd never thought about a man washing her hair before, the only person who had ever bathed her was her mother. It wasn't something she'd even thought of in the realm of sexy situations, and she'd imagined loads of them. If it wasn't a sex thing, her vagina was broken because she was acting like it was. She heard him settle behind her, and he tilted her head further back. Her eyes caught his staring down at her, and her stomach flipped. Oh my.