Wedlocked
Chapter 8: Love Bites
Hermione stuffed her hand deep into her pocket as she walked to breakfast, determined to keep anyone from seeing the bloody ring. That was the name she had given it in the few short hours she had been forced to wear it, The Bloody Ring; a rather fitting moniker since it was The Bloody Law that forced it onto her finger. If she could, she would remove it, but the damned thing was stuck. No matter how hard she tugged, The Bloody Ring would not budge. It had not caught on her knuckle when Sirius put it on her hand in the early hours of the morning, so she was lost for a reason why it caught painfully on the knuckle now. It was extremely inconvenient.
She tried buttering her toast using only her right hand. The bread slid around her plate irritating her even further. With a huff of annoyance, she pulled out her wand and resorted to magic to prepare her breakfast.
Harry rolled his eyes. "Oh, just get it over with. They'll all see it eventually anyway," he told her and yanked her hand free. His eyes grew enormous at the sight of the engagement ring. "That is massive."
"It's embarrassing," she hissed and shoved her hand back into her robes.
"How much did he spend on that?"
"I've no idea, but I'm sure it was too much," she said. "Everything he does is too much. I told you about the books, right? And last night?"
"Yeah," he nodded thoughtfully. "I doubt Fred would've gone to all that trouble."
"I don't want to be trouble," she insisted.
"Too late for that," Ron said with a grin.
She scowled at him and slumped on the bench, eating her breakfast as well as she could with sickness in her stomach and only one hand. "Come on," she ordered the moment she finished picking at her toast, grumbling all the way to the classroom, taking a seat on the left side of the room, half-hidden in shadow, where no one would see The Bloody Ring if she pulled her hand from her pocket, which she still had no intention of doing.
Transfiguration seemed to be going well enough. Everyone was too preoccupied with their work to bother noticing that Hermione had veered from her tradition of sitting front row, dead centre and that she kept one hand stowed away inside her pocket, not that anyone in their year ever paid that much attention to her to begin with. Still, the girl was quite pleased that no one had pointed out the oddity of her behaviour and she thought, for one short moment, that she might make it through the entire day without anyone finding out about her engagement.
She thought wrong.
Her lemur, a beautiful, male specimen with pure white fur on his body and distinct black rings on his tail, took a fancy to her wand. As she waved it before the primate to turn the animal back into the beat up old copy of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night that McGonagall had given her at the start of the lesson, he reached out and took hold of her wand. His dextrous little fingers, managed to steal it from her grasp before leaping from her desk and under Harry's.
"Get back here with that!" she cried and chased after her lemur, reaching under the desk and just barely missing his tail. She cursed, following the ringed tail as the creature ran around the room, finally chasing him onto the top shelf of a bookcase near McGonagall's desk.
"Miss Granger," the professor called. "Return to your seat."
"But my wand, professor. My grade!" she replied and reached with both hands as high as she could. The lemur remained just out of reach on the top of the bookcase.
"You have completed the assignment," the woman informed her. "What the creature does after you bring it into being has no bearing on your grade. Return to your seat and I will retrieve your wand."
Hermione fell into her seat, crossing her arms and grumbling about uncooperative primates while the rest of the class muttered behind her. McGonagall transfigured the lemur and returned Hermione's wand. The woman glanced sharply around the room, forcing everyone back to work without a single word spoken. The girl spent the remainder of class practicing her nonverbal spells, attempting to summon her quill from one side of her desk to the other. It was time wasted.
As she exited the classroom, fretting over her inability to make her quill move even a fraction of an inch, Hermione found her path blocked by a solid wall of students. Gryffindors and Slytherins stood side-by-side, each too intent on the bushy-haired Prefect to bother caring who was standing next to them. From the intimidating line, Lavender and Pansy stalked forward, the intensity of their faces enough to make the girl step backwards.
"What is that?" Lavender demanded.
"What?" Hermione glanced down at her robes, worried she had gotten something on them.
"That," the Gryffindor pointed to Hermione's exposed hand.
She gasped and shoved her hand behind her back but failed to notice Parvati standing there. The girl grasped Hermione's hand and pulled it to where they could all see it.
"That looks rather like an engagement ring," Parvati declared loudly.
Millicent snorted. "She's just making it up," the girl insisted. "What pureblood would want to marry her?"
"A damn good one," Ron spat, pushing Parvati off his friend and standing like a guard beside her. "Piss off, the lot of you."
"Who is it then?" Pansy demanded. "If you aren't making it up, then you'll give us his name."
"What's it matter?" Harry asked. "It's no one you know."
"Well, I don't know," Ron said. "He was in the papers an awful lot. And his family is mighty old and well-connected… They might know him, might even be related."
"Oh, stop it," the girl sneered. "This is just stupid." She turned and stomped away. Most of the others followed when they realised that Ron and Harry would not back down and that Hermione would not give her fiancé's name.
When only their friends were left, Lavender came closer and grabbed her hand again. "That is an amazing ring. Whoever he is, he must really love you."
Hermione tore her hand free and ran as quickly as she could to the washroom, not caring that it was the one on the second floor that girls avoided for a very good reason. She splashed her face with water to cool the embarrassed red of her cheeks.
"Rumour has it," Myrtle's squeaking voice whined, "that you're engaged."
"For once, rumour has it right," she said.
Myrtle floated closer, the chill radiating off her ghostly body made the young woman shiver. She examined Hermione's hand just as all her living counterparts had done, disbelievingly, almost suspiciously. That really was beginning to grate on her nerves. What, precisely, was so unbelievable about a man liking her?
"So what idiot did you manage to Confundus into proposing?" Malfoy's drawling voice echoed in the tiled confines of the washroom.
"A boy!" Myrtle shrieked and fled into her toilet. "A boy in the girls' room!"
Ignoring Myrtle's immature outburst, Hermione glared at the intruder. "Unlike some people, I don't need to use magic or money to win anyone over, Malfoy." She recalled telling him something similar back in second year and remembered how his smug smile had fallen; he had turned to throwing slurs. Appalled as she had been at the time, some tiny part of her grinned to have hit the mark so accurately that day. Today was different. His smug smile did not falter at her words.
"No, you wouldn't," he agreed, his granite tone at odds with his self-assured smile. "Some just have people flock to them, however undeserving they might be, and the rest of us have to claw for all the recognition we can get."
"What is wrong with you, Malfoy?" she stepped away from him, worried more by his strange confession than his proximity. "Why do you even care who I choose to marry?" She knew on the whole why he cared. Voldemort wanted her in his grasp to weaken Harry and punish her, to make an example of her to all upstart Muggle-borns, but, specifically, she didn't see why Malfoy would have any interest in her at all.
His eyes flashed as the smile finally faded. "Did you know what's happened to my father, Granger? What you and Potter did to us? My father is in Azkaban because of you. And now he is punishing us for what you did." He stalked forward, forcing her further from the door. "I was going to win back our favour with you. If I handed you to him, everything would have been forgiven."
"So sorry I actually found someone I want to marry, Malfoy," she retorted with bravery she really did not feel. Malfoy was clearly desperate; desperate cowards will resort to anything to get what they want.
And he did.
An invisible wave of magic crashed into her, throwing her into the wall. The wind rushed from her lungs as if she had been punched in the gut. Even with the wand held tightly in her hand, she could not manage to gather enough oxygen to say a defensive spell. Malfoy waved his wand a second time to send her wand and hope clattering across the room as she coughed and clawed at him. He dug in his pocket, pulling out a vial and forcing the contents down her throat. Even as she spat it out, her head began to spin and grow fuzzy.
"Granger," Malfoy snapped, drawing her glazed eyes to his face. He looked very handsome, his nearly-white hair haloed from above by the sconces, making him look like an angel, the warm light of the flames adding colour to his pale cheeks.
He smiled at her. "Do you love me?"
She nodded eagerly.
"Will you send that ring back and marry me instead?"
"Of course," she said breathlessly, her lungs only just regaining some of their lost air. With the promise of a husband she actually loved, she tugged excitedly at the ring, but still it refused to come off her finger.
"Give it here," Malfoy demanded and stepped closer.
Standing this close she could smell his cologne; it smelled like freshly mowed grass and new parchment, like books, old leather books and the newly printed books she had gotten as an engagement present, like a sweet citrus smell she couldn't quite place. "You smell wonderful," she said dreamily.
Malfoy snorted, took hold of her wrist, his grip so tight that her skin actually felt like it was burning. He wrapped his fingers around the massive ruby, pulling so sharply that her finger broke. She cried out in just as he did.
"What's the matter?" she asked. She touched his face gently, all her thoughts focused on his safety and not the throbbing of her own hand.
"Don't touch me!" He pushed her away, gasping in pain as he touched her shoulders. Hermione looked at his hands. Angry, red blisters were rising up on his palms as if he had put his hands to a white hot blade rather than a cool ruby.
"What magic is this?" the boy said through gritted teeth, his burned fingers curling uselessly inward, as he stumbled away from her.
"Where are you going?" she asked. She pulled him close, hugging him tightly to make his hurt and anger go away. He struggled against her affection. Even injured he was physically stronger that her. He shoved her off easily and ran from the washroom. She was left there to cry by the boy she loved, as if she meant nothing. Too heartbroken from seeing him sneer at her so hatefully, she just sat on the cold floor and cried.
"Boys are awful," Myrtle said with a little too much joy in her voice.
Ginny came searching for her some time later and found her still on the floor, injured and crying. "Hermione, what's wrong?" she asked, hugging the girl and bringing her to her feet.
"He left me," Hermione moaned, sounding as much like spectral resident of that washroom as anything else.
"Who left you?"
"Draco," she said, failing to notice the strange look her friend was giving her. The crestfallen girl sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve, flinching as her broken finger snagged on her robes. "It's all The Bloody Ring's fault. Horrid thing won't come off."
"Come on, Hermione," Ginny said gently. "Let's take you to the hospital wing."
"Oh!" Hermione smiled brightly. "Maybe Draco will be there."
"Why would he be in the hospital wing?" Ginny questioned.
"He hurt himself on Sirius's awful ring." The girl scowled down at the ruby and started to pull at it, not caring that the action sent nauseating shockwaves up her arm. It had angered her love enough to scare him away; if she had her silver potions dagger, she would have cut her finger off to remove the bloody thing from her presence.
Ginny forced her hand away from the ring and pulled her friend from the washroom, coaxing her in the dulcet tone Hermione had often heard her use on Dean when he was being jealous, "Leave it for now. I'm sure Madam Pomfrey knows a spell that can remove it. Draco wouldn't want you to hurt yourself, would he? He'd want your finger in tact so he could put his own ring on it. I'm sure that would make him very happy."
With the prospect of finding the boy she loved waiting for her and removing the ring that so aggravated him, Hermione all but ran through the school to the hospital wing. She found, to her disappointment, that Draco was not there. She dropped onto the nearest empty bed, completely bereft but with no more tears left to shed over her misfortune.
"Whatever is the matter, Miss Granger?" Madam Pomfrey asked. Her wand glowed as she performed a diagnostic spell.
"Madam Pomfrey, I think Malfoy might have done something to her," Ginny said cautiously.
"Don't you talk about him that way!" Hermione shouted. "I love him. He's wonderful and he smells… of everything I love."
"Like Amortentia?" Madam Pomfrey asked, her voice hard and face knowing. She cast the spell to mend the girl's finger as she waited for her reply.
Hermione considered the smells. "Not quite the same, no. Amortentia didn't have that fruit smell like Draco does. I love that smell." She sighed and lay back on the bed wishing that he was there so they could know that wonderful citrus smell that went straight to her head.
"Drink this, Miss Granger," the woman ordered and held a brimming goblet of potion out for her. Hermione drank it down without question, coughing at the sour taste that coated her tongue.
"What was that?" she demanded. Her vision was blurred from the tears the disgusting potion had brought to her eyes and her throat burned painfully, she suspected from bile.
"The antidote," replied the witch dryly. "I would take more caution around certain wizards until after your wedding if I were you, Miss Granger. Drink this, it will help you rest, and I will inform the Headmaster of Mr Malfoy's advances."