Chapter Thirteen: Healing
Paperwork.
Well, at least this time she wasn't signing in a suicide attempt - though in her position, she could classify it as one.
She tried not to think, and tried not to feel as she worked her way through the sheet. Name? Draco Malfoy. Age? 20. Sex? Male. Relation to patient? Therapist. Just another patient in St. Mungo's, just another day, right?
Bloody idiot! she fumed, inking her quill. I knew he'd have a nightmare after he passed out in my office, and he still didn't take it! I told him that he needed to take it tonight!
"Hermione?" came a voice from behind her. She turned. It was her favorite nurse, the nurse that always ended up helping her patients when they landed themselves in there.
Or in other words, Parvati Patil.
"How's he doing?" Hermione asked, looking at the other girl. Parvati rolled her eyes.
"He's okay. I might have had the urge to run him through, but I didn't."
Hermione gave the girl a stern look, who shrugged.
"We did have a hard time waking him up, but we gave him some potion that should keep him from hallucinating for the next couple hours while we run tests. It hasn't kicked in yet though. After that, he should be fine. What did you do to him, anyway? I've never seen him so terrorized."
Hermione looked at her feet. "Our session today was a little rough." She lightened her expression, and changed the subject with a note of desperation. "How's the healer's training going?"
"Good... Malfoy is actually one of my first hands-on patients. I'll probably get my certification by the end of the year." She smiled widely. "Well... I better go check on the prat. He keeps going on about blood... he says he can smell it everywhere. I'll come back when he's ready to go."
Hermione thanked Parvati and sat back down, wondering how a girl like Parvati - whose favorite subject had been Divination, and who had never appeared to take her coursework seriously - had landed herself as a healer's assistant, and moved up from that to a nurse. And by the end of the year, she'd be a certified Healer! Hermione shook her head. Why wasn't her own life like that?
"Hey, Hermione."
"Ron! What are you doing here?"
Ron looked at her for a few seconds, taking in her frazzled appearance. She was wringing her hands together, and her eyes were dark. He sat slowly down in the chair next to her. "You didn't come home last night... and word is out that Malfoy went crazy, or something like that. I'd figured you'd be here."
Hermione looked at her watch - it was 4 A.M.. She didn't have a patient until 8:00... but she still felt panicky.
"I'm sorry about that, Ron." 'Word is out?' What does he mean by that? "Word is out?"
"Parvati's still the same gossip queen. I heard it from an owl sent by Neville."
At this early in the morning? Hermione tried to wrap her head around this new information. So now... everyone knew about Draco's... about his accident. He wasn't going to like that too much when he went into work.
"You said you'd gone to check on him. Apparently... for good reason. What happened anyway?"
Hermione fingered the edges of her shirt, keeping her voice even. "He had a really bad nightmare."
"And here I thought it was serious," Ron snorted, earning him a glare. "What?" he defended. "I have nightmares, and I don't check in here for that."
"Trust me, Ron, it wasn't just a nightmare. He was suffocating. Delirious. I revived him... and then he just... went out, cold. I've never seen anything like it. If I didn't know any better, I would have guessed it to be the work of a dark spell." Hermione looked down at her hands. "It was probably my fault. I put him through a lot today. It was like I'd never gotten over our past."
Ron put his arm around her shoulders. "You tore into him, didn't you?"
She nodded. "He said something... 'it's just an expression'... when I was doing the blood thing and making his nightmare potion, and it just woke up this... beast. I was cursing like a sailor... and then I just flat kicked him out. Literally. I'd seen the look on his face... that dead look he had when I'd last broken him down. That's why I went to check on him - who knows what he was doing, he was off work today. All that negative energy, all that darkness I was throwing at him... probably took root, waiting for a time to strike. For all I knew, he was hanging from his shower spout."
Hermione tried not to think about that.
"I would've liked to see that whole argument - " she gave him a dark look, " - if we were still in school." He smiled weakly.
She shook her head at him and looked away.
"You care, though."
She ignored that, studying her fingers. Ron looked away as well, and they sat in silence for a minute, listening to the distant screaming of someone on the other side of the building.
"Otherwise, you would have left him..." he continued hesitantly.
"Ron, I don't leave people. It's my obligation as his counselor to see that he is in his best condition. And besides, I wouldn't have been able to leave him if we were back in school and he were bleeding to death in the mud. Harry didn't - not after he saw him in Azkaban. It's just... not right. I couldn't live with that. And also... he's different now. He's shown me that he can be a regular person."
"So... you actually care about him, then." Ron looked at her.
For whatever reason, his words almost felt like an accusation. Like he had worked for years and years in order to get her to love him... and Malfoy throws himself around her little office for a few months and she suddenly feels the need to care? She'd hated him, and that had taken only a month to wear off?
"Yes, I do. And I have no idea why."
That admission sat heavily between them.
She looked up as Parvati came over to them. The girl sighed heavily, flipping her long braid over her shoulder.
"Well, he's better. We had to transfer him down to Spell Damage so they could run some more tests, but they didn't find anything significant. In the meantime, he's as good as new physically, but he looks terrible otherwise. You've got some work to do on him yet, Hermione."
Hermione nodded, looking back at her feet. "I thought as much."
"Also, he'll be needing something for any future breakouts - "
"I gave him some potion, but he didn't take it."
Parvati nodded. "He told us that. If he needs something stronger, send him over to us and we'll give him something."
Looking back on it now, she thought, something had probably gone wrong somewhere between me offering him a piece of chocolate covered in my blood and me dumping the blood into his potion. She couldn't imagine what that must have been like - looking at the clear blue potion and thinking about how much blood was used to make it - the more blood, the stronger the potion. And he must have been thinking, in order to have relief, I need to drink her blood.
That would have driven her mad. And especially after she'd flipped out on him.
Suddenly, she couldn't think anymore.
He was standing there, at the end of the hallway, looking like a ghost in his white nightclothes, pale skin and blond hair. He was frail-looking, like a ghost, and haunting-looking, like a ghost.
Hermione became acutely aware of Ron standing beside her, watching her as Draco came slowly down the white corridor. He looked like he didn't know what to make of her standing there, with Ron, eyeing him.
Draco wanted to make her feel guilty - he wanted to blame everything on her. He wanted to tell her to go away, and that nothing could make up for what she had done today. But in all honesty, he hadn't expected to see her standing there, and hadn't expected to see Ron there with her - did that mean that they actually cared about him? Everything he was about to say - everything that he was feeling about telling her off just disappeared.
She was there, waiting for him. So was Ron. And they cared.
Or was Hermione there because she felt obligated to visit him... and Ron just wanted to tell him off for being late to work?
He stood in front of them, ignoring the expression that Hermione was giving him. "What time is it?" he asked quietly.
"About 4:30," Ron said, looking at the large wall clock.
At least I'm not late for work. So what is he doing here then?
They all stared at each other for a good five seconds.
"Coming to see me wasn't all that necessary," he said to Ron.
Ron looked a little uncomfortable at this admission; he hadn't exactly come to see Draco. Hermione nudged him with her foot.
"Well... yeah, I know. We just wanted to see how you were doing. Hermione brought you here and everything - she's been here since at least midnight."
Draco nodded and forced himself to look at her. He had a strange urge to cry as he studied her expression. He couldn't place it exactly as a certain emotion - but he could read every ounce of what she wanted to say to him, and even what she didn't.
Especially what she didn't.
"Thanks, Granger," he said softly.
She shook her head and waved her hand at him, looking at her feet. She was hiding something.
"What's another day, right? Was that your thinking?"
Draco nodded, his eyes fixed on the splotch on the ceiling.
Hermione continued writing on her notepad. Her reflexes were working a little slowly from her lack of sleep, and being in the same room as Draco was making her even more clumsy. She took a second to collect her thoughts and remember what she was about to write before continuing and setting down her quill. There was a good couple minutes of silence, and he knew that she was now staring at him apologetically. It would usually have annoyed him... but it didn't. Nothing she did annoyed him anymore - he felt nothing, as if he was incapable of feeling anything past the silent sadness that had consumed him for the past couple hours.
What was wrong with him? Surely that potion they had given him wouldn't blanket his emotions.
"And um... one more question - "
"What are you getting out of all this?"
Hermione stared at him. He was inquiring about her personal life again. "Look, Draco... this isn't you and me talking right now. This is Draco Malfoy and his therapist. You really need to understand that."
"We really do need to talk, you and me, Granger."
Hermione stared at him again.
In a way, she had failed him. She was the one that had made it too personal in the beginning. If she were any kind of therapist, she would have talked to him as if he were any other patient. And now, when she had finally gotten over the fact that he was Draco Malfoy, prat extraordinaire, it stopped mattering that he'd even been that way in the beginning. Everything had been awkward then, and it was still awkward now, though for different reasons - and it was her fault.
She couldn't get over him, no matter how much they'd talked. She'd seen him talk to her as if she was his therapist, but she could not stop thinking of him as who he was and who he had been for his whole life. Who he'd been to her.
And now, it was clear that they did not have a therapist-patient relationship.
But apparently, that was exactly the kind of therapy that he needed. After all, he'd still gotten better.
She wondered - would he have changed if he'd gotten one of her colleagues, who didn't know him like she knew him, who didn't have the personal history with him and thus the knowledge of how to make him tick?
She, herself, could make him tick, because of who she was, and what she was to him.
Maybe that's why he had changed at all.
"I'm serious." He was looking at her now, cutting her to pieces with his eyes.
She tried not to think back to how they'd looked when he'd been sitting on the floor behind her couch - how she could see his soul right through them if she was close. She sighed as she shook these thoughts away, giving in. "What did you want to talk about?"
Draco ran his hand through his shortened hair. "There are just... so many things that I'm not sure of now. We've been at this point before, and something tells me that we'll be here again..."
Hermione shook her head, trying not to think what she was thinking, because it was a dangerous thought - the kind of thought that could torture her if she was wrong. Was he talking about his therapy? Why did he care what she got out of this?
Was he trying to understand why she was doing it?
"I don't know what you're saying." He was always doing that - speaking out of the blue about something that he'd been thinking about, and only he would know the meaning of.
"I think you know," he said quietly, still staring.
She hated it when he stared at her like that. It made her feel vulnerable. "I really don't."
"Well," he said, getting up, "if you don't know what I'm talking about, then clearly I have something wrong." He quickly turned his face away from her.
What was she getting out of all this? What was that supposed to mean?
"Draco... I - "
"What ever you have to say," he said, turning back, his hand on the doorknob, "think about it really hard. If you mean it, then tell me tomorrow, when I give you my assignment." And with that, he left her office, leaving Hermione to stare after him.