Author's Note: I wanna' rock and roll all ni-i-ight, and party every day…

Some food for thought: maybe if it makes you go "wtf?!!", that's because I want it to make you go "wtf?!!". Then again, maybe it's because I F-ed up. On second thought, it's probably the latter.

Um, oops, Ron's kind of an asshole in this chapter. Didn't mean for that to happen. I really like him, I swear. Most of the time. Some of the time. Occasionally.

Chapter Fifteen

Just a Cookie

Hermione was sitting on the couch on top of Draco's bedding, reading the paper. There was a worrying story about a pregnant woman who had been found dead. The baby had died with her, and she hadn't yet been identified.

Glumly Hermione folded the newspaper and pushed it across the table. She felt horrible about herself, and she felt horrible for feeling horrible about herself, because there were much worse things happening in the world. She was twenty bloody years old. Why did she feel like she had already failed? She'd done a lot in two decades.

And at the same time… Hermione sighed. She hated her job, lived in a four-room apartment in a hellhole tenement building, and had never been laid. Whatever she told herself, however many times she repeated that twenty was still good and young and only a year away from being a teenager, the things that people said—her mother, and Lychorida Bolton, and even the dreaded Hesperides—took root and grew rapidly in the fragile soil of her insecure heart.

Furious tears sparked in her eyes. She needed a scapegoat—she needed someone to blame. Acknowledging her own failure would have hurt too much to bear. This was all Ron's fault—

There was a banging knock on the door and then, like a demon conjured by the thought, Ron's voice shouted at her.

"Hermione!"

Her fists clenched the sheets in both hands.

"I don't want to talk to you!" she shouted back.

Harry's voice sounded next. "Hermione, please!"

"I don't want to talk to you, either! In fact, I never want to talk to you again! In fact, I hope you fall off a cliff and die! In fact, I'd rather it be even more painful than that! In fact, I'd like it to involve a bit of lava and a meat cleaver!"

It was Ron again. "Hermione, it's Draco!"

She froze. Then she scrambled heedlessly over the coffee table and yanked open the door.

Harry had Draco's shoulders, and Ron had his legs. Between the two of them, they heaved him onto the couch, where he continued to bleed forlornly. His face was whiter than the sheets his fluids were staining.

"What did you do?" Hermione gasped.

"We didn't do anything!" Harry protested, holding his hands up to signal peace.

"Yeah, except save his bloody ass," Ron muttered.

"Pun not appreciated, Ronald Weasley," Hermione snapped. "This is my house—"

Ron snorted. "Some 'house.'"

Hermione heard her voice rise both in pitch and in volume. "—and I can throw you out of it faster than—"

"A speeding bullet," Draco said.

Hermione stared at him. His eyes were open, though only just, and he was watching the exchange with a very, very thin, very, very wan smile.

"Can I get you something?" she asked urgently.

"New skin," he declared. "Mine's all torn up. Don't want it anymore. It'll be like in Jeepers Creepers—"

"I'll go soak some towels," Hermione told Harry and—the other one. She went to dig for some under the sink in the kitchen.

"Did you do her yet?" the other one asked eagerly as soon as she'd stepped out of the room.

"…Pardon?" Draco responded weakly.

"Did you do her. I could never talk her into it, though it might have saved us—"

"Ron," Harry interrupted.

"Well, doesn't matter anyway, since we gave up and everything." He sighed—happily. "But it's better now. Better this way."

Hemione wrung the life out of the particular specimen of towel unfortunate enough to be in her hands. She wasn't going to think about it. She wasn't going to think about him and his beautiful girlfriend—fiancée—wife—and how bloody happy they bloody well were. Oh, no; she wasn't going to think about that. She wasn't going to think about how he had won because she had lost him. She wasn't going to think about the glinting gold ring that she hadn't seen on a finger that had used to twirl itself in her hair when he was feeling flirtatious. She wasn't going to think about any of it at all, because as much as Draco was, as much as she knew Draco could be, she still had her own set of battle wounds, and they were far from scarring over.

"So did you?" the other one inquired again, excitedly.

"For the love of Christ, Ron!" Harry interjected.

"Who's Christ, and why do you love him so much?"

"Never mind! Just—Hermione's our friend, not some racy TV show you catch up on when you get a chance and gossip about—"

"She can also quite clearly hear you from the kitchen," Draco said mildly. "And to answer your question, Mister Weasley, I am a gentleman, ergo the only thing I do around here is the dishes."

"I don't trust him with the laundry," Hermione added stiffly, doing her damnedest to try to make light of it all.

Draco smiled weakly at her and then closed his eyes. "As well you shouldn't."

Pushing her way shamelessly in between her ex-friends (and making sure that Ron got a taste of her elbow), Hermione started mopping blood off of Draco's skin. Once she'd soaked up the worst of it, it became clear that its source was a single long, smooth, deep gash on the left side of Draco's chest.

"Sectumsempra again," Draco murmured.

"'Again'?" Harry and Ron repeated in perfect unison.

Inexplicably, Draco gave a choking laugh that quickly became a wet cough. He had shielded his mouth with his fist, and he drew it away bloody.

"Oh, shit," Hermione whimpered.

There was dead silence for a moment as everyone stared at her.

"I mean, 'darn,'" she amended feebly.

"Well, that was a monumental first," Draco remarked dryly. "I'm going to sleep now." And he closed his eyes again.

"No, you're not," Hermione told him. "You're going to the emergency room, where you're going to get stitches."

Draco sighed—a sigh that succumbed to the same horrible, bloody cough as the laugh before it. "Women," he said.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sparky failed miserably to understand the subtle concept of Draco's infirmity. He seemed to understand only that, because Draco was spending the vast majority of Sunday stretched out on the couch, his favorite perch on Draco's chest was very available. Ergo he spent the vast majority of Sunday leaping up onto it.

Consequently, Hermione spent the majority of Sunday grabbing him around the middle, disentangling his single set of claws from the gauze on Draco's chest, and relocating him to the floor.

"Sparky," she sighed when she found him curled up on top of Draco for the umpteenth time.

"He can't help it," Draco remarked. "We're soul-mates, after all."

"I think he's also part dog," Hermione noted, looking at Sparky's fluffy gray face. "He's giving me puppy eyes."

"If I give you puppy eyes, too," Draco offered with a grin, "will you bring me a cookie?"

Hermione raised an eyebrow. "We have cookies?"

Draco grinned more facetiously yet, a sure sign that his strength was slowly coming back. "Did you pay any attention to what you were putting in that shopping cart, love?"

Hermione knew that it was a term of endearment. She knew it was a pet name, and one that Draco had employed before. She knew that he threw them out with abandon. But she couldn't keep a little smile off of her lips. "Not in the slightest," she admitted. "I figured you'd take care of me."

Draco's grin widened. "I'm very flattered." Then he put on a mournful face and stuck out his lower lip imploringly. "I'm also very hungry."

"Then you shouldn't be eating cookies," Hermione sniffed.

"What?" Draco's eyes were wide and horrified. "No cookies?"

"What, you want to be diabetic by twenty-five?" she asked him.

Draco pressed his hands over his eyes. "I just want a cookie, woman!"

"Not when you're on your deathbed, you don't!" she fired back.

"You mean my death-couch," Draco corrected.

Firmly Hermione folded her arms across her chest. "I'm willing to bring you something healthy, but if you want a cookie, you're going to have to get up and get it yourself."

After about five minutes of highly impressive moaning, keening, and whining, Draco plucked the cat off of his chest, got up, and went to go delve his head into the fridge.

Evidently, he was cured.

By that evening, he was dancing around as he did the vacuuming.

"Don't you forget about me," he was crooning to Sparky as the cat darted away from the roaring vacuum. "I'll be alone, dancing, you know it, baby/Going to take you apart/I'll put us back together at heart, baby—" He swung his hips back and forth a few times and tried to maneuver the vacuum into a spin, to little success. Sparky retreated to the couch, and Draco crouched down to sing to him at his level. "Don't you forget about me/Don't, don't, don't, don't/Don't you forget about me…"

Hermione didn't think that such a thing would be possible.