Junebug.
Or: The Secret Lives of Frogs. In which Hermione is a scary feminist, Draco's into misogyny and jumping, and pregnancy happens. I've got Bob Dylan, vegetarians and swearing and I still can't believe I'm putting my name to it.
Notes:Oh, I repeat any warnings and disclaimers I made last time. I think it works better that way. It is not beta'd because I am lazy when I'm on the computer. It's just me and you, charming reader, so let's get cosy and begin.
Chapter One: In which shit really happens, Hermione fails to learn anything at all and the seed of extremist feminist behaviour are sewn.
The next time Hermione sees Ginny, she is trying to remove the hairs on her arms with sellotape.
"That is improper use of stationary," she tells her well meaning ginger friend, but her heart just isn't in it. She cannot even raise herself to be displeased by the disruption this will cause to her natural order.
"It could be worse," Ginny says. "He could have been fugly. Then you'd have a fugly baby."
"I'm having Rosemary's baby," Hermione wails.
"I thought you said it was Malfoy's?"
Hermione dispairs for a moment, regarding Ginny's ignorance toward the films of disturbed Hollywood producers as horrific, but then remembers that she had to stop Ginny's education of all things muggle and modern when the girl complained of nightmares whilst watching the first season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, on account of her thinking that Sarah Michelle Geller was in fact going to descend from the ceiling in her ankle bashers to blast them all to Christ knows where. Despite Hermione's frequent assertions that witches could not be frazzled alive with holy water, and that they were in fact just muggles with an intuitive sense when it comes to the metaphysical, it did nothing to disperse Ginny's fears.
"What happens when I get big?" Hermione says. "People will notice. What do I do then?"
"You could try a womb minimising spell. If such a thing exists."
Leaving the queen of all reasonable advice behind her, Hermione makes to perambulate her way around the corridors in an aimless manner, hopefully bumping into someone who will give her some food.
She does bump into someone, as it happens, but they don't give her anything of nutritional value.
"So you're Draco's babymama?"
Millicent Bulstrode is neither charming nor particularly pleasing on the eye but she does have an air of honesty about her. It's the kind of pervading air that comes with most heartless bitches but it is what makes them appealing to other members of the same sex. It's a odd type of charisma.
I digress.
"How does he know?" Hermione says in a worried, melodramatic voice last heard in a bad adaptation of a Bronte novel.
"He doesn't. You're just lucky that your completely unsubtle vomiting and general hormonal imbalance unnoticed because your child was fathered by the single most self centred creature in Christendom and the outside world. But I would tell him, if I were you, because it would scare the living bejesus out of him." Hermione is not swayed by this clever use of Catholic imagery. It shows. "Alright," Millicent says, "I shall rephrase this. Better you tell him than I or any of my associates."
"You're not going to tell me you've put one of my men in the morgue are you? Because I can't run through that scene. We could do Pulp Fiction. You can be Brett and I'll be that one who isn't Vince."
Millicent, unsurprisingly, has not a fucking clue what Hermione is talking about so resorts to the time old mannerism of just swearing in a bemused fashion.
"Just tell him you fuckwit before you do something buggering silly."
Hermione finds herself wondering whether this irrisory humour is something that has always existed, and that she has never noticed, or whether learning things has stopped her from, you know, noticing the rest of the human race.
She puts this to her companions at dinner. Ginny tells her that it's totally untrue but Ginny, Hermione thinks, probably thinks irrisory humour is some kind of Nu Rave group.
Nu Rave reached the wizarding world sometime in the early Noughties. This in itself was rather surprising; for a community that hadn't quite managed to quash ideas on imperialism and racial purity, it is down with the kids when it comes to music. Another big thing was salsa, but then you can't knock a good thing down.
This consideration of Ginny as some silly bimbo is wholly misplaced. The girl might not be the sharpest tool in the box but she's not completely incompetent. She knows a fuck load about salmon and the wizarding world is in need of a voice in the world of fisheries and agriculture. She could be that voice.
Or, she might just spend the rest of her life making bejewelled pants for rich old women.
In her time, Hermione has done a lot of thinking. It's what she excels in. Logic is definitely her thing. She can, however, think of no rational approach to bring her to tell her unwilling sperm donar that he has done a little more than stain her jeans.
As Harry will tell her when she relays the news, this ain't no Etch A Sketch. This is one doodle that can't be undid.
So she settles to confront the not very astute feller whom Ginny has christen, in light of recent events, her babypapa in Herbology. He can't do anything crazy and anyway, practically no one took it. It'll be them, Neville and a handful of kids who failed to get into the NEWT Astronomy course. It's a universally acknowledged fact that Astronomy dropouts take Herbology. It's the equivalent of dropping Maths to take Photography.
Draco is taking it because, though rich, he is still a bit dim.
Hermione is taking it because she thinks the flowers are nice. Not that she'd ever tell anyone. To those who ask (and there are few) she just says that she's interested in furthering botanical uses in magical medicine, which has enough long-ish words to baffle the average student.
I digress.
Hermione's plan begins well enough. By that I mean she doesn't inadvertently go into premature labour at any point in the day beforehand and she avoids any more potential pep talks with Slytherins.
Nothing explicable occurs to her upon her entrance to the greenhouse. She isn't bitten by some magical nibbling plant, and nothing tries to set her hair alight. She lies in wait, obscure by some deadly but surprisingly sleepy greenery until Draco is gloved up, and so therefore less likely to hurt her.
"Hi there," she says in a cheery way as she makes her approach.
"Fuck off."
"Was this how you got into my pants last time? Because if it was I'm seriously starting to worry about my levels of alcohol consumption."
"I am not interested in getting back into your pants, as you so charmingly euphemistically put it," he counters in a very bored voice. "We hobbled on the sofa because you were out of it and I thought you were that Hufflemuff with the great tits. We all make mistakes. Now fuck off."
"You had me while I was out?" Hermione says, outraged at his lecherous audacity.
"It was kinda fun in a necrophile sort of way. Have you finished?"
Want Hermione wants to say is something along the lines of 'go die in a pit you misogynistic narcissistic twatface' but, once again, she keeps her opinions to herself.
"I'm pregnant," she says instead.
"What?"
"I am up the spout. You've stuck a bun in my oven. My womb is blossoming forth with your seed." The last analogy makes Draco drop his tweezers and go a funny shade of puce. "I don't like you either by the way. I'm not carrying it out of some creepy devotion to you."
"It's not mine!" he snaps. "I'd never get you-" He gesticulates wildly, unable to utter anything.
"I haven't slept with anyone else."
"Anyone else that you remember," he tries to add.
"I really don't think anyone else in the school would engage in the kind of drunk shenanigans that you like to engage in, like shagging unconscious young women."
"You were perfectly consensual," he says warily.
"I couldn't see who you were!"
"You still said yes!"
"You were crap," she says, aiming decidedly off topic and vaguely below the belt with her insults. "There are trolls better in the sack than you."
"How many trolls have you shagged, Granger?"
"I couldn't feel my legs! And I think you're skirting the issue here. I am going to have a child with you in about eight months. Don't you have responsibilities?"
"Fuck no. Not until you can prove it's mine. For all I know it could be the ginger minger's and you could be angling over child amenities. You women are all the fucking same."
"Now listen here, you," Hermione snaps, waving her secutares at him with a look of malicious intent, enraged at his blatant and highly unattractive chauvinism. "And you are going to listen because my hormones are very fucked and I've got a pointy thing here." She doesn't mention that also, she has ninja fast reflexes because she spent the summer learning all sorts of oriental fighting skills in her local village hall over the summer and so would be able to snap him like a twig if he so much as moved to fight her. "This is definitely your baby. When I explain to my parents what has happened, I will stipulate you as the guilty party. When they complain to the school, you will be branded as the corrupter of Hermione Granger and McGonagal will have you castrated. And another thing!" she says crossly. "I was not a virgin!"
Draco just sits for a moment as Hermione storms away, both of them furious and slightly confused. Hermione does not know for a fact that McGonagol will try to geld the greasy bastard and Draco does not know what the fuck just happened. The imminent threat of fatherhood has not quite set in yet.
It takes about two hours. At approximately half past five in the afternoon, he is found banging his head against a wall in the Slytherin common room, gnashing his teeth and bewailing the unfairness of his existance. Millicent Bulstrode tells him to shut the fuck up because it's not him who's carrying the baby. This draws quite a crowd. Who has Draco impregnated? Suspicion automatically falls on the Slytherin hoes, who denign it all. It's not one of their numbers. So puzzlement falls across the school. Ten to one, it's a Patil. Two to one, it's a Hufflemuff slag.
So when Ginny inadvertently reveals to her partner in Charms the true identity of the chalice of Draco's seed, though her name is now blackened by her harlotry, Hermione does make a packet. She was down as one hundred to one. It must be, she thinks grimly, a good start to any child's life.
The moral of this chapter is don't write stuff after you've watched Torchwood. Mmm, Torchwood. Glee and doom don't make for good prose composition. But join me next time because I'm bound to be less distracted. The novelty of Jack Harkness molesting everyone in Cardiff for the good of the universe will wear off after a bit oh, fuck it, it won't.