Author's Note: Okay, you all hate me and I apologize. Real Life erupted into a great big pile of Actually Doing Stuff for the first time in forever. This chapter is shorter than I tried to make it, but I'm getting tired and it just didn't want to be written. I'll try to pick up the updating pace, and probably the story pace too (a slow chapter as well as a short one)! Reviews are always appreciated - let me know how I'm doing please!
Sleep still refused to come
Sleep still refused to come. She hadn't really expected to have much luck – her nap earlier had been overlong and besides, she wanted to sleep, to not be awake anymore, so much as to make the plausibility of drifting off as close to nonexistent as can really be managed.
She laid in bed for what seemed like ages, eyes closed, disallowing herself to think of anything besides her breathing. She focused on her breathing with a mental inhale… exhale… pattern so strictly that if she allowed her thoughts to wander for even an instant, she would stop breathing.
And still, sleep didn't come.
She lumos-ed her wand and brought out the book she had been pretending to read earlier. It was not interesting in the slightest, not even to her – and she loved books to no end. Still, she read a page, then a chapter, then a hundred pages, then the entire Part I of the book.
Sleep wouldn't touch her with a ten-foot pole. Not even if it had gloves on.
She finished the book, surprised that she had managed to stay awake through all the boredom and dullness and the complete lack of anything even remotely interesting or relevant. She couldn't see outside from her underground room, but she felt certain that the sky would be lightening in preparation for the sunrise at the very least. But it was a Sunday, and she didn't want to give up this precious opportunity to sleep in.
Sleep had deleted her off of his MySpace, his Facebook, his e-mail address list, every messenger service he had, and probably even the memory in his cell phone.
By this point, Hermione knew that the sun had to be at least halfway risen in the sky, and she felt that she would be lucky to fall asleep by lunchtime. Cursing insomnia and afternoon naps simultaneously, she got out of bed and walked in the direction of the bathroom, deciding to take a nice, long shower before figuring out what to do with the rest of her day.
With a groan that she barely managed to stifle, she remembered that she was supposed to spend most of the day with Tom Riddle, working on their Transfiguration essay. She had no idea how this was going to turn out. Writing a very important paper - one that she would be stressing out over even if absolute academic perfection wasn't now required in everything she did - with the future Dark Lord – whom she was supposed to… befriend or seduce or assassinate, or some mixture of the three – on absolutely no sleep – and no lack of trying.
Joy and wonderment would most definitely ensue – butterflies and candy canes and rainbows and picnics. That or mass murders and tears and sarcastic comments, and maybe even a few things that she would regret the next day, and find a tiny bit overboard.
Either way, it was sure to be an exciting day.
"Morning, Jane," said a voice that she very sincerely hoped was present only inside her sick, twisted, and sadistic subconscious.
She looked around just in case the voice came from a person who – though likely sick, twisted, and sadistic - did not in fact reside solely in her subconscious.
Unfortunately, her mind was for once not just playing tricks on her. She quickly pasted a smile onto her face, though her reaction time was not nearly as fast as she hoped it usually was.
"Morning Tom," she replied, trying to sound very much awake and desirable. She wished that she had been faster on the shower route, so she would have been able to take her time. "I was actually just going to take a shower, so I can't really talk just now."
That sounded like the phoniest excuse ever to not talk to someone. 'Sorry, I can't go out with you tonight, I've got to wash my hair,' on a whole new level. But it was true – she felt dirty and gross, which was reason enough to merit a shower even if she hadn't felt the need to just stand in a room by herself for a few minutes and pretend that everything was normal. Tom Riddle may get a lot of things – her time, her attention, and if things kept on in this fashion, probably most of her sanity – but she could not allow him to take away her attempts at normalcy, nor could she allow him to interfere so directly with her personal hygiene.
"Certainly," he replied. "Shall I see you at breakfast?"
She considered, very briefly, telling him to go directly to hell, and that she would meet him there. The lack of sleep was already seeming to do wonderful things to her temperament. She restrained herself, however, forcing the logical portion of her mentality to beat her grumpiness with a big stick down, away from her vocal cords. She really didn't want to do it, but she knew that it would be a bad decision at this point to continue appearing completely bipolar.
She then considered telling him that she was going to go back to bed as soon as she washed the grossness and fatigue off of her, but knew that if she went back to bed, she wouldn't wake up until the late afternoon at the earliest, and she had far too much to accomplish over the course of the day to risk such a lengthy, ill-timed nap. She was then left with no real choice.
"As soon as I'm done," she replied with a smile that she hoped was genuine even though she didn't feel anywhere near smiling.
He turned away then, probably to go to the Great Hall for breakfast or summon a meeting of the Future Death Eater Society or something else useful, and she turned away also, heading towards the showers, hoping that the water would help wake her up and make her useful for a day that was sure to be long and strenuous. Hermione realized that it would probably do no such thing, and the showerheads would likely transfigure into a stampeding horde of hippogriffs or something similar, just to make sure that she didn't get too comfortable with her positions as savior of the wizarding world, salvation of the soul of the future Dark Lord, and object of apparent obsession for the Head Boy at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Her shower, somehow, did not end disastrously. She was halfway asleep through most of it, and for the parts that she wasn't asleep she was trying desperately to keep herself awake. She knew from her experiences over the past week – had it really only been a week – that being around Tom Riddle, though sometimes startlingly natural-feeling, required a lot of concentration. She had pulled off a lot of impressive feats in her time, including getting both Harry and Ron to pass their exams year after year, but this was something on a whole different level altogether. It was a startlingly peaceful experience, after how stressful and tense and completely aggravating the past few days had been for her. She thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, regardless of how close to consciousness she had been.
Unfortunately, she couldn't manage to grow fins and gills and start living in the bathroom, so she had to come out eventually. She spent significantly longer than necessary fixing her hair and straightening her clothes, trying to forestall the inevitable, hoping in vain that Tom Riddle would have finished his breakfast and moved on to some other activity, but after a good half an hour of fiddling around she sighed and walked out of the common room, towards the Great Hall and her waiting companion.