Cappuccino After Eleven
Warning! Warning! Longer chapter incoming;) I was not feeling motivated at all, and then I just started, and here I am two hours later – who would have thought!
I'd like to extend a huge thank you to all readers and reviewers! Especially thanks to merendinoemiliano and Niel2804 (I'm so happy you both appreciate my story!)
To GidgetteLover: Thank you so much for another lovely comment! About Lavender: I think it's kind of sad whenever she is portrayed as the unlikable annoying girl, as if she's just another villain. I hope this chapter doesn't break her character, although she can be a bit sassy in my writing hahah
Chapter Ten
Hangover
Hermione had woken up with laughter like a bubble on the tip of her tongue, the fuzzy joy still sparkling in her blood from yesterday evening.
Hermione had also, however, woken up with the sudden urge to puke.
She had rushed to the toilet, thanked the gods that Pansy wasn't there so the bathroom was free, and then proceeded to wait out the waves of nausea that washed over her.
Details from the walk back with Lavender swam in her head.
With a frown, she was flooded with the remnants of their conversation.
"Step one," Lavender had said, pointing a finger in the air, "Talk about Quidditch. He loves Quidditch,"
Tripping down the last step of the stairs, Hermione had nodded along, listening with one ear, brushing her fingers along the wall to keep her balance all the way down.
"Step two," Lavender had continued pretentiously, "Don't assume he has any a bigger emotional range than a teaspoon. Except when talking about his brother,"
"His brother?"
Lavender had looked slightly annoyed at that.
"Yes," she'd said, as if whatever Hermione had said was incredibly stupid, "The one that died?"
Hermione's face must have looked like a question mark. Lavender's expression had darkened into a scowl.
"Don't ask about the brother,"
And then the conversation had moved on.
"Three," she'd continued without any more response, "Don't come between him and Harry. The guy even moved to Italy for him. I'm sure he would switch universes for him too if he had to,"
The rest of the list was rather fuzzy, but she remembered the most important points, she thought.
Hermione couldn't remember drinking so much she would forget anything, but in her defense, she were hardly a person to drink in the first place. Or a person for parties, for that matter.
Lavender had droned on and on without needing much encouragement, talking about Ron, but somehow yet managing to always angle the conversation into talking about herself every time.
Hermione had just nodded along, deeming the entire thing useless. She'd rather find out about Ron herself anyway.
He was like a chemistry set ready to be explored, and she would rather have the pleasure of experimenting with it herself than hearing the solution from Lavender.
She'd rather not overstep any boundaries too. Lavender didn't seem to know what those are.
Hence, the walk to her apartment had been filled with Lavender's empty talk about Brad – some guy she'd had a fling with for a short time while in Italy – and her eternal struggle of submitting papers on time.
Suddenly, another detail from the conversation popped into her head, bringing along a flood of nausea. Hermione gripped the side of the toilet in a white-knuckled grip but chased the nausea away with some less-than-controlled breathing.
Her first hangover was just fantastic, and it did not help to have Lavender's shrill voice from last night ringing in her ears.
"How come you're telling me all this?" Hermione had asked.
Lavender had smirked at that, "I just want you to succeed. No offence, Hermione, but you seem kind of lonely. And he needs someone like you. As a good friend I'm just helping you two find each other,"
Hermione had been silent, breathing the fresh night air.
"I know you two will work out. Trust me or not," Lavender had continued, "You see, before I was his friend, I used to be his ex,"
Something lurked in Hermione's stomach, and she finally vomited into the toilet. Immediately, it felt like a burden was lifted from her chest, and she could breathe normally again.
Gosh, that helped.
She made a mental note of her newly acquired knowledge about hangovers; vomit if you feel like vomiting.
Time passed while she was sitting on the bathroom floor, before Hermione crawled over to the shower, pulling her towel down from the knob where hung on the wall.
She showered quickly – realizing that the warm water made her feel sick, and the cold water made her dizzy.
Then, walking like a kicked dog, hunched over, and feeling terrible, she staggered to her room.
She'd made sure to drink lots of water before she went to bed the night before, but it seemed to not have helped that much. Thankfully though, because of her water chugging spree yesterday, her room was riddled with half-full cups of water.
She took one and downed it in one mouthful, swallowing before it would remind her of shots.
Her heart was racing with yesterday's poison, but at least it didn't feel like it would be ejected out of her along with the puke any longer.
Thankful for that, she got dressed, finding a white t-shirt and a pair of grey sweatpants in her closet.
Immediately, she felt better.
Shaking her head, she pulled Lavender out of her memory and headed out towards the balcony door. If she were lucky – her heart jumped in anticipation – maybe Ron's paper bird would be flying towards her in greeting this late morning.
But when she took the first step outside, she was immediately met with the reality of the world like a brick to the face.
The sun was high on the sky, bombarding her in the heat of a frying pan. A couple of birds were singing loudly to each other in a nearby tree, and the tram had apparently just stopped in the street nearby, because she could hear the rumbling of the rail brakes on the asphalt.
She winced. Her head pounded.
A figure in the corner of her vision waved quietly at her. The vertigo stopped for a moment.
Ron was sitting in his usual position in the ledge of the windowsill. He seemed to be smoking a cigarette, a leg dangling over the edge dangerously. Following the length of his leg, she saw that he'd clad his foot in a bright red sock, almost as if to signal the danger he was putting himself in where he sat.
"Hey," Hermione whispered inaudibly.
The flap of a bird's wing fluttered in her ear, and she let it land on her forearm. It uncurled itself into a dazzling white letter in her hands.
Ron's handwriting was shaky.
I have a hangover. Are you dying too?
Underneath the writing, he had drawn two empty checkboxes marked with Yes and No.
She disappeared briefly behind her curtains to withdraw a pen. She took it out and drew a third checkbox beside his, titled Already passed away and crossed it off.
Hermione brushed her finger against the sheet, and suddenly it folded itself back together, and like how thread makes a garment, the sheet was suddenly back to being a beautiful white bird.
She blew on it to encourage it to take flight, but it gripped her arm tight with its paper-folded claws. It snuggled against her arm, opened its beak, then flew away. The design was more intricate today, she noticed. It seemed like Ron had gotten better at Charms seemingly overnight.
The bird sailed over to Ron and landed in his arms as a letter.
Ron opened it, and she could see the laughter ripple over him where he sat. Then, he took out his own pen and scribbled something, then looked over his work, scribbled some more and sent the bird back.
A moment later, it unfurled itself in her hands, opening his writing to her like a gift.
In black, scrubby letters, it said:
Can I come to the funeral?
His eyes on the other side of the backyard were wide, his arm casually slung over his other leg. He looked chill as a cucumber to the untrained eye, but Hermione could see the nervous glint in his features as he tried to casually flick the cigarette out on the wall. His hand movement was too stiff to be properly relaxed.
Hermione's heart jumped, and she could feel her blood spike in her veins.
Had he just asked her if he could come over?
The adrenaline pumped loudly in her ears.
Sure.
She wrote back, plastering the same casual look on her face while pretending as if her insides were not a raging warzone of clashing emotions, threatening to rip out of her skin at any moment.
The bird's wings flapped a couple of times, then zoomed over to Ron, who nodded happily.
She saw him shuffle and pull his limbs together, getting ready to crawl back in through the window to his room.
"Wait!" Hermione shouted, and he halted in his steps.
He swung his head back out, dousing his red hair in harsh sunlight, and it flickered like a flame.
She checked the time. It was 12.53. Way past eleven.
Fuck the rules, she thought, for the second time in her life.
"Cappuccino?" she yelled at him.
A bright smile cracked his face in two, "Yes, please!" he hollered back.
And then he disappeared back among the curtains of his window.
Hermione was left standing alone on the balcony in their backyard then, basking in the afterglow of his smile. Then suddenly, she jolted awake.
Her mind shifted quickly between images of the bathroom where she had puked, to the ten glasses of water in her room, and the mess of school papers drifting in the wind on her desk.
"Merlin, Arthur, and all of the above, I have to clean," she yelped.
She jumped to her feet, and like a breeze, collected all the papers into an organized heap, then the glasses of water and dumped them into the sink. She started the tap and waited for the water to run down the dirty dishes.
To verify that everything was tidy, Hermione turned her head to look around, and with a sigh realized that the flat no longer looked like a hurricane had swept through it. The tension in her shoulders eased, and she let out a long exhale in blissful relief.
But then, when she turned back to the dishes, her eyes caught her own reflection in the shiny metal of the sink.
Frizzy, undone hair, glassy eyes, drool on her cheek.
Oh, Fudge.
A/N: Thank you for reading this far! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I have;) This chapter was a bit more light-hearted than the earlier ones. Which ones do you prefer?