Chapter Seven: Haven
They were a quiet couple. The immediate shock that swept the castle had died down after nearly two weeks. Most people no longer stopped to stare at Draco and Hermione as they walked from class to class. Some did. Some older students would always be curious as to how this strange couple transpired.
The Slytherins were most outspoken about it, especially Pansy. She threw a fit and refused to talk to Draco until he broke it off, but that was fine by him.
Draco explained to his friends the appeal of the incredibly intelligent witch. He put on a show, raving about her boldness and her kindness whenever another snake questioned him. He was attracted to the challenge that Hermione was – or so he told people. He would tell Blaise and Greg that they argued constantly (which wasn't a lie) and he found a totally agitated and uninhibited Granger alluring (which also wasn't totally a lie).
Draco wouldn't admit it to himself, but he really did find the brunette attractive when she stopped being uptight. It usually happened when she started pulling her hair up. It meant she was done being awkward for the night and was starting to be comfortable around him.
Over the weeks, this point in their night had gotten earlier and earlier.
She no longer flinched away from his hand. She automatically sat with him in most classes and sometimes at the Slytherin table for meals. She'd make jokes with the other snakes and he could see a friendship forming between his witch and Tracy Davis.
Occasionally, she would make notes on his essays without asking. She smiled more often with him – her natural smile, not the fake one she got by with at first.
Draco discovered that Hermione had an entertaining sense of humor. He quickly learned that she was smart enough to understand his sarcasm and she wasn't afraid to send clever quips his way, especially when they were with his Slytherin friends. He found that she could be downright ruthless when she felt she had something to prove, but he didn't mind. It made the other Slytherins like her more, which was no doubt helpful in keeping their relationship believable.
It got easier and easier to pretend the more they spent time together. Sometimes he even forgot they were pretending. It had only been once or twice when she was laughing at something he'd said, but he quickly reminded himself this was Hermione Granger, the Supreme Bookworm, he was thinking about and that he was being ridiculous.
Being a fake couple became easier.
Unfortunately, even though Hermione's relationship with Draco had become easier, the same couldn't be said for the other factors in her life. Today had been dreadful the way Hermione looked at it. It had been one frustrating event after another so that she never seemed to get a break from awkward situations or frustrating conversations.
Harry had asked Professor McGonagall to keep her after transfiguration earlier that morning to 'check on her mental state.' Despite her best efforts, her loyal friend still thought that Hermione was insane, or perhaps, Imperiused.
Then Ginny had come to her crying before lunch because she'd had another fight with Dean. This time, it was something about not wanting her to sit by the younger Gryffindor boys in her classes even though she 'absolutely hated' everybody else. Always something silly, Hermione thought. "Just break up with him," she suggested. Ginny stomped away.
Then she had eaten lunch at the Slytherin table, which was becoming the new normal for Hermione. But today, Draco had tried to mess with her by letting his hand sneak far higher than approved up her thigh, causing her to jump out of her skin right as Snape walked by. The professor gave Draco detention (for the first time ever it appeared), which caused Draco to be in an absolutely sour mood for the rest of the afternoon.
It was a half hour after dinner and Draco was still being rather snappy. After they'd finished eating, the couple found a table to share in the library where they could work on homework before going up to their office to do more research on vanishing cabinets.
Even in the sanctuary that was the library, the pounding sensation in Hermione's head had grown stronger. But of course, her downward-spiral of a day had not yet reached its end.
From her spot across from Draco, Hermione huffed at her bag as she rummaged through its depths looking for something. With a final loud, "ugh," she threw her bag onto the table, knocking over his inkpot and causing a mess.
Noting her agitated state, Draco decided to ignore her outburst and simply clean up the mess with a wave of his wand.
"I'm sorry, Draco. That was reckless of me," the curly-haired witch sighed her apology.
He waved it off with her hand. "What's got your knickers in a twist this time?"
Her glare was only half-hearted, but he appreciated the attempt. "I've lent my transfiguration notes to Harry and haven't gotten them back. I'm going to have to go get them and meet up with you later."
He nodded in understanding and placed a gentle kiss on her rosy cheeks before she set off to find Potter.
It's been one thing after another today, Hermione thought as her headache reached an all-time high. Still, she climbed her way up the never-ending staircases to Gryffindor Tower, hoping Harry would be there with her notes.
When she stepped through the portrait hole, however, she could not spot Harry anywhere. Annoyance growing, she continued to walk through the room and eventually decided to check their dorms. When she reached the top of the stairs and stepped through the door, she immediately wished she hadn't.
Just in front of her, Lavender Brown was shirtless and laying on top of a tall boy with undeniably red hair as they tried to eat each other.
"Oh, sorry," she professed, face flushing and hand reaching up to cover her scarred eyes in an attempt to hide the wetness that began on the tips of her lashes. She started turning toward the staircase.
"What is she doing here?!" Lavender shrieked at her boyfriend and ignoring the witch who still stood there, shielding her eyes.
"Leaving," Ron said sternly, flashing a dangerous look at his once best friend.
His voice took its toll on her emotions, making those pesky drops of salty water clinging to her lashes a little bit heavier. The first time she's heard Ron's voice in three weeks and he berated her like she was a defiant child.
"I was looking for Harry," her voice managed.
"Well, he isn't here!" Ron shouted probably with more malice and threat than he intended. But that didn't make it hurt any less.
Tears were so close to spilling over now, but she kept her hands up in front of her eyes to block the couple's view. She'd seen Ron get defensive over her before. She'd seen him get jealous. She'd seen him angry and she'd been on the receiving end of his criticisms and hurtful words before, but not once in their five years of being friends had he properly raised his voice at her.
She tried again to remove herself from the room as she muttered, "obviously, I see that now, Ronald." It only had a slight bite to it, but it was all the anger she could find.
"You don't have the right to just go barging into people's rooms, Hermione," the redhead scolded. Hermione uncovered her eyes to watch as Ron abandoned his girlfriend on the bed with furious steps directly toward the spot where she was rooted by the door. The feelings that welled up in Hermione's stomach weren't sadness or pain anymore. This – this was rage.
She shook a stray curl out of her face, rage bringing a glow to her cheeks. "You've never had a problem with me coming up here before unannounced!" She took a brief moment to appreciate the absolutely green look that consumed her roommate, who was still laying on the bed half-decent.
"Oh, sure, why don't you shout that louder so they can hear you down in the dungeons. I'm sure your ferrety, wanker, boy toy of a boyfriend would love to hear you say that," spat Ron, disgust clearly showing all over his face.
"Don't bring Draco into this."
In most moments, using Draco's given name still felt wrong on her tongue. But sometimes, it flowed easily and felt natural. Sometimes, she didn't even think about it.
This instance had been one of those unconscious, thoughtless moments where it almost felt like she'd been saying his given name for years. It was the familiarity in her voice, she thought, how easily it had rolled off her tongue in a defensive tone that sent Ron's face into a reddening, blotchy direction where his sour expression seemed bigger and angrier.
"Things are different now, Hermione! That was before I had a girlfriend!" He shouted fiercely. "We- we could have been naked!"
"Shut the curtains next time!" With a jab of her wand, Hermione spelled the curtains on the bed shut, closing a whining Lavender behind them. She shrieked to be let out, but Hermione continued to shout, unlistening and uncaring. "Put up wards! Lock the door! Tell your friends you need privacy! Do neither of you have brains? Seriously, you could have done so many simple things to ensure you wouldn't be bothered."
With the fury of an insulted Hippogriff, the redhead invaded her personal space, forcing her to take several steps back to escape his warpath. His shouts shook the tower. "I'm not daft! I'm not a bloody idiot! I may not be as clever as you, but I'm not completely lost like you make me out to be all the damn time."
Distracted by the disdain in his voice, her spell weakened slightly, allowing Lavender's smug face and tacky red bra back into Hermione's view.
"Surely you don't think this is my fault, stumbling upon the two of you! Don't you think you could have done something to keep people from coming up here?"
"I did, Hermione! I told my friends not to come up here."
"What do you mean? You didn't tell me anyth–
"Don't you get it? We're not friends anymore!"
She shot him the coldest look she could fabricate and laced her words with a coolness that she usually associated with Draco, "Oh well that's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard! We've been best friends for six years, Ron! You get a girlfriend and I get a boyfriend and suddenly we can no longer be friends? Is that how it works? I've never heard something more ridiculous–
"It has nothing to do with dating!"
But Hermione and her extensive memory didn't believe him. "You did the same thing last time! I went on one little date with Viktor and you had to go and blow everything out of proportion. We didn't talk for ages then! How is this any different?"
"Simple, I cannot be friends with someone who doesn't believe in me."
At that statement, Hermione fumed. Her current state of fury surpassed each and every past argument they'd ever had.
She saw red.
"I don't believe in you? Who's been there beside you through everything the past five years? Who has been at every Quidditch game? Hell, I even went to tryouts! I've seen you face Death Eaters. I've seen you face ravenous half-dog murderers. You braved your biggest fear -to save me, might I add - and you've stolen a flying car. I've seen you sacrifice yourself in the best game of wizard's chess ever played, yet you think I don't believe in you? You don't think I know you're capable of anything when you set your mind to it?
"No, Ronald. You'd rather throw away five years of friendship just to spite me. You'd rather throw all of this away for a blonde bimbo that thinks the sun shines out of your arse and Divination is an honorable topic of study. You'd rather let your inferiority complex drive you to a point of insane, unnecessary anger. You always insist on thinking that you're not good enough and that you'll never be good enough for the world. How about this: Are Harry and I not enough? Are our friendship and loyalty not enough for you?"
He roughly grabbed her upper arm, shaking her to look at him and ending her rant. She was furious. She was upset. Tears threatened to spill down her cheeks.
"No! No, Hermione, you're not enough! You're always thinking the worst of me. My homework is never to your standards, my table manners earn glares, you think I need a lucky potion to block a goal! You're upset that I chose a witch that's actually attractive, one that actually finds me interesting, one that actually tells me that she likes me! You always act like I'm the most idiotic person you've ever met because it takes me longer to see things logically like you do, but you never let me try! You always spit the perfectly correct answer out with a scoff and a look down your nose in my direction before I can think it through. You explain things to me like I'm a bloody first year and you hide behind your books and cleverness so no one sees how scared you are that you don't belong. No, I may not be perfect, but you're the one who no one likes to be around. You're swotty and opinionated and pushy and obsessive and stubborn and over emotional. You're the one that's not good enough, and I think you know it. You know it like you know everything else-"
At the sounds of a loud smack, an anguished grunt, and a deafening shriek, Hermione ran from the boys' dormitories.
She ran through the common room unaware of the attention she was attracting. She ran down three hallways, four staircases, two more corridors and another set of stairs before she pushed through the double doors and ran out into the barely-there layer of the first snow.
She sat down on a cold, stone bench that paralleled the bank of the Black Lake and peered out at the frigid water.
The bench was tucked up against the edge of the Forbidden Forest where the trees were scattered enough to see through, but dense enough to smell. It was the perfect kind of isolated, much like how she felt. The lake would surely be frozen in a fortnight. She ached to throw rocks at it's frozen edges so she could watch the ice shatter and break into jagged pieces.
How had she let all of her relationships grow so cold?
She took a few sharp breaths of the icy air hoping that she could keep the tears at bay by sheer force of will.
But she couldn't.
Ron had been right. She had never been very good at anything. She couldn't be the girl that had a ton of friends or the girl that boys wanted to date. She couldn't figure out a single spell or potion that could tame her hair. People only knew her because she was Harry's best friend and annoyingly brainy. She was the prefect everyone hid from; the girl that single-handedly ruined every party Gryffindor threw just with her existence.
She wasn't incompetent. She wouldn't lower herself down to entertaining that thought. No, she was smart and she was capable, but she wondered, what's the point of being smart and capable if no one likes it; if no one likes you? Ron was right. She couldn't consider herself good at anything if everything she did turned people away.
As every other failure crossed her mind like a stream of tragic movie footage, the witch failed to hold in the tears.
She cried. Not like the silent tears shed in her bedroom or the sniffling tears she cried when she was overwhelmed. Not the pretty cry one manages when everyone is expecting you to break down, either.
This was the worst kind of cry. The kind where your lips start to shake and the tears build up quickly and fall even faster. The kind when you're bent over trying not to make any noise but it hurts too much to hold it in so you let out a yelp and an earth-shattering cry.
Then comes the loss of breath which is awfully pathetic because not only are you crying out loud but you think you sound dumb for not breathing, too.
And then you continue this cycle of crying and not breathing until you run out of tears to cry or you run out of air to breathe, and then you're just sitting bent over, grasping yourself to pretend you have a shred of dignity left and a reason to hold on at all.
This is where Hermione sat, bent over on the same marble bench, arms tucked tightly around her torso, eyes screaming color, angry for they had no tears left to offer for the dying soul of a girl with too much self-loathing.
Tears dry but the pain drowns.
She sat.
It seemed that Merlin himself had made it his personal mission to curse her that day, no doubt punishment for the lies she'd told and the relationships she'd strained.
Dementors seemed to swarm her. Boggarts, too.
Today had been the absolute, unbeatable, most miserable, awful, horrible day ever.
The snow behind her crunched in that telltale way. Gathering her jumper more tightly around her, Hermione sealed herself off from whoever thought it was a good idea to come to try to calm her down. She couldn't, wouldn't, look up to face them and add to her already insurmountable self-loathing.
She felt warmth join her on the bench as they sat down beside her. Straining to open her bloodshot eyes, she noticed the shiny, black dress shoes that could only mean Draco, her sodding fake boyfriend.
She wasn't sure how he found her or why he came to join her in the November cold. Maybe she was late for meeting him in the Room of Requirement. Maybe he wanted to build up their cover. Maybe Dobby had sent him to check on her. Maybe... Maybe he simply cared a little bit about her.
Hermione couldn't deny the hope that it was the latter. It's hard to spend almost every day with someone and still hate them.
She couldn't hate him anymore, she knew that. She would try; she would pretend, but really she was growing quite fond of Draco Malfoy.
Even now, she found his presence calming. He didn't say anything, and for that she was grateful. He placed a hand on her back and began rubbing soothing circles between her shoulder blades.
New tears cascaded down her nose to wear more spots in the quickly melting patch of snow in front of her.
She cried for her failure, she cried for her inadequacy, she cried for the lies she'd told and the friendships that were strained. She cried for her mom, who always knew what she needed to hear in moments like this. She cried for Draco, this poor man who she pulled along into her web of lies and heartbreak. She cried for the black eye Ron was sure to sport tomorrow. She cried for all of the characters in her favorite books who's sadness had been her lifeline in times like this. It wasn't fair to them. It wasn't fair to their problems to be burdened by the weight of this witch's crumbling world. She cried for her freezing fingers and nose and Draco's willingness to sit by the broken girl with a heart as cold as the weather.
These tears were silent.
She slowly brought her stiff back to its upright position and looked over at the blonde man sitting beside her.
She didn't expect him to come, but even more, she didn't expect the deep sadness and concern that consumed his usually stoic features.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He moved his arm around her small shoulders and pulled the tearful witch into him.
She let the cloak he wore float around her body, she let his fingers innocently run laps along her shoulder, and she let them sit there in silence watching the stillness of the lake as more snow slowly fell around them.
That's what winter is for, after all. Letting your fake boyfriend keep you warm. Keep you from freezing.
They sat in silence for a while just like that before he rubbed his free thumb across her cheeks to brush away the remaining tears. She'd just barely stopped crying. His touch was so gentle and so calming. He let his fingers brush underneath her chin, turning her tearstained face toward his own.
"Don't ever let anyone do that," he spoke in a stern voice, though she could hear that it was laced with something shaky and sad.
"Do what?" She asked.
"Take away your happiness without a fight. It's like killing yourself - except it's worse because instead of killing your body, you're killing your soul." She could hear the strain in his usually steady voice that told her he'd seen this kind of soul murder before.
Draco bled this vulnerability that he'd never dared to show anyone before.
She knew this wasn't part of the game they'd waged.
"Oh, it wasn't without a fight." A light smile tugged at her brightening cheeks. "I punched the prat square in the eye before I left."
At first, it was just an unblinking stare, but then his features contorted into something she wasn't sure she had ever seen. Draco couldn't help himself, laughter consumed him at the boldness of the witch sitting in his arms. Soon, she began laughing with him, throwing her head back as she considered her dramatic exit.
She laughed at the look on Lavender's face when her fist collided with her boyfriend's face. She laughed at the strangled grunt of pain he let slip through his damned lips. She laughed at Lavender's shrill shriek and at the loud smack that resonated off the dorm walls as the time of impact. She laughed at the irony of the boy she was currently laughing with, him having been the only other object of her nose-breaking punch before. She laughed at the crinkles that formed next to his eyes as they shut, utterly consumed with amusement.
And she continued to laugh for the sheer humor of how horrible her day had been.
But then again, here she was laughing at the end of it, so maybe it hadn't been all bad after all.
Draco preferred this side of Hermione to the weeping hysterics he'd seen only a few minutes before. This was the version of Hermione Granger that he could get used to. The kind he could fake-date.
.
.
A/N: Well, my readers, my friends... Here is a very emotionally-powerful chapter. This is real, to me. Sometimes we have bad days and sometimes it seems as if everything is against us, and sometimes we cry. I'm sorry if aspects of this aren't what you expected or like, but I wouldn't go this direction if it didn't play a role in a bigger (hopefully good) plot! I will promise that this is not going to be a total Ron-bashing fic. There is much more to come as our plot develops.
Beta Love for Rachelletwin2 and soundsoulsoundmindweakbody! Any errors that remain are my own.
Disclaimer: All publically recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of J.K. Rowling.
Many thanks to anyone who takes the time to read this story, OxfordElise