HP -- Getting a Life VI: Just a Tad
Title: Getting a Life
Chapter: 6. Just a Tad
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,680
Warnings: a wretched pun?
Summary: Hermione Granger loves metaphors. Draco Malfoy loves Muggle cigarettes. What happens when the king of Slytherin and the queen of the library collide?
Author's Note: Just remember that you're doing this to yourself. ♥
DRACO
I didn’t explain to my illustrious roommates why, at approximately seven o’clock on a Wednesday evening, I exploded into the dorm, careened up the stairs, and commenced furiously brushing my teeth, an activity that I followed with the severe scouring of my face with a washcloth and a lot of spitting into the sink, punctuated by bouts of scrubbing my hands under the faucet. They wouldn’t have grasped the nuances of my design, and, furthermore, I didn’t trust them to keep their fat mouths shut about it. Presuming that I told them and they managed to comprehend, odds were that they would be inclined to chortle, snigger, and otherwise express their malevolent glee at the most inopportune moments, and they would therein expose me. That was a risk I was not willing to take-not now, when the chips were down and the bets were in, and all that remained was to wait and see what card came up next.
There was little doubt in my mind that I was ahead at the moment-that I was winning by a landslide, to be more precise. But if I let my guard down now, there was still time to lose everything. No, better to watch, to wait, to judge, and to strike again, harder and faster.
The plan was extraordinarily simple, a trivial teenager’s ploy, used and reused: I was going to make Hermione Granger fall madly in love with me, and then I was going to humiliate her in front of the entire school-and the entire wizarding community, if I could manage it. It was exceedingly uncomplicated, and that was why it was going to work. That, and the fact that Granger, isolated by her vast intelligence, lonely at the snowy summit of brilliance, casting a desperate glance below to seek some kind soul to act as her anchor, was extremely vulnerable.
And extremely stupid, and extremely sentimental.
Maybe this was too easy.
The next morning, I strolled into Potions a few seconds shy of late-though today, I didn’t stroll so much as stumble, the picture of ambivalent agony, lavender circles under my eyes to match the violet bruises on my cheeks; hair arranged in “haphazard disarray;” everything ostensibly unsettled and uncomfortable. I was Rodin’s Thinker with heavy undercurrents of Pietà anguish. I slumped in my desk and made it absolutely clear that I resolutely refused to look at the dear, sweet Mudblood sitting not far away, for surely my tortured heart would break in two. Surely the purgatory prison to which the tyrant Love had condemned me was already too much. Surely no one could ask any more of this hapless, helpless, hopeless soul!
My serpentine compatriots were even more confused than usual. Consequently, I ignored them. As far as everything that mattered was concerned, they were little more than pawns on this grandiose chessboard. I liked to consider myself more of a knight-imposing enough on the superficial level, but with the real power in the swift and unexpected attacks.
A bit conceited of an analysis, perhaps. I never claimed humility among my sparing virtues. That, however, was one thing that I did admire in myself-my brutal honesty. I was willing to say things from which legions of others shied away-and I was willing to express them concisely, in the most appropriate terms available, terms that “civilized” folk frowned upon. Terms like Mudblood.
We all knew it was the right word for it-short, accurate, and precise. Why equivocate? They just weren’t the same stock as the rest of us. It was an established fact. What did we stand to gain by sugarcoating the reality?
Call it bigotry if you want. I’ve heard it all before.
As the materials for the lesson were distributed, everything seemed comfortingly normal. Snape looked as sour as if he had recently drunk something out of Neville Longbottom’s misguided cauldron; Longbottom himself was staring morosely at the instructions laid out before him; Blaise Zabini was trying to make eye contact with me so that he wouldn’t get stuck with a partner who was utterly inept; Potter and his red-headed tumor-pardon me, friend-were conspiring, possibly planning their next act of harrowing heroism; and Granger was reviewing the neat set of notes she’d written out to help her perfect today’s potion. She sensed my eyes on her and started to look up and meet them. I chose that opportunity to drop my gaze demurely, slowly enough that she’d see me do it, and turned to Blaise.
The coyness was then very abruptly decapitated, because I had no further use for it.
“You going to fuck it up this time?” I asked him.
He snorted. “You fucked it up last time,” he responded.
I didn’t deign to argue with him. We both knew who had fucked it up and who hadn’t.
We also both knew, and hour and a half later, to whose credit it stood that our project was bubbling tranquilly, releasing a thin, sweet-smelling steam that curled its way upward towards the arching ceiling of the dungeon. Blaise could not bring himself to feel a flush of victory, however, because General Mudblood Granger, with Lieutenant Idiot Longbottom at her side, had managed to whip up her own batch of sickening orange syrup first.
The bitch.
Blaise continued to mutter about the indignity of it all as we sat back and twiddled our thumbs until the remaining fifteen minutes of class wore out. I considered maneuvering some way to necessitate my partnering up with Granger next time in the interest of my ultimate goal, but despite all the progress I could make with hesitant smiles and kind words in that setting, it was too risky and too obvious. There were other ways to get her undivided attention and appeal to the hormone-ridden, lonely little girl that was Hermione Granger. I wasn’t worried. I had time.
That evening, I fortified myself with a few cancer sticks and then tracked her down in the library again. “Tracked her down” is very appropriate terminology. This arrangement was predatory in the profoundest sense.
She looked up at me and smiled, and I knew that I had her in range of my teeth. I used them to smile back-for the moment. “Walk with me?” I asked.
She did, and we sat on the hill overlooking the lake and let the wind try to scalp us. As we perched there in pensive silence, I considered my hands as if they were the most important thing I’d ever seen.
“This is hard,” I mumbled, knowing she’d perceive the object of my hanging ‘this.’ “I mean…I’m the single heir to one of the most famous wizarding families in the history of the world, and you’re…” I cut myself off and put on my Miserable Face. It was one of my best faces.
“A Mudblood?” Granger supplied airily.
The surprise with which I looked up was genuine, unlike the “misery” before it. The calm with which she was employing the word-that spoke volumes of its impotence. Maybe I had overused it a little. Just a tad.
“Yeah, I guess,” I muttered, lowering my eyes again.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ my ass, I thought vindictively. There’s no guessing here. She’d a Mudblood, no two ways about it, and that is an absolutely disgusting thing to be. Don’t let her touch you, or you’ll never be able to get it off.
Granger watched the wind rip leaves off of the trees that dared poke their heads up into the horizon. “Muggle things aren’t as bad as you seem to think they are,” she declared quietly. “They’ve got movie theaters and microwaves, and ballpoint pens and fluorescent lights, and automated alarm systems and iris scanners.” She paused, and I wavered over what I should conclude about the fact that she referred to Muggles as they. I didn’t have long to mull over it before she concluded, “And cigarettes.”
My head jerked up sharply again, and too late I realized how stupid and obvious the gesture was. Instead of crowing over her victory, Hermione Granger offered no more and no less than a thin, ironic smile that was almost sad.
“You smell like tobacco,” she informed me. “And you go dashing out of class and disappear for awhile, entirely discomfited, and then you’re cool and collected when you come back. How many today? Three? Four? A pack?”
I transferred my gaze to the ground just in time, such that I glared at the grass and not at her-much as I would have reveled in it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I announced, as idiotic as it sounded even to my own ears.
“There are Muggle ways to stop, too,” she added. “Patches and pills and so on.”
“I don’t have a problem, all right?” I couldn’t help the sneer. It was so natural. It was me.
She shrugged. “De Nile is more than just a river in Egypt.”
The statement was absurdly stupid to begin with, and, as if that wasn’t enough, it came out of the faultlessly intelligent, endlessly mature Hermione Granger’s notoriously articulate mouth. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed-hard.
Apparently the conversation was over, because she stood up and shook out her robes. I took to my feet as well, primarily because I despised the very idea of being at a disadvantage. I expected Granger to take that opportunity to try to kiss me or something, but she didn’t. Maybe it was my newfound tobacco aura. That could be a pretty good warding charm, come to think of it.
Instead, she patted me on the arm, bid me goodnight, and walked off with her head held high and her ridiculous hair streaming away as if it wanted to follow the wind to the ends of the earth.
Perhaps, I thought as I trudged my way back to the dorm, dodging teachers and tattletales alike as I went, this endeavor would be a little harder than I thought.
Only a little. Just a tad.
[Chapter V] [Chapter VII]
Chapter: 6. Just a Tad
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,680
Warnings: a wretched pun?
Summary: Hermione Granger loves metaphors. Draco Malfoy loves Muggle cigarettes. What happens when the king of Slytherin and the queen of the library collide?
Author's Note: Just remember that you're doing this to yourself. ♥
DRACO
I didn’t explain to my illustrious roommates why, at approximately seven o’clock on a Wednesday evening, I exploded into the dorm, careened up the stairs, and commenced furiously brushing my teeth, an activity that I followed with the severe scouring of my face with a washcloth and a lot of spitting into the sink, punctuated by bouts of scrubbing my hands under the faucet. They wouldn’t have grasped the nuances of my design, and, furthermore, I didn’t trust them to keep their fat mouths shut about it. Presuming that I told them and they managed to comprehend, odds were that they would be inclined to chortle, snigger, and otherwise express their malevolent glee at the most inopportune moments, and they would therein expose me. That was a risk I was not willing to take-not now, when the chips were down and the bets were in, and all that remained was to wait and see what card came up next.
There was little doubt in my mind that I was ahead at the moment-that I was winning by a landslide, to be more precise. But if I let my guard down now, there was still time to lose everything. No, better to watch, to wait, to judge, and to strike again, harder and faster.
The plan was extraordinarily simple, a trivial teenager’s ploy, used and reused: I was going to make Hermione Granger fall madly in love with me, and then I was going to humiliate her in front of the entire school-and the entire wizarding community, if I could manage it. It was exceedingly uncomplicated, and that was why it was going to work. That, and the fact that Granger, isolated by her vast intelligence, lonely at the snowy summit of brilliance, casting a desperate glance below to seek some kind soul to act as her anchor, was extremely vulnerable.
And extremely stupid, and extremely sentimental.
Maybe this was too easy.
The next morning, I strolled into Potions a few seconds shy of late-though today, I didn’t stroll so much as stumble, the picture of ambivalent agony, lavender circles under my eyes to match the violet bruises on my cheeks; hair arranged in “haphazard disarray;” everything ostensibly unsettled and uncomfortable. I was Rodin’s Thinker with heavy undercurrents of Pietà anguish. I slumped in my desk and made it absolutely clear that I resolutely refused to look at the dear, sweet Mudblood sitting not far away, for surely my tortured heart would break in two. Surely the purgatory prison to which the tyrant Love had condemned me was already too much. Surely no one could ask any more of this hapless, helpless, hopeless soul!
My serpentine compatriots were even more confused than usual. Consequently, I ignored them. As far as everything that mattered was concerned, they were little more than pawns on this grandiose chessboard. I liked to consider myself more of a knight-imposing enough on the superficial level, but with the real power in the swift and unexpected attacks.
A bit conceited of an analysis, perhaps. I never claimed humility among my sparing virtues. That, however, was one thing that I did admire in myself-my brutal honesty. I was willing to say things from which legions of others shied away-and I was willing to express them concisely, in the most appropriate terms available, terms that “civilized” folk frowned upon. Terms like Mudblood.
We all knew it was the right word for it-short, accurate, and precise. Why equivocate? They just weren’t the same stock as the rest of us. It was an established fact. What did we stand to gain by sugarcoating the reality?
Call it bigotry if you want. I’ve heard it all before.
As the materials for the lesson were distributed, everything seemed comfortingly normal. Snape looked as sour as if he had recently drunk something out of Neville Longbottom’s misguided cauldron; Longbottom himself was staring morosely at the instructions laid out before him; Blaise Zabini was trying to make eye contact with me so that he wouldn’t get stuck with a partner who was utterly inept; Potter and his red-headed tumor-pardon me, friend-were conspiring, possibly planning their next act of harrowing heroism; and Granger was reviewing the neat set of notes she’d written out to help her perfect today’s potion. She sensed my eyes on her and started to look up and meet them. I chose that opportunity to drop my gaze demurely, slowly enough that she’d see me do it, and turned to Blaise.
The coyness was then very abruptly decapitated, because I had no further use for it.
“You going to fuck it up this time?” I asked him.
He snorted. “You fucked it up last time,” he responded.
I didn’t deign to argue with him. We both knew who had fucked it up and who hadn’t.
We also both knew, and hour and a half later, to whose credit it stood that our project was bubbling tranquilly, releasing a thin, sweet-smelling steam that curled its way upward towards the arching ceiling of the dungeon. Blaise could not bring himself to feel a flush of victory, however, because General Mudblood Granger, with Lieutenant Idiot Longbottom at her side, had managed to whip up her own batch of sickening orange syrup first.
The bitch.
Blaise continued to mutter about the indignity of it all as we sat back and twiddled our thumbs until the remaining fifteen minutes of class wore out. I considered maneuvering some way to necessitate my partnering up with Granger next time in the interest of my ultimate goal, but despite all the progress I could make with hesitant smiles and kind words in that setting, it was too risky and too obvious. There were other ways to get her undivided attention and appeal to the hormone-ridden, lonely little girl that was Hermione Granger. I wasn’t worried. I had time.
That evening, I fortified myself with a few cancer sticks and then tracked her down in the library again. “Tracked her down” is very appropriate terminology. This arrangement was predatory in the profoundest sense.
She looked up at me and smiled, and I knew that I had her in range of my teeth. I used them to smile back-for the moment. “Walk with me?” I asked.
She did, and we sat on the hill overlooking the lake and let the wind try to scalp us. As we perched there in pensive silence, I considered my hands as if they were the most important thing I’d ever seen.
“This is hard,” I mumbled, knowing she’d perceive the object of my hanging ‘this.’ “I mean…I’m the single heir to one of the most famous wizarding families in the history of the world, and you’re…” I cut myself off and put on my Miserable Face. It was one of my best faces.
“A Mudblood?” Granger supplied airily.
The surprise with which I looked up was genuine, unlike the “misery” before it. The calm with which she was employing the word-that spoke volumes of its impotence. Maybe I had overused it a little. Just a tad.
“Yeah, I guess,” I muttered, lowering my eyes again.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ my ass, I thought vindictively. There’s no guessing here. She’d a Mudblood, no two ways about it, and that is an absolutely disgusting thing to be. Don’t let her touch you, or you’ll never be able to get it off.
Granger watched the wind rip leaves off of the trees that dared poke their heads up into the horizon. “Muggle things aren’t as bad as you seem to think they are,” she declared quietly. “They’ve got movie theaters and microwaves, and ballpoint pens and fluorescent lights, and automated alarm systems and iris scanners.” She paused, and I wavered over what I should conclude about the fact that she referred to Muggles as they. I didn’t have long to mull over it before she concluded, “And cigarettes.”
My head jerked up sharply again, and too late I realized how stupid and obvious the gesture was. Instead of crowing over her victory, Hermione Granger offered no more and no less than a thin, ironic smile that was almost sad.
“You smell like tobacco,” she informed me. “And you go dashing out of class and disappear for awhile, entirely discomfited, and then you’re cool and collected when you come back. How many today? Three? Four? A pack?”
I transferred my gaze to the ground just in time, such that I glared at the grass and not at her-much as I would have reveled in it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I announced, as idiotic as it sounded even to my own ears.
“There are Muggle ways to stop, too,” she added. “Patches and pills and so on.”
“I don’t have a problem, all right?” I couldn’t help the sneer. It was so natural. It was me.
She shrugged. “De Nile is more than just a river in Egypt.”
The statement was absurdly stupid to begin with, and, as if that wasn’t enough, it came out of the faultlessly intelligent, endlessly mature Hermione Granger’s notoriously articulate mouth. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed-hard.
Apparently the conversation was over, because she stood up and shook out her robes. I took to my feet as well, primarily because I despised the very idea of being at a disadvantage. I expected Granger to take that opportunity to try to kiss me or something, but she didn’t. Maybe it was my newfound tobacco aura. That could be a pretty good warding charm, come to think of it.
Instead, she patted me on the arm, bid me goodnight, and walked off with her head held high and her ridiculous hair streaming away as if it wanted to follow the wind to the ends of the earth.
Perhaps, I thought as I trudged my way back to the dorm, dodging teachers and tattletales alike as I went, this endeavor would be a little harder than I thought.
Only a little. Just a tad.
[Chapter V] [Chapter VII]