HP -- Getting a Life X: Honestly
Title: Getting a Life
Chapter: 10. Honestly
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,121
Warnings: same ol', same ol'... and another fistfight, ooh!
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, kids. F-bombs make the world go 'round.
DRACO
Blaise Zabini is a stupid asshole.
“Holy Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed, in that stupid asshole way he had.
“It’s kind of the point of Jesus that he’s holy,” I noted. “That’s redundant.”
“You’re a fucking idiot!” he continued, as if I hadn’t made a very valid point.
I sighed. It’s so hard to reason with stupid assholes.
“What?” he demanded. “What?”
“You’re a stupid asshole, Blaise,” I explained patiently.
“No, you’re a stupid asshole, Draco fucking Malfoy. You fucking puked in the fucking trashcan!”
He had a point. But that didn’t alleviate the grievous offense.
“‘Come not within the measure of my wrath,’” I warned him halfheartedly.
Cracking an eye open revealed that, as expected, he was staring at me dumbly.
“Valentine. The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” I told him.
“So now you’re a stupid crazy asshole,” he muttered.
“Real mature,” I shot back. “At least I’m not a stupid illiterate asshole like you.”
Crabbe and Goyle wandered in and paused as one.
“What’s going on?” Crabbe inquired.
“Smells like shit in here,” Goyle commented.
Actually, it smelled like puke. The unbelievable stupidity of some people. Honestly.
As any fool could have predicted, even Blaise Zabini, I had a hellacious hangover the next morning. I drank some orange juice, gritted my teeth, and bore it. I wouldn’t give Blaise the satisfaction of hearing me complain-not after the bullshit homilies he’d tried to give me the night before, all that crap about ruining my life and “squandering” shit… Either he’d been reading a self-help book for alcoholics, or he’d been talking to Hermione Granger. Whatever the case, he was the one who needed “a brain and an attitude adjustment, in that order”-a direct quote.
Honestly.
The owls came, in a mad whirlwind of feathers, a veritable vortex of wings and claws ushered in by a screeching and a fluttering. It was as if the world outside had exhaled into the windows of the Great Hall, birds tumbling like beads of moisture in the gust of foreign air.
I always kind of wanted to put my hands over my food, in case one of those stupid birds decided to take a shit in flight. Invariably I refrained, because if owl shit ended up in my food, once I got over the utter disgust, I’d have a great excuse to make a big, melodramatic fuss, and my father would write a letter to the Ministry so scathing as to strip the skin from its readers. It’d be glorious.
Let ‘em shit. I’d show ‘em.
I was reveling in the deeply pleasing thought of Dumbledore’s wrinkly skin melting off of his face as he scanned my father’s tirade when a regal owl sat its regal owl ass down on my empty plate. I turned its head about a hundred degrees around to glare at me with unsettling yellow eyes like candles lit in the dark.
For a minute I just glared back. My orange juice was going to taste like feathers and dust now, purely as a psychological thing. Having a filthy animal so close to my food just ruined the whole experience of eating.
After trading pointless angry stares with the insensible creature for a little while, I buckled down to untie and remove the small scroll attached to its scaly leg. With all the dignity of a king the thing ruffled its plumage and then took off from a standstill to go soaring out the window, light as-well, a feather.
Scrolls, I reflected, were also very melodramatic. All pseudo-ancient and shit. Nonetheless I unrolled it and looked.
There was no signature, and precious few words, but it didn’t matter.
Mudblood’s onto you. Don’t give her anything to be onto, or you’ll be receiving a lot more than a letter.
Daddy dearest had spoken.
I tapped a fork on the table bemusedly and read the note again. It didn’t take long, of course. This looked bad. In addition, it exacerbated my headache something awful. I tried to take a sip of orange juice, but the pulp stuck in my throat like a crowd squeezing through a bottleneck. Accordingly, I proceeded to snatch someone’s unattended goblet of water and empty it. Reviving liquid life poured down my throat. It felt a damn sight better than my figurative language was turning out.
I put the cup back down and monitored it out of the corner of my eye until its owner sought it again. He was some dark-haired, heavy-browed, thick-headed, Neanderthal sort of individual, and he glanced into his glass and then looked around bewilderedly. I made a point of staring vaguely off into space. That blankness was the ultimate alibi-though if it had been me, the clueless kid would have been my primary suspect. Likely he’d have been too busy thinking to figure out which drink was his.
Fortunately, my Neanderthal neighbor wasn’t quite so astute, and my crime went unpunished.
That was all right, in terms of karma and universal justice and all that. My father was probably going to kick my ass soon enough, and if there was anything left of me, Harry Potter would spit on it and Ron Weasley would grind it into the pavement with his heel.
I considered how I was going to wreak my bloody revenge on Granger. Stupid thing to do-get my father into this. Lucius Malfoy prowling around this dump of a school looking for problems was the dead last thing we needed.
It was hard enough thinking through my hellish headache, and ignoring McGonagall’s droning about Transfiguration-this and Transfiguration-that made it verge on impossible.
“Mister Malfoy?” she said near the zenith of my inattentiveness, in that sniffy you’re-in-trouble-young-man voice of hers.
“Yeah?” I muttered back. It wasn’t the response she was looking for, but I was too strung out and pissed off to give a damn.
“Would you care to answer the question?” she inquired pointedly.
“Not really,” I replied truthfully. Don’t all the parables for children proclaim that honesty is the best policy? …Besides, I didn’t know what the question was.
“Ten points from Slytherin,” she noted calmly.
I shrugged. It wasn’t like we’d ever win anything with the Implausible Potter-Man patrolling the halls of Hogwarts, besting endless exams with a single stroke of his quill and snatching honorable victory from the jaws of humiliating defeat in everything from Quidditch games to duels with Voldemort. I wanted to say that nobody that smooth could possibly be real, but he was. The stupid asshole.
It wasn’t even Potter I was really begrudging at that particular moment. Not McGonagall either, as much of a smarmy bitch as she was. No, it was Hermione Granger that I was going to kick the shit out of.
If you’ll pardon my ending a sentence with a preposition.
Just after the lunch rush I found a group of Ravenclaw First and Second Years. The exalted trio of my enemies loitered not far off. No one had seen me, because I didn’t need an Invisibility Cloak to walk quietly with my head down, and that was all it usually took. Nonchalantly, I tossed a smoke bomb into the midst of the knot of kids. There were sparks, then a bang, then a beautiful plume of navy blue smoke that blossomed outward and spread to create a low-hanging cloud. Stupid boys shouted out awkward curses to seem tough, and the girls who had been flirting with them released ear-splitting shrieks that would have made a banshee proud. Then, utterly predictably, the three idiot Gryffindors, in the heroic meddling tradition of their house, hastened to the rescue by diving without hesitation into the sulfurous chaos.
Self-righteous fools. They were going to get themselves killed that way, one of these days. My personal hope was for sooner rather than later.
It was a small matter to catch Granger’s sleeve and, before she’d even realized what was happening, drag her into a conveniently-located janitor’s closet and slam the door. There were a lot of those closets around. I suppose when you have one man doing the janitorial duties for an entire castle, he needs a couple of good closets here and there.
I’d shoved Granger down onto a box of latex gloves, muttered “Expelliarmus,” and caught her wand in one hand before she’d finished blinking acrid smoke out of her yes. The first thing she did was reach for her wand, and the second thing she did was frown at me when she saw that I had it.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“Go fuck yourself, Granger,” I responded calmly.
“You know,” she remarked, “maybe I would, if you hadn’t locked me in a closet.”
“Know what, Granger?” I countered. “I wouldn’t have had to lock you in a closet if you hadn’t been stupid enough to go to my father behind my back.” When she only snorted, I found myself scowling petulantly. At least the relative darkness was easy on my eyes and my throbbing head. “Know what’ll happen if he finds out about all the shit going down here, Granger? He’ll fucking slaughter me, that’s what.” I jammed her wand in a pocket next to mine. My hands were shaking so hard that I thought I might drop it.
“You’re really pale,” Granger told me tentatively, standing slowly. “Are you okay?”
“I need a fucking cigarette,” I muttered. I patted a few pockets before remembering that I wasn’t dumb enough to carry evidence around with me.
Granger’s hand was on my shoulder. “Draco-” she began softly.
I batted it away. “Fuck off,” I snapped.
“Ever thought about what’ll happen if you keep this up, Draco?” she asked sharply, sounding remarkably similar to McGonagall. “I have. You want to die in a gutter somewhere, Draco Malfoy? Your dad would be real proud of that, wouldn’t he? Think again, stupid. You’re letting him down. You’re letting down everyone who has ever tried to give you a decent life. And you’re letting yourself down, because you have more potential than just about anybody here, and you’re wasting it.”
She was like a fly, buzzing insistently around my head, tickling my ears. I tried to swat at her, but she ducked my hand easily and then held it fast in both of hers, one of which had a knit glove on it. “Listen to me, Draco,” she persisted. “Think about it. Do you really want to be this way for the rest of your life?”
“You gonna’ read my palm next?” I snapped, trying to jerk my hand away. Maybe, I reflected, she’d let go if I bit her.
I heard the door open behind me, and Granger whipped around to look. I turned, too, and the rapid motion made me dizzy.
But not as much as did the punch that Ronald Weasley slammed into my face with a strength I never would have attributed to him.
My head rang, and spots danced in front of my eyes. Trying to force them away, I swung back blindly, and my fist connected with something solid. Glass tinkled and sliced vindictively into my knuckles.
Harry Potter said, “Jesus Christ!”, and Granger gasped out, “Don’t rub your eyes!”
As my vision cleared, I could make out a large, red-haired object moving towards me, curses spewing from its mouth. I came at it with a lacerated fist raised. I went for the figure’s neck, and he went for my face.
My hands grappling their way around Weasley’s throat, I shoved him up against the wall and tried to center my slippery palms, but I couldn’t get any traction due to the quantity of blood on my hands. Ron kicked like a thing possessed, and his clenched fist caught me under the chin. Inadvertently I bit my lip, hard, and blood ran hot and thick over my tongue even as Harry Potter grabbed the back of my clothes and yanked. Overpriced robes gave way with a sound like a rent slashed through the very fabric of the universe, but I pulled away and pressed my thumb hard against Weasley’s windpipe. Urgently someone’s fingers scrabbled against me. I was too preoccupied with strangling the flame-haired rat in front of me to react, but even as I dodged another vicious blow from Weasley’s foot and the desperate rake of his fingernails that immediately followed, Potter jerked me back with more strength than I could fight. The next thing I knew, I was lying flat on the dirty floor, and Granger was pointing a wand in my face-whose I couldn’t even tell.
If that wasn’t bullshit, I didn’t know what was. Three against one, from the world’s leading proponents of fair play? What crap is that?
Honestly.
[Chapter IX] [Chapter XI]
Chapter: 10. Honestly
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,121
Warnings: same ol', same ol'... and another fistfight, ooh!
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, kids. F-bombs make the world go 'round.
DRACO
Blaise Zabini is a stupid asshole.
“Holy Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed, in that stupid asshole way he had.
“It’s kind of the point of Jesus that he’s holy,” I noted. “That’s redundant.”
“You’re a fucking idiot!” he continued, as if I hadn’t made a very valid point.
I sighed. It’s so hard to reason with stupid assholes.
“What?” he demanded. “What?”
“You’re a stupid asshole, Blaise,” I explained patiently.
“No, you’re a stupid asshole, Draco fucking Malfoy. You fucking puked in the fucking trashcan!”
He had a point. But that didn’t alleviate the grievous offense.
“‘Come not within the measure of my wrath,’” I warned him halfheartedly.
Cracking an eye open revealed that, as expected, he was staring at me dumbly.
“Valentine. The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” I told him.
“So now you’re a stupid crazy asshole,” he muttered.
“Real mature,” I shot back. “At least I’m not a stupid illiterate asshole like you.”
Crabbe and Goyle wandered in and paused as one.
“What’s going on?” Crabbe inquired.
“Smells like shit in here,” Goyle commented.
Actually, it smelled like puke. The unbelievable stupidity of some people. Honestly.
As any fool could have predicted, even Blaise Zabini, I had a hellacious hangover the next morning. I drank some orange juice, gritted my teeth, and bore it. I wouldn’t give Blaise the satisfaction of hearing me complain-not after the bullshit homilies he’d tried to give me the night before, all that crap about ruining my life and “squandering” shit… Either he’d been reading a self-help book for alcoholics, or he’d been talking to Hermione Granger. Whatever the case, he was the one who needed “a brain and an attitude adjustment, in that order”-a direct quote.
Honestly.
The owls came, in a mad whirlwind of feathers, a veritable vortex of wings and claws ushered in by a screeching and a fluttering. It was as if the world outside had exhaled into the windows of the Great Hall, birds tumbling like beads of moisture in the gust of foreign air.
I always kind of wanted to put my hands over my food, in case one of those stupid birds decided to take a shit in flight. Invariably I refrained, because if owl shit ended up in my food, once I got over the utter disgust, I’d have a great excuse to make a big, melodramatic fuss, and my father would write a letter to the Ministry so scathing as to strip the skin from its readers. It’d be glorious.
Let ‘em shit. I’d show ‘em.
I was reveling in the deeply pleasing thought of Dumbledore’s wrinkly skin melting off of his face as he scanned my father’s tirade when a regal owl sat its regal owl ass down on my empty plate. I turned its head about a hundred degrees around to glare at me with unsettling yellow eyes like candles lit in the dark.
For a minute I just glared back. My orange juice was going to taste like feathers and dust now, purely as a psychological thing. Having a filthy animal so close to my food just ruined the whole experience of eating.
After trading pointless angry stares with the insensible creature for a little while, I buckled down to untie and remove the small scroll attached to its scaly leg. With all the dignity of a king the thing ruffled its plumage and then took off from a standstill to go soaring out the window, light as-well, a feather.
Scrolls, I reflected, were also very melodramatic. All pseudo-ancient and shit. Nonetheless I unrolled it and looked.
There was no signature, and precious few words, but it didn’t matter.
Mudblood’s onto you. Don’t give her anything to be onto, or you’ll be receiving a lot more than a letter.
Daddy dearest had spoken.
I tapped a fork on the table bemusedly and read the note again. It didn’t take long, of course. This looked bad. In addition, it exacerbated my headache something awful. I tried to take a sip of orange juice, but the pulp stuck in my throat like a crowd squeezing through a bottleneck. Accordingly, I proceeded to snatch someone’s unattended goblet of water and empty it. Reviving liquid life poured down my throat. It felt a damn sight better than my figurative language was turning out.
I put the cup back down and monitored it out of the corner of my eye until its owner sought it again. He was some dark-haired, heavy-browed, thick-headed, Neanderthal sort of individual, and he glanced into his glass and then looked around bewilderedly. I made a point of staring vaguely off into space. That blankness was the ultimate alibi-though if it had been me, the clueless kid would have been my primary suspect. Likely he’d have been too busy thinking to figure out which drink was his.
Fortunately, my Neanderthal neighbor wasn’t quite so astute, and my crime went unpunished.
That was all right, in terms of karma and universal justice and all that. My father was probably going to kick my ass soon enough, and if there was anything left of me, Harry Potter would spit on it and Ron Weasley would grind it into the pavement with his heel.
I considered how I was going to wreak my bloody revenge on Granger. Stupid thing to do-get my father into this. Lucius Malfoy prowling around this dump of a school looking for problems was the dead last thing we needed.
It was hard enough thinking through my hellish headache, and ignoring McGonagall’s droning about Transfiguration-this and Transfiguration-that made it verge on impossible.
“Mister Malfoy?” she said near the zenith of my inattentiveness, in that sniffy you’re-in-trouble-young-man voice of hers.
“Yeah?” I muttered back. It wasn’t the response she was looking for, but I was too strung out and pissed off to give a damn.
“Would you care to answer the question?” she inquired pointedly.
“Not really,” I replied truthfully. Don’t all the parables for children proclaim that honesty is the best policy? …Besides, I didn’t know what the question was.
“Ten points from Slytherin,” she noted calmly.
I shrugged. It wasn’t like we’d ever win anything with the Implausible Potter-Man patrolling the halls of Hogwarts, besting endless exams with a single stroke of his quill and snatching honorable victory from the jaws of humiliating defeat in everything from Quidditch games to duels with Voldemort. I wanted to say that nobody that smooth could possibly be real, but he was. The stupid asshole.
It wasn’t even Potter I was really begrudging at that particular moment. Not McGonagall either, as much of a smarmy bitch as she was. No, it was Hermione Granger that I was going to kick the shit out of.
If you’ll pardon my ending a sentence with a preposition.
Just after the lunch rush I found a group of Ravenclaw First and Second Years. The exalted trio of my enemies loitered not far off. No one had seen me, because I didn’t need an Invisibility Cloak to walk quietly with my head down, and that was all it usually took. Nonchalantly, I tossed a smoke bomb into the midst of the knot of kids. There were sparks, then a bang, then a beautiful plume of navy blue smoke that blossomed outward and spread to create a low-hanging cloud. Stupid boys shouted out awkward curses to seem tough, and the girls who had been flirting with them released ear-splitting shrieks that would have made a banshee proud. Then, utterly predictably, the three idiot Gryffindors, in the heroic meddling tradition of their house, hastened to the rescue by diving without hesitation into the sulfurous chaos.
Self-righteous fools. They were going to get themselves killed that way, one of these days. My personal hope was for sooner rather than later.
It was a small matter to catch Granger’s sleeve and, before she’d even realized what was happening, drag her into a conveniently-located janitor’s closet and slam the door. There were a lot of those closets around. I suppose when you have one man doing the janitorial duties for an entire castle, he needs a couple of good closets here and there.
I’d shoved Granger down onto a box of latex gloves, muttered “Expelliarmus,” and caught her wand in one hand before she’d finished blinking acrid smoke out of her yes. The first thing she did was reach for her wand, and the second thing she did was frown at me when she saw that I had it.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“Go fuck yourself, Granger,” I responded calmly.
“You know,” she remarked, “maybe I would, if you hadn’t locked me in a closet.”
“Know what, Granger?” I countered. “I wouldn’t have had to lock you in a closet if you hadn’t been stupid enough to go to my father behind my back.” When she only snorted, I found myself scowling petulantly. At least the relative darkness was easy on my eyes and my throbbing head. “Know what’ll happen if he finds out about all the shit going down here, Granger? He’ll fucking slaughter me, that’s what.” I jammed her wand in a pocket next to mine. My hands were shaking so hard that I thought I might drop it.
“You’re really pale,” Granger told me tentatively, standing slowly. “Are you okay?”
“I need a fucking cigarette,” I muttered. I patted a few pockets before remembering that I wasn’t dumb enough to carry evidence around with me.
Granger’s hand was on my shoulder. “Draco-” she began softly.
I batted it away. “Fuck off,” I snapped.
“Ever thought about what’ll happen if you keep this up, Draco?” she asked sharply, sounding remarkably similar to McGonagall. “I have. You want to die in a gutter somewhere, Draco Malfoy? Your dad would be real proud of that, wouldn’t he? Think again, stupid. You’re letting him down. You’re letting down everyone who has ever tried to give you a decent life. And you’re letting yourself down, because you have more potential than just about anybody here, and you’re wasting it.”
She was like a fly, buzzing insistently around my head, tickling my ears. I tried to swat at her, but she ducked my hand easily and then held it fast in both of hers, one of which had a knit glove on it. “Listen to me, Draco,” she persisted. “Think about it. Do you really want to be this way for the rest of your life?”
“You gonna’ read my palm next?” I snapped, trying to jerk my hand away. Maybe, I reflected, she’d let go if I bit her.
I heard the door open behind me, and Granger whipped around to look. I turned, too, and the rapid motion made me dizzy.
But not as much as did the punch that Ronald Weasley slammed into my face with a strength I never would have attributed to him.
My head rang, and spots danced in front of my eyes. Trying to force them away, I swung back blindly, and my fist connected with something solid. Glass tinkled and sliced vindictively into my knuckles.
Harry Potter said, “Jesus Christ!”, and Granger gasped out, “Don’t rub your eyes!”
As my vision cleared, I could make out a large, red-haired object moving towards me, curses spewing from its mouth. I came at it with a lacerated fist raised. I went for the figure’s neck, and he went for my face.
My hands grappling their way around Weasley’s throat, I shoved him up against the wall and tried to center my slippery palms, but I couldn’t get any traction due to the quantity of blood on my hands. Ron kicked like a thing possessed, and his clenched fist caught me under the chin. Inadvertently I bit my lip, hard, and blood ran hot and thick over my tongue even as Harry Potter grabbed the back of my clothes and yanked. Overpriced robes gave way with a sound like a rent slashed through the very fabric of the universe, but I pulled away and pressed my thumb hard against Weasley’s windpipe. Urgently someone’s fingers scrabbled against me. I was too preoccupied with strangling the flame-haired rat in front of me to react, but even as I dodged another vicious blow from Weasley’s foot and the desperate rake of his fingernails that immediately followed, Potter jerked me back with more strength than I could fight. The next thing I knew, I was lying flat on the dirty floor, and Granger was pointing a wand in my face-whose I couldn’t even tell.
If that wasn’t bullshit, I didn’t know what was. Three against one, from the world’s leading proponents of fair play? What crap is that?
Honestly.
[Chapter IX] [Chapter XI]