CHAPTER 10
Draco had never been one to suppress natural curiosity, so it wasn’t with much hesitation that he cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself and stole after Hermione and Armani. He kept a steady pace behind them, and was thus able to eavesdrop on everything being said.
“Hermione,” asked Armani as he took off his coat and threw it by a nearby tree. “I’m sure you’ve heard about the upcoming dance by now. Have you considered anyone for that evening?”
Draco could already sense where this conversation was headed, and needless to say, he was already seething (although why this was happening, he was not entirely sure).
“Well, er,” Hermione replied slowly. “I haven’t been thinking about it too much. I mean, I have got to plan the whole thing first before I consider personal matters…but, no. I haven’t yet decided on whom I’ll be going with.”
Armani grinned. It made Draco want to punch him. “Then there’s still hope, eh?”
“Hope for what?”
“That you’d go with me.”
Draco saw Hermione pause, and Armani also turned and faced her. He began to use what Draco had heard other girls identifying as his “velvet voice”.
“You will go with me, won’t you?”
“I don’t know, Alexander,” Hermione said with a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “I’m not exactly a great dancer or very knowledgeable about balls and parties. Maybe you’d have more fun with someone else.”
Armani raised his hand and brushed away a stray lock of hair that was in Hermione’s face. “You’re the only girl I’ve really noticed here, Hermione. I don’t care if you can’t dance or if you don’t know every type of music the band plays. I’m asking you because I feel like we’d be good together, and because I really like you.”
Draco wanted to barf, he really did, but he wanted to stick around long enough to hear Hermione’s response.
“I – I don’t really know what to say, Alexander.” she said.
“Say you’ll go with me,” he murmured. He picked up her hand and held it in his. “Please say yes.”
“Even if I do say yes, you must remember that I have to enter with the Head Boy, and that I must save him one dance that night.”
Draco saw Armani’s face tighten, and he relished the fact that no matter what Hermione’s response would be, he’d still have a small hold on her for a part of the ball.
“I have no objection to you dancing with Malfoy,” Armani said smoothly. “But I do want you to be the one only I hold in my arms after your initial obligations.”
OBJECTION?! Who the hell does this git think he is, a fucking saint? I don’t care if he’s the newest Minister of Magic; he is not going to get me to give her up that easily after just one dance! Draco thought viciously.
“All right, then,” Hermione said to Draco’s immense displeasure. “I suppose you’ve got yourself a date.”
“Excellent!” Armani exclaimed. And then, without warning, he leaned down and kissed Hermione on the cheek.
Draco swallowed hard and it felt like he was trying to swallow a boulder. In his anger, he dimly registered that Hermione stiffened as Armani kissed her, but had then raised her hand to her cheek in slight shock.
Now trying to remember all the human mutation hexes his father had ever taught him, Draco stomped off furiously until he faced the Slytherin Common Room. Muttering the password, (“Salazaar”), he walked inside and threw himself onto the black leather couch where Blaise was busy doing Herbology homework.
Blaise looked up, glanced at Draco’s murderous expression, and quickly set aside his homework. “What’s up, mate? What’s got your knickers in a twist?”
Draco sat down as stiff as a board, and glared into the blazing fire across from him. “How much trouble,” he asked in a dangerously steely voice, “Do you think I’d get into if I were to hex Armani’s lips off of his face?”
Blaise looked slightly taken aback at this inquiry, but he handled it well. “Uh, I’d think you’d get at least four months straight of detention and also expelled from the Quidditch team. Why do you ask?”
“Because the bastard cannot keep his talons to himself, that’s why.”
“Ah, I see.” Blaise said as he nodded his head, and Draco had no doubt that Blaise really did understand. “So Armani cornered Hermione about the ball, eh? I’m sure he coerced her into saying yes.”
Draco conjured up a block of wood with his wand and then blew it to bits. “You bet he did.”
“And I’m sure, knowing you, that you stood by in your newly perfected Disillusionment Charm guise, watching and designing new ways to torture him.”
The block returned bigger this time, and Draco savored the loud “BOOM” it made as it exploded. “Perhaps.”
Blaise sighed loudly and melodramatically. Draco spared him a go-on-bitch-about-whatever-you-have-to-bitch-about look before returning to his block of wood to satiate his affinity for explosions.
Blaise rolled his eyes before using “Evanesco” to get rid of the wood. Thus, Draco’s exploding jinx misfired and instead blew up the opposite couch. The room was suddenly filled with falling feathers and Blaise just sat there giving Draco a look which could only be read as painstaking patience.
Draco knew that normally, the two of them would have had a great laugh over something as stupid as what had just happened, but now was a more serious time, so instead of guffawing, he made a sweeping motion with his wand and all the feathers stuffed themselves back into the couch, making the room look normal again.
“Sorry.” he grunted.
“It’s okay. Now will you just stop messing around and deal with the problem?” Blaise said as he took Draco’s wand from his hand and pocketed it.
Draco plopped himself back down, and Blaise took that as a yes.
“Can you tell me something, Draco?” Blaise asked. “What’s your relationship with Hermione? Are you two just roommates, friends, or is there something more?”
Draco knew this question was coming sooner or later, but he hadn’t given himself the time of day to answer it. He frowned. “I’m not sure, Blaise. One day I feel like she’s just someone who I occasionally say hello to, and she says hello back. But the next day, I look at her and I think she’s the most wondrous thing ever. I look at all the boys ogling her and I feel so possessive and angry. It’s like I don’t want her to be with them, I don’t want her to seem so beautiful to them, I don’t want –”
He stopped because Blaise was staring at him with a most peculiar expression. It was almost like pity and encouragement mixed in together.
Abruptly incensed with himself, Draco got up, grabbed his wand back, and left the common room leaving behind a saddened and somewhat incredulous Blaise.
“You’ve got it bad, Draco Malfoy,” Blaise whispered under his breath. “You’ve got it bad.”
* * * * * * * *
Hermione sat down at dinner confused and indecisive. Alexander had been quite sweet to her just a while ago, and while he was incredibly charming (not to mention good-looking), she hadn’t felt any flurries of excitement when he’d asked her to the ball. Was that normal? Shouldn’t she be intoxicated with his “utter hotness” by now? What was wrong with her?!
“Was wong, Wione?” Ron managed to ask through the enormous hunk of chicken in his mouth.
She shook her head to clarify that nothing was wrong and shot him a look of playful disgust, but was asked the same thing by Harry who thankfully took much smaller bites.
“Everything all right, Hermione?” he asked kindly.
She gave a small smile and nodded, but then Ginny arrived and quickly sat down next to Hermione. “Oi, Hermione, what’s this I’m hearing about you and Alexander getting together for the ball?”
Hermione blushed as Ron and Harry stopped chewing and began to stare at her. “We’re just going as friends, Ginny. He asked me a while ago while we were taking a walk, and I wasn’t very sure at first, but I said yes in the end.”
“Oh, he’s so handsome, isn’t he?” asked Ginny eagerly. “I mean, have you seen the way he gets a dimple in only one cheek when he smiles, and the way his hair always looks so thick and soft…”
“Ginny!” Hermione exclaimed, forgetting who she was sitting with for a bit. “You have a boyfriend!”
“Excuse me?” sputtered Ron as he nearly spewed half of his pumpkin juice across the table. “I’m sorry, Hermione, what did you just say?”
Ginny glared at Hermione as if to say, “Now you’ve done it” before turning towards Ron and saying stubbornly, “I’m currently dating Blaise Zabini.”
“Blaise Zabini?” asked Harry with evident amazement. “You’re honestly going out with Blaise?”
Ginny tossed her hair. “Yes, I am!”
Ron began to turn a light shade of red. “But – but he’s a –”
This time, Hermione was the one who spoke resolutely. “Don’t you dare say she can’t date him because he’s a Slytherin, Ronald Weasley! I’ll have you know that it was Blaise who healed Ginny that night we were patrolling, and it was him and Ginny that Draco and I bumped into the other day in Hogsmeade.”
Ron frowned down into his chocolate pudding, but Harry quickly put up his hands in a mark of surrender. “Okay, okay, you two! You don’t have to bite off our heads, all right? We know that Blaise was a good guy because he was with us that day when we beat up Hoffschwitt in the bathroom.”
Ginny relaxed her shoulders in relief. “Fine. So now that you two are perfectly happy with my new boyfriend, do you mind letting me and Hermione discuss the ball?”
Hermione groaned, but Harry chuckled and said, “Be my guest.”
Ginny spun around in her seat and started executing all the dramatics involved when a teenaged girl gushes about an upcoming ball. “Oh my gosh, Herms, did I tell you that I found the perfect outfit for Blaise? I mean, you were there when we bought my cat girl costume, and it didn’t cross either of our minds that Blaise would have to match up with mine somehow, but that problem was fixed just the other day when I dragged him over to another store and got him to choose one that he liked. So now guess what he is?”
Hermione told her that she had absolutely no clue.
“He’s going as a lion!” Ginny squealed as Hermione raised her eyebrows at the thought of the Slytherin boy dressing up as the king of the jungle.
“Wow. Um. That sounds really cool, Gin.”
“It is! He’s going to have a crown on his head, and a nice bushy tail and everything!”
“Sounds great.”
“Hey, wait,” said Ginny as she began to direct her focus back to Hermione again. “What is Alexander dressing up as?”
Hermione shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I mentioned to him once sometime ago that I’m going as a mermaid. He hasn’t let me know what he’s going as yet.”
Ginny sighed in mock misery. “Sheesh, ‘Mione. You’re so lucky…you get both Draco and Alexander in the same night. Too bad your bed won’t be able to hold the weight of three!”
“GINNY!” Hermione shouted as she smacked her madly giggling friend with her book.
Ron and Harry very graciously acted as though they hadn’t heard the last bit, but the fork Harry was squeezing mercilessly in his hand and the two bright red beacons that were better known as Ron’s ears gave them away.
* * * * *
Draco had not a single inkling as to what he was up to, but right then, all he wanted was a distraction. And so, plucking up the bare minimum of courage required to ask out a girl who’d lick his shoes if he asked her to, he set out to find Daphne Greengrass.
It wasn’t that hard to find her. After all, all one had to do was look for a somewhat attractive girl with scores of boys around her, and whoop! There she was! Draco had had a fling with her once, but after the first terrific night, he got bored and immediately dumped her, much to her dismay. The result was that she never really spoke to him again, even though he knew at times she’d eye him like a manic jackal eyed a hunk of meat out of its reach.
Of course, he had every reason to understand that he was one undeniably sexy piece of flesh, but the constant staring unnerved him. Just a little.
Sauntering over to her with not a hint of recollection about past incidents in his expression, he ruffled his hair lightly in front of her and drawled, “Hey there, Daphne? Want to go to the ball with me?”
He could see any walls she’d initially put already crumbling down, and smirked. Life was so easy when everyone acted like a hormonal girl: easy to knock down, easy to overpower, and easy to leave.
“I don’t know, Draco,” she said in an overly-breathy voice. “What’s in it to really tempt me?”
She emphasized the movement of her lips on the word “tempt”, and Draco noticed with just a modicum of unease that many of the guys crowding around her were now glaring at him. He forced himself to continue smirking and vaguely thought of how cheap Daphne was compared to Hermione. But then, he wasn’t here to think about Hermione, was he? No, he was here for a distraction. And there it was, standing in front of him, obsessively wetting her lips and batting her eyelashes.
Draco groaned inwardly before turning on his sexy voice and growling, “Hmm, let’s see. You’ve got a 6’2’’ devilishly handsome guy standing in front of you and asking you to a ball, and you ask me what’s tempting in it? Obviously you’re not as well-informed as I thought.” He leaned down and whispered in her ear, “But we can fix that privately, now can’t we?”
Without further ado, Daphne tilted her head and whispered back, “Of course I’ll go with you. I’ve been wondering how that new mattress in your dorm’s been holding up anyways.”
Draco smirked and grabbed her around the waist, but inside he was ambivalent about what he was doing. One side told him that he had really scored with this pretty girl clinging to his arm, but the other side was saying that he was getting himself into a big pile of shit with all these extra complications.
Ignoring his conscience, Draco walked away with Daphne still clinging to him and jabbering on and on.
“Ooooh, Drakey, this is going to be so much fun! I’m gorgeous and you’re gorgeous…we are going to be stars of the Halloween Ball! Tell me all about your costume! Please say it’s going to be sexy!”
Draco remembered that Hermione had said his costume should be something related to a merman or the underwater world, so he told Daphne, “I think I’m going as a merman, and Hermione’s going as a mermaid. You should go as a, um...sea goddess or something.”
Daphne wrinkled her nose. “That Mudblood’s going as a mermaid!? Ugh! That freak is so irritating! All she does is whine, read, and rot all day. But you’re right, Drakey,” she cooed thoughtfully. “I’m sure I’d look stunning as a sea goddess. So stunning, actually, that you’d probably have to fight off the other fellows to keep me for yourself.”
Draco looked sideways at her and grinned even though he was still simmering about the Mudblood comment. “Then maybe we should just spend the night in my dorm, eh?”
Daphne turned to face him and had a nauseatingly saccharine expression on her own countenance. She grabbed his tie and pulled him down before engulfing his lips with her own. It was, to say the least, a very disgusting snogging session, what with her mouth being excessively wet and slimy, and him not wanting to be a part of it at all.
When she finally broke away to catch her breath, Draco feigned a cough into his sleeve, thus subtly wiping away the surplus spit lining his lips. He watched gratefully as she walked away and blew him a kiss. It had barely been ten minutes and he was already sick of her. How would he survive through an entire ball?
Now smiling to himself about the fact that Daphne had left him alone, Draco put his hands in his pockets and turned away only to find Hermione staring at him on the opposite end of the small hallway with a stricken look on her face.
The smile left his face as quickly as it had come. The look on her face churned his stomach…it was a hodgepodge of fleeting emotions: anger, sadness, disgust, and finally betrayal. This final feeling faded away from her face, but it did not recede from her eyes as she stood, frozen, and Draco walked slowly towards her.
“You and Daphne are together?” she asked dispassionately, her eyes still beseeching him to deny what she’d just seen.
Draco angled his eyes down at her knees and nodded. He didn’t want to keep looking at the same sparks of hurt in her normally brown eyes.
“And do you feel that you’ll be happy with her?” she continued in the same unfeeling, biting tone.
Draco did not know what to say, so he merely shrugged and tried to look indifferent. “She’s an old friend,” he said with a façade of flippancy.
Hermione raised a cynical eyebrow. “A friend? A friend with certain benefits, I would think.”
Draco hoped with all his might that a hippogriff would swoop down and carry him off to a far away land in that instant. He was finding it very hard to act casual in front of Hermione’s intense gaze, and he knew exactly what she meant by her use of the word “benefits”.
“It’s nothing like that.” he muttered as he tried to look incredibly interested by the tapestries on the wall.
“Is that so? I was under the impression that Greengrass there was quite the ideal bed-warmer on dark and stormy nights.”
Draco shuffled his feet. “Yeah, so maybe we had a night or two to ourselves last year. What’s it to you?”
“Nothing.” Hermione murmured demurely. “I just felt that maybe you’d gone temporarily blind or something while she was with you.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean!?”
“Well, that means that maybe you should choose your girlfriends with a bit more care!”
“She’s not my girlfriend!” Draco shouted at Hermione. He couldn’t believe this was happening, but for some reason, he felt like fighting back. “What’s with you, for Merlin’s sake? What’s so wrong with Daphne Greengrass?”
“What’s wrong with her, Draco Malfoy,” Hermione shouted back, “Is that she’s no good for you! Have you seen the way she walks, the way she talks, the way she constantly fools around behind her boyfriends’ backs? She’s a complete sleaze, Draco, and I don’t think you’ve made the right choice at all!”
“So how am I supposed to control the way she walks, talks, and acts, huh? Am I her guardian that I can order her to do this and to not do this? And how the hell would you know if I’ve made the right choice or not? You’re the one over there necking with Armani and promising to have his children!”
Hermione’s hair seemed to crackle with electricity and she narrowed her eyes at him until they were almost slits. “I have not been ‘necking’ with Alexander, as you so eloquently put it,” she hissed. “Nor have I promised to have his children. There’s a difference between Alexander and Daphne, Draco. At least Alexander is decent and kind…Daphne is just a –”
“– A what? A what, exactly?” retorted Draco hotly. “A slut? Do you honestly think I don’t damn well know that, Hermione? But what the fuck am I supposed to do about it? Oh, I know, let’s stand around and wait for the All-Knowing Hermione Granger to enlighten us with her invaluable advice on how to identify the right kind of girls! Tell me, Hermione,” he asked relentlessly. “Who were you matching me up with in your little fantasies, huh? Should I have come to you? Should I have come to you and swept you up in my arms, thrown you onto my broom and flown away with you into the full moon night? Should I have hurled you onto my bed, ripped off your clothes, and made love to you so much that the babies would never stop shooting out?”
Hermione glared at him with rage burning in her eyes and fire blazing in her cheeks at his last words. “No, of course not, Draco! That’s what people do when they love each other and want each other. Maybe you haven’t discovered it yet, but love is something that only comes from the right kind of judgment.”
“Stop preaching to me about things you’ll never understand, Granger! Just because you’ll never be loved by anyone doesn’t mean you have to unleash all your anger and wisdom on me, does it?”
Hermione stumbled back as if he’d slapped her, and Draco immediately felt the harshness and cruelty of his words.
“N-no, Hermione, that's not what I meant.” he said weakly as he reached for her.
“Don’t touch me!” Hermione whispered viciously as she clumsily backed away from him and strove to keep her tears from falling. “Just get away!”
The fury in her words stung, and he himself drew back with a terrible feeling in his guts. It was like someone had poured lead down his throat and into his body.
Hermione was breathing very hard and quickly, almost as if she was trying to hold back her sobs, but still she managed to rasp, “You know, when I first met you and spoke with you, I thought, ‘Ah, this one’s going to be a real true friend.’ I thought that you would be so sweet, and charming, and kind. But I was wrong. I was so wrong. You’re just a monster,” she spat causing him to flinch. “You’re a vile, loathsome creature. You’re nothing but a monster, Malfoy. Nothing but a monster.”
And with that, she turned and fled the hallway, leaving Draco behind to drop to his knees and attempt to pick up whatever pieces remained of her shattered heart.
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