Year Seven:Blindsided

Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to any of these characters or places; they belong to the wonderful J.K. Rowling. It’s her world; I just play in it.


Chapter 12- The Truth


Hermione dressed quickly and sat waiting at her door until she was certain that Draco had left the common room. Now she’s wished that she’d just gone to eat breakfast, as she would have on a normal day. Why had she kissed him back? She should have just turned and walked away from him or maybe slapped him. Her mind was spinning with all of the things she should have done. But this, as she knew all too well, was a fruitless waste of time. Worse than anything else he was making her act out of character, she was never so careless and scatterbrained. What was she going to do?


Draco knew that it was she who he’d danced with almost all of the evening at the Ball! He knew things she’d never confided in another living soul. Things that were too terrible to tell Harry, Ginny or even Ron, she’d told him without a second thought. What kind of horrible pain would he inflict on her now that he had the tools to do so at hand? Hermione felt sick, nauseous and overheated. She decided to visit Madam Pomfrey, if anyone could help her, the school nurse could.


Hermione gathered her determination to act as though nothing had happened between the two of them about her as she stepped from her bedroom. (Just as a precaution, incase she happened to run into Draco on her way to the Hospital Wing.) He was nowhere to be seen as she passed through the common room and into the corridor. She looked at the portrait that served as the guardian of the entrance to her common room and sighed. The wizard in the painting shot her a quizzical glance, “You know, Miss Granger, you should not leave your affairs in such a jumble. It is out of character to say the least,” he said taking a puff of his pipe.


“I know…” she muttered as she retreated from the portrait hole with more haste than was really necessary.


Draco dressed quickly and hurried back out to the common room to talk to her, but at the last moment he hid behind the curtains as he heard the door to Hermione’s room open. He was certain that the amount that he wanted to talk to her was inversely proportional to the amount that she didn’t want to speak to him. After a considerable amount of thought in a small amount of time, he came to the decision that it would be best to give her some space until she could sort out her feelings toward him. Draco decided that it would be prudent to get an early start on his Potions work for the day. He set off to the dungeons at a comfortable pace, and in a mood that passers by could not account for.


Students froze in their paths as the Head-boy passed them by; they were rather dumbfounded not to have been unjustly ridiculed by him. Draco’s temper as of the last few days was the type of tyrannical thing that legends were made of. Many of these same students were quite reluctant to even utter so much as a whisper as Draco passed by, his good mood was a piece of very delicate china in an earthquake. No one wanted to be the unfortunate soul to have broken the serenity that had settled around the Head-boy.


He had just rounded the last corner that led to the Potions corridor when he was accosted by the discordant and shrill voice of his former girlfriend, Pansy. It was coming from one of the smaller dungeons off to the left of where he was standing, “No. No, you are much bigger than Draco was. He had no idea where to put things, truthfully it was rather taxing always having to play teacher. I’m ready for a real man, the sort who can just look at me and get me off.”


Draco stood in the doorway and cleared his throat. Pansy looked up startled to see him standing there with a look that danced between anger and amusement. Her accomplice looked perhaps more guilty than anyone would have thought possible. “Zabini! You didn’t seem the sort to mix with trash. I mean, come on mate if you wanted one of my exes there are at least a dozen of them who are pretty! But she is good for one thing, even if she isn’t very good at it,” Draco said matter-of-factly.


Pansy was stiff with fear and anger, her cheeks only flushed to a deeper shade of crimson when her boy toy laughed and agreed with him, “Too right! Sloppy seconds, indeed.” Blaise pulled his robes on and strode to meet Draco in the doorway.


“Wait a minute, I want you to see something Blaise.” Draco reached out his hand and gently stroked Pansy’s bare back with the tips of his fingers. She screamed and convulsed, angry that someone she hated so could arouse her so easily. “Playing teacher is taxing, Pansy. Now put some clothes on you little slut.” Draco and Blaise swept from the room laughing with malevolent smiles on their faces.


Hermione came from the Hospital Wing in a huff; apparently Madam Pomfrey had told her that it was against school policy to treat the symptoms of lovesickness. She also told Hermione that they only way to cure her was for her to confess her feelings to the object of her affections. This, in Hermione’s mind, was impossible. One simply doesn’t march up to one’s archrival and say that they’ve fallen in love with them. The very idea that she’d soon see Draco in Potions set her stomach into revolt against the rest of her body. She was not quick enough to stop the vomit from spewing forth from her mouth, as she rounded a corner.


Poor Pansy was not having very good luck that day, in a cosmic attempt to add insult to injury; the Head-girl had just thrown up on her. She ran crying from the scene before Hermione could dock points from Slytherin House for Pansy being out of bounds. “Uggh!” Hermione snorted as she raised her wand to clean up the mess she’d made in the corridor, “Scourgify!” She straightened her robes and made for Snape’s class.


Severus Snape had not been able to sleep last night after his disturbing discovery about Hermione and that little twit Draco. Halfway through the night he decided that it would do no good to dwell on what he could not change, at least not until morning. He crossed his bedchamber and conjured a pitcher of water to which he added a drop of a powerful sleeping potion and two drops of a dream calming serum. He then began the complex mixing of the compound that would render it effective. It turned out that the mixture had been such a success that Severus awoke late and was late for his first class of the day, Independent Study of Advanced Potion Making, the very class with the two students he wanted to see the least.


Snape stormed into the dungeon in a right awful mood, this mood, however, evaporated when he saw that the two of them were sitting on opposite sides of the room and making an art of not speaking to or interacting with one another. Perhaps the two of them had not figured out that they had danced all night at the Ball? There was still some hope that Draco had not tainted Hermione’s purity after all. Snape entered his office smiling, and determined not to give his motive for being so happy so suddenly away.


No one spoke as Snape entered the dungeon, he paused in a manner that Hermione found to be strange, but then he continued into his office in his normal gait. Hermione crossed to the shelf and selected three bottles, which she would need for her latest potion, a draught to cure chicken pox. This was a special request of her from Madam Pomfrey. Hermione grudgingly agreed to make it, though she was still sore at her for refusal to help her get rid of her symptoms of lovesickness.


Hermione began to set up her cauldron for the day. She laid a fire underneath it and began to chop the dry ingredients, Flax, Adder’s Tongue, Vervain and Maidenhair. The Flax had to first be chopped finely and evenly, and then crushed into a powder that had the texture of silk. Adder’s Tongue and Maidenhair had to be added whole at the same time and stirred with precision. The Vervain had to be stewed in a separate cauldron with salt for and hour and a half after being chopped in long thin strands.


So involved in making her potion was Hermione that she did not notice when Snape left the dungeon to attend to his class of first-years. Draco looked up, rather distracted by the muttering of his teacher as he swept from the dungeon. Draco grunted and rubbed his eyes, he was developing what, he was sure, would be a monstrous headache. He looked back down at his recipe and tried to concentrate on what lay before him. “Draco?” The sound of her voice seemed to banish the pain from his skull. He looked up again to see Hermione standing less than a foot from him holding a jar of fire salamander tails in her hand.


“Hermione…do you need something?” he asked weakly.


“Y-yes. C-could you help me? I can’t open this,” she held out the jar, but she refused to look him in the eye as she usually did. He made a small noise that made her glance up at him without thinking about it.


Draco smiled at her to her surprise, the real smile she’d seen in her dreams. He took the jar and removed the lid without a problem. As she reached for it her hand paused as it touched his, and she licked her lips as the two of them locked eyes. This was another moment that the two of them had shared that seemed to last forever. “Draco, I…” she looked down very intently gazing at the hem of her robes, or rather anywhere that was not his face.


“Shhh.” He touched his fingers to her lips and placed the jar on his table. He ran his hand across her cheek and down her neck, finally resting it on her shoulder. His other hand caressed her under the chin, and he tilted her face up to meet his. “You are so beautiful,” said Draco as he leaned in to kiss her.


Hermione stood on her tiptoes to get as close to Draco as she could while he kissed her. “I…I think…”


“Not yet.” He kissed her again, more deeply than before. Her stomach had finally settled down. “After class.”


She nodded at his suggestion, speechless for the first time in her life that she could recall. She scooped up the jar and made her way back to the table where she’d been making her potion. Though neither of them spoke for the rest of the lesson, it was not the awkward silence of the first part of the lesson; they kept glancing at each other and grinning. Somehow, despite the obvious distraction, both of them managed to finish their potions without catastrophe. Snape returned with five minutes left in the period to dismiss them to lunch. He disappeared into his office, leaving the two of them alone to clean up.


They cleaned up in record time and Draco gave Hermione a few minutes head start before following her out into the corridor. She was lurking just out of the Potions Wing of the dungeons. “So, what now?” she asked brightly.


“I was thinking we might want a little privacy, so that we could talk.”


“What did you have in mind?”


“I’ll meet you in the common room in ten minutes,” said Draco as he kissed her on the cheek and walked off toward the kitchen. His arrogant swagger no longer annoyed her, she watched him with a ridiculous expression dancing on her lips as he walked off.


Hermione let out a very girly giggle, once Draco was out of earshot and practically skipped back to the common room. She decided to wash up, as Potions proved to be a very messy class, and this lesson had not been an exception. She put on clean robes, brushed her silken hair and put on a dab of her favorite perfume before going back out to the common room, where she’d barely made herself comfortable before Draco arrived.


His confidant swagger, as he strode across the room, excited her once more. She felt a chill of exhilaration run up her spine as he took her hands in his and kissed them lovingly. “Our lunch should be arriving shortly, and don’t worry, Dobby prepared it personally. So there will be no need to fast as a protest to the welfare of the creature who made the food.” She looked at him in askance. “I knew all about S.P.E.W. from the first day you formed it.”


“Really?”


“Yeah, I mean yes. Its hard not to notice you…when you get on an idea, Hermione.” His tone took the edge off what he’d said. Hermione was still shocked not to hear any trace of malice in Draco’s tone of voice. He had quite a nice voice when he wasn’t using that ridiculous drawling whine of his.


As Draco sat opposite Hermione and looked into her eyes, and took in a deep breath so that he would feel surrounded by her, he wondered just how he’d managed to miss how pretty she was all those years. Of course he could never have guessed how soft her skin was or how she’d held her tongue between her lips when she was concentrating on something particularly difficult. Nor could he have imagined how sweet her lips would taste against his, he leaned in eager for another kiss.


Their make-out session was interrupted by the arrival of lunch. Dobby had seen that the two of them receive the proper kind of meal for trysting. It consisted of small pieces of food that were not too messy, and were all too easy to feed to each other. Exotic fruits, tiny teacakes and bits of chicken with a magically fueled fondue pot, rounded out the meal. A drink that most closely resembled Muggle champagne, but did not cause the drinker to become inebriated, sat fizzing next to the tray with pieces of strawberry floating in it.


“Wow! Draco, I don’t know what to say. This-its beautiful,” said Hermione as she gazed open mouthed at the elegant spread that Dobby and Draco had planned on such a short notice. “My God, what are you capable of when you have time to plan?”


“You’ll see in good time my sweet. I’m glad you like it.” They began to feed each other the little morsels of food and enjoyed the pleasantries of polite conversation. The meal was nearly gone when the more serious topic they had chosen to avoid came up at last, “So, how are we going to handle this? I mean I want to tell the whole world that I’m with you, but…”


“But you feel like that isn’t an option? Or else that they wouldn’t understand?” he asked.


“Exactly, but I knew that you’d understand.” The two of them exchanged a relieved glance.


“So, for the moment, its our thing, private? We both agree that no one close to us is ready for it just yet? Its not a secret, its just not any of their business.”


“Pretty much. I mean as long as you are alright with that…”