Valentine's Day Minus

D Minus 2

Today was the day of preparation. So when Draco didn't turn up in the library, Hermione was furious. She wasn't doing this out of the goodness of her heart. No matter how Good she was.

She'd seen him in lessons, that was the most infuriating thing. Seen him sitting at the Slytherin table during lunch. Seen him commanding his Quidditch team. Harry had confessed to her a few weeks back that Slytherin were frighteningly good these days. They'd never been bad, exactly, but they're tactics had changed. Just the sly kind of tactics, Ron had scowled, that Malfoy was likely to employ.

Hermione had welcomed both Harry and Draco's promotions to team captains. Their hatred of each other frequently played itself out on the pitch, leaving them both too exhausted for more than dull verbal barbs afterwards. Gryffindor versus Slytherin games were always dirty. Draco planned them that way, Hermione knew, but he was good at it. It was subtle and it was, more importantly, all within the rules. Harry struggled. Harry didn't have the kind of devious mind that could wrap itself around those plots. Hermione had always admired that about him.

She glanced at her bag and glanced around the library. She'd waited half an hour already, more, since she'd arrived early. Her original plan had been to use the Room of Requirement (not telling Draco what it was, of course) or, as a last resort, the Shrieking Shack, though that would mean telling him about the secret passages. Hermione wanted to keep as many of Hogwarts secrets out of the slimy Slytherin's grasp as possible. Knowing him better these days, she wasn't sure quite what he'd do with Hogwarts many secrets, though it was easily conceivable that he could use them to spy on Gryffindors and report to teachers whenever they did something marginally unlawful.

It surprised her sometimes how careful he was. He only broke rules if he was certain he'd get away with it, or, in a pinch, have someone else to blame it on. He sucked up to the teachers. He told tales on any one he didn't like, but covered up for everyone he did. It also surprised her that he wasn't made head boy, but she guessed Dumbledore had thrown the spanner into those works. They'd probably have hexed each other into next week if they'd been forced to share the duties of head boy and girl. They'd come close just sharing the responsibility of this week.

Hermione glowered at her name, still immortalised in ancient wood. Draco had let her down. This was all about him, and he wasn't even here. She could do this alone, she was confident, but that wasn't the point. She wasn't getting anything out of this. It wasn't as though he was her boyfriend. No, he was her enemy, and he was using her. And for the first time, she felt it.

But then, no Draco meant she could play potions in her own room. God, she loved having Her Own Room.

Her room was at the top of Gryffindor's tower, with an amazing view over Hogwarts. There were two single rooms in each house's 'area'. Sometimes she wondered how she'd managed to earn head girl, with her chequered past. Ernie Macmillan was her match, in his room tucked away by the Herbology sheds, with a near perfect record and consistent grades and good relations with most of their year. She hadn't seen his room, and he hadn't seen hers, though she had taken some time to explore the Gryffindor's Head Boy Room. It looked depressingly like her own. Bed, desk, wardrobe, chest of drawers, sink, window.

Hermione gathered up her thoughts and her things and trekked back to her room, offering smiles to a few familiar faces in the common room, but getting none in return. It had to be the Draco thing, she sighed. She wondered what she could do or say to make them understand what was going on. Perhaps if she simply admitted she was being blackmailed into silence they'd accept that. Perhaps not.

She spent a lot more time in her room than she ever had in the dormitory. As an only child she'd grown up with her own room, and with no sibling to drag her out of it periodically to play with them she'd got used to spending her free time there. It was comfortable to build a room around you, know that the books go in this order and that drawer hold skirts while this one has blouses, the soft toy you got when you were born sits there and the ornament you can't stand but have to keep goes here, and the rug your grandmother made you rumples up on that side because you sit on it and the edge gets shoved up against the open wardrobe.

She'd had Ron and Harry up there, Ginny too, and they'd all taken one look and smiled. Ron had voiced the mutual thought: "It's just so 'Hermione' you wondered how she's survived all these years without it." She'd added extra bookshelves and filled all of them. Her desk was buried under parchments and timetables and notes. Ornaments were scattered across other free spaces, all gifts from friends and family over the years. None were particularly nice, but point and ask and Hermione could tell you who and where and when and why and even what, if you weren't quite certain. There were books in the bed as well, which had sent Ginny into a fit of giggles, and Crookshanks had a basket next to the window which didn't shut properly, which had Ron complaining about the draught until Crookshanks obligingly blocked it. Hermione was certain that cat was more than feline.

Hermione settled herself in the centre of the rag rug her grandmother had sent when she heard that Hermione made Head Girl. On the floor in front of her she set up the collapsible cauldron that she was certain Percy would outlaw in seconds. Still, it had worked so far, and it was just Malfoy.

The Dragons Chutney had been sitting in the Tuber juice since yesterday, tucked at the bottom of her underwear drawer. She retrieved the forget-me-not powder and, with a cringe, the rabbit's claws. She eventually found her pestle and mortar in Ron and Harry's dormitory, and picked up two of her textbooks at the same time. Resettling herself, she arranged what she had around her and made a mental note of where everything else would remain until she needed it. Grinding the claws into powder was a nice mindless occupation.

She'd hurt Draco's feelings last night. It hadn't even occurred to her that that was possible. She'd slapped him and he'd barely batted an eyelid. That was what he expected from her. Right?

Hermione groaned and ground. Wasn't this precisely what she didn't want to think about? Grind. Concentrate on the fact her arm was beginning to ache like hell.

Her stomach ached as well, and not in the ill kind of way.

She pushed the guilt away and glowered at the very finely powdered nails. With a heavy sigh she added the dust to the forget-me-not powder. She recovered the chutney mix from her drawer and sought the strongbody fruit hairs in her wardrobe. She put the hairs under the cauldron and gingerly poked them into a mound with her wand before muttering 'incendio'.

It smelt terrible, but it kept burning. Hermione drained the chutney mix over the cauldron and let the dark liquid simmer. She mashed the remains with the powder until it all turned a pleasant kind of dusky blue, like the sky during a summer evening. She frowned at her two mixtures in indecision. One had to be added to the other, but did it matter which way around?

Hermione reached into her bag to fish for the instructions, but somewhere between beginning and ending the action her motivation gave out.

Hermione knelt on the rug, one hand in her bag and the other in her lap, staring out of the window. She was perfectly still, looking outwards but focused inwards. She could only see the sky from where she sat, so low. It was a hazing grey, not quite cloudy, not quite clear. The sun looked twice its normal size but half its brightness. That was how she felt. Translucent, like a jug of lemonade, glowing like a dying glow-worm.

Something had died inside, she knew. She wasn't sure what, and she wasn't sure when, but it had died and she had to get it out of her before it poisoned her.

Night

Draco sat on his bed with his head pressed against his knees, arms around his shins and back curled like a bow. No one had spoken to him for seven hours now. He'd had to sit among the first years at dinner, and even they had frozen him out. He'd managed to get an entire table to himself at peak time in the library, long after Hermione had retreated to her own room to study. He didn't want to see her.

The notoriety wasn't all it cracked up to be, especially when he hadn't done anything wrong. If one was going to be famous for one's misdeeds, one ought at least have had the pleasure of committing them.

Pansy was a bitch.

The day after tomorrow was Valentine's Day, and he was not only not going to get any sex, but he was going to be single. For Valentine's, and for the rest of his life.

Some people acted like Valentine's wasn't a big deal. No one sent cards, not really, and most guys who were dating told their girlfriends that they refused to celebrate it on a moral basis. After all, why devote one day to doing what you ought to do every day? Pansy didn't fall for that one. Probably because Draco hadn't exactly paid the best of attention to her at any time.

Valentine's was for Muggles with too much money and a fetish for stuffed bears carrying satin hearts. No self respecting wizard should put themselves through that. Look at Lockheart.

Draco rubbed his eyes. He was tired. He hadn't had a lot of sleep recently. Running around on errands to research magical penis enlargement and getting ingredients tended to take some hours out of your beauty sleep. But, Draco considered, that was hardly why he was so tired now. He simply hadn't slept.

Masturbating usually helped him sleep. Used to. Right now it was an impossibility. That was frustrating.

Nerves, those had kept him awake, even before the Potions accident. Pansy was a demanding girlfriend. If he didn't get it perfect first time she'd let him know about it. She'd let all of Slytherin know about it. Draco had heard a rumour that the girls kept a chart, comparing each guy on things like length and time and who came first. Draco could see himself on the bottom of that list, labelled: "Crap. Should have stayed a virgin." Girls seemed to think guys didn't get nerves. Maybe most didn't. After all, it couldn't be that different from masturbation, right? As long as you got off it was all okay, right? As long as you weren't thinking, at all, right?

He should have found someone less demanding. A younger Slytherin girl. One who didn't know he was a bastard. One who was a virgin herself. One who just wanted to tell her friends that she'd done it with a prefect.

Of course, there was no chance of that happening now.

What else had kept him awake? Hermione had. Thoughts of being a rebel had. Dreams of infamy and reputation and admiring looks had. After all, even Potter hadn't managed to get into Granger's knickers. Even Weasley hadn't got further than a grope in the dark. And she a Gryffindor, she who had slapped him, she a proud mudblood. Yes, that ought to have given him a little credibility. Well, not the mudblood bit, but that couldn't really be helped. It wasn't though he was thinking about a relationship here, and god knows they wouldn't breed.

And, even worse, he'd known she was tempted. He'd seen in her eyes. Her hatred had lost its edge, and if you can throw that much passion into dislike a bit of pressure on one side will flip the coin and suddenly it's lust. Not lust in the 'he's so hot I want to throw him down in the library and bonk his brains out' way, but in an 'I hate him so much I'm going to screw him to death' way. Draco understood that. When Hermione slapped him and spoke like he was dirt, it flared up. He wanted to show her he wasn't dirt. Not because he had anything to prove, like he did with Pansy, and that was the beauty of it. You had to respect someone to hate them that viciously. He didn't need to worry about earning or losing that respect.

Draco took a long, shuddering breath. These were bad thoughts when your dick was half the length of your little finger. He wanted to go and take a cold shower, but he could feel the rest of the dorm room guarding him darkly. To leave the room would be suicide.

He conjured up Pansy's spiteful face, screwed up like a bulldog with a mouthful of lemon. He tried to imagine her sucking him off, and pulling that face. His libido took three steps back in the face of that image and fled.

Still, sleep was a long time coming.