Life and Times
Rating: R
Ship: HHr (main emphasis)
The (unlovely) procedure: all rights go to JKR for previous plot and characters, Scholastic, Warner, and whoever else has their hands in HP.
Author Note: Wow - I couldn't believe that nearly a thousand people read last chapter from the day I uploaded it till now. Wow - thank you! And, thank you for the reviews I've gotten throughout the past three or so chapters since my long hiatus (even though I'd like to hear from more of you!)
To mention, as it may not be completely evident to those not reading these in sequential order (with the three week or so pause between the last chapter and this) that the rain being discussed in this chapter is the same rain being discussed in the last. The chapters overlap with its point of view changed from the time Hermione notices the rain in chapter twenty-five.
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Chapter Twenty-Six - Withdrawal
***
Knifelike, a surge of immense electricity created such a sound that I thought I'd gone deaf for the second. I breathed in, sharply like the flashing, white bolt, and watched the raindrops strike bullets against the windowpane. The atmosphere outside withdrew many people indoors, like me, its darkness foreboding something on the horizon. I felt a chill after a strong zephyr pounded against the window. I stood, staring out into the night. A slight breeze blew through me from some unknown seam in the weather strip.
I had the curtains in my hands, satiny to the touch and crimson to go along with the stained-bronze hard wood. From behind me, two separate noises clashed with one another. One was from my dear Neville. The day winding down, the evening was drawing closer to eight o'clock. The time wasn't late, but he had a job interview tomorrow and needed to get to bed earlier than normal.
Well, his normal.
I didn't really sleep…normally, anymore.
I needed something to help me, or to exhaust myself out.
Sleeping for me scared me. I'd start dreaming out of control. Of course dreams were not of my control, but I needed them to be controlled-or suppressed. I dreamed of the future, of Hermione, or Neville, or Hermione and Neville, and I'd wake up shaking. Literally shaking in a cold sweat. Before I found the liquor cabinet my newest friend, I'd end up in the living room spending days awake to have me drop off. I spent three days wide-awake one time just to get tire me out. God help if I didn't have a supply now of alcohol, for I'd sit or lay in silence, on the sofa, in thought. And, I didn't want to think.
Thinking scared me.
A lot of things scared me nowadays.
Thankfully, the clash to Neville's wandering around was Cho. She's come over nearly every night since Hermione left my life…or whatever. She's my best friend and someone I confide in tons; but, she's no Granger. And, I miss my girl and regret, truly regret ever opening my stupid mouth for the truth to pour out. Ironically I knew it was under the same influence of which I use to help me sleep that I let my feelings out, but that didn't stop me.
Every time I drank or smoked, it felt good-because I needed the pain. I felt guilty, and no one had gotten onto me. Not even Neville and I'm sure he knew something big had happened. Maybe he even figured out the details-he's a smart guy. Distancing myself from him probably framed the clues. I've never divulged the precise problem to him, what went down that night with her and me, and never would.
I swore to it.
I'd rather rush out, into a night like this-my eyes gently lingering on our neighbor, a mother and her son rushing into their house in the pouring rain-and get struck by lightning.
As much as the inside of our house was warm, I was starkly frigid.
"Gin."
My mind had gone elsewhere, my eyes following our neighbors as the father of the son, the husband of the wife, rushed outside to get something from their car. He hadn't an umbrella, using his hands to cover himself from the ever-flowing sheets of rain.
I felt something flush against my cool skin, covered slightly in a green sleep slip, my hair revealing a certain sanguine-colour around the hue of my exposed neck. I turned when another "Gin" aroused me to my left. I blinked, absent from earth and only came to when I re-opened my eyelashes, settling to breathe a moment. The person beseeching me softly was a tired Neville in his pajamas.
He reached out and stroked the length of my hair as I remained stationary, observing him looking me over like a medical specimen. He glanced at all my details, not as much for anything else other than for my well-being. He knew how cold I'd gone figuratively alongside the literal chill.
Saying I "felt out of place" was far from how I felt.
I was on Pluto, farthest from any known organism.
Neville finally looked back into my lifeless eyes without a slight of emotion in either of our features.
"Is Cho staying the night again?" He spoke low.
If the act of breathing solely predicted life, I'd be dead.
My eyes went to the floor.
I couldn't look at him for any length of time.
"…Well," Neville cleared his throat. "You know where I'll be."
If Cho hadn't have been there in the kitchen, there would have been deathly silence. But, she was rummaging in the drawers quite loudly, searching for what seemed like eating utensils as metal-to-metal clanked together, teetering on beleaguering.
I saw his feet shift away from me.
"I love you…," I heard him clear his throat again.
The tip of his index finger grazed underneath my chin.
A tickle ran up my spine from his light touch, but nothing more.
His feet disappeared from the area of my vision, turning my head from him and back between the curtains.
My eyes were back looking out the window as I heard him ascend the stairs to the bedroom one weary step at a time. I choked on my own tongue. I couldn't speak a word. I heard how…sad he'd gotten, and it was all because of me.
Me…
I had to support myself from keeling over by holding onto the windowsill. I felt a hot-streak pass through me and the sickening knot the made its home pleasantly in my stomach grew and twisted.
Between my mother, Neville, Hermione, Harry…and even Ron-
The sound of clinking ice cubes in a glass stirred me. Such an inviting sound it was, making me happy. I turned around, my hands still attached to the windowsill, and saw Cho in a shirt-and-shorts-styled PJ skip from the kitchen, hop off a stair and into the living area.
My feet hit the floor as quick as I could.
My eyes were on the glass, and on the clear liquid sloshing around inside. The ice cubes sparkled like diamonds, a girl's best friend. My hands were around the glass before Cho could even speak up, and when she did, she had to stop for I swiped the drink from her like a mugger.
"I didn't really know what-" She paused as I took the glass, its swirling vapors of intense scent rising into my nostrils. The burn was painfully sweet. The drink was my teddy bear, the blankey, and I wanted it back.
My hands were so tightly grasped its circumference that the joints in my hands were white from my clinch.
I tilted my head back and drank the chilled vodka quickly.
"Whoa-" stated Cho. I felt her hand on my arm. "There's only one bottle left. Make it last a little longer."
The alcohol drowned her out.
I coughed, my throat burning with its fire.
When my cough subsided, I finished what was in there.
Like a silly cough was going to stop me.
"…I think you broke last night's record."
"More," I turned my head to the side when I felt another cough pound from within my chest. I pushed the glass back in Cho's hand.
"Want me to just bring you the bottle next time?" she laughed.
I didn't.
I could already feel the alcohol working, doing the job I wanted it to. My mind clouded with smoke and my vision began to lose itself in a swirl of blurriness.
"Just do it." Swiveling on my feet, I turned toward the sofa in front of the flickering television. I had to block another cough with the backside of my hand, sniffing back watery snot and a trickle of tear from the lasting burn of my esophagus.
I stumbled across the arm rest and fell face-first into the sofa cushions. My ears perked at the same sorts of noises from the kitchen, Cho getting me another drink. I had to crawl, slowly, my head beginning to hurt, so I wasn't so lopsided. How I landed, half of my body fell on the floor. My knee was inches from the wooden surface below.
I think I fell asleep, or blacked out a second, closing my eyes to the blinking television. I'd begun to get a headache. The next thing I knew was the warm feeling of something, and then what felt like a hard nudge on my back. I rose as much as much as I could, feeling heavier than I should with the weight of the world upon me. I could barely make out Cho, but knew it was her from her disturbingly bright baby blue pajamas.
"Where should I put this?" She held up something, but in the dark-and utterly out of it-I couldn't make any sense. But, the clinking ice cubes came to me Pavlovian, and I knew the object she held was the next drink.
I tried to say something, but my head fell face-first back into the sofa.
"…Right. I'll just put it on the table." I couldn't really make out anything much anymore, just the direction of nearby sounds. I thought I heard her put the glass down, but then again I also heard the annoying, overly-excited news anchor on television talk about the "Potterphilia"-craze.
"We met up with Harry Potter himself leaving the Ministry of Magic and tried to get some answers out of him about the rumors of a set wedding date. Our photographer asked him the question as he was about to Floo-"
"Turn it off…," My voice was muffled what with my face smashed into the cushion.
"You'd think they'd have something better to do than to harass poor Harry and Hermione," Cho was talking with her mouth at the rim of her own glass. "Every night it's another `Breaking News!' about them-let them be!"
Cho shouted at the paparazzi now running alongside Harry who was being shoved into the Floo by a swarm of Ministry bodyguards.
"Earlier this week we got in touch with the one, Rita Skeeter, to discuss the rumors surrounding Harry and his fiancee-"
I grunted, trying my best to lift off the sofa to tell Cho once more to, "Shut the damn television off," but failed miserably.
My entire arm slipped right off the edge.
"Oh, right-Neville's gone to bed," Cho chimed in. "Maybe I shouldn't be yelling-and what are you doing down there?"
Apparently Cho finally saw how eager I was to get up…
"-the point is that Harry is too young and he doesn't know what he wants. This is evident by his misuse of Miss Ginevra Weasley, which was, as we all know," Rita Skeeter's voice screeched like nails on a chalkboard. A repeating pain throbbed behind each of my eyes. "Mister Potter's love interest. If I were that boy's mother I'd surely give him a well-deserved talking to for mistreating that wonderful girl and going to some-well-Muggle-born."
Rita's laugh was sharp and clung to my brain like a blood-sucking leech.
Cho had her hands beneath my arms and was in the process of pulling me towards her. I was like a rag doll, utterly limp. "Aw, come here…"
I didn't want to talk anymore. My head pounded, the den swayed, and the alcohol drove through my veins easily without an ounce of food to slow it down.
She smelled clean with a hint of lilac, my head in her lap and my arms wrapped around her waist. I tried to bury my face in her stomach, blocking out the incessant flicker from the tube. I also tried to put my arms in a way on my ears, or at least my hands, so I didn't have to hear the television anymore.
The wizarding world had become this voyeuristic society prying its way-or believing they were-into Harry's life. And with Harry came Hermione, and come Hermione came-I didn't much care to turn the television on lately.
Cho twisted and turned. I became perturbed. She was stroking my hair, and now she was fighting with something. Then came a soft material sliding up my legs, and then around me. She settled finally with a blanket up to my neck. I put myself back into the darkness of what was between me and Cho's abdomen and settled, too, only to hear her say:
"You're not going to turn gay on me now, are you?"
If I weren't completely sloshed, if I hadn't have given a fuck right then and there, I'd have slapped her. I'd have left a mark on her cheek, too.
"…It was only a joke," she replied to the silence I gave her. "See, you're getting close to my-whatever. I didn't say anything."
Her fingers were back combing my hair.
***
Cho had left the television on when she fell asleep. I'd gone to sleep far before her, passed out less than a half hour after her assumed "joke". She found the matching ottoman to the sofa and propped her feet up for more comfort in her snooze. The television cast its bluish glow on both of us as the news had-miraculously-changed from Harry and Hermione rumors, and Rita Skeeter's forecast of them, to the economy and the equivalent to the Muggle stock market system, to the rainy weather, and then to a story about new magical medical treatments being done at St. Mungo's.
During an image of fibrous arm surgery done solely by wand, the news suddenly shifted back to the desk with the attractive blonde anchor and a streaming ticker headline underneath her stating, "Breaking News!"
"We're getting breaking news," she said quickly, holding a piece of equipment to her ear. "That something horrible has occurred at the summit between our Minister of Magic and the German President. We've been following their talks of interstate trade amongst their branch of magic and ours all this week and-wait, it seems like we're getting a live look at what has just occurred."
The image switches from the blonde anchor to a coat-covered male in front of a very large, white building.
"Right, so," started in the male reporter. "This has just occurred mere minutes ago right here at the British-German summit which was being held behind me at its parliamentary building here in Berlin. Many German citizens were out and about doing the midnight pub-scene when they first saw the foreign object that lit up the sky. To ours, I'm afraid, it's not so foreign."
The camera swiftly pans and zooms into the "object" hovering above the parliamentary building.
"As you all can very well see," the reporter says about the image. "It really is nothing foreign to us."
A deeply green, misty wisp of clouds has formed strangely into the depiction of a skull, slithering its tongue-a vile snake-in and out of its mouth.
"The mark of He Who Must Not Be Named."
The camera pans back to the reporter, the wind picking up and blowing his hair into his face. He shrugs it off and stares competently into the lens, squeezing inside his coat for heat.
"There hasn't been any solid word of whom or what has done this. The Minister's security has already taken Minister Kingsley from Berlin and is now on their way back to London, much to the Minister's persuasion to stay we've heard to believe. The Ministry taskforce has already begun separating the facts from the fiction, here now in Berlin. The Obliviators got flew in first to calm the crowds of Muggle-spectators, and as always, to do their job of erasing their memories. I'm sure they've cooked up some alien-related story and tomorrow's headline here in Berlin will be some cockamamie rubbish about outer-space gray men visiting the skies above the parliament."
The broadcast switches back to the blonde news anchor.
"Do we have any ideas at all about the mark? I know you've said we don't have anything solid to stand on right now."
The broadcast switches back to the male in Berlin.
"Well, we've been reporting about these splinter cells, those rogue cultists being rounded up by the Ministry taskforce worldwide. This is probably just an attempt to scare rather than a murderous attempt. Anyone should know how tight the security is around Minister Kingsley. They're probably seeking attention. They've done this a few times throughout the world since His death."
The broadcast switches back to the news desk.
"Well, they certainly got their and our attention-if that's what this all was an attempt to do. I'm glad to hear Minister Kingsley is safe and on his way back to London."
"Correct," the male reporter's voice was heard over the blonde's before it switched back to him. "His motorcade left for the skies seconds after the mark appeared. I'm sure they've done this drill several times for just this scenario."
"Very, very," The blonde came back on the television. "Glad to hear he is well."
She turned her focused back to the television audience. "And, we'll be keeping everyone on top of this situation through our news ticker and any further updates will break our currently scheduled late-night broadcast."
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