Ketamine Potion

Chapter 1

Draco didn't want to die. He also didn't want to trust Hermione Granger, either.

"What are you going to do to me?" he gasped, clutching the side of his hospital bed, trying to sit himself up, but struggling to breathe.

"I am going to intubate you," Hermione replied calmly, without glancing up. She was expertly flipping through the drawers of the code cart, removing items as she went and lining them up neatly on top.

Draco whimpered. He was too frightened to care that he looked weak in front of the witch he detested since childhood for her holier-than-thou attitude.

He felt, rather than saw, the color drain out of his face. He struggled through the feeling to whisper.

"Help."

This time she did look up, and met his eyes quickly. She then stood up from her crouched position by the lowest drawer, and calmly and quickly walked over to him. But instead of strangling him, as he thought she might do, she calmly pressed the big red button by the head of Draco's bed.

Suddenly loud, annoying alarms began to call – "Code blue on South 7. Code blue on South 7."

Nurses and healers began filtering into his room, until there were almost what seemed to be 20 people crowding around him. A low excited chatter could be heard, and a nervous energy could be palpably felt.

Hermione Granger called out: "I am the healer running this code. Medea, please record all events. It is 11:34 in the morning. Jane, I need you to draw 1 milligram of epinephrine. Puck, please come to the head of the bed in case I need your assistance while I intubate. I will be using the 8.0 cuffed ET tube. Tia, please hang a bag of normal saline now and administer with push-pull as quickly as you can.

"Draco," she addressed him now, "Can you hear me?" she spoke to him calmly and gently.

Draco was starting to panic. When he woke up this morning, everything was fine. Now he was dying. Coding. And he would die looking into Hermione Granger's offensively gigantic brown eyes.

He tried to tell her to sod off, but only moaned in response. How embarrassing. She continued to speak to him gently as if his life wasn't slipping away before her very eyes.

"I am going to intubate you, but before I do that, I will sedate you and paralyze you. You will not feel any pain. The paralysis is not permanent. When your lungs are healed, we will remove the breathing tube."

And then as quickly as she finished this speech, she ordered a nurse to push ketamine, followed by rocuronium.

Everything went black.

XXX

Hermione sat quietly in her special corner, hidden partially from the nurses' station. She was writing furiously, eager to finish her documentation before she had to sign out to the next team.

Patient is a 29-year-old wizard with an extensive history of atopy, including asthma and allergies, who presents with acute hypoxic respiratory failure and shock secondary to a biologic attack while walking to work...

Hermione paused. She still couldn't believe that she had to intubate Draco Malfoy today. Draco freaking Malfoy. It was insanity. She hadn't seen him in over ten years, not since their 8th year at Hogwarts together. She'd been surprised at how quiet and withdrawn he'd been then, but had chalked it up to the awkwardness of his situation post-war. His family had been very lucky—more like very rich—to get out of an Azkaban sentence at the time. She had predicted that Draco had been told by his father to keep his head down in true Malfoy fashion. She was also head-over-heels in love with Ron at the time, so she wasn't actually paying attention to Malfoy...