Sour Grapes

Chapter 17 - Out Sick

Hermione awoke the next day already holding her head in her hands.

The world was far too bright, it was unseemly. How dare the sun shine so brightly at such an hour? She looked over to her clock and saw that it was, in fact 10:30am

"Oh, bollocks!"

She was two hours late for work.

And her head was absolutely pounding.

Fumbling around haphazardly in the drawer of her nightstand, her hand finally rested upon its quarry.

She uncapped the years-old and hopefully not useless hangover potion with all the deftness she could muster and downed it in one.

As the potion took effect, her headache mostly lifted and her fogginess almost cleared. Too bad the potency had waned in all the time she'd had it. Drinking to excess was something she had only done enough times to count on one hand.

She didn't think she could face a normal day in the office, whether she got new potion from somewhere or not.

Her foggy remembrance of the events of the previous night left her with a sense of foreboding significance, even though she could not expressly remember them.

It was now time for the most painful part of any hangover morning: taking stock of what had actually occurred.

All that she could recall in the moment was that Draco Malfoy, the sneaking spy, had infiltrated her safe haven and polluted the only clear waters she'd had to swim in. The foul git!

An unbridled pool of anger began surging through her at the thought of his pale, handsome face smiling in the Potters' kitchen.

Stupid handsome face, she grumbled aloud.

Reaching back into the drawer of her nightstand, she fumbled a bit before her hand emerged clutching ink and quill. She grabbed a blank slip of parchment as well and scribbled a note to her supervisor saying that she had fallen ill, and although she'd be fine, she hadn't slept through the night and would need the day to recover.

Then she realized she had no owl to send it with and let out an aggravated sigh.

Chucking it aside, she grabbed her wand and cast a patronus. The otter swam out of her apartment on route to the ministry, and she noticed it looked a bit sluggish, devoid of its usual happy sway.

Did patronuses get hangovers too?

Given that she hadn't yet taken one sick day in her entire stint as a ministry employee, she thought that it would probably be alright that she miss today.

She lay back in bed, pulling the covers up over her head when she heard multiple talon taps on her window pane.

Owls. And just when she no longer needed one.

It seemed that two of her friends had chosen this moment to send her messages, or perhaps they had been collecting outside and she'd been too unconscious to hear them.

She groaned with guilt as she realized it was probably the latter.

Dragging herself out of bed to let them fly in, she stopped at her jar of owl treats and grabbed two before going to collect her messages.

One seal bore the Hogwarts crest. Neville. He would, of course, be checking up on her. She didn't have the energy or the memory, frankly, to fill him in on what had happened.

The other seal was a familiar shade of orange. Ginny still used her Weasley family seal even though she hadn't been a Weasley anymore for quite some time. Her reasoning was that it matched her hair, and Hermione smiled at the thought.