Parade of the Sun - Dramione

PART EIGHTEEN.

July 16; 12:42pm

Walking downhill was a lot easier than walking uphill, except when the day decided to attempt suffocation by way of humidity. She had read somewhere that it required more muscles to go down than it did to go up, but she would have to check up on that when she got home. Her muscles weren't burning as much as they had yesterday, and she was sure the sweat was thick enough to be packing on extra weight.

God, she hadn't even known it was possible to sweat this much. She was dripping with it, her clothes soaking through, and her hair wet. She hated sweating. Some people liked it because it made them feel they were getting a real workout, but Hermione just felt like a fat blob of gross messiness. She was sure she must sweat more than normal people did, because half the water in her body felt like it was flowing through her skin. She had tried to keep wiping it away this morning, hating the slickness and the smell, and being self-conscious of Malfoy looking over and finding her a moving ball of nasty liquid. It had worked for an hour, but then her skin kept getting redder and hotter, and there was no stopping the flood. She finally gave into it with an angry acceptance that there was no other option.

She didn't know why her body wasn't attempting moderation, though - she didn't have the water supply to be sweating it all out like this. She wanted to push it back into her skin while giving several stern, disapproving looks to her body's self-sabotage. She couldn't keep hydrated like this. Not when sips of water could only be taken when completely desperate.

Malfoy had taken his shirt off an hour ago, shoving the drenched fabric into the bag he was carrying. She had glared at him for less than a minute, before it felt like too much energy to even bother. If he weren't there, she would have stripped down to her underwear two hours ago. It was too hot for things like clothes, or hair, or movement. She couldn't even look at the line of his red, shiny back because it only made her more overheated. It was like being boiling hot and seeing someone in a jumper - it made the heat increase like you were wearing one too, and all you could wonder was if the person was from Africa or had any sort of logical reasoning beyond being a loon.

A tree root was her downfall. She was trying to wipe the sweat away from her eyes before they started burning again, and then her trainer caught. She was so wiped out that she barely even tried to do that awkward, useless, instinctual movement that people did upon falling face first - jerking back like a body convulsion, while your legs tried fruitlessly to catch up and your arms grew a mind of their own. She had just a split second to register that she was going down, and she accepted it as fate in that same moment.

Her forearms caught her before her face could break open, her pinkie bending oddly against the ground. She cried out as the movement of her broken knuckles threatened to turn the bones to dust, shutting her eyes as her face screwed up. She brought her hand down to her shoulder with a pained whine, and turned her face to rest her cheek on the cooler ground.

"I'm dying." She heard a clunk and then the shift of wet fabric, though she didn't know what Malfoy was doing in her dying state.

"Promises, promises."

She was just trying to breathe, and maybe the oxygen could do something to cool her body down. She needed some water, like an entire lake, to submerge herself in and drink until her stomach threatened to burst. Every pull of air felt like a wind of fire down to her lungs, and with all that water she had sweated, she was probably dry as bone inside. She was like a rotted tree in some otherwise barren landscape, and if her breathing kept up this heat, she might set ablaze. She wondered if that was how people combusted. She was just going to explode, already cooked up for Malfoy.

Bastard. There was no way she was going to make it that easy. She hoped she tasted like burnt, dried-out turkey. No, not turkey - something inedible. Bats? Were bats edible?