Illusions
Summary: "She looks around the room and wonders how many of the joyful smiles her classmates are wearing are illusions." Draco/Ginny at the end. Short and flangst-y.
Author's Note: I was typing up a horrible story I wrote earlier (with the same title as this one) when I suddenly thought of this, and thank goodness I did, because I was going insane.
There's a lot of pairings in this one, huh? It's not a "love square"; don't worry.
This is divided up into odd little sections like Lies was, and it's in present-tense. Yay.
Oh…"flangst"=fluff angst. That's my favorite kind of story.
Illusions
She's eleven and with him again, like she often is. He may be but words on a piece of yellowing parchment, but he's real to her, as real as trees and grass and anything else.
"I love you," she scrawls on the parchment, nearly spilling her bottle of ink in her hurry to get the words down. You never know when he's going to leave.
"I love you, too," he writes back quickly, and she closes the diary, smiling. He may be only words…but somehow it still feels genuine.
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She's thirteen now and dancing in the Great Hall with a boy she barely knows. He steps on her feet again and she glares at the floor, trying hard not to make eye contact with him.
"I'm having a great time, you know," he says softly to her. "Thank you for coming with me."
"You're welcome, Neville," she replies, trying to sound genuine. "I'm having a good time, too." She looks around the room and wonders how many of the joyful smiles her classmates are wearing are illusions.
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Eleven is still too close to comfort, and she can still see herself grabbing a fresh quill and eagerly scribbling a dull account of her day into the diary and trying to sound witty. She can still see him writing back:
"I love you, too." She wonders if he was lying. She hopes he wasn't and pushes the thought out of her mind. It wasn't real. It can't be. She won't let it be.
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Thirteen was hard, she remembers. The ball is one of her most vivid memories, and also one of her worst. She first talked to Michael there. She had no idea before then that she was such a horrible judge of character. She doesn't even know if it was really a relationship-aren't you supposed to love the person you're in a relationship with? She surely didn't love Michael; she was too young for that, anyway, and he was more like a friend than a love interest. She wonders if she could have even imagined then that they would break up within a year. It wasn't a relationship, she decides. Relationships are authentic, and there was nothing real about that.
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Somehow, she can't leave the past alone. She still refuses to write in diaries, and she still can't look Neville or Michael in the eye, and she is still a horrible judge of character. Some things never change, and maybe they don't have to. Maybe she's better off this way. She isn't sure. Somehow, it feels right now, and more real than it ever did.
"Draco?" she asks quietly.
"Yes?" he replies, yawning.
"I love you."
"I love you, too."
It is almost like Tom is writing to her again, a lost little girl who desperately needed a friend, but she pushes that out of her thoughts and smiles. Tom was an illusion. This isn't.
-End