Just a short oneshot dedicated to my amazing husband. It's been much too long since I've written any Dramione. Enjoy.
Words, Hermione knows, are sharper than double-edged swords and more poisonous than anything the darkest of wizards can concoct. Words can kill you and blind you and make you bleed and scream. Words can lie and make you believe whatever they want, they can capture your heart and make it hard to breathe. They will torment you, lead you on and make you want more, make you need more.
In all of those ways, Hermione knows, Draco Malfoy and words are alike. He is like a fairytale, all fantasy and myth and strength and repeated from mouth to mouth, father and mother to daughter and son. Maybe he is like a horror novel, so strange and cold and sometimes you'd rather die than know what's going to happen. Or maybe he's the musical word, notes and chords and songs and strings plucking, drums pounding and reverberations felt deep within.
Whatever he is, Hermione loves him like she loves words. Books and Draco Malfoy have become the most important things in her life, and she would rather die than give either up. She'd never be able to choose, she thinks, between the words that weave around her like dust and visible magic, and the boy whose skin is hot against hers and thrusts into her with such passion and looks at her in that way that makes her soul bow down and say anything you want it's yours because she loves him and will do anything to make him stay.
It isn't that she's idealistic, she's not a fool, of course, and she doesn't expect the happy ending with the white dress and the church and the cake--no, she doesn't really want that anyway, because that future is something Draco Malfoy would never be a part of, and where he goes, she will follow.
Besides, it isn't like a marriage certificate and a ring would make her feelings for him more real, or that she would love him deeper, because she is already devoted to him in that way that makes her blind to all other men, that makes the idea of being with anybody else leave a bad taste in her mouth.
She often wonders if he loves her like she loves him, but she doesn't wonder for long because she couldn't stand the conclusion if it was, in fact, false. War changes many things, and though this war has changed Draco Malfoy from a snotty, spoiled, arrogant Death Eater into a snotty, spoiled, arrogant Order member, Hermione doesn't think his true self has really changed all that much. He didn't join the Order out of selflessness or because he wanted to fight the good fight, but because his mother was murdered and his father missing, and he had nowhere else to go.
But maybe that's a reason she loves him, that he's himself no matter what, no matter where he is. That self is deplorable on some levels, she knows, but it's easy to overlook when she sees his other self, when she's seen the Draco that rushes out to aid the Order in their endeavors, often without a regard for himself, when she's sees the Draco that carries small children over borders and across battlefields to safety, when she sees the Draco that whispers her name softly and touches her with caresses.
In those ways, too, Draco is like words, so ardent and passionate, but soft, like eyelashes on her cheeks or long grass around her bare legs. He is endless like the black sky scattered and smattered with millions, billions of stars and planets and comets, eternal in his expanse and glowing like the pale moonlight.
Hermione thinks that maybe Draco is what is called a victim of circumstance, but she doesn't really care, if she's honest with herself, and though that is probably a betrayal to everything she and her friends are fighting for, she can't help it. There are always exceptions, and since she was twelve and so thirsty to know about the magical world Draco has been her exception. He is a constant her life, just like Hogwarts and Ron and Harry and the Weasleys, he represents something to her that is precious and while heartbreaking, it is something she would never trade away, not even if she had the chance to.
Yes, Draco is like words, endless and eternal and forever, and it is never enough.
She thinks, though, as he gives her a small smile when they are through, their bodies utterly spent, when the shadows of the day have lengthened into the shadows of the night, and pulls her under his arm, that he feels the same.