Hermione Granger is not beautiful. He supposes it would be easier if she were, but she isn't. He looks at her now and at her eyebrows which she has managed to furrow in her sleep. She looks worried all the time, even in sleep, he thinks, and I do not like it. Girls are supposed to look blissfully dumb in their sleep, like the petty things they are. She is thinking even now and I do not like it and I almost wish she would wake up.
But he doesn't wish it—doesn't wish the waking-up. He needs to decide whether he's going to pretend this time again or finally tell her how worthless he has been trying to make her feel. And if he tells her that he caught her like he planned, that he drew her in to make a fool of her, he doesn't know whether he should tell the greatest lie of all and say that he succeeded.
He cannot make her worthless and it is the most terrifying failure of his life, more terrifying than the tower and Dumbledore; more terrifying than the mark on his forearm that still manages to make him nauseous. Yes, he thinks, I've seen her look pathetic. It's what happens when you let someone trust you. But every time she has known it. Her self-awareness makes him ill. She knows how small she is and how useless she can be and I never had to tell her and that is the very worst thing. I cannot make a fool out of someone who knows she is one.
Theodore Nott had noticed. "She's staring at you. The mudblood." And in Slytherin style it was mapped out, planned like a war. But it did not work and he hates that it did not work as he stares at her face and wishes she was uglier, or something, or was confident, or had one thing she didn't know. Know-it-all.
It worked in the technical sense, of course. It was destined to do so. She told him when he first came to her that she couldn't. Not that she couldn't in the sense of honor or feeling. She couldn't. "I'm in love with you," she had said, looking him squarely in the eyes, knowing everything in that horribly innocent way of hers. "I'm in love with you. So I can't."
It was his intellect, she later said: "Some people won't ever be half as clever as you are, and it makes me have faith in you. It shouldn't, but it does." He had smiled, then. She hadn't smiled back. Thinking on it now he believes that was the first time she began to know things.
He won, eventually... reeled her in. That was the goal, technically- the public goal. But the unspoken dark vein of Slytherin was there, too, winding tendrils around their conversations, their interactions. That other goal. They never spoke of it—none of the Slytherins did—because it seemed needy, weak….it was the essential quest for power over others: control. He needed power. He needed her to hate herself the way she deserved to.
I have achieved the wrong end. He does not want to be in her dreams; he wants to be in her nightmares. He does not want to curse her with an unfulfilled love. He does not want her thinking of him standing at the platform with Weasley when they are inevitably married someday—thinking of him when she looks at her kids, when she looks at the sky. He wants her hate. He wants her to hate him and he wants her to feel like a fool. It is what will make him feel powerful, knowing that he broke her, but she is whole, still. Sitting in his bed he reverts suddenly, feels like his seven-year-old self in the Malfoy drawing room, petulant and frustrated: after having hurled a toy at the wall he is crying not because it broke, but because it did not break the right way. She loves him. He hates it. He wants her to be disgusted with him but more disgusted with herself. She won't be angry. She will be miserable.
But not miserable in the right way. She won't do it the right way. She won't give me an argument; she won't spend nights wondering how she could have been so stupid. She will brood over the fact that she absolutely loves me even though I am not worth her and that makes me so ill and it makes me shake with fear or anger or something- I do not know what it is.
She is the kind of girl who would make someone good fall in love with her, he thinks. She is plain, but in some lights, in the right clothes or in some moment of grace or some spark of laughter she could be beautiful. Has been, even... he remembers the worst moments of all, ones where he had almost wanted to smile; had felt that her figure had managed to frame itself into some mysterious template that resulted in beauty. It isn't enough for him, but it will be, certainly, for someone else. She has a mind that is sharp but kind, an intellect that can captivate. And she isn't the type for a fling or even for a dating relationship. She is too serious, too logical, too in-control for that frivolity. She is love, marriage, forever, and that too makes him ill.
Draco Malfoy frowns at the sadness asleep next to him and he is quite sure that he doesn't love her. He supposes it would be easier if he did, but he doesn't. He looks at her and he realizes with the last and greatest pang of fear that he has done what Tom Riddle did: destroyed himself in the underestimation of the enemy. He wants her never to love, he wants her bitterness, but he has now assured that she always will love- and love him. He has strengthened her and he cannot control her.
He supposes that maybe if he loved her it would not be so bad, the reality that she will haunt him—for the rest of his life, likely. In that case perhaps he'd wait for her, would perversely delight in her apparition in the background of his existence. But she is not something that captured him- no ghost of loveliness, no fanciful hallucination- just something that he could not ruin in the way he wanted. Something that did not, would not, work; a mechanical broken thing.
No one is awake at five in the morning when Draco Malfoy starts to cry, when he cries not in a gentle, grieving way but in an ugly, devastated, ragged way. But she is awake at five ten, and she watches him quietly, eyebrows furrowed still, and eventually sits squarely in front of him, legs crossed, and only takes his hand in both of hers, moving her thumb across it.
I cannot look at her but he does anyway, although he cannot say why. For the first time he doesn't want her to leave. Her hands feel good. Maybe it's because she's the only one there, or maybe it is because in the wide world she is the one soul to love him at all, and she loves him with everything she is.
"I'm not leaving," she says.
He has never believed it before. He has imagined her getting her wits about her finally, running to Weasley, as inevitably as the snowfall is to begin in several weeks.
She smiles. Perhaps she has guessed it all. Perhaps I don't have to tell her anything.
"You wish I would leave, but I won't. I'm not really sorry about it, though I want to tell you I am. He's dead," she says quietly, "and you aren't dead at all. That's the difference. And you're not alone for right now, but he always was. From his birth until the day he died."
Know-it-all, he thinks again. He doesn't love her; she frustrates him with the truth, with her sense of justice and her light that cannot fade. But right now there is no one to see, to ask, and the world is simple and sad. He lets it be that way for a minute, although it isn't very Slytherin of him. He lets her hold him because it feels good and lets her love him because she wants to and lets himself be pathetic like he never has for her because it is how he's always been.