Inspired by the whole, "oh, look whose there over your shoulder Harry!" moment in HBP because I'm whimsical and have a tendency to latch onto the improbable... just a (hopefully) cutesy little one-shot you can enjoy without thinking too much while I attempt to get over my writers block!
She's not really aware of anything else except his face, blanched and thin and pointed, even though Harry's brows are furiously furrowed and his throat's bobbing like he's swallowing litre after litre of lukewarm beer and she can literally feel Leanne's eyes burning holes into her robes, pressed and starched and smelling distinctly of home, and staring pointedly at the gap that'd been created solely for her to occupy.
She must be so, so, so selfish for ignoring the seventh year Gryffindors clustering around her like bees to honey – to grill her about what had commonly become known as 'The Bell Affair' with true Hogswartian flair for melodrama – in favour of Harry Potter, who wasn't so much of a Knight-in-shining-armour mascot than an annoyance.
"I know what you're going to ask me, Harry, but I don't know who cursed me,", she tells him, glancing over the lean slope of his shoulder at a shock of white blond hair and horrified lips drawn tight over clenched teeth and she tugs nervously at the stiff cuff of her Oxford, wanting to shrug Harry off but not quite having the heart, "I've been trying to remember, honestly, but I just... can't,".
Harry follows her gaze – a slight tilt of his chin over his shoulder, and suddenly she foresees an altercation that she could had prevented so very easily by ignoring the ache in the very bottom of her stomach to stare whenever he's around – and she slips quietly into aforementioned reserved seat and blithely buries herself in the 'Merlin's Beard!'s and 'Katie's that effortlessly surround her.
Earlier...
"Katie...", he says torn and ragged and so very close to breaking that for one moment she's close to threading her fingers through his hair and pressing tiny, butterfly kisses into his jaw. But she is Katie bleeding Bell and she is stronger than that. (Though she thinks her escape, for a mighty Gryffindor, bold and chivalrous, is so close to cowardice she can feel the cool sting of it on her cheeks.)
"No,", she replies, her mouth drawn thin, pale, the bitterness she feels in the pit of her belly lacing across her tongue like poison, "you said it yourself, Malfoy, things are different here,".
He knows better than to let anyone close to him, but she is the closest he's ever come to a tragic downfall. All his regrets and stupid mistakes sit on his tongue and threaten when her eyebrows furrow, and more than anything he longs to confide in someone, anyone, so that this burden of his can sit more easily on his shoulders. (Though he knows that she does not love him and that maybe he does not love her and it would be his greatest mistake of all if she knew.)
They, these two incomplete souls, are tragic lovers who steal moments of baited breath and dark glances in gloomy corridors and across buzzing halls and perhaps one day they'll write their names in stars and ashes and sigh.
But for now they are not meant to be, and she leaves in a flurry of robes on flagstones and the gummy scent of macademia nuts and passion fruit.
He looks stonily at the wall dead in front of him, cold and callous and as slick as a machine, his lips turning downwards, curling his splintered knuckles into fists and pressing them against the rough limestone wall, wishing with all his heart that things were different.
But they each had parts to play; and they must all be allowed to play them.
He follows the outline of her retreating back and thinks sombrely of the desires he'd allowed to turn painfully into regrets.