A/N: For Annie (Sadistic Hufflepuff), my fellow beater and Dramione NOTP-er! I hope that I did both characters justice regardless of my own opinions.
Beater one for the Ballycastle Bats (whoo!) in the illustrious HPQL Season 5. My prompts are (word) Apple and (dialogue) "If I'd wanted you to then I would have asked!".
Draco eyed Pansy warily from his prone position atop his friend's second-husband's lover's bed. She carefully lined her dark eyes. Draco felt her stare intently despite her physical focus on her lashline. "Draco, I'm going to be blunt," she lectured. "She's married, monied, and a Weasley. Get off somewhere else."
Draco rolled his eyes with as much grandiose romanticism that he could summon on short notice and flopped back onto the bed. "It's not like that, Pans. She's purely a platonic, intellectual interest."
Moving on from her eyeliner, Pansy pursed her lips, taking in her pitiable collection of liners and sticks. She paused as she lined her upper lip to look directly at Draco through the mirror. "Have you considered, after you realized Golden-Boy-Potter wasn't your happily ever after, that going out with his best friend doesn't help whatever public facade of "reformed" that we," she motioned to herself airily with a lip-lining baton, "have been trying so hard to cultivate?"
Groaning at the familiar argument, Draco pushed himself up to his forearms. "Pans, Potter was obsessed with me!"
"So were you! Remember third year? You obsessed for longer than that tosser anyways. You spent Christmas with him and the Weasleys last year for Merlin's sake!"
Pansy clicked closed her last lipstick and turned to see her oldest friend. She took in his disheveled state and was mentally thrown back to her sixth year. The seemingly permanent eye-bags had returned with a vengeance, his wrists fragile, and his poor decision-making resurrected. She carefully drew up his head into her chest, watchful of the delicate folds of her shirt when she pillowed his head, holding him firmly into her torso as if she herself could vanish all his self-destructive tendencies with pure love and tenacity alone.
"Last year," she started, and Draco moaned, thrashing pathetically under her grip, attempting to escape whatever bad memories would leave her mouth next. "Last year," she continued, "you told me that you loved Harry Potter and wanted to raise your stupidly cute blue cousin with him. You told me that he was the end-all be-all of loves and that he loved you and I should forget all my inhibitions and just get onboard with the "love train"."
Pansy mimed tooting a horn.
"I know you've had a rough six months and I haven't been around as much as you've needed but c'mon Draco, even you can see that this is a bad idea. Beyond her being a Weasley - Morgana knows I hate their stupid name - I'm worried about you."
Looking down at her despondent friend and knowing a lost cause when she saw one, Pansy swiped some of her dark hair back out of her eyes and away behind her ear. "I'm only trying to help, hun." Kissing the top of his white downy hair, she retreated from the bed, exiting the shared studio flat softly.
Draco's voice cracked, weak from being unused as he called pathetically after her retreating figure. "If I'd wanted you to then I would have asked!"
Only Pansy could make a quiet exit in four-inch platforms. Only Pansy could make him feel more miserable (than Potter did).
She left Draco alone, sad, and ready to make poor decisions.
Stupid Potter, stupid prophet, stupid Rita Skeeter, stupid smart Hermione Weasley.
Sighing, he pulled himself up and out of bed, crawling his way across his wooden floor to the dresser. He pulled out three shirts and some muggle trousers, deciding on which outfit screamed "leave-me-to-die-alone" the most elegantly.
Looking in the mirror, Draco understood on some level that he lacked the conventional attractiveness of Blaise and Theo, instead opting for harsher features with a narrow jaw and chest to match. While not handsome, Draco was adamant that he still met the requirements of "attractive" and if anything, traditionally pretty.
By third year, Draco had also understood that his money and intelligence filled up his physical defects in the eyes of his peers. When given a choice, gallions, status, and prestige would always prevail victorious.
However, relatively poor at twenty-three, Draco lacked the ability and material goods to shrug off his many insecurities.
He turned into a pub an hour after Pansy left for one of Blaise's many social events.
Draco would have once accompanied Pansy, but after Harry and his' rather nasty and public break, he had receded into the shadows, preferring to take a pass on any public encounters with people he'd rather avoid.
Nursing his shot glass, Draco eventually got tired of the loneliness and the awkward rejections and began to amble his way back to the flat he and Pansy shared. Somewhere along the way, he made a left turn instead of a right and ended up at one of the many entrances to the Department of Magical History's Library. Imagining the warm ivy couches that lined the many shelves of the library, he approached a ramshackle light post. Tapping on it first with his wand and then again in a staccato rapping pattern with his knuckles, Draco was soon granted access.
After the War he had puttered around a bit, falling into all sorts of professions: babysitting, socialite-ing, warding, before he settled on History. As a mid-level ministry-registered Historian, he regularly used the library. It was, besides his flat and a muggle Italian restaurant on Baker Street, his favorite location.
Eyeing his favorite couch, Draco quickly made his way to a peaceful night of self-pity, aided by some pillows charmed to eke out classical music every twenty minutes. He never got there.
Draco, already aware he was not the Adonis of his generation, came to a full stop when a messy bun popped into his peripheral vision. The first couple weeks after the wrecking ball, otherwise known as Harry Potter, crashed in and out of his life, he came into work every other day either dressed to the nines (sometimes even with a cape) and other days with green apple themed pajamas. Gradually, as it became less socially acceptable to be such a public wreck, he began wearing regular clothes again. Partly this change was due to Hermione. At the time, he got a phantom itch whenever he saw her prim-put together form in the hallways and was wearing a worn backwater shirt. He could feel her eyes, caring, judging, evaluating across hallways, through walls, trained on him and his pathetic-ness.
His Hermione-paranoia eventually got him dressing properly again, if only to relieve the forsaken feeling of being watched by the woman.
The watchfulness of her eyes lessened soon after, but in the months that followed, Draco's feelings of inadequacy fueled by Hermione reformed into an indescribable need to impress, to prove that he (while very much not) was okay and socially functional.
He joined his coworkers on coffee runs and told jokes and eventually met the illustrious Weasley face-to-face.
His last proper interaction with her was way back in their Hogwarts days. Even when he was dating Potter he tended to stay in his corner whenever Harry dragged him out to Weasley family gatherings (which of course always made stupid-kicked-puppy-Potter sad).
She was loud, she was beautiful, he wanted to take her head off eighty-nine percent of the time. But she was compelling, she gave him a funny feeling in his gut that he didn't know he had been sorely missing. After one coffee encounter, Draco's coworkers having long filtered out of the shop to get back to work, he listened to her for the first time.
She had so many plans. She had a vision of the future and he could hear it in her everyday conversations about menial things like coffee prices.
When he was sixteen he followed a madman with a clear vision of the future.
Now twenty-three, he was falling head-first for a similarly brilliant witch with the ability to make him believe in her future too.
She gave him hope and direction and soon the one-off coffee encounter became a weekly thing. She graced him with her presence, her daily woes, and her observations. He regaled her with little known historical facts. On Thursdays they swapped potion recipes.
They developed a camaraderie of mutually shared interests that went deeper, a connection of spilled blood and sacrifice that tethered them and every other child of their generation together. Their entire Hogwarts class was reborn in blood, bathed in the red sea of fascism.
Hermione had no interest in somehow saving Draco but with every smile she sent his way he could feel the slump in his shoulders lessening, tension ebbing away, and the blossoming hope of a better England, a better Wizmount, and salvation.
She may be the last person on earth (his Mother died last year, Father still in Azkaban) of whose opinion he still truly cared for. That's why, dressed in a worn shirt and threadbare jeans, he felt a chilling stab of panic.
Twenty paces to his right stood Hermione Granger-Weasley.
Turning slowly (because he couldn't not be drawn to her neither could he not say hi) he caught her eye.
She waved him over, taking in his dress but did not comment. He was grateful and he joined her in her search for a 298 B.C. letter from a Goblin child on the eve of the First Goblin Rebellion.
Research was relaxing, far better than lying as a heap on a magical chair to get a less than magical cramp in the morning.
Draco traced Hermione's delicate neck with his eyes, watching the soft slope run up to meet her thick hair. Lit up by the library's warm lanterns, Hermine read out the letter to him, concentrating on her translations.
It was truly a testament to her intellect that she could concurrently sight read and translate gobblygook.
Draco shifted in his seat, tore his eyes away and sent them up to observe the ceiling. Hearing the soft cadence of her voice, he knew that he never wanted her to leave.
He turned to see her again and watched as her wedding ring caught all the available light in its area, glimmering greedily, teasing him.
He was so screwed.
A/N: I recently read A Tale of Two Cities and it may or may not have impacted my interpretation of the two characters (*Cough* Lucie Manette and Sydney Carton).
Wow, fun tidbit, this is my first (completed) fanfic (even if it is a one-shot) after 2 whole years!