Beautiful
Author's Note: More from my drabbles file. Yay!
Summary: Hermione watches Draco and she sees clearer than most.
Disclaimer: Not mine. I wouldn't make Draco lose his hair.
Beautiful.
It's a word reserved for women on the pages of the Witch Weekly and hauntingly pure white unicorns.
It is a word too often used as incentive in a game I could no more play than Harry could skip through the world with innocence in his eyes or Ron could toss his grandfather's chess set into the flames.
I am giving it back the solid shades and sharp angles that used to sustain it.
I am using it to describe Draco Malfoy.
Draco Malfoy is beautiful. Silver eyes shadowed and simmering disdain and reveal and speak to me in a language that is entirely foreign when our gazes chance to meet. I fear those chancy moments, run from them and wait. I wait till butterfly wings rub against my skin and tiny, fizzy bubbles swarm my throat and then I look up. Freeze frame. The opaque molten metal of his irises hardens to granite and I bang against the chiseled rock. The sound echoes. He smiles. Beautiful. Hateful, cold, impossible, hard, magnetic, fiery. Beautiful.
The potion we're assigned to do is all those things. Because it's clear and it mirrors his eyes. I was never a religious person, never enough sense in the books or the prayer or the ephemeral wisp of divinity but I can pray when our gazes meet in the surface of the liquid in my cauldron. I pray for the moment to end. I pray for it to stretch out into infinity, to rubber-band so that when it snaps, it inverts, bringing me back to the beginning.
Our hands touch sometimes. His are cold and dry and mine are just a bit warmer, just a bit moist with nerves and concentration and a fearful sort of desire that must seep from my pores to decode on his skin. His skin is soft. Satin or velvet maybe and maybe just the texture of swan down. He is all contradictions, impenetrable eyes, irresistible skin. Beautiful.
My cousin Riana once told me that childhood goes the way of ice cream. They both melt away. She was right. My childhood is melting under the accidental brushes of our fingers. One day I think I am going take that puddle, pour it into the form of the woman I aim to be and freeze it into place. Someday might be soon. Because Draco Malfoy is beautiful.