A/N: Hey guys! This story is completely random, and entirely based off of this quote from "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger:
"Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can."
If you guys like it it may progress into more than a one-shot, but I'll never know if you don't review!
When Hermione Granger first stepped abord the Hogwarts Express, Harry and Ron's compartment was not the one she visited first.
The train had been crowded beyond belief, and as a sad muggle girl with no idea where she was or what she was doing, it would have been a complete and total understatement to say that she felt alone. As a matter of fact, she felt like she was standing in the middle of a giant black abyss, with nothing and no one around her for lightyears. That wasn't true, of course, seeing as how there were thousands upon thousands of bodies packed into platform 9 and 3/4, but it was certainly how she felt. It seemed like everyone knew at least one other person, except for her. The only person she recognized was a single boy, and that was because she had noticed him on Diagon Alley the other day, and really, she couldn't help but stare.
He was beautiful. She knew you weren't supposed to think of boys as beautiful, but he was. His hair was a shiny-white blonde, and he had incredibly angular features that seemed comletely out of place on an eleven-year-old boy's face, but somehow seemed to work flawlessly. If she had to describe his appearance she would say he reminded her of an angel, except for the fact that he was dressed clad in black from head to toe, and had a look on his face of someone who had smelled something incredibly disgusting. There were rare moments, however, when his parents weren't by his side, that the expression would slip and he would look like a child, filled with wonder and joy, and those were the moments where she allowed herself to think of him as beautiful.
So when she saw him heading by himself onto the train, Hermione decided to follow him.
It wasn't like she was a stalker or anything, of course. She was just a simple young girl with a puppy-love crush on a beautiful young boy who she had seen walking down the street, and being the confident person she was, she was going to sit with him. Most kids her age were terrified by the opposite sex, with all that nonsense about cooties and everything, but not Hermione. Reading novels like Pride and Prejudice had completely turned her off of the idea of boys being "gross" and "icky", and her scientific mind knew that cooties were entirely made-up. So no, she wasn't afraid or ashamed or embarrassed to go talk to the boy - if anything, she was excited. What if he was her soulmate? Perhaps they could have a tragic love story like Romeo and Juliet, minus the tragic part because no way was Hermione dumb enough to kill herself over a boy. She knew she was getting ahead of herself, but she had always been an imaginative child, and the idea of meeting the love of her life was enough to get her mind reeling with millions of possible scenerios. They could get married in Hawaii, she had always wanted to go there, and then they would have four kids, two boys and two girls, each named after Greek gods and goddesses, and...
A flash of blonde from inside one of the train compartments caught her eye, completely cutting off her train of thought. He was sitting in a compartment, alone, and all she could think was that this was her chance to fall in love. There was no turning back, it was time for the leap of faith.
With that thought in mind, she entered his compartment.
Draco Malfoy had never believed in love.
Why would he? There was no evidence of it in his own home, no matter how much his parents liked to pretend. He knew for a fact that his father and mother had loved each other at one point in the past, years of stress from their "secret clubs" had turned their marriage from one of love to one of bitterness and hatred. Yes, his mother loved him, and he was sure his father loved him too, but there wasn't much chance for them to show it, especially not in pubic. He was barely even allowed to talk in public, except for when he was wanted to make a rude comment about a muggleborn or introduce himself to one of his father's wealthy "associates". By age eleven he was already being moulded into a miniature version of his father, and he would be lying if he said he enjoyed it.
Not that he didn't idolize his father, because he did. Hell, he wanted to be like him when he was older more than anything in the world. But he wasn't even a teenager yet, which he figured meant that he had plenty of time to just relax and be a child every once in a while. Even Crabbe and Goyle got to goof off with each other occaisionally, but whenever Draco wanted to join his father would cooly insist that "real men do not play" and his mother would give him a stern look that implied that no arguing was allowed.
Eleven years old and he was already half way to being an adult.
So when the girl walked into his compartment, the first thing that popped into his mind wasn't that she was beautiful, or that her eyes were the prettiest things he had ever seen. Not once did he think that maybe, just maybe, she could be the girl he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Because hell, he was eleven-years-old, and what kind of eleven-year-old would think something crazy like that? No, the first thing he thought when he saw the bushy-haired girl was how many different creatures must have been living in her mane, because he swore at one point in the first three seconds she had walked into the compartment he had heard a growl come out of it. He scooted a little closer to the window, mainly out of fear that some kind of unidentified species was going to jump out of it and start ripping his face to shreads.
The second thing he thought was that she wasn't that remarkable looking. Maybe it was shallow, but he had been raised to judge people by their looks, and this girl certainly wasn't the best looking thing around. She looked like one of those girls who would grow up to be a librarian, living alone in a single-room apartment with fifty cats urinating in every corner while she read romance novels and ate takeout on a Friday night. Once agian, not one of the nicest thoughts he had ever had, but Draco was an honest boy, and that was honestly the vibe she was giving off.
Thought number three: she talked a lot. He only realized this when he realized that the entire time he had been planning out her future in his mind, she had been rambling on about there not being enough seats on the train and that this was the first empty compartment she had seen, and she figured she should sit down and was that his natural hair colour? All of this had been said with one breath in three seconds, and he had half of a mind to turn the girl away simply because she just didn't know how to shut the hell up. But then, before he even knew what he was doing, he was telling her that he would love for her to sit down and she was joining him in his compartment, rambling on about how they should really make the hallways in the train bigger and spewing off fact after fact about Hogwarts and the Hogwarts Express, as if he actually cared.
So, he did the only thing that there was to do in his situation, and tuned her out.
And the best way to tune a girl out, he found, was to scrutinize her looks. Draco was very good at scrutinizing and judging people's appearance, and this girl - whose name he had gathered to be Hermione, from the story she was currently telling about the origin of her name - was certainly strange enough that it would take her at least an hour to fully take every inch of her in. Hopefully that would be long enough so that by the time he was done she would have run out of things to say. But, based on the speed she was talking right now, that wasn't too likely.
First things first were her eyes. They were big and brown, classic girly, puppy eyes. His mother always warned him about girls with big brown eyes, because she said they could steal a boy's heart before he could blink twice. Of course, he had always disagreed, claiming that brown eyes reminded him of feces, but on this girl they reminded him more of melted honey swirled with chocolate. When she got excited about something, which she was currently doing as she spoke about the oppression of house elves, they tended to squint a little, her right one just a fraction more than her left. On any other girl it would have been strange, but on Hermione he found it...well, cute. Merlin, he was eleven, he wasn't supposed to even talk to girls, let alone think they were cute.
Which was why he moved onto the second thing: her nose. It was a tiny little thing, perfectly petite and upturned and exactly the way a nose should look like. Pansy Parkinson had an upturned nose, but hers made her look like a pug and Draco swore if you looked hard enough you could see all the way up into her brain. Hermione's nose was at the perfect angle, and every couple of seconds she would scrunch it in a way that made his heart flutter. Which was wrong on so many levels. He was about to move onto her lips when he noticed the adorable way her big front teeth were digging into them in a pretty little way that reminded him of innocence and sunshine and flowers and everything good in the world. What the hell was wrong with him?
It was then that the boy, only eleven years old, realized he was half way in love.
And it was right then that he learned the most important lesson he would ever learn about girls.
Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.
So when she stood up from the compartment, rattling off some excuse about how she didn't like the angle the sunlight was coming through the window and how she hoped to see him again sometime, Draco decided right then and there that he would never allow himself to become vulnerable to this girl ever again. He was going to make her life hell, make her hate him more than anything else in the world, and he was going to do it because he loved her.