Some things never change.

She's curled up in one of the window seats in the library, tucked away into the corner. The world seems to have slipped away, foundered into the pages of her book and lost themselves, reality slipped away like fine sand through a sieve. Sunlight filters through the glass panes, broken periodically by the metal bars that cross its surface, playing across the contours of her earnest face and lighting a soft warmth in her the brown, bushy hair she's caught back into a messy bun.

Her eyes trail along the lines, enraptured. There's an eager light in them, which isn't unusual considering this voracious appetite for literature, but today it's laced with something more. Her features are not marred with a pinched, hurried expression so typical as she struggles to pack far too much schoolwork into too few hours. Instead a faint wisp of a smile curls at her pink lips, bemused and indulgent.

It is no textbook she cradles in her hands, but a worn copy of fairy tales she had brought from home. Her slender fingers trace along the margins of the pages as she reads, tapping every now and again. There's a reverence in the way it rests against her legs, knees pulled close. Something sacred. And she's calm, relaxed, for these temporal, fragile moments, losing herself to the sweet childhood memories and dreams. A world of whimsical color, right and wrong, good and evil.

Happily ever after.

She knows such fairy endings are broken by reality, but she loves the lines written within the pages, where there is no confusing grey, and hope is everlasting. Perhaps it is this sense of justice that she drags back with her to reality, attaching it to her madcap schemes and ideals.

She is beautiful in her own way. Not conventional, not by a long shot. But it is endearing, to see her with the sun running on her skin and that lopsided, half-teasing quirk of a smile and pieces of hair already slipping out of her bun. It is another kind of beauty.

She's lost in some far off land, drinking in another world and some great adventure so removed from these familiar walls and the languid spring day.

And from across the room, he reads her.

X

X

X


I'm baaack. I really needed to post something, so here it is. Wrote it as Draco/Hermione, but take it how you like it. I'm THIS close to finishing up with my finals and then I'll have a beautiful long summer to post stuff. Yay? I've already started working on the next chapter of The Theory (which got kind of put off for a while) so watch out for it!