Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling, and I can't claim her characters, plot line, or anything else she did that I didn't. Unfortunately. If I could, I'd be rich, and I'm not…believe me. I can only claim a few plot twists here and there in this, and my dialogue, lol. Thanks!
He turned the corner slowly, feeling things he never had before. No, that was a stretch, just feeling something at all was strange enough. He realized for the first time that, in his entire life, he'd never really felt anything. Or, at least, nothing but neutral dislike and hereditary hatred for all muggle-borns or Harry Potter-related things and people. How strange it was for his heart to feel present, beating…as though he had one.
He was careful to keep his eyes on the stone floor passing slowly below his feet, so it was a while before he noticed he'd passed the entrance to the Common Room already. With a heavy breath, he turned around, walking back until he reached it.
"Basilisk." He muttered, then passed through the stone door and went straight to his dorm room, sitting on his bed and folding his hands in thought. Even if the vague voices he'd heard while passing through the Common Room had been calling him, he didn't feel like listening to anyone right now. And he was sick of pretending to care about their trivial troubles.
All of it, everything he'd ever used to think was important, he expected now, at this moment, had been irrelevant. All the stupid things he'd done, said, or even thought, he regretted now with burning intensity.
Everything had changed.
Since her.
Or had it been since he realized he loved her? The lines were blurred somewhere in the middle. Or maybe it was just another one of those things that just didn't matter. Either way, he loved her now.
Maybe he always had.
She paced back and forth in the back row of the library where no one could see her. After seven years at Hogwarts, Madame Pince had finally decided that she would never hurt a book, so even she stayed away. Every now and then, she would run her fingers along the spines of the books surrounding her. There were so few times they had failed her…and this was one of them. Perhaps the worst.
No book could explain what it felt like to be in love, how to know whether or not you were in it, why it even happened to begin with and with the people it did. Was your chest feeling five times its normal size a symptom? What an awful word to describe this wonderful, horrible, terrifying sensation…but she could think of nothing else.
It was the last thing she'd expected to happen in her life, especially with him, of all people. Being one of Harry Potter's best friends, she'd learned to expect the unexpected, but this, it was more than unexpected.
But it had happened.
And it had all started with knowing his secret, a secret that should have changed things. And it had, just not in the way she'd wanted.
But it seemed there was someone watching out for all of them who wanted something better for them than they wanted for themselves.
It was easiest to believe that now.
But could he love her back? Even though nothing was the same, could it make a difference to him?
It was the most painful question she'd ever asked.
And yet again –twice in one day- a book could not answer.