Okay guys, this is a one shot so it's going to go verryyyy quick. I know Draco may seem a little OOC and that their relationship may happen quickly, but this isn't really supposed to be very accurate – it's just supposed to be an interesting, fun to read, single chapter story. Hope you enjoy!

Hermione Granger had always had a thing for words.

They were so easy to twist and bend to your will, so easy to make something boring into a musical melody that drifted between your ears like velvet. They were helpful, giving knowledge in a way that sights and sounds couldn't. Words could describe a scene better than the eyes themselves, could compare and contrast, could mean the difference between life and death and she liked that. She liked the feeling of knowing that a couple of small, seemingly insignificant noises from worthless lips could change everything. She liked knowing that something so small could impact so much. She liked the feeling of knowing that although she will die, the markings on paper will always remain and never change.

This was why she was alone in a library at three in the morning on a school night. Of course, she might regret it in the morning but she needed to do something while Harry and Ron, the selfish pricks, were out there alone, blindly attempting to find scattered pieces of the Dark Lord's soul. And words had never let her down before, so of course it made sense that she would be scouring the thousands of books in the library for even just a sentence, even a miniscule word that might be of help. She hated feeling helpless, hated that they had left her in the middle of the night, and hated that she was underestimated just because she was a girl.

Hermione glanced up through her eyelashes at the tall stack of books in front of her. Yes, it was late, but she already knew everything in her classes, and honestly, who's going to care that she can't keep her eyes open if Voldemort is out murdering muggles somewhere? So therefore, Hermione Granger huffed at the nearby clock and picked up another dusty tome, her sleep- glazed eyes slowly drifting to sleep as words danced across her mind, taunting her with visions of that night.

She sat up quickly, gasped a quick breath, and looked around quickly to make sure nobody had seen before she resumed her search for horcruxes.

Draco Malfoy had always hated words.

As a child, he used to sit on the other side of his bedroom door as he listened to his father scream filthy words at his mother. He hated the way they tasted on his own tongue, as most of the ones that he spat out were venom-filled and cold. It was common knowledge that if you said something enough times, it lost its meaning.

"Murder. Murder. Murder. Murder. Murderer. Murderer." He used to say them in his sleep too, attempting to convince himself that they meant nothing. For if words meant nothing, the killing curse wouldn't exist. If words meant nothing, "Avada Kedavra" would never be murmured through the hateful lips of his own father. If words meant nothing, his kind, regal, quiet mother wouldn't be six feet under the cold, hard ground.

Draco had taken to falling asleep on the balcony of his room, with the stars as his ceiling and the lush land of the Malfoy Manor as his carpet down below. He despised the inside of his house, with its dark colors and deadly inhabitants, all of which were in the dungeons right now, enjoying whatever show Lucius had put on to impress them. Just by not being there Draco would cause suspicion, but he had taken part once before. He still saw the eyes of that muggle in his nightmares, still remembered the last emotion on her face before it became unable to distinguish details due to dark, oozing blood.

Contrary to popular belief, blood is not red. It isn't the color of a fire hydrant, or the color of lipstick on those models that you see in magazines, their seductive smiles popping with the rich hue. Blood is a dark, black substance when it is truly thick enough to suffocate. He sees it in his dreams, and sometimes if he wakes up too quick, he sees it dripping down his walls, covering his room with a substance so real that he swears he can smell it, can taste the coppery flavor on his tongue.

He's seen too much, he's been too exposed to evil. He is scarred, in a worse way than Potter.

The night that Draco switched sides, it was freezing outside, almost like the Dark Lord could see that he was about to commit the ultimate betrayal. The price on his head after tonight would be more than the price on Albus Dumbledore's. The Dark Lord hated to be betrayed, hated knowing that someone dared to defy him.

The wind howled like a coyote and pushed its way through the thick fibers of his coat. The stars, usually so comforting, were covered up by angry clouds as silent snowflakes began to fall, catching in his platinum hair and blending in with the blinding color. His eyelashes became heavy with the stubborn flakes, but he continued on. Ten miles left, just ten miles before he could end all this, before he could end this war. The words that he needed to say were ready, on the tip of his icy tongue. He repeated them as he trudged through the barren, wintery land.

"It's at Hogwarts. He hid it at Hogwarts. It's at Hogwarts. He hid it at Hogwarts." Draco wondered why he continued to be surprised when it always turned out that words ended everything. Everything, including the war.

However, it was a shock to him when the ground suddenly disappeared from out under his feet. He was spinning uncontrollably and everything was distorted and blurring as splotches of color kept him from seeing his surroundings. He felt himself thump roughly against a carpeted floor and immediately jumped to his feet. His head was still spinning but he knew what had happened. The Dark Lord caught me, he's going to torture me, I'm going to-

"What business do you have at Hogwarts?" A cold voice said from a few feet away. Draco froze in shock at hearing that it was a woman's voice. He raised his head gingerly to see none other than Minerva McGonagall, who stood with her back ramrod straight, refusing to show fear in the presence of this filthy, blonde boy that had traveled inside the first set of wards. Inside she was shivering, horrified at the presence of the son of one of the cruelest Death Eaters known, but she'd rather eat a porcupine than let him know that.

"Headmaster," Draco managed to mumble through his heavy tongue before he passed out. McGonagall sighed and kept a fierce eye on his limp body as she owled Albus Dumbledore, a heavy feeling settling in her heart as some distant part of her was sure that this was the beginning of the end. The sons of Death Eaters didn't show up to Hogwarts without Dark Magic on them unless…unless… the thought was too unnerving. Maybe the dark detectors were malfunctioning. Maybe he'd dropped it when she'd summoned him.

Or maybe, just maybe, Draco Malfoy's icy exterior was hiding something more than a dark family history.

The confession took six hours and thirty-seven minutes. That was, if you ask Draco, six hours and thirty-seven minutes too much. He didn't like the repeating the story, because it caused him to remember the look on his mother's face at the funeral. She looked peaceful and happy, happier than she ever did alive. He also didn't like explaining to the old fool, two thousand times over, that he had heard You-Know-Who talking about the hidden horcrux. Yes, he was sure it was at Hogwarts. No, he didn't know where the others were. Yes, he was telling the truth. No, he didn't know what the horcrux was. It was exhausting.

Finally, they got his motive for switching out of him. He had tried to avoid it before, but then they had asked about his family and he couldn't help it. That was when he had sworn that he would revenge his mother's death. The veritaserum tasted bitter on his tongue as he finally spat out his final answer.

"They killed her. They killed her simply because she spilled a glass of wine. I will not forgive them. Kill them all." He saw Dumbledore and McGonagall, the old hags, look at each other.

"Your motives are not pure, but they are real. We will keep you under our protection here for the time being. We will do everything in our power to keep harm from coming to you. However, we must ask a few things of you."

He stared at her.

He stared at her all the time. While she was reading in the library, surrounded by towering bookshelves that seemed to loom over him. While her quill scratched furiously on the parchment as she did more than the suggested amount of essays for her classes. While she stared off into the distance, her brown eyes glazed over with the possibilities of another world, a world in which she wasn't forced to study with the son of the man who killed her parents.

McGonagall and the old kook thought it would be good for him if he looked for information to help their side of the war while Potty and Weasel cluelessly searched for horcruxes. However, he spent most of his time watching her. He remembered that night, the night where she had been chained to the chair that he always sat in, the night that he had seen her parents and watched them die and done nothing.

And yet, she was forgiving enough to allow him to sit near her. Even the fact that she allowed him in the same room was a miracle. For the first week, all she did was spit insults and glare. By the second week, she ignored him. But in the third week, she just treated him like he was another book, another shelf, just another part of the library. Not forgiving but not furious.

Every time she thought she found something, she would lean forward on the edge of her seat. First her eyes would light up and then she would start to write down the information, practically scratching a hole in the parchment with the force of her quill and excitement. He swears that her hair gets bigger as she gets excited, but when he voices that opinion she glares at him for the next twenty minutes.

They study until the fire burns low, and then she goes to the kitchens and brings him back some dinner. He isn't allowed to leave their section of the library for fear that the students will see him and panic, so he is confined to their space. He doesn't mind, really. The area reminds him of her, with the books neatly organized into perfect stacks. It smells like her too, a smell like mint leaves that seems to waft between the pages of every book he reads, filling the air with mint every time he turns a page.

He isn't sure why he studies her so much, more than the books probably. She's like a book herself when she reads, her face expressing every emotion she feels while she's not paying enough attention to guard it. Her eyebrows knit together when she gets frustrated, her lips curl down in a scowl when she finds something disappointing, and the corners of her mouth turn up in a slight smile when she finds what she was looking for.

She's mesmerizing, really.

Sometimes she falls asleep in the library and has nightmares, hands curling into fists as she mumbles under her breath. He knows what she's dreaming about. He hopes he's not in her nightmares, but knows he is. After all, you don't forget the face of the person who stood by and watched as your family died.

He would know.

She came to the library crying one day. It had been her parents' death anniversary, and she tried to hide the tears but he knew. He knew. And so this time he pulled his hood up over his head and traveled to the kitchens, coming back with two pints of ice cream and some hot chocolate. He sat next to her on the couch as she silently let the tears fall down her face. He intertwined his fingers with hers and pulled her against him, whispering "I'm sorry" over and over again as the uncharacteristic kindness of his act made her begin to suspect something about his cold, stationary heart.

The next day he was slightly colder than usual, to make up for his earlier act of niceness. She found herself curious about him, wondering why one moment he was almost human and the next he was frozen inside himself all over again. She wondered when he had even begun to change, wondered when he would have even thought to get a crying girl ice cream.

Nearby, Draco wondered the same thing. A year ago, he would have taken three showers after he even breathed the same air as a Mudblood. Now, he was holding hands with one and saying sorry to her? What the hell was happening to him? It had only been three months since he'd arrived at Hogwarts, and he had already turned into some muggle-loving fool. In fact, if he didn't know any better he'd say that-

He suddenly hissed with pain as his arm began to burn. A dark shadow began to burn through his white shirt and he moaned in agony. His arm was on fire and he could barely hear Hermione as she kneeled next to him, asking what was wrong.

He couldn't breathe, couldn't think, and couldn't even see around him to know what was going on. The flames were eating at his arm, burning through his skin and eventually he couldn't hold it in. He screamed, his back arching in agony. The Dark Lord was punishing him. He'd finally found Draco, and since he couldn't reach him, he was being sent a message – "you will die." In this moment, he would rather die than feel this pain.

Slowly, very slowly, the torturous pain began to ebb away. A throbbing feeling remained in his arm, but his senses began to come back and he looked straight up into the eyes of a very concerned headmaster.

"Well, this presents a new problem."

Hermione Granger was very confused. First, one of the people that she hated most in the world was exiled to the library, somewhere that she refused to stop visiting. Then, he doesn't say anything as she spits fire at him. No insults, no Mudblood jokes, nothing. It unnerved her until she finally started to get used to it. She had learned to ignore his icy stare as it drilled into the back of her head. He was always looking at her, always glaring at her. He may not say anything, but she was sure there was darkness under all that ridiculously bright hair of his. Thus, she was sure he would make fun of her when she came to the library on the day of her parents' death. She was even more sure that he wouldn't remember but he did. He remembered and he brought her ice cream! Merlin's beard, what was happening to the world?

Granted, he was colder towards her after the ice cream incident, but she figured that would happen. Everything about him was cold and frozen. One day he fell asleep, and she stopped her reading to study him.

His skin was a pale, wintery color. He hadn't been outdoors in a very, very long time, so his lack of a tan wasn't a shock. It fit him anyway. His platinum hair was casually messy, and his eyes….they were hypnotic. Silver with gray flecks, they fit him perfectly. When he was frustrated, she noticed that they turned darker, almost like a thunderstorm. That's what he reminded her of – a furious snowstorm, the kind that start out seeming like a good excuse to miss school until they knock over power lines and bury homes.

He was a mystery, and Hermione always had a thing for mysteries.

It happened on the coldest night in January, when the two occupants of the library could hear the howling wind through the six-inch-thick windows. The moon hung from the sky like it had been tacked on a bulletin board, and the stars glittered like sequins on a dark canvas.

Later, Hermione would swear that she didn't even remember saying it. It didn't matter though – accidents or on purpose, words changed everything once again.

"Malfoy," she said, absentmindedly sifting through a volume that was probably thicker than her head. "Do you hate me?"

Draco Malfoy froze. He saw her chained to that chair once again, a river of tears leaving tracks on her face as her parents' lives drifted away. He saw her punching him in third year, saw her at the Yule Ball in fourth, and saw her fighting the Death Eaters in sixth year. And then he saw her reading a stack of books, crying while eating ice cream, spitting insults at him as she furiously turned the pages of a book.

Yes, his mind screamed at him. He knew he shouldn't even be hesitating to say it, but his mouth seemed to have a mind of its own. She looked so hopeful, looking up at him through her light eyelashes, tucking a few stray curls behind her ear. The word bubbled up from deep inside him; the exact opposite of what every instinct of his was screaming and raging into his ears.

"No."

Six months had passed since Draco's arrival.

He was beginning to get attached to her in a horrible way that made him want to puke. She was part of him now, as part of him as his eyes and hands and feet and he couldn't function properly without her. She was in his bloodstream, racing throughout him like the deadliest type of poison.

It wasn't that he loved her – no, not like that at all. He didn't even like her. It was just that when you spend six months with someone and that someone only, you get dependent on their existence. It was like they were in their own little world when she was around, like Voldemort wasn't hunting him down or making his Dark Mark burn like hell in the middle of the night. She had become part of him, part of his being. She was in his blood and he was afraid that if something happened to her, his make-believe world would be shattered and he would have to go back to living in the real, cold, hard world outside this library.

He didn't love her, but he needed her.

He woke up screaming in the middle of the night once again. This time, however, it was different. He had seen the Dark Lord, had seen him torturing his father. Draco realized something he had never even considered before – that Voldemort might take out his anger at Draco on his father. Lucius was the Dark Lord's greatest supporter, but even so, he wasn't safe.

Nobody was safe. Draco couldn't believe that it had taken him this long to figure that much out.

It still bothered him, however. He was scared, so scared that he was going to turn around and be just like his father anyway. Sure, the goody-two-shoes Hermione Granger might be part of him, but so was his father. The purest forms of good and evil, both close to him in different ways. He couldn't help but wonder which one would win. Nowadays, he wasn't sure of anything anymore.

She smiled today. She smiled at Draco when he talked to her and he could almost feel his heart of ice melting. She was so innocent, so sweet. Maybe he hadn't liked her that way before, but something was changing. Her eyes were beginning to look less like mud, and more like chocolate. Her hair was starting to look less frizzy and more endearing. He started watching her again, started marveling over how she could completely tune out everything while she was reading.

"Granger," he drawled, careful not to sound too eager. "Do you hate me?"

She didn't even hesitate.

"No."

The next week passed slower than molasses. He was completely familiar with her now, completely at ease with every detail of her. He knew the shape of her jaw, the slope of her chin, the exact hue of her eyes when she smiled. He found that he wasn't even scared anymore.

They talked now. They talked and they laughed and he couldn't ever remember being so truly close to someone, couldn't remember ever knowing somebody so well. When she left, even for a couple minutes, he felt something deep inside him frown. Draco wasn't dumb. He knew that nothing good was going to come of this feeling, this fuzzy feeling inside his chest, but he couldn't help it. He felt fluttery whenever she came close to him.

They had progressed to sitting on the same couch so they could share notes. He made it a game with himself. Every time she left, he would scoot a little closer to her side of the couch – one millionth of an inch, yet still closer. Being so close to her made him feel warm, like he was wrapped in a cocoon of blankets.

Occasionally, the old Draco Malfoy would kick up again, swearing at him and causing him to scoot a full six inches away from her side of the couch. But the next time she left, he would start up again, hating himself.

He didn't know how she had done it, but then again, she was the brightest witch of her age. She had managed to melt his icy heart into a pool of water in the bottom of his chest. She was making him change, completely change. He was a completely different person.

Of course, there were still the sarcastic remarks, the occasional insults. There were still the fights when they were both tired and frustrated, but he never used the M-word anymore. Never. No matter how much she pissed him off, he wouldn't let that word slip out of his lips anymore.

He was alive. He was truly alive, without the shards of ice seeming to dig into his heart every time he spoke cruel words. He was honestly, truly happy and although he was sure his mother was rolling in her grave, he couldn't help but dream about her. The coldness of his past wasn't present as long as he sat by the fire in the library, a mere foot from the girl he was (and he had to admit it) falling for.

Merlin's beard, she was going to be the death of him.

He did it.

He couldn't help it; he just had to do it. She looked so beautiful as she laughed at something he had said, her caramel curls floating around her mocha-colored eyes. She smiled at him once again, and something inside him snapped.

He didn't know what it was. Maybe he had scooted over too far too her this time, maybe she had put a charm on him, maybe the book he just read was cursed, maybe the fire was too warm and cozy for him to think properly – he didn't know the cause.

All he knew was that in the middle of her laugh, he reached over and pressed his hands on both sides of her face, gazing into her confused eyes. Then he pulled her towards him and kissed her petal-pink mouth, wrapping his arms around her waist.

At first she was rigid, but then he felt her smile against his lips and she wound her fingers into his hair, kissing him back. For the next two years, neither of them would forget this moment.

Two years later, to the shock of the entire wizarding world, Draco Malfoy got down on one knee and proposed to Hermione Granger, who was supposed to be the brightest witch of her age.

But if she was really that bright, they thought, why would she have said yes to a former Death Eater?

With the words, "Will you marry me?" Draco Malfoy found for the first time that maybe he could learn to love words.

And for the first time in her entire sodding life, words failed Hermione Granger.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Slytherin's very own Romeo fell in love with Gryffindor's Juliet.

Please read and review! Tell me if I should write another and PLEASE leave suggestions and criticism, I love it! Once again, reading over this I noticed that it does go VERY fast, but it is a one shot and takes place over a longer period of time than the story shows so please forgive me.