He wonders sometimes, wonders even now as she reaches for him with smooth unmarked limbs from across the bed. Two hands snake along his chest and he shuts his eyes.
He thinks, I misplaced her.
He misplaced the girl with wild hair and wary eyes; misplaced her scarred arms and the ink-stained clothes; he misplaced her thumb and forefinger, and the permanent quill-dent in each - and her smell, like the spines of ten different books. Somewhere along the way, the girl he doesn't see slipped away, so he married the porcelain pureblood instead. His parents approved.
The lights are off and he can barely make her out in the darkness, but this is an act he has rehearsed before.
'Astoria,' he says, because it's his line and it's expected. Mudblood, he wishes.
Then he stretches out a hand. She purrs his name like she is supposed to and he slides on top of her, fingers at her hips and mouth at her neck.
They're like bad poetry, with silences that stretch far too long and words that don't quite fit.
She traces his jaw with hands that have never held a wand so hard it sparks and snaps; she kisses him with a mouth that has never screamed out for somebody (anybody) to help her – because she has never known loss or pain or desperation. No, he thinks, she has never known war, because war did not reach the swollen emerald manors of purebloods. When there was death and green light, Astoria Greengrass wore dresses that covered her knees and she spoke when spoken to; she looked out from her balcony and counted blades of grass quietly in the garden like she was supposed to. She never danced with a scarred man or cried over a red-headed weasel.
She married who she was told to.
And her arms slip round his neck, wanting like a wife should be, because now she's Astoria Malfoy and she has responsibilities. He pushes up her nightdress – so thin that he can see the join of her hip and thigh, the delicate rise of her chest – and presses against her, because it's his cue and this is how the act goes. He tries to say her name again as he thrusts forward, but she's tight around him and he only manages a strangled 'fuck' before he's inside and can't speak anymore. When she puts her lips to his neck, he closes his eyes tightly and thinks of the girl he is not supposed to think of, the one he lost somewhere along the way.
Neither one of them is perfect: she is sensitive, unused to sex and he never lasts long when the mudblood is on his mind, so it's no surprise when she finishes minutes later and he isn't far behind. Hands that don't slap run through his hair, a gold ring cold against his scalp, before pulling away to the other side of the bed.
'Goodnight,' he says to the wrong girl.
i hope you could get the gist of this and it wasn't too convoluted.
i wanted to write something more in line with what actually happened in harry potter, rather than finding some way for hermione and draco to be together. i think draco found his own way in the end anyway.
- bump.