Disclaimer: Harry Potter is not mine. Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy likewise belong to J.K. Rowling.
Summary: In a war-torn world, Hermione Granger falls in love with an old enemy, and loses more than her bitter feelings.
It's Not About Us
The sun blazed despite the winter chill. The ground was unseasonably snowless leaving a despondent memory of summertime that taunted as the winter wind blew.
And somewhere a girl was waking, opening her eyes to an artificially lit room. If only it would snow, or the ice would melt from the pavement. But nature was caught in an elemental limbo, refusing to do either.
And somewhere the girl was dressing, pulling her socks on, right foot first, then the left foot. They make her feet colder, icy from being left by the window. Quietly she makes her way downstairs, not wanting to break the primordial silence of the igloo temperatured house.
And somewhere her heart was breaking. Somewhere, far away, her heart was crying out. Not here, not here in the frozen household, but somewhere farther. Somewhere beyond the frost covered windows. Somewhere far removed from this barren chill. Perhaps if her heart were here, it would be warmer. Perhaps if she had kept her heart it would not be breaking now. But she can feel it, can feel it breaking, shattering, like icicles falling from the roof.
The Muggle community felt the aftershock of the war as well as in the Wizarding world, but Hermione Granger chose to reside here. She thought that perhaps it would be easier to forget, if she left the place that had caused her so much pain.
She was wrong.
She feels like someone else. She feels cold and the lack of heat does not dull the pain, does not make it less real. It makes it even more vivid. The pain blazes with a fierceness that startlingly contrasts the cold. Maybe if she could be as warm as this burning pain she could match it's heat and feel it less, but now she is pulled towards her desperation. The silence is all too terrifying. It knows things, knows everything, and feels nothing. If only she could feel nothing. She tries to, she tries to separate her mind from her body. As long as she can keep pretending this misery will pass, it is bearable.
In a sane world, a rational world, he was her opposite.
In a twisted world, he was her ideal. He was the inverted reflection of her heart. His thoughts were hers in a fragmented rearrangement. His feelings and ideas paralleled her own. Black to white, front to back, they matched. His shattered dreams called to her soul, and her soul cried to anyone who would listen. Undiscriminating, their entire beings drew each other, in a dangerous magnetic attraction. Positive to negative, plus to minus, their relationship was electric, and, like electricity, it was dangerous.
She had been fighting for so long that she had forgotten what it was like to relax. She thought she had forgotten how to love, that she would never be so weak as to betray any human emotion. She thought she was impervious, that nothing could touch her.
But he opened her up, brought her back into the light, drew her from the dark shadows that had surrounded her since the war had started. After Hogwarts was destroyed, Hermione didn't know where to turn. It had been her home. She wanted to crush those that had ripped her from her home, and hatred consumed her. She become hard, cold, like a Slytherin. She never would have guessed that it would be a Slytherin to set her free.
"What do you want, Granger?"
The first time they had met since Hogwarts, Draco Malfoy was the same conceited bastard he had always been. "Well, Mudblood, talk."
"Do you have to be such a jerk, Malfoy? Forget it. I'm leaving."
She walked away, delicately, swaying her hips knowing that he was too much of a man not to be attracted.
"Wait."
If Hermione had been in a happy mood, which she rarely was these days, she would have smiled.
"Yes?" she asked him, moving her mouth carefully, sensually.
"Would you like to have a seat?"
She smirked inwardly, realizing that Malfoy had the same plan she had. She knew that he could never see her as an equal, and she would bet a vault full of Galleons that he was trying to seduce her, hoping to learn more about the Order of the Pheonix.
She would have been right.
What Draco Malfoy didn't know, was that Hermione was a brilliant seductress. He could never truly win her over.
Many Firewhiskeys later, they ended up back at her flat. "Tell me what it's like to be a Death Eater," she whispered in his ear as he carried her to her room. It had been so easy to get him to talk, and the information turned out to be reliable, so she kept going to see him. He thought that he was getting information out of her.
His naivety would become the Order's victory.
But it became too much. Eventually, Hermione realized it wasn't all a game anymore.
They were on opposite sides in a world gone mad. She never suspected, when she joined the Order of the Phoenix, that she would be forced to do all she could to draw information from her childhood enemy. She never suspected that she would actually like it. She never imagined that she would ever feel anything beyond a sense of responsibility to the Order.
He felt it too.
She tried to leave, but each time he convinced her into staying with him.
"We're not hurting anyone," he told her.
No one but themselves.
It was dangerous, sneaking around. They both knew it, but there were too mesmerized, at first by the passion, and then by each other.
"I don't give a damn if you are Muggle born, Granger," he told her once between kisses. "The sex is just too damn good for this to be wrong."
"The girls in my dorm were right," she responded.
"About what? My charming good looks? My decisive wit? My wicked Quidditch skills?"
"No...The fact that Slytherins are only after one thing." She laughed when she said it-She didn't really mind. She liked being with him.
"I am only after one thing," he said, seriously.
"What?"
"You."
"My body, you mean," she said bitterly.
"No," he replied, smiling at her. "You."
He had changed. They both had. Hermione had learned that Draco Malfoy was capable of love.
And so had he.
The war was too heated. It was too much for Hermione, fighting Death Eaters by day and sleeping with one at night. She was afraid that if she stayed with him, she would become weak, lose sight of the goal-ridding the world of Voldemort.
"I can't do this anymore, Draco" she told him, but the assertion was more like a plea, a desperate bid for release.
"You say that each time, Hermione" he said, taking hold of her hand.
How could she tell him that this time was different, that this time, she knew, that if she stayed, if she the consequences would be impossible to cope with?
"What are you fighting against?" he asked. "What is it about me that's so terrible, so horrifying that you can't even look me in the eye? How can you kiss me, let me hold you in my arms, yet refuse to tell me you love me?"
"It's complicated," she answered.
Two words and they held her entire world, the complex intricacies that composed her life.
"I love you." He said it without emotion, as if stating a fact, because that is all it has become. She has refused to allow it to evolve into something more than words. These five words contained their universe, their souls. Everything they had been to each other, everything they could have been, was completely summed up in these two phrases.
And now she is left all alone in the cold, no hands to warm her save her own. Her hands have remained, they are still hers, but her heart is gone. It never belonged to her, it belonged to him and he refused to return it to her.
"Just let me go," she begged, with her eyes more than her words. Her words were strong, demanding, but her eyes were threatening a river.
"You love me." Again, the words were a statement, a declaration. It was not a question, it was not a request for her to acquiesce. It was simply him, stating what he knew to be true.
"I can't."
"But you do."
"But I can't. Don't ask me to be something I'm not. If I stayed, if I let us be together, I wouldn't be me. I wouldn't be the person you fell in love with...the person you think you fell in love with."
How could she stay with him? She had no choice. There were two sides in this war. Light versus Dark. Good against Evil. The Death Eaters fighting The Order. Hermione on one side, Draco on the other.
"I will always love you. Always and forever, dead or alive, with you or alone," he said, trying not to feel, wishing he could Summon words of love from her mouth.
"And I will always remember you. Always and forever, dead or alive, with you or alone." It was the closest she could come to a confession.
"So I'll love and you'll remember. And that's it? We'll go our separate ways and never see each other again?"
How could fate be so cruel?
"This isn't about us. It was never about us, Draco! There's a bigger picture here, something beyond us and whatever the hell it is going on between us! We can't forget where ourloyalties lie! You will always be a Malfoy, a pureblood...and I will always be Mudblood Granger. This isn't about us."
"What if it was?" He had to know. He couldn't just go away not knowing.
"If it was...If love was the only thing, if we were the only people in the world...If we could just say 'to hell with everything and everyone'...If all that was possible-" She stopped, faltering, knowing that she couldn't give him any more hope.
"Then you'd love me?"
"...Yes." It broke her heart to say it. Falling in love was supposed to be wonderful, magical, spectacular, but this...this hurt.
"And now?"
"And now...I'm sorry." She gave him one last, sweet departing kiss, icy hot, blazing with passion and freezing with the knowledge that it was truly over.
End.
A/N: Please review if you read this. Even if you're one of those people who hates leaving reviews, I'll settle for a 'Hi'. This is the first time I've attempted writing this pairing, so any feedback will be appreciated. Okay, that's not entirely true-If it's completely cruel, I may cry. But otherwise, you know what to do!