Chapter One
Everything I am
"The more I see of the world the more I am dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistencies of all human characters", Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice.
"I'm not quite sure that I'm following", I said the words slowly, deliberately, trying to ignore my inital gut reaction of wanting to hit him so hard the freckles fell off of his nose. I tried to bring some vestige of calm to my face and allow the awful swooping sensation in my stomach to subside.
He watched my face incredulously as if already the illusion he had built up of me over the years was shattering before his very eyes and there was nothing he could do but watch.
"I'm breaking up with you".
There were those words again, I looked dazedly about me simply because...well because those words just did not belong in my world and could not be coming from his mouth. I must have accidentally wandered into the middle of somebody else's drama, somebody else's problem, somebody else's heartbreak because...this couldn't, no, shouldn't be my own.
I waited for my body to react, for my face to register the shock and pain my heart now felt in all its unforgivable glory and then in turn display it to the world through my features. But I felt like there was a cork in me, somewhere deep inside the recesses of my heart, plugging up all of my emotions and preventing them from erupting forth giving my brain time to find the logic in his words.
"Yes, I heard that part and forgive me if I'm being obtuse but I suppose the part I'm not following is why? We, we had been...we are supposed to be perfectly happy?"
I stared at him willing him to gloss over the fact that I had already used the past tense when referring to our happy relationship, the meaning of the term happy now dimming in my eyes. Did that mean that my brain had already accepted what he was saying as fact? No, that just couldn't be right.
He raised a hand up as if about to caress my face, his features resonating what I was sure was tenderness but then his hand dropped back to his side just as quickly and when he spoke I realised it wasn't tenderness at all.
It was pity.
"I haven't been happy with you in a really long time", he said awkwardly, and then as if he needed to keep talking in order for the proverbial blade to plunge deeper into my heart he added; "Not since the first month of our relationship I guess".
I forgot how to breathe. The actual motion of my lungs taking in air and exhaling carbon dioxide was lost to me and my chest abruptly halted its steady movement. The air caught in my throat and I opened and closed my mouth stupidly several times wishing my numb brain would wake up before I passed out.
It was the 'I guess' at the end of the sentence that had struck that fiercest blow as if I had asked for a specific time frame and all he could do was 'guess', shoving the word nonchalantly at the end of the sentence like it didn't really matter.
It made our entire relationship utterly pointless, it didn't matter how long he had felt this way just that he had. Never mind that I had believed we were as much in love as any young couple can be, no my thinking that had been a delusional fantasy until he had decided that he just didn't feel like that at all.
The cork inside me finally exploded allowing the torrent of emotional pressure that had built up behind it to come bursting forth. I lost all sense of myself, of time, of the freezing January snow that swirled around us. The reality that he hadn't been happy since that tender, intial month of our courtship, that month which was now so far in the past it had already become a distant memory for me. Knowing that the subsequent months as my happiness grew, his had diminished until it had turned into a time game in which had he had to build up the courage to end it. He had been faking.
He had been pretending.
And it was the knowledge of that, that finally brought it home to me. That I, who was supposed to be his best friend turned girlfriend in one of the most convenient happy endings, mattered so little that he could pretend to love me for so long and now I was being unceremoniously dropped on my ass because I had been too stupid to see it before now. He saw the emotions finally register with me and he had the good grace to look at his feet.
"You mean to tell me that all of these months you let me live in some alternate universe where I was certain everything, for once, was actually fine while you secretly wanted out?" I laughed bitterly but the sound felt hollow, brittle and if he had flinched at it, I may have cracked like glass.
"You are pathetic, where was your courage to do this when you realised it was a struggle to be with me?"
"Do you have to do this?" He said lowly, his glaze flickering up briefly to meet my own. "You're making a scene".
"Oh, I'm making a scene, well maybe everyone can come and watch my spectacular breakdown", I roared back at him, no longer caring or bothering to keep my voice down. Angr red splotches had appeared on my cheeks and I felt much too warm depsite the freezing weather. I felt dishevelled, as if I had outwardly fallen apart and my appearance had suffered as a result.
"I'm sorry, you couldn't have done this sooner. I'm sorry you've suddenly decided you are so much better than me", I said sarcastically.
He took a quick step towards me, "Don't you get it? I wasn't happy but I never realised what was wrong. I thought it was a phase, that I would go back to some semblance of happy. Okay, yes maybe I lacked the guts to do this sooner and maybe I should have taken the advice when I got it but don't you see that you're the problem?"
I gasped as if he had hit me, not realising that perhaps he had every reason to want out.
"You're too hard to love, you are always on my case about something, correcting everything I do and say. It's like going out with a person who has realised they can't change you and keep nagging at you and punishing you for it until you try to change yourself just to please them. You made me feel inadequate because you think you are just so perfect. I get that I should have done this sooner but fuck Hermione", he ground out, "You're too hard to love".
My stomach clenched tightly and the urge to vomit rose in my mouth but he wasn't quite finished.
"You're the problem here, not me. Granted it shouldn't have taken Malfoy to make me realise just how hard it was to be with you and I'm sorry about that I really am but I can't take all the blame here", he paused but I never allowed him to continue.
My brain was still stuck a few minutes back in the past, the air had become very still and the dull roaring in my ears came to life tenfold.
"Malfoy?" I spluttered. "Malfoy made you realise?"
Finally, he looked extremely uncomfortable. "Well, not just Malfoy. Lavender also said that if I wasn't happy this was the best thing to do".
"Oh yes and we all like to take advice from the village idiot I forgot but tell me just how many people did you speak to before coming to me with this? Or should I run and ask Parvati Patil and Pansy Parkinson before we continue?"
"It wasn't like that, Jesus could you come back to the whole 'I'm breaking up with you thing' it is a little more important".
"No, I think I need to hear all of this advice Malfoy gave you", I said, refusing to let it drop so easily.
Ron raised his arms and roared in frustration. "I'm done, this is over. I would still like to be friends but..."
"As if", I replied thunderously to which he replied with a non-commital shrug as if this was exactly what he expected me to say.
Before I could blink, he had turned on his heel and began his brisk walk back to the castle. I soon lost his retreating back in the snow.
Why had I said 'as if'? Why had I closed any path to friendship we might have eventually taken? I needed him in my life, he had been...no he was everything to me. We had had a wonderful Christmas with his family, he had given me a beautiful necklace with my name on it, when had it gone wrong?
Up until a few minutes ago I had been so deliriously happy that part of me had wondered if it was all real? That surely one person couldn't be as happy as I was they would die. He had crushed it with one decisive, destructive sweep of his words and now, now I was alone wondering if I really was so impossible to love.
He would return to Harry, who would say that he couldn't possibly take sides and then inevitably he would take Ron's and the two of them would remain huddled in the boy's dormitory analysing the whole thing until I couldn't but look like a deranged psychopath hopped up on hormones.
One thing refused to compute in my logical mind however and it angered me to realise just how unfair he' been to say the words and then refuse to tell me the rest of it. Of all the things Malfoy has said to him over the years, this was the one thing he seemed to listen to. And not just listen to, actually act upon.
It made no sense and that part was killing me the most.
So what now? Did I actively seek out Malfoy and demand, not a word associated with Malfoy to begin with, answers that he wouldn't want to give to me anyway. Did this mean that even that arrogant blonde bastard had been aware of Ron's misery? How had I missed all of this, in my deliriousness had I simultaneously blocked everything else out?
I turned my back on the castle, my vision blurred with tears, and trudged towards the lake eventually collapsing in the snow upon it's edges. I didn't notice, as the sobs wracked my body, the cold seeping in through my clothes and down to my very bones as my heart accepted what had happened.
It was over, Ron had left me and my one true idea of what perfect harmony and bliss between two people felt like had shattered before my eyes, the ruins lying around my feet as a constant reminder that I was a failure. I had made him unhappy for months and I wasn't emotionally astute enough to even realise. I was the pathetic one.
Removing myself from the ground as darkness began to fall and beginning my weary ascent to the castle took more energy than I would like to admit to. It seemed my body had physically given up, that nothing was worth the effort anymore and I should just curl up out here and wait until I froze to death. My brain no longer possessed the mental capacity to make my legs do anything.
I bypassed the Great Hall upon my entrance back into the school, the warmth engulfing me and delivering some feeling back into my body, and ignored the jovial sounds emitting from there as dinner got underway.
I didn't notice Malfoy coming down the stairs towards me until I had literally walked right into him and fallen three steps backwards and onto the floor with a sharp thud.
I briefly contemplated refusing to get up until he spoke and startled me out of my reverie as I realised just who I had the unfortunate luck to walk in to.
"Granger, I know you are starved of physical contact dating a moronic imbecile who I doubt knows where any of the important parts of your body are but please, don't do that again", he drawled sardonically, brushing imaginary dust from his shirt before putting his hands back into his pockets.
I mumbled something incoherent under my breath, my brain working too slowly to think of a suitable retort and far too preoccupied with sending urgent messages commanding my legs to get me off the floor.
He watched me with something akin to amusement and disbelief as I eventually managed to pick myself up but as I made to push past him, he bent very close to my face.
Too close.
"Wait, have you...you've not been crying?" His eyes searched my own averted gaze and I knew he would discern the tear stains covering my face as well as my extremely puffy and irritated red eyes. I tried to move again up the staircase without looking at me but he blocked my path.
"What's the matter Granger, has Weasley...". He paused because he had seen.
I cursed my body, cursed my emotions as everything about myself in that moment was repulsive to me. I had visibly flinched at his words, unconsciously recoiled as if he had slapped me and of course he had seen. Why could I not wear a hard mask around my features like him, why could I not control my own emotions like he so easily did? I needed to harden, I needed to pull myself together, I needed to be more like, well, more like Malfoy.
"He has, hasn't he?" Malfoy, unaware of my inner turmoil was watching me delightedly his voice brimming with glee, one short of clapping his hands in triumph. "He's finally done the sensible thing and dumped you and you're actually upset, didn't see that coming". He scratched his head thoughtfully, frowning slightly before a smile broke through again and he shrugged.
"Still, all's well that end's well, eh Granger?"
Then he shoved past me, taking one last glance at my face and continued down the staircase, laughing softly to himself. Leaving me, standing there my mouth agape like some sort of moronic ape wondering to myself, just what hadhe said to get Ron to break up with me?
I felt sick.