Sweet Secrecy
A lock of hair, pushed absent-mindedly out of her eyes. The tip of her quill, lightly brushing the surface of her cheek. Her eyes, glowing softly with her own personal light, poring silently over the surface of a thick, leather-bound diary.
He notices everything about her, while she stares past him without the slightest glimmer of attention. She hides behind her curls, her warm secrets churning in her head, mysteries to everyone but her.
He wondered what imaginings went on in that little girl's exquisite head, what thoughts he could peel from her skin, layer by layer … what mysteries he could tear from her soul like pages from a book.
She intrigued him, with a shuddering intensity he never felt before. She teased him with her sheer silence. Sweet mysteries clung to her body like shadows, hiding in the curve of her hips, the nape of her neck. Her eyes smouldered with secrets that her parted lips were on the verge of spilling, but just would not. When she smiled, it was the subtle, butterfly smile of someone who knew things he didn't, dark as smoked glass and sweet and thick as treacle.
When he lay awake in bed at night, exhausted but unable to sleep, it was her voice that dominated his puppeteered thoughts, haunting his drunken dreams like an afterglow inside the twisted darkness behind his eyes.
This was hate, it could only be hate. On those empty, moonless nights, tiredly watching the stars cross the sky, he was filled with such a wretched, lonely loathing, and epic hatred so strong it burnt up all other emotions.
With just a clever phrase or a flickering glance, she manages to throw him off-guard, scar him with her delicate, blazing light.
And it worried him, so much, that he seemed to be obsessed with this torture. Like a moth courting disaster, when it begins its doomed love affair with an open flame. Sick and afraid, he wonders what he's become: a shadow of his former self, a vessel that can only be filled by his all-consuming disgust.
She quietly closes the book, apparently finished with writing. Her eyes silently rest on the dark, burnt honey-coloured cover of the diary. On the surface, clearly seen, is etched 'Diary' in burnished gold.
Then she looks up. She's smiling ever so softly, and she's looking straight at him.
As if she's known he's been watching her all this while.
Her eyes glimmer with a trace of something utterly unique, her face is glowing softly in the firelight, and his heart stops. He sees her holding out a hand to him, while the grey, swollen torrents of a flood swallow him whole. Her eyes whisper invitingly to him as he sinks further into black oblivion, screaming her name, wanting so much to be part of her story that it destroys him totally.
Then she quietly gets up, her face blank as if the exchange never happened. She brushes past him without so much as a word or a glance.
He watches her pass.
Author's notes: This fanfic is based on and inspired by the song, 'Diary of Jane' by Breaking Benjamin, which is the national anthem of Draco/Hermione of this season, if not of all time.