Love/Forget
"Don't lie," he says, pleads to her. "Slander it, wreck it, call it names, call me names, but don't ever pretend like it never happened. Never pretend to forget." That fateful night at the end of sixth year may have changed things irrevocably between them, but afterwards, two things will always remain the same.
Warnings: Explicit Language, Sexually Suggestive language, angst and perhaps even tears
It physically hurts him to stand there in the doorway (he dares not come any closer) and watch her play. It is not the sharp sort of pain (as he imagines being stabbed must feel); it is a deep, throbbing pain that begins in his heart and works its way outward, all the way to his scalp and his fingertips.
She told him the year before that she played piano. They were sitting in the Room of Requirement (so different from the set of Dumbledore's Army, so different from the Room of Hidden Things it became in the upcoming few months for him), and she leaned against him, her whole body aligned with his in a way that warmed him physically and emotionally. They were sharing things, little things the other didn't know about.
"When I was little, my father got this book by owl post," he told her some minutes earlier. "It had been some muggle rights supporter who had sent him a book on that American, Martin Luther King Jr. It was this big, hulking thing, probably a biography, but I don't remember all that much about it anymore. I think the bloke sent it to him as a joke. But as soon as he saw it, he spat on it and tossed it into the fire place. Granger, you probably would never have expected this from me, but when I was young—around five or six years old, when I was first learning to read—I was curious and a bit rebellious."
She glanced up at him then, grinning her wide grin that made her seem like she could draw away all the unhappiness in the world and swallow it all in one go.
"You, rebellious?"
He chuckled. "I had quite the spine back then. It rivalled even yours."
"Doubt it. Anyway, continue."
He obliged with a small smile. "When he left the room, I snatched it out of the blaze and read it cover to cover."
She let out a huge laugh, one that made her sound like a barking seal and stole nearly all the breath from her lungs. "You'd think you'd have learned a thing from it."
He shook his head in reply. "I said I read it—not that I understood it. Anyway, it's your turn."
"Well… when I was five, my mother started giving me piano lessons."
"You play piano?" He was a bit shocked.
"Oh, Malfoy, I'm not going to lie-I was spectacular. A little prodigy."
"When have you not been?" he said teasingly, with none of the cruel intent he would have shoved behind the words just a few months ago.
"I grew out of the lesson books when I was nine and played all the time before I found out I was a witch, but since coming to Hogwarts... it's been harder."
"Who has time to sit down and bang out a few notes when you've got to save the entire Wizarding World?" he said, and she grinned.
"Exactly; I'm glad you understand. I still play every once in a while, though; actually, every time I get a hold of a piano outside of my house."
He found her in the choir room, after hiding outside the Gryffindor Common Room for a few hours, checking the library, nearly all the spare classrooms, and the kitchens. This was his last resort.
And there she is. Looking absolutely stunning, her hands roving up and down the keys, as graceful and light as if they were being buffeted by a breeze. Beautiful, foreign music slips into the air; thick, soft notes falling through the air like clouds. It is bittersweet, like the song should be happy but just can't bring itself to smile. The notes drift across the room, slowly, as if they have all the time in the world, before they settle into his ears and wrap around his brain, cushioning, numbing, comforting it as he imagined clouds would.
When it comes to an end, he feels as though something has been ripped from him—something extremely precious, like a portion of his soul.
"That was beautiful," he says softly, and he hardly finishes his sentence before she whips around with a small gasp.
"What are you doing here?" she demands, and the venom in her voice poisons his heart until it feels like it's going to shrivel up and fall to the bottom of his ribcage.
"I came to find you," he replies. "I… I wanted you to know that I'm leaving... soon."
She sneers, and it doesn't look right on her face, it looks toxic, and he finds himself thinking, if she sneers like that enough, her smile is shrivel up, too. She turns around, back to the piano.
"Go bother someone who will miss you."
He nearly stumbles against the door frame. He's always known that she has a slightly vindictive side (Her capture of Rita Skeeter after the TriWizard tournament, for example), but that did nothing to prepare him for the wrath encased in that simple sentence. He supposes he deserves it, though—he was ruthless towards her when he ended it, and now there was the mess he's gotten himself into, the danger he is about to put her in. And the damage it will to do her, and her friends, and this entire school—Fuck, but what else could he have done?
"I… I just thought you deserved to know."
She ignores him, turning back to the piano. Banging wildly on the keys, she begins a new song, but it isn't anything close to the beautiful, simple tune from minutes before. It's complex and powerful, but angry, too, swarming with rage and revulsion, roaring chords and vomiting arpeggios, ripping, clawing through the air. And stabbing into the slots between his ribcage.
He will not leave her like this. Had he never made his feelings clear to her? Had she already disregarded that, if nothing else, he'd loved her? The idea of it makes him unbearably furious and distressed that he has to clench his fists at his side to stop himself from punching the wall.
This will not be our last memory together, he thinks. I will make sure of it. Lunging forward into the room, he reaches around her and seizes her wrists. Sound stops for a single instant before she fights against his grasp, unable to escape but capable of slamming the heels of her palms down on the keys. A single, disjointed, chaotic, painful chord jolts into the room, followed by an equally disjointed, chaotic, painful sob.
It takes him a moment to realise it's coming from her, not him.
"Damn you, Draco, what do you want from me?" she cries out, and he lets go of her. It kills something inside of him to know that even after their fights, even after he cut her off, even after all the anger they've hurled at each other like stones, she still calls him by his first name. She whirls around on the seat and their eyes meet. Had her eyes always had that much amber in them?
"I don't want to leave you like this," he murmurs, searching her for some remnant of the months they spent together.
"You have no say in the matter," she says, sounding almost bitter. "Leave." She turns as if to face the piano again, but he won't let her, not on his life.
"No—Granger—"
She starts playing again, another angry, bitter song, but he will not let her, Goddammit.
"Granger!"
She plays louder.
"Granger!"
Louder.
"GRANGER!"
LOUDER.
"HERMIONE!"
And she freezes. Merlin. He hasn't said her name in… in months. Since last March. When he told her that he loved her.
"Hermione." He whispers it this time, and reaches out to run his fingers down her arm. She flinches under his touch, and for an instant he doesn't want to be human, because perhaps if he wasn't, that simple reaction would never have injured him as much as it did. "Hermione, please look at me."
There is a long moment that is both infinite and non-existent, during which there is only silence and the soft fabric of her jumper and the warmth of her skin pressed against his fingertips. And it breaks when she finally turns around, ever so slowly on the square little seat until they are eye-to-eye once more.
He falls to his knees and grabs her hands, pressing them between his fingers. Her skin is chapped from the chilly winds that have swept through the castle as the last dregs of spring drained from the air. Her hands are small, her fingers, bony. She's trying to remain expressionless, but emotion threatens to spill over and down her cheeks. She always was much too prone to tears, considering how strong she could be.
"I don't want to leave you like this," he confesses. "With this… this thing between us. I want us to be… on good terms, at least. To have some things fixed, if not everything." Before I ruin it all.
"What us?" she says, though there isn't enough conviction for it to have the effect she must want.
"Don't lie," he says, pleads to her. "Slander it, wreck it, call it names, call me names, but don't ever pretend like it never happened. Never pretend to forget. Because I don't know if I can handle it, if the only real thing in my life's forgotten and replaced by lies."
There's something that breaks in her. He sees it in her eyes (if eyes are windows to the soul, then hers are great, towering panes of glass, floor-to-ceiling beauties that take up the entire wall, clear as fresh rainwater). She slides off the stool, pushing it back against the piano. They're eye-to-eye once again, and her hands tremble in his.
She's searching him, as she had back in the beginning when they were both testing the waters, watching their backs, tentatively pawing at something that resembled friendship. "I still can't read you," she murmurs, her voice breaking. "I've never wanted to more than I do now."
He tries to manipulate his face into something resembling a smile, but he's afraid it only comes out to be a sad grimace. "I would open my mind to you if I could," he confesses, but knows it's impossible, and he'd never be able to afford to do it if he could. To make up for the semi-lie, he raises one of her hands, still encased in his, and presses a kiss to her knuckles.
A solitary tear slides down her cheek, and he leans forward to kiss it away. "Hermione," he says against her cheek, and her name tastes like memories on his tongue-sweet and bitter and young and old all at the same time. When he kisses her lips (chapped like her hands, but still achingly beautiful), her name trembles between them, fluttering like butterfly wings against her skin. "Hermione."
And suddenly he's placing kisses on her everywhere he can find, on the forehead, the tip of her nose, her jaw, her lips again, her neck, beside her eye, and she's not stopping him, and there are silent tears running down her face, and maybe it's because in between every kiss he whispers her name, "Hermione", the sound of it rustling against her skin.
Damn, but why has he never said it before? How is it that, before this night, he has only ever said her given name once without her surname trailing behind? He tries to make up for it now, repeating it over and over again between his kisses, and she just cries and cries and cries without a sound until he can hardly keep track of the tears he needs to kiss away.
Eventually, he pulls back and runs his tongue over his lips to find them wet and briny with her melancholy. Her tears have stopped, but her eyes are still shining.
They once had a long, rather one-sided conversation about the power of words. She waxed lyrical on a hundred poets that had made her cry or laugh, angered her or brightened her day; spoke on dozens of authors that had gifted her the knowledge that made her famous among her classmates. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me, she said, reciting an old muggle saying, and then she went on to disprove it, talking about emotion and trigger-words and the science of it, how human brains processed and registered the meaning behind words and chose the appropriate reaction, and this went on for hours. He sat there across from her and faded in and out of listening, because sometimes he just liked to hear her voice, or watch her get caught up in her own passion for something. It was rather beautiful.
But in this moment, words are useless. Utterly hopeless and inadequate. Because, he finds, the English language simply hasn't found the proper word to describe this. This emotion, reminiscent of love and loss and regret and anger and fear and hope, is relatively new and foreign to his relatively young heart.
And he finds that sometimes there are only actions.
Their lips meet in a bone-jarring collision, their teeth bumping hard even though the flesh of their lips, but that isn't a problem anymore because their mouths are now open and their breaths are mingling (his, sweet with spearmint, hers, sweet with strawberries), and their tongues are stroking one another's, and her hands are no longer in his, they're fisted in the fabric of his cloak and in the material of his shirt, and one of his arms is wrapped tightly around her while the other reaches back so his fingers can wind around her hair.
They're sitting for a moment longer, and then she leans forward, pushing him backward and backward and backward until he is flat on his back and she is on top of him, her whole body aligned with his, and she is so light, so ridiculously light, and he is so light, and they are both made of air, he swears it.
Every time one of them pulls away for a split second, gasping for breath, he says her name, says it as their noses brush and he runs his fingers through her hair. And Merlin, it is so beautiful. So beautiful.
And somehow, his cloak and shirt is on the floor across the room, and her jumper is across the room, and their shoes are thrown off, and both their trousers are gone until it's only his boxers, her underwear, and they are still kissing harder than they have in their entire lives on the freezing wooden floor of the choir room.
His fingers trace the edge of her knickers, her skin cool underneath his fingers (it really is too cold in this room to be doing this), and she's straddling him now, her weight on his hips and his erection in between as they kiss and her hands roam across his chest. Her touch sets him on fire and he's able to forget in these precious minutes. He can forget his choices and his failures and his betrayal that has yet to come to fruition until there is only her, him, and the grand piano that watches on with its eighty-eight eyes.
He rolls them over so that he is now straddling her hips, his knees pressed into the floor and his body curved over hers. "What are we doing?" she whispers against his jawline as his palms settle on the ground at either side of her. "Draco…"
"Sh…" he says, dipping down to nuzzle her neck, directly under her chin. He didn't plan this either, but he doesn't want it to end. He is too selfish to make it end. "Please."
And that's it. That's all it takes. The wood floor is hard and unyielding and cold beneath them, and the air is frigid and unforgiving around them (strangely so, for this time of year), but he will never have this again, this sort of magic that's saturated the air when he first eases himself into her and lingers on even after they've both had that exhilarating surge forward over a precipice they both have had little experience with.
He finds himself thinking about this as he slides himself beside her, both of them panting as he pulls her now warm, trembling body flush against his. This is their second time. This is their second time together. This is their last time together.
And God, how it hurts, how it drives into his stomach like a fist and stabs into his chest like a knife once he realises that this is the only thing they have left. This is their last night, for the rest of their lives.
He buries his face in her hair, inhaling her scent and relishing the sensation of her curls pressed against his cheeks, his eyelids, his lips, tightening his grip around her. And then he reaches for his wand (tucked in the pocket of his trousers) and conjures them a warm, thick blanket, draping it over them.
"Draco?"
Her voice is almost inaudible, but he catches it, and latches on. And he will do this for all of her remaining sentiments, her final words in these final minutes, because he will never be quite sure which one will be her last to him.
"Hermione?"
"I can't remember if I said it back." He doesn't have to ask to know what she is talking about it. "But I do. I really do."
"Me, too," he agrees softly, so softly that he wonders if she even heard him.
"Please don't leave me."
He chokes, and fights to keep it silent. "You know I ha—"
"No, I mean tonight. Give me this night."
And his heart breaks, because he can't even give her that. So he lies, because it's all he can do, and he hates it, he hates what he's become and what he has to do and what it means for him, for her, for them, for everyone in this whole damned school.
"Alright, Hermione" he says, and she burrows into him, leaning back into his chest and running her thumb across one of the arms he has around her. "I'll stay."
Minutes pass, the shortest minutes he has known in his entire life, and he spends them all wrapped tight around her, breathing her in and hoping never to breathe her out, feeling her hair and her body and her skin and her heartbeat, until she is sound asleep.
And then he detangles himself from her. He does it slowly, not only because he doesn't want to wake her, but also because this hurts, this is agonising, it feels like he is ripping his soul from his body and he might as well be, for after he stands, staring at her asleep under that blanket, he is nothing but an empty shell.
He reaches for his clothing, pulling on his pants and trousers and shirt, and after that he dons his cloak and pockets his wand. And then, he kneels beside her and leans down to kiss her forehead, afraid that his quivering lips will wake her but unable to stop himself. She doesn't wake, and for a second he thinks that maybe it's because she believes herself to be content, thinking that she will wake up with his arms around her. And that very thought squeezes a tear from between his lids, and it splashes onto her cheek.
She is still asleep.
"Hermione... hate me. Please hate me," he begs her slumbering form. "But never pretend to forget."
And he leaves that room.
But he will still love her as he points his wand at Headmaster Dumbledore, and he will be thinking of her when his wand lowers a fraction of an inch.
He will still love her as they cross paths in the Astronomy Tower, when their eyes meet for a single instant and there is nothing but agony and rage and betrayal and sadness burning like hellfire through her beautiful windows.
He will still love her nearly a year later when she ends up in his parlour room, and he will still love her when her screams rebound across the walls over and over and over again until he thinks he will collapse with the excruciating pain of it, and fuck, but why can't he be braver, why does his mother have to stand there beside him as a constant reminder that she probably hates him by now, and that his family is nearly all he has left? He will still love her enough to let go of the wands when Potter tries to snatch them, right before they escape.
He will still love her when they meet again in the final battle, when he finds her in the Room of Requirement latched onto Weasley, and he will dwell on this for years later, the way he let his jealousy and fear and anger consume him enough to let Goyle cast that curse that nearly killed them all.
He will still love her when he sees her kissing Weasley in the Great Hall after the war is over, and even when he sees their wedding announcement in the papers years later.
He will still love her even after his son is born, his wonderful, beautiful, magnificent son from a woman he never wanted, and he will love her when he tells Scorpius that all witches and wizards are born equal, no matter where they come from, no matter what his grandfather will tell him. He will spend the next fifty or so years wishing that Scorpius's eyes are a warm brown instead of Astoria's green.
And when he dies, at the age of eighty-four (Blacks were always notorious for dying young), with her name lying unspoken on his tongue, he will be reborn into a muggle named Jonathan.
She will be reborn into a witch named Madeline, and they will meet in a museum in London. He will be unstoppable and irresponsible and a bit insane, playing music on the streets, and she will be calm and serene and a bit insane, too, scribbling mad poems on her trainers and arms.
He will still love her, from the day he catches sight of her warm brown eyes in that museum, even though he will have no memory of her at all, and she will fall in love with him, even though they fight and bicker every day and her mind wars against it. And even through half-break-ups where no one really knows what they're doing, through their blazing rows where she tells him he will go nowhere in life and he tells her she lives in a box, through months without each other spent in stony silence on opposite sides of the world, she will never pretend to forget.
Eventually, they will die and be reborn. Die and be reborn. Die and be reborn. And he will still love her. And she will never pretend to forget.
A/N:
This is what I imagined Hermione to play in the opening scene (just add the youtube address and the slash before it): watch?v=yxu8i-KxSxk Some of you might recognise it. I really am not a fan of Twilight in the least, but the film people and SM have seriously great tastes in music.
Also, I apologise for any spelling/grammar errors. I only looked over it once for conventions, and any pointers on that front are especially welcome! Please tell me what you think and thank you so much for reading! ~Gen