Hermione stared unblinkingly at Harry as he gazed out the window. She stood, back leaned against the shelf, and couldn't help but wonder why it was he could be so calm. Why he could look the way he did. So perfect, yet so broken.

Her mind unwillingly pushed her back into the memory of their first meeting. Of a shy boy, with rags for robes, and a bruise on his wrist that she brushed off as ink.

She looked at him now. Watched him. As he looked out at the courtyard.

"Are you really going to stand for her lies, her disrespect? How can you stand it when she looks you in the eyes and lies point blank, like she's pointing a gun at your head?"

Hermione wasn't sure if she was curious, empathetic, worried or just plain angry. Harry was her friend, she liked to think, and she couldn't stand to see him spineless. He was a Griffindor! It was just not right, it didn't sit well in her throat, make her choke on words she could normally spill like sunlight through a skylight.

Harry murmured, still not facing her,

"How do you know that she is lying?"

He sounded tired, worn, like a rag used to clean the same kitchen side over and over until he needed to be replaced. He looked defeated, crumpled, bone thick and skin thin. His voice was raspy and felt like the gentle touch of a lover's sigh on her cheek. Warm, soft, and somehow meaningless.

Why did he continue this charade?

Hermione huffed, crossing her arms tightly across her chest, and looked away in something that almost crossed the line into disgust,

"Everyone knows. Everyone can see. And I know you see it to. You are not blind to the sniggers behind their hands, the gloating looks the boys send you, the scent of another man's sweat when you kiss her on the forehead. You have not even truly held her, and she is already tainted by another's flesh. How can you stand it? Do you truly love her so much that you would let her get away with this? I know you are selfless, Harry, but it is not okay to let her break you so."

Hermione expected him to relent. To give in. To accept that she was right and he was wrong. Perhaps he would break it off. Perhaps he would let the fake blushes and smiles finally end. Perhaps he would cut the strings sewn into his back and act like himself. She longed for him to be like he was. To be free like he was.

Not the chained dove with broken wings he had become, so cruelly shackled to the ground.

Her heart stopped as he laughed. As Harry, her Harry, laughed a cold cruel laugh that she didn't know he was capable of. And it should have been wrong. It shouldn't have fit his eyes and his smile. It shouldn't have been something she understood better than what he was meant to be like. It shouldn't have made so much sense for him to laugh like that. To cackle like the wicked witch in all those stories, no mercy painted on his skin.

"Love her?"

It was a whisper, but a breath, and she felt it whirl around her like a storm. She felt her heart and lungs beat too fast and too slow. Her skin become sticky with fear and apprehension. There was a fire in her veins, a fire that was too far away to reach, and she begged anyone that was there to let her grasp it, to let it shield her.

"...And they say I'm blind. I would not love her if I were but a gentle flower and she were the sun that blessed me. I would not love her if she begged me, and it was her only wish in life. I would not love her if it saved her from damnation, and saved her soul from being shredded like the trash it was. I would not love her if she gave me her ultimate devotion and loyalty, if she bent down onto her knees and prayed to me as if I were a god. I would not love her if she were so experienced in her whoring, her sins of the flesh, that she could make me feel that she and I were the only one's left in the universe, the only ones that mattered. I would not love her even if she could convince me to love anyone. I would not love her if it saved my life, and every other life that lived."

Harry did not look away from the window. He did not move his hands from the pain, the cold pain, that fogged with his early morning breath. He did not shed his wings like the fallen angel he was, and fly from the spot. Harry sat, as he did before, the same expression of maniacal glee on his face, and watched as everything clicked in his 'friend's' mind.

Hermione stared, horror filled, as it all made sense.

"...How did you make it to Griffindor?"

Harry chuckled,

"Bravery is not nobility."

"What of Dumbledore and his games? His mind tricks?"

Harry snarled, an animal creature in that moment,

"Minds and masteries is not something that one can learn overnight, but it is something that is needed, and necessity makes it possible."

Hermione gasped, fell to her knees, and grasped the bookshelf as it it were the only think keeping her attached to the world. Her legs beckoned her down into the pits of insanity, made her scream denials to every rising cloud, and she looked up, through cursed and haunted brown eyes to the devil sitting across from her.

"So you knew... You always knew that it was fake. That... But I..."

Harry smiled a sad, almost sympathetic, smile.

"Reality is only what you make of it."