A/N: I don't own Harry Potter or any of its characters. Yay for speculation. One can dream (but I am a DHr realist through and through). Criticism makes me happy, so please review!
p r o g r e s s ion
i.
It is the first time she sees him and she doesn't think much of him. He is just an annoying blond brat who thinks having his hair all gelled back is cool. He is just another annoying Hogwarts student who doesn't care about grades. He is entirely not worth her attention, and so she casts him out of her thoughts within two seconds. After all, she has far more important things to worry about. Like grades. Like, though she secretly refuses to admit it to herself, whether she'll ever have any friends.
It is the first time he sees her, that pathetic bookworm from the enemy-house; she is sitting alone in a corner of the library and a large book is splayed open on her lap. He snorts in contempt, jerks his chin in the direction meant for his two new friends to follow, but not without one more backward glance. Her eyes aren't really on the pages; they're trailing a group of students exiting the area. He looks at her and he is reminded of himself at a tender kind of age where he is without playmates. They feared his father, and he thought that was cool, until he realized he didn't know what affection was.
But in the end, she finds out and he doesn't.
ii.
She scrubs herself down with unnecessary force, rinses herself with more buckets than usual today. The redhead's explanation hasn't helped matters. She know that she is better off knowing than not, but it is irrational how she has let just another insult (she has taken so many before) affect her like this. She feels dirty and yet she knows this is incomprehensible, she hasn't done anything wrong at all. And she can't bring herself to admit how much that single word has hurt her. It is not just the word in itself. It's the way his lip curls as he says it, the way he hurls it towards her with that much force.
He doesn't feel enough satisfaction when he calls her that. It probably has to do with the way her features crease in confusion when he says it. She doesn't know what it means, of course. And that's perfectly logical, considering her origins and the fact that it is a word censored from almost all books in the library, since books stocked in the library are bound to be 'politically correct' and she buries her nose in nothing else.
What makes him burn is how Potter's eyes flash and how the redhead, albeit stupidly, socks himself in the stomach with a barfing spell to protect her. What makes him burn is how she laughs when she is with them and how they all blend in so nicely together.
They are supposed to be alike. And despite being alike, he is the far superior one. If they are ever to know happiness, he should be the one to find it first. She should know her place. She didn't. So he punished her. How can she be happy when he is not?
iii.
He can't bring himself to admit how much that single blow has hurt him. It is not just the physical force (surprisingly strong) of it in itself. It is the way her dark eyes flash with such blinding hatred for just that tiny instant. It is one thing to be feared, one thing to be pitied. It is another thing altogether to be despised, and despised so openly at that, and it is almost overwhelming.
She confuses him more with each time he sees her. She is different now, a different person from the girl who had washed herself extra thoroughly the day he cast his lethal insult, a different person from the girl he had first glimpsed in the school library.
iv.
He becomes the least of her worries. It makes him mad, oh, so mad. He does everything to get her attention and even comes close to hexing her right on the spot, in front of everyone, but she only tosses her head and drags her pile of schoolbooks, hoity-toity, to the school library. This time, she has a companion in the school library. Then something happens that does get her attention. This time, what he receives when he meets her eye is a long repressed smirk as a certain four-footed furry animal flits across her mind.
When he glimpses her at the Yule Ball, his mouth drops open, he can't stop staring. It is all so corny, but he can't help but wonder how come he has never noticed her potential for beauty. Hundreds of males present at the dance are thinking the exact same thing, but these hundreds of males are not treated to a small laugh of contempt on a regular basis.
He can't understand why it takes a twist of outward appearance for him to realize that, from the very beginning, she has always been a higher creature than him.
v.
Pansy is the first and only person who notices. She wants to know why his kisses are halfhearted, why he is looking somewhere else when he touches her. She forces his admission with a snarl. He realizes he is trapped and does the only thing he can – give in. His voice rings loud and clear, Yes, I'm in love with that fellow prefect from Gryffindor – and then he guffaws, nudging Pansy and slapping his knee in apparent hilaration. And soon the news travel to the furthest corners of Hogwart.
She isn't too perturbed. She is used to jokes of this caliber after all, after flipping through Harry's love-or-hate-mail for hours, after that whole issue with Rita Skeeter. She doesn't do much more than roll her eyes when he falls to his knees and flings open his arms or swoon, every inch a drama-king, in the corridor whenever he sights her. Of course he does manage to make her burn with anger sometimes, but she never loses her head.
Yet she is also a female, born with the same inherent powers of perception as Pansy. She notices that Pansy is the only one who isn't shrieking with laughter as he drops into a swoon after 'accidentally' brushing shoulders with her. Pansy is downright unsmiling, in fact. It doesn't make sense why he would suddenly target her when he's mainly been at Harry's or Ron's throats all the while and pretty much left her alone for more than a year now. Doubt grows as she wonders about it all, and the more she berates herself for perplexing herself over such a childish issue, the more she wonders. One day she finds herself confronting him one-on-one.
It is the first time they are so close together and he finds his throat is jammed. It finally unsticks long enough for him to burst into a peal of hysterical laughter. She is way below him. She shouldn't become too high-and-mighty after merely becoming a Gryffindor prefect. It will take more than an eternity for a dirty slut like her to ever come close to being worthy of him. It is hilarious, absolutely hilarious. He thought she had more brains. When she slaps him tightly across the face and slams the door on her way out, he feels numb.
The next day it is all over Hogwarts that she is in love with him, too. Whenever the two happen to meet they put on a show for the masses. They conceal their carefully-polished swords and blades with smiles and affected laughter and venomous words with double shades of meaning. They come close to hexes and jinxes on so many occasions. The loser is the one who walks away first, seething, and it is usually him. Because he lets her.
It is a different matter when the two stumble across each other, alone; the air and the silence crackles with tension and animosity. When he realizes that he has hurt her he feels a glimmer of hope, but then he remembers that he's already smashed it. I love you is supposed to set people free, but for him it is a cage because she doesn't believe it when it comes from him.
vi.
She doesn't really think much about him now, since she doesn't really bear grudges. The fiasco has ended long ago; people tire of some things after a while. He only crosses her thoughts fleetingly when Harry pushes forward his absurd theory of the blonde being up to something insidious. This is ridiculous, she presumes. He is nothing but a coward and a weakling and a scumbag who resorts to low-grade means to insult and hurt others.
She runs into him once when he is on his way out of the sixth-floor bathroom. She opens her mouth to let fall her usual condescending remark but he cuts her off with a desperate, wrenched Not today. She is shocked when one brief look into his eyes before he turns away reveals someone who is on the verge of shattering. Cowering is one thing, brokenness is another. He is breaking or broken and it scares her.
She catches his robe before he can leave. She has caught glimpses of hopelessness behind his cold, pale stare before, glimpses of that and something else which have led to her repeated musings and questionings. But she has never seen such absolute volumes of despair before. What's wrong? she asks, what's wrong? Something overrides her rationality and she puts her hand on his arm.
He barely maintains his self-control. He is already weary, so weary. He wants nothing more than to be able to cry and put his head in her lap and let the whole damned story rip out of his soul like a hurricane. He wants nothing more than to lose all his worries, lose himself in crushing him to her and her lips to his. Salvation is only inches away; he hasn't been this close to her since that fateful day more than a year ago. But salvation is torn to shreds by the reminder of that impossibility of his burden.
His cold fingers close around hers and they touch them for a little longer than they should before he wrenches her grasp off his sleeve. Keep your filthy hands away from me, you dirty Mudblood, he says, the only thing he can say, and this time he manages to leave before she can catch him again.
She stands very still, straining for that usual sharp sting from his insults, but she can't feel it anymore. She didn't believe him before, and neither does she now.
vii.
Salvation has a face framed by untamable brown hair and is beset with an obstinate mouth and a pair of eyes, sometimes comforting in its warmth, sometimes blazing in its heat. Salvation has a pair of eyes that is rapidly filling up with tears. Salvation has finally reached out to him again after so long, Salvation is only inches away, just like before. It is amazing. Things have come full circle, he thinks.
She is clutching the straw tightly, getting her hands dirtied with all that blood over the room, his blood, as though wishing she could stuff it all back into him.
"…Hermione."
"I'm… sorry..." Her voice is shaking hard.
"No," he manages to say. Salvation is getting hazy. It doesn't matter; as long as she's here, really and truly here, he doesn't really mind this whole dying thing at all. He had it coming, anyway.
And it's all ended, finally ended. It's okay. He'll go. "It's not your fault. I didn't let myself be saved…"
The tears come with full force. "Draco," the word falls, and he contentedly takes that breathing of his first name on her lips to the next world.
The war is over. Everything is over. They can all live in peace again. They try to understand, try to help, try to comfort; of course you can't expect her to be alright after so many (albeit enemy) lives have been taken, especially since one of them belonged to a fellow schoolmate. But Hermione goes on crying long after everyone else. The war is over, everything is over, it is over and I don't know what it is because it never began.
fin.