Title: Broken
Rating: K+
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Summary: Draco faces the end of 'us'.
His world was ending. He was watching it end, and it felt gut-wrenching. A distant (very distant) part of him observed with clinical ease that a heart couldn't actually break. It was just a muscle, and therefore, it couldn't shatter like a plate dropped from a tower. But it sure as hell could feel like it. His grey eyes were flat as he watched from the back of the chapel. She was stunning.
There was nothing Draco could do about it. This wasn't, after all, a fairytale, where he could storm in and proclaim his love for his fair maiden, with her messy curls and melted chocolate eyes. She hated him. She'd said so eight months ago when he'd told her he couldn't marry her. When he told her that she was never getting that little piece of him. His divorce from Pansy had torn his life into shreds, and he wasn't going through it again. She'd wanted him to trust her. She'd wanted him, Draco Malfoy, to trust her.
Well that just wasn't happening.
And it'd hurt her so bad she'd left him. She'd packed up and left him, because he couldn't trust her, because he wouldn't take the next step with her. Hermione had left him with all his pain and anguish and self-loathing. She'd run right back to that red-headed weasel, who'd accepted her with open arms.
Now he was watching them, covertly, from the back of the church. His heart felt like it was dying, and he couldn't stop the feeling from spreading in an almost panicky manner to the rest of his being. Draco swallowed hard and concentrated on Hermione's veil, the thin gauzy material hardly hiding her beauty. She shone, glowed. She made his world bright.
The last eight months without her had been the hardest, so he'd thought. But standing here, watching her exchanging vows with another man...
He had to be dying. That was really all there was to explain it at this point. He shifted his weight to his other leg, eyes intent on Hermione as she said 'I do'. He couldn't hear her, not over the rustle and shift of the audience, and not over the beating of his own, breaking, shattered heart. But he could see her lips form the words. Lips that looked so adorable when she pursed them in worry, or when she laughed and the corners tilted upwards...
Draco closed his eyes as he turned. There wasn't any point to staying- he'd seen what he'd come to see. Hermione was no longer his, not in any way of the word. He had memories to cling to, like a kite flying on a faltering wind.
But, Draco consoled himself, a faltering wind was better than none at all. And even a broken heart was better than none at all.
A/N: Drabble. Enjoy. Trying to get in the swing of things... and failing, hah. xD