Sometimes he liked to look at her.
In the most disgusted, condescending way that any pedigreed pureblood would look at an obnoxious, buck-toothed, frizzy-haired mudblood.
She was a sickening sight, really. Those unattractive ink-stained fingers made him shudder whenever he caught sight of her scribbling notes from lectures, paying no mind to the ebony ink leaking on her fingers from her white feather quill. He thought, with deep disgust and loathing, that she generated more ink on her fingers than her parchment.
And she slouched, quite boorishly, from leaning over books too frequently. He could always tell in the morning when she had been stupidly up studying too late the night before. Her posture was always worse, her shoulders pushed forward under that explosion of awful, unkempt hair. God, it irritated him. Academia was not that fascinating.
He watched with such rapt attention and concentration that at times that repulsive bushy mop, so tangled it could not remotely be referred to as hair, morphed into russet curls that cascaded, flowing down her slender back. There were times that those curls were so close to his hands that when he learned forward from his seat behind her in potions, he could also touch them. He often wondered, as he stirred his cauldron, if they felt as silken as they looked.
Every time he tried to turn his head, ignore that witch that really did not deserve his princely gaze, her pale, peach-colored skin caught the corner of his eye and, for some unexplained reason, he could not look away. Sometimes, it seemed, when he followed the curves of her cheeks downward, that the mudblood's mouth was even decent looking, her small rose-colored lips soft under the light of the lantern hanging in the dungeons, and her teeth. Draco had to admit, they looked much more straight since their first and second years, although he still never failed to call her "beaver face" to his Slytherin cronies at the table behind her, just loud enough for the Gryffindor to hear. It was really one of his favorite taunts.
Her eyes, he supposed, were as pretty as any girl of mudblood stature could have. Quite a deep chocolate brown, he thought, like staring into a brand-new, unwrapped Honeyduke's chocolate bar. His stomach stirred at the thought.
And then, in those silent moments at night when he was alone, the bed curtains drawn and his roommates asleep, he thought about her. It was one of those unexplained and strange passing thoughts that he wondered, for Merlin's sake, why she, of all people in the world, would cross his mind. Why Hermione fucking Granger would ever work her irritating, know-it-all way into his senses.
It had started at the end of second year, after the Chamber of Secrets debacle and his father's failure to resurrect the Dark Lord using Tom Riddle's diary. He had been walking to the Great Hall from the dungeons for dinner when his father found him, slapped him across the face in the middle of the corridor.
"Next time we will work harder to kill that fucking mudblood and Potter," he spat. "And next you will be of more service to me or else."
And he left. Draco thought no one had seen.
But, of course, she had been there. Standing calm and collected a few yards away from where he stood. He knew she had witnessed everything. He knew she was aware that she was the mudblood his father was hell bent on killing.
It was the first time he had seen her since she had drank the mandrake drought, and he had been sure that this was her first stop from the hospital wing, as she still looked pallid and unhealthy from her bout of being frozen for the past week. But she still didn't say anything, even though she knew that that was exactly where his father wanted her to be: facing death.
And, in that very curious and awkward moment before he sniffed and swirled his robes around to march into the Great Hall to join his Slytherin cronies for dinner, something went amiss. Something had made pureblood Draco Malfoy appreciate mudblood Hermione Granger for an instant that he now thought about far more than he would ever admit.