My Little Obsession

By Femme Teriyaki

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I first met Draco Malfoy when I was seven years old, the summer of 1987, among a myriad of stupid tea-parties, of arranged "play-dates" with other Death-Eaters' kids. The summer of not liking anyone, the summer of being "that pug-faced girl," that "stupid, dull, unattractive one," the summer of being invisible. It was another afternoon party at the Parkinson Estate, more of a convention than anything else: all in order to get schemes and underhanded plots in place, to get little Death-Eaters in Training to know each other, to make them friends before any sort of good could infiltrate their brains, to make sure they could think only what their parents wanted them to think—to chain them to a life of conformity. I made a resolution to hate everyone.

It wasn't a hard resolution to keep. Every child there was an annoyingly snarky replica of their vicious, predictably dead-looking Death Eater parents. All they wanted to do was talk about how well their daddies had served Lord Voldemort and daydream out loud about their future stellar Quidditch successes though none of them had been on anything but kiddie brooms before. Cute little hypocrites. I won't deceive myself by pretending that Draco Malfoy wasn't one of those cute little hypocrites, talking about being a world-famous Seeker and how his father was practically the Dark Lord's right hand man—because he was, Lord knows he was. But he was the best at it. And what girl isn't attracted to the best?

Draco Malfoy was the best. It was as if it was part of his private Malfoy mission—at seven, he had the best clothes, the purest bloodline, the most money, and (consequently) the most friends. Everyone was drawn to him, drawn to his pale, pointy face; his affected, stylish manner; his designer dress robes, dragon-hide boots too old for him, but that he wore with confidence; his dire grey eyes—his stupid, vain, and irresistibly characteristic drawl. You felt him in a room two minutes before he arrived.

I was seven years old. You know how seven-year-olds tend to have their little obsessions.

- - -

It wasn't terribly difficult to move myself closer to him. Even if I wasn't saying anything incredibly witty to him, I was still always close to him, and he tolerated me—perhaps because of longstanding familial obligations—and that was all I needed. For a long time, I honestly believed that everything that was modern and attracting about Draco would manifest itself in me as well, just as long as I stayed close.

"My dad wants to send me to Durmstrang," said Draco casually, walking through the terribly elaborate gardens that surrounded Malfoy Manor. I almost wanted to pass out as all the scents of the various different flowers mingled before me: lilies, poppies, roses, narcissuses (naturally), and not a pansy in sight. He stopped by a great oak and sat down. Crabbe, Goyle, and I followed his lead. "I wouldn't mind. Great Dark Arts program there," he said flippantly. It was cute how he pretending he wasn't thinking about it at all. "But my mother, of course, can't bear to let me go even twenty miles away from her, so… Hogwarts. With that Muggle-loving headmaster."

No, of course he wasn't disappointed.

"It won't be so bad," I offered. "Crabbe and Goyle," I gestured towards them, "and Tracey Davis and Theodore Nott are going too. And me," I added cautiously. I didn't want it to seem as if I were begging him to stay in England only because I was. Which, of course, was exactly what I was doing.

"So what?" And there Draco went again with his "blasé, I don't care, screw me just to see if I'm alive, don't give a shit" attitude. I wanted to scream at him. You're eleven, not forty! But then again, who was I to tell Draco to start acting his age? As I recalled, I'd wanted to jump his bones at seven.

"Well, the Notts are a very prominent family," I said, thinking hard over reasons for Draco to resign himself to life in England. "But not nearly as prominent as the Malfoys—you'll be the talk of the school. You'll be the most prestigious person there—famous before you walk in the door." I knew he'd like the sound of that.

"Yeah, maybe…" But you could already see the gears turning in his little head, thinking hard about it, imagining himself as being the most looked-up to boy in school, imagining himself Seeker, Quidditch captain, Head Boy… that famous Malfoy imagination was working hard as I prayed it was working in my favor…

I immediately started in on the overkill. "I can see you reforming the school," I said, giving him a smile as if I were proud of him already, "showing all those blood traitors what's what—" I knew he'd like that bit. "—they'll run out, and the school will be left to the purebloods. You'll be the leader of them, of course," I said nodding with a smile—the idea was even sort of getting to me. "By the time you get through with Hogwarts, it'll be so dark that the Dark Lord himself couldn't do a better job."

He was grinning ear to pale, affluent ear. And now he was thinking about it—all I needed him to do was think about it.

"It looks like I'll be joining you useless lumps at Hogwarts," said Draco one day, as we were fiddling aimlessly with the solid-gold set of Gobstones that he'd purchased in Diagon Alley only a few days before. I ignored the insult and beamed. He's staying! He's staying! I had to remind myself that he wasn't staying as a personal favor to me—he was staying because he expected something out of the school he was going to attend. I'd just have to keep reminding myself until it was hammered into my head that Draco didn't love me, he wasn't mine… but the bliss was crowding the way, and all I could do was smile. "What, Pansy, are you a glutton for ridicule? I've got some other horrible things I can say about you, if you'd like," Draco said sardonically as a smelly, dark green liquid squirted into Crabbe's face.

I stopped smiling; compressing my face into a look I'd by then perfected: I was disgusted with everything. It was a look everyone seemed to have in the circle I traveled around in—because nothing was ever good enough, they always had an excuse to be displeased. Secretly I'd practiced in front of the mirror—it was always the first thing Draco would make fun of, a look of awe or surprise or actual satisfaction. "What? Have you never seen something mediocre like this?" So I had to get the balance right, the whole game was getting the balance right.

"No, that's all right, Draco, you can save your insults for someone else," I said, hoping I was looked as if I were poised to scream "No! I can't take it! This place is too, too mediocre!" I glanced around briefly. We were seated comfortably in the parlor, Lucius Malfoy and an assortment of his close friends a few rooms over, talking in conspiratorially low voices, but just loudly enough so that we could hear the hum and wonder what brilliant plans they were forming. Overall, the room was… cold. The colors were cold: everything in shades of grey, deep navy blues, silvers, and Slytherin green. Everything was made of metal, cold to the touch, and it made me shiver to look at it. I turned my attention back to the one thing my attention was constantly falling on anyway: Draco. I was deeply surprised to find that looking at him wasn't much better.

I shivered and tried to fix my mind on the game of Gobstones, blocking out everything, trying not to think about anything. Once I started thinking I'd end up in a place so far away from reality that it would hurt all the more painfully when I came crashing back to earth. "Your turn, Goyle."

- - -

And so, to my eternal delight, he stayed true to his word and came to Hogwarts that September, filling me with a lovely almost sickening feeling that felt like a very pleasant nausea. And everything he'd say that year would be followed by my eager agreement, desperate to please him, pressuring myself to show him that I could make him happy. How deep can a feeling go that starts in mere childhood? Oh, so much deeper than you know—it's the worst kind. The kind that builds and builds, the first and the only— with nothing to compare it to, it makes itself feel like the world. As if Draco Malfoy and my painful, beautiful disease were the only two things that mattered in my life—because they were my life. Classes and teachers and Slytherin superiority fell a far second from where Draco and my infatuation stood. Nothing can compare to a first love, even if—perhaps—it isn't really love, but an illness that bears a striking resemblance. How was I to know it wasn't love? Or wouldn't be someday? It was growing inside me with every breath I breathed.

Every conversation we had (which in reality was Draco's monologue to an over-enthusiastic audience)—whether it be about Harry Potter and the infuriating way in which he was stealing Draco's divine right to spotlight or about the single-file line of half-breeds, half-bloods, and Muggle-born witches and wizards that seemed to be trotting through Hogwarts—left me slightly heartbroken. I was near to him, yes, that much was true… but no closer than I would have been if I were just his acquaintance, and I almost wished it could be that way. How life would be if only I weren't thrown into his presence, if I weren't Draco's to command, if it weren't "Pansy, come here, I need to talk to you" and if I didn't feel this incessant invincible tug when he called for me.

Over the years, things grew worse. In this, I don't mean Harry Potter's constant defeat of the Dark Lord or his refusal to just die, because I fear I am more self-centered than that. I speak of our fourth year, in which the lovely disaster that was the Tri-Wizard Tournament presented itself, and alongside it: the Yule Ball.

I know he loves me; I know he does. How could he not ask me to go with him? I'm constantly with him; he's constantly talking to me, and who else is there? Well, there's Tracey Davis (damn, damn Tracey Davis) and Lord knows he's going to ask the Beauxbatons champion—everyone is—but she'll turn him down, she's too vain to do otherwise—and that leaves me. Me. It has to be me… I don't know what I'll do if it isn't me….

Seven years had passed since we first met, and still I was as foolish over Draco as I was when we were young. I can't fool myself and call myself wise at fourteen—if anything, I was stupider than I was at seven, but I felt as if my logic were infallible and that, after nights and nights of dreaming up scenarios, that there was no other way for anything to happen. He must love me, he must.

It's painful to think of how easily dreams can be crushed by the truth of reality. He asked me, after all, but it wasn't anything even remotely resembling the scenes I had created in my mind—it was a quick, rushed thing, as if he'd wanted to get it over with or had someplace more important to be. He hadn't said it the right way, the way I'd wanted him to say it. He'd barely looked at me, instead looking over my shoulder at something or someone else. "Pansy, I suppose I ought to ask you to go to the ball with me," he said. I suppose I ought to. Once again, I was his obligation. And, despite any pain I might have felt, I said yes, because the pain was better than the loneliness and despair I might have felt at watching him with someone else. At least this sort of pain came with a proper trade—a night with Draco in exchange for a moment of agony. The torture was worth it. It was always worth it.

And so I spent days fretfully wondering over what I should wear or say. I'd been given this beautiful opportunity, and it was my duty to make the most of it. He may have come to me as a last resort, but I had assured myself that he'd only been worried about something else, perhaps his mind still on the incident at the Quidditch World Cup, wondering on what this meant in regard to the return of the Dark Lord. I would take his mind off of this. I would be beautiful and radiant and glowing; he would look at me and instantly see that I was all he had ever needed, that his fears were trivial, that I was the one to cure him of his problems. He would see that we were two pieces of a puzzle that fit together perfectly, I one half and he the other, and that things couldn't be right any other way. And for the puzzle to fit together perfectly, I had to have the perfect dress.

It was pink. I had found the outfit that made me something other than what Draco saw every day, black robes, the rest marked in green and silver. Pink. He'd have to notice me; when he danced with me, he'd have to look at me… he'd talk to me and say things that he'd never before said to me, and by the end of the night we would be closer than friends, a step in the direction of the only thing I wanted.

He'd entered the ballroom with me, and yes, he danced with me the first couple of dances, but when I'd gone to get something to drink, I returned and found him gone. I must have looked horribly and pitifully lost, standing in the midst of everyone else, holding a goblet filled with the pumpkin juice I didn't even really like, looking for Draco. I must have seemed pathetic, my eyes darting this way and that, racking my brain for all the places he could be. But I'd stopped caring about how I seemed to everyone else, because they were all secondary. Draco. I only had to find Draco.

So I searched the dance floor, wandered through the halls, peered into the Slytherin common room on the off-chance that he might have wandered there; I asked Crabbe and Goyle, who naturally had no idea, I even scoured the kitchens, but that's not where I found him. I found him just outside, by the bushes, snogging Tracey Davis. My heart snapped like a twig, and then it was almost as if it were being ground into powder, for I couldn't tear my eyes away. And then, finally, when I found the will within myself to move, I couldn't make it far without meeting mirror after mirror after mirror, wondering why I couldn't make him notice me. Before the ball was even over, I ran up into my empty dorm room, changed out of the failure of a dress, and tore it into pieces.

It wasn't about the dress. It was thinking you were going to be beautiful and realizing you never were, never would be—especially when it was something you had craved in your soul for a long time… It was a disappointment too hard to bear without tears… I had failed… it had all failed….

But the next day, I took him back, pretended it had never happened, that I had had a simply jolly time. And I smiled at Draco and Tracey, and went on smiling through that year, and the next, and continued smiling when Draco decided that he needed me to fill a place again. If he had bumped into me in an empty hallway, he wouldn't have known me, but when he needed someone to be there, he called on me, and I appeared. So when he rejoiced at the Dark Lord's rebirth I rejoiced as well, and when he needed someone to sing merry songs of celebration I was there to sing with him, and on New Year's Eve when he needed someone to kiss, you must know that I was there beside him. And for a bit, I was his girlfriend-like-thing, and he knew it, though our dates were never really dates, and we never really talked. I was there for a quick snog, and I would drain every ounce of meaning out of it until the memory became brittle and dry and crumbled to dust.

But I was always his when he kissed me. And that was a fact that nothing could or ever tried to change.

- - -

A frightening amount of time has passed since then, and we have grown far past Hogwarts, far past exams, and lessons, and childhood games. We have all grown far past who we were when we were seven years old, and fourteen, and sixteen. We are no longer the people who we once were.

I have changed with the seven years time has brought… into a person who would never do or think or say the things I may have then. I have a life away from a life of a Death Eater's child, a life away from any memories. I have done my best to destroy them. Changed my hair, changed my name, changed everything I could to escape this… thing.

And now I sit, back in England after a long estrangement, drinking tea now that even just the scent of pumpkin juice makes me sick, and I'm content. Alone, but content. Perhaps the one in the deep green cloak over there will be the one for me, the one in the grey suit maybe, or the blonde in the dragon-hide boots; it's not a question that needs to be answered now. But the one in the boots makes his way over to me, a look of faint puzzlement on his face as he sits down across from me. "Hello."

"Hello." It's lovely how I can get on by myself now, how independent and free I am now, that I can say hello with even the smallest amount of confidence to this perfectly lovely stranger. And perhaps it's more lovely, the irony of the fact that it isn't a stranger. He may not recognize me, but time will never let me forget Draco Malfoy and the semi-obsessive love that I harbor for him.

"Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?" he asks. It is simply the greatest triumph. He doesn't know who I am, or that I know who he is, and for once something goes like I've always wished it to be in my head. And the only thing necessary for this to be the perfect moment, the perfect victory… is for me to turn him away. To show him that I am no longer dependent on him, even if he may never see this moment for what it is.

I've realized after all this time, that I don't want to be that girl anymore—I'm not that girl anymore, not that girl who comes when he calls me, begging for him to take me back every time he breaks my heart. I've promised myself so many time that I'm not that girl anymore… But I can't turn him away. The tug is still there after all these years, torturing me like he's tortured me, refusing to let me be. And the horrid, poisonous word slips out of my mouth, like death crawling out of a grave… "Yes."

I can't believe I ever thought that I wasn't still his. I can't believe I ever thought I could escape from this. His eyes, his hands, his lips, his smile—it's an inevitable truth: I'm his till he lets me go…

When it comes down to the matter, this is the truth. I will always love Draco Malfoy and he will always break my heart; I will always take him back after he breaks me inside over and over and over again. I will take his constant punishment obediently, almost eagerly, as long as it keeps him satisfied with me, as long as it opens the door for him to be mine again. More truth? He'll never be mine. Draco Malfoy is first, foremost, and inevitably his own. He is complete in himself and he will never need anyone to complete him. Truth: this will never stop me from trying. As much as he belongs to himself, I belong to him, and without him there is nothing left in me.

A/N: Kindly review; I've never done anything of this particular sort before, so... be honest.

Love,

Femme Teriyaki