Chapter 4
He was breathing, which was a good sign. When she turned him over she saw that he had a minor flesh wound bleeding from the side of his head but nothing that appeared too life-threatening. With her panic subdued, she levitated him and stood there for a moment, trying to decide whether to bring him to the hospital wing straight away or keep him in the common room until he was conscious enough to tell her what happened.
"Well, get on with it!" the portrait barked at her. "It'd be a bit suspicious if somebody found you out standing here with his floating body, don't you think, Head Girl?"
She glared at him but directed Draco's body into the common room as she heard the portrait door shut firmly behind them. She set him gently on one of the couches, and she inched closer to inspect him, her bottom lip clenched between her teeth.
She reached out to sweep his hair – stained slightly pink from some blood – from his face but hesitated, watching him closely, expecting him to open his eyes any moment now and reach out to accost her. Was it possible that she was actually scared of him? Or was she just scared of being this close to him again, after having spent so long trying not to be? The fact that she had these questions pulsing through her mind, along with the obligatory "What happened?" and "Is he all right?" made her think twice about being in the room at all. It occurred to her that she could just leave him here until morning, but her civic duty as Head Girl prevented her from being so forcibly careless. Even if it was for the sake of her own self-preservation.
Slowly and cautiously she finally did it, as gently and quickly as she could. She swept his damp, fine hair from his face and for a second she just looked at him. She might have held her breath as she did so, she didn't really know. But she allowed herself to look at him in a way she scarcely now ever let herself. Her eyes traced every detail of his face like they were carving them into her brain, and she came to the same conclusion she'd always had, even when they were younger. That he was so fucking beautiful but the world had ripped his soul from him as if it had never belonged to him in the first place, as if he was just some temporary soul surrogate. Knowing that – unable to go a day forgetting it – his beauty disappointed her. It actually grieved her. Because now he was just a shell, washed up and lost.
She magically cleaned and patched up his head wound, being very careful not to actually touch him. But as she kneeled beside him on the couch, hearing his soft breaths and watching his still, peaceful face, she could feel the niggling curiosity and dread. Her eyes trailed down to his forearm and lingered there, as if trying to see through the cotton that covered it. She looked back at his face, checking to see if he was still unconscious, before she began to lightly scrunch his sleeve up his arm with the tip of her wand. She silently braced herself to see the hideous, unholy symbol that would officially let her know that he had given himself to the other side as part of a fucked up twist of his short privileged Pureblood life, as the pale ivory of his skin and the bluish veins that throbbed underneath them were slowly becoming exposed –
Suddenly Draco's arm shot out, catching her wrist in a vice grip, Hermione barely noticing as her wand clattered to the floor and the sleeve fell back down like the curtain after the show, hiding whatever she might have seen. Her own breath was sucked back into her body with such force that it caught her off guard and almost pushed her backwards – and would have, had he not physically seized her.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he demanded, his face drawn down into a threatening sneer. He was so close she could feel him panting on her face, like a beautiful bloodthirsty albino bull ready to gore its victim.
Her heart was beating so hard she swore the room had begun to throb with it.
"I was just—you were passed out—" she stammered, her own tongue fumbling like a foreign object in her mouth.
"What's this? Head Girl Blackwell stumbling over her own words?" he said. "I see that smart little Muggle mouth of yours has its limits." His eyes moved across her face, as if taking her in – her flared nostrils, her quivering lips, her flushed cheeks, her wide but shiny eyes. She felt her stomach coil at the slow smirk that began to snake its way across his pale, sweaty face. "What's this? Do I scare you, Mudblood?"
She tried to pull her wrist back but he only held it tighter, trying not to wince as his fingernails dug into the thin skin of her wrist. Don't let him see through you, a voice echoed in her mind. Don't let him win. "Not a chance, you lowly little snake," she spat. "Now let me go before I make you."
"That's too bad," he said lowly. "Thought you'd finally learned your lesson. But maybe it's high time you learned the hard way, hm? Let's see, what shall our first lesson be – oh, how about this? Don't you ever fucking touch me," he said, his voice deepening into a growl. "Got it, you dirty little Gryffindor wench?"
It happened before she'd even realized she'd decided to. She felt the harsh impact of her palm hitting the side of his cheek so hard his face snapped the other way. Her hand stung tenderly and his porcelain skin began to glow an angry red in the shape of her hand. There. A brand he could finally be proud of.
"Clearly," he snarled, "you have a death wish."
Apparently she did because she swung her hand back yet again and hit him with even more staggering force. She could hear her own breaths, heavy and jagged to match the rhythm of her pulse in her ears. But still, twice wasn't enough because she did it again, and again, and again until the air stung the tender, livid skin of her palm like electricity. In front of her, her hand became a raging red blur – the blood having come up to the surface, boiling underneath her skin.
She could almost feel the heat coming out of her eyes. She was trembling now; no longer able to keep still and silent and professional and act like nothing happened. Her bones quivered with the thousand questions she'd bottled up inside of her and she hoped that if she hit him enough they would topple out of her and he would get it. She hoped even more that if she hit him enough this stupid, infuriating mask of his would come off, that maybe on some impossible, paper-thin chance he would come stumbling out of the darkness and back to her, begging for her forgiveness over and over again like a prayer.
She rose her hand one more time to hit him again, but he caught her other wrist squarely in his palm with the resounding smack of skin hitting skin. His eyes were dark and stormy and his right cheek was so tender she almost wondered if it would bruise tomorrow. Inside, she both hated and praised herself for letting him get to her like this. Everything inside her sung from the adrenaline and long awaited vengeance, but it was a sad song, wasn't it? Nowadays they always were.
"Are you?" she rasped, suddenly parched, staring into his face, as if she looked hard enough she could make out the answers. She shook from her desperation. She didn't care if he saw it; physically, he was keeping her together but already she was crumbling from the weight of the situation, the pulsing multitude of unanswered questions that had hovered over her for so long, rooted in her nightmares and pulling her away from any and all happy moments. "Are the rumors true? Are you one of them?"
Something flashed across his stoic, statuesque face. Something quick and sad and painful but gone before she could reach out and tell it to stay. "You must have forgotten who you are, Blackwell, to think I could ever be tempted to answer any of your questions."
"No, I know exactly who I am," she said to him, almost shouting. "I'm not the one who's clearly lost here. I'm not the one on the verge of selling his soul." She said "on the verge" to be hopeful. She said it even though every bit of her was collapsing because every bit of her knew better but was trying not to.
"What gets me, Blackwell, is that you still think you know me. You don't. You don't know a single bloody thing about me," he was saying to her, with eyes like murder but his voice rising to accompany the agony she could finally hear coming at her in waves as if she had been deaf to it this entire time. "It sickens me when you still look at me with that look of shock and hurt in your eyes like a pathetic wounded animal. Like you're surprised – like what's happening to you is so fucking unimaginable. But it's not, is it? Nothing is. It's happening. And you have nobody else to blame but yourself."
She shook her head. "How do you do it, Draco?" she whispered. "Lie to yourself. You do it so magnificently."
His nostrils flared. "Don't," he said darkly, "call me that."
"You hate it, don't you?" she hissed, something hot and acidic gurgling up her throat. She didn't know whether it was stillborn laughter or just vomit, but she swallowed it down just the same. "Seeing me, hearing my voice – hell, even the knowledge that I'm here, just one measly room away from you, sleeping, breathing, existing. Well, let me tell you something, Draco. Just because you decided to cut me out of your life because I didn't fit the mold of some outdated, fucking delusional concept your racist, heartless father has drilled into your brain – just because you decided I would no longer be worth a single nice thought or passing glance doesn't mean I get to stop existing. It doesn't work that way. You can't just throw me away when you feel like it. So go ahead and hate me like you've proved you're so keen on doing. Spit at me, tell me again just how much lower beneath you I really am, and spend every night trying to forget. But let me tell you right now – I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay right here. I'm going to be a reminder of everything you wish you could erase. I'm going to torture you, just by breathing. And I'm going to enjoy every second of it."
He didn't say a word – didn't need to, as his face said volumes. Beautiful and so damn angry she could almost feel her bone marrow turning into vapor but like something was slowly dying inside of him, too. She knew the feeling because she'd been decaying since the day he looked at her as if she was nothing but a stranger.
"Go ahead," she said, bracing herself, reading his mind. "Hit me."
The old Draco would never, and she knew this. The old Draco would never lay a hand on her. Then again, the old Draco would have never given his life to the Dark cause. The old Draco might as well have been a myth that she told herself at night, fantastical and unreal and everything she wished was true about the world.
But he didn't move.
"No," he said to her, his voice cold and dead. "You aren't even worth that."
And just like that, she watched the stone veil fall back down over his eyes. And she knew her time – if she'd even had any at all – was up. He was gone.
He let her go, thrusting her down to the floor, her palms burning as they grazed the carpet. She looked up at him. She wanted to laugh, almost. He fit the image, damn it if he didn't. An angel of darkness.
"Don't come near me again," he said. "I don't need your tainted Muggle hands doing me any favors."
"Gladly," she replied, wishing she'd left him there to rot.
She wished she could have been the one to walk away first, this time. To have him look after her and feel the humiliating sting of her victory. But he was already up and walking to his room while she felt as if every muscle in her body had been petrified and nailed to the floor. She could only let out the painful, mounting breath once she heard the door to his room slam behind him. And then, collecting herself from the carpet, she went into her own room, where she silently allowed herself to fall apart.
ooo
"Would you let him snog you?"
It was fourth year and she and Draco were out by the lake, studying. It was a bizarrely sunny day and they hadn't met up by design but coincidence. During the school term they didn't spend much time together, which he blamed on her constant company of Harry and Ron, to which she then responded that she hardly ever saw him outside of classes because he was usually off trying to find some poor girl's tonsils in the deep recesses of her mouth. He had an affinity for physical intimacy with any girl with a pretty face and a decent pair of legs, which wasn't anything new. He wasn't even ashamed about it. He just smirked and shrugged it off like any red-blooded male actively satiating his raging hormones.
She looked up at him from her textbook, squinting from the sun. "What?"
"You know, Viktor the Bulgarian Boulder. You're important to him, which is why you were chosen for the underwater challenge – which is a classic move, by the way. And he's asked you to the Yule Ball, to which you have tastelessly replied yes. So if he wanted to snog you, would you let him?"
"I don't know," she said, honestly. "I haven't really thought about it."
He picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the lake, the ripples in the water causing the Giant Squid to raise one tentacle and wave. "It doesn't require much thought, Blackwell. This isn't Advanced Arithmancy. It's not quite as serious of an ordeal as you think."
"I understand that." She rolled her eyes at him. "But forgive me if I'm not currently on the prowl for halfwits to snog, thank you very much. It's not exactly the most urgent piece of business in my life at the moment."
He scoffed, faking a look of offense. "I'll have you know, the girls I've entertained are at least in the top ten percent of their class," he said. She gave him such a dry look it almost crackled. "All right, twenty-five."
"Unlike you," she went on, pointedly, "I've got my priorities sorted."
Draco shook his head. "You're nuts, you know that? It's a simple question. And here you are, getting defensive, attacking my priorities. I thought we were friends, Blackwell."
She stared at him, narrowing her eyes. "Why do you want to know, anyway?"
He shrugged, smiling mischievously. "Pure human curiosity, that's all. Is that such a crime?" She scoffed, shaking her head, as she went back to reading her Potions book. He lapsed into silence, even though she could still clearly feel his eyes on her. Finally, she looked up, unable to focus, knowing that he was staring at her.
"What?" she said, exasperatedly. "What is it?"
"Do you want me to teach you?"
She just looked at him for a very long moment before bursting into laughter. She laughed so hard that other students in need of their vitamin D who had also taken to socializing or studying by the lake looked over, curious as to what Draco Malfoy could have said to put her in such hysterics. She laughed so hard she had to wipe tears from the corners from her eyes. When she finally opened her eyes wide enough to see him, standing there and looking increasingly irritated at her idea of humor, she just laughed even more.
"Laugh all you want, I'm just trying to be a good friend," he said to her. When he noticed the other students looking, he told them all to sod off.
"You can be a good friend without offering to stick your tongue in my mouth, thanks," she said, finally composing herself. Her stomach was literally sore from laughing so much. "Besides, I don't even want to think about how many girls you've snogged. Probably enough to fill a small European country. Look accomplished all you want, it's still disgusting."
"What can I say? Practice makes perfect."
"Yeah, and I'm sure the hours you've put into perfecting the art of snogging have been quite the drag," she said. "Take it from me: there's nothing more unromantic than the thought of the queue of girls before you that have now left their own DNA in a bloke's mouth." She shuddered.
He stared at her, as if in disbelief. "Bloody hell, you've never been kissed, have you? Not even once."
She felt her cheeks flush. "No, and I'd like to keep it that way. You're not going to mortify me out of wanting my first kiss to be nothing short of perfect."
Draco tipped his head back and laughed. "That," he drawled, "is such a girl thing to say."
She shrugged. "Good thing I'm a girl then." When he sat back down next to her, on the grass, he was still chuckling under his breath. In the sun his eyes were light and sparkling. In fact, if she looked close enough, she could make out the faintest trace of blue in them.
"There's no harm in waiting, you know," she told him. "Life isn't a race. Finishing first and having all of those notches in your belt isn't what it's about. There are some things actually worth waiting for."
He looked genuinely amused by her seriousness. "Snogging is recreational, Blackwell. It's not a sodding marriage. It's supposed to be fun and enjoyable, not something profound and once-in-a-lifetime. It's not poetry. It's the ancient exchange of swapping spit."
"I know that. But I'm choosing to wait, until it's with the person I fancy and the timing is right. Which can be decided either in advance or at the moment itself. And neither you nor anybody is going to sway me from that," she said, definitively, turning back to her book.
"Then I hope that when you finally do get your first snog, that it was worth waiting for," he said, faintly smiling at her. "I'll even give you that first edition Hogwarts: A History I have in my family's library. Because that's the thing with first kisses, Hermione – they hardly ever are. Worth the wait, I mean."
"How would you know," she asked him, both condescendingly and curiously, "if you've never waited?"
He sighed, resting his head on his hands as he lay on his back. "Let's just say I've yet to have that moment where I've regretted not waiting. Lately all of the girls I've snogged have been sub-par. I can't even tell them apart anymore. It's like they're all blurring together in this sad blob of barely adequate snogmates."
"I don't know how you do it. You know, get up in the morning, and face the monstrosities and hardships you do every day," she said, rolling her eyes and turning back to her homework. "That's quite the uncharmed life you're living, Draco. I feel sorry for you."
"With the gall you have mocking other people, you'd think you were born snogging someone," he said to her, incredulous. Then he pressed his lips together, furrowing his brows. "You've got some dirt on your cheek, you know."
"Where?" she said, blindly rubbing her cheek with her right hand. "Did I get it?"
"No, it's – lower, just a little bit – no, to the right," he said, before he sat up, reached out, and rubbed it away himself. Hermione stayed completely still, watching him, feeling a slight tingle down her spine as his fingertips gently wiped her cheek. A small breeze passed and she felt goosebumps ripple across her skin.
When he was done, he didn't draw back away like she thought he would. His eyes flickered over her face, as if in thought. He was holding back a smile.
"What if I kissed you, right now?" he said, quietly.
She could feel the others around them, watching. She felt warmth flood her cheeks but didn't move away. "You wouldn't dare."
He was silent for one moment, as if contemplating, before he finally retrieved his hand. "You're right," he said, collapsing on his back, and she felt her heart sigh – in relief, in disappointment, she wasn't exactly sure. "Wouldn't want to steal your delusional perfect first kiss. That'd be terrible of me. Couldn't possibly imagine having to live with myself after I'd robbed you of such a vital human experience."
Her mouth dry, she swallowed. "Exactly."
And underneath the bright sun, making his eyes twinkle like precious stones in dazzling light, he smiled, just for her. Like a friend. Or maybe something more.
And for a fleeting, heart-throbbing second, she couldn't remember for the life of her why sharing her first kiss with him, this boy she had known all her life and could make her laugh to the point of tears without even meaning to, would be so terrible at all.
"Well, if you change your mind, you virginal, uppity Gryffindor," he said, smirking. "I'll be here."
She ducked to hide her face back in her book, not wanting him to see that maybe she already had.
Thanks for reading and please review! Super short chapter this time around - if we have to go around pointing fingers, I'd have to point it towards school because it is back to slowly sucking out my soul... I'll do better for you guys next time, I promise.
