Okay so this is a shorter chapter but if I added any more it would have been super long and I'd rather have just another chapter. So last chapter I only had one reviewer so thank you to LittleMarauder29 for reviewing! It means a lot for everyone to review so please review this one!
Apologies
At the end of the summer, Draco was exhausted. He had gotten hardly any sleep and many nights he was kept awake by his thoughts. He was busy thinking of the supposed "return of the Dark Lord." He didn't know what to believe. After all, it was loony old Dumbledore yapping about it, and Saint Potter claiming to have seen him. In Draco's opinion, they were just like crazy Lovegood.
But if the Dark Lord has returned, Draco's whole life would change. His father would no longer be working for the Ministry of Magic, but the most powerful Dark Wizard of all time. He would go after Potter since he was supposed to be the only one to be able to defeat Voldemort. He would recruit more Death Eaters, attempt to kill Dumbledore, take over the ministry. Draco had to admit, the Dark Lord was very predictable.
Then, of course, there was the matter of Draco and Astoria. Astoria, the girl who looked beautiful with her dark soft curls and bright blue eyes. Astoria, the girl whose heart he broke before he even dated her. Astoria, the girl he knew if he spent more time with getting to know her he would fall in love with.
He knew he needed to apologize before their relationship dwindled too much and there was nothing to rekindle. He was planning on sitting next to her at the Sorting feast and apologizing there, but he wasn't sure he would be able to do that. Astoria had her own friends to sit by, Althea Travers and Emeline Fawley. If the rumors were true, Charlotte and the rest of the girls had a huge fallout when she was caught kissing Blaise Zabini, Emeline's former boyfriend until that incident. Since then, Charlotte was moved into a different dorm and had made friends with Gryffindor's and was currently a blood traitor.
As he was finding the compartment that he usually sat in, he remembered that he hadn't seen Astoria since that night. She had avoided every opportunity to see him and vice versa. She wasn't at meals or the library and left classes later so he couldn't catch her after. He had been miserable for months, thinking of the damage he had caused to their relationship by kissing Pansy. It was one of those cliche "she came on to me" moments where he didn't break it off immediately. The second that he let the kiss linger was the second Astoria saw them.
He had immediately told Pansy to shove off and had burst out yelling, blaming her for the mess and causing her to cry. But her tears weren't the ones he cared about.
He had found Daphne on the train earlier in the day and learned that Astoria's tears weren't anything to worry about. "Astoria and the rest of my family don't get along," she had said. "I won't hesitate to admit that I hate her and neither will the rest of my family. Her emotions have never mattered to anybody so she doesn't show them. She has only cried twice in her entire; when she was born she was so silent that we thought she was stillborn. Once, when she was six and mother had said that she hated her and another time when when-"
Daphne stopped abruptly. Draco motioned with his hand for her to continued. "When she was eight, some muggle boys took her from the manor. They took her to the forest near the manor; they beat her for not showing them magic that they had seen her do. We found her with tears on her face, shaking terribly. They broke her arm and her spirit. She was changed after that; never speaking unless spoken to, never trusting anyone." She was eight, Draco thought. "Was this-" "This was after the party in which she met you."
After that he was shaken up. Hearing what those muggles did to Astoria made him fume. He was fully to brood in his compartment when he ran into to something. Or, rather, someone.
He smiled at the sight of her sprawled out on the ground. She didn't seem to notice that the person she ran into was him as she got up and tried to leave. He followed behind her, before grabbing her waist and pulling her into an empty compartment. She struggled against his hold. "Astoria," he breathed into her ear. She instantly relaxed into him. He could feel his pride building up at that.
He pulled her onto the compartment bench and sat her on his lap. "Before you say anything, let me speak," he said, silencing her from saying anything. "Astoria, I'm sorry. I screwed up. I lost the small trust that you had in me. I let that kiss that she gave me linger for a second and that's when you saw us. I was trying to break up with her but then she kissed me. I broke up with her, screaming at her. I tried to find you, I've been trying to find you.
"I talked to Daphne. She knew I was worried about hurting you. She told me what happened when you were little, with your mother and those muggle boys." She tensed in his arms and started struggling again. He leaned in her ear again. "I know you have trust issues, and I know it goes against your nature to trust me or show emotions but I want you to know that you can. Astoria, I have these feelings for you that I can't deny and I'm tired of you trying to. Let me in, Astoria."
She sighed and buried her head into his chest. Finally, he thought as he wrapped his arms around her. "We can start out slow-" she started to say. "Thank you," he said. He squeezed her against his chest, where they stayed like that until Hogwarts arrived.
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~Beautifully Falling
