Apricity – Prologue
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Summer 1994
She'd melted him like sunlight.
All his life, Draco Malfoy had stood frozen in the center of the wasteland that was Pureblood wizarding culture, forcing his heart to remain rigid no matter what the cost. He'd made himself as cold as stone to ensure that he kept his parents happy and stayed true to who they wanted him to be.
With one swift right hook to the nose, Hermione Granger had broken him down and remade him in the image of a disaster.
Draco spent the Summer after his Third Year in a foggy haze. Nothing brought him joy. The things that had once lifted his spirits and sent him soaring now chained him at the ankle and dragged him to the depths. He felt sick. Sick and wrong and empty. Like half of himself was missing.
Like she'd taken it.
And he was angry with her, he supposed, when he really thought about it. Because before she hit him, everything was certain. Everything was in its place. He knew who he was, who he was going to be, and what colors the world was painted in.
Now, it was just grey.
His father didn't notice, hang the prick—he never noticed anything but failure. His mother did, however. She noticed that Draco wasn't out on his broom, zooming around the estate like he usually was. He wasn't in the stables, petting and stroking the manes of the Abraxans, and he certainly wasn't out feeding the peacocks with Lucius. He came down to eat, but it was mechanical and quiet—unlike the chatty boy who'd come home from Hogwarts after First and Second Years.
"Why don't you come take a sip of tea with me, Draco?" Narcissa had asked one morning in July.
It was nearly noon and Draco still hadn't gotten out of his bed. He was lying on his side, arms wrapped around the pillow with his hair in eyes, staring. Staring at the air between his bed and the wall. Staring at the emptiness he felt inside.
"I'm not thirsty," he'd said after a delay.
"Do you have a fever?" She'd placed her wrist against his forehead, something he would have smacked her hand away for the year before. "You don't feel warm."
"I'm just not thirsty."
Narcissa had frowned, then, before she gathered up the skirts of her robes so she could sit down on the edge of his bed. When Draco let his gaze slide to meet hers, he could tell she was concerned. He just didn't have the energy to explain to her the reason why he was so tired and numb.
"Did you sleep well? The circles beneath your eyes are ghastly, my dragon," she said in a voice similar to a gentle coo.
Draco closed his eyes. Behind them, he saw buck teeth and honey-brown eyes.
"I slept," he said, because it was true.
Narcissa paused and then said, "Did you dream?"
Draco gritted his teeth, the humiliation spreading along his veins like wildfire. He didn't want his mother—his Pureblood witch mother—to know he'd been dreaming about a Mudblood for nearly three months. He didn't want her to think he fancied her because if she did and his father somehow found out . . .
"I always dream," he said, his voice a murmur.
Narcissa ran her fingers through his hair until he fell asleep again. Even though she did not question him further, he knew she knew something. He didn't know how he knew, he just did. She was his mother.
The next time Lucius complained about "that Mudblood Granger" at the dinner table, she shushed him and changed the subject.
The dreams continued long into August, until they became so vivid that he woke gasping for air. They were always arbitrary—smidgeons of memories from a life that belonged to her—drops of her spirit from a distance. He went days with only a few hours of sleep. Days without any answers.
His father finally noticed when he spilled a jar of jam in his exhaustion. It oozed out all over the table and the juices spread until they dripped onto the carpeted floor. Lucius backhanded the fourteen-year-old boy, complaining of his lack of attentiveness, and he told Narcissa to take care of it.
After the House Elves came and cleaned up the mess, his mother walked him to his room and told him with kindness to stay there until Summer ended if he wanted to. He felt so dejected and so lost that all he did was trudge to the bed and fall into it. He didn't leave it again until September.
When the time for school finally did roll around, Draco felt ravenous. He felt like a specter, haunting the halls of his own mind. He had no idea what was going on and his mother had no real words of comfort to offer him. His father had smacked him on the back of the head more times than he could count, complaining of his hygiene, the length of his hair, and his disinterest in his Summer studies. His clothes barely fit him, so he'd had to go with his mother to get dress shirts, ties, and trousers, and he'd run into friends from Hogwarts in Diagon Alley that could hardly recognize him.
He was a mess, but one thing had become painful in its clarity.
Hermione Granger was something to him, he just didn't know what.
December 1994
Why did she have to wear that color?
She looked like an ice princess, her tawny brown skin appearing as soft as a blanket of snow and her body draped in sheets of frosty periwinkle chiffon. When Krum spun her around the dance floor of the Yule Ball, it was like her feet didn't even brush the ground. Krum touched her and Draco felt ill.
Why did she have to wear the color that made him feel the coldest?
He could have left her to die the night of the Quidditch World Cup. He should have, the more he mulled it over. He should have told his father where she was so they could have gotten rid of her. That way he didn't have to feel like she was crawling along his bones. So she couldn't spread her metaphorical Muggle poison through his body.
Draco didn't understand what was going on and why—oh fucking why—did it have to be her?
He regretted not getting rid of her then. He regretted not shedding his skin, cleaning her out, and donning the person he used to be. But the moment the Dark Mark went up and everyone started screaming, it was like the smoke in his mind—the haze that had floated around him for every waking moment since her knuckles connected with his face on the hill outside the castle—rumbled with deep thunder. He left his mother in the tent, claiming to be looking for Lucius.
He went looking for Granger.
Without knowing why or how, he gathered up his friends and they ran through the encampment. The screams of non-magic people rang in his ears and instead of turning and going back for his parents, he kept going. He kept looking for her.
Why?
And he'd heard her screaming Potter's name. Somehow, he'd heard it, or he'd felt it. He didn't know which.
He had taken off to the Southeast, forcing Crabbe and Goyle to lumber after him, and then he skidded to a halt in the chaos. He'd barely managed to wrestle himself back into the character he made himself to be before this awful Summer, and he'd warned her. He'd warned them—Potty and the Weasel—and made sure all three of them knew that if she stayed there, she would die.
He didn't have to do that, but he did, and as much as he regretted it, something told him that he would regret it more if he didn't make sure she survived the night.
The dreams had continued unabated since the Summer, but seeing her that night with the fear wild behind eyes that normally showed only strength had seemed to renew them. The moment his head hit the pillow at night, he saw those eyes. When he woke in the mornings, he wondered whether or not he fancied her.
It terrified him.
It terrified him because he hated her. He was supposed to hate her. But here she was, prancing across the expanse of his slumbering mind with her curls and her protruding beaver teeth and her bushy hair and just . . .
Ruining him.
Months later, as Granger swept out of the ballroom with tears on her cheeks after arguing with the Weaselbee, her carefully coiffed curls tumbling from their pins, Draco followed her. He left his date, Pansy Parkinson with the rest of the Slytherins and followed the witch that had haunted him to the brink of sanity. He heard her soft sobs echoing down the corridor as she headed for the moving staircase room and he felt his stomach churning with each one.
He didn't know why, but her crying bothered him.
Maybe it was because it didn't look right. He hadn't seen her crying since First Year, when she was weak and mousy. Now, she was strong and feline, and anyone who got on her bad side came face-to-face with her claws. Or her wand.
If she was crying, she was hurt, and something inside of him wanted to burn the world down at the thought.
There was an alcove right before the staircase room that Draco had been to before. He'd been there with more than a few girls and tasted their lips upon his, but this time—this time he was going to pull Granger there. He was going to talk to her and ask her what the Hell curse it was that she'd placed upon him. He was going to figure out what sort of punishment she deserved—a letter to his father or an Unforgivable from the tip of his own wand.
An Unforgivable, which he knew he wasn't supposed to know how to do, but that his father had taught him how to do on his eleventh birthday.
Her heels clacked against the stone and one more sob left her mouth before his hand wrapped around her wrist and dragged her to the left. He saw her glance down towards her hip, no doubt looking for her wand, but then she seemed to remember that there was no need for a wand at a ball.
She cried out in outrage and shock, but within seconds, he had her pinned to the wall. Boxing her in-between his arms, the taller boy glared down into her eyes at a much closer distance than he'd been to her since the day she'd started this all.
He had all sorts of plans. "What in Salazar's name did you do to me?" he was going to snarl. "What muddy curse did you place upon me with your blasted fist?" He was going to demand answers and keep her there until she replied. He was going to ask her how she was infiltrating his dreams.
She stood before him, the top of her head near his shoulder, the picture of only the best parts of those dreams. With her lips painted and her cheeks rouged, her lashes curling and black, she was something awash in color. Because in all of the months that he'd seen her when he closed his eyes, it was never in a nightmare.
No, the nightmare would be what was left if he tried to pull her roots out of his soul and watch her die.
"I may not have my wand," she said, her voice thick from her earlier weeping, "but I'll still find a way to make you regret it if you don't move the bloody Hell away from me, Malfoy."
He narrowed his eyes down at her. She lifted her chin. They held each other's gazes in silence and challenge. In her eyes, there was a ferocity that only belonged to her. One that he'd never noticed before but for the mud his father told him was there.
She was fucking gorgeous.
The span of two breaths passed and then his head snapped forward. He captured her lips mid-gasp, his head tilted to the side as he prepared to snog out of her everything she'd taken from him this Summer. The sleepless nights, the grey haze of the atmosphere, and the emptiness she'd torn into him—he was going to snog it all and consume it.
She kissed him back.
It was only for a moment. One brief moment where her fingers were against his face and neck and she was on the tips of her toes. They were kissing as though they were two randy students in an alcove, hoping they wouldn't get caught by a Prefect after curfew. Inside, he felt every part of his body swelling and singing and burning. It wasn't grey anymore. For just this moment, nothing was.
Granger tasted like sunlight.
She shoved him back, their lips tearing apart with a smacking sound, and then she slapped him. She slapped him hard enough to make his ears ring. They stared at one another, him with his jaw hanging open and his fingers twined through his platinum hair, and her with her hands over her mouth.
The silence was shattered by her.
"We never speak of this again. Never again. It didn't happen, do you hear me?"
Draco felt like he'd been hit by a Bludger. He wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to snog her into oblivion. But he had the wherewithal to respond.
"Never happened."
She wiped the last of the tears off of her cheeks and took a shaking breath. Her lips were swollen. "Fine."
"Fine," he said, and it came out on a breath.
Her heels clicked on the stone as she dashed away, each step hammering a nail into his heart.
