AN: This was written for the QFL for the Seeker's prompt for the Falmouth Falcons.
Prompt: There's nothing technically wrong, but your OTP (or one half of them) just doesn't feel right. OTP is Drastoria (Draco Malfoy x Astoria Greengrass)
Wordcount: 1,040
Content Warnings: None
Astoria stared out the window. It was a perfect sunny day over the moors of Dorset. Her hands curled into fists around her green robes, a white-knuckled expression of her frustration. Her expression remained stoic as ever.
If it had been raining and cloudy, that would make it easier. If the heavens were thundering and crying, then maybe she could convince herself that it was an omen, that the stars themselves told them to stay apart. But instead, it was a beautiful day. More beautiful than most. There was hardly a cloud in the sky, except for a few puffy white ones like the fluff inside a plush animal that drifted lazily across the sky.
It was the kind of day Astoria loved, when she would insist on taking Draco by the arm out to the gardens. They would lie beneath the trees and let the albino peacocks wander about as aimlessly as their thoughts and conversations.
It still could have been that day, if Astoria wanted. There was still time to change things. She looked back to the open trunk at the foot of their wedding bed.
It was the very same trunk that she had taken to Hogwarts all those years ago, when she was a chubby eleven-year-old trailing after her elegant and so-cool thirteen-year-old sister. It was a pine green with silver fastenings, prophesying her Sorting into Slytherin—or perhaps, rather threatening that she would join her sister there. Astoria could identify all of the little scuffs and scrapes, and that little stain toward the back in the little shelf where she had accidentally broken a bottle of ink.
She'd done her best to conceal and fix the scars and scuffs of the trunk, but the imperfections still nagged at her. They were a reminder of her failures—and not just in regard to the trunk.
Perhaps that was why she lifted her wand with the same trepidation she might a sword or a muggle weapon, and cast a Summoning Charm, bringing her things to her. With a flick of her wand, the robes folded themselves, the hats and shoes plopped down neatly along the back row at the bottom. Photographs, trinkets, books—they all found room inside her trunk.
'I should thank Daphne for showing me how to do this properly,' Astoria couldn't help but think as she swished her wand. With a final, heart-wrenching click, the trunk locked closed, just like this chapter of her life.
Astoria placed her wand inside of the hidden pocket of her dress robes. She glanced about the room she and Draco had shared. No trace of her presence remained. A quick and lonely stroll through the empty dark halls of Malfoy Manor confirmed that all her touches on the place had been packed away into the trunk.
She'd left such a little mark here, after all. She was like a ghost, roaming these halls that she had once hoped to bring light and life to. And now she left them abandoned and deader than they'd been before she'd come.
She only could hope that the same wouldn't happen to Draco.
Astoria paused in the parlor—right before the new portrait that was placed on the mantelpiece among her favorite flowers in a fresh arrangement.
The portrait had only been painted a month ago, and yet Astoria felt millennia older than the woman smiling back at her in the portrait. She watched how the painting-her smiled at painted-Draco, how her hand intertwined with his, the ring on her finger being the only way to tell which hand was hers and which was his.
Astoria found herself twisting the identical one on her hand. Heat rose in her cheeks and she clutched the skirts of her robes again.
This was one trace of her that she couldn't erase.
Her footsteps rang out like the curses that had been cast in this place, each with the same dread, foreboding, and potential damage.
She didn't want to hurt him.
That was why she was leaving like this, one of the few times he left the house and she didn't, to visit Theodore Nott or some old friend.
She still loved him—and she knew he would always love her, despite even this.
Of course he wouldn't understand why she left.
Astoria was hardly sure of it, herself. There had been no fight, no drop into silence that had characterized the fatal end of all loves that had come before him. And yet she felt uneasy. This was too good to be true, too kind an ending for either of them.
It was too perfect for a girl who was just as scuffed-up and broken as her trunk.
Astoria inhaled sharply as her hand closed around the rope that would draw the curtains closed. This was the last time she would get this beautiful view of a perfect day on the beautiful moorlands. She only released it when the black curtains fell over the landscape, shutting out the light and throwing the Manor into the mourning that could have been.
A little sliver of light still peeked through—and it was by this light that Astoria approached her desk and wrote her tear-stained manifesto.
When it was done, she sat there and stared at it for a moment. It would be so easy to back out, to lose courage now. She could light it with a single incantation. But she had to be strong.
She rose with shaky knees, but walked straight to her trunk anyway, casting the spells so that it would follow her, just as Daphne had taught her as schoolgirls. She carried herself like the pureblood witch she was supposed to be, cool and confident and graceful. And hiding all of the cracks and scuffs.
She walked out the front of the property, let the iron gates close behind her. She walked off the trodden path and steeled herself.
"Astoria?"
She looked back one last time at his face. He wasn't fast enough, he could not get to her fast enough.
She did not even say the words she wanted to when she Disapparated forever.
'I love you. I'm sorry.'