A/N: Well, here is the second part to my D/H fic. A Draco monologue about his feelings for Hermione. This fic took me much longer to write than the first chapter. The paragraphing is also fixed on this one, the HTML mucked it up on the first one…sorry about that, I can assure you that it annoyed me as much as it annoyed you guys who had to put up with it!! PLEEEEEEEEEASE REVIEW-I will love you forever! I am begging you on hand and knee here people! If I get 8 reviews or more I will upload the next, and probably final chapter. And hey, tell me you hate it and that it is a complicated, over-profound mess if you want, I just want honest, constructive criticism. I do honestly listen to what you say!
Disclaimer: Theirs. All I own is some potato chips and me. Nope, just ate those so all I own is me, myself and I.
Dark Angel
I've never been able to sleep on the nights around the full moon. I leave the brocade velvet curtains in my room open and let the moon cascade through the window in heavenly slivers of clear light. The moon always makes things seem so simple-pure, light and good. But beside the slivers of light my room is also shrouded in a darkness that is made even more evident by the contrasting colours. But the moonlight sometimes reflects and lights up some of the darkness too.
Like she does to me. With her hair shining silver in the moonlight and her eyes resembling an eerie shade of liquid mercury, full of flame she looks so different, so much less restrained than she does in the daytime. That is why the nights are so special to me. I can sit by my window for hours, tracing her reflection on my windowpane, the closest I'll ever get to her. She is my tiny sliver of moonlight that I know will never rightfully be mine in a world that is overflowing at the brim with darkness. And sometimes her reflection reflects light onto me as well, if I stand close to her.
She is sinfully full of grace. That may sound like a paradox, but then so is she. She is more beautiful, more intelligent, more...just more-than I have ever seen before. Her soul overflows with radiance and passion and darkness like my own and light like nothing and noone I have ever known before. But she chooses to hide her personality behind bookishness and to everyone but me she is successful. As I know she sees me, so I see her. To everyone else, it is like we are hiding behind a complicated Illusion, but to each other, we are as clear as sharp white against a dark background. She may seem to take relatively trivial things such as work seriously but beneath that exterior there is dark beauty that shines like a beacon to my heart because I recognise a kindred spirit. We are both contradictions-me with my angelically blonde hair and my black soul and her with her never-ending loyalty to her friends who I know she'd give up in a second to be able to look freely into my eyes without seeing the pain that she feels equally reflected in them. I know she is in pain. I am also in pain, me, Draco Malfoy, born with a charred silver spoon in his mouth. I am in pain because she disturbs me as much as she melts me. Why should a girl, just a girl like her, Muggle-born...all I have been raised to hate and consider inferior, have the power to see my soul, something that noone, not even myself, often glimpses? It is ironic in a wonderfully twisted way.
I scare her. I've known that for a while. I scare her because whenever I'm around her, she loses control. And control is very important to her, her control is her wall, much like my arrogance is mine. Those characteristics are also our downfall, because without them we become human and fallible. Imperfect, blemished by invisible hands that draw stark lines on our faces and weary expressions take up residence on our countenance. I want to be a creature of the light, but I also want to wallow in the deepest pits of darkness. To wallow in the pits of darkness is a wonderfully comforting feeling: like you are surrounded by it and it can heal you because in darkness you don't need a conscience or to feel hope. You are just there and that feeling of being there in the present, with no fears or worries...you could stay there a lifetime. Some people do. To step into the light has always felt, to me, like you are exposing yourself to so much more...a whole world of betrayal and regret over what could have been. Noone can stay in the light always without being burned.
So why do I feel the irresistible urge to run in the light and watch the sunlight play with your hair, dappling it and making it bronze instead of brown? Why do I feel the need to drag you with me, your body limp and yielding because you have no choice but to follow me, into the light where I sometimes get the feeling that we both belong?
Because I think I love you. And for me to admit it is more terrible than enduring seventy Cruciatus curses simultaneously because curses are just a little excruciating pain. It ends eventually. Loving you is a constant ache. Wherever I am I feel the pull of strings on me to be near you, be as near to you as it is physically possible until our bodies fall into disrepair just because we could not tear ourselves away from each other long enough to do anything but cling to each other, falling against a wave of emotion that could drown our willing souls. Because I know we'd be willing as long as we would be together. When I am near to you I have to strongly resist these urges with every fibre of my frayed being. My soul has jagged patches left around the edges from the amount of restraint it takes from me to accomplish this simple task. And I know you have the same patches, because I can see your soul better than I can mine.
I cannot and would not use any endearing terms to you. 'Honey', 'darling', 'sweetie', none sound quite right because neither of us think it is dignified to use those sort of clichés. Or maybe they just don't express our emotions fully enough to be worth the breath. But every day I thank a God that I don't even believe exists that He let you breathe and that I am blessed enough to be able to look at you every day. Fleeting glimpses of an elusive perfection that I know I don't deserve is all I'll ever have of you, like jagged edges of a shattered mirror that I could use to cut your skin to see if you really are flesh like me. Because secretly I think that you are really sent as a test of my self-control because there is no way that you could be real, you are too wonderful. You are the best thing ever to happen to me but I've never even felt the caress of your silky hand on my cheek. And I never will, I know that. That is what happens in idyllic and therefore unrealistic Muggle romance novels, or their music that I secretly love with all my soul because it contains so much passion. I don't know if you love Muggle music too, but whenever I listen to any song, I always find something in it that reminds me of you.
Whenever I do anything I find something in it that reminds me of you.
Do you have any idea how much that scares me?
When talking to anyone else that would be a rhetorical question but when talking to you I know that the answer is yes. You do know how much it scares me because I see the need to heal my everlasting anguish with your sweet touch, soothing me when I cry out silently and knowing when you need to be near me, otherwise I would come after you and grab you and never let you move away and bond our hands forever together and seal our destinies and fates so that neither of us could ever turn away from the other because we would be two parts of the same person.
We are two parts of the same person. I am a strange combination of darkness and light, and so are you. My dark angel who hides so much anger under your pragmatic and feasible surface. Anger at the world and at injustice. You wish you could make it all better, don't you? You wish you could make me all better.
You never get what you wish for. You never have. Neither have I. But maybe I don't want to be made all better. Maybe all I want to smell your wafting vanilla scent mingling with the strange smell of old books and spices I have never smelt anywhere else. Maybe I just want to look at you and see you as you forever, to show that in my entire life, I never need to do anything more than look into your tarnished soul and meld it together with mine until noone can distinguish two people, only one. You and me becomes more than just you and me, it becomes a single syllable that people run together as if they are used to us being of the same skin.
But that will never happen. Why do I torture myself so?
Because torture is a most exquisite form of pain that once I have experienced, I never want to let go. Being tortured by you is a strange -combination of spine-tingling breathlessness combined with the innate urge to become flushed red with the warmth that you project to me and that I project to you whenever we see each other, that we project without even thinking about it. Because I know that we both need the others' comfort even if we only give it unconsciously. I think that you need me as much as I need you. But maybe you don't admit it to yourself because if you did that fully, you would cling to me with just as much strength as I use trying not to cling to you. Because you are strong and honest about your feelings and I am weak and dishonest.
Why can I never cling to you? Because, dark angel, you deserve so much more than me. Even if I am all you want, you need so much more than me. You need someone warm, someone surrounded by people who genuinely love them, someone who can wrap you tight in a security blanket. I stand alone against a wind that will eventually make me fall over the edge of a steep ravine and I won't have a blanket to keep me warm, or someone to catch me when I fall. Noone genuinely loves me. Noone even knows me. Apart from you. You might argue that noone knows you, but for you it is a simple question of letting people into your soul, and I know that they will always accept you and all your darkness much more than they will ever accept me. Because I need my darkness to remind me of how good the light can be. And if you took my darkness then I might have to face the light.
And that prospect scares me even more than my love for you does.