TITLE: Every Gryffindor has its claws. AUTHOR: Mexx. EMAIL: mexx@wild-dystopia.net DISCLAIMER: All Harry Potter characters mentioned within this fic are property of JKR. No profit is being made from this writing. RATING: PG. SUMMARY: Draco thinks about Hermione's nasty side. FEEDBACK: Would be nice.

There are some things that everybody hides. Everybody has a secret, a secret so dirty, so corrupting that they dare not share it with those they are close to, those they love. Sometimes they will even hide it from themselves. Draco knows this, he's an expert in the behaviour of those around him; voyeuristic tendencies drilled into him as a child from too much spare time on his hands. And he knows just how to exploit these secrets.

People share things with their enemies; those they hate. They share the darkness in themselves with those they think that are dark. Hermione certainly does, and Draco loves her for it.

He is foolish, he knows. To love a girl using him for sex, using him to reveal her nasty, dangerous side, so that only her prim, proper exterior ever sees the light of day. Draco gets the bad parts of her, the parts she shows no one, and that nobody would like to see anyway. But Draco is grateful for this... he prefers the true side of Hermione Granger. He loves her darkness.

She is a wonderful actress, he has decided. So wonderfully adept at fooling her friends into believing the good and innocent persona she has created for herself. But he cares not for her forged identity, and barely spares her a fleeting glance during class hours—cannot bear the insipidly sweet girl that she pretends to be. Draco is far more ensnared by the dark beauty that will sneak into his single dorm room during the darkest hours of the night, the girl who loves to tease, and taunt and has a wicked tongue... in more ways than one.

Draco would never dare tell the girl he loves her, she may be a truly fascinatingly dark creature, and if she'd been a pureblood maybe his father would approve, and if she'd not pretend to be something she was not then maybe Draco would admit to her there was something to their relationship than sex in darkened rooms and gropes in cobwebbed corridors. But he'd not confess his love to her for fear she'd rebuke him, because as dark as she is at night she was—and always would be—Harry Potter's Golden Gryffindor Girl; the eternal prudish and stuffy girl that everyone loved, and Draco knows she'd not dare show her claws to them, even for a moment.

--finis