12:37 AM Saturday

Draco's calloused hand slid over her pale, silky arm softly, lovingly. He moved down her forearm and the two hands melted into a firm grasp. Fingers intertwined, pressing into white sheets. His rhythmic breath was hot on her bare neck. His mouth explored. Tasted. Caressed. He moved inside her, feeling her accommodating response. Hearing her pleasurable moan. Delighting in his ability to make her feel this way. He released her grasp, and moved his hands over her like the sculptor and his Galatea. He bit softly into warm, soft skin.

It had stopped being about his own pleasure long ago. It was all for her. All to make her happy. All so he could just hear her cry his name with that lust filled voice. Just once, to have those sparkling, joy-filled eyes gaze upon him lovingly. To see her eyes glaze over like the heat haze from a fire. He knew he could take her there. He had done it every other time. He needed it.

She moaned more desperately and dug her fingers into his back. He could feel she was about to say it. It was time. Her moans climaxed and she screamed. He didn't see her lips move, but he felt the impression they left. That slow, inexorable stab wound in his chest.

'Harry,' she cried.

He knew it was coming. He knew that there wasn't even that small little chance that she would cry his own name. Yet, it still surprised him. It always surprised him.

To his severe disgust, due to his surprise he lost the control he had somehow maintained thus far. He gasped tersely, knowing that the woman underneath him might as well have been in a different room. She didn't love Draco. She loved Harry. He sighed. Who was he kidding? As long as it was her, he didn't really care.

He pushed away from her, to stare into her eyes. She smiled back, and her eyes were kind and loving. However, they were alien. These weren't the same eyes, the same smile. They weren't Hermione's eyes, but the eyes of a muggle he used to work with. The glaze was there but not the intense heat that he craved, only a pathetic facsimile, more akin to a disastrous oil slick on the surface of a dead ocean. A desolate, all absorbing plane of destruction, festooned with the slowly rotting corpses of everything the black sickness had choked. Wet sickly fins and pallid flesh and those horrible, horrible dead eyes. Staring, always staring, always at him. Nothing but death.

And then he realized that the evil wasn't in her eyes. They were just showing his reflection.

Once, long ago, he had held a cat with a broken leg in his arms. The cat had screamed for a while, and that had a definite pain of its own, but the worst thing was when it had finished being loud. When it quieted down, it just stared at him with helpless, questioning eyes. Why is there so much pain? Why does everything have to be this way?

If Draco would have looked in a mirror, those same eyes would be staring back at him. Eyes that were red rimmed and swollen from unshed tears.

He looked down at her. Her eyes were peacefully closed and her head rose and fell with his chest. She was asleep. He paused, and stroked her hair, splaying it out onto himself.

How impossibly disgusting he was. How offensive to be hurt by something that was less than anything. How pathetic.

He continued stroking her sweet-smelling hair, and savored her warmth. He pulled the blanket so it covered her more, because he felt her getting cold, although she seemed to be oblivious as she slept. Although her warmth was physical and couldn't comfort the fierce, enveloping cold inside him, he wanted her, at least, to be warm. He used to find comfort in these things. In the brief interim between his disgust at the levels he had dropped to, and the raging guilt he felt from convincing himself that this trash was the woman he needed, he had actually felt good. Good about himself, good about life, good about being able to fool himself.

Not this time. This time was different. The void inside him had been ripped savagely and was now expanding uncontrollably. He was such a disappointment. He was a useless -thing- that existed to be a sponge for all the bad. He was truly, utterly, and inescapably trash.

Trash. Nothing more. He carefully disentangled himself from the muggle and surrendered the entire blanket to her. She didn't wake.

His eyes swiveled to his bedside table. Nothing. He opened the drawer slowly and removed the razor. Nothing. He pressed the cold metal against his skin. Still nothing. He felt nothing. He looked at his bare arms, and saw the scars from the shallow cuts he sometimes made. They used to help him manage the pain. He now needed more.

He ran the razor down his forearm, without cutting, and reached his wrist. He could already see the blue veins pressing out from his skin, like a baby's mouth begging to be fed. He fancied he could even feel the blood pumping in them through the blade. Another time he would have taken a deep breath, or closed his eyes and allowed himself a few self indulgent tears. He would have tried to talk himself out of it. Now, he didn't need to take a deep breath. He didn't need to cry, even if he could have. He didn't need to hesitate.

The steel dove a majestic, blissful dive through skin and vein and blood. There was pain. Intense pain like he had never felt before. It didn't seem to make sense considering it wasn't really a large wound yet, still the pain was there. If he hadn't acquired a base physical need for that very pain he might have stopped. His heartbeat quickened, and he saw the blood match it's new tempo, welling out of him like an orchestral response to a conductor's accelerando.

He turned the blade sideways and cut a long gash down his arm. He felt the hard metal penetrate the easily yielding flesh, and move inside him savagely. He gasped softly, feeling the extreme stimulus of both the pain and the release. The blade withdrew from his skin once more, letting a flow of hot, thick blood drop sluggishly to his chest. He felt it begin to slither sideways off him and onto the white sheets.

He let the blade fall to his chest, and retrieved the worn photograph. It was partly stained red. That he did regret, but it couldn't be helped now. He saw those sparkling eyes. They no longer looked at him with reproach. No more recriminations. Those eyes looked at him with kindness, and a slightly sad or pitiful gaze. Even though he had betrayed her by pretending those other things were her, even though he had thought the things he had about her, she still forgave him, right at the end. It showed just how incredible she was.

'I think...' Draco murmured, struggling to keep focus on those beautiful, shining eyes, 'I think I loved you Granger.'

He abandoned trying to look at those eyes, and his hand dropped from his view, closing over the photo. It seemed that a cloud had passed over the moon outside, because the room had dimmed slightly. He closed his eyes, and smiled. Somewhere, on some level of consciousness, he thought he could feel Hermione beside him, drawing closer to him. Comforting him. Whispering into his ear that she loved him too.