Disclaimer: If I was JK, do you really think I'd be writing FanFiction?
Looking back, it was her temper that caught his attention at first. Her funny little impudent outbursts that filled a room so easily, startling everyone else into silence. It was almost unbearable silence, bar the fact that she would invariably be standing in the middle of it all, raising her voice to the rafters, neither caring who heard what she was saying nor what she said, as long as she said it. And through this shield of anger, he saw her, as she was. As an insecure girl, worried about herself, worried about the people she loved; to the point where she was driven to this… comical insanity. She was too afraid to show people who she was, so she hid, and it made her angry.
Before that moment, he had never really considered her at all. It wasn't, as his friends often told him with solemn faces, because he was too busy thinking about himself. It was because she really wasn't anything much to consider – the small, shy redhead who rarely spoke up in class, and you only knew her name because she was a friend of a friend of a friend. But suddenly she was just there, with her raw passion for life, and… justice, and little puppy dogs. She was just there, and it was startling.
He was sure that he could help her, that they could help each other - him to feel more, her to feel less – and they would grow together. His cockiness, however, drove her away. On the outside, he set up the pretence of not knowing why she hated him so, but deep down, he really knew. He knew that he was behaving badly, he knew that he would never get her if he kept acting the way he was. But he still did, because he was scared of her. Something that had the potential to be so wonderful had come into his life, and he was afraid that if he managed to hold onto it, it would go away again. The pain of not having this gift in his life would be much less than the pain of having it, and then losing it.
As he grew, he became more and more angry with himself. More and more frustrated at not having her, and more frustrated at the chance that he could have her. And so he retreated into himself, to fight his own private war. His friends, as much as they wanted to, couldn't help – their flip suggestions on how to win her heart merely aggravated him.
And then, something happened. Suddenly, she was smiling at him, talking to him, enjoying, it seemed, to be in his company. When he thought about it, she was there with him because he was angry. He was angry, and she yelled less. It was strange that, without being together, they had achieved what he had wanted for each other:
She felt less, and he more – and now they had each other to maintain the balance.