The lock turned and the door to Hermione's apartment clicked open. She stepped in gingerly, taking a deep breath and refusing to look at the blond sitting on the sofa.
He didn't protest at her neglect. It was quite unlike Malfoy, who always had to be in the centre of attention. He didn't fix her with his grey eyes that held a gleam only when he was looking at her.
He didn't eat. Drink. Sleep. Breathe.
She had been ignoring these oddities for a long time.
"You have to stop, Hermione," Harry said, staring at her firmly with his brilliant green eyes. She felt numb under his gaze. "It's killing you."
"Maybe I want it to," she said.
"So what have you been doing the whole day?" Hermione ran a hand through her frizzled hair and set down her bag.
"Waiting for you," Draco said.
Hermione shuddered. His voice sounded exactly the same. "You're not real," she whispered.
Trembling, she walked toward Draco and reached out her fingers. She watched as her hand moved inch by inch, shaking all the while. She almost sobbed when his skin gave the littlest bit of resistance to her probing fingers, but she pushed through his skin and watched as his flesh turned translucent.
He didn't move, merely continuing to give her the smirk that used to take her breath away.
It still did, now, for reasons both familiar and all too different. Because she loved him. She hated him. Because his smirk was so breathtakingly, intimately familiar.
Because it wasn't real.
Ron rubbed at his nose and sighed. "'Mione, you're brilliant and all, but you really shouldn't be putting your magic to this use."
"You have to accept he won't come back," Ginny whispered, blinking back the sheen in her eyes.
They converged on Hermione in a hug, wrapping her in warmth and the comforting smell of Molly's cooking. She shook in their arms, breathing in the scent of pure love. Love she'd taken for granted.
"Fucking Malfoy," Ron murmured. Hermione cried even harder.
She let the tears fall. It shouldn't be possible, she thought miserably, that she still had tears left in her body to cry. The past months had wrung her dry. She had been all cried out; she had established a rhythm, a routine the last few days. A routine, she forced herself to realise, that was consuming her from the inside.
Draco sat motionless below her. She let herself pretend, one last time, that his grey eyes held soul behind them.
Then she raised her wand.
"Finite."