Chapter Text
It’s all fucking bullshit. Are they truly expecting everything to just go back to normal, as if the past year hadn’t happened? As if Draco hadn’t had to shred his soul to fucking pieces over the course of months, hadn’t had to go through with acts that made him want to rip off his skin. As if he hadn’t been forced to live through that year, when all he wanted to do was disappear.
He’s so tired of all of it. Of the classes, the professors, the lower years staring at him. Of having to play nice with every-fucking-one, lest they alert the Ministry that he’s not cooperating appropriately.
And whose idea was it, really, to force them all back to Hogwarts again? As if the few of them that have survived aren’t all shadows of their previous selves.
Theo barely speaks anymore, and Draco is pretty sure he isn’t sleeping, either. Pansy is a fucking mess, and has stopped caring about most things. She cries, too—Draco has caught her several times late at night in the Slytherin Common Room, chest heaving with ugly sobs. He hadn’t done anything to comfort her.
The Gryffindors aren’t doing much better. Potter is a walking, traumatized version of himself, snapping at everyone who dares speak to him, flinching whenever someone gets too close to touch. Weasley is going through bottles of Firewhiskey as if they hold the answers to all his problems, if him showing up to more than one of their shared classes drunk off his arse is anything to go by. Longbottom and Lovegood, Draco thinks, are the only ones that seem to be holding it together. But maybe finding comfort in each other’s bodies all over the school grounds isn’t exactly holding it together, either.
And then there’s her. Granger. The Golden Girl.
It’s been four months since the Ministry told them all that they could come back to Hogwarts for an Eighth year. Well, they didn’t exactly tell Draco as much as demanded he go back, just so they could keep an eye on him. But the others, Potter’s fan club, they’re here out of their own free fucking wills, and where he can’t understand why Longbottom or Weasley or Potter decided to come back, he can perfectly guess why Granger did.
It’s because—and this Draco knows as well as he knows the color of the blood running in his veins—Granger is dead set on acting like nothing’s happened. She’s trying so hard to just go back to who she was before all the shit show, back to being the intelligent, studious girl she used to be. Always the first to class, always the first to answer questions, always the one with the best grades.
But here’s the deal—she can’t. And Draco knows it’s killing her inside. A part of him gets off on it, on knowing that try as she might, Hermione Granger is as traumatised as the rest of them.
At the beginning, Draco had been surprised by it. When he’d first set foot back in Hogwarts, he’d been expecting something of the sort from Potter. Draco had been convinced he would’ve had to spend the next few months confronted by a smiling, laughing Potter, basking in Voldemort’s defeat, urging the others to forget about it all and start living their lives again. He had been prepared to want to strangle Potter every moment, for them to snap at each other, teeth bared, as they had done in the past. But no—Potter looks as fucked up as Draco feels, and he’s not trying to hide it. Draco’s grown to respect that, and now, when they cross eyes in the halls, he gets that nagging feeling that Potter is the only one who would understand, could understand. In the end, it had been Draco’s wand in Potter’s hand when Voldemort had died.
But it’s Granger, and not Potter, that’s putting on a front, and Draco loathes it. He loathes it because Granger doesn’t deserve it, doesn’t deserve to act all so put together, as if she’d already gotten over all the traumatising shit they went through. She doesn’t deserve to throw it all under the rug, not with everything that happened, not when it had meant so much, not when they’d had to sacrifice their younger selves to a fight they should’ve never had to deal with in the first place. Not when she bares that scar on her arm.
The good thing is that Draco knows that it’s all a lie. He knows that Granger is just acting, just holding on to the idea that maybe, if she tries hard enough to act as if everything is manageable and alright and fine, then maybe she’ll feel like that as well. And it’s this that is surprising to Draco, because Granger’s not stupid, not at all. He’s sure, down to the marrow of his bones, that Granger knows that this isn’t how things work, that trauma doesn’t simply disappear if you ignore it long enough, that faking doesn’t mend anything, certainly not the things they went through. Just like him, Granger’s been through hell. Her hands are as red and bloody as his, yet she refuses to see it. She’s chosen to act her way through life, and out of all the coping mechanisms she could’ve picked, Draco hates that she’s picked this one.
Worst of all, he hates that sometimes he believes it.
On those days, when he sees her walking down the halls, a small smile on her face, talking with some of the younger Gryffindor girls and fucking laughing, he has to clench his fists and stop himself from going over her and just yelling at her to stop. When he spots her in the Library, books sprawled on the desk in front of her, hair tucked up into a messy knot and that concentrated look on her face that tells him she’s completely absorbed in what she’s reading; Draco gets overwhelmed by a sense of injustice so sharp that his body seizes up, breath catching in his throat.
She almost looks happy, sometimes, and Draco despises it. He doesn’t want to see her happy, and he doesn’t care what that says about him.
Which is why, whenever Granger has a bad day, Draco revels in it. It’s how he knows it’s all an act, and she isn’t as well as she wants them all to believe. It’s how he knows she’s desperately trying to keep some semblance of control over her life, and miserably failing whenever she loses her grip on her emotions.
When he sees her in the halls, hair a mess, uniform and robes dishevelled, dirty and looking unkept, he wants to fucking grin. When he sees her in the Great Hall early in the morning, pushing her food around her plate, dead eyes staring at the empty air in front of her, he’s sickly satisfied by it. It makes him grin, pushes him to walk right in front of her, her gaze flicking up to his, catching on the Cheshire cat grin that takes up his whole face. It makes that emptiness in her eyes a little deeper, but there’s a part of her that’s still stubborn, that apparently still refuses to bend, that makes her stare Draco right in the eyes and fucking smile, smile like she would to an old friend, smile in a way that makes him almost, almost mad. The only reason why he doesn’t is because Draco sees the way her hands clench in her skirts, how the skin around her eyes tightens imperceptibly. How as soon as he heads to his usual place at the Slytherin table, she packs up her stuff and scurries out of the Hall.
Draco doesn’t get mad, because he knows that Granger is aware that he can see right through her act. And he thinks that scares her.
Howgwart’s Golden Girl is not so golden anymore, and Draco’s glad for it.
As the months pass, it turns into a game. How often Draco can catch her off guard, how deeply he can peer into that darkness that he is each day more convinced Granger is hiding behind those deep brown eyes.
He starts thinking about it more and more. Whether she lies awake at night, staring at those red velvet curtains around her bed, wondering why me why us why why why. Do her memories haunt her dreams when she manages to fall asleep? Does that day at Malfoy Manor replay on loop, Bellatrix’s Crucio burning hot and heavy in her veins, seizing up her muscles?
Sometimes Draco dreams of it, of how she looked on that dirty wooden floor, back arched in pain, that high-pitched scream coming out of her mouth for infinite moments.
He wonders how things are going between her and Potter and the Weasel. Draco sees her with Potter sometimes, talking quietly in the Great Hall. She’s one of the few people Potter bothers to interact with anymore. Draco’s also caught her playing chess with Weasley a couple of times, in those rare moments when he’s not drunk off his arse. Are they still friends like they used to be? Draco doesn’t think so. Salazar only knows things between him and Theo haven’t been good or easy, so why should it be any different for them? Does it pull at her soft little heartstrings to see her friends so messed up? Does it make her guilt curdle in her stomach?
The thing that pisses him off the most is that Granger, who had always been the one ready to sacrifice herself, to defend, to rage and be brave, is being a fucking coward. And Draco has grown to loathe cowardice.
For too long he’d been a victim of cowardice, been nothing but a frightened little boy doing what he was told, always too scared to do what he wanted. But Draco isn’t like that anymore—not since he chose, in the middle of a bloody battlefield, to throw all he’d been taught to believe in away in exchange for one last chance at life. He’d realised only in the aftermath of the War how good it could feel to not be a coward, how even if it all came crashing down around him, he could at least know that he’d made his own choice. That he’d been his own person.
It had tasted so sweet—not having to lie to himself to justify his actions. It had felt so good, in fact, that Draco had made a vow to himself: to never be so weak-hearted again. To never accept cowardice again. His Father had been a coward, his Mother as well, every single fucking Death Eater that wasn’t sick in the mind had been one. For too long he’d been part of it, surrounded by it, and he had grown sick of it.
Draco rejects cowardice, now. He’s accepted that he hates it, has hated it ever since he was a kid, though he hadn’t had the strength to admit it, then. The hatred had always been there. It had been the reason why, when they were kids, he’d disliked Potter and Weasley and the rest of their group so much—because they had courage, and Draco didn’t. He’d been envious of them, and hadn’t truly understood why. That same hatred is the reason why now Draco almost respects Potter, because Potter’s not hiding the fact that he’s not well. He and Potter, at last, have something truly in common. Because Draco, too, isn’t trying to hide how messed up he is. He refuses to be ashamed of it, or of who he now is and how he acts.
But Granger has chosen to be a coward.
And since Granger’s cowardice is the most loathsome of all, Draco has decided that he’s going to pull her act apart and get her to admit, to him and to everyone else, that she’s no better than them. That’s she’s as fucked up as they all are. That the War hasn’t been clement to her out of some karmic blessing. No, because if Draco and Potter and Theo and even goddamn Longbottom are fucked up, Granger doesn’t get to act as if she isn’t, too.
Distantly, a part of Draco is aware that he’s probably taking something out on her, focusing on her as a way to avoid focusing on his own problems. He’s self-aware enough to admit as much. The problem is, he doesn’t care enough to stop, or to try and understand the why of it all. Granger probably has her own reason for acting as she does, for choosing to hide all that trauma deep within herself, but Draco doesn’t care for them. In the end, he’s not doing it out of a twisted sense of duty, or out of guilt for the things that he indirectly put her through. He doesn’t care about Granger enough for it to be something like that.
No, the reason is much simpler. Granger’s threading a thin line, wobbling on unsteady feet, each day getting closer and closer to losing her balance and completely falling apart. And Draco wants to see it happen. He craves it like nothing before. He aches to see sweet little Granger break down, wants to see her messy and crying, screaming and angry. He wants to see her raw, wants to watch the damage and anguish she’s trying to hide stream down her face in ugly tears.
Draco wants to be the one to push her over that edge, watch her shatter into pieces, and leave her to pick up the remains of herself.
It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and they’ve just finished a Potions class, the Slytherin and Ravenclaw Eighth Years crammed together with the students from the year below, since there’s too few of them left to justify a class with only them. Draco had been distracted the entirety of the time Professor Terries had droned on about potions Draco had learnt in his free time during his Fifth Year.
The cause of distraction had been, of course, Granger. And that today, Granger’s apparently having a bad day.
They had just started class, the last Seventh Years having settled into their seats not a minute earlier, when the door had banged open, and Granger herself had stumbled in, hair wild around her head, tie crooked and loose over her messily buttoned up blouse. Her bag had slipped from her shoulder to her elbow, hanging loosely and half-open, and the rush she’d been in when she’d entered had caused her to drop the notebook she’d been holding in her hand, loose pages scattering all over the floor.
She’d immediately dropped down to her knees, crawling on the floor to gather them all up, muttering curses under her breath. The vision of Granger like that, messy and agitated and on all fours on the floor, shirt riding up to expose a sliver of skin right above her skirt, had caused something to perk up within Draco, as if a beast within him had cracked open an eye.
Then she’d lifted her eyes from the floor, arm still extended and reaching for a stray paper, and noticed all the eyes trained on her. Realisation must’ve quickly drawn on her that the students she’d stumbled in front of were not, in fact, Gryffindors, nor Hufflepuffs, because she’d frozen and her eyes had widened, mouth forming a small o of surprise. Her gaze had bounced around over the faces of the other students until it had landed on Draco. He’d been staring at her from over his shoulder, tapping his quill quietly on the side of the table, and when Granger’s wide eyes had locked on his, he’d let a smirk lift the corner of his mouth, letting his gaze trail over Granger’s messy appearance. The sound of paper crinkling had been the only sound in the otherwise silent room, Granger’s fingers creasing the paper she’d been reaching for. At the sound, Draco’s eyes had snapped first to her hand and the balled-up piece of parchment, and then to her eyes again, where he’d found her gaze narrowed on him, a flicker of anger in them. He’d allowed his smile to grow, and had watched in delight as Granger’s jaw tightened, letting it turn into a vicious grin when she’d rushed to pick up what was left of hers on the floor and pull herself up, leaving the classroom in a rush without even bothering to close the door behind her.
Professor Terries had cleared his throat and gone back to whatever it was he was explaining, and no one had said anything about what had just transpired. But Draco hadn’t stopped thinking about it, about that whisper of anger in Granger’s eyes, anger at him, at his mocking smile. He hadn’t stopped thinking about how she’d looked on the floor, legs tight together, arms reaching out, wondering how high up her arse her skirt must’ve ridden in that position. Draco hadn’t been able to stop himself from wondering how she’d look if her knees were to be pushed further apart, how deep her back could arch were he to press his hand down in the middle of her shoulder blades.
Hence Draco’s distraction for the rest of class.
As he leaves the classroom and strolls down the corridor towards the stairs that will bring him to the Great Hall, Draco realises that he must take advantage of the fact that Granger’s not having a good day.
The thought sends a shiver down his spine. Excitement and anticipation rise like twin waves in his blood, making it pump faster. Draco can feel his focus sharpening, his thoughts clearing, until all that runs through his mind are ways to push Granger until she breaks, to find the cracks in her and tear them open.
Draco’s going to have his fun, today, and Granger’s going to be his entertainment.
Hermione’s been on a downward spiral ever since Harry killed Voldemort, but the stubborn, unrelenting side of her that she’d used as a shield all these years to protect her most vulnerable part refuses to accept it; ergo, Eighth year so far has been—well, a mess.
Hermione doesn’t want to sleep, but she takes a sleeping potion religiously every night. She’s never hungry, yet forces herself to eat until her stomach cramps and she has to do her best to keep the food down. She doesn’t want to chat with Harry, or play chess with Ron, or gossip with Luna, but she does all those things anyway, as often as possible. She’s grown to dread studying or opening a book, her Gryffindor tie feels like a noose around her neck, and nothing holds her interest anymore.
She’s started to lose time, too. Moments where she realises she can’t remember what she’d been doing, what someone had recently told her. Sometimes it feels like she’s sleepwalking, disconnected from all that goes on around her, memories playing vicious loops around her mind until something jostles her back into the present, into this reality she doesn’t recognise anymore.
She doesn’t recognise Harry. He’s a shattered, tattered version of who he used to be. Whenever they talk, they never talk about important things. It’s always superficial conversation, like how classes are going, how their projects are coming along. They never talk about how they’re respectively doing, about the scars the past year has left on them both. Hermione doesn’t know if it’s for his benefit or for hers. Harry has stopped trying, this she knows, and whenever she thinks too long about it, an ache grows in her chest and it becomes hard to swallow, and although she wants to help him, she feels like she no longer knows how to be the friend he needs.
She doesn’t recognise Ron, either. He’s not doing any better than them. He’s taken to drinking, always chasing the next bottle. Hermione used to scold him for it, to fight for him to stop. She’d seen the look on Molly’s face when she’d found Hermione helping Ron while he vomited in the toilet yet again before they left for Hogwarts. A part of her had wanted to protect Ron from the disappointment in Molly’s eyes. But Ron hadn’t cared—he’d laughed at them both, telling them to fuck off and leave him be, and another part of her had died that day. Now, whenever she manages to convince him to play a game of chess, or to have some tea together in the Gryffindor common room, it feels like a bittersweet win.
Hermione feels lonely like never before, and she’s realized that she’s scared of it. She’s scared of it all, of this aftermath that hovers over them like a dark cloud. It shouldn’t be like this. They’d won, they’d fought until the end and they had won. Death Eaters had been locked in Azkaban, those few who had made it out of the final confrontation. The others had been left to rot where they’d died, or so she hoped. The majority of her friends had survived. They should be happy, should be filled with relief, with hopes for their futures, what they can rebuild. But Hermione feels no hope, no relief whatsoever, and it scares her.
A sick part of her wants to laugh. She almost finds it funny, the fact that she’s so scared now. She used to be brave, used to carry courage around her like an armour. Her mind and her fearless heart had been what she could always rely on, what would carry her through anything life might throw at her. She’d been proud of them, proud of herself.
Now Hermione can’t look at herself in the mirror. And she hates it. She hates it like she has never hated anything before—more than she’d hated Voldermort, or Bellatrix, or the Gods above that had cursed them all and decided that they, her and Harry and Ron, who had just been children, had to be the ones to deal with the Dark Lord.
But the thing she hates the most, the thing that turns her blood hot and makes her want to scream until her voice is hoarse, is that she’s scared of something she can’t change. Hermione has turned into someone who’s afraid of the past, of things that are good and done, things not even a Time Turner could fix.
Or better, she isn’t scared of the past per se—she’s scared of the effect that the past can have on the present. She’s scared because Harry’s past is making him walk around like a corpse, and Ron’s is turning him into an alcoholic.
She’s scared because she doesn’t know what it all means for her, what her past is going to turn her into. What it’s already turning her into. A weak, disconnected, fearful version of herself.
Hermione isn’t capable of dealing with it. She refuses to deal with it, refuses to lend the past so much power over her, over who she is.
So she fakes, and she acts—as if maybe by trying hard enough to be who she wants to be, to be once more the person she used to be, the person she’s becoming will fade into the shadows for good. And if the cost of her miserable attempt at a life is that she can’t look at herself in the mirror, if it’s that lingering taste of disgust at the back of her throat—she’s willing to pay it.
Some days it’s easier to put on her mask and act like people expect her to—answer all the questions in class, laugh with Luna and Parvati, get ahead on her work. Some days it’s harder, and sometimes Hermione feels like a failure.
On those days, Hermione swears Malfoy’s eyes track her every move.
It began by late September.
Malfoy’s actions in that Final Battle had shocked everyone, Hermione most of all, and although she recognises that they all now owed Malfoy something, it seems like no one truly wanted to acknowledge it. She definitely did not want to acknowledge it, or even think about it, but it seems that with that single act, that single choice to fight against Voldemort in the end, something had clicked within Malfoy, and he’d become king of himself.
He walks around Hogwarts with his head held high, though he looks as bad as the rest of them. His pale hair is longer, and he’s lost the hunch to his shoulders that had weighed him down in the past. Malfoy seems taller now, broader, as if suddenly he’d started occupying more space. Sometimes, Hermione watches him stride down the Great Hall towards the Slytherin table with his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, the Dark Mark on full display, stark against his pale skin.
Malfoy looks proud, now. Proud of being free, proud of the ugly scars that slash across his Dark Mark. Proud of who he is and unafraid to keep who he’d been hidden away. Proud in that way that only people who have nothing left to lose can be.
It makes Hermione want to rage.
Especially because it all feels like a taunt.
It feels like Malfoy’s taunting her, telling her look, this is who I’ve become, and laughing at her pitiful attempts to keep some miserable semblance of control over who she now is. It feels like a taunt every time their gazes lock in the corridors, whenever she sees him in the Library picking up a book she doesn’t recognise, every time he gives her that ridiculous, infuriating smile. Malfoy has that gleam in his eyes of someone who knows your deepest secrets, and Hermione is terribly, horribly afraid that he’s already uncovered all of hers.
As autumn creeps over Hogwarts, she’s started to become jittery, stressed. On the bad days, she finds herself looking over her shoulder, her gaze searching for a flash of pale hair, her heart beating faster every time her eyes fall on a green and silver tie. It feels like he’s always there, lurking behind the next corner, the sole constant spectator to her every failure, to her every stumble. It makes Hermione overanalyze her every move, forces her to imagine what she must look like from his perspective, if he sees her as the mess she tries so hard to hide.
The worst of it all, is that Malfoy never, ever, says anything to her. Not once, since they’ve been back at Hogwarts, has she heard his voice utter a snide comment in her direction. No, his eyes tell her everything he doesn’t have to say—that he’s judged her and found her lacking.
Sometimes, Hermione swears she sees a well of disgust in Malfoy’s grey eyes when they catch on hers, deep enough to rival Bellatrix’s.
But sometimes—sometimes she swears it’s something else.
Hermione wakes knowing she’s going to have a really bad day.
She hadn’t had enough for a full dose of her sleeping potion the night before, so she’d had a restless sleep, filled with haunting dreams that had left her with an unsettling sense of unease. Hermione snaps at Ron when she finds him sprawled on the rug in the Common Room, sleeping in a shirt covered in his own vomit, then leaves him there, rushing to the Great Hall in a frantic, bitter craze. She does her best to shovel some oats down for breakfast, conscious of the ticking clock and that she’s going to be late to class again, but stops at the third spoonful, her stomach protesting her attempts to fill it.
Still, no matter that she takes the steps two at a time, she reaches the Potions classroom with no time to spare and falls, like a fool, in her rush to get to her seat. Her notebooks slip out of her hands, stray papers flying everywhere as her knees hit the ground with a thud. Hermione tries to catch her breath, her cheeks hot in embarrassment—and it’s then that the silence registers, and makes her freeze.
It’s never quiet in a Gryffindor classroom, she knows this from many years of experience, which can only mean one thing. Hermione swallows, and raises her eyes—and all she sees is black and green and blue; Slytherin and Ravenclaw robes; unamused, cruel faces; and Malfoy’s eyes on her, watching her over his shoulder as if she isn’t worth more than that.
Frustration makes her embarrassment swell and it takes all of Hermione’s hard-earned self-control to not reach for her wand and hex him right there, in front of everyone. But her iron control almost slips away when Malfoy smiles—no, grins—like the cocky, utter bastard that he is, and Hermione truly considers casting a Bombarda at him. But instead, she grabs her things and flees the room, teeth grinding so hard her jaw cramps.
How could she have been so stupid as to get her classes mixed up? It’s Wednesday, she has Arithmancy, not Potions, for Merlin’s sake. And obviously, it had to be his class she’d walk into, of course, with Malfoy right there, with a front-row seat to her making a fool out of herself, again.
Irritation burns hot in her veins, making her flush, and she sweeps down the hall and towards the Library, heading straight for her favourite corner—towards the old oak table with scratches on its surface and slightly uncomfortable chairs. Hermione flings her bag onto it, careless of the noise she makes as she sits down and groans, letting her head fall into the cradle of her arms.
A distant part of her recognises that it all isn’t as big of a deal as it feels. She isn’t the first nor the last student to get their classes mixed up. What’s getting at her is, obviously, that Malfoy saw—saw her lose her grip on her notebook as she’s losing it on her life, likely noticed her messy and dirty uniform that she’s just been too lazy to charm clean; and dammit, he probably somehow also knows that she hadn’t slept the night before.
It has taken Malfoy one single look to make her feel completely naked and exposed, her armour vanishing as if it was made of the thinnest smoke. He makes her feel unbalanced in ways that make her wish she could crawl out of her own skin, and Hermione doesn’t know how to deal with it.
Hermione buries her hands in her curls and pulls until the stinging pain in her scalp makes her forget the last few minutes of her life. She gives herself a moment, closing her eyes, and lets her mind go quiet. When she opens them again, she smoothes her hair and pulls it back into a knot, using her wand to keep the curls in place.
Then she pulls out her notebook and a couple of her books from her bag, and gets to work.
Draco finds her in the Library.
They should be having lunch, but when he’d stepped foot into the Great Hall and hadn’t seen her at the Gryffindor table, he’d immediately turned around and headed for the place where he was sure he’d find her.
Granger sits in one of the quietest corners of the Library, surrounded by shelves which Draco knows are filled with old Herbology books. It’s not his favourite corner of the Library—he prefers the small circular tables by the History of Magic section—but he has to admit that this corner is, in truth, quite nice. There’s a tall window on the far wall between the shelves, coloured glass in the figure of a tree reflecting green and dark red shards of light on the ground and the table. One of those rays of green light is bright against the pale cream of Granger’s fingers as she traces along a page, reading under her breath; and a part of him perks up at the sight of her skin bathed in green.
Her hair’s up in a knot, her wand poking out from it. Stupid, to keep it there, he thinks. One could so easily take it from her. Draco almost wants to laugh.
Before Granger has time to fully notice him heading towards her, he sneaks into the little alcove behind her and plucks her wand from her hair. It tumbles down her shoulders in a dark wave; curls twist and coil, and Draco grins.
Granger let out a startled gasp, her hand reaching for her hair, but before she can turn around Draco leans over the back of her chair, crowding her. He grabs her hand and pins it back down to the table, then slips his arm around her and pushes the tip of Granger’s wand into the soft skin beneath her jaw. It forces her head back until it’s against his stomach, his tie tickling her curls. Granger grips Draco’s wrist viciously, fingernails digging into the thin skin there so hard Draco knows they’ll leave a mark.
Draco chuckles. He tightens his grip on her hand, so small in his hold, so delicate he wonders how much pressure it would take for her bones to snap. Grager’s skin is cold, colder even than his, though the Library is charmed so that the heat is almost stifling.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Granger hisses through gritted teeth. Her voice cuts through the quiet, sharp as ice.
Draco leans down, crowding her even more, pushing his weight onto the back of her chair until he’s close enough to whisper in her ear, “Leaving your wand so exposed, Granger?” He tsks, shaking his head, “How disappointing.”
He pushes the tip of her wand harder against her throat, until it drags a hiss from her, her head inching back until her whole throat is bared, tendons straining softly. Draco tips her chin upwards until he can see Granger’s face, just to take in the murderous expression in her eyes. It makes them look pretty, he thinks. Alive. Draco likes them more like this, filled with rage, than filled with that emptiness he sometimes see in them. A blush tints Granger’s cheeks, and her lips are white, pressed into a thin, angry line. The point where her wand is digging into her skin is pulled tight, and Draco stares as she swallows. He gets the sudden urge to wrap his hand around her neck, to squeeze until he can feel every single bone underneath, until he has her clawing at his hands and gasping for air.
Draco pushes the wand forwards harder still, and watches as Granger’s pupils blow wide, as the corners of her eyes tighten and a sneer takes over her face. It makes her look ugly, makes her look like a wild beast.
For several moments, neither of them talks nor backs down, staring at each other. The hatred in Granger’s stare is almost tangible, and Draco can imagine the thousands of names she must be calling him in her mind, but he knows she’s too stubborn to move away, to give him an inch.
Without a sound, Draco backs away. He extracts his hand from Granger’s grip but doesn’t let go of her wand. He lets go of Granger and walks around the table, sitting down in front of her. He doesn’t look at Granger. Instead, he studies her wand with a lazy sort of interest, twirling it around his fingers.
Draco’s never actually had the chance to look at Granger’s wand so closely, to study this wand from which so many clever spells have been cast—spells which played pivotal roles in the War, tipping the balance to the good side. Spells which hurt people, spells which saved them. A wand that will go down in history, right alongside his.
It’s almost unimpressive. A light brown wood, ivy curls around the stem in precise swirls. Feminine, yet not overwhelmingly so. Granger is quiet on the other side of the table, but Draco feels her eyes on him, feels the tension in the air as he waits for her to make a move. He doesn’t raise his gaze to hers, nor does he break the silence—just studies her wand like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever laid eyes on, until suddenly, it’s ripped out of his hands.
Draco smirks, slowly looking up at Granger, who holds her wand in a white-knuckled grip. His smirk turns into a smile. Granger looks like she’s about to hex him, and Draco wants her to do it—wants a reason to get angry at her, to retaliate, to unleash some of the dangerous energy running rampant beneath his skin.
But today is not that day, it seems. Granger loosens her grip and sets her wand on the table, resting her hand lightly over it. She straightens, pushing her shoulders back, and her whole face smoothes out, the mask of the restrained, diplomatic witch once again falling in place. The look of anger in her eyes vanishes, replaced by bland annoyance, as if it all is but an inconvenience to her.
“What do you want, Malfoy?” The tone of her voice makes him grit his teeth, how flat it is, how emotionless.
Draco stares, searching for any signs of the anger that was just there, but her face remains impassive, her body relaxed in her chair. It pisses him off to no end that she’s not giving him a fight, because they both know that she’s acting, that the leash she has on her emotions is pulling taunt.
It makes Draco sick to his stomach, watching her stifle her emotions like this. He wonders if she’s afraid of what she might do were she to lose her grip on her self-control, and he thinks again of what a coward she is.
Draco looks down at his wrist. Though the pain hadn’t registered, her nails had dug hard enough into his skin that she’d left red, crescent-shaped marks behind, blood pooling at the corners of some of them.
Pity, he thinks. All that fury, and she won’t let it out.
Draco lays his hands flat on the table and leans back in his chair. He taps his fingertips on the table, the soft thuds of his rings echoing in the quiet alcove.
He looks back at Granger, whose face is still flat, as if drained of all emotions, and scoffs before repeating, “How disappointing, indeed.”
He stands. Granger’s expression doesn’t change, but Draco swears he sees her fingers twitch over her wand, then still again.
Granger doesn’t say anything, so Draco doesn’t deign her with another look before leaving.