Sweet Dissonance (A Hermione & Draco Romance)

Chapter 1

Hey guys, this is my first time at a Draco/Hermione story, so I hope you guys like it! (P.S. This is also on Deviantart, and it will be on FanFiction for a short time before I delete it.)

"I HATE him." Hermione Granger spat viciously in the air, throwing herself down on her bench at Three Broomsticks. She took her place next to Ron and slumped down so much that Ron had to support her weight.

"Don't worry about Malfoy," Harry said, rolling his eyes. The name made Hermione shudder. She hated to think of anyone or anything that had to do with that cursed family.

"Yeah," Ron smirked, putting an arm around her. "Don't worry about Drrrrrraco. He's too much of a pretty boy to realize who your friends are - "

" - and what they could do to him if he dares hurt the great Hermione," Harry finished for him.

Hermione, who had always been strong, who had never shed a tear in the presence of a single boy - or man - found her eyes filling with unwanted moisture. She hastily lifted her coat sleeve and tried in vain to wipe the tears away, but it only left her eyeliner running and smeared across her eyelids.

"What happened to your face?" Ron asked, not intending to sound rude, but not a word came across as good to Hermione after hearing what Draco had to say about her and her parents.

"She's crying, idiot!" Harry sighed and turned away. Hermione knew he didn't like drama, and his life was already in enough peril to risk adding anything more. It would only make him weaker.

"No, no, I'm not!" she denied everything. "I'm fine...there's just...an eyelash, nothing else. Just an eyelash."

"Uh huh," Ron muttered, but a murderous glance from Hermione shut him up. "Come on, Hermione!" he protested. "You're in your sixth year. Don't act like a first year...crying over a simple word that doesn't describe you!"

"But it does," she said quietly. Her heart felt heavy, and all she wanted to do was slide under the covers and lay her head on her favorite pillow. "I am a mudblood, and my parents weren't wizards. You see, everything he said was accurate. That's the worst part. I would've been much less bothered if he'd been lying." Avoiding the worried glances passed between her best friends, she stood up and managed to drag herself to the door.

She shivered and hugged herself as she walked back to Hogwarts. The tears that had succeeded in pushing their way through to Hermione's cheek were nearly freezing into balls of ice because of the weather. Her nose was numb and red, and the sound of her name made her jerk her head up despite the cold.

"Look. It's Granger."

"Stupid mudblood! Let's throw something at her!"

Hermione clenched her teeth and glared as menacingly as she could at the passing trio. Malfoy with his fat posse - Crabbe and Goyle. Goyle leaned over (at least, as much as he could without falling over his stomach) and retrieved a ball of snow. Unfortunately, she did not notice the rock that Crabbe had snuck into the snowball.

The snowball-with-a-rock-inside hit her with full force. Hermione cringed and leaped back with a shriek. Crabbe and Goyle were erupting with guffaws, and Malfoy was smiling with contempt. She reached up to her temple and felt trickling blood, but she was too exhausted to say anything else. She only looked forward and commenced walking back to the school.

Before she turned around, she looked one last time at Malfoy, who was surprisingly looking back at her. His face was not filled with the evil grin that she'd seen before. In fact, she could almost sense a twinge of guilt. But before she could decipher his face, he turned back to Crabbe and Goyle with a toss of his hair.

Hermione was too tired to even get herself dinner. She walked straight to the Gryffindor dormitory and fell backwards onto her bed. She lay on her back for hours, staring at the ceiling, not noticing when all the other students came in to hit the sack. All she could do was wonder what she'd done to deserve such mistreatment. Answer too many questions in class? Study too hard? Surpass everyone else in brains? What did Malfoy, with those piercing silvery-blue eyes, see in her that made him want to hurt her so much? Was the fact that he was in Slytherin automatically make him feel like he should be an ass?

She'd gotten tired of hating him. However much she proclaimed that she couldn't stand his pureblood guts, only she knew deep down that nothing could make her hate the boy fully. There was something in the way he looked at her, in the way he acted when he was near her, that made Hermione realize that although he could easily pour out hordes of rude words to describe her, Draco Malfoy really didn't hate her as much as he acted like he did.