A Discordant Life

Chapter 4

This story doesn't belong to me, it's everythursday work

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(April, 1999)

Granger shrugged and looked up from her cup of tea, the light from the coffee shop windows turning her eyes an ice blue. Her coloring was always so dull that he thought he'd prefer the difference, but he hated it. At first, he thought it was because the black hair and blue eyes reminded him too much of Pansy. Then he thought it was just because it wasn't Granger. It stripped away things that were distinctly her, and it made him uneasy.

"Sorry – I've been talking about work a lot, haven't I? It's pretty boring when it doesn't concern you at all."

No, she'd actually been talking about Evans a lot. Every story or event she started in on contained him, and it was bothering Draco since the second one. More when she smiled to herself on the fourth one after talking about waiting for a meeting to start, which Draco found nothing amusing about to any degree.

He was irritated, there was a tenseness in his neck he couldn't crack out, and his tea had gone cold.

"Do you ever get sick pretending to be someone else?"

Her eyes widened, and her cup clinked back to the table. "Uh..."

"Every time I see you outside of Potter's, you're wearing a different face. Evans probably only knows you from photographs in the paper. You're constantly forgetting the change in your appearance, as if it's who you are. Monitoring what you say in public, hiding your life. Are you ever concerned you'll take off the enchantments, and find you feel more at home in the person you are outside of your flat?"

Her fingers tightened around her cup until her knuckles were white, and he waited for it to break.

"Sometimes," she said quietly.

His irritation demanded anger, not a soft voice, and scared honesty, and lowered eyes. He expected to be more irritated, but it spun into something else he refused to call guilt. Whatever it was, it made him feel awkward, and it wasn't often he experienced it.

"I do it for a lot of reasons. All the ones I've already told you. But I guess...I guess it feels like I can't be who I am when I look like who I am. When I show that to people. Does that make sense?" She shook her head. "I know it doesn't make sense. But there's these expectations about how and who I'm supposed to be, but I'm a lot of things, and not always that. Not always what they want me to be. So I guess it's easier to pretend I'm never that at all."

Maybe Granger forgot who it was she was talking to. It would explain a lot of things in the past few months, and certainly why she still didn't seem to realize what she said and to who. But he had learned that a human being can never be who they aren't. They can embrace a part of them or an ideal and try to remain that way, but they will always slip, and fail, to show themselves or lose a self to be true to.

The whole world is connected through emotion. The cause, the belief might be different, but we feel the same. At times when Draco shook with rage, he would contemplate if it was the same feeling his father got before his father did worse things. What differentiates is who you are, and what you do with it. It's why he was sitting here. It's why Granger would always be Granger.

"I know a few things about expectations. You'll find it's better in the end to do the things that who you are demands you do, rather than someone else. You lose more failing yourself than failing them."