This Is War

Fight For Somebody

Hermione doesn't know why it's getting to her so much. She should've expected as much from the beginning, right? It's not exactly like he's a dimensional person. He didn't have layers; all that was true about him was what was on the surface. He was nothing but cold.

'Chocolate, really?' She giggled a little too loudly for her liking. 'Out of all things, your mother banned chocolate from you?'

He rolled his borrowed-eyes, fingering the corner of a page from his Charms textbook. 'Malfoys aren't fat,' he scolded her to her, the way they'd done to him she figured. 'And they don't lapse into a sugar-coma after twenty-eight Chocolate Frogs and faint during their etiquette lesson.'

She laughed some more, picturing a little toddler Draco Malfoy collapsed on an armchair, face covered in melted chocolate and his belly sticking out from his expensive robes. 'That's honestly priceless. But I suppose I can relate. Mum and Dad forbade me from eating sweets. They're bad for your teeth and all that.'

'And you had plenty of teeth, Granger,' it was his turn to laugh.

She nudged him with her borrowed-elbow, rolling his silver eyes at him. As she did so, even as she muttered a 'whatever, Ferret' underneath her breath, the situation had not turned hostile. It was like two friends picking on each other. It was harmless.

He was always going to be the same, wasn't he? He was always going to be that narcissistic, ignorant, and prejudiced boy that she met when she was eleven. He was full of lies. He was a master of them, capable of cocooning himself into a giant bubble of them; telling the world it wasn't there and they were seeing things.

He hadn't changed at all.

'Do you ever have nightmares about it?' he mumbled to her, refusing to meet her eyes like he'd been doing since he confessed something he'd been ashamed to admit. 'About that night with Bellatrix?'

'Bit of a rubbish question, isn't it?' She smiled, her borrowed-head still resting on her own shoulder. She could feel her curls acting like a fluffy pillow, the smell of strawberries in the brown strands.

'Yeah, I suppose it is.'

After a moment of silence, as she let that smile on Malfoy's face die, she sighed through his lips. 'It affects me more than I let on,' she finally spoke, admitting to something she didn't want to or hadn't told anyone. 'It makes me physically ill sometimes. I go into this panic...like there's not enough air in the room or the walls are closing in on me. It overwhelms me. It's like my body shuts off...Like it remembers the torture and it's still tired from it.'

She swallowed a knot that had begun to form in Malfoy's throat from her own memories. 'I'm exhausted,' she confessed, feeling the truth press into her mind, 'but there's no time to be. I'm not the only one, but I've got to keep going.'

Releasing her lips from the tight line he'd pressed them into, Draco let out a sigh of his own. 'Why do this, Granger? Why fight for Potter? You could've stayed in the Muggle world. You could've been safer there than you could ever be here.'

'Because I love him,' she said immediately, not oblivious to the way Malfoy made her shoulders tense. 'He's my best friend. I'd go to the end of the world for him,' and she hadn't hesitated one bit to say that. She pushed herself off of Malfoy, looking straight at him as he hesitantly looked up,too. 'And I'm not afraid, Malfoy. I'm not going to hide.'

'That's foolish of you,' he told her, creasing her forehead. 'They wouldn't be hunting you down if you just left the Wizarding World.'

She made his face frown. 'I'm not afraid,' she repeated. 'I'm a witch, Malfoy, and I belong here. I don't care that there's masses of wizards and witches trying to kill me. I'm still a witch. Mudblood or not, I have as much magic in my blood as all of them.'