Wanderer

Just Fine

Now she knew that wasn't true, because Draco Malfoy had no strings too.

She had been surprised to see him in Hogwarts, despite the whispers that had leaked from compartment to compartment on the train. When she arrived, her heart had constricted and the thought of seeing the Great Hall, cleansed of the blood and bodies that had littered it when she'd last stood there, meant Hermione decidedly avoided it, opting to wander around the castle instead. As it had turned out, her feet took her to her one solace, untouched by the wrath of the world: the library. She strolled through the aisles, fingers brushing the spines of books she had committed to memory, and stopped.

The gleam of his white hair, no longer slicked back but loose and ruffled and falling into his eyes, caught her attention first. It was always what people noticed about him, perhaps because it was so traditionally Malfoy. Hermione always thought it was superficial to focus on his alabaster hair, and though she could admit his eyes had every so often left her breathless (for more unsavoury reasons than just because they were pretty), it was the wry smile that she looked for. It was rare, and she was never the cause of it though she couldn't say it bothered her. She merely found it bizarre. It struck her when any semblance of human emotion was wrung from him, and she both longed for it and detested it because it made it simultaneously harder and easier to hate him.

And she did hate him. Hermione remembered the way his jaw had crunched under her knuckles, the sweeping fury of her fist, along with the burning feeling of abhorrence that writhed in her gut in Third Year. She thought it was a waste, how such beauty and intellect was wasted on the mindlessness bigotry he was fed as a child.

But she felt that hatred crumble when she saw him on September 1st for the first time since the Battle of Hogwarts because Draco Malfoy was not the same scathing, smirking boy she recalled him to be.

Where the air ignited around Harry and Ron, Hermione was always sure it dropped a few degrees when Draco Malfoy entered a room. It wasn't so much that he was a cold person, more his countenance never held a flicker of warmth, and the inherited, marble like features of his face ensured he looked more like a statue, than a living human being. His lithe chest barely moved when he breathed, and his eyes would regard everything with an air of boredom and callous cruelty. He was impossibly tall, taller than even Ron was, with pale skin, never fused with blush, and blond hair that remained the only thing to be moved by outside influences when the wind threaded through it. But what really struck people were his eyes: two light and icy glaciers, sometimes they were bluer than the summer skies, when the light fell on them right, but it was rare and they remained grey and cold enough to make even the sun freeze over. What really struck Hermione, however, was the complexity beneath the granite, the rush of blood beneath the paleness of his skin. She had seen him broken last night, and in some sick, twisted way, she wanted to see more. It made her feel less alone in her brokenness.

"You aren't to me."

She didn't know what had made her say it. Hermione knew she was a pennant for wounded puppies and societal injustices, and though Draco Malfoy did not instantly appear to be either of those things, she did not regret the words. He needed to hear them, and truth be told, the Malfoy heir had ceased to be Lucius Malfoy's Pureblood son the moment his aunt had dragged Hermione by the hair and demanded Draco confirm her identity and he'd grappled for a lie to save them a few precious seconds. The purple crescents under his eyes and the way his lips had tightened and pursed so he wouldn't cry out or vomit when the word 'Mudblood' was being carved into her flesh were proof enough that this boy was not the same one she had known before the war.

She didn't know who he was.

One of the few liberties of being an Eighth Year was the separate room that had been created at the top of the Gryffindor Girls dormitories, giving her both the House camaraderie that she loved and the solidarity she craved. Hermione collected her uniform from where it was piled neatly on her drawers. It was only when she caught sight of herself in the mirror, sighing at the bird's nest her good night of sleep had left her with, that her eyes strayed to the clock on the wall and she swore.