#thebolt

Artwork done by the very talented celestikatt! (@celesitkatt on instagram)

Excerpt:

Draco looks at her, and his expression is one of strange, hopeless pain. “But then came you,” he says roughly. “You broke me — completely, utterly. I disobeyed each one of my family’s rules for you, and I would do it again, over and over. I am doing it still.” 

There is a silence. 

“But you don’t need to,” Hermione says finally, her voice hard and thin. She feels slightly sick. Her body feels tense, twisted, like a cloth wrung dry. “I do not have to be the cause of your destruction; I do not want to be. You have what you want now. You have what your parents want. I cannot be the person you hide away in private rooms, pretending that the secrecy is of our volition and not out of your cowardliness — I will not. I’ve done it once, and I cannot do it again.” 

“I am already destroyed,” he whispers. “It’s only a matter of what I can bear more — your absence or theirs.”

“If I know what love is, it is because of you” — Hermann Hesse

Pansy presses her lips against his, slowly, sweetly. The tip of her tongue probes his mouth.

Then — suddenly — an image comes to him, so vivid that for a moment he’s not sure where he is: Hermione in the library, her figure illuminated by a large, arched window. She’s bent over a piece of parchment, writing something, strands of her hair catching golden in the light. He’s close enough to see the peach fuzz of her cheeks, the slight knot between her eyebrows, the small ink blotch on her chin, from where she’d rested her quill there to think; he is close enough to trace the elegant line of her collarbone, smell the faint scent of clean linen, lemons, salt. She seems to be emitting a warm, white glow.

They look at each other for a moment, and her eyes are wide, endless, swallowing everything. Then she tilts her head, her lips curving up into a small, bashful smile. She shakes her head: no.

This is not a memory, but it feels like one.

She looks up suddenly, startled.

Draco takes a ragged gasp and shoves Pansy away.

"Hermione —"

"Say it."

The silence between them stretches miles and miles. He cannot bring himself to look at her. "Hermione" he says finally, closing his eyes. "Please."

The silence between them is now a razor-sharp blade. Draco's skin stings with what feels like a thousand paper-thin lacerations, each word unspoken a cut.

"You're a coward," she says quietly. Her voice is steady. Draco doesn't recognize her, the way she looks at him in that moment: as if she'd seen him fully, thumbed through every thought and feeling, felt the wet pulse of his stuttering heart — and came to an understanding about him in which he has not even begun to realize.

"You call me over here whenever you feel like it, you hold my hand, you kiss me — but you won't take me to the ball. You can't even say it directly, whether you like me or not." She releases a breath. "And I let you — I let you do that to me." She shakes her head incredulously, gazing at him, and there is a raw, bitter acceptance to her expression, entwined in the downturn of her eyes, the slight trembling of her lip.

from “The Bolt”

- Draco Malfoy, “The Bolt”