The Bolt, Chapter 8
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.”
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works










