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First Year: Force - a push or pull on an object.
He thinks he knows what she is when he sees her, first, on the train. She’s got This Look that says ThirstyBrilliantFightMe, and from the exact moment he sees her, he knows what she is: Muggle-born. Mudblood. Forbidden.
(And, clearly, she knows it too.)
She’s like the books he reads sometimes in the dark under all of his blankets with a Muggle flashlight he found locked in a forgotten room last summer. She’s a word that he can’t quite place but knows the power of.
He knows that she’s the apple in his Garden of Eden.
He doesn’t want to know, but he does, and it's kind of the worst. Because, for a second, he can almost pretend that none of it matters. He understands how important all of the rules he has to follow are, but he doesn't know why they're important. Nobody's ever really told him. He just knows that if he doesn't follow them, Father will get angry and Mother will just Look at him and he'll have to tell her everything and cry because when he doesn't cry things will just—
When he finds Crabbe, Goyle, and Pansy, he tells them that he got lost on the way back to the compartment. They all nod and go back to whatever it is that they were doing, but in the time that he stops talking and sits down, he realizes that She’s mutated from His Apple to His Secret.
A few weeks after they're settled at Hogwarts, he hears about the argument that Theologists are having. (“Draco, what does that even mean ?” “Pansy, shut up.”) It’s about the Apple — some of them argue that it’s a red apple, some are arguing that it’s a pomegranate, and most are saying that it doesn’t matter either way.
Right there, he laughs so hard he cries.
She doesn’t look at him.
≁
Second Year: For every action, there is an equal, but opposite, reaction.
He doesn’t understand her. None of her.
But he does watch her.
He thinks the girl is practically made up of bitten lips and folded tongue. He thinks this because he knows that she’s trying not to say the wrong thing, or the right thing, or the Too Loud, Too Cruel thing, but he just doesn’t understand.
(He mainly doesn't understand, because she often does end up doing just that, anyway.)
(Just to spite him, probably.)
Her name is Hermione Granger and of course it is. Her name has to be the most Muggle thing Lady Magic could come up with, just to torture him personally. Deep down, on a visceral level, he enjoys the torture. He enjoys the fact that he has something that no one can take away from him, because it's not something anybody interested in taking anything away from Draco would even know exists in a person like him.
But then . . .
Then he calls her that word.
It's almost an accident, if you'd believe that. Something used to degrade an entire group of people from birth for something completely out of their control, and he just "lets it slip."
He hates that moment, but he doesn't know what he hates. (Hint: he hates a lot of things about that moment, but he doesn't know he's allowed to yet.)
He hates that stooped to that level. He hates that the word doesn't catch in his throat or in the filter he's been told he has between his head and his mouth. He hates that he's expected to say things like that in his world, and how the look of surprise on her face goes to prove that.
He hates how quickly the look of surprise turns to eight different things that no child should be able to comprehend, let alone feel.
She looks at him after that.
For a few weeks, she looks at him whenever he does anything in her presence besides breathing. She always catches him sneaking glances at her in the Great Hall. They see each other at other times on the Quidditch pitch, and even though she's effectively surrounded by Gryffindors and whoever they're practicing with, he always feels her eyes on him. He spends about as much time in the library as she does, but he doesn't know why. (If he's in there because he has to beat her, why is she there now, and what is she doing that he isn't?) They run into each other often in the middle of shelves, and he always has an apology on him when he sees her: in his robe pockets, just behind his eyes, just at the back of his tongue . . . It never does end up coming out, though, because the way she looks at him . . . No matter how many dictionaries he has Mother send him, he just can't find the word for it.
And then she goes and gets herself Petrified.
His classmates are getting Petrified left and right, it seems, but her Petrification demands to grab his attention. It demands to remind him that the last thing he'll have to remember her by if she dies is her face in eight different shapes.
Of course, he never visits her.
By the time the thought manifests itself completely, she comes running through the Great Hall and everything is fine again.
(Draco doesn't even think she's remembered his existence.)
≁
Third Year: It’s when, like, a rocket takes off and pushes off of Earth . . .
First of all, she calls him a cockroach, which—
"Draco, if you'd just hold still, this would go a hell of a lot faster."
How do manage to properly — oh yes, quite thoroughly, in fact — insult someone using the name of an insect?
"I'm sure she just managed to punch you in a particular place. She couldn't have hit you that hard; she's just a girl."
"Pansy, you're a girl."
"That's very beside the point, Blaise."
Foul and Loathsome are quite weak, compared to what he would expect from somebody of her caliber.
But cockroach?
They're practically indestructible, aren't they?
"What exactly did you do to provoke this?"
He's heard rumors that they can survive without their heads.
"We could talk to Snape, I guess. He won't be happy you let her make you bleed, but it's better than letting her get away with this."
Wouldn't that make what she said a compliment?
"Draco, can you not smile as I fix your broken nose? It would make this process much easier."
But he can't.
Because Hermione Granger has complimented him, and now he needs to make a plan for how to deal with that.
And maybe a plan for how to deal with dealing with that.
For a second, he forgets that she's physically assaulted him. (Because it really isn't worth his time, in comparison.)
Funny that.
≁
Fourth Year: . . . It's not flying, you see — it's jumping!
He isn't jealous.
There are other things that he is: hating Potter (which is standard for his daily agenda); vaguely aware of Pansy ogling Weasley; very aware of Blaise ogling Potter (which is, upsettingly, not a new fact of his reality); and slowly developing a migraine with the intensity of his glaring at Krum and Granger.
He is not, however, jealous.
He thinks he'd know if he was, and he definitely knows that he's not.
If he were, he'd have asked Granger to this stupid ball in the first place, because absolutely no one has been unaware of Krum's obnoxious infatuation with her or that he was going to ask her to the Ball. If he were, he'd have actually said something to Granger at the beginning of the night, because he wouldn't have been staring at her like a complete idiot. He would have said something like Hello or Come here or literally anything than just opening his mouth for nothing to fucking come out.
And if Draco were jealous (which, as previously stated, he 100% is not) he would just go over There and do . . . something.
But he isn't.
So he doesn't.
His hands itch as he leads Pansy onto the dancefloor. Placing his hands appropriately at her waist and wrapped around her smaller one doesn't help whatsoever. He's acutely aware of exactly where Hermione is as he is pushed around the room with the current. Krum's cloak is easy to keep track of, even though he acutely doesn't want to. Every time he turns his head, he can catch the bounce of a curl or a corner of a smile and, slowly, he thinks, it's going to drive him insane.
(He isn't bitter about any of this, by the way.)
This is why, when the music stops and he can see a wisp of her dress slink into the crowd and headed towards the tables, he follows her. (He isn't as aware of that as he should be, but nothing comes up in his mind in the time it takes for him to catch up to make him stop.) He can see her head towards Weasley and Potter, but catches her before she can, grabbing her elbow and steering her out of that godforsaken Hall.
He almost doesn't notice her protesting.
They make it just outside the doors before she breaks away.
"Malfoy!"
Oh.
She's shouting at him.
Oh no.
"Malfoy, what exactly do you presume you're doing?"
He hadn't expected this.
(Good that he hadn't, too, because even if he had had an answer prepared, it'd be something between "I don't know." and "What are you doing?" and he likes to believe he's generally more clever than that.)
"I'm not entirely sure. What do you presume I'm doing?"
Fuck.
Close enough.
He narrows his eyes at her and hopes that he looks menacing. (He's never gone for menacing, per say, but now's as good a time as any to give it a go.)
She looks at him like she can't quite believe those are words a human person is allowed to say in this situation, let alone how one should respond to them.
"What is this?" she asks, wary now. "Are Crabbe and Goyle hiding somewhere, waiting? Are Parkinson and Blaise going to come and make fun of my shoes?" It's mocking, but she sounds genuinely curious.
And now he's left to answer that ridiculous string of words.
He points back into the Hall, approximately to the table where Potter and Weasley are.
(Correction: to where Pansy and Blaise are currently crowding them into. The two-thirds of the Golden Trio are left back-to-back in their chairs, left at the mercy (read: lack thereof) of the wizard and witch and it's clear, even from this distance, that they have no idea what to do.)
"Pansy and Blaise are in there," he says, obviously, as if she isn't watching the same scene play out. "I have no idea where Crabbe and Goyle are, and your shoes are brilliant."
That has her turning. "Then what is this, Malfoy?"
He doesn't know.
"I don't know," he tells her, which, it quickly becomes apparent, is the wrong thing to say. She looks past him, clearly planning to walk away, and all he really knows in that moment is that is not what he wants. "I mean," he says, louder than he really means to, grabbing her elbow again.
He doesn't let go as easily this time and pulls her more in a direction that doesn't allow for as easy of an escape. "I didn't mean to . . . take you out of there that way. I apologize."
"Okay," her tone is patient. "In what way did you mean to?"
He could be honest; he doesn't have a whole lot to lose if Pansy and Blaise are doing what he thinks they are. "I meant," he starts, and he's speaking as slowly as she is. "to get you away from Viktor."
Her eyes widen, and that's the only sign that she's really hearing any of this. "And why would you want to do that?"
(Her tone is almost kind.)
He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. "I don't know, alright?"
(He tries to pretend like they both don't know that he's lying.)
She nods, biting her lip and looking anywhere but at him. "I can't work with that."
(They both pretend like they both don't know that she's lying.)
He opts for honesty, hoping it will take the direction anywhere but his feelings. He can talk about what he wants, sure. But he's never been made to discuss what's really going on inside his head. "I didn't want you to keep dancing with Krum."
She nods again, looking like she's in a daze. "You didn't want me dancing with Viktor?"
He shakes his head.
"So, to prevent me from doing that, you decide to 'remove me from the situation' that I was already leaving?"
He ignores the fact that he hadn't actually thought of that and nods.
She takes a deep breath. "And you don't know why you've done any of it."
"Look," he starts, running a hand through his hair. "If I knew, I'd tell you. Unfortunately, I don't. I just have to stand here with you in that dress, looking at me like I'm an idiot. I know that what I did was idiotic, so if you could kindly—"
"What's wrong with my dress?"
He's aware that he's glaring at her now. "Nothing is wrong—" He's shouting; he corrects himself. "Nothing is wrong with your shoes, your dress, or you. If anything, there's something wrong with me, okay? Let's get the idea that there's anything wrong with any part of you in this situation and throw it out of the fucking conversation, shall we? Let's throw it off of the fucking Astronomy Tower, Hermione, because it's so very, very fucking irrelevant to the conversation we are having right now."
A pause.
"You called me Hermione." she points out, unfazed by whatever moment he's having.
He doesn't . . . "Yes. I called you by your name."
"You've never called me by my name. I didn't think you actually knew my name."
"Of course I know your name," he says, like it's obvious. "Our first year was just an extravaganza of hearing your name over and over again."
She licks her lips (something that is astronomically unhelpful) and crosses her arms over her chest. "Still, you've never used it before now."
"Because you've never worn that dress before now!"
There's silence now, again. They're both just staring, left to gather up whatever the consequences of his statement are separately.
Unsurprisingly, she gathers them first.
"It is perfectly normal," she begins, her tone more formal than when she speaks with the professors. He instantly knows that he hates whatever she's about to say. "for you to be . . . confused about certain things in your life right now. You are, erm, growing and to confuse—"
He groans and goes to brace himself against the wall. "I swear to Merlin that if you finish that sentence I'm going to hang myself."
"What do you want me to say?"
"Anything but that!"
There's another pause.
Draco rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, hoping maybe, that if he presses hard enough, this night will never have happened and he can go back to his pathetic existence he was subsisting in before this.
That's not how anything works, however, and he tries to compose himself properly before he continues. "I see you almost every day of my life, alright? If this were just . . . you in that dress . . ." which is, admittedly, having effects it should not right now "I probably would have figured it out quite a while ago."
She looks torn between terrified and confused. "Really?" and they both ignore how her voice is octaves away from what is deemed safe.
He nods. "Not only would that have a much easier solution," he cringes, internally, and briefly wonders why he was gifted with the ability to speak. "but, I would be able to explain something like that. This is different."
"How different?"
"You punched me," he states simply, and it all falls together for him. "You punched me, and then called me a cockroach, and—"
She's staring at the floor, but a little cough interrupts him. "I called you a cockroach and then I punched you . . . over a year ago."
And she's blushing.
He smirks. "You punched me, and now you're wearing that dress."
She looks up at him and purses her lips. (Face still pink, he notes.) "While chronologically correct, I still don't see how any of that is relevant to this? I was enjoying myself—"
"You're enjoying yourself now."
He has no idea if this is true.
"You've trapped me and are forcing me to figure out whatever twisted narrative you've devised that allows you to randomly capture people—"
He scoffs. "I did not capture you; I coerced you."
She sighs again, and Draco starts to wonder if it's her preferred method of exhale. "Well," she begins, picking at the ruffles on her dress, not looking at him. "If you ever figure out why I had to be coerced, you can send me an owl or something."
And then she's gone.
The rest of the year is anticlimactic in that same sort of way, but also not at the same time.
Now, Draco knows Hermione is aware of him, even when she doesn't look at him.
(Which, she does, almost as much as he does at this point.)
He, like the rest of Hogwarts, knows that Krum is still interested. Krum, and his broken English and his dumb cloak, have gone just short of publicly professing his love for Hermione. He talks to her and follows her and sits with her and breathes around her.
Draco is Aware that this is happening.
It's annoying, on his best day, and positively infuriating on his worst. He's stopped trying to deny himself opportunities to think about her and has found that, if he just gets it over with, he can move on with his day, uninterrupted by thoughts of her.
(Hint: no, he can't.)
They don't speak again until long after he watches winter drag itself into spring.
He just wakes up one morning and knows that it's been days since he's seen her. He doesn't know how that's actually possible, but it happens, and he finds that it is very much is not okay with him. He doesn't exactly go looking for her, but he intentionally seeks her out whenever he's not with his housemates and finds ways to covertly ask after her when he happens across other Gryffindors.
"Potter! Weasley! Granger finally get sick of carrying the Trio?"
"Girl Weasley, has Granger gone into hiding?"
"Lovegood! Where's the resident—?"
He was getting progressively worse at this. Didn't matter much, as most of them simply ignored or insulted him. He wasn't expecting anything else, but it still managed to disappoint him every time he was not able to get a useful answer.
He finds her hidden, curled up in one of the open windows in the outside corridors along the courtyard. She's just sitting there. He expects her to be reading, for some reason, but she just has her head rested against the stone and her cloak wrapped around her. There's a chill, but she looks unaffected.
He almost hates to interrupt her.
(She looks beautiful.)
He approaches her slowly, hoping to make enough noise in walking so that he does not startle her. "Granger?"
It takes a moment.
"Malfoy." she acknowledges without looking at him.
He tries for nonchalance. "I heard you were hiding from Krum."
He hadn't heard that, actually. He'd heard quite the opposite, but he wasn't about to let her know that. It was a vague hope he had, that if he wasn't seeing her, neither was Krum.
She smiles a little then. "I think it's quite hard to hide from someone that half of your house is in love with."
It hurts, but only a little. He just nods, decidedly not having anything to say in response. Durmstrang students stayed, mostly, with the Slytherins. It was custom that a hosting school wouldn't keep two champions within the same dorm. Potter had apparently given his consent because he hadn't seen nor heard of Krum anywhere outside of eating times.
"Of course," she added. "It doesn't stop you from trying." She gestures to the courtyard with her book and gloved hand. "I get my moments of peace when he goes off training with Karkaroff, and if I try hard enough, I get a few more."
"Why are you telling me this?"
She shrugs. "I don't have anybody else to tell, and neither do you."
"I could." he counters.
"You could," she relents. "but you won't. It's not practical, me telling you this."
She's right, of course, on both accounts. The worst he could do is tell Pansy, and even she wouldn't believe him. It would do nothing good for his already demonized image to tell anybody else. He'd probably just have to carry it.
"So you're hiding?" he asks, taking his own seat just across from her.
"I'm hiding," she agrees. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm still deciding," he says, because he could be here for her, but he doesn't know if that's something he's entirely ready for, honestly. It's hard to admit to himself that he was looking for her, but telling her would probably be damn near impossible. It's none of her business anyway, he decides. "I was looking for something."
She nods in long pulls. "I think I might be looking for something, too."
He understands.
≁
Fifth or Sixth or Seventh Year: When you jump, the force you apply to the Earth throws itself back at you and you move.
They aren't together.
She tells him that, surprisingly, and as much as he'd like to bargain for more, he'll take what he can get.
They don't pretend they're anything they aren't: they act civil no matter the audience; they fight (publically) when they're up to it; they ignore each other when nothing else is going on; etc. etc.
But they aren't together.
It's good this way, he thinks. He doesn't have to pretend that his parents wouldn't be devastatingly appalled, and she doesn't have to pretend the same of her friends. They don't have to change, or talk, or compartmentalize, or anything. They don't have to speak about the aspect of things that are obvious, which is nice, for a period, and almost certainly virulent.
And it's fine . . .
Or, it might be . . .
Or, maybe, it wasn't . . .
It's just . . . Draco feels like he's forgotten something. Feels, almost, as though he's forgotten himself. Feels, some days, as though he's forgotten the entire world inside himself.
He feels a bit unstuck in time.
Some days he wakes up and words feel inverted. Some days, he feels like he's walking on the ceiling and the sky is some sort of ocean. Second Tuesday of November, he wakes up to find that it's March already. He develops cataracts for seventeen minutes on Boxing Day, and he never gets the opportunity to speak about it because then it's Christmas and everything is fine. For a weekend in April, he dreams of some sinister battle that never would come to be, friends that don't exist enough to be killed, and a war he'll never be forced into.
It's a strange . . . feeling.
It's an absolutely unnecessary feeling to have, is the point, but it doesn't stop, no matter how many times he realizes that.
He doesn't tell Hermione this, but sometimes, he has a feeling that she feels it, too. He hears her muttering about snakes and lockets and growing old and dying in a Forest of Dean.
He wonders, that if the Forest of Dean were ever a garden, would he have ever eaten from it.
It may be a bit on the nose.
(He never checks.)
≁
Sometimes the Earth throws itself back a little too hard . . .
So, there's no war.
"Draco, if you don't want to be together, all you have to do is say so."
"It's not that. I don't want them to hurt you."
"Who? Who is it that you think is going to hurt me?"
"I . . . I don't know."
There's no revolution.
" . . . Mrs. Malfoy, I don't quite understand why you . . . why you hate me so much."
"I wouldn't expect you to. There are certain things that just are in our world, dear. You are not one of them."
"I shouldn't . . . shouldn't be?"
"Frankly, dear, I should think not."
There's no time.
"You can't give up your entire life for me, Draco!"
"I mean, I think I did already, but nothing bad happened."
"Your family will abandon you! Can't you see how serious this is?"
"I figured, you know, you could be my family. If you want."
" . . . You don't even know me."
"I think I know everything about you."
. . .
. . .
"Wipe that fucking smile off your face, Malfoy, or I'll kick your teeth in."
≁
. . . But, you know, you can only hit something as hard as it can hit you back. So there's that.
He thinks he knows what she is when he sees her on the train, and thank fuck he's never been more wrong since.
There's no ending to this, really.
Because . . . maybe Draco and Hermione graduate Hogwarts and completely disappear. Perhaps, they fall off the fucking map and pop up thirty minutes outside of Glasgow, and they grow watermelons and crab grass for a living. Maybe Hermione and Draco snap their fucking wands, and completely fuck off of the fucking radar, because they can. Maybe they fall out of touch after a few years because things exist and plot devices that are really hard to write about. Maybe nobody sticks around to write about them. Maybe they buy a house, and paint it yellow because yellow is a happy color and they are happy people. Maybe Harry marries Blaise and Ron marries Pansy and out of the couplings come children who call them Aunt Hermione and Uncle Draco and everybody's happy.
Maybe they go into veterinary medicine.
Maybe Hermione hates dogs, and Draco hates cats, so they don't do that.
Maybe they do literally anything else with their lives.
And, maybe, they do it together.
They probably do, actually. I can tell you that the world stops feeling like it's being split open inside Draco's skull at some point, and Hermione never loses her aim to prove herself right. I can tell you that they never say "I love you" because no matter what world they exist in, that's not how that works, and that's okay.
Maybe everything is always going to be okay.
Maybe it always was.