Tainted - {d.m. & h.g.}

fifteen - blue silk | purple scars

songs: between the bars - elliot smith
someone to stay - vancouver sleep clinic

HERMIONE

S

She's discovered something in these passing moments; arm still raised in the air— comparing the scar on her arm to his.

How his is dark, haunting yet beautifully drawn with thick ink; but hers is nasty, red— merely a faint line of uneven lettering that scrawls across the skin of her forearm.

Opposite sides of the war— yet here they are.

Yet here she is.

Maybe he's right— maybe they are more alike than she'd like to admit, she thinks, his words ricochet around in her brain.

And she's quickly come to the realization that there's something intimate in the act of healing someone.

Something vulnerable— something confessing within the absolute core of it.

Makes you feel power within the wilted parts of yourself.

She'd spent quite a lot of her time at St. Mungo's during the Grieving Pause. Healing helped her cope— and it's something she's missed dearly.

And she swears— she fucking swears, Draco Malfoy's secrets were spilling— no, pouring with the crimson of his blood— leaking from each place his skin had been split open from whatever mess he had gotten himself into.

Wounds that she had used her own magic— her own hands to heal closed.

And this little altercation has flipped some sort of switch on her perspective of him. She feels closer to him for some odd reason; feels a sense of empathy within his actions— his feelings.

The begging for death— the self-hatred that runs so deep in his veins that pain is the only remedy.

The war against himself.

And she's still studying all of him; looking at him now— hair tousled, abdomen slumped over, and dark mark's black ink shining brilliant like a beacon of haunt through the darkness— she knows he has it worse.

Knows he lets his past define him like a dictionary defines words.

Knows, ultimately, she could fix him.

Knows fixing him could be the key to her own dilemmas— his demons may be just enough to distract her from her own.

It's then that she allows a breath that she's been holding to bellow from her lips, shoulders slouch with the release of air. She lowers her arm from where it was lifted into the air and lets it flop into her lap along with her other.

Her thighs sweat from the condensation steaming through the air; the skin of them cling to the surface of the tub's lip where the bare underside of them touch the marble.

Warm streams of salty liquid still pencil down her cheeks, collecting on the collar of her shirt; the wet darkening the blue of the silk in places where the tears meet the fabric.

And he's still unconscious; it seems the effects of her Stupefy have drifted him into a deep slumber— and she's stuck here in this position; fears moving would startle him awake.

She reaches behind her blindly, searching for the dampened rag she had been previously using to pad the blood from his skin.

An idiot mistakes.

Her elbow bumps into a glass of decorative soaps; the dish falls quick, and the glass splatters in all directions as it crashes into the stone of the flooring— oval shaped soaps teeter and totter with dull thumps.