Tainted Love

Between

IRIS

Things were, all around, fucking terrible.

Iris and Draco were speaking at work again, but he was acting strange. Tracey and Sebastian were walking on eggshells around her. They didn't mean to be, but it made her feel less like a person and more like an object of eternal pity.

And Theodore. It was worse with him. She still hadn't managed to confront him, and she wasn't sure if her hesitation was made of fear or guilt or some combination of the two. Or something else entirely.

Iris was losing him and she knew it. They didn't see each other as often now - he didn't wait for her outside work everyday like he had done in December.

She wasn't sure how she felt about it. She should be entirely sad, or maybe angry. She should demand answers from him.

Instead, sometimes, she wanted to lose him. He was being kind of awful lately but she didn't always mind it.

Why not? Because she was so devoted to him that she was looking past it? Or because she didn't care about him enough. Or because something was wrong with her, something had gone wrong in her brain.

Or all three.

He wanted Daphne. He liked her, liked her a lot. Iris supposed there was no reason he shouldn't. But the problem was that he liked Iris too. He was trying to have both of them at the same time.

It was Theodore. He didn't mean it maliciously - he would never want to deliberately hurt Iris and she guessed he didn't want to hurt Daphne either. He wasn't trying to be an asshole but the way he was going about the situation was completely fucking wrong.

Draco wasn't doing anything right, either. Besides work - he always worked with an icy precision.

But perhaps icy was the wrong word.

It was easy to compare Draco to snow. He was equally as cold, twice as beautiful. But Iris thought he was more like sand. He was the desert, unmerciful and cruel. His beauty wasn't temporary - it never melted off him. It was permanent, the lines of his face like cliffs rising from the dunes, shaped by ancient oceans that had receded to faraway shores.

That was how he went about his work. A cliff in the desert, jagged and unmoving. He would never really change, or if he did it would take centuries of wind and rain beating away at him, dulling his edges. And even then it would be barely noticeable.

Once, Iris was happy to be stranded in his desert. The sun had starved her, the heat had clawed at her throat, but she had been so delusional that she had seen a mirage of happiness somewhere between the dunes.

And after that, she thought she might be the ocean. She thought she might be able to lap at his shores, slowly ease him into her. That had been short-lived and naive.

Now she was trying to escape him, but it was too late. No matter where she went, sand would follow her for the rest of her life. Grains would lodge themselves in her floorboards, live amongst her clothing, dig into her bare skin in the middle of the night.

But that was better than living under Draco's thumb, under a sun so hot she thought she might be dreaming it. It was better than melting at his every touch.

Looking at him still felt like she was melting. He was more stoic lately and it wasn't an act. There was something new about him since they came back from winter holidays. It had taken Iris a while to differentiate it from his normal silence, but it was there.

She wasn't foolish enough to attribute his change in mood to anything she had done. That was a relic of the past. He seemed sort of unhappy, though. It probably had to do with Astoria. Or Pansy.