Tainted Love

Pure Form

DRACO

Draco sat in his kitchen in the same thing he had worn to bed the night before. The morning had been sunny, but clouds moved over the sun a couple hours after Iris left his apartment. Now they were growing darker, heavier. Threatening rain.

He felt slightly cold and wandered back down the hallway to his room. He meant to put on a sweater but instead he lay down in his bed and pulled the covers over him. He exhaled, letting his body still.

If he turned his head, he would see the side of the bed that Iris had slept on the night before - the side of the bed that she had leaned on to get her balance back. The side of the bed she had backed into when he tried to kiss her.

Saturday was turning out to be a mixed bag in more ways than the weather.

Draco shut his eyes but he doubted he would be able to sleep. He didn't feel much like sleeping. It was one of those listless days, cloudy and monotonous. There was no point in trying to do anything.

He could have Iris. There was a thought. She had told him so.

He could have Iris if he didn't have anyone else.

She was back to normal. From the moment she woke up next to him her meekness had dissipated. She had been quiet for the past couple of months but she filled the room with her voice, her demands, her propositions.

And when she did get quiet it was not because she was cowed. It was because she was tired, tired of Draco and tired of the feelings she had for him. He felt, for the first time, like he genuinely understood what was happening between them.

Iris told him what she wanted from him, what it would take for him to have her back. It was all in his hands.

Strangely, though, he didn't feel like he controlled the situation at all. He was on Iris's terms now. She had held the power through their entire conversation despite not knowing anything that happened between them the night before.

She understood what she felt and knew what she wanted. Draco couldn't come close.

He tried to look inside himself sometimes, analyze the things he thought and felt. But his blankness was wired so deeply that he couldn't find his true beliefs half the time. Years of being punished for showing emotion had sunken into his skin, so far that he repressed his feelings from his own self.

His feelings for Iris might have existed months ago, but he hadn't recognized them until Christmas Eve and hadn't fully realized them for weeks after that. He still wasn't sure how to deal with them.

He had to give his subconscious mind time to understand before he even considered introducing it to his conscious - and that introduction had to be slow, so slow. Otherwise he would reject it.

Iris was not slow. She was a force. Her hair was slightly damp and matted in the back. Her lashes were rimmed with dripping black mascara. Her clothes were wrinkled. But her eyes had been clear, her voice clearer.

He was like a shadow in comparison to her. She was a real person, alive with desire and hope and love. Surrounded by friends and light and drinks. Smart and capable and clumsy.

Perhaps Draco had been a real person once. Back at school. He hadn't been a good person, but he had been a real one. He was snide and controlling and loud. He drew attention to himself, he liked attention, he had people jostling to sit next to him at the Slytherin table. He liked girls, loved Pansy. He had a certain wit - a cruel one, to be sure, but it was there.

Some parts of that boy were left in him. He could be cruel; he was certainly controlling. But he lacked fire. He lacked life. He was cold and quiet and stern. He was a solitary figure, flitting in and out of the periphery of other people's lives, flitting in and out of the gossip column. Iris would never know what it felt like to be that alone, that separate from the rest of the world.