In My Dreams [Draco Malfoy]

chapter twenty-five: corduroy and confrontations

INDIGO

For the remaining week of term, my Ravenclaw friends avoided speaking of the holidays. I knew they were worried. I knew they didn't approve of my choice to spend the break with my brother, not to mention our plans for while we were there. But, like every other problem we'd had this year, they responded by dancing around me and anything else that would prompt uncomfortable conversation at all costs. And, once again, I found myself avoiding them, as being around them had only succeeded in making me feel like a burden.

That said, I couldn't really be upset with them, for Draco and I had also handled our second meeting in the Astronomy Tower by never speaking of it again. Blaise and Theo were pretty much oblivious. Maybe they'd assumed that Draco and I had simply gotten over being mad at one another, gotten over and forgotten about yet another argument. And, although Blaise had been clever enough to figure out that I was a seer, he and Theo were not clever enough to pick up on the lack of usual bickering. They didn't notice how we occasionally caught each other in the corner of one another's eye and turned away, or how we purposely never sat beside one another...

It was a dance, I realized, but not the kind of dance that my Ravenclaw friends and I always did. We weren't dancing around one another. We were dancing with each other, always waiting for the other to make a move. And I hated how much I enjoyed it, how much I began to look forward to it, even.

But I hated nothing more than how regularly I thought of that night. Especially when I was with my Ravenclaw friends, while they were gently keeping my participation in the conversation to a minimum, my mind wandered to how he had kissed me, how it had felt when he held me. I would like to say it was all tingly fingers and butterflies in my stomach when I thought about it, but the memories were also painful ones, as I didn't know what any of it meant to him...

I had told him that night that, despite what he thought, I didn't hate him. It was the truth. I didn't hate him. I had never hated him, even at his worst. But that didn't leave him hating me off of the table. He had told me so once before and I was hyper-aware of how kissing me didn't necessarily cancel out the possibility that he still did. I was equally aware that 1.) I had begun to feel something for him—what that was, exactly, I wasn't entirely sure,—and that 2.) I had liked what had happened that night. I had wanted what had happened that night. The trouble was simply knowing what to do with those feelings. If they were genuine feelings at all, that is...

When I really thought about it, I had long-since feared that many of the relationships in my life were born from sympathy, empathy or pity, and not genuine connection. As a seer, I often knew what would, or could, happen to people and I had made it my business to prevent any misfortune I could. I had made it my business to take care of them. In this way, Draco was no different. For months now, I had known that Draco would kill, or, at the very least, attempt to kill Dumbledore. Now that I thought about it, I wasn't sure if he was going to be the one to do it or not, but Dumbledore was going to die that night, one way or another. If anyone else had learned of this, they probably would have immediately taken it to the man himself, or distanced themself from the wand-wielding maniac as much as possible.

Yet I had done the exact opposite.

What I had seen hadn't stopped me from spending more time with him. It hadn't stopped me from seeing the good in him, the boy that had so attentively held the container beneath my hands as I cut and drained the Shrivelfigs in Herbology. The boy that was tormented by his classmates constantly saying "Hi, Professor Moody" whenever he was getting on their nerves... Though I had seen good in him even before then, good that existed alongside the bullying and berating he so often took part in. When I thought about it, I think I had felt this way—whatever 'this' was—long before that night. Actually, it had probably begun the night he flew me to Aberfeldy, a night I thought of often now. He had shown an entirely different side of himself that night. He had been caring and considerate, and kind, trying to make me laugh when I was beside myself with worry, wondering what could be happening to my mother. But, even then, he didn't see any of that in himself and had outright said he never wanted to see me again when I suggested the very idea. That, it seemed, was one of the few ways in which nothing had changed over this past year...