Breath Mints / Battle Scars

Chapter 10: X

October 5th, 1998

He knows.

He has to know by now. The same way she knows now that this is the last thing she should've done. A line she shouldn't have crossed.

She spent all night flipping through it, and less than three entries in she knew it was something she wasn't supposed to be seeing. It was too personal. Too close.

And it made too much fucking sense.

Scrawled across those first few pastel lavender pages, she'd found evidence of alcoholism, abuse, self-harm and regret. So, so much regret. Unfit parents. Drug overdoses. Death.

She'd pieced it together: this wasn't so unlike Muggle parole. He has to submit these entries weekly - or perhaps even daily - to a psychiatric healer. Those moronic Third Years hadn't been entirely wrong about the situation.

But she's trapped now.

She can't give it back to him. He'll know she took it. She can't keep it from him. He'll be arrested for not submitting entries. She can't unsee what she's seen.

It's too, too personal.

What was merely a petty attempt at revenge has backfired violently.

I'd love to be gone. I'd give anything to be gone. Let me be gone.

The slant of his handwriting is the sort you see from psychopaths. Ink is splotched everywhere. It's almost as messy as his life, and it's riddled with things she'd never have known from looking at him.

It's also riddled with opinions about her - opinions she hadn't been prepared for.

...bitch...

...Mudblood...

No, she'd been prepared for those. But not for ones that said things like confusing... and distracting curls... and everywhere I look, she's there...

Those entries were of a rarer nature, and they'd sort of coagulated towards the end - the most recent. She'd been changing his mind about her.

But she's read over the entry from October 3rd over and over again, and nothing.

Nothing about the kiss.

It's childish of her to expect him to write about it. After all, it didn't mean anything, did it? But thinking about it has her remembering his antics at the snogging bench, and an unwelcome shiver slides down her spine.

Above anything, she hates a puzzle she can't solve.

The purple binding feels hot in her hands - feels like it's burning her with guilt. She lets it fall to the sheets between her knees. Uses her wand to check the time. Six in the morning.

She hasn't slept.

How could she? With both the past and the future colliding inside her head? Thinking about the touches he's already given and the hate he's going to give when he finds out?

It's the first time she acknowledges that she doesn't want him to hate her.

It's also the first time she acknowledges that kissing him was...different. None of the sloppiness and stickiness she'd gotten from Ron. None of the fumbling hands and knocking teeth. Kissing him was clean - crisp and succinct, every movement having meaning, every touch placed where he wanted it to be - and yet at the same time entirely unclean. Dark. Demanding. Sensual. With his bold tongue and adventurous fingertips. She'd never imagined Malfoy could kiss like that.

She'd never imagined kissing Malfoy at all.

And yet now she can't imagine why.

She sits back against her pillows, tangling a nervous hand in her curls as she, for once, allows the image of him to seep into her mind unfettered. Undeterred. Why hadn't she ever thought of Malfoy in that way? His despicable attitude notwithstanding, there was never a conceivable way to pass off his looks as average. He's tall - taller than most of the boys she knows, and even though she's always told herself that height should have nothing to do with it, there's something about sinking into the inky darkness of his shadow. His hands are long...delicate. Aristocratic in every sense. There would've been no way for her to know in the past how smooth the pads of his fingers are, but after feeling them trace her naked hipbones after slipping beneath the waistband of her jeans, she knows. Oh, she knows.