Stupid Weaselbee! Draco thought for himself as was wandering along the deserted corridors of Hogwarts. He was coming back from the Quidditch pitch. They had just lost to the Gryffindors He had just lost to the Gryffindors.
As he was cursing Weaselbee and Pothead to death, something interesting caught his eye.
A door.
He quickly looked around to see if anyone was following, and when he convinced himself that he was alone, he quietly approached the half-closed wooden door. As he was coming closer, he slowly drew out his wand from his inside pocket, when he heard a quiet sob.
Draco stopped dead in his tracks.
What? He thought for himself. He listened carefully. Maybe he had just imagined everything. But what he found oddly interesting, was that this was the door to the Room of Requirement. As the realization hit him, he felt his blood drain from his veins. Impossible, he thought. Who would know about his plans as a Death Eater? He did some quick thinking, and he came to the conclusion that no one could possibly know. This was The Room of Requirement after all, and no one was needing the space in the same way he did, so most probably, he wasn't the only one who knew about its existence. He was interrupted from his train of thoughts, as he heard another sob.
This time, he knew he hadn't imagined it. He frowned in confusion, because finding the door of the Room of Requirement ajar and hearing quiet sobs coming from inside it, was not something he had experienced before. He came closer to the door as he realized that the sobs could only belong to a girl, because they were quiet and delicate, and from his experience, no man could have such a soft voice.
He thought about abandoning the situation and continuing his silent walk, but as he turned around to leave, he just couldn't seem to be moving. It intrigued him too much, and judging by his somewhat curious character, he was now determined to find out who else knew about the Room of Requirement.
So he pushed the door open, not expecting to see the beautiful petite girl, whom he had presumably hated, sprawled on a couch, in front of a loud-crackling fire.
He thought his eyes were deceiving him, so he blinked a few times to make sure he wasn't delusional. And, after brushing his eyes with his arm, he realized he was not crazy, and the exhaustion didn't get to him. Yet.
Granger
It took him a while to process everything that was going on, because the girl in front of him was looking a bit nicer than usual, and, as he already considered her somewhat beautiful in general, he had never seen her look better than that before. And it was already driving him mad, because he knew, that his first instinct was not supposed to consist in wanting to punch whoever might've hurt her feelings.
But as he stepped closer to take a better look at her, his grey eyes landed on her perfect face, and then he realized she was crying. Hard. And she hadn't even noticed his presence, and then it hit him harder that any Crucio that he had ever had to endure, because he had shoved away this memory for as long as he could remember. He had forced himself not to feel since that night. That one night he had to face reality. That one night in which he had met a new feeling of pain, and one he had never met before, and as much as he wanted to ignore the memory of everything about that night, he couldn't because it came like a shock for him, and he wasn't prepared to feel something so early in his life.
He had tried to forget the night of The Yule Ball, which made him bottle up all of his feelings, because that had been the night he had taken a proper look at her, Granger. And the memory came flooding back in his mind painfully fast and clear as daylight, as though only a few seconds had passed since the Ball, for he could never forget that night properly. Because it was the night that had changed him the most, it was the moment he had become the Draco Malfoy they all thought they knew. The emotionless, evil and spoiled git, who had rich parents and was not able to show any signs of weakness, the Draco Malfoy who only cared about himself, and the one who had those cold, piercing grey eyes, whom he was so well known for, rather than his sleek white-blond hair. And why? Because why would anyone bother to remember him as a human being? Why would anyone bother to remember him for his white-blond hair, who would shine so bright in the sunshine? No. Because everyone was too busy to judge him for the coldness of his arctic grey eyes, rather than try and see the real side of him, who cared more than he should've had. And all of this happened because that was the night he had first looked in her caramel-brown orbs, and he nearly lost himself there and then.
