the girl with all of the choices

f i f t e e n

2893 words

march twentieth- warm and cold

~ Draco ~

I hated myself for doing this.

I didn't try to make this happen. I never planned on asking her to go to Hogsmeade with me all those weeks ago. And then I told myself I wouldn't do it again. But I did. And then I did it again. And then I asked her to go to the bloody Yule Ball with me. What the hell was I thinking?

I couldn't help it. I loathed her from the second I met her, on the train coming to school on the first day of first year. She bumped into me and quickly apologized. I asked her who she was and realized that her name wasn't one on the list of people that father said I should be friends with, so I never spoke to her again. Until I did. 

The next time I was speaking to her, I called her a mudblood in front of a crowd of people. It was true. She was a mudblood. She still is a mudblood, you idiot. 

I loathed her because she was always cheery. Except, she wasn't always cheery. That was just the thing I would say. She wasn't always cheery, but she was always happy, always loved, always with her friends. And if she wasn't physically with her friends, you could see that she was emotionally with them. She had that support. 

I was disgusted by her, revolted by the fact that she could be that content with who she was. I don't think I ever actually believed in any of that blood supremacy shit, but I definitely thought she was less than me.

I was a Malfoy. You still are a Malfoy, dumbass. Nobody was better than a Malfoy, except maybe a Black, but I was also one of them. Nobody was better than me, certainly not a mudblood. 

Stop calling her that. You promised you wouldn't call her that. 

Well, idiot, do you see her here to complain?

Shut up. She doesn't have to be here for it to be wrong. 

Oh so you really like her, don't you? You're weak. Your father was right about you. You certainly are disappointing, aren't you...

I was still disgusted by her when we were assigned to be deskmates earlier this year. To be that close to someone so content made me unbelievably uncomfortable. I would never have that, but I knew that.

But, somehow, in the first two months that we worked together in our classes, she was never mean to me, not once. I expected her to mouth off to me at least every other day. She might be a Hufflepuff, but even then I could tell she was a fiery one. You could tell that she wouldn't hesitate to put you in your place if you were being unkind.

I had expected that from her every day, but it never came. Sure, she would comment if I muttered something rude under my breath, but she never confronted me for all of the terrible things I had said to her over the years. Instead, she was actually nice to me. Well, nice was probably not the right term in her world, but in my world, she was nice to me.

And it continued that way. She was nice, and I was, well, I was me. Cold, abrasive, a Malfoy. Until the day we got our first detention. 

I wasn't going to sit there for upwards of an hour and not talk to her. Sorry, but I physically couldn't do that, I didn't care if she's a mudblood or not. So we talked, and we talked. She actually talked to me. I wasn't sure if she would. She had tried to make small talk in class in what I'm assuming was an attempt to break the awkwardness, but I never responded. What is it with Hufflepuffs being so damn uncomfortable around awkwardness. It's human, get over it.