THE SYMMETRICAL TRANSIT (DRAMOINE) BY EVERYTHURSDAY

Part 12

Day One Hundred Twenty-Three; 3:36pm

He looked good.

Just as good as he had the last time she had seen him, in fact. Better, even.

And it hurt a lot worse than she had thought it might. There was this horrible tearing inside of her, like her insides were split in two. She wanted to look away and walk away as much as she wanted to run up to him and whack him, and then kiss him, maybe, too.

Because she had been thinking a lot, and she knew it was one of those stupid things she had seen other girls do and thought was ridiculous at the time, but she had been rationalizing like hell for days and weeks now. And she had been wondering just how much she was supposed to blame him.

She knew it was just because she missed him. She knew it was a stupid thing to do. She knew she should never want anything at all to do with him again.

But she sort of understood, in a way. In a way that she was still pretty angry over it, but that she still wanted to maybe bandage him up after she hexed him.

He was doing what he had to do. What he was told to do by an Order who he fully believed would try to screw him over the moment he wasn't doing something they needed him for -- unless, of course, that was a lie too. But if his actions had been anything to go by, Malfoy had been at least a little guilty over carrying on with it. In fact, knowing the circumstance, she could even remember situations where he might have been torn between the two decisions he had to make.

In the end, he was on a mission that they told him was for her own safety. And she wasn't the sort of girl who would believe that he hadn't told her because he feared for her safety either. But she was the sort of girl who could think about it in the privacy of her head for a bit before dismissing it.

Really, though, she understood. Hermione was very good at putting herself in the shoes of other people, and had it been her mission, she couldn't say she wouldn't have done the same thing. Even after liking him and spending so much time with him, she still wouldn't have told him what the real plan was. It would have been her