the girl with all of the choices

f o r t y - o n e

3490 words

may eleventh- collateral damage

~ Draco's POV ~

It had been a month. A month since we got back from the holiday. A month since we raided the dormitories. A month since we had gotten back on track. 

I told her that day that I had forgiven her. 

It was a lie.

She had lied to me for the entire school year. It might not have been about the biggest things, but it was still a lie. And then that lie got bigger, and it actually involved me. 

I never thought she would lie to me. 

And then she did.

The thing was, all of my favourite memories from this year were now tainted. All of the times we snuck around in the fall. Bringing her down to the Slytherin common room and accidentally walking in on Blaise and Pansy. Sneaking off to the kitchens. Christmas.

Christmas.

Wandering around London like tourists. Baking cookies. The parties. Sneaking out to see the Christmas decorations. Her gifts to me. My gifts to her. Meeting everyone in her world. 

It was all built on top of a lie. 

She had lied to me.

And in that moment, I didn't forgive her. But I had come to.

Finding out the truth hurt, for more than one reason. She had been sneaking around with the people who didn't like me most in the world. Potter and his stupid suicide squad. I understood why she had done it. You-Know-Who had come back, and she was in danger. Her parents, everything surrounding her existence, it was all like a giant red light flashing over her head. She wanted to learn how to protect herself, how to protect her family. It made sense. But it hurt.

I started to wonder if everything else she had said was a lie. 

She told you she loved you. She told you you weren't a bad person. She told you you weren't like him. 

She lied.

Why would anyone love you? You're a terrible person. You've treated everyone in this school as your own emotional punching bag. You've said terrible things.

You're just like him. 

I opened my eyes. I was in the Great Hall, eating lunch with Blaise and Theo. Well, eating was an over-exaggeration. I was moving the food around on my plate, but any time I actually went to take a bite I would remember.

Remember that she lied to me. Remember that she broke my trust. The only other person I remotely trusted in comparison to her was Theo. And I had known him my whole life. I trusted her with everything.

Well, not everything.

I would tell her the truth, but not the whole truth. Just little snippets of it. If I had told her the whole truth, she probably would never let me out of her sight. 

There were just some things that she shouldn't have ever had to know. Things that were too dark, too unforgiving. She was so light. The light. She didn't deserve to be weighed down by the darkness, by my darkness.

I trusted her with my life. With my feelings. With some of my deepest and darkest secrets. With my...

No. 

She had lied to me. 

But I forgave her...

We weren't what we were before, but then again, we hadn't been that way since Christmas. Hogwarts just let too much darkness in. But we were... okay. We would talk before and after Defence Against the Dark Arts, instead of completely ignoring each other. We had even snuck off to the kitchens this past week. She made a small batch of cookies and sent me back to my common room with them. Blaise and Theo had stolen them, but it was okay because I was happy.