clawmachinee
inspired by Shakespeare's Sonnet 116
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Cordelia "Claire" Greengrass has always lived in the space between her sisters. Daphne, the eldest, is perfection in human form-brilliant, disciplined, and impossible to fall short of. Astoria, the youngest, is effortlessly adored, soft-hearted and endlessly magnetic. Claire, the middle, is the one people think they understand: social, observant, and easy to talk to. But underneath it all, she is constantly measuring herself against them, convinced she doesn't quite compare.
At Hogwarts, Claire is well-liked and deeply woven into Slytherin's social world, but she spends far more time analyzing others than believing in her own place among them. She reads people the way she reads books-quickly, curiously, and always looking for what lies beneath the surface. What she never sees clearly is herself.
Draco Malfoy has known her forever.
Their families have been close for years, their lives overlapping long before Hogwarts ever sorted them into the same house. To Claire, Draco is familiar, sharp, and irritatingly easy to understand. To Draco, she is anything but simple. He notices everything about her-far more than he admits-and somewhere along the way, that attention stopped being casual and started becoming something else entirely.
He is undeniably in love with her. Claire is entirely unaware.
While she second-guesses herself in quiet moments, Draco is the only constant who never seems to waver-but the one thing neither of them knows how to confront is the space between what is felt and what is said.