The Day After Tomorrow

HOUSE TRAITORS

42 - HOUSE TRAITORS

IT had been the wrong thing to say. Draco's cheeks already drawn of colour, went flushed with red. His eyes were angry as he took in her face. "Don't apologise." He knew he sounded harsh, furious and rough but it felt like she'd turned an unbearably sweet moment into something ugly. 

He thought of Astoria, of her telling him to be happy and felt like letting out a manic unhinged laugh. This, him and Granger. It was good till it wasn't . What kind of kiss was meant to leave one of you on the verge of tears and the other on the verge of splitting down the middle like a stone fracturing under too much pressure.

She was breathing fast now, her chest hitching up and down in frantic little breaths as she struggled to catch enough oxygen. All she could feel was the overwhelming weight of what she'd just done, it felt like it was rolling over her lungs, pressing them flat, pushing out the last breaths of air from her vessels and air pockets till she was choking. She hadn't meant to make the situation worse.

Through blurry tears she saw Draco waver in front of her, his face the picture of horrified as it came closer. With each step closer, she felt that pressure in her chest go worse till there were spots in her vision and she could barely see him at all.

She was trembling there, her frame shivering in gasps as she stared at him through wide eyes. This didn't feel like the greenhouse when she'd lost her head, this felt like another monster altogether. He gripped her arms tightly, rubbing them up and down like the sensation would ground her, all the while searching her frozen gaze. "Granger breathe." His voice dipped low, all evidence of anger and fury dripping away from his words till they were left raw and painful like expsosed bone. "Breathe, come on, just breathe."

He could feel her beneath his palms, and she felt fragile, breakable and on the verge of fracturing. Her cheeks which had been flushed and warm in a red blush were almost white now, her brown eyes impossibly large in her face.

This is what they'd been reduced to, scarps of happiness and tensed moments of regret. He gripped her harder, willing everything in him to pulse through her like some elemental magic. "Breathe Granger, I need you to focus on my breaths." She shook her head, her dark hair going sweaty like she was running on empty fumes. He felt a fear like nothing before overtake him, and forced himself to stay steady. "Hermione, please, for me, just breathe." Her brown eyes went unnaturally still, her chest seizing as if she'd been stunned for a drawn second.

His thumbs caught the tears at her cheeks, rubbing along her jaw as he continued to speak. "Come on Hermione. Breathe." And she did, raggedly at first, in through her nose and out through her mouth for a long handful of seconds. So loudly in fact that it felt like he was shaking with her in the eye of a storm.

His fingers were still at her cheeks, and she could feel the last of her tears pooling against them. She gulped wetly, struggling not to sob. "I'm sorry." His grey eyes widened but he didn't speak, his lips were pressed into a thin line of worry. She gasped out a breath, doing her best to fill her lungs.  "I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking." They came out sounding like hiccups.

Her words were like a slice through his ribs, painful and sweet like a poisoned dagger. That part of himself that he'd tried to keep buried and bound in the back of his head felt a surge of victory; when all was gone, when there was nothing but them, she'd kissed him, she'd wanted to.

And yet, like the shadow of an explosion in his mind, cutting shards of his consciousness away, was the fact that it didn't matter.

After all that, it didn't matter if she wasn't thinking, or if she was. It didn't matter if she wanted to kiss him or if she didn't. It didn't matter because it couldn't.