I Loved You Once

War was a cold business. In war, you didn’t have time to worry about innocent lives being taken, or you would die. But in war, you had to worry about innocent lives being taken, or you would still die. She had seen it happen too many times to her friends. They would go off to a battle with their faces still bright and happy, and they would return dead, cold, the product of war. No longer would they trouble themselves about who they were cursing. Death Eater, innocent Muggle, neutral wizards—all opponents fell before their wands, and they returned, alive, but dead.

When had it happened to her? Not that the when mattered, not really, just the fact that it had. But still, she couldn’t help but wonder. When had she stopped caring, stopped trying, stopped anything but shooting hex after hex, curse after curse, just desperately struggling to stay alive? Her friends marveled at her bravery, at her wonderful fighting ability. At her bravery. At her heroism. Only she knew how it all meant nothing. She wasn’t brave. She wasn’t a hero. She was a machine, and machines are not brave or heroes. She was a machine who blocked, cursed, blocked, and killed, a machine from which spells shot by reflex, all in the never-ending struggle to stay alive.

And here she was now, in the library, her old sanctuary. Despite herself, she smiled slightly as she remembered how it had always been the library, the one place where no one and nothing could touch her, because here she was safe. Her fleeting smile disappeared as she recalled how it, too, had shattered when one day the Death Eaters had come upon her when she was in a library. She had won, of course. Her kind—the machines—always won. But she had lost—lost her one sanctuary, her one haven, her one last tie to her innocent past.

She stared unreading at page 393 of Hogwarts, A History on her lap. The inked words blurred and ran together, and her eyes saw naught but the casualties of the battle, and her ears heard naught but the screams of the war. There had been a time when she had enjoyed the smell of fresh parchment. Now all she could smell was the sticky smell of blood, rancid blood everywhere, on her hands and her face and the book—she thrust the book from her, shaking, and it landed with a thump on the floor.

“Granger?” she looked up, startled.

Draco Malfoy stood before her in the flesh. He was still as pale as ever, she noted. His sleek hair was tied back now, not gelled—on the run, she supposed that there wasn’t time to gel hair. He was skinnier than before, and he was wearing Muggle clothes, for practicality she supposed. His shoes were worn, as though he had walked a great deal.

“What are you doing here?” the words were harsh, harsher than she had meant them to be. But then again, he had all but killed Dumbledore.

“I came to see you,” he said.

Before, she would have gaped or blushed before stammering out a, “Likely story,” or something equally lame, and then have been convinced of it three seconds later, to be made a fool of again.

Now she simply looked at him coolly and quirked an eyebrow, waiting for him to continue.

“I thought I should tell you something I learned.”

“Why would I be concerned with a lesson you learned?” her voice was still cold.

He opened his mouth, but she didn’t give him a chance to finish. She whipped her wand out from her robes and pointed it at him. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t finish you off right now,” she said, her voice steady, her wand hand unshaken. She had come such a long way since her first capture.

Instead of answering, he looked steadily back at her. There was something so knowing in his grey eyes, so deep and understanding, something that probed her deepest depths and yet did not condemn, that she looked away and focused on her wand instead.

“So it’s happened to you, too, has it?” he asked quietly. She stiffened.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“You know.”

She did.

“Tell me anyway.”

“The coldness. The fear and the desperation that sucks away at your heart until one day you wake up and you find that you don’t have one anymore, but by then you don’t care because it’s easier not to feel, not to cry every time you kill someone, not to break down every time your friend dies.”
He knew her too well.

“So tell me,” she said, ignoring what he had just said, hoping that her eschewing of the subject would cause it to disappear, “what did you learn that so important, so earthshaking that you had to come all the way to Hogwarts to tell me?”

“I learned many things,” he told her, looking her straight in the eye. “I learned that when you’re on the run, blood doesn’t matter so much. I learned that when you don’t know whether you’ll live or die, families and last names don’t count. I learned that there are more important things than pride and reputation. And finally, I learned that I love you.”

She stared at him then, stared and stared and stared until she thought her eyes would go blind from the intensity of her staring, searching desperately for any sign that he was lying, any sign that this was a trick and she was free to live as she had done until now, unencumbered by emotions and feelings and a heart.

But she found none.

“You can kill me now,” he said. “Stun me, turn me in, whatever. I just wanted you to know.”

Her wand hand trembled, a moment in stasis. For one instant, just one, everything slipped away. The War, Harry, Voldemort, all the deaths she had seen, Madam Pince, everything except one girl, and one boy, and two people’s chance for redemption. She stared at her wand, the deceptively sleek, smooth thing that had taken the lives of so many people in the name of good.

She looked at him again.

And she made her decision.

“Avada Kedavra!” she yelled—or cried—or what did she say, or did she even say it out loud? She didn’t know, could only watch as her wand shot a jet of green light, as the man before her toppled slowly to the floor, his eyes watching her with betrayed trust, disappearing hope, and fading love. Watch as her last chance at redemption, at salvation, at innocence vanished with the green jet of light and the sparkle in his eyes. Watch as he hit the floor with a dull thud.

She looked at the immobile body for a long time as her wand stopped shaking and his body cooled down. She didn’t know how long she stood there, staring at the corpse. His long blond hair—hair of an angel—was strewn about the floor, and his face was neutral, but looking at it, somehow it seemed to reproach her, to berate her betrayal of his trust. He was beautiful.

She sat there looking at her last chance for salvation gone until the candle flickered out and she knew the library was closing. Then she got up, gathered her wand and her cloak, and stepped over his dead body.

“I loved you once,” she whispered, then headed out the door to tell the Order that yet another Death Eater was down.