The Ichor and the Blood

Hermione thought it decidedly strange that Draco had simply run away, Draco seemed the type to face anything, do anything, and running away.

The next few days, Draco sat in his room or in the streets, personally seeking to avoid all contact with that girl who had done that romantic thing to him.

Hermione did not approach him for that time, completely unaware of why or how he acted as he did. She’d demanded to see him three days afterward, dragged him out and faced him.

"Draco, what’s wrong?" she questioned interrogatively.

He did not answer her question, but he held her face in his hands and stared at her and probed her high forehead, her pallid skin her large mystical eyes so full of intellect. "What do you think about me? What do you see in me?"

She could simply look into his eyes then and melt like a storm of fire on an arctic shelf, but she burned in gold. His eyes, how haunted, so desperate, for love, love he must have never known. There his pain coruscated in his terrorized eyes, ravaging his being was some self-inflicted pain. Every sense of what was safe she wanted then to leave behind, she had meddled in the fires of his intellect, the sharp razor of his wit, and the pain of his soul that he never spoke of. Every day, he had been on her mind, those piercing eyes glancing so sharply on her face with an obsession, she was attracted to him, loving to “play pretend” in a game of verisimilitude, imitating what was art so falsely, so horrendously in longing to be near him. He adored her for all those months. She knew she should abandon him then, that love with him would be all consuming, desperate. "Draco, about what happened-" she looked away then, and his eyes, unable to stand the pain radiant in his glance.

"I want you to look at me, I want it to happen again." He put his soft hand on her face and pulled it up to his and kissed her, full on her mouth. His mouth had been so needy on hers, so new, inexperienced, and ravaging, wanting to love her, wasted love, anger at the world but adoration and sadness mixed in his view of her, wanting, in a torture which rocked him as he kissed her. His arm gathered on her back, and she kissed him back, knowing whatever this connection had been was dangerous and unhealthy but without caring. She wanted his entire being so completely. He, to her was tortured, and still so beautiful, and brilliant, the perfect man. And her hand slid beneath his detrimental jumper to feel with her hand every fold of his muscular torso and she broke from his lips to find what she did. She saw a terror in his eyes, "I hadn’t been intending for you to go any further than kissing." Had he been ashamed?.

"Take off your shirt."Her voice sounded soft and pleading. He had obeyed and looked away, as some tears simply came out, forced, so alone. She cried as she looked over each bruised patch of skin, each tear, each burn each inflicted wound. And how puzzled to see marks that ought to have been fatal.

"I don’t want to talk about it," he did not want to talk about how much of it was done to himself from his own hands inflicting punishment for imagined wrongs. It was sick in a mind, but she leaned forward to kiss him again, their tears beginning to intermingle as he continued to hunger for her love. And she had already loved him so entirely with her soul.

In her mind she knew he was dangerous. He would demand a great amount of investment from her heart, that she wasn’t most likely entirely prepared to give him even if more and more she felt it, and as if he read her thoughts he grew terrified. He, without any sort of trepidation, cleaved harder to her body. So angelic was her face, her huge green mystified eyes, the black curls of her hair, her upturned, perfect nose, and properly proportioned mouth, seemed gorgeous. Her eyes shined in great lambency, and they came heavily lidded, and long were the eyelashes, and her head sprouted that gorgeous Pre-Raphaelite glory.

While she kissed him and her hands felt his bare back, a chest, sides, ribs, lean chiseled stomach, she felt him grown so often from the pain, and then he almost began to bite her mouth in his wanting kisses.

This was new to her, she had kissed a few men before, but when had they Draco’s haunting gaze, the perfection of his face, soft, and with a roughness to make him seductive, attractive, and as vulgar as it sounded sexy. From her mouth, he expected things, when he almost bit her in a passion. And in her mind the prospect of sleeping with him seemed dangerously appealing as it did with him.

"I love you, Hermione." Had he not the self-control he did, the disturbing heightened sense of morality, he would be ravaging her then, as every inch of his exposed flesh burned in pleasure and pain from her tremulous touch, and his blood began to race in his entire body yearning for a sensual awakening with her only as he had felt for her.

With the sun that day rising, she lay awake watching him sleep, with fear overtaking her heart. She felt she would never settle down with him deep inside, and oh how she would’ve longed to, but she hadn’t stopped him from kissing her.

When he awoke, he begged her to take him home, her home, never minding the threat of her parents. "Yes," she had replied.

Oh, how he charmed them and made them glad and they almost loved him, not touching, not sweet, disturbed.

Most of the time he unabashedly kissed her, happily, excitedly. He held tightly to her and she could feel it in his gaze, his touch, his kisses, the love he felt for her, the obsession, and he told her it daily. Spending time with him she learned that he was an accomplished composer or could be as he loved her and she could hear the piano keys weep, the thrill of love being a sort of razor of delight and weeping regret in an undertone. And he recited to her poetry she never would have guessed he had written, all of it passionate and longing, clever, brilliant in fact. His voice in fact probed her mind and let a passion within her soar with love for him. And each day, love grew nearer to the obsession, her heart burning to love him. She never said it, and he so shamelessly said it. When he slept in her bed with her, she’d awake to find him glowing, smiling and on so many days she saw him struggle with some dark fate she could not understand, self-perpetuated, and a romantic notion, and in so many ways unknown to her.

He was a romantic figure to feel such depth of sadness to urge her and implore that she love him.

So many things happened then, she explored in ways sexuality in her experiencing with him for the first time to know the feel of masculinity knowing and feeling him aroused as she guided his hand with her own to feel the swell of her breasts, knowing her body, over her clothes and without any intention to go any further than almost accidental touching no body part left bare, except the torso she memorized in her head left bare and feeling the bruising and scarring. He smiled.

He was white from his high forehead to his feet he occasionally let bare.

He felt no amount of fear that her parents would see, Draco figured they already had, he had assured them even that his intentions had never amounted to anything remotely near sex of any sort, nor truly feeling her. If they had found him with her, surely something around his scars would as equally torture them. He didn't care about them really, he wanted only to know Hermione.

Hermione learned things then, about what made a man, what a man did, how Draco was not a man but someone who could become the definition of what ought to be a man. Never had a man been as handsome, loving, intelligent, insightful, emotional, and secretive.

Draco was extraordinary, never mind that he cleaved closer, needed more deeply, found himself wandering some great boulevard of butterflies drinking ever deeply from the petals of those poisonous flowers, stirred by the cadence of her eloquent tongue, intimidated by that razor of her wit, and trapped in some celestial fire that burned and yearned with want, he adored her.

Draco realized and stated the perfection of her face, admitted she was the best thing that had ever known even so much as a moment of life’s tortures and sweet agony.

To him she provided a fire to spark nous and love and running outside in leaking rain and investing himself into her showering her more effectively than weather with his kisses and love.

Her beauty was more than what would feel a fragrance for the eyes charming with perfume and allure, it was deeper, ever deeper, love obsession and consuming devotion and like is love, and sex is holy and sacred and for the one girl he has ever loved in a couple of years.

Draco was brave and strong, and that emotional grip was in horrid contradiction to the overall trait of his character. Draco did not have that emotional strength so common in men, but he could have, but he thought himself destined to give women strength and simultaneously rely on her.

To him the world was only a collection of protected machines rusting and still projecting all gains into daggers all of those who breathed the world’s treacherous air, as he had his entire life, and his lover had on many occasions.

A violin in his capable musical hands should guide her to him.

He could watch her and feel moved, delighted and sad, morose. Morbid thought did not refuse to cling still at his chest.

One day she told him she loved him with her eyes, and to him it became a declaration to the world that she did.

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Durmstrang would build a school in Bulgaria with the oh so weak prude Slytherin, and then he would be forced to give himself away.

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Hermione had spent weeks with Draco in his arms, kissing him at various places, and then received a note from Harry at her house. She was to meet him.

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The Weasleys did little to notice a change in Ginevra, Ron made prefect, Percy had a girlfriend, Bill had a new fiancé, and Molly got a new set of kitchen supplies.

Ron, however, might have become infinitely more perceptive, because he noticed periods of long absences, and a look of being elsewhere on his younger sister's face. She seemed hardly aware of where she was, or what she was doing, and all the while her mind was occupied with greater thoughts and fantasies of things none else in her family could hope to know.

But Ron still looked at her, though it had seemed so long since she had ever particularly stood out. Noone noticed her change from innocence to womanhood, or her great potential in academics.

All she heard from her family,"Nice dear, that's great dear, whatever, so, I really think she looks good, Quidditch is really fun."

"What about me?" she never dared to ask.

She felt accustomed to their ignorance, and she unconsciously took advantage of it that summer, exactly when they should have yelled and screamed and taken her to those psychological healers. They should have shown concern, and as perceptive as this new Ron became, he accepted it stupidly and moved on.

Hermione dressed casually, like scarves and a two thousand galleon puffy delicately pink skirt and knitted suit top, when she went to Diagon Alley. She shot plethoric glares at Draco, because he had insisted on going with her. Though she did let him come with her there, she made it very clear he was not to be with her, she did not want Harry to know that they were together. She foolishly imagined it so much greater of a romance because it was secret.

Harry met her at the giant pillars in front of Gringott's Bank. He looked disheveled and tired and did not hold any quality of exuberance or vivacity.

She hugged him and in the corner of her eye saw Draco, forty feet away, look at him in his gorgeous eyes with a look of great superiority, and deeper in them a sort of longing. Noone had hugged Draco before, not out of that sort of love or want to be together. In their most intimate moments, Hermione had never hugged him, rested on his arm or climbed ontop of him to kiss his forehead, but no, they had never hugged, except when she had met him earlier in the summer, but it had been his arm she hugged.

After their ten seconds, she withdrew, and sat down with him on the steps.

"How are you?"she asked him there.

"Oh, swell, I suppose, it has not felt any different, with the Dursleys, thinking of you and Ron, and Ginny, and your hair."

"My hair."

"Yes it's changed almost as much as your teeth, as much as Skeeter's scoops, as much as Malfoy's insults."

She did not focus on his ridiculous attempt at poetry, but on his comment about Draco."Oh, how has he changed?"

"He has gone from saying mean things to cruel things, and from there to stupid things."

"Petty things," she said. "They only get that classification because he does not know you. I'm sure his insults would feel particularly mordant, witty excuse me, if he knew you."

"So you read it too? I can't believe it, they had a list in the Herald of the highest O.W.L.S. in the last decade, he had the highest score. You scored lower." He shook his head. "I thought he would sore lower on defense against the dark arts, but he found out I did a patronus and cried fowl, and produced one of his own. He reportedly said that looking for ways to score kids more highly on an individual basis was discrimination, an egregious unconscionable method of testing, whatever the bloody hell that means."

"Since you memorized it, you might as well know it means-"

"That the fool had methods which were abominable and beyond the moral sensibilities of a fair person." Draco had in his eyes lifted Harry off the ground and strangled him as Herakles had done to Antaeus. She wanted to strangle Draco too, she had made things so clear. "I'm sorry, but I can't refuse my helping nature when it comes to giving my intellectual inferiors a much-needed vocabulary lesson."

"Malfoy, why don't you realize that you have no helping nature." Draco cruelly laughed at Harry's inability to catch his sarcasm, and Harry caught on a moment too late, and looked ashamedly at the ground.

"Perhaps Malfoy, you should look up the words ruth, compassion, and kindness." Hermione looked about.

"I was never given promises or words of mercy's strain, so I do not utter them. I'll only show it, words for such trivial things ought not get taken seriously." She wanted a way to get even, to keep up with the show, and to not leave Draco distraught.

Draco caught her delivering hand, and Harry's balled fist aimed to punch his perfect nose with his other hand. "Blood does not matter half as much as intelligence or morality, you have neither, you were right, I have changed."

"Not to me, Malfoy," said Harry.

"Never to you."

He let both of their hands down and looked desperately at Hermione. "I want you to tell him." He knew Potter would think nothing of such a comment, and he wanted to keep her again, to kiss her and love her. He thought of it, and left her alone with his defeated opponent. He had done what he had come to do and drifted away.

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"Do you love him?"

"I've never asked myself that."

"Maybe you should, so I can know."

"Yes, Harry, I love him, I find him everything I am, that whatever the infinite wisdom of every thought on love feels true, he does have that second part of my soul, but it also contains that soul of pain I had the potential for and never felt. And his soul also has a heart that feels parallel to my own and yet hungers more greatly with living generously, and resigns itself more frequently to the despair he has introduced me to."

"Could you have children with that sort of man? Have you had sex with him?"

"Have you had sex, Harry?"she offered in offense, to set the boundary.

"Yes, I regret to say."

"No, he wouldn't have allowed me to."

"It took me all this time to figure something out. The meaning of his last comment." Harry had insight, sometimes, funny in regards to his lack of intelligence. "With the tragic figure you paint of him he says truthfully I do not have much more than some degree of average intelligence, and I am not some virginal, giving, generous fu-"

A howler sounded with the exact word it stopped him from saying a couple yards away.

"I don't have that, you know, but does that make me a bad person?" he asked.

"No, it isn't bad for a person. Draco's beyond that. I was a bit beyond that, but with him, I am beyond that as a -"

"I'm not going to give you my blessing, he's touched upon your most unreachable qualities. But you are still a friend, my best friend and I'll lay low if you promise to never let that change."

"It would have changed, somehow if we became boyfriend and girlfriend, if you found a girl, somehow the dynamics between us would change, there's nothing wrong with individuating. We will always be friends, but not always this close."

"Would you have had sex with him if he let you?"

"In a few years, I would have tried, but I wont pressure him when he doesn't deserve it, I'm similar in views on that issue in any other regard, anyway."

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Hermione came back to Draco later that day and he stood up and placed his mouth on hers and she only pulled away from his mouth and hugged him, with him discovering the akwardness of such a situation. "I truly love you, Draco, more than anything else in the world, I love you.".

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Durmstrang bought her palace and made it into the school where she immediately invited all of the children of her former lovers. And they flocked, children of the princes of German states, the children of her short former lover, the duke of Alsace, and the king of Spain, and the child produced by his wife that could have been another's due to the lack of constraints on their open marriage.

India's nobles sent their children, and all on the basis of blackmail, fondness of their liaisons, whatever, it worked, and she acquired professors of every rank and type, a centaur secured for astronomy, a vampire for Introduction to the black arts, and all sorts of mermaids and banshees for languages, and a faerie for glamyre, a wasted class noone mastered, and a dwarf for alchemy.

She invented a spell famously recorded by Boraes

Some giant hand must've pulled the burning fire from underneath the hands, for it rose so majestically and brilliantly; chasing away the grandeur of night, so that it became a wholly more awesome force. No longer were only bits of the sun collected in torches that were so feckless underneath a bathing pallor of distant stars and a moon that gave only a layer of sweet lucent charms over Earth, but torches were gathered together and multiplied until all of the light shined together to create a palace of nature that was outshone the fertile green with gilded walls. So the rays gathered, and created patterns that so closely mimicked the complexity of baroque/rococo marvels that seemed above even these miracles of architecture.