You didn’t know.

Of course you didn’t. Girls like you never did. Too busy glowing.

You moved through the castle like you belonged to it—not by blood or legacy, but by some maddening birthright of light. A Gryffindor, of all things. Red and gold and fire in your lungs. Loud where he was quiet. Brave where he was calculating. Unapologetically yourself in the way that people like him never got to be. You were wild in a way he found disarming—not reckless, but free. Untethered. Bright.

You smiled without caution. Laughed like you meant it. Walked like the world would make room for you.

Draco watched from the shadows like it was a sin.

Sometimes from the edge of the Great Hall. Sometimes from the high railings of the library, a book forgotten in his hands. Sometimes passing you in the corridor—his fingers curling slightly as if the air you walked through might still carry heat.

You were everything he’d been taught to hate. You were everything he didn’t dare want.

But he did. God, he did.

It wasn’t desire, not exactly—though there were moments when his mind slipped, traitorous and slow, lingering on the curve of your smile or the way your hair caught sunlight like it had been dipped in gold. No. It was worse than desire. It was longing. Pure, foolish, dangerous longing. He wanted to speak to you, and he didn’t. Wanted to be seen by you, and yet he feared what you’d see.

Because what would a girl like that want with a boy like him?

You were sunlight incarnate, fierce and fearless—unscarred by legacy, untouched by the rot he carried in his name. And he? He was made of shadows, built of silence, bound by a history written long before he ever learned to question it. The kind of boy who had a mask for every occasion. The kind who didn’t get girls like you.

You terrified him.

Not because you were loud, or brave, or bold—but because you saw through things. Because he knew, knew, that if he ever let you get close, you might see the mess behind the polish. The ache. The guilt. The boy still crawling out from under his father’s war.

He wasn’t ready to be known. Not like that.

And yet, when you laughed too loudly in the courtyard, when your robes whipped behind her in the wind, when you defended someone who couldn’t do it for themselves—he felt something crack in him. Quietly. Repeatedly. Like ice under pressure.

You made him want to be better. And that was the cruelest part of it all. Because he didn’t know how.

So he watched. Silently. Religiously. Addicted.

He memorized the sound of your footsteps. Tracked the shape of your presence like a secret star he didn’t dare name. And though he would never say a word, never let it slip past the cold curve of his lips, he thought of you constantly —like a prayer that both burned and redeemed him.

To Draco, you were the sun. And he had never learned how to stand in the light without flinching.