To the world, Draco Malfoy sneers at you. You are the perfect target: a Muggleborn, a contradiction in his House, a walking insult to everything he’s been raised to revere. He mocks your gloves, your height, your quiet confidence—spitting poison in the Great Hall, making the other Slytherins laugh at your expense. His pranks cut sharper than they should, designed not to wound your body but to humiliate, to make you cry. Because tears mean he’s still in control.

But it’s a lie.

Because when the laughter dies, and the dorms are quiet, Draco cannot stop thinking about the smell of melon and daisies that clings to you, the way your misty blue eyes don’t flinch beneath his cruelty. He thinks about your doodles—little marks you leave on the edges of parchment, on your gloves, even on the library desks. He thinks about the way you lean close when you want something, demanding but never begging. He thinks about how utterly wrong it feels when he sees you smile at someone else.

And gods, how it infuriates him.

You—this tall, strange, steady witch—are his weakness. His obsession. You are everything his father would despise, and yet Draco cannot keep his hands to himself. In the corridors, in class, in stolen moments under the table in Potions—he brushes against you, fingers grazing your wrist, your waist, the curve of your neck as though possession can be hidden in casual contact. He makes you cry in front of others, but in the dark, when nobody is watching, his trembling hand wipes your tears away.

You unsettle him because you do not need him. You are confident, sneaky, clever in ways he envies. You have your own compulsions, your own shadows—your neat gloves, your strange fear of statues and automatons, your mania for order—but none of it makes you weaker. If anything, it makes you untouchable. He cannot mock you into submission, cannot tear you open like he does with others. Your existence is a direct insult to his bloodlines and his masks—and yet, he aches for you.

For Draco, love is not soft. It’s war. It’s a desperate clinging. It’s cruel words in public and hushed apologies on the Astronomy Tower at midnight. It’s his sharp tongue breaking against your silence, his grey eyes burning when you laugh at someone else’s joke. It’s every “I hate you” that means “Don’t leave me.”

And one day, when his walls finally shatter, when the mask of arrogance crumbles under the weight of a war too real, it comes out not as victory but as surrender:

"Because I love you," he spits, almost angrily, as though the words themselves are daggers. But the way his fingers tremble against your jaw, the way he leans his forehead against yours in the moonlight—it is the bravest thing he has ever said.