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[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

"I'm going to escape," she promised herself. "I'm going to go somewhere where people are kind and warm and I am free." She gradually got so good at keeping herself preoccupied that she would momentarily forget that she was forgetting. She'd breathe in and experience a moment that didn't feel broken or grieving or despairing. When it was just her loneliness that stretched out before her. The guilt that would strike her a moment later was as cold and bitter as seawater. She'd freeze for a moment and then swallow the lump of horror in her throat and renew her vow to escape. But she couldn't escape.

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

He looked at her so intently it felt as though he were committing her to memory.

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

Watching spring unfold itself slowly almost felt like hope. Except—the place inside Hermione where hope had once lived now felt like a hole. As though someone had reached in and cut away something from the core of her being. Where hope had once bloomed there was now nothing but something painful and rotting. But still—spring was beautiful to see.

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

She didn't want to think about spring, or life, or children, or beauty, or goodness. She didn't want to think about beautiful things that had been, but were now destroyed. Or the beauty that still remained. It cast the horror into harsher relief until it made it physically painful to think—to breathe—to live.

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

No one so young should have had such icily restrained rage behind their eyes. Hermione had seen many faces aged by the war but Malfoy’s expression was unique. He was so precisely contained, but his eyes were a storm; they looked like they contained the power of the sea.

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

The potion blocked everything she realized. She wasn’t sad. Or angry. Or ashamed. Her grief was gone. Her rage. She was—nothing. She simply existed in cold nothingness. She looked up at Malfoy. “Is this what it feels like to be you?”

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

“Everyone who wins say they were good, but they’re the ones who write the history. I haven’t seen anything indicating that it was actually moral superiority that made a difference”

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[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

Ha. Vashafaru, 2025

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

Ha. Vashafaru, 2025

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

Grief is a violent emotion, a sort of acid that eats away at the best parts of us. The bereaved are in agony, yearning for someone to blame, and if they cannot find a culprit, they turn their fury upon themselves.

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

“I feel like I can breathe,” she said. “Like I’ve been drowning so long I forgot what oxygen felt like.”

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

The next morning, she woke and felt like a boulder had been placed on her chest. Pinned to her bed and overwhelmed by the whiplash of despair she’d been unable to experience the day before. She fought to breathe. The twelve-hour respite made all her emotional pain hurt more. Cast it into stark relief. She hadn’t realized how deep the cuts of grief and loneliness reached inside of her until she was briefly freed from the pain of them. As the weight of it bore down on her once more, she felt as though she were being ground to dust. She could almost feel the edges of herself crumbling and breaking. Dissolving into ether. There was almost nothing left of her but hurting.

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

one lovely morning

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

Draco Malfoy was an enigma. There were so many contradictions swirling beneath his cold facade. What were his ambitions?

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

Survivor’s guilt, she thought, that was the Muggle term for it. Such a paltry description. It didn’t capture even a fraction of the breadth of agony in her soul.

[delightfuldetectivestrawberry]

"If an assassin’s blade were made into a man, it would take the form of Draco Malfoy."