Dance Dance

All HP characters are by JK Rowling and lyrics are from Fall Out Boy. Just a reminder of how obsessed I was with Harry Potter fanfics back then. OMG, is this me? :))

The roof of his mouth had the consistency of sandpaper and he felt his tongue shrivel up long before the main course. The tip of his polished leather shoes kept a cadence with the stone floor only he could feel and understand, and he had practically ripped his chartreuse handkerchief under the table yet it didn’t give him the satisfaction that shredding a good many Galleons’ worth of Iberian silk usually did.

 

He glanced at the others and seethed. It was already unfair that he had to suffer for three blasted hours but the indignity was added by the fact that no one, not even Pansy, had noticed how he had paled considerably during the last hour. Nor did anyone drag him away from the damn table where his so-called “date” was currently sitting, head tilted back as she laughed at the Headmaster’s joke about the three hippogriffs who got lost somewhere along Cardiff. Or was it Ammanford? He couldn’t care less. The dinner grated on his nerves like a rake across the blackboard and that was something, considering the mortifying meals he was forced to attend along with his father’s cronies.

 

 

However, it was the dancing that he feared most.

 

 

“Let the merriment begin, young couples!” Dumbledore had cheerfully boomed across the stuffy Hall and at once, high heels and leather shoes pounded the floor, where their respective owners would throw away –or at least try to— the last scrap of their embarrassment and gather it with a hefty hangover the next day. He distastefully eyed Potter and the She-Weasely make a few turns before finally stopping and laughing with fingers interlaced. He turned and tried to focus on a mental image of bloody Potter’s bloody top of his silver plate; at least that eased his wretchedness a bit.

 

 

She says she's no good with words but I'm worse
Barely stuttered out

"A joke of a romantic" or stuck to my tongue

 

“Nice dance,” said a female voice in front of him. It was then that he noticed that they were the only ones left at the table. He could see Dumbledore smoothly turning Professor Trelawney, much to the amusement of the raucous Gryffindorks. He fisted his hands under the table and went back to his sparkling plate, now adding a few details such as a bruised lip and a slash across the cheek to his mental image of a decapitated Potter. However, he did try to say something coherent. Honestly.

 

 

“Er, yes. Quite the bash.” Oh yes, quite the bash all right. He was hoping to bash something right now, rather than have a conversation with her. It’s not that he still hated her after all those childish years of blind taunting; it was something worse. Much worse.

 

 

“Yes, well…” she wandered off and hunched her shoulders a bit. Her eyes were averted and she kept on chewing her bottom lip. He, however, was too busy resolutely expanding visual horizons to notice.

 

 

Weighed down with words too overdramatic
Tonight it's "it can't get much worse"
Versus "no one should ever feel like…"

 

“So how’s the spew thingy coming on?”

 

Oh God, he was getting too little oxygen to his brain as well as a tad too desperate if he ever turned to that. Anyway, the Hall was quite stuffy and he did seem to have a bit of sweat on the spot in between his shoulder blades …

 

Her eyes lightened but she swiftly pursed her lips. “Malfoy, you know that it isn’t spew but-”

 

“Yes, well, you know what they say about elves…” he trailed off, looking nonchalant. He didn’t know what the thing was with house elves and he surely didn’t want to know.  He tilted his head to one side and whistled between his teeth. He could use a nice smoke right now, but he had to control himself. Oh, how he barely did.

 

The silence between them was pushed to one side to make way for the blasting music but the pounding in his ears went on and on, and he was the only one who heard it. Internally, he grimaced.

 

----

 

A thousand thoughts left muddy imprints on her mind. Harry. Ron. The Yule Ball. Tutoring sessions with lower years. Head Girl duties. At the bottom of it all, one thought kept on drifting hazily in and out of her consciousness.

 

Him.

 

She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips and looked at the slouched boy sitting in front of her. He looked positively peaky, a generous helping of black smudged under his eyes, normally so stormily, arrogantly grey but now diminished with such rapidity it made her cringe. His normally immaculate hair was less than perfect, with a good many strands sticking in different directions and the same dress robes of amethyst green he had worn three years ago now hung a bit loosely on him.

 

If this isn’t stress, she’ll eat her inkpot. A glance should sate her but no, she to continually raise her eyes.

 

 

The truth is, he intrigued her with his swaggering manner, nose perpetually stuck in the air and eyes deigning to look down only in moments of sheer condescension. His wit was rapier-sharp, a match for hers and sometimes more so. Such arrogance had been meticulously maintained in the course of seven years but one thing she had noticed was that the veneer of calm superciliousness tended to flake off once the last prefect had closed the door and left them with only the dying fire for company.

 

 

Every time she looked at him, she had to suppress a sigh – regret for how he could have turned out but at the same time, relief that he never went down the same path his father trudged.

 

 

The dance continued, getting wilder and wilder with each flagon of butterbeer being refilled with Professor Flitwick’s wand. Snape and McGonagall were looking darkly at the stage, where the band was playing music, or at least tried to. A dozen or so whoops and yells blended well with the jarring, discordant sound of the Hufflepuff band named, he recalled with an eye roll, ‘The Yellow Badgerz’. Leave it for the Hufflepuffs to exceed bad music with even worse band name options.

 

 

He was biting the inside of his left cheek and sadistically savored the tinny flavor of his blood. It was quite ironic that for someone who prided himself in generations of pristine breeding, his blood just tasted, well… common. In the end, he thought abruptly, it all boils down to how good your blood tastes. He shook his head at such an unguarded notion and chuckled harshly at himself and at everything he had thought he believed in.

 

 

I'm two quarters and a heart down
And I don't want to forget how your voice sounds

 

He sneaked a glance at the Head Girl and stiffened. She was also staring at him, with something akin to bewilderment, fascination and forlornness. Her brow was creased and her lips took a downward turn. She looked so hopelessly childlike that he wanted to scoop her up in his arms and whisper words of comfort, sentences without the oft-used staples ‘I hate you’, ‘dirty’ and ‘Mudblood’. But he never did; instead, he raised an eyebrow, leaned over, knocked a tin goblet filled with red wine with his elbow and hoarsely whispered in her ear, “Am I really that fascinating?”

 

 

She never expected, not in a million lifetimes, that he would do just what he did. His breath was rapid, shallow and warm against her earlobe. She could hear, barely above the music, a few gasps and mutterings from the rest of the dancing crowd. Of course, who wouldn’t be shocked? They had bickered for the past two months and seeing him lean over to her in such close proximity contradicted their clashing ideologies.

 

 

Her hands crushed the blood-red silk of her gown instead of doing something rash like throttling him. She said through clenched teeth, “Malfoy, you prat, what in Godric’s crimson flannel nightdress are you doing?!”

 

 

He wished he could capture her voice, freeze this moment when he finally got close enough to pin down the scent of her perfume. It was the scent of apples and he wondered what color were the apples: were they red or green?

 

 

Without want of anything better to say, he mumbled, “Care to dance?”

 

 

There. He had said it. It came out a bit raspy and shaky but it came out. He could hear her gasp and reply as shakily, “W-well yes, of-of course.” Her brain, something that Ravenclaws maintain should be theirs, could only nod blankly at the unexpected query.

 

 

These words are all I have so I'll write them
So you need them just to get by

 

He gingerly enfolded her hand in his clammy one and led her to the dance floor, hoping that the restless mass of dress robes of every hue and color will camouflage them. Some students were eying them with undisguised interest and some had outright shouted things like “the Lioness gets together with the Snake” and “Merry Christmas”, taking note of how snobby Malfoy and brainy Granger’s green and red dress robes incongruously blended well together. At least the students of Hogwarts have an eye for spotting out the irony underneath the details.

 

 

His hand had barely encircled her waist when the music dropped and Dumbledore’s magically magnified voice filled the cavernous Great Hall.

 

 

“Students, please give a hand for the Head Boy and Girl, Mr. Draco Malfoy and Ms. Hermione Granger! Without their thorough efforts, this Yule Ball wouldn’t have come into being.”

 

 

“Smile, Granger. Show them what you’ve really got,” he muttered under his breath as he felt her slim fingers tremble slightly.

 

 

So much for remaining undetected. The applause was thunderous, partly because of the students’ shock in seeing them dance together out of their own free will, barring the Slytherin jeers of disgust and the Gryffindor groans of antipathy. He forced himself to follow her lead and took a stiff bow before hundreds of prying eyes, student and teacher alike. The horrendous music started again and the couples moved gauchely across the ballroom, leaving the two stranded in a sea of moving humanity.

 

 

Dance, Dance
We're falling apart to half time

 

His eyes burned in their sockets and the scratchy consistency of his throat plagued him even more. Despite these, five years of ballroom dancing tutorials didn’t fail him. He stoically maintained a light grip on her hand, no matter how bad he wanted to press a tad harder. He had to admit that for someone who lugs the whole contents of her house in a bag on a daily basis, Hermione Granger moves with the fluidity and litheness which he thought were the exclusive birthrights of Purebloods (with the obvious exception of Neville “Oh-Damn-Was-That-The-Eighth-Glass-I-Dropped?” Longbottom).

 

 

Her lips quirked when his hands (or rather, the very tips of his fingers – his palm wasn’t even touching her hips) nudged her a bit closer. She didn’t know whether to smile at his gingerly expression or to frown at his second rule breaking. First the boy asks her to dance and now he inches her closer than should be with their status taken into consideration. She was debating whether this phenomenon was caused by the stifling heat that had gone into Malfoy’s brain or the Yuletide cheer that had imbrued the castle in the past few weeks.

 

 

Dance, dance

 

These are the lives you love to lead

 

Of course, being the prudent little Lioness, she didn’t dare think that perhaps he did these things because he just wanted to.

 

 

She was thinking more on the lines of being as she should. Which is why he caught her meticulous attention: he did as he pleased. It was ‘could’,  ‘liked’, more than ‘should’ when it came to Draco Malfoy’s social résumé. Faultless pristine saint in public as she was, the nonconformity of his sneer and swagger made her afraid. She wanted to be as she was but she ended up being as she must. The bitterness of it all lingered on her tongue and throat like vulgar vomit.

 

 

As she was engulfed in her thoughts, the music dipped a notch. The dance was over and she didn’t even catch the rare, if not self-deprecating, smile he sent her. She licked her lips and stared at him squarely in the eye.

 

 

“The dance was… interesting,” she hastily mumbled. Alright, the bravado was gone.

 

 

Head cocked to one side, he smiled lopsidedly. He was thinking how easy it was to exercise unused facial muscles now that they acted like human beings around each other.

 

Not yet normal, but they were getting there.

 

She grinned back tentatively and looked at him for a moment as just… him. The spontaneity of the notion surprised her and she quickly withdrew lest it take her to uncharted waters.

 

 

“Hermione, there you are!”

 

 

They both spun around and saw Ron loping towards them, one arm laden with chilled Butterbeer bottles. He took her by the arm and led her past the crowd without as much as a cursory glance at Malfoy. She threw her head back and raised a hand in farewell.

 

 

And the crowd dances to the beat of another tune.

 

 

The pale boy’s hands drifted into his pocket and softly felt the shredded red silk.

 

 

If they knew how

Misery loved me.

 

 

 

 

Author's Note

Yeah. Um. I haven't reread this even as I posted it here. Too embarrassed? Perhaps. Teen drama! LOL. Anyway, if you're a D/Hr fan, then I hope you enjoy this one. XP

Reviews

[Philosophile. (Maddy)]

Whew what a flash back! You make Draco surprisingly sexy, appealing, ooh! Nice to have Hermione and Draco dancing together. I haven't read the books in years, but I dare say I Liked your use of language better than Rowling's.