The heavy oak doors of the library groaned as Draconia pushed them shut, sealing the warmth of the corridor away. She moved through the aisles with a purpose that suggested she had a right to be there, her robes sweeping against the stone floor. It was nearly midnight, and the library was mostly empty, save for the occasional flicker of a candle on a distant table. She had spent the last hour in the common room, pretending to read, but the thought of his face from the previous week had kept her from sleeping. She needed to be productive, to be perfect, to be anything but distracted.
Her bag felt heavy against her hip as she walked toward the back of the room. She was not here for the restricted section tonight; she was here for the common area where the study tables were arranged in long, disciplined rows. She found her usual spot, a corner table near the window, and began to unpack her parchment. The quill she laid down was a silver-tipped thing, elegant and sharp. She sat down, her back straight, and pulled out the essay she had been working on for Defense Against the Dark Arts.
The prompt had been a tedious one regarding the modulation of elemental charms in combat, a topic she could discuss in her sleep. She had written it with a precision that was meant to be unassailable. Yet, a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction had been clawing at her since she had finished the last paragraph. She knew her work was good, but it felt sterile. It lacked the certain spark of flair that a Malfoy should possess.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a second piece of parchment. It was a copy of the essay she had seen him holding earlier in the week, a scrap she had snatched when he was distracted by a passing group of Gryffindors. It was a risky move, one that most would consider a breach of etiquette, but she did not care for the rules of others. She began to read his words, her eyes scanning the jagged, hurried handwriting that stood in stark contrast to her own.
"You are being ridiculous," she whispered to the empty room.
She compared his sentence structure to hers, noting where he had faltered and where he had succeeded. He had a tendency to use too many verbs, making his descriptions feel frantic and unpolished. His logic was a bit loose, drifting into anecdotal evidence when he should have been sticking to the theoretical framework. It was frustrating to see such a lack of discipline in a person who was clearly intelligent. He was messy, and his prose reflected a mind that jumped ahead of its own feet.
"It is almost as if he is in a hurry to be wrong," she muttered, her finger tracing a particularly clumsy line of his text.
She found herself reading his essay more closely than was strictly necessary for a simple comparison. She was looking for the source of his confidence, the thing that allowed him to look so unbothered even when he was being imprecise. She found it in his voice, or rather, the way his words sounded when read aloud in her head. He had a rhythm to his thinking that was unconventional, a sort of kinetic energy that made his mistakes feel less like errors and more like deliberate choices.
The silence of the library was not absolute; the distant crackle of a dying candle and the scratching of her own quill provided a minimal soundtrack to her isolation. She felt the weight of the task she had set for herself. She was not merely reading; she was dissecting. She wanted to see where he had gone wrong so she could understand why he didn't seem to care about the small things.
"A semicolon would have saved you here," she said, her voice a low murmur in the dark.
She looked at her own essay again. It was technically perfect, every comma in its place, every grammatical rule obeyed with a devotion that was almost religious. But it was safe. It was the kind of essay that earned an 'Exceeds Expectations' because it left no room for debate, yet it also left no room for wonder. His essay was a mess of bold claims and half-finished thoughts, yet it possessed a vitality that her work lacked.
She leaned back, the wood of the chair creaking under her weight. She thought about the way he had laughed when she had insulted his family. It was a genuine laugh, one that had caught her off guard and left her feeling strangely small. He had not been offended; he had been amused by her, as if she were a particularly spirited kitten trying to hiss at a lion. The memory made her chest tighten.
"You are not a lion," she told the shadow of a bookshelf. "You are just a boy with a messy desk."
She returned to the parchment, her quill hovering over the empty space at the bottom of her own essay. She began to make notes in the margins of his work, her handwriting a sharp, elegant contrast to his scrawl. She noted where a transition was too abrupt and where a noun had been used incorrectly. She was being a critic, a teacher, and a judge all at once.
The more she read, the more she felt a strange sense of kinship with his errors. They were the errors of someone who was too busy living to bother with the minutiae of a perfect sentence. She found herself wanting to reach through the parchment and fix the very things that made him who he was. She wanted to straighten the crooked lines of his logic until they were as straight as her own.
"It is not quite right," she said, her eyes narrowing as she looked at a particularly long-winded sentence of his.
She thought about the way he moved through the corridors, with a sort of easy grace that seemed to defy the gravity of the school's traditions. He was a Gryffindor, a creature of instinct and noise, while she was a creature of structure and silence. Yet, in this moment, in the quiet of the library, she felt the two worlds colliding. She was using her intellect to bridge the gap between her perfection and his chaos.
She looked at her own work one last time. It was flawless, and it was boring. She looked back at his, which was a disaster, and yet it felt alive. The more she worked on the comparison, the more she realized that she was not just fixing his mistakes; she was trying to find a way to incorporate his energy into her own rigid structure.
"His is better than she wants it to be, and worse than it should be, and she can fix both."