She had always noticed him. Him, with his sleek hair and posh manners, his upturned nose and poignant eyes, and of course, that trademark smirk of his. She had always hated him. Hated the way he was against her and her kind, hated the way he could be so brilliant in class and so horribly fruitless in seeing anything beyond his family’s preconceived notions of right and wrong, at the same time. He was a bad boy with a sharp mind – the kind of kid that she usually wouldn’t have looked at twice.

So she didn’t.

But he put himself in her way, taunting her to make himself feel better, putting her down so that he himself could feel more like he belonged. She hated his insults, always felt empty inside after his words tore out her heart. He knew how to hurt her, knew what would get to her most, and he exploited her weaknesses, pushing her down in order to raise himself up. But she refused to be quieted, refused to be pushed aside and forgotten, for she was the memorable type, she was the kind of girl that nobody forgot, nobody cast aside, nobody mistreated. She was the type that didn’t just live, she glowed. She waltzed through life with the kind of self-made assurance that personified her intense spirit and mind. She helped others and looked out for them, and she never, ever cared about her appearance. It just wasn’t something she did, wasn’t something she thought about. A mane of frizzled hair irked her about as much as a crinkled piece of parchment. Nothing big, nothing life threatening. There were more important things in life, more important things that needed to be taken care of, and those were the kind of things that she thought about and worried over – not the trivial pursuits that others followed.

Yet, despite their differences, the arrogant boy and the perceptive girl had more in common than they thought. Both craved respect; both craved honour; and both wanted desperately to belong. But their methods to achieve the sort of respect they demanded differed significantly – the boy pushed others down, but the girl raised others up. In the process, all were gratified. They weren’t really that much different when one looked beyond their exteriors. The boy did the only thing he knew how when he taunted and bullied others and lived the lifestyle he had been taught to live. He lived in the only way he knew how and didn’t care to learn another life because the one he lived was troubling enough. He didn’t want a complicated life, didn’t want any more worries than he already had. He wanted security and a defined future. He wanted a life that was familiar and real to him. That was what he wanted and that was what he had always had.

The girl thought the same. Raised to be compassionate and loving, her innate nature flourished in those around her. Her presence was a blessing; her spirit beautiful; her personality vivid. But she never tried to see the other side; she was too innocent, too naïve to survive in the twisted world in which she had been born into. Her world consisted of a stark palate of white and black. There were no greys in her world – there didn’t need to be. She wholeheartedly believed in the good of those around her, and ironically, also reviled in the evil of her enemies. She was white, they were black, and that was that.

She didn’t want to know any different.

But their two worlds of influence collided and their barriers that they had carefully constructed all these years fell apart in each other’s presence. He was her sin, her grey that marred her black and white world, the one colouring that failed to fall in line with the others. And she, she was his release, the one thing that didn’t fit into his patterned lifestyle, his patterned world. The first time their lips met, they met in a fit of passion, of lust, of betrayal. Their first kiss broke all the barriers they had set up and destroyed all of their previous assumptions. They needed each other in the same way that the earth needs water and they succumbed to their passions. They met secretly, loved secretly, and needed secretly. On the exterior, he was still her nuisance, a pest that she wanted to get rid of, and she, she was still nothing more than a punch bag for verbal sparring. Yet, the atmosphere around them changed because of their precious secret. The little glances during class and the casual hints dropped in each other’s presence were nothing more than wood for their shared fire. They grew apart from their other friends and began to grow and to change. He became more considerate, more careful, less presumptive. He no longer longed for his previous state of uniformity. Now, he longed for the dissonance that resounded in his life, the time that he had put up to chance. She began to grow and understand, began to see past the white and black that coloured her world, began to see those tints and hues of grey, those colours that were neither wholly good nor wholly evil. She became more deceptive, more cunning, less judgmental. Harsh words did not hurt her so much anymore; their potency had faded with time.

For the first time in either of their lives, they had allowed someone their trust, had given someone else the power to rule and crush their lives, had allowed someone else to know their hearts and minds. They had always imagined that they were impenetrable, unbreakable, but now, they were at their weakest, now, when they had allowed a bond to form between. For this bond grew stronger with each gentle caress and loving embrace and in the same instant in which their bond grew stronger, they grew weaker, for by allowing another person into their lives, they had opened themselves to attack and had made each other that much more susceptible. It was funny really, how such a beautiful thing like love could bring about such tragedy and hardship, how every action was a chance they had to take, not just a calculated manoeuvre. For another person’s actions was not something that could be counted up and spat back out; no, their actions were as much theirs as their lives were theirs, and nothing could take out something like chance in such an equation. A faulty equation love was, but a necessary one. The sort of equation that causes hardship and tribulation, weddings and funerals, the sort of equation that makes the world go round. They soon grew to love this equation despite all of its defects and they grew to know and understand each other intimately.

But eventually, fate pulled them apart.

The girl was the one who first accelerated the natural cycle of attrition that had already begun to take place. Her doubts about their relationship and about the boy in particular were profound and couldn’t be shoved aside by any measure of the word. She began to worry that she had drifted too far from her ideals of right and wrong and had already begun to drift much too far from her friends. She began to ignore the boy in favor of her friends, began to believe that the thing they had together was nothing special. The time the girl and the boy spent together became hasty and quick, nothing more than superficial greetings, a superficial message. Their kisses and caresses became empty, and their passion quickly dissipated. The mutual understanding of indifference became pronounced, and they agreed to bury all evidence of their past love and move on, away from future they had once believed was in store for both of them. The teasing little smiles were generated no more, and their eyes no longer twinkled when they passed each other in the hall. They had become strangers to each other once again, and their barriers were quickly and painstakingly reconstructed under different roofs, as each sought to bury the remnants of their momentary weakness and blip in their lives. They counted each other off as nothing but past mistakes – mistakes that they knew nobody else would ever understand.

The girl was the first to recover. She plunged herself wholeheartedly into her schoolwork, studying more than ever, hoping to try to blot from her mind the boy that would still haunt her thoughts and her dreams if she let him. She became extremely immersed in the lives of her friends – and even joined them in a harmless prank or two – but more than that, in order to right that perception of the world that had strayed so far from her black and white palette, she became more than overly concerned about Harry, about his welfare, about the world. Her ideas about Voldemort and the Death Eaters became more pronounced and she denounced them more loudly than ever. She became a decrier of the evils of the Hated One, the Nameless One, the Horrible One – appellations were never at a loss in her mind, and she used them effectively – perhaps, overly so – in a desperate attempt to try to right the wrong that she feared had blemished even her own soul. But late at night, when the other girls lay sleeping peacefully in their beds, her thoughts often drifted back to that boy that her heart still loved and she wondered, more often than not, if what she had done – alienating herself from him like that – was the right thing to do. She could never give a real, precise answer to an unanswerable question, but still, she liked to ponder a reality that could only exist in her perfect utopia. Yet despite her doubts, she continued to struggle onward in her quest for cleansing and beautification, pushing all of her doubts out of her mind until well after the struggle. And as spring turned to summer turned to fall, she became more and more immersed in a struggle that she believed in only halfheartedly, but with which she approached with a glowing optimism, real only on the bare surface of her fated existence.

The boy, likewise, tried desperately to remove all that had been done and all that had been said from his mind, as if in an attempt to purify himself and make himself whole once more. The girl had destroyed all of the notions that he had previously taken for granted and had brought his faith in the Dark Lord crashing down around his ears – for a girl like her, he could never kill, could never torture, could never hurt. She had stolen his heart during their brief alliance, but he refused to listen to that voice inside his heart that screamed its deafening proclamation to his muffled ears. But he did not want to believe that this girl – this girl who had become indifferent to him – could rule his life, and so, he began to push all the lessons she had taught him out of his mind one by one, by sheer force of will and nothing else. He garnered up his strength and renewed his position as the Slytherin Prince with vigour, putting others down with a renewed spirit and a renewed soul that needed to find solace in a false superiority. It was with hooded eyes that he watched that girl recover from him so quickly, saw with hooded eyes and a contemptuous snarl the way her spirit became vibrant once more and how quickly she returned to denouncing his former way of life. And as much as he loved her, he hated her – hated her for her brilliance, her excellence, her spirit, and her unbreakable will, hated how she didn’t need him like he needed her, hated how she could so easily shrug him off and return to her old ways, hated how she made him feel weak and vulnerable, like a piece of dung on the side of the road. But more than anything, he hated the way she treated that red-headed boy, that Weasley, hated how that girl, before long, began to find comfort in another’s arms and yearned after different lips. He always felt repulsion at the mere sight of the two together in the halls, his arm wrapped casually across her waist. He yearned to smack the boy, make him see sense and see how he was defiling her noble personage with his filthy ways, but he couldn’t, because that girl, that wonderful, ingenious girl was no longer his.

Yet, if he had taken the time to study that object of his affection even a little longer, he would have noticed how her smile never quite glowed anymore and how her eyes, now, always seemed to hold some deep, unbearable silence. Sure, she laughed at the jokes of her friends and was as attentive as ever in class – maybe even more so, if that was possible – but she was not happy. She had run into the out-stretched arms of another, only to find that he was not the one she was looking for, as if she had searched so long for a treasure and had finally found it, only to have it misplaced once again. That boy, her new boy, was a kind and affectionate boy, short-tempered and fiery, and she loved him like she loved a brother, but she had mistaken that love for true love, having desperately wanted to find peace after she had unknowingly broken her own heart in two. She had run too fast and too rashly into another sticky situation, and she just couldn’t bring herself to break the heart of the one boy who had loved her for as long as she could remember.

And so, she was stuck in a terrible dilemma, while the war raged on around her, pulling everyone in from both sides. The war was a time of hardship and betrayal and a time in which even the littlest of eyes soon recognized the futility of humanity. But it was with raged breaths and beating hearts that she finally stumbled through the war alive, the only surviving member of the Golden Trio – as the world called them. While the world at large rejoiced in their homes and enjoyed the new freedom that came with such news, the girl mourned her celebration, mourned the fact that such freedom had to come at such a price.

The boy meanwhile, had also survived. He had played an essential part in the war, serving as a servant to both sides. The girl had changed him too wholly, too completely for him to be blinded by blood again, despite the fact that he continued to rationalize his actions with thoughts of righteousness and nobility. But deep down, that special girl was never too far from his mind because he had since come to accept the very fact that she had changed and would continue to change his life forever. And, in a way, he accepted this change because she had wanted this change. He loved her with every fibre of his being and knew that he had chosen the winning side more to ensure her survival as best as he could than for any other reason, whether right or wrong.

When he had heard of the death of that boy that he still thought she loved, he had not been happy like he thought he would have been prior to the boy’s death – no, he had been saddened because his only wish now was to see her happy. Such a noble ambition, he had come to sustain, but it was not noble to him, no, but craven and despicable because even though he had changed for the better, he still regretted how soft and weak he had become at her hands, for he was no more than a pawn at her disposal whether she knew it or not.

In the weeks and months following the war, they met on more than one occasion, and he was often startled by the ways her eyes could twinkle and her mouth twitch upward in a smile so soon after the war. He did not know the meaning of this and was troubled by it, but did not think to question her happiness or apparent disregard for the boy that had once been her lover – her happiness was reason enough for him.

The boy did not know then that it was for him that her eyes twinkled and her mouth smiled. She felt it almost vulgar that she should be so happy at the sight of a boy that she had long since marked off as a slight dalliance. But she could do nothing about the butterflies in the stomach or the way her face blushed a beautiful shade of red at the sight of him. People said that she always seemed happiest in his presence and she dared not disagree with them, although her mind screamed out her frustration.

She did not wish to be tied to this boy once again like she had so many years ago, but now, the attraction almost seemed fatal. They had become acquaintances again during the war due to his position as a spy and hers as an Auror, but now, they had become friends bonded by the terrors of a blighted humanity. She did not know what to do when faced with this attraction of hers for that reformed boy, and so, she continued on, uncertain of what aim she should try to achieve.

But more than ever, she found that she could no longer ignore the way shivers jolted down her spine every time their hands brushed together and the way the air around her became instantly warmer in his presence. So, when their hands had brushed accidentally once again on the path to a nearby teahouse, with halting breaths, she had slowly slipped her hand into his, gently at first, and then firmly. Avoiding his gaze, she had continued walking, but she could feel the blush creeping up her cheek, desperate for attention and hidden only by a shock of honey-brown hair, tamed with time.

He had looked quizzically at her for a second as if locked in some sort of an internal conflict before grasping her hand firmly in his and bringing her body to his. He felt her breaths rise against his chest and they breathed together, as if one with the world. It was with halting gestures that he lowered his face to her and brushed those lips that he had longed to taste again for so long. And he broke away, just as quickly, sorry for his actions – sure that she didn’t feel the same – before he felt her beautiful gaze resting on him again, telling him intimately with her eyes, words that they both could never have spoken if given a lifetime.

But they didn’t need words when they had eyes and lips and hands, and he accepted her beautiful apology and admission with his own recognition. And they understood each other perfectly that day because they had, in that one, pristine moment, been made one.