Knife-Edged
I can feel you.
I wake up most nights now, your breath hot on my neck and your voice whispering in my ear. But it's satin sheets and silk pyjamas sliding across my skin, and not your hands. It's never you, just remembered moments and encounters and a thousand fantasies that never see the light of day.
I want you.
It took me a long time to admit that, to admit that I wanted you and needed you, that it was for that reason that I despised you...well, mostly for that. Your poor choices of company have always baffled me, although Granger does prove herself useful. But I could never forgive you for choosing that...weasel over me.
I want you.
I'm from one of the most highly respected and important wizarding families, with my bloodlines stretching back to Salazar Slytherin himself, and you took up with that red-haired clod with more muscle than brains. And you, you're nothing but a poor half-Muggle, with two dead parents and a wretched home, and the only things you've ever had are a life-long enemy and this school.
I need you.
You always wonder exactly why I keep taunting you, keep rubbing salt into your wounds, and the answer is simple: I have to. The more I make you feel like nothing, the more you see me. The harder I push you, the more you push back. It's an arousing combination, the feeling of hurting you and your rebellion against it.
You never see, you're never quite smart enough to figure out just why I keep myself in your view. The weasel's just brawn and bluff, he never understands and he never will. He just thinks it's because I enjoy proving that I'm better. It's not that, really. I know I'm better -- after all, why wouldn't I be? I'm someone, and you're just poor white trash with a famous name.
Granger sees it, I think. She sees things, that one, and her brain is always working to fit things into their proper slot. She watches as we fight, as I taunt you and you take it because you're too good to fall to my level, and she knows.
It's not in me to hate her, not with her brains and her talent. She might beat me in school, but that's not the issue. It never has been. On some levels, she is my perfect match. She's got the brains, the ambition. The only thing that prevents her from doing what I do is her scruples, and half of them would vanish with you, if you were gone. The only reason I taunt her it to hurt you.
You. Ah, you. You're nothing like me, you're too good, too virtuous, too pure to be seen associating with someone like me. You and I could never work and yet, don't they say that opposites attract?
I want you.
I want to own you, possess you, make you mine and make you nothing because that's what you are. Nothing. You are nothing but poor little Potter, everything gone wrong in your life and the only thing to show for it a scar. I am someone important, someone stronger, smarter, better than you on so many levels I stopped counting so long ago.
I don't lose to you because you're better, I lose because then I can keep coming back. If you lost to me, you'd be such a fucking good sport about it, never claiming foul, not jealous or enraged. You'd just look at me, say "Good game, Malfoy," and slide off. Your little entourage might be the belligerent ones, but you are the one I need and you'd just walk away.
So I keep losing, and I keep taunting you and I keep coming back because I need you to hate me. I hate you, and I know just how small the jump to something more is.
After all, love and hate are just the two edges of the same knife.