Shipping Draco with...

[aedifica]

Draco's comment to Daphne a few weeks ago seemed to me to imply that he fancies someone, and I started wondering who. Then his comment to her today that "If [he] well and truly fancied a girl there are very few things that would stop [him] from asking her out" seems to imply that if there is someone he fancies, there's something big standing in the way. Perhaps she's a Muggleborn, who's in service to a friend of his?

Comments

[kiya]

I think it's also clear that Draco genuinely respects Hermione - I mean, he can't resist twitting her (and she can't resist twitting him), but when he was looking for practical advice on how to get through the Notts' party without losing a handle on his faculties, he immediately figured that she might know something he didn't.

He has a lot of self-hatred going on, and a lot of personal ghosts. (The bit a while back where he said something like, "You mean you don't have nightmares every night? How interesting" - I think to her! - about broke my heart.) There aren't a lot of people who have any earthly idea what his life and interior narrative are like, and he's not forthcoming about any of it.

He wants to be a better man for someone - I thought when I saw some of that stuff it was Pansy, but a lot of the stuff that might be him thinking about Hermione as stuff that I parsed as "I don't really want to break up with Pansy but I feel that I fundamentally have to". I'm not as sure what 'being a better man' means to him, except that it includes some sort of dealing with that self-hatred somehow.

And I don't think he's shown it to many people. And it would take someone who actually knows something about it to help him deal with it.