A/N: Warm-up challenge. Prompt: "commitment," Draco's pov required.

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Her voice has gone brittle again, like a glass I want to break. It does this when I've disappointed her, which is more often than not.

I tell her people don't change overnight. She says she knows, her expression sometimes softening, sometimes hardening. Resentful of the reminder, I guess, but she needs it.

She is patient. More patient, I suspect, than she ever was with Potter and Weasley, who couldn't keep up with her brilliance.

"Our relationship isn't Charms homework," she says.

But I catch the fleeting frowns, the way her eyes shift away when I dismiss a house-elf too curtly, or forget to thank it (or refer to it as an "it"), or, Merlin forbid, state the fact that Weasley's family is too poor to have had a house-elf at all.

Apparently, redemption means one can no longer state facts. At least, not ones involving freckle-plagued exes.

Tonight, the brittleness, the hardening behind her eyes, has an edge that's sharper than normal. It worries at me like a splinter.

"We've been planning this for weeks."

"I know," I snap. Because how could I not? (Know. Snap.)

She moves in closer, her hair a cloud at my cheek. "Meeting my parents…it's so important to me. Isn't it to you?"

I scrape my immaculate nails lightly across the fabric of the couch, the warmth of her near body an accusation, a promised thing I'm not doing my part to earn.

"But I won't…know what I'm doing. I don't know Muggle…things." I stare straight ahead, pretending to ignore the tickle of her curls. Their cherry blossom scent that lingers on my clothes everywhere I go, spring, summer, autumn, winter. "I'll look foolish."

Her hand coaxes my face to meet her expression, her eyes startlingly soft, like liquid chocolate. I don't understand.

"You know me. And I know you. And you are foolish. And so am I. Yet here we are," she smiles. "I love you. Let me."

Her parents open the door, letting me into her childhood home, all its magical Muggle things, mysterious as what lets me keep trying. Failing. Trying.