Author's Note: More from my drabbles file. Warning for very high sap factor.

Summary: Hermione is sleeping and Draco pauses to look at her. Because beauty in the eye of the beholder.

Disclaimer: Not mine. I wouldn't make Draco lose his hair.

Draco muttered to himself softly as he peered through heavy eyelids, the bright morning rays of rare British sunshine playing over his face to his utter annoyance. Lifting his arm from the warm bundle next to him, he blindly fumbled for his wand, the polished wood almost slipping from his fingers. Cursing silently, he finally pointed it at the window and tilted his head slightly, wanting to see what he was doing so as not to screw up the spell and wake his companion. The wind tugged at the sides of the drawn shades and the sunlight shifted, falling across the face of the woman next to him.

Draco forgot his wand.

They had both been working hard, digging through the library for useful combat and healing magic, training, teaching. It left no time for each other, no time for even the barest of vanities. Draco's hair was frequently left unattended, now grown to brush his jaw, and generally loose, tucked behind his ears. The schedule took an even harder toll on the woman he loved.

His eyes roamed her form, the blankets thankfully tossed to the floor in her usually restless sleep. She looked tired. Her lower half was covered an old pair of his boxers, green of course, that looked shapeless on her slim body and revealed pale, toned legs that at the moment were covered with short, dark stubble. He laid his hand on her thigh, feeling the silky skin under the roughness of the hair that she would charm away the moment she noticed it was there. Her toes bore a fading pedicure, an effort on the part of her female friends to bring up the general mood, at least among the women, the color chosen for her a rich pink, something neither of them liked but she had yet to bother with changing it.

His eyes traveled higher.

Her tank top was grey and faded, bulky as well, revealing more creamy skin, starting just under a pale silvery blue-green chunk of stone hanging at her throat, held and suspended in silver coil. His eyes lingered on it. It seemed ridiculous that the girlfriend of one of the richest wizards in Britain would be adorned in anything less than diamonds, but then she was a diamond herself, brilliant and tough. The stone was starstone, a memento of a meteor shower that they watched once in silence and afterward he laughingly offered to Apparate them to where the molten rock fell into the earth. She took him up on it, challenge in her eyes and so he could do no less than live up to her expectations. That piece of it lay right next to his feet and it seemed to him an omen. So he gave it to her and he kissed her and he could have sworn she cried. And she wore it still and always.

His gaze found her hand. Her fingers were splayed on the rich satin sheets, stained in ink she could not wash off, adorned in paper cuts that marked her red in stark contrast to the near opal of her skin and the black of the ink. Her nails were cut neat and short, viciously functional, practical, just another point on the catalogue of evidence that proved her to be a warrior and scholar first and woman second. But he knew better, just as he knew that she hid a battalion of nail polish bottles in a bright array of colors in the back of his closet, waiting for the day she would have the time to do fuss a bit with her nails and the energy to bother. She would always be a woman to him that was a scholar and a warrior at the same time.

He smiled faintly and tipped his head to study her face. Her hair was a tangled mess, the bulk of it escaping the worn band she had secured it with before she fell into bed in an exhausted heap. It framed a pale face, thinner than it should have been, angled by that thinness, accented by the smudges of exhaustion painted purple and blue under her eyes, which were crusted in the corners.

She was a sight.

He smiled again, just a faint ghost of an expression that had nothing to do with amusement and everything with affection, and ducked his head, pressing a kiss to the tip of her nose that she so often tipped into the air imperiously.

She did indeed look like a sight.

But she was Hermione Granger and she was beautiful to him.