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Part I.
Draco malfoy is proud. He is 11 and he resembles his father. He paints himself in Lucius Malfoy's image as accurately as he possibly can. He mimics the haughty and important nose tilt. He watches as his father walks like the world bows down to kiss his feet and Draco vows to himself that one day he will feel as powerful as his father looks.
Draco Malfoy hears the name Harry Potter in many different inflictions. He hears it whispered in tones of awe when he watches an old wizard converse with a slightly younger witch, both with unmistakable glints of hope in their eyes. He hears it in words that speak of question and doubt, words that are intermingled with mentions of You-Know-Who, spoken by wizards scarred by war. He hears it sneered by some, in ways that are distinctly hateful and bitter, expressed alongside grievances over the fall of the Dark Lord.
Draco Malfoy tries to reserve his judgement. Tries. He cannot deny himself that wants to meet this Harry Potter. He is itching for that glorious first day at Hogwarts where he will meet the mysterious Harry Potter. Maybe he isn't as wonderful as he is made out to be. Maybe he isn't as good and powerful as he is rumoured to be. Draco fights, and fails, to suppress intrigue over this golden identity.
And so Draco Malfoy meets Harry Potter. (The first time he meets him, he does not know him. He later remembers, and decides to make himself forget, that his curiosity was piqued by the scruffy boy in Madame Malkin's robe shop.) Oh yes, he meets him, meets that little brat who has the nerve to deny Draco Malfoy his alliance. Following that disgraceful meeting, Draco Malfoy glowers at every mention of Harry Potter the entirety of the year. Harry Potter is a boy who Draco swears to himself he will antagonize for the rest of his life if he has to, because no one, no one, has the right to make Draco Malfoy feel stung and betrayed with just a single sentence upon meeting him. And so Draco carries on, striving to be the image of a proud, untouchable, and powerful boy, never missing a chance to bear his fangs at Potter. Potter, who has glory and luck and happiness thrown at him from all sides. Potter, who gets everything Draco wants, though Draco wouldn't ever actually admit (even to himself) that he wants that.
Potter, who he vows to hate for eternity.
Part II.
The summer after his first year after meeting the Golden Boy, Draco fumes, and rants, and fumes some more. "Potter, with his hair, and his broomstick." Damned Potter. Draco knows all that glory is undeserved. The git doesn't do anything, anything to deserve it at all, and gets fame and glory for spinning fat tales about meeting You-Know-Who, because he knows that's exactly what will get him most recognition. The absolute filthy git.
Draco feels wonderful, wonderful glee and elation that year, when practically the entire student body believes Potter to be responsible for the near-murders of students, even if that means he is thought to be the Heir of Slytherin. How ridiculous. How could anyone believe that Harry Potter, with a head so hollow you could use it as a drum, could be cunning and smart enough to be the Heir of Slytherin. Nevertheless… His suffering still brings Draco happiness. And so does the fear he sees in that mudblood Granger's face when Draco declares the muggle to be the next target, and he is happy as long as he can use the fear that spilled out of the Chamber of Secrets as leverage.
Part III.
“Potter,” Draco spits.
Potter, whose head will grow to be bigger than his entire body and soon enough will require a team of helpers to carry it for him (helpers that will throw themselves at his feet and kiss his arse the second they are offered the opportunity.) The absolutely pretentious git. Draco smirks and plans and gloats at Potter's weakness for dementors. If Draco ever needed proof that feelings were a weakness, here it was. He curls his lip, his life's goal to irritate Potter. And if he can take down a hippogryph while he's at it, even better. Glorious payback. Simply glorious.
Until that is, Potter thwarts his plans without even trying, again.
Miserable arse.
("Potter is, not me.")
Part IV.
Draco narrows his eyes at Potter as he battles and claims victory over a dragon, as if it's an every day thing. He has never know anyone else to be so infuriating as Potter. Merlin, why is the git so good at escaping death. (And why is he so damn good on a broom.) Draco growls at himself for thinking that later that night, storms outside, gets on his own broom, and shoots off, over the forest.
The utter idiot. Who in their right mind would stay at the bottom of a lake just to make sure that no one else got stuck down there? (Oh right, Potter isn't in his right mind.) That takes some ridiculous lack of any sense of self preservation. (And maybe a death wish?) What. A. Gryffindor.
Nothing shines brighter in Draco's heart than triumph over Potter. Having the Skeeter woman aid him in his Make-Harry-Potter-Miserable-Mission is simply delightful. Draco grins wholeheartedly and purposefully evilly nearly the entirety of the year.
Part V.
It's a great year, Draco can't deny that.
Umbridge is, to put it simply, one of the best things to happen to Hogwarts.
Draco plays his role perfectly, plays it right into her tightest circles and settles himself there, gloating, as Potter flares and fights and rages at all the chains set up around him. He reminds Draco of a chained dragon.
Draco can practically see it in Potter's eyes these days. He starts fuming slowly at first, like smoke coming out of a dragon's nostrils. His eyes flare, and Draco imagines the dragon rearing, and expelling flame from deep down, out into the sky. Potter's magic is parallel to his emotions; Draco feels it rolling off of him in waves, and Draco revels in it.
Out of control, he is. Draco thinks. Potter lives entirely based on his emotions, and it's quite pathetic really. He floats along, going wherever his emotions take him. It's just so predictable. It's unbelievable.
It's like, when Draco had burst into Potter's train compartment at the beginning of the year, every reaction he had to what Draco said was so damn readable it was ridiculous. The way his eyes were lit up with joy and contentment while surrounded by his friends. The way the hatred swirled into them when he saw Draco standing in the compartment door. It amuses Draco greatly, how easy and simple Potter is. His large green eyes, the very windows to his every feeling. He loves to watch for these flares in Potter, it makes Draco feel wonderful, to see how much effect he had over the boy. To see that the effect Potter had on him, was mutual.
He pretends that everything didn't come crashing down the damn day Potter and his fucking army of pathetic Longbottoms and smily Weasels got his father into Azkaban.
Part VI
Absolute loathing. Draco Malfoy boils with it, even on a calm day. It's all Potter's fault. All fucking Potter's fault that his father is stuck in Azkaban and his mother's hands never stop fucking shaking these days. Draco hates him, hates him so much, hates him for his father, hates him for his mother, but also hates him for his fucking goldenness. Draco's inescapable livid fury lives with him, and it heightens in a blaze when Draco is assaulted by his memories of how Potter makes him feel. He feels enough as it is. It's disgraceful to feel this much, he knows it. He fights it. Feelings, he thinks for the millionth time, are for the losing side. I must become - no, not become, I am stronger than that.
And so Draco feels glee when he is set the task. He tells himself it is glee. He brags about his high status in the Dark Lord's ranks. He uses that as leverage to put more meaning behind his smirk. He feels that if he looks like he knows something it will prove to be more infuriating for Potter. --damn feelings. He will make his father proud. He will make his mother, proud. He will redeem his family's name in the eyes of the Dark Lord, and there will be only power to gain after that. He puts that confidence in the forefront of his mind, and places the fear (which he denies is there most of the time), in the back of his mind. He will succeed. And he will not be weak, and will not let feelings take hold.
Then, the haze comes.
It filters his senses. He thinks - no, he knows - it's roots are in the fear he feels. It's not a mild fear anymore. It snuck up on him when he was too busy plastering on his confident mask, and he didn't notice the haze it brought along with it. Sometimes there is ringing in his ears. Sometimes he just notices himself standing, staring. At nothingness. (Maybe he wishes he could disappear into it). He feels holes in his existence. There are parts of him missing. He looks greyed when he looks in the mirror. Nearing black and white.
When he looks himself in the eyes he is surprised with how good his mask is. He has been sculpting it for years, after all. And that mask doesn't betray his fear into his eyes. But it also doesn't feign confidence anymore. It just looks blank. A hole in who he is. He never thought fear could eat away at him like this. He knew, of course, that the weak were affected by fear. They could be manipulated by it. They could be controlled by it. But he was strong, wasn't he? He didn't let himself feel feelings? Affection? Contentment? Peace? (He didn't believe in love.) (He would, later.) How could fear affect him so? He felt betrayed by his own self.
Oh, Harry Potter.
Draco doesn't really like looking at him much any more. Its like looking at the sun. No, maybe not quite like that. More like hot, burning coals, Draco thinks. You can stare at them for as long as you like, and then you start to decide that you never want to look away. They're deeply inviting. Everyone is drawn to them. They're the heat of a room. The life and soul of a place. A bright fire goes out fast, but coals can live on for ages and ages, and may look like they've burnt out but they're still going, the life of warmth. And so Harry Potter is just like that, after all. Draco didn't want to look at him. Draco tells himself that he is cold and therefore does not want warmth. Warmth is dangerous because if he got too close to it, he might never want to leave. He sees Ginny Weasley, through his haze, feel the entirety of that warmth, and be granted the warmest coals. (You can't feel jealousy if you don't feel some form of love, so Draco pretended that what he felt was not jealousy. He pretended that he did not feel at all.) He could feel the tingle of that warmth, however, on the back of his neck sometimes. He knew Potter was watching him. Potter was always watching him. It was best to ignore. He did not want to know warmth.
Dumbledore offered peace; Draco had wanted peace. He wanted to accept, but the opportunity was wrenched away from him. He decided that that meant he did not deserve peace.
He did not deserve warmth. He does not deserve warmth.
He lets himself be led home by Snape's icy grip, and even icier glare. It was in the cold, where they all belonged after all.
Part VII.
Everything was frigid. Sure, Draco was always mean. Draco had always been cold. This was nothing new. He was used to this by now. (He thinks that he should be used to it, anyway.) Draco was sharp angles and stone cold glares and bite, bite, bite. He would've liked to say that he didn't love. That he'd never felt it. But he knew, oh he always knew, that he unequivocally loved his mother. He knew it, and he didn't like knowing it. It was something soft. And soft things are a weakness. And Draco was now entirely ice.
Love, he felt, was something for the losing side to realize too late, that the key to power was in prioritization and strategy, abandoning anything that could be a hindrance. In prioritization, there is no room for things such as love. In war, there is no time for soft things. For warm things. War was no time for weakness.
That was what he always told himself, and continues to now. He pretends that whispered words in locked bedrooms do not mean all that much, spoken while huddling for warmth and safety. He tries to stop the shanking of his mother's hands, but that was a difficult task now, when he himself hadn't felt what it was like to have steady hands in months.
He never wanted to admit that sometimes he became aware of the hollowness inside his chest, as if it was as dark and empty as the hallways of the manor that he was too scared to wander alone, the echo of a hiss seemingly trapped in the wallpaper. In the floor boards. In between the walls. It wasn't always that hollow. Sometimes he'd feel like his heart had multiplied in size and was trying to end itself. As if it's beats were numbered and it was going as fast as it could, in attempt to quicken the process. Like it was begging for death.
On those days his hands shook too much for him to hold on to anything. Anything except his wand. They never said a word about it, but their wands never left their sides. His mothers freezing palm in one hand, his wand in the other. Sometimes they saw his father. Lucius bursting in the room. A flinch mirrored by Draco and Narcissa. Lucius standing there, as if all the pride and honour their family name once had that he had been holding up with his shoulders was now always laying at his feet in shattered pieces. The whites of his eyes too prominent, the features of his face too wild.
Draco considers Lucius' appearance, and decides that it embodies that hollow feeling in his chest. Draco suppresses the mild fear regarding where his own hollowness might lead him, as he has learned to always do with fear, but now there is a strange whisper coming through that hollowness sometimes, that makes him consider that maybe he should reconsider that oppression. That he should reconsider some other things as well.
But...he can't afford to do that. Not here. Not now. Not ever. Not in a future that's smeared in the grey fog permeating everything, in the pooling blackness of the Dark Lord.
There is... there is one thing that stands out to him in the greyness. In the smog. He refuses to look at it, afraid that it will go out like a pale star in the night sky when you try to look directly at the pinprick of light. But there is a little glow, a heavy stone, warm, deep in his chest. A warmth that refuses to be smothered, like a flame defying the laws of nature and continuing to burn even in a glass with no oxygen left. But as long as it burns, he will refuse to look at it. As soon as he looks at it, it will flicker, and snap into darkness, leaving him robbed of everything he's ever known.
He wonders if anything exists, if there is no light to show its there. Does he have a heart, if he has not felt a feeling in months? Can you say there is space, if there are no objects to measure it between? In a starless, moonless night, the universe is as large as the witness. How big is he, void of everything? Does he exist, without a witness?
Months pass, and he is a starless sky.
Then, the light hidden behind his periphery flickers, and oh so infinitesimally, burns brighter. His heart pounds in alarm. The name he's so used to hearing whispered and growled as a taboo in the dungeonous walls of his home, the name he can't bear to say aloud himself, the name the Dark Lord curses in blood curdling whispers -- is uttered once again.
Harry Potter.
Harry Potter, is coming to the Manor. Harry Potter, is captured, bound, and being dragged to the Manor. Or so they say.
It happens in a blur. A group arrives and he sees Granger, Weasely, and a disfigured form. A disfigured form that's unmistakeably Harry.
He is looking into the pale flame, and it does not go out. He is looking directly at the light that's spent the frozen months cowering in slightest breezes, so close to burning out. He is looking into the eyes of Harry Potter, and the flame ignites with a deafening, cracking, boundless roar, and he is electrified into life. He is looking into Harry Potter's eyes, and he begs for a witness.
Lucius's hollow voice paired with a vice-like grip hisses in Draco's ear, but Draco does not hear it. "I don't know." He hears his voice reply, outside the bounds of his volition. "I can't be certain, I don't know." His father's hissing continues, grows, crescendos, but his own voice is locked once more and he is vacant to the world, insides cracking open by the violent thawing of his heart.
His burgeoning heart trembles and rises and cries and sends nausea spinning into his every limb at the screaming cries of Granger's torture, sends dizzying lightness in his head as the horrifying sounds of Potter and Weasely and the house elf merge into one, and almost bursts into shreds at the warmth of Harry Potter's hands gripping his own in a grappling battle for wands, a battle he never intended to win. His hands give way, his eyes mutely boring into Harry's; eyes that stare back, bewildered, manic, and then, just as quickly, gone.
Part VIII. The Final Battle.
Harry Potter's hand reaches down from the sky into the desolation blazing around Draco's every side, and Draco feels his weight struggle against the forces of gravity and flame and life and death and something outside all of this. Their clasped hands pull, and he is dragged up into the flameless air by arms he swears his life to, and he is on the back of Potter's broom, clutching blindly at the boy's frame, both of them bent tightly around the broom, zipping through the darkness of clouded smoke.
Cold, clean castle air breaks onto their faces, and Draco Malfoy has indebted his life to Harry Potter.
Then, Harry Potter lies dead. Harry Potter lies dead, lies motionless on the cracking stones of a dead courtyard, lies witness to all the eyes of everyone who has ever loved him and lived to see him die.
Inside Draco Malfoy, something breaks. The pale flame flickers, shakes, and burns brighter than the sun, exploding into a fiendfire through every limb. He is going to die, he thinks. He is on the winning side, but, a dying star's final act is an explosion beyond the limits of its sky.
Inside of him, memories burst forward, and he is lost in a sea of every emotion he has never felt. He sees Harry Potter, age 11, turning down the friendship of a snobbish brat in favour for those who will love him as much as he deserves. He sees Harry Potter, age 12, fighting for the smattering of injustices imbedded in every inch of this school that ever allowed the secrets and whispers of the Dark Arts to remain unheard, the deaths of thousands sealed in fate by every mild remark implying blood superiority, destined to ignite the passions of Death Eaters decades later, saturated by time and prejudice.
Perhaps things left untended to, unwitnessed, can grow and fester just the same, and all they'll be is wild and untamed, left to the raw and unbidden creations of nature. Perhaps Draco and everything left unwitnessed in him has yet to be born, unwitnessed roots of neglect and dreams and pain and love, all molded into a creature of their own. Perhaps Draco has yet to be born at all.
He sees Harry Potter, age 13, dreaming of a world to be better than the one he's ever known, imagining a life that his fate had repeatedly denied him. He sees him laugh, sees him joke, sees him cry, sees him live.
He sees Harry Potter, age 14, fighting for his life in a war too old for him, his own life too young for it. He sees each card stacked up against him in the fucked up destiny written for him by people he's never met, controlled by hands he never chose, and thrown into a rink against the persistent opponent, death, and coming out victorious. He sees him clutching a dead body. A dead body, in the arms of a child framed as a soldier of fate.
He sees Harry Potter, age 15, despising his destiny, and all those that put him to it. A destiny eternally cruel.
He sees Harry potter, age 16. How did he go on, after all that time? He sees Harry Potter, watching him. He wonders what he saw.
He sees Harry Potter, age 17. Dead.
He sees Harry Potter, lying at the feet of a wizard who's only ever known death and demise and ruthless revenge, and he wants to laugh. He wants to look into the face of that creature that calls himself a man, a Lord, as if power and forced obedience could ever earn him a life worth living, and he wants to spit in his fucking eye.
Then, everything stops.
Everything stops, because Harry Potter disappears.
Harry Potter disappears in a swift motion of an invisibility cloak pulled over his head, and Draco Malfoy knows that he will get a second chance at life.
Harry Potter is alive, Voldemort is dead, and Draco Malfoy stands a chance against the empty expanse of the universe, because he knows once all of this is over, he will have a witness.