Author: of Iris
Title: "Just This Day"
Summary: 600 word drabble "He'd thought his life was over, and in a way, he'd been right, because he couldn't honestly say that he was the same Draco Malfoy."
Rating: PG
Genre: Angst
Warnings:SPOILERS.
A/N: I wrote this at 2:40 to 3:00 in the morning, while doing laundry. If you don't understand it, or if there are mistakes, forgive me please.
Draco Malfoy thought he was a bad person.
He'd be right, too, if you asked anyone. But they didn't know about the times that his father had taken a belt to his back, or the cigarette burns, couldn't see the healed ribs under his rug burned skin.
They didn't know that he had no marks on either of his arms, which his father kept perfect for the dark mark, which Draco had been hit for turning down exactly twenty eight times.
So when he goes back to Hogwarts for his sixth year, no one notices that he's quiet, that he doesn't hold his hair in place with the usual truckload of gel, the way he did his work and brought his grades back up to where they were in his first year. And he's the only one that knows that his infatuation with the dark arts isn't even minorly associated with the dark lord, purely morbid fascination with the power they bring.
Nobody notices the longing way he looks at the Gryffindor table during meals.
Over there, it's like a whole different place where, right now, the only face he might find over there that isn't smiling is a freckled face matted with lank, flimsy locks of red hair.
He'd thought his life was over, and in a way, he'd been right, because he couldn't honestly say that he was the same Draco Malfoy. The old, dead, rotting Draco Malfoy would never long to be a Gryffindor, but this Draco Malfoy was trapped inside his mind, thinking about the coming day when it would be his wand bringing down the greatest Hogwarts headmaster in history, or else it would be his hands covered in his family's blood.
The thought made him retch a little.
But, now, he'd decided that he can't let things like that bother him. And so he keeps walking like nothing's wrong, like he didn't see that freckled face matted with lank, flimsy locks of red hair in the chambers where the dark lord kept his meetings, when his own face was being crushed into the stone floors.
And he runs into that face, because it just seems to be everywhere, and he says he sorry, which sparks some confusion in the other boy.
"A Malfoy saying he's sorry?"
The thought doesn't scare him as much as it should. Malfoy pride is all just hype anyway. For every time he's told Potter, the Weasel, or the Mudblood that Malfoy's don't apologize, he's pled with his father for forgiveness ten times.
And somehow it seems appropriate to say sorry again, because maybe it was a mistake, like the mocking tone in the other boy's voice says so clearly.
Maybe it's the submissiveness, but his disposition puts the boy at odds with himself.
"I didn't mean it like that… It's nice to hear you say it."
And then he walks away, because he always walks away.
So when Draco Malfoy is lying awake in his bed that night, and he sees a freckled face matted with lank, flimsy locks of red hair, he realizes that the other boy wasn't there at what the dark lord called his "initiation," that maybe he was never there at all, because Draco Malfoy is sick, and he always has been, and always will be, even if some days are better than others.
He falls asleep, content with that thought.
FIN
A/N: I know that it's crap, but PLEASE REVIEW! so that you can tell me that it's crap.