This story is for the DG Forum's 100 Days, 100 Drabbles Challenge. Expect a chapter a day, no more than 400 words long, all D/G. This should be a lot of fun.
1. New [399]
Draco's life had always been filled with empty space. The Malfoy manor was gigantic; the ceilings were arched and impossibly high with dark-as-night corners, the floors highly polished and extending onward for what seemed like ever. The garden was roughly the size of a Quidditch field, and as a child Draco remembered most sitting by himself in a chair large enough for four of him, legs dangling, staring across years of lacquered wood at his parents on the other side of the dining table. He never swung his feet, just stretched them down stiffly until the day they finally touched marble floor.
The chair was still large enough for two of him, even now, and the shadows in the corners of the ceilings were still distant and dark. Nothing had changed since he was a child, it often seemed; he filled no more space and was still a small figure, a bit part in the Malfoy Legacy, acting out his assigned role. He walked in wide-open spaces, but trod a narrow and rigid path.
So it had always been, so Draco had imagined it always would be – trapped inside a never-ending box. And then from nowhere, Ginny Weasley had arrived and begun erecting shoddy walls of her own, tearing the old invisible ones down. Draco found himself standing frozen in a room smaller than his closet, filled with more clutter than had ever been in his bedroom. The ambient heat was upped by so much body temperature, to a comfortable, slightly musty, warmth; a sharp contrast to the cool marble he knew.
He couldn't move, couldn't force himself to take even a single step for fear that he would knock something over and it would all crash down; Draco was used to having meters of space around him at every moment and here there were only inches, if that. Red hair everywhere, people brushing past him, all talking, gesticulating, shouting, laughing, setting the table in a mad bustle that to Draco's eyes looked like just so many pinballs bouncing off each other. He feared for a crash, and claustrophobia pressed down with the knowledge that he could simply reach up and touch the ceiling.
Ginny walked over, grabbed his hand, and tugged him further into the mess, enough so Draco knew he would never escape. And in that tiny space, he moved freely for the first time.