Why Not?
By Jonathan Moeller
Disclaimer: I do not own anything having to do with Harry Potter!! It's all the fabulous J.K. Rowling's.
This is the prequel to "Why?" (my first HP FanFic). This takes place the Christmas Vacation before Draco makes his decision.
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Draco sat on his four-poster bed in the Slytherin dorms. He was stuck at Hogwarts for all of Christmas Vacation. His dad, of course, was stuck in Azkaban. His mom, however, just couldn't bear to have him home. "You remind me too much of where your father is," she had told him. He knew it was bullshit. She was just disgusted to have a son that couldn't kill Dumbledore. He knew about the pact she had made with Snape to make sure the killing had gotten done.
He sat there. He'd been sitting there for hours, sometimes throwing his roommates' junk around the room, sometimes just thinking. He hated his life. The only friends he had were the ones that were afraid of him or his family.
He got up and walked out of the dungeons. Flying around on his broom would make for better entertainment than sitting in his room. On his way to the Quidditch pitch, Draco noticed that someone was already on a broom, but he was too far away to see clearly. Draco reached the locker room, changed into flying robes, and grabbed his broom. Before he reached the door, Harry Potter walked through, already taking his shirt off. He sneered at him, and walked past him to the shower. Draco walked out the door and got on his broom.
Idiot. What gives him the right to look at me that way? thought Draco, pushing his broom faster and faster. He steered right into the Forbidden Forest and used it as an obstacle course. He swept left and right around trees, up over the Giant Spiders' nest, and flew up out of the Forest. He turned his broom to face the castle. He sped towards it, driving the broom until it was almost to fast too hang on to.
He was heading straight for the castle wall. Let's see if Potter can top this! he thought. Just as he was about to pull up and fly above the turret, a blur of movement took him off his broom and flew him on top of the castle.
"What the hell were you doing?!" screamed Harry. "You just about got yourself killed!"
Dumbstruck at the thought that Gryffindor Golden Boy had just "saved" his life, Draco tried to respond. He sputtered, "I was g-going to pull out of-of it," he tried to explain. Then he got angry. "Where do you get off trying to 'save' me when I'm just practicing for Quidditch. Besides, what do you care if I smash myself into a wall?"
"Oh my f-" Harry got on his broom and flew away. Draco went to get his own, but it wasn't on the roof. He looked down the wall and saw his broom, on the ground, destroyed.
"Crap," muttered Draco. He'd have to spend all afternoon fixing it. He went in through a tower and made his way down to his broom. This was going to be a long day. He knew it. On his way down the stairs to the grounds, Draco met up with some first years who looked at him with fear. That's more like it, he thought.
He retrieved his broom and began to mend it, carefully muttering spells to repair the magic and wood. "You know what? This sucks!" Draco said to himself. He got up and mounted his barely finished broom and flew around to get to the Slytherin dungeons. He grabbed his sack of galleons and left to go shopping.
He got to Knockturn Alley through Floo and went straight to Malady Mim's and bought four bottles of her strongest alcohol. Mim, being a dimwitted middle-aged woman, gave the bottles to Draco half-priced due to his charm and good looks. Without a "Thanks" or "Goodbye" Draco left and was back at Hogwarts by ten.
There weren't any Slytherins still at Hogwarts, so he had the dungeons to himself. He went to his dorm, opened a bottle and chugged as much as he could, which wasn't much. He let out a string of mangled curse words at the burning sensation in his throat. He halfway choked on the air he was breathing. A few minutes passed, and so did the pain, so Draco proceeded with caution and drank more. He was wasted before midnight.