Title: Burden of Innocence
Rated: low R/M
Pairing: D/Hr
Story Word Count: 928
Author Notes: written for Queen of Serpents for the Spring Forward Fic Exchange at dmhgficexchange. The italicised portions are excerpts from a site that deals with those who were wrongfully sent to jail. I forgot which site, but I used the excerpts for a history paper I once had to write.

I still remember the day we had that conversation. We were sitting in The Grey Room. He didn't look at me that day, not once, with those cool, slate grey eyes of his. It was the only time he ever spoke to me of his stint in Azkaban. I don't know what drove him to talk to me about that, but I suppose it must have been something akin to guilt, madness, or even possibly anger. I don't know. All I know is that, staring at his profile as he told me his story, I had never felt so disconnected from him in my life, not even when he was in Azkaban. I couldn't relate to him. I couldn't comfort him. I couldn't understand the burden he went through.

Going to prison is like a death, the death of the soul.

Some say he went crazy during his confinement, they say that he gave up on life. But that's not true. He would never give up; he was too good for that. Giving up was the easy way out, and he wouldn't do that, couldn't do that. He battled with every problem he ever had and he always won in the end. He never failed. No, he was just a changed person. Gone, were the beliefs on life and the perception that life and the world were separated into black and white, right and wrong, with its clear-cut evils. He went into prison a man; he came out a shell.

They take away that part that makes you human and replace it with a number, a uniform.

I always used to say that his eyes were the only things that made him seem human to me. Everything he did was too perfect - even for me. His eyes, the ones that I had loved to lose myself in whenever I was around him, changed. They weren't molten pools of silver that displayed his emotions to the world. They were hard chips of stone, barring anyone from seeing into his soul. To me, he wasn't human anymore. He was still there, but I couldn't help him. I couldn't reach to him.

In the eyes of society, you are an evil, soulless thing – the living dead – left to rot in a place where the only people who see you are those who don't care.

I remember when he first came out of Azkaban. I was sitting in our room, and he stumbled out of the fireplace. I didn't know who he was at first, and I dropped the glass of Chardonnay I had poured myself earlier in fear. A tinkling sound alerted me it had broken, but all that was forgotten when he revealed himself. He was so skinny, so pale. He didn't resemble the man that had gone in. That man was full of life, he loved me, full of control, and he was my lover. The man that was standing in front of me looked as if his world was gone. But he stumbled into my arms and held me as if I was the only anchor that kept him in this frothy sea known as life.

When you come out you feel like nothing. You are nothing in the eyes of society.

Oh how he held on to me, sobs wracked through his body when he pressed his body against mine for the first time in four years. We held each other that night as our hands reacquainted themselves with our bodies. I don't know if I would have done anything different if I had known that it was the last night I would ever see the man that he once was again.

The world has gone on turning without you and no matter how hard you try, you can't seem to be able to jump on again because it's spinning faster than you remember it ever did…

They told me, four months ago that he was wrongfully accused of performing an Unforgivable on Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley, the Unforgivable that secured them a spot in St. Mungo's permanently. Now, I knew that, and so did the rest of Hogwarts. But the world needed a scapegoat, and what other person was there, besides their childhood enemy? It was unjust, but I've become to realise that the Wizarding world is unjust. In fact, it's ridden with bribery, deceit and immorality.

Now, I was okay with a public apology, a bit peeved, yes. But the moment they told me that his sentence was useless, and that they were going to pay us one thousand galleons per month for four years as compensation, I snapped. They were going to pay him off. Seventy-two thousand galleons would be his total at the end, a mere drop in the bucket if you compared it to the money he was in control of. Moreover, they didn't care that those four years cost me my lover, my heart, my soul. They just hoped that we wouldn't press charges. I flew into a rage and did something I never imagined I would ever do. I performed an Unforgivable.

So I'm lying here, in my cell, knowing that the next four years will be a long time. But I also know that at the end of those four years, I'll be a different person, one just like my lover. So maybe then, I'll be able to reconnect with the man I loved. I won't be able to understand the burden innocence had on him, but we'll finally be Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger once more.