Disclaimer: I do not own the world of Harry Potter, and I do not own any of the characters that appear in this. They are all JKR's.
Author's Notes: I have never really written Draco before, certainly nothing Draco-centric, but I do feel rather sorry for the little bugger.
Please don't forget to review!
o.o.o.o
It's difficult, being what people want you to be.
It's difficult, living up to expectations.
It's difficult, doing the right thing.
It's so damn difficult being what people want you to be and living up to expectations and doing the right thing.
It's even more difficult, when they're three completely different images, and none of them are quite exactly you. Somehow you have to push and pull and prod and twist, until they all merge together, ragged at the edges, into an awful travesty of something that answers to your name and wears your face and feels the tortured beating of your heart, yet cannot touch the fragile, horrid soul of you. But you try not to notice, because you are good at it, because you have had lots of practice.
They broke you when you were born, you know. They did not mean to; they just didn't care. You were born a son, you were born a wizard, you were born a Malfoy, you were born Draco. You had no choice, it was simply what you were. Draco Malfoy, though, does not exist. He is a projection of his father's obsession, of his mother's deluded self-love, and he is not you. You are something else, with no name to call yourself, because you have only ever known the lie they forced you into.
No-one sees past the exterior that is your parents' construction of you. To them you are like the smooth, glassy surface of a puddle on the pavement, clear and flat and shallow, capable of being seen clearly with the most perfunctory of sideways glances; but you are really, if not a lake, then a pond, with at least that one hidden, murky deep spot that no-one could stand in or see through even if they wanted to. Most simply do not realize there is anything else to you, and those that do are not interested in the substance that makes up the filling for your pretty cardboard face. Nothing matters but your Malfoy hair and your Black nose and your vacant, colorless eyes that look exactly like those of your great-great-great-uncle, who would have been the greatest Dark Lord in history if he hadn't choked on that halibut bone at the celebration for his twentieth birthday. Appearances are everything, which is fortunate, because that is all you are allowed to be.
You know that you are more than what they think. You could do amazing things, make friends with all the smartest, the cleverest people, bask in the glow of the most powerful wizards. You are so much more than the name that they have given you.
But you are also less, because you will never quite be able to force the pieces of yourself back together again. It is, you have realized, impossible, and that maybe you were just never meant to be more than a jigsaw puzzle of a boy with only three corners, too much edge and not enough middle.
You have tried and tried and tried, until your fingertips are raw with worry and your knuckles ache from gripping your sanity so hard. Until your scalp is sore and cannot stand even the thought of anxious hands running through your hair. Until your eyes that mean so much and say so little to everyone are permanently red rimmed and grainy from meeting themselves in the mirror as they weep your heart dry in frustration. You have tried, without success, and kept trying, until there is nothing left within you but their lies.
It's difficult, being yourself.
You don't want to try anymore.