Challenges: CUtopia's Duelling Club Competition (Round 1, Arts) on HPFC; Philaria's 85 Shades of AU Competition on HPFC.

Characters: Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger.

Prompts: High Hopes (Kodaline); 2. Post-Apocalyptic, 15. Muggle/Non-Magical.

Word Count: 833

A/N: This was going to be at least 500 words longer, but I paused writing half way through and forgot what I was going to do. So have a change-of-heart instead of whatever self-destruction I was going for.

It's time to let go, go out and start again
But it's not that easy

High Hopes - Kodaline

If you were to imagine a broken world, you'd be halfway to picturing the reality of Draco Malfoy, former CEO of Malfoy, Inc. Imagine broken bottles in the lobby of every hotel, each room filthy with dust and dirt. The windows were not smashed, for no reason other than there was no point. Nobody liked the chain of high-end hotels. They didn't care when the exotic locales became wistful dreams, and cared even less when the local hotels went bust. They just didn't care.

Draco's reality had been tainted with the dull haze of alcohol and its' poisoning. His hotels, for all their faults, have never been short on the only way to get that.

At first, he drank for something to do. He was the only person left in London, after all - or at least the only civilised one. Of course Potter and his gang were somewhere, using whatever weapon they could get their hands on for sport and pathetic attempts at entertainment. They'd certainly stumbled upon a very drunk Malfoy more often than not. They would shake their heads and disappear back out in the dust of the half-gone city.

All of them, that is, except for the frizzy haired, meddlesome cow, Granger. It was as though the group only ever showed up to escort their 'friend'.

She never explained why she came, and she always disappeared by the time dusk fell, back into a city that was slowly caving to the whims of nature. In his drunken haze, Draco convinced himself of a thousand silly things: she wanted to watch him waste away. She wanted to ensure he remained drunk, that he sobered up, that he die from alcohol poisoning. She was a time traveller, using him to save the world. Or she was a witch, come to cast a spell on him.

Each was as ridiculous as the next, but somewhere along the way, he became lost in delusions. Maybe the alcohol toxicity in his liver had spread to his brain, maybe he had neural damage from falling down the hotel steps one time too many. Whatever the cause, he had become convinced that Hermione was his saviour, the one who would save him from his crimes - and, perhaps best of all, from himself.

Hermione the know-it-all reminded him of the world before it was broken. She invited ghosts into his mind by triggering a sense of security in him, and people who were long gone drifted through his dreams; his parents, dead by execution on the cusp of societal collapse. His friends, people he barely knew, people he didn't; they were all paraded before him: look at me, look what the world has been cost.

Slowly, colour seeped back into his sepia world. The greenery that had taken over London transitioned from limp and dead, choking the city, to vibrant and lush in a manner that entranced him. The stained glass windows of the church he began to venture into, to explore, were red and gold and green beneath dust that clung to his fingertips as he brushed them over the shadowy works of art.

It got to the point that, when Hermione disbanded from Potters' gang in the morning, she was more likely to find him in the church than among the clutter of empty bottles the colour of sewer water. Eventually, one of her numerous questions were gifted with an answer that wasn't monosyllabic. "It gives me hope," he croaked in a voice as coarse as gravel, "reminds me of the world when this started."

"This?"

"London. England. Civilisation, I guess. And we're both here now, aren't we? Two civilised people in a world consumed by barbarianism."

"Those are my friends you're insulting. They might be barbaric, a little rough around the edges, but it's thank to them that I'm still alive."

He was stung by her blatant dismissal of whatever it was he provided to her. "It's thanks to you that I'm in one piece right now."

"Why did you stop drinking, Draco?"

He ran his fingertips over the wings in the stained glass window, still in one piece. The hotel windows had never been smashed because nobody cared enough to bother. The church was untouched for the opposite reason: it had been left as a monument to the world as it had been, as it was before. It was a civilised myth left where its' stone walls would protect it from the brutality of nature. "I realised something. I worked out that it doesn't matter what I do with my time; the world won't care if I kill myself; it will only ever look on as I waste away. it isn't going to stop spinning because anyone had a breakdown, least of all me."

"So you're saying..."

"I realised that the world keeps spinning around, even once chaos is everywhere. And that, with people like you around, is a good thing. It gave - gives - me hope. So I began again."