This is an exploration of Draco's crying in the bathroom in Book 6, nothing more than a spur-of-the-moment sketch.
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Tears were precious.
Draco surrendered them rarely, almost never, struggling to keep them all within him. One couldn't go pouring them out all over at every little thing; to do so would cheapen them unforgivably. After all, he was nearly a man now (he rather liked to fancy that he already was one), and that meant that his tears should be priceless, invaluable, legendary, mythological. They should be only the stuff of whispered stories at most, unheard of and unattainable.
So why, then, did they force themselves out in a trickle when he was alone, leaning over a grubby sink with his shoulders hunched in despair? He would avoid the gaze of his reflection, unable to accept that those miserable red eyes, those contorted white lips, that uncharacteristically unkempt hair were all very much his own. It seemed so un-Malfoy—so human! This was unacceptable.
He could not snap his fingers and make everything perfect. He had never learned anything like that because, after all, weren't Malfoys always perfect from the start? Why should they need to know how to make things perfect? Here, too, he had failed, failed to be what he should, and the frustrations drew lines of tears down his pale cheeks.
Once they started, he could do nothing, and the tears would come faster and faster, bursting from him and spattering like so much blood from a wound. How could there be so many tears inside of him? Did he have room for nothing else? They flowed with humiliating strength, completely disregarding his feeble attempts to stop them. That, too, irked him, that he should be so powerless to control himself, to do something about the shocking surplus of tears.
Then there was the matter of the dead Mudblood. She floated about him, sometimes speaking, sometime silent, her frigid presence caressing the burning of his tears. By then, he was beyond caring; she mattered so little in his unhappy world. In addition, despite the insurmountable difference of their lineage, she honestly seemed to care. She never mocked him, and, most of all, he found it odd that she never seemed to notice how devalued his tears became. Perhaps he didn't mind so much because she shared his bitterness, that horrible, overwhelming sense of being alone in the world, the feeling of being as commonplace as any of the other living, breathing tools around him.
He hated that his soul, gilded in silver and robed in deep green, should be as cheap as his tears.
All it took was one moment, one gut-wrenching glimpse of those loathsome green eyes and tousled black hair in the mirror. In an instant, everything was hatred, flaming within him, yet not enough to vaporize the incriminating salt-droplets on his face. How dare Potter intrude! How dare he know that Draco Malfoy's tears were nothing, worthless as water, and that Draco himself was the same. Potter had no right to know because he could never understand. Potter was the Miracle Boy, the Perfect One, and he could cry all he wanted because everyone would always coddle him and call him precious.
In that moment, Draco wanted only to kill, to wipe out that sanctimonious, priceless gaze.
But of course he failed at that too—Potter was faster, and suddenly there was blood, so much of it. The crimson filled his vision just before the blackness, flowing and flooding, even cheaper than his tears.
Quietly unnoticed, at the base of the smudged porcelain sink, the drain carefully gathered the last of the tears like pearls.
Fin.