Draco gasped softly. It was perfect. He had been made a prefect at Hogwarts this year, and the private rooms awarded prefects were gorgeous. The wood of the desk and four-poster bed was a lustrous mahogany, and the curtains framing the bed and windows were rich, green velvet. The walls were spare to allow the room's inhabitant his own decorations, and they too were green, for, Draco supposed, the Slytherin spirit. The room, though small, seemed luxurious to Draco. After his summer at home, the privacy would be a welcome change.
Draco paced to the desk, and pulled open a drawer. A small smile played about his lips as he saw that his things were already unpacked and neatly arranged. "The house elves of Hogwarts are well trained," he thought, admiring the new parchments and quills he had bought for the upcoming school year, so carefully tucked into the drawer. They would not stay so neat, but for now they befitted a prefect and a Malfoy.
Draco Malfoy was no ordinary Hogwarts student. He was born of a pureblood wizarding family; the bloodlines could be traced for generations. The title "pure" used to be important to Draco, but now his attitude was changing. He had observed his parents over the summer, and seen how unhappy they were. He already knew he was gay. He had not known his parents' loveless marriage would turn him off to the pureblood way of life as well.
Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy had married young, and it had not been an ill match, at first. They fancied themselves in love, until his drinking and her wild behavior turned their fancy to indifference. They had slept together long enough to produce a son, Draco, and that was it. From then on the two occupied different wings of the house. It was a marriage of convenience, not love, but strangely enough, the two were content. Narcissa carried on her affairs with younger men, and Lucius made love every night to a bottle of firewhisky.
There were his family's ties to the Dark Arts to consider as well. Lucius was a prominent member of Voldemort's inner circle, a Death Eater in the extreme. When Voldemort fell, Lucius wasted enormous amounts of money and time on his rejuvenation, but to no avail. Voldemort had vanished, and Lucius Malfoy was an outlaw. He survived with a bullshit, (in Draco's opinion,) story that he had been lured into the Dark Arts and had never meant any of it. Lucius was lucky not to be in Azkaban, and as for Voldemort, nobody knew.
The summer had been long and silent for Draco, with his parents involved in their lives and he in his. Draco had no real friends, only the pureblooded friends-of-the-family that he had only paltry ties to. With no one to write to and no one to visit, he had spent a lonely, miserable summer wallowing in his own angst. Sleep had been his only comfort, dreams his companions. He had looked forward to Hogwarts, yet now that he was here, he was apprehensive.
For there was another chapter in the saga of Voldemort: the Boy Who Lived. Harry Potter had destroyed Voldemort's powers, but no one knew how. He had been only a baby, and the only outward sign he showed of having been through any ordeal was a lightning bolt scar on his forehead. Harry Potter had been lucky, but now every Death Eater hated him. Draco's parents would have willing killed him on sight if it was acceptable, but the Dark Lord had been hated and feared, and Harry was the wizarding world's hero.
For all the family animosity towards Harry Potter, Draco knew too well his own feelings. He had hated Harry when he met him, had been bred to hate the boy that destroyed the Dark Lord. When they had first crossed paths in Madame Malkin's Robe Shop, Draco had desperately wanted to stab Harry's pale chest, to make his parents proud of him for once in his life. He treated Harry cruelly for several years, without reason or rationale. Then a change had begun to take place in his heart, and it did not bode well for the Malfoy family honor.
Draco Malfoy had fallen in love with the great Harry Potter. It had not been a sudden, defining change, but a gradual one. One day he took notice of how exceptionally brilliant Harry's eyes were, the next of his slightly crooked smile. While Draco made love to this boy or that, (the gay boys of Slytherin house were not hard to find) he would suddenly think of Harry. His heart began to die, piece by piece, until it felt as though there was nothing left. He knew Harry could not love him back, so were their roles. Their destiny was to be enemies.
Then a day came when a seen of uncertainty began to grow in Draco's stomach, a seed planted by Harry himself. It had been a normal day, unlike any other, and yet it came back to Draco in such sharp relief it could have been the defining moment of his entire life. He was in Potions, slicing some unusually stubborn herb, and his blade had slipped. It sliced vein in his wrist nearly through. Blood gushed from the wound, until someone shouted an incantation that stopped the flow immediately. It had been his lab partner, Harry Potter, who should have been happy to let him bleed to death after everything Draco had done to him. But instead Harry sat beside him, almost cradling Draco's wounded arm until it could be bandaged. Even then, Draco thought he saw a hesitancy to let go in Harry's eyes, or was it only Draco's own hopes fooling him? Harry hated him, didn't he?
Draco had been standing motionless at his desk for sometime, but now he sat noiselessly, robes swirling gracefully around him until they settled at his feet. He rifled through various drawers until he found what he searched for: a long envelope, yellow with age. He opened it nonchalantly, yet his heart began to pound. From it he withdrew paper-thin dagger with a silver hilt, in which was set a single emerald. The name Malfoy was engraved just below the hilt, into the dagger itself. Draco held it up, admiring the flames from the fireplace reflected in the dagger's cold steel. The blade seemed alive. Draco held the dagger firmly, and with a short, deliberate movement, cut the delicate skin of his wrist.
As quickly as the blood began to trickle down his arm, Draco raised his wand to staunch it. "Finite Sangre," he muttered, the blood vanishing as quickly as it had come. With a swipe of his handkerchief, Draco cleansed the dagger, and without further ceremony shut it in a drawer.
Draco had never thought about his self-mutilation until now. It reminded him of Harry, the way certain strains of music reminded him of his mother, or certain cigar smoke of father. Knitting his skin back together with the incantation was just another way of showing what he'd like most: to knit his soul to Harry's, before their ties were completely dissolved.
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