For My Sake, a harry potter fanfic

For My Sake

I imagined that battlefield. Wands blazing, corpses flying. Of which side they are, nobody knows. After all, you heroes were just minions inside one big plot, unheard, even when your screams echo and slice open the sky. And while you metaphorically sharpened your knives and heard the dull, echoing sounds of a deafening war drum, I crafted a plan to run away. Merlin knows I was good at that at least.

To you, for you, always you:

It's bizarre: me, you, us—the knowledge that if the world hadn't been in our way, perhaps we would have made it. Perhaps we would have grown old next to our friends with me chasing after articles to write and you settling as an artist after the adrenaline of stupid Auror work. Perhaps you would have bought a hideous couch to sit on while you sketch (don't pretend you don't, I have eyes, and what you draw is beautiful), and I would have tried to get rid of it, but I would have ended up sprawled next to you instead.

It's a nice dream. But the reality is what we live in, and unfortunately, none of those colorful dreams ever come true.

"Malfoy," you scowled.

It's what you always do, even if you weren't speaking to me. Granger mentions my name with her brows furrowed and eyes tentatively poking, you swat the air next to you and impatiently divert the subject. Weasley rants about my potions and "how were his potions bloody perfect again, Harry?" (it was nice to know that he envied me, I suppose, but even at that time those things weren't mattering anymore) You snort and say something fabricated about my shattering imperfection with a thesis statement, 3 reasons, and backup examples.

(I basked in the glory of it, because you looked, you saw, you observed, and you remembered.)

"Potter," I scowled back and eased my smile down into something more appropriate for when one is arguing with one's archnemesis.

(If no one was going to scowl at the perfect Golden Boy, I was going to be the one who did it. I suppose it all matched up you see: I had always been the selfish one. I had always wanted to own, and you were desperate to be owned.)

I had been waiting for this moment. I had been waiting to show my intelligence, to tease you, to infuriate you, to fall into this relieving and distractingly easy pattern that some unobservant others might even call flirting.

(I don't even deny it now. It's pathetic.)

You were shaking with rage and something else that your petty Order group would be aghast at seeing on your face, and for the first time, I noticed that this was different, whatever this was this time. The Slytherins continued to bully you until what was left of your intelligence and eloquence (I'll admit, you have those traits, just not a lot of them) was just burnt smithereens, yes, but this was bigger.

Your Gryffindor little house elf friends didn't trust as blindly as they did before, Ravenclaws were shedding their heavy tomes for cunning stealth, learning lessons from Slytherins, even the little Hufflepuff people had a steel in their eyes and had traded their "let's sing kumbaya together" attitude with a piercing loyalty to protect and even hurt, if necessary.

(And oh how necessary it all was.)

The tide was turning, not necessarily in the way you want it to, and I realized that you were feeling it too for the first time.

Instead of saying what I wanted to say, I straightened up and scowled at you, remembering that my father had said to "antagonize Potter". And let it be said that antagonizing was what Malfoys do best.

"Well, Potter? I reckon you've got something to tell me? Or are you just that inept at the skill of walking away?"

You returned the sarcasm with something as equally as witty and a smile, signaling that you thought you had bested me. Though I can't remember what you said, the flurry of owls that entered the great hall represented a snow-colored hope that I carried in my chest for the rest of the week.

Of course, hope came as a disfigured angel, warning in futile for future death.

By the next week, chaos was the new normal, and no one really bothered anymore, not even the professors. Peeves paraded empty classrooms and even filled ones, Filch limped his way across the castle, scowling at random things out of his control (which was more or less everything), and most lessons were put on a full pause or the professors would assign homework randomly and fill their classes with permeating boredom.

Except for Potions.

It was almost invigorating to see Severus, sweeping his robes across the classroom with his normal gusto. He subtracted points off Gryffindors, made fun of you, taught us more about things that can't possibly have any effect on our lives, including the several uses of Polyamorous juice and how it could be blended with pinches of nutmeg to maximize full ability of strength. I raised my gaze up to where you were, and was surprised to see that you were looking at me, too.

You were grinning at the ridiculousness of learning potions in the middle of a war, even as he deducted 5 more points off Gryffindor for "being distracted in the middle of a very important lecture, Mr. Potter."

Then he deducted 5 points off Slytherin, glaring at me reproachfully, teeth gritted, when he caught me grinning back at you. I kept grinning, even when Blaise teased me, Pansy blackmailed me to be her pet boyfriend again (she needed a beard, the poor girl, never knew how to not do things the Slytherin way), and Theo just snorted in abundance and made rather inaccurate kissing noises whenever he saw me.

That was one of the days at Hogwarts that I felt marginally close to being happy.

Outside of classes, you and the rest of the Golden Trio were planning, planning, and planning like a bunch of prudent Ravenclaws, while the actual Ravenclaws engineered offensive battle plans and long distance, 10-times-stronger stunning spells.

It was refreshing to see how the mighty had fallen, or how the weak had risen. It was all about perspectives, you see, Potter. It's perspective that ensures battle and bloodshed, sympathy and happiness, love and revenge.

But I don't expect you to understand.

We exchanged wits and battled our brains in hopeless preparation for something far bigger than what we were or what we've ever seen while the others memorized spells and exercised wands like they were toys springing out of their cages. Jack in a box, the Muggles called it. I'm not so mighty now, I know.

Illusions last, but not forever.

It was the war of our houses: Salazar Slytherin and his deviant but nevertheless useful ways, Godric Gryffindor and his damned bravery that was the best and worst of him, Rowena Ravenclaw and her honesty and pure thinking that have worn out with the progression of years, and Helga Hufflepuff, her friendly and caring trait that have condemned her and her house occupants weak.

It was our war too: the war of our generation, not just our forefathers. It had been boiling over, the anger, the injustice of it stuck itself onto raging newspapers, retaliations turned violent during official ministry meetings. When it strikes, I thought to myself, they would fight with everything they've got. Because for good or bad, it would be for a new start.

I imagined that battlefield.

Wands blazing, corpses flying.

Of which side they are, nobody knows. After all, you heroes were just minions inside one big plot, unheard, even when your screams echo and slice open the sky.

And while you metaphorically sharpened your knives and heard the dull, echoing sounds of a deafening war drum, I crafted a plan to run away.

Merlin knows I was good at that at least.

Father sent an owl during breakfast one day.

Father never sent owls, ever. Mother was the one who did the doting and normal parenting things. Weird now, isn't it?

I was to join ranks, as soon as I was of age and finished with school that year. We were hosting the Dark Lord and his other allegiances in the Blue Room for conference daily.

(Conference of how they were going to make people pay for what was not a fault, let alone their fault to begin with. Conference of how they were going to back us pay—for impudence, for disloyalty. Conference of how to murder— faster, better, stronger. That's when I realized I would never let any of your moronic friends die, let along you. None of them. And I—it seemed—always got what I wanted.)

Mother's letter was more detailed that day. She described the new inhabitants of our house. Our home, Merlin dammit.

Bellatrix Lestrange ran mad across the corridors of tightly-bound portraits who don't approve of our new, psychopathic guests with tendencies to torture a new muggle each day. Rodolphus Lestrange, who long ago had conceded his wife over to the Dark Lord, was slinking into a hysterical kind of malady that persevered and filled the Manor with sickly groans all day and all night long. Crabbe and Goyle senior were smirking each day with more poison than the last, and it seemed that's all they were good for—smirking.

Also, it seemed that mother's garden was slowly improving, but mother's signature trembled.

They've made us roommates. All of us, a Gryffindor and a Slytherin for each room.

The irony of reality makes me laugh sometimes. That was one of irony in its finest cases.

McGonagall said it was for the "inter-house cooperation and alliance." "For the war," went unsaid but I knew they were the next thing that was going to come out of her mouth before our two houses erupted into a scarce display of self-righteousness and indignation of pouting children. With the facades as soldiers and adults, we've never had time to act as immature as we've wanted to.

Weasley said it was to "annoy the bloody hell out of you," while Granger said it was to "protect you better." When you snorted recklessly in her face, she said, matter-of-factly, that I was going to protect you, because even though I didn't seem like it, I was useful, and I was going to protect you if needed.

I wondered how she knew.

(She later told me, as she brushed past me in the Ministry after everything, that I wasn't the epitome of inconspicuousness when I stared.)

To be bested by Hermione Granger…

Though I suppose it's Weasley now, isn't it? Do offer her my good wishes, Potter.

Tension was mounting.

Mother had escaped to France and left Father in all of his profligate, crumbling glory under the Dark Lord.

She asked, in one scarce and cheap-looking letter, if I knew any way to get past father's personal bank accounts in Gringotts.

I didn't.

You were smarter than I expected.

I was less of a prick than you anticipated.

We were both nothing like the grudge-holding school boys from the years before. I was not sure if that was a good thing.

"How the fuck are you done with it?!" you disrupted me, as you did, in an abundance during the time we were roommates, though I was pretty sure you didn't want to oftentimes. Sometimes I felt like you were so angry that you were just going to burst open in this brilliant firework of a fire and light everyone around you on fire.

I was surprised you never did. I was often the one who got under your skin the most, and no one ever said rooming with Draco Malfoy was an easy task.

"I work, Potter," I said as I spun around my quill in the air using magic, and I now don't even deny that I've been showing off. "I work and study in Arithmancy, unlike you, who will undoubtedly end up gossiping with Weasel and Granger or whichever one of your band of little "special" misfits managed to get into class with The Golden Boy."

"Well you know what? Maybe I don't want that, maybe I don't want to be their Golden Boy. Malfoy, has that ever occurred to you while you're all riled up in jealousy?" You snapped, no longer caring that you have knocked over your chair while tripping to get up.

"Jealousy? Oh so you think I'm jealous of you? Of you, of all people?" I narrowed my eyes, because my blood was steaming and my heart was pounding and I really could no longer bring myself to care.

"Of course, little Draco with his nonexistent friends, watching me during meals. Oh don't think I haven't noticed, Malfoy, I've always noticed," Your hair shook, and it was unfair, how much inescapably attractive I found it to be.

"So you notice that? And what's holding back from you noticing simple equations in class, Potter?"

"You! With your— " you twisted your hands in the air as if miming the process of dark magic, "stupid friends and stupid smartness and stupid answering questions like they're nothing!"

I snorted, because I couldn't help it. The contradictory phrases were amusing. You were amusing. One second you were saying I had no friends and the other I had in fact several of them.

"So why don't you learn, Potter?"

"… What?"

"I can even teach you, though it's a shame that you wouldn't have the brains for it, Potter."

It was a challenge, it was an offer, it was an insult. You scowled back with an equally daring glint in your eyes, and somehow, that makes up the start of our… whatever the hell you would call it.

"Potter, it's not that hard, okay? Just listen."

"It's not working!"

"Because you're thinking about it in the wrong way!"

"And what's the right way?" You collapsed back unceremoniously into your chair again, defeated by the complications of algebra.

"Okay," I opened the book in front of me — "The Magic of Numerology" by Septima Vector. "You're making a mess of this problem, because you're overthinking it. It's just two equations and translating the numbers to the corresponding events that happen on the chart."

"But it's not that easy, there's this whole thing with probability depending on the permutation of numbers and I just don't get it."

"Potter," I paused, "Oh Potter, Potter."'

"What?" you asked, annoyed.

I grinned at you, feeling a sudden sensation of freedom, "You little git, that's not what we're studying, not for units to come."

"But I almost got it using the permutations…" You sounded almost disappointed to be ridded of the problem.

I grinned again, "So you do have the brains after all."

Then I reveled in the sprinkle of blush around your cheekbones and smiled, besotted, for many more hours to come.

You found me in our dorm, huddled in my blankets like a child with a crumpled parchment in my hand, my books tornadoing out around me, pages ruffled and folded catastrophically.

"I—Malfoy?"

"What?"

"Are you okay?"

"Do I look like I'm okay?"

"I, I mean, do you need anything? Uh, d'you want to talk about it?"

And then I blew up. I had been looking forward to that, since nobody could bear to talk to me anymore. The Slytherins jeered of a "traitor," Gryffindors scowled in their heroic, "for the greater good" ways, and the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuffs avoided me like one of the prehistoric plagues.

"My father is in fucking Azkaban and Mother doesn't want to do anything except for sit in a dusty, collapsing chair and read non-existent, faded out words on a page, in bloody freaking France, Potter. I want them both to be alive and well, though you can't do anything about it, can you?"

Because that was what I hated: you, prancing around, helping everyone, even me, who didn't deserve your help and probably still don't.

And you looked stunned. For a second, I wondered what there was to be stunned about, before I rewinded what I had said, and oh. And oh, oh I hadn't planned this. It was my sole interaction with you that I hadn't planned so far. The control of it spiraling out of my grip and your widened eyes were somehow more terrifying than anything else I've ever encountered.

Then your eyes softened, and I almost backed away with alarm, because not you, not you out of everyone, don't let it be you who pities me, of all the things I did to you.

Then you gathered me by your side into a peculiar side hug of a sort, an embrace. The only other person who had ever done this to me has long gone into a world of her own insanity, looking for comfort in a rotting house, I realized. Then I almost started throwing my random books again, but you held on.

Savior Potter.

Good Potter.

Wonderful Potter.

And my destiny was to end up being saved by you, who at that point, was my worst enemy.

I watched the wall opposite us as your hair brushed into my face but neither of us bothered to move it. A Gryffindor red drape vibrantly burned against a Slytherin green and silver drape on its side. I fixed my eyes on the middle where the two colors blended together.

I felt your arms brushing against my shoulder blades, your hand wrapping around the curve of my shoulder. I leaned tentatively against you, feeling a teary gasp escape out of the bottom of my throat, and I decided that the two drapes looked quite good together.

Sometime, between that mercifully quiet moment in the dorms and the next calamity, you took me aside and shook my hand.

Quite forcefully, as if your hand could channel what you can't bear to say out loud.

I smiled, because your way of problem solving is and always will be ingenious but bafflingly so.

"Scared, Potter?" I looked at you, from under my eyelashes this time. I couldn't bear to say what I wanted out loud either.

"You wish."

It took time—too much time that neither of us could afford—for us to do what we wanted to.

Life stood in our way, your friends did, my friends did.

There were shortcuts we could have taken: maybe if we were sorted into the same house, maybe if we had been different people, maybe it all could have been less messy, and more fitting together.

Once, at the Reunion Ball, we danced. You were not such a bad dancer, not after I've taught you. McGonagall smiled contentedly in the background as Celestina Warbeck warbled of lost love and heartbreak: she had forced us into displaying an action "of friendship and interhouse bonding."

We glided across the ballroom, not noticing anything else.

The lights blurred, eyes blinked, and we ignored them together, stepping away as the voices murmured in disbelief. It was okay to put them away. Just for a little bit, at least with you next to me. Your dance robes were green, matching your eyes, matching me. You looked good in green.

I'd like to think that you could have looked good next to me, this whole time. But now I'm beginning to realize that it might never have been a choice.

Did I ever tell you, on Christmas (a holiday of sweet and destroyed things), Mother shipped me a box of sweets from France—the last one, probably, and told me to savor the sweet things in my life?

She was always so good at giving advice, and I was always so bad at following them.

Sometimes I miss them: my fellow Slytherins. It seemed like they were the only people who understood how I lived—betrayal, calculation, living by the pure blooded rules that are not as pure as we deem them to be—they were my family above law, family above all. Beneath of facades of grandeur, we understood each other's' heartbreak, and sometimes a quiet hand on a shoulder was better than any expressed pity or sympathy from others who had played Quidditch while we flirted with and courted death underneath our own roof. We understood how to tell cruelty away from logics, and our parents' silence taught us the fine line between the two, but there was a reason we were never selected to be put into Ravenclaw.

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if we had met in some other world. Maybe we would have gone to a pub, a muggle pub, and we would have drank ourselves silly.

Pansy would utter some sly insults in her slightly hoarse voice and tell embarrassing stories of "oh Draco has always wanted a pink tutu, haven't you Draco?" while Goyle would rave about the fries and football scores. Blaise would be there too, whenever he felt like it, subtly aiming jibes at whoever he felt like that week with a teasing smile. You, in all your ridiculousness, would try futilely to convince me to play footsie with you under the table and maybe bring your own friends along for the ride too.

And after you get over the whimsical and utter bullshit-like aspect of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson and Gregory Goyle and Blaise Zabini and Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley going to a fucking bar, you would bond with Pansy as she tells you the story of how I once frolicked in the lake with the Giant Squid and tried my hardest to learn its language.

(There's a mass murder each week on Sunday by the week after Christmas, like clockwork.)

The hallways of the shack were dark and gloomy, as they've always been. But the myriad of flickering torches illuminated areas of poorly magicked bricks, and the corridors seemed to stretch on forever on both sides of us, though it was the Shrieking Shack and we knew disillusions from reality.

You didn't speak and neither did I, except for muttered groans and silent declarations of love against salty skin (on my part, because of course it was).

I manhandle you to a wall, knees spread over its hard stone and heart palpitating. You arch up against me.

False hope, manipulation, perfection, love. It was all too close to each other for me to separate, especially with you against me. But there was one thing you had said that I'll always remember.

"I'll come back," you whispered against my mouth sometime in the infinity.

I didn't respond and just kissed you harder, making a mark on the dip of your clavicle. You gasped, silenced.

Once we were done, you stood up and gave me a look. It's a combination of everything: "We shouldn't be doing this, not again," and "but…" and the look you've always sent me: "Malfoy…"

Because that was it, the unsaid, the three little dots. I thought of all the things that they could signify while you were quickly getting dressed again, as if someone would see, would care.

As if you were disgusted of what you've done.

And because I wasn't supposed to care either, I smothered the pang of hurt when you turned and strode back in the direction of the castle, the war, your future.

The wind whistled, the shack screamed under the pressure, and I begged myself not to run off in a strot.

Then I tried not to sob when I turned to the other direction after your silhouette was fading against the rising sun and I've decided that I've watched you enough for a lifetime.

The hallways eventually led me to an abandoned garden. It was a lovely garden, my mother would have said so. Exotic butterflies and wild, dewy plants tipped around in the slight breeze. The fountain, copying the Fountain of Youth, trickled out what seemed to be the last of its golden red water, shone on by the sun. But all I saw was the cracks on the walls and the dirt caked in the ancient gazebo.

I had planned on a single "Scourgify" spell to clean the garden. Because you know how I am, though you like to claim otherwise to the blundering idiots you surround yourself with. But I pointed my wand and muttered the spell, and the walls and the gazebo sucked it up.

It seemed to be that my entire being was inside a tornado that was slowly increasing in speed. My magic went to repair the garden first, but that wasn't enough and I knew with a morbid certainty that I had to do it. Had to, not wanted to. There was a certain responsibility to rid the world of this darkness, and I suppose I knew how you felt.

Dark and light blended together, as did day and night. The next time I opened my eyes, the garden was clean, except for a streak of darkness that coated on of the bigger cracks on the wall.

I Scourgified it again, but the black scar didn't seem to want to budge. Again, again, again. The words tasted stale by the time I gave up, and I ended up on my knees. I wanted to fix, heal, move on with whatever it was that life was going to throw at me the next second, but oh, it was stubborn like I was.

I stalked out of that garden, pushing my too-long hair away. I never find that garden again. I would suppose that the dirt is still there, after all these years.

From the Forbidden forest, I watched as you heroes did what heroes do best and Deatheaters streaked across grounds as malicious slashes of black.

The house elves came out, led by Dobby. They charged with their warbled threats and silver utensils from the rubbled kitchens of Hogwarts. Dobby was ours, you know? The Malfoy house elf.

And he looked so redeemed for a moment. His crystalline, bulbous eyes trembled with a sense of heroism, a broken butter knife in his hand glinting with pride.

I was broken by the wanting to be next to you, fighting, protecting. I've missed the action, missed the hate, missed the quiet moments when we sat around, I tossed around an apple, and you studied for Arithmancy.

(I've missed you.)

It was only the reassurance that at least something—someone (because I think Granger has been infecting me with her house elf rights club) in the Malfoy household got fight on the side of what he truly wanted for the world.

I loved you.

In a way, I had cheated death. After I had left the garden, I returned to Hogwarts grounds, and the war was nearly over.

And you maybe were right by calling me a coward. It's the self preservation gene of the Malfoy family that always rings through when something worth fighting for happens, so I waited until it was over to come out.

Golden sunlight soaked the blood on the meadow in a silly way that made the bloodied battlefield look like child's play in a park. There were blurry clay figurines spread onto a tacky, fake looking green field. Some had their eyes open as if they were scanning the horizons for hope, and others spread their own version of reassurance by going peacefully silent. Birds chirped while seconds stretched out until they threatened to burst.

The grim silence prevailed; no one moved.

The lone survivors stood out, each staggering away from what was chasing them. The war was over yes, but fear was not. They did not realize that would happen. They did not suspect, did not anticipate, did not think, because though survivors they were, but built to live in this bloodied world of afterwards they were not.

Only you and I were not tripping over our own feet to try to get to nowhere. I should have been impressed.

I took a look at you then. You—Harry Potter—the Boy Who Lived, the One They Blamed Their Problems On, the One They Loved, the One They Turned Their Backs to When Convenient. Your hair flopped noiselessly against your forehead, the scar is a stunning shade of silvery white. You made quite the sight, too. Red against pale white against green, the smoldering green of yours eyes pulling me in, and quite suddenly I was staggering, too, magnetising towards you, like I've always done.

I didn't know what I was trying to do, I, frankly, still don't now. But it was going to be something, and it was going to mean something, and it was going to mark something.

I know I'm being vague and cryptic, Potter, but I do hope you understand. It meant the same thing to me as your expression did when you turned around to head for the castle that held the clamors of war.

You could have chosen me.

You know you could have chosen me.

I tried to walk towards you, but it's a shame that Ginerva Weasley beat me to it.

I tried not to feel like an anathema, unwelcome in the waves of heroes that surrounded me.

They tried to tell me that I was a hero, too. Even Weasley shook my hand and Granger just sort of looked at me with those eyes of hers. I think she knew. She would have made a good Slytherin, though it hardly matters anymore, does it? The petty fights, the House Cup, Quidditch.

The heroes were of every color: the surprising flashes of green, standing for turnabout Slytherins, the brave ones, red and gold crowed in swarms in the Great Hall, or what was left of it, yellow cocooned its safety around them in the shape of blankets and butterbeers, and the blue strength of knowledge picked up the pieces and logically preceded when everyone had too many emotions left to spare to deal with what a war leaves.

Along with survivors, there were deaths. Among victories, there were losses. And in exchange for living, I had lost you.

(And later, Weasley told me I looked white, with my shock of hair and my translucent skin. That was why I didn't fit in with the heroes: despite all their colors, I could never be one of them.)

One night, after an arduous battle with insomnia, I went back to the corridor.

You were the only one who healed my insomnia, at least for that one night after.

You were there too. Rumpled pajamas and unapologetic eyes. I desperately wanted to ask you why your hair looked like someone had shagged you against the wall.

I desperately wanted to ask you why that someone wasn't me.

"We wouldn't have worked," You sought after my approval as if it was a question, as if you wanted me to agree with you.

But what good would that do?

I don't answer, because we could have worked, Harry.

I would write, you would draw. We would shag, we would fight, we would love. We would be home anywhere in the world. I would insult you with a mediocre attempt to ridicule your skills, and you would insult back with some teasing comment about the mess that I am. You'd be right, and then the cycle would repeat again.

We'd repeat until we got old, but it would never be boring.

"What happened to being mine?" I wanted to ask.

I think I can see the answer now, but denial blocks my sight and a vague buzzing fills my ears.

You were never mine.

Fate manifested us together as a pair of irony, a paradox. It was the evil and the good, the Malfoy and the Potter. Maybe I should have been thankful while we lasted.

But it's still not too late for my mother. Ministry debts are piling, and they're confiscating Malfoy manor soon. As of the manor, I'm a little glad that the ministry is getting rid of it for us. The paintings have been abandoned a long time ago, golden gilts have been dulled with a thick layer of dust, the elves are long gone, Mother never bothers to magic some fresh flowers in the cracked vases or clean the house, and Father isn't here at all. Knowing you, you'd probably know where he is.

(It's not just the house that's falling apart.)

I hate to sink as low as this, begging for friendship and shelter with a held out hand. Vulnerability, exposing oneself, hope.

Do you remember, Potter? In first year when I did this exact same thing? You said no. No one had quite said that to me before. Outright refusal, for my friendship no less. Being the little git I was, I thought I was important, valuable, pureblood. (A lot of good that did me. Can you blame me for being bitter?) I was curious, I was hooked. That was the beginning, now I'm not so sure I want an end.

Potter, can you save us?

For my sake?

Yours,

Draco Lucius Malfoy

Malfoy Manor

Wiltshire, England