I've been kindly reminded of this sites policies, so I've had to remove the song lyrics that were where the line breaks now are. I do hope you'll still read it - or message me, and I'll send you the original version of this.
A little blonde boy steps through the barrier between the mundane world and his world, the more colorful, more special world he was born into.
He sticks out his hand, unfaltering pride and belief in his own rightness pervading every inch of his thin, fragile stature. An equally sure boy with raven hair, brilliant green eyes and a thin and fragile stature (he's that way for a different reason, a more tragic reason, but the blonde boy doesn't know that yet) stares back at him, glancing between his hand and his face for what seems to be the longest of moments.
He rejects the blonde boy and that – that colors their relationship for years afterward.
But then He returns and the blonde boy is equally less important and then more important than ever by turns. It's a hard and unstable environment, one that keeps throwing them together and then apart and neither of them really, truly knows what to make of the other. Their relationship has progressed so much past the simple dislike that colored their first year of knowing each other.
They collide more violently than ever when he's sixteen and the other lies bleeding out on the floor. All his anger, all his obsession – it melts away and leaves him so cold that the blood on his hands burns. Burns and leaves marks so deep that they can't be seen.
He aches to see the other boy rise, but he doesn't. He's not seen for days afterward.
He leaves it alone then, he's learned his lesson.
And there are other, more important things consuming his time. A witch with hair the color of flames, twinkling blue eyes and a black hand that seem to trade places in their predominance of the man possessing them both – one slowly becoming weaker, less seen, and the other growing more starkly and noticeable – and the itchitchitch of his yearly near-death experience approaching.
Fallout is a good word for the ensuing months following Dumbledore's murder. He knows he failed – he was supposed to kill Dumbledore but he couldn't, he hadn't been able to muster the resolve before the other Death Eaters burst out onto the tower. Perhaps, if he had just had a bit more time, he would've let the Headmaster help him. He wanted too – he wanted to so badly that it had coated his throat thickly and choked him – but time wasn't on his side and he watched, feeling despairfearnauseahelplessnessfury well up under his skin until he was nearly bursting with it.
Fallout describe so accurately what happened when he returned to his ancestral home that night – his mother's murder, his father's broken state of existence afterward, his own pain, and the isolation that followed – and he figured it was nothing less and nothing more than he deserved for being unable to even have the courage to help himself, to help his family. If he had been a bit more like him, perhaps he could've saved his mother. But he wasn't, and he didn't, and he lives with that every day.
Being a wanted criminal isn't what he expected. In the weeks following Snape's murder of Dumbledore, he scrambled to cope and to survive, even when doing something as simple as attending his best friend's oldest brother's wedding – which was promptly crashed and that's how he ends up here, hiding in his Godfather's old home, and preparing to break into the Ministry – probably the last place he should ever go near.
It claws at him, this gulf that seems to between him and his best mate, but there's nothing he can do, no words he can say that's going to reach across the distance.
He can feel his chances of living to see the end of the war – and at this point, he doesn't give a flying shite about who wins it – dwindling down to splinters as he's forced to step up and cover some of what his broken father no longer can. He does it as subtly as he can, wishing to protect his cold, absent father as much as he can. He doesn't want to be a complete orphan.
He thinks, during a stroll down a Muggle street – he's supposed to be meeting up with other Death Eaters for some event, but he thinks he'll claim that he got lost (and to make it true, he's not looking at signs and looking around confusedly) and therefore couldn't make it (which he'll be tortured for, but he rather have the physical pain at night, than the nightmares of crying, screaming children who don't know what their sin was, who don't understand their crime of being born different) – that perhaps he could find himself a place in this odd, precarious, so defiantly and cheerfully different Muggle world.
He thinks if he just gets so lost that he's never found, he'll find himself.
He'll find how to be someone he isn't – someone braver, someone stronger – and he'll never have to look back at who he is now, at who he's been all his life.
For just a moment, he think, perhaps, he can forget what it means to be a Malfoy – to be a pureblood – if he just runs far enough.
It's tempting.
But he returns back dutifully, he faces his punishment for missing the revel because he might not be stronger or braver or better than he was as a child, but he's a little less selfish. If he never returned, there'd be no one to shield his father. No one to step up and take the blistering fury of the Dark Lord. Because if he ran, he wouldn't have anything to return home too and that scares him. So he returns, he continues as he has been, and he forcefully puts thoughts of running away, buried deep in the darker, hidden parts of his mind.
He looks around and, not for the first time, he despairs of the war ever ending. It's the dead of winter, he's alone and Hermione's sobbing again. And even though they had scrounged up just enough cash for a night in a heated, extremely cheap (as in, rents by the hour) motel, everything seems bleaker than ever. He's not strong enough, he's not clever enough, Dumbledore didn't tell him enough –
Not enough anything, there never seems to be enough, and he – he doesn't do well. They're not as strong as they could be with a third of them missing.
But even then, it wasn't enough and that's why he left, right?
Because he wasn't enough, because he didn't know enough, and because there was nothing they could do to change anything about that.
His visions is blurred, there's copper in his mouth, his body is shaking uncontrollably, and he wildly thinks this is it.
He's going to die. Or go insane.
Either way, it didn't matter much.
Either way, the pain ended.
Either way, he didn't have to remember that his father was now dead and there was nothing left for him.
The thing he had been so scared of losing, of running away from and never getting back, is fucking gone.
A hysterical laugh bubbles up and he chokes on it because the pain starts anew and his body can't decide if it wants to laugh or scream, and does a bizarre mixture of both.
He's sick, physically sick, at what's become of his old rival. He's no longer a pale, striking figure sauntering down the halls of Hogwarts with an entitled air – he's thin and wasting away, his eyes dark and nearly feral, and now – now, because he refused to identify him or Hermione or Ron, he's being tortured by his own aunt. He can't say much about his childhood, but at least Petunia never had the ability to do this to him.
It's sick and getting worse, because something's snapped and he's laughing and there's an actual glint of relief in the planes of his sharp face.
"Stop! Stop it!" he snarls, feeling something snap in himself. Magic pours out of him a hurricane of lightning bolts and he doesn't know how to control it, how to stem the river gushing out of him into a focused stream bent to his will, and he finds that he doesn't particularly care to figure it out.
It's scary, in some distant part of his mind, but mostly it's just gratifying.
Finally, he has enough of something to do something about something else.
Finally, he's enough, in and of himself.
It's a trial to bring himself back to any semblance of a person.
Personally, he doesn't even care all that much about it, but as he was currently camping with the Golden Trio and owed their darling the rather large debt of his so-called-sanity and what he guesses is supposed to be the treasured gift of his own life, he's kind of stuck playing along by their rules and the BWL, for one, is hell bent on sorting him out and putting him back together like the broken shards of a mirror.
With grim humor, he thinks that perhaps he's so determined because, if he can fix something even more broken than himself – and oh, is he broken – it won't be so hard to fix himself.
"I don't give a damn about – " he rages.
" – of course you don't!" is shrieked back at him. "You never do! Why should you, with the sun shining out of your arse from its place on your fucking high horse?"
That startles him. He can't say why – it's nothing he hasn't heard before – but maybe it's just that as petty and angry and word-y as the blonde tended to get when things didn't go his way, he's never actually heard aforementioned blonde swear before, much less so crudely.
He burst out laughing and that drives him even further into a rage, and well, he stops laughing when a fist connects with his mouth.
Oddly enough, it's after that particular blow-out that they come to some sort of unspoken (and little understood) understanding and peace reigns. They bicker, still, and snip and gripe and complain about each other, but they are, for perhaps the first time ever, on the same page and in agreement about the major issues.
And it helps that he's rather knowledgeable about the Darkest of magic and the Darkest of wizards, having up close and personal experience with both, and that that's what they seem to be after.
Looking back, years later, it's really not hard to say that that night in his manor, when he had to be rescued by the three Gryffindors he hated the most, was the lowest of lows for him. It was his rock bottom and for weeks afterward, he – and the trio – despaired of it ever getting better for him.
And for a bit, it seemed like it wouldn't. Even after he regained some stable footing, even after he found a new purpose to drive himself with – the complete and utter destruction of the Dark Lord and every single one of his followers that had ever even looked at him wrong – he never thought he'd reach that once treasured dream of losing himself somewhere only to find himself.
It took ages – and the end of the war – for his (and, seven months ago, he never would have believed it) friend to finally look up and abruptly realize how far he had come.
It was an exceptionally emotional moment for him, having – in his opinion – played a rather important part in helping his friend along the road to becoming someone both softer and stronger at the same time. Softer, because he was more compassionate, because he understood every depth there was to despair and pain, and stronger, because he had faced it down and hadn't let it break him (though it seemed like it would for a bit, there at the beginning), because he wasn't afraid of flinching away from what he deemed right (they were working on that, making his morals a tad more morally acceptable), and because he stopped letting others' opinions of him make an impression on him. He wasn't soft clay that fit whatever mold Voldemort and his parents had cast him in anymore, but his own person, shaped and formed and hardened by fire.
He looks at the raven who's played such an important, central role in his life since that day when he first started his magical education, and offers a hand.
This time, there is no audience, no judging and curious stares. It's just them, standing in an empty room where they had been studying for their horribly surreal eighth year mid-terms. He's not wearing designer robes – just dark jeans and a black, soft cotton shirt he learned to love during that camping trip from the ninth circle of hell – and the raven, in a reversal of roles, is wearing a designer robe. It's understatedly elegant and fits his friend's personality to a 't'.
Solemnly, the raven accepts his hand this time and, mouth suddenly quirking and striking green eyes coming alive with mischief, yanks his hand hard, so that the blondes stumbles into him.
He's still fine boned and shows marks of his months under Voldemort's rule, but he's gaining back the lean muscle that had made him so attractive to so many of his fellow, female Slytheirn year mates – but the Gryffindor is still just a few inches taller and somewhat broader.
And when he hugs Draco, he's sincere and warm and Draco's still not used to hugs like this – doesn't think he's ever had a hug quite like this, though they became more frequent after he fell in with Harry, Granger, and Weasley – and there's so much pridedelightpleasureaffectionhonorsatisfaction on Potter's face when he pulls back that Draco feels his face burn and mumbles something about wrinkling his shirt.
Potter just laughs and they go back to business as usual.