Closing the Rift
Disclaimer: WARNING! This story is slash! If you don't like it, go away! Also, I do not own a bloody thing. So don't sue me. Harry Potter belongs to the almighty goddess J.K. Rowling.
Ch.1: Draco- Enter the Dragon
Sometimes two people, who have the potential to be the very best of friends, through one cause or another, simply miss each other. In the drifting world of particle physics, some particles collide and join together, whereas others simply bounce off one another, sailing into other hemispheres to eventually join with others. Occasionally, if there is inclination on both sides, the two will amend whatever differences they had to form another union, but far more often, the rifts that separate people are far too deep to surmount.
Such was the case with Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. The first year that Harry arrived at Hogwarts, and Draco held the hand of friendship out to him, and was subsequently rebuffed, set the tone for their entire relationship. The two boys had met, collided, and subsequently parted. But in the very act of collision, each had left an indelible mark on the other, like cars colliding.
Draco, in his lonelier moments, thought often about the marks that Harry had left on him, and wondered, after their first meeting, what exactly had gone wrong. His arrogance and prejudices, so apparent and detestable to Harry, did not even occur to Draco to be seen as repugnant. When one has been brought up on the food of coldness and snobbery, as Draco had, one does not recognize it as others do.
Draco truly believed in the truthfulness of everything he had said when they had met. The Weasleys and Hagrid were riffraff, capable of exciting nothing more than contempt in a well-bred person.
The Weasleys produced offspring like rabbits, were ill-mannered and poor, not even having the sense to realize that they would be better off if they had less children.
And Hagrid, (what wasn't wrong with that oaf?) got drunk, set fire to his bed and bred disgusting, viscous beasts.
Then there was that insufferable mudblood, Granger, who bore a striking resemblance to a demented beaver, and who time and again, outshone him in every class, much to his father's scorn.
If only Potter had the sense to extricate himself from that group of freaks, he could have been associating with the best.
Draco had actually longed to be friends with that bloody git. His parents had told him from the beginning that he must work to distance himself from the saviour of the wizarding world, and Draco himself, learning that one of the most powerful wizards of the age was to be his classmate, was eager to form a companion of, 'the Chose One'. What power, what glory lay in associating with a boy already famous and destined to become legend. And yet, inexplicably, he had been rejected by the very person he had so longed to meet. And with what coldness! How was he to know that in the course of one train ride, Harry Potter would form such an attachment to a gangling, dirty- nosed, cretin? Draco had enough sensitivity to realize that the reception his overtures had received would never cool into anything resembling friendship.
So perhaps it was only natural that Draco should attack with the weapons of wounded pride, the person he had earnestly desired to befriend. It is easy to disguise pain with anger, and Draco very often took the easy way out. The two boys from that point on matched wound for wound, and a rift the was wide to begin with grew stedily wider as the years went on.