Most people called Harry Potter a hero. They worship the very ground he has walked upon, their obsession near religious. The remainder call him a survivor. They respect him and his ability, in awe over how he survived the Dark Lord so many times as a child, how he defeated the monster on the cusp of adulthood. They think it's some great, indefinable quality that makes a person a survivor, and they think Potter has it.
Draco knows better.
Potter was lucky, unbelievably so. To spit at a madman who held your very life in his hands was nothing short of suicide, and yet the Dark Lord managed to fuck up the "assisted" part of that equation. Potter didn't walk away from the graveyard because he was skilled, or powerful, or had some inner quality beyond most men, but because he was lucky. Because his wand just so happened to resonate with Voldemort's, he managed to walk away from an encounter with a wizard several decades his senior. He walked away from the fight in the depths of the Ministry for the same reason. Every encounter the stupid shit had ever had only ended with him alive out of pure luck. The damn fool didn't study magic, didn't even try particularly hard to learn what was spoon-fed to him. The Dark Lord hadn't taken the gift of magic for granted, had learned anything and everything he could about it. Granted, he'd gone a tad bit fucking insane due to some dark ritual or another, but still. The point remained. Potter was the luckiest little shit on the face of the planet.
Draco was a big boy, he could admit he was bitter.
Draco knew what was what. Refusing the dark mark would have been a particularly painful form of suicide, so he didn't. He participated in raids, tortured and killed defenseless muggles for the amusement of his fellow Death Eaters. To not do so would have been to cast his loyalty and devotion into question, yet another form of suicide. He did what he had to no matter how much he hated it, and he survived because of it.
Some of the older Death Eaters had raped their victims first. He'd stood by and laughed, even and steady and sounding completely genuine no matter how much he wanted to retch. And when they'd felt like having a more "willing" toy, they used pretty young Death Eaters like Draco. He'd learned to pretend to like that, too.
His teenage years were a lie, carefully fabricated to survive even the next few years, months, days, hours, minutes. He sobbed and apologized and pretended to be sorry when he saw where the war was headed, realized that Potter's ridiculous luck would likely pull through again and kill the Dark Lord. He survived the aftermath, avoided Azkaban and the dementors. He strutted and sneered his way around, pretended to have more bark than bite and convinced everyone he was a coward, that he should be at least partially forgiven for having no spine, as Potter would likely put it. Lucky little shit didn't know what it really took, what it meant to outlast and outlive. Draco did.
Draco was a survivor.
(Despite all his plans and preparations, his masks and his acts, he'd still almost died once. One of the muggle houses he raided had turned into hell the moment they opened the front door. He was the only one who'd seen the string attached to the inside handle, but even he hadn't known what it meant until a Death Eater had yanked the door wide and gotten an explosion of shrapnel to the face. He never forgot the desperation of the next few minutes, and honestly, if that was what a retired muggle soldier was like, he thought the Dark Lord was seriously disconnected from reality if he wanted to start a war with the fuckers).