A/N:
Thank you for taking the time to consider reading this story. I hope that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I'm a feedback nut, so any comments - good or bad - will be happy received and taken on board. This chapter has been revised slightly to bring the style a little more in line with the rest of the story and the sequel, but I assure anyone who read the original version: the plot implications of this version are the same.
Warnings:
HPDM, temporary character death, violence, strong language, and various other adult themes. I would recommend that you be of age in your resident country to read this story.
Disclaimer:
I don't own these characters or this world. These ramblings make me no profit.
"It's a trap you eejit!"
"Mr Malfoy, I can assure you-"
"I was talking to Harry, not you. Don't do this, stop and think for once in your bloody life! Please Harry, please don't do this" Draco begged.
"I don't have a choice."
"There's always a choice, you're just too hell bent on running out and getting yourself killed to see it. Do you really think I can't see you, Harry?
"Do you think I cant see the shadows behind your eyes? No one would ever guess it would they? You're strong, and good, and untainted: You can handle the chaos that they throw at you. And you do, by some god-awful feat, you do. They try their hardest to believe that it's your purity that conquers it. I know better.
"I've been there inside your head remember; For one blissful night I was a part of the turmoil that rages through your heart. I wanted to stay there; you wouldn't allow it. You snapped shut like some dusty old book, aged beyond your years with maltreatment. You just can't bring yourself to imagine that there might be a future for you after this damn war can you? All you care about is fulfilling your duty so that you can roll over and die in peace."
"Draco stop it, you've made your point," Harry's voice, though forceful, had a waver of fear beneath it.
Draco barely heard him over the sound of blood thrumming through his ears, "I used to be like that, used to ooze indifference to it all; What's the point in caring when no one actually gives a shit about you anyway? Well now I have to pull through. I have to make it, for you. To pick you up after they've drained what they deem necessary of you, left you to rot, and gone back to their blissfully ignorant lives.
"I still can't believe you let me in. I know that what I saw was a mere fraction of the person you keep hidden. I know that you could never love me the way I do you, but for you, that minuscule grain of your soul means something. I've watched you shoot down everyone who's ever dared try to breach that outer shell of yours. Friends, mentors, potential lovers: they reached out to touch you and yelped back with third-degree burns.
"It makes me wonder what I was to you. I can't survive the thought that you still view me as an enemy, so I don't. I force it into the deepest pit of my mind and bury it.
"I've watched you, did you know that? For the past two years - since that night - I've studied your every move. I've felt your heart freeze over as if it were my own, and fought so hard to thaw it out. For you, for the day you let me close enough again to show you that it doesn't have to be this way. I was a fool; you've spent far to long building yourself into that self-inflicted prison to allow me to tear down the walls with some foreign romantic notion.
"In all the time I've observed you, I've only ever seen you falter once. A period so brief that few recognised it for what it was, and even fewer knew the reason behind it. It was pain. Self-hatred. An emotional seizure. And then it was gone, replaced once more by the daily façade that you fixatedly dress yourself in. But you broke that day, the earth shook for you and your heart shattered into a million more pieces than before.
"You looked at me for the briefest of moments when I came to see you, when I found out and needed to know if it was true. I saw it in your eyes and I couldn't breathe, everything inside me split open and I couldn't breathe.
"You refused to look at me after that, you walked away. I'm sure you imagined that I hated you, but I didn't, I don't. How were you to know? I know you didn't, you cant have, you would have stopped training if you did. You're cold, and determined, and driven, but you're not a murderer. How were you to know that you were carrying our child? How were you to know that the constant pressure you work under would result in our daughter never having the chance to be born?"
Harry's throat was dry, it stung with words that he couldn't let out.
"I wanted the world to stop that day, you did too, that much I know. But it didn't, I never does, and it makes me want to scream! You have to understand that it wasn't your fault. None of the crap that you see fit to encumber is. You're the best person I know, and they don't appreciate that. They don't see that it's the man underneath that deserves to be loved. Not the 'boy-who-lived', not the 'saviour-of-the-wizarding-world'. You, just you. I know you're too good for the world that I'm asking - begging - you to share with me. And so I trundle on, watching you as you place yet more barricades around your heart. Starving it of what we both know it craves. All because you insist on setting the needs of strangers before your own.
"Why destroy yourself for people who constantly and consistently lie to you? Who deprive you of knowing what it is to be loved? Why take orders from the man who robbed you of a childhood? I know what went on, Severus told me, he saw it in your head. Albus did that to you and yet you stand there and dotingly live up to the 'golden-boy' image that he's moulded for you, through deception: By covering your eyes to the man you could have been, the man you still can be.
"It's funny, the man that's fought so hard to preserve your innocence all these years is the one who's driven you into oblivion - turned your insides black by shutting out the light that you needed to be yourself.
"I know you think if you don't do this the guilt will plague you for the rest of your life. As if you didn't have enough scar tissue by now… And if you fight, he will fall, because you've been disciplined to win, drilled into the warrior you are after years of schooled submission."
Draco finally addressed the rest of the room and beseeched them, "But is the cost really something you're willing to let him bear? He won't have to live with those consequences, but can you?"
"Draco, stop it." Harry pleaded.
Draco's voice was weary and the knew from the guilt etched faces around him that he'd lost this battle, "If I could stop loving you I would, but I can't. I don't expect you to return the sentiment, after all that's happened I don't think you're even capable of that. But you should know, that years from now, decades, centuries - when we both live other lives, in other worlds - I will love you with the same ferocity that I do now. Maybe one day, you'll come home to me. Maybe one day you'll let me give you what you gave me."
The heavy oak door slammed behind him as he left. A resounding crack was heard as Harry's knuckles slammed into a hard, stone wall, and he slid to the floor in new-found desperation.
A/N:
I'm truly humbled that you've taken the time to read this. Please let me know what you think.
x X x
'Rora