He had spent his whole life pretending. There had never been a growing up period in his life – no childhood to be left behind. Instead, he'd been reared on fake smiles and the sting of slaps incurred by a misplaced hair, a laugh that broke the darkness which consumed his parents until they were nothing but shells. Even his mother – who at one point in life had been a watery ray of sunlight filtering through the rainclouds that were his father – eventually faded away, forgetting who she was and instead actually becoming those false smiles and meaningless pleasantries exchanged between strangers at dinner parties. The entire world had questioned at one time or another if he had simply forgotten how to smile, how to laugh, how to be human. But it wasn't that he'd forgotten – Draco Malfoy had never known what it was to be human. He didn't know what love was.