A/N: This contains triggering content. This again contains suicide and mentions of suicide. I want to remind you guys that suicide is never the answer. Please do not read if you think this content will trigger you.

I want to dedicate this to CrazyPedantic for their review that got me thinking about what would happen next, to everyone who favorited or followed this, and to fandoms books life for being my friend.


Draco Malfoy woke with a start.

Aurors had come and Aurors had gone, and he was left in school in his now unshared room. He didn't know how, but they'd cast spells on him and on the body of Harry Potter, and they could tell that they had not touched one another. He was not punished.

But somehow none of that was true. It seemed to Draco that the moment Harry Potter had taken flight, he'd taken a piece of Draco with him, something that alternatively felt like guilt and a gaping hole. He was unpunished by the law, but nightmares woke him continually now. Mind-Healers had been brought into the school for the students, and it was mandated that he talk to one, but nothing they said could change was Potter had said mere seconds before he died.

This was his fault.

His room was unshared but the presence Potter had left behind took up so much room there was no remaining air. He spent as little time there as possible, but it seemed there was no where else for him these days.

He rose from his bed, tousle-haired and in the clothes he'd fallen asleep in the night before, and left. He didn't check the time, but he went to his first class anyway: potions. He had it with the seventh years as well, since he was technically retaking that year. By the empty halls he knew it was either breakfast or first class had begun, but he didn't speculate which, just walked to the dungeons.

When he opened the door, the class turned to see him. They were already working on their potions, an easy brew because of the tragedy, but the structure of classes would help the students return to their usual lives. A work station had been left empty in the back of the room, and he gathered the materials listed to it, and began his work, pretending not to notice the puffy, red eyes turned his direction, pretending not to notice the Granger girl working by herself in front of him, her usual partner gone now, for good.

Many of the students were nearing completion and as they finished before the class was supposed to be over, they dropped their vials of Dreamless Sleep on Professor Slughorn's desk and left.

Granger's potion was a sludgy mess when she delivered it, but Draco's was a perfect silvery blue when he poured it into a vial and stoppered it nearly twenty minutes after the other students had all gone. Slughorn didn't say anything to him as he waved his wand to vanish his mess, where Snape would have thrown a fit two years ago. But Snape was gone now, just as all the rest.

Draco left, heading towards Herbology. Halfway up the stairs, he realised he'd never turned in his potion. No matter, he'd set it with the collection of unmarked work that was growing in his room. It filled the space that Potter had simultaneously left and was still taking up.

He never made it to Herbology. As he walked across the yards, he passed the base of the Astronomy Tower. No flowers or candles had been left, and it had snowed since the Savior's body had lain there, but still he knew exactly where Harry Potter had died. Somehow he laid there, but he didn't remember walking to the spot, and he stared up at where his face must have been hanging over the balcony as he'd stared at Potter's dead body.

No one disturbed him, a small speck of black on a wide field of white, not even when they returned inside from their lesson. It was the way it had become since he'd killed their Savior. It was as if he had died that day too, only no one mourned him, and his ghost floated through his life as Mr Binns' had, with no one telling him something had changed, but no one acknowledging him either.

When light faded from the sky and sounds from the halls died down, he knew it was dinner. He rose, not bothering to brush the snow from his robes, and walked inside. He didn't know where he was heading, but he passed the Great Hall's closed doors, subdued noise muffling more with every step he took away from it.

He came back to himself on the spiraling staircase to the Headmistress' office, but when he stepped out, there was no one there and he had no recollection on how he got in. He found the Sorting Hat on his head and for the first time since his hand had grasped empty air where Potter had been only half a moment before, he felt the desire to act.

Quietly, hesitantly, and with his voice rough from disuse, he asked the Hat, "Can-" he stopped, one didn't question why the Sorting Hat chose what it did. Either it gave a reason when it gave its decision or it gave no reason at all. But Draco had already come here, some part of him knew this was what he needed, and he tried again, "We were supposed to be with who we'd be most suitable with. Can you tell me why you chose him, why it didn't work?"

The Sorting Hat was an object, capable of reason but no feeling, and it's voice betrayed no sympathy when it sounded in Draco's head, maybe unknowingly and maybe intentionally echoing Harry Potter's words, "You know."

And he did; lying in bed that night, he knew that Harry Potter had been his only hope of redemption, his only hope of becoming a better person. When he'd killed the world's Savior, he'd killed his own as well. It had all fallen apart. He was too toxic. If this is what had happened to the person most suitable to live with him, what would he do to everyone else?

Sleep came uneasily, but it did come for a short while. When he woke once more, covered in sweat and echos of "Come with me… I want you to see what you've done," "It's all. Your. Fault," and "You know. You know. You know. You know. You know," spinning violently though his body. He woke screaming, "I tried so hard!" just as Potter had, but in his dream, Harry had yelled it as he fell.

Sometimes in his dreams, Potter didn't die when he hit the ground. Instead he glared at Draco while the light faded from his eyes. Those always left guilt dripping from him as thick as blood.

Sometimes he simply relieved what happened, leaving him shrieking and shaking for the rest of the day.

But sometimes he was able to catch Potter's cloak before it was too late. Those were always the worst. In the moments between sleeping and waking it was all too easy to forget which was real, which had happened. And when he remember his failure, he could never quite feel his body. He didn't leave his bed those days.

This dream was not that dream however. In this dream, when Harry Potter fell, Harry Potter died. His echoes screaming through Draco, growing louder instead of a fading, but that was the way it should be, Draco decided. It was what he deserved. But that didn't make his punishment any easier to bear.

Draco turned his head to the side, letting his tears fall from where they'd pooled in his eyes. As he did, the vials lined along his bedside table caught his eye: the silvery-blue of Dreamless Sleep, the navy of the Draught of Living Dead, the purple of a low scale pain potion, the yellow of a Calming Draught. He always was a coward.

Draco lay in the snow when they found him. Empty vials of potions scattered about his body. Three was a good number, and the third body to die here would be the last. But no one saw the poetry like Draco had as he had walked to the foot of the Astronomy Tower in the dead of night. No one saw how right it was as they crowded around the body he left as they disturbed his resting place's stillness.

When they left, however, and when his body was taken away on the same stretcher as the one used for the Savior, the stillness returned, and with it, an echo of Harry's words in Draco's voice was revealed, spinning, "You always were a coward," into the wind.


A/N: I want to remind you again that suicide is never the answer. Please let me know what you think.