The Way It Grows
Springfall
A/N: Angst, angst, sadistic evil character abuse! Hooray! Wait, let me rephrase that. Merciless, evil, sadistic Draco abuse. My favorite kind :). And a tiny bit of Harry-angst. And now, you'll find out why Draco hates the night so much. Ideas borrowed from the wonderful Cassandra Claire (Hellhounds) and inspired by the utter brutal song by Maroon5, 'Harder to Breathe'. Oh, it has a happy tune. But go look at those lyrics. I guarantee you'll get chills from it.
~*~
Part IV
~*~
The Monster that Lives in Your Dreams
~*~
Draco sat in the dark, his legs pulled close to his chest, listening to Harry's breathing. He was muttering under his breath, and Draco was listening to the words. Every once in a while, he could pick one or two out:
"Cedric...Cup...Cedric...Mum...You...Mum, Dad, Expecto...Siri...us..." Draco slouched back farther, his back hitting the rough wood, prickling and sticking beneath his thin polo shirt. He didn't want to hear this. As he sat here, listening Harry talk openly, he felt as though he was hearing something so private, it was like a mental diary. Seeing something like a broken boy, naked and beaten, crying. Too much raw emotion. Harry hiccupped and Draco felt a guilty writhe in his stomach. Harry was crying softly now, and Draco shifted again, not wanting it to continue. He was reminded of himself when he was young. Harry hiccupped again and murmured, "Sirius," and then went silent. Draco waited for about two minutes, noticing that Harry didn't seem to be breathing. He rocked forward onto his knees and crawled across the floor to Harry, and sat back on his heels by the boy's shoulder.
"Potter?" he asked, timidly. He reached out for Harry. "Hey, Potter, you okay?" He dropped his hand onto Harry's bare shoulder, and squeezed gently.
Harry flew up into a sitting position, and struck out, hitting Draco across the face, hard, sending the smaller boy reeling back. His eyes were open, blindly, and out of him came an ethereal howl, wild and frightened and fierce, and he began clawing at Draco, his eyes cloudy and dark, that high-pitched scream ripping through the silence and tossing it aside like a child's limp rag doll, shattering Draco's soul as Harry stopped striking him and instead grabbed his own hair in fist, tugging, keening harshly like a wounded animal. Draco backed rapidly away from Harry, his hand wiping his face as though he'd been touched by something impossibly dirty. Draco couldn't stand, he couldn't get his legs to function, to get up underneath him, hoist his shaking, tremulous weight to his feet, he simply reversed until he struck the wall, and he continued to clutch at his face, wide- eyed, pupils stretched wide like voids of black, fingernails scrabbling at his skin, feeling them bite into his cheeks and forehead, and a low wail rising from within him deep as Harry continued to scream, striking blindly around him, the shrieks almost unbearable. He sounded so distinctly like the hellhounds.
Draco was transported back nine years, to the age of seven, to the little boy hiding under his covers in the night, listening to the baying of the fierce black dogs, with their eyes like coal and their prominent shoulder blades, their whip-like tails and their sharp spines and violent ribs, teeth shining white in a mouth like blood. The dogs prowled the house, scratched and wailing at his door, and his mother would sometimes come and hold him to her, her face buried in his hair, and he would press his face into his mother's soft breasts and holds her dress tightly balled in his fists, crying against the silk of her housecoat, and the two would sit sobbing in the darkness, the hellhounds bounding past them. But sometimes, his mother wouldn't be there. And it was when he was seven that Draco went out to look for Narcissa that his greatest fear became reality.
Since he was small and heard the hellhounds, he never thought of them so much as petrifying dogs as he did tormented souls, ghosts cursed by some vengeful god to wander the Earth, seeking out the innocents to feed their insatiable appetites. Not seeing them, one would have thought his imagination would have painted a worse image of the hellhounds than they actually were.
One would be wrong.
Young Draco, searching for his mother's comfort one night his father was out hunting with the hellhounds, opened his door to the dark halls of the family manor, and set down the corridor, padding in small bare feet, clutching at his ears, trying to block the noise of animals being ripped apart by the horrible dogs. In the night, the house was different and two flights of stairs and three wrong turns later, Draco was hopelessly lost. He began to panic, turning corners in a frantic rush, running across dark, thick carpets and smooth wood floors until he flung open a door which closed behind him, and he found himself in a high-ceiling stone room with one huge stain-glass window, set with a large mahogany table, ten chairs around it.
The Grand Hall, his mother called it, and forbid him to play in it lest it anger Lucius. Draco walked in, footfalls making no noise on the soft green carpets, looking for a way out. He could hear only his heartbeat pounding in his ears and his own ragged breath. He stopped. Was it only his breath? Did the floor just shift behind him? Draco held his breath, not daring to turn around. He heard the slavering licking of monstrous lips, the clicking of five-inch canines, and slowly little Draco turned on his heel and faced the monster he had heard since he was born.
Towering over Draco was the huge beast of his father's, called Diablo, eyes like fire and mouth like an open, gaping wound, its tongue lolling out like some ripped muscle from a bone. Draco had opened his mouth, clutching his face against the animal's attack, other hand going to his throat. He backed away and Diablo stepped to where he had been standing. Diablo's paw was as big as Draco's head. Draco finally made a strangled sound and bolted, and this is when Diablo sprung, lunging at the child and snapping at his tiny body with a rotting mouth. Draco ran towards the table and scrambled onto a chair, and finally onto the long wooden table, soft beneath him. The window was before him, serene with a green dragon spreading its wings over a poor human village, roofed with brilliantly yellow thatch, a flame from its gaping maw incinerating those steady wood structures. A maiden dressed in red with a snake curling around her arm sat on the dragon's back. 'Priscus Cruor', the window read in old script, 'Ancient Bloodshed'. Draco hated that window, with its smiling blond woman who looked like his mother, the green dragon destroying her home with a breath of fire and her not caring, not seeming to notice at all. And it was supposedly noble, to be like that woman. Draco continued to hug himself, staring at that foolish smiling woman, wondering if she meant it. Meant to let her home burn. Perhaps she wanted something more from life, Draco had wondered. Perhaps they were cruel to her. Lucius had always said that the woman was in no wrong, for she had called on her true family, the dragon and the serpent, the strong and the wise. And slowly, as though in a trance and he knew it was coming all along, Draco watched the skeletal animal clamber up over a chair and leap onto the table, bunching up the green silk runner, and suddenly Draco was screaming for his mother, 'Mummy! Mummy!' over and over, and the dog was crouching low, and Draco's voice grew high and terrified and he was yanked off the table just as the dog lunged at him, jaws bared. Draco was pressed against his father's warm, sticky hunting tunic as his father roared: 'Avada Kedavra' and the dog dropped lifeless onto the tabletop. Lucius had turned on his son then, gloved hand raised and struck him in the exact place Harry had, back in the tree-house with sixteen-year-old Draco. He had beaten the boy until he was trembling and sobbing, dripping with blood from the strap his father kept on the wall for use on house-elves, swearing at the child for provoking his best hellhound, his eyes glowing an angry, evil sort of orange, the same as the hellhounds. Draco had trembled in the dark and his father had roughly thrown him back into his room, and had not allowed anyone to patch Draco up, letting his deep, painful wounds heal slowly. Lucius would ruthlessly grab the salt-shaker from a house-elf every time he laid eyes on his son that fortnight, and would smother the slices in his son's chest and stomach with the stinging, burning mineral until Draco would cry for pity, tears streaming from his eyes as blood streamed from the cuts. He ceased, finally, after a beseeching Narcissa claimed that the boy was truly repentant. Draco still had those four cuts along his chest, running in crosses across his pectoral muscles and ribcage. The marks on his back had all but healed. The deep pearly wounds on his chest would not vanish, no matter how much balm or magical remedies he would try to put on.
Draco shook his head and realized that the low weeping in the room was coming from him. Harry had stopped screaming and was sitting, dazed, rocking. Draco could barely breathe, though as he sat, he stopped overheating, his breath calmed, his blood desiccated, his tears dried. He still saw Harry rocking and crying, shoulders heaving, and in a fit of indignation Draco managed to haul himself to Harry's side, damning his father and the stained glass woman, blaming them, blaming himself, and he put his arms as far apart as he could and leaned forward, as best an embrace as he could manage, this slumped position against Harry, arms finding the boy in the dark, fingers clutching at him, fingertips digging almost painfully into the skin of Harry's back. And after a shuddering breath Harry too flung out his arms and crushed Draco unreservedly against his wet face, gripping Draco just as hard as Draco was hanging onto Harry, and the two boys sat there in the dark, crying and clinging onto each other, slipping to the floor as a unit, their tears melting away in each other's comfort, sleeping, if not soundly at least deeply, intertwined.
~*~
Harry woke first, woke early, and wondered why there was this soft white-gold hair beneath his chin, why his arms were around this little beacon of warmth, why there were slim fingers holding his arms, legs entwined with his own, and why a breath blew against his shoulder in a steady rhythm, light eyelashes brushing his skin in a touch so fine it was barely real. He jerked, once, haphazardly, unintentionally. He stopped, hearing Draco's breath pattern switch with the movement. Slowly, after a long moment in which Harry was painfully aware of every inch of Draco against him, he untangled himself from the smaller, frail-looking boy in this pre-morning light warm against his skin like murmured words of love. Harry blinked. Love? What was he thinking? Last night was a red-tinted blur. He shook out his tangled hair and slipped out of the treehut, wincing as his foot touched the ground, roughly two seconds before Draco rolled over, eyes open, thinking about what he needed to do. Silently, Draco dropped from the treehouse, and followed silently after Harry, more like a cloud's shadow than a boy.
Harry felt a bit guilty for leaving Draco there, but he needed some time to think. Obviously, something monumental had happened last night, and Harry didn't know what. He was panicky, he knew that, but what if...Draco had meant what he said about...
'Stop,' Harry told himself sternly. 'He doesn't and you shouldn't, so stop.'
"Not that easy, is it, Potter?" Harry blinked. Draco? Why was Draco talking to him? 'This is in your head,' Harry thought. 'Just don't reply, and he'll go away.'
"What are you talking about?" Harry said, despite himself. He heard something shift behind him.
"You. Me. Us."
"There's no us, Malfoy." Harry said blandly. "You said so yourself, that it wasn't your thing. That's why you were taking the piss so much, alright? I know. I'm not stupid, despite me being a Gryffindor, despite you being an all-knowing Slytherin. There's no us, there's just me and you, and that is very different."
Draco sounded hurt when he spoke again.
"You assume too much, Potter. What makes you think that? Why do you think I've never had a girlfriend, with all the girls in Slytherin crawling all over me? Why do you think I don't dance at the Yule Balls, why do you think I barely speak to girls, why do you think I blush every time you smile at me, why do you think Weasley hates me so much more than Granger? Why do you think Blaise Zabini was so eager to spill my secrets before she, no doubt, lost her senses and stomach contents completely? Yes, I liked Weasley at one point, back in...second year. A lot happens in four years, Potter. You grow up and you learn things about yourself you never wanted to know, you never wanted to happen, things that shouldn't have happened to you, anyone but you, everyone but you. You don't know, your family doesn't support you as it is, they wouldn't give a shit either way, would they? You're not some sole heir to an estate. You'll go off and marry the Mudblood and have some filthy little half-breed children who will be so beautiful it'll break your heart, and it won't be because of Granger."
Harry was so shocked at Draco's words, he didn't even realize that Draco had insulted Hermione.
"And you'll laugh it off once I'm done talking at you, telling you things I can barely even admit to myself, things that no one should know about another person and now you know, Potter. Now you know. Are you happy? Now you can ruin my life. There wasn't much left to go. Go on, then. Go write to the Mudblood and the Weasel. Go tell the world. Impress them, be the hero, be the Boy Who Lived, The Boy Who's Straight, The Boy-Hero Of Muggles And Wizards Alike, The Boy Who Everyone Wants and No One Can Have. Go be Harry Potter, for Christ's sake," Draco spat, bitterly, his voice braking. "Go do what you do best. Go save the world. I'd rather stay here and die than ever look at you again. Go, Potter, go write to Snape, go back to Hogwarts, go defeat the Dark Lord, go marry Granger, go have babies, go have a full, long life. After all, that's your job. That's what you're supposed to do, isn't it? Go live, Potter. Go live and let me die."
Harry was silent and watched Draco walk away from him. He lunged forward, and grabbed onto Draco's upper right arm, spinning him to face Harry, Harry's grip firm yet gentle.
"Draco," Harry said, weakly. Draco's eyes were watery and dark, and he yanked his arm feebly away. Harry held tight.
"Let the hell go, Potter," he wailed. "Just let me go."
"No," Harry said, his voice gaining strength. He yanked Draco towards him.
"Why the fuck not?" Draco shouted, beside himself, tears escaping him, in anger and frustration he swiped them away with his left hand. "Get out of here, Potter, before I hex you!"
"I would rather die," Harry said, "Than be the Boy Who Lived if it meant you wanted to die."
"I don't think you can change who you are, Potter," Draco hissed, trying in vain to jerk his arm free. Harry tightened his grasp.
"Neither can you," Harry replied simply. Draco gaped, open-mouthed, lips forming words that carried no sound. He stared at Harry, painfully, and dropped his gaze.
"Let go, Harry," he pleaded- or as close to pleading Draco had ever gotten.
"Will you come back?" Harry's voice was deceptively calm.
"Yes."
"Do you swear?"
"Oh for Merlin's sake, Harry-" Draco cried, trying to free his arm but subsided when he realized that it wasn't going to work. "Yes. I swear, I swear on the most noble and ancient house of Malfoy* that I'll come back. Now please, let me go."
Harry released him, and Draco swayed, as though dizzy, until he turned on his heel as he had to face the Hellhound, and sprinted, wobbling, away from Harry until the sun rose in Harry's face and he had to look away. Looking back up, Draco had vanished. Harry stood watching the direction Draco had fled in for what seemed a long time- how long it was, no one could say for certain. It could have been five minutes, or five hours. Finally he turned and returned to the orchard, where he sat by the pool of fresh water, hurling small stones into the water, Draco's face flickering in every ripple, his eyes every gray pebble Harry tossed in prayer to the depths of that liquid soul.
((A/N: Since Narcissa and Sirius were related, the 'Noble and Most Ancient House of Malfoy' seemed an excellent name for the Malfoy's estate; indeed, it appears an appropriate title for all old, distinguished families.))
Springfall
A/N: Angst, angst, sadistic evil character abuse! Hooray! Wait, let me rephrase that. Merciless, evil, sadistic Draco abuse. My favorite kind :). And a tiny bit of Harry-angst. And now, you'll find out why Draco hates the night so much. Ideas borrowed from the wonderful Cassandra Claire (Hellhounds) and inspired by the utter brutal song by Maroon5, 'Harder to Breathe'. Oh, it has a happy tune. But go look at those lyrics. I guarantee you'll get chills from it.
~*~
Part IV
~*~
The Monster that Lives in Your Dreams
~*~
Draco sat in the dark, his legs pulled close to his chest, listening to Harry's breathing. He was muttering under his breath, and Draco was listening to the words. Every once in a while, he could pick one or two out:
"Cedric...Cup...Cedric...Mum...You...Mum, Dad, Expecto...Siri...us..." Draco slouched back farther, his back hitting the rough wood, prickling and sticking beneath his thin polo shirt. He didn't want to hear this. As he sat here, listening Harry talk openly, he felt as though he was hearing something so private, it was like a mental diary. Seeing something like a broken boy, naked and beaten, crying. Too much raw emotion. Harry hiccupped and Draco felt a guilty writhe in his stomach. Harry was crying softly now, and Draco shifted again, not wanting it to continue. He was reminded of himself when he was young. Harry hiccupped again and murmured, "Sirius," and then went silent. Draco waited for about two minutes, noticing that Harry didn't seem to be breathing. He rocked forward onto his knees and crawled across the floor to Harry, and sat back on his heels by the boy's shoulder.
"Potter?" he asked, timidly. He reached out for Harry. "Hey, Potter, you okay?" He dropped his hand onto Harry's bare shoulder, and squeezed gently.
Harry flew up into a sitting position, and struck out, hitting Draco across the face, hard, sending the smaller boy reeling back. His eyes were open, blindly, and out of him came an ethereal howl, wild and frightened and fierce, and he began clawing at Draco, his eyes cloudy and dark, that high-pitched scream ripping through the silence and tossing it aside like a child's limp rag doll, shattering Draco's soul as Harry stopped striking him and instead grabbed his own hair in fist, tugging, keening harshly like a wounded animal. Draco backed rapidly away from Harry, his hand wiping his face as though he'd been touched by something impossibly dirty. Draco couldn't stand, he couldn't get his legs to function, to get up underneath him, hoist his shaking, tremulous weight to his feet, he simply reversed until he struck the wall, and he continued to clutch at his face, wide- eyed, pupils stretched wide like voids of black, fingernails scrabbling at his skin, feeling them bite into his cheeks and forehead, and a low wail rising from within him deep as Harry continued to scream, striking blindly around him, the shrieks almost unbearable. He sounded so distinctly like the hellhounds.
Draco was transported back nine years, to the age of seven, to the little boy hiding under his covers in the night, listening to the baying of the fierce black dogs, with their eyes like coal and their prominent shoulder blades, their whip-like tails and their sharp spines and violent ribs, teeth shining white in a mouth like blood. The dogs prowled the house, scratched and wailing at his door, and his mother would sometimes come and hold him to her, her face buried in his hair, and he would press his face into his mother's soft breasts and holds her dress tightly balled in his fists, crying against the silk of her housecoat, and the two would sit sobbing in the darkness, the hellhounds bounding past them. But sometimes, his mother wouldn't be there. And it was when he was seven that Draco went out to look for Narcissa that his greatest fear became reality.
Since he was small and heard the hellhounds, he never thought of them so much as petrifying dogs as he did tormented souls, ghosts cursed by some vengeful god to wander the Earth, seeking out the innocents to feed their insatiable appetites. Not seeing them, one would have thought his imagination would have painted a worse image of the hellhounds than they actually were.
One would be wrong.
Young Draco, searching for his mother's comfort one night his father was out hunting with the hellhounds, opened his door to the dark halls of the family manor, and set down the corridor, padding in small bare feet, clutching at his ears, trying to block the noise of animals being ripped apart by the horrible dogs. In the night, the house was different and two flights of stairs and three wrong turns later, Draco was hopelessly lost. He began to panic, turning corners in a frantic rush, running across dark, thick carpets and smooth wood floors until he flung open a door which closed behind him, and he found himself in a high-ceiling stone room with one huge stain-glass window, set with a large mahogany table, ten chairs around it.
The Grand Hall, his mother called it, and forbid him to play in it lest it anger Lucius. Draco walked in, footfalls making no noise on the soft green carpets, looking for a way out. He could hear only his heartbeat pounding in his ears and his own ragged breath. He stopped. Was it only his breath? Did the floor just shift behind him? Draco held his breath, not daring to turn around. He heard the slavering licking of monstrous lips, the clicking of five-inch canines, and slowly little Draco turned on his heel and faced the monster he had heard since he was born.
Towering over Draco was the huge beast of his father's, called Diablo, eyes like fire and mouth like an open, gaping wound, its tongue lolling out like some ripped muscle from a bone. Draco had opened his mouth, clutching his face against the animal's attack, other hand going to his throat. He backed away and Diablo stepped to where he had been standing. Diablo's paw was as big as Draco's head. Draco finally made a strangled sound and bolted, and this is when Diablo sprung, lunging at the child and snapping at his tiny body with a rotting mouth. Draco ran towards the table and scrambled onto a chair, and finally onto the long wooden table, soft beneath him. The window was before him, serene with a green dragon spreading its wings over a poor human village, roofed with brilliantly yellow thatch, a flame from its gaping maw incinerating those steady wood structures. A maiden dressed in red with a snake curling around her arm sat on the dragon's back. 'Priscus Cruor', the window read in old script, 'Ancient Bloodshed'. Draco hated that window, with its smiling blond woman who looked like his mother, the green dragon destroying her home with a breath of fire and her not caring, not seeming to notice at all. And it was supposedly noble, to be like that woman. Draco continued to hug himself, staring at that foolish smiling woman, wondering if she meant it. Meant to let her home burn. Perhaps she wanted something more from life, Draco had wondered. Perhaps they were cruel to her. Lucius had always said that the woman was in no wrong, for she had called on her true family, the dragon and the serpent, the strong and the wise. And slowly, as though in a trance and he knew it was coming all along, Draco watched the skeletal animal clamber up over a chair and leap onto the table, bunching up the green silk runner, and suddenly Draco was screaming for his mother, 'Mummy! Mummy!' over and over, and the dog was crouching low, and Draco's voice grew high and terrified and he was yanked off the table just as the dog lunged at him, jaws bared. Draco was pressed against his father's warm, sticky hunting tunic as his father roared: 'Avada Kedavra' and the dog dropped lifeless onto the tabletop. Lucius had turned on his son then, gloved hand raised and struck him in the exact place Harry had, back in the tree-house with sixteen-year-old Draco. He had beaten the boy until he was trembling and sobbing, dripping with blood from the strap his father kept on the wall for use on house-elves, swearing at the child for provoking his best hellhound, his eyes glowing an angry, evil sort of orange, the same as the hellhounds. Draco had trembled in the dark and his father had roughly thrown him back into his room, and had not allowed anyone to patch Draco up, letting his deep, painful wounds heal slowly. Lucius would ruthlessly grab the salt-shaker from a house-elf every time he laid eyes on his son that fortnight, and would smother the slices in his son's chest and stomach with the stinging, burning mineral until Draco would cry for pity, tears streaming from his eyes as blood streamed from the cuts. He ceased, finally, after a beseeching Narcissa claimed that the boy was truly repentant. Draco still had those four cuts along his chest, running in crosses across his pectoral muscles and ribcage. The marks on his back had all but healed. The deep pearly wounds on his chest would not vanish, no matter how much balm or magical remedies he would try to put on.
Draco shook his head and realized that the low weeping in the room was coming from him. Harry had stopped screaming and was sitting, dazed, rocking. Draco could barely breathe, though as he sat, he stopped overheating, his breath calmed, his blood desiccated, his tears dried. He still saw Harry rocking and crying, shoulders heaving, and in a fit of indignation Draco managed to haul himself to Harry's side, damning his father and the stained glass woman, blaming them, blaming himself, and he put his arms as far apart as he could and leaned forward, as best an embrace as he could manage, this slumped position against Harry, arms finding the boy in the dark, fingers clutching at him, fingertips digging almost painfully into the skin of Harry's back. And after a shuddering breath Harry too flung out his arms and crushed Draco unreservedly against his wet face, gripping Draco just as hard as Draco was hanging onto Harry, and the two boys sat there in the dark, crying and clinging onto each other, slipping to the floor as a unit, their tears melting away in each other's comfort, sleeping, if not soundly at least deeply, intertwined.
~*~
Harry woke first, woke early, and wondered why there was this soft white-gold hair beneath his chin, why his arms were around this little beacon of warmth, why there were slim fingers holding his arms, legs entwined with his own, and why a breath blew against his shoulder in a steady rhythm, light eyelashes brushing his skin in a touch so fine it was barely real. He jerked, once, haphazardly, unintentionally. He stopped, hearing Draco's breath pattern switch with the movement. Slowly, after a long moment in which Harry was painfully aware of every inch of Draco against him, he untangled himself from the smaller, frail-looking boy in this pre-morning light warm against his skin like murmured words of love. Harry blinked. Love? What was he thinking? Last night was a red-tinted blur. He shook out his tangled hair and slipped out of the treehut, wincing as his foot touched the ground, roughly two seconds before Draco rolled over, eyes open, thinking about what he needed to do. Silently, Draco dropped from the treehouse, and followed silently after Harry, more like a cloud's shadow than a boy.
Harry felt a bit guilty for leaving Draco there, but he needed some time to think. Obviously, something monumental had happened last night, and Harry didn't know what. He was panicky, he knew that, but what if...Draco had meant what he said about...
'Stop,' Harry told himself sternly. 'He doesn't and you shouldn't, so stop.'
"Not that easy, is it, Potter?" Harry blinked. Draco? Why was Draco talking to him? 'This is in your head,' Harry thought. 'Just don't reply, and he'll go away.'
"What are you talking about?" Harry said, despite himself. He heard something shift behind him.
"You. Me. Us."
"There's no us, Malfoy." Harry said blandly. "You said so yourself, that it wasn't your thing. That's why you were taking the piss so much, alright? I know. I'm not stupid, despite me being a Gryffindor, despite you being an all-knowing Slytherin. There's no us, there's just me and you, and that is very different."
Draco sounded hurt when he spoke again.
"You assume too much, Potter. What makes you think that? Why do you think I've never had a girlfriend, with all the girls in Slytherin crawling all over me? Why do you think I don't dance at the Yule Balls, why do you think I barely speak to girls, why do you think I blush every time you smile at me, why do you think Weasley hates me so much more than Granger? Why do you think Blaise Zabini was so eager to spill my secrets before she, no doubt, lost her senses and stomach contents completely? Yes, I liked Weasley at one point, back in...second year. A lot happens in four years, Potter. You grow up and you learn things about yourself you never wanted to know, you never wanted to happen, things that shouldn't have happened to you, anyone but you, everyone but you. You don't know, your family doesn't support you as it is, they wouldn't give a shit either way, would they? You're not some sole heir to an estate. You'll go off and marry the Mudblood and have some filthy little half-breed children who will be so beautiful it'll break your heart, and it won't be because of Granger."
Harry was so shocked at Draco's words, he didn't even realize that Draco had insulted Hermione.
"And you'll laugh it off once I'm done talking at you, telling you things I can barely even admit to myself, things that no one should know about another person and now you know, Potter. Now you know. Are you happy? Now you can ruin my life. There wasn't much left to go. Go on, then. Go write to the Mudblood and the Weasel. Go tell the world. Impress them, be the hero, be the Boy Who Lived, The Boy Who's Straight, The Boy-Hero Of Muggles And Wizards Alike, The Boy Who Everyone Wants and No One Can Have. Go be Harry Potter, for Christ's sake," Draco spat, bitterly, his voice braking. "Go do what you do best. Go save the world. I'd rather stay here and die than ever look at you again. Go, Potter, go write to Snape, go back to Hogwarts, go defeat the Dark Lord, go marry Granger, go have babies, go have a full, long life. After all, that's your job. That's what you're supposed to do, isn't it? Go live, Potter. Go live and let me die."
Harry was silent and watched Draco walk away from him. He lunged forward, and grabbed onto Draco's upper right arm, spinning him to face Harry, Harry's grip firm yet gentle.
"Draco," Harry said, weakly. Draco's eyes were watery and dark, and he yanked his arm feebly away. Harry held tight.
"Let the hell go, Potter," he wailed. "Just let me go."
"No," Harry said, his voice gaining strength. He yanked Draco towards him.
"Why the fuck not?" Draco shouted, beside himself, tears escaping him, in anger and frustration he swiped them away with his left hand. "Get out of here, Potter, before I hex you!"
"I would rather die," Harry said, "Than be the Boy Who Lived if it meant you wanted to die."
"I don't think you can change who you are, Potter," Draco hissed, trying in vain to jerk his arm free. Harry tightened his grasp.
"Neither can you," Harry replied simply. Draco gaped, open-mouthed, lips forming words that carried no sound. He stared at Harry, painfully, and dropped his gaze.
"Let go, Harry," he pleaded- or as close to pleading Draco had ever gotten.
"Will you come back?" Harry's voice was deceptively calm.
"Yes."
"Do you swear?"
"Oh for Merlin's sake, Harry-" Draco cried, trying to free his arm but subsided when he realized that it wasn't going to work. "Yes. I swear, I swear on the most noble and ancient house of Malfoy* that I'll come back. Now please, let me go."
Harry released him, and Draco swayed, as though dizzy, until he turned on his heel as he had to face the Hellhound, and sprinted, wobbling, away from Harry until the sun rose in Harry's face and he had to look away. Looking back up, Draco had vanished. Harry stood watching the direction Draco had fled in for what seemed a long time- how long it was, no one could say for certain. It could have been five minutes, or five hours. Finally he turned and returned to the orchard, where he sat by the pool of fresh water, hurling small stones into the water, Draco's face flickering in every ripple, his eyes every gray pebble Harry tossed in prayer to the depths of that liquid soul.
((A/N: Since Narcissa and Sirius were related, the 'Noble and Most Ancient House of Malfoy' seemed an excellent name for the Malfoy's estate; indeed, it appears an appropriate title for all old, distinguished families.))
