Since the massacre, It's been grey outside. Mist, Rain, Stones. Everything is the same color. Food, Lake, Sky. Everything is this overwhelming grey- like the earth is mourning the loss.
Last week, Harry and Ron told me to find the weakest window in the Malfoy's expensive home, so that they could enter through it and avenge all those massacred.
The library failed me, for perhaps the first time in my life.
All I had to work from were his eyes. Meager enough to go on in any event, but his eyes have always been so guarded. They are full of scorn and pride. They are eyes of entitlement.
I looked into those eyes every day, every class, so often that I wondered that he didn't tease me for it. I kept looking for 'the real him'.
I wanted to see his soul.
Yesterday, two Death Eaters were captured. They were silly enough to try to use a Muggle pool without bothering to hide their brands, thinking that they'd be safe, but an undercover wizard spotted them and called in the Ministry. Thankfully, Harry and Ron have dropped their plans of amateur revenge; they spent last night agonizing over their upcoming Quidditch match.
But I haven't been able to stop watching Malfoy's eyes.
Every so often, there would be a flash of some feeling- pride, accomplishment, anger- but then it would disappear, and his eyes would go back to their stormy, arrogant ways.
But that flash would be enough for me to continue watching him, trying to find his soul.
I wonder why he hasn't teased me about it yet.
Maybe, maybe he's been desperate for someone to simply look him in the eyes without fear…………
Since the massacre, all I've seen is fog. Hazy grounds, hazy pathways, hazy choices.
My time is running out. Father knows that I have been treated as a hero throughout the week, and he grows frustrated with my lack of pride in that fact. He sees it as a lack of pride in who I am, who I stand for… and in who I must be.
It is, after all, inevitable that I will ever be granted the chance to be something more.
But I cannot stand to know that I will one day be forced to stand, head bowed, subservient to a cruel-hearted, deceitful Master.
I will become my father, locked into a system of bribery and lies, without an independent thought in my mind and thoroughly consumed with the Dark Lord's work.
And if the Dark Lord is somehow brought down, the world will be full of options again.
For everyone but me.
Heck, even Granger will have options again. Granger's Mudblood status will suddenly become a badge of honor. Her clumsy friends will be the heroes that they deserve to be - because if they can, somehow, successfully bring down the Dark Lord, then even I could not help but admit the service they would have rendered.
And I…. if I am not killed fighting for the side of subservience and torture, then I will be locked into Azkaban. No one will care about the internal struggle I have faced, the hazy future I have had to live with.
It is easier, after all, to say that I am the same as they are. To say that the future is the present.
Because, one day, I will be.
But for now, I wish that that I could be anything but.
I am not foolhardy enough to behave in an undignified way and thus draw Father's attention, or to act in a manner unbecoming of my family's name and status….
But I wish that before I lose all of who I am, that I could have a taste of what I could have been. A person that people would be glad to see. A person who would be sought out in a crowd and missed in his absence.
I wish that my father would understand.
In a strange way, I think that somehow Granger understands. She has been watching me all week, and while when she began, her eyes were full of anger; now, they are curious.
I refuse to tell her off for it. Because somehow, in this past week, she has become the only person who is not afraid to look at me, the only person who does not see my father behind my eyes, the only one who still tries to find the Draco hidden beneath the Malfoy. Somehow, in the past week, I have come to depend on her trusting gaze.
If only my father would look me in the eye... as she does.