Disclaimer: J

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns these lovely creatures. I, however, own the plot. She makes money off her characters. I receive words. So there.

Warning: this will be SLASH. That means there will be a relationship and perhaps more between two people who both happen to be of the male persuasion. Should this sort of thing irritate you, you may not want to get too involved. Just scurry along and please don't tell me what a despicable person I am, I am already painfully aware.

Pairing: none as of now, but there will be some Draco/Seamus action later on. Yeah, I know, I'm obsessed. But I finally found my pairing, damn it! and they make me happy. Yeah. So.. uh.. sorry for that outburst, we shall now continue with the regularly scheduled program.

I would like to dedicate this fic to none other than Rubicon, my lovely little muse, without whom I would not be writing. I luv ya. And also to Gwen, thanks for the kind words, here's a bit more for you. Hope you will enjoy it. Cheers!

This is without a title (as though you didn't already know) so please feel free to make a suggestion. They are always appreciated. So I guess I'll just get on with it, then….

Construction Time Again

            The year before the fall of his lord, Lucius's wife gave him a son. This son was destined to give the Dark Lord an heir. It was only a minor sacrifice for Lucius in order to secure himself a place at the top of the proverbial food chain. His concern was not to continue the family name or even to have someone to leave his own legacy to. That was all minor. But to go down in history as the creator of the boy to whom the most powerful of wizards had left his empire was the end-all-be-all for Lucius.

            Some said Draco was a coldhearted boy. Others argued that he had no heart at all. The truth was somewhere between the two. Those who knew him as a small child knew him as intelligent, perhaps too intelligent for his own good. He used to smile and dream and play like most children. But this was only a temporary state for Draco. His father had started working on him when he was six years old, carefully removing any and every aspect that was unique to Draco's personality. Over the next five years he had molded and formed Draco to be nothing more than a cold cast of himself.

            Devoid of feeling, Draco had become the perfect kind of soldier. He answered to his father's every demand, never bothering to question the motives behind it. He had no motives of his own, no selfish pursuits with which he might define himself. He had no self. There was a wall built between his heart and the world. On the outside he made it appear as though there was nothing within him. But behind that wall, deep inside there was a steady flame warming the hands of the boy Draco Malfoy could have been.

            Before Draco had gone off to school, Lucius had been sure to impart in his son the knowledge that Harry Potter was the enemy. He'd spent days locked in a cold, stone room reciting his father's notes until they were a part of his psyche. He'd come out believing that there was no worse evil in the universe than Potter. He made his father very, very proud.

            Being away from his father for the first time in his life gave Draco the opportunity to put his knowledge into practice. He treated Potter not only as the enemy, but as the scourge of the Earth. But over the years, it had become little more than a silly, childish rivalry. For Draco, their rivalry had become something he could call his own. Potter himself had become something of a possession to him, something his father couldn't touch. Being away from Lucius gave Draco a chance to come into his own. Though little of who he was was created through personal experience, Draco was forced to learn how to be independent of his father. Spending ten months of every year on his own, he had to learn to fend for himself. Fending for himself meant that he would only put more of what Lucius had taught him into practice.

*****

            Most everyone in his family had had hard lives. But Seamus Finnegan lead a far more difficult life than the rest of them put together. He was a short, skinny kid that grew up being treated as though he were a burden on the world's shoulders. He was neither expected nor wanted by either of his parents, and he was painfully aware of this. The fact that he had no attention span and a rather active body made him a difficult child to raise, but his family's dislike for him went above and beyond. When Seamus was five years old, his father left his wife and children to join a Muggle terrorist group. His mother had come to live with her daughter-in-law in the hopes that she could do something to set her son's irresponsible actions right. What she ended up doing was raising her grandchildren when their mother turned to the bottle for consolation.

            Growing up in a Muggle part of Ireland, Seamus learned how to adapt. The vast majority of the children he grew up with were Muggles, though there were a few wizards and witches as well. He was the ultimate child of two worlds. He knew almost every Muggle and wizard game known to man, read both Muggle and wizard literature, and even learned how to drive a car. Although going off to Hogwarts placed him more in the wizarding world than the Muggle one he grew up in, he fit in perfectly.

            Confessing his sexuality to his family made the rift even deeper. He was thirteen years old when he decided he could no longer put off the inevitable and told his grandmother he was gay. She accepted him with open arms, as was her style. But when it came time to tell the rest of the family, he was not so well received. His mother cried, then denied it. His older brother, Thomas, laughed and called him a sodding woofter. Burke, his younger brother, said nothing at all. He hardly knew Seamus at all and didn't care about such a thing, anyway.

            Hogwarts proved to be his saving grace. He had friends there who accepted him and loved him for who he was, and not in spite of who he was. Dean Thomas, his best friend, though he didn't share the same preference, was supportive beyond all belief. He knew of Seamus' pathetic home life and did his best to make up for it when he could. While he was indeed a difficult student, he was extremely bright and more than willing to learn. Over the years, he had become a favourite of most of his teachers and very few of his classmates disliked him. Hogwarts had given him an opportunity to blossom, and blossom he did.

*****

            For the first hour of their detention together, the two boys had said nothing to each other. They had earned it independently of the other and had little reason to speak to each other, anyway. Over the course of six and a half years they had said maybe a handful of words to the other. Being in separate houses had not so much made enemies of them as it had built an almost impenetrable fortress around them. After all, Gryffindor and Slytherin were simply not meant to be on friendly terms with each other.

            There was no one in the whole of the United Kingdom as skilled at handling dangerous creatures as the Hogwarts gamekeeper and Care of Magickal Creatures teacher. Hagrid had been asked by the Ministry to raise Welsh Greens, as their numbers had greatly dwindled in recent years. The dragons themselves had been exported earlier that day, leaving the pens free to be cleaned. There having been no less than fifteen baby dragons under Hagrid's care, the pens were in a horrid state.

            "No magick!" Draco complained, finally breaking the silence.

            Seamus couldn't help but smile. "Finally figured it out, did ya'?"

            "Shove it, Finnegan. I suppose you're enjoying this aren't you? Reminds you of home, I imagine."

            With his usual grace, Seamus cheerfully replied, "No, not really. It does remind me of dragon pens that haven't been cleaned for a week, though."

            "Are you intentionally that dense or is it a birth defect?"

            He seemed to give it some thought. "Birth defect." And he went back to shoveling the bones of small animals into a heap.

            Draco stood there, totally taken aback. Never had anyone so gracefully accepted being berated by him before.

            "Are you going to stand there and stare at me all night?" Seamus asked sweetly, not looking up. "I mean, I know I'm just too cute for words, but I would like to get this done and over with before I die of old age."

            The other boy let a cold smile cross his face. "Can't have that, now, can we?" he said with a sickly sweet tone he reserved for insolent Gryffindors. "Goodness knows, your poor old mother might starve to death between now and then. Pity she's not got a good man to take care of her..."

            At that Seamus stopped and turned around. "What is that supposed to mean?"

            "Oh, nothing really. Just a shame that a nice woman such as herself should have to be without companionship. How does she handle being second best to Muggle women?"

"Stop right there, Malfoy."

            Draco mentally gave himself a point for getting a rise out of the Irish boy. "What's the matter, Finnegan? Still crying yourself to sleep because Daddy chose Muggles over your mum?"

            "What the hell do you know about my dad, anyway?" he asked, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. 'That's two.'

            "I know lots of things," he drawled, picking at his fingernails. "I know he ran off to fight some silly little war..."

            "Do you know he's dead?" Seamus shot, cold fury accentuating every syllable, drawing Draco's attention once more. "Do you know he's been dead for eleven years? Do you know that I saw him die?" At that Draco paled, knowing he had crossed the line. "That's right, Malfoy. I was there in Dublin when he was taken down by bullets from a gun carried by his best friend. I was lying on my stomach in the street watching them kill anyone and everyone they could. Kids, Malfoy, kids were caught up in the crossfire. 'Silly little war' is it? I don't think it's very silly when people are willing to devote their lives and lives of their family and friends to fight for a cause. It's not all that little when everyone you know is a part of it and has been since before you were even born." Draco backed up as Seamus came closer. "Six years old, Malfoy. I was six years old when I saw my father's friend point his gun and kill him. You want to talk about 'silly little wars'? How about your war with Harry? That's silly and little. You are silly and little."

            Draco involuntarily shrank away from the livid boy in front of him. For all he wanted to hate Seamus, the pain and fear emanating from him made it a virtual impossibility. All Draco really wanted was for the last hour and half to not have occurred at all. He would have gladly given back whatever minor and petty victories he had won just to make it all disappear. The seething visage of Seamus Finnegan was frightening him into a submission that not even the Dark Lord himself had ever evoked from him. He stood there silent and staring, not even remotely aware of the way his face had turned from an expression of mockery to one of concern.

            "And don't look at me like that either. Don't ever say you know anything about me and my life. And don't you ever, ever try and talk to me about 'silly, little wars'," he spat, the animosity in his voice almost palpable.

            These words never registered with Draco; he never heard them. He was off in a world all his own where the walls were crashing down. Walls built by generation upon generation of people just like his father. People whose only concern was ever to have their name passed down and to be known to all the world. People with warped ideals. Ideals that he had been taught and, though he never believed in them himself, came to regard with some measure of acceptance. Options were extremely limited when you were a Malfoy. Either you chose to suck it up and play the game or you chose to be most dishonourably discharged. This discharge used to hold a sort of black pleasure for Draco. He used to fantasize about being nothing at all instead of being his father's master's heir. He used to fantasize before that was knocked clean out of him along with most of the other things that made him human. The will to die, he came to believe, was as much a facet of humanity as the will to live. Having only the resignation to exist separated Draco from the rest of the universe and made his load easier to bear. Now, sitting before the tortured and irate creature that was nothing to him merely an hour prior, Draco's will was coming back to him.

                Less than three feet away, Seamus watched the changes that occurred within Draco's mind manifest in his body. He watched his facial expression alter from mockery to concern to utter confusion. He watched his lower lip begin to tremble in a painfully childish fashion while his hands lay open on his lap. The nothing that was in his eyes had transformed into something akin to wonderment. He may not have known it, but Seamus was watching the first brick being laid in the reconstruction of Draco Malfoy.

            *****

So what do you think? Is it adequate? It will have more promise later on, I just wanted to get this posted before I decided it was crap and threw it away. Review! Cheers!