He was lying face up on the velvet of his bed, staring up at the patterns the angular stone ceiling. He had taken down the canopy to stare at the haggardly changing patterns. The more he stared at it the more he felt he could touch it if he'd just raise his hand. Then he would feel something just as cold as his entire system had been ever since that brief chance to realize just how unhappy he was.

He was being selfish and he wanted to be.

He wanted to be loved more than anything. Friendship seemed so empty to him. He wanted to be held in someone's arms, hold someone in his arms, kiss them, be with them forever. He wanted it to be his grey-shrouded angel, no matter who it was. He felt that his angel was the only one who had ever understood him, who had ever felt every shrapnel of pain or happiness or relief or guilt he's ever experienced. His angel had the answer to everything he had a longing for.

But ever since then there was nothing. Absolutely nothing but a void, a depth of darkness he'd never known he could possess, rivaling the death of Cedric, and the losses he had caused.

Harry decided he needed to wake up from this.

He started to put the canopy up, drawings the curtains to a close and sliding into his invisibility cloak. He tried best as he could to slip out of the common without being clumsy. He gave a heavy sigh as he reached the door to the bathroom, going inside quietly.

He froze, taken aback by the small, bony figure of Malfoy standing in front of a mirror, where alone used to be. Harry was afraid to breathe, scared that he would notice him paralyzed and staring at him from behind.

"It's like the opposite of Erised, isn't it," Malfoy let out rhetorically, sounding somewhat... more honest and vulnerable than Harry had ever heard. He wanted to deny for a second that it was actually him. But what bothered him more is why Malfoy was there, standing before what he used to stand before. Were they really messages for Malfoy, and not for him?

"It shows what you don't want to see. What you don't desire. And we all deny our true selves wherever we go, don't we?" It almost seemed like Malfoy knew he was in the room, but it didn't stop him from continuing. Harry stood dumbfounded and enthralled by the hypnotising grace of Draco's voice.

"I learned from my father that nobody deserves what they receive. I have had the longest urge to put this mirror up and finally let you know who I am. But would you even be able to see me?" Draco laughed a little. "Probably not. I wouldn't prostrate myself to anybody even if I was faced with death." Harry could notice the strange change in his posture. Draco Malfoy was shaking.

"But I think I would for you. But I'm not quite what you wished for, am I?" He stopped shaking, and his voice started becoming angrier, with himself, with the world. "What you see is what you get. And I am not what you want."

He heard him take a sharp gasp. "And that is why you will never see me."

Harry's eyes had become dry, entranced, his tongue desperate to say something. Without a second thought, as Malfoy stood staring, Harry moved behind him. Harry searched for words. But he knew he wouldn't say the right thing. He would say what his heart would, no matter where that got him.

"You're wrong," Harry said, watching Draco's shoulders tense up. He looked up at the mirror and at the bewildered face of Malfoy. "You don't see me."