Edited 20th February 2014 to remove review responses and superfluous author's notes.

4. An Internal Struggle

It was dark in the Slytherin common room, but no darker than the heart and soul of the sole occupant of the room, a tall, thin boy with an angular face. Draco Malfoy failed to appreciate the rich irony; the similarities between the silent, cold, dark room and his own inner self. He felt something that he had never felt before in his life. He felt miserable. Malfoys didn't feel sadness and misery. They felt resentment, but never sadness. The only "real" emotion he was allowed to feel was fear. All other feelings he had were mid-tones, no black or white. No one could hurt him because no one could get near him. His dark, wounded soul was sealed off from everyone.

Malfoy was not a Death Eater. He hated his father for his hypocrisy; for claiming that to be a pureblood and a Malfoy was practically to be a prince, and then fawning to his Master, a twisted little half-blood. He didn't know if he was evil or not. His father meant him to be, he knew, but he would do anything now to disappoint that man. He couldn't join the Dark Lord. Draco's mind, heart and soul were his own.

He blamed his parents. It was impossible not to; anyone could see why Draco had turned out the way he had. He was terrified of his father's wrath; in a lesser way, he was frightened of Crabbe and Goyle. Their fathers were Death Eaters too, they could be spies sent to trap him and reveal his hatred of the Dark Lord's cause. And if they were spies and if they did reveal that, his life would be over.

He didn't know whether it was worth living anyway. He could either sell his soul to the Devil or die horribly as a traitor. Either way, people he knew would be the ones who would kill him. Should he join his father's "Cause", Potter would probably destroy him, and be glad. If he did not, it would be his fellow Slytherins who struck the death blow. It didn't matter to him which it was. Every way he turned was a dead end. He couldn't escape the nightmare that lay before him. There was no way that he could wake up.

Draco was not given to this dark introspection. He would not normally willingly spend any of his waking time dwelling on his inadequacies or his eventual fate. Those thoughts were the ones he saved to torment his dreams. This unusual brooding was caused by Fletcher, however much Draco wanted to deny that. The boy had always been there, one year up, charming all and sundry, but it had never really mattered till now. Humiliating him in front of Potter, his arch-enemy, was the last straw in a long and irritatingly unintentional campaign to ruin his life.

He hated Fletcher for much the same reason as he hated Potter. It was so easy for them. Their families didn't have expectationslike Draco's father did. They weren't caught between loyalty to their families and loyalty to themselves. All Potter's Muggles wanted was for him to get out of their house, and he was quite happy to oblige. Fletcher's father was dead, and his mother plunged so deep in grief that she no longer cared what he did or did not do. It was easy for them to be good. For Draco, it was all too easy to follow the path of least resistance; too easy to betray himself and become a devil like the rest.

At the root of his misery was the dark knowledge, that however hard he tried to blame his father, it was all his own fault. His fault that Potter hated him; how could the boy like him when all the words that had ever passed between them were insults? It was his fault that Fletcher had taken all his 'friends'. He had never tried that hard to keep them.

It was never this bad before he came back. The only Slytherins that would associate with Draco now were the ones that he didn't want to see; the ones whose fathers followed the Dark Lord, snivelling and on their knees, just as his father did. The others were repelled by his association with him and by his appalling manners. He was a snob and a bully, and he realised with a wrench that that was exactly what his father had intended to make him.

It was his own fault that he had no friends; that he had never had any friends; that the only people who wanted to be near him were the only people that he knew for sure that he couldn't trust. He had made himself that way. That was why he was miserable. After all those years of persuading himself that it was all somebody else's fault, he had realised that it had been his choice. He had chosen to become what his father and the Dark Lord had always intended him to become. The realisation was too much. He wanted to scream, he wanted to break things, but more than anything he just wanted to cry. But for him there were no shoulders that he could cry on, nor would there ever be.

Just then, the common room door opened and Fletcher stepped in. Draco looked up, startled, and then his sallow features set into his customary emotionless mask. He could not let anyone, especially not Fletcher, see him at his lowest. He could not have succeeded in looking normal, however, because the Head Boy took one look at his white face and approached the solitary, vulnerable figure.

"You okay, Malfoy?" Daniel knew the words were a waste of time; the boy hated him and would not want his concern or his mostly veiled pity.

He was right.

"It's none of your damned business, Fletcher!" Malfoy snapped, his cold eyes flashing with something close to a genuine emotion. "Meddling little half-blood!"

Daniel let the insult go. He'd heard it many times before, often said with much more conviction, even hatred. He was surprised, not by the outburst, but by what he had seen in the split-second's silence before Malfoy had noticed him. If he hadn't known better, he would have sworn that Draco Malfoy, son of a Death Eater and owner of the hardest, coldest heart in Slytherin, was almost on the verge of tears...