"I have loved you – quite recklessly. So fully I have lost myself in this life. But I love myself too and have learned to love myself better for all the time I have wearied upon your heart. I have respect and knowledge of the real burdens I can endure. In vain I thought I could bear for eternity only the hope of your love – but the heart is weak and the mind tempered by cool judgment. Therefore, I accept the truth and so withdraw."
The voice that spoke was even-tempered and contained the right amount of strength and sorrow. But the boy who stood in its place seemed to lack a home. Gone were eyes that stared down the worst that the wizarding world could offer, lost were the hands that could teach a wand to dance. There was, like so many before him, only a boy, humbled and thrashed by the painful and bottomless knowledge of love.
"You are leaving then," Draco asked casually, his manner and position unchanged from the moment Harry had entered. Some would believe that he was trying to contain the fierceness of his heart, to shield from the boy who was breaking him that he was falling apart. But he had not that weakness. Truth, no matter how painful, cannot be altered by casual thoughts.
He did not love Harry. He aspired to own him, to call the boy who everyone loved as his own. But he did not love Harry. He did not desire to make him stay.
"Then I suppose," he stood up and carelessly clasped his hands behind his back, "this is a goodbye."
Harry looked at him, his eyes searching what the final gaze of every broken lover scrapes to finally win in the last stand of the heart. He saw only his vacant expression in those eyes that he still dearly wanted to adore.
"Yes," Harry nodded mechanically. "And I suppose we won't see each other again." The war was coming and soon there would be no Hogwarts to return to, no closeness to await. And again his heart clenched, but he ignored it.
"Hmm. It would be difficult to keep in touch." The blond boy looked out the window, watching the stillness of the dark, moonlight sky. "Then it's for the best."
That he was unfeeilng, unmoved by the warm presence of the boy-who-lived, was a falsity as solid as those he uttered daily. But that he was moved in a love that sighs, that robs a man of sleep was untrue. He felt as he thought he should and for him that was enough.
"Well then...goodbye."
Draco's head turned and focused on the boy in front him, already half turned and reaching for the door.
He hesitated, just once, before he said his own farewell. "See you, Potter."
And the last image he was to remember of the boy he once held so close was the unruly and defiant mess of his jet black hair.
He sighed with no great amount of feeling and amused himself with making objects in the common room float about until the ring of the dinner bell was made and Hogwarts awoke with the clattering of feet.
That he had lost something was not yet apparent. And would not be for many years to come.
For he would have grown to discover that tender feeling, that passionate explosion that surpassed his reason and logic.
The soft eyes and the affectionate smile so freely turned and given to him would have conquered and endured to chain him irrevocably to a warm, unrelenting hand.
In the love of one person, he would have had nothing short of everything.
And it was this realization that he had not yet understood. A lesson learned when everything else has burned away and nothing else can succeed. When the final hope is just the dull knowledge of a destiny thrown away.
Because there are things that we later come to truly regret, when we have lived just little bit longer and learned a little more truth.