A/N: WHOOPS. Completely forgot about this one yesterday night - I'm not sure why. Here it is. Will do another one today too. I honestly have no idea what happened here, though.

Prompt #28: 8/5/17

731 words, according to Google docs.

Pain was something Draco should be used to by now - after all, he experienced it almost every day. When he was a child, his father beat both him and his mother. Narcissa Malfoy did her best to protect her small son, but she could only do so much. Bad nights usually ended up with his mother, broken and bleeding on the master bedroom floor and Draco himself in the Manor's many dungeons - cracked, bruised, and hopeless. He often wondered how long he would last.

Blaise Zabini was usually the one to rescue him from the dungeons - but whether this was by his father's request or his own will he was never sure. They never said anything to each other - Blaise simply cast the required spells, bandaged any severe wounds, and left the dungeon with the door unlocked. Draco always left ten minutes after.

Pain was what he felt when he was fifteen as he saw his mother on the ground, dead from an over-enthusiastic beating from his father.

Pain for him was always red - the color of blood, suffering, and agony. The color he saw as the Cruciatus curse was cast upon him time and time again. But red was also the color of hair - the scarlet strands that always evaded his grasp - the hair of a commoner. The hair that belonged to Ginny Weasley.

The first time he saw her on the Hogwarts Express, he was still smarting from an early-morning beating from his father.

"Remember me as you hang out with your pitiful friends," he sneered as his cane came crashing down on his son's spine. "Don't you dare go against me or the Dark Lord."

So when he approached the Weaslette and her prat of a brother, he took out his anger on them.

"Look what we've got here," he sneered, leaning against the door of the train compartment. "Weasel, Weaslette, Pott-head, and mudblood. How fitting." Crabbe and Goyle chuckled menacingly behind him.

"Go away, Malfoy." Momentarily shocked into silence, Draco gaped at the youngest Weasley girl, taking in everything - the flaming hair, sparkling brown eyes, and secondhand robes. Of course.

"Interesting," he said at last, raking his eyes up and down the girl's skinny frame. "Older Weasley, I suggest you look out for your sister in the future. There'll be…a spot of trouble coming her way." He turned, his expensive robes swishing, and left the four people in their compartment - Granger and Pothead restraining the Weasley brother while the Weasley sister looked on quietly.

He saw her a second time - really saw her - in Hogsmeade with the Creevy brat. He hated how she had more than enough boys to keep her company at a crook of her pinky finger, and he hated how Creevy looked at her as if she was the only thing that deserved his attention in that café. She was a Weasley, godammit, and poor to boot.

So why was she so popular?

That was a question he asked himself often - hating himself for finding her so intriguing and hating her for being so.

He felt pain as he was tasked with killing Dumbledore - and if he failed, his parents would be killed. Although his father abused him regularly, Draco - in some strange, demented way - still loved him. He could help it. All children are programmed to love their parents at all costs.

So he had to do it.

Endless hours were spent in the Room of Requirement, working on the Vanishing Cabinet after his last two attempts had failed. Pain stabbed through him as he imagined what would happen to his family if he failed.

But none of this pain was comparable to the pain he felt when he fell in love with Ginny Weasley.

He knew immediately he could never approach her with this confession - he had already had too much contact with the youngest Weasley. His father would become suspicious - he wasn't sure if he already had - and the entire façade he'd kept for so long would crumble. No. He could not. And that was painful enough.

The pain was what helped him through the war - his betrayal of the dark lord, joining the Order, and fighting on a different side in the end.

As he stood at the bottom of the hill, gazing up at the crumpled form at Harry Potter's feet, he figured all that pain was worth it.