Untouchable
Draco Malfoy wasn't born on any special day. Just a day like any other, a little drizzle in the morning, dull sunshine in the afternoon and his mother screaming like the world was crumbling. At least that's what he was told years later. Not that it mattered much, in the greater picture of things.
What mattered was that he was Draco Malfoy, first born of Lucius Malfoy and Narcissa Malfoy, born Black. He was the son of Death Eaters, of pure blood wizards and there were other things to learn for a Malfoy than where he came from and what his place in the world his parents meant to build, was.
Draco learned his first important lesson on the day of his fifth birthday. He had wanted a new FireClean212 but not gotten one. He glared at his mother for full five minutes and when she didn't pull the broom out of some hidden corner he climbed to his feet, grabbed a piece of her favourite china and threw it against the wall before turning back to watch his mother's reaction, since she was the only one present.
Malfoys did not have friends, they had minions and minions in training and his father was somewhere halfway around the world doing things that Draco wasn't allowed to talk about in the name of some Dark Lord, he was too young to remember. It was just the two of them and the house elves, but then the house elves were nothing more but minions so they didn't count either.
He watched his mother watching the shards of broken china explode into the room, a rainbow of white, until one hit her in the face, turning the white rainbow red.
He watched as her eyes filled with something cold and hard. Anger. Draco had seen it before, but never on his mother's face. He expected her to do something, at least yell at him, but she didn't. The only thing she did was grab his thin pale arm and drag him into his room, where she placed him on the bed and left without another word.
That day Draco learned the first lesson. He was the first born son of Lucius Malfoy and as long as he didn't go for people's throats of after their first born, no one dared lift a hand against him. He was a Malfoy and no matter how bright the rage shone from their faces, lit their eyes like Christmas trees, they were scared. They were afraid of him and of what his father could do to them.
It was all about power. Draco Malfoy held power over others because of who he was, who his parents were and the fact that emotions always make you weak.
The next lesson came when he was seven. Not much bigger than at five, so fragile, so small but even the adults that came and went in Malfoy Manor knew not to cross him, because they had quickly figured out that the rage shining from their eyes when he yanked their chain in that childish way of his was the reward he was looking for.
His mother was standing in front of her husband, begging him, pleading with him to get rid of certain 'things' that had become 'unwise to keep around' after the Dark Lord's fall. Draco watched his father stare down his wife until she dropped to her knees and reached up to him, crying.
"What will happen when the Ministry finds those things? What will happen to Draco?"
Lucius just kept staring and there was nothing in his eyes, except and endless plane of dead earth and fading trees. What slumbered behind Draco's father's eyes was a place of nightmares, a place where you never felt warm, or safe.
Draco forced himself to stare into those coldcoldcold eyes and understood. He could provoke all the emotions he wanted in others, but what really made him strong, made him a fortress was not to allow himself any emotion.
He was barely seven years old but people feared him. But those people were minions and if Draco had learned anything during the long hours of sitting at his father's knees, it was that minions were weak and that there was always someone stronger.
There was only one way to become stronger than all the rest and that was to be untouchable. If he could control the emotions of others as well as his own then no one would be able to touch him. To hurt him.
He knows that at the age of seven his realisation was much easier. He saw how his father acted and how others reacted and paired with the knowledge that no one ever punished him and the fact that he was an insufferable brat, well, the result was the same.
Draco Malfoy was untouchable and so high up that everyone else was just bugs beneath his feet.
Four years later he had being a rich, spoiled brat with a superiority complex to boot down to an art. He marched through the Hogwarts Express, Crabbe and Goyle looming behind him and there was nothing and no one that stood up to him.
And once they reached Hogwarts he offered his hand to Harry Potter, because his father told him to.
Usually, Draco didn't follow orders at all, but in this case, doing what his father wanted him to do was easier than getting yelled at and having to make excuses. (He still had not found a way to beat his father's death glare, therefore Lucius was the only one who could still touch him, though he rarely did) If there was an easy way to do something and a right way to do something, Draco was usually already a mile ahead on the easy way before others got their asses moving.
So he held out his hand and for the first time in his life he did not get what he wanted. Potter turned him down with a dry answer and an empty look and it was like a world crumbling around Draco.
Because suddenly he was touchable. That slip of a boy with an ugly scar on his forehead did not play by the rules, did not care or know, whatever that he was a Malfoy and you didn't turn Malfoys down. Potter's ignorance made him touchable and that, in turn made Draco boil with rage and hatred.
Whenever he tried to get through to the Gryffindor Saint, he was trying to pull him down to where he was, down to earth where everything was touchable. Vulnerable. But no matter what he did, no matter how much he hated, all Potter ever did was react. He never acted, only reacted and his anger was like a thought, it came and went, leaving nothing but a faint aftertaste, an idea of what could have been.
And the fact that he could not help hating Potter, while Potter didn't deem him worthy of any lasting emotion was driving Draco crazy. He couldn't control his hatred, couldn't keep up his mask of indifference whenever Scarhead was around, whenever he just thought about him. But Draco was anything but stupid so he figured, if he couldn't be untouchable, the least he could do was make Potter touchable. To even the odds.
An eye for and eye.
Indifference for indifference.
For five years he tried and he failed. Failure tasted bitter to one who had never lost anything of value before, mainly because there had never been anything he had valued more than himself and his comfort.
He succeeded, though, in his sixth year when he stood crying, bent over a dirty sink, hating the mirror above his head for what it showed him. There are only three reasons to cry in the world. The first is the loss of something precious, the second emotional upheaval and the third is pain.
Draco was neither in pain nor did he feel much at all, as usual when Potter wasn't around or on his mind and the only thing precious to Draco Malfoy was Draco Malfoy. And that was the reason he was crying. The Dark Lord had ordered him on a suicide mission and Draco was failing before he had even begun. It seemed that this time the way of least resistance was also a shortcut to hell.
And then, suddenly the door to the always empty bathroom opened and in came Potter. For a second Malfoy felt indescribable glee at the look of utter confusion on his arch enemy's face when he encountered the crying Slytherin.
Mere moments later he was lying on the dirty floor, bleeding like a pig and all the glee was gone, replaced by something else, mostly pain. But a small part of him hated Potter so violently in that moment that he almost wished he'd die just so that Bloody Fucking Potter would rot in Azkaban for murder.
And all because the confusion in Harry's eyes and changed to something else.
Pity.
For years Draco had tried to make Potter feel anything, just so he could hurt him and now, when he finally did. When he finally felt something it was pity.
For him.
Then Snape came rushing in and it took almost a year for the two of them to stand face to face again.
Draco will never forget that day.
The day they ran into each other, miles and miles away from Hogwarts and in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of war. Draco felt the fire he had buried deep inside for a year surge back up and he could see the answering spark in Potter's eyes. He was tempted to laugh at the irony of it all. The day they faced off against each other for real, with lives at stake, for the first time was the moment that Harry's anger finally manifested into something real.
What followed was wild and glorious and painful. By the time Draco spilled Harry's first blood his own ribcage was already painted in angry reds and spiteful purples, covering the fine net of white scars their last confrontation had left.
Draco had always bruised so easily.
They fought with wands and fists, painting gruesome stories on each others' skin and faces until suddenly something changed. Draco can't really tell today when exactly it happened, it might have been after he ducked that Sectumsempra or when Potter's glasses broke, but it happened.
Suddenly they were kissing each other and groping with hands that had been fists before. It was still angry and violent, but less painful and a lot more satisfying because finallyfinallyfinally Harry was down there with Draco. Down on the ground and he was real and touchable and vulnerable. So was Draco, of course, but now he could give as good as he got because there was no high ground, moral or otherwise separating them now.
They were just two boys (men) that fought in a war they had never asked for and didn't know what they were doing most of the time. Draco remembered an old Muggle saying, 'It's a thin line between love and hate' and he suddenly understood it for the first time in his life.
They tumbled to the ground, all awkward limbs and messed up clothes and today Draco thinks that he might have loved Harry then. Because you can't love without hating and you can't hate without loving. Draco had never loved anyone before, but he knew that he hated Potter plenty, so he probably loved him, too.
The next day he made a choice between returning to a lair where his father was in prison and his mother was a minion, a lair where he had to fight everyday to earn the dirt he walked on and was always in danger of falling victim to the Dark Lord's next mood swing. Or, he could go with Potter to the Order that would protect him in exchange for information that was no use to him inside his head anyway and get great sex on top of it.
Some might have called Draco a whore for choosing what he did, but he preferred pragmatic. Practical. It was the easy way to do things and he'd had hard the night before, thank you very much.
Letting his cigarette drop to die between wet autumn leaves, Draco sends the headstone a wry grin. The grave is neat and clean, covered in roses and cards with waving happy people on them. It's the grave of a hero and Draco is the only one who remembers nights spent between dirty sheets, both of them smoking as if they wished for cancer to kill them before the war could.
Draco is the only one Harry ever talked to when everything else became too much and the expectations too great. With Draco Harry was never scared. Maybe it was because they hated each other more than they loved each other. Or maybe just because Draco always chose easy and easy is telling the truth while telling lies is hard work.
Draco never lies and Harry once appreciated that fact.
It was Draco who uncovered the truth about what was keeping Voldemort alive. And it was Draco who told Harry when his so called friends didn't want to.
One can't live while the other survives.
Funny how one couldn't survive without the other, though. Harry's lifeblood was Voldemort's and to kill the most evil wizard that their world had ever known, one of the best had to slit his wrists. At least they didn't have that cheesy final battle with too many dead to count and so much more than necessary.
Harry Potter died at the age of 20 from severe blood loss due to two slit wrists.
It was his duty and his destiny and the whole world hates Draco Malfoy because he was the one who told him so.
They don't understand that it was the way the two of them worked. Because working was the only thing they could during the war. They functioned, both of them and they found that they functioned better together. There was simply no room for lies.
Weasley, the weasel, claims that Draco told Harry on purpose, to get rid of him. Some grand scheme to rid the world of The-Boy-Who-Lived. That Voldemort died alongside Harry was purely incidental.
"Malfoy killed Harry because he hated him."
Draco hates Potter, did back then and always will, but he thinks that he might love him more. Or at least he did, two years ago when the world was nothing but red and black, blood and death. When they were both in neck deep, vulnerable and drowning in their emotions. They had control over nothing and were so mortal it hurt. They were touchable for everyone who just reached out a hand. But they were together and that made all the difference and in the last days of the war Draco found he didn't mind being touchable all that much anymore.
It's easier to love when people around you are dying every day.
Yes, Draco is sure that he loved Harry. Today, he can even admit it.
But it's too late now, isn't it? Potter is dead, forever untouchable and has been for a while and all Draco can do is smoke in front of the grave that marks the decay of a body he once knew so well and smile at the fucking irony of it all.
He was five when he understood that the world is all about power. He was seven when he learned that emotions are always a weakness and from eleven to twenty he fought so hard against that thing that Potter had breathed into him the first time they met.
Maybe it was love, maybe hate, maybe it was neither and they were all just dreaming, or maybe both. He'll never find out now.
Because Harry Scarhead Potter is dead and Draco isn't. Not really. There's this part of him that died right alongside his lover and Voldemort. A part that bled to death in that bathroom. He doesn't have a name for that part of him, doesn't know if he's supposed to miss it.
But he knows one thing for sure.
Harry Potter is dead and gone and Draco Malfoy is untouchable once more.