shattered

                               A Single White Daisy

                                                                                                                       

Disclaimer: Do I really need to say it? Honestly, if I were Rowling, would I be writing fanfiction?

A/N: DH compatible. And by the way, this is not—I repeat, this is NOT slash. I guess this could be interpreted as such, but this is NOT MEANT TO BE SLASH. I’m afraid I don’t write slash.

 

 

 

Slice. The sound of the knife on his skin made a strange gritty sound, and he almost smiled, savoring it. He stared in twisted fascination at the blood seeping through the cut, spreading on his milky skin, a compelling pattern of red and white, blood and skin. Crimson on ivory…blood seeping from wounds on a different floor, aching all over, droplets of red shivering from a torn petal of white, the last remnant of a daisy… For a few seconds, he waited, letting the delicious pain soak through him, letting it wash over him and immerse him in a few seconds in which he felt nothing—no guilt, no self-hate, nothing but sheer pain.

Pain, without love

Pain, can’t get enough

Pain, I like it rough

Cause I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all…

Slice. He wasn’t handsome, like his father Lucius.

Slice. He had always been bested by a mere Muggleborn, never top—never best. 

Slice. He hadn’t made Head Boy.

Slice. He hadn’t lived up to the name Malfoy.

Slice. He had stupidly agreed to take the task set him by Voldemort, and then couldn’t even complete it.

Slice. He had taken the Dark Mark, even though Severus and Mother had warned him not to.

Slice. He had gotten himself in trouble, and then, of all people, had had to be rescued by Potter and Weasley.

Slice. Not being content with just once, he had had to be rescued twice.

Slice. He had done nothing in the War for either side, just cowered in silence.

Slice. His whole life—everything he had been taught—had been a lie, and he had been too stupid to see it.

Slice. He was stupid, and worthless, and fit for nothing. No one would miss him—no one would be sad if he died. No one loved him. Certainly not the bloody Dream Team, or any of the backstabbing Slytherins. Pansy would just miss a sex-buddy, someone good in bed but nothing more. Father would be glad his worthless son was gone… “Malfoys are not weak, boy. Malfoys do not pick flowers. You’re worthless, do you understand? Worthless.” Mother was dead—her wounds had killed her after the Battle.

The blood poured out from the wounds, staining his face and hands and hair a sticky scarlet. He twisted a strand of his hair and stared at it in morbid fascination. Red. No longer the signature Malfoy platinum. Which was good, because he was no longer worthy of being a Malfoy. Red on fragmented white, dripping on the floor. His hair stained with blood, staring at the tattered daisy on the floor.

 Loss of blood made the room spin for a moment, and when it had stopped moving, he was no longer sitting up but propped against the wall at an odd angle, not quite lying down but not quite sitting up either. The knife fell from his numb fingers. It made a clatter on the stone floor of the Potions dungeon, and no w he cursed, because footsteps were coming this way. He hadn’t meant to kill himself, just punish himself, just get some relief from it all, but now he had failed at that too, and just another worthless failure. There he goes, the ferret who couldn’t even kill himself and do the world a favor.

Tears threatened to fall, but he held them back without even thinking. Malfoys did not cry. He did not cry. He never cried, not anymore, not since the daisy, and he thought vaguely that perhaps he should have cried when his mother had died. But by then, it was too late. He had forgotten how, and now—all he could do was wait to be found.

He opened his eyes to stare into jet green ones and groaned. Here it was—the crowning jest of his miserable joke of a life. Of all people, he had to be found by Potter. Damn.

“Malfoy?” the voice was incredulous.

“Go ahead, Potter,” he said wearily, too incredibly tired to even be insulting. “Gloat.”

Potter knelt down beside him. “Damn, Malfoy, you are so incredibly stupid.”

“Believe me,” he said faintly. “I know.” It didn’t even bother him that he was making this admission to his worst enemy. The numbness was creeping up now. Perhaps he hadn’t failed at this after all.

Potter picked up the knife—it was silver, with a green handle shaped like a serpent and the letter M engraved on the blade. He shook his head. “What were you thinking?” he asked.

“Like you would know,” his voice was becoming weaker. “Bloody Boy-Who-Lived.  Always got it all. Approval of the teachers. Admiration of the crowds. Always win in the end. Hell, you even beat Voldemort in the end. Family and friends who would actually miss you if you were gone.” His voice ended up sounding incredibly jealous and pathetic instead of disdainful like he had meant it to be. Even his voice, that smooth calm drawl, had deserted him, and he closed his eyes in shame.

“Malfoy?” the other boy sounded alarmed now, and he put his hands on his shoulders. “Malfoy? Merlin Malfoy, you can’t just die!”

“Try me.” Flat, like the air. Flat and empty as his soul. He could feel it now, could feel death seeping in his veins. He had seen enough death in the war to know it when it was coming on him. Potter knew it too; he could see it in the pale set of his face, and the sudden jerk of his jaw.

“No.”

“What?” he asked, startled.

“No. I’m not going to let you die.”

The words almost gave him a warm feeling—something he hadn’t felt in a long while, something so alien to him that he almost didn’t recognize it. But he shoved it away harshly, killing it before it could take root, then wither just the same.

“Like you give a damn,” he laughed, except he couldn’t laugh, and he ended up coughing until he choked on his own blood.

Potter looked horrified, and Draco would have scoffed at his weakness—surely the boy would have seen more deaths than this in the war?—except that he was much too weak. “And don’t say you do—that would be a waste of breath. I know you don’t.”

“Look—we, we didn’t get along—” here Draco snorted, “but I don’t want you to die.”

“Oh?” his voice managed a bit of sardonic humor this time, and he was grateful for it. “And why not?”

He hadn’t expected the Gryffindor-wonder-boy to actually answer, and was taken aback when the other answered frankly, “Because I’ve seen too many people die, Malfoy. I don’t want to see another.”

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” Too late he remembered that this was a Gryffindor he was dealing with, and those bloody sods never backed down from a challenge. Potter’s jaw set, and he ran his hands over him, waving his wand over the numerous cuts all over his arms, legs, torso—anywhere he could reach, he had slashed.

Muttering numerous spells that he must have learned from the impossibly, annoyingly smart Granger, the biggest Sorting-Hat mix-up (Ravenclaw, not Gryffindor), he healed Draco. Draco could only watch in frustration as all his work was undone with the mere wave of a wand. He had forgotten how much he hated that, the feeling of helplessness when the other person could undo something he had cared about with a wave of his wand…or the stamp of his foot, the shoe, tearing it apart, destroying the fragile beauty... Soon his wounds were closed, and though he still felt faint from blood-loss, he sprang up and rounded furiously on Potter.

“Why did you do that?” he demanded.

Potter just looked at him with those impossibly green eyes, his hands shoved in his pockets, and shrugged. “I couldn’t just let you die,” he said in the Gryffindor nobility that was so bloody annoying. “And that was an incredibly stupid, selfish, and cowardly thing to do.”

“Oh? How so? It’s my life, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t I do what I want with it?”

“You have an obligation to the people who’ll miss you.”

“In other words, nobody.” Potter now looked seriously startled, but he wisely held his tongue.

“The stupid part?”

“We already agreed that I’m not as smart as Granger—who is?”

Potter was by now positively gaping, but he closed his jaw before he looked too idiotic.

“And the cowardly part?”

“Come now Potter, I’m a Slytherin. We leave the thickheaded nobility to the Gryffindors and other pricks too stupid to save their own lives.”

Potter just shook his head. “Someday you’ll learn that there’s more to life than just getting ahead and using other people.”

“I already know that, Potter. Why do you think I tried to kill myself?”

Already he wished that he had succeeded. Leave it the bloody Boy-Who-Lived to mess things up for him—again.

Potter just looked at him. “You know,” he said softly. “Maybe we’re not so different after all.”

Draco choked at that, started laughing and laughing, until he had to stop because the cuts on his side ached, and he collapsed on the dank floor. Potter perched on a bench above him. “Not so different?” he said. “I’m a Slytherin, you’re a Gryffindor. I’m a pureblood, you’re a half-blood. I’m the son of on the most prominent Death Eaters, you’re the Boy-Wonder.”

You have friends, I don’t. You’re worth something, I’m not. Everyone would mourn for you, not for me. You always win, I always lose. He didn’t say the words, but he could hear them anyway, and knew Potter could as well, the unspoken words hanging there in the empty air.

“Laugh all you like,” said the other boy finally. “But it’s not like you think.” He said it awkwardly, and Draco knew instinctively that this was a crude attempt at comfort. Reflexes took over and he tensed—he didn’t need anyone’s pity.

Potter saw him tense and knew the reason why, but said nothing, just looked at Draco. He hated pity, perhaps because pity is just that—pity. Pity, and nothing more. Pity takes away your esteem, degrades you, throws out respect. Pity mercilessly grinds down into your soul until everyday you live with it, the knowledge that someone knows you as weak. Pity in his mother’s blue eyes when she saw his cuts…But the other boy’s eyes held no pity, only an understanding so deep that Draco shifted, uncomfortable that anyone, especially Potter—even Potter? Said an insidious voice in his ear—should know him so well.

“Many people tried to kill themselves at one point or another,” Potter said. “Hermione almost tried it, you know.” Draco stared at the boy, trying to discern whether this was an empty lie, a half-comfort. But there was no façade, no tell-tale shuttering of the eyes that would have said that he had something to hide. “I saw her pick up her wand and point it at herself.”

“How do you know Granger wasn’t just trying to tame that bush she calls hair?” Draco cut in.

Sweet Circe, the boy actually laughed. Threw back his head and laughed. He hadn’t heard laughter like that—laughter free and unrestrained, laughter unhindered and unhidden—in so long. And at one of his best friends, too. Then he sobered. “No, her eyes were screwed up, and she was biting her lip. I can tell, you know. She’d been devastated because—well, because. Ron had just left, you know, and we didn’t know he was coming back.”

Draco was surprised that Weasley had deserted his friends, but that was not the point of this conversation, and he kept silent.

“Everyone felt like there was no point to it at least once. I saw Remus, one night. He was looking at some pictures of Sirius, and his eyes were so—I dunno, but it was like he would never laugh again. And then the next morning he just smiled like nothing was wrong. That’s when I started wondering what the other people were hiding. Molly—that’s Ron’s mum—was so worried, and she just fell to pieces when Fred died, you know. Ginny cried on my shoulder several times.” Here he winced, his face drawn, and Draco knew he really did love the Weaselette. “Professor McGonagall cries in her sleep.”

Unwillingly, Draco’s lips twitched at the thought of the stern Deputy-Headmistress crying. It was incomprehensible. And then he knew why, and his face shuttered once more. Dumbledore. Another person killed, not by him directly, but because of him. Another man who deserved to live much more than he did, except he died and Draco hadn’t.

Potter, it seemed, was more perceptive than he let on, because he immediately realized what he had said and looked horrified. “Bloody hell, Malfoy, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s all right, Potter,” Draco cut him off. He didn’t want to hear anymore. Dumbledore had been like a father to Potter, he knew, and he felt guilt, an emotion previously wholly unconnected with Potter, for depriving him yet again of another parental figure.

“But really,” Potter said, his damn annoying Gryffindor persistence, “everyone felt like giving up.”

“Well, none of them did, did they?” he snarled, finally losing patience. “None of them almost killed themselves, none of them were going to go through with it but got stopped by a stupid boy with a hero-complex.”

Potter’s lips twitched at this, but his voice was serious when he said, “They remembered what it was like to live. Someone very wise said once, ‘I live for those who love me.’ They remembered what it was like to be loved.”

“Well, that doesn’t exactly work for me, does it?” his voice was vicious. Vicious was good. Angry was good. When you were angry, you forgot about how much it hurt. He had been angry that night, in his bed…

Anger and agony

Are better than misery

“There’s no one who loves me, who gives a damn whether I live or die. So tell me, Mr. Hero, what would you do if you had absolute no one?”

“Regardless of what God they believe in, or even if they don’t, everyone prays,” Potter said vaguely, and looking at him, Draco got the impression that he was repeating something someone had told him. His suspicion was confirmed when Potter said, “Luna told me that once, when she caught me with a knife in my hand, staring at some pictures of Sirius and Dumbledore.”

“Luna?” asked Draco in incredulous disbelief. “Loony Lovegood? The daughter of that batty editor of the Quibbler?”

“She’s not loony,” said Potter automatically, it seemed. Then he cracked a grin, almost in spite of himself. “Well, maybe a little. But she’s got a good head on her shoulders, you know. She’s smart—the only one who can almost keep up with Hermione, and she’s, well, wise. I know that’s not a word you use for teenagers, but hell, there’s no other word for it.”

Draco thought he knew what he meant, recalling the vague blue eyes that gave the impression of knowing more than she let on.

“But whatever Luna is, or isn’t, those words stand. You don’t have to pray, exactly, just remember that there’s always Someone out there, no matter who, who cares about you.”

You know I’m always here for you…

“Oh? And who might that be?” Draco asked harshly.

“I for one, believe in a God. But it doesn’t have to be a higher power—just another normal person who cares about you.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” hissed Draco. “I already told you, no one cares.”

“That’s not true,” said Potter. “I do.”

This was so totally unexpected that Draco’s mask cracked, his jaw hung open slightly, and he stared at the sheepish boy in front of him.

“Not like that, but ever since you couldn’t kill Dumbledore, I always thought you weren’t as bad as everyone thought.”

“You were there?”

“Under an Invisibility Cloak. Dumbledore froze me so I couldn’t move.”

Draco understood, knew how it must have killed Potter to be there and not be able to do anything. Standing there, watching the daisy fall to pieces, watching the last remnant of beauty disappearing under his father’s foot, knowing that he would be next, unable to do anything lest he trigger the onslaught prematurely…

“Then what do you do?” he demanded. “What do you do when it all closes around you, when you feel the darkness suffocating you, dragging you down, and you can’t feel anything except how utterly goddamned you are, how nothing fucking matters?”

“You pray,” said Potter simply. “You look for the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“What light?”

“Every flower. Every beam of sunlight. Every little happy thing, every fragment of beauty that ever existed, exists, and will exist. Every rainbow, every drop of dew, every piece of love—all those things, come up together, make the light.”

Flowers…

“Father! Look!” he had been five, too young to know any better, when he picked the little daisy. It had been white, and he had thought that he had never seen anything so simple, yet so beautiful. And so, without thinking, wishing only to share this beauty with everyone he met, he had picked it and gone running to his father. Except his father had not been alone.

He had been in a room with other men, men in hooded cloaks and masks that Draco had later learned were Death Eaters. When he had burst into a meeting, they had burst out laughing. Lucius’s face had tightened, and he had said in a cold voice unknown to Draco, “Come here, boy.”

Obediently, Draco had walked over to his father, still holding the little daisy, his face shining with confidence. What came next was a surprise to no one but him. In a swift movement, Lucius had snatched the daisy from his son’s hand and stamped on it, ruthlessly tearing it to pieces. Protesting at the beauty destroyed senselessly before his eyes, Draco had begun to cry out. Lucius sneered, hissing, “You are weak. Malfoys are not weak, boy. Malfoys don’t pick flowers. You’re worthless, do you understand? Worthless.” Snatching up another’s wand for fear the Ministry would trace the Unforgivable, Lucius cried, “Crucio!”

“Malfoys don’t pick flowers,” sneered Draco in an exact imitation of his father. “Sunlight. Rainbows. What next? Do we all hold hands and frolic with bunnies, singing, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’?”

“I know what you mean,” said Potter. “When Luna first told me that, that’s what I thought too. But it makes more sense as you go on. All you have to do is remember, every time you look at something beautiful, to really look. To see how beautiful is, and to know that life’s still worth living.”

Silence.

A silence filled with so many things that they rushed up in his throat and choked all the words. Silence filled with unsaid words, things better left as they were, in the silence that somehow conveyed so much more than mere words, silence that was at once demanding and yet patient. And then,

“How?” it was only one word, a simple three-letter word, but in that one word Draco recognized a multitude of things. Hope was there. Willingness. Acceptance. Forgiveness, and a tentative apology. A new shot at life.

“It’s hard to remember, sometimes. When you have bad days. But it helps if you have someone for you. Someone who’ll remind you, and someone who you can remind later. Someone you live for, because that someone would miss you if you died.” Potter held out his hand.

It wasn’t much. Just a ‘someone,’ and a proffered hand. But it was enough.

He looked at the hand. Such a simple gesture, taking someone’s hand. But somehow, it entailed so much more. Friendship. Love. Acceptance that he was no longer the only person who mattered. A letting down of barriers, a melting down of ice. Could he do it? Did he even remember how?

His eyes shifted from the hand, to the face. The honest eyes. The crooked smile. No pity, anywhere.

On his face formed a smile in return. He reached up and took Potter’s hand.

It was the following night. Draco had cried himself to sleep, battered and bruised as he was, for no one had dared cross Master and treat his wounds. Perhaps midnight—perhaps later it was, when his bedroom door creaked open. Draco’s eyes flew open; already he was a light sleeper, then fluttered close again as he saw who it was. Lucius stood by his son’s bedside for a while with an unreadable expression on his face. At last he put his hand on his son’s shoulder for a moment, then turned and left, pausing only by his son’s dresser for a moment. Draco felt the warmth of his father’s hand for a long time later, as for the second time that night, the last time in his life, he cried. In the morning, he found a single white daisy on his dresser shelf.

~Finis~

A/N: Lyrics scattered throughout the story are excerpts from “Pain” by Three Days Grace.