The Sweetest Downfall

Not Good Enough

He hated her in the beginning, absolutely fucking abhorred her. He was taught to, her and her kind, but her righteous, all-knowing attitude contributed to his hate in the course of the following years. She wasn't just a Mudblood, someone who didn't belong in his world, but she thought she was better than him. She turned her nose up at him, eyes judging him like she knew exactly what he was about. But that wasn't the worst of it—the pity in her eyes only made him loath her more. She gazed at him like he was a lost cause, like he was a wounded soldier dragging himself through the battlefield.

That hate remained the same until she was dragged into his manor on a night when everything changed. There was so much going on in his life during those miserable days; thoughts plagued his mind, demanding answers for questions he never thought of asking before. His entire life crumbled and everything he knew as being right was taken from him. His parents created that platform of truth and when it was destroyed they couldn't make him another. The same wrongness that he felt reflected off their eyes. His father, someone he used to admire, a man who was high in power, who made people tremble and obey, had withered. He became a disgraced drunk; a man imprisoned in his own home. His mother, a once elegant woman, someone proud to be associated with the elite, dark circles, now drowned in regret. She was a woman haunted with failure; her arrogance and trust in her husband only brought upon destruction to her family.

Surrounded by death, torture, and madmen only served to make Draco ponder if his past beliefs were wrong. The answer ultimately became clear when his Aunt Bellatrix tortured Hermione Granger in front of him. There was an incredible pleasure and unwavering insanity in Bellatrix's eyes that the muggle-born's cries and pleads never halted her. Not once did his aunt shiver, not once did she look remorseful, and not once did she pause to focus on the damage she was doing.

The letters Bellatrix had brutally carved onto Granger's arm bled red. Red. She, the mudblood, bled red like purebloods. There was no difference, which meant there never had been a difference before. Everything was a lie.

Draco hated Granger with all his being before, but then and there, as her screams dug their way into his eardrums, traumatizing him, scarring him, he knew that he was wrong. Everything was so fucking wrong with who he was and what the world had become. He couldn't move with the realization, but also because the image of Granger being tortured was something that was going to haunt his dreams at night...

The war came to an end not long after that horrible night. He was arrested, as it was to be expected, and a part of him resigned to it. He was so tortured by everything he'd seen during the war, by everything that he'd done during the war, that he knew he needed punishment. Or maybe he hoped that the lonely, cold cell in Azkaban would give him the escape he was too much of a coward to take from Death. Pieces of him longed for freedom—freedom from Malfoy Manor, his parents, and the aftermath of war. But especially he needed to hide from his parents, and then maybe he'd stop hating them.

Because he hated them no matter how much he loved them. They were responsible for the lies that made him king in his own eyes, that allowed him to mistreat and hate, that made him want blood supremacy, that made him serve a madman with a lust for blood and power. His own parents, the two people on the surface of the planet that were supposed to protect him above all else led him straight to hell.

He was only in Azkaban for two days before he was pulled out and a trial for his defense started down in the court rooms. He almost choked on his own oxygen when he found the damn Golden Trio ready to testify for his release.

All the time that the trial went on he couldn't look any of them in the eye, especially not Granger. Even more so when she took the stand and told the Wizengamot that she believed he was just an ignorant boy who was misguided, who had done all those awful things by the Dark Lord's manipulation and threat. When the verdict was made, when he was sentenced to a year of probation and lifelong sessions of Legilimens, he had an urge to find Granger and ask for forgiveness. It was odd, strange to want it, but he felt like he needed to do it. The motive was majorly selfish: he desperately believed that if he did apologize that he'd stop seeing her in his nightmares.