Draco
Therapy was a great thing for most students because it allowed them to deal with their war-related traumas, death of loved ones and regrets in a healthy way. For most students it was helping a lot, as they were starting to overcome their lost stares and nightmares, while opening up and regaining the light in their eyes. But Draco Malfoy was not "most students"; at least not in his head.
Draco had gone through far worse than most students because, on top of losing people he cared about and fighting in a war at seventeen years old, he had been forced to fight on the wrong side, he had had Lord Voldemort living in his own house and had gone through several cruciatus curses for over a year. He had been forced to let death eaters into Hogwarts and to kill Dumbledore. Even if he hadn't actually gone through the last one, the guilt was still there. The feeling that everything had happened because of him was there. It never occurred to him that if he hadn't obeyed those orders, his family would be now dead and the death eaters would have found a more violent way into the castle. In fact no one had ever thought of that, and so Draco Malfoy now also had to deal with the death glares, hexes and insults he received from most students in the school.
Draco was very strong though. He wouldn't drop his mask for anything or anyone. When he was feeling particularly sensitive or annoyed he would just return the glares, hexes and insults instead of ignoring and blocking them; but no one had ever seen Draco Malfoy even flinch when being the recipient of the bullying he so often perpetuated back in his pre-nightmare days. Besides, his usually cold self managed to throw off anyone who could think that he might actually have feelings and tricked them into thinking that he really didn't care about anything or anyone.
This helped him shut down any suspicions about him being broken inside and allowed him to have mental breakdowns in his silence-charmed bed at nights and start the habit of self-harming.
Every day after therapy, when his emotions where bubbling in a sea of depression inside him, Draco Malfoy would go into the bathroom to take a shower; he took a very long time, but his roommates knew better that to bother him or asking him about it, they just went to another one if they really needed it and took their showers before therapy, because even if Draco was feeling a lot of sadness and regret, he was also feeling anger and pure rage that would often show in his face when he was annoyed, thus making him look more threatening and intimidating than ever before.
Inside the bathroom, after locking the door and putting up enough silencing charms to block the sound of a rock concert, Draco would drop to his knees and cry; then he would sit with his back laying on the wall and cry some more before forcing himself to calm down; after that, he would pick up his wand take off his shirt, bringing his red puffy eyes to his dark mark that held several scars across, some deeper than others, old and recent, long and a bunch of short ones. Scars that reflected how he felt and told different stories.
One could identify which scars had been made the day they wrote about the death of Dumbledore in therapy and which ones had appeared when they discussed everything good they had done in the war.
Draco had been completely blank that day. He couldn't even use the easy way out that some students used when they had been to scared to fight: "I supported the right side". Most of the students that gave that answer did it while glaring at the Slytherins, the rest of them were Slytherins. Because, against what many people may think, Slytherin is not a house for the evil and traitors; but for the cunning and ambitious, and so it's pretty obvious that many Slytherins fought for the school they grew up in. Sure, there might have been a couple of rotten apples, but be sure that most of the Slytherins fighting against Hogwarts did it because they were forced to, just like Draco Malfoy.
But he couldn't find anything good in that, he didn't think that having the heart in the right place made any difference; he had completely forgotten about how he had helped Harry back in the Malfoy Manor because for him it had been nothing.
But Harry remembered, and he knew that they wouldn't have made it out of there alive if it hadn't been for that small act of goodness; so he spoke up when it was Draco's turn to speak and the silence had become deafening.
-Malfoy saved our lives in the Malfoy Manor when we went Horcrux hunting- Said Harry with Hermione and even Ron backing him up.
But Draco didn't say anything, he just kept his emotionless face and lowered his head briefly in a small nod. Then he got to his bathroom and repeated his small routine, that ended with him standing underneath the cold water, watching his blood contrasting against the white tiles of the shower floor while putting on fresh bandages that would stop the bleeding and quickly heal the cuts before lunch, leaving nothing but a fading scar over the unchangeable tattoo.
Today they had had another session of writing down their feelings, and these annoyed Draco the most because his mind usually went berserk with all of the events of the war. Nothing he heard in therapy made him feel any better about himself, but rather just opened old wounds and stopped them from closing.
But today it had been different.
Today, when it was time to start writing, his mind took a different path and started remembering lunch with the Gryffindors the day before. They had pumpkin pasta with bat wings. Blaise had spilled his entire plate of pasta on himself when one of his wings grew a body and the newborn bat went flying away, courtesy of Pansy showing off her magical abilities to Hermione. Everyone had laughed so hard, even Ron had cracked a little smile.
It had become their thing to sit together to have lunch and sometimes breakfast when the Great Hall was mostly deserted. Sometimes Neville and Luna joined them and they would have a laugh at some crazy story or conspiracy that Luna read off the Quibbler. They always had a good time.
Draco thought about all this when he got to his bathroom. He didn't start crying right away, but rather smiled a bit at the thought of his new friendship. Ever since it started he had felt a little bit better, he laughed more often and he received less hate from the student body thanks to Harry, who had shared the word of Draco's heroic act.
And so, Draco Malfoy made a vow, that he would not be hurting himself again; mostly because he thought that his friends would abandon him if they found out that he wasn't what he showed everyone and that he had been lying to them, but also because he didn't want them to worry about him. He didn't want to think of it this way, but he needed their friendship. It was good for him.
He knew that he wasn't going to be able to fulfill his new promise if he kept going to therapy, it was too painful, and so he decided to stop going altogether, hoping that nobody would notice. But when someone has a crush on another person, even if they don't know about it yet or won't admit it, the are bound to notice their crush's absence, and this was the case of Draco Malfoy's secret admirer.