measure the walls
When Harry’s shoulders fell and his breath stuttered, it was Draco Malfoy who saved him.
He’d never really considered the full depth of water until he’d been plunged into it, sunken into the thick molasses of it as if he was a tiny, insignificant thing. The chill was shocking but the length of it was what kept him up at night, years later; how impossibly far he’d seemed to sink.
He could recount it in small details. The slow suck of light as the darkness rose around him in towering, imposing columns. The salt touching his lips. The way Malfoy’s hair had been a shock of ice white in the tundra of black-blue.
“Why?” he’d asked since. A constant drawling plea.
“Why?” he demanded at his trial. Narcissa imprisoned and Lucius dead. There was a tiny sliver of gold tied around Malfoy’s wrist. A mark, much like the one Malfoy had carved into his forearm, that condemned him to live a small life.
“Why?” he asked at Pansy’s wedding, bells ringing in the air and Draco’s hair lacking the lustre of when he’d had magic at his fingertips.
“Why?” he’d ask, a million more times in a million more ways.
Always the same answer.
“You’re welcome, Potter.”
People worshiped him, now that he’d saved the world. They sent him bags of sweets and broomsticks and galleons. He’d tried to refuse them at first but people had thought him rude, and the concept of being unliked had hit him so suddenly and so harshly that it'd felt a bit like being flung back into the thundering pressure of the water he'd almost drowned in.
Grimuald was stacked to the ceilings with boxes of things he would never open and grief he’d never been quite equipped to handle. Hermione and Ron had tea with him sometimes. Walburga’s portrait screamed until her throat was bloody and frowned as she wiped crimson over her frame. Life was slow and thick and dark, just like it had been when the water was pulling him down, and down, and down…
And then the morning would break and he’d feel guilty. Guilty for wasting something other people didn’t have. Guilty that some days, he didn’t think a single time about the sticky nothingness of death. Guilty that his guilt felt permanent.
He spent his afternoons pretending to be brave to the mirror. Practicing for the real thing.
Those days, his house felt more like a coffin, his heart less like a hero’s, his mind a blank slate which rain water collected on and festered.
He did not feel like the boy who lived.