He stood still, unable to understand what had just happened, unwilling to process it.
“Draco?”
There he was, the Boy-who-Lived, red Gryffindor robes covered in red blood matching the red of his eyes and the red of his hands and wand.
Red, red, red, no matter where he looked.
“Draco?”
Merlin, there was just so much of it. It was pooling around Potter’s feet. It had stained those damned white trainers he insisted on wearing beneath those garish maroon robes.
“Draco! Please, do something?”
What was he supposed to do? He couldn’t focus. There was so much. It was everywhere. Red, red, red, red. All he could see was red. Merlin.
“D-Draco?”
He looked up, prying his eyes away from his boyfriend’s shoes (red, stained), past his jeans (sticky, wrinkled), past his hands (outstretched, bloody), past his neck (clawed, dripping), finally to his face (questioning, pleading).
“I did it for you.”
For him? Did it for him? In this world where he was already a social pariah, already a thing-not-to-be-touched, already the subject of the papers’ constant questioning of whether he was good enough for the Boy-who-lived?
“I wanted to be like you!”
Be like him? He who had seen the horrors of war closely and personally and carnally, he who had seen the deaths of a thousand men? He who had taken the hands of his men and led them willfully and wrongly into battle, to be cut down like carnations, red stained deeper from their sticky, fruitlessly spilled blood; he who had watched a man live beyond death and conquer the minds of the upper echelon, and did nothing but meekly follow in the path of his ancestors into yet another ill-begotten, falsely prophesied heaven-yet-hell?
“When you told me you could see them, I wanted to see them too.”
See them? The towering beasts with mouths of rotted flesh and teeth, the beasts that marked his descent into the maladies of society, the beasts that forced him to relieve the days and nights of the war that took his voice, his mind, his home, his family? The beasts that had dragged the bodies of his victims to and fro before they ate in some pale parlance of the chase before a meal?
“I wanted to be like you, Draco.”
What was there to want to be like? He was rotten, spoiled, treacherous. He was bathed in blood and bone, baptised with the rattle of death, anointed by the lingering fingers of those begging for mercy. He was a startling juxtaposition to the boy-yet-man who had been hidden away by powers larger than he, hidden in the land of milk and honey and peace, unknowing of the horrors he had caused, unable to fathom the depth of depravity his boyfriend mired in.
And yet.
And yet, the man stood here, covered in the entrails that clung to his robes, covered in the blood of some nameless person whose body lay decomposing somewhere unknown. The man who had stood by his side as he lay motionless and voiceless from the horrors of the war, who has stayed by his side as he had stood frozen in fear in front of the doors of the courtroom; where had stood frozen in fear of what retribution the populus would wrench from him, of what he had done when he had been blinded by the idea that he would not be here to collect the consequences.
And yet, the man stayed here, loving and ready to understand the silences, ready to understand despite the silences, ready to understand from what the silences came. Ready to fight for any perceived injustice, no matter if he deserved it or not, for “he had been acquitted, and they should respect that, Draco!” Ready to face the populus that he had faced all his life, the life which he had spent basked in sunlight and love and adoration.
And yet, perhaps that was where it had gone wrong. Perhaps that was where the Boy-who-lived had gone just as insane as him. Perhaps the seclusion and isolation and separation had taken a toll on the mind of his boyfriend. For would one not go mad if they spent all their life in a test chamber? Would they not go mad if the only person they saw was an old man whose entire purpose seemed to be to orchestrate a life that was not his? Would they not go mad from the voices they heard, from the people they saw who were not truly there, from the noises they made because there was no one else to make them? Would they not go mad?
And yet.
And yet, the Boy-who-lived had chosen him, he who had sinned more than the devil himself, he who had drunk from the chalice of death yet lived to tell the tale. And he had chosen the man in return, the man who had spent the last decade in the same room with the same walls with the same people and the same thoughts.
Perhaps they were both wrong in the head. Perhaps he had died along the way to this Pyrrhic victory and this was his reward in that heaven-hell the monster had promised: a man who loved him in all the wrong ways and was ruined in all the right ones.
“Draco, I love you. Please say something.”
He looked back at this mirror, this foil, this being that had hewn smooth statue from rough stone, this boyfriend of his.
For what was love but a mismatching of chemicals? For what was love but the misalignments of the universe forced into equal yet separate horrors? For what was love but the simplicity of the deranged finding others to be deranged with?
“I can see them now, Draco. I understand, just a little now. I love you. Do you love me, Draco?”
What was love but the connection of the deranged, the misbegotten, the dredges, the mad?
I love you, he mouthed back.