Luna always dragged him off to parties. He wasn’t really sure how it had happened, really, that the two of them became friends, but it had, and here he was. She had stopped him right after the trial, of all times, when he was still crying and tired and disoriented, and invited him over. He hadn’t even remembered that she had invited him until he got her reminder owl. And because his father was dead, and his mother was depressed, and he had nothing left to care for, he did.
She was nice enough, Luna. She didn’t ask many questions. She was mostly just there, when he wanted her to be, and made him tea and ate dinner with him. They smoked together sometimes. It felt almost magical to him, the way it allowed him to just turn off his feelings, to stop caring about everything for just a moment. So magical that he hadn’t wanted to stop. He was starting to become afraid that he smoked too much. He couldn’t remember when he had last been sober for more than 24 hours. That was bad, probably. Wasn’t it?
She invited him to Muggle parties where he didn’t know anyone and stood in a corner awkwardly, hand around a glass that he never drank from. He didn’t much like alcohol, it made him tired and irritable and reminded him of the war. Somehow something always smelled like alcohol during the war. The Death Eaters always smelled like alcohol. The kitchen smelled like alcohol. The stairs smelled like alcohol. The floor was sticky with spilled wine and the air heavy with the disgusting sweetness of it, irritating his nose and sending his stomach roiling. Draco was the only death eater who didn’t drink during the war. He was too afraid of getting drunk and letting his guard down. Or saying something he might regret. So he hadn’t gotten drunk during the war, and after it had mostly lost his appeal.
Sometimes, when he hated himself, he drank.
He wasn’t sure why. All he knew was that he hated himself, and he had the incredible urge to do things he hated even more, so at the end of the day all he felt was the most profound self-disgust he had ever experienced.
He didn’t drink on most days, though.
Mostly he stood in the corner, watching, pretending to drink. He noticed that if he was always holding a full glass, even if he never drank from it, people would stop trying to get him something to drink or refill the glass he was already holding. He’d smoke if there were other people smoking, but he was never the first to start. He brought his joints to parties already rolled because he got so nervous when people watched him roll that his hands began to shake, which was ridiculous, but that was the way it was, so he rolled them at home and brought them to parties and if nobody there was smoking he’d sometimes smoke them alone in his room after he came home.
He’d started smoking before bed sometimes. It was a worrying habit, but he told himself it wasn’t that bad since he still went to bed most days without it. Dreamless Sleep didn’t count.
Sometimes he’d have sex with people. He’d never thought of himself as especially handsome, but people were constantly trying to sleep with him. Even women, which surprised him, because sometimes straight men would come up to him and try to start a conversation, try to talk about women, and they all seemed to have in common that none of the women ever wanted to sleep with them. They’d try to commiserate with Draco about it, but he couldn’t relate. He wondered whether it was because he looked gay. Whether straight women could sense it and sought him out because of it. Or whether they simply wanted someone to listen to them instead of talk, which Draco was superb at - mostly because he had very little to say to them. Who knew. Draco certainly didn’t.
He didn’t usually tell them he was gay, because he wasn’t, was he, he just wasn’t interested in women anymore, not like he was when he was a teenager. To be perfectly honest, he wasn’t interested in men either, but he slept with them anyway. It didn’t make him feel better, most of the time. Sometimes he felt worse. It was something to do, anyhow.
Sometimes he slept with men he found repulsive. Sweaty and fat and grimy, the type of men who thought themselves funny because they liked to listen to themselves laugh.
He’d had threesomes, too. Mostly he just found them stressful because he had to pretend to be enjoying sex with two people at once, and he found it difficult to gauge what they wanted. He can’t put on a persona that both of them would like equally, and everything was happening so fast and at the same time that he felt he couldn’t control it. A couple times he thought to himself he should stop having sex. But then he couldn’t find a good reason to stop either. No good reason to keep going, no good reason to stop. So he just didn’t disagree and let things happen, and went to all the parties Luna invited him to.
He wasn’t really sure how she knew enough people to constantly be invited to new and different parties, but he was sure it must have had something to do with her new Muggle degree. She was studying ethnology and sociology at some university, and she had tried to explain to Draco what that meant, but he still didn’t really understand exactly what she did. Something about societies and different peoples and too many statistics. That was the one thing he remembered. Whenever he talked to people about their studies, they always complained about their statistics classes. It was surprisingly easy to lie and pretend he was studying something as well, because Muggles who didn’t do anything, who weren’t at university or working or doing something worthwhile with their time, were suspicious. Sometimes he said he worked full-time at Tesco because he knew people wouldn’t want to ask any follow-up questions after that. Sometimes they gave him a pitying look.
It was funny, because Draco was actually genuinely curious about what workers at Tescos did. How did they know which numbers to type in? How did they know where to put all the things? How did they do it without magic? People at Tesco’s always seemed incredibly important to him, like they knew what they were doing and they wanted nothing more than to get it done. They were so driven that customers asking questions frustrated them to no end, as if they wished they could do all their stacking and calculating and list-writing and announcement-making without pesky customers getting in the way.
He told Luna about it one time and she told him just to apply. So he did.
It took him a bit too long to understand that the people stocking the shelves and typing the numbers and manning the registers were called “customer assistants”. He wondered briefly why they called them that if they never really assisted the customers anyhow. At least not Draco. Whenever he asked them something, they always got immeasurably annoyed. Maybe his questions were stupid, he thought, or maybe people were just sometimes called things that they weren’t. Just like he himself had never actually eaten death, had he?
He had to fake a graduation certificate to get in, which was pretty easy. The manager told him he’d get discounts at the store, which he tried to refuse at first, but she didn’t let him. He didn’t need charity, he told her, he was perfectly capable of feeding himself without 10% discounts off everything.
He wasn’t poor.
He was immediately sure he had said something strange, maybe offensive, maybe funny, it was hard to tell. The energy in the room had shifted completely. Mostly, the manager just seemed irritated.
He got the job anyway.
He worked afternoons and evenings most days except Saturdays. On Saturdays, he had to get up at 5am for the early shift. If he went to a party on Friday he usually went directly to work after, without sleeping in between. He’d have a coffee, even though it didn’t really make him more awake, mostly just jittery, because that’s what the other Muggles did at the beginning of the morning shift, even though they should’ve been working. He met another university student there who also worked the early shift on Saturdays. Her name was Tiffany, which she was embarrassed about, because apparently it was a posh name and she wasn’t a posh person. She certainly had a strange accent, but Draco didn’t really understand Muggle naming conventions anyway.
He started inviting her to Friday night parties.
They started returning to work together in the early hours of Saturday mornings, before the sun came up and while the world was still dark and distant, their feet heavy on the wet asphalt, the stars in the London sky hidden by light pollution. They’d get to work - often still high out of their minds, giggling like idiots - and by the time their shift was over, they’d go to Tiffany’s place and pass out on the couch together.
Sometimes they almost had sex. He would laugh at something she had said, or they would be sitting just a bit too close together, or one of them would turn around and suddenly be much closer than anticipated, and Draco could feel the heavy possibility of it in the air, weighing them down. It didn’t happen when he was wide awake, or sober, rather it happened in those late nights or early morning hours, when his brain was muddled and his body was simultaneously tired and oddly energetic, and rational thoughts took longer to form than hasty decisions.
He always stopped himself before anything happened. Made himself get up or lean away. They never really talked about it, but he didn’t think Tiffany really got it. She tended to sleep with most of her friends, and really, he admired how she could do all that and have absolutely no emotional troubles with it, but he didn’t trust himself with that. He was afraid of ruining their friendship. And he wasn’t all that sure that Tiffany really managed to sleep with all her friends without any emotional fallout - every once in a while, he would notice one of her friends trying to treat her as more-than-that, being overly tactile in public, adoringly gazing at her, the works. Some time later, these friends would disappear from all their joint outings and stop turning up in conversation, but Draco never asked. He could guess what had happened.
It was Tiffany who gave him the idea to apply to university. He had joked about enrolling just to be able to blend into conversations better, and she had very directly asked him why he didn’t. She waved off his usual answer about the finances not working out - Draco hated pretending to be poor, but it was the only realistic reason why he would be working at Tesco anyway - and kept asking until he didn’t have any excuses left.
“You’re such a swot, Draco, I don’t understand how you haven’t got ten degrees already. I wish I was that smart, you’ve got a real talent for that shite. I’m going to put two more years into that uni and probably barely finish. I’ll be happy when I get to work full-time. But you’re such a smart bloke, it would be such a waste for you to stay at Tesco for the rest of your life. You could really, you know, go places, be someone…”
She looked at him then with such tenderness in her big, brown eyes that he had to look away. He didn’t deserve for her to be this caring towards him. This loving.
“Look, Draco, if it’s really about the money, we’ll figure something out. I bet you could get a scholarship if you really wanted. But if that doesn’t work… you can get a loan, and if that’s not enough, I’ve still got a couple thousand saved, you know. It’s not much, but it could help. I could pick up a couple more hours at Tesco’s.”
At this point, Draco was crying. Embarrassed, he tried to wipe his cheeks, but the tears just kept coming.
“There’s no need for that, Tiff. I’ll finance it myself. You don’t have to - “ his stupid, breathy, I’ve-just-been-crying-like-a-ponce voice broke and he choked up for a second.
“Really, there’s no need.”
He sent his applications a few weeks later. Even though he was fairly good at pretending he knew how technology worked, he really didn’t. Tiffany had to help him open an email account and register online at UCAS. His acceptance letters came back a while later, and he felt apprehensive at the thought of going to a real Muggle university, where he wouldn’t just have to fit in for a couple of hours, but for his whole life.
But he wasn’t just nervous, he realized. He was excited. He liked his Muggle friend Tiffany, he liked his work at Tesco, he liked his odd little electronic mail address and he couldn’t wait to study with real Muggles. He was going to be studying French Literature and Philosophy, and he couldn’t have been happier.
In hindsight, it was fairly obvious that Potter would choose this exact moment to waltz back into his life and ruin it all over again.
***
He was at another party. Tiffany couldn’t make it that day, and he was bored. He realized how much he depended on her lively chatter and ridiculous drunk stunts. He felt adrift without her and didn't know what to do. He joined some stoners on the couch to smoke with them, but before they even passed the joint around to Draco, he saw him.
Shaggy black hair, cheap, ratty clothes, and trainers that had definitely seen better days. He still dressed as though he has been overweight for years and only recently lost at least thirty pounds or so to become the scrawny twenty-year-old he was now. For all intents and purposes, he looked like he had just crawled out from underneath the bridge he slept under, but still -
His smile lit up his whole face, giving his skin a bronze glow. His green eyes were so bright it almost hurt Draco to look at them. He carried himself with a sort of effortless grace that drew everyone else to him, and he exuded so much happiness Draco could practically feel it oozing out of him, and he hated him for it.
Potter was once again at the center of everyone’s attention without even trying. People flocked to him in almost the same way they would flock to him in wizarding society. Trying to get as close as possible, trying to flatter him, make him smile, make him notice them. And they couldn’t even feel his magic the way Draco could, crackling just below his skin, electric and so powerful it knocked the breath out of his lungs. Draco had forgotten what it felt like to be in a room with Potter. He looked like a god among those Muggles.
And the worst part was how he wasn’t even aware of it, just smiling, laughing, talking as if this was normal, acting like everybody must live the way Potter did. Draco didn’t understand how he did it, he would go mad.
Draco escaped to the balcony. It was curved in a way that made it impossible to see who was sitting there from the living room, which suited him perfectly. It was so cold outside that his breath came in little white puffs, but he resisted the urge to cast a warming charm. Too obvious, in case anyone came outside to check on him. He hadn’t brought his wand, anyway. It barely left his bedside table these days. The street below was strangely quiet, all he could hear were hasty footsteps and hushed conversations. No drunk fights or stray dogs today. His fingers hurt from the cold as he bent them to use his lighter. Thank Merlin and Circe both that he had had the foresight to roll his cigarette in advance.
It didn’t really calm him down, but it calmed Tiffany, and whenever she needed to calm down she lit up a cig. He’d started joining her for no good reason that he could discern, but now the ritual had stuck with him.
Maybe it did calm him down, after all.
He’d been outside for no more than ten minutes when he heard the balcony door open and close.
“Malfoy”, he said, as if there were not a thousand other words between them unspoken.
“Potter”, he answered.
For a while, they were both silent.
A couple started arguing right below the balcony, their angry words wafting up to the balcony in bits and pieces. If he had been with Tiffany, he thought, they’d be laughing about it, joking, spinning tales about the couple’s background and thoughts and motivations. Her father is against them, he might say. But she doesn’t care, Tiffany might say in turn, and she’s run away to live with him instead. His parents think she’s a gold digger, and they’ve arranged for an actress to come to his house and pretend she’s pregnant from him so the young couple will fight, Draco would answer. And so they would go on, their grins growing and growing until they dissolved in a fit of helpless giggles.
But he was not with Tiffany, he was with Potter, and so he stayed silent.
He wondered if Potter noticed how Draco’s voice had changed. How it was suddenly just weary instead of full of malice, as it used to be. He wondered if he could see how Draco had changed, because sitting next to him, he felt just like the boy he used to be back when Potter still knew him.
Potter started speaking, then.
“You were probably the last person I expected to see here, Malfoy. Friends with Muggles now, are we?”
Draco stayed silent. He didn’t trust himself not to spit out an insult in retaliation. He didn’t want to fight Potter tonight.
Potter sighed.
“Sorry, that was unfair.”
His breath came out in little white puffs.
“I still have your wand, you know. I wanted to apologize to you about that. I had meant to give it back, really, I did, I’m not really sure what happened. I just - when I came back home, I just put it on top of the little table in the hallway by the door, and it’s been there ever since. I see it every day, I’ve meant to - I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Draco thought it was ironic that Potter was apologizing to him here, him of all people, here of all places, but he didn’t say that. Instead he said: “It’s fine, Potter. When I do magic I use my mother’s wand.”
Potter looked surprised for a moment.
“But how does your mother do magic then?”
Draco looked down to the cobbled street, wet and shining from the rain, reflecting the street lights overhead.
“She doesn’t. She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”
He’d spent months thinking it was. Thinking Potter could have saved her, as he’d saved Draco, as he always saved everyone, the sanctimonious git, even if they ended up hating him for it. It had made it easier to grieve for him, having someone to hate. But even as he did it, as he spent long nights in bed, fuming over it, hating Potter, doing nothing but hating him, drawing his life from that hate - even then, he had known how ridiculous it was. But it had felt familiar, that hate, and that was why it had kept him alive.
“Malfoy - “
“Draco.”
Potter looked over, as if seeing him for the first time. His face was open and vulnerable, his eyes shining brilliantly green in the darkness. Green like frogs, he used to say as a joke. Green like seaweed, green like pickles, green like vomit, green like the shell of a dung beetle when it catches the light. Green like envy.
He didn’t compare it with anything now. They were not green like anything, a bit like a forest, but not quite, a bit like a sparkling emerald, but not quite, a bit like a cloudy stone of jade - but not quite.
They were green like Potter.
“Draco”, Potter repeated, and in an instant Draco recognized that look in his eye. The furtive glance at his lips. The slightly open mouth.
“I’m not going to have sex with you, Potter”, he said, surprising himself with his directness.
“I’m going to go home now.”
He got up and turned, having to almost step over Potter to get back to the door due to how narrow the balcony was. Potter watched him leave, stunned into silence.
Funny little expression, the word “no”. He hadn’t said it in a long time. Too long of a time, he realized. It had felt good to say it. He rolled it around a bit in his mouth, that odd little word, and smiled. It tasted like freedom. When he walked through the door, he finally felt like he belonged to himself again.