Chapter Text
Black, suffocating emptiness that slowly devours you. It gnaws at you from the inside, so gradually that you barely even notice it.
Yet the sunken, greyish hollows beneath his eyes remain impossible to ignore. Eyes that stare lifelessly into the distance, without truly focusing on anything at all.
Dreams now haunted by piercing, fiery red eyes. Unavoidable memories of the pain he once endured. Since that day, he had no longer been able to drift peacefully into the land of dreams.
Dreams that once resembled those from his childhood had been replaced by visions of hellish torment. Memories of times when he sat curled up beside his mother in bed while she read one of his books to him in her gentle voice.
They all felt like fragments of a past life now, one that had long since ended.
So it did not surprise him when he awoke with panicked breaths from the burning clouds of the dead, his blue-grey eyes falling upon the empty compartment of the Hogwarts Express before him.
Warm, humid air drifted through the window, filling the compartment with an unpleasant heaviness. And yet, despite how suffocating it felt, it awakened memories of his school days, days when Hogwarts had not been a place of bloodshed, but rather a place to escape from reality.
He had remained at Hogwarts for months, only to be confronted time and time again with the brutal truth that his home. A place that should have welcomed him with warmth and comfort, had always been tied to unbearable expectations.
Expectations forced upon him by his father, a man desperate to preserve the honor of the Malfoy bloodline.
And now that same father rotted away in Azkaban, under the watch of soul-hungry Dementors that stole the air from one’s lungs and spared not even the remains of a person’s life.
Yet Draco sat there with stiff shoulders pressed against the cold, lonely seat of the train carrying him back to the crumbling castle that had been scarred by the war against the Dark Lord.
The damage had still not been fully repaired. The destruction left behind by the Dark Lord had been far too great, and Draco himself had become part of it.
The fog slowly lifted as the wheels of the Express screeched to a halt. The sound of the rails pulled him from the depths of his dark thoughts and forced his attention toward the world outside his compartment.
Students shoved through the narrow train corridors, desperate to reach one of the carriages pulled by the lonely Thestrals.
Creatures that, after the war, had become visible to far more people than before.
As he grabbed his far too light bag and his heavy footsteps met the warm concrete beneath him, his gaze brushed against emerald green eyes he knew he would never forget.
And he longed, more than he cared to admit, for those eyes to meet his own once again.