A Kingdom Beside the Sea (Dramione)

Chapter 5

Eighteen

He was in a jail cell for his eighteenth birthday, though he hadn't realized it at the time. He had been trapped, physically and mentally. A prisoner to the country and to his own self, his past. Draco had done a lot of thinking and remembering. Had analyzed until everything in the two years before it had been ruthlessly picked apart. It was amazing what hindsight brought. How much could change when looking at it through a different angle of perception. He had come to a lot of understandings – about the past, himself, his parents, his once-beliefs. It all felt so fucking trivial. The hell it had turned his life into – he almost couldn't believe that a war had been fought over it, that people had died for it. He didn't care about any of it. Not a single thing that had forced him to that place. He wanted his life back, and the opportunity to start over again, to make it something better.

And once he got there, there was no where else to go. He paced the floor, he thought again, he counted days, he lost track. He learned that the mind was the worst prison one could find themselves trapped inside. A person could be locked in a corner, but if their mind was still free – if they still had imagination over mistakes, memory over thoughts, hope over desperation – they still had a measure of freedom. They could dream themselves anywhere and be at peace for it. But if you put a person in an open world and take away their mind? There was no freedom in that.

Granger wasn't sleeping. Neither was he, but he had a reason for it. The red rim of her bloodshot eyes were days away from matching his and the faint, tiny blue veins spidering across his eyelids. It annoyed him. They had fought about it, and she had thrown a book at him when he demanded she go sleep and piss off. She had been the one to pick it up later, writing down more notes on her stack of parchments as she read, which had irritated him more than when the book hit him in the knee. They had fought again until she stormed off into her bedroom, yelling about how ungrateful he was.

It's not that he didn't appreciate her help. If it hadn't been for her and her poorly placed faith in him, he would have still been convinced he had murdered someone and was in the process of going insane. But he had learned a long time ago that nothing came for free, and he didn't know how to pay back this debt. If he ever could.

He had forced her to stay in France, lost his mind for several seconds while he tried to kill her, and now she was helping him. Losing sleep over it, even. He wasn't sure how exactly it made him feel, but he knew he didn't like it. Relying on another person, seeing them so dedicated to help, taking the hit to his pride that came with accepting help at all.

But she was unrelenting. She didn't stop when the information she extracted from his head turned out nothing, when he freaked out over her whispered confession that she thought magic itself was either keeping the curse active or making it more severe, when he fought with her over everything. Anything. She had even had his wand after the spell crippled him last week, but she hadn't done anything with it beyond summoning a pain draught.

No wonder Potter had held onto every annoying, bossy, stubborn, pain in the arse bit of her. If her knowledge or bravery hadn't been enough, the woman's loyalty at even the slightest indication of friendship was so ridiculous it was awe- inspiring. Draco didn't have a clue what to do with it.

"I hear the birds." "That's nice, Granger."

"You don't hear them?" He finished writing his sentence before looking up at her, blank-faced. "You don't he--" She cut off at the faintest twitch of his mouth, narrowing her eyes as she looked around the table.

"You better not be looking for something to throw at me."

"Of course not. I'm looking for something to injure you with."