Drarry - It Was All Just A Game (REWRITE - CLEAN VERSION)

CHAPTER 43 - MURDER

The problem with tragedy is that it's sneaky and deceptive. It hides in the normal, flat glass of a calm ocean.

And then comes the tsunami.

It can come in waves, every one more vicious than the last—each time you think you're going to drown, each time you think it'll kill you, and you work to accept your death. And then it doesn't. For a bit, when your sand is dry, you think you're going to make it. It's almost a betrayal to yourself when you do.

Grief is a tsunami that is rude enough to drown you, but not kind enough to kill you.

But, if there's one thing about tragedy, it's that it wakes after you do, giving you mere seconds to enjoy life without it, as if it never happened to you until it happens again, a wall of water strangling your mangled body.

You think that the waves that came before would make you wiser, more apt and able to take the next down.

It never does.

And that cycle happens all the time, until one day, it spreads out and those pauses between waves allow you to forget the waves are even there. And then a special little thought will come around and call upon a tsunami before the tsunami itself was even ready, sending you into a tangle of chaos. Like realizing that it's Friday or hearing "Hey you," in passing. Seeing someone eat a treacle tart or a flicker of blond hair in the distance.

The hardest part of when something tragic happens to you is the few seconds when you wake up and haven't remembered it happened yet. Or, those few blissful seconds when you're distracted in class or by your friends, and you don't remember you're sad.

But then you always remember it, as remembering tragedy is a guarantee. And the picked scab to open air bleeds just as fresh as it did when you first got the wound.

That was remembering that Harry wasn't his boyfriend anymore. That he hated him. And that Draco was supposed to hate him back.

It was those few seconds that tortured the both of them the most. Both of their first coherent thoughts each day were the same: I don't have a boyfriend.

He betrayed me.

I hurt him.

Death Eater.

Death Eater.

For Harry, it was a compound interest of each and every bad thing that had happened to him in his lifetime that made waking up difficult. That made dealing with Malfoy so impossible. Because he hadn't healed from all of those yet. It was year after year, trauma after trauma, and the home he made with Draco, where he felt safe, didn't exist anymore.

It was also the fear of what was to come, because he knew Draco was going to try to hurt Dumbledore, but he didn't know when or how, and he wasn't ready to risk his best friends on finding out. The only thing that gave him any hope whatsoever was the lessons with Dumbledore, looking through Tom Riddle's memory, a giant breakthrough after he took liquid luck and celebrated Aragog's death with Slughorn and Hagrid.

For Draco, it was his loss of identity. With no Harry at all, there was nothing holding him back from going into the darkness.

But even if he tried, he couldn't become a Malfoy. Harry had completely taken away his ability to become one, because when he called himself a Malfoy, he laughed because he knew how obnoxious it was.

But he was too, mourning the loss of Harry ever being able to save him ever again. They'd let go, soulmate bond be damned.

It didn't matter that they were soulmates. There was no recovery from this.