gold-vision
The first time Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy stood in the same room, they were eleven years old and the world had not yet broken them.
That would come later.
This is not the story of how they broke.
This is the story of what they built from the pieces.
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There is a particular kind of hatred that is only possible between people who see each other too clearly. Not the clean, impersonal hatred of strangers, but something more intimate, something that requires attention, sustained and unwilling, the kind you can't quite stop even when you want to.
Harry Potter had hated Draco Malfoy for fifteen years.
He had hated him the way you hated something that kept demanding to be looked at.
He had not, until it was far too late, understood what that meant.
This story begins with a letter on a Tuesday.
But really, if you're honest about it and this story is going to ask you to be honest. it begins in a corridor in 1991, with an offered hand and a refusal, and everything that grew from that small, irreversible moment.
Everything that was always, somehow, growing toward this.