HP: The One Who Cared

Draco Malfoy couldn't breathe.  He couldn't think.  It was like the entire world was him and his mission and the huge, looming failure that hung over them both.  Honestly, he was in such a daze lately that he hadn't even realized Valentine's Day was coming, and if it hadn't been accompanied by a Hogsmede visit it might have passed him by entirely without him ever noticing.  As it was, he was just glad to have some time to himself, so that he didn't have to pretend everything was fine.  Even Crabbe and Goyle, tired of guarding him when he wouldn't tell them what he was doing, tired of being disguised as little girls, and maybe even tired of him, had gone on the trip, which meant he was even more alone than usual.  It was actually sort of nice.  Wandering around the castle's empty corridors, he felt more relaxed than he had in months.  The pressure of his mission wasn't gone, but at least no one was looking at him.  He felt like he had eyes on him all the time, like Crabbe and Goyle, formerly his best friends, were talking about his failure behind his back instead, and everyone else was trying to find out his secret.  Even Potter kept poking around, which made him feel almost worse.  Potter being the way he was, Draco would have to hide this whole thing from him anyway, but the fact that he wasn't even hiding victory from his rival, he was just hiding away his own failure, made him feel very small and uncomfortable.

He had meant to work on the cabinet in spite of not having any guards, but he was feeling antsy again, like his failure had turned solid and was crawling around under his skin, and he couldn't quite face the Room of Requirement right now.  It wasn't like he had any ideas left about the cabinet anyway – it would just be a lot of staring and feeling lost and letting the failure wash over him until he fell to pieces, so he might as well skip it.  But he could hardly go to Hogsmede and pretend to be carefree.  No one would buy it, and even if they did, at least some of them would ask him why he wasn't back at the castle working on his "project."  He could hear Pansy's voice in his head even as he considered it, nasty and wounded.  "Why aren't you working on your big fancy mission, Draco?  You love it more than you love me anyway."  No.  That wasn't an option either.  It was too much pressure right now.  Everything was too much pressure right now.

For a while, he just drifted, trying to breathe.  The worst part of this whole thing was the way the stress seemed to have moved into his chest like a living thing, pressing on his lungs and heart and stomach and tightening everything so that he couldn't sleep or eat or breathe without feeling squashed.  He'd had to stop wearing his scarf, even now in the dead of winter, because having anything around his neck made him feel like he was being strangled, and if he spent too much time in the common room watching the underside of the lake through the windows, he began to feel as if he were drowning, even though that was ridiculous.  He hadn't slept more than an hour and a half at a time since Christmas, or maybe before, but he couldn't pace in the common room without the drowning feeling coming over him and he couldn't wake his roommates pacing in his room, so he kept volunteering to take over the nighttime patrols for the other prefects.  It was the only bit of his job he was really doing anymore, but until he got in trouble for it, he wasn't going to think about that.  Failing as a prefect on top of as a Death Eater and a student was more than he could handle if he let it get into his head.

Three weeks ago, he'd gotten detention for his failures in his school work, and that was when it had all gotten worse, when he'd started feeling the worst he'd ever felt.  The prickly feeling in his skin almost never went away, now, and sleep had turned from a series of fitful catnaps to brief, nearly-hallucinatory moments of a light doze.  Worst of all, his stomach had begun to betray him as well.  He threw up almost everything he ate, now, no matter how hard he tried not to, and that was the hardest to hide.  The skin prickling was invisible, the breathless feeling nearly so, and the lack of scarf-wearing fairly subtle.  Sleep could be faked, and he could slap on a mask and pretend he was alright, but this – this was nearly impossible, and the fear that someone would find out just made it worse.  And then, of course, someone had found out, but it was only one of the ghosts, and she seemed quite content to keep it a secret.

And so when he found himself only a few turns away from the girls' toilet on the second floor in spite of not having meant to go there, he decided to go see Myrtle anyway.  She'd found him two weeks ago in one of the boys' toilets, throwing up, and she'd asked him why and he'd been vague about it and he wasn't sure what she thought was going on, exactly, but what mattered was that Myrtle was the only one in the whole bloody school – maybe the whole bloody world – who didn't seem to care that he was a failure.  Now when his stomach turned on him, he dashed in here to deal with it in secret, and she murmured soothing pointless things and rubbed the back of his neck with her icy fingers and something about it felt good even though it shouldn't.  It was like having a cold, damp cloth on the back of his neck, but this one moved in gentle circles and sank all the way into his skin on occasion when her hand slipped a bit. 

Though he didn't like to think about it, he'd even cried in front of the ghostly girl the other day, leaning his forehead against the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl and sobbing so hard that it shook his entire body.  She'd flushed the toilet (he could tell she was proud of herself for managing it, because she said once he was calm that it was the most solid she'd felt since she'd died) and rubbed his neck and back and shoulders and he hadn't meant to do it, but he'd found himself trying to hug her.  That did feel bad, cold and clammy and awful all over and all the way through him, and the fact that he couldn't actually hug her had just made him cry harder in the moment, but somehow he didn't mind it now, when he thought about it.  It wasn't her fault she was dead, and honestly, he liked her better than anyone else in the castle right now, in spite of the fact that she'd died in 1943.  Her cold touch was unpleasant as often as it was pleasant and the things she said weren't always as comforting as she meant them to be and he hadn't actually told her much of anything in detail, so there was still a chance she would turn her back on him if she found out he was trying to kill Dumbledore, but none of that changed the fact that for the first time since he'd left home at the beginning of the year, he felt like someone might actually care about him.

As he reached the door, a thought occurred to him – it was Valentine's Day.  It was Valentine's Day, and he was about to be talking to the only person in the entire castle who actually cared about him, and if he admitted it, which was crazy, but he was alone anyway, he cared about her, too.  Maybe he should do something about that.  Waving his wand, he muttered a spell he only half-remembered, one his dad had used a few times when coming home to his mum, and produced a bunch of flowers out of thin air.  Good.  Taking a deep breath, he pushed the door open and stepped through.  "Myrtle?  Happy Valentine's Day."  This time, it was Myrtle who cried and it was his turn to comfort her, for all the bits of life she'd missed and the fact that no one had ever brought her flowers before, and returning the favor she'd already done him a dozen times made him feel better than he had in ages.  Suddenly, he could breathe again.