Breathe — Draco Malfoy

breathe — draco malfoy

pairing: draco malfoy x female!reader

prompt: her death leaves behind a void in draco’s chest nothing can ever fill.

t/w: death and mentions of anxiety

requests are open. please refrain from plagiarizing my work!

Five months.

He’s gone five months without her. And he’s determined to keep going—he has to. He has to. 

But goddamn does it bloody well hurt.

—

In the middle of a quiet cemetery stands a boy in a black suit and a cluster of white roses clasped in his hands, eyes staring but unseeing as he stands over one of the countless tombstones with his heart in his throat and what feels like a gaping hole inside his chest.

“I miss you.”

Snow falls from the sky. Bits of it sink deep into the fabric of his suit, fall into his hair, some onto his face. But Draco doesn’t feel it, the bite of the cold. His knuckles may have turned a pinkish red from the frost and his blond hair may have turned stiff from the flakes of snow stuck in it, but he doesn’t feel cold.

He’s been cold for five months now. He can’t feel it anymore.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

It has, says the voice inside his head that keeps him company when he feels the loneliest—when the pain becomes too much to bear—the voice that he knows isn’t real and hates that it isn’t. The one that sounds painfully like her.

“Yeah,” Draco continues, bottom lip trembling, and it’s not because of the snow. “I’m doing okay.” He lies. Keeps lying. “I think I’m getting better.”

He’s not. He can’t get better, not when he sees traces of her everywhere, even when she isn’t really there.

He sees a wooden desk and remembers her with her head bowed over a sheet of parchment, tongue poking out of her lips in concentration as she chides him—"Not now, Draco, I’m studying“—he pulls out an old chessboard from the crevices of his closet and remembers her grinning in triumph over winning a particularly intense chess game even though he lost on purpose—he walks past a park and remembers lying on the grass in the Hogwarts courtyard with his head in her lap and her fingers raking through his hair as she told him Muggle stories of love and tears and laughter and everything in between. Stories with happy endings; so unlike Draco’s and hers.

He squeezes his eyes shut; tears fall and trickle down his cheek onto the ground, joining the bundle of snow at his feet. 

"Life hasn’t really been the same since—”

A sob tears its way up his throat and out of his lips before he can even think about suppressing it. 

“—since you left.”

With his other hand—the hand that’s not grasping onto the bouquet of roses like it’s a lifeline—he wipes his tears away aggressively, almost angrily.

“I’ve started talking to myself a lot lately even though I know you’re not going to respond because I’ve been so used to you being here to listen and now you’re not.”

Another sob. Pathetic, says a voice inside Draco’s head. Not her voice. Never hers. She would never make him feel bad for feeling things—no, she’d crouch down next to him on the floor, wrap her arms around him and say “Everything’s going to be okay, love. I’m right here with you. Right here” and he’d look up at her and start crying even harder, because in a world where his parents expected too much from him and he was never good enough, he had her.

Or, well. He used to.

Draco clenches his fists, nails digging crescents into his skin as his breathing gets uneven and the air suddenly feels too tight. He tries to ground himself by inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth and repeating the process—

“That’s it, love. Keep breathing. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere." 

Draco took another shaky breath, trying to focus on her face even though her features were blurred and he didn’t quite know where to look through the tears obscuring his vision.

Panic attacks. He hated them. Hated the hand that felt like it had reached straight into his chest and started squeezing. Hated the tears that slipped out of his eyes almost automatically.

"It’s okay, Draco. Breathe with me.”

He inhaled deeply, closing his eyes, shoulders trembling from the effort. “You’re doing such a good job, Draco,” she said gently. Draco let out a long, shuddering breath. “You’re doing so well. Now breathe. Breathe with me. In through the nose, out through the mouth—that’s it, love, keep going. In through the—the—” her voice broke. Draco couldn’t see it—and maybe it was better that way—but she’d started crying at some point.

“In through the nose,” she continued, swallowing back a sob. “Out through the mouth. I love you, Draco. You’re gonna be okay.”

“I know you’d probably get mad at me for this if you were here, but sometimes.. well.. sometimes I find myself wishing I was dead.”

And even though there’s no one around that’s listening and Draco is the only living, breathing soul among the countless graves, he feels exposed. Bare. Like he’s laid his biggest vulnerability out for the rest of the world to see. 

“I wake up everyday,” he says slowly, a crease in between his brows, "I stare up at the ceiling for a little bit. And then I get up, eat, sleep. Get up, eat, sleep. Over and over and over again.“

A pause. "It all just seems so.. pointless,” he bows his head, staring at his shoes as though he's ashamed. And he is. He’s ashamed that he’s like this—because he knows that if she were here (which she isn’t, says that annoying little voice at the back of his head) she’d smack him upside the head and say

“Don’t be ridiculous, Draco,” she rolled her eyes, glancing up for a brief moment before transferring her gaze back to the textbook in her hands. 

Draco fell quiet again, staring into the embers of the fireplace. Maybe it hadn’t been the best idea to ask her to drop everything and run away with him on a whim.

A few seconds passed in silence. She looked up at him again out of concern to find that he hadn’t moved at all. A twinge of sadness plucked at her chest and she sighed, closing the book with a soft snap as she set it down on the floor. 

Draco lost himself in his thoughts sometimes. It wasn’t a common occurrence, but she'd seen it enough times to know how bad it could get inside his head. It was a side of himself that he only felt comfortable enough showing to her and her only—a side that he'd kept well hidden under the facade of arrogance he always had put up.

It was when he would start thinking about—well—everything. How he never seemed to match up to his parent’s expectations no matter how hard he tried. He'd think about his obligations as the heir of one of the oldest pureblooded wizarding families. He’d think about his future and wonder if he deserved one with her with that dirty mark on his wrist.

Usually it would take quite a while to snap him out of his reverie, but tonight Draco seemed more lost in his thoughts than ever before. When she got up from the carpet to sit down next to him on the couch, his eyes were still hazy and unfocused. “Draco,” she murmured, sitting with her feet tucked underneath her as she turned to face him. “Draco?”

Her hands reached out for Draco’s, fingers slipping into the spaces between his own of their own accord. At this, he blinked, his gaze clearing, and looked at her. 

“Love,” he breathed quietly.

She pursed her lips in a small smile, squeezing his hand in hers. “I’m here,” she told him, basking in the silence of the Slytherin common room, only interrupted by the sound of her and Draco’s breathing and the crackling sounds from the fireplace. She shifted on the couch to make herself more comfortable, leaning the side of her head on Draco’s shoulder and ignoring the ache of sadness in her chest that would always come when Draco felt down.

“Galleon for your thoughts?” she whispered.

Draco unlaced her hand from his to slowly trace the lines on her palm with his index finger. “It’d take much more than a galleon, love,” he whispered back, and there was a ghost of a small smile on his lips, but it was blanketed by the worry etched deep into his face. 

The corners of her mouth tugged up into a sad smile. There was nothing in the world that she wanted more than to rid Draco of all the worries plaguing his head. He’d grown up surrounded by so much despair and for years he had no one but himself to carry his burden with, but now here she was. And even though she’d already done everything she could to help him—and she continued to do so every single day—it never felt like it was enough. 

“You know you can always tell me everything, yeah?” she said quietly, looking up at him from the corner of her eyes. 

Draco, with his gaze fixed on their hands, nodded. "Yeah.“

"I mean it. Always.”

He smiled, and it was a real one this time. “I know.”

The snow has stopped falling. Draco tastes tears, hot and salty, on his tongue. 

“I’m going to keep going, though,” he tells her. Hangs onto the tiny sliver of hope he has that she is out there somewhere, listening. “I’m going to.. I’m going to keep getting up and eating and sleeping until it doesn’t feel so tiring anymore. Okay?”

Silence. “Does that sound good, love?”

Like shouting into a canyon and waiting for an echo that would never come. 

“I know that’s what you’d want,” he says quietly, gritting his teeth. “For me to keep living. Not to give up. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Don’t give up.”

Draco snorted out a laugh. “Shouldn’t you be telling yourself that?”

He was sitting with her at their usual table in the library; the one right by the window near the restricted section. She had a Potions quiz tomorrow—Draco being the “smartass” he was (or so she called him), didn’t need to study, but she did. Him being her boyfriend, he'd offered to tutor her, unaware that it was easier said than done. She just couldn’t, for the life of her, get the terms right. 

She scoffed. “I don't need to tell myself that. I won’t give up no matter what—you, on the other hand..”

Draco scrunched his nose. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying you have a tendency to stop trying and call it a day.”

“That is a lie.”

“Is not.”

“Well, I suppose it depends on the task—if it’s tutoring you, then anyone’s bound to give up..”

“Hey!” she reached over the table to smack him on the shoulder. He swiftly dodged, laughing. She rolled her eyes but couldn’t suppress the smile on her face as she sat back down. “Maybe I should be getting a different tutor.”

“Or maybe you should just be studying harder.”

“Or maybe you should actually be trying to teach me—”

“I am!”

“—without giving up halfway!" 

Draco huffed. "Okay. Fine. Let’s try this again. What’s another word for wolfsbane?”

“Um,” a pause. “No idea. Okay. I’m sorry." 

He let out an overly dramatic sound of complaint. 

"Don’t give up, Draco,” she reminded him, fighting back a laugh. “Don’t give up.”

Draco crouches down next to the grey tombstone already decorated with all sorts of flowers from friends and family and places his own set of white roses right next to her name. With hands that won’t stop trembling, he pulls out a tiny box from his pocket.

“I was supposed to give this to you after the war,” he says quietly, presses his palm to the snow under which he knows she’s resting, looking as breathtaking as she always has with her eyes closed.

“I wish I could’ve given it to you when I had the chance, but..”

“Don’t do this to me, love.”

Draco couldn’t think straight. He gathered her into his arms and cradled her the way he had done countless times before, except this time she wasn’t smiling up at him with a familiar sparkle in her warm eyes—no, she was limp and cold and her eyes were open but unseeing. 

“No no you can't—you can’t do this to me—” Draco was gasping for breath that wasn’t there. Choking on his tears, he shook his head repeatedly, rocking back and forth on the ground, "Look at me, love, you promised you wouldn’t leave—"

In the middle of a destroyed hallway, with the battle of Hogwarts in full fledge all around him, a boy in bloodied robes and an entire ocean caught between his lashes knelt on the ground, cradling the only person who had ever mattered to him in his arms as she did exactly what he was begging her not to do—

“You can’t leave me like this, love. Don’t leave me like this, please please—”

—and died.

Left him. Just like that.

In the middle of the empty cemetery, a boy in a black suit kneels next to a tombstone, hands shaking as they gingerly set down a small, golden ring on the grave marker. Pulling out his wand, he whispers a spell and enchants the beautiful golden band to stay there for as long as the world exists.

Draco closes his eyes, inhales through his nose, exhales through his mouth.

And then he leaves. 

Just like that.