Recently, Harry's noticed a pattern. It is simple and telling and an old, old thing that, by now, he knows better than to ignore.

Sooner or later, everyone he loves will die. Quickly or painfully -- the way they go doesn't matter (though it suffices to say he's noticed a pattern with that, too.) They will be (spares) collateral damage in another yet futile attempt at Harry's life.

Everyone he loves will die. And it will be his fault. It always has been before.

Take Harry and run! (A flash of green light.) Kill the spare. (The sound of a body hitting the ground.) When Harry goes to bed, these images and sounds and feelings haunt him. In the morning, guilt joins the stomach acid eating at him.

Isolating himself is his new favorite hobby. Unintentional, at first, a side effect of a trauma and the Durselys being good to pester when you want to suffer and not so much when you want to alleviate it. And then, when he is taken to Grimmauld Place, surrounded by friends and those he wants to call family alike... it is wholly intentional.

Don't they know what happened to his last family? To his last friend?

Times when he is (hunted down) discovered storing himself away in the nearest unused room and hustled (forced) into eating dinner with them, Harry sits and eats nothing. Cedric will never eat again. Why should Harry bother?

And during these rare moments that he thinks are supposed to be wholesome, he hears Sirius joke about that old Potter luck of his. What a funny thing it is, he says. That your bloodline is so misfortunate.

Personally? Harry thinks it is nothing to do with blood and everything to do with love. Love killed his father and his mother and love killed Cedric. Love, even, in an odd way, killed Quirrell.

It is a dangerous, unruly thing, and a part of him sees why Voldemort is so adverse to it. For a man who wants to live forever, who would he involve himself in what is, at its core, nothing more than a death trap?

Love has a morality rate... people like Voldemort do not.

Harry slips on that skin of apathy not for the selfish, malicious reason that Voldemort does, but because he has killed before and refuses to kill again. These people deserve the world, but he will not love them. For their sake, he is better off a stranger. (And that is its own form of love, his disposition. He is not smart enough to see the irony.)

Ginny's sympathy toward him wavers. She is tired of giving and getting nothing in return. When he tells her to fawk off and she finally decides to listen, it stings. It stings but Harry does not take it back because all the heartbreak in the world is worth her safety. All of it. Every time.

Ron is harder to persuade, if only for the fact that they share a room. Harry awakes in a cold sweat and, if he is unlucky (and his Potter fucking luck might indicate), screaming. When he awakes, Ron does, too, concerned and worried and not at all distant, like Harry needs him to be.

"Won't you just pull a fourth year and abandon me again?" he snapped one evening. "You're a jealous bitch, you know that, and that jealously doesn't just go away, does it?"

Ron had frowned, winced (Harry has more things to feel guilty for by the day) but protested, promised, "I will never do that again. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."

"I know you, Ron," Harry'd said, despaired. "Never say never."

Hermione is not one to frown or wince, noted with growing frustration. When she finds him, sitting on the floor of some room not yet checked for curses, she brings him his homework to work on. She brings him a water bottle and a plate of food that will go untouched and reads her books, unbothered by Harry's occasional hostile comments.

It is not fair. People love him when he is acting the very image of unlovable. He's never asked to be hated before, but now he's borderline begging for it. And it doesn't matter. And it isn't fair.

Often he will dream of the graveyard. In Cedric's place will be Hermione or Ron or Ginny or Sirius. Spares. Collateral damage. They serve as chilling reminders of the result of what will happen if he fails... but though they are useful, in their own way, they're also terrible. Leaving him with shaking hands and terror he cannot rid himself of, he wishes (for one moment) that he had his friends with him. He cannot survive feeling so alone for so long.

And he will think (for just one moment) that the list of things he'd do to get rid of his nightmares is not in any way short.

XoX

Harry Potter, in Draco Malfoy's large house, has always been a sore spot of discussion. His father's relief at the Dark Lord's vanquish was evident. The words Safe and Hero and Fortunate are tossed around a lot.

This adoration is not missed in the way Draco is drawn to him, this story book character come to life. Safe, Hero, Fortunate. Draco is forever indebted to the boy that made his father so gracious, and forever bitter his affections are not returned.

Narcissa reminds him that he's to be wed to a pureblood woman, do not forget, but Draco doesn't get why she'd say that. He knows that and nothing, he thinks, in his behavior has indicated otherwise.

When he turns home for the summer following his fourth year, his father is no longer grateful. He is worried and tense. The slightest noise or movement will set him off. Draco Malfoy does not fear his father.

... Draco Malfoy is starting to.

He grabs him harshly by the shoulders one day, stinking heavily of alcohol, and tells him he will deny it to the ends of the earth to everyone else, but the Dark Lord is back. The Dark Lord is back and his father is sorry, so sorry.

"Do you want to live, Draco? I want you to live. My family, my son... I love you. And I am sorry I cannot give you the life, the freedom you deserve -- but compliance will save you. It has saved me before and I hope it will save me again. You want to live? Then do whatever it takes. Whatever it is."

His father, revealed then, was there. His father was there when Harry Potter was cruico'd and cut and Cedric was murdered -- he did not drop dead of his own accord -- and the Dark Lord was revived and...

And it was real. His father was there and it was real.

He wants to live. He (thinks of Harry Potter and how he and his Dark friends have never existed entirely on the same wavelength, how they have shared opinions and views and laughed at the word Mudblood but do not really relate to each other)... will do whatever it takes to live.

(Apparently, not enough.)