Across the Great Divide

Chapter 3:

There were still mornings where Harry woke up expecting his first view of the day to be the low, slanted ceiling of a cupboard built under a flight of stairs. Where the first voice he heard was the impatient shrill of his aunt, demanding that he wake up. And the first scent he smelled was the musty, dusty odor of a small, dingy room with inadequate ventilation.

The more time that passed between that period, and his current situation, the less he greeted each new day on earth with innate trepidation, but the feelings and the fear and the rejection had never gone away entirely; and was, in fact, as ingrained in him as his later developed irritation for Daily Profit reporters, and anyone who, upon meeting him, stared at his forehead for longer than polite two second intervals.

Beyond the occasional rough morning, he still thought of the Dursley´s occasionally. Sometimes with indifference - as if they could have fallen off the edge of the earth and it wouldn´t have mattered to him. Sometimes with curiosity - his nature wondering, against his will, how they had faired, and if they were all right; as if he couldn´t, despite all they had done to him, let them go entirely. But most of the time, when he thought of them, it was with a burning anger.

He hated them more than he did Voldemort.

The Dark Lord had never made any pretenses about who he was or what he believed in. He was evil and that was that: black and white, plain and simple, easy to interpret. The Dursley´s were his family, his protectors. They were supposed to love him, but hadn´t.

When Harry had been little he had wished that some kind soul would show up at the door, claim to be a second cousin twice removed, who had decided that he/she wanted to raise Harry his/her self, and take him away from the Dursley´s forever. Failing that, he had wished that the Dursley´s would wake up one day and miraculously realize that they had been neglectful, and unkind, and that they really did love Harry as one of their own.

The closest he got to either scenario was the day Hagrid, not a cousin, but a kindred spirit nonetheless, showed up at Harry´s door and informed him he was to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The contrast between Hogwarts and the Dursley home had been striking. It was finding friends who cared about him, a godfather who loved him, and teachers willing to work with him to help him develop his potential that forced him realize the extent of the Dursley´s neglect.

By then it was too late; his ideals about himself and the way that people interacted had been fully formed. If `love´ for another to such an extremity meant that it could be lavished on some, such as his cousin Dudley, and withheld entirely from others, such as himself; if `love´ to such a high degree meant that young parents were willing to die for their infant son because they carried such an abundance of love within them, then it was something, he decided, that was extremely dangerous.

Hermione had asked him this morning if he had any intention of stopping by the Dursley´s home in Surrey to let his relations know that he was back, and still alive. At the time Harry had answered an emphatic `NO´, and shot her a look he hoped she had interpreted as `how can someone so brilliant ask such a blatantly stupid question?´

Yet, hours later, he couldn´t help but wonder what the Dursley´s would say if he did go to visit them and nearly hated himself for the hopeful and sickly idealistic image that filtered uninhibitedly across his mind... The three of them greeting him at the door, instantly drawing him into tight hugs, announcing that they were sorry everything they had ever done to him, and that Harry was welcome to come visit them at any time, in fact, they would prefer it if he did.

It was ironic, to his mind, that he could hate three people so desperately, yet still, secretly and involuntary, long for their acceptance. He loathed that they still had that power, and that they probably always would, no matter how much distance he put between himself and them.

When he had been young he had needed the Dursley´s as a child needs a loving, guiding hand and they had failed, in every regard, to fill that function. At Hogwarts he had made friends, and even loved them: entirely, and without question, but he didn´t need them. And although he knew he would be terribly lonely without them, he also knew that he could, in fact, continue to operate as an entirely self-sufficient person if they weren´t by his side.

Draco was another matter entirely. It wasn´t that he had *needed* Draco to manage, per say, as much as it was that he had *wanted* Draco, desperately, and love in any form of desperation was something to be feared indeed.

The paradoxical thing was that he was entirely cognitive of all these conglomerate issues that made up his psyche, more so than he knew his friends gave him credit for. They thought him oblivious, unaware of his own destructive habits; the truth was that he was simply silent. He didn´t speak because it was hard to articulate, to explain every nuance, every fear, and it was even harder for someone who hadn´t experienced it all to understand his own massive whirl of confusion. In addition, it would make him as uncomfortable as hell to try to explain it.

He figured what mattered most was that he knew.

He had been aware of his problems during his fight with Voldemort; he had been alert to his mental anguish when he had left Draco two years prior; and he was still entirely conscious of it all as he stared at Draco now; his first day on the job, as the blonde man updated him on the current dark activity that still plagued the wizarding world.

He wondered if Draco knew how soothing his voice was, how musical; a timeless whisper of intelligence, and calculated artistry; combined in a smooth, fluid tenor. He pondered if Draco realized how profoundly beautiful he was: clear eyes, angled face, silver blonde hair, and a strength of spirit that shone through every movement, every expression. He also debated whether Draco grasped just how easy he was to fall in love with, how simple it was to love him still, despite the blatant issues still standing between them; especially on Harry´s part.

It had been his second year at Hogwarts, when Harry had been twelve, that he had come across a startling discovery in the form of a diary - he and Tom Riddle, the-man-who-would-be-Voldemort, had an uncomfortable number of things in common. Orphaned at a young age. Abandoned, overlooked, and neglected by a muggle world that refused to embrace them. Tom Riddle had been sorted into Slytherin house for his cunning and craft, and Harry had very nearly been sorted into the same house himself.

It had been that discovery that first forced Harry to contemplate his situation.

He knew what the Dursley´s had done to him, knew that his life had been filled with deceit and tragedy, he also knew that he would be forever damned if he allowed any of those circumstances to turn him into a monster like Voldemort. And so he made a conscious decision to control his destiny, make his own choices; choices that he hoped were the right ones. For the most part his decision, so long ago, had worked for him - it had guaranteed that Harry could live with himself and not entirely dislike the person that he had become... Save one choice, made in a fear. Easy to recognize in theory, yet harder to control when it had actually happened and his carefully constructed walls of protection had been infiltrated by a spirit so like his own.

He still wanted Draco; that fact was as obvious to him as his inherent concerns. Draco still had the power to cause Harry´s blood to rush to his brain, as well as other, more primal, parts of his anatomy. He still attracted Harry´s soul with an unparalleled lure. And he still sent Harry´s mind screaming, both silently and beseechingly. Yet intermixed with that was the still present fear, and the guilt over the bad choice he had made.

Harry didn´t think that, aside from Voldemort, there had ever been anyone in the universe as entirely contradictory as he was.

"Potter, have you heard anything I´ve been saying?" an irritated voice broke through his reverie.

"Yes," Harry answered, wincing at how solemn his voice sounded to his own ears. "The Deatheaters, minus their insane and quite unstable figure head, have developed an underground movement in which they still practice the Dark Arts; all of which has been difficult to control due to a few oblivious, perhaps even paid off, leaders in the Ministry who turn a blind eye to the problem, mistakenly believing that because Voldemort is gone, they no longer have to worry."

"Interesting," Draco responded, his gray eyes flashing. "Did you pick up this extraordinary multitasking skill of yours, where you can listen to what a person is saying while your mind is wandering elsewhere, in Tibet, or was it Hong Kong?"

There was no mistaking the bitterness in Draco´s tone, and for a brief moment Harry felt anger burn inside him at the thinly veiled chastising he had just received. The anger, however, was soon replaced by pain, and a mingling curiosity.

"How did you know I was in Tibet and Hong Kong?" Harry asked quietly, not daring to hope, and trying desperately not to read into what it meant that Draco had kept track of his meanderings.

`Merlin, Draco, what have I done to you? What am I doing even now? Is this game that I can´t help but play destined to continue for all time... the game in which I want and love you, but can´t seem to take and hold you? It would be easier if I had driven you to hate me. Easier, yet so, so painful.´

Harry´s eyes were glued to Draco´s face; unable to turn away; unable to breath. He watched while the blonde man opened his mouth to say something scathing, yet, upon contemplating the matter, shut it again to ponder over something Harry couldn´t begin to fathom.

The seconds stretched out between them: deep, focused, poignant; everything attributed to who and what they both were. Finally, Draco reached for a quill and piece of parchment from his desk, scribbling something on it, and handing it to Harry with a veiled, unreadable expression on his face.

Harry looked at it, then looked back up to Draco, confused, his body almost shaking.

"What´s this?" he asked, uncertain.

"That," Draco announced, his eyes intense and sweltering, "is the name of my therapist. Whatever it is you have going on up there, Potter, I suggest you get it out. Hiding doesn´t suit you."

And with that he stood and walked abruptly out of the room, leaving an entirely stunned Harry behind.

In a fleeting moment of panic, it dawned on Harry that Draco, somehow, someway, knew too.

*****

The first time Draco had met Maggie, his therapist, he had refused to speak beyond tightly controlled, single syllable answers.

She was a witch with a muggle mother and a wizard father, earning a degree from Hogwarts, and then, afterwards, a PhD in psychology at a muggle university - a woman with a proverbial foot in both worlds and a close friend of Albus Dumbledore.

It had been Dumbledore who `suggested´ in that overtly cheerful, entirely too smooth way of his, that the younger man pay her a visit; and Draco, repelled by both coercion and the very idea of opening up to a complete and utter stranger, regardless of credentials, was determined to prove that he didn´t need it.

Thus, in that first meeting, Maggie had taken it upon herself to fill the silence.

She told him a story of a muggle physiologist named Pavlov, who, in order to study digestive process in dogs, rang a bell every time he fed his dog, noticing that the dog salivated more readily with the promise of food. The scientist repeated this behavior over and over until the dog was so used to the sound of the bell at a mealtime that it would salivate from the ringing alone, even if the sound wasn´t accompanied by cuisine. Upon further study, it was discovered that humans, too, could be trained to respond to outside stimuli, resulting in things such as fears and phobias, learned behaviors and reactions.

Maggie had called this `conditioning´ and no sooner had she finished recounting the tale then Draco had decided that maybe vocalizing his life to her wouldn´t necessarily result in the fall of the cosmos, as previously expected. Especially given that, for the first time to his knowledge, he had learned and understood a term that defined his childhood so completely.

He had been conditioned.

Draco knew first hand what the wizarding world thought his childhood had been like, despite societies tendencies to discuss such things behind one´s back under the veil of politeness.

The son of a confirmed death eater, everyone assumed that he had been subjected to numerous beatings and countless curses. The truth was that, despite his father´s admittedly sadistic tendencies and a temper well known to rival them in atrociousness, Lucius Malfoy only occasionally raised a wand or hand to his son; predominantly in light of the fact that the elder Malfoy was seldom home, yet also because Draco had openly idolized his father throughout his childhood, and had, up to the summer before his seventh year at Hogwarts, done little to defy him.

While Lucius wasn´t a particularly abusive parent physically, he wasn´t exactly a well of warmth or parental inclination either. In fact, Draco used to observe his father as a means to imitate; he studied the cool, aloof, entirely unemotional mask of conceit that his father wore so effortlessly. He examined the fluid, precise, controlled motions that his father used when he moved - never rushing, never panicked or frightened; always, always in control.

Only extremely rarely had Lucius graced his son with a nod, or a light squeeze on his shoulder, a small tug at the corners of his mouth in a fleeting smile; yet it was those moments that Draco had learned to live for. They were his bell at a mealtime... just a fleeting glimpse of his father´s approval, or any sign that his father truly saw him, and realized that he was there and that he mattered.

The reality of just what kind of person Lucius Malfoy was - the kind of person Draco didn´t want to be, had been crushing.

The first Death Eater meeting Lucius had brought Draco to, the younger Malfoy had been over filled with pride: his father had wanted him to follow in his footsteps, his father finally saw him as worthy enough to do so.

The second Death Eater meeting Draco attended he had been forced to watch a muggle woman get tortured and eventually killed. Yet even then, with the screams and wails of the innocent life haunting his dreams, and his body shaking with empathy for a spirit he had watched die, he had rationalized Voldemort´s and, by association, his father´s behavior. They had a goal, they had beliefs; terrible things were necessary to achieve that means.

His third Death Eater meeting had placed him faced to face with a caught and bound Harry Potter. Voldemort had somehow exhausted the wards protecting the Dursley home and caught the arch nemesis he had so longed to kill.

The deference was that this time the Death Eater´s were targeting someone Draco *knew*. Someone who, although he was loathe to admit it, he admired. Someone who he had spent the last six years of his life growing up with. Confronted with the hard reality of seeing Hogwart´s greatest Quidditch player in over a century, the one person he had most envied, and the boy with whom he had wanted to befriend, bound and gagged, Draco found that he was no longer able to rationalize his father´s lifestyle.

Thus, in a moment that went against years of conditioning, Draco had approached the then seventeen-year-old Harry under the pretense of testing the enchanted ropes that bound him, and helped him escape - wand in one hand, the means of a portkey to Hogwarts in the other.

That had been the defining moment when Draco had first realized that the multitude of feelings he had felt for Potter over the years had not been hatred. In fact, they didn´t even compare. No, real hatred is what he felt for his father: for being who he was, for forcing Draco to confront evil, for being so heinous that Draco had lost his role model, his hope, and his allusion all within one shattering day.

Yet it wasn´t his father who he thought of now, faced to face with Maggie during another one of their `meetings´ - they had been over that before. No, this time it was the other betrayal in his life that actively occupied his thoughts.

"I want very much to hate him. It would be so much easier if I could. Instead I´ve been alternating between wanting to beat him to a bloody pulp and just grabbing him and making love until we are no longer capable of movement," Draco announced with his usual rancor, his gray eyes deadly serious.

"Its natural to have conflicting feelings when dealing with the abandonment of a loved one," the young psychiatrist responded gently, "especially when that someone is a person you still care about who has just reentered your life so dramatically."

"That´s just it! Regardless of the fact that I still harbor feelings for Harry, I keep thinking the best course of action would to stay as far away from him as my job would allow. I´m not prepared to forgive and forget all that has happened between us," there was a firmness to Draco´s tone that even startled him, yet he realized, even as he said it, that his willpower wasn´t *that* strong and prolonged exposure to the only person he´d ever truly loved was bound to break through his defenses eventually. In fact, Harry almost had, earlier that day, when Draco had been updating him on recent Death Eater activity.

"First," Maggie replied, surprising them both with the sudden briskness in her voice, "do not lessen the importance of your feelings. There is no `regardless´. Your feelings *matter* Draco, and in order to work through them you have to learn to recognize them for what they are. Secondly, forgiveness is indeed a formidable task, because it is done in steps. It´s not just something you can wake up one morning and decide to do or not to do. Before you can forgive you must accept. Yet beyond accepting and understanding Harry´s behavior and actions, you have to learn to accept your own motivations... Let me ask you an important question?"

"Go ahead," Draco breathed, riveted despite his turmoil.

"Are you still in love with Harry Potter?" she asked bluntly. He actually admired that trait in her; it was, in fact, one of the things that kept him coming back - on the days when the confrontational demeanor she sometimes used with him didn´t serve to annoy the hell out of him.

His first impulse was to vague his way out of responding, despite the fact that he did know and comprehend his answer to her question.

"Yes," he said instead, deciding on honesty. There really was no point in denying it.

"Why?" she asked, calmly, soothingly. "Why do you love him?"

"Because I do. I love him because he understood me in a way that no one really bothered to before. Because there is this unbelievable chemistry between us. Because, despite his apparent and rather drastic fear of relationships, he has a lot of traits that are worth admiring: bravery, kindness, tenderness, friendship, protectiveness... He was - is, everything I aspire to be, everything my father tried to train out of me," there was a realization in Draco´s tone as he spoke, as if he were recognizing his words as indefinite truth.

"Is he still all of those things?" she asked, unrelentingly, as she watched the dawn of comprehension form in her patient´s eyes.

"Yes. I haven´t been around him for two years, but yes," he replied assuredly. "Most of those traits are inherent to his nature. And just watching him these past couple of days, how he still acts with Dumbledore, Weasley and Granger; I know he still cares about people. I know he still feels things deeply, and I also know that he is essentially the same man he was when he left: scared, conflicted, uncertain, but still the hero, still willing to stand in front of a moving vehicle if it meant saving humanity from themselves. His demeanor screams nobility, as does his willingness to jump back into the war against Deatheaters immediately after his arrival home."

Maggie smiled at his sardonic yet lovingly tolerant description, but continued her relentless pursuit of truth nonetheless, indefinitely pleased with the progress they were making. "Yet none of the things you just listed are easing your dealings with him at all?"

"No. He left me," Draco responded tiredly, simultaneously realizing his own contradiction, "yet it´s frustrating because a part of me understands why he might have done it. I knew when Harry and I first got involved that he had issues. I mean, I didn´t know much about his life pre-Hogwarts, but you can´t have your parents die, a godfather on the run from the law, and Voldemort after you year in and year out, trying to kill you, without having serious repercussions."

He paused for a moment, thoughtfully pondering his next words prior to voicing them.

"Also, Harry´s best friend, Granger, confirmed the suspicions I´ve had for quite awhile that the muggle family who raised him mistreated him. I sort of expected that too. I think it´s easier to recognize someone from a broken home if you come from one yourself. And Harry always had this lost little boy aura about him... He still does."

There was another, longer pause before he continued, his voice firm yet wracked with an emotion he couldn´t control; as if he had to force the words out against better judgment.

"It´s really very confusing to so angry at what he did, yet still possibly comprehend what drove him to do it. We were getting too close and he ran. There were times, when we were together, that I would get so frightened of my feelings for him that I couldn´t breathe. He just took that fear to the next extreme."

Maggie nodded, relaxing visibly in her chair. "I take back what I said earlier, you´re already well into step one... acceptance. Just do yourself a favor?" she asked, smiling as Draco waved his hand to signal her forward with her advice.

"Don´t shut yourself off from what you feel, even if your emotions are conflicting. Explore every aspect of yourself and what it is you want, and, once you decide what that is, make sure you are equipped with the means of going after it," she smiled at him again, reaching over to gently squeeze his hand. "Our pasts effect us; no human being is capable of weathering the scars of traumatic experiences without repercussions. Yet remember that it´s not what happens to us that shapes who we are, it´s what we do with the knowledge we gain from our experiences. We have free will, and as such, we make our own decisions. Happiness isn´t something that simply comes to you; it´s something you create for yourself. It´s called self-accountability."

He nodded, letting her know that he understood, at the very least, her words; even though he knew that he had a lot to think about before he could apply them to his own life.

"And speaking of self-accountability," she stated as if in after thought, her eyes shining with mischief, "I received an owl from one Mister Harry Potter this afternoon asking for an audience, it seems someone suggested he see me and he took that advice to heart. Remember, the first step to moving beyond the restraints in which we bind ourselves is recognizing that they´re there to begin with. Perhaps you´re not the only one willing to seek understanding."

She winked, catching the light that suddenly sparked to life in Draco Malfoy´s eyes, one that, in the year that she had known him, she had never seen before, but she hazarded to guess that Harry had, and that he was the reason it glowed there again.

To be continued...