Broken Man

For as long as he could remember, Draco had been proud to be a Malfoy.

As a young boy, he had never told new people that his name was Draco. No, he always introduced himself as Draco Malfoy, with extra emphasis on his surname. After all, his family was more than just who had produced him- they were who he was.

As he had gotten older, he had begun to hero-worship his father. This was natural, of course. All little boys wanted to be their father when they grew up. So Draco began to attempt to mimic his father's mannerisms and the curl of his lip around those of lesser breeding and his haughty attitude that Draco saw as pride in his forefather's accomplishments.

He remembered practicing walking in the garden, holding a stick he had found like his father carried his cane, sneering at the rosebushes. He had been seven or eight at the time. By the time he had reached nine or ten, he flushed at the memory of playacting in the garden and spent his time trying to be an adult. Reading by the fire, talking politics, practicing his superior attitude.

When he got older, he realized that the real adults had undoubtedly laughed at those attempts at maturity as well. His father was proud of his son's ambition to be an adult at the age of ten, but had encouraged him to be young while he could, while it was still seemly and acceptable to make mistakes.

The next year, he had gone to Hogwarts. He had been dreaming about it for years. He had known that the other kids there would understand, how he did, the Way Things Worked. By his understanding, it was universally known that the Malfoys were as good as royalty and ought to be treated accordingly.

He had found out quickly that this just wasn't the case.

His name inspired no awe amongst the other students, and try as he might he just wasn't the man his father was. He was just a boy. He was just a boy who was not his father, no matter what he looked like.

Mudblood students had been ignorant of his social status, and he had seen the mockery in their eyes as they tried to prove their worth against him, and in the eyes of the Headmaster seemed to win. Halfbloods had been jealous of him, he could tell. Other purebloods mostly understood that the Malfoys were king, though there were the persistent, usually Gryffindor, ones that insisted on acting as though they were Mudbloods.

He had forced his way through his schooling, trying to win the respect he deserved. He might not have made the best choices all of the time, but at least he had stood for something. And until the end of his fifth year, that had been more than enough.

That summer had been the worst he could remember.

His mother had been furious over his father's imprisonment, and had lost her icy demeanor to yell at him, the house-elves, and even the portraits that lined the halls. There was a tenseness in the house that hadn't been there before, the feeling of unwelcome change.

It was a startling contrast to the summer before, with his father's understated elation at the return of his master and his mother's knowing, superior smiles. Now they were angels fallen from Heaven, only to discover they were hated in Hell.

He had been angry that his father was in prison, of course. His father was too great a man to be chained like a dog. The Malfoy name was too great to be tarnished because of the lawmaker's idea that just because a man had aligned himself with a different leader than that incompetent Fudge that they deserved to rot.

Draco tried his hardest to keep this viewpoint clean of any other contradictory facts, difficult as that might be. His father was not a common criminal, not one of those dulled faces that one saw in the back pages of the Prophet when they'd finally succumbed to Azkaban's true intent of slow death. He wanted to be like his father, after all, and he didn't want to be a lowly criminal who was the laughingstock of the wizarding world. He didn't want to be weak.

He was failing miserably.

Because he was weak, and he was scared. He was terrified. He remembered that one visit to Azkaban's cold grey womb, and seeing his father ghost-pale, dirty, and ruffled. Seeing the desperation, anguish, and most disheartening that absence of the drive that had been a part of his father's personality as long as he could remember.

And Draco kept telling himself that his father was not a broken man. He was not fading, and he was not going to stay locked away, condemned to a dishonorable and contemptuous fate. Draco's childhood hero had not been defeated by his own actions. Draco told himself that he was sure of this.

But then he would see his mother, waif-thin as ever, still dressed in her finest and draped in jewels as she emptily accepted condolences for her latest personal tragedy, and he would lose his coveted delusions and want nothing more than to be named something other than Malfoy. He had no hope, just as his mother's eyes held no emotion. But then he would catch a glimmer of something- anger, resentment, sadness- escaping from his mother's ice shell, and hope flooded back to him. The Malfoy line did not end with Lucius. The Malfoy line flowed onto Draco, and he could perhaps rectify his father's mistakes.

He tried to ignore the fear that he would only cause more shame on his family, that he would only drag them further into the muck until escape and redemption was no longer possible.

And then, after this summer of realizations and pain and disillusionment, he had returned to school, where his childhood dreams had been stomped upon and scattered in the dirt. There, he had received taunts and jeers from the students who understood nothing about loyalty and dedication. But there was something else mixed in there. Something from the people he had expected to turn on him.

The Slytherins treated him with more respect than ever. Maybe he had grown up in that silent house with his should-be wailing mother, or maybe they had finally realized that the Malfoys were someone to align themselves with more now than ever, even as the patriarch had fallen from grace. The other students might have delegated him to a social standing little better than a Weasley, but his own house still supported him.

But Draco remembered childhood days when just being a Malfoy had filled him with more pride than some people would ever feel, days when he had known beyond a shadow of a doubt that he and his line were superior to anyone who came their way, days when he had felt confident and free. He kept those memories close as a jeer was thrown at him. Oh, how the mighty had fallen, they cried, and the mighty looked down on them from their landing spot, still looming high over the crowd's heads, and the mighty smiled with bared teeth.

And Draco's confidence, his hope was renewed, and he walked the halls with uncommon pride, and sneered down on those of lesser breeding, and he was, once again, who he had always thought he had been.

A Malfoy.