Adrian Pucey, Personified

Everyone knew that Harry Potter was good, and Voldemort was evil. Just like Gryffindors were brave and noble and Slytherins were sneaky and untrustworthy. So, logically, Slytherins were often thought of as 'Voldemort's' house. True, many members had parents that were Voldemort supporters, and a good deal were supporters themselves. But, despite being a Slytherin, Adrian Pucey didn't really believe in all that Voldemort rubbish. Up until he was eleven, he had been sent to a muggle boarding school. And while he was there, it had been emphasized that killing was definitely a bad thing.

Adrian had never really known his parents. He knew then by name, of course, Barnabas and Tabitha Pucey. He knew where they lived, in his family's Manor on the south side of Devon, near Plymouth. But other than seeing them at an occasional meal or party, they were as much strangers to him as the Muggles that lived less than twenty miles from his home.

The Pucey Manor had nothing on Malfoy Manor, but it was still borderline gargantuan. It was the kind of place one could go into, get lost, and not see another human being for a week. Adrian liked it that way. His parents each had their own wing somewhere in the house, Adrian didn't know where. Nor did he care. His own rooms were in the back, joining a small courtyard, and he liked them just fine, thank you. He could come and go as he pleased, without making his way through the rest of the house. To be honest, the only real parts of the house he actually knew were his rooms, the way to the kitchen, and the library.

Ah, yes, the library. Adrian's favorite place in the world. It had always been his own private place, where he knew he would never be bothered. Earliest he could remember, he was the only person that ever entered it. In fact, he was the only person he could ever remember being on this side of the house.

Four years after Adrian was born, Draco Malfoy entered the world, blonde and gorgeous and powerful and perfect. The Pucey's, being reasonably high in the wizarding world, saw him three days after he was born, and Tabitha was infatuated with him. For hours, she would talk about Draco, and how much like him her son should have been. By the time Adrian was five, she had worked herself up into a stupor, and she refused to accept anything less than a perfect son. So Adrian, pale and a bit scrawny, with a mop of mousy brown hair on top of his head, was not a son she wanted anything to do with him. House elves raised him, he was lucky if he saw his parents once a week. I don't suppose it was his fathers fault, really, he just happened to be away a great majority of the time.

House elves, while being wonderful and magnificent creatures, were not exactly the best people for a young wizard to be raised entirely by. Knowing this, his mother made him swear never to speak of house elves, wizardry, or his home with anyone, then sent him to the nearest boarding school, which happened to be almost entirely muggle. When he was home, however, he spent all his time in the library, reading up on everything even mildly associated with wizardry. By the time he was 10, he had read every book in the room. And by the time he was ready to go to Hogwarts ('Finally!' his mother thought), he had memorized almost every fact in the room.

His first year, he was terrified of the older boys, and rarely did his work because he spent too much time running from them. He was no longer so scrawny, but pudgier, with chubby red cheeks and fluffy brown hair that came down over his eyes. Many an older student mistook him for a punching bag.

It was partially because of that that Adrian developed a harder glint in his eye by fourth year. No one would dare call him pudgy now, either. Over the past few years, he developed into a tall, strong, muscular boy, with messy brown hair that fell over into his eyes in the most sexy of ways. Girls stopped in the hall to watch him stride by, eyes betraying nothing and head looking neither right nor left. He didn't talk much with the other students, either. Growing up with only house elves and muggles could do that to you. He just figured there was nothing to talk about.

At his father's request, to bring at least some pride to the family name, he joined the Quidditch team in his fifth year, which was coincidentally the same year that Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy came to Hogwarts. As the two protégées of the light and dark side of the wizarding world entered the school and immediately started causing a ruckus, Adrian was once again pushed to the side. He actually turned out to be an excellent chaser, fantastic really, but it was all lost in the awe of Harry Potter, Seeker Extraordinaire. No one really cared that he had scored a record twenty-two goals in that game where Potter had been unconscious, the fact that Potter had been unconscious was enough to convince everyone that it was a fluke.

Most of sixth year passed in a blur of classes, quidditch and late nights spent in the library. Although his grades were never much, he spent every free night he had reading up on ancient forms of wizardry. So maybe it was fate that led him to be in the common room that night, midway through Draco's second year.

"Mudbloods are dropping right and left," he heard Draco drawl, as he went on to describe pretty much every way of destroying them. Adrian was curled up in a chair deep in the shadows of the dungeon, oblivious to the nearest couch full of admirers. In his lap was a new book, one on the ancient cities of Greece and the magic of their Gods. So when he heard his name, he was a bit startled.

"Just ask Adrian... With his father, he must know all about muggle torture," Draco had drawled.

"Excuse me?" he had replied, let his book fall and raising his eyes to meet Draco's.

"I'll bet you're your father's little helper, aren't you, Pucey? Bet you get a kick out of watching muggle children writhe and squirm under your father's wand." Draco stood, had on hip with that smug, knowing look he always had. Adrian rose slowly, like a swimmer breaking the surface of the water. He did not appear to move quickly at all, but in a second his hand was around Malfoy's throat and he was shoving him back against the wall. He lowered his head until his face was mere centimeters from Draco's.

"I do no such thing," he hissed, in a whisper that carried across the room. "My father's business is not mine." With one last squeeze, he let the smaller boy fall as he stalked up to his dorms.

His father? Torturing muggles? Adrian realized that he really had no idea what his father did. He tossed and turned all night, dreaming of bloody muggle children and a masked man with red slits for eyes. Who this man was, he didn't know.

Upon returning home that summer, he took it upon himself to explore the house in its entirety. Despite becoming lost a multitude of times, he finally found what he was looking for, on the first floor in the East Wing, a place he had never been before. The place was dark, damp, and it reeked of urine and sweat. It had obviously been closed up for a long time; he had to wrench the warped doors open. But the tapestries on the wall depicted scenes of torture, and murder, and the stains on the wall were definitely not water stains. Draco had been right.

Adrian had closed the doors softly and retreated back to his rooms, where he remained for the rest of the summer. He found he was numb, couldn't sleep, eat, and think. He just existed. He didn't really feel betrayed, he would have had to have known his father to feel that way, more disgusted that this has happened in the same house. So upon returning to school, he was quieter and more withdrawn than before, but no one seemed to notice.

When he received a letter from his father at the end of the year, requesting he come join him, he knew what it was for. He had heard about Sirius Black escaping, and he knew his father was calling him to begin training to be a death eater. He wrote back, politely declining, insisting that his studies were too important to him. The second letter was not a request, but a demand. At breakfast, when he received it, he calmly ripped it to shreds, set them on the table, then took out his wand and ignited it. Same with the third, fourth and fifth. The sixth was not a letter; it was a notice of disownment. Adrian smiled. So this was the parent he had never known.

He went on to play professional quidditch, with an apartment in London. He was still a no-name, despite being one of the better players on the team. So that's why he was so surprised to find Draco Malfoy on his stoop and one o'clock in the morning, the year after he would have graduated. Seventeen year old Draco was much, much different than thirteen year old Draco. His body was longer, leaner, more angles. He was much thinner than Adrian, in all aspects, and his usually shiny blonde hair lay in messy clumps around his head. His eyes bore deep bruises underneath them, and his skin had a flaky, translucent appeal to it. But his eyes, oh, his eyes. They were the only part of him not resembling a corpse. They twitched, left and right, alive with terror.

"Pucey," he said, as if a haggard looking Draco Malfoy was a completely normal thing to find on one's doorstep in the middle of the night.

"Malfoy," he replied in kind. Draco took that as a sign to bolt past him into his sitting room, pacing the floor and biting his fingernails.

"It was almost impossible to find you." he had said with that superior smirk. "It appears you are still a bit of a non-entity."

They exchanged small talk until there was nothing small left to talk about.

"Why are you here?" Adrian has said, bluntly.

"I need your help," Draco had replied.

Draco had received his letter two weeks before, immediately running away from Hogwarts and trying to make his way back to London. He had come to Adrian, because Adrian had gotten out.

"I don't want to kill anybody," he said.

That's all it took, Pucey found a tired, worn looking Remus Lupin at the ministry, Draco hidden under an invisibility cloak,

"We want to help," he said quietly.

Draco moved into Grimmauld Palace, while Pucey stayed at his own flat which was nearby. They were the only two Slytherins in the Order, and they stuck close together. They were near inseparable, where one was the other was never far.

When the final battle came around, no one was really surprised they fought side by side, and back to back. They covered for each other, blocking spells for each other, healing each other, and, near the end, keeping each other standing. They moved as a seamless team, and no one could touch them. It was fitting, Adrian thought, that when the rain started to pour down, the ground turned to slippery mud and those not strong enough to fight it were sucked in and left there. Through the sheets of water, Adrian could see Harry Potter, dancing with the Dark Lord. Good luck, kid, he thought, I don't know what to do for you. But, as he watched, a shorter, squatter, shape loomed up out of the ground, pointing a short, thin wand at the boy's back.

Pettigrew.

Pucey never even had time to signal Draco, with every ounce of energy he had left, he hurled himself forward, throwing himself on top of Pettigrew, who fell, the spell dying on his lips. They rolled in the mud, but Pettigrew's heavy, lumpy body was easy for Pucey to straddle, and when he pressed his hands into his throat, he didn't think. When the mouth of the plump, rat-like face opened and closed like that of a fish, he didn't think. When the struggling gradually died off, he didn't think. Harry Potter was safe. Pucey had saved him. Pucey was a hero. If only someone bothered to notice.

Upon hearing the struggle, Draco turned towards Adrian, reaching for him, and grabbed his arm just before Pucey's body convulsed with shock, his eyes rolling up into his head, and his mouth gasping open

"Run..." he wheezed.

"What?" Draco questioned, falling to his knees beside Pucey, and found himself looking at a pair of tall black boots. He knew those boots. Even with the dirt and the rain and blood, they never lost a bit of their shine. And, Draco knew, those boots had seen more than their fair share of blood. He'd seen them every day, since before he could remember. More often than not, he felt them too.

"Drat," they spoke, "I appear to have missed." Draco looked up; into the face of the thing he feared most.

"Hello, Father," he said. Before he could raise his wand, or dodge or even see the green light heading for him, he convulsed with pain, landing face down in the mud. He didn't get up.

Before Lucius could celebrate his victory though, the sky ran a deep bloody red and the rivulets of water and blood stopped, and flowed backwards. All at once, time stopped at was jumpstarted, flipped upside down and thrown back again and those that were there couldn't even begin to describe the way it felt, as the Dark Lord fell first to his knees, and then flat-out face first and was absorbed into the mud. The corpse burst into flames, unquenched by the rain, rising to a height of almost ten feet before retreating to smoldering ashes. Harry Potter sat numbly on the ground, and the war was over.

Pucey's body was cleared away along with all the others. There were so many bodies, most disfigured, that it was hard to tell who was who. The identifiers couldn't place his body, and it was only because his name was not listed as 'alive' or 'identified' on the Order's list that it was even determined to be his. If he had been alive, he would have been surprised he was on the list at all. The field of the final battle was turned into a park, with plaques for each member of the light that had died in action. Pucey's plaque was right next to Draco's, under a little oak tree. This was, in fact, his greatest claim to fame. N one could ever forget Draco. It was rarely, if ever, that anyone visited their spot though. One Remus Lupin frequented it, and blamed himself over and over for dragging them into all this. Pucey had cared a great deal for Remus, because he always remembered his name, and very rarely did Pucey catch him looking almost through him. After a while, even Remus stopped coming.

They never did find Pettigrew's body, but if they had, his death would surely have been attributed to someone else, more well known. It's impossible to have more than one real, true hero, Pucey had decided long ago. With more than one, people would just be dividing their loyalty, and pitting them against each other. The sooner one resigned himself to that fact, the easier things would be for everyone. People were horrible at making choices. The less they had to make, the better off they were. Harry had been the hero, and Pucey had been... something else. If that.