Meant to be
Pairing: Draco Malfoy x hufflepuff!reader
Summary: When you and Draco became something real, but everything around you made sure it didn’t last.
Warnings: no use of y/n
Cw: angst
Wc: 3k+
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (coming soon)
Beauxbatons was beautiful in a way that made your chest hurt. Grand staircases spiraled upward. Gardens bloomed with flowers you'd never seen. Everything felt utterly foreign.
Your cousin showed you around, but everything felt hollow. It was as if you'd left part of yourself at Hogwarts, in the Room of Requirement, in his arms.
Hannah's letters arrived regularly, but their silence on certain subjects was deafening. Three weeks in, she finally broke down.
"He came looking for you on the first day back," her letter read. "He went to the Hufflepuff common room. When he realized you weren't there, when he realized you weren't coming back, he just... shut down. He looks hollow."
You read that letter until the paper fell apart at the creases.
You tried to write him a hundred letters. Sat in the Beauxbatons library with parchment and quill, searching for words that would explain everything. But every version sounded like an excuse. In the end, you wrote nothing. What was the point?
Draco's sixth year was a descent into darkness. Without her light, everything became harder to bear. He threw himself into studies with desperate intensity, as if perfecting spells might change his fate.
He spent the first month looking for her. Checking the library at odd hours. Walking past the Hufflepuff common room like a ghost. Catching himself looking for her at meals before remembering.
When Hannah finally told him the truth—that you'd been transferred, that you were gone—something broke inside him.
She'd left without telling him. After everything, she'd chosen to disappear.
He became colder. The teasing vanished completely. His face became a mask, perfect and impenetrable. He rarely smiled anymore. In the Great Hall, he sat in silence, his expression blank, his eyes empty.
People noticed. "He never smiles anymore," one seventh-year said to a friend. "It's like someone died inside him."
They were right. The part of him that had loved, that had teased, that had felt anything at all—that part was gone, buried under ice.
In the common room, he'd sit completely silent. When people tried to engage him, he'd respond with single-word answers delivered in a tone so cold it made skin crawl. Even Snape seemed concerned, noting how the brilliance had dimmed to almost nothing.
By December, the Dark Mark was burned into his forearm. With it came a burden so heavy he thought it might crush him. A task that involved Hogwarts. A task that would either destroy him or turn him into someone unrecognizable.
He wanted to tell her. God, he wanted to tell her.
But she was gone. And he had no one to blame but himself.
The months stretched on like a wasteland.
You made friends at Beauxbatons. Real friends, kind friends, people who didn't know your heartbreak and didn't pry when you sometimes went quiet in the middle of conversations, lost in thoughts you couldn't articulate. You attended classes and earned decent marks, though you found it hard to concentrate on French incantations when your heart was still speaking in English accents that belonged to a boy an ocean away. You participated in Quidditch practice and actually played well, losing yourself in the rush of flight and the focus required to chase the Snitch, in those brief moments when the only thing that existed was the wind and the sky and the pure, uncomplicated joy of flying.
On the surface, you were healing. Your smile became more genuine. You laughed at jokes that had nothing to do with him. You made memories that didn't hurt to access. You were becoming a new version of yourself, a girl who'd loved deeply and been broken and was slowly learning to live again.
But there was a part of you that was still sitting in the Room of Requirement, waiting for him. There was a part of you that flinched every time a letter arrived, hoping it might be from him, knowing it wouldn't be, because you'd made the conscious choice not to reach out. There was a part of you that checked the mirror you'd bought in Hogsmeade—a small, ornate thing you'd kept hidden in your trunk—the one that would show you glimpses of Hogwarts if you held it just right and whispered the right incantation, looking for any sign of him, any proof that he was still there, still alive, still existing in the world even if he wasn't existing in your world anymore.
You never saw him in that mirror. You didn't know if he was deliberately avoiding reflective surfaces, if he'd found a way to hide himself even from the magic meant to track him, or if he'd simply accepted that you were gone and stopped trying to find you. It hurt either way—the not knowing was perhaps worse than any concrete answer could have been.
You heard through an older Beauxbatons student who had friends at Hogwarts that there was something happening. Something dark. Something that involved Draco. The details were vague and fragmented, but the fear was real. Your heart had started racing uncontrollably, a primal terror that something was happening to him, that he was in danger, that he was suffering.
You didn't have access to the kind of information that would tell you what was really going on. You only had worry and the terrible, helpless knowledge that he was going through something you couldn't help him with, facing something you weren't there to face alongside him.
For the first time since leaving Hogwarts, you truly grasped what your parents had been trying to protect you from. Not the love. They could never protect you from having loved him. But the danger. The darkness that came with his name, his family, the choices he couldn't make for himself.
It didn't make the separation hurt any less.
Draco spent December and January in a haze of despair that seemed to seep into his very bones.
The Dark Mark had been pressed into his forearm during the winter holidays, burned into his skin in a ritual that felt less like an honor and more like a branding, a searing that left not just physical scarring but a permanent mark on his soul. And with it came a burden so heavy he thought it might crush him entirely, might press him down into the ground and bury him there where no one would have to see what he'd become.
His father had given him a task—a task that involved Hogwarts, that was almost certainly meant to either turn him into someone completely unrecognizable or result in his death. The specifics were vague, designed to keep him in a state of perpetual anxiety, wondering what he was supposed to do, when he was supposed to do it, whether he'd ever be capable of doing it.
He wanted to tell someone. More than anything, he wanted to tell her.
The realization that he couldn't—that she was gone, that he'd destroyed any chance of her ever knowing what was happening to him when he'd made those public, cruel statements to protect her from being associated with him, to make her want to leave before he was pulled completely under—hit him like a curse, hit him like a punch to the stomach that knocked all the air out of his lungs.
He'd sacrificed her to save her, and in the process, he'd lost her anyway. He'd pushed her away, made her believe he didn't care, made her hate him, all so that when the darkness came—and he'd known it was coming—she wouldn't be pulled down with him. And in doing that, he'd broken them both in ways he wasn't sure could ever be repaired.
The Room of Requirement became his refuge, the way it had been when she was there. But now it was filled with shadows instead of soft light. Now it conjured images of the couch where they'd held each other, the fireplace where they'd sat and talked about futures that would never materialize, the walls that had seemed to understand their love now seemed to mock it with their empty vastness.
He tried to keep it away, tried not to go there, tried to find other places to escape to. But the Room would find him, would manifest itself in corridors where he needed it, and he was too exhausted to resist. So he'd go in, and he'd sit in the darkness, and he'd remember her laugh, her eyes, the way she'd looked at him like he was capable of being good, like he wasn't already lost.
He became something hard and cold as spring turned to summer, like ice forming over water, like winter freezing over the world. The boy who had teased her, who had delivered cruelty wrapped in intelligence, who had at least occasionally shown that he felt something—that boy ceased to exist.
In his place was someone harder, someone colder, someone who had completely sealed himself off from any semblance of human emotion. The teasing was gone entirely. The mockery had vanished. Even his presence seemed to repel people now, as if he'd built walls so high and so thick around himself that no one dared to approach.
He barely spoke anymore. In the common room, he'd sit in complete silence, his expression unreadable. When people tried to engage him, he'd respond with single-word answers delivered in a tone so cold it made people's skin crawl. The sharp wit that had once been his defining characteristic had been replaced by an emptiness that was somehow more terrifying. He'd become a ghost, moving through the corridors like someone who wasn't quite alive anymore.
His task was already underway. His father was pleased. His mother had stopped asking him questions, had stopped pretending she didn't know what was coming, had simply accepted that her son was being consumed by forces neither of them could control. And he was dying by degrees, losing pieces of himself that he wasn't sure he'd ever get back—his conscience, his hope, the part of him that could tease and mock and feel, the part of him that had loved her.
Teachers noticed the change too. Even Snape, who had always favored him, seemed concerned by the complete withdrawal. Draco's grades remained impeccable—fear and obedience ensured that—but there was something else missing now. The spark that had made him brilliant had dimmed to almost nothing. He was a shadow of what he'd been, going through the motions, performing the role of a Slytherin student but not truly alive anymore.
The worst part was that she wasn't even there to watch it happen. She wasn't there to try to save him. She wasn't there to remind him that there was goodness in the world, that kindness existed, that love was real. She wasn't there to see what her absence had done to him, how completely it had destroyed the carefully constructed mask he wore, how completely it had frozen over every warm thing inside him.
She was gone. Safe in another castle in another country, living a life that had nothing to do with him. And he had no one to blame but himself.
When your father told you that a student from Hogwarts had died—that there had been a terrible accident, that someone had been killed in the castle in circumstances that were still unclear, that there was blood and chaos and a darkness that the Ministry was trying to cover up—your blood went absolutely cold.
"Who?" you demanded, your voice shaking with a terror so intense you could barely breathe. "Who died? Was it a student we know? Was it anyone from Hufflepuff?"
"I don't know the specifics," your father said gently, moving toward you with the kind of careful concern that made it clear he understood what you were asking, even if he wasn't saying it directly. "The name wasn't in the report the Ministry released. But it was someone important. Someone significant enough that the death made it into the wizarding papers, which means someone powerful is affected."
You spent three days in a state of terror so complete it was like drowning, like the world had narrowed to a single point of agonized uncertainty. You couldn't eat. You couldn't concentrate on your studies. You pulled Hannah's letters apart looking for any clue, any hint as to who had died, praying with an intensity that bordered on religious fervor that it wouldn't be the one person you absolutely couldn't bear to lose.
When Hannah's letter finally arrived, your hands shook so badly you could barely break the seal. You read the first line three times before you allowed yourself to believe it.
"He's alive," she'd written immediately, as if she'd sensed your fear across the distance and had made the information the very first thing she told you, the most important thing she could possibly communicate. "Whatever you're thinking, whoever you're afraid died, it wasn't him. He's changed though. He looks like a ghost. He looks like someone who's lost everything. Like someone the war has already consumed before the actual fighting has even started."
You'd sunk to the floor after reading that, relief and heartbreak crashing through you in equal measure. He was alive. He was suffering, he was changing into someone maybe you wouldn't recognize anymore, he was being destroyed by circumstances neither of you could control, but he was alive. That had to be enough.
It wasn't enough. But it was what you had.
You'd made it through your year at Beauxbatons. You'd passed your exams. You'd even started to laugh again, genuinely, at things that had nothing to do with him. But there was a kind of melancholy that had become permanent, a quality to your joy that was slightly muted, slightly careful, like you were always holding back just in case.
The war was coming. You could feel it in the way people talked about Hogwarts, in the worried letters from your friends, in the darkness that seemed to be creeping across the wizarding world. And somewhere in that darkness was him, alone, facing things you couldn't even imagine.
You thought about going back. You thought about defying your parents again, thought about using every trick you knew to try to get back to England, back to Hogwarts, back to him. But you were older now. You understood the impossibility of it in a way you hadn't before. Your parents were trying to keep you safe. The world was collapsing. And he—he was part of a family that was orchestrating much of that collapse.
Love wasn't enough to overcome the divide between you. You'd learned that the hard way.
But you still thought about him. You still wondered what he was doing, whether he thought of you, whether he'd managed to survive whatever dark thing his family had pulled him into. You still held onto the letters you'd written and burned, the words you'd never gotten to say, the explanations he'd never gotten to hear.
You'd loved him with an intensity that had shaken you. And you'd lost him in a way that had shattered you.
And you were still learning how to pick up the pieces.
A/n: sry it took so long to update but good news tmr im most likely posting the next part real soon, comment to be tagged!
Taglist: @gabriellewood, @lulzs-world06, @bumblebeebutter, @svnn132, @learninglinesintherainn, @nanamisandkakashiswife, @mochi-bear24, @bevwalsh, @bambibbam, @lilyyyyy08, @kakaolover
