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"It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. (…) Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible."
- Albus Dumbledore
Why anyone would invent something as useless as a mirror that didn’t show your reflection was beyond Draco.
It had simply been there, one day. Draco knew that the room changed – sometimes a new piece of furniture would appear, or a stack of books, or there would be a void where there had been a statue the day before. He usually never paid these things any attention.
But the mirror was too large to ignore, it seemed to loom over Draco, daring him to look into it every time he walked past.
Until one night, he did.
At first he startled at seeing not one, but two people in the mirror, immediately whirling around with a thundering heart and raised wand. But he was alone.
When he turned back to the mirror and looked closer, he realized that neither of the two people in the mirror were a reflection.
They didn’t look directly at Draco like a reflection would, but had their faces turned towards eachother, smiling.
It was revolting. As if Draco would ever look at Potter like that.
As if Potter would ever look at Draco like that.
He fled the room in disgust.
*
The mirror was still there next time.
Draco tried to ignore it, he had much more important things to do, after all. He wouldn’t waste his precious time on such a perverted object.
But now that he had seen it, it was harder to walk past the mirror without glancing in its direction, not sure if catching a glimpse of what he had seen the first time was something he should hope for, or be afraid of.
It took him three more days until he gave in and stepped in front of the mirror again.
The image hadn’t changed. It was still him and Potter, or at least some twisted version of them.
Draco dared to look a little longer this time, noticing that mirror-Potter was even holding mirror-Draco’s hand. He looked up at mirror-Draco from under the fringe of his atrociously messy hair, with that stupid smile he usually reserved for his friends.
But the worst thing was that mirror-Draco smiled back, all soft and unguarded, and for some reason it made Draco furious.
He started throwing curses at the mirror, but mirror-Potter and mirror-Draco remained unfazed.
They were still holding hands when Draco finally left, feeling angry and confused and slightly nauseous.
*
Draco didn’t understand why the mirror was still there the next time. It was called the room of requirement, and he certainly did not require a mirror showing an image of himself and Potter.
And yet, there it stood.
And yet, Draco looked.
The more Draco allowed himself to look, the more he noticed.
He noticed the way mirror-Potter’s thumb caressed mirror-Draco’s hand, or how mirror-Draco looked at mirror-Potter with something disturbingly close to adoration in his eyes. He noticed that Potter had freckles on his cheekbones if you looked up close, and how his canines were a little pointier than Draco’s.
But most of all, Draco noticed that he wasn’t angry or disgusted anymore. Instead, there was a numbness in his chest whenever he looked at the mirror that Draco couldn’t quite comprehend.
*
After a while, Draco started to wonder.
He wondered how it would feel to have Potter – the real Potter – look at him like that.
He wondered what Harry’s hand would feel like in his own, whether it was as warm and strong as he imagined.
He wondered if he would ever be as happy as his mirror-self looked, seemingly content to stare into Harry’s eyes for hours on end.
Draco started to feel jealous of his mirror-self. He wanted to scream at mirror-Harry - Look at me, I’m right here.
But Harry never looked.
(And when had Potter become Harry, anyway?)
*
The numbness finally broke like a shell, opening up to something much more delicate underneath – something he had guarded so carefully but that was now laid bare, trembling and vulnerable.
Insanity. That’s what it was.
Because why else would Draco step even closer to the mirror and touch it?
Why, if not for the fact that he had completely lost his mind, would he trace Harry’s face with shaking hands, leaving fingerprints on the mirror?
Why would Draco press his face to the mirror, his breath fogging up the glass, shivering at the cold sensation against his hands and cheek?
He hated himself for it, but he was drawn to the mirror like a moth to a flame.
Sometimes he stayed long enough to feel the glass grow warmer under his skin, until he could almost convince himself that the warmth he was feeling wasn’t his own.
*
Draco was used to seeing Harry’s face in a mirror. But seeing Harry’s real reflection stare at him out of the bathroom mirror, taking in Draco’s tear-streaked face and disheveled appearance without so much as a shadow of the care and affection that he showed mirror-Draco, made something snap painfully inside Draco.
He wanted to hurt Harry for all the things he did to him.
And yet, Draco was the one to end up lying on the tiled floor, bleeding out from the gashes across his torso.
Draco was marked twice now.
He hated the ugly, black symbol on his arm, hated the way it seemed to whisper to him, reminding him of his own unworthiness.
A mark given to him by a man he used to worship and now hated.
The other mark was different.
A pattern of white, slightly raised scars marred the pale skin of his chest. He sometimes traced them with his fingers, oddly comforted by the fact that Harry had put them there.
A mark given to him by a man he used to hate and now worshipped.
Next time Draco stared at the mirror, he wondered whether mirror-Draco had any of the same scars, and if mirror-Potter would still look at him the same way if he did.
*
Light and dark were waging a war inside of him, slowly pulling him apart into different directions.
The night before Draco let the deatheaters into the castle, he fell asleep in the room of requirement, slumped on the floor with his head resting against the mirror.
He knew that if his plan succeeded, he wouldn’t be able to come back.
Draco felt like he was leaving a friend, or a lover. But then again, hadn’t he always just been an onlooker? An intruder, entranced by the image of a reality that wasn’t meant for him.
He wanted nothing more than to trade places with mirror-Draco, to just fall through the glass into a world where everything was brighter and Harry smiled at him.
A world where nothing could hurt them.
*
Leaving Hogwarts meant falling into the dark.
It meant going back to a home that didn’t feel like home anymore. Home had ceased to be a place, for places felt much too lonely these days. Home had become a feeling, the familiar pull and twist of his heart whenever he looked at the mirror, raw and warm against the coldness that seemed to surround him wherever he went.
When Draco lay awake at night he tried to imagine it. He tried to picture the mirror, but the details always seemed to elude him, like swirls of smoke that dissolved at his touch.
He had no photograph, nothing to remind him of the way the corners of Harry’s lips curled when he smiled, or the exact shade of his eyes when Draco looked at them up close.
Draco was scared to forget how perfectly his fingers fit into the space between Harry’s.
He had looked at it so much he could almost convince himself he’d actually felt it.
*
When he finally saw Harry’s eyes again, they burned him. Those green eyes held everything that he used to despise Potter for – courage, defiance, hope – even as he was kneeling on the floor of the drawing room, possibly only moments away from his execution.
Harry was everything Draco was not. Harry didn’t give in to the darkness, Harry was the light.
And so Draco let it envelop him, let the familiar warm ache in his chest remind him that there was a universe beyond all of this, where Draco made all the right choices and Harry loved him.
„Is it Harry Potter?“
„I can’t be sure.“
And as if Potter hadn’t already taken all of him, that night he left with Draco’s wand.
*
Fate was a cruel thing. Draco wondered whether it liked to watch him fall apart, to set the stage for his demise in the most ironic and twisted way possible.
Because of all the places he and Harry could have met again, it had to be the room of requirement.
„You have something of mine. I'd like it back.“
Only Draco knew that these words could refer to either of three things - His wand. His heart. His dignity. To Harry, of course, they didn’t mean anything at all.
“Why didn't you tell her? You knew it was me. You didn't say anything.”
I wish I could show you, Draco thought.
And then everything went up in flames.
Harry saved him, but Draco wasn't delusional enough to imagine that it meant anything.
After all, Harry was a hero, and saving was what heroes did.
As they flew towards the door Draco desperately tried to catch a glimpse of the mirror, to make sure it was still there, that he could come and find it when all of this was over.
But when he returned after the battle, the room and everything in it was gone, reduced to nothing but ash and stone.
*
Draco tried not to think of the mirror anymore.
He told himself that he didn’t need it anymore, that it belonged in a different time, to a different version of himself that was now fading like the remnants of a bad dream. If only it wasn’t for the black ink on his arm and the white scars on his torso, Draco might have believed it.
He’d barely made it through the first month after the battle when one night he broke down crying, harsh sobs escaping his lungs and hands desperately clutching the sheets as he tried to hold on to something – anything – to ease the agony that threatened to rip him apart.
Draco didn’t even know exactly what he was grieving for.
*
It got better with time. When he could finally breathe again, the ever-present ache in his chest subsided until there was only a dull sensation in its place. The pain left, but the memory of it remained, like a hand imprinted into wet clay.
Slowly the void started to fill with new experiences and new memories. Although none of them made Draco feel quite the same as the mirror had, he embraced all of them.
When he married Astoria, he was happy. He didn’t need to pretend anymore.
*
Draco remembers the first time Potter ever smiled at him.
They had crossed paths at the ministry, shortly after Draco’s wedding, and Potter had shaken his hand and said, „Congratulations, Malfoy.“
Draco had felt the imprint again that day, fresh and warm and pulsing behind his ribs.
But he knew better than to dwell on what ifs.
Sometimes, Draco still dreams of the mirror.
When he does, he holds Astoria a little tighter, and remembers that this version of himself had never belonged to Potter.
And yet, he finds comfort in the thought that somehow, somewhere, in a universe behind mirrored glass, a different version of Draco always would.