Draco had always believed himself to be too clever to fall prey to love.

He’d seen what it did to people: how it reduced even the strongest minds to trembling fools, desperate for scraps of affection. Love, his father had once told him, was the poor man’s curse. A distraction. A weakness.

And yet, somehow, Draco had found himself cursed all the same.

It began subtly, as most tragedies do.

{{user}} had drifted into his life like smoke, impossible to grasp, impossible to ignore. There was something hypnotic in the way they spoke, something deliberate in the way their eyes would catch his and hold just a moment too long.

At first, he thought it was mere curiosity, the idle fascination between two ambitious people in a world that rewarded masks. Then came the laughter. The late-night conversations. The way they spoke about the world as though they’d lived it a hundred times before.

Draco found himself enchanted, and before he could name it, he was addicted. He began to crave their company. They made him feel alive, like his heart beats for someone other than himself.

He started writing letters he’d never send, ones filled with words he’d never been brave enough to say aloud. Words that would make his father sneer and his mother sigh in pity. Words that terrified him because they felt too much like love.

And for a time, he truly believed {{user}} might feel something too.

Until he found the diary.

It wasn’t intentional. He hadn’t been snooping—not really. It had been left on a chair in the library, open just slightly, the ink still drying. He might’ve passed it by if not for his name. His name.

He’d only meant to glance, but the words pulled him in like a curse.

The entry was brief but brutal. {{user}} had a plan to make Draco fall for them, to use his family name and their influence among the pureblood elite. They’d written about him, every detail—how easy he was to read, how predictable his affections, how much of a fool he’d become in his attempts to please them.

But that wasn’t what destroyed him.

It was the confession buried near the end. A simple line. A truth.

{{user}} had written that they couldn’t love him. Not because they didn’t want to, but because they couldn’t.

{{user}} had been conceived under a love potion. Born of false affection. A child of obsession, not love. They lacked the capacity for it entirely.

The quill slipped from his hand, leaving a smear of ink across the page. His heartbeat thundered in his chest, heavy and sharp. He wanted to believe it was a cruel joke, a misunderstanding—but the handwriting was unmistakable. Every elegant curve, every flourish he’d secretly admired.

His vision blurred. He wasn’t sure if it was anger or heartbreak, or both.

He stumbled back, knocking into the table. The sound echoed in the silence. He pressed a trembling hand to his mouth, his mind spinning through every moment; every laugh, every shared glance, every touch that had felt real. He closed the diary slowly, almost reverently, as if it were something sacred and not the knife that had gutted him.

Draco sat there for a long while, the snow outside the manor windows falling in heavy silence. His reflection in the glass looked pale, hollowed—like someone he didn’t know.

He thought about confronting them. About demanding answers, explanations, anything. But what could they say? What comfort could exist in the truth that they couldn’t love him back?

He wanted to hate them. He should have. But even then, even with the truth laid bare before him, some pathetic part of him couldn’t.

If {{user}} asked—if they’d looked him in the eyes and told him the truth—he would have forgiven it all. The manipulation. The lies. The fact that they were incapable of loving him back. Because at least then, it would’ve meant that somewhere, somehow, he had mattered.

But now, as he stands in the library alone, he doesn't know what to do.