In the story that was the grand scheme of things, Draco Malfoy knew that he had been cast in the role of the villain. Not the all-encompassing, over-evil villain that was necessary in any story that dealt with the battle between good and evil, though. No, he’d been cast in the role of the young villain, the one that was the same age as the hero of the story and was destined to antagonize the protagonist for as long as they both should live. He’d known that that would be his role from the day he’d arrived at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and he’d discovered that his classmate was none other than the famous Harry Potter, the boy who had almost (albeit unknowingly) destroyed the wizarding world.

(That wasn’t the official story, of course. No, Potter was most commonly known as The Boy Who Lived, the one who had saved the wizarding world from certain doom. Draco, like every intelligent wizard out there, knew better.)

Sure, for some reason unknown even to him, Draco had tried to change the story line by offering Potter his friendship. He hadn’t asked to be the villain in the story after all, hadn’t asked to be cast in the role of Harry Potter’s arch-nemesis, and didn’t particularly count it as a life long aspiration of his. He’d just wanted to go to school and learn magic that would aid him in later life. He’d tried to change fate, to change the story before it had truly been written, and he’d been rebuffed, like he’d rather expected he would be. What good was a story about good and evil, after all, if the villain and the hero were on the same side?

Other people knew that he was one of the villains of the story, too. Why else would the Hogwarts professors have whispered conversations about him in empty classrooms where they thought neither he (nor any other students) would be able to hear them? As if Lucius Malfoy would send his son off to a school run by "those bloody idiot do-gooders" without teaching him a simple eavesdropping spell.

"There’s a chance we can save young Malfoy," the professors (most notably that nosy bat McGonagall, and the Potter-worshiping Headmaster Dumbledore) whispered over and over until the words echoed in Draco’s brain when he slept at night. "There’s still hope for him where there’s none for his father."

Hope. For him. Where there was none for his father.

Draco told that to Crabbe and Goyle, all of them laughing long and loud together, the sound echoing off of the walls of the Slytherin dungeons in a rather maniacal way. The way, Draco supposed, that Evil Laughter was supposed to sound. In this story, after all, they were the sons of evil.

The teachers had hope for him, though… Draco could see that hope clearly; the professors saw him as not only as a villain, an enemy of their precious Potter, but as The Villain Who Might Be Redeemed. He was the character who would be evil and hated until the final climactic scene of the battle. There, suddenly, like magic, all of the Light’s lessons in goodness, in bloody morality, would pierce his dark heart and he would see the error of his ways and return to the light. That was how battles of good and evil went, after all. 

Draco could almost picture it: hellfire and brimstone, Potter locked in a wand battle with the Great Lord Voldemort, and Draco would do something, jump in front of Potter as a fatal curse was cast, maybe? He’d do something, though, to sacrifice himself in a way that would give Potter that extra moment he needed to finally do the deed he’d been trying to do since he was barely a year old—kill Voldemort. Draco, of course, having finally redeemed himself in the eyes of the world, would not live to see the fire and brimstone fade away and be replaced with white, fluffy clouds and whatever else filled a ‘good’ world. No, he would be dead, but his memory, his name would live on. Draco Malfoy would be remembered for all eternity as The One Who Gave His Life so that in the final moment the Light Might Triumph. 

He would be lauded and praised and as far as Draco was concerned, it was complete and utter bullocks, just like all of those bloody metaphors that related Dark to Evil and Light to Good. 

His professors had hope for him and it was really rather amusing to watch people who were so educated, who were supposed to be among the best and brightest wizards in the world, be so terribly, utterly wrong. It was he, Draco, who had hope that his teachers would one day wake up and, well, see the proverbial light. 

If he’d had his way, he would have sat all of his professors (and anyone who would listen to him, actually) down and then he would have educated them in the ways that the real wizarding world worked, to show them what a fantasy world they’d been living in. He wanted to show them that Dark didn’t necessarily mean bad. Dark, Draco liked to think, was another word for pure. It was a metaphor for the concentration of wizarding power, where as Light was a word that described power that had been diluted by generations upon generations of mingling and breeding with Squibs and Muggles and other non-purebloods.

Idiots they were to think that that could be a good thing.

Dark, Draco wanted to tell them, symbolized the potential that the wizarding world had; it symbolized their ancestry, the world that they had been forced to leave behind due to sheer idiocy on the parts of their ancestors. Embracing the Dark would return them to the good ol’ days, as his father called them. The days where a wizard could truly be a wizard, exploring his powers to the fullest, instead of using the mere shadow of that potential that was Ministry approved magic.

"We are descended from a world," his father had told him, "where wizards were revered above all others. Non-magic folk turned to us for protection, for miracles, and we provided. Magic was the cornerstone of life, and yes, we could kill, but we could also stop death, pain, control from outside influences, making ourselves immune to any evils that came our way. We had that power, everyone had that power." He’d shaken his head then, as if in despair. He’d continued: "Now, though, most wizards are lucky if they have enough power to apperate across the street. They fear rather than admire those of us who can do more than that."

Idiots.

Draco was proud of the fact that he was a Dark wizard. When the time came, he would stand by Voldemort and when Dark triumphed, as it was bound to (because right always won in the end) Draco would be the first to call the so-called ‘Dark Lord’ the savior of everything that should be valued.

It was almost amusing because Draco was sure that if he said any such thing at Hogwarts, the professors would be sure to blame his father, saying that Lucius had forced his views upon his young son. There was still hope for young Malfoy, after all. There was still a chance to save him from the life that his father had brought him up to lead. 

Draco laughed about that because his father had never forced him to believe anything. He’d simply educated his son in the most thorough way he’d been able to, exposing Draco to what the Ministry truly was: a cover up. It was a cover for weakness, an attempt to conceal mistakes that had been made in the past, mistakes that the Ministry was too cowardly to admit were actually mistakes. The mistakse of love.

"Love," his father had drawled, "is the ruin of everything in this world. It’s a petty excuse for shirking your duty, that’s what it is."

The duty that they all had to produce strong, pureblooded offspring who would carry on—and bring pride to—the family name. Draco had nodded and laughed along with his father. He knew that he wouldn’t marry for love, but for whatever match would be the most beneficial. It was the way the world worked, after all. The way that it should work, because it was with the half-blood’s that wizard’s powers started to wane and then wane some more. 

"But what about Mudbloods," Draco had asked his father once, when he’d been having a moment of rebellion and had been questioning his father’s beliefs. His father encouraged questions, he’d told Draco more than once that he trusted him to come to the correct conclusions himself. "Mudbloods can be strong," Draco had said. "Look at Granger."

"Wild magic," his father had replied, looking pained. "They contaminate the bloodlines with this wildness when we’ve worked so hard to preserve our heritage. They are a disgrace to wizards everywhere and should be disposed of properly."

The Ministry had been created to even out the playing field and place reins on magic, his father had told him, based on the belief that all wizards were equal and should act accordingly. It was unnatural, the Ministry said, to be able to control others, to cause bone-crunching pain, to kill… His father had told him what a load of bullocks that was; weaker wizards were scared and intimidated by the sheer power that the pureblood families possessed.

Was it not unnatural to be able to stop death? Draco wondered. Was it not unnatural to take the form of another person? If one really thought about it, was not all magic unnatural?

His father had smiled in wicked way when Draco had posed those questions.

"Ah, my boy," he’d said. "The Ministry is filled with idiots who have decided to play the part of the highest authorities, deciding good and bad, right and wrong. So few wizards nowadays have the strength to perform what they’ve deemed Dark magic, they feel it must be bad. They do not understand the concept of being ‘in for a foot, being in for a mile,’ and think that magic must be okay if it is used only for good. What right do those who are less fortunate have to tell us that we may only use a portion of the power that we’ve had the intelligence to preserve?"

"None," Draco had said and his father had nodded. "So they’re jealous."

Good and Evil, Dark and Light, and Draco saw the picture clearly. The Light was the status quo and change was feared, and people just didn’t see that if things didn’t change, wizards’ powers would continue to be diluted and the chance to save their world would slip farther from their gasp. A mistake had been made the first time a child was born of a coupling between a wizard and a non-wizard. A greater mistake had been made when such behavior had been allowed to continue. 

Draco was almost convinced that Dumbledore and the Ministry could see those mistakes and could see that the wizarding world was going to ruin. Dumbledore was a smart man, after all, no matter the opinion that most Dark wizards had of him, but in the end he was a fool because his pride was just too great to let go of everything that the Light had fought for. Too many people had joined in the fight against the Dark and too many lives had been lost.

It was those lost lives that were the true issue, Draco knew, because people didn’t particularly want to associate themselves with murders unless they were of the evil persuasion. It was, perhaps, the one mistake that Voldemort had made in his first attempted rise to power, but Draco could see the necessity of such actions. Time was of the essence. The longer it took to cleanse the wizarding world of impurity, the less chance they would have of salvaging the world that they belonged to, that they were supposed to inherit. People had laughed at Voldemort’s predictions, at his warnings of impending disaster, just as they’d been angered by his blatant disregard for Ministry rules, and finally he’d needed to do something drastic to make the world take him seriously.

Some had joined him, awed by his power, a power that was buried deep inside of all of the purebloods, he’d said, if they just had the courage to explore what was rightfully theirs. Others had not joined him, declaring him evil, the greatest threat to life as they knew it, when in deed, Voldemort had been working to slowly but surely remove thos that posed threats, showing the world what could be again.

Once, his father had told him of the wondrous meeting where Voldemort had rallied his troops. Draco had often wished that he could have been there, too.

"We," the Dark Lord had said, pacing the clearing that the Death Eaters had taken as their meeting place. "We, the purebloods, have been gifted with powers beyond the imagination of those weaker than us. They try to prevent us from using these powers and from claiming our place as the hierarchy of the wizarding world, and what sort of weaklings are we that we should let them? They don’t care about our heritage, they are content to let Muggles dictate how we live. They say that we should hide our true selves from them. We do not believe that. We are the true hierarchy. We shall not back down, we shall not let our world be taken from us. Explore, my friends, for we are going to reclaim our world."

Lord Voldemort’s words rang true today, even more true because precious years had been lost. It was still only Voldemort, returned from the dead, who had the strength, the tenacity, the gumption to stand up and show the world what had been taken from them by their ancestors, what was continually being taken from them as each generation made it’s mark on the world. Voldemort was the only one who had had the vision to see the direction that the wizarding world was headed in—more dilution, weaker and weaker wizards until squibs were the status quo and everything was lost.

It was true, Draco had heard, that Voldemort himself was only a half-blood, but that could be ignored because the Dark Lord had shown more concern for the wizards in the world than any of the so-called good guys. Voldemort was power embodied. He’d seen the past and what could be the future and he’d used his own body to demonstrate those now forbidden powers. He’d rediscovered spells that had been lost for centuries; he’d tapped wells of power that wizards (even those of pure blood who had tried to ensure that talent would not be lost by continuing ‘Dark’ teachings long after the Ministry had outlawed them) had forgotten.

Reign of terror it hadn’t been. It had been war and nasty things happened during war when both sides were determined to be triumphant. While Voldemort’s followers had committed murder, yes, they’d done so no more frequently than the so-called Light had vanquished members of the Dark.

It had been war. Sometimes Draco wanted to yell that in the hallways of Hogwarts when people were discussing the many sins of He Who Must Not Be Named, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t be viewed as a Dark sympathizer, after all, even though the whole school knew that he was. He just wanted to tell them the truth, that Voldemort was displaying the wizarding legacy, showing those who cared enough, who were brave enough, how it could be again. And damned if Draco wasn’t going to fight for that. 

It was rather pathetic, he thought, that the hope and salvation of the wizarding world was a teenage half-blood (half wizard, half Mudblood with those wild powers his father had told him about) whose only claim to fame was that his mother had died protecting him. That in itself, Draco thought, should illustrate how weak the Light’s arguments against the Dark were, because he knew Potter and knew that his classmate was not as special as he was cracked up to be. In fact, the only special thing that Draco saw about him was that he had an inordinate amount of luck, both for getting out of trouble and escaping blame. It was sickening, really, that a half-blood who had grown up in the Muggle world and had no concept of what it meant to be a true wizard should be able to escape the wrath of Lord Voldemort so many times. It was insulting that Potter should be able to cast doubts and aspersions on the power of one who was so visibly superior. It was insulting that people who called themselves wizards should turn to this… interloper for guidance and protection.

If he’d said any of that out loud at Hogwarts, he would have been accused of protesting his dislike for Potter too much. People would have started whispering that he was still hurt by Potter declining his friendship, that he was jealous of all of the attention that Potter received over their years at school together.

That, too, was a load of bullocks and he laughed about that with Crabbe and Goyle for hours on end, just resolving to torment Potter all the more for it. Because seriously… 

Anyone who knew anything about him would know that he wasn’t jealous. Not at all. Malfoy’s were not jealous people. They had nothing to be jealous of. And truly, as strange as it might sound, just as he’d been less than thrilled to be cast in the role of the villain, he had no desire to be a hero. 

Heros were foolish people who went looking for trouble and might or might not be rewarded in the end. Heros often ended up dead, and when they did, they weren’t remembered as heros, but as people who had tried and failed. Malfoy’s didn’t fail either.

In truth, the only reason Draco paid any attention to Potter at all was because that was what he was supposed to do. He’d been cast in his role and he would fulfill it, because he was loyal to the cause. He would fulfill his duty as Potter’s arch-nemesis, he would fight the fight that he believed was in the best interest of everyone, whether they could see it or not, and he’d be given his due when the time came. 

That was enough for him. 

He knew that that was a very un-villain like thing to say, but when Voldemort’s victory occurred in the story that was the grand scheme of things, and the winners got to rewrite the history books, he would no longer be a villain. He’d just be a boy who had gone to school with the fallen-hero Potter. He’d never be the hero, not while Voldemort was still alive, and that didn’t really matter.

All that mattered was that in the story that was the grand scheme of things, he would have been cast in a role on the winning side. All that mattered was that he would not be known as the villain for all eternity, no. 

All that mattered was that he would be remembered as a boy who could tell right from wrong, good from bad. 

All that mattered was that he would be remembered as a boy who had believed.