Disclaimer: The following is a work of fanfiction. The characters in the story belong to their creator, J.K. Rowling and the quotes to the people to whom I have attributed them. The only thing that I own is the plot, such as that is.

Author's Notes: The majority of the quotes carry attributions. "What I tell you three times is true" comes from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll. The quote "Forgive them, for they know not what they do" is biblical. I'll admit to having stolen "only (he) could go Dark and remain such a Gryffindor" from SerpentClara's story 'His Mistress'.

This story is dark. It also contains SLASH, allusions to character death, torture and serial murder, though nothing is explicit or especially gory. It is definitely a rather cynical side at the more destructive side of love. I leave you to decide what that says about my mental state.

Read, enjoy, review!

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I.

"You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!"
J.K. Rowling, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince".

The prisoner writes:

Dear Draco,

You mustn't blame yourself, you know. What I did, I did for you - but that doesn't make it your fault.

But then, maybe you know that. You've never visited me. Is that why? Because you know it's not your fault - but mine? Do you think I betrayed you? Did I betray you? I just don't know anymore. Why don't you ever come to see me? They'd let you. They couldn't stop you. Is it because I killed for you? Because I fell from grace, because every terrible thing I did was for you? Or is it because I did all of those things too late? I trusted them too much, I know. That's my fault. What happened to you, what they did to you, was my fault. I shouldn't have trusted them with you. I should've known what would happen. But it's easy, so easy, to be wise after the event. If I could do it all over again... no, I don't think it would make any difference what I did. I'd still be here, and you'd still be out of my reach. You always were, you know, even when we were inches apart.

What excuse do I have for this? For my faithlessness? I don't mean that I betrayed them. They don't matter anymore. Because of them I lost you. No - I mean, that I betrayed myself. Everything I used to stand for. Everything you came to stand for. I guess I did betray you, after all. In trying to make up for everything that happened, for my misplaced trust, I betrayed you. Laughable, isn't it? When I think back to how it used to be, how I used to be, back when you were still in your father's shadow, I think that everything is back-to-front. I am you, and you are me. Who would ever have thought that I would end up here?

I've been thinking. There's not much else to do here. (Is it wrong that I wish I could hear you make a snide comment about that, right about now?) The problem with Dumbledore's mantra, the problem with choosing between "what is right and what is easy" is that you start to think that just because something's hard, it must also be right. And this path I've walked in the name of vengeance has been hard. It would've been easier to just go along with what was expected, to smash a few golden trinkets in my anguish and grief, and then get over it. Would that have been right?

I was always told that love would save me. It was "the power the Dark Lord knows not", my one true advantage. He could never love, and no one had ever loved him. I would triumph because of love. And yet it is love that has landed me here. Love, my love for you, the thing I never spoke of until it was too late for you to hear me. I am what I am now because of love. It was supposed to be my salvation, the one reason why I would never become Tom Riddle - and yet look at what I have become instead. In a way, love was my damnation. I loved you too much, and look at what that made me. Look at what evil I did in your name. Is that what I am now? Evil?

Forgive me. I do not blame you. Don't blame yourself. Curse me with all your heart. Join the rest of the world in their hatred of me, if that is your choice. But send me some sign. It hurts too much to believe that I will never see you again. Because they'll never let me out. You know that, don't you? In my case, life means life. And who could blame them? What I did was unforgivable, and yet I somehow cherish the foolish hope that you will find it in yourself to forgive me. Maybe you won't. Did you ever love me as much as I loved you? In a way, I hope that you didn't. Then you will never feel such soul-deep despair as I have felt.

Forgive me, my friend, my lover, my everything.

Yours forever and always,

Harry.

II.

"The most destructive force in the world is love."
P.D. James, "Death of an Expert Witness".

The letter arrived the next morning in the Headmaster's office at Hogwarts. The phoenix, Fawkes, shifted on his perch uneasily when the grim, black bird swept into the room, and once it had gone, he stared intently at the letter. He gave what for a phoenix was almost a sigh, followed by a sharp trill, as if the bird thought that the missive would be better burnt. The headmaster looked first at his bird and then at the envelope. He recognised the straggly handwriting almost immediately and frowned. Why should he be writing?

He picked up the letter without inspecting it for hexes. It would never have left the island of Azkaban had it been carrying any sort of magic whatsoever. Frankly, the headmaster wondered that the prisoner had been allowed to send anyone anything. Surely he was one of the highest security prisoners of them all. He held the envelope in front of him, turning it over and over, as if searching for some hidden clue on its surface. The faint scent of death and misery rose to his sensitive nostrils. He shivered.

Picking up a letter-opening knife from his neat, ordered desk, he slit the envelope open and extracted the letter. The sheets of substandard paper smelt still more distinctly of death. It seemed a proclamation. The last person whose hands had touched these pages was a murderer, a man with his hands soaked in more blood than the headmaster had ever seen. His eyes flicked over the contents of the letter. Insanity, he mused. I hadn't ever thought that the boy would last long. Then he noticed the name at the top of the paper and cursed. Not mad, after all.

He laid the paper down on his desk and stared straight at Fawkes. "Find Draco, will you?" he asked, his voice terse and yet shaking slightly. He hadn't imagined that reading any letter from the brat – the one who had betrayed everyone – would affect him so. But he was sure that this was nothing to how it would affect Draco. To know why the boy he had loved had done such terrible things might break him. The headmaster had half a mind to tear the letter up, or to let Fawkes burn it. But that would be dishonest. The boy had been permitted to send the letter; surely Draco should be permitted to read it?

There was a faint pop and then Fawkes reappeared in the room, accompanied by another figure. This figure was pale, with fine silver hair and long, ethereal limbs. The headmaster looked up. "A letter came for you, Draco," he said, softly. This young man was one of the only people he had ever cared for, back in the days when he was unapproachable and cold. He had much more experience at caring now, but he still had a soft spot for his former pupil. "I'm afraid I opened it, but the envelope was addressed to me. I didn't read much of it, if you're worried about that."

Draco shrugged his shoulders. "I'm not," he said, shortly. "It's not private, after all."

"You know who it's from?"

"Who else would it be from?" Draco asked, with a faint sneer. "Who else would ever send me a letter?" He stretched out a pale, pale hand towards the grubby letter, and then said, "Do I want to read it?"

The headmaster shrugged. "It is an attempt at explanation," he told him. "All murderers will write something of the kind. I don't know whether you will enjoy reading it, but I think that perhaps you would regret it if you did not. You might always wonder what it said." There was hardness in the man's tone that suggested that he was no stranger to regret. "We never regret those things we do, only those things that we do not do," he added, kindly, seeing the anguish written on the young man's white face.

"Very well," Draco said, and stretched out his hand again. His long fingers touched the pages of the letter and then slid straight through. He smiled, wistfully. "Sometimes, I forget," said the ghost. He stepped closer and looked down at the scrawling, plaintive handwriting, his eyes both fearful and cold. The headmaster turned the pages around so that the ghost could better read the words. They stood in silence for several minutes, as Draco's eyes darted back and forth over the lines of writing. At last, he sighed. "Only he could go Dark and yet remain such a Gryffindor," he said, eventually. "Only he could say that he had done all of those things for love… and really mean it."

"You think he did mean it, then?" the headmaster asked, interested.

"Of course he meant it," said Draco, scornfully. "Look at what I did for him in the name of love. Can you really believe that he wouldn't do all the things he did for me?" His expression of amusement and contempt sat strangely on the face of an insubstantial spirit. "He tells me not to blame myself," he continued, after a moment. "And I don't. It would be easy to blame myself. If I hadn't been so stupid, if I hadn't acted the way he so often did, throwing caution to the winds and rushing into a dangerous situation, I would never have died. But I don't see it that way. If the Order had guarded my mother better, if the Death Eaters hadn't killed her, if the Order had trusted me more, they never would've killed me, and I never would've died." His voice broke slightly. "Is it any wonder that he hated you lot in the Order enough to destroy you?"

"You blame us?" There was a certain sarcastic amusement in the headmaster's voice. "You blame a young, trigger-happy Auror who'd always been told that Malfoys were evil for shooting before she was sure of her facts?"

Draco shook his head, slowly. "I can't," he said, almost choking on the words. "I saw her body, remember? How can I blame her?" He stared off into space as if thinking of that terrible sight. The headmaster recalled it also. He hadn't known that the boy he had taught for six years was capable of such brutality. Love had made a monster of Harry Potter. Had old Dumbledore suspected that? Was that why he had deposited the precious child in a home where it had surely been obvious that he would never be loved? It wasn't Draco's fault. It didn't matter who Harry had fallen in love with. The end result would have always been the same.

"He wants you to visit him," said the headmaster, breaking the silence unwillingly. "Are you going to do that?"

"I can't," Draco said, again. When he saw the raised eyebrow, he elaborated, "I mean I physically can't. Ghosts don't survive in Azkaban. There are still Dementors there. If a ghost goes near a Dementor, it is destroyed. It's like getting the Kiss. It seems odd that Harry doesn't know that." Musingly, he continued, "I think... I might go to see him if I could. The way he begs forgiveness… it feels like he's really sorry. I'd like to hear him apologise for everything. I'd like to comfort him. But I can't go. Even now, even with everything he did, I'd risk most things for him. But not the ultimate death – the death of the soul. I don't think he'd ask, if he knew."

Feeling sure he would regret making the offer, the headmaster said, "If you like, I'll go and visit him," he said, softly. "You can write – sorry, dictate – a letter for me to take back with me, if you want. It won't be the same, I know."

"But it will be better than nothing," said Draco, determinedly. "I don't want him to think that I've stopped caring about him – caring so much that it hurts. I always have, and always will. But I can't ever be with him again. Even in death we must be apart. He can't become a ghost when he dies, because he'll be sucked away before he can escape." The sadness in those ghostly eyes was too deep for any mortal to comprehend. The headmaster was so shaken that he had to look away. The ghost spoke again. "I think I would like to send him a letter. I'll dictate it to you. Just – don't laugh, or argue, or be horrified. What he reads must be what I want to write." For a moment, the indistinct, wraith-like voice rang with the echo of a Malfoy's command.

The headmaster only nodded, and replied, "I will write what you say. Whether he deserves to be told those things is none of my business." He pulled a sheaf of parchment towards him, and dipped his nearest quill into blue ink. "I stopped judging people a long time ago," he added, and realised that it was true. He could think of Harry Potter and feel only pity, only sorrow that the boy had turned out this way. He drew his quill out of the ink and placed it at the top of a clean piece of parchment, ready to write, and found himself wondering where all of his hatred had gone.

III.

"Some prices are just too high, however much you want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart."
Lois McMaster Bujold, "Memory".

The days since the Letter had been written had gone by slowly. In truth, the prisoner did not expect a reply or a visit. He had no hope at all that his lover would forgive him. He had had to write the letter. He had written it simply because if he had not, he would have felt incomplete. The last thing he wanted was for Draco to misunderstand him, or to feel guilty. Now he had set the facts straight, absolved his beloved ghost from blame, he no longer wished for anything. He sat on the floor in the middle of a square cell in Azkaban and sighed as a Dementor approached. Maybe that wasn't true. Maybe he did want something. The only thing he wished for was to die.

The wind squalled around the high rocks and fortress walls on the island, and the prisoner listened to the tortured wailing that echoed the sounds in his own head. Memories assailed him. He remembered Draco dead, remembered that stupid girl's attempts at justification. He had only hit her then – a ringing backhand across the face, true, but at any rate less than she had deserved. She had got her deserts in the end, though. As had so many others. Bellatrix Lestrange sprung to mind, suddenly. Laughing at him after she had killed Sirius. Writhing under the Cruciatus curse the first time, when she had jeered at his incompetence. Not so the second, when she had howled as if her very skin was on fire.

Who else had he killed? The faces came back to him. Mad-Eye Moody, for supporting that awful girl in her decision to wipe out his lover's life, for the paranoia that had prevented anyone from ever trusting Draco. Death Eaters, countless, faceless Death Eaters who had tried to kill him, certain that now he had gone rogue he would be an easy target. If the Dementors had not been there he would have laughed. He had never been an easy target. He'd killed Voldemort in the end. The Death Eaters had distracted him from his task of revenge. He smiled bitterly when he recalled posting Peter Pettigrew to the Ministry in small pieces. Sirius had deserved that posthumous pardon.

He remembered other faces. McGonagall, for lying to him for so long and for trying to reason with him when he had declared his intention of having his revenge upon Draco's murderer. Aberforth, for telling him that Dumbledore would never have wanted him to brood over his lover's death. Liar, he thought, fiercely. Dumbledore would've understood. He knew that I wanted to destroy my parent's murderer. Why shouldn't he have supported my intention to kill Draco's? Three of the Aurors who had finally brought him in. Kingsley. He had felt sorry for that. Kingsley Shacklebolt had never deserved to die. He had said so at his trial. He had apologised for nothing else, but for Kingsley, yes, he was sorry.

The Dementors suddenly passed away, and the prisoner looked up, surprised, into the face of a human warder. "You've got a visitor," he said, shortly. "I know you ain't rightly meant to have them, but what with that letter you wrote I thought we all deserves God's forgiveness. And if you'll die happier for having had one person visit you, who am I to stop that? Just don't tell the Minister, right?" And the man tapped the side of his nose in a conspiratorial fashion. The prisoner stared. A visitor? Then he frowned. The warder had read his letter? He felt a dull ache where his anger should have been. There was no curiosity in his mind either. Who could the visitor be? It couldn't be Draco – Draco would never come. And if it wasn't Draco, why should it matter who it was?

There was a swirl of black robes, and the prisoner was looking up into the slightly pained face of Severus Snape. "Good afternoon, Potter," he said, for all the world as though this was merely a remedial potions session. The prisoner shuddered at those words. He remembered what 'remedial potions' meant. Occlumency. This was another thing to regret. He regretted having killed Kingsley. Yet he regretted having left Snape alive. Still, what had been left undone would have to remain undone. There was no way of putting right his mistake now. None of his mistakes could be made right.

He grimaced. "It might be good for you," he said, weakly.

Snape snorted. "How can it be? I'm here. I'm visiting you. I hardly find this my idea of a good way to spend an afternoon. But Draco asked me to go, and I could not find it in my heart to refuse him."

The prisoner laughed. "You have a heart, then? You surprise me, Snape." He was pleased to see his hated teacher's brow furrow into a frown and his eyes fill with pain. Another thought struck him. No one here will say 'Professor Snape, Harry' as if I've done something wrong. "And I thought you'd rather die than set eyes on me again. You were wrong about me, Snape. How can you face that? You thought I was insufferably Gryffindor, brave, foolish and arrogant, and yet you've been proved wrong. Not a hero, but a lifer in Azkaban!" There was a certain mad pride in the prisoner's voice, and Snape shuddered to hear it.

He suppressed the feeling and said, coldly, "I wasn't wrong. You are insufferably Gryffindor. Who but a Gryffindor would wreak havoc on the world not to gain power but to avenge love? And you are foolish, because you turned the world against you. You are arrogant, because you believed you had the right to kill those people. You believed that when they touched something that was yours that they lost their right to live. You imagined that you wouldn't be caught. Although I will admit that I was wrong about you being a hero. With the power you proved to have, you could've championed any cause, and yet you let yourself get caught up in petty revenge."

The prisoner's face was stone. "Petty? There was nothing petty about wanting to kill those who had destroyed Draco." He looked up at Snape with anguished green eyes. "And I killed Voldemort. I didn't let you down. I didn't let Dumbledore down. I never joined the bastard. He killed my parents. But after the Order killed Draco, I couldn't be a part of that, either."

Snape shook his head. "I didn't come here to argue with you," he said. "Draco sent me to give you a letter. He says he can't visit you. Dementors and ghosts don't mix well."

"Would he come if he could?" the prisoner asked, sadly, and Snape had no answer for that. "It is no matter. Knowing what he knows now, I thought that he would never wish to have anything to do with me at all. This letter… it is strange, but it gives me hope. Not that I deserve hope." The green eyes were suddenly almost as vibrant as they had once been. "I want you to know that no court in the land could've judged me more harshly than I judged myself," he said. "I never thought I had the right to kill them, only that I had the will and the means, and no reason why I should stop. What right do you have to judge me, when you once killed people just for having the wrong type of blood?"

Snape hesitated. "I don't want to discuss anything with you," he said. "I don't judge you. I wish – I just wish that you had listened to me. Even after you knew the truth, even after the testimony of Fawkes, you never listened to me. It would be better for the world if you had learnt to take your losses without seeking such devastating revenge."

The prisoner smirked. "Take my losses, Snape?" he asked. "Are you even listening to yourself? Who thinks like that? And did it never occur to you that I'd already lost too much? That I couldn't lose anyone else without losing myself as well? I had Draco's ghost then, but it wasn't the same. Of course it wasn't. How could it be the same? I thought, when Sirius died, that if I could talk to him and see him I wouldn't feel as bad. But that's not true. Draco came back for me, but it wasn't any better. It was worse! I couldn't stand to see him and know it wasn't him. To know that I could hear him and see him but never touch him, never have anything other than a mere shadow of what my lover had been – that was the worst thing that could ever have happened to me. His death, his ghost – oh, if only I had never loved him at all!"

Snape watched a tear slide down the prisoner's cheek. He felt a twinge of pity for the self-confessed multiple murderer. Eventually, he said, "There are many people who have wished that." He passed the yellow parchment envelope through the bars of the cell. "But none of them can turn back time and make it true." The prisoner gave a small choked sob as he seized the envelope. Snape looked down at him. "Did you ever read or hear this phrase: 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do'?"

"Yes," the prisoner said, flatly, staring at the envelope with pain and interest warring for precedence in his eyes. "I've heard it. It's in the Bible. The Dursleys had one, ungodly people though they were." He paused. "I never laid a finger on them, you know," he added. "In the end, they just weren't important enough. I forgave them for what they did. Sixteen years of neglect and cruelty. I never hurt them for that. If they know what I've become, are they grateful?"

This was not where Snape had wanted the conversation to go. "If you know those words, why not forgive the Order? The girl didn't know what she was doing when she killed Draco. He doesn't blame her. He never did, except at first when he was very angry. Couldn't you forgive?"

Frostily, the prisoner said, "I've had lessons in a lot of things, but no one ever taught me how to forgive. The Dursleys didn't forgive me for being a freak, even though I couldn't help it. The Ministry didn't forgive me for telling the truth. You couldn't find it in yourself to forgive me for being my father's son. Tell me, Snape, have you ever heard the phrase: 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you'?"

Snape was startled. How could a murderer take the moral high ground? How could Harry Potter blame anyone and everyone for what he had become? Then he remembered the apology in the letter. Potter wasn't like that. He knew that he, and only he, was to blame for those actions. "You know that what you did was wrong," he said, understanding at last. "But you don't think that any of us have the right to tell you what you already know, and expect you to apologise for it."

The prisoner smiled. "You're right," he admitted. "It was unforgivable. Everything I did was unforgivable. And I wasn't mad – I was horribly sane. All I can say is why I did it. And if I give my reasons, who has the right to tell me they're not valid?"

"Not I," Snape said, shaking his head. "I am sorry." And he was sorry, too. Sorry that it had ever come to this. Sorry that the promise in this boy who sat before him had been wasted. Sorry that, though Potter had fulfilled his destiny, he had managed to be a villain and not a hero. More than anything, he was sorry that he had ever come. Maybe it would have been better had this poor prisoner not known what his dead lover wanted to say to him. He thought that forgiveness and condemnation would be equally unwelcome here. "I have to return to Hogwarts," he added, although he did not need to explain anything.

Harry Potter nodded and stood up. "I understand," he said. "You won't come back – I know you won't – but in some ways, I am glad you came today. I would ask you to give Draco my love, but I don't know whether he'd welcome it, and he knows he has it anyway." There was a sad, ironic smile lurking on his lips. Snape just nodded in reply and left the cell, walking away down the narrow stone corridors of Azkaban, feeling cold though the Dementors were kept at bay. He had not met any of the nightmare creatures, and yet he still felt as though the happiness had been sucked out of him. He supposed that the sight of the world's one-time hero slumped in a cell, paying for his misdeeds, would probably have depressed anyone.

IV.

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-quarters dead."
Bertrand Russell, "Marriage and Morals".

The prisoner reads:

My Harry,

You've never had to explain yourself to me. Why start now?

That doesn't mean that I agree with you. What you did was wrong. Not unforgivable, but wrong. You know that. I know that. That doesn't mean I love you any less. If I hadn't loved you, I would never have come back for you, to hover between life and death in a place where I had only briefly been happy. See that? I came back for you. The only times in my life when I was ever really happy was when I was with you. So I knew I had to be with you in death, or I'd have gone crazy. But that was all for nothing, because now I can never be with you again.

That isn't a judgement; it's just the truth. You want to know why? Ghosts can't come to Azkaban. Dementors eat them. It's a bit like the Kiss. You can't become a ghost when you die, not if you die in Azkaban, and we both know that's likely. I want to hit you, sometimes. I wanted to be with you, and because of your stupidity I can't be.

As for love, I've heard that if you aren't unhappy, you aren't in love, so maybe love is suffering. How Dumbledore ever thought that the power of love was a weapon that wouldn't backfire on you is beyond me. It has a tendency to hurt those who feel it. Trust me; I know. Don't ever think you love me more than I love you. That's stupid. You know that I love you so much it hurts, and I have for ages. I will forever, even after you've gone on to whatever adventures await after death. I can't join you. I never went with you on any of your adventures – why should the last be any different?

You tell me that you can no longer distinguish between what's right and what's merely difficult. You think you took the hardest path back then, don't you? Well, think of this: if you had resisted your urge to avenge me, if you had gone on working with those people you blamed for my death, wouldn't that have been hard? But wouldn't it have been right, as well? Wouldn't everything be better? Wouldn't we be together instead of separated like this? If your will had been stronger, you'd have known what was right, instead of fooling yourself that what you wanted to do and what you ought to do were the same thing.

But that doesn't mean I can't forgive you. If Snape can forgive you – and I think he has, somewhere where it won't show to anyone who doesn't know him – then surely I can. What you did, you did for me. Right or wrong, you love me and I love you. Although... you frighten me sometimes. I was terrified when I saw that Auror's body and knew who had done it, who must have done it. You didn't have to do that. I didn't ask you to. I didn't want you to. I never wanted to believe that you were capable of such brutality. I didn't want to believe that there was darkness in you, whatever the newspapers or the Ministry might have said.

It seems love really is blind.

But I forgive you. You asked me, three times, to forgive you, and you know I could never refuse you anything. And I believe you want forgiveness, need forgiveness. "What I tell you three times is true", remember? So I forgive you. I can never pretend to understand what you have done, or why, but it will never stop me loving you. But the part of me that hates you – because that part has never faded; I love you too much not to feel any hatred for you – wants to hex you into oblivion for being so stupid.

Yours eternally,

Draco Malfoy (dec.)

"There is no remedy for love but to love more."
Henry David Thoreau