Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any of its characters!

Full Summary: In the midst of the chaos of his sixth year, Harry finds a source of stress release in Draco Malfoy that becomes so much more than he ever expected it could. That all comes crashing down when Draco lets Death Eaters into the school at the end of the year. Harry overhears that Dumbledore knew about his abuse all along and his trust in the man shatters. When Vernon finds out about Harry's sexuality that summer, he gives him the worst beating of his life and nearly kills him. With nowhere to turn and unable to trust anyone, he takes his destiny into his own hands. Prophecies can be broken, after all.

Story Warnings: Rape, self-harm, smut

I hope you enjoy this story! It is very new so please bear with me as I write it. I only started it yesterday. A lot, if not all, of the chapters are/will be named after song titles.

Hogwarts was Harry's home. He felt comfortable with the Weasleys, sure, but he still felt like a guest at their house. He still felt indebted to them. To Molly's love and meals. To Ron's friendship. To their kindness. Their home was his home they said, but it wasn't. It never felt that way. It was so much more of one than Privet Drive of course, but he still felt like he owed them. At Hogwarts was where he was truly free. Even though he was attacked there nearly every year, even though there were still rules he needed to follow, even though it was a school. There were places to hide if he needed to get away where no one could follow, if he was careful enough. He wasn't able to be himself, but he has never been able to so he didn't know what that even felt like. No one beat him up, here. No one called him a freak. No one starved him. No one… hurt him. Well, not in the sense the Dursleys do. Not in the way Dudley does.

But even homes had negative qualities and experiences, and this year was shaping up to be a crazy one. Between pensieve sessions with Dumbledore, legilimency lessons from Snape (though those didn't last long), manipulating a memory from Slughorn, Ron and Lavender sucking each other's faces off, a perpetually pissed off Hermione, the Half Blood Prince's book, Ron getting poisoned, girls trying to sneak him love potions, and Draco Malfoy being sneaky and suspicious, Harry felt like he was going insane. His mind and his moods have been spiraling out of control.

Then again, not a single year while at this school has been anything but chaotic. This was the curse of his life. There was always chaos wherever he went. He stopped trying to predict anything in his third year. Before he knew he was a wizard, life sucked but it was simple and easy for him to handle. He was abused and neglected, but he learned how to control outcomes and ease his family's moods. Ever since Voldemort and Dumbledore came swooping into his life, he lost all forms of control. All sense of predictability flew out the window. He discovered a method of coping that not even his closest friends knew about; he kept the visible evidence of it covered at all times whether by clothing or a spell. This addiction exploded last summer when Dudley decided he would take out his frustrations on Harry in a new way that Vernon and Petunia didn't know about. That was when his panic attacks started. That was when he began falling, losing his way, desperately grasping for the light Dumbledore kept promising him.

He shook his head free of those thoughts and shuddered. As he poured over the Marauder's Map searching for Draco Malfoy's footsteps, he knew that Hermione was right; he had become obsessed with it and finding out what Malfoy was up to. Harry hated that she was right and he continued to deny it out loud, but he knew the truth. He still didn't agree with her about being obsessed with Malfoy himself, though. That was just preposterous. He knew why he had obsessions, an obsessive personality, and that she didn't understand it. She couldn't. She didn't know most of Harry's darkest secrets. Obsessing over things made him feel important. It gave him a purpose and made him feel needed, even if he went overboard sometimes.

He had good reason to believe Malfoy was up to something and that he was a death eater, but she grew more annoyed with every point he tried to make. Before the beginning of the school year back in August, he heard Draco and Narcissa in Madam Malkin's shop. Draco freaked out about his left sleeve being pushed up. How was that not hard proof? But Hermione didn't buy it, then. She even fought him about the unbreakable vow he found out about, disregarded what happened to Katie Bell as something Malfoy wouldn't do, and refused to believe it was Malfoy's doing when Ron was accidentally poisoned by a bottle of mead meant for the headmaster. Draco was just a student, after all. A kid like them. So she said.

But he knew better. He wasn't sure how or why, he just had a gut feeling. But even he made mistakes, and he admitted that he went too far last week. He nearly killed Malfoy with a spell that was handwritten on one of the pages of the Half Blood Prince's potions textbook. He did feel badly about that and hadn't worked up the courage to apologize, yet. Though to be fair, the blonde had only returned to classes two days ago. Which was why he was currently scouring the map. He intended to apologize. … And maybe find out what Malfoy was up to at the same time.

His breath hitched; Malfoy's name appeared. Harry figured out by now that the blonde was using the Room of Requirement, but he's tried going in there asking for the room Draco was using and found nothing. He needed to follow Malfoy inside, which was why he was sitting under his invisibility cloak on the floor outside of the empty wall on the seventh floor. Harry scrambled up and hunched over so his feet wouldn't be visible. A few minutes later, Draco came around the corner and walked back and forth in front of the wall. A door appeared and Harry followed him inside. He almost audibly gasped at how large this room was and how many mountainous piles of – well, rubbish, towered over them. It looked like years of discarded items that teetered precariously on top of each other, magic being the only thing keeping it all from toppling over.

He was so in awe by it all that he didn't notice Draco stopped walking, or that he turned around. He waved his wand and Harry's cloak flew off. The two young men stood there watching each other, both waiting for the other to make a move. Harry was frozen while trying to make his mouth say what he wanted to say and Draco was positively seething.

"What the fuck do you want, Potter?" the blonde asked through clenched teeth. "Come to laugh at me for last week? Or perhaps you want another go? You'd like that, wouldn't you?" He stretched his wand arm out further in emphasis.

Harry shook his head, finally finding his voice. "No, no I came here to –"

Draco didn't give him a chance to speak. He fired a curse at Harry, who dodged and ran around a pile of junk. "To finish me off, didn't you? Come on, Potter! Don't be a wuss! Let's END this once and for all!" He shot a curse directly into the tower Harry was hiding behind. It exploded, forcing Harry to run.

"I don't want to fight you, you idiot!"

Draco snarled as his eyes caught Harry's again. "Like I'm supposed to believe that after you almost killed me!"

"I didn't know what that spell did!"

This made Draco pause. "You… used a curse… without knowing what it did?" he asked quietly, rage bubbling, threatening to spill over again.

Harry felt so guilty but he had to get this out. He had to. "It was in one of my textbooks, an old one that has a bunch of handwritten notes in it. I wasn't thinking. I was angry about Katie and I saw the look you gave her when she came back – I lost control."

Draco was shaking with fury. "So you thought you'd try out a spell you'd never heard of on me."

Harry looked at the ground. "… Yeah."

"That almost killed me."

Harry bit his lip. "Yeah."

"And you want to, what exactly? Say you're sorry? Tell me how badly you feel about it?"

Harry looked back up at Draco. "Yes. I do, I am. I'm sorry."

"Oh cry me a BLOODY river!" the blonde bellowed. "You don't give a shit about me, you're only sorry because your conscience can't handle what you did. You have no idea what this war is really about or what's really going on out there, how many people are being needlessly killed, or what your friends are even up to. You don't give a real shit about anyone but yourself. You parade around being this fucking saint who 'loves' his friends but inside, you're only worried about yourself. Always watching your own back, carelessly wandering through life while everything is handed to you and throwing tantrums when things don't go your way! Well guess what, Potter. The world doesn't revolve around you. Not all of us get everything handed to us."

Harry's shock turned to a slow burn anger, which grew volcanically until he exploded. "YOU THINK EVERYTHING IS HANDED TO ME?!" He felt satisfaction when Draco looked taken aback. He advanced on the blonde with his wand still out and poised, ready just in case. His breathing was labored, heavy. He felt a mild panic attack coming on from the memories Malfoy forced him to relive. "I do watch my back, yes, but did you ever, even once, stop to think about WHY?"

Draco stood his ground and opened his mouth to retort but Harry didn't let him.

"I GREW UP WITH MUGGLES!" Harry didn't know why he was telling Malfoy this. Maybe part of him wanted someone to know. Someone other than Hermione and Ron, who didn't even know the surface of what the Dursleys did to him. He was sick of the world believing he grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth. Sick of everyone thinking he always knew about his parents and that he was a wizard. Sick of people pinballing about whether they loved him or were afraid of him. Sick of Malfoy constantly on his case, accusing him of having it made, of having this picture perfect family. "I didn't know I had magic until Hagrid forced a visit on my aunt and uncle BECAUSE THEY HAD BEEN REFUSING TO GIVE ME MY HOGWARTS LETTER!" He needed to calm down, or this panic attack would become full blown and he could not let that happen in front of Malfoy. "You know nothing about me, Malfoy. I could say all these wretched things I think about you but I won't, because nothing is what it seems on the surface. What I do know, though, is that you're an egotistical, arrogant, holier-than-thou, cold-hearted son of a bitch."

Clearly Draco hit a nerve. He had never seen Potter this enraged before. He subconsciously took a step back but stopped himself. He stood still and let Potter advance on him. The brunette screamed and raged, but it wasn't one of his normal anger spikes. This was much more serious. Why would he need to watch his back? Muggles? Wait, Harry Potter grew up with muggles? Muggles who didn't tell him who he was, and who had tried to keep him from going to school. How he had been so wrong about Potter, he didn't know. He just assumed that all this time, Potter was a drama queen who ached for attention. But there was something not quite right about what the Golden Boy had been saying. Something felt off. Warning bells were ringing in Draco's head. But before he could process any of it, Harry dropped a bomb. Son of a bitch. He hadn't been talking about Draco's actual mother, but that didn't matter. It was a trigger for him anyway. Draco let go of his wand and swung.

Before Harry knew it, Draco's fist connected with his face. He dropped his wand and stumbled backward. Momentarily dazed, he shook his head and dodged another punch. That may have hurt, but Vernon and Dudley have been hitting him his whole life. He was used to it, and Draco wasn't as strong as they were. He launched himself at Draco, wrapped his arms around the blonde's middle, and sent them sprawling to the floor. This was exactly the kind of distraction Harry needed to knock the panic attack out of his system. They punched and rolled around but it didn't last long. Before he knew it, he was on his back being pinned by Draco with one hand on his chest. Draco's other arm cocked back with a fist ready to fly at his face, but all Harry saw was Dudley. Flashes of Dudley pinning him down, pulling his pants off, and turning him over raced through his mind. It triggered Harry's freeze mode. He stopped struggling and turned his head to the side, flinching and closing his eyes.

Draco was both taller and stronger than Harry. He was able to take over quickly, having had many lessons in hand-to-hand combat, and rolled them over. He straddled the brunette, held him down, and drew back to hit him – but Potter flinched and stopped fighting. Up until that point, Draco wanted to hurt him. He wanted to beat the shit out of him. But this was a sign of abuse. He froze with his arm still in the air, all traces of anger gone from his face. Was this what Potter meant by nothing is what it seems on the surface?

Harry opened his eyes. This was Malfoy, not Dudley. He had to remember that. He focused on steadying his breathing and studying Draco's face. That would help. He took in those grey eyes, the angular face, the blonde hair. His flashback subsided. But with that came a feeling he did not want. Arousal. He has always thought Draco was beautiful, but that never got in the way before. It never took over his senses, never made him hard, never gave him the desire to kiss him. Harry's anger came roaring back along with fear. Draco could not know about this. So Harry needed to goad him into hitting him again. "Why'd you stop? HIT ME!"

But Draco got off him and stood. He walked over to his wand, picked it up, and sheathed it.

Harry shot off the floor and stalked over to him. He grabbed Draco's arm, spun him around, and shoved him. "What the fuck is wrong with you? One minute you're attacking me, the next you're walking away?! Fucking finish what you started, you unbalanced ferret!"

Draco had every intention of walking away. He truly did. But the ferret comment struck a cord. Being bounced around as a ferret was the most humiliating moment of his life. So fuck it. It wasn't his responsibility to be sensitive about Potter's supposed abuse, which he might have imagined anyway. And back to brawling they were, though there was more wrestling this time. More of a struggle, less hitting. It didn't take long for him to wind up on top again, but this time he pinned Harry's arms down instead of his chest. "Don't. Call me. A ferret."

He should have let Malfoy walk away. He wouldn't have been caught in this predicament if he had. They were on the floor again, and he was on his back. Again. He didn't understand how Draco was so heavy and so strong when he didn't look it. His heartbeat sped up but this time, it wasn't from fear of being pinned. Perhaps that was partly due to how Draco was holding him down, but it was mostly a different reason. Malfoy was sitting on his hips. Curse his hormones. Curse his sexuality that had only just now reared its head, making itself known. Curse his hardening dick and curse Draco Malfoy. The only way he was getting out of this was if he either conceded defeat, which he wasn't going to do, or if he caught Malfoy off balance. He jerked his hips up to unseat the blonde, but it had… unexpected results.

Sorry the first chapter is short (well, it's short for me!) but I had to end it there or else it would turn into a much longer chapter. The next one should be up soon. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for reading!