Draco Malfoy felt the weight at his side while he stood there.
He had hated muggles as he'd been raised to, but that hate was replaced.
As a child, his father and his friends spoke of them as mere cattle and fools ripe for the slaughter, but something happened since then.
Harry Potter had changed that, had changed everything.
The creature taunting them, laughing at them for his own twisted amusement was not inspired by a wizards power, but from a muggles tale.
Muggles had inspired such a power and monstrosity that it couldn't be matched.
He had seen things that changed him, saw what no man should.
Draco had not been unchanged by those events, nor would he have desired to do so if he could.
It was almost as if the blinders had been torn from his eyes, and for the first time in his young life, the young Malfoy could see clearly.
His fathers master was not his own, and he was not willing to sacrifice himself in one mad fools dreams of defeating a greater monster.
The cross dangling from the chain around his neck was a comfort, one gained the previous summer when he'd decided to see the world he was to hate.
A bookstore had seemed safe as anything, and it was there that he'd found the books.
Images that had caught his attention and held it.
Hellsing...
Books with art that told a story that horrified him and yet intrigued him.
This was the key to the terrors past, a key that just the door to more questions.
Hours later he found himself in a church, just staring at the stained glass, trying to process what he had learned, the cross, a simple wooden thing the priest had given him with the words.
"Peace be with you..."
But there was no peace for him.
No, there could be no peace, for a monster still stalked his world.