Summary: Twenty years after the war something is happening to magical children. Is it a curse, an outbreak, the fallout of war? Old enemies form a tenuous alliance as one tries to protect her students and the other races against time for a cure. Draco/Hermione.
Prologue
I was about a month into my final year at Hogwarts and I swear I hadn't learned a goddamned thing since maybe third year. Professor Stone was going through the niceties and peculiarities of some esoteric home warding charm that would almost definitely be on our NEWTS but I mostly heard a sort of low, persistent buzz.
And, no, before you even think it, that's not a slight at Stone. Even though he's part fairy and diminutive, and has a voice like squeaky fly wings—one might say—the buzz was all in my own mind. It's always in my mind, these days. I just sit at Hogwarts and think about magic so hard I don't learn any and don't learn any and don't learn any.
People say it happens for all sorts of reasons: bad blood, good blood, precociousness, promiscuity, being gay, a bite from an infected flobberworm, too many siblings, a magical hangover from the war, too much time with muggles, too much TV. The list is always changing and it's not exactly written down anywhere. And, I don't know, I suppose I've believed most of the things on it at one time or another.
Back in second year, just after it started happening to kids instead of old people, our parents all said it was a balance thing, like nature was correcting for the magical baby boom after the war. So, when I was twelve I just kind of assumed I was safe. I only have one sibling, first of all, and I'm a pureblood. Mother and father still let slip that word sometimes. Not even in an intentionally awful way or anything, not even Father. Just, different times, you know? I've been reminding mother for ages it's so very gauche these days. Nobody talks about blood status except in History of Magic. I mean, we all know where we come from and everything but you don't go around talking about it. So I figured, one brother and pureblood, I must be all right.
But then Slade Zabini dimmed in the middle of Potions Class. One minute she's giving her cauldron that appraising look of hers and the next she's just staring around the classroom like, "Why am I in a dungeon?"
She might have even said that because I swear I remember her benchmate, Robbie Thomas, saying, "Because this is where we take Potions." He had a sort of panicked look on his face and he was trying to get her to sit and mash up Gilpy eggs.
But Slade just shook her head and smiled coolly like it was all too bizarre. And then she put her wand down like it was just another quill and walked right out of the classroom.
I followed her. Most of us did, really. It had never happened to someone in our class and never happened to anyone at Hogwarts itself before then. There were rumors in the upper classes about kids that just didn't come back after the summer or the holidays but this was Slade marching across the grounds before our very eyes, stripping off her robes, quickstepping all the way to the gates and out beyond the wards as fast as she could because the charms on the school were strong and she was a Muggle now.
That was four years ago, almost, back when dimming was still an oddity and most people just thought it happened because you were sort of a bad egg. But Slade had been my friend and she was all right. Was she good, in that good vs. evil, Potter vs. Voldemort kind of way? I don't know. She was thirteen.
She was also a pureblood and an only child and thus went the air out of my sails. The next year or so was pretty confusing. More people dimmed and I started acting kind of gross. I was still a pureblood and I was already getting that "good blood" and "bad blood" probably had nothing to do with pureblood but there were other pureblood things that kept me safe. Like, I didn't know any Muggles personally and I had only ever seen TVs while shopping in Muggle London with Mother.
We were already all going a little crazy and I was no exception. The world suddenly felt kind of dangerous, you know? And I started thinking dangerous things. I wouldn't wear anything that looked too Muggle. I stopped hanging out with my Muggle-born friends. I started using words people didn't use anymore. Worse than "pureblood," believe me. People said my personality had taken an ugly turn. They said I was acting quite a lot like my father had at my age. I suppose I was.
My father said very little on the subject, in my defense or otherwise. He sat me down once and told me that I was acting foolish and that dimming had nothing to do with associating with Muggles. No one knew where it came from, he said, but it wasn't as if Muggles were contagious. I believed him. Not because he's my father but because that's what he does: R&D of potions for magical maladies. He's quite good at it, I think. In any case, it's one of the only things he could do. After they snapped his wand.
It was the only time we really talked about it. He didn't ask how I felt about dimming or if I was afraid like mother would have. He just told me my behavior was unbecoming and misinformed and left it at that. I didn't exactly clean up my act, not a for a few more months. But I only saw Father at breaks from school and he'd always worked a lot even before Scorpius dimmed.
After my brother became a Muggle, no one corrected my behavior for a long time. Because, Father was right, no one really knew where it came from and of course I was scared and, well, now I'm the only Malfoy left who can use a wand.