Pas de Deux
Chapter One
"History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man." -Percy Bysshe Shelley
Witchwood Forest.
Blaise Zabini had always heard about the area, tales of dark and mysterious events that often occurred there, tales of vampires and stories reminiscent to Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," but he stopped believing them around the age one stopped believing in Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy. Though he didn't doubt some dark creatures lived in the wood (what scary beings didn't inhabit forests?) he knew he'd never have to go there and find out on his own, and what he couldn't see with his eyes, he refused to believe.
So he thought.
"We have to go to Witchwood?" Ron Weasley asked, even his freckles paling at the mere thought.
"Yes," Dumbledore calmly answered. "There are rumors that a Death Eater camp has been stationed there, and we need to find out. You eight are the best for the job." 'You eight' being Blaise, Draco Malfoy, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron and Ginny Weasley, Neville Longbottom, and Luna Lovegood. Four Order members were accompanying them, for it hadn't been long since they'd all graduated from Hogwarts, though Harry, Ron, Ginny and Hermione were all Aurors, and those four happened to be Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and Christopher Pennington, a wizard not too much older than The Eight.
"However, you will all be partnered, so you can split off to investigate different areas, and the danger will not be as great. Harry, you are with Luna, Neville with Ginny, Ron with Draco, and Blaise with Hermione. You've all been trained well, I'm sure you'll be fine. Follow the usual procedure of shooting up red sparks if you are in danger, green if you find something suspicious." They all nodded, then reached out and touched the Portkey of a very old Muggle cassette tape that looked as though it had been buried for twenty years and only recently dug up again, and soon landed in a forest clearing. The air was typical for September - cool and slightly damp, as though a rain had come through not too long ago.
"Meet back here in an hour," Hermione declared, and Blaise took a look at his new partner. He hadn't spoken three words to her, but he'd very often heard her mouth running at meetings or to her friends in the hallways of the Haven, the new Order headquarters. She wasn't much shorter than him (though he wasn't incredibly tall himself, coming to about 5'8") and her wild, dark brown ringlets were pulled back in a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. She was curvy, and very pretty, but she wasn't as delicate as most women, having some muscles from Auror training, and there was no doubt she knew how to use her strength. "Even if you found nothing, we have to regroup."
"Who appointed you leader of us?" Draco sneered, and Ron very obviously rolled his eyes.
"Can't you shut up for two seconds? We don't see you giving any orders."
"Both of you be quiet. This is no time for arguing. Meet here in an hour, no arguments. Understood?" Everybody mumbled their agreement, and the others paired off and left, leaving Blaise in a rather uncomfortable position. He wasn't exactly sure what to say.
"Well?" Hermione drew her wand. "As much as I'd love to stand and chat all day, we've got work to do, so let's get to it. This way." She led, and he followed. He gripped his wand tighter as they ventured deeper and deeper into the forest, a scuttle of an animal across twigs and leaves causing him to start, and soon the sun had fallen out of view (as much as it had been, being it was near dusk). Hermione stopped suddenly, and as Blaise had been distracted for a moment with a squirrel nearby, he crashed into her.
"Sorry!" he exclaimed, grabbing a branch of a tree to steady himself, and realized his apology had been the first word he'd spoken to her in the thirteen years he'd known her. Hermione didn't seem to have noticed; her eyes were fixed on a building ahead. Blaise squinted and saw that it was made of once-white stone, now covered nearly entirely in ivy, two doors arched and a large, circular stained-glass window above them. A cross stretched from the ceiling.
"This cathedral - this could be it, don't you think?" Hermione whispered to him excitedly, and he swallowed.
"I don't think we should find out..." Blaise normally would have ventured there - he was a Death Eater, for Merlin's sake, (though not one of the Elite, the group The Eight were searching for) what did he have to fear? - but a church in the middle of a forest? One had to admit it was pretty creepy.
"Come on," she walked on, and they reached the front of the building in no time.
"Yeah, I'm not so sure this is one of your better ideas," said Blaise as Hermione pushed open one of the doors of the church. She ignored him and continued in. He had to admit the inside of the building was beautiful; the stained glass windows that were still intact (only five out of twelve, he counted) allowed moonlight to spill through and pool on the floor, which he suspected once to be white marble, in haunting kaleidoscopes. The ceiling reached impossibly high, arched and typical of the Gothic architecture that had come about during the Middle Ages.
"There aren't any pews," he pointed out. "Are you sure this is a cathedral?"
"Pews weren't invented until around the time of the printing press, just before the Protestant Reformation," Hermione answered, walking forward to an altar three steps up from the rest of the area. "That means this church hasn't been used in over five hundred years." Blaise reluctantly followed her up to the wooden table with a red, moth-eaten cloth hanging over its edges. On top of the altar was a golden chalice, encrusted with rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Blaise's eyes were drawn to the gems, as were Hermione's; they seemed to glow from within, beneath the years of dust and grime caked thickly on top of it. Blaise reached out his hand, but Hermione's fingers tightly gripped around his wrist stopped it. He looked at her, seeing in her eyes a strange sort of fear. She'd lost her hair grip somewhere back in the forest, and her hair tumbled wildly down her shoulders, the moonlight glinting off of it quite eerily.
"Don't touch it, you never know what it could do."
"I'm sure priests of the Roman Catholic Church weren't involved in witchcraft - don't forget about the Holy Inquisition -"
"That was several centuries after," she hissed, her tone growing impatient. "Remember, if this church is truly from the early Middle Ages emerging from the Dark Ages, everybody was still trying to get used to this new institution, and pagans were converting, but not fully. They still held their old beliefs and rituals close to heart. Think of the Celts - hedging your bets, putting pagan images on the backs of tombstones while Christian ones on the fronts. Don't tell me you forgot all this from History of Magic."
"I never even learned anything in History of Magic. I was too busy thinking of ways to keep from falling asleep - most of which didn't work." Blaise retorted, pulling his arm from her grip. "Come on, there's nothing else to see - we need to leave."
"No, there is more to see," she said, her eyes suddenly glinting as she eyed a dark space in the corner of the room. "There's a door in that corner, don't you see? I'm going to check it out." She whispered a soft "Lumos" before making her way over there. Blaise considered his options. He was supposed to stay with her - if he encountered one of the members searching in the forest nearby as well, he'd be in for the Wrath of Dumbledore, and no doubt Potter and Weasley - but if he went with her, they could get killed. Which was worse, he wasn't sure.
"Dammit, Granger," he muttered and followed her footprints, clear on the dusty floor. She wasn't too far up ahead, he discovered, as he stepped into the small corridor behind the door. She must have cleared the cobwebs, for only a couple caught on his robes, but all he could think of was the smell. It didn't help the corridor was tiny, with just enough width for him to fit, and he had to crouch some, but it also smelled of years of decaying, as though fifty human bodies had been crammed in this space and decomposing. But there were no skeletons, not even of dead animals.
"A scriptorium?" he heard her whisper, and behind another door there was a small room with six slanted tables, inkwells long forgotten still resting on parchments unfinished and in Latin, a language Blaise only knew vaguely.
"What do you suppose these manuscr -" suddenly Hermione was cut off by her own scream, and Blaise could only watch in horror as a large stone she was standing on quivered, then fell out, taking her with it. He never heard a crash, and upon shining his wand down the hole to see a bottom, there was none. He bit his lip, contemplating going into the forest and finding one of the others, but no - it would take too long, and she could be dead. That would be something to tell, wouldn't it? With a gulp and a split-second decision, Blaise straightened, tucked his wand in his robe pocket and jumped down.
Blaise landed hard on his back, his eyes seeing too many white spots to know what he was looking at, his head throbbing and muscles aching. He wondered how far he'd fallen, if his back was broken, if he was even in an existent place or somewhere in his mind, but he distantly heard a groan followed by the rustle of clothes. He took the painful effort to turn his head and blink his eyes until he could see at least the blurry figure of Hermione sitting up, lifting a hand to her head.
"Blaise?" she whispered, and he pushed himself up on his elbows. Her gaze went to his, and she came in focus finally. The tips of her fingers were covered with blood, and her hair was tangled and bloody on the side of her head. "Are you bleeding anywhere?"
"No, but you are. We need to get you -"
"Zabini, I think I know enough about Healing to help myself out, thanks," she said, suddenly very determined. He raised his eyebrows. Perhaps Hermione Granger had even more in her than he'd previously thought. After she'd healed herself as best as she could, she helped him to his feet and they looked around. The room they were in had three open windows, cool air filtering through, and a chamber pot poking out from beneath the bed, the latter of which didn't look particularly comfortable. The door was wood that looked as though it would disintegrate at any given moment, and the lock was a simple sliding bit of wood. Blaise raised his eyebrows at Hermione, who shrugged back. She then went to look out of the window, and a frown crossed her features, before it was replaced with shock, her mouth promptly falling open.
"Come here," she said, her voice somewhat breathless. He looked out over her shoulder and his expression must've mirrored hers, for he found himself staring at a medieval version of Hogsmeade, men dressed in tunics and women adorning long gowns, some of the women with fairytale-esque cone-shaped hats with veils flowing from them - hennins; some with wimples, and others with hair plaited down their backs plainly, ribbons woven in. Many of the men carried swords at their hips or on their backs, held with a baldrick, and women carried books. Of course. Women in the Wizarding world were far more educated in the Middle Ages than Muggle ones, because of Rowena Ravenclaw and Helga Hufflepuff. Hermione should fit right in.
"We have to get these clothes somehow," Hermione said frantically, her eyes wide.
"Why don't we just Transfigure the ones we've got on now? It can't be that hard, we do have the ability to do magic, you know."
"Oh," she sighed. "I would've thought of that eventually, my mind's just not all here. Thanks." He held back a smirk - he knew Hermione was trying to cover up for her blunder. She pulled out her wand and muttered a few words Blaise couldn't hear under her breath, and her robes turned into a parti-coloured dress¹, her right side maroon and her left gold, and she wore one of the hennins that matched the maroon in her dress, gold vines traced around the bottom of it, the veil that was at the top of it a sheer gold fabric. Her hair was tucked up under the hennin, but some stubborn curly tendrils escaped to frame her face. She then pointed her wand at Blaise, muttering those same words, and he found himself in a forest-green tunic, a silver snake imprinted on the breast. Under the courtepy², which came to the middle of his thighs, were white hose, and over them up to his knees were black stivalis³.
"Now, what exactly do you propose for us to do?" asked Blaise, feeling very cynical all of a sudden.
"We're obviously in the Three Broomsticks, judging from the position of the shops around us, but how do we explain how we just ended up here?" she thought aloud, then looked through the window again. "I think we can both fit through the windows, so if we climb out of that one there -" she pointed at the back wall, "we can get out of here safely without anybody seeing."
"You've forgotten one thing," he interrupted, and she glared.
"What?"
"We're two stories up."
"Bullocks," she said, a strange grin lighting her face. "Don't you know of levitation?"
"You're mad."
"Do you want to find a way to get back to the future or not?" she snapped. "Assuming there is a way, of course." He knew she was right, and it would be no use arguing, so he agreed. Once they'd both made it out onto the ground safely, she adjusting her headpiece, he looked at her.
"Where to next?"
"Why do you think I made our clothes Gryffindor and Slytherin oriented? We're going to Hogwarts."
A/N: All footnotes taken from except for the bolded parts.
5'8" 1.73 meters
¹ - divided vertically in half, a 12-14th century garment in two colours of cloth. Ex.: Princess Isabelle in Braveheart wore one of these when meeting with William Wallace for the first time. It's not exactly two different colors, but for the most part it is divided between red and blue.
² - very short, hip belted tunic. Ex: I always think of Link from The Legend of Zelda games, most especially Ocarina of Time. Not just because he's hot, either...
³ - summer light boots close fitting to the leg and usually in black, but sometimes red. Ex: I don't have an example, but I think of the boots Aragorn often wears in The Lord of the Rings, even though they're brown.
Now onto hennin - I researched them on about three sites, and one said they were introduced by Marco Polo when he came back from China. Seeing as he traveled in the fifteenth century, and Hermione and Blaise ended up in the twelfth, that kind of puts a stress on the question "Why do you have the women wearing hennins then?" Well, on another of the sites it said that the hennin lasted a while through Europe, while the third site I looked at said it lasted from only 1450-90. However, we all know of fairytale princesses who wear them, and I decided to be cliché for this. Who knows how fashion differed between the Wizarding and Muggle worlds? So, if you don't like it, I'm sorry but that's how it will be in this fic.
Also, I know that this is somewhat akin to "Fate of Awakening Love," one of my other fanfics, with the exception that our hero and heroine have graduated now, and the hero isn't Draco Malfoy (hopefully you figured this out...). I just don't want people going "OmG uR fanfic is lyke, the same as the other!" because it's not. With all that said, please review!