The Invention of Monsters
Disclaimer: I own nothing but a healthy dose of shame and several Ks of student loan debt I would happily let someone else take off my hands. No? No takers? Okay.
Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
ooo
THE DAILY PROPHET
PANSY PARKINSON FOUND DEAD AT PARKINSON MANOR
On Wednesday morning, the body of Pansy Parkinson, 24, was discovered on her family's estate. According to the Medimorts who arrived at the scene, she was found to be deceased from ingestion of Basilisk venom. Detectives from the Magical Law Enforcement Squad are currently investigating if the nature of her death was self-inflicted or otherwise.
Pansy Parkinson was the sole heir to the Parkinson fortune. Her parents, Udolpho and Marcelle Parkinson, were killed during the Dark War.
If you have any information you think may be pertinent in the ongoing investigation of Parkinson's death, please contact the Magical Law Enforcement Squad in a timely fashion.
ooo
7 Newsome Street was a quaint little house. First painted a pale yellow in 1966 when it was first built, it now resembled more of a cream color, the sunniness bleached away by decades of weather. The short walkway to the door was lined with an array of well-tended flowers, along with a small, square lawn that was routinely maintained under the watchful eyes of members from the Division 12 Surrey Homeowners Group.
Unthreatening and bland, number 7 was barely distinguishable from the row of identical, suburban three to four-bedroom homes that occupied mostly every street for miles. They were homes for small families that were comfortable with being away from the city even if it meant occasionally getting lost in a maze of generic middle-income housing.
It was on a Thursday night that the occupants of 7 Newsome Street heard their doorbell ring.
A confused Nancy Granger turned off the faucet and wiped her hands on a tea towel.
"Henry, are you expecting a visitor?" she called out.
"No," he called down from upstairs. "Are you?"
Nancy left the kitchen, making her way across the living room to the door. She heard Henry's footsteps descend on the stairs.
"You think it's those magazine-selling bastards again?"
"It's eight in the evening," Nancy said.
"All the better. They'll expect you to be home and too tired to be skeptical of answering the door."
Nancy and Henry Granger cautiously opened the door to see a man standing on their doorstep. He was tall, pale, and wearing dark robes. He didn't look too well, either – there was some blood on his forehead, his lip was split and purple, and his right eye was beginning to swell up. Henry Granger instinctively moved in front of his wife.
"Can we help you?"
"I'm looking for Granger," he said hoarsely.
"Yes?" Mr. Granger said, warily.
"No, Granger," the man weakly rasped, shaking his head. "Hermione Granger."
Before the Grangers could say another word, the man collapsed in a heap on their doorstep.
ooo
"Oy, go home, will you? You're making the rest of us slackers look bad."
Hermione looked up to see a petite brunette standing in front of her desk. It was her coworker, Lisa Turpin, with an amused look on her face. Hermione turned back to the case file she had been signing off on.
"Correction: I've been making you slackers look bad for the past four years," Hermione said dryly. "Why stop now?"
"Because you're too pretty to coop yourself up in a stuffy office with bad lighting," Lisa frowned. "Frankly, none of us know why you work so hard. You helped save the world. Put that on your resume and you can have any job you want. Or better yet - not work at all," she said, wistfully. "Go prance off to a tropical island and drink refreshing alcoholic beverages from the inside of a pineapple."
Hermione smiled. Mostly because she was allergic to pineapples. "I'm afraid helping 'save the world' didn't come with a monetary reward. In fact, the war actually bankrupted the Ministry of Magic."
Lisa scrunched up her nose. "Well, I know that. But the money's out there. You could have a book deal, do speaking engagements -" Lisa stopped, looking at her. She sighed, rolling her eyes. "But you wouldn't, because you're a person who actually likes working hard. You're despicable."
"So I've heard," smiled Hermione.
"I'll see you on Monday," Lisa said. "Hermione, please go home. I beg of you. Have a glass of wine. Wank off. Get some sleep. Just get out of this dusty old place before you die in it."
"Good night Lisa," Hermione said, not looking up from her stack of files. She listened to the sound of Lisa's high heels fade down the hall. She liked Lisa, she did – but, Lisa always being the second last to leave, it always relieved her a little bit to see her go. Hermione relished the sound of a quiet office. During the regular workday, the office was filled with the usual workplace cacophony - the frantic hum of anxiety, too little caffeine, and too much to do in so few hours in a day. There would be people walking by to say hello as well as the comings and goings of friendly chatter that interrupted her focus.
Hermione finished up and placed the file on her Completed stack on the corner of her desk. She looked forlornly at the other, much taller stack of Incompletes on her desk, but sighed and began to pack up her things for the night. She knew those would still be there bright and early on Monday morning.
She'd just shrugged on the strap of her purse when an owl flew through their office, dropping off a letter on her desk.
Hermione stared at the letter, wondering if it could wait. Could she risk it? It obviously had to be important to come this late in the day.
She picked it up and tore it open.
Sorry to bother you at work, dear. A man showed up to our doorstep just now, said he was looking for you, and then promptly fainted. Your dad and I have made him quite comfortable on the couch, but whenever you have a moment, you ought to drop by. He was bleeding a bit.
Your dad said I ought to give you a description. He didn't get a chance to tell us his name. He's blond, very tall, very lean. Is it appropriate to tell you he's quite handsome?
Please do pop on by when you have a moment.
All my love, Mum
ooo
Hermione dressed the wound on his head and used a Healer trick she had learned from Ginny to survey if he had anything else amiss in his body - broken bones, ruptured organs, etc. Aside from some bruised ribs, his forehead wound, busted lip, a black eye, and what Hermione presumed to be a minor concussion, he wasn't in too dire of a condition to be taken to Hospital. Not yet, anyway.
At least, this was what she kept telling herself. She tensely sat on the armchair across from him, watching him with a furrowed brow. The sight of him in her Muggle parents' living room was jarring. His legs were too long and they stuck out at least one foot over the edge of the couch's arm, exposing his expensive leather boots, the soles thinly caked with mud. Someone – her mum, she would bet – had taken off his cloak and folded it neatly on the coffee table. His white collared shirt was stained with blood and dirt. The sight of him so unkempt would have unnerved her, too, had they not fought in a war together four years ago.
Her mum handed her a cup of tea. Hermione put it down on the coffee table in front of her and watched the steam rise from it.
"Do you think he'll be unconscious for long?"
"I don't know," Hermione said, gnawing on her bottom lip.
"Why do you think he's here?" her mum whispered. "Maybe he's come to, I don't know, ask you out to dinner?"
Hermione scoffed. She would have found her mum's unrelentlessness a great deal more amusing were she not so preoccupied with being concerned over Malfoy turning up so unexpectedly – and suspiciously – on her Muggle parents' doorstep. At that thought, she got up and walked over to their windows, peeking through a small gap in their curtains.
"Somehow I highly doubt that, Mum," she replied.
"Oh, honestly, darling," her mum tsked. "You don't give yourself enough credit. You're a beautiful, brilliant girl. Who's to say he didn't come all this way as a bit of a romantic gesture?"
Under the dim streetlamp, Hermione watched their longtime neighbor Mrs. Gardner walking her dog, Mr. Churchill, and then as Mr. Churchill squatted on their front lawn. Mrs. Gardner idly stood by and then walked away with Mr. Churchill in tow when he was finished defecating.
Other than that, there was nothing. No suspicious people. Aside from the one on their couch, anyway.
"No offense Mum, but I'm pretty positive he isn't here with romance in mind, what with showing up concussed and all," she said dryly. Hermione sighed, stepping back from the curtains and returning to her seat. "Mr. Churchill left us a present on our lawn again."
"That Mrs. Gardner. I'd report her but she's the head of the committee," her mum grumbled.
Hermione began to wring her hands, looping her fingers around each other. She knew it wasn't safe to keep her parents around. She needed to get them out of here, and someplace safe.
"Listen, Mum. I think you and Dad should take a trip to see Aunt Esther and Grandpa. Starting tonight. For at least a few days."
Her mum's eyebrows met in the middle of her forehead. "Do you really think that's needed?" She glanced down worriedly at Malfoy's form on the couch. "He doesn't look so bad. Not like a Bond villain at all. Quite Adonis-like, actually," she muttered appreciatively, tilting her head to gaze more closely at his face.
Hermione chose to ignore this.
"To be safe, yes," Hermione said. "Please, Mum. I wouldn't ask if I didn't think it was necessary."
Nancy Granger looked at her daughter and saw the serious, pleading look on her face.
"Well, all right," she relented. "It's a bit late, but I'll let your dad know and give your Aunt Esther a ring. I'll tell her we're having our house tented for termites."
Twenty minutes later, Hermione was waving from the doorstep as she watched her parents pack their suitcase into the trunk of their car and drive away, their headlights disappearing down the road. She let out a deep sigh before heading back inside the house, making sure all of the curtains were shut.
Hermione made herself another cup of tea and settled back inside the armchair, refocusing her gaze back on Draco Malfoy. Could she afford to move him someplace else? Apparating was too risky; if he woke up in the middle of it, either of them could get splinched. There was a reason he'd chosen her parents' house - here, in the Muggle world, in the quiet and oft-forgotten Newsome Street, home to unextraordinary houses for unextraordinary families.
Hermione picked up the scrap of paper her mum had found in the pocket of his robes, gazing at her own handwriting.
This book belongs to Hermione Granger
If lost, please owl to:
7 Newsome Street
SURREY
GU17 7HF
The fact that he had this at all confused her. He must've torn it out of one of her old textbooks from Hogwarts. But why? Why would he have wanted her parents' address? A dark thought then occurred to her, and she glanced back up at his unconscious form.
She knew that Malfoy had been privy to important intel from the Dark Lord's side before he'd switched over to their side, years ago. She wondered if... She shook the thought away. Not that the idea hadn't occurred to her before. That was why she had enacted the spell on this house in the first place. So that they wouldn't find it, even if they'd wanted to.
She slid the piece of paper inside her pocket.
She hadn't seen Malfoy in years. Not in person, anyway.
So why was he here now?
ooo
4 years ago
"Would you look at that," one of the hooded figures smirked. "Never thought I'd live to see the day. The mighty Malfoy and the Mudblood bitch, working together. Repulsive, that is. Then again I always had the feeling there was something off about you, Malfoy… Something deeply, psychologically wrong."
There was a loud, heavy noise as another masked and hooded figure entered the chamber, dragging someone in on their knees. Hermione stiffened when she realized that she recognized who it was, even though they'd shaven off his long, blond hair, and his pale skin was mottled with bruises.
She watched Malfoy's face go slack with recognition.
"Look at this!" he clapped. "The more the merrier!" The Death Eater's voice was giddy and loud, bouncing off the damp stone walls. "Let's see who's joined our little party, shall we?"
They clasped the chains around his hands and feet before the Death Eater grabbed his face, pulling it up. Hermione and Malfoy found themselves looking into the haggard face of Lucius Malfoy.
"Draco," he choked. Hermione watched as the knot in Malfoy's jaw bulged.
"You see, we thought a reunion would be in order. Once we realized you had defected and gone running to the other side, well – the Dark Lord simply blamed it on your father. All that work, all those years… and still, your father was too weak to raise his only, begotten son correctly." He chuckled sinisterly, letting go of Lucius's head. "We voted to kill him right then and there, but the Dark Lord's sentimental, you see. He wanted you to watch him die, for you to viscerally comprehend the consequences of your actions." Underneath his mask, he smirked. "But don't worry. He'll only go first. Then it'll the Mudblood. Then it'll be you. Oh, the sweet anticipation."
He brought out his wand with a flourish. He was grinning now, and Hermione could see his stained, yellow teeth. She could feel the bile rising in her throat. She could still see their wands in his pocket. Trophies, he'd called them.
"But – enough with the dreary monologue. Let's get started, shall we?" He pointed his wand at Lucius. Lucius's eyes – darker, older echoes of Malfoy's – grew wide with fear.
"Crucio."
ooo
Hermione Granger woke up with a start to find Draco Malfoy staring at her.
She jerked up, disoriented. It took her a moment to realize that she was still in her parents' house. It was early morning now. Pale light was streaming into the house through the curtains, casting soft shadows across the carpet.
Upright and conscious, he looked better – not that it was much consolation. He still looked like shit.
"Good morning, Granger," he drawled.
She blinked at him. So last night hadn't been a dream. Draco Malfoy had, in fact, shown up to her Muggle parents' house and fainted on their doorstep from his numerous, mysterious injuries. "Malfoy, what are you doing here?" she demanded.
His eyes dimmed. "I need your help."
"Then you should have come to me," she said, angrily. "You know, in the wizarding world, where I live? You could have sent an owl. You could have gone to see me at the Ministry. Not - not shown up here, frightening the wits out of my poor parents - Muggle parents - and possibly involving them in whatever dangerous plot you've gotten yourself into now."
For a brief moment she thought an expression of remorse flickered across his face, but she might have just imagined it – whatever it was, it was gone as quickly as it came.
"I came here," he said slowly, "because I need to disappear."
Disappear. Hermione tried to digest this. Of course the first thing Malfoy would think of was to come to the Muggle world if he needed to disappear. It was the last place anyone would think to look for him.
In Hermione Granger's childhood home, no less.
This made the ball of panic she'd been nesting for the past few hours burst in her stomach. She could feel the dread rising in her throat – acrid and hot.
"Why?" she demanded. "Why here? Why not - I don't know, some tropical island hundreds of miles away from civilization?" Hundreds of miles away from – specifically – her parents?
He hesitated for a second. "I remembered something you said, during the war," he said. "How you found a spell to make your house untraceable by magic unless they stood at the pile of rocks and said a magic word. It was the name of your baby sister. Violet."
She felt like she'd been punched in the gut. Only a few people in her life knew about Violet. Not even Harry and Ron had known before she had told them about the spell she had cast on her house. She felt her face flush with heat, realizing that Draco Malfoy had been privy to this information all these years. Why hadn't he mentioned it before? Why hadn't he lorded it over her, used it to hurt her? Mock her?
She stopped herself there. The old Draco Malfoy would have.
The one currently sitting on her couch had just tucked it away in his back pocket until he needed it.
Frankly, she couldn't tell which was worse.
"You weren't supposed to know that," she said hotly.
"Then you should have whispered quieter," he said, irritably.
She glared at him. "Well, you bloody well can't stay here. For all I know, you've already endangered my parents just by showing up on their doorstep."
He scowled. "Trust me. I made sure no one was following me."
"You fainted when they opened the door!" she exclaimed. "Forgive me for being highly skeptical of how diligently you were looking out if you were lying face down on our doormat."
He turned his eyes away. She noticed the muscle in his jaw, the one that pulsed whenever he was angry. His voice was low and deep. "I can't go anywhere else. Everywhere else, I'm detectable. This was the only place I could think of."
Hermione stared at him, trying to calm down her ragged breathing. There was a niggling voice in her head that told her he wouldn't have come here unless he was truly desperate. Even after everything they'd been through in the war, they weren't exactly friends. They hadn't kept in touch, nor had they felt much inclined to. They had both been in different places when the war ended, that much she knew.
She had followed his trial closely, though. It had been hard not to, what with the frenzy the media had with it. Immediately after the war, he and a few other people - Pansy Parkinson, Crabbe and Goyle, among several others who had survived - were arrested and charged with conspiracy for having supported the Dark cause, no matter how briefly. It had been a grueling and charged trial. Many of those who had lost people during the war naturally had funneled al of their grief and rage into the verdict.
In the end, considering that Malfoy and the others had ended up feeding important information to their side - not to mention having physically fought with them during the final battles - they were acquitted.
"Tell me," Hermione said, firmly. She sat back down on the chair, and he looked up, jaw squared, meeting her eyes. "Tell me everything."
ooo
The simple truth was that not everyone had been happy that they had been acquitted of all charges. Turncoats, the press had nicknamed them. Many had thought they were no better than the Death Eaters who had killed on behalf of the Dark Lord. "Just opportunistic scum" had been the common phrase. Weak-spined. Cowards.
Even in Hermione's group there had been some dissonance about what was true justice. Many had not supported letting the Turncoats join their side in the first place - execution was what they wanted - but it had become unavoidable once their numbers began to drastically decline due to injuries and death.
Who knew whether having them on their side actually won them the war? They, after all, had lost people to the Dark Lord, too. Parents, friends, family. Malfoy had lost both his parents to the Dark Lord. He'd been in the same chamber, forced to watch while his father was tortured by people they had considered family friends. She knew this because she'd been there, too.
Hermione remembered sitting there and watching Lucius scream in agony, thinking about what that man meant to her. What he symbolized. He, after all, wanted to rid the world of her kind. He was one of soldiers hell-bent carrying out this mass genocide. He genuinely believed that she was beneath them, and that she didn't deserve to walk among their kind. The only reason he hadn't been allowed to live was because his own son had betrayed them, which the Dark Lord had considered to be an unforgivable failing as a father. The sins of the father, et cetera and vice versa. At least that's how the Dark Lord's logic worked.
Knowing all that, managing to string together what she had thought was sound reasoning… she thought she would feel better, seeing him suffer. She thought she would feel vindicated, bathed in the afterglow of a perverse kind of justice they never talked about in her textbooks. Lucius had to look at her while he died, slowly and painfully. Knowing this, she had tried to smirk at him from where she was chained to the wall. She'd wanted to. She'd wanted to gather up that feeling of nausea that sat rottenly at the pit of her stomach and make it disappear. All so she could do this one last thing: smile at the man who hated her and wanted to kill her – while he died.
Instead all she had felt was sick.
Hermione remembered all of this while she waited for Harry and Ron to get to her parents' house. Malfoy was still in her living room, just sitting. He looked the way he did when he'd been awaiting his trial. Grim and stony.
There were two consecutive pops. The tall, lean figures of Harry and Ron landed in her living room, right across from Malfoy. They greeted the sight of him with expletives, though not exactly of the hostile nature they'd been accustomed to.
Hermione leaned over by the door frame that separated the living room from the kitchen.
"Glad you two could come on such short notice," Hermione said.
They whirled around to face her, their faces bewildered. They were still in their Ministry robes.
"You said tea at your parents' house," Harry said, his brows furrowed with concern. Ron was still glancing at Malfoy in her living room as if he was starting to doubt his own eyesight. "I knew it had to be odd enough to be code for something."
"What the hell's Malfoy doing here?" Ron blurted. "As in, here here?"
"We'll explain that. Let's all have a seat," Hermione said, walking back into the kitchen. They all followed her, including Malfoy. Sitting down across from each other, Ron got a closer look at him. He looked towards Hermione again, before his eyes swiveled back to Malfoy.
"Merlin, Hermione - did you do this?" He motioned towards Malfoy's partly swollen face. It was hard to ignore his hopeful tone.
"Don't look so prematurely impressed, Weasley," Malfoy said with disgust.
Ron frowned. "So that's a no?"
Hermione sighed and gave him a stern look. "Listen. Let's not muck about, shall we?" She dropped the latest copy of the Daily Prophet in front of Harry and Ron. It was turned to the headline about Pansy Parkinson's death. They all stared at the picture the paper had featured of Pansy. It was an old picture, one from before the war - one of her smiling in her Hogwarts uniform. They all grew quiet.
"What do you know about this?" she asked Harry and Ron.
"Not much," said Harry. The picture did something to Harry. He looked away from Pansy's smiling face and didn't look at it again. "And even if I did, Hermione, it's confidential. Rules of the job."
"Were either of you at the scene?"
"No. But Seamus was, and Ernie. A few others. They're the ones investigating." Harry paused, looking hard at her. "Why are you asking? Why does it matter?"
Hermione ignored his question. "Did they say anything about the body?"
Harry and Ron both looked at Hermione in perturbed shock.
"All right, what the fuck's going on?" Harry said, moving his eyes from her to Malfoy. From the look on his face, he was growing increasingly disturbed by their interrogation about Pansy Parkinson's body.
Malfoy spoke up this time. "She was killed."
Harry stared at him, scrutinizing. "You sound quite sure of yourself there, Malfoy."
"That's because I am, Potter," he said sharply. "Pansy would never kill herself."
Ron scoffed. "That's what everybody says about suicides."
"Ron." Hermione's voice was like ice. Ron's ears turned pink, but he didn't look at her. Instead, he kept his eyes on Malfoy.
"How do you know Pansy wouldn't kill herself?" Harry asked, his voice even. "She'd just gotten out of St. Mungo's. Who knows what that could have done to her psyche."
"She checked herself in and she checked herself out," Malfoy said. "It wasn't like she was committed. She went in voluntarily. I saw her the day after she checked out. She was... happy," he said, shaking his head. "I just know, all right? I know she wouldn't do something like that. She was a bit broken after the trial, sure, but she was too entitled to ever think of something as preposterous as ridding the world of the bright and shiny diamond that is Pansy Parkinson."
"Geez," Ron muttered. "Talk about not speaking ill of the dead."
"Say you're right," Harry continued, unfazed. "Say she was, in fact, murdered. What does that have to do with you hiding out here in Hermione's parents' house?"
There was a beat of silence.
"Unless," Harry said, stonily, "you're the one who did it."
And then it happened, as Hermione feared it inevitably would. There was a flurry of movement and suddenly they were all on their feet, pointing their wands at each other – everyone, that is, except Hermione.
"Drop your wand, Malfoy," Ron warned.
"I recognize it may be a tall order to ask the pair of you to not be idiots, just this once," Malfoy hissed, "but I didn't kill her. Do me a favor and let some oxygen finally make it to your brain. You really think that if I killed her, I'd come running here?"
"I think desperate times call for desperate measures, so yes," Harry snapped.
"STOP!" Hermione yelled. They all froze, their wands still raised. She glared at all of them. "You're all being idiots. Put your wands down before I confiscate them all."
No one moved. They all just looked at each other warily.
Rolling her eyes, Hermione drew her wand. "Accio-"
"All right, all right," grumbled Ron. He begrudgingly lowered his wand. "No need to be such a grouchy schoolmarm. We're only trying to protect you."
"I'd be less like a grouchy schoolmarm if every time the three of you were in a room, you'd stop trying to hex each other to protect this delusional concept you all have that is your own fragile masculinity," she snapped.
"My bloody masculinity's just fine," Harry muttered. He withdrew his wand at the same time Malfoy did. He didn't put it away just yet, though. "What I want to know is if you're aware you're harboring a criminal fugitive."
"For fuck's sake - I didn't kill her, all right?" Malfoy seethed. "The whole reason I came here is because - I think somebody's going to try to kill me too."
There was silence. And then Ron guffawed.
"Well tell that bastard to get in line!"
"Ron," Hermione said warningly.
She knew it was going to be a difficult time trying to get them to hear Malfoy out - definitely a great deal of handholding and probable wand-confiscating - but she was hoping they'd break the barrier here sometime soon. She hoped so. This entire ordeal was giving her a migraine.
Insufferable men! Even fighting – and winning – a war together didn't change that.
"Humor me," said Harry darkly.
"Last night, I was attacked in Diagon Alley."
Ron snorted. "Sound the alarms. Malfoy got attacked in Diagon Alley. Never mind that loads of people get attacked there every day. But God forbid a Malfoy gets his feathers ruffled in some dark, godforsaken alley!"
"Not like this," Malfoy said firmly, shaking his head. "I was blindsided. Whoever it was – they were cloaked, like they were hiding. But I could feel their... rage. They knocked me down and then another one held me down while he did this to me."
Three pairs of eyes were on Malfoy as he began to roll up his sleeve, revealing his milky skin. And then they saw it. Still fresh and barely healing, unimaginably awful to look at. Hermione had to turn away, her hand raised to her mouth.
There, hideously marring Draco Malfoy's pale forearm, was the Dark Mark.
Except it wasn't the Dark Mark they were used to. This one was red and angry, with the skin around it raw and puckered.
Someone had branded him with it.
Notes: 1. I know nothing about postal codes/addresses in England, so her address is gibberish, I'm sorry. 2. My reasoning behind Harry and Ron being able to Apparate into Hermione's parents' home is because they'd been there before and Hermione had set up exceptions, whereas Draco only has the address, so he would have only been able to Apparate onto her street, and then look for the "pile of rocks" (the spell is that her house isn't visible to magical folk). This probably isn't cohesive with the rules of Apparition but that's okay! I'm sure as hell not losing any sleep over it. :) I hope you won't be either.
Thanks for reading! Please review if you feel so inclined!