No Mortal Can Keep A Secret

It is said that every family has skeletons lurking in their cupboards. Past shames are locked away in the hope that one day the bones of their fears will turn to dust. They long for the day their transgressions will no longer plague the family's honor, reputation, and existence. Sometimes these secrets do dwindle down to nonexistence. However, until they do; they put enormous pressure on the family, threatening to tear it apart. In most cases, the aristocrats of the world often seem to think that the risk of corroding the core of the family is worth the luxury of silence. And although the wise will preach on the pitfalls of depending on assumptions, it is traditionally presumed that the more prominent the family is, the more lurid their secrets.

There were few families in Great Britain that could exceed the Malfoys in influence, wealth, or legacy. All the houses of Hogwarts would swear that one could fill the dungeons of their manor twice over with the quintessential familial skeletons and still need more space to hide the rest. Depending on the house these individuals might mean their words figuratively or literally. Of course, this is a gross exaggeration, but one the Malfoys don't exactly try to discourage. It fueled people's fear and pre-emptively ended any desire they might have to cross a Malfoy. However, in truth there were actually very few incidents that the Malfoys would rather people be oblivious to. They were a proud family and felt no shame in honoring their glorious history.

Nonetheless, there was one secret to top them all—one the Malfoys would die before exposing. It was an ancient secret so old that it seemed even to them more like lore than an actual event. It was heavily guarded by faint disbelief and family tradition; father passed down tale of it to son, and it was thereafter never to be mentioned again. It was a private myth too costly for anyone to know, so no other path for protection was available, or so the Malfoys of each generation told themselves.

Sometimes families must face their dark secrets head on regardless of great the desire to discount them. The Malfoys were fully aware of that fact. But never did the Malfoys believe that they would see the day where this particular legend would become their stark reality.

It was an unusually hot, muggy June night in the country side of Wiltshire. The air felt so thick that it could have hidden the elegantly foreboding fortress from the world like a velour curtain without the use of any wards or spells. It was a night so hot, that even the thought of moving was too stifling to bear. The only avenue of escape was to lie dormant and pant, like an undignified krupp.

It was a small consolation to the inhabitants of that place that the heat was to be the only kind of danger the manor would have cause to face that night. As it should have been, for the family had taken great care to protect it. Only those magically inclined and in good favor with residents of the magnificent manor could locate it. It had been that way since before all who lived there could even fathom, but recently security had been tighter still. There was no denying that these days had been dark ones in the wizarding world—even darker times for the family who called this manor home.

In a dim, luxurious chamber in the west wing of this dismally humid scene laid a restless young man. The room screamed privilege. The grand furniture was of the richest mahogany, carved in a timelessly streamline fashion. Every curtain and pillow had been crafted with the most lavish of black fabrics. The stone floor had an eerie glow in the moonlight, which flowed across its ancient surface and caught beautifully on each tiny ridge and ripple. This was a decidedly masculine room, resonating with power, influence, and control. Ironic really; control was the one thing that teen wished he had.

Everyone thought they had him pegged. They would swear they had the great Draco Lucius Malfoy all figured out. It was downright frustrating to him; he didn't even know who he was anymore. Could he be anything other than what others expected him to be? He wanted to take command of his own life and prove them all wrong, but he didn't think he had that choice any longer. Every aspect of his life was currently under the command of The Dark Lord, and anyone with half of a functioning brain could see that man's complete madness. Good old Voldemort was hell bent to destroy the world—why would he care if his plans completely destroyed the life of Draco and his family. To Draco Voldemort's scheme to purify the world was bonkers. The math did not add up to Draco. If purebloods were better than all others then why would they risk death in a petty attempt to harass muggles and mudbloods? He probably would never be able to stomach muggles, but in his mind if they left him alone he would be more than happy to simply continue to ignore them.

For his part, Draco just wanted to silence his thoughts and get some rest. He'd been groggy all day, but right now he felt as if he had been trampled by a heard of Centaurs only to be thrown beneath the Hogwarts Express. His entire body ached as if he'd just been through a grueling session of "family time" with his darling Aunt. She usually elected to use him as target practice. He found it all perverse. It was, as she often reminded him, only what the Coward deserved for failing such a simple task. Who would send a sixteen year old student to kill their Headmaster, really? Aunt Bellatrix craved a sadistic thrill to be able to sleep at night. He wasn't sure but he would be willing to bet that Rodolphus couldn't satisfy his wife. There had to be a reason why Bellatrix was permanently in a foul mood and panted after the Dark Lord brazenly in her husband's presence.

The night dragged unbearably on with his mind racing and his body aching all throughout. It seemed like it would never end. Tomorrow was his to be his birthday, but he had a premonition that he would probably stay locked in his room all day in acute misery. Briefly, he wondered if suffocating himself with his own pillow was a legitimate means of falling asleep. It was not his most sensible idea ever. It was tad more permanent of a solution that he wasn't really interested in fulfilling, but it was the best he could conjure up at the moment. His head pounded. Every sound seemed magnified and warped. Even the constant ticking of the clock, time moving slowly and endlessly on, hammered in his skull and ceaselessly taunted him. The cooling charms in the room were helpless against the overwhelming heat. He had begun to consider the heinous idea that he might have a fever.

Huffing and impatient, he turned to look at the damn clock but was too caught in his own bedding to move. Draco's sheet was unyielding like it had cemented itself to his skin He fought with it what seemed like eons but might have been only seconds, only succeeding in twisting the cursed fabric even tighter around his long limbs. There was nothing comfortable about tonight's attempt of finding sweet slumber. He refused to let a blasted piece of woven fabric imprison him. Finally, he broke free with an undignified croak of triumph. He managed to glimpse his clock just as it struck midnight.

The first chime came, tearing through the silence of the night. Draco sighed with the sound of it—the first moment of his next year of life. He resigned himself to another year of complete drudgery. Draco was a proud man; however, he was not above allowing himself to start yet another round of self-piteous wallowing. Before another thought could enter his head he promptly froze. His world was suddenly inundated with excruciating pain—vibrating through his very skeleton and making the room around him warp and sway in the most accursed of ways. He had just enough mental faculty left to look down at his own body, horrified to watch every bone in his body break one by one.

Draco had been told since before he could remember that Malfoys were supposed to be in control of themselves at all times. Emotion was allowed only for the purposes of manipulation. And they certainly never lowered themselves to something so mundane as screaming. But the sound that ripped itself from his chest at that moment was the most gruesome ever to be heard in Malfoy Manor. He screamed and was only vaguely aware of it, using his voice as a way to release even a portion of the madness that gripped him until his vocal chords were too strained to utter any audible noise. All pride and sense of self had left him in the face of this agony.

He didn't know how long he was trapped in that nightmare, but it could have been years. Some part of him knew that in the world around him, time was ticking forward, and when his awareness flickered briefly back he thought he could feel something blessedly cool against his skin. Draco struggled to stay in that place, but he could not. He was fighting just to keep his sense of self. His consciousness cycled between nothingness and chaos.

Draco was nowhere near cognizant enough to recognize his parents' and his Healer's attempt to bring down the radiating fever, but he realized later what must have happened. All he knew was the unrelenting pain until, just as quickly as this attack had sprung, it retreated. His whole essence cried in relief to be absent from the torture. All his nerves still throbbed with the memory of the extreme ordeal, but in the face of what he'd just gone through this gentle ache seemed divine. Unable to take any more, he descended into a deep sleep.

Awaken

Draco was unsure from whence the forceful command to stir from his slumber originated—his stomach, his conscience, or some higher power. Then his sarcasm kicked in. Who was he kidding; any higher power had forsaken him long ago. This… whatever it was, was simply the latest development in the long litany of things that plagued him. It was either hunger or his own madness waking him now, and that was the end of it. However, regardless of who'd made them, he had no choice but to oblige the order to wake. His mind was fully alert now, and he would never have gotten back to sleep anyway even though it was a laborious task to rouse his exhausted body.

His eyes fluttered open. What he expected to meet was the usual, heat hazy world he had left the night before. What he found instead was a strange mirage. Everything was shockingly vibrant and clear; the colors seemed brighter, outlines starker. Draco gazed around in wonder, drinking in his surrounds as if for the first time. Was there a pattern engraved on the ceiling? Draco blinked, shook his head and looked again. The tiny, intricate detailing of his high ceiling looked back. Draco took a few seconds to panic before the traditional Malfoy-composure reared its head. Surely this was an illusion. He had most likely slept for a long time, which had messed with his vision before. Besides, everyone knew that fevers did strange things to the mind. This was just a figment of his unruly imagination.

Draco's will eventually overpowered his body's protests and he set himself to moving. He felt as if any more time in that prison of silk would make his muscles atrophy. Morbidly, he wondered if this was how rigor mortis felt to the dead; assuming they could feel, of course. Every muscle in his body was stiff and taut, as if he had been tested beyond any mortal limit. It was horridly taxing just to get up, but the idea of remaining stationary any longer was simply too pathetic to consider.

His usual lithe movements were currently inoperative, so he wound up hobbling along and cursing at himself to start functioning again. In his mind, it had become a necessity to go about his routine despite his recent illness. It was an allowable self-comfort—a way to keep himself from thinking too much about the horrible visions of last night. Draco shuddered at the memory of those preposterous fever dreams. He reasoned that his temperature must have gotten unbelievably high for a logical person like himself to have such a vivid, heat-induced nightmare. Really his bones breaking beneath his very gaze with no visible cause? It had to be the fever. Any other explanation was too absurd even for a man who been surrounded by magic his entire life.

Judging by the overly bright light streaming into the room from behind his dark curtains, he must already have wasted more than half the day away. It was a fact that only goaded him further to prove that he was not some pitiful invalid. He selected one of his many immaculate, light-weight dress shirts and some comfortable slacks, then directed himself towards his private bathroom. A shower to wash the residue of sickly sweat off of his body would do him some good. He had been taught from a very young age to dispose of any traces of weakness in the most timely of manners, and feeling grimy all over like this only reminded him of last night's terror. He was too disgusted by his appearance and the memory of his pathetic display last night to even look in the mirror, despite his reputation as the epitome of vanity in a man.

The hot water and soothing bath soaps swept over his weary form, and eased much of his tension away. He lingered there just long enough to feel human again and then resigned himself to facing the remains of today—just another wretched day spent waiting and wondering if Voldemort would request his followers' immediate attention. That was the plan, anyway. Unfortunately, life did not want to make itself simple for Draco. The second he sought to get dressed it became apparent to him that someone had shrunken his blasted shirt. It was a fact most perplexing; never before had any of the house-elves made such a gross mistake. But his tailored shirt would not go over his shoulders, reach his wrists, or even come anywhere close to hitting below his waist. An internal battle raged within Draco; whether it was best to enlarge the garment and run the possibility of ruining its tailoring charms, or to forgo his dignity and go downstairs in his bathrobe.

Well the clothes he had selected were already ruined anyway, he reasoned to himself. He would just have to enlarge them and risk looking, Merlin forbid it, slightly frumpy. Draco scoffed. What a glorious day this was turning out to be.

He sauntered out of his wing of the manor on a mission of the most basic nature: food. However, as he marched on his way to find it he began to feel most peculiar. It came suddenly—that annoyingly persistent queasiness one suffered when one started to realize something was off. The manor was never truly loud, but the portraits did have a way of creating a little noise here and there. Draco was not usually one to pay much mind to his dead ancestor's portraits. They really didn't have anything that fascinating to say. There are only so many times a person could glorify the linage of the Malfoy and insult everyone else before it got a little humdrum. However, at that moment the portraits were more silent and still than a moon-lit graveyard. They had all frozen within their frames, as if they had all simultaneously experienced some sort of portrait-hysteria. Draco looked from one pale, painted fact to another in askance, but none of them were willing to look him in the eyes. Some had an expression acutely similar to shame written clearly across their delicate visages. Draco scowled, and raised one eyebrow, mentally commanding them to return to their normal behavior, but none of them did. Draco had witnessed every person in his life fall victim to the virus that was Voldemort. Draco guessed this only justified his theory that insanity was contagious; even animated paintings could become unhinged like everyone else.

"Lucius, you cannot be serious." Draco paused in his step, surprised to hear Snape's oily drawl emanate from his father's formal study. It wasn't every often that family friends visited anymore. Well… perhaps that was a lie. Some days there were plenty of "friends" visiting, but never during the middle of the day. They preferred the dark of night to cloak their intentions these days, not that it wasn't simple to figure that crowd out anyway.

"Severus, what else can I do? I am doing my best to try to protect my son. You know what this could mean." Lucius' usually refined tone was replaced with a desperate urgency that made this situation even more confusing.

He could hear his father's footsteps as he paced. He had never known his father to be so loudly agitated. From his safe, eavesdropping post, Draco sneered at the bold proclamation. Where the hell had that protection been last year? Lucius hadn't voiced any qualms about Voldemort sending him on a mission to murder the Headmaster. What could his father possibly care enough about to protect him from now. Could it be an unfortunate marriage to a mountain troll? He had a brief musing over what it would be like to attempt to procreate with Millicent Bulstrode, which made his stomach attempt to rid itself of all remaining contents. Draco felt undignified at the very idea of it. He swore he would never think such a horrible thought again.

Snape's scoff must have been heard throughout the house it was so overdramatic. Draco swore he could almost hear Snape's cloak dramatically follow Snape around the room.

"You think he won't find out?" Draco wondered if Professor Snape had just slam his fist onto a desk for emphasis. "Draco needs to know what is happening to him; so, he can protect himself. His life depends on him accepting this. Denial will help no one." Snape challenged back.

"What if someone else is to discover this? Our family can trust you, but I cannot doom my so—"

"You are damning him to death, Lucius, if you do not tell him the truth. If I understand the research at our disposal; he has one year from the start of his transformation. He already lost days from exhaustion of receiving his inheritance and you want him to ignore it." It was a rare to listen to the monotonic Potion Master get so vehemently upset.

Draco refused to be idle any longer. His blood boiled. He would demand to know what his family was hiding now. If his life was on the line, yet again, he would rather be given the courtesy to know the truth. As he grew angrier his temperature seemed to spike, weakening the last bit of resolve to remain couth. The locked doors of the grand study flew open, in Draco's fury he was unaware of his wandless magic. Snape and Lucius turned to the door, ready to attack whoever had just blasted in and ruined what needed to remain a very private conversation. Relief flooded both Lucius and Severus' faces when they saw it was only Draco at the door. Lucius grabbed the back of his chair for support as the little color in his face drained away from his ghastly pale form. Of course, Draco could see Snape was far more pleased than his father that he had barged so rudely into the office. It would appear Lucius would concede this round to Draco. However, it sounded like it would be unavoidable to keep this secret from him anyway.

"Father, tell me now." Draco voice was low and threatening. It reverberated with power; this command needed to be followed.

Lucius began to collapse into his chair in utter defeat his usually kept hair veiling his face away from his son's wrath. "I have to apologize—"

"Now!" Draco was done with pleasantries his father could lecture him all he wanted on his behavior another day.

"You are a Veela, my son"

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.~ Sigmund Freud

Author Note

After three years of the occasional messages about wanting updates on the original version of this story the guilt consumed me… Against my Beta/Moirail's advice I deleted the old story. But she convened me to try my hand at this again.

Fair warning this is a rewrite… so if this all sounds like something you read before, thank you for reading it again. I probably don't deserve the loyalty. Unfortunately, in order to update I needed to refresh this.

I almost forgot…. DISCLAIMER—this is fan fiction and I am no one of importance… You can do the math.

Thank you crystal-chan for the vote of confidence.

xoxo

bluesuitharold