Note : Well, well this fic is something else. It's not exactly crack, more an attempt of making sense out of crack.
Have you ever heard of the HP fanfic called My Immortal? It has been dubbed by some The worst fanfic ever (it even has its own Wikipedia entry), and you can find it on this site if you're curious.
My Immortal features an OC, Ebony Raven Way, who is the most stereotypical Mary Sue ever, and terribly OOC Harry and Draco.
This fic is the result of a bet with some friends: the aim was to rewrite My Immortal in a way that would make sense and would be consistent with the HP-verse. (So, no Good Charlotte concert here, you're gonna have to do with the Weird Sisters!)
It will probably make more sense (or less) if you go read a few chapters of My Immortal before. The parts in bold are phrases that come directly from My Immortal.
Hope you enjoy!
Ebony
It was snowing and raining at the same time. The drops were hitting the surface of the lake diagonally because of the strong wind. It was a shitty weather but I didn't care. It matched my mood. I didn't want to come back to school. I didn't care about my NEWTs. But Father had insisted.
He said that in this new world, we didn't have the luxury of choices anymore. He was pretty quick to forget that we didn't have that many options either while the Dark Lord was holding his court in our house. The Manor and Hogwarts alike had been desecrated by his filth. I
didn't particularly like standing outside in the cold and wet weather, but at least when I was here, I didn't get that suffocating feeling that sometimes took hold of me when I was in the dungeon. Most of the time, I was fine but on some nights I would wake up covered in sweat, unable to breathe, unable to move, as helpless as under the Imperium that the Carrows used to put me under to "test" me.
A counselor Mediwizard had been sent from St Mungo, but she was fully booked with appointments for the good guys. Lavender Brown was basically camping in front of her office and Ron Weasley was seeing her thrice a week. I was pretty sure I had been on the receiving end of more Crucios than him, but I wasn't a friend of precious Potter.
But I was fine. I didn't really need the counselor Mediwizard.
Pansy, on the other hand...
I didn't know exactly what had happened to her. If it was just the trauma of the last year, a lost spell during the battle or if someone had attacked her during the summer, as a cowardly revenge for... what exactly? She hadn't done anything. She was just a kid, lost in a war that was way bigger than her, way bigger than all of us. In any case, she wasn't totally herself since she had come back.
That was quite the understatement. She was so not like herself that she had invented herself a new name. She now demanded to be called Ebony. Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way. Sometimes, it changed: she would replace one of her numerous middle names by another one, like Tara or what not.
She had also altered her physical appearance, casting a Glamour on her hair to make it appear longer, so that it now reached the middle of her back, and painting it in garish colours, purple and red. I thought the teachers would reprimand her for the outrageous length at which she cut her skirt uniform, but they let it pass. They probably had more important things to concern themselves with than the weird makeover of Pansy Parkinson.
I couldn't really blame them for that, even if a part of me wanted to blame them for everything. But they were still working on rebuilding some parts of the castle that had been torn down and they were tending to their own wounds. Once again, Pansy, me, and a large part of the other Slytherin students hadn't exactly been on the good side of that war and it was already good that they had let us come back to school and take our exams.
As if conjured by my thoughts, Pansy appeared, some fifty yards away from me, walking back towards the castle. A group of Hufflepuff watched her pass. She was certainly drawing attention to herself with her weird clothes and strange make up. She made a rude gesture in their direction. The Hufflepuffs looked like they had only waited for that provocation to lash onto her. I had to intervene before things escalated.
I doubted that the School Board would be very sympathetic to her, and she couldn't really afford to get herself expelled. She hadn't anywhere to go. Her parents were not as rich as mine and hadn't be able to escape some time in Azkaban with a clever donation to the Victims of War Committee.
"Hey, Pansy!"
She ignored me even though she obviously heard me. I tried again:
"Hey, Ebony!"
She turned and walked up to me.
"What's up, Draco?"
The Hufflepuffs students went back to their business.
"Did you hear about the Weird Sisters concert?"
She batted her eyelashes.
"Yes..." she said.
Her voice was loaded with forced seduction and I wondered what I was getting myself into. I remembered Blaise who had said we needed to stick together, help each other. Pansy could really use someone to talk to. I heard myself say:
"Well... do you want to go with me?"
The next morning, Millicent sat next to me for breakfast.
"I heard you're taking Pansy to the concert."
I nodded shortly, not really wanting to talk this early in the morning.
"You need to be careful, she's very vulnerable at the moment."
I sighed, exasperated. It was because she was "vulnerable" that I was taking her to that concert. I was just trying to be a good friend.
"Draco... you do realise she still has feelings for you, don't you?"
That was ridiculous. We had briefly went out together in sixth year. It didn't work out and we simply broke it off. That was more than two years ago and I was sure it had nothing to do with Pansy's present state.
But Millicent wasn't done with her preaching.
"Don't let her imagine things that aren't there."
"Millie... She's already imagining things."
At that moment, a shrill voice echoed through the Great Hall:
"No, I so fucking don't!"
Pansy let herself fall on the bench just next to me. Millie's eyes met mine, as if to say "see what I'm talking about?" I wasn't sure how this was supposed to prove her point.
"Pansy! What happened to your face!" exclaimed Millicent.
She reached towards her and touched her cheek. Her fingers came back covered in white.
"Is that... some sort of make up?"
"No, that's my natural skin colour. I'm a vampire, you see?"
Millicent shook her head.
"Pansy, you're not a vampire."
"My name is Enoby."
"Wasn't it Ebony?"
"That's what I'm saying, you dimwit."
Daphne sat down on the other side of her.
"Pansy... Ebony... Please, eat a little."
"I only drink human blood."
Milly and Daphne exchanged a glance.
"She hasn't been eating for two days, now," Millicent told me in a whisper.
It hit me like a blow in the face. I hadn't realised it was that bad. On the other side of the table, Blaise pushed a glass filled with dark liquid towards Pansy. She drank with relish as I watched Blaise put away his wand. He winked at me, making me sure that this was just pumpkin juice enchanted to look like blood. If that could help her get anything in her stomach…
As soon as Pansy was done with her glass, she turned to me and grabbed my right wrist.
"Let me see."
She took her own wand out and pressed it to my forearm. I jerked away violently, but she still had time to trace a pattern on my skin. It was a black heart with an arrow through it. The word "Vampire" was written through it in a Gothic font.
"Pansy! What the hell!"
"It's the symbol of the love triangle between Vampire, you and me."
Millie mouthed "I told you so" in my direction.
At that point, though, I was more concerned for myself than for Pansy. I cast a Scourgify on my arm to try and get rid of her hideous tatoo. Since a certain dark mage had branded me like some piece of cattle, I wasn't too keen of the idea of anyone etching their little fantasy on my skin. Hopefully, Pansy's feeble attempt at body art was way easier to remove than the Dark Mark. Pansy started sobbing but I left the table, incapable of staying longer.
I didn't feel like going to class. I took the stairs to the seventh floor. I couldn't gather the courage to go in. I didn't even know if the Room of Requirement was still there, if it had survived the Fiendfyre. I just sat in front of the place where the door used to appear. The blotched ink on my right wrist had completely disappeared. On the left, however, the ink had always come back. I tried several spells and even had cut my skin with a dagger, but the ink always came back. Only now, the skin underneath the black skull was embossed by scars.
Daphne found me there half an hour later.
"You ok?"
I shrugged.
"Apparently, Pansy thinks Potter drinks human blood and is in love with you. It was a bit hard to get because she keeps referring to him as "Vampire". She also calls Weasley "Diabolo" and Granger "Bloody Mary". I don't know. The more we wait, the less in touch with reality she seems to be."
"It has to be a spell. At first, I thought she was just really upset by what happened, but this is getting worse and worse."
Daphne nodded.
"If we only knew what kind of spell it was..." I started.
"Blaise tried to do some research in the library, but of course, no teacher wants to give him access to the Restricted section."
"Of course..."
A few days later, I found myself waiting in front of Pansy's dorm to take her to the Weird Sisters concert. With each passing day, she was adding more elements to her crazy stories. Now, taking her to the concert seemed a bit like a band-aid on a wooden leg. It was not by getting her to socialise that we were going to solve her problem. Plus, this really looked like a date and that made me nervous. The fact that Pansy insisted that me and "Harry Vampire Potter" had an affair didn't help.
She finally came out of the door, wearing high heeled boots, red fishnets, and a black mini-dress with a corset. She had clearly put a lot of effort in her garb and make-up, but my eyes were almost immediately attired to her bloody wrists. I walked to her and took her hands in mine.
"What did you do!"
"Oh, I was a little bit bored, that's all."
I cast a spell to clean the wound and heal it. I wasn't much of a healer, but that was better than nothing.
"I'm taking you to the hospital wing!"
"No! I won't go! I swear, Drake, if you force me to go there, I'll kill myself."
In other circumstances, I would never had let anyone call me by that stupid nickname. But compared to the rest, it seemed insignificant.
I surrendered and we went out of the castle. The concert was taking place on the Quidditch pitch. Pansy was blabbering about how the Dark Lord had given her a gun to kill Potter, but she was supposed to go back in time to kill him, and I wasn't sure if she meant Potter or the Dark Lord.
When the band finally walked onto the scene, she latched onto my arm and started to scream excitedly. They played the first notes of "Do the Hippogriff" and everyone around me clapped and shouted in approval. I tried to get into the music, but suddenly, Pansy collapsed by my side.
In the tumult and confusion that ensued, I heard someone throw a protective spell to avoid that people stomp on her. I looked up.
Of course, it had to be Granger.
Madam Pomfrey was looking sternly at me and Daphne.
"Why didn't you come earlier?"
I shrugged. Daphne muttered something about being a Slytherin pariah. Pomfrey didn't react. Instead, she threw another spell over Pansy's asleep form.
"She has lost some blood and apparently she hadn't been feeding herself properly for a while. This explains the fainting. But her psychological state is what really preoccupies me. As soon as she will be well enough, it is absolutely necessary that she starts seeing the counselor Medicowizard."
Granger was standing on the other side of the bed.
"Also... we have that group therapy that we launched for people who have been in traumatic events during the war. I think you should join, Draco."
"Yeah, right," I snarled at her.
She smiled gently.
Fucking Gryffindors.
