Draco was on the Quidditch pitch, riding the bitter cold updrafts by himself. This is where he belonged, up in the air away from everyone else. This is where he felt free. He looked down at the Ravenclaw team that was gathering for their practice. He finally flew off to another part of the grounds and landed next to the lake.
He looked around before settling down next to the slightly frozen lake. It was crystal blue with long arms of ice running out towards the middle. He wanted to just stay here forever. It wasn't like he hadn't stayed out all night, sleeping on bus benches and walking along the dark alleys of the muggle world. He used to love the feeling of looking into a person's face and not seeing some sort of recognition.
He leaned forward and slowly ventured out onto the skittish ice, his weight spread out as he pulled himself along with just his arms, feeling along the ice for a hand hold. He finally got to the edge and looked down into the icy depths of the lake. He heard his name and looked up, the ice cracked below him and he took a deep breathe before the ice gave and he plunged into the cold, cold waters.
He blinked open his eyes and found himself face to face with a pretty mermaid. She tilted her head slightly in curiosity, he tried swimming away from her but his limbs were already numbing up from the cold, he wasn't moving. She slowly reached towards him; her webbed blue fingers looked so fascinating to his numbed brain. Suddenly someone grabbed him and pulled him to the surface, he took a deep breath as the air hit his face. He could barely feel it but he also couldn't feel much else.
"What the hell were you thinking?" A voice filtered into his brain as he vaguely felt a hard surface underneath him. He looked up into honey hazel eyes and blinked once then twice. Hermione asked him something else but he couldn't hear her, only see her. She finally disappeared and he felt himself being levitated to the infirmary. Sometime during the journey he fell asleep.
When he woke up he was warm and in a comfortable bed, he looked around at the deserted hospital wing and sat up. Hermione was dozing in a chair next to him, he smiled slightly, delighted that she actually stayed by him. He rubbed his arm and realized there was a bruise in the shape of a hand print with webs between the fingers. He hadn't realized the mermaid had touched him and in the freezing water, her skin must have burned him the way dry ice does. Hermione groaned from her place and straightened up, rubbing at her neck.
"Good, you're awake," Hermione commented, a small smile on her face.
"Thank you for saving me," He murmured.
"Contrary to what you keep saying, I do care if you died Malfoy," Hermione told him.
"When will I get out of this place?" Draco asked.
"You're not the first who's fallen into the lake during the winter months; Madame Pomfrey said you can leave when you wake up. She's already administered the necessary medicine for you to recover from the shock of ice cold water plus you weren't in there for very long," Hermione got up and help him out of bed. He followed her out and up to their rooms. Draco shut his door quietly when they got there and went over to his closet to change out of his dirty clothes. They may have been dry but they were caked with dirt from the lake.
A few days later he was in class when he looked around at his classmates, everyone was paying attention to Flitwick's lecture so he slowly pulled up his sleeve to reveal the mermaid's touch on him. It had impossibly grown in size or maybe it was his imagination. He had a feeling Madame Pomfrey missed this when she was helping him recover from the frozen lake. He hoped it was his imagination that the print was getting bigger; he couldn't find anything in the library on it and didn't know really what to do.
It was painful to touch but nothing too unbearable. He glanced over and found Hermione staring wide eyed at the black bruise on his arm. He hurriedly slid his sleeve down and locked eyes with her. She tilted her head questioningly but he just looked back to the front, feeling her eyes still on him.
An owl swooped down on him the next day during lunch and he pulled the little note wrapped around its leg and opened it up. It was from Hermione, he had been steadily avoiding her since advanced charms and she had finally given up, sending him a message instead. She wanted to talk to him after dinner. He looked over at the Gryffindor table but she was already gone.
That night he came home really, really late and silently walked into his room. He switched on the light to his room and there she was, sleeping in his armchair by the window. He walked over to her and looked down on her, wondering why the moon looked so good running over her hair, why her skin looked so perfect under that same glow. She looked like a sweet angel sleeping there, lit up by the light of purity. She slowly blinked her eyes open and looked up at him, she stretched from the cramped position she had been sleeping in.
"Did you think I would give up that easily?" She asked him groggily, leaning back into his chair. He sat down on the bed across from her.
"What is there to talk about?" He asked her, she shrugged.
"Why didn't you go back to the hospital wing for that," she pointed to his arm with the bruise on it.
"I don't know. I didn't have time?" He couldn't help the smile on his face from her concern.
"Bullshit, let me see it," she got up and walked towards him, he pulled his arm in close to himself and shook his head. She couldn't help but smile at his childishness then grabbed his wrist and forcefully pulled it out then slid his sleeve back to reveal it. It looked so black and horrendous, like a blot on his ivory delicate skin.
"It must be painful," she murmured, touching the skin around it, he shrugged.
"Pain doesn't bother me," he replied, she tutted and pulled out her wand, murmuring an incantation. A light green glow emanated from it and she frowned darkly.
"This is a magical wound, it will only get worse," she told him, looking up into his eyes. His heart stopped at the real concern on her face, nobody had ever given him that look other than his mother when he was very young.
"I've already tried to find some way of taking care of it myself. The mermaid down in the lake touched me," he explained.
"Mermaids don't burn you with just their touch," Hermione pointed out.
"But it could be that her body temperature was so cold that she burned me…you know like dry ice," he looked up at her, she shook her head. He realized it had been a desperate argument he had told himself so he wouldn't worry but in the end it was flawed logic.
"Then it would have started healing by now," Hermione simply pointed out, dashing the las of his hopes.
"What am I supposed to do? Madame Pomfrey would kill me if I went back now because I didn't point it out in the first place."
"Yes but it would better than having this thing spread over your entire body," she argued.
"I can't, I can find something to heal it, I know I can," Draco murmured.
"Not by yourself obviously," she growled, letting his arm go.
"I can take care of myself," Draco rolled his sleeve down.
"No, that's the point, you can't or you would have had this thing fixed by now. But since you're so stubborn I'll help you find something to at least stop it from spreading, I might have the perfect spell for it to. I've been reading up on things like that in my Med book," she went off to her room, when she returned she was carrying a heavy volume.
"Alright, let's see," she sat down on his bed and pulled her legs up to support the book in her lap, flipping through the glossy pages. It was her personal text book and it looked to have cost a lot. He leaned over her shoulder and watched as the pictures went by. Finally she stopped at the chapter for cold water magical infections. She slid a couple more pages over and stopped at the page outlining the spell. She studied it for a while before pulling his arm forward, scrapping it against the book and he hissed. She didn't notice as she pulled his sleeve up again and grabbed her wand then murmured the words. Soon the spell absorbed into this skin and he blacked out instantly.
He was staring at the mermaid; she had clouded eyes and long white hair. She was blindly staring at him but for some reason he felt like she could still see him. Her baby blue scales ran down her tail and ended in a delicate but powerful fin. She had heavy breasts and a trim waist with delicate arms. She looked pretty, very pretty as she slowly moved towards him.
She was smiling mysteriously then she opened her mouth, it gaped open like a black hole in her face, he saw the row of sharp teeth framing this nightmare. He wanted desperately to get away from her, she was going to bite him as he felt a hand drag him up, he also felt her hand grab onto him but she wasn't strong enough to hold him down with her. She snapped at his leg, searing pain went up from his calf and he woke up, sitting straight up in bed, panting heavily.
He looked over and Hermione was sitting on his bed, she had tucked him in under the covers. Pain rolled up from his left leg and he dug his fingernails into his knee, right above where the pain was coming from. She pulled the covers away from it and he moved, exposing the small bite at the back of his leg that he hadn't noticed before.
"What does it mean?" Draco asked, hysterics rising in his voice, she looked up at him.
"I don't know," Hermione said clearly.
"You've been bitten by a very powerful mermaid. I'm surprised you are not dead," Madame Pomfrey was matter of fact as she paced at the end of his bed in the hospital wing.
"Why wasn't there any pain before? Why did I forget about her biting me?" Draco asked.
"Because she didn't want you to remember, she wanted her hold on you to grow until you either died from that growing bruise on your arm or until you turned into a merman yourself. Provided you had actually survived from the poison. She's been there in that lake for eons and has never bitten anyone," Pomfrey explained, stopping and leaning over the bed railing to examine him closely.
"Then how come there are so many other merpeople in the lake?" Hermione spoke up.
"Merpeople aren't usually made like a werewolf. They are a species unto themselves, they breed and have colonies, families…" she answered.
"What can I do?" Draco asked.
"We can stop the process and possibly reverse it since we caught it so quickly. If Hermione hadn't of done that spell on you, you would be in serious trouble. I checked you when you came in for any signs of this but it might have been too fresh to detect. Magical bites can take time to appear, sometimes they don't appear at all," Pomfrey explained.
"I'll need help," Pomfrey looked to Hermione.
"Of course, anything," Hermione straightened in her chair, Pomfrey nodded and looked to Draco. "You are a very extra-ordinary being Mr. Malfoy," she mused then turned and walked off back to her office with Hermione trailing after.
