A/N: If you are reading this right now, bless your heart. It's been a damn long time, I know. Thanks for sticking with this fic (and me) and for reminding me it hasn't been forgotten. Enjoy!
Chapter 12
The day the news broke, Draco Malfoy woke up to a different world.
Somebody had left a copy of Witch Weekly next to his pillow. His face met the stiff, glossy cover when he rolled over in bed. He grabbed the magazine from underneath him, grumbling. "What the living fuck?"
Her face was on it. Hermione's. He stared at it for a minute, bleary and blinking, waiting for the synapses connecting his eyes and his brain to finally wake up and start firing at each other. The headline shouted at him, but the bolded words only rattled around his head, senseless and bulky. Wealthy Family Harbors Pureblood Phony!
He sat up in bed, quickly reading the article. Once. Twice. Then again, on the off chance that he'd completely misread everything. With his chest tight and his jaw clenched, he tried to steady the slight shake that had suddenly appeared in his right hand.
Afterwards, he stared at her picture in the paper, the photo infinitely replaying itself in three-second loops. There was one of her and her parents from one of their Christmas parties. He remembered which year it was from the dress she wore. This was the year of the blue dress, the one that had revealed exactly how many freckles dotted the apples of her shoulders.
He stared at that picture until it made him dizzy.
He threw the magazine across the room.
ooo
Blackwell's face was all over their common room.
It wasn't just Witch Weekly – some truly keen soul had taken it upon themselves to retrieve the mother lode of every gossip newspaper and magazine that had run a story on her. He came down the stairs, and she was everywhere. Pages and pages of her, torn out and displayed haphazardly – on the walls, hung over the fireplace, behind the couches. A majority of them had been vandalized with select words and death threats. Draco took it all in and, with his fists clenched in his pockets, did his best to look unaffected.
A group of Slytherins had been waiting for him. They watched him closely to see how he would react to the news. He could feel them, like vultures – their hungry eyes scanning every minutia, salivating over the sudden, dramatic and grotesque end of their alliance. After all, this was the kind of opportunity such bloodthirsty, bored people waited for their whole lives. Not only was Hermione Blackwell a liar, she was a Mudblood. She had roamed their elite circles since birth and had subsequently tainted them all. They expected her to be dealt with appropriately soon enough – a delicious punishment to be publically delivered and savored for years on afterwards.
Pansy could barely contain her joy, sitting with her legs crossed on the couch. She looked so proud of herself that anyone could have guessed she'd orchestrated this all on her own. But Draco knew better. No, Pansy was just about as lucky as she was vicious.
"It won't be too long now," Pansy said, in singsong. "That bitch Blackwell's dug her own grave." Her eyes sparkled with sadistic glee. "Oh, the obscene things I would do to be the one to shove her into it!"
The rest of the Slytherins sniggered in agreement.
"A Galleon says she'll be dead before we graduate," one of them said.
Blaise Zabini, who had been hovering by the entryway, leaned close to him, his voice low. Draco could hear a smirk in his voice. It felt like needles against his skin. "And guess whose job that'll be?"
ooo
Do you, Draco Lucius Malfoy, vow to protect Hermione, under any and all costs, for as long as you live?
I vow it.
Severus Snape pulled out of his mind and staggered back, staring at Draco incredulously. Draco could only savor his look of astonishment all too briefly before his knees buckled under his weight and his body crumpled, trying to catch his breath. He planted his palms and spat on the floor, speckling the ground underneath him with little freckles of blood.
"Tell me you planted that," Snape growled. His face was pale and pointed, furious. "Tell me you didn't commit an act of such grave idiocy."
Draco said nothing. He tried to calm his breathing and he closed his eyes, trying to get the dancing spots in his vision to disappear. His silence apparently did not please his Head of House, because then he felt a hand on his collar, pulling him up to his feet and shoving him against the wall.
"Are you really such a sniveling, pathetic slave to your emotions?" Snape hissed. He released his grip, and Draco leaned against the wall, locking in his knees to stay upright. "Over a girl?"
A girl. A girl. The words danced around Draco's still-disoriented head. Occlumency had a tendency of scrambling his brains and disconnecting him from his physical body. During the first few months of their lessons, Draco could barely make it through without passing out. Even now, he still had his fainting spells after particularly intense sessions, but at least he could manage to keep some of his consciousness. His wit, however, still struggled to keep up.
He uselessly tried to come up with a scathing reply to defend the Unbreakable Vow he'd made to Hermione's parents, but they'd been at this – Occlumency lessons – for what seemed like an awful long time now. Snape had clawed around in his most private thoughts, rooted through his memories; there wasn't anything Draco could say that his Head of House hadn't already felt for himself. Snape had discovered just how many rooms this girl took up in his head. All buried, sure – but buried so that nobody else but Draco could touch it. Nobody else could taint it. Nobody else could know.
Snape looked down on him, his lip curled in disgust. "Blackwell's proven she can take care of herself better than most of the halfwits in this castle."
Draco wiped his mouth on the edge of his sleeve. He pushed himself off of the wall, trusting his knees enough to be able to walk now. "You know that's not the point."
Being brilliant doesn't make you fucking immortal, he thought.
He didn't need to tell Snape about his nightmares about her. That was the terrifying intimacy of Occlumency lessons. Snape, always a master at finding the silver lining in a dark cloud, even conjured them up during their lessons to induce pain. The worst part was that the frequency of the nightmares didn't dull the horror. Draco didn't speak to her now, could barely look at her as it was – but often woke up in terror imagining a world where she no longer existed. That was where he lived now. In hellish limbo.
Snape called out to him, quietly. "For this to work, you know what you have to do," he said, his drawl almost as low as a murmur. "Let her go."
Draco opened the door, not looking back. This time, his voice came out stony and flat. Just like he'd practiced. "I already have."
It was the best lie he'd ever told, and nobody - not even himself - believed it one bit.
ooo
Draco always fought it the best he could when Snape invaded his mind. In the beginning it had seemed impossible. It would only be a few minutes until Draco couldn't hold him off any longer and damn near blacked out, but not before Snape had managed to reach into the deep recesses of his mind to drag out his most private memories, stretching them as far as they could go, pulling them back over him like a tight skin.
In the beginning they were all about his father. In them, Draco had to relive Lucius's "fatherly love": the painful dueling lessons they would have in the forbidden wing where Draco was consistently outmatched by someone stronger and larger and faster - at ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Snape was there to see Lucius down a bottle of bourbon and take sadistic joy in seeing his only son learn the brutal aches of "being spineless and weak." "You'll learn this lesson until it's scored on the insides of your eyelids, boy," he used to say, standing over him. The lesson was that failure and pain were symbiotic. And that the only way to win was to be the one in charge of the pain, to be the giver of it.
If this ever bothered Snape, he never let on. Snape, after all, carried the baggage of his own mysterious upbringing. He was well-versed in the Dark Arts and the tempers of its active participants. While Lucius Malfoy was silver and polish and upcurled lips on the outside, he was pure rage on the inside. He imagined nothing about his father from his memories conjured any kind of surprise, not to someone like Severus Snape.
But as the weeks went on, Snape had managed to go deeper, despite Draco's best efforts at blocking him out. He had twisted himself in, snaking in through the crevices, just like he had promised.
That was where he found her.
It was the New Year's Eve party of the blue dress. In that blue dress, Draco had watched her bare shoulders move through the party like a beacon, exchanging niceties, carrying that plastic smile - and at the time it amused him how so intimately humiliating it felt to be so fixated on such an unscandalous part of the female body. But he watched her, and he waited. He watched her eyes scan the room and he relished the part of him that knew the person she was looking for was him. She was waiting for him, too.
"Thought you would be at the Greengrasses' New Year's Eve party," she said to him, once he finally came around. He noted the begrudging tone in her voice.
He grabbed a drink. "Careful there, Blackwell. Starting to sound a bit bitter, are we?"
They exchanged their usual snark before she went off to fulfill her obligation as the darling daughter of the party's hosts, and he went upstairs to her room with a bottle of whiskey to avoid the crowd. He picked out a book from her shelf and made himself comfortable on her bed, drinking from the bottle. The only time he could really ever smell Hermione was when he was on her bed. She smelled like brown sugar and vanilla - a sadistic combination, he was sure, created for the sole purpose of making it easy to pine after.
Twenty minutes later, the door opened and she slipped back in. She immediately began taking off her heels and he suppressed the urge to tease her by calling her a flatfooted peasant. It was something he found greatly amusing about her; the way heights made her nervous - even when just mere inches from the ground. Even just on high heels.
"If you're bored, you can leave, you know," she said. She let out a sigh of relief as she rubbed her toes. "I'm releasing you from any sense of obligation you might have been feeling by showing up here and not to the Greengrasses' tonight. So go. Fly away, bird. Be free."
He turned the page. "You're not getting rid of me that easily. You insult me just by trying."
She got next to him on the bed, and he willed his eyes to look at nothing else but the book. He could smell her now, all warm beside him, and soft. And so goddamn close. He suddenly wanted to ask her if she'd always had freckles on her shoulders, or if, like their guests, they'd just shown up for the party, too, for that blue dress.
"You broke up with her, didn't you?"
It took him a second to realize who she was talking about. Oh, her. Daphne. He tried to reel in his thoughts. It was hard to focus on anything outside of this room.
"In a sense," he said. "Yes."
She scoffed. "What was it about her this time?" She began to rattle off absurd flaws - nose too pointy, knees too fat, voice too shrill, breathing too loud - no doubt for her own amusement, so he indulged in one of his favorite pastimes: humoring her.
"Yes," he quipped. "All of those, if you can believe it."
She stared at him. Then she sighed. "Only you could find a flaw in the most beautiful girl in school. She made decent marks, too, from what I've heard."
Draco snorted. Oh, how Hermione Blackwell could swing to and fro like a pendulum when it suited her. Just a few weeks ago, she had been singing an entirely different tune about Daphne.
"You hated her. You told me yourself. You thought she was up her own arse and that she was ridiculous."
"So? I think that about all the girls you date. They all seem to fit the same mold, as if they're all clones of each other," she went on. Draco rolled his eyes at the inevitable appearance of what was Hermione Blackwell's highly inflated sense of self-righteousness. "But she was better. A little, at least. You two would have made a decent pair, if you weren't so monogamously-challenged."
He closed the book, feeling a twitch in his jaw. "And what about you?"
Her eyes were wide, lips slightly parted in surprise. "What about me?"
"Exactly. Nothing," he said, feeling his frustration seep through his stony facade. "I seem to give you ample cannon fodder and you give nothing. You give worse than nothing. You give - negative space."
For years, she'd watched and criticized every witch he'd fooled around with. He'd never taken her remarks seriously - after all, he entertained himself with the occasional thought that she did this partly out of a deep, subconscious jealousy - but lately he'd found this frustrating. Aside from Viktor Krum, a truly random and unforeseeable foray into the sad semblance the world called Hermione Blackwell's "romantic life," Hermione was about as untouchable as the worst of them. She'd never let on, even to him. She treated almost everyone she liked with the same level of affection and respect. How could he possibly know what she liked, if she never did so much as let him know?
"I told you. I'm not going to get involved with just anybody."
Draco stared at her, bothered by her utter nonchalance, her complete dimwittedness to the fact that she was a very eligible and wanted witch (or so he'd heard, from the rumblings in the halls), but most of all, he was bothered by her shoulders. The teasing nakedness of them in that sodding blue dress, and how much his hands itched to reach out and touch them, to see how they would feel.
"Don't you ever think that whoever this mysterious perfect man is that you're waiting for might never show up?" he asked. "And that years later, you'll look back on these prime snog-worthy years of your life and regret it?"
"Que sera, sera, Draco," she smiled wistfully, insufferably. Then her face sobered, just a little. "Besides, being with all those girls... don't you find it exhausting? You don't even like them half the time. Not as people, anyway."
Blackwell, ever the observant one, was right. She was always right. It was the most maddening thing about her - other than her shoulders. And that stray curl that frequently escaped from the hilariously separate entity that was her hair - but always seemed to hover right beside her cheekbone, so that whenever she moved her head, it curled up against her face, like it was kissing her.
They continued on this way, talking, until quietness crept in between them, and they both slipped into the silent conversations they were having with their own thoughts. He could tell something was on her mind from the way she began gnawing on her bottom lip. Another habit of hers that he found annoying. The sheer abuse that poor bottom lip had to endure, it was cruel.
When she spoke again, it wasn't laughingly or condescendingly. Her voice was soft, hesitant. "Do you still do it?" she asked him. "Dream about flying away?"
He stared up at her ceiling, observing the long shadows that stretched across it. The dim lighting in her room - and the bottle of whiskey he'd snuck up here – had started to make him feel a little bit fuzzy.
"More now than ever, I think. But the more I'm tempted to, the more it feels impossible," he said quietly.
The truth was, he could feel what was coming for him. After all, he'd had his father's zealous monologues of glory and destiny hammered into his head. Yes, he still thought about flying away, as absurd as it was. There was nothing more ridiculous than envisioning a teenage boy flying away from his destiny on a sportsman's broom. His pride cringed at the thought of it. There was still his father's voice in his head insisting that he was destined for greater things. History Book type things. He would be great, because damn it if Lucius Malfoy hadn't committed his life to cursing the weakness and failure out of his son's blood for nothing.
Her voice was small. An audible breath. He swore he could fit it into the palm of his hand.
"Why?" she asked.
He looked at her. Something changed, then. He felt it, like electricity had touched him at the bottoms of his feet. It was how she looked at him. It made him... he didn't know what. Or he did. Or he did, and he was just too cowardly to say.
He got up from her bed. He walked over to her window, putting some distance between them, so he could breathe. A small patch of fog formed on the glass where he was closest. There, then gone. "Has anybody ever told you that you ask far too many questions for your own good?"
Asking questions will get you killed, Draco wanted to tell her. For reasons unbeknownst to him, his heart had begun to race in his chest. You don't have to know everything. Just keep your head down.
"It's only because I'm on the quest for the truth, Draco," she said, faux-seriously. "Like any purpose-searching human being."
He closed his eyes, grimacing. How could Blackwell be so brilliant yet so naïve about the world?
"Well, the truth is pretty fucking overrated, I'm sorry to say," he said, coldly. He slightly turned his face so that her silhouette appeared in his peripheral. "You know that, don't you, Blackwell? That the truth is cruel and ugly. Tell me you do."
What would she do if she knew the truth about him? His future? What they were grooming him for? He knew she liked to think she had some idea, but she was still hopeful for him, which made it maddeningly obvious to him how little she knew after all. There she was, constantly telling him he didn't have to fold to his father's wishes, that he could so easily just stray and wear down his own path… for a time, he'd believed her. He really had. That was the thing about Blackwell. Sometimes that insufferable hope she lit up with – for the world, for its people – was infectious. But, still, it wasn't enough. He'd seen what happened to those who rejected the Dark Lord's orders. And Draco, lucky firstborn son that he was, had been handpicked by the Dark Lord himself. "Pray you don't make your father's mistakes," he'd been told. As if he'd been chosen despite his father's weaknesses, or because of them.
How would she look at him now, if she knew everything? What would she say to him?
He barely noticed when she got up from her bed and walked over to where he was. He was watching the people down below, infuriated by their carefree smiles. These happy, stupid people with their champagne flutes and their glittery dresses. He could hear the muffled music and the drunken, joyous chatter, and it only intensified the feeling he now had in his chest. He spotted his parents walk out into the grass, the muscles in their faces barely moving as they talked, and he remembered how he used to see his parents as a child. To him, they had always looked like the most powerful people in the room – any room. But tonight they looked like a school-age prank: a pair of old, marble statues misplaced by some drunken idiots at a party.
He heard her say something, but there was a ringing in his ears. He looked down at her. Her face was faintly changing colors from the light display outside in the garden, and there was that damn stray curl against her cheek again, taunting him. You could be this close to her, too, it was saying. If you wanted to be. If you were just brave enough to try.
That was when he did it. Bypassing all rational thought, he kissed her. He'd already had his fingers tangled up in her hair when he realized she was kissing him back, and at that he didn't know what orbit his poor, stuttering heart had shot itself off to, except that it was somewhere else not here, and that it was far, far away.
But that feeling only lasted for a moment. Suddenly, her hands were against his chest and she was pushing him away. He staggered back, his lips still tingling.
She stared at him, her cheeks flushed and her eyes wide. "What," she breathed, "was that?"
Draco hadn't thought this far. His brain was actually still catching up to him, weaving through the dust of his impulsiveness. His heart was still in a frenzy in his chest, bludgeoning itself against his rib cage, but he could already feel the guilt creeping in. What had he thought? That he could just kiss her just this once and get away with it? Hermione Blackwell was not the kind of girl you kissed just for fun on New Year's Eve. Hermione Blackwell was not the kind of girl you kissed just for fun on any day. She was the kind of girl you kissed at the end of the world because it took you your entire life to prepare for it.
"Nothing," he said instead. He ran his fingers through his hair, annoyed. He could see it, already. Things changing, right in front of him. It was all his fault. "Does everything always have to mean something to you?"
Why couldn't she be like other girls? Why couldn't she just be attainable and normal and easy? Why did she have to look at him in a way that made his skin feel like it suddenly didn't belong to him? Why did she have to be the kind of girl who took up so many rooms in his head? Who gave her the sodding right to inhabit so much space in his brain, in the first place?
Why did she kiss him back?
"Nothing," she scoffed. Her voice fell flat and hard, like a boulder off of a cliff. He could already hear it - the disappointment, the hurt. The part of her trust he had lost and would never get back. "You think that was nothing."
He couldn't look at her anymore. "What do you think it was?"
"Well, I can hardly say, can I?" she snapped. "I'm not the one who attacked your mouth."
"Oh come off it, Blackwell," he said. "It was just a bit of fun. It's New Year's Eve, for Merlin's sake. Little did I know you'd want to dissect it to pieces - if I'd known that, I wouldn't have even considered it. Honestly. Just let it go."
Draco thought he saw her flinch. He tried to convince himself that everything he was saying was true.
"So I've become one of those girls then. The girls you don't take seriously, that you like to kiss or shag just for fun because they mean nothing to you." She clenched her hands, wrinkling the fabric of her blue dress. "Fuck, Draco! Is nothing sacred to you? Does everything always have to be about sex? Does everything always have to be so-so - disposable and meaningless?"
Disposable and meaningless. If only, Draco thought bitterly, looking at her. If only life could show him that kind of mercy.
A few more biting lines were exchanged before Draco couldn't take it anymore and walked out on her. He didn't go far - just to her lake. He just needed space. Air. When he was with her it was like there wasn't enough oxygen in the room, and he just needed to get out. It was the closeness, he thought. He had played with it often; after all, with their friendship, physical closeness was rendered innocent by default. But over the last year, his denial had begun to wear thin. There were things he felt when she walked into the room that he knew weren't… normal. It made nights like this loom with both soaring hopes and crushing disappointment, and it made him feel... too much. Like he was coming apart at the seams.
Snape pulled out of his head before the memory could finish. Draco was relieved at that - if not mostly because it was painful to have someone rooting through your head at all, but also because it had been a deeply humiliating, private moment that he still felt ashamed about.
Draco was on his knees again, slumped forward. Exhausted from fighting him, and even more exhausted from failing. His brain throbbed and his head ached something terrible, but at least it didn't feel like it was about to burst open from all the pressure.
"The more you feel, the easier it's going to be for him," Snape scolded.
In Draco's head, there was still the image of her by that window, looking at him so hopefully. Nobody else in the entire world looked at him that way. Nobody else was stupid enough to.
"You have to get rid of it," Snape continued, gravely. "Kill the feeling, Draco. Kill it before it kills you first."
ooo
On the night of the inaugural Welcome Back ball, Draco had just finished putting on his dress robes when he received an owl. It was an inconspicuous owl, colored a muddy brown – one of the more common breeds, so it wasn't one that he recognized. It dropped it right on his desk through his open window, circled around the room, and flew back out again into the night sky. Obviously it wasn't expecting a response back.
The letter wasn't sealed, just folded. When he opened it, he only found one word, scrawled in black ink.
Showtime!
He stared at the parchment for a few more seconds, scanning it over and over again. He had no idea what it meant, except that it had been meant for him and only him - it had dropped it off right here, in his room. Somebody had meant for him to read it.
If it was congratulatory, they would have signed it. The fact that there was no signature was what gave him that sickening clench in his stomach.
Draco grabbed his wand and brought the letter to his Head of House. The ball was starting in fifteen minutes, but there was something about this letter that didn't sit right with Draco. It felt like a taunt, or a warning.
"Do you know whose writing this is?" Draco said, barging into Snape's room and shoving the letter into his hands.
Snape scanned the letter, looking bored. "Mr. Malfoy, does it look like I'm the type to sit there and memorize students' handwriting?"
"I don't think it's from a student," Draco said, speaking quickly. "It's unsigned, and there wasn't a seal. An owl dropped it off in my room ten minutes ago. I didn't recognize it."
Snape looked at the letter again, before handing it back. "I think it's one of your housemates trying to congratulate you on a job well done channeling your energy into something as frivolous and foolish as a ball."
Draco shook his head. "What if it's - I don't know, a warning?"
Snape raised his eyebrows. "A warning? For what? To bring your most comfortable dancing shoes?"
Draco narrowed his eyes at him, before sighing. He tucked the letter back into the pocket of his robes. "Forget it," he snapped, and he left the room and made his way to the Great Hall before his Head of House could waste anymore of his time ridiculing him. But as he made his way down the corridors, his hand still clenched around the parchment, he considered the thought that maybe he was just on edge. Perhaps Snape was right in mocking him, and this was nothing. Perhaps one of his housemates had just written him a letter and forgotten to sign it. He unclenched his hand. Before he entered the hall, he crumpled up the letter and threw it in a bin. He had bigger things to worry about than a damn unsigned letter.
He met Astoria at the entrance. At her request, they posed for a photograph from one of the papers running a story on the ball, before joining the rest of the students. Friends of the school and alumni hovered around the outer edges, drinking from champagne flutes. Draco watched his peers, flushed and shiny-faced, nearly vibrating through their own skins with nervousness. What was it about balls that had everyone's blood pounding at twice its normal rate? He leered at some of the First Years who looked like they had never seen a girl in a strapless dress before.
Then he saw Blackwell in the crowd, wearing some kind of cranberry silk number, with her hair half-pinned up in loose curls. He watched her as Astoria chattered on in the background to the other Slytherin girls about her summer plans in France. There was the sickening pull of nostalgia as he realized what this reminded him of: the New Year's Eve parties her parents used to have, every year. Her, looking insufferably pretty in a nice dress. Him, looking for her in a crowd, and not taking long to find her at all. Because that was the thing, wasn't it? He could shut out every bit of him that recognized her, but the most primitive part of him still did. That was the problem. She went too deep. It was all too easy to be cruel, and to hate her - but to forget her? To forget she was in the room? That was the part that still felt impossible.
He had just turned away when something suddenly clicked in his mind. Something that made his entire body tense up and his blood run cold. He tried to shake it off, but his throat had tightened up and adrenaline began to rush through his body. He had to leave. He had to tell her. No, he just had to leave.
Showtime!
Gritting his teeth, he swung his gaze back to her, only to meet her eyes. She had been looking at his way, too. She raised one eyebrow at him questioningly.
"Draco?" Astoria called.
He was already putting away his drink. "I'll be back," he said. His feet headed towards the doors, then past them, and he was about to sprint down the corridor when he suddenly heard footsteps, following after him. Then a voice called out to him, echoing down the dim, empty hall.
"What are you doing?"
He held his breath. It was her. Of course it was her.
He turned around, glaring at her. "What do you mean?"
She looked nervous now. Fidgety. "You're different," she said, the last part of her statement falling quiet. "Something's not right with you. Just tell me, so I can stop thinking about you. Then I'll leave you alone."
He tried to ignore the desperation he could hear in her voice, but there was a part of him that clapped in sadistic glee at the idea that he tortured her as much as she tortured him, just by being near. He even almost wanted to scoff at how much of what she'd said he could have easily mirrored himself.
Instead he took a few steps toward her, and said, darkly, "You shouldn't be here."
He didn't know how he knew, except that he did. That whatever was about to happen – what that anonymous Showtime! letter had hinted at – it was going to be bad, very bad, and it was going to be because of her. Pansy had been right. They'd all been right. The minute the world had found out about Hermione's true birth, an hourglass had been turned over with her name on it. Tick-tock.
He opened his mouth to tell her, but the words slipped around all clumsy in his mouth, and it made no sense. He said them anyway. "I wasn't sure of it before, but I'm sure now. You need to get out. Just trust me, Blackwell."
He watched her face and he knew instantly that he had said the wrong thing. Before he knew it, she had staggered back and was quickly walking away from him. Back to the crowd. Back to whatever terrible thing that was about to happen.
His own voice bounded back to him. "Don't," he was saying after her. "We'll get out of the castle. Hermione!"
He chased after her, grabbing her arm just as they reached the open doors. People looked over, curious at the sudden commotion, and even in his jumbled, rioting mind, he remembered who he was supposed to be now, so he let her go. Overhead, Dumbledore had begun his welcome and opening remarks. Draco could barely comprehend what he was saying. He was watching Hermione, who was getting congratulated by her peers with shoulder pats and cheers. But she was moon-faced now, with her eyes glazed over, bizarrely nonreactive. Something wasn't right with her. Her skin had gone all pale.
And then the lights went out, and the room went quiet. Draco felt a wave of fear ripple through his body, making all of the tiny hairs on his skin stick up like needles. He instinctively moved closer to her.
Behind him, an expectant Blaise Zabini watched the front of the dark room with gleaming eyes. There was nothing there yet, but there soon would be. In 3, 2, 1...
Showtime, he mouthed.