A/N: Woo hoo another chapter! Tying all these strings together has been tricky, as I have to go back and make sure I haven't missed any details. As it is, if there are little inconsistencies, please don't burn me at the stake. I tried. :B
I love Draco Malfoy. He's such a snark-monster, but a layered snark-monster. Enjoy the chapter!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE ONE TRUE SLYTHERIN
Hermione wasn't in any state of mind to be cognizant of the gasp which escaped her at the moment she realized Narcissa Malfoy had been having an affair with Kingsley Shacklebolt and that the young Draco had witnessed it all on the night of his madness, but in the moments following, she was pretty sure her gasp was huge.
She could feel Lucius trembling beside her, but whether he shook from rage, betrayal, or a more nuanced stew of emotions she knew not. All of this was then trumped by Narcissa and Kingsley looking to the side, and the sound of more arrivals.
"They're here," said Kingsley, and two men came into the room from the back parlor entrance, dressed in Death Eater robes. Hermione recognized those men.
"Those are the men from the investigation photos!" said Hermione.
Lucius stayed silent. Hermione suspected he couldn't even talk in his current state.
"They didn't have to try to sneak in at all, because Narcissa let them in!" said Hermione, and then she wondered aloud, "But why are they here? They definitely don't look like they're here to kill Narcissa."
"I believe, my dear, our plan is airtight," said Kingsley.
"As airtight as this manor?" asked Narcissa.
"Even more," he said. "You'll soon be free of the burden of even the name of Malfoy. The war is over."
"I certainly don't want to go through that again," said Narcissa.
"I'll make sure you never do," said Kingsley.
"We shall see," she said.
"I should go," he replied, glancing behind him.
"You definitely shouldn't be here," replied Narcissa with something of a smirk.
"I never was," said Kingsley, and he went out the way the two robed men had come.
Narcissa turned to the men in Death Eater robes.
"Right, so this is how it's going to go," she said. "I will be upstairs, and you will be hidden here. Draco should be home soon, and at that time you will make your move. Make sure you use killing curses, we don't want this to get messy. Think efficiency."
Hermione noticed Draco had begun trembling in the same manner as his father.
"I will come down as soon as I hear something, but, of course, I will be too late. I will, however, be able to apprehend you, which will go far towards clearing my name even further. Neither of your identities will ever be revealed, as per Mr. Shacklebolt's orders, and you'll go back to being Aurors as if this never happened."
One of the men shuffled his feet, looking as if maybe this wasn't what he'd signed up for. Narcissa gave him a sharp look that almost made Hermione flinch.
"Do you have a problem with getting rid of another Death Eater?" asked Narcissa.
She was going to "get rid" of Draco?
"He just seems rather young," said the man.
"Who trained you?" demanded Narcissa. "Should I report you to Shacklebolt for retraining? A Death Eater is a Death Eater, now be silent and follow orders."
"Yes, ma'am," said the man.
Narcissa Malfoy was, clearly, made entirely out of ice. Or she was the ultimate Slytherin opportunist. Probably both mixed together. Hermione had to admit that, if one were to cast all morality aside, her plan was logical if her goal was her own ambition. She seemed to be well into the process of completely reinventing herself, and that reinvention required unburdening herself from the name of Malfoy, and any unfortunate Malfoys who happened to be attached to her. The cold logic of Narcissa's reached that conclusion, but the humanity in Hermione wanted to scream at the very idea because it was, for reasons completely un-logical but real, an absolutely horrible thing to do. This was like the opportunism of Lucius dialed up to 11, devoid of all emotion, devoid of all love, devoid of all humanity. What gave Hermione chills up her spine was that she could see the reason behind it and almost understand because, if one didn't care about things or people or anything but furthering one's own ambition, it made sense.
Draco shifted beside Hermione, and she noticed he was pulling out his wand. Hermione swallowed hard. She watched the young Malfoy draw a shattered breath, let it out, pull himself up, straighten his posture. She watched as a faint sheen of sweat appeared on his temple. He looked broken, but determination filled his features and he packed it away, packed it away as his father surely taught him, and he smoothed it all behind a veneer of control. Across him spread the threatening calm of dormant power, and she saw, for the first time, Lucius Malfoy in his son. Once Draco had fully gathered his faculties, he pushed open the door to the parlor and walked in.
"Mother," said Draco, and to his credit, his voice didn't shake at all. He did, however, have his wand out.
It was clear by Narcissa's face she didn't expect to see Draco at this moment.
"Draco," she said, gauging subtly what he might or might-not have heard. "Have you just come home?"
"No," said Draco, still radiating a dangerous calm.
"Oh," said Narcissa, as if calculating what comes next. She seemed to decide to feign normalcy. "Have you eaten? Shall I call an elf to bring you dinner?"
"Are these your friends?" asked Draco, ignoring his mother's question and eyeing the men in Death Eater robes.
"Oh, they were just asking after your father," said Narcissa. "I'll be sending them on their way soon."
"I didn't think you still fraternized with Death Eaters," said Draco, his voice calm.
"They're not Death Eaters," said Narcissa with a little laugh.
"Then why are they wearing that?" asked Draco.
"Because they're-," began Narcissa, then she was cut off by her own inability to come up with a plausible reason.
"We're going to a costume party," said one of the men. Oh, it was just awful. The look on Narcissa's face reflected just how terribly executed the lie was.
"A costume party," Draco dead-panned.
Narcissa held still a few moments as if she were wavering between going with the horrible, horrible lie or changing tactics, and then changing tactics emerged the victor.
Her eyes became blue steel and it seemed to Hermione that Narcissa had no remorse when she said, "Fine. It happens now, then."
"What happens now?" asked Draco.
She glanced at the men behind her and ordered, "Do it."
Lucius made a soft noise.
The men, to their credit, hesitated long enough for Draco to incapacitate one of them with stupefy. As the one fell to the ground, Draco dove behind the nearest lounge with surprising battle-readiness as the other man's disarming spell missed. Hermione supposed all the mess over their years at Hogwarts had trained them all in the art of warfare to an unusual degree, Draco included. She felt like she'd been transported back to a time when things were wilder, when things were dire, or even when things were… well… exciting.
She supposed she had. This was Draco's memory, and it happened long ago.
Draco's and the remaining man's wands flashed in a syncopated give-and-take, while Narcissa screamed orders. Hermione assumed she knew why Draco wouldn't silence Narcissa. It was likely Draco didn't have the heart to turn against his own mother in any way, shape or form, whether she was a heartless ice-queen or not.
"Curse Lucius for taking my wand with him!" raged a frustrated Narcissa. She looked a bit wild as if this, though a thing she reasoned must be done, was, perhaps, unhinging her to a small degree. She grabbed the wand from the hand of the stupefied man and pointed it at the lounge which covered Draco.
"Accio lounge!" she cried, and the lounge shifted and jerked with the noise of heavy wood scraping against a tiled floor, and the flung it against a wall, where it struck, crashing into the framed portraits which hung there, leaving Draco unprotected and alone in the center of the parlor.
"Expelliarmus!" shouted Draco at the man, who was too surprised by the exploding couch to notice, and the man's wand was ripped from his hand and clattered into the corner.
"Mother," said Draco, breathless and cautious, his wand trembling in his hand.
There seemed, however, to be nothing of "mother" in Narcissa as she leveled her wand at Draco.
"Are you a true Slytherin Draco?" she asked.
"Of course I am, Mother," said Draco, seeming put off-guard by the question. "If I weren't Slytherin, what else could I be?"
"Well," she said. "If you are, then you understand why this is what I must do."
Draco's eyes widened as it dawned on him fully what she was about to do, and so, as Narcissa cried out the words, "Avada Kedavra!", Draco also cried out "Protego!" in desperation.
The thing was, protego wasn't supposed to protect against the killing curse, and while Hermione was watching this play out she knew this, while she also knew Draco was still alive, eighteen years in the future. These two knowledges created an odd paradox where, while she felt all of this was a horrible situation overall, her intellect was riveted, because she could only wonder how, how, how did he live?
Of course this pure engagement of Hermione's brain only took a tenth of a second to lock in, and as the killing curse left the wand in Narcissa's hand, and the shield rose in front of Draco, a third magic became apparent. This third source came from the room itself, and Hermione watched with fascination as it filed its way, whitely, down the walls on either side of Draco, and collected into his shield, shimmering and then solidifying into a brilliant mirror.
This house.
Narcissa's curse hit the mirror and bounced with perfect precision back into her, and Hermione could see she knew it was coming, she didn't know how, but it was, and she frantically cried, "Protego!" as well. It wasn't enough for her, though. The killing curse pierced Narcissa's shield and she fell to the floor, dead.
"Mother!" cried Draco, releasing his shield and seeming not to remember that his mother had just tried to kill him. "Mother, no!"
The conscious man in Death Eater robes gasped audibly from the corner, his hand covering his mouth. Hermione assumed he wasn't accustomed to these kind of Slytherinesque dealings, and he didn't seem to have the presence of mind to pick up his wand, which was lying on the floor by his feet.
The house magic dissipated the moment Draco had ended his own, but as Draco ran across the parquet floor to kneel at his dead mother's side, the white tendrils of magic began to seep down the walls again.
"Mother," sobbed Draco, tears streaming, "I didn't mean to kill you, I didn't—…"
It was perhaps too much for Draco to have lost his father and then his mother in such strange ways.
The tendrils of magic reached from the house and surrounded Draco, and he didn't notice through his mourning, and they seeped into him and he stilled and she watched his eyes lose their intensity, relax, and the balm of forgetting came over him. Draco's wand clattered to the floor.
"Draco," said the man, who Hermione now saw was holding a bleeding arm. He must have been caught in the crossfire of exploding parts that was once the chaise lounge Narcissa introduced to the wall. He seemed both ashamed over what had transpired here as well as relieved it was over. "Draco, are… are you alright?"
Draco looked up at the man without guile. House magic shot from the walls and grabbed the man, as well as the man who had been stupefied and pulled them tight, strung up in a web of white magic. The man managed to touch a pin on his cloak before the magic took away his ability to move.
"Shacklebolt…" he said. "It's over. It's a disaster."
"Father?" asked Draco the man, who looked away, pained.
It was at that moment that all of the pieces fell into place for Hermione. She saw and understood the house in an instant, understanding its motives and its reasons and its surplus of patience. Malfoy Manor knew what went on within its walls, and it protected the House of Malfoy, persons. Narcissa was indeed the most Slytherin, the most ambitious, the most cold-heartedly logical of them all, and she had become the greatest threat to the House of Malfoy.
Narcissa knew Kingsley Shacklebolt was to be the next Minister of Magic, and therefore one of the most politically powerful men in wizardom, and that made him the best man to attach herself to in the aftermath of the great war, one which, due to her familial relations, did not reflect well on her or give her the opportunity she sought. In order to outright reinvent herself, however, she had to rid herself of the baggage of the past, and that baggage happened to be Lucius and Draco Malfoy.
In tandem with Shacklebolt (who provided her the means), she would first get rid of Lucius. The manor seemed to be attacked at regular intervals anyway after the war, and, if some persons were to get through the wards and manage to kill Lucius, it wouldn't be a terrible surprise. Then, shortly later, it would be arranged that "Death Eaters" would manage to get in to take Draco out, too, and at that point Narcissa would be taken from the manor by Shacklebolt for safekeeping and her new life would begin. Hermione realized Shacklebolt had been helping Narcissa salvage her reputation by publishing multitudes of Death Eaters turned in by her alone… and Hermione wondered if Narcissa had actually turned in any Death Eaters at all (besides her husband and son, that is).
Narcissa's carefully laid plans began to go awry the night Lucius disappeared, and Hermione began to see the wisdom in the manor. Was it planned by Narcissa and Shacklebolt to kill him that night? Was the muffling spell cast on the manor to prevent Lucius from perceiving gathering Aurors outside? It was possible, perhaps even probable. That was, however, the night the manor chose to take Lucius Malfoy into its own safekeeping and carefully waited for Narcissa to go after Draco. The house, in its wisdom, gave Narcissa every opportunity not to do it, but once she did, it protected Draco with both a reflection of Narcissa's killing curse, but also a mental blindness over what had happened, the inability to recall, the inability to be cogent, and therefore the inability for anyone to consider him a threat and dispose of him until the right time came for Lucius to return and fix it all.
It was clear that there was no way that Draco could have stood up to the power of Shacklebolt and his aurors when it would only have been his word against the rest. No one would believe Draco Malfoy. He would have been consigned to an ostracized, perhaps Azkaban-al fate for the death of his mother, and it was even possible that Shacklebolt would have taken out his anger over Narcissa's death on Draco, had he been sane.
Draco's manor-induced insanity saved him and preserved his memories for the time when the right people were in the right places to save the House of Malfoy. A person might be too impatient to consider waiting seventeen years for the right circumstances, but a house doesn't seem to notice these kinds of things.
As Hermione made these connections in her mind, she realized she was an integral part of the house's process. Was she the first person who had seriously wondered about the strange circumstances of the Malfoy destruction? Or was she the person who was the right person to wonder about these strange circumstances? Was she chosen by the house? It all seemed so random and impossible to happen on purpose that she couldn't wrap her mind around how she'd become embroiled in it all, but she did know that she wouldn't have cared if she'd been brought into the manor a year after, or five years after, or maybe even ten years after. It took seventeen years of fading of past memories to bring Hermione to the place where she could care about the destroyed House of Malfoy, and even then only just. But… in the intervening weeks and days and hours… how she'd become so entrenched in the fate of Malfoy, how she'd come to know the house and respect and revere it, how she had come to grips with the paradigm of being in love with Lucius Malfoy, a state of being that ached cruelly but to which she had resigned herself like a sacrifice for the greater good. She would love Lucius while she could, she would respect Malfoy Manor while she could, and she would set right the House of Malfoy, even if it meant the destruction of this particular universe and the genesis of a new one.
Kingsley Shacklebolt and several aurors rushed into the room to find the dead Narcissa, the strung-up men in Death Eater robes, and Draco, insane and kneeling on the floor. A wash of expressions crossed Kingsley's face as he discovered Narcissa, but most were almost immediately carefully hidden. He looked up to see the man with the arm injury seemed to have fainted from blood loss, and the other one was still out from Draco's stupefy. Hermione had to hand it to Draco, it was an excellent stupefy.
One of the aurors with Kingsley produced a white sheet and laid it over Narcissa as Kingsley turned his attention to Draco. He picked up the wand by Draco's feet.
"Draco," he said. "Is this your wand?"
"Father, is it you?" asked Draco.
Kingsley stepped back in horror.
Hermione felt herself pulled out of the pensieve, backward, out, and out and up to the place where she was standing with Lucius over the pensieve and a prone Draco and lightning struck, lighting the room over and over from the window. Except it wasn't lightning.
There was a breathless moment for all three of them as Draco sat up, and Hermione and Lucius watched the window to see bolts of magic striking wards, shields, and the residue of magic not clear in the window lighting the sky in the distance.
"They're attacking," said Hermione, voicing the thing that everyone knew, obviously.
"Of course," said Draco, "Shacklebolt's reputation is at stake."
"And who knows what other secret dealings are piled upon this particular cover-up," said Lucius, but there was something in his voice that made Hermione turn to him.
She saw the remnants of tears on his face. It must have been too much to see, of course it was too much to see! Oh, she felt sick for him, the betrayal, the horror, the lives ruined, everything he had ever worked for undermined, destroyed… by the person who was supposed to be his one ally in life. Hermione rushed at once to embrace him with all the warmth, safety, and security she could muster. She threw her arms around his shoulders and held him, and he received her like he had been dying for this comfort, perhaps for his entire life.
"We will fix this," she whispered into his ear, meaning it to her bones.
He sighed against her and held her, and said her name, the colors of tone in his voice filling her with joy and sorrow.
"No matter what," she cried softly, and they both knew what that meant and their embrace grew tighter as if… as if that could change their impending fates.
Release. She ran a hand through his hair and gave him something of a lopsided smile. He looked as if he adored her.
"I'm … going to pretend I didn't see any of that," said Draco from nearby, disgusted.
"Get your wands out, both of you," said Lucius, ignoring Draco's aside and easily falling into order and authority. He grabbed his own (Narcissa's) wand from the pensieve.
Hermione and Draco obeyed immediately through habit, or perhaps because Lucius was just that persuasive, and braced themselves for further orders.
"It's time to join the fight," said Lucius.
A/N: Thank you for reading so far and thank you to those who have given reviews! They make my day, and really make me inspired to continue (I'll continue regardless because I'm determined to finish this, but reviews make me more bouncy about it). Have a great day!