Rated M for violence, for the time being. At the moment chapters are pretty tame but will put trigger warnings when appropriate.
Disclaimer: If I owned Harry Potter it would've been a grisly tale.
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That Fateful Night
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It's almost agonizing, how everything is heightened.
Before he was cornered — alone, with only a handful of hexes to his name — in a moonlit forest that one fateful night, he had been excited. To watch Viktor Krum, who was only four years older than him, play a masterful game; in fact, Draco had dreamed himself more than he'd like to admit of zipping down, raising the golden snitch in his fist and smirking at a roaring crowd. Malfoy. Malfoy. Malfoy.
Except the Malfoy name is tainted, now.
On his shoulder is a viscous mark. Not only does he wear three layers of clothing at a time (despite his Mother's insistence that he would make himself sick in the heat), but he'd gotten Pansy to teach him numerous glamour charms. Batting off his Mother's prying hands is easy enough; and shutting Pansy's questions up with rough crashing of lips works perfectly fine. The Malfoy name might be tainted, now, but it's not like anybody needs to know that.
So he went to the Quidditch World Cup, as was planned, with his parents. The cheering, jeering and hooting, coupled with the tang of alcohol and cheap food, sweat, dizzying mixture of perfumes and the damp grass under a summer night's sky — it had been all Draco could do to not hurl over the stands, at the feet of his Mother and Father. He barely registered that Krum pulled off the Wronksi Feint to erupting applause; nor did he care all too much when Ireland still beat Bulgaria. All his senses are heightened, now, and it's almost unbearable with so much going on. His parents are quick to usher him out of the stands after the game's end. They pass the hoard of Weasleys, who all smell the same: freshly mown grass and spearmint toothpaste. Potter reeks of generic male cologne.
The last scent catches him by surprise… on Salazar's Grave, when he whips his head around to glimpse a bushy mane of hair, he thinks he's going mad if a Mudblood like her can smell so good.
But there's no time to dwell on that.
As soon as they enter it, his Father is pacing in the grand dining room that their tent has produced. Its intricate patterns in the marble wall, the polished finish of the dark mahogany floor, along with the three master bedrooms that comes with it, is worth every galleon spent. Behind Draco, his Mother is casting several non-verbal spells at the entrance; he listens to wards trickling over the tent like water. From outside, the singing, chanting, laughter, becomes muffled. That's when his Father stops pacing. Draco tenses at the clench of his Father's jaw, and the wild gleam in his eyes.
"Draco, please leave us." Icy, stony and hard, he knows his Mother is about to unleash a storm.
As his Father's lip curdles, Draco listens to her heels tapping closer to them. "Now now, Narcissa. He is old enough to learn of what is happening." Even as he says this, Draco's Mother's cold hand rests on his shoulder, pulling him backwards towards her. He flinches away from her; the bite under his coat, jacket and shirt burns as if his Mother had thrown Fiendfyre at it. Despite the furrow of her brow, he fixes her with an insolent glare.
"I want to know, Mother." In his peripheral vision, his Father smirks.
An hour later, he leaves the tent as his Father's fellows start filtering into it. His Mother's reluctance morphed into anger when it was suggested that Draco should participate. Without his consultation, he was sent out of the tent, as they all knew the Death Eaters wouldn't touch a hair on a Malfoy's head.
For a while, Draco ambles through the campsite and picks up on various scents. Pansy's unbearable powdery scent had amplified since he got his… condition. Generally, Draco tends to avoid spending time with her when he doesn't need her. Crabbe and Goyle always reek of something nasty that he doesn't want to figure out. That multiple time the Notts had come to visit that summer taught Draco that Theo smells like metal and pinewood. He's yet to get a whiff of Blaise.
Then, it begins. Flashing lights — red, blue, green — makes him hiss and block his eyes. As Draco pursues shelter in the darker shade cast by trees, he listens as the echoes of laughter and singing turns into screams and panicked voices.
One woman is dragged out of her tent under the wand of a chuckling, tall masked figure. Her fingernails scrabble at the dirt; Draco is rooted to the spot when he watches the rapid slash of the wand, the skin of her throat splitting scarlet liquid.
"Filthy Mudblood," spits the Death Eater, before he whisks away out of Draco's eyesight. There's blood seeping all over her nightclothes, now. Gurgling and spluttering fades as her eyes glaze over under all the flashes of wandlight. The last thing she sees is Draco, watching her die. He tries to swallow but his throat is too dry. The iron scent of blood is strong in the air, and he isn't sure if it's hers or if there have been more throats slit.
Bile rises in his throat when the urge to crouch over her corpse and tear at the flesh with his teeth crosses his mind.
Draco finally rips his eyes away from the Mudblood woman, catching sight of the silhouette of trees ahead. His signature Malfoy strut is constantly interrupted when he stumbles at a particularly piercing scream, flinches at jeered dark curses he recognises and shrinks away when he catches sight of ruby stains, splattered on tents or on the Earth itself. There's no perfume, cologne, alcohol, food — with each inhale he takes, there is only sweat and blood.
When he reaches the hem of the forest, he staggers in. It's darker, here, and because his eyes are more receptive to light now, he can view the forest as if it were day. Gnarly tree roots intertwine with each other, thorny bushes scattered here and there. Draco leans against a particularly large tree, until his forehead is kissing its rough bark. Here, the iron scent is a lot weaker… there's forest creatures nearby, his ears twitching with each rustle in the branches and among the twigs below. The sharp scent of leaves and dying summer heat gradually calms his racing heart.
There's some scuttering and a thump behind him.
"Oh, this is ridiculous!" Buttercream and roses pierce through the iron tang. His heart rate accelerates, and he swivels around, leaning his back against the tree. Weasley's laying face down in the dirt; Draco would've laughed under other circumstances. With eyes darting underneath his askew spectacles, Potter stands uselessly beside Granger. Who raises her wand and says, "Lumos!" Draco's sensitive eyes squint at the additional light.
"I tripped," Weasley snaps, staring angrily at the imbedded roots of the forest.
None of them seems to have noticed Draco standing a few feet in front of them. "With overly large feet like that, it's no surprise." It doesn't take much to get Weasleys to go as red as their mane of hair. An insult that a toddler could come up with does the trick.
Weaselbee gets to his overly large feet and snarls something at him, but Draco's more interested in the Mudblood behind him. When it comes to Weasleys, he sees them as temporary entertainment. Saint Potter? Not much else to say there. It's Granger who, without fail, pisses him off, every time. Just the sight of her, prancing around, in his world, wielding his magic… and doing it better than him. Even to this day, he feels the shame roiling in his gut at his Father's disgusted face, at learning his son isn't top of his class for anything because of a Mudblood.
As much as he would like to see her lying in a pool of her own dirty blood like the rest of the Muggles out at the campsite, Draco wouldn't be able to prove himself if she's dead. The Mudblood woman's dull, lifeless stare is imprinted in his eyelids. He wonders if his Father has sliced any throats. He decides he's too cowardly to ever want to find out.
"You probably don't want them seeing her," Draco drawls, watching the way her brows draw together, the way her eyes set ablaze. Not a few months ago she wore the same expression, her knuckles bruised and his nose stinging. Oversensitive now, his nostrils twitch at the mere prospect of such a thing happening again.
"And what's that supposed to mean?" she asks defiantly.
"Oh, Granger," he says, smirking, "Haven't you noticed? They're attacking Muggles."
"Hermione's one of us!" Weaselbee growls, as Potter takes a protective step towards her.
Refraining from rolling his eyes, Draco pushes himself off the tree. "You think they can't tell who's a Mudblood when they see one?"
Growling again, Weasley makes a step forward, but Granger grabs his arm. Potter is watching him with narrowed eyes. "I bet your parents are having the time of their lives."
Draco chuckles, pride swelling in his chest that his parents are considered dastardly enough; even though his shoulder twitches slightly, the scalding reminder of what he has become. "If that was true, Potter, I wouldn't be likely to tell you, would I?"
"Ok, never mind," Granger intercepts whatever was about to come out of Potter's mouth, and she grabs him, too. As she hauls them away, she doesn't cast one look back, unlike Potter's and Weasley's furious glares over their shoulders.
Under the canopy of branches against a starlit sky disturbed by shattered screams, and beneath his smirk, Draco hopes to Merlin he doesn't come across her mangled body this fateful night.
...
When people call Hermione Granger the brightest witch of her age, she does try to not let it get to her head. Really, she does. It's not like she's an absolute prat about it — she's not that kind of pretentious. What it means is that she starts looking in places that she really has no business looking. Noticing details that, in the majority, people miss.
It's not like people would be looking for any details this year. The excitement from the Quidditch World Cup had been marred by the massacre of Muggles and Muggle-borns at the campsite: thirty-two casualties, seven fatal. Anyone who reads the Daily Prophet (which Hermione does religiously) will see Cornelius Fudge bumbling silently on the front page as he tries to keep his Ministry in check. There are multiple suspects of who started this chaos, and most were former 'Death Eaters' in the Wizarding War.
Many of them have children attending Hogwarts. Montague. Pucey. Nott. Parkinson. Crabbe. Goyle. Malfoy.
The summer had aged quickly, and before they knew it, they were back in school. Initially, people had been murmuring about Dark Magic and Voldemort sympathisers, but then the announcement of the Triwizard Tournament made for fresher and less depressing conversation. Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students had each made their own elaborate and, well, pretentious entrances into Hogwarts, and now Ron is drooling over Viktor Krum.
"Why's he sitting with them?" he demands, glaring at the Durmstrang students perched at the Slytherin table across the Great Hall.
Hermione rolls her eyes. "Honestly, Ron. He's just another dumb Quidditch player." On the other side of her, Harry chokes on his pumpkin juice.
"Dumb?" he splutters, juice dribbling down his chin. Giving a watery grin, his eyes narrow. "Am I dumb to you, 'Mione?" Scoffing and whacking him gently, she wonders if she should emphasize how there really isn't anything special about Krum. Cool, he can snatch some golden flying ball at eighteen years old, big whoop.
"You're mental." She whacks Ron, too, but not as softly as she had Harry.
They resume shovelling in their food like trolls, talking about Quidditch and Wonky Feints across her. And that's what she means about people not picking up the little details. While they had been panting after Krum, they didn't notice the uncharacteristic behaviour of Draco Malfoy.
He's sitting a metre away from the Durmstrang students, but he's not trying to suck up to Viktor Krum like Theodore Nott is. Pansy Parkinson is fluttering her lashes at a burly looking fellow; Blaise Zabini is engaged in conversation with a guy sitting next to Krum. Even Crabbe and Goyle appear to be grunting something to the quieter-looking Durmstrang students. Out of his usual group, Malfoy is the only one staring down at his plate as if he's watching a fascinating movie.
She wonders what's changed since she'd stumbled across him with Harry and Ron, with the echoes of screams and the hisses of curses in the air. At the time, it had seemed her sucker punch hadn't rattled much out of him… on the contrary, he seemed very much the prat that he always was. Almost gleeful at the prospect of his parents involved in that horrible night, murdering and torturing people who were just trying to have fun, whether it be a dumb Quidditch Cup or just a night under the winking summer stars.
In the three years she'd gone to school with him, she'd always thought Malfoy was just like all the kids in primary school; who were insecure about something, so they took it out on the likes of her. Now, though, she can see there's darkness inside him. There must be, if he could be so nonchalant, leaning on a tree and smirking while people had their throats slit open from beyond the forest.
Also, why is he wearing a winter coat? Yes, the summer is dying, but it's not that cold — she's already spotted the way the French girls at Beauxbatons are wrapping their shawls around them and shivering like they're in Antarctica. Hermione scowls when one of them sniffs at the food, wrinkles her bloody perfect nose and pushes her plate away. Turning her attention back to Malfoy, she considers the prospect that he's trying to impress one of the Beauxbatons students. She knows full well that theory is a long shot into the dark; Malfoy isn't even looking up from his plate, not once.
There is something up with Malfoy, but Hermione can't put her finger on it.
She decides that focusing on her lessons is more important. After all, the world is still spinning and her OWLs are next year. Her usual routine — lessons, Harry and Ron, library, and late night Gyffindor common room — continues, until, that is, it's time to extract names from the Goblet of Fire. People had been stepping in, left, right and center, confident that they would be competing at the Triwizard Tournament. Apart from Fred and George (of course) nobody underage had attempted; Madam Pomfrey allegedly had bit off their heads, and then Dumbledore's head for using a ward that made them look a century old.
They started the evening expecting the Goblet of Fire to reveal three champions.
Viktor Krum of Durmstrang, surprise surprise (Hermione had rolled her eyes at the eruption of the Hall, and Ron's literal squealing).
Fleur Delacour of Beauxbatons (and she had rolled her eyes again, because now, primarily the blokes had become overly enthusiastic in cheering).
Cedric Diggory of Hogwarts. There's not a whole lot she knows about him, except that he's a Sixth Year Hufflepuff that everyone likes.
Professor Dumbledore was about to refer to the events of the Triwizard Tournament, but then the Goblet of Fire spat another name out. Amongst the muttering and whispering of the students, the parchment fluttered down into the Dumbledore's outstretched hand. The moment she looked at Ron and Harry, mirroring her own curious expression under the flickering red light of the Goblet returning to blue when it finished spitting, is one she will never forget.
The Headmaster of Hogwarts' voice is calm as it whips through the Hall; the low chatter wisps into silence, and anyone who knows her name — which, being one of Harry Potter's best friends, means a lot of eyes — looks straight at her.
She might be the brightest witch of her age, but she's pretty sure her hearing's not as great as she must've misheard Dumbledore calling out, "Hermione Granger."