She's screaming.
Draco escaped from the stygian wood of the drawing room, and onto the starlit field.
He's really just such a fucking coward.
Draco knows this, intrinsically. From the moment he had the Sorting Hat in his sight, all those years ago, Draco had started down the path of cowardice. Lockstep.
It's not as if ALL Slytherins were cowards, or even that they all were destined to be dark wizards; on the contrary, Merlinus Ambrosius and Alastor Moody had both been Slytherins. But they must have made a detour somewhere down that path that he hadn't seen.
Or, maybe his journey had started earlier… from the moment he had been bounced on his father's knee. That was a comforting thought, really; almost a balm for Draco's soul.
For, if he had been damned by the very act of being fathered by a Malfoy, then perhaps there would be clemency for him in the end. That was the ticket. Potter had to be managing his escape by now, it had already been ten bleeding minutes of her suffering and, frankly…
Frankly, what? That's right, Draco. Frankly, nothing.
'You're barely an observer here', certainly not a player; possessing no more autonomy in this moment than an actor charged with a particularly distasteful role. After all, what was to be done for it? He had tried, had tried, to lie in the foyer. He had scrunched up his nose and narrowed down his eyes, and he had tried to say he didn't recognize them. Had tried to save them from this fate and-but, there had been no saving them when the sword had tumbled out onto the floor. Draco would face reprisal for that later, he was sure- unless his demented aunt could be made to believe that his failure to recognize the three was born from the depths of apathy instead of active duplicity.
Which was unlikely, given that Bellatrix was the one that taught him how to occlude his mind in the first place. No, before the day was out, Draco would also have his turn on the hardwood floor, spasming and screeching into the abyss. The prospect shook the starlit field that was west of the jacobean manor of his ancestral seat, but also in his head. He forced his lungs to assume a cadence not befitting a horse at full gallop, and reigned in his thoughts.
He was in for pain later, there was just nothing to be done about it. The Madame Lestrange was mad, yes- but not stupid. She'd meter out her wrath while she was on a roll, just as soon as Granger had been disposed of. And really, Draco had well and truly earned it this time, lying as artlessly as he had.
Like he couldn't pick out those puke green eyes from underneath the mangled wreckage of a particularly ruthless stinging jinx. As if Draco hadn't spent over half a decade looking for the golden reflection of the snitch in them- not that he ever beat him to one.
Like he couldn't pick out the putrid scarlet blemishes that could only serve to enhance Ronald Weasley's exceedingly common bone structure. As if Draco didn't envision his fucking face every time he tried and failed to cast a torture curse on a student serving a Carrows' detention- not that Draco had been able to produce one that was "any worse than my monthlies," as he had been reliably informed by a particularly incensed Hannah Abbot.
Like he couldn't pick out the matted-savage befitted mane that Granger dared to call hair, as it framed the defiant set of her lips and eyes. As if some of the most exhilarating moments of Draco's life hadn't been working her up past that point- breaking her resolve and ripping tears from her eyes with biting word and malicious jinx.
That was it, wasn't it? Draco Malfoy's greatest claim to fame, the single best piece of evidence to illustrate his devotion to the Dark Lord's cause, was the tauntings he visited on a little girl who had thought she finally found a place she belonged. Because, really- what else did he have? He settled himself down in the wildflowers in his mind's eye and watched her small, delicate form waver in and out of his field of vision, obscured by the tall stalks of his occlumantic shields. This was… fine. Where he could no longer summon up the hate for her very existence, he could at least conjure a level of apathy befitting her station in his world.
She screamed again. His soul shivered. Her voice was a hoarse mewling now, no longer possessing the structural integrity necessary to be shrill. The meadow receded and he was in the drawing room again, with merely an imagined starry sky paying lip service to the abdication of his prejudices.
Bigotry is a funny thing. Common opinion holds that it is a mindset born of fear and ignorance. Of course, the commoners, as is often the case, were completely wrong. To be a proper, powerful bigot, one needn't be born into a specific caste or class. People don't rise to the heads of institutions of considerable influence by being behind the times- that was just an absurd notion. Rather, it required the complete and total understanding of different peoples' common beliefs and attributes, coupled with the overarching assertion that your way was better.
That was the root of it, at least. For example, muggles had hunted witches and wizards to the brink of extinction multiple times across the millennium. The magical world had suffered in secrecy ever since the fall of Rome. Muggleborns were a danger to this, already volatile, paradigm, because of the circumstances of their birth; they were born of muggles, and thus would always have sympathies for them whenever the next breakdown in the Statute of Secrecy occurred.
And it would occur. Everything else was just dressings on the turkey; he remembered well the words of Nott senior at the Lughnasadh that followed Draco's eleventh birthday, the month before he would set foot on the Hogwarts Express for the first time. The Lughnasadh festival was a mainstay of British pureblood culture, and principally offered up the very first fruits of the harvest to the magicks of the islands, strengthening ancestral wards and paying homage to the natural ley lines. Of course, that bit was for stuffy adults, and most school age children were more interested in the queer atmosphere of permissiveness that suffused the interactions between the, normally rigidly separated, sexes.
Lughnasadh was a time for matchmaking, for testing the boundaries of maturity and the compatibility of the parties involved. While parents drank, caroused, and rubbed elbows; they, with one hand sealed partnerships with the firm exchange of shakes, and with the other, pushed on the shoulder of their chosen heir in the direction of the viable candidates that would seal the deal. If both parents vetted a possible union as advantageous, and both parties could stand to be in each other's company without acts of physical violence, then a courtship quickly ensued. Courtships after Lughnasadh, proposal somewhere between Yule and Imbolc, wedded before Beltane- so as to ensure the speedy furnishing of an heir, of course.
Still, Draco's cohort had been a little too young for that yet, and instead they had been subjected to a primer by Theo's father on the finer points of picking out the mudbloods at Hogwarts. Afterall, there were other purebloods beyond the Sacred Twenty-Eight in Great Britain, and it wouldn't do to go mixing with the wrong sort when trying to make alliances beyond the pool of attendance in their circle. A pool that even the adults had to come to terms with being too small and imbalanced to meet the needs of the next generation. For every one Draco, there was a Daphne AND an Astoria that needed to be wed.
The stooped, sallow looking Theodore Nott senior had sat on a stone bench in the garden with the four boys who would be going off to Hogwarts together arranged in a semicircle, spellbound as he injected them with hate and vitriol.
"You'll be able to tell a mudblood just by looking at her, the wretchedness of their muggle birth leaves permanent scarring. We call them mudbloods because you can see it in their coloring, they won't have the special traits of a proper, magical family; like your eyes, Draco, or our family nose, Theodore. A muggle family almost always has common features, mousy hair and muddy eyes. They're an ugly lot, and I always say you can tell'em by the set of their teeth- never straight. The muggles also don't have our potions, so their women can't style their hair, like you all see your mums do before a festival like this. "
The assembled sons had bobbed their heads, the first born heirs of Death Eaters, all of them. They might as well have been swaddled in those heavy black robes, for, if their fathers were all Death Eaters, then their mothers were death nursers, and by the time they were weaned from that cursed mother's milk, they were sent on their way to Hogwarts to vomit out the poison that they had spent their whole childhoods imbibing.
"Remember, a mudblood will have weak magic and be too uncivilized to bear the thought of helping. They're a brutish people, those muggles, and their children won't understand our ways, and won't be intelligent enough to catch up with their peers."
Another chorus of sycophantic nods.
He could still see the caustic loathing in Nott senior's eyes as the man sat across the field, on the stone bench that had invaded Draco's occlumantic sanctuary.
"And remember, you'll know one when you see one, because she'll be too ugly to look at." He had finished the list by coming full circle to his original point, and the young Draco recorded each sign in the engraved ledger of his prepubescent brain. Mudbloods would be: ugly, magically weak, uncivilized, stupid, and ugly again.
"Please"- a gulp of air- "stop, please!" - here a sob- "It's a fake, I swear -" The rest of her wretched begging was stolen from her by the unyielding malice of Bellatrix's walnut will. Because you have to mean it to cast an unforgivable, and his aunt most assuredly does. Draco couldn't fathom it, the rapturous delight the deranged woman extracted from the tortured screams of her victims. The Malfoy scion couldn't even cast a killing curse with any degree of consistancy, and he was convinced the only reason he had a proficiency with the imperious curse was because of his deep seated desire to take hold of the flaming, fucking carnival act his life had become since the Dark Lord had returned.
But that tent and ring show was distant to him now, standing as he was, on the meadow. If he turned, he knew he'd see a white stucco bothy behind him, and across the rolling hill to the right, a small lake- really no more than a pond with delusions of grandeur.
"Tell me the truth, mudblood, or I'll let that mangy halfbreed, Fenrir, fuck it out of you." Draco breath caught somewhere in his diaphragm as Bellatrix betrayed the covenant all witches held sacred amongst themselves. Draco couldn't imagine the violation a girl would feel as an older woman threatened to set a filthy animal on her in the most unthinkable way possible. He knew she would, too. He had seen it at the revels, the ones where the only witches in attendance were Bellatrix and Alecto.
Who would have guessed that the same beady eyed Nott senior, who had warned them off interacting with mudbloods entirely, had no compunction with pinning such a witch to the floorboards of his dining hall and raping her in front of the entire assembled inner circle, the Knights of Walpurgis. It was no great surprise that those girls, cursed with youth or beauty, rarely made it to the manor unspoiled by Snatchers or beasts like Greyback.
Draco wished he could say that watching Nott's eyes, his infernal, dehumanizing gaze, hold steady as he took a muggle girl, who couldn't have been more than 14, at the table where Draco had learned how to properly seat a young lady for dinner, was what broke him. That watching Nott's unwavering hypocrisy suffer not a stutter, but to glaze over as he finished inside his weeping victim, and the broken sobs of her father- who had been kept alive long enough to watch- had been what had finally disabused him of his prejudices.
But that would make him a liar, and not a coward. And Draco was a coward, first and foremost.
He heard a huge gulp of air over the wind in the meadow, and then the scream; "Please! Ask the goblin, ask Griphook! He'll tell you, I sweaaaaar!" Granger's proud case dissolved into a wail as the cruciatus took hold of her again. She had clearly been using the last of her strength to project the plea, not at Bellatrix… but through the manor. Through the flooring… to the dungeon.
Granger needed that pint sized banker to corroborate her story. That means that the gaudy, ruby encrusted monstrosity was real. That it was a weapon that a lieutenant of the Dark Lord had been entrusted with. That he, himself, feared! That she was lying to secure. This brilliant, stalwart, virtuous witch had been tortured within an inch of her life, and still had the presence of mind to keep fidelity with her peoples' cause. The sword was clearly of paramount value if it warranted an interrogation before an immediate call to the Dark Lord. It was an act of providence, a Merlin provided bargaining chip that no one would fault her for leveraging.
Instead, in the face of this mad woman, and the suffering that would undoubtedly continue to be visited upon her, she emerged unbowed and unbroken. Draco was unable to fight the admiration for her that swelled a warmth in his breast, so he weaved it into the meadow, a Polaris for his starry sky, and he smiled his first smile in a long time.
XXX
In another life, in a different world, Draco Malfoy does not smile at this very moment. What a small thing? A slight curling of the lips, barely more than a grin, and far from his customary sneer. In all of causality, how much could possibly be different for one smile? A fleeting countenance, born to an ephemeral sentiment that should have died, unwitnessed. This was not that time, or that place. Because, here, now, Bellatrix spares her disappointment of a nephew a glance to put him to work, and she notices.
She sees, and does not see. He really was such a disappointment, a truly hopeless cause- but wait, was that a smile? Did he… was he finally coming in to his own, in regards to the mudblood scum? Could these small embers of delight, surely lit by the treatment of the filth at her feet, be kindled into a raging inferno? She was going to send him to retrieve the goblin but… no, better to have him stay and observe. After all, this flame had to be monitored, stoked…maybe he could prove himself her true kin, yet.
"Wormy, be a dear and go retrieve the hook nose, would you?"
In a castle tower, far in the north, a divinist wearing bottle glasses began to moan out the third portent of any real veracity in her life, and a centaur that walked the green below intoned, (far more concisely,) "Thuban will be bright tonight."
Draco smiled. Fate snickered.
XXX
He is aware, in the most peripheral of ways, that Pettigrew has been dispatched to retrieve the Goblin. In the interim- well, Bella had never been one to let the vacancy of a dull moment go unfilled, especially when a target for torment was so near. The thought made him sick to his stomach, as he contemplated the similarities that must have been flitting through Granger's head between his aunt and himself. He too, had never given her any reprieve from his unceasing denigrations, and he wished he had been the one sent from the room, and… what was that look on his mother's face?
Narcissa Ursa Malfoy nee Black was visible in his meadow, standing as the tallest flower among the mustard and ivory blossoms that she took her name from. He was aware, as all boys are made aware by the arithmetic secrets that governed such matters, that his mother was a stately beauty. She was formed with the soft cupid's bow and strong cheekbones that characterized the feminine British pureblood ideal. These features were crowned with the lustrous silver eyes of the Black family, and capped with pin straight hair that had been black as night before marriage. It was, in fact, this confluence of visual factors that gave the Blacks' their proclivity for names of astronomical significance. This might have been the only change in her ageless beauty since that day, as she had gained swathes of Malfoy blond at the temple after being handfasted using the family bloodrite.
The lady of Malfoy Manor was one of refined comportment. Blessed with the Black family talents in transfiguration, divination and occlumency; Draco knew his mother to be possessing of a silverclad control over her bewitching features, to be utterly incapable of betraying herself. She was simply not the same creature in front of guests or in Diagon Alley as she was when they took tea on the eastern veranda together, as a family.
Which was why he found the disgust that befouled her face to be so striking. Where he expected to observe controlled indifference, or- at the very worst, the dismissive wrinkling of her nose she affixed when she decided to broadcast her disapproval publicly, for instance, when encountering an undesirable party at a merchant she might have previously enjoyed patronizing- he instead saw something quite worse.
Narcissa was looking at her sister's handiwork with a look of utter repulsion, as if the very continuing existence of the subject of this look was a nauseating affront to the dignity of her house, and its place in society.
The acrid scent of ammonia and unlaundered denim washed over Draco's nose then, and he thought, 'Yes, if unadulterated terror in the face of mortal peril had a scent, it would be this.'
The meadow wilts, the starry sky dims, and Draco follows his mother's gaze until he is no longer able to deny that she is upset with the prone form of Granger, who had the audacity to lose control of her bladder before her convictions. And so he studies her instead. She's trembling in a puddle made of her urine and tears, and her eyes are flashing defiantly- it's a look he's seen a hundred times- mudblood brown and resolute, despite it all. It's her, all of her, smelted in the crucible of their societal conflict, forged in the fires of her righteous indignation, and tempered in her own bodily fluids. Her spirit was a weapon, surely shaper and more injurious than anything a goblin could produce.
Those eyes, those eyes began to dart back and forth, to and fro now, assessing- calculating. She flits past Bellatrix, perched above her like a bird of prey, past his mother's contempt, his father's ambition, Fenrir's perverse leering and finally to him, to Draco.
Draco had never particularly cared for his eyes. He had inherited the silvery orbs of the Black family, instead of the cold, Aryan blue of the Malfoys'. They were entirely too expressive, and seemed to make a mockery of the family's fabled, prodigious occlumentic skill. Still, his barriers had kept the red slits of the Dark Lord at bay, had kept the twinkling half moons of Dumbledore at length, and would keep…
Her swirling, chocolate depths locked with his paltry offering of unburnished silver, like decadent truffles; affronted by the flatware that had been laid out by elves too lazy to polish them free of fingerprints from the wash.
He supposes she must have whispered the incantation, but he misses her lips for her eyes, like the forest for a tree, and she's wandless but a magical foci isn't strictly necessary for the mental arts, and the only place he really hears the word "legilimens," is in his soul.
Granger didn't attempt to pierce his shield or batter his psych, like a practiced legilimens would. She simply held the gaze of a sinner as he stared into the abyss of her pupils, which continued to contract down to pinpoints that Draco followed back to her. His conscience rubbed up against this, the sharpened tips of her resolve, and it punctured his occlumency. Emotion swelled into the breach, shame first, forming a pressure difference as the space in between his eyes exploded- and the meditative vision that made up the bedrock of his occlumency finally shattered.
"Mudbloods are magically weak."
Draco is upset and confused. He's eleven, and it's Yule, and his marks have come back, and his father had seemed so, so pleased at first… Second in his year! His mother had held him close and pressed a kiss to his cheek, a practice he publicly thought he was far too old for, but that privately didn't mind so much, and they were so, so proud. Second in a year full of the Sacred Twenty Eight and Harry Potter, himself! They had made it to pudding before they asked him how his continuing efforts to become a friend of Mr. Potter were progressing, they knew that he had felt terribly spurned by the young man at the start of the year, but they were sure that he would be more open to the idea moving forward, after all- "He'll be wanting for an intellectual equal in Gryffindor, darling" - and, really, if it wasn't the most infinitesimal of Destiny's nudgings for him to have replied with; "Actually mother, I think the Granger girl was top of the form, you know- the one I wrote to you about? Merlin knows she can't sit calmly unless every possible inquiry a professor has is fully sated, but she can do almost every charm Flitwick asks for on the first try."
The eleven year old made the admission with an almost rueful reprisal of the sparkling look that he could still see as she vibrated with excitement in his mind's eye, but the silence at the table is deafening. His mother's reaction was controlled, but his father's was disciplined, and Draco learns that there is, there is, a difference between the two, but he is not the prey that is fixed in his father's gaze.
"Cissa, is she of any relation to the Dagworth-Grangers?" A sigh of resignation.
"No, darling… I've made the inquiries and there's no wizarding parentage to speak of."
His father doesn't touch him, not really- oh sure, he clasps his heir strongly at the shoulder, but you don't strike your firstborn, it's simply not done, so he makes Draco watch on as he visits flogging jinx after flogging jink on the boy's whipping elf, Dobby.
When Draco is eleven, his elf, Dobby, festers with a resentful mindset towards his wizarding family, and begins to take hold of ideas bordering on outright sedition.
Draco gains a reason to hate the mudblood, Granger- for she has ruined Yule pudding and proved Nott senior wrong.
At least she was ugly.
"Mudbloods are uncivilized."
A twelve year old Draco spits the word at her in response to her most grievous insult, and it's all he can do to do so with a sneer and not a scream.
The cacophony of indignant adolescence that fills the deepening valley between the two soothes his wounded pride; how dare she doubt that he wasn't as capable of playing seeker as her precious Potter? It isn't until he sees the glassy look in her eye that the satisfaction of feeding crow to so many hypothetical Gryffindor naysayers turns to ash in his mouth. His mother would probably scourgify his mouth for using that word in public, and he almost, almost apologizes for it- when Weasley draws on him. Draco wasn't threatened and needn't have been, as the ginger sidekick succeeds in doing nothing but cursing himself with a far worse taste than the shame that had settled on Draco's palette.
He'll crow in victory months later, hoping to recapture some of the public adulation in private with Crabbe and Goyle, boasting of his hope that the mudblood, Granger, would find herself dead at the hands of the beast of Slytherin.
It is only after she has been petrified, and revived that the truth comes to light, via the rumor mill; The Heir of Slytherin had been set the King of All Serpents, a BASILISK, on the mudbloods of the school. Only dumb, stupid luck had saved the less clean population… except for Granger.
Granger had warded off death from one of the most dangerous creatures in the known world by using a hand mirror to peer around corners with. He imagined her having successfully deciphered the conundrum that had befuddled some of the greatest minds in Magical Britain, before calmly reaching into her bag, and wielding a lady's beautification device to protect her furtive, brown eyes as she darted down gothic hallways, enroute to the Headmaster to divulge her suspicions.
When Draco is twelve, his father, Lucius, gains a reason to fear the Dark Lord's reprisal, for; if Bellatrix had been his right hand, then Lucius was his left, and he had just lost an artifact he had been charged with protecting, because of Arthur Weasley's insipid raids.
Draco's hatred for the mudblood, Granger, has deepened- as she has proven the Nott senior a liar, again.
At least she was still ugly.
"Mudbloods are stupid."
One would think that it would be impossible to hold this preconception and to know Granger, personally. But a thirteen year old Draco is very young, and very bigoted, and he is grasping at straws now. Sure, she knew the answer to every question ever conceived at Hogwarts, but Father had always said that the school had been slipping since his days, and had wanted to send Draco to Durmstrang. And sure, she -a mudblood Gryffindor- had successfully divined what the monster hidden in the Chamber of Secrets was, beating out Dumbledore by several months, but Father had always said that Dumbledore was cracked anyway.
It is when Draco begs his father for revenge against the hippogriff, that he is truly forced to concede the point to the bookworm. After assembling an unimpeachable legal defense for Buckbeak that is presented to a Wizengamot subcommittee, for a court system she doesn't know the first thing about, she forces his father to turn to coercion to ensure an execution.
Which is when she, in a manner most befitting a Malfoy, cheats and saves the beast from the fabled Death Eater Walden McNair's, executioner axe.
She has outsmarted his father, Lucius Abraxas Malfoy, and even taken a second out of her busy time table, in the middle of pulling off the con, to punctuate her utter dominance with a slap that made his ears ring. The simmering rage in her dirt-colored eyes would have been home in a valkyrie, and that, far more than the slap, is what prompts him to turn tail, and withdraw.
When Draco is thirteen, Hermione learns that an indomitable will is the only way she will survive in this new world.
Draco's hatred for the mudblood, Granger, has reached its zenith- as she has proven Nott senior a complete fool.
At least he could still convince himself that her bushy hair and beaver smile made her ugly.
"Mudbloods are ugly"
The mudblood, Granger, was a year older than him, and it shows. Puberty has begun to work a magic all its own on Draco's peers, but it's art is almost done on her. When he sees her, wrapped up in the green and white livery of Ireland's national team, it's all the fourteen year old boy can do not to stare at the licentious temptation of the girl-no, the woman in the mockery of his house colors. The delicate lattice worked scaffolding sways underneath him as the Malfoy scion's world swayed with it.
For surely, this cannot be Hermione Granger? Her hair is longer now, the weight of it domesticating the chestnut curls, finally bereft of any bangs to hide her dainty face. Her smile is different now, he's seen it first as she whispered into the youngest Weasley's impoverished ear; it's a woman's secret smile, the kind only recognizable by the upturned corner of a pouty lip, made all the more wicked as her front left tooth caught her wind chapped bottom lip to stifle a laugh at her friend's response.
Really, it's all Draco can do not to make a disgrace of himself right there and then in his trousers, and of course- there it is, his father's pithy quip about their inferior seats. Thank you, father- Draco had been wondering how he was going to draw her attention to the evidence of his burgeoning masculinity. He was positive she'd appreciate the new manner that he'd taken to combing his blond fringe with, it looked rather dashing in concert with the sable, muggle suit and turtleneck he had donned for the occasion, even if Draco did say so himself.
But, ah, there was her look of indolent rage. As if she was above dispensing the simmering disdain she had brewed in her brown depths for him, Malfoy, and his paterfamilias. He's cowed and confused, and although he does a good job of imitating his father's affectation, his world has been permanently set to turn on a different axis. So lost was the pubescent boy to his inner turmoil, that the silky blond, perfectly proportioned charms of the Bulgarian veelas are completely wasted on him.
Fortifying his occlumantic barriers, Lucius Malfoy is only vaguely embarrassed by the preening idiot of a man that purported to be the Minister of Magic, and very concerned with his son. A young man on the cusp of adulthood should be, well… acting like the Minister currently was, boasting and flexing in the general direction of the scintillating creatures on the field. His only son and heir seemed… rather bored with the whole display. Almost disappointed, actually. Lucius is a logical man, and his mind immediately goes to the most likely answer, that his only son bludgeons for… the other team, so to say.
Lucius has no immediately negative thoughts on the matter, after all- it was something of a family proclivity if Armand Malfoy's portrait was anything to go on, and- really, as long as a proper marriage could be worked out, so as to procure a pureblood heir, what did it matter? Maybe Draco would take after his ancestor and wind up buggering another country conquering royal, and the Malfoy family would wind up with a new palatial estate? Come to think of it, that was another Malfoy family proclivity, muggle royalty, according to Lucius Malfoy the first's unceasing carrying ons about the "Virgin" Queen of England.
Narcissa is a mother, of course, and so reads her son as only a mother can. She looks at the mirror of the face she has spent an entire marriage deciphering, different only in the changes she has wrought herself, in the core of her being. She observes the vacant set of his pale eyebrows, and the disinterested puff of air he issues from his nostrils; this all paints a picture her husband is interpreting too, but… one so juxtaposed to the shuffling of his legs as he readjusted a growing problem, so endemic to boys of his age.
But, there! The narrowing of the Black eyes to silver slits as he fixed the predator stare, not on the field, but on a sky box above, and to the left of them. The cadence of his breathing audibly changes, (so much like his father when he's finally found himself alone with Narcissa, at the end of a long engagement, and looking to be unzipped from her gown,) and she traces the burning path of her son's gaze.
When Draco is fourteen, his mother, Narcissa, is disgusted to find that her son is impervious to the allure of the magical creatures designed to enchant him, only because he has already been bewitched by Potter's pet mudblood.
Draco's hatred for the mudblood, Granger, has burnt itself out, and he finds himself angry with her only twice in the coming year. Angry for the hurt look in her eye as he warns her, in the best way he could, by questioning her modesty in the face of the rapacious terrorist attack that happened later that very night. The thought of her taken advantage like that- of anyone but Draco seeing her like that- makes him seethe, and the knowledge that she probably thought differently made it worse.
He's only angry like that once more that year, and it's when he sees her descend the staircase on her way to the Yule Ball. He can find nothing to say in front of the company about her appearance, or her new admirers. He'll realize, much later that night,(after fobbing off Pansy,) that he is upset because she has potioned her hair and shrunken her teeth, and it has taken a deviation from how her muggle parents have made her for their classmates to realize just how beautiful Hermione is.
Draco now knows that Nott senior has lied to him, lied to them all.
The Dark Lord has returned, and a fifteen year old Draco, quite frankly, couldn't be bothered with him.
He was far too enamored with his mudblood to care. Oh, sure, it was fun enough to rile Potter, but- "... dogging your footsteps?" Really? That was all it took to wind him up? If Draco didn't know better, he'd think the Prophet had it right, and the Boy-Who-Lived-to-annoy-him had finally cracked under the weight of his own self delusions.
The deference his father paid the Dark Lord seemed ridiculously out of proportion to services rendered, so to speak. Why Draco should have to play minion to that absolute blight to the gothic landscape, Umbridge, was lost on him. He wasn't a servant- have Crabbe or Goyle play sympathetic ear to her inane ramblings… And of her touches… the less said, the better. Comparatively, even Pansy's attentions were bearable.
The way Warrington and Montague had it, having the attention of a witch on your arm made it more likely for another to fancy you. Draco had thought it highly fortuitous that they'd all made prefect, Draco, Pansy… and Hermione.
He could no longer call her Granger, at least in his head. It was too impersonal, too distant for her starring roles in his recurring, lurid adolescent fantasies. He hasn't touched himself to a witch with blond or red hair since he started wanking, and he's always finished hardest when the animated brunettes of Blaise's Playwizard wore curls. Gryffindors and Ravenclaws had their respective towers' panoramic splendor, but the Puffs and the Snakes got private dorms after third year, and Draco has tested the fortitude of his privacy wards on a daily basis; Granger just wasn't long enough a name to stutter over between the ragged breaths that marked the culmination of his nightly routine, and he knows that now.
So it's Hermione. Variety might be the spice of life, but routine is the lube on his cock; this being the only rationale that he can fabricate in the fleeting moments of post orgasmic shame that almost always followed his daily adoration of her. His obsession.
But it's a good routine, and it gets him hard enough to swing at bludgers every time. The Slytherin prefect's favorite fantasy went as follows; he'd report to his patrol route for the 10p.m. curfew, only to find that his partner for the evening had been serendipitously replaced by Hermione. He'd start off, cool, calm and collected, and strike up a conversation with her over a particularly interesting bit of trivia, only tangentially related to something covered in a shared class. The little swot would be hesitant at first, but she'd eventually be unable to resist the urge to mount the lectern she kept perpetually stuffed up that pert little arse. Merlin knows, she must be dying for intelligent conversation with the company she kept. He'd engage her, play Morgan's advocate and summon up a counterpoint. Get her to, at least acknowledge an alternative historical perspective or academic line of reasoning.
She'd be wary, of course… at first. But Draco knows he's attractive enough, for his age, and also rather well spoken. He'd tap into her urge to lecture, after all, she was always so eager to put the fruits of her academic toils on display, as if each line recited verbatim was a piece of evidence that served to prove that she belonged at his school. That she had a place here. Draco rather agrees, and that place was underneath him. And so it would go, he'd turn the conversation from there to something only slightly more personal, perhaps the book she'd last read for pleasure, or a date he had recently found to be particularly disappointing.
Then he'd begin flattering her. "Oh, well that sounds remarkably like the novel I just completed last month;" "Yes well, one does get tired of all that pin straight hair, it comes off as artificial as the witch underneath it… don't you agree, Hermione?" He'd do it like that, slide in her name like it's drawled off his tongue a hundred times, because it has, and she'd turn pink at his inflection. After all, the only way he knows how to annunciate her name is with a wanton passion, and he's sure it sounds an order of magnitude more enticing coming from him than that illiterate fool, Viktor Krum.
She's too quick and too clever to let that go unnoticed, and she'll try to call him out on it.
But Draco is prepared for this moment, and she'll be unbalanced, both by the flattery, and by the tone he's used to caress the vowels of her name.
"Well, that's your name, isn't it? After the daughter of Helen, a woman of such beauty that her loss launched over a thousand ships to war?" That would get her, feint, dive, and snitch. He bet there wasn't a single wizard in Gryffindor Tower that knew the first bleeding thing about the Trojan Wars. She'd be flushed with color then, if she wasn't already so by his attentions. Her debut the year prior had definitely not gone unnoticed by the male population of Hogwarts, but they were entirely too scared of her own red and gold patterned Crabbe and Goyle bodyguards.
Of course, those two were either a step below half witted, or too pigeon-hearted to edge the other out, and as such, Hermione's natural desires to be pursued by a wizard were woefully unmet. She'd most likely sputter out some rejoinder centered around his "previous opinions" of her, and he'd go for broke by pulling off his greatest deception to date; telling her "that he'd gotten more enjoyment out of this last hour of conversation than any broom cupboard excursion with a pureblood that he could remember."
After all, the greatest lies were just fragments of the truth, told advantageously; Pansy's complete and utter failure to keep track of her teeth when on her knees and polishing his knob was a fact.
He'd say that, while holding her gaze and invading her space, and she'd be done. Her need for intellectual validation would be so supremely satisfied that it would sit back, and let her needs as a witch mount the hippogriff, so to speak. Everything after that was by the numbers, after all- where would their rounds end, but in the dungeons? "A gentleman would walk you back to your Dormitory, but oh, Hermione! Let me go get that novel I mentioned earlier, I think you'd like it- have you ever been inside the Slytherin common room before, it's underneath the lake, and really rather fascinating…" She'd worry her luscious bottom lip here, and protest at the implicit rule breaking, forgetting entirely the impropriety of the proposition.
"Ah, just as well- you'd be the first muggleborn to step foot in there in… Merlin knows how many years?" It was three hundred and three years, Draco had checked, and he bet she had too.
She'd spit the number out with scorn, then fix him with that look. The one he first saw right before she struck him, two years prior. And in that moment, as simmering rage finally boiled over the cauldron walls of her self control, he'd clasp his fingers firmly around her wand hand, and gently tug her into the room. Take the fire of her righteous indignation out from underneath the bubbling brew, and what was left?
Across the jade lit common room, down the corridor on the right, fifth passage to the left, last door on the oblique end of the tunnel. She would still be processing those emotions as he led her along, and by the time the lock on his door clicked into place, he'd be upon her.
By this point in his fantasizing, he'd be rock hard at the end of his rounds, weeping precum and tugging his robes across his torso until he could complete the fantasized journey, alone… but wanting. And he wanted her, just like that. Wet, and soft, and quivering underneath him, as her body committed treachery against her mind; betraying all of her allegiances by lifting her regulation length uniform skirt and spreading her legs for her best friend's nemesis. He'd divest himself of his robes like he was practicing his 'evanesco', and pumping himself to whatever model he could find that looked the most like her in his newest acquisition from Zabini.
But that alignment of the stars (and the rota,) never occurred.
So he joined the Inquisitorial Squad. If fortune favored the bold half as much as Dumbledore seemed to, he'd eventually get the opportunity he was waiting for with her, whenever Umbridge finally zeroed in on their little insurrection. In the interim, he got to wear the silver I, preen like one of his father's peacocks, and dock points from whoever didn't clear out of his way fast enough. Not a bad deal, as they go. He'd have her, eventually. It was destiny that she be underneath him. That was her lot in life. Hermione Granger would belong to Draco Lucius Malfoy, an uppity mudblood kept as a pet by the patronage of the Malfoy family.
Of course, by the time he is able to strike at an opportunity, like an adder in the tall grass, it is almost the end of term and the situation has gotten completely out of control.
He catches the little Weasley chit, screaming her ginger head off about "Garroting Gas," and rather than take the bait, he proceeds in the opposite direction of her diversion with Bulstrode in tow, stumbling on Hermione first, then Potter.
His patience has finally been rewarded. Draco has bested his mudblood's machinations and caught her in flagrante delicto, making a call to their crackpot of an old headmaster! Finally she'd see him as he was, a Pureblood, a Malfoy, a Scion of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. He hesitates but for a moment, he needs to see it; to look into her eyes as her molten, cocoa wrath finally subsides into the hearth-warm umber of acknowledgement. Instead, he's barely completed the mental revisions to the monologue he is sure will prompt his witch to raise her gaze from the flagstone floor, before Millie reappears with aforementioned crackpot's replacement in tow.
Bulstrode is given the order to restrain her by Umbridge, and it's all Draco can do to not gnash his teeth at the missed opportunity being squandered by Millicent, as SHE pushes his mudblood against the wall with an uttered threat.
Then there's more Gryffindors, Snape prevaricating, casual threats of torture, and really, far too much company for Draco to be paying the slippery witch the adequate amount of attention she deserves…
And then she's crying, and Draco doesn't believe her for a second, so he presses his luck and pleads with the pink abomination to let him tag along as Hermione leads her on what will undoubtedly be a stunning reversal of fortune. The bitch postures and denies him, and over the irritating, nail on chalkboard overestimation of her position; Draco sees it. The look.
Between the fabricated sobs and splayed, ink stained fingers, he sees the defiance burn in Hermione Granger's dry eyes. And he stops worrying about how badly Umbridge is fucked, and begins to worry about himself. For, he is so distracted by the memory of her brown eyes- how was he the only one? What was more pressing? Why would he ever wish to possess her, like an object, when she looked like that as she connived her way to freedom?
So distracted was Draco, that Ronald Weasley was able to mount an escape, leaving the Inquisitorial Squad stunned, disarmed, and in the Malfoy heir's personal case, beset upon by his own boogies. By the time he has been restored by Severus and is left to convalesce in the comfort of his own room, Draco is hard for her again, and spends the remainder of the night masturbating to the visage of Hermione Granger, superimposed across one particular centerfold, and aglow with the inner fires of victory that he had found only in the hot, earthy undertones of her eyes.
That's how his Head of House finds him the next day, covered in his own spunk and shame.
Severus has come to tell him of his fathers arrest at the hands of the Order of the Phoenix… and his classmates.
When Draco is sixteen, his aunty Bella has learned that the new generation must be relied upon to carry on her Dark Lord's noble mission… and that the little, curly haired mudblood is really too uppity for her own good.
Draco has learned that the sins of the father are, indeed, inherited by the son.
He's sixteen the next time he permits himself to think of her like that again. He's learned occlumency in the interim, and is thankful for it. If Bellatrix had noticed his fascination with the mudblood as she battered his psyche over the summer, she hasn't mentioned it. Besides, if what he's seen at the revels is any indication, he couldn't be the only Death Eater that tossed off to muggle girls.
It helps that he's channeled his passion for her, turning his ardor into hate, for she is the one that has put his father in chains… not that he didn't have it coming.
Draco could no longer begrudge her for the animosity towards his father, after all- the boy, who is not quite a man, has been branded like livestock, and had his mother abused in his presence, because of the precarious position Lucius has left his family in.
He took his mark like a wizard, and was proud for it. The Malfoy heir was the de facto lord of his household now, and he took to his duties like he had been preparing a lifetime for them-because he had. No one had ever faulted his thoroughness before, and by the time he boarded the Hogwarts Express in September, he is comforted by the multitude of plans he has already set into motion.
And why shouldn't he be? He is, after all, the youngest Death Eater to ever be marked, and the confidences of the Dark Lord were not misplaced. He cowed the impertinence of Zabini with a single upward sweep of his robe sleeve, and if Pansy seemed put off by the new addition to his flesh, all the better. She was truly insufferable... And there's the star of the show, Hello, Potter!
Having the "Chosen One" at his mercy, in a full body bind, under his boot-heel, should give Draco a rush of glee. But he doesn't drop his occlumency, even for a moment; preferring to crush the boy's nose from his view of the Manor's western meadow. He leaves him there for them both to stew, Potter in his own blood and mucus, Draco in his fit of juvenile pique; for what did that accomplish? He didn't feel any better for it, and Potter's absence would assuredly be noticed then immediately rectified.
It takes another seven months and two failed attempts on Dumbledore's life for the reality of Draco's circumstances to fully set in. There had always been nagging doubts of course, flirting at the very edges of his conscious thoughts… but those had been well and truly repressed by the meadow. The damage to his occlumantic barriers begins after his first attempt on Dumbledore's life- well, really his second. The mulled wine, that Slughorn hated but that the headmaster loved, was a bit of a long cast- the cursed opal necklace was really the opening volley and it hit. Not its target, but someone had ended up in StMungo's over it…
The feint opened up a wealth of opportunity as the eyes of the ministry were turned, even more strongly, towards weapons poised to penetrate the castle, rather than items that were already in it. When Draco learns that he's almost killed a Gryffindor mudblood instead of that cracked, senile, poofter- he ducks into the closest loo on the second floor and meets the ghost of Myrtle Warren. She doesn't make herself known until he's quite done with his panic attack, and her comforting words are the very first time Draco learns what it means to be given something by a peer without the expectation of reciprocity.
She's a mudblood, and dead besides… but dead witches tell no tales, and he begins to outline his problem, in only the vaguest generalities.
A childhood of lies, an impossible task, a mother held hostage. Over the months he tells her everything, and nothing at all- and Myrtle becomes the boy's first real friend. He chances, only once, to divulge the jealousy he was consumed with when he happened upon McLaggen's wandering hands- and really, if it wasn't a credit to his efforts that he manages to work a delaying effect into the regurgitating hex that paints Severus's brogues with the kisses he dared to steal from…
Meadow. Bothy. Lake. Open, blue sky. Hold.
The key to any good occlumentic exercise isn't in the vividness of the mental image, it was in the image's capacity to excuse the intrusion of emotional stimuli. He learns that in this, he is sorely lacking, and he has blown up over half the sinks in Myrtle's bathroom before he figures that out.
When Weasley imbibes in the poisoned wine and almost dies, the revulsion that suffuses Draco tells him, for certain, that his situation is futile.
Regret over Bell is understandable, the girl is so similar to her that he excuses the lapse in fortitude. But if Draco cannot even bear the thought of sending Weasley to the Hospital Wing without hyperventilating in the fetal position, well… maybe he's not quite cut out to be a Death Eater. When the muggleborn (because by Beltane he can no longer think of Myrtle as a mudblood,) ghost wraps her cold, spectral form around him in comfort, Draco tweaks his occlumantic trance, swapping a noonday sky for the crisp, familiar comfort of a starry night… Besides, he's always liked astronomy, and this mental image proves to be far more durable.
It safeguards him from Snape's intrusive efforts and he's able to focus on the task at hand, making more progress on the cabinet in one month than he has in the entire preceding term. The key, Draco learns, is just to let those pesky thoughts flow away, and he does just that- he bundles up the opal necklace, the tainted mead, his mother's face, even McLaggen's fucking hands… and puts them each on a shooting star.
He watches them fall out of the sky, blazing trails of color that lead them farther and farther away, over hill and out of sight.
And, really that works until he sees Potter interrogating Bell in the middle of the Great Hall and he just. can't. bundle. her. face. up. quick. enou- Eyes as green as his master's killing curse find his guilt in a sea of a hundred innocents, and the hunt is on.
He runs because it's the only thing he knows how to do, and because his failure will mean his mother's life, and because he's not quite sure Potter will leave him alive long enough to see it.
Draco has barely gathered his breath from his impromptu flight enough to properly start on gasping sobs when Potter finds him, driven as he is to new levels of hysteria by the sight of his own visage in the mirror. Perhaps his rival doesn't know how to feel, finding Draco as he does, crying tears of repentance to the soothing empathy of a muggleborn ghost.
But it's not as if Draco is thinking rationally at this point, and like a prey animal when confronted with a predator wielding a weapon and a map, he lashes out in the blind hope that he can escape, as the only living wizard to continuously survive his lord's ire is standing between the Dark Lord's sacrificial lamb and escape, and the irony would be stark in any other circumstance- but it isn't and it's lost to them both, so Draco lets loose a knockback jinx with the non-verbal competency of a duelist who has spent the past year wreaking property damage on all manner of porcelain basins.
But Potter didn't survive crossing wands with the Dark Lord twice by being slow on his feet, and he's ducking and returning fire with a non-verbal banishing charm that smashes out a mirror before Draco can even process the thought that Potter is much more practiced at this than him.
So he retrea-repositions by pulling Potter further into the bathroom, and slides down to the ground, behind the cover of the stalls, before attempting to take his enemy unawares with a blasting curse- a mistake quickly rectified as the novice Death Eater is forced to jack knife up and away from a blue jet that obliterates the columned sink he had been resting against. Draco had cast confringo and is honestly disappointed when Potter choses to respond with the blue jet of what he guessed to be an expulso, the largely non-lethal variety of explosive curses, and occlumency is a distant fucking memory as Draco is consumed with a rage hotter than his last, orange cast.
Did Potter think this was a game? That he could just keep Draco a prisoner here long enough for a professor to give him a detention? That the first evate statum had been anything but a warning shot, meant to clear a path of egress by an enemy combatant?
It is this anger that he finally, finally understands what auntie Bella meant when she told him, "...you've got to mean it, Draco…" in the haunting tone of a child who delighted in showing off her favorite toy.
He's barely halfway through the incantation before Potter's curse hits him.
The blood pumping through his eardrums keeps him from hearing the duel ending spell, but that's a temporary problem, as his blood is soon all over the floor. He's lying in a pool of water from the ruins of the sink, slowly being refined by the addition of his pure blood, and he hears Myrtle screeching, not moaning, out her condemnations of the Boy-Who-Lived.
He spends the next dozen hours fading in and out of consciousness, and he learns that Severus was able to pull him back from the very precipice of the veil, but not soon enough to save him from a permanent reminder of his folly. All cursed wounds carry the remnants of dark magic, and Potter had struck well, cleaving him nearly in twain from right hip to left collarbone.
"You were lucky," Severus had informed him, "that you could be saved at all."
That Potter was so inadequate a wizard that the damage was reversible. That even so, it had bit almost completely through his ribcage and sternum. That Snape had been the first professor to respond, and one of the few on faculty who was proficient enough in healing magic to save him with wandwork alone.
That his mission was still viable, because Snape had the good sense to glamour the boy's left arm before he was turned over to Pomfrey. That he should bear this scar as a reminder of the sheer feats of idiocy he had demonstrated this year. The boy had managed a bloody gurgle at the irony, permanently scarred by the great Scar Head, himself. He could have sworn, although he must have imagined it, that he was visited at dusk by both Dumbledore and Pansy, but that made no sense-and thus had to have been a hallucination, borne of blood loss.
Draco was, conversely, quite certain of the physical presence of his next visitor.
It was a gentle inquiry from behind him that dragged his potion addled thoughts to clarity, although he was incapable of placing it, turned as he was, on his left side with his back to the door.
"How are you feeling, Malfoy? I suppose that's a ridiculous question…" The witch trailed off. The sound of her voice was sweet, and that makes him even more confused… it was much too young to be a professor and not nearly shrill enough to be Pansy's.
"I don't even know what I'm doing here… surely I'm the absolute last person you would expect to be visiting your bedside." She finished that with an incredulous snort, as if the visitor with a voice like honey was sharing a private joke that only they knew.
Not Myrtle then, or even his cousin, Nymphadora, who stalked the perimeter of the castle, scornfully suspicious of the nephew of the shared aunt who had sent her to the hospital last June.
Who are yo-
"It's just that… this is all my fault, you see... I told Harry! I told him months ago that that book was nothing but trouble. But he's been possessed of this, this ridiculous notion that Voldemort has made you a Death Eater!"
He's figured out who she was by the time she got around to the name, and understood immediately his previous difficulty with the task.
You see, Draco Malfoy had never heard this particular voice address him with such a soft tone, and it is only the ruthless condemnation she pours onto Potter's given name that betrays the identity of his visitor.
Hermione Granger has broken into the Hospital Wing, after curfew, to visit him in his sick bed. The shock of it all washes over his limbs, freezing his feigned sleep in a paralysis of pins and needles.
"He's even claiming that you were about to use an Unforgivable on him, as if he seriously believed that this stunning example of hypermasculine bravado masquerading as a duel, was worth a lifetime in Azkaban to you… Of course this lunacy was immediately validated by Ginny; tell me, are men even capable of understanding a string of words that come from a woman's mouth if they haven't had their tongue down her throat?" She spat the sentiment out like his father might have spat out a wine that had vinegared, as if the very breath had turned sour on her palate.
It takes until this moment for Draco to realize something that's been apparent since the beginning. Of all the people in this castle, and indeed, Great Britain- the only two who have offered him a shred of defense were… Myrtle and Hermione. He's been offered as a token of fealty by his father and aunt to the Dark Lord, set to task by threats on a despondent mother, doubted by Snape, ignored by Dumbledore, and cut down by the Chosen One, Harry Potter.
And it was, in the end, two muggle-born witches that showed any degree of magnanimity for his position. They were able to look at him, a living culmination of centuries of privilege and prejudice, with… sympathy? Myrtle had called Potter a murderer, and Hermione didn't believe her best friend's account was even reliable.
This was his chance. The moment he had been waiting for. She was here, alone with him. He needed to turn over and tell her… 'tell her what?' The insidious voice of doubt was back, creeping across the inside of his eyelids and into his unprotected mind...
'That she was wrong? That he was a marked Death Eater? That he had already put no less than three of her friends in mortal peril? That he had tried to use an Unforgivable on Potter? That he had spent the year letting his marks and mental health deteriorate in an effort to deal a decisive blow in the conflict that would end, most favorably for her, in exile or sexual slavery; the latter of the two being the outcome he's fantasized about for as long as he's been old enough to figure out what to do with his erection?'
The sudden urge to escape, to run away, so stay, to do whatever it takes to hear her speak sweetly to him again is overwhelming. He is confronted now with two unfathomable pieces of knowledge he's firmly locked away for almost a year; Hermione Granger is at her most stunning when she's as free as her Hippogriff, and how similarly wounded she'd leave him.
For, in admitting to himself, that most outrageous of creatures to lie to, that he adored her- not despite, but because of her muddy brown features, and her exotic heritage, and her flaming scorn, and her underserved compassion- he has tacitly acknowledged that he has fallen in only the deepest of loves with her that a mortal man is capable of.
And so his entire world has changed, and also nothing. His mother is still a prisoner in her own home, Draco is still guilty as sin, and the Dark Lord was still well positioned to win the war after, what was essentially just, a decade and a half of false reprieve.
It's all rather meaningless actually, Potter couldn't even finish Draco off, there was absolutely no way Draco would be able to finish Dumbledore off, and he can't fathom a course of action where he could manage to be a better man for her, and could scarcely refrain from being a worse one. He was saved only by the knowledge that his affections would probably prohibit him from scraping enough hate together to cast a killing curse that would ever strike a person she cared for.
He might be laid out now, but he was on the road to perdition still, make no mistake- it was a road he had set down from the very moment the Sorting Hat had rendered its verdict, and the ruling was as clear as the Wizengamot sentencing he now so desperately hoped he'd live to see at journey's end: Damnation.
He doesn't roll over or open his eyes as she wishes him well, and the tears that rise from his anguish at the sound of her retreating form has nothing to do with regrets stemming from the events of this evening, for he does not need to have caught her eyes tonight to see them, he knows now that he will be haunted by those brown depths for the rest of his life.
When Draco is sixteen, his mentor, Severus, learns that the boy is incapable of casting a killing curse, and so passes the sectumsempra to him, knowing that he was gifting a weapon that would never be abused for evil ends.
Draco learns that he is a coward. And he never stops revisiting this lesson, every day, for the next year.
Draco can see she's been dragged out of the sea of his memories by the renewed attentions of Bellatrix, who had exchanged her wand for a ritual knife, and was screaming obscenities with unwavering vigor.
Apparently she'd cottoned on to what Hermione had been doing when the girl had stopped responding to the cruciatus, and had taken offense to the idea that his occlumency was being so thoroughly tested.
"How dare you, how DARE you, you filthy, little, mudblood- attempt to invade the mind of the scion of a Pure Blooded house? A mind I have, MYSELF, secured?"
She continued on like this as she began to carve into the object of Draco's undying devotion, reinvigorated by the tune of her victim's new screams.
"You will never, EVER, again forget what you are, girl- for however long your putrid cunt can be used to service your betters!"
He sees now, the loopy M begin to take form on the creamy backdrop of her inner arm, and is hard pressed to decide if he's more nauseated by the sight of her mutilation or the year of his continued cowardice.
The watering of his mouth and the chattering teeth are the tell tale precursor of retching, Draco would know, he hasn't had a proper appetite in years, and his body seemed to only be able to conjure this much saliva when he was to be sick and… and what?
Nothing has changed. Nothing has become better. His family was in no safer a position now than it had been last year, and the abuses of the Malfoy household showed no signs of slowing, and Draco has fucked up any and all chance of stealing the glory of this capture from the Snatchers responsible when he misidentified Potter and…
As his mad aunt stopped to survey her evil handiwork, Draco realizes that there's no road at all.
Life wasn't a path, it was a forest that you could only move forward in.
Life was… life was full of choices, and there was always a choice, and he chose this, he chose and he chose and not all choices are the same, but some matter more than others, and he has the scars to prove it.
The deep breath he takes drags the starry sky and the meadow back by the fingernails of his sanity. He had always had the choices, had the most of them, of any of his peers, in fact.
Except with her. He'd probably been doomed to love her from the moment she had slapped- Had it really only been a slap?- it had felt like a chisel she had taken to his very soul.
And now she knew, she had seen and felt the yearnings of his soul, the rapturous torture of his existence. He revered her like an uncultivated wildflower on his family's property. She was a feat and feature of nature, ephemeral and exquisite, but undomesticated and immovable. Never truly his to pluck and cherish. But what good could come of her knowing the depths of his feelings?
He wants to retreat further back in his mind, perhaps to the bothy… where none of this could touch him. Otherwise, he'd be doomed to die with her, today- he knows now that the line of Malfoy would end with her death, as assuredly as with his. He wished, desperately, for another choice, a new crossroad, a second chance to avail himself of the horrors he himself has played no small part in inflicting on their world. Permanent harm, like a curse… like a scar.
'No!'
The voice returned, and he realized his conscience sounded awfully like Severus; 'Look around, survey the situation beyond the flowers…'
Bellatrix is apologizing for getting mudblood all over his mother's hardwood, his mother is whispering into his father's ear, whose brow was furrowed in consternation, Fenrir is licking exaggerated passes across his maw, like the sight of Hermione splayed out and violated before him was enough to prompt a lunar change…
Draco doesn't look at her, doesn't need to- he had been right, her eyes had never really left his mind anyway. His pale hand stole across his diaphragm to unbutton the short, stylish black robes he had taken to wearing after getting marked. It didn't relieve his shortness of breath.
His aunt's knife hand twitched with malicious intent, and Draco is left with choices as the flashing silver reminds him of a conversation with his Head of House that now made far more sense…
'Let the Gryffindors keep their goblin forged, offense to good taste. We have our own swords, principally the very curse that was so ineffectually turned on you, Draco. It is a spell of near limitless potential… Know this, I've chosen to impart this technique on you for no better reason than that your continued deficiency in emotional magic has become a glaring vulnerability to your life… , and therefore, mine.'
A tweak of an eyebrow, the dismissive flick of the potion master's wand, the whispered incantation; these were the only warnings the elder tree at the edge of the Malfoy Park was given before it had been cleaved in half.
The visible awe must have been evident, as his mentor had continued on that day with the ghost of a smile on his countenance.
The Sectumsempra curse is a vorpal blade that grows more potent with the caster's clarity of purpose. It is more suited to the cold detachment of a skilled occlumancer, rather than a blustering imbecile, tripping over his own passion.'
Draco had nodded that day in understanding. Potter's lack of focus had been the only reason he hadn't ended up bisected like the tree; which had slid apart at its new, diagonal seam, lacking the structural integrity to support itself.
Severus had made him cast until he could replicate those effects, till he had bent the unicorn-hair core of his wand to accept the dark magic he was channeling through it.
'There remains one more lesson for today, Draco… Surely, by now, you have worked out the latinic roots of the incantation to be "forever sever?" This curse is one of my own creations, and try as I might- I've never been able to devise a countercurse to it. A general healing charm that is performed by a wizard of prodigious skill, who casts thrice over the wound will be able to turn back the damage, as you might recall… But when properly cast, this curse will forever sever flesh and bone, bisecting limb or torso in such a way that there is no remedy. When you cast this curse, you must do so with resolve in your decision, Draco… am I understood?'
Draco had nodded his assent that day, but he had been lying. Or, more charitably, had only now come to a full understanding of his mentor's meaning. That life was full of choices, and the choices you make with this curse could never be undone.
In the meadow, Polaris twinkled as Draco Lucius Malfoy made a decision.
His fingers wrapped around the dark hafted hawthorne length in his inner breast pocket.
Bellatrix's left hand twisted and dark magic spilled forth from the wand, slamming Hermione's curled up form, supine again. The knife in her right hand descended.
Choices.
When he had Dumbledore at his mercy, his wand hand had been trembling in the night sky like a storm caught dinghy in the open ocean.
Decisions.
Draco's hand is steady as stone now. He takes that as a good sign. He bet Paris's hand had trembled when he stole away with Helen of Troy, the poor fool. Who would choose anyone else when they had already been promised Hermione of Sparta? If Helen was worth a hundred thousand men-at-arms, then surely Hermione was worth his one, measly act of defiance-
The knife tip is a hair's breadth from skin now-"Don't think I've forgotten about you, after all, we've got to finish up here so that the hooknose doesn't feel-'"
He's drawn, and the oxblood tip of his wand has cleared his dark raiment.
He hears his mother shout his name, but that's already bundled up and away, on the tail of a comet. There's nothing in his sky now, save Polaris.
"Dra!-"
"-slighted!"
"SECTUMSEMPRA!"
The tendrils of distorted reality at the tip of his wand only appeared, but for a moment, like a white star. The invisible sword that lopped his Aunt's left arm off at the elbow in a show of scarlet treachery was, however, impossible to miss.
Her wand fell from that height, clasped in the taloned grip that bore the Dark Mark that Draco had divested their master's lieutenant of.
Bellatrix reared back, unable to process the spigot of blood issuing from the ruined stump.
Narcissa gasped in horror, his father issued a growl, fruitlessly grasping at the empty walking stick at his side, which was bereft of the wand that his master had forbidden him from wielding.
Fenrir turned his wand on Draco with an equal mixture of surprise and hunger, lips twisting around a curse-
"Confringo!"
-just to be lost in a fiery gout of blood.
His warrior princess of Sparta, covered in the ichor of her tormentor, had taken the werewolf's life for him. Stained her spotless soul… for him.
She's as shocked as he is.
In the vacuum of a moment, his mother began to form words, which, really, might have been anything, when the heavy wood paneled french doors of the drawing room detonated behind her.
Harry Potter and his faithful sidekick have escaped captivity.
Finally.
Potter's patented "Expelliarmus!" snapped Narcissa's ebony wand from its mistress's hand, and his father could barely manage two spell deflections, using the shielding charms bound to the rune array under the veneered shaft of his father's walking stick, before he fell to a stunner from the Weasel.
What an ignominious climax to the only successful skirmish ever waged against Malfoy Manor.
The agonized wailing of his dismembered foe had arrested the attention of the Boy-who-apparently-wouldn't-curse-anyone-but-Draco for a moment. It is in the breath of this moment that the ginger affliction to his house is able to stupify his father, and that allows the boy, who might just have become a man, to walk over to Hermione and offer her his free hand. It's a calculated maneuver as much as a requested boon.
She surprises him by replying with both hands, grasping the proffered limb with one, and pulling him down to bended knee with the other.
And then she's wrapped them both around him, and is sobbing out her thanks against his collarbone and into his ear.
It's a balm that forgives his past transgressions, and praises his small act of valor. Four out of his five senses fail, and he responds by bracing her shivering form against him, conveying the inviolable nature of his decision in the only way that seemed to make sense.
She whimpered and Draco felt the sting of regret, but then she dug in even deeper, somehow making the embrace more intimate, and warmth shot upwards from the pit of his gut to the space between his shoulder blades.
This pride… this… this was everything. Years of backhanded compliments and mocking commendations from his father, then the Dark Lord, paled in comparison to the effects of a simple affirmation he had been offered by a witch, for an intercession she had never even asked of him.
She knew how he felt, how could she not after stepping through the corridors of his mind? He didn't hold the intrusion against her, after all, it was her's, all of it. This was his moment, his choice, he needed to talk to her, to gauge how she felt in the wake of what had to be a startling series of revelations, to inquire if she was experiencing any aftershocks from her torture, to just look into the eyes that had held him captive for longer than he could-
"What. The. Fuck?"
Ah, there was his rival's fabled heroic timing.
I took a break from a WIP I had started while locked in my house in order to focus on drafting some original fiction. But, when I recently showed my fiance the Harry Potter movies for the first time, I was once again reminded that Draco's story in Book 7 was a missed opportunity for one of the greatest redemption arcs in western literature. I've been planning this scene in my head for over thirteen years, and I've never seen it in another fic the way I wanted to. Dramione fans know that he has the makings of a great wizard inside of him; we hold Draco in higher regard than J.K. does. By her own admission, she's never been able to reconcile the character she wrote with the bully who served as his original inspiration.
When she later claimed that Astoria was the one who disabused him of his prejudices, and prevented him from raising Scorpius with them… I think even other shippers sputtered in disbelief. Why would a girl from the same social class as Malfoy have a stronger influence on him than the muggleborn prodigy he's been in school with for years? Even J.K. admits that the behavior of a young Draco very clearly parallels a boy who is too immature to express a crush on a peer in an appropriate way.
That's where this story came from, I just looked at the behavioral pattern of a boy progressing through puberty and navigating his privilege, as a lens to look at canon through.
If you like my Dramione you're more than welcome to check out my crossover WIP!
Also, all credit to Olivieblake for the inspired escapades of Armand Malfoy, she is truly one of the greatest recent novelists I've read in some time.
Oh, and leave a comment telling me what you thought of this writing style and plot divergence- are the ramifications something to be explored, this was meant to be a oneshot but... I could be convinced otherwise.
