Draco felt sick. He locked eyes with the trembling woman in front of him, the tip of his wand digging into her pale forehead, and pressed his dry lips together. She's filth, he told himself. Not even a mudblood, not a drop of stolen magic running through her dirty veins.
Her eyes were wide and blue, like the summer sky. He hadn't seen the sky without the distortion of a glass pane for weeks now.
Less than an animal, he chanted inside his head, less, less, less. Almost in reply, she let out a very human whimper.
"Please," she whispered. "Please."
Please what? Draco wondered distantly. Please, mercy? Or please, let me die, and make it quick? Because Draco knew he wasn't the first to have a go at this pathetic muggle woman, partially immobilized on the dark hardwood of the manor's floor, though he didn't see any blood. His mother would have thrown a fit, because even house elf magic couldn't get stains out of these floors.
Her lips were moving but no sound escaped them. Her chest heaved as she took rapid, shallow breaths.
Draco's wand arm was shaking.
He thanked his lucky stars, if they existed, that nobody was around to notice.
Someone banged on the door of the study room. "Hurry up, Malfoy, we're waiting for a turn too!" came the rough voice of Walden MacNair. Unconsciously, Draco shivered. The tall man with the axe and scowl frightened him perhaps somewhat more than the useless posturing with wands that the others preferred. MacNair had a battleaxe and was not afraid to use it.
"Please," the woman repeated, and Draco shut his eyes. He took a breath and cast a diffindo blindly, hearing her sharp intake of breath.
He opened his eyes to see the shallow cut he had opened up on her forearm. Blood welled by the edges, bright crimson in the half-light of the study. "I tortured you," Draco said, quietly enough that whoever was waiting outside the study. "I made it so you couldn't scream."
The woman shuddered and began to cry, her tears dripping onto her arm and mixing with the blood. "Kill me," she whispered. "That one—the one just outside—he—" More tears roll down her cheeks.
Draco bit back the bile rising in his throat and the press of his own tears. He leveled his wand again, let it dig into her forehead. "Av—" he tried, but choked on the words.
He didn't know how long the two of them were frozen there, her face raised in supplication and his own turned away because if he looked into her summer blue eyes again he would break completely. As the banging on the door resumed, he grit his teeth and lowered his wand. He turned, took a step toward the door, and began to tuck his wand into his robe picket.
"Please," the woman cried.
He put his hand on the doorknob, turned it, and shut the door behind him. "She's all yours," he said woodenly, but it wasn't MacNair standing there. It was his godfather, looming over him like he had just failed an important test. "Did you kill her?" Severus Snape asked, leaning on the wall.
"No."
"Why not?" Uncle Sev asked, and for once in his life, Draco did not know the right answer. Why not? he wondered, and scrubbed a hand across his face. I couldn't, he said silently. I just couldn't.
But instead he tilted his head, smirked, and narrowed his eyes. "MacNair wanted to play," he heard himself say. "It would be too much of a pain to go and fetch another one, not after Rosier went to all that trouble."
He sauntered down the hall, acutely aware of the penetrating gaze of the potions professor digging into his back.
It seemed like his chambers were miles away from the study as he walked through the manor, avoiding where the shadows seemed to pool like water. In the lower levels, like where the study was, magic moved sluggishly through the air—an unfortunate byproduct of whatever the Dark Lord was doing in the dungeons. Draco didn't know what he was doing down there, and didn't care to find out. Yet it didn't seem like anybody knew either. Just rumors, as thick in the air as the miasma of magic.
He's summoning things, the Death Eaters whispered. Old things.
The higher he climbed, the easier it was for him to breathe without the weight of power, plain and simple, pressing on his chest. Or perhaps that was due to the distance he was putting between himself and the study? The study, and the muggle woman inside it, kneeling on the floor as if she were praying to a god.
Gods are invincible.
He was not.
When he arrived, finally, at the door to his rom, he let himself in quietly and locked it with a quick mutter of "Colloportus."
He picked a book blindly from the stack by his bedside and fell onto the sheets. He cracked it open and did his best to escape to somewhere entirely different. The title was Underneath the Ministry, and the disclaimer at the beginning called it utter fiction.
Good, Draco thought.
Chapter 1 : Allusion
Some say that the world began with a bang and will someday go out with a whimper. Some disagree and say that no, that's ridiculous, the world began with a Word with a capital "W". That sounds like hogwash, others say, the world began when an omnipotent being decided that they wanted an earth and so made it with a thought. Every civilization that has cropped up since has wondered where they came from and, more than that, wondered why.
The answer, of course, is 42, though no-one has yet deciphered the question. (Though that, as of yet, is irrelevant.)
The wizards were no different—the ones in Britain existing in one particular time stream, at least, because there are all sorts of other wizards in other places, other Earths, and other times. These are the wizards with bastardized Latin incantations and phoenixes and who believe that love will conquer all, given a little bit of time and sacrifices to work with. Did I say sacrifices? I meant people.
In this particular time and space, the beginning of the wizards' misfortune was not a mysterious egg (as it so often is), unchecked imperialism, or even a seemingly-innocuous sugar bowl.
No, both the world and misfortune (because the two go hand in hand) began with a veil. Specifically, an archway covered by a veil, though the archway was never as important as the veil itself. The last is where the wizards always went wrong in the years later. If the archway were destroyed, the veil would endure, a floating, unanchored piece of fabric, imbued with what the muggles called magic and the wizards called death.
The Veil is made of neither. It is the fabric of could-have-beens and what-may-bes and conceals uncertainty in its myriad of forms. It is the foil to the Hall of Prophecy, which is a room full of absolutes and threads of fate already pulled taut. The Veil deals in what could generously be called possibilities.
Wizards who have the misfortune to draw too near hear the voices of what they think are their loved ones but are really alternate futures, different paths they could have taken. The Veil is temptation and longing rolled into one, from which, perhaps unsurprisingly given its nature, sprang the Mirror of Erised.
The Unspeakables who study it, deep in the bowels of the Ministry of magic, never dare to touch the fabric for fear of being sucked in. Instead, they foolishly study the proto-runes scratched into the archway and attempt to take samples of the magic surrounding the Veil like a cloud. Not even their best and brightest realized that the fabric predates the archway by millenia, and that the runes were etched years thousands of years after it was built to anchor the unsettlingly free-floating gauze.
A knock at the door startled Draco into closing the book, which had begun to sound less and less like fiction.
"I'm indisposed!" he called, hoping that whoever it was would leave him alone. "This is urgent," came a quiet, familiar voice from outside. With a curse, Draco leapt to his feet and crossed to the door. He Unlocked the door and yanked the person from outside into his room. "You can't be seen," he hissed, scanning the pale face of Hermione Granger with an almost manic desperation. If she was seen, if someone noticed, he would die, no question about it. And she would too. It would just take longer.
"I know that," she hissed back, their noses almost touching. "Of course I know that."
"Then what's so urgent that you're knocking at my door while completely exposed in the hallway?" Draco sneered, hiding his worry.
"There's been an enormous shift in the ley lines," Hermione told him. "I'm downstairs, almost all the time, and you know your manor was built on a ley line. I was trying a very magic sensitive spell when suddenly it just fizzed. Magic doesn't just fizz, Malfoy, and I could feel it all around me. It was like a rubber band just snapped."
"Rubber band?"
"Muggle thing," Hermione waved a hand dismissively, before refocusing her steady gaze on Draco's. "Listen to me," she said, her voice intense. "Something major just occured and Draco, if I felt it, Vol—the Dark Lord did too."
Draco felt all the blood drain from his face. "He'll call the Death Eaters," he whispered.
"Which means you need to prepare yourself for what's ahead," Hermione said grimly, and, gripping his hand, led him to his bed. "We have contingency plans, remember that, okay?"
Draco fisted the sheets of his bed and tried to steady his breathing. When the Dark Lord was in the dungeons underneath the manor, he could pretend that Voldemort was was somewhere else, like at the Ministry. But if he called his followers, it would be massive. It would be public. It would be walking a tightrope fifty miles in the sky.
Hermione was gathering vials into her arms and had plucked Draco's wand from a side table. "C'mon, Malfoy, you know what to do," she said, and tossed the wand onto his lap. She held out three large empty vials.
Woodenly, he put his wand to his temple and extracted silvery white memories. In his head, they faded somewhat. The color of her hair was suddenly less vibrant, the sound of her laugh—rare enough in this purgatory—dimmed, and, really, all his positive memories of Hermione Granger became less saturated. Gradually, they faded, until there was only a dull echo of joy, trust, and longing. He put the memories into the vials, corked them, and handed them back to Hermione.
She handed him a quill and a piece of paper. "Write the note," she urged.
In his usual cursive, he wrote, "Put the memories back in."
"Good," she said, exhaling, and held out her hand for his wand. "I've plenty of practice with this spell, Malfoy. I won't turn you into a vegetable," she told him when he hesitated. He knew he could trust her, knew it implicitly, and still his hand shook around his wand.
He squeezed his eyelids shut and handed her the wand. "Do it," he whispered, and took a shuddering breath.
"Be brave, Draco. Obliviate," Hermione Granger muttered, and everything went dark and silent.
A/N I'm sorry for how late this chapter is. Between school, side projects, and life in general along with a healthy dose of writer's block, this chapter has been sitting unfinished in my computer for a while now. It's also rather short, because I wanted to finish and get it out as quickly as possible. Guest, thank you so much for your reviews! They really inspired me to keep writing.
Just to clarify, the ritual went wrong, which is why it was possible for Other Hermione to be summoned. Draco and Hermione's history will become clear soon. Last chapter's reference was to Colubrina, who invented Luna's nollywhatsits. A few references to original literature cropped up in Draco's book, by the way-I just couldn't resist.