"It occurs to me that we've never made this trip together before." Hermione fought the urge to look at the empty air where the comment originated from. Draco Malfoy's voice brought back less than pleasant memories in the halls of Hogwarts. And, despite the litany of injuries that covered the bodies of her classmates, this was still Hogwarts. The vaulted ceiling and blackened iron sconces were as comforting and familiar as the hallways of her childhood home; the Room of Requirement had done its work well, and hollowed out a new passageway from the room proper, all the way down to the dungeons.
Albeit, an inconveniently meandering one, but that was just Hogwarts. Why spawn a tight spiral staircase when a languid penrose would do just as well? She harrumphed.
"Invisible deserters should be neither seen nor heard."
There was a knowing snort, then Draco shed the hood of the cloak to reveal his pointy face. It was a wonder she hadn't cut her hand open when she smacked him all those years ago.
"You're thinking about that time you struck me."
She didn't need a mirror to tell she had colored in response to his comment. Any attempt at denial would have been futile.
"How did you know?" she asked instead.
His smile was eminently smackable.
"You always have the same look on your face when you're thinking about committing violence against my person."
She turned her eyes away since being inscrutable was, apparently, beyond her, then went over their goals in her head like a mantra.
'Hugo Rosier is a third-year Slytherin. He'll be down the right-hand passage-way of their common room, in the third tunnel to the left. Third year is the last that Hufflepuffs and Slytherins share dorms, so we can expect there to be several students in bed. Our best plan is simply to put them deeper into bewitched sleep, for which the correct incantation is "Somnuma," with a lazy, backwards "S" shape drawn over the top of the target's head. When Hugo is located, a sample of hair must be procured directly from the source, to ensure that the specimen is genuine and to safeguard against… accidental cross-species polyjuicing.'
Her face lit up at the memory. To this day, she was unsure what was the most mortifying aspect of that first brew, the cat ears or the vestigial tail.
Hermione could feel the curious gaze originating from the floating head next to her, and the attention only made her face burn hotter. She opened her mouth to make some manner of distracting conversation, but her throat was drier than the chianti her parents preferred over dinner, which triggered an unfortunate sensory memory.
'Hairballs. I remember being most embarrassed about the hairballs.'
God, they were terrible, and at this rate, Draco was going to think her complexion was naturally the color of a ripe tomato. The only time he seemed to lose his cool was when…
"That's just as well, you have your own tells too," she baited, still refusing to look any way but forward.
"Tells? I'll have you know, between my occlumency and good breeding, my demeanor is universally regarded amongst my peer group to be unflappable." He seemed indignant as he walked into her verbal snare, but Hermione was intrigued.
"Your peer group? What, do Slytherins all line up once a week, in front of a mirror, for a staring contest?"
"Hardly, the wizards do have monthly exploding poker tournaments though; and I've always performed well."
She rolled her eyes at his choice of nomenclature, 'the wizards' indeed, but was privately intrigued even further. Exploding snap was the only card game that was ever played in Gryffindor tower.
"Oh? And I suppose that witches just balance textbooks on their heads and flit about the common room in the meantime?"
"Hardly, the third year's girls' room is generally appropriated for whist night."
Jane. Fucking. Austen.
The following silence was short of comfortable, but well within acceptable parameters for culture-shock recovery.
"Playing cards for money is considered unseemly for witches," he explained unnecessarily. Hermione took the comment at face value, truthfully, gambling was considered a male vice even in the muggle world.
The shift in ambient temperature was enough to inform Hermione that they had entered the dungeons proper. Any moment now, they'd reach their destination, and Draco seemed to pick up on it too as he stopped her with a light touch to the crook of her elbow.
"I've been thinking about the best way to go about this."
Hermione leveled him an expectant look, and he quickly continued.
"Why don't you take the cloak?"
The shock translated cleanly across the face she tried to keep as open as a book. "You are dead, remember? If You-know-who learns that you're alive then-" Her speech petered out to the look on his face. He seemed nervous, almost ashamed… if Hermione was being forced to guess.
"Ah, yes, well… about that. I have a disguise that will guarantee my anonymity." She knew that he wanted her to make the leap that he was unwilling to elucidate, but it escaped her. After the space of five heartbeats, Draco finally raised his wand from its new home in his father's walking stick, fanning it in front of his face like a geisha.
The action elicited an immediate, violent flashback as living shadow coalesced off the flat of the wand, forming a blackened silver mask in its wake. She remembered his father doffing his Death Eater mask in the same manner, and the muggle-born found herself unusually quiet. His mask was the proverbial lynchpin in the plan he refused to voice aloud, and instead of annunciating her eureka, she simply considered the silver visage that hid his pointy, patrician features from her scrutiny.
At first glance, it seemed to resemble his father's more than the other ones she had seen in the Department of Mysteries, silver on black, not black on silver. However, where Lucius had marked his with the image of a silver kraken, Draco's was more difficult to decipher.
For one, it was asymmetrical. The side facing her, his left side, was decorated with the silver serpentine body of a spiked beast that curled itself around the eyehole, but that stretched from tail and cheek, all the way up to wing and temple. The other side was bare and black, except for a silver lance, which bisected the right eyehole and terminated somewhere just short of his hairline.
She had lived no small amount of her life in the halls of 12 Grimmauld Place, and had spent time amongst the shelves of their library searching for something, anything that would give them an edge after Mrs. Weasley had personally removed any and all books that might have contained dark magic in any form.
What had remained after so thorough a purge was a sizeable history section, the chronologically arranged personal journals of the Black family heads for at least four centuries, a small collection of dirty french novels, the finest selection of references in Astronomy that she had ever seen, and a copy of the Pure Blood Directory. In its pages, she had immediately, if furtively, sought out the familial coat of arms of her childhood bully. And it was all there, right across his face.
The wyrm, the lance, all he was missing was the caduceus and the spiky "M," and it would be painfully apparent to whoever was on the other side of his wand, just who had come for them.
Finally, she managed, "I suppose it's a good thing I didn't ask you to destroy that." The voice that responded to her almost shocked her back to silence as he gathered the cloak into his hands and offered it to her.
"I figured it might eventually be useful, so I didn't remind you that I offered to." It sounded like Draco, but also didn't. It was as if his voice had been recorded on a record, then played on a gramophone with a razor instead of a needle. She didn't like it, it wasn't him.
Instead of responding, she threw the massive cloak over her small form, ensconsing herself completely in its protection. The familiar weight had provided her no small measure of comfort since she had been twelve, and it continued to do so, a literal rather than metaphorical safety blanket.
He had already conjured the nondescript, heavy black robes that Voldemort's army favored and was reaching for the door that would lead them into the snake pit.
Full of their classmates… not Death Eaters. Classmates that had been cruciating other children this year, but classmates all the same. Inhale. Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale, "Not quite how you thought you'd be escorting me into the Slytherin common room, is it?" she murmured.
His low chuckle of acknowledgement was her only comfort as he opened the door wide enough for her to hurry through the gap.
Their masks were really an ingenious piece of magic. In the old days, Death Eaters had worn harlequin masks shaped in the facsimile of human skulls, underneath peaked hoods.
How 1970.
Almost immediately after returning, The Dark Lord had set out to revolutionize the appearance of his army. If one were to assume the matter was an issue of practicality, rather than aesthetic, it was probably an attempt to distance any sighting of his new following from the bumbling attack at the Quidditch World Cup. And if the sleek redesign had the added benefit of attracting the younger aspirant, well, all the better.
The bewitched silver of their masks were linked to the same dark magic as the 'morsmordre' and their twisted apparition, all given as gifts of the dark mark. Their distinguishing markings were deeply personal, an outward sign of their commitment to the Dark Lord's cause. Draco had been told by his mother that the twisted ivy of his Aunt's mask was reminiscent of the Black family's tapestry in their ancestral seat. His father's was marked with the giant squid, an obscure homage to the first time he had been "charged with leadership," as the Head Boy of his year. A sixteen-year-old Draco might have chosen something of a similar vein if he had been old enough to have been awarded the post, (and had not let Anthony Goldstein pull ahead of him in sixth year.)
Severus's was still a mystery, and he wondered, not for the first time, what had led the master of the Dungeon to forgo black enamel altogether in favor of gentle silver loops, indistinguishable save for the fleur-de-lis on his brow. Draco didn't even think he was French!
When Draco had marked his in negative, with half of the Malfoy coat of arms embossed on his face, his mentor's reaction had been visceral. Just for a moment, Draco had seen something dramatic there, before it had been wiped away under the breath of occlumency. It was an odd thought to be preoccupied with as the pallid stretch of stone wall that barred the Slytherin common room from the school retreated before his utterance of the password, "The Worthy."
At least that was better than it had been in previous years. There was at least a five year stretch where the wizard had kept the phrase "pure-blood" and had simply rotated the language required. Laziness, truly.
His mother had raised a gentleman, if nothing else, so he made sure that he had given ample enough time for an invisible Hermione to slip past him before he started down the corridor behind her.
The jade lighting of the common room was omnipresent, provided by hanging lamp in lieu of the dark lakeview windows. The fireplace in the corner was burning low in its magnificent black marble hearth, but it was surrounded by students nonetheless.
'Fuck.'
This had suddenly become far more difficult. Draco knew, for a fact, that he wasn't the only Death Eater stalking the castle these days, and when the three fifth years caught sight of him and bolted down the corridor to their rooms, he was unperturbed. At least one of them was the younger Greengrass, and her family had no one on the inside to protect them. He made a decision quickly.
"Go quickly," he whispered to the empty space in front of him.
An unknown Death Eater sighting in the Slytherin dungeon was fairly innocuous, in the grand scheme of things. But a Death Eater appearing in the dorm room of a child who would later be found breaking into the Lestrange Vault? That would be far more significant to the Dark Lord's intelligence apparatus.
He assumed Hermione had understood the change in plans, as he heard nothing in reply but the smoldering flame of the fire, now condemned to die alone.
There were ways to remedy that, however. The deserter moved among the black leather sofas he had spent years lounging across and assumed his favorite thinking position. Right heel on left knee cap, fingers steepled at eye level. As long as he was here, he might as well go over occlumency exercises. It had been a forever since he had- "Draco?"
He looked up from the fire to the group of students that now clogged the passageway of the female wing. Among them were the shocked faces of Daphne Greengrass, Pansy Parkinson, Millicent Bulstrode, and Tracy Davis. Astoria had raised the alarm along her sister's entire passageway. It shouldn't surprise him that they had recognized him immediately, although he was grateful his reaction was hidden. His mask aside, the assembled students had probably seen him digest his morning paper in this exact same position a hundred times. He needed a lie, and a good one. Maybe they'd believe he returned as a ghost? Not transparent though… Inferi? Eh, he was too elegant to appear shambling.
The truth? Not even close to believable. Nor could they be trusted with it. Cryptic premonition it was, then.
"Sit," he commanded, rather than invited, with one hand. Millicent turned on her heel and retreated back from where she came, almost tripping over herself in fear. Daphne took a series of perfectly measured steps, befitting the eldest daughter of her family, and sat down across from him, Tracy in tow. Pansy lagged behind the two, simultaneously both fearful and entranced. Finally, she came to rest on the same couch as him, on the farthest seat cushion.
He appreciated the delay, it gave him the space to draft.
"You must realize what it cost me to come here." The spell that distorted his voice achieved its desired effect, and both Pansy and Tracy shuddered as he started to speak. Only Daphne remained seemingly unaffected. The darkness hid the green eyes of her family well, but Draco would have wagered anything that she was using occlumency. The neutral tone of her response supported the assumption when she questioned him.
"But where have you come from?" He laughed instead of answering, of course she'd treat this as an opportunity for information gathering. Hallett Greengrass had been given two daughters instead of a son, trust him to make sure that the mighty Greengrass merchant clan would fold into one of the other members of the Sacred Twenty-Eight with pomp rather than fade to obscurity.
"I cannot answer that. I did not come here to answer questions at all, but rather, to pose them," he ground out, trying, above all, to banish the humor from his tone.
He ignored Pansy, whose father was a member of the Inner Circle, and Tracy, who was a halfblood. He needed Daphne to bite. Enlightened self-interest had kept the Greengrasses outside of this war for far too long, and their fortune was hardly another obstacle Draco needed being pit against the Order. She gestured with her hand, inviting him to continue, so he did.
"Why did Salazar Slytherin warn against the inclusion of muggleborns at Hogwarts?-" Pansy opened her mouth as if to respond, completely missing that the question was rhetorical, but Draco plowed on, "-Ah, yes, you know the answer, of course. But who has visited violence at every turn on the faculty and students of Hogwarts?" Pansy wore a soft look of confusion on the hard planes of her face now, but Daphne abandoned her ambivalence for a wry smile.
"It doesn't really seem to matter, except that they're always working with the Malfoys, aren't they?" she questioned.
He allowed the slight, it was a fair one. The fact that Draco had succeeded where Armand failed had been the source of no small amount of vindictive pride. Deathblow or not, Dumbledore had joined Godric in the ground, far ahead of his natural schedule.
He felt the hot coal of Hermione's attention explode below his scalp almost a full minute before he felt her finger prod his shoulder. Time to wrap this up.
He stood to leave, but didn't drop his gaze for a moment.
"Two questions I've given you, whose answers contradict. Another two I'll leave you with, to reckon with what they depict." Daphne's annoyed countenance could twist a wizard's stomach, but from his standing position, he could see Astoria's face from the corridor beyond, attentive and bemused by his little couplet. There really was something with witches and speaking in rhyme scheme.
"What is the stated goal of the Dark Lord's cause, and how many of the Sacred Twenty-Eight have been snuffed out to achieve this end?"
This time he didn't wait for their reaction as he walked to the door in his best robe-billowing Snape impression.
There was frustration, and then there was what Harry was feeling at the moment. It was all he could do to ignore the voices of Ron and Luna as they pressed in from either side of him. They didn't have all the time in the world, and he hadn't anticipated the stunning amount of separation anxiety he'd suffer after relinquishing his invisibility cloak.
It didn't matter that Luna had proved quite adept with the disillusionment charm, he felt completely exposed. And he still could not figure out where he had seen that blasted crown before.
Rowena's marble statue stood proud, almost mockingly, before them; and all the trip seemed to reward Harry with was a wrenching headache and the desire to run before they were found out.
The young man twisted in place, and was greeted with a sight that sent the headache between his eyes rushing till it became a great pulse between his eardrums. There, at the entrance of the Ravenclaw common room, stood Severus Snape, whose greasy locks were being tossed back and forth as he surveyed the dimly lit room.
That was something Harry could actually do, a problem he could actually solve. If the scream he let loose didn't give away their presence, he was sure the blasting curse from his wand tip most certainly did.
AN: So I got married! And moved… and started a new job… And didn't write at all. But, seriously, I wasn't going to let a whole calendar year pass without an update- and actually was sitting on this chapter mostly done for an obscene amount of time. Also, that whole "didn't write," is largely a lie. I've been working on my own novels in lieu of writing fanfiction because my new job is so unpleasant, it's making me consider a career change. Still, this update is much later than promised, but I'm hoping that it will be the start of a better rhythm as I make sense of my writing schedule. Monthly updates of longer chapters is my goal!