"How do I know you're not going to use this against me?" Potter demands. He stands across from me in the front parlor, wand half-raised at me. He eyes me with wary speculation, which truthfully, I can't blame him for. A year ago, I would have given anything to have a chance to root through the mind of my enemy and find all of his vulnerabilities. Now, though, we're on the same side. Any vulnerabilities I use against him, I use against me, too.
"Harry, Malfoy's survival is too entwined in ours now. If he harms you, he harms himself." Granger's ever-patient voice sounds from the corner near the fireplace. She has her legs draped over the side of an overstuffed armchair while she reads the book I gave to her last night. Wisely, she has decided to act as referee between the two of us. I try to ignore how desperately I wish she'd call me Draco instead. I cannot get the sound of my name on her lips out of my mind.
"Does she always read minds like that?" I ask in a mock-whisper to Potter. Despite his mistrust, he laughs.
"Yes," he says at the same time as Granger. "Annoying, really," Potter continues, "she's always about three steps ahead of everyone else."
"Which is why we're still alive," she replies with a sniff. "Less focus on me, Harry. Malfoy's offering you an invaluable look into the other side, and you need all the help you can get with occlumency."
She's right. He's rubbish. I break through his barriers like a hot knife in butter within a second. A whirlwind of memories warp around me as I step into his mind. It's no wonder the Dark Lord can see inside his mind so easily. His wards are about as thin as muslin. Flashes of the Weasley brood, Hogwarts, and a painfully Muggle home filter through my mind's eye. I step back and the connection is broken. Potter glares at me, rubbing his forehead. I raise my wand again, ready for a strike.
He comes back at me a little stronger this time, though I'm still able to crumble his wards in record time. The memories are different, Dumbledore, Quidditch, and a Ginny Weasley who saunters toward him, dropping her cloak to reveal-
"That's enough!" Potter shouts. His face is burning red.
"Merlin, I'll say. Does Weaselbee know you and his sister have danced the sinner's salsa?" I ask, an amused smirk forming. The blush deepens.
"Harry James Potter!" Granger exclaims, sitting up in her chair. Potter and I both jump, having forgotten she was sitting there. "You and Ginny slept together?!"
"So what? You've slept with Viktor!" Potter says, desperate to get the attention off of him. My eyes snap to hers, and she juts her chin out stubbornly, almost like she's challenging me to say something sideways about it.
"That's not what I'm talking about, but thank you so much for airing my own sexual escapades," she says. "I mean, when did this happen? Why didn't you tell me? I understand keeping it from Ron, but me?"
"Can we please talk about anything else?" I interrupt. "Not that I wouldn't love to hear more about your escapades in particular, Granger, but we have work to do."
"Pig," she mutters, settling back into her seat.
I quickly learn that half of Potter's issue is the way he organizes his mind-or rather, doesn't organize his mind. As he takes in information and memories, he just leaves them there like clutter in a child's room. One of the first lessons I learned in occlumency was to create a filing system in your mind that only you could understand and figure out. The likelihood of a surprise occlumency attack at the hands of a Death Eater was a high chance; backstabbing in the name of greed and power is a regular occurrence amongst the lower members who want to be someone, and the higher members who hold the prestige and titles. Even amongst them, there is a level of sabotage unlike anything I've ever seen.
My aunt, Bellatrix, is particularly devious. She is one of the better occlumens that are out there, and the Dark Lord holds her close for it. Bella, blinded by her rabid loyalty to him, is insatiable and cruel because of it. In teaching me occlumency, she tore each and every memory out of me, mocking me when they were sentimental and punishing me when they were emotional. She learned things about me that I had never shared with anyone, and she used those to mold me into a footsoldier for the Dark Lord, who does not favor individuality in any way.
Potter should be grateful that I'm the one teaching him. The feeling of your mind being infiltrated is painful regardless of who it is on the other side of the wand, but it doesn't have to feel like torture. It doesn't have to feel like white-hot pokers are being shoved into your eyes. That was something special reserved for me. Family means nothing to Bellatrix when facing the pleasure of the Dark Lord.
In response to the frequent and unpredictable occlumency attacks, I taught myself how to lock everything away. I created boxes within boxes, mislabeled in code only I would know. My brain must look like a card rack in a library, with a broken system and terrible lighting. It was a dual-edged sword in my lessons-Bella was pleased that I had learned to organize and hide, but furious that she could not break through my system. They wanted to create a powerful weapon for their side, but instead, they just taught me how to hide and survive.
"Your mind is a mess, Potter," I say. "I've never seen something so disorganized in my life. How do you tell the important information from the secondary information?"
"What do you mean?" he asks. "It's all the same."
I slap my palm to my face. The more time I spend with him, the less I understand how he has made it so far. I am confident that it is due to the mass of hair sitting in the corner, reading. Tiredly, I sit on the lounge in front of the fire and point at Potter, motioning for him to sit across from me. I summon a couple pieces of parchment, two quills, and a pot of ink. Spreading them on the table, I start to scribble down a vague resemblance of how I organize my mind, and then an image of Potter's mind. I hold it up to show him.
"Do you see the difference? This is your mind, and this is mine. Organization is the absolute first law of keeping others out of your head. Didn't you say you took lessons with Snape?"
"There wasn't much training," Potter mutters. "I accidentally broke into his mind in an attempt to shield myself, and he kicked me out." I turn the parchment toward me to examine the images again.
"What are these?"
I jump at the unexpected voice behind me. A slender arm reaches past me, brushing my shoulder as it does so. I suppress a shiver at the soft touch and sudden scent of jasmine and vanilla. I look over my shoulder to where Granger stands, her left hand outstretched over my shoulder and her right hand anchoring her just behind my right shoulder. If she leaned down, she'd be able to rest her chin on my shoulders. I swallow hard and focus on what she's pointing to.
"Boxes inside of boxes. I hide the most important pieces of information inside of mislabeled boxes so that they will be left alone. The Dark Lord doesn't care about my first time riding a broom, but what's actually inside that box is-um, just more personal things that he'd want to know," I finish quickly. What's actually inside that box is all of the guilt I hold over the crimes I've been forced to commit against innocent people.
"Wow," she sighs. I realize that at some point, she leaned in. Her warm breath tickles my ear and neck and I cannot stop the shiver that overtakes me. "Malfoy, that's genius." I look over my shoulder again and come nearly face-to-face with her. We lock eyes for a fraction of a second before we pull away. She stands straight again and walks around to the other side of the couch. Potter is oblivious to whatever it is that just happened, but the beating in my chest and the flush on her face makes it clear that neither of us was left unaffected. I'm sure she's just embarrassed to have been in such close contact with a Death Eater.
"Potter, I'm giving you homework. I don't want to waste my time teaching you until you've learned how to organize your mind better. If you treat it like the floor of your bedroom, you'll never be safe to yourself or this war," I say.
Granger catches me in the kitchen at midnight. I'm pressing cloths charmed to remain icy to my arm. The skin is irritated, beginning to scar. Minute lacerations have opened up around the ink, and the snake writhes in anger. I am in too much pain to even worry about her seeing the wound.
She watches as I lift the cloth from the mark and gasps. She grabs hold of my wrist and yanks my arm closer to her face. I hiss in pain. I don't know what she's examining for, but she leaves before I can ask. I press the cloth to my arm again. She returns a couple of minutes later, arms filled with bottles of potion and a book.
"Was it worth it?" she asks. There is no judgment in her tone. She isn't looking at me as she places all of the potion bottles in a straight line on the table. She examines the bottles, nibbling on her lip.
"No," I say plainly. Granger's head shoots up in shock. She didn't expect me to answer. Interesting. I fight to keep the bitterness out of my voice as I continue, "No, this wasn't worth it. I don't belong to myself anymore."
"I use this to numb my arm," she says, holding out a silver bottle. "It's not permanent, but it helps. May I try?" I nod, removing the scrap of icy fabric. She spreads the potion across the surface of the Dark Mark. Her fingers ghost over the symbol, tracing it delicately. The effect is instant. My mark goes numb, and I let out a moan of relief. "Oh, Merlin, that's good, Granger." She turns bright pink and shushes me. "I have an idea to help you, but it'll take a few days, and it will not feel good when we do it," she warns me. "Do you still want-"
"You can do whatever you want to me, Granger," I say, still basking in the numb relief on my arm. My eyes shut as she continues her ministrations on my arm. The feeling of her nimble and sure fingertips is an experience that gets tucked into one of my mislabeled boxes. That'll be there for me later.
"Am I interrupting something?"
More light floods the room as additional lanterns are lit. Weasley stands at the end of the table, the lantern in his hand throwing his angry face into a harsh relief. Granger's fingers tighten on my arm, whether in panic or irritation, I can't tell. Weasley's eyes rove over the table where the potions sit, at both of our faces, and then land on Granger's hold on my arm. His nostrils flare. I prepare myself for an encore of their fight.
"Of course not, Ronald," Granger says.
"Really? Because from what I heard, it sounded like you and Malfoy-," he spits my name, "-were getting nice and personal. Never thought you'd lower yourself for a Death Eater."
"You don't know what you heard," I spit back. "But even if she did, that would be her right. We all heard your fight the other day, Weasley. How would it feel to know that she chose a Death Eater over you?"
A fist collides with my jaw and pain blooms across my face. Granger shrieks and leaps between the two of us. Weasley doesn't notice and goes in for another blow. It lands squarely on her eye and she drops to the ground with a cry of pain. She clutches her face with both hands, laying on the dirty flagstone in a fetal position.
"Hermione!" he cries, dropping to his knees beside her. "Shit, Hermione, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean-I was trying to hit Malfoy! Shit, shit!"
"Get away from me, Ron," she says in a thick voice, muffled by her hands. "Just go." He hesitates and then lumbers to his feet. He makes sure he slams into me as he storms out of the kitchen. I stoop down next to Granger. Candlelight reflects off of tears on her cheeks.
"He's a fool," I say. I don't know how else to fill the silence, or what to say. I offer a hand to her. She takes it with one hand, the other still covering her eye. I pull her to a standing position, and she drops mine as soon as she is righted.
"This is just as much your fault as it is his," she snaps at me.
"How do you figure that one?" I ask, irritated. "I'm not the one who punched you. I'm a lot of things, Granger, but a woman-beater isn't one of them."
"No, but you goaded him into hitting you. You knew his weakness and you exploited it," she responds. She uncovers her eye and I inhale sharply. It has already swollen and is bloodshot from broken vessels. "We're on the same side now, Malfoy. Act like it! If you keep pitting yourselves against each other, we'll never win this damn war!"
"He accused you of being loose!" I say. "He took a swipe at your character-how can he claim to love you and then run his mouth the moment he is upset?"
"Malfoy, I am not a damsel in distress. I don't need a man swooping in to defend me every time an insult is hurled at me. I've spent nearly a decade fighting off aspersions cast on me." She glares at me through her good eye, and I know what she's alluding to.
"You wouldn't even be alive if I hadn't 'swooped in to defend' you!" I shout.
"You wouldn't have had to defend me if your family hadn't tried to kill me!" she shouts back.
There it is, the thing that hovers between us, unspoken but always there. In the short time I've been here, it has been ignored; now, it rears its head. Our allyship, tenacious as it was, lulled me into a false sense of security. She's right. My family tried to kill her, her friends, and a dungeon full of their Order. I'm still a snake among lions.
"Forget this," I mutter. I point my wand at the cloths and they fly into the sink. "Don't worry about helping me, Granger. I'd hate you for you to feel like you have to swoop in."
I cast a silencing charm on my room as soon as the door is shut, and then let out a feral scream. I'm never going to shake the cloak of darkness that I was plunged into. To everyone else, I will only ever be the villain of the story.