The Pale Boy's Secret

by Asleep

Note: Here it is, sorry for the wait. Let me know if there are errors in this one...

From now on, I'm hoping the chapters will be getting a bit longer. And scroll down for a nice "Thank You" section.


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Chapter Three: Draco - A Lot of Revelation


Draco Malfoy was sitting on a cold, stone floor. Actually, it wasn't as bad as it sounds--in the room was a large bed and even an armchair (which looked loads more comfy than the ones in the Slytherin common room). In fact, someone had even laid out tea and toast with butter and marmalade. But Draco was so put out about being tied up that he seemed to want to be as uncomfortable as possible for the sake of being contrary to whomever had kidnapped him.

"Damn rope. Wish I had my wand."

Draco's hands and wrists were raw and scraped with rope burn. Ever since he had woken up in this room (he suspected he'd been there for at least a day) he had been trying many methods of freeing his hands, which were bound with an extra thick rope. He was beginning to get rather desperate, and the more desperate he got, the more inventive and rediculous his methods for removing the rope grew (among these methods were banging the rope on the floor and trying to talk his hands into becoming smaller).

Draco was seriously considering the notion of gnawing his wrists off when there was a funny noise. He looked up just in time to see a doorway form out of nothing in one of the stone walls.

When Draco saw who was at the other side of the wall, he couldn't restrain himself. The cold, defiant look that normally graced his face vanished and was instantly replaced with one of utter surprise.

"Mother?"

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At Hogwarts, things were beginning to get a bit out of hand. Rumors about Draco Malfoy's disappearance were spreading as quickly as fire--and getting stupider even more quickly. Hermione heard a series of pretty weird theories that involved mutant toads, but these weren't the worst of them. In fact, professors were having quite a difficult time teaching (Professor Snape had to stop every few minutes, one Potions class, to chastise Pansy Parkinson and some other Slytherin girls and order them to cease the animated discussion they were having about how awful it would be if Draco's silvery hair were messed up during a struggle).

"They're starting to get really worried," said Hermione in the commonroom after dinner the next day. "If Malfoy's run away, he's not at home. His mum and dad are apparently going mad at Professor Dumbledore about letting whatever happened happen to him."

Ron laughed loudly. "Oh, right. As if anyone would care if that stupid prat got himself blown up, let alone kidnapped."

Harry was about to agree, but decided against it at the look Hermione gave Ron. Sensing a lecture about sensitivity in a grave situation, he instead said, looking across the room, "What's Professor McGonagall's doing here?"

Hermione and Ron follow Harry's gaze. Sure enough, Professor McGonagall, the head of the Gryffindor House (who was rarely seen in the commonroom) was pushing her way through the crowds of students.

"Hey," said Ron after a few moments. "Hey, she's heading for us!"

Indeed, Professor McGonagall seemed to be walking straight towards the three friends, looking rather grim. When she finally reached them, she looked sharply at Hermione.

"Miss Granger, please come with me."

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As Hermione followed Professor McGonagall through the dark corridors towards what Hermione presumed would be her office, she noticed that the hallways seemed much less inviting under the cirumstances (although she was not yet sure what these circumstances were). She had left Harry and Ron, very confused, in the commonroom. They didn't dare, of course, ask Professor McGonagall if they could accompany her, but she now wished they all had at least tried. She found herself feeling very small and alone without them by her side. With a deep sense of foreboding, she struggled to answer the questions that were chasing each other through her head.

Why had she been summoned so late at night? What had she done? Why did McGonagall look even more serious than she usually did?

What bothered Hermione most was the fact that she could not answer these questions, a problem she never usually stumbled upon.

"In here, Miss Granger."

Hermione looked up, now feeling quite miserable. Professor McGonagall was holding open the door to her office, indicating that Hermione go in. Hermione's usual confidence deserted her altogether as she shuffled nervously through the doorway.

Inside, Professor Dumbledore, the headmaster, was sitting in an armchair before the fire. The sight of him would, under normal circumstances, have cheered Hermione up a bit. But Dumbledore's usual smile, like Hermione's confidence, seemed to have flown from his face. It left him appearing nearly as grim as Professor McGonagall, a look which did not suit him at all.

Gesturing to a chair, he spoke to her.

"Please, have a seat, Hermione."

Although being called by her first name made the situation seem a bit friendlier in her eyes, Hermione fidgeted anxiously with a tiny hole in her robes as she sat down. Glancing about the room, Hermione noticed a snowy owl sleeping in a cage. This came as a surprise as she had been in Professor McGonagall's office before and had never seen an owl there.

Professor McGonagall sat down and started rearranging papers and books on her desk. McGonagall, Hermione realized, seemed to be as nervous as she was.

Hermione's attention was drawn back to Dumbledore as he extracted what looked like a letter from the folds of his purple robes. He said gently, "This appears to be for you, Hermione."

Taking the letter from his outstretched hand, Hermione looked at the front of it. It was blank except for her name, which was written in a hasty scrawl. Noting that the envelope had already been opened--"Precautions," Professor McGonagall said--Hermione pulled a very short letter from it. Smoothing the crinkled parchment out with trembling hands, she read:

Come to the Leaky Cauldron in Diagon Alley tomorrow night. You alone can bring Draco Malfoy back, Hermione Granger.

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Although the face of the person who stood before him was shadowed by a hood, Draco recognized the long, silvery hair and slender figure.

"Mother?" he repeated.

The woman sighed and lifted the hood of her cloak to reveal a pale face. Sure enough, Draco's mother stood before him--or so it looked.

How could this be his mother? How could this be Narcissa Malfoy? The more Draco looked, the less he recognized about her. The cold hardness in her eyes had been replaced with a certain sadness. She had deep circles under her eyes. She did not even carry herself the same way--Draco's mother stood tall and stiff, while this woman's figure was more relaxed and awkwardly slouched. She was also nervously fidgeting with her robes; Draco's mother never fidgeted, but always kept herself composed. She must have used the Polyjuice Potion...

For a moment, Draco was speechless. He and the strange woman stared at each other. Suddenly, he remembered himself. His eyes regained the coldness that he had inherited from his mother. He fixed the silent woman with a piercing glare.

"Who the hell are you?"

The woman seemed to regain the power of speech.

"I--I'm your--mother," she said shakily, in a foreign voice, quite unlike Draco's mother's.

"Oh right," he sneered. "And I'm a houself wearing a velvet dress and dancing shoes."

The harshness of his tone seemed to catch upset the woman immensly (which he considered to be ironic, considering which of the two was sitting on the floor with his hands tied). Each word seemed to be like a slap in her face, for she flinched when he spoke. But Draco wasn't finished yet.

"I see you've used the Polyjuice Potion. I don't know what for, but let me give you a bit of advice: If you're going to use it, at least make it convincing. You're nothing like my mother."

The woman had lost her voice again. She looked even more pathetic than before. The corners of her mouth had turned down in a sad frown and her eyes were full with tears which she was making no effort to repress. Draco found the sight overwhelming and turned away from her. He wished she would speak or at least move--anything but stand in the doorway and stare.

"Look," he muttered, avoiding her gaze. "Whatever ransom you want, my family will pay it. I promise. They're used to this sort of thing. I've been kidnapped before..."

As if Draco's last comment had jerked the woman suddenly from a trance, she straightened up and moved, for the first time, toward him.

"You're wrong," she said indignantly, as if his suggesting this were utterly absurd. "This isn't about money. And I am your mother."

Draco, rather taken aback by her sudden burst of words, frowned at her wordlessly.

"You're correct, however, about one thing," the woman continued. "There is Polyjuice Potion involved..."

She dropped her stern look. Her eyes filled again and she bit her lip.

"...Only I'm not the one who's using it."

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Hermione looked over the top of the letter. Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall were both watching her intently as if they expected her to speak, but Hermione did not know what to say. There was a long silence which Dumbledore finally broke by clearing his throat.

"Hermione," he said gently, "what do you make of this?"

Hermione did not know what to make of it at all. She stared blankly back at the professors as she tried to make sense of the letter. Who had sent it? How could she, a muggle born, and Malfoy, a son of one of the richest and snobbiest families in the wizarding world, be connected in any way other than their mutual loathing of each other? When she had first read it, she had thought it must have been a joke, but then why would she have been called into Professor McGonagall's office so late? Why would they both be looking almost as grave as they had the night Cedric Diggory died?

"I don't know," she finally said in a very small voice.

Dumbledore sighed. "Well," he began, "to be frank, we didn't think you would."

He paused, as though waiting to see if she would say something, but Hermione was concentrating on the now throbbing feeling in her stomach and didn't feel much like talking. Dumbledore went on.

"We are taking this letter quite seriously, but we have decided not to alert the Ministry of Magic."

"But--but why?" Hermione said, rather shocked. "I would think that you'd want to get the Ministry involved with something like a missing student."

Professor McGonagall said bitterly, "Cornelius Fudge would try show up at Diagon Alley with a squad of Aurors and eighty dementors, all ready to perform the kiss." McGonagall seemed to have lost quite a lot of respect for Fudge, the Minister for Magic, ever since the year before when he had allowed a dementor to perform the kiss on someone before he had testified.

"That," Dumbledore said, "is exactly what we don't want to happen. Not only would it not be fair, but I believe I know who the sender of that letter is."

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Draco was sitting in the armchair, hands untied. His suspicions were confirmed--the chair was a lot more comfortable than the ones in the Slytherin common room. But that's not what he was worried about.

His mother was busy boiling water for more tea; the tea that had been laid out had long since turned cold. But, Draco reminded himself angrily, she was not his mother. For Draco was still very much convinced that the woman could not possibly be his mother. Sure, there was a definite resemblance at first glance, but anyone who had met his mother would surely know that this was not she.

Like right now, for instance, he thought. Mother never makes tea. I've not seen her set foot in a kitchen in my life. He saw the unpleasant but farmiliar image of his mother, who always seemed to have a cup of tea in her hand, being brought tea by a servant, never bothering to say "thank you."

Perhaps it was the belief that the woman who stood fixing tea was not his mother that drove Draco to examine her features. She was quite beautiful, a quality he had never associated with his mother. Her beauty was strange and unearthly, like nothing he had ever seen before. She didn't seem to care much about her appearence, though. Her silvery hair had been roughly shoved into an untidy braid as though it were a nuisance; her nicely shaped lips had been bitten and were dry, cracked, and peeling; there was no trace of make up or anything of the sort on her face. The sight of Draco seemed to oddly please the woman and she often glanced at him and smiled weakly, something his mother rarely (if ever) did.

Despite his annoyance at her for kidnapping him and pretending to be his mother, Draco wished for a brief moment, that this pretty woman were his mother. But he quickly banished this thought from his mind.

"Here you are, dear," the woman said, pushing a hot cup into Draco's cold hands. She did this rather awkwardly, as though she didn't know how to act around him. Settling herself against a wall, she watched him.

Draco didn't touch his tea. "You haven't explained anything," he said, laying the cup down on a little table next to his chair. He crossed his arms and scowled.

This seemed to be what the woman had been dreading, because she immediately went back to fidgeting, balling and unballing her fingers into fists nervously. She began pacing the room, which irritated Draco immensly.

"I guess," she said, finally stopping pacing, "It all started when I was a child. You see--"

"I don't care," Draco interrupted, "about your damn childhood. Just tell me why you took me here."

The woman crumbled under the look he gave her as if it broke her heart. Draco looked away from her for the second time.

"I came to tell you the truth," she said slowly, after a moment. She wasn't looking at him anymore, but at a corner of the room, as if she could see something there. "I brought you here, took you out of school, to tell you about my past and your past. To tell you about what kind of a man your father is."

She said this last sentence fiercly. The coldness that Draco recognized in his real mother returned to her eyes. He shivered, but she didn't see.

"So," he said, sneering slightly. "Enlighten me, please. Who are you? What kind of man is my father? And what of the Polyjuice Potion that you so cleary use but deny it?"

The woman looked at him again. She stared determinedly and for once seemed not to be affected by the way Draco looked at her.

"Your father's raised you to be just like him," she said decidedly, as though this had just occured to her for the first time. "I tried so hard to prevent that when you were little."

Draco couldn't think of what to say to this. He was annoyed that he could no longer control the woman's emotions by giving her venemous looks.

She sighed and leaned against the wall again, looking away from him again and staring into space. "I suppose I'll start with the Polyjuice Potion, since that's what seems to interest you. The woman you think is your mother isn't," she said. "You think she is, but she isn't. I'm your mother. I gave birth to you. I raised you until you were five."

He blinked and stared. The woman seemed lost in thought.

"Do you remember your nursemaid?" she suddenly shot at him, finally facing him.

Draco nodded, dumbstruck. He remembered. Marielle, his nursemaid, the one who always kept her face hidden with a scarf from under the eyes down, the one who never spoke. She had taken done everything for him when he had been little--she had cooked for him, bathed him, taken him to the park. He remembered, suddenly, the way her eyes would crinkle at the corners, showing that she was smiling. He had loved her.

The woman smiled rather wildly as he remembered. "See?" she said triumphantly. "That's what kind of a man your father is. That's what your father made of me. I'm your mum and you only knew me as your nursemaid."

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I hope that was okay. I had to wait a while to finish it because I had an English essay to write. The "thanks" section is in order of the reviews.

Thank you to everyone who has reviewed, whatever they said, thus far (because I love seeing
my name in "thanks" sections):
All's Well that Ends Well, Lorelai, Someone-Who-Reviewed-Anonymously, Hermione2, julie, Lyra, Dendraica, "noyb", Pansy Parkinson, Jess, Kacella, trowa barton, Heir of Darkness, Draconia, Ravenclawizard, Margaret Comer, Lelio, Sylph, Angel, LadyLady, Maya Papaya (thanks for reading it!), Cleary, Firecloud, Selphie, Malfoy's Girl, Lady Mags, Hope Murphy, Thea, Ts, and Prongs*.
"Fanks" to you all!

Love, Sophia