Disclaimer: Harry Potter is property of JK Rowling!  I'm sure everybody is aware of this by now.  : ) 

Spoilers/Warnings: Spoilers from all FIVE books.  Some swearing, too, so the weak at heart must leave.   

The Secret Keeper

by fantasm

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war… – James Baldwin

Chapter 2: Dreams and Hypocrisy

Perfectly pinned black hair, full cerise painted lips, precise kohl-lined eyes-

Blaise Zambini quickly appraised herself in her mirror and smiled.  Immediately, pearly rows of even teeth greeted her on the mirrors surface.  She had to admit, she was too beautiful.  It was almost… disgusting.  Almost, she reminded herself with another Miss America smile.

And beauty deserves beauty, so why did she not yet have Draco? 

She meant "have" in the most possessive way; not meaning a couple of midnight, alcohol induced snogs; not a careless one night stand, and definitely not to share with Pansy.  If she were less lovely, less perfect; she would have accepted what she had gotten from him so far- passionate kisses in his bedroom, trinkets and other small gifts sent to her room, and drunken nights under his covers- the things half of the girls at school had gotten from him, as well. 

But that's not what Blaise aimed for.  Her mother had married rich at sixteen, and her unfortunate daughter was seventeen without even hints at a ring?  Pity. 

And that was precisely why Blaise dressed in her most romantic summer dress; doused in perfume, and was traipsing up the marble steps to Draco's room, full white skirt billowing behind her.  She was going to make him love her.  She was going to make it so he was unable to breathe, unable to live unless she was there beside him.

She found him pacing restlessly across his carpet.  He didn't even notice her entry. 

"You look tense," Blaise remarked, sultrily as her voice could manage, as he turned to meet her voice.  "Maybe you should take a break."

"Voldemort hasn't contacted us yet," he said suddenly, worry furrowing his brow. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the Mudblood.  His only instructions were to bring her-"

"Shh…." She delicately brought a finger to his lips and stared up at him pleadingly through the fringe of her dark lashes.

His brow unfurrowed, and a sly grin replaced it. 

"You were here only yesterday," he reminded her with a gently raised eyebrow.  "Already back for more?"

She answered him with a brutal kiss, already beginning to push him towards his bed.  She shoved him onto it, savagely, and she joined him, crushing him with a thousand bruising kisses.  His strong arms wrapped across her waist, pulling her closer. 

Running her hands through his silky hair, she allowed herself to drown into the clear, never-ending blue depths of his eyes.  

And she could only think-

Please let him love me.

***

By the time the light of the pale moon washed through the windows of the Malfoy Manor, its master was already lost in sleep.

Only at morning was this bare sleep blemished with a dream. 

In an ephemeral mixture of fiction and reality, as it rose into his mind.  

There was a lake, foam streaming madly towards the surface, and his dream-ears were filled with sound.  Music… discordant music… no, a muffled terrible voice surrounded him, booming from all sides.  And dumbly, his eyes could focus only on the surface of water. 

A face broke the surface of the murky water, but not human face.  The skin was a slick pale green, a crown of algae lopsidedly scattered across the forest of emerald hair.  Its eyes were a dead black, emotionless beady fish eyes, and from the distance, they focused straight at him.  Its hideous, scar-like mouth suddenly opened and began to move. 

Its unearthly voice floated across the water's murky surface.  It was trying to tell him something, it's eyes were shining wide and bright, and its hands were waving desperately in the air, as if beckoning him closer.     

The creature continued to wail, frantically screeching more incomprehensible words.  Draco fought to move in, but his body was plastered into place.  He fought against this immobility, waving his arms frantically, and scratching his nails through the mystic fog like talons. 

And suddenly, his surroundings began to effervesce.  The dark water, the looming trees, and blue sky above him- all bubbled away from him, and became his ceiling. 

And he was free from his dream, although he had never wanted to be.  He wanted to know what it was saying.  The setting was unnervingly familiar, but he just couldn't remember…  If only he could see it once more-

Draco knew that horrible things happened to people that followed their dreams.  His nemesis, Harry Potter, had learned that the hard way just over a year ago.  When he was younger, his father would tell him bed time stories of pathetic Muggles who dreamt of stout green men leading them to a path beyond the rainbow- and their deaths by falling over cliffs and running into thorny bushes because they never looked ahead.  Just up.  So Draco felt thoroughly guilty about even considering to take this dream further.

He untangled himself from the mess of green and silver sheets around him, washed up, and walked to the kitchens. 

"Young Master," a leathery voice called far beneath him as he entered through the double doors, "Young Master should know what your foolish friends have done." 

The leathery voice in question came from an equally leathery-skinned House Elf.  Its dirty potato sack was all that covered the decrepit, hunched creature, and tufts of white hair poked out of his plate-like ears.  His crinkled face was groveling against the floor with shame, and its spindly legs and distorted feet shuffled uncomfortably before him.    

"Kreacher tried to stop them, yes he did," it mumbled rapidly, a quick attempt at redemption.  "But they wouldn't listen to Kreacher, no, those stupid big idiots, they didn't want to listen to Kreacher."   

"What did they do, Kreacher?" Draco asked, now suddenly alarmed.  The hunched House Elf shuddered dramatically.

"Young Master must stop his foolish friends," continued Kreacher angrily, as his rickety limbs trembled with rage.  "They've allowed that Muggle filth into the most sacred Manor, yes they did, and she's sitting at the patio instead of locked in that cellar ROTTING LIKE MUGGLE FILTH SHOULD."

But Draco had already heard enough.  He crossed the kitchens, temper at boiling point, and he thrust open the wooden double doors that led to the patio. 

And sure enough, there she sat, sitting rigid as china, surrounded by Pansy, Blaise, and Crabbe. 

Blaise's eyes lit up immediately upon the mere sight of Draco, although his face was scarlet with fury and his cold blue eyes were even more forboding than usual.

"Look what we've done to her!" she cried joyfully, as if presenting a newborn child.  "Isn't it wonderful what the Imperius curse could do?"

Sure enough, they had done something to her, she was propped lazily on a chair, head lolling about like a rag-doll.  Her eyes stared vacantly ahead of her, maroon bruises contrasting sharply against her fair skin, evidence of brutality that Draco had not committed.   

"Who knew we'd have our Head Girl as our personal slave," Pansy said, in awe of herself, blue eyes wide with delight. 

"That's not even half of it," Blaise exclaimed, thrilled at what she'd made out of the top of their class.  "Look at what else we can do."

Draco's anger was hardly appeased. 

"What do you think the Death Eaters should do about Mudbloods and Muggles, Head Gryffindor," asked Pansy, clearly amused.

"The Death Eaters should wipe Mudbloods and Muggles clean from the earth that the most consecrated Lord Voldemort inhabits," Hermione replied, expressionless, as if reading lines from a textbook, "Their existence- my existence- is a disgrace to the pure world the Lord Voldemort will create."

"And Mudblood," cooed Blaise in her characteristically feathery voice, "What do you think of Harry Potter?"

A light sparkled in Hermione's otherwise lifeless eyes, but it was quickly diminished.  Her lips opened and closed wordlessly, a silent struggle taking place within her, but eventually the curse rose as the victor.

"Harry Potter is scum," she intoned, in a disconnected voice.  "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named will reign supreme and in that golden era, The Boy Who Lived will meet his rightful end.  Dreaded half-blood, pathetic product of Muggle-" 

At this point, Kreacher, who had been lurking just beyond the doors pressing his flat ears to mahogany, let out a wheezing shriek of laughter.      

This interruption seemed awaken something within Hermione, however, and she stopped mid-sentence and with a contemplative thought, continued on.

"-Harry Potter will triumph over Voldemort, and all those allied with him," she continued, voice rapidly gaining strength, words tumbling faster out of her cerise lips. "Harry Potter will destroy the Death Eaters.  Harry Potter will save me.  Harry Potter-"

"Shut up, dumb girl!" screeched Pansy, who had risen from her seat to land a stinging slap across Hermione's face.  A red mark glowed feverishly on her cheek in its wake.  This seemed to subdue Hermione back into her servitude.

But to watch this scene, was almost as if Draco were watching an old movie flickering painfully before him, a single frame dragging by per second.  He saw the slap extended through time, Hermione's crumble into a complacent, glass-eyed, helpless little child, and then the mark burning on her white flesh-

-and in that exaggerated moment, something snapped within him.     

It might have been something about the way he had been standing there for a full five minutes without so much hearing a "Ferret Boy" or some nasty comment about his mother.  The way her eyes were passed right through him rather than boring hatefully into him; glassy, instead of filled with revulsion as they should have been. 

Or perhaps it was because this scene was all too familiar, a sickening déjà vu, from when he would watch his ever-obedient, ever-proper mother cowering obediently before his father, angry red marks glowing on her face, her arms, her back- 

He was so completely disgusted by this, by her, and at the same time utterly disturbed.  

There was the gnawing desire to hurt her, to grab her powdered face between his hands and scream at her until his throat was raw, because his confusion, in effect, was all her fault.  Why the hell couldn't she stand up to the damn Imperius curse?  The brightest witch of their time, so susceptible to a curse that in an instant stripped her of all her strength and bravery- the qualities that made her the disgusting Mudblood Potter-trio member that she was for the past six years.   

But to see her without these qualities, was infinitely more vile. 

"Get out," he seethed quietly, at first, as his anger boiled to the surface.

And then it exploded.

"Get out, get out, GET OUT."

He shouted at them, half out of his mind, having no idea what he was doing.  He shoved the dainty chairs away from him in all directions- even their intricate wire designs and adorable cushions disgusted him now- finding a sickening release when he heard them clanging on the wooden deck.  Pansy, Crabbe, and Blaise scattered, jumping out from their chairs and running for the doors.  Only Blaise stopped to give him a questioning glance before she spun out of the room, robes trailing dramatically behind her. 

Porcelain and glass fell from the high table and shattered unceremoniously onto the floor.   

And he was left, alone, with the reason for his fury. 

The noise served to stir Hermione back into reality, and she slowly regained control.  Her mind had been trapped within her body, a strange voice shouting instructions, but her resistance was too weak.  Up until only moments ago, she could feel a sensation only describable as a complete nothingness- a void of thought, action, existence.  And then, that's when the voices had started, increasing in frequency and tempo, suddenly angry voices, but muffled.  A tremolo of sounds, incomprehensible but growing clearer- 

And that's when she heard his voice. 

She blinked, and suddenly, everything was suddenly clear.  Her eyes moved from the glass crunching beneath his soles, to the overturned chairs, and the tea spilled over the wooden floor. 

And then she finally saw his face, which was glowering with anger. 

"I can honestly say, Granger," Draco started, in a booming voice, "that in the six years I had to deal with your shit, I've never seen you more repulsive than you were just now.  And you being a pathetic Mudblood to begin with, I mean that in the worst possible way."

"Seeing that I had no idea what I was doing, and still have no idea what the hell I did, it takes a genuine jackass to say that."

"But that's exactly what made you so pathetic.  You have absolutely no clue what you just did.  You had no- fucking- control- at- all." 

"And I suppose you would know how it feels to be under the Imperius Curse, you spoiled prat?" she spat bitterly, tenderly placing her fingers against the red skin of her cheek.

 From the look on his face, Hermione immediately knew that was the wrong thing to say.

"I know better than anyone what the Imperius Curse feels like, Granger.  And it can be resisted, unless you want it to happen."

Before she could even blink, she saw him produce his wand from the folds of his robes and heard the words Imperio escape from his lips, and she felt the now-too-familiar bodily lock down take place again.  Her mind was floating, somewhere far away, watching herself and Draco as if it were a third person in the room. 

Her body was paralyzed. 

He moved closer, too close, dangerously close- she could even feel his breath across her face.  She had expected it to be cold, cold like his eyes, cold like the Dementor's chilly excitement, but it was a warm breeze against her face.   

She could see only his lips, the world around them was blotted away, and she felt a warm hand against the skin of her cheek, and one nestling in her hair.

Give in.  Give in.

A voice was screaming clearly in her ear, shouting orders, and she couldn't understand why.  There was nothing in the world she wanted to do more than this…

But then why did it feel so wrong?

She could count every individual eyelash, see every misplaced lock of hair sweeping across his face…

She closed her eyes.

Kiss him.

Her lips parted.

And another voice interrupted the first-

Remember who this is. 

And that new voice resonated more loudly, until her mind was shot back into her own body, and perfectly in control. 

But there was still nothing she wanted more than to-

Remember Harry. 

She pushed him from her with all of her might and he stumbled back into the clutter of chairs and crunching glass.

Regaining his balance, he was suddenly very much as confused as before, and ashamed.  An overwhelming urge to touch her had filled his judgment, and his mind and body felt impure.  He had wanted her, a Mudblood.  Harry Potter's devoted follower.

In that horrible, deafening silence, there was nothing that could be said to break it.  They stared at each other, almost unbelievingly, both dying for breath. 

And he walked away, leaving Hermione to stare open-mouthed at nothing, all alone. 

He would not allow her the satisfaction of believing a Malfoy would want filth like her. 

But he did.

And that scared him more his what his father would say when he came back with Voldemort, the torture he would endure under hours of the Cruiciatius curse… more than anything.

***

Chapter Completed- 7.3.03

Thanks You:

-To everyone who actually read through the last chapter and this chapter.  My writing is boring, and I am impressed you sat all the way through it!

-For all my super-nice reviewers.  I can't thank you enough.

-To the wonderful person who e-mailed me and completely brightened my morning.  Thanks again!

-To Flexi Lexi: for fixing my stupid mistake.  Never feel bad about pointing out my mistakes!  They're my fault, and I'm happy you pointed it out so I could fix it.

Please:

-Remember to review!  Reviews make me (and all other writers) happy!

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