Ok. The next few chapters need some explaining. They had take place during the same day, though at different times, so it's a bit sporadic and jumpy. ~_~() Sorry about that! All write 'Day One' and such so you can keep track.
Chapter 4
Day One
Pale fingers snapped in time with the brisk beat in his head as Draco practically bounced down the hall, and he would have started humming it if humming wasn't so horribly undignified. And very un-Syltherinish. Who ever heard of a humming Slytherin?
But he couldn't help it… a very un-Draco-like giggled bubbled dangerously in the back of his throat, but he managed to clamp it down, spreading it instead into a wide, smug smirk that seemed to encompass his entire face.
Ahh, life was good.
The soft morning sunlight smoothly outlined his face as he passed a window, and a quiet flutter of birdsong sifted through the air. Draco blinked and paused, cocking his head to the side, gray eyes fixed on the small bird that twittered peacefully nearby. After contemplating it for several moments, he whipped out a wand and cast a stunning spell on it, smirking in satisfaction as it tumbled to the ground in a dazed flurry of crimson feathers.
"Nice aim," commented a measured voice from directly over his shoulder.
Draco, unruffled, turned and found himself face to face with one Blaise Zabini, leaning against the wall beside him. "Off to breakfast?" he queried, his normally impassive face breaking into something resembling a grin.
Draco nodded and continued stalking down the hall, Blaise at his side. Draco glanced over at him and noted the quasi-smile hovering around his lips. "You've heard, then?"
Zabini nodded, half-grin growing into a full fledged leer. "It's too good to be true. Not unexpected, though… although if I'd been turned into a fairy, I'd have done much more than just casting the lot of them into a coma."
Draco snickered in agreement, pleasant visions dancing their way through his head. "Disembowelment, more like," he said dreamily.
"Or decapitation," Zabini continued gleefully.
"Or castration!"
"Or dismemberment!"
The boys sighed wistfully, staring off into space. "Ah, well," said Draco, snapping himself out of his pleasant reverie. "The Gryffindors are comatose, and all is well in the world."
"Ye-es…" Blaise said slowly, "although it will be rather boring without them to harass. The Hufflepuffs are too crybaby-ish, and the Ravenclaws just don't care. But it's always enjoyable to get a rise out of the Gryffindors."
Draco blinked, a small frown flitting over his face. He'd never thought about it that way before… And now that he did, he had to admit that Blaise was right. His day pretty much revolved around abusing Harry Potter, watching those forest green eyes flare with deeply rooted fury, exposing the bitter, antagonistic side of the 'Boy Savior' that only he could unleash…
But he was getting carried away. Draco tugged uncomfortably at his collar where his neck had grown oddly warm. Just shows how much I hate him, Draco told himself with grim satisfaction.
"True," he shrugged, keeping his voice cynically light, striding through the doorway to the Great Hall, "but it'll be a pleasant change not to have all those Gryffindor mudblood-lovers swarming about. And we won't have any classes today, what with all of the teachers turning into broomsticks and pigs."
Draco smirked as he surveyed the room. The Gryffindor table was beautifully silent, and the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff tables were severely depleted. The students at those tables were pale and wary, eyes darting uneasily about, as if they were expecting Snape to jump out of their oatmeal. But as to the Slytherin table… completely untouched.
The pair paused in the doorway, surveying the student body with obvious delight. Blaise indicated the Slytherin table with his head, sneering, "Ah, favoritism is a wonderful thing."
Draco cocked his head to the side, gray eyes catching the light. "I don't know about that," he said slowly, suddenly becoming serious, "I did some reading yesterday. Apparently, when this spell is performed incorrectly, the subject tries to fish people out of their little lands of denial. And we, I think, are the most honest about ourselves. We know we're evil, been there, done that. We know all of our faults and strengths and we're honest about them. There's nothing for Snape to change about us."
Blaise slowly raised one eyebrow, staring at Draco with vague surprise. "You do realize that you sound like Granger, don't you, Malfoy? What are you, a closet nerd?"
Draco immediately bristled, flaring with anger, and whipped about to shoot him a particularly scathing remark, but Blaise was already coolly striding off towards the Slytherin table, completely ignoring him. Draco breathed heavily through his nose, gray eyes narrowing to furious slits as he watched Zabini's receding back.
How dare he compare him, a MALFOY, with that mudblood?? Especially Granger!! He seethed, stomach coiling into a tight knot, digging his nails into his palms. His steps rigid with anger, he strode into the Great Hall, stalking straight into the center of the room on his way to the Slytherin table, fury welling in a tense, bitter wave through his throat.
He had a perfectly acidic remark for Blaise poised on the edge of his tongue, and was rolling the sound of it about in his mouth, relishing in its Draco-ness, when it began. It was barely noticeable at first, just the merest shadow of a tremor rolling through the flagstones beneath his feet. And then it swelled into a grumbling roar, the ground jarring beneath the soles of his feet, and students looked up in surprise as cutlery began to dance and rattle rigidly over tabletops as the trembling grew.
Draco, fiercely aggravated by this new development, swore loudly as he tried to navigate his way across a floor that seemed to be attempting to do the salsa, the tremors so violent now that he could feel the reverberations jolting through his bones.
Draco gasped as he suddenly lost his footing and crashed to the jolting ground, the breath knocked forcefully from his lungs. The grumbling roar grew beneath him as he quickly tried to scramble to his feet, but he was jostled so violently he could barely crawl to his knees before being thrown to the ground again.
The groan of stone grating against stone filled his ears, and he stared in horror as the ground beneath him began to strain and crumble. Vaguely, a small part of his mind registered screaming and panicked figures rushing away from him, but the large part of his mind was focused on the fact that the floor beneath him was disintegrating. With a strangled yell, he scrambled backwards, but with another grating moan, a bulge pressed up from the ground and smashed through the flagstones. A huge protrusion of rock, almost taller than Draco himself (who prided himself on being quite tall), burst from beneath him and bore a loudly cursing and thrashing Draco upwards, shards of stone rattling frantically from its sides and raining on the ground below.
And then, as suddenly as it began, the commotion ceased. Draco clutched at the rock, gasping for breath, his usually immaculate blond hair falling into his eyes, as he dizzily tried to reorient himself. He was staring at a sea of gaping faces; his own face, even though he was lying down, was around level with theirs as they shifted and stared several yards away from him. The Slytherins were staring at him, askance, horrified that Snape would actually attack him, his established favorite.
After taking several moments to get a hold on himself, Draco regained his bravado, and snorted and rolled his eyes at them, gingerly picking himself up and dusting off his robes. He tried to keep the wobbling down to a minimum. He would never have admitted it, but the experience had left him rather jarred. Trying to regain a certain level of suavity, he smoothed back his hair and drawled, "Oh, alas, I am in such pain. This rock is just terrifying. Come on, Snape, you can do better than this; where's my knight in shining armor? Aren't I guaranteed one of those in these Muggle-crap delusions?"
Suddenly, a silver flash whistled sharply past his ear, and with a grating slash, lodged into the rock behind him. The snickers of amusement that had sprung up at his speech quickly turned to gasps of alarm as faces paled and fingers pointed behind him. Raising an eyebrow, Draco whirled around, and froze. There before him, embedded deeply into the stone, was a long, gleaming sword, its golden hilt glowing richly in the sunlight that streamed from the enchanted ceiling. Draco felt his breath catch in his throat, remembering exactly how close that sword had come to his face.
"I asked for the knight, not the sword," Draco said weakly, taking a step back.
He was about to jump off the rock and get the hell out of there when suddenly, the inscription on the side of the sword caught his eye. Curiosity piqued, he hesitated, and then leaned forward, squinting to read the faint, spidery tracery of gold etched into the sword. It wavered oddly before his vision, the words nearly undecipherable. He grabbed the hilt of the sword to steady himself as he knelt, pushing his face closer to the sword in an effort to see better.
This was a bad, bad idea that Draco would bemoan for days to come.
The sharp clang of iron was what first jerked his concentration away from trying to decipher the slender script flowing over the blade. And iron band had clamped itself around the part of the hilt he wasn't holding. Nonplussed, Draco stared at it, and at the flow of links that suddenly grew from it. It wasn't until the chain lashed around his wrist that he began to become alarmed.
"WHAT THE HELL?!?! GET OFF OF ME!!!!" he bellowed, clawing at the iron chain that writhed like a snake as it bit further into his skin. Suddenly, the portion of iron that clasped his writs glowed faintly, and then solidified.
He was latched to the sword.
His jaw dropped in disbelief. He was too horrified to even let loose the stream of expletives that thundered through his head.
He was latched to the sword.
His horror-struck eyes drifted downwards, taking in the fact that the vague weave of gold on the blade's surface, previously barely discernible as writing, had now suddenly solidified into bold letters he could now make out. It read:
HA! HA! SUCKER!!
And below that:
Whosoever pulleth this blade from this stone shall be proclaimed the true love of Draco Lucius Malfoy.
Now that snapped Draco back into himself. "WHAT?!?!?" he howled, "I DON'T EVEN BELIEVE IN TRUE LOVE!!!!" He spat out the last two words as if they were poison, face contorting furiously. "WHAT THE FUCK DOES SNAPE THINK HE'S DOING!!?!"
He yanked viciously at the chain, straining and throwing all of his weight onto it, but it didn't give. He even whipped out his wand and blasted it with curse after curse, but all he managed to do was give his wrist a nice set of lazily waving tentacles.
Charming.
When he looked up again, exhausted and severely pissed off, he saw that the entire Great Hall was deserted, the students having rapidly surged out as soon as Draco had whipped out his wand. Draco was rather notorious for his talent with hexes.
He slumped against the sword, banging his head repeatedly against the rock. He wanted to die.
Well, at least Potter wasn't around to see him like this...
~*~*~*~*~*~
Harry wiped his raw hands on his tattered excuse for an apron, sighing with exhausted relief as he scanned the heap of dinner plates he had just cleaned. Finally, after another full day of work, he was done for the night.
Not for the first time, Harry wondered why the house elves didn't just use their elf magic to clean up the plates. He had a nasty feeling that Snape had designed this spell specifically to torture him with plate-washing. He certainly wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
He staggered over to the far corner, cradling his throbbing hands, and was about to tumble in an exhausted heap into the pile of blankets that constituted as his bed, when a house elf prodded insistently at his thigh.
"What?" he snapped, a bit more brusquely than he had intended, but he was just so tired...
The little elf held a warm plate of food in his hands, and he held it up to Harry, gesturing for him to take it. "Dobby says Potterella take plate to Great Hall!" he squeaked before scurrying off.
Harry blinked down at it, confused. It was nine o'clock at night... the dining hall had closed an hour ago. And why couldn't they just magically transport it up there?
Harry sighed unhappily, trying to keep his weariness at bay, and trudged towards the painting/door at the other side of the kitchen.
He might as well just get it over with...
~*~*~*~*~*~
Fairytale Count:
*Sword in the Stone
*Annoying Disney animal (hey, it counts! The bird Draco blasted could very well
be one of those twittery things from Snow White)