Chapter 2: The Precipice
"It is truly astonishing," said his father, without turning around, "to watch your notion of time grow looser and looser with each passing day." Draco remained silent.
"Sit," his father instructed, indicating a chair to his left. Draco would've rather eaten an acid pop, but unable to think of any compelling reason why, he obeyed. At last, his father turned to face him.
"It is time," he hissed, beginning to pace slowly back and forth on the rug between Draco and the unlit fireplace, "for you to learn the necessary skills to protect your mind against those who would seek to enter it." Draco frowned.
"Occlumency?" Why did his father have to use eighteen words when one would do?
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Surely, you are not asking why one might wish to protect one's mind from attacks?"
"No," Draco retorted, summoning the energy to be annoyed. "I'm asking why anyone would be trying to enter my mind." The moment he spoke he knew he'd made a grave mistake, but to his astonishment, his father simply continued to pace.
"Well, don't. Close your eyes." Draco did, but seconds later they flew open again, for he'd realized, with a horrible jolt, what must come next.
"You-" he swallowed hard. "You're going to-to look inside...my mind?" The last two words came out scarcely above a harsh whisper.
"Only if you do not focus your mind sufficiently to stop me." Draco snapped his eyes shut. Minutes ago the inside of his head had been dull and sluggish, nothing but thick gray fog. So why, now that he needed to empty his mind, had it suddenly cleared? One by one, images flashed before his mind's eye, revolving faster and faster as if on some demoic sort of merry-go-round. The false back in his closet where he'd hidden his broomstick as a child. Sirius complimenting his Disillusionment Charm. Hermione's face, radiant in the sunshine of a June day on the castle grounds. The letter he'd found in his father's study over Christmas his second year at Hogwarts. One by one he closed steel doors over them, his heart racing faster and faster with each slam. The more doors he closed, the more images sprang up behind his eyes. Himself and Blaise in their first year, levitating their classmates' belongings as Professor Binns droned on in the background. Theo in the common room, eyes catching the flickering light of the fire, Olive curled peacefully next to him. Snape forcing him to practice until he could conjure a snake. Steel doors.
"Legilimens!" The spell struck him with such force that he nearly fell to the floor. One by one, his doors began to crack, straining against the weight of some awful power he couldn't see or touch.
Whatever it was, it could certainly touch him. He had the impression a snake was tearing its way through the inside of his head, pushing aside his brain matter or perhaps simply cutting through it, jamming up against his skull hard enough to bruise it. The images were clearer now, and he couldn't just see them; he felt them.
A dirty mirror with a crack toward the bottom, his own face hazily visible within it-but it was wrong, his eyes glowed fiercely blue and his cheekbones were hollow. Theo's boggart. He tried, with everything in him, to close this behind a steel door as well. But he was being drawn into the image in the mirror, pulled down so fast it was like being sucked into a drain. He couldn't remember what a door looked like, much less how to close one.
A little girl's face, streaked with tears but lit with a soft smile that indicated she'd since forgotten them. At first Draco didn't recognize her, but then she held up a toy horse.
His mother hugging him. They were in his bedroom. You mustn't ask these questions, she whispered. He felt his heart stop. If his father saw this...
No. He dug into the most cavernous depths of himself and pulled out every ounce of energy he possessed. When the snake moved again, he met it head-on with a glowing wall of white-hot power, but the snake was still writhing, banging unbearably against his skull, and he was weakening...his wall was flickering...great holes were forming, it wasn't glowing any longer, and then it vanished as quickly as a candle flame in the wind.
And then it was dark. Deep, heavy dark he could feel reverberating off his wounded skull. He wanted to scream from the agony, but he couldn't find it within him to make a sound.
"Pathetic." His father's voice. It was dark...because his father wasn't prodding into his memories any longer. It was over. There was nothing for him to see. He fought for what felt like an hour to open his eyes before realizing that they already were. The parlor came swimming gradually back into view, dull and blurry and pulsing back and forth in time with his pounding head. His view had changed; the fireplace looked very tall, and he could feel something sharp and cool against his cheek. Stone. He was lying on the floor beside the fireplace. His head throbbed with a pain so different from anything he'd felt before that it struck him as wholly unique. It stung from the outside as if his individual nerves were being pricked by needles and ached so badly from the inside that he felt sick. He tried closing his eyes, but somehow, this worsened the pain tenfold. If only he could cry out, but no, sound was still trapped somewhere deep inside.
"Get up." Before he could understand his father's words, hands seized him and wrenched him from the floor as if he weighed nothing. He hit the wall beside the fireplace with such force that he nearly crumpled to the floor again. His hand snatched the mantle of its own accord, only just catching his balance and sending a wave of vertigo through him as though he'd nearly fallen from a great height.
"What is this?" His mother's voice, but he couldn't see her. He couldn't see much of anything, aside from a chaotic mess of extremely desaturated color swirling unpleasantly around him.
"Nothing of note. Your son simply lacks the discipline to empty his mind."
"Lucius…" He couldn't understand what his mother said next. All his life, his father had given him lessons. Today, his mother had interrupted for the first time. His breath caught in his chest and his throat tightened unbearably, and by the time he understood that he was going to cry, it was far too late. He didn't hear his mother approach before he felt her arms around him. Without thinking he clung to her, and for a split second, she let him.
"What did he see?" she breathed, so quietly it was as if he were reading her thoughts.
"N-nothing," he gasped. It hurt to speak. A light shove, and then her warmth evaporated as quickly as it had come.
"Go upstairs."
Reeling from the cold of her sudden absence, he stumbled from the room on legs that no longer felt like his own.
"Oh, thank god." Ginny seized Hermione by the elbow and swept her out of the house the very instant she'd set foot inside. "Someone sane. Let's go." Quite startled, but knowing it was often useless to argue with Ginny, Hermione allowed herself to be dragged unceremoniously out the door and back up the road the way she'd come. Ginny turned sharply down a fork Hermione hadn't noticed before, and as the house disappeared around the bend, an explosion rang out behind them that put Hermione in mind of the Howler Ron had received for flying his father's car to school in second year.
"What on earth's happened?" she asked, alarmed. Ginny rolled her eyes.
"It's a long story," she sighed. "C'mon."
"Where are we going?" Hermione couldn't imagine where the path could be leading, and her trepidation increased as it narrowed and vanished into a particularly dense thicket up ahead.
"We'd be there by now, if you'd stop complaining," Ginny admonished, dragging her along faster. She pushed aside the bushes blocking their path, and Hermione's jaw dropped. They were standing at the edge of a ravine the likes of which she'd once imagined reading children's fairy tales. A creek roared good-naturedly fifty feet below them, and caves dotted the rock face across the way. The towering, gnarled trees and dark, mysterious crevices in the rock put her in mind of dwarves and elves and...of course, she realized with a jolt, there probably were such things as dwarves and elves, after all.
"Whoa," she breathed, awe-struck. Ginny laughed.
"Good, isn't it?" she said casually. "I come here to fly. My brothers don't know it's here, so they're still using the garden and crouching like idiots to hide from Muggles."
"Does anything...live in those trees?" Hermione asked, gesturing across the creek. "Elves, or anything?" Ginny frowned in confusion, but after a few moments her face cleared.
"Oh, I've seen those things Muggles think are elves," she said knowingly. "Like giant fairies with pointed ears, you mean?" She shook her head. "There's no such thing. I mean, there's House-Elves, of course, but…" Hermione frowned.
"House-Elves?" She wracked her brains, but couldn't remember hearing of them before. Ginny shrugged, unconcerned.
"Yeah. They live with rich families as servants, and believe me, they're nothing like giant fairies with pointed ears."
"Servants?" asked Hermione. She hadn't heard of such a thing in the real world-the very word felt like a gross anachronism, as if it had walked off the pages of Cinderella. "You don't mean-Wizards don't...keep servants, do they?" Ginny frowned.
"Well...not all of them, no. You'll mostly find House-Elves in the old Wizarding families these days, passed down generation to generation. They live quite a bit longer than we do, see," she added, blithely unaware that she'd just thrown a Molotov cocktail into Hermione's face.
"But-but surely-" Hermione stammered, suddenly at a loss for words. "Surely there are...well, Elves who don't live as servants?"
"I don't think so," she said slowly. "What's-"
"You're telling me," Hermione interrupted, finding her tongue, "that there is an entire race of magical creatures-" she broke off here, realizing Ginny had never said House-Elves had magical powers. "They are magical creatures, aren't they?" Ginny nodded vaguely and took a step back, evidently stunned.
"Er-yeah, they've got very powerful magic of their own, I think. They often can't use it though, without their master's…" she trailed off, wincing as though she'd made a terrible mistake.
"Without their master's permission?" cried Hermione, aghast.
"Well...yeah, obviously," said Ginny, looking utterly confused. Hermione, however, was incensed.
"What d'you mean, obviously?!" she demanded. "If they've got magical powers, they should be able to use them, shouldn't they?" She paused. "Who decided all of this, exactly?"
"There are laws, calm down." Ginny was looking at her as if she were a large and angry beast one might encounter in Hagrid's lessons. "The Ministry's got all sorts of laws for magical creatures who live among wizards." Did Ginny hear herself?
"But surely there are...Elves involved in these decisions?"
"Elves, in the Ministry? Come off it, Hermione."
"What d'you mean, come off it? It's completely amoral, it's-" she stammered to a halt, unable to think of a stronger word. She felt as if the ground had opened up beneath her feet.
"What's with you?" asked Ginny. "Muggles have got servants, I know they do."
"That's not the same!" cried Hermione. "In the Muggle world, people-people pay their housekeepers, they get...well, sick leave, and-and pensions, and-"
"Well, House-Elves don't want sick leave and pensions," said Ginny at once, as if the idea were absurd. "So it's better, isn't it?"
"Has anyone actually asked them?" Hermione demanded. Ginny shrugged.
"In case you haven't guessed, I've never seen a House-Elf," she said wryly. There was something so inexplicably disarming about her tone that Hermione simply sighed. She wasn't through with the subject, far from it-it would simply have to wait until she could get to the library.
She wanted to know more about these laws Ginny spoke of.
"What's your Mum angry about?" she asked, after a moment. Ginny rolled her eyes.
"Oh, that. Well…" she sighed. "Fred and George had their O.W.L. results back last week, and I'm sure you can guess how well that went." Hermione winced. Fred and George certainly favored making a ruckus in the common room over studying, and from what she'd observed, last year was no exception.
"But then, Mum was cleaning in their bedroom and found this stack of order forms they'd made? With price lists for all this stuff they've invented, fake wands, trick sweets. They were even working on firecrackers, but, well...Mum put a stop to all that. Burned all the order forms, told them they're not to make any more of it. They've been rowing for days. I thought they might calm down a bit once Bill and Charlie arrived, but now they're both involved…" Ginny trailed off, staring intently at something across the ravine. Hermione was reminded powerfully of Draco, though she couldn't have said precisely why.
"That sounds...I mean, are you-er-" she broke off, hating the awkward halt in her voice. Ginny was quiet for a few moments.
"I've always sort of wondered...I mean, I know Mum and Dad love us," she said slowly, much more quietly than normal. "But I've always thought…" she made a sound of consternation in her throat and trailed off. With a jolt, Hermione realized exactly what was reminding her of Draco. She wore the same desperate, fragile expression he did when he was telling her something he didn't think she'd understand, but was desperate to convey nonetheless.
"Ginny, what is it?" she asked softly. Ginny continued to stare across the ravine.
"I...don't want to go into the Ministry," she said at length. "I know that Dad does important work, and I...suppose Percy's probably going to be quite famous someday, and Bill's one of the most successful Curse-Breakers in the country, and Charlie's always got loads of exciting stories from Romania, so it's like…" she paused, seeming to struggle with her words for a moment, and Hermione didn't prompt her. "It's like the rest of us...we've all got a choice, yeah? It's all been done before, so we've just got to pick one and it'll be okay, we'll be okay...but I don't want to pick from a set of lives my brothers have already made for themselves. I guess Fred and George didn't either…" she trailed off, and when she spoke again, it was scarcely above a whisper. "I know Mum and Dad love us," she repeated. "But I've always wondered whether they'd accept me, if they knew what I really wanted. It looks like I've got my answer."
All the air seemed to go out of Hermione's lungs at once, and though she fought to replace it, something sharp stabbed the center of her chest and prevented her. She'd never doubted for a second that her parents would accept her no matter how she turned out; they'd accepted the existence of the Wizarding World, after all, and really, what more could there possibly be after that? At the same time, she couldn't accept that Mr. and Mrs. Weasley-two of the kindest, warmest people she'd ever met-couldn't find it in their hearts to love and support their children no matter what they did with their lives. It was a notion too far removed from reality for her mind to comprehend.
"They'll come around, they've got to," she said decisively. "They're just surprised, I'm sure, and handling it badly." Ginny shrugged.
"Yeah, maybe." She heaved an enormous sigh and turned to face Hermione again. "Harry's arriving tomorrow, in any case. They'll want to be on their best behavior when he gets here."
"Oh, good!" cried Hermione, seizing gratefully upon this new, happier topic. "I wasn't sure whether his aunt and uncle would let him come."
"Yeah. Ron's over the moon. I'm wondering where they're going to put everyone." She grinned. "I'm really glad you're here, Hermione. I've been going mad with only Ron to talk to."
"The groundskeeper sent an owl. He won't be in this afternoon." His mother scarcely looked up from the parchment as she read, then set it aside with an imperious sort of flourish.
"Perhaps the groundskeeper should look into another line of work."
"I shall be sure to suggest it." The smirk that passed between his parents' eyes would've been scarcely noticeable to anyone else, but to Draco it might as well have been raucous laughter.
"May I go?" he asked.
"You've been at the table ten seconds," his mother scoffed. "And you've eaten nothing." That's not what I asked, is it, he longed to reply.
"I'm not hungry," he said instead.
"I seriously doubt that," came his mother's retort. Draco simply shrugged. He'd slept through dinner after his father's ghastly attempt to teach him Occlumency; by all logic he ought to be starving, but instead, the thought of food made him ill.
"I doubt," hissed his father, "that Draco will allow himself to starve to death, Cissy." No. No, he wouldn't. What would it feel like if you did, though, came the old familiar whisper in the back of his head-the same voice that had suggested, last year, that he provoke the hippogriff's wrath to feel its talons dig into his skin. Sometimes, hunger felt strangely pleasant-faintly dissociated from the world around him, not enough to cause distress but simply enough to give the impression of floating. Not an unpleasant way to go, all things considered, hissed the voice.
Draco pushed it away with a shudder.
"Can I go, then?" he repeated abruptly. His father gave him a very cold look indeed.
"No," he snapped. "There are things we must discuss with you." Draco suppressed a groan with difficulty, but remained in his seat.
"As you are aware," his father began, in a voice of deadly calm, "tomorrow is a very important evening not only for myself, but for the Minister as well. Should you and your...ah...friends...find yourselves behaving in such a way as to...embarrass us…"
"I said I was sorry about the ice sculpture," said Draco resentfully, before he could think better of it. He hadn't even broken the stupid thing, it was Blaise, and anyway, who had a bloody ice sculpture in their garden in June, for fuck's sake?
"And I said you're all very lucky Mr. Runcorn was so understanding about the ice sculpture," his father went on. "I assure you that, in his place, I would not have shown the same generosity, which brings us back to tomorrow evening. The Minister shall be playing host to important people from around the globe, and it is imperative that it go well. Certain...events...depend upon it." Draco frowned.
"What events?"
"If they concerned you, you would know." Draco sighed.
"Right. We won't break anything."
"I am delighted to hear it." His father looked far from delighted. "On another note, your mother and I have determined that she shall be teaching you Occlumency for the remainder of the summer holidays." For the first time all morning, Draco sat up straight.
"Why?"
"Your tone of shock is insulting," his father admonished. "She simply has far more patience than I, and evidently, patience will be required for this exercise." He paused. "You may go now." Draco didn't wait to be told twice. His father was wrong, he wasn't shocked...well, he was, but not for the reason his father thought. What did he see, she'd asked, which meant...which meant there were things in his head that his mother didn't want his father to see.
The real question was, which ones? And why?
