Narcissa and Draco Malfoy sentenced!
By Rita Skeeter
Published on July 8th, 1998
Narcissa and Draco Malfoy, mother and son of the well-known and ancient Malfoy house, have been sentenced to a year of parole following the war, further details of their conviction are not disclosed to the public. This unlikely and controversial conviction is a result of Narcissa Malfoy, wife of well-known Death Eater Lucius Malfoy (currently at Azkaban awaiting his own trial), helping Harry Potter in a deciding moment during the Battle of Hogwarts. As for the Malfoy heirs' conviction, it is said that Draco Malfoy's age at the time of the events played a deciding factor in the decision of his sentence. Many now ask: did the Malfoys already get away with it? With two thirds of the family escaping Azkaban already, many hopes of the pureblood ideology which led to this war being eradicated are withering, if their representatives are allowed to continue to live among us. Many have protested the Ministry following this and other convictions, raising doubts and questions over how much space we can give to those who caused the war and deaths of many. If you ask me? They have no place here anymore. More on page 3.
It was oddly fitting, Hermione thought, that on the evening they'd decided to truly begin the attempt at the widely known to be impossible, the northern lights graced the skies for the first time since they had arrived in Norway.
She almost ran their brand-new car off the road when Malfoy pointed out the green and blue hues above. The lights danced like flames across the sky, flickering and shimmering in lovely green and white shades, and she leaned forward as she drove to look at the wide-open space above. The rays moved to a rhythm that only they understood, hand in hand, taunting and bewitching anyone lucky enough to see them.
In this case, Hermione.
Theo had come by again earlier, looking displeased as always. He'd been an uncomfortable reminder of their finicky plan, and how much of it depended on him. The cherry on top of Malfoy's endless questions and criticisms of her well thought out plan. Like he was trying to find a weakness, expose a fatal oversight that would cost them everything, as if he still did not quite trust her to be serious about this.
Which she most definitely was.
"They could track us. You literally have a spell to find people. To keep the badges is bloody stupid, too. And-"
And on and on he'd nagged, and she'd begun to wonder if he even wanted to do this. Even when she explained that she helped create most of these spells and tools when the division was first created and knew their inner workings, and thus, how to evade them too; even then, he'd only sat back with a disapproving, quirked brow.
Still challenging her. Doubting her. Even after they stole a bloody car together. Or more so, she robbed a man of his keys while he stood outside and watched like a helpless idiot. Which made her feel oddly accomplished in…
Stealing a car.
Which thinking back on, she could not remember much after she saw that shiny red car pull into the lot. As soon as that perfect idea, that insanely logical notion took shape in her head, her memories flushed into a mere concept of colours and words and images, of adrenaline, quick decisions and quicker thinking. There'd been this feeling again, the one she'd felt when she decided to help Malfoy.
That little energy in her chest, squirming and pushing out, spreading through her body and lifting her off the earth. That made all of her thoughts go into overdrive and her mind feel light-headed. Quick thinking, spontaneity, doing something no one expected; something she'd last felt in the war. When she managed to escape the most nefarious situations with rapid decisions and instant actions. It was a high she hadn't allowed in years.
And those words she'd said to that man; the smiles and looks, all smooth and perfect, like someone else was doing it. Like she had slipped into another's skin to ask for directions so innocently, swaying her hips when she walked, twirling her hair.
It was intoxicating.
And it had worked, miraculously so; they had a new car, far better than anything they'd expected, and the look on Malfoy's face when she flashed the keys at him – she almost wished she'd taken a picture. He'd been positively stunned. She quite enjoyed seeing him speechless, she had to admit.
Even now, thinking back to it, her pulse still picked up and gushes of air tumbled out of her in nervous giggles. It was exhilarating.
And yet, Malfoy doubted her. The rest of the day after that had felt glorious; riding the high of adrenaline and maybe, crime. It trickled into the next day, until it faded out, and Malfoy slowly reverted back to his snarky, insufferable self. If Hermione didn't know for sure that she wanted to do this, she would have left for his dramatics alone. Because while she knew what he was trying to do – cure an Obscurial - she didn't know why.
After all doubts and questions, they'd still managed to get everything done and prepared to everyone's satisfaction. Because despite Malfoy's… everything, Hermione was beginning to like the thought of doing something so bold.
Healing an Obscurial. Something no one had ever, ever done before, or even attempted. An obliterated memory of an idea, an impression of who she once was. The kind of person to do the impossible. An untethered promise whipping through the wind like a loose leaf, only predicted to do the unpredictable.
Steal a car. Quit the job. Go rogue. How to say this… kidnap a child?
Who would have expected this of her?
No one; and that was the point. So Hermione held on, despite Malfoy's whiplash inducing moods, his somber, almost friendly sort of quiet acceptance, and then his closed off crankiness.
Snatch it, he would have said with a tasteless glint she'd gotten regrettably used to over the past two days; he had an odd air of both relaxation and nervousness. One moment he made a tasteless joke about the crimes they were committing, the next he was pacing the living room with his hands clamped together, rubbing and pulling his fingers. Hermione was far more stressed, no moments of peace and confidence. He had a bit of an upper hand to her in a sense. After all, he'd had years to get friendly with his plan. She'd had about two days.
Barely believable what her life looked like only a week ago. And yet, this was certainly something she could get used to, mostly because it was the exact kind of situation she would have turned away from just days earlier.
Hermione was quite disappointed to see the lights fade as they approached Nordkjosbotn. They snapped her back into the reality of yanking the car into park in front of the dark orphanage.
They sat in pensive silence for a few moments. The digital clock on the car dashboard glowed. 00:00.
"Are you ready?" Malfoy spoke. She glanced over at him, but he was staring at the orphanage standing grand, looming. Eyes intense again, in that way she'd only seen once before. When he'd looked at Anette.
"Yes." She replied with a hushed tone. Lying came so easy to her now.
They left the car unlocked – for speeding away purposes – and charmed their feet and hands with spells to have anything they touched produce as little sound as possible. The moon was hidden behind clouds, and with the absence of the lights, the night was dark, the blackness around them all encompassing. The silence was deadly. Nothing but quiet wind whistling through dead trees and rustling leaves. It felt too grand, too dangerous, a bit treacherous.
The front doors slid open with only one spell and a soft click. But they creaked when they pushed them apart, and it sounded comically loud in the night. Hermione cringed, sucking in air to squeeze through the small gap with Malfoy right behind.
The air was thick and dusty and lethally dark.
"Lumos," Malfoy breathed, and the weak light shone through the empty foyer, throwing flickering shades onto the reception and the many doors leading to various, unknown rooms. The orphanage looked barely hospitable in the daytime, and it was positively haunting at night. With no children and sunlight to swell the air, it only seemed like a desertion of childhoods, an eerie reminder that this is the place where children with dead parents are doomed to spend their lives.
She heard him mutter the locating spell and watched his eyes flicker back and forth, and then finally focusing on a glowing string entirely invisible to her.
"She's upstairs," he mouthed, glancing towards her, and she nodded.
This was the part where they separated.
Like a bell ringing clear through her every vein, Hermione froze. This was real, this was it, this was them breaking and entering, this was them stealing, this was them kidnapping a child. This was what she'd signed up for two days ago, sitting on that pier with Malfoy, desperate for just one thing.
This is for a good cause. We have to do this. To help her.
Hermione's breath staggered, and as if he could feel the tremor beginning in her hands, he looked at her. Clear intent and somber understanding. He raised an eyebrow, as if to ask,
going to back out now? Just as I thought?
Not a chance. She pursed her lips in determination. Doubts and laws faded into the back of her mind, like a lever pulled in her head, the aspect of disproving him made it all disappear. A tunnel vision, her focus recalibrated onto their plan, and what she was to do. With a last nod – and an uncomfortable shuffle of his hand waving in the air between them – he turned his back and the light of his wand shrunk away as he ascended the stairs.
She cast her own spell and moved around the reception, to the door behind.
"Homenum Revelio," she whispered, pointing her wand onto the gap underneath the door – and the light swooped underneath. She exhaled shakily. It was what they'd hoped for, but also made it all the more terrifying.
The door was unlocked with another simple spell, and behind it was, thank Merlin, no living quarters – but a storage room with files, shelves lined with medicine bottles and first aid kits, and much more miscellaneous clutter spread around in trunks and crates. To the right was another door, and the glow from the human revealing spell was threading its last light underneath. As the tip of her wand became the only source of light, everything in front of her threw contorted shadows and the back of the room appeared to be pitch black. Dust swirled right in front of Hermione's eyes and she felt that even her breath would disturb the temporary safety.
High metal cabinets lined the wall to her left and she moved her wand across them, lighting the labels to discern a pattern. Thank Merlin that digital filing had not arrived here yet.
They were sorted alphabetically. The third drawer down was marked 'I-L' and it pulled open with a low metallic screech that made her wince and freeze. She looked up, head turned towards the door behind her. Listening for any sound at all.
But the night was still dead silent.
Gathering a deep breath behind her chest, she pulled it open completely, the drawer not complaining anymore. Clammy fingers sifted through the files behind the divider titled "K" and she found a thick folder titled 'Knudsen'. After quick work of a Replicating Charm, she slid the file back to where it had been, closing the drawer shut. She shrunk the copy and stuffed it into her coat pocket.
Now for the most difficult part.
She swallowed painfully, a stone lain on the back of her tongue, and it stuck in her throat. She stepped towards the door on the right slowly, opening it with ease.
"You can do a false memory spell, right?"
The moment he'd asked her last evening as they'd started working out tonight's plan, she'd felt a pit in her stomach. Yes, of course, she'd said. Too well, actually, she hadn't added.
She had only used this spell once before, at the cusp of a brewing war, in a desperate attempt to protect her parents from a cruel world they understood nothing of. And to this day, they lived in Australia, their memories impossible to retrieve.
Dusty, long forgotten feelings threatened to overtake now when the door opened into another wall of impenetrable darkness. They slashed to the surface, desperate to fight, sloshing and disturbing the still waters of her focused mind. Hermione lifted her wand over her head, and its light shone tentatively into a small bedroom. She saw a carpet first, a large wardrobe to her right, and then, to the left-
Her breath hitched as her eyes fell onto the foot of a bed, heavy duvets hanging down. And when her gaze travelled up, over a sleeping form underneath, she gasped at nothing but her pounding heart. Pressing her hand onto her mouth, keeping in the panicked gushes of air clawing out through her fingers into the heavy air.
She can't hear my steps. We made sure of it. This is the most important part, come on.
Her breath hitched when she stepped forward, feet sinking into the thick carpet. She was close enough to almost see the old woman's head, the shadow of its outline, so she stopped. She could not bear to look at her.
The words rang painfully in her mind, but she forced them out with low breaths. Slow, minute incantations, as she pictured the false memories clearly in her mind.
You will find Anette gone from her bed and disappeared. In the morning, before anyone else woke up, as you were calling the police, I turned up and assured you that we were investigating the disappearance. You do not question how I already knew about it. I was distressed and disheveled. My partner was not with me.
You will find Anette gone from her bed…
She repeated the words, the images moving across her eyelids until she felt that they were securely lodged inside the woman's mind. A tight web of false memories that would kick into action an hour after she woke. Impossible to penetrate, especially not by an underpaid and bored Ministry worker.
Hermione forced her breaths to still when she lowered her wand and stepped backwards out of the room, away from the woman changed. She closed the door and the second one too, locking it with the simplest charm she could think of. Finally, she could feel the air in her lungs again.
And right then, footsteps fell above her, growing closer to the end of the room overhead and then softly, down the stairs. Malfoy carried a larger light with him now and she immediately shot another silencing charm towards his feet.
"Do you-"
The words died in her throat when she saw the tiny body cradled in his arms, carrying her bridal style
"She's just sleepy," he whispered as he got closer, arms wrapped tightly around the hollow of her knees and her shoulders. Hermione tensed up immediately, unconsciously, but then she saw her for the first time. Up close.
Anette was almost sleeping, curled against Malfoy's chest. One arm was wrapped around his neck, her naked feet dangled in the air, and she was wearing mismatched pajamas, with a brown teddy bear pressed tightly against her chest. Her bleary eyes squeezed shut at the exchange of words above her, flickering beneath her lids. Rubbing her face deeper into his shoulder, an attempt to elude the noise and light. Hermione's heart was pounding uncontrollably, making it difficult to see for a moment.
This was the thing that killed her adoptive father. There was a dark, destructive force inside of her, capable of murdering people-
This was also just a child.
It was a stolen moment in the orphanage's foyer, too long and too unimportant. But it mattered more than anything to Hermione, right then. To be so close to an Obscurial, for the first time in her life.
She could not help but stare in wonder. And Malfoy was watching her, for once, without a snide remark ready.
"Come on," he whispered. "Touch her."
1. Any and all physical contact with an identified Obscurus will result in immediate death.
She looked at him, the words that had been ingrained into her mind for the past few years pounding with relentless rhythm. His wand was pinned in the crook of his elbow, a warm glow spread out between the three of them. For the first time she could think of, his eyes were not cold and void, empty, freezing abysses of disdain, or glinting razor sharp. The low, orange light made them warm. So contradictory.
Almost understanding. Like he knew exactly what this meant to her.
Not like. He did know.
She gnawed at the mellow inside of her mouth, looking at him for one last time – before she raised a hand, the backs of her fingers hovering above Anette's cheek. A last shaky breath.
Her skin was warm and soft, and she moved slightly at the disturbance. Hermione exhaled with a shudder. Watched sleepy eyelids peeling apart in tired delirium, rubbing her head deeper into Malfoy, before she closed them again.
But that was the thing about stolen moments; they never lasted long.
"Her bedroom is the third door on the right. There are three other children sleeping in there, the Muffliato should still be affecting them."
Hermione pulled back, nodding, and they went their separate ways again.
Upstairs, she found the room exactly as he'd described. There were four beds, two on each side, all but one filled with children sleeping peacefully. Hermione kneeled down beside the empty bed frame, the first one to her right, and she slowly began moving the tip of her wand across the sheets and pillows, mouthing spells as she went. They tore and ripped the fabric apart; shredding through the mattress and planting the seed of a very slow ember, incapable of escalating into an actual fire. The wooden bedframe began to fall apart and rot under her incantations, turning into an unpleasant grey and charcoal sinking into itself.
The small nightstand beside the bed suffered the same fate, and she filled the emptied drawers with shrapnel and ashes, leaving no room to wonder about her belongings.
And lastly, she straightened up, and sloshed black and grey markings around the wall behind the bed and the floor surrounding it. The telltale mark of an Obscurial inflamed in its sleep, a slow but deadly process. A rare occurrence that had no victims but the Obscurus itself, the aftermath of which she had actually seen herself in a Mexican foster home once.
She stepped back when she was done, pointing her light at the end product. A smouldering, destroyed scene that reeked of death. Something no one would want to look at longer than necessary.
It could have fooled even her. She turned on her heel to leave the room.
The foyer was completely dark and empty, and Hermione hushed through it, a stressed step pushing her forward. And then, when she slid out into the dark, cold night, finally, an air of victory descended down upon her.
Their plan had worked. Everything was taken care of. Anettes' death was faked, Hermione's false disappearance had eyewitnesses, and she even had her file. Everything worked out perfectly.
She turned her face towards the sweet night sky, the moon, freed from clouds, smiling back at her, absorbing the relief.
"Granger, stop wasting time!"
Of course, her moment of happiness could never last too long; Malfoy made sure of that. Whatever moment of understanding he'd had in the foyer ten minutes ago, that part of him had died.
Hermione skipped down the stairs, towards the now black car – its shiny red was far too eye-catching, and so was the identifying license plate, all of which they'd changed – and rounded the hood to get into the driver's seat. The passenger was empty, and only then she noticed that Malfoy was in the back, Anette stretched out across the other two seats with her head in his lap. Sleeping peacefully.
Her eyes wandered up to meet Malfoy's, barely visible from the streetlight outside. But he was looking down at Anette with a sort of softness in his expression that made something in her chest twinge. Like she was intruding on something.
He looked up then, disturbed at the lack of movement. His eyes were hard again.
"I know we have all night Granger, but maybe we should leave," he whispered sternly; as disparaging as it was quiet, scolding her while keeping Anette asleep. Hermione sniffed in quiet protest, but started the car nonetheless.
They had a long night ahead of them, because their plan wasn't actually all done yet. They had until the following morning for the next stage:
Theo's problem.