A/N: I guess this is what happens when I take a hiatus from fic and read a bunch of Lovecraft stories in the meantime. Still, Draco deserved it.
The End of The Hogwarts Rowing Society
The Hogwarts Rowing Society seemed like a smashing idea until nearly everyone stopped showing. Word was, there was something fishy about the Giant Squid. Well, der. Draco smirked, contemplating the unfortunately droll wording. It was a fucking fish, wasn't it?
So here he was, trying to finish his seventh year and reintegrate himself into the reluctant acceptance of his wizarding peers, and he was at one end of a canoe with his former abductee and torture-victim, Luna Lovegood, balancing out the other. Life was grand.
But wait! It got grander.
Somewhere in the vicinity of the supposed center of the lake, just as the gray mist began to tickle their ears, Luna let her oars hit the water with a splash. Likewise, Draco ceased rowing and craned his platinum head around to see what was the matter. Her big, dreamy eyes were bigger and dreamier than ever. She was muttering beneath her breath.
God. God. Luna Lovegood was having some kind of, what, some kind of post-traumatic fucking episode, and he was going to have to row them both back to shore and like it because it was his fault, he tortured her and watched crazy Aunt Bella do a tap dance to the rhythm of her Cruciatus-induced thrashings, and what the fuck, why was she even in a canoe with him? What was she thinking? Did she ever think? Really think?
Draco jumped. An immense shadow flashed in and out of visibility beneath the surface of the water, quite near the canoe. A thrill traversed his body from scalp to tailbone, and he nearly leapt from his seat as goose-bumps broke out along his entire form. The thing—the creature, for it moved with every sign of life—was in view for a mere second, but the sight remained imprinted on his brain for the rest of his life. The foremost of the animal was a squid—or, rather, like a squid—but the rear two-thirds was disturbingly anthropoid. Perhaps worst of all, just before it darted from sight, two great extensions fanned out from its sides, as though it shot out enormous flippers or wings to aid its movement through the water.
"That's not a squid!" Draco squeaked, his knuckles white on the oars. The piercing octave of his voice immediately rendered him ashamed, and he sniffed, curling his lip into an imitation of his mother's permanent, haughty sneer.
Shite, Draco, he scolded himself. You're as bad as all the other lily-livered old ladies sitting for their N.E.W.T.s.
One would have expected the Dark Lord (and related horrors) to kill the lesser fears out of him. He tossed a loose lock of hair off his forehead and turned again to his rowing companion.
"Snap out of it, Loony," he said. Sure, he was a bastard, but she knew that already, and there was no one else here to witness his bastardly behavior. It made him feel bolder, ordering her so. "Blow the nargles out of your nose or whatever and get ready to fish your oars out of the water. I'll row us back a piece and—"
Luna sucked in a great gasp and shuddered violently. Her eyes, huge and unseeing, yet fearful, as though she looked on some invisible vista all around them, went still rounder, and her muttering rose to a tremulous, wailing kind of chant.
"What?" he asked, baffled.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu Hogwarts wgah'nagl fhtagn!" she repeated. Or some such nonsense. He only caught Hogwarts, really.
"Fucking what?" he snapped. Maybe if he poked her with the oar—
But the resulting splash of the paddle sweeping from the lake's dark, misty, mid-morning surface was too profound. In the same moment, as though the mysterious shadow in the lake made itself manifest in the air, a cool darkness fell across the front of the canoe and covered him like a pall.
Slowly, slowly, Draco turned to face the thing which was not the Giant Squid and, let's be honest, probably ate the Giant Squid like a Chicken McNugget weeks ago when the "fishy" rumors first started circulating. He didn't even think to go for his wand. Not that it would have saved him. The Avada Kedavra would bounce off this thing like a wad of parchment. The gigantic, scaly, alien monstrosity was in all ways too enormous and too abominable for the scant seconds of study allowed, but Draco saw its long, narrow wings beating against the water like membranous beaver tails, keeping its unspeakable upper half aloft. He saw its claws, like the spikes used to kill vampires, curving toward him, and he was so numb with awe and terror, and he felt so bloodless already, that he barely perceived the sharp points slide between his ribs. Life was already seeping out of him as he felt himself lifted upward, felt his feet leave the canoe, heard the thumps of the oars knocking against the wooden surface as they fell.
Below its maddening, unutterable eyes, muddy green tentacles waved and snatched at his white face as though each possessed a separate will and volition. The great toothed maw in the center grew wider and wider as Draco drew closer and closer.
Luna came back to the mortal understanding of consciousness, alone in a precariously unbalanced canoe. There was only one oar, lying longwise and crimson-spattered where Draco ought to have been sitting. Blinking, pressing her hand briefly to her temple to stifle a terrible headache, she crawled toward the oar, taking care not to upset the canoe.
Seated in the center, she peered around. No Draco alive. No Draco dead. No anything, really. The lake was so vast, and she hardly knew how long or how far she had drifted. She took out her wand and cast the Four-Point spell. Any internal grasp of direction seemed to have utterly fled her, pushed out by a single, insidiously troublesome impression, which was merely this:
I've been dreaming, she thought, and I've awakened. And so has something else.
A/N: Obviously, Luna's "nonsense" statement is stolen directly from H.P. Lovecraft: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." Translation: "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."