Disclaimer: This is all for fun, I do not claim ownership of the characters or anything recognized from the work of JK Rowling. I am only borrowing them.
Warning: Mature themes, subject to change: mild violence, strong language, substance use or abuse, scenes of a sexual nature as well as general innuendo smattered throughout, adult themes including but not limited to death and disease both mental and physical.
[A/N] June 5th, 2016. Happy Birthday, Draco Malfoy!
One of the longer updates I've had in awhile, and this chapter took a while to get to me. Thank you immensely to everyone who continues to take the time to review and read this story. Seriously, the last round of reviews has really helped to accelerate the muse for this story. The questions more than anything help the process. The plot is moving right along, and now that we've reached right around 60k words, I think that this may be wrapped up in 100k. Don't quote me on that!
I am also quite active on tumblr with the same username, that is the best place to reach me for questions!
Playlist: The Resistance (Muse Cover) - 2cellos | Hold Up - Beyonce | Mutiny - Hans Zimmer
Saturday, August 6th, 2005 | 1:14 am | Loch Lomond
Insufferable was a generous description of that girl, that woman, who insisted on vexing him constantly, when he could not in good conscience remove himself from her vicinity.
The cauldron explosion must have broken the silencing charms. He did not lack...touch, as she put it. Amateur, he could admit begrudgingly, allowing a cauldron to explode. When was the last time he had...of course. The day after Tracy Davis's charm test. Draco tried to insist he not brew so soon afterwards, and there were blue scars on his right shoulder blade to attest to his bullheadedness.
Insufferable witch.
Severus moved around the potions lab, inadvertently at half the volume as before. The cauldron pieces vanished to nothingness, since the melted parts were beyond reparo. Constant work on the Dark Magic Banisher the last several years left his other potions and projects dusty and neglected. The work, though devastatingly important, wore on him, but these short forays into the other portions of research did nothing but frustrate him, since they always brought him back to the original issues.
What curse had Bellatrix used on Hermione, through that knife? There was no doubt in his mind the bastard Tom Riddle could claim ownership of its creation. The similarities between the wounds of the others to his and Draco's Dark Mark's were more than uncanny: they were obvious. Embedded runes twisted within the magical cores of each victim, fueling itself like a parasite off a host.
Why, then, he wondered, was Hermione not responding to any form of treatment, if her curse wound was the same as his and Draco's? They'd ruled out the voluntary aspect. Severus would never deny he'd chosen the Mark, but Draco was forced physically, mentally, and emotionally to submission to receive his own.
He resisted throwing another set of beakers against the wall, crushing them beneath his fingers instead to relish the distraction of blood, pain, to remove himself from the cyclical thoughts plaguing him. Copper salted the back of his tongue as a line ran from his palm down towards the crook of his arm. Drying into trails painted criss-crossed across his Mark, Severus sneered at his own youthful folly.
But, the blood caught his attention again, the way it covered the skull and snake...rather, how most of it avoided the black magical ink. Two ends of a magnet, the Mark and his blood, resisted each other except for the thinnest sheen, drying to a second brittle skin.
Could it truly boil down to one simple oversight, a common trait shared by those dozen remaining patients without a cure in sight?
Saturday, August 6th, 2005 | 5:43 am | Loch Lomond
Draco stirred like a cat, eyes open immediately but his body reacting in a slow, sinuous ripple.
"Good," said a voice near the end of his bed. "You're awake."
"Bloody hell," Draco shouted, throwing the covers off and arming himself with the nearest weapons: a wand and his feather pillow. "How long have you been standing there?"
His godfather ignored his accusation, speaking over his shoulder as he stalked out of the bedroom. "Get dressed for brewing. I've made tea."
His feet, bare against the carpeted floor, made small shuffling noises as he flopped back onto the mattress. "Crup fucker, it's not even six in the morning..."
"It's early as hell," agreed Hermione from the hallway, "but he woke me up an hour ago."
With his arm thrown over his face in protest, he didn't see her move to the bed, but he did feel her sit next to him and her chilled hand rest on his chest over his shirt. She didn't say a word, and the two friends sat in mutual silence, only the quiet sounds of tea cups and the kettle in the other room interrupting the peace.
"He's found something, hasn't he?" mumbled Draco. The exhaustion from the day's work before ate at his bones and dragged at his eyelids.
He imagined she nodded, before he heard a shaky inhalation. Her hand on his chest remained steady, warming from his body heat. "Yes. We need you to open the copy of the Pure-Blood Directory."
That made Draco sit up.
Hermione's hair piled on top of her head in one of her favored top knots, curls spilling everywhere, telling him she hadn't fixed it since waking. Her face, so gaunt after the Hogwarts ceremony, was filling out again after he and Severus quietly fed her as she studied. The pace of the curse. attacking her body until she wasn't much more than a waif, and ebbing back to allow her more normalcy made their heads spin. If Severus had found something, anything, that could slow or stop this...he wouldn't complain at the early wake up call.
"It's downstairs," he mentioned as he stood to get dressed. The warning to cover for brewing wasn't lost on him. "Have you both eaten yet?"
"When I wasn't trying to throw more biscuits at him?" Hermione joked. She rubbed sleep from her eyes, the upbeat tone draining from her voice the next instant. "He's insufferable, tenacious, won't let an idea die -"
"Remind you of anyone?"
"Shut up, prat. But I've run a few numbers-"
"Of course," Draco teased, pushing her shoulder lightly as he walked past her on the way out his bedroom door.
Hermione pushed back, a little more force behind her shove than his, and hissed, "Stop interrupting! You're insufferable, too! As I was saying I ran an arithmantic equation and I won't be able to unlock it without that book."
"You flatter me," Draco continued to tease her, the same warm feeling in his chest as the night before with her spirited responses. This was the Hermione he'd befriended in university, a Hermione that fought back and didn't crouch in corners, a Hermione with fire in her blood. "I strive for insufferability, yours and Potter's reactions are too priceless not to barb you."
"The more you focus on Harry, the more I'm going to believe you've had a crush on him this whole time."
When the two of them, both holding Masters and degrees in several subjects, reached the kitchen ,Severus observed as the two adults deteriorated to children in a slap fight. Rosy cheeks and grins belied the true intentions behind the bickering, and made him roll his eyes.
"If you've quite finished," he grumbled, drinking deeply from his mug of oolong.
Draco's grin relaxed but didn't fade completely as he sat at the island table next to Severus. The trio ate in silence while Draco woke up fully with the aid of strong tea, and a small bottle pushed pointedly in his direction from Severus. Nutrient replenishing potion, stronger than a vitamin supplement, would assist his recovery from holding the Wards.
"So," Draco said after the final slice of toast was buttered on Hermione's plate, preceded by sliced tomatoes and a hard boiled egg, "the Directory."
Severus nodded, wiping the crumbs from his face caught in the morning stubble he hadn't cared to remove yet. "I've explained to Hermione what we'd neglected to inform her on before."
Draco sipped his tea, carefully choosing his words in order to ask Severus for further clarification. There were, unfortunately, many possibilities of what details she wasn't aware of. He didn't have to wait long, but it was Hermione who piped in.
"My memories are still at St. Mungo's," she began, "so I cannot see them for myself. I don't want to, anyway, and don't start with me on reverse Occlusion, Draco. Snape explained what you both saw with my core, how it fought against the curse."
She paused to take a breath, and finish the last bite of food on her plate. Looking to Draco, she continued, "He also told me the names of the remaining twelve patients, including me."
Draco's lip twinged, his Healer training rebelling against the satisfaction of a researcher. Confidential information was imperative to finding a cure to this mess, but he still didn't like that she knew their names.
"He had to tell me their names," she explained, "because of that damnable law. I'd known the contents of the records for weeks now. Ever since he came to my house to recruit me. But...we continued to meet at the same crossroads. The answers were in the omittance.
"Removing blood status information from a medical record is fucking ridiculous," she said venomously. "Omitting that is as bad as omitting the age or sex of the individual. Everyone gets so tetchy about that sort of thing on paper, and it's just as bad in the Muggle community, really. The problem is the idea all doctors, Healers, discriminate based on the information provided."
"They did discriminate, all the time, Hermione," Draco said.
Hermione placed her hand on Draco's nearest arm. "I know. And it's still not fully eradicated in the Wizarding World, and frankly I don't think I'll see it happen in this lifetime. The fact remains that someone's blood status is vital. Different issues plaguing different people, you see. And, really, I feel like a fool for not realizing it had a deeper impact sooner. Simply considering who created this damn curse in the first place, it should have been obvious."
Severus stood to take away the breakfast dishes with a wave of his wand. As he walked the few feet to the sink, he kept his eyes trained on the two of them as each dish flew to be washed by a waiting scrub brush and drying cloth.
"We need to change our approach," he said over the clinking of silverware, "and the Directory will give us information we could not obtain through medical records."
"The only option we have after this is the Hogwarts student log, but that's a last resort. If we get anywhere near to that book all media hell will break loose."
Draco nodded sagely even as Severus snorted inelegantly, intoning in a bored voice, "Former Death Eaters work to exclude incoming Muggleborns!"
"Well, we can hardly have that," replied Hermione in the same bored tone. "And breaking into the Ministry Archives is a joke. It would be too easy to get into those scrolls written before the Protection Law but the organization of information is abominable."
Standing from the table, Draco watched as Hermione cast a quick spell to open the cupboards and place the dishes back into the cupboards after the towel was done with them. Though the two before him resolutely ignored each other's presence, they moved delicately around each other. With the rosy color returning to his friend's cheeks, he watched happily as the symptoms of the potion receded from her frame.
He slipped out of the kitchen without a word. The Directory was locked in a bookcase in the lower levels of the lodge and required one of the Malfoy bloodline to open it. Each family had their own curses placed on their books, as each copy held family secrets that wouldn't automatically appear in another book, like illegitimate children or prior betrothals. As a descendant of the Blacks, Narcissa held details within the pages of her family tree that could close cold cases and explain the rise of several Ministers for Magic. Draco didn't care enough to expose his ancestor's debauchery, turning instead to the back of the first page, where his name glittered in metallic ink.
Rubbing the last bits of sleep from his eyes, Draco brought a sheet of parchment and quill closer to him, and began to write down the names of the twelve left to show positive results of the treatment, starting with the three worst affected.
Hermione Granger, Dennis Creevey, Mary Cattermole…
The next line were the names of those who'd perished after receiving treatment.
Tracy Davis and Penelope Clearwater.
The daunting task of reviewing each line of the book and how they were interconnected loomed over him, but the notion there could be a solution hidden with the pages spurred him towards what could save his friend.