histories
A/N: I'm writing on my French laptop as my English one has gone kaput. (Yes, I lost half this chapter and had to re-write it, and, yes, I'm still mad about it.) So, I can't tell if my em dashes are actually em dashes or if they're a few pixels too short. Please excuse me on this front until my laptop issue is resolved.
Also–check out the new cover!
shea
It began with a duel.
It was sixth year defence class, and Draco had been fucked up. He hadn't slept properly in nearly a week–at the time, he was staying up most nights to work on that fucking cabinet–, and he had been hocked up on some holly tisane that Pansy had turned him on to.
No one–not even Pansy, his fortuitously liberal drug dealer–knew what was really going on that kept him up all night. Probably tipped off by his being constantly away from the common room, Pansy had taken a lucky guess that it was a Task. Although, even then Draco was beginning to suspect that it was more than a lucky guess.
Now he knew it was.
Pansy had some peculiar talents. Perhaps the first hint should have been more obvious to him at the time. She had been the one to aid Theo in his first Task assigned by the Dark Lord in fifth year, something she never should have known about in the first place.
Theo had been commanded to seduce and recruit the Ravenclaw Marietta Edgecomb in an effort to strike down any alternative education options at Hogwarts; he was to convince her to break down the trust in Dumbledore's Army from the inside and then crush it with the force of the Inquisitorial Squad (the power of which had been sincerely overestimated). The Dark Lord wanted complete control, absolute dominion over the minds of the next generation, pure indoctrination of the sort the Ministry was more than happy to provide; Potter's–although the Dark Lord had then believed it to be Dumbledore's–little duelling group challenged his goal directly.
When Draco eventually found out about Theo's Task, he howled. It was inherently hilarious. Theo had known he was gay since he was five years old, and it was no secret–not that his father particularly cared when it came to the betrothal contract between Theo and his cousin Alexandra that he had every intention of seeing through. It was blindingly obvious, too, with the way that he looked at Blaise. That is, apparently, to everyone except to the Dark Lord.
And this wasn't the only challenge Theo faced with his Task. Theo had always been peskily moral; he spent several years at school as a vegetarian (although that went out the window after Blaise took him to Tuscany on a 'The War is Over' joy-ride, and he discovered he absolutely adored a shockingly rare Bistecca alla Fiorentina; now he just was peskily moral about the farms from which he would buy his meat) and even more time as an absolute anti-Death Eater who swore he would never enlist (although, once again, this particular point of pride was rendered obsolete after that horrid summer between forth and fifth years during which both he and Draco were forcibly marked). But this morality got rather in the way of the second component of his Task: if Marietta refused to comply, he was to put her under the Imperius Curse and force her hand about outing Dumbledore's Army.
Pansy, Draco heard later, had helped Theo in the way that only a woman could. She advised him on how to seduce a schoolgirl and pushed him into acting on her plan, reminding him that deception was better than the utter violation of the Imperius Curse. Of course, Pansy with her odd morals probably would have rather just cursed the girl to get it over with, but she loved Theo like a brother and would do anything to ensure he wasn't broken by the Task and that he wouldn't have to sacrifice the strong moral viewpoints that sometimes seemed to be the true fibre of his being.
Now that it was Draco's turn, it was another story. His Task was more gruelling, more corrupt, more soul-wretching. He was to shepherd in a whole army of Death Eaters to attack a castleful of children and orchestrate the murder of Albus Dumbledore. Draco assumed it was revenge for his father's utter fuck up the summer prior: the Dark Lord had struck his mother and his father had attempted to defend her. His parents were maddeningly in love–sickeningly, really–, even if their family was being slowly poisoned by the presence of their houseguest. This loyalty to one another appearing to trump the will of their lord was deemed unacceptable. The only clear answer was surely to threaten the only thing they could possibly love more than one another: their child.
Pansy got her first prescient inkling about his Task in divination class one winter morning. The course as a whole was a wash, and Draco hardly believed in the drivel that came out of that kook Trelawney's mouth. How could he when he hardly believed the whims and predictions of his mother, who, as a third daughter of a third daughter of a third daughter, was supposedly the recipient of 'the sight?' But Pansy seemed to believe the hogwash, claiming she had a particular talent with tarot. Perhaps he should have more readily believed her, as it was one of the only cards she held close to her chest. Anything else she could flaunt, she did and did so loudly.
Draco had been partnered with her that day when Trelawney began a new unit on the cards. Pansy had smirked all through instruction, and, when the time came for practice, she proceeded to do a significantly more complicated spread than the simple past-present-future layout on which they had been instructed. She called it the Celtic Cross. She laid two cards crossing one another in the centre of the table and surrounded them with a circle of four others, all face-down; next to them she placed another line of four.
She flipped the card in the centre of the table first; it was the Eight of Swords, a woman bound and restrained, blindfolded and sword-guarded. She said this represented him in the present moment: trapped, powerless… and, as he would discover later, self-victimising. Then she turned over the card that she had placed across it. Its face was decorated with the image of a lavishly robed man on a golden throne. On his head sat a tall crown; with one hand he beckoned and with the other he grasped a sceptre. Before him knelt two disciples. She called it the Hierophant.
He had sat up a bit taller at that. It seemed rather good to him. A king with worshippers knelt before his feet? He'd take that. Oh, he'd definitely take that.
She coyly laughed at his increased attention.
Apparently, he had been wrong about the card. The man depicted wasn't a king. It was a religious leader–although to him the description sounded very little different from that of a god himself.
She explained that this second card represented a challenge and that the hierophant in this position could have two meanings: it either represented an external challenge of one's desire to push against an established group's traditional ideals or an internal challenge to rise to the occasion, re-dedicating oneself to the traditional ideals one knows are right for them to follow.
That was when he'd had enough. Those were two diametrically opposed meanings! It was bollocks, and this was proof enough.
"Thank you, Pansy," he said as he stood to leave the classroom, relieved that their practice time had been cut short by the end of the period, "for a spectacular waste of my time."
He had always been sensitive when something struck a nerve, and he felt at the time that his behaviour was probably what had given him away to Pansy. Now, however, he wouldn't be surprised to hear that the remaining cards on the spread had whispered to her about his secret. She showed up at his door that evening with a sachet of dried leaves and steeping instructions. She never asked any more questions; she knew better than that. That could get them both killed–or worse, their families tortured.
The only person in the world that otherwise seemed to know about Draco's Task was Professor Snape, who had, by the day of the duel that changed everything, been pestering Draco to open up to him about his Task for weeks.
But Draco knew he couldn't do such a thing. If even a hint of him having spoken to Snape got back to the Dark Lord, he would be branded a failure. He would be considered incompetent, inept, unuseful. And the Dark Lord had no patience for people that were of no use to him.
Draco had already seen evidence of the Dark Lord retiring the old guard. Sure, most of them were scared shitless of the bastard and were willing to do just about anything to gain his approval–but why not kill two birds with one stone? Use them and their sudden 'precarious position' to extort the younger generation into fearful submission & increasingly wild Tasks while driving the older generation to yet more absurd devotion to achieve his artificially scarce approval? Not to mention how the parents' devotion led them to push their children into dangerous positions, breaking family ties and ensuring both parents' and children's primary loyalties were to him and him alone.
The problem was that the Dark Lord was right. Children are easy to manipulate, indoctrinate, control.
Draco had been easy to manipulate, indoctrinate, control.
He knew he couldn't turn to anyone for help, not even Snape who was ostensibly on his side and, were the world logical, might have made a decent mentor.
And, as far as he could tell, Snape was absolutely livid about it.
Snape had always been tyrant, but he had been punishing Draco excessively for his unwillingness to tell him the nature of his Task.
Extra detentions for every snide remark or poorly executed casting featuring hours full of gruelling potions preparation for Slughorn (whom Snape knew Draco found simultaneously unbearable and, also, bafflingly blind to the fact that Draco deserved to be in his stupid little club); the sorts of duelling partners that bored him to tears and provided no challenge; randomly assigning him the sorts of demeaning work that should be reserved for house elves in the Slytherin common spaces (yes, even cleaning the loos) at the risk of losing house points–each of these became a staple of Draco's sixth year, a fact of his life at school.
And it had been made perfectly clear that it would remain so until Draco accepted Snape's help.
Until that fated day, when Snape switched his strategy. Gone were the days of boring Draco to tears in DADA, now it was time for him to fear for his life: Snape had assigned Hermione fucking Granger as his duelling partner. Was he trying to get him killed? There was no one who hated him more in the world, except maybe the girl's rottweiler of a boyfriend (or was he dating that Brown girl now? Draco couldn't be bothered to keep up with that particular series of dramatics).
Draco had been confident at first. The girl was all bark, no bite; she was book smart in the sort of way that never seemed to translate to practical magical prowess. She would never–could never–compete with him; he had been trained in hours-long sessions by none other than his mad Aunt Bellatrix for two summers straight, during which he had actually fought for his life and sanity–and he had learned to win. At any cost.
She might hate him, but the joke was on her. He hated himself more.
And, when it came to duelling, he was the best.
They were suddenly nose-to-nose on the duelling platform. She was a good three inches shorter than him, yet her sheer ego seemed to inflate her to his height. She angled her head up towards him, and their eyes met for what he then realized was the first time since she had sucker punched him in third year. Her eyes were a piercing dark brown; there was no softness in them.
He wondered if her habit of holding her nose so high in the air made her prone to nosebleeds.
Then they both turned sharply on their heels and marched seven paces away from one another towards their respective stations. They each wheeled around to face one another once again and then stooped into a low bow.
At the apex of his bow, he lifted his eyes towards his opponent. He was hesitant to trust her. His father had always told him that muggleborns were opportunists: they relished the chance to play Judas and would buck tradition to gain the upper hand every time. And why would they play by the rules of convention? They had no reason to respect them, no idea of the weight behind them, or of their long and culturally significant history. In some ways, Draco envied them for this. They were unfettered, unrestricted by the customs & unspoken codes that dictated his every move.
But what he found surprised him: she was tucked into an elegant bow, eyes lowered, hands relaxed at her sides. She had perfect form; it was certainly better than his, which more clearly indicated his readiness to launch into an attack at a moment's notice. In a more traditional setting, his obvious dismissal of her character and integrity would be considered none but the highest offense.
The seven-count rest ended and both duellists righted themselves and assumed a fighting stance.
He fired first. Something simple and inoffensive flew out of his wand, a disarming charm. It barrelled towards her chest with unmatchable speed and precision. He hoped to get his hit quickly and move on with his life.
He had no such luck.
She dodged his spell with a tut. Of course she did, he had thought with amusement, she probably had had plenty of practice evading disarming charms, what with Potter's peculiar affinity for them.
She then delivered a one-two shot, attempting to distract him with a Stinging Jinx sent towards his legs and then catch him off-guard with a Stunning Spell. But he ducked and weaved with sharp, athletic movements, evading both with remarkable ease.
That had been the first time this move hadn't worked for her in the classroom. Draco had noticed her utilising it in previous Friday duelling sessions; just last week she had knocked Ernie Macmillan off his feet in under thirty seconds with the same manoeuvre. In fact, watching her pull this same stunt week after week had become a habit of his; it was hard not to pay attention to someone who consistently toppled their classmates in under a minute. This was not to say that Draco yet recognised this talent as anything more than successful repetition of a move she had likely read about in Duelling Strategie, Volume III–the very same tome in which he had first encountered it. He expected her to be easily bested after this move failed to incapacitate him. He expected her strategy to crumble. He expected to see defeat written all over that smug swot's face.
Instead, a smile spread across her face–one of near-hysterical enthusiasm. She looked insane; she looked alive. Draco recognised the expression: it was the same inane look that came over her face when a professor offered essay challenges for house points.
The details of the fight had faded over the years; he no longer could recall the other specific spells or steps or strategies used. It all was a blur of colour and sound. But what he could remember clearly was what changed in him that day, how watching Hermione fight had changed in him.
It was as if she lived and breathed magic. What he was capable of suddenly seemed a pale imitation, a regurgitation of an art which had previously been long-lost. Until she rediscovered it, reinvented it.
After that day, he thought often of her smile, her glowing eyes, the feeling of sweat dripping from his hairline and the bemused frown that came over Snape's face.
Yes, the casual observer might not have noticed, but Draco saw the slight downturn of the corners of Snape's lips after he called time on the duel. It wasn't a frown; it was a covert laugh. He was amused.
And, somehow, the amusement seemed to override his more sadistic tendencies.
All of a sudden, the punishments let up, the extra chores dwindled, the boring duelling partners all but disappeared. In fact, his life became a lot easier, on all fronts except for one: the private duelling practice he was suddenly expected to attend every Wednesday night–the only shared evening he and Hermione both had free from prefect duties, quidditch and Astronomy class.
Draco grumbled at first, but Snape made it clear that accepting this offer was not optional. Not unless he wanted to spend the next year scrubbing the first year toilets. Draco figured that spending a few hours a week at a single duelling practice was significantly less invasive to his fixing the vanishing cabinet than Snape's previous torture regime. And so, he agreed.
To this day he wasn't sure why exactly it was that Hermione had agreed to subject herself to the whims of a professor that expressed clear disdain for her, but she had. Perhaps it was just her obsessive need to prove herself to be the most truly sickening sycophant in the school that led her to make such a masochistic move. Or perhaps she felt what he did, too, when they duelled.
Perhaps she wanted more. He couldn't acknowledge it yet–no, that would take a more few months and several very confusing dreams to come to terms with–, but somewhere deep down, he wanted more of her, too.
Their first session was slow and brutal. Snape didn't allow them to fight; in fact, he didn't allow them to do anything but spring into Starting Stance IV again and again and again. He made them do it until it hurt, until it was a memory burnt into their thew, until he said it was perfect–and then promptly knocked them arse over tit and told them to do it again, from a crouch this time.
By the time they were done, Draco's thighs burnt more than they did after that time Flint got it in his mind that the quidditch team needed "more conditioning." Even Hermione was frustrated; she kept muttering about some muggle thing called "burpees."
It would be another three sessions until they were finally allowed to fight one another.
While one might imagine those three intervening sessions had led to the two of them developing some form of amicable rapport, what in fact happened was entirely the opposite. Their mutual dislike burned into a fiery hatred fuelled by competition. When he thought he'd finally managed the correct parry-duck-roll footing, he looked across the room to gloat, only to find she had it sorted just moments before. When she finally had a breakthrough improvement on her Popper Shield Charm, he laughed at her puny attempt. Protection was something he was good at, great at, even. Bellatrix had told him it made him weak, a coward in a family of fighters; but here it made him better than her, and that was all that mattered.
By the time Snape told them to step up on the duelling platform three sessions later, Draco had had so much pent up rage, he thought he might implode. Their fighting turned volatile, their spells potent and anger reaching a boiling point. They each refused to give the other any lead, they stepped forward into violent offensive spells until they were firing at close range.
In the end, she hit him with a stinging jinx, the very spell he had first dodged from her weeks before. It felt like a slap in the face–literally. His left cheek stung like a son of a bitch.
He was fuming. This was not how this was supposed to go, and Merlin be damned if he was going to let her get away with slapping him a second time. The first time had been one of the most embarrassing moments in his life; Crabbe had laughed at him for more than a week and had done his best to make sure that everyone in Slytherin knew about the incident. None of the girls in his year could so much as look at him without giggling until the next term.
But by the time he turned back to face her after the shock of the hit, Hermione was gone.
He stalked her out of the room, seeing just seeing her round a tight corner at the end of the hall. Luckily for him, he was faster than she was. She was nearly running by the time he caught her arm. He whirled her around and pinned her to the wall. He had his forearm pressed into her neck, his wand at her throat.
Yet, even here, in a prey's position, stretching onto her tiptoes to gulp air, she was no less scary than she always was. Her expression curdled as she looked up at him through her dark lashes.
"Let. Me. Go. Malfoy."
He pushed his wand harder into her tender flesh and narrowed his eyes. He had so many thoughts, and he couldn't make sense of any of them. He kept getting distracted by her flashing eyes, by her heavy breathing, by the thick thump-thump, thump-thump rhythm of her heart against his skin. His mind was scrambled. Gods, he should not have drunken so much of thatfucking tea. It was doing things to his head. He was enraged; he was excited; he was embarrassed, but he couldn't stop himself.
"Do you think–" she gasped for a breath with a strangled wheeze, "threatening me will make me any less better than–"
She stopped talking.
He had leaned forward, his forehead then almost resting against her own. He had relieved at least half of the pressure against her neck by then, but, despite the opportunity to run away, she was frozen by curiosity. His lips wavered near her own, and then pressed gently against the corner of her mouth. He had no fucking clue what he was doing.
His attention was torn back to the present by Pius and his rather annoying throat-clearing habit; the man sounded like Grandfather Malfoy.
"Are you planning to answer my question anytime soon, Mister Malfoy? Or am I to presume that you will continue to stonewall me in the same manner as Miss Granger–"
"Missus Granger-Weasley," Draco grumbled in correction.
Pius gave Draco a pointed look. It seemed to Pius that Draco had a guilty conscience. There was something that burdened him, that much was clear.
"Mister Malfoy, if my presence here is some ill-advised attempt to draw attention to Miss Granger as a suspect in order to disguise your own culpability—"
"It's not," Draco snapped.
"Are you aware that your silence on the matter might very well mark you as a suspect?" Pius prodded.
Draco held his tongue.
"And that I can do very little to protect you without your testimony?"
Then, Pius decided to act on a whim.
"And that giving me the reason you've hired me on her behalf might very well be what allows me to keep her out of Azkaban?"
There it was, the thing that Pius had been waiting for: a flinch. It was barely a twitch, but something about the movement told Pius that he had tugged on the thread that would unravel the jacket. The only reason he could deduce for the silence of the younger man was that he wasn't acting in his own self-interest.
"I believe the… comforts of Azkaban are something with which you are intimately familiar. I can only imagine what it would do to such a lively young soul as Miss Granger's. How do you think she'd fair after twenty years? Or thirty? Either would be reasonable considering the offense, if not–"
"Because I fucking love her!" Draco bellowed.
Then his voice dropped to just above whisper: "Just keep her safe, okay? Just keep her safe."
Downstairs, Pansy was playing parlour games.
Daphne and Astoria's whispered conversation fizzled to an awkward end, and Astoria stormed off in the direction of the garden. Theo and Blaise gave each other an odd, exaggerated look, obviously about whatever tiff the sisters had just had. But Pansy saw an opportunity. She marched towards the seat previously occupied by Astoria.
Daphne, fortuitously, had just finished her cup of tea and was about to reach for the pot to refill it when Pansy arrived and stilled her hand with her own. Pansy leaned forward and leered into the cup.
"Quel dommage," she clucked, "It says 'go home!'"
"I'm sorry?" Daphne squawked, cupping the wretched thing with anxious hands. She had been considering how best to get out of the situation–she couldn't involve herself more and had half a mind to ask her husband to extricate himself, as well. She hated it here suddenly, and Astoria wasn't making it any easier on her with her tight lips.
Pansy burst out laughing.
"Of course not, you nit! That's not even my medium."
But Daphne didn't seem to find it funny.
Pansy looked at the other woman; she tried to really look. Daphne was shaking slightly, buzzing with nervous energy, and the bags under her eyes spoke of little sleep. She wondered where the ballsy business owner that would've given it right back to her was. She missed–
Oh, Circe's left tit! Had she missed Daphne bossing her around? She was losing her ever-loving mind.
It was nothing less than a turn of luck that Draco encountered Hermione on his way from the library.
She had been sneaking along one of the back corridors near his suite. He found her approaching a door with excessive caution. What, was she expecting a ghoul to jump out from behind it?
"One did just three doors back. Maybe consider a locking charm tonight."
Fuck. Had he been fucking talking to himself?
Of course he fucking had.
Potter's near-attempt on his life had him in some sort of state.
Hermione retreated from the door, seemingly discontent with whatever it was that she had found–or hadn't–behind it. She seemed only then to process to whom exactly she had just been speaking.
"Oh." She looked to her feet.
"I'm sorry about–" he began;
"Don't be," she said quietly, then quickly amended, "I mean, you didn't– it's not yours to be sorry for."
He stepped closer to her, allowing himself for the first time since their reacquaintance to remember what had been, briefly, once upon a time.
"Don't," she flinched and stepped backwards.
She shrunk against the wall. He felt something knot in his chest: she was so small. Not physically—physically she was of the same middling height she always had been, and childbearing had wreaked its own unique and beautiful havoc on her previously blunt frame. It was an emotional smallness that he saw in her now which perturbed him so. She had folded into herself; it was as if she had been swallowed by life.
"Was it him that did this to you? That reduced you to this?"
He had whispered, but she flinched as if he had screamed.
"I–I have to keep it under control," she breathed, "I hurt people."
"You never hurt me–"
"Don't you understand?" she pleaded, "You don't know anything!"
POP. The echo of a house elves' apparition rang clearly from behind the very door from which Hermione had emerged just minutes before.
Draco looked from her to the door, and then rushed to open its handle.
Gudgeon was inside, laying an oversized fur coat down on the sofa.
"Gudgeon," Draco growled, "What are you doing?"
"Master Theo asked Gudgeon to clean up the mess. So I clean up the mess."
Gudgeon resumed his tidying, straightening and readjusting the position of a few items on the side table: an ornate silver tin, a pearl hair pin, a round-bottom flask full of deep amber liquid, a quill and inkwell.
What the hell was Theo up to?