Well, here we go again. Wrote this once, but wasn't happy with the writing nor the direction of the plot.

I have a thing for Draco creature fics it would seem.

M for mild gore and graphic violence.

No, I don't own it. J.K Rowling doesn't seem to be into grisly tales.

Chapter I

It's agonizing.

Before he was cornered — alone, with only a handful of hexes to his name — in a moonlit forest that one fateful night, he had been excited for the summer. He imagined that the roaring crowds over glittering stadiums would make the Hogwarts House Cup games look utterly juvenile. All he could dream about (apart from the execution of that damn hippogriff) was watching Viktor Krum soar through the warm evening air, chasing after that golden glint which could disappear in a blink. Krum is older than Draco by only four years, which left plenty of room for the imagination during the dregs of Hogwarts' classes; in fact, he had dreamed himself more than he'd like to admit of zipping down, raising the golden snitch in his fist and smirking at crowds decorated in silver and green. Malfoy. Malfoy. Malfoy.

Except the Malfoy name is tainted, now. Not that anyone needs to know that.

So he went to the Quidditch World Cup, as was planned, with his parents, even though he correctly predicted it would be torture. The cheering, jeering, hooting, and amplified commentating coming from the stands right below the one he's on, mixed with the tang of alcohol and cheap food, sweat, dizzying mixture of perfumes, body sprays and the damp grass under a twinkling summer night's sky — it's all Draco can do to not bend over the stands and throw up onto the head of Ludo Bagman, who, enthusiastic as he is, probably wouldn't stop commentating. He barely registers that Krum pulls off the Wronksi Feint to erupting applause; nor does he care all too much when Ireland still beats Bulgaria. All he cares about is gritting his teeth in an attempt to keep the bile down his throat.

When the game ends, his parents make their way agonizingly slowly out of the stands. They pass the hoard of Weasleys, who had probably had to beg to get this place on the stadium. But his mind unfortunately chooses to pick up on something he never would have wanted to even think about: their smell. The entire lot of them are surrounded by some irritating cloud of freshly mown grass and spearmint toothpaste, probably because they sleep in the mud and share the same tube of toothpaste between the five-hundred of them. But they do have some distinctive scents, such as the Weasley girl's sort of flowery breeze. Potter, who is literally never seen without a Weasley, reeks of Sterquil body spray. Draco makes a mental note to tip all of his Sterquil bottles down the drain when he gets home. The last scent catches him by surprise… on Salazar's Grave, when he whips his head around to glimpse a bushy mane of hair, he thinks he's going mad if a Mudblood like her can smell so good.

But there's no time to dwell on that.

As soon as they enter it, his father is leaning on his cane in the middle of the grand dining room that their tent has produced, smirking in no particular direction. Behind Draco, his mother is casting several non-verbal spells at the sealed entrance; he listens to wards trickling over the tent like water. From outside, the singing, chanting, laughter, all becomes muffled. That's when his father draws a silver mask from the shadow of his robes, one of his hands still leaning on the snake head of his cane. Draco tenses at the clench of his father's jaw, and the wild gleam in his eyes.

"Draco, please leave us." His mother's voice is cool, which is a tone she usually reserves for the public and house elves. Brows drawing together, his eyes linger on the silver skull mask in his father's grip. The clicking of heels against the mahogany floor approaches him.

"Now now, Narcissa. He is old enough to learn our ways," his father drawls. Even as his words fill the hollow dining room, his mother's cold hand rests on his shoulder, pulling him firmly backwards towards her. He flinches away from her, reminded of the mark that has tainted his body underneath his three layers of clothing. He moves so that he has a healthy distance from both his parents, arms crossed, with his eyes able to track the pair of them. Despite the furrow of her brow making his stomach twist, he fixes her with an insolent glare.

"I want to know, Mother." In his peripheral vision, his father smirks.

For a while, Draco ambles through the campsite and picks up on various scents, dwelling on how he's going to get through the year knowing how his housemates smell. Parkinson's unbearable powdery scent has amplified since he got his… condition. Generally, Draco tends to avoid spending time with her when he doesn't need her. Crabbe and Goyle always reek of something nasty that he doesn't want to figure out. The multiple times the Notts had come to visit that summer taught Draco that Theo is bathed in pinewood and a bitter metal sort of smell. He's yet to get a whiff of Blaise.

Then, it begins. Flashing lights — red, blue, green — makes him hiss and block his eyes. As Draco spots the darker shade cast by trees in the distance that would provide ample shelter, he listens as the echoes of laughter and singing turns into screams and panicked voices. When he passes a rather moth-eaten looking tent, one woman is dragged out of it under the wand of a chuckling, tall masked figure wearing an identical mask to his father's. Her fingernails scrabble at the dirt; Draco is rooted to the spot when he watches the rapid slash of the wand, the skin of her throat splitting, a snagging tear he processes centimeter by centimeter, that makes his blood turn to ice.

"Filthy Mudblood," spits the Death Eater, before he whisks away out of Draco's eyesight. His father had told him it was to teach the Muggles a lesson about thieving their magic. There's blood seeping all over her nightclothes, now. Her sickening gurgling and spluttering that he focuses on under the ruckus fades as her eyes glaze over under all the flashes of wandlight. The last thing she sees is Draco, watching her die. He tries to swallow but his throat is too dry. As he realizes the bitter metal scent in the air is blood, he realizes that's what Nott smells like. He wonders if Nott's father is out there too; he isn't sure if it's just the Mudblood at his feet, or if there have been more throats slit by the fathers of his housemates. By his own father. Crouch over her corpse and tear at her flesh.

His already weak knees give way. For a moment, he really does think the parasite within him is directing him to her body. But instead Draco gives in to the urge he's been holding back all night, throwing up onto the dry, yellowing grass at his side. His blood rushes in his ears, which he discovers is actually a blessing since all the screaming and buzzing of angry, harsh-lighted curses become muffled. He uses this blessing to hoist himself up and strut speedily towards the treeline, keeping his mind on the forest and his eyes on the stars.

When he reaches the hem of the forest, he staggers in. It's darker, here, and because his eyes are more receptive to light now, he can view the forest as if it were day. Gnarly tree roots intertwine with each other, with thorny bushes scattered here and there as if the plants have risen in defense from what is happening out there. Draco leans against a particularly large tree, until his forehead is kissing its rough bark. Here, the lingering bitter metal is a lot weaker… the sharp scent of leaves and dying summer heat gradually calms his racing heart. There's forest creatures nearby, his ears twitching with each rustle in the branches and among the twigs below.

The out of place scuttering and a thump behind him speeds his heart right back up. Draco scrambles up the tree with a simultaneously impressive and repulsive skill, just as he catches someone snap, "Oh, this is ridiculous!"

Something like green apples pierce through the fading iron tang. If possible, his heartrate accelerates even faster. Draco peers over the clearing, leaning against the tree's bark even when the branch below him makes an ominous groan that he never would have normally been able to hear. Weasley's laying face down in the dirt; Draco would've laughed under other circumstances. With eyes darting underneath his askew spectacles, Potter stands uselessly beside Granger, who raises her wand and says, "Lumos!" Draco's sensitive eyes squint at the additional light.

"I tripped," Weasley grumbles, staring angrily at the embedded roots of the forest.

None of them seems to have noticed Draco hovering on a tree a few feet above them. He would certainly notice a humanoid figure in a dark forest, though a fat lot of good that did him.

"With overly large feet like that, it's no surprise," he drawls, pushing away his bitter thoughts as their heads whip up in his direction, Granger's wand pointing higher. He squints some more but they can easily pass that off as him narrowing his eyes; instead, he smirks, because of the look on their faces. Especially Weaslebee. It doesn't take much to get Weasleys to go as red as their mane of hair. An insult that a toddler could come up with always does the trick.

Weasley gets to his overly large feet and snarls something up at him about 'cowardice' and 'fighting like a man', but Draco's more interested in the girl behind him. When it comes to Weasleys, he sees them as temporary entertainment. Saint Potter? Not much else to say there. It's Granger who, without fail, pisses him off, every time. Just the sight of her, prancing around in his world, wielding his magic… and doing it better than him. Even to this day, he feels the shame roiling in his gut at his father's disgusted face, at learning his son isn't top of his class for anything because of a Mudblood.

He wonders if his father has sliced any throats.

"You probably don't want them seeing her," Draco drawls, watching the way her brows draw together, the way her eyes set ablaze, even from this distance. Not a few months ago she wore the same expression, her knuckles bruised and his nose stinging. Oversensitive now, his nostrils twitch at the mere prospect of such a thing happening again. Despite Weasley's pledge about his cowardice, he considers it lucky that he chose to confront the other forest-dwellers from on top of a tree.

"And what's that supposed to mean?" she asks haughtily.

"Oh, Granger," he says, smirking, "Haven't you noticed? They're attacking Muggles."

"Hermione's one of us!" Weasley growls, as Potter takes a protective step towards her.

Refraining from rolling his eyes, Draco pushes himself off the tree's bark to balance on the branch. Death Eaters tend to have very little business with actual Muggles. At least that's what his father said. "You think they can't tell who's a Mudblood when they see one?"

Growling again, Weasley makes a step forward as if genuinely considering climbing up the tree, but Granger grabs his arm. Potter is watching him with narrowed eyes.

"I bet your parents are having the time of their lives."

Draco chuckles, pride swelling in his chest that his parents are considered dastardly enough; even though his shoulder twitches slightly, the scalding reminder of what he has become. He decides to ignore the Mudblood woman's dull eyes and slashed throat that's still imprinted in his eyelids. "If that was true, Potter, I wouldn't be likely to tell you, would I?"

"Ok, never mind," Granger intercepts whatever was about to come out of Potter's mouth, and she grabs him, too. As she hauls them away, she doesn't cast one look back, unlike Potter's and Weasley's furious glares over their shoulders.

Under the canopy of branches against a starlit sky disturbed by shattered screams, and beneath his smirk, Draco secretly hopes that the Death Eaters don't find her.

x.x

x.x

When people call Hermione Granger the 'brightest witch of the age', she does try to not let it get to her head. Really, she does. It's not like she's an absolute prat about it — she's not that kind of pretentious, as in the tragically fraudulent Lockhart kind of pretentious, no, not at all. What it means is that she starts looking in places that she really has no business looking. Noticing details that, in the majority, people miss.

It's not like people would be looking for any details this year. The excitement from the Quidditch World Cup had been marred by the massacre of Muggles and Muggle-borns at the campsite: thirty-two casualties, seven fatal. Anyone who reads the Daily Prophet (which Hermione does religiously) will see Cornelius Fudge bumbling silently on the front page as he tries to keep his Ministry in check. There are multiple suspects of who started this chaos, and most were former 'Death Eaters' in the Wizarding War.

Many of them have children attending Hogwarts. Montague. Pucey. Nott. Parkinson. Crabbe. Goyle. Malfoy.

The summer had aged quickly, and before they knew it, they were back in school. Initially, people had been murmuring about Dark Magic and Voldemort sympathisers, but then the announcement of the Triwizard Tournament made for fresher and less depressing conversation. Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students had each made their own elaborate and, well, pretentious entrances into Hogwarts, and now Ron is drooling over Viktor Krum.

"Why's he sitting with them?" he demands, glaring at the small number of Durmstrang students dominating the large Slytherin table across the Great Hall.

Hermione rolls her eyes. "Honestly, Ron. He's just another dumb Quidditch player." On the other side of her, Harry chokes on his pumpkin juice.

"Dumb?" he splutters, juice dribbling down his chin. Giving a watery grin, his eyes narrow. "Am I dumb to you, 'Mione?" Scoffing and wacking him gently, she wonders if she should emphasise how there really isn't anything special about Krum. Cool, he can snatch some golden flying ball at eighteen years old, big whoop. Harry did it when he was eleven! Why's he so worked up about some boy with rich parents who got lucky and got into the big leagues?

"You're mental." She wacks Ron, too, but not as softly as she had Harry.

They resume shovelling in their food like trolls, talking about Quidditch and Wonky Feints across her. And that's what she means about people not picking up the little details. While they had been not-so-subtly ogling Krum, they didn't notice the uncharacteristic behaviour of Draco Malfoy.

He's sitting a metre away from the Durmstrang students, but he's not trying to suck up to Viktor Krum like Theodore Nott is. Pansy Parkinson is fluttering her lashes at a burly looking fellow; Blaise Zabini is engaged in conversation with a guy sitting next to Krum. Even Crabbe and Goyle appear to be grunting something to the quieter-looking Durmstrang students. Out of his usual group, Malfoy is the only one staring down at his plate as if it is another quiet Durmstrang student.

In the three years she'd gone to school with him, she'd always thought Malfoy was just like Ollie Taylor from primary school. Everybody was friends with Ollie. He hung out in large groups during break and lunch, and he would snicker at the back of any classroom with his friends as whatever poor teacher had him that time of day talked. But Ollie wasn't like his friends — he was unathletic, unintelligent, a little on the chubby side and a lot of his jokes people started to grow out of. Especially the girls. Ollie would take all his frustrations out on Hermione throughout her primary school days. She was the one girl who never found him funny in the first place, and when he made a vulgar joke about her being desperate enough to get on her knees in year six she snapped and finally gave him a piece of her mind. He never bothered her since, and she had three blissful months of peace before the summer.

Malfoy hasn't changed much. During the World Cup, it had seemed her sucker punch hadn't rattled much out of him… On the contrary, he seemed very much the prat that he always was. Almost gleeful at the prospect of his parents involved in that horrible night, murdering and torturing people who were just trying to have fun, whether it be a dumb Quidditch Cup or just a night under the winking summer stars. Unlike the immature and insecure Ollie Taylor, she can see there's a true darkness inside him. There must be, if he could be so nonchalant, leaning on a tree and smirking while people had their throats slit open from beyond the forest.

Also, why is he wearing a winter coat? Yes, the summer is dying, and it dies quicker in Scotland, but it's not that cold — she's already spotted the way the French girls from Beauxbatons are wrapping their shawls around themselves and shivering like they're in Antarctica. Hermione scowls when one of them sniffs at the food, wrinkles her bloody perfect nose and pushes her plate away. She turns her attention back to Malfoy, and ponders.

There is something up with Malfoy, but Hermione can't put her finger on it.

She decides that focusing on her lessons is more important. After all, the world is still spinning and her OWLs are next year. Her usual routine — lessons, Harry and Ron, library, and late night Gyffindor common room — continues, until, that is, it's time to extract names from the Goblet of Fire. People had been stepping in, left, right and centre, confident that they would be competing at the Triwizard Tournament. Apart from Fred and George (of course) nobody underage had attempted; Madam Pomfrey allegedly had bit off their heads, and then Dumbledore's head for using a ward that made them look a century old.

They started the evening expecting the Goblet of Fire to reveal three champions.

Viktor Krum of Durmstrang, surprise surprise (Hermione had rolled her eyes at the eruption of the Hall, and Ron's literal squealing).

Fleur Delacour of Beauxbatons (and she had rolled her eyes again, because primarily the blokes had become overly enthusiastic in cheering).

Cedric Diggory of Hogwarts. There's not a whole lot she knows about him, except that he's a Sixth Year Hufflepuff that everyone likes.

Professor Dumbledore was about to refer to the events of the Triwizard Tournament, but then the Goblet of Fire spat another name out. Amongst the muttering and whispering of the students, the parchment fluttered down into Dumbledore's outstretched hand. The moment she looked at Ron and Harry, mirroring her own curious expression under the flickering red light of the Goblet returning to blue when it finished spitting, is one she will never forget.

The Headmaster of Hogwarts' voice is calm as it whips through the Hall; the low chatter wisps into silence, and anyone who knows her name — which, being one of Harry Potter's best friends, means a lot of eyes — looks straight at her.

She might be the 'brightest witch of her age', but she's pretty sure her hearing's not as great as she must've misheard Dumbledore calling out, "Hermione Granger."