Crumple Horned Plot Bunnies
By Andrew J. Talon
Disclaimer: I do not and probably never will own Harry Potter or any other copyrighted works mentioned in this story. I am not writing this for profit.
There's A Reason The Hat Put You All Here
By cliffc999
"And for solving the mystery of the Heir of Slytherin, and ensuring there would be no further attacks against any students, I collectively award Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger four hundred points for Gryffindor!" the Headmaster proclaimed triumphantly from the head table, and the banners displayed above the hourglasses shifted from green-and-silver to the red-and-gold of Gryffindor as they yet again trumped Slytherin House with a massive last-minute surge due to 'the Golden Trio's' contributions.
Professor Snape was far too self-possessed to openly react in public, but his fixed stare into nothingness and his tightly pursed lips were a dead giveaway to anyone who knew him well. Most of the Slytherins seated alongside of him were able to similarly keep their masks up, only a few of the hotter-tempered or less well-trained allowing their genuine feelings to vent outside the safety of the Slytherin Common Room. Daphne Greengrass, who happened to be sitting across from me, showed a surprising lapse from her usual perfect demeanor but as it was confined to a lifted eyebrow of surprise at my own lack of reaction I was entirely willing to forgive her the lapse. After all, under normal circumstances I would certainly have been the one most loudly complaining.
My continuing unconcern had Pansy asking me throughout the Leaving Feast if I was feeling all right, and I managed to play on that concern and the curiosity of several of my other classmates to draw them all into a discreet private meeting once we got back to the Slytherin quarters. As soon as the door closed behind us and a discreet Muffliato charm was cast, the masks came off.
"It's not fair!" Pansy huffed and pouted "The Headmaster's just thrown points at them for nothing ever since we came here! What's the point of all our effort if they just cheat?" she finished, expectantly turning to me.
"It wasn't 'nothing', Pansy." I replied flatly as I turned to face her, as I watched her own expression collapse into incredulous shock at how calmly I was taking this. "Something was petrifying the students, and the Board of Governors would never have reinstated Professor Dumbledore as Headmaster if he hadn't been able to legitimately claim that it would no longer be a danger. And if he's willing to publicly give all the credit to Potter and his friends for pulling that one off, then logically they must have had something to do with it."
"... who are you, and what have you done with Draco Malfoy?" Blaise Zabini asked me after a hurried round of glances between all my nearest acquaintances.
"Was anyone else besides me studying the Gryffindor table during dinner?" I asked the room. "And if so, could anyone tell me what was different about that portrait tonight?"
"... the youngest Weasley was sitting in the middle of all her brothers, after they'd been ignoring her all year?" Pansy reluctantly spoke up. I felt a mild flare of pride at her spotting the clue, but I shouldn't have been surprised- she had always had a keen eye and ear for gossip-
"Precisely." I agreed. "After all being too wrapped up in their own pursuits to have any time for their youngest sibling, now they're all like a pride of lions surrounding a wounded cub. The prankster twins in particular looked like they were ready to draw wands and hex anyone who even came too close."
"She was the final student the Heir of Slytherin almost murdered, the one that the staff so very carefully refused to name." Daphne nodded. "Well spotted, Draco, but I don't see where it has you so concerned." And despite the part where I only knew about the youngest Weasley's involvement because I'd remembered whose belongings my father had handled after his entirely uncharacteristic public brawl with her father in Flourish and Blott's, I accepted the compliment in the spirit it was given.
"'Enemies of the Heir, beware! You'll be next, mudbloods!'" I quoted the message that had been drawn in blood on the wall next to a petrified cat, the one that had announced the start of this year's reign of terror. "Mudbloods. The message threatened mudbloods. And yes, most of the subsequent attacks were indeed against mudbloods. Creevey, Granger, Fitch-Flenchley... even Prefect Clearwater was a half-blood. But Ginevra Weasley? Look, for all that they're dirt-poor blood traitors none of us can deny that the Weasleys are as pure a family as any of us are. And yet she's the one that the Heir deliberately targets; more deliberately than any of the others, in fact. All the rest were hexed in the hallways in passing and yet she was deliberately abducted to the Chamber of Secrets itself for some horrid sort of sacrificial ritual." I looked around at all the rapt yet uncomprehending stares I was receiving, even from my more intelligent classmates, and sighed inwardly at how on Earth the Sorting Hat had ever called us lot 'cunning' to begin with-
"The Heir is not actually a believer in the pureblood cause." I finally spat out impatiently. "You can see that just from how willing they are to expediently seize and slay one of us for their purposes, when they don't have any other victim handy! Do you begin to understand now why I'm too busy to be worried about House Points?"
"You wouldn't be this concerned about that unless the Heir of Slytherin was still alive." Blaise said. "But Professor Dumbledore just said that they were gone."
"And the Headmaster said he was gone the first time, too, but that doesn't stop us from having parents who still expect them to return one day." I replied, and the entire table fell deathly silent.
"Oh no." Pansy whispered in terrified realization. "You mean-?"
"Him." I nodded meaningfully. ""That's who the Heir of Slytherin must be. Look, there isn't a one of us here who isn't expected to... follow in certain footsteps... when we're old enough to. So I'm taking an awful risk in sharing my doubts about Him with you at all, but-" I shook my head. "For all that we compete against each other, the fact remains that when it's wand-drawing time for real we'll all be the only possible allies the rest of us have. Merlin knows that no one else has the time of day for a Slytherin nowadays. Which means that if I think we're all heading into a trap, then I need to call out a warning to the rest of you even if it risks my own hide or else one day I'll look around and I'll be without any backup when I need it the most."
"What trap?" Daphne asked me. "Because you're not just talking about the same hazards that our parents faced, are you?"
"Has anyone here ever sat down and thought about how many Pureblood lines were ended during the War?" I asked them. "And I don't blame you if you haven't, because even I didn't start realizing what had been under my nose the whole time until the Weasley girl's almost-sacrifice finally prodded my thoughts in the right direction. But seriously, get out a peerage book some time and start counting names. Twenty years ago the Boneses were an entire power bloc of their own and now they're down only to our classmate Susan and a maiden aunt by marriage. The Prewetts and the MacKinnons are gone. The Weasleys are still going relatively strong only because Molly Weasley is the most fertile woman in Magical Britain, but even then that's another family line that could vanish in a single night if the Burrow burned down. And then there's our own family trees." I shook my head. "Between all the obligations, and pressures, and threats they had to stay vigilant against- Daphne's the only one of us who even has a sibling. And look at me- so many of my Black relatives have been killed or thrown into Azkaban in service of You-Know-Who that if I so much as fall off my broom in a Quidditch match not only is the Malfoy line cut short but the Black line would then pass to a certain half-blood sitting over at the Gryffindor table, and the Black family tree used to be Magical Britain!" I shook my head vehemently. "If you block out all the talk of glory and power and call-to-action and everything else used to emotionally pump up a mob and simply admit the cold facts of the situation to yourself, the fact remains that literally nothing has done more damage to blood purity in Magical Britain than the direct and indirect actions of... that man... over the past several decades."
"I wish I could say that you were wrong." Theodore Nott contributed to the conversation for the first time. "But no, now that you point it out, I can't not see it."
I sighed. "I know why our parents followed Him- that was before they could possibly have known any of this. And, of course, I still agree with their goals." I looked up at them, as sincerely as I possibly could. "But I no longer have any faith in the man who was supposed to lead our families towards those goals, because I gravely doubt that his actual goals are the same as what he promised our parents. We're a means to an end to him, nothing more." I snorted derisively. "And yes, that's certainly a time-honored tactic for getting ahead in life - for any of us - but that still doesn't mean we just sit still and take it when it's going to be us on the sucker's end of the wager, now does it?"
"The Weasleys have always been his enemies." Pansy tried to argue. "You don't coddle your enemies, so his doing that to them still doesn't prove that he'd do it to us."
"The ultimate end goal is conquering Magical Britain." I replied to her. "And Pansy, you're not a conqueror if you just kill everyone. Just look around at how many mudbloods and half-bloods are in this school. If they're all gone, there'd barely be one person in ten here left. That's just barely enough to make a nation with. So if you start indiscriminately purging them too, whenever it's expedient for you? What are you left with, just Marked followers and their immediate families? How many of us would that be?" I snorted. "That sort of 'victory' would mean we wouldn't even be Magical Britain anymore. We'd barely be a magical village."
"Now I am surprised you're that willing to share your feelings." Daphne said. "Because if any of us repeated so much as one sentence of that to your father, you'd be in for it."
"But none of you are going to, are you?" I replied fearlessly. "None of you are fools, that's why I asked you in here tonight. We all want the same thing - to be pureblood scions, wealthy and powerful and enjoying Pure Rule of Magical Britain. But our parents' erstwhile Master does not have the ability to lead us to that future. For all of his power and cunning, he is simply too committed to spreading terror and death. Even if he wins, we'd be a huddled remnant of survivors surrounded by a kingdom of the dead."
"But if he loses, we're not even that." Zabini pointed out. "Because they're not going to let the survivors bribe their way out a second time."
"I am not going to be stuck trapped in a doomed, misguided war because I'm too frightened to try and cunning my way out of it, and neither are any one of you." I said vehemently. "Not if you've got the slightest bit of proper wizarding pride whatsoever." I slumped. "But no, I'm not enough of a strategic genius to figure out a plan for doing that all on my own. That's why I'm talking to you."
"We pool our heads." Daphne nodded. "And our information, and our resources. All of us contribute to try and get us out of this trap - because you're right, Draco, we are in a trap - because none of us can buck these kinds of odds alone."
"Obviously we'll all have to keep up the pose at home." Theodore agreed. "Not even those of us who have parents who aren't fanatics, like Greengrass, can dare to share their doubts with them." he said, phrasing his demand as an observation. "But He's not returned yet, has He?"
"No." I agreed. "My father's reaction if he had succeeded in returning would have been impossible to miss, and he hasn't reacted. So we still have time."
"Oh Merlin, we're going to have to help Potter and those other Gryffindorks, aren't we?" Pansy said in disgusted realization. "Because they're already straining as hard as they can to prevent His return, and now we've got the same goal!"
"The best way to fight a war is with other people." I agreed with her. "So yes, distasteful as it is, we're going to have to find a way to-" I shook my head. "Make friends is not only an asinine concept, but given all the bridges burned between here and there we might as well wish for free Philosopher's Stones all around as wish for that. But yes, we're going to have to abandon the schoolyard grudges and find at least some way to slip them information when it's convenient for us to steer them at the targets." I nodded towards Daphne. "You at least haven't participated in any of the back-and-forth hexing, it's just an academic rivalry with you. Can you stomach getting closer to Granger - study together with her or something? At least enough so that she'll believe you when you bring her a secret later on?"
"You have heard how much like a screech-owl her voice gets when she's excited about anything, haven't you? And you want me to regularly sit next to that?" Daphne shuddered elaborately. "Very well, my nerves and my hearing will just have to be sacrifices to the cause."
"Pansy, your father is constitutionally incapable of keeping his mouth shut when he's drunk." I turned to her. "And he loves to invite others from the old crowd over so they can commiserate with each other about the 'good old days' over bottles of Firewhiskey. Brush up on your eavesdropping charms so you can keep abreast of what him and his cup-companions talk about this summer at your estate."
"I can do that." she nodded back at me.
"And us?" Zabini asked me after sharing a glance with Nott.
"Your parents are not soft targets, any more than mine are." I reassured them. "Keep your ears open, obviously, but don't take any unnecessary risks. If you spot an opportunity of your own, you'll be the best judge of whether you can move on it safely. But Nott, I do want you to spend as much time as you can in your father's library researching the history of the past War. The more obscure details, the ones that didn't make it into the Daily Prophet or our textbooks. This summer's going to need to be an information-gathering phase for all of us; before we can hope to actually do anything to improve our future chances we're going to need an opportunity of some kind, a way to generate leverage. Maybe that opportunity will crop up in whatever madness targets Potter and his friends next, and we'll certainly pounce on it if it does, but until then- well, winners make their own luck."
"I'm surprised you're trusting us with this at all." Theodore smiled crookedly at me.
"I'm trusting you all to be smart enough to see the truth now that I've held it under your nose, and to know where your own advantage lies." I nodded back at him. "And also to know how long any of us are going to live the instant the rest of us even suspect they're about to be sold down the river."
"Which is the best kind of trust there is." Daphne nodded back at me. "Damn, Draco, I certainly didn't expect this when you asked for a meeting this evening."
"You expected another petty revenge plot of mine against Potter." I agreed with bitter amusement. "And trust me, the part where I actually have to help that twit in order to get what I want is one of the foulest-tasting parts about this whole affair. But that was then, and this is now." I sighed. "If life were fair then we could trust our parents to do the best thing for our futures while we enjoyed our school days and schoolyard hijinks, but life is never fair and our parents are following the wrong man to the wrong battlefield." I sighed. "So like it or not, it's all up to us now. Time to grow up."
Because seriously, it's just common sense...
