Beneath Appearances

Beneath Appearances

Chapter 1

Pull the First Thread

Four a.m. The moonlight shining through the high, slit windows of Hogwarts' dungeon level was growing thin, and pre-morning hung still as death in the air. It was too late, or too early, for even Filch or Peeves to be roaming the hallways. Too late for students to be causing any kind of trouble. Which made Draco Malfoy wonder what he was doing stealing silently through the corridors. The castle at this hour was boring; you couldn't even count on finding Potter prancing about after curfew practically begging someone to report his offense to an unmerciful professor. Still, Draco reflected, anything was better than his dormitory at the moment. He could handle Crabbe and Goyle's snoring - he'd learned long ago to simply cast a silencing charm before going to bed. But the two had been so much more gallingly stupid than usual yesterday that just lying in the same room with their silently rumbling bodies had frayed his nerves and made sleep a joke.

Even so, it could have been born if Pansy, apparently thinking his defenses would be lower if she caught him already in bed, hadn't sneaked into his room and crawled under his covers. It was just like her, Draco scowled, to assume he'd put the silencing charms there for her benefit. It had taken at least half an hour to make her realize that hadn't been her only mistake of the night, and in the process he'd been touched in quite a few places no one as repugnant as Pansy had any business putting their hands. Actually, the girl came from a perfectly respectable pureblood wizarding family. She was even pretty if your tastes ran toward coarse and militaristic - her preferred seduction tactic was pointing her enormous cannonball breasts at a bloke and hoping he'd be knocked onto a mattress. All of which said to Draco that practically any boy in Slytherin would be glad to have her and there was no reason for her to force all her pushy, common attentions on him. Honestly, if the word "no" were a dart, and her ass had a target painted on it...

The sounds of a door opening and low voices coming from around the next bend pulled him out of his thoughts. Maybe the old school wasn't so dull before dawn after all. Anyone else out and about now was at least up to something odd, and at most up to something he could use as blackmail. He cautiously peeked around the corner, and only his careful Malfoy upbringing kept him from dropping his jaw.

Hermione Granger and Professor Snape were standing in the doorway of the Potions classroom - standing quite close, actually. And they were speaking in soft murmurs entirely unsuited to either the cold threat or the trembling apology one would expect upon finding the Slytherin Head of House talking to a Gryffindor student on his doorstep after curfew. As Draco watched with shock and growing glee, Hermione turned to go, and Snape caught her arm, whispering something with a look on his face that might actually have been concern. She placed a firm hand on his chest, smiled a tired smile, and shook her head. Snape shook his head too and gently - yes, gently - lifted her chin with his wand tip. He muttered an inaudible incantation and brushed his wand against either side of her face. Draco thought he saw a bit of darkness fade from beneath her eyes and that the smile she sent Snape as she turned a second time to leave looked a bit less exhausted.

Hermione began walking straight toward Draco's hiding place, and he quickly ducked back around the corner to let her pass by. As soon he heard the door of the Potions room thud safely shut, however, he reemerged from hiding and caught up with the witch in a few quick strides. "Quite a display back there," he hissed suggestively.

"Malfoy?" Hermione whirled in surprise but still kept her voice low. "You've got a really sick talent for turning up where you're not wanted, you know that?"

The scowl on her face looked disappointingly closer to anger than fear, but Draco ploughed on. "Impressive, really. No one could even conceive of Granger the bloody Head Gryffingirl sneaking about, spreading her legs for the Potions Master, so I'll bet it's been pretty easy to get away with...up 'til now."

"I've no patience for hints and games, Malfoy. As you've gathered, I don't get much sleep at night, so this next hour is very important to me. What do you want?"

Well, that had been simple. No denials, no pleas for pity. It almost took the fun out of what he was about to do, but not quite. He smirked. "Oh, it'll take a high price to make me to hush up this sordid affair."

"Not as high as you think."

"As high as I want. Just think what your sorry little Gryffindor chums would do if they found out. And I'm sure the board of directors would have plenty to say to Professor Snape if I told them what you two've been up to."

"The fact is, Malfoy, you've got nothing to bargain with here. If I thought I could trust you - and I'd be much happier if I thought that - I'd let you name your price. As it is, I'm going to have to Obliviate you and live with my conscience."

"You're what?" Draco's whisper sounded choked, and his pale, moonlit face turned even whiter with shock at how quickly the tables had turned.

"You heard me. And you're going to let me."

"Why in bloody hell would I do that?"

"Because if you keep acting like a sodding prat, I'll simply off and charm you anyway. But if you cooperate, you can have a favor in return. It'll be exactly like me paying you to keep quiet - I'm just ensuring you keep your half of the deal."

How terribly...Slytherin of her. Come to think of it, he would have demanded the same in her position - actually, he wouldn't have promised any favor in return for wiping his opponent's memory. "It had better be a bloody grand favor," he grumbled.

"Not at all. I'm not in the least obligated be even this decent to you. It can't be anything that would hurt Harry or Ron. It can't be anything I'd consider wrong..."

"This from the girl who's screwing Snape."

"I said that I'd consider wrong. Not what most of the world would tell us is wrong. And you'll have to think of a favor I can do in the next fifteen minutes because I want this whole thing settled before I go to bed."

"What can you possibly do for me in fifteen minutes?"

"Well, barring the obvious naughty things I'd rather not suggest to you, there are spells. I could cast you something you can't cast for yourself. I don't know. What do you want?"

What did he want? There were countless things, and as much as he'd like to slap Granger for being so goddamn conceited, he knew she could handle all kinds of magic that eluded him. A golden opportunity, and with the clock ticking and the Mudblood unsubtly tapping her foot, he couldn't think of anything. Well, there was...but there had to be something better...no, it was all he could think of..."Make Pansy stop bothering me."

"Just that? How?"

"I don't care how. Some way that doesn't seem suspicious. Something natural, I guess. Just make it happen."

Hermione shrugged and drew her wand. She took a few steps away from Draco, settled into a comfortable, centered stance, held her wand in both hands before her chest, and tapped her nose with the tip. She remained that way for several minutes, casting her eyes from the floor to the ceiling and back again. Finally, a light seemed to come on behind those eyes. She raised her wand in the air and drew a tight circle of white light above her head while muttering softly. Then she twitched her wand, and the circle expanded in a flash, its glowing circumference racing outwards and away into the dim Hogwarts' morning. As the band of light passed through Draco, he felt a burst of illumination then a sudden wrench and twist inside himself. He stood shuddering for a moment afterwards, feeling that what had been wrenched was a floodgate in his head, and now a stream of water, complete with small, wriggling fish, was flowing down through his body, seeking the lowest level.

"What the fuck did you do?" he whispered.

"Exactly what you said. I sent out a generalized spell that will sweep the castle. It'll act on the first thing it meets that can be altered to end Pansy's interest in you."

"You let off an open-ended charm? Those are insanely hard! And unpredictable. If I grow bats' ears because of this, you daft, bloody Mudblood..."

"Gods and demigods, give it a rest, Malfoy. You said it should seem natural, so I stipulated that nothing the spell does is allowed to be overtly magical or compel people to act against their natures. Oddly decent of you to make me think of that. So now, if you please..."

"Not so bloody fast! I want to be sure this works before you go poking holes in my memory."

"Ordinarily I'd say fair enough, but how do I know you won't welsh on me?"

"Because I would particularly like this spell to work, and if it doesn't, I'm coming back for a second go."

Hermione's eyes met his, her brown succeeding somehow in seeming just as steely as his grey, and after a moment she nodded. Then without another word, she turned and strode off down the corridor.

Draco sighed and headed back to his dormitory to try for a nap before breakfast.

And awoke more horrified than he'd ever been in his life. What the fuck had that been? And why...? He sat gripping the edge of his bed, rocking slightly, and breathing like it was something he'd never done before. He was overheated and sweaty, and he pulled his drenched tee shirt over his head. "Morning, Draco," Goyle greeted him, coming out of the bathroom and clearly not noticing the blonde's distress.

"Say another word if you want to die," Draco snapped and resumed his rocking. There was absolutely no explanation for it. That was it, it was meaningless. A pure, stupid, pointless dream. Even if at the time... No, he simply wasn't thinking about it.

At breakfast, Draco tried very hard to concentrate on eating, but somehow without his intending it, he ended up stealing many more looks at the Gryffindor table than he managed to get bites of fried potatoes into his mouth. It was exactly like in his dream, and that was absolutely not allowed to be. That hair, looking so deliciously, suggestively wild. Eyes so bright he swore he could see them flashing from across the hall. And gods, just the perfect shape of that body was almost enough to make him forget how fucking, gut-twistingly revolting this was and think instead about how robes were really cruel and unnecessary, how they ought to simply vanish from those perfect limbs, or better yet, part slowly, inch by tantalizing inch, under his fingers, as he ran his hands over that throat, those strong, flaring collarbones, and lower... He recollected himself with a start. Almost enough to make him forget? Clearly more than. He shook his head bitterly, stood abruptly, and stormed from the table.

In Potions it was the hands. The one spreading books and parchment across the desktop, the other gripping a quill. Then writing, the hand traveling quickly over a growing scroll of notes, picking up smears of ink as it went. Dropping the quill, about to turn a page. Putting one long, slightly inky finger to an absolutely intoxicating mouth, and - bloody fucking hell! - the tongue coming out to lick the fingertip... Draco's throat barely closed around the moan trying to escape. Thank gods, the page was turned. But now the thought: were those amazing fingers as talented as they were beautiful? As gentle and agile? They were, they had to be. It would have to feel absolutely incredible to have them wrap around the back of his neck and pull him in for a kiss, unbelievable to have them wrapped around something besides a pen and wet with something other than ink...

Snape must have ordered them to begin preparing the potion he'd just described because the amazing hands were reaching for a ginger root, mincing it to specks; they were sprinkling dried salamander's blood over the root, dripping a bit of wild honey into the mix, and kneading, oh, kneading the sticky mess into a smooth, sweet paste. They were pinching - mmmm - bits of paste into a cauldron. At some point Blaise probably asked him to do something to help with their own potion, but if he did, Draco never noticed.

The end of class bell just managed to penetrate his foggy thoughts, and he rose to see Pansy sliding around a block of desks toward him. "Oh, my Draco, you had the most beautiful look on your face a moment ago. Anything I can help you with?" She angled her unearthly cleavage directly at him. Draco barked a short laugh and staggered back. "Wouldn't you just die if you knew?" he thought. Then another thought hit him like a flash of white light. A very particular white light. "Bloody fucking Granger!" he snarled and bolted from the classroom.

Draco caught up with the Gryffindor Trio after only a minute of mad sprinting through the hallway. "We need to talk," he growled, seizing Hermione's arm and dragging her down a side corridor and into an unused classroom before Harry and Ron had a chance to blink.

Draco threw his silencing charm so hard the classroom trembled. "What the fuck did you do to me?!" he shouted, slamming Hermione against a wall. Hermione looked calmly down at his hands gripping her robes. "Ferveo Localis," she said, causing her robes to grow hotter and hotter under Draco's fingers until he broke away, unleashing a vicious stream of curses and shaking his hands in the air. "Finite Incantatum." Hermione remained leaning coolly against the wall as if it had been her idea to stand there in the first place. "Now. It seems at the moment you've got a far better idea what's happened to you than I do. Care to share it?"

Draco paced nervously among the desks. "All I can say, is you'd better be able to undo this, or you deserve nothing better than for me to tell the whole wizarding world your dirty little secret, right before I chop you up and feed you to the giant squid."

Hermione rolled her eyes before fixing him with a pointed glare. "Yes, but that's hardly the point now, is it?"

Draco perched for a moment on a desk, stood up again, and knotted his fingers rather violently in his white-blonde hair. Could he actually say this to someone? Even the someone who was completely to blame for the whole nightmare? Best just to be as much of a bastard about it as possible. He planted his hands on a desk in front of him and almost managed to meet her eyes. Oh, yes, that was very badass, but in the circumstances it was the best he could manage. He began in a hard, gritty voice that grew only a little hysterical near the end, "Fine. As if you don't know, what with it being entirely your fault, ever since that damn spell of yours this morning I've been...attracted to...fuck, I've been lusting after and practically spraying myself over Potter!"

Hermione's first urge was to burst out laughing, but in another half an instant her mind began to pick out the intricacies of the situation. Her forced expression of boredom and unconcern melted into one of shrewd concentration. "And this has never happened before?" she asked walking over to take a seat across from Draco.

"Never," he groaned, sinking into a chair himself.

"Not even hints? Or thoughts about some other boy?"

"No! Nothing!"

"And just to be certain, you're sure Pansy's knowing you're gay would end her interest in you?"

Draco scoffed and looked pityingly at his companion. "Considering the Slytherin obsession with old Pureblood families being absolutely respectable, it would end her interest if I had a squiggly birthmark on my elbow or liked playing the accordion."

"And you couldn't have just taken up playing the accordion?"

"Absolutely respectable is important."

"Ri-ight," Hermione drawled. "Anyway, I'd say that spell blew the hell out of your repression."

"I am not repressed! Up 'til this morning I'd never had a single naked, sweaty thought about a boy, and you went and fucking turned me gay!" He grimaced. "And that's not even mentioning that for some sod-all reason it had to be Harry."

Hermione blanched a bit. "Maybe you shouldn't mention that. And you do realize you called him Harry?"

"Fuck," he sighed. "Change me back."

"Can't."

Draco half rose and leaned dangerously over the desk. "'Can't' is not a word you should be saying."

"Don't be thick, Malfoy. The spell didn't make you gay; it made you realize that you are. I can't change you back to something you never were."

"It was the spell." Draco ground out from between gritted teeth.

"There are three perfectly good reasons that's impossible."

"Oh?"

"Fine, but I can't believe I'm going to miss dinner to counsel you about your sexuality."

Draco glanced at his surroundings for the first time since they'd entered the room, and sure enough, the light slanting through the windows had changed from clear brightness to a heavy, gold half-light. "You're not counseling, you're being a bloody great pain in the ass. Now, the three reasons?"

No one, thought Hermione, could provoke her to sighing and eye rolling as frequently as Draco Malfoy. "One," she began, "I limited the spell so it couldn't cause you to do anything you weren't naturally inclined to do."

"Bullshit."

"Two. Modern wizarding spells are derived from the etymology, mostly Latin, of the word for the thing or concept being magicked. The word 'homosexual' is half Greek and half Latin; it's an etymological atrocity. Extremely awkward magically.

"Three, and this one's important. Sexuality is part of the basic nature of person, just something that is about them. And there are no spells for changing basic nature. My magicking you into being gay when you're not would be like my trying to magic you into being a girl. Sure, I could Polyjuice you into looking like Greta Garbo - never mind the reference - and I could even cast a delusion on you to make you believe you're her, but you're not changed basically. Take the spells away and you go right back to being you."

"Fucking...fucking Kneazles with a broomstick!" Draco stammered. "Do you mean to tell me we've been arguing about a piece of trivial PC garbage for half an hour? So you bloody well made me believe I'm gay. Huge fucking difference. Undo it."

"I told you that's not how the spell worked."

Draco looked stumped.

"Draco, have you ever really been attracted to a girl?"

"Of course! I mean, some, I guess." The blonde wizard now looked utterly perplexed. His shoulders hunched and his eyes unfocused as he dealt with an onslaught of deep thoughts.

"Right," said Hermione again as she rose to go with a half smile on her lips.

"Wait!"

"It's late, Malfoy."

"Just a minute. So I'm gay," - his mouth seemed to work especially hard to form those words - "We've established that. And there are delusion spells, you said. Your spell must have undone a delusion spell that made me think I wasn't."

At that Hermione gave tired laugh. "Honestly, you git. Why would anyone cast a spell like that on you? Do you really find it so hard to believe that you've just been in denial up 'til today?"

"I have no idea why, and yes I do. I need you do some kind of magic test or something on me, figure it out."

"The only thing I've got to do to you is Obliviate, but it can wait 'til tomorrow when I'm not so bloody exhausted."

"Look, denial is one thing. I have no problem with denial - it implies there was something there to be denied. I'm saying I had no fucking clue. So I wasn't all that interested in girls; I never, never once thought about a boy. And the sort of things - gods - the things that were in my mind today aren't anything you can just fail to notice. I need to know what's going on. And besides that last spell you did for me went a bit wonky. I think you owe me another before Obliviate."

Hermione thought that final gab and bargain would be the closest thing to a 'please' she'd ever hear from a Malfoy. "Tomorrow," she said.

"Now," he replied.

Sighing, Hermione drew her wand. "Just some kind of previous castings detector?"

He nodded. Hermione pointed her wand at his head and slowly began lowering it toward his feet. With the wand pointing straight out at chest level she suddenly stopped. "Fucking whatever you said about Kneazles," she breathed. Then she turned and bolted from the room, calling over her shoulder, "Meet me here after dinner tomorrow!"

Hermione raced into the library swearing under her breath. Her conversation with Malfoy had taken quite a while, it was true, but it really wasn't that late. What was the school thinking with its nine o'clock curfew, and how could she possibly find the books she would need with only twenty minutes until she was supposed to be back in Gryffindor Tower? And even pulling a Head Girl curfew-dodging trick, wouldn't keep the library from closing. No time to be selective; she grabbed everything that looked like it might be the slightest bit helpful and staggered hastily from the library under the weight of sixteen books and Madame Pince's disapproving eye.

Harry and Ron were waiting anxiously for her when she struggled through the portrait hole minutes later. Their alarm grew when she collapsed on one of the common room sofas, scattering books in all directions.

"Are you all right?"

"What happened with Malfoy?"

"We tried to come help, but he must've enchanted the room you were in to hide it."

"What's wrong?"

Their voices tumbled one over the other so quickly Hermione could hardly make them out. Finally, she waved a hand for silence.

"I'm fine," she sighed, "but if one of you wants to take the invisibility cloak to the kitchens and bring me back some coffee, I'll owe you 'til I die."

"Isn't that a little extreme, Hermione?" Ron grinned.

"Not under the circumstances," she answered, deadly serious.

Ron shook his head, "Invisibility cloaks, best friend of dragon smugglers and the Hogwarts room service staff."

"You're off track, Ron," Harry chuckled, then turned back to Hermione. "So what's up?"

"Coffee?" she suggested hopefully.

"Of course, right after you tell us what's going on."

Hermione let her head fall onto the back of the sofa. "Well...I don't exactly know myself right now, and I think even if I did, it would be somebody else's decision whether I could tell you - don't give me those looks; you've no idea how I'd like to tell you. Anyway, I should understand things better tomorrow. And do you remember Operation Finnegan's Wake?"

Harry and Ron both grinned at that amusing memory. A couple months ago, Parvati had attempted to cast a Truth Trance on Seamus to find out whether he liked Lavender but had inadvertently put him in Seven-Year Slumber, where apparently, if the sleep mutterings they'd overheard could be believed, he'd been dreaming he was Lavender. Parvati had come to Hermione, desperate for a way to lift the spell before any of the professors found out, and Hermione had come to the rescue. She'd spent an entire day and night shut in her room researching, while the boys smuggled her books and meals and made excuses for her in classes. She'd cobbled together a counterspell before any non-Gryffindors suspected Seamus had suffered anything more interesting than a day of bad allergies, and ever since Hermione had referred to the incident as Operation Finnegan's Wake, which, she assured a baffled Harry and Ron, was very clever.

"I need you to do that again."

"Uh, Herm, you nearly killed yourself last time," Harry said worriedly. "Is this that important?"

"Can't be, if it involves Malfoy," declared Ron. "Oh gods, Hermione, you're not doing something to help him, are you?"

"You two have just got to trust me that this is at least ten times as important as last time." She turned a serious, beseeching gaze on each of them in turn, and after a silent moment, Harry nodded.

"Right, then," he announced, "it's off to the kitchens for us."

Both boys got up to fetch Harry's invisibility cloak from the boys' dormitory, Ron trailing a sulky step behind Harry and muttering about some people being "just too bloody nice." Hermione opened one of her numerous new books wearily, but by the time Harry and Ron again crossed the common room toward the portrait hole, she was already too intent on her reading to notice them leaving.

Draco was waiting when Hermione hurried into the unused classroom the next evening and collapsed into a chair on the other side of his desk. "You look worse than dead," he greeted her, giving her an intense urge to curse him to smithereens on the spot. One hour of sleep in three days, and she'd had to switch from coffee to Pepper-Up Potion in the middle of her research that morning, so her nerves were jangling more than a bell choir performing "Flight of the Bumblebee." She had to admit, though, that, insulting as he was, this time he was probably right - if she felt like murder, she guessed she must look like death.

"It was worse in third year," she answered dismissively, then breezed on before he had a chance to wonder what she meant by that. "Anyway, how are you?"

"Marvelous. By the time I got to Astronomy - that's my last class on Thursdays - I'd gotten the hang of fantasizing about bloody Potter only when no one watching to see me drool. Couldn't quite muster the level of control needed to take notes, though."

"Self-mockery, Malfoy?" Hermione asked, exaggerating the shock in her voice to disguise just how disturbing hearing that tone from Malfoy really was. "It's a good look on you, though it makes me feel the world may be crumbling."

"At least for you it's only a feeling," Draco muttered.

Hermione felt a reluctant but powerful sympathy well up inside her. She reached out and put one hand over his two, which lay clenched together on the desk between them. His eyes jerked up to meet hers in surprise. "It's about to get a lot worse," she said gently.

Draco snatched his hands away and spun in his chair so he was facing the classroom's stone wall. "What, am I going to start picturing Dumbledore in his skinnies as well? Or - don't tell me - that filthy great oaf Hagrid?"

It was truly amazing how quickly Draco could transform sympathy to irritation, Hermione thought. Still, that had been his first outright foul comment of the evening, and she supposed under the circumstances he was allowed a minimum level of bastardliness. She answered him tightly, "No, I think we've got your sexual impulses more or less sorted out," - a snort from Draco - "The reason I asked you to meet me tonight..."

"Had better be to explain why you ran out of here cursing yesterday."

Hermione rolled her eyes to the ceiling and shook her head. "Well, if that's all you want to know, it was because I'm pregnant with Snape's child, and I was overcome by a sudden fit of nausea. And that's all I'm saying." She smirked at the expression of utter shock and horror now turned toward her. "Of course I'm going to tell you why I ran out of here - and no that wasn't it - and I'll be able to tell you that much more quickly if you can hold off on pointless interruptions."

Draco scowled, unable to believe he'd been had by a Mudblood, but Hermione's next words recaptured his full attention. "When I did that spell last night, it turned out that you were actually right. There had been a spell making you believe you were straight. 'I told you so' is going to waste time," - she shot him a warning glare - "But there are also other spells still on you."

"What?! Like what?"

"I don't know. Diagnostic spells aren't my thing - I didn't know last night how to figure out what the spells were, only that that they were something."

"Bloody great."

"Shut up. The reason I ran out of here was to get to the library right away. I know how to do it now."

"Figured it out in less than a day? Not possible."

"Well, if you don't want the help..."

"All I'm saying is that you knew how to do it all along, and now you're just showing off. I'm a bloody wreck, and you still have to pull your little genius act."

"Just go stand over there," Hermione grated out, pointing toward the front of the classroom where the floor was raised to form a lecturing platform and dusty chalkboards ran the length of the wall. Draco shrugged and crossed the room sullenly to step up on the platform. "Hold still," Hermione ordered after he'd turned back to face her, "this one's a lot more...impressive...than the one last night." She moved into position facing him directly across the room, and breathed deeply for over a minute. Draco wondered if that was a sign to start worrying.

"Incantatum revelus totalum," Hermione intoned, pointing her wand. A thin golden thread of light flowed out of the wand and snaked through the air toward Draco. It wrapped around him again and again, then began to tighten. There was the faintest squeeze and then the coil disappeared, sinking into and under his skin. He could feel the golden cord wriggling around inside him, branching into countless fingers that poked about everywhere, teasing their way in between his cells. They were warm and not painful, just terribly foreign-feeling and intrusive. He fought the urge to squirm. Finally, he felt the fingers retract and the thread coil itself up into a single ball that leapt from him. It hung in the air to one side of his head and quickly transformed itself into a set of multicolored symbols in a language he didn't recognize. Draco sagged a bit as Hermione walked to the front of the room, an open book in her hand, to study the figures more closely. She pulled a self-inking quill and a scrap of parchment out of a fold in her robe and began jotting notes. Draco watched her eyes dart between the symbols and parchment repeatedly, checking and rechecking her work; when he was just about to pitch an impatience fit, she waved a hand dispersing the glowing display. "Have a seat," she instructed him.

Back in their desks, she turned to him gravely, "What you've got on you, Malfoy, looks like a sort of makeshift super-spell pieced together out of smaller spell components. Some kind of malleability spell, you might say." She pushed the parchment and book toward him, pointing to various markings as she spoke. "See here...the symbols that appeared - I've copied them. Red and blue represent elements of behavior, enhanced and inhibited, respectively. You've got loyalty and obedience, both red. Silver and purple are elements of the mind, enhanced and inhibited; you've got capacity for doubt, purple, contentment or complacency, silver. And then this green represents a sort of focus, probably the caster of the spell, meaning that all these spells affect you predominantly in regard to just one person." She noticed that Draco was staring at her, completely dumbfounded; it didn't look likely that he'd find his voice again anytime soon. "It means someone wants you doing exactly what you're told without asking any questions, and they want you to think that's exactly what you want to be doing as well," she prompted.

"You're saying I'm being controlled?" Draco finally managed.

"Not so much controlled as, well, you've been conditioned so outright control is unnecessary. Rather brilliant, really - much more subtle than Imperius."

"That's fucking impossible," Draco's voice had taken on a hollow, whispery quality, and he spoke very deliberately as if trying to work through a difficult puzzle. "You're just, just...bloody, barking mad, Granger." Hermione said nothing, only rustled her bit of parchment at the point where glowing symbols had hung before the chalkboard minutes earlier. Draco hunched in his seat and sighed, sounding, if possible, even more defeated. "Just get them off me."

"I figured you'd ask - that's another book," - she pulled a frighteningly thick volume from her from her satchel - "but really, are you sure? Undoing these spells - it'll probably rip a fantastic hole right in the middle of who you think you are. Do you want to do that?"

"Get them off."

"And I figured on that, too. Consider that your 'I'm fully aware of the consequences and have signed on the dotted line' moment." Draco's jaw clenched.

Hermione flipped through a few pages of her book, lips moving silently as she reviewed the spell. Then she reached into her satchel, brought out a medium-sized beaker from the potions lab, which she set on the desk, and picked up her wand. "Just, um, relax." She reached out to where Draco sat facing her across the single desk and touched the wand lightly to his shoulder. He felt a glow of warmth spreading into the shoulder, then saw Hermione give a tiny shake of her head and instantly the warmth was gone. The wand was transferred to his other shoulder, and it was exactly as before -

warmth, shake, gone. The wand moved to his chest, the palm of each hand, Hermione looking grimmer with each repetition of the pattern. Finally, with a nervous swallow, she placed the wand tip on one side of his neck, just below and behind his ear. The heat began to seep in again; then suddenly, Draco felt something catch. He drew in a sharp breath and saw Hermione tense across from him. Her eyes squeezed shut. She slowly drew the wand away from Draco's skin, and threads in the colors of the glowing symbols were clinging to it. She cracked one eye to watch her work as she tentatively began twirling her wand, wrapping the threads around it like strands of spaghetti.

Draco shuddered violently and gripped the edges of the desk. He fought the urge to shut his eyes as well and instead managed to slide them to the side, watching as Hermione pulled the magic out of him. It looked as though spells were unwinding from the point behind his ear as neatly as thread from a spool, but inside he could feel them now, diffused throughout his body, forming a matrix that supported and held in place the trivial bits of flesh that he'd thought were all that made him up. Now this support structure was being pulled, stretched until it snapped away from infinite points of attachment inside him, being dragged through the bottleneck point behind his ear, compressed and drawn out of its big, cloudy Draco-shape into those fine, multicolored wires... He was starting to feel hollow, as if his organs were rattling and his blood sloshing sloppily inside him. He was going to collapse, implode. He was going to scream, "Stop!" but he screwed his face up, finally shutting his eyes, and gripped the desk harder. Was he biting his tongue? That might be blood in his mouth.

Finally, with a last bit of suction, the threads detached themselves from his neck. A clump of colorful gauziness was balled around the end of Hermione's wand, but Draco didn't see it; he was slumped forward across the desk. Hermione stuck her wand into the beaker and murmured an indistinguishable word, and the glob melted, sliding from her wand to slosh about in the bottom of the glass container. Draco tried to lift his head, but Hermione placed a hand there and held him down, the action taking virtually no pressure. "Shh, hold still another minute; I need to check for stray bits."

With that, she rose and circled round behind him, sweeping her wand over his back, arms, everywhere. Occasionally, she made a tiny sound in the back of her throat; then the wand would stop and pull out another speck of color, which she would add to the beaker, and Draco would feel a profound, miniscule crumbling in his left shoulder blade, his right forearm as tiny bits of comfort he hadn't realized he'd had left were sucked out of him. At last, Hermione moved back around the desk and sat down. She took his hands again. He felt smaller than he had before.

Several silent minutes later Draco was able to raise his head. He nodded very slightly toward the beaker, "That's it?" he whispered, his voice shaky.

"Mmm-hmm."

"You're keeping it?"

"This is really too big a deal to keep secret; Dumbledore has to see this."

Draco wanted to argue with her, or better yet command her to tell no one. At the moment, though, he thought he'd better start small. He laid his head back on the desk. "You don't need to Obliviate me now; I don't want anyone knowing about this."

Hermione paused a moment, then nodded. "No one will, except Dumbledore."

Stupid bitch, she'd not gotten the point. Or else she'd deliberately ignored it. But he just didn't have the energy to fight right then. He promised himself they'd come back to the topic and sighed weakly. A few more moments silence, then, "How did this happen?"

"What do you mean?"

"How...? Who?"

"Ahh," Hermione nodded knowingly, "I expected we'd get there. That's another spell again. D'you want to try it now or rest up a bit more?"

"You know this is all bloody, fucking ridiculous?" he said, suddenly half pleading, half explaining the obvious to a very dull-witted child. "It's fucking impossible. My father would never allow anyone to actually use those spells against me - he must have found the bastard years ago and tossed him in our pit of stakes. No one's been controlling me. Those spells have just been sitting there, um, dormant, so I wouldn't have to go through that."

"Of course, because that makes perfect sense, Malfoy."

"It does," he was gaining a little energy now and managing to sit up a bit straighter, "and I bet you knew it too. Just decided to go yanking those spells out for the fun of watching the Slytherin squirm, didn't you?"

"You're being irrational."

"What's irrational is anyone in the bloody wizarding world trying to curse me! No one could be that stupid; I'm Draco fucking Malfoy. Anyone tried it, my father would have them strung up by their nuts while our flock of harpies chewed on them. He'd..."

"Say that again," Hermione cut in coolly.

"What?"

"My father, my father," she mimicked. "You were off the charts for the most annoying broken-record phrase back in fourth year. It was one thing when you were a kid, now it sounds like arrested development...or a spell."

"What are you saying?" All at once Draco was on his feet, his strength apparently recovered. He leaned across the desk separating them, fists planted on either side of Hermione, snarling. "If you dare, if you even think..."

Hermione gazed at him with her best bored look and calmly inserted the tip of her wand into the beaker holding the swirling spells. "Instigatrix." A miniature, vaporous image of Lucius Malfoy's head floated out of the beaker and was gone in an instant.

For half a minute Draco only stared at the point where the tiny ghost had been. Then he spoke, not moving a muscle or shifting his gaze, his voice low and so tightly controlled Hermione could hear it vibrating beneath his restraint. "You filthy, fucking, perverse Mudblood. Schemed it all up, didn't you - some kind of twisted revenge because I caught you whoring yourself to our greaseball Potions Master..." - his control was slipping - "I don't know how in the bleeding depths of hell you got me going on this; I don't know what the fuck you've done to me, but you can rest assured you're going to regret it, sobbing and begging me you're going to regret it..." He was screaming in her face now, and as he carried on he gave the table half of the desk a fierce shove, slamming it back into her chest.

Hermione gasped and winced. Then she rose - carefully - and fixed Malfoy with her most resentful glower. "You're welcome," she said and reached out to take the beaker.

Draco snatched it first and sent it flying to smash against the room's closed door. Colorful trickles of magic ran down the dark wood, evaporating into nothing before they could even reach the floor. "I fucking hate...I more than hate you," Draco whispered, trembling, "Get out."

With the barest of nods, Hermione spun away from him and stalked - carefully - from the room, slamming the door behind her. "Bastard Malfoys," she muttered, setting off down the hallway.

Snape answered her ferocious knocking on the door of his private chambers wearing a look of furious distaste, which softened instantly. "Just hold me while I sleep tonight," she said, "and don't wake me up for anything."

Draco collapsed back into the nearest seat when Hermione slammed the door. After that, it took him two hours to walk a few steps, stop and rest, walk a few steps from the classroom to his dormitory in the Slytherin dungeons. When he finally fell into bed, he would have loved to have been able to sleep away the night and the next day and the rest of his life, but even a minute's doze turned out to be impossible.