"Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men." - Benjamin Disraeli.
Draco
Life had never really been simple for Draco Malfoy.
He had been given everything as a child, or close enough to everything that the distinction hadn't seemed to matter. Toys, servants, the best of whatever was on offer. The first time anyone had said no to him, he had been five years old and he had wanted a wand.
"Not until you're eleven," his father had said. "It's tradition."
"I don't care about tradition, I want it now," Draco had said, in the tone of someone who had never had cause to believe that wanting something wasn't sufficient reason to receive it.
His father's expression had shifted then, something cold and deliberate moving through it. "There is something you need to understand, Draco. You will respect tradition. Tradition is what separates us from the rest. Do you understand me?"
He hadn't understood. Not that day. What he understood that day was the flat of his father's hand, which was a different kind of lesson and one he didn't forget.
It took him several years to properly grasp what had actually been communicated. The gifts, the servants, the yes to everything, all of it operated within a system. Step outside the system and the system stepped on you. The generosity wasn't unconditional. It never had been. He had simply been too young to notice the walls.
He learned. Children always did, eventually.
When word reached him that the Girl-Who-Lived was arriving at Hogwarts with no knowledge of the magical world, he had seen an opportunity. He had explained his reasoning to Crabbe and Goyle with the confidence of someone who believed he was being brilliantly strategic.
"She defeated the Dark Lord, yes, but she didn't choose to. She doesn't know the world she's entering. A half-blood with no connections, no understanding of how things work here. If I bring her into the right circles, establish the relationship early, she could be an asset. For a half-blood she probably has her uses."
The response he received was not the one he had planned for.
"I choose my own friends," she had said, looking at him with an expression that suggested she had already filed him somewhere unimportant. "And your face bores me. Same for the redhead who sat down next to me and immediately asked to see my scar. Both of you, leave me alone."
It had been, objectively, the most dismissive thing anyone had ever said to him. He had spent the rest of that train journey oscillating between outrage and a grudging, furious curiosity about someone who spoke to a Malfoy that way without appearing to feel any particular concern about it.
He had filed it away as something to be addressed later. She wasn't worth a public confrontation, not yet. He had his reputation to consider.
She remained irritating. Year after year, she remained irritating. And she remained, infuriatingly, beyond his reach in ways he couldn't quite explain and didn't want to examine too closely.
The end of first year had produced one of his least pleasant memories.
"Your marks are not sufficient for the top ten," his father had said, in the tone of someone reciting a verdict. "With everything invested in your education. And you have allowed yourself to be surpassed by a Muggle-born whose origins I won't dignify by speculating about. I find myself questioning the return on my investment."
Draco had stared at the floor and thought about crying and decided against it because Malfoys did not cry.
"Deal with her," he had said. "Get rid of her. Father, it's the obvious solution."
His father had looked at him for a long moment. Not with warmth. With assessment.
"You want to make problems disappear, Draco, but you lack the intelligence to understand why that's not always possible and the subtlety to find another way when it isn't. Dumbledore watches that girl. She's untouchable through direct means, which means direct means are unavailable. What does that suggest to you?"
Draco had no answer.
"It suggests," his father had said, "that you find another way. And in the meantime, you will spend this summer revising until your marks are no longer an embarrassment to this family."
He had spent the entire summer studying. His privileges returned at the start of the following year. He had never been entirely sure whether his father had lowered his expectations or simply stopped expressing them.
When the news reached him on the train back for fourth year, he had reacted with uncomplicated joy. The Dark Lord had returned. The Mudbloods would pay. Everything was about to change.
He had not known, at that point, what the inside of Malfoy Manor looked like when it had been commandeered. He had not known what his father looked like from the ground, which was where Draco found him.
He had not known what a Cruciatus curse felt like.
The Dark Lord occupied his father's chair at the head of the room. He had raised the chair on a platform at some point, so that anyone approaching had to ascend to reach him, and anyone standing before him was, by simple geometry, looking up. Draco had catalogued this detail automatically, the way you catalogued things when the rest of your mind was too occupied with terror to think clearly.
His parents were on the floor. His father's eyes were empty. His mother was trying to look at him and not quite managing it.
"So this is your offspring," the Dark Lord had said, with the interest of someone examining something mildly disappointing. "He doesn't look particularly clever. Like father, like son."
"Get your hands off my parents," Draco had said, because he had not yet fully understood where he was or what was happening. "Let them go."
The Cruciatus had answered him.
He had not known, before that moment, that his body contained that much sensation. Every nerve, every muscle, every thought he had ever had seemed to contract simultaneously into a single point of white agony. It lasted approximately forever and then it stopped and he was on his hands and knees on the floor.
"You will address me with respect," the Dark Lord had said pleasantly. "You are alive because your family has residual usefulness. The moment that changes, you understand what follows."
Draco had looked at his father. His father had not looked back. His mother had finally managed to meet his eyes, and what he saw there was not reassurance.
"Yes," Draco had said. "My lord."
The curse resumed anyway. For no reason he could identify. Simply because it could.
The summer that followed was the architecture of something that had broken and been rebuilt wrong. In public, the Malfoy name still carried weight. In private, there was only the waiting, and the pain, and the specific humiliation of his father receiving orders that were given to him the way orders were given to servants.
He had decided, somewhere in the middle of that summer, that this was Harriet Potter's fault.
He wasn't entirely sure of the logic. He was aware, in some cold and functional part of his mind, that the logic didn't fully hold. But the Dark Lord had returned because of her presence in the wizarding world, because of the events she had set in motion or failed to prevent or provoked, and his family had been reduced to this because of the Dark Lord, and therefore.
Therefore.
He sat with it until it felt like certainty. By the time September arrived, it had calcified into something that felt almost like purpose.
Hermione
When she woke, the first thing she registered was the smell. Damp earth, pine, something decomposing quietly nearby. Then the ropes.
She kept her eyes nearly closed. Long habit, that. Assess before you reveal. There were approximately twenty people in the clearing, all in Slytherin robes, and one unmistakable head of platinum hair.
The Forbidden Forest. Charmed ropes. Twenty opponents.
It didn't take long for the rest to fall into place. She had been drugged. Dolores, the sweet and innocent-seeming toad that she was, had orchestrated this with Draco Malfoy. Of course. The Weasley twins weren't the only ones who could come up with a scheme.
This was a deliberate attack.
They've finally done it, Hermione thought bitterly. They've finally decided to put me in my place. And probably deal with Harriet in the process, using me as leverage.
She catalogued this with the part of her mind that didn't panic, which was, she was beginning to realize, a larger part than she had previously given herself credit for. What she felt was not fear so much as a cold, clean anger directed at herself, because she had seen this coming. The tea. The office. The practiced smile. She had assessed all of it correctly and walked in anyway.
Brilliant, she thought. Truly.
The ropes tightened when she tested them. Charmed, not just tied. She stopped pulling and made herself think.
Harriet would come. She knew that with a certainty that had nothing to do with hope and everything to do with knowing Harriet, the actual Harriet, the one who operated on instincts Hermione still didn't entirely understand. She would come not because she was the hero, not because she felt obligated, but because Draco had made something personal and Harriet had a very specific relationship with things that were made personal.
Though she might take her time about it. That was the part Hermione found herself less certain about. It seemed absurd to worry about in the current circumstances, but she knew Harriet well enough to know that absurd was not a disqualifying factor. They still had a friendship of sorts, she and Harriet, but the distance between them was real and both of them knew it.
What she had done was quieter and in some ways worse: she had let go of something rare and close and irreplaceable, and she had told herself it was practical, and she had been wrong about that in ways she was only now beginning to fully account for.
As though the opinions of others or the dangers around her shouldn't matter to someone like her. As though she was above being affected by any of it. After all, she was a g...
She stopped the thought there, firmly, before it could finish forming. That particular variety of arrogance wasn't going to help her right now.
The question was timing. And whether, with a hostage and twenty opponents, coming was going to be enough.
She ran the calculation quickly. Harriet had been steadily dismantling Slytherin's volunteer roster for a month and a half. She had her invisibility cloak. The sensible play was to get Hermione out quietly before engaging. The problem was that Draco was right there, relatively undefended in the sense that his defenders were occupied with watching the prisoner.
She opened her eyes.
"Draco," she said, in her clearest and most deliberate voice. "I didn't expect much from you, but kidnapping a student and conspiring with a teacher who tortures children? Even for you, this seems poorly thought through. Dumbledore will know. The other professors will know. You understand that no amount of gold will make this disappear."
Draco turned. His expression arranged itself into something smug.
"Miss Top Student has finally decided to wake up," he said. "Did you enjoy the tea?"
"You're aware this is illegal," Hermione said. "You're aware that your name is not as protected as it used to be. You're aware that the people who might have looked the other way before have considerably less reason to do so now."
"A Malfoy is always protected," Draco said. "Gold speaks in every language, Granger. Even the Ministry's."
She looked past him at the assembled Slytherins. "What about theirs?"
A few of them shifted. Not much. But enough.
"Ignore her," Draco said, with a dismissiveness that didn't quite land. "She's doing what she always does. Making noise. She hasn't got anything else." He looked at her with something that might have been amusement if it hadn't been underlaid with something harder. "The main reason you're still in one piece is because of Harriet. But an audience gets bored." He waved a hand toward the assembled Slytherins. "You're quite pretty for a mudblood, I'll give you that. So someone go shut her up. Have fun while you're at it."
A few of the braver ones began to move forward, and Hermione's heart, which had been performing admirably up to that point, finally decided to make its panic known.
And then there was a sound from the treeline. A rhythmic knocking, unhurried, like someone tapping a walking stick against bark as they strolled. It grew closer in the specific way of someone who was not in a hurry and had no intention of being in a hurry regardless of what was happening ahead of them.
Harriet emerged from the trees at a walk.
She had apparently found a stick somewhere. She was tapping it against trunks as she passed them, not breaking stride. No dishevelment, no urgency. She looked like someone who had come across an interesting clearing and was taking a moment to assess the decor.
"Honestly," she said. "All this noise. I thought Slytherins were supposed to be subtle. You've embarrassed the entire concept of a snake." She looked around the clearing with the mild interest of someone reviewing real estate. "Nice spot, though. Whoever organized the logistics, well done." A brief pause. "Perfect place for graves, honestly." She considered this for a moment. "Actually no, I'd rather not. Too much digging."
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