Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

July 14, 1998

Draco knew he had been crying soundlessly all night, trying to find anything to build the wall to trap that part again. There was no void like he had thought there would be if the wall ceased to exist. There was simply nothing where it had been. There was no other side. He searched every memory, knowing the monster was there somewhere. It had been an embodiment, right?

Suddenly, he was no longer alone in his mind. “Healer Simons! Why are you here?”

She appeared in his mind as a somewhat idealised version of herself. This must be what she looked like to herself. Draco looked at himself. He was far more ragged and pale than he looked in the mirror each day.

“Draco. You’re in some sort of Occlumency shock. I’m here to help you through it as your Leglimens. You’re still in Hogwarts.”

Draco was confused. Was he still in his bed? This made no sense.

“No, Draco, you’re in the hospital wing. It’s the morning after you were discovered in your bedroom in distress by your friend Neville.”

Oh fuck, she could hear everything. This was very, very bad.

“I see. Will it be better if I only respond to things you say with this projection of yourself?”

Draco felt a previously unfelt pressure subside. She looked more crystalline somehow. “Yes, it would be better if I still had some semblance of privacy in my own mind, ma’am.”

She nodded. “I’m sorry I intruded. It will be most effective for our work today if you call me Madeleine. And, so that I can help you best, have you had any Leglimency training, or is it only Occlumency we’ll work with? Also, do you consent to my looking at your otherwise unmentioned memories to see if I can find anything that will help you come out of the shock?”

He shook his head. “No, no Leglimency. Yes, you can look at whatever the fuck you want, just don’t complain if it upsets you. What work do we need to do? I thought Occlumency was a solitary practice.”

Her eyebrow raised. “Without one, what is the other, Draco? Why would someone need to continue practicing Occlumency without a Leglimens to keep part of themselves from? Maybe you’ve missed the point of the practices.” She conjured two chairs in this mind space. “Let’s sit. If you have other seating you prefer, by all means, pull it up. This is your home after all.”

Home? What the fuck did that even mean? This was his mind, not his home. He looked up at her and felt immediately ashamed. “Sorry, Healer, err, Madeleine.”

She shook her head with a calm smile. “There is no reason to apologise for any thought you have here, Draco.” She took a seat.

Draco pulled up the wingback chair from his room at the Manor and sat heavily in it. “So, what do we need to do? Am I in a coma or something?”

She shrugged. “Or something. Draco, what can you tell me about how you’ve been using Occlumency this year?”

He thought back to how he had been shoving various pieces of his desire behind walls since Severus first trained him. He thought of the way he had built the wall to keep the worst parts of himself from affecting him all the time. “It’s been a little bit here and there to stay alive around Voldemort and then everything I hate behind a solid wall while I was in Azkaban.”

“And, what did that hated part feel like while it was behind the wall?”

“It felt like a monster trying to escape. Clawing the wall, burning, screaming.”

“Draco, can you feel the monster now?”

He began to cry again. He could feel the tears on his face more real than they had been all night. “No, I can’t find it. I thought it would hide in my memories, but I’ve searched them all night and there’s nothing there that feels like it felt behind the wall. It’s hiding somewhere deeper than I actually remember.”

She nodded. “That sounds terrifying, Draco. What were you keeping behind the wall? Can you show me some of the things? I have my own Occlumency barriers in place, and nothing you show me can follow when I leave you.” She smiled.

He nodded.

He was eleven and suddenly found that he needed to find a physical source for hate to come out of him. He was excited, not sickened as he should have been to imagine using the Unforgivable Curses. He could not bring himself to hate hard enough.

His father clapped him on the shoulder, a wide smile on his face for the first time all week. “That’s how you’ll take out the mudblood girl, Draco… keep practicing and I know you’ll make me proud one day…”

The year of the hippogriff he began dreaming of her, waking up from sweaty, sticky dreams that should have been about Pansy, but featured so much more hair and violence than Pansy dreams.

He was in the forest watching the trio hurry away. He had not faltered. He said the words with the same conviction as every other successful Killing Curse he had performed. But there was no flash of green, no silence after the prey noises. She was the worst part of his world! She was the rubbish that should be removed by house elves! Everything about her screamed wrong! bad! disgust! She was the most dangerous kind of mudblood, she was respected for her intelligence! And not just by blood-traitors! He should have been able to make her fall.

After the end of the tournament, something had changed deep within Lucius. His words about the mudblood had become increasingly violent. He threatened Draco directly - if he could not perform his task by the end of the coming school year, he would have no place at home the following summer. As Draco was now as tall as his father, his fear was not as physical as he expected. It gnawed at his insides.

Then, Hermione was no longer just the mudblood Granger. She became the mudblood bitch, Potter’s mudblood whore, the muddy quim. She was no longer just the girl who needed to be taken out as a means to Potter, she was a dangerous woman for Draco to guard himself against.

He knew her as intimately as anyone who had not had a full conversation with her could know her. He wanted her dead. He wanted her writhing body against his. He wanted to feel her body, flesh on flesh, blood on blood, her filth purified by him.

He had no ideas to get her in a position to be killed, so he watched her, slowly coming to know with absolute certainty he would never do it. He had the conviction to do it. He simply would not. He would find a place for himself, without his family. He began hoarding his pocket money, saving for the summer when he would need to run, when his failure would surely be punished by more than just homelessness. Lucius was becoming both more specific and more vague with how he explained Draco’s failure. Draco was obviously keeping her alive to taunt Lucius, to keep Lucius from being able to have the power he deserved. Lucius suspected Draco was already fucking her, another in the growing list of reasons Draco could not kill her in the forest.

The worst part of all of his father’s disgusting words was how he wanted it to be the truth. Draco hated himself for how he wanted the mudblood. He hated himself for how he wanted for her to be dead, for how he wanted her to be alive, for how he wanted to see the life drain from her. Sitting in class with her felt like sitting too close to a fire. Nothing he ever said to her could have given away how much he wanted her. He was still Slytherin and he still knew how to keep his mouth shut.

The letters from his mother after that summer were terrifying. She said nothing that could be taken as secret information, but absolutely every letter, there was something written in a voice that was not hers. She was still under the control of the monster in their home until Draco could finish his fucking task.

Then, he could not kill the old man. He had never felt such anger, but he also had never felt such pity pointed at him. Everything was breaking, falling, the Vow would have to be invoked. He could hear a screaming and then there was silence and the words were clearly spoken, “Avada Kedavra”. Green.

Hermione was on his drawing room floor. His father was appalled that she was just a child, and Draco was restraining himself from doing something irrevocable to his father. He heard her screams as his aunt pulled pain and fear from her body. His cock twitched and he nearly hexed it off himself.

He sat back in his chair. “That’s part of it. Quite a lot more specifics of what I wanted to do to Hermione. Quite a lot more of what my father’s poisoned words actually were, instead of just the gist of them that I’ve kept to remind me of how not to be.”

Her face was a mask of interested concern. She had not been affected by what he showed her. It made him angry. How was she allowed to just sit there watching him? Watching his memories? Why wasn’t she affected by it?

“Wasn’t it awful, Madeleine? Weren’t you scared? The stuff with me shoving my cock in every hole Hermione has? Aren’t you afraid I’ll do something to you? To Hermione? I wanted to be the one to kill her, for years.”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not afraid. Because you didn’t put anything back there that actually hurt anyone. You wanted to be able to remember the parts where you actually hurt people. There’s nothing here that will hurt me. And from what you showed me, there’s actually nothing there that will hurt anyone but you.” Her eyes were still kind. “Tell me about Hermione.”

Draco rolled his eyes. “She’s the girl I was supposed to kill for about five years, then she’s the girl I couldn’t get out of my head for the next two years, and now through some sort of providence, she’s my girlfriend as of Sunday afternoon. Oh, and it turns out we’re fucking soulmates, too.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Well, that’s all about her place in your life so far, Draco. Tell me about who she is.” He rolled his eyes again. “Just trust me. Tell me about HER.” She pointed to a Hermione conjured from his memory. This Hermione still had a bush of hair, was dirty and clutching her new wand, pointing it at him.

“She’s been through too much. She’s hurt. She knows I’m wavering in my resolve to be a Death Eater. She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. She’s also the toughest person I’ve ever met.”

He conjured the Hermione from the day she slapped him. “She cares more about every single person around her than she cares about herself. She’s beautiful and terrible. She kicked my arse this day, then quit Divination, then discovered our soul string. And, she’s going to kick my arse in every class but potions, for the rest of school.”

He conjured the Hermione from the courtroom. “She just cut her hair and I’d never seen it before and I was the first person to give her an entirely spontaneous compliment on it. I just said it suited her and she seemed fixated on it for weeks.”

He conjured the Hermione from the day she left for the Burrow this summer. “She’s scared of something, and I don’t know what. There’s too much for her to do, and at the same time she’s lost her purpose since the war ended. She’s vulnerable in a way that’s never happened before. It’s not about me, but I’m falling for her and I can’t let her know because she’ll be terrified of how to handle it right.”

He conjured the Hermione in the Hog’s Head. “She’s going to murder me with her gaze. But, somehow I’ve turned her on by talking about wanting to watch the world burn. I’m sure she’s going to slap me again.” He remembered the slap he received Sunday night in the greenhouse. “But, then she told us all about her idea to restore the Room of Requirement, and she’s honestly the smartest person in wizarding society right now, because she will absolutely make that happen, and she’ll bring us all with her.”

Madeleine put her hand up and swept away the Hermiones. “How much of her did you put behind that wall, Draco?”

“Everything violent or perverse I thought about her for about seven years.” He felt afraid of where this was going.

“And, how much of her was that? How much of your idea of her was that?”

He could see the monster. It appeared before them. It was all the terrible things he had thought of her, and that his father had said to him about her, and all the terrible thoughts he had about how to kill everyone in terrible ways. It was Hermione watching the world burn.

Madeleine gestured to a new chair. “May I call you Hermione?” The burning girl nodded. “Would you like to have a seat, Hermione?”

Draco could feel that he had stopped breathing.

Hermione sat in the chair, all fury and sex and pain.

“Hermione, what can you tell us about yourself?”

The Hermione watching the world burn took a breath in. She did not speak. It was so hot. Nothing was alright. Everything happened in some kind of bubble. She could feel that Draco was with her real self and she wanted that. She could feel that Draco loved her real self and she knew that her time was ending. She simply knew she should not be in this form. She wished to never be coagulated like this again. That was all she ever wanted. Last night she had taken her chance while he was not paying attention. She would not be a prisoner again. She would be in every memory of his father’s poisoned words, in his fantasies, in the memory of his desire to kill. She should never have been. What was wrong with him?

Hermione watching the world burn was gone.

He felt an ache. She was Hermione in so many ways.

“No, that’s not true. I don’t know. I can’t know that. I wish Hermione was some of her.”

Madeleine nodded. “You know that the real Hermione is some of her. You know a lot about the real Hermione. What was it you said earlier? You knew her more intimately than anyone else who had barely had a conversation with her?”

Draco nodded.

“And, something did happen between you on Sunday. She is not afraid of the darkness, and that is exactly how it usually is. No one is as afraid of someone else’s darkness as they are afraid of their own darkness.”

She conjured the Hermione who he had wrapped in a blanket after sex on Sunday. “She saw your darkness. She asked for your darkness, Draco. And, she enjoyed that you showed it to her. The Hermione you had trapped is in many ways a version of the real Hermione. The real Hermione simply has boundaries that your trapped Hermione did not.”

So, she wanted it at the time, but then she stopped wanting it and now she is just gone, and the version of her that was trapped is gone. And he fucked up. He wrote so many things he cannot take back, and he understood the wall, but now the wall is gone and he has no idea how.

Madeleine waited.

“How did the burning Hermione take away the wall?” Draco leaned forward in his chair.

The healer arched an eyebrow. No Hermione would be imprisoned like that. He loved her. She was so strong, even trapped behind a wall in his head. She was brilliant and powerful and she could not be contained.

“She belongs in all the other memories, then?” Draco sighed.

Madeleine nodded. “Draco, it is very important that you not try to build any further occlumency walls. Leglimency is not supposed to be used as a weapon, but Voldemort did. And, Occlumency is not sustainable when used this way either. Using it to permanently hold pieces of yourself is dangerous as those pieces will always attempt to form a coherent whole. Severus Snape was accomplished as both an Occlumens and a Leglimens, but he did you a disservice in not being explicit about the limits of its use. All Occlumency walls should be temporary. They are meant to get you through a short-term problem, so you can focus on the actual task at hand. And, the exercise required to pull up an Occlumency barrier at will requires a Leglimens who is not wielding that power as a weapon.”

Draco was stunned. Snape definitely never told him any of this. What the fuck?

“Now we have done all the work we can for today. I believe you will be able to come out of your mind. Would you like to try?”

Draco sighed. “Yes.”

“I’ll go first. Try to wake up as soon as you can. You’ll find it is a bit difficult to open your eyes, but you have to push. It will work if you try.” She vanished.

He did try to open his eyes. It felt like they were as heavy as galleons, but he pushed and eventually, his eyes opened to see the vaulted ceiling of the hospital wing.

Healer Simons leaned over him. “Hi, Draco. You did a great job. Would you like to talk to anyone here? Neville and Ginny are here.”

Draco frowned. “I could talk to Neville.”

She nodded and disappeared. Draco found it was hard to move anything.

Neville appeared, large dark circles under his eyes. “Merlin’s beard, you’re really awake. I was so worried.”

“What happened? She said you found me?”

Neville explained how he found Draco, and what had been done for him. “It’s been just about all day she’s been in there, Draco.”

Draco was extremely surprised, but could only muster a, “Wow.”

He could feel his eyelids getting heavy again. “Mm, tired. Stay with me?”

He felt a hand slide onto his arm.

“Wouldn’t be anywhere else, friend.”