"I'm going to kill you, Potter," Draco tried to snarl at him, but his voice came out weak and hoarse. Harry couldn't figure out whether he was delirious, suicidal, or just plain stupid.
"How are you going to manage that?" Harry asked with a mixture of worry and amusement.
"You're dead, Potter. You'd better let me go, because my father will hunt you down..." he ranted as he struggled against the petrification spell. Harry cast a stunner at Malfoy to get him to quiet down.
"You could have just silenced him," Hermione criticized.
"Stunning's more satisfying. Let's try this again. Enervate." Draco awoke once again, more alert this time. "You almost killed me, Potter. When I'm through with you, you'll know what it's like to starve for days..."
"Oh, shut up for Merlin's sake. It's only been a day and a half and I've starved for a lot longer than that. Maybe you should try it, you little pansy," Harry said. He never knew he could look upon his mistreatment at the Dursleys' with humour. Draco was about to say something when he was stunned by Hermione.
"Why'd you do that?" Harry asked.
"You were losing your temper. We need to make Draco cooperative, not give him your life story," Hermione said.
"Fine, fine. Let's try it one more time," Harry suggested after taking a few calming breaths.
Another reviving charm later, Hermione began by immediately silencing Draco. "Now listen here, Malfoy. You're stuck down here, as you already figured out. You tell anybody about this, you're in here again for the rest of your life, do you understand?"
Draco spat at Hermione in response and sneered. Harry stunned him one more time and conjured a handkerchief for Hermione.
"Okay... how do we deal with this?" Harry asked.
"We're NOT leaving him down here," Hermione said, seeing the looks Harry was giving Draco.
"I wasn't suggesting that!" Harry responded, although he was certainly thinking it. "But as soon as he's out of here, he'll tell everyone, including his father, that I almost killed him. That's pretty much a one-way ticket to Azkaban for us, and he knows it."
Hermione sighed. She had hoped it wouldn't come to this. "It looks like we'll have to obliviate him." They had learned the spell incantation, wand movements, and the mental framework needed to cast the spell out of the auror's handbook that Moody had given them. It was part of the auror's duty to obliviate muggles individually if there were three or fewer witnesses to magic. Unfortunately, neither of them had actually cast the spell on a person for practice.
"I guess Malfoy's as good a guinea pig as any," Harry said, raising his wand.
"Wait, Harry. We can't just erase his memory," Hermione said. "He's been missing for a full day and a half. If someone finds a big blank in his memory then we might as well turn ourselves in. We need to replace his memory with something."
"Well, where else could he have disappeared to for a day and a half without anybody finding him? We'll have to get him out of the castle," Harry pointed out.
"Forbidden Forest?" Hermione suggested. "We need a reason why he'd go in there at all."
"Um... how about this. He's been wanting to get revenge on me for a while now, so he followed me into the Forbidden Forest to try to ambush me after you were in the Hospital Wing. We fought, he got disoriented and ran deeper into the forest instead of coming back out," Harry suggested.
"And why would you be going into the forest?" Hermione asked.
"I don't know, I'll make something up. Draco doesn't have to know. Uh... Tournament training. I wanted to practice fighting wild animals."
"Alright, that works well enough. We've been pretty far into the forest and I can modify the memory of one of our practice battles to stick into his head... but that doesn't explain why he's been gone for so long... and without his wand. He couldn't even conjure water for himself to drink."
"Attacked by wild animals," Harry suggested. He might as well keep going with that excuse.
"What kind of animal, though? I haven't fought any animals before, and it's hard to create a memory from scratch. Should we use Buckbeak's attack on him as a sample? One slash isn't much to work with, though."
Harry thought for a while. He recalled one long, scary chase from monsters that infested the Forest. Modifying the memory so that Malfoy dropped his wand in the escape wouldn't be too difficult. "Acromantulas. I'll use the memory of me and Ron in second year."
With the plan in place, they practiced the wand movements and incantations a few times on rocks to make sure that they had the physical part of the spell correct. Hermione went first, as she was more proficient with the mental arts. She wiped Draco's memory from the afternoon after the potions "accident" and replaced it with one of her own, one of Moody's training sessions where they were practicing tailing a target. Draco would believe he was really doing it, from her point of view. The memory ended when Harry had turned and shot a stunner straight towards her.
"Alright, Harry, I'm done. Remember two weeks ago, tailing and shadowing practice with Moody? That's what I used."
"Up to the stunner?"
"Exactly," Hermione said.
"Even better," Harry told her. "I didn't really know it was you back then; I just heard a rustle. It could have been an animal. This way I can say I just shot a stunner without knowing it was Malfoy. This works with my alibi... I thought I stunned a wild animal and didn't bother checking up on him."
Harry then proceeded to work on his part of the memory. He made Malfoy believe he had reawakened at night, completely disoriented. Wandering around much like they had done in their first year detention, except alone, he stumbled upon an acromantula colony. Skipping over the part where he actually conversed with Aragog, Harry gave him all the memories of fleeing the spiders he could, and added one additional memory of Malfoy dropping and snapping his wand. The acromantulas would have given up the chase but Malfoy kept running until he was exhausted and collapsed.
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