#draco dormiens

The basic premise is a Harry-Draco bodyswap fic.  Since this was written before the release of Order of the Phoenix, it starts with a fifth year potions lesson.  Snape is teaching the class about polyjuice potions, and forces everyone to temporarily swap bodies so they can see its affects.  He pairs Harry and Draco, which is in-character because he’s making Harry suffer, but also wildly out of character, because he’s making Draco suffer, too.

Anyway, Harry and Draco chug their polyjuice potions and bitch for a while about how awful it is to be each other.  Draco particularly whinges about Harry’s bitten nails, because his own are like, professionally manicured by house elves.

Take a moment to let that sink in.  Dobby the nail technician.

I digress.  When the class turns back, Harry and Draco don’t. Draco checks his Rolex—and my brain does a spit-take because why the fuck is Draco wearing Muggle apparel?—and says they should be back to normal now.  Harry, thinking Draco’s spiked the potion, starts throwing punches.  I mean, he never threw a punch in a lifetime of Dudley’s bullying, but I guess now’s a fine time to start?  The fight ends with Draco knocking Harry the fuck out, and then realising he’s still stuck in Harry’s body.  Harry (still looking like Draco) is taken to the Hospital Wing, where Madam Pomfrey’s like, ‘No problem, Dracey-poo will be out cold for the night and all better in the morning!’

She um.  She doesn’t use magic to heal him or anything.

This is a recurring theme in Draco Dormiens.  Magical healing is mostly ignored for plot purposes, and suddenly pops up when it’s convenient.

At this point, you’d think Draco would point out he’s Draco, and the unconscious Draco is actually Harry, but he … doesn’t?  Draco essentially says to himself, ‘I AM THE GREETEST, I WILL BE HARRY POTTER NOW, FOR NO RAISINS!’ and continues to follow Harry’s timetable and never inform anyone of what happened.

So we get some bumbling comedy while Draco tries to be Harry, including him being exceptionally nasty to Cho Chang, revealing that Goyle wears ladies’ underwear, and eventually snogging Hermione.  You know, the Mudblood he loathes.

If your brain just slammed on the brakes, don’t worry.  That’s normal.

Meanwhile, Harry wakes up in the Hospital Wing screaming he’s not Draco Malfoy.  Rather than gently calming him and getting an explanation so this whole contrived plot can be repaired, Madam Pomfrey knocks him the fuck out again and calls for Lucius Malfoy to take him home.

Harry, buddy, you might want to get a CAT Scan when you wake up.  I hear being unconscious is super bad for you.

So Draco finds out Harry’s been carted off by his dad and understandably flips out, because he thinks Lucius is going to realise he’s basically got Harry captive and murder him, leaving Draco stuck as Harry forever.  If you’re thinking a) polyjuice potion doesn’t work like that, or b) if it did, Lucius would be smart enough to not just murder Harry and ruin Draco’s life, your mind is in the wrong place for this fanfic.

Hermione catches Draco in the library, being swooned over by Cho Chang because apparently all she really wanted was a bad boy.  You know, like Cedric Diggory.  That real bad boy Hufflepuff she dated.  (Speaking of which, Cedric Diggory is not mentioned once in this fic.  Ever. Voldemort’s return is barely referenced until halfway through.)

BRB, rolling my eyes to space.

When they’re alone, Draco finally, finally admits to Hermione that he’s not Harry Potter.

And she punches him.

A lot.

I mean, I guess it’s technically more in-character for Hermione, but still.  They’re in a library.  Respect for the books, yo.

When she’s eventually got all the punching out, Draco uses a truth spell on himself to prove he didn’t fuck this up on purpose.  Now. This was another brain-stop moment, because I know that veritaserum was in Goblet of Fire, and the spell Draco uses is ‘veritas’.  But Hermione freaks because it’s DARK MAGIC and BAD and YOU SHOULDN’T DO THAT, even though good characters use veritaserum in Goblet of Fire with no problem.  On the other hand, Hermione recovers enough to ask Draco if he’s ever had sex in order to humiliate him (he hasn’t).  How heroic.

Draco does point out around now that he and Harry have a kind of mental link, and it’s making him do all kinds of nice stuff like saving Hermione from bludgers and Neville from bullies.  Character development?  Eh.

Hermione and Draco decide to go to Malfoy Manor and rescue Harry, leaving Ron behind because they’d have to explain everything to him, and that’s just such a bother.

Don’t worry, Ron.  You’re actually getting off lightly, tbh.

Harry, in the meantime, wakes up in Malfoy Manor and plays along as Draco so he won’t get out-and-out murderkilled by Lucius.  Now, Lucius in the books was implied to be cold with Draco, but still fond of him.  Lucius in Draco Dormiens is full on, no holds barred abusive to both Draco and Narcissa, and also a total sex fiend who repeatedly cheats on Narcissa and attempts to assault Hermione.

But we’ll get to that later.

After some hilarious banter with McNair, where Lucius reveals Dumbledore straight-up cold-blooded killed a man ("And when Zabini tried to send the boy an exploding broom, Dumbledore intercepted it and sent it right back in a different package. They had to bury Zabini in a matchbox!"), Harry discovers the Death Eaters have captured Sirius.  Narcissa faints; Harry tries to deck Lucius to get to Sirius; Lucius locks Harry in Draco’s room, and saunters off to stick Sirius in the dungeon and, presumably, gloat him to death.

At this point, Hermione and Draco make it to Malfoy Manor and Draco does a few spells to get them inside. I want to make a point of that. Draco performs a few spells.  It takes up maybe a page, at a push.  This is important later.

(This, also, is the first time I spotted a quote definitely lifted from Blackadder, when Draco dives in the way of an arrow to save Hermione and gets it in the leg, and she comments, ‘Six inches to the left and grandchildren would’ve been out of the question.’)

They burst into the bedroom where Harry’s locked up, and Harry proceeds to get irrationally angry because Hermione and Draco were holding each other for dear life as they crashed wildly through the window.  It turns out this irrational anger is contagious, as the three of them continue to pointlessly argue for the rest of the fic, mostly about which of the two boys Hermione wants to bang most.  It’s a wonder Harry manages to actually tell them Sirius is in the dungeon, smh.

Lucius arrives and Draco and Hermione hide in the wardrobe.  Only after Harry’s walked off to the dungeons with Lucius does Draco point out the wardrobe locks from the outside, so they’re now stuck.  This, of course, is a perfect opportunity for them to get drunk on butterbeer and make out.  Because why not?

Harry gets to Sirius and is miraculously left alone with him.  Sirius can smell that he’s really Harry, and this makes perfect sense because he’s a dog half the time.  What doesn’t make sense is Hermione’s constant musings that she can also smell the difference between Harry and Draco, who smell like a variety of painfully fanficcy nonsense, from coffee to maple syrup to lime and I cringed every time.

Anyhoo, Sirius tells Harry that it’s super weird Narcissa married Lucius because Narcissa was totes a nice girl at school and I started going cross-eyed at this point because I couldn’t believe I was watching a Sirius/Narcissa plotline emerge.

Harry nances back up to the bedroom to enlist Draco and Hermione’s help in saving Sirius, and goes apeshit when he catches them snogging.  Not at Draco—no, no, no.  Entirely at Hermione.

You know, if I left my female friend locked in a wardrobe with a guy I didn’t trust further than I could throw him, and then opened the wardrobe and found them all over each other, I’d kind of … assume it was the guy’s fault?  Like, my first instinct would be to push him off and check the girl’s all right, that he wasn’t assaulting her.

Not Harry.

Nope.

This is all definitely Hermione’s fault.

And I’d judge Harry for this, but Hermione’s actions over the next few chapters kind of explain his response.  I lost count of how many times she kissed Harry, then Draco, then Harry, then Draco, and got angry with both of them if they dared be upset at her constant cheating. Bella Swan was positively decisive compared to DD!Hermione.

After more mind-numbing bickering, they stick Draco under the invisibility cloak, what with him looking like Harry and all, and all head back to the dungeon to save Sirius. However, they’re caught by Lucius Malfoy, who somehow completely doesn’t recognise Hermione, who Harry introduces as his—Draco’s—girlfriend, a Ravenclaw and totally not a muggleborn at all.  Nope.

Also he kisses her.

Because you know. Hermione hasn’t done enough kissing yet. Not by a wide margin.

Lucius sends Harry away, and the instant he’s alone with Hermione he proceeds to pounce on her like a sexually starved dog attacking someone’s leg.  I’m a damn strong advocate for not censoring sexual violence in fiction, but this scene doesn’t further the plot in the least and has basically no emotional effect on Hermione after the fact.  It’s pointless.  Deeply uncomfortable, and pointless.

Welp, Draco chases his dad off Hermione by throwing shit at him from under the cloak, kinda like Harry throwing mud at Draco in Prisoner of Azkaban, and before Lucius runs off Hermione notices he’s clutching some ugly-ass necklace with a tooth in it.

Hmm.  I’m sure that’s not plot relevant at all!

A bunch of shenanigans happen that I don’t remember all too well because I read this whole fic in one evening at midnight, but eventually another Death Eater recognises Hermione, and Lucius gets right down to torturing her so she’ll tell him where Harry is, because he sent an owl to Hogwarts to lure Harry in to save Sirius so they could capture him and—

Wow.  Déjà vu.  This, um. This was actually written before Order of the Phoenix.

Huh.

Anyway, eventually Draco can’t stand it anymore and bursts out from under the cloak all, ‘TIS I, HAROLD POTTERSON, PLEASE DESIST!’ and Lucius totally desists so he can capture Draco and toss Hermione in the dungeon with Sirius.  I think Harry gets sent to Draco’s room again.  I think?

But basically he gets out and goes to save Sirius and Hermione, but you can’t get into the dungeon unless you’ve got Malfoy blood in your veins, so he sneaks to Draco, who’s now locked in a sparkly magic cage.  Harry decides to take the phrase ‘Malfoy blood in your veins’ 100% literally, and just straight up steal a bunch of Draco’s blood.  So of course they painstakingly set up a magical blood transfusion and—

Hahaha, just kidding! Harry slices their palms open with a knife and they hold hands until probably he’s got some Malfoy blood in him.

At this point, you may be wondering why the polyjuice potion hasn’t automatically turned Harry’s blood into Draco’s, since it turned the rest of him into Draco.  If so, stop thinking.  You’re not allowed to do that.

Also, what I haven’t mentioned until now is that this fanfic comes with artwork.  Wall-eyed anime Draco holding a black rose is the cover art, and it’s peppered throughout with crappy pencil sketches, mostly of Hermione swooning over either Harry or Draco.  It’s honesly worth reading the fic just to cringe at the illustrations.

Anywhoo, Harry runs back to the dungeons to release Sirius and Hermione, and then they meet Narcissa Malfoy, who tells them a) Voldemort is totes here already to kill Harry (Draco), and b) that ugly necklace of Lucius’s is actually a curse on Draco, so if the necklace breaks, he dies.  This is the only reason she’s stayed with Lucius all this time.  Poor battered wife Narcissa.

Boo.

They also learn that Voldemort isn’t going to kill Harry—instead he’s going to do some ridiculously convoluted magic to give Harry a magic metal arm that kills Muggles and Muggleborns, and then set him out with the Imperius Curse to kill people.  Why he wouldn’t just … give Harry a knife and send him out under the Imperius Curse to kill people is never explained.

Whatever.  Voldemort arrives and Draco makes some cutting remarks about him being ugly, because that’s a smart move?  Voldy realises pretty sharpish that Draco isn’t Harry, because Draco doesn’t scream bloody murder when Voldy pokes him in the face.  Then Voldemort removes the spell from polyjuice potion.

With two words.

He uses finite incantatem.

I’m serious, that’s it. Other characters have used finite incantatem several times throughout the fic, but apparently none of them thought to check if it would reverse the polyjuice potion.  This does get elaborated on later, but still, none of the characters questioned it. None of them said, ‘Oh duh, we should totally have tried that!’  I may have screamed into a pillow a little.

Anyway, Draco turns back to Draco and Harry turns back to Harry, and Harry possibly makes out with Hermione again.  Everything at this point is pretty fuzzy because it was getting late and I was on the brink of wishing for death.

EDIT: Because I can’t believe I forgot to add this before: Draco’s full name in this fic is Draco Thomas Malfoy.  Thomas.  After Tom Riddle.  He’s named after his Uncle Voldy.  Yes, that in an actual tear on my cheek.

Harry decides he can’t just leave Draco behind, so Hermione messes with the metal arm gadget and he whacks it on and storms in on the Death Eaters.  Voldemort starts monologuing, saying the instant Draco turned back to himself he told Voldy everything and totes betrayed Harry and Hermione.  Because you know, without the magical link to Harry, Draco’s just plain evil.

Then Voldy puts Harry under the Imperius Curse and … Harry just kinda tosses it off?  He throws out a line like, ‘You know the Imperius Curse doesn’t work on me!’ as if it’d been foreshadowed in any way at all, and I narrowed my eyes and sighed and moved on.

Harry uses the metal hand to fire lasers at all the Death Eaters, which doesn’t kill them since Hermione tinkered with it, but sends them all super far away.  That should be helpful … for like three minutes.  They’re adult wizards.  They can apparate.  Ugh.

Well, they don’t apparate. Harry takes off the metal arm and he, Hermione and Sirius march out of Malfoy Manor together.

This ought to be the end of the fic, right?  Harry and Draco are back to normal.  Voldemort was faced and defeated.  Just gotta wrap up the loose ends and all done, surely?

So imagine my surprise when I glance up at the top of my PDF and realise I’ve got over half the fic to go.

O-okay?

The crew grab Draco before he can scarper, because they want his help getting out of the Manor, since it’s all cursed and shit.  Now, remember when I said that getting in took a couple of spells and maybe a page?

Getting out takes ten times as long.

Yeah, suddenly Malfoy’s garden is full of hexes and booby traps and really, painfully obviously-stolen-from-Blackadder lines that Draco has to lead them all through.  (And yes, at this point I’d noticed several plagiarised lines, most of them cited half-arsedly at the end of their chapter.)

The whole way, Harry and Hermione are sulking because they think Draco betrayed them, Draco’s sulking because he didn’t betray them but they think he did, and Sirius is essentially me, face-palming at the idiot teenagers the whole way.

Eventually they get to this chasm, and Draco makes a magic path for them to cross.  Harry falls off, screaming ‘I LOVE YOU’ at Hermione, who is so dense she immediately convinces herself he couldn’t possibly have said that. Draco legs it back towards the manor alone, because I guess he’s still a prick.

Harry has some weird fever dream about Hermione in a yellow dress as he’s falling, and then he’s suddenly in the back of Arthur Weasley’s flying car with Ron and Fred and George, and honestly it took me half a page to realise the flying car wasn’t part of the fever dream.  Turns out Ron got the owl from Lucius Malfoy and came flying to the rescue with Fred and George, and they saw Harry fall and caught him.

They fly Harry back up to Hermione, who cries a lot, and while Sirius runs off to get Draco, Ron suddenly becomes Harry’s Life Coach is all like, ‘Harry, my man, my bud, pls tell Hermione how you feel about her now, we literally cannot stand this love triangle for another page.’

So Harry goes off to do just that, and Hermione.  Hermione. Hermione.  Twists everything he says, cries again, says she can never be with him because she loves him too much and it scares her, says she’s safer with Draco who can’t hurt her, and runs off sobbing.

Have I mentioned Hermione is kind of the worst?

Yeah.

Cassie broke Hermione. Thanks, Cassie.

Meanwhile, Sirius finds Draco and has a heart-to-heart with him, essentially saying that Draco reminds him of him, what with the Death Eater parents and the shitty home life, and that he learned to be friends with James and that was cool, so why not be friends with Harry?  Draco grumbles but comes with him, and I check the numbers at the top and still like, 100 A4 pages to go, what the fuck?

As Sirius and Draco return, Lucius Malfoy apparently remembers how to apparate and does so, right in front of them all.  He tries to kill Harry but Draco’s like ‘DADDY NO!’ and jumps in the way in an elegant and moving rendition of the climax from Pocahontas.

Lucius decides fuck it, he can make more babies, and goes to crush the necklace.  But Hizzle P. and da Crew dive in to stop him, and shove him in the trunk of the Ford Anglia.  Draco, however, is now basically dying from a dent in the necklace, so they rush him to Hogwarts.

There’s a lot of wrapping up at this point, but basically Draco goes to the Hospital Wing to get fixed up, Lucius Malfoy gets thrown to the Aurors, Narcissa agrees to testify against him.  It’s all looking like we’re heading for a happy ending.

And I look up.

Ninety.  Fucking.  Pages. Left.

‘Everything’s done!’ I’m screaming.  ‘What more is left to discuss!?’

Well, two things. First of all, Dumbledore has to sweep in and explain how Super Special both Harry and Draco are.  Apparently they’re both Magids, a stupid word Cassie made up for this fic, which basically makes them … super wizards?  I guess? It’s not terribly clear.  Either way, Dumbledore also says this is why Voldemort wanted to kill Harry as a baby and I cackled wildly because hindsight is 50/50 when you’ve read all seven books.  He also says Draco is a Magid, and Draco accidentally made the polyjuice potion permanent, and Voldemort is a Magid, and that’s why his finite incantatem stopped the spell.

Oh, you may be thinking, that’s nice.  At least that got explained.

Except.

EXCEPT.

ANY ONE OF THEM COULD HAVE AT LEAST TRIED FINITE INCANTATEM. DRACO COULD EVEN HAVE JUST ASKED SNAPE FOR HELP.  BUT NO. THIS WHOLE MESS JUST HAD TO HAPPEN.

MAGIDS IS A TERRIBLE EXPLANATION.

Well fine.  Draco also kind of hand-waves a half-arsed reason for wanting to be Harry—because apparently Harry is just so popular and well-liked, and poor woobie Draco isn’t.  At this point I think my eyes start melting out their sockets, because Harry is regularly despised by his classmates throughout the books, but fine. Whatever.  I just want this trainwreck finished.

But wait.

There’s still so, so much more.

What follows is pages and pages of Hermione humming and harring over Draco and Harry.  It’s dumb.  It’s agony.  I wanted to shake her, shake the author, shake the whole world, as I skimmed this drivel.  I wanted Harry and Draco to say fuck her, to admit they were each gayer than a rainbow parade and fly away together in the Ford Anglia like the end of Grease.

But no.  Finally, fucking finally, Harry finds the Mirror of Erised, hereafter to be known as the Mirror of Plot Convenience, and Hermione sees herself standing with Harry.  She decides he must be the one for her, and I’m put out of my fucking misery.

Siiiigh.

Draco Dormiens ends with a letter from Sirius to say that Narcissa’s getting divorced from mean old nasty Lucius, and she’s going to marry Sirius instead—and with hysterical screaming laughter from me.

  So that’s Draco Dormiens.

I’ll give Cassie Claire this: she’s good at creating hooks to propel you through the plot.  Even as I shook my head and tutted and rolled my eyes and screamed into pillows at the stupidity, I never stopped reading.  Each chapter gave me another hook—okay, so what’s Harry going to do; what about that necklace; how do they free Draco?

But oh my god, it was stupid.

Every character did something that felt just plain wrong at least once. Especially Hermione.  Hermione was the most painfully out of character: bitchy, selfish, hysterical, utterly awful.  A few times in the fic, Cassie mentions that Hermione doesn’t cry often. But that’s not true.  Hermione cries all the way through this fic.  If she’s not sobbing, she’s on the verge of tears.

I’m an absolute sucker for redemption arcs, but making Draco a poor, abused woobie in order to turn him good felt cheap and unrewarding.

And, of course, the plagiarism.  Jesus Christ.

Other people have covered this much better than me, but yes, I spotted several pinched or reworded lines in the fic.  This wouldn’t usually bother me in a not-for-profit fanfic, but Cassie did profit from her fanfic, in more ways than one (please, please read the exposé, it’s fascinating).  It also meant that, every time I saw a witty or well-written line I didn’t recognise, my instinct was to wonder where she’d stolen it from.  It’s really awkward to read with that level of paranoia hanging over you.

It’s not the worst fanfic I’ve ever read.  It’s not My Immortal level ridiculous or Master of the Universe level offensive.  If you’ve got nothing to do of an evening, it’s amusing enough for a few hours to laugh at the missteps—I honestly can’t believe a 27-year-old wrote DD; her craft is terrible—and it’s got enough plot to keep you relatively interested between the what-the-fuckery.