---Chapter One
The day that Hermione's life really began was the day she looked death in the eye.
Death came in a strange form. It appeared to her just as death always came; when she least expected it. But this time, Hermione saw it in the face of someone that she hadn't seen for years...someone she had thought to have died long ago.
She was just walking the grounds at Hogwarts that evening for a moments' quiet reflection. As a teacher at the school, her day was busy and full of stress, and a calming stroll by herself in the freshness of the outdoors was an evening ritual. It helped her mind to clear and rejuvinate for the rigors of the next day.
She hadn't meant to enter the Forbidden Forest. Everyone knew that the forest was now even more literally forbidden due to the Wizarding Worlds' war with Lord Voldemort. Evil that had lurked unseen in unplotted caves now ventured more and more out into the openness of the trees; dark creatures became increasingly vicious towards any other form of life. These and many other factors added to the danger, rendering the odds of survival in the heart of the forest nearly nonexistent.
Hermione hadn't been thinking straight. Her mind felt muddled that evening; students that day had been particularly rowdy and concentration levels had been slim. She blamed the lack of focus on the fabulous autumn day of the kind that fell on schooldays and not during holidays. Even Hermione herself had felt for once that she would rather have been outside enjoying the weather than trapped in a stuffy schoolroom teaching Arithmancy to poorly prepared students.
She didn't realize just where she was until she was nearly a hundred feet from the Forest' Edge. When it finally came to her, Hermione stopped dead in her tracks and determined immediately to turn around, but she was stopped again by a faint moan coming from somewhere deeper into the woods. She became still, and listened.
The moan happened again.
This time, she pinpointed the direction from which it came. The cry was definitely not from any creature of the sort that thrived in the Forbidden Forest. Hermione's curiosity got the better of her, and with a sense of trepidation she continued on further.
The Forest got darker the closer to the heart of it Hermione went and she would have turned back if the moaning, growing increasingly stronger and more piteous, had not led her on. Finally, she reached a small clearing in the forest, and a dead end with impenetrable brambles on all sides.
She heard the moan again, and this time Hermione concluded that it was coming from somewhere in the brambles. It seemed to be hardly a few feet to her left. Pulling her wand from her robes she aimed it at the thorn patch and reduced it to twigs. As the brambles fell away, a small field of ferns appeared before her, and she noticed immediately that a trail had been worn away, very slightly, and almost as if someone had been dragged through it. The path led down a small incline to the mouth of a well-concealed cave that opened at the base of a hill
Her senses tingling, Hermione held her wand out before her as she walked hesitantly over to the hole and looked down into it. The forest around her had become eerily silent.
"Lumos," she barely heard herself whisper. As her wand lit up she was disheartened to see nothing but dirt walls continuing down into the ground, farther than her eyes could follow.
Someone moaned again, miserably, and Hermione heard it echo distinctly out of the depths of the cave. "Oh dear," she thought miserably, but mustering her courage she crouched down and entered the cave. The roof was so low that she could hardly move through it without stooping her head and adopting a walk like a crab's. Progression was slow, and Hermione's pulse raced faster and faster as she went further down into the ground. Finally her light caught the reflection of a panel of stone ground.
The end of the tunnel.
Hermione felt her stomach drop as if she had just leapt off the top of a tall building. Shaking nervously, she prepared herself for anything she might possibly encounter in the bowels of a mysterious cave in the middle of the Forbidden Forest, though her mind found it difficult to ponder the extense of the magical evils that patrolled these sorts of dark places. She had almost convinced herself to turn back when the room in front of her was filled with the sound of someone in pain.
Wand blazing, Hermione's sympathetic heart went out to the person, whomever it was, and she scuttled as fast as she could down to the end of the tunnel. The light wavered up to reveal a crude room, circular, lined with badly-hewn wooden boards and roofed by the dirt of the hill alone. The ground of the place was paved in stone.
It was not the room that struck her so much as the figure of a man, beaten and bloody, lying in shackles at the far end of it. Hermione cried out in alarm before she could stop herself. Throwing caution to the wind - something she rarely did - Hermione launched herself forward and fell to her knees beside the prone figure. Hesitantly, she laid her hand on his right shoulder as he rested on the left side of his body, facing away from her, and pulled him over onto his back. She was torn to see that he was barely in his twenties, perhaps no older than herself. With a groan, the man flopped over and his head lolled to face her, bloodied, with the eyes closed as if he were dead.
Then she recognized him.
"Malfoy?" she gasped in disbelief.
She opened his eyes slowly with the tips of her fingers on his eyelids. Malfoy appeared to be dead. Blue irises were glazed over with the glass stare that only morbidity could create, and the skin of his face was cold to the touch. Hermione's heart stopped, and she pulled her hand away as though she had been stung.
Her first thought was immediately to guess what had happened to him.
He couldn't be dead. Why, she had heard him cry out only a few seconds before she found him. Desperately, Hermione grabbed her wand from the floor where she had dropped it in her haste, and flicked it at Malfoy's still form.
"Ennervate!"
Sparks shot out at him and his body twitched hopefully for a moment, before becoming still again. Hermione brushed the sweat worriedly from her eyes before trying the spell again. Then, when it remained without effect, she tried it again, more urgently than ever. But nothing happened. Throwing down her wand in desperation, her mind forgetting nearly everything she had ever learned in school, Hermione bent over Malfoy's body and pressed her hands to his chest. One, two, three...to fifteen. Then she put her mouth on his. Quickly she attempted to resuscitate him, breathing deeply into his lungs, then back to revive his breathing by pumping her hands over his chest once again. With a small cry of exasperation she reached the count of fifteen again and flung her mouth over Malfoy's still lips again. Once, twice, she breathed into him.
Her third breath met a wall of air. Trembling, Hermione withdrew and looked over into the once sightless eyes. She saw him then, looking back at her; alive.
For a moment, there was silence. Then Malfoy tried to speak.
"Hermione Granger," he managed weakly. "We meet again." Then he fell back in a faint.