Author's Note:
It's been a while since I wrote anything unoriginal. I find I kind of miss it. Life has been such SRS BSNS lately that I thought I'd take a well-earned moment out of it to write a bad fanfic with very little relation to canon other than some vague concepts.

I hope you all enjoy it anyway.

Stockholm
By Rurouni Star

Hermione Granger was a girl with a book in her hand. That's how he always remembered her—rushing down the hall, sneaking looks at the textbook or reference book of the day, hoping to read just one more line without tripping over herself. It happened once or twice—sometimes engineered by a Slytherin's well-placed foot, but often on its own—and her things would go sprawling, along with her pride and her hair. Amazingly, she never seemed to learn from the experience.

Blaise stopped to help her pick her things up once, all the way back in second year. He was pretty sure she didn't remember that. It only seemed like good manners, and he'd been raised with plenty of those. The Slytherin-Gryffindor rivalry was more of a passing thought to him then, something other people always talked about or made into their hobby. He didn't think about it one way or another. Instead, he thought there is a girl on the floor who's dropped her things, and I am supposed to help her pick them up. So he did.

Bushy-haired thirteen-year old Hermione Granger gave him a sheepish and embarrassed look. She apologized more than once, as though ashamed to be inflicting the consequences of her book-obsession upon the rest of the world. Always, Blaise thought, she was apologizing to someone. He thought it greatly peculiar. He'd never felt the need to apologize for being himself.

"You should be more careful," he told her by reply. "You'll hurt yourself one of these days."

"Sorry," Hermione said again, as though this warning required an apology as well. "I… I should have been looking, I know."

Blaise picked up the book she had risked so much to dart a glance at. Hogwarts: A History. It looked well-read.

"It's not going to magically change the fourth time you read it," he told her dryly. "There are books that do that. I know this isn't one of them." He handed it back to her all the same.

Hermione took the book quickly, clutching it to her chest as though it was a priceless treasure. "It changes for me," she admitted shyly. "I mean… I didn't know a lot about all this when I first read it. I learn more every day. Then, you know, the next time I read it, I understand it entirely different."

Ah, he thought then, with the first pangs of real contempt. Muggle. He had forgotten.

"Just read it differently when you're sitting down, why don't you?" he said. He didn't mean to let his voice come out more coldly, but it did. She didn't seem to notice.

"Oh. I… I will. I'll try. Thank you." She got back to her feet, and shoved the book inside her bag with one last, longing look—and then she was headed down the hall, and they would never speak politely to one another again.

Today was a different matter. A different story. Today, Hermione Granger was a bleeding, teary-eyed wreck of a girl, huddled in the corner of the room. And him? He was the man behind the mask, with the only wand between them.

Blaise should have been thinking of their last year at school together. He should have been remembering how she'd cursed him and Malfoy both, and covered Potter's mad retreat, and apparently single-handedly engineered his current rebellion against Voldemort.

Instead, all he could think of was her things scattered across the floor of Hogwarts, and the way she'd limped away because she'd hit her knee. She was hurt today, and quite a bit worse. It wasn't nearly as bad as it was going to get, if he didn't get her to talk soon.

He wondered if she would try to apologize to him as he tortured her for information.

"You're in a rather tricky spot," he observed to her, from behind the silk veil that covered his mouth. "I wonder if you realize."

Hermione glanced up at him carefully from the place she'd hid her eyes upon her knees. Her eyes were wet. Her lips were trembling in fear and pain. Of all of the people the Death Eaters could have captured, she was probably going to be the easiest to break. She'd probably never endured real pain before. Not to this extent, and not for so long, over and over and over.

"I'm sorry," she said, and part of him was struck dumbfounded at the fact that he'd been right, after all these years. Then, she licked her dry and bloody lips, and said "I'm not going to be able to tell you anything. I really do appreciate your visits, but you've come again for nothing."

Silence stretched between them. For the first time since the Death Eaters had dragged him off his apathetic fence, Blaise found he felt more like a clichéd villain out of a book than he felt like a survivor.

"I think you're mistaken," he sighed. "Let me be up front with you, can I? You're going to break. I can already tell. The least you could do is spare yourself some trouble beforehand."

To her strange credit, Hermione Granger didn't tighten her lips, or straighten her shoulders, or tell him to do his worst. She merely sighed, and pressed her forehead to her knees. "I'm not," she said. "But thank you for the offer. I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I took you up on it."

"Don't be dramatic," Blaise said. He settled himself across from her, his wand across his lap. It was good that she was still talking to him today. As long as they talked to him, he found, he was good at making them say the things he needed them to say. He didn't need to torture people. The others were talented enough at that. It was the Death Eaters who were willing to talk and be friendly that were in short supply. "You could tell me something stupid, but true. If you did that, I could keep them off you for a day. Your friends would understand that much, I think. They wouldn't want you hurting for no reason when you could say something that doesn't hurt anyone."

Hermione sighed into her legs. "I can't," she said. "I'd screw it up somehow eventually, even if it started little. I'm better off not postponing the inevitable at all."

Blaise raised his eyebrows, though he knew she couldn't see it. "Your lack of confidence is a little astonishing. I heard you were some fearless tactician. Brave charges, suicide missions, the whole package."

She shrugged. Somehow, she managed to make it look embarrassed. "I'm not trying to get myself killed, if that's what you're saying. I just don't want to run away."

It struck him that she used the word 'want.' Most people, in her situation, they used the word 'can't.' I can't betray my friends, they'd tell him desperately. It'd be a kind of dare, a twist-arm hint to him to make them feel they could. He didn't mind obliging them.

Hermione made the word 'want' a stronger statement than anything he'd ever heard.

"It's not running away to take a moment for yourself," he tried to reassure her gently. The words didn't seem to have the impact he'd been hoping for.

"I really won't," she said softly. And then: "I'm sorry."

Blaise felt for a moment as though he'd been detached from the rest of the world. Not can't, he thought again, you won't.

It hadn't struck him before today, those words. They meant something after all. She hadn't blamed her circumstances on anyone else—hadn't tried to find somewhere to push away her responsibility so she could safely give in. It was her, she didn't want to, so she didn't.

"You're being very quiet," she observed. "Is something wrong?"

"I'm going to have to torture you," he said. It came out even as he thought it to himself. She wasn't going to break after all. Certainly not today, and that was as long as he had. He hadn't really expected she would last this long. Some part of him had hoped, secret and cowardly, that she would tell him something helpful, and he would get to leave with his bottom line intact. I joined their side, I put on the stupid mask, but at least I never hurt anyone, he could say.

Hermione stared at him over the tops of her knees. Her eyes were wide, red-rimmed. Bloodshot, and somehow still pretty in their common, mudblood way. "…oh," she said weakly.

It lingered in the air between them, that word. She didn't say anything else, but there was plenty echoing within his mind, as loudly and as recriminating as if she'd said it in her own voice. Have to? You have to, Blaise Zabini? Who's twisting your arm?

He rose to his feet in a daze. Hermione flinched and closed her eyes and pressed her lips together in anticipation, and he thought there is a book on the floor, you silly, stupid muggle, and I never stopped wanting to pick it up for you, it just seemed the thing to do.

It seemed a very stupid thought to cross his mind, and yet, at the same time, it held a certain simplicity to it.

"Crucio."

She screamed and whimpered and thrashed like all the others had, beneath the wands of his fellow Death Eaters. But though she cried in between, and asked him please to stop, she never once told him where Potter was, where Weasley was, how many members the Order had, or even (when he got desperate enough) what color the wallpaper in their meeting room was.

She bit her lip clean through by the end. He left with a hollow, horrible feeling where his heart should be, and wondered what part of Hogwarts: A History had taught her to live and die without regrets.

"You're a very strange muggle, you know that?"

Hermione gave him a startled and confused look as he entered the Ministry holding cell the next day, the expression tempered now by wariness. She probably hadn't slept the night before. He certainly hadn't.

"I don't… I don't know what you mean," she said.

"Well," he observed. "You're still talking to me, for one."

"They healed my mouth," she told him cautiously. She tastefully chose not to mention whose fault it was she'd split it in the first place.

"That's not what I meant."

Hermione gave him a rather helpless look. "What did you mean, then? I'm not sure I can guess right now."

They'd been in on her for hours, probably. Hell, they'd probably switched people in and out since he'd left. Nott and Avery didn't mind the way he did. They thought it was fun, playing Break the Muggle. They played mean tricks on her, told her horrible lies about her friends all being dead, her family murdered, her old school burned to the ground. They saw her as a thing, a goal, a box of secrets to be opened, not a little girl with a book too big for her to carry and a penchant for getting caught up in the magic of it all.

"You really don't care that you're going to die?" he asked her tonelessly. He couldn't let his voice fluctuate. He'd break on the words, like he was twelve and trying his first hex again.

"Of—of course I care!" Hermione had no such qualms at this point. Her throat was raw and broken where the words tumbled out. "What made you think I didn't care?" Her eyes were raw from crying, with a bruise upon her cheek, and her left hand's fingers had been broken, left to turn purple and black. "I… I don't want to die," she cried now, with her other arm wrapped around her legs. "I don't. I don't. I'm terrified and I don't want to die, is that what you want me to tell you?"

I'm going to be sick, he thought to himself distantly. Instead, he sighed and crossed the few feet between them to kneel in front of her and take her hand gently. Her hand was warm from all the blood that had rushed to it, but her fingernails were sticky with dried blood where the nails had torn away. She was too shell-shocked, too tired to do anything but cry into his shoulder in bewilderment as he gritted his teeth and straightened out her fingers one-by-one to heal them properly.

"Why are you doing this?" Hermione asked him. "I don't understand why, and… and it's driving me insane. I don't know why you'd do this to another person, for anything at all."

Because some of us are cowards, he could have told her. Because I don't want to be in your place, and me, I'm the one twisting my own arm.

He didn't tell her, though. He held onto her in confusion, stroking her hair as though that made some sort of difference. She shuddered against him violently. She was cold, certainly, and tired and in pain, but he knew she was shuddering because of the perceived violation, the feeling of betrayal that he would talk to her and touch her and help her and not care about any of it.

He couldn't explain to her that it wasn't true. He cared, of course, it was true that he cared on some level, and it would be an exercise in stupidity to deny it to himself after the way he'd sobbed into his hands and thrown up his dinner the night before. Blaise was made for talking, for charming people and making them feel good, and not for hurting them. The opposite was something of a violation to his nature in return.

"I can't help you," he whispered to her helplessly. "I can't until you tell me something. Why won't you tell me anything? Just something, why won't you? What would you do if you left? What would you eat, what would you read?"

It was the sort of emotional low blow that generally reduced people to nothing. Think about what you could have, now let me tell you how you get it. But Hermione merely turned her face up toward him with dawning horror in her eyes. "Oh," she said. "Oh, god. I… I know you?" She pushed at him, clawed to get away, still shivering and clutching at her stomach. Blaise couldn't hold onto her. It felt too dirty, suddenly. Everything about him was like that, with her in the room.

"I can't help you," he whispered again.

It had never felt like such a weak and traitorous lie before. I could, he realized. But I won't.

"Please stay away from me," she whispered back. "Just do that much, if you really want to help me."

Blaise didn't know what to say to that.

When he left that night, he told Nott and Avery to leave her be. He said he'd got a new idea, that he needed them to lay off for a day to make it work, make her think he'd gone out of his way for her. When he went back the next day, he'd tell her that much, show her what he'd done for her because he cared. He'd plead with her again, with sincerity in his tone. Enough manipulation, a soft enough touch and a nice enough voice, and she'd begin to break, no matter her resolve. She had to care about someone. That was her strength. If he made her care about him, made her see how much it hurt him, she would break.

But that would take too much time, in the end. Because, of the two of them, he had broken first.

"What would you read first?" Blaise asked her the next day, as he sat down in front of her.

Hermione didn't answer. She'd been crying again, he could tell. It was tearing her body apart slowly from the inside out.

"I think I know what you would read first," he continued for her calmly. "You'd read Hogwarts: A History. You'd read it again, to see if it meant something different to you, after everything you'd been through. But that book didn't change, Hermione. You haven't changed either."

He reached forward to close his hand around hers quietly. The look she gave him was drained of emotion, dead behind the eyes. She didn't even notice he'd passed her a wand until he closed her other hand around it as a hint.

"You haven't changed," he told her softly. "I did. I can help you, Hermione. And I want to."

She still didn't seem to comprehend. But Blaise suddenly felt as though he'd never seen anything clearer in his entire life.

"I've got some things to make up to you," he admitted. "I figure I'll start with Avery's mask and robes. They should fit you fairly well, as soon as I stun him."

Hermione just stared at him. She didn't believe him, of course. He'd expected that. It was going to take time, and probably she wouldn't really believe him at all for a few weeks, at least. She'd think it was a trick, a way to get her to trust him—some crazy masquerade of unknown length and dubious ends. He could handle that.

"Who are you?" she whispered finally.

Blaise threaded his fingers through hers. He marveled momentarily at his own very brave and very stupid decision. "No one you'd remember particularly well," he said. "But maybe that will change."

Hermione hesitated, looking down at the wand as though she'd never seen one before. "I… I can't…"

Blaise snorted. "What now you can't? You won't break under torture, but you will decide to stay and die?"

"Oh," Hermione said. It was a short and surprised word—a sound like someone suddenly coming up for air. "I suppose you're right."

Blaise linked his arm with hers, and used it to haul her to her feet. "In this case, at least. I suppose I am."

It had taken an awful lot of years for Blaise to find his way back to the simplest instinct he'd ever had. But now he was sure again that girls who fell required boys to help them up, and that was maybe something worth dying for.