01 - One of the Monsters
September 2009
"Crucio!"
Her back bowed off the ground, limbs bending and twitching awkwardly, and her jaw dropped open in a silent scream. The pain was insurmountable, unbearable, it was utterly maddening - or it should have been in any case.
The cackles of Hermione's mistress echoed in her ears and while she still bent and writhed and tried to scream, she no longer truly felt the pain. She had stopped feeling anything a long time ago; anything but hatred towards her captors anyway.
This year would mark her thirtieth year on the earth and a little over a decade in captivity. A decade of crucios and yet her mind still hadn't shattered. A decade of suffering and she still wasn't broken. It was a miracle. It was a show of her mental fortitude, her inner strength.
It was a lifetime of complete and total hell.
"CRUCIO!" Her spine felt like it was on the edge of snapping, she could feel the grinding of her bones and it set her teeth on edge.
The Battle of Hogwarts was a distant memory – no, the fall – the FALL of Hogwarts was but a faint twinkle of the past.
"CRUCIO!" The mental walls she'd built shuddered as another curse ripped through her mind looking for weakness.
Dumbledore had been right about Harry needing to die to destroy the accidental horcrux within him; he'd been all too right actually. There was no clever turn of fate that day when he walked into the woods to meet his end. As hard as they all had wished it to be a lie, he had died that day, well and truly. They'd lasted only minutes in the face of the Dark Lord after that; without him to bolster them all, without that hope he'd carried on his small shoulders, they crumbled in the face of Voldemort's army.
And so began the new world order.
"CRUCIOOO!" Bellatrix's giddy voice reverberated through every inch of Hermione's body. The crazy witch's insane tittering flared at a particularly good spasm from the girl writhing in a muddy puddle of the decently manicured backyard. The sound died off, rising and fading again with each of her slave's violent twitches until it was nothing but a low rattling chuckle.
Hermione's mind, her brilliant, magnificent, once treasured mind was the only thing that continued to allow her to function from day to agonizing day. Where Harry had failed in occlumency, she had succeeded. As with everything she set that brilliant mind to do, she succeeded - even if it was with independent study, a prayer, and "field training" - and to that very day she was sure it was the only thing that ultimately kept her going, kept her tethered to this world.
Shutter away the thoughts.
Shutter away the pain.
Shutter away the most valuable pieces of sanity and hide in the dark, away from the crushing storm, and be safe…as safe as she could be without being…
Dead.
Everyone was dead; if not dead, then imprisoned or enslaved as well. She and a handful of other Muggle-borns – Mudbloods, use the right name, silly girl – and Half-Bloods she knew were spared immediate death because of the Dark Lord's twisted love of magical folk.
No unnecessary blood need be spilled, he had said. Harry Potter is dead, we will give fortunate few the opportunity to join our ranks and the rest… are examples.
She didn't need three guesses to know that she was not, in fact, part of that fortunate few.
Gifted to Bellatrix – to stifle the woman's incessant whining, she was sure – Hermione found herself slightly lower on the servant's ladder than the most common House Elf. There were rules of course, with the Dark Lord there were always rules or courtesies or formalities; he was a bit of an odd duck, that one.
Sometimes, Merlin help her, Hermione imagined that the man had to have had the most peculiar, if not perfect, set of manners a young man for his time could have had. That in itself was unlawful; a Mudblood thinking about the Dark Lord, tut tut. Bellatrix would be extremely displeased.
Hermione's mouth twitched in a shadow of a smile.
"CRUCIO!"
In any case, there were rules.
The Dark Lord would stand for no sort of breeding with the less than pure magical servants. Touch, taste, play, but no more than that or he advised he would be more than pleased to remind his followers personally that the lines were to remain unsullied for their future to truly succeed. The inner circle hadn't taken such a warning seriously enough until word of Yaxley's unfortunate accident rippled through the right channels and he appeared at their next meeting. That is to say his skin appeared first, then what was left was delivered piece by piece by the most elegant parliament of owls that galleons and sheer unadulterated terror could buy.
It was the only additional warning the Death Eaters had required.
Hermione had eavesdropped on her Master and Mistress' discussion after the meeting and always wondered what had become of that girl.
Shutter away the thoughts.
She wondered what the Dark Lord did with the girl if he didn't display her death as part of the reminder.
Shutter away the pain.
She tried not to wonder too much.
Hide…hide from this world.
In addition to the no breeding rule, the second and final taboo was that the graciously spared servants were not to be killed and tossed aside prematurely. To do so would be an insult to the Dark Lord's generosity and "vision" and also… Yaxley. The magic within their filthy blood was to at least be given its due and allowed to run its full course throughout their enhanced lifeline and contribute to their wonderful new community.
It was bolstering, he'd claimed. Look how far even these pitiful creatures had come, the better, purer future would be leaps and bounds above this round of mutts.
Something about keeping the filth around to keep his lieutenants or whatever the bloody hell they were from becoming too comfortable, too lax. A reminder that they couldn't rest on their magical laurels, they needed to keep striving for power to increase the distance between them and the trash; something like that.
Hermione didn't remember the words exactly, just his eyes, his eyes falling on her in the room of his minions and their gifted trash. Red, blazing eyes. They'd been so interested in her and she'd wanted to shrink in on herself at his inspection but at the time she was still too foolhardy a thing to have the sense to.
Such a contradiction that man, that creature was... he was such a strange thing.
"CRUCIO!"
Her eyes squeezed shut and she was probably finally screaming now but it was so very hard to tell.
Their – the slaves - magic wasn't left to all of their own devices of course.
She assumed it was the same for all of them, but Hermione knew that her magic was bound by the Lestranges to the point where she could only care for the house and defend her keepers with it if she should ever be so gifted with a wand again. As if things would ever become so dire in Voldemort's perfect new world to allow for THAT.
His rules were funny but in a twisted sort of way, she supposed they made sense. They weren't in place to actually protect her, of course, just her special, albeit filthy blood. They didn't protect her as point of fact seeing as how the Death Eaters were nothing if not inventive with their ways to skirt the rules, but they were there at least. It could have been worse.
Hermione's mouth twitched. She hated to think that, but it could have been worse.
As she lay there in her mud puddle, her mistress having tired of her for the moment, Hermione thought; she wondered.
The rules didn't protect anyone really, but the fact that he'd put them in place at all, well that was a curious thing then wasn't it?
As she lay there, in a pile of her own waste as her body continued to jerk and spasm with aftershocks of the curse, Hermione thought of the Dark Lord.
A part of her, one that existed in this small gap of peace between the cracks in her walls with her sanity starting to bleed out, pondered if there was anything left of the man that had severed himself for immortality and his "vision".
As she lay there with Kipsy the House Elf cradling her head to administer the same bitter draught that she received every day to repair the damage and soothe the spasms for Mistress Bellatrix's next session, Hermione thought.
What turns a person to such evil ways?
Shutter the thoughts.
Her body seized angrily as it always did, fighting against the potion for several minutes before the tremors finally subsided. She could sense her mistress pacing nearby, imagined she was running her pointed tongue along sneering lips and trailing her fingers across her stomach. She waited, was waiting, wanted to send her into spirals of pain as soon as possible.
What had she done again? Oh, that's right, she woke up again today.
Shutter the pain.
How much does one have to suffer at the hands of monsters before you plot their demise?
Hide… hide from this world.
When does it happen?
What is that defining moment where everything falls away and you understand that to stop them you have to become a monster too?
Shutter away, shutter away, shutter away…
"Enough! AWAY WITH YOU!" Bellatrix barked at the elf who dropped Hermione's head immediately and disappeared with a crack.
Hermione was still, frozen, but not by fear, just simple exhaustion. If her mind was all there, if she was aware of her Mistress' words, she might have found fear, but it was simply too exhausting trying to hang onto the shreds of herself that'd finally began to unravel; so many years, pity it was finally falling apart.
She wasn't cowering properly, she wasn't twitching anymore, she wasn't responding correctly to her Mistress' taunts and jabs and it was leaving the dark witch enraged beyond all reason.
Shutter away…shutter the thoughts…shutter the—
A maddened snarl. "Filthy little Mudblood—CRUCIO!"
PAIN.
Hermione screamed.
She screamed and she screamed and she screamed.
Her chords bled but there was more, even more, so much more, and her back arched more violently than before.
Something cracked, might've been her back, maybe her skull on the ground, a rock, yes perhaps that.
Something.
Something something something.
The walls in her mind shook, they rattled they split. A fine seam appeared, the tiniest little cracks spidered out.
Shutter shutter shutter shutter-
"CRUCIO!"
All those pretty, fortified walls shuddered violently free of their foundation and that something broke free.
A laugh bubbled up from Hermione's chest amongst a slew of other less jovial sounds and she was sure Bellatrix mistook it for insanity by the sound of her own elated cackle. The force behind the witch's curse stopped abruptly and her Mistress must have been bent over with glee by the sound of it – Hermione Granger, finally driven mad – she must have been celebrating.
Hermione laughed harder, muttering under her breath, body twitching in the mud and her Mistress none the wiser for it all.
"Where have you gone to my filthy little Mudblood?" Bellatrix purred and moved with a fluid grace around her little slave.
She sauntered, walking circles around the spasming girl, watching with great amusement as she tried to move her hands, her arms. Bellatrix tittered when Hermione actually managed to jerkily trace her fingers over her own cheeks, seeming more amused at the fact that she was still laughing, still muttering.
"Where where where is your mind now?"
Bellatrix was a foolhardy woman, much like the Dark Lord. Too confident in their abilities, too much ego and too often did they miss things, underestimate the worth, the skill of the fodder that dusted their feet.
That was why she laughed.
The dark witch knelt in a less muddied spot of yard, eager to hear the ramblings of the mad, so pleased that she still had it in herself to drive them there.
"Where have you gone, pet?" she asked again.
"Shutter the pain."
Bellatrix's face contorted in a mask of confusion and anger. "What?"
Hermione smiled.
And she continued smiling even as she forced her jerking limbs up to grapple the other witch's head by the temples and sink her thumbs fully into the woman's eyes. She pushed and she pushed with a decade's worth of memories fueling the impossible strength behind the move and then she pushed some more, hooking her digits into wet, sticky, gooey things and wriggling them around for more.
Bellatrix screamed in anguish, a sound so raw and so rare that it spread goose bumps all along Hermione's mud soaked flesh. It made her laugh again, this time it sounded much less like the sound of the mad.
The witch thrashed and tried to wrench the girl – no, not a girl anymore – the woman off of her. Bellatrix slammed a fist against her head, tried to cast a spell, but the spell went wide with her panicked aim. She was frantic and unprepared in the face of such a Muggle styled attack and it only intensified Hermione's resolve.
Hermione's body was still trembling and twitching, tremors of the dark curses still more than evident in her body but she held on; she held on because to do anything less was death and she was no longer ready to meet it.
She found herself somehow atop the struggling witch and hummed sweetly with her hoarse voice. "Oh my Bella, how old you've become in these last ten years."
Her wand had been lost in the struggle and Bellatrix was shouting at this strange, this different, this completely Muggle kind of agony.
Hermione fastened the fingers of just one hand into the blind and bloodied holes in her Mistress' face grinning even as the woman beat her fists against her head and shoulders and arms and everything she could reach. She removed the other just long enough to reach for that irritating rock that'd cut up her backside during today's torture.
Dragging the stone's jagged edge along Bellatrix's cheek she smiled a smile that failed to reach her cold chocolate eyes and Hermione placed a chaste kiss to her Mistress' forehead. "Shutter the pain, Mistress… it makes it so very much easier."
When is it that you realize that you're already one of the monsters?