Before, i begin my chapter, i want to thank every who read the last chapter, especially Lollingalltheway who favorited this story :)

the title of the story came from the lyrics to a Killers song, when it got stuck in my head after going to see their concert last week. i would recommend to anyone who likes them to go and see them because they were absolutely fantastic :) so i have decided to stick with the theme, so if the chapter titles sound familiar than i guess you guys know why.

i should shut up now, right? :)


05 July 2012

2:42

Yes, you read that correctly. 2. 42 am. As in; the morning. I am woken by screaming. Not mine, though it wouldn't surprise me if it had been because I was having a terrible nightmare.

I decide to start writing; sluggishly, but I continue to drag my pen over the page anyway. It's something to do. I can't get the screams out of my head now that they are there. Loud piercing sounds that cut through the air like knives; marring an already awful picture and scaring deeply into my soul.

So I said I would start at the beginning and I did. I guess the only place to continue would be what happened after the first time your bastard of a nephew entered my life. In some twisted way I blame you for him being there are that point in time, Captain. It works in my head by a fragile connection that won't make any sense to anyone else. But I need someone to blame for my gullibility and it's going to be you.

If you hadn't married his aunt, maybe we – Draco and I, and I guess me and you is also a meeting I could do without – wouldn't have met. And, I wouldn't be here.

The first time I met Draco was first year. The doors to the great hall.

The last time I saw him was the same place, seven years later, on the day that he betrayed me and threw any love I had for him back in my face.

Over the years, the pain caused by his hate filled words had started to dull and I, in turn, became more and more immune to the scarring colloquy that escaped his lips.

But the sentiments returned full force when he broke my heart and once again I was an eleven year old crying because her school girl fantasy had crushed her heart. I tried to squash the tears. I tried to block it all out and to pretend that nothing he had ever done had hurt me. But it didn't work and trying to quench the tears like I did just made it hurt more. A lot more.

I won't pretend his hate filled words didn't affect me, because they did. And I won't pretend that I believe that he ever felt any remorse for what he did and what he said, because I know that he didn't. He never would.

So there you have it, our first meeting and the knowledge that Draco Malfoy was my first crush ever. The snarky git, with the perfect hair made my heart melt like chocolate over the gas of a burner, and I got too close to the fire. Close enough to get burned.

We let him in. I guess you know when he was reporting everything I told him back to you. Was he the one who told you where I was that night? Was he the one who gave me up?

I don't know how he could though, because he hadn't seen me in over a month by that point. Did he tell you everything? The way I crumbled like a burnt chocolate chip cookie, turning to dust beneath his fingers. But I was dust that didn't know how to fly away, how to coast on the wings of the wind because I had never had to before.

So I let him mould me. Was the decision to take my virginity yours, or his? I guess I don't really want to know. Even though I know that it is a long shot, I guess I still like to hope that there was some small recess of his brain that found me attractive enough to willingly bed me. But I guess I will get to that point in the story. It's something that I will make you sit through because I want to tell it. I want everyone to know how you hurt people. How you cut and destroy and stab at innocent children – mudbloods – until they bleed real tears and real pain and real hurt that you Death Eaters don't even know how to feel.

When this war is over, because I know it will be soon, I want everyone to know that you were all monsters. I want everyone to understand how you scarred innocent girls, ripped away their naivety the way a tornado rips a house from the ground, just because you could.

I want no one to have mercy on you; I want you to all fall to the law. Especially Draco Malfoy. I want you to suffer through what you put me through, but I guess a dementor will do if I can't get a cigarette to your throat.

The young Master Malfoy had always carried himself with poise and grace; he didn't act like a teenager. His posh Italian leather shoes and expensive robes screamed old money and we used to take the piss out of him all the time for it, even though in the recesses of my own, hormonal mind I used to want to peel every inch of his clothing off with my teeth.

We didn't take the piss out of him for the money, I guess we were all a bit jealous of that. Everyone wants to be rich. But, because of the way he used to prance around like he had a broom permanently stuck up his arse.

The first time he call me a 'mudblood' I think it left a scar on my heart, mostly because I wanted him to respect me. If not because he was really worth the pedestal I put him on, but because he represented the wizarding world and I just wanted to be accepted. I felt that if I could get the Slytherin Sex God / Prince to accept the lowly Gryffindor mudblood, then I would really fit in. I would really have it all. Being a witch was not enough. Being friends with the boy who lived and Ronald Weasley was not enough. Nothing was enough until I got the respect that I knew I should have and not just from him, from everyone.

All I wanted was respect from one of the only people I had met who wouldn't give it to me.

It didn't matter however, because he can begging for my help on the seventh of September 1997. School had started for Ginny seven days earlier and the peace and quiet and relief from her constant crying and moaning over not being able to accompany us on our mission was enough to make me only slightly forgetful about our safety.

I ventured out of the boundaries of the wards that I had erected, around the tent we had taken with us, to keep us alive and that was when I found him. Lying on the ground behind a large boulder – which now that I think about it had no place in the middle of the forest in which we were staying.

He saw me first.

Calling lightly to me as the blood continued to flow from the wounds on his broken body, I realised who it was. I was half tempted to turn around and march back into the tent before waking Ron and Harry speedily and apparating away as soon as possible, because in the back of my mind the first thing that I thought was TRAP.

Looking at him lying so pathetic on the ground, bleeding out with sticks and leaves fixed to his skin with the drying blood, I knew that I would never have been able to leave him to rot on the ground.

There was something about him that made me want to bend down and help him, crawl on my hands and knees until I hovered over his bruised form and was able to touch the pale skin that was painted red with rivers of blood. Or maybe I was just being a teenage girl and I fell to the idea that Draco Malfoy needed me. He NEEDED me.

I nursed him back to perfect health. There is no need to worry Captain. There is no way that I would have let you nephew come to any harm in my care, not when I grew to love him.

The entrance to the tent flapped shut behind me as I carried Draco's form through the opening and into the warm comfort of the magically enhanced tent. "What are you doing, Hermione?!" Ron looked at me flabbergasted as he watched me wipe the blood from Draco Malfoy's beaten face.

Now I realise that it was probably all an act.

You didn't really turn on him, you didn't really leave him to rot behind a boulder in the middle of some unknown forest that just happened to be where Harry, Ron and I were camping.

I know now that you were probably watching me. You undoubtedly saw my face softening as I watched Draco struggle to breath and you knew that you had me because there was no way that I would be able to leave him to die.

I played right into the trap, and for that reason I have to admit that I am angrier at myself that I ever was at Draco.

What he did was bad. He played on my emotions and relished in breaking someone who had done nothing but put him back together after he was crushed into a million pieces himself, but I did worse.

I let my guard down. I let myself get crushed.

"I'm helping someone who needs help, Ron!" I told my best friend, not even turning to look at Harry's face because I knew what was going to be there. Anger and his signature 'lost' look that made me want to do anything to make it better, so instead I refused to meet his eyes and I busied myself with cleaning the dried blood of Draco's face.

"He's a death eater, Hermione!" Ron continued to insist, gripping my shoulders between his fingers and holding me steady as he forced me to meet his steely gaze. There was something that look akin to betrayal in the deep, cornflower blue irises that I had known so well for so long.

There was a laboured coughing from the hammock that I had placed Draco's frail body into, "Please," he begged, holding my eyes. The familiar 'storm cloud' grey had me rushing to his side in an instant and this time there was no mistaking the betrayal that rang strong on Ron's face.

I tried so hard to block out the growing resentment that Harry and Ron - and even to some extent Draco because he never did seem to let the past go; for a long time it was like my hands burned with every touch - felt towards me as I nursed their worst enemy back to heath in their safe haven, but I couldn't help it. I couldn't stop my hands moving to wipe clean any grazes and to dress and redress wounds that cut so deep that they needed more than one dose of magical healing spells or potions.

I could have let him die. I could have walked away from him in the forest and left him to bleed out on the frigid ground. There were a lot of times that I could have killed him.

In hindsight there are a lot of things that I would have done very differently.

But that is what's good about hindsight. It always makes the best decisions, doesn't it, hindsight?

From the day he arrived so many people told me he was trouble. Tonks – you know Tonks right? She's somehow related to you, I don't keep a personal record of your family tree in my back pocket so I don't know Captain just where she falls in the category of family, but I know she is there. – told me to watch my back because I was put in charge of keeping an eye on him.

Tonks was nervously touching her hair, another sign of the impending doom was the way her hair turned a bright red. Obviously her Metamorphmagus power was behind the odd hair colour, but maybe it was an omen. I'm only saying that now because I feel I should have known that Malfoy was a bad apple.

Get it, red...apple?

Give me a bit of credit, Captain. I'm working on an empty stomach, two hours sleep and a table that keeps giving me splinters. Sorry if my sense of humour is not all it should be.

Anyway, I feel like I should have known. The brightest witch of her age fails again, right?

Maybe if I had trusted the people around me instead of being so naive I would have been able to protect myself, my heart and everyone who I loved.

"Thank you," he whispered the first time that he woke for a long enough time to speak. He had been catching only glimpses of life for the past week or so. Most of the time he lay placid in the soft, banana-yellow hammock that I had left him in the first day that I had returned with his battered body. His voice was still cold and distrustful and harsh, but it was a start... no matter how small.

Looking at him, the inside of the tent empty and the only light source being the moonlight rushing in from the open flap, my breath caught as I took in his ethereal looking form. He looked like an angel lying in a halo of natural light and looking at me with piercing eyes. "Hush," I told him, not trusting myself to speak as he reached a wary, slow hand out to push my fingers away.

He still despised my touch.

I loved his hands the first time that I ever saw them. There is something about a man's hands; the thick fingers, the protruding veins that snake their way up their fingers and loop around their wrists before flowing into their bulky forearms that makes me all excited...and Draco Malfoy had the perfect hands. The kind of hands that you want on your body all the time. They were kind of hands that you imagine ripping your clothes off before lowering you to the ground and doing wicked, other worldly things to your body.

After I finished plaiting up the delicacy of the day - I guess we could call my food Mystery Surprise, sort of like school lunchtimes - I carried the plaits to the table in the middle of the tent. "You have to eat, Malfoy, otherwise you will not get better." I reminded him tiredly; I had been repeating the same thing for over two weeks now and he never seemed to listen. His had always been lanky, but he used to have copious amounts of muscle thanks to quidditch, and now he was just hollow. Like a tuna tin can after I fed the fish to Crookshanks.

"I don't want to eat," his voice was still the harsh, cruel noise that he had always aimed at me.

"Have I killed you yet?" I asked him, my voice taking on a slightly hurt lilt as I watched his grey eyes flicker with something uninterpretable before closing off into the practiced blank look that I had seen him using many times over the two weeks that he had been awake in the tent with us.

Shaking his head, as if to clear any thoughts that may have been rushing through his mind, he asked, "Why haven't you?" looking at me, he took the fork from my outstretched hand and speared some of the wild mushrooms that I had found growing just outside the tent. "Killed me yet."

"I don't know," I replied and then stabbed some of my own mushrooms, "And if we don't die from these mushrooms, then I would say that not killing you would have to be a stroke of good fortune on your part." Smirking at the look of terror that passed through his eyes, he coughed out the mushrooms and pushed his plait back towards me. "Ha!" I laughed, shovelling another forkful of mushrooms into my own mouth and winking easily at him.

"Oh ha ha,"his glare was fixed firmly on his face once more and the usual cold look in his eyes that had melted moments before returned instantly.

I pushed his plate back towards him and muttered out, "It has been two weeks, injured my arse, I just think you are just faking now."

I should have known then that there was something funny going on. He hadn't called me Mudblood once; there was still some resentment or hatred on his part even though I had saved his life, but no one loses their ideologies that quickly.

"humph!" he huffed as he stood and hobbled back to the hammock.

I had had to reset his leg twice. Having to re-break it was the hardest part; I would never get the screams out of my head. I had stayed and dried his tears for hours after I had finished healing it - of course, he didn't know, he had passed out from the pain hours prior - I whispered 'I'm sorry' over and over and over again, crying to myself as I fell asleep. Harry and Ron didn't say anything to me that night.

"Hermione?" Harry walked into the tent, immediately throwing up silencing charms and making an opaque circle around us so Draco could not see or hear. "We have a new lead and we have to leave now." I could hear Draco fumbling about on the other side of our makeshift barrier and I was thankful that I was going to leave him for a few hours, everything had become so tense and tightly-strung, and there were some times - and I am truly not proud of this - that I just wished I had left him to die in the forest.

There were nights when I sat up late into the night – sometimes through to the morning – talking to the little traitor. I told him about my life. I told him about every one of my secrets.

One week later, Harry had come to a dead end. My parents had left me a house and we decided that we would used that as a base because none of us could bare to go back to Grimauld place.

The first night we arrived, Draco was in a worse state than I have ever seen him. We had ran into his mother on the way over, Narcissa Malfoy didn't know that we were there, she didn't see Draco, but we all heard what she said.

She had wished him dead. She had said that she was better off. Had told the woman she was with that she could have never loved the weak child that she had produced.

Just like the first night we arrived at my parent's house I stayed with him pretty much until he disappeared. That first night was the longest and the worst of my life.

He had drunk too much, there was bottle hidden in the back of one of the drawers at the house where we were all staying – the name is under fidelus charm so I can't tell you, what a shame (bet you didn't find that one funny) – and he got smashed out of his mind.

He gets violent when he's drunk. And scary. I was told to stay with him through the night. Maybe it would have been better if Harry or Ron had stayed with him. Maybe then I would have avoided the emotional connection we formed after I let him cry on my lap when he broke down when he realised what he had done.

It might have been the drunken haze, but I think he actually did feel some remorse over hitting me. I let him cry himself to sleep on my lap. I wiped the drool off his lip and I stayed with him as he puked up the alcohol that was rejected from his body. I didn't expect him to be thankful, I didn't even expect him to acknowledge his moment of weakness, but he didn't let me go the whole night.

He cuddled into my side and I could feel his breath on the back of my neck and his hand running up and down my arm before he knotted his fingers through mine and held my hand the whole night.

I don't think I slept at all that night. He did, but he definitely didn't let me go.

Maybe that was when I subconsciously realised that my innocent school girl crush had never truly dissapeared. All of the times that I wanted his affection maybe I was just searching for the emotions that I wanted to be there. They say there is a fine line between love and hate, and I really believed that there was for a little while.

When you come into the room Captain, you pull me from my story.

I watch you eating your croissant in front of me. Selfish BASTARD. If I ate off of the floor would you let me eat? Don't hold your breath though because I wouldn't get my nose anywhere near your feet if your breath smells this bad. I guess you like eating muggle food don't you. So you'll eat their food but won't tolerate their 'dirty blood?'

Why don't you try black pudding? Great muggle delicacy, I think you'll love it.

When you finish eating your croissant so delicately, pealing each of the layers back with a smile on your face and your eyes flicking to me like you are imagining ripping of a layer of my skin with every pastry flake that crumbles into your hand, you watch me. You make a writing motion and gesture for me to continue.

I don't. I've already done enough for today.

Oops. Maybe not. The cigarettes are coming back out as well as the matches – another muggle invention (bloody hypocrite- OW!


i hope that you are all enjoying the story so far. hopefully you are understanding what is happening. if not then i will quickly summerise,

Hermione has been captured due to draco selling her out.

She is being interogated by the Lestrange's and in exchange for her cooperation they have given her time - she is trying to hold out for rescue.

and she has been told to answer questions, but to try and buy more time she is telling ALL of her story from the beggining and is writing it down for them to read. eventually i will get to the questions she has to answer and stuff, but the next few chapters are just going to be more of setting the scene and developing hers and draco's relationship.

the italics are her written memories and the normal is her writing what she is thinking in the present.

please review to tell me what you think - constructive criticism is always welcome.