Day 2-Draco:
On the second morning Draco had been locked in a cell, he was served breakfast. It came on a metal platter, and there was no silverware, so Draco had to eat with his hands. It was eggs on toast, typical breakfast food, but the eggs were runny and watery, and the toast was burnt and so crunchy that it got caught in Draco's throat. He ate ravenously despite all this, his stomach aching and growling loudly from the lack of food from the past two days. When he had finished all his food and licked the plate clean, he glanced across the hallway, to Astoria's cell.
That was her name, Astoria Greengrass. It had a familiar ring to it, there had been a girl in his house at school named Daphne, but he had not known her well. Astoria may have been a relative, a sibling perhaps, but Draco had not asked her. She was sleeping through breakfast, he noted with surprise. They had shoved a plate of food through the gap in her cell bars as well, and Draco noted with envy that the boy who delivered food and slipped her an extra piece of bread.
A few hours passed, and Draco wondered if it would be unreasonable to ask for the time. He wished he still had a watch on him, but he had lost that ages ago, at the battle of Hogwarts. He looked over his own wrist, where the watch had been, and traced his fingers over the angry red welts, which had not vanished in the past four months. He wondered if they ever would. The storm of fiendfyre he had been trapped in and burnt the metal in his watch so badly that it molded to Draco's skin, leaving behind a set of burns that he believed would scar the skin for life.
Draco glanced over at Astoria's cell, to see that she had awoken. Her first move of consciousness was to walk over to the breakfast tray, sniff at the food, and then snatch up the glass of water. She drank without reserve or pause, gulping down the glass in seconds. She then looked over the food, wrinkled up her nose, and pushed the tray out of the bars with her toe, refusing to even touch it. Draco's stomach growled so loudly that she looked up in alarm.
"Sorry," she said, a half-amused smirk overriding her expression. "I would have pushed it all the way over there, if I could."
"Do they give you lunch in this place?" Draco asked, glancing down the hallway as he inched closer towards the bars of his cell. If he got close enough, he could wriggle his face through the bars just enough that his vision wasn't blocked by the metal pillars, and it almost felt as if he weren't in a cell at all.
"Usually stew or some kind of gunk they call noodles," Astoria replied. She glanced towards the window in her cell, too high to look out of, and then nodded to herself. "But that might not be for some time."
"How do you know? How can you tell?"
Astoria stood in the center of her cell, back to Draco, and raised her arm. She moved it mechanically, like the arm of a clock, and then stopped as sudden rays of grey light shone over her skin.
"I've learned to tell time from the light outside," she told him. "What light there is, anyway." She walked over to one side of her cell, the side with the toilet and the mirror and sink. From under the sink, she grabbed a roll of material, and unrolled it in a clipped, business-like manner.
"What's that?"
"You ask a lot of questions."
"I've only been here forty-eight hours if you haven't noticed, didn't you have a lot of questions when you first came here?"
"No." Astoria blew on her fingertips, stained with some sort of black chalk, and began to let her fingers dance over the cinderblock walls—she was writing something. "Questions get you no where, really, haven't you noticed?"
"No," Draco replied.
She rolled her eyes, folded up the scrap of fabric, and stored it back under the sink. She turned on the tap and began to scrub at her hands.
"Asking questions may determine Point A and Point B, but only action gets you from Point A to Point B. You catch my drift, Snake Boy?"
"Snake Boy?" Draco asked, slightly affronted.
"Your name is Draco, which if I'm not mistaken, translates to some sort of reptilian creature, and as you were in Slytherin, well, it all falls into place doesn't it? Not to mention you have been particularly slick at getting away from the Ministry for some time now, hmm?"
"Well, you said you were in Slytherin," Draco replied, trying to keep up. Astoria never stopped moving, never stopped speaking. She paced her cell, stretched her arms and legs, and cocked her head from side to side as she spoke, her eyebrows dipping and rising with her tone. "I might just call you Snake Girl."
"No. No, I don't quite like that. It implies I'm some sort of sidekick, if you're Snake Boy and I'm Snake Girl; it sounds like I come in second to you in some sort of way. And you'll soon learn that I don't come in second. Ever."
"It could just sound like we're married," Draco pointed out.
"Sounds like you're getting a bit ahead of yourself there, Snake Boy." Astoria grinned in a superior manner and then spread her legs, stretching as she plunked her hands down on the floor. Her hair tumbled down, nearly brushing the floor, and she winked at Draco from between her own legs.
"You're something." He frowned. "How are you so-?"
"What? Cheeky?" Astoria jumped back up into place and cracked her own back, moving her arms from side to side. "I'm probably mad, to be honest. I've been here one hundred and twenty-five days with no one to talk to but the blushing boy who delivers the food."
"One hundred and twenty-five days?" Draco asked, his brain whirring. "But that's…"
"Yes, of course, the Battle of Hogwarts, everyone knows that," Astoria said, waving a hand. "Keep up, I didn't know Prefects could be so dense."
"Forgive me," Draco said, his temper rising but his voice icy. "Hiding out in a forest for one hundred or so days has slowed me down a bit."
"But of course." Astoria withdrew a bit, reprimanded. "Sorry. Sometimes I forget about the world outside. Like I've said, I'm mad."
"Mad, possibly," Draco conceded. "But I highly doubt criminal. What did you do to get in here, anyway?"
"Ah, yes. Wouldn't you know it; my family had ties to Voldemort. Seems that I do, too."
Day 125-Astoria:
She had caught a cold. Astoria knew the symptoms full well—she had a headache when she woke, and not from the fact she had no pillow on her cot. She had long ripped up the pillow in a fit of rage. But anyway, she had a cold, and it was apparent from her stuffed up nose. In the evening hours of her 125th day in prison, they brought her soup to eat, and she had never been so grateful.
"Thanks, Cole," she said, mocking a flirtatious tone as the pimpled boy's hands shook when he handed her soup. He blushed all the same at her words though he shouldn't have, the words of a prisoner had no place to do that. Cole wiped his brow, and gave her an extra pack of saltine crackers, and she winked and held a finger to her lips quietly. Cole nodded. From across the hall, Draco glowered and stared hungrily at the extra packet of crackers in her hand.
She had thought, once he arrived, that perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad to have a boy living across the hall. In a sad, pathetic way, it reminded her of her days at school. And it comforted her, a bit, to see that the boy was one she recognized, even if he didn't recognize her. But Draco had begun to disappoint her, a bit. He was so concerned with why he had ended up in this place, and it seemed that he expected answers from Astoria. Well, she had no answers to give, and even if she had, she wasn't sure she wouldn't have handed them out. Astoria was not a usually generous person.
But then again…he was the only person who had tried to hold an actual, real conversation with her in the past one hundred and twenty-five days, the least she could do was show a sliver of interest, or reciprocate the best she could.
"Here," she called, once Cole had gone through the exit at the end of the hall. She held up the extra packet of crackers in hand, and Draco perked his head up from the depths of his soup bowl, which he was drinking as easily as if it were a mug of tea. "If I throw these high enough, they'll plunk through the top bars of your cell and you can catch them."
"How do you know?" Draco asked, extending a hand upwards. Astoria threw the crackers. They sailed directly up through the top of his cell, bounced off the side of his bed, and he caught them with one hand.
"I used to practice throwing pebbles in their at night, when I was bored. Sorry if you have quite the collection over there…I was bored quite a lot."
Draco was quiet for a moment, and then placed his bowl aside. He ripped open the packet of crackers with cracked, calloused hands. Astoria imagined that if she had seen his hands up close, they may have been blistered and bloody around the nails. Draco munched quickly on the saltines, scattering crumbs everywhere. Astoria winced; the mice would come later this evening to feast.
"You said you were in here because you were connected to the Dark Lord," Draco said after a while, and Astoria nodded.
That's what they had told her when they came to arrest her. It had been odd, surreal. The school had just brought her home, and her Aunt Vera had been there too. They had called in a batch of healers to look over Astoria, and she heard Aunt Vera telling the healers that she had been in shock. Aunt Vera said it was because her family had died. And that's when they came to take her away, the aurors. They had read a script of paper with her charges, her reasons for arrest:
Conspiracy to commit Treason
Conspiracy to commit Murder
Conspiracy to commit Genocide
Involvement with Illegal Magic
And then, when they had taken her away to her cell, one of the aurors hissed in her ear: Serves you right, you Dark Lord loving filth.
"Yeah, that's what they said. Don't know why, though. I'm sure they have no evidence." Astoria smiled bitterly. "Props if they can find anything connecting a sixteen year old student to Voldemort."
Draco flinched and paled at her words.
"Sorry, is it the name?" Astoria shook her head. "Apparently I just can't respect authority figures. That's what some of the guards have told me."
"No, it's just…A memory," Draco murmured, turning away from her. He ran a hand over his crop of white-blonde hair. "That's all."
"Alright, Snake Boy?"
Draco didn't answer. He quietly moved aside his soup bowl and shivered as he crawled into his cot, pulling the covers up to his chin. Astoria moved closer to the bars of her cell, peering at him, trying to gauge his expression.
"Oi!" She called. "Are you sick too?" Draco didn't respond. Astoria grimaced and turned away. So it was fine when he wanted to talk and ask questions, but when she did so, she didn't get a response. It wasn't as if she had better things to do, but had she not been in a jail cell, that's what she would have said to him in a haughty and conceited way that would have made Draco Malfoy thoroughly ashamed of himself.
Astoria crawled into her own bed. She began to close her eyes to drift off to sleep, when she heard Draco say something quiet into the darkness.
"What?" She called back.
"You're not mad, you know that?"
Astoria was quiet for a few moments. She tapped her fingers in rhythm against the metal framing of her cot. The sink began to drip. Moonlight swung through the window and caught the far wall in it's light. One Hundred and Twenty-Five tallies crowded the cinderblocks.
"You ask a lot of questions," Astoria replied. She might have heard him chuckle into the darkness, a very brief spurt of laughter that was quickly extinguished as he lapsed into silence, and then they both fell asleep.
A/N: Please remember to give a quick review! If I don't get enough reviews, I won't write anymore!