A/N: Just as a warning, a part of this chapter is quite graphic. So you expect it ahead of time.

Unexpected Encounters

She was a slave – pardon, House-Witch owner, as if that name would make it so much more palatable. The thought alone would have been enough to repulse Hermione to the point of illness, but not only that…

She was Harry Potter's sister. Or Harry Evans' sister, as it appeared to be in this universe.

She ran through several scenarios in her mind, and the only one that made the most sense - particularly given she was quite obviously Ron's girlfriend and Ginevra was quite obviously Harry's, at least in Ginevra's mind - was the one in which she had, in the course of her acquaintanceship with Harry, been adopted by his very much alive mother and possibly father. Which also meant that, in the course of her acquaintanceship with Harry…

Something must have happened to her parents.

No, no, no...

Suddenly, everyone to whom Hermione would normally go to enlist help for her less-than-stellar situation seemed wholly untrustworthy, and there was no earthly way she was going to seek out the Dumbledore of this world as if he was the respected, wise old man from hers.

What a sodding mess.

She didn't know how long she simply sat, trying absorb/accept the wave of nearly overwhelming new information, especially since her head still held the lingering effects of a migraine that hadn't entirely vanished since she'd entered this new reality.

Finally, she took a heavy breath.

She knew what she had to do. And by Merlin, when Hermione Granger was determined to see something through to the end, it would certainly be done.

Then and there, she made a solemn vow:

She would get home again. No matter what lengths it might take, she was going to survive. No matter what lengths it might take, she was going to find a way back to the world she loved, a world in which, she was quite certain, the darkest evil had already been defeated.

Primping like a model every morning? Curling her hair? Keeping her hand down and her mouth shut during classes and acting like Lavender Brown for an extended period of time? Not a problem – or, at least, not if it would dispel any suspicion from herself while she religiously staked out the library until she found a counterspell to whatever magic had landed her in Universe B.

It was an undercover approach she had never considered trying before - not during the war she had already fought. Then again, virtually everyone in her world would have been able to call her out as Harry Potter's brilliant best friend. Here, she was in a completely different situation, and if this world thought she was nothing more than another pretty face and empty head, it could more than certainly work to her advantage.

Which was why she was now discreetly trailing her way, under the cover of a Disillusionment charm, back to the Head common room along a vaguely familiar and lesser used corridor on the outskirts of the castle, lit wand held in an upright position as she poured over a copy of one of the more recent Hogwarts yearbooks. It was from what would have been My's fifth year in Universe B.

With a form of curiosity that resembled dread churning in the pit of her stomach, she opened to the first - and uncharacteristically large – section of the yearbook.

Red and gold blasted off the pages. For the first time in her life, the colors clashed painfully with her gaze. She still belonged to Gryffindor, quite obviously, and almost instantly, she found at least four photos of herself – Well, not herself, per say, but of My, Ronáld, Harry, and Ginevra.

She peered at the first one and frowned - it was solely of Ginevra and herself, Ginevra's hair still streaked black and My's hair still scarily perfect, but this time straightened in a feat that Hermione herself had only managed once, at the Yule Ball. Looking at an image of her well-dressed look-alike doing things that Hermione had never done was downright chilling. In this photo, the two were posing amidst many onlookers (most of them male) as if the center aisle in the Great Hall had been turned into a Parisian runway, uniform robes slung partially off their shoulders.

Merlin, not at all looking forward to the next few days, Hermione thought bleakly, taking notes on My's apparently loose behavior nonetheless. Swallowing her disgust, she tore her eyes away from the disturbing images long enough to sidestep a particularly ominous statue of an ogre that she hadn't remembered in this area of the castle in Universe A. To her mild relief, the positively deserted halls were a much-wanted testament that the Welcome Feast was still in full swing.

Quickly turning her attention back to the yearbook – her new form of 'research' - she flipped the page to another image, this one featuring Ronáld-with-the-slicked-back-hair, Harry, and herself. Harry was staring at the camera as if he were trying to break it, Ronáld was too busy planting kisses along My's exposed neck to look at said camera, and My was blowing a kiss toward the viewer, giggling, and giving a saucy wink.

Sweet Merlin, please, please tell me I will never be put in another position where I will have to pose like that!

Here her name was still listed as My Granger, so whatever had happened between herself and the Evans/Potter family had to have happened quite recently. So too must have whatever reason Harry had for talking to her as if he hated her more than Dementors –

"Eh, Filch! 'ow many more yeh got there?"

Oh bugger.

The deep male yell was dangerously close.

Hermione leapt into the shadows of the nearest wall, wand in hand and spell in mouth, until she remembered that she still was under the Disillusionment. She let out a breath and sagged in relief. She tensed up again as a few self-suffering mutterings sounded and someone else replied, "Erm… this 'uns the last one."

Cautiously, she leaned back out into the hall once more, her eyes narrowing in curiosity. As if someone very large was walking about, a large, rhythmical thumping sounded and then stopped up ahead, most likely coming from a small courtyard nearby that, if she remembered correctly, also doubled as a luggage unloading station and led out onto the grounds. "And which one'a the Fusties do we 'ave 'ere, eh?"

Hermione sucked in a surprised breath.

This time, the voice was unmistakably Hagrid's... except that it sounded much more like a growl than his typical, well-intentioned but grunt-like speech.

She quickly leaned back into the darkness, muttering another Disillusionment for good measure. Hagrid had been good in her world, which, unluckily for her, meant that here he was almost certainly bad.

Meanwhile, there was a distinct but faint sound of something – cloth, maybe? – rustling. Then came perhaps the most terrifying sound Hermione had heard since she'd regained consciousness:

Hagrid suppressing chuckles of pure malevolence.

"Well, well, well. Look 'oo it is."

A thick silence greeted this comment, until...

Crack!

Hermione leapt at the sharp noise.

"That's right, that'll teach yeh ter address yer superiors, ya good-for-nothing whelp," Hagrid's evil doppelgänger said in an eerily amused voice. "Eh, Filch, c'mere."

Dear goddess, whatever they were taunting was a person? Hermione thought, horrified. She had been under the impression it was some kind of animal for Care of Magical Creatures! (Not that that made it any better...)

Slowly, she began to inch closer to the courtyard. Of course, the wisest, most self-preserving thing for her to do would have been to turn around immediately and go back the way she'd come, but a mixture of curiosity and, now, repulsion at whatever was being done to whoever was in the courtyard kept her in place. Anyway, she hadn't run around undetected after hours, in teachers' offices, or while avoiding Death Eaters for seven and a half years for nothing.

"Don't suppose His Lordship'll mind if we teach 'im a little lesson," Hagrid's distinct voice continued.

Filch, oddly enough, sounded very much the same as her universe's version of him – just creepy, plain and simple. "Sure looks like His Lordship's already taught 'im a few lessons 'imself, don't it?" he chuckled out.

Hermione tucked the bulky yearbook under her left arm, gripping her wand in her right as she slunk down the last few meters of the hall that remained before it emptied into the courtyard and the light of the hallway faded into the darkness of the night.

"It certainly does," Hagrid agreed smugly. "But as the Headmistress says, it don't hurt to give these types another extra taste. Ain't that right, Fusty?"

Silence greeted his question, and Hermione involuntarily winced at the abrupt sound of metal violently striking metal. "Blast it, I told yeh once to answer me when I speak ter ya, yeh filthy slug!"

Sweet Merlin, how can this be Hagrid?

As she drew up alongside the very edge of the wall bordering the courtyard, her heart twisted painfully, longing more than ever for the home from which she'd vanished only a half day earlier.

She struggled to swallow, and took a breath.

No time for that now. Get through one second at a time. You're going to get yourself home eventually, I promise.

Forcing the homesickness to the side, she tried to decide exactly what she was going to do now that she was where she wanted to be. She dearly wished she had a pair of Fred and George's Extendible Ears as a low, muffled response to Hagrid's demand finally came... but it must not have been what he'd been looking for.

Without even a breath's notice, Hagrid howled, "Crucio!"

The word slammed into Hermione's ears like a sledgehammer, as did the horridly uncharacteristic anger lacing the voice that had wielded it. Her body turned to ice at the sound of a sharp but muffled intake of breath – but, incredibly, not a scream.

Hermione had never heard anyone withstand the Crutiatus Curse without a sound.

At first, she thought - in relief - that whoever it was had passed out, but a jerky rattling of what could have been chains and the very occasional soft, choking gasp, hardly audible over the raucous laughter of Hagrid and Filch, told Hermione that he or she hadn't.

They were conscious. And they were being tortured.

Ice turned to heat that burned through her body to act, to stop this senseless violence against a defenseless being, even if it meant risking her own exposure in the process -

Oh, forget my stupid cover! I can't let this go on anymore!

Taking a quick breath to steel her nerves, Hermione flung her head and wand arm around the edge of the wall and took quick but critical aim at the first thing she saw- the towering, instantly recognizable bulk of Hagrid. "Oppugno avis!" she hissed.

Instantly, at least four dozen small, yellow birds exploded from her wand and shot, screeching, toward the two men like brightly colored missiles locked onto a target. In less than three seconds, both men were positively swallowed up by the cloud of canaries, any obscenities they might have uttered drowned out by the horrible racket.

Hermione sagged in relief - the distraction would surely lift the Cruciatus curse from its intended target.

Quickly doing a hall check to ensure that the sudden din hadn't drawn any extra company, she held the birds on who she assumed to be the groundskeepers/castle guards for a good half minute. Once yellow feathers actually began flying through the air around the melee, she pointedly flicked her wand and sent all 48 of the things swarming toward the grounds, but held them tauntingly within visual - and auditory - range.

She peered into the courtyard in time to see Filch stumble to his feet, his once-brown coat now splattered with white splotches and an innumerable amount of feathers. "Bleedin', bloody, buggering bollocks–"

"Birds're a bloody menace!" Hagrid grunted furiously, red-faced and wheezing.

In any other situation, the scene would have been unspeakably hilarious, but now her eyes were simply drawn sharply to the edge of what appeared to be a cage hidden behind Hagrid. Her view of it was lost as Filch flung a large, dirty sheet over it, still cursing vehemently.

Cutting off his comrade's wave of profanities, Hagrid easily grabbed the much smaller man by the collar and stabbed his finger out toward the Forbidden Forest. "Go down'a my hut an' bring me som'a that bird killer potion, or whatever else down there that'll work for som'min like this." He shoved Filch toward the courtyard's small, arched entrance to the grounds, simultaneously brandishing a wand, and shouted after him, "I'll trail 'em 'til yeh get back!"

The ground actually shook as Hagrid crashed out of the arch.

Hagrid… Wand… WHAT?

Hagrid had never been allowed to perform extensive magic, especially not an Unforgivable... but with history as upended in Universe B as it was, she didn't doubt Tom Riddle would have had a better chance of being expelled from Hogwarts than Hagrid had the two gotten in a confrontation.

Warily, Hermione glanced around once more before she cautiously jogged across the grassy expanse, her senses set to high alert. Several flickering torches lining the courtyard's stone walls illuminated only a few bench slabs, a central, flowing fountain shooting from the mouth of a magnificently carved dragon, and the waist-high, rectangular-shaped object that Filch had covered. Silence wrapped around her, broken only by the cheerful sound of trickling water, some distant bellows from Hagrid and the faint buzz of late-summer insects.

The quiet was eerie...

Especially because there was something – someone – alive under the dark, ripped cloth.

In all honesty, Hermione wasn't quite sure what she would find inside what she was fairly certain was a cage. She became increasingly nervous as she approached it, uneasily sweeping her - My's? - obnoxiously long, bouncy hair from her face. Whoever it was, Hagrid had called them a 'fusty,' which she recalled was the insult used toward the vanquished conservative insurgents- those supposedly on the 'good side' here.

But... what if even the 'good' people of this universe weren't really good at all? What if everyone - everyone - was morally twisted?

Gingerly, Hermione reached down, tentatively grasping the edge of the rough material. As quickly as she began to pull it off, she hesitated, gripping the worn fabric tightly.

Oh, come on, Hermione! You've escaped Death Eaters; you've been through a war... You can handle whatever's beneath this.

The thought wasn't exactly comforting, but it was enough.

Clenching her jaw and her wand for good measure, Hermione steeled herself and flipped back the cover.

Oh my sweet goddess.

Her heart lurched to her throat; her hand leapt to her mouth as the contents of her stomach abruptly threatened to hurl from it.

Within the long, thick bars of what was definitely a cage, something alive also started violently in equal surprise, swiftly curling chained, bloody legs in toward itself in what was most likely the only defensive action it could manage.

And it was human.

Hermione stared down at the man before her in unutterable horror. Nearly every part of his visible body was one ugly purple and blue bruise, more welts, gashes, and discolorations lining what skin she could see that wasn't covered with chains, mud or blood. His face was blackened with grime, the left side of it swelled to an abnormal size and the right bruised in such a way that she was positive she could see individual finger marks on the battered skin.

For a moment, she forgot how to breathe.

The person on the other side of the bars, for his part, looked rather frozen in place as well, his entire face utterly exhausted as he mutely returned her shaken gaze with an unmistakeable pair of pale gray eyes Hermione knew could only belong to one person.

A person she had just seen shooting curses at Order members during the final battle.

"Malfoy?" she gasped in a hushed whisper, blinking in shock as her eyes raked over his form once again.

Were it not for those eyes, she would have never recognized him.

This Draco Malfoy's appearance was as far a cry from the impeccably-groomed, aristocratic Draco Malfoy of Universe A as possibly conceivable. Dressed in nothing but literally tattered rags, he was absolutely filthy, covered in grime and Merlin only knew what else, more gaunt than the Draco Malfoy of her world had even been near the end of sixth year, his trademark blond hair unshorn and matted dark with dirt and blood…

"Draco Malfoy?" she repeated dumbly, unable to tear her gaze away from the awfulness of seeing a familiar face in a state like this, no matter how much of a git he'd been in her world. Of course, Hermione had seen unspeakable horrors while running from Voldemort, while fighting off tens of Death Eaters and Snatchers, but in this universe, it wasn't even wartime, and she found herself again asking the heartbreaking question that she had asked far, far too many times in her relatively short nineteen years.

Dear Goddess, how can anyone do this to another human being? How can anyone do this to any living thing?

In one fell swoop, everything that had built up inside her from the moment she, Harry and Ron had finally rejoined with the Order yesterday and knew the final battle could very well be upon them, every hysterical, panicked, overwhelmed emotion that she had desperately tried to block out both from that fierce rollercoatser of a fight for their lives that had followed through her subsequent abandonment in this foreign, terrifying universe, slammed into her like a ton of bricks.

In absolute exhaustion, she sank to her knees in the thick, damp grass beside the cage, mechanically observing the way Malfoy's arms were awkwardly pulled behind him, as if restrained.

The subjugation she'd read about only minutes earlier had abruptly become horrifically real.

He might have been Draco Malfoy, it was true, but he was still a person. Not only that, he had fought with the people who were supposed to be good in this Universe. Was this what had happened to them all?

"Who did this to you?" she whispered.

In response, Malfoy's split, bloodied lips wordlessly parted slightly, his first movement in at least a minute, his breaths audibly growing more ragged, his indecipherable gray stare never leaving hers.

Ronáld.

Ronáld had done this, she realized, a surge of hatred toward her best friend's degenerate Universe B counterpart sweeping through her nerves with a ferocity that surprised even her. Both Hagrid and Filch had referred to someone called 'His Lordship' who had already taught Malfoy a lesson, and "Lord" Ronáld Weasley owned Malfoy.

And she was supposed to pretend to be his girlfriend.

She was supposed to believe in what they believed in.

But who could even pretend to believe in this?

How can I live in this world?

Suddenly, Malfoy's swollen lips parted once more, and Hermione was jerked back to the waking nightmare that had inexplicably engulfed her.

"Lady... Evans," he said hoarsely, his incomprehensible gaze swiftly dropping toward the cage floor. "What-– "

Abruptly, his shoulders lurched forward as a ragged cough burst from his mouth. The motherly concern that Hermione had always easily felt for those she encountered flooded her yet again as he turned his face into his far shoulder, coughing roughly against it. Instinctively, she reached out toward him, but when her fingers brushed the metal bars of the cage she quickly drew her hand away.

His coughs faded, and he swallowed visibly, briefly closing his eyes, before he attempted verbalization again. "Come for a - a bit more – fun at my... expense, have you?" he rasped in broken speech, his voice either gravelly with disuse or over-use. As if, even though he had hardly made a sound during the Crutiatus, somewhere, sometime in the relatively recent past, he'd been screaming for hours.

With considerable effort, Hermione forced the ghastly conjecture from her mind, but it was quickly replaced by another equally ghastly one. What did he mean, 'Come for a bit more fun at my expense?' Had she – or My – done something to him before?

Sweet goddess —

Swiftly, Hermione offered up a small prayer that she hadn't been the one who'd done this to him, though she somehow doubted it – her impression of My was that of a selfish, spoiled, and somewhat idiotic girl who wouldn't want to get her hands dirty like this. But even still…

For the second time that day, Hermione Granger had absolutely no idea of what to say.

She finally managed to choke out an intelligible response; one that wouldn't give anything away, just in case he was… Well, just in case. "I haven't, actually," she answered softly, swallowing back another wave of nausea.

Her eyes landed on the lock to the cage's door. Though she suspected her actions would be moot, she aimed her wand at the lock regardless. "Alohomora!"

Nothing happened. Of course, it was specialized. Not even a daft halfwit would have put a simple lock on the cage that held their slave, she thought, seething.

Malfoy finally lifted his head again, his tangled hair loosely falling into his face, a far cry from the usual slickness that was typically favored by him rather than Ron. As his tired eyes impassively followed her motions, the lifelessness in them unexpectedly began to glimmer with the tiniest sprig of emotion. Hermione suspected that it was either bewilderment or confusion. Or both.

"You can't... open it, you know," he suddenly murmured, the few, gravelly words voiced in a heavy, wholly defeated tone that she had never dreamed she would hear pass the arrogant and proud Draco Malfoy's lips. "Though - it's... rather nice of you for trying."

Any sneering contempt seemed to have been replaced entirely by an almost unnatural, exhausted evenness she had never heard from someone her own age, but was unnervingly reminiscent of Remus Lupin's voice:

One that had experienced a lifetime of suffering.

Hermione shook herself from the deeply unsettling comparison and turned back to the task at hand. Calculatingly, she regarded the lock with narrowed eyes before glancing back at him through the bars. "What kind of alteration did that weasel of a redhead put on it?" she practically spat out, her eyes darkening the instant the very thought of Ronáld re-entered her mind.

Malfoy's gaze flew toward her. "You'd - I'm to... answer?" he croaked out after a moment, the smallest tinge of bafflement shining through his even voice for the first time.

"That might be helpful!" she responded more forcefully and sarcastically than she'd intended, unable to keep her anger at the monstrous filth that was this world's version of Ron Weasley from escaping her lips.

To her horror, Malfoy instantly flinched and shrank away from her as if her words had physically lacerated him, poorly concealed dread flooding his injured features.

Guilt wrenched at her chest.

Damn it, Hermione, he's clearly been imprisoned by a sadist for months, possibly years! You can't just raise your voice at him!

She lifted a shaking hand to her forehead and let out a breath. "I'm sorry, Malfoy; that anger wasn't directed at you," she said hastily, desperately hoping she hadn't destroyed his willingness to speak with her.

His heavy stare didn't move from where it'd landed on his knees, his hunched shoulders tense. After several seconds, he choked out hoarsely, "Auditory," and again began coughing softly.

"Of course, aural-targeted locks," Hermione muttered, nodding as she re-familiarized herself with the rather standard security charm addition that would only open if Ronáld's or Ginevra's voice commanded it to do so. There weren't too many ways to get around those short of becoming the person, or using Polyjuice Potion… If a ward hadn't been set up against such deception, of course.

Anyway, even if you would have gotten it open, what then? she thought sardonically, raking a hand through her hair in frustration. Free him and run away into the night?

Somehow, she doubted escape would be that easy.

Hermione shifted her gaze back toward the blond wizard analytically, and started slightly when she found he was already surveying her in a surprisingly perspicacious manner. He swiftly averted his searching gaze, but she couldn't blame him - She could only imagine she wasn't acting at all like My Evans, either. She still couldn't quite yet sort out how different this man was from her version of Draco Malfoy, or whether he was a good person, even, a person here she might actually be able to trust… save for his eyes.

Even unreadable as they were, his eyes were filled with more emotion than she'd ever seen in Draco Malfoy's eyes.

With a wince, Malfoy shifted slightly then, the clinking sound of metal scraping against metal accompanying even this small motion. He looked distinctly unnerved, his gaze firmly fixed on the ground, and Hermione abruptly realized she was still staring at him. She jerked her gaze away-

As a deep, hearty but not at all comforting chuckle rang out in the not-so-far distance.

"-uddy birds won't be a problem anymore, that's fer sure."

Sod it!

With a jolt of adrenaline, Hermione leapt to her feet. Malfoy stiffened as well, so much so that he accidentally jerked back against the bars of the cage. Instantly, he sucked in a short, pained gasp, which quickly turned into a hacking cough that he desperately tried to muffle.

Compassion shot through her heart, and halfway between sprinting off and reaching for the tarp to cover the cage again, she crouched back down at the side of the enclosure. "Malfoy. What hurts the most?" she whispered urgently, ignoring her mind's panicked chants of Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

For a moment, Malfoy's gaze listlessly shifted in her direction without quite finding her face. "What - What?" he suddenly repeated swiftly between coughs, as if the true meaning of her words had just sunk into his mind. He squinted up at her without bothering to hide the disbelief scrawled across his features.

"I want to help you," Hermione said, hastily glancing through the arch and the narrow view of the grounds it gave. Nothing yet, but Hagrid's vociferous complaints were getting louder and louder…

"You're obviously injured; where is it most painful?" she enunciated clearly, looking back down at him.

She froze.

Malfoy was staring at her so motionlessly he may as well have been paralyzed. His clearly exhausted gray eyes were suddenly filled with so much tangible, unspeakable emotion that Hermione felt as if she could see into his very soul… and that it was the farthest thing from wicked.

Abruptly, her own eyes filled with tears.

This was not the Draco Malfoy she had known. This was a good person. She knew it… she could feel it.

And they had tortured him.

But before she could speak, or even think of something to say, to ask, to offer, his vision shuttered, leaving her at a very well-guarded wall. "My… back," he whispered, his gaze briefly searching hers before he looked away.

Her lips tugged into a frown at this odd location, given she could name about fifty other injuries not on his back that appeared absolutely excruciating, but she nodded and drew her wand nonetheless, praying that Hagrid moved as slowly in this world as he did in hers. "Show me. Hurry."

Raw fear that pierced something deep inside her sprang back to his expression, but he haltingly bowed his head away from her and, clenching his jaw, awkwardly shifted around until his back was to her. Hermione bit back another hot wave of anger when saw his hands were indeed chained behind him, the grubby skin around and beneath the tight bindings bleeding and rubbed raw...

But none of it mattered the instant she looked at his back. Through the many jagged tears in the rough, blood-soaked material that was his clothing, it was impossible to miss the multiple bloody, inflamed lines crisscrossing the bruised skin.

Whip lashes.

It brought a fresh wave of tears to her eyes.

Tiredly pressing his right cheek against the bars of the far side of the cage in an attempt to keep himself upright, Malfoy's gaze wordlessly slid sideways as if trying to gauge her reaction through his peripheral vision, his chest raggedly rising and falling more quickly.

"Right. I'll take care of it," Hermione choked out after her heart had begun to beat again, swallowing back a fresh wave of nausea at the ghastly sight.

She sucked in a sharp breath to steady herself and lowered her wand on the torn skin. Malfoy visibly tensed, closing his eyes, which led her to wonder if he expected the spell that she would utter to be more along the lines of something 'fun at his expense' rather than one that would heal a part of his pain.

To squelch his doubts, Hermione nonverbally performed a fast healing spell, one of many she'd picked up during the war, and a soft orange glow settled over his rough clothing, if it could even be called that. The cuts and welts covering his back quickly vanished, leaving in their place nothing but thin, deep scars that Hermione, unfortunately, could not prevent without the help of an actual healing potion. On second thought, she hurriedly added to that incantation one that cleared his lungs of any invasive fluid that might have been behind his cough.

As the glow soaked into his skin and then faded completely, Malfoy's eyes flew open. She watched as, slowly, he looked down at his chest and visibly, experimentally took a deep breath. Hermione held her own, then released it with a weak, relieved smile when he didn't begin coughing.

Slumping against the bars, the Slytherin twisted back toward her, his glistening eyes holding an unreadable intensity that caught her completely off guard, that she had only seen in the eyes of her Harry, and even that occurred only very rarely.

"I don't understand," he whispered hoarsely, true emotion breaking up the defeated levelness of his voice.

Something about that moment caused Hermione to believe more firmly than ever that she was not at all dealing with the same Draco Malfoy that she had once slapped and despised. She stared back down at him, her eyes still reflecting her horror at the violence inflicted upon him. "That makes two of us," she managed to murmur.

"- take care 'a this runt up here an' then we're done fer the night!"

Abruptly, another bark of laughter rang out from just beyond the courtyard wall. Without another word, Hermione breathlessly flung the cover over Malfoy's cage and sprang to her feet, casting another Disillusionment charm on herself so anyone with an untrained eye who looked in her direction would only see whatever was behind her.

As she'd hoped, neither Hagrid nor Filch were Mad-Eye Moody material. Neither noticed her standing out in the open as they came into sight, nearly to the crest of the thankfully sizeable hill atop which the archway into the courtyard stood.

"Keep this secret, Malfoy," she breathed to the rectangular-shaped cloth.

It wasn't much of a command, but it was all she had to rely on. Even though any response that might have come from the cage was drowned out by the suddenly animated conversation marking Hagrid and Filch's return, she had a sneaking suspicion that he probably wasn't going to go running to his 'Master' about My Evans' suddenly advanced magical healing ability.

Silently, Hermione carefully backed away from the center of the courtyard in time to narrowly avoid a head-on collision with Filch. She shuddered, quickening her retreat as Hagrid proficiently flicked a wand at Malfoy's prison and said clearly, "Locomotor cage!"

Hermione couldn't help but shoot another startled glance his way at his effective use of wand magic. Everything was so bloody different... How would she learn enough about this place to survive here like one of them - wherever 'here' was - without ending up in a cage just like Malfoy was?

No, Hermione. You're going to find a way back. There's got to be a way out of here, and you're going to find it and take it. You're going to get home.

Despite the determined vow, Malfoy's battered face flashed through her mind like he was still directly in front of her, staring at her with unreadable eyes that were loaded with more benign emotion than any other person she'd yet seen in this world, let alone the Draco Malfoy of her own universe.

Clenching her hands, she fought back tears, swallowing back bile and the urge to vomit. Sweet Morgana, his treatment was horrendous - horrendous! Had all Light witches and wizards been condemned to the same abuse? Why? Why did the obvious victors need to be so horrific, so cruel to people who sounded like they'd never really had much of a chance to begin with?

Once she arrived back at the castle entrance, however, basic escape and evasion instincts took precedence over her troubled thoughts… and, clutching the yearbook, she ran for the Head common room without looking back.

A/N: For those of you who are curious; Draco's not going to be a mirror image of Universe A Harry at all; he's definitely his own unique person here. Feedback is good; I'm always curious to know what you think! Thank you so much for all of your support on the previous chapters, including bearing with the influx of new information/surroundings… There's a lot of new stuff to absorb, and I'll try to keep it as straightforward as possible.

Do be kind and leave a review behind!