Lucius apparated to the grassy clearing just the sun was about to set. He dragged himself through the concealment charm, limping slightly. The chain activated itself, and he heard the startled cry that signified Hermione was being pulled across the floor to her post. She was alive at least then, Lucius thought grimly. He hobbled across the field, the distance between the clearing's edge and the oaken trapdoor seeming impossibly far today. He was panting by the time he reached the prison, and with a trembling hand opened the magically locked door. His descent downwards was shaky and lacked its usual grace, and his knees buckled when he landed.
Lucius could hear Hermione's sharp intake of breath at his appearance, and for a moment neither said anything. Lucius balanced himself casually against the wall of the prison cell, trying hard to maintain nonchalance. He closed his eyes against a wave of dizziness.
"You came back," Hermione's whisper met his ears, disbelieving. Lucius opened his eyes and gazed at her. Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her. Her eyes blinked back obvious tears, and she shook slightly from her corner position on the floor.
"I thought—" Hermione's voice broke. "I thought you'd – you'd died," she choked, tears running down her cheeks. Her relief was obvious.
Lucius raised an eyebrow.
"It would seem not, Mudblood," he retorted. "You'll live to see another day yet." He flourished his wand, conjuring a large bowl of restorative broth and bread aboard a wooden tray. The spell cost him some energy. The tray settled itself in the middle of the room, and he watched Hermione give the chain an experimental tug. It gave her leeway, and she all but dashed to the bowl.
"Eat slowly," Lucius cautioned, and Hermione's head bobbed in a nod. "It's been—" a sudden pang of pain from his side cut off his words and he became winded.
"Four days," Hermione completed for him, imbibing the soup cautiously. The first drink seemed to fortify her immediately, the magical broth bringing energy with its nutrition. She drank again, murmuring appreciation. Lucius gripped his side and slumped against the wall, closing his eyes.
"Lucius!" Hermione's panicked exclamation forced his eyes open again. His body had slid down the height of the wall and he was in a huddled pile on the floor. How distasteful, he thought vaguely. His vision was dimming in and out. He was aware of the sound of chiming chains, and the next he saw Hermione's anxious face was peering down at him.
"You are hurt," she said, and he could hear the fear and concern in her voice. Small hands patted at his robes, seeking to find the wounds beneath them. She struggled with the knotted fastener at his chest. With sudden alacrity, Lucius whipped his arm upwards, gripping her forearm tightly.
"What do you think you are doing, Mudblood," he snarled at her. Hermione looked bemused.
"I am helping you," she replied simply, her face neutral. "Where are you hurt?"
Lucius' mind reeled. Helping him? This Mudblood? He stared at her.
"You have no business touching me, girl," he hissed. "And I certainly do not need help from you."
He could have sworn now that he knew the know-it-all look Draco complained of constantly. The girl sniffed.
"I think you do," she replied back to him, "Or you can prove me wrong and levitate yourself back out of this cell."
Lucius looked up at the far-away doorjamb, his vision tunneling slightly. He groaned and closed them against the sensation of vertigo.
"Hmm," replied the girl above him noncommittally. Her hands, soothingly cool, worked at the fastener again. She shrugged off the cloak with little effort on Lucius' part, and methodically untucked his shirt, checking each extremity first as she undressed it. Lucius watched her warily. She had done this before. Not to him of course, but the systematic cataloguing of wounds and the sight of battle scars was clearly not new to her.
Hermione exhaled sharply when she discovered the gash on his side just over his ribcage.
"This is really deep," she murmured, a note of anxiety in her voice. She immediately pressed the cloth back over it to staunch the bleeding. She looked up at his face, concern etched across her features.
"Did you try to heal yourself?" she asked. Lucius nodded.
"There are limitations to self-healing," he intoned tiredly. Hermione nodded, as if she already knew this. She glanced to his right hand, which held his wand in a white-knuckle grip.
"Do not even think of it, Mudblood," Lucius snapped. He tried to sit himself further upright. He glared at her. "If you so much as touch my wand, the chain will kill you in an instant." He shoved her away. Of course she would take this moment to try and escape. How could she not? It made him no less angry that she had made him vulnerable, seen him weak. He struggled to stand.
"No, I wasn't—I didn't," Hermione seemed to be fumbling for words. "Lucius please just sit down, you will only hurt yourself more."
"Like you wouldn't rejoice, witch," he seethed at her. Hermione stood herself. Clearly that broth was too strong, Lucius reflected. He gripped his side with what strength he had left.
"I would not," she huffed at him. "Your existence is the only reason I continue to live. Should you die, I would too. Your life matters more to me now than ever, Mister Malfoy." She halted, wringing her hands. "Please, sit down. Let me help you."
Lucius considered her. She was either an exceptional liar, which thus far into their relationship she had proved rather terrible; or, she was being genuine. He weighed his options through the haze of pain and anemia. If she did take his wand, she would die, and he would be no worse off than he was now. He gave slight tilt of his head and collapsed again against the wall. Hermione was at his side in an instant again, buffering his descent to the ground again.
"We will just have to make do with Muggle methods," she murmured matter-of-factly. She stood and he listened, eyes shut, as the jingle of chains crossed the room to the bed. She returned to him with her sheet in hand. It smelled faintly of soap, the scent wafting up to Lucius' nostrils.
"Lucky I just washed this today, really," Hermione spoke more to herself. "Keep pressure on that wound if you can," she directed him, rolling up the sleeves of her jumper. Lucius could see in the waning light that her T-shirt was on backwards, and he remembered what he had done to her the last time he had seen her. He watched with some awe as this Muggle-born witch, despite all he had put her through, prepared herself to help him.
With little apparent difficulty, Hermione ripped the linen into long strips. These she wound efficiently into neat balls, until she had six rolls before her and a square of linen left over that she soaked thoroughly and then wrung out under the spigot of water. When she was ready, she turned to him.
"When you let go of that compress, you are going to hold this wet one in place," she instructed. "And you'll need to exhale a little, and hold it as long as you can." She raised questioning eyebrows to him, and he nodded his understanding.
"Okay then," Hermione breathed. Lucius noted that she did not seem at all nervous, and found this reassuring. "One, two, three!"
Lucius removed the sodden cloth of his shirt from the wound and Hermione swiftly placed the icy cold damp linen over his wound. He hissed, but at her encouragement and guiding hands, held the cloth in place and exhaled. Hermione moved quickly around him, wrapping her hands in a sort of hug about his midsection as she wrapped the dry clean linen about his torso. One, two, three, four times around she went before the cloth ran out. She continued with the second, third cloths.
"Okay, breathe," she said, and from her breathlessness Lucius could tell she had held her breath too to make sure the process wasn't unbearably long for him. He did so, feeling his midsection quite restricted of movement. Hermione was nodding satisfactorily, examining the patch directly over the wound, which already seemed to be slowing its blood flow. She took up one more roll of linen and bound it about him, tying it off tightly.
"The pressure of the bandage and the expansion of your ribcage should stop the bleeding fairly quickly," she explained in what sounded to Lucius like a trance. She was cleared zoned in on her work. Professionally, she checked over the rest of his body, using another linen roll to clean and bandage more minor lacerations on his forearm, and another to his thigh. Their proximity did not seem to bother her at all in this moment, and Lucius found he rather reciprocated the feeling.
"There," the witch said when she had finished. There was a light sheen of sweat on her forehead. She stood and retrieved the bowl of restorative broth.
"Drink," she ordered bossily of him. She must have seen the look of disgust on his face for she rolled her eyes. "Lucius, you must. You have lost a lot of blood. This is no blood-replenisher but if you hope to get better at all to at least get to a proper healer, you must eat. You can decontaminate yourself of me later," she added somewhat sarcastically.
Grudgingly, Lucius took the bowl and sipped. He felt almost immediately better for it, and took a long drink from the bowl. When he finished it was nearly empty, and he heard to his chagrin Hermione's stomach rumble impatiently at that moment. Hermione blushed.
"I'll, uh, just finish it with the bread then, shall I?" Hermione said, and Lucius nodded.
"I will bring you more tomorrow morning," he promised as he watched her eat cross-legged on the ground. This made her pause and swallow hard, suddenly not looking at him. He couldn't fathom why. Her body tensed, and he could see her mind working its way out of the calm reverie it had settled in during her ministrations to his person.
"What happened to you?" Hermione asked in a small voice. Her brow had the anxious crease to it that Lucius took to understand some foreboding. He shrugged, mind still somewhat hazy, belly full and warm with the restorative broth.
"I was attacked," he replied, as though this were sufficient.
"By Draco," Hermione responded immediately. Her voice now verged on panic. "It was him, wasn't it?" she asked.
"And how did you surmise this?" Lucius asked her, unnerved that she had guessed correctly.
"So I am right?" Hermione whispered. Lucius nodded. Hermione's breath hitched. "I thought as much," she whispered, eyes filling with tears. "I thought I recognized the cut of sectum sempra." She paused.
"For the good of my family. For the protection of what is mine," she quoted. "You've found out haven't you? That Draco has helped us in the past?"
Lucius' eyes bored into hers. He nodded, and Hermione closed her eyes tightly.
"It is much more than that, Mudblood," he told her. He worked to keep the strain out of his voice. "Surely you must know, it is much more than that."
And for the first time, Lucius considered that perhaps Hermione did not know of Draco's feelings towards her. That he was willing to throw away his entire livelihood, his family, his honor, for her. Could she possibly not even know that he loved her?
Hermione's blank stare was his answer.
"You stupid girl," he uttered, and she flinched. They spoke no more. It was an incredibly awkward hour, spent down in the frigid cell as Lucius waited for the restoring potion to summon enough strength to leave. Hermione had curled up on her bed, lying still under the lumpy blanket he had conjured for her. That seemed ages ago, now. The damp cold of the cell was just bordering on unbearable by the time Lucius stood to leave. His side ached but on the whole he was far better off than when he had arrived to this dismal place.
"Wait," Hermione called to him as he was about to ascend to the ground above.
"Yes?" He lifted an eyebrow toward her. He had been sure she was asleep. Hermione fidgeted with a frayed thread of the blanket.
"Tomorrow when you come," Hermione started, her eyes looking determinedly at the thread, "Will…will you hurt me? Again? For Draco?" The questions ended in a whisper that plainly conveyed her fears.
"Yes," Lucius replied. He felt anger towards himself that he felt regret at this. But this is what must be done. There was no other way, he reiterated firmly in his head. Draco must know this, must realize the consequences.
Hermione had shrunk away from him in the corner of her bed, and he could see her body shaking with the effort not to cry. He sighed.
"You have survived today, Mudblood. Take solace in that, and sleep." He leveled his wand at her. "Somnium." And Hermione's body slumped into an immediate slumber. Rubbing his brow tiredly, Lucius exited the cell and left.
When Hermione awoke the next day it was to the voice of Lucius Malfoy's Ennervate spell. Memories of last night flooded her mind, and her heart dropped sickeningly as she remembered why Malfoy was here today. She scrambled out of bed, bleary-eyed but heart pattering quickly against her chest. Her head swam dizzily, with lack of adequate nutrition to feed it.
As Lucius came into focus, she noted that he looked significantly better this morning. Or was it afternoon? She glanced up at the beam of light above. Afternoon then, she thought. Lucius stood tall above her wearing his mask of indifference, perfectly well-groomed and well-dressed again today. There was no sign that he had been mortally wounded last night, and Hermione concluded that he had indeed seen a healer.
"You will drink this first," Lucius indicated the bowl of now-familiar restorative broth on the ground. Hermione nodded, but her hands shook so badly with trepidation that Malfoy knelt to help her steady the dish as she drank. There was a kind of unspoken intimacy between the two of them today. She nearly choked on the first swallow, but then was able to tolerate most of the rest. It was almost with gentle touch that Lucius led her to the corner of the cell that housed the shower spigot and drain.
"Lie down," he reminded her softly. Hermione did so, trembling all over and crying. The anticipation of knowing what was coming was nearly worse than she remembered. She covered her face in her hands.
Lucius banished her clothes, and Hermione instinctively curled into a ball on the floor. Before she had time to be properly embarrassed though, the pain set in and she knew nothing more.
It was so much worse this time, reflected Lucius later that day. Maybe it was her incredibly weakened state. Maybe it was because she had just helped heal him the night before and he felt annoyingly indebted to her. But either way, by the time he lifted the curse he was so moved by her pathetically writhing form on the ground that he could no longer maintain the force of will that the curse demanded.
It ought to do, at any rate. Carefully, he extracted the memory and deposited it into a tear-drop shaped ceramic vial. A porta-penseive that was just barely big enough to contain one memory. He strode from his room in the manor down the long hallway, pocketing the vial as he went. To his surprise, Bellatrix emerged from Narcissa's dressing room as he passed by.
"Bellatrix," he greeted stiffly. His sister-in-law turned and grinned toothily at him.
"Luuucius," she called, drawling out his name. "Cissy and I were just talking about you!"
"Oh yes?" Lucius purred, lifting an eyebrow skeptically. "And what of me?" he asked. Bella's eyes bulged outwards and her grin broadened.
"One Malfoy secret for another Malfoy secret?" she asked imploringly. "You never did tell me you know. I want to know your little secrety secret Lucius."
"Bellatrix," Lucius sighed, putting on his best air of haughty indifference, "For the last time, I have no secret, least of all one I would keep from my own wife." And he narrowed his gaze at her.
"And what of you, Bella? What secrets are you keeping from us? Have you told the Dark Lord yet of your failed attack on Grimmauld Place?" Bella's look of anger and fear made him sneer. "No I thought not. Still thinking of a good cover story are you?" He pressed further, enjoying her discomfort as much as he was relieved to distract her. "If I were you Bella, I'd confess sooner rather than later. Even the teacher's pet wouldn't escape the Dark Lord's fury if he's been lied to."
Bellatrix made a huffing, sort of strangled sound, and she raised her wand at him.
"Now, now Bella," Lucius said smoothly. He cut past her, seemingly indifferent to the threat of her wand. "We don't want the Dark Lord to find we've turned on each other now, do we?" He continued his stroll down the corridor. "Now, if you'll excuse me." And he exited the hallway to Bellatrix's baleful stare and muttered threats.
Lucius ended his journey at the manor's private owlery. Gesturing to the largest owl, he fasted the vial to its leg. "Take this directly to my son," he crooned to the bird perched on his forearm. "Today. Deliver it safely to him no matter the hour."