She did not know why she had expected her small show of kindness to be received with any less malice.
The sun was not even up when she was woken. It was awful, the way the couch rocked on its short legs, the way it suddenly tilted and then slammed back. Mostly because Bellatrix had roused Hermione from what felt like her ninth dream and she was unforgivingly unhappy with being the only one up.
"Muddy!"
She was startled, once she'd realized who was so viciously hell-bent on her existence.
"MUDDY!"
The couch rocked again, as it seemed she had not been quick enough to answer. So, instead, she found that, for the second time in a mere day and a half, the entire piece of furniture pitched over.
"WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?!"
She bounced, rolled off the cushion, and found the taller woman grinning broadly above her, eyebrows risen, that lustrously dark hair falling around her in great coiled tufts. It took a few moments to remember the situation she had gotten herself into, and even more moments to recognize the person that she was in it with.
"I have grown exceptionally weary of eating carcass and wildlife, and would very much like a large stack of pancakes."
She did not know whether to take the 'carcass' comment seriously, but the younger Witch noisily propped the couch back up- so hard it knocked Bellatrix in the shin- and scratched the pretty wood floor in a long, gaping scrape. The other's playful mood turned swiftly dark, but Hermione was much more wary of that and, above all things, she was much angrier.
"Do I look like your personal housekeeper?!"
"Look, either you can make breakfast, or you can starve, for all I care. If it were up to me, I could very well easily trot into the woods and find myself a lovely snack, or I could make one of you. Now if you came away from that War with some small modicum of sense in that Mudblood head of yours you will make food or I will force you to."
Somehow, Hermione had the notion that fighting against Bellatrix frequently got her nowhere. The two were a horrible chemical reaction. Sometimes, when one substance was added to another, and it was volatile, the possible outcome was bad. However, when a volatile substance added with a volatile substance, the outcome was practically volcanic. So before she leveled the house with a considerable blast of Fiendfyre that she couldn't control because she was maddeningly enraged, she clenched her teeth and stomped over to the kitchen area with a look so sour that Ron would have likely joked she resembled Crookshanks.
In spite of her Wizarding blood, her extensive knowledge, and her overwhelming aptitude, there were some things Hermione still chose to and enjoyed doing the 'Muggle' way.
She'd been raised as such. Though her Mother and Father were often so busy, they both did their bests to make time for their Daughter. She remembered the scent of her Mother's home-cooked meals. The smell of breakfast before it hit the table, the aroma of spices marinating a roast, the sound of water as it boiled, perhaps, a little more than it needed to when her Mother neglected to remember it was there, chatting away on the phone. She liked the relaxing length of it, the amount of time it took to do certain things.
Bellatrix did not.
Bellatrix enjoyed the luxury of instant gratification. It was how she thrived, how she lived. Dementors were hell, but the true suffering of Azkaban was tedium. No contact or enjoyment, no way to cause herself any sense of amusement. The madness of it all had been being shut up in her mind twenty-four hours of the day, seven days a week. Boredom was lethal.
"I could have starved to death fifteen times before you have even made a single egg!"
It had been exhausting. From the second she began mixing ingredients, Bellatrix's high-pitched, childish, grating voice cut into every activity she did. Crack the eggs, put them in the bowl. Are you done yet? Whisk everything together, make the batter. Muddy, I haven't eaten properly in weeks, this is abusive! Pour the batter into a pan. I've a very well developed nose, you know, and it doesn't smell you bloody well cooking anything! Heat the pan, this time with a spell before she took out her frustration on the disagreeable Witch laying across the couch. If I were waiting to eat decent food for this length of time, I would expect it to be world-class! Waiting this long for your subpar cooking, however, is unacceptable!
"By god, then cook it yourself!"
She physically had to set down the spatula, fully conscious of how she was about to hurl it. Bellatrix was in the other room, by that point, her arms crossed at the top of the couch, her chin resting atop them. Watching Bellatrix Lestrange wasn't like experiencing a person, but a series of ever-changing masks, each one more extreme than the last. The one she was wearing right then was a sort of dull apathy that seemed to embody everything about the word 'apathy'. If she did not care, then people in the States knew about it, and people all the way back in London did, too.
It crossed her mind that Harry had said to her, once, that Andromeda, the littlest Black sister who was no longer a Black sister anymore, could be easily mistaken for Bellatrix. It had been odd, he had said, and disquieting, but Andromeda had been kind and it was hard to associate the raven-haired master of torture with the word 'kind', even if it was a misstep.
"I'm a Black. We don't cook. It is deplorable enough that this filthy rat's nest of a household hasn't even got a House Elf."
"No. No House Elves."
"That sounded like you telling me what to do again, Mudblood."
She rolled her eyes and turned her back, counting backwards from ten. Mostly because she had literally felt her blood pressure skyrocket.
"Muddy," the tone was conversational. Suddenly, it felt like someone was standing behind her and pushing pins into her spine, one by one, slowly but surely. She didn't want to turn around for fear that through some inhuman silence the woman had snuck up on her and was standing directly behind. When she cast a glance over her shoulder, Bellatrix was still at the couch, busily picking her long nails with sturdy disinterest, "Has anything of remote interest or peculiarity piqued your dulled instincts at all?"
"Apart from the expected calibrating to live with a jackal? No. Not that I know of."
"Hm." Was all Bellatrix said before falling silent.
"Hm?" Hermione pushed, flipped a pancake.
"Hm." She reiterated stubbornly, and refused to budge from there.
"Look, I don't like you any more than you like me-"
"Now that's awful, Muddy. You've gone and hurt my feelings. I like you, just as much as anyone likes their slightly handicapped pet."
"However, I think that it would be beneficial to us both if we could just dialogue like civilized human beings." The brunette continued, her teeth gritted. She would not lose her temper.
"That is impossible. For one, I am a daughter of the noble and most ancient house of Black, and while I have long ago left my sense of human civility behind, you are a Mudblood. This means it is literally impossible to communicate on my level. Your suggestion is absurd."
"Nazi Germany has almost literally nothing on you."
She turned over another pancake and set it aside, then, grateful that she had not burnt it. She imagined that, if she had, she would never hear the end of it. That tedium had shifted to curiosity, the sort that made those eyes wide, black, narrowly childish, "What Muggle nonsense are you on about?"
"Just the idea of racial genocide. Not necessarily breakfast-table conversation."
"Well, there's a familiar subject." Brushed (or at least moderately tamed), Bellatrix's absurdly explosive curls shifted about her shoulders when she walked, bouncing slightly. At the temples and in lightly vivacious, scattered iron strands, she'd gone just slightly grey, and it was a brightly distinguished, unavoidable color that easily melded into the black. She could never imagine Bellatrix dyeing that hair. That would imply she felt some degree of shame for even the smallest part of herself. And Hermione was still surprised she, Bellatrix, and Bellatrix's ego could live in the same house. "Do you regularly take such a massive time-span to prepare a meal? I'd rather just slink off and find myself a lovely deer to hunt."
"A wolf of your size could not take down a deer."
There was that glare again. Quiet, dangerous, "And yet you seemed very frightened of my fangs, little one, long before you even knew it was me wearing the wolf's pelt."
"Well I wasn't aware that- forget it. Forget it."
She was adapting, little by little. Sometimes it was best to just let things go, because she was irritable and damnable Bellatrix was an annoying beast. It was an exercise in staying calm, but she was still taking time to master it. If she wanted to, Bellatrix Lestrange could try the patience of every saint in every religious text she had ever studied. It was gruesome.
When she got back to the table after a brief wander over to pour a glass of milk, Bellatrix had literally taken the entire stack of eight pancakes and began slaughtering them with her knife. As in, had they been humans they would have been dissected and hemorrhaging. The syrup was entirely neglected. Fluffy, buttery chunks were ripped mercilessly apart, and while she was angry that her food had been pilfered, she was amazed at the hostility with which one person could obliterate breakfast.
When the awful spectacle had completed Hermione was still hungry, and Bellatrix seemed casually satisfied.
"Reasonable, I suppose." Remarked Bellatrix breezily, and she carelessly tossed the plate, missing the sink and shattering it into a hundred little shards.
Rather than let out the scream she was so dying to release, the young Gryffindor clutched her hands together and squeezed, letting the high-pitched sound die inside her throat.
There was no way to win directly against Bellatrix.
It was impossible.
So one had to outsmart rather than succeed.
So she effectively enchanted the legs of the couch, adding an unimaginable amount of gravity. She proceeded to do this with every bit of furniture in the house she possibly could when the mangy Wolf went to 'bed' that night, and the front door clicked shut. It was much too chilly to leave it open, and here and there she heard the placid sound of the woman's tail sweeping back and forth against the floor, thumping or shifting, reassured that the mad Witch wasn't running off into the distance to cause further chaos.
She solidified every breakable thing in the house. She did her best to make all the china harshly indestructible. If she could not ultimately succeed, then by god, she would make a formidable opponent.
Once she was satisfied with every inch of the living room- she stopped. She stopped, because slowly, she heard a sound that seemed almost familiar. It was loud, loud enough to travel far, but when she went to the window to glance outside there was nothing but bright moonlight and the soft call of the ocean. And the waves never ceased, because Bellatrix had spent the day griping about how she could not tolerate the sound.
But there it was again! She turned her face to where it had come from and slowly opened the window, leaning outward to strain herself a just little more. HoOOoooOoOoowl! It called out, deep into the thick of the trees that surrounded their cozy home.
She opened the front door, then, in quite a rush, and she found Bellatrix still lounging, but this time the posture of her tail was different. It stood on end, the prickling bristles of her fur quite visible in the soft white glow, though she herself was still hunkered down in as though she'd been woken from a sleep. No sound emanated from her throat, but those soullessly black eyes flicked visibly up, and no magic Hermione had ever felt could possibly measure up to the way she was silenced with just that look. In that faint illumination, Hermione saw then that small tufts of fur near the beast's ears were whitish-grey against the black.
She finally got her speech back.
"Come inside. I don't know what that is."
It was then the scraggly creature snapped up and reared back, lashing out with those snarling, dripping fangs of hers. They were enough to catch and shred at the arm of the sweater Hermione had been wearing, tearing the fabric and gashing skin with a penetrating graze. She let go and stumbled back against the doorframe, the look on her face an incredulous frustration.
The bark that tore free from the Wolf's throat was a low, guttural sound, so deep, so dark it was too powerful to belong to the scrawny creature. Stumbling and startled, much too far out of her element, she half-tumbled back inside. The howls had since silenced, and the Wolf's tongue lolled out to run casually across the bloodied tips of those vicious fangs.
"You are mad." Hermione breathed, clutching the palm of her hand against where it stung when the air hit, a fresh burst of pain, "What the hell is going on?"
Bellatrix Lestrange did not make another hostile movement. That sinewy body made a full, singular turn and laid back down on the porch with a dull thud, those massive ears tilting downward, those empty eyes closing. Hermione's shuddering, frantic breaths did nothing to stir her.
The woods howled again.
And she slept.
