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The Roots of This Tree
Chapter Six
She expects darkness.
Would have wanted it, really, if given the choice. A swaddling blanket of blackness. How necessary. How nice.
Instead, she finds light.
It is a light that encompasses. A light that excludes. A light burning so brightly that it leaves room for nothing else.
And it is bright, this light. White-hot and pulsing. Silver-blue and scorching.
It is everywhere, all at once; as pervasive as oxygen in the air, the heat extending as far as her awareness allows. Beyond, even. It fills her.
There is no end to this incandescence. No beginning, either. It is energy, swarming and swirling and eternal.
Yet it's more than that, because she burns with it. Burns without loss; burns without pain.
She is burning.
And still, it's more than that. More than all of it, because she is the heat. She is the light.
She is light.
She knows this down to her depths, in her truest, barest self, and though it is a knowledge without facts or figures or tangible proof, she finds she doesn't need the proof, doesn't need the figures.
She is what she is, and she is burning. For a minute and forever.
White. Blue. Light. Heat.
Inescapable, unquestionable fire.
But—no. That isn't right.
Or, at least, not all. Something pushes her off track. Throws another reality in her light, a craggy black in the swirling white-blue; a contradiction, a truth.
Because, really, what does fire do? That crackling, life-giving energy—what does it do?
It consumes.
It takes, and it takes, and it burns all it touches. Eating and engulfing and inhaling, until there is nothing left.
It is everywhere, extends everywhere, as far as far can go, burning and sucking in great, gasping, ravenous gulps, as pervasive as oxygen in the air.
It needs that oxygen. Needs that fuel. Needs to eat, needs to consume, needs to breathe.
She needs to breathe.
She needs to breathe, and she can't.
She needs to breathe.
She can't breathe!
Her chest surges upward. Her neck stretches, tendons ropelike and straining.
She is held down, her body convulsing.
Something covers her, pressing against her forehead and pinching the cartilage of her nose. The something is rigid. A solid, immoveable force.
A hand held over her, deliberate and unyielding, pinning her down.
Her chest is burningburningburning, and she gasps, taking huge, desperate sucking gulps, guzzling air like water.
As soon as her mouth opens, cold glass bites into her bottom lip, clinks hard against her teeth. It presses further, the angle changing, and a pungent taste floods her mouth.
She coughs, chokes, then goes still.
When she stills, she finds light.
The light is a beacon. Bright and beaming. It is a sun, white-hot and pulsing.
The rays color the inside of her eyelids a saturated yellow-pink. A gradient of warmth settles over her, gradually heating her from hairline to jaw. Like a magnifying glass, it intensifies and amplifies. Like a magnifying glass, its focus helps and harms.
The burning is almost welcome, because the rest of her is so, so cold.
She doesn't realize this at first. Doesn't realize anything, really. Words are difficult. Thoughts are fragments. Figments. The trembling of limbs. Colors: reds, oranges, greys. Muffled, frozen pain.
Then her breathing stops. It's one of those vital functions that goes unnoticed and unappreciated until something breaks.
She is the something that breaks.
She tries to inhale. To inflate her cracked lungs, to drag deeply through her nose, but she can't. She tries, and she tries, but she can't.
There is a pinch and a pressure. Her airway is obstructed.
She chokes on a cough; reaches blindly, clawing.
A congealed liquid oozes over her tongue and down her throat, thick and clinging like coagulated blood.
She shudders. She shakes.
She stills.
She hears herself.
She's crying. Begging, really.
"-please," she says, coming to awareness mid-sentence. A dry, heaving sob escapes her, tearing at the cracks in her throat. "Just one sip. Just one!"
"No."
"Please!"
"No."
"Please!"
The world is swirling, and she is shivering, and a man-shaped blur is next to her yet below her yet not there at all.
"I'm dying," she hears herself sob.
"You are," the dark blur agrees. "And you have. I'm trying to fix that."
"I need water to live. I'm dying without it. You're killing me."
"No, I'm not. Not yet. If I give you water, it will flood your insides, and your internal bleeding will worsen."
Liar. It is all she knows for certain. This... thing is a liar.
Her throat has never been this dry. It is sandpaper: rough and raw and painful. This is not — she would know if her body was getting better, would be able to feel those reserves, the relief of it.
"I'll die. I will. The human body can only take so much."
The dark blur stiffens. "You are a witch," it enunciates. "And you'll have what I give you and nothing else."
She feels her eyes close. But there will be no more tears from her. Even if she had them to give, she refuses to waste precious moisture on them — on this thing in front of her.
"Are you a witch or aren't you?" a memory calls, echoing back to her. With it, she tries her best to focus, feeling entrenched and stubborn and willful.
"Agua- Aguamen-" she begins. A hand covers her mouth.
"Stop that."
She looks up and fights more for that focus. But she is coming back to a body not quite ready for her, and she cannot stay.
Dark eyes look down, attempt to pierce her. Look at her and look at her, a thing looking at a thing.
Her eyes shut for her once more, and in that moment for a moment, she stops fighting. Not because of it, but because of... she doesn't know. And doesn't need to.
The energy drains out of her, and the light and dark find her, cradle her, and she slips softly into nothing. Nothing at all.
The shack is tidier. Not quite clean, but with each iteration of consciousness, it looks less and less like a hovel and more and more like a house.
Hermione doesn't know how many times she slept and woke and shook and choked down potions, but when she comes to enough awareness that she knows her name and feels her body and clears the fog from her mind, there are splinters under her fingernails and slight tickmarks on the wall. Somewhere during the whole process, she had started counting—her awareness or the days, she isn't sure.
The first time she retains her consciousness of it, there are five already there, waiting for her. Tiny sloped grooves in the wooden wall.
Hermione bites her lip to balance out the pain, to remind herself not to talk, and scratches in line number twelve.
She knows scratching lines into walls will not solve her problems. It's a tact reserved for the mad and imprisoned. And as much as she would like to not believe it, she may just be those things. Regardless, though, if there is a way for her to assert her reality on this plain, to find steady ground — an anchor — well, she is going to take it.
She scratches, even though it hurts her. Even though there is no point.
Tom-Riddle-Voldemort watches her do it. It's not a secret she can keep, what with her ruined nailbeds and close proximity to him—a proximity that never, not once stops unnerving her.
He watches her always, and always he talks.
"You're a very stubborn creature, aren't you, Hermione?" he'd said on the eighth line, as he had carefully, mechanically stirred a steadily simmering cauldron.
"You're special—different than most, aren't you, Hermione?" he'd said on the tenth line, as he had minced ginger and mandrake root with precise, even cuts.
"You're quite magical, aren't you, Hermione?" he says on the twelfth line, as he stoppers a vial of something viscous and red. Blood replenisher, she thinks.
His words are meant as compliments, at least the last ones. It doesn't take long for her to realize that, next to perhaps Professor Dumbledore, he's the most skilled magic user she's ever seen. Reverent and concise and effortless all at once, like magic is both a tool to be wielded and an extension of his own self.
He's also a liar.
And a murderer.
And Voldemort incarnate.
It makes for a difficult healing environment, to say the least. She keeps waking and waking and waking up, but never from this dreamscape. This hellhole.
The more tickmarks she makes, the more she understands—and doesn't. Her mind clears with each healing draught he coaxes down her throat, but the situation only becomes more muddled, insane, ridiculous.
And Tom—he keeps talking to her, a near-constant stream of nuance and information.
He doesn't hint at the past. Doesn't talk to her about her or the fact that she'd run in a second if she could muster the energy or that he'd held her down and threatened her for information, just about what he's making, the things he's reading, how her body is doing. It's like he's lecturing, in a way. On ingredient collection and Potions theory and magic.
She never would have thought Voldemort chatty, but she's found he likes both conveying information and the sound of his own voice. She'd assumed the stories Harry had told of his mad ramblings were a recent trait—a result of his death and resurrection. Now, she's not so sure.
Not so sure about so much.
But he talks to her, and she knows — she knows — it's not for her comfort or out of the goodness of his heart or anything other than to pick her apart, but on tickmark fifteen, he heals her fingers, and she finds herself talking back.