A/N: I know I'm going to get a lot of 'Lost' comments regarding the hatch :) The way the bodies decomposed was inspired by an episode of 'Eerie Indiana' (I think...or it might have been 'The Twilight Zone') I saw when I was kid - wherein this crazy 50s housewife had preserved her entire family by making them sleep in giant Tupperware containers at night. Inevitably, this one time she doesn't seal them in tightly enough and they end up aging overnight. That was the gist of it, anyway. That freaky scene stuck in my head.

-10-

"Ladies first."

She wasn't a founding member of Dumbledore's Army for nothing. At least that was what Hermione reminded herself. There was just something about lowering yourself into a dark, mysterious hole in the ground that made you a tad nervous.

Understandably so, one would think.

Malfoy stood beside the open trap door, watching her with what she first thought was a challenging expression, but upon closer inspection, she could make out his underlying unease. All was not what it appeared to be in this desolate place. And in their line of work, the unknown could prove fatal.

There were rungs just below the hatch – an iron ladder descending into darkness. Hermione made her way down cautiously, taking care with her footing on the icy metal. She paused at the bottom rung, sniffing tentatively at air that didn't smell old and damp like she'd expected. It smelled…exactly like the outside, actually. It was as if the air inside the bunker and been sucked out, displaced by the crisp, cold air aboveground.

Even as she thought this, she thought she could now detect a definite unpleasantness to the smell.

Lucius' pensive face appeared under the square-shaped bit of blue sky. She glanced up at him, shielding her eyes from the glare over his head. Backlit by the bright morning, his hair was an intense shade of sunlight. Dare she say? It was positively halo-ic.

Hermione suppressed a snort.
"Pay attention," he snapped. "If you fall and break your ankle-"

"Yes, yes. You're not carrying me back. I got that memo last week," she muttered, more to herself than to him.

With some relief, she finally placed both feet on solid ground and had a quick look around inside the bunker. Sunshine spilled past the open trap door, casting a column of light wherein dust motes floated into view. The light did not penetrate the deeper gloom.

"It's dark," she called out to him. "I can't see a thing."

The odd smell was getting stronger. It had started off unpleasant, but was quickly crossing over into 'bad.' She put it out of her mind as Malfoy came down the ladder after her, forgoing the last three rungs to land directly beside her with a soft thump. The ends of his long hair brushed against her cheek. In the still, sheltered space, she caught the scent of his musty, borrowed clothes and that other smell that was just him. It bothered her that she could now say it was familiar.

"Lumos."

A small ball of light flared in his right palm. As still as the air currently was, it looked like it was trying to exist in a gale; the light sputtered and extinguished and came back to life. Hermione quashed the urge to cup her hands over his palm to shield the fragile flame from invisible wind.

"We'll have to be quick. I cannot sustain this for very long."

She heard him, but was too distracted to pay attention now that she could see what was contained within the bunker. Her mouth hung open slightly at what they had inadvertently discovered.

There was a large woven rug covering most of the floor, the pattern nearly identical to the one in the cabin. In one corner was a lopsided futon that looked like it'd been put together by an inexpert carpenter. It was piled up high with blankets and pillows. Next to the futon was a wicker bassinette, draped with delicate lace. Almost every spare inch of available space was taken up by boxes of canned food. There were the ever-present peas and peaches, but also corned beef, more sardines in aspic, trout in tomato sauce, canned legumes of every description and the original miracle meat, SPAM.

"Jackpot," breathed Hermione.

They shared a brief moment of stunned silence. Well, you couldn't tell if Malfoy was stunned from looking at him. He didn't utter so much as an "Oh my." At the moment he was doing his impression of a contemplative, concrete pillar.

Hermione practically grabbed a box of SPAM and hugged it. With an almost childlike glee, she applied herself to the task of identifying all the boxed food. "Look at this!" she cried, holding on to a tin of pear slices like it was the cure for mortality. "To think this has been here all along!"

Her exuberance was not contagious. Lucius edged around her with his flickering ball of light. He seemed intent to explore the remainder of the narrow bunker before ripping open the boxes and stuffing his face. Hermione had no such qualms. She was a natural multi-tasker and would attempt to eat while she explored, provided she could get a can open with nothing but ecstatic desperation and hopefulness.

And all this while, the unpleasant smell increased. It was the greasy, organic, eye-watering smell of decomposition. Most people had experienced this unpleasantness in the form of roadkill, a dead cat or dog, raccoon or possum caught in the roof. At the back of her mind, she readied herself for the discovery of a small, decomposing something or other, trapped inside the bunker, like the remains of the mice she had found under the piled firewood in the cabin.

Hermione examined a tall stack of boxes directly to her left. She noted the canned fruit that made up four boxes, but the fifth, at the top, made her stop and gasp.

Lucius turned around sharply. "What?"

She ripped into the box, sending paper and cardboard flying. When she answered him, it was through a mouth full of food.

"Shawcolate!"

Remarkably, it was as good as new. She remembered reading somewhere that if packaged properly, chocolate--like honey--could last indefinitely. All she knew was that it tasted better than anything she had ever eaten before. Hermione broke the block in half and held the rest of it out to Malfoy with an expression of rapture. "Oh my God," she said, and then swallowed. "You have to try this."

"Later," he replied, narrowing his eyes.

She took that to mean he was put off by her gorging. "Your self-control is unholy," she muttered. Bugger him. She licked her sticky fingers and sighed with pleasure. Only some of her happiness had dents kicked into it by the horrid smell, which had now progressed to a bona fide stench.

Hermione wrinkled her nose. "Where on earth is that coming from?" She put her wrist under her traumatized nose.

Lucius was looking over the top of her head. He looked inquisitive for a moment, and then he looked grave. "Step aside."

She did, with great trepidation. With the box of chocolates removed from the top of the tall stack behind her, a small, low alcove was revealed at the opposite end of the bunker.

There, on a pile of blankets, lay a pair of corpses; a man and a woman huddled together. Hermione probably would have screamed (in her defence it would have only been a mild scream) had her mouth not been full of chocolate at the time.

The discovery was grisly, but it soon took on a nightmarish flavor. It was like something out of a horror movie.

Even as they watched, the bodies changed. Flesh that was pale turned to darkening purple and yellow and began puffing up slightly. They were witnessing accelerated decomposition. Eyelids shrunk back from the expansion of the putrefying flesh, exposing eyeballs that bulged in an expression of vacant horror. The man's mouth fell open and his swollen, purple tongue lolled out.

Hermione dropped her chocolate and backed away until she felt Lucius behind her. With his free hand, he grasped her upper arm lightly and directed her to the side. She watched as he approached the corpses. To her cringing dismay, he grabbed hold of the dead woman's legs and pulled off her boots.

Malfoy tossed them to her after a cursory examination. "These look to be your size."

Hermione automatically caught the footwear. Only Lucius Malfoy would be sensible enough to strip a decomposing body for useful items. Trust him not to be squeamish. Luckily, too. By the time it might have occurred to Hermione to take the shoes or any clothing, the rapid decomposition of the bodies would have rendered the items a tad…sticky.

They could do nothing more, but stand there and watch the bizarre spectacle unfold. The bodies progressed past bloating. Now the flesh was breaking down at a phenomenal rate. Soon, it became impossible to tell the man from the woman, if it wasn't for the woman's long, black hair. Bits of flesh fell from bone. The bodies eventually slumped to the ground, falling away from each other. There was an expanding patch of wetness, spreading away from the corpses - virulent fluids from their decomposition soaked the blankets on the floor. It was just as well her stomach was empty, thought Hermione. She covered her mouth and gagged once or twice, but there was no follow through.

Within minutes, Hermione and Malfoy were staring at a couple of withered, leathery corpses. He bent down to the remains, heedless of the sticky mess or the smell, and picked up a gold locket on a chain around the woman's neck. He flicked it open to look at its contents briefly, before pocketing it. The dead man's watch went the same way. Hermione didn't think he was actually grave robbing, but she was still a little too disturbed from what she had just seen to ask him about the items just yet.

Hermione hugged herself. "What in world did we just witness?"

"The aftermath of an elaborate kill, I believe," said Lucius.
His wandless Lumos extinguished for the space of several heartbeats and in that brief moment of darkness, Hermione felt her flesh crawl. She was relieved when he brought the light back, though it was weaker this time. The muted golden glow illuminated the lines and hollows of his face.

Murder? Yes, she could believe that. Nothing of what they had just seen screamed 'natural causes.' And the seal was on the outside of the bunker, she reminded herself. She processed all the available information before she next spoke.

"They were trapped down here. Someone used magic to seal them in from the outside."

Lucius gave her an assessing look. "And the rapid decomposition?" She realized she was being tested.

"The seal cut off the air and kept the outside at bay, which turned this place into a hermetically sealed tomb. When we opened the hatch, the seal broke and time came back in a rush." It wasn't an original theory. Powerful sealing wards were commonly used household spells. Many magical folk used them in place of Tupperware.

He was impressed with her deduction. She saw it, however fleetingly that expression stayed on his face.

"Have you seen this before?" It was a fair question. She surmised that he'd seen a lot.

"Only once." He touched one of the cardboard boxes. "And the effect was nowhere near this dramatic. If I am not mistaken, some of the food will have spoiled as well."

Hermione hastily located the chocolate bar she had dropped. As he predicted, the perfect milk chocolate was now brittle, white and powdery. It fairly crumbled when she picked it up. Her expression of grief must have been a little comical, because she caught his brief, amused look.
"Please don't tell me we've just lost all our food?"

He retrieved a can from inside one of the boxes she had opened earlier and Hermione now noted the new corrosion around the edges. All the cans she had inspected minutes earlier had been in pristine condition.

"Anything in here that was meant to last twenty years should still be fine to consume."

She sighed. "With our luck, that's going to amount to peas and peaches."

"Fate could not possibly be that cruel," he said, looking mildly disturbed. "Not even to me."

Hermione could not contain her small smile at his tone. "How do you know it's been twenty years?"

In reply, Malfoy showed her the watch he had taken from the dead man's wrist. It was a plain, silver-plated wind up specimen, with a small slot for the date. She squinted down at it, in the low light. The watch had apparently stopped functioning at twelve-thirty on May the fifth, 1980.

Twenty-years, more or less. Unless of course the watch had continued on its own steam for a little while after its owner had expired.

"Could you tell how they died?"

He shrugged. "However it happened, their death did not apparently leave any lasting damage that caused significant blood loss. My guess would be suffocation." He looked thoughtful through this macabre explanation. "Or perhaps Avada Kedrava."

"Magical death," she whispered. And then her eyes widened. She clutched at his forearm with a gasp. It was a habit Ron and Harry would have described as vintage Hermione. "Wands! Malfoy, they might have wands on them!"

Malfoy's gaze cooled slightly. He peeled her chocolate-sticky hands away from his arm. "Unhappily, they do not."

"Oh. You checked?"

"I did. Not that I expected to find any. Think, Mudblood. Had they wands, likely they would not have died here."

She bristled at his use of the dreaded 'M' word. He'd refrained from calling her by it for the past two days. Hermione supposed it was too much to hope that he's retired the word indefinitely. "If it was Avada Kedavra, then they were killed first and then sealed in."

He considered this at length. "I assumed that at first, but I may have to reassess that assumption."

She worried at her lower lip. "It's because of their placement, isn't it? They were holding on to each other, which wouldn't be a natural position for two bodies to fall into, unless they were arranged that way."

"True," he allowed and Hermione was struck by the realization that there were actually theorizing cooperatively.

"In any case, there should be an easy enough way to tell…" He walked away to investigate the underside of the hatch.

Hermione joined him at the ladder, inspecting the spots he pointed out to her. There were hacking marks around the hatch opening, great gouges scratched into the metal. Littered around the base of the ladder were bent and warped bits of cutlery, a broken screwdriver and two knife blades that had snapped free of their handles. Upon closer inspection of the debris on the floor, Hermione could make out splinters of wood and small chunks of cement that looked like they'd been blasted off the beams and walls.

She ran her fingers along a deep, gaping hole in the concrete beside the hatch. There were similar, circular dents in the metal. If she had to hazard a guess, it looked like Reducto, only more precise. Whatever it was, it'd been powerful. Though still not strong enough to blow open the iron hatch.

The euphoria from the discovery of the food was all but gone. "This is a crime scene. We really shouldn't be touching anything." She wasn't telling him. She was just verbalizing her thoughts.

Lucius raised an eyebrow. "Starting with that kilo of chocolate you devoured earlier?"

She sniffed. "This-" she said, holding aloft the powdery remains of her block of chocolate "-is a matter of survival."

"If I'm not mistaken, most women feel that way about chocolate," he responded dryly. He brushed past her to resume his inspection of the rest of the bunker.

If Hermione didn't know any better, she'd say she was being teased. "If these poor people were locked in here alive, they can't have starved to death with all this food around."

"No," Lucius concurred. "More likely they suffocated because of the sealing ward. It would have taken a while, though. Two adults in a room this size…"

They seemed to remember the bassinette at the exact same time. He glanced at it and she felt, rather than saw his dread.

Not so tough after all, huh, Malfoy?

It was a small, but welcomed revelation in the midst of a god-awful moment.

This was all the encouragement Hermione needed to walk over to the cradle and lift the lace that covered it. She knew it was impossible to steel her heart against what she thought she might see in that small, soft little bed. But she would try, all the same.

Thank God. It was empty. She moved to show him. There was a tiny, blue and white rag teddy, but no baby.

Somehow, the empty cradle didn't bring as much relief as it should have. She could tell Malfoy was feeling it too. No doubt he recalled the suitcase they had found in the cabin, with the orphaned items of babies' clothing.

"Something really awful happened here," said Hermione, quietly.

A quick search of the remainder of the tiny bunker did not, thankfully, turn up any tiny remains. If there had been a baby, it had not died there with its parents. Or at least, she assumed the couple was its parents.

They found other useful items. There was certainly no shortage of bedding. In addition, there was more clothing in a small trunk. Like the clothing in the suitcase, most of the men's garments were too small for Lucius, so they were given to Hermione instead. The woman had kept a selection of serviceable jumpers, some thermal underwear and a brassiere which Hermione could tell on sight was too small for her. Socks would not be a problem – there were at least a dozen pairs. There was an abundance of babies' clothing. A boy, apparently, as most of the items featured blue in some way. The type of clothing did not constitute well-thought out packing. It looked like whomever had intended to wear the items had been in a hurry, tossing whatever they could into the trunk and the suitcase back at the cabin.

At the bottom of the trunk was a hard-shelled cosmetics' case with toiletries, creams and lotions (a quick sniff proved that they were all well past their use-by date), some toothpaste which had turned solid, shaving apparatus, hard soap and a small, sewing kit. There was also a glass baby bottle, several teats and a glass phial of some clear liquid that smelled faintly alcoholic and sweet. Hermione wondered if it had been a homemade version of Gripe Water, once upon a time.

With the exception of the phial, Hermione piled all these items into the middle of a blanket and tied it off to form a sack. Malfoy, meanwhile, was busy taking cans out of boxes.

"We won't be able to bring all that back with us in one trip," he said, without turning to look at what she was doing.

Hermione stared down at her load. He was right. There was no way she could carry it all. She re-prioritized and packed only the essentials, even if everything she was currently looking at seemed necessary to life. A hairbrush was one such item. When she finally shut the half-empty trunk, she noticed a long bundle of rolled up cloth behind it.

When she unfurled it and looked down at the contents, Hermione realized she had solved the mystery of the damage under the hatch. Reducto had been a good guess, but incorrect.

The marks in the ceiling were the result of gunfire. A rifle, to be exact. The couple had tried to blast their way out of the bunker. Hermione glanced up to see what Malfoy was doing. He was occupied piling a selection of food into an empty box. She turned her attention back to the rifle, thinking how funny it was that skills she never thought would ever come in handy, could potentially save the day now.

She picked up the rifle and after a moment's examination, unlocked the bolt and exposed the breech. The movement was heavy because the gun was in dire need of a good cleaning. There was a spent shell casing inside the barrel, which Hermione removed and discarded. She shut the bolt, an action that automatically cocked the firing pin. The loud, metallic scraping sound was not promising.

Lucius predictably appeared beside her, eyeing the gun. She couldn't tell if he was familiar with it or not.

"It's a rifle," she informed. "From the damage around the hatch, I think at one point they tried to shoot their way out of here."

Malfoy was still taking the gun apart with his eyes. "A rifle is different from a pistol." It was a question without a question mark, because Lucius Malfoy would not willingly confess to knowing less about something than her, even if it was something Mugglish.

"Pistols are smaller, easier to conceal," Hermione replied. "You don't hunt with them."

"But you hunt with rifles?" He looked at the gun with growing interest.

Hermione responded by holding on to it a little more tightly. "Yes."

"Noisy and inefficient weapons, at best."

It was absurd to feel defensive over a Muggle invention that had caused so much misery. Compared to a wand, there was obviously no contest. But Hermione was defensive all the same.

"Well, yes, if you call a piece of hot lead tearing into you 'inefficient'."

His gave her a long, speculative stare. "How do you know about guns? I don't suppose most Muggles keep them in their homes."

"They don't. Not in Britain, at any rate. I have cousins who live in the country. One of them is a competitive sheet shooter. I spent a few summers with her."

"Ah, and I presume from your reaction to the demise of our two bird friends, that this 'skeet' was not skinned and cooked afterwards?"

Now she was definitely being teased. Hermione thought she might be getting used to Malfoy's particular brand of dry humour. The comment was heavily doused with sarcasm, but it was humour nonetheless. What else had she to learn about him? For all she knew, he played the ukulele in his spare time.

"Skeets are clay pigeons," she explained, on the hundred to one chance he was actually being serious. "They're tossed into the air and shot at for sport."

"How droll. And this rifle. It requires…" He searched for the word. "Projectiles to function, does it not?"

"Shells," she clarified. "I found two boxes with the rifle. But I don't think this will fire anything before a thorough cleaning." She demonstrated by pulling back the bolt again to show him how stiff it was."

"Then you will clean it when we return to the cabin."

"I have every intention to," she responded, with forced brightness.

"Good. " He held out his hand. "Now give me the gun. In addition, I will carry the food and the bedding. You can take the clothing."

"That's alright. I'll manage." Hermione wrapped her hand around the rifle's cracked leather strap. Belatedly, she realized the nozzle was pointing at his head and immediately lowered it.

Too late. He noticed.

"Not thinking of sending me off, are you, Mudblood?" He advanced on her. "Give it to me."

"Might do, if you keep calling me that," said Hermione, through gritted teeth. "And I think I'll hang on to this, if it's all the same to you." She couldn't tell if he was concerned that she now had a weapon that she alone knew how to use against him, or if he was just being a controlling arsehole.

It was probably the latter.

Undaunted, Malfoy walked towards her until the rifle's nozzle parted the fold in his clock and butted into his flannel-covered abdomen, which she couldn't help but note was very hard. No squishy, pushy bits.

"But it's not all the same to me, Mudblood. Now, I did ask you for the gun. We both know I don't have to ask."

The rifle wasn't loaded and even then, it probably wouldn't even fire in its current state. But he wasn't to know that. She braced it against her hip took aim.

"Back off, Malfoy."

"Or you'll shoot me, will you?" he asked, almost tenderly. It was his soft, scary, 'persuasive' voice.

"You're daring me?" she scoffed. Maybe he didn't understand how guns worked? "If I pull the trigger at this range, it'll blow a hole clean through your middle, Malfoy."

"Oh?" he said, sounding unconcerned. "And which part is the trigger?"

To her consternation, he gripped the end of the nozzle in his leather-gloved fist and forced it upwards towards his chest. The butt of the rifle slid across her hip and rode down her belly, coming to a rest at the delta of her trousers. He gave it a little push, and it slid between her legs, at a particularly effective angle. She could feel it well enough through her trousers. Her heart began hammering a familiar percussion of expectant anxiety.

He held the rifle still, increasing the upward pressure ever so slightly. And then he slid his gloved fist down the shaft with complete nonchalance, as if he was merely learning the tactile characteristics of the rifle.

She knew he was watching her face, savouring her rising panic

Hermione found she could not look away from his hand's maddeningly slow progress down the shaft of the gun. There wasn't any room to move back. He wanted her to shove the gun away and relinquish it to him.

Sod him and his little power trips. No.

Blood was rushing to her face. Was he being deliberately suggestive or was he just….um.

What, Hermione? Wanking a gun?

By now she was nearly straddling the blasted thing. Hermione held her breath when he got to the trigger, his long fingers a hair's breath away from the zip fly of her trousers. She snatched her hand away before he could reach the trigger and possibly touch her.

And just like that, the gun was his. Malfoy neatly plucked the rifle from her grasp and slung it over his shoulder. Hermione blinked at the sudden return of winter.

With the gun safely in his possession, he gripped the neckline of her jumper in his left hand and hauled her to him so roughly she thought she suffered whiplash. "Don't you ever hold a weapon against me, Mudblood," he sneered into her face. "Especially when you don't intend to follow through."

She couldn't shrink back and lapse into meekness when he was holding her like this. He effectively forced a retort out of her from sheer proximity. "So what then? I should have shot you?"

He snorted. "If you had that kind of fortitude, we would not be in this position in the first place. We would have left the Revel undetected."

Ah. He was referring to how she had alerted Bellatrix to their presence. She wondered when he was going to bring that up that folly.

"What you said applies to you as well," Hermione replied. Her voice quavered. She could feel the entire hard, immovable length of him pressed up flush against her body. "If you had any real fortitude of your own, Malfoy, you wouldn't have ended up Voldemort's failed servant."

She'd gone and done it now. Yes, there had been some level of camaraderie in the past two days, but she had just obliterated whatever accord they had established with that statement.

Oh God, he was going to hit her. The feeble lumos in his right hand disappeared and they were plunged into near darkness once again. She could feel his free hand rise, balled tightly into a fist as it brushed past her body and joined the hand that was holding her to him by her jumper. He shook her once. This may have started out as an exercise for him to vent some frustration, but now he looked like he wanted to rip her apart. She was close enough to feel his ragged, angry breathing.

"You…" he seethed.

And then he released her. Hermione scrambled away from him, watching warily as he glared at the ground, just above the toes of his boots. His lips moved. She thought he might be counting.

The silence was colder than the weather, on their walk back to the cabin. Malfoy didn't turn back to look at her once, not when she fell, not when she failed to keep pace and lagged behind. Had she fallen off the edge of a precipice and screamed all the way to her death, he would have just kept on going. He was furious, but not just with her. This was about more than just them. Hermione could see that. It was as plain as day.

The loss of the gun chafed. He had the axe, his knife, the stupid fireplace poker that he used for roasting. He had claimed the cabin's only armchair and this was in addition to strutting around the cabin like he owned the place. He had all this…this… intimidating power. He couldn't help that he was bigger and stronger than she was, but Hermione thought she could at least even out the odds with the old rifle in her possession. She wasn't a bad shot either.

Being helpless was not a happy feeling.

Oh yes, it was a perfect example of how twisted their situation was that she, Hermione Granger, felt possessive over a bloody gun. She hated guns. At the moment, what she hated most about this particular gun was the way Malfoy walked back to the cabin with it slung across his shoulder.

Like he had a right to own it and use it.

She suspected he felt the same way about her and wands.

End Notes:

Lucius gets his comeuppance in the next chapter, guys. Hang in there. Hermione's not a pushover, she's just doing what she needs to do to surivive with a self-confessed murderer and escaped criminal.