Hermione awoke alone on the fourth morning of her captivity. She'd slept remarkably well, and in spite of everything that had happened, she felt fairly good about how the previous day had gone. After all, she'd deflected the first round of questioning from the most dangerous of her interrogators, and still had all her wounds healed. It had been a good trade.
She took her bearings silently. The room was empty. Avery wasn't lurking in any of the corners, waiting to pounce on her. Not that he seemed like the type to let her sleep in. She shuddered at the thought, and continued to do so, unconsciously pulling the blanket more tightly around herself. She sat up, murmuring a silencing charm that was intended to keep the bed from creaking. As it did so anyway, she remembered that her wand was long gone. Predictably, the deadbolt on her door turned not long afterward.
Still shaking, Hermione braced herself for Avery. But for once, he was NOT the first person through the door for the day. Her quick mind concluded immediately that this was bad. If Avery wasn't first, he was last. If he was last, she would be lucky not to bleed to death in the night. Still, when Dolohov smiled at her, placing 2 apples on the bed beside her as though he was offering her rubies, she couldn't help but smile back just a little.
She hadn't been aware of just how weak she had become with hunger until she realized that she was devouring the first apple indiscreetly. The second one was already in her other hand, as though she was afraid someone would take it from her. It was only then that her mind slowed its unceasing situation analysis to realize that she had not seen food in days – only water. And not much of it, at that. She had been so caught up in the need to keep her silence, and be strong through the physical struggles that she hadn't noticed her hunger.
Now, however, as she consumed the first apple core, not noticing how the stem scratched her throat on the way down, it seemed as though years had passed since her last meal. Dimly, it occurred to her that they'd noticed that the hunger wasn't affecting her, and granted her this small amount of food to make her AWARE of the hunger that was certain to return with a vengeance later today. She couldn't make herself care, and she bit into the next fruit with relish.
Dolohov watched her eat in silence, his features carefully schooled into something like kindness. His thoughts, however, were nothing of the sort. The hunger would bother her much more now than it had previously, if, indeed, it had bothered her at all. He had had his doubts, and when he'd mentioned them to Lucius, the demented genius had come up with this. Just enough food to whet her appetite. By this time tomorrow, she'd be convinced that they were starving her to death.
What little food he could 'sneak' to her would be vastly more appreciated. He would have his answers yet.
Professor McGonagall continued to watch her star student in silence, though it bothered her to do so. At one point, early in the hour, Hermione had smiled briefly. Following that, however, there had been only tears and a continual grimace of pain. She thought little of it. Perhaps she had managed to have a good dream or two, if the bastards had let her sleep at all.
When the Headmaster arrived for his shift, having taken the last two hours to carefully consider his post-remembrance dealings with Hermione, he found Severus pacing outside the hospital wing door. He raised a bushy eyebrow in question, but received no answer. This was of no moment to him, and he opened the door and indicated that Severus should precede him into the room, which the younger man did.
Professor McGonagall looked up at their arrival, and stood. "She's in a great deal of pain, Albus," she whispered. "Isn't there anything we can do? A way to give her a break from it for a while?"
Both men shook their heads in response. "No, Minerva. Once the spell has been reversed, there is no stopping it. She will have to relive the remaining 6 days, but only four of them were spent with the Death Eaters. The final two she was back safe with us. It is over by more than half, now."
While his colleagues addressed one another, Severus turned his eyes to Hermione, who, he was startled to discover, was looking at them all with something akin to loathing. Instantly he realized why: they'd been speaking about her as if she wasn't present. He was thankful that he'd remained silent thus far.
As they continued their admittedly rude conversation, he went to stand beside her bed. "Are you alone?" he asked, upon finding that her face wasn't scrunched into a mask of pain. She nodded shortly in response, but looked away and wouldn't meet his eyes. He found this odd, but didn't comment. "They are only concerned for your well being," he offered rather weakly.
"Too little too late," she whispered in response, sparing him a brief glance before focusing once again on a point near the ceiling. He imagined the comment must have been at least partially in response to something she was remembering, as her hands immediately fisted again. After a moment, a small drop of blood soaked into the sheet under her right hand. She was cutting her palms with her own nails. Without a thought, he took her hand in his own and forced it open, allowing her to squeeze his fingers instead. He regretted it at once, as her grip was rather stronger than he'd expected.
He heard Minerva take her leave, and found the Headmaster's eyes, nodding slightly toward the other side of the bed. Albus quickly took up a similar position.
After several moments of gazing into Hermione's pain-filled face, Albus looked across the bed at his Potions Master. "I would have done anything to spare her this," he said quietly. "I researched – "
"She is neither dead nor absent, Albus," Severus answered curtly. "If you must apologize, apologize to her, not to me."
At this moment, Hermione gasped loudly, and the two men turned their attention back to her, thinking that something particularly horrible must have happened in her mind. But her surprised gasp had not been the result of the memory. Even in the midst of one of the most awful experiences of her life, Hermione was aware of the exchange that had just taken place.
For an instant, she met Severus' eyes, and released and squeezed his hand. It was as close as she could get to thanking him. It was hard to force yourself to talk when half your mind was convinced that there was something in your mouth.
For his part, Severus could only see anguish in her eyes. The glance seemed, to him, to hold nothing but accusation. Why had he not rescued her before she'd had to endure this hell? Where had he been? Helping WEASLEY? He let go her hand abruptly, and nodded once to Albus. Hermione never saw him leave, as her eyes were, once again, focused on the unassuming juncture at which the wall met the ceiling.
Half an hour later, Albus was sitting in a conjured chair watching intently as Hermione continued to do nothing at all. The least flutter of her eyes made him jumpy. Part of the reason he was supervising this folly was to keep her from closing them, after all. At least until they knew her memories had progressed into the safety of her rescue.
He shook his head. One couldn't even call it a rescue, actually. They'd been looking everywhere for her, of course. All of the other functions of the Order of the Phoenix had been put on hold. Remus had been called back from his work among the werewolves, Hagrid had been summoned from the north. She was nowhere to be found. Until she had Apparated, naked and bloody, into the most unlikely place. What had come to pass in the time between her abduction and her reappearance in Quality Quidditch Supplies of Diagon Alley, however, was an utter mystery to him. He was well aware that he had not gotten the full story that day.
It had been days since Dolohov had come, though how many, she wasn't really sure. She WAS certain she had at least three broken ribs. And that her hair was irreparably matted. Avery loved her hair, she knew, because it gave him more control. If she'd had any way to rid herself of it, she would have done so. She'd contented herself with tying it into a huge knot, and then another, so that it stayed high on her head, and close to her aching scalp. She could only hope that he would find it less useful to him when he returned.
She'd stopped taking inventory of her bruises. It hurt too much to turn at the waist to see his handprints on her buttocks. It hurt too much to do much of anything. She was lying quietly on the cot when the door opened. Her throat was raw from screaming and vomiting, and she greeted Dolohov only with silence.
He asked for nothing better as he began to heal her. When her face was no longer bruised, he pulled the blanket away from her. She was lying on her back, but didn't resist as he exposed her.
Hermione observed his clinical detachment from the corner of her eye, but did not turn her head to him. Even when he finished with all that he could see, and covered her once again with the blanket, she made no move to acknowledge him.
"I was called away. I tried to argue, but – it does no good to argue with the Dark Lord."
"Voldemort?" Hermione asked. Predictably, Dolohov flinched. She looked at him then, hoping to see anger in his eyes. She was baiting him, trying to make him give up the game. 'Good Cop,' indeed. Did he honestly think he was fooling her?
"Yes. I – "
She sat up abruptly and fixed him with such a stare that he fell silent. She didn't flatter herself that it was anything but a calculated maneuver on his part. "You knew every spell I would require. Tell me, did they train you to be a healer in Azkaban? You healed my raw throat. That spell is so archaic that most people would RATHER brew the necessary potion than learn the wand movement. And the internal bleeding? I know one of those ribs punctured a lung, as I've been spitting up blood and breathing shallowly all afternoon." She paused for breath, and took a minute to be impressed that he didn't look uncomfortable yet.
"Should I assume it's just a coincidence that you knew that too?" she accused quietly. "Do you like to watch, you despicable – "
"I say what they tell me to say, Hermione!" he said quickly, whispering and looking fearfully over his shoulder at the blank wall, as if to indicate that she was, indeed being watched. "Lucius filled me in, and it took me hours to learn that damned wand movement or I would have been here sooner!" He calibrated his voice to sound as though it pained him to leave her hurting so long. As though he'd HURRIED to help her.
Hermione didn't reply. After a moment, and after carefully placing his back to the wall he'd just hinted was not opaque, he pulled several tiny, hard boiled eggs from his shirt pocket and enlarged them to their normal size. He withheld them only long enough to de-shell them by magic, then handed them to Hermione, who made no attempt to hide her atrocious eating habits from whomever might be watching. She didn't even see his masterfully executed glance of fake concern, as if to imply that he was going to be in trouble.
Unknowingly, she responded to the act anyway. "You can't have it both ways – either you're all watching everything I do, and know just what to say and do to get to me – or you're not, and you are able to sneak food to me. You're not sneaking me anything. If they tell you what to say, then they tell you what to feed me. Whatever happened to not insulting my intelligence?" She said all of this with food in her mouth, however, unlike Ron, she didn't lose a morsel of it.
Still kneeling on the hard floor beside the bed, Dolohov made a quick decision. They'd wanted him to wait another day, but he couldn't. Her cynicism was growing and her trust lessening by the hour. They would never agree to call off Avery, and so he had to make the move now if he wanted to get the chance. And he wanted the chance.
"I apologize. I can only do what they tell me, Hermione," he said wearily, lifting himself from his knees with a difficulty he didn't have to affect. "When I don't – " He didn't finish, but instead seated himself on the bed beside her. There was a pause. "The wall is solid. They thought about trying to watch you by magic, but there was too great a risk that you'd find a way to make use of anything that compromised the structural integrity of the room. You might not believe it, but half of this compound is scared to death of you." The implication that the place was crawling with Death Eaters was not lost on Hermione.
She had moved distrustfully away from him when he sat, but now turned her knees toward him and looked at him long and hard. The overwhelming urge to giggle hysterically was fought and beat, but only just. They were afraid of I her /I ? Then Harry was going to trounce them.
"Look, I need to know if you can tell me anything that might help me convince them to let you go. If I could just – "
"Don't be stupid. The minute I spill it I'm toast, and I know it. I don't want to talk to you anymore," Hermione stated roughly. She wanted desperately to stand from the bed and go to the opposite side of the room, but she couldn't, as he was sitting on her only form of modesty. She took a second to think it curious that she had any left.
Dolohov made no move to leave, as she had hoped he would. Lucius had suggested that he might get a better reaction if he let her stew in silence once in a while instead of always trying to bait the answers from her. In this instance it worked admirably.
"If you really wanted to help me, you'd give me your wand and take your lumps for it like a man." She turned her back to him, and sat in silence a while longer.
"I don't want to die," he whispered. In another instant, he was kneeling on the floor before her again. "You are strength incarnate, but I'm the same coward I've always been, Hermione. I took the bloody mark when I was still in school because I was too afraid of what they'd do to me – to my family – if I didn't. And I say what they tell me and act how they tell me because I'm still afraid."
Hermione didn't look at him until she felt his hand through the blanket, caressing her knee. "But if they could see me right now, I'd be good as dead," he whispered. This time there was no fearful glance over his shoulder to try and fool her. There was no time to analyze the truth of what he'd said, either, before he was stretching up a hand to her face.
His touch was so gentle. When he had healed her, so many times in the last few days, he'd always been professional about it. No lingering touches. Not even a double take as his eyes traveled over her breasts. The gentle pressure on her cheek had her leaning down to kiss him before it had even occurred to her that something was odd about it all.
Hermione lay still in the hospital ward, hardly daring to believe what her memory was telling her. Even as she experienced it – making love for the first time – she couldn't believe she'd done such a thing. From the vantage point of more than a year later, knowing all of what she now knew, she was mortified at her behavior. She'd let that beast touch her, begged him to, at the end, even.
She held her body rigid in the bed even as she remembered her damnable pliability – they way their bodies had molded together. Her face flushed with shame so deep it hurt and, for the first time since Severus had forbade it, she closed her eyes.
Albus noticed at once, and jumped from his seat. Nothing he could say, however, seemed to bring any response. Her eyes remained resolutely closed. No harm seemed to have come to her yet, but he continued trying to get her attention, finally shouting, "MISS GRANGER!" in his best disciplinarian voice.
In the hallway, Severus heard the commotion. Three seconds passed before he determined that whatever was wrong was more important than the Headmaster discovering that he had been pacing the hallway again, and he entered the ward for the third time that day. He reasoned that it was nearly his turn to take up the vigil anyway.
As he strode into the room, he heard Albus mutter, "Oh, thank Merlin," and he pushed the curtain aside to see that Hermione's eyes were open once again. They appeared unfocused, however a quick check with his wand revealed no new bruises.
Hermione's eyes had flown open of their own accord, due to a startling discovery in her memory. She'd been so enjoying Dolohov's attentions that she'd stretched her arms luxuriously up under her pillow and had come across something completely unexpected. A wand.
Even as she moaned incoherently in pleasure, she was able to comprehend what she'd found. In the same moment she realized that her cowardly paramour could not have put it there. She could see his wand sticking out of the pocket of his trousers, which he'd carefully placed near the foot of the cot, so that he was always between her and his wand.
He didn't know she had a wand. And no matter how good he made her feel, she wasn't going to give herself away. She sighed contentedly and stretched her arms further above her head, carefully placing the wand on the little metal ledge that supported the pitiful mattress of her cot. She'd made her move not a moment too soon, as Dolohov lifted his head less than a second later.
"I want to show you how it should be," he whispered in what he must have thought was a seductive voice. Maybe two moments before she would have thought that it was. After finding the wand, however, it felt like she'd walked out of a dense fog and into the sunlight. She looked at him through hooded eyes, and squirmed down the bed, to be sure that he couldn't see the wand from the vantage point he was about to assume.
"Please," she whimpered. Part of her wanted this – the contact of someone who wasn't going to hurt her. Part of her was utterly revolted, but resigned to what she saw as whoring herself in exchange for her life. It wasn't hard to deceive him.
She braced herself as he moved over her, and didn't have to pretend to be afraid as he took what he wanted from her. But he was gentle. The whole experience was so different from anything else that had happened to her in this place that she couldn't help but give in to it a little.
Dolohov was thrilled. Not only was he going to get all the information from her when this was over, he was going to do it without Avery. Not only was he going to have his satisfaction with the little tart, he was going to be rewarded by the Dark Lord as well. Perhaps she would be his reward? Perhaps he would be permitted to keep her? It was with this thought that he found his satisfaction, vaguely pleased that he'd managed to provide for her need at the same time. She would, thus, continue to trust him. In the haze that would follow, he intended to lay the groundwork for the questions he would ask her tomorrow.
He rolled from her, and lay at her side, wrapping a possessive arm around her and placing a kiss on her temple. She was breathing heavily with her eyes still closed, and he allowed himself a victorious smirk. Tomorrow, after he had used her far worse than Avery had yet done, when she was completely broken as the only person she trusted turned on her –THEN he would have his answers. And his reward.