She would never forget the expression on Harry's face as he pushed Sirius out of the way and fell backwards into the Veil. His green eyes had widened and his eyebrows had drawn together, and then the wispy fabric covering the archway had swallowed him whole. Ron, a brain still attached to his arm, had ran at Bellatrix—that foolhardy idiot, Hermione thought fondly—and she had laughed. It was terrible and cruel and she had whispered, almost too softly for anyone but Hermione to hear, "Crucio."
But the way Ron collapsed and writhed on the ground was unmistakable. His fit might've lasted ten seconds or a minute, for all Hermione knew, because the next thing she remembered was his body twitching once, twice. And then going so terribly still.
Then someone had grabbed her from behind and she was dragged into the melee, kicking and screaming until the Death Eater jabbed his wand into her skull and muttered "Stupefy." She woke up in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor an indeterminate length of time later, chained to the wall like it was the bloody Dark Ages again. She supposed she should be glad that she still had clothes on, but then Antonin Dolohov had emerged from the darkness and her blood ran cold.
Down there, in the dark, Hermione had learned many things.
First, that straining against her shackles only rubbed her wrists raw. No matter how much pain she was in, she tried her hardest to stay still.
Second, that Dolohov was a sadist who preferred brute-force Legilimency than any other kind of torture.
Third, that there was no limit to the amount of pain she could feel while trapped inside her own mind, because she could never pass out. And she couldn't die, either.
Fourth, there was no way out of her mind. The Longbottoms had been lucky, Hermione remembered thinking, because eventually their brains had essentially turned off. Physical pain could do that to a person.
Mental pain, no matter how much she wished it, could not.
Dolohov came down once a day. Sometimes he was happy and sadistic, sometimes he was melancholy and sadistic, and sometimes—and those were the worst days—angry and sadistic. For whatever reason, the Dark Lord had given her over to him as a chew toy. And it hadn't escaped her notice that now she referred to the man as the Dark Lord, like the rest of his servants, because uttering Voldemort within the Manor was just plain suicidal.
Out of the darkness and into the light, Hermione thought, because now her mind liked metaphors much better than straight facts and hard logic. Dolohov hadn't destroyed it, no. He had rewired it, and that was the worst part. She could not think in rows anymore. Her neat lists and boxes hovered, sometimes just tantalizingly out of reach, because now her mind liked to meander from thought to thought. Rigid. Ron might've called her that once, and she had bristled, ever predictably. The adjective had never applied to her less.
Before Dolohov's daily visit, something like two months into her torture, she had hung from the bloody chains around her wrist that attached her to the wall with the sort of despondency that said she was very near breaking.
The steps coming down the stairs hadn't been the heavy, tramping footfalls of her least favorite Death Eater. They had been light, hesitant, and not at all sure of themselves. Hermione had raised her head, ignoring the ache in her shoulders, and tried to reorganize her thoughts because they were spread out so far that she had trouble reeling them back in.
The second thing she had noticed, besides the different footsteps, was the hair. That unmistakable Malfoy hair, a near-translucent blonde, shone dully in what little firelight made its way into her personal circle of hell. "What the fuck," she spat, surprised at the vitriol in her own voice, creaky and gravelly from screaming, "are you doing here?"
She remembered Malfoy flinching back from her anger instead of getting annoyed, and how that had surprised her. Little could surprise her in the darkness, she had thought, but she had been wrong, because Malfoy surprised her yet again. He pulled out his wand with shaking fingers, and Hermione had readied herself for another bout of pain. Mental, physical, it didn't matter to her. Bellatrix had already bounced down the stairs to carve "Mudblood" into her arm, and the damn thing was still weeping blood. She figured they had let Malfoy down here to deliver the killing blow.
Instead, he had murmured "Ferula" to wrap bandages around her forearm and a quick incantation to break the wards on the shackles. Then he had unlocked them with a quick unlocking charm—and that had brought tears to Hermione's eyes as she remembered what, exactly, she had first done that with charm—and she had fallen to the ground like a rag doll.
"Shit," Malfoy said, and stepped closer. "Didn't mean to—"
"Drop me?" Hermione said, and the side of her mouth crept up involuntarily. "Bold of you to assume—" she coughed, and her chest hurt from it. "Bold of you to assume that I could stand."
Malfoy muttered a diagnostic spell and paled even further from what Hermione assumed was an already unhealthy pallor. "That's not a normal cough," he said.
"Go figure," Hermione said, and spat blood onto the stones of the dungeon floor. "What are you doing?"
"Getting you out," he said, shaky but resolute, and that conviction warmed her somewhat because it reminded her of the way Harry and Ron had been. "It's not going to work," she replied, wiping at her mouth then. "The wards are keyed not only to keep intruders out, but to keep people in."
She glanced up at him for the first time since he had crept down the stairs and he took a step back looking almost frightened. Of her? A prisoner, limp and boneless on the floor?
Pathetic.
"I'm not keyed into the wards," she said quietly. "I'm never getting out of here alive."
Then Malfoy's face had set into a queer mix of obstinacy and determination. "No, but we can make it look like you did."
Hermione perked up at that, meandering thoughts dragging back together at this semblance of a plan, at this spark of hope.
Malfoy had dragged her up to his quarters in an agonizing start-stop journey from the lowest recesses of the Manor through hallways and storage closets and forgotten stairways, up from hell and into the light. It hadn't been Albus Dumbledore who had saved her, she thought bitterly. It had been the person she least expected to have the courage.
He had taken her to his room and laid her on his bed, then, flipping distractedly through a medical textbook normally given to Healer trainees, had done his best to mend her physical wounds. The curse scar on her arm he could only keep bandaged, and he had no idea how to fix the gaping holes in her psyche.
"I could try—" he had offered, and she had scoffed. "Give me the book," she all but ordered, and he silently passed it to her. She held her hand out for his want and reluctantly, the Malfoy heir handed it over. Hermione inhaled, muttered a diagnostic, and tried to read the quickly flashing words and numbers. It was no use. Her eyes couldn't stay focused long enough for her to understand any of what the diagnostic was telling her.
"Damn it," she swore, and passed the medical textbook to her unexpected ally. At his questioning look, she sighed. "I can't read it," she muttered, "the numbers go too fast."
"What did he do to you?" Malfoy asked, apprehensively.
Hermione fixed him with a steady gaze and didn't reply, watching as he gulped. "He ripped my mind apart," she told him matter-of-factly. "He ripped it apart and sewed it back together along entirely different seams. I'm not the Hermione Granger you knew, Malfoy."
He had surveyed her, those gray, cloudless eyes fixed on her face. "No," he agreed, "you're not."
And somehow the tentative friendship that formed when he had dragged her, quite literally, out of his basement, led to him caring for her as she recovered. The next day, Malfoy came into his room looking especially shaken. "Dolohov threw a temper tantrum when he realized you were gone."
"So they're looking for me, then?" Hermione asked, and realized she was beyond caring what happened to her.
"No," he said. "I Imperiused Jugson into admitting that he took a turn at you and that your body couldn't hold up under the stress. He dumped your body on the Manor grounds."
Hermione didn't even twitch at the mention of an Unforgivable. "I assume a Transfigured body double was found near the wardline?"
Malfoy had smiled at her, a dry, wry twist of his lips, but a smile nonetheless. "Dolohov and Jugson had it out right there in the dining room, throwing curses left and right until…"
He gulped, then continued. "Until my father stepped in and separated the two. Jugson had to promise to bring in two Muggle toys to replace you."
Once upon a time, Hermione would've cared that two Muggles were to be tortured in her place. But she was just so relieved that maybe she could have relative peace, at least for a little while, that she couldn't bring herself to feel sorrow.
Does that make me a terrible person? she wondered absentmindedly, then realized she didn't care about that either.
She spent most of her time under Disillusionment, down in the Manor's library. It was quiet there, but brightly lit, so that the shadows that haunted her dreams couldn't touch her, encircled as she was in the barrier of light. Nobody ever went inside. It was locked by Family Magic of some sort that was accessible only by direct heirs of the Malfoy line. Malfoy's father had sealed it for some reason, and he had managed to open a hole in the wards as the heir for her. It was there, in the silence and the light and the books, that she and Draco spent hours of their time looking for either a way to sneak through the wards. Or kill Lord Voldemort, though at this point it seemed merely like a pipe dream.
…
Hermione was currently hiding in Draco's closet, not knowing how he would react to her presence before he put the memories back. He had just entered the room, trudging across it with his back bent and his chin drooping to his chest. He was waif-like in the faint sunlight coming in through the window.
He stopped abruptly at his bed, spotting the full, corked vials and the note penned in his own shaky handwriting.
Hermione counted a full three minutes before he drew his wand, uncorked the bottle, and started feeding the memories into his own head. With each memory he put back, his movements became sharper, more desperate, until he was effectively shoving the memories in. when the last vial clinked to the ground, he whipped around. "Hermione?" he asked, his voice broken but so full of hope.
With a deep, steadying breath, she stepped out of his closet. "Here, Draco," she murmured.
Draco turned to her, a heartbreaking expression on his face. "You're okay," he whispered, and strode to her. "You're okay."
The devastating relief in his voice gave her pause. She hadn't thought he had cared so much until he wrapped his arms around her, both of them thin and trembling children.
"You're okay," he repeated into her hair, and his arms tightened around her. Tentatively, Hermione wrapped her own arms around him , face pressed into his chest. "As much as I can be," she replied dryly.
He pushed her back slightly, scanning her face with a hungry desperation. "God," he murmured, and she couldn't tell if it was in prayer or in exultation, and when he kissed her it was the third time Draco Malfoy had surprised her.
It wasn't love.
No, the feeling that bloomed in her chest when she was in his arms was not love, because all of her books told her that love was something soaring, something beautiful and free and untouched by the problems of men. It wasn't butterflies in her stomach or blood rushing to her cheeks, or tentative smiles and easy comfort.
It was something darker, something edged with desperation and obsession and frustration all tied into a pretty package.
She did not love Draco Malfoy, of that she was sure the way she was not sure about anything else anymore.
No, that was a lie. She knew that she did not love Draco Malfoy, and that we was sure of, but she was also sure of the fact that she hated Albus Dumbledore. Which, she could admit readily enough, was due to Draco's stories and also from her own experiences. They called Albus Dumbledore the Leader of the Light, after all, the man to lead them all out of the darkness. And he had led them all astray, hadn't he?
She pushed away her bitter thoughts and tried to focus on Draco. We'll get out of this, she promised herself silently, promised the both of them. We'll get out of this alive.
And sometimes Hermione wondered if the not-love she felt for Draco Malfoy would've been possible with her old mind, the one that was rational and chose the best path when weighing it against the others. Not-loving Draco Malfoy was dreadfully inconvenient. In fact, connections of any kind were dreadfully inconvenient, because if Hermione was ever to escape the hell of Malfoy Manor, she could not afford to care about other people along the way.
But he had saved her, she reminded herself, and that should count for something.
Hermione let her thoughts scatter like wild horses, then, and let herself stop thinking for a little while.
A/N Virtual cookies to whoever spotted all the literary allusions! The part about the world beginning with a bang is from T. S. Elliot's poem "The Hollow Men", the Word is from the Chronicles of Narnia (specifically, The Magician's Nephew, which is either the first or sixth book in the series, depending on how you look at it), 42 is, of course, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the sugar bowl is from A Series of Unfortunate Events. I don't have a beta, so please feel free to point out my grammar mistakes!