Hermione I
My name is Hermione Granger.
I am seventeen years old.
I am a muggleborn witch.
I hate Lord Voldemort and Albus Dumbledore, but the latter slightly less so.
I trust Draco Malfoy.
She woke up each morning in Draco's bathroom (the last place they would think to look for her) pleasantly surprised to be alive. And every morning, as she went through the motions of groping for her wand and washing her face, she would remember her five truths. She knew her name, her age, what she was—Merlin, she would never, ever forget what she was, not when it was burned into her arm—who she hated, and who she trusted. And then she would repeat them until she felt they were burned into her brain.
Her thoughts were so fleeting nowadays, and so shrouded in uncertainty, that she felt she must hang onto the few things that she knew were unquestionably true.
My name is Hermione Granger.
I am seventeen years old.
I am a muggleborn witch.
I hate Lord Voldemort and Albus Dumbledore, but the latter slightly less so.
I trust Draco Malfoy.
Her five truths were a strange bastardization of ritual affirmations and possibly brainwashing, but they kept her focused as she searched for a way out.
She had been inside Malfoy Manor for four months. For two of those, she had been down in the dungeons having her neurons rearranged. For one, she had regained her strength in Draco's care, which, if not skilled, had been earnest. And she had spent her last one observing the Death Eaters and writing down her scattered, jumbled thoughts.
Hermione knew their routines now. Dolohov, that piece of shit, spent a concerning amount of time inside the Manor. He ate breakfast at five in the morning, left until lunchtime, remained inside doing whatever psychopaths do for fun, and left on night raids at seven.
This was in stark contrast to Travers, who only came when Lord Voldemort called for a meeting. Bellatrix and her two pet Lestrange brothers were notably absent for the first half of every day and kept inside for the other half, haphazardly patrolling the hallways and making a mess for Lucius to clean up.
The senior Malfoy was almost always at the Ministry on business, while his wife kept to her chambers as often as she could. MacNair spent time at the Manor intermittently, and his schedule was perhaps the most chaotic. The others were predictable enough that Hermione had time to sneak into the dungeons or the library, and, once, the kitchens—always, always, under heavy Disillusionment.
She had yet to find a way out, and expressed her frustrations to Draco often.
"I'm going to die here," she said once. She was sitting on top of his bed and trying to wrangle her hair into a ponytail. Draco stiffened. "We'll make it out," he said lowly, his fists clenching in his blankets.
"And if we don't?" she asked.
"We will," he promised, and there was such burning conviction there that a small part of he couldn't help but believe him.
"How?" she pressed nevertheless. "I've looked through every goddamn book your family owns on warding. There is no way I can leave without being keyed in, and your dad is the one with the wards tied to him with that stupid ring. And you've said it yourself, that ring's not coming off unless he pulls it off willingly. We can't exactly cut off his finger, no matter how tempted I am," she spat.
The Malfoy family ring was the biggest pain in the ass Hermione had encountered since she learned about the restriction on underage magic. With it, the wielder could control the wards around the Manor, which meant they could key people in and key people out. To get out at all, she would have to attack the wardstones somehow, and with wards as old as theirs, there wasn't even a guarantee that she could bring them down anyway.
"We just need that ring," he said, drumming his fingers on his thigh. "We had the two highest scores last year, we should be able to figure this out."
Hermione bristled. "I've told you," she said, clenching her jaw, "I'm not that girl anymore."
"You're still you," Draco pointed out, "just angrier and probably twice as dangerous."
Hermione shook her head. "But I'm not," she said. "I can't even remember facts from Hogwarts: A History anymore. The knowledge is just…gone. Dolohov ruined my near-eidetic memory and completely removed my ability to focus and I hate it, Merlin, I hate it so much—"
She realized, belatedly, that she had started hyperventilating.
Draco reached out a hesitant arm and draped it around her shoulders. "Breathe," he said softly. Hermione watched the fingers on his other hand begin to tap nervously on his knee. "Just breathe, Granger, breathe."
"Yeah," she gasped, "yeah."
She wasn't sure how long she stayed there, pressed into Draco's side and watching the fingers of his left hand tap.
"Five things," he muttered into her hair.
She took one controlled, deep breath, and began to list. "I see your fingers, the wood of that table, the drapery, your hair, and my socks. I can touch the bedsheets, the floor, my hair, and your skin. I hear…" she paused, because this was usually where it got tricky. "I hear my thoughts," she grumbled.
"Those don't count," Draco reminded her.
She took another breath. "I hear...the sound of your fingers on your pants, the creak of the floor, and the rustle of the bedsheets. I smell the Pepper-Up you keep in your drawer and the lavender your mother puts everywhere. And I taste the sandwich I had for lunch."
"There," Draco said softly. "You're alright."
"I'm not," she shot back instinctively.
"You're getting better," he corrected, and she relaxed. "Yeah," she agreed, and shelved the issue of the ring for the next day.
…
It just so happened that the solution for the ring, quite literally, fell into Draco's lap. The two of them were sharing a rare quiet moment in the library—read: making out—when Hermione's back slammed into the bookcases a little too hard. A book perched on top of the shelf, positioned so neither of them would have noticed it otherwise, tumbled off the edge and smacked into the both of them.
Draco cursed and picked up the book. "Bloodlines," he read, eyes narrowing.
Hermione ran a hand through her disheveled hair and took the book from him, then flipped to the table of contents. A smile stretched across her face. "That's fortuitous," she muttered.
"Lucky," Draco agreed, as she flipped pages.
She scanned a passage, her smile growing. "I might just have a plan," she told him, and the hope in his eyes lit up his entire face.
…
The next week, they put their plan into motion. "We have everything?" Hermione asked, fingers pulling at her hair in a nervous tic she hadn't had since childhood.
Draco thought for a second, looking over the items on the bed. "Blood, key to the wardstone room, shovel, our notes, my mother's engagement ring—"
"Engagement ring?"
"I couldn't get her to part with her actual marriage ring. I nicked this from her jewelry box. She hasn't worn it in years, but it's a heirloom."
"Who did it belong to before her?" Hermione wondered.
Draco's slash of a grin warmed her as he replied, "Officially, it belonged to my grandmother. My grandfather, however, never told his son that he bought it from a muggle store originally and had it reworked by a wizarding jeweler."
Hermione threw her head back and laughed. It was a dry, raspy thing brought on by too many sleepless nights from nightmares, but a laugh nevertheless. Draco's expression seemed torn between something altogether too fond to be comfortable, and the same wicked glee reflected in her own. "This might just work," she said, digging her bitten nails into her palm.
"It just might." He swept their supplies into a worn bag. Hermione Disillusioned herself and Draco as she opened the door, but she had never wished so much for Harry's invisibility cloak.
But, not for the first time, did she wonder where it was. Harry hadn't brought it to the Battle, had he? Because if he had, it was lost in the Veil with him, and that was just a waste.
The two teenagers crept through the hallways of the Manor, sticking to the shadows clinging like some deadly miasma to the walls. According to Draco, this was a side effect of whatever the hell the Dark Lord was doing in his basement.
Unfortunately, the wardroom was also located in the basement, and any changes in the wards would immediately be felt by Draco's father if anyone went through them. "Magical resonance is a pain," Hermione remembered the blonde complaining, as he hunched over the floor plans of his own house and her scribbled notations of the Death Eaters' routines.
It was Wednesday. The Dark Lord spent Wednesday mornings at the Ministry, and Death Eater presence within the Manor were at their lowest just after breakfast. If they had to wait another week for their window of opportunity, the chances of the key to the wardroom being discovered as missing increased. And Hermione had snatched it off of one of the house elves, so she couldn't exactly return it without being able to definitely get it back.
It was now or never.
They crept down the endless stairs of the Manor, descending into the darkness and into the heavy feeling of latent magic that only increased in density the closer to the Dark Lord's workplace one got. It pressed into Hermione, and the suffocating feeling of it only reminded her of her own stint in the dungeons.
Draco, noticing her tension, pressed a hand into her back. He didn't speak, knowing that any sound in here would echo, but the silent comfort calmed Hermione's ranging thoughts somewhat from a waterfall of tangling noise to something akin to a stream.
It seemed like forever before they arrived at the wardroom, the innocuous wooden door with a single keyhole melting out of the shadows.
Hermione raised her wand and shot off a ward probe she had found in Draco's library. The amount of feedback she got from the spell was staggering enough that she took a step back, breathed deeply, and gestured for the key. The door was wrapped in enough protective magic to stop a rampaging chimera from bashing down the wood, and the wall around it had strange trails of magic reinforcing the structure. Hell, that kind of protective magic, layers cast by each successive generation of Malfoys, could only be cut through by a key—which, thankfully, they had—or maybe a very, very intelligent wardbreaker.
She gestured for the key, which Malfoy handed to her, and, gingerly, opened the door.
Inside was the wardstone—a chunk of limestone three feet wide and two feet tall. Etched on its surface were hundreds of thousands of tiny, painstakingly etched runes, of which Hermione could only read a few.
"We have a ten minute window to get out of here, if this works. Dictionary?" she muttered, as Draco closed the door behind them. He dug around in their bag and pulled out a worn leather book. She took it from him carefully, and knelt by the stone. With shaky hands—something she had never needed to deal with before being captured, so her working theory was that Dolohov had misaligned some of the neurons in her motor cortex somehow—she flipped through the pages. "Are you drawing the circle?" she asked.
"Yeah," replied the blonde, who had chalk and a piece of string in his own, steadier hands. He was drawing out a ritual circle. Leaving spaces, he began to draw the anchor runes. Raidho, for focus. Naudhiz, to restrict the casting energy and to help with the initial tear they would make in the wards. Dagaz, for stability. And Fehu, a rune that described the movement of wealth. Draco had argued long and hard with Hermione about including Fehu at all, because he had always associated Fehu with actual money. Hermione hadn't budged. "I'm doing the actual casting," she told him, "and power is a kind of wealth the same way Galleons are." In the end, he had acquiesced, knowing that the Arithmancy supported the use of four anchor runes in a warding circle.
"Okay, I have the ones you need for the blanks," Hermione said, her finger moving quickly down the page she had opened to. "Isa, Tyr, Yr, and Thurs, going clockwise."
Draco nodded and began to draw the runes with the chalk.
"Ready?" Hermione asked a minute later, growing antsy.
"Yeah," the blonde replied, and dropped the ring into its spot in the circle. Hermione surveyed their work with a critical eye, nodded once, and stepped back. "Flood it."
Draco gripped his wand tightly in his right hand, placing the tip on Raidho. He pressed his left into the wardstone.
Please work, Hermione thought, Please.
Draco was visibly sweating as he pushed magic through the circle. The air was heavier, almost charged with static electricity, and Hermione found herself backed against the wall.
"Come on," he muttered, already pale face nearly chalk white from exertion. "Come on."
With the feeling of a rubber band snapping, the latent magic in the air whipped once and disappeared, funnelled into the ring. Draco sat back on his heels, panting, and picked up the ring. Our ten minutes starts now," Hermione whispered.