Chapter 1: U as a Cup?
'...you are coming with me.' Bellatrix Lestrange's voice is low and scary in its lack of inflection.
The dark witch grabs the fistful of her currently still long and straight blond hair and pulls her currently quite big and manly frame off the large bed.
Something is very wrong.
The witch must know her identity.
Hermione scrambles to fasten the pants. She is so startled and frightened she cannot muster an ounce of embarrassment about anything that have just transpired.
'...we'll chat when I get back,' are the last words that terrifyingly quiet voice say before their departure.
The words presumably are directed at the only other occupant of the room, Mrs. Malfoy.
Hermione doesn't get to contemplate anything further as she is whisked away by the side-apparition. She is so going to die!
She lands awkwardly on the mossy ground. The thick strand of blond tresses Lestrange anchored herself to finally gives in and leaves her abused skull. Hermione can't help the pained yelp. Her head rebounds sharply over the thick tree root. Her vision swims and her ears ring as the world fades to the background.
The Death Eater is the personification of fury. Fists clenched, panting fast and shallow, eyes blazing at Hermione.
Hermione feels for her wand but her movements are sluggish and weak.
Lestrange's lips move but Hermione doesn't hear much over the ringing in her ears.
The kicks don't help her condition either but she is too sluggish to even try to protect her insides.
The dark witch gets bored, or tired, reigning the abuse on the unmoving teen and lets out a scream. The crooked wand barely moves and a tree nearby bursts into flames.
Bellatrix screams and spins again and again and soon half the trees around the pair are burning.
The effort does nothing to dampen the dark witch's fury or drain any of her stamina.
The plants and earth all around them are blown and burned and sliced as if by giant claws.
Hermione's senses start to come back.
She wishes they weren't.
Her ears ring, her head threatens to split open, and now the shrill screams are added to the mix too, making everything even worse.
Between the screams and curses the dark witch mutters to herself, not full sentences but broken phrases and singular words.
It sounds almost like an argument.
'...backup… no no no!... my Lord… betrayal…blood is everything… but MY LORD…'
Lestrange lets out another long shrill screech. The trees around them that were not ablaze yet are now on fire.
Is the mad witch trying to kill them both?
Hermione doesn't wish to die but if she must, taking Lestrange along could be her little consolation.
Hermione fingers her sleeve with the hidden wand. It twisted around her arm just awkwardly enough to make the quick and easy draw impossible. At least the wand feels intact. She will pull it out, and will stun the Death Eater as soon as she gets a chance.
The quiet startles her. She raises her eyes to find out what silenced the witch .
She doesn't have to look far.
Black skirt and leather boots are in front of her still slightly swimming eyes.
Lestrange spits at her, and screams. The tree under which Hermione lies ignites now too.
It is becoming very toasty in their little circle of burning trees.
The witch stares at her with revulsion. Hermione is sure that is exactly how she looked at the slugs Ron vomited once. Hermione is half certain the witch will spit again.
'Search for secrets in the vaults, filth, not in my sister's bed.' the witch hisses instead.
The rapidly approaching boot is the last thing Hermione sees. She is swallowed by the flames as the mad witch's voice sings...
Hermione jerked awake with a scream. For a brief moment her body felt as if the phantom flames still covered and ate at it. The odd singsong echoed in her ears long after the feeling of the flames dissipated from her awareness. She finally remembered into the wakefulness the full rhyme.
Take the Urn or face defeat
Grab and run or drawn beneath
Bella hates you very much
But some days the needs are musts
The mad witch was mumbling a version of that verse between the shouted threats as she cut into Hermione's arm at the Manor too. Hermione was sure of that.
She rubbed her face hoping it would help to rub the nightmare from her mind.
She was safe.
Bellatrix was dead.
Voldemort was permanently defeated and very very dead.
Hermione's ill-conceived excursion to the Malfoy Manor, as well as her later capture and torture at the same place, happened over a month ago. She was at Hogwarts, helping to restore the castle. Safe. With any luck and a lot of help the school could reopen in September. She would finish school, take her NEWTs, and be on her way to a bright future in a world she fought so hard for. That was the plan.
She wasn't burned in the forest fire. The flames just started licking at her boots when she came to her senses. One of her eyes was completely swollen shut. Her body felt like one big bruise. The tang of blood in her mouth was unmistakable.
Yet, her wand was still with her and completely intact.
The dark witch was gone.
Hermione immediately apparated to their camp.
Gave the boys quite a fright.
Hermione kept her story heavily redacted as she promised Mrs. Malfoy. Though the secrecy had much more to do with her desire to protect her own character in front of the boys rather than desire to protect the blond witch. As she suspected, Ron and Harry took the confirmation of Nagini as the horcrux and the news of the potion shortages among the Death Eaters as a pleasant and curious trivia. Both were quite angry with her risking her life like that.
She obliviated Mr. Malfoy, and the boys left him unconscious where they first found him.
Since then they were captured, she was tortured, and Voldemort was finally no more.
Hermione hoped if she reminded herself of the current state of the world enough times her subconsciousness would remember it too and would stop sending the nightmares her way almost every night!
Hermione went downstairs to the common room. She made a calming tea and started the fire. She was the only occupant of the Gryffindor tower at the moment. At least for the time being she didn't have to explain or excuse her odd hours and habits to anyone. The boys would not be coming back to the castle. They made their decision to start their professional careers, and their confusion about her choice to continue studying, quite clear.
Hermione's mind went back to its currently favorite spin trying to make sense of things that made no sense to it.
Hermione traced the healed and faded U in the otherwise permanently raw and bleeding wound.
This was the first letter Bellatrix cut into her arm. She was certain. She didn't think much of it at first. The witch was crazy after all.
Hermione assumed the dagger was poisoned and possibly cursed when the wound refused to heal. So she kept putting cleansing ointment on it, drank healing potions, and avoided looking closely at her damaged arm as much as possible. Weeks after the Battle of Hogwarts, she finally sought assistance of the healers. The healers immediately determined that the would was cursed and not at all poisoned. They tried to lift the curse out of her flesh without any success, and in the end just gave her a more appropriate for the cursed wound salve. Then someone pointed to the faded U suggesting that perhaps the curse would dissipate with time on its own.
Hermione almost laughed in their faces then. She strongly doubted that any curse of Bellatrix Lestrange would just dissipate on its own. She concluded that since the U was the first letter maybe Bellatrix didn't plan to curse the scar at first. Maybe it occurred to her only after she started cutting the second letter.
Take the Urn or face defeat… sang once more in a childish high pitch through her head.
Search for secrets in the vaults… echoed in the deranged witch's half hiss half growl right after.
Helga Hufflepuff's Cup. Could Bellatrix have meant the cup? Could U have been just as cursed as other letters until it wasn't anymore?
Grab and run or drawn beneath...
Hermione clutched fistfuls of her hair and shouted in frustration.
She felt like a fool!
For whatever reason, the Death Eater gave her everything she needed days before the three got captured… She was just too shaken and too offended to recognize the meaning behind the revolting words and acts in time. She put the witch and all her words out of her mind. Yet a clear direction was right there between the curses and the slurs and the ramblings!
She scourgified her clothing as soon as she got to safety. Yet she could have used the witch's spit, or might have even found a stray black hair, to use in the Polyjuice potion.
Not only did the dark witch tell her where to look, she told her what to look for and how to be most efficient.
The brightest witch indeed!
Here she was with that nasty word carved into her flesh, a painful evidence that the brightest witch just was not that bright after all.
Hermione scowled at the once again bleeding wound. Truly, she earned it.
You are not too bright are you?.. Can you do anything well?.. Did you have at least one OWL on your transcript?... whispered through her mind mockingly in another Black sister's voice, cool, measured, and stubbornly dismissive of the pain and humiliation that Hermione caused, voice.
That voice, and the witch it belonged to, haunted a very different set of Hermione's nightmares.
And dreams.
She pulled again at her hair and groaned pitifully.
The tea and the fire had the desired effect. The witch calmed down. The calm mind and the newly discovered details of the forest events prompted a new insight. There was more to Bellatrix's rhymes the second time around, when the dark witch was cutting into her arm. If Hermione stilled her mind she could almost remember the other verses. She was now certain that several annoying phrases in her head she couldn't explain had to belong to the dark witch's rhymes.
Several perfect opportunities to test out her theory were coming up during the next several days.
Her friends might not be happy about her actions but she had to know.
End of Chapter 1