They stayed, curled together, in that chair. Several other Gryffindors poked into the common room and exited again, seeing them, while others slipped through the room under Silencing charms. Ron and Hermione brought a pot of tea and cold cloths, then went about telling the others to give them a wide berth. Harry held her and murmured softly to her, gently stroking her hair and dabbing her forehead with the cloths.
After an hour crept by, her sobbing slowed. She sniffled off and on, but made no move to leave his arms. She laid her head against his shoulder, under his chin, and sighed a deep, shaky sigh.
"Harry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to do this." Her voice was hoarse and ragged from her screaming.
"Don't. Don't be sorry, Ann. Can you tell me what happened?" She shivered at his voice murmuring against her hair.
"It started in my fourth year. Titus Malfoy was hired to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts and flying- I think the Curators had an eye to start a Quidditch team at our school, and they wanted someone who had played. We all had to take both classes. Our parents thought it was great, they thought we'd be well-rounded.
"Anyway, Professor Malfoy started watching me in class. You know how the Malfoys are- it feels like they're stripping you naked and laughing at what they find. He started to criticize everything I did, picking on tiny errors, sometimes things that I hadn't done wrong. I got to the point that I would be nauseated all day before his classes and almost in tears for the rest of the day. My father thought I needed toughening up, so he wouldn't do anything about it."
"What about your mother?"
"My mother hates the Malfoys. But Dad's a diplomat, so she can't afford to raise a flap because her daughter's having trouble in a class. So she didn't do anything."
Harry clenched his jaw in frustration. Poor Ann, having to deal with Malfoy on her own, so young. He tightened his arms around her and laid his cheek against the top of her head.
"Anyway, Professor Malfoy starting making me stay after school. Not full-on detentions, but requiring me to come in for stupid things, like putting away my wand incorrectly or not catching on to a spell quickly enough. He would make me sit in a chair in the classroom while he berated me for all my mistakes."
"What a shit." Harry growled into her hair.
"God, I was scared to death of him, but at the same time, he was so...handsome and attractive and just...magnetic. I hated him the whole time he was screaming at me, but I dreamed about him at night. Either way, I couldn't get him out of my mind.
"It just kept getting worse. The more he kept me after school, the more upset and behind I would get. Then he started dishing out detentions, four or five in a week."
"Didn't anyone notice? I mean, that seems really excessive."
"Not when you're failing two courses. I couldn't stay on my broom for anything, and I was so scared of making a mistake that I never spoke in my Dark Arts class. He was failing me, so the Academy agreed that I needed extra help and extra discipline. By the middle of Spring term, the Curators and Professor Malfoy convinced my father to sign a form giving him permission to cane me for my attitude."
"Christ, Ann, how did they pull that one off?"
"Discipline was always a sore point between my parents. My father traveled, and my mother refused to use physical punishment. But you have to understand, Harry. The Toronto Academy is very exclusive and very old-fashioned."
"Spare the rod, eh?" Harry asked, sardonically.
"Exactly. And so is my father. So he signed the papers, and I started getting caned. Usually a stroke or three, but it escalated unbelievably quickly. At the worst point, I was caned fifty strokes a day for a month." She shuddered, and tears began to leak out of her eyes. "Have you ever been caned, Harry? No? It's obscenely painful. You can hear the rod coming before it hits you- it makes this whistling noise, and you know it's going to be bad. Then it hits, and you can feel it bury itself in your skin. The pain doesn't come right away. It doesn't hurt until the upswing. Then it feels like you've been flayed. Your legs go weak and your stomach cramps up and you can't stop screaming after a while."
Her voice dropped to a monotone, coldly reciting the facts of her punishments. Harry couldn't keep the tears from rolling down his face as she described how Malfoy would deliberately draw out the caning so that she would almost recover from the pain before he started again. How he would cast Silencing charms on her so she could scream without making sounds, or on the whole room so she could scream without anyone hearing. How he would beat her until her stomach seized and she vomited onto the floor or until she wet herself from sheer pain. How she slept on her stomach for months and couldn't sit down to eat.
"That's when I quit eating. Summer short-term, right before my fifth year. I figured out that if I didn't eat, I wouldn't throw up during detention. He hated that.
"I thought fifth year would be better. I'd be out of his classes and on to something else. But I failed, and had to take the classes over again. More detentions and canings, pretty much every day."
Harry could feel her shaking, could feel her hands growing cold and clammy. He shifted enough to open his still-sweaty Quidditch robes and wrap her in them. She shuddered against his warm sweater and wrapped her fingers in the fabric close to his waist.
"Ann? Don't stop now, Ann. Please go on."
She gasped against his throat, sobbing again. "I can't, Harry. I can't. You'll despise me, and I couldn't take that."
His throat constricted around a tight lump. "Ann, I couldn't hate you. No matter what he did to you, no matter what, I couldn't hate you. You're not responsible, you didn't make him hurt you. He's the one I hate." He gripped her shoulders and pulled her away from him just enough to look her in the eyes. "Do you hear me? I won't leave you."
She sank back against him, weeping. The words broke out of her like a collapsing glacier.
"He starting touching me. He would make me raise my robes to be caned and he would touch me, would force his fingers inside me while he beat me. He forbade me to wear underwear, told me he could make things so much worse, that he would tell my mother we were having an affair. I obeyed him, because I was afraid of him and because I was so ashamed.
"Halfway through the Fall semester, he raped me for the first time. He pinned me to the desk and forced himself on me while I was still bleeding from the canings. He just got more and more savage and violent after that. He said he liked to see me cry and beg and bleed on the floor. He raped me so many times, I couldn't count. I stopped sleeping nights, I almost completely stopped eating. I stopped menstruating in October. In November, I fainted in class. That's when the school nurse Divined that I was pregnant. I told her it was a Muggle boy I met at a club."
She shuddered again, and Harry stroked her hair until she calmed.
"Malfoy went into a rage. It was my fault I got pregnant, he said. He beat me until I lost the child, right there in his classroom. He magicked it all away, like it never happened. That's when I went to my mother. She was enraged, threatened to have his job. He told my father that cooked-up story about me consenting, and my father punished me, sent me away for the rest of the year."
"Didn't they see the wounds, Ann? How could they think you could want that?"
She turned her tearstained face up to his. "I never told them, Harry. I was too ashamed of what I let him do to me. And I was ashamed that I was starting to enjoy it."
Harry reared back in shock. "What do you mean, you enjoyed it? You liked him to hurt you? To treat you that way? How?"
"It wasn't the pain I liked. It was the sex, but more than that. It was the desire, the acceptance. He was the first man that had ever touched me, and he was good, Harry. He was frighteningly good at making me want him even though I had to bleed to have him. I thought it was a price I could pay, just to have him love me."
"But Ann, he didn't love you." Harry's voice was thick with rage and sorrow. "He didn't love you. He wanted you to hurt, he wanted to use you. How could you think he loved you?"
She pushed away from him. "Don't speak to me like that Harry! For God's sake, I was fourteen years old! I didn't know what love is like- all I knew was that this incredibly sensual older man wanted to be with me! I didn't understand! God, I knew you would hate me. Why did I ever tell you?!" She struggled to pull out of his arms, to flee the room. He grabbed her around the waist and pinned her to his lap.
"No! Ann, you're not running away from me! I don't hate you! I'm sorry. I'm just confused, and angry at him. Not at you. Please. Please stay and finish." He gently eased her back into the chair and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. She looked doubtful, then gradually relaxed.
"What did you parents do? When they found out that he...seduced you?"
"My father hit the ceiling. It was all my fault, of course. He packed me off to Scotland over Christmas. I missed the last term, and he pulled some serious strings to get me in here for this term without having to make up the semester I missed. I can't go home for Christmas, and I'll be with Gran for summers. He can't even look at me right now. Mom says he'll get better, and I think he will, eventually. I just don't know if I can forgive him."
She wept again, quieter this time, and Harry snuggled her closer to his body.