Disclaimer: Not mine. End of story.
Quick Summary: Hermione and Draco have determined that the key to discovering Voldemort's plans is to go to St. Mungo's and talk with the Muggle that survived. However, Hermione has shown herself to be adverse to the course of action out of an irrational fear of what they might discover about her mother and the way she died - she hasn't faced her mother's death properly, remember, and is frightened to think that there might be a plan, a reason, for the way she died. Draco's reasons for finding Voldemort's plans remain ambiguous. The climax of their confrontation follows (you may want to go back a chapter and reread). With the Fates: Passion's back in control of the fire (the puppet stage), Cruelty's ambitious mask has slipped over her eyes, Snake is showing portions of his evil plan at last (part of which includes a knife, though that doesn't resurface for a couple of chapters). The Sensing sequence: Lucius raises the knife in the Womb, prepared to cut a door into the next stage of their journey. Hermione is currently crouched below the huge body of a fetus, and Wormtail is frightened for his life, and for good reason too.
Last time -
Hermione let out her breath. Her hands leapt to her cheeks, resting there in frustration, pulling at the brown, frizzy hair framing her face. "Draco. Think logically. What happens if we're discovered? We're expelled."
"We won't get discovered."
"How are we supposed to even get out of here without a teacher's help? Neither of us can Apparate, and St. Mungo's is too far by broom. A teacher can help us with that."
"Transportation is easy," Draco dismissed. Hermione clenched her fists and pressed her teeth together until they groaned. "What we need is the name of the Muggle, if one survived. You don't need a teacher's permission for that; in fact, they're probably wondering why you haven't asked yet."
Hermione's eyes glazed and her breath came quickly in broken gasps. "You don't understand," she said, her voice breaking.
Draco's voice rose, overwhelming her plea. He paced in front of her, his body a whip as it turned corners swiftly and furiously. "I think I do understand, perhaps all too well. You want to know what I really think, Hermione? You really want to know? Fine. I think you're a coward. You're too afraid to do what's important because you're caught up in your bloody textbooks and parchment. You're scared to give your mother's death meaning. You're scared of understanding what's going on, and you're afraid of the burden that comes with the knowledge. You're just a frightened little girl, Hermione, scared of the dark, the dead, and herself."
Draco wrenched open the door, and swept out into the empty hall. Hermione stood still until she found the strength to stagger to a desk. As the students' chatter echoed through the corridor, she lowered her head to her arms, trying to separate her thoughts from the thrum of shock.
She didn't succeed.
Chapter 13 – Voices
Snake bent over his fire, his eyes glinting in the light of the blue flames. Greed poured from his fingertips, allowing his hand passage in the icy flames. The drumming trees – silent now, content in death's shadow – gave the flames their full-hearted permission to dance on their bones, dark with ash.
Laughter clawed at his throat, begging to scramble free from his body. He opened his mouth, letting the cruel sound echo over the field, carry to the distant Fates. He was close, so close to his purpose. The storm above him raged on, carrying tidings of war and heartbreak and suffering. His doing, all of it.
He raised his hand, a long, supple rod clenched in his fingers, and traced a convoluted ring in the air. It shimmered, then lowered slowly to the flames where it hardened and grew thick in the freezing smoke. One ring, to be followed by many more. A chain to be worn about the ankles, the wrists, and the neck. His eyes looked out at the Fates.
The ancient sisters cackled, unaware that their servitude was about to become slavery.
"Her name is Eleanor Horrigan."
Hermione sat down across from him, her hand still splayed across the page Draco had been reading. He glanced at her irritably, gingerly sliding the book from beneath her fingers. His eyes caressed the page for a moment longer, then abruptly closed the cover and moved the text aside, staring at her above a severe mouth. She tried a smile, but it wavered and slipped beneath her skin when he failed to return it.
She sighed. Here we go again, she thought drily. "You're still mad at me, Draco? You shouldn't be. I just gave in. I surrendered. You won." She paused. "Really, if you think about it, I should be the angry one. At least I've never called you a coward."
Draco said nothing.
"Okay, so I have a couple of times, but not since we've become friends," she conceded. At his silence, she clicked her tongue impatiently. "You do consider us friends, don't you?" she asked him. All her hesitation was lost, now; at the risk, her confusion was set aside, whether it was personal, social, or emotional.
"I'm still deciding," Draco finally said. "I've had to reevaluate my opinion of you." He didn't bother to add that the change was negative; they both knew it.
"I expected as much," Hermione said. She lapsed into silence for a moment, the space between her eyebrows puckered in hard thought. When she spoke again, the words were a friend's—casual, unassuming—but spoken in a professional tone. "Right. I've done my part, and got the name of the Muggle at St. Mungo's. You were right, you know, it was easy. Professor McGonagall even asked what had taken me so long, though she did warn me not to visit until I was entirely ready." She paused. "Basically, she said that I was forbidden to go there until one of the Order could accompany me." She glanced at Draco once, her accusation carefully masked beneath politeness. "So, now that we know our mission really is off-limits, how do you propose we get there?"
His silver eyes burned. He had waited, allowed her to come snuffling to his palm, to be lured back to him with the welts of his punishment still fresh upon her pale hide, and had been rewarded for his patience. He leaned across the table towards her, jerking a corner of paper that stuck out of his book. A plan fluttered to the table, full of scribbles and arrows that contradicted themselves, furiously limping from one edge to the next.
"Easy," he whispered, glancing around the Library for eavesdroppers. "I've got it all figured out."
He pointed to a single word, circled many times in blue and black ink: Hogsmeade.
The sky hung low and heavy over the castle, the grey clouds soft and damp around Gryffindor Tower. The trees in the Forbidden Forest were unnaturally still, their budding leaves a sheer sheet of green in the horizon. Once, a wet wind tumbled through, disturbing the silence with a brief scratching of limbs and bare bark. The world was waiting.
Hermione woke at dawn, dread filling her with black hope. She rolled over on her stomach, face watching the light swell in the east. Why had she agreed to this? There was still a chance, she knew, a chance to just fail to show up. But she knew that then Draco would never forgive her. She knew that she valued his friendship for a reason she was just beginning to discover, and that she wasn't prepared to let it slide out of her grasp so quickly. She fought the feeling of desperation away, and turned her gaze inwards to her breath. A blue being nestled in her body, beating a steady drum: in, out, in, out, in...
Harry would love this, she thought ruefully. A chance to discover Voldemort's plans, a chance to feel the freedom of danger. For a brief moment, she contemplated telling him the truth about what she was planning to do. She watched his expression in her mind as the hurt filled his face as he discovered her deceit; she watched it turn to reserved apprehension and the joy of revenge on his parents' murderer. But the possibility fell slowly to the floor; again, Draco's friendship was in jeopardy. She felt guilt wriggle in the pit of her stomach, but forced it to kneel subdued in stillness with the flat of her hand. She would not think of it. She would not think of how perhaps there were two more friendships in jeopardy; if she chose Draco over Harry and Ron, there would only be blame and the broken pieces of the past.
She walked with Harry and Ron to Hogsmeade, the March weekend warm with the chance of beginnings. She carried a small tin box under her coat, steeling herself for the lies that were to follow. The cobblestone road below their feet was straight, pausing only at corners and walkways that branched to the shops.
"Should we check out Zonko's?" Ron suggested half-heartedly. He wondered why the three of them even bothered to come down here anymore, for many of the sights had lost their charm after three years.
Harry shrugged, and led the group towards the crowd at the door of the joke shop. Hermione hung back. "Actually, I can't come" she said. Her mouth was dry.
Ron looked back. "Why not?" he asked.
"I've set up an interview in the Three Broomsticks with Dobby. It's his day off, and I thought we might discuss elf rights." The lie was easy on her tongue. If you looked closely, you couldn't even see the stitches. "You two should really come along, you know; it's important to show a strong face to a possible future client. Dobby could be a valuable asset to our campaign, he has loads of ideas."
The two boys exchanged wearied looks and cut her off with empty excuses.
"Well, I don't know—"
"I mean, if it's all the same to you, we might—"
"—I kind of wanted to see whether it held up to Fred and George's, now that they've opened up—"
"—we might opt out. You don't really mind, do you? It would be loads easier without us, really."
"Harry, you at the very least should show up, you haven't seen Dobby in ages—"
"Hermione, we have homework," Ron said, dragging Harry away. "We're going to have to make this a short visit anyways, so at least let us do something we like. We'll meet you up at the castle later tonight."
Their long legs carried them quickly across the square, backs immune to her sigh of relief. She hitched her bag higher on her shoulder and set off towards the Three Broomsticks, a grey-shingled pub that squatted on the edge of the square. She slipped inside the yellow warmth; it was crowded with students escaping the low sky, fingers clenched around bottles of butterbeer. She thought to herself again that Madame Rosmerta, the pretty owner of the shop, would make twice the money if she brewed a cool drink—a Pepper Down rather than a Pepper-Up—for the warmer days. The woman had no business sense.
She scanned the student body, and glimpsed a shock of pale hair bent over a table in the far corner. She wove her way between the loud students, carefully backtracking when she almost stumbled upon Professor Flitwick and Professor McGonagall talking low and earnestly together. After squeezing by the door that led up to Madame Rosmerta's quarters above the pub, she pulled out a chair and sat gingerly on the edge.
"I'm here," she said quietly. "Let's get this over with."
Draco looked up, slowly folding the parchment he had been scanning. He watched her fidget in her seat several times, eyes darting to identify any eavesdroppers that hid themselves in the throng. "Should we go over the plan again?" he asked.
"No. I've got it. Pretty straightforward, isn't it?"
Draco hesitated. No, he decided, it wouldn't do to add to her prior vacillation; she was a woman, and thus weak. There was nothing to keep her from forgetting her promises. "Do you have your questions planned already?"
"No, no, I don't. It doesn't matter, I'll think of some on the way. Let's leave. I don't like waiting." It was true, she thought. She felt far better moving, fighting, planning. A pause was fatal, a rust-tipped knife lodged between her ribs. It pricked her now. She reached her hand to the blue-bodied breath inside her, steadied her clear conscience with the drumbeat.
"Fair enough," Draco said, standing. He lazily kicked his chair aside and pushed himself through the students the same way Hermione had arrived. From behind, Hermione thought that he looked as if he was moving through mud, each movement sustained and slow. Anyone could see through him if they had eyes, she thought.
As Draco reached the door of Madame Rosmerta's quarters, he paused and turned back, watching Hermione walk toward him critically. He caught her eyes; they were bare, collected, cups spilling brown assurance. Transparent, crystal mud, he thought, and laughed inwardly at his surprise. Gryffindors were all the same, he reminded himself. Heroics. It was the only reason she rose to his bait; she had no true grip on the how and the why she acted. Nobility clouded the mind, polluted the clarity of motives and the sense of self each person instinctively possessed. It was the reason so many bowed to pressure; though courage was rumored to make you tall, it was simply a response to peer opinion, a salute to their decision and a promise made with honor to follow. Courage didn't exist, there was only man and the master. It was why Gryffindor was such a joke. Why Hermione was such a joke, he reminded himself.
As if to prove his point, he whispered with barbed tongue, "Stop acting so damn suspicious, Hermione. Remember: casual. You're drawing attention to yourself."
Hermione reddened. "I'm not doing anything more than what you're—"
"Now, if you would be so kind as to look out from behind your hair, watch Madame Rosmerta. I need to fiddle with this stupid door."
"It's: Alohamora," she murmured from the corner of her mouth. Draco felt the sting of his words return to bite into the flesh of his shoulder. He knew that, she didn't have to be so patronizing. "She's looking this way," she added calmly.
"Well, block me and strike up some conversation with the people at the table next to you, then!" he said. He glanced towards the bar, where Madame Rosmerta was staring at Hermione.
Hermione moved in front of Draco, bending over to converse with a couple of Ravenclaw Second Years, racking her brain for an excuse to talk to them. When her mouth dropped open and the words sprang forward, she hardly even knew what she said, only that she spoke desperately. Her hands flew wildly through the air, illustrating a point not even she understood. The twelve-year-olds traded looks, nodding politely when the flow slowed, only to be rewarded with more words strung together haphazardly. She glanced at the bar only once. Madame Rosmerta had turned her back.
"We're through!" Draco whispered behind her. He vanished through the crack in the doorway.
Hermione made her excuses swiftly, hoping that the crazed impression she left on them would be enough to blind the Second Years for the moments in which she made her escape. She backed away from the table, and casting one last look around the pub, slipped inside to the cool well of the stairway. She shut the door behind her.
It was dark, shapes barely illuminated by the blue light that wormed its way through the bottom of a door at the top of a staircase. She didn't see Draco on the stairs, and hoped he waited at the top. She had long since buried the fear of expulsion, she now had to face the dripping dread of a mistake: mistaken morals, mistaken motives, mistaken trust. She locked her eyes on the door at the top of the stairs. One step at a time, nothing for it, she whispered to herself. She put one foot on the bottom stair, and it creaked sharply in the silence. At the noise, hands moved out of the darkness to find her wrists and she fell backwards with a cry, slamming her slim body to the wall and thrashing outward with her elbows. The wood slid splinters into her back.
"So bloody jumpy," Draco muttered. He rubbed a blooming bruise on his cheek.
"That was completely unnecessary," Hermione told him, her voice slightly strained. She took a breath, ready to tell him that this stupid arrogance, these childish tricks had to stop if they were to continue. They were partners, not man and master. "I think—I don't think she saw us," Hermione whispered. Not now, she decided. She pulled herself free from his grasp and put her ear to the door. Her hands found and clutched the tin S.P.E.W. box in her robes as she listened. "No, we're okay."
She turned, but Draco had already vanished. She sighed and followed his dusty footprints up the steep stairs and through the door at the top of the staircase, blinking in the sudden light as she found herself in the wide, many-windowed apartment above the clamor of the shop. A couch sat low in front of a fireplace; a small table and chairs basked under a round window. She glimpsed a blue bed through a half-opened door off the open kitchen. The rooms reeked of clean and simple living, and orderliness echoed off the orange walls.
She caught motion in the corner of her eye and spun on her heel to join it. Draco emerged from the bedroom, stumbling slightly on the edge of a red rug stretched across the coarse wood floor. "You're not supposed to go in there!" she hissed. "This is her home, not a museum."
"She has protections about," he said. "I need to try to turn them off. The door took long enough on its own. I can't light a fire until they're gone. Standard wizarding protection, but I can't figure it out with this..." His voice trailed off, his fingers gestured limply before falling to his side. He blinked slowly.
"Are you—are you okay?" Hermione asked. His grey eyes looked shocked and glassy; her fingers touched his brow, feeling for a fever. He pulled away.
"I'll be fine. Listen, did you bring the powder?" She produced the tin. "Good. Will you try to find a way to shut these things down? They're giving me a headache."
"What things?"
"Just do it, will you?" He collapsed on the couch.
As soon as she entered the bedroom, Hermione suddenly understood. In the echo of her first footsteps, a whispering filled her ears. The words were vague and uncertain, but their intent was clear. No one would be able to think clearly with the hiss leaking through his or her mind, in one ear and out the other. She shook her head to clear it without success, lifted her eyes to the bed in front of her. There, she saw the reason for Draco's shocked appearance.
There was a corpse, its separated head resting beside it on the mattress.
She recoiled, horrified. She stumbled against the wall, hid her eyes from the grey, colorless flesh that hung from its limbs. Behind her, the door shut. The hissing roared in her ears, told her to look up, examine the body closely. She obeyed.
The body was not made of fluid and bone, she saw, but of paper. Of millions and millions of faces, eyes staring and scowling at her from fingers, elbows, knees. There were drawings, magazines, newspapers, photos, all blanched and crumbling from the use of dark spells. Magic for making pieces become whole, for making life out of nothing. Hermione's wide gaze shifted to the head. It's eyes were closed, mouth slack. It's mouth was made of many mouths, its ears made of many ears—no whole faces anywhere.
"Starved," Hermione murmured to herself. "She's starved for company."
And the eyes opened. They were terrible eyes, filled with jealousy and a repulsive intelligence. Its gaze flickered to the idle body beside it, commanded it to move. With a cold stiffness in its joints, an awkwardness no oil could mend, it creaked off the bed. Its hands opened in front of it, one carrying the eyes and the terrible sound of voices.
Starved, starved, the voices mocked, laughing hoarsely. She's not the only one who's starved.
Hermione swallowed. She shifted away, towards the white door. Her hand found the knob of the bedroom door behind her. It was locked.
Soon will be, won't she? they murmured. She won't last long. We drive you mad, until you can't even remember the taste of food or the sound of water or the sense of wind. You'll forget companionship, you will. You won't hear anything soon. The body paused, its empty neck turning from side to side. It lifted the head high above its neck
"Listen," she said, fighting the cold fingers of dread that clutched her throat, "I didn't mean to upset you." Somehow, instinctively, she knew that the head could not be connected to the body, that then there would be a terror unleashed that no human could withstand. That she'd fall, broken, next to Draco, before being physically torn apart by the clumsy fingers of the grey body. Grey Death, she thought, and found took humor, her last laugh, in the irony.
He didn't either, did he? No, the little runt took one look at us and fled. Too cowardly to confront us, just he was too cowardly to ask permission to enter here.
"Please, we don't mean Madame Rosmerta any harm—"
Yes, that's what they all say. You just want to borrow, you greedy-fingered wizards. It begins as just a favor — the tea kettle, a single spoon — until you want more. You want the use of her bed, her heart, and then you want her life.
"No, you don't understand. We just want to use her fire to visit the hospital—" That terrible face, staring. She could not think...couldnotspeakcouldnotactcouldnotbreakfree from this helpless cycle downwards.
See? See? All the same. Nothing, until it becomes everything. It's why our mistress listens to us—me. We are—I am—the power of many in one, the memory of her anguish entered into the material world. Nothing, until it becomes everything, don't you see? It starts with one, a stepping stone, but one stone spreads until it makes a path, ironed by the footsteps of the infinity that follow. We're—I'm—Revenge: immortal, wise, and her adoring servant. The head and its many mouths laughed again, sharing an irony she couldn't see. We—I—could never hurt her, my Rosmerta. The head paused above the neck. The hands turned it, showed her the empty back of its head, before slowly turning it back to the front.
"Please." Her voice broke. She sank to her knees, despair tight about her ears. She couldn't think, couldn't feel past the terror the voices fed her. They shoved it in her heart with a silver spoon, more and more and more until she thought it would burst with the blackness. "Please, let us go."
And then, blessedly, the discourse was broken, the descent of the head frozen. The voices rasped on, unintelligibly, malignantly, but over them, the warm sound of a human voice. A woman's voice. Hermione clung to it, driftwood that floated in the madness, and felt tears push their way down her cheeks. Slowly, she began to feel her mind wake and swim to the surface, gasping for air.
"I saw them go up the stairs. Two of your students, Professor, though I don't have the slightest idea why. You ought to teach them better, you know, it's outrageous that we have to chase them down every weekend after they violate my privacy. If it goes on, I don't see how we can continue to have these outings, and that's bad for the business as well as the—"
"It's quite all right, Rosmerta. There's no need to get upset. I'll take care of it, you can be sure that the students will be punished accordingly."
Hermione's head snapped upwards, her hands scrabbled on the floor as she stumbled from the room. The door to the bedroom had unlocked. "Draco! Draco!" she called softly. She saw him lying on the couch, pale-faced and grim. She shook him, one eye trained on the door. He didn't notice her. The voices surged around her ears again, rising in strength, battering her skull. She closed her eyes and leaned her shoulder against them, shoving them aside with all her mental force. She stood up straighter, her shoulders lightened.
"Hold on a moment, Professor. I've got to lift the protections for you to enter."
"It's good to know that some of you take this seriously, at least. I was very disappointed in the Ministry, the standard spell packet issued to every wizard was sadly untrustworthy. Really, they're simple to break, a two-year-old could do it even without a wand. I don't know what Scrimgeour was thinking. It wouldn't have taken long to test, and if 'nothing is so important as security,' as he constantly reminds us, he would have had the decency to write a good protection spell."
"Stand back, please, Professor."
Hermione had only a moment to act. She wrenched Draco upright and dragged him toward the fireplace. At the base of the hearth, she saw the tin box lying open and grabbed a fistful of the grey Floo powder stolen from Professor McGonagall's office. Leaning Draco on her shoulder, her other hand dug frantically in her pocket until her fist wrapped around the smooth stick of her wand. No magic, she knew, until the wards had been alleviated.
"Elevante!"
The door opened, exposing Madame Rosmerta's worried face and the rigid back of Professor McGonagall, who ran her fingers over the golden threads of a fading spell at the head of the staircase.
"Incendio!" A flash of flame in the grate, a sudden eruption of green, and then —
Emptiness.
Hermione stepped out of the grate into the empty lobby of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Injuries and Maladies, dragging the unconscious Draco Malfoy behind her. The Welcome Witch at the desk barely even gave them a glance, but continued to doodle in the air with her wand, shaping patterns with gold smoke spouting from the end. Hermione laid Draco down on the cold floor, and whispered, "Ennervate!"
He groaned and rolled over on his side, arms crossed over his stomach. Hermione sat back on her heels to wait, feeling the silence ring in her head. The voices had ceased when Madame Rosmerta had lifted the protections; her tongue had been so clumsy with shock, she was surprised they even ended up in the right place.
"Where are we?" Draco croaked, sitting up. He winced and put a hand to his head. "Actually, no, scratch that. What happened?"
"Exactly what was supposed to happen," she answered. Her voice was bitter, biting. "We nearly got caught, you know. Madame Rosmerta saw us leave, and got Professor McGonagall to come up to arrest us."
Draco swore. "Did they see who we were?"
"Madame Rosmerta did, but Professor McGonagall was turned the other way." She looked away from him. She was angry, annoyed that they hadn't dealt with it better, that she hadn't anticipated it. Most of all, she was furious that she had been frightened. "Get up. We need to finish this up before three o'clock, so we can head back with the other students." She glanced at the clock above the receptionist's head; it was past noon. She left Draco sitting on the floor without another word.
"Excuse me," she said, standing before the reception desk. She glanced back and saw Draco struggling to follow her, palm slipping on his sweat-drenched forehead. "Could you please tell me which room Eleanor Horrigan is staying in?"
The woman, tight blond curls bobbing suspiciously, looked down at her. "Who's asking?"
"Family." She didn't add more. She hoped the woman didn't know that the patient was a Muggle.
"Fourth floor, third door on your left," she said, consulting a list. She paused, then added in a softer voice, "The closed ward. I'm sorry."
"That's quite all right," Hermione said, gesturing for Draco to follow. She smiled at the receptionist and stepped onto the gold-netted lift, the doors shutting quietly behind Draco's robes. It rose slowly and steadily, pressing softly against their feet.
"I didn't know she was in the closed ward," Draco said to the silence.
Hermione didn't answer. Draco stared at his reflection on the ceiling. It made him look too yellow and drawn, he thought, and looked away. Only man and the master, he said to himself, and grimaced. If there was only man and the master, he reflected, how was it that she saved his life, his sanity, his life? He had offered her no incentive to do such a thing, and yet she had responded with great personal risk. What was that, was there a word for that? More than loyalty, more than that stupid, self-righteous value they called nobleness. Selflessness? No, not even Hermione was that idiotic.
Draco felt discomfort tickle the seat of his gut. The answer was there, in front of him, but the curtains of his eyes had been drawn. No light would be let in or let out. He shifted his mind away from the shaded domain, a site of constant battle, of his accomplice. He fixed his eyes on the spot between here and there where it glinted in midair, just beyond his vision. The truth buried itself next to the rusted spade which had created its grave; nothing was progressing, all was caught in the gasp between this breath and the next. He firmly denied and ignored the pattering twaddle of a thought in the rear of his mind, the one insisting that his pretended respect was becoming solid, real, and that maybe Hermione ought to have been a Slytherin. And to that he answered, the blood. The blood makes the man. If anything, his tool is simply sharper than he could have hoped.
His tool. He shoved his hands in the deep pockets of his robe and traced the edge of the plan with his thumb. It's corners cut into his finger; he was finally here, so close to finally knowing. Knowing what the Dark Lord planned, knowing how to stop it, knowing how to help. He shifted his weight.
Hermione pressed her hands palm to palm in the silence, felt the rough skin grate in a dual sensation. Her thoughts leapt to her mouth.
"Have you ever done that trick where you cross your fingers, then rub them with a third? It feels like there are two fingers touching the place where they cross." She paused, considering the line where her hands met. "I always felt that when I prayed. The physical touches the mental touches the divine. Connection. It's a pity I didn't like church. It's times like these that I wish I could still pray."
She dropped her hands. She wished that her practical knowledge didn't so often interfere with the whimsical, ideological part of herself. The books and her carefully lettered conclusions told her that there was no God, or if there was He was but a pawn of the Fates. The Fates, who puppeted all life and gave her no choice but to comply, soft as warm clay. The Fates, who had killed her mother.
She rested her head against the cage of the lift. Its steady hum drowned the anticipation of her mother's death, drowned the expectations and the horror of the reason why she died. Hermione didn't want to know, she asserted. She wanted the death to remain just that - a death. Just a fact, not a story. Yes, she didn't want her mother's death to be one murder in a thousand, without a reason, but she didn't need to know it.
Her tongue tasted the acid of a lie.
The doors slid open. Hermione stopped moving, frozen with the sight of the tiled hallway, steeped in the stench of disinfectant and sickness.
"Lead the way," Draco said. She turned a stiff neck and looked at him; his voice echoed with a different ring, and upon examination, she judged the change to be wholly unintentional, merely influenced by a decision made in the dry folds of his subconsciousness. His eyes were clear and focused on her, observing her with an intensity she instinctively rose to meet. And where once he would have been brutal and grating, his touch was curious, as if he wanted to see what would happen if he left her heating on the stove for an hour without outside contact. With a hand the color of a spider's underbelly, he pushed her out into the corridor.
Lucius Malfoy stood next to the fetus, lip curled. He gazed into its right eye, where the yellow iris stared at and through him. The thing was blind, hardly alive. It breathed, yes, and needed also. But it couldn't want. It couldn't think. The fetus couldn't use its senses: couldn't taste the satisfaction of hunger when filled; couldn't hear the heartbeat that drummed inside it; couldn't see the threat that stood before it. Sensing, Malfoy thought, was what truly made something come alive. If he could feel compassion, it would only be for those things that could feel hurt and gratitude and wonder.
His foot stirred within his boot. He wanted to teach it to feel, wanted to make it scream and writhe and bleed. He wanted to kick it, to pummel it, to make it gasp. This was what he hated about childhood, why he had distanced himself when his son was born, nearly blind and squealing. At least the infant could feel, even if he couldn't think clearly enough to find what it meant and how to stop it. Malfoy shoved aside the shame at being like that himself when he was younger, told himself that he had never been as dead as this fetus, sleeping and nerveless. He pushed away the impulse to torture, to teach. The time wasn't now, and his master was waiting.
He raised the knife, admiring the point as it shivered in hesitation. He took careful aim, cold and ready, and with sudden motion, plunged it into the fetus's eye. He heard a sharp hiss from behind him as Wormtail turned away, cowardly to the last. He pulled his arm upward, made a square in the mass of blindness, in the life that wasn't even truly alive. Hermione, curled tightly and invisibly below Lucius' Malfoy's feet, felt the warmth of blood spill onto her neck.
And then, surprising Malfoy at last, the fetus began to cry.
A/N: Whew! What a chapter - my longest by far. A lot happened, but I think it's pretty straightforward (nothing too twisty). I'm so sorry for the long delay in posting, but I went to Italy on an exchange trip for my school, and make up work has been intense. Updating may well be sporadic - once every three to four weeks - but I will work extremely hard to actually make those deadlines, providing nothing unexpected occurs like it did over the past two months.
So author notes are now illegal. Sigh. However, I will take the time to do review responses. I think that it's very important to answer all questions that you guys may have. Please bear with me as I juggle my time to answer both last chapter's and this chapter's. Of course, that's no reason not to review!
The biggest thank you to all my wonderful reviewers. You are a huge part of making this story worthwhile, and I have no intention of abandoning it.
You got questions? I got answers! Drop a line, and I'll try to clear things up. As always, I know that this story is confusing, and I'd be thrilled to help.
Love,
Alison