Hermione fell and scraped her hands on the stone floor when she was thrown into her cell. She hissed at the new pain and glared up at the guard.

"Enjoy your stay," the man said. He laughed and slammed the heavy metal door, shutting out even the faintest light.

"Don't I get a phone call?" she yelled. Her voice echoed in the small room and she suddenly felt extremely claustrophobic. Her hands stung, she was cold, and now she was blind. "Damn," she muttered.

On the bright side—if it could be said that there was a bright side—there weren't any dementors in Azkaban anymore. Most of them had been wiped out in the war. That still didn't make the place cheerful by any stretch of the imagination, but it did comfort her a little to know that her chances of going insane within the dank, dark prison were considerably lower without them.

She sighed and ran her hands along the cold stone floor until her fingers brushed something. It was a blanket, ratty, torn, and threadbare, but better than nothing. She wrapped it around herself, shivered, and tucked her knees up against her chest, trying to get warm.

Distantly, she could hear the sound of waves crashing against the stone walls. The North Sea sounded horribly like a woman moaning in pain and despair.

Hermione shivered again pressed her face into the blanket. It smelled like mold and sickness and death. In another cell close by, someone screamed for their mother.

"Oh God," she whimpered. She had not cried when she was arrested, or at any point during her hearing, or even when that bastard Scrimgeour snapped her wand and passed judgment on her, but she felt like crying now. "Oh God," she repeated.

"Who's there?"

She tensed and her head shot up to look around for the source of that voice. Of course, she couldn't see anything, not even the stone walls of her own cell.

"Hello! Who's there?" the voice hissed again.

"What do you want?" Hermione asked. She was ashamed to hear her own voice shake.

"Who are you?" It was a male voice, Hermione decided. She hadn't been able to tell before, but when he brought it above a hissing whisper, she could. "Who are you?" he repeated.

"I . . . Hermione," she stuttered. "My name's Hermione."

"Granger?" the voice sounded incredulous. "Is that you, Granger?"

"Er . . . yes," she said. "How do you—"

The voice laughed and Hermione's eyes widened in shocked recognition. "Think, Granger," he said. "Think real hard."

"Malfoy?" she whispered. "Draco Malfoy."

"The one and only," he replied.

Hermione got up, feeling her way along the wall toward the source of his voice. She found it when her hands glanced off the bars of a small ventilation window about five feet up from the floor, slightly lower than eye-level for her. She gripped the bars and tried to see through them into his cell. All she could see was a darker shadow in the blackness.

"Malfoy?"

His hand shot through the bars and closed over hers, not painfully, but with a strength that implied a kind of latent violence held closely in check. "What the devil are you doing here, Granger?"

She tried to pull her hand away from him, but his grip tightened. His fingers were slim and bony, but as strong as steel bands. She stopped pulling and let him hold her hand. "I could ask the same thing of you, Malfoy," she said. "I thought you were dead."

He laughed humorlessly, his thumb running back and forth over her fingers. "Not yet," he said. "And believe me, I've tried."

He caressed her hand like it was the most fascinating thing he'd touched in his entire life. Hermione suspected it was the human contact alone that he craved, and had nothing at all really to do with her. The last time she saw him was the night Dumbledore had died, more than twelve years ago. He must have been arrested and locked up soon after that, and how long had he been alone in his cold, dark cell with only his thoughts? Ten years? Eleven? Long enough to have contemplated suicide, attempted it, and discovered that the prison would not let him die. It hardly surprised her then that he had gone a little bit mad.

"So what exactly are you doing here, Granger?" He asked again. "Did you kill somebody?" He laughed like that was the most absurd thing in world.

In truth, she had killed a lot of people, but that had been war, and another matter entirely. "I don't know," she said.

"What the hell do you mean, you don't know?" He asked, a light tone of mockery sneaking into his voice. "Did you kill somebody, or didn't you? It's a simple question."

If only the answer were half as simple. "I don't remember."

"You don't remember," he said flatly. "Well, then who do they think you killed?"

She took a shuddering breath, then slowly let it out. "Ron."

"Weasley?" He choked. "They think you murdered Weasley?"

"I would assume so, yes, as I'm here and that's what Scrimgeour said it was for," she said.

"Why in God's name would they think that?" he demanded.

She smiled. Whether he meant to or not, he had just given her the one and only vote of confidence in her innocence that she could recall getting through the entire bloody thing. Strange that it should come from someone like Draco Malfoy, when those she thought of as friends had not been nearly as certain.

"I suppose they might think I killed him because they found me in his bed with his dead body, holding the knife that he had been stabbed with," she said, her tone almost conversational.

"Jesus, Granger," he said. "Remind me to never get on your bad side—or into your bed."

She coughed back a laugh. "It wasn't my bed, it was his."

"Still," he said, and she could imagine him shrugging, "Not a bad way to go, I guess."

"You don't sound all that surprised," Hermione pointed out.

"That Weasley's dead?" He snorted. "I'm not. Someone was bound to do it eventually. . . I didn't think it would be you though."

She didn't have anything to say to that, so she just stood there and let him fondle her fingers. It actually felt rather nice.

"How long?" Draco asked her after a few minutes.

"What?"

"How long are you in here for offing the weasel?" he clarified.

"Oh, twenty-five years," she said.

He gave a low whistle.

"What about you?" she asked. "Why are you here?"

"Now come on, Granger, I thought you were smart," he said. "They say I'm a Death Eater, remember?"

She did remember. She also remembered that he had been charged by his master to kill Dumbledore, and that despite everything, he had not done it. "How long are you here for?" she asked.

"Until I rot, presumably," he said. "They don't let Death Eaters walk out of here, not even the ones they can't actually prove are Death Eaters."

Hermione recalled reading about Stan Shunpike after the war was over. She'd been checking the list of fatalities, searching for the names of friends and acquaintances, when she noticed the article. Stan had gotten himself a lawyer somehow and been appealing his sentence when he was found dead in the showers by one of the guards. They still didn't know who had killed him, not that they were looking all that hard to find out. No, they didn't let accused Death Eaters walk out of Azkaban, not even the innocent ones.

Just then they heard the sound of jangling keys outside her door.

"Shit," Draco hissed. "Get down, Granger."

"Let go of my hand then," she told him, tugging on it frantically.

He released her and she pulled her hand back through the bars. She scooted away from the little vent toward the back of her cell and curled up against the wall. When the metal door was flung open, faint grey light hit her face and she blinked owlishly, trying to adjust her eyes.

"Get up," the guard snapped. He kicked her and his hard boot connected solidly with her ribs. She yelped in pain and used the slimy stones of the wall to pull herself to her feet.

"What's going on?" she asked. The guard was looking at her oddly; she pulled her blanket tighter around her body and hoped he was not looking at her for the reason she thought. "What—?"

"You got a visitor," he said.

"Who?"

"Don't know," he said. He clapped the heavy manacles over her wrists, and she hissed when the clasp pinched her skin. He took the end of the chain and dragged her out the door. "Come on."

Hermione tried to keep up as the big man pulled her along the passageways behind him. She stumbled once, and with a savage curse, he dragged her to her feet again and shoved her onward. He stopped at a heavy wood door and flicked through the keys on a massive key-ring until he found the one for the door, then unlocked it and shoved her in ahead of him.

The guard led her to a long, solid wood table with a steel ring in the center of it. He wrapped the chain at the end of the manacles around the ring, locked them in place, and turned to go.

"Sir, what—?"

"He'll be in shortly," the guard said, then left and locked the door behind him.

Hermione looked around for a chair to sit down on. There wasn't one. There was a chair on the other side of the table, presumably for her visitor, but she couldn't reach it, and it looked like it might be bolted to the floor anyway.

"Bugger," she said, and waited.