I dont own harry potter... yet. If JK puts him on ebay, he's mine!
Chapter Two
Waking up there was only darkness. When, correction, if you ever survive any kind of torture you will realize what Hermione already realized. At night, there is always some kind of illumination in the comfort of your own home. A street lamp. A night light. A soft glow from a television or a fireplace. During the middle of the night a person can wake up and their eyes would adjust to the darkness because there would be some kind of light.
Some kind of hope.
Something.
Anything.
There is always a source of light when you are safe.
In a dungeon, with a concussion, you only see things in stark contrasts. You keep waiting for the light to adjust but it doesn't. If anyone saw you blinking like an idiot during those first few seconds, you would be humiliated. Then as Hermione realized, this kind of darkness is pitch black.
It does not matter who you are, good or evil, that kind of darkness is never comforting.
You are not in control, and the darkness affirms your lack of power over self.
The head blow itself will reinforce this sinking feeling. Throbbing, dulling your senses with each beat of your own, slow pulse. Agonizing fire with each breath reminding your nerve endings of their damage.
Then there is the rest of your body.
Your body doesn't feel quite alive, but since you are moving you are sure you're not yet dead. The darkness does not confirm, nor deny the possibility of death. That sinking feeling, weighing down each injury, slowly forms into an animalistic panic.
The silence never helps.
Dungeons are always silent. They are the holding cells to capture hope. Darker atrocities are committed elsewhere. Places where drainage systems can be used to wash away blood. Places where no one can hear the screams of victims. Places where bodies can be disposed of easily. Simply elsewhere.
Dungeons are just holding cells birthing the panic inspired nightmares in a few glimpses of consciousness.
Self-perseveration is the first instinct once the panic starts to abate. You feel so helpless that you automatically try to regain control. It's a little funny how everything in life can change, but this one instinct usually remains.
Hermione touched her scalp first. She will always remember she did not scream. She did not attempt to run away. She did not cry. She merely began assessing damage; matter of factly. Maybe all the battles over the years, she had survived had trained a sort of first responder reaction in her. Maybe all the battles she had survived merely turned her into a waiting sociopath. Part of her always had wondered, prior to this night, if someone or something would send her over the edge. Hermione, always liked to think, until the rest of that night unfolded, she had still been hopeful. Still innocent. Still good.
Blood, when dried in hair, feels more like mud. It's got this very crusty sandy texture. At first, you would think you just fell asleep on a beach, but then chunks of the flaky copper substance sticks to your fingers and skin. It never really quiet dries completely if you have thick hair either.
Hermione remembers wondering if that's where the death eaters got the idea for the pejorative of mud-blood. Maybe they knew what their torture would feel like. It's unlikely, it's too deep a thought. Word connections and slang are never that deep. It is eerie how the nick-name still reminded her exactly how her wounds felt after the physical torture.
Maybe Hermione was already insanely evil then, thinking so calmly.
However, that undercurrent of panic explodes when the world becomes real. There's a moment when the other senses return… like smell. Suddenly there is a connection to the things a person feels. The stones beneath you are rough all the sudden, and something smells of decayed food. You would say it was rotting flesh, but if you say that, then the image frightens you. So for that moment, the scent you smell in its fetid disgustingness is old pizza or rotten apples. It's something inanimate, something that has never been alive. It's something that is not you or the people you know.
At that moment, when connections are made, panic resurfaces and cackles through your body like a thunder storm's delayed bout of lightning.
Where's Ron? Where's Harry? Now there is something beyond instinct and somehow it is a small comfort in her psyche. Hermione knew she was alive for sure. Now she wanted to speak, but if she spoke… she wasn't sure if a scream would be all that was left. If no one responded from the silent darkness… she remembered it would have only confirmed she was all alone in this hell.
Hermione wanted to be lucky enough, she would have lost enough blood or received enough shock that she should pass out from the emotional stimuli. At that moment, she would have not been strong enough to survive. She would have not been strong enough to face real terror and real evil.
One thing always bothers Hermione. She is still not sure, all these years later, how many times she woke and passed out again. How many times had she faced panic, came to rational thought, connected her senses, and spiked back to another black out? How many days had she been down there? Was that place even the same 'there?'
That doubt always haunted her.
Eventually, she woke up and it was cold and bright. Well bright, compared to the pitch black of the dungeons. There was fresh air; the smell that awoke her was earthy, not rancid. She was lying on soft grass, and dread filled her instantly. She was not alone out here.
She could see the feet and hems of cloaks of people she assumed were death eaters. Hermione did not know where she was, but she knew it was a dark revel, and that these moments might be her last.
She knew she had been captured for at least several months. She had been beaten, raped, and starved in the manor dungeon's of one of the death eaters. Reality was flooding in. The mantra that kept Hermione alive that night was 'Focus on the moment' or 'stay alive.'
That moment: where her vision was too incoherent to be of any real use, lingers.
Gods, Hermione always remembered how incredibly thirsty she was being outside again in moist English air. When Hermione did get to the hospital eventually the doctors had her on a drip for weeks. Apparently when dehydrated, she had suffered from excessive diarrhea and lost substantial weight. She had wasted away, that's another reason she was so weak. At least, that's the justification she would give to herself later.
"Good evening Miss Granger,"
She never needed to look up to know that the voice was Voldemort's. His voice confirmed her hunch that she was at a dark reveal. He wouldn't sully himself with the mere torture of unimportant mud blood.
So why was Hermione here?
Voices float over her and she knew that the long speeches were intended for his followers. She could not help but tune them out. She was so thirsty, so tired, so weak when it came right down to it.
It took her this long to realize she should apparat right out of this field. Anywhere would be safer. Closing her eyes and she tried to channel her magic. Instead of waking up in the burrow, fire erupted on her wrists and ankles.
Anti-magic chains bound her in the fetal lump she stayed in.
There are tones that change when they change topics. Dark quiet angry tones and light warm glorified tones. He talked to them the way a master would its dog.
"Miss Granger, I believe my friends have something to show you."
He refused to acknowledge she was even capable of magic. Capable of magic that made the chains glow their dark amber glow when their binding principles were activated.
Hermione still didn't move or make any sound that resembled acknowledgement.
Moving and speaking required power, and Hermione was drained. Hands grabbed her from all over and jerked her up. The movement did not hurt because of their grip or ferocity; it hurt because any movement – period… simply just hurt. They grabbed her by the wrists and the hair and the hips, like some kind of animal.
Someone jerked her head in the direction they wanted her to look. Hermione barely had enough moisture in her eyes to blink, let alone see. But then she saw it.
Saw him.
Ron, her husband of little over eight months… her childhood friend for little over eight years, was hanging limply by his hands. Hermione, suddenly knew why six hands were clasped so tightly around her.
Ronald Weasley now looked like a human pin cushion, minus the pins. The ministry's report would read that a double-edged blade, of some thirty inches or better had stabbed him over 76 times, if no one counted the outside lacerations that happened before the fatale wounds were inflected. He had not bled to death before the wounds were inflicted.
What Hermione saw was not a black and white, text-based report.
Hermione saw the first man she had ever truly loved, barely have enough flesh to cover his body. What flesh remained was blood soaked beyond the color of his hair. In all reality, looking back, she knew that it wasn't his body that made her realize it was him, it was the hair.
His hair was undamaged. Perfect. Just like the morning she had last seen him.
It was still long, clean, flowing with its slight curl on the ends that was always curlier when he first got out of the shower. It was still just Ron, like the rest of his body had not been mutilated. His hair was like he just stepped out of bed, just oh so slightly tousled.
Hermione does remember thinking the final thought that would push her over; his hair would have had to been charmed before his torture and murder began.
To say Hermione exploded would be the understatement of the century.
There's a funny thing about pure untarnished rage: once provoked far enough, a person becomes an animal and no longer feels. All the pain, fear, self-perseveration, fuzzy vision, weakness… all of it just disappears. It crashed out of her body through her feet and out into the ground. Hermione knew she began screaming incoherently.
"Calm down Miss Granger or you will meet a like fate."
The things you think of when in full rage are never quite linked properly.
Afterwards, she could see only a few of the connections, but when in that moment, she was not focusing on preserving the facts of what she felt or did. Hermione was not paying attention to the links. Hermione was merely acting. Just like the way an animal acts.
Hermione remembered she was hit with all kinds of odd emotional pain.
Self-loathing, because she had never taken Ron's name. She had never sacrificed that strength – NO! That pride, of hers, just to make him happy.
Loss, because she knew she would never have the opportunity to have major blow outs or make up dinners with Ron, ever again.
Sadness, because she knew he had escaped when she was captured. She had made sure he had touched the port key first. He was only dead because he wanted to rescue her.
Deafness suddenly increased while the anger washed over Hermione. Her skin prickled from this new silence, this deadly silence, that her drowning emotions controlled and washed over. Silence was needed to focus, focus on energy.
No wand, and binding chains were a challenge, but raw energy would do. Magical strength ten-folds if the witch and wizard can summon wandless magic.
Before Hermione couldn't move and did not want to feel. Now, Hermione was nothing but a complete innate feeling. She felt the ground, the miles of roots that extended from every stem of grass, tree, and flower. She felt the tides of the rivers reaching out to the waving sea kilometers away. She could feel animals sense her. Sense the magic she awakened. The old magic of the night, the dark magic that fuels abstracts like souls. This was the stuff that legends were written about.
It washed over her body like a cool wave of unseen blood or water… some invisible, tasteless, scentless substance.
The hands that were holding her were suddenly gone. All of those death eaters were dead on the ground.
No words.
No wands.
Just the desire for them to be dead pulsing off of her skin that was coated in the energy she drew off of the land. The kind of magic she summoned. The magic that grew from the earth between her and her binding chains. The same chains that were usually only a dull burgundy where now flaming red hot. Burning her ankles and wrists. Burning through the hair, skin, muscle, down to her bones.
The magic needed a release. Fast. It needed to leave her body before it exploded through her skin. Hermione closed her eyes and channeled what she had called. She snapped and opened her eyes, targeting the others, and they collapsed to the ground and ignited into flames.
One death eater attempted to cast some kind of pathetic water charm before his wand became kindling. Another attempted to put out his comrade, but instead the water fueled the fire and the victim… Hermione's victims just begin to burn brighter.
Harry was screaming, "Hermione stop! This isn't what he wanted. STOP!" A wave of Hermione's shackled, burnt hands, and the channeled power silenced his voice. The ministry files said that Harry was mute for three months.
Some female idiot attempted to physically charge Hermione. Before she can even lay a hand on her, the death eater stopped mid step under Hermione's complete control. Hermione stalked up to her and ripped the robes off her body. Hermione raked her hands through her blonde hair and gripped chunks of it near her temples. Hermione let her memories wash over her. Hermione had never attempted legilimency prior to this night. She doubted she could be stable enough to actually control what she would have seen. The power she had called knew what control was needed. It knew what Hermione needed. Hermione trifled and tucked the death eater's thoughts deep inside of her.
Hermione used the power to hold her in place, as she snaked her hands down her front and then hand carved her liver from her. In the gaping hole that was left, Hermione squeezed the liver until its bile dripped back into her insides. The bile within the liver is one of the most toxic substances known to mankind. Hermione remembered if someone had ever gotten stabbed in the abdomen region, the person would likely die from the liver's poison before any bleeding or blood loss would ever did you in.
Moments and years later, Hermione is always haunted by her choice. By killing nameless minions, their master and few others were given the opportunity to escape.
Who knew that the all and powerful Dark Lord would scamper away from such a lowly mud-blood? Looking back on all these years, Hermione wondered if killing him that night would have really prevented her from the path she took.
Only when Hermione was having a really morbid day, would she think her worst thoughts: had she gotten the death eaters that killed her husband?
"Harry, we're leaving."
He darted off to save his best friend's corpse. Hermione didn't know what she was going to become in that instant. But she knew she would never forgive Harry for not stopping or saving or replacing Ron. She always remembers the first thought of hate she had for him as clear as a bell ringing in her ears:
Harry was only the champion of the dead. We were all wrong for thinking was some kind of a hero of the light.
Hermione heard something whisper behind her ear, "You won't find solace Miss Granger," but to this day she is not sure if it was her own conscience or the Dark Lord warning her.
Harry and her apparate from the marsh. Hermione passed out, never remembering anything after grabbing Harry's hand and Ron's cold, dead, hand.
She woke up four months later in St. Mungos. She was half expecting to be charmed and restrained to the bed. But when you murder murderers, suddenly you become a savior.
All Hermione felt, and all she would continue to feel was the emptiness only a monster could possess. Sometimes, more often than she would admit, Hermione wished she had never woken up to this destroyed world.